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⏪ Previously, Mheksos outlined his master plan to erase every version of himself with time-travel powers from the multiverse. He intends to prevent the resulting reality-collapsing paradox by swapping in someone else as Mheksos’ secret identity—and informed Hades that he seems to be the most obvious choice…

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“Me?” Hades tried to swallow, but couldn’t. “No, I…that doesn’t make sense. How would you even ensure that?”

“It should be sufficient to return you to the point in time where the paradox resolves,” Mheksos said. “I vanish, you vanish, and then—Mheksos will always have been you. The record will show that you left your timeline at that point and rampaged throughout the multiverse, attempting to make your name as a villain, before your future self finally returned to your own timeline just a day or two before your past self had left. The overlap between you two explains the paradox here. The damage you inflicted to the other timelines explains the erasures there. No version of Mheksos with the power to edit history remains. And once you live through the paradox again, you’re free to call off the invasion then and there, if you want to.”

“If I want to, ha,” he said beneath his breath. Perhaps that was the question. After he had always been Mheksos, would he still want to? Or would Mheksos’ accumulated memories consume even that little piece of his soul that he had kept to himself? “But—no, look, this is ridiculous. I thought that bringing in a new Mheksos was supposed to settle everything, but The Matrix still knows who you are—were—will have been?—and now we’ve talked, so—look, it’s not that I don’t want to be the Master of the Multiverse. But outside your extended paradox bubble, what becomes the rationale for Mheksos’ existence? Why in the Below would I leave this timeline now and start waging interdimensional war, and why would I purposely come back early enough to influence my own past?”

Mheksos shrugged loosely, picking up a twelfth chipped cup that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. “Once you’ve actually resolved the paradox, one question may end up answering the other. In any case, do recall that you’ve been living in its aftermath, not events as they will have been to start with. With a scar like that on the timeline, it’s possible you may never entirely reconcile the causality; some plausible reason is all it would take. Perhaps you’ll have had some dust-up with your puppetmaster, or a humiliating rejection from your lovely nemesis…see, the longer you think about it, the more sense it makes, doesn’t it?”

It did, so Hades left off that thought and attacked the next. “I can’t even travel between timelines.”

“Can’t you?” Mheksos asked. “Or have you never tried, because you didn’t know what was possible? I know that you understand the physics. If you were to revolt against your master and take some of his power for yourself, enough to keep yourself alive without him, enough to see through the fourth dimension and face that first jump…”

Hades had stopped listening. His master! He hadn’t thought of Archangel at all since being pulled through the rift. He reached mentally for the familiar sense of control, just to be certain, and brushed against a feeling like the empty socket of a missing tooth. Panic surged through him as if he hadn’t found his pulse. “What did you do?” he demanded.

“I’ve done nothing. You still have the power he was letting you borrow, but he doesn’t exist here, so he can’t touch you,” Mheksos said. “You must have noticed that it was the same way for Makaria? Your master couldn’t just take control of her, since she was created by a different version of himself; he’d have needed your help. As Mheksos, marauding abroad through the multiverse, you’ll likewise be entirely free from his influence. You’ll be your own villain. Your own man, even.”

“I…” Hades stared at him, recalculating. “Well…yes, I suppose I would.”

The ironic thought had just occurred that perhaps he was well-suited for the job: his own timeline might very well also be safer without Lord Hades. The good world that he was slowly coming to appreciate, that he’d become reluctant to allow his master, or anyone, to ruin…his daughter smiling at her mother, free of the yoke across his own shoulder…it might all still be possible. But only at a price. He slowly clenched and unclenched a fist as he thought it over. “Everything Mheksos has done would become my work,” he said. “Even killing my Lady Radiance. I know that’s happened many times.”

“Not your Lady,” the other said. “Mheksos hasn’t touched a hair of yours. The others—there was nothing you could do. They got in the way.” He looked darkly amused as he added, “That’s not a bad reason for jumping from timeline to timeline, is it? Trying just one more time to get it right.”

“I didn’t say I would do it,” Hades said, bristling, suddenly overcome by a feeling that he was rarely allowed to experience.

“I wasn’t asking,” Mheksos said.

“I don’t get a choice?”

“No more than I did.”

“Wonderful. Story of my life.” Hades put on a wide, shallow smile. “Will I remember any of this conversation?”

Mheksos’ presence was starting to look a little thin. “It’s possible; there are things I remember from my past lives that have since technically been erased. Then again, possibly not.” He raised a hand, and the room took on a deepening green tint. “If any of it’s important to you, I suggest concentrating very hard.”

Liam’s skin tingled with fear as his surroundings continued to fade. What was important? All that came to mind immediately was Makaria, but she’d only come here in the first place because of Mheksos; to try to remember her at all seemed like a hopeless kind of circular logic. And yet that was all he could think of—Kari, and the happy family she wanted so badly, and her hesitation to believe that she was even allowed to say so. He knew that pain, and yet he was about to inflict it.

“Will they forgive me?” he asked, his voice cracking like thin ice underfoot—as if Mheksos could answer that. But he was already falling again.

An approaching thunderclap rolled over the city as Kari stared into the space where the rift had been.

Lady Radiance had stopped running when she saw it close itself from the inside, and now she began to walk slowly toward her daughter again. The bright-white and warm-gold auras, hazy from refraction through the pouring rain, tangled briefly at the edges and then melded as Christa reached her and leaned down. Behind her, Jacob and Titan Beetle hung back by the stairs.

Kari took the proffered hand, but stayed where she was, sitting in the pooling water that had splashed flecks of tar across the hem of her cloak and the skirts of her borrowed pink dress. “Is he coming back?” she asked, with her gaze still fixed on her last sight of Lord Hades.

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⏭️ This episode concludes Part 5 of 7. Next week will be a brief intermission. We’ll return on Monday, May 18th with the opening to Part 6, another trip down memory lane—this one to The Matrix’ universe, Terra-43. You may want to reread #8, his previous flashback episode, in the meantime...

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Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

⏪ When we left off last week, Mheksos had our friend Hades trapped in his interdimensional lair for what seemed to be a good old-fashioned villain monologue. In doing so, he confirmed most of what The Matrix had guessed at in #23—except that while Matrix believed that Mheksos was trying to reenact the events of his initial timeline, the real truth may be far darker…

Thanks for your perseverance through the first draft of a very tangled plot! I made some minor edits to the previous episode for clarification, and ran today’s through a beta reader ahead of time. I hope it lands a bit more smoothly. —EB

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“You see,” Mheksos continued, “what that third version of myself realized was that if one of us had had this idea to go back and fix history, then the chances were that he wouldn’t be the only one. And as I said, it’s a power that’s almost too dangerous to be used at all. The only responsible thing was to ensure that it would never be.”

His meaning arrived to Hades so suddenly that it would have knocked him over had he been on his feet. “Are you saying that you’ve been triggering these paradoxes on purpose?”

“Exactly. Since him, each Mheksos in turn has undertaken to create a time paradox that prevents his own birth, exploiting the reality-repair mechanism to summon a replacement—who, having the memories of everything that came before, comes inevitably to the conclusion that he must continue the cycle.”

He had to force a breath. “And when you run out of replacements?”

Mheksos smiled like a master praising his apprentice. “Ah, that’s the genius of it. Those first two universes, well—they may very well end up collapsing. I was clearly known to be the problem there. But elsewhere, when the last relevant version of myself has been written out of history, what will there be left to explain? Only the clumsy efforts of an unhinged interdimensional conqueror. Only Mheksos the Mighty, who never revealed his identity nor showed his face. He could be anyone with the ability to bridge the fifth dimension, couldn’t he? The egoism, the robot minions—it’s all theatrics. That is why there will be no paradox when I am gone. At the end of the line, a far less dangerous man waits to take my place.”

Hades had no words; his thoughts were occupied with trying to check the logic. The paradox-erasures did make a twisted kind of sense, and if he himself had been put in the same position….well, whatever the right choice might be, he didn’t think he could have made a different one. He wasn’t sure that Mheksos would be able to pull it off this time around, though, since—although Mheksos evidently didn’t know this—The Matrix had split their original timeline to create a backup pocket universe1.

In theory, making a backup should have stabilized the situation. Mheksos preventing his own future birth here, in the new timeline, shouldn’t erase the original version that was talking to him now. The shelved version of their timeline should hold a stable origin open for the mighty marauder, stopping the paradox cascade in its tracks. The worrying thing was that Hades only had Makaria’s word that it had even been done. Could they take the risk that it had worked correctly? That splitting the timeline hadn’t, for instance, caused some further paradox that meant this Mheksos was the new timeline’s version? There would be no knowing until the moment that he succeeded in his goal—or the moment that they inadvertently changed something so drastically that they accomplished it for him.

The thought was sobering, and it was suddenly astonishing to Hades that The Matrix wasn’t even grayer than he was.

“I would have explained all this to the particular Matrix that we’re dealing with now,” Mheksos said. “In most universes he’s both a knowledgeable source and the chief threat to my plan, so I try to find him and at least have a chat. The initial paradox left me with so much information about Jonathan that the easiest way to do it is to pick up his location and follow to see if it intersects with The Matrix’—it doesn’t always. You have, which one is it, Titan Beetle? I believe I ended up having to pull off a full-scale invasion of Earth to get rid of myself there. Some of my earlier work. That version of Mheksos didn’t even have all the same grandparents that I do, so you see what I meant about details varying…where was I?”

“You didn’t explain this to The Matrix,” Hades said, falling back instinctively on the mask of helpfulness.

“Yes, thank you. After our last encounter, I had to glance back at his timeline to see which one he was. That version wouldn’t tell me anything; there was no talking to him at all, really. All this moral outrage that I knew would boil down to self-interest if I let him go on for long enough…most people are like that, of course. In the end, I had to let him go and erase him to get it over with. It’s unfortunate that I missed, but here we are.” Mheksos shook his head, looking darkly amused. “It’s most irritating that he’s presented such an effective obstacle without even knowing what my goal is.”

“I can see how it would be.” Finally at the end of his tangle of thoughts, Hades cleared his throat softly. “I must congratulate you; it’s all very clever. There’s one thing I don’t follow.”

“Only one? I knew I liked you.”

“Why doesn’t that feel reassuring?” Hades quipped, only further unsettled when Mheksos responded with a narrow-eyed smile. “The thing is, I understood that neither Jonathan nor the Matrix has been born yet. Why choose this point on the timeline, then?”

Mheksos leaned in conspiratorially. “When I examined this timeline from the outside, I found clear evidence of paradoxical damage already visible here. As I’ve never been able to see my own work before, I could only conclude that I was seeing the end of my time as Mheksos, and my own replacement in progress. In fact, I suspect that, very shortly, this conversation will never have happened at all.”

“And why is that?”

“For quite a while, I assumed that it would be some version of The Matrix who succeeded me,” Mheksos said. “But this conversation really has been clarifying, and he’s not the only one here with powers that would let him plausibly ascend to interdimensional villainy. I think that you, Lord Hades, would make an excellent Master of the Multiverse.”

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⏭️ Next week: What does Lord Hades have to say about this development? …and will it make any difference?

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The air shivered with a grating voice from beyond the rift. “You can’t hold me off forever. I only have to get enough of my forces through to strike once.”

“And then what, Mheksos?” The Matrix shouted back. “You know that if you keep this up, you’re going to create a time paradox serious enough to destabilize us all! Do you really want to win so badly that you’re willing to take all our timelines down with you?”

“There will be no paradox! I am the Master of the Multiverse! Time and space serve me!” —#22, The Return

Previously, Mheksos the Mighty has made several attempts to invade our heroes’ reality—but he’s yet to take any of those opportunities to explain why. The Matrix noted that their enemy seems to be trapped in a cycle of erasing and replacing himself across the multiverse, and theorized that each new version of Mheksos, still remembering his vanished lives in some way, can’t help but reenact the initial paradox; however, given his lack of insight into Mheksos’ motivations, even The Matrix would admit that that’s far closer to hypothesis than theory.

Now, the already-conflicted Lord Hades has found himself in an unlikely confrontation with the man responsible for throwing his evildoing life into turmoil. For once, will he be able to succeed where everyone else has failed?

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Mheksos had not invited Hades in, but nonetheless he found himself more directly in the Mighty One’s presence, seated beside a grumbling little robot that he was sure he remembered recently setting on fire. The room was closed up, without windows, and it was impossible to tell if they were in any one timeline properly or just a pocket dimension that Mheksos used as a private lair. The shelves that lined its walls were stuffed to overflowing, with futuristic tablet computers sitting next to five-inch-thick binders with typewritten labels and snarled bundles of power cords poking out of cardboard boxes. Eleven identically chipped coffee cups were stacked neatly in a corner, and notebooks, loose paper, disembodied mechanical parts covered every remaining open surface.

“Very homey,” Hades remarked, returning the robot’s wary look.

“I suppose you would think so,” the Mighty One said. Up close, the man behind the curtain looked even less mighty: unimposing, unmasked, wearing something that looked like a tracksuit but didn’t quite fit, and much older than Hades had imagined. Although it was true enough that he hadn’t talked to The Matrix yet, Makaria had been eager to share what she knew. “You know, this may be interesting after all. You’re before my time, and we don’t talk very often. It’s so rare that I have to kill you.”

It took some effort to decide which of those statements to pursue. “And what is your time?”

“I was born in the year 2082—details vary, of course. You’re familiar with the paradox of the Ship of Theseus?” Mheksos’ outline stuttered again. “Something similar comes to mind. When each version of myself which I stumble across seems to have yet one more biographical detail out of place, I start to wonder if they can all be considered the same man.”

Hades shrugged slightly. “They must share something essential, or you wouldn’t know yourself when you saw him.”

“True enough. But if I’m wrong about what that essential element of my identity is? Perhaps you and I might even be multiversal variants of each other.” He gave a toothy, ironic smile, as if he’d just thought of a private joke at reality’s expense. “Perhaps, if our definitions become loose enough, any of us may be.”

“You’ll pardon my ignorance, but I don’t think that’s very likely,” Hades said.

This seemed to amuse Mheksos. “No, it’s not likely at all. You’re sensible—I knew I liked you. Well. To set philosophy aside and be more specific, all the versions of myself which have seemed relevant were born in 2082, and to varying degrees, they all had the ability to travel through time and permanently alter history. Not simply to change the course of events, as your acquaintances are doing, but to edit the timeline itself.”

“Most impressive.”

Mheksos shook his head. “So I thought, once! I didn’t find that out how dangerous it was until it was too late. I was reckless in my first incarnation. —oh, yes, there have been many, many…even I don’t know how many Mhekses. I remember how Mheksos began back in Terra-764, and I remember my own immediate past in Terra-32, far off in your future. But in between, it’s not terribly clear. The timelines all begin to run together after a while.”

