2.09
An Imago of Rust and Crimson
Chapter 2.09
No, of course Dad didn't cancel the appointment at the school. That would be too much like good luck.
Not that I wanted him to be feeling bad enough to cancel. I mean, his friend was maybe-dying. I didn't want him to have to go through this. Not one bit.
I just didn't want to have to go through this, either. Especially since I hadn't got much sleep last night. Lying there in the dark, the enormity of what I'd done hit me in a sudden attack of nerves. I'd stolen hundreds of dollars' worth of clothing. What had I been thinking? I could have been caught. I'd heard rumours at school that the Boardwalk guards had killed someone they caught shoplifting and it had all been hushed up. And now it was all under my bed and what if Dad looked under there?
In the end, Dad had all-but-pulled me out of bed, and I'd had to go hammer Cry Baby to the wall. I came out of the bathroom washed, awake, and feeling somewhat more human.
"See," Dad told me. "I said you'd feel better once you were out of bed and splashed some cold water on your face." He chuckled weakly. "Remember, you're still more of a morning person than me. I need coffee as well as water."
He didn't know it, but he'd actually raised an interesting point. What would happen if I trapped Cry Baby in a coffee jar instead of just nailing him to a wall? Years of living with Dad had made me connect the smell of coffee with waking up. Would that kind of association keep him locked away longer? I'd have to try that out some time.
"… or maybe not," Dad said, mistaking my musings for zoning out. "Come on, kiddo, let's get some food into you, and I'll put on some more coffee."
Dad was wearing a suit, and he'd made me put on a blouse and a plain black skirt. They were both on the small side, because they weren't new and I'd shot up like a weed. I tried not to be bitter about the fact that the first time I had nice, new, smart clothes that actually fit me, I couldn't wear them. I had to keep them hidden under my bed. Not only were they my costume, but Dad would start asking hard questions if I showed them off. Ironic, I supposed.
No, instead I got to wear a blouse which was too tight around the shoulders, and showed off the wristbands that covered the scars on my arms. Of course, I couldn't even try to hide the ones on my face. I hadn't thought to get any makeup yesterday, and I wouldn't really know how to use it if I had. I'd need to work out how soon, though. If I could cover them up, hopefully no-one would stare at them. I just knew people would start calling me something stupid if I didn't deal with it soon – 'stripe face' or 'skid mark' or whatever.
We were quiet on the way over. Well, I was quiet on the way over. Dad was trying to reassure me, telling me everything was going to be fine, but I didn't even need to check the Other Place to know that he was lying to me. And when I did, I could see the nervous flicker of his flames, which were just a damped corona compared to the inferno he'd had recently, whipped by an unseen gale. He was worried enough that it was overcoming his anger.
Well. Fine. It didn't matter. I had enough anger for the two of us. And if I didn't before, I certainly did after I saw the Other Place reflection school from the outside.
It was so… unremarkable by the standards of that place.
How dare you, I thought furiously at the Other Place. How dare you show it as 'not that bad'! As 'no worse than anywhere else'! It should have been a wretched place of torture! The jail it was, pulsing with all the pain and misery inside! Not… not just filthy and dilapidated and rusted, like everywhere else in the Other Place. Even if what had happened to me hadn't painted it to match the interior of the locker – and it should have! – then surely the years of misery, of isolation, of everything terrible that they'd done to me should have left its mark!
I balled my hands into fists and seethed. I preferred being angry over scared. I certainly wasn't crying. The blurriness in my vision when I left the Other Place was just a sign that I might need new glasses. Or that I was getting too used to my perfect vision in the Other Place.
"Are you okay?" Dad asked.
"No," I muttered, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. How could I possibly be okay? What kind of stupid, stupid question was that? Why couldn't I ever get nice things? I hated my stupid power. All it did was tell me things I'd known for years – the world was rotten and full of lies. "Let's get this over and done with," I said unhappily, reaching out and squeezing his hand.
It was a school day today. I hadn't really thought of that before, but as we reached the building I could hear the noises of kids moving from class to class. A cold hand closed around my stomach at the realisation. There were people here. I might get stared at.
I would get stared at.
No. No one was going to look at me. I choked down a sick bubble of laughter, because I didn't want Dad to notice. It would be business as usual. That was my life. Either everyone ignored me, or I grabbed all the wrong kinds of attention. Being ignored was better, but still not nice. I knew all about loneliness. I knew all about people not wanting to talk to me, pretending I wasn't there. I barely had to imagine it.
My loneliness was something like a heat haze, an almost invisible cloud of warped air which made everything seen through it seem further away. It whispered faintly, in different voices, but I couldn't make out what it was saying. In the midst of the mist were a few isolated butterflies, with rust-red wings. I chained them together, and the cross-linked chains made a protective cordon around me.
I thought I'd call it Lonely Flight. No, wait. That sounded dumb. Distant Haze. Yes, that sounded better. Well, somewhat better. No, it was terrible too. I needed something… pithy. Like 'Isolation'. Actually, that worked. I'd make a note of it.
I still needed to think of a name for my cape identity. It was so hard. How did people come up with things that sounded good?
A hulking monster with open wounds on his hands and face, and a bestial – maybe goatish – cast to his features ambled down the halls. I stepped in his way and he stepped around me without any sign of acknowledgement. "'Scuse me," he said to Dad, "are you lost?"
Dad paused. "I'm just looking for the principal's office for… well, I have an appointment with her," he said, looking around. "It's for…" he looked straight over me. "Well, I need to talk to her."
"Up the stairs," the hulking monster – a jock type in the normal world – said with a shrug. "There's a sign and stuff, yeah."
"Thank you," Dad said, frowning with an edge of confusion on his face.
"No probs," the guy said, ambling off.
I inhaled Isolation again. "So, come on," I told dad
Dad blinked. "Where were you, Taylor?" he asked, frowning.
