"God, it's so much smaller than I remember." — Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
Tokyo at three in the morning, local time, looked like a circuit board someone had set on fire.
The kaiju was thirty stories of armored fury, dragging its serrated tail through a pachinko parlor on the eastern edge of Shinjuku and roaring at frequencies that were rattling the glass out of windows for six blocks. Its hide was the color of wet stone, plated like something that had grown up under enormous pressure and had decided, somewhere along the line, that pressure was the only language it spoke. Six eyes. Eight legs, only four of which it appeared to be using. A jaw that articulated in ways jaws were not, traditionally, supposed to articulate.
Mark hovered three hundred meters above it in the rain, the triangle on his chest glowing steady through the under-suit's black weave, and listened to ARIA's threat assessment while his team finished their initial sweep of the evacuation corridors below.
"Probable origin: Pacific trench fissure. Estimated mass: four hundred and fifty metric tons. Exposed pressure points: six. Civilian casualties currently zero. Evacuation completion at ninety-four percent and rising." ARIA's voice was warm in the way a good copilot's voice was warm — clearly not human, but pitched for the kind of competence that didn't need to perform itself. "Atom Eve has the western perimeter contained. Blue Rush reports the subway lines are clear. The remaining six percent are non-evacuated by choice, mostly elderly residents who refused to leave their apartments."
"Mark them on the map. We work around them."
"Already done."
"Bulletproof?"
"On standby above your position. Awaiting your call."
Mark exhaled, watched the breath fog briefly inside his faceplate and dissipate as the suit's environmental cycle pulled it through. Below him, the kaiju snapped at the air with a kind of mindless hunger and brought its tail around in a sweep that would have leveled a residential block if Eve hadn't been there to soften the trajectory. Pink light bloomed outward from her position on a rooftop two streets over — a wide, low-arc construct that caught the tail's swing and redirected it into the open lot of a construction site, where it crashed into a stack of rebar and concrete forms instead of a building full of people who hadn't quite gotten out yet.
Four minutes, Mark thought. clock starts now.
He dropped.
The dive was clean. His decent was fast and controlled that put him on a vector aimed precisely at the joint between the kaiju's first and second armor plates — the only seam ARIA's scans had flagged as genuinely vulnerable on the dorsal side. He hit it with a forearm-extruded blade at full velocity, the nanites reconfiguring around his right arm into a tapered point that sang at a frequency the kaiju's tissue did not know how to refuse. The blade went in. The kaiju screamed. Mark was already pulling the blade back into the gauntlet, already pivoting in the air, already calling the next move.
"Monster Girl, north flank, now."
She came in from the north flank like a freight train with a personal grievance — eight feet of green, banded muscle slamming into the kaiju's shoulder joint with enough force to crack the plating on the leading edge. The kaiju turned to address her, which was the point of having a Monster Girl on your team. While its attention shifted, Mark dropped into the seam he'd opened and went to work on the muscle bundle underneath.
It was efficient. It was, by the standards of what they used to be, almost unfairly clean.
Black Samson's seismic bracelets discharged into the ground at a precisely calculated angle from the south, sending a focused wave through the bedrock that cracked the kaiju's footing and dropped its left rear leg through a sinkhole it hadn't existed thirty seconds earlier. Powerplex, soaring overhead, drank the kinetic energy out of three falling chunks of debris and routed it back into a single concussive blast that shattered the kaiju's mandible. Thunderbolt threaded a current along Powerplex's discharge line and added enough electrical surge to scramble the creature's central nervous system for a critical handful of seconds, during which Bulletproof — coming in from above at terminal velocity — connected with the back of the kaiju's skull at a forty-degree angle that drove the creature's head into the asphalt hard enough to register on local seismographs.
Three minutes, fifty-one seconds.
The kaiju went down.
Mark stayed in the air a moment longer, watching the aftermath, watching the steam rise off the carcass where Eve was already laying down containment constructs to keep any surviving spores or pathogens locked under a pink dome until the GDA's hazmat teams could arrive. Around the perimeter, civilians who had been told to stay in their shelters were filtering out anyway, holding up phones, pointing, taking video. Some of them were cheering. A handful were not.
