Wonder City Stories

The Art of Losing

"The thing is," Madeline Fukuda told us, "I've regenerated the parts of the brain that were damaged by the bullet. Also the bone and skin, both lungs, her liver, and the damage to her leg and hand. Fortunately, there was no intestinal perforation, but she'll still need to be on antibiotics for a while. But she's going to have to reeducate the portion of the brain that was damaged."

Ruth sat in her chair there in the basement of the Gold Stars facility, radiating rage like a dark star, her forehead contracted in a frown. "Can you guess at what kind of therapy she'll need?"
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#BLACKLIVESMATTER

Happy sixth anniversary to us! More things to be said tomorrow; for now, please enjoy this finale for Volume 3, with its special surprise just for you all.






Everything Dies

Angelica was changing into her new dress in Madame's bedroom—carefully, carefully, so as not to muss either hair or makeup, done professionally less than an hour earlier—when she heard the commotion out in front of the house. X knocked on the door a few moments later and said, "Our chariot is here."

"Come give me a hand?" Angelica said, after struggling with her dress halfheartedly and deciding she'd rather have a handsome helper. She deserved it for dealing with today.

X came into the room. Sie was wearing an exquisitely tailored black three-piece suit and a snow-white dress shirt with French cuffs and onyx rose cufflinks. The tie was deep blue silk with a pattern of pale grey gingko leaves, and was restrained by an onyx rose tie clip that matched the links. Angelica gave a low whistle.

"You're too kind," X said with a small smile. "What can I do?"
( Read more... )

Goodness, these are getting long.





Deny Everything

Absolutely the only reason I agreed to meet with Sara West (her request, and also the government's) was because Ruth needed an excuse to get into orbit—to dispose of Jane Liberty's body before too many questions started getting asked. So Ruth boosted me and my little lifepod (the one she'd brought me home in) up to New Alcatraz. I was wearing my alien technology that let me leave the house and retain my sanity, but I left my dog in the bunker. Orbit just doesn't agree with her, poor thing.
( Read more... )

Homecoming

Of course I knew what had happened.

Jane had tried her best to cut all the mental ties between us, but she and I were well intertwined. She managed to break most of them, and I managed to break more when I realized what was happening.

But I still woke up on the floor of my "office" with Flori worriedly pressing her cold, wet nose to my cheek and neck. As I painfully pushed myself up to a sitting position, I broke, just fucking broke, crumpled back down onto the floor weeping.

"Rennie," Ruth said, kneeling down at arm's length from me. "Rennie, what can I do?"

I dragged myself to her and clung to her, like I did that day she took me out of the hospital, clutching at her black spandex and just wailing. A piece of me had died, had just stopped being, and it was like someone had cut me open and tore my liver out while I was conscious.

I really can't explain more than that.

Ruth held me, and Flori pressed herself against my back, whining, and life went on around me as the Gold Stars presumably took possession of the ship and did whatever the fuck it is superheroes did when they weren't dying in my head.

I could feel them all, despite the weird protective thing the aliens gave me, and was of course tangled up in Ruth's mind, but she had practice with me doing that. She rubbed my back, and rubbed Flori's ears, and generally just tried to get us both calmed down. I think Sekhmet came to talk to her over my head once—I could feel Sekhmet close by, and I knew she was telling Ruth about Jane. Ruth had, I think, figured it out already from things running through my head. She didn't really react, she just kept projecting her stolid facade at me.

Eventually, I did calm down. I don't know how long it took. I just finally subsided into hiccoughs and shudders.

Ruth said, "What do you need, Rennie?"

I took a deep breath and tried to talk like a grownup, but it still came out pathetic. "I want to go home."

"Okay, baby," Ruth said. "Okay, I'm gonna take you home."

They rustled up an air-secure escape pod or something and put me and Flori in it, and Ruth flew us home. Flori snaked out of her restraints to huddle in my arms the whole trip down.

And then we were on Terra Firma.

Ruth cracked open the pod on the lawn of the house under which my bunker resided. I had pulled most of my shit together on the trip down, and the alien artifact around my neck kept the worst of the city's psychic explosion away from me. While Ruth moved the pod back to the Gold Stars compound, I took my dog for a walk in the well-trimmed grass and through the less-maintained back yard. There were trees, and birds, and a breeze, and just me and Flori (and a crowd of minds, held at a slight distance) walking in the twilight.

It had been years since I felt free air. My bunker had never—well, okay, rarely—felt like a prison to me the way the spaceship had. This was… therapeutic.

Ruth came back, carrying my mama, and that made me cry again. I hadn't touched my mother in thirty years, I think, and here I was, able to hug her because of those fucking aliens.

At least one good thing came from it.

At least one.
good.
thing.

"I've gotta go, Rennie," Ruth said. "There's cleanup to do."

"I know," I said around my mother's embrace. "I know. You'll come back, though? Coffee?"

"You know it, baby," Ruth said. She hesitated, and I reached out for her. She kissed me on the cheek and gave me a quick squeeze before she took off.

