Soon I Will Be Invincible (25 page)

“I heard Doctor Impossible was Jewish,” Rainbow puts in.

“Seriously, how much would it hurt you to break out of there?” I want to push her. Just once, I want her to behave like an ordinary person, drop the act and get us out of here.

“I cannot,” she says flatly.

“Is it, like, a phobia? Are you afraid?”

“I am of the Legion of the Western Sidhe. I do not know fear. But I’m governed by our law.”

Damsel wearily intervenes. “Fatale? Let it go.”

“No, I’m not going to die because a fake elf won’t cross an imaginary line. I know what’s holding me, and it’s not something I made up.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you walk out of here yourself if you can, clockwork lady.”

“It’s a software lock! It’s electricity and metal. That’s what I am. I’m the next generation of warfare.”

“And I am twenty generations of war. What is it you’re so proud of, that makes you walk about and twitch and strut that way, like the bronze guardsman who strikes the hours on the clock at St. Clement’s?”

“I’m a super-soldier!”

“You’re no one!”

“Fatale, just shut up,” Blackwolf adds, helpfully.

But I’m on my feet now, and I turn to the rest of them. “She’s not a fairy! She’s just not. She’s a genetic experiment, or an alien. And it would be nice if Tinker Bell here dropped the pretense, just this once, before Doctor Impossible, you know, throws our entire planet into the Sun.”

Group silence. I can see I don’t have everyone’s support in this.

Having accepted your surrender, I will begin the launch of the new Ice Age, the Age of Doctor Impossible. An era of science and marvels and, of course, my total domination of the world.

“God, when is he going to shut up?” Rainbow sighs. She isn’t looking so good.

I try to change the subject. “Blackwolf? I thought you said he needed a power source for this.”

“He could be bluffing.” He doesn’t bother looking at me.

“He didn’t look like he was bluffing when he beat the crap out of you.” Rainbow won’t leave it alone.

“Jeez.” Blackwolf mock-cringes. “Thought you were my sidekick.”

Silently, Rainbow gives him the finger.

“He had a new weapon, damn it. Did anyone else see that hammer he was holding?”

“We all saw the hammer. Nobody knows what it is.”

“It looked magical.”

“That’s what Mystic said before he went down. The Doctor took him out first.”

“Forget it,” Damsel says. “We couldn’t even save CoreFire.”

Our fearless leader. In the amber glow of an overhead light, Damsel sits at the back of her cell, her knees up. She’s loose in there—I can’t see anything restraining her. He took her swords, but otherwise I can’t see any reason why she doesn’t smash her way out. I’m too embarrassed to ask what the problem is. Without the swords, she looks like a different person—a slight, greenish, surprisingly young brunette. She has the cell next to Blackwolf’s.

“This was such a mistake. The military would have prepared properly, instead of just jetting off after lunch. This should have been a ground assault.”

“Come on, Ellen. You’ve seen what Doctor Impossible does to conventional forces. We’re the logical counterforce.”

“You mean CoreFire was. Without him, Doctor Impossible’s beaten us twice this week. The first time, he didn’t even have his costume. Let’s face it, the New Champions was a stupid name, and kind of a stupid idea. We shouldn’t have tried it.” Damsel punches the wall hard. It should crack the concrete; it should smash it to powder. There’s just a dull smack.

“That’s easy for you to say, Miss Stormcloud. It’s not as if the rest of us had anywhere to go.”

“And I did? Didn’t you ever wonder why I didn’t join the Supers?”

He holds up a black-gloved hand. “Don’t start.”

“I can’t believe you never figured it out. CoreFire knew; I guess he could sense stuff. The one date we had, he worked it out. After that he wouldn’t go near me. Fucking racist.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have slept with him then.” Blackwolf’s tone is low and bitter. He’s smart; he knows we’re listening. Maybe he doesn’t care.

“You remember what happened to my mother?” Damsel sounds like she really wants to know.

“Your mother?”

“You know…the alien princess?” she says, her voice acid now. “Remember her? Stormcloud’s first wife. It was one of those superhero marriages—he saves her planet; she goes back to the stars.”