Mark could see, on a balcony three blocks east, a woman holding her child up to look at him. The child waved.
A few rooftops over, a man stood with his arms crossed and his face set in the particular expression Mark had learned to read with depressing fluency over the past four months. Not all of them clap. The 31% had a face, several billion of them, and Mark had stopped pretending he didn't notice when he caught one in the wild.
He waved back to the kid. Didn't look at the man.
"Mission complete," Robot's voice came through the team channel. "Total engagement time: three minutes, fifty-three seconds. Civilian casualties: zero. Property damage: within acceptable parameters. Cleanup ETA: forty-five minutes."
"Nice work, everyone," Mark said, and meant it.
Rex's voice cut in. "Hey, Boss, that thing had really intense breath. Like, really intense. I want it on the record that I held my breath for two minutes during the engagement and I want a bonus for it."
"Noted," said Robot, with the long patience of a man who had been noting things about Rex for several years.
"Document it for HR," Rex insisted.
"There is no HR."
"Then we should get an HR."
"Noted."
Mark let himself smile inside the helmet. He felt the rain against the suit's surface, felt the faint pressure of his own heartbeat slowing back to baseline, and held position over the carcass for another twenty seconds while the rest of the team transitioned into cleanup. The triangle on his chest pulsed, steady, banking the small reservoir of stored kinetic he'd absorbed from the impact. Power levels nominal. Suit integrity at one hundred percent.
Four minutes. They used to need 10 mins for something like this.
Getting better, he thought.
He hit the thrusters and broke for the upper atmosphere. Tokyo fell away beneath him. The world curved.
He was home in nineteen minutes.
The dorm room was dark when he came through the window.
He retracted the helmet first — faceplate splitting, the nanites flowing back across his scalp in the reverse of their forming pattern — and then let the rest of the suit recall to the chest housing in a smooth ripple that left him standing in his under-suit, the black weave catching the light from the streetlamp outside in faint red-stitched seams. The triangle on his sternum dimmed to a low ember. The under-suit was breathable, comfortable, light against his skin in a way that the nano-armor wasn't quite — the armor had a presence to it, a density, that the under-suit lacked.
He walked across the room and dropped into his desk chair.
"ARIA, lights at thirty percent."
The lights came up at thirty percent.
"You have seven assignments outstanding," ARIA said, picking up exactly where she'd left off three hours ago when the kaiju alert had come through. She had perfect continuity. It was one of the things Mark liked about her. "Three are due tomorrow before noon. Two are due Friday. The remaining two are due next Tuesday but the professors have penalty windows for late submission that begin at midnight."
Mark rubbed his face with both hands. The skin felt tight in the way it always felt tight after a fight in cold rain — chapped, slightly raw, the suit's environmental seal good but not perfect against the long descent through subzero atmosphere.
"What are they."
"Two essays. One problem set. One lab report. Two reading reflections. One creative writing piece for the elective you keep forgetting you're enrolled in."
"The poetry one."
"The poetry one."
He let out a long breath. "Do them."
There was a small pause. ARIA had been programmed with a sense of humor that mostly stayed off, but it surfaced occasionally in the spaces where a human would have made a face.
"All of them?"
"All of them. Match my voice. Match my errors. Don't make any of them too good. Don't make any of them too bad. Submit them on staggered timing across the next thirty-six hours. The poetry one — make it about something I'd actually write about. Don't be fancy."
"Acknowledged."
"What else."
"You missed a call from Art Rosenbaum. He left voicemail."
Mark frowned. Art didn't call. Art ran a tailor shop and rebuilt the suits of professional violence-doers out of the back room of a converted brownstone in Brooklyn, and Art's preferred method of contact was you walking through his front door with cash in an envelope. He didn't leave voicemails.
"Play it."
"Hey, Mark. It's Art." A pause. The voice in the recording was Art's, but slower than Art's voice usually was. Heavier in the back of the throat. "Listen, when you get this, can you swing by your mom's place? Whenever you can. I'm — I'm here right now. It's nothing emergency, I just — yeah. When you can. Bye."
The recording ended.
Mark stared at the desk for a moment. The triangle on his chest cooled to ambient.
