Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (13 page)

Good. The sun will be up soon, and she wants to change into clean clothes before the Freedom Squad comes for her.

* * *

Will is the first into the abandoned warehouse, the silver-white of his suit generating its own luminescence and casting a soft glow around him. Perched on an empty shipping crate, she watches them approach— Captain Freedom, Star Sire, and Fury.

She’s surprised it took them this long. She’s left three bodies in as many months, and made little attempt to cover her tracks. On the other hand, one body might be a random act of violence, two a coincidence. Three is a pattern, a sign of a deranged mind requiring superheroic intervention. Anything less is beneath the Freedom Squad’s notice. Unless a villain makes it personal.

When they draw close enough to see her, but haven’t yet, she bangs her heel against the corrugated metal, drawing their attention. Will — Captain Freedom — is the first to look up, the catch in his breath audible.

Even wearing shapeless sweatpants and an oversize grey hoodie, even with the new pallor of her skin and the shadows in the warehouse, she knows she doesn’t look that different. He can’t fail to recognize her.

“Jenny.” Even shocked he says her name the way he always did. Never Jennifer, or even Jen. Always Jenny. “Is it really you?”

“Impossible.” Fury speaks almost before Captain Freedom finishes. A moment later, Star Sire’s sonorous voice reverberates through the space.

“I sense no deception. She is who sh
e appears to be, though there is…”

“Stop.” She cuts them off.

She has no interest in letting them define her; she will tell them what she is, explain her existence on her own terms. Three pairs of eyes shine in the light of Captain Freedom’s suit as she drops lightly to the floor.

Fury tenses, hand going to the baton holstered at her hip. Outwardly serene, but eyes watchful behind his domino mask, Star Sire hovers just above the floor, arms crossed. Captain Freedom raises his hand, commanding them to wait.

“I came back,” she says, the words plain and unadorned.

She’s shorter than any of them, not even counting Star Sire’s hovering. But their lithe perfection no longer intimidates her. In death, she has come to accept her body, growing so intimately acquainted with it after putting it back together. Her height, the slight roundness of her hips and waist, her once-glossy hair, her skin, her bones. She fought for every single one of these details; they are precious.

“But how?” Captain Freedom’s expression softens. Through the eyeholes of his mask, something almost human shows, a splinter of light she could mistake for genuine pain.

“It’s impossible, Jenny. I… held you. I buried you.” He falters.

A sudden image intrudes: Will dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Captain Freedom’s persona shed. Icy bare feet tucked under a blanket pressed against her thigh, trying to steal her warmth. She remembers yelping, almost spilling popcorn, before swatting at him them pulling him in for a kiss, bathed in the TV’s glow.

The memory— it happened just before she died. How could she have forgotten? Shaken, she steps back, keenly aware of Captain Freedom and the others watching her. She closes her eyes, probing at the fresh sense of loss. What else has been stolen?

She searches, and… There. The edges of the memory, sudden and sharp, snap her eyes wide. The memory isn’t hers. It’s a jagged shard, inserted into Captain Freedom’s life to make her loss more poignant. The moment, if it ever occurred, has no lead-up, and no aftermath but her death. It is one of a series of images, broken free of context and strung together in an arc designed to increase not her pain but Will’s. As though her life — that life — had no meaning except where it touched his.

She shakes herself, a faint buzzing haunting the periphery of her hearing. When it fades, the understanding remains, a harsh clarity banishing guilt. She straightens, pulling aside the neck of her sweatshirt to reveal a scar. Captain Freedom gapes; she tugs the sweatshirt back into place.

“I put myself back together,” she says. “I changed the story.”

“Those men…” Fury says, shattering the tension, finally giving Captain Freedom an excuse to look away.

“I killed them.” The words are cold, unflinching in the dark space.

She turns her full attention on Fury, and Fury is the one to look away. Only Star Sire meets her gaze when she shifts to him. There is something unexpected there; perhaps he is acquainted with death, too.

“You have committed a crime.” Star Sire’s voice echoes, low and deep, only the faintest note betraying him as other than human. Even if he understands her better than the others — perhaps because of it — he has the least sympathy.

