Soon I Will Be Invincible (4 page)

Damsel was just there one day when I got home, standing on the shag carpeting in front of the television. She gave me an appraising stare. I knew who she was, obviously, and apparently she knew me.

“You must be Fatale.” She glowed a little. She was being projected here as a hologram, the superhero phone call. Her left foot wafted through a thrift-store coffee table—there hadn’t been much room to materialize. I wondered where the transmitter was.

“Damsel?” I ducked a little to come inside.

“I’m here to offer you an opportunity. Part of a group effort we’re putting together. If you’re willing, there’s a meeting coming up at the Manhattan facility. I understand you’re temporarily at liberty.”

“Uh, right. Of course. Well of course I’m interested. And no, I’m not, uh, engaged right now.”

“Excellent. Details will arrive by courier. We’ll expect you.” She winked out. Whatever level of technology they used, it was pretty far from anything you’d see on the street.

I noticed she didn’t promise anything. And she didn’t use the word
team,
like the old Champions were. They’d been more like a family, even before Blackwolf and Damsel married. No one expected that to happen again. They wanted an available hero who could be a technician, like Galatea was, but they weren’t pretending it was going to be that relationship again.

I could picture the conversation that led to my selection.

“So who can we get? Somebody who does machines.”

“Dreadstar?”

“Eh.”

“Calliope? Argonaut? The Breach?”

Chorus of shouts: “Not the fucking Breach!”

“Who, then? We’ve got no psychics, nobody technical…”

“Please, just find somebody who’s not going to be a total disaster. Have the computer give us a list.”

They’d looked at my schematics, and my references had checked out, and Damsel was dispatched. The official invitation came later in a heavy envelope of crisp, velvety paper. I was to report to their headquarters for the informational meeting two days later. They sent me a plane ticket along with. I’d never flown first-class before.

Talking about CoreFire, they fall into old rhythms. They used to be a team—once; they did this for a living. They all seem rusty at first. Damsel’s just a part-time crime fighter now. For all her power, she spends more time fund-raising for groups like Amnesty International. Elphin has a line of beauty products. Mister Mystic works as a consultant, to an odd and exclusive clientele.

“All right, say he’s missing. Now what?” Blackwolf’s natural charisma seems to make him cochair of this meeting.

“Who saw him last?” Damsel asks.

“I did.” Blackwolf answers her levelly. “He looked fine.” Blackwolf holds the distinction of being the only human ever to knock CoreFire unconscious. He still patrols in costume, part-time, but it’s mostly publicity for his corporate holdings.

“He always looks fine,” says Feral. He’s one of the few heroes on this level still working the streets, still busting up drug deals and foiling muggers. “Damsel? I know you two kept in touch.”

“I haven’t seen him in a year. When we took down Impossible together last time. He was on form. Untouchable as ever.”

I follow the conversation, feeling useless. I’ve never met CoreFire. I’ve never even seen him in person.

“He always had that vulnerability to magic. I saw an arrow go right into him one time. Some kind of magic arrow thing.”

“A magic arrow is not an object you understand, Blackwolf,” Mister Mystic responds. “In my current pursuits, I seldom traffic in such things, but I will inquire.”

“The forest realms say nothing,” Elphin offers wide-eyed, wings rustling.

Damsel takes a deep breath.

“Look, this is what I’m proposing. CoreFire’s never failed to answer a hail before, and if he’s over his head, this is going to be serious. If this is Doctor Impossible, it’s the moment he’s been waiting for. We’re setting up a…group. People from the powered community. You people are the short list.”

That makes them think. The Champions meant a lot to the community before they split, but the core members haven’t all been in the same room since then.

As a group, they seem to have trouble keeping still. Feral paces and lashes his tail. Damsel rewraps the cord on one of her sword hilts while she speaks. Elphin flies up to perch on one of the computer banks, her long eldritch spear held lightly in one hand, the barbed metal tip nearly touching the curved ceiling.

Rainbow Triumph taps one foot, glances over at me or at the ceiling, and drums polished fingernails. She was an obvious choice, a high-profile hero with great approval ratings and generous corporate backing. The invitation had probably been cleared through Gentech, and her agent. I’m a little surprised to see her still in the field. Child superheroes so rarely turn out well—look at the Impkin now; look at poor Theodore Bear.

