by Matt Carter
This is wrong. Quentin devoted his life to helping people. The exact people in that video. It doesn’t make any sense.
Ace snorts and nods at the TV. “No proof, huh?”
I’m not having this conversation right now.
“If you want my help, I need to have a talk with your dad,” I say firmly. “Now, please.”
Apparently, all I had to do was ask on camera.
All three Card offspring point in the same direction.
“His office is seventh on the right,” says Jackie.
If I stay another moment, I’ll make a scene. I don’t know what kind exactly, whether I’ll pick an ill-planned fight with Ace or worse, accidentally agree with him, but either way it’s sure to be immortalized.
Instead, I take the excuse to walk out of the shot. That is, I try to. The automated cameras watch me along the hallway.
“That was dead fish, kids,” Jacob berates them behind me. “Ace, you’ll fuck a hole in a durian fruit, would it kill you to give us a little heat? She’s the first attractive girl you’ve been on camera within weeks who’s not your sister. Just play it up, and we’ll do a nice, steamy fight and make-up arc with you and Jessica when she gets back in town and finds out, ’kay?”
“I keep telling you, Jake, chicks who can fold me in half are never gonna be my thing.”
I pause with my hand on the knob to Mayor Card’s home office.
I can handle this.
I can handle this.
And whether I can or not, I have to handle this, right now, because the cameras are still rolling, and I can’t allow footage to exist of the first female Solar Flare cowering away from the presence of Mayor William “The Conqueror” Card.
Do your job.
Be yourself.
Open the door, you silly girl.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but his office turns out even harder on the eyes than the rest of the mansion. Pointless marble pillars turn the room into an obstacle course, while the walls themselves are almost covered floor to ceiling with pictures of him smiling and shaking hands with superheroes and celebrities.
The only picture not of him is to the left, out of frame of the cameras: a giant map of Pinnacle City as seen from space, with sections highlighted by hand in different colors and marked with pushpins.
Next to each pillar is a museum display case of jewels, or some other relics of bygone royalty, each gaudier than the last.
Flanked by two massive oil paintings of him looking somber yet powerful (each cutting a generous ten inches off his waistline, at least), Mayor Card himself sits behind a desk of black marble, looking even more like a slab of melted plastic than he does on TV. His withered face is starched and painted with more Botox and makeup than any of the ladies in my mom’s philanthropy club, and his thinning hair is so black that it looks like he’s resorted to dipping the back of his head in permanent ink every morning to keep the passage of time at bay. The reflection of his upper half in the desk’s bright finish gives the calculated illusion of a reversible, two-headed playing card king.
He’s looking intently at something he’s writing with a hawk feather quill, as if I’ve caught him unawares in the middle of some important business, but judging by the cameraman waiting with his lens aimed at the doorway to follow me in, I doubt this.
No fewer than six armed security personnel are positioned around the perimeter of the room, observing.
I don’t wait for an introduction this time, just clear my throat. Card looks up and puts his quill in its ornate stand. It’s already dripped all over the place.
“Solar Girl,” he says, in a voice with the same maxed-out volume he uses on TV. “Great of you to make the time. Just terrific!”
I try to reconcile the being myself part of me that’s spent years wanting to kick this man in the shins, and the doing my job part that probably has to represent the Guardians with a certain level of courtesy and decorum. I ultimately manage to summon an extra dose of friendliness I do my best to save up for people who make friendliness especially difficult.
“Solar Flare, actually,” I correct him cheerfully, as if it happens all the time. “And no trouble. The PCG take all threats of violence seriously.”
I shake his hand, which has a pinkie ring with a diamond-shaped setting and smears of spilled ink on it, and then float myself comfortably in the air, because there’s no chair on this side of the desk.
“Of course. You’re Ethan’s girl, aren’t you?”
I think my uncle had some dealings with Card back before he went into politics, but we’ve never been introduced.
“His niece,” I acknowledge.
“And even lovelier than he always said you were. It’s a pleasure to have you. I’m a big lover of the superheroes, I hope you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I say with a smirk, eying the many superhero pictures on his walls.
“Oh, you’ll never find a bigger lover of superheroes than me.”
So, in that rant he gave last week about how supers are stealing the natural power of real people (his words, not mine), I guess he only meant the supers who aren’t famous.
I bite my tongue.
“The kids will feel so much safer from all those animals out there with a superhero on the job,” Card continues. “You know how they can be. All the bodyguards in the world just make them feel more singled out, but if there’s a cape involved, they know everything’s going to be okay, and who can put a price on the best for my kids?”
I almost point out that two of his “kids” are legally adults, but I stop, because I’m invulnerable and they’re not, and however ridiculously worked up they may get about having to order overpriced purses from the next city over, maybe it’s not fair for me to judge their feelings about their personal safety.
“We do what we can,” I say.
“It’s nice that you’re so close to their age, too. As traumatized as they’ve been by all this persecution, it doesn’t seem to stop them from doing stupid things.” He chuckles as if he expects me to join in this indulgent criticism of the intelligence of young people in general, right after he’s aptly pointed out that I’m one of them. “Truthfully, they need the most protecting from themselves, and if anyone can give them that, it’d be you. They might even listen to someone like you.”
