On the other side of the yurt was a vehicle that looked like some kind of post-Soviet merger of a bladeless helicopter and a pickup truck. The front was round like a helicopter, no protruding engine as we normally had on a vehicle in America. The back was all truck, with a bed that had been bolstered by wooden support beams on the side. It was ingenious, actually, how they had bolted the wood to the flatbed to make it better at carrying stuff.
There was an outhouse as well, about fifty feet away, which was where I headed to take my morning piss.
“Fwoo,” I said as I waved my hand at the huge flies buzzing around the outhouse.
This wasn’t like the outhouses I had seen in Western movies, or on Red Dead Redemption Three (badass game, btw). It was merely a deep hole in the ground with flies buzzing around it, and a front wall built up so someone on the yurt side couldn’t see what was happening.
Of course, if you moved around to the other side, one would definitely see someone squatting or draining the lizard.
But the flies. Big flies, too, easily the size of peanut M&Ms and annoying as hell as they buzzed around me.
Once I finished up, I moved away from the makeshift outhouse to the yurt where Arianna was being held.
I let myself in and found Angel sitting on one of the beds, watching her.
“How long have you been watching her like that?” I asked.
“What does it matter to you?”
“I guess it doesn’t,” I said as I looked over to our prisoner, who looked to be sleeping. “Did she try to seduce you?”
“No. What the hell kind of idiotic question is that?”
“Yeah, me neither,” I said, trying to gauge the temperature in the room.
I was glad that Angel wasn’t part of our group of supers who had abandoned AEFL.
He was too goddamn moody, and while I didn’t know what his fashion sense was ten years ago, I had this itching feeling that he had been emo as fuck at the time and that this had, for some godawful reason, carried over to now.
At least that was how I imagined his youth in my head.
In actuality, he’d been being trained to be a super soldier and having a relationship with his aunt at that time.
Definitely fucky.
“There are family members coming; maybe one of them speaks English,” I said after a moment of silence.
“Good. We will get to civilization; Arianna and I will go from there.”
“How are you going to take her into civilization? Just keep her in that cage?”
“Yes?”
I shook my head. “Talk about terrible optics, even for a supervillain such as yourself.”
“I have my ways,” Angel said, not looking up at me. “And fuck off with the superhero and supervillain bullshit. That’s something normals came up with to reimagine fantasy in the twentieth century, moving it away from medieval shit and into something more relevant.”
“How insightful of you.” I settled my breath, trying not to debate his previous statement. “I don’t know what you plan to do with her, but I think that…”
“It doesn’t matter what you think. And if there were more of my peers with me, I would be taking you and the others as well. Don’t forget that, Gideon,” he said, finally locking eyes with me. “We are still enemies after all this.”
“You know, when I first met you, I thought you were this super macho alpha-y guy, but then I get you alone and you act like a brooding asshole who’s good at making threats, but not so great at following through on them.”
“Pfft…” Angel stood, and took a step closer to me. “Want to say that again?”
“This would be a terrible place to fight,” I told him.
I was definitely feeling a few butterflies in my stomach by this point, my brain sending all the signals to my body telling me some shit was about to go down. But I bottled it up. If Angel attacked me, I would absorb his power and I would use some of it against him.
It wasn’t an ideal situation, especially in such an enclosed space, but I was ready to throw down if the aunt-fingering greaseball wanted to make it happen.
Two interruptions stopped us from acting like a pair of assholes.
The first was Arianna Lord, who awoke violently, the woman having seemingly forgotten that she was in a cage. There was a moment of terror in her eyes as she tried to break out, then fear once she looked up and saw both of us, then the realization of where she was again.
“Good morning,” I told her.
Angel shook his head with disdain.
“Let me out of here,” she said hoarsely, rattling her cage. “Let me out, now. Now!”
I was still human, and a large part of me hated to see someone caged. And an even larger part of me hated to see that someone was a female, to hear her shrill plea. But I knew this was for good reason. She could turn herself completely invisible, and if she did that, the situation would take a turn for the worse.
The second interruption came in the form of a motorcycle pulling up, the engine shutting off.
Angel and I both looked to the front door of the yurt. He nodded me toward it, in a way that indicated that he would watch Arianna.
I waved awkwardly at the two who had just shown up on their motorcycle. One was a guy about my age with odd tattoos on his neck and slicked back black hair; the other was a girl that couldn’t be older than ten.
It was a cool motorcycle too, one of those ones with the sidecar, this one clearly a refurbished military number with its camo paint job.
To my surprise, it was the girl that approached me, a smile on her face as she took me in with her dark eyes. She had long black hair and red cheeks, and she wore a peacoat, black jeans and clean DisNikes. I say “clean” here because of just how polished her shoes were. They were obviously something that she took good care of.
“Hello,” I told her as slowly as possible.
“Why, hello,” she said in a British accent.
I looked at her strangely for a moment.
“Was it something I said?”
“You speak English?”
“I’m speaking to you in English, aren’t I?” she asked with a smile.
