Soon I Will Be Invincible (20 page)

I know Blackwolf keeps a lab somewhere upstairs. It’s already a late night, but I wait until 2:30 before I go looking. Everyone is asleep and the whole building is quiet, so I just wander around until I find it. There’s a keypad lock, but, as I said, I’m good at things like that.

It’s cold inside, and pitch-dark except for bright halogen bulbs illuminating the work area. He’s in shirtsleeves and a mask. I can see wine purple bruises from yesterday’s fight.

“Fatale.” He doesn’t even have to turn around. He’s going over tapes of the fight, frame by frame, on a big flat-screen monitor. Elphin’s frozen mouth open in a silent battle shout.

“Yeah. Hi.”

He goes on working, paging forward frame by frame. Doctor Impossible is zapping someone off-camera with his walking stick.

“Look at that. It’s not the same staff he had before. He got a new one.”

“Sorry I missed out.”

“Not your fault.”

Outside, the city looks asleep, except for a few late workers twinkling in the office blocks around us.

“Look, I don’t know how to say this…. I need you to take a look atmy enhancements.”

“Sure. You having a hardware problem?”

“Kind of.”

“Just step up on the scanner. Ah, can you take the costume off? It’s shielded.”

“Okay.”

I set down my bag and step onto a glass-topped dais, a kind of walk-in MRI. There’s a lot about my body I don’t like people to see, but I guess I asked for this. It takes a minute to get the costume off. I strip down to the tank top and panties I wear underneath and take a breath. LED indicators run up my side and down one leg, glowing brilliant in the darkness. The air on my skin raises goose bumps. He can see just about everything that’s been done.

“Galatea helped build this when she was here. Just hold still for a couple of minutes.”

He does something at the keyboard and the scanning element swings over soundlessly on two long arms and gently encircles my midsection before doing a slow transit up and then down. The results come up on two of the big monitors.

It’s a full-body scan. I haven’t seen this view of myself since Protheon closed. I can see my skeleton—everything they did. On the screen, my fusion plant pulses like a second heart. A cascade of cables and jewellike points descend through me. When I move, it moves. Looking at the screen, Blackwolf is looking at me in a way no one has ever looked at me, with power or without.

He gives a low whistle. “You’re a piece of work.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I’m not kidding. This is brilliant work. Totally unconventional. Somebody wasn’t kidding around.” I’m blushing, furiously, but the monitor doesn’t show that.

“Yeah, well, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. I think…I think I found out who the somebody is.” I take a breath, then reach into the bag and toss him the metal hand I’ve been carrying around all day. “This was in Doctor Impossible’s motel room.”

He turns it over and over, his long fingers feeling the joints, spreading the fingers. You can see the same configuration in my own arm, right up there on the screen, and I can almost feel his hands on me. There’s a long silence. I can hear the air conditioning, a couple of machines beeping, the thrumming of hard drives.

No one knows much about Blackwolf’s own origin. Why he’s so good at things. A lot of people, including me, think he’s the outcome of a government breeding project. But that doesn’t really explain the crime fighting, the obsessive behavior. I want to ask, but I don’t.

“Has anyone else seen this?” he asks.

“Just you.”

“He made CoreFire, too, you know. That’s the rumor.” He takes my hand, the real one, turns it over, feeling the metal bones. His hands are still warm in the cold laboratory.

“What if there’s a bomb? Or a microphone, or a tracking device?” I feel excited just saying the words, and I’m not even sure why.

“The NSA must have checked you over. I’ll look myself, but you’re clean, I’m sure of it.”

There never was a supersoldier project. I must have been part of one of his schemes, and not even one of the good ones. There was never going to be another one of me, unless we were going to be superhenchmen robbing banks for a malicious idiot in a cape. But I’m not even that; I’m a discard. Or am I?

I step off the platform and snatch my hand back. “Get it off the screen.”

“Fatale…”

“Just get it off. Get rid of it.”

“I really don’t think it matters.”

“Maybe I’m one of them.” I’m whispering now. “Did that ever occur to you? It doesn’t have to be a bomb. I could be a traitor. It could be written in the code.”

I’m making this up. Doctor Impossible probably doesn’t even know I’m out here. But maybe he does, and I’m under his control. Maybe this is all part of it.

Blackwolf widens his stance a little as he listens, one foot feeling the floor. His pupils dilate behind the mask, and his breathing changes. I can see him waking up, noticing me in a way he’d never done before. As a threat.

“I could be the one. He could have planned every bit of this. I wouldn’t even necessarily have to know about it.” I take a step toward him. I know I’m right, and it feels powerful in a way I haven’t known before.

