Behind the Mask

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

  In reality, she only gets those few sentences. Then the woman gets a puzzled expression, stands. She shakes her head a little, like she’s forgotten something, and picks up the envelope before wandering away. She leaves the page from the yearbook.

  Seraph folds it neatly into eighths and tucks it in her pocket. She doesn’t cry; even she has trouble remembering Cass, these days.

  She goes to the cathedral and sits at the peak of the roof, the wind tugging at her hair. There’s nowhere in the city she can’t get. It’s in her bones, after all. She’s not surprised when he shows up, but she is surprised when he sits down next to her.

  “My mother came to see me today,” she says.

  “That’s a head-trip,” he says, and she nods. He offers her a cigarette; she declines.

  “She says there’s a cure.”

  “You going to take it?”

  It’s already the longest conversation she’s had in years. “Would you?”

  He shrugs. “I’m faster and stronger than anyone alive. I can heal a bullet wound with a nap.”

  “And you just use it to cause mayhem.”

  “And I’m supposed to what, save kittens from trees?”

  “If you don’t get the cure, I can’t,” Seraph says. “I can’t let you run amok.”

  “Amok?” he laughs. “Okay. I’m your fault, you know.”

  “How are you my fault?”

  “You infected me,” he reminds her, and for a moment, it works. For a moment, she remembers.

  Three weeks shy of eighteen, dreams of London and Paris and New York. He wants to see the Great Wall; she wants to see the Grand Canyon. He draws a map across her skin with one finger.

  He sits in the waiting room with her. He holds her hand. Normal, she whispers; he squeezes her fingers tight.

  The doctor tells them sexual transmission is unusual, but not unheard of. Her mother turns scarlet; Cass looks away. He just nods. At least they’ll get to take one trip together. A pair of one-way tickets, but they don’t talk. When they get to the city, they rent an apartment barely big enough for a bed. She waits tables; he washes dishes.

  When the visions start, she goes out to meet them. He stays home, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to blot them out. She tries to convince him not to fight them: it’s easier if you give in.

  The city finds her a new place. She looks at photos of London and Paris and New York, and wonders if she should get anything from the old apartment. But she can’t think of anything she cares about enough to bring.

  She blinks. The memory is gone. He’s still there, but not for long. He’s standing, stubbing out his cigarette.

  “I’m your fault,” he says. “I’ve done everything I can to remember you, but you never even tried to hold onto me. You left me behind.”

  She can’t remember whether that’s true, but she doesn’t argue. She goes home, instead. Smooths out the yearbook page. She finds his photo. The name beneath it isn’t familiar, but he’s signed next to the picture. Can’t wait for the summer. A sloppy heart.

  The morning paper arrives. They’ve given him a name: Nightblade. Dramatic. She thinks he’d like it, though she can’t say why. She frames his picture, puts it up on her wall next to Paris and an X-ray of the bones of her right hand.

  • • •

  The nights they’re too weary to fight, they meet at the church. Half the time, she can’t remember why she’s there until he shows. They don’t talk much. Shared silence is revelation enough.

  She watches a special on Caspar-Williams. It’s still misunderstood, the mechanism of transmission imprecisely imagined. They’re the only two in their city, but elsewhere, there are more. Dozens. New York, London, Paris. Men and women with maps on their bones, cities that own them. Most are like the two of them, strong and fast and quick to heal. But she sees a woman sheathed in flame, a man whose skin sprouts plates of armor like a beetle’s carapace.

  She pauses on a blurred image of herself in mid-leap, shadows streaming behind her like wings. She can’t even see herself clearly in mirrors anymore.

  “I have an idea,” he says that night. “We can keep our powers and escape the city. See the world together, like we planned.”

  She pretends to know what he’s talking about. Some nights she remembers. Tonight isn’t one of them. “How?” she asks.

  “You’ll see.”

  She doesn’t see him for weeks. She keeps hearing about the cure. Watches an interview with a former Caspar-Williams sufferer. His cheeks are hollow, eyes sunken, but he smiles, arm around a wife who thought she was single the last three years. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself.

