Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (13 page)

“He’s not…dead, is he?” the Carpenter said.

“No,” the Blind Man said. “Something would still linger on. The spirit is not a thing that just vanishes. If the boy was dead, I would have broken the connection immediately. Communing with the recently deceased brings uncleanliness into the soul.”

Niobe didn’t hold much belief in spirits. But it wasn’t worth arguing over. Her legs felt steadier now, so she took her own weight and brushed off Solomon’s arm.

They didn’t have much, but it was a start. The man who attacked Sam wore a Met Div uniform, but he didn’t have any backup. And that attack was nothing close to a lawful arrest. She didn’t put it past the cape coppers to pull something like this, but her gut told her this wasn’t official. A rogue element, maybe, or someone hired by an outside party. She’d seen what passed for internal affairs in the Metahuman Division.

The Carpenter watched her, his mouth turned down in a frown. She gave him a short nod to let him know she was okay. “Come on. I’ll fill you in on the way back. I’ll even let you drive.”

The grin he gave was forced, but he slapped her on the back anyway. “You know, you’re a lot more agreeable like this. I may have to make arrangements to have your head messed with more often.”

She turned towards the doorway.

“I believe you’re forgetting something,” the Blind Man said. “Or rather, there’s still something you need to forget.”

She froze, stomach tightening.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Solomon said. “You said you couldn’t give us the full picture. I think she’s entitled to a discount.”

The Blind Man pushed himself up to his feet, still wheezing. Niobe faced him as he shuffled towards them.

“I gave you all there was about the boy,” he said. “Now comes payment.”

“It’s okay, Carpenter,” Niobe said as Solomon opened his mouth again. Her guts twisted as she spoke. “It was my deal to make.”

She stepped forwards to meet the Blind Man. He reached out again with his large palm, but this time he gripped the base of her neck and gently pulled her forwards until they were inches apart. He pushed up her mask to expose her mouth and nose, and brought his own shriveled lips close to hers. Their faces touched, nose-to-nose and forehead-to-forehead.

Don’t you dare die, Sam,
she thought. Even now, she could feel the boy’s soul imprinted on hers. In those few minutes, she’d been closer to him than she ever had to any other human being. She’d come to know a sad, lonely boy who loved his books and wanted to kiss pretty girls.
We’ll get you out of this. I promise.

The Blind Man’s breath had no smell. It came slow and whistling against her nose. She ran through the memories of her childhood one last time, knowing it was hopeless. She couldn’t remember the internment camp on Somes Island she’d been born in during the war, but she remembered the insults and the hatred that came after. Even though her parents had been in New Zealand for a decade before the war, they were still Japs, still the enemy. But they worked hard, built a life for Niobe and her little brothers. She remembered when she was eleven and her mother was teaching her to play piano at a public library. She’d been so happy to find the old piano. Her mother always had the most beautiful fingers.

Forget it. Do it for Sam, and do it for Gabby. Save them.

“Hurry it up,” she said. “We’ve got a job to finish.”

The Blind Man inhaled sharply. The image of her mother’s fingers on ivory keys crawled out of her inner eyes and turned to smoke inside her. Memory after memory flashed before her eyes, then slipped away like a dream upon waking. The Blind Man continued to inhale, sucking in the memories while his eyes twitched in wild pleasure.

Then he stopped. There was no hole gnawing at her mind, not even a shadow of the memories she had lost. She was still the same person. But when she tried to summon the event she’d been recalling before the Blind Man began, she found nothing. Just a vague sense of loss.

The Blind Man smiled. He looked refreshed, almost youthful. She shoved her hands in her pockets to stop herself punching him.

“You have fine memories,” he said. It was almost a sigh. “So full of life.
Haere ra
, Niobe Ishii. Find the boy you seek.”

She didn’t trust herself to speak, so she turned on her heel and walked out of the pub, leaving the Carpenter to trail her.
Just shadows of the past,
she reminded herself.

