The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (19 page)

Chapter
30:

Trust/Fall

To someone on the ground, walking
through the City, they might have looked up into the sky and seen a shooting
star cutting across the twilight, a white streak of light hurtling toward the
earth, silent and harmless.

      Turning to the left, they might
then see something even more unusual, a streak of fire, its trajectory putting
it on a collision course with the shooting star. A meteor, burning up in the
atmosphere? Something more nefarious? What were these things falling from the
sky?

      The ball of fire, of course, was
Jane, fist extended in flight, her eyes never wavering from the falling form
she knew to be Billy. She could hear Titus on the earpiece trying to get Billy
to respond, saying his name over and over again, receiving no response. He
plummeted in a steady arc, not his usual playful darting about, and the closer
Jane got, the more she thought the worse was happening. Why was he falling? Was
he dead? Unconscious?

      "Come on, Billy Case, wake
up," Jane said.

      She poured on the speed, getting
close enough to make out Billy's shape within the ball of light. His limbs
dangled loose, his shoulders slumping forward, head lolling against his chest.
She pushed herself even faster. Now she could see the looseness of his hands,
his closed eyes. Falling. Straylight was in free fall.

      "This game again, is it?"
Jane said, aiming herself at the prone hero in front of her.

      "What was that?" Titus
said into her earpiece, but Jane ignored him. She focused on one place: Billy's
wrist, somewhere to grab hold of, to keep him from crashing. What would happen
if he hit the ground? Jane thought? Would his shields hold, or would the impact
kill him? Would the crash hurt anyone there in the City? What if he hit
something explosive?

      Closer now, almost there, her hand
outstretched, fingers extended, but he was falling so fast…

      "Em, where are you,"
Jane said.

      "Where are you?" Emily
responded through the earpiece.

      "In the air, above the
downtown," Jane said, gritting her teeth as she reached for Billy and missed.

      "Are you serious?"

      "Em I need some help here,"
Jane said.

      "I'm moving as fast as I can!"
Emily said.

      Jane knew she was on her own,
picturing Emily's tugboat-like flight puttering toward them. Once more she
willed herself faster, felt a burst of fire explode forth from her feet, and
she was there, reaching Billy, grabbing hold, catching his forearm in her grip.
She lifted, feeling the tug of his weight against her shoulder, feeling his
body shudder as it stopped falling too suddenly, his bright white aura mixing
with the gold of her flames.

      She felt his hand grab hold of her
wrist in response and looked down.

      His face was gaunt and hollow, the
color under his eyes bruised. There were broken blood vessels across his
cheeks. But he was smiling.

      "Hey, you," he said
weakly.

      "Look what I found,"
Jane said.

      "You caught me," Billy
said.

      "Just returning the favor,"
Jane said.

      "Pretty good aim considering
I just fell from the moon, I think," Billy said. "I think my shoulder's
dislocated."

      "I did that," Jane said,
swerving around to start flying them back toward the Labyrinth. "You find
what you were looking for out there?"

      "Jane," Billy said. "The
stuff I saw out there."

      "Good? Bad?"

      "Everything," he said,
still dangling from Jane's grip. "Good, bad, and everything in between."

Chapter
31:

Empathy
Emily

Bedlam couldn't believe she was getting
bored already. Couple of near death experiences, fight a few aliens, and suddenly
some hours in a quiet, secure location and she was ready to start climbing the
walls.

      So she paced the Labyrinth,
wandering wherever the signs and corridors would take her. She spent a little
time looking over research with Titus, but then they got wind that Straylight
was in trouble and everyone scrambled into action.

      So Bedlam hung around. Alone.

      Not quite part of the team yet, am
I? she thought.

      She decided to head down to the
infirmary, where she'd heard Jane had taken Billy after the rescue. Might as
well get a look at him, see how things went. She was curious what he'd come
across.

      When she got there, though, Emily
sat in the waiting area, arms folded, as if expecting her.

