A promised land.
A utopia. A harmonious kingdom.
The promised land could be this world at its climax, the shards at critical mass, the entity and its counterpart bringing about the end of the cycle. It could be utopia, as the entity understood the term.
It could be the world at peace, people saved from hardship, as Kevin Norton had described it.
Whether the entity was somehow able to return to its original task or whether it continued carrying out Kevin Norton’s answers in an attempt to find itself, the term fit.
“Zion,” it spoke.
■
Memories. A refuge, a reminder of how things should be, if the cycle were intact. There would be more shards, more conflict, but it would be more controlled. The dead shards polluted the setting, almost too numerous.
The female with the administrator shard had long since fled, covering the retreat with her small army of lesser lifeforms, more traps snapping into place in her wake.
It thinks of Zion, and it thinks of other metaphors and ideas. In the thirty-three revolutions since arriving on this planet, the entity has had time to think. It has saved a lot of individuals from harm, heard many prayers.
It was aware of everything that occurred around it. The planet’s star moved across the sky, above the dark, heavy clouds of moisture. Small movements, but movements nonetheless.
It thought of the beetle in one mythology, rolling the orb across the sky.
It was an idea that persisted across mythologies. Scarab. Chariot. The Brother. The Sky Barge.
Abstract thought. Was that the sort of pattern that led to a connection, an inspired idea in the development of new shards? The entity wasn’t sure. Its counterpart was supposed to handle such matters, retain that capacity for thought and analysis.
Its physical body continued to loop in time. It didn’t matter.
The conflict continued. The broadcaster was moving in and out of trouble, relying on a pronounced projection that was being emitted by a dead shard to provide further protection. There was another entity nearby. A boy with another dead shard. Odd, that they had gravitated towards the broadcaster.
Mature shards, a situation ripe with conflict, so much to be gained, and nothing could be done with that. The entity felt a hint of another emotion, dismissed it. The simulation of the host-creature’s psychology was only that. A simulation.
It would spend some time here. Nothing would change in any event. Kevin Norton had passed.
The entity observed the ongoing conflict. No less than five seconds after it had been trapped, two figures had emerged from a doorway between worlds. The entity could see the paths forming, trace them back to the source. Another world, a living world without a shard occupying it.
They engaged the eight with their own perception abilities, intervening to assist a group of others. As a pair, they opened fire with guns, then waded into hand to hand combat.
The entity looked at the male, and it saw the connection to the same shard as the eight. His connection was stronger, more mature.
It looked at the female, and it saw a shard that wasn’t its own, but wasn’t dead.
Puzzling.
The fight progressed. Strikes with weapons and with the creature’s limbs were evaded, a careful dance of attacks where each edge and bludgeon touched skin, many even shaving off the finer hairs from cheeks, noses and chins.
The male fought the eight in such a way that they couldn’t move without exposing themselves to attacks from the female. Each movement placed the male in a path for obvious harm, a fatal blow, but the eight could not capitalize on that. At the same time, he positioned himself in such a way that four or five at a time were unable to retreat. Not just in reach of weapons, but in reach of arms, elbows, for being taken hostage.
The female felled three of the eight, and the situation was decided. The remaining five dropped to a position where they sat on their knees. She spoke, and an interdimensional portal appeared behind them.
They crawled through, heads down, and the portal closed.
The pair glanced up at the entity as another wormhole opened. They stared.
The entity, in turn, faced a different direction, but it could perceive them nonetheless.
They disappeared back into the portal.
Puzzling.
The entity observed as the fight concluded elsewhere.
The broadcaster remained unaware as an individual without any attachment to shards at all entered the confined space, unloading a vaguely familiar substance over the group. Something the entity might recollect if it had access to all of its memories. A technology.
It didn’t matter.
The entity watched as the broadcaster was sealed in a time distortion.
A female, standing just outside another time distortion, walked around the effect, charging objects with energy. The entity could see as the small pieces of alloyed metal unfolded, taking shape in not just this world, but all realities, at the same space and time, bristling with an effect that would sever their attachment to most physical laws.
They were thrown, and they disrupted connections to two shards at once. The projection disappeared, only to reappear a distance away. The boy who had created the time distortions fell as well.
Sting, the entity thought. Once it had been a weapon for his kind, against his kind, back in the beginning, when they had dwelt in oceans of gray sludge.
The others hurried to confine the broadcaster. They were apparently aware of what he could do.
Interesting.
■
“Just you and me,” Tecton said. “That’s what he said. Between gasps of pain, anyways. ‘I wish I had better company, but I’ll take what I can get. Ironic, that you’re so boring.”
Golem looked at his old leader. “That’s it?”
Tecton shook his head. “He said, ‘I bet you think you’re noble. You’re not. You’re uglier than any of us, sparky.”
“And?”
“And that’s it. The D.T. guy foamed up the gap, I raised the shelf, you closed the hand, and he was completely sealed in.”
“You’re right. That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“He hasn’t ever met me.”
Golem shook his head. “Doesn’t seem world ending.”
