2.06
An Imago of Rust and Crimson
Chapter 2.06
My feet slipped on the wet ground. My heart pounded like a drum. My ears were hammered by angry barks. Legs thumping, I threw myself around the corner, dimly aware in the back of my mind that even if I was moving away from the guard I was still going the wrong way. That knowledge didn't couldn't change a thing, though. He was between me and the bit of the fence I'd squeezed through.
Behind the warehouses was nothing but a maze of old dead ends, unused buildings, and overflowing dumpsters. I had to get out of here. On the street, there were people around. I needed witnesses, help. I couldn't get trapped in here, in these stinking alleyways with filth all over the floor and rusty metal and… and I tried to push myself even harder. No. I wouldn't let myself get caught. I wouldn't let him put me back in the locker- in somewhere like the locker.
I couldn't even empty my mind to leave the Other Place. My head was hurting from all the things going on in it - I couldn't just think of nothing. My throat was raw, and each breath of cold air burned. The stink that surrounded me just made it worse. Each mouthful of stench made me want to throw up, stomach churning as I ran.
I took the first turn to the right, trying to escape the building more than its guard. The walls were covered in Other Place scrawlings-
APATHY APATHY APATHY NO ONE HEARS THE whimpers APATHY APATHY
-and I the already cold air felt even cooler near it. I could barely see in the panic and gloom, and my first clue to a trashcan in my path was a jabbing pain in my left thigh. It rolled over with a clatter, and I nearly fell too, stumbling out of the collision and grabbing onto a drain pipe. The pain in my sensitive hands barely went noticed.
The barking was getting closer, and I reached the end of the alley, taking the left turn. Wrong direction; dead end. The other end was blocked up with rusty construction equipment and plastic sheeting. I turned, and the other path ended in a door.
Which was locked.
"Let me in," I shouted, tears rolling down my face. "For fuck's sake, open up!"
No response.
Hyperventilating, I looked around desperately. The dog sounded close enough that I couldn't head back. I had to find somewhere to hide. Maybe… maybe in the normal world this place smelt bad enough that it couldn't smell me? I didn't know. I couldn't think of nothing and I didn't even know what the place looked like. There was just the rust and bare concrete and brick. There was an alcove – an old bricked-up door, really – and I ducked into it. I pressed myself against the back as hard as I could, hoping beyond hope that the dog wouldn't smell me and he wouldn't hear my breathing.
I was trying to think but it wasn't working and I couldn't focus and I couldn't think of anything and God, what was I going to do? I was a skinny out-of-shape teenage girl with hurt hands; he was a security guard with a gun and a dog – and in the state I was in, I was more scared of the dog than the gun. I huddled down, trying to keep out of the light – but no, my reason for that wasn't anything so reasoned. I wasn't thinking by that point. I was just reacting. All I knew was that the dog was growling and it could probably smell me and it was getting closer. The panic and the stench of the building in the Other Place and the way I just wanted it to go away all pooled together, and welled up out of my mouth in the form of a vaguely dog-shaped thing made of dried blood and wire.
I gagged, and stuffed my forearm in my mouth to avoid being sick. I had tasted my feelings doing that, and that just felt wrong. I spat blood, from my suddenly bleeding lips.
And the thing I'd made wasn't chained at all. The blood-wire-dog barked, only it didn't bark, it slammed and I knew the sound because it was the sound the locker doors made at school when someone kicked them and… and… I couldn't look.
The dog bark-slammed again, and then the other dog yelped. The man started shouting and the dog shifted to snarling and I heard the man yell and then there was the gloing of a falling empty trash can. The dog's frantic barking receded, but the man – swearing, shouting – wasn't going. I was trying to think and it was like trying to think when I had no sleep, all fogged and blurred and…
Tired.
Crybaby – my feelings of tiredness. It was still nailed to the wall at home. I wouldn't have to make it; I already had it made. I just had to think the nails released from the wall and there it was, wailing at the edge of my vision. I didn't know how it managed to get back here so fast, but I wasn't asking questions right now.
"Go for him," I muttered. "Get in him." I clenched my hands, letting the pain stab into my awareness. I could feel the creeping tiredness from the wails and… no! "Do it," I growled. "Or I'll send you back to the wall!"
The horse-headed infant with the midnight blue skin reluctantly crawled away, the nails in it scraping against the floor. I heard it hiss, and hoped against hope it'd work. The footsteps were coming closer and closer. I heard the man swear as he stepped in a puddle, and I could hear his breathing.