“Fatale…” He doesn’t go on. He’s trying to figure out how to beat me. I honestly don’t know what will happen next, but something has to. I take another step, and reach for him.

He moves so fast, he’s an afterimage on the cameras. Somehow I never thought of him as dangerous. He reads human to all my senses, just bone and meat, like the rest of them.

The world slows down. I’m moving into fighting stance, arms coming up, but it’s too late. He doesn’t hit me that hard, but he gets just enough leverage behind me to knock me off my feet, all
450-
plus pounds. By the time I hit the tile, he’s pulled an extensible police baton from somewhere I didn’t see. He’s straddling me, one hand pinning one of my arms back, the other holding the baton cocked, trembling. I’m ready to unleash some seriously nasty countermeasures, but he’s stopped. It’s a submission hold, and if I were human, I would be in agony, but I’m not.

It’s as good a chance as I’ll ever get. I could punch him through the ceiling, but I lean up to kiss him. He’s breathing hard. It’s been a while since my nonmetal days, and I’ve kind of forgotten how this goes, but I bet I can figure it out. My artificial nerves are lit up, even better than I thought they would be. I can feel the taut muscles in his forearms, even the tremor of his skin, but my hands are as strong as his, stronger even. I’m steel maybe, but I’m not dead. I’m getting a lot of error messages from my onboard systems—they don’t like having anybody this close. They keep wanting to electrocute him or break his wrist, and part of me is busy stopping them.

Our lips touch, and for a second it’s everything I thought it would be. The metal in my jaw is awkward but somehow exciting, and he kisses back. I pull him down to me, get his weight against me. I’d forgotten what it was like to want something this much. He reaches up under my shirt, and the feeling is so good it makes me want to cry. Nobody but a surgeon has touched me there for a really, really long time.

Then I make a mistake. I reach for the mask, and he catches my arm, ready to break it. His jaw sets, and I’m dealing with Blackwolf again. It’s like watching a different personality take hold, and I get a glimpse of what he’s always holding back, a terrible, unappeasable mourning. Something really god-awful must have happened to him at some point.

And the only woman he’d chosen was the closest the world could produce to an unbreakable girl. I’ll never be anything but an also-ran, half invulnerable, half twentysomething nobody. Metal alloy and flesh are nothing compared to Stormcloud’s daughter.

Before he can do anything, I catch him under the arm and lift him off of me as I get to my feet. I could break bone with the grip I’ve got, but I set him down.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Forget it,” I say, grab my costume, and slip out. The early-morning corridors are pitch-dark, but not to me.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MAYBE WE ARE NOT SO DIFFERENT, YOU AND I

         The way people talk about it, you’d think anyone could build a doomsday device. Like it’s not a power at all. But you have to remember everything, catalog everything, and realize how to fit it together in a new way, a way that solves or destroys or takes everything apart. If it were so easy, they would have figured out what I’m doing by now.

This is the last piece, the jewel, the one I’ve been putting off. I didn’t want to come back here, and I didn’t want to do it this way. I’d hoped for something subtler, and a fresh invention. But then, I’d hoped for a lot of things.

I’ll have to hope nobody sees a miniature submarine come whirring up the Charles River by night. They’ve been one step behind me for a week, Elphin and Damsel and the cyborg whose name I keep forgetting, skimming over the coastal waters. But I’m shielded from their vision, and it holds, this time.

The physics building used to be my second home, and slipping in a window is nothing to me. No one guards this stuff anyway; there are just a couple of padlocks to keep students out, and I shoulder my way through them with barely an effort. Practically my last work as a legitimate scientist, but it might as well be a stuffed polar bear.

Inside, the air gets dustier, staler. How many years has it been? I’m in front of the last door, and beyond it I can see the silhouette of the familiar apparatus, shrouded in dust cloths.

But there’s a dark figure leaning in the doorway, poised and elegant. This is the one I should have foreseen, the logical adversary. The most dangerous of the New Champions.

Mister Mystic has the pencil mustache and jet black hair of a cartoon stage magician, with high cheekbones and a long, handsome face. He stares unruffled into the barrel of my homemade plasma rifle as if it were a bouquet of flowers. He smiles and tips his hat, defiant yet elegant.

“I know what you’ve come for. But they’ve set me to guard it, you see.”

In his long, graceful fingers he flourishes a long black-lacquered wand, with an inch of white tip. He invariably appears in full evening dress—a tuxedo, dazzling white gloves, and a cape made of a cloth that flows and drapes itself with impossible elegance, regardless of local atmospheric conditions. He’s older than most of us, at least in apparent age.

