I stood in the middle of the chaos and tried not to be in the way.
I stayed there for almost an hour. Mistral had just returned from taking some of the critically injured to the nearest hospital when she caught sight of me. I watched her land and make a beeline toward the open circle of space and silence that seemed to follow wherever I went. Someone intercepted her; a Cape I didn’t know. I couldn’t hear their words, but the way that other Cape kept glancing in my direction told me exactly who they were talking about.
Mistral listened for a few seconds, then shook her head. She stepped around the other Cape, ignored whatever it was they were still saying, and continued in my direction.
We stood together in silence for a long while before she spoke. “Hi, Damian,” she finally said. “Are you okay?”
“My father is dead.” I’m not sure why I said it. I’m not sure that I even cared, but the words slipped out anyway.
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know if I am.” I frowned into the distance.
“Maybe you should sleep on it?” she suggested. “There’s a kind of shock we all experience after even minor battles… and this one was anything but minor.”
“Tempest died.” Maybe she was onto something. Maybe battle shock why I kept saying things she already knew.
“I know,” said Mistral. “Rocket too. And Moth and far too many other good men and women, Powers and normals alike.”
“Where was he?” She followed my gaze to where Dominion stood in his own circle of space and silence. “If he’d been here—”
“Then we’d have lost all of Arizona and New Mexico to our southern neighbor,” said Mistral, her own voice going hard. “Tezcatlipoca took the field today for the first time in decades. Dominion spent seven hours battling him, giving the rest of us time to destroy the monster’s foot soldiers.”
“Oh.”
“There are no easy days, Damian. No easy days and no easy decisions.” For just a moment, she hesitated, then she reached out, patted me on the shoulder, and walked away.
I watched her go, watched until she took to the sky with the next handful of injured victims, and then I turned and looked again at Dominion, still standing in his bubble of silence.
•—•—•
Any other day, a teenager drenched in blood would be the kind of thing that people took notice of… but this wasn’t any other day. As I walked through the crowd, I could tell who knew what I had done and who didn’t. The ones who did skittered out of my path like scared animals. The others ignored me entirely.
It was almost a relief when I reached Dominion’s pocket of quiet.
Maybe it was because he predated the Cape generation or maybe it was because he didn’t need to worry about things like public relations or sponsorship deals, but Dominion had never been featured in a single Cape vid. Even when people told stories about him, it was about what he’d done or said and not what he looked like. I think most of the country had built up a certain image in our minds. Taller than Paladin, stronger than Atlas, square-jawed and handsome, with eyes that blazed like miniature suns.
Turns out Dominion was kind of short, with broad shoulders and a noticeable paunch pushing against his classic red and gold costume. His hair was cropped, but the stubble was steel-grey, and his skin, dark brown like the Bakersfield mud after a rainfall, was thick with wrinkles. He didn’t look his age—he had to be pushing at least a hundred, given that he’d been in his twenties during the Break—but he was a thousand miles of bad road from looking young. His eyes, an unremarkable brown, were locked on the corpse at his feet.
In death, Tempest was older than she’d looked in the vids, white strands of hair mixed in with dark, and crow’s feet and lines around her eyes and mouth. Someone had wrapped her body in a blanket, hiding most of the damage she’d taken, and her eyes were shut. I’d love to say she looked peaceful, lying there, but that’s just not how death works.
“Are you okay?”
No clue why I, of all people, thought it was a good idea to check on Dominion. Maybe it was that battle shock again. Maybe sucking down Carnage’s life energy had fucked with my head. Only thing I knew for sure was nobody else had seemed willing to do it.
Dominion kept his eyes on Tempest’s body, his reply a slow rumble that I had to strain to hear.
“Some people see a light and all they want to do is snuff it out. It’s always been like that, even before Dr. Nowhere.” He bent over and picked up a ribbon that had come free from Tempest’s hair, clenched it tightly in broad, weathered hands that could shatter mountains. “But me, I wasn’t satisfied with just a light. I had to build a bonfire that our enemies could see from orbit. And what did it get us?”
I wasn’t sure the question was meant for me. I wasn’t even sure what he was talking about, but I took my best shot at answering anyway. “A country where everyone can be free. Even normals.”
“And what happens to this country when I’m gone?”
After a moment’s thought, I shook my head and shrugged.
“I guess whoever’s left will do what we can to hold the line.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment, staring off into the distance, standing over the body of a dead heroine young enough to be his great-granddaughter.
Eventually, he nodded.
“Good man.” He spared me a second glance. “What’s your Cape name, son?”
I discarded a half-dozen options, including—sadly enough—Baron Boner. Somehow, after a year of not knowing the answer to that question, only one name seemed to fit.
“Walker.”
CHAPTER 76
Now that would be a good way to end the story.
Problem is, that’s not how the story ends. Not even this little piece of it.
You