“It must be very difficult for you.” Keeping an overlord-type flattered but not suspicious was all in the tone, and Liam thought he was doing well. If there was one fine point at the juncture of sarcastic, sympathetic, and sycophantic, Lord Hades was currently balanced on it.

“You can’t imagine,” Mheksos said drily. “But, yes, that first lifetime is still clear enough in my mind…I can remember his childhood, even. The Matrix was his grandfather, just as mine was—though my predecessor never knew his version. That’s the real tragedy, to my mind. Some mentorship in the appropriate use of his powers, as I had, might have prevented all this.”

Hades nodded sympathetically to cover his confusion, having assumed that all this was what Mheksos wanted. “So what did he do?”

“Unfortunately, he survived the Global Cataclysm,” Mheksos said. “Fifty years of devastating war, and the fool got it into his mind that he should have done something about it. He did, too. He went back in time and killed that nephew of yours, Jonathan Jones, preventing the war. But then, of course, he no longer had a reason to go back in time—the classic time paradox. The fallout wiped him from existence as reality tried to fix itself.” He shook his head, finally setting aside the Mhekanite whirring under his hands to turn directly to Hades. “Would that that was where it ended, but for the post-paradox timeline to be stable, somebody still had to be there to kill Jonathan and do all that damage to the local spacetime, didn’t they? It was like a wound left open to bleed into the multiverse…you see the problem.”

“Dimly, yes,” Hades said. “Go on.”

Mheksos nodded. “To close the loop, a second version of myself was pulled from the nearest parallel timeline and retroactively identified as the culprit. The problem was that he had no motivation to do it; there had never been a Cataclysm in his timeline, and he would never have willingly killed anyone. He was horrified, but what could he do about it?”

Hades had the feeling that this was not a rhetorical question.

“There was only thing he could do: he removed that self from the equation as well. He returned to his own timeline and edited history so that he himself had never been born.”

“Causing a second massive paradox?” Hades said, his heart twisting.

“Yes, and dragging a third me into the mess. The first Mheksos, you see.”

“…no, I’m not sure that I follow you.”

Mheksos gave him that ironic smile again. “Then I must direct you past the madness to the method behind it.”

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⏭️ Next week: the continuation…

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Previously, a meaningful conversation between Hades and Makaria was cut short by the intrusion of a new dimensional rift…

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Makaria moved first when they saw the rift open, throwing her hands up in a blaze of white flame. Hades extended a warier gesture, examining the anomaly as best as he could without getting in her way. It was a rip in their reality, raw and angry, with the herniated folds of other spacetimes pressing in behind it. Up close, he could see very clearly how the girl was working to pick out the threads that should go together and yank them tight again across the gap. Her power felt familiar, very much like his own, and yet not quite. Was it a difference between their masters? The addition, maybe, of some of Persephone’s powers?

A sharp pop behind him warned Hades that he’d spent longer in study than he’d thought. “I couldn’t wake The Matrix!” Jacob called.

Makaria turned her face slightly to be heard better. “I’m not surprised, after everything that last fight took out of him! Mheksos has to be trying to wear us down.”

Jacob reappeared off to the side, crouching on the roof of the stairwell with his arm over his head against the strengthening rain. “The others are on their way. Should I try to get Baz or Ignis up here too?”

“If I can get it closed before he widens it enough to push his forces through, we won’t need anybody—” Her hold on their spacetime slipped as the rift ratcheted open further, and she stumbled back half a step on the wet concrete. With one hand Hades steadied her, and with the other he caught the threads she’d dropped. He hadn’t entirely known that he could, but—of course he could. It wasn’t so different from picking up coordinates in space to form a portal. He handed them back to an open-mouthed Makaria with a thin smile.

“We’ll get it closed,” he said.

“...thank you, Father.” She nodded gratefully toward the other end of the rift, which had begun to spiral outwards like a malignant vine searching for purchase. “I’ll hold this side, and you take that one.”

Zipping the tear back together turned out to be relatively simple; that was an intellectual exercise in matching up the torn bits and letting them remember how the world was supposed to be. Spacetime, governed by inertia as much as any of them were, could do that much by itself. The unexpectedly difficult endeavor was to take the wide-apart edges and draw them in. As Hades worked—or tried to work—he found that closing the gap required a personal force of character that did not come naturally.

His hold slipped now, and the gash stretched open further in front of him. His clammy hands were shaking. How could a thing like him come up with the necessary resolution to impose his will on reality itself? He could give himself over to his master, let his strength and personality suffice, but—that would diminish that small part of him that was Liam even further. And then there would be no buffer between Archangel and Makaria at all.

No. No, he had to do this himself, somehow. Liam focused very hard on the thought that this world had to be worth saving—he didn’t know how it could be, but—

The rift pulled away from him again, and he grabbed wildly. No, it was. It was good. This world had sunlight and laughter. It had Christabel, and her anger, and her pity. It had his daughter, their daughter, who had come all the way across the multiverse to save it. It was a good world, and if he wasn’t worthy of that, then he’d find a way to become so. Bracing himself, Liam pulled back in turn on the edges, and was relieved to feel them obey this time.

With his newfound determination he was able to work his way almost to the middle, with Makaria just about a foot away. Then the material behind the rift suddenly buckled, sending them both toppling. He fell forward, through the mist, into the fifth dimension and the heaving chaos beyond.

He kept falling. The weight of a thousand parallel realities pressed in on him, throwing him further in and further down—whatever meaning down still had. Within their gauzy folds, image after image of his own face passed him like the reflections in a house of mirrors, each staring back in astonishment. Before he could give in to the urge to reach out to one, another scene emerged from the mist before him. Just beyond the threshold of reality, an unassuming man of indeterminate age sat surrounded by mechanical odds and ends, cleaning blood from the feet of a Mhekanite. As the distortion between them faded, the man looked up and seemed to see Hades approaching, and scowled.

“That wasn’t supposed to be you,” he said. As he spoke, something in his face suddenly glitched, as if briefly exposing another face beneath, identical but not quite in sync. “When you get back, tell The Matrix I’ve had enough of his tricks. I’ve seen far more of the multiverse than he has, and he can’t imagine the suffering that ensues if he succeeds in his stupid little campaign. Tell him to give up now, before his interference contaminates the timeline any further.”

“Your Mightiness, I presume?” Hades spoke quickly, seeing Mheksos’ hand lifting to banish him. This was the sort of thing that did come naturally. “You must know I have my own motivations in the matter, nothing to do with The Matrix at all. You must know also that our timeline has already been so contaminated that surrender would do you no good without wiping out nearly every person who’s become involved.”

Mheksos hesitated, his expression narrowing in silent confirmation.

Hades pressed on. “Perhaps, however, if you in your wisdom might advise us—”

“Perhaps,” Mheksos said curtly. “What did The Matrix tell you?”

“Nothing.”

“Naturally.” The Master of the Multiverse lowered his hand. “He never told me anything, either.”

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⏭️ Next week: Mheksos the Mighty…in his own words.

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⏮️ Previously, Lord Hades had an ominous conversation with his psychic puppetmaster regarding his alternate-timeline daughter Makaria.

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As Liam was reemerging from the trance, a figure crouched fluidly next to him and waited patiently for him to recognize its sharpening features. Makaria. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Fine.” A lie, but a kinder lie than the ones she must be used to. “He…wanted a report, that’s all.”

“Yes, I felt it,” she said. They sat quietly together for a minute, Liam still reorienting himself. Night had fallen by now, but that made no real difference to him; his eyes required no more light than the city’s reflection on the low glaze of cloud cover. It was only the two of them and Jacob up here, since Christabel and—what was the Titan’s name?—Jonathan had the next shift. Jacob seemed to be pointedly ignoring them, having said what needed to be said and now moved on to handling business. It was a respectable position that shouldn’t have bothered Liam in the slightest.

“Was that really all he wanted?” the girl asked.

No matter what he chose to do, he had the sinking feeling that he was destined to screw this up. He might as well talk to her honestly in the meantime. “No,” he said. “Makaria, what did you really mean to get out of coming here?”

Her eyes flickered suspiciously. “Saving you and Mother, of course. You don’t believe me?”

“I’d like to, but…really? After everything you went through, I’d expect your loyalties to have shifted.”

“It’s not about loyalties,” Makaria said with a bitter smile. “The Matrix promised that things would be different here.1 That Gabriel wasn’t controlling you, and the two of you were happy together, that we—that you could be a real…”

She closed her mouth tightly on the rest of that sentence—Liam suspected that it would have been the word family—and blushed faintly violet. “Maybe it hasn’t happened yet, but I know it has to be possible.”

“Possible is one thing. Achievable is another,” he said. If he knew how to get free of the Master, to make himself a new life like the one she believed he should have had…but how? He’d thought secretly of it, sure, but those were daydreams. Just the sunlight and fresh air up here making his head swim. This Hades didn’t have any burning resentment or great love to fuel his resistance. Besides the foreign, abstract idea of a happier world, it was only his own dignity and well-being on the line; and, soaked down to the soul in gloom in since childhood, Liam had never come around to the idea that he was worth doing much of anything for.

Makaria seemed to know he was thinking, as she watched expectantly for him to continue. There was her to consider, now, but he couldn’t imagine how his defection might go better for her here than in her own timeline. His father hadn’t hesitated to replace Siren with Lord Hades, and if he lost Hades in turn… “We may have changed our timeline too much,” Liam said quietly. “The Master’s suddenly very interested in you, since he found out that you served his other self.”

“You told him?”

“I had to.” He scowled down at the cement in shame and frustration. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain, Makaria. I don’t understand how your mother could be happy with me, when there hardly seems to be a me for her to know or love. I’m his instrument, and everything I do is for him. Every time I get some thought or feeling he doesn’t like, he takes it away. I know it’s for the best—if it’s not for the best, I can’t—I can’t imagine why he would. But there’s still some part of me that doesn’t like it.”

“That part’s you,” Makaria said. “That’s what Mother loved.”

Liam shook his head. “Was your—Gabriel like that as well? He didn’t treat you that way, did he?”

She hesitated. “He did.”

“But you told Christabel…”

“What else could I have told her?” Makaria said sharply, her own mood suddenly turning. A drop of moisture appeared on Liam’s hand, and then another: the mist that had begun while he was distracted was turning into a light rain. “I won’t apologize for telling her what she wanted to hear. Of course I said that Hades was a good man, and our master wasn’t so bad—I wanted her to be happy. People don’t want the truth, no matter what they might say. My father taught me that.”

Liam reached over and pulled up the hood of Makaria’s cloak against the spattering raindrops. The light from her eyes shivered as she looked back at him. “You deserved to have a better father than you did,” he said.

“So did you,” she replied.

“No.” He stopped himself, confused now. “It’s not…it’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

Liam intended to say that of course it wasn’t. Makaria was half her mother, and an innocent child. He was something reanimated, therefore monstrous. There was no contradiction in accepting treatment from his own father that he would never tolerate for her. But—was that really what he thought?

Was he truly so much worse, so much less human, that this was justified?

The sound of spacetime tearing about six feet away superseded any contemplation. Another small rift had opened up between them and Jacob Jones, and green mist was trickling out of the air again.

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⏭️ Next week: that fifth-dimensional fold isn’t going to unfold itself…

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⏮️ Previously, Lord Hades’ dark master charged him to go with the heroes, protect Lady Radiance, and keep his eyes open…

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Liam couldn’t say he’d been comfortable with anything he’d had to do today, but climbing to the roof as the sun set behind the treetops had turned out to be a new genre of unnerving. Taking the elements individually, there was nothing wrong with any of them; however, standing watch on rooftops felt very much like a hero thing, and as everyone was eager to remind him, such things were not for him. He had no noble purpose here. For whatever reason, the future deconstruction of the world as they knew it depended on Lady Radiance remaining alive and well; that was all, and he wouldn’t even be here otherwise.

He had been tempted to disregard that fact, true…but then he’d persuaded Makaria to fill in more of the details of her timeline. His own fundamental monstrosity had become much harder to doubt after that.

A familiar psychic intrusion prodded at the base of Liam’s neck. Clare Harper must be leaving to see to her more usual maternal duties, dissipating the interference that had kept his Master out. :Lord Hades. How goes it?:

:Well enough,: he sent back, offering his memories from this morning. :We successfully fought a battle.1 Lady Radiance is alive, and…tolerates my presence.:

:Good. What have you learned?:

:Nothing useful, I’m sure.:

:Tell me anyway.:

Hades gazed past Jacob Jones at the thin blonde girl pacing the roof’s perimeter, so that the Master could have a good look at her. :Makaria is the only one who speaks freely. She tells me that in her timeline, you corrected my genetic information and Lady Radiance’s in order to synthetically create her, and that you used your powers to effect some kind of transformation in the Lady. She became Persephone, my Queen…is that possible?:

:Much is possible. What of her mother’s death? Did she speak of that?:

:In passing. Mheksos killed her.: He struggled briefly with himself and then admitted, :Makaria said that just before her death, Persephone stopped listening to us.:

The answer came sharp, with some surprise. :Persephone did?:

:Yes. She could no longer abide seeing suffering without trying to help. Her will was strong enough to break the bond that the transformation created.:

:I see. What of Makaria’s father, then?:

Liam had asked that, too, feigning indifference very badly. Hades, also transformed, also bonded: what of him? If he disobeyed, would he not surely die?

:I…she says that after Persephone’s death, he dedicated himself to villainy in his own right, leaving her with you as his replacement.:

:You are omitting something.:

:No…well. It’s hardly relevant—:

:HADES.:

Liam flinched at the strength of the demand. :Yes, all right. I broke our bond as well, and kept my share of the power. You sent the girl after me many times to try to bring me back, but I wouldn’t come. When she tried to help me, I disowned her for interfering in my life. Even when you made her bear your power alone, so that I could see she couldn’t, I said I would rather see her die than…to serve you again.:

The dreadful inner voice was silent.

:Father, that was another Lord Hades, in another world. I’m loyal to you, as I promised. You know I am.:

:Until you find some greater loyalty.:

The betrayal in that voice reached so deeply into his soul that Liam felt it as if it were his own; overwhelmed, he forgot everything else, even the mingled horror and hope of knowing that Hades could treat his own flesh and blood that way—but that he could be free. :Never!:

:How can I trust you?:

:I’ll prove it. Give me a chance. I’ll do anything.:

:We shall see about that. In any case, don’t worry any more about Lady Radiance.:

He felt suddenly unsteady. :But your plans—:

:My plans are worthless if Persephone can be broken. Forget her. I am turning my attention to other affairs.:

:Yes?:

:Did you discover what the scientists are up to?:

It would have been no good wondering how the Master knew about Lady Radiance’s associates; he was always a step ahead. :They’re experimenting toward a depowering treatment. It doesn’t work very well yet. I think they accidentally gave the electric one more powers than he started with…: Hades showed him the memory of snooping around Dr. Cotlin’s office; it wasn’t photographic, but thinking it through like that helped him visualize what was in the notes he’d seen. : Right. That was before they put together a serum to give him more powers on purpose. Supposedly it’s a better-developed version of the one they’re working on now.:

:That’s more like it. Do you have that formula?:

:No. The one called The Matrix brought it from the future, but he had it memorized and did most of the synthesis himself. The doctors were both very annoyed he didn’t trust them with it.:

:You’ll have to investigate. Check the equipment, if you can. And the serum may not have been completely metabolized yet; get me a hair sample, saliva, something. Who is it they’ve improved?:

:The label said Sebastian Carter Grimes.: Given that the man had said specifically that he was “about to go straighten that girl out” and not to call him for anything less than the imminent end of the world, Liam couldn’t see himself getting that close to Chained Lightning anytime soon; but he was careful not to let that thought rise to the level of a communication. He was not supposed to be empathizing with these people.

