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DATE:29th of August, the 70th year after the Coronation
LOCATION: Concord Metropolis
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The shaking started at my shoulder and worked its way into whatever I'd been dreaming, which dissolved before I could decide if I'd wanted it to.
Pamela.
"Half an hour," she said, and stepped back.
I sat up. The room was dim — curtains mostly drawn, the kind of late-afternoon light that felt like an accusation. My feet were back. My hands were back. The aspirin had done its quiet work while I was unconscious and hadn't asked for anything in return. Small mercies.
She'd ordered coffee. A ceramic cup on the nightstand, pale brown, steamed. Caffe latte. The smell reached me before I fully registered what it was.
"I hate coffee," I said.
I picked it up and drank.
It was warm. That was the best thing I could say about it. The milk softened whatever damage the actual coffee was trying to do, but the bitterness still sat at the back of my throat like a complaint with nowhere to go.
I drank it anyway. My body needed something and this was what was in front of it.
Pamela was already dressed. Standing near the window with her phone, scrolling. The suit fit — not perfectly, men's tailoring on a woman never did, but she'd made the adjustments that mattered. Jacket sleeves pushed up slightly. Collar open one button further than intended. She'd done something with the hair that made the cut look more deliberate than catastrophic.
Ignoring the hair, she didn't look too shabby.
"I've been looking into who'll likely be at the gala," she said, not looking up from the screen. "There are a few names worth knowing in advance—"
"I don't care," I said.
She looked up. "You don't want to know who—"
"I'll find out when I'm there."
She closed her mouth. Opened it again. Closed it. Let it go.
I dressed in the white suit. The fabric settled the same way it had in the store — heavy, well-cut, like it was performing competence on my behalf. I adjusted the cuffs. Checked the holster lines in the mirror. Acceptable.
Pamela held out the mask.
White. Smooth. Black lettering in Ventian script curving across the upper half — Aionis.
I took it and turned it over in my hands.
I'd specified this at the workshop. I remembered doing it. What I didn't remember was why — or rather, I couldn't locate the reason beneath the decision. It had felt obvious at the time, the way things did when you weren't thinking carefully enough to question them.
"What does it mean?" I asked. "Aionis. In old Ventian." I obviously know that it meant eternity, but what was the actual meaning behind the word? It couldn't have been a mistake that she saw it as being etched on my face. As if I was someone's property. My own name, Kassius, is one thing. I can get why it was there. Obviously to name the property. But this one? The name of the owner or something else entirely?
Pamela tilted her head, considering. "It could be related to Aion. The god." She paused. "God of time, eternity. Cyclical existence. That sort of thing."
I looked at the letters again.
There being a Ventian god called Aion was not something I remembered. And I should have — I'd grown up with the religion, or near enough to it. The major figures, the minor ones, the regional variations. It should have been there.
It wasn't.
I turned the mask over once more, then put it on.
"Hm," I said, and left it at that.
I injected another dose of the drug and prepared to leave. Bringing in a weapon was certainly an idea but I was probably going to be searched. That wouldn't be very smart.
This time I made sure it was a premium taxi. It would not do to arrive at a gala smelling like someone else's cigarettes and bad decisions.
The interior was clean. The suspension worked. The driver didn't treat red lights like personal affronts. I had no complaints, which was its own kind of disorienting.
Pamela spent the entire ride scrolling on her phone. The same phone she'd been on since the café. I watched her thumb move up the screen at the mechanical rhythm of someone who'd found a new compulsion and hadn't noticed yet.
In her other hand, loosely, was her mask. White. Rounded. A bunny, apparently. I hadn't asked.
She'd told me about the venue somewhere between the second gate and the third turn — that the official gala was held in a separate building on the estate, but that the family had arranged a preliminary gathering at the main house first. More intimate, she'd said. More selective.
I'd said nothing.
The taxi left us at the curb a hundred meters short of the entrance. Standard for this kind of property — the last stretch was meant to be walked, so you could be observed doing it.
Reflector lights cut upward along both sides of the path, illuminating a row of statues on each side. Stone figures on plinths. Formal poses, formal expressions, the particular blankness of people commemorated for things no one could quite remember anymore.
Ancestors, presumably. The Aurelian lineage arranged in chronological self-importance.
I didn't recognize any of them, which told me everything I needed to know about how great they'd actually been.
Two men flanked the stone entrance to the main mansion. Large. The expensive kind of large — the kind where the suit was tailored specifically to accommodate shoulders that shouldn't exist. Their masks were eagles. Of course they were.
