Form 8774-D, page 4
Leelee walks into the bar and looks around for Samir. She doesn’t see him right away, but she does see a couple of his friends. Duncan waves at her and beckons her over.
The hairs on the back of her neck stand up a fraction of a second before the bar’s front windows blow in. A coruscating sphere of energy, swirling in every color of the rainbow, drifts in as people cower behind the bar or in the short hallway leading to the bathrooms. Leelee stands and watches. The sphere dissipates, revealing a figure within, backlit by spiraling lattices of prismatic energy that all trace back to rings on the figure’s hands.
Oh, shit. It’s Lady V.
“Hello, Veronica,” Leelee says.
“Don’t give me that friendly professional shit,” she growls. “Where’s your friend who scrambled my brain?”
Leelee shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“I’m sure. Do you know that I can’t get certified now because you put my impromptu demonstration into your system as a symptom of unreliability?” Lady V floats through the air, a foot or so off the ground, in Leelee’s direction.
Leelee finds this grandstanding pretty fake. “Well, Veronica, if you didn’t want me to write about it, you shouldn’t have done it in the first place.”
“Oh, yes. I should be a good little girl and obey all the directives of dull, stupid bureaucrats like you. Very heroic.” She’s close to Leelee now, much too close, and Leelee discovers with terror that she can’t move. “Well, I have a message for people like you, on behalf of people like me. Stay out of our way. And I have a special message for your friend…” She closes her eyes and Leelee can feel a tickle in her mind. No, she thinks. Get out.
Lady V’s eyes open wide. “Oh. Interesting. Most people never know I’m there. Well, I got what I came for. Since your friend Drogba messed around in my brain to protect you, I’m going to mess around in yours. Just to show him, and all the rest of you,” she snarls, looking around the bar. A few people are still cowering under tables, and yep, there are phones out. What the hell is wrong with you people, Leelee wants to scream. She can’t talk, though.
“Show you,” Lady V goes on, “what happens when you interfere with the natural order of things.” She returns her attention to Leelee and reaches out her left hand. The three rings on it are blue, pink, and green. “Let’s see,” she says. “Pink or blue? I’m not really feeling green. Why don’t you choose? Oh, wait, you can’t speak, can you?”
Leelee remembers the blue hero from last week. She sure could use someone like that now.
“Maybe both,” Lady V decides. A beam of pink energy sprouts from that ring, slowly growing toward Leelee’s face. Wreathing it are tendrils of blue. Paralyzed, Leelee watches them approach. If she could run, she would. If she could scream or beg, she might do that too. But mostly, as she faces what she assumes will be the end of her conscious existence, all Leelee can think is For doing my job? This is what I get just for doing my job?
She wishes she could see Samir again.
The blue tendrils have outpaced the pink beam. They writhe right up to Leelee’s face, so close she can see tiny fractal patterns inside them, endlessly repeating—until another flash of blue absorbs and redirects them. The pink beam hits her square in the forehead. The sensation is unlike anything Leelee has ever experienced. She’s outside herself looking down but she’s also blind, her skin prickles, she’s flooded with memories of things she hasn’t thought of in years—a puppy run over in the road, the day she learned to tie her shoes, a cruel boy making fun of her at a middle-school dance, the first time she ever saw the ocean.
All of that in an instant, before Lady V screams in frustration and whirls to meet her attacker. The blue hero from last week flashes into view with a flying kick.
Leelee collapses. She can’t form a coherent thought and something seems wrong with all of her senses.
Their fight is brief but devastating, at least to the bar. Light bulbs explode, rows of liquor bottles detonate, Lady V tries to annihilate the blue hero with sweeping beams of energy and he dodges them like a master thief somersaulting through security lasers. When he gets close, he delivers a staccato series of punches and kicks, each accompanied by those actinic blue flashes.
This would make a great TV show, Leelee thinks. But probably everyone thinks that about their job.
She’s drifting into some kind of fugue and loses track of time. When she can focus her eyes again, everything is quiet except for sirens approaching. There’s no sign of either Lady V or the blue hero. A few people are emerging from their hiding places, murmuring to each other in the kind of reverent tone people take when they’ve survived a brush with death.
Leelee feels like someone has put her brain in a KitchenAid. Also her body seems to be moving, and she doesn’t know why until Samir is there, suddenly, cradling her. “I looked for you,” Leelee says. “Where were you?”
His eyes are so beautiful, deep and dark and caring. She smells ozone. “Kinda embarrassing, but I got stuck in the bathroom,” he says. “I got here as soon as I could.”
