Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  Wrong profile, he was trying to say. And didn’t quite have the everyday jargon for it. “Not to worry,” Lau said, and returned the smile. “That’s what we’re here for.”

  It didn’t take long to pack up: files, computers, the video from that interview room, all safely tucked away in suitcases. And of course, Dan Morrison, handed over to the field office for formal transport to Ashton, Virginia. They’d barely been in town a day, Lau realized. She hadn’t even checked in to the hotel.

  “Best. Case. Ever,” Hafidha said as they trudged down the stairwell to the parking lot, where their two black SUVs sat waiting to take them to O’Hare.

  “Best?” Chaz replied, bumping his wheeled suitcase behind him. “You never know what could happen. We could be called in to inspect three-eyed fish. Or suspicious dirigible deaths.”

  “Best,” she said, and hopped down to the ground floor door.

  There was a uniformed officer guarding it from the outside; he turned as Lau pushed the door open, and waved them back. “We’ll have to ask you to wait a moment, please. I’m sorry, agents. It won’t be long.”

  “What,” Brady said, “is the holdup?”

  It took a moment before the officer cracked the door wider, and Lau saw what the holdup was.

  Rumpled, chained, Dan Morrison was being escorted out of the Racine Avenue police station under heavy armed guard: one officer to each limb, approximately, and all of them holding on tight. Lau watched them go. He didn’t even turn his head to look at them. They weren’t him, and he didn’t care.

  Morrison bounced in the officers’ grip. He wasn’t resisting. He was skipping.

  “I feel,” Chaz said conversationally, “like we have just done a kind of terrible thing.”

  “He did steal a few million dollars,” Brady said.

  “Akin to kicking a puppy,” Chaz said. “Or taking ice cream away from a very small child.”

  “We’ve safely quarantined a gamma,” Lau said, voice low. “And now we get to go home.”

  Act V

  J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC, July 25, 2012

  Daniel Brady stopped by Arthur Tan’s desk twenty minutes after official FBI closing time, when nobody in the FBI had actually gone home yet but it wasn’t treason to start thinking about it. He was even less obtrusive out of the field: hovered genially out of the way until Tan finished his sentence on the report he was writing and turned to acknowledge his presence.

  “Jock,” Tan said, pleasantly.

  “Nerd,” Brady replied, and pulled up Pauley’s desk chair. “How’s life back in the Muggle world?”

  “Grim,” Tan said, and waved his new case file. “Human trafficking sucks. It sucks the worst of all things.”

  Brady did not argue. Tan had learned since joining the BAU that there were more worst things in the world than fetishes on the Internet, and they were all still the worst.

  “How’s life at Hogwarts?” he asked instead.

  “Good,” Brady replied, shockingly enough. “Dan Morrison’s settled into Idlewood, and it looks like the lawyer the court appointed for him is going to take a mental health plea and let him stay. Dr. Ramachandran says Morrison’s actually quite well-behaved and cooperative.”

  “Biding his time for the inevitable Arkham jailbreak,” Tan said in an ominous voice.

  Brady nodded. “Unfortunately for Morrison, nobody busts villains out of Idlewood to keep the story going for another hundred issues.”

  He cut off the last syllable too fast. Tan restrained himself from cocking an eyebrow: That we know of, floated into the subtext. He looked disturbed.

  Briefly, Arthur Tan wondered what Agent Brady was hiding.

  “Anyways. I just wanted to thank you. I know you’re still finding your feet with the kind of cases we do, and you really brought that one in.”

  Tan’s eyebrow rose. There was clearly more coming. He knew the difference between an intermission and the end of the show.

  “I’m telling you this,” Brady said, “because we have an empty ACTF position posting tonight. And I think you might want to look at it.”

  Everything in Tan’s head stopped. Even the part about what he wanted for dinner.

  “Hold on,” he said. “You guys want me to—”

  “My personal opinion only,” Brady said quickly, and held up both hands. “And you probably know that there are … limitations to a career move Down the Hall.”