“You speak British English?”
“Is there another English?”
“No, I mean, yes, well, shit. Sorry for cussing. Okay, this may not sound very inclusive of me, but I wasn’t expecting to run into a young girl with a British accent in the Mongolian countryside.”
She pursed her lips. “I’m from Mongolia, but I lived in London for ten years.”
“And how old are you now?”
“Eleven.”
“So you just moved back to Mongolia then?”
“That’s right.”
“I see…”
Ingrid approached, offering the young Mongolian girl a wave.
“My name is Michidma, but you can call me Mary.”
“Hi, Mary, I’m Ingrid.”
“Gideon,” I told the girl. “Well, since you speak English…”
I stared at her intently for a moment, using Grace’s power to the best of my ability.
I wanted to make sure that she was somewhat under our control, that she would serve as our translator. It didn’t take much effort in the end—the young girl was brought here for the specific purpose by the family. Mary, as she’d asked to be called, was the niece of the mother I’d seen cooking earlier.
“Okay, first question: where are we?” I asked her.
“I thought you already knew where we were. We’re in Mongolia,” said Mary.
“No, I mean where in Mongolia are we?”
“In western Mongolia, a few hours from the city of Khovd.”
“Okay, this gives me something to work with.”
Mary nodded. “And we will be taking you to UB after we have breakfast here.”
I looked to the motorcycle she came in on. The Mongolian man with the slicked back hair stood near it, smoking a cigarette, eyeing us suspiciously.
“UB?” Ingrid aske
d.
“That’s what foreigners call Ulaanbaatar, U-B,” Mary informed her. “I suppose it is easier than saying the longer name. I think it would be funny if we just called it by its translation, ‘Red Hero,’ but no one seems to agree with me.”
“Why Red Hero?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I believe it has something to do with Soviet times, long before I was born.”
“That’s right, Mongolia used to be part of Russia.”
“Exactly,” she said, “but we separated about thirty years before I was born. If you have more questions about those times, you could ask some of the older family members. A few of them were alive then and they still speak Russian.”
“Will do,” I told her.
Mary tilted her head as she looked from Ingrid to me. “Why are you in my country?”
“Don’t you worry about that,” I told her, scrubbing this question from her mind.
It wasn’t like using Jedi power, but that’s how I imagined it. As if I were trying to smuggle droids out of Tatooine, I simply directed her question elsewhere.
“You don’t happen to have a cellphone, do you?”
“Of course I do,” she said, reaching into her back pocket. “But it doesn’t work out here in the countryside very well. It can only place calls in certain areas.”
“We need the Internet,” I said, glancing to Ingrid.
“You will have the Internet in UB,” she said.
One of the yurt doors swung open and the mother of the family poked her head out, yelling something to Mary.
“She wants to know if you’d like to have breakfast.”
“Sure,” said Ingrid.
“And your friends in the other yurt?”
I shook my head. “They are not so hungry.”
Once we reached the yurt door, I turned back to look at the young man by the motorcycle.
“Is he coming in?” I asked Mary.
“Don’t worry about him. He’s just the neighbor boy my parents paid to drive me out here.”
“I like her,” Ingrid said after Mary entered the yurt.
“She definitely has a personality,” I replied, stepping inside.
Once I was in, I could stand up fully, the high ceiling providing plenty of room for tall people. Well, relatively tall people. An NBA player or anyone over 6’ 5” would have trouble staying in a yurt.
“This is your milk tea,” Mary said, bringing me a cup, “and yours,” she said as she gave a second cup to Ingrid.
The mother of the yurt motioned us toward a bed.
“Please, sit,” Mary said. “And what about your friend?”
I glanced over to the bed next to ours, where Stella was still sleeping.
“I will wake her,” Ingrid said.
She lightly placed her cup on the floor and moved over to Stella’s bed, where she tapped on her shoulder.
Stella’s eyes fluttered open, and for a moment she had that shocked look of someone who had been woken up from a deep slumber. Her eyes settled soon after, and it wasn’t long before she too had a cup of milk tea.
Salty milk tea.
I didn’t know exactly what I was drinking, but it tasted like thickened saltwater. At first, I didn’t like it, but after a few more sips, it grew on me.
“And what is this called?” I asked Mary.
“Suutei tsai.”
Ingrid tried to say the word and sounded like she was sneezing.
Mary laughed. “Close,” she said, helping Ingrid say the word by sounding out each syllable.
Along with our milk tea, we were given a plate full of fried pieces of dough. After taking my first bite, I realize that this could totally be a donut if only there was some sugar sprinkled on it.
I glanced between Stella and Ingrid to see if they had also come to the same realization, but neither seemed to know what I was hinting at.
“So you’re going to take us to UB, right?” I asked Mary, just to strike a conversation up.
“That’s right. That’s why we came here.”
“And how are we all going to fit on the motorcycle?”
Mary looked at me like I was stupid. “I see someone has a sense of humor,” she finally said, laughing lightly.
