Soon I Will Be Invincible (22 page)

“Your reign of terror is over, Doctor Impossible. You’re coming with me.” It hadn’t been that much of a reign, actually. Maybe more of a stewardship.

The Impossiblaster was my last chance. It was the nastiest thing I could build that still fit in one hand, absolute small-arms hellfire. I held it on him for about five seconds as he walked toward me, the flames washing over him, and he didn’t flinch. I could feel the reflected heat of it.

“Nice try, Impossible!” Jesus. I waited until the overhead light came on, then threw it at him.

And then there was nothing to do but to put up my fists, which looked about a third the size of his. I have long fingers, meant for control knobs and test tubes, not striking things. I’m a scientist, I think I should remind you. But I had decided not to go quietly. I would see this through.

“Take that!”

We faced off a moment in silence, and then he reached for me. He put his hands on me, a scientist! I recall there was a brief pursuit around the command console. I may have flailed at him once or twice. I managed to inform him, before passing out entirely, that he hadn’t heard the last of Doctor Impossible.

I came to in the air, dangling by my cape as he flew me back to the authorities. Hanging limp, face averted, I pretended to be unconscious the whole five hours until we arrived in Ottawa. And I kept the mask on.

The trial was mercifully brief. Bank robbery, racketeering, blackmail, countless zoning and regulatory violations. But they didn’t discover my original name. My fingerprints are long gone, and even dental records can be faked. I didn’t stay inside long—they weren’t prepared for me, that time.

After that first outing, the game was afoot. The next time we met, he and I were old enemies—nemeses.

The thing of it is, I actually liked Erica, even afterward. Even after the headline
HERO THWARTS WOULD-BE WORLD CONQUEROR
appeared over her byline. She was a sharp writer, although her book of short stories never got much attention.

I didn’t see her much after that—she was swept away into the bright lights of the superhero world and the society pages. But I followed her work later on when it appeared in the
Sun,
all her Champions stories. Good work. She even broke the news of Lily’s origin.

And yes, I took her hostage a few times—just in the early days, to draw CoreFire out. It never failed to get him moving. I would snatch her off the street and roar off in a supersonic aircraft of my own design, then tie her to the columns in my laboratory as the doomsday machine powered up.

And if my eyes behind the mask seemed to gleam with a special, yearning intensity, waiting for her to look, to recognize me, I don’t think she took any notice. Something about my approach just failed to attract her attention.

In later years, true, we drifted apart. You can’t just take the same hostage every time. Not that my dating techniques grew any more sophisticated in the meantime. But she must be out there somewhere. I’m still waiting for that interview.

The Zeta Gem lies cool in my hand, the last piece of the puzzle. It looks like glass or a ruby, but I know how to build a machine that will tap its energy, enough to move the planet. I shake my head, still fuzzy from Mister Mystic’s routine, but it clears as I walk unseen back through the Yard and through the side streets down to the Charles River. In three days, I’m going to conquer the world, but I’ve lost my chance at him. CoreFire will go down in history as the man I couldn’t beat.

It’s hard not to feel a little sorry. Perhaps it’s only professional pride—I made him, after all, and I like my creations to last. And we did have a score to settle, he and I. The world thought it began in Nova Scotia, but it had a deeper subterranean history stretching so much further back. It’s even possible that he knew it, too—what if we were both pretending up in Nova Scotia, each for his own reasons, and then forever afterward?

We’ll never know. I was going to beat him, and on the day I beat him, I was going to take my mask off and stare into his face, and let him know that it was me all along. The whole world would have known Doctor Impossible beat CoreFire, but most of all, Jason Garner would have known that I beat
him.
To a pulp. But now he never will.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SECRET ORIGINS

         I knew this would happen. That this would end in some awful screwup, and that would be it for me and the Champions. New Champions. Whatever. I knew a hundred fancy uniforms wouldn’t make up the difference between them and me. I wonder if Doctor Impossible’s island is where I should be now; maybe he’d even take me as a henchman. Maybe Lily can tell me.

Damsel must know something’s going on. Blackwolf’s acting normal, just ignoring me, but I blush every time he walks into the room. You’d think being part machine would have some advantage in that area. Maybe if I really were a robot. Thank God Elphin manages to ignore it, or more likely is blissfully oblivious to anything unrelated to her weird fantasy life.

To make matters worse, Doctor Impossible is nowhere to be found. Every day we don’t find him is another day for him to figure out how to beat us. Every day we expect to hear him announce that our pitiful world is doomed, that the Earth will soon be his. He is doing something diabolical, somewhere; that much is certain. I wonder what it will be like to meet him.

The hunt for magical devices is in full swing, and the idea is to split into subteams, which comes as something of a relief. Blackwolf is in Los Angeles, Feral is handling Prague, and Stormcloud has come out of retirement to sit up at the Phantom Satellite. Lily’s seeing a villain friend. But no one’s thinking about those possibilities. They’re thinking about the Scepter of Elfland, a piece of fairy-tale logic escaped into our world. Damsel will go all the way to Angkor Wat this afternoon, but before she leaves she gives me the mission.

