by Samit Basu
He bursts out of the pile, sending metal flying in every direction. He’s naked, covered in blood, and looks more like a porcupine than a human, but they all take an involuntary step back at the sight of him.
Immediately, Jason and Anima flow into a joint attack stance, but Jai raises a hand.
“Not here,” he says. “Not today.”
He turns and runs across Awesome Boy’s former dojo, trailing blood, glass and metal. He smashes straight through the far wall, out in mid-air, and disappears.
The Unit heroes stand in shocked silence, trying to catch their breath, hearing screams and sirens outside, but unable to summon the courage to go and stop them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The sunsets over Mar Bella beach are among the most beautiful in Barcelona, and today is no different. It will be dark soon, and the sea is turning from brilliant blue to smoky grey, but Uzma’s gigantic sunglasses stay resolutely on. Down the years, she’s accepted the fact that there is nowhere in the world where she can stay unrecognised for any reasonable period of time.
No one left on the beach has any interest in lounging about: the sea is empty, and the boats have left. Uzma is surrounded by large numbers of incredibly toned young bodies cavorting in the sands, and the trendy bars now blaring turn-of-the-century dance music. Since she’s wearing a bikini, she’s one of the most conservatively dressed people on the beach, but she’s getting stares from all sides as usual. She doesn’t know whether it’s her powers or just her demanding workout regimen, but several men have already managed to summon up the courage to ask her to accompany them across a large dune to the nudist section. She sips slowly from her fourth glass of sangria, and wonders, for the thousandth time, whether this whole solo excursion is her worst idea yet; worse even than charging into Hisatomi Tower without wondering what that annoying Japanese maniac might have done with Rowena Okocha’s blood.
But it’s difficult to keep thinking about blood and violence and intrigue on the sands of Barcelona. Uzma stretches and yawns, and looks around again, taking in the parties that are starting around her. She idly watches two Adonis-like men throw a large beach ball around, clearly for her benefit, and when there’s a soft cough behind her, she waits a good minute before she turns and acknowledges the man in his mid-thirties who’s standing nervously in the sand near her towel.
“I feel like I should beat you up,” she says.
“How long do you have?” asks Aman.
Uzma smiles, and shakes her head. “You let me think you were dead,” she says. “It’s going to take a lot of apologising before I can forgive that.”
“I’m angry with you too, you know,” he says. “You’re the reason they cancelled the Firefly reboot. It was a good show.”
“I had nothing to do with that. It’s Wingman’s show. I was just in the pilot.”
“It still hurts.”
“That’s not going to work, Aman,” says Uzma, surprised at how much it stings to say his name. “I’m going to need a lot of grovelling. Knees, flowers, speeches, the works.”
“How long do you have?” Aman asks again.
* * *
At midnight, Uzma rolls off an utterly exhausted Aman and pronounces him forgiven. He doesn’t respond, but from the idiot grin plastered on his face it’s clear he’s happy about this. Uzma waves the lights off and curls up next to him, facing away, and he turns instinctively and holds her as he always has. It’s ridiculously easy to pretend they’ve been together all this time. They spend the next ten minutes in perfectly joyous silence, feeling each other breathe, watching the room’s curtains flutter in the sea breeze.
“Does Tia know you’re here?” asks Uzma, and then winces in the dark, wishing she’d given them both some more afterglow time.
Aman sighs. “She knows,” he says.
The silence between them grows uncomfortable. Aman gives in first, waves the lights on, and gets up to drink some water. Uzma sits up and watches him walk about. In a while she realises that she hasn’t bothered to draw the sheets up around her as she does with her other lovers.
“We got married last year,” says Aman. “She died. The Venezuela thing.”
“I’m so sorry,” says Uzma. “So… how does that work? Are you still married to her?”
“No,” says Aman. “Tia had forty-three husbands around the world the last time I checked. Thirty-nine kids over the last eleven years. And I stopped checking last year. It’ll be a while before the law catches up. So no, we’re not married. But we obviously still live together, and… you know.”