■
“…I always hated the blank… slates,” Jack groaned the last word. His utterances were finding an odd cadence or rhythm between the gasps of pain, the fresh wounds that were actively criss-crossing his body, opening his stomach, his intestine being gripped and pulled through the wound as if by an invisible force.
The foam weighed him down, and in the midst of the complete and total darkness, he stared skyward.
“…Never that interesting…” He grunted. “Never created art, never… created variation... you’re worse than… most…”
High above, the entity listened.
■
Tattletale listened over the earbud microphones as Tecton finished relating Jack’s statements.
She raised her eyes from the computer. Her underlings were arranged around the room, along with others. Her soldiers were at the ready, alongside Imp’s Heartbroken, the first and second in command of the Red Hands, Charlotte, Forrest and Sierra.
Sierra was bouncing her leg nervously. She’d cut off her dreads, and her hair was short to the point of being in a buzz cut, with a fringe flopping over one side of her forehead. But for the hair and two small hoop earrings in one ear, she was a businesswoman. Had to be, when she was the ostensible owner of all of Brockton Bay’s prime real estate.
Charlotte was in the company of one of the children, holding him close. Her fingers toyed with a paper origami cube, and she was doing her best not to look like she was poised on the edge of her seat for any news at all.
The second she gave the word, they’d be ready to evacuate the city, to get people onto the trains and moved through the portal.
But…
“Things have settled,” she said. “Jack is
contained.”
She could see them all relax as if strings that had held them rigid had just been cut.
“That’s it?”
“I don’t know,” Tattletale said. She grinned wide. “But if the world is ending, then it’s an awfully quiet end.”
There were chuckles here and there, nervous relief.
“Go home, or go do whatever,” she said. “I’ll be in touch with more news, let you know how your territory leaders, past or present, are coping.”
As a crowd, the others began filtering out. Sierra stayed where she was, pensive, but the nervous bouncing of her leg had stopped.
Charlotte, too, remained.
“Sup?” Tattletale asked.
“It’s him,” Charlotte said.
“Aidan. Hi Aidan.”
“He triggered yesterday. It… didn’t take much. Which is probably good.”
Aidan hung his head.
“That’s excellent,” Tattletale said. She looked at the seven year old. “How are you?”
“Okay. Had a nightmare for the first time in a long, long time. I woke up and I was sleepwalking, and I didn’t know where I was… I got scared, and then it happened.”
“What happened afterwards?” Tattletale asked.
“Birds.”
“Birds. I see. Interesting,” she said. Her eye moved over to the boards that marked the perimeters of the room. Each was packed with information in her small, tight, flowing handwriting. Messy, but she’d gotten good at putting pen to paper these past few years
“I push and the birds go where I pushed. Or I pull and they fly away from that spot. It’s hard to do. I can see what they see, but not while I’m controlling them.”
“Like Taylor, but birds, and not that flexible. I see.”
“We suspected he would trigger,” Charlotte said.
Tattletale looked up, surprised.
“Aidan had a dream one night, back when the nightmares stopped. He drew that picture.”
“Picture?”
“I gave it to you. I kind of emphasized it might be important.”
“Pretty sure that didn’t happen,” Tattletale said. She stood from her desk. “Sorry, Aidan, to squabble in front of you, but Charlotte needs to remember I don’t tend to miss stuff like that.”
“All that money you’ve given me for helping to look after the territory? The money for the kids? I’d stake it all on what I’m saying now. I promise, I swear I handed you that picture.”
Tattletale frowned.
“I swear,” Charlotte said, for emphasis.
“Then there’s a fucked up stranger power at work. Don’t like that idea. Let’s see. Um. I store everything in a rightful place. If you handed me a picture… was it here?”
“Here.”
Tattletale crossed the room. She pulled a bin off a shelf, then sorted through file folders.
Charlotte said, “There.”
Tattletale stopped, then went back a page.
“Huh. I stand corrected.”
There was a beep on the computer. Tattletale went back to the computer to investigate, shrugged, then sat down.
“Well?” Charlotte asked.
“Well what?”
“The picture.”
Tattletale frowned. “What picture?”
“What’s going on?” Aidan asked.
Charlotte stalked over to the bin that was still out, grabbed the paper, then slammed it down on the desk. “I don’t think a piece of paper can have superpowers. Pay attention. Focus Memorize.”
Tattletale frowned. She turned her attention to the paper.
There was a block there. She felt it slide out of her mind’s eye, caught herself.
She turned her attention to the surroundings, the underlying ideas.
“Aidan? Describe it to me. I don’t know what you drew.”
“Those are kind of like fish, or worms, or whales, but they fold and unfold in ways that are hard to understand, and there’s stuff falling off them. Those are stars, and-”
Tattletale felt something fall into place.
As though a floodgate had opened, the pieces started coming together. She stood from the desk, striding across the room.
There were still gaps in her work on the boards, where she was outlining everything, trying to decipher the underlying questions. Now, she began unpinning things from the board.
