by Lee Winter
“It collapsed on you,” the man said. “We saw the guardian swoop up to get the kid so we ran back as the building came down. But you were just standing there with your eyes shut. Didn’t even move. Then...BAM! You got blown backwards and now we got this. A huge motherfuckin’ pile of bricks.”
Lena swallowed, tasting grit. “Where’s Ny... Shattergirl?”
He shrugged. “In that somewhere.” He pointed to the rubble pile. “But they can’t get killed can they? I mean guardians don’t die? Right? I’ve never heard of it.”
Lena scrambled to her feet, opening her mouth as panic coursed through her. “NYAH?” she shouted, earning confused looks. She focused and thought urgently: Where the hell are you? You’d better not have gotten your ass killed. She ran towards the rubble and began tossing rocks back.
“What in hell are you doing, woman?” the man called. “And who’s Nigh-uh?”
“Don’t just stand there!” Lena shouted back. “Dig! Ny… Shattergirl could be hurt.” She glanced back and saw many in the crowd gaping in astonishment.
“Are you an idiot?” he hollered. “She’s a guardian.”
“But she’s not invincible.”
Members of the crowd looked at each other, then back at her, unconvinced.
“It’s true!” she shouted. “They bleed too. Come on. We have to help, have to...shit!”
There was a roar as the mountain of rubble suddenly erupted with a writhing tornado of broken brick and debris. A dust-coated Shattergirl burst into the open before them, holding a small girl in her arms.
A woman cried and ran forward. “My baby! Oh lord, I didn’t know! I didn’t know she was inside. She was supposed to be with her daddy today.” She flung her arms out, tears streaking down her face.
Nyah handed the girl to her and looked around the crowd. She paused on Lena, her eyes narrowing, scanning her dust-covered, torn clothing. If Lena didn’t know better, she’d say she looked concerned. Their eyes locked for a moment, then Nyah’s face became blank. She turned her back to Lena, scanning the debris. Professional mask duly welded on.
You’re fine, right? Lena thought, staring hard at her back.
Nyah paused, turned to one side, looking at no one in particular, then gave a tiny nod.
Relief flooded Lena. Meet me where you first landed?
Nyah didn’t respond this time, but Lena didn’t need an acknowledgment. She backed out of the crowd, trying to stem her irritation as she saw people rush up to Nyah, waving paper, pens, and phones. She’d just risked her life, and all they wanted was a prized pound of flesh to claim.
“Spare me the fangirls,” Nyah had growled to her the day they’d met. Lena felt a stab of sympathy for her now. It was obscene in a way. But this was hardly new for Nyah, and Lena knew she could handle herself. She glanced back at the crushing, suffocating press of fans and tried to imagine facing that every day for a hundred years. She couldn’t.
“I love you, Shattergirl!” one excited woman’s voice called. “Can I have a selfie?”
Lena paused in distaste, whipping her head around to see Nyah’s reaction. They didn’t know her at all.
At that moment, Nyah glanced up and their gazes caught for a beat. Lena shook her head slowly. This is insane. Nyah’s eyes dropped, as she murmured something to the man closest to her, who was waving a pen in her face.
Lena darted away, zigzagging through the alleys, and, five minutes later, reached their landing point. She was only there a minute before Nyah slowly descended from the air, looking as regal as a goddess. And how the hell had she gotten all the dust off her? Had she looped the city at the speed of sound or something?
Lena focused on putting her mental barriers back up, building a wall between them.
“A pity,” Nyah said, with a small smile as she touched the ground. “I was becoming accustomed to your voice in my mind. Especially all those sarcastic rejoinders you never share with the world.”
Lena shot her a wry smile. “Well, I discovered early in life that the world doesn’t appreciate my biting wit.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say the whole world.” Nyah’s expression tightened and she glanced down at her side. She lifted her tunic and Lena gasped at the darkening patch across her ribs.
“You said you weren’t hurt!” Lena said.
“I only cracked them. They’ll heal soon. Probably an hour at most.” She gritted her teeth, then gingerly slid her top back down.