"Behind you," I said glibly. "That guy almost walked into me. And," I swallowed, "I didn't want him to see me." That wasn't technically a lie, anyway. I had stepped behind Dad, and I hadn't wanted the guy to see me.
He seemed to accept what I said. That had been a mistake, hiding myself like that. He'd noticed I wasn't there. Or that he couldn't remember who I was, maybe. I wasn't sure exactly how the power worked, but I was willing to bet it made people ignore me in the same way everyone at school did.
Either way, I shouldn't have done that. But that would be a very useful talent. As we headed up the stairs, I had to resist the urge to smile. I wasn't a very strong parahuman in any one field. Sure, I could emotionally nudge people, but there had been a Canadian villain a few years ago who could make anyone fall in love with him, which made my nudging pale in comparison. Of course, he'd eaten a drone missile to the face – maybe it had been attracted to him too – so that kind of power was more trouble than it was worth. I might have weak individual powers, but I had a whole grab-bag of effects, all coming from my basic Thinker power to see the Other Place.
I had a slow dawning suspicion that I might be more similar to Eidolon than Alexandria. Only, you know, vastly, massively weaker and less flexible. So not much like him, but he was the most famous hero with lots of powers who I could think of off the top of my head. I wasn't much of a cape geek.
"Taylor?" Dad asked, pausing before the door to the principal's office, "are you feeling all right?"
I took a deep breath. "Okay," I said. "Let's…" I paused, "get this show on the road?" I ended up turning it into a question when I didn't mean to.
He grinned faintly. "That's the spirit," he said.
After a short wait in an antechamber, we were let in to see the principal. Principal Blackwell was short, with a narrow face and a strong nose which left you feeling you were staring at the edge of an axe. She had blonde hair in a bowl cut. I could see the darker roots.
Of course, in the Other Place, she was a dog-faced monster, bone-spikes protruding from her neck. I didn't need to be told she was a bitch, but here it was in an undeniable form. The monstrous hound forced into women's clothing had pale grey fur, but there were bald, scabbed patches. Her hands had patches where it looked like the flesh had been torn away. I didn't want to look. I had to be focussed on the normal world. I forced myself back to reality, and hoped she hadn't been paying too close attention to the expressions on my face.
"Taylor, Mr Hebert" she said, an edge of warmth in her voice that was almost certainly false. "I'm glad you came to talk. And Taylor, how are you feeling?"
"I don't feel like I'm about to kill myself, if that's what you're asking?" I said bitterly. My power had already told me she was going to be a bitch about things.
Beside me, Dad winced and the expression on the principal's face flickered, as she tried to find something to say. "Um. That's nice," she managed. She shifted slightly. "Please, take a seat," she said. "We're here to discuss your return to school, Taylor. I'm please to find that you're feeling better."
Because it was costing you and the school board lots of money when I was in the psych hospital, I didn't say. "Yes," I said.
"Now, I understand if you don't feel that you can return immediately, but you need to think about your future and your grades this year and…"
"I've done all the work I was set," I said. There had been so much free time in the hospital, I was actually annoyed when I ran out of schoolwork. At least it filled the time. I pulled the first of the green card folders I had with me out of my bag. "Here they are," I said.
She blinked. "I'll see your teachers get them," she said, taking them from me. "At least you were able to get them done. That at least should mean that you won't be too far behind."
"Now," my dad said, clearing his throat. "The last time we spoke, I still had some issues with her coming back. You hadn't persuaded me that you'd put enough precautions to stop something like this happening again." He squeezed my arm. "How do we know she's going to be safe?"
The principal started talking. She went on and on about 'safety precautions' and 'systematic failures' and dense polysyllabic words which all basically meant 'we don't want to be sued'. Handing out anti-bullying leaflets? Putting up new posters about a help hotline? Telling the other students – who were at best apathetic and at worst actively malevolent – to report bullying and not turn a blind eye to it? How could that possibly help? Of course it wouldn't. But they could say that they were 'taking precautions' and so cover their asses against a lawsuit.
Just wonderful.
"If you wanted to do something to stop it happening again," I said, trying not to clench my teeth, "then you could expel the people who did it! I mean, I only nearly lost fingers! I could have died! It… it was attempted murder! What have you done to punish Emma, Sophia and Madison for it?"
Principal Blackwell sighed. "Well, to put it plainly with you…" she laid her hands upon the table, "we can't punish people for something we don't know they did. We have already investigated this incident, and while something clearly went terribly, terribly wrong…"
"They did it," I said hotly.
"No one saw it happen… I believe even you agree that there was no one else around at the time, and the girls you are accusing were questioned by the police," Principal Blackwell said. "I'm sorry Taylor, but there is no proof. We can't do anything without proof, and even if there was proof, it would be serious enough that we would simply do what the police told us to."
"Proof? You want proof?" I said hotly, pulling the second folder out of my bag. "What about all the other things they've done? I started keeping records at the start of last semester. September 8. Madison poured pencil shavings onto my head and took every chance she got to push my books off my table. Sophia pushed me over on the stairs, and also in gym. She threw my clothes into the showers, so I had to wear my gym clothes. I got six really nasty emails. After school, they got me around near the big trash bins and threw my bag in them. That's one day. Then there's the nineth, the tenth… oh, it goes on."
I coughed, tasting the metal and rest and stink of the Other Place, and tried to calm down. I had to stay in control. "Read it if you want," I said, coughing again. The world dimmed slightly, and I squeezed my hands against the arms of my chair. The pain helped me focus on normalcy.
I watched as she flicked through the paper. She was frowning. An outsider might even think she was concerned. Not me. I'd seen her. She was just pretending to care. She was just a liar. A fake.
Oh, I'd make her care.