  That had been obvious, Tan reflected, from the very first day. It was always him or Pauley who talked to the ACTF, never Blaze or Lisa. He was the new kid; he got the scut work, no matter how tight a unit the BAU was.

  And Pauley, well. Pauley wasn’t ambitious. Not that way. Not the way people marked ambition normally at the Bureau.

  “But,” Brady added, “you’d be good at it. You think your way around problems. And you weren’t too hung up on certain things to get the job done right.”

  “Like my dignity?” he said, and waggled his eyebrows. “Aw, shucks, stranger.”

  His heart wasn’t in it. Like his dignity; like procedure; like the technical rules of extradition to a private facility, where he didn’t quite know what would happen to someone who had, yes, committed a crime.

  Suddenly, Tan wasn’t sure this all was a compliment.

  “I,” he said, cautious and polite, “would really need to think about that.”

  Brady didn’t get offended. He seemed to catch all the laugh tracks going through Tan’s face, and nodded. “You should, yes.” He stood, pushed Pauley’s chair back where it belonged. “Goodnight, Nerd.”

  “Jock,” Tan said formally.

  The link was where Brady had said it was: a fresh posting to the Bureau internal jobs site. Tan hovered his cursor over the link. The job description inside would undoubtedly be written in the vaguest terms possible: not a word about superpowers or fighting evil, or the things he’d seen in that bunker—the cages, the fear—or the way the agents from Down the Hall had barely seemed to feel it. How they’d looked at those things as if they weren’t the worst thing they’d ever seen before.

  As if there were worse things.

  Tan was reasonably ambitious. He’d hustled hard to move up from bomb squad, and, well, he had a family to help support. But he was also—grimly, terribly, morbidly—curious.

  He closed the intranet browser. Padma. He had to check with her first.

  He had to talk to his wife.

  The office had emptied out by the time Lau tapped on Esther Falkner’s office door, the one kept propped perpetually open in case of emergency or need for a spare breeze. Falkner looked up and saw Lau hovering in that neutral space on the wooden threshold, and waved her inside. “Come on in.”

  “You wanted to see me?” Lau said. Her face was neutral: not holding back a real whopper, this time, but just unsure what to say.

  “I looked at everyone’s reports,” Falkner said, and motioned for Lau to sit. She hesitated, and then sprawled gratefully in one of Falkner’s plush guest chairs. “You did a good job: kept everyone on point and moving, and brought in our gamma alive and cooperative, without any collateral damage.”

  “It was an easy case,” she said.

  “It was a case with a lot of potential to go volatile and a lot of unpredictable moving parts,” Falkner corrected, “and the fact that they neatly canceled each other out means good situation management, not that the job was somehow easier. Don’t minimize that,” she added mildly.

  Lau had the good grace to flush.

  “I just don’t know that I can take credit, here. I wasn’t really all that in charge,” Lau said. “Everyone knows what they’re supposed to do. We just did it.”

  Falkner sat and watched her until her face changed slowly. It took about thirty seconds.

  Lau chuckled, quietly, like someone who just found their glasses sitting on their head where they’d lost them. “Now I am a Jedi, hm?”

  “Wax on, wax off,” Falkner replied dryly. “I’m putting in a re
commendation. It has to go through Celentano, of course, but I’m going to push for a promotion to SSA on your next review.”

  That did the trick; the brightness came back into her eyes. “Agent Falkner—” she started, and then stopped. “Esther. Thank you.”

  Falkner smiled, halfway. “You’re due,” she said.

  It was true. Nicolette Lau had come into the ACTF too early to understand that the time away from home, the trauma, the suspect kill rates were astronomical compared to most every other branch of the Bureau. That this wasn’t normal. That they didn’t live real life.

  “You won’t regret it,” Lau said, and rose; and from the hint of steel in her voice, Falkner was entirely sure she wouldn’t.

  “Never thought it for a second,” she said, and shifted in her seat. “Go on home. I’ve got to beat it anyways. Ben’s making pad thai for dinner.”

