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Overhead, thick clouds, wound tight with rain, began to unspool themselves out over the open ocean. They failed to block out the sun entirely with their thinning bulks, but the light they did let through was weak in comparison to a moment ago.
“So,” a quiet step forward. The silence passing. “They named you Sidestep,” recounting and. Nudging. Faint and soft and every edge of every syllable bleeding edge sharp. Ready to cut in and cut deep to get to the core. Every spider silk thought in her mind sharper than obsidian when it wanted to be. Sticky and lethal.
Ah beans.
She was already dangerous. In a few more years. If something or someone didn’t kill her as soon as she broke this story, she was going to really make some people quake.
“How long was it before you began working with the Rangers and Charge?” poised and waiting.
Richard felt his hand rise up to his mouth and rub it gently. He wanted it to be gently. Knew he was still pressing too hard by the alarm bells ringing away in his gums.
“A few months? Ortega kept,” keeps, a voice in his mind cleared its throat. Ortega keeps. “An eye on the streets. The media is pretty well aware that Lady Argent is the one working with more vigilantes these days, but I’m sure you know that back then it was him,”
“Scouting for fresh talent?” no barbs. Richard shrugged.
“I couldn’t say what his motives were. You’d have to ask him,” and that was a particularly nasty bundle of thoughts. Not a fan at all of the former Marshal. Not at all. Hm. Not enough to pick fights but there was a glimmer of something on one of the web strands and.
Oh.
Right.
“If I had known how much you…,” Mia’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t look up from her page and forced the visible reaction back. Back. Face smoothing until her Standard Professional Reporter’s Expression took back over. “I’m sorry I had him drive you back into town,” and it was striking how quickly her SPRE shuddered back to let the faintest hint of a sneer onto her lips. Mind bunching oddly around the apology, completely unsure what it was meant to do with it.
Mad Dog apologizing for having a superhero protect her on her way home.
Richard tried not to feel the ember of relief that her mind hadn’t swapped over to referring to him as Sidestep. Not yet.
“He’s an asshole,”
“Yep,” a snort that made a lot of her own tension relax back. “But he was also the first person who…who,” don’t let the voice crack, don’t let the voice crack. Clear your throat and square your jaw and ignore Mia noticing all of this and. “He treated me like a friend worth having,” cracked on friend. Cracked like a fault line ran through it and Mia’s mind scented blood.
She pushed a bundle of words around on her tongue for a moment, letting him try to pretend that that hadn’t just happened. “All my life I had been a thing. An object to be used. And being visibly homeless and poor and scared hadn’t done much to bolster the illusion of humanity among the first people I interacted with,” they both grimaced in unison. The dehumanization of the down and out wasn’t Mia’s focus, usually. But she wasn’t blind to it. “Putting on a mask helped, but then all I was, was a mask. I wasn’t just a guy in a suit, I was just the suit. Just the mask. And Ricardo was one of the first people to treat me like just some guy. He was an ass sometimes too, but even that was so…novel,”
Richard found his eyes staring out at the clouds. Too much of him fighting back against the desire to see lightning.
Melodrama. Huh. “And we began working together more and more,”
“And when you stopped the nanosurge, Charge covered for you to keep your secret,”
“It. Yes,” nodding because there wasn’t a single fiber of his being that could admit to her that he hadn’t told Ricardo back then. Better to let her assume that the bright eyed and bushy tailed Sidestep had blabbed about what he was to his first sparkly new friend. “He downplayed how involved I was to…help protect me and my privacy. He knew how much I wanted to avoid anyone finding anything out about me and he. He tried to keep people,” a pointed nod, and Mia’s mind had the decency to know he was talking about ‘people like her’. And Vernon. “From snooping too close,”
“And,” a hard stop. Weighing the risks of asking her next question, but what it was exactly kept being slid along those gossamer threads, twisting and weaving together until whatever her questions was, it was neatly obscured by cobwebs. She knew it was potentially very dangerous. “May I ask an entirely personal question?”
That couldn’t be good.
Maybe she wanted to know in more detail about Sidestep revealing himself to Charge or.
“Only if you don’t include it in the final draft,” hoping that might be enough to dampen her spirits. Nope. Apparently not. The question was being neatly unwrapped again, but before Richard could get a peek beyond the general outline, it shifted.
Mia’s question hit like a gut punch. Just as stinging.
“When did he break your heart?”
“What?” too much ice in the word. Slicing into his tongue and freezing the blood that formed there into damning crystals. Mia visibly shivered and shifted further back but couldn’t fully escape the frigid muck being raked up from the depths of her mind. She swallowed hard. Shaky. Not terrified. But aware, very keenly now, of how dangerous the person sitting next to her was. That drop in temperature hadn’t come from inside, and she knew it.
