Proton and Electron Pt. 1

I really wanted to do this all in one part, but it got too long! I'll be working on finishing it tonight but I wanted at least one more short story before the year ends. I can't thank you all enough for your continued support and enthusiasm. I've got some really cool things coming in January and you'll be the first to know!

Here's part one of a new superhero story (because Madame Science is fun to work with and I can't put her universe down!)

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“Don’t tell my wife,” Paulina says in my dream. She’s in her superhero clothes, the bright red of her skater skirt vivid against the black and white background. Her knee pads and elbow pads are also red which is why I can see the scuffs and burn marks clearly against them.

“What happened?” I’m not fully in Our Space yet, still stuck in dreamland. I concentrate on dragging all of me out and my body forms slowly, checkered PJs, tousled brown hair that falls past my shoulders, and bare feet. Paulina and I have never figured out how to make our mind-selves look different than our real-selves, but not for lack of trying. “Why—why are you in your costume?”

Paulina pulls off her helmet. Her hair is a lot shorter than mine, and darker, barely brushing the top of her shoulders. It’s matted and tangled like she’s been in the helmet for a long time and, when she brings the helmet to her hip, I can see a dark, perfect circle punching right through the top.

I launch myself to my feet. “Did you get shot in the head? What’s going on? You said you weren’t going to be Proton anymore—“

“I know!” Paulina holds out a hand. “I know, Jenny, I know. I just—fuck, listen, okay? I need you to listen for a minute. I don’t know how long I have.”

Adrenaline doesn’t work the same in Our Space as it does in the real world. My body goes impossibly still, my heart slowing and slowing until it’s nearly not beating. Across the sky, lightning cracks. “I’m listening.”

“I was called in,” Paulina says, the words spilling from her mouth. She flinches at the flash of lightning. “I know, I know, I said it was over after the baby was born, but it was just—Crane asked me. He’d never ask if it wasn’t serious.”

Crane. The ground under our feet, glassy black, undulates. I keep the memories from rising with too much effort, shoving down my bitterness and anger when they threaten to flood Our Space. It’s not about me and Crane or how I wouldn’t trust him any further than I can throw him these days. It’s about what exactly Crane’s asked my twin to do. “What did he want?”

Paulina swallows. “The team’s been compromised. After we—after we left, they hired on two new members. A shapeshifter named Orchid and a telekinetic named Charge. After they put away Stone Mason—that kid who could throw rocks?—last week, some stuff leaked. Stone Mason’s mentor found out where the kid was getting locked up and she broke him out.” Paulina’s eyes are haunted. “It’s Avarice, Jenny. Stone Mason’s mentor is fucking Avarice.”

Our Space lights up like the fucking Fourth of July, red and blue and white lightning smashing all around us. It’s both Paulina and I doing it now and we both cover our ears at each strike. Hell, I close my eyes too. Like children, hiding from the storm.

Avarice is the Villainess. The one Foresight, the founder of the League, came after, was formed because of.  She’s got some sort of longevity, because the 20th and 21st centuries are peppered with scars from her appearances. Whole towns falling under her reign. People disappearing. Entire states under siege from one of her famous armies. No one’s really sure what sort of power she’s got, but mental is suspected considering the size of the force she can command. 

My sister and I aren’t S-class heroes. We don’t save cities, we stop bank robberies. Compared to Avarice, we’re not heroes. We’re mascots, but not like good mascots. Off brand cereal mascots.

“Paulie,” I say, “are you safe?”

“He just wanted me to find the mole,” she says instead of answering. “He wanted me to come ‘talk’ to them about what it means to be a hero and let it slip to both that I wasn’t happy with how I retired. He thought they might try to recruit me or something.”

I touch her for the first time, grabbing her arms. She’s not wearing her jean jacket and I touch her bare skin. We don’t need to touch to be close in Our Space—it’s already mind to mind.  But, right now, it’s muscle memory. “Paulie. Are you safe?”

