“Maybe Armo’s right,” Shade admitted, her voice sounding like she felt: defeated. “If we play by some set of rules we don’t even understand or know, we’ll lose going up against assholes who know exactly what they want.”
Cruz started to speak but was ignored.
“I thought we were supposed to be the good guys,” Dekka said. “What the hell is the point if we’re as ruthless as they are? If we turn into them, how is that a win?”
Shade shook that off impatiently. “We need to cut out the false equivalence here. We aren’t looking to hurt people. We aren’t looking to enslave people. We’re trying to stop all of that.”
Cruz tried to speak again, but again was overridden, this time by Armo. “Hey, it’s not like we’re giving up. We lost a round, just a round. Like Malik said. Round One, ding-ding-ding.”
Cruz held up a hand and was ignored again, then said, “Ahem. Excuse me! If I could maybe say a word or two?”
“What?” Shade snapped.
“We’re all here, all six of us, and yet I hear footsteps upstairs,” Cruz said.
That stopped conversation dead. Shade was already morphing. But then someone appeared, walking down the stairs.
“Who the hell are you?” Dekka demanded. “You’ve got like three seconds.”
“We’ve met,” the girl said. “My name is Simone. Simone Markovic. Sometimes I’m blue.”
“How did you get in here?”
Simone raised an eyebrow. “I fly, remember? I followed you and came in through a bedroom window. And I’m not here looking for a fight.”
“Well, what do you think, Shade?” Dekka snarked, some of her anger coming back. “Should we just go ahead and kill her? You want me to shred her, or do you want to do it yourself?”
“Simone?” Malik stood and held out his hand. “We spoke briefly . . .”
“You mean you distracted me so Shade could throw a blanket over my father.”
Malik tilted his head in acknowledgment. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
Simone, cautious, edged past the glowering Dekka and the bemused Armo and sat stiff and rigid. Cruz sat beside her, signaling her own choice to listen rather than attack.
“Are you here to beg for your father’s life?” Shade asked.
“I guess in a way I am,” Simone said. And with that the temperature in the room dropped a few degrees. There was a collective sigh.
“Understandable,” Dekka allowed. “He is your father.”
“Look, don’t misunderstand,” Simone said, holding both hands palm out as if ready to push away any misconceptions. “I know my father. He’s power hungry, a control freak, and really doesn’t have much idea of right or wrong.”
Shade had the impression that Dekka was holding herself back from saying something like, Hmmm, now who does that remind me of? Which, Shade had to admit, would be fair.
“So, what is it you want?” Shade demanded.
“He needs to be stopped,” Simone said. “But he’s still my dad . . .”
“You want us to stop him, but not hurt him?” Cruz asked.
Simone sighed and hung her head. “Look, I’m new to this, all right? Yesterday I was being gunned down in a field. Then I could fly. Then my father turned into a cloud of bugs. Now I’m sitting here talking to the Rockborn Gang. I just walked into a room full of people who could kill me.”
“How do we know you’re not a spy for your father?” Shade demanded.
“Because I’m here to help you stop him. He has to be stopped. He can’t . . .” She looked down. “I saw what he did to that policeman.”
“Francis and I saw what he did to some other guys, too,” Dekka said. “I’ve seen some very bad things. I’ve seen children burning. And this was worse. Your father is sending people into unending pain and horror. He’s condemning people to a living hell.”
“You have some brilliant idea for how to stop your father without killing him?” Shade asked.
Simone met her eye coolly, not seeming as overawed as Shade had hoped. “You need to go at him when he’s off guard. Find a way to . . .” She sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe some nonfatal bug spray? Then take him to a cell. A jail. Somewhere he can be held safely until this is all over.”
Shade was ready with a mocking rejoinder, but Malik held up a hand, stopping her. “Simone, there is no ‘all over.’ This isn’t a phase. Or even a FAYZ, F-A-Y-Z: this is life now.”
Simone’s eyes widened as she took that in. “I don’t . . . how would you know that?”