      "Hello, Bedlam," Emily
said.

      "Hello," she said,
echoing her melodramatic tone.     

      "I thought I might see you
here," Emily said, with cartoonish suspicion.

      "Oh really," Bedlam
said. "You a detective now?"

      Emily did a spot on impersonation
of Benedict Cumberbatch's accent as Sherlock Holmes.

      "Consulting detective,"
she quoted. "Only one in the world. I invented the job."

      "You are so weird,"
Bedlam said.

      "We have to talk," she
said.

      "About what?"

      "About the Billy thing,"
Emily said.

      "What Billy thing. There's no
Billy thing."

      Emily patted the seat next to her.
Bedlam, resigned, sat down.

      "Look, we're just going to
bomb the Bechdel test right now, but I'm just going to say it: Billy has had a
crush on you for like more than a year and I don't want to see you mess with
him in any way," Emily said.

      "Are you seriously calling
dibs or something?" she said

      "What? Huh? No! Oh. No, not
at all," Emily said. "Billy's not my type. I'm—no. He's my best
friend, though, and I do not truck with people messing with him."

      "Why do you think I'm going
to mess with him?" Bedlam said.

      "Because you strike me as the
type of person who messes with people," Emily said.

      "This from you. I've hung out
with you approximately twice and all you do is mess with people," Bedlam
said.

      Emily growled.

      "I'm just saying. He's
sensitive. Don't toy with his heart or whatever," she said.

      "You realize he and I have
never actually had a conversation outside of either beating the hell out of
each other or breaking him out of prison, right?"

      "… I thought he asked you out
to coffee," Emily said.

      "Apparently we've all been
really, really busy or something," Bedlam said. She studied the younger
girl, in her mismatched uniform and blue hair and bravado. Her annoyance
drained away. "Look, I don't know him at all, okay? I barely know any of
you. It's funny to joke that he has a crush on me but it's like having a crush
on a cartoon character. We're not real people to each other."

      "Not yet," Emily said.

      "Right, not yet," Bedlam
said. "Do I think he's a good looking kid? Yeah, I think he's a
good-looking kid. I'm a little weirded out that he's got an alien living in his
brain, but half my body is made out of car parts so who am I to judge anyone
else for their quirks? I don't get why you're so freaked out about this."

      "He's a profoundly sad guy,"
Emily said, not making eye contact. "I'm just concerned about him is all.
He's my best friend and I don't like worrying about him, and I can't protect
him against things like crushes. Aliens I can help out with. Monsters? Sure. A
crush? Nope."

      Bedlam leaned back against the wall
behind her. She could hear the servos in her limbs humming. Most of the time
she could tune it out, but sometimes all she heard was her cyborg pieces and it
drove her insane, some sort of white noise endurance test.

      "Trust me, he's not the only
profoundly sad person around," Bedlam said. "I get the impression
there's two more of us right now in this stupid waiting room."

      Emily stopped staring at the floor
and faced Bedlam.

      "Yeah," she said, her
eyes shiny and big.

      "A tough life, isn't it?"
Bedlam said.

      "I'm pretty sure there's no other
kind of life than a tough one," Emily said.

      "That's pretty deep for a
lunatic," she said.

      "I get that a lot,"
Emily said and popped up out of her chair. "I'm going to go see if he's
awake yet. You want to come with me?"

      "Not afraid I'm going to walk
in there and pull his heart out, 'Temple of Doom' style?"

      "Can we pretend we never had
that part of the conversation?" Emily said.

      Bedlam laughed.

      "Fine," she said,
standing up. "Sure, I'll come with you. And hey?"

      "Hey what," Emily said.

      "What is your type, anyway?"
Bedlam said.

      Emily made a face and wagged her
hands in the air.

      "Wouldn't you like to know?"
she said, laughing. "C'mon. Let's go freak Billy out. He doesn't know you're
here."