“No,” she says. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I’m not.” She meets my eyes and, like mine, they’re brown and filled with tears. “Neither is anyone else.”

A fog rolls in, bringing with it a stinging heat. My fault again. I don’t do well with being scared. I do much better with being angry. “Where are you?”

She’s already shaking her head. “You can’t come here, Jenny, she’ll get you too! You need to—“

“Tell me where you are!” I let go of her, scared of the strength running through me right now. If we hurt each other here, we hurt each other in real life. That was a hard lesson. I swear at the bruises already showing up on her pale arms. “Damnit, Paulie! You have a wife! You have a baby girl! You can’t—“

“Don’t you think I know that?” Paulina screams back. Tears fall over her cheeks and they’re not normal tears. They’re black. Real grief. “I fucked up, Jenny, I know! I won’t ever come back from this. I won’t ever get to hold them in my arms again, I know.”

My mouth snaps shut, horror at her words making me mute. “What do you mean you won’t come back? Paulie, where are you?”

She’ll get you too. Dread wells up in my stomach and the ground goes soft underfoot.

Paulie shrugs, but her lips is trembling. “What happens to little heroes, sis? They get caught. I played it too hard and Charge took me to his mentor.”

“Avarice,” I say. I choke on the name. “She’s got you.” Again, the heat. Again, the steam. “You have a family, Paulie! How could you be so stupid—“

“I KNOW!” Her scream echoes in Our Space and the air pulses with it. The fog and steam blows away under the reverberations until we’re standing in the dark. Alone. “I know I’m an idiot, I know that I—that I didn’t think of them. But I am now and this is for them. Jenny, I am asking you to please, please, listen.”

She’s asking. Paulina knows all she has to do is ask. I take a shuddering breath and reach for any bit of calm I can find.  I’m sure my real body is panting, sweating, thrashing. Here, I hold very still and I swallow hard. I stare at her grief-stricken tears. “Okay. What do you need me to do?”

“Go to the League,” Paulina says immediately. “Get to Foresight. Tell him that Avarice is coming back. She’s got a ship off the coast of Delaware that’s heading to land in three days. She’s going to meet Abomination there and then they—they’re going to make their way north.”

Another big villain name. Abomination, capable of taking on any horrifying form you can imagine, and the cause of the worst super-powered massacre on either side of this century.  

We’re in Virginia, or at least I am. Delaware is a lot further away than I’d like. “Paulie, are you on that ship?”

Paulina doesn’t answer me. A fresh wave of tears fall over her cheeks. “I also—I also need you to tell Sab something. For me.”

I stop plotting courses to Delaware in my head, the realization of what she’s asking making my blood run cold. “No, no, you’re making it out of this. She’s going to be waiting for you when you get back—“

“Tell her that I love her,” Paulina says, steam rolling right over me. She knows that it’s pointless to try and tell me otherwise. Her jaw sets. “That I’m sorry I’m not there for her. For Lee. I—I didn’t think this would happen. I planned to be there for her first steps, for her first word, for—for everything. I’m so sorry that I’m not going to be there.”

I can see it now. Sab waking up in the morning to news of heroes going missing. She knows Paulina and I’s identities. She’ll be able to recognize the red mask as her wife’s and not mine. She’ll be clutching her daughter over breakfast, her daughter who’s not old enough to understand, trying to figure out how to be a family without my sister.

The image breaks my heart.

“This isn’t the life you said you’d give your daughter,” I say when she falls silent. Her eyes are shut, mouth trembling, as if waiting for the guillotine. “You’re just going to give up? Just like that?” When she doesn’t react, I can feel anger sparking under my despair. I bare my teeth. “Just like Mom?”

Paulina jerks like I hit her, a small sound leaving her lips. Our mother died as a hero, sure, but she died after kissing us on the cheek and promising to be back later that night. We’ve never quite forgiven her for not keeping her word.

“I wanted to be better,” Paulina says when she gets her voice under control. “I really tried, Jenny. You know I did.”

