Behind the Mask

by Link, Kelly; Rambo, Cat; Vaughn, Carrie

“I will only sleep with someone,” the Sphinx says, twisting, turning, cartwheeling, “who knows who they are.”

  Ms. Liberty’s arms fall around the other woman, who is iron and velvet in her embrace. Then Ms. Liberty pushes away, stammers something incoherent, and rushes from the room.

  The Sphinx looks after her, waits for hours in the room, gives up the vigil as dawn breaks. Several stories above, Ms. Liberty saves the twenty thousand words she’s written, a love scene so tender that readers will weep when they read it, weep just as she does, saving the file for the last time before sending it to her editor.

  • • •

  Ms. Liberty lets X cook her dinner. This is a mistake for most beings. X has flexible and fairly wide definitions of “food,” and she has no discernable theory of spices. But for a cybernetic body, fuel is fuel, and sensation is sensation. There are no unpleasant physical sensations for Ms. Liberty. All she has to do is make a simple modification, performed by mentally saying certain integer sets.

  She knows that she can do the same with her emotions. She could make loneliness bliss, frustration as satisfying as completing a deadline. But would she be the same person if she did that? Is she a person? Or just a set of desires?

  She eats chili and bread sandwiches, washes them down with a glass of steaming strawberry-beef tea. X has produced candies studded with dangerous looking sugar shards colored orange and blue and yellow and green. Inside each is a flake of something: rust, brine, coal, alderwood.

  Ms. Liberty eats them meditatively, letting the flavors evoke memories.

  Rust for the first day she met X, when they fought against the Robotic Empress. Brine for the Merboy and his sad fate. Coal for the day they fought the anti-Claus and gave each other gifts. Alderwood has no memory attached and it scents her mouth, acts as a mental palate cleanser. She goes upstairs and writes five chapters set in Egypt, and a heroine in love with the dusky native guide. At midnight she eats the chocolate-flavored flatbread X slides under the door and writes another 2,000 words before lying down to recharge and perform routine mental maintenance.

  She pushes herself into sleep as smoothly as a drawer closing. Her last thought is: is she a superhero or just programmed that way?

  • • •

  They fight Electromargarine, the psychedelic supervillain.

  A band of intergalactic pirates.

  Super-intelligent orcas from the beginning of time.

  The actual Labia League, which turns out to be supervillains who refer to themselves as supervillainesses.

  Alternate universe versions of themselves.

  A brainwashed set of superheroes.

  A man claiming to speak for Mars.

  A woman claiming to speak for Venus.

  A dog claiming to speak for the star Sirius.

  And all the time, Ms. Liberty keeps looking at the Sphinx and seeing her look back.

  Dr. Arcane has her own set of preoccupations. There’s Zanycat’s hero-worship, Kilroy’s chemical dependency, and whatever guilt rides Rocketwoman. Zenith suspects the last is some death. She tries to figure out who, tries to observe where Rocketwoman’s eyes linger, which conversations shade her voice with regret (all of them, which is a little ominous), how she looks when reading the morning newspaper.

  Dr. Arcane catches her in the hallway, hisses in her ear, “Listen, Charisse, I need for you to tell me who dies. If it’s me, I won’t be angry, I just want to get my affairs in order.”

  “I can’t tell you,” Rocketwoman says. She looks away, avoids Zenith’s eyes.

  Zenith snarls with frustration. She doesn’t like not knowing, it’s the one thing in all the world that can make her truly angry.

  Plus all that stuff about the sanctity of the timeline that time travelers spill out is hooey. You can alter time, and many people have. If it was as fragile as all that, you’d have reality as full of holes as Brussels lace. No, when you change time you just split the timeline, create an alternate universe. The unhappy future still remains, but at least it’s got (if you’ve done it right) a happy twin to balance it out. This is, in fact, why most travelers appear and Zenith is sure that Charisse is no exception. She’s here to change something. She’s just not saying what.