I rub one arm at the line where the steel alloy bonded with my skin. No seam at all—it’s like two layers of Neapolitan ice cream, flesh and alloy, some protein voodoo they managed mostly by luck. Underneath it’s a lot uglier; wires run everywhere like bad kudzu, and there’s still a lot more human tissue in the right half than anyone thinks. Only the Protheon team knows for sure.

Blackwolf watches everyone else, eyes flicking to elbows and knees, all the weak spots. He puts a lot of time and thought into working out exactly how, if it came to it, in a fight, he could hurt the person he’s looking at. It’s not personal. It’s the only thing he’s good at, and it’s amazing he’s survived this long. He was diagnosed mildly autistic before he was a superhero.

Only Lily keeps utterly still, in a chair a few places down the table, a sculptured plexiglas form. She raises one crystalline arm.

“So…why do we think it’s Doctor Impossible? Isn’t he still in jail?” Lily’s voice sounds carefully neutral. Damsel answers, looking straight at her.

“I don’t, personally, but who knows what he’s capable of? And something this big doesn’t happen without his knowing.”

“Do we know where he is?”

“That setup near Chicago, locked down tight.”

“Look, if you’re so worried about him, why not just ask him yourself?” Lily looks almost amused. She and the Doctor were an item back in her not-so-distant villain days.

“He knows us. He won’t talk to us. Unless you think you could do better?” Blackwolf’s tone is even, genial; he’s watching to see how she’ll take it.

“I was hoping that between us we’d have a few leads, Lily.” Feral holds her gaze, tiger face unreadable. They say he has a drinking problem now, but he’s pure havoc in a fight.

“I don’t have all my old connections, as my presence in this room ought to tell you. CoreFire has a lot of enemies. Any one of them could have found that stuff he hates. The iridium.”

“We scan for that. Always,” Damsel shoots back.

“I’m just saying, there are a lot of people trying to figure out how to do this. And you haven’t been watching. You’ve been out doing…whatever you’ve been doing.” Lily watches their reaction; this part, I now realize, is her job interview.

“You have, maybe. I do my job. I always have,” Feral rumbles, and leans back in his chair.

It’s an uncomfortable silence. Too many heroes in this room, and too much history.

Most of them are naturals, superpowered since puberty or before. Powers that came on their own. Naturals are the wild talents that form out of the ever-churning soup of the human megapopulace by accident or fate. Once in a hundred million times, a lifetime of factors align, and at the right moment something new coalesces out of high-tech industrial waste, genetic predisposition, and willpower, with a dash of magic or alien invention. It started happening more often in the early 1950s, and no one knows why—nuclear power plants, alien contact, chlorinated water, or too many people dancing the Twist.

A very few of us got this way on purpose. Manufactured, treated with chemicals, surgically altered. Sheer force of will, or radical educational measures, or a willingness to take insane gambles for power. Blackwolf, for example, is little more than a superbly gifted athlete.

His father, legend has it, taught him most of what he knows in their backyard with only a baseball bat, a German shepherd, and an old rubber tire hanging from a tree. I’ve been snubbed before, for doing for myself what destiny did for others. But it may be a nobler thing to claw one’s way up, to seize by an effort what others had handed to them. What they were born with, or what dropped from the sky one calm summer night.

Damsel breaks the silence. “If someone out there has figured out how to beat him, we need to know it.”

“We owe it to the man, don’t we?” The question hangs in the air. Whatever had split them up made that an actual question.

“He was one of us,” says Elphin with finality, in the clarion tones of an Amazonian warrior. “If he truly has fallen, we cannot let him go unavenged.”

Elphin sits to my left, looking around with a disturbingly avian stare. We rode up in the elevator together. She’s not a teenager; she only looks like one. According to her press kit, she was born in tenth-century England. She’s a fairy.

They say she’s the remnant of an elite fairy guard, a warrior woman, one of Titania’s picked few. When the rest of the fairies departed this world, Titania asked her to stay behind. Where her friends had gone, no one knew. All those years, she’d lasted it out with no word from her own people, sipping tea from acorn cups and hunting the shrinking forests of England with flint arrowheads, fairy tech, while the centuries passed.