"ARIA."
"Yes."
"Open a line to Art."
The line opened on the second ring.
"Mark?"
"Hey, Art. What's going on."
"You got my message."
"Yeah. What's wrong."
There was a small pause on Art's end. The kind of pause where a person is weighing how to say something and discovering, in the weighing, that there isn't a good way.
"It's your mom."
Mark was already standing.
"What's wrong with her."
"She's not — physically, nothing. She's not hurt. She's just —" Art's voice did the thing voices did when a person was trying to be careful with something fragile in front of someone who had a complicated relationship with the fragile thing. "She's having a hard time, kid. I came over to drop off a sweater she'd left at the shop and she — yeah. She's having a hard time."
"On my way."
"Mark, you don't have to —"
"On my way, Art. Thirty seconds."
He cut the line.
The triangle on his chest flared awake before he'd finished the sentence. He didn't even need to think about it anymore — the neural interface read the intent at the level where intent and motion were the same thing, and the nanites poured outward in the familiar liquid wave, red across the chest and shoulders, black settling into the joints and segmentation, the helmet forming last and the faceplate sealing with the soft hiss that he had stopped noticing months ago. Two seconds, start to finish. The suit was on. The world was in his HUD as he floated in the air.
He went out the window.
The flight was a streak.
He didn't bother with stealth profile. He went up, hit the layer where the air thinned enough to stop pulling at him, and burned across the eastern seaboard at a velocity that would have set off six different early-warning systems if Cecil hadn't long since flagged Mark's signature as friendly across all of them. The HUD overlaid trajectory data, ETA to destination, atmospheric resistance, passive scans of the air ahead for anything in his way. There was nothing in his way. Nothing on this planet was in his way when he was moving like this.
Twenty-eight seconds, by ARIA's count.
He came down in his parents' backyard in a hard descent — too hard, he knew it was too hard the moment he committed to it, but committed was what he was — and the impact hit the lawn like a god dropping a hammer. The grass compressed in a circle. The flagstones under his boots cracked along three lines. The shockwave rolled outward in a low wave that rattled the windows of every house on the block, set off two car alarms, made a wind chime four houses down sing a long unhappy note.
A half-second later, in the GDA surveillance van parked two streets over, three different pieces of equipment lit up red, and a junior agent shouted seismic event, residential sector, and a calm hand from across the van — Donald's hand, by the cuff link — touched his shoulder and said, "It's just Mark."
"Sir?"
"It's Mark. Suit signature in the readout. Flag it as Invincible-arrival, log the time, stand down."
"Yes, sir."
The kaiju adrenaline was still in Mark's blood. He felt it in his hands as he walked across the back lawn — the suit retracting now, peeling back into the chest housing in the reverse waves, leaving him in the under-suit and his boot on the cold flagstones. The triangle dimmed.
The back door opened before he reached it.
Art Rosenbaum stood in the threshold. Sixty-something. Wire-rimmed glasses. The cardigan he wore at the shop, the gray one with the leather patches. He had a dish towel over his shoulder, which was an Art Rosenbaum kind of detail — he had been doing something useful in the kitchen, because Art could not exist in a house and not do something useful.
He looked at Mark. Looked at the cracked flagstones. Looked back at Mark.
"Hey, Mark."
"Hey, Art."
"Damn, you got here fast."
"Yeah."
A beat.
"Is mum okay," Mark said.
Art's face did a complicated thing. The mouth opened, started a word, didn't commit to it, started another, didn't commit to that either. He pulled the dish towel off his shoulder and wrung it once between his hands, the way he sometimes wrung a measuring tape when he was thinking about how to explain that a customer's shoulders had become uneven.
"Yeah," he said. "I — uhm — yeah. I think so."
He stepped aside to let Mark in.
The house smelled like home. That was the first thing. It always smelled like home, even with everything that had happened, even with Nolan's absence sitting in every room like furniture nobody had moved. Coffee, faintly. The lavender candle Debbie liked. The particular warm-wood smell of the floors that Mark had never been able to identify but had memorized at some level deeper than the conscious one. He had walked into this house thousands of times. He had walked into this house seven years old and twenty-two years dead and he had walked into it as a thirty-year-tour veteran of a dimension whose air tasted like copper.