Sympathy was a little worm of tarnished, sea-worn silver. I wondered why it looked so familiar, and then it struck me. It looked my mother's flute. Even as I made that realisation, it started piping out a sad little song. It squirmed through the air and crawled across her monstrous Other Place face and into her ear.
I could see the quiver in Principal Blackwell's hands as she reached the end of the first page. Yes. It wasn't so easy to ignore it all like this when you actually have some fucking empathy, is it? "Taylor," she said, "I… is this every day?"
"Pretty much," I said. "Things got a bit better towards the end of last semester, but of course, they were just preparing this."
"I," she licked her lips, "I can see why you… you might blame them, but you have to understand here. These things are… well, they're not in the same ballpark. They're severe, yes, and… I don't know how we missed things like this happening. You should… you could have reported these things."
I snorted. "The teachers knew. They just ignored it. And I tried reporting it back when it started, but that just made it worse," I said bitterly. There had been one teacher who had listened, but then she went on maternity leave and her replacement was a useless idiot who wanted to be liked. Like Mr Gladly, but worse. They'd paid me back with interest for all the times I'd tattletaled on them.
"Still," she ran a hand through her short hair, "I hope you have to understand that if the school – as an organisation – doesn't know what's going on, we can't do anything about it."
"What good would it do?" I asked bitterly. "Teachers have seen them doing this sort of thing to me, and they just let it happen. At most, those three just have to get more subtle."
"I understand this must be very distressing for you…" she began.
I exhaled, and added a little doll with a contemptuous expression painted on its blank porcelain face to her shoulder. Leading in, it grabbed her ear with its two bladed hands, and leaned in close. "You're a terrible person," it whispered in a little girlish voice. "You're failing her. Why are you ignoring her? You're doing it wrong. Did you become a teacher to do things like this? Why aren't you helping? She almost killed herself. Imagine the pain she's going through."
Stupid treacherous construct. It was clearly telling her what she was afraid of. Because I hadn't tried to kill myself. It was working, though. In the normal world, I could see her squirm with guilt. Because that was what the doll was. It was all the guilt I knew she should have been feeling.
"… and I think we can all agree that you shouldn't be in any of the same classes as these three girls," Principal Blackwell said. Her lips were thin, and her entire posture was slightly slumped. "I know you think they were behind that whole… that whole unpleasantness with the locker, but you, please, please, I'm sorry Taylor, but we can't act here. The police have taken it out of our hands. I'm not saying I don't believe that you – at the very least – think it was them."
My dad cleared his throat. "What can you do, then?" he asked.
"We can make changes at the school level," she said, "and one of the things we can do is make sure you're not in any of their classes. That should reduce the chance of anything happening. In addition… we didn't know how bad things were. This is the first time I've found out about this. I had no idea what was happening. Yes, you'd alleged that they were behind it, and there were some reports of possible issues between you and those three, but nothing this… sustained."
She looked genuinely shocked. If I hadn't known better, I might even have believed she was innocent in this. Maybe she hadn't had the full details, but that was because she'd turned a blind eye. That wasn't an excuse. And the best she could give me was not being in the same classes as those three? I seriously doubted that would help much, but my new friend Isolation might tilt the scales there. If I could hide from them in-between lessons, this might actually work out.
Especially if I could give them a little taste of guilt. Who knows? It might even help them reform, if they felt bad about what they'd done. Nothing could make up for what they'd done to me, but at the very least if they felt bad about it they wouldn't do anything to me again. I'd settle for that if I had to, even if I really wanted to get them thrown into one of those SuperMaxes where you spend 23 hours a day in solitary. Even then, their 'lockers' would be larger and cleaner than the one they put me in.
In the end, we 'came to an agreement'. I would be heading back to school on the Monday after next, I'd be moved classes so I wasn't doing any of the same things as them, and best of all, she had taken a photocopy of my log. Maybe I wouldn't get them punished for the locker, but at least I might get something out of it.
I guess Principal Blackwell must have been feeling bad about the blind eye she turned to everything.
Dad had me do stuff with him for most of the day – he seemed happy about how things had turned out, which was good – so it was evening by the time I got some free time to myself. I left him watching the television, and flicked through the paper. The Docks seemed to have quieted down, so at least I wouldn't be walking into the middle of a gang war if I went down there. Or at least, not a gang war big enough to make the paper.
Then I got a little distracted filling in the crossword. I got about half-way through before I got bored. I hadn't really bothered with them before, but they'd helped pass the time back in the hospital. Plus, I'd figured practicing that kind of puzzle might help me with interpreting the metaphors of the Other Place. Still, my attention wandered, and I started doodling on the paper. I tried playing tic-tac-toe against myself, but I always won. And lost.
I paused. Oops. I'd started with a circle, not a cross that time. And the letter 'I' in the centre of the circle made it look like a slit-eyed pupil. I tilted the paper so the 'I' was straight, and the tic-tac-toe grid was at about 45 degrees. That didn't look half-bad. I drew it again. Yeah. It was sort of like an eye looking out through prison bars.
I went and got our tatty old thesaurus down from the bookshelf. I still had to find a name, after all. I looked up 'eye'. Eyeball, orb, optic nerve, peeper, lamp, headlight. Okay, all of them were pretty terrible. 'Peeper' just sounded like the like of thing some skeevy voyeur supervillain might call themselves. No help there.
Frowning, I went and looked up 'prison'. Penitentiary, slammer, clink, lock-up, bastille, can, cooler, panopticon, dungeon, jail, stockade. "Fear me, I am Slammer!" Yeah, perfect. It was as bad as 'Peeper'.
On the other hand, both Bastille and Panopticon sounded promising. But Bastille sounded a bit French. And I didn't know what on earth 'panopticon' actually meant.
I pulled out the dictionary. Bastille [ba-steel; French bas-tee-yuh], noun, plural bastilles [ba-steelz; French bas-tee-yuh]: (initial capital letter) a fortress in Paris, used as a prison, built in the 14th century and destroyed July 14, 1789. Alternatively, any prison or jail, especially one conducted in a tyrannical way. Not a very heroic name, and nothing particularly close to my powers.
