Chapter 8
"I'm sorry, Grandma. This is all my fault." I squeezed her dry, cool hand carefully with my good one and leaned closer, keeping my voice down. "I never should have gotten involved in any of it."
"Silly boy." She pulled her hand free and ran it through my disheveled hair. She was lying on the cot in a private room, connected to an array of machines that hummed and beeped contentedly around her, confirming that my only living relative was no longer in any danger. "You did the right thing. You got Connie's money back. Now she'll spend it on a new house, but… that old wreck of hers. She's been complaining about wanting renovations for years."
She finished her little speech with a bout of dry coughing, then glanced around the room with exaggerated caution and winked at me.
As it turned out, Connie had come out of the whole thing best of all. She had her cash back, and she'd be getting a payout on the house on top of it — because every sensible person in this world had started buying insurance the moment superhero incidents began multiplying faster than anyone could count.
"But let me ask you something." Another round of coughing interrupted her, taking a solid ten seconds before it passed. "Did you bring what I asked?"
"I did, but… are you sure? The doctors said—"
"Oh, dumpling." She rolled her eyes, though I could see she was holding back a smile. She reached out and pinched my cheek. "I've already got one foot in the grave. A wild youth among the hippies and a life badly lived don't exactly leave you with great health…"
"Please spare me the details."
"…I'd like to see you hang your own superhero poster in my room someday, and…"
She trailed off and held her hand out expectantly. I didn't have the strength to refuse her. I placed a small flask and a pack of cigarettes into her open palm.
"And what?"
"Never mind." She took a long, satisfied pull of expensive bourbon and melted against the back of the cot, sinking deeper into the blanket with an expression of pure contentment. "I'd given up on great-grandchildren until recently… The fact that you brought a young woman home is already so much better than your eternal evenings with your Mecha Man figurines."
"Grandma…"
"What?" She straightened and pointed a finger at me. "I worry about you! What's going to happen when Jack Daniel's and Jim Beam finally come to collect me, hm? At least now Amanda will be around to look after you — I've been thinking about giving her—"
"We're just friends," I cut her off before she could say whatever it was I didn't want to hear. Though even as I said it, the thought of Amanda sent a spike of pain straight through my chest. Her condition, her injuries, everything the electric lunatic had done to her — done to her because of me. It was a weight I couldn't carry cleanly. "Although probably not even that anymore." My stomach turned. "Bleh."
"Oh, sweetheart." She shook the water off her hand with practiced ease and lit a cigarette, waving toward the window — a silent request for me to crack it open. "When you say things like that, I start to think I was wrong to let your mother drink cocktails with me while you were still in the womb."
"Grandma—"
"What, what? I've been your grandma for twenty-three years!" She waved the cigarette at me, dropping ash at my feet, and took another pull from the flask — using expensive liquor as a perfectly ordinary sedative. "Amanda is a good girl. Plenty of baggage, plenty of damage — but she has a great deal more experience than you."
She dropped the usual coddling tone she reserved for her grandson. When Elizabeth Herby spoke next, it was direct — and she punctuated it with a sharp flick to my forehead.
"She knew how things might end, or at least suspected it. She helped anyway." She exhaled a thick stream of smoke toward the cracked window, turning her face toward the fresh air now pushing into the stale, close room. "Stop inventing problems and just talk to her. Worst case, she takes her anger out on you and then forgives you."
The mental image of a furious girl with superpowers taking her anger out on me sent my body into a reflexive, full-system clench.
"Now go visit her, and come back and tell me how it goes." She put a period on the conversation and didn't look at me again. I sat by her bed for nearly a minute, trying to find something to say, anything at all — and couldn't.
"All right. Get better." I pulled the door shut behind me, grimaced at the wet handprint I'd left on the handle, and started down the corridor. Calm was still out of reach, and my control wasn't cooperating — though at least the hospital had its own problems to deal with and wasn't paying much attention to the damp trail I was leaving.
A long, slow walk. A staircase, a few floors, and then I was on the first floor, in the intensive care wing.
It was early morning. The only person I passed in the hall was a lone orderly who smelled strongly of marijuana and was absently chewing peanuts in front of a vending machine. He let out a stupid little laugh when the door to Amanda's room squeaked open. He was presumably stationed here to respond quickly if something happened to Monster Girl. Apparently he'd found better things to do with his time. Which was, in a roundabout way, lucky — a competent, attentive person would simply not have let me in.
I stepped through the door and got hit immediately by the smell of antiseptic and the quiet rhythmic hiss of the ventilator. The steady beeping bounced off the walls, and every time it sounded I felt moisture appear on my palms.
I stood in the doorway and looked at my friend.