“Then you should take me to Freedom Tower.” She holds out her wrists.

She turns her attention to Will, challenging. His perfect definition softens toward defeat. Looking away, he touches her arm. His voice is barely a murmur as he guides her into the rain.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

* * *

“I brought you chicken pot pie. I know it’s… I mean, it was your favorite.” Will tries on a smile as he sets a tray on the low table in front of the couch. “I’m sorry that took so long.”

“It’s okay. Wooster has been keeping me company, catching me up on your exploits.” She holds up a tablet, displaying the home screen of the Freedom Squad’s customized computer interface.

She’s holding herself rigid, perched on the edge of the couch. How did she used to sit? She leans on one elbow, tucking her feet up beside her. Will takes the other end of the couch, keeping a wary distance.

Rather than thinking too hard about whether she’s wearing a neutral expression, whether she’s remembering to breathe at the right times to set him at ease, she thinks about the other members of the Freedom Squad and the meeting Will’s just come from, where they likely discussed her fate. Star Sire doesn’t trust her; Fury doesn’t either. She occupies the liminal space between prisoner and guest— confined to a comfortable common room with the doors locked, but not actively restrained.

Only Will trusts her unconditionally. Of course he does. She broke his heart by dying, and he wants to believe time has turned backward. He’s still looking for some trick, some deception to explain her presence and why she claims to have murdered three men and left their bodies for the Freedom Squad to find.

“You should try it. It’s good.” Will gestures to the pie.

She pierces the crust releasing steam, and the creamy smell of butter and herbs.

“My mother used to make this for me.” She frowns at the memory, sluggish and slow. “She made it the first time I brought you home. You asked for the recipe.”

Pictures come with the memory— Will, Captain Freedom, the man who didn’t blink when he single-handedly faced down the League of Seven’s death squad, brought low by meeting her mother. Palms sweating, nervous, unsure what to do with his hands. And her mother, teasing him, a smile crinkling the corners of her eyes, asking about secret identities and form-fitting costumes.

When he’d finally calmed down enough to appreciate her mother’s humour, they’d had a lovely meal. It was the moment she’d known she was in love with Will, wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.

The memories belong to someone else.

She reaches for them, these phantom memories. They are hers, but they aren’t. There are gaps. Her life is a book; the page she’s on is here and now but preceding pages are nonexistent until she riffles backward through them. And every single page she reads intersects with Will. There is no her without him.

The crackling flaky pastry is dull and tasteless in her mouth. Two conflicting truths exist in her head: she has never tasted this chicken pot pie until now; she remembers her mother pulling it fresh from the oven on a cold winter day. She remembers cheeks chapped red from the cold and oversize mittens. She remembers her aunt’s farm on the border of Québec and Ontario, the racket of cats and cousins and noise, and her, an only child. She remembers the maple tree in her backyard and the swing, the ropes holding it up cutting into the bark. She remembers…

But that version of her —
Jenny
— doesn’t exist. Never did. She wants that life. She longs for the bliss of oblivion, for a giant reset button putting everything back the way it used to be.

Knowledge tickles the back of her mind. She could bring it back, that life. She doesn’t know how she bent the rules to cheat death, how she understands these things about herself, or Will, and the story that contains them. She simply
knows
, the way the memory of Will in front of the TV, or Will meeting her mother, came to her.

It’s tempting to let it go. But then her memories subsume her, the her she is now. The real her. The tiny concerns of Jenny’s life — grocery lists, work, evenings with Will, Sunday dinner with her mother — grind against dying, being ripped apart and putting herself back together. This is her story now; she won’t let the old narrative catch her up, sweep her along. Even if it could heal her wounds. Even if it could make her fall in love with Will again.

“Thank you, Will.” She sets the plate aside.

It’s the first time she’s spoken his name aloud since coming back. It tastes strange in her mouth— sharper and more immediate than the food.

Questions crowd his eyes. He’s taken off the domino mask. The faint glow remains, even out of his costume. He looks like a regular man— maybe a bit handsomer, more defined, but human nonetheless.

