The Good Guys, page 11
“Because…because maybe if I stare into that dark night again, and again, and again, maybe I might see how things could have been different.”
“You hope for a victory that is no longer yours to earn.”
Legion fell silent.
The Mirror sighed. “It is an abyss. Going into the darkness over and over again will not reward you with the light that you are looking for. To keep tasting the fruit of your failure—what will that bring you? Why do you choose to revisit this singular point in your life?”
“To atone? To remind myself of my inadequacy?” Legion muttered. “To try to make myself a better soldier?”
“Yes, but for what purpose? The Long Winter is over.” The Mirror shook its head. “There are no more wars left to fight, neither can you truly blame yourself for what happened. You know this. Deep down, I know you have acknowledged it. Any one of a multiplicity of factors could have determined the outcome of that one night in the jungle. That does not make you a failure.”
After a pause, the Mirror said, “If you are looking to atone, what are you atoning for?”
Legion gave no answer. Instead, he turned away.
“I bear you no ill will,” said the Mirror gently, “but you must understand that there has to be a motive force behind everything you have chosen to do, and you need to acknowledge what that is, no matter how uncomfortable that might make you. So when you tell me you want to atone, my next query will always be: Whatever for? If you want to indulge yourself in your wrath, what are you being wrathful over?
“I admit that anger can be righteous; it can even be productive. But if you recognise that there are no real answers to those questions—that you turn to your rage because it sustains you—then that directionless, aimless loathing is without meaning. It is without purpose. And without it, you carry the weight of all that malice in your heart for nothing. No one will feel the malignance of your anger but you. So what then is the point? All that acrimonious fury—that raw and painful antagonism—will you surrender to it and let it consume you? Where has it gotten you? A cell to rot in, alone? Is this the end of your road? Is this what you wanted?”
The silence that fell was uncomfortable. Legion still could not bring himself to look at the Mirror.
“No one can help you if you do not even wish to help yourself,” the Mirror offered, “and that starts with seeing that the infinite depths of your anger exist because of no one but yourself. If that anger is predicated on a warped understanding of why and how you failed—and which you are continuing to feed because you cannot confront any other alternative—then you only serve to hurt yourself. The only loser here is going to be you. It will stay that way.”
“And what about the others?” Legion asked. “Landslide? Seraph? All of them are dealing with the consequences of their own losses, aren’t they?”
“It is not my place to say,” the Mirror said, “but neither of them decided to take it out on the Wall. Everyone deals with failure in their own way. It is a constant—that is the unfortunate reality of holding on to the outfit that you wear. It is the price each and every one of you has paid, and will invariably continue to pay so long as you continue to act in the service of others. But it is a price worth paying. The day you fail to see that is the day you no longer deserve to be a super.”
“It’s not my fault,” Legion groaned. “I did not ask for the Wall to be here. The Wall, of all people. So many supers are ex-military. The Phase Sixers could have picked anyone else. Why him?”
“You are just unlucky, I suppose,” the Mirror conceded, “that the man who was the cause of your greatest pain is now the man overseeing your attempt to surmount it. It is bitterly ironic. I feel your conflict. I understand how you are trying to fix yourself, the steps you are taking to better yourself. To pull yourself out of the gutter that the Long Winter left you in. But sometimes, you can do everything you believe to be right and still suffer for it. That is not cause for you to accept that you have failed, or that you have done wrong. That is just life.”
“I’m…I’m supposed to be better than this.” Legion closed his eyes. “I’m a soldier. That’s all I am, that’s all I’ve ever been. I’m supposed to be stronger than this.”
The Mirror nodded. “You were a good soldier. Maybe you were among the best.”
“Then why do I suffer like this? Why is it that my heart screams for punishment when my mind knows that the Wall is not the one to be blamed? The sight of him or just hearing his name, god, it chills me to the marrow and it makes my blood boil. Why can’t I just move on?”