"That Ruth," Mama said, and Mama was looking so much older than I remembered the last time we'd talked on video phone—ages ago, more than six months, I know. There was grey in her hair now, and I could swear there wasn't before. "That Ruth," she said again, shaking her greying head.

"I know," I said. "Would you like to come down and have something?" I added, inviting my mother into my house for the first time.

"Are you sure it will be all right?" she said, peering into my face worriedly.

"Please, Mama," I said, stroking my dog's head. "I don't want to be alone right now."

"All right," she said, gathering herself up like she was visiting her sister's house. "Just for a bit, then."

This just gets harder and harder to write...


Only Got Four Minutes To Save The World

I'm pretty sure I was getting seasick, even though I'd never been on a damn boat in my life. Poor old Flori wasn't sure what to make of me—my scent had changed, I think, with Sophie driving, and all my body language was different. Poor baby kept trying to crawl into my lap to make things better, and when Sophie wouldn't let her, she settled for crawling to the chair behind me.

Allow me to remind you that Floribunda is not a small dog.

So there's my gloriously fatass body with a brainiac twenty-something running it, teetering on the edge of my seat with a giant coward of a pit bull squished in behind it.

And there's me, mashed into Jane Liberty's tempestuous head, going down for the fifth or sixth or hundredth time.

... I looked at the President and said, "Sir, it's time."

He blinked at me. "For what?"

"For the bunker at Fort Wilson," I said, looking as grave as I could manage.

"But if I..." he said. He ran his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. "Can't you just wait another few months, until after the election…?"

"No, sir," I said. "I can feel myself slipping away, day by day. How long will it be before I slip in a way that kills people? No, sir, I would feel much safer if you gave the order." And maybe this would kill his party's chance in the next election…

I couldn't afford to be curious, because I'd get pulled in, but this woman kept a fuckton of shit in her head.

In the present: she'd destroyed six of 25 generators. "How many before you can bring her up here?" I asked Sophie.

"Another six or seven generators, I think," Sophie said, mentally gritting her teeth at me. "Hang…"

I could see the thing growing in Mama, I could see it growing, but I couldn't figure it out, I couldn't fix it. "Go to the doctor, Mama," I pleaded.

"There is no money," Mama always said.

"... I think the reason you're getting swamped so much is the power she's using," Sophie was saying. "There's a temporal element…"

I handed Mama a wad of cash and said, "Now you can go to the doctor."

She looked at me so gravely. "Where did you get this money, Jane?"

I looked at her, seeing the thing inside her staring back at me, and said, "Does it matter? You can go to the doctor!"

She exclaimed something I'd never heard her say in Spanish before and threw the money in my face. "It matters. If you don't think it matters, then you are not my daughter."

"... can feel it fucking with the telepathic link, can't you?" Sophie was saying.

"I can, but there ain't shit I can do about it," I said.

Dottie understood, Dottie always understood. I was legally too young—I'd told her that when she asked me, though I hadn't intended to—but she could see the potential. She brought me into the Gold Stars and gave me the advance on my pay I'd asked for.

I handed Mama my check, my check with its shiny gold foil star in the corner, and said, "Now will you go to the doctor?"

Mama gave me her most beautiful smile, the smile I knew had won my father's heart, and said, "Yes, now I will go."

"Get her back on course!" Sophie snapped.

I gently wrenched Jane's mind back on topic, and our stomach clenched painfully with shame, and stayed that way, agonizing, though I tried to soothe her embarrassment. I felt her punch through the next one in Africa.

"That's perfect, Jane," Sophie said. "Now I need you to cut across the south Atlantic…"

I made myself look at Bernie at the end, even though all I could see at that point was the thing that had taken her body from me. I could just see, through the thing, that she was smiling at me as I gently, so gently, held her hand. "It's okay, Jay," she growled in the voice the thing had given her, "it's really okay. I'm ready."

"You're leaving me alone, Bern," I said, and I couldn't stop the tears then.

"I know, I'm sorry," she whispered. "But you've got Hal now. He's kind of a shithead, though," she admitted.

"And he's not you. None of them are," I said. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry I couldn't do anything."

"Jay, even you can't work miracles," Bernie said.

I managed to stop Jane from overshooting her destination in south Chile, and she came around in a sharp turn that made our stomach lurch. Jesus, had she always flown like this?

"Got it," Sophie said. "There are three more in the mountains up the coast, just run up the coastline, just like that…"

"Mama, please let me try to fix it," I said quietly.

"No, Jane," she said, just as quietly but firmly. "God put it there, and if He wills, He will help the doctors take it away."

"Mama, please," I tried again, wishing God would just fuck right on off.

"No, Jane," she said. "Healing is not your gift. You know that, I know that. The doctors will help me."

We were navigating the complicated coastal mountains of South and Central America all together, so that kept me from going under for a while.

"Why are you using this blinking ability?" I asked her at one point.

