They turned on me, eventually. Oh, they were so concerned, my boys. Only for my own good, only because they were so worried about my delicate constitution!
“She can’t control it,” Paravox whispered to the Professor.
“No one could,” Bruce hurried to say, so I wouldn’t take it personally.
“The more she uses her powers, the less human she gets,” Hal Cyon sighed, looking so fucking earnest while he called me less than human. So fucking sincere.
“What the fuck, Hal,” I snapped. “You can turn into a time-traveling dragon. How human are you?”
Crucible couldn’t even look at me. “Maybe if you could just . . . hold back a little. Until you can figure out exactly what happened out there and whether it’s hurting her.”
They all stood around Professor Yes’s desk like veterinarians discussing a rowdy horse in need of breaking.
“Since when,” I said softly, “is power a problem for any of you?”
“You don’t understand,” Zigzag pleaded.
I stared them all down. “Sure I do. Hold back. Got it.”
If you could just wait until it’s clear that none of the other children know the answer before raising your hand. Don’t read ahead of the rest of the class. No one likes a know-it-all.
Finally, Lodestone met the Millennials on the shores of Antarctica. Neutral ground. I floated above the snow. Whales came blinking out of the deeps to croon at me. I sang Bowie to them in the concert halls of their vast salted minds. We waited for Lodestone’s army, his twisted, angry mockingbirds, our opposite numbers. But the army didn’t come. Lodestone himself strode over the Ross Ice Shelf in his long silver cloak and his iron mask. He had one companion. A tall young man wearing white punk gear tourniqueted with straps of leather and rope, his head half shaved and half curling, shining black hair. His eyes were stitched savagely shut; two angry black X’s scrawled over them from brow to cheekbone. Those horrible, furious black X’s glowered all over his body, hundreds of them, big and small, shakily scribbled and boldly slashed and some carved into his flesh with knives. He didn’t seem to feel the cold; he carried no weapons.
His name was Retcon. He was new. He was strong. He was about to ruin my life.
I held back at first. I wanted Crucible and Bruce Force and the others to feel useful. I seethed, but I’m a team player. I always was. A nice girl doesn’t show off. Crucible lit up Lodestone in a column of fire; Zigzag darted around, too fast to see; Hal’s scales flipped up over his skin like playing cards. Paravox started incanting, his eyes turning to molten glass. Bruce went after Retcon with his blades.
But the new guy didn’t flinch. He dodged Bruce easily, casually, like he’d meant to bend practically in half anyway, and if it just happened to keep him out of the path of death, so much the better. He turned his awful stitched-up eyes to me. His mind hit mine. I knew he could see me. I knew his name. I knew with a sickening feeling in my gut that somehow he had fought this battle, this exact frigid, miserable fight, many times before. It was only new for us. Retcon spoke into the star-storm of my mind:
Hiya, Jules! Watch this!
Retcon reached up and dragged one long, sharp fingernail over his brown shoulder once, twice. A black X rose up on his skin as though he’d had a schoolkid’s Magic Marker up one sleeve.
Crucible burst into flames.
The fire that had never hurt Henry Hart, had always loved him and done whatever he asked, swallowed him whole. His skin blistered, scorched, peeled away. His bones cracked like kindling. I saw it all, I heard it all, I felt him die the way I always felt everything that had ever happened to him. I screamed—I became a scream. Nothing in me was not that scream. And the scream of me clawed reality apart. It threw Retcon north toward Buenos Aires at the speed of sound. It annihilated Lodestone’s mind and replaced it with the mind of a twelve-year-old Egyptian girl from the height of the Middle Kingdom. The scream of me dragged green grass and wildflowers out of the million-year freeze of the ice shelf and I fell onto that meadow, sobbing red Mars dust onto the warm, wet earth.
• • •
1:58 AM
So, yes. I lost it after Antarctica. I didn’t quit. I just . . . didn’t show up for work. I checked into a hotel in Buenos Aires and put a DO NOT DISTURB sign over my life. Professor Yes grazed my mind with phantom fingers, her green apple–scented thoughts searching for mine across the sea. I would not let her in. The TV clicked on in my room, the screen filled up with her miserable, stupid face, that fake maternal smile.