  • • •

  They fight something huge and big and terrifying. That’s par for the course. That’s what superheroes do, whether they’re programmed by three almost-adolescents in lab coats or by centuries of a culture’s honor code or by some childhood incident that set them forever on this stark path.

  Dr. Arcane fights because she likes the world.

  Rocketwoman fights because she’s seen the future.

  X fights because her friends are fighting.

  Zanycat fights because it’s what her family does.

  Kilroy fights because there’s nothing better to do until she gets to return home.

  The Sphinx fights because she doesn’t want to be a supervillain.

  Ms. Liberty thinks she fights for all these reasons. None of these reasons. She fights because someone wanted a sexy version of Captain America. Because someone thought the country was worth having someone else fight for. Because a woman looks sexy in spandex facing down a flame-fisted villain.

  Because she doesn’t know what else she should be doing.

  Because her instincts say it’s the right thing to do.

  • • •

  Ms. Liberty finishes her novel, sends it off, starts another about a bluestocking who collects pepper mills and preaches Marxism to the masses. She spends a lot of time pacing, a lot of time thinking.

  X has discovered paint-by-numbers kits and is filling the rooms with paintings of landscapes and kittens, looking somewhat surreal because she changes the numbers all around.

  Zanycat is about to graduate high school and has been scarce. Next year she’ll be attending City College, just a few blocks away, and they all wonder what it will be like. Zenith remembers being student and superhero—it’s hard to do unless you’re well-organized.

  Kilroy has joined AA and apologized to several villains she damaged unnecessarily while fighting intoxicated. Before each meal, she insists on praying, but she prays to her own, alien god, and an intolerant streak has evidenced. She’s apparently a fundamentalist of her own kind and believes the Earth will vanish in a puff of cinders and ash when the End Times come. That’s why she’s been working so hard to acquire money to get off-world, lest she be caught in the devastation.

  • • •

  Ms. Liberty goes to Reede and Mode to find fabric for a new costume. There’s a limited range to the fabrics—not much call for high end fashion in super-science, but she comes across a silvery gray that looks good. She finds blue piping for the wrists and neck, not because she wants the echo of red, white, and blue, but because she likes blue and always has. And it makes her eyes pop. The super-robots take her measurements. They’ll whip it up while she runs her next errand.

  There are some places that are neutral territory for superheroes and villains. A few bars, for example, and most churches. And this hair salon, high atop the Flatiron Building. Arch rivals may face down there and simply step aside to let the other have first crack at the latest Vogue Rogue.

  “My friends keep trying to push me to try something different, Makaila,” she tells the hairdresser.

  “Do you want to try something different?” the hairdresser demands, putting her hands on her hips. She has attitude, cultivates it, orders around these beings who could swat her like a fly, drain her soul, impale her with ice and kill her a thousand other ways, as though they were small children. And they enjoy it, they sink into the cushioned chairs and tell her their woes as she uses imaginarium-reinforced blades to snip away at super-durable hair, self-mending plastic. Usually she just trims split ends.

  Ms. Liberty looks at the tri-fold mirror and three of her look back. She thinks that this is the first time she’s decided to alter herself, step away from the original design. She thinks of it as modernization—a fe
w decades of crime fighting can date you, after all.

  Here’s the question, she thinks. Does she want to be a pretty superhero? Is that what being a superhero means to her?

  And here’s another question: what is a superhero’s romance? She’s been writing them as though they were any other love story, writ a bit larger, with a few more cataclysms and laser guns in the background. Girl meets boy, there’s a complication, then she gets her man. But what does the superwoman do after she’s got him? Does she settle down to raise supertots or do they team up to fight crime? Can you have your cake and eat it too, as Marie Antoinette, the Queen of Crime, would insist?

  Her makers thought sex was a worthy goal, a prime motivator. And instead all they’d done was make her start to question her body. And now was she questioning her own mind the same way, wondering if she wanted love or sex, and what the difference was.

  Her three faces stare and stare from the mirror and she hesitates, conscious of the waiting Makaila. Finally, she says, “I want it short and easy to take care of,” and leans back in the chair.