The sky was red when she emerged. She stopped on the cracked footpath, trying to make sense of the time. “How long was I out?”

“A few hours, maybe,” Solomon said. “Time doesn’t seem to work the same way when the Blind Man’s doing his thing.”

Hours. Now that she thought about it, her stomach gnawed with hunger, and she needed to pee. A few of the Blind Man’s people were milling around the street, smoking or talking. She spotted the white-suited Quick-fire prodding at the burn mark on his suit. He glanced at her, saw her watching, and quickly shuffled away.

“That boy’s father used to be a hero.” Hine-nui-te-po glided up behind them, arms folded in front of her. She followed Quick-fire with her eyes. “Now the man starts drinking when he wakes and doesn’t stop until he passes out at midday. It’s not good for a boy, growing up in a house like that.” She shook her head sadly, then sighed and turned to Niobe and Solomon. “It’s still early. Won’t you stay for
kai
?”

“No time to eat,” Niobe said, ignoring her rumbling stomach. She wasn’t going to stay here a minute longer than she had to.

The woman nodded and looked up. Her
moko
made her look bestial in the sunset. “A bloody sky before a long night. Violence is coming. Do you feel it? Do you hear the Earth singing her last songs?”

Niobe pulled a Pall Mall from her packet and lit up. She glanced at the sky again. The Moon was out early, nearly three-quarters full. She couldn’t see the lunar colony, but it was there at the northern pole, nestled between the craters. Metahumans had beaten both the Americans and the Soviets there and built themselves a new home. McClellan and his baby wouldn’t have been killed if they’d been there. Sam wouldn’t have been taken. And when Niobe and Gabby got there, they’d be safe. Free.

“No,” she said to Hine-nui-te-po. “I don’t hear anything. The Earth stopped singing a long time ago.”

She turned away and gestured to Solomon. He nodded at her, and together they strode back down the ruined street, the night closing in around them.

8: A Crooked Man

Miss Knuckleduster smashed through the wall of our island lair and started crushing robots and genomorphs like they were toys. Steel Skull had left me in charge of the defence. He figured he’d escape while I was getting my teeth kicked in. He figured wrong. While Miss Knuckleduster tore through the last robot, I disabled the auto-airlocks and set the island to sink. She panicked as soon as she saw the sea pouring in through every opening. So did Steel Skull. I locked his cabin door before he could get to a diving suit and watched as the water slowly engulfed him. I didn’t need a suit, of course. Everyone always laughed at the meta with gills. They didn’t laugh so hard when I drowned them all.

—Shrimp to Shark: An Autobiography of Mako, Supercriminal

Sam ached to see the sun. Being confined to a small space didn’t bother him. He’d lived on the boat with his uncle for years, after all. The cell—or whatever it was—was a little bigger than the cabin he shared with his uncle, but there was no window here. God, how he wanted to feel the sun again. He was starting to forget what colours looked like, what the sea smelled like. All he had here were the concrete walls and the light that stayed on all day and all night.

He sat curled up on the mattress and tapped the back of his head against the cool concrete wall. How long had he been here? Three days? Four? A month? Time had no meaning. He slept most of the time now, if you could call it sleep. He had no blanket to shield himself from the cold and the light, so he did little more than doze. Sometimes—he had no idea how often—a hatch at the bottom of the thick steel door would open and someone would shove in a bowl of porridge or watery soup. The first couple of times, Sam raced to the door and begged to be let free. Then he begged for whoever it was to talk to him, to say something, anything. But the hatch always closed in silence and the footsteps faded away, leaving him alone again. His last meal had come an hour or so ago—it was hard to tell—and now the remainder of it sat beside him. Something in it tasted strange this time, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe he was just forgetting how things were supposed to taste.

