"After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken." — Jodi Picoult
PRESENT UNIVERSE
The Pacific looked different from twelve thousand feet up.
Not the way photographs made it look — not the flat blue plate that you got from satellite imagery or the postcard horizon that came through airplane windows. From up here, with the air thin and cold against the seams of the suit and the sun cutting at a low afternoon angle, the ocean had texture. Real texture. You could see the way the swells moved in long, slow corrugations, the way the light caught the leeward face of each wave and turned it briefly silver before the next swell rolled over it and reset the whole pattern. There were birds down there somewhere, but Mark was too high to see them. There was weather building in the southwest, a long grey smear that looked, from this altitude, almost decorative.
Below him, the cargo ship Hyundai Auriga was settling back into a stable cruising position, its hull listing maybe four degrees to port now instead of the thirty-seven degrees it had been listing twenty minutes ago. The crew was on deck. Several of them had been waving at him as he'd lifted off. One of them had been crying, which Mark had noticed and filed away, the way he noticed and filed most things now. Captains cried sometimes when their ships didn't sink. That was a thing he had learned about adult men in the past year.
The wave that had hit the ship had been a freak — a confluence of currents and weather that the GDA's monitoring had flagged about ninety seconds after it became a problem. By the time Mark had arrived, the Auriga had already taken on enough water through the breached hull plating that the engines were threatening to flood. He'd patched the hull with a section of titanium mesh from the ship's own emergency stores, held the vessel level while the bilge pumps caught up, and then taken five minutes to actually weld the patch properly because patches that weren't welded properly came off the next time the ship hit weather, and the ship was going to hit weather, because the ship was a cargo ship and that was what cargo ships did.
He'd done all of this with the news playing quietly in the corner of his HUD, because ARIA had a rotation of things she queued up during routine work and the news was one of them.
A woman's voice, pleasant and professional, the kind of voice that had been trained out of any regional accent it had ever had.
"...marking three weeks since the reformation of the Guardians of the Globe under expanded membership. Crime and natural disaster response metrics released this morning by the Global Defense Agency show an eighty-percent reduction in unaddressed incidents worldwide compared to the same period last year, with response times averaging—"
Mark angled west, picking up speed without thinking about it. The suit handled the transition automatically; one of the things ARIA had refined over the past month was the kind of subtle attitude adjustment that used to require him to consciously think about pitch and yaw. Now it just happened. He thought west and the suit went west.
"...credited in part to the team's expanded roster, which now includes returning member The Immortal as well as the high-profile addition of Invincible — son of Omni-Man, whose role in the Guardians' previous deaths was to act as the executioner. Polling data released this week suggests that while approval of the new Guardians lineup sits at a record seventy-three percent, a significant minority of respondents — approximately thirty-one percent — continue to express reservations about Invincible's long-term reliability, with concerns frequently centered on, quote, 'the possibility that he may eventually act as his father did.' Commentators across the political spectrum have noted—"
"ARIA, mute it for a second."
The audio feed dropped to a low murmur.
Mark flew for a while in the relative quiet, with just the wind and the suit's faint internal hum and the muffled audio he could ignore if he wanted to. He didn't think about the polling number. He'd seen the polling number. He'd seen variations of the polling number for three weeks, in slightly different configurations, with slightly different framings, and he'd developed a strategy for it that mostly involved not thinking about it. The strategy worked about sixty percent of the time. The other forty percent was what running was for.
He was running quite a lot, lately.
"Incoming priority call from Director Stedman," ARIA said. Her voice in the suit was warm in a way that wasn't quite human — closer than most synthetic voices, but with the small, deliberate edges that kept it from being uncanny. Mark had spent a lot of time helping Robot calibrate it. He'd asked, early on, for it to sound less like a person; he'd realized about a week in that what he actually wanted was for it to sound like a person who was clearly an AI, which was a more specific request and had taken longer to get right.
"Yeah, patch it through."
"Patching."
There was the small click that meant the line was open, and then Cecil's voice, in that particular register Cecil used when he was already doing three other things, and you were one of them.
"Mark."
"Cecil."
"The ship?"
"Patched. They're fine."
"Good. I need you to take care of Doc Seismic."
Mark frowned inside the helmet. The HUD registered the frown — ARIA had been working on facial expression detection from the inside of the suit, and it was about ninety percent accurate now, mostly thrown off when Mark grimaced because of pain rather than puzzlement, which the model still had trouble distinguishing.
"Didn't I already take care of him? Like three months ago?"
"He escaped." Cecil's voice was even. The kind of even that said this was not the most annoying thing on his desk this morning, but it was on the list. "During the commotion when the Mauler Twins broke out. Some of our high-security targets used the opportunity to escape. Doc was one of them."