She is back in full ice queen persona for the briefing in the Crisis Room. She hands me a stack of printout. She knows. She must.

“I want you to search out every one of these magical artifacts. Confirm they’re in place and not tampered with, and warn the owners that Doctor Impossible is on the prowl for a power source. Can you do that?”

I nod, not really trusting myself to say anything, or even look her in the eye.

“Good. I’m sending Elphin along to look after you. You can have the ChampJet if you want.”

Great. I don’t ask where Mister Mystic is—apparently, no one’s ever supposed to ask what he’s doing. I just hope there’s somebody I can beat up at the end of this trip.

There’s no further comment. The Scepter of Elfland has been placed, diplomatically, at the close of my list, without comment, and I wonder about that. Am I being sent to face our worst foe? Maybe, but it’s like a secret between Damsel and me. I’m going to meet the woman who raised her after her mother left, and that’s an odd little intimacy, especially in light of recent events. For the millionth time, I wish I understood how superteams work, what the dynamic here is supposed to be. Am I supposed to end up fighting Damsel? Are we fighting already? And who’s winning?

The rest of the list turns out to be people on the magical fringe of superherodom, most of them in Manhattan itself and the outer boroughs. Apparently, magical superheroes don’t quite do it the way the rest of us do, and we get a tour of the least likely places you could think of to find a superhero. In fact, I have only Damsel’s word for it that the whole thing isn’t a joke or a hazing ritual. We interview a psychic healer in an inappropriately slinky dress, and in a corporate boardroom, a voice speaks out of a brazen mask. We meet an improbably muscled man wearing a bright red outfit, living in a garret, and a private investigator with hooves. All shake their heads—no sign of Doctor Impossible.

In Newark, I visit an actual magic shop, a dusty antique store that looks like an empty storefront from the outside. Inside, it’s bigger, and full of old clocks; tapestries; mannequins and dressmakers’ dummies; gowns and tuxedos and a ceremonial saber that might have been swung in the Crimean War. An old man comes out from behind a curtain in the back, just a piece of patterned fabric tacked across a door frame. I get the sense that it would be a very bad idea to make a deal with him. I flash my ID, and back out once he tells me everything is okay.

Regina herself turns out to live in Phoenix. It makes sense now that Damsel would choose someone else for this, but I can’t tell if sending me is punishment or a sign that she’s beginning to trust me. I have to admit I’m curious—Damsel’s family life has long been a subject of speculation.

I make the call to Phoenix myself to tell her we we’re coming. Her real name has always been a big secret, but this late in the game, they’re letting me in on some of the classified files, files that go all the way back to the Super Squadron.

She called herself Regina, and she fought crime until the early 1970s. She was the first of the Super Squadron to retire. A tall, dark woman with a commanding eye, she wore a crown and robes that gave her strength, and fought with a mystic scepter that cast a ruby ray that had power over evil minds, and could perform other feats, as well.

Or so she claimed. She also claimed to be the surviving member of a band of children that had acquired monarchical power in the feudal government of a pseudomedieval civilization of a dimension populated by humans, elves, and talking animals. The difficulty arose because this was, in fact, the plot of a popular series of children’s books called
Four Children in Elfland.
It was as if she expected to be taken seriously as law enforcement on the strength of an acquaintance with Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin. She wouldn’t be the first major hero to succumb to mental instability later in life.

Not long after the Champions formed, she retired into her secret identity, which she had gone to great lengths to protect. Then she just disappeared from sight, as superheroes do, except for a controversial interview conducted in great secrecy and later published in
The New Yorker.
The Scepter of Elfland is still on the books, a class-A magical artifact.

I park the rental car in front of the house, which is in a quiet suburb of Phoenix. Elphin’s been chattering aimlessly since we flew in, about Titania and fights she’s been in and the weather here and about different kinds of trees, which she seems to pay a lot of attention to. Our training duel on the first day is a forgotten thing for her.

It’s the middle of the afternoon, and the lengthening shadows are just beginning to cross the roads. A couple of newspapers are lying around on the front lawn. But Regina said she’d be home, and there’s a car in the driveway.

Elphin looks around, puzzled. “Is she not a queen? I do not see her attendants.” I was afraid of this.

“Um, I was thinking you could wait in the car. To, you know, keep watch.” As a social being, Elphin is perfectly pleasant, but only as long as you’re not invested in the conversation going in a particular direction for very long.

I leave her there humming to herself, her spear leaning awkwardly into the backseat. She’s got a communicator, so she’ll listen in and beep me if there’s a problem. My weight snaps a flagstone going up the front walk.

It’s like visiting the school bully’s mother. I’m going to sit down with the woman who raised Damsel, the most famous female hero in the world. With CoreFire gone, the leader of the Champions may be the biggest hero in the world, no exceptions. I wonder again why it’s me—I guess because I never worked with her before.

