Hole Hearted
I don’t know how Bella did it, but we all took our cues from her. She didn’t give up and lie down when Metis refused us help. She didn’t give up and lie down when Alex Tesla died. She only got tougher when Verdigris took over ECHO.
Somehow she decided that if no one else would lead the revolution and save ECHO, she would. And if she had to rebuild one person at a time, so be it.
Starting with Bulwark.
She stared at her own face on the “Hot Healers of ECHO” calendar on the wall of the Med team Locker Room. She was the only one in a white version of the spandex pseudo-ECHO uniform, in no small part because while the skin-tight blue spandex gave everyone else the illusion of being clothed, unfortunately when the day came for the shoot, it so perfectly matched her skin that it made her look totally naked. So Spin Doctor had sent people to ransack the supply rooms for something else, and the photographer had put her front and center of the group shot.
Which ended up making her the fanbois fave and looking like a brainless bimbo. She’d hated that at the time, but now that turned out to be a good thing. A very good thing. Now Dominic Verdigris III, ECHO’s lord and master and the man behind the assassination of Alex Tesla, thought she was a brainless bimbo. He had no idea that among herself, Yankee Pride, and Detective Ramona Ferrari, with the collusion of CCCP Commissar Red Saviour, there was a quiet revolution brewing in his ranks.
The actual head of ECHO Medical was…ineffective. She’d become the first go-to, and on the basis of “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than get permission,” she was making a lot of the decisions that the actual MDs couldn’t or shouldn’t be bothered with. And she and the actual MDs had quietly agreed that paperwork would be turned in without permission being granted. It was working. The bean-counter in the head office was just as happy to sign everything put in front of him without actually reading it.
Which was kind of making her…operating head of ECHO Medical, at least so far as the metahuman teams were concerned. On top of being one of the “Gang of Three.”
She was off-and-on uncomfortable in this position, but…Johnny Murdock had put it best. “Ain’t necessarily ’bout bein’ the ‘right one’ so much as it is bein’ the one that’s there an’ willin’.” As she had said, there were four people who could do this. Yankee Pride, Ramona, Bulwark and herself. Yank was being watched day and night, Ramona wasn’t a meta, and Bulwark…
She pounded her fist into the wall beside the calendar and swore. Bulwark. Bulwark was still in a coma, the coma that bitch Harmony had put him into. And then she had murdered Tesla. But it was what had happened to Gairdner that really hit Bella hard; of all the wretched things that had happened since the Invasion, this was the one that made her heart twist up into a tight knot and hurt as if she was the one that had been on the wrong side of a gun. She’d only been to see him once, and she’d left feeling furious and helpless and—
—and her comm went off. Swearing again under her breath, she thumbed it on. “Belladonna Blue.”
It was Ramona. “Bell, we’ve got a crisis in sickbay. Einhorn’s having a meltdown, and you seem to be the only one that can handle her.”
Of course Einhorn was having a meltdown. What else was new? “On it,” she replied. Fortunately, she was only a few yards from the source of the crisis du jour.…
* * *
“I can’t!” Einhorn wept, ringing her hands and tossing her head so that the little pearly unicorn horn that gave her that callsign cut through the air. “I just can’t! I’ve tried and tried and he’s not getting any better!” Her voice spiraled up into a wail, and Ramona waved her hands placatingly at her. The rest of the ECHO DCOs had left the room; Einhorn was a projective empath and not even remotely under control at the moment. Stay too close to her in this mood and you’d be throwing yourself out a window in short order.
But Ramona was right. Bella knew how to handle her, in no small part because Bella was a much more powerful—and much more controlled—empath than she was. So the question was—comfort or confront? What Mary Ann Booker wanted was comfort, and she usually got it. And in this case, she might just be due a little comfort, because Einhorn was the one in charge of Bulwark and Bella could understand and absolutely sympathize with her despair.
She had been trying. For once, she’d put aside a lot of her selfishness and had been spending hours beside the comatose meta. Maybe that was out of guilt, because Bull had treated her with respect and care. Bella wasn’t going to argue motives; all she wanted was results.
But if Bella was going to successfully run this revolution, she had to have respect. And she wasn’t going to get that by acting like a greeting-card angel and going “There, there, sweetie, it’ll be all right.”
So she marched right into the ready-room, stood just inside the doorway with arms folded over her chest, and barked into the first moment of silence. “Shut the hell up, Mary Ann!”
Einhorn froze and fixed Bella with a deer-in-the-headlights stare.
Now Bella moved into the room, one slow, deliberate step at a time. “That’s enough, girl,” she said, quietly now. “You aren’t doing Gairdner any good by having a fit, and you’re doing everyone around you a lot of damage. I’ve warned you about projecting. Shut it off, or I’ll shut it off for you, and you won’t like that.”
Einhorn immediately throttled down on the despair rolling out from her in waves. Ramona sighed with relief, and eased out of the room. Bella nodded. “Good girl. That’s more like it.”
Einhorn blinked, and tears welled up out of her limpid blue eyes, coursing down her cheeks. She was the only person outside of Hollywood that Bella knew who could look beautiful when crying. This time, however, Bella could tell the tears were genuine, born of real frustration and real desperation. Einhorn liked Gairdner, a lot. She might even have been one of his protégés; she’d certainly been the DCO for him plenty of times. And despite being one of ECHO’s strongest psionic healers, she hadn’t been able to do a thing for him. “I can’t bring him out of it,” she sobbed. “I can’t even get him to heal! I’ve tried and I’ve tried and—”
All right. Now is the time to comfort. Bella let her expression soften, dialed up her own projective empathy into what she called the “Momma Fix” mode, and let it wash over the girl. “I know, kiddo,” she said. “Hell, everyone knows. You’ve been a trooper, and it’s not your fault you’re getting no results. We need to try a different approach. Boss says you need off the case. I’ll take over from here. You’re back on street duty.”
Einhorn’s eyes widened and the tears stopped. “You are?” she said incredulously. “I am?”
Bella nodded. The girl burst into tears again, but this time of gratitude and relief. Bella had come prepared, since there was very little that Einhorn did that didn’t involve tears at some stage or other. She handed over a packet of tissues. “Go on, blow your nose, wipe your eyes and suit up. Check your comm for assignment. Shoo.”