There’s nothing to say to that. She did try. She resigned from the hero business and went back to civilian life. I resigned too, in support and because we were strongest in the field together. She got a job as a waitress. She saved up. She became a manager. She worked hard for the life she wanted and now—

Now she’s in the hands of a woman who won’t ever know how many hours she spent to get it.

I pull my sister into my arms, too tight, too much, but I have to. “I know. I know you did. You did everything right, Paulie.”

She hugs me back, her arms coming up so that her hands grip my shoulders, falling into me. Something wet and viscous drips on my shoulder as she lets herself fall apart.“I want to see them, Jenny. I want to see them one more time, at least.” 

I lean my cheek against her hair. She smells like sweat and blood. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she says between her tears.

I’m hugging around her biceps, hands locking behind her shoulders. My footing is firm. “This isn’t your fault, okay?”

Her fingers spasm against my shoulders. “What?” She tries to pull back, to look at my face, to step away. I won’t let her. “Jenny?”

I reach back to my physical body, finding the tether that keeps me there. It’s black, like my power, and I drag it up through my core. Black dots begin to spot the landscape around us and the sky stops flashing. It starts glowing. A building charge. “I want you to be there for them.”

Paulina thrashes in my arms, realizing too late what’s happening. White sparks flash around her head, but I’ve already over-saturated Our Space. “No! No! Jenny stop!”

“I want this,” I say. I’m crying now too, but I don’t look at what color my tears are. I loop my tether around her, easily batting away what few sparks she manages. “This is my choice.”

Paulina screams wordlessly. Her hands claw at my shoulders, trying to pull or push me away. The charge is too far in my favor even if I didn’t have the grip I have on her body. She’s all positive charge and I’ve made this a very negative place.

“I love you,” I say again. The sky releases the biggest bolt of lightning back and this one isn’t white or blue or red. It’s pure black.

Then we’re being ripped apart, ripped through space, ripped through each other. I see smears of her face, eyes wide, mouth still open. She disappears in the swirl of electricity and, instead, I start getting other flashes. Darkness. Metal. The color red.

The smell of brine.

I slam back to earth.

————————————-

I open my eyes. Metal plates are riveted together above me, flickering under an eerie blue light. I turn my head to find that the bars of my cage aren’t just metal. They’re crawling with electricity, a continuous charge.

I feel like shit. Our Space doesn’t show real world wounds, not unless they’re old, and I didn’t realize how badly hurt Paulie is. My back is cold on the ground but I can feel bruises all along my spine. My right leg is hot and aching, like it’s been nearly wrenched out of socket. My head is pounding and I’ve had enough concussions to know that this one isn’t as bad as it could be. A little fogginess, that’s it. Paulie’s always healed faster than me.

I sit up, bumping Paulie’s helmet laying next to my arm as I do. If I can, I need to get out of here. I’m not going to give up like Paulie did. It’s not in my nature to know when I’m beat and I stand a better chance than she ever could because of it.

Crane is looking at me from the plain cell across the way.

“You okay, Proton?” He asks. His voice is raspy from abuse and there’s blood seeping out from under his navy mask. “That looked like one hell of a nightmare.”

“This place kind of inspires it,” I say. Paulina’s voice is lower than mine and her throat hurts like she swallowed sandpaper. My throat feels like I swallowed sandpaper. “Really atmospheric.”

Crane snorts. He’s wearing a straight jacket. That’s all that’s needed to stop his powers. Stretching arms, while useful in a fight, aren’t exactly super strength. “Tell me about it.” He breathes out evenly and I watch his eyes dart to the door and back. “You, uh, see anything better than this in your dreams?”

Crane, as our former team leader, knows about Paulina and I’s telepathy. He doesn’t know about Our Space unless Paulina made that call without me. She wouldn’t have. He’d betrayed my trust before Paulina and I agreed to tell him. Who’s idea had it been to tell me to go to Foresight? His? Or my sister’s? “Sure did.”

“Good,” he says. Relief breaks over his face and washes the tension from his shoulders. “Great.”