"How is that possible?"
"It's possible the same way most things are possible, Mark. People dropped a ball. Multiple people, multiple balls. We're reviewing it. In the meantime he's at the Washington Monument and he is, per my last report, currently yelling about clay."
"Clay."
"Clay."
Mark exhaled. The HUD flickered — a small adjustment as ARIA cross-referenced the mention of Doc Seismic against the suit's threat database and pulled up a brief profile: real name unknown, geological manipulation via wrist-mounted tectonic resonators, affiliated equipment improved post-incarceration based on debris analysis from the Mount Rushmore incident, last known association — Mauler Twins escape.
"Do you have any leads on the Maulers?" Mark asked.
There was a small pause. The kind of pause Cecil only did when he was deciding how much to say.
"No," Cecil said. "And it gets worse."
Mark slowed.
He didn't decide to slow. The deceleration just happened, the way the body sometimes does the work the mind hasn't gotten around to yet. The suit registered the velocity shift and asked, in a small text overlay in the corner of the HUD, whether he wanted to maintain the current course. He didn't answer it. He was still listening.
"Worse how, Cecil."
"Titan," Cecil said. "And his family. We had them in a safe house. The whole family. Wife, kid. We checked on them this morning and they were dead. All three of them. Done up by something with a heat signature that's not on any of our domestic threat lists."
Mark stopped flying.
It wasn't a controlled stop. He just hung there for a second, and for a second he stopped flying twelve thousand feet over open water, with the suit holding him in place because the suit was, by now, very good at holding him in place when he wasn't paying attention to flying. The wind moved past him without doing anything. A gull passed underneath at a distance that, on a different day, he would have noticed and tracked.
He had been tracking Titan. He had been tracking him. After the Machine Head business, after Isotope, after the whole long chain of bad nights that had ended with Titan looking at him across a kitchen table and saying — quietly, with the specific deflation of a man who had spent his entire adult life being a hard thing — if you can get me out of this, I'll take it. The kid had been three years old. The kid's name had been Fiona. The kid had a stuffed elephant that she'd held throughout the entire conversation, like a hostage, and Mark had registered the elephant as a fact about the situation in the same way he'd registered the layout of the kitchen and the exit angles, and now—
The kid was three years old.
Was. Had been.
"Mark."
"I'm here."
"You there?"
"I'm here, Cecil."
"You okay?"
"No."
"Okay."
There was a small silence. Cecil didn't fill it. That was one of Cecil's actual skills — he had a sense for which silences he was supposed to fill, and which silences belonged to the other person, and he'd developed it through forty years of being the person on the other end of bad news for a wide variety of people in difficult professions. He let Mark have it.
Mark let himself have it for about four seconds. Then he straightened in the air and pointed himself at the eastern horizon and the suit responded to the directional shift before he'd consciously committed to it.
"ARIA, plot a course for Doc Seismic."
"Plotting. Optimal vector. ETA three minutes, twelve seconds at current acceleration profile."
"Cecil. Keep me updated on anything you get. Anything at all. Maulers. Machine Head. Any of it."
"I will."
The line clicked. Mark accelerated.
The sound barrier broke behind him with the small, clean thump the suit made now — he had spent two weeks shaping the air-displacement signature so that he wasn't dragging a continuous sonic boom across populated areas every time he traveled, and the result was something that registered on instruments but not on most ears. The Pacific went past underneath him in a long blue blur. The mainland came up faster than it should have. He had to remind himself, sometimes, that he was moving fast. The suit made it feel like the world was moving and he was holding still, which was a strange feeling that he had not yet entirely gotten used to.
He thought about the elephant.
He thought about Fiona.
He thought about the mountain clearing a few weeks and the look on the Immortal's face after the third hit had landed. He thought about the polling number.
He thought about how short three weeks was, when you measured it against the things that could happen in three weeks, and how long three weeks was, when you measured it against the parts of a day that you actually had to live through one minute at a time.
The Washington Monument came up over the horizon.
You could hear Doc Seismic from about half a mile out, even at altitude, even though the helmet. The man had a remarkable set of lungs for a guy who spent most of his time underground. He'd cleared the whole area — a perimeter of maybe four city blocks where the tourists and the staff and the Park Service personnel had all done the sensible thing and run very fast in the opposite direction — and he was standing on top of the monument itself, which he had apparently scaled or possibly tunneled up the inside of. The aluminum apex cap was glowing faintly red. Mark wasn't sure why. He filed it.
