He’s also a space-bending squid monster capable of transforming whatever he touches, so there’s only so much sympathy I can have for his doomed cause. I enjoy the number of limbs I have now and buying jeans is difficult enough without mutating.
“That world isn’t coming, and you’ve got to go,” I said.
The other problem with Venusform as a villain is that he’s so damn big, and his tentacles do his dirty work for him. There’s no solution to the danger he presents apart from a frontal assault. So I raised my sword and charged anew, swinging at any tentacle brazen enough to get near me. My reflections joined the fray, glass ghosts darting in to deal damage and distract the waving tentacles. Venusform roared, wrapping a tentacle tight around one of my transparent shadows. She screamed, the screech of breaking glass, and began to swell into an alien parody of my shape. At the same time, the tentacle that held her iced over, visibly freezing.
Venusform roared again, this time in agony. I seized the opportunity. Lopping off the tentacle nearest to me, I leapt, and drove the Vorpal blade right into the closest of his three massive eyes.
The two eyes he had remaining blinked, apparently stunned that I could still do my damn job when I wasn’t wearing a blue pinafore. “I WILL RETURN,” he intoned ominously, and burst into a putrid green fog that left everyone unlucky enough to inhale it coughing.
Since I still need to breathe, that included me. And since I had been hanging six feet in the air, courtesy of my sword through a supervillain’s eye, when Venusform disappeared, I fell square on my famously unpadded ass.
“Oof!” The impact with the floor knocked the sword out of my hands. It flew upward. Before it could come back to earth, potentially impaling someone on the way down, I waved my hands in a quick negation, sending it back to the other side of the mirror. It vanished with a sound that was the aural equivalent of glitter. My reflections vanished with it, even the ones that had mutated in Venusform’s grasp. I gasped again as their injuries mirrored into me, drawing bruises and scrapes across my skin. The mutation, thankfully, didn’t mirror. Fatal injuries never do.
“Miss!” A man hurried toward me, the name tag pinned to his shirt identifying him as one of the store managers. “Are you all right?”
“Um, yeah.” He offered his hand. I took it, letting him pull me off the floor. Pride rarely goes before the fall for me, but it can leave me on the ground for a long, long time. “Sorry about, you know. The window.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” he said, letting go of my hand. “You saved us all.”
It was close to the truth. A team would have been dispatched as soon as someone realized there was a problem. It would have taken them at least five minutes to get here, maybe more. The supermarket and its inhabitants would have been reduced to those panels at the beginning of the comic book, the ones where things go terribly wrong for a bunch of nameless civilians who never mattered to the story anyway.
“Not all,” I said, glancing at the tangled heap of tentacles that had been one of their patrons. “I’m so sorry.”
“You did your best.”
“She put you all in danger,” corrected a pious voice.
That. Was. It. I whirled on the blogger from before, suddenly grateful for my limitations. If I couldn’t draw a sword without a reflection, I couldn’t run him through for the crime of being too damn annoying to live.
“What’s your name?” I demanded.
His eyes widened. In that moment, he seemed to realize that maybe baiting a superhero for fun wasn’t the best plan. “I don’t see where that’s any of your—”
“You incited a supervillain attack by revealing the location of a licensed superhero in civilian form,” I said. “Our legal team is already learning your name, your address, and the scope of your personal assets. So why not make me a little less angry, and tell me?”
He seemed to wilt. “Trevor.”
“Well, Trevor, this is on you. I just wanted some ice cream.” It was probably soup by now. Even if it wasn’t, it was probably close enough that it wouldn’t survive the walk home. “I didn’t put anyone in danger. You did.”
“You have no business being here, among normal people!”
“Really? That’s your story now? Because ten minutes ago, you were all about getting me to smile for your blog.” I was starting to get properly angry. My bruises didn’t help. They pulsed and ached, making me want a hot shower and some aspirin. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t ask you to take my picture. I asked you to leave me alone.”
“You exist,” he said. “You don’t get the perks of being famous without the downsides. You’re ungrateful. You don’t deserve anything you have. You don’t—”
The manager’s hand landed on his shoulder. He stopped talking, turning to look quizzically at the older man.