Chapter
32:

The
god on the island

Doc Silence and Henry Winter
materialized on a snowy island, gray mist hanging all around them like a sad
song. Henry immediately turned up his collar and grimaced as his cane sank into
the snow.

      "Could've warned me I needed
to bring a hat," he said.

      Doc ignored him.

      Henry walked to the edge of the
island, and where water should have been, he found nothing but open air, a drop
into foggy gray nothingness. He kicked a clump of snow over the edge and
watched it fall away into the mist.

      "This place goes against
everything I believe in," Henry said.

      "You traveled through a
magical portal to get here," Doc said. "You going to pull the
scientist card on me right now?"

      Doc started to walk away, but
slowly, allowing Henry to limp along and catch up.

      "It's just… it's an island in
the sky, Doc," Henry said. "Even you have to question why it doesn't
fall."

      "Magic," Doc said,
smirking. Henry hit him on the shin with his cane. "Watch it or I'll make
that cane evaporate."

      "Ha ha," Henry said.

      They came across a campsite, logs
in a semi-circle covered in snow, a fire pit burned down and blackened, cool
and damp. On the far side of the camp there stood a cave, ringed with snow like
a frozen mouth, too dark to see inside.

      "We really need to ask him to
help?" Henry said.

      "I'm not about to throw these
kids into space and possibly to their death and still allow his royal highness
to sit in a cave and ignore us," Doc said. "I refuse."

      "You do all the talking,
then," Henry said. "He never liked me."

      "He never liked any of us,"
Doc said. "But that's not relevant now."

      Doc strode around the dead
campfire, throwing a fireball from his hand into the pit, setting it ablaze. He
pulled a bottle of what looked like red wine out of his coat—Henry wondered
briefly if there had been a hidden pocket inside, or if Doc conjured the bottle
from thin air as well—uncorked it with a twist of his wrist, and took a sip.

      "Korthos of Aramaias, the
Truthbringer, the Dragon's Son! Get your sorry backside out here and talk to
me. It's Doc."

      No sound came from the cave. Doc
rattled the bottle. Henry could hear the booze lurching around inside.

      "Come on, Kevin, get out
here. I want to talk to you," Doc said. "I have mead."

      "Go away, wizard. I want none
of what you're selling," a booming voice rumbled from within the cave. "And
don't call me Kevin."

      "I'm certainly not calling
some petulant child hiding in a cave the Dragon's Son," Doc said. "You
want to be treated with respect, start acting like you deserve it."

      Henry's breath caught in his
throat. Snow fell in light flecks, catching on Doc's dark coat. Finally, a
shape appeared at the mouth of the cave—a man, seemingly made of nothing but
writhing muscles. He was shirtless and wearing an armored kilt below the waist,
his hair, the dark blue of early morning sky, belt-length and braided to hang over
one shoulder. His beard, the same dark blue, was also long and elaborately
braided and framed a face that was something both human and not, as if he were
from another place and time, carved out of the ancient ancestors of humanity.
He was both handsome and horrible to look at, a wonderment of violence. In his
hand he held a halberd taller than he stood, its blade black as oil.

      "Hi, Kevin," Doc said.

      Henry cringed again. That name.
Doc was taunting him. Goading him.

      "You have come to my island
uninvited, magician. You best have a better reason than a bottle of sour mead,"
the massive man said, snatching the bottle from Doc's hand and drinking half of
it in one long drag.

      "You know that fight you've
always wanted? The one where you can finally prove yourself? Well it's coming,"
Doc said. "I thought you might like to know."

      "I'm done with fighting for
your world," Korthos said. He spit into the fire.

      Henry heard the saliva sizzle
there. For the first time, the huge man seemed to notice him.

      "I see you brought the tinker
with his soft money-counting hands."

      "Good to see you too,
Korthos," Henry said.

      The warrior shot Doc a disdainful
look.

      "Even the tinker knows to
call me by my proper name," he said.