Paulina’s mask is hot and wet on my face. I stare out at him, behind my sister’s eyes, and realize that he has no clue what’s happened. He has no clue what he’s risked. As usual. “You realize,” I say, “that once she tells him about this, we’re dead.”

The flash of guilt across his face hits me hard. I always forget how transparent he is when he’s exposed. He looks up at the corners of the room. “We don’t know if those cameras have audio. You shouldn’t talk about—“

“They won’t, not with this much electricity in the room,” I say. I sit up, careful to stay out of reach of the curling electricity. “Which you know. Right?”

You’ve hid the consequences from us again, right?

He stares at me and doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “Getting the news out is more important than what happens to us.”

“I agree,” I say. He opens his mouth again, but I steamroll over whatever he might say. “You lied to me—“ Paulie “—about there being audio so that I couldn’t ask questions. You didn’t want to talk me through the risk because I might not choose to do it knowing what I might lose.” I feel my power sucking at the electric bars. “Right?”

Crane, to his credit, doesn’t try to lie again. He meets my eyes. “There was no choice, Proton. This is bigger than us.”

“It always is,” I say. I start climbing to my feet, testing out my leg as I go. “I guess you had to be right sometime.”

“Should you be moving?” Crane climbs to his feet much faster than me, only wincing when he turns his torso the wrong way. Ribs, maybe. “You were shot in the head—“

“I’m not dying here,” I tell him, teeth biting over the words.“Let me explain the risk to you, Crane. We stay here, they come in and ask us how we narced. Maybe they torture me. Maybe they torture you. Someone breaks and then they kill us both. We get out? Maybe they shoot us trying to get off this boat. I know what risk I’m willing to accept.”

The bars are my first obstacle. The electricity crawling on them is impressive, too impressive for it to be steel or iron. There’s a percentage of silver in the bars, there has to be, and silver isn’t nearly as strong as most people think. And even if it is mixed with something stronger, a lock is only as strong as a lock can be. I reach for the bar closest to me.

“You said the electricity could kill me if you tried to short out your bars,” Crane says. His voice is blank, carefully scrubbed of emotion.

I look through the blue arcs to try and see his face. He’s watching me, standing very still in the middle of his cell. His eyes flick from me to the bars and back again. His feet—bare—shift on the cold ground, bringing his weight onto his toes.

“You’re afraid I’ll do it,” I say. I laugh without humor. Paulie’s always been the one he’s trusted. “After all these years, you think I’d do something to endanger my team?”

“You retired,” he says, “and people’s choices always change when it’s their life on the line.” He says it like a challenge, like he’s daring me to disagree. Crane’s always been a pessimist which, unfortunately, makes his job as the optimistic team leader a little harder.

I shake my head. “You’re a piece of work.” I crack my knuckles and turn my attention back to the bars. “Don’t worry, this won’t touch a hair on your head.” I pause, thinking. If I’m underestimating the current, then… “Or,” I add, “it’ll take out a few decks.”

Alarm flares in his eyes. “What?”

I grab the bars around the lock.

Paulina’s power is exactly opposite mine. Charge and Avarice had done their research on my sister. She generates electricity, a positive charge, and can direct it at will. If she touched these bars, the resulting combination of the metal’s electricity and her own would scorch her and strike any metal in the room, including the buckles on Crane’s straight jacket. She’s not the strongest electric hero on the payroll, but she’s the most consistent. There’s never a time when she doesn’t have electricity in her body which means that the bars would have kept her in forever.

Me, on the other hand? I’m a real killjoy.

The light in the room nearly goes out as I suck the energy into my core, electricity darting and fizzing as it tries to resist the current. I grit my teeth as the metal under my hands heat. Oh yeah, definitely silver. Steel has a higher melting point and my tiny resistance to heat wouldn’t have held.

The roar of electricity dies all at once. The room is so dark now, the only light coming from a single bulb in Crane’s cell, illuminating him like a spotlight. It takes me a moment to realize that there’s light in my cell too.

My veins are a shining, crackling blue.