“Come home, Julia,” she said, her voice dripping with shit and kindness. I rolled over in the sweatheap of my griefbed and vaporized the television. I opened up the liquor cabinet of my head enough to lob one whiskey-bottle thought at her:
This is what happens when I hold back, Clara.
But I wouldn’t hold back again. I wouldn’t keep my hand down for one more second. I did whatever I wanted. I let the thing inside me, the thing that had grabbed hold of me somewhere between home and Mars, run wild. I turned the Casa Rosada into a ziggurat, then a pumpkin, then a very confused alpaca. I listened in on everyone in a way I hadn’t done since before St. Ovidius, sucking up their sticky, wadded-up little secrets. I drank and fucked anyone I could find and passed out in the street, a goddess sleeping in her own puke with a bag of old bread for a pillow, fighting the birds for it, setting the bolder ones on fire if they got too close. But then the fire would remind me, and the cobblestones shook and the sky went black and Henry died all over again in my head until I beat my skull against a friendly wall long enough to lose consciousness again.
Professor Yes followed me everywhere. She appeared on billboards, on the radio, in the pages of books, every word and image warping into hers.
Come home, Julia. Don’t do this to yourself.
We can’t just let someone like you run free, sweetheart. You’re not safe.
I think the fucking bothered the team the most. Every time I dragged someone home to make me feel real, the hotel room mirrors and microwave and appalling pastel paintings would explode with a hundred disapproving Professors. I ignored her. Who cared? Why should we all be with the same idiots we loved in high school? Dead idiots. Idiots on fire. A church window with Clara’s big dumb eyes tut-tutted that perhaps I was drawing some kind of terrible power from all these men, taking their souls, their anima. As if that was the only reason to let so many of them climb on top of me.
Leave me alone, you Puritan fucking outhouse. I shattered the window with a stomp of my shoes on the morning frost. They all thought that. I could hear them thinking that. I could hear Bruce Force thinking that at a goddamn strip club, but I couldn’t hear anyone thinking he was sucking those dancers dry. And neither was I. It was just sex. And loneliness. And hunger. And the utter nihilism of another human body.
I found Retcon in the basement of a shitty little casino. He’d crashed into it when I threw him; they didn’t have the cash to fix it up quite yet. He turned his head toward me. His thoughts didn’t smell like green apples. They smelled like wild grass and hot stone.
Heya, Jules. I missed you. Don’t hit me too hard.
I hit him. Again and again. Against the dark slot machines, the roulette wheels, the card tables. Harder than any human and most mockingbirds could take. He let me. It all bounced off him. Retcon looked up at me from under the billiards with his ruined eyes and scrawled out another nasty X on the back of his hand.
The casino vanished.
Retcon and I stood in a field of pampas grass and big purple flowers. Massive prehistoric capybaras grazed on the plains. A few mooed in dim Mesozoic alarm. The sun was setting in red splatters.
“Where are we?” I was too stunned to swear at him, or even to finish the punch I’d been winding up.
Retcon turned to me with wide-open, bright blue, unstitched eyes. “We’re about a thousand years back in a timeline where the New World was never colonized. Europe just sort of . . . didn’t happen. Africa’s aces, though. We sho
uld go have a look.”
“Why did you bring me here?” I clenched my fist again.
“Hold on, hold on!” Retcon held up his hands. No tricks. “I brought you here because I’ve always brought you here. I will always have been bringing you here. I’ve met a hundred million versions of you. I know you so well. This is what I do. This is what I did. Back on the ice. I moved us all into a timeline where Crucible wasn’t invulnerable to fire. There’s another one where he never had any powers at all, where no one ever did. You’re still together in that one. You have a baby girl. She’s going to be a programmer when she grows up. In this timeline, our Henry is . . .” Retcon scanned the herds. He pointed. “Just there. Alive and well.”
The Crucible-capybara mooed gently at the rising moon and scratched at his haunches.
“Fine. I’m impressed. So move me back to my timeline. The good timeline.”