I didn't understand the logic of hero bodyguards. Heroes didn't need defending. But rich families needed the appearance of being defended, which was a different requirement entirely.
They asked for names.
I gave mine.
One of them consulted whatever list he was holding. Ran his finger down it with the studied patience of a man who enjoyed having people wait.
"You're not on the list," he said.
I looked at him. "Check again."
He checked again. "Not on the list."
What followed was not a conversation so much as a structured disagreement about reality, during which I remained certain that Marguerite had put my name down out of spite if nothing else, and during which they remained certain that their list was correct, and during which nobody moved.
Then the second one leaned forward slightly. Looked at my mask. At the Ventian lettering across it.
He made a sound — not quite a laugh. The kind that comes out when something is funnier than you want to admit.
"You're that guy," he said.
I waited.
He reached back and pulled the door open. Held it. His expression hadn't changed except for something at the corner of his mouth that he wasn't bothering to hide.
"Wouldn't want to keep royalty waiting," he said.
The word royalty landed exactly the way he intended it to.
I stopped.
The calculation was fast and came out the wrong way — he was large, probably durable, certainly not worth the scene, and I was here for a reason that had nothing to do with him. Still. The specific tone of it sat under my skin like a splinter.
Pamela's hands closed on both my shoulders from behind. Her grip was light but deliberate.
"Don't," she said quietly, close enough that only I heard it. "Don't even think about it. I'll put you to sleep myself if I have to." Her tone made it seem like she was serious.
Oh no! So scared!
Whatever. It wasn't worth it.
I shrugged once, sharp enough that her hands fell away, and stepped through the door.
They didn't search me at the door.
In hindsight, not bringing weapons was a mistake. In further hindsight, it didn't matter. Half the people in this building probably couldn't be stopped by a pistol anyway. You didn't bring a gun to a hero gala to threaten anyone. You brought it for the people who weren't heroes.
Oh well.
______
Inside was more or less what I'd expected from people who thought marble communicated something meaningful about their character. A grandiose entrance room. Stairs at the far end. Everything hard and white and cold. Columns that served no structural purpose. Lighting designed to make you feel observed.
At least it was cool. The heat outside had been an ongoing personal insult and I was glad to be done with it.
A masked servant directed us toward the dining room. His mask was a long-beaked bird I couldn't identify — something extinct, probably, or something that had never existed. The Aurelian family would commission both.
He left and returned twice for no reason I could determine. Possibly just to demonstrate that he could.
The dining room had wood accents. Tables arranged with food in portions sized for people who ate to be seen rather than to be full. Small towers of things. Garnishes outnumbering substance. The usual.
I scanned the room.
Heroes. Masked, suited, clustered in the particular configurations of people who trusted each other only marginally more than they trusted strangers. I didn't recognize most of them, which was unsurprising — I barely knew anyone without the masks, and the masks made it worse. A room full of expensive strangers pretending to be relaxed.
Morgan didn't seem to be here. Neither was Lucien. Their figures at the very least I could have recognized.
I was deciding whether that was a problem or a convenience when I heard her.
"Aionis."
The voice carried across the room with the blunt cheerfulness of someone who had never learned that volume was a social variable. I turned.
Anisa. Her hair was exactly as chaotic as I remembered it — random strands of red and green, the haircut of someone who'd declared war on consistency. She was weaving through the crowd toward me with the energy of a person who treated obstacles as entertainment rather than inconveniences.
Beside her, Joseph moved with his usual measured pace. Slicked hair, clean glasses, the expression of a man permanently calculating something. Neither wore masks. Bolder than me I suppose, I lost this one.
She reached me first, obviously.
"You actually came! I thought you'd be too antisocial." She said it like it was a compliment.
"Anisa." I kept my voice flat. "Joseph." I think I met them a week ago yet it felt like months.
Joseph nodded, the smile reaching his eyes with that particular quality that made it hard to know if it was sincere or the very good imitation of sincerity. "Carter. Good to see you well."
"Hmm."
Anisa was already pivoting toward Pamela with the aggressive curiosity of someone who had decided they found a new person interesting and intended to make that the other person's problem.
"And you are—" she started, leaning in slightly.
"Someone who knows who you are," Pamela said, stepping forward. Her voice was pleasant. Precisely pleasant, in the way that meant it wasn't. "Anisa. The Nightcrawler." Huh? When did I ever mention these guys to her?
Anisa blinked. Her expression shifted through surprise, then delight, then something cooler underneath both. "Oh. You've done your research." Right, I forgot she stays on her phone all day… or is it something else?
