This Eternity of Masks and Shadows

by Karsten Knight

  Cairn and Nook both sensed the eye before the storm. Madison dove onto the stage, lunging for her saber. At the same time, Nook drew his weapon and fired two shots. The first went wide, shattering what remained of a glass window behind the stage. The second glanced off the back shoulder of Madison’s armor. She let out a pained cry as the impact sent her spinning. As Nook fired two more shots, she dropped flat to the stage floor and reached for the saber still lodged in the piano stool.

  Meanwhile, Cairn lunged forward, ready to drive her knife up under the soft target of Madison’s chin.

  But just as Cairn was descending on her, Madison’s gauntlet connected with the saber’s hilt and her body began to dematerialize.

  Cairn plunged the blade down, but it was too late. Madison’s form vanished into an inky haze, and the knifepoint stabbed into the wooden stage instead.

  Her mother’s killer had been within her reach and escaped, literally disappearing into thin air.

  It was too much for Cairn to handle—she tilted back her head and released a feral scream into the open air.

  Ra advanced on the officers who had taken cover behind the remaining police cruiser. With each step, he melted a footprint into the concrete. The flames expanded around him, a globe of fire transforming him into a human sun.

  One of the officers frantically radioed for backup, praying that SWAT would get there in time to save them—and that they would bring guns that worked.

  Across the park, a news outlet filmed the scene from a safe distance. Their chopper hovered just over the channel to capture more footage of the senator’s rampage.

  As Ra stalked forward, the cruiser’s wheels blistered and popped. Overcome by the heat, the officers retreated toward the glass lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel.

  Ra stepped out into the intersection and spread his arms. “I am your one true god, you despicable redcoats,” he shouted to the cowering bystanders, “Denounce your king and kneel before me, or I will fertilize the earth with your ashes.”

  Across the square, a knot of ink solidified into human form. A few onlookers pointed as Columbia materialized. Clad in her crimson armor, she marched cautiously toward the senator. “Senator Ra!” she called out. “Surrender at once.”

  Ra responded to the trespasser’s demands by hurling a fireball in her direction. In reality, it wouldn’t have hit Columbia even if she’d stood completely still. For dramatic effect, Columbia scrambled out of the way as the napalm struck the base of a streetlight. It melted through the metal, and the whole rig came crashing to the ground.

  Columbia dodged another series of incendiary projectiles from the sun god. The wall of fire circling Ra had not been part of the plan. No matter how meticulously Phobetor designed his victims’ nightmares, there was never a way to ensure that the subject reacted 100% the way he intended. In effect, Columbia would be unable to directly approach him; she would have to improvise, and soon, before the Nocturne wore off and the senator became lucid again.

  After the latest volley of fireballs, Columbia found herself next to a female journalist—Quinn Cypress—who had taken shelter behind a park bench. Her cameraman had run for his life, so Quinn had picked up his camcorder continued to film the attack.

  Columbia pointed up at the news chopper. “Can your eyes in the sky confirm whether Ra’s wall of fire protects him from above as well?”

  Quinn nodded, trembling, and after she made a few quick taps on her phone, she pulled up the live aerial feed playing on the station’s website. While the sun god’s corona extended high above him, there was a hole in the top of the orb, almost like the eye of a hurricane.

  “Thank you,” Columbia said as she dematerialized.

  As Columbia’s spectral trail dissolved, Quinn scooped up the camera again, frantically panning around the scene for some sign of the goddess’s crimson armor. She could feel the air growing hotter as Ra continued his fiery march toward her hiding spot. Soon the temperature would escalate too high for her to remain behind her cover, and she’d be forced to retreat.

  But then she spotted an obsidian cloud forming several stories over Ra’s head. She zoomed in on the anomaly.

  Out of the darkness, Columbia appeared and dropped from the sky. She angled her sword downward with both hands as she threaded the eye of the inferno.

  Ra looked up just in time for the blade to slide into his open mouth and out the back of his neck, cutting him off mid-scream.

  Instantly, the corona around him extinguished.

