Lafferty, Mur (34 page)

Pallas is alone now. She sits in Timson’s old office in the third floor of the Academy, still going to work despite the gaping hole leading from a basement level through the roof. If she can’t have friends, coworkers or mentors, at least she can have routines.

Her days have new responsibilities, too. Frequent meetings with the mayor to discuss the future of the Academy. Ferreting out the supporters of Timson, the leader of the heroes who acquired powers, wreaked havoc, then left town.

Pallas needs to make sure the Academy doesn’t die. She needs to reassure the populace, reassure her fellow heroes who are confused at the blatant corruption that went on in front of them without their catching on, and reassure those who would put an end to the superhero training program.

And she needs to find Timson and bring her to justice.

Pallas sighs and pushes back her brown and gray hair behind her ears.

Timson’s office was once welcoming to her, but now she sees its former occupant’s madness in the decoration. Framed notification of her Nobel Prize for genetics just reminded Pallas of the monster she had become with the modification of her own genetic makeup. The proud news clippings on the wall of the daring acts that White Lightning, The Crane, and others in Timson’s inner circle just remind her of her burden; with the senior heroes all but gone, she has to carry the Academy until it thrives again.

She had done so in the beginning, as the first hero. She will do it again.

She just wishes she weren’t alone.

But since heroes don't wallow, she busies herself with paperwork, slogging through whatever Timson's private files that had survived the Academy's destruction.

Most of it is administrivia, day-to-day workings of the Academy, logging of different heroes' powers and training. She finds the registration files of Third Wave and First Wave citizens, and puts that aside for now -that is a mess she isn't sure she wants to deal with. After they helped win the battle against Timson and the villain Clever Jack, the lesser-powered people of the city, the Third Wave, demanded the expunging of the existing records of them and their talents, and the cessation of the mandatory registration.

Pallas had argued that now that the heroes would be more open to training the lesser-powered people, they should keep the records, but Keepsie and her friends had been adamant. If someone with lesser powers wanted training, he or she would come forward. Pallas had said she would consider it, and promised no more.

She picks up another folder, this one singed on the edges from the exodus of the nuclear villain, Light of Mornings, from her basement prison, and flips it open. Reads.

Heroes don't swear. Normally. But the words escape her mouth before she can stop them.

A shadow appears in the door. She jumps and swears again.

"I'm sorry," says Peter, one of the Third Wavers who had been instrumental in the fight the previous week. "Am I interrupting?"

"What are you doing here? This is a private office!" she says, slamming the folder down.

"You invited me, Pallas. You were going to give me some advice to help my search for Timson?"

She blinks at him. Unclenches her fists and takes a deep breath. She could have snapped him in half; she'd been so angry when reading the file.

"Yes, of course. I'm sorry. Please, sit down."

"Are you all right?" he asks. His skin is still pink and puckered in places that he'd been injured in the previous week -healing from a machine the villain Doodad had created before going rogue had helped, but nothing would remove the scars he would always have from the torture he suffered at the Academy.

Pallas feels shame squirm in her gut, even though she had had nothing to do with the torture.

She sighs. "It's classified." The standard answer is so comfortable that it slides from her lips without her thinking.

Peter nods. "Understandable. However, you do realize that most of what Timson's plans contained in the past several years were classified. From you, even. Is this something of hers?"

Pallas nods mutely. She looks at Peter's tired face, with his wide, haunted eyes -Timson had looked out of those eyes when she had controlled Peter -and wordlessly passes the folder to him.

Peter’s eyes grow wider as he reads.

"I-I don't understand," he says. "What was this boy's crime?"

Pallas sighs. "It appears that Timson and the others, well, when met with a power that was particularly devastating that couldn't be controlled, they put those children into stasis tubes, like the one Light of Mornings was in."

"But she was a delinquent. This boy did nothing wrong."

"His power could have been devastating on a level of national security.

She couldn't take that risk."

"But he did nothing wrong."

She doesn't look at him. "No. He did nothing wrong."

"You have to let him out, Pallas. This is not heroic. This is police-state action. I know you admired Timson for many reasons, but it’s clear she had some questionable stuff going on apart from the creation of the super-drug.

She was insane, but you can't follow in her footsteps. Do the right thing, Pallas.

If you don’t, we will."

She feels a stirring of anger at the implied threat, and then wilts. The Third Waver -one who'd lost his miniscule power, even -is more willing to risk something to right this wrong, to be a hero, than she is.

Still, the loyalty to the Academy is strong. “We don’t know what he knows. We don’t know what he’ll remember. He had access to two people who may have seen very sensitive things inside the Academy, and we don’t know who else he touched.”

Peter stands, his face stony. “He is an innocent. None of this is his fault.

This is not on the side of good, Pallas. This is paranoid, controlling maneuvers.

You don’t give him free will to do the right thing simply because he is, in your eyes, too powerful.”

Her gray eyes did not waver from his face. “If a five-year-old picks up a gun, Peter, you take it away from him. What do you do if he is the gun?”

“You give him to people with experience in handling guns. For God’s sake, Pallas, you’re the strongest, and the oldest hero there is! You’ve seen it all! You have super strength, speed, leaping ability, and you’re damn near invulnerable. Tell me you can’t control a twelve-year-old boy with no offensive powers, no mind-control, and no travel powers to get away from you. There is no better place for him than here at the Academy with you. And if you honestly don’t think you can handle him, you have bigger problems than you think.”

She doesn’t move.

"All right. We'll get him out. But if he goes rogue, he's going right back in there."

"…Right back in there."

The comment elicits no response from him. The boy merely feels her trepidation, her shame. There is a very dangerous person to release. Not someone evil, but very, very powerful. She's scared.