"Some," Pamela said. "Including the incident at the Dorvain warehouse two years ago." A small pause. "So I'd appreciate it if you gave him a little more space than you gave him last time." Like when did we even talk about this? Last time? And what warehouse? Ahg, whatever.
The silence between them was brief. Anisa tilted her head, reading something in Pamela's expression that I hadn't caught. Then the manic energy came back, slightly softer at the edges.
"She's fun," Anisa announced, to no one in particular.
Joseph's eyes moved between the two of them, then settled on me with an expression that suggested he was recalibrating something.
"Quite a guest you've brought," he said.
"I thought so," I said. What were we even talking about? I was at a loss of… thought…
"Did you think about what we talked?" He had that serious tone from last time.
"I guess I'm in." There wasn't that much to think about. I didn even have the time to do that. But I remember Matrix annoyed me last time so he might as well die.
He flashed me a smile, not bothering to hide his excitement. Excited to have his supposedly old friend killed? Such a messed up guy. And I thought Anisa was the bad one.
Pamela seemed to have shifted in place. "What is this about?" Was she curious? It's clear she already knows.
I shrugged, ignoring her. "Not like I remember"
We talked for a while. Nothing worth remembering — the kind of surface conversation that happened at events like this, where everyone was performing mild interest in each other while actually watching the room. Joseph was good at it. Anisa was bad at it in the specific way of someone who didn't see the point of pretending.
Then Joseph's attention snagged on something across the room. His expression didn't change, but his posture did — that slight realignment of a man who'd just spotted either an opportunity or a problem and hadn't decided which yet.
"Excuse me," he said, already turning. "There's someone I need to speak with."
He moved off without waiting for a response. Anisa watched him go with the expression of someone who had been abandoned at a party before and had made peace with it.
Then she turned back to me.
Her eyes moved from my shoulders down to the cuffs and back up again, unhurried, with the particular quality of an assessment that wasn't trying to hide itself.
"You look domineering in that suit," she said. She bit down lightly on her middle knuckle, grinning.
I looked at her.
"There were," I said, "so many other ways to word that."
She laughed, already shifting her weight forward — and then lunged.
Pamela's hand closed around my bicep and pulled, smooth and immediate, like she'd been waiting for exactly this. Anisa's trajectory died mid-air. She landed a step short, blinking.
A beat of silence.
"Go away," Anisa told Pamela.
"I don't particularly want to," Pamela said.
Anisa's eyes narrowed. They moved over Pamela with the slow deliberateness of someone constructing an insult from available materials.
"Your hair," she said finally, "is genuinely ugly."
Pamela's hand went to her chest. Her expression collapsed into devastation — eyes wide, mouth trembling, the performance of a woman receiving the worst news of her life.
"I'm so hurt," she said.
Then she made a small sniffling sound and pretended to cry.
The effect on Anisa was immediate and total. The calculated composure evaporated. Her jaw tightened, her shoulders came up, and something genuinely furious moved behind her eyes. She pulled back slightly, weight shifting onto her back foot —
Joseph appeared from nowhere, or close enough to it. His hand caught her under the arm with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this exact intervention many times before and had stopped being surprised by the necessity of it.
Nearby, a few onlookers were smiling into their drinks.
"Anisa," Joseph said, voice low and controlled in the way of someone suppressing something considerably less controlled. "Do not humiliate me at this event."
She started to say something.
He was already moving, steering her away from us with a grip that looked polite and wasn't.
Pamela watched them go. The devastation had left her face entirely. She looked, if anything, mildly satisfied.
I said nothing.
I was hungry.
That was the most straightforward thing I'd felt all evening, so I followed it.
One of the tables had caviar — the real kind, apparently, presented in a tin nested in crushed ice with the particular reverence people reserved for things that cost more than they were worth. A waiter materialized at my elbow and began explaining its origin. Black Sea something. Centuries of something else. A region whose name I didn't retain.
I ate it anyway. It was good. Salt and cold and the faint mineral quality that made it worth the theatre surrounding it.
I was reaching for a second portion when I heard the heels.
Fast. Uneven. The rhythm of someone who had spotted a target and was crossing a room with more urgency than dignity.
I turned.
Alice.
She was in ivory — a structured dress that would have looked composed on someone composed. Her mask was a mime's: white face paint visible at the edges, black detailing, the expression of theatrical sadness frozen in place, which was either accidental irony or the only honest thing about her outfit. Her hair was done. Her posture was not.
And her wrists — even across the distance, even in this light — had the particular texture of someone who had been finding reasons to be alone with sharp objects. So pathetic.