  When the smoke rising off the pavement cleared, Columbia knelt in front of Ra’s smoldering corpse, which slowly slid down the length of the saber that had skewered his head. Shakily, the goddess rose to her feet.

  Murmurs rippled through the crowd that had been watching as they emerged from cover. One person began to clap. Soon the applause swept over the audience, adoration for the powerful god who had just saved them from another.

  Then Columbia pulled off her war helmet and dropped it to the pavement.

  Quinn gasped, but quickly recovered and zoomed on the solemn face of Madison Ra. There were tears in her eyes as she loomed over her husband’s remains. Her expression was a twisted cocktail of anguish, exhaustion, and relief. But beneath it all, there was the tiniest glimmer of something else:

  Triumph.

  Phobetor stood at the window of the Avalon’s penthouse suite, smiling down at the carnage. The shattered husk of the Coconut Grove club loomed against the harbor sky. Below, firefighters were still extinguishing random fires that remained from Ra’s rampage, while the sun god’s blood soaked into the snow.

  Columbia would be pleased with his performance, and a hearty bonus was no doubt already being wired to one of his accounts in the Caymans.

  A knock at the door interrupted his celebrations. “Room service,” a man’s voice announced.

  Phobetor rubbed his hands together. He celebrated every successful hit the same way: an aged Filet Mignon, so rare that the juices pooled with the beurre blanc, a kaleidoscope of blood and fat.

  Today he’d ordered two. Five minutes since the city suffered its most catastrophic attack since 1776, yet the hotel kitchen was still open for business. Gods bless capitalism.

  Phobetor opened the door and let the white-clad kitchen attendant roll the cart into the suite. He gripped the gun in the back of his waistband the whole time—one could never be too careful.

  After the waiter deposited it by the opulent dining room table, Phobetor deposited a single dollar bill into his hand with a disdainful smile, then slammed the door behind him.

  Alone again, Phobetor poured himself two fingers of whiskey and wandered over to the room service tray. He lowered his face to the plate as he pulled off the round metal dome covering it, excited to breathe in the aroma of freshly seared meat.

  But there was no steak on the plate beneath, nor any food at all. In the middle of the porcelain, a single folded placard read:

  Go fuck yourself :)

  A gloved hand wrapped around his mouth at the same time that something sharp stabbed into his neck. Phobetor roared with anger into the leather, already reaching around for his pistol.

  But then his limbs stopped responding, and his eyelids sagged. The nightmare god had always been in complete control of his movements in and out of sleep, yet now it descended on him like a heavy curtain.

  He dropped to the floor.

  Vulcan crouched beside him, wearing a kitchen attendant’s outfit and holding a syringe in one hand. “You should learn to tip better.” As the darkness overtook Phobetor, his last image was of the forge god waving at him and whispering. “Nighty night. Don’t let the fireflies bite…”

  As soon as he was sure Phobetor was out cold, Vulcan loaded him into the bottom shelf of the room service cart, lowered the linen cloth, and rolled the cart out to the elevators, whistling the whole way.

  Sisyphus

  Boston was a different place in the week after the Tea Party attacks.

  In the years
before, people had gradually accepted that reincarnated gods walked among them. While some had mistrusted these supernatural beings, many had embraced their existence. For some, proof of the supernatural gave them hope that maybe, just maybe, there was something more out there, whether it was a higher being watching over them or the promise of an afterlife.

  But Ra’s rampage through the Seaport had given the people a glimpse into the dark side of that power. Mortals went about their day in fear of another attack. Nowhere felt safe. Overnight, gods became enemy number one, power-hungry time bombs just waiting to explode.

  All except one. After she had slain her own husband to save them, the city had rallied around Madison Ra—or Madison Hancock, rather, as she was quick to revert to her maiden name. She was their gargoyle, their protector. In the hours following the Tea Party attack, the media had followed her around as she visited the wounded in local hospitals. While some wondered how she could have missed the warning signs of her husband’s evil plans, most instantly forgave her. If another god should snap and descend upon the city, the people knew they needed an ally like her, a fearless sentinel to watch over them.

