This Eternity of Masks and Shadows

by Karsten Knight

  Cairn turned from the railing to look back at her.

  Quinn smiled darkly. “Let’s torch this Populist Barbie.”

  As Phobetor regained consciousness, his first thought was: It’s raining. This was impossible, of course, because it didn’t rain in bedrooms.

  But the water continued to pelt his face.

  He opened his eyes.

  Phobetor lay on a grassy hillside, sprawled beneath an overcast sky. He groaned as he peeled his cheek out of the mud. Was he hungover? Had he passed out drunk from too much mead?

  His eyes followed the flow of the rainwater down the slope. Sixty feet below, the hillside ended abruptly in a jagged cliff. A deep ravine stretched beyond—a canyon? No, he realized as he spotted a rusting excavator in the distance.

  A quarry.

  Something was wrong. Through his hazy brain, memories of the chaos reemerged—everything proceeding as planned at first, the fiery wreckage of the Seaport, but then the syringe in his neck, and the room service attendant, and the world slipping away from him as—

  “Good morning, asshole.”

  Phobetor had been so transfixed by the quarry that he hadn’t yet looked uphill.

  Cairn stood on the slope, black hoodie and jeans soaked from the rain. Had she been watching him all this time, waiting for him to wake up?

  She leaned against a boulder that was almost her height. It looked as though a meteoroid had crash-landed in the field.

  Phobetor scrambled to his feet too fast. A blistering headache thrummed at his temples, threatening to burst out of his skull. “Where am I?” he croaked, voice hoarse from dehydration.

  A bolt of lightning forked down behind Cairn. “In my nightmare,” she rasped. After a dramatic beat, she laughed. “Not literally, of course. But you’re going to wish it was.” She swept her arm over the hillside, to the ravine below. “This is an old granite quarry where I used to collect rock samples with my father. At least once a year, some poor daredevil would accidentally kill himself diving off the cliff, not realizing the water down there was never more than a few feet deep. Enough people died that they finally closed it to the public, so you and I should be able to have a nice, private chat.”

  “What do you want, mortal?” Phobetor assumed a defensive stance. His powers were useless in real life, but surely he could overpower this girl who was a foot shorter than him.

  “I want to tell you a story,” she replied. “A myth about punishment—I know you’re a connoisseur of those. Well, my mom taught me a few, too, before you murdered her. I assume you’re familiar with the myth of King Sisyphus?”

  Only then did Phobetor notice the long chain hammered into the boulder. He traced the strand of links that snaked through the glass.

  The other end was fastened around his ankle.

  Cairn reached down and picked up a sledgehammer concealed in the grass. “As punishment for a lifetime of tricking the gods, Sisyphus was forced to roll a stone uphill for eternity. Every time he made it to the top, the boulder would roll right back down to the bottom.” She glanced down toward the cliff. “You might not want to let it get that far.”

  Cairn wound up, and with a mighty swing, she slammed the sledgehammer into the wedge anchoring the boulder in place.

  Realizing what was happening, Phobetor rushed forward just as the formidable stone started to roll toward him.

  It was far heavier than he imagined. He stretched his arms wide, as though he could bear hug the thing back into place. He pressed his broad chest into the stone.

  Still, it rolled slowly but fatally toward him, pushing him down the slope.

  And then a miracle: after some fancy footwork, he dug his heels into the mud, and the boulder’s descent stopped. Every muscle from his arms to his thighs strained to hold the stone in place.

  “Please …” Phobetor wheezed as his stubble chafed against the craggy rock.

  Cairn leisurely wandered down in front of him. “I’ll make you a deal. For a voyeur like you, I’m sure there’s no way you agreed to do business with Madison without lurking in her dreams and researching what makes her tick. Tell me her secrets and I’ll free you.”

  “She wants to be president!” Phobetor cried out. “Yearns for it. All these years, every move she’s made—it’s all been one long con to launch the ultimate political career. One in which America would see her as its messiah. Now set me free!”

