The Posterchildren: Origins Read online

  “Don’t. I can do it,” he begs, knotting both hands in his cape. “Baba, I’ll do it. Please let me. You know that I can— that I will. Please.”

  The Rook rubs a hand over his face, the palm of his leather glove rasping against his stubble.

  “I give you a nine out of ten for self-sacrificial effort, but don’t burn that card this early in the game. Hold onto it until you can make it count, you hear me? Just...”

  His father squeezes his shoulder, shaking him a little. It’s a frustrated and misguided gesture, but it’s meant to be reassuring. A frustrated and misguided gesture meant to be reassuring is an accurate summary of his relationship with the Rook, really. They’d both known and acknowledged the fact that they’d never gotten it right.

  “...just be good. Tell your mother and brother I love ‘em. Ellie, too. Be good for them, Little Bird. You use your head, and you keep them safe. I need you to do that for me.”

  A dry sob lodges in his throat. The Rook never bothers to preface it with if this plan fails, because he knows what’s coming. Failure was the plan. He refuses to believe that, but the sequence of events never changes.

  His father’s outline softens and stretches like saltwater taffy. When it’s just the two of them, just the family members with the fewest secrets between them, his father is the closest to being himself: a mere five and a half feet tall and slim, his slight build got him regularly mistaken for a younger man. But as soon as he pulled on his cowl, he shifted up seven inches and put on seventy pounds of muscle.

  His silhouette alone is intimidating. The rest of the world thinks that Corbin Underwood and John Wright stand eye-to-eye, matching specimens of masculinity painted in complementary color palettes, and that was the way the Rook wanted it.

  He struggles to hold onto the Rook as he changes, twisting his hands into the straps of the empty holsters criss-crossing his father’s chest as it broadens, but he won’t let him. The Rook gently peels his fingers away. He has no choice but to let go.

  The birds in the trees rattle and shriek as the sky gets brighter. They pull off the branches with the twig-like snaps of hollow avian bones breaking, gathering into a flock of rot and black feathers.

  The rooks dive for his father, compacted into a single undulating mass. He’s calm as he walks toward them. So calm. When the cloud of rotten birds swallows him up, he doesn’t even raise his hands to block. His father doesn’t fight them, but he does.

  He pushes through the swarm, ignoring the wicked beaks and talons raking at his skin. The wounds will heal. There is nothing that the writhing, stinking flock can do to him that he won’t survive. He’d tried to tell his father that. He’d tried to make him see. This was what he’d been made for.

  “Stop!” He howls, clawing back at the beating wings. “Leave him be, you vultures!”

  A woman screams. Windows shatter, and the birds burst like punctured balloons, one after another in a near-deafening chain reaction. The fetid cough of a gust kicks him backward, dragging at his hair and clothes.

  When the swirling blackout settles, all of the craggy trees outside the apartment are bare, and his father is gone. Feathers choke the street gutters, deep as oily black snowbanks. He tucks his chin, fanning a bleeding hand over his face. It protects his eyes from the tinkling rain of fine, hollow bones.

  The Rook’s cape, cowl, and goggles are neatly folded, resting atop a rectangular wooden box. A drizzle of angular skulls, curled up spinal columns, and bits of empty, brittle ribcages pattered against the mahogany.

  Dead again. Buried again. Gone, his pieces left in the casket.

  And again, he has failed.

  °

  The warm whisper of breath fanning against the inside of his throat was enough to pull Mal out of his dreams, a rude yank from such a light tug. Mal twitched, instinctively pushing away at whatever had gotten close enough to breathe on him. He was a light sleeper— a poor sleeper— so it was rare that anyone came near him without his notice.

  But his hand met something furry, and hooks sank into his arm. Mal hissed, his eyes flying open.

  It took him a few overlong seconds to figure out what had latched onto him. His initial worry was that it was a badger, but its claws weren’t quite that impressive. It was large, and it was furry, and it was yowling at him, its ears flattened to its skull.