He didn’t move from his bunk much anymore. Sometimes he wondered if he was even still alive, or whether he was a disembodied ghost. He wasn’t hungry and he hardly drank anything, so he didn’t need to use the steel toilet in the corner very often. His heart still pounded whenever the hinges of the food hatch creaked, but he forced down the excitement. He didn’t know why he was here, what they wanted from him, but they weren’t going to let him go. Maybe he’d be here until he shrivelled up and stopped collecting his food, then they’d come and clean out his corpse to make room for the next prisoner.

While he tapped his head against the wall, a memory dredged itself up from the swamps of his mind. A few months ago, while he and his uncle sailed slowly south through the Indian Ocean, he reread
The Count of Monte Cristo
. In it, the protagonist Dantès was imprisoned for fourteen years. Would Sam be imprisoned that long? He wouldn’t survive. At least Dantès had a Mad Priest to keep him company. Without contact, without the sun, Sam would just stop existing.

Of course, Dantès had escaped. Sam had thought about escape when he first woke here. He studied the creaking, noisy pipes that ran across the ceiling, and he tried to pry the toilet away from the wall. But all he got was bloodied fingers and broken nails. He cried that day. He didn’t have the strength for that anymore.

But maybe there was still a chance. He’d felt something back on the boat when the man attacked him. He couldn’t describe it, even to himself, but he could feel the residue of it sticking to his skin, like sea-spray on a windy day. He pressed his hand to the bruise on his throat. In that brief second when the man elbowed him, strength cut through the pain. It was some sort of energy, maybe even electricity, as stupid as that sounded.

He’d felt the energy once before, when he’d had a shouting argument with his uncle over something he couldn’t even remember. The energy was fainter then, and he figured it was just anger. But his uncle got quiet all of a sudden, and backed down just as the energy went through him.
Did he see something in my face? Why wouldn’t he talk to me about it?
Afterwards, they made up and had fresh fish for dinner. But his uncle wouldn’t meet his eye for days.

He held his palm under the light. He swore he could feel traces of the energy tingling in his fingertips. But it was just childish, naive hope. Wasn’t it?

Footsteps clicked outside the cell. Sam snatched his hand back and crossed his arms over his knees.
It’s just mealtime. You lost track of time again.
But there was another sound along with the footsteps. A voice.

“There was a crooked man,” the high-pitched voice sang, “and he walked a crooked mile.”

Sam pushed himself to the end of the bed as the footsteps came closer. His heart thudded.

“He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.” The voice giggled.

He’d heard that nursery rhyme before, but never in that lilting, off-key tune. The footsteps came to a stop.

“He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.”

The door’s lock groaned and clicked, and the hinges creaked slowly open.

“And they all lived together…” Spindly fingers appeared around the door. Sam backed into the corner. “…in a little…crooked…house.”

It took Sam’s tangled mind a moment to take in the slender man in the doorway. He wore a skin-tight black leotard and torn fishnet stockings. One of his long, pale arms held the door open, while his other hand rested against his face, fingers splayed.
No,
Sam realised.
That’s not a face.
He tried to force himself further into the corner, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the man. Leather string held a plastic mask shaped like a doll’s head to the man’s face. Crusted, dead flesh surrounded each of the stitch-marks in his skin. Crude make-up covered the face, with a grin of lipstick and thick pink blush across the cheeks. Mad eyes stared out of jaggedly carved eyeholes. Goose bumps ran down Sam’s arms.

The man cocked his head to the side and took a step into the room, a high-heeled woman’s shoe clicking on the concrete. “Is it scared?” His voice was high, girlish. Sam couldn’t see the man’s mouth move behind the mask, which only made things worse. “Doesn’t it like Doll Face’s singing?”

“Who are you?” Sam tried to keep his voice from trembling. His feet were frozen in place.
Oh my God, what is this thing?

The man giggled and took another step forwards. “It doesn’t know Doll Face. The Pretty Man said it wouldn’t know, but Doll Face didn’t believe him. Everyone knows Doll Face.”