  Cairn rolled her eyes. “Too obvious, and most of that she’ll say on national television before the week is out. Give me something I can use against her.”

  The rain picked up, a full-blown torrential downpour sending a cascade down the hillside. Phobetor’s heels lost their purchase and he slipped in the mud.

  The boulder started rolling again. Frantically, Phobetor twisted around and pressed his back into the stone. Its progress slowed but his quads and shoulders burned torturously, muscles threatening to rupture.

  “Even her marriage was a farce,” he yelled. “Madison blackmailed Ra into divorcing his first wife and marrying her instead. All that time, he knew exactly what she was.”

  Cairn considered this as she watched Phobetor squirm. It was a start, but Quinn wanted something she could prove. “Dig deeper. Metaphorically and literally.”

  As the rushing water eroded the earth beneath the boulder, it lurched without warning. Phobetor’s legs buckled under the pressure. He fell, and with a yelp, he tumbled out of the way to avoid being flattened.

  As the stone rolled away from him, he attempted one frantic, final maneuver: he wrapped his hands around the chain, set his feet, and pulled. The boulder slowed but continued to edge forward, dragging him through the mud.

  Finally, he shouted out the one card he had left to play: “She’s a clone!”

  Cairn felt the world shift. “What?”

  Between grunts of exertion, Phobetor told an incredible story. All the while, Cairn listened, enraptured.

  There it was, the skeleton she had been hoping for.

  And it was juicier and more horrific than she ever could have imagined.

  “Please, that’s all I know!” Phobetor screamed in agony as something in one of his knees popped. Somehow, the nightmare god still clung to the chains, even as his fingers blistered open and his muscles failed, and the stone pulled him gradually toward a fatal fall. “Please …”

  Cairn sighed, wheeled the sledgehammer back, and struck the stone where Vulcan had anchored the chain. Then she struck again. On the third blow, the chain broke free of the rock.

  Phobetor’s descent down the hill stopped. He collapsed, exhausted, and watched with Cairn as the boulder picked up speed.

  “Thank you,” he whispered, relieved. His watery eyes met hers as he groveled. “I promise on my life that I will never again use my powers to—”

  Below them, the stone arrived at the lip of the cliff and disappeared. As it plummeted, it pulled taut the second, longer backup wire Cairn had tied to Phobetor—this one a fishing line he hadn’t noticed while he was fixated on the chain.

  “You killed my mother,” Cairn reminded him.

  With a surprised yelp, Phobetor careened down the hillside at an incredible speed, like an out-of-control sled. His fingertips futilely clawed at the mud the whole way down, right up until the moment he vanished over the cliff.

  Cairn wandered to the edge. She cautiously leaned out and gazed down.

  Eighty feet below, Phobetor’s body floated face down in the quarry’s shallow water, neck twisted at an unnatural angle. A scarlet smear painted the boulder’s fractured remains, where the assassin had landed on them.

  She pulled out her phone and dialed. When Quinn answered, Cairn said, “Get ready to break the story of a lifetime.”

  The Bear Cage

  The evening of Columbia’s big interview, Nook arrived at Cairn’s house just before sunset. He started complaining the moment she opened the front door. “We don’t exactly have oodles of time,” he grumbled. “What was so important that I had to take
a detour here?”

  “Hello to you, too,” Cairn said. “Boy, if you always make an entrance like this, you must be every party hostess’s dream. Who needs flowers or a nice bottle of pinot grigio?”

  Nook only grunted in response as he stepped into the Delacroix house. While the detective would never admit to being afraid, she could tell he was nervous about the confrontation that would happen later that night. Along with Vulcan, they had walked through the plan a hundred times now, the tightly choreographed movements each of them had to make in order to incriminate Columbia in front of the world—and then to neutralize her.

  The most difficult part had been negotiating with Nook about her own role in all of this. Still guided by an intense mission to keep Cairn out of harm’s way, to never let her suffer the same fate as his daughter, he had refused to let her or Vulcan have any involvement in physically confronting the unhinged goddess. He alone would assume that risk.