“How did it happen?”
“I picked up the girl and turned to see the building about to land on your head, and you were in your own trance. I had to propel you out of the radius with everything I had—which would have knocked you out briefly. By then the building buried me and crushed my ribs. I used my powers to create a small bubble of resistance and waited for the shifting to stop. I heard you call.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Lena said, suddenly feeling foolish. Maybe the man was right. Nyah was a guardian. Born to survive. Lena shifted her feet. “It was amazing, by the way,” she admitted. “Seeing you at work. Sorry about all the clingy commons.”
Nyah’s eyebrow lifted in amusement. “Are you, Tracker Martin, actually admiring a guardian? What’s the world coming to?”
Lena scowled, folding her arms. “I wouldn’t call it ‘admiring,’ exactly.”
Nyah’s eyebrow lifted even higher.
“You know, you’ll sprain it if you keep that up,” Lena said pointing at her arching brow. “And just take the compliment will you?”
Nyah shrugged. “But it’s what I do.”
“I get that in theory, but seeing it for myself? It’s something else again. You know?”
“I know.” Nyah sighed. “And that is the problem. I’m too good at what I hate.” She held out one arm and looked at Lena pointedly until she stepped closer. “Come on—I would prefer to not be here anymore. This place is too depressing to linger too long.”
Before Lena could comment, Nyah torpedoed them off into the skies once more, a swallowed half grunt her only concession to her injury.
They cleared the city, traveling faster than they had before, and the longer they flew, the more withdrawn Nyah appeared.
“What’s wrong?” Lena asked. “You saved that driver. Not to mention me. Shouldn’t you be a little happier?”
“But I didn’t save the old man being mugged two streets away. I didn’t stop the teenager vandalizing some street signs as we speak. I didn’t help the woman who just fell down a flight of steps and broke her hip. I prioritized the loudest pain of the one, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still hear the many.”
“Oh.” Lena couldn’t even wrap her head around that. Her heart clenched at a thought. “Is our planet just a never-ending series of hellscapes for you? Is that how you see it?”
Nyah gave her an unfathomable look. “Actually I prioritize shades of hell too.”
“That’s… Christ, Nyah.” She swallowed. “So can we go back to Socotra now? I mean are we over our hell tour?” She’d rather have asked if Nyah could drop her straight back to her apartment so she could crawl into a ball in bed and forget the past twenty-four hours. But her backpack was still in Nyah’s cave, along with her passport and an extremely expensive, company-issue FacTrack.
Nyah gave her an appraising look. “Not yet. There’s one last thing I want to show you. And, for the record, you haven’t been to hell just yet.”
Lena shuddered and shut her eyes.
They were sitting on the roof edge of a random tenement building in a downtown city. Lena hadn’t asked which one. What was the point? It looked like just another boarded-up, rundown, black spot, like so many in the world. She could tell by the cars they were still in America, but not much else.
Nyah’s customary confidence had dissipated. Her shoulders were slumped, and her eyes held none of her customary spark. Lena wondered what this place signified.
“Why are we here?” she asked lightly. She tried a joke. “What’s this city done to you lately?�
��
“Look at the tallest buildings,” Nyah said quietly. “Pick them all out for me. And then tell me what they all have in common.”
Lena stared at the glass edifices on the horizon emblazoned with familiar logos. “They’re all banks.”
“Yes,” Nyah said. “This is the god your world worships. This is what your kind deems most important. Banks, corporations, money. I have learnt that on this world you use people and love things. That is why we see broken humans, yet efficient strip mines. Shattered people with suffocated hopes, next to shiny, soulless towers of greed. On Aril wealth was never a goal. We embraced ideas. The better the ideas, the more standing you had. Here? It’s the men and women in those buildings in thousand-dollar suits who are worshipped.”
“So you’re here to tell me our economic system is all wrong?” Lena looked at her in disbelief. The topic made her all kinds of uncomfortable.
“No,” Nyah said, sounding tired. “That’s not why we’re here. It just occurred to me now while we were here anyway. I suppose I was delaying. But we’re actually here for this.” Her hand dropped uneasily to the building they were sitting on. “This is why. This is why I walked away from everything.”
