This Eternity of Masks and Shadows

by Karsten Knight

  One week in office, and her tradecraft was already top-notch.

  “Senator Hancock—Columbia—I want to start by asking some of the tough questions, and give you an opportunity to silence any critics once and for all. You are not the first widow to be appointed to her late husband’s congressional seat. In fact, in the history of the United States, you are not even the fiftieth. However, you are the first woman to have taken office after defeating your husband in combat while he attempted to carry out an act of unspeakable evil.” Quinn took off her glasses. “And while we’re all grateful for the hard choice you made that day, it does beg the question: how did you not see what your husband was capable of?”

  Columbia nodded solemnly. “In other words, how can you trust me to hold an office that requires someone with sound judgment and an acute attention to detail when I couldn’t even see the threat that was right in front of my face the whole time?”

  “Your words, not mine.”

  Columbia cast a pensive look back at the still image of herself preparing to execute Ra. This was a critical moment—how to show flashes of grief without regret, how to make peace with her decision to end his life.

  But she had been an actress her entire life, winning over those around her with her charmingly human edifice, and strong-arming those few who proved immune to her wiles, leveraging their secrets against them.

  The American public would be no different.

  “My husband and I,” she began slowly, “had been drifting apart for nearly two years, since before the election. I thought it was just the pressures of a high-profile marriage in the public eye, a hard-fought campaign, and the demands of his new office. So I loyally stuck by his side through thick and thin and channeled my frustrations into the only outlet I knew: vigilantism. I took to the city streets and rooftops each night, vanquishing violent criminals and rapists and gang leaders. While Ra was fussing over policy or going to happy hour with lobbyists, I was in the trenches, making sure my people could safely walk the streets.” She lowered her gaze to her lap. “But I was so caught up in my nocturnal activities that it never once occurred to me that the greatest threat to this city was sleeping right in my own bed.”

  Quinn leaned across and patted the goddess’s armored knee. “I believe the expression you’re looking for is ‘I’m only human.’”

  This earned a laugh from Columbia. When she lifted her head, her eyes blazed with a new intensity. “Never again will I make that mistake. Maybe I missed the warning signs, but when it came time to choose between my husband’s life and my people, I did not hesitate. That is the kind of intrepid, fearless attitude I will bring to the Senate, and the same brutal justice I will continue to dispense to anyone who threatens harm to the innocent and defenseless.”

  “So no plans to hang up the armor?” Quinn asked.

  “Just the opposite.” Columbia tightened her gauntlet into a fist. “I’m only getting started.”

  “Before we touch on some of your past triumphs—and look to your aspirations for the future—I want to go way back.” The projection behind them dissolved into a small cabin surrounded by towering pines. “Can you tell us a little about your childhood?”

  Columbia gave an embarrassed grimace. “Only if you promise not to air any awkward prom photos.”

  “I make no such promises.” Quinn checked her notecards. “According to the biography on your website, you were born and raised an only child in the small rural township of Chesterfield in Western Massachusetts.”

  Columbia nodded. “I was home-schooled by my single mother until she passed away just before my sixteenth birthday. And though I spent many hours training at the Tanglewood Academy of Ballet, I was much more at home in a pair of jean shorts, hiking the Berkshires or off-roading with my ATV on the muddiest trails I could find. I guess you could say I couldn’t have chosen a more idyllic, backcountry childhood.”

  Quinn tapped her lips. “That’s an interesting word choice, ‘chosen.’”

  Columbia responded with a confused but polite smile. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because according to my research …” Quinn pulled out a file that she’d hidden beneath her chair and unfolded it on her lap. “… just about everything in your biography is a bald-faced lie.”

  It was like a guitar string had snapped. A stunned, tense silence washed over the set, and even Columbia, who always over-prepared, didn’t immediately react. “Excuse me?” she finally stammered out.

  “In reality, you were born Aether Valentina Sibelius in Hallstatt, Austria, in 1996, five years after the birthday listed on your website,” Quinn continued as she leafed through the pages. “Your father, Dr. Leopold Sibelius, was a disgraced experimental biophysicist obsessed with harnessing the abilities of gods. He even married one—a Germanic hunting goddess named Abnoba, whose teleporting abilities fascinated him.”