:I’ll have someone look him up. In the meantime, I want any information you can scrape together on their work. And, Hades?:

:I’m listening.:

:If this Mheksos does come back, as I said, leave Lady Radiance alone. You look after Makaria. I think that she may prove far more useful.:

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⏭️ Next week, Hades questions his orders…and Kari is only too happy to help.

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⏮️ Previously, Marissa mentioned that she’s concerned about her alternate selves’ sense of morality, and the fact that The Matrix wasn’t acting alone; she later discovered, despite her horror at the idea, that Ignis’ parents were his timeline’s version of herself and Baz; and, overall, Baz seemed to be taking the whole situation far better than she has…

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Marissa couldn’t bear to look back and see if Sebastian was still standing in the door with those big blue eyes pointed her way. Instead, she slammed a toolbox closed and went back to her desk to sling it in a drawer before turning off the music she’d let Cade pick out. Behind her, she heard Sebastian’s footsteps on the tile in the silence, and the creak and rattle of the vacated spare chair as he dropped into it and rolled it across the floor. A hand appeared beside hers on the black laminate desktop, fingers tapping to ask her to look over. She didn’t.

“You knew all along that he was ours,” she said. It would make at least some of this stupid whirlwind day make sense. Ever since he’d met Ignis, Sebastian had been…weird. True, a lot of his behavior had been weird recently, but this was a noticeable escalation. All of a sudden, he’d become her shadow. He was switching between provoking and charming her on the scale of hours instead of months, and the little pockets of genuine softness she’d been catching in between were something she might normally see once in a good year. He’d even asked her…oh, no, that had been a date, hadn’t it? And he’d wanted to walk her home this morning, too. What would he have said if she’d let him?

A wave of heat clawed at her chest as she mentally fumbled the logic puzzle of everything The Matrix had let slip, her failed attempts to put it together overshadowed by the inescapable implication that Baz Grimes’ reaction to finding out that some version of him had loved some version of her was that sounds like a good idea.

“Yeah,” he said. “He got your sense of subtlety.”

Marissa pulled her hand back and turned to sit on the edge of the desk, arms crossed tightly against her waist. “I admitted you were right. What else do you want me to say?”

Sebastian edged into her view until he was unavoidable, half-draped across the low chair back as he leaned forward to look up at her. “I want you to tell me what had you so scared you couldn’t see it,” he said.

She hesitated. “You won’t understand.”

“Never stopped you before.”

“Fair.” She sighed, squeezing herself, and jumped in at the first place she could think to start. “Look, this whole multiverse thing is really freaking me out. I thought I knew who I was. I mean, I figured out what matters, and I made the choices that got me here. That’s me. That’s who I am. There’s not supposed to be some other me out there with different values, doing something else, like…that just shouldn’t even be possible, right? But they are out there, and they’re terrible. In Beetle’s timeline I’m a terrorist, in Ignis’ I’m a war criminal, in The Matrix’s I’m punching holes in reality, in Makaria’s…I don’t know, but it’s probably even worse somehow.”

“Oh, Jake said you’d already died by now in that one,” Sebastian said.

“I hate that that’s the better option.” A glimmer of memory worked its way out of the tangle. “…wasn’t I…no. We were married in that timeline too, weren’t we?” He nodded, a slight smirk curling across his face. It didn’t reach all the way to his eyes, though, and Marissa had to look away from the gentleness in his gaze before it pulled all the breath out of her. Her conversation with Cade had reminded her of something she’d have preferred to forget: she had once hoped Sebastian might look at her that way. Once. “I can see that,” she mumbled, before adding hastily, “But that’s the problem! When Cade was telling me about his mother, she didn’t feel like some other me. I understood her completely. And like—the more I think about this, the more I realize how long it’s actually been since I felt like myself. I thought I was just getting burned out, but what if it’s because I’m not supposed to have my life together? Like maybe it’s my default state to care too much and burn the world down. Like maybe this me only made it this far because I- I tried so hard not to care.”

He frowned a little at that. “You do care.”

“I don’t mean in general.” She’d tried to avoid the conclusion, but from the evidence she had, it seemed almost certain now. “What scared me is that I don’t think this is really The Matrix’ mission. I think it was mine…I had to keep Mheksos from killing you again somewhere, at any cost. Maybe our son, too; I don’t know, Nick won’t tell me…I know he’s been hiding something. I’m sure he thought his precious plans would work out better if I went on thinking I was a good person, letting him sacrifice you and Ignis if he has to, the conniving—” Sebastian’s hand was on her arm, and she shoved it away, blinking hot tears onto her cheeks. “No, you don’t get it, okay? I never thought it would be that bad, but I tried so hard not to love you because I knew I couldn’t handle letting you go. It was hard enough at first, but now you’re all-in on this stupid vigilante thing, and either way I know you’d get tired of me when I wasn’t a challenge anymore, I know you. You don’t want me, Sebastian. I’m selfish, and I’m jealous, and I can’t have you and lose you, I can’t. I can’t do it. Don’t do that to me.”

The torrent of words left an empty space under her heart that demanded a shuddering gulp of air to fill. While Marissa was brushing off the tears and trying to force her breathing back into a more dignified pattern, Baz was standing up and stepping in closer, one of his hands on the desk again next to hers.

“Hey,” he said. “Do me a favor, hit me on my left side. Right’s a little sore from all the shots.”

Marissa didn’t have time to express her confusion before he leaned in and pressed his lips to her cheek. The kiss seemed to soak all the way through her skin, burning as it went, the contact a buzzing in her nerves. She felt dizzy even after he pulled away—enough to reflexively smack him on the right arm, for maximum pettiness, before she remembered that she actually had injected the serum on the left and hit him on that side too.

Sebastian chuckled. “Now, that’s not fair. I only got you once.”

“Serves you—ah!”

He’d already put his hands over hers on the edge of the desk, holding them down, and kissed her other cheek firmly until it was tingling as well. “That’s better.”

“Did you hear anything I said?” Marissa demanded.

“Every word,” he said. “Rissa girl, you’re a lot smarter than people give you credit for, and I always thought that was their mistake, but you gotta work with me here. Exactly what part of that did you think was a problem?”

She could only glare at him. “All of it? Should I start by circling back to the ‘biological warfare decimating the population of Earth’ thing?”

“Oh, yeah, horrible. Knowin’ how far you’d go to try to keep our boy safe, that’s a dealbreaker,” Sebastian said flatly as he picked up her hand and pressed another burning kiss across her knuckles. “Listen: I do want you. I will not get tired of you. Even if I did, you’d get sick of me and my nonsense long before that.”

“Maybe,” she said, trying to ignore her heart fluttering. “What about Chained Lightning?”

“What about him? …oh, well, I’ll quit.”

“You’re having the time of your life. You won’t, and I won’t ask you to.”

“I will,” he said. “I wouldn’t even have started, except you won’t stay out of trouble.”

Marissa’s eyebrows flew up at that. “Oh, I won’t stay out of trouble!”

“Yeah, you, Dr. Controversial-Research-No-Security.” The smirk was fully back now. “I’ll cut you a deal, all right? I won’t get into any more vigilante stuff—no crime-fightin’, no secret identity or alter ego on the register—but you can’t complain if I still look out for you. I don’t care about the rest, as long as you’ll let me be your hero.”

Against her better judgment, but feeling herself blush, she settled her arms across Sebastian’s shoulders and let him step in closer. “And if Mheksos kills you tomorrow?”

“Avenge me,” he said, with evident relish at the thought.

Marissa shook her head slightly. “There’s something wrong with you.”

The smug side of his mouth quirked up a little further. “You like it.”

She looked into his eyes, clear and honest and somehow still wanting her exactly the way she was, and she smiled. “Yeah, I do,” she admitted.

Sebastian’s face crinkled into the warmest, sweetest smile she had ever seen from him, and as Marissa tilted her chin so he could kiss her, the rest of the multiverse no longer seemed relevant at all.

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⏭️ Next week, we’re taking a short break between Part 4 and Part 5. Mirai, Mirai will return on Monday, March 30, rejoining the Joneses and Makaria from Liam’s point of view…

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⏮️ Previously, we saw a series of flashbacks from Ignis (Terra-86’s Cade Grimes) that covered some of his experiences at war, his family’s struggles, and the fact that he was never sure what his father thought of him—aside from being a lot like his very dangerous mother. This time, he’s agreed to give the full story to this version of Marissa…

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Marissa spent the rest of the evening listening to Cade patch together his memories while she studied the device grafted into his spinal cord like a vine. Neither task was easy. She’d heard a lot of tragic life stories in her line of work, but it wasn’t usually such a struggle to avoid identifying with one of the central characters—though she was pretty sure they’d both given up on that somewhere in the middle.

It hadn’t started out so badly. Cade remembered a chaotic but happy childhood, growing up very closely with Nick Harper and his sisters. His mother worked three days a week, and so did theirs, so for several years they traded off kids and sent everyone to his Aunt Christa on Wednesdays; when they got older, Nicky would walk home from school with him. They would play heroes and villains until they were so late his dad had to come looking, only vaguely aware then of the dangers that would later come to dominate their lives.

Marissa had mentally braced herself and asked point-blank if his parents were happy together.

“Yeah, they were.” (Here, that face-scrunching expression that seemed to be his way of externalizing a reluctance to tell the whole truth.) “I mean, they didn’t really get along…but I think they liked it that way, you know?”

Yes. She knew. Marissa could imagine that, under the right circumstances, it might feel very satisfying to successfully kiss the stupid smirk off Sebastian’s face.

“Except for that last fight,” he’d added, abruptly knocking the bottom out of the fantasy.

After nearly thirty years, Cade still remembered the towering, screaming fight between his parents that might not have literally delineated the turning point in his life, but was inextricably associated with it now: you can’t go versus you can’t tell me what to do, we need you here versus you’re not the only ones who need me. On the day his dad left to fight and didn’t come back, his mom had still been quietly furious as he tried to kiss her goodbye.

“I never saw her happy after that,” he’d said. “Not really.”

It had, of course, only gotten worse from there. He’d used as few words as possible to describe the chaos of war descending planetside and his slow realization, completed too late, of how unstable his mother had become. Her bioweapon, so promising at first. His and Nick’s adolescent guerilla warfare, still half play-acting even though they’d both lost parents already. Then the death of one of their friends in a moonlit cul-de-sac, torn to pieces by the centipedes in retribution. His partner never talked to him again; Cade turned professional, and never went back home. For years he got news only in bits and pieces, which grew fewer and further between as the retrovirus jumped to humans and the plague began to spread, turning the war into one of attrition. The fighting was brutal in every way. He hadn’t said it outright at first, but eventually admitted under her questioning that the aliens had learned to torment him with familiar faces.

Marissa had caught herself wondering, jaw clenched, if she could somehow wipe out this timeline’s Rigelians from here. Just in case.

The end of the war, when the grinding Pyrrhic victory finally came, brought little relief. Although relatively few people had ever encountered a shapeshifter, societal trust had been shattered by their invasion. There were plenty who believed that they were still out there, lurking undetected among decent human folks, no matter what the propaganda said—and, true or not, there was a lot of propaganda around. The peoples of Earth wanted to remember themselves as righteous victors, not cornered and desperate insurrectionists; for the sake of rebuilding, anything and anyone who complicated that narrative had to go. Offers to reintegrate the Glorious Terran Revolution’s veterans into society were graciously extended, but those who took them up tended to disappear. Ignis knew better, and had planned to ride things out in the former combat zones, avoiding the DNA checking and power suppression required to enter a protected area.

“Yes, I can see how well that worked out for you,” Marissa said, gently peeling a contact pad away from his skin. Nearly done now. “Is this the part where you explain why you had to get into prison?”

At her question, a little of the bitterness crept back into Cade’s eyes. “I didn’t say earlier? That’s where you were.”

“Oh.” He hadn’t. “Right. The war crimes.”

“Mhm.” He winced as she started on another pad. “I couldn’t do anything about it, but I wanted to see y-...my mother again, at least.”

She hadn’t even noticed the slip before he caught himself. “Did it…go well?”

“Well, apparently the civ authority only got Mom into custody by telling her I was dead. Plus she hadn’t seen me in almost a decade, so this was…” He motioned to his scarred face while seeming to search for words. “...no, it didn’t go well.”

“I’m so sorry,” Marissa said. For once, she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Her whole heart ached to comfort him, but she couldn’t take the thought of accidentally hurting him any more.

Cade just shrugged. “I couldn’t have not. ’Course the whole thing was a trap for me anyway, so I had to fight my way out. That’s how I ended up stuck with this thing in my neck for the last…”

He stopped himself mid-sentence, pupils dilating as his sweeping gaze snagged on something over Marissa’s shoulder. She glanced back to see Sebastian in the doorway—how long had he been listening?—with his eyes fixed on Cade.

Baz cleared his throat, seeing he’d been caught. “Doc needs you back for a minute,” he said. “He wants to hit that with some stronger antibiotics, try to knock the infection out at least. The Jones clan’s splittin’ second and third shift and they’ve got me on call, so you can sleep it off once she’s done with you.”

“I am.” Marissa wiped the last bit of gel from around the implant site, as carefully as she could. Her stupid fingers suddenly wouldn’t stop shaking. “You go, hon. I’ll check on you in the morning.”

Cade nodded and got up onto uneasy legs, his chin held high and mouth tight again. He made to slip out, but Sebastian stopped him at the door with a gentle hand at the scruff of his neck.

A look passed between them that she had no hope of understanding: something serious, but not grave—a kind of recognition, maybe. One man to another. Baz gave a slow nod, and Cade slumped forward until his forehead hit his father’s shoulder and the rest of him collapsed into his tight embrace. For a long minute, neither of them seemed to move except to breathe. Then Sebastian ruffled “the kid’s” hair, sent him out with a clap on the shoulder, and looked back at Marissa.

She turned away sharply, looking for something else to examine. Her throat had become unbearably tight. “I thought I told you to go to hell,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said, in a tone that was almost solemn. “Been doin’ my best. Hades said I’m still your problem, though.”