And then she’d come out of hiding to battle the enemies of humankind. That’s if you take her word for it. I admit she looks like a fairy. She’s around five feet tall, with ethereal blond hair, big bright eyes, high cheekbones, tiny breasts. And she acts like you’d think a fairy would act—cute and flighty, blond and haughty. Merry without projecting anything much like happiness. Pretty, but only approximately human.

Her wings look about right; long and iridescent, they whir like an electric fan when she’s in flight. She shouldn’t be able to fly at all, but
should
can’t be depended upon to mean what it’s supposed to when she’s around. I don’t like to look at the place where they join her back, where the insect anatomy joins the human, where the whole thing gets touched with horror. She carries a long spear or pike, a shaft of pale wood tipped with a barbed curlicue like a corner of spiderweb. In her hands it’s like a willow wand, but I’ve seen her punch it through the door of an armored car.

I don’t know what she is. Sometimes she acts like the heroine of an epic fantasy novel and sometimes she acts like she’s about nine years old, which might be cute if she didn’t kill people. But if you tried to make up a list of reasons why a person would look and act like she does, “fairy” would be about the least likely. Maybe it just suits her to say that—better than “wacky elective surgery” or “spy from evil wasp-persons,” or whatever it is that made her this way. God knows, my story is no better than hers.

I had four major operations, the longest lasting seventeen hours. The bones and armor went in first, to support the weight of the rest of it. I gained 178 pounds overnight, most of it lightweight alloy steel, bonded by an electrochemical process they wouldn’t explain.

For the next six days, I wasn’t allowed to move, not that I could have easily. I lay on my back and watched movies and healed. The worst part of it was my skull and jaw. The way it runs across my face like a stripe of silver paint, that took getting used to. My jaw too heavy, my tongue fumbling against metal teeth and cheek, like a strange metal cup always at my lips. At that point, it was all dead metal, like a suit of armor that wouldn’t come off.

Next came the first muscle enhancements, basic nerve grafts, and the power plant that would run it all, light as they could make it but still heavy and bulky in my back. Don’t ask how they made room for it. I can feel the warmth of it all the time, hotter when I’m working hard. I had to be strapped down most of the time while I learned to access the motor functions of a new set of skeletal muscles.

For months, I walked like a drunk staggering in a high wind. You learn to think and move with it. You have to accept that you’re not the same person. It doesn’t work if you try to be. You move, then it moves, and then you’ve gone a step. When a situation’s happening too fast, when a gun goes off or I’m hit from behind, the machine takes over and executes everything for me—by the time my regular brain catches up, I’ve already returned fire, already thrown an elbow, rolled forward, come up in cat stance, and my HUD is showing me half a dozen options. After a while you start to like it.

Everything afterward was refinement. Enhanced senses gradually layered in to include light amplification, infrared. Reflexes, sped up bit by bit over four weeks so I could adjust to the idea of superhuman speed, think in smaller units of time. The arsenal of gadgets that line my arms, legs, and torso—grappling hook, sonics, aqualung, dozens of tricks to get me out of any situation they could think of.

Sensation isn’t quite what it was. It feels like half of me is standing in another room, one where there’s always a warm, soft breeze blowing. Sometimes I wake up in the night and panic, thinking half of a department-store mannequin has gotten into bed with me. At least I don’t get my period anymore.

I’m not complaining. They did a good job. My enemies call me “Tin Man,” which would be less offensive if I had an actual boyfriend. Maybe I had one before the accident, but if I did, he can’t have been a very good one. He ought at least to have sent me flowers while I was having my body replaced. Good riddance. Or maybe he doesn’t know I’m still alive.

And, wait, what exactly was the Tin Woodman’s problem anyway? I can’t remember, except that he had a magical ax that chopped him up, limb by limb. Someone must have put a curse on the ax, and there must have been a third person—a tinsmith?—who put him back together again, who stuck on tin parts as the living ones came off. But who was so mad at him in the first place? Why didn’t he throw away the ax and get another job?