9-1: Lion-Hearted Girl, Part One

Radiance #9: You're not alone.

And…we’re back!

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.

Radiance is a hopeful fiction serial about one of Earth’s darker timelines. It takes place around 2014 in a world where atypical abilities have become increasingly common, with the storyline following a group of minor-league superheroes based in Washington, DC. Our protagonist is Lady Radiance, former teen sensation, aka Christabel Jones, professional ray of sunshine—or, at least, she's trying her best.

Previously, Lady Radiance may have physically escaped the clutches of arch-villain Archangel, but she’s fallen victim to a toxic cocktail intended to turn her into Lord Hades’ obedient Queen. We last saw her being forced into cryostasis until efforts can be made to reverse its effects. This time, we see how well that’s working, and the Lady must decide once and for all which side she’s on.

<#8 // To #8.75 || Directory || #9, Part One>

When she became conscious of herself again, Lady Persephone was drifting through Christabel’s memories.

They were slow, slightly out of order, and distorted as if in a dream. The events in front of her didn’t match up to how she remembered them, even accounting for how young Christa had been.

This, for instance—That’s not right, she thought, watching as her very small self sat swinging her legs back and forth at the top of the playground slide. When was this? Why would she have been left alone for so long, snagged up here on that thin line between climbing and falling?

“You were easy to overlook, weren’t you?”

That was…Leila’s voice. Her Lord’s adoptive sister, the villainess Siren. She’d used to serve Archangel, years ago. She could look into your head, and see your most secret dreams, and make you think she was everything you wanted. But she didn’t do that now.

“That’s why you wanted to see how long it would take them to notice you were gone.”

More recent events stirred in the Dark Lady’s mind. Yes, Siren was calling herself Sylph now—doing her good deeds, so she said. Reading your memories and showing you the other side of them, or something like that. Christabel had thought it a noble idea. Lady Persephone didn’t think it sounded terribly trustworthy. How could anyone else say for sure whether the thoughts in your head were true?

“Just watch,” Sylph said firmly. The Dark Lady focused reluctantly on that stubborn little girl, watching herself watch the sunset beyond the buildings across the street.

“Found you!” There was a thin voice from the bottom of the ladder. It was Jacob, already taller than her and with a smile she didn’t think she’d seen in a while. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

The girl’s hands tightened on the platform’s edge. “I can’t. The slide’s too long, and the ladder’s too tall.”

“All right, so jump.” He was impossibly far away down there, so small against the sea of wood chips, but his arms were outstretched confidently. “I’ll catch you.”

He couldn’t possibly catch her. Even she wouldn’t have been so trusting, surely...yet that younger version of herself did jump, and landed squarely on top of him in a puff of red splinters. Lady Persephone watched it in amazement, unable to reconcile the image with how she thought of herself and her brother now. Was it true? And if it were, when had things changed?

Sylph gave her no time to reflect. Instead, she presented another scene, and then another. Over and over, with a child’s shameless tiresomeness, it was the same thing: Watch this. Look at me. In the Lady’s recollection, no one had ever seemed to look; with her mother gone, her brother drifting, their father struggling not to fall apart or take it out on them, there was no one there to love her up close. That was why she’d begun to look for roles to play, masks to put on. That was why she’d poured herself into Lady Radiance, only to realize too late how little she was getting in return.

And yet that wasn’t what she saw now. All along the way, Dad had supported her. Jacob had never left. What a thing to imagine, her twin leaving her—all their lives, hadn’t her annoyance come from constantly finding him in her shadow? He was there suited up as Spacewalker when she needed backup, there to drag her clear across the country when she needed breathing room, always there to catch her just as she hit free fall. Jake could have gone his own way anytime, but he’d chosen over and over again to love her more.