“Mr. Mayor, I … appreciate your wanting the best for your family. But you need to understand that the PCG are responsible for an entire city of families. I’m not your employee,” I tell him this nicely, like breaking bad news. “I’m also not a nanny, or an actress, or a pet. I’m going to be here until the danger to you is neutralized or subsides, and no longer. You might want to prepare your kids. Just so they don’t end up disappointed.”
“Of course, of course, we’ll figure it out if it comes to that,” he says, which is the exact opposite of what I just suggested.
“So about the danger other than themselves …” I prompt, and Card pulls a sheaf of envelopes addressed to himself from the desk drawer and places them between us.
“It’s shocking, how these dregs of society will terrorize a law-abiding family,” he says seriously.
I pick up the envelopes, and Card turns his quill around once in its stand.
The cameraman takes this as a signal, powers down, and angles his lens to the floor.
“It’s off?” Card verifies.
“Yes, sir,” says the cameraman.
“All right, tell her the score, Sergei,” Card says to one of the guards standing around the room.
Sergei takes a tablet from one of the room’s locked cabinets, shows me a map of the estate’s extensive security system, and runs me through the various alarms and what will trip them, which I suppose is something that probably shouldn’t be detailed on TV.
“Looks pretty exhaustive.”
“It is,” says Sergei, and I get the sense that Card’s dissatisfaction with his protection alone is as irksome to him as it is to me.
“Not
against my enemies with superpowers,” says Card. “The bad supers, of course,” he adds to me, as if that explains everything.
“Well, you’re set against intangibles and teleporters,” I tell him, looking over the security specs. “It doesn’t look like anything’s going to sneak past your team here, and once any intruders are detected, they won’t muscle past me, even if they’re bulletproof.”
At least the part of this assignment about keeping the Cards alive won’t be difficult.
“Do any of the letters suggest anything about the sender having access to particular abilities we should account for?” I ask, starting to open the first envelope of the sizeable stack.
“See for yourself,” says Card, opening the laptop on his desk and beckoning me over.
When I get it open, the envelope is empty. Card chuckles.
“The paper looks good on film, but hardly any of these deviants take the time to write their attacks down anymore.”
I float around the desk to look over his shoulder and have to lean in close to read the tiny font setting of his inbox.
He takes his hand off the mouse to give me room and rests it instead at the small of my back.
My skin’s been crawling more than enough since I set foot in this house, and I have half a mind to tell him to back up and give me some air, but I’m sure those cameras can be turned back on at a moment’s notice, and that’s one more scene I’d rather not make.
I focus on scanning the screen quickly and find exactly what I was afraid of: a folder full of angry email subject lines, all from different addresses, all angry for slightly different reasons, calling him a Nazi, a pig, an idiot, a villain, a psychopath, and a variety of other titles of varying accuracy.
This isn’t evidence of a single stalker or criminal group. This is just the public inbox of an intensely divisive and inflammatory public figure, and not something that’s going to change in time for me to get in on the PCG’s next big trafficking sting.
“This isn’t going to be a simple fix,” I warn Card, scanning my cursor farther down the inbox.
“I have faith in you,” says Card, sliding his hand farther down my back.
In a protracted instant of unreality, driven more by blind hope than reason, I almost manage to believe that the movement is unconscious on his part, a mistake, that he’ll notice and pull away at any second, or vanish into a crowd never to be heard from again, the way my occasional obnoxious fans sometimes do.
Then he slides a fingertip under the back edge of my leotard’s oversized leg hole, runs it along the inside of the hem, and finally snaps the stretchy fabric against my skin.
The protracted instant continues, lengthened by my superhuman reflexes. Within that frozen, stunned moment between two ticks of a clock, I’m able to take stock of his hand, still resting on my butt where the spandex struck, now caught in the middle of a follow-up squeeze. I read his face next to mine, observing me, checking on me, checking that I understand something.
I do.
Shaking off my shock, I send an energy charge down through my body and into his hand with a firework crack. With a yelp synchronized to Card’s own, I leap away, all within a plausible human reaction time.
Thank you, reflexes.
Sergei draws his gun a million years late in response to the sound, and I pretend not to notice.
“Oh my gosh!” I rush back over to Card, who’s rolling his desk chair away from me, cradling his hand.
I didn’t use enough force to break it, but he won’t be touching anyone, including himself, with it for at least a week while the blistered skin grows back.
“Oh my gosh, I am so, so sorry!” I lie. “That happens sometimes when I’m startled. Are you okay?”
Before Card can answer me, half a dozen more guards charge into the room, their guns also drawn.
“Is everything all right, sir?” the lead guard asks, looking around in confusion. “I heard gunfire, and screams.”
Card’s looking at me, and so is the cameraman, and Sergei and his team, all waiting to see what I’m going to make this into.
