City Without Heroes

by Tanya Lisle

  She was left alone in the house just as the microwave announced her dinner was done. She would eat and grab a quick nap, because she was not sleeping tonight. She needed to have a chat with Penny.

  Chapter 9

  Dream Walking

  Growing up, Indira had always been told about how you could not cheat the powers test. It was the way they determined if you had powers and what your powers were. It set the people who needed it up with mentorship, kept an eye on any health conditions that their powers may cause, or generally cataloged who had which abilities so that should something happen, like a villain rounding up all the psychics, they would be able to contact you discreetly and get you to a safe place. It was imperative that it was accurate, and it was said only the most powerful beings could cheat it.

  Indira had not considered herself powerful when she cheated it. It was as simple as leaving just enough of her attention with her body to answer questions and perform tests while she took the rest of her mind and powers elsewhere. It was hardly her fault that they didn’t realize that people could astral project and hold a conversation at the same time. Or that they never caught her astral projection abilities when she was already doing it when she started the test.

  She might have liked a mentor to help her make sense of it when she first learned she could do it, though. Separating herself from her body was a strange experience, and things didn’t look quite the same from outside if she strayed too far. Besides just wandering away, there were other, stranger directions that she could travel and get herself lost in if she wasn’t careful.

  For right now, though, Indira contented herself to wandering through the physical world, simply trying to regain her legs. She left her body under the covers at home, looking like she was asleep except for the markedly shallower breaths she took, and went through the walls to the street. She didn’t need to walk so much as expect to be in a new location, and that propelled her from one streetlight to the next, and then into the mostly quiet homes of her neighbours.

  Though she knew she would not be caught, Indira still felt strange about simply walking into other people’s houses uninvited. Plus, this wasn’t the most convenient way to find someone. She didn’t know where exactly Penny lived and wandering around the streets looking in each of the houses would take her days.

  She made a note of where she was so that she could find the way back to her body before she let herself shift away into a much more chaotic place. Various things wandered past, shapeless half formed ideas of creatures that mingled amidst partial places that continued to shift from one image to the next. Indira liked to think of this place as the collective subconscious, though in Whitten there was a fog that felt almost sticky as she passed through it.

  Penny had already been in her head once, so it wouldn’t be that hard to find her, even in this mess. As she walked, the scenery changed with every step, Indira trespassing through dreams as she looked for Penny. When she was younger, this was a lot more treacherous territory and resulted in her parents having to have a lot of very open and honest conversations with her at a young age. Dreams were, after all, very strange things that the mind conjured when it was the least inhibited.

  Now, Indira was not shocked when she wandered through a sex dream or when she saw people in horrible states of agony from all manner of torment. Whatever had caused the dream, she understood that she was trespassing on it and she was not meant to see anything happening here. Not the little girl befriending a bear. Not the old man literally falling into the sweet embrace of death. Not a familiar face being dragged onto a pyre as one of her classmates cowered, watching from the shadows. None of it was meant for her to see, and she knew better than to come to any conclusions based on what she might witness here.

  Her goal was Penny, though, and she was already drawing closer. Penny was easier to find in this chaos, not only because Indira had dealt with her intrusion into her thoughts before, but also because she was magic. Magic users did not dream normal dreams, if they dreamed at all. If they saw anything when they slept, it was either some vision or a memory. Indira hoped that it was neither of these things and they could just talk.

  The first thing she noticed as she finally found Penny was that she was not alone in whatever dreams she was having. There was a knot of something here, someone else entwined with her. The second was that she was, in fact, dreaming with this other person. Matt. Indira already knew it would be her brother in there with her.

  Pressing on now meant she would see something that either had or would happen. Worse, pressing on meant that she would be intruding on Matt as well, and the possibility that both of them would remember that she had been in there in the morning if she wasn’t very careful.

  Well, Indira had come this far.

  Indira stepped into the darkness of the woods, keeping herself as little of a presence as possible. If this was a memory, they might know that something was off when they saw her but, looking around, she wasn’t sure they would see anything at all. She saw the pair of them running, Penny ahead of Matt, Matt pushing her forward, neither looking at anything but whatever was straight ahead as they crashed through the woods. Behind them, Indira could see Whitten, looking like any normal city at night.

  Penny stumbled and took Matt down with her into the underbrush. From here, Indira could see the perspiration on their faces, though given the redness in their eyes she wondered if all of it was just sweat. Matt tried to help her up, both of them dragging deep breaths into their lungs. Penny turned looking wildly around for a new direction, but Matt had her arm and held her back as he tried to catch his breath.

  “We’re far enough, Pen,” he said. “We can get out of here and-”

  “We can’t just leave them!” she screamed back at him through ragged breaths. “We have to… we have to go back and help them! Maybe we can regroup and we can-”

  “Look at me!” Matt said, grabbing her by the shoulders and turning her to face him. “Penelope, they are already dead. You know that. I know that.”

  “They can’t be!”