  It was a cat. Probably. Possibly. The one thing that was clear was that it was a giant hairball of an animal, and the already-healing scratches and bites on Mal’s limbs attested to the existence of both claws and teeth. He swore, trying to throw the beast, but it wrapped its front legs around his forearm and dug in with every natural weapon it had available.

  He managed to wrestle it off, scooting backward so that it wouldn’t be able to automatically reattach itself. Yes, he decided, it was a cat. A large cat with a matted coat and a significant chunk missing from its left ear, but a cat all the same. Mal doubted that it belonged to anyone. It didn’t look particularly well-liked, much less well cared-for. It was likely that his feline adversary was feral, one of the kittens born to abandoned domestic cats. Foundation had something of a problem with feral cats. Over the years, pets had either run away, or were left when capstone students graduated. The furry little monsters thrived on the rodents and songbirds native to the area, consuming and rapidly breeding.

  The cat stared at him with large yellow eyes, its pupils drawn into furious, thread-fine slits. Its tail lashed, sweeping pine needles. It was tawny and brown, its long hair tangled into a near-solid knot. It was easily the largest cat that Mal had ever seen, and seeing as it’d challenged him, it knew that it was a big cat, too.

  It growled at him. Mal growled right back. He refused to be cowed by an animal, especially one whose immediate ancestors had been house pets.

  “That won’t work on me, cat,” he briskly informed it, wiping beads of blood from his arms. The scratches had already healed over. “I am bigger and more ferocious than you could ever hope to be. If you have any self-preservation instincts to speak of, you’ll back down from this confrontation and leave with what remains of your pride.”

  The cat flicked its ears. It looked away, nose raised, and ignored him. It had plenty of pride left to spare, apparently. While tactically unwise, Mal had to respect its decision to stand its ground. It was what he would have done, had he been a mangy feral cat engaged in a territory dispute.

  “Is this what you want? Fine. Take it, you filthy beast,” he muttered, wadding it up and throwing it. The cat hissed again, the long hair over its spine puffing up in an arch before it skulked over to inspect the blanket. “I was done napping anyway.”

  The cat kneaded the blanket with its front paws, still shooting Mal distrustful looks. He rolled his eyes. There was just no pleasing some creatures, it seemed. It had won the blanket, but it wasn’t satisfied. The cat wanted the natural rock cubby he’d been sleeping in to itself, and it was determined to stare at him passive-aggressively until he vacated the area. No matter. He had other blankets and other nests scattered across the campus.

  The personal game of hide-and-seek was an embarrassing habit, but it was one that he fell back on more and more often since his return. It was impossible to sleep when he couldn’t shake the sensation that his door was going to open at any time. He hated the feeling. The anticipation pulled his nerves tight and plucked at them until he practically vibrated with anxiety. He got out of bed angry and exhausted, having spent the entire night being angry with himself for his failings. There was no banishing the idea that he was eternally a heartbeat away from hearing a knock at his bedroom door, and the waiting made the hours pass by at a snail’s pace. It was easiest to remove the closed door from the equation.

  Mal couldn’t rest unless he was reasonably sure that no one knew how to find him. It was paranoia, pure paranoia, bundled up into a corner of his brain where rationality held no sway. He couldn’t construct an argument strong enough to break through it, so it’d developed into a habit. A childhood sp
ent exploring the woods had given him an excellent mental map of the area. He had an almost unlimited number of places to tuck himself into, nests that were difficult to find and easy to defend. The woods were never cold enough to require more than a thin blanket. He took a few hours of sleep after classes in the late afternoon, then a few more just before dawn. It wasn’t ideal, but it sufficed.

  But if wild cats continued to bully him for his blankets, he’d have to start considering alternative options for his cat naps, Mal thought as he picked the last of the pine needles out of his hair. It was essential that he get some rest in here and there. Extended bouts of insomnia turned him into an intolerable posthuman being. He had difficulty tolerating himself when he was tired and moody, so he pitied anyone stupid enough to try his patience when he was at his growliest.