“Get out of my store,” said the manager calmly. “Do your grocery shopping somewhere else, or I’ll call the police on you, and you can explain to them why you think it’s acceptable to harass women who’re just trying to buy—what was it, miss?”
“Ice cream,” I said.
“Ice cream,” said the manager. “Go.”
Trevor scowled. “I’m within my rights. She’s a public figure. I—”
“Go,” repeated the manager.
I’m pretty sure Shock Star himself wouldn’t have been willing to stand his ground against that tone. Paling, Trevor turned and fled.
“He’s going to post about this,” I said. I felt light-headed, dizzy with what had just happened. “He’s going to tell everyone what a bitch I was.”
“He’s not the only one who knows how to use the internet,” said the manager. “You saved a lot more people than you pissed off.”
I wanted to tell him why he was so wrong. I wanted to explain that reality doesn’t matter, not really; not when image is for sale on every corner and beamed straight to every smartphone. There’s a reason most of us are shut-ins these days, only appearing in costume and when our contracts demand it. Secret identities don’t hold up in a world of facial recognition software and constant fan surveillance. We get caught. We always, always get caught.
“Sure,” I said softly.
“We knew. About you, I mean. We’ve known for months.”
I hesitated before asking, “Knew what?”
“That you were who you are.” The manager shrugged. “We figured you wanted to be left to do your shopping in peace. You save the world when you’re at work. We didn’t need to get in your way when you were trying to get good food at reasonable prices.”
I stared at him. I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m guessing you don’t like delivery much.”
“N-no,” I managed, shaking my head. “They never know how to pick the produce.”
He smiled. “I think we can fix that for you. If you wanted to take a little break.”
Hesitantly, I smiled back.
. . . no way he actually met Alice. She never goes out in public. She thinks she’s better than us just because she’s got powers . . .
. . . apparently our little diva of the mirrors now has a private arrangement with her local grocery store. They make one of their clerks do her shopping and drive everything to her house—no delivery charge. Guess it must be nice to be famous . . .
. . . what an entitled brat . . .
. . . what a terrible human being . . .
. . . what a shame superpowers are wasted on someone who doesn’t appreciate them . . .
. . . isn’t Alice one of the ones who was born with her powers? She didn’t do anything to earn them. She doesn’t deserve them . . .
. . . so lucky . . .
. . . so ungrateful . . .
. . . wish I were her.
Seanan McGuire lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest, in a large, creaky house with a questionable past. She shares her home with two enormous blue cats, a querulous calico, the world’s most hostile iguana, and an assortment of other oddities, including more horror movi
es than any one person has any business owning. It is her life goal to write for the X-Men, and she gets a little closer every day.
Seanan is the author of the October Daye and InCryptid urban fantasy series, both from DAW Books, and the Newsflesh and Parasitology trilogies, both from Orbit (published under the name “Mira Grant”). She writes a distressing amount of short fiction, and has released three collections set in her superhero universe, starring Velma “Velveteen” Martinez and her allies. Seanan usually needs a nap. Keep up with her at www.seananmcguire.com, or on Twitter at @seananmcguire.
As I Fall Asleep
Aimee Ogden
Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine. Eighty—
Cerebrelle came back to herself all at once.
It took her a moment to remember where she was. Shattered glassware and smashed computer parts: a laboratory. Poison Dart’s lair? Yes. She remembered the mission now, locked onto the situation at hand before it could slip away again. She ran a quick self-assessment before moving on. Damage? Yes. Her wrist had been badly wrenched. Her vision telescoped inward, and she could see millions of red blood cells flooding into the injured region. No fractured bones, no ligaments stretched or torn.
She let her awareness expand back out to her whole body and flexed the injured wrist once—nothing serious. She looked left, then right, and her eyes fell on the perpetrator of her injuries. She flinched.