  “What has your life been like, the last three years?” the reporter asks her. She hesitates a long time. “It was good,” she says at last, not looking at him, not looking anywhere in particular. “I didn’t know I missed him.”

  Seraph crouches on the cathedral steeple, waits for him to show. The city calls to her; for just one night, she doesn’t answer. Winter passes.

  • • •

  It’s spring when he finds her again. Things have been quiet without him; she’s lost the habits necessary to survive such utter isolation. When he tells her to follow him, she doesn’t hesitate.

  The machine is a nest of wires and clear tubing. Phosphorescent liquid churns at its core; it clings to the wall like a starfish, like a tumor. It pulses with the heartbeat of a dying titan. Seraph runs her hands over the cold metal; the city’s fear is electric in her blood.

  “Destroy the city with me,” he says. “Destroy the city, and we’ll be free. We’ll still be strong. But we can go wherever we want.”

  She presses her body to the machine, fitting her limbs among its protuberances, laying her cheek against its thrumming heart.

  “I can never remember your name,” she confesses. “I put your picture on the wall, and I still can’t remember.”

  “We loved each other,” he says.

  “I can’t remember that, either.” She steps away. “I have to stop you.”

  “You don’t have to do it for me,” he says. “Do it for yourself. See London and New York. Just think about it.”

  She tells him she won’t, but she does. The notion itches, scratches, burrows.

  Haven’t I done enough for you? she asks the city. Its fear grows more urgent with every hour; her dreams are filled with glowing liquid and a heartbeat that shudders with promise.

  She gets the number of the man she saw interviewed. He agrees to meet. By the time he gets there, he’s forgotten why he’s come, but he answers her questions. He doesn’t regret it. She asks him what made him do it.

  “I was lonely,” he says. Then he shakes his head. “That’s not it. Honestly, I couldn’t stand seeing that everyone I loved got along fine without me.”

  She tells him about the machine. He asks what she’s going to do.

  “I could give him the cure,” she suggests, but he shakes his head again. It’s not a syringe of blue liquid you can jam in his thigh; it’s months of drugs and radiation. She looks at his skin, paper-thin, his color like a day-old bruise. She wonders how much life he’s traded to have any life at all.

  “The thing is,” she tells him, though he’s lost track of her now, doesn’t register her voice, “the thing is, if I stop him, I’ve got to kill him. Or else I’ve got to stay here, forever. Because he won’t go for the cure, and he won’t stop trying.”

  She stares at her hands, her fingers gnarled from fractures that have healed over wrong.

  “I’ve never killed anyone before.”

  He laughs at something on his phone. She leaves him with the bill and walks down a street that stretches from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine.

  It is not, in the end, a beautiful city. It has no real soul to it; it is forgettable, indistinct. It clings to her, infests her, gives little in return. No one on this street knows her name.

  He joins her. They walk the city, stand at the e
dge, where the pain sets its teeth gently against their throats.

  “It’s ready,” he tells her. He takes her hand. “Cass. Destroy the city with me tonight. Destroy the city, and be free.”

  She almost remembers him. In a way, it makes it easier, or else nearly impossible, when she turns to him, kisses him, hands on either side of his face. When she wrenches her hands to the side. When she feels his neck break.

  It’s not enough to kill him. There is no magical serum to make him weak, no stone from the orbit of a distant sun, no incantation. There’s only brute strength and the crack of bones. Too much damage to heal.

  When it’s done, she goes to the church steeple. The city thanks her with a sunrise more brilliant and more beautiful than any she’s ever seen, flooding light over men and women who are alive because of what she’s done. Because of the blood drying to grime in the creases of her hands.

  Not one of them knows her name. Not one of them knows about the machine still under their feet, waiting for a switch to be flipped.

  The city shows her something new. Six hundred miles away, someone’s matching her streets to the map on their bones, praying for an end to the ache. It’s a promise, a gift. The city’s consolation prize. You won’t be alone.

  She leans back. Wonders what part she’ll play when they get here. Maybe they’ll work together. She’ll get a sidekick, and they’ll get a mentor who knows every brick and shadow. They’ll get each other. They won’t have to be alone.