“Sorry,” off handed and in the tone of someone who regretted asking because of the consequence, not because they’d learned a lesson. Richard didn’t press it. The interview wasn’t over for both of them, and he couldn’t afford to send her running just because he was tetchy.
“So am I,” just as insincere. Sorry for the result, not the action. “But if you intend to ask about Heartbreak, I would advise you to just ask and not try to be cute about it,” clipped and cold.
Back was the bristle, the grit of her teeth that was wrestled under control. The ‘cute’ comment rankled her. Richard let it. Tit for tat. Up until she shook her head.
“If I had meant to ask about Heartbreak, I would—and will—ask about Heartbreak,” she protested coolly. Fuck. “But the way you look,”
Wait.
“When you talk about him,”
Hold on.
“I just assumed,”
What the hell had his face been
Ah, beans.
“Charge and I were never romantically involved,” proof of mercy in the world. His own voice was steady and stable. Not even too sharp at the edges, just. Plain and firm. The nerves in charge of controlling his expressions were getting a curt talking to, threatened that if they even so much as thought about blushing, there would be hell to pay.
“Oh,” she didn’t have to sound so surprised about it, a voice from a bleaker corner of his mind grumbled. “Sorry,” more sincere there, actually shuffling those thoughts around because. Ah, beans, had he really looked so whimper weak? He couldn’t blame Mia for seeing the nostalgia and making a different connection. Still.
“And I don’t make puppy eyes,” Mia didn’t respond to that out loud, but the very clear ‘sure you don’t’ was mainlined straight into Richard’s head hard enough to actually make him snort. It was either that or blush again. “I…when I was starting out, I was pretty starstruck by him, yeah. I’m not straight, if you want to put that into the story, see what hype that might generate…even back then, I knew that. And I…had a crush on him. I’ll grant you that but…a lot of that was because I had no. No real reference point for my emotions?” Mia’s brow furrowed slightly, but she had wisely chosen not to push her luck on this particular topic. Wanting to avoid the chill of him again. Richard twisted his hand and sighed.
The softer things hadn’t been high priority for the Farm. Enough to keep basic emotional development on track. Enough to make it so their progeny weren’t completely devoid of basic human interaction. The building blocks of affection, just so the taste was there, from the memories they implanted. The rest of Richard’s heart very carefully pulled a curtain down over the other memories that were trying to look in through the window. The groping desperation for any of the others to look at him. To see. To feel something with him. Only to be turned away at the door.
No one wants a psychic around when your mind is your only safe place.
“Look. Think back to the first crush you ever had—how much of it was actually based on anything that an adult would call love, and how much was infatuation?”
“Right,” those pieces were easier for her chew. Digesting down to see what honesty she could pull from it. Richard caught a glimpse of a young person with a beaming smile and patches of drying mud on their face, grass stained knees. Fond memories.
She understood what he was trying to say. At least she thought she did.
“He’s still my best friend, and I do…care. Very deeply about him,” sighing again and letting both of his hands hang between his knees for a moment. “There’s probably some refined term or old word for it, but,” shrugging, letting Mia’s mind go back to her mental thesauri before gingerly turning her back to the topic at hand. “He never broke my heart, or anything like that,”
“Right,” again, pausing before a slightly more genuine. “Sorry, I guess I just…doesn’t matter,”
“It doesn’t,” he agreed quietly. “But if you actually want to talk about the Heartbreak incident, I can do that,” shifting on the bench and feeling Mia’s focus tighten, the aperture of her attention narrowing. Accepting the change in topic back to Sidestep and Charge and away from flinching adolescent embarrassment. The passed note asking if someone liked him back being wadded up and tossed into a trashcan.
“Alright. What happened? They said that you and the Ranger Anathema died,” taking his wince and putting the tightness taking over his face on his own death, not Themmy’s. Not. His next words were too tight. Too clipped. Mia squirmed next to him as an unseen weight settled onto her shoulders. Shrugged it back like a too heavy coat in the heat of summer.
“They called it a terrorist attack, yeah?”
“Yes,” eyes verging into hungry, although she hid it well. The rest of her body language didn’t, leaning in closer to him despite having been snapped. There was a chain around his neck. At least, she thought there was. Mad Dog hadn’t bitten, for all his snarl and hackle raising. All bark. No. “You’re saying it wasn’t?”