"Because I can't use Blitzkreig's full speed in atmosphere," Jane said. "Using Blinken's power lets me move nearly as fast without the atmospheric disruption. I'll drop it when I head to space." After a moment, she said, "I'm sorry it's making it harder for you."

"It's all right," I said, though we both knew it wasn't. Jane had been my first teacher in reining in my telepathy, and she knew what riding another's mind was like. She knew, possibly better than anyone else, what my history was with that.

I stripped Blitzkreig's powers from her as she ran past me. She had just killed the first American Dream, an earnest young man with beautiful blue eyes and a big voice who now had a hole where his chest used to be. (I'd copied his eyes whenever the Army wanted me blonde and blue-eyed for photos.) I tried not to hear her screams as she shattered her feet, but at least they didn't last long once she started sliding across the ground at just sub-sonic speed…

"All's fair for War," I said, not quite to Sophie, feeling a little glazed.

Floribunda's tail thumped against the arm of the chair, and we felt her shove her cold, wet nose against the skin of my back where my shirt had ridden up.

Second episode of anniversary week!



When It Rains, It Pours

Out of the corner of her eye, Nereid saw Sophie turn and bolt for the Cosmic Flyer. So she stopped looking like she was making it rain (appearances were everything in the superhero game), kept making it rain, and followed, soggily, into the Flyer.

When she got inside, she heard Sophie yelling: "You have the biggest goddamn processing center available right now with full surround-sound imaging coverage of the planet. Let me in!"

Nereid ran and caught herself on the doorjamb of the cockpit. Sophie was sitting in the pilot's seat, staring upward, looking distraught. She wasn't on the communicator, the speakerphone lights weren't on, she was just shouting at the sky.

"Jesus Harriet Christ, Renata, we need to know where the goddamn ground-based generators are. You've got all the locations in that system in front of you. Yeah, you could probably look for them, but do you know how long it will take them to power up?"

Renata. She was talking to Renata Scott in her head. Nereid stared—she couldn't remember a time she'd seen Sophie look or act this rattled. Sophie had never spoken aloud to Renata, though she'd told Nereid when she was talking to her.

"I know, Jesus fuck, I know," Sophie said, her voice breaking over tears. "Please, please, I can do this, just let me do something that's good."

There was a moment's pause, and then Sophie's body fell forward over the controls. Nereid stepped forward and pulled her away from the controls so if she had any random twitches, the Cosmic Flyer wouldn't suddenly take off. She knelt next to Sophie and held her hands, half of her mind still concentrating on the rain outside, trying not to feel a little jealous of Renata. Both Sophie and Renata were such intensely private people; the level of trust—or desperation—between them to do this was astonishing.

She reached up and gently wiped the tears off Sophie's face with her thumb. Appearances were everything in the superhero business.

Sick as the proverbial dog this week. Glad I have stuff written ahead!


Resist or Serve

I was so interested in keeping an eye on the newsfeeds spinning by on my screens that Mark West managed to surprise me in my office.

He burst through the door, which had me on my feet facing him in a split second. He was pale and furious; even his perfect Ken hair was askew.

"They're going crazy down there," he began.

"About damn time," I said.

"No, you don't understand!" he shouted, and he actually clutched at his hair.

He was so agitated that he was projecting his thoughts hard, as agitated people do. As I often have to do, I was working hard to ignore that, but the repeated epithets were getting on my nerves.

"What's the matter, Mark?" I said, taking a step forward. "Feeling a little threatened? Feeling like you might not win? How much of the US were you promised for your very own after subjugating it and making all the freaks commit suicide?"

He looked shocked. Horrified, actually. "You really don't get it," he said faintly. "You don't understand that everything I've done has been to try to keep the aliens out of our affairs?" His voice was rising in volume with every word, and his face was going brick-red. "You don't understand that they came to my wife and made her more of a freak—yes, a god damned freak—because they were going to use her to do whatever they wanted to our world, and I put myself forward to try to save our world, our damned, damned world, because I want somewhere for my children to grow up that isn't under the heels of some alien dictators? That I wanted the world that was given to us by the lord to be our own to stay our own?" He was raging at me, walking toward me without fear. At least his rage was focusing his thoughts so I could ignore them. "I could tell these… people had more power than all the mightiest heroes or villains our planet could muster and the only way we would conquer would be to work along their plans until the lord pointed the way to overthrow them, escape them, cast them away from our world. My boys—and my girls too—would inherit our world, a human world, ordered by human minds and choices, as the legacy of their parents." He stopped two paces in front of me, panting, weeping with his fury. "I knew you would fuck it all up, you ignorant bitch."

For just a moment, I had a glimpse of him as a human being, as a father and husband, as a desperate human facing impossible odds just trying to do what he thought was best. I knew he'd fuck it all up.

"Maybe you should've trusted to the rest of the human beings on the planet, instead of trying to play god," I said, glancing back at the images of resistance and revolution playing across the screens.