She moved through the crowd toward us with the particular energy of someone who had been waiting for permission to fall apart and had just found it. By the time she reached me her hands were already reaching, fingers closing around my arm with that grip that had always been slightly too tight, slightly too desperate, mistaking pressure for connection.
I turned back to the caviar.
"William." Her voice was low, raw at the edges. "I didn't know you'd be here. I've been trying to reach you, I—"
I gestured with the small spoon. The gesture meant: not now, not interested, not particularly registered. At least that was what it meant to someone with common sense.
"Alice."
"I know you're angry with me. I know I deserve it. But I've been so—"
"You look well," I said.
Her breath caught. She searched my face for something and found what she always found — which was nothing she was looking for.
"I'm sorry," she said anyway. Her voice had that specific quality of someone who had rehearsed an apology so many times it had worn smooth, lost its edges. "For everything. I really haven't been — I haven't been well, I—"
Did she really think this means anything? That any of this could be solved with a few words?
"Please," she said quietly. "Can we just talk? For a few minutes. Somewhere—"
Sometimes she is just so funny. So simple.
I started laughing.
It came out before I'd decided to let it — short, genuine, the kind that had nothing generous in it. A few heads turned from nearby clusters. Someone's conversation paused.
"I'm here with someone," I said.
Alice's face did something complicated. Her eyes moved to Pamela for the first time. Took her in. Came back to me with a question she didn't want to ask.
I answered it anyway.
"My girlfriend," I said.
I reached up and removed her hands. Not roughly. Just with the finality of closing a door.
"William, please—"
"This is Pamela," I said. I gestured at Pamela, who had appeared at my periphery with the expression of someone choosing not to react while actively deciding what to make of what was happening. Seems she learned her lesson. Why couldn't someone else?
Silence.
Alice's face did several things in quick succession, none of them dignified. Her grip on my arm loosened. Her chin moved upward in that way it did when she was trying to keep something from spilling out of her expression. She looked at Pamela. Then at me. Then at Pamela again, as if a second inspection might produce a different result.
It didn't.
Her face crumpled. Not slowly — all at once, like something structural had given way. The mime's mask made it worse somehow, the frozen theatrical sadness on her painted face contrasting with the real thing happening beneath it. She made a sound that wasn't quite a word and turned, moving back through the crowd with the specific urgency of someone who needed to be somewhere walls existed.
I watched her go.
"Cheap diva," I said, watching the space where she'd disappeared. My hand reached for the caviar again.
Pamela was quiet for a moment. Then she turned to look at me. Her voice was measured, careful. "You should go after her."
"Naah. No chance. Rather than doing something useless like that, she should finish the job already." I drew a finger across my throat, casual, the way you'd indicate anything that was simply overdue.
Pamela stared at me.
Then she looked in the direction Alice had gone. Then back at me. The confusion on her face settled into something that wasn't quite disgust and wasn't quite pity
"That's—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "You're unbelievable.".
She left without another word, moving in Alice's direction.
I ate the second portion of caviar. It was still good.
The waiter was visibly shocked. He seemed to have been recalculating his career choice. Honestly speaking, if he was moved from something so little then he wasn't made for this job anyway.
"So, about that origin," I said gesturing towards him. "What were you saying?"
____
I ate without enthusiasm and watched the room and waited to feel something about any of it. Nothing came, so I kept eating until the caviar stopped being interesting, which didn't take long.
I set the small plate down and started moving.
No destination. Just motion. The room had a particular geography to it — clusters of people orbiting each other by status, the less important ones circling the edges, the more important ones holding ground near the center. I walked along the margins, which suited me fine.
I was somewhere between a sculpture of something military and a table of untouched desserts when I felt the arms close around me from behind.
Not Anisa — the grip was different. Deliberate rather than feral. Controlled.
I didn't move.
"You're harder to get alone than I expected."
Maia's voice. Low, precise, with that quality it had of being aimed rather than simply spoken. She had a red tulip mask — simple, fitted, covering only the upper half of her face in a way that left her mouth free to do exactly what it wanted. Her dress was deep burgundy, structured at the shoulders and falling cleanly to the floor, the kind of cut that didn't draw attention to itself because it didn't need to. The silver of her hair caught the chandelier light above us.
She still had her arms around me.
"Progress report," she said pleasantly, as if this were a scheduled meeting.
"There have been complications," I said.
"Mm."
"Things are moving soon."
"Sure they are."
"Like what do I even have to prove?" Since when was she my boss?
I reached down and lifted her hands away from me by the wrists. She let me, with the ease of someone who had allowed something rather than been stopped. "Let go."
She stepped around to face me, unhurried. Those blood-red eyes moved across my mask, my face beneath it, with the same probing quality I remembered from the agency meeting — less like looking and more like reading.
