#proximas

I hear the doorbell ring. It doesn't matter. 

“911, what’s the nature of your emergency?”

“Uh, there’s a guy outside. With a gun. Outside my family’s apartment. I’m thirteen and my family isn’t here and this guy is trying to kill me.”

“What’s your address?”

I tell them, quickly. I add, “He’s an adult, a white guy with brown hair, medium height. Looks like 30-ish maybe. He’s dressed like a UPS delivery man.” I want to make sure they know it’s a white guy so my uncle doesn’t get beaten or shot if he comes home before the police get here. Rodney King was only three years ago.

“I’m dispatching officers to your location now. Stay on the phone with me.”

“Okay, how long until they arrive?”

“They’ll be there within ten minutes.”

That doesn’t mean much to me. Ten minutes can hold an infinite number of five-minuteses. “My name’s Alannah Foster,” I tell them. “My mom and my uncle are both doctors. Cynthia Foster and Daniel Foster.” I’m thinking that if I can’t hold this guy off long enough, the police need to know who to tell about what happened.

The gunman shoots the lock off the door and kicks the door open.  I can see him from where I'm standing with the telephone. I could drop to the floor to get out of the line of fire; I’m standing in front of a counter. But to get out safely, I’d have to be able to crawl to the door that goes out to the hallway, and I’d have to do it so fast that he can’t shoot me when I’m not behind the counter anymore, and I’d have to do it before he can get here.

That’s not gonna happen. I don’t go to a superhero academy like my uncle did when he was my age, and I know I’m no action hero from a movie. There isn’t any way forward where I’m getting out of this kitchen before he shoots me.

He aims the gun at me. So I jump back five minutes ago.  I don't have as much runway to work with this time.  I jump into the middle of the conversation with Emergency Services, and pick up with barely a stumble-- I'm used to this.  “--adult,” I say. “White guy, brown hair, medium height, UPS uniform.” He's been ringing the doorbell for half a minutes.  In five minutes he'll get the door open and he'll come after me.

My uncle Dan’s a healer. He could maybe save my life if this guy shoots me in the chest – but not in the face or the head.  My mom's just a scientist.  She doesn’t have any powers. And they're both out for the day, Mom at a conference, Dan with his teammates.  There's just me, 13-year-old Alannah, and there's no one I can call that could get here faster than 911 could.

I drop the phone before the 911 dispatcher finishes telling me she’s dispatching officers, and run for the fire escape.  The window’s old wood, painted many times, and it jams as I try to lift it.  I hear him shoot off the lock.

I jump back five minutes ago.  This time as I get off the phone with 911, I don't waste time trying to force the window open.  Instead I pick up one of the heavy iron bookends holding my collection of computer books on my desk, and use it to smash the window.  I'm small enough that I can squeeze through without getting cut up too badly.

There’s a fire escape outside our apartment building. I start down it carefully, not wanting to move too fast and fall.  But I hear him shoot the lock, I hear him head for my bedroom, and as I see him up above me pulling the window open and coming out onto the fire escape with his gun, I jump five minutes ago, to the point where I was smashing the window. This time I run down the fire escape as fast as I can go, trusting that if I fall, I'll just jump five minutes ago and be more careful.

There’s an alley below me, and it doesn’t smell great – garbage pickup won’t be until day after tomorrow. I jump off from near the bottom, and race around the corner, out of the alley and onto the street.  He's probably following me.  No reason to think he's not.  Quickly I crawl under one of the cars parked on our street.  With luck, he won't see me.

I can see his feet.  I can see him looking for me.  It takes longer than five minutes, which makes me nervous.  And then he sees me.  I scream as he kneels down.  "There you are, you little bitch," he says, aiming the gun.

Five minutes ago I'm still under the car and he's out there, looking for me.  I roll out from under the car and start to run.

Behind me he fires. The bullet slams into my back, and then I'm half a minute ago-- I can't jump my full five minutes until I've returned to my origin time.  Half a minute is long enough to throw myself to my stomach as the bullet whizzes over my head, to roll behind a parked car, trembling.  He starts to come around the car.  I circle, keeping the car between him and me.

He's faster than me, and he runs at me, the gun out.  At that range he can't miss.  The bullet is a searing pain in my chest, and then it's five seconds ago, and I'm dodging, now that he's already committed to the shot.  It hits my arm.  Not good enough.  I jump again, ten seconds.  This time I dodge too soon, and he’s able to adjust his aim. It hits me in the chest again. Seven seconds.  Just long enough that I can get all the way out of the way, just short enough that he can't change where he's aiming. 

I drag myself under a car again.  I wait until he ducks down to shoot me, and jump ten seconds, giving me time to position myself just where his head will be.  As his head lowers again, I kick it with all the strength in my body.

He staggers backward, and I pull myself out from under the car, rolling to my feet and running down the street.  We live in a residential neighborhood in Brooklyn, one that’s just expensive enough that everyone here works, so there’s no one on the street in the middle of the day. With gunshots going off, I don’t expect that to last. But I’m not expecting anyone to come save me, either.