Badger Girl’s broken body lay across a cracked black laboratory bench to Cerebrelle’s left. Cerebrelle closed her eyes and turned away from the too-still face. Should she even think of her as Badger Girl anymore? She doubted the Protectors let you keep your call sign once you took to defending the secret lair of the Coalition’s favorite mad scientist. Besides, Badger Girl hadn’t even suited up in her black-and-red uniform. She was dressed civilian-style in a denim jacket and T-shirt; only her motorcycle boots would have passed super-heroic muster. Cerebrelle’s sidekick—gone rogue.
Cerebrelle squared her shoulders and turned back to Badger Girl. There would be time to deal with the fallout of her sidekick’s betrayal later. But for now, she had work to do, and she had to do it fast. Badger Girl had always been more than a physical match for Cerebrelle. Of course, a solid punch wasn’t everything—you had to know where it was going to strike, too—but it still meant Cerebrelle had a limited time frame to work. She pulled Badger Girl down from the bench, leaving a smear of red on the broken computer screen where the younger woman’s head had been resting. She’d seen a lot of Badger Girl’s blood over the years, but this time, she turned her eyes downward to avoid it.
Cerebrelle grimaced as she cinched Badger Girl’s hands behind her back with a frayed length of electrical cord and knotted it twice for good measure. As she twisted the cord tight, she could feel the rough edges of broken bones grinding together. She pulled back, but too late: she was spiraling down the black hole of Badger Girl’s injuries. Her mind contracted down to count leukocytes and chase platelets through capillary beds, then just as suddenly it was rocketing outwards, assigning numbers to stars never before seen from Earth, let alone from deep underground in Poison Dart’s hideout. She triangulated distances, chased the highest prime number. —Three hundred and twenty, three hundred and twenty-one, three hundred and twenty-two— She counted the hairs on Craig’s head . . .
Craig? Who the hell was Craig?
No time to worry about that now. Cerebrelle rubbed her eyes and dark sparks flew behind her eyelids. Badger Girl would heal; that was what Badger Girl did, after all. And Cerebrelle had work to do. Her gifts were mental, not physical. But it didn’t take a powerhouse like Badger Girl or Red Comet to wreak havoc on some helpless technology.
Helpless only until Poison Dart’s henchmen showed up, though. Cerebrelle glanced over her shoulder and took in the three access points to the room: door, upper right. Door, lower right. Ceiling duct. Imaginary laser fire trajectories arced through her mind, weaving a perfect spider web . . . or a complex manifold. She blinked and the web folded in on itself, resolving into a Klein bottle.
No. Not now. She lifted a boot and brought it down hard onto an exposed hard drive. Plastic shrieked, wires ripped, the plastic carnations decorating the adjacent desk flew through the air, and suddenly Cerebrelle was translating the complete works of Neruda into Farsi.
—I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. A thousand and twelve, a thousand and thirteen, a thousand and fourteen—
Wires frayed into a tangle of neurons. Glassware shattered into elaborate constellations. Cerebrelle panted as she stared at her dark, fragmented reflection in the remains of a busted flat screen and tried not to let her heart beat in time with the nearest pulsar star, tried not to count the sodium ions scurrying between action potentials in her brain. Her mask was crooked. She pushed it back into place with a shaking hand. Bring it back. Close it all out. There’s a job to do. —Four thousand three hundred and two. Four thousand three hundred and three—
“Lian?”
A low blow from Badger Girl. Poison Dart’s minions could be here any minute, and Cerebrelle’s secret identity would be blown. “I don’t want to talk to you right now.”
“Oh, no? Because it seems like a damn good time to me.” Electrical cords squealed as Badger Girl strained against them, and she grunted in pain. “What the hell do you think you’re doing down here? And a better question: why did you smash my head open?” Another groan from the cords. “They pulled me out of a date to come after you. She was cute, too. But they thought it should be me, I guess. Lian, are you listening to me?”
Of course the Coalition thought it should be Badger Girl. A twist of the knife. “Don’t use my name.” She moved faster down a row of desks. With a sweep of her arm, a cluster of glass bottles shattered to the floor. Under her boots, circuit boards splintered. “And I don’t talk to turncoats. How long have you been working for Poison Dart?”
