The Indestructibles (Book 3): The Entropy of Everything (33 page)

Chapter 66:

Legacy

      A girl sat in the corner booth of a coffee shop, drawing charcoal sketches of strangers on thick white paper.
She had a gift, an ability to capture faces she only just saw. This was how she interacted with the world.

      A man wearing a long black coat and red-lensed glasses walked in. She took to sketching him immediately, curious what those red lenses meant, wondering why anyone would wear such an ugly threadbare coat. Tattoos crept out from beneath the cuffs of his sleeves, just barely hidden by the Henley tee shirt he wore. He sported a goatee. It looked almost blue in this light.

      Perhaps he was from the circus.

      He bought a coffee. The girl expected him to leave, though she hoped he'd sit a while. She wanted a bit more time to be able to draw his face.

      Instead of leaving, he sat down next to her.

      "Hello, Sasha," he said.

      Well, I've never had a stalker before, the girl thought. This should be horrific.

      "It's extremely creepy that you know my name," she said.

      "I know. There were better ways I could have done this," the man said. "But it's been a very difficult week, and it couldn't wait any longer. I've learned a few things."

      "Like how to find peoples' private information on the Internet?"

      "I knew your father, Sasha," the man said. "He was my friend."

      "I don't think my father really had any friends," the girl said. "I'm sorry."

      "No, I'm sorry," the man said. "I knew him for years, but I only just recently learned his real name. I only just discovered some important things about him. He was a hero, you know. But he never told anyone about himself. He was a good man."

      "My father was a hero," Sasha said. "Were you?"

      The man smiled into his coffee.

      "I try," Doc said. "You live long enough, it's hard to tell. But I try."

      "What are you doing here?" the girl said.

      "The White Shadow taught me a lot of things. How to investigate a crime scene. How to read expressions and body language. He was quite the detective, in his own way," the man said. "But he never asked for anything in return. And when he stopped . . . doing what we do, none of us knew how to find him. We were never sure. Did he get sick? Did one of his enemies get him? Did he simply retire? We hoped it was the latter. We thought, well, if something really terrible had happened, we would have heard about it. He would have ended up in an emergency room somewhere. Or something like that."

      "Nothing like that happened," the girl said.

      She found herself wanting to trust this weird man, despite the glasses, despite knowing her name. He reminded her, just a little bit, of her father. There is a stillness to men and women who have saved a life. It's like for every terrible thing they've experienced, they weigh a little bit more. Gravity pushes down on them. Her father moved very slowly in his later years. He seemed to carry the weight of the world on his back.

      "Sasha, we all owed your father a debt," the man said. "Not a repayment, not a bargain. We simply owed him the honor of looking after the people he loved when he couldn't any longer. And we weren't there. Now I'm really the only one left who can. And I wanted to make sure you were okay."

      The girl set aside her pencil, took a sip of coffee. She looked at this strange man in his ugly coat and ridiculous glasses. Yeah, she thought. This is the type of person who actually could be my father's friend.

      "He kept you all at a distance on purpose," she said, at last. "It wasn't because he didn't trust you. He just desired . . . another life. A safe place. And safety for us. He needed a barrier between what he did and who he was. It's why he wore that mask. A mask with nothing on it."

      "A blank slate," the man said.

      "Yes," she said.

      "And what are your plans?" the man said. "Will you follow in his footsteps? Planning on taking over the family business?"

      The girl stifled a laugh. "If he were alive that would certainly break his heart," the girl said.

      The man raised an eyebrow.

      "How so?"

      "One of the last things he said to me," the girl said. She felt a twinge in the back of her throat. It had been a long time since she'd spoken of her father. Certainly longer since she'd discussed anything at all about his secret life. "He said to me, I've spent my whole life trying to make this world a better place, and I haven't. Not through my actions. But I made you, and that's enough."

      "He died happy," the man said.

      "As happy as he could be," she said. "He missed my mother. He thought I'd be lonely. But he was at peace."

      "You're an artist," the man said.

      "As much as anyone is," the girl said.

      "You'll pursue it? Your art?"