I step forward and swing, and the fight is already over. He folds up at the first punch like any civilian, slumps to the floor, his cape settling over him. I prod the cape with my foot, half-expecting it to be empty, but there’s a warm body, and it’s him. He just lies there, breathing.

But Mystic has a way of wrong-footing you. I step over him and through the doorway, and everything ceases to make sense. Instead of the lecture hall beyond, I’m in a small room with identical doors on each wall. God, I hate fighting magicians.

Mister Mystic has always kind of bothered me. The Champions’ personnel database lists him as William Zard, a failed stage magician and petty crook. None of this explains why he thinks he’s a superhero.

The true history of William Zard is hardly one to strike terror into his foes. No college education—he barely finished high school. For two years, he traveled with the Merchant Marine—Europe first, then India, then the Far East. He jumped ship in Hong Kong, and there’s a notation from the American embassy concerning vagrancy. He must have made his way inland, wandering through Tibet, learning from a little-known group called the Seven, a semireputable New Age cult. He popped up again in the United States almost four years later, under the name Mister Mystic. Then we have the first record of his crime-fighting adventures.

At first, we thought he was just a hypnotist, one of those quiet, liquid-voiced masters of men. Eyewitnesses were vague, or they couldn’t remember meeting him at all, even when placed at the scene.

He still used his fists as much as his voice. Hypnotism was a show-man’s flourish, window dressing for old-fashioned fisticuffs and detective work. But he never abandoned the elaborate accoutrements of the stage magician—the final phase of an arrest would be an elaborate coup de théâtre, a curtain jerked aside to reveal the culprit already chained up, the stolen goods already back where they belonged. He had a showy knack for staging his own apparent death.

I back out, suspicious of what will happen next, and find him still there in the hall, collapsed.

I don’t like magic. I think I’ve said that. There are too many frauds mixed up with it; it reeks of old-time vaudeville and stage shows and con men. It’s shadowy and psychological and too much like hypnotism, and nobody likes what it implies about the world. It goes against the whole premise of my—well, my whole thing. That we live in an ordered universe. That the stars and planets swing around one another according to laws. And that a smart-enough man, a man who is very, very smart indeed, can apply these rules at the right time in the right way, curving one orb just a few hundred feet closer to another, and thus make himself their master, and master of all. If Mister Mystic thinks he lives in a world different from that one, I have to prove that he’s wrong and I’m right.

Mystic’s adventures take place in other dimensions, or concern legendary artifacts whose existence flatly contradicts the most basic understanding of the historical record. He seems most comfortable in his own milieu, up against werewolves or Indian fakirs—I don’t know these people—mystical menaces that never even crop up unless he’s around.

What are his powers? Depending on who you ask, he’s a player on a cosmic scale, or a skinny man in a cheap tuxedo. But I know for a fact he has gotten out of situations that should have killed a normal man. I myself saw him enter the Mayfield Sanitarium before it collapsed, and we all know how badly that situation ended. If he is a fraud, he must be a very brave one.

I tie him up in his own cape, then shake him awake.

“Magic’s not going to save you, Zard. Fix whatever you did to the hallway.”

“It’s not magic, exactly. Not the way you’re thinking of it.”

That punch didn’t bother him as much as I thought it had. He lies there bound and blindfolded, but from the sound of it, you’d think he was holding
me
captive.

“Tricks, then. Whatever it is you’ve done.”

“You want to get through the door, don’t you? Go ahead. Try. After all, you don’t even believe in magic.”

I look back toward the doorway, then nod. I can’t stay here all night. I grasp the cloth of his cape and pull him easily across the floor behind me. Whatever’s in there, he’s going to meet it, too.

A second room, as before. Then a third, and a fourth. I count footsteps. We should have been in the lecture hall by now. We should be outside the building.

“Be reasonable, Zard, or Mystic, whatever you call yourself. It’s the twenty-first century. Now where are we?”

“When you were in the eighth grade, your guidance counselor told you you were a genius. Remember that?” He ought not to have known that. His voice rises and falls in a seductive rhythm, the voice of a hypnotist, but I know about such tricks.

“So…so what?”

“Well, mine did, too,” he says, laughing a magician’s stagy laugh. And then the spell precipitates out into the warm air, a pattern of frost and mist like a huge snowflake gradually becoming apparent, etched into the pavement. The charge in the air feels like the third act of a play, or the light on a playground a moment before sunset.

The cape lies empty on the tiled floor, still tied.

Never mind. Teleportation isn’t necessarily magic. He thinks the ordinary rules don’t apply to him, but they do. They apply everywhere, even at Harvard. That’s what science is. But when I step through the doorway, it’s not the same building. It’s not even Cambridge.