She hadn't woken up in two days. Her hair, usually gathered in its familiar ponytail, was loose and had been cut short on the left side. Her hands were wrapped in thick bandaging, and so was her chest. The hospital pajamas were two sizes too large and made her look like she was buried under a pile of sheets.
"Hey, Amanda…"
I let the door close behind me and walked to the bed on stiff legs, standing over her. Her breathing was heavy and labored — and not her own. Her chest barely moved. Her eyelids twitched every so often in her sleep.
I had a reasonable idea of what she was dreaming about. The same nightmares had been finding me most nights, waking me up with muscle spasms and pain in my arm.
I shifted my gaze to my broken, burned arm and had to bite down on my lip to keep the profanity inside. The doctors said full recovery could take up to six months. Sensation might not return completely.
The repeated electrical strikes — especially that first massive hit — had done real damage even to my enhanced body. Amanda had taken it far worse. Where one discharge had been enough to put me down, the doctors had found fourteen separate strike points on her.
Her regeneration was far stronger than mine, so permanent disability wasn't a concern, and she wouldn't be left with the branching scar patterns that normally followed lightning burns.
But what frightened me most was that one of Electro's charges — that was apparently the villain's name — had hit her directly in the head. Everything else would heal. Her brain was another question that nobody was willing to answer with certainty.
"D-damn it…"
I bit through my lip. A puddle had spread beneath me without my noticing. I sank down to the floor right where I stood, unable to keep looking at her — at my friend, who wouldn't wake up, who was lying here because of me.
I pressed my forehead against the cold metal rail of the bed. Then, carefully, afraid of frightening away whatever small courage I still had, I reached out and closed my hand gently around Amanda's wrist, trying not to disturb the monitors and catheters. Who was I kidding. I was more afraid she'd pull away. She didn't. I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed by that.
"G-Grandma says you w-wouldn't blame me for this…" I swallowed the thick knot forming in my throat and let my head knock softly against the railing a couple of times. "And I know she's right, but… God, it f-feels terrible anyway."
My head was splitting with contradictions. On one side: the fearful, phobia-soaked part of me that had always been Herman, whispering that I should have run and never gotten involved in any of this. On the other: my own wanting, my own dreaming, my admiration for the people who actually did something — and the awareness that I had a power that could matter, if I let it.
"I'm sorry." I tilted my head back and looked at the ceiling for a moment, grateful, almost, for the slow drip of water running off my body. Just having something mundane to notice helped. Then I looked back at Amanda's sleeping face. "Everything is so complicated."
I exhaled several times, splashed cold water on my own face from my hands, and forced myself up onto my feet. The pain in my arm and ribs barely registered. Standing by the bed, I reached out and brushed a few strands of hair back from her face.
I stood there for a moment, looking at her. Then I pulled my hand away and closed it into a fist.
I could keep whining. I could keep making excuses. But underneath all of it, I knew exactly what the real problem was.
I was weak.
The moment things had gotten even slightly comfortable, I'd started looking for the exit. Telling myself I didn't need to become a superhero. Using my ability just enough to avoid drawing attention. Hiding behind Amanda's back — behind her frail back — as if her power was a shield that covered me too. It absolutely wasn't. In this world, any random person walking past might turn out to be a local-scale Thanos who could end you with a thought. The current situation had been of my own making, yes. But something exactly like this could happen for no reason at all, to anyone, at any time. The sheer density of enhanced individuals in this city exceeded any reasonable threshold.
It was time to stop making excuses.
---
The wind was tearing through the trees and the laundry still hanging on the lines. Neighbors had briefly attempted to brave the storm and bring their things inside, but the weather had driven everyone back into their warm, comfortable homes very quickly.
Everyone except me.
A genuine monster of a storm had built overhead. The rain was coming down hard enough to erase the houses down the street behind a solid curtain of water. Black sky cracked and rumbled, sending lightning down at intervals that kept reminding me — helpfully, and it actually was helping — exactly why I was standing out here. It was working. In two weeks of training, today was the first session where I'd felt something meaningfully shift, just from pushing myself in brutal conditions and staring at the primary weapon of the man who'd put the people I cared about in the hospital.
Classic. Embarrassingly, textbook classic. Dig through the backstories of any two superheroes or villains and in at least two out of three cases you'll find grief and revenge at the root. Electro had done an efficient job of turning himself into my personal, painfully unoriginal motivating grievance.
I had the rough shape of a plan. Finding him wasn't going to be a problem either — I had the feeling that if I simply went back to South Central, he'd find me himself and finish what he'd started. Last time someone had interrupted him, and based on how quickly he'd vanished, whoever came after him had been fast and dangerous. He might have been caught already. But I didn't entirely believe that. Or perhaps I simply hoped he hadn't been.