And here I am…not the boss in name of ECHO’s DCOs, but the boss in fact. Ramona defers to me. Everyone defers to me, where the healers are concerned. Jesus Cluny Frog…I have the healers. If I can keep this up, if, if, if…can I get everyone?
The girl took the packet, stammered something, and hurried out. Bella took a deep breath, steeled herself, and headed for the ICU where Gairdner—aka ECHO Op 3 Bulwark—was hooked up to far too many machines.
And she wondered what the hell she was going to do now.
* * *
“Dammit, Jarhead,” she murmured to the unconscious man. “What is wrong with you? You’re like some kind of black hole.”
It was horrible to see this man she knew, she admired, she (admit it!) more than admired, lying there like some sort of special effects dummy hooked up to so many machines he had to have the room to himself. No wonder Einhorn was in despair. Bella had been sitting here trying to pour energy into him, to kick-start his metahuman body into healing itself, for the last hour. And everything she poured into him vanished, as if he was a bottomless pit, as if there was a hole where his heart should have been. She’d never seen anything like it before. And for the last ten minutes, she had debated trying to find The Seraphym and hope to persuade her to help—
But The Seraphym had her own priorities and her own agenda, and if fixing Gairdner was part of that, she’d have already been here. If it wasn’t, Bella could hunt Atlanta until she was old and gray and never find her. Or…more likely…if this was something Bella could do on her own, the Seraphym would not appear until after Bella had figured out how.
She reached out and smoothed a strand of his white hair back in place. “This has to be something Harmony did,” she said, thinking out loud, as her heart ached to see him this way, and she repressed the urge to cry like Einhorn. “But how in hell did she do it? If I knew that, I’d know where to start to fix it.” Only four people had been there when Harmony had planted Bulwark; one was Bulwark himself, one was dead, and the other two weren’t exactly going to come forward and make confessions. Tapes didn’t show her anything useful.
All right. Tapes showed her nothing. Her own psi wasn’t helping. The docs hadn’t come up with anything. That left a miracle or—
Magic.
She pulled out her comm, and scrolled through until she got the right callsign and gave it a ping. After no more than a couple of seconds, a sleepy voice answered. “Victrix.”
“Vix, are you on duty?” That was a loaded question; in a sense, Vickie was always on duty, but that wasn’t evident on the ECHO duty roster, because only a handful of people were aware that Vickie was also Overwatch, running a very clandestine operation out of her own apartment for both select ECHO personnel and CCCP.
“Clear for the next few. Why?” came the reply.
“I’d like you to come over to the ECHO ICU and run an eye over Gairdner. And round up Sovie and see if she’s free to do the same.” Sovie was callsign Soviette, Jadwiga, the CCCP’s chief MD and psionic healer. “He’s not improving, he should, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what Harmony did to him. It’s exactly as if he has a—an energy drain somewhere, but I can’t figure out how, and I can’t figure out how to plug it. I need more experienced eyes over here. Different ones, anyway.”
There was a pause. “But that wasn’t magic—” Vickie said uncertainly. “At least, not that I know. Harm wasn’t a magician.”
“No. But magic might tell me something that science and psionics isn’t. And Sovie might have seen something like this before. Marx knows the Russkies have more than their share of weird metas.” She described as well as she could Gairdner’s situation while Vickie listened. There was another pause.
“All right, I’ll come with a kit and give it a shot. Be there in half an hour.”
“Thanks.” Bella settled back on her chair, and resisted the urge to take one of Gairdner’s hands in hers.
* * *
Vickie brought two people with her, both CCCP. One was Soviette, but the other was the black-clad, porcelain-white-faced meta called Upyr. Althea Vladislava, was her given name, but even she rarely used it or answered to it.
“Why—” Bella began, when Upyr waved a gloved hand at her to cut off the question.
“Am beink to look for wolunteers for donations,” the young woman said. “Henergy donations, da? Ven donation is villink, is cleaner. Purer.”
“Oh…” said Bella doubtfully. Then. “Oh!” with realization of what Upyr was talking about. Upyr’s power was like nothing Bella had ever seen before, but it could be exactly what they needed to at least hold the line. “Lemme text Ramona.” Well that would solve one problem. Upyr was…well her name meant “vampire” in Russian, but rather than blood, she both took and gave some form of—Bella wasn’t sure what to call it. “Vital energy”? Whatever it was, it was the same thing she and Einhorn had been pouring into Bull to no real effect.
Ramona appeared in person in answer to Bella’s text, and went off with Upyr. After that, the girl came and went several times, arriving looking pink and nearly vibrating with vitality, leaving looking like her usual composed, white-faced self.
Meanwhile Sovie and Vickie both huddled over Gairdner, while Bella did her best to restrain her impatience, perched on an examination-room stool. The two of them muttered in rapid Russian; Bella was conversant, but not fluent enough to follow much of it. “Da” and “Nyet” and “Nechevo,” she got, but they were getting deeply technical in rapid-fire medical-Russian and she was not conversant in that. Vickie sketched signs in the air over Gairdner’s chest and studied them intently as they changed, then faded. Then she’d go to her laptop and tap a while, then go back to muttering to Jadwiga.
Then, after this had gone on for almost an hour, they stopped Upyr and muttered at her. There was a lot of nodding and further muttering before Upyr went back out again in search of more victims. Finally Sovie gave a determined nod and the two of them turned their attention to Bella.
“You are beink to haf good instincts, sestra,” the Russian doctor said warmly. “Comrade Victoria made postulate, Upyr and I confirm and agree. Harmony—created somethink like ve haf all three seen, but this—” she waved her hand at Bullwark’s prone body “—it goes beyond vat ve haf seen before.”
Before Bella could blurt that she wanted them to get to the goddamn point, Vickie stepped in. “Harm was something like Thea—Upyr. Her overt power was to amplify energy, but now we know she could take it too. Yes, I know you know that. But this wasn’t a standard meta ability, obviously, and she hid it well. Until now, Upyr is the only one of her kind that Sovie’s ever seen…I’ve heard of something similar, but I’d never actually seen it until now. And she could do something Upyr can’t; just like you thought, she set up some sort of permanent drain on him, in the part of him that actually gives him his powers. It’s like she’s put a shunt in there. I don’t know where it’s going, Upyr can’t suss it out, and neither can Sovie. We only know it’s there, and though we’ve put a governor on it to slow the drain, neither of them can figure out how to shut it off.”