I checked the other entry. Panopticon [pan-op-ti-kon], noun: a building, as a prison, hospital, library, or the like, so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a single point, I read.
That was perfect. I could actually do that.
Plus, there was already a cape called Panacea, so cape names which were probably Greek – 'pan-' was Greek, wasn't it? One of their gods? – were totally acceptable and were kind of classy. And didn't involve announcing to the world that you were called 'Slammer'.
I closed the book with a snap, smiling faintly to myself. Good.
Then I went and spent the rest of the evening with Dad. We watched TV together, he awkwardly tried to get me to talk about whether I was nervous about going back to school, and I asked how his friend was. "Not good," was about all I got from him. From the impressions I got, even if he pulled through, he wouldn't be the same man he was before. Whether than was because of brain damage or some horrible injury or – I paled at the thought of how close I got to losing fingers – gangrene or whatever, it wasn't going to be pretty.
And his son was dead. Dad mentioned in a somewhat vague way that he'd be going to the funeral and how I didn't have to come if I didn't want to.
"I'll come if you want me to," I said, almost surprising myself. "You know, if… if you think it would help or something? I mean, I didn't know him or…" I trailed off.
It certainly surprised Dad. "Uh… thanks for the offer," he said, "but… well, we'll see how you feel at the time. How I feel, too."
Dad was tired. With everything that had been going on, he needed his rest. A good night's sleep would be good for him.
This was all true, but I still felt bad about breathing out my tiredness in the form of Cry Baby and setting it on him. The midnight-blue-skinned horse-headed baby clung to his chest, wailing. He yawned, stretching, and rubbed his eyes. I tried my best to look tired, even though I felt like it was the morning and I was all prepared to face the day ahead of me.
Sorry, Dad. I promised myself that I'd try to be back soon so I could take Cry Baby back. I really hoped I wouldn't need to pull it away in an emergency.
I gave him time to go to bed, took a shower and brushed my teeth. I didn't get into my nightclothes, though. Wearing my towel, I crept out and checked that Dad's light was off. Then I returned to my room.
Hands shaking, I pulled my 'borrowed' clothes out from under the bed. They were sitting there. Waiting. Promising.
I quickly got dressed in the pants, shirt and sweater. It wasn't much of a superhero costume – I looked more like one of those young businesswomen who worked in the techsector near the Boardwalk – but that was just the first layer.
The frock coat was double breasted. Both rows of buttons were real, too, which gave me a bit of trouble until I realised how to do it up. The security tag was still on, but I had a barbed-wire cherub teleport it off, leaving that intact. It might be childishly amusing to hide it in Emma or Madison's bag so next time they went into Monarch, they'd have the alarms go off.
No, wait, there might be something in it that would let them know which coat it was from. It might get linked to me., somehow. I'd just have to go drop the security tag in the harbour. Also, I wanted them punished for something they'd actually done. Then the charges would stick.
It was a bit big on me, but that didn't matter. I had an idea. I'd get one of those… I didn't know the name, those things that soldiers wore to carry things with. Those vest things with lots of pockets on them. I'd wear that under my coat, and I could just have a construct move things from the vest-thing to my hands if I needed them. There were all kinds of things that might be useful. Disposable cameras, pepper spray, a taser. Maybe I could even take some tinkertech gadget from a criminal, and use it for the name of good. But since I didn't have that, I put the disposable wind-up camera I'd bought in the pocket of the coat.
Getting all my hair under the balaclava was more of a pain. In the end, I had to do it up in a ponytail, and then pin it up in a bun. I'd need to get a hairnet if this was going to be a regular thing. I should have thought of that earlier.
I tilted my head at my reflection, just before I put on the balaclava. The girl in the mirror, with the pale scars on her face and her hair in a bun, didn't look like me. She looked serious, and more than a little threatening. I supposed that was appropriate. This was serious business. Then came the black balaclava and the gas mask over the top of it.
Then I had to take it off again, because I realised I'd forgotten to put on my glasses. Which completely ruined any sense of ceremony I might have been aiming for. And then I had to mess around with the straps on the mask, because it was loose and slipping down my face. I finished up by putting on the black gloves over my latex ones.
Finally, it was done. I stared at my reflection.
It was a very… monochrome look. The only bit of me that wasn't black or grey was the tiny rim of flesh visible through the eyes of the gas mask. Well, and I'd be wearing white trainers, because I didn't have any black shoes. But still. The overall impression was clear.
My… uh, well-considered choices had left me looking more than a little villainous. At least it was a classy kind of look. I couldn't have lived with myself if I was tramping around in some skanky skin tight outfit which would have left me looking like a beanpole at a fetish club. It was also a look which would make me hard to see at night, and if I just dumped the balaclava and mask, I could be a perfectly innocent person out for a late night walk. One who was fairly well-off, which would have its own benefits if I was trying to avoid suspicion.
"Beware, wrongdoers, for you are under the gaze of Panopticon!" I proclaimed to my reflection, and struck a pose. "I shall show you the horrors of the Other Place!"
It wasn't a very good pose. Or a very good speech. I was probably just going to have to stand in a corner while people who could actually pull off this kind of thing did the heroic motivational posturing. Well, that was all good for me. Posturing probably got you shot at anyway. It didn't matter that I'd somehow managed to pick a sinister costume. I wasn't jealous of those capes with powers that could actually save people in the nick of time. Not one bit.
Well, it didn't matter what I looked like. I was going out. Tonight. A bunch of girls in my year went out on a fairly regular basis, to get drunk and boast about it in the corridors. There were places that didn't care if your ID was obviously fake, and places that didn't even bother asking for one. That wasn't for me, no.