  While Cairn desired nothing more than to avenge her mother, they needed Nook’s help to pull off the plan. Ultimately, she had relented.

  Cairn led Nook down the wine cellar stairs, with Squall trotting close in tow. “Vulcan crafted you a little something for tonight,” she explained. “In case you need to ‘go polar,’ we thought you could use a special suit that would expand and contract with your body, whether you’re a half-ton bear or your grumpy human self.”

  Nook pursed his lips. “You want me to wear high-tech spandex?”

  “Do you want to end up stark naked on national television?” Cairn countered as she pushed down the secret wine cradle that opened the lair door.

  “Fair enough.”

  Nook stepped into Sedna’s lair and audibly exhaled. He took in the ice walls and the aquariums teeming with fish. “The last time I set foot in here was right after she finished building it,” he said.

  “You’ve been inside our house before?” It was hard for Cairn to imagine how this burly detective could have been here without her knowledge. His brooding aura practically penetrated walls.

  “It was summer, years ago,” he explained. “You were off on some expedition in South America with your dad. I’d always tried to convince Sedna to hang up her vigilante spurs for a safer, normal life, but she was so damn proud of this place.”

  Cairn tried to imagine Nook sitting down for a family dinner with them. But Ahna had been absolute in the way she kept her double lives discrete. “My mother led two separate existences, and you and I each only got to experience one of them.”

  Nook shook his head as if to shed away the nostalgia. He cleared his throat. “So where is this special suit you and fire-boy dreamed up?”

  The only response was the clack of the door closing behind him.

  Nook spun around and found himself suddenly alone in the lair. He gripped the latch on the door and pulled at it, then again more violently.

  The door did not budge.

  “Cairn!” he shouted as he pounded on the stone. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry,” her muffled voice replied. “But if you won’t let me avenge my mother, then you’ve left me no choice.”

  Nook rolled up his sleeves and a low growl rumbled from his throat. “If you don’t let me out in the next minute, I swear to you I will shift into bear form and claw this door apart.”

  After a pause, Cairn replied, “No, you won’t.”

  “What do you mean?” Nook reached out to that special cave in his mind where the beast had always lurked, waiting hungrily for the next time that Nook would set him free.

  But the opening of that vault had been sealed off, piled high with stones, separating him from the formidable creature that longed for release.

  Nook had felt sluggish all day as if he were coming down with a cold, but now he recognized those symptoms for what they were. “Cairn …” he moaned. “What did you do?”

  Outside, Cairn was sitting with her back against the door, head pressed against the stones. “I slipped serum into your coffee earlier. Given your body mass, I imagine it will wear off by midnight, and so will the timed lock that I coerced Vulcan into installing on this door.”

  His voice had lost all its authority. “Please don’t do this,” he pleaded. “I already lost one daughter. I can’t lose you, too.”

  Cairn pulled herself to her feet and brushed the dust off the back of her jeans. She brought her face close to the almost invisible seam around the door. “For what it’s worth, I bet you were a pretty great dad. Elisa was lucky to have you.” She watched as Squall darted through the aisles and out of sight. Somewhere in the labyrinth, a shelf of glass bottles rattled. “Oh,” she added, “and if I don’t survive tonight, please feed my cat until my dad gets back.”

  With that, Cairn rushed through the cellar and up the stairs. Columbia awaited her back in Boston.

  Back inside the lair, Nook shouted Cairn’s name until his voice went hoarse. When it was clear he was alone, he checked his cellphone—zero bars. He picked up the old landline on Sedna’s desk, but there was no dial tone.

  Defeated, Nook slunk over to a dark recess in the wall, the alcove where Sedna had stored her armored costume. As he approached, its door whisked open.

  The mannequin inside was bare.

  Hero Complex

  “Stand by for soundcheck.”

  The film crew raced around the floor of the New England Aquarium, making final preparations. The gaffer fussed with the lights.