Which means he's scared.

Pallas is his favorite. The boy has been many people in the past fourteen years, but he always returns to her. She is so strong, so heroic, so tragic. The Crane is slightly warped and panicked -he doesn’t like worrying about things being out of place. Fred, a former janitor at the Academy, has led a fascinating life, from the powers he’s seen and the heroes he has befriended to the role he played in the Mirror Wars - and the adventures he still has there in exile -and he is fun to experience on occasion.

But he always returns to Pallas.

He watches, out of her eyes, as she and Peter walk down the stairs toward his cell on the eighth level of the basement, where the stasis chambers lie. She respects Peter, resents him a little, but doesn't blame him for everything that had happened. She trusts him, which she doesn't do to most people; Peter wants the same thing Pallas does -to find Timson.

Timson. His mind shies away from the memories of that fractured woman. She scares him.

He likes Pallas. He likes who he is when he experiences her life out her eyes. And now he looks through her eyes at his own sleeping brown face as she peers at him through the crystal porthole in his stasis chamber.

After fourteen years, Parasite will wake up.

"So he could copy anyone he touched? Did he steal powers or something?"

Peter asks. The hallway is chilly from the thermostat control - on emergency power, which never failed during the battle with Light of Mornings - and he shivers.

"Not exactly," Pallas says. "Imagine if he planted a bug on you that never was removed. He touches you and he can look through your eyes, hear what you're hearing, even hear what you're thinking." She looks again through the window at the sleeping boy.

"Wow. And you can never remove it?"

She shakes her head. "Not that we could figure out."

"Who did he touch?"

She punches some numbers into the keypad next to the boy's chamber.

Peter looks through the window at the sleeping boy. There’s a loud shhhhhhhk and the red lights on the keypad turn blue. The boy looks only twelve or so, although chronologically he'd be twenty-six. "We know he touched the janitor.

He began telling us things about the poor man he couldn't know. He touched the Crane, which didn't help his paranoia at all. We don't know exactly when his power manifested, and once people started freaking out, he wouldn't tell us who he had attached himself to."

Peter rubs the back of his head. "You'd think he'd go mad with all that information in his head."

She shakes her head again and hits a red button. "He described it like security cameras at a mall. He could look through only one person's eyes at a time."

The door opens and Pallas reaches in to lift the boy's body out. His body is wrapped, mummy-like, leaving only the skin on his face exposed. She's careful not to touch his head except at the back, which is covered by a white hood. "He'll wake up in an hour or so, according to Timson's information."

"Then what?" Peter asks.

She shrugs. "We'll see what he's like. We don't even know if waking up will wipe those experiences from his head, or if resuming the information stream will snap his mind. No idea."

Peter swallows. "Maybe this wasn't the best idea."

Pallas sighs. "No. Maybe it wasn't. But you were right. We have to see.

Now, we will."

She turns and carries the boy back to the elevator, the remaining working one in the ruins of the Academy.

The boy’s first sensation is total disorientation. He sees the small, dark boy, with short curly hair and fine features. He sees the tall, white, female hero with long graying brown hair, a strong jaw and stern gray eyes. He sees the boy strapped to a bed who attempts to turn his head and squeeze his eyes shut.

Ah. That's better. He can't see her. He sees through her. The concern she feels for the boy wells up in him; her strength calms him.

She is strong, powerful, and courageous. The boy before him merely shivers and retches. He would much rather be her. He doesn't remember the time he touched her hand fourteen years earlier, accidentally leaving a tiny bit of his own consciousness inside her. He has little memory of the time before, he only has memory of being Fred the janitor, Crane the neurotic, a host of others, but most of all, he has memory of being the hero, Pallas.

"The poor kid," he whispers. "I don't know if we can help him. Timson really was a monster to lock him away, but what do we do now? What do we do to help him if we can't touch him?"

The gasp is heard in his own ears and hers. The disorientation gives him vertigo and he retches again.

"What is it? What does he mean?" Peter asks, and the boy hears it again through two sets of ears.

"He is seeing through my eyes. Hearing through my ears. He must have touched me after his power manifested," she whispers, and the boy echoes her as she speaks.

"Parasite, do you know who I am? Can you see through me?" she asks clearly and slowly.

"Parasite is the boy's name," he whispers. "I am the hero of the Mirror Wars, the defeater of Seismic Stan, and the new leader of the Academy, Pallas."

"You're insane," Peter says. "You can't put him back. It's not his fault that he touched you. He has no malice. He doesn't even have an identity! He thinks he is a white woman!"

He glances through the glass window into the boy's new recovery room on the first basement level where he lays strapped to the bed, whispering to himself. "And I don't even know why you insisted we talk out here. It's not like he can't hear you. Or me."

The hero winces at his comment. "You don't need to remind me. I know all too well what he is capable of. Do you realize what would happen if he gets out of the Academy? Sure, with malice he'd be more dangerous than Clever Jack, but now he thinks he's me, he could easily get himself killed."

Peter thinks briefly about the slight boy trying to pick up a car, and shakes his head. "Not to mention what he knows about you. If he has lived the last fourteen years through your eyes…"

She goes pale. Parasite, the boy beyond the glass, roars in outrage, his pre-pubescent voice higher than hers. "WHAT DO YOU KNOW?" he screams.

She gasps and looks through the window at the boy.

Peter steps back, looking warily at her. "You hide your emotions well, Pallas."

She sets her mouth in a firm line. "He is not sane. But he knows everything I have seen for the past fourteen years. He is a risk; he can destroy everything just by opening his mouth."

"He is a risk to you, Pallas. Not 'everything'. He has committed no crime."

"I have work to do. Watch him. But don’t let him touch you."