It always smelled like home.
"Mum?" he called.
There was no answer. There was only a sound from the living room, low, a sound he recognized before he had time to name it, because he had heard it before and he had heard it through floors and walls and the windows of a hospital room — the sound of his mother crying.
He walked through the kitchen. Art followed at a distance.
The living room was lit by the television and one lamp.
Debbie sat on the couch in her bathrobe. Her hair was tied back the way she tied it at night when she didn't expect anyone, and she had a glass of wine in one hand and the remote in the other, and the television was playing the leaked clip. The clip had been on the internet for four months now. It had been translated into seventy-two languages. It had been analyzed frame by frame by every conspiracy theorist, news network, and academic with a YouTube channel on the planet. Mark had not watched it since the day it had leaked, but he didn't need to watch it to know which line was playing when his mother's whole body did the small, contained shudder he saw it do as he walked into the room.
Your mother is more like a pet to me ———— and for the first time in your life, I'm telling you the truth.
His own face on the screen, in the freeze-frame the network had cut to. The expression on it was one he didn't remember making. The man saying pet was —
His father.
His mother was sitting six feet from the screen, watching it, with a glass of wine in her hand and the kind of crying that wasn't loud, that wasn't dramatic, that was just water coming out of a person who had run out of places to put it.
"Debbie," Art said gently from the doorway. "We have company."
She startled. Wiped her face with the back of her hand the way a person does when they are absolutely not going to make a production of it. Set the wine glass down on the coffee table with a precision that bordered on dignity. Looked up.
"Oh, Mark — sweetie, I didn't know you were home." Her voice was thicker than she wanted it to be, but she wrestled it almost back to normal in the space of the sentence. She turned her head toward Art. "Hi, Art, when did you come in? How have you been?"
"I've been here twenty minutes, Debbie." Art's smile was small and tired. "You barely noticed."
"Oh." She laughed. It was a small laugh, and it caught in the middle. "Oh, God. Sorry, Art. Sorry."
"I'm fine, Debbie. It's you I'm worried about." Art walked into the room slowly, the way you walked into rooms that contained something you didn't want to startle. He sat in the armchair across from the couch — Nolan's chair, technically, which Mark noticed and knew Art had also noticed and knew Art was choosing on purpose, because Art was somebody who chose where he sat. "If you're in the mood to talk, me and Mark are happy to listen to whatever you've got to say."
Debbie's face did something. The composure cracked along an interior seam, and she covered her mouth with the heel of her hand for a moment and Mark, standing at the doorway, understood that his arrival had not actually been the thing she'd been steeling herself for. The thing she'd been steeling herself for had been here all evening. The wine glass was almost empty. There was a second one, also almost empty, on the side table by the lamp.
"Trust me," she said, and her voice was wet, "I've got — there's some things I'd like to get off my chest, but I — Mark —"
She looked at him.
He understood. He understood in the specific way you understood things when you had been a son for two lifetimes, and your mother was looking at you across a couch trying not to break apart in front of you.
"It's okay, mum," he said, gently. "I was just about to turn in anyway. I'll make some dinner and stay up in my old room, if you don't mind."
Her face broke a little more, but in a different direction.
"Oh, sweetie." She stood up. She came around the coffee table and across the rug and she hugged him.
She hugged him for a long time.
She was smaller than he remembered. She had always been smaller than he remembered, because every time he came home she had gotten incrementally smaller in his arms and he had only noticed it in the cumulative, but tonight the smallness was sharper, was more present. Her head fit under his chin. He felt her breathing — controlled, deliberate, the slow regulated breathing of a person who was trying not to fall apart on her son. He felt her shoulder blade through the bathrobe.
He held her.
Across the room, Art was looking at the carpet with the careful, polite gaze of a man who had given up a long time ago on being a person who pretended he wasn't seeing the thing he was seeing, but who was still a gentleman about where to put his eyes when somebody else's grief was running through the room. Mark caught a flicker of his face. Art was smiling. Not happily. The small, sad, complicated smile of a man who had known a family for twenty-five years and had watched part of it unravel and was watching, right now, the part of it that hadn't unraveled hold itself together in a doorway.