  “It was a bad idea,” he told her. “We made a mistake. But they helped us get away.”

  “They might not be-”

  “They are dead, Penelope.” He was so serious that Indira felt shaken by it as the world around them started to fall away. Penny collapsed into her brother’s arms. Matt stayed with her, shaking his head and looking back into the darkness. “We didn’t know everything. People died. It was a bad plan, but we got out of there. And I don’t know how many more times you can do this, Pen.”

  “One more time,” Penny said. “We’re getting closer every time. Stronger, right? How many more times could it possibly take? Just change the people. Change the plan.”

  “Get out of town.”

  “Not an option,” Penny told him firmly, pushing away from him and staggering onto her own two feet. “Maybe we just need to go back and wait a little longer this time. Maybe someone new will come who can help us. There’s always new people. We just have to convince them to help, right? And why wouldn’t they?”

  “Because it’s dangerous,” Matt told her. “What about we just go back before we did any of this. Start warning people instead. You can keep everyone around and keep an eye on them. Make sure they don’t go disappearing again. We can just watch them and make sure no one dies instead.”

  “But what about Mom?”

  “Do you really think mom is still alive? Really?”

  Indira glanced back toward the city, but there was nothing left there, this memory lingering on the last moment as everything else started to fall away around them. Though she knew she had trespassed on something very private, Indira knew that she didn’t have much time left if she wanted to ask her questions or get any answers. Now that it was ending and the details were scarce, she might be able to slip in as a part of the memory and hope that they just didn’t realize she was out of place. If she could still do this.

  She brought the woods back around them, mak
ing them appear as if day was beginning to break through the leaves. For herself, she changed her appearance to look like she’d been lost in the woods herself for a few days. The woods around them got slowly friendlier and neither Matt or Penny appeared to notice. She filled in the dense underbrush with flowers and put the pair of them on a path.

  Indira was amazed at how easily it all came back to her. Creating worlds was one thing that she enjoyed doing, but practiced so rarely given the low profile she was trying to maintain. At a thought, she was able to change everything, and it was more difficult to keep her ideas from getting out of hand. She needed to keep this similar to their memory so that they wouldn’t suspect she was trespassing.

  Instead of Indira wandering out from the bushes, she looked like one of her friends from Iverson. She had her curly brown hair tied up behind her, perfectly normal brown eyes looking around in bewilderment. Behind her, a pair of large green wings protruded from her back, but instead of a costume, she wore jeans and a hoodie.

  When the pair of them turned to look at her ready to fight, Indira put her hands up in surrender. They glared at her a moment before they straightened up. Confusion filled their expressions as they looked behind them, finding that the dark things they were running from were gone now that it was daybreak. They saw only a strange fairy girl wandering across their path.

  “Sorry,” Indira said. “I got a bit lost. I’m trying to find Whitten. Can you point the way?”

  “You don’t want to head back there,” Matt said. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Oh, I hear it’s a very nice place,” Indira said. “Nice and quiet. A great place to raise a family. I’m not really sure why they call it The Speckled City, though. That seems like a very strange name for a place.”

  “It’s because of those damn specks,” Penny said. She used her magic freely once she saw Indira’s wings and raised up some of the vines along the side of the path until they formed small stools. “Sit,” she insisted. “You look like you’ve been out here for a while.”

  “Thank you,” Indira said, taking her seat at watching them. “But what are these specks? What do they do that’s made you both look so sad?”

  “The specks watch you,” Penny said. “They make sure anyone with powers like us don’t ever get to use them. If we do, the specks get rid of us. Or the men in the white vans do. I’m not really sure which it is, but after you see them and they hear you, you never escape again. You’ll be gone forever.”

  “That sounds terrible,” Indira said. That was disappointing. So they didn’t know much more about the specks other than confirming that they were actually listening to them. “But if you don’t say anything, then they leave you alone, right? So if I don’t say anything, then they’ll never bother me!”

  “You’ll have other problems with those wings,” Matt said.

  “Oh, aren’t they pretty?” Indira said, fluttering them on her back daintily. They felt almost natural in the dream and she knew just how to make them move. “I do love them so. But I’ve gotten so tired from flying that I think I’ll walk for quite a while now.”

  “You really don’t seem at all worried about the fact that we told you the city kills people.” Penny didn’t look happy and Matt followed her suspicion.

  “Well, I’m sure someone will handle it,” Indira told them, changing the mood around them. The colours and the atmosphere became duller, tones that she’d learned would encourage people to talk more. The quiet around them started to filter into their ears, so hopefully they would need to fill the silence.

  “We’ve tried to handle it!” Penny snapped, taking the atmospheric bait. “We’ve done everything we can think of to make people not die anymore. We have kept trying to take out those towers. I know those towers are the thing that are doing it. But every time we try…”

  “Oh no,” Indira said sympathetically. “What happened?”

  “How many times have we tried now?” Penny asked. Indira could tell from the look on Matt’s face that he knew something was wrong, but he did nothing to stop her. “We kept trying. Ronnie almost lived the last time. Esther’s too reckless. I don’t know what she can even do.”

