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“It’s no use ignoring me,” he said airily. “I can find it. There’s only so many places a nasty, stupid, bad girl hides her filthy little diary. Under the bed? Under the mattress with her magazines? In her makeup drawer? Or have you got a loose floorboard? That would be a classic.”
I don’t read magazines. I don’t have a makeup drawer. My music professor stepped daintily around the edges of my bedroom, listening for a creak, a click, a groan. Please no, I thought, and Tom locked eyes with me. Floor of mine, just this once, shut up.
Creak. Groan.
Dr. A leapt to the floorboard and pried it up. Tom vanished from under my hands. It happened at a speed I couldn’t see, the speed of mistakes, which is faster than anything in the universe. Later, Tom told me he almost got the vials out of Augustus’s hand. But he’d never been shot before. The bullet had shattered his collarbone. He didn’t know how to counterbalance the damage. So, I watched as Dr. Augustus poured my hypermercury onto the ruined stump where his hand had been, rubbed it onto his bare arms and his neck like soap. He laughed, a real villain’s laugh—he never had to practice once. New, silvery fingers stretched out of his scar tissue, longer and thinner and stronger than any human fingers, slicing up out of his skin like knives. He screamed. He laughed again. His eyes became diamonds.
• • •
The rest happened about how you’d expect. There’s a certain inertia to these things. Heroes in motion tend to stay in motion, but villains in motion tend toward mass destruction.
Doctor Nocturne was born.
He built his machine, a great, terrible organ buried deep within the city, on which he could play out his symphony of death. With one chord, he proclaimed to every news station, he could electrify the whole of Manhattan. With another, he would bring it crashing down. Tom kept telling me to stay home. After all, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t help. Just stay home and wait, Paige. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I understood how hypermercury worked, what Nocturne had done. It was my fault. I had to fix it. The last thing I said to Tom Thatcher was: I am not going to stay home like a good little girl. I am going to beat him.
When Tom says shit like that, the universe rearranges itself to make it true. When I said it, the universe pissed itself laughing.
They fought on the bridge. Doctor Nocturne,
so much more eager to push the hypermercury past its limits than Tom had ever been, surrounded by great silver arms like a fucked-up mecha-Shiva, laughing that perfect, sick laugh, while I ran past them, small, dark, quiet, trying for once in my life to be unnoticed. One of those silver arms picked me up and flung me over the edge like I was a paper cup. The garbageman’s daughter, thrown away. Oh, Tommy jumped after me. He did. My love. My hero. Caught me just in time, just before I hit the water. But a funny thing about bodies. They can’t stop once they really get going. Girls in motion tend to stay in motion. Kid Mercury caught me and the sudden stop snapped my neck in half. The ends of my hair dripped out the East River onto Tom’s feet and the violet lights of Doctor Nocturne’s machine lit up the night and pretty soon they were the only lights left in my eyes.
• • •
Tom’s got a girl now who stays home when she’s told. A good girl. A girl who leaves the fixing up to him. I was just the prototype, the Act One conflict who had to go so the story could grow a little more gravitas. Some days, I’m okay with that. But some days? Some days I want to rise up out of the dark, rip open Kid Mercury’s throat, and drink back every drop of my 2.21% solution, my fault, my mother, my quicksilver, my speed, my strength, my story.
But Paige Embry is dead. So, all she gets is a cigarette from one of the Hell Hath girls, plucked out of a black case. Up there, cigarettes taste like tar and ash. Down here, they taste like sunlight.
THE HELL HATH CLUB VS. THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM
The door to the Lethe Café swings open. A fresh gust of leafy moonlight blows in. Behind the counter, good old Neil wipes his claws on his apron and waves to the tall redhead. She vanishes before she reaches the till to place her order. When she reappears, she’s a brunette. She only gets half a word out before she blinks out again. We’re all used to it. Julia never stays long, but she never leaves for long, either. By the time she gets her cup of nothing, she’s got a shaved head like a prisoner and she’s wearing the ragged ruin of some uniform I don’t recognize.
“Hi, Paige,” she says shyly, scooting in next to me. “Sorry I’m late.” She disappears. Reappears. Gone again. Back for more.
Julia Ash is always late.
Julia lives in the apartment across the alley from mine. She gets the Times and the Deadtown Funnies every morning. Milk delivered twice a week. Sometimes I sit on my fire escape and watch her try to make herself eggs. She flickers in and out and in and out and the yolk plops onto the floor or the counter or gets hurled against a cabinet in frustration. If the egg makes it into the pan, it always burns before she can hold on to a spatula long enough to scrape it onto a plate. Then she cries. The only way Jules ever gets breakfast is if the gargoyle who lives above her takes pity and fries her a sunny-side up on his red-hot demonic palm. His name is Christopher. He has a crocodile face and four green tongues and a high jazzy tenor. Sometimes Christopher holds her while she cries, cries and whispers: Please let me stay. Please let me stay.
Julia is pretty fucked up.
She lights up Deadtown style: fish a burning cig out of your purse, flick your lighter, and dark flows up to extinguish your smoke. She breathes the drifting ash.
“I can’t stay,” she says.
No shit. Gone. Here. Redhead. Brunette. Blonde. A bruise on her cheek. No, wait, on her shoulder. A black eye. She’s always so nervous. Shaking. Clenching her hands into fists and letting go and clenching again. “Lucas gets angry if I’m not home when he gets back from work.”
THE HEAT DEATH OF JULIA ASH
On Monday, I am Julia Ash. I dye my hair cranberry red and live in a trendy suburb with three cats, two teakettles, and one first edition Jane Eyre on which I have never once spilled ramen broth.
On Tuesday, I eat a star.
On Wednesday, I stand silently in front of a classroom at St. Ovidius’s School for Wayward Children, a sensible brunette in sensible pumps, lecturing telepathically on the fall of the Byzantine Empire.
On Thursday, I tuck a platinum curl behind my ear, hit send on a new UrbanFeed article and reach over Audrey III, my ginger tabby, for my tea. She leaps away over a stack of papers, spilling a bowl of hot ramen, staining the left corner of Jane Eyre the color of oyster sauce.
On Friday, I am Charybdis, Insatiable Devourer of Galaxies, and my hair is the color of a nebula. I starve in space, alone, naked. I am stronger than my hunger.
On Saturday, the Millennial Men fight Lodestone in the shadows of the Antarctic ice shelf. I pulled down mountains onto his head, and we freeze to death together, his black hair and mine fusing to the lichen forever.
