Soon I Will Be Invincible (3 page)

There are moments in life you just can’t take back. In the terrible slowness of the accident, I got halfway across the room before realizing what I’d done. I had time to look back and read the controls, to see the glass begin to bulge and craze before it shattered, time to notice the sound of my foot scuffing on the floor, and an urgent musical whine from one of the generators sliding up the scale.

A dozen people have gotten themselves killed trying to replicate the effects of that explosion. I turned and saw my future crystallizing out of a volatile green compound, written out in invisible ink. All my life, I’d been waiting for something to happen to me, and now, before I was ready for it, it was. I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings. I was going to declare war on the world, and I was going to lose.

CHAPTER TWO

WELCOME TO THE TEAM

         Four years ago, I decided to start calling myself Fatale. It’s my superhero name. I chose it from a list they supplied me in the clinic, and at the time it seemed like the perfect symbol for my dangerous, sexy new self, a cybernetic woman of mystery. Admittedly, I was on a lot of painkillers.

Before this, I was an enhanced operative in an NSA-style spook show. When they fired me, the government techs said I was having an adjustment disorder, but I prefer my term for it. I’m a superheroine, gifted with powers and abilities above the norm. I’m superhuman, one of the good guys. One of the chosen.

I got my powers by accident, a random tourist mishap in São Paulo. It wasn’t a fancy accident, just a runaway dump truck on the Rua Augusta that plowed into me and scraped me forty feet along the side of a building. I was on life support for four months and unconscious most of that time. I’m going to be in a clinic for three weeks this year, and the next, and basically for the rest of my life.

Why I was in Brazil, or even who I was there with, I don’t know. That went in the accident and the surgery that followed, taken out when armor plate and dead reckoning and a prototype microwave projector went in. I’ve looked at travel guides to try to jog my memory—was I there to see the architecture? The zoo? I don’t even speak Portuguese.

But yes, I did it to myself. I signed the papers, medicated and supine in a hospital bed, scrawling an illegible name with a fuck-it-all panache, knowing vaguely that I didn’t have much of a shot otherwise. The press release was of course bullshit, not that anyone bothers to look at my web site. They wrote it while I was still in recovery, all about cancer and a miracle cure. I never even learned all the made-up details about my grandmother and the old house, and how I wanted to be an astronaut. The real story is much more complicated and stupid and isn’t a thing I could explain fully, not even when I had all of my original brain tissue.

Protheon approached me in South America. The corporate doctors came to see me several times during my conscious intervals; polite, friendly men, in suits and in lab coats, to talk to me about a proposal they had for me. I was the one-in-a-million accident they had been waiting for, and they were my last option. They explained about the super-soldier program. They told me I was going to be the forerunner of an army of people who looked and fought like me. I said okay.

The Brazilian clinic had contracted the advice of a Swiss designer of artificial organs, three American software engineers, a German military contractor, and a Thai plastic surgeon famous for sex-change operations, but the main design and modification was the work of an unknown party.

Forty-three percent of my original body weight is just gone. Mostly on the left side, ground into the pavement or discarded on the operating table. Muscle, nerve tissue, bone, and skin. Hair, fingernails, cartilage, an eye, and a good deal of brain tissue. A lot of my guts are plastic, too.

That was the unlikely beginning to my career as a superhero, enhancile, trans- or super- or metahuman or whatever other term you like to use to describe it. What I am now, and will be for the rest of my life.

I can see myself reflected in the curving metal walls of the Crisis Room, a patchwork woman of skin and chrome, souvenirs of a bad day in São Paulo. I lost a lot of skin, and gained four inches of height and a metal skeleton.

I’m in Manhattan, on the forty-eighth floor of a midtown skyscraper, sitting down with the seven most powerful heroes in the world, and I’m lucky they even asked me to be here. A month ago I was spending my daytime hours watching television and listening to the police scanner. It’s hard to make it on your own as a cyborg—we have serious overhead, maintenance and supply issues I’d rather not explain.

I check my reflection again to make sure I’ve got the look exactly right, a silver-haired, high-tech Amazon warrior, hair drawn back in a long ponytail, a gleaming technological marvel. I was going to be the next generation of warfare.

