35: The Cycle

Mirai, Mirai #35. Serial fiction: multiverse family drama.

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. In order to save their timeline from multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty, former TV superhero Lady Radiance and her friends must unravel the mysteries of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

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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…

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

Superverse Directory

1. as referenced in #05, “The Blessed”.