I was going out to make the world a better place.
Chapter 2.09
No, of course Dad didn't cancel the appointment at the school. That would be too much like good luck.
Not that I wanted him to be feeling bad enough to cancel. I mean, his friend was maybe-dying. I didn't want him to have to go through this. Not one bit.
I just didn't want to have to go through this, either. Especially since I hadn't got much sleep last night. Lying there in the dark, the enormity of what I'd done hit me in a sudden attack of nerves. I'd stolen hundreds of dollars' worth of clothing. What had I been thinking? I could have been caught. I'd heard rumours at school that the Boardwalk guards had killed someone they caught shoplifting and it had all been hushed up. And now it was all under my bed and what if Dad looked under there?
In the end, Dad had all-but-pulled me out of bed, and I'd had to go hammer Cry Baby to the wall. I came out of the bathroom washed, awake, and feeling somewhat more human.
"See," Dad told me. "I said you'd feel better once you were out of bed and splashed some cold water on your face." He chuckled weakly. "Remember, you're still more of a morning person than me. I need coffee as well as water."
He didn't know it, but he'd actually raised an interesting point. What would happen if I trapped Cry Baby in a coffee jar instead of just nailing him to a wall? Years of living with Dad had made me connect the smell of coffee with waking up. Would that kind of association keep him locked away longer? I'd have to try that out some time.
"… or maybe not," Dad said, mistaking my musings for zoning out. "Come on, kiddo, let's get some food into you, and I'll put on some more coffee."
Dad was wearing a suit, and he'd made me put on a blouse and a plain black skirt. They were both on the small side, because they weren't new and I'd shot up like a weed. I tried not to be bitter about the fact that the first time I had nice, new, smart clothes that actually fit me, I couldn't wear them. I had to keep them hidden under my bed. Not only were they my costume, but Dad would start asking hard questions if I showed them off. Ironic, I supposed.
No, instead I got to wear a blouse which was too tight around the shoulders, and showed off the wristbands that covered the scars on my arms. Of course, I couldn't even try to hide the ones on my face. I hadn't thought to get any makeup yesterday, and I wouldn't really know how to use it if I had. I'd need to work out how soon, though. If I could cover them up, hopefully no-one would stare at them. I just knew people would start calling me something stupid if I didn't deal with it soon – 'stripe face' or 'skid mark' or whatever.
We were quiet on the way over. Well, I was quiet on the way over. Dad was trying to reassure me, telling me everything was going to be fine, but I didn't even need to check the Other Place to know that he was lying to me. And when I did, I could see the nervous flicker of his flames, which were just a damped corona compared to the inferno he'd had recently, whipped by an unseen gale. He was worried enough that it was overcoming his anger.
Well. Fine. It didn't matter. I had enough anger for the two of us. And if I didn't before, I certainly did after I saw the Other Place reflection school from the outside.
It was so… unremarkable by the standards of that place.
How dare you, I thought furiously at the Other Place. How dare you show it as 'not that bad'! As 'no worse than anywhere else'! It should have been a wretched place of torture! The jail it was, pulsing with all the pain and misery inside! Not… not just filthy and dilapidated and rusted, like everywhere else in the Other Place. Even if what had happened to me hadn't painted it to match the interior of the locker – and it should have! – then surely the years of misery, of isolation, of everything terrible that they'd done to me should have left its mark!
I balled my hands into fists and seethed. I preferred being angry over scared. I certainly wasn't crying. The blurriness in my vision when I left the Other Place was just a sign that I might need new glasses. Or that I was getting too used to my perfect vision in the Other Place.
"Are you okay?" Dad asked.
"No," I muttered, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. How could I possibly be okay? What kind of stupid, stupid question was that? Why couldn't I ever get nice things? I hated my stupid power. All it did was tell me things I'd known for years – the world was rotten and full of lies. "Let's get this over and done with," I said unhappily, reaching out and squeezing his hand.
It was a school day today. I hadn't really thought of that before, but as we reached the building I could hear the noises of kids moving from class to class. A cold hand closed around my stomach at the realisation. There were people here. I might get stared at.
I would get stared at.
No. No one was going to look at me. I choked down a sick bubble of laughter, because I didn't want Dad to notice. It would be business as usual. That was my life. Either everyone ignored me, or I grabbed all the wrong kinds of attention. Being ignored was better, but still not nice. I knew all about loneliness. I knew all about people not wanting to talk to me, pretending I wasn't there. I barely had to imagine it.
My loneliness was something like a heat haze, an almost invisible cloud of warped air which made everything seen through it seem further away. It whispered faintly, in different voices, but I couldn't make out what it was saying. In the midst of the mist were a few isolated butterflies, with rust-red wings. I chained them together, and the cross-linked chains made a protective cordon around me.
I thought I'd call it Lonely Flight. No, wait. That sounded dumb. Distant Haze. Yes, that sounded better. Well, somewhat better. No, it was terrible too. I needed something… pithy. Like 'Isolation'. Actually, that worked. I'd make a note of it.
I still needed to think of a name for my cape identity. It was so hard. How did people come up with things that sounded good?
A hulking monster with open wounds on his hands and face, and a bestial – maybe goatish – cast to his features ambled down the halls. I stepped in his way and he stepped around me without any sign of acknowledgement. "'Scuse me," he said to Dad, "are you lost?"
Dad paused. "I'm just looking for the principal's office for… well, I have an appointment with her," he said, looking around. "It's for…" he looked straight over me. "Well, I need to talk to her."
"Up the stairs," the hulking monster – a jock type in the normal world – said with a shrug. "There's a sign and stuff, yeah."
"Thank you," Dad said, frowning with an edge of confusion on his face.
"No probs," the guy said, ambling off.
I inhaled Isolation again. "So, come on," I told dad
Dad blinked. "Where were you, Taylor?" he asked, frowning.