At this point Bella was about ready to explode with frustration, but again, Vickie held up a gloved hand. “Whoa, wait. Just because they can’t, that doesn’t mean that I can’t. Remember the almost-disaster with the comm-unit a few days ago?” Vickie waggled her eyebrows like a couple of semaphores, and briefly her fingers formed a shape like the Tesla device. “That was when I found out that magic works enough like psionics that I can probably cut the drain. For all intents and purposes, Harm was a vampire, and that’s one of the things my family specialized in for generations. I won’t lie to you, it’s magic, which means it’s risky, I can’t give you the odds on whether it will work or not right this minute, I can only tell you that if we don’t do this, he’s never going to come out of the coma, he’ll just keep draining down, and you can’t keep pouring energy down a hole. And you know this.”
Yes, dammit, she knew this. Her fist hit the concrete wall beside her in frustration, but she did know this.
“Is not just his best chance, sestra,” Jadwiga said solemnly. “Am tellink you as physician and healer, is his only chance.”
“All right,” she said, after weighing the alternatives as best she could, and coming up with nothing better. “Let’s do this.”
* * *
Vickie was in a hurry, and lugging an extremely heavy bag—an old-fashioned portmanteau that had been in her family since the 1800s in fact—and wasn’t watching where she was going. As a consequence, she nearly ran into a chest. A male chest, covered only by a very non-standard excuse for a t-shirt. Which meant that the chest could only belong to Red Djinni.…
He caught her by the shoulders before she bounced off him. “Whoa, shorty. What’re you doing out of your cave? For that matter, what are you doing here in Medical lugging a suitcase?”
She looked up and saw him sporting a different face today, one of his new favorites. If she hadn’t been in such a rush, she might have laughed. He was getting better at his “George Clooney” every day.
Four or five replies passed through her thoughts, she settled on the quickest. “Bull,” she said. “And we’re on the clock.”
His eyes narrowed further. “Bella—”
“Knows and authorized. Brought in me and Sovie on it.” She fidgeted. “Djinni, I really am on the clock.”
“Brought in the big guns—” he took the case from her before she could tighten her grip on it. “Explain while we move, then.”
The hell—She almost told him to take a hike, but partly because she still was on the border about him scaring the crap out of her, and partly because…well, because…she didn’t argue. She just set off down the corridor at a trot, which his longer legs ECHOed as merely a fast walk, explaining in layman’s terms as best she could. “So that’s why. My family specializes in vamps. All kinds of vamps. So I’m the closest we’ve got to an expert.”
“All kinds of vamps?” His brow wrinkled. “There’s more than one kind?”
“You don’t know the half of it.” She couldn’t resist adding, “Though none of them sparkle as far as I’m aware.”
They reached the door to Bulwark’s private room. He opened it for her, and gave the relatively barren cube a good raking gaze as he closed the door behind her. “Room swept?”
“To the best of our ability,” she told him, with emphasis. She didn’t tell him who the our was, but he was smart enough to intuit they’d had some Metis help.
He watched her as she unpacked her kit, a mix of high-tech and antique. “Risk?”
“High,” she told him truthfully. “But the risk is all mine and…dammit, it’s Bull we’re talking about. Bella will be here shortly as my monitor, and this time she’s got some folks on-call if things go too pear-shaped.”
“Like?”
“Sovie and Mary Ann.”
Djinni rolled his eyes at the mention of Einhorn. “That’s a lot of help,” he said sarcastically. “Well hell, I’m here, you might as well use me as your anchor.”
“Uh…what?” She turned to look at him in complete disbelief.
“I said, you might as well use me as your anchor.” He snorted. “It’s not as if you haven’t already infected me with your magic cooties, so I’m not exactly pure anymore.”
She was so shocked that she didn’t reply with equal sarcasm. “That…would be…amazingly helpful,” she said instead. Then, thankfully, her sarcasm returned. “Did your priest require you to do some penance or something? A hundred thousand rosaries would probably be easier.”
He snorted. “Make with the magic, Vix.”
Red stood aside and let Vickie begin her preparations. He assumed a relaxed posture, his arms lazily crossed as he leaned back against the wall. At first glance, one might have assumed he was bored. Laying down a square of heavy canvas, painted with a double circle and a few arcane symbols, Vickie paused and glanced up at him. His eyes betrayed him. They bore into her, watching her every move. She felt a painful flush in her cheeks as the intensity of his stare made her acutely self-conscious of everything she was doing.
“Uh, do you want me to explain this?” she asked.
“Just keep at it, Victrix. Time. Issue. Remember?”
Vickie shrugged and continued to work, adding things at the corners of the square. A very heavy pillar of stone, an equally heavy copper bowl, a glass bowl with walls an inch thick that she poured a tiny amount of water into, and a cast-iron incense burner. They all looked old. Very, very old. Probably because they were very, very old. She put an LED light into the copper bowl, and a little computerized gizmo of her own design into the incense burner. Immediately a faint scent of amber filled the room. She didn’t want any real fire in here. Not with Bull on an oxygen-feed.
The Djinni stiffened up, then let out a subtle exhalation as he composed himself. That smell, Vickie thought, groaning inwardly. She had forgotten what that smell meant to him, how it might affect him, and she cursed herself silently for that. She needed him steady, focused. Still, it couldn’t be helped. The “incense” (nothing that would compromise the breathing of Bulwark or any other patient) was necessary, and they would have to put aside any misgivings if they were to succeed. If they were to save Bulwark.
Red had, in his usual Djinni fashion, surprised her. To say he was skittish around magic was an understatement. That he would volunteer so readily to participate in this endeavor spoke of…what? Whatever the reason, he was trying too hard, straining to look calm when he was obviously on edge. Was it worry? For Bull? Before everything went to hell, when Bull’s team had been getting solid at last, Vickie had seen them together via her high-tech Overwatch protocols, whether at work or in the quiet times between jobs. By the end, the conflict and near-insults had become banter, and the sniping had…almost seemed forced. They would argue, but like two old friends who thrived on getting almost on each other’s nerves without actually going over the edge. It had become clear to most everyone as well as to her that Bulwark and the Djinni had become friends.
