2: Nobody's Baby, Everybody's Girl

Radiance #2: the One-Winged Army's sinister origins; international law and the ethics of emergency cloning; and, don't freak out, but I think we have a portal to Hell in the living room.

Radiance is a lighthearted (?) fiction serial about one of Earth's darker timelines. It takes place around 2013 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 helped beat back a group of mysterious attackers at her friends’ super-science lab, encountered their sinister yet fascinating leader in a dark alley, and decided to go public with her involvement. This time: the fallout.

<#1, Part Two || Directory || #3 >

“That one’s really sweet,” Christabel said, looking over Marissa’s shoulder as she scrolled through the comments on her Tumblr post. It was a Saturday again, and when the cyber-biologist had texted her the location of a Starbucks out in McLean, she hadn’t found any real reason not to go meet up. Christa was kind of proud of herself, actually: look at her, living in a new place for eight whole months and already making friends outside of work. …outside of her regular work, anyway. “Oh, so who’s Claire?”

“I didn’t want to burn this account,” Marissa said. “As far as anybody there knows, Marissa is still just an underpaid intern and could probably solve all her problems by spending less time on the Internet. Claire is my hot alter ego who has two PhDs, regularly hangs out with superheroes, and is probably secretly dating the Cerulean Commander. I might make a blog for her later, if you were thinking about leaking stuff to your fan club.”

Christa frowned in confusion and said, “But she’s you.”

“She’s a better me,” Marissa corrected her. “If you can be Christa Jones and you-know-who, then I can be Marissa Cotlin and Claire Kelley, right?”

“Well, it’s not really the same…I mean…” It wasn’t the same thing, was it? Lady Radiance was a superhero; Claire Kelley was an excuse for Marissa to avoid exposing her real life and ambitions to the Internet. Christa just wasn’t sure how she could put those words together in a way that wouldn’t feel like she was picking on her friend. She sighed instead and offered a slight smile. “Do you think I should make a blog?”

“Nope, nope, nope. This is where innocence goes to die. —yeah, see, we’re going to skip right past this whole section.”

Just for fun, there are five real fandom references and a Belle and Sebastian song hidden in the usernames.

“Oh,” Christabel said. She could feel her shoulders tensing up, and shoved down a sour feeling that wasn’t really Marissa’s fault. “You don’t have to do that. I’m not a kid.”

“Oh, geez. Of course you’re not! Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. But trust me—” Marissa squinted more closely at something on the screen and then quickly closed the browser window. “You still don’t want to read most of this stuff. I mean, I don’t want to read some of it, and it’s not even about me. Didn’t you have media people when you were in TV?”

Christa nodded. “I did, yeah. It made things a lot easier.”

“Exactly! So, just let me and Claire be your social media people. I promise I’ll enjoy it, and you’re going to have enough on your plate pretty soon.”

“Thank you,” she said with a smile. “Sorry. I guess it’s going to take some readjusting to remember what I just got myself into.”

“You’re fine, babe. I can imagine it’s a lot.”

Christabel waited a minute or so, half-watching the older woman open her email and get distracted by something on alphabet-agency letterhead, before she fully relaxed. It had been such a long time since she had spoken about this side of her life with anyone who wasn’t…well, Jacob. She and her twin brother had always been close, but when he didn’t want to talk about something, she didn’t have to press very far to regret it. Right now, she was on day two of the silent treatment over the mere suggestion that she was capable of looking out for herself. It was an odd relief, if not quite believable, to have made it through that conversation without somebody chalking up another mark on the grudge board.

“So, is that why you’re out here?” she asked, when she had a little more confidence back. “You said ‘pretty soon’. Is Dr. Marcos already thinking about wrapping up the house hunting?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Unfortunately, yes,” Marissa said, closing the computer and taking a moment to shove it into an overflowing messenger bag. “Don’t get me wrong, being on furlough has sucked, and leasing out here is about the only way we can get back to work within a year. So I get it. I just wish this had happened, like, two weeks before it did.”

“Why’s that?”