"I have had it up to here with this shit," I heard him mutter. "Fucking stupid dog. Get back here, you stupid thing!" I, thank God, heard him yawn. "For fuck's sake. Going to have to chase it down. I'm not paid enough for this. Get back here, Lupe!"
And mercifully, I heard him turn on his heel and stomp away, his bad mood obvious in every footstep. I stuffed my forearm into my mouth, and tried not to whimper until he was out of hearing. Then, slowly, aching all over, I pulled myself to my feet. I licked my cracked lips. They hurt, and tasted of iron. My bottom was wet and grimy, from where I'd been sitting. I left the Other Place, and just stood there for a bit, shaking, until I realized that the man might come back.
I felt sick.
I wasn't entirely sure how I managed to hold on to the contents of my stomach until I'd squeezed through the gap in the fence and got to safety, but I did. And then I emptied about half of my lunch into a dirty alleyway.
I was in a daze as I walked back. My mind was running around in loops, and I was still shaking. People might have been staring at me. I wasn't sure. I only noticed I was sort of a mess when I saw myself in a shop window.
I had to clean myself up. I found a 7-11, and went in.
"Fell down," I told the guy behind the counter when I noticed he was staring at me. "It's slippery out there, isn't it?"
One bottle of water purchased, I drank about half the bottle to wash out the taste of sick, and then used the rest to sort of blot off most of the dirt. That meant I was wetter, but at least I didn't have alley gunk on me.
Fight-or-flight? Really, really terrible for my power. My stupid body hadn't got the memo that I could imagine up scary monsters, and decided I should panic instead. And when I panicked, things went wrong. I had to be in control. All the time.
I… I wasn't suited for being a cape. When I grew up, I could be a parahuman detective and go work for the FBI, but it wouldn't be me on the front lines saving people.
I wiped my eyes. It hurt to think like this. I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to go out and fight crime. Personally, I meant; I wanted to be strong. I wanted to be able to stop people who were picking on others. But my powers – they helped me with investigation, they helped me find things, but if I had to act on the fly, things went wrong. I'd never be someone who could just see someone being attacked and step in to protect them. Not any more than I could have before, at least, and look at me. I couldn't even protect myself from bullies, let alone someone else.
I wanted to be a superhero. I wasn't. I was just a person with powers.
Oh, I realised dimly. The lights had been back on properly in the 7-11. When had the brownout ended? I frowned, and realised I hadn't been paying enough attention to notice.
I snuck in through the front door of the union offices, trying to get to the ladies bathroom to do a proper clean up and…
"Taylor!" Dad asked, standing by the vending machine in the offices with a look of surprise on his face. "What happened?"
No such luck.
"I just went for a jog… well, mostly a walk during the brownout," I said defensively. "I couldn't read when the lights were flickering like that. I stayed in the area!" I sucked in a breath and looked down at the dirty knees of my jeans. "And… uh, yeah, there was a reason I stopped jogging. You know, it's still pretty slippery out there." I licked my lips. "And I think I need to get some lip balm. They're cracking in this cold weather."
Dad pinched the bridge of his nose. "Taylor," he said, "you should have… you…" he sighed. "You didn't go too far?" he asked.
"No," I lied. "I just was trying to find a place to sit which had light and was out of the wind." I rubbed my arms. "It's cold out there."
"We'll… we'll talk later. Just… just stay here," he asked me. "Please."
Yeah, he wasn't done yet. I ended up waiting in the offices, reading, for another hour or so. It wasn't sinking in much. I was just staring at the pages, and the words which didn't make sense. All I could think of was how scared and helpless I'd felt, and how horrible the sweatshop had been. I went and cleaned myself up in the bathroom.
Eventually Dad was done, and he said his goodbyes. "I'll be heading into the hospital this evening," he said, as we got into the car, "but I'll leave you at home, okay? If you're okay with that."
I didn't want to sit around the hospital. "Yeah, sure," I said. "Is… is your friend going to be okay?"
His lips were a thin line. It didn't seem to be good. "I hope so," he said, his tone guarded.
"How did you meet?" I asked. I wanted to talk about something normal, surround myself with things as far as possible from the Other Place and that horrible building, to get some peace from what I'd seen. Well, that and the more mundane 'oh god I was chased by a guy with a dog'.
"Oh, we go back years," Dad said. "All the way back to CANE. Me and him and a few others."
"The supervillain group?" I said, blinking. I didn't expect that.
"CANE? A supervillain group? Taylor, it was the Campaign Against Nuclear Escalation."
"Someone from CANE assassinated Reagan," I objected. "That sounds pretty supervillain-y to me."
