New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (16 page)

I went at him fast, and he waited for me, arms raised in a boxer’s pose. I tried a couple of kicks, but his reaction time was at least as good as mine, and he almost managed to grab one of my legs, which would have pretty much ended the fight right then and there. Kicking isn’t a good idea unless you’re much faster than the other guy or he’s already on the ground. Next I went with a couple of jabs, which he parried easily, slapping my fists away, and in that first contact I knew he was still way stronger than me.

So I kicked him in the balls.

It wasn’t easy, because he was expecting just that kind of dirty trick. I had to feint and dance around a bit before I found an opening, and in the process I blocked a few punches from him, catching them on my arms and shoulders, and even those glancing blows bruised me pretty good. He was a heavyweight, I was maybe a light-heavyweight, or more likely a super-middleweight, and it was probably a good thing I hadn’t found a bookie and put money on myself.

As I tried to get into position I caught a fist to the guts that almost finished the fight right then and there, but I exaggerated the effect, pretended to collapse, and then sprung up and drove my foot into his crotch at supersonic speeds, just as he was cocking his arm to finish me off.

Even invulnerable Neos don’t like to have their family jewels rearranged like that. Ultie’s grin went away, along with much of his grace and mobility, and I went to town on him. Body punches, a couple of nice right and left hooks to his big square jaw that delivered enough kinetic energy to turn a battleship into scrap metal, and he went down. I got to kick his prone form for a while. I was looking forward to knocking him unconscious, which seemed to be his default state whenever he was around us.

I had it all my way for about fifteen seconds. I delivered as much pain and suffering as I’d handed out to the Iron Tsar. Then he reared up and caught me with an uppercut that overwhelmed my anchoring power and sent me crashing against the dome’s walls, and as I bounced back from the wall, he clotheslined me and everything went dark.

* * *

“Happy now?”

Christine had waited until we were alone in our new apartment to speak up. Before that, she’d been unusually quiet after I woke up, Adam certified Ultimate as the winner, and we went home.

“I’m ecstatic,” I grumbled. I don’t like losing, in no small part because, in my old line of business, losing is usually synonymous with dying, and if that fight had been for all the marbles, Ultie would have put me six feet under. Now, maybe I could have tried drawing in more power from the Source, pushed myself past my limits, but Christine had warned me very sternly that each time I did that I was playing Russian roulette with myself; she was working on improving my ability to contain more power within my body, but the process turned out to be long and very painful. Winning a sparring match wasn’t worth risking a literal burnout. Still, getting knocked out on the first round pissed me off to no end.

“You two are like bull deer during mating season,” Christine said. “And guess what: I’m not going off with the winner, because I’m no effing prize for you two to fight over, okay?”

“That’s not what that was about,” I said. “Not really. I just wanted to take him down a peg or two.”

“Why? He’s been through enough already. Do you think he liked having to get rescued not once, not twice, but three times in the last few weeks? He’s still in a pretty bad state, okay? You seem to forget John was on the verge of losing his mind not very long ago, and he’s not used to being a dude in distress. He’s recovering from some pretty bad trauma, and I’m worried the recovery is only superficial, and that he still has problems beyond the induced insanity thingy. Come to think of it,” she added, “Winning this fight might actually make him feel better.”

“Well, there you go. I helped make Ultimate feel better by beating the shit out of me.” My mood wasn’t getting better. I made a face, Ultimate’s face, and leered at her. “There, do you want to kiss him?”

Even as I said the words I knew I’d fucked up big time.

Her eyes had never been that cold before. I dropped the face. “Don’t. Ever. Do. That. Again.”

I’d hurt her. I knew she liked the big guy, and I’d used that against her. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you are, but you’re also still angry at him, and at me.” For a moment, neither of us said anything, and that silence hurt even more.

Finally, she hugged me, and I felt a huge weight being lifted off me. I hadn’t completely fucked up. This time. “We’ll have to work on it.”

“I will,” I promised.

