Hero (Gone 9)

Dekka swallowed and nodded and could only say, “Yep.”

“I’m sorry, Dekka,” Shade said, hanging her head. “I just . . . It doesn’t matter, I’m sorry.”

Dekka sighed, and as Armo stepped aside she took Shade in an embrace. “It’s hard, Shade. All of this. Violence. Hurting people, even if you have no choice. Seeing people hurt. Seeing people afraid or in pain. It just hurts, Shade.” And Shade felt Dekka’s body shake with suppressed sobs.

“I used to wonder why so many FAYZ survivors became drunks or druggies. Or suicides.” Shade stepped back and brushed away tears. Cruz appeared with a box of tissues.

“This stuff, you want to just put it all in a box,” Dekka said. “But it never fits. You can never quite close the lid on that box. All of a sudden, from nowhere, for no reason, it just hits you.” She accepted a tissue with a nod to Cruz. “We had this girl, Mary? She was a saint—I mean, if I ever met a saint. Mother Mary, we called her . . . and she broke. All of it, the fear mostly, I guess, it broke her. I watched Mary lead a group of little kids off the edge of . . . That kind, sweet girl . . . She just came apart. And people always think, ‘Oh, that won’t happen to me; I’m tough.’ But you’ll be standing in a line at Starbucks or whatever, everything fine, and then it’ll come back, and suddenly you have to sit down, you know? It knocks the wind out of you.”

Armo said, “Look, as long as we don’t know the game, we can be outplayed.”

“It’s not a game,” Shade said, frowning. “This is people’s lives.”

“But it’s still a game,” Armo insisted, “and we don’t know what the rules are. Do we sacrifice people? How many? Do we just kill any mutant who does something bad? I mean, what is it we’re doing? What are we?”

Shade was about to say something dismissive, but she recognized that there was truth in what Armo was saying.

“Maybe Armo’s right,” Shade admitted, her voice sounding like she felt: defeated. “If we play by some set of rules we don’t even understand or know, we’ll lose going up against assholes who know exactly what they want.”

Cruz started to speak but was ignored.

“I thought we were supposed to be the good guys,” Dekka said. “What the hell is the point if we’re as ruthless as they are? If we turn into them, how is that a win?”

Shade shook that off impatiently. “We need to cut out the false equivalence here. We aren’t looking to hurt people. We aren’t looking to enslave people. We’re trying to stop all of that.”

Cruz tried to speak again, but again was overridden, this time by Armo. “Hey, it’s not like we’re giving up. We lost a round, just a round. Like Malik said. Round One, ding-ding-ding.”

Cruz held up a hand and was ignored again, then said, “Ahem. Excuse me! If I could maybe say a word or two?”

“What?” Shade snapped.

“We’re all here, all six of us, and yet I hear footsteps upstairs,” Cruz said.

That stopped conversation dead. Shade was already morphing. But then someone appeared, walking down the stairs.

“Who the hell are you?” Dekka demanded. “You’ve got like three seconds.”

“We’ve met,” the girl said. “My name is Simone. Simone Markovic. Sometimes I’m blue.”

“How did you get in here?”

Simone raised an eyebrow. “I fly, remember? I followed you and came in through a bedroom window. And I’m not here looking for a fight.”

“Well, what do you think, Shade?” Dekka snarked, some of her anger coming back. “Should we just go ahead and kill her? You want me to shred her, or do you want to do it yourself?”

“Simone?” Malik stood and held out his hand. “We spoke briefly . . .”

“You mean you distracted me so Shade could throw a blanket over my father.”

Malik tilted his head in acknowledgment. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

Simone, cautious, edged past the glowering Dekka and the bemused Armo and sat stiff and rigid. Cruz sat beside her, signaling her own choice to listen rather than attack.

“Are you here to beg for your father’s life?” Shade asked.

“I guess in a way I am,” Simone said. And with that the temperature in the room dropped a few degrees. There was a collective sigh.

“Understandable,” Dekka allowed. “He is your father.”