"I know this might sound surprising, kiddo," he said, "but you can't just say a protest group is a 'supervillain group' just because a parahuman linked to them went and killed the president. It's more complicated than that. I was a member 'cause I was protesting against the way it looked like Reagan was going to make the Cold War go hot and was… you know, showing off all these 'super-men' and brand new tinkertech bombs and new nuclear weapons and his Star Wars missile defence thing… stuff like that. And, of course, he was cutting everything else when he was throwing money at these world-ending bombs. Because otherwise the Soviets might get ideas."
We came to a stop at traffic lights.
"But I blame Reagan for that. Talking about 'evil empires' and 'supervillains' and turning everything into black and white, good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers. It was treating stuff like that which made the problems. Anyway, the worst I got up to was some vandalism and… okay, we scrapped a bit with the police, but they started it! We were just protesting and then they started up with the tear gas and the water cannons."
The lights changed.
"Though I should probably thank them for that, because something good came of those riots."
"Oh?" I asked sceptically.
Dad flashed a grin at me. It was a strange expression, somehow both carefree and sheepish. "How'd you think me and your mother met?" he asked. "Singing at choir? Hardly!"
"Dad!" I said. I didn't mean to sound quite so scandalised, but… uh, yeah. I sounded pretty shocked. Hell, I was pretty shocked.
"Oh, it was the eighties. Things were different back then," he said. "And your mother had a hell of an arm on her."
"She was part of the police?" I asked sceptically. "What, your eyes met romantically as she beat you with a baton?"
Dad looked confused. "What, no! Not likely! She was throwing petrol bombs at them." He sighed. "She was always more of a radical than me," he added. "She had such beautiful eyes behind her army surplus gas mask. And those outfits that her and her friends were wearing were really flattering."
"Dad!" I managed, cringing.
"If you're going to accuse either of us being supervillain henchmen, look to her, not me. I didn't have a costume. Just some wet cloth tied over my mouth to try to help with the tear gas. She'd come prepared."
I stared at him flatly. "Okay, now you're just making things up," I said.
He grinned. "Look, if you want to pretend we sprung fully formed in a parental state, that's up to you. Whatever helps you sleep at night," he said, and then his face fell and he winced. "Oops. Sorry."
"It's all right," I said.
He sighed. "But you have to get how the world was different, Taylor. We were young, and the idea of the Cold War going hot terrified us. It would have been the end of the world, before the Endbringers even showed up. I remember I got a call from my dad once, telling me to get out of the cities, because they'd be first hit. That was afterwhat happened in Nicaragua, back in '84. Him and your grandma packed up and headed out into the country. Mind you, he was a bit… eccentric by that point, but I almost joined him."
"What happened in Nicaragua?" I asked blankly.
"Honestly? No one really knows," he said, shaking his head. "I mean, a local Nicaraguan cape caught people laying mines in their harbours, then they paraded them on TV saying they were CIA agents, and the government, our government, said they'd just kidnapped some tourists on a boating trip and it was all false allegations to try to embarrass us. Then they sent in people – capes and special forces – to rescue the people who were supposedly tourists. Then it turned out that the Soviets had sent their own capes to help Nicaragua as 'advisors'. So there's this massive parahuman fight and it's all being recorded by local journalists and… yeah."
"Oh," I said, realisation dawning. "That's the Corinto Incident, right? Yeah, I've heard of it. That was the first really public display of parahumans fighting. That was in Parahuman Studies at school. We watched the footage."
"And that's what it gets remembered for," Dad said, shaking his head. "Reagan and his damn 'Superman is real… and he's American!' speech. Trying to turn the whole mess into a 'look at how dangerous the Soviets are with their supervillains; good thing we have our own to protect us'. And what did we get from the Cuban Missile Crisis II: Electric Boogaloo? The name 'Protectorate'."
He seemed bitter. He seemed old. I kept silent, hoping he'd calm down. The rest of the drive back was quiet. I headed up to my room and changed. I had a nasty bruise on my thigh from where I'd run into the bin. Well, if Dad noticed that, I'd just tell him I hit a bin when I slipped. The best lies were mostly true, after all. I couldn't focus on reading, so I went downstairs and stared at the television screen. Dad seemed to be happy that I wasn't spending time in my room, though.
He'd probably have been less happy if he'd known that I was trying to work out a way to tell him that a place near his work was an illegal sweatshop, without telling him what I'd done today.