"Thanks, sweetie," Debbie said into Mark's collarbone. "And no, I don't mind. You're always welcome here."
"I know."
"You're always welcome here."
"I know, mum."
She let him go.
She wiped her face with the dish towel Art had left on the arm of the chair, smiled a small wrecked smile in Art's direction, and sat back down on the couch. The television was still playing. She picked up the remote and turned it off. The screen went dark and the room got darker.
"Right," Mark said. He cleared his throat. "Dinner. Art, you eaten?"
"I had a sandwich at four."
"That doesn't count."
"It was a good sandwich."
"It still doesn't count."
"Fair enough."
Mark went into the kitchen.
The pasta was simple. He had stocked his mother's pantry himself, six weeks ago, when he'd realized she had been eating mostly toast. Linguine, olive oil, garlic, a can of crushed tomatoes, the basil that grew on the windowsill in the small clay pot his father had bought ten years ago at a farmer's market on the Cape. He cooked the way he did most things now — fast, methodical, unsentimentally efficient. The garlic browned. The pasta hit the water. The sauce simmered down.
He plated three bowls, grated parmesan over each one with a hand that did not shake, found three forks, walked the bowls into the living room on a tray.
"Here you go, mum."
"Oh, Mark." She took the bowl with both hands. She didn't eat any of it for a long moment. She just held it, looking down at it, the way a person held something warm when they were cold. "Thank you."
"You want a drink?" Art said, standing.
"God, yes."
Art went into the kitchen. Mark sat on the couch beside his mother and ate his pasta and didn't say anything because there was nothing to say. His mother didn't eat. After a minute, she set the bowl on the coffee table and stared at it. Art came back with two more glasses of wine — a small one for her, a regular one for himself — and set hers down beside the bowl and sat back in Nolan's chair and ate his pasta with the slow methodical chew of a man who had not actually been hungry, but who understood that being fed was not always about hunger.
Mark finished his bowl.
"I'm going to head up," he said. "Long day. I'll see you in the morning, mum."
"Okay, sweetie."
"Art, thanks."
"Goodnight, kid."
He took the dishes to the sink. Rinsed his bowl. Started up the stairs.
He had reached the third step from the top when he heard his mother say, behind him, from the living room, in a small voice that broke clean down the middle:
"Oh, God, Art, I don't — I don't know how to do this."
And then the sound of her crying. The real crying, the kind she had been holding back since he'd walked in.
His Viltrumite hearing was a thing he forgot about, sometimes. It was just there. It picked things up he didn't ask it to pick up — distant sirens, the hum of the refrigerator from across the house, a moth trapped in a lampshade two floors up, his mother on a couch in a downstairs living room crying in the voice of a woman who had been holding herself together for a long time.
He stopped on the third step from the top.
He didn't turn around.
He listened, because not listening would have been a different kind of dishonor. He listened to Art say something soft that he couldn't quite make out — Art was, by some grace, just outside the angle where Mark's hearing could resolve full words from his low voice — and he listened to his mother sob in the way people sob when the thing they have been holding back has finally become heavier than the holding back.
He listened for maybe twenty seconds.
Then he walked the last three steps, and he went into his room, and he closed the door behind him.
His old room had not changed.
The same posters. The same desk. The same bedside lamp with the chip in the ceramic base from the time he had knocked it over reaching for an alarm clock when he was nine. The bed was made — his mother had been making it once a week for four months, he knew, even though no one had been sleeping in it, because his mother handled grief by maintaining the small daily orders of the world. There was a layer of dust on the desk that was not the dust of months but the dust of days. She had been in here recently. Maybe yesterday. Maybe this morning.
He sat down on the edge of the bed.
The springs gave the same small tired note they had given when he was twelve. The mattress, he realized, was the same one. They had never replaced it. He had moved out at seventeen and the mattress had stayed and he had come home for laundry and weekends and had slept on it through college breaks, and now he was sitting on it at thirty —
Thirty by the count of the body he was wearing.