  They pointed the cameras at two conversation chairs in front of the aquarium’s crown jewel: the Giant Ocean Tank, a mammoth cylinder forty feet wide that rose all the way up to the fourth story. A long ramp spiraled around it so visitors could stop at every level to admire the thousands of colorful fish darting around the reef.

  The production assistant’s hands trembled as she struggled to clip a microphone to Columbia, who occupied one of the chairs. “I’m so sorry, Senator Hancock,” the young woman fretted. “I’ve never had to mic someone wearing armor.”

  Columbia offered her million-dollar smile and tapped a section of chainmail between her breastplate and shoulder. “If you think that’s hard, try sitting down in it.”

  The assistant finally secured the lavalier and stepped back. “I just want to say how grateful I am for all you’ve done for Boston,” she gushed. “I’ve been following the news reports about you since you stopped that armored car heist.”

  Quinn Cypress emerged from behind the cameras and cleared her throat. The young intern sheepishly scampered off the set. “I think my assistant is a bit starstruck,” the newswoman apologized as she settled into the opposite chair.

  Columbia waved her gauntlet dismissively. “It’s refreshing to see young people who care so deeply about their city.” She glanced around. “I have to admit, I was intrigued when I found out you wanted to film here.”

  “Are you kidding?” A school of seahorses bobbed past the glass behind Quinn. “A visually arresting backdrop, at one of Boston’s most iconic locations, interviewing the city’s savior—the world is going to remember this.”

  Columbia had been very particular in her demands about setting the stage. In addition to insisting on wearing her armor, with her helmet tucked under her arm, she’d positioned her crimson blade between the two chairs, propped up to look as though it had been driven into the floor. “To project strength in an uncertain time,” she’d explained.

  To Quinn’s dismay, it seemed more like an excuse for Columbia to ensure that the saber was always within arm’s reach.

  “Thirty seconds to air!” the director called out.

  Quinn thumbed through her stack of notecards. “Before we go live, I always like to ask: is there any topic that’s off-limits?”

  “No. My husband’s political career was mired with secrets.” Columbia took a long swig of the water bottle on the table beside her. “What the people need right now is full transparency—so don’t hold back.”

  Quinn smiled primly. “I was hoping you’d say that.”


  “And we’re live in five … four …” The director counted down the final three seconds on his fingers.

  Quinn folded her hands in her lap and turned to camera one. “Good evening. My name is Quinn Cypress and tonight I address you live from the heart of Boston, a city that’s endured many hardships since this country’s most nascent moments—but has always come out stronger. On March 17, 1776, George Washington’s colonial army forced the British redcoats to evacuate Boston, a major turning point in the American Revolution. Two and a half centuries later, we faced a very different threat on our soil.”

  On the aquarium tank behind her, a projector played clips from the attacks—Ra’s dive off the Tea Party ship and the subsequent explosion; his fiery path of terror through the city; shaky handheld footage of citizens fleeing through the snowy streets, and police officers taking cover behind squad cars.

  “On the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, a day meant to celebrate the birthplace of American liberty, a god laid siege to our humble streets with a reign of terror that rendered our police force inert and left seventeen innocent civilians dead. Through the destruction and helplessness, however, a miracle materialized.”

  The montage showed Columbia’s dramatic arrival and the fiery battle that ensued. The image paused just before her fatal blow to her husband, with her frozen above the flames, sword poised to skewer the senator.

  Quinn crossed her legs in the opposite direction as the camera panned to include her armored interviewee. “Tonight, I feel fortunate and honored to be sitting across from our city’s resident superhero. Senator Hancock, thank you for being with us tonight.”

  “Please, I was never one to stand on formality. Call me Columbia. That goes for all of you,” the goddess insisted as she gazed directly into the camera, then added with a wink, “… except for my new colleagues in the Senate.”

  Quinn pursed her lips. A goddess of unimaginable power convincing a country full of mortals that she was just an ordinary Jane, and at the same time sticking it to the elitist political swamp.