  “Wait—” Columbia started to protest.

  But Quinn was a freight train and nothing could derail her. “Unfortunately, Abnoba was a loose cannon and a self-radicalized zealot who believed the gods were here to restore balance to the mortal world. She was linked to several attacks around the globe during the 1980s, including bombing a public market in Morocco, the derailing of a train in Shanghai, and the assassination of at least four world leaders in their own bedchambers. And because your father couldn’t control her, he decided to start from scratch and create a new version, Abnoba 2.0 if you will. So he poisoned his wife and cloned her in his laboratory. He named that clone Aether, killed every lab tech involved in her creation, and told the rest of the world that she was his daughter.”

  As Columbia opened her mouth again, she stopped cold when she saw the projections behind her. One was a headshot of her; the other was a faded photo of Abnoba from thirty years earlier. Their faces were identical.

  It morphed into a screen with bold white text that declared “DNA match: 99.8%” against the backdrop of two rotating double helixes. Quinn’s reporting team had obtained blood from Columbia’s facial wound at the Coconut Grove; simultaneously, in a cemetery in Bavaria, Interpol had exhumed Abnoba’s body to take a posthumous sample.

  Quinn leveled a finger at her. “You inherited your predecessor’s thirst for power and blood, but you fixed your sights on this side of the Atlantic. The problem: your true age disqualified you from serving in Congress, and your true birthplace would prevent you from pursuing higher presidential aspirations down the road. So you crafted a fictitious childhood like you were some patriotic folk hero. You modeled your vigilante persona after the statue of Columbia that stands atop the Capitol Building.” Quinn counted the sins on her fingers as she continued. “You blackmailed a rising political star into divorcing his wife and marrying you, and you rode his coattails into the spotlight. You orchestrated a series of attacks that terrorized the very city you pretended to protect, drugged your husband so he’d look like the mastermind, and positioned yourself to sweep in as the people’s savior.”

  Columbia staged a laugh, but it sounded thin and panicked. “This is preposterous. If you’re going to lob insane, unfounded conspiracy theories without evidence, then maybe you’re better off working for the tabloids than syndicated news.”

  Quinn responded by looking back at the screen, which had transitioned to a video of the Boston Tea Party celebration, seconds before the first explosion. The amateur footage zoomed in on Ra as he made the fateful dive off the ship, and the fireball that followed. The video rewound and this time played in slow motion. While the reenactors all reached out for Ra as he plunged into the water, leaning over the gunwales to see if he was okay, Madison shrank away from her husband, diving for cover instead.

  “Ten thousand people showed up to the Seaport that day,” Quinn said, “but in the moments just before your husband jumped into the channel, only you anticipated the explosion that was about to happen—because you planned it. Here’s a tip: if you want to be a convincing actress, you might want to work on your timing.”

 
; “Enough,” Columbia commanded.

  “And while no one can fault you for the circumstances of your birth, we can fault you for being a mass murderer who defrauded the American people into revering her.”

  “I am a goddess, and it is my divine right to be worshipped!” Columbia bellowed.

  Quinn had ridden a wave of adrenaline through her accusations, but suddenly terror struck her silent, as she gazed up at the vigilante, who had risen to her feet and towered menacingly over her.

  Even Columbia seemed surprised to find herself standing. She looked to her hand, almost as if she didn’t recognize it—in her blind rage, she had seized her crimson saber.

  Columbia looked around the room at the terrified film crew, who were abandoning their stations one by one and scuttling toward the exits. Her gaze finally landed on her own wild-eyed reflection in one of the camera lenses and the red “recording” light that stared back. In that moment, she knew that her political career and the years of careful planning that had preceded it had imploded into smoldering ruins.

  With a feral scream, she brought her gauntlets down on the first camera, then the second, sending them crashing to the floor. Then she spun around with her sword raised to skewer Quinn, who had fallen out of her chair, and was trying to scamper off the platform.

