Red Fox Action Log 49 cont:

  “Woah,” I said, a grin spreading uncontrollably across my face.

  “Oh!” Cynthia exclaimed, putting her hands over her mouth reflexively. “I’m so sorry!”

  “No it’s fine,” I laughed, “I’ve just, literally never heard you curse.”

  “I try not to. I’m sorry, but that’s just wild! What could she see in a monster like that?”

  “Freedom, I think. She thinks we’re all trapped in the world of her vision, and that ‘He’ can free us.”

  Cynthia thought for a moment. Her long lashes framed her contemplative blue eyes like… nevermind. I got to try and make these a little more professional. Uh, how do you talk about your smoking-hot colleague’s eyes in a way that isn’t creepy? You don’t? Maybe you don’t.

  Right.

  “Maybe,” she said, “maybe she’s right. A villain that powerful could cause a lot of chaos. Maybe the timeline where he escapes is so volatile that even precogs can’t see past it.”

  “Or,” I said. “Or maybe it’s like when I escaped her.”

  “I actually don’t know how you escaped her. The reports about the incident are a little vague.”

  “Well, she had this machine that siphoned people's powers like a, like a big ass laser.”

  “The RRR? The Reality Redistribution Ray?”

  “Maybe?”

  “Continue.”

  “So, she’s using this huge machine that destroys people bit by bit, and turns them into a serum.” Suddenly my mind went to the Fox Serum. Maybe the reason they didn’t know how to make more is that they couldn’t make more without killing the people that had the powers in the first place. I shook my head, tried to get back on track. “Anyway. She said she knows that a third of the time I escape but she literally couldn’t see the event. I had this Mass Altering Device that I used to fight with —”

  “Really? Do you still have it? Those are priceless.”

  “No, nudged it into the path of the laser beam, and it exploded.”

  “No way?!”

  “Yeah. It sucked me into another dimension or something for just a moment then spat me back out. I think the reason she couldn’t see the moment is because the timeline was suffused with dark energy or something.”

  “That’s an interesting theory.”

  “So maybe the monster in the maze has something to do with dark energy?”

  “Could be,” Cynthia mused. “John had a hard time with monsters that used Dark Energy. Physics just goes haywire around it. It’s how Carla Quick can run so fast.”

  “Right.”

  She stood again.

  “I need a scone,” she announced. She looked back at me playfully.

  I just stared at her, unsure what that meant.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “It’s an invitation.”

  “Right,” I said, standing.

  We walked to the pastry display. I watched her intently as she ordered the scone. She had this energy to her. She wasn’t bouncy; she was fluid, graceful. When she moved, I was keenly aware of the thousands of pictures of her I was taking in my mind, trying to hold onto the moment.

  She handed her credit card over with both hands, then folded her hands in front of herself as she waited for it back. He gave her the card, which she slipped into a jacket pocket, then she took the scone in a pastry bag. She broke off a piece, blueberry apparently, then popped it into her mouth. She closed her eyes, savoring it.

  It was only then that I realized that I probably should have paid for it.

  “Oh! I should have paid,” I said, reflexively.

  She murmured something that approximated ‘it’s no problem’ in a singsongy way, without ever opening her mouth, then swallowed.

  “We both get paid. You have the Fox Foundation, while I still have the Interstellar Adventurers League.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. I had actually never heard of it. Surprising, given that hero stuff was something of an area of expertise for me.

  “Eh,” she shrugged, popping another piece into her mouth, then covering it with a hand to continue talking, “it’s sorta like a co-op. Anyway. You’re pretty tall!”

  “Oh. Yeah,” I said. “I try not to be.”

  “I can tell,” she said, glancing up at me from the sides of her eyes. “You hunch like you’re trying to duck some kind of perpetually present doorway you’re too tall for.”

  I stood up a little straighter. “Do I?”

  “Yep!”

  “Oh.”

  “Man, I love sugar. Superhero metabolism says I could just keep eating these. But my teeth would fall out.”

  “Cynthia,” I prodded. “You haven’t formally accepted my offer yet.”

  “You’re right. I haven’t.”

  Her eyes gazed back at me, both sad and inquisitive, as if she were studying me. I didn’t mind the attention. I gazed back as earnestly as I could.

  “Walk with me?” she asked.

  I nodded, then grabbed the mostly empty teas. I tossed them and ordered another two. We chatted about an old story from Captain Iron’s war days, tossing tanks at Nazis. Didn’t get a chance to do it often, but man, did I like punching Nazis. In the future, I’d probably have to stick to my kicks. Which was fine, but lacked the skin-on-skin feeling of a good punch.