We went to bed, just to sleep.

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, May 11, 2013

She was flying. Oh, great googly moogly, she was flying!

“You’re veering off to the left, Dark,” her instructor told her through her cochlear implants. “Try to keep station and not bump into your flight mates, if you don’t mind.”

“Roger. Sorry.” She corrected her flight vector, veered a little too far to the right, and corrected that, just in time to avoid smacking into the graceful winged figure of the Golden Angel, and finally managed to stay in formation with the other five students. Not bad, considering they were flying at a good three hundred miles an hour and doing all kinds of tricky maneuvers. She was in control, more or less. She controlled the horizontal, she controlled the vertical, and she was getting the hang of port and starside, no, starboard, that’s the ticket.

Flying, as it turned out, was fun.

If only the rest of her life could be so much fun and, more importantly, uncomplicated.

Well, you could still be running for your life. That was pretty uncomplicated, pure animal fight or flight. I don’t recall you enjoying it much.

Shut up, you.

Her brain was right, though. She’d spent a whole month without anybody trying to kill her (except for training purposes, and without actual danger of injury), without having to abandon all her possessions (and now she owned more stuff than she’d ever bad back on Earth Prime, and her bank account had a lot more zeroes than she would ever have accumulated there, even after graduating and working for a couple decades, not counting student loans to pay off), and without losing Mark. Her new set of problems weren’t even First World, they were pure One-Percenter problems. She’d better check her Neo privilege and stop whining.

Except not all her troubles were trivial. A couple of them were heart-wrenching, and one could be literally world-wrenching.

Item one: she was homesick. Yeah, you could never go home again, blah, blah, doubly and triply true when you hadn’t just changed, you’d become an entirely different species and moved to a new universe. Uncle Adam had apparently lost the ability to jump between worlds at some point between his death and semi-resurrection, so she was going to have to figure how to do it herself, or find someone else, like the mysterious Magister and his magical Porta-Potty, who so far had refused to be found, the d-bag. She wanted to go back to Earth Prime, let her mother know she was okay… and maybe figure out where she wanted to live.

Item two: Mark wasn’t handling the transition to the Legion very well, and it was putting some strain on their relationship. His instincts were all down-and-dirty. Case in point: he and John had gotten into a sparring match, and it had been a mess. John was stronger and tougher – after testing, Mark had scored a 3.4 versus John’s 3.6 – so even after Mark pulled some dirty tricks on him, John still beat him handily. Those two were never going to be besties, for sure. And there’d been more incidents with other Legionnaires: some people didn’t care to have a vigilante in their midst, and acted as if someone had dropped a doody in their punch bowl. At some point there was going to be a non-training ass-kicking involving Mark and some snooty d-bag. On top of that, Mark’s mood swings were beginning to wear her out. His rage hadn’t come bubbling to the surface, but it was still there, and it bothered her.

It would help if he’d tried to make more friends, but he was downright antisocial. He was relying solely on her for companionship, and that was wearing her out as well. She’d managed to make some friends – Artemis/Olivia, for example, who was a great teacher and mentor; and, much to Mark’s chagrin, John Clarke, who’d turned out to be pretty nice and charming, now that he was back to being the hero of the ages, and wasn’t all depressed and going insane and stuff. John was still not a hundred percent well, though, and she was trying to help him even as he helped her. Sometimes, she suspected she saw him as a project, a prospective fixer-upper. She didn’t know quite what to do about that.

Item three was a biggie. It involved one certain red cube weighing down her tasteful fanny pack – er, utility pouch – on the belt of her brand-spanking new costume, a fairly tasteful and not skintight fuchsia and white bodysuit with sensible boots – i.e. no five-inch heels or other idiocies – and a matching headband to keep her hair off her face while she kicked butt. Her agent had been aghast at her costume choice; her suggestions for alternative outfits had made Christine aghast, and she’d politely told the woman that she wasn’t interested in being whack-off material for teenage boys. The agent had muttered darkly about missing millions in merchandizing opportunities, but given in eventually. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the Codex in said fanny pack.