“I figured it was time to be a real adult about something, so—” She smiled wryly. “Serves me right, huh? I just signed a fifteen-month lease on a condo in Bloomingdale that was 20 minutes away from our old digs. It took me an hour and a half this morning to get out to the place he’s looking at.”

Christa was still wincing in sympathy when a heavy footstep hit the tile behind her. “Wow. An hour and a half,” Baz said. “Good to see you, Miss Christabel. You know, Rissa, that’s just awful. I can’t imagine.”

“Hello to you, too, Bad News. Don’t tell me this is your fault.” Marissa wrinkled her nose and explained, “He lives right down the freakin’ street.”

“Really? I didn’t realize. You got out to our house pretty quickly the other week,” she said, turning to him.

“Happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said. “Anyways, don’t blame me. I didn’t even know about it until I ran into the doc on the way to my car. He said if I was headed this way, I should let you know he’s goin’ to the realtor’s office.”  

Marissa buried her face in her hands for a moment, mumbled something into them, and then sat up again with a groan. “He let his phone die again, didn’t he?”

“Yep.”

“Of course he did.” She gestured vaguely to an empty chair they’d moved aside. “Well, don’t just stand there making me feel like I was raised in a barn, Sebastian. You might as well sit.”

“I wasn’t gonna bother you two,” Baz said, holding up his paper takeout cup.

“You’re not bothering us,” Christa said as she scooted her chair around to the other side of the table. “Actually, I was just going to ask Dr. Marissa if we had a plan yet for keeping whoever was behind the last attack from trying again.”

Marissa sighed. “We don’t.”

“I’m workin’ on it, woman.” The chair scraped a little as he pulled it up to sit down with them. “I have a buddy in NYC who recognized the tattoo from the last big wave in the ‘80s. Back then, it was associated with a small-time outfit callin’ themselves the One-Winged Army.”

“With powers?” Christabel asked.

“No idea,” Baz said. “I mean, you’d think it would be easy to tell, but apparently when Dr. Ultima went down in ’79, his henchmen flooded the black market with cutting-edge supervillain tech. Every gangster and drug dealer in the tri-state area had something going on for a while. He said since these guys spent most of their energy on turf wars, they weren’t a priority.” He paused to take a drink. “Until an undercover detective who’d infiltrated one of the gangs they were fighting got vaporized.”

“Yeek. That’d do it,” Marissa said.

“That’s awful.” Christa twisted her hands together in her lap, fighting a swell of emotion over injustices older than she was. It was wrong that it had taken so much for the police to pay attention—a dreadful end for a brave man doing his best. This was exactly why the world needed heroes. This was why she had to be Lady Radiance. “Did you get his name?” she asked, since that seemed like the only gesture she could make.

“Yeah, I did.” Baz looked at her oddly, but pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and flipped for a few pages. “It was Gabriel Maestri. He was a young guy, too. Art still remembers his momma turnin’ up, screamin’ about…well, after that, the OWA were walkin’ targets. The last one NYPD found alive left Rikers feet-first in ’84. It’s been thirty years since they've been seen on the street.”

“So…why now? And why here, instead of New York?” Christa said.

“Your guess is as good as mine.” He turned to Dr. Marissa. “Did you hear anythin’ useful back from the morgue?”

She shook her head. “The bodies were literally falling apart by the time they got over there, and there was only so much they could do under hazmat protocols. The coroner said it looked like massive organ damage—possibly starting in the liver, but it was pretty hard to tell by then. Ask me again in a couple of weeks. Their lab’s backlog is so bad, they said they’d release some samples to me for analysis once we get ours up and running.”

“Nice.” Baz looked like he was about to say something else, but his phone rang. He frowned as he checked the caller. “Sorry, I gotta take this. It's a client. —Grimes here.”

He got up to step outside, leaving his coffee cup on the table, and Christa glanced after him. She knew he still worked in electrical design, but the details had never really come up. “Baz does consulting, right?”

“Mmhm.” Marissa was leaning around Christa to watch him through the window. “Hon, you’re the closest thing I have to cover, so don’t move.”

“What…?”