  And by ‘anyone stupid enough to try his patience’, he mostly meant Zipporah. His partner continued to baffle him. He was torn between believing that she was incapable of learning, and believing that she was incapable of giving up. As far as her development was concerned, each day was a new one for her, every familiar obstacle a fresh wall to collide into at high speed. There was something to be said for that level of aggressive optimism. It was borderline madness. Mal didn’t understand what she had to gain from her refusal to learn simple, painful lessons, but he had no choice but to acknowledge her determination. Zip had sworn that she was tough enough to hack it as his partner. Moreover, she had promised that she would do whatever he asked of her.

  And that was why he owed her an apology, though there wasn’t a single thing Mal could think of that he dreaded more than telling Zipporah Chance that he was sorry. A second standoff with the feral cat was preferable by far. Mal had hoped that the idea of apologizing to her would be somewhat more palatable after a powernap, but he felt no more equipped to handle the conversation than he’d been immediately after class. If there was one thing that he hated more than being wrong, it was having to admit that he knew he was wrong.

  Apologies were such ugly things. They forced the person making the apology to reflect on their mistakes, and it was difficult for Mal to cut the ties in his sense memory that bound failure to the smell of lighter fluid and rotten bird bones.

  °

  Zip trudged back to her room feeling awful close to defeated. She’d held herself together fine during the class itself, but the untouched pyramid of honeycrisp apples on the dresser had done her in. Between Mal and Cindy, she was starting to feel like there wasn’t a darn thing she knew how to do right.

  So Zip made her way to the track, determined to remind herself that there was one thing that she could do better than anyone else: she could run.

  Daylight came early to Foundation and left late. Zip had plenty of time to run, and she usually got it in between dinner and dusk. That was on good days, though— days where she wasn’t trying to escape her own brain. The first few dozen laps were for decompression. She sorted out her thoughts, since she was alone with them anyhow. The longer that she ran, though, the more her muscle movement boiled through her thoughts. She both had to think of what her legs were doing, and didn’t have to think at all. Before she knew it, the sun was going down and the track’s perimeter lights were beginning to flicker on.

  She only stopped because she had to. She could run fast, and she could run for a long time, but she had her limits. As frustrated as she was, she’d pushed those limits, too. She’d hoped that a good run would clear her head and tucker her out enough to get some shut-eye, but as soon as she slowed down, the thoughts caught up to her again. She staggered to the bleachers on legs that were newborn-colt-shaky.

  Zip gulped, sucking in her own tears with her bottled water. She didn’t know whether to sob or swallow, so she choked instead.

  A firm, warm hand on her back startled her into a coughing fit. It would’ve been a comforting gesture, if the hand hadn’t had Mal attached to it. He must have been sitting in the bleachers, watching her. She didn’t know how long he’d been there, and that made her skin go creepy-crawly.

  “Don’t cry,” Mal commanded. It was like he had the right script for the role of supportive friend, but he didn’t know how to deliver his lines. Zip choked on a hiccup and her own indignation.

  “I’ll cry if I want to!” She said, twisting away. “I’m not stoppin’ just ‘cause it makes you feel bad! You should feel bad!”

  She’d had enough. Zip had been as considerate and understanding as she could be, since she’d wanted to start things off right with all of the new people in her life. They didn’t seem to have any intention of giving her a chance, though. Mal had decided that she was twenty points shy of being worth his time, and Cindy would rather starve herself to death than accept a nice gesture from her. She could only take being someone’s punching bag for so long, and she’d more than had her fill of Mal’s jabs. Enough was enough.

  “But you— ”

  “No, you listen to me, mister!” Zip snapped, jabbing a tear-coated finger at him. Nobody interrupted better than a speedster. “You don’t get to do that, y’know? You don’t get to just show up and make demands of a person like that! You can’t expect me to know what you’re thinkin’ and what you want me to do if you won’t talk to me!”

