Aaron is jerked off his feet and slammed into the wall although he stringently manages not to drop either of his charges. One of them does hit their head on a jagged piece of wall that’s sticking out at a sharp angle. The impact is hard enough to split open a wound near her temple. Unblemished skin tears apart and blood begins to trickle down over her face. The blood is black like oil, thick and shiny in the hallway’s flickering lights.
The children are, somehow, Liquid Onyx survivors. That should be impossible. All traces of Liquid Onyx was destroyed over a decade ago, and to my knowledge, no one has been able to recreate it in that time.
I climb down from the window ledge as Aaron rights himself. He holds the now-injured child close to his broad chest. He’s dressed all in black, except for the white letters stamped on his chest that read “FISA.”
Aaron watches me impassively as I stalk inside the containment cell behind him and come out with the third child held awkwardly in my arms. This one is about the same age as the others and unconscious like Aaron said. There’s a visible crack on the back of his head that must have been really bad if it still hasn’t healed. The wound on the little girl’s head has already closed over, the blood stemmed by her enhanced healing ability.
I bring up a mental map of the facility based on the building plans I scoured over before breaking in and pick out the most viable exit, then start jogging in that direction. Either Aaron will follow me unquestioningly, which I’ll judge him harshly for, or he’ll try to find his own way out, which I’ll be relieved by.
Unfortunately, whatever made him think he could trust my sense of morality earlier must still be colouring his views about the purity of my intentions because he chases after me with a truly embarrassing lack of hesitation.
Most of the inner stairwell collapsed during the first explosion, and obviously the lifts are out as an option. I lead Aaron to a fire escape exit opposite the door to the stairwell and use my foot to kick it open, busting out into the smoke-laden night air and taking the metal steps two at a time. Aaron is surprisingly fast despite being such a large man and the extra weight of carrying two children rather than one, and he keeps pace with me all the way down to the ground.
Aaron’s government friends must be focusing their attention elsewhere because there’s no one to meet us at the bottom of the fire escape.
I take the child a good distance away from the building, just in case there’s another explosion, and place him down on the grass gently.
Aaron is right there when I turn around. He lays the children he was carrying down on the grass near where I offloaded mine. All of the frail-boned little mutants are still unconscious from whatever OI shot them up with.
Aaron is wheezing from the smoke inhalation, but there’s an intense scrutiny to how he’s looking me up and down, like I’m an interesting new bug he’s discovered in a garden he’s been tending for years. I don’t appreciate it. I’ve had far too many people stare at me in curiosity, yearning to poke and prod, to rip and tear until all my secrets are laid out for them to study.
I pull my lips back into a snarl, wolfish and white, incisors bared. It irritates me that my mind seems to have decided this man even deserves a warning this blatant. I know what this man is, and I don’t fuck with heroes. They’re like drug addicts. You can’t fucking trust them to look after themselves, let alone movethrough that kind of life without dragging everyone around them into their shit.
Some of the Liquid Onyx survivors of my generation, the ones who were saved from Obsidian Inc., have suited up and become vigilantes, like comic book characters ripped right out of the pages. I watch them on the news sometimes, and it makes me feel sick just to look at what they’ve allowed themselves to become on behalf of a world like this one. The kind of world that deserves superheroes is the kind of world where the creation of them would never have been allowed to happen in the first place.
“Who are you?” Aaron asks, words croaked out through a soft mouth surrounded by dark stubble.
I take a few steps back from him warily, watching to see if he’ll be stupid and chase after me. But he plays it smart and stays exactly where he is, looming protectively over the mutant children. The thought that those kids might wind up strapped into multi-coloured suits and sent to save the unsavable is almost enough to make me wish I’d left them in that burning building. It’d be easier on them to die here and now than it would be to try to make sense out of all this brutal chaos they were reborn into.
“Not a problem you want to have in your life,” I answer him and start moving backward with more purpose, ready to turn around and sprint away.
Aaron doesn’t follow me physically, but he tracks my movements with hawklike focus, and when I pass some invisible line that only he can see, he whips out a gun faster than I can blink between shallow breaths. Aaron doesn’t say stop; his weapon does that for him just fine.
“Who are you?” he repeats with a more aggressive undertone this time.
One good thing about heroes is that they tend to think justice is more important than survival, that the necessary eliminationof any threat, no matter how known or unknown, is less tangible than how they feel about it.
I jerk my chin at the children. “Try not to let these ones turn their trauma into a nighttime hobby, huh?”
Aaron’s finger is on the trigger of his Sig, and he’s staring at me unblinkingly, that stubborn line of his brow and grim set to his mouth indicative of a man willing to shoot if he has to.
But that’s the key thing in all this. If hehas to.
I’m gone before Aaron has the chance to come up with a response, darting off into the night and out of range. I find my bike down the street, thankfully unharmed, and climb on, riding away from the building on fire behind me.
What a fucking waste of some well-planned B&E.
***
The second time I cross paths with Aaron North, it’s another accident.
I’m scoping out a bar called Black Ice somewhere in downtown Danger City, owned by the infamous Winters crime family, and a well-known hangout for big-time dealers, whether that be drugs, weapons, or flesh. It’s a seedy little shithole with shadows in every corner that look hungry for light and mismatched décor that may or may not be stolen, with sticky surfaces where you don’t want to think too hard about what the substance making it sticky actually is. An optimist would say spilled alcohol, but an experienced patron of shitty downtown bars might suggest taking another look through a UV light.
At seven o’clock in the evening, the bar is dead except for some all-day drinkers that keep to themselves and expect everyone else to do the same, which suits my purposes.
Aaron is at the bar, nursing a whiskey and surreptitiously listening in on a conversation between two Winters familyenforcers. I keep to the shadows for the whole night so he won’t catch me watching him from across the room.
Days later, he walks right in front of my sniper scope, blocking my target, an arms dealer named Lucinda. She’s the head lieutenant, and sister, of Titanus Bullet, one of the world’s most notorious weapon sellers. Titanus has a tenuous, and lucrative, business arrangement with Obsidian Inc. They manufacture new-age weaponry that would never pass government approval to be sold legally, and Titanus uses his contacts to reach out to buyers on the black market.
