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They turned on me, eventually. Oh, they were so concerned, my boys. Only for my own good, only because they were so worried about my delicate constitution!
“She can’t control it,” Paravox whispered to the Professor.
“No one could,” Bruce hurried to say, so I wouldn’t take it personally.
“The more she uses her powers, the less human she gets,” Hal Cyon sighed, looking so fucking earnest while he called me less than human. So fucking sincere.
“What the fuck, Hal,” I snapped. “You can turn into a time-traveling dragon. How human are you?”
Crucible couldn’t even look at me. “Maybe if you could just . . . hold back a little. Until you can figure out exactly what happened out there and whether it’s hurting her.”
They all stood around Professor Yes’s desk like veterinarians discussing a rowdy horse in need of breaking.
“Since when,” I said softly, “is power a problem for any of you?”
“You don’t understand,” Zigzag pleaded.
I stared them all down. “Sure I do. Hold back. Got it.”
If you could just wait until it’s clear that none of the other children know the answer before raising your hand. Don’t read ahead of the rest of the class. No one likes a know-it-all.
Finally, Lodestone met the Millennials on the shores of Antarctica. Neutral ground. I floated above the snow. Whales came blinking out of the deeps to croon at me. I sang Bowie to them in the concert halls of their vast salted minds. We waited for Lodestone’s army, his twisted, angry mockingbirds, our opposite numbers. But the army didn’t come. Lodestone himself strode over the Ross Ice Shelf in his long silver cloak and his iron mask. He had one companion. A tall young man wearing white punk gear tourniqueted with straps of leather and rope, his head half shaved and half curling, shining black hair. His eyes were stitched savagely shut; two angry black X’s scrawled over them from brow to cheekbone. Those horrible, furious black X’s glowered all over his body, hundreds of them, big and small, shakily scribbled and boldly slashed and some carved into his flesh with knives. He didn’t seem to feel the cold; he carried no weapons.
His name was Retcon. He was new. He was strong. He was about to ruin my life.
I held back at first. I wanted Crucible and Bruce Force and the others to feel useful. I seethed, but I’m a team player. I always was. A nice girl doesn’t show off. Crucible lit up Lodestone in a column of fire; Zigzag darted around, too fast to see; Hal’s scales flipped up over his skin like playing cards. Paravox started incanting, his eyes turning to molten glass. Bruce went after Retcon with his blades.
But the new guy didn’t flinch. He dodged Bruce easily, casually, like he’d meant to bend practically in half anyway, and if it just happened to keep him out of the path of death, so much the better. He turned his awful stitched-up eyes to me. His mind hit mine. I knew he could see me. I knew his name. I knew with a sickening feeling in my gut that somehow he had fought this battle, this exact frigid, miserable fight, many times before. It was only new for us. Retcon spoke into the star-storm of my mind:
Hiya, Jules! Watch this!
Retcon reached up and dragged one long, sharp fingernail over his brown shoulder once, twice. A black X rose up on his skin as though he’d had a schoolkid’s Magic Marker up one sleeve.
Crucible burst into flames.
The fire that had never hurt Henry Hart, had always loved him and done whatever he asked, swallowed him whole. His skin blistered, scorched, peeled away. His bones cracked like kindling. I saw it all, I heard it all, I felt him die the way I always felt everything that had ever happened to him. I screamed—I became a scream. Nothing in me was not that scream. And the scream of me clawed reality apart. It threw Retcon north toward Buenos Aires at the speed of sound. It annihilated Lodestone’s mind and replaced it with the mind of a twelve-year-old Egyptian girl from the height of the Middle Kingdom. The scream of me dragged green grass and wildflowers out of the million-year freeze of the ice shelf and I fell onto that meadow, sobbing red Mars dust onto the warm, wet earth.
• • •
1:58 AM
So, yes. I lost it after Antarctica. I didn’t quit. I just . . . didn’t show up for work. I checked into a hotel in Buenos Aires and put a DO NOT DISTURB sign over my life. Professor Yes grazed my mind with phantom fingers, her green apple–scented thoughts searching for mine across the sea. I would not let her in. The TV clicked on in my room, the screen filled up with her miserable, stupid face, that fake maternal smile.
“Come home, Julia,” she said, her voice dripping with shit and kindness. I rolled over in the sweatheap of my griefbed and vaporized the television. I opened up the liquor cabinet of my head enough to lob one whiskey-bottle thought at her:
This is what happens when I hold back, Clara.
But I wouldn’t hold back again. I wouldn’t keep my hand down for one more second. I did whatever I wanted. I let the thing inside me, the thing that had grabbed hold of me somewhere between home and Mars, run wild. I turned the Casa Rosada into a ziggurat, then a pumpkin, then a very confused alpaca. I listened in on everyone in a way I hadn’t done since before St. Ovidius, sucking up their sticky, wadded-up little secrets. I drank and fucked anyone I could find and passed out in the street, a goddess sleeping in her own puke with a bag of old bread for a pillow, fighting the birds for it, setting the bolder ones on fire if they got too close. But then the fire would remind me, and the cobblestones shook and the sky went black and Henry died all over again in my head until I beat my skull against a friendly wall long enough to lose consciousness again.
Professor Yes followed me everywhere. She appeared on billboards, on the radio, in the pages of books, every word and image warping into hers.
Come home, Julia. Don’t do this to yourself.
We can’t just let someone like you run free, sweetheart. You’re not safe.
I think the fucking bothered the team the most. Every time I dragged someone home to make me feel real, the hotel room mirrors and microwave and appalling pastel paintings would explode with a hundred disapproving Professors. I ignored her. Who cared? Why should we all be with the same idiots we loved in high school? Dead idiots. Idiots on fire. A church window with Clara’s big dumb eyes tut-tutted that perhaps I was drawing some kind of terrible power from all these men, taking their souls, their anima. As if that was the only reason to let so many of them climb on top of me.
Leave me alone, you Puritan fucking outhouse. I shattered the window with a stomp of my shoes on the morning frost. They all thought that. I could hear them thinking that. I could hear Bruce Force thinking that at a goddamn strip club, but I couldn’t hear anyone thinking he was sucking those dancers dry. And neither was I. It was just sex. And loneliness. And hunger. And the utter nihilism of another human body.