“I killed those men, Will.” She straightens, meets his eye. “No one forced me to do it. I’m not being mind-controlled. I’m not my own evil clone.”

She allows a slight smile at the last. Will flinches as the words hit close to home, but she brushes them away.

“Your methods weren’t working. Your methods
don’t
work.”

She retrieves the tablet and calls up a video from the local news showing the Freedom Squad’s takedown of an attempted robbery.

Will is a streak of light in the foreground; Fury a blur of motion pummelling a crook. Star Sire rips out a section of the bank’s counter and smashes it across the door to prevent a criminal’s escape. Glass shatters, and beyond the window three other members of the Freedom Squad can be seen inadvertently causing a multi-car collision.

“Or this.” She flips to video of Zephyr smashing the Red Death through two successive buildings, chunks of concrete raining down, dust filling the air, panicked screams everywhere.

“Or this.”

She turns the tablet to show a still photograph of the first victim of the man she executed in the park. The woman’s arms are wrapped around a Golden Retriever. She grins at the camera; her cheek is not shattered, bruises don’t ring her neck, her body is not lacerated, left to rot beneath a pile of leaves.

The death, the damage, she doesn’t show him is her own— her body pinned to the wall of the Freedom Tower. Proto Star, Captain Freedom’s nemesis, his opposite, his twin, used endurium bands to hold her in place. A metal only Captain Freedom, or Proto Star himself, could break.

“I don’t understand.” Will’s expression is tight, pained.

She flips back to the second video. “How many people were saved in this fight?”

“Red Death was holding seven hostages, but if we hadn’t reached him in time he could have killed dozens.”

“And where is he now?”

“In High Gate, maximum-security ward.”

“How many times has he been there before?”

Will frowns, forehead creasing. She flips back to the photograph of the smiling woman with the Golden Retriever.

“If you’d caught the man who killed her, would he stand trial?”

Will’s frown deepens, but he has an answer this time. “Of course.”

She sighs, setting the tablet aside. “Before I killed him, Jackson Penton murdered six women. People like that don’t get better. They don’t stop unless they’re stopped, and prison doesn’t cure them. The Red Death has been in and out of High Gate at least thirty-seven times. That’s only counting since he became a supervillain and they started putting him in a supposedly inescapable institution.”

“If this is about what happened to you…” Will reaches for her hand.

His touch is an electric shock. She can’t stop herself from flinching back, doesn’t want to. She stares at Will. Can he really not see the larger picture?

His expression is guileless, his eyes wide. Then she sees it — a flash, a spark of color, or the lack of it — something looking out from behind Will’s eyes. It’s not possession, not mind control, not any of the other supervillain tricks. It’s something worse, something much more insidious; the narrative, holding him tight.

But he is oblivious. Beyond the edges of her vision, at the back of her mind, outside the frame, something wants her to give in, to let go.

She wants to shove back, hard, but there’s nothing to shove against. She laughs, a low, broken sound made raw and harsh by death. The spark in Will’s eyes is gone, replaced by something else. Concern?

She doubles over. She can’t breathe. But of course she doesn’t breathe anymore. Dirt, six feet of it to be precise, and the worms crawling through it, the rot of leaves, the damp of rain— all of it is inside her, trying to force its way out of her throat with the laugh. It hurts, not like the pain of dying or putting herself back together, but it’s the first genuine sensation she’s felt since returning. The first thing that’s really hers.

“Oh, God. Don’t you get it? Even your name is a joke. Captain Freedom. Will? Free Will?”

“Jenny…” He touches her arm, and the sound of his name for her snaps her back. She pulls her arm away, anger returning and cutting off the laughter abruptly.

“Don’t call me that. It’s not my name. It never was, but especially now.”

“What are you talking about?”

She’s shaking, the absence of breath a force in itself. Her stiff muscles want to cramp, to lock up. Rigor mortis setting in for good.

“Tell me one thing about me,” she says, jaw tight enough to make her teeth ache.

“What?”

“One thing. Go on.”

“I…” He falters.

“You can’t. I was a prop, meant to bring you pain. I died so you could grow, but have you? Has anything really changed?”