The pace didn’t slow, and she saw herself standing in the alley where she’d first encountered Lord Hades. Her other half. Her great love. She knew now that it had been orchestrated; she’d been picked out of a catalog of Archangel’s past creations as an insurance plan, the ideal hostage and bride. The thought should have taken more of the romance out of reliving that moment, but what pulled her out of it instead was the hard look Jacob gave her as they passed each other by.

There. That was where the change that she was so sure of had come in. But why…

Her memories from the last year began to unspool in front of her, and then she realized why. July, September, November…it was with guilt burning her throat that she watched her own open, joyful smiles begin to close like flowers at dusk. No one had driven her and Jake apart. She’d chosen to push him and everyone else away, step by imperceptible step, chasing her hopes for Liam. They skipped breathlessly from scene to scene of secrets, lies, abandonment, not always for motives as pure as she had pretended to herself. And behind it all, the ugly specter of her present state.

Leila’s voice cut in again. “I’m not usually so blunt, Christabel, but it’s an emergency.”

The Lady couldn’t imagine what kind of emergency required making her feel like the worst friend and most ungrateful sister in the world.

“Good, keep feeling that way. That’s a good sign. We’ll get there.”

What did they think would be the point of it? She was the Queen of the Dead. Already she felt the anguish her Lord had so often described lapping at her own feet. It would overwhelm her petty personal regrets before long. He had not come to take her yet, but he would.

“He says the transfusion isn’t taking, Leila,” another voice said—thought? It sounded like Clarevoyante. “You’re running out of time.”

“Okay. I need your eyes.”

The scene before her dissolved into static and was reassembled into what the Lady had to assume was Clarevoyante’s point of view. She was standing a few feet from the Dark Lady’s mortal form, which floated apparently lifeless inside a sleek glass and metal tank. Between them was Sylph, glowing softly, with her eyes shut and one hand pressed to the surface of the glass. As Sylph dropped her further into Clarevoyante’s head, the Lady felt the warmth through her hand on Sylph’s shoulder and realized that the slight blurriness to the scene was from tears. Although the psychic never moved her gaze, and her thoughts had gone quiet, she was passing along a strangely detached set of ambient emotions—heart-chewing regret, slithering anxiety, grief and dread, and a sadness that overwhelmed all the rest.

The proper rejoinder came to her immediately, in a tone not quite her own: emotions were no basis on which to make a decision. The Queen of All Below could not simply bow to the wishes of whomever would be sorriest to lose her. Her Lord needed her by his side.

“We’re not giving up on you, Christabel,” Sylph said. “Don’t give up on us.”

The story of the lost little mermaid stirred in Christa’s memories. Siren…Sylph…had chosen to fight the spell that bound her to the Master’s influence. It could be done. It would cost…but it could be done.

Thoughts stirred in the back of her head: and what would it cost Christabel? Her life? Her soul?

Would any of her friends forgive her?

“We can’t get you out of there unless you want to come. Let us worry about what happens next—just fight while you still can.”

Fight? For what?

“You’ve never needed anyone to tell you that. You’re all goodness and light, no matter how he tries to twist it.”

She didn’t feel there was any light left in her. Distantly, though less so as Clarevoyante’s vision faded, she felt the cold pierce her bones again. It hurt, and she pushed back instinctively against the pain. A dim violet glow flickered around her, but there was no heat in it—no life. For the first time, the Dark Lady doubted.

With enormous effort, she brought her own eyes open. The view from inside the tank was blurred by the icy liquid she was floating in, but she could see Sylph’s outline through the glass. It reminded her of her last memory—of Jacob standing there, reaching out. Some time must have passed since her capture, and her Lord, if he were even still alive, had not come for her. Their Master seemed almost to have forgotten she was here. Lady Radiance’s friends hadn’t. She tried again to summon enough light for warmth, her powers’ most basic function, but again failed…was this supposed to be happening?

This time, too, the answer cut in sharply. She couldn’t expect things to be the same as they were before. She was being transformed, after all. Archangel had no use for Lady Radiance as she was, or he would have kept her that way.