“Wonderful,” she said, with a small, ironic smile. “Just my luck.”

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⏭️ Next week, there’s nothing for it: Baz and Marissa may just have to face each other honestly this time. It’s #33…The Talk.

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⏮️ Previously, Marissa found out that something seems to be badly wrong with Ignis, got genetic confirmation of his parentage—and was surprised by the man himself turning up, unmasked and apparently willing to talk about it…

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“Do you want to start with why I had to test you to find out you’re my son?” Marissa asked.

“I told you that part already. It doesn’t matter.” Ignis closed the door behind himself and took the spare office chair, tucking his feet up like a cat. “You and my mother may have had very similar lives, but we’re from different worlds. You’re not her, and if you had a son, he wouldn’t be me.”

“You haven’t been acting like it doesn’t matter.” She leaned over the back of her chair. “I think you just didn’t want to get hurt.”

“It takes one to know one, doesn’t it?” Ignis said archly.

Marissa felt her mouth drop open. “Rude.”

“Am I wrong?”

…she had been trying every excuse to get out of this, hadn’t she? “I don’t know. Maybe not,” Marissa said. She wanted to study his face further, but his slight smile was almost too bitter to look at. “What’s your name?”

“Cade Grimes,” he said.

“Cade.” And his father’s surname. That answered another question. “Not what I would’ve guessed. Not that I’ve thought about baby names in, like, a decade, but…I mean, it’s a nice name. I like it.”

Marissa came around the chair and rolled it closer in, steeling herself against that bitterness as she sat down. He’d been a little boy once, and she thought she could still see it. “Can I…?” She raised a hand toward Cade’s chin, waiting for him to run again, but he let her gently turn his face to examine the scarring. His skin felt feverish under her hand. “This is a mess,” she said, like he didn’t know. “Do you have enhanced healing?”

He continued to watch the wall behind her. “Sort of. Ground Ops tried giving us regeneration at one point, and it didn’t really take for me. It’s ugly, but at least the wounds close up fast.”

“Yeah, I guess you got a double dose of stubbornness genes. Sorry about that.” She moved her touch to the dent in his cheekbone, frowning in surprise when he flinched. “Does that still hurt?”

His eyes darted to her face. “...sometimes.”

Marissa felt her throat tighten as hot threads of an anger she didn’t recognize twisted around each other under her heart. “Cade, who did this to you?”

He shied away further, pulling his chin back to his chest and suddenly looking very young. “Nobody you know.”

“Just tell me.”

“Mom, don’t—” He froze with his hands raised between them. She bit her tongue, wide-eyed at the fear on his face. “Sorry,” he whispered.

Her dry mouth suddenly tasted like guilt. “Don’t you dare apologize.”

“No. It’s, it’s fine.” Cade shuddered, shaking off whatever memory had come over him. “They, uh. It was a lot of different things. Centipedes mostly—the aliens, I mean. That’s what they look like when they’re not shifted. But that was all over years ago. The rest is just dumb fights I got myself into.” He pointed to the gauze covering the infected wound on his forehead. “That’s the only one that’s bothering me, honest, and your Dr. Marcos patched it up. I’m just waiting for the meds to kick in.”

“You weren’t even treating it?” Marissa said. “Is that why your lymphocyte count was through the roof?”

“It didn’t help.” He pulled down the edge of his suit, exposing a narrow metal plate, about eight inches long and apparently self-supported, that curved around the base of his neck. A red light flashed rapidly at the bottom edge. “This is the bigger strain on my system. It’s a power governor, courtesy of the Delmarva civ authority. It’s supposed to be for short-term use only, but I’ve had it on for…a while.”

“It’s a what?” She turned her head, trying to work out the thing’s structure.

“A power governor. Actually, that’s why I came down here; the doctor said you’d be the right person to look at it. I kind of need it switched off, or else trying to use my abilities won’t end so well.” Cade gave her a defensive look in return for her disapproving one. “It’s a long story, okay? I had to get it put in so they’d let me into the civ zone and through prison security, but they make you go through hell to get it back out—uh, careful. If the control chip gets the idea you’re trying to hack it, it’ll turn my brains into a smoothie.”

“O-kay!” She yanked her hand away. “Tell me that first next time. Who the hell designs…never mind. I’m just going to walk you back to the part where you needed to get through prison security.”

“That’s…also a long story.”

“Well, you said you wanted to talk. I’ll look over our imaging options, and you start talking.” Their research focus didn’t afford Marissa many opportunities to work with biotech, but Lautaro didn’t mind her tinkering on the side. The back half of her lab was dominated by her thesis project, a neurolinked exoskeleton affectionately referred to as Scorpius; it also contained an assortment of equipment that might be gentler than CT scanning. “Are you hungry?” she asked, getting up to go and dig through it. “I’ve usually got some pizza rolls in the freez…what’s that face for?”

“Nothing.” Cade scrunched his crooked nose up, like he was trying to hide the look of concern. “Uh—when I was little, my mom used to say that frozen snacks are for people who’ve given up on enjoying life.”

Marissa considered this with a sigh. “Definitely not wrong,” she said. “Well. Was that a yes, or a no?”

“Sure,” he said after a moment. “Thanks. I guess I should try to start at the beginning…”

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⏭️ Next week, the continuation, in #32: The Wars…

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⏮️ Previously, Ignis rejected Marissa’s attempts both to find out who he was and to offer some sympathy after hearing about the future he comes from. We, of course, later discovered that he’s her alternate-timeline son, and that The Matrix recruited him with the promise of saving her—but that he’s been concealing an implant that will kill him if he uses his powers…

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Whatever had been bothering The Matrix, the building was still standing when Marissa got back from dinner. She went straight to her lab, pulled up the waiting immune panel results, and clicked through the data intently. Makaria and Nick both seemed healthy enough. Jonathan’s results were a mess, and she quickly realized with disappointment that his nanomachines had self-destructed when separated from the pack, ruining the lot. Her algorithm had red-flagged Ignis’ replacement sample, too, but for different reasons.

She squinted at the numbers. “Did I miscalculate…no, no no no. The code’s—but that can’t be right…”

Marissa checked her work again, manually this time. No signs of contamination, the factors were all correct…with his white blood cell count this high, though, she didn’t know how Ignis was still walking around. Was it a persistent infection? Turbo-leukemia? Lautaro had said his body temperature seemed unusually elevated—she’d thought he felt warm herself, the one time she got close enough—but they’d both dismissed that. Heat powers, after all. She fired off a typo-riddled email to the doctor, and was about to run up to his office when she realized that she had nothing logical or proportionate to say about it. There was absolutely no reason to be this worried about a total stranger from another timeline, who might be respectful of her but was also as aloof as he seemed to think he could get away with. Ignis had just hijacked an existing mental process by reminding her so much of Sebastian. See, if it was him, then…

But that didn’t help. She’d been trying so hard to avoid considering what she might do if something happened to Sebastian. Even so, everything seemed to keep coming back to that.

She pulled up Ignis’ genetic report, started on impulse but now inescapable, and stared at the little dark bubbles. It was only a partial sequence—nowhere near the workup she would normally do for a test subject—but it would be close enough to know.

[ Compare > existing profile > GRIMES SEBASTIAN C ]

[ > > > ]

[ > 48.5% match ]

Marissa swallowed. “I didn’t need you to tell me that,” she muttered. A result that low, though—he wasn’t a clone. He had a mother, and either Sebastian was right and it was her, or…there would have to be some other woman.

She flew through the prompts again before she could regret it, grabbing her own profile this time from a years-old database test.

[ > > > ]

[ 51% match ]

She took a shaky breath, forwarded everything to the printer, and reached for her phone.

Messages: Dumb Ass Grimes, PhD

Marissa: play stupid games
Marissa: win stupid prizes
Marissa: ignis is our son
Sebastian: . . . and you tell me this by text
Marissa: i’m in shock ok???
Sebastian: am i the stupid game here or ?
Marissa: IF YUO DNT TAKE THIS SRISLY I S2G
Marissa: SERIOUSLY*
Marissa: you** don’t*** ffs
Sebastian: :-)
Sebastian: ok. what color flowers you want?
Marissa: go to hell

“Jackass,” she said, dropping the phone on the desk. Unmoored, she moved automatically to the lab fridge in search of more caffeine, and had gotten as far as staring at a number of unlabeled petri dishes when she heard a familiar step in the hallway and the door opening behind her. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she snapped without turning around.

“I do.”

It wasn’t Sebastian’s voice, and Marissa jumped half an inch in surprise before she looked. It was Ignis, and he had taken off his mask.

Even though she knew better, she had somehow assumed that Baz’ short-tempered, magma-powered son would be a redhead. He wasn’t. Ignis had a fringe of ill-kept brown hair, a little darker than hers, and clear blue eyes that were two or three shades grayer than his father’s. She could see her own father plainly around the edges now, too, in chin and ears and the curve of his shoulders.

His most striking features, though, were acquired rather than original. Marissa was used to seeing badly healed injuries during subject intake exams, and had learned to read the stories they told; Ignis had clearly been taking damage for a long time without anything in the way of support. Scars from multiple incidents over a decade or more raked his face and neck, long, raised claw marks crossing over discolored avulsions. Near his hairline, red-splotched and swollen skin from some neglected wound surrounded the tape on a fresh square of gauze. His nose was noticeably skewed, broken by a blow that had also left part of his upper jaw sunken in, and his mouth was tense, the lips pulled taut across what she now realized must be several missing or migrated teeth.

Without waiting for Marissa to comment, Ignis held up a printout: the DNA comparison, plucked from the shared printer she’d already forgotten she sent it to.

“Oh.” She tried for an apologetic smile, still off-balance. “Too far?”

“No, I figured you would. I mean…I would have,” he said.

“Fair’s fair, then.” The open refrigerator beeped at her, and she sighed and shut it heavily. “Well, come on. Let’s talk.”

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⏭️ Next week, in #31: The Failsafe, Marissa digs into Ignis’ past—more literally than either of them is entirely comfortable with…

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Bonus: I haven’t gotten to do much character art lately, but as an apology for all the trauma, may I offer you Garrett Hedlund as my reference for both alternate-Ignis (minus the scars) and everyone’s dear Baby Sparky?

Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.

Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

⏮️ Previously, Baz has been trying more overtly to flirt with Marissa, and was delighted to realize that she’s immune to his newly supercharged lightning powers. However, she’s remained defensive for reasons that she refuses to articulate, even to herself. The Matrix noted that she has trust issues dating at least from her capture by atypical terrorist group Sonic Vorpal, but there seems to be more to it now than that…

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“Is this a date?” Marissa asked.

It wasn’t what she had intended to say to Sebastian when she got here, but since all her other thoughts had scattered, that was what came out of her mouth. She was still standing on the sidewalk beside the café table, one hand raised to the strap of her purse and the other on the sun-warm metal of the chair back. There was a sandwich plate and a gently sweating cup of soda already waiting for her.

“If that’s what you want to call it, sure,” he said, looking deeply amused. “Why d’you ask?”

She bristled, already mentally kicking herself. “Because you asked me to come out and meet you instead of just poking your head into the lab,” she said as she pulled the chair out and dropped into it. “And apparently you were buying.”

“Well, you took forever gettin’ here, and I know you skipped lunch, so…” He picked up his phone to check something, the flex of a muscular forearm immediately drawing her attention off course. Sebastian never rolled his sleeves back in public, even in summer—for as long as she’d known him, he’d always done his best to hide the electrical scars from his accident.

Marissa’s stomach dropped as she looked more closely at his skin. The network of burnt-in lightning figures that she’d become so familiar with had faded to near invisibility, and she’d been so caught up in everything else she had to monitor that she hadn’t even noticed.

Her gut-deep distress at missing any part of him suggested more than she wanted it to. She had wanted to fix him, to give him a normal life…but not like this. Not with more strange powers on the balance. She should have tried harder to talk Sebastian out of letting some other Marissa experiment on him from the alternate hellscape future, but when she’d asked this morning, slightly radioactive syringe in hand, if he was sure he wanted to go through with this, he’d summoned a genuinely charming smile and said yes, I trust you. That was that. She’d suddenly felt very strong and very weak at the same time, and no longer had any choice in the matter. Of course she’d had to say well you shouldn’t and poke him a couple of extra times to illustrate the point, but it had felt like theater, and she got the feeling that he’d noticed. Why he’d taken that as his cue to be even more insufferable than usual, though, she couldn’t imagine.

“Sorry. It’s work,” he said as he slid his phone back into his shirt pocket. “Can’t really tell them ‘not now, I’m savin’ the world’, y’know. Anyway, I just wanted to talk to you without anybody listenin’ in—it’s about Ignis.”

“Oh, him.” She popped open the bag of chips, grateful to have something else to think about. “Sure. What’s up?”

“I know this might sound stupid,” Baz said. “But look, in that group, we’ve got Jake’s kid, we’ve got Christa’s kid, we’ve got Clare’s kid, and then there’s him, right?” He leaned forward over the table. “I think Ignis is yours.”

Marissa stopped short in the act of nodding along and had to swallow very quickly to keep from choking. “W—what? I—yeah, no way. No. Absolutely not. That’s not funny.”

“It’s not a joke.”

She leaned in too, dropping her voice. “But why, like what on earth would make you think that?”

“For one thing, there’s only one place he could get that attitude honestly,” he said, a quick half-smile jeopardizing her willingness to believe he wasn’t joking. “But mostly…you know I saw him just about bust a blood vessel tryin’ not to yell at Jake for callin’ you the local mad scientist. And he doesn’t sass you at all. Somebody clearly taught that boy to treat you right.”

“True. That doesn’t mean I’m his mother, though,” she said. “You’re wrong about that.”

“You sound awful confident,” he said.

“Because we can’t both be correct.” She tapped her fingers on the table for emphasis. “I mean, I haven’t done the genetic comparisons yet, but I’ve been watching him. The way he moves, little things he says, it’s obvious enough. I’m, like, 99 percent sure that he’s yours.”

Marissa hadn’t fully considered the implications of that sentence until she heard herself say it. Sebastian beat her to them while she was still watching the corners of his mouth tighten up. “So, I know you’re the biologist. And normally I wouldn’t tell you your job,” he said. “But most people do have two parents.”

No. Not possible— “Most people, yes,” Marissa said sharply. “Maybe he’s a clone. Did you think of that?”

“Is it really better if you’re raising my clone?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, you’re implying that there’s a universe out there where we can stand each other’s company for, what, five minutes at least.”

Her subconscious mind had been flailing for a weapon, grabbed the first thing to hand, and chosen badly. One of Sebastian’s eyebrows floated up lazily as he set his elbows on the table and leaned in further. It was impossible to tell from the rest of his expression whether he was genuinely offended or about to laugh. Up until now, it had been…gentle, almost, despite her abrasion. That was gone. “Five minutes, Rissa?” he said.