She was remembering, and she was putting it together, now. There was a block, but she’d formed enough connections now that things were going around the block.
The whole. The idea had stuck with her.
All powers fed back into a greater whole, each was a piece of a greater construct.
Of Aidan’s fish-whale-worm things.
But that wasn’t it.
No. It didn’t fit in terms of timeline.
There was more.
“Like gods,” she said, recalling.
“Like viruses, like gods, like children,” Charlotte said. “Back on the day I first met you, you said that.”
Like viruses, infecting a cell, converting it into more viruses, bursting forth to infect again.
Like gods. So much power, all gathered together. All powers stemmed from them.
Like children. Innocents?
Blank slate.
“Oh,” Tattletale breathed out the word.
“Tattletale?” Sierra asked.
“Oh balls.”
■
“I’m not… Darwinist,” Jack gasped. “None of that… bullshit. Augh! I’m… I think it is simple-”
He continued grunting. His switch to turn off the pain took a second to activate, took deliberate action, but getting in the rhythm meant he could buy himself one or two seconds of relief with each loop. It was a question of concentration, and his concentration slipped.
“It’s simpler. Us monsters and… psychopaths, we gravitate towards… predation, because we were originally… predators. Originally had to hunt… Had to be brutal, cruel…”
He paused, spending a few moments grunting in pain, letting the loops continue.
“Order to survive. Violence was what made us… or broke us back… in the beginning.”
The entity was patient. It had time to spare.
■
Saint swayed slightly in his seat.
The information continued to stream in along a dozen different channels.
Too much. It was too much, but somehow, somewhere along the line, they’d succeeded.
Jack was contained. Things were quiet.
Until he noted someone bludgeoning their way through Dragon’s password security. A series of personal questions, ranging from a favorite texture to something about a pet name for Dragon to a question about the first results of the ten by ten game.
The first two were answered in order.
Defiant? Getting access to the system?
No, too crude, too obvious.
The individual stalled on the last question.
He waited a few long moments, then saw the same individual making calls to Defiant. Three communiques, initiated within one or two seconds of one another. Then emails, to the PRT and Defiant both.
Saint intercepted it.
“Fuck, finally!”
“What are you trying, Tat-”
“Shut up and listen, douchestain. It’s Scion. He’s the point where it all catalyzes! And I just clued into the fact that he can probably sense Jack! Get Grue back to the area, blanket Jack in darkness, now! Now, now, now!”
“Mags!” he shouted. “Dobrynja! Get Grue back to the scene now! This is it!”
“On it!” the reply came back. There was a pause. “Grue is four miles away!”
“Teleporter,” he said.
“We don’t have any that survived the last few Endbringer fights!”
Saint hesitated.
Too far, it would be too late.
The woman who claimed she could control Scion.
His tired fingers flew over the keyboard. He dug up the f
ile.
It had been seen to. They’d taken her name, but there’d been no proof. Hearsay.
Hearsay was better than nothing.
The cyborg was piloting the closest Azazel. Controlling it could be seen as an attack. The cyborg would fight, wrestle him for control.
He opened up the window for a message, instead, even as he used the full access Dragon had for every camera, email and phone message to find this Lisette.
A Hail Mary, if there ever was one.
“Defiant,” he said, overriding everything in his way to open communications with the cyborg. “Help me.”
■
The entity followed the movements of the various individuals around the battlefield. More containment foam was being layered over the broadcaster, burying the area.
A noise, a blare that had people doubling over, covering their ears, started emanating from one of the craft.
The craft launched a second later, flying right for the time distortion.
It crashed into the area of warped time, wrapping forelimbs, tail and rear claw around the irregularly shaped feature.
The blaring noise stopped as a voice emanated from the speakers.
“Scion. Zion. Golden Man. It’s Lisette. Kevin Norton introduced us. What the man down there is saying… whatever he’s saying, don’t listen. Turn away. Please.“
Turn away.
The entity moved, and it broke through the time distortion effect with ease. The craft fell head over heels before propulsion kicked in. It had to fly in zig-zags to keep pace with the entity’s slow retreat from the scene.
“I- uh. You broke free. Okay, good. Leave. Run! Please go. I’m- I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to talk to you before. You never came back to that spot, and I could never reach you to talk to you. There was help you needed and I couldn’t give it. I went to authorities, and nobody believed me. But now, now maybe I can give you advice. We can work on this together? As a pair? Is that alright?“
The entity didn’t respond.
“I hope it’s alright,” she said.
The entity took flight, leaving it all behind.
Leave. Run.
It didn’t return to the task of saving lives. For a period, it only flew.
It stopped when it had circled the world twice, hovering over the ocean where it had first appeared.
The broadcaster had finished speaking just a moment before the craft had launched, oblivious to the blaring noise that had been intended to drown him out. What I don’t understand, is why a blank slate like you would default to doing good deeds, rescuing cats from trees. Why not turn to that violence, as our ancestors did? It drove them, just like it drives the basest and most monstrous of our kind.
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