By the other count — the one nobody else in this universe knew about, the count he kept private, the count that started in a crosswalk twenty-two years and a lifetime and a whole world ago — he was something more like fifty-something, depending on how you counted the thirteen years in the Flaxan dimension and the seven before-and-after, depending on whether you counted the years he had lived as Devin or only the ones he had lived as Mark. Thirty-seven, if you wanted to be generous to one count and stingy to the other. Thirty-seven years since I woke up in this bed and looked down at hands that weren't mine and heard a voice from downstairs say dinner's ready.
He was sitting on that bed again now.
The room was small. He had not noticed how small it was until he was sitting in it. The ceiling was lower than he remembered. The desk was closer to the bed than he remembered. The window seemed not as wide. He had grown — physically, since seventeen, but more than that, he had grown in the way that fighters grew, in the way that men who had carried a planet on their back for four months grew. The room had stayed seventeen.
He thought about Devin's mother. He thought about her face. The face was not as clear as it used to be — that was the thing he had noticed, in the months since the Flaxan dimension, that his old mother's face was harder to recall in detail than his new mother's, and that he didn't know what to do with that, and that he had stopped trying to do anything with it because trying to do anything with it felt like a betrayal in a direction he couldn't name. He had two mothers. He had loved both of them. One of them was a couch downstairs crying into Art Rosenbaum's shoulder.
There's still work to do, he thought. The thought was a habit. It came up in his head several times a day. It was the engine that drove him through the assignments and the workouts and the suit fabrication and the gravity belt at ninety g and the constant, low-level future-orientation that organized his every waking hour.
He lay back on the bed in his under-suit, with the triangle on his chest dim in the ceiling-dark, and he stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars somebody had stuck to the ceiling thirty years ago. They had faded. They glowed faintly, but only in the patches where the original adhesive had held, and the stars in the patches where the adhesive had gone bad were just blank ceiling now.
Work to do, he thought again, and this time it came in less convincingly.
He fell asleep with his boots' phantom weight still on his feet, even though the boots had retracted hours ago, and the under-suit's thermal regulators kept the heat off his skin while the room went cold and quiet around him.
He woke to gray light.
He had not dreamed. He almost never dreamed anymore. He missed dreams. He didn't talk about it.
He sat up and looked around the room. The morning light through the curtains was the particular color of an autumn morning in this neighborhood that he had known in two lifetimes and hadn't seen in too long.
He didn't have a change of clothes. He had come over in a hurry. He thought, briefly, about asking ARIA to bring him something from the dorm — she could route a delivery drone out of the workshop in eleven minutes — and discarded the thought. He pulled his old hoodie out of the closet, the gray one with the university logo half-flaked off from a wash gone wrong, and pulled it on over the under-suit. The under-suit looked, with a hoodie over it, mostly like a dark t-shirt. He pulled on a pair of sweatpants that had been folded on the closet shelf for at least a year. They almost fit. They were a half-inch short at the ankle. He looked at himself in the mirror on the back of the closet door and looked, for the first time in months, like a college student who had slept over at his mom's house.
He went downstairs.
He had always thought that a house felt larger when fewer people lived in it — more space per person, more silence per square foot — but this house had been quiet for months and had felt enormous. With Art down the hall in the guest room (Mark could hear his soft snoring through the wall) and his mother breathing in her room and Mark himself padding down the stairs in old socks, the house had compressed. Three was a number this house knew. Three was a number this house had been built for.
The place feels smaller with all three of us here, he thought, and the thought was not bitter. It was tender, and a little afraid, and he carried it down the stairs into the kitchen.
He stood at the kitchen counter for a moment and thought about his life.
He had been preparing. He had been training. He had been building. He had been, by his own internal accounting, productive. Every hour he could squeeze out of the day had been bent toward the future — toward Conquest, toward Thragg, toward the Empire that was coming, toward the threats he could see the shape of. He had bought the house. He had built the suit. He had run a thousands of combat simulations. He had made the gravity belt heavier and heavier and heavier until ninety-times-Earth gravity felt like a normal Tuesday. He had become, by every metric he had given himself, more.
And in the meantime, his mother had been a woman alone on a couch with a glass of wine and a paused video, and he had visited her once a week and called her three times more and had thought he was doing enough.