It seemed a reasonable answer, but…these weren’t her own thoughts. What were they doing in her head, as if they belonged there?

Was that what she had accepted, to be nothing more than a paper doll crumpled at the bottom of a drawer?

No. She couldn’t do any good as the Queen of the Dead. Even for Liam, she didn’t want to live like this, never knowing her own heart. She would find some other way—his Master couldn’t have her will.

Voices pressed in around her, angry and accusing, but she pushed them aside.

Christabel reached out toward Leila’s hand on the glass in a white-hot burst of light.

✨✨✨

“You’re not sleeping here, are you?”

The voice on the other side of Christa’s closed eyelids—young, male, nonthreatening—was familiar but not immediately identifiable. Given that she felt like death, she decided to give herself a pass on that.

For a second she considered scraping together the energy to answer, but then someone else did. “Ugh, no. Nobody should sleep on this thing. I’ve only been here a few hours, and my back is killing me.”

Was that Jacob?

“Your back? Gaaawd, I hope I never get old,” the first voice said.

“Go get the pillow, squirt, or I’ll tell the nurse to revoke your sick note for daycare.”

It was Jacob. Christa brought her eyes open weakly and found herself in another hospital bed—this one much nicer than the last one she recalled. The small white room was easily lit by the bank of windows to one side, their blinds rolled up to reveal a slice of cloudy sky; in one glance she noted both its uninspiring furnishings and her brother, leaning back on the cushioned bench. He sat up immediately when he saw her looking around. “Christabel.”

She put her arms out for him, choking as she tried to speak. “Jacob, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking her hand and letting her hug him with the other arm. “You can’t be sorry, too.”

“Of course I can! This was all my fault. If I’d trusted you, if I hadn’t…”

“Don’t, Chris. It won’t help.” She sighed into his shoulder in response. “I’m serious. You don’t need to worry about anything except getting better.”

Christa let herself fall back onto the pillow, quieted but not convinced. “This is the regular hospital, right? How did I end up here?”

Her brother scrunched up his face awkwardly. “Well, you remember I had to call Baz to get you out…uh, do you remember?”

“Basically,” she admitted. She could probably remember the details too, if she tried, but she didn’t particularly want to.

“Yeah…so, obviously you’re Lord Hades’ nemesis, but since that first attack last year, he’s the one all the paperwork’s been attached to. Bringing him in meant the atypicals department getting involved, investigation, psychic quarantine, everything. As soon as you were stable, they made us transfer you somewhere more official so their doctors could check you out. And you definitely are on a registry now.” He paused. “But he’s all right, and you—you made it. And that’s what counts.”

“Jake…” Christa searched his expression as a distraction from both that ‘nemesis’ comment and the realization that her short-lived vigilante career was already done for. He looked like he was holding something back.

“It’s fine. It’s fine.”

She grabbed his hand again. “Jake, what’s the part that doesn’t count?”

He was saved from answering by a door opening behind the curtain, followed by a figure pushing through it. “A’ight, I got—oh! Lady! You’re up!”

Christa looked back at the young man blankly. He still sounded familiar, but she didn’t think she’d ever seen his face. He was young, maybe even a teenager. There were dark curls spilling onto his forehead, and his eyes were gleaming in impish delight.

“Oh, man, you don’t recognize me,” he said. “Hey, I said it’s a good costume—”

“Don’t start that again,” Jacob groaned. “Lucas, Christa Jones. Christa, Lucas López, alias Featherweight. He showed up in character and said he knew you, so the rescue team took him along. He did not tell us that he’s only fifteen, or that his scary uncle knows where I live—or I wouldn’t have let him go get beat up like that.”

Christa allowed a surprised and vaguely scandalized expression to cover the compounding layers of guilt. Was there anybody her mistakes hadn’t gotten hurt?

“I’m gonna tell Uncle RJ you called him scary,” Lucas said, using an antigravity field to shoot the pillow across the room to Jacob.