"You've been busy," she said. "I hear things."
"People talk too much in this city."
"People talk the right amount. You just don't like what they say about you." A faint smile. "You've made quite an impression since you took the position."
"I didn't take anything."
"No," she agreed. "That's rather the interesting part."
She accepted a glass from a passing tray without looking at it and turned slightly to survey the room the way people did when they wanted to seem casual and weren't.
"You know," she said, "I thought you'd be more difficult to find tonight. But you've been approached by — what — four separate people in the last hour? Five?"
"I wasn't counting."
"I was." The smile didn't move. "I wouldn't call it popularity exactly."
"Neither would I. Desperation has a different smell."
She tilted her head. "Not desperation." A small pause, precise as a scalpel. "Obsession. There's a difference. Desperation looks away when you catch it staring. Obsession holds the gaze."
I said nothing.
She finished looking at the room and looked back at me. "There are meeting rooms upstairs. The family keeps them for guests who need privacy during these events." A pause that managed to convey the word obviously. "I think we'd both benefit from a conversation that doesn't happen in front of fifty heroes."
I glanced toward the staircase at the far end of the hall. Those are probably sex rooms, but whatever. Guess we're hacing a meeting.
Then back at her.
"Fine," I said.
I followed behind her as if some she left behind a guiding aura. Something velvet and with falling petals around. Perhaps it was just one of my many mental episodes. I certainly hope so.
Anyway, the room was small and deliberately so. The kind of private space designed not for comfort but for containment. Dark wood paneling on three sides, a single window with the curtains drawn, a low table between two chairs that faced each other at an angle suggesting negotiation rather than conversation. A lamp in the corner produced light that was amber and close. No mirrors. No art. Just the room and whatever you brought into it.
Maia closed the door.
She set her glass on the table and turned to face me with the unhurried quality of someone who had already decided how this was going to go. Without saying anything, her hands raised and took off my mask, revealing my eyes to her 'magic'.
"Jacket," she said.
I looked at her.
"You've been tense since you walked in," she said. "And I find people talk more honestly when they're not armored."
"I'm always tense."
"I know." She reached up and undid the top button of my jacket herself, fingers efficient and entirely unsentimental about it. Not seduction — inventory. Like she was unwrapping something she'd already purchased and wanted to confirm the contents. "Humor me."
I let her take the jacket. She folded it over the back of one chair and sat in the other, crossing one leg over the other, and looked at me with those red eyes that had never quite stopped reading.
"Sit down, William."
I sat. What else was I going to do?
"The Donn raid," she said, without preamble.
There it was.
"What about it."
"You were on the team that killed him." Not a question. "The Don himself. The man who ran the largest criminal network this city has produced in thirty years. And you were there." She tilted her head slightly. "As a new hero, just barely holding the title."
"And just a month later I was at the agency meeting," I said. "As the Legion leader. People contain contradictions."
"Even before that. The Headmistress," she continued, as if I hadn't spoken. "At Zenik. Defeated — incapacitated, to be precise — with Liliam's assistance. Again, you. A mere month or two after supposedly discovering your powers." She uncrossed her leg and leaned forward slightly, elbow on her knee. "And then there's the Combine. Which brings me to tonight, and this gala, and the Aurelian connection, and why exactly you're here."
She reached out and took my wrist. Turned it over. Looked at it with the same clinical attention she'd given everything else.
"You're Ventian," she said. "Originally. Before Concord. Before the Academy." Her thumb pressed lightly against the inside of my wrist, over the scar tissue. "Old Ventian, if I had to guess. Not the merchant class. Something older than that."
I said nothing.
"I've been trying to work out," she continued, "whether you're operating independently or whether someone is running you." She released my wrist. "Paradox Mundi's name keeps appearing near yours. He's careful — he's always careful — but the proximity is difficult to ignore." Her eyes came up to mine. "Is he controlling you?"
"No one is controlling me."
"That's what someone being controlled would say."
"It's also what someone not being controlled would say," I replied. "So the question answers nothing."
She studied me for a moment. Then something shifted in her expression — not warmth exactly, but a concession of some kind.
"You thought the gift was from someone else," she said.
I went still.
"The one left at your door yesterday." Her voice carried a faint quality now — amusement, or something close to it. "It was from me."
I looked at her.
She met the look without flinching, which most people couldn't manage.
"I wanted to see how you'd receive it," she said. "What it would tell me about you. Whether you'd ask questions or simply use it." A pause. "You simply used it." No? Pamela drank the poison. Or was she talking about another gift?