I couldn't work out how to do it, though, not least because all that tiredness which I'd built up last night seemed to be coming back. It must have been escaping the guard or… or something. I was feeling limp and listless, so when Dad got ready to head off to visit the hospital, I told him I was going to bed early.
"I think I sort of overdid it on my first day out of that place," I told him. I tried to smile. "Maybe I'm coming down with a cold."
He looked worried, but he couldn't pin it down on anything. What was he going to do, anyway? Drag me off to the hospital when I was clearly exhausted?
I lay face-down on my bed, forehead resting on my arms. Maybe I should just go to bed. Take my sleeping pills, rest.
There was one thing I could do before I did that, though.
Quietly, I snuck out of my room. The house was almost silent without Dad around. I crept into his room, which smelt of sweat and needed an airing, and wrinkled my nose at the pile of clothes in the corner. He was usually tidier. How much had he been worried about me?
Well, time to think about that later. I was here for something else. I knew the old photo albums were tucked away on the top shelf of his cupboard, and standing on a chair I could easily reach them. They were handily dated. So… hmm. What dates was I looking for? Well, there was one which was 'Early 80s' and one which was 'Late 80s', so I got them both down.
Faded photographs were tucked into sleeves. I started with the 'Late 80s' one, and got lucky. Yeah, that was Dad with a full head of hair and a slightly straggly beard standing next to a considerably thinner version of the guy he'd been talking to at work, and a black guy. Probably the Cal who'd been shot. More pictures of Dad. Him and Cal working on a placard together. The three of them holding beers and mugging for the camera. Dad and Mum, holding hands.
I turned the page. And there was Mum, dressed in – my eyes widened. Okay, yeah, that was some kind of fairly close fitting leather catsuit thingie. It was black with yellow patches on it. And she had a hood up and a gas mask around her neck. It… was sort of flattering, I had to admit. Especially since it looked like it had been armoured around the chest, which covered up that – well, I got my figure from her.
Wow. Of all the things I thought she'd did in the eighties, I didn't think she'd have been a henchman. Henchwoman. Yeah, Dad might have said that things were different back then, but come on. She was dressing up in black leather – maybe biker leathers – and wearing a gas mask and throwing petrol bombs at the police. There was a term for people like that.
I sighed. She was quite obviously posing for the shot, too. And from the nature of the posing, I could bet that Dad was taking it. I shuddered. Not going to think about that. I turned the page to get away from that image, and came face to face with a picture of a line of similarly attired people – all women, I was pretty sure. Next picture, Mum sitting next to a few other young women in the black leather without their hoods and gas masks. They were either students, or not much older. There were banners up behind them. Things like 'Troops Out Of Panama' and 'Down With The New Patriarchs'.
My head sunk into my hands. My mother had been a henchwoman in her student days and I'd never know that. My mental image of her was going to need some adjustment. I couldn't believe it. She'd gone out wearing leather and a gas mask, no powers at all, and taken on the police because… why? Why would you do something crazy like that?
Well, according to Dad, because she thought she was going to stop the end of the world.
… damn. When I put it like that, if I thought I could stop nuclear war that way, I'd probably do it. I shook my head. Clearly inherited villainy. I'd need to watch for villains trying to recruit me by telling me that they were really the good guys. I smiled weakly at my bad joke. My twenty-something year old mother smiled back from the faded photograph, standing among a bunch of armed leather-clad women.
I was looking more and more like her. Not in every way, of course, but I wondered properly for the first time how this was affecting Dad.
And whatever bad things she might have done, I thought, at least she was doing it because she believed in it. Because she thought she was helping. And even if she had been wrong and even if there hadn't been a war, she'd done her best. Or what she thought was her best.
Not like that place down in the Docks. My stomach squirmed in disgust. There was no higher goal there. No cause they believed in. They were making the entire building a hellhole in the Other Place, and why? So shops on the Boardwalk could get cheaper clothes. For profit. Did the guards for that place even care they had a bunch of people trapped in there who probably thought they were coming to America for a better life? Did they just not care? Or did they think they deserved it or something?
I had to stop them.
The fury burned away my melancholia. I'd been wrong earlier. I could be a hero. All I'd need was proof. Photos. Enough to take to the police. I could drop them off without being IDed, get the police to raid the place and arrest everyone responsible for this. Maybe I could discover where these clothes were going, who was buying them. Get them arrested too, or make them feel so bad about it they'd never do it again. And my powers were very, very good at finding things out. The Other Place would tell me where to look.
The Protectorate could fight supervillains. I could stop this 'small' crime – which wasn't small at all.
I'd need an outfit. I didn't want them finding out who I was. I'd need a camera.