“I don’t even want to imagine.”
“But she doesn’t mind sharing me, she says it’s only fair. You know Tia. I manage to wrap my head around the whole situation from time to time.”
“But your Tia was yours,” says Uzma. “Were you happy, being married? Please tell me you don’t have children.”
“I don’t.”
“Wow. Your love life is probably the only one in the world more complicated than mine.”
“Yeah. Well, we’re both several light years behind Tia, of course. And even Tia says she doesn’t remarry her own widowers.”
“Conservative. It’s age.”
“And you? Who’s the lucky man now?”
“The usual. Nothing extra interesting.”
“Well, you’ve obviously been practising a lot. I noticed some exciting new tricks.”
“You too. But then, Tia. Well played all around.”
Aman’s idiot grin reestablishes control over his face.
“Are you all right, Aman?” asks Uzma.
“I am,” he says, and manages a grin. “I mean, look at you.”
“I love you, you know,” says Uzma.
He looks at her, smiling and blinking, savouring the moment.
“If you say ‘I know’ I’ll smack you,” says Uzma.
“I love you too,” says Aman.
* * *
The next afternoon, Aman drags a reluctant Uzma to the newly restored Park Guell. They walk through the gardens, watching the milling tourists and musicians with their holo-zithers. Aman still hasn’t told Uzma why he insisted they meet in Barcelona, and she’s well past impatient; as the slow Spanish hours roll by, she works herself up into a quiet frenzy. But at sunset, when he drags her to the fountain presided over by Gaudi’s wonderfully insane salamander mosaic, she understands his reticence. If he’d told her who they were going to meet, she might not have come.
Vir is dressed in classic awkward-Indian-tourist gear, complete with baseball cap and dangling entry-level DSLR camera. He lacks the belly to really pull it off, but he makes up for this with an exaggerated slouch. Aman greets him warmly and declares him a master of disguise; Uzma and he nod stiffly at each other. Vir’s last public appearance was in Barcelona, weeks before he quit the Unit. He had stopped an Algerian supervillain from sandblasting the Sagrada Familia, and then ended up in a huge fight with the Unit’s former press agent over official photos. Uzma had had to Talk him out of making a scene. He’d tried out a few other superhero teams – former Unit members were always in demand – but eventually went back to his nomadic stranger-comes-to-town brand of helping people.
Vir is not here to build bridges with Uzma today, in fact he seems wary of talking in front of her at all. They leave the gardens, and walk downhill until they find a cluster of cafes, which both in the quality of coffee available and general atmosphere are opposite in every way to the crowded, generic cafe in Mumbai where Aman and Vir had met for the first time. Aman wonders who has changed the most since those days. He doesn’t have to think about this for long: it’s Vir.
“We’ve had these conversations before,” says Aman. “Vague threat of the world ending, no one knows where it’s coming from, Jai on the loose, other sinister powers at work. But this time there seems to be a general consensus on when it’s all going to go belly-up. One week. So. What do we do?”
“I’ve looked everywhere you asked,” says Vir. “The only people
on your list who I thought were real suspects – the magicians – have no idea what this particular apocalypse is about. They’re trying to build new dimension gateways, but there’s nothing there that could destroy the world. They’re not planning to let anything in that could.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Uzma.
Aman explains that he sent Vir to look at a few far-flung corners of the world where supers were working in isolation: groups of magicians in Tibet, Sri Lanka and Cameroon who’d gone off the grid a long time ago, wary of governments, other supers and Utopic gather-squads. A lot of their work was in the field of imagined sciences: they were trying to build new worlds, new havens for supers, new dimensions in which to practise their magic. None of their powers fit into the structures of the real world.