  • • •

  They fight:

  Shadow elementals.

  A team of super-scientists.

  A group of sub-humans.

  A cluster of supra-humans.

  Ms. Liberty’s creators in zombie form.

  A villain who will not reveal her name.

  The hounds of the Lord of the Maze of Death.

  A rock band.

  A paranoid galaxy.

  A paranoid galaxy’s child.

  A paranoid galaxy’s child’s clone.

  A witch.

  And in the end, everything turns out fine, except for the hovering death that Rocketwoman still watches for, that Dr. Arcane still watches her watching for. The Sphinx and Ms. Liberty do go to bed together, after issues and problems and misunderstandings, and at that point we fade to black and a few last words from our sponsor, along with X in the shape of a giant candy bar.

  • • •

  “Every woman knows she’s a woman,” Ms. Liberty says. “She’s a woman. And every hero is a hero. They’re a hero. That’s who they are.”

  Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches atop a hill in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is an Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee. Her second novel, Hearts of Tabat, appears in early 2017 from Wordfire Press. She is the current President of the Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of America. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction, see www.kittywumpus.net

  Destroy the City with Me Tonight

  Kate Marshall

  Cass gets the diagnosis in high school, three weeks shy of eighteen, full of dreams about Paris and London and New York. She’s always had the aches. Growing pains, her mother tells her—normal. She repeats it to herself as they wait for the X-rays—normal—in a waiting room with a broken air conditioner—normal—and an antiseptic smell. She repeats it when the nurse calls them back—normal—while the doctor looks down at his notes—normal—all the way until he says the words.

  Caspar-Williams Syndrome.

  The city is mapped on her bones, to lines that wrap ribs, tibia, mandible. A dense knot of streets engraves her sternum; a lonely road carves a notch in her clavicle. An intersection splays like a starfish below her left eye, and she stares at the shadow of it on the X-ray as the doctor explains. Rare condition. Few known cases. Well, we’ve all seen the news.

  Her mother gives a strangled laugh, covers her mouth. “It’s only,” she says. “It’s only, I thought I was going loopy in my middle age, but I guess . . .”

  Cass thinks of the times her mother has forgotten to pick her up. Has seemed startled that she’s in the room. Has stuttered over her name or only stared a moment, bewildered, as if she does not know who this stranger is.

  Normal.

  “The pain will get worse, if she doesn’t leave. She might have weeks or months or years before it’s unbearable,” the doctor says, but Cass doesn’t wait around. She’s never liked long goodbyes.

  It takes her a week to find the right city, searching maps for familiar streets, matching them to the osseous grooves beneath her skin. It’s not London or Paris or New York; it’s nowhere she’d choose to go, but she buys a one-way ticket. Her doctor gives her the name of a local specialist, but she never calls the number. There’s no cure, after all, and she’s had enough of tests.

  She gets a job at a diner and an apartment barely big enough for a bed. The street she lives on sits snug in the crook of her left elbow. For the first time in years, her bones don’t ache.

  She waits.

  • • •

  It’s six months before the visions start. The city starts her out easy: a little girl lost ten blocks from home. Cass walks her back and leaves her at the doorstep. It’s stolen suitcases next, dumped in the bushes, money scraped out but otherwise intact. A few weeks after that, it’s a mugging. She takes a fist to the stomach, punches back, feels the man’s bones break. She doesn’t even bruise.

  Her boss forgets to give her shifts. Then he forgets she works there at all. But that’s all right; her landlord’s forgotten she’s there, too, and stops collecting rent. Cass spends her nights riding buses, always tucked in the rearmost seat, waiting to be where the city wants her. She never once fights it.

  • • •

  Two years in, the symptoms are getting worse. Her fingerprints have smoothed out, vanished. Her features blur in photographs. She can stand in a room for an hour before people notice her.