  But just as she was about to impale the journalist, the overhead lights all clacked off, leaving only the eerie cerulean glow of the fish tanks.

  Over the loudspeakers, a recording of a blue whale singing began to play—several piercing high squeaks punctuated by clicks, and then a lower tone. An ethereal and beautiful symphony of the deep.

  “Aether Sibelius!”

  From the shadows, a figure emerged, bathed in the shimmering light from the tanks. Columbia immediately recognized the monochrome costume—the armor plating, the combat boots, the helmet with the sharp tusks. In her crazed state, Columbia briefly thought that Sedna had returned from the underworld, crawled out of the depths to seek her vengeance.

  But then she realized that the voice and the steely cobalt irises that stared out from the cowl belonged to Sedna’s daughter, Cairn.

  “You.” In her tunnel vision, she didn’t even notice Quinn scampering away down the ramp. “This was all you?”

  “Aether Sibelius,” Cairn repeated. “I accuse you of murder in the first degree—the murders of Tane Makoa, Leopold Sibelius, Ra Al Dosari, Njörun Rasmusson, Talia Themis …” Cairn stopped ten paces from Columbia, backlit dramatically by a tank full of pulsating jellyfish. “… and Ahna ‘Sedna’ Delacroix. How do you plead?”

  “You’ve stopped nothing—only delayed the inevitable,” Columbia seethed. “I’ll just vanish off to a far corner of the earth, bide my time as the world forgets, and come back with a new identity, a new mask, a new face. I could destabilize this broken world until the people cry out for the hero they needed in the first place.”

  Cairn shook her head. “You know I can’t let you leave here alive.”

  Columbia cackled. “Have you forgotten who I am, little minnow?” She circled her prey, dragging the dip of her saber along the concrete floor. “I could slit your throat in one swing, and in the blink of an eye, be sipping a mai tai on a beach in the Canary Islands before you were done bleeding out.”

  “Maybe I can’t command the oceans, or summon fire, or rend stone.” Cairn’s voice quavered. “Maybe I can’t weave dreams or teleport or see the threads of fate. But I will bring the full weight of my grief crashing down on you like a tidal wave and you will drown in it. You will suffer as my mother suffered, and I will stare into your eyes until the light in them fades to nothing.”

  Columbia spat at her opponent’s feet. “You are just a mortal.”

  “Maybe so.” Between the tusks of her mask, Cairn’s mouth formed a vicious smile. “But for the next twenty-four hours, so are you.”

  Alarm bells sounded in Columbia’s mind, and she reached out to use her gift. Cairn must surely be bluffing, and she would teach the petulant child not to lie by crossing the space between them and embedding her sword in the girl’s brain.

  But then Columbia felt that familiar soul-dulling heaviness of her father’s Tacitus serum, running through her veins like mercury, a sensation she hadn’t experienced in the nineteen years since she’d finally escaped the doctor’s clutches. When she attempted to teleport, nothing happened. Not the first time, not the tenth. Every time she tried, it was like a flint casting sparks, but the flame refused to catch.

  Cairn nodded to the empty water bottle on the table next to the interview chair. “You must have been really thirsty under all those hot stage lights.”

  Columbia lost it. With a rage-fueled howl, she lunged across the space between them, raised her saber, and swung the blade for Cairn’s exposed neck.

  Red Tide

  Cairn watched the gleaming blade arc around on a fatal trajectory intended to separate her head from her shoulders. Columbia’s eyes blazed triumphantly behind the eyeholes in her helmet.

  At the last minute, Cairn thrust her arm up to intercept the blow, even as Columbia’s muscles tensed, ready to give the extra oomph necessary to slice right through her prey’s armor plating and into the flesh and bone beneath.

  But when the edge of the saber struck Cairn’s wrist, the unthinkable happened:

  The blade shattered into a thousand pieces.

  For a moment, Columbia just stared dumbfounded at the now useless hilt in her hand and the jagged nub of a blade that remained. The rest lay in a trail of debris across the floor between them.