“Because you do not want to.” The Mirror’s response was direct, without hesitation. “We both know that the Wall is a convenient target. You made a mistake and now you look for something else to blame. You cannot blame Eagle, your handler, because he has long disappeared from your life. You do not want to blame yourself, because it is all too easy to see your own flaws. And you would very much like to blame someone else. You have the Wall—the source of your physical hurt, the cause behind the loss of your powers. I’ve seen you put yourself in those shoes too many times—seen you be a spectator to the searing, crippling pain you felt that night. It must be easy to feel like you are less than nothing if you define yourself by your powers and all you can do now it to reminisce about them. It must be even easier to think that if you get back at Manus somehow, you can prove to yourself that you are more than just your powers. So who you are really angry at is yourself. Your anger at your own failures, your own perceived inadequacies—that sort of fury burns the hottest because it feeds on your unwillingness to forgive yourself. This type of fire refuses to die easily.”
“I can’t forgive myself,” Legion whispered, crestfallen. “I just can’t look in the mirror when I wake up in the morning and think to myself that I have earned the right to live free of it. That pain—I just can’t.”
“Well if you won’t, no one else will. I can guarantee that.” The Mirror sighed. It approached Legion; if not for the clear wall keeping them apart, the Mirror would have been well within Legion’s reach. “Yes, you stumbled. And yes, you fell. But just because things happened the way they did does not mean you ought to stonewall yourself for the rest of your life. It does not mean you cannot be better than the sum of your failures. Your valuation of your self-worth is not predicated upon the severity of your shortfalls. It is not earned. It just is.”
There was a long silence.
Then, softly, Legion pleaded, “Let me out of here. Please.”
“I cannot do that. That decision is beyond my authority.”
“How else am I going to help Landslide and the others? They need all the help they can get.”
The Mirror’s shoulders dropped. “Help yourself first,” it suggested, “in order to be in a position where you can render help to the rest.”
“He’s not wrong, you know.” A new voice drifted into the conversation. Both Legion and the Mirror turned to look. Walking up to them was Hound, carrying a small, empty canister.
“Good to see you’re doing well, Legion,” Hound said. “At least you’re in a much more civilised frame of mind than the last time I saw you. That’s good.”
“Why’re you here?” Legion asked. He sniffed the air. “And while we’re at it, why do you always smell so fancy?”
“Glad to know you’re a man of good taste.” Hound shrugged. “I came here to look for you, to see if I could make any headway into understanding the sudden outburst that you demonstrated. You and the Lance both. Speaking of which, how is he doing?”
Legion heard a soft gurgling noise, then a thud coming from the Lance’s direction. He turned to look and saw that the super had collapsed to the floor and was convulsing. His hands were gripping his chest and he was gasping for air, making coarse, hacking noises from his throat.
Hound froze, then swore.
Legion slammed his fist on the wall to get both Hound and the Mirror’s attention. “What the hell are the both of you doing?” he cried. “Quit standing around with your thumbs up your asses—go and get help! Help him!”
15
“Situation report, now.” Landslide could hear the forced stoicism in the Wall’s flatly given order. “I want to know what’s going on.”
Landslide and Seraph were in the Wall’s command centre. As it turned out, the Lance had suffered a seizure. Landslide and Seraph stood idly by, awkwardly awaiting instructions from a clearly stressed Fortress Manus.
“Facilitator,” a Caretaker said, “the Lance has been brought to the medical facilities in the lower decks.”
“And how is he now?”
“His condition has been stabilised, but he has been placed in a chemically induced coma to prevent him from incurring any additional trauma.”
“Thank you, Caretaker. I’ll take my silver linings where I can get them.”
Seraph cleared her throat awkwardly. “With all due respect, sir, um, what now?”
The Wall snapped around. His metal lips were drawn in a thin line.
“Nothing?” Seraph asked, exasperated. “We have two dead supers, two more locked up because they went crazy—one of whom just nearly died as well.”
