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“Want to make fun of dudes on Tinder until Greg comes back?” I grinned. “Yeah.”
“Is he a pervert. Is he going to touch me.” “No! Calm down—shit. He’s a supervillain, not a fast-food assistant manager.”
“Your empathy moves me.” “I’m dying.” “So is my sex life.”
They either write you off immediately or get a hard-on imagining you robbing banks in a thong and goth boots.” “So I shouldn’t wear that to work tomorrow.” “I mean, follow your heart.”
“Isn’t this great, Anna?” E stage-whispered to me. He sounded like he was vibrating with glee. I smothered the urge to stage-whisper, No.
I wondered what it must be like to be so mediocre and so confident at the same time.
In my darkest moments I felt like my life couldn’t get any worse, but the bleak pragmatist in me knew it absolutely could.
That was what 468 years of our lives were worth to him. That was how little I mattered.
superheroes, for all their good PR, were terrible for the world. They were islands of plastic choking the oceans, a global disaster in slow motion. They weren’t worth the cost of their capes; whatever good they did was wiped out many times over by the harm.
“That depends. I have one more question.” “Okay.” “Do you hate them now?” I was shocked by the intensity of my reaction. I felt my chest tighten and a weird acidic burn crawl up my throat. “Them” was such a vague word, but the hate I felt was extraordinarily specific, and right at the front of my mind. There was the petty disloyalty of two-bit villains like the Eel. The ineffectual brutality and brown-nosing of the police. The blithely ignorant wrecking machines that were all of the heroes, unaware of the human and material costs of their every stupid, impetuous move. And then there was
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Within a few weeks, I’d carved out an extremely demanding and deeply satisfying position utterly ruining as many heroic days as humanly possible. It was immediately the best job I’d ever had.
I started to own my significant limp; I started to feel at home in my body again.
“Right now, we’re in the process of making Pneumatic and Typhoid’s charter flights to Austin as uncomfortable as possible.”
“I’m shocked he bounced back from this,” Darla said, gesturing toward the monitor, where Nour and Jav were still giggling at a loop of Glassblower getting his ass handed to him by two men wearing chest harnesses and assless chaps.
“I don’t do fieldwork, Molly.” “I know.” “I am a fucking delicate flower.”
Tardigrade released an official statement condemning him, and an even more vicious Instagram story. I was particularly moved by her saying that she’d “spit on him, but he’d enjoy it too much.”
“I don’t think you can win if you’re not broken.”
physics prodigy Rosalind Fife, who was terrifyingly young and profoundly neuro-atypical,
Sometime between when I finally went back to my suite rather late that night, and when I wandered back to my office in the morning, someone found the time to tape a sign to the door that read, WARNING: FRIGID AUDITOR BITCH. I opened the door slowly and was greeted by my entire team grinning at me. “This is going to be a thing, isn’t it?” I sighed. Nour giggled. It was a good week before I realized that Greg had changed my email signature from “Anna Tromedlov” to “The Auditor.” It stuck.
Making her laugh was a particular kind of joy I had never found anywhere else; even now, as she was more despairing than I ever remembered seeing her, I still held that power.
“You don’t understand me. You’re a problem,” he said. “I didn’t mean for you to be, but you are.” “I get that a lot.”
The story I heard, which I first assumed a lie, but a very sweet one, was that Leviathan had been prepared to raze the building to the ground and salt the earth when he heard what had happened. When I repeated the story to Leviathan, however, expecting him to refute it, he grew very still. “They were kind,” he said, “to describe my outburst so judiciously.”
It was one of a small list of things I planned to never tell him I noticed, so that he couldn’t become aware of his tells and stop.
“Would you say you’re officially a cyborg now? Are you a pirate cyborg? A piborg?” I looked at Susan. “Remind me, is this thing weaponized?” I tapped the side of my head. “I’m afraid not.” “Damn.”