Patiently, like he was giving bad news to a grieving mother, Malik explained. “There are tons of the rock. Each ton is thirty-two thousand one-ounce doses. Say that there is a total of just one ton, just to simplify. Say that governments around the world have control of two-thirds of that, okay? That means there are still more than ten thousand doses of the rock out in the world somewhere. That means a possible ten thousand random people who can become Rockborn. Just one, Justin DeVeere, so-called Knightmare, destroyed a passenger jet, brought down the Golden Gate Bridge, and wiped out a famous lighthouse—and guess what? He’s still out there. It only took one Dillon Poe to nearly destroy an entire city. And if he’d been a bit smarter, he might have literally taken over the country. That’s reality now.”
Dekka decided this would be a good time to sit again, so Shade did as well, signaling the end of their emotional back-and-forth. For now.
“The point is, just a handful of Rockborn, people no worse than we’ve already seen, could do as much damage to civilization as nuclear war.” Malik let that sink in. “And that’s assuming the government—anyone’s government—doesn’t start up another Ranch and start creating their own superpowered soldiers.”
“So . . . so what’s your big plan?” Simone asked.
“We don’t have one,” Malik said softly.
“Whac-a-Mole,” Shade said. “Bad guy causes trouble; we take him down.”
Simone said, “It took the six of you to not quite stop Knightmare, and not really stop Napalm, and not stop that starfish kid, who I guess is dead now, but you didn’t kill him. The six of you barely stopped Dillon Poe, and you had nothing when it came to dealing with my father.”
Dekka nodded. Shade frowned and nodded, too. Then the two of them exchanged a confused look.
“She’s right,” Shade acknowledged. “We don’t have a plan. All we have is Whac-a-Mole. And that is a losing strategy in the end.”
“So your enemies are every clown with a piece of the rock, plus possibly every government on earth?” Simone looked around and saw blank faces.
“Parts of the government, not all of it,” Shade said, then added, “But you’re right: too many of them, not enough of us.”
“Right,” Simone said. “So your plan is to play Whac-a-Mole until sooner or later you’re all dead. And then the world belongs to the bad guys.”
Cruz interjected, “We’re not the only so-called good guys.”
“Exactly,” Simone said. “You need more people. You need more power. And you need to stand for something more than just killing bad guys.”
“More people?” Armo guffawed. “Who’d be dumb enough to join us?”
“Well . . . ,” Simone said. “For a start, me.”
CHAPTER 20
The Brownstone Declaration
We, the Rockborn Gang, state the following principles:
Our goals are peace and freedom for all people, human or human-mutant.
We value human life and will always do everything in our power to avoid causing the death of any human, including human-mutants.
We believe in the rule of law and will work with any legitimate law enforcement agency committed to our goals of peace and freedom.
We will oppose any human-mutant who uses their power to dominate, control, intimidate, or kill innocent people.
We will also oppose any government or part of government that seeks to use the rock to dominate, control, intimidate, or kill innocent people.
&nbs
p; Cruz made copies and handed them around.
“You’re like our very own Thomas Jefferson,” Dekka said, smiling wearily at Cruz.
“Mmmm, shouldn’t it be ‘We will oppose any mutant who uses his or her power,’ instead of ‘their?’” Shade asked. Then, spotting Cruz’s raised eyebrow, she said, “Oh. Okay, gender neutral it is.”
They debated language back and forth, but Cruz had summarized their feelings pretty well in the document.
Cruz produced the original and laid it on the coffee table. She placed a fine-point Sharpie beside it. “Sadly we don’t have parchment or quill pens.”
Dekka turned to Francis. “Francis, you haven’t said a word.”
Francis shrugged. “I figured I’m the youngest . . .”
Dekka smiled. “How old do you think I was when the FAYZ happened? How old do you think Sam Temple was? Any of us?”
“Okay, well, yeah,” Francis said. “But what about what Simone was saying, that there aren’t enough of us. What do we do about that?”