The past few hours are a blur. Flying up from Hanscom Air Force Base, where it took me three hours to get through security, aprivate helipad. A crowd of reporters stood around the Champions’ headquarters shouting questions about CoreFire, but no one so much as recognized me. Then another long security check before I could get a visitor’s badge.

Even though I was running late, I stopped in the trophy room outside the Champions’ Crisis Room to gaze at the old memorabilia and the old group portraits of the finest superteam in the world. Two of those faces are absent now, two empty places at the table. Nobody says anything, but it’s obvious whom I’m here to replace. Galatea’s sculpted face beams down from the glamour photographs, a metal angel.

So I’m the last to arrive. Nobody looks up—the meeting’s already running. Being this close to so much power is a vertiginous sensation. The heroes pop out at you, impossibly vivid, colorful as playing cards but all from different decks, a jumble of incompatible suits and denominations dealt out for an Alice in Wonderland game. A man with the head of a tiger sits next to a woman made of glass. The woman to my right has wings. This is where I want to be—the players.

The Champions have money behind them. A marble table the size of a small swimming pool, arched ceilings, a dozen instrument panels blinking global updates. There’s a charge in the air. This is where the greatest heroes in the world sat—their portraits ring the room, images of the heroes they were ten years ago. Except two of them, Galatea and CoreFire, are missing.

“Whatever this is, it’s global. The tides are off, and there’s a temperature drop in the deep ocean. And CoreFire is still missing.” In the Crisis Room, Damsel tells us the world is ending. We sit in a half circle, like children. A
U
-shaped table spans the room, and Damsel hovers at the open end before the wall of monitors.

Her force field flickers a moment, green and then indigo, over her skintight red-and-purple costume. Her face is familiar from a thousand interviews and magazine covers; a slender, pretty brunette, nondescript save for the odd little markings on her throat. She has the glamour of a film star, but her power is no illusion.

Damsel’s father was Stormcloud, the mainstay of the old Super Squadron, so Damsel is that rare thing, a superhero by inheritance, her name a half-serious play on her father’s vocation. His weather powers may not have been genetic, but his strength and speed are there. She wears a pair of swords to compensate, wire-wrapped hilts coming up over her shoulders.

Behind her, a wall-size video monitor flickers, showing weather patterns, locations of recent superhuman crimes, profiles of a few at-large supervillains. The eight people scattered around the conference table are some of the most famous superheroes in the world. People like Feral, Rainbow Triumph, and Elphin. The air is thick with power. These are people who have, quite literally, saved the entire world.

“Honey, we haven’t seen a serious threat for almost a year. I’ve been almost bored.”

This is Blackwolf. He doodles on a BlackBerry and twirls a combat knife in the fingers of his off hand. Former Olympic gymnast, millionaire, and onetime scourge of the underworld. Technically, he doesn’t have any powers at all, the paragon of the bare knuckle and gadgets style. His lack of a real superpower emerged as a point of pride—any powered hero who cared to make a remark soon found himself challenged to a friendly sparring match, and Blackwolf never lost. He’s also Damsel’s ex-husband.

Her field goes white for a split second. Then the cat thing, Feral, huffs a sardonic laugh. “Maybe you should be back at work, then. Spend some time on the streets.”

Damsel cuts him off. “He should answer his hail at least. He has the same fail-safe signal device as the rest of us.”

“I know,” Blackwolf replies. “I designed it.”

“Could he be off-planet?” I ask.

“Not without saying something. He and I have a deal about that,” Damsel says. I look for some sign as to whether this was a stupid question.

“You honestly think there’s something behind this,” Blackwolf says, as if I hadn’t spoken.

“I, too, have felt it. An emanation of the darkness.” We all turn to look. Mister Mystic’s voice is heavy with portent, and even in the sunlit boardroom the shadows seem to fall heavier in the corner where he stands. He wears a tuxedo and crimson-lined cape, like a cartoon of a stage magician, complete with a wand tucked into a sash at his waist. Rainbow Triumph rolls her eyes. I would laugh if I hadn’t seen news footage of him high above Colorado, crimson energy curling out of him to hold a falling satellite motionless above a Denver suburb.

