Day's End

Published by Peitho Press
Detroit, Michigan, 2016

© 2016 Colleen Vanderlinden

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the author at
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Contents

For my daughters —
May you write your own stories, be your own heroes, and never, ever stop growing.

Part One
Savior

Chapter One

“Next up on Detroit Today: the death of a super villain. Is Daystar a menace or a hero? Is Mayhem’s destruction of superhero teams really such a loss? We’ll update you on the latest kidnapped powered children. And hear what a psychologist has to say about the mental stability of the average powered being—”

Jenson snapped the television off. “Assholes,” she muttered. We were in David’s lab, where he was working on some improved dampening collars. He sat, hunched over his workbench, while several Jensons monitored incoming security and media feeds. Jenson — the real Jenson — sat with me. We were testing out some of the new tech David had come up with for me. Mostly environmental and physiological monitoring stuff, but there was some new cloaking gadget he’d been trying to get working since shortly after the Tribunal had called for me to turn myself in after Render’s death. He nearly had it right. It didn’t turn me invisible, but it kind of made my armor blend into whatever my surroundings were. The only problem seemed to be that if I moved, it held onto the old surroundings for too long before blending into the new one.

“I mean, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we’re wired differently, probably,” David said from his part of the lab. “Look at us. Really, look at anyone in any kind of law enforcement or military situation. We run into places everyone else has the sense to run away from. We signed up for this voluntarily.”

“Yeah, but you know the point they’re trying to make is that we’re somehow unbalanced and dangerous, and the powers are to blame for that,” Jenson said.

“The powers just make everything
more
of whatever it was. So if you’re violent and controlling, the powers let you be more of that. We scare the hell out of them, and I can’t even blame them for that,” I said, setting aside the dampening collar I’d been testing. “It’s why they see Killjoy and Mayhem as a good thing. Having us organized, in positions of power? It scares the shit out of them. So every team his little crew manages to take down makes them sleep a little better at night.”

The room was silent. The fact was, we hadn’t actually seen Killjoy do any of it. The last shreds of the previous incarnation of Mayhem were still locked up here at Command: Raider, the red leather twins, the electro that was Daemon’s cousin, plus Alpha and his people. We still had Daemon, too, and he had continued to be an asset to us during his confinement. So Killjoy had either gathered a new team that quickly, or he’d had more people waiting in reserve. Either notion made me want to scream. He was out there. He’d been credited with bringing down three city’s super hero teams in the past month, even though nobody had actually seen him anywhere near any of the scenes. He was hitting the hero teams hard. He was winning, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Ever since the day Render had died, I’d been pretty much confined to Command. I’d gone out a few times, mainly to get Justin, who we now knew to be our friend Detroit UnPowered, and a few times tracking down what was left of Killjoy’s known facilities. I’d expected that to draw him out. Instead, he’d been silent.

Honestly, I would have felt better if he’d been around and up to his old tricks. This silence, this calmness while they utterly and systematically destroyed some of the smaller super teams was making me jumpy. Every day I didn’t hear from him or those working for him was another day he had to surprise us with something really, really bad. I had the nagging feeling that he was planning on working his way up to the more powerful super teams, and he was just biding his time until he was ready. Keeping quiet gave him time to regroup, and probably recruit more assholes to work for him. Time to gather new facilities, new supplies. More money. We’d helped the Detroit police take in a good number of Detroit Mafia members, and most of them were now in federal custody. But we hadn’t gotten the big guy, the one who’d arranged the little working relationship between the Mafia and Killjoy. The head of the Giannotti crime family was still out there somewhere, and despite the leads Daemon had given to the feds regarding his uncle, the old mob boss was nowhere to be found. So we had to believe that Killjoy was still getting funding, because now Giannotti would need Killjoy’s muscle even more, with so much of his organization in custody.

And all of that, all of that mess, all of that murder and craziness… that wasn’t even all of it. The kidnapping of powered kids that we’d started tracking weeks ago had continued. Dozens of powered kids missing across the world, without a trace. It had taken a while for the media to connect the dots. Justin had actually been instrumental in pushing the story on his show, in getting the stories of the families out there. Unsurprisingly, it had only made the general population more nervous about powered people. Of course, there was sadness that kids were missing. Any parent seems to be able to relate to that fear. But underneath it all, there was this weird line of tension. Some of the worst anti-powered groups had praised the kidnappings, believing that it was the act of someone like them, someone who hated powered people.

I wasn’t so sure about that. Any one of those powered kids would have kicked the snot out of a non-powered person who tried to mess with them.

So, yeah, it was all pretty much a mess, and there was no way we could keep up with it all.

But other than the few times I’d gone out tracking leads, I’d been stuck at headquarters. Even I had to admit that it was stupid for me to be out in the open when everyone from the Tribunal to the Mafia wanted a piece of me for one reason or another. It wasn’t lost on me that an actual murderer was being heralded as a hero, while I was basically on house arrest for beating the hell out of another actual murderer who just happened to die of his injuries. Fear makes people illogical and stupid. I tried not to hold it against them, but it wasn’t easy.

I had other shit to worry about.

Despite the fact that I didn’t exactly feel bad about it, Render’s death still haunted me. I’d most definitely been trying to kill him when I’d taken him down after he’d injured Ryan. I’d wanted him dead in that moment, and it was only afterward, when he was in custody, that I was glad I hadn’t succeeded. It had given me time to try to get my head right. To be grateful that I hadn’t taken a step I couldn’t come back from. Time to remind myself that we’re supposed to be above shit like killing, because there are judges and juries and laws that are there to decide someone’s fate.