Cruz nodded, retrieved the paper, and handwrote:
We welcome any Rockborn who agrees to live by our principles.
“Good amendment,” Malik said. “But it will be hard to control, hard to manage. What if a dozen Rockborn show up? We’re not going to know them. We’re not going to know if we can trust them.”
“We can have the NYPD at least run background checks, right? The mayor wants our help,” Shade said.
“Okay, someone sign,” Dekka said impatiently.
Shade said, “You sign first, Dekka. Just because I disagree with some of your decisions . . . Look, you’re the one person here who everyone trusts.”
“Not to stick my nose in here,” Cruz said. “But we’ll need someone to just, manage, you know? Like, nonmutant, not someone who has to fight. The six of us . . . seven, I guess now . . . we’re the front line, but someone’s got to organize stuff. We’re going to need people we can trust who won’t be on the front line.”
“People we can trust?” Shade frowned. “Trust to be calmly dealing with daily chores while everything’s going to hell?”
Dekka said, “As it happens, I decided that last night, and I have an idea.”
With that cryptic remark, Dekka took the pen, held the document flat, and in a bold hand wrote Dekka Talent and the date.
One by one, they signed. Shade Darby. Cruz. Malik Tenerife. Aristotle Adamo and in parentheses Armo. Francis Specter. Simone Markovic.
Dekka handed the signed declaration back to Cruz. “There you go, Ms. Jefferson. Time to put it up online and show it to the world.”
Two minutes later what was to be known as the Brownstone Declaration hit Facebook.
“Great, now what?” Armo said.
“Now,” Dekka said, looking at Simone. “We figure out how to take down the bug man. Without killing him. And I make a phone call to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Because somehow that’s my life now.”
From the Purple Moleskine
SOME DAY IN the future, if there is a future, I am going to need a long period of serious therapy. We have all of us become almost casual about things and events that could destroy our minds if we stopped long enough to think about them. Dekka talked about it a little, the lasting effects, the trauma, and Dekka knows about it in ways I’m just coming to understand.
And it’s not just the violence and the fear; the sheer weirdness makes you doubt everything. Malik and Francis pop into and back out of some impossible-to-imagine extra dimension. There’s a supervillain made out of insects that carry hyped-up, accelerated versions of every disease on this planet. I saw Williams. Dekka and Francis saw the poor men at the Pine Barrens. Speaking of which, the US government is now deliberately murdering people. And Twitter says Tom Peaks blew his own brains out in a sporting-goods store. And some old man with Alzheimer’s tore up a drugstore after turning into a massive beast. And, and, and, and, and, and each new “and” is like a nail being hammered into my brain, and I’m thinking, huh, I don’t feel it yet. But I know that you cannot keep doing this to yourself, living this way, and not pay a terrible price for it.
How many FAYZ survivors ended up drug-addicted, drunk, or ended their pain through suicide? A lot. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’ll be spared.
There’s no point mourning all we’ve lost. Our families. Friends. Familiar places that were ours. A world we mostly sort of understood. If I think about all that’s gone now I’ll just start crying. Even the simple belief that we are real, that we are the creations of a loving God or the results of billions of years of evolution, is lost. We’re someone’s game. Someone’s entertainment. We’ve lost everything. Everything except each other.
We all signed that Brownstone Declaration. My prose was not as elegant as Mr. Jefferson’s; sorry, I didn’t have a lot of time. The names on that sheet of paper, those people, are all I have now.
It’s beginning to dawn on regular people, too, that we are never, ever going to be able to find our way back to where we were. That world is gone. I don’t think I ever spent five minutes thinking about the concept of civilization before; it was just a word in a textbook. But that’s what is falling apart around us now: civilization. The whole network of systems that defined our world is coming down as we lurch uncontrollably toward some future dystopia.
There’s an old song I stumbled across on YouTube. I’m probably misquoting the lyrics, but it was something about how you don’t know what you have till it’s gone.