“No, it’s a serious question,” I told her with a smile on my face.
“We’re going to take the lorry back to the city.”
“Lorry?”
“You are American, right?”
“You couldn’t tell by the accent?” I asked her.
“There are plenty of other people who have the same accents as you, such as Canadians.”
“Good point.”
“In that case,” Mary said, nodding to the exit, “the British would call that vehicle out there a ‘lorry,’ and Americans would call it a ‘truck.’”
“There’s not a lot of room inside,” I said, recalling the oddly shaped truck parked behind the yurts.
“That’s why you will be sitting in the back,” she said, “with your other friends. Can I meet your other friends?”
“You will meet them at some point,” I told her, trying not to make my statement sound ominous.
This would prove complicated. I didn’t know how we were going to bring a caged woman into the city.
While it was possible for me to control people here, we would not be able to control the other people we encountered in a typical major city, such as other drivers, or pedestrians that saw us driving around in a pickup truck with a caged babe in the back.
No, we had to be very careful in how we handled this.
My train of thought was shattered by the two-year-old girl, who was still leashed to the center pole of the yurt. She came toward us with her hands out, squawking, reaching for the bowl of fried dough, cute as hell.
Mary handed her a piece and the girl walked away happily.
“And what’s her name?” I asked.
“Sor.”
“Does it mean something cool?”
“All Mongolian names mean something,” Mary said.
“And what would my name be, if you were to give me a Mongolian name?” I asked as I finished my milk tea.
Mary laughed. “Teneg.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Silly, but in a stupid way.”
Ingrid and Stella cracked up, and Mary offered them the biggest shit-eating grin the young Mongolian girl could conjure up.
I wished our banter could have continued too, but commotion outside caught our attention, and I knew that trouble was brewing.
Stella and I advanced toward the front of the yurt, Ingrid staying back with Mary, telling her to remain inside.
Yelling reached my ears just as I kicked the door open.
Our nice morning had just turned sour.
Chapter Three: Once an Aunt-Fucker, Always an Aunt-Fucker
Angel held Mary’s neighbor boy by the throat, blood streaming down the dude’s face, Arianna on the ground still locked in her cage.
I had to hand it to the kid: even though he was about to be choke-slammed by a superpowered aunt-shagging asshole, he was still trying to fight back, kicking, spitting blood at Angel, yelling curse words in Mongolian.
“Gideon,” Angel said, a sinister grin taking shape on his face.
“What in the hell are you doing?” I asked, seconds away from activating Veronique’s draining power. “Put him down, or face the consequences, you stupid fuck!”
Angel bared his teeth. “It is time for us to leave, and since there’s a motorcycle right here with a sidecar, I figured it would be the best way for us to go.”
“Put him down,” Stella said, her power flaring up around her wrists, “or we will put you down.”
“No, you won’t. This is where it ends, Gideon,” Angel said, his grip tightening on the young man’s neck. “I told you we would go our separate ways at some point, and this is that point.”
“Put him down, or we take you down,” I growled. “Last warning, douchebag.”
“
Fine.”
But rather than put the young man down, Angel brought his hand back and cast the guy aside. The man hit the ground hard, tumbling for a moment before finally coming to a stop.
“I need you to do one thing before I leave,” Angel said, returning his focus to me. “I need you to drain her power a little bit more. I want her good and passed out. This is going to be a long ride.”
“You don’t even know where you are,” I told him.
“Let me worry about that,” he said.
“No,” I told him firmly. “No. This is not how this is happening. I’m not doing shit for you, you hear me? If this is how you want to make your exit, then bye, bitch.”
“Gideon, don’t be a fool. I’m letting you go, which no one in their right mind would do considering what you have done, especially to my…”
“Look, man, I know Mother was pregnant, but she was also your aunt. That is some fucked up Game of Thrones meets Deliverance shit right there. You know it, I know it, and…”
“Shut the fuck up. I don’t care about your trivial references, or whatever bullshit you just happen to be going on about,” Angel said. “And I most certainly don’t care about what you think when it comes to my relationship with Ava.”
“I can take him down,” Stella whispered.
“But then what do we do with him?” I said under my breath. “We can’t have two prisoners.”
I looked to Arianna in her cage. The woman that was the spitting image of Veronique was wide-eyed now, gritting her teeth, not knowing where this was going to go.
I could tell she was scared, and as much as I knew she was our enemy, I felt for her in that moment.
I took a step closer to Angel.
“Let’s just focus on getting back,” Stella told me, her hand falling on my shoulder. “We don’t need any prisoners, not if we’re going to the capital city. And unless you want me to kill both of them…”
“Try it, you and I have trained together before. You know that I can break through anything you throw at me. So what’s it going to be, Gideon?” Angel asked, curling his fists at his sides.
I took another step forward, hesitating in that moment. It went against my upbringing and my basic code of morality to let her go with Angel, but I knew that Stella was right. We couldn’t just bring a caged woman into society, especially if our ultimate goal was joining the others.
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