And I'd need a plan.
Chapter 2.06
My feet slipped on the wet ground. My heart pounded like a drum. My ears were hammered by angry barks. Legs thumping, I threw myself around the corner, dimly aware in the back of my mind that even if I was moving away from the guard I was still going the wrong way. That knowledge didn't couldn't change a thing, though. He was between me and the bit of the fence I'd squeezed through.
Behind the warehouses was nothing but a maze of old dead ends, unused buildings, and overflowing dumpsters. I had to get out of here. On the street, there were people around. I needed witnesses, help. I couldn't get trapped in here, in these stinking alleyways with filth all over the floor and rusty metal and… and I tried to push myself even harder. No. I wouldn't let myself get caught. I wouldn't let him put me back in the locker- in somewhere like the locker.
I couldn't even empty my mind to leave the Other Place. My head was hurting from all the things going on in it - I couldn't just think of nothing. My throat was raw, and each breath of cold air burned. The stink that surrounded me just made it worse. Each mouthful of stench made me want to throw up, stomach churning as I ran.
I took the first turn to the right, trying to escape the building more than its guard. The walls were covered in Other Place scrawlings-
APATHY APATHY APATHY NO ONE HEARS THE whimpers APATHY APATHY
-and I the already cold air felt even cooler near it. I could barely see in the panic and gloom, and my first clue to a trashcan in my path was a jabbing pain in my left thigh. It rolled over with a clatter, and I nearly fell too, stumbling out of the collision and grabbing onto a drain pipe. The pain in my sensitive hands barely went noticed.
The barking was getting closer, and I reached the end of the alley, taking the left turn. Wrong direction; dead end. The other end was blocked up with rusty construction equipment and plastic sheeting. I turned, and the other path ended in a door.
Which was locked.
"Let me in," I shouted, tears rolling down my face. "For fuck's sake, open up!"
No response.
Hyperventilating, I looked around desperately. The dog sounded close enough that I couldn't head back. I had to find somewhere to hide. Maybe… maybe in the normal world this place smelt bad enough that it couldn't smell me? I didn't know. I couldn't think of nothing and I didn't even know what the place looked like. There was just the rust and bare concrete and brick. There was an alcove – an old bricked-up door, really – and I ducked into it. I pressed myself against the back as hard as I could, hoping beyond hope that the dog wouldn't smell me and he wouldn't hear my breathing.
I was trying to think but it wasn't working and I couldn't focus and I couldn't think of anything and God, what was I going to do? I was a skinny out-of-shape teenage girl with hurt hands; he was a security guard with a gun and a dog – and in the state I was in, I was more scared of the dog than the gun. I huddled down, trying to keep out of the light – but no, my reason for that wasn't anything so reasoned. I wasn't thinking by that point. I was just reacting. All I knew was that the dog was growling and it could probably smell me and it was getting closer. The panic and the stench of the building in the Other Place and the way I just wanted it to go away all pooled together, and welled up out of my mouth in the form of a vaguely dog-shaped thing made of dried blood and wire.
I gagged, and stuffed my forearm in my mouth to avoid being sick. I had tasted my feelings doing that, and that just felt wrong. I spat blood, from my suddenly bleeding lips.
And the thing I'd made wasn't chained at all. The blood-wire-dog barked, only it didn't bark, it slammed and I knew the sound because it was the sound the locker doors made at school when someone kicked them and… and… I couldn't look.
The dog bark-slammed again, and then the other dog yelped. The man started shouting and the dog shifted to snarling and I heard the man yell and then there was the gloing of a falling empty trash can. The dog's frantic barking receded, but the man – swearing, shouting – wasn't going. I was trying to think and it was like trying to think when I had no sleep, all fogged and blurred and…
Tired.
Crybaby – my feelings of tiredness. It was still nailed to the wall at home. I wouldn't have to make it; I already had it made. I just had to think the nails released from the wall and there it was, wailing at the edge of my vision. I didn't know how it managed to get back here so fast, but I wasn't asking questions right now.
"Go for him," I muttered. "Get in him." I clenched my hands, letting the pain stab into my awareness. I could feel the creeping tiredness from the wails and… no! "Do it," I growled. "Or I'll send you back to the wall!"
The horse-headed infant with the midnight blue skin reluctantly crawled away, the nails in it scraping against the floor. I heard it hiss, and hoped against hope it'd work. The footsteps were coming closer and closer. I heard the man swear as he stepped in a puddle, and I could hear his breathing.