"You have to stop them," he said, suddenly falling off his high horse. He gritted his teeth and said, "Please. They say you have enough power to control everyone on the planet. If you do, you have to stop them from doing this."

"Even if I had that kind of power," I said, making the effort to explain though I knew it was pointless, "what no one really understands about psionic powers is that it's a two-way street. Even if you think you're purely projecting, there's a little piece of you inside that person's mind. You can see what that's done to your wife."

He blinked and looked alarmed.

"She's more tired than ever, isn't she?" I said, almost sympathetically. "She's exhausted. Barely enough energy to sort of take care of her children, and nothing left for you because you're nominally a grown-ass man and can take care of yourself. That's what trying to control millions of minds does to you, if it doesn't drive you stark raving mad immediately."

I had hit awfully close to home. He rubbed his face, muttering, "Oh, God, Sara, what have they done to you?"

"You've got to see that there's no way anyone could survive being inside the minds of seven billion people," I said. "Because actively controlling takes more energy than passively projecting."

"But if you don't," he said in an exhausted tone, still staring into his hands, "everything will be for naught."

"If I don't," I said as gently as I could muster for this horrid little man, "then people get to choose their own fates, which is what humans with free will ought to be able to do."

He gave me a defeated, dead look and took himself to the door. At the door, he said, "You won't be able to say that I didn't warn you." And before I could answer, he went out.

I looked back at the screens nervously. That was the thing we'd not been able to predict: what would the aliens do in response? What tricks did they have up their Hoovers?

The Only Winning Move

After considering the task to which I had been set, I did pretty much what I expected to do when Joshua first told me about it: nothing.

At first, I sat in my extremely comfortable chair in front of my two-story-high set of screens, with my keyboards and virtual mousing controls and voice controls and stared at the enormous live satellite map of Africa. I eyed it thoroughly; I expected it to bite me, at least metaphorically. Then I opened up Wikipedia and other parts of the Internet and started reading, because I had no idea what countries were extant in Africa right then. From there, I jumped to the surprisingly healthy African blogosphere (surprising because the American blogosphere was a censored wasteland). I got hints that the non-English and non-French areas were even less restricted.

There are, for your information, sixty-some-odd countries in Africa. The actual number is in constant flux because there are about half a dozen para individuals staking territorial claims to regions, usually sub-regions of countries, at any given time. Some of these are flat-out supervillains -- well-heeled First-World-backed almost-locals with some flavor of superpower, major gizmo arsenal, or mystical army. A few are well-meaning people trying to improve the quality of life in some specific area. Then, in addition to the countries on the map, there are also the so-called "lost" civilizations that pepper the continent, with some confirmed and in communication with the UN and local governments, and others that withdrew from detection after first contact.

Then there are the UN Emergency Exclusion Zones, of which some have their own governments, completely separate from the countries in which they occur. For instance, the area around what the Great White Victorian Explorers called a "gate to hell" (a gate to another world) that periodically emitted "demons" (people from that other world), the region around which was populated by "demon worshippers" (people who'd had diplomatic relations and trade with the otherworlders for thousands of years). Or the empty land that was barricaded off by NATO troops because, forty years after The Atomaster blew himself up there in a fight with one of the South African para teams (killing himself and the para team and a dozen villages of innocent bystanders, the area was still hotter than the site of the crash of Doc McGee's airship in Montana.

Of course, while I was engaged in all this research, I was looking up the shit that was going on in the US and being horrified. Mark West's cronies had clamped down on the press so there was very little mainstream coverage of, say, the water riots in LA and San Diego, or the large-scale extremist violence in suburban areas, or the enormous suicide clusters blooming like bloodstains across the countryside. Twitter was mostly a wasteland, but it did have tidbits. What West's people didn't know about particularly were the locked-down sites where a small group of mental health para professionals interacted. I didn't use the onboard computers to view those sites, of course, but contacted the psi-activated robot waldo in my old home and had her bring up the screens on my home computer.

I researched for a week before Sara West showed up in my "office."

I felt her sticky-sweet oozing presence as she approached. I braced myself (imagine: slick smooth stainless steel outer shell coated in oil) and said, "Come in," when she knocked.

She hung in the doorway, like she did before. Floribunda wasn't in the office that day (sometimes the ship just freaked her out too much for her to emerge from whatever hiding place she'd crammed herself into), so I was able to turn my full attention to the uncontrolled empath in my space.

I made her wait a full minute, as I closed windows on my displays, leaving only the massive image of Africa, clouds drifting over the equatorial region. Then I turned my chair toward her.

"Yes?" I said.

Dame Shirley's voice faded out on the speakers (at least they gave me decent speakers) and was replaced by Tracy Chapman.

"Last night I heard the screaming/Loud voices behind the wall..."

The dark circles under Sara West's eyes were deeper than before, her pale skin more transparent. She smiled wanly at me. "I just wanted to look in on you and see how you were settling in."