  Lau saluted—half ironic, maybe—and took herself out the door.

  Falkner leaned back in her chair. Easy case? Maybe. But there was no more inappropriate deference in Nikki Lau’s step, and no more worry in her shadow.

  It was good for kids, growing up. To let them do a thing for themselves, and realize that they could.

  Yeah, Falkner thought, as she shut down her computer and locked her desk drawer. They were going to be fine.

  HEROIC MEASURES

  MATTHEW JOHNSON THE NURSE STOPPED HER ON HER WAY INTO THE ROOM. “YOU NEED TO SIGN THIS,” SHE SAID.

  The old woman peered at the page the nurse had handed her. She was unable to focus on the right part of her glasses, and the paper was a blur. “What is it?”

  “Directions for his care. It says here he’s Do Not Resuscitate, is that right?”

  “Are things that serious?”

  “It’s just routine. The DNR form says you’re his power of attorney, so you can change it if you want.”

  She shook her head; she knew what he wanted. Still unable to make out the letters, she followed the nurse’s finger, checked and signed, handed the page back. “Thank you,” she said, and went on into the room.

  He was lying on the bed, his eyes closed, his form as muscular as ever but looking somehow deflated. The room was nearly empty, only a heart monitor beeping softly and rhythmically. There were no tubes of saline solution running to his arm, no beeping and whirring and probing machines. The skin that had turned away uncounted bullets wouldn’t admit them.

  His chest rose and fell, slowly, shallowly, and every few seconds he twitched with the dream-tremors that had consigned the two of them to separate beds all these years. It was strange to see him sleeping there alone, without her bed nearby; it was that, she realized, which made the room feel so empty. A pair of black-framed glasses sat on the end-table next to the bed; he still wore them most of the time, from habit, must have had them on when he fell.

  She watched him breathe for a minute. It didn’t look much different from regular sleep, except for his pale, dry skin and lips, and the crust that had formed over his eyelids, sealing them shut. This is the kind of care he gets, she thought, after everything. She went into the half-bathroom, picked up a rough beige washcloth and moistened it with warm water from the sink, then went back to the bedside and started dabbing at his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” a voice said from behind her. Turning, she saw a dark-haired man in his thirties—or maybe his forties; the older she got, the more all people younger looked the same age—wearing a lab coat over brown slacks and a windowpane checked shirt. “The nurse should have told you. We think he might be having small seizures, and we’re worried about what might happen if his eyes are open. Without his control, I mean.”

  She nodded, dabbed the cloth on his forehead instead. How long had his skin been this pale, the veins so visible? “I’m—”

  “Yes, I know,” the man said, holding out his hand. “I’m Doctor Weller. I’m glad we were able to reach you. Was your trip all right?”

  “It was fine.” In fact she had no memory of it: no memory of anything between being called away from the conference and seeing the nurse at the door. “How bad is he?”

  Weller looked away slightly, scratched the side of his head, above his right ear. “Well, that’s hard to say,” he said. “We have only the simplest tools available. No X-ray, no CAT scan: none of it will penetrate his skin. So really I’m just left with an EKG and a stethoscope.”

  “And?”

  “And we don’t know. Who knows what’s normal for him? We’ve seen what look like little seizures, as I said. It might have been a stroke, but we’ve got no way to tell.”

  She looked over at him on the bed. He still looked strong; his hair, white as it was, still fell in that curl over his forehead. “So what are you doing?”

  The doctor shook his head. “There’s not much we can do. Even if we knew it was a stroke, it would be too late to give him a plasminogen activator—a clot dissolver—even if there were a way to get it in his bloodstream. Frankly, anything we could give him probably wouldn’t be as effective as what his own body can do. He’s shown an amazing ability to heal himself over the years.”

  “What are you doing to keep him hydrated?” she asked, annoyed. At what age, she thought, do you start being treated like a child? Or do doctors talk like that to everyone?

  “Ice. I don’t know if he can choke, but we don’t want to take the risk. So we’ve been taking crushed ice—there’s a machine down the hall, in the pantry—and letting it melt in his mouth.”