“It certainly caused enough terror. But…Not in so many words, but it wasn’t,” fingers lacing back between each other, taking the risk of breaking a finger over breaking into Mia’s head. Stopping her. Stopping this. He could remove the heartbreak question. A neat little bundle wrapped up off center of her web, tightly bound and practically aching to be stolen.
Deep breath in. Hold it. Two. Three. Four. Exhale. Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Telepathic hands in telepathic pockets. “I might have to uh. Take my time with it. But it began with Charge reaching out—we had information that Heartbreak, the uh. The person behind it. Was a psychic. Which is why my version of things…it will be the true version of what happened to me. Other people might remember it differently,”
Mia nodded and for all her powers of perception, didn’t see the ice cracking under her feet.
“You said it was one Person,” capital P in her mind. “Not people?”
“There was only one that I knew about. On site, I mean. There uh. I don’t think it was uh. Orchestrated,” knew it wasn’t. Not the full scale of it. Mia…the world didn’t need to know more.
Was it wrong to pin it all on one dead kid? Absolutely. But Richard’s mouth was running anyway. Whatever heartbreak had been, it had wanted to die. Maybe it would be allowed to stay dead, even if Richard spoke ill of it now. Even if it may have been locked in the crumbling tomb of Regina’s mind as her body died around it, dragging it into the grave.
Guilt rose up his gullet and it burned his sinuses to swallow it back down.
Up above the dirt line, a thousand feet up, Mia said something. Again.
“Sorry. Got…a little lost there,” another pop from his knuckles. “In broad strokes, we knew that something was making people kill themselves,” had he wanted to before? Had the ever present hum really been forever? He could remember fleeting jolts, electrical shocks from shag carpeting, back before any of this started. Lustful whispers of an entirely too permanent release from the loneliness and the otherness and. Deep breath. “We knew it was a psychic attack,” Tap.
“And Marshal Charge’s sidekick was apparently a telepath all along. Not a bad secret weapon,” Mia’s immediate regret at the word choice made it across her face, but the apology didn’t have time to leave her head.
Little polished stones of sound slipped out from between his teeth. Pearls or molars or both. Too soft to be anything other than. “Ricardo didn’t want me there,”
“Wait, what?” scooting again. A bad choice. But Richard wasn’t in a place to stop her. Let the nosy little creep creep closer, she might learn something usefuuck. No. Drag it back, kicking and screaming and desperate and getting locked somewhere cool and damp and dark. Tap. “Was he afraid of your powers being altered?”
“He was worried. Either that I wasn’t ready or about what would happen with all the…death and pain around me,” Tap. “But I insisted,”
“Were you offended that he didn’t want you there?” examining a marble for an angle.
No. Yes. “Maybe. But I also wanted to help people,” true. True statement. He had wanted to help. There had been so many people hurting and in danger and he knew he should have. That he thought he was able to help them. “I was arrogant, after the nanosurge. And I paid for it,” Tap. Richard shook his head loose and let his.
When had his hand gone up into his hair?
“Charge took the lead, then Steel. Fitted with mobile dampeners,” no need to specify that only Chen had had them. This expose was about him, not Ricardo. “Anathema and I brought up the rear,”
A question formed. Was inspected and then unspooled to see if it would stick. “What was it like?” Tap. “Around the apartment building, I mean,”
“Bad,”
Tap tapping tapping. Filthy fingernails scraping along the interior of his skull. A plitter plop, dollops of cerebral spinal fluid against his eardrums bodies against the ground and the slick pop popping of eyes like grapes like tomatoes between molars and acid burning flesh slip slip slip sloughing off sizzling off plopping against fusing into the grimy cement.
Deep breath in and it reeked of death and acrid meat stinking filling the back of his mouth bile and blood and screaming and.
Deep breath out.
The shape next to him had gone slightly pale. Not full nausea, thank goodness. Only a few slips of himself had melted enough to drip into her mind. Enough to make her queasy, but not enough to hurt.
“It was very bad. There were bodies of the dead and dying all around us, but the paramedics couldn’t get close enough to save those who hadn’t already died,” and the asphalt had been warm with blood beneath his her his their cheeks. “We went in through the main doors,” had they been main doors? Side door? No. Must have. “And. It was Anathema that opened them,” yes. That was right, because Anathema had used their acid to burn through the doors. The locks at least. “And then,” was it worse inside. Had it been worse inside?
Mia waited. Watched. Starving for it.