Lena took a closer look at where they were. The apartment building was worn out, with a rusty tangle of fire escapes and crumbling red brick. She counted. They were fifteen levels up.
“We’re here because of Lucy. That’s who I…. I saved a little girl from throwing herself off this very building,” Nyah said, her voice bleaching of all life. “She was right here, sitting beside me, when I talked to her. She was only eight.”
“Eight?” Lena gasped. “Why would she want to do that?”
Nyah’s face became still. “She told me that her daddy did secret things to her from the time she was five. Things that hurt her and made her bleed.” Her eyes filled with a dark anger. “And while he did these things to her, he told her that she was nothing. Not special. Not a thing anyone would ever want. He said that she was lucky he was there to bother with her. Lucy believed him with all her little heart. She had a beautiful soul, Lena. I could hear it. In her thoughts. She just wanted to be a good girl. And she believed to her core that she was dirty, unlovable, and broken.”
Lena’s eyes filled with tears and she squeezed them shut, wishing she couldn’t hear the words, or the heartbreakingly empty way Nyah delivered them.
“I sat up here with her for three hours, telling her all the ways her life could be amazing if only she believed. I told her she wasn’t broken, but beautiful. And she touched my skin, so like her own, and ran her hand down my face, as if daring to see the truth in it. And then she nodded. I made her believe.” Nyah became unnaturally still, her eyes fixed on the smaller buildings below.
“That’s good, right?” Lena whispered. She reached for Nyah’s hand and gave it a squeeze. The other woman’s fingers lay unresponsive under hers. Lena felt a tremble in them.
“Her father’s dark thoughts were a blackness I could feel even from up here. Lucy’s mother knew what was happening too, but she didn’t want to lose him. I felt those fearful, selfish thoughts. She knew and she let that happen.”
Nyah inhaled sharply and one hand curled into a fist, so tight her knuckles went white.
“I confronted him. Told him if he touched his daughter again he’d never walk straight, let alone sire another child. I felt his terror. I made a report to police and Child Protective Services. They agreed to investigate. Said they’d make very sure it was looked at, top priority, because I had asked personally.” She shook her head. “When you’re a guardian, people do what you tell them. Always. So I assumed…” She looked ill and then gazed at Lena helplessly. There were tears in her eyes.
“I was busy with a rockslide in Argentina after that… It took a few weeks to clear and get all the survivors out, so I didn’t follow up immediately. Those officials had looked me in the eye and said they would make Lucy their top priority. I believed them, of course, because I was Shattergirl, damn it, a perfect, glorious superhero in the eyes of the commons.” She gave a cynical, cold laugh. “And people always do what I say. By the stars, I was so arrogant.”
“Did they? Help her?” A sense of dread curled into a ball in Lena’s stomach.
Nyah looked away. “Three weeks passed. They were so busy. Nothing happened. Her father obviously thought I was long gone, and returned to his abusive ways. Lucy believed I’d abandoned her. I promised her it would get better and yet nothing changed.” Nyah shook her head. “She’s right, I did fail her. I did.”
Her voice shook. “So she came up here again and did it quietly, all alone, so no one would stop her this time. Lucy left a note weighted down by an old brick, as cracked as she felt. The note said: ‘Please tell Shattergirl I’m very sorry.’ I still have the note, tear stains and all. I see her face at night. Every night. And I hear the memory of her voice whispering in my head that day we spoke. Do you know what her thoughts were? ‘You’re wrong, Shattergirl. I am nothing.’”
Lena stared in horror at the drop below. That poor little girl.
Nyah brusquely wiped away a tear.
It was a tragedy on every side. Worse than that. Lena’s stomach was churning, and she felt cold, sick, and disgusted by everything. To think she had ever had the conceit of thinking her life was worse than a guardian’s. This hell Nyah had gone through would have broken her for good if it had been her. She scrambled to her feet.
“Get me out of here.” Her voice was raw and rough with unshed tears.