By the time he recovers, I've got a nice comfortable margin, a minute or two.  When he shoots me again, I use my margin to jump back, to know when he's going to shoot and duck it again.

"Goddamn, you fucking proxy bitch!  Fucking stay still!"  he screams, proving my theory that this is about me being a Proxima, and shoots at me again.  He's got good aim; he hits again.  I'm so tired of jumping, so tired of the pain of bullets hitting and the fear that I won't be able to evade the next time.  I want so badly to stop... but I don’t want to die. So I jump again, and dodge again, and this time I make it to the cover of a tree before he can shoot me again.

I'm so out of breath. My knees and elbows are all scraped up from hitting the ground repeatedly.  And I'm drained from so many time jumps.  I've never done so many in a row.  There's no way I can keep this up.  The tree isn't big enough to shield me if I run now, not big enough to shield when he reaches me.  I'm boxed in.

And then the cops pull up.

He runs.  They tell him to halt and drop his weapon; when he keeps running, they shoot him.  The bullets tear into him, leaving him on the ground covered with blood, and he doesn't jump five minutes ago.  He stays dead.

***

They call me the hero kid, the resourceful little girl who stayed ahead of a hardened killer for fifteen minutes, long enough for the police to come.  They tell me it wasn't about me at all; he was a small-time hit man, probably hired by someone to take out me out to scare my mother off her pro-Proxima activism.  They don’t mention my uncle at all, so I guess secret identities are good for something after all.

My mom comes from her conference, and hugs me, and my uncle comes from where he's hanging out with his teammates, and he tells me how great I was, and how much control I've got over my powers (he says that part privately where no one can hear.)  I appear in the newspaper in the local news section.  Fifteen minutes of fame, much better than five minutes of fear.

But I want to take self-defense classes, and I want to enter the Peace Force’s superhero academy like my uncle did, and learn what superheroes know about using their powers to survive.  Because someday five minutes might not be long enough to get away.

---------------------------------------------

Takes place in the same universe as “The Cold At The Heart Of The Light”, focusing on some of the minor characters.

She lays on the bed in her cell, because hiding under the bed doesn’t help. If she’s laying on the bed when the guards want to rape her, they’ll do it, and if she’s hiding under the bed, they’ll drag her out, beat her, and then do it. There’s no point to it. No point to trying to protect herself. No point in trying to protect anyone else.

Christmas is coming, but Meg strongly suspects she won’t live long enough to see it. Not like it matters. She remembers her last Christmas with David, the two of them in the tiny apartment on the 11th floor, a living tree that was heavy as fuck to carry but she’d gotten it up there with its pot and its soil, and she’d put it in the window so it would get sunshine, which meant they didn’t get any in the small common room because the tree was blocking it. David had experimented with chemical lights, blues and reds and greens and whites that ran on oxygen, slowly, and they’d covered the entire apartment with them, lights around every window they could see and lights around every door and lights criss-crossing the ceiling. She’d taken the drugs he was cooking up in order to test them, and as soon as she’d determined that they wouldn’t poison anyone, she’d let herself experience the high, giggling like the teenager she’d been as she lay back on the floor and pretended the ceiling lights were stars, making up fake constellations like The Butthole and Zeus’ Balls. All that December, she’d made cookies, pizzelle and horn cookies and Christmas-shaped iced sugar cookies and traditional New York black and white cookies, and eaten most of them because David had had a chronic low appetite and not much taste for sugar anyway. And then on Christmas she’d given him a Nintendo and a couple of games, and he’d given her a dozen CDs and Stuffy, a stuffed white and gray cat.

In August of the following year, the Special Service killed David, in his bedroom, unarmed. His blood ended up all over Stuffy. Meg never washed it out. His DNA embedded in her plush fur would comfort Meg when she cuddled Stuffy at night; it was a memorial no ordinary human would respond to, except perhaps in the abstract, but Meg could feel David’s DNA in the splatters of his blood. Slowly decaying – there wasn’t a lot of DNA in blood in the first place, since red blood cells don’t have nuclei, and it doesn’t last forever. But it was still there, the last time she saw Stuffy. In the townhome she shared with Tara, in her bedroom.  

Is Tara still there? Is any of her stuff still there? It’s December. She was kidnapped in April. The billing service would probably have continued to pay the rent, but if Tara had moved out, Meg’s checks wouldn’t be enough to keep the lease.

Does it matter? Does any of it matter? She’s never getting out of here alive, is she? She’ll never see Stuffy or any of her other things or Tara or the apartment again.

She wants to cry, but she can’t. There’s no safety here, nowhere they can’t see her.

Four diseases, two viruses and two deadly bacteria, tailored to strike only Proximas. They’ll breed in the presence of catalysine, or they’ll look for the Proxima gene and insert themselves into the DNA there, breaking it in a way that will slowly poison them. They gave her no choice, but that’s a lie, there are always choices. She could have found a way to kill herself. She could have forced them to trigger the bomb around her neck. She could have waited until they had her in the sealed room, with the collar off, tasked with healing some important old man… and she could have killed whichever man she was supposed to fix that day, and forced her captors to shoot her.