Marissa could feel air entering her lungs, but to no apparent effect. “No, I. Oh no. Forget that. I didn’t mean it like that—”

“Is that really how inconsiderate you think I am?”

“I told you I didn’t mean…”

“So that’s just how low the bar is for you, then. What ex of yours do I need to go smack around? Cause that ain’t right.”

There it was. There went the smirk, and she flushed with rage at the thought of her humiliation entertaining him. “Just shut up.”

“Oh, no,” Sebastian said. “You made this bed, and you can lie in it.” He paused, his electric blue eyes glinting. “For I’d say, minimum—”

“Shut. Up.” Marissa reached over to pop his arm, but he grabbed her hand first, making her wrestle him to get it back. “This is all your fault,” she hissed, finally snatching it away. “I swear my IQ drops every time I get within ten feet of you.”

He looked like a puppy who’d heard someone say ‘walk’. “You know, you can just say you want me.”

“In your dreams.” She realized suddenly how close his face was to hers, and sat back in her seat. Did The Matrix also have a molecular formula for the ability to disintegrate people with a look? She needed that one. “What’s gotten into you? One of the serum side effects must be all the blood rushing to your ego.”

Baz chuckled. “Hey, I’m not the one who made this personal. But you’re welcome to try to prove me wrong. Think of all the data you could collect, huh?”

Marissa was saved from having to convincingly lie that even her devotion to science had limits by his phone beeping again. He looked at the screen, and his smile faltered. “Well. This has been fun, but I have to go,” he said as he got to his feet. “Jake says the man with the plan’s gettin’ antsy about something. You eat, though. Run that DNA when you get back, and see what you can get the kid to tell you about his folks.”

“Kid? I’m pretty sure he’s older than you are.”

Sebastian shrugged. “He’s our son. I’ll call him what I want to.”

“He’s not our son,” Marissa called after him, ignoring the unsubtle side-eyes from the next table over. “There’s no way. Forget it.” He didn’t even turn around.

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⏭️ Next week, Dr. Marissa reads her analyses in Mirai, Mirai #30…The Results.

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Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

Previously, Ignis unconsciously started to melt the blacktop, only to catch himself in pain; in a flashback, Titan Beetle recalled a power-suppressing technology used by the government of Earth in his future; Marissa witnessed an argument between Ignis and Beetle about something The Matrix allegedly needed to know; and last week we saw a number of Ignis’ memories, stitching together the story of how he came to be feared and hated by not just the alien attackers, but the people he was defending…

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Terra-32B, year 2013.
Bethesda, Maryland.
Eighteen hours after The Matrix’ arrival in this timeline.

Ignis had fallen asleep after the morning’s fight, folded into a chair somewhere without taking off his boots or his battle-scarred suit. The world was flat and grey through the tinted lenses that guarded his eyes, and the left side of his neck was still clenched in dull pain. There was a humanoid figure looking down at him, looking for all the world like someone he used to know, except—but Nicky was my age, he isn’t old yet—is he?—anyway, he was looking down, his eyes wide, tired pools of pity and fear. His glasses weren’t really on right all the way.

Ignis stared, hardly breathing. Shifters never knew what to do with glasses.

The Nick-thing-maybe reached in next to Ignis’ throat and pulled up the side of his cowl a couple of inches, where they’d put the implant. It was part of the containment measures; nobody with powers got into the exclusion zones without a governor, just in case. That was understandable. It just made for some small problems once you left.

“So Beetle was right,” it said, touching the exposed metal where it emerged from his neck. “I thought you had this removed already. And it would have been the smartest course of action for you, I thought for sure…”

“Fooled you,” Ignis whispered.

“Why would you lie about that?”

The thing sounded genuinely injured. He blinked a few times, and Old Nick came into focus a little better through the cowl’s smudged lenses—oh, no, he was real. This was all real. Ignis remembered now what was going on, and raised a clumsy hand to bat The Matrix’ prodding fingers away before he could set off the governor’s anti-tampering measures. “Why would I trust you?” he said bitterly.

“I’m your friend.”

“No, you’re NOT.” His neck throbbed again as he fought his rage for control; his friends were dead, or they didn’t talk to him anymore. This man wasn’t the Nick Harper he had grown up with. They weren’t the same at all.

“Cade.” The Matrix raised a hand. “This is serious. Everything I planned counts on you being able to use your powers. You said you’d help me save this timeline for the good version of Marissa, and you’re still onboard with that, aren’t you?”

Ignis chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment before he answered, his voice reluctant. “Yes.”

“All right. Then we have to figure out how to disable the implant safely.”

“‘We’ nothing, you don’t need to get involved. I’ll talk to the doctor.” He pulled the fabric down again, reclaiming some feeling of security with the vulnerability tucked away.

The stranger’s eyes didn’t relax. “You’re lying again.”

“Maybe so,” Ignis admitted. Mostly, he wanted to buy time; the whole thing seemed like a terrible idea to him. Showing anyone the governor implant would require explanations and confessions, dredging up things that were dangerous to consider—he was out of practice in throttling the subconscious link that turned thought to heat, preferring over time to make himself cold. He’d had multiple close calls already over the last day, which must have been what tipped Beetle off. Damn busybody. The boy had to know that with his failsafe gone he’d be a danger to everyone, assuming he even survived the process of taking it out.

“Amazing.” The Matrix shook his head in just the way that Nicky used to laugh at himself. “All this knowledge and preparation, and I ended up making the same mistake everyone else did.”

“And what’s that?”

“I expected you to act like my Cade,” he said. “When he gave his word that he’d do something, he did it.”

Ignis didn’t flinch. “Yeah, well, maybe that’s why I’m still alive and he’s not.”

The Matrix froze for a moment with his fist drawn back, an unexpected flush creeping across his face, before he let it drop. “I know you want to believe you’re a screwup and a lost cause,” he said, his voice hard. “Maybe you were, where you come from. But you agreed to come here, and so help me, you will take your damn second chance. I know it’s going to be rough, I know we’ve both tried to keep things from getting too emotional, but we don’t have a choice anymore. Is that understood?”

Ignis scowled, but gave a sharp nod. “Understood.”

“You’ll deal with it?”

“I’ll deal with it,” he said. “I promise.”

“Good,” The Matrix said. “Oh, and I still don’t know when Mheksos is coming back, so you’ve got about an hour before I walk you over there myself. Figure it out.”

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Next week, Baz and Marissa compare notes (and conclusions) about Ignis in Mirai, Mirai #29…The Date.

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Welcome back to Terra-32B! A general recap for those who’ve been reading live:

Previously, Christa discovered that The Matrix has had no qualms about bending the truth to get his allies’ cooperation, and that his motivations are far less selfless than she first assumed. She’s also learned that Mheksos—whom The Matrix has speculated to be his own grandson from the even more distant future—is intent on killing her brother, her future nephew, or both, allegedly in order to avert a terrible war in his own time. Lord Hades is helping her out under a truce, but with secret instructions from his dark Master to act as a spy. And meanwhile, Marissa’s noticed that her alternate selves seem to be, shall we say, morally challenged…and begun to worry that the true mastermind behind the plot to change the course of fate was not The Matrix, but her.

And now, some tragic backstory…

Terra-86, the home timeline of MM’s Cade Grimes (Ignis), is one of the closest timelines to Terra-32 that The Matrix found useful, next to his own. Rather than interacting peacefully with the Rigelian aliens during first contact in the late aughts, humanity’s efforts went so badly that war had been mutually declared by 2025. After orbital efforts to turn back the invaders failed, World War III became a ground war against shapeshifters whose silicon-based biology made them difficult to kill by ordinary methods. Ignis has already mentioned that Chained Lightning was killed fighting the aliens, and that with his lava powers, he was also on the front lines; however, he has yet to use his powers against the Mhekanites, or to disclose anything else, including his own identity…

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Terra-86, year 2029.
Pimmit Hills, Virginia.
23 years before The Matrix recruits Ignis.

The stairs down to the basement seemed to get longer in his memory. They had never bothered Cade at the time, but through his older self’s eyes, standing at the top made him dizzy. A small, dim square of green light wavered at their impossibly distant conclusion.

Maybe this was a dream, or more likely a nightmare. Maybe the memories themselves were failing him—one too many blows to the head, or too long chasing ghosts through the wreckage of places he’d used to know. Everything was tangled up in his mind; the smell from an uncleaned toaster oven would trigger (age seven, playing Snap with his mother, peanut-butter oatmeal burning in the pot) as quickly as that recollection melted into (age four, her asbestos embrace, smothering a molten rage he doesn’t understand yet). There was no remembering (age three, the transcendent joy that comes past in flashes as Mom spins him in her office chair and he screams laughing) without (age fifteen, her voice bubbling like evaporating nitrogen, explaining how a retrovirus overwrites its victim’s DNA cell by cell). Which was what had brought him here, all at once adolescent and uncertain again, his feet dragging behind him.

He didn’t want to go down there. He hadn’t then, and he didn’t now.

“Don’t just stand there with the door open, Sparky,” Mom yelled from somewhere behind the light.

Ignis closed it behind him and took the inevitable first step on the descent into madness.

(age nine, his towering father kneeling beside him on the pavement with complete and misplaced confidence in this scrawny boy, the effect just as vertiginous. ‘Take care of your mama,’ he says—but he’s the only one she listens to. What was Cade supposed to do when he didn’t come back?)

(age twenty-eight, an ex-girlfriend…which one? Her face distrusting behind a chain bolt, telling him he can’t come in. ‘You’re too dangerous.’ Does she think he doesn’t know?)

(nine again. He never could tell what was really behind Daddy’s small fond smile when the man would look over to Mom and say, ‘that kid’s yours all right.’ Which one of them was the smile for? And what was that supposed to mean?)

Back to the basement. This used to be his father’s space, but over the last six years it had become Mom’s private laboratory. If she wasn’t at work, she was almost always down here now. “Are we eating dinner?” Cade was asking.

“Eating what now?” Dr. Grimes pushed back the frayed sleeve of her lab coat to check her smartwatch. “Oh, man, I didn’t even—wait, I thought you had chess club today.”

“It’s Saturday, Mom.”

“Saturday,” she repeated, distracted already by picking at the damaged skin on her fingers. She’d been flash-freezing tissue samples with her bare hands again, the nitrogen as corrosive as the cold, hard anger that never really left her face anymore. On the bench behind her, he could see brittle gray slivers mounted on slides: flesh, or the closest thing the aliens had to it. They could give a powerful illusion of softness and warmth, but an illusion was all it was.

(age twenty. The figure’s hands are dissolving, two pale smudges melting into a steaming gray stream of liquid minerals. He couldn’t do that to a person—there’s too much carbon in a human being. Scorch them, scald them, burn them up—sure. When you’re tracking an enemy that hides among friends, eventually somebody’s going to stand too close to the fire. But he can’t melt people. This is a shifter, a centipede wearing a stolen face.

But tell that to his stupid shrieking monkey brain.)

Ignis had yet to fully appreciate that at the time.

“Come look at this,” his mother said abruptly. “I think I finally have the sequence worked out.”

She made him squint through various scopes at cells that looked like shattered mica, their spasming organelles trickling in confusion from one to the next. “I’ve been putting together a retrovirus, with a common Rigelian immunodeficiency virus as a base,” she said. “You took Bio last year, right?—so, yeah, a virus is a free-floating piece of genetic information that parasitizes living cells, and a retrovirus is a virus that specifically targets its victim’s DNA. It translates its own RNA into DNA and inserts it into the germline…”

“Permanently changing the genome of the host cell and its descendants, while forcing all of them to churn out copies of the virus.” He’d done very well in Bio, not that she had noticed. “But they’re prone to mutate, right?”

“Right. That’s why they’re the ideal bioweapon. Once a retrovirus is out in the wild, that’s it, you’ll never be able to fight every strain at once.” She paused, searching his expression. “Oh, you’re worried…no, no. It biologically can’t attack humans. I mean, the bad guys don’t even have DNA, they have something called mSNA. We’re just the carriers.”

“Oh,” Cade said, trusting that she was right. “So what’s it do?”

“It breaks their illusionary abilities. As the infection spreads through their system, they lose control over the shape they take on, until they’re completely unable to disguise themselves anymore,” Mom said. “’Course, by then they won’t have much of an immune system left, either. That’ll kill them if one of us doesn’t.”

(age twenty-three, boiling gravel in the palm of his hand, staring up into the blacked-out sky. He imagines the gray crystalline stalkers huddled around a table in their soulless starship, consulting their files, hissing among themselves: “What will frighten the Ig-nisss as much as it frightens us?”

The second Clarevoyante, Nicky’s sister, says they’re not telepathic; so they must have studied him. With everyone else, they use their mimicry for deception and confusion, taking on allies’ faces to infiltrate any human group they can. But him, he’s their Grendel. Their nightmare. The primeval alien horror they didn’t know they were digging up, who won’t go quietly back into the dark.

Once he starts to kill one of them, it’ll do anything to try to make him stop.)

Her hazel eyes had turned to iron as she reached up to stroke his cheek with the side of her frostbitten hand. “Did I ever tell you what they did to your father?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good.” She studied his face, softening just for a moment at the sight of the way he used to look. “I won’t let them get you, too.”

(Remembering his old face hurts worse at twenty-three than it will in later years. A lot of the damage has already been done now, his hardest hits taken early, when they first figured out whose son he was. He wasn’t prepared then to push past the shock when the half-melted creature in front of him became his mother, crying, or the limp form of a broken man.

But he kept going. Somebody has to fight them. And it’s the only thing that lets him imagine his father proud.)

His memory telescoped again, the room off-kilter. He was still in the basement with Mom, but she had an unmarked brown glass vial in her hand. Liquid sloshed inside as she held it up.

“How’re you going to test it?” Cade asked.

“Oh, so, this is an aerosolizer. Right now I have the virus suspended in an inert carrier solution, see? The most efficient method of administration is as a nasal spray.”

“I meant, uh…do you already have volunteers?”

“This has always been a one-woman project,” she said, mouth twitching towards a tired smile. “It only seems right to start with myself.”

He looked straight at her, knowing what his duty was. “Let me go first.”

His mother squeezed his hand. “No, it should be me. Besides, your powers might skew the results.”

They’d never realized she had any powers of her own. It should have been obvious, in retrospect, but she’d always just said that innovators stay lucky. Would it have made a difference if she’d known she was the perfect incubator for a plague that could attack humans, after all?

As angry as she was, would she have cared?

(age four, Mom’s arms tight around him as he howls and scratches to get free. Something is wrong, wrong, WRONG, and the only way to exorcize the feeling is to grab something else and destroy it. He wants everything to get out of his way. He wants to melt down the world— ‘I know,’ she says, ‘I know, baby. But you can’t.’)