"...look at you. Look at you! You're thieves! Rapists! Criminals, every one of you, all so ignorant of your true crimes against Terra Therma! Granite stolen from the Earth! Iron ripped from her loins! Bricks — bricks! — made of the clay she bleeds from humanity's endless ruinations!"
"He has a script," ARIA observed neutrally. "The phrasing matches the manifesto distributed during his last incident with eighty-six percent overlap."
"He's improvising the new sixteen percent?"
"It appears so."
"That's actually kind of impressive."
"In its way."
Mark slowed his approach and dropped into a hover at about four hundred feet, far enough that Doc Seismic didn't immediately spot him but close enough to read the situation. The man was wearing a refined version of the gauntlets he'd had during the Mount Rushmore incident — sleeker, with what looked like an additional channel of conductive material running up the forearm — and Mark's HUD lit up with a small alert from ARIA noting modified wrist resonators, configuration consistent with top tier-class engineering, recommend non-destructive recovery for analysis.
"Got it," Mark said.
"Come forth, my Magmanites!" Doc Seismic shouted, and threw both hands out theatrically, in the gesture of a man who had practiced the gesture in a mirror.
The ground around the base of the monument cracked open.
Lava welled up through the fissures — actual lava, not the cosmetic kind, the temperature reading on Mark's HUD spiking to over a thousand degrees Celsius — and from the molten ground, the Magmanites rose. There were twenty of them, give or take. ARIA counted twenty, and Mark trusted ARIA on counts. Each one was roughly seven feet tall, humanoid, bulky in a way that suggested they'd been pulled together according to a specific aesthetic vision, the rocky exterior cracking open here and there to reveal molten cores. They moved with the kind of slow, deliberate weight that things made of stone had to move with.
The ground around the monument was already starting to char. Trees at the perimeter of the Mall — the cherry trees, Mark noted, with the particular small ache that came from realizing it was almost cherry blossom season and now those trees were on fire — were beginning to go up.
Civilians who hadn't already cleared the area were running, and a few were not running, because a few of them were the kind of people who, when their city was attacked, took out their phones. Mark had given up trying to understand those people. The suit's HUD tagged each of them in yellow with a small annotation: non-evacuated civilians, low priority threat to self.
"I count twenty hostile magma beings," ARIA said in Mark's ear. "And the one known as Doc Seismic is preparing to use his bracelet to destabilize the monument's foundations. Calculating most efficient intervention route for minimum collateral damage."
A path lit up across his HUD, looping in a counter-clockwise spiral through the formation of Magmanites with eight branching exit points for civilian extraction. Mark studied it for half a second.
"I got it."
He moved.
He didn't bother announcing himself this time. He didn't have anything to say to Doc Seismic that Doc Seismic would have processed. The man was in the middle of a sermon, and the only useful thing to do with a man in the middle of a sermon was end the sermon. Mark accelerated from four hundred feet to ground level fast enough that the air pressure behind him caused two of the Magmanites to physically rotate toward where he'd been about a half-second after he stopped being there.
He took the first three Magmanites apart on the way in.
It wasn't dramatic. The suit had been refining its approach to magma-based combatants ever since the mark uploaded date from when the guardians fought magmamanic at machine head penthouse, and what it had landed on, after a great deal of analysis, was that you didn't punch them — punching them was inefficient and produced splatter — you applied directed cryogenic discharge through the contact points on the suit's gloves, which the suit had developed specifically for this kind of opponent. The first Magmanite went brittle around the torso and Mark's elbow took it apart in two pieces. The second one Mark grabbed by the head and the cryo-discharge ran down through the body in a fractal pattern of cracks and the whole thing collapsed in a clatter of cooled rock. The third one tried to grab him and Mark redirected its swing into the fourth Magmanite, both of them cooling on contact and crumbling against each other.
He grabbed a civilian.
There was a man — maybe forty-five, in a Park Service uniform, who had clearly been trying to get a family out and had been cut off from his own escape route by the lava field. Mark scooped him up under the arms in a grip the suit was calibrated to make safe for human anatomy, lifted, and deposited him on the roof of the Lincoln Memorial gift shop, which was outside the lava perimeter and structurally sound. The man landed sitting. He was still holding a walkie-talkie. He stared at Mark for half a second.
"You okay?" Mark asked.
"Yeah."
"Stay there."
He moved.
He worked through the formation in priority order — the Magmanites that were closest to fleeing civilians first, then the ones threatening structural targets, then the ones that were just standing there waiting. A woman with a stroller. A teenage couple who had been on a date. A guy in a delivery uniform who had abandoned his bike. A group of school kids — maybe eight of them, with a teacher who was actively counting heads as Mark deposited them, two at a time, on the steps of the Smithsonian. Mark counted the heads with her. They came out to eight. The teacher said thank you in a voice that was about to break, and Mark nodded, and the teacher hugged the nearest child, and Mark went back.