  He eyed her sticky fingers distastefully. “You’re making a mess, Zipporah.”

  “You’re the biggest jerkface jerkwad jerk— ” Zip stormed, stomping her feet. She couldn’t think of what to call him, since every form of jerk that she knew of felt like it fit, so she shrilly rattled through the whole list. He was Kinglet, King of Jerks, and he made her so mad sometimes, she could scream. “— jerkbutt jerk-j-j— ” In fact, she did. She punched his arm, hard enough to make him wince, and yelled, “It wasn’t even my fault!”

  He rubbed the spot on his upper-arm that she’d nailed. He seemed to shrink a little.

  “You’re...not wrong,” he admitted, finally.

  “W-what?”

  “Look,” Mal said, gathering up some of his bluster again. “If you’ll stop screeching and leaking, I’ll help you practice two-man drills.”

  She’d heard that tone before. It was a real exercise in restraint not to hit him twice. He might have thought she had no impulse control, but the fact that she hadn’t run him to the top of the mountain and left him there showed that she had loads of self-control. He was the one that didn’t know how to exercise restraint. Mal said every nasty thing that popped into his head, after all. That rhyme about words not hurting as much as sticks and stones was bunk. Mal knew how to cut a person up with his words, and those wounds were slow healing.

  “Because you must?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, agitated. He took his time spitting out his response.

  “No. Because you want to improve. And I want that, too.”

  Zip blinked, with difficulty. Her coated lashes kept threatening to glue themselves together every time she closed her eyes.

  “Do you— I mean— ” She hiccupped, wiping her hands off on the thighs of her shorts. The material stuck to her gummy palms. “D’you mean that?”

  “Lying in order to puff your self-esteem is a waste of my time, as well as yours. I dislike wasting my time nearly as much as I dislike repeating myself. From now on, please believe me the first time I say something.” His lips thinned as he frowned. “You have never worked with a teammate before, but I was— I’ve had practical experience. You went into it unprepared, and that is my fault. I have no choice but to assume responsibility for our failure in today’s exercise. I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t blame you.”

  Zip could barely believe her ears. That sounded an awful lot like an apology, but it was coming out of Mal Underwood’s mouth. She didn’t think that kind of thing happened. She didn’t know what to say.

  For once, the silence ate at him, not her. He fidgeted his weight from one foot to the other, working his blue metal band around his wrist.

  “Do you keep to a running schedule?”

  “Yep
. Every single day,” she said, bobbing her head in a short nod. “It’s the only way to get faster. I’ve gotta push myself.”

  “I respect that about you.”

  No doubt about it. That had been a compliment. Mal was trying. Maybe he wasn’t the greatest at being decent, but they both had things they were working on.

  “Coming from you, it’s, um. That-means-a-lot-to-me-like-a-lot-since-you’re-you-and— ” She forced herself to button her mouth and take a breath in through her nose. Restraint. “We’ll make a good team. I just know it.”

  “That remains to be seen, but your aggressive optimism is…unique.” Unique was a murky word, but if she tilted her head to the side and squinted a little, it could have been a compliment. With Mal, she’d take all the non-prickly words that she could get out of him.

  “How ‘bout we run together?” Zip said, holding her ankle and lifting her foot back. She held the quad stretch, sighing at the warm burn. She’d pushed herself hard, and she didn’t look forward to feeling it come bedtime. “I’ll do my cool down laps while you do your sprints. After that, maybe we could run a couple of those drills you mentioned.”

  He gave the invitation as much serious thought as regular folks applied to major life decisions. Finally, he nodded. The setting sun bronzed his scarred arms as he pulled his sweatshirt off over his head. Mal discarded it in the bleachers, rolling his shoulders and stretching.

  “I suppose we might as well begin training together. While I was reading your file, I noticed that you have decreased your personal best for the timed mile run by roughly fifteen percent in each of your last three evaluations. Given that your last evaluation was well over six months ago, I am interested in seeing the current limits of your abilities.”