Leelee has that feeling. She’s never wrong.
Right before she passes out again, she understands.
V. AFFIRMATION
I affirm that this form is complete and true to the best of my ability to determine the truth. I acknowledge that failure to answer truthfully is a violation of United States law punishable by fines and/or imprisonment.
Signature6: __________
Signature of parent/guardian if applicant is a minor: __________
Signature of Paid Preparer: __________
Paid Preparer address and license number: __________
Witness signature: __________
Saturday, 8:33 a.m.
She’s in the hospital for a couple of days getting various workups on her brain, which seems to be getting itself together pretty well, so they let her go home Friday afternoon and she crawls into bed and sleeps for sixteen hours. In the morning she goes into the kitchen and just sits, listening to the birds chirp and watching the morning light on the grain of the kitchen table.
Samir comes down a little while later. She lets him make coffee before she says it. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Um,” Samir says. He sits across from her and sips his coffee. “Tell you…”
“Samir,” she says. “You saved my life twice in a week and don’t get me wrong, I’m really grateful for that but it also means that you’ve been lying to me for like three years, and that puts me in a very confused place.”
“I’m sorry, Leelee,” he says. “I didn’t lie to you just to lie to you.”
“I’m not sure it matters why,” she says, although of course it does. A silence stretches out until she can’t help but ask, “What do you call yourself?”
“I never could decide,” he says. “But the leadership, they decided on Electric Blue.”
“That’s not bad, I guess,” Leelee says. “Wasn’t that a song?”
“Was it?” Samir’s musical taste runs to techno and ambient stuff. He never knows anything playing on the radio. “So,” he says. “I know how you must be feeling…” He trails off. There’s a distant look on his face, like he’s listening to a voice only he can hear. Leelee’s intuition, or maybe it’s her suspicious nature, locks in on a possibility. “Are you…did you plan this conversation? Like, you rehearsed it?” When he doesn’t say anything right away, Leelee sits up straighter. “You did, didn’t you?”
“I did, yeah.” His voice is quiet, introspective rather than ashamed. “They wanted me to because they knew eventually you would figure it out. But I’m messing it up.”
“They? Are you in a group?”
He tries to lighten things up. “You’re filling out the form in your head, aren’t you?”
This makes her mad because she has in fact been filling out Samir’s Form 8774-D in her head and it infuriates her to be predictable. “Fuck you, Samir! You should have told me! You know I could lose my job. You know I—do I even know you? What other secrets do you have?”
His infuriating smile. “I…wet the bed until I was in high school?”
“Goddammit! It’s against the law! A law, I will remind you, that I sort of help administer?”
“Babe,” he says, obviously trying to placate her, but for some reason this doesn’t make her angry. That is one of Samir’s gifts. He never seems to be doing anything for the wrong reason. “Babe. I know. But you said yourself they never prosecute anybody. I mean…are you going to turn me in?”
She puts her face in her hands, takes a long deep breath down into the belly, lets it slowly back out. No, she’s not going to turn him in. But having an outlaw supe for a boyfriend sure wasn’t on her list of things she expected to happen in her thirties.
“Yes, I’m in a group,” he says. “And they asked me to get you to tell me when someone really powerful comes through your office. I told them I wasn’t going to put you in that position, and they backed off.”
“Who?” Leelee asks.
He tells her. My god, Leelee thinks. The Quantum Polyhedron. She knows that group. Everyone knows that group. They pulled off the Vacuum Counterstrike, the famous infiltration of a lava tube base under the Mare Serenitatis that permanently crippled the Eschaton Triad.
“So, they want to use me to recruit,” she says.
“Yeah.” He leans back, looks out the window. She gets a good look at his profile in the morning sunlight. Her heart quickens a little. “Recruitment is a big deal for the top groups,” he says. “Some people take it a little too far. The QP, they really want someone on the inside at BMMOA.”
“I don’t want to make you feel bad, but is that why they wanted you? To get to me?”
“I’m pretty sure I had something to offer them anyway,” he says. “But they did mention you from the beginning.”
This makes her feel better, like she has value even though she’s not a supe.
“There’s a shapeshifter in the group who suggested he could take your place,” Samir says, reluctantly. “I told him I’d kill him if he tried.” He makes that little noise in his throat that always means he’s about to say something else but is holding back. Eventually he lets it out. “So, um, he tried.”
“Oh my god,” she says. “So that wasn’t Lady V in the bar?”