I gave her a tight smile. "Just fine, thank you." Internally, I cursed my mother for instilling indomitable politeness in me. I didn't want to thank this woman. I was smoldering, thinking about the children who were hanging themselves in Chicago, and the immigrant women who were poisoning themselves in Arizona, and the young gay men who were drowning themselves in Virginia.

"I…" she began, and then her gaze travelled over my screen, apparently taking in the custom markings I'd put in to denote the various conflicts that were actually being covered in the press. "What's that?"

"Places where people are killing each other," I said, nastily pleased by her flinch.

"Always come late/If they come at all," Tracy sang.

"Mr. West is wondering," she said, averting her eyes down and to the right, "why you're not using your power more."

"And Mark West sends you to ask his questions for him?" I said.

Tracy added, "They say they can't interfere/With domestic affairs…"

She shook her head and glanced at my face furtively, then looked away. "I heard him talking to one of them about it. I think he's trying to get you locked up again."

"And you're hoping I'll be grateful to you for this information?" I said. I wasn't really surprised that the aliens were monitoring my telepathic output. Joshua had intimated as much, if I read between the lines.

Tears overflowed and she said, "Why are you so mean? I'm just trying to be nice in this… this horrible place."

I set my jaw. "I don't care how 'nice' you're being to me, you're killing people down on the ground. You and your husband are mass murderers."

"I'm trying to stop the killing!" she wailed, her saccharine emotional spray turning cold and jagged and sandpapery. "I just want to go back to raising my kids and cooking for my husband and being normal, but while I've got this god-given power, he says… I know I've got to try to make the world better!"

Kids, of course, that was one reason she looked so fried. But the pictures of the kids who'd died just in the last month in the drug violence that was erupting in pretty much every city in the US wrote over the images of the children floating on the edge of her consciousness.

"Then a silence that chilled my soul…" Tracy crooned.

"You've tried, and you've failed, and the more you try, the more people you kill," I said as brutally as I could. It's hard when another person is facing you in tears, especially when they're an uncontrolled Class 9 or 10 empath projecting all their mess all over you. "Unless you believe in a very different god than I do, then you need to stop, right here, right now, or have more deaths on you."

Tracy added, "And the policeman said/I'm here to keep the peace…"

She covered her face with her hands and said, muffled, "I can't believe what you're saying. I can't believe you. You don't understand!" And, finally, she fled and the door slid shut behind her.

In the fresh silence, Tracy's song finished mournfully and I took a few deep breaths.

Then I turned back to the screen and started considering how to make it look like I was using my power just enough to keep my job.

Sorry about my post-fail last week. It's been a little rough weather here. But so is it rough weather in Wonder City.


Partying the Hard Way

Tam Lane was pressing her up against a cold metal wall, bending over her, his long auburn hair shading their faces. "Come on, baby," he was whispering, pulling her hand against the bulge in his jeans. "Do it."

Before Nereid could say anything past her horror, Tam was dragged away from her and thrown to the ground. Sophie brought a baseball bat down on the man's pretty face. There was a crunch, and a wail, and Nereid turned away.

A warm hand pressed against her back. "It's okay, Pacifica," Lucid's sympathetic voice said. "It's just a dream."

Nereid turned back to look at her, slowly rising into lucidity through her paralysis and confusion. "Really?"

Lucid smiled at her. "Yes, really. I should know, right?"

Nereid looked toward Sophie, who was still plying her baseball bat, even though most of the dream was fading away around them. Lucid said, "Sophie, time to go."

Sophie dropped the baseball bat with a little grimace and nodded, pushing some of her hair out of her face.

They walked silently away from the disintegrating scene, Lucid keeping an arm around Nereid's shoulders. Shortly, they came to a train station and mounted the steps into one of the waiting silver cars. They sat down along the side of the subway car, and the train started into motion, the rubber loops swinging silently with the motion of the car.

Nereid blinked, and took deep breaths, and looked down at herself. She was wearing her uniform, the swirling blues and greens in close-fitting spandex. She ran her hands over the fabric and forced herself to feel the texture, still breathing deeply. She'd done this a number of times, visiting Lucid's Dream Party, but it had been a while since their last trip.

"Just a baseball bat this time?" Lucid was saying curiously to Sophie as the train slanted downward into a dark tunnel.

"I've got a lot of anger issues right now," Sophie said.

"Apparently," Lucid said. "How've you been doing, Pacifica?"

Nereid blinked hard and smiled. "All right, I suppose, Leah. Wonder City is just kind of... hard."

Lucid nodded. "Seattle's no bed of roses but at least we're not having a modern-day Les Mis, like in California."

Nereid looked at her and said, "Les Mis?"

Lucid smiled briefly and bitterly. "Food riots. Water riots. Police declaring martial law and killing people left and right. It isn't just the LAPD, but that's where it started."