He hadn't been.
I need therapy, he thought, and the thought came in dry and self-deprecating and entirely sincere, and it sat in his chest in a way that was, in its way, more honest than most of the thoughts he had let himself have in the past four months. He stood at the counter in his old hoodie with his mother's coffee maker untouched on the counter beside him and he let the thought sit there and didn't push it away.
Then he made breakfast.
He fried four eggs. He made four peanut butter sandwiches, two for him and two for whoever else wanted them, on the white bread he knew his mother kept in the freezer because he had bought it for her. He poured three glasses of milk and put the carton back in the fridge. He plated everything. He set the table. He found the salt and the pepper. He set out napkins. He made the coffee — strong, the way she liked it.
The smell did the work.
His mother appeared in the kitchen doorway in her bathrobe with her hair flat on one side from the pillow, blinking at the table.
"Mark? Did you make this?"
"Good morning, sleepyhead. Yes I did. Eat up."
He smiled at her. She looked at the table. She looked at him. She walked to the table and sat down and picked up a peanut butter sandwich and held it for a moment without eating it.
"Thanks, Mark."
"You're welcome."
He sat down across from her. He started eating. She started eating. She ate slowly, the way a person eats when they have not been remembering to eat. The eggs were good. The sandwich was a peanut butter sandwich. The coffee, when she got to it, was strong.
They ate for a while in silence.
It was a comfortable silence in the way silences are comfortable when the people sitting in them have already cried in front of each other and have nothing left to perform. Outside, a delivery truck went past. A neighbor's dog barked twice and stopped. The refrigerator hummed. Mark's hearing picked up Art turning over in the guest bed two floors up and the small papery sound of the sheet sliding against itself, and he chose to leave that information in the bin where he kept all the information his hearing brought him that he didn't need.
His mother put her sandwich down.
"Mark?"
"Yeah, mum?"
She didn't speak for a moment. She was looking at her plate. Her hands were on the edge of the table, fingertips just touching the wood. Her hair was still flat on one side. He thought, watching her, that he loved her so much it scared him, and that the love had not gotten smaller in the four months since her 'world' had ended, and that the love was something he had taken for granted as a constant in the way you took for granted that the sun was a constant, and that he had been failing the love by treating it like a constant and not like a thing that needed to be tended to.
"I just don't know what to say," she said.
He waited.
"I — I've been drinking. I'm sorry for sending you away last night. I just didn't want you to deal with — I didn't want you to see me like that, and I —" Her voice did the broken-glass thing it did when she was trying to control it and failing in a particular direction. "I'm sorry, Mark. I am."
"It's okay, mum." He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. She didn't pull away. She turned her hand under his and laced her fingers through his fingers. "We're going through a lot. I know that. You're the only person who has any idea what I'm going through, and the same goes the other way. I totally understand."
She squeezed his hand.
"Sometimes I wish I didn't send him away," he said, and he said it quietly, and he hadn't planned to say it, and the moment he heard the words leave his mouth he understood he had been carrying them for four months and had finally found a place where he could put them down. "I wish it was all a bad dream."
She cut him off.
"Mark, no. You shouldn't." Her voice was firmer than it had been all morning. The firmness surprised him. He looked up. "You did the right thing, son. That man — as hard as it is for me to admit — that man we knew and loved? He never existed. He was a lie. He used me, and he used you. And it's hard for me to — to convince myself, every morning, that the man I loved was never real. But that's what I have to do to get through the day. We have to move on. We have to."
She said it all in one long breath, the way you said things you had been rehearsing in your head for weeks. She had been telling herself this. She had been telling herself this every morning when she got out of bed, every night when she watched the clip alone on the couch, every afternoon at work when the sympathetic looks from her coworkers became too much and she had to go to the bathroom and sit in a stall until her face was steady again. He understood. He had heard her practice this in her own head, in his own way, by watching her live it for four months.
He looked at her.
His face did something complicated. He could feel it doing something complicated. The complication was not an act and was not a strategy and was not anything he was choosing — it was just the truth showing through.
"What if I told you he really did love us?" he said, in a small voice.