Aman had met one of the ringleaders, a young woman whose power was to bring her favourite characters from fiction into existence for brief periods of time; he’d found her while she was on the run from Utopic’s notoriously trigger-happy copyrights division. Uzma has dealt with magical cases before: at least five different schools along the lines of Hogwarts have been closed down over the last decade, and the Unit was recently involved in shutting down a scam where a Utopic subsidiary had collected vast amounts of money from real estate sales in a Narnia-esque fantasy dimension they said was under construction.
No one really knows the truth about magic, of course: whether it has always existed, or whether each act of magic is merely a super’s power in action. Even Wu doesn’t know if the spirits she summons are her own creations, or if they have always been there, lying in wait for the right vessel. Aman’s always felt it was unfortunate that the First Wave happened at a time when most of the globally popular works of fiction were fantasy in one form or the other, the whole super phenomenon was tough enough to deal with without the occasional outburst of vampire and zombie plagues.
“In any case,” says Vir, “they were all perfectly happy to shut down their projects for two weeks, none of them wanted to be accidentally responsible for ending the world.”
“Or so they claim,” says Uzma.
“Either way, I’ve sent them all on holiday,” says Vir. “Aman’s paying.”
“Utopic is paying,” says Aman. “But if it’s not the magic supers, who could it be?”
“Doomsday cult,” says Vir. “You can’t possibly be sure you’ve got them all.”
“But they’ve tried before,” says Aman. “It never works.”
Plenty of supers have already sought to end the world, the universal death wish is a distressingly common super desire. But the mysterious power or natural force behind the super waves has, fortunately, its own system of balance: whenever a super has tried to turn world-ender, the attempt has failed. In 2013, a very depressed failed bank CEO in Australia had just wanted everyone to die; everyone in the world had blacked out for a second, but then normality had been restored. There had been thousands of deaths in that moment, of course, but that had been because of accidents, not the unhappy super’s death wish. It happens occasionally, some strong mind, whose sole wish has been to change one particular aspect of the whole world, turns super, and implodes under the weight of its power at work. The 2019 attack of virulent pimples among everyone in the world who happened to be wearing hipster glasses at the time, is still widely discussed in fashion and law circles. But whatever the balancing power is, the super-apocalypse has always been diffused thus far.
“The only super we know who can actually affect the whole world is Viral,” says Uzma. “Could he be used in some way to harm every human?”
“Bloody Viral,” says Aman. “But no. I don’t see the end of the world coming from relentless advertising. But if you want to hunt him down and kill him, I’m on board.”
“Which leaves only one definite suspect,” says Vir. “Kalki.”
“Then it leaves no known suspects at all,” says Aman. “Kalki’s fine. Sher keeps him safe.”
“How long has it been since you checked?” asks Vir.
“Tia joined Sher’s army,” says Aman, “and their communications are monitored. But she gets a message through from time to time. Kalki’s crazy, but happy, and Sher keeps him well protected and on the move.”
“But the question is, what if Kalki’s protection is not the issue? What if Kalki himself is the danger?” asks Vir. “His mission as far as we know is to cleanse the world of evil. What if that involves ending it?”
“We have no idea what Kalki’s mission is,” says Uzma. “Kalki can’t speak. He’s never threatened anyone. We had a lot of trouble with Utopic over this, when they were going to send in an army to extract him.”
“I remember,” says Vir. “I also remember agreeing with them. Kalki is dangerous. We’ve all felt it. There’s something deeply wrong with him.”
“There’s something deeply wrong with all of us,” says Aman. “And a lot of people think we deserve to die because of it. In Kalki’s case, though, all the fear is completely unfair. Rumours off the internet based on legends based on what he looks like. We called him Kalki. He’s not done anything to deserve this suspicion.”
“First Wave,” says Vir. “Unique. Superpowers before birth.”
“They’ve tried to replicate it, you know. The Chinese sent up whole planes full of pregnant women,” says Aman. “Hasn’t worked so far.”
“Well, that makes Kalki even stranger,” says Vir. “Unquantified powers. Growing every day for eleven years. Insane. I say he’s our prime suspect.”
“You want to kill Kalki?” asks Uzma. “I thought you’d become some sort of wandering sage.”