"And what does that tell you?"
"That you're either very confident," she said, "or you don't particularly care what happens to you." She picked up her glass from the table. "I haven't decided which yet."
The lamp in the corner flickered once and settled.
"So," she said. "A mafioso who leads heroes. A Ventian with a demon's name written on his face. A man who dismantled an academic institution and a criminal empire and is now standing in the Aurelian house at a gala for people who fund the Combine." She looked at me over the rim of her glass. "Tell me what you actually are, William. Because I've been watching you since that meeting and I still can't place you."
So her power only goes so far. Yet she said 'demon's name? This was a wild statement to just leave there with no cue.
The room was very quiet.
"Dangerous," I said.
She smiled — the first one that reached her eyes.
"Yes," she said. "That part I already knew."
You're thorough," I said. "I'll give you that."
She waited.
"The Donn raid. The Headmistress. The Combine connections." I leaned back in the chair. "You've been building a file on me for weeks. That's not what someone with clean hands does."
Her expression didn't change.
"You're accusing me of working with the Combine," she said.
"I'm noting that you know a great deal about their movements. Their funding structure. Their connections to this family." I gestured vaguely at the room around us — at the Aurelian house containing us. "And you're here tonight, same as me. So."
She picked the glass back up.
"The difference," she said, "is that I was invited." A pause. "And I've been watching the Combine's money move through this city for four years. Not participating in it. Mapping it." Her red eyes were flat and direct. "There's a distinction."
"People who work for organizations tend to surveil them very carefully," I said. "Keeps them useful."
"People who oppose organizations surveil them more carefully," she replied. "Because they can't afford to be wrong." She held my gaze. "I have been building a file. On everyone. Including you. Because in this city, information is the only thing that doesn't get taken away when someone decides you're inconvenient." A beat. "I am not your enemy, William. I'm not your ally either. I'm someone who pays attention. There's a shortage of us."
The room sat with that for a moment.
She wasn't lying. I couldn't be certain of much about her, but she wasn't lying about that. The way she'd mapped my movements — the precision of it, the patience — that wasn't the work of someone with something to hide. It was the work of someone who couldn't afford surprises.
I said nothing, which she seemed to take as acceptance.
We talked for a while longer. She was precise and occasionally interesting and never fully relaxed, which I respected even if I didn't enjoy it. She asked questions I answered partially and asked some in return that she answered the same way. The lamp continued its amber performance in the corner.
Then she shifted.
"There's something I keep returning to," she said. Her voice had changed slightly — still controlled, but with something underneath it that hadn't been there before. Closer to unease than she probably intended to show. "When I try to read you."
I looked at her.
"Most people," she said, "are legible. Even the ones who've trained against it, even the ones with strong natural resistance — there's always something. A surface. A texture." She paused. "With you there's — an edge. And then nothing. Like leaning over a wall and finding there's no ground on the other side." Her eyes moved across my face. "I get dizzy when I push further. Which has never happened to me before." She said it with the tone of someone reporting a structural fault in a building they'd always trusted. "It feels like a bad omen."
I considered this.
"A man's intimacy is paramount," I said.
She looked at me for a long moment.
The look she gave me then was not the cold analytical one she'd been using all evening. It was something quieter and considerably more dangerous — the expression of someone recalculating what they were dealing with and arriving at a number they didn't like.
"Don't," she said, very evenly, "be glib about this."
"If it isn't Mundi," she said, "then what is it."
"What did you mean," I said, "about the demon's name."
She accepted the deflection without comment, which meant she'd noted it.
"Aionis," she said. "It's written across your mask in old Ventian script. Aion — the god of eternal recurrence. Of cycles that don't end." Her eyes moved to the mask resting on the table beside me where I'd set it earlier. "It's also one of the titles attributed to Aeshma-daeva in the older texts. The aspect that persists. That doesn't get consumed." A pause. "You had it made deliberately. Which means either you know exactly what it references, or something in you does."
I said nothing.
She leaned forward slightly.
"You're not acting like a human being," she said. "I want you to understand I don't mean that as a figure of speech."
"Most heroes think they're above—"
"No." She cut me off cleanly. "That's not what I mean. Every hero I've ever met, every one — even the genuinely dangerous ones, even Morgan with all his performance — they still locate themselves in relation to other people. Above them, through them, in opposition to them. There's still a relationship." Her voice was careful and precise, like she was constructing something she didn't want to collapse. "You don't have that. You're not looking over humans. You're not looking through them. You've simply — filed them. Every person in that room downstairs is an inconvenience to you until proven otherwise, and most of them never will be." She paused. "I've met people who hated humanity. I've met people who feared it. I've never met someone who found it this boring."