* * *
Again, she paused and looked up at him. Red shifted his stance and looked away. She could see through it, he could tell, his bad attempt at nonchalance. He almost shook his head in dismay, but merely grunted. Despite it all, here he was again, at the heart of a storm. I’m such a putz, he thought. After everything, I promised myself never again, and here I am, voluntarily chaining myself in the eye of the tornado.
He knew what she was doing, of course. The stone was to represent the element of Earth, the bowls for fire and water and so forth. He had seen similar things before, the last time he had participated in something like this, what he had promised to be the last time…
He steadied himself as Vickie began to explain her set-up.
“This is mostly old-school. Older stuff in magic has more…” She paused to consider exactly the right world. “…gravity. The more times something is repeated successfully, the more you shove the odds in your favor. I prefer to shoot from the hip and use cybermancy, but I refuse to take any chances when it comes to Bull.” She pointed at her Elemental Pillars. “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. All four objects have been in my family for five hundred years, minimum. That rock for Earth, which is my prime element, dates back to the Etruscans, we think. Those are my power-points, what I’ll use as my fuel lines while I execute the setup. They’ll also be my protections from anyone with magic trying to get at me while I’m working.”
The door opened. “I’d prefer mystical Rottweilers for that,” said Bella, looking…odd…in doctor’s scrubs. “Djinni, what the hell are you doing here? The wall doesn’t need holding up.”
Red didn’t look at her. He simply shrugged, and continued to watch Vickie.
* * *
Well, that’s a first, Bella thought. The jerk’s usually got his eyes all over me when I enter a room. Bella felt an odd pang, disquieted by Red’s lack of attention.
“He volunteered as my anchor,” Vickie said. “Since we, uh…worked magic together, and no one else around here has, that’s a plus, but even more…” she managed a wry grin. “Well, for an anchor I need someone with a strong will, and I can’t think of anyone more pig-headed than the Djinni.”
“Got that right,” Bella replied dryly. She flexed her fingers and cracked her knuckles, a bad habit from her paramedic days she still hadn’t broken. Then she checked to make sure her two panic-buttons were right where she could get to them quickly, gave Bulwark another once-over to make sure nothing had changed, and plopped down on a stool between him and Vickie. “So, we ready?”
“Did most of the prep at home.” Vickie stood in the center of the circles painted on the canvas and looked straight into Djinni’s eyes. “Speaking of which, that is what I need from you. I’m casting everything loose in order to get deep into what’s sucking Bull dry. Best picture is, we have a whirlpool and I have to go down to the bottom to plug it. I can’t concentrate on anything but that. You have to do my concentrating for me on my lifeline. It’s easy. Just think of everything that means home to you. Doesn’t have to mean home to me, just you. It’s the home part, not whose home it is.”
“I can do that,” Red muttered, and took a deep breath.
* * *
She gave him a real smile, not strained, not faked. “I know you can. You may have one of the strongest wills outside of a magician I’ve ever seen.”
Home, he thought. Right, think of home, c’mon Red, old hat, just do it like before…NO…not like before. Vix has got this, she knows the score. Not like Justine. Just think of home, of home…
Vickie took a deep breath. “Right. Here we go.”
And now all that work on the parkour course showed. Her hands moved smoothly in the air as she moved in a slow, precise circle, like a tai-chi practitioner crossed with a symphony conductor, sketching lines that glowed, and stayed, weaving a web of symbols all around her until it solidified into a wall. And at that moment, she stopped moving, completely, eyes open, seeing nothing, and the four objects at the corners of the canvas began to shine; deep gold, emerald, sapphire, crimson.
* * *
From her perspective, she was free of that imprisoning body…but not free, for she was already caught up in the “gravity well” that was what Harmony had done to Bulwark. It was slowed, but not stopped, a black-hole in slow-motion. She could have fought the pull, but that wasn’t why she was “here.” She had to let it take her; had to fall into it. That was the only way to reach the heart of the process and cut the damned thing out.
Because a spell is a process, and not a thing. People forgot that, or never knew it in the first place. They treated spells like concrete constructions and tried to break them. That was not how it worked. Spells were things that kept going, which is why they resisted breaking. You had to interrupt the process. Once that happened, the whole mess would tangle up and fall down, and…and if you were very, very lucky, some of it would snap back on the person who had started it, like the end of a long and deadly bungee cord stretched too tight.
You also had to be very careful that none of those bungee cords snapped back on you, or (if someone else was involved) the person you were trying to help. There was a lot of energy tied up in spells, and in magic, the laws of physics worked pretty well. All that energy had to go somewhere when the process stopped.
She was treating this like a spell, and it was reading to her mostly like a spell.
People always asked “What does magic look like?” and she always had to shrug, because when you were in the Between place where real Mage-Sight took you, it looked different to everyone. She saw it as elegant fractals of symbols, numbers, and relations, all in colors that told her yet more information about what was going on. But her mother saw it as lacework. And Hosteen Stormdance, one of her mentors and her parents’ partner at the Bureau, saw it as a Hopi dance-pattern.
So this swirl of symbols whirlpooling around her told her, among other things, “this isn’t actually a spell, but it acts just like a spell, so you can treat it as a spell.”
The black hole was very dark, and very deep indeed. But the bit of process at the bottom of it was as straightforward and as simple as she had hoped. The older a spell was, the simpler it tended to be, and the easier to deal with. Things that were natural abilities, like Grey’s ability to walk through walls, were also straightforward and simple. Primal. It made her wonder where Harmony had gotten this…and if it wasn’t a metahuman ability, what in the heck was it?
Whatever…it was something she could handle. She dangled right on the verge of being swallowed up and looked it all over, twice and three times, just to be sure there was nothing hidden from her. She found one fiendish little trap, but it was something she had seen before—and Harmony must not have counted on someone taking this approach to saving Bulwark.
Actually she probably counted on no one being able to save him.
All right then. This was a running machine of sorts. She and Upyr had put a governor on it earlier, but that wasn’t going to choke the feed off for much longer. The fractals told her that the whole process was putting such strain on the choke-point that it was going to shatter soon.
It was her job to shatter something else. To make the machine kill itself.
Stop the machine. Just a sharp, hard, immovable spike—there.
The proverbial spanner in the works.
The process jammed. The tension built for a nanosecond, but a nanosecond is an eternity in the Between. She watched the fractals go red, watched the process strain and strain and approach critical. But her spike jamming the whole thing up held firm. The part Vickie wanted to snap…snapped. The machine blew apart.