I think about Paragon going bad, how they found him. What am I going to find here? I scan the house with every faculty I have available. One human female inside, flat normal to anything I can pick up. Still, I brace myself for anything. I press the doorbell, and she answers.

She looks older out of costume. Softer, a princess grown fleshy and middle-aged. Is this really who Damsel was so afraid of?

I used to be a fan of the
Elfland
series myself, and maybe I was thinking she’d look more like the girl they cast for the movies. There’s a photograph that circulates on the Internet, supposedly from the earliest case files, of four children wrapped in shiny foil emergency blankets, grinning like maniacs. She might have been one of them grown up, black hair and pale skin, but much older. Her real name is Linda.

I step inside. Meeting the Champions was one thing, but the members of the Super Squadron are a step beyond, something closer to myth, their origins in the stars or among the gods. But her living room looks like any middle-class suburban housewife’s, and I’m surprised to find I’m a head taller than her. She glances twice at my face, the metal hand I extend to grasp hers. She lights a cigarette without asking.

“Can I offer you anything? Cocktail?” she says.

“Um, no thanks, ma’am. My metal half doesn’t like it.”

“Damsel must have sent you. You’re Fatale. The cyborg.”

“That’s right.” I actually wasn’t sure she’d remember me from her visit.

“We didn’t used to have them, you know.” The conversation grinds to a halt there. Maybe I should have brought Elphin along after all. I take a breath and get to the point.

“We need to know, well, about the Scepter of Elfland. Whether anything’s, well, happened with it lately.”

“Then you don’t know?” she asks. I sit forward. Maybe I’ve got something here after all.

“Why don’t you tell me.”

“I guess since I’m no longer part of their little fantasy club, it’s all right for me to talk about it. It’s not as if anyone ever believed us anyway.” She takes another drag from the cigarette. I’ve spent enough time around superheroes to recognize the look on her face. She’s going to tell me her origin.

“It’s hard to remember details now. I’ve had to tell the story so many times now, what I remember is a blur of therapy rooms, my years in costume, and then maybe, way at the back, what I remember may not be anything more than a glimpse of lights shining in a dark forest. It’s been thirty-four years since then, most of it in offices, entering sales data into computers. That’s what I do for a living now. My secret identity.”

She tells me the story of her journey to that other world, the story from the children’s book. How she’d stumbled into the other world one morning with her brothers and sister, and had adventures uncounted in a magic land beyond imagining.

“We came to what thousands of people have searched for since, a standing stone five feet high, marking a path we hadn’t seen before. It had writing on it, a message we didn’t bother to read; and maybe it was important, but it’s lost forever now. We turned down the path without much comment, expecting any moment to come out in someone’s backyard and turn around. We walked for ten minutes, and there was at some point a change that afterward we all remembered differently—to me, it was a shift in the quality of the light, but nothing I’ve ever been able to describe. And the forest grew darker and then lighter as we walked, and then we met the first of the fairies, standing there real as a policeman.”

And then one day, they stumbled back. She gets up and paces the living room as she speaks, mixes herself a drink, something strong-looking. She gestures a lot when she talks, and she doesn’t really look at me.

“I’m not saying it was a game, and I’m not saying it wasn’t a game. All anyone knows for sure is that we were gone for eleven days, long enough for the search to become national news. No one has completely explained where we were, or how at the end of it we showed up again in that field after volunteers had searched every square foot of it, in the midst of all those dogs and reporters and emergency personnel, dressed the way we were, and obviously happier than we had ever been in our lives. We certainly weren’t twelve years older than when we had left, although a moment before it had seemed that way.

“It was raining the day we came back. We had set out riding that spring morning, the four of us, to look at what the flooding had done. The footing grew uncertain and we tied the horses and walked ahead. We began to hear faint helicopters and engine noise, and the whiff of exhaust, and I think we all realized what was happening at roughly the same time. It was exactly like waking up out of a dream, and the exact moment when you realize you’re waking up is the moment after which you can’t possibly get back to sleep. And then the noise broke on us all at once, and through the trees we could see the bright colors of tents and windbreakers. One of the rescue workers saw us and yelled, and then people were running toward us with blankets.

“I remember two things the most vividly. One was the recognition on Sean the High King’s face. I think he may have known first, having lived the longest time at home. The other was Wendy, who in the moments before they reached us tore off the amulet she had won from the White Queen, snapping the chain, and threw it as hard as she could back into the trees. We never found it, or Sean’s hammer. Nothing except the clothes we wore, and my scepter. Sean always claimed the rescue workers took them, but they would never admit it.

“I still thought we were going to give brief explanations and goodbyes, and set off back to the kingdom. It never occurred to me or any of us until later that something so real and concrete could vanish forever into a group of trees so thin, you could see the back of a house behind them.”