A breeze hits me, carrying with it the scent of blood. The purple lights are off. The darkness is almost complete.
My attention is pulled to the right, back toward the platform that brought us here, but there’s nothing in the air. No bats, no Champions. The ground of the ledge might have a few rat and bat bodies littering it, but the tracks themselves are clear of both rats and villains. Taranis is gone. The only thing on the ground are corpses.
Calmly, I exhale. Far too calmly. So calm that I know my therapist is going to have a fucking field day when I tell her about this, how curiosity, rather than abject fear, compels me now to turn around and head back into the utility closet.
To quote Taranis, “I’m not a fucking electrician,” but the problem with the electrical grid seems pretty obvious from where I’m standing.
There’s a huge box—several of them—but the door to one in particular hangs ajar. Feeling my way around, I open it all the way, and right there in the middle are three massive red handles, all pulled down. I lift all of them up. The lights flicker and return, just like that.
As I drop my camera back to my chest and drag my wrists across my damp hairline, I step back out onto the ledge into the tunnel and know that the power outage was intentional. The point was to draw him here. But to what end? Did they kidnap him? I don’t know. Did they kill him? I start to worry.
A shudder nips at my heels and spurs me to move, to get help. I don’t want to look at the dead men lying across the tracks, missing some of their ... parts. But it’s my job. As I take a series of shots that will count among my most gruesome photographs yet, I notice my camera. My Zfc. It fell off the ledge but is lying face up near one booted foot, spattered in blood.
Dropping onto the tracks, I pocket my backup camera and snap a few final photos of the dead and of the thousands of tiny, bloody rat footprints tracking away from them. I don’t have my phone, so I can’tcall anyone for help, but I remember that the men held keys to the service corridor, which I’ll need to get back to the car—and the car keys, at that. I retrieve both from one of their vest pockets. I have blood on my hands, which I wipe off on my pants. I keep going.
Under the watchful eyes of the flickering orange lights lining the tunnel, I make it back to the platform. Taranis is there, and I feel a small spark of relief to see him pacing slowly back and forth. He’s simultaneously trying to peel pieces of bloody uniform out of the grooves on his chest. I heard his footsteps before I could see him, but seeing him and the look he gives me—pure contempt sprinkled with confusion—still surprises me as I pull myself back up onto the platform ledge.
“You’re still alive?” he has the audacity to ask.
I hold out my arms, refusing to dignify that with a response.
He huffs, “I’m leaving. Find your own way out.”
“Sure, but first can you approve these pictures? I want to get them to the editor and out as soon as possible.” I hold out my camera, and when I get close enough, he snatches it from my grip.
I watch the mean expression on his face sharpen and then relax, bit by bit. “You took all of these?”
I assume the dumb question to be rhetorical, and give him a bland look.
He grunts, his gaze flicking away from mine back to the little screen. “Is this everything?” he asks next, handing the camera back to me.
I consider showing him the film from the recording I took with my backup camera, and the other footage from my camera still mounted on its tripod filming the tunnel, but decide against it. The camera fell. There’s a high chance I’ll have to scrap all but a few stills, if I’m lucky. And the only thing my mounted camera caught was Taranis and me coming and going and the other two SDD guys just ... going.
“Just these and the recording from the platform,” I say, gesturing to the fixed camera. “Though this one didn’t see much.”
“Fine. Send those you showed me to my team immediately. You can call the SDD if you want to get help for those idiots who were with us.”
“‘Help’? You meanbody bags?”
He shrugs. “Don’t care. Tell the SDD I did what I could to help y’all, but you were the only one with the grit to make it. Or don’t. I don’t give a fuck.” He takes a few steps away from me, spitting curses as his gaze refocuses on his injuries. He’s got wounds covering his face, his neck, and chest, and ordinarily I might grant a little grace to someone so badly injured, but I know his wounds have no bearing on the way he’s speaking to me now.
I feel so strange. Not ...angrythat I’ve clearly been manipulated. That he told me what he needed to tell me to get me to agree to take his picture in what is one of the worst contracts I’ve ever signed, including the BS contracts handed over to me when I was young and green, just starting out, a young, talented Black female photographer white men with money thought they could manipulate. And I don’t feel shocked like I did when I first got in that armored car this afternoon and heard the way he was speaking to the now dead.
No, it’s clear who this male is. Who he’s always been. I just didn’t see it. I saw the version reflected in the posters on my childhood bedroom walls. I sawTaranis, the brand. But this thing here? This is who he really is. This is what his soul looks like. Who he is beneath this beautiful veneer of humanesque skin. I wonder whether his alien face is just as handsome or if it more accurately reflects his inner ugliness. Whatever the case, I won’t be surprised if he eventually reverts, whatever his face looks like.
It was too much to hope that the world could have a hero like the one he’s presented himself to be. Someone wholly good, so beautiful on the inside that his outside could only reflect it. I feel a little ... dumb for having been so severely duped, but in my surprise not surprised at all. After all, Taranis is only proving the old adage that if anything seems too good to be true, it is. Because even perfect veneers can have rotten cores.
“All right.”
He gives me a lingering look over his shoulder, eyes narrowing as if I’ve grumbled an insult at his back he didn’t quite hear. He finally grunts. “Don’t forget about your NDA. You tell anyone I let those SDD guys die, and I will kill you and make it look like an accident.”
“I believe you.”
He turns to face me fully then, his gaze so narrowed I’d think his eyes were shut if I couldn’t see the bright-purple light blazing out of them. The orange lights on the wall flicker purple too. He opens his mouth to speak, then shuts it, then shakes his head as if shaking off a thought before he repeats, “You can find your own way out.”
“I will.”
“I’m not going to help you.”