But Meg wants to live. She did something terrible because she wanted to live, and she didn’t want to be tortured. She made those diseases. They gave her no freedom to do anything but study, genetics and biology and chemistry, on top of her medical school training and the training David used to give her in neurobiochemistry, and she used that knowledge to do what they asked. Because she knew they would check.

She remembers the blue homeless man vomiting, over and over, until he had no electrolytes left in his body and he died. The prostitute who could make a light show dance over her body, shaking and seizing until she was dead. The old man whose power mitochondria went into impossibly high gear, burning up all the phosphate and magnesium in his body to make too much ATP, and then his telekinetic power going out of control and tearing him apart. The homeless teenager crying as the poisons built up in his body. All her fault, and there will be thousands more, maybe millions, if her captors release the diseases they made her make into the population.

She hates herself, but she wants desperately to live, because she knows how to undo them all. She can immunize her people. She can. If she can get out of here alive. But the collar that suppresses her powers has a bomb in it. If she were to leave this place with it still around her neck… it would be the last thing she ever did.

There’s a click in the lock. Meg doesn’t look. She has no power over what’s going to happen, and if she turns her head to look, if she sits or stands up, if she visibly braces herself… then they’ll know she cares. They’ll know they’re hurting her, they’re frightening her. And she won’t give them the satisfaction… not until she can’t help herself, anyway. Without access to her powers, she only has a normal human ability to control herself.

“Get up,” a harsh female voice says.

Well. Small mercies. This isn’t going to be a rape, most likely. And they don’t torture her much anymore, not since she started cooperating. Torture doesn’t really work to get information – she knows that well, having tried it several times when she was a teen thug working for drug lords – but it works very well to terrorize people into doing as they’re told. But she’s been doing as she’s told. So it probably won’t be that.

It could be the execution she’s been expecting, but even if it is, there’s nothing she can do about it.

Meg gets up. Slowly, but not so slowly that the guard will decide she’s being insolent and shock her. The collar suppresses her powers, and it keeps her from escaping because of the bomb, but it’s also got electroshock capabilities, that all the guards can trigger by remote any time they want to. Electroshock’s how they captured her the first time – they went after her with the Special Service, the cops in hardsuits that her powers can’t get through, and the Special Service shocked her over and over, until her powers couldn’t handle keeping her conscious, and then while she was unconscious they put the collar on her neck. Since then, they’ve been able to shock her any time they want to, and they use it, frequently. Especially when they think she’s not being deferential enough.

She’s a former street kid and assassin for gangsters. She was living on her own since the age of 17. She went to superhero school with people who hated her, who’d fought her – and lost—when she was a supervillain. And she’s from Brooklyn. None of this lends itself well to respecting anyone’s authority or being deferential; she gave that up when she was thirteen and traded in a life as a Catholic school girl for a life in the criminal underworld. So when she first got to Sonnebend, they shocked her a lot.

She’s learned, though. Meg keeps her hate and her rage and her desire to commit bloody murder out of her eyes, out of her body language. If she ever has the chance, everyone who works here will die… but she’ll never have the chance, and she knows it.

The guard’s a black woman, head shaved, muscular. What progress America has made, Meg thinks bitterly. Now you can be a government thug and torturer even if you’re female and black! The guard motions her out the door, where there’s a second guard, this one a generic bland-looking dark-haired white man like practically every other guard in this place. “Keep moving,” the black woman says.

“Where are you taking me?” Meg asks. “What’s going on?”

“Keep your mouth shut,” the black woman says, but doesn’t shock her.

They’re taking her to her execution. She’s sure of it. Two guards usually escort her when she is taken anywhere, but she doesn’t recognize either of these two, and they’re not walking her in the right direction to be going either to the labs or the chamber with the one-way glass where she heals powerful old men, collar off but guns trained on her outside the chamber where she can’t see.

For a moment, Meg considers the possibility of killing these two guards. Even without her powers, she can fight; the absurd things she can do when she has her powers, the power-jumps, extending her arms, making tentacles, all that kind of thing… those are icing on the cake. All she needed to do to learn martial arts at master level was to find a dojo where the sensei had advanced skills and the urethane on the wooden floor had worn away enough that she could reach into her sensei with her powers and copy what he was doing down to the level of specific nerves firing and muscles contracting, and now she’s an expert. She could, maybe, grab the white guy, use judo to throw him into the black woman, then kick both of them in the jaw hard enough to snap their necks.

But what good would it do? She sees no evidence that they’re carrying keys that could unlock the collar; usually only a couple of specific people carry those keys, which have a distinctive appearance and are too large to hide in a pocket, and they wait for her in the chamber rather than walking around the base with them. She can’t get out, and any one of the guards can trigger the electroshock remotely, without even being near her, so she can’t escape. And if escape isn’t possible, what’s the point to killing these guys? It might make her feel better, for a few moments, but their friends will blow up her head, so it won’t help.