  She gently put a finger to her husband’s lips. “I don’t think he’s gotten that in a while.”

  Doctor Weller had the grace to look embarrassed. “Labor’s always at a premium in a hospital. Even for someone like him—if there’s a good chance it’s just the natural way of things, more urgent care takes priority.”

  The natural way of things. Who knew what that was, with him? “I’d like you to show me where the ice machine is, please,” she said. “And I’d like a cot brought in, if you can spare one.”

  As it turned out, they couldn’t. What they had instead was a padded chair, like a recliner; it wasn’t terrifically comfortable, but it leaned back far enough to sleep in. Not that she was sleeping much. She was the only one to watch him: his parents were long dead, her sister half a continent away and too frail to travel besides. No children, of course. The risk was too great: if the child took after the father, one kick while in the womb … . She had thought about adopting, but ultimately had to agree when he’d said their lives were complicated enough already. So it was just the two of them.

  And soon, just one.

  Luckily their neighbor’s son was out of school for Christmas; he could gather a bag full of clothes and books and bring them to the hospital. She had given up on her bifocals, wore her reading glasses most of the time and switched to the others when someone came in or she went to get water. She had started out by reading to him, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dickens, his old favorites, kept it up for a day. Now she saved her voice, sat by the window and reread Scoop.

  She saw a fuzzy gray-and-white centaur shape moving past the door, heard the breakfast cart rolling by. Switching to her distance glasses, she patted her husband on the arm, dog-eared her book and headed for the pantry. After a few days she knew the rhythms of the hospital: the big water cups, the ones that held a liter, were put on the pantry shelf right after breakfast and disappeared by noon. Every morning she grabbed two, filled one with water for herself and one with ice for him. Like being back at the paper, she thought, timing your break to a fresh pot of coffee, knowing the times when there wouldn’t be a line at the Xerox machine. She took a long while filling the mugs, to give the nurses ample time to change him before she returned.

  He was stirring when she got back to the room. She knew, now, which tremors could be soothed with a gentle hand or moist washcloth and which would lift him inches off the bed, set him thrashing hard enough to bend the bed frame. This was a small one, and she took his hand as she sat down. “It’s okay,” she
said.

  His mouth opened. “Luh—” he croaked.

  Her hand twitched in surprise, jerked back in case his should close out of reflex. She reached into the mug of ice, slid a small handful into his mouth. “Just let this melt.”

  Nodding, he moved his jaw around then swallowed. “Cold,” he said in a rasp.

  She reached over for the washcloth that sat on the table, dabbed at his eyes. “Do you need anything?”

  “Where?”

  “You’re in the hospital.”

  His eyelids were clear of the crust now, and he opened them a bit; the eyes behind looked pale, unfocused. He blinked at the light from the window, and her heart ached to see him hurt by something that had always been a friend. “What happened?”

  “You fell,” she said, fighting to control her voice.

  “Fighting?”

  She smiled. He had always hated the fighting, using his fists to solve problems: it wasn’t the way he was brought up, he’d say, and besides, if someone like him had to resort to violence, it meant he must be pretty dumb. “No.”

  He nodded. “Good,” he said, then took a deep breath. She reached into the mug, her hand numb with cold, fed him another handful of ice. He sucked at the ice for a moment then swallowed. “Tired.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You go to sleep.”

  “Yeah.” For a moment that old twinkle she remembered was there, and the corners of his mouth curled into a smile. “You take care, now.”

  She woke with a start. Her chair had been pushed away from the bed, and people bustled all around, reaching over her husband. The room was oddly quiet, and for a moment she wondered if she were still sleeping, dreaming. Then she realized just what sound was missing. The heart monitor was silent.

  “What’s happening?” she said, rising unsteadily. She didn’t know which of these people was the doctor, who was in charge. Nobody seemed to be doing anything.

  “He’s coding,” said one of them, a young red-haired woman in green scrubs. “I mean, his heart’s stopped.”