(age sixteen, he’s holding her by the shoulders as she tries to push him off. ‘What did you do?’ he says. ‘People are dying, Mom, WHAT DID YOU DO?’

‘‘It’s a war,’ she spits at him, her fury like shards of ice. ‘Of course people are going to die! Get over it!’)

The world agreed with her, for a while. As long as the threat remained, and especially as they finally began to win, the casualties caused by Earth’s defenders seemed a small price to pay. For a while, it was all almost sustainable. Wars end, though, and the monsters are put back on the shelf…Ignis discovered soon enough that every war hero eventually becomes a war criminal. With that shift in judgement, the hammer fell: trials—containment measures—

Assassinations—

Somewhere outside his memories, a searing pain shot deep into the side of Ignis’ neck, shattering his recollections and jolting him awake.

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Next week, Ignis must finally face the consequences of running from his past in Mirai, Mirai #28…The Omission.

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Previously, Christa got Liam’s help in carrying Baz’ blood sample up to Dr. Marissa. But how will he repay her trust? And under the circumstances, how much longer can Marissa avoid confronting her real feelings about her favorite test subject?

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Dr. Marissa was in her second-floor lab, if the strains of late-nineties pop audible through the door were any indication. Christa knocked as she opened it anyway.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Christa and…” She glanced sideways at her companion. “Lord Hades.”

“Titan Beetle asked us to bring up a specimen,” Hades added.

“Ooooh. Much appreciated. Figures he’d send you, the poor kid's scared stiff of me. I can’t understand it.” Marissa emerged from behind some equipment and leaned over at the desk to turn her music down. “Do you know, I have been waiting years to get to work on a cyborg? A real cyborg, not just peripherals. And now we finally have one, and he’s from like the worst and most insane future you could think of, and he has full neurointegration and everything, and he won’t let me take one little minimally invasive network scan! It’s so lame.”

“Uh-huh,” Christa said, understanding exactly why Jonathan wouldn’t want to come up here.

The scientist dropped onto her rolling stool and extended a hand to Hades, making impatient grabby motions. “Give it here, Hellboy.”

A muscle twitched above his jaw as he passed the bag over. “You’re not allowed to nickname me.”

“You’re in my lab, and I’ll call you what…oh, this.” Marissa held up the little container of Baz’ blood between finger and thumb, all the excitement having left her face. “Of course. Gamma-twelve panel for the wannabe superman. Make sure his organs aren’t dissolving or something, y’know.”

Hades constrained himself to raising one eyebrow. “Was that a known risk?”

“Considering that it was some other and possibly just slightly evil me that designed the stuff we gave him, anything’s possible.” Marissa tilted the tube slowly back and forth, watching the thick dark liquid inside with half-parted lips and deepening uncertainty. “Christa,” she said finally, “you were talking to Nick, weren’t you? Did he happen to say why he needed to find a timeline where Sebastian doesn’t get himself killed?”

Jacob hadn’t mentioned that part, and neither had The Matrix. “No, he didn’t.”

“Damn.” She shook the sample vigorously and slid it into the tray of a tall, square machine. Christa considered what The Matrix had said: that their original timeline was the best situation for their future children. He’d also as good as admitted that Ignis was one of Marissa’s, as if anyone couldn’t tell—very possibly, though Christa hadn’t considered this before, her son with Baz. Was this just another of the stories he’d told to get the resources he wanted onboard? Or had another familiar face led him to let something slip about his true goal? Or—

Christa realized suddenly that no one had ever clarified why The Matrix’s Dr. Marissa had teamed up with him to pull this off. In retrospect, she’d be the obvious choice—with her cancellation powers, she’d have retained enough memories from before the timeline damage to understand Nick’s motivations, and Christa didn’t have the highest confidence in her scientific ethics—but, still, why would she have agreed?

“Life really is just a cruel joke,” Marissa said, jabbing savagely at the control panel.

“Of course it’s not!” The sentiment was automatic, but perhaps not as heartfelt as usual.

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re goodness and light in every universe, aren’t you?” She paused, biting her lip. “Sorry. I wish I could be as optimistic as you are, honestly.”

“Marissa…”

Marissa broke off staring at the progress screen to turn to Christa, leaning forward with the force of the words spilling out. “I think this whole thing might be my fault.”

That didn’t track at all. “What on earth do you mean?” Christa said.

“It’s just…Nick’s talked about things that the other me, I mean in his timeline, had planned or convinced him about,” Marissa said. “And then he told me that I was the one that made him actually go, and I—I realized I don’t know that any of it was his idea.” She took a long, steadying breath. “I mean, how could I just send him to punch a hole through the multiverse? How could I care about anything so much that I’d risk a friend’s life, not to mention reality itself? Losing your sense of proportion like that—that’s supervillain territory, right? Destroying and killing for what you love...I’m better than that. I’ve tried so hard to be better than that. Full offense, by the way,” she added.

“Taken,” Hades answered cheerfully from where he was now poking through an unattended stack of printouts on another table. To her embarrassment, Christa had entirely forgotten that he was still here and in need of supervision.

She shot a stern look his way, satisfied to see him put the papers down and slink back, before returning to their conversation. “Why don’t you just ask him what happened?”

Marissa shook her head. “If Nick thought I’d take it well, he would have told me. Whatever’s going on, he knows me well enough to believe it’ll go better if I figure it out for myself, the twerp.”

Christa wanted to bring up what he’d said about Mheksos and Addie’s erasure, but—Hades was right there. How much could she trust him with? She was just making up her mind to hand him off to Makaria and double back so they could sort all this out when Dr. Marcos came in the door.

Lautaro Marcos was not, by nature, an intimidating man. However, all his bespectacled, middle-aged approachability was offset for Christa by a single-minded devotion to his research into atypical abilities; she hadn’t forgiven him yet for introducing himself on their first meeting with a request to compare her DNA to Jacob’s. She smiled blankly and said nothing as Marissa greeted him and reached for the tray he was carrying, with four glass vials identical to the one they’d brought.

“I convinced them all to consent to an immune screening, at least,” Dr. Marcos said.

“Oh, good. The last thing we need is to add some alternate-timeline super-corona—ow!”

Marissa had banged her elbow against the edge of the table, and dropped the tray with one tube still in it. A wave of queasiness passed through Christa at the sight of blood spattered across the floor. She shut her eyes tightly while Marissa made swear-studded apologies.

“Which one was it?” the doctor asked.

“It was…ugh, Ignis’. I bet he gave you trouble, too.”

“So he did. Well, this time I will have Titan Beetle sit on him.”

A cold hand touched Christa’s arm, and she opened her eyes on Hades looking at her. She steeled her face immediately, ashamed of herself—when she was acting, when she had her armor on, these things didn’t bother her at all. He had no right to see the weak girl on the other side of Lady Radiance’s mask.

As she turned to avoid his gaze, she saw Marissa tear open a sterile swab, swipe it across a bloody piece of glass and back into the envelope, and quietly drop the sample into her pocket.

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Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.

❗️ Next week begins my planned hiatus. ❗️ I had hoped to post continously through the end of this serial; however, November and December are very busy months for me and my family. After writing straight through them, I need some time off to recover and catch up. We have now essentially reached the halfway point of the story, so this is a good time for a break in any case, and one month—the remainder of the greater Christmas season, as it happens—seemed a reasonable amount to give myself.

Mirai, Mirai will return on Monday, February 2, with Part Four opened by #27: Sparks, Terra-86—Ignis’ flashback episode.

Feel free to scream among yourselves in the comment section…

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Previously, a frank conversation with The Matrix (Nick Harper) revealed to Christa that Liam may not be able to redeem himself in this timeline after all…

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Christa couldn’t find the first speck of coffee in this kitchen.

Earlier, Marissa had told her she was directing everybody to the first-floor break room for the time being, because that was where she kept things for test subjects—water, glucose supplements, and so on. Christa hadn’t really been tuned in for that part. She’d just assumed that the presence of two coffee machines (one large and very stained drip brewer, and one so fancy that she found it personally offensive) meant that there would be coffee grounds somewhere nearby. There was cinnamon vanilla coffee creamer in the fridge next to the energy drinks, and she’d even found a styrofoam cup behind the microwave that was gritty with spilled sugar but still stuffed with stirring straws, suggesting that while her assumption had been correct, she just hadn’t looked hard enough yet.

Not seeing a stepstool, Christa summoned her light again and floated towards the ceiling to check the cabinets’ top shelves. The last eighteen hours had been nothing but shock after shock in quick succession, and even this morning’s smiley sprinkle pancakes seemed a lifetime away. She just wanted a hot cup of coffee to help her pull herself back together. Why did that have to be so hard?

She had been furious to find out only after recruiting Lord Hades that The Matrix had lied to them all in order to get their cooperation…and was likely still lying, as getting straight answers had required her to press him on direct questions. All the same, without him there in front of her—and recalling how as she slipped down the hallway she’d heard Clare crying into the shoulder of an old man who wouldn’t even be born for another two years—she was struggling to stay angry. His story did sound tragic, and although she’d argued, she could understand wanting to save the last solitary instance of someone you loved. But that didn’t make it right to lure Jonathan into mortal danger and set up both her and Kari for heartbreak, did it?

No, she couldn’t agree…but she could understand it. That was more than she could say about Mheksos. Whether it was the physics or the philosophy that was beyond her, Christa could not wrap her head around how a time paradox could lead to someone merging with their alternate selves. As she shuffled forgotten boxes of kitchen supplies and thought it over, she decided that as Mheksos only made sense to her as Nick and Addie’s evil grandson from the future, she would leave her mental conception of him there. It wasn’t as if he seemed to be all that different from Nick, anyway, except for the robots.

The top of the refrigerator was dusty but finally promising. The coffee canister she picked up turned out to have a slot cut in the top, and to be labeled SWEAR JAR MAD SCIENCE! AND COFFEE FUND in faded Sharpie; behind it, however, was a box of pods for the fancy machine. Christa put the canister back and brought the box down. It annoyed her deeply to make plastic trash at a task so easily accomplished without it, but she supposed she couldn’t expect self-proclaimed mad scientists to share her sensibilities about the world. Some of the coffee pods were mocha flavor, at least. Checking that the machine’s water reservoir was full enough, she dropped one into place and closed the top with a satisfying click.

“I promise I’m not trying to follow you around.”

She turned, her aura flaring at the surprise. It was Hades, standing in the doorway with his stupid black coat fluttering in the draft from the hallway. She’d wondered when she first saw him if he was really dressed in all black in May, but he was—even the skinny jeans. Christa pushed her hair back from her face and flipped a loose coil around her wrist, holding her expression neutral only thanks to years of coaching. She was sure there was some reason she’d been angry with him, but it wasn’t coming immediately to mind. The brightness of his red eyes was different from when she’d seen him in battle—still there, but gentler and almost friendly, a fire caged in a hearth. Ruffled locks of dark hair brushed his broad, thoughtful forehead as he tossed his head a little, one corner of his mouth digging back into his cheek like it didn’t know where else to go. For an unguarded moment, she imagined resting the heel of her palm against that dimple while she executed the perfect stroke of eyeliner to frame the soft flame just so…

You’re staring, Christabel. Stop staring.

“Really, I’m not,” he said. “Makaria sent me down here to make her a cup of tea, but, uh…” The rest of Hades’ mouth joined that corner in an uncomfortable smile. “She set me up, didn’t she?”

“Probably so.”

“I should have expected it.” He came up to the counter beside Christa and opened the cabinet, thankfully finding the tea bags right away. “She caught me up to speed on everything she knows about the situation, but the whole time I was thinking how terribly biased she seemed to be by how much she wants to see us, uh…you know.”

“Yes.” She felt herself begin to blush, and ruthlessly suppressed it. “I suppose I can’t blame her.”

“I suppose I can’t, either.” His sigh was a little too theatrical, but then, it could only be for the best if he kept his mask on, too. “Your brother did give me a stiff talking-to on the matter, to his credit, but it was hardly necessary. Even from what Makaria’s told me, I think it’s obvious that we would make a bad match.”

She handed him an empty cup so that he wouldn’t have to reach past her. The hot water was on his side; maybe they wouldn’t really have to interact. The spare inch separating their fingers as he accepted the cup didn’t count. “Yes, a terrible match.”

“Then we agree on something,” Hades said as he filled it. “You know, though, I’m looking forward to when all this is over and I can go back to being villainous. I think you’d make a delightful nemesis—in a strictly business sense.”

“Of course.” She allowed him one of Lady Radiance’s sweet but superior smiles, even though a bit of a blush slipped out with it. “That’s cute. Are you already preparing schemes for me to foil?”

“My Lady, I can’t give away my secrets.”

“Hmm, it was worth a try.” Her coffee was finally done. She popped the pod out and tossed it overhand past him into the trash can in the corner. Hades whistled softly, and she tried to look disapproving as she shook her head over the splash of creamer. Then she took the cup and ducked out into the hall, hoping that they could quietly go their separate ways from here. Unfortunately, she got no such opportunity.

“Aunt Christa?” It was Jonathan, looking slightly relieved to see her. She felt a pang of guilt at having almost forgotten that he didn’t realize he was one of Mheksos’ primary targets. How could The Matrix have done this to him? What could she say to begin to explain it? “You’re on your way upstairs, right?”

“Well—”

“Thanks, you can take this up to Dr. Cotlin for me. I’m supposed to be next in the chair.”

Jonathan thrust a smooth plastic bag at her, and Christa accepted it reflexively. Then she looked down, and her stomach contracted uneasily at the sight of blood sliding across the inside of a sample tube. The printed sticker on the outside read GRIMES, SEBASTIAN CARTER. “I suppose…” But she looked back up to find he was already gone. “I wonder how badly it would derail Marissa if I suggested she get a real intraoffice delivery system for lab draws.”

“Which one’s Marissa?” Hades asked.

“That’s Dr. Cotlin, the biologist. I think she’s into robotics or something like that.” She pushed the bag onto him, seeing a way out of at least one of her problems. “Come on. She can be a bit much, but as far as I know, she doesn’t bite.”

“What a recommendation,” he said, following with the still-steeping tea in one hand and the unsettling specimen in the other.

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Thanks for reading, and a blessed and Merry Christmas to all of you!

For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory—you know you want to plunge into the archive over your long weekend.

Next week, Liam and Christa check in on Dr. Marissa in Mirai, Mirai #26: The Sample…

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Previously, Christa cornered The Matrix and demanded to know more about Mheksos’ motivations—discovering in the process that he seems to be traveling back in time specifically to kill her nephew, Jonathan Jones, aka Titan Beetle…

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Christa let go of The Matrix and stepped away slightly, but didn’t take her eyes off him. “Wait. Beetle is the only version of himself who’s ever escaped Mheksos, and he still agreed to come with you and face him again?” A far likelier thought occurred to her almost immediately. “You didn’t tell him.”