  Cairn smiled and reminded herself to buy Vulcan an expensive dinner if she survived the night. Thirty minutes earlier, disguised as a production assistant, the forge god had replaced Columbia’s blade with a replica he’d crafted, identical to the original to the naked eye. But under the surface, the new saber had been made of a special alloy-bonded ceramic that would harmlessly explode under stress.

  Still, Columbia didn’t know that. Beneath the nose guard of her helmet, her mouth attempted to form words but nothing came out.

  “When you called me a mortal, you were only half right,” Cairn said. “I’m a demigod.”

  Without warning, Cairn struck upward in a vicious undercut. Her fist connected with Columbia’s chin where it was exposed at the bottom of her helmet, and the goddess went reeling back across the floor.

  Before the fight, Vulcan had made some upgrades to Sedna’s suit. Among them: assisted-motion technology that would amplify the brute force of Cairn’s strikes. Even through armor, Columbia would feel the wrath of each impact.

  Cairn darted forward, hoping to capitalize on the moment while Columbia was stunned, but her foe remained on her feet and recovered quickly. As Cairn charged, Columbia sidestepped, seized her by the shoulders, and used her own momentum against her. Cairn slammed face-first into a tank full of seahorses.

  In the aquarium glass, Cairn saw the reflection of crimson armor looming behind her. She dodged left just as Columbia’s fist slammed into the tank. Cracks spiderwebbed through the glass, and the seahorses scattered, taking refuge in the coral reef.

  Cairn spun just as a second punch struck the glass, then ducked to avoid a third. She delivered a cross of her own to Columbia’s lower torso, where the armor was thinner to allow movement.

  Columbia retaliated with a left-right-left combination of body shots, leaving Cairn temporarily breathless. In her sparring sessions with Themis, she had grown somewhat used to getting punched, but now, feeling the full malice of somebody who intended her grievous bodily harm, she became aware of just how much her mentor had been holding back.

  Cairn tried to escape from her vulnerable position, trapped against an aquarium of pulsating jellyfish, but Columbia wrapped her neck in a chokehold and slammed her back up against the glass. As Cairn felt the gauntlets closing around her throat, she raised her foot and drove it down on Columbia’s knee.

  Columbia roared in pain and backed up enough for Cairn to kick her in the s
tomach, sending her tumbling back toward the ramps that spiraled around the giant ocean tank.

  Sensing an opening while Columbia was doubled over, Cairn rushed forward. If she could just pry the helmet from her foe’s head, then she might have a shot at incapacitating her.

  But it was in her haste when she made her fatal mistake.

  Just as she got within an arm’s reach of Columbia, the goddess recovered and grabbed Cairn around the waist. Before Cairn knew what was happening, she felt her feet leave the ground as Columbia lifted her with more strength than seemed possible for someone of such a lithe frame.

  Then Columbia brought Cairn crashing back-first down on the ramp.

  All the air left Cairn’s lungs. She felt ribs break inside of her, daggers of pain needling her insides, and then the explosion of light as her head snapped back and hit the floor.

  As she lay on her back like a beached turtle, helplessly concussed, she vaguely felt herself being dragged by her feet down the ramp.

  When they reached the edge, Columbia picked her up again. Cairn flailed as she looked over the edge and realized what was about to happen.

  “When you get to hell, say hi to Sedna for me,” Columbia said.

  Then, with a victorious scream, she heaved Cairn over the edge. Cairn landed on the giant whale skeleton that was suspended in the air by a series of wires, before rolling off and dropping limply into the water of the penguin enclosure twenty feet below.

  Cairn didn’t resurface.

  With her enemy vanquished, Columbia used the comm system in her helmet to call in a favor. She was always ten steps ahead, and that meant having contingencies in place, escape routes for emergencies like this.

  Columbia ascended the ramp to the fourth floor, where a railing encircled the open top of the giant tank. Over the muffled cacophony of sirens outside, she could just make out an uplifting sound somewhere in the distance: the whirring blades of an approaching helicopter. Soon, she’d be boarding a one-way ticket out of this dirty, helpless city. All she needed to do was find sanctuary for the night until the serum finally wore off—then she could teleport anywhere she liked and formulate her next move, while the search for her cooled off.