"Behind you," I said glibly. "That guy almost walked into me. And," I swallowed, "I didn't want him to see me." That wasn't technically a lie, anyway. I had stepped behind Dad, and I hadn't wanted the guy to see me.
He seemed to accept what I said. That had been a mistake, hiding myself like that. He'd noticed I wasn't there. Or that he couldn't remember who I was, maybe. I wasn't sure exactly how the power worked, but I was willing to bet it made people ignore me in the same way everyone at school did.
Either way, I shouldn't have done that. But that would be a very useful talent. As we headed up the stairs, I had to resist the urge to smile. I wasn't a very strong parahuman in any one field. Sure, I could emotionally nudge people, but there had been a Canadian villain a few years ago who could make anyone fall in love with him, which made my nudging pale in comparison. Of course, he'd eaten a drone missile to the face – maybe it had been attracted to him too – so that kind of power was more trouble than it was worth. I might have weak individual powers, but I had a whole grab-bag of effects, all coming from my basic Thinker power to see the Other Place.
I had a slow dawning suspicion that I might be more similar to Eidolon than Alexandria. Only, you know, vastly, massively weaker and less flexible. So not much like him, but he was the most famous hero with lots of powers who I could think of off the top of my head. I wasn't much of a cape geek.
"Taylor?" Dad asked, pausing before the door to the principal's office, "are you feeling all right?"
I took a deep breath. "Okay," I said. "Let's…" I paused, "get this show on the road?" I ended up turning it into a question when I didn't mean to.
He grinned faintly. "That's the spirit," he said.
After a short wait in an antechamber, we were let in to see the principal. Principal Blackwell was short, with a narrow face and a strong nose which left you feeling you were staring at the edge of an axe. She had blonde hair in a bowl cut. I could see the darker roots.
Of course, in the Other Place, she was a dog-faced monster, bone-spikes protruding from her neck. I didn't need to be told she was a bitch, but here it was in an undeniable form. The monstrous hound forced into women's clothing had pale grey fur, but there were bald, scabbed patches. Her hands had patches where it looked like the flesh had been torn away. I didn't want to look. I had to be focussed on the normal world. I forced myself back to reality, and hoped she hadn't been paying too close attention to the expressions on my face.
"Taylor, Mr Hebert" she said, an edge of warmth in her voice that was almost certainly false. "I'm glad you came to talk. And Taylor, how are you feeling?"
"I don't feel like I'm about to kill myself, if that's what you're asking?" I said bitterly. My power had already told me she was going to be a bitch about things.
Beside me, Dad winced and the expression on the principal's face flickered, as she tried to find something to say. "Um. That's nice," she managed. She shifted slightly. "Please, take a seat," she said. "We're here to discuss your return to school, Taylor. I'm please to find that you're feeling better."
Because it was costing you and the school board lots of money when I was in the psych hospital, I didn't say. "Yes," I said.
"Now, I understand if you don't feel that you can return immediately, but you need to think about your future and your grades this year and…"
"I've done all the work I was set," I said. There had been so much free time in the hospital, I was actually annoyed when I ran out of schoolwork. At least it filled the time. I pulled the first of the green card folders I had with me out of my bag. "Here they are," I said.
She blinked. "I'll see your teachers get them," she said, taking them from me. "At least you were able to get them done. That at least should mean that you won't be too far behind."
"Now," my dad said, clearing his throat. "The last time we spoke, I still had some issues with her coming back. You hadn't persuaded me that you'd put enough precautions to stop something like this happening again." He squeezed my arm. "How do we know she's going to be safe?"
The principal started talking. She went on and on about 'safety precautions' and 'systematic failures' and dense polysyllabic words which all basically meant 'we don't want to be sued'. Handing out anti-bullying leaflets? Putting up new posters about a help hotline? Telling the other students – who were at best apathetic and at worst actively malevolent – to report bullying and not turn a blind eye to it? How could that possibly help? Of course it wouldn't. But they could say that they were 'taking precautions' and so cover their asses against a lawsuit.
Just wonderful.
"If you wanted to do something to stop it happening again," I said, trying not to clench my teeth, "then you could expel the people who did it! I mean, I only nearly lost fingers! I could have died! It… it was attempted murder! What have you done to punish Emma, Sophia and Madison for it?"
Principal Blackwell sighed. "Well, to put it plainly with you…" she laid her hands upon the table, "we can't punish people for something we don't know they did. We have already investigated this incident, and while something clearly went terribly, terribly wrong…"
"They did it," I said hotly.
"No one saw it happen… I believe even you agree that there was no one else around at the time, and the girls you are accusing were questioned by the police," Principal Blackwell said. "I'm sorry Taylor, but there is no proof. We can't do anything without proof, and even if there was proof, it would be serious enough that we would simply do what the police told us to."
"Proof? You want proof?" I said hotly, pulling the second folder out of my bag. "What about all the other things they've done? I started keeping records at the start of last semester. September 8. Madison poured pencil shavings onto my head and took every chance she got to push my books off my table. Sophia pushed me over on the stairs, and also in gym. She threw my clothes into the showers, so I had to wear my gym clothes. I got six really nasty emails. After school, they got me around near the big trash bins and threw my bag in them. That's one day. Then there's the nineth, the tenth… oh, it goes on."
I coughed, tasting the metal and rest and stink of the Other Place, and tried to calm down. I had to stay in control. "Read it if you want," I said, coughing again. The world dimmed slightly, and I squeezed my hands against the arms of my chair. The pain helped me focus on normalcy.
I watched as she flicked through the paper. She was frowning. An outsider might even think she was concerned. Not me. I'd seen her. She was just pretending to care. She was just a liar. A fake.
Oh, I'd make her care.
Sympathy was a little worm of tarnished, sea-worn silver. I wondered why it looked so familiar, and then it struck me. It looked my mother's flute. Even as I made that realisation, it started piping out a sad little song. It squirmed through the air and crawled across her monstrous Other Place face and into her ear.