“Turncoat?” The anger in Badger Girl’s voice was punctuated by the shriek of the electrical cords as she ripped free. “Is that what you—Lian, stop. Just listen to me. You’re going to hurt yourself, or me again, and neither of those options sounds great to me. You don’t understand—”
“I understand enough.” And Cerebrelle didn’t want to understand any more than that. What would make an old friend into an old enemy, what sort of blackmail or leverage would turn Badger Girl against her? She leapt over a silent server bank to put space between them as Badger Girl bore down on her. “Stay back!”
“I’m not going to hurt you!” Badger Girl cried. Her fist pounded down on a wooden desktop, splintering it.
Cerebrelle backed up farther. How much more damage would she need to do before Poison Dart’s chances of rebuilding were effectively nil? And she still needed to get out of here before Badger Girl forced her into a fistfight that Cerebrelle couldn’t finish. She didn’t want to—couldn’t end up as the latest addition to Poison Dart’s menagerie.
“Will you just sit still and listen to me for a goddamn minute?”
Cerebrelle looked Badger Girl in the eyes. She was the one wearing the mask, really, not Cerebrelle—how had Cerebrelle ever thought she knew that face, knew the person behind it? She watched for the twitch of micro-expressions to betray Badger Girl’s true purpose: a pinching of the lips, narrowed eyes, flaring nostrils.
No: she lingered too long, and her viewpoint ratcheted in even closer. Badger Girl’s blood was spiked with adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol, and the sinoatrial node in her heart was pulsing an electrical signal nearly twice a second. Millions of glycogen phosphorylase molecules were racing through her muscles, churning glycogen into burnable energy, and her major blood vessels had dilated to a diameter of—
“Stop it!” Badger Girl shook Cerebrelle hard, shattering her trance. Cerebrelle squeezed backward and upward out of arteries and back into the uncomfortably cramped quarters of her own mind. “Damn you Lian, stay with me here!”
“Stop calling me that.” A favorite Wing Chun escape
twisted Cerebrelle free from Badger Girl’s grasp. She darted under Badger Girl’s arm and shoved the other woman off balance. A leap and a vault, and she’d scrambled up onto a bench top before Badger Girl’s hand locked around her ankle.
“Lian, listen to me. Do you know where you are?”
“Of course I know.” Cerebrelle closed her eyes, letting her awareness hang on Badger Girl’s muscles and nerves.
“Do you?”
She was no physical match for Badger Girl, but she was more than a mental match. A deep breath in through her nose, then a slow exhale. When Badger Girl pulled her backward, she was ready. Braced against the bench, she shoved herself backward in the direction of Badger Girl’s pull, like a tug-of-war combatant suddenly letting go of the rope. Like a compressed coil unwinding. The boot on her free leg clipped Badger Girl’s chin, and Badger Girl staggered backward.
Cerebrelle dropped to the ground between Badger Girl’s feet but sprang upward immediately. Badger Girl had already recovered her balance—her arm shot forward toward Cerebrelle.
But Cerebrelle was already waiting. She blocked Badger Girl’s swinging arm, trapped it over her shoulder, and shot upward as hard as she could.
Badger Girl screamed as freshly-knitted bones snapped anew. Cerebrelle grabbed the broken arm by the wrist and pushed backward. Her heart squeezed at the sound Badger Girl made when the two splintered bone ends smashed together—but she hadn’t left Cerebrelle any choice.
Badger Girl arced backward and crashed into a pile of smashed glass bottles and beakers. Cerebrelle ripped the front of the plastic casing off of the server bank and used the broken piece to smash the contents. Surely this much damage would keep Poison Dart too busy to . . .
To do whatever it was that Poison Dart was planning to do? The villain’s plan was a dark, dizzying hole in Lian’s memory, and she turned away from it. Something dire, something dreadful. It was Poison Dart, and that was all anyone really needed to know. Counting comforted her; numbers had always been a familiar and reassuring place to turn when the universe grew too big or too small around her. —Five thousand six hundred and seventy-two. Five thousand six-hundred and seventy-three—
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