And, as she had figured, utter chaos broke loose all around her. From being surrounded by a relatively orderly swirl of symbols and numbers, she was at the heart of an avalanche of non-related bits that obscured everything else. A blizzard of possibility, causality, and insanity. And all the flying bits were attacking her. Not deliberately, this was all pure accident. But she had to get out of there before it cut her to ribbons.
Now would be good, Red. She groped for the “lifeline.”
* * *
Across the canvas, Red stood opposite from Vickie, oblivious to everything but the creeping darkness that began to envelope him as she wove her spell. He was trying his very best not to panic. He felt a deceptive sense of peace envelope him, a paradoxical calm before the storm, because he knew what was coming. Sooner or later, there would come the jolt of sudden energy, a quick roar within the depths of his mind, and the very strength of his resolve would be tested. And every time, she had saved him.
Amethist. Victoria. Vic.
If there had ever been anything that he equated as home, it was her. The way their laughs fell in line, creating a smooth harmonic blend that quelled whatever damned thing they had just been arguing over. Her hair, how a slight change in lighting could make her seem like she was ablaze in soothing warmth. How she had felt in his arms, falling into him, they just seemed to fit together.
Each and every time he had focused on her, on what she meant to him, and it had carried him through. With Victoria as his foundation, he had proved himself more than just an anchor, but stable enough to allow others to “mind-ride” with him, even taking complete control over his body in relative safety. It had been a rush, and giddy with the thrill of it his crew had attempted some terrifying acts of magic, constantly pushing themselves to greater heights. By the end, they thought they were invincible. Though Red himself had no magical aptitude, the strength of his will fooled his cohorts into the belief they could manage anything. They began to overexert themselves, until that last attempt…
* * *
It was Justine, of course, who had lost her grip. Justine the Bold, Justine the Pyromancer, the Chosen, the Forever Ticklish in Bed or whatever the hell she was calling herself that week. She had been a timid young thing when they had found her, but even Tomb Stone had to admit that she had some pretty remarkable firepower, raw as it was. And as her power grew, so did her confidence, her daring, and unfortunately, her recklessness. They should have seen it coming. It wasn’t the extent of her power that was the issue, it was her control—control, from someone who notoriously did not have a lot of self-control. What they were attempting would have taxed even an experienced mage. A frame-up, making it look as if the ECHO meta Pyroclastic had gone rogue. The first step had been simple. Red had done his job well, and he was the spitting image of the ECHO operative. It wasn’t enough to create the illusion of fire though. Pyro’s ability to ignite his body and hurl blasts of plasma had to be authentic. Within the confines of their circle, Justine had channeled the flames to erupt from Red’s body, from miles away. That alone had taken quite a bit out of her, but when it came time to rein it in she had felt her grasp falter, then slip. And with that, the power, and the fire, turned on her. Red, safely tucked within the recesses of his own mind, watched in horror as Justine tried to sever the link. In a panic she tried to withdraw and let the flames roar, unleashed, to draw upon whatever source was handy. She cried out, her screams a constant ECHO reverberating through his mind, when he gave her a mental slap and tried to calm her down. Too late, the fires recoiled and raced back through the mystic tether to ravage her own body. They “watched,” stunned, as Justine’s body became her own funeral pyre.
But that had not been the end. Oh no.
There was a moment’s pause, just a moment, as they sized each other up. They had grown close in the weeks leading up to this job. Once shy and unsure, she had gladly followed Red’s lead. He was the man with experience, the one who strode with confidence from one job to another. She had known little outside of her own sad world where others, be they friends or family, simply took what they wanted of her and left her to rot. Red had been the first to care, and she willingly placed herself in his capable hands, learning whatever she could. She had finally found a mentor, a brother, someone to look out for her. He had taught her to take shit from nobody, to know what you wanted, and to go for it. The world was yours, you just had to take it.
And at that moment, she knew what it was she wanted. This time nothing, and no one, was going to stand in her way. Not even him. There was too much at stake.
“I’m sorry, Red.”
“Justine, hold on, we can figure this out—”
Red reeled back as she struck. His body staggered and collapsed, like a puppet with its string cut, as a battle raged within. A contest of wills. Two souls, where there could be only one.
“Dammit girl, we’re not doing this! You can’t just—”
Red stopped as he felt her desperation. There was nothing there, nothing to reason with, nothing to talk down. What could he have said, anyway? With her own body destroyed, she was trapped inside him. All that kept her alive was her will, and when she tired she would slip away to nothing, unless she took this body from him.
It was a matter of self-preservation for both of them, and friendship, trust…love?…nothing mattered except to live. Justine struck first, impulsive as always, using the mental version of her fires. She tried to cage him in flames, to incinerate him at best, drive him out at worst. He dodged back, her cage grasping at nothing, though he felt the scorch as if from a real blaze. He responded instinctively with “cold,” and oh, he could be cold if he had to be. He took the fuel, denied the energy. Justine countered by trying to smother him but he eeled out of her grasp, slippery ice. Without her fire, she had nothing except pure will. He kept retreating; she kept coming. He realized that this could go on…if not forever, for far too long. He lunged, enveloping her as she had tried to envelope him, and without her fire to protect her, he overwhelmed her, and with a great and desperate squeeze he felt something snap. She shuddered and stiffened in his grasp. Loosening his hold, he cradled her ebbing consciousness within his.
“I didn’t…I couldn’t…oh Red…this isn’t really happening, is it?”
She was fading too fast. Red clung to her, but there was nothing he could do. She slipped out of his grasp, and away, forever into the dark.
“Good-bye…” he sobbed. “Oh God…good-bye…”
* * *
…when nothing, not even Amethist, could have prepared him for the price of reckless magic. It’s different this time, he reminded himself, again. Different, with someone who’s actually trained for this crap. Someone who knows and understands, and accepts the cost. Someone who’s careful. Just reach out, Red, reach out and bring her back.