I could see the quiver in Principal Blackwell's hands as she reached the end of the first page. Yes. It wasn't so easy to ignore it all like this when you actually have some fucking empathy, is it? "Taylor," she said, "I… is this every day?"
"Pretty much," I said. "Things got a bit better towards the end of last semester, but of course, they were just preparing this."
"I," she licked her lips, "I can see why you… you might blame them, but you have to understand here. These things are… well, they're not in the same ballpark. They're severe, yes, and… I don't know how we missed things like this happening. You should… you could have reported these things."
I snorted. "The teachers knew. They just ignored it. And I tried reporting it back when it started, but that just made it worse," I said bitterly. There had been one teacher who had listened, but then she went on maternity leave and her replacement was a useless idiot who wanted to be liked. Like Mr Gladly, but worse. They'd paid me back with interest for all the times I'd tattletaled on them.
"Still," she ran a hand through her short hair, "I hope you have to understand that if the school – as an organisation – doesn't know what's going on, we can't do anything about it."
"What good would it do?" I asked bitterly. "Teachers have seen them doing this sort of thing to me, and they just let it happen. At most, those three just have to get more subtle."
"I understand this must be very distressing for you…" she began.
I exhaled, and added a little doll with a contemptuous expression painted on its blank porcelain face to her shoulder. Leading in, it grabbed her ear with its two bladed hands, and leaned in close. "You're a terrible person," it whispered in a little girlish voice. "You're failing her. Why are you ignoring her? You're doing it wrong. Did you become a teacher to do things like this? Why aren't you helping? She almost killed herself. Imagine the pain she's going through."
Stupid treacherous construct. It was clearly telling her what she was afraid of. Because I hadn't tried to kill myself. It was working, though. In the normal world, I could see her squirm with guilt. Because that was what the doll was. It was all the guilt I knew she should have been feeling.
"… and I think we can all agree that you shouldn't be in any of the same classes as these three girls," Principal Blackwell said. Her lips were thin, and her entire posture was slightly slumped. "I know you think they were behind that whole… that whole unpleasantness with the locker, but you, please, please, I'm sorry Taylor, but we can't act here. The police have taken it out of our hands. I'm not saying I don't believe that you – at the very least – think it was them."
My dad cleared his throat. "What can you do, then?" he asked.
"We can make changes at the school level," she said, "and one of the things we can do is make sure you're not in any of their classes. That should reduce the chance of anything happening. In addition… we didn't know how bad things were. This is the first time I've found out about this. I had no idea what was happening. Yes, you'd alleged that they were behind it, and there were some reports of possible issues between you and those three, but nothing this… sustained."
She looked genuinely shocked. If I hadn't known better, I might even have believed she was innocent in this. Maybe she hadn't had the full details, but that was because she'd turned a blind eye. That wasn't an excuse. And the best she could give me was not being in the same classes as those three? I seriously doubted that would help much, but my new friend Isolation might tilt the scales there. If I could hide from them in-between lessons, this might actually work out.
Especially if I could give them a little taste of guilt. Who knows? It might even help them reform, if they felt bad about what they'd done. Nothing could make up for what they'd done to me, but at the very least if they felt bad about it they wouldn't do anything to me again. I'd settle for that if I had to, even if I really wanted to get them thrown into one of those SuperMaxes where you spend 23 hours a day in solitary. Even then, their 'lockers' would be larger and cleaner than the one they put me in.
In the end, we 'came to an agreement'. I would be heading back to school on the Monday after next, I'd be moved classes so I wasn't doing any of the same things as them, and best of all, she had taken a photocopy of my log. Maybe I wouldn't get them punished for the locker, but at least I might get something out of it.
I guess Principal Blackwell must have been feeling bad about the blind eye she turned to everything.
Dad had me do stuff with him for most of the day – he seemed happy about how things had turned out, which was good – so it was evening by the time I got some free time to myself. I left him watching the television, and flicked through the paper. The Docks seemed to have quieted down, so at least I wouldn't be walking into the middle of a gang war if I went down there. Or at least, not a gang war big enough to make the paper.
Then I got a little distracted filling in the crossword. I got about half-way through before I got bored. I hadn't really bothered with them before, but they'd helped pass the time back in the hospital. Plus, I'd figured practicing that kind of puzzle might help me with interpreting the metaphors of the Other Place. Still, my attention wandered, and I started doodling on the paper. I tried playing tic-tac-toe against myself, but I always won. And lost.
I paused. Oops. I'd started with a circle, not a cross that time. And the letter 'I' in the centre of the circle made it look like a slit-eyed pupil. I tilted the paper so the 'I' was straight, and the tic-tac-toe grid was at about 45 degrees. That didn't look half-bad. I drew it again. Yeah. It was sort of like an eye looking out through prison bars.
I went and got our tatty old thesaurus down from the bookshelf. I still had to find a name, after all. I looked up 'eye'. Eyeball, orb, optic nerve, peeper, lamp, headlight. Okay, all of them were pretty terrible. 'Peeper' just sounded like the like of thing some skeevy voyeur supervillain might call themselves. No help there.
Frowning, I went and looked up 'prison'. Penitentiary, slammer, clink, lock-up, bastille, can, cooler, panopticon, dungeon, jail, stockade. "Fear me, I am Slammer!" Yeah, perfect. It was as bad as 'Peeper'.
On the other hand, both Bastille and Panopticon sounded promising. But Bastille sounded a bit French. And I didn't know what on earth 'panopticon' actually meant.
I pulled out the dictionary. Bastille [ba-steel; French bas-tee-yuh], noun, plural bastilles [ba-steelz; French bas-tee-yuh]: (initial capital letter) a fortress in Paris, used as a prison, built in the 14th century and destroyed July 14, 1789. Alternatively, any prison or jail, especially one conducted in a tyrannical way. Not a very heroic name, and nothing particularly close to my powers.