So she walks, with the white guy in front and the black woman behind, down a corridor she’s never traveled before. And probably never will again.

There’s a checkpoint, right before a door outside. The guard at the checkpoint looks up. “Where’s she going?”

“Where you think?” the black woman says, and hands him a sheaf of paper.

The checkpoint guy – another generic white dude, with sandy blond hair instead of black – looks at the papers, and then chuckles. “So I guess Williams and Becker aren’t getting a piece tonight, huh,” he says, and confirms what Meg suspects. Those are her execution papers. The guards who rape her nearly every night aren’t going to have the chance to tonight, because she’ll be dead.

Once again she considers killing them all. It won’t save her life, but at least it’ll take down a few of them with her. Once again she lets it go. Maybe, if she has a chance while she’s outside, since it looks like they’re taking her outside to do it. But she wants to see the sun again. If they’re going to bring her outside to kill her… then at least she won’t die in this nightmare building, where she hasn’t seen so much as a window since she was captured.

Is there snow outside? She doesn’t even know where Sonnebend is; no one’s ever told her what state they’re in, and with no windows, she can’t look at the sun and plants and try to guess. It could be Texas. It could be Florida. It’s probably not either since there aren’t enough guards with Latino names, but maybe it’s North Dakota. Maybe it’s Indiana. She has no way to tell.

The white guy with her chuckles, just a second later than you’d expect, like he’s not a native speaker and took a moment to parse what was just said. The black woman doesn’t. Stone-faced, she takes back the sheaf of papers. “Get moving,” she says to Meg, motioning her toward the door.

Outside, they’re behind the building. There’s a dumpster, and a loading dock, a short distance away. The black woman makes Meg walk in the opposite direction, along a wall with no windows or doors in it, nothing but unbroken beige brick. It’s cold; Meg’s breath makes clouds in the air. But there’s no snow. In the distance there’s grass and trees, but where they’re walking, there’s nothing but concrete. Meg stares hungrily at the grass and trees, at the sun in the sky, at the clouds overhead and in front of her mouth, as if she can make up for eight months of never seeing them by looking at them really hard, right now.

“Kneel down,” the black woman orders, and the tears Meg hasn’t shed in months well up. Not for herself. She has this coming. She may have tried to reform – first by being a superhero, then by becoming a doctor – but she’s always been a terrible person. She murdered her father, and then she became a murderer for hire, and then she’d helped David design drugs, and then she’d been a murderer again. She’d been a vicious jealous bitch around her first boyfriend, and had seduced her second, a man three times her age, just so she could take him away from her mentor. And then she’d gone to medical school, she’d tried to be a better person, but they’d kidnapped her and made her make diseases and because she was too weak to stand up to torture, many, so many, people will die. She’ll never have a chance to undo what she had done, to protect the Proximas of the US, or the world, against the engineered plagues she was terrorized into creating.

“Oh, you gonna cry now?” the black woman said.

“Fuck you,” Meg snarled through the tears. “I know you’re gonna kill me, so just do it.”

The woman sighed like she was at the end of her patience. “Kneel down, girl.”

“No. Shoot me standing up. I’m not gonna kneel to any of you anymore.”

“Have it your way,” the woman says, and points her gun at Meg.

It goes off, a deafening sound, but nothing that happens after that makes any sense. Meg sees her own body topple backward behind her, turning in time to see it fall, but she hasn’t been hit. There’s no pain. Is she a ghost? There’s her own bloody, headless corpse on the ground, and the black woman and the white man dragging the body off, but the black woman is also still here, tapping her foot.

“What—”

“Figure it out yet?” the black woman asks, and turns blue. The azurin mutation. In a small percentage of Proximas, melanin converts to azurin instead, and the person ends up blue. White people turn pale blue, with blue or green or purple hair, and black people turn deep blue, with blue eyes and blue hair. The buzzcut vanishes, replaced by a bright blue Afro that in shape and fluffiness looks like it came straight out of Cleopatra Jones. The woman’s face also changes, subtly, small aspects of eye shape and cheekbone placement altering, so she looks similar to the woman she was before, but not the same. Like sisters, or cousins. Except that one of them’s blue. Which means Proxima.

“You’re a Proxima?” Meg asks. She can’t quite believe this is really happening. She can still see the brown woman with the buzzcut and the dark-haired white man dragging her own corpse toward the corner of the building. Is this like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or something?

“Sure fucking am,” the blue woman says, and puts out her hand. “Shadow. Illusionist. And you’re Megamorph, the bio-controller.”

Meg has never heard her power referred to as bio-control, but it makes sense. Any organic tissue she’s touching, she can do nearly anything to, and any organic tissue she can reach through an organic channel, like a wooden floor or a shaggy wool carpet, it’s the same as if she’s touching it. She takes Shadow’s hand, tentatively. “Why… if you’re an illusionist, couldn’t you have told me what you were doing to begin with?” The tears are still in her eyes. Angrily, she wipes them away.