She hadn’t done anything with it.

Oh, she’d had plenty of excuses. First, she’d had to sort out the fallout (some of it literal) of her adventures. Then, she’d figured she should actually train in the use of her powers rather than making things up as she went along, which admittedly had worked out an amazing amount of the time, but clearly wasn’t the right way to go about things. And now that she was getting the hang of things, she’d discovered the stark truth under all the excuses.

She was scared as eff to try again.

Her ‘uncle’ hadn’t been much help so far, because he’d also had been dealing with a bunch of issues. He was getting his crap together faster than she was, though. She figured that sometime this week, or next week at the latest, he’d start prodding her to get back to work. He’d already dropped a few hints in that direction over dinner a couple of nights ago, and hadn’t pushed things only because Mark, who’d been drinking a bit too much, started getting ornery about it. The evening had turned awkwardly tense; Uncle Adam had left early and Mark had retreated into a book and not said much the rest of the night. They’d ended up in bed, cuddling but without making love, which was happening much too often lately.

“You’re veering left again, Dark.”

“Oops. Sorry.” Okay, thinking deep thoughts wasn’t conducive to good aerial maneuvering, and she needed to get it right. In a week she was going to go through a series of qualifying exams, after which she’d get her diploma or whatever they gave you and would become a full-fledged Legionnaire, complete with an official code name, which wasn’t going to be Armageddon Girl. Nossir. She’d applied for Dark Justice: some dude in the 1980s had taken that name, donned a silly ninja outfit, and after a couple of adventures had run into a Neo pyromancer who’d burned him to a cinder, so thoroughly that the masked vigilante, who might not even have been a Neo, remained unidentified to this day. Legal had said she could use the name, but after hearing the story behind it she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Maybe Justice Dark, instead. She’d be the first of that name.

“And a sharp left now!” Everybody made a ninety-degree left turn, canceling their forward momentum and turning and reorienting in one smooth motion. Everybody except her. The command caught her by surprise; she stopped in mid-air, and got slammed by Olufemi Oni, a Nigerian student who could turn his skin into solid iron. He bounced off her shield, and the other students behind him barely avoided more collisions. The graceful formation shattered.

“Sorry!”

“Dark! Fall out and report to Instructor Bronte for beginner flying practice!”

Yep. Life is great.

* * *

“So now you can fly? And better than me, I bet,” Christine said to Mark as she walked into their apartment, a nice two-bedroom place off in a residential annex some nine blocks away from Freedom Hall

While she’d been enduring the shame of going through basic flight again, she’d caught sight of Mark soaring through the air with another beginner class. His lessons had ended before hers, so she’d had to wait for an hour before she could talk to him about it. She could have used their mental link, but she’d been worried about getting distracted and screwing up.

Mark was chilling on one of the comfy armchairs that had come with the apartment, and watching a
Seinfeld
rerun. The show was a lot like the one on Earth Prime, except here Jerry Seinfeld had super powers very much like Ultimate’s, although at much lower scale; the idea of Jerry Seinfeld being a Neo still scared Christine a little bit. “Hey,” he said. “I was just about to order a pizza. Broccoli on your half, or do you want something else?”

“Broccoli’s fine.” After a few weeks of living together, they’d learned a few of their likes and dislikes. She liked broccoli on her pizza as much as he hated it, for example. Playing house had been equal parts fun and un-fun, as they discovered each other’s bad habits. He didn’t believe in folding clothes, for example, and liked to just stuff them in his chest’s drawers any which way. On the other hand, he hated it when the dishes didn’t get washed right away, while she preferred to wait until there were enough dirty items to fill the dishwasher, so he ended up doing the dishes about ninety percent of the time. Overall, though, they got along great; he never left the toilet seat up, for example, which put him ahead of a goodly percentage of the male gender.