"I have had it up to here with this shit," I heard him mutter. "Fucking stupid dog. Get back here, you stupid thing!" I, thank God, heard him yawn. "For fuck's sake. Going to have to chase it down. I'm not paid enough for this. Get back here, Lupe!"
And mercifully, I heard him turn on his heel and stomp away, his bad mood obvious in every footstep. I stuffed my forearm into my mouth, and tried not to whimper until he was out of hearing. Then, slowly, aching all over, I pulled myself to my feet. I licked my cracked lips. They hurt, and tasted of iron. My bottom was wet and grimy, from where I'd been sitting. I left the Other Place, and just stood there for a bit, shaking, until I realized that the man might come back.
I felt sick.
I wasn't entirely sure how I managed to hold on to the contents of my stomach until I'd squeezed through the gap in the fence and got to safety, but I did. And then I emptied about half of my lunch into a dirty alleyway.
I was in a daze as I walked back. My mind was running around in loops, and I was still shaking. People might have been staring at me. I wasn't sure. I only noticed I was sort of a mess when I saw myself in a shop window.
I had to clean myself up. I found a 7-11, and went in.
"Fell down," I told the guy behind the counter when I noticed he was staring at me. "It's slippery out there, isn't it?"
One bottle of water purchased, I drank about half the bottle to wash out the taste of sick, and then used the rest to sort of blot off most of the dirt. That meant I was wetter, but at least I didn't have alley gunk on me.
Fight-or-flight? Really, really terrible for my power. My stupid body hadn't got the memo that I could imagine up scary monsters, and decided I should panic instead. And when I panicked, things went wrong. I had to be in control. All the time.
I… I wasn't suited for being a cape. When I grew up, I could be a parahuman detective and go work for the FBI, but it wouldn't be me on the front lines saving people.
I wiped my eyes. It hurt to think like this. I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to go out and fight crime. Personally, I meant; I wanted to be strong. I wanted to be able to stop people who were picking on others. But my powers – they helped me with investigation, they helped me find things, but if I had to act on the fly, things went wrong. I'd never be someone who could just see someone being attacked and step in to protect them. Not any more than I could have before, at least, and look at me. I couldn't even protect myself from bullies, let alone someone else.
I wanted to be a superhero. I wasn't. I was just a person with powers.
Oh, I realised dimly. The lights had been back on properly in the 7-11. When had the brownout ended? I frowned, and realised I hadn't been paying enough attention to notice.
I snuck in through the front door of the union offices, trying to get to the ladies bathroom to do a proper clean up and…
"Taylor!" Dad asked, standing by the vending machine in the offices with a look of surprise on his face. "What happened?"
No such luck.
"I just went for a jog… well, mostly a walk during the brownout," I said defensively. "I couldn't read when the lights were flickering like that. I stayed in the area!" I sucked in a breath and looked down at the dirty knees of my jeans. "And… uh, yeah, there was a reason I stopped jogging. You know, it's still pretty slippery out there." I licked my lips. "And I think I need to get some lip balm. They're cracking in this cold weather."
Dad pinched the bridge of his nose. "Taylor," he said, "you should have… you…" he sighed. "You didn't go too far?" he asked.
"No," I lied. "I just was trying to find a place to sit which had light and was out of the wind." I rubbed my arms. "It's cold out there."
"We'll… we'll talk later. Just… just stay here," he asked me. "Please."
Yeah, he wasn't done yet. I ended up waiting in the offices, reading, for another hour or so. It wasn't sinking in much. I was just staring at the pages, and the words which didn't make sense. All I could think of was how scared and helpless I'd felt, and how horrible the sweatshop had been. I went and cleaned myself up in the bathroom.
Eventually Dad was done, and he said his goodbyes. "I'll be heading into the hospital this evening," he said, as we got into the car, "but I'll leave you at home, okay? If you're okay with that."
I didn't want to sit around the hospital. "Yeah, sure," I said. "Is… is your friend going to be okay?"
His lips were a thin line. It didn't seem to be good. "I hope so," he said, his tone guarded.
"How did you meet?" I asked. I wanted to talk about something normal, surround myself with things as far as possible from the Other Place and that horrible building, to get some peace from what I'd seen. Well, that and the more mundane 'oh god I was chased by a guy with a dog'.
"Oh, we go back years," Dad said. "All the way back to CANE. Me and him and a few others."
"The supervillain group?" I said, blinking. I didn't expect that.
"CANE? A supervillain group? Taylor, it was the Campaign Against Nuclear Escalation."
"Someone from CANE assassinated Reagan," I objected. "That sounds pretty supervillain-y to me."