The remaining Magmanites had figured out where he was. They'd reformed into a rough circle around the monument and were trying to coordinate, which was sad, because nothing made of magma was capable of coordinating against something the suit could think faster than. Mark cut through them in a low arc, the cryogenic discharge ringing out in a series of small sharp sounds, and by the time he came up on the back side of the monument there were three Magmanites left, and they were starting to retreat into the lava field they'd come from.
He let them go. The lava field would cool. The Magmanites would deactivate. ARIA had run that calculation already. All this was done in under 30 seconds.
Doc Seismic was still on top of the monument.
He had been working up to the next part of the speech. He had not yet noticed that his army was gone. He was raising both hands, the bracelets glowing with charged tectonic energy, and he was drawing in breath for what was clearly going to be a very satisfying climax — and now, my friends, you will witness the beginning of the end of human—
Mark came up behind him faster than the man could track.
Doc Seismic registered Mark's arrival approximately a quarter-second after Mark had already chopped him in the side of the neck with the precise amount of force the suit had calculated would render him unconscious without doing permanent damage to the trachea or carotid. The man went down sideways onto the apex of the monument. The bracelets pulsed once and went dim.
Mark caught him before he could roll off the edge.
"ARIA."
"Recording."
He pulled the bracelets off carefully, working the clasps with a delicacy that the suit had been designed to enable. The improved resonator design was visible up close — the additional channel of conductive material was actually three channels, woven, with what looked like a piezoelectric amplification ring inset along the inner forearm. Mark held one of the bracelets up so ARIA could scan it from multiple angles.
"You getting this?"
"Detailed schematics captured. Cross-referencing against Black Samson's current bracelet specifications. Preliminary analysis suggests at least four upgrade pathways that could be integrated into Black Samson's existing units without structural revision."
"Send it to Robot."
"Sending."
He dropped both bracelets into a containment pouch on the suit's hip and then produced a set of restraint cuffs from the same compartment — the suit had a small fabrication unit that printed mission-specific items as needed, which had been Cecil's idea after the third time Mark had to improvise restraints from rebar — and locked Doc Seismic's wrists. Then he flew the unconscious man down to ground level and laid him out, on his side in the recovery position, on a relatively cool patch of ground.
He keyed the comm.
"Cecil."
"You done?"
"Done. He's out. Bracelets are recovered, ARIA's already sent the schematics to Robot. I'd appreciate if you could send a pickup team because if I leave him here some idiot with a phone is going to try to wake him up."
"Already inbound. Two minutes."
"Thanks."
"Mark. Good work. Clean. Efficient."
"Thanks, Cecil."
"Keep it up."
The line clicked.
Mark stood there for a moment. The Mall was a mess. The cherry trees were going to need to be replanted. The lava field was already starting to crust over at the edges, the thousand-degree Celsius reading dropping to nine hundred, then eight hundred, the cooling happening fast enough that the GDA cleanup teams would be able to start work within the hour. Sirens were audible now from several directions. Police. Fire. The specific high tone of a GDA priority dispatch.
He thought about Fiona.
He shook his head once, hard, inside the helmet. The HUD recalibrated. ARIA registered the movement and didn't say anything, which was one of her better qualities — she had a sense for when to speak and when not to, and Mark had spent some time helping her develop it.
"Mark," she said, after another half-second. "Reminder. Eve, Amber, and William's high school graduation begins in forty-three minutes. You committed to attending."
Mark closed his eyes.
He had genuinely forgotten. Or — not forgotten, exactly. He had been carrying the appointment in the part of his mind that carried appointments, and the part of his mind that carried appointments had been temporarily overwritten by a three-year-old girl with a stuffed elephant, and now the appointment was reasserting itself in the way appointments did, which was abruptly and with the specific guilt that came from realizing he had almost missed something he had promised someone.
"I still got time, ARIA. Don't stress."
"I am incapable of stress."
"That's a thing you say a lot. It's not as reassuring as you think."
"Noted."
He lifted off, cleared the Mall airspace, and pointed himself north-northeast at a velocity that would, allowing for atmospheric considerations and the no-supersonic-over-populated-areas protocol Cecil had asked him to follow, get him to the school with about eight minutes to spare.
He muted the news.
He flew.
Reginald Vel Johnson High School had spent two weeks preparing for the graduation ceremony.