He didn’t look sorry. “His knowing or not knowing that didn’t affect the statistics.”

She felt cold. “What about us? How would it have affected the statistics if you’d been honest up front about Lord Hades?”

“It would have made them far worse,” The Matrix said. “Makaria wouldn’t have been interested, and even if I had convinced her to come along anyway, you wouldn’t have let Hades within a mile of you. You’d probably already be dead.”

“So you lied.”

He raised a finger. “It was not a lie, Christa. I told you that I branched your timeline, and the other version of Hades will change sides. I was strategizing based on the assumption that we’d meet up with you later on, after that had already happened.”

“You assumed you wouldn’t get caught, you mean.” She paced in a half-circle, rocking on the low heels of her sandals and letting her hands begin to glow again. Kari had assured her so confidently that they were only bringing Clare as a precaution, that this Liam was surely on the side of good, with no great evil twined around his soul and whispering in his ear. Christa had believed her, and stupidly allowed herself to dream. She didn’t expect that broken dream to be easily forgiven. “That’s the other version of him, but there are two of him now. What’s going to happen to this one?”

He paused, not meeting her eyes. “Any number of things could happen.”

“Nick.”

“Too much has changed,” he said quickly. “I thought my previous calculations would hold up for longer, but things have started to go wrong all over the place. We couldn’t handle that last attack as I’d thought we could, and I don’t—I don’t know. I’m just trying to get us all through this alive this time, and I may not even be able to do that. Mheksos won’t move on until he thinks he’s eliminated Jacob or Titan Beetle, or maybe both if I haven’t managed to confuse him as much as I hoped. That’s what I’m focused on. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to run therapy sessions, I’m sorry, so spare me whatever you were about to say about the nerve I have keeping secrets. All I really have left is my predictive abilities, and they won’t work at all if the situation starts to spiral out of my control, which despite all my best efforts it has done and is doing, so! So—”

He’d begun to tremble, and took a deep breath that didn’t steady him. There was a growing anxiety in his bearing that reminded Christa of his mother, Clare; despite the gray hairs and lines, it made him seem suddenly much closer to her own age. “But that’s not what really matters,” he said, as if he had to remind himself. “Getting here was what mattered. We accomplished the hardest part already. As long as we put up a good fight, the original timeline will be safe.”

“Wonderful. I’ll try to take some comfort in that,” Christa said, folding her arms to hold back the anger. “This was never about us at all, was it?”

“I don’t know what you could mean by that.”

He was still nervous enough to be unconvincing, and Christa remembered all at once how she’d meant to start this conversation. “Who did Mheksos erase?” she said.

Nick blinked at her, too rapidly. “He erased a lot of people. There were ripple effects from the initial timeline damage, and not everybody had high enough chances of existing in the first place for the chronomancers to get them back—”

“I mean when he was trying to hit you.”

He glanced over her shoulder, towards the sudden noise from the back door banging open and shut as voices bubbled in. “There’s no hiding anything from you,” he said. “I should have known, as often as I used to go to my Christa for advice after…ah, come on. I’ll explain.”

She ducked after Nick into the empty lobby, their footsteps echoing on the tile in the larger space. The glass had been swept up, but the lights were switched off and it was only half-lit by the sun coming through the scuffed plastic sheeting pulled across the broken doors. He sat down on one of the uncomfortable waiting-room chairs in the darkest corner, motioning for Christa to join him. “You might remember we had a civil war back in the ‘30s,” he said. “The 2030s, I mean, when I was a teenager. That’s when my mother died.”

This was the first Christa was hearing of it. “I’m sorry,” she said reflexively.

“It was a long time ago.” A flicker of sadness crossed his face, and then it was steeled again. “You were one of the few older heroes to make it out the other side of the war, so you became a mentor for a lot of us. We couldn’t have done nearly as well against Mheksos otherwise.”

She gave him a pointed look. “That’s nice. Are you trying to flatter me into forgetting what I asked?”

“I’m not,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “I suppose I don’t know where else to start. I mean, it wasn’t supposed to happen like that. When I looked at the future, there were a lot of possibilities, but I couldn’t see him. That’s what he counts on, everybody going on doing what they’ve always done, and it was all so stupidly predictable. Of course she would want to help, and I wouldn’t see the danger at first—but all the same they would never have thought of not calling you, or you of not stepping in to back us up. And after all those years fighting together, jumping in front of me was second nature to her. If I’d just known…” Nick stopped himself and shook his head in frustration. “I still don’t know what I could have done differently. There’s no telling now for sure who that version of Mheksos was ultimately targeting. Maybe if I hadn’t shown up and drawn his attention, he’d have left her alone.”

“Who?” Christa pressed.

“Addie,” Nick said finally. “My—well, I’m hardly used to saying my wife now, but at the time, she was.”

This, at last, was some useful information. Christa considered this while waiting to see if he would say anything else, realizing only after an awkward stretch of silence that he wasn’t going to. It was now dawning on her that The Matrix was one of those wildly irritating people who treated emotions as hazardous materials, and that this was a very emotional subject for him. “I see,” she said, although what she really wanted still was to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. “So would that make her Mheksos’ grandmother?”

“Possibly. As I’ve said, he’s done so much damage to history that there’s no telling,” he said. “She might be this time around, but I couldn’t say. She and I might not even wind up together in your other timeline.”

“You didn’t check that?”

“It didn’t matter. You see, not everybody has an equal chance of existing across timelines—take Beetle and Makaria. There’s about a fifty per cent chance of Jonathan existing in any given timeline, but as far as I know, there’s only one of Makaria. If he was erased, his origin point could theoretically be repaired using information from other universes, but she would simply be gone forever.” He paused to push back the shadow that had been creeping into his expression. “Addie’s existence was a one in a million chance. I was afraid we had lost her, but…I found your timeline. I made absolutely sure that she would be born here, and then I found a team that would have their own reasons for being invested in the project.”

“So that’s why they’re struggling so much,” Christa said, hurt. “It really never was about us.”

“It wasn’t about me, either,” Nick said sharply. “My Addie’s gone, retroactively written out of reality. We’ll never have her back. I just needed to know that there is still one of her out there in the multiverse, somewhere that Mheksos can’t get to her. Imagine—well, your parents both died, didn’t they? But you can visit their graves. You have photos, letters, you have your birth certificate—your mother, she was an actress, you have her films. If you introduce yourself as Ginger Baines’ daughter, people know who you mean. They remember her. Imagine that they didn’t.”

That was personal. “I’d rather not,” she snapped.

He didn’t back down. “Just make a thought experiment of it. What if it were Makaria—you see what I mean? Imagine being the version of yourself that loved and raised her, now having no proof you ever had a daughter, and nothing to remember her by. Not many people’s memories are immune to the effects of timeline repair. Maybe you’re the only person you know who doesn’t think she was a figment of your imagination. What wouldn’t you do to make her real again?”

Christa scowled. “You could have been honest with me.”

“I couldn’t risk that,” he said. “Look, the other version of you isn’t exactly going to have an easy time of it, either. This was never the good timeline for you. It’s the good timeline for my generation—for your nephew, your adopted children, Dr. Cotlin’s children, me and my sisters…all of us. And if that means that we have to go through hell here, or that it thwarts whatever perfect utopian plan Mheksos is putting together a hundred years from now, oh, well. I couldn’t do anything then. I can at least do this now.”

For another silent moment, they sat and seethed at each other across the cheap corner table. Then he flinched. “Your Clare’s looking for me,” he said. “Run along. I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone about this, but I suppose there’s not much that I could do. Use your judgment.”

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Thanks for reading, and for your patience with this long episode posting a little later than usual! As a heads-up, the next two weeks (#25 and #26) may also be somewhat delayed, and once #26 has been posted, Mirai, Mirai will be on hiatus through January. I’ll have more details in my end-of-year update.

For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.

Next week, Christa may have been distracted by her investigation, but there’s someone who’d still very much like to see her…

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Welcome to a special “I am sick and tired of my posting schedule being thrown off” double-length episode of Mirai, Mirai! (It’s still only 8 minutes’ reading time.) Previously, Christa chose to trust that The Matrix had her best interests at heart, both in the general sense and specifically in the case of her relationship with Liam. Now, she’s wondering if that was a mistake…

(And I can’t neglect to share an alternate perspective of last week’s battle, provided by in “Here He Comes to Save the Day,” episode 10 of his current mad wholesome superhero serial. Thanks, Michael!)

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Lady Radiance slipped to the ground and landed on the cracked pavement beside her daughter, who was putting her borrowed sunglasses back on against the now-untroubled noon sunshine. “Kari, take Hades,” she said. “I need to talk to The Matrix before Clare gets here.”

Makaria frowned reluctantly. “Shouldn’t Father go with you?”

“No.” She gave no more explanation, only an apologetic shake of her head as she pushed past. “Matrix—”

But a hand held her back. Turning, she found that Jacob had caught up with her. His goggles and the hood of his suit were already pulled back, and an undercurrent of concern in his expression that only she would have noticed. “You’re okay?” he asked.

“Fine. It just turns out that when our friend from the future said we needed Liam’s help, he meant as my babysitter, not in general, and when he said he might be consumed from the inside by darkness in this timeline, he meant he was.” She reached up and moved his hand. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Chris, what…”

“Just keep an eye on him,” she said, finally catching The Matrix’ attention. “Nick, can I have a minute?”

“Got it. I’ll prep the ‘you’re not allowed to date my sister’ talk,” Jacob said.

The Matrix winced. Was that a sympathetic glance behind her to Hades, or was she just angry enough with him to imagine one? “Later, Christa.”

“No, not later. Now.”

But he wasn’t listening; he was already across the alley with Chained Lightning. She followed, leaving her brother with Hades and Makaria, and was looking for a chance to get a word in edgewise when Baz noticed her first. “Hey, it’s Christa! You made it back all right? Christabel’s our Lady Radiance,” he said to his friend. “And this is RJ López, the Intangible Man.”

The other groaned. “Don’t start that, man, it’s gonna catch on. I told you I don’t want to be in your little vigilante club.” A little shorter than The Matrix but twice as wide, RJ had large, blunt features and a just-noticeable Nuyorican accent. Intangible—he had matter-phasing powers, maybe? He looked fairly tangible from the way he was still holding the disintegration gun, so she supposed he could turn them on and off.

“Nah, that was good,” Baz said. “Now you got some practice, we should have an even easier time of it when they come back.”

“Oh no. You can go ahead and turn off that charm right now. I owed you one favor…”

“You said that the serum is working so far?” The Matrix interrupted.

“Oh, yeah.” Baz raised a hand and showed him and Christa the results of the other Marissa’s super-serum: on command, an electrical current summoned from nowhere flashed across the gaps between his fingers. “I could get used to this.”

The older man seemed to be attempting a smile, but his face was slack from exhaustion, and his eyes were even heavier than they had been last night. How much was it taking out of him to keep pushing Mheksos back? “Good. You’ll probably have to.”

“Trouble on your 8, Sparky,” RJ said smugly.

“Now don’t you start that.” Baz snapped his head around, the half-serious glare he’d directed at RJ shifting to a mask of exasperation at the sight of Marissa. “Rissa, can you not stay inside for ten minutes?”

The scientist strolled up with her hands shoved in the back pockets of her jeans. “Why should I? The fun part’s over. Anyway—cancellation powers. As long as I stay away from the bots, it’s not like I have to worry about friendly fire.”

“That so?” Baz looked back at her as if this were the first time he’d considered those implications—Christa’s instinctive, startled thought was that he was about to kiss her. Instead, he stuck a finger out and touched Marissa’s arm with a zap. Current crackled and snapped harmlessly across her skin, ionizing the air around her in a pretty halo of electric blue as it slowly diffused away.

Marissa snatched her arm away and backed up a step, blushing as she breathlessly tried to smooth her static-blown hair back down. “What was that for?”

He was grinning ear to ear. “Like y’said, I can’t hurt you.”

“Oh, good for you—” She jumped away with a squeal as he reached for her again, laughing now. “No-ooo! No no no Sebastian don’t you dare—”

“Somebody should really have just knocked their heads together by now,” Ignis muttered as he stalked past Christa.

“There you are,” The Matrix said. “Ignis, I need to talk to you.”

The masked man kept walking. “No, you don’t.”

The Matrix started after him with a groan of frustration. Christa was about to yell at him to come back, probably in vain, when she remembered Clare’s trick with the mom voice. It was worth a try. “Nicholas Harper!” she called sharply, cutting through the ruckus of Marissa scolding RJ and Baz continuing to laugh at them both. “Don’t ignore me!”

He pivoted on his heel. “Miz Chris-...sorry, I…what is it?”

“What was all that about?”

The Matrix looked at her blankly, as if this final crescendo of chaos had at last overheated his brain to the point of shutting down.

She ventured to push him a little further. “What did you mean about a time paradox?”

“Oh…” He shook his head. “Do we have to do this now?”

“If you’d rather, we can start with everything you told me and Kari about Liam, and why,” she said pointedly.

The Matrix took a shallow breath, looking off in the direction Ignis had gone before turning back. “The thing is, they’re really the same conversation,” he said. “All right. Walk with me, and I’ll see if I can explain it to you.”

“It can’t be that complicated,” she said. He chuckled, but said nothing as he started to walk toward the building. Christa allowed him a few silent steps before she prodded again. “How do you know Mheksos?”

“That’s an easy one. I helped to expel him from my timeline thirty years ago.” He gave another weary kind of laugh. “See, this is why it’s complicated. The question you really wanted was, how does Mheksos know me? And the answer to that one is, I’m fairly sure that I used to be his grandfather.”

“Used to be?” she asked.

“Time paradoxes, you remember? I traced him back through the multiverse while I was looking for you. It wasn’t easy with all the damage, but I think I did find his original timeline. There, the man who ultimately became Mheksos was from the 22nd century, a time of terrible global war. He thought that he could go back in time and stop it.”

“But he couldn’t?”

“Oh, no, he could,” The Matrix said. “That was the problem. Almost always, when a person goes back in time and changes something, what actually happens is that they fork their timeline and create a new one where the change is in effect. That’s what we did to you by showing up here. However, his powers allow him to actually edit the past. And if you edit your own past, you change the future you came from—pardon the apparent repetition—so, in succeeding in preventing the war, he removed his future self’s reason for going back in time. That’s an instant time paradox right there. It’s not entirely uncommon, and healthy spacetime ecosystems can heal over a small paradox or two, but this one was fairly serious.”

Christa was starting to feel dizzy again. She focused on the blast of AC across her face as he opened the door, counteracting the heat that still lingered from the battle. “So what happened?”

“His whole past had to shift to prevent the rest of the timeline from imploding. Functionally, I believe he was erased and replaced with another timeline’s version of himself, which would have been incredibly destabilizing for him…especially when he attempted to, from his perspective, fix things in that timeline, causing the same thing to happen again.” He adjusted his jacket absently on his thin shoulders. “I don’t know how much of Mheksos’ original self is really left. He seems to still recognize me, though.”