"I know this might sound surprising, kiddo," he said, "but you can't just say a protest group is a 'supervillain group' just because a parahuman linked to them went and killed the president. It's more complicated than that. I was a member 'cause I was protesting against the way it looked like Reagan was going to make the Cold War go hot and was… you know, showing off all these 'super-men' and brand new tinkertech bombs and new nuclear weapons and his Star Wars missile defence thing… stuff like that. And, of course, he was cutting everything else when he was throwing money at these world-ending bombs. Because otherwise the Soviets might get ideas."
We came to a stop at traffic lights.
"But I blame Reagan for that. Talking about 'evil empires' and 'supervillains' and turning everything into black and white, good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers. It was treating stuff like that which made the problems. Anyway, the worst I got up to was some vandalism and… okay, we scrapped a bit with the police, but they started it! We were just protesting and then they started up with the tear gas and the water cannons."
The lights changed.
"Though I should probably thank them for that, because something good came of those riots."
"Oh?" I asked sceptically.
Dad flashed a grin at me. It was a strange expression, somehow both carefree and sheepish. "How'd you think me and your mother met?" he asked. "Singing at choir? Hardly!"
"Dad!" I said. I didn't mean to sound quite so scandalised, but… uh, yeah. I sounded pretty shocked. Hell, I was pretty shocked.
"Oh, it was the eighties. Things were different back then," he said. "And your mother had a hell of an arm on her."
"She was part of the police?" I asked sceptically. "What, your eyes met romantically as she beat you with a baton?"
Dad looked confused. "What, no! Not likely! She was throwing petrol bombs at them." He sighed. "She was always more of a radical than me," he added. "She had such beautiful eyes behind her army surplus gas mask. And those outfits that her and her friends were wearing were really flattering."
"Dad!" I managed, cringing.
"If you're going to accuse either of us being supervillain henchmen, look to her, not me. I didn't have a costume. Just some wet cloth tied over my mouth to try to help with the tear gas. She'd come prepared."
I stared at him flatly. "Okay, now you're just making things up," I said.
He grinned. "Look, if you want to pretend we sprung fully formed in a parental state, that's up to you. Whatever helps you sleep at night," he said, and then his face fell and he winced. "Oops. Sorry."
"It's all right," I said.
He sighed. "But you have to get how the world was different, Taylor. We were young, and the idea of the Cold War going hot terrified us. It would have been the end of the world, before the Endbringers even showed up. I remember I got a call from my dad once, telling me to get out of the cities, because they'd be first hit. That was afterwhat happened in Nicaragua, back in '84. Him and your grandma packed up and headed out into the country. Mind you, he was a bit… eccentric by that point, but I almost joined him."
"What happened in Nicaragua?" I asked blankly.
"Honestly? No one really knows," he said, shaking his head. "I mean, a local Nicaraguan cape caught people laying mines in their harbours, then they paraded them on TV saying they were CIA agents, and the government, our government, said they'd just kidnapped some tourists on a boating trip and it was all false allegations to try to embarrass us. Then they sent in people – capes and special forces – to rescue the people who were supposedly tourists. Then it turned out that the Soviets had sent their own capes to help Nicaragua as 'advisors'. So there's this massive parahuman fight and it's all being recorded by local journalists and… yeah."
"Oh," I said, realisation dawning. "That's the Corinto Incident, right? Yeah, I've heard of it. That was the first really public display of parahumans fighting. That was in Parahuman Studies at school. We watched the footage."
"And that's what it gets remembered for," Dad said, shaking his head. "Reagan and his damn 'Superman is real… and he's American!' speech. Trying to turn the whole mess into a 'look at how dangerous the Soviets are with their supervillains; good thing we have our own to protect us'. And what did we get from the Cuban Missile Crisis II: Electric Boogaloo? The name 'Protectorate'."
He seemed bitter. He seemed old. I kept silent, hoping he'd calm down. The rest of the drive back was quiet. I headed up to my room and changed. I had a nasty bruise on my thigh from where I'd run into the bin. Well, if Dad noticed that, I'd just tell him I hit a bin when I slipped. The best lies were mostly true, after all. I couldn't focus on reading, so I went downstairs and stared at the television screen. Dad seemed to be happy that I wasn't spending time in my room, though.
He'd probably have been less happy if he'd known that I was trying to work out a way to tell him that a place near his work was an illegal sweatshop, without telling him what I'd done today.
I couldn't work out how to do it, though, not least because all that tiredness which I'd built up last night seemed to be coming back. It must have been escaping the guard or… or something. I was feeling limp and listless, so when Dad got ready to head off to visit the hospital, I told him I was going to bed early.