“I could take him up to one of the space stations,” says Vir. “Keep him in orbit for a month. He’s a ticking bomb, Uzma.”
“You can go and have a word with Sher about it,” says Uzma. “An ex-Unit reunion. That should go well.”
“They always do, don’t they?”
“Children. Behave,” says Aman. “What else do we have?”
“We have any number of possible situations,” sighs Uzma. “Villain collective. Monsters, like the thing we saw in Tokyo. More magicians. Or some true believer creates a god.”
“There’s always the old-fashioned nuclear holocaust,” says Vir.
“No,” says Aman. “I’ve got that covered. Let’s stick to threats we know. I still think the magicians are our likeliest danger. How far have they got with their world building?”
“Not far at all,” says Vir. “None of their alternate realities are self-sustaining. We’re very far away from the day when we can actually build new worlds that people from here can travel to.”
“So, no mirror universes full of our evil alter-egos,” says Aman. “I always dreamt of Evil Dominatrix Uzma with a French beard and everything.”
“Save it for later,” says Uzma with a grin.
Vir looks at them sharply.
“If you two are done,” he says. “Yes, there will come a time when somebody creates an alternate world and people try to move there in large numbers. And yes, I’m sure things will go horribly wrong and people like us will have to step forward and do something. But I’m confident it won’t happen next week.”
Aman is distracted. A teenaged boy at the table next to theirs is recording their conversation surreptitiously. Aman deletes the video and forwards a set of sexts from the boy’s phone to his online public profile. The boy reads his email and runs out of the cafe in terror.
“And then there’s Norio,” says Aman. “Have you found him yet?”
Uzma has not. Worse, Azusa escaped when Wu and Wingman raced to rescue the rest of the Unit.
“And have you found Sundar?” asks Aman. “Sorry, I know you haven’t. We should. There’s a doomsday device builder if I ever met one. Norio told me he was his research head. But he isn’t on the Hisatomi payroll.”
“No one in the company knows anything about Norio’s other life,” says Uzma. “I’ve asked. Norio and his gang are missing, and pr
esumably still working on whatever plan Norio has.”
“I’ve been through the list I gave him,” says Aman. “Lots of troublemaking potential, given his mind control machine, but nothing that can end the world.”
“What is this plan of his?” asks Vir.
“I honestly have no idea, and I’ve been tracking him for a while,” says Aman. “He clearly has a problem with supers, but his attack on all of us can’t have been in the works for very long – he got to Rowena through sheer good luck. Killing Jai was something he’s wanted to do since his father died. But there’s more to it. More to him. To know what he’s planning, we have to find out what else Sundar built for him. But I don’t see how we can do that.”
“You’ll find him eventually,” says Uzma. “He’s only human.”
“A human who drives a three-hundred-foot-tall mecha and defends Tokyo from giant monsters, when he’s not being a playboy billionaire and flirting with Utopic,” says Aman. “If he wants to stay hidden, I might not find him for a while. And in the meantime, we’ll have to find someone else to defend Tokyo.”
“What about the other members of ARMOR?” asks Uzma. “Can’t we get to them?”
“I know who they are,” says Aman. “Azusa is one. The other three are Tokyo gamers. They met online. They don’t know about Norio’s grand plan either. They don’t even know who he is.”
“Well, like the magicians, he’s going to be a problem, but not this week,” says Vir. “And if he pops up, we’ll get him. In the meantime, you have to find a way to listen to every phone call and read every message in the world.”
“On it,” says Aman. “And then there’s our dear friend Jai.”
“Jai doesn’t want to end the world,” says Vir. “He wants to rule it.”
“Who knows what he wants now,” says Aman. “But for starters, you should stay away from the Unit for a while, Uzma. Because when he wants revenge, it’s you he’ll come after.”
“Eleven other supers that we know of have powers like Jai’s,” says Uzma. “It’s not like it was when it was just us. He can be beaten.”