I checked the other entry. Panopticon [pan-op-ti-kon], noun: a building, as a prison, hospital, library, or the like, so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a single point, I read.
That was perfect. I could actually do that.
Plus, there was already a cape called Panacea, so cape names which were probably Greek – 'pan-' was Greek, wasn't it? One of their gods? – were totally acceptable and were kind of classy. And didn't involve announcing to the world that you were called 'Slammer'.
I closed the book with a snap, smiling faintly to myself. Good.
Then I went and spent the rest of the evening with Dad. We watched TV together, he awkwardly tried to get me to talk about whether I was nervous about going back to school, and I asked how his friend was. "Not good," was about all I got from him. From the impressions I got, even if he pulled through, he wouldn't be the same man he was before. Whether than was because of brain damage or some horrible injury or – I paled at the thought of how close I got to losing fingers – gangrene or whatever, it wasn't going to be pretty.
And his son was dead. Dad mentioned in a somewhat vague way that he'd be going to the funeral and how I didn't have to come if I didn't want to.
"I'll come if you want me to," I said, almost surprising myself. "You know, if… if you think it would help or something? I mean, I didn't know him or…" I trailed off.
It certainly surprised Dad. "Uh… thanks for the offer," he said, "but… well, we'll see how you feel at the time. How I feel, too."
Dad was tired. With everything that had been going on, he needed his rest. A good night's sleep would be good for him.
This was all true, but I still felt bad about breathing out my tiredness in the form of Cry Baby and setting it on him. The midnight-blue-skinned horse-headed baby clung to his chest, wailing. He yawned, stretching, and rubbed his eyes. I tried my best to look tired, even though I felt like it was the morning and I was all prepared to face the day ahead of me.
Sorry, Dad. I promised myself that I'd try to be back soon so I could take Cry Baby back. I really hoped I wouldn't need to pull it away in an emergency.
I gave him time to go to bed, took a shower and brushed my teeth. I didn't get into my nightclothes, though. Wearing my towel, I crept out and checked that Dad's light was off. Then I returned to my room.
Hands shaking, I pulled my 'borrowed' clothes out from under the bed. They were sitting there. Waiting. Promising.
I quickly got dressed in the pants, shirt and sweater. It wasn't much of a superhero costume – I looked more like one of those young businesswomen who worked in the techsector near the Boardwalk – but that was just the first layer.
The frock coat was double breasted. Both rows of buttons were real, too, which gave me a bit of trouble until I realised how to do it up. The security tag was still on, but I had a barbed-wire cherub teleport it off, leaving that intact. It might be childishly amusing to hide it in Emma or Madison's bag so next time they went into Monarch, they'd have the alarms go off.
No, wait, there might be something in it that would let them know which coat it was from. It might get linked to me., somehow. I'd just have to go drop the security tag in the harbour. Also, I wanted them punished for something they'd actually done. Then the charges would stick.
It was a bit big on me, but that didn't matter. I had an idea. I'd get one of those… I didn't know the name, those things that soldiers wore to carry things with. Those vest things with lots of pockets on them. I'd wear that under my coat, and I could just have a construct move things from the vest-thing to my hands if I needed them. There were all kinds of things that might be useful. Disposable cameras, pepper spray, a taser. Maybe I could even take some tinkertech gadget from a criminal, and use it for the name of good. But since I didn't have that, I put the disposable wind-up camera I'd bought in the pocket of the coat.
Getting all my hair under the balaclava was more of a pain. In the end, I had to do it up in a ponytail, and then pin it up in a bun. I'd need to get a hairnet if this was going to be a regular thing. I should have thought of that earlier.
I tilted my head at my reflection, just before I put on the balaclava. The girl in the mirror, with the pale scars on her face and her hair in a bun, didn't look like me. She looked serious, and more than a little threatening. I supposed that was appropriate. This was serious business. Then came the black balaclava and the gas mask over the top of it.
Then I had to take it off again, because I realised I'd forgotten to put on my glasses. Which completely ruined any sense of ceremony I might have been aiming for. And then I had to mess around with the straps on the mask, because it was loose and slipping down my face. I finished up by putting on the black gloves over my latex ones.
Finally, it was done. I stared at my reflection.
It was a very… monochrome look. The only bit of me that wasn't black or grey was the tiny rim of flesh visible through the eyes of the gas mask. Well, and I'd be wearing white trainers, because I didn't have any black shoes. But still. The overall impression was clear.
My… uh, well-considered choices had left me looking more than a little villainous. At least it was a classy kind of look. I couldn't have lived with myself if I was tramping around in some skanky skin tight outfit which would have left me looking like a beanpole at a fetish club. It was also a look which would make me hard to see at night, and if I just dumped the balaclava and mask, I could be a perfectly innocent person out for a late night walk. One who was fairly well-off, which would have its own benefits if I was trying to avoid suspicion.
"Beware, wrongdoers, for you are under the gaze of Panopticon!" I proclaimed to my reflection, and struck a pose. "I shall show you the horrors of the Other Place!"
It wasn't a very good pose. Or a very good speech. I was probably just going to have to stand in a corner while people who could actually pull off this kind of thing did the heroic motivational posturing. Well, that was all good for me. Posturing probably got you shot at anyway. It didn't matter that I'd somehow managed to pick a sinister costume. I wasn't jealous of those capes with powers that could actually save people in the nick of time. Not one bit.
Well, it didn't matter what I looked like. I was going out. Tonight. A bunch of girls in my year went out on a fairly regular basis, to get drunk and boast about it in the corridors. There were places that didn't care if your ID was obviously fake, and places that didn't even bother asking for one. That wasn't for me, no.
I was going out to make the world a better place.