The first thing I'd focused on was my power. Control — that was everything. Herman's ability was extraordinary in scope, if you actually thought about it. The pressurized water blast from my palm alone was something most people couldn't produce. But I was certain I could do more. I had enough sense not to try grabbing everything at once, so I'd focused on specific things I'd actually need to beat Electro.
Beyond the small, constant manipulations that had always come easily, I'd started working with large volumes of water, ramping the difficulty up until I was completely spent every session. No giant tentacles, no water prisons, nothing theatrical. Just a dome of water — one I could hold and operate within, and that I could control with more freedom, more confidence, and more precision than anything I'd managed before.
Every night the water park rang with a loud crash when my strength gave out and the water I'd raised from the pool came back down. Night after night, unsettling the occasional late passerby and the long-suffering Mr. Ramirez, the security guard who had been kind to me from day one. I genuinely felt bad about disturbing that good man. He'd brought me tacos once, made by his wife. Incredibly good. I was never eating anything that spicy and rich again in my life.
Back to the present.
Tonight I was trying something different. Standing in the backyard of the house I shared with Grandma, working my power continuously for hours, running the same technique over and over until there was nothing left — and the storm gave me cover to make as much noise as I needed.
Above my head, a dome of water held the rain back, keeping the yard dry and intact while everything around it soaked. It shuddered and buckled and threatened to collapse every few seconds, but it held, rebuilt each time by my will and my flagging strength.
Sweat poured down my face in streams. Large salt drops ran down my body in sheets, especially along my shaking arms, which I held raised above my head with fingers spread wide.
I had my jaw locked so hard my teeth were grinding. The moisture coming off my own body had more or less stopped being something I consciously managed — but the dome was holding. The volume of water inside it grew with every second, and the harder and angrier the rain became, the more effort it took to keep it from coming down.
"*Come on* — hold!"
My left arm cramped. The limb was still healing, and it answered the sustained effort with deep, bone-level pain. I held anyway. My eyes stayed fixed on the lightning in the sky.
In previous sessions I'd had to convince myself to keep going — to find the logic, to articulate the reasons. Not tonight. Fear of a genuinely dangerous opponent, disappointment in myself, the specific anger of someone who wants to settle a debt, and a clear target in front of me — all of it kept me on my feet. And most of all, the fact that Amanda still hadn't woken up, which made each session more relentless than the last.
Nearly ten more minutes. Then my knees buckled and I threw myself sideways to avoid being buried as the dome came down all at once, crashing to earth behind me, taking out the fence and showering me with water, clumps of mud, and torn grass.
"Not bad… really not bad… bleh."
The stress, or the exhaustion, or both. I'd gotten used to it. Lately I walked around soaking wet as a matter of course — same as those first days in Herman's body, same as the soldiers at Guadalcanal I'd once read about.
"All right, n-need to eat… and sleep." I hobbled toward the house on legs that had stopped cooperating. On the way through the back entry I picked up a pair of dehumidifiers — the liquid I'd been collecting from them was probably the central ingredient in my plan. It had to work. Because if it didn't, Electro would simply cook me down to charred bone and there wouldn't be enough left to bury.
I turned the television on without looking at it and put something in the microwave. I was about to drop onto the couch and start pulling the collected moisture together when a familiar voice came through the speakers.
"It's a terrible tragedy, without question." A bald man in a simple blue shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow sat giving an interview, smiling directly into the camera. Perfectly even teeth, a persuasive gaze, a strong jaw — the reporter taking his statement was turning noticeably pink every time he glanced her way. "But our electrical company will have all the infrastructure damage repaired quickly — you have my word on that."
The remote control creaked in my grip.
I straightened slowly, leaning toward the screen, staring at the face. My imagination required no effort at all to place a tight costume and a ridiculous mask on it. Electro was barely hiding. He was practically doing a Superman impression — same face, different outfit.
I swallowed and moved closer to the old television, turning up the volume. My eyes drifted to the lower corner of the screen, where the name of the man being interviewed was printed in plain text.
"But Mr. Dillon, the financial losses must be enormous," the reporter said, leaning in with a smile that was just slightly too enthusiastic, letting her gaze travel across the broad-shouldered figure. "How do you—"
"Don't worry about it." Maxwell Dillon winked at the camera and swept a hand toward the power lines visible behind him. "Our company has been doing this for a long time. We can restore everything quickly, and for a fraction of what anyone else would charge. We've been working this territory for years, actually — nearly all the wiring in the southern districts was originally installed and upgraded by us."
"That's remarkable. And I understand you're leaving for the East Coast in the next few days — your company is—"
I stopped hearing the rest.
The memories from that night ran through me in a single hot current, and I was on my feet before I'd consciously decided to move. I had to get ready immediately. I had to get to him before he left for the other side of the country.
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