“Conserving power. I have to create the illusion of what they expect to be happening, and hide what we’re actually doing. The more you move around, the harder it is. Now kneel down. I was serious about that part.”

“Why?”

“Hard to rescue you if you’re missing a head,” Shadow says, and pulls off her belt something that looks almost, but not exactly, like the keys that unlock Meg’s collar.

“Those don’t look right. Are you sure they’ll work?” Meg hates that she sounds plaintive, almost whiny… but if Shadow’s here to rescue her, she really doesn’t want to get her head blown up on the verge of freedom.

“Tested them already. They’ve got some collared corpses in the pit around the corner.”

There’s a pit around the corner full of dead bodies. This doesn’t surprise Meg in any way – it makes perfect sense – but it horrifies her, hitting her in a nerve she’d have thought burnt out by all the horror she’s endured. Her knees go out from under her, which she manages to make look as if she’s kneeling like Shadow told her to, rather than that she’s half collapsing.

Shadow puts the key to the collar. There’s a clicking sound. Meg holds her breath despite herself.

And then the collar falls to the ground.

It works by magnetic induction, suppressing the part of her brain that controls her body’s production of catalysine, and suppressing the part that allows her to perceive and control her powers. Stopping the magnetic induction doesn’t instantly replenish her body’s catalysine, and without the catalysine, she doesn’t yet have any powers to perceive and control. So she doesn’t feel any different. “My powers will come back, right?” she asks, knowing it’s a stupid question – she knows how the collar works, she knows how Proxima powers work probably better than anyone. She knows they’ll come back. But at the moment, she feels painfully young, and not like an expert on anything. She wants Shadow to reassure her the way a mother might reassure a child.

Shadow nods, her expression gentle. “Of course they will,” she says. She reaches a hand down and helps Meg to her feet. “We need to get out of here.”

“Wait.” Meg takes a deep breath. She doesn’t want to admit to this, but she won’t let people die for her pride. “Do you know if… that pit, are there any of the victims there? The experimental subjects, of the bio-engineered diseases?”

“I figure that’s probably where they are, yeah,” Shadow says.

“I’m sorry, but… is there any way you can cover me to get in there? I… they made me make those diseases. I have to stop them, but I couldn’t keep samples. It’ll be a lot easier to inoculate people if I can get samples…”

Shadow grins. “Oh, yeah. We knew all about those diseases. That’s why the World Unity Collective decided to rescue you.”

World Unity Collective is Caesar Primus’ group, a supervillain gang dedicated to creating a world where the Proximas of the world unite and take over, which is supposed to bring about a utopia for everyone, Sapiens and Proxima alike. Meg thought it was a stupid idea when she first heard about it, training with Peace Force Tau, and she still thinks so. Proximas are different from Sapiens by exactly one gene, and there is absolutely no reason to think Proximas will treat the world any better than Sapiens have. But she doesn’t care anymore.

Over and over, in her prison, she called out in her mind, begging her mentor to hear her. Suri Chandrasekhar is the leader of the Peace Force, and an incredibly powerful telepath. Suri knew where Meg was going to medical school; if she was paying attention, if she cared, she would know Meg had been kidnapped, and with her powers she should have been able to find Meg… if she was looking. But she hadn’t. No rescue came from the Peace Force. And right now, Meg has reasons to hate Sapiens – reasons that are illogical, because there are billions of Sapiens and they cannot possibly all be responsible for the torments she’s suffered over the past eight months, but Meg’s reasons for hate are rarely all that logical anyway. If it’s Proxima supremacists who’ve rescued her, then yay for Proxima supremacy.

“I’ll ask you how you knew about the diseases later,” Meg says.

“Yeah. Let’s get this done quick.”

***

The pit’s covered with a tarp. As soon as she peels the tarp back, Meg has to shut off her sense of smell. She hasn’t eaten since the terrible cafeteria-grade scrambled eggs for breakfast, so there’s nothing in her stomach anymore – it’s all moved on to the intestines by now -- but if she had to smell this without her powers, she’d be puking up all of the nothing in her stomach over everything.

It’s not hard to find her diseases. There’s maybe twenty bodies in here, tangled together in a heap, most in a fairly advanced state of rot. All of them are infected. Or were, when they were alive. Apparently Sonnebend doesn’t kill lots and lots of people as a general rule. This isn’t a concentration camp; it’s a research facility, where part of the research is on how to kill people with diseases. And since the people had to be Proximas, that limited the supply; only one in ten thousand people has that one gene that differentiates Sapiens from Proximas. Can’t very well murder five thousand people in testing a disease if you have to screen fifty million to find them.