      "My father tried to make the world a more beautiful place with his fists," the girl said. "I'd like to give it a go with my pencils. Maybe we're both wrong. But it's worth a shot."

      The man rubbed his eyes under his glasses.

      "That's a good goal," he said, standing up slowly, adjusting the wrinkles in his coat. "If you ever need anything. Ever. Just ask," he said.

      "And if not? Will I ever see you again?" the girl said.

      "Only if you want to. Or if you look up into the sky," the man said.

      The girl bit her lip. "There aren't too many people I can talk to about my father," she said. "If you ever . . ."

      "Any time."

      "I'm here a lot," she said.

      "I'll find you," he said. "I'm sorry for your loss."

      "Thank you," she said.

      "He was a great man," the man said.

      "The best," the girl said.

      The man in red glasses tipped his chin to her, picked up his coffee, and walked away.

      She looked down at the sketchpad, flipped the page. And she began to draw her father from memory. It was something she hadn't done in a long, long time.

Chapter 67:

And nothing was ever the same

      The Tower felt cold and sterile after their days hiding in abandoned buildings. Jane wandered the halls at night.
Sometimes she'd find Emily playing video games or reading comics by lamplight. Occasionally she'd stop to talk with her. Other times, they would not even acknowledge the other's presence, letting their fellow insomniac find her own solitary method of passing the time.

      Titus and Kate paced in the night, as well, though rarely together, and always with an almost supernatural ability to avoid Jane's path. She knew it wasn't meant to be hurtful. The werewolf and the Dancer had always flourished in isolation. They needed those lone hours in the dark to sort things out.

      Billy slept like a baby at night, or so it seemed, curled up with his dog, glowing softly in the dark. But he spent a lot of time on his own in the daylight, patrolling the skies, a bullet of white light traveling—seemingly with the absence of a pattern—above the City and beyond.

      A few days later, Annie called them all together to say she was leaving.

      "It's been long enough," she told them in the large conference room.

      "You can go back to the moment we left," Emily said. "There's no such thing as long enough."

      "That period of time missing matters to me," Annie said. "It throws my internal clock off. I can sense the hours running by. I need to go."

      Kate, hanging in reserve at the back of the room as she always did, then chimed in.

      "You took us on this expedition to teach us something, didn't you?" she said.

      "I did this to save a world," Annie said. She took a breath and pushed her red sunglasses up onto her forehead, nestling them in her pink and silver hair.

      Kate held up her hand. "I'm not belittling that," she said. "But you brought us there for another reason, too. You wanted to show us how bad things could really get, if we let them."

      "I could have picked a thousand futures to show you that," Annie said. "I just needed your help."

      Titus and Kate exchanged a look, then Titus shook his head.

      Kate shot a dark expression towards him but let the conversation drop.

      "You'll come back though, yeah?" Emily said. "Because you're the closest thing to Doc who I'm ever going to meet. I do not like the idea of being abandoned."

      "I'll try," Annie said.

      Emily popped up out of her chair, walked up to Annie, unwound her long, multi-colored scarf and draped it around her neck. "It's dangerous to travel alone. Take this," she said.

      "Only Emily can figure out a way to work a Nintendo reference into an otherwise sentimental goodbye," Billy said, sitting with Watson perched on his lap. The dog appeared to agree with his assessment.

      "I'm serious. Take the scarf," Emily said.

      "You sure? This is your favorite thing," Annie said.

      "I can make a new one. It's okay," she said.

      Annie wound the scarf around her neck and shrugged a bit. "Couldn't clash any worse with my hair, could it?" she said.

      "Neon pink and manic tartan look great together," Emily said. "Live long and prosper, lady."

      Annie offered the traditional Vulcan salute, fingers split.

      Emily threw her arms up in apparent victory.

      "Stay safe, you," Annie said.

      "Try not to end up in a future where the apes take over," Emily said.

      "I don't like that one much," she said.

      Doc walked up, kissed Annie on the cheek, and placed his hand on her shoulder. "Don't stay away so long this time," he said. "We miss you when you're gone."

      "I know," Annie said, smiling wryly. "Look after them. And don't disappear into another dimension while I'm away."