Something flickered in the window opposite Nereid. It was one of those advertisements consisting of a series of stills posted on the subway tunnel wall that become a little animated movie when the train rushes past them. This one only had a man's face in the center of a bright starburst. He was a handsome thirty-something with short, sleek ash-blond hair and bright, earnest blue eyes. He was speaking in the image, enunciating carefully so, Nereid supposed, someone could lip-read what he was saying.

Almost against her will, she was drawn to stare at his mouth, trying to puzzle out the words.

Lucid got up, walked across the car, and yanked down a window blind that Nereid hadn't seen there before, breaking the spell. "I am so very tired of that fucker."

"Who is he?" Nereid said, rubbing her eyes.

"Pastor Al," Sophie growled. "Tent revival boy. Is he appearing in the dream world a lot?"

"All the fucking time," Lucid said. She sat down heavily. "He's always trying to say something to the dreamers. It's not like he's actually here -- believe me, I've looked. I think that he's just a really potent symbol."

Suddenly, his face reappeared in every window of the car, and each face was saying something different, smiling a slightly different way.

Lucid's eyes narrowed and she stamped on the floor. Blinds snapped down over every window.

"We'll be there soon," she said after a moment.

"Good," Sophie said. Then, more softly, "Thanks."

Lucid squeezed Sophie's knee and patted Nereid's shoulder. "I couldn't let down some of my favorite people."

The Dream Party was less populated than Nereid had ever seen it before. The buffet was still busy. There was still a small jam session in the corner, consisting of variously-dressed people playing guitars, Vulcan harps, and drums. But there were definitely fewer beings chatting in little groups, and they spoke in lower voices.

Nereid noticed a woman sitting nearby, calmly watching roses grow from her left arm. Green sprouts burst through her skin, grew and extended, and eventually exploded into blood-red blooms. When one bloomed, she carefully snipped it off at the base with a pair of scissors, and slid the rose into a nearby glass vase that was overflowing with flowers. The water in the vase was red.

A small blue dragon alighted on the table, arranged its feathers carefully, and watched this ritual for a few moments before asking, "Does that hurt?"

The woman said, "Like a bitch. But it's the only way I know to get rid of them."

"Your friend is waiting in the private room," a second Lucid said, gesturing over her shoulder toward a door. The two Lucids nodded to each other and stepped together into a single Lucid. "Let me know if you want anything."

Sophie cast a longing glance at the buffet, but said, "Thanks," and, taking Nereid's hand, went through the indicated door.

X was seated on a straight chair with long legs crossed in the very masculine way Nereid had noticed before when X was angry. The outfit for this Dream Party outing consisted of a dark blue velvet cutaway coat over tailored black trousers and waistcoat. X was also wearing sunglasses.

X looked in their direction but didn't get up or say anything, though there was a nod to Nereid.

Sophie shut the door and said, without any introduction, "This is why I asked you both to come here." And then there was a sound like wrenching metal. Sophie let out a little gasp and staggered to one side, while another woman staggered away from her in the other direction.

The other woman was a stocky, dark brown African-American woman of medium height. Her dark hair was shaped into a short afro. There were deep lines around her eyes and mouth, lines that made her look a great deal older than Nereid would have guessed from the rest of her body. She was wearing a t-shirt and old jeans. After she caught her breath, she straightened up and put her hands on her hips.

"This is damned weird," she said, looking around at the three of them.

Sophie coughed and slid into a chair. "X, Pacifica, meet Renata Scott."

"Oh!" Nereid said, then covered her mouth with both her hands. Renata, the telepath who'd been in her head when she'd killed Sator. Right.

X rose, swept off the sunglasses, and crossed the room, extending one elegant hand. "So pleased to meet you."

Renata looked at X, grinned, and -- somewhat gingerly -- shook hands. "Hah!" she said. "This is damned weird. I'm glad to meet you finally, X. I saw you at Ruth's birthday party and didn't get introduced." She looked at her hand, then Sophie. "You must be filtering me big time."

"Well, me and your prison, I think," Sophie said, then waved a hand. "Tell them what you told me."

Renata shook hands with Nereid. Nereid gave her an embarrassed, somewhat hopeles little smile.

Then Renata threw herself into an overstuffed chair and said, "Sit yourselves down, and I'll tell you about the aliens."

X sat obediently, eyes fixed on Renata. Nereid sat down more slowly, glancing over at Sophie, who was leaning her forehead on her hands.

"They've been trying to get me to work for them," Renata said. "They won't say outright what it is they want me to do. But I suspect."

"They're projecting some sort of psionic energy via mechanisms Brainchild built," X said, and Nereid was a little startled by hearing X use Sophie's spandex name.

Renata nodded. "I know," she said, and glanced aside at Sophie, who hadn't raised her head. "And I know whose psionic energy it is."

X sat forward in the chair, perching on the very edge. Nereid blinked at Renata.