The viruses are easy. With the machinery of the cells stopped, they’re not replicating, but a lot of them are intact, easy to capture. The bacteria are harder. They’ve been dying since they killed their hosts. But there are a couple of subjects that still have live bacteria. Meg pulls them in and stores them in tiny nodules of fatty tissue in her breast, with no capillaries feeding them so they don’t have much chance to get out into her bloodstream. Not that it would matter; Meg’s powers automatically destroy any organic matter that would trigger an immune response. She can’t get sick. Even at Sonnebend, the fact that they removed her collar every few days so she could heal some politician or CEO or important donor meant that she couldn’t get sick; in the hour or so she had her powers, her body would destroy any potential source of infection. She’s going to have to be more careful to make sure her body doesn’t annihilate these infectious agents before she has a chance to engineer an inoculation or cure than she will to make sure they don’t actually infect her.

She climbs back out of the pit, with Shadow’s help. “I’m done. I’ve got everything I need.”

“Then let’s get the fuck out of here, okay?” Shadow says, and ten minutes later, they’re in a car parked outside the barbed wire fence, driving away.

“It’ll take them some time to figure out you’re not dead,” Shadow says, driving the car with a cigarette in her hand. “I took back the fake papers for your execution, so they’ll have a hard time figuring out who authorized it, or where I went, or who I even was. If they compare video feed of the outdoors to the indoors, they’ll see me and the fake guy I made walk back through the door but then never show up at the checkpoint right inside, and maybe that’ll give them a clue, but none of their video will have anything real.” She takes a deep drag from the cigarette. Meg wants to warn her about lung cancer and suggest she quit, but she looks up to Shadow too much to be her condescending prick doctor persona.

“What were you doing? Manipulating light?”

Shadow nods. “And sound, but fuck it’s hard. It’s so much easier for me if I just work on the brain. Altering myself and making another dude is almost the limit of what I can do with sound and light, whereas if I’m going in through the brain, I can make people see a full Hollywood spectacular. Aliens shooting laser guns all over the place. An army of Picts with bows and arrows. Whatever I want.”

“That’s really cool,” Meg says, somewhat awestruck. “Doesn’t that mean you really have two powers? Because a psionic illusion power and the ability to manipulate sound and light sounds like it’s two entirely different things.”

Shadow takes another drag on the cigarette. “Used to just be the psionic part. I got fixed up by a guy named Giovanni. Told him I wanted to be able to fool cameras. Closed-circuit cams were getting big around then. It was hard to pull a job when the security guys can see you on the cam, even if they can’t as soon as they get close enough to use their eyes.”

“Wait… this Giovanni guy can give people powers?”

“Yeah, though all he does is give Proximas new powers. He won’t give powers to a Sapien and he’s got some weird rule about what kind of powers he’ll give a Proxima, but what I wanted sounded to him like it’d work with what I already got. Gives me a motherfucking headache if I overuse it. I gonna need a whole fucking bottle of Tylenol tonight.” She laughs.

Meg puts her hand on Shadow’s shoulder. “No, you won’t,” she says. Her power can hurt when she invades people with it, unless she’s working to numb them or make them feel good, neither of which is safe to do while someone is driving… but it only takes a second, barely time for Shadow’s body to register that Meg’s power is inside it, to clear away the tension that’ll lead to a migraine.

Shadow turns her head. “What the fuck you doin’, girl?” she demands.

“I fixed it,” Meg says, beaming. “So you won’t get a migraine. I owe you a lot more than that, but that’s the least I can give back to you.”

For some reason Shadow does not look happy. She rolls her eyes and slumps slightly forward against the steering wheel, which is all right because they’re at a traffic light. “Listen, kid. I know you meant well, and I’m not mad. But you can’t just go doing things to people’s bodies without even telling them, let alone asking them. You gotta ask permission. If it’s a friend or an ally, anyway. I could give a shit, what you do to enemies and Sapiens, but with friends and allies you ask.”

“Oh.” Meg feels terrible. She’s overstepped a boundary she should have remembered, because in Peace Force Tau, Suri told her this, but she’s so excited to have her powers back and so grateful to Shadow and so desperate to show that gratitude, she forgot. “I’m sorry. I, I really should’ve known better, it’s just, I’ve been locked up so long… I’m really sorry…”

“Look, kiddo, forget it. S’alright. No harm done, and I do feel better. Just, remember next time. Ask.” She pronounces the word as “axe”. This makes Meg feel strangely nostalgic. One of her best friends from the days right after she got her powers, a teenage prostitute named Rhonda who was one of the most level-headed people Meg has ever known, used to talk that way. Most of the girls she’d known in those days had, actually. Whereas no one in the Peace Force or medical school would have used anything less than 100% proper English, like back in Catholic school.

***

It turns out Sonnebend is in Minnesota, near the Great Lakes. World Unity Collective headquarters is in Florida. They’re going to drive to Chicago to use something called a “transmat” to teleport to Florida, but lake-coast Minnesota to Chicago in Illinois is still what Shadow calls a “long-ass drive”. “We’d go faster if we had a boat,” Shadow jokes, and shows Meg the route on the map.

There are explanations. Shadow won’t tell her how she knew about the diseases – “you’re not cleared to know that, yet,” she says – but she explains eagerly why Meg was recruited. “We figured, since you created the bioweapons, you’d know how to stop them… and you might be able to stop others they come up with. Or create ones to threaten them with, if they keep pulling this kind of shit.”