“The elevators weren’t working, but we knew whatever this was had been coming from higher up,” and Steel was too heavy for stairs but it wasn’t Steel’s fault and, “So Charge and Steel headed up the stairs. And the. Whatever Heartbreak was doing, it got to Anathema,” had it gotten them first? Or had the wave already broken the dampeners, hit Steel because Orte-cardo. Ricardo had talked Chen down except that, god he hadn’t, had he, it wasn’t talking down it had been worse so much worse but had it gotten to them first and then out into the hallway with—
“Got to them?”
“I saw them take their hands and put them against their face.” The part of his brain that was awake enough to register his voice heard the hollow echo. He could feel how numb his throat was. “They melted straight through the. Their.” Deep breath in.
Had they screamed?
Did he remember screaming? Out.
Another knuckle cracked. Mia’s throat clicked with her next swallow. In.
He’d told them, once upon a time, that even though they were invincible he would have tried to save them.
And that had been a lie. Out.
He was a coward. And a liar. And all the other things that whispered into his ears from bleak crevices in his brain, urging his rope a little tighter. He had deserved to die there. In.
“No one gets what they deserve,” a hiss more than a whisper, but Mia still caught it.
Had the decency to be wrong about what he meant. “Yeah, I don’t think anyone would deserve that,” a pause. Hesitation before the commitment. “What happened next?”
“I ran.” The admission sliced through his esophagus on its way out. “I ran up the stairs and passed Ricardo and Chen,” slipping. Charge and Steel had been on the stairs, but he had run by Ricardo and Chen and Chen must have been. Ricardo must have been trying to keep Chen from. Staying with him, to succeed where Richard had just failed. To keep his friend alive while Richard had let his die. “And when I made it to the top,” voice dying, sputtering out. Words and wind and strength sputtering out from the hole in his throat. “It.”
A harder pause. Breathing in. Breathing out. Let it settle in his veins. Keep it out of Mia’s. Keep it for himself. “It was up there. Heartbreak, I mean,” the body that had housed the mind that had caused the. Mia didn’t need all that. She pressed anyway.
“You saw the person who caused it? What did they look like?”
“I…think so. But I couldn’t give a description that would make sense to your readers,” Mia frowned but let it drop. For now. “It…,”
Richard paused to tug a string or two. Grave dirt beneath his nails and fingers shaking. Just to see where they might lead into the stretches of her mind. But to go deeper would be too dangerous now. He was in no state for it. Lucky enough that he could even recognize that at this point.
“It was like looking at the sun, except the sun is alive and it hates you and wants you dead. Every secret shame, every humiliation. Every fear and fault and worry and self-conscious knee jerk. Every doubt and failure I had ever had, blasted into my face,” snorting. “Everything I had ever hated about myself laid bare and justified as right. It was right to hate myself. I deserved to die. It was more than knowing or feeling, it was like gravity. A pull you can’t fight against. Understanding with every fiber of my being that I should kill myself. That it was the right thing to do,”
Mia shifted on the bench. Her pen trembled slightly in her grip and pull it back pull it back pull it back down his throat and swallow it and hold it in his gut, this wasn’t for her. She didn’t deserve to hurt. Breathe in.
“Ricardo saved my life,” tried. Desperately. “I had my gun in my mouth and he got there in time to pull it out but,”
Breathe out.
In.
Hold.
Hold.
Out.
“But I broke away, and threw myself out of the nearest window,”
A pause. Courage, he could feel her urging herself forward, courage, Mia. “But the fall didn’t kill you.” Not a question. Everyone had said that it did. Or come close enough for prize money.
“I could feel people dying around me,” no poetry there. Not the question she asked and not the answer she wanted. “I could feel them dying and it felt good to have a little more pain leave each time,” words like the closing of coffin lids. Grim and final and was that simile him or Mia? “I don’t blame them,” Steel seeing not seeing making a choice and. “For assuming I was dead. I thought I was dying, certainly. I broke my spine in two places, broke my jaw and cracked my skull. Shattered my pelvis and obliterated my right hip joint,” listing off the injuries shouldn’t have been a soothing balm to the sting of the trauma.
But it was.
The injuries were easy, in their way. “Plenty of soft tissue damage, too,” he added on. “But I didn’t have to wait long. People who were pretending to be paramedics came and scraped me off the tarmac like roadkill,”
And that caused a slight warp in the web. “Who was it? You said it wasn’t paramedics?”
“That’s probably not entirely fair of me. The official line is that I died in the ambulance, right?” he didn’t wait for the nod, but he could feel it coming. “I probably—well, no. I know I did. More than once, even. And they did take me to get ‘life saving medical care’,” making the air quotes with his left hand. The right felt too weak, twisted and abused as it had been for the past half hour. “But they were there to recover missing property. They were there to bring me back,”
Back from the dead.
Back home.