This is wrong. I’ve seen this place before, but only from the outside. It’s Mister Mystic’s house, an ordinary, square-shouldered brownstone by a back corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Faded purple velvet curtains veil the dusty windows. Outside, tufts of grass grow in the neglected yard; plastic bags have snagged on the low wrought-iron fence facing Ocean Parkway. I’m breathing the exhausted air of the city’s late-summer evening.

And it seems to have been abandoned years ago. From the front hall, I can see into the sitting room and the dining room, and the staircase leading up to a second floor. A feathering of dust lies on the coffee table, the Victorian ornamentation, the ashtrays.

Tricks with time, I suppose. I try to remember when it was I left the submarine. But what am I afraid of? Ghosts? Witches? Ridiculous. But there is documented evidence of strange heroes who came from Europe in the war years, out of Dresden and Warsaw, things disturbed out of their long rest. Men who could dissolve themselves, heat metal at a distance, shriek loudly enough to shatter buildings. But I’m obliged to ignore such things until they’re proven true. That’s science.

A flicker in the dimness—he’s here. Taking no chances, I pull the trigger on my plasma pistol. But the beam strikes nothing but air and glass. The mirror shatters, and I’m alone in the darkening house. Where are his teammates? That half-alien woman, that cyborg who replaced Galatea, those are people I understand.

I wave my flashlight across a line of bric-a-brac, souvenirs from Europe and the Far East. Maybe he brought something back, some trick or device I’ve never heard of. How much space can there be back here? A stuffed tiger looms in the angle between two hallways. I watch it carefully for a minute, but it doesn’t move.

Sitting rooms, smoking rooms, a library, a music room. I lose count of the stairways; they go up and down in threes and sevens, according to no plan I can detect. I listen for traffic noise, but there isn’t any.

I stop in a paneled hallway by a bust of Schiller. I need to draw him out.

“Why not make this a fair fight, Mystic? Because you know you’re a fake. You have to hide and play tricks! I know your secrets! I know about the Seven!” My voice sounds weak, lost in all this darkness.

But he calls back, the voice coming from anywhere and nowhere. “You think I found something. You think the Secret Seven gave me something, some device. Is that your theory?”

“A gadget, some trick. You’re not a magician, Zard. It’s not possible!”

“Relax, Doctor. Enjoy the show. Didn’t you ever want to believe in magic?”

His voice is a perfectly refined baritone, a theater voice, nothing like what you’d expect from a petty crook from the suburbs. It sounds noble, and a little sad.

I follow it into another darkened room. I’m starting to lose focus—a drug in the air, in the candles? Am I back at Harvard now? Or still under the ocean in the submarine? I grope for the submarine’s steering wheel, then remember. I’m in Mister Mystic’s house. It’s dark outside now.

“I can see in the dark, Doctor. Did you know that?”

“No. No, I didn’t,” I reply under my breath.

“You think you have secrets from me. But I can see in your darkness, too, down below the dungeon you once built. The fire beneath the world, and the magical winter. The snake that ate your heart.”

Lights come up, blinding for a moment; then I see him in front of me. I’m just in time. He’s on the pocket stage of the old lecture hall, the one where CoreFire was born. The lecture hall is an enormous domed room, empty for years. Breathing in the dusty air is like drinking in memories.

Old-fashioned footlights illuminate him from below, and he’s set up what appears to be a little magic act. A chalk line forms a circle around him, and a small folding table displays the accoutrements of a children’s magic show—a hat, a deck of cards, a birdcage. And inside the cage, glowing from within, the Zeta Gem.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our show begins.” He gestures and a phantasmal audience begins to appear, holograms perhaps. I even see myself as I was in college, standing before the zeta beam device, waiting expectantly for my cue. Almost a caricature in my glasses and lab coat; nearby stand Erica and Jason himself, looking on, just as they did in my memories.

Enough. I draw my pistol and hold it on him. “Give me what I came for.”

I gesture with the gun, advancing on him, and the phantoms vanish. “Last warning.”

He shakes his head and covers the birdcage. I fire at him point-blank, but the plasma bolt stops short in midair above the chalk line. Impossible.

“This is a magic circle.” He gestures at the floor.

He taps the covered cage with his stick.

“This is a magic wand.”

He whips the cover off of the cage, and it’s gone; in its place, a dove explodes into the air. When he turns back to me, his eyes seem enormous, black.

“Look deep into my eyes….”

I can’t help myself. I do, and when he looks back, his eyes are unnervingly clear and deep. A magician’s eyes should be heavy-lidded, misty, and deceptive, but his eyes seem to see to the bottom of things, and catch something that I missed. He laughs his hysterical booming laugh one more time. A laugh that knows something.