      She stepped back, closed her eyes, and put her arms to her sides, palms facing downwards and parallel to the floor. Annie looked at each one of the Indestructibles once again, and then faded away.

      "Can I propose we stick to saving our own timeline from now on?" Emily said. "I don't think I can do that on the regular."

      Jane leaned back in her seat, exhaled a long sigh, and closed her eyes. "I kind of think that was the point after all," she said.

Chapter 68:

North country

      Titus and Kate left on a Friday morning.
She argued they could take a shuttle from the Tower's bay, but Titus insisted on the long route and bus tickets, departing from the City's central terminal. They rode north, passing through suburbs, crossing state borders, finally leaving the streets behind to travel on foot.

      At some point, they crossed international borders as well, the way forest creatures do, without care for the laws of man.

      The journey this time was not nearly as difficult as the last trek Titus undertook northward. This was a good thing. While the creature within was a hunter of the wild, he remained city born and bred, a predator of the city, and his companion had never been anything but a being of the urban jungle. An unnatural journey for the both of them, Titus worried that while he knew Kate could handle anything the world threw at her, she would be utterly miserable after the first few days passed.

      Kate handled it all with the same stoic strength she faced all tasks with and he knew he should not have been surprised.

      They followed runes carved into tree trunks and hidden messages in stone. Titus transformed when no one was around in hopes of catching faint scents in the wind. Eventually he discovered what they had been looking for in a small off the path cabin, covered in dried pine needles and memories, a dwelling that didn't seem to be in use anymore.

      Titus approached slowly, Kate stood guard on his flank. He let their footsteps fall loudly, hoping to warn whoever might hear them of their presence. Finally, someone spoke.

      "You'll come no further," the man said.

      Titus recognized the voice. Younger, but belonging to one of the werewolves he'd met in the future. One of the men who died during the final battle with the hunters.

      "You leave him be, lad," a truly familiar voice said. "That's Titus Whispering. He's one of ours."

      "He has a human with him," the younger werewolf said. Both men emerged from the woods like ghosts to cross in front of Titus's path.

      "There he is," Finnigan said. Younger, and whole, more red in his hair than the last time Titus saw him. "I never thought I'd see you again this soon. Come on in. Bring your friend."

      Finnigan led them to the camp itself. Signs of a half-dozen werewolves were scattered around, bedrolls, weapons, shirts abandoned while they hunted in the forest. Gabriel, the lanky, long-haired werewolf who had helped train Titus when he first found the rest of the pack, sat by the fire, sharpening a long knife.

      Leto, as she always did, seemed to materialize from nowhere, gliding in to join them.

      "You're the Dancer," she said, looking at Kate.

      She nodded.

      "You're a long way from your hunting grounds," Leto said.

      "I've come to ask a favor," Kate said.

      Finnigan and Gabriel exchanged an odd look.

      Titus laughed, hard.

      "What?" Finnigan said.

      "Just missed the both of you, that's all," Titus said.

      "So what's this favor?" Finnigan said.

      "We were wondering," Titus said, joining Gabriel by the fire. "If you knew anything about teaching someone the art of blind-fighting."

      "You came all the way up here to ask to learn something you could pick up in a dojo in your city?" Finnigan said.

      Titus threw a fistful of dirt at him. "I came up here to see you madmen," Titus said. "Because . . ."

      "Because something has changed," Leto said. "And you know more than you did when you left."

      "A lot more," Titus said.

      "And because Titus doesn't trust anyone to teach us as much as he trusts you," Kate said.

      "Do you not trust us?" Gabriel asked her in his deep, quiet voice.

      "I don't trust anyone," Kate said.

      Finnigan roared. He pointed his crooked finger at her, then at Titus. "That's an excellent place to start," Finnigan said.

      Gabriel stood up and began rummaging through a bag of gear. He threw Kate a long black scarf. "Blind-fighting is something you'll never regret learning," he said.

      "C'mon, Gabe, let them have dinner first," Finnigan said.

      "What you having?" Titus said. "Venison?"

      Finnigan belly-laughed again. "Pizza," he said, grinning impishly. "We knew you were coming two days ago. Figured we'd use your city girl's visit to let us remind ourselves we're human too sometimes."