“I know.”
“You know? So what are we going to do now? What are your instructions? The longer we hang around doing nothing, the more this is going to affect us.”
“Enough.” The Wall’s exasperation was clear. “I know full well what can happen if we don’t get this over with, and soon.”
“She’s not wrong,” Hound said, stepping forward. No one had noticed him slipping into the command centre. “Seraph’s reaction is perfectly understandable—we’re all a little high-strung now, and it’s easy to see why. Maybe we ought to cool ourselves, let calmer heads prevail.”
“What do you propose?” the Wall asked.
“Perhaps we need to take a different look at things. We could use a different perspective on this issue,” Hound suggested.
“What do you mean?”
Landslide caught the whiff of something strange in the air. The look on Hound’s face gave him the feeling that something was more than a little wrong. Landslide took a step backwards.
“Well, for a start,” Hound offered, “maybe we could take a closer look at the list of suspects.”
“I don’t understand,” the Wall said. “We’ve already narrowed it down to—”
“No,” Hound said, wagging a finger at the Wall. “We need to go back. We need to re-examine the names in the original list.”
“What are you trying to say?” the Wall narrowed his eyes at Hound. “If you take away the dead, and you take away those who we’ve locked up, well, what did we overlook?”
“Not ‘what’, Manus,” Hound laughed, mirthlessly. He turned to Landslide. “Who.”
With all eyes now on him, Landslide withered under the unwanted attention. His eyes swept the command centre, taking stock of the situation. Then he bolted for the door.
He heard the Wall barking his orders, then several Caretakers marched into his path. Landslide ducked and dodged under their swinging arms, barely managing to steer clear of their fists. He dropped onto his knees and slid past them, running his fingers against the ground. At his touch, the floor fractured and scattered behind him in bursts of fragmented marble that peppered the Caretakers, pushing them back.
He scrambled to his feet and pulled at the floor. Fragments of tiles rose and whipped around his wrist like an asteroid field.
He felt a vice-like grip clamp down on his shoulder, firm and unyielding enough to almost bring him to his knees. Swinging back wildly, he clamped his hand on the offending Caretaker’s forearm and squeezed. His spinning ring of shards flashed and sparked as they pummelled at the Caretaker’s arm like the blade of a chainsaw. In seconds, the whirring fragments had shorn right through the Caretaker’s wrist, leaving a limp mechanical limb behind.
Landslide tossed the metal hand aside and ran, but the precious seconds he had lost trying to get away from that single Caretaker had cost him. He felt a sudden pain as something heavy collided with his shins, tripping him. He was airborne for a moment before he crashed into the ground, the wind knocked out of him.
Groaning, he turned on his back to see the the Wall’s imposing silhouette looming over him. The Wall lowered himself into a squat, displeasure etched across his metal face.
“Why?” the Wall asked softly. “Why did you run?”
Landslide looked away, wondering briefly if he could do anything to make good on his escape. A line of Caretakers had formed up to cut off any exit through the command centre’s main door. The Wall, reading his mind, motioned for Seraph. She stepped forward and crouched down, laying a hand down on his knee. Upon her touch, Landslide realised that he could no longer move. He struggled against the prison of his own body. He sucked in the air hard, felt his muscles clench in protest, and remained frozen on the floor. “You’re too dense,” Seraph said, with sadness in her voice. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“I’ll ask you again,” the Wall said, “and please don’t disappoint me further. Why did you run, Landslide?”
“Because he’s not Landslide,” Hound said, approaching them slowly. Seraph and the Wall turned to look at him. “Or at least, he’s not the Landslide you expected to be here.”
“What do you mean?” Seraph asked. “There’s only one Landslide, isn’t there? And we’re looking at him.”
“Oh, I concur absolutely—there’s only one Landslide in this world. But that Landslide is geo-kinetic, which, I’m afraid, is not unique at all.”