The pile of presents was dominated by a massive teddy bear from Keller and his goons. It was the size of a goddamn person, clutching a fabric heart that said, “Get Well Soon!” The thought of him, or one of his Meat, picking it out and bringing it over was delightful.
I can’t watch you disappear into another car again.
STFU IM CRYING RN
“Self-deprecation has splash damage.”
“They get scared that it’s going to happen to them, you know. Like the violence is contagious.”
“You know why they can’t get to our loved ones?” Keller asked. “Because they’d never stoop to it?” I answered. “Because we don’t have any.”
It’s all like this. It’s all data. Everything new means something, but in a language you’re still learning.”
Something I didn’t say to Vesper was that part of the unexpected deluge of sensory data was learning there were so many new things I was attracted to. Suddenly someone’s heart rate was stunning, or their array of capillaries made me breathless. I had a whole new library of preferences to deconstruct and fret about.
Larvomancer had immediately, even gleefully, taken credit, claiming that his “exploding grubs” had caused the damage. Leviathan didn’t need to tell me he’d invited the vivisectionist to take credit; Larvomancer was a diva always looking to bolster his reputation, so his cooperation probably hadn’t been expensive.
What would you say, if you could shut down an earthquake?
Accelerator himself was relatively harmless. He was bad for the world, certainly, but nowhere near the scale of Supercollider. He could have been offset by becoming vegan and making regular donations to Greenpeace.
Trust me. I will. Do not let me down. It is time for blood, Auditor.
I didn’t say it out loud, but in my head I played some of the hours and hours of video of their interactions I’d watched over the past few weeks. The way she carefully kept a bit of distance between them whenever she could and, when she couldn’t, the way she micro-flinched when he touched her. You might only see it if you were looking for it, like I was.
It hit me, though—walking through the sweet coolness of that night garden over and over again—that Supercollider was already the worst thing that had ever happened to her. I would just be forcing her to confront it.
With the lightest pressure, the facade of their lives fell away to reveal a stricken, barren landscape. Expecting excess and decadence and despair, I found only the stark, silent ugliness of something that had already been razed to the ground.”
I wanted to know what these stories had in common, what the themes were. I wanted to see if there was a pattern to how he hurt people. I wanted to know the cost.
And then, the moment she vanished, his face contorted into a pure, awful rage.
For the first time in a long while, he touched me. He wrapped one hand affectionately around my throat, thumb pressed gently against my trachea, his four fingers reaching toward the back of my neck. His fingertips were slightly rough, and I was surprised again by how warm he was. Let me do this, I begged inside my head. Let me do this for you.
“You have not seen me fight yet, Auditor. Let me show you what I am capable of. By the time this is over, you will have nothing to worry about ever again.”
“Greg said you’d lost it.” “Greg is an idiot.” “He adores you.” “He adores me and he is an idiot.”
I am glad you aren’t here so this can’t hurt you, but I miss you. So much
“No, let me go down.” “I don’t like it.” “Me neither, but she’s doing us the courtesy of knocking when she could have fucking phase-shifted into the bathroom while you were taking your morning shit.” “First of all, I shit in the afternoons. Second, take Ludmilla with you.”
Without hope he goes back to what he is.” “What—what is that?” She sounded genuinely frightened. My hand tightened on Keller’s shoulder. I was frightened too, and a childish part of me wanted to turn off the audio before I heard an answer. But I was also fascinated, and that infernal curiosity won. “I don’t know how to explain it, honey. What’s left is . . . whatever it is, it’s hungry.”
“No. Quantum. Listen to me. He’s not wearing armor.” “Doc? That doesn’t make any—” “There is no armor. He’s not wearing anything at all.”
The dead armor I’d seen in front of me couldn’t be his because it could come off. Leviathan was alive because that glimpse of naked flesh couldn’t have been his body.
For ‘choosing the greater good over doing good,’ that’s how she always said it.
Imagining a young, heartbroken Leviathan summoning all of the still-developing powers of monologue he possessed to try and win over his friend and avenge his mentor made my chest contract painfully.