  “She just likes getting her hands bloody, Penny,” Matt told her gently. “She wanted to punch people and stab them. She would have followed us if you didn’t bring her along yourself.”

  “And Alan. Steve. Carol. Noa. We can’t keep doing this, can we?”

  Matt shook his head. “We need to stop. We’ve reset too many times already.”

  “Until someone new comes. If someone new comes, if we can get some new people, then we can try it again, right? We have to keep trying. I can’t keep living like this, Matt. We can’t.”

  “Fine,” Matt conceded. Around them, the memory was coming back, and Indira let it bleed back through her illusions. She stepped back, fading away with them until she was no longer part of their dream anymore. They were moving back into a point that had actually happened. “If we can actually find someone new, if we can find anyone who can do something to actually help, then we can try again. But right now, we’re going to reset it and make it all go back again, okay? Back to before.”

  Penny nodded sadly and the two of them joined hands. Indira noticed a marking show up on the ground as the two of them started to speak in words that didn’t quite sound like anything, but she could feel echoing in her head.

  Indira left them. Those were more than enough answers for tonight. Tomorrow, she would figure out what she was going to do with them.

  Chapter 10

  Forgotten

  History wasn’t the reason Penny let out a yawn next to her, but it seemed as good a reason as any. Mr. Cantrell, for his best efforts, was doing a poor job of relating ancient history to current events, and Indira was paying only the barest attention to the front of the class. Whether or not Penny and Matt knew about her walking in on their dreams was much more pressing, and so far it seemed like she was in the clear.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Indira asked Penny as they packed up and headed to lunch. “You’ve been kind of off today.”

  Penny shook her head and smiled. “Just a busy weekend,” she said. “Didn’t sleep that well. And I completely forgot about that paper until last night.”

  “This school should think about a nap room.”

  A snort interrupted Penny’s stifled yawn and she shook her head. “Good luck getting that approved. Trying to get space for the Welcoming Committee has been enough of a pain in the ass. Speaking of, you think you could stick around for a bit after the next one? I wanted to introduce you to a few people and ask you about something.”

  “So ask me now.”

  Penny hesitated. “It’s better to ask with everyone around.”

  Indira hid her thoughts behind a smile. After what she’d seen, she didn’t trust anything that sounded like it might be assembling a team to go out and do something that might get them killed. Even if Penny and Matt could just reset things one more time, Indira didn’t even want to die once, and she had spent her life to this point avoiding getting herself involved in any heroics. She was not about to start now.

  “I’ve gotta get home,” Indira said instead. “Curfew. My parents don’t want me out too late.”

  “It’s an open invitation for whenever you want to take it up,” Penny said, though her expression made it no secret that she didn’t believe her. “I think you might be able to give us a hand with something. We’ve been trying to figure it out for a while.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get it without me.”

  They found Kyle holding a table for them alone in the cafeteria, Penny’s mood immediately dropping as she looked back to the line for food before turning to Kyle. “What happened?” she asked. “Where’s Matt?”

  “We got cornered by Brittany and Laura,” Kyle said. “He sacrificed himself to let me get away.”

  “God, not again,” Penny said, rolling her eyes.

  “What?” Indira asked. She knew roughly who the
y were, but hadn’t really interacted with either of them beyond a little relatively pleasant small talk here and there. They seemed nice enough when she was around, even if they were a bit judgemental of everyone around them. It wasn’t a bad thing, Indira finding that to be a fairly common trait among people in Iverson in particular even if it didn’t happen as often out here, but when you were surrounded by heroes, it was pretty normal.

  “The two of them have been practically fighting over Matt for, like, two years,” Penny said. “He’s dated both of them before, but he was basically just a trophy that they stole from each other while he wasn’t paying attention.”

  Indira let her gaze linger on Penny a little too long, trying to puzzle out her words. “I don’t think that made any sense.”

  “Matt didn’t know he was dating them,” Kyle said bluntly. “Not until Laura accused Brittany of stealing him. Not that it really stopped either of them. I think they have a truce.”

  “Those two really aren’t interested in him so much as they want to beat each other,” Penny chimed in, glaring across the courtyard. Indira followed her gaze to see Matt, free of whatever had been happening, coming towards them. “And look who finally got away.”

  “Sorry, I got a little tied up,” Matt said. He was noticeably without lunch and Penny passed what was left of hers over to him. He took it and shook his head, trying to smile in apology. Indira was pretty sure anyone other than his sister would have forgiven him for that, but Penny was not having it.

  “Just tell them no,” Penny told him bluntly. “I swear, you tell me no often enough. You can try to turn down the hot girls with the puppy dog eyes once in a while.”

  “They just wanted to know if I could help them set up for the Halloween party they’re throwing this weekend,” he said. “And I did tell them I couldn’t do it. But we’re invited, so if you guys aren’t doing anything this weekend.”