“I know. But…”

“Think about it. She wasn’t human, even if she looked a little like us. She wasn’t even a mammal. No one even thinks about the fact that I look human. My hands are a little big, see? And my ears, that’s why I wear my hair long.

“I shouldn’t exist at all. Her people have an advanced gene science, and my mother’s father donated his expertise as a wedding present. I’m mostly a clone of my father—they switched the gender, probably so it would be less obvious. They managed to include a few of my mother’s traits—my biology is less human than you think. Why do you think I throw up all the time?

“I know my nervous system reads funny, and my blood type’s irregular, a one-off. I’m red-green color-blind. Did you know that?

“My father did his best to hide it. They raised me human, but my mother was always an alien. Green skin, of course. Her breath always smelled like cinnamon. Her eyes were huge. Cold hands, and she loved to swim. She went back when I was nine, when she succeeded to the throne on her world. We spoke English together when we could, over the hyperwave communicator. I never learned her language, only a few words. It’s difficult for humans to learn, but I thought I should.

“At first, they thought I didn’t have any powers. My father raised me pretty strictly. I was in private school under a secret identity, God, until eleventh grade. I hated it. Then on my sixteenth birthday, I walked out onto the Peterson quad and screamed. I broke windows. Fucking Regina was pissed.

“After that, at night I’d be flying above the city in a blaze of light, but I’d retreat afterward into my secretary job. And afterward, after the Champions, there was nothing to stop me from being Damsel all the time. And the reality was, I had no idea who Damsel was, not really. Not when she wasn’t saving people. All I wanted was to be in the Super Squadron.

“I still have my title. I’m even still a princess. My mother rules an ocean planet somewhere; it’s in my passport. But the Super Squadron wouldn’t take off-worlders. And I failed the goddamn blood test.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. Not to me,” Blackwolf says. He looks calmer than I thought he’d be. Like he’s finally understood something, a missing piece. CoreFire must have seen it first, with those eyes of his.

She gestures weakly at the overhead lamp. “Her sun’s radiation takes away my powers anyway. That’s what the lamp is for, smart guy. I guess Doctor Impossible knew it, too. Face it, I’m a mistake.”

Yes, in the coming era I shall rule your puny world, as is my right. I will be just but fair, and above all, scientific. It will be my pleasure to keep you alive to witness your total and utter defeat.

And Elphin stirs on her platform and makes the longest speech I’ve ever heard from her.

“You know how they found me? I was starving and I passed out. A couple of hunters—they thought their luck was in.”

“Jesus,” I say. She flinches at the name. “Sorry.”

“I was born in the twelfth century of your Christ, and I am the last fairy in the world. When the Fair Folk left the world of humankind early in the seventeenth century, I was left behind—Titania could not or would not explain why. But there I stayed, the lone fairy in all the woods of England.”

She crouches in her cell and tells the story.

“Year by year and century by century, the game thinned out, acorns lost their flavor, and the spring dew grew less and less nourishing. Alone, I walked the forests, empty now of knights-errant and loitering maidens, while the long nineteenth century stretched on. And the twentieth. The forest diminished into odd patches of undeveloped land, crisscrossed by dirt roads and power lines, overflown by airplanes three times a day. I began hearing cars zoom past on the expressway, where once cool forest had stretched hundreds of silent miles in every direction. I grew used to hearing them pass, always behind the next stand of trees. Squirrels replaced deer; wolves were a distant memory. One day, a young boy in a red anorak saw me in full daylight as I crouched drinking from a drainpipe.

“I waited for Titania’s plan to become clear. I hiked farther north as time went on, and then farther. I crossed the roads late at night, asphalt stinging the soles of my bare feet, to get to the next square of land. I was lamed once when a car struck me. I’d taken wounds before in Titania’s service—I knew the burn of cold iron, and once the flash and hot thump of a lead musket ball—but this, the blinding light and the force of it rolling me over and over, it was like nothing I’d ever felt. I flashed away into the brush before the shock had worn off, and lay there shaking.”

I look around and the others are listening silently. Blackwolf has heard this before; he must have. Rainbow clearly hasn’t. But Elphin is speaking to me.