      "I'll call you what I want
to, Kevin. Until you prove to me you deserve all those honorifics after your
name."

      "I have fought wars on a
dozen planes. By your side and alone. I have murdered tyrants and killed
monsters from across dimensions. I deserve—"

      "If you deserved respect you
wouldn't have to ask for it," Doc said. "All I know is you came up
here to your little island and ignored your home world for years and now that
it needs you again you're still sitting here, what, playing dice games all by
yourself?"

      The warrior rose to his full
height. Somehow, Henry thought, the silence was worse than the bluster.

      "What are your 'years' to me,"
Korthos said. "I am of time unending."

      "And what good has that done
you?" Doc said. "You used to have purpose. Now you're just the son of
a dead god from a religion no living human except myself has ever even heard
of. Instead of honoring your fallen pantheon, you retired. I hope the fishing
is marvelous here on your little floating island."

      "How dare you speak of my
family like that?" Korthos said. "I am—"

      "You're what, Kevin? What?"
Doc said. "A god? You're a demi-god. And you used to be a hero. You used
to be a fine, wonderful hero. And now you're either lazy or cowardly, and
neither of those things look good on you up here."

      Henry's stomach became a pit of
acid. He could feel the anger emanating off Korthos like static electricity.

      "I will not be spoken to like
this! Not by some petty charlatan hedge wizard who—"

      Doc pulled off his glasses, his
eyes flaring in bright purple flames. Their light reflected off the snow,
turning the campsite into a violet hellish nightmare.

      "I am Doctor Silence, last
Silver Wizard of the Council Prime, holder of the Seven Flames. The Eye of All
Things Points to me. I am Demon Blooded, High General in the Army of the
Dreamless, First Mage of the Nightmare Kingdom, the Flame of the Forgotten Way.
And by all my names Korthos Truthbringer . . . I. Will. Speak. To. You . . .
however I bloody well want to."

      Henry Winter stared with his mouth
hanging wide open as the wizard and the warrior stood like statues, eyes locked
in a battle of wills.

      The bottom of the bottle of mead
cracked and fell away, spilling the remains into the snow like black blood. Doc
spoke softly then.

      "You forgot to pour a draught
for your fallen brothers, Kevin," Doc said. "If you remembered who
you were, you would have done that first."

      The monstrous man looked at the
empty, broken bottle in his hands with an unreadable expression. He no longer
made eye contact with Doc.

      "Consider what I said,
Korthos Aramaias," Doc said. "There's a war coming. It would be a
better war if you were on our side once more."

      With that, Doc stormed away,
leaving Korthos illuminated by the firelight, still staring at the empty
bottle.

      Henry waved at him weakly. "It
was good to see you again, man," he said, hobbling away quickly. "Um.
Sorry about the mess." Then, he scurried along, catching up to Doc, who
was walking with long, angry strides toward the shore of the floating island.

      "What the hell was that!"
Henry said.

      "It was properly motivating
him to stop pouting," Doc said.

      "And all those names? Were
you just making stuff up at the end?"

      Doc stopped, put his glasses back
on his face, and smirked at Henry. "I might have made a few of them up,
yeah."

      "You really are a charlatan,
aren't you?" Henry said.

      "All magicians are, by
degrees," Doc said. He let out a deep sigh of relief, and Henry could see
the wizard had been terrified the entire time, his whole body bound up in fear
and tension.

      "If you were just going to do
all that, why even bring me?" Henry said.

      "You were here in case it
didn't work and he decided to chop my fool head off," Doc said. "I
figured you could at least stall him long enough for us to teleport out of
there."

      "And if I couldn't?"
Henry said.

      "Well, if nothing else, I
wanted a witness if he killed me," Doc said.

      Henry exhaled his own sigh of
relief as Doc opened up a portal home.

      "Do you think it worked?"
he asked.

      "No idea," Doc said. "I
guess we'll find out if he shows up."