“You see now?” Nyah asked, rising slowly and holding out her hand. Shame colored her features.
“You couldn’t have known.” Nyah wasn’t wrong in assuming her request would be honored. Lena had seen people do anything for a guardian. Anything. Her confidence hadn’t been without basis. “It isn’t your fault.”
“Isn’t it? I should have done something more to her father. He’s in jail now, I made sure of it, after she died, but I wish…I wish many dark things.”
“Then that would make you a killer. And you’re not.”
“Some days I think that’s a shame.”
“Nyah,” Lena said softly.
Without another word, the guardian wrapped an arm around Lena, and hurled them both into the sky.
CHAPTER 10
When they made a harrowing, wind-swept landing back on Socotra, Lena pushed off against Nyah, and almost sprinted inside the cave, desperate for distance from the horrors she’d experienced, and, by proxy, the person who’d opened her eyes to them. She didn’t get far, her burst of energy suddenly seeping from her. She dropped to her knees beside the fireplace, too shaky to walk, and unsure what to do next. How long had they even been gone? Half a day? Felt like a year.
“I’m sorry,” Lena said, as the guardian’s footsteps strode across the cave floor. “For everything you’ve gone through and the terrible crap you’ve had to live with.”
“It wasn’t my intention to make you so upset.”
“Of course it was,” Lena said wearily. “But you’re right. You’re right about our world and its fucked-up priorities. And you’re right to be angry at what we forced on you. I don’t blame you for running after what you’ve seen. I’d also hole up in some cave at the end of the world and toss anyone who came to recruit me into the Baltic Sea. Hope his ass drowned.”
“Well,” Nyah said with a long pause, “I didn’t exactly drown that agent in the middle of the Baltic.”
“But…” Lena frowned trying to recall their first conversation. “I thought…”
“There was a ship nearby,” Nyah admitted.
Lena stared at her helplessly. “How do you live with this? These thoughts in your head, going around and around? I couldn’t. It’s inhuman expecting someone to cope with that for a day, let alone a hundred years.”
“But I’m not human, remember.” Nyah lowered herself down to sit beside her. She expertly relit the fire. “Which means no one cares what we go through. We�
��re just expected to do our jobs without complaint. Every single day.” There was no self-pity in her voice, just resignation.
“Fuck them all then,” Lena said fiercely. “I mean it.”
There was a pause. “So do you think an overdue can be just left to run?” Nyah asked. “Whatever happened to the legendary Silver—no guardian left untracked? No hesitation or doubt. Always gets her prey?”
“Fuck her too.”
“You know what this means?”
Lena lifted her head and saw amusement in her eyes. “What?”
“You’re not the awful person you think you are.”
“You’d be wrong about that.”
“Oh?”
“I’m pretty screwed up. There’s a crap-load of things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. I’m ruthless at what I do. Hell, I’m little better than a machine.” She swallowed. “But now I’ve seen...that. Now, I have…I have doubts,” Lena said with a harsh whisper that felt wrenched from her.
“Doubts,” Nyah repeated quietly. “So you do have compassion.”
It would be so easy to accept that. Absolution from the most haunted and hunted guardian who’d ever lived. The words, surprisingly gentle, felt like a caress. It was undeserved. Lena couldn’t accept them. Nyah didn’t know the truth about her. If she did, absolution would be the last thing she’d offer.
“I need to get some rest,” she said abruptly.
“Lena…”
“No.”
“It might help to talk.”
Lena didn’t reply. She lay on her side, on her sleeping bag, facing the fire. The silence dragged on, her back taut, as she waited to see whether Nyah would press her.
Instead, there was a cautious “All right.”
She closed her eyes, shutting out the superhero, and heard the shifting of grit on the cave floor and retreating, booted footsteps. The creak of the bed told her where Nyah had gone, and it allowed Lena to feel safe enough to risk opening her eyes again.
She stared into flickering flames that should have warmed her. Instead, a sickness spread though her that left her washed out and clammy. So much had been stirred up that she wasn’t sure she could shove it back inside ever again.