  She’s always wondered why you’d bother with a mask; now she gets it. It’s not to be concealed, it’s to be seen, to be remembered. Her mask is pale blue, the hint of feathers at the edges; she gets wings tattooed across her shoulders. When the name arrives, it’s Seraph. She takes to it, ditches Cass entirely. No one’s called her by name in over a year, anyway.

  The city offers up a better apartment, right on Main Street. The former tenant is dead, a tunnel taking the place of his right eye, the killing too quick for the city to catch on. She drops the killer off at the police station and cleans up the blood. The walls are decorated with black and white photos: New York, Paris, London. She frames her X-rays and hangs them next to Big Ben.

  The next day she gets shot. It’s the fifth time, but it still stings.

  • • •

  The apartment on Main has been “vacant” for six years now. At some point, the former tenant’s family showed up for his things, but they somehow forgot to take the bed, the couch, the TV, the photos. They looked uneasy when they left, and they lingered, engine idling, for nearly an hour. She almost wished they’d come back and demand she get out, but like everyone else, they shook it off and left.

  Seraph’s skin is a map of its own now—scars too deep to heal clean. Bullets, knives. Rebar that punched through just under her ribs. Not enough to kill her, though she knows that they can die. She watched it happen once, on the news, the one called Glaive, body slicing downward through the air for a few graceful seconds before gravity and asphalt put an end to her momentary flight. Death breaks the amnesiac contagion; in death, she is remembered, known. Her name was Danielle and no one pushed her.

  Seraph gets a recording. Watches it on repeat and wonders when she’ll get too weary of being forgotten. When she goes, she decides, she doesn’t want to be witnessed.

  Another winter passes.

  • • •

  He shows up in April, when the streets are wet and cool. Another Caspar-Williams. The Rothschild variant, though it hasn’t been proven that the variation is one of pathology rather than psychology. Every city produces a Rothschild eventually. An echo, a reflection, the destruction to her protection. Whether it’s a matter of balance or just a fluke mutation of the virus, no one knows.

  Shadows seethe around him when he moves. He’s faster than her, hard to keep a fix on; his symptoms are advanced
. That worries her, as she steps over the bodies he’s left for her; she should have known about him before now if he’s been infected this long. He kills bad men, but not exclusively. He doesn’t seem to have any point or purpose but destruction.

  Their first real fight is at the arboretum. She gets dirt in her hair and a broken arm and doesn’t land a blow. Then the Main Street Bank, then the subway, then the football stadium, and by then she can’t taste anything but her own blood, and her ears won’t stop ringing.

  “Why bother?” he asks her, before dislocating her shoulder with a twist. She doesn’t have an answer.

  She sits in the diner where she used to work, arm in a sling. No one comes to serve her; they never do. Symptom of the disease. She’s not wearing her mask. She’s no one. So it takes her a while to hear the voice calling her.

  “Cass.” The woman’s said it three times before Seraph looks up. The woman is middle-aged, tired. She’s clutching a page ripped out of a school yearbook. Distantly, Seraph remembers the faces on the rear side. Recognizes a few names, too.

  “Mom,” Seraph says. Not sure if she’s surprised or glad or anything at all. She’s spent years trying to forget her family, her friends, as thoroughly as they’ve forgotten her. No use clinging to what she can’t have. Now the memories hurt like a half-healed wound wrenched open again.

  The woman sits down across from her, smooths the page out on the table between them. One picture is circled. The girl looks vaguely familiar. Cass, the woman has written, letters traced and retraced until they’re thick and manic. Arrows point to the picture, more words. Cass your daughter cass CASS casS don’t forget CASS.

  “I don’t know if I’ll remember long enough,” the woman says. “So I wrote it all down, everything I wanted to say.” She slides an envelope across the table, stuffed thick with folded paper. Her eyes are already getting distant. “There’s treatment now. Maybe a cure. That’s what they’re saying.”

  Seraph allows herself a moment of fantasy. In her mind, they talk for a while. Catch up. The woman, her mother, says that she’s proud of what Seraph’s done. That she misses her.