“It’s one-way, I’m afraid. But doesn’t it feel better knowing that somewhere, your Henry, the one who called you a boat, is alive and safe?”
No, it did not. But I didn’t say anything. I walked toward the capybaras, soothing them with the tendrils of my mind, singing Bowie into their cozy, hungry hearts. I held out my hand to the Henry-beast. He looked suspicious. He’d never smelled human this close before unless the human smell was very quickly followed by the blood smell. But then he nuzzled my palm and gave it a prim little lick. Somewhere deep, in every timeline, Henry Hart knows me.
Retcon ran his hand over the shaved half of his head. “I didn’t know him. He wasn’t anything to me. Just a job. You’ve had lots of jobs. Your jobs have killed my friends, too, you know. My family. But I knew you didn’t mean anything by it. It’s not personal. When you see all of time and space, you can be very understanding. I hope you will understand too. In that timeline, the one I took us out of, Crucible would have siphoned off some of your power to keep you from—he thought—going mad, and eventually, he would have lit the world on fire with it. Destroyed us all. I was helping. I am helping.”
“I don’t believe you.” Crucible nibbled at my sleeve. “Just take me home.”
“Okay.” Retcon shrugged. “But in your timeline, they’re going to kill you. Well, not kill you. But freeze you and bury you in a bunker. You’re too powerful for her to let you live. Professor Yes doesn’t tolerate mockingbirds she can’t control. Come on, you must know that. You are the knife she uses to cull the flock. She’s done with you. You have to go in the drawer.”
“Fuck,” I sighed. Tears came up in my eyes. The dark spilled out over the long, pale grass. Stars like infinite timelines broke the sky apart into light. “Whose side are you on?”
“Reality’s.”
I chewed on that for a few minutes. “What happened to your stitches?”
Retcon put a tentative hand on my hair. It didn’t feel so bad. Human contact is a terrible drug. Sometimes, you’ll even take the hit you know is tainted. You can’t stop yourself. The need is too strong. “There’s too many people in most timelines. I see all their versions crowding in on top of each other, all trying to happen at once, all fighting to become. But here, there’s just us. Here, I can open my eyes.”
We stayed there for months. Years. Mockingbirds don’t age much. It’s hard to tell. We built a yurt. Capybara-Crucible stayed near me always, looking up at me with big brown capybara eyes, his thoughts as peaceful and wordless as sleep. We ate wildcat and otter and tapir. We drank cold river water. Retcon told me his real name: Lucas Fawn. We flew across the ocean to see the metropolises of Africa once, but neither of us could bear so many other minds so close by. Eventually, we made love under a majaguillo tree. That sounds bad, I know. But Lucas let me roam the whole of his mind. I could see what he saw, time crackling like ice on the surface of an infinite lake. I could understand. I touched him and the X’s on his skin turned into the word REST, written neatly, over and over.
When we finished, I stretched sleepily in the warm summer wind. Lucas and I took the long way round the river to our yurt, holding hands, companionably quiet. Something loosened in me, something that had been clenched tight as a fist since Henry died. I smiled at Retcon and kissed his cheek. It would be good to sleep, for once. I knew I’d have no dreams at all. I lifted the flap of the yurt.
And walked into the white icefield of the Antarctic. The Millennials ranged all around me, screaming, yelling commands, warnings. Bruce slashed at a figure in an iron mask. Paravox was chanting, his eyes filling up with molten glass. And Crucible, my Crucible, my Henry, my heart, alive and whole, threw fire from his hands at a tall young man with X’s drawn over his eyes. Lucas smiled sadly at me, a smile I’d come to know so well and so long.
I thought it was a gift. Make things right. Take it all back.
What could I do? I was such a big fucking problem for all of them. My power, my strength, my lonely body. They’d freeze me and bury me in a bunker. Or Crucible would siphon off some of my power—my soul, as if any of them had the right—and light the world on fire. Any girl who wanted in on Team Millennial after me would have to prove she was weak enough to put the boys at ease. I had no good choices on Earth. So, I picked up Henry in my arms and shot into the sky. I was gone before Lodestone could cry out. I set Henry Hart down in Buenos Aires, by an elegant little casino. I kissed him. He looked at me in confusion, big brown eyes full of love and questions.