“Dude, he knows. It’s his whole thing.”

“Hold on,” Christa said, lost for context. “Lucas, how did you get involved in this?”

“A’ight, so, long…actually, it’s not that long a story.” He leapt up in slow-motion and settled casually into a perch on the end of her bed. “Short story short, I live with my Uncle RJ while my mom’s deployed, right? And he’s friends with Mr. Grimes and this guy from being guinea pigs together, so I found out pretty fast when you went missing. Jake spilled your secret identity on, like, the second sentence.”

“You didn’t have to tell her that part,” Jacob said. “And how come I don’t get to be Mr. Jones?”

“You couldn’t fry me like a potato chip with one finger. It’s a respect thing, man.”

Christa wished they wouldn’t banter like that while she was starting to develop a headache, but she couldn’t quite summon the will to say anything about it. She still felt cold, and wondered how long that was supposed to last. Maybe, deep down, she would always feel the call of the grave.

She shivered and reached from habit for her aura. To her relief, it flickered on around her, warm and lively—the color back to its usual gold, if dimmer than she’d expected.

“I don’t even see why RJ blames me,” Jacob was saying. “Clarevoyante knows you. She should have said something.”

The memory flashed of Leila and the psychic speaking to her. “So you did call Clarevoyante.”

“Well, I had to—we didn’t have another way to find out where he’d taken you,” Jacob said. “Lucky you, she answered my message very nicely and said she’d had a feeling something like this was going to happen. She helped us round up a few people who could help, they went up to Ohio, and, uh…that part could have gone better.”

“Everything after that could have gone better,” Lucas said.

“Okay, so you’re not wrong, but you are not helping.” Jacob shook his head. “It really was a mess. Hades tricked Silver Lance and Mr. Molecular into some kind of crossfire that trapped everybody in parallel time-dilation bubbles, then had the clones start picking fights. It was the next day here before they all got back in sync and figured out that they were missing Baz.”

“You weren’t with them?” Christa asked, catching herself too late. Although the last few days before her kidnapping were concerningly hazy in her mind, she remembered well enough that Jacob no longer had his powers. At the time, it had only convinced her that by walking away from them, he was really abandoning her. She couldn’t possibly believe that now. “…Sorry. Of course not.”

He was looking down, his expression pained. “Yeah. I wouldn’t have been much help.”

“He did find Clare, though,” Lucas said. “And Miz Leila. Getting her to pull you out of it was really what saved you.”

“Mostly saved her,” Jacob said.

“…mostly, yeah.”

Christa pulled herself up to sit straighter. “Jake, come on. You can’t just keep saying things like that and not explaining.”

“Well—” He shifted uncomfortably. “If you want the technical details, you’ll have to ask the experts.”

“I don’t care. Just tell me what’s wrong.”

Jacob sighed, glanced towards the door, and then lowered his voice. “Look, as far as the official record is concerned, this is normal for you, so don’t bring it up if you ever want to get out of here. We only knew about psychic control being transmitted by contact with the clones. The stuff you were infected with was different—it was operating on a whole other level. They managed to pull out enough of it for you to clear quarantine, but Dr. Marcos said your DNA was permanently damaged, and your powers aren’t all that stable. Clarevoyante was getting really weird reads.”

“Weird…” Christa let the question trail off, refocusing her attention inward. Thin strands of light spooled from her fingertips and twisted themselves into cords at her direction, but she felt like she was pulling against somebody holding the other end.

Then she gasped, letting the cords dissolve into a pool of light across her lap and shimmer away. She’d felt long fingers wrapping around her wrist and a hand pressing into hers, but when she opened her eyes, nothing was there.

She didn’t know how, but she was absolutely certain that Lord Hades had survived, and he was waiting for her.

<#8 // To #8.75 || Directory || #9, Part One>

Thanks so much for reading! (And for your patience as I get it all back together!) Tune in next week for part two…

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