  When they were ready, I handed her the tea late, and we headed back out onto the street. She didn’t say where we were going, but I figured she just wanted a chance to walk-and-talk.

  “What’s Sniffer Sleuth like?” she asked.

  I answered immediately.

  “His powers are surprisingly useful. When he’s helping me with a chemical mix, he can get a solution that is darn near 30% more effective, and no less stable. As an investigator, he’s almost near second to none. And he’s a decisive leader. Honestly I don’t know if It’s me who’s leading or if it’s him. If I want a tactical decision, I listen to myself. If I want a moral one, I defer to him.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Yeah?” she prodded, eyes shining with something I couldn’t place.

  “He’s good at his job,” I admitted.

  “What about Bronze Boy? I heard he was injured last week, but nobody will confirm or deny.”

  “She’s…”

  “She?”

  “Yeah. She’s as powerful as she ever was, maybe even more so now. But her colleague went Supervillian, and she took it hard.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Tell her I’ve had to feel that sting, and it can fell the best of us.”

  “I'm sure she’d love to hear that. I will.”

  I didn’t tell her that Twitchy was basically just a magical, sentient suit of armor now, too. That wasn’t really my secret to hand out. Most days she spent crying and clawing at a face that shed no tears. Sometimes she drew a woman’s body over and over, as if she was trying to remember what it looked like.

  We’d gained a powerful ally, but she’d lost everything in the process. Most days she refused to talk to me. We’ll figure it out. She has to know death would have been worse, right?

  “What about you? You lost an arm.”

  “Oh, you noticed that, did you?” I said, raising my hook.

  “I’m sorry, even as old as I am I can put my foot in my mouth sometimes.”

  “Old? You’re not old?”

  “I’m old enough to be your mother,” she said.

  “You don’t look it.”

  “Like that matters!”

  She laughed. I felt a smile growing. Involuntarily, I did the math and concluded that my mom was probably still ten years older. But her point still stood.

  “Anyway. The arm doesn’t bother me,” I said, minimizing my life’s greatest wound, but also saying something that felt true. “Not as much as losing the Kit City Care Team. They didn’t deserve what White Rabbit did to them.”

  She was quiet for a long time, hair trailing behind her in the wind as we walked.

  “You want me to join another team,” she said. Her hand shot out, and she turned me around to face her. I did. “You know what happened to the last team I joined. And now you’re asking me to do it again, even though losing another could destroy me.”

  “No it wouldn’t.” I stated.

  “You don’t know me, Fox. You don’t know what I had to survive.”

  “I know you’re brave,” I said, standing a little closer, stealing some of her body heat to warm me against the cold. “I know that you’re the bravest of us.”

  “What if I’m not as brave as you think? What if I don’t want to be brave anymore? What if I just want to live?”

  “Is that a life worth living, the one where you turn your back on everything you’ve done? If you want that life, who could stop you? I’m betting that isn’t the life you want. I’m betting that like me, you know you can’t live any other way. You’ve had this conversation before. With yourself. You chose to become Gem Blade. You chose to get back out there. Why?”

  She looked down. The wind suddenly tossed her pigtail in her face. She sputtered, and stepped back.

  “You okay?” I asked, instinctively grabbing her shoulder to keep her steady. Even with the jacket, I could feel the power in them. I also felt how slight they were. She was just a girl.

  No. No she wasn’t. Couldn’t think like that.

  “What the heck!” she sputtered.

  I let go as quickly as I could.

  “You got a face full of hair,” I said.

  She pawed at her face to make sure that she got all the strands clear.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. What were we talking about?”

  “We were talking about fear,” I said. “And you were going to tell me why you decided to become Gem Blade.”

  She screwed up her mouth in a frown. Then she launched into it.

  “In my last team. The leader, we called her Hinata, she would say ‘duty is the essence of heroism.’ Which meant that even though we were scared, that our duty to help pushed us to be bigger than that fear. Sometimes, she’d describe it as fear being this ‘little spot of darkness in the blinding light of duty.’ Without it, you wouldn’t understand what’s really important. So… the fact that I’m this afraid, means that it must be important.”

  She looked at me, her blue eyes hard, like I’d just challenged her to a fight. In a way, maybe I had.

  “After coming back,” she continued. “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I was so scared to get back to the work. Then, one day I just picked up the sword and got out there.”