“And yeah, they figured I could fly during my last physical,” he said after he placed the call to their favorite pizza place – there were only four pizza places in Liberty City, including a Pizza Hut, so it wasn’t great pizza, just the best available.

“Makes sense. Your super-strength is partially telekinetic, so if you can lift weights with your mind you can lift yourself, and if you can lift you can thrust, and so on.”

“Are you talking dirty to me?” Mark said with a bright mental smile.

She grinned back. “I wasn’t, but I’d be happy to.” They’d have to wait until after the pizza, or the delivery guy might end up interrupting them, but now they had some nice after-dinner plans. He flashed a quick image of what he had in mind, and her smile widened. “Okay, stop it, or I won’t be able to wait until after the pizza gets here. And anyways, congrats.”

“And no, I can’t fly better than you,” he said. “Right now I can either float around at a snail’s pace, or fly in a straight line; if I try to make a turn I usually end up crashing into the nearest surface. I saw you back there, and you are kicking ass.”

“Sure, except the reason you saw me back there was that they sent me back to the kiddie pool after I ruined a group maneuver.”

“Let me guess, you were thinking about something other than flying.”

She shrugged. “I can’t help it. I think; it’s what I do.”

“Descartes couldn’t have put it better himself.”

“Well, he kinda did.”

“In any case, that’s one bad habit you need to unlearn, Christine. You know I like to brood and turn things around in my head myself, but when it’s time for action, you have to stop telling stories to yourself and just
be
. Otherwise you’re going to be running a fraction of a second or more behind the other guy, and in a fight for your life that’s plenty enough time to get killed. Yeah, you’re almost invulnerable, you took a direct hit from the Iron Tsar and lived to tell about it, but you probably wouldn’t have been able to take two hits in a row. You want to avoid taking any hits, and save your shields for the times when nothing you do will avoid taking a hit.”

“You’re right. The meditation classes are supposed to help, but I still get my brain whispering to me, especially when I know it’s not real.”

“That’s probably it. You’re not taking the training seriously enough. Another bad habit. Still, I’m not going to nag you about it. Your instincts when the shit does hit the fan are pretty good.”

“Thank you.” He meant it, too; he wasn’t just blowing smoke up her butt to try to make her feel good, and that made her feel damn good.

“Anyways, what were you thinking about when you shoulda been concentrating on flying?”

“You know what. The Crimson Cube O’ Doom.”

“I figured as much. I knew your ‘uncle’ was starting to nag you, the other night, which is why I got pissed off at him. He’s not very good at being tactful, and that’s coming from me, Mr. Tact his own fucking self. From what I hear, that comes from both sides of his ‘family.’ Doc Slaughter was always a cold fish, and your Dad wasn’t big on talking to people even before he went cuckoo for cocoa puffs, as you like to put it, whatever that means.”

“Just a phrase from the Auld Country, me foine bucko me lad,” she said in an atrocious attempt at an Irish accent, and he chuckled. She decided to lay her cards on the table. “I was also worried about how irritated you’ve been getting these last couple of weeks.”

Mark’s posture slumped a little. “I know, and I’m sorry. At first, it wasn’t so bad. Turns out I had a lot more to learn than I expected, and I’m fine with that. But a lot of the Legion bullshit is just, well, bullshit. Sanctimonious crap, optics over results, trying get the whole world to love us when the best we can hope for is being tolerated by fifty-one percent and feared by the rest, and maybe even that’s too much to hope for. And a couple of the local dickheads still think I got a sweetheart deal I didn’t deserve. There’s this Chilean prick, code name Diamond Drill. The other day, I try some of my Spanish on him, and he acts like he doesn’t understand me, then talks to me in English, real slow, as if I’m mentally deficient. You know, the kind of petty shit that usually gets people smacked around a few times until they grow out of it, except here I can’t smack him around, because then I’ll prove to them I’m some ghetto piece of shit.” He took a breath. “Damn, I didn’t know I had that much verbiage stuck up my ass.”