  Except she was never alone, and she was. He was always here, and it wasn’t enough.

  Except that she hasn’t taken apart the machine. She should have headed straight there. Scattered its pieces, destroyed its blueprints. She hasn’t. She’s finding that she likes the option. The switch she could flip and opt out of this whole dance.

  Except that she knows, if she’s willing to admit it, that someday—not soon, but someday—she’d smile. She’d hold out her hand. And she’d say, Destroy the city with me tonight.

  She could fight it—for a while. But she’s got one death to her name, now. Another would be easy. Another hundred wouldn’t be hard. Her disease is advanced; she has trouble remembering herself these days, but she remembers enough to know that isn’t the way she wants to be.

  She smokes his cigarettes until the sun comes up. The city calls to her to reconsider, but she’s made her choice. She walks to the clinic, blood still caked beneath her nails.

  There’s no paperwork to fill out; they move too quickly, the only way to ensure the treatment actually gets started before the disease wins out.

  The needle slides into her arm. No blue liquid; it’s clear, and it slithers into her blood like poison, hot and acidic. Her bones begin to ache, and the city grieves.

  In another city, far away, a woman runs her fingers over the letters carved in her kitchen table. CASS, they say, and she begins to remember.

  Further still, six hundred miles and more, someone buys a bus ticket. They step on board, searching for the streets etched on their bones.

  Kate Marshall lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and several small agents of chaos disguised as a dog, cat, and child. She works as a cover designer and video game writer. Her fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres, and other venues, and her YA survival thriller I Am Still Alive is forthcoming from Viking. You can find her online at katemarshallwrites.com.

  Fool

  Keith Frady

  On a skull-shaped tropical island deep in the Atlantic, five stories beneath a dormant volcano, Dr. Entropy admired his new portrait, contemplating Armageddon and its implied suicide. The portrait hung on a wall erected center stage of the theater, and Dr. Entropy’s painted-self returned his judgmental squint with wide, maniacal eyes. Their wardrobes matched because Dr. Entropy was in costume: two red lab coats with black buttons and two pairs of black gloves and black boots. He thought his painted skin looked pastier than his flesh, but the only lights in his windowless volcano were artificial, and he had to admit to himself that it had taken a pale toll. The portrait Dr. Entropy stood in his workshop, clutching a ray gun in his right hand, his left touching a red button on a panel embedded in the volcano wall. The likeness was uncanny: a stranger passing by might have thought Dr. Entropy was considering himself in a mirror.

  Generator Organizing Graphics and Hues Mark VI was not programmed to twitch or fidget or sigh, so he stood resolute as Dr. Entropy passed sentence on the portrait. He also could not speak to his creator unless given a command or asked a question, so he made no reply when Dr. Entropy said, “I did well creating you. This shall be a towering monument for whatever species next crawls on the Earth’s surface. Every race should be so lucky as to gaze upon their God.” Dr. Entropy turned away from the portrait and its artist, calling out, “Turn the lights off behind me.”

  G.O.G.H. Mark VI bowed. “Yes, Master.”

  Dr. Entropy paused backstage and added, “Spend the last few minutes of your existence doing as you wish.”

  The android bowed again. “Yes, Master.”

  Dr. Entropy entered the stairwell, which spanned all five levels of the volcano, and began climbing the spiral staircase. He wheeled his arms in large circles at his sides, rotated his neck, cracked his knuckles through his thick gloves, and paused at each landing to stretch his hamstrings and touch his toes. All the while he recited, “She sells seashells by the seashore. Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers. Red leather, yellow leather. Red leather, yellow leather.” At the top of the staircase he paused before an open door. His workshop beyond it— usually overgrown with brambles of wire, boulders of alien metals, and gadgets and traps like so many trees in a forest—was deserted. All of his projects had been transferred to storage except for the machine featured in the portrait: a simple panel embedded in the volcano wall that coughed in beeps, winked in lights, sighed in whirs, and lacked all interface except at its center, where a single, plump button screamed in scarlet. The workshop would have opened to the sun and sky were it not for a metal dome capping the volcano’s mouth. The dome was retractable, but he had not cracked it open and felt the sun on his face in all the long months he had been orchestrating the apocalypse.