He fell into his routine, alarmed at how easy it was to bring up his cycle of memories. Each of Amethist, each one a powerful glimpse into the heart of someone he had actually cared for more than he cared about himself. Their first encounter, her flash of anger, his dismay as she chased him with jagged shards of ice, and through the fear he fought down a growing attraction to this enraged—and feisty—girl. Their first kiss, after a titanic battle when he had finally, finally, gotten the upper hand and she lay helpless before him. She was vulnerable, all it would have taken was a slash of his claws, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he cradled her to him and carried her home, and as he turned to leave she reached for him, and brought his head down to hers. It had all changed then. Their first battle, as partners, how they moved in sync, and the sweet taste of that victory. One by one, he ran through them all, his mind afire with memories of love and the promise of forever.
And then, it all went wrong. Something new and unexpected, and in a jarring flash Red watched the memory he had been fleeing from for the past year.
Amethist, leaping to save him, and vanishing in a burst of white light.
And as the Djinni screamed his loss, the line anchoring him to Vickie fell away, lost in the void.
* * *
The lifeline…wasn’t there. Instinctively, she curled in on herself, to preserve as much as she could, for as long as she could. But this was like being in a sandstorm, with the whirling remains of Harmony’s trap etching her, scouring away at her protections. Without an outside source of power, she would last only as long as her will did. Or…or until Red could punch through again. If he could. If he would. If he had second thoughts, wanted to eliminate the uncomfortable magician from his life…now was the time.
No, she wouldn’t think that of him. If he could, then he would. And if he couldn’t—
Then at least I go out saving someone else. And until she knew that for certain there was no getting out of here, she would believe he could do it, he could reach her. Her will had kept her going for a long, long time now. She hardened it, and herself, and held on.
* * *
Bella knew immediately when something went wrong. She sensed the drain on Bulwark stop, and her heart leapt, but then she sensed Vickie…go missing. Her attention was ripped from Bull; Vickie was white as a piece of paper, rigid, eyes glassy, a statue caught in the glowing matrix of her own protections.
If this had been anything other than magic, Bella would have lunged off the stool and grabbed Vickie with both hands—but Vickie had warned her, the protections would guard her from anything, including the best of intended help. There was no way to reach her—
—except through Red.
So Bella lunged for the Djinni instead, clamped both hands around his head, and shoved energy into him. ::Dammit, chowderhead!:: she “yelled” at him. ::FOCUS!::
But she couldn’t reach him. And he couldn’t reach Vickie. He was caught in some terrible memory of pain that she couldn’t break past.
Screw that. YES I CAN.
“Red!” she shrieked. “Snap out of it!” She backed up her physical shouts with psychic ones. ::Home, you rat bastard! Bring her home!::
But instead of anger, she surrounded him with something else entirely. The satisfaction and pride she felt when he finally started coming up to the mark. The odd affection when he started helping Vickie. The surety that, yes, he could do this.
And…what do you call the opposite of loneliness? Whatever it was, she shoved that at him too. You’re not alone anymore. We’re in this together. I have your back, now you get hers…
* * *
It came back to him, those long days spent in that cramped ECHO prisoner cell, the torture of sleep, the faces that came to the surface, taunting him with his failures. And her face, most of all, that serene beauty that could in an instant radiate girlish charm, infectious laughter, unwavering determination or a righteous wrath. Amethist knew he loved her, but she could never have guessed how much power she had over him. From her, a simple look of gratitude gave him a desire to accomplish five impossible things before breakfast. A mildly scornful expression would plague him with doubts and self-loathing for days. But the worst, by far, were her fierce stares of blame, and he would simply want to shrivel up and die, right there.
For weeks now, that had been the expression that haunted him most. Even though that was not what he had seen in that last moment. His fault, his fault, and surely, surely she must have felt that in the nanosecond of her death. He couldn’t bear it, the accusation, the—hate—
It spilled over to everything else. She surely hated him in that moment, and so he hated himself, and so everyone else, by extension, had to hate him, and the fact that no one alive knew of his guilt but him was irrelevant. There were plenty of other things he’d done. How many had paid for his greed and ambition over the years. How many had he knowingly manipulated for some paltry sum? How many had died, whether by his hand or indirectly from his actions, simply because they had gotten in his way? And just this past year, god…
He’d almost killed Vix. He’d opened the door for Jack…so he was responsible for Tesla, and for Bull…
Here he was again, looking for redemption, fooling himself into thinking it was even possible. It was a tired lesson he could never seem to learn. There was no redemption, not for the things he had done. Any time he tried, it only seemed to make things worse. Amethist’s look, that look…that wasn’t just blame. It was every failure he had ever endured, masked by the illusion of past victories, shielded by false pretenses of atonement. The truth was, he doubted he could ever outrun his past.
He was utterly alone because he deserved to be. There was no one, no one…
::Dammit, chowderhead!:: Her voice rang inside his head. ::FOCUS!::
Red cringed in annoyance. For all her beauty, Bella had the most piercing voice of anyone he had ever met. It was typical of her too. Here he was, trying to enjoy some much deserved self-loathing, and she had to intrude with—
“Red!” she shrieked. “Snap out of it!” She backed up her physical shouts with psychic ones. ::Home, you rat bastard! Bring her home!::
He felt her then, her presence, and through the darkness she appeared. Her look was encouraging, her posture inviting, and she smiled at him.
You’re not alone anymore. We’re in this together. I have your back, now you get hers…
He felt her pushing through the guilt, through the absolute cloak of solitude to where he was. He felt her bombard his mind with pride and friendship. He shrank away from it. He didn’t deserve feelings like that. He was who he was, a cynical bastard, and as much as part of him longed for such acceptance, the rest of him knew better.
She persisted, stubborn wench, refusing his rejection, drawing ever closer, until he could almost feel her breath upon him. She was radiant. He had desired her since the moment she had first marched up to him and cold-cocked him across the jaw. Here, in the dark weft of Vickie’s spell, it was so cold. And Bella was so close, and so warm…
He reached out, drew her close, and kissed her. Hard.
She fought for a moment, a sense of shock, surprise, indignation blanketing everything else. Then, unexpectedly, she melted into the kiss, for just a moment.
Home, Red. This is home now.
Home, he thought, and gasped as the tether blazed back into existence.
* * *
She felt it, the lifeline, and grabbed onto it with everything she had, with the desperate will to live that had kept her going for this long.
Then, she was out, taking in a huge, gasping breath, as her protections blazed up around her, then winked out. She staggered backwards and came up against the wall.
That wasn’t just Red…
She shook her head to clear it, and saw them. Together. Bella and Red. Which…explained why the tether hadn’t been “just” Red.