"Look," Renata said, looking at them, but running her fingers over the tooled leather of the chair she'd ended up in, "I'm imprisoned on the spaceship until I either work for them or they decide what else to do with me. They've given me a very comfortable apartment, and I'm heavily shielded from psionics there. The only reason I can project to Earth, in fact, is because I stuffed Sophie back into her head a few years ago, and so I know her better than any other human on the planet and could probably find her anywhere. The aliens have captured and imprisoned Ruth and the rest of the Gold Stars in an interdimensional prison, and they've got some jackass as their 'human liaison' whose wife is an empath. Somehow, they amped her up and she's projecting her own emotional dogma down at the U.S. of A."

X slumped back in the chair, exhaling, "Shiiiiiittttt."

Nereid looked over at Sophie again, but Sophie wasn't moving. So Nereid said, "Does she know about the new church and stuff down here?"

"Probably," Renata said with a shrug. "What little I got during my brief interviews with them was some serious right-wing religion."

X said, "That's probably what's doing it, then."

"Doing what?" Renata said.

X sat forward again, counting off on slender fingers. "Here it is: resource riots, little teams of men in black roaming the streets, martial law, nationwide mental health crisis, tripled suicide rate."

Renata stared.

"I can't get hold of Simon any more," Nereid said slowly. "Every time I call, his friend Megan answers, and she doesn't seem to know that... that Simon's human. I don't think he can be human any more. He told me he was feeling horrible about himself about and... you know he's trans, right? He was even thinking about... going back to living as a girl, just to try to make it easier to be human."

"I think the men in black may be minor telepaths," X said. "I think they may be altering potential troublemakers. A therapist I know told me that people who say they've met up with a group are often... never quite right afterward."

"I met some," Nereid said with a shudder, and started remembering like a nightmare. "For a little while afterward, I felt better. Or I thought I did. Everything was so clear. They gave me a ring. Every time I met them, they gave me a ring, and Sophie took it away from me. But after a couple of days, things weren't so clear any more, and my brain was like thick soup, and I'd feel even stupider than I used to in high school."

X reached over and put an arm around her shoulders. Nereid could feel herself shaking in the circle of that arm, but was so grateful for X's familiar warmth.

Renata's face had grown stern. She looked like an old woman, Nereid realized, though her body was young. "I can't play any more," she said. "I can't hide in my room. I didn't... I wouldn't face what was going on, but I've got to do what I can to... make it less horrible." She stood up, and her hands were clenched into fists.

"We're doing what we can," X said, also standing. "Or we'll try. I have friends who're trying."

Renata nodded sharply. "Once I know more, I'll get Sophie to bring us together again. Perhaps Lucid will be willing to bring in some of your friends, X."

"Will you come if we need to talk to you?" X asked.

"Tell Sophie," Renata said. "She knows how to get in touch."

Renata walked over to Sophie and laid a hand on the younger woman's shoulder. "Quit beating yourself up," she said quietly. "You can't help anyone that way." And then she vanished.

X sighed and said, "She's right, you know. We all need to work together in any way we can."

"Easy for her --" Sophie said, gesturing over her shoulder and upward violently "-- to say. She's not party to mass murder."

"You made an outstandingly shitty choice," X said, going to stand over Sophie, hands on hips. "I'm certainly not going to argue that you didn't. But you've got to find a way to try to make up for it now. It isn't like you're the first para to accidentally almost destroy the world."

Sophie snorted. "I could at least have done it more cleanly if I'd done it myself."

Nereid walked over to the two of them. "Yes, we all know how much better you'd be as a supervillain. You tell us all the time." She crouched down in front of Sophie and butted her forehead against her girlfriend's, looking up cross-eyed into Sophie's glasses. "But you're not, and I won't let you be, all right?"

Sophie almost smiled as she pulled back, shaking her head. "Puppydog eyes don't work at that range, dammit."

X smirked. "They do, though. From Pacifica, at least."

"That's her other damn superpower," Sophie said, standing and pulling Nereid up too. "Class 10 puppydog eyes. Let's eat, for fuck's sake."

We have heat! It's amazing how grateful one can be for singing steam radiators.


All the Pretty Little Horses

The door chimed, and this time, before I could acknowledge it, the door popped open and in rolled one of the alien Hoover suits.

"Excuse you," I said, deciding to get up, wanting the advantage of height. My dog had abandoned me for whatever hiding place she'd found this time.

The Hoover hesitated, swiveling its hair dryer toward me. It said, in the 50s machine voice, "Unclear transmission."

I crossed my arms and stood with as much hipshot attitude as I could muster. "Well, you sure aren't Joshua."

"You may address me as Joshua if you wish," it said.

"I'm not buying this 'We are all Josh' shit," I said. I noticed a few little differences in this Hoover from Joshua's Hoover -- a subtle metallic weave through the breathing bag, a very slight difference in color. "You can at least introduce yourself after busting in here."

"Our names are private," it said. Although I couldn't read it telepathically, I could certainly perceive an aura of what I chose to perceive as annoyance. "You may address me by whatever misnomer you prefer. Clarify your first transmission."

"I was telling you that you were being rude," I said, deciding that blunt communication was the way to go with this Hoover. "And I think I'll call you Fluffy."