The football field had been transformed in the way football fields always were, every June, in towns and cities across the country — folding chairs in long lines on the grass, a stage at the fifty-yard line draped with the school's blue-and-gold colors, a big banner with the year on it strung between two light poles, a sound system that had been borrowed from the auditorium and was performing slightly above its expected limits. The PA system kept producing a faint feedback whine every time someone touched the wireless mic, which Principal Winslow had been told about three times and had decided to ignore on the principle that telling the AV club about it would only make it worse.
The weather had cooperated, which was a relief. The forecast that morning had threatened thunderstorms through the afternoon, but the front had pushed north and broken up over the lakes, and what remained over the school was a high, slightly hazy blue sky with the kind of light you got in early summer in this part of the country — not too bright, not too soft, just the steady all-day light that made every parent's photographs look better than they had any right to.
Principal Winslow stood at the podium. He had not slept particularly well the night before, but he had slept better than he usually did the night before graduations, which counted for something. He cleared his throat. The microphone whined once and he moved his head an inch to the left and it stopped.
"For some of you, it probably seemed like this day would never come."
The graduates, in their blue gowns and gold tassels, sat in the rows of folding chairs in front of him with the particular restlessness of people who had been sitting in folding chairs for forty minutes already. A few were paying attention. Most were on phones, or whispering, or looking past the podium at the families in the bleachers and the chairs along the back, scanning for parents and grandparents and, in some cases, ex-girlfriends.
"For others, it came far too quickly. Maybe you're even wondering if you're ready for this. For what comes next."
In the third row, William Clockwell was sitting between Amber Bennett and Samantha Eve Wilkins, and he was leaning slightly toward Eve, and he was whispering.
"He's gonna show up, right?"
Eve didn't turn her head. "Yes. He promised."
"You sure?"
"He promised, William."
"Okay but the last time he promised something, he showed up forty-five minutes late and he was missing half a sleeve."
"He'd just been on fire. He was allowed to be late."
"I'm saying. The bar."
Amber, on William's other side, leaned in slightly. "He's probably off studying again. Trying to skip another year."
"Jumping classes again, that's what he's doing." William nodded sagely. "Mark's a hunk of meat with a textbook. That's what he is. That's the unit you're should be dating, Eve."
"William."
"What? Have you seen him recently? Have you actually looked? I swear to God he added more muscle. I didn't think it was physically possible for him to add more muscle, and yet."
"William."
"I'm being supportive."
Amber was openly grinning now. "Awwww, Eve. Are you jealous?"
Eve's face stayed perfectly neutral, which was its own answer. "What? No. No, I'm not jealous. He'll be here. I know he will. Now both of you shut up and listen to Principal Winslow."
"...you are. I look out at this class and I see hope. I see a bright new world, with a special place for each and every one of you. You may not know yet what that place is. You may not know for years. That's okay. That's the part that's supposed to be difficult..."
William leaned over again.
"Last sleeve, though. Half a sleeve. Eve, you remember—"
"William, I will leave you here."
"You can't leave. You haven't graduated yet."
"Watch me."
Behind them, a few rows back in the family section, Debbie Grayson was sitting in the second row of folding chairs with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the podium. She had dressed the way she always dressed for things like this — a simple navy dress, low heels, her hair pulled back. She looked good. She'd been making an effort to look good, lately, in a way that had less to do with vanity than with the small daily decision to keep going. She'd lost some weight in the last six months, and she'd put some of it back. She was working on putting more of it back. She had a glass of water in her hand from the table at the back. She had not been crying, but she had been in the place where crying was a thing she could feel waiting for her if she made a wrong move, and she had been sitting very still to avoid making one.
Then someone slid into the empty seat next to her, and the seat creaked in the very specific way it creaked when something heavier than an ordinary human sat down in it, and Debbie turned her head and her face did something that, if you had been watching her closely, you would have called a relief that had been waiting to happen all day.
"Hey, Mom."
"You made it."
"I made it."
"Did you have to break the sound barrier?"
"Twice."
"Mark."
"I went around populated areas. ARIA was very strict about it."
Debbie laughed, quietly, and put a hand on his arm. He was wearing a button-down shirt and slacks — the suit had retracted into the small storage configuration on his chest, under the shirt— and his hair was a little bit windblown but otherwise he looked like a regular eighteen-year-old at his friend's high school graduation, which was exactly what he was, today, on purpose.
"You smell faintly of sulfur," Debbie said.
"Doc Seismic."
"Of course."
"In my defense, I did shower in the Atlantic."
"You did what."
"It's a reentry technique. ARIA—"
"Mark, I do not need to know the reentry technique. Please do not tell me the reentry technique." She tapped his arm.