Of course…
Bella had her arms around him. While it looked like it was for support, and Red seemed very shaken, in her estimation there was a ninety-percent probability that a moment before she saw them it hadn’t “just been for support.” Hell, she wrote romances. The guy the girl hates and fights with was always the one she ended up with. Right?
And now she felt the bitter bile of…not jealousy, no, how could someone like her be jealous of someone like Bella? But. Envy. The way Red was looking at Bella. No one, not even someone as damaged as Red would ever, ever look at her that way. No matter what she’d…hoped? Subconsciously, anyway…
Yeah, right. And pigs would fly in attack formation over Beirut before that happened. Be grateful for what crumbs you get.
She fought down tears, swallowed down the sharp-edged lump in her throat. Be happy for your friends being happy. Try, anyway. Because that’s the closest you’ll ever get.
Still, they had just saved her life. You would think they would turn to look at her or something.
The terrible armor of her scars closed in around her, a tangible barricade that would, forever, stand as a barrier to anything beyond friendship. Forget it, move on. Concentrate on something besides yourself. You aren’t the star of this story, and it isn’t all about you. It’s about the team. Don’t forget why you were here in the first place. She clamped down on her heart, hard. You get half an hour to feel sorry for yourself and cry when you get home. That’s it, that’s all the self-indulgence you get. Then you concentrate on something productive.
While they were still staring into each others’ eyes, she dashed her glove across her own to clear the burning tears away, and turned her attention to Bulwark. And frowned.
There were some things even she could tell, from the machines, and from him, thanks to Sovie’s briefing. He was breathing on his own at last. And that dreadful draining was shut down for good. But he wasn’t coming out of the coma, and she wasn’t medic enough to guess why.
“Bell,” she said, without turning to look at the other two. “What the hell is going on with Bulwark?”
Bella and Red came apart with a start, as if awakening from a dream, and looked at Vickie blankly. Bella snapped fully into work mode first, and wobbled a little as she raced to Bull’s side. OK, breathing on his own. She disconnected the respirator; there was nothing good that came of keeping a meta on one of those if he or she didn’t need it. She checked the EKG; looked like a coma, but not a vegetative one—there was something going on in his head, something very active. But he wasn’t coming out of it. She glanced at Vickie, who shrugged.
“Metas,” Vickie said, and shrugged again. “I mean, I’m no doctor, but Sovie says you can’t always tell how they’re going to recover. For some of them, at least from the conversations I’ve had with her, it’s like they’re doing a systems-check constantly, and they stay out cold until everything’s repaired, then they come to all at once.”
Bella scowled, Djinni, for the moment, forgotten. “Well…at least now I’ve got brain activity and I don’t need to keep anything but the IV drip on him. So nobody’s going to have the excuse to pull the plug on him.”
They both knew who that “nobody” would be, too. Nothing like eliminating the last witness to what had happened in Tesla’s office.
“I’ll put a magic cyber-snoop tag on him. If anything looks hinky, it’ll alarm for me, and in this state we can move him to Sovie’s bay,” Vickie said firmly. “Won’t hurt him to be off the drip for the hour or two that would take.”
Bella let out a sigh of relief. “That’ll work. Murdock can probably do the heavy lifting. Or Chug.”
Red looked back and forth between the two of them. “We done here, then?” he asked, finally.
Vickie jumped as if she’d been stung. “Shit! Sorry, Djinni. You were…” Her voice caught for just a moment, then she swallowed. “You did great. Like I figured. Thanks.”
He shook his head. “No, I really didn’t. Almost got you killed. Lucky Bella was here.” He favored Bella with a strained look. Bella averted her eyes and turned back to Bulwark’s monitors. Red shrugged in defeat, and stepped next to her. He paused, as if unsure of what to say, and shrugged again. He laid a hand on Bull’s shoulder, and gave it a rough squeeze.
“Hope this helped, big guy,” Red murmured. As he turned to leave, he brushed by Bella and felt her flinch away.
But Vickie touched his arm with a flick of a gloved finger, as if she knew how sensitive his skin was. Of course she knew. She’d been in it.…
“With or without Bella, you did good. The only way she could have reached me was through you.” She smiled wanly. “Thanks.”
He wouldn’t look at her. He and Bella were seriously off…uncomfortable. With the kind of confusion you saw in high school kids who just had a Moment with someone they’d never considered romantically before. She watched him leave, closing the door behind himself quietly.
She wanted to feel good. Instead, she felt like hell.
And it’s not all about you, she reminded herself. She glanced at Bell, who was busy with Bulwark. Go home. Cry. Then work on those sensor-balls and get them integrated with the cybermancy. You’re going to need them. The team is going to need them and the team is counting on you. There’s just too much at stake for you to play at self-indulgence now.
* * *
It was a garden. A garden with no paths, arranged with little geometric plantings of flowers, green turf between them. So far as Gairdner could tell, it went on forever. There was a great deal of light, but no sun, no way to tell time.
It was peaceful here, but it was also…isolated. He hadn’t been really alone in a long time. Alone, as in “no people around,” that is. “Alone” as in “without someone”…he’d been achingly alone since Victoria vanished, but that was different. But so far as he could tell, and he had walked for what seemed like miles through this garden, he was the only thing in it that wasn’t a plant or a bug.
So he finally sat down, even though he wasn’t tired, and waited. Eventually, something changed.
The “something” was a light in the distance, growing nearer. It seemed in no hurry to get to him, but then, he was in no hurry to see what it was. There just was no sense of urgency here. Eventually, he saw that the light had a human shape. When it grew near enough, he recognized it, or at least, he thought he did, because he had never actually seen this…person…with his own eyes, only had her described to him. If he was right, this was the one that had been tagged as “The Seraphym.” She wasn’t in ECHO, she wasn’t in any organization that he could tell. Opinion was divided on whether she was a metahuman or a real angel.
It appeared that he was about to find out for himself.
She stopped, a few feet away, and contemplated him. Her gaze was somewhat unnerving, since her golden eyes had no pupils. “Greetings, Gairdner,” she said, quietly. Her voice had some odd overtones, as if more than one person was speaking with her mouth.
He nodded politely. “Ma’am,” he said in way of greeting. Heaven wasn’t exactly as he had pictured it. As inviting as his surroundings were, he felt wary and on his guard. Still, minding his manners seemed the thing to do.
