Festus’s eyes went wide. He’d apparently never known that the watchman had been watched.
“Staring how, Hnossi?” I asked. “At what?”
“Like…he vuss tryingk to see if somehow ze test hadt been wrong…or if I’d lied to him about ze test, maybe? I don’t know. And zen after she got to a certain age, he stopped lookink at her altogezzer, I sink, because…she remindtet him.”
“Of what?”
She looked at me, twin tears glistening in the shock of her frosted eyes, apparently stunned that I could not figure it out for myself. “Of vut couldt never be!”
She beckoned in Festus’s direction. He was at her side instantly, holding her crumbling hand with the delicacy of cradling a newborn.
“Festus…I vant to tell you sum sings…”
“What, Hnossi?” he croaked, his throat a tuba of mud.
“I’m sorry…zat I made you suffer srough all of my, my—”
“This isn’t the time for sorrys, Hnossi—”
“Let me finish!” she snapped, then instantly softened. “I’m sorry for hurtink you, rejectink you…for all my…vut does Frau Doktor call it? Ze ‘crazy-makink’ behavior, ja.”
“It’s okay, Hnossi,” he said, clearing his throat and swallowing heavily, twice. “It’s okay.”
“Nein,” she whispered. “It vuss never okay. But at least now, at ze ent, I can say to you vut I shudt haff said back zen, back in 1962…”
He waited, stooping, clutching her hand to his cheek. When she said nothing, he begged, “Yes, Hnossi?”
He looked down into her eyes.
They were pale gray, motionless.
Her chest fell as softly as snow.
Red, rust-scented smoke was drifting from her mouth.
The medical monitors screamed as one.
“Hnossi!” shouted Festus. “Dr. Singh! Nurse! DR. SINGH—”
The door swung open, and a suited and caped Omnipotent Man strode in.
“Wally, you idiot! What the hell are you doing here? Get Dr. Singh!”
“Step aside, Festus,” he said. He clutched Festus’s shoulder and plucked him out of the way like a mother dog retrieving a puppy by the neck.
Wally reached into the bed, sifted out Hnossi, and clutched the red-ravaged body in his arms.
And then he kissed her.
Electricity crackled from Wally’s mouth into Hnossi’s, streamers of it whipping frenetically around the room and overloading the machines and exploding the lightbulbs, plunging the room into flare-strobing darkness. Festus screamed at Wally to stop while Hnossi’s limbs danced and jerked and her chest sucked closed and inflated outward violently again and again, and still Wally welded his kiss onto her, and when the scorching blue luminescence brightened to the point of blindingness, Festus and I scrambled from the room in fear for our lives.
“HNOSSI!” screamed Festus from the hall, while light seared our eyes even from around the rim of the door for what seemed like forever.
And then there was silence.
The door swung open.
Standing beside the steely, confident Omnipotent Man was Hnossi Icegaard.
Reborn.
Her skin was gleaming copper, her hair was returned miraculously to its full thick blackness and luster, and her eyes were shining like halogen amethysts. Wrapped only in a white bedsheet, she looked more Greek goddess than Norse, glowing before us and smiling with secret, joyful knowledge, as if listening to celestial music only she and the divine could hear.
“Wally,” gasped Festus, relief and horror fighting for control of his face, “what did you—”
“All th’little gal needed, Festy, was a little galvanizin. Course,” smirked Wally, “not every man knows how t’perform that.”
Back in therapy after the excursion to Asteroid Zed, after Hnossi had already developed rust poisoning, Wally had fallen to pieces and electro-welded his own fingers and limbs back on. But none of us—not I, not Festus (whom Wally’d electro-blasted across the room), and not Wally himself—had realized how that power might be applied to transforming others.
I complimented Wally on his apparently successful transformation of Hnossi and, of course, of himself. He turned a sunrise smile on me, saying, “I couldna done it without ya, ma’am-doctor.”
“And your alters? Ricky R. Bustow, Reverend Crocket, Musk Ox Miller? Are they—”
He tapped the side of his skull, eliciting a soft bell tone. “Wellsir, they’s still all up here—but now, they’s together. Uni-mah-fied.” Even Wally’s voice had been transmuted, expanded, as if the multiple “voices” inside him had harmonized sonically into a melodious choir, powerful and hypnotic.
“I did like you told me, ma’am,” said Omnipotent Man. “I cogitated suh’m fierce upon who I wannid t’be, steada all the thangs I weren’t an that I was a failure at. I put all m’shortcomins in th’closet an put on m’best Sunday-go-t’meetin suit, an fixed m’self to bein like m’mentor. An th’more I did, the more I realized the truth.” His eyes shifted toward the ceiling, as if gazing past drywall and plaster and up into the majesty of the revolving, evolving galaxy.
“And what truth is that, Wally?”
“That I have a personal relationship with the Ka of Hawk King,” he said, his voice riding a rhythm. “That I have accepted the Ka of Hawk King as my own personal superhero. That the Ka of Hawk King has saved me—”
“Ka-ka,” mumbled Festus.
Wally’s eyes flashed tiny electrical arcs, twin bolts of lightning, but he did not stop.
“—and that in his celestial crusade for justice, he has made me his knight. His Hawk Knight.”
Draping herself from his shoulder, Hnossi stared up at Wally, her eyes sparkling as if his dynamic current were still surging inside her. Her flesh renewed, her muscles taut and defined, I’d never seen her look more powerfully beautiful or beautifully powerful.
And I had never imagined I would see the dark matter of disdain so disintegrated from her demeanor that she would shimmer like a nebula from the light of a hyper-masculine supernova. Wally’s omni-belief in himself, and the resulting growth in his own superstrength, had proved an old maxim: for many women, even goddesses, power is the greatest aphrodisiac of all.
And then Mr. Savant returned with Syndi, who was agog at the sight of her radiant mother. Mother and daughter embraced in a death-averted hug with more warmth than they’d