“No. He had some plan to take you somewhere after he’d put on a show as Lady V. We found her. She’s all right, he needed to keep her alive as a patsy. She’s pissed, especially because the QP has her rings now. Anyway, that’s why I’m probably going to be out of the QP any minute now.”
“Good,” she says. “You’re better off without them, and they will totally lose their government contracts if they’re using unregistered talent.”
She lets it drop for a while, but a couple of hours later she walks into the living room where he’s sitting on the couch watching soccer. She stands between him and the TV.
“Are we going to make it, babe?” Relationships between normal people and supes are notoriously doomed. There are TV shows about it, millions of TikTok videos, an entire self-help industry. Everybody knows. And that’s what Leelee is, just an ordinary person.
“Not if you keep standing in front of the TV when Liverpool’s on,” he says.
She looks over her shoulder. It’s halftime and the studio talking heads are bantering. “Oh, please,” she says. She really wants to be angry at him—is angry at him—but several years of working at the BMMOA has taught her that secret identities are just part of the game.
Plus, Leelee knows Samir. She knows that his sincere smile is a little crooked, she knows the way his crow’s-feet soften when he can tell she’s worried or sad. He’s never been anything but loving to her. If that’s all an act, she’s going to go along with it. There’s a new ride ahead of her—of them—and Leelee wouldn’t want to take it with anybody else. Even if he did apparently call her ma’am once.
The decision made, she slides onto the couch next to him, nestles under his arm and exhales, long and easy. “You won’t tell anybody, will you?” he asks.
“Babe, no. Of course not.” She snuggles closer. Work is work and her life is her life. “It’ll be our little secret.”
“Whatever you do, don’t make me fill out that form.”
“It’s really kind of compulsory,” she says. “But I don’t have any enforcement powers.”
“I can live without the tax break,” he says.
“Sure,” Leelee says. On the screen there’s a local news break before the second half of the Liverpool game. The midday anchor puts on his concerned face and introduces a piece on budgetary consequences of super battles. The main interviewee is a city councilor who suggests the price of supers might be cuts to education funding.
“You should be a TV reporter,” Samir says. “The way you can sense bullshit, you’d ask the best questions.”
“Oh my god.” Leelee shudders. Her, on TV? “As if.”
“You do have a power, you know,” Samir says. He watches her, waiting. Leelee feels like she’s being tested. She wonders how many conversations in the Quantum Polyhedron’s subterranean hideaway are lurking behind this moment.
“No,” she says, looking him in the eye and daring him to make a sound. “No, I don’t.”
About the Author
Alex Irvine is the author of A Scattering of Jades, One King, One Soldier, The Narrows and Buyout, as well as licensed work in the DC, Dungeons & Dragons, Foundation, Independence Day, Marvel, and Supernatural universes among others. His short fiction has appeared in most of the major magazines, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s, and in many anthologies, and has been collected in Rossetti Song, Unintended Consequences, and Pictures from an Expedition. He lives in a 160-year-old house in Maine where there is not a level floor to be found with four kids, two dogs, one bird, and one snake. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 Alex Irvine
Art copyright © 2023 Zoe Van Dijk
1 If applicant was born on a planet other than Earth, or if parent(s)’ origin is unknown, complete and attach BMMOA Form 8804-UO, Displaced/Immigrant Metahuman Status Notification.
2 If applicant was not gestated and delivered by a biological entity, complete and attach BMMOA Form 8804-NB, Certification of Non-Biological Origin.
3 If you checked any of the categories within the group “psionic energy,” complete and attach DHHS Form 8809-AA, Registration for Telepaths and Psionic Adepts Act of 2015 Basic Information Form.
4 Occult power is defined as power derived from otherplanar sources. These can include demons, devils, jinn, etc.
5 Items of sufficient value are subject to Internal Revenue Service policies on valuable gifts and professional courtesies. Consult Pamphlet 5454, Declaration of Artifacts and Extraterrestrial Technologies.
6 If applicant is not physically coherent or materially solid enough to sign the form, visit your nearest BMMOA regional office for proxy certification by a BMMOA employee. Notarized signatures, astral manifestations, and telepathic overtures are not considered valid substitutes for direct BMMOA certification. If presentation at a BMMOA office would entail risk of harm to BMMOA employees or others, contact your nearest BMMOA regional office to arrange an on-site verification. All requests for an on-site verification must be accompanied by BMMOA Form 8791, Assertion of Inability to Present in Person.
Alex Irvine, Form 8774-D