  Dr. Entropy took three deep breaths, then thundered into the workshop.

  “As ripples on the sea’s surface whisper of leviathans rumbling and undulating in the deep, so does this fragile button herald the end of all things,” he said, staring at the red button across the room. Turning in a circle, gesturing at absent enemies: “I am leagues from the nearest shore, reposed on a throne that crowns the sleeping fury of the earth itself. Beholden to no country or flock of sheep who bay the false prophet that is the law, I shall baptize their idiotic ideologies in the smooth liquor of oblivion.” A step closer to the button, bent over as if to whisper a lover’s secret: “Once I awaken this dreaming, red harbinger with the tip of my finger, intense bursts of radiation will sear every last person and electronic to cinders, and satellites I launched into orbit will reflect this flood around the world to ensure not one corner is spared.” Shrugging and teasing with a grin: “And the nuclear missiles that follow will ensure no lucky soul escapes behind a wall of lead.” Looming over the button, a finger raised to the heavens: “No one can stop me now.” His finger came down as if to open a hymn with the stroke of a piano key, but it hesitated, never reaching the button’s surface.

  “No one can stop me now,” Dr. Entropy repeated, louder. The panel continued to cough and wink and sigh, but nothing else stirred. The workshop seemed so much larger without the cluttered multitude of half-completed gadgets and death traps. “No one”—Dr. Entropy challenged the metal dome, raising both arms above his head, fists clenched—“can stop me now!” He thrust his index finger down toward the button. It stopped, trembling, less than an inch from the button’s scarlet grin, but moved no closer to apocalypse. Dr. Entropy glanced up toward the metal dome as if expecting something to crash through it. Met only with the unrelenting coughs and
winks and sighs, his finger curled back into his fist.

  “Yes. Well”—he straightened back up, grasping for an explanation to his hesitance—“of course. This planet may be diseased, but I am its cure, its favored son. How could I not grace it with one final performance?” Dr. Entropy turned his back to the button and strode toward the staircase. “That’s it. For that single noble accomplishment, my birth, this putrefied world deserves a grand valediction.” He pulled open the door to the stairwell, and glanced once more at the ceiling. “There’s nothing stopping me.”

  A dilapidated couch Dr. Entropy had had since college anchored the main room of the living quarters, facing an 88-inch television he had made himself not long after moving into the volcano. Bookcases lined the left wall, and he perused the dog-eared paperbacks on their sagging shelves. His thumb caught on a particularly thick volume, and Dr. Entropy collapsed onto the couch and began flipping through The Complete Shakespeare for a monologue fit to end the world. He paused now and then to mouth a few lines or recite a promising passage aloud. The speech needed to shore him against doubt and galvanize his finger to its ultimate task. It had been foolish to rush in so unprepared mentally. Ending the world was also suicide, and that had perhaps been the philosophical hand that had stayed his finger. Dr. Entropy read louder. Nothing had stopped him. He had not hesitated, but acted out of prudence. A slight preparation, and then the world would bend its knee and collapse beneath the weight of its God.

  When he found an appropriate monologue, Dr. Entropy tossed the book on the coffee table in front of the couch, then went to the dressing room adjoining his bedroom. The mirror was outfitted with stage lights around its edges, an accessory Dr. Entropy had not used of late, but now he flicked them on and squinted at their stilted glare. “Isaac, come here,” he called out as he studied his face, the lights accentuating every wrinkle and scar, and turning his skin into an emaciated yellow pallor.

  He was applying foundation when Isaac arrived. Six inches shorter than his creator, Isaac was the most complex and detailed of Dr. Entropy’s androids. When Isaac had been constructed, Dr. Entropy told himself that their physical resemblance to each other— their wide, green eyes, pugnacious chins, and untamed brown hair— was purely functional because he hadn’t needed to spend extra time designing a new visage. After Isaac, though, he’d made all the androids identical bald, brown-eyed copies, differentiated only by their programming. And Dr. Entropy and Isaac were not a perfect match. Isaac looked younger, leaner, and more handsome, but the resemblance remained.