Hound crouched down next to them and looked at Landslide almost regretfully. “It wasn’t all that complicated in the end. I was looking through the Vault’s systems, checking the background information of all our current residents, and I had a niggling feeling that something was amiss. Then it hit me: the masks.”
“What about them?” the Wall asked.
“We’ve all got one—they’re keyed to our personal information and are entirely unique to each of us. But when I went through the records, I noticed something odd—there was a duplicate entry in the system. Wouldn’t you know it, but Landslide’s been here before. So I checked up on his operations. In fact, he’s still out and about now.”
“Out and about?”
“Outside. Doing his usual crime-fighting duties. That is to say, not here. And as far as I can tell, he remains completely unaware that there’s an imposter parading as him in the Vault.”
“So who the hell is this?” Seraph asked, gesturing at the man whose leg she was gripping.
“Well,” Hound smiled, “I’m sure he has a satisfactory explanation of his own.”
The Wall bristled, thinking it over. Then he turned to Seraph.
“Make it a little easier for him,” the Wall ordered. “I want to hear him tell us who he is.”
Seraph nodded. Landslide felt a slack in her hold; he could move his head, albeit barely. The pressure on his jaw loosened. He tried moving the other parts of his body.
“So,” Hound leaned in. “How about you tell us who you really are?”
Landslide gave up his half-hearted attempt at struggling. He locked eyes with the Wall. “I’m…Tremor.”
“Tremor…who? I’ve never heard of that name before.”
“Low-level crook.” Hound shrugged. “Same geo-kinesis as the real Landslide, except he’s a fair bit younger, and he spends those powers on petty theft, mostly. Doesn’t make much of what he’s got, if I’m being perfectly honest.”
The Wall seethed. “You’re telling me that he’s not even a super?”
“That’s right, Shiny. Just a kid who can move mountains. But instead, he’s been busted for using his powers for, well, mischief, I suppose.”
“Then why did he find his way here?” the Wall asked, and turned to face the inert figure on the floor. “Why, Tremor?”
“I needed…the help. Last year, there was…a fire. People were stuck inside a burning building,” Tremor said with a struggle. “I tried to save them, but I brought the building down instead. There were people who got…killed. I couldn’t…I—”
Seraph’s eyes widened with realisation.
“No,” she breathed. “It was you, wasn’t it? You caused the building to collapse. You killed my partner. You killed Archangel.”
“No!” Tremor managed to choke out. “I was just trying to help—”
“You killed her,” Seraph hissed at Tremor. Tears welled up in her eyes. “I trusted you. Everyone here—we trusted you.”
“I’m sorry,” Tremor choked. “I'm so sorry...”
Seraph shook her head. “Not enough. You took her away from me.”
They fell silent.
Finally, Hound asked. “So, where do we stand, now?”
“Now?” the Wall spat. Tremor could hear the anger mounting in his voice. “Two supers dead, two more start playing psychopath, and then we find out that one of the suspects turns out to be a felon?”
“I’m curious how you managed to pull it off,” Hound said, looking Tremor in the eye. “There’re still a lot of things that irk me. How’d you get Kinetic Blue to kill Warpath? How’d you manage to screw with the Lance's head?”
“No! I would never do it—I couldn’t have! I was with Seraph and Legion all the time. They can be my witnesses—”
“Save it for the Phase Sixers,” the Wall ordered. “This isn’t a courtroom.”
Tremor fell silent, cowed.
“Given all that’s happened, I’m just annoyed I didn’t see it earlier,” Hound murmured. “It should’ve been obvious that it was him from the start. My apologies for not identifying him sooner, Manus. It hasn’t been to my standards as a professional.”
“Don’t apologise,” the Wall said, waving Hound’s concerns away. “You did good work here. The other supers in the Vault will be able to rest easy tonight. You have my gratitude.”
Hound nodded. “What about our newly unmasked friend here? Are we following protocol?”
All eyes turned back to Tremor.