Eve turned, automatically, the way you do when someone taps you on the shoulder during a graduation speech. Then she saw Debbie at the family section. Then she saw Mark.
The look on her face — Mark would think about it later, in the small hours of a later night, the way you thought about specific frames of specific moments. It wasn't a smile, exactly. It was the relaxation of a tension she hadn't been showing.
She elbowed Amber. Amber turned. Amber made a face at Mark that had several layers of meaning and was, in summary, finally. William turned last, saw Mark, and gave him a thumbs-up that was probably visible from low orbit.
Mark gave a small wave back.
Eve mouthed something at him. You're late. Mark mouthed back: Sorry. Eve mouthed: Liar. Mark mouthed: Doc Seismic. Eve mouthed: That's not an excuse, and then she had to turn back toward the podium because the announcer was clearing his throat and the whining mic was whining.
Debbie squeezed Mark's arm once and let go.
"...announcing this year's graduating class. Please hold your applause until all names have been read. Amber Justine Bennett."
Amber stood, walked the length of the stage with the easy poise of someone who had always known how to walk across stages, took her diploma, shook the principal's hand, and turned to the audience with a small wave that was specifically for William, who was already grinning at her, and a smile that was specifically for Mark and Debbie, who were too far back for her to wave at without making it weird.
"Samantha Eve Wilkins."
Eve stood. Her gown caught on the back of the folding chair for half a second, the way gowns always did, and she unhooked it with a small efficient gesture that was so characteristic of her that Mark felt a strange small bend in his chest, the kind of feeling you got when a person was so completely themselves in a small detail that you remembered, for a second, exactly why you cared about them.
She walked the length of the stage.
The cheer that came up from the family section was, by acoustic measurement, primarily one person. Eve's mother stood up in her seat in the third row and shouted THAT'S MY DAUGHTER in a voice that traveled. Eve's father, sitting next to her, did not stand up. He did not shout. He sat with his arms crossed and his expression doing the careful, unreadable thing it always did, the expression of a man who had decided a long time ago which feelings he was going to allow on his face in public and which ones he wasn't, and had not revisited the policy in some time.
Eve took the diploma. She shook the principal's hand. She turned, and for just a moment her eyes found her father's in the crowd, and the moment did its small private thing, and then she walked back to her seat.
"William Francis Clockwell."
William stood up, adjusted his tassel with the specific deliberation of a man who had been planning this gesture since freshman year, and walked across the stage.
He took the diploma. He shook the principal's hand. He raised the diploma over his head with both hands. He spun it once.
"I'd say it's been fun," he said, into the air, "but, you know — high school." He shrugged, theatrically, and walked back to his seat, and a wave of laughter went through the family section that was the kind of laughter graduations needed and only sometimes got.
The rest of the names took twenty minutes.
Mark sat next to his mother and didn't fidget. He was, he realized partway through, paying very close attention. Not to the names — most of the names belonged to kids he didn't know, kids who had been in classes Eve and William had been in but he hadn't, kids who had gone to dances he hadn't attended and had run for student council positions he hadn't voted in — but to the experience of sitting in a folding chair next to his mother on a high school football field on a hazy June afternoon while the world produced graduation, the way the world produced graduations every June, in places and for people who did not, today, need rescuing.
It was a weird feeling. He noticed it. He let himself have it.
When the last name was called and the principal returned to the podium, Mark realized he'd been smiling for a while.
"Everyone, please rise. Congratulations, graduates."
The graduates rose. The cheer was the ordinary cheer of two hundred sets of relieved parents and three hundred relieved graduates, and Mark and Debbie stood with everyone else, and the principal said something into the microphone about being bold and being original and being— and then the microphone whined, badly, the worst whine of the afternoon, and the principal said, audibly:
"Oh, crap."
The crowd laughed. The principal recovered. The caps went up. They came down slightly off-target, because the graduates this year had been better at throwing them up than catching them, which was true every year. A cap landed in the third row of the family section and the man it landed on caught it and held it up and looked around for whoever had thrown it.
Mark and Debbie made their way down the aisle toward the field.
Eve, Amber, and William had converged at the edge of the makeshift exit and were looking around for them. Eve had her cap in one hand and her diploma in the other and her hair was coming loose from where she'd pinned it under the cap. Amber had her cap on at a slight angle that was probably deliberate. William had taken his gown off entirely and was holding it over one arm like a coat.
"Amber Justine Bennett," Mark said, walking up, with a deliberate smirk. "I thought we weren't keeping secrets from each other anymore."
Amber gave him an extremely serene look.
"Some secrets," she said, "should never be revealed. Markus."
Mark's smile froze halfway. "...How."
