Villain (Gone 8)

“I have an Italian cold cut and a ham and cheese. Also chips.”

Cruz said nothing, but pushed open the door, leaned out, and vomited onto the concrete.

Without a word, Shade handed her a bottle of water. Cruz swirled and spit, then drank the entire bottle and dropped the empty. Then she took the Italian cold-cut sub, wolfed down half of it, swallowed, and mumbled, “Thanks.”

Shade nodded and looked away.

This was a new Shade Darby. Cruz had always seen her strange, brilliant, ruthlessly determined friend as two people in one body: there was the pretty, vaguely punk-looking girl with the interesting scar up one side of her neck. That Shade Darby was amused, kind, a bit distant but supportive. Then there was what Cruz thought of as the shark, the cold, calculating young woman with the brilliant mind.

This was a different girl, neither easygoing Shade nor the shark. This was a wounded Shade, an un

certain Shade. A girl who had made decisions that destroyed her relationship with her only surviving parent, dragged Cruz into a life of felonies piled upon felonies, and, finally, left Malik screaming in unbearable agony, a charcoal and melted-flesh version of the boy Shade had once loved and been loved by.

“How are you?” Shade asked, practically cringing, as if she expected Cruz to berate her.

But as Shade had come to recognize the damage she had done, Cruz had come to accept her own complicity. No one had put a gun to her head to force her to follow Shade. Cruz had been the new kid in school, a mid-semester transfer after being kicked out of a Catholic school for wearing dresses. Evanston, Illinois, was still a bastion of relative tolerance, but the nastiness that had come to be a part of American life, even at the highest levels, had threatened her. Until Shade. Shade’s friendship had spread an umbrella of safety over Cruz at school, and Cruz had leaped at the chance to have a friend. She had quickly seen that Shade was obsessed with the death of her mother on the day of the Perdido Beach Anomaly four years earlier, when the FAYZ dome had fallen. And Cruz knew that Shade’s head was filled with fantasies of revenge against the monstrous being called Gaia who had used her powers for slaughter. But Cruz knew as well that Shade’s revenge fantasies were just that, fantasies. No one can get revenge on a dead thing, and Gaia, that evil child, had died, destroyed in the end by the courage and sense of justice of an autistic child called Little Pete, and the charming sociopath Caine.

And yet, step by step, Cruz had gone along with Shade. She had chosen to take the rock herself, to become Rockborn. She had then acquired and learned to use a superhuman power. And she had raised nothing but the most token objections as Shade used her super-speed to steal money and cars and phones to keep them going.

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa, Cruz thought, an echo of her upbringing in the church. My fault. My most grievous fault.

Hero, villain, and monster, that was the three-part taxonomy of superhumans, according to Malik. Shade was meant to be a hero, intended to be a hero, wanted to be a hero, and Cruz, to the extent she’d really thought about it, imagined herself as a sort of Robin to Shade’s Batman, a sidekick.

I’m not even starring in my own life.

But at the moment, the hollow-eyed, quiet, sad girl beside Cruz did not inspire notions of heroism. She looked like Cruz imagined soldiers must look after far too long in battle.

“What do we do?” Cruz asked, hating herself for the question, hating the weakness that made her turn to Shade for the answers even now, even with Malik a few hundred yards away with tubes in his throat and veins, with tubes collecting his bloodred urine, with acres of gauze and gallons of salves hiding the horror show his body had become.

Shade lowered her head to look through the windshield and up at the hospital. “I guess they’ll do skin grafts and—”

“No,” Cruz said. She shook her head. “They’re not thinking of fixing him, they’re waiting for him to die.”

A spasm twisted Shade’s face, squeezing her eyes shut, making a grimace of her mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and these she did not brush away.

Cruz said, “His only hope is the rock. Too much deep-tissue damage. His legs . . . I was there when they changed the dressings. His legs are just bones with chunks of burned meat attached, like, like those turkey legs they sell at fairs. It was awful. Terrible. There’s no coming back from that, Shade. Malik is dead unless the rock . . .”

Shade cried silently for a while, her forehead on the steering wheel, hands limp in her lap.

“I don’t know what to do,” Shade said finally. “I don’t—”

But Cruz did not hear the end of the sentence because at that moment a wave of unspeakable pain assaulted her with a suddenness and violence that wrung whinnying, panicked screams from her mouth.

Shade, too, shrieked in agony, her face distorted like a figure from some medieval painting of hell’s torments.

And it wasn’t stopping; it wasn’t lessening; the two girls writhed and shook and bellowed in pain as if they were burning alive inside the car. Shade screamed and slapped at her body as if she was on fire. Cruz pushed open the door of the car, panicked, believing the car had caught fire.

It was the worst thing either had ever felt, and it would not stop. And through a mist of tears and with senses twisted by mind-shattering agony, Cruz realized that they were not alone: people were streaming from the hospital, crying, screaming, rolling on the ground, tearing the hair from their heads.

“Morph!” Shade yelled. “Now!”

Cruz understood, though holding on to even a snippet of thought was almost impossible. Agony lent wings to the transformation as Cruz, the six-foot-tall trans girl, became to all appearances a large young black woman with dreadlocks. Cruz had gone to the first image that popped in her mind, their fellow Rockborn mutant, the FAYZ survivor Dekka Talent.

Shade at the same time had changed even more drastically. Her face narrowed and seemed to sweep back, like a person in a wind tunnel. Her russet hair became a solid punk-rock-looking wedge. Her body seemed to be covered in something like plastic, like she was a less slick version of a Power Ranger. Her knees reversed direction, making a noise like wet stones tumbling, becoming insectoid, inhuman.

In seconds Shade was the vibrating speed demon she could become at will. And Cruz was Dekka. The pain was subdued, lessened, manageable, but it was still right there, like a physical force, like standing beside a rampaging river and feeling its power even if all that hit you were drops of spray. They were no longer in that river but felt its devastating power and knew that one slip . . .

“Malik,” Shade said, slowing her speech to normal time so that Cruz could understand. It was like dragging a finger on a vinyl record to slow it down, words slurring but understandable.