And yet, step by step, Cruz had gone along with Shade. She had chosen to take the rock herself, to become Rockborn. She had then acquired and learned to use a superhuman power. And she had raised nothing but the most token objections as Shade used her super-speed to steal money and cars and phones to keep them going.
Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa, Cruz thought, an echo of her upbringing in the church. My fault. My most grievous fault.
Hero, villain, and monster, that was the three-part taxonomy of superhumans, according to Malik. Shade was meant to be a hero, intended to be a hero, wanted to be a hero, and Cruz, to the extent she’d really thought about it, imagined herself as a sort of Robin to Shade’s Batman, a sidekick.
I’m not even starring in my own life.
But at the moment, the hollow-eyed, quiet, sad girl beside Cruz did not inspire notions of heroism. She looked like Cruz imagined soldiers must look after far too long in battle.
“What do we do?” Cruz asked, hating herself for the question, hating the weakness that made her turn to Shade for the answers even now, even with Malik a few hundred yards away with tubes in his throat and veins, with tubes collecting his blood red urine, with acres of gauze and gallons of salves hiding the horror show his body had become.
Shade lowered her head to look through the windshield and up at the hospital. “I guess they’ll do skin grafts and—”
“No,” Cruz said. She shook her head. “They’re not thinking of fixing him, they’re waiting for him to die.”
A spasm twisted Shade’s face, squeezing her eyes shut, making a grimace of her mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and these she did not brush away.
Cruz said, “His only hope is the rock. Too much deep-tissue damage. His legs . . . I was there when they changed the dressings. His legs are just bones with chunks of burned meat attached, like, like those turkey legs they sell at fairs. It was awful. Terrible. There’s no coming back from that, Shade. Malik is dead unless the rock . . .”
Shade cried silently for a while, her forehead on the steering wheel, hands limp in her lap.
“I don’t know what to do,” Shade said finally. “I don’t—”
But Cruz did not hear the end of the sentence because at that moment a wave of unspeakable pain assaulted her with a suddenness and violence that wrung whinnying, panicked screams from her mouth.
Shade, too, shrieked in agony, her face distorted like a figure from some medieval painting of hell’s torments.
And it wasn’t stopping; it wasn’t lessening; the two girls writhed and shook and bellowed in pain as if they were burning alive inside the car. Shade screamed and slapped at her body as if she was on fire. Cruz pushed open the door of the car, panicked, believing the car had caught fire.
It was the worst thing either had ever felt, and it would not stop. And through a mist of tears and with senses twisted by mind-shattering agony, Cruz realized that they were not alone: people were streaming from the hospital, crying, screaming, rolling on the ground, tearing the hair from their heads.
“Morph!” Shade yelled. “Now!”
Cruz understood, though holding on to even a snippet of thought was almost impossible. Agony lent wings to the transformation as Cruz, the six-foot-tall trans girl, became to all appearances a large young black woman with dreadlocks. Cruz had gone to the first image that popped in her mind, their fellow Rockborn mutant, the FAYZ survivor Dekka Talent.
Shade at the same time had changed even more drastically. Her face narrowed and seemed to sweep back, like a person in a wind tunnel. Her russet hair became a solid punk-rock-looking wedge. Her body seemed to be covered in something like plastic, like she was a less slick version of a Power Ranger. Her knees reversed direction, making a noise like wet stones tumbling, becoming insectoid, inhuman.
In seconds Shade was the vibrating speed demon she could become at will. And Cruz was Dekka. The pain was subdued, lessened, manageable, but it was still right there, like a physical force, like standing beside a rampaging river and feeling its power even if all that hit you were drops of spray. They were no longer in that river but felt its devastating power and knew that one slip . . .
“Malik,” Shade said, slowing her speech to normal time so that Cruz could understand. It was like dragging a finger on a vinyl record to slow it down, words slurring but understandable.
Shade blew away, raced through the emergency room, a hellish scene of patients and their doctors and nurses all writhing in torment, crying, roaring, letting go of every bodily fluid. She went on, down corridors where patients dragged themselves out of sickbeds in a desperate need to do something, anything, to escape. She saw a nurse just about to jab herself with a syringe and took a millisecond’s detour to snatch the syringe away.
Finally, Shade arrived at Malik’s room.
And there he was: Malik.
Of all the things Shade expected, this was none of them, because Malik stood. Stood. He had pulled the tubes from his throat and was unwinding gauze and peeling off compresses, revealing his own healthy black flesh, undamaged, unscarred.
Impossible!
From every direction the terrible screams lessened, giving way to moans and cries of shock.
Shade could do nothing but stare as the full horror of what she was seeing came home to her. The rock transformed those who took it. The power the rock granted came with the necessity of a physical transformation—a morph.
This Malik, the one with flesh and muscles, was not Malik, it was a morph of Malik, like some desperately unfunny joke. He had become not himself but a version of himself, a living memory of himself.
“It’s gone,” Malik cried. “The pain’s gone! I’m better, Shade! I’m fixed!”
| 3 | | | VETERANS OF PAST AND FUTURE WARS |
“YOU WERE CLEVER to come in through the back window,” Astrid Ellison said to her guests. “We’ve been under surveillance for the last four years, but it was pretty sketchy. You’d see a cop every now and then, or maybe an FBI car. But in the last weeks it’s been more intense.”
“Any chance the place is bugged?” Dekka Talent asked, accepting a cup of tea.
Astrid made a humorless laugh. “Of course it’s bugged, but we found the bug with some help from a guy Albert sent us. He tied the bug into a YouTube channel, and if anyone’s watching or listening they’re probably getting awfully tired of listening to autoplays of Tim and Eric.”
“Albert, huh?” Dekka said with a glance at Armo.
Armo, short for Aristotle Adamo, was very large, very strong, and not terribly bright despite his given name. He was a pathologically oppositional white high school boy who had ended up