“I don’t want to create bioweapons. Not against Proximas, not against Sapiens, not against anybody.”

“I hear you,” Shadow says. “You don’t have to. You do whatever you feel comfortable with, for the cause.”

Shadow talks a lot about the cause. Talks about being thrown out of her home for being a “devil child”, when she was 12 and turning from brown to blue. Talks about the Human Definition Amendment, a thing some conservative Senator has proposed that will define “human”, in the law, to mean “Sapien”, meaning Proximas will essentially legally be wild animals, with no legal protections whatsoever. Talks about Proximas being killed as “witches” in Africa, especially the ones with the azurin mutation, who couldn’t hide being Proximas, and being turned into weapons for the government in Russia and China and who knew where else.

Talks about the Special Service killing unarmed Proximas who are suspected of crimes, and that one hits hard, because that’s exactly what happened to David. His power was to see chemistry at the atomic level, completely useless for fighting, and he was a skinny twenty-something nerd and he wore coke-bottle glasses with a tint because he was photophobic, and he was unarmed, and they’d gunned him down in his apartment, and Meg had only lived because he’d sent her on an errand to find his lawyer. Because she’d assumed, when he said he’d need his lawyer after they arrested him, that of course, that was normal, that was how it worked. She was pretty sure he’d known they were coming to kill him, and had sent her on that errand because they’d have killed her too.

Caesar Primus – it means “Emperor First” and it’s pronounced the Latin way, like “Kaiser”, not like the salad – is, according to Shadow, the smartest and most experienced man on the planet. Meg assumes the experienced part is probably true, because apparently, he is somewhere around 2,000 years old, and was a gladiator in ancient Rome. She’s not so sure about smartest. The guy apparently still believes that Sapiens and Proximas are different species. A lot of people believe that, but mostly they are idiots, or at the very least, they know nothing of science.

He’s also bought into a lot of silly ideas about evolution, or claims he has and teaches them to his people. Shadow tells Meg that Proximas are the next evolution of humanity, superior because they are more evolved, destined to rule over humanity, and will survive instead of Sapiens because they are stronger. Meg can identify five errors in Shadow’s concepts of evolution off the top of her head, without any kind of deep dive, but she says nothing. If Shadow wants her to worship at the altar of Caesar Primus… Meg hasn’t done worship at an altar since she left Catholic school, not for anyone, but for Shadow’s sake, she’ll pretend.

And if it’s true, as Shadow implies, that Primus sent her to go rescue Meg, then she owes him as much for her freedom as she owes Shadow.

***

A transmat turns out to be a platform, where you put in some coordinates, step on the platform, and are instantly somewhere else, on a transmat platform elsewhere. It reminds Meg of Star Trek transporters, but makes more sense – she’d always wondered, how did the transporter beam know how to reassemble when it got where it was going?

The base is in a swamp, and the only ways out of the base are either to wade through alligator-infested waters, or take the transmat. Or fly, she supposes, for those that can do that. Wading would be annoying, but can’t hurt her; neither mosquitoes nor alligators, nor anything else in the water, can cause her any harm. But it’s obvious to her that that’s not going to be true for most people, and it bothers her a little. If the cause is so wonderful and important, why make it so hard to leave the base?

“It’s not to make it hard to leave,” Shadow explains. “It protects us from so-called superheroes, and it means that if you want to go anywhere, you have to take a risk. Keeps you strong.”

“But if you’re going by transmat that’s not a risk.”

“Yeah, but you can’t go anywhere by transmat unless Caesar agrees.”

The building’s far too much like Sonnebend. It’s made of concrete rather than bricks, a big brutalism box in the middle of a swamp, and there are windows all over the upper floors, but it goes down several floors underground. Sonnebend had linoleum tile and World Unity Collective headquarters has concrete flooring, like a warehouse, but either way there’s nothing alive, nothing for her powers to sense through her feet or the canvas shoes she makes herself from rubber and cotton. She’s not going to spend much time here, she can already tell.

“I need to go back to Baltimore,” she tells Shadow. “I don’t know what happened to anything I owned when I was kidnapped.”

Shadow is skeptical. “Do you really need any of that stuff, or do you just have a sentimental attachment to it?” she asks. “Revolutionaries have to be ready to break free of any material possessions, at any time. You can’t have sentiment. And here, your room and board are provided for, and I know with your powers you can make your own clothes whenever you want…”

“I want my medical textbooks,” Meg says. “I was trying to become a doctor when they kidnapped me.”

Now Shadow raises an eyebrow. “You think being a doctor is the best way to serve the cause?”

Meg smiles. That particular smile is the last thing some gangsters saw, once upon a time. “To heal, you need to know intimately how the body works and how everything fits together. That’s also what you need to know to be really creative about hurting people. You know, if it’s going to advance the cause to hurt someone in a particularly creative way.”