She held my gaze.
"My power doesn't work on you. So tell me. What actually are you."
I chuckled.
"You're repeating yourself," I said.
She pressed her lips together.
"Do you have family?" I asked.
The shift in her expression was immediate and controlled — a door closing. "You're not owed that answer."
"I don't need to ask," I said mildly. "If I wanted to know I'd simply find out."
"What is your point—"
I touched the tips of my fingers together. Lightly. The way you might if you were doing arithmetic.
"I'm wondering," I said, with no particular inflection, "how many of them will die in the coming war."
Not to her. Not really at her. Just — wondering it. Aloud. The way you might note the weather.
She snapped.
"What the hell is wrong with you—"
"That," I said.
She stopped.
"That reaction." I lowered my hands. "You just proved my point for me."
She stared at me, fury still sitting in the line of her shoulders, in the set of her jaw.
"Your comparison was wrong," I said. "The one about me being beyond humans. More exaggerated than Morgan, further gone than the rest of them." I glanced at the mask on the table. "Superheroes are still humans. Fundamentally. Every one of them — you included." I looked back at her. "You got worked up just now over a useless tangent I threw out specifically to provoke you. You felt it. It landed."
A pause.
"That's not what beyond humanity looks like," I said. "That's just a person getting angry." I leaned back slightly. "If anything, your reaction should reassure you."
She looked at me for a long moment. The fury hadn't left exactly — it had redistributed, become something colder and more considered.
"And you?" she said quietly. "Did it land for you?"
I didn't answer.
Which was, of course, its own kind of answer.
"I'm not so different from my cousin," I said. "When you think about it."
She looked at me the way people looked at things they found offensive.
"You are nothing like him."
"Why not?" I asked. Not defensively. Genuinely curious, the way you might be about a classification error. "Kevin was a god walking among men. Everyone knew it. Everyone felt it when he entered a room. The scale of him." I tilted my head slightly. "I'm simply operating on a different frequency. The principle is the same."
"The principle is not the same." Her voice had an edge to it now that hadn't been there before. "Kevin cared. Whatever else he was, whatever the scale of him — he cared about the people in that city. Every one of them. It wasn't performance. It wasn't strategy. It was genuine and it was constant and it cost him." She leaned forward. "You don't have a single genuine feeling about any of them and you know it."
"Feelings are inefficient."
"Kevin had feelings and he was the most powerful person this city has ever produced."
"And he's dead."
Something crossed her face.
"Of course," I said, "becoming the Legion's leader so close after his death was suspicious. I'm aware of how it looked."
She had settled back slightly, the previous edge redistributed into something more watchful. Her glass turned slowly in her fingers.
"It looked like positioning," she said.
"Everything looks like positioning to people who spend their lives positioning."
"And what would you call it?"
"Inconvenient," I said. "I didn't want the title. I still don't."
She studied me. The mind-reader's study — not just the face but whatever she could reach behind it, which in my case appeared to be the wall and the dizziness beyond it.
"Kevin trusted you," she said slowly. Not an accusation yet. Working toward something.
"Apparently." Did he really trust a loser like William Carter Jr.? I thought they hadn't seen eachother for a while.
"He didn't trust easily. He was careful about people. Especially people he brought close." Her red eyes moved across my face. "He would have had reasons."
"I wouldn't know. We didn't discuss his reasoning."
"But you were close enough that when he died—" She stopped. Close enough is a strange way to put it. Wait, does she think I got the position because the other heroes knew me? I suppose what happened with Sarah wouldn't have spread.
Something had changed in her expression. I watched it happen — the thought arriving, the pieces arranging themselves, the particular stillness of someone who has just understood something they didn't want to understand.
Her eyes came back to mine very slowly.
"You were there," she said.
I said nothing.
"When he died." Her voice had gone quiet in a way that was more dangerous than volume. "You were there."
That's a pretty vague way of putting it. I was at more than a kilometer away.
The lamp flickered.
"The reports were vague," she continued, almost to herself. "Deliberately vague, I always thought. The circumstances, the location, the sequence of events. Everything that should have been documented clearly was — blurred." Her grip on the glass had tightened. "And then within weeks you're standing in a conference room as his replacement." She looked at me. "You killed him."
The room held it.
The reports were vague? Like what? I remember it was pretty televised. His assasination I mean.
I didn't confirm it. I didn't deny it. I simply sat with the same expression I'd been wearing all evening, which told her everything my silence was supposed to withhold.
"You—" She exhaled slowly. "You killed Ultraman." I mean yeah, but it certainly wasn't how she imagined it.