Outside, the East River flashes in the sun. A pile of bagels sits untouched at the center of the table.

“Darkness? Crime, you mean.” Feral’s voice is a growl distorted by jutting canines. He’s a mutant, a genetic metahuman. Massive, he catcrouches in one of the office chairs—how could someone just be born like that? It must have been a genetic program, but officially he’s an accident. He has a long feline tail, and it’s lashing, thudding against the mesh back.

I know these people—everyone does. They started the Champions in the early eighties, just as the old Super Squadron started to retire, people like Go-Man and Regina. They were younger and sexier than their predecessors, the seemingly immortal heroes of the postwar boom, with their statesmanlike demeanors and bright costumes like the flags of strange countries. That generation had been compromised by the alien-war intrigues of the seventies, and these people became their newer, slicker replacements. If the Super Squadron were the golden age, they were the silver.

Some of them don’t even wear masks anymore. They don’t have secret identities as working-class chumps; they date movie stars and attend celebrity charity events. Even their powers are cooler—fast, fluid, nonlinear. Monumental blocks of muscle have gone out of fashion, and these new powers seem to emerge as pure style. The team roster changed every few years, but these were the core, the ones who had been there for the big breakup nine years ago.

I take a few stills out of the camera in my left eye in case I never get this close again, catching details you miss in the magazines, the precise way the light glints off of Lily’s skin. If Damsel looks almost ordinary, Lily never could—the daylight miracle of her skin is always there. I can’t believe they asked her here. No one is talking to her. Even Blackwolf keeps a wary eye on her.

“I don’t want a high-profile event. I’m not talking about getting the team back together, okay? I thought it would be smart for a few of us to just look into things. Informally.”

Blackwolf shifts in his chair. “This is CoreFire we’re talking about. The big guy can take care of himself.”

I watch him unobtrusively, aware of those preternatural reflexes. His hands as he holds the printout in front of him are strong but graceful. I can see scars and calluses. Hands of a pianist turned prizefighter.

“We’ve got some new faces here, so let’s make some introductions. I’m Damsel.” The famous face is carefully neutral behind the mask.

They all know one another, but we go around the room anyway. I can’t help but feel it’s a courtesy to me.

“Feral.” It comes out as a breathy cough.

“Blackwolf.” He nods, looking just like his
GQ
cover. In costume, his black bodysuit shows up that perfect musculature. Almost forty, he looks twenty-five. Genetically perfect.

“Rainbow Triumph.” Rainbow Triumph’s is a bright chirpy cartoon of a voice.

“Mister Mystic.” Mystic’s is baritone perfection, crisp and resonant. I wonder if he used to be a professional actor.

“Elphin.” A child’s whisper but somehow ageless; the voice that once lured naïve young knights to their doom.

“Lily.” The glass woman. Her name brings an unmistakable tension into the room. She worked the other side of things for a long, long time. She’s stronger than almost anyone here, and some of them know that firsthand. Now she’s come through the looking glass, into the hero world. I wonder how she got here.

When it gets to me, Damsel says a few polite words about my work on the sniper killings. No mention of the NSA. I stand awkwardly to say my code name, conscious of my height.

“Fatale.” There’s a digital buzz at the back of my voice that the techs never managed to erase. When I sit back down, one armored elbow clacks noisily against the marble tabletop. I don’t wear a mask, but I fight the urge to hide my new face behind the silver hair they gave me. Most of it’s nylon.

They found me in Boston, living on the last of the reward money from that sniper thing, plus a kill fee from the NSA when they voided my contract. Becoming a superhero doesn’t happen all at once, and by that point I was working the bottom end. Spending nights lurking in Allston, or Roxbury, or Somerville, senses open to the police bands and 911 lines, sprinting to be there before the authorities. Supposedly, I grew up around there, but I didn’t remember these neighborhoods. There was no particular money in it or even superhero glamour, but I needed to be working. I was lucky to find that sniper thing.