  The next day, Governor Curley had summoned Madison to the State House. With Ra dead, Massachusetts had a vacant senate seat it urgently needed to fill, and it was up to the governor’s discretion to make that emergency appointment.

  The natural leadership Madison had demonstrated during the city’s harrowing brush with tragedy made her a no-brainer to replace her husband, the governor had proclaimed. With feigned reluctance, Madison accepted the responsibility of serving out the rest of her husband’s term, on one condition:

  That the people of Massachusetts continue to call her Columbia.

  Ninety miles away, in a cabin deep in the Green Mountains, Cairn grimly watched Columbia’s meteoric rise to power on an old television.

  Not only had Cairn failed to stop her mother’s killer, but now she had to watch hours of television personalities shamelessly praising Columbia as the city’s greatest hero since General George Washington repelled the British during the Siege of Boston.

  After Columbia had teleported away from the Coconut Grove, Nook and Cairn had carried a still unconscious Delphine out of the building and over to Nook’s car. There were so many bystanders wounded in the attack and the subsequent panic that to everyone else, they were just another pair of good Samaritans trying to get a victim the urgent medical attention she required.

  None of their residences were safe to return to—Cairn pictured waking up in her bed to Columbia sliding her saber through her throat. So Nook drove them northwest to a fishing cabin a police buddy owned but never visited during the winter months. Until they developed a plan, it would be their safe house.

  Delphine was still out cold by the time they reached the Vermont cabin. It was too dangerous to check her into a hospital, so Cairn stayed up the whole night, watching over her. When Delphine’s eyes eventually fluttered open at the break of dawn, she was barely lucid. Sweat had matted her hair to her forehead.

  “Withdrawal,” Nook said, arms crossed as he watched with concern from the doorway. “Taking a drug that blunts her abilities her whole life, then unloading two decades of pent-up power in one night? She’s lucky it didn’t kill her.”

  Cairn pressed a cold washcloth to Delphine’s furrowed brow. “She’ll pull through,” she insisted, though it sounded uncertain even to her ears.

  That morning, Cairn’s father called her in a panic as soon as news of the Tea Party day attacks reached his remote outpost in Canada. After asking her about twenty times whether she was okay, Emile insisted that he would board the next flight home to Boston.

  But Cairn knew she couldn’t let that happen—Columbia knew who Cairn was, and the vengeful goddess had already killed one of her parents. How could she explain to her father that their house was no longer a safe place? No, he would be better off in the wilderness, far from the city.

  Though with a teleporting deity involved, was anywhere truly safe?

  Emile didn’t seem to buy her argument that the danger had passed with Ra dead, so she changed tact. “Seriously, Dad—I’m hours away from the city, staying with some friends in a cabin,” she told him—it wasn’t a lie, for the time being at least. And it laid the foundation for the trump card she knew would make her father hesitate. “Besides, if you were to come home, I’d feel obligated to go back, too, and then really aren’t we both closer to the big, bad, dangerous city?”

  A long pause ensued, but Cairn wasn’t sure her persuasion had worked until she heard her father release a long sigh. Then he said, “Tell me there are at least some good rock formations to hike around where you’re staying.”

  Cairn smiled. Hook, line, and sinker.

  The sound of a car arriving outside brought Cairn to high alert. She quickly rushed her dad off the phone. Nook drew his gun as he peered out through the Venetian blinds, but then he visibly relaxed. He opened the door, and Vulcan strode into the cabin. “Did somebody order a pizza with extra nightmare god?”

  Retribution was a sweeter elixir than Cairn could have imagined. “Where is our little dream-trespassing friend?” she asked.

  “The trunk of my rental car, pumped deliriously full of barbiturates and Tacitus serum.” Vulcan tossed her his keys. “What should we do with him?”

  “Keep him under for now,” Cairn said. “I’m going to need to ask him a few questions before we send him off on a dirt nap where he can’t hurt anyone.”