"Ah. In the future, you will perceive that humor does not translate," Fluffy said.

"Oh, I knew that," I said. And neither does politeness, apparently. "What do you want?"

"Our peacebringing efforts are not working with adequate speed," Fluffy said. "We require your powers. You will cooperate."

Although humor doesn't translate, I couldn't help mocking its machine voice. "CO-OP-ER-ATE," I said. "No, it just doesn't have the same ring."

Fluffy apparently had decided to ignore anything I said that it didn't understand. "My family is now in charge of this mission. We require your cooperation."

"What exactly is your glorious mission?" I said. "No one has been able to tell me."

"That is why I have been tasked to be your liaison in place of the one you call Joshua," Fluffy said. "Your world is excessively turbulent. Your people are reaching out beyond the bounds of its orbit and of your solar system. We bring peace to newly developed worlds so that the dimension your people call Psychespace does not become cluttered with your unpeaceful transmissions and interfere with our movement through it."

"Peace through force," I said.

"However necessary," Fluffy said. "We will only interfere for one of your generations, but we will educate your telepaths and others with similar abilities so they can maintain the peace."

"I doubt you'll manage on this world," I said.

"We have successfully pacified hundreds of worlds," Fluffy said.

"How many of them did you pacify by killing everyone?" I said, fists on hips.

"That was unnecessary," Fluffy said. "If they did not accept peace, then they destroyed themselves with their unpeaceful transmissions."

"I begin to see that by transmission you mean speech, thoughts, or bullets," I said.

"You will cooperate," Fluffy said, its aura of annoyance increasing. "We have studied your transmission archive and have identified the individuals with whom you have familial connections."

"You will not fuck with my people," I said, my stomach twisting in a knot at the thought of these fucking vacuum cleaners taking up my mama or my sisters.

"We have no need of further acquisitions," Fluffy said, and something blinked on its hair dryer.

I felt the telepathic screens on my holding apartment fall for just a moment. If I'd been prepared, I suppose, I could've grabbed someone's mind on Earth and told them where I was. But I hadn't expected the exposure, and the sudden influx of the shipboard human minds -- as well as the weird pressure of what was probably thousands of Hoovers -- brought me to my knees.

There was an agonizing psychic ripping sensation nearby, and for a split second, through all the psychic noise in my head, I could feel Ruth. She wasn't conscious, but I'd know her anywhere. And so help me, I recognized the feel of the place she was in on the other side of that bleeding dimensional wound.

The Hoovers had stuck her in the psychic dimension I'd been slowly exploring for the last decade or more. It was just a pocket, but it was stuffed with a bunch of other minds that I didn't have the energy or attention to focus on beyond Ruth. I didn't feel any way out before it sealed back up and my apartment's shields came back up too.

"You fucker," I spat, wiping my face where the involuntary tears had started to run down as soon as the shields dropped. "You shit-sucking sockfucker." I crawled slowly to my feet. "I will see every one of you passive-aggressive imperialist weasels in hell for this."

Fluffy said, "You perceive the reason for your cooperation."

One mistake a lot of people have made with me is assuming that because I'm a fat girl, I don't move fast. But I have spent a long time with not a lot to do but work out and swim, and I am lightning when I put my mind to it, which I did, right then. I had one hand wrapped around the neck of Fluffy's hair dryer and the other bunched into the breathing bag, and I ripped those things sideways with all my might. There were one or two pleasant rending sounds.

"Cease! Stop!" Fluffy squawked.

I lifted the Hoover over my shoulder -- it wasn't much heavier than my mama's Hoover at home -- and walked to the door, which opened for me. I threw Fluffy down as hard as I could on the deck outside the door, and it bounced on the metal floor, pieces clattering off it. It squawked wordlessly.

"You don't come back in here," I said, careful to stay inside my shields. "You send Joshua. Or no one at all, by preference."

I stepped back inside and let the door shut.

I cussed and cried and even screamed for a while, and smashed a couple of plates against the not-glass of my view of Earth. If Ruth was captured, I was utterly screwed. So was the Earth. So was the whole human race. I couldn't think of anyone else who had the ability to stop this fucking huge ship while it was outside of Earth's atmosphere.

I finally settled down and extricated poor terrified Floribunda from my closet. I cried with her on my lap some, and finally settled into the kind of flat vagueness I get after a psychic thumping like I'd just had. My dog tucked her head under my arm and shivered.

My music started to sink in through the exhaustion after a while, though, and I tuned in just in time to hear Sister Rosetta singing,
Everyday (everyday)
Everyday (everyday)
There are strange things happening every day.

If you heal right through the lies
You can live right all the ties
There are strange things happening every day.

I thought, slowly, There's one person who I know feels the same way I do about Ruth, and I have spent considerable time inside her head.

And then I thought, even more slowly, Tomorrow. I'll take that right up... tomorrow.

And Sister Rosetta sang me to sleep.