"I think I sort of overdid it on my first day out of that place," I told him. I tried to smile. "Maybe I'm coming down with a cold."
He looked worried, but he couldn't pin it down on anything. What was he going to do, anyway? Drag me off to the hospital when I was clearly exhausted?
I lay face-down on my bed, forehead resting on my arms. Maybe I should just go to bed. Take my sleeping pills, rest.
There was one thing I could do before I did that, though.
Quietly, I snuck out of my room. The house was almost silent without Dad around. I crept into his room, which smelt of sweat and needed an airing, and wrinkled my nose at the pile of clothes in the corner. He was usually tidier. How much had he been worried about me?
Well, time to think about that later. I was here for something else. I knew the old photo albums were tucked away on the top shelf of his cupboard, and standing on a chair I could easily reach them. They were handily dated. So… hmm. What dates was I looking for? Well, there was one which was 'Early 80s' and one which was 'Late 80s', so I got them both down.
Faded photographs were tucked into sleeves. I started with the 'Late 80s' one, and got lucky. Yeah, that was Dad with a full head of hair and a slightly straggly beard standing next to a considerably thinner version of the guy he'd been talking to at work, and a black guy. Probably the Cal who'd been shot. More pictures of Dad. Him and Cal working on a placard together. The three of them holding beers and mugging for the camera. Dad and Mum, holding hands.
I turned the page. And there was Mum, dressed in – my eyes widened. Okay, yeah, that was some kind of fairly close fitting leather catsuit thingie. It was black with yellow patches on it. And she had a hood up and a gas mask around her neck. It… was sort of flattering, I had to admit. Especially since it looked like it had been armoured around the chest, which covered up that – well, I got my figure from her.
Wow. Of all the things I thought she'd did in the eighties, I didn't think she'd have been a henchman. Henchwoman. Yeah, Dad might have said that things were different back then, but come on. She was dressing up in black leather – maybe biker leathers – and wearing a gas mask and throwing petrol bombs at the police. There was a term for people like that.
I sighed. She was quite obviously posing for the shot, too. And from the nature of the posing, I could bet that Dad was taking it. I shuddered. Not going to think about that. I turned the page to get away from that image, and came face to face with a picture of a line of similarly attired people – all women, I was pretty sure. Next picture, Mum sitting next to a few other young women in the black leather without their hoods and gas masks. They were either students, or not much older. There were banners up behind them. Things like 'Troops Out Of Panama' and 'Down With The New Patriarchs'.
My head sunk into my hands. My mother had been a henchwoman in her student days and I'd never know that. My mental image of her was going to need some adjustment. I couldn't believe it. She'd gone out wearing leather and a gas mask, no powers at all, and taken on the police because… why? Why would you do something crazy like that?
Well, according to Dad, because she thought she was going to stop the end of the world.
… damn. When I put it like that, if I thought I could stop nuclear war that way, I'd probably do it. I shook my head. Clearly inherited villainy. I'd need to watch for villains trying to recruit me by telling me that they were really the good guys. I smiled weakly at my bad joke. My twenty-something year old mother smiled back from the faded photograph, standing among a bunch of armed leather-clad women.
I was looking more and more like her. Not in every way, of course, but I wondered properly for the first time how this was affecting Dad.
And whatever bad things she might have done, I thought, at least she was doing it because she believed in it. Because she thought she was helping. And even if she had been wrong and even if there hadn't been a war, she'd done her best. Or what she thought was her best.
Not like that place down in the Docks. My stomach squirmed in disgust. There was no higher goal there. No cause they believed in. They were making the entire building a hellhole in the Other Place, and why? So shops on the Boardwalk could get cheaper clothes. For profit. Did the guards for that place even care they had a bunch of people trapped in there who probably thought they were coming to America for a better life? Did they just not care? Or did they think they deserved it or something?
I had to stop them.
The fury burned away my melancholia. I'd been wrong earlier. I could be a hero. All I'd need was proof. Photos. Enough to take to the police. I could drop them off without being IDed, get the police to raid the place and arrest everyone responsible for this. Maybe I could discover where these clothes were going, who was buying them. Get them arrested too, or make them feel so bad about it they'd never do it again. And my powers were very, very good at finding things out. The Other Place would tell me where to look.
The Protectorate could fight supervillains. I could stop this 'small' crime – which wasn't small at all.
I'd need an outfit. I didn't want them finding out who I was. I'd need a camera.
And I'd need a plan.
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