I disappeared. Up. Into the black and the white and the cold and the fire. Into space, into crystal flesh and breathless speed. As long and far as I could go. I gave in to the mass of magic and molten physics inside me. The alien, churning thing I’d crushed down inside myself like sorrow. I became the piece of broken irradiated sun that caught me coming home from Mars, the seed of another creature I swallowed in space: Charybdis, a whirlpool of want and need and sacrifice. I remembered a billion years of travel in the shrieking dark. I remembered feasts of worlds before the invention of self-replicating cellular life. I remembered a singularity of hate and fury and hunger.
I forgot who Julia was.
I flew a long way.
• • •
2:00 AM
Two minutes left. I am Julia Ash. I am Julia Ash.
I am Charybdis.
I am so hungry.
This was Lodestone’s plan. He used me no more or less than Professor Yes. I have been nothing but a gun all my life.
I ate a star. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was starving. The whirlpool inside me could not keep going with only a roast beef lunch and/or the phantom tapir jerky of another lifetime to fuel it. When you’re hungry, really ravenous, you eat everything in sight. You barely even taste it. Your whole body is a mouth. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t see anything but the famine of my personal universe. I couldn’t see anything but that blue star, hanging in the dark like meat. I opened my jaw as wide as light-years and bit into it. The star-juice ran down my chin. I couldn’t hear the screaming of planets suddenly freezing in the void, careening in the release of gravity’s hand brake. I couldn’t hear it, I swear. Charybdis was so much bigger than a planet’s weeping.
And then it was gone. The Galapagos-colored thing that had filled me up for so long. It was satisfied. The red dust and the coffee and David Bowie and green in the Antarctic and the flower on fire in the sink. All gone. All the lights gone out in Georgia. I began to fall out of the sky.
I fell a long way.
On Sunday nights, at 1:47 AM, for fifteen minutes, I know what happened. They had to punish me. Of course they did. But they never understood. There may have been a universe in which Crucible was vulnerable to fire, but Retcon couldn’t really move everyone there wholesale. He and Lodestone planned it so beautifully. Retcon dropped me into a bubble of experience, a bubble of grief in Buenos Aires, broken slot machines, Clara Y. Xenophile’s face staring at me out of a rabbit-eared television, untouched pampas and wild capybaras and the majaguillo tree. Retcon knew I would do anything to save Henry, to avoid living it all again, to spare everyone,
to save everyone.
All I ever wanted to do is save everyone.
And that’s how Lodestone aimed me, cocked me, and fired me at a star on the other side of the galaxy. God knows who he hated enough on those planets to turn off their sun, but he got what he wanted. And after it was all done, Retcon, a new player, ready to consider his allegiances objectively, could come humbly, hat in hand, to St. Ovidius and that big mahogany desk and the lumps of exploded bronze phoenix and offer to take care of the Julia problem as only he could.
After all, he was on reality’s side.
On Sunday nights, at 1:47 AM, I know I have lived in Retcon’s prison for seven years. Flickering through recycled realities, losing myself in myself, over and over. I know that they’ve all forgotten me. Redemption is for other people. For literally everyone else. Mockingbirds fuck things up. Occupational hazard. No one locked up Avast when he inundated Los Angeles to get at one lousy shark. But I am the Wayward Child of St. Ovidius. I was used and tricked and thrown away, but I cannot be forgiven.
It’s a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you’re the protagonist, but really, you’re just backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up and half of them do much worse than a star and still get the key to the city, and eventually you’re just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife.
Every day, Retcon crosses out my past and rewrites it, drawing a furious black X over me again and again. Some days, he even lets me be innocent, lets Charybdis take the blame out into the black and set it on fire. He can probably do it without thinking, like a digestive process. Lucas Fawn goes about his day, redeemed, eating and drinking with my friends, in my house, and some autonomic system erases me for the thirteen thousandth time, while another builds a new Julia or a new Charybdis to play with in his private dollhouse. Some guilty, some innocent, some powerless, some young, some broken, some dead.