“Do you know what he wants?” she said.

“Possibly. I suspect I do, in any case,” he said. “Whoever he is currently, it seems to me that he wants to rewrite events the way he remembers them in his original timeline. The people he most often goes after are…in the way of that, shall we say. But he’s also still trying to ensure that that war never starts. It’s the only reason I can think of that he’s exclusively been shifted to timelines where your nephew Jonathan exists.”

Christa jumped forward a step so that she could catch The Matrix and hold him back. “Hold on. What does Jonathan have to do with anything?”

“If I said ‘spoilers’…”

She held up her free hand, encircled with glowing golden threads. “I might tie you to a chair until you explain.”

“Understood,” he said, the slant of his mustache a little sheepish. “Well, obviously if he’s going to be born in eight years or so, he’s not likely to be the direct cause of a war that won’t start for ninety. He must have been a critical component somehow, though, because Mheksos killing him is what seems to have caused the initial paradox. That’s why you always die in his attacks,” he added, while she was staring at him aghast. “Either your brother or his son is always targeted, and Mheksos has no qualms about going through you to get to them. Titan Beetle is the only Jonathan Jones I was able to find who survived.”

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Next week, Nick and Christa’s conversation continues in #24: The Erasure…

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Previously, the Mhekanite invasion force was repelled, but not defeated. Will the defenders’ temporary alliance with Lord Hades provide enough firepower to answer The Matrix’ call for help?

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On the other side of Kari’s portal, Lady Radiance landed in a patch of unfamiliar gravel and bounced up immediately with light beneath her feet. She could see what the general situation was—the Mhekanites were back, and the defensive going had proven to be tough without her and Makaria there—but had no time to try and tease the details out of the chaos and noise. She spun up a rope and lassoed the nearest robot handily, pulling back hard to smash it into its neighbor.

This time, the little bots weren’t so easily distracted by dealing with the other heroes. A whirring sounded from the five or six closest as they swiveled towards her and reared. Lady began shielding on instinct, finishing the arm-crossing maneuver just before their metal bodies slammed against solid light. When she relaxed the shield enough to see through it again, she found herself floating in a golden bubble on a lake of fire. Lord Hades hung above her with an air of languid self-assurance, looking down through the haze as her attackers overheated and burst into jets of flame.

She returned a righteous scowl to his tilted smile, momentarily forgetting her sympathy for handsome, troubled Liam. How could he be evil? She’d had such faith in him, and made such a fool of herself in his defense! How could he be a villain? An agent of the forces of darkness—he was Lady Radiance’s natural enemy, and now, when she’d barely even found her feet as a hero, he had the nerve to try to swoop in and save the day!

“I’m supposed to be keeping you safe, my Lady,” he called.

“I wish you the best of luck.” She dissolved the shield with a gesture and soared past him, taking better stock now of the scene below. They were still at the lab, but out back this time, by the delivery loading zone and a couple of Dumpsters. A series of flashes around the perimeter turned out to be Spacewalker, contributing to the chaos by popping out here and there to fire some kind of energy weapon at the Mhekanites and disappear. Chained Lightning and an imposingly rectangular man she didn’t recognize had the middle zone, the one putting voltage through everything in reach and the other using Ignis’ disintegration weapon on the survivors. Titan Beetle and Ignis were rampaging together in the thick of the onslaught, closest to the rift continuing to widen along the fenceline—Kari was already at The Matrix’ side, working to contain it.

With Hades trailing her, Lady Radiance supposed the most useful thing she could do was snag any bots that got too close to The Matrix and Makaria and drag them back into his flames. When she couldn’t find any more, she looked back to the rift: they’d managed to shorten it considerably and the Mhekanites had stopped coming through, but they couldn’t seem to get it all the way closed.

The air shivered with a grating voice from beyond the rift. “You can’t hold me off forever. I only have to get enough of my forces through to strike once.”

“And then what, Mheksos?” The Matrix shouted back. “You know that if you keep this up, you’re going to create a time paradox serious enough to destabilize us all! Do you really want to win so badly that you’re willing to take all our timelines down with you?”

“You!” The rift yawned suddenly; between the two lines of green light bulged a darkness so black that no image escaped it. “No. You don’t exist anymore! I erased you myself!”

“It wasn’t me you hit!” He was laughing, but it was the cold laugh of a man who’d already lost everything. “Of all the shots to miss, right? I told you you’d regret getting me involved—!”

A bolt of energy flew from the darkness, directly at him. The Matrix already had a hand out to psychokinetically deflect it, leaving a void in the air above him that sizzled for a moment and then thunderously collapsed.

“There will be no paradox!” Mheksos roared above the noise. “I am the Master of the Multiverse! Time and space serve me!”

“That’s not how it works, future boy,” The Matrix said. “Think it through while you’re trying to break that!” With a twist of his outstretched arm, the remainder of the rift drew itself up to a single dark point and then popped out of existence.

A shell-shocked kind of silence settled on the field of battle, broken a moment later by a whoosh and the disappearance of every remaining piece of Mhekanite detritus.

“Ah,” The Matrix said to no one in particular, calm again and taking off his glasses to wipe the lenses. “They’re time-phased. I imagine we’ll see the thirty-minutes-ago version of those things again later.”

Lady Radiance glanced back to Lord Hades and wondered if he regretted coming along yet.

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Next week, #23: The Paradox. Lady Radiance wants answers, but can she get them?

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Previously, Makaria informed Liam’s Master that Lady Radiance would die without Lord Hades’ help. Is she serious? Is she seriously trying to out-manipulate a master manipulator? Or is there something darker afoot…?

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Liam looked across the park to the shape of Christabel lagging behind Clare, drawing in the dirt with the toe of her shoe. So she was Lady Radiance? The name meant nothing to him, but it suited her. She seemed so sunny, so innocent. And she had smiled at him.

He wasn’t a hero. He couldn’t be. But if he were protecting her, would she forget that for long enough to smile at him again?

He turned a thought purposely towards the Master. :What does she mean, a goal in common? Is Lady Radiance important to your plans?:

:Vitally important.:

:Then send Lord Hades. We’ll see soon enough if there’s any truth in what she says, and either way, I can ensure your work is not endangered. Isn’t that why I’m here?:

:There may be some truth to it. I recently noticed a set of strange disturbances to reality, and this would explain them. But I don’t like how much she seems to know.:

“I mean it,” Makaria said, since Liam hadn’t answered aloud. “The Matrix has seen thousands of timelines, and she can only survive if you join the fight.”

Power swelled in the interstices of his body, and a question forced its way painfully through his lungs and into his mouth. “And what does The Matrix say will happen if she does not survive?”

The glow of Makaria’s eyes wavered. She flattened herself slightly against the tree, but didn’t run. “Hades breaks,” she said. “I saw it happen in my timeline. He stopped listening to you, no matter what you tried. Even…even I wasn’t enough.”

“You?”

She laughed softly, as if they should have understood. “Makaria, daughter of Hades and Perse—”

“I see.” An invisible grip arrested Liam’s thoughts, holding them churning in place until that voice retreated from his throat to his mind. :The situation interests me, Hades; go with them and keep Lady Radiance out of danger. I want you to find out everything you can, but remember they’re not our kind of people. Your loyalty is to me.:

:I’ll remember.: He sighed in relief and slumped back against the bench as the psychic pressure ebbed away. The last few minutes were already gone from his mind, except for the Master’s instruction. When he looked up, breathing more regularly, Makaria had come to stand next to him.

“Are you all right?” she said hesitantly.

“Oh, yeah, this is normal. Lucky you, he says you get to put up with it for a while.” Liam tried an ironic, mirthless grin, but dropped it when she didn’t react. “Makaria, if we’re going to work together, I really would like to know who you are.”

She sat down slowly where Christabel had been. “You didn’t hear…? I see. So he hides things from you?”

“Sometimes. Only for my own good.”

Makaria lowered her gaze. “It’s strange how unlike him you are. Not him, I mean,” she added quickly, “but the you I knew. I’m your daughter. I came here from twenty-seven years into my timeline’s future.”

Liam considered this. If they really were dealing with alternate planes of spacetime…in a theoretically infinite multiverse, there was bound to be one of him that had his life together. He wouldn’t discount the possibility outright. “Didn’t I hear you call Christabel your mother?”

“Yes,” she said. “The two of you are my parents.”

He looked over to the girl balancing on one foot to reach for a flower just overhead. Oh. Sign me up. His inner romantic was already breathlessly transmuting hints into dreams, manifesting an entire world in his heart where he was not the dragon but the knight. For one intoxicating, rose-colored moment, all his inner noise fell silent again at the thought of holding her hand—and then grim reality returned. He could feel his face fall even as it burned. “It could never work here,” he said, soft.

“It will,” Makaria insisted. “Father, she wanted more than anything for you to be good. Please don’t let her down.”

That was impossible. “She doesn’t even know me.”

“She believes in you. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

Liam didn’t think so, and he would have happily argued further, but Clare had broken back into his consciousness. She was running towards the bench where they sat, Christabel now jogging at her heels.

Makaria noticed and turned her head. “What is it?”

“We’re leaving!” Clare said. “I just got a distress call, and I hope you have Liam sorted out because we are leaving now.”

“I do. He’s coming with us.” She was on her feet, already flicking through spatial coordinates at speed. Liam wondered if he could rightly feel proud of her skill. “Who’s calling?”

“The—it’s Nicholas. I should never have let her talk me into coming here first. If something happens and I don’t even get to see him—”

“He’ll be all right. He knows what he’s doing,” Christabel said. She was glowing gold, her skirt fluttering as her loose waves twisted themselves back into a crown of braids. “Let us handle this, okay? We should have it safe enough for you by the time you catch up.”

“Oh, I hate this. Fine.” Clare squeezed her arms anxiously around herself. “I hate this so much. Tell that boy he’s grounded forever.”

A portal stretched in midair between Makaria’s hands. “You two first,” she said.

There were a lot of things Liam would have liked to know—where they were going and what the danger was, just for a start—but he had his orders, and Lady Radiance was already jumping in. He pocketed his shades and followed in a flash of cold white flame.

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Next week, #22: The Return…

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Previously, Liam’s reflections on his reluctance to commit to villainy were interrupted by a very beautiful girl and a very powerful psychic. What do they want with him—and how on earth, or below it, is he going to explain this to his dark master?

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“Now will you tell me what’s going on?” Liam said from his hard landing on the steel seat of a park bench. The girls had dragged Liam to the nearby public greenspace without stopping to introduce their friend or answer any of his questions, and though he was well aware that a proper villainous monstrosity would have immediately summoned a wave of fire to knock them into the street for their impertinence…well, Christabel wouldn’t stop glancing back and blushing, and it made him want to see how much longer he could successfully pretend to be a real boy. Besides, smiting Clare would presumably have brought the shrieking-of-the-damned in his head back to full volume. With apologies to the Master, it was a nice change to be able to hear himself think.

“Oh,” Christabel said as she sat next to him, clasping her hands in her lap. “Well—where to even start…”

“I just got here myself,” Clare said, raising her eyebrows as if to say don’t look at me. “And I’ve guessed a little bit from context and stray thoughts, but I know Marissa didn’t tell me everything yet.”

Come on, man, you can’t let a bunch of girls push you around. Liam was still workshopping his Lord Hades persona, but he tried to straighten up and deepen his voice, at least. “What is it that you want?” he demanded.

“We need your help,” the other blonde said. She’d leaned back against the tree trunk a few feet away and was telegraphing her glances between him and Christabel with a small tipping of her chin. A soft violet light was reflecting off the back of her sunglasses, hinting at some powers of her own. “You’re familiar with multiverse theory, aren’t you?”

Liam nodded. By now it’d become second nature, but folding four-dimensional spacetime to create a portal involved much more math than magic. “The theory, yes. I’ve never actually been through the fifth dimension.”

“I have. So has our enemy, Mheksos. He’s been traveling between timelines and burning a hole in the spacetime fabric here, or not too far from here, in every one.”

He hadn’t thought she could pivot quickly enough to keep her own alleged fifth-dimensional transit from being the weirdest thing in that statement. “Here? Why?”

“If we’d been in a position to find out, we wouldn’t have survived it,” she said. “The Matrix—that’s Clare’s son. He brought me, and my cousin, and his friend here from our own timelines to try to fight Mheksos off—I think he knows, but he doesn’t say much. You may have better luck with him.”

She was trying to trick him, playing on his natural curiosity and acting as if he’d already agreed to join them. Clever. “That’s quite a presumption,” Liam said. “I don’t know how you found me, or why you thought I would help you, but I’m not a hero. I’m an agent of the forces of darkness, and I have certain responsibilities. I can’t just run off and save the world anytime it’s in danger.”

He’d been half afraid they would laugh at him. Instead, Christabel’s posture straightened uncomfortably, and somehow that felt worse. “So you are Hades,” she murmured. “I hoped…”

“It was always the most likely possibility,” the other girl said, like she wanted to be comforting but didn’t at all know how. “That’s why The Matrix had us bring Clare.”

“And I’m very glad he did,” Clare said. “This does not feel like the simple psychic influence you described, Kari.”

“Oh.” Kari grimaced. “Yes, he said that might be the case, too. That changes things…I’ll have to go to Plan C. Could you drop the interference?”

“Sorry, why?” Liam said.

She pulled the glasses off and handed them to Christabel, revealing narrow eyes pulsing with violet light. “I’m going over your head.”

“You can’t be serious,” Clare said, taken aback. Liam just braced himself, not caring for the consequences if he argued.

“It’s fine. He won’t hurt us,” Kari said. “If it makes you feel better, I guess you can have Mother stand next to you.”

“You’re insane.” Clare stuck a hand out as if she expected the other girl to take it. “Come on, Christa. You and I and the psychic shielding are going to go stand at the other end of the park, like sensible people.”

“But—”

“Christa, come here now.” Christabel got up with an uncertain look at Liam, and Clare pulled her hand back sheepishly. “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to pull out the mom voice on you. I have a toddler at home…”

The tortured wails returned while he was still watching Christabel walk away, shortly followed by a nervous shock crackling up his spine at the inner voice of his father. :Tell me the meaning of this at once, Hades.:

“I don’t know,” he muttered, swallowing the nausea. “Kari—is that your name?”

She took a shallow breath. “The you in my timeline preferred to call me Makaria,” she said. “But we can talk about that later. Please tell…him that The Matrix sent me to offer help, not only to ask it. We have a goal in common.”

“And what is that?”

“Christabel Jones, the woman you just met, is Lady Radiance. She’s going to be killed by Mheksos unless you step in to protect her.”

:Did you—:

:Yes. I heard.:

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The conversation continues next week in #21: The Truce…