That makes Shadow laugh. “Oh yeah, I knew I was right about you. You’re gonna be a fantastic asset to the team, Meg.”

There’s no one else important in the base right now – Primus is apparently in DC, and his other top-ranked minions are away on various missions. No one here but Proximas with low power levels who work as grunts. Thugs, like she was once. The only person here to give permission for transmat use is Shadow, and she’s all in favor of Meg getting her medical textbooks once she understands what Meg can use them for.

Except that Meg’s read them all already. The term had been about to end when she was kidnapped. Her ability to directly sense bodies and how they worked had gotten her through med school in record time – she’d been there a year, and she’d learned two years’ worth in that time – and then Sonnebend had taught her more, because to create the diseases they wanted her to create, or heal the ailments of rich old men, she’d needed to know more. It’d been all she had to do that gave her any kind of pleasure in any way.

She’s not going back for medical textbooks. Shadow the true believer can give up material possessions and eliminate sentiment, if she wants. Meg believes in very little of this bullshit. She just worships Shadow for saving her.

World Unity Collective maintains a transmat in Grand Central Station, and Shadow’s able to advance Meg some cash, since of course she doesn’t currently have an ATM card, a credit card, or checks. Meg takes the subway from Grand Central to Penn Station, and from there the Amtrak to Baltimore, and then a cab to the Johns Hopkins medical school campus.

***

Meg walks down the street to the townhome she used to share with her roommate, breathing in the winter air. She can't stop looking at the buildings, the trees without their leaves, the sun behind the solid wall of white winter clouds. The people. There are so many people and they're so beautiful and they know nothing about the way the world really works, nothing at all. She wants to kill them, to save them, to tell them the truth. To take the men, at least, home and screw their brains out because she's free to choose not to, now. She doesn't do any of that.

She doesn't have the key to her old apartment any more, but the music inside tells her that her housemate Tara is there right now. Meg knocks, hard.

Tara opens the door. "Meg?" she asks, sounding shocked.

"Is my stuff still here?" Meg asks.

"Uh, yeah, yeah, of course. The landlady was just wondering where you were -- she says she's been getting your rent checks in the mail, but she sent us a note about the electric bill going up and you didn't increase the amount you were paying, and she was trying to get hold of you, but I had no idea where you were so I just paid it for you."

"I'll reimburse you." Meg walks into the apartment. She looks around the place. Everything is just as she left it. "Pack up my stuff for me and I'll have movers come get it. I'll pay the landlady for your share of the rent for the next two months."

"What happened to you, Meg? Where did you go?"

How does one explain that one was kidnapped by the government and has spent the past several months being raped, tortured and forced to work on biological weapons? One doesn't. "Something came up."

Stuffy is still sitting on her bed, David’s dried blood still all over her. Dried blood looks brown; she explained the stains on Stuffy as chocolate sauce to everyone in Peace Force Tau. Tara never went into Meg’s own bedroom, so she never had to make that explanation. Meg picks up Stuffy and puts her in her coat. She suddenly wants to cry, but badass supervillains don't cry, so she uses her powers to suppress the urge. She's going to have to figure out somewhere to put her. Obviously she can’t bring a stuffed animal back to a base full of supervillains.

"Meg, are you okay?"

She doesn't look at the Sapien who used to be her friend. "I'm fine," she says shortly, and thinks, No. Not even slightly.

Back on the street, it's cold and crisp and she can walk anywhere she wants. She can walk to a hot dog cart and get a hot dog. So she does. And ice cream. The whole time she was imprisoned she never had ice cream.

Tears sting her eyes again. Stupid that she has to keep using her powers for this. She should be tougher than this. She stopped crying after the first month in prison, never did it again until she thought Shadow was about to kill her. Why is she crying now?

When she was at Sonnebend, she never stopped wishing for her freedom, but she stopped believing or even hoping she would ever be able to walk around on a city street and buy a hot dog ever again. And then Shadow walked into Sonnebend and brought her out like Orpheus freeing Eurydice from Hades, except of course that Orpheus hadn't succeeded in the end. And Shadow did that because Caesar Primus had ordered her to. Most likely. She’d never specifically said, but Meg could read between the lines.

If Primus sent her to rescue Meg, Meg will do anything for him.

Meg knows his ideology is ridiculous. Right now she doesn't care. She'll burn the Sapiens' world down for what they did to her, and she'll enjoy herself doing it. Out of gratitude for the gift of her freedom, she will do anything for the people who saved her.

She’s got financial things to arrange – Meg has a lot of money. Being the most terrifying killer in New York City used to pay really well. She’ll reimburse Tara, get movers to take all her stuff to a storage unit. Buy some clothes – she doesn’t need new clothes, since her powers can reshape the ones she has, but she likes to shop for clothes. She likes to dress up in clothes that make every man around want to fuck her, and maybe she’ll pick some of them out and do it. She hasn’t had sex because she wanted to in eight months. Maybe she’ll fuck away some of the memories of Sonnebend before going back to Primus’ hideout.