"Your mother."
He turned slowly.
Debbie, beside him, was already laughing.
"Mom."
"Sorry not sorry."
"Mom."
"What. You introduced me to Amber. We had coffee. Twice. We are friends now, Mark, you don't get to introduce me to your friends and then be surprised when we have things to talk about."
"I introduced her to you for, like, fifteen minutes."
"Two coffee dates, Mark."
"I never agreed to coffee dates."
"You weren't there. They weren't your dates. You were not invited."
Amber and Eve were both watching this with the unrestrained delight of women watching another woman successfully deploy a son. William, behind them, had taken out his phone and was filming.
"Markus," William said, reverently. "Markus. It's a baptism name. It's like a confirmation name."
"It's my legal name, William."
"Yeah, it is. Markus."
Eve stepped in. She was smiling, the specific small smile she did when she was happy in a way she didn't entirely want to broadcast, and she looked at Mark and tilted her head slightly.
"You actually came."
"I said I would."
"You did."
"I always do."
"You're forty-five minutes early to your own argument, Mark, that's not the point."
"I was on time."
"You were on time. You made it before I went up. That's not on time, that's a miracle."
"Doc Seismic was a quick fight."
"Doc what."
"I'll tell you later."
She looked at him for a moment. The smile changed, very slightly. The corners of it deepened in a way that, Mark thought with a small private clarity, was its own conversation. He didn't say anything else. Neither did she.
Debbie produced a phone. "Picture. All four of you. Eve in the middle. Move."
"Mom—"
"Move, Mark."
They moved. Amber on the left, William on the right, Eve in the middle with one arm through Mark's and one arm through Amber's. William threw up a peace sign because he was William. Debbie took six photos in rapid succession because she had reached the age, finally, where she did not trust any single photograph and required six in order to have one she actually liked. The light caught the gold of the tassels. The sound system in the background played Pomp and Circumstance for the third time, because it was, in fact, a loop.
Behind them, the football field emptied slowly. Families finding their graduates. Underclassmen who had snuck in for the moment. The principal, on the stage, being congratulated by a parent he had clearly been hoping to avoid. The PA system whined, one last time, and went silent.
Mark stood with his arm through Eve's and his other arm at his side and his mother in front of him taking pictures and he thought, for half a second, this is what the rest of it is supposed to feel like.
Then he pushed the thought away, because thoughts like that, when he had them, tended to mean that something was about to go wrong.
The warehouse had no windows.
That had been a deliberate design choice. Machine Head had selected it for a number of reasons — its location at the edge of an industrial corridor that the GDA's surveillance grid had a known blind spot in, its existing reinforced power infrastructure left over from its previous life as a metal-stamping facility, its proximity to three different highway exits — but the absence of windows had been near the top of the list. Windows leaked light. Light attracted attention. Attention was, in his current line of work, expensive.
The interior was lit by industrial sodium fixtures that Machine Head had personally re-routed, because he didn't trust electricians and because he was, despite everything, still the kind of man who liked doing certain kinds of work himself. The light was orange in a way that suggested dusk regardless of the hour. The floor was painted concrete. Cables ran in neat bundles along the walls, color-coded and secured at regular intervals with the meticulousness of a man whose mind was, after the modification, no longer capable of letting cables sit in any other configuration.
In the center of the warehouse, the cloning apparatus was approaching completion.
It was big. That was the first thing you noticed about it. It occupied the center third of the warehouse floor and rose almost to the rafters, a tangle of containment vats, conductive lattices, biotic synthesis chambers, and centrifugal separation arms that had been built, over the past two and a half weeks, by the combined effort of the Mauler Twins, four of Multi-Paul's duplicates, and a small army of contracted technicians who had been told they were working on a private medical research project and had been paid enough to not ask follow-up questions.
The Mauler Twins were on the upper gantry, working on the final integration of the central housing. Both of them looked tired. The first one had a streak of conductive paste across his forehead that he hadn't noticed and that was beginning to itch. The second one had been awake for thirty-six hours and was running on the kind of stubborn focus that only hit you in the third hour of a very long stretch of work.
Multi-Paul's duplicates moved between the lower gantries with the seamless coordination that only Multi-Paul ever had with his own duplicates, which was to say, perfect, because they were him. Four of him were threading the secondary cabling. A fifth was on the floor, double-checking the calibration of the tertiary intake valves with a clipboard. A sixth was somewhere in the back making coffee, because someone had to.