  “I like that,” I said, stepping back a pace to give her some room. “Hinata sounds smart. Or sounded.”

  “She’s still smart. Even though she’s given herself to the universe, I carry her with me. It sounds silly, but that’s how I feel.”

  “No,” I said, thinking about Gus. “It doesn’t sound silly. I like to think like that sometimes too.”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” she said, probably too quickly.

  “You don’t have to. I should probably check in with the team anyway.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “The nonchalant thing. You want me.”

  “Oh? The most powerful superhero in the universe — Gem Girl? Why would I want you on the team?”

  “I’m not Gem Girl anymore,” she reminded.

  “You’ll always be Gem Girl.”

  “That wasn’t my first name, you know,” she said, gesturing for me to walk with her some more. “In Japan, I was Gem Brigadier Sapphire.”

  “Is that how you still think of yourself, Gem Sapphire, just one of the Brigade?”

  “I mean, that’s the girl she made me. She gave me the gem,” she said, tapping on her chest. “She was my best friend,” she said in a way that seemed like the word ‘friend’ was inadequate. “She showed me I could be something, something greater. Maybe greater than a silly exchange student, lost in a big city. I was a woman. I was powerful. And then she up and died on me.”

  We’d arrived. The statue of Captain Iron in Garden City. Didn’t know we were walking here until we arrived, but she must have had some sort of point to make with it.

  They called it Ol’ Johnny. You wouldn’t catch me dead calling it that, but maybe to some folks he was just this, this gaudy statue. It was half human figure, half impressionistic form of strength, ten feet tall, with a lovingly rendered cape, but a face kind of just blandly Black, not really representative. You knew who it was even at a glance, but I felt like something was missing.

  The cars sped in a circle around it. This late in the afternoon, it was almost Garden City rush hour.

  “It’s big,” I said, lamely.

  “Yeah,” she said quietly, “but it doesn’t much look like him.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen him,” I said, only a small amount of envy creeping into my voice.

  She laughed.

  “He’s just a guy! The best guy — but he wasn’t that. He gave the best hugs. Loved puns. He was an awkward kisser.”

  “What?!”

  “What?” she said, eyebrow arched coyly.

  “You dated Captain Iron?”

  Her laughter descended into giggles. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat.

  “We didn’t date. I was very young. Just out of my teens when we met. But come on. Two heroes at the peak of their power? You try things. He couldn’t see me as anything other than a girl. And I didn’t want to be a girl anymore. He’s surprisingly easy to get along with, you know. He slots right next to you like you’ve always been friends. But then you realize that he’s like that with everyone. And the shine comes off it a little.”

  She sounded bitter. It was weird. I didn’t like it. But I didn’t interrupt.

  “I don’t want to just be that,” she said, nodding her head in his direction.

  “Huh. You feel like being a hero boxes you in?”

  “Oh yeah, sure, there is that, you don’t always get to choose how they see you. But more than that, I don’t want to have to live up to that all the time. It’s exhausting! I want to mess up! I want to be human. I want to go out with a boy without a hundred photographers in my face.”

  “No photographers here,” I acknowledged.

  “Yeah, well, once I join your little team, they’ll show up.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Definitely,” she said. “I know it’s selfish. I know that most people would trade every bit of privacy they have to help others the way we do. But they don’t know. You don’t know.”

  I shrugged. She was right in a way. I didn’t have the kind of scrutiny on me that she had back in the day.

  She continued.

  “How much is enough? When do I get to stop? When do I get to be me?”

  “Well,” I said. “Haven’t you had some time to be you? You’ve been gone a decade. Do you feel like yourself yet?”

  “I haven’t really been gone that long,” she said, turning away, talking to the wind. “I still go out all the time.”

  “Why?”

  She turned back to me.

  “Because who else would?”

  I gazed at her for a time. I could imagine some of what she was going through. I’m sure to her, going back to being a public hero was like being walled up in that statue, being trapped. But the truth was, we were always trapped. Duty trapped us, not our choices. Embrace it; run from it. It was all the same. You had to live your life in deference to it either way.

  I didn’t say that. I didn’t need to. Something bound us together in that moment. Maybe it was our experiences. Maybe it was the gems we both had now. But she got it. I got it.

  She didn’t even need to say anything.

  But I waited for it anyway.

  “When did you figure it out?” she said conspiratorially.

  “Right about the time I noticed the statue,” I said. “When did you decide?”

  “Sometime last week.”

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