The truth tempts me for half a second, but I change my mind at the prospect of having to file a report. That would mean Pinnacle finding out, and there’s no way I’m running back to him after this morning’s briefing to whine about how the bad man who can’t physically hurt me touched me in a naughty place.
I answer the guard with a giggle. “Oh, nothing like that. Just a little misunderstanding.” I pretend that smiling at Card is the same thing as spitting on him, and smile with according vigor. “But I think we understand each other now, don’t we?”
CHAPTER 9: THE DETECTIVE
Even through the rain you can smell all the fires.
The biggest blazes are all in the WPC wreckage, mostly transforming rubble into more rubble, but there are a few fires out here in the Crescent too. Whether they were set by protestors or hate-filled assholes, I can’t say.
What I know for sure, though, is that Ruby didn’t give the footage I shot to the police.
No, she took the easier path to justice and gave it to the media a few minutes after dumping it all online, and the Internet working the way it does best rolled with it from there.
Mayor Card took the murder of respected EPC citizen Quentin Julian as a rallying cry, calling it a vindication of everything he’s said about the danger of gene-jobs and the cesspool they call home. Standing in front of blown-up pictures of the four unidentified attackers, he urged all “true heroes” to not let this crime go unpunished.
He might as well have put a bounty on their heads.
While the Guardians vowed to be vigilant in the wake of such a “terrible crime” (including her), a lot of people found a pretty funny definition of “true heroes.”
Violent crimes against gene-jobs in particular, but non-humans in general, are all over the place. There are gangs of EPC kids in Card for Senate hats just driving through the Crescent and WPC like goddamn old west posses, stopping and beating the shit out of gene-jobs, aliens, Lemurians, Atlanteans, and any super whose power makes them look vaguely non-human. One of these gangs had the misfortune of trying to take on Petting Zoo, who showed them what it was like to be on the receiving end of a timber wolf attack.
The cops have been out in force, allegedly to deal with the violence, but mostly adding to it, turning a blind eye to the Card for Senate hat-wearing crowd while hassling Crescent people harder than ever. At least three unarmed Crescent citizens have been shot by cops already for “resisting arrest,” with one dying.
The way things are going, he won’t be the last.
Mayor Card didn’t waste any time calling on a special DSA task force to round up and imprison unlicensed supers. While my paperwork’s in order, I’ve seen their heavily armored vans patrolling the streets, and the Lemurian restaurant next door to my office closed down after one raid cleaned out most of their kitchen staff. I fear for Tragedii; she won’t be born for another sixty-odd years and is the definition of unlicensed, but she’s not taking this as a serious problem.
Considering when she’s come from, she’s seen worse.
The feeling in the Crescent has been one of defiance, even if no one can agree how to respond. There’s a lot of people arguing for peace and accountability from authorities and the EPC crowd, and god bless Fadia for giving them the biggest voice with her program, but even with their peaceful protest plans, there’s a lot of others who don’t want to stop there.
People in the Crescent are used to fights, and they won’t back down.
Their way of demanding peace has been trying to take their fight to EPC by force, staging violent protests that are mostly an excuse to throw things at the police and set stuff on fire. Burning police cars and DSA vans are almost as common a sight as cell phones.
I don’t blame them for being angry, because they got every reason to be with all this shit going down, but I want to yell at them that what they’re doing isn’t helping and only gives more am
munition to Card and his cronies.
I want to believe the rumor Tragedii told me that Milgram’s been sending goons out into the Crescent to encourage chaos, but that’s probably just wishful thinking.
I know that the real blame sits with me.
There were so many threads to the case I didn’t pull on, so many things I thought, knew, were off, and I didn’t look into them because I just wanted a quick check so I could go home and get drunk.
I didn’t vet her intentions well enough. I didn’t read her like I should have.
And now the Crescent burns because of me.
I can’t fix this.
But I can do my best to drown it out.
The rain’s pouring so hard my headlights barely cut through the torrent, but I don’t need their light.
Not when I know the way to the Lineup by memory.
It’s late, and the Crescent around me is not a Crescent I know. It’s dark and, even stranger, it’s quiet. I recognize the shops and the streets, but it’s a ghost town even by rainy night standards.
Then again, when you see businesses with broken windows and words like GENE FREAKS FUCK OFF spray-painted on them, you get a pretty good idea how things get this way.
A beer can, full by the sounds of it, smashes against my windshield, cracking it.
“Fuck!”
A voice outside screams, “TRAITOR!”
Another can hits my side-view mirror, knocking it almost clean off.
I floor it, getting the hell out of dodge before I find out if the guy bought a six-pack or a case.
It’s been like this around here ever since things started going to shit. I don’t know how the news spread so quickly, but the Crescent’s been letting me know how much it doesn’t like me getting the Julian evidence. Mostly it’s been people looking at me funny on the street, but some have gotten in my face.
And I can’t say that this guy’s the first to forcibly redecorate my car.
Whoever slashed my tires this morning got that honor.
This isn’t the first home to reject me, but it hurts a lot more than last time.