  Over the next twenty-four hours, Delphine eventually stabilized, though she continued to drift in and out of a fitful sleep. Cairn couldn’t handle one more minute of idling around the cabin, while Columbia’s face flickered endlessly across the tv screen like some digital shrine.

  Nook had been sitting in the rocking chair out on the porch, standing guard as though a teleporting goddess would use the front door if she decided to come kill them. “Where are you going?” he asked Cairn as she jogged past him and hurried out onto the dirt drive.

  “To cash in the only favor I have left,” she called back. She pointed behind Nook. “Vulcan will explain everything.”

  Nook looked over his shoulder. The doorway was empty.

  When he turned back to Cairn, he watched as the Challenger peeled out down the driveway. He patted his pockets only to discover that his car keys were gone.

  When Quinn Cypress arrived at the top of the Custom House clocktower, the rose-tinged glow of dawn had only begun to paint the eastern horizon. A frigid breeze billowed around the journalist and she tightened the sash of her trench coat.

  “I’m here,” she called out impatiently. “Now tell me why you summoned me here at such an ungodly hour.”

  Cairn stepped out of the shadows and drew back the hood of her sweatshirt. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “That makes two of us,” Quinn muttered. “If I wanted to wake up this early, I’d anchor ‘Good Morning, America.’ But your message sounded urgent, so let’s hear it.”

  Cairn handed her one of the coffees she’d picked up across the street. “I heard you landed the big tell-all interview with Columbia—with Madison Hancock—this weekend. I have information that can bring her down.”

  Quinn narrowed her eyes at Cairn. “And why on earth would I want to do that? Columbia is trending off the charts. People love her, and why shouldn’t they? A vigilante who came from nothing, a grieving widow who saved the city from a terrorist attack? So I ask again: what could she possibly have done that was so bad that I would torpedo the biggest story of my career?”

  “For starters, she coordinated the attack she allegedly stopped,” Cairn said. “And she had my mother murdered in cold blood. Do I have your attention now?

  Quinn had been blowing on the hot contents of her cup, but she froze, mouth agape.

  Cairn told her everything. When she got to the part about Tane’s murder, Quinn took a step away from the building’s edge.

  After Cairn finished the story, s
he said, “Ask yourself: what will make your career? Another paint-by-numbers Q&A with the sleazy politician of the month? Or exposing a terrorist on live television?”

  “Even if I believed you,” Quinn said cautiously, “I see two major problems here. The first is that you have no hard evidence.” Cairn started to protest but the journalist held up a hand. “It’s the word of a celebrated public figure against a girl nobody’s heard of and a detective whose division failed to thwart the attacks Columbia stopped.”

  Cairn gazed off at the skyline, where the first rays of the rising sun danced over the Financial District. What she needed was enough damning proof to bring Columbia down in one fell swoop. No mercy, no shot at redemption.

  “I’ll find your smoking gun,” Cairn promised. “You mentioned a second problem?”

  “Yeah.” Quinn laughed nervously. “You want me to expose a vengeful, murderous teleporter who carries around a sword, and I don’t want to get beheaded on live television. I’m not that eager to be famous.”

  “It would give new meaning to ‘making headlines,’” Cairn offered. “Look, I have a plan to neutralize Columbia. I’m not going to lie to you that this proposition is danger-free. But if we don’t stop her now, she will continue to kill anyone who stumbles into her warpath. Tomorrow it will be me. Soon a political rival. Maybe even the president.”

  Quinn threw up her hands in disgust. “Well, that was a low-blow. Now if I do nothing, I’ll not only have your blood on my hands, but I’ll have sacrificed the fate of the free world to a ruthless despot. Seriously, that speech was so compelling that if we survive this week, I might have to hire you as one of my writers.”

  “So you’ll do it?” Cairn asked hopefully.

  “If you bring me hard evidence.” Quinn wagged a finger. “No proof, no takedown. You have forty-eight hours.”

  With that, Quinn pitched her empty cup into the wastebasket and strode for the exit. Before she left, she added, “And Cairn?”