Civilization? I’m sorry I never paid attention to you. If I had, I’d probably have had a bunch of things to criticize. But now I’ve caught a glimpse of the future and it’s not good, Civilization. It’s not as good as what we had with you. Sorry it took your death for me to see that.
CHAPTER 21
The Desk Clerk
LATER HE WOULD learn just how it had happened. He would learn that Dekka had placed a call to the general in command of the deadliest military force in the world, reminding him that he had pledged his full support.
The general had then called the general in charge of US Southern Command in Mayport, Florida, who in turn called the US embassy in Tegucigalpa. Half an hour later a helicopter was en route from Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, to the country’s third-largest city, La Ceiba, a lovely resort town.
But he would learn all of that later. The eighteen-year-old had a pleasant brown face and neatly trimmed black hair, and dark eyes that seemed so much older than the rest of his face. He was the first to see three Honduran National Police vehicles, extended-cab Toyota pickups painted white and blue, skidding to a dramatic stop in the parking lot of the Quinta Real Hotel and Convention Center.
But this was not necessarily alarming. The National Police loved drama, and twice in the young man’s time working as a front desk clerk at the Quinta Real, police had come swooping in to make an arrest. So the desk clerk put on his pleasant talking-to-customers expression as five heavily armed men came stomping up to the front desk.
“Can I help you?”
They asked him to show his ID, so he did, frowning in puzzlement and beginning to worry.
“You are to come with us.”
“What? Why? Am I under arrest?”
“The Americans want you.”
He was not allowed to pack, just make a quick phone call to his mother to let her know that he would be out of town for a while. Then a helicopter landed right on the beach and took him on the hour-long flight to the airport, where he was hustled aboard a US Department of Defense Gulfstream C-37A.
Just under nine hours after he’d seen the first National Police vehicle, a confused, worried, bleary ex–desk clerk climbed down the airplane stairs at Teterboro and was hustled by two New Jersey state troopers to a waiting SUV.
An airman opened the door of the SUV and he climbed in.
“Well, hello there, Edilio.”
A slow smile spread across Edilio’s face. “Dekka,” he said. “I thought it might be you behind
this.”
They hugged awkwardly but with deep affection.
“I’m sorry to do this to you, Edilio,” Dekka said as the SUV sped back toward Manhattan. “But I—we—needed someone we could trust.”
“Things must be bad,” Edilio said, half joking. Then, “You look good, Dekka.”
“Oh, so sad to see you’ve taken up lying. You used to be so honest.”
Edilio laughed. “Seriously. Good to see you, Big D.” He reached for and took her hand, and neither of them broke contact for many miles.
“You may not feel that way once you know why I’ve dragged you here.” She gave him a rundown of the situation, gratified that Edilio didn’t interrupt or protest. He just sat quietly absorbing facts, nodding, occasionally asking for some small clarification.
The four years they’d been in different worlds now seemed no more substantial than a quickly forgotten dream. Edilio had never been deported, never worked as a desk clerk; that was someone else. He was not Edilio of the Quinta Real, he was Edilio of Perdido Beach. Edilio of the FAYZ. He felt it as a physical weight settling on his shoulders, a weight made of responsibility, fear, regret, and determination. An elastic band of tension wrapped around his chest, crushing the air from his lungs, making his heart labor for each leaden beat. Even his vision changed, becoming predatory, eyes searching for threats, ready to trip the alarm that would dump the oh-so-familiar shot of adrenaline into his arteries.
Edilio of the FAYZ.
“So,” he said, forcing an upbeat tone. “You want me to help organize a group of superpowered vigilantes. Is that pretty much it?”
“Pretty much. It’s not the kind of job where I can just call a temp service or advertise on Craigslist, you know?”
“And this group of superpowered vigilantes includes a supersmart but ruthless girl who can outrun a bullet, an equally smart guy who isn’t entirely real and can project excruciating pain, a big guy who can turn into a sort of polar bear, a trans girl who can change her appearance at will, and a girl who can travel back and forth into some n-dimensional space.”
Hero Page 15