Her mind was moving — I could see it, the rapid recalculation, the framework she'd built of me being reorganized around this new load-bearing fact.
"The hierarchy," she said, half to herself. "You wanted the position. You removed him and took—" She stopped again.
Her eyes narrowed.
She looked at me — really looked, the way she had in the conference room that first day, the probing quality of it — and I watched her arrive somewhere she hadn't expected to go.
"No," she said quietly. "That's not it."
A pause.
"You don't care about it at all." Something moved across her face. Not fear exactly. The thing that preceded fear in intelligent people. "You genuinely don't. The Legion, the title, the position — it means nothing to you." She set the glass down. "So why—"
Hah, if this was enough tp shock her then she would probably die from hearing the whole story…
She moved fast — faster than the dress suggested she could. One moment she was in her chair and the next she was over me, her weight pinning me into the seat, both hands closing around my throat with a grip that wasn't exploratory. It was committed.
"There is no point," she said, very quietly, "in leaving a variable like you in play."
Her red eyes were close. The tulip mask had shifted slightly. Her silver hair fell forward.
"I won't stand by while the Balmundi take this city." Her grip tightened. "Whatever you are — whatever is behind you — it ends here."
Ehh, assuming that I'm doing it for the Syndicate is a bigger insult than most things I heard these past weeks.
She was stronger than she looked. Considerably. My arms felt distant, unhelpful, the aspirin wearing thinner than I'd estimated. I couldn't throw her off. I couldn't get the leverage.
So I stopped trying.
While I said earlier that bringing weapons was useless, this didn't take into account the reality that their durability was also a detriment to themselves. If they got into a fight, most would fall into a stalemate.
So shouldn't such a shrewd woman have a tool to break that stalemate? At least that was my assumption.
I let my hands move; slow, methodical, running along her sides, her ribs, her waist. She took it for something else and her expression shifted into contempt.
My fingers found it. Under the left side of her bra, flat against the ribcage. Small handle. Fixed blade.
I gripped the fabric of her dress and pulled. The seam gave with a clean tearing sound and the knife came free in my hand.
I wasn't sure of what metal this was and neither did I care. If a hero carried it, then it certainly could cut one.
Seems she also realized what was happening because she lowered her arms, trying to catch the blade. I was faster.
I drove it up into her jaw.
Not deep enough to kill — the angle was wrong for that. But deep enough. The blade caught the soft tissue under her chin and pushed through, reaching her tongue from below. She made a sound that wasn't a scream yet and her grip on my throat spasmed.
Then she screamed.
Her nails came down across my face — four lines of fire from cheekbone to jaw, opening the scar tissue over whatever was underneath. I felt the warmth of it immediately, running down into my collar.
I breathed in.
Time thickened. The amber light in the corner slowed its flicker to something geological. Her nails hung in the air half an inch from my face, already trailing the evidence of what they'd done.
I moved.
The knife found the tendons at her wrists — one, then the other, precise and unhurried in the syrup of slowed time. Then her knees. Then the back of her right ankle for good measure.
I exhaled.
Time came back. She collapsed sideways off me, hands no longer responding to whatever she was telling them to do. The sounds she was making were extraordinary. I reached down and picked up the knife where it had fallen.
Guess someone just lost their mother. A pointless death really, even coming from me. Oh well.
At this level too much had been said so there was no sense in sparing her. A shame as she seemed to be one of the few that were fully against the Combine. Too bad she read too much into it.
I tried for the heart. Pressed the blade against her sternum and applied pressure and found the bone stubborn and the angle worse and my arms still not entirely cooperative.
I settled.
I drew the blade across her neck in one clean motion, left to right, the way you'd close something. Then I set the knife on the low table beside her untouched glass of wine and stood.
The room looked like a problem.
I put the mask back on. Settled it against my face. Shrugged the jacket back onto my shoulders and smoothed the lapels, which was a wasted effort given the state of the shirt beneath but the gesture felt necessary. The white suit was no longer white in any meaningful sense. I looked down at it and decided that at a hero gala, bloodstained formal wear could probably pass for a statement if you carried it correctly.
Hopefully.
At the door I paused. The lock was a simple lever mechanism. I gripped it from the inside and applied pressure until something in it bent — not broke, just deformed enough that the bolt would sit engaged without turning from either side. Then I took the small folded card from the table — the kind these rooms had for reservations — and slipped it into the external handle bracket.
Occupied.
It wouldn't hold forever. An hour, maybe. Possibly less if someone was paying attention.
I straightened my jacket one more time and walked back toward the stairs.