“I assume you understand at this point that you are not…in the world you knew.” There was no irony, no amusement in her tone; more like a grave serenity. “And no, this is not Heaven. Although there are as many of those as there are believers, and for some, this might be Heaven. For you, however, this is…call it a rest stop.”
He glanced around. “So this is my Platform 9 ¾?”
Now she smiled. It was a radiant smile, one that bathed him in approval. “Clever man. Yes, in a sense. And in that same sense, thanks to herculean work by your friends, you actually have a choice in destinations. I think, however, given your temperament, you would prefer to think about those destinations before choosing.”
“Careful consideration of options and assessing the cost, risks and potential benefits of each.” Bull bowed his head for a moment, then looked up at the Seraphym. “Yes, that sounds like me.”
“It is permitted me to tell you a great deal. This is because if you should choose one particular one of those options, you will not retain the memory of what I tell you. That option is, of course, to go back.” She blinked, slowly. “It is in my gift to see the futures. You are important to them. Not absolutely vital, but I See you in many of the ones that lead to…success. As opposed to failure, which for humanity, would be total.” She paused as if thinking. “However, you are not absolutely vital. It will be difficult, but I can find ways and means to replace you. If I must.”
“You mean my value in this world is non-essential,” Bulwark said. “You’re saying I have really nothing to sway my choice to either return or to go on.”
She sighed. “You all really are caught up in hearing what you choose to hear, not what I actually say…No, I did not say that.”
He held up his hand. “No, please, do not misunderstand. I am not assuming a tone of self-deprecation. I’m merely trying to understand the full extent of the ramifications of my choice here. If, as you say, I return, then I may be of use in the trials before us. If I choose not to return, my choice alone will not damn all of humanity. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“Just checking,” he said and held his hands behind him, standing at ease. “Please, continue.”
“Should you choose other than return, your options widen. To…well, the universe is yours. To share with Victoria, with others, if you wish. To find incarnation in some other form—’return to the fight’ as it were, elsewhere, elsewhen. The possibilities are infinite.…” She tilted her head to the side, looking curiously alien.
“Wait…” he interrupted, and held up his hand. “Did you just say I could rejoin Victoria?”
She nodded. “If you wish. I can tell you it is her wish. But no individual’s wish is forced on another. Free Will is the Law. She knows this, and accepts it. She also accepts that your choice will not be indicative of your love for her, or lack of it. She does not doubt that.”
He glared at her for a long moment. “She is dead, then,” he said finally.
“Yes. But in your heart, you have known this for a very long time.”
“I am a soldier, ma’am. I needed confirmation.”
“I understand. This is why I told you. In this moment of choosing, you must have all the information you need.” She spread her hands a little. “It is not permitted that I recommend a choice—”
“How did she die?” he asked, interrupting.
The Seraphym sighed, and closed her eyes for a moment. “I cannot tell you,” she said, finally. “That is not permitted either.”
“Not permitted,” he repeated. “Not permitted…”
“No, it is not,” she said. “I am only an Instrument. I am constrained by the…”
And again, Bull cut her off, but this time not with words. She fell silent, genuinely surprised, as his face began to redden, his lips curl back in a snarl and his entire body began to quiver.
With rage.
“Not permitted?” he roared, and a force erupted from him…expanding outward like the force-field of his metahuman power. Where it touched, the garden disintegrated, shattered, as if the flowers, the turf, the trees and bushes, were all made of glass. Where it had passed there was nothing left but dust. But it wasn’t enough. Bulwark reared back and bellowed, releasing all his pent up frustration over Victoria’s sudden and inexplicable disappearance, over the months of fruitless searching that followed, of the careful dance he had performed around the Djinni. The Djinni, who could never be coerced into anything, who had to be handled just so, and what had that gained him? Nothing! The Djinni remained tight-lipped about the whole affair, never once surrendering even a passing thought of the events of that day. Bull continued to roar, his bubble of force and rage ever-expanding in undulating waves of light. He began to manifest fire, which tore from him to consume everything within that expanding space. The field shuddered and bellowed out as he gave one final dreadful push, as if driven by the fires within him, creating a small sun, until there was nothing left of the garden from horizon to horizon.
And even that did not satisfy his anger. In the blink of an eye, the fires contracted to a pinpoint of searing light—then exploded, taking everything, light, fire, all, with them. And then, there was nothing but darkness.
And a voice, her voice. Dry, but a little surprised. “I would describe that as…excessive.”
In the vastness of the void, his consciousness sounded both overwhelming and somehow terribly, insignificantly small. “I didn’t just wreck a common staging area, did I?”
“Only your own.” A light grew in the darkness. It became The Seraphym. Light spread outward from her until she hung in the center of the brightness, fiery wings spread, perfectly balanced in the heart of a sphere of soft, white light. “Would you like it back again? Or do you prefer the dark?”
“A good question,” he answered as he resumed his customarily neutral tone. He figured the Seraphym realized what a rare thing it was for him to externalize any internal conflict. This one was a long time coming, and still he was no closer to the answers he sought, except for one. Vic was dead. The how and the why aside, it was the certainty of her death that had finally sparked what rage he had bottled up over it. And now, she was being offered back to him. His heart leapt at the idea of it. But was he done? With everything? Was it time to rejoin his love?
He considered his choices, and realized there really wasn’t any choice, not for him. There was nothing like destroying an entire plane of existence, even a personal one, to put things in perspective.
I’m sorry, darling, he thought in prayer. Perhaps in time. I hope you understand, but I’m just not done fighting. Not yet.
Seraphym somehow took on an aura of command, that cool impression of certainty he had always received from his best COs. “You are a soldier, Gairdner. In a sense, so am I. I have my orders, there are reasons for them that I am sometimes privileged to know, and you are not. And sometimes, even I am not privileged to know reasons or even information. But I trust that this is for the greatest good. Do you understand?” She waited for his answer.
“Not entirely, no,” he answered. “But it’s my choice, and I choose to go back.”
“That will be permitted,” she said, gravely. “But…” She paused. “Curious. It will be permitted…but not just yet.” The light expanded until it filled everything again. “Do not be concerned. It will be permitted.”
She vanished, leaving him alone, drifting in light.
“And now what?” he asked aloud.
::You might consider rebuilding what you broke,:: rang the words in his mind.