She blinked.
"What do you mean, son?"
He couldn't tell her what he knew of the future, but he could tell her what he had seen. He could tell her what he had felt, in the air between his father's fists, in the seconds when his father's eyes had not been the eyes of a Viltrumite finishing a mission.
"While we were fighting," he said slowly, "it looked like Dad was — struggling with himself. Like he didn't want to do it. Like he had no choice. And even when he resolved himself —" Mark's voice caught. He pushed through it. "He still ran away, mum. He could have done it a lot sooner. He could have just ended it. He could have killed me and you before I got my powers. He didn't. And — I know — his feelings weren't fake, mum. His love for you wasn't fake. Whatever else he was, he wasn't faking that part."
There was a long silence.
His mother's eyes had filled. She didn't wipe them. The tears just came down her face slowly, in two parallel tracks, while she stared across the table at her son.
"Oh, Mark."
She got up. She came around the table. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders from behind and pressed her face into the top of his head, and he turned his head and pressed his forehead against the side of her ribs through the bathrobe, and they stayed that way for a moment.
"We can't think that, Mark," she said into his hair, and her voice broke on every other word. "We have lives to live. You have college. I have to go back to work. We just have to — we have to move on."
"Yeah."
"We have to."
"Yeah, mum."
She stayed there for a moment like she was saying it more to herself than to him. Then she straightened up, and she pulled the dish towel off the counter, and she dried her face with it, and she sat back down across from him and picked her sandwich up again. She ate one bite. She put it down. She picked up her coffee. She drank.
He watched her. He understood, in the watching, that she had heard him. She had heard what he'd said, and she had filed it somewhere she would visit later, alone, in the way she had visited the clip on the couch alone last night. She was not going to engage with it in front of him because she could not afford to engage with it in front of him. She had a workday to get through.
That was okay.
The phone in his hoodie pocket buzzed, once, sharply.
ARIA only routed calls to his civilian phone if they were priority or emergency. He pulled the phone out. The caller ID was a green dot — Cecil's emergency line.
He looked at his mother.
"Mum, I —"
"Of course, sweetie. Go."
"I'll come home soon."
"I know you will."
He stood. He walked to the front of the door — his hand brushed her shoulder on the way past, and she covered his hand with hers for a half-second and then let it go.
He closed his eyes for a half-second. The triangle on his chest warmed.
The nano-armor poured outward in the familiar wave — red across his shoulders, black settling in the seams, the helmet forming last and the faceplate sealing — and at the same moment, the suit's stealth profile activated, and he became a distortion in the air. His outline shimmered. Then there was no outline.
He stepped through the doorway.
Behind him, in the kitchen, his mother was sitting at the table looking at the open front door, and the morning light was falling on her face, and Mark — invisible now, lifting silently into the gray sky above the street, pulling altitude as the call from Cecil routed into his helmet — looked back through the suit's rear sensors and saw her.
She was crying.
Not the broken kind from last night. The other kind. The kind a person did at a kitchen table when their grown son had just left the house for school for the first time.
Outside, the morning was gray and quiet. A neighbor was walking a Pomeranian. A jogger went past, headphones in. The street was a normal street on a normal morning.
The neighborhood fell away. The houses got smaller. The sky got bigger. Somewhere south and west of him, in a building he had visited too many times in the past four months, a director with one functional eye was waiting on the line for him to pick up.
"Cecil," he said, into the helmet.
"Mark."
"What is it."
There was a pause. Cecil paused before bad news the way some people inhaled before they jumped into cold water. Mark had learned to count those pauses. This one was a long one.
"I need you at the Pentagon. There's been a development."
"What kind."
" A fishy situation. I will tell you more about it when you get here."
"On my way."
He cut the line.
ARIA, in his helmet, said, "Mark. You should know — Cecil's vital signs on the call were elevated. He's worried."
"Yeah," Mark said.
"Are you ready."
He thought about the question. He thought about it in a way he did not always think about it, with the small additional honesty he had picked up in his mother's kitchen this morning and had not yet put back down.
"No," he said. "But I'm coming anyway."
The Pentagon got closer.
He descended.
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