Machine Head watched all of this from the observation booth on the second-floor catwalk. His chair was custom — wide, reinforced, with a swiveling base that allowed him to take in the entire warehouse floor without rotating his head, which was useful because rotating the chip on his head with anything resembling speed sometimes produced a strange flickering effect in his vision that he had not yet successfully diagnosed. He sat with his fingers steepled. The chip on his temple ran softly, the small green and amber lights of its diagnostic array pulsing in a slow rhythm.
He had been quiet for several minutes.
He was singing.
It was not a song anyone listening would have recognized as a song, exactly — the chip's audio output was working at low volume, and the words were not in any clear order, the way words came out when you'd had eight different programs running simultaneously in the same processing core for six hours and your output channel was, in technical terms, a bit jammed. But it was a song. It was a song the way certain humming under one's breath were songs.
He stopped, mid-phrase. He tilted his head to the side.
"Has that fucker," he said, to the air, in the deliberate sing-song voice he used when he was performing for an audience he had not yet introduced himself to, "and his family. Been slaughtered."
The air to the left of his chair filled with a green static. The static crackled. It resolved into the shape of a thin man in a green hooded coat — Isotope, who had developed, in the past few months, the small showmanship habit of materializing into a room as if he were auditioning for it.
"Yes, boss," Isotope said. His voice was tired, the tired of a man who had done what he had been told to do and was trying to feel about it the way he was supposed to feel about it. "It's been taken care of."
"Good," Machine Head said. He stood up. He paced two steps to the railing of the observation booth, looked down at the warehouse floor, watched a duplicate of Multi-Paul argue with another duplicate of Multi-Paul about the correct torque setting for a coupling bolt. "Good, good. That'll teach that big stone son of a bitch to think before double-crossing me. Will it not. Will it not, Isotope."
"It will, boss."
"Loyalty," Machine Head said, in the singing voice, half to himself, "is the operating system of any reliable enterprise. Disloyalty is a bug. And I am, my friends, a thoroughly debugged man."
Isotope said nothing. He had learned, over the past several weeks, that the moments when Machine Head was speaking like this were not moments when anyone was supposed to respond. They were moments when the chip was doing something. You let the chip do its thing.
"Boss," Isotope said, once a respectful interval had passed.
"Yes."
"The new Guardians of the Globe have been cutting our operations. They're like a — they're like a weed-whacker on a lawn, boss. A new one. The ones with the —" he gestured, looking for the word, "— the spinning wire."
"Strimmer."
"Yeah."
"The British call them strimmer's."
"Sure, boss."
"It's onomatopoeic. Strim. Listen to it. Strim. That's what the wire does, isn't it. Strim, Strim, Strim."
"...Yeah, boss."
"What about them."
"With the Guardians, boss. Even with incentives, nobody wants to take the jobs anymore. Word's out. The Manticore brothers passed last week, and they'll work for anyone. The Schism crew said they were taking the season off. I had to up the rates on the Tinkerton job by sixty percent and the guy still asked for medical, and he isn't even a meta. Word's out, boss. The kid is the difference. They've got him on rotation now. He's everywhere. You can't do a bank job in a major American city without him being there in ninety seconds."
Machine Head's face did something, briefly, that wasn't quite an expression. The chip flickered. The orange light in the booth caught it once, sideways, and then resolved.
He turned. He looked at Isotope. He smiled.
It was not a good smile. It had not been a good smile since the procedure.
"Isotope," he said. "My main man. My favorite teleporter in three states. Don't worry about those Guardian fuckers. This, my friend, is a temporary setback. For a comeback. Say it with me."
"Setback for a comeback, boss."
"Setback for a comeback. As soon as this cloning machine is up and running, we are going to tear them, my friend, we are going to tear them a new one. We are going to tear them several new ones. We will be in the new-one business."
He turned to look down at the warehouse floor.
The Mauler Twins, on the upper gantry, had just finished torquing the final coupling. The first one wiped the conductive paste off his forehead with the back of his glove and looked up at the observation booth. The second one stepped back from the housing, surveyed it for a moment with the satisfied exhaustion of a man finishing a marathon, and then gave a single decisive thumbs-up.
Machine Head saw it. He smiled wider.
"Patience, Isotope," he sang, in the warm singsong voice the chip pulled out for moments like this one. "Patience, my friend. Patience patience patience. We will tear those fuckers — to pieces."
The chip on his head pulsed once, in time with the word pieces, and the small green and amber lights ran in their slow rhythm, and below on the warehouse floor, the apparatus stood waiting, and somewhere a duplicate of Multi-Paul handed another duplicate of Multi-Paul a cup of coffee, and the air smelled faintly of conductive paste and ozone and possibility.
Outside, the city kept doing what cities did.
Inside, Machine Head began to sing again.
"Please read authors note"