“I began to starve. I grew thin, thin even for a fairy, a creature of long nails and silvery skin stretched over hollow bird bones. The fish were gone. I munched nettles and drank tainted water from streams, and in winter I raided squirrels’ granaries. On summer nights, I sat and gazed at the few stars visible beyond the light of the cities, and dreamed of old hunts. It was
1975,
unfathomably late in the day to be a full-blooded fairy in England. I wandered dazed in the forest, moonlight shining through my flesh. I was fading.

“One morning in early spring, I collapsed and lay for hours at the bottom of a culvert, until a sudden rainstorm washed me down out of the hills. The hunters were up from Berwickshire, making a day of it. They found me stretched out in a streambed, unconscious in full daylight.

“It was noon, and they were already a little drunk when they found me, a tiny woman in a nightdress, four and a half feet tall, inhumanly graceful even in sleep. One of them handed his buddy his gun and went to get a closer look. He must not have noticed the wings, or the nails.

“According to a police report, I was later seen walking along the expressway around noon, naked, blood splashed over my face and body. I did not know what had happened. But when, after three hundred years, one of the Fair Folk walked barefoot up the center line of a main road, it was a Catholic priest who recognized the gravity of the situation.

“He bundled me off the street and found me clothes, and a room with no crosses or cold iron. He called his superior, who found a scholar at the Vatican archive who specialized in such things. The Catholic Church has what you would call a very fine institutional memory. The last man to have been in this situation wrote in twelfth-century Latin and told the protocols, modes of address for speech between fairies and Christian men. And it remains in effect, Vatican Two notwithstanding. The priest repeated the language they gave him, and, dazed, I replied in the language of the ancient compact, words I had learned under Henry the Second.

“I have been charged with two tasks, to uphold the honor of Fairy and to fulfill the task that has been laid on me, when the time is right. But those who made the covenant knew nothing of the world I found myself in now, nor did Titania.

“I was a nine days’ wonder. The press grew tired of me—I could not be featured forever on your talk shows and in your magazines. I could not go back to the forest, to graze on highway median strips. I did not know how to rent an apartment, or work in a trade, or live in a city. I am a fairy, but I cannot be Titania’s knight anymore.

“But Damsel found me and offered me a job, one that made sense of my life again. I could be a superhero.”

“How about you? How’d you get started?”

For once, Damsel is looking directly at me, but the amber light makes it hard to read her features when she asks me the question I’ve been waiting to figure out.

“You guys don’t want to hear about it.” I’m not ready to talk about it anyway.

“What’d they do to you?” She says it in a tone I’ve never heard from her.

And for a full minute, I can’t answer, a minute before the thoughts start to come again.

“I was a superhero, too, for a while, but the NSA was just easier. It’s not like how they tell you it will be. It’s hard to make it on your own as a cyborg—I’ve tried. I weigh almost five hundred pounds. I can’t find clothes that fit me. I can’t ride a bicycle. I can’t eat in a normal restaurant, or sit in a chair not reinforced for my weight. I need special foods; I need medication to keep my body from rejecting the implants, and then I get sick too often due to a depressed immune system.

“And those are only things I know about. I have systems nobody understands. It’s not like I’m a car that can be recalled if one model out of a million fails—there’s only one of me.”

I don’t want to tell them this stuff, but I’m sick of being the only one who knows. It all comes spilling out.

“When they told me they weren’t going to take care of me anymore, I thought I was dead. The Ohio facility that maintained me shut down overnight; I went in one day and found a bare office. And when I went to try to trace their assets, I found out they never existed.”

It’s about as far as I can go, but there’s more I can’t even put into words. I still don’t have a boyfriend. I can’t even have children—that’s where the fusion reactor went in. I know it’s crazy, but I thought Doctor Impossible was going to take me in, or maybe he would fix me, put me back the way I was. I know that’s crazy. But I hate this piece of metal that I had them put inside me. God, I hate it. The way you can only hate a part of yourself that you made.

I leave you to ponder the error of your ways. The error of opposing…Doctor Impossible. Ahahaha hahahahahahaaa!

Damsel actually looks a little better now, but that light is still shutting down her powers. She and Blackwolf are talking in low tones. They’ve been in tight spots before.