She slipped out of her seat and disappeared through the pickup line to return from the condiment counter with her hands full. “I don’t care how much he hates himself,” Marissa muttered as she popped the lid off the coffee cup and set it on a napkin. “Nobody can hate themselves enough to justify drinking drip coffee black.”

Christabel chewed her lip nervously, not quite sure if she was going to be implicated in this just by sitting at the table without trying to stop her. “Um. Does he really?”

“They all do,” Marissa said as she smoothly ripped the top off a sugar packet, dumped most of the contents in, and moved on to a second. “It’s why they’re here. People who’re happy with the hand they were dealt don’t usually care enough to respond to our recruiting. Honestly, that’s why it’s so nice to hang out with you for a change.”

The idea made Christa’s insides twist, and she shoved her hands under her legs so she wouldn’t fidget any more than she had been. “What about Jacob?” she asked.

“Oh…” Marissa paused guiltily with the paper cup of milk still dripping into the coffee below. “Okay, so maybe I misspoke,” she continued, crumpling it up with the empty sugar packets and grabbing a splintering stir stick. “Not everybody we work with hates themselves. Some of them really like themselves—or at least they really like the person they think they could be without their atypical abilities getting in the way. Especially if they’re disfiguring or dangerous, not everybody can adjust.”

“Jake’s powers aren’t dangerous, though,” Christa said defensively. “And he could just—you know, not use them, if he doesn’t want to. There’s no reason he should feel bad about them.”

Marissa swept her trash into one hand, then carefully reoriented the plastic lid before popping it back into place. “Christa, it’s not my place to try to explain what he’s thinking. You need to talk to him.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to me,” she admitted.

It felt more damning than it should, but no judgment showed on Marissa’s face as she got up again and then returned from the trash can. “Then I guess you’re going to have to wait until he does.” The door jingled open with a familiar shadow falling alongside their table, and Christabel jumped in her seat. “And calm down, wow.”

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“I don’t know why that couldn’t have waited ’til Monday,” Baz grumbled as he sat back down.

Christabel’s eyes darted to the coffee cup on the table, and he smiled slightly around narrowed eyes. Marissa’s face remained steadfastly blank. When Christa looked back to Baz, he was still looking at her pointedly. She swallowed to try to ease the tension in her throat, but it wouldn’t budge even as she attempted to smile. She had an uneasy feeling that it was actually coming across as queasy.

“Well, I’m not tellin’ you any secrets.” He lifted his cup, swirling the liquid inside like he was trying to check the weight. “She didn't spit in it, did she?”

Marissa pulled a face, disgusted. “Ugh, why would I do that?”

“I dunno. Immaturity? Immune-scripting biotech from outer space? Your ways are mysterious.” He took a sip and raised one eyebrow, but didn’t seem displeased. “Hell, you've probably got enough of my DNA by now to clone me. Fair’s fair.”

“Okay—first of all, I wouldn’t clone you, all right,” Marissa said, sitting forward and poking his arm with an air of deep and personal offense that Christabel, herself, would have reserved for that spitting accusation. “Not unless it was an emergency.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel so much better.”

“It’s just such an ineffective way to copy somebody! Cloning’s old tech, like disco and Watergate old. These days, I could use your neural maps to make a psychological model of you and train an embodied AI on it. Or if I got a geneticist for a couple of weeks, it would be trivial to knock together a suitably recessive female profile, play arts and crafts with some of your stem cells, and proceed to in vitro testing.”

“Trivial aside from the ethical issues, you mean,” Christa said, in the hopes that this had gone without saying because it was simply so well-understood.

Marissa giggled. “Oh, yeah, that would be insanely unethical. It's still a lot less illegal than cloning him, though.”

“Sure. Just the New York Convention, as usual,” Baz said.

“Tell me about it.” Marissa stopped talking with her hands for a moment to fold them together in concentration. “What is that, provision…two? Three? No citizen or resident of the signatory nations having a significant natural or artificial mutation as defined, et cetera, shall: be subject to unlawful discrimination, approved local registration and peacebinding requirements excepted; be deployed to a combat zone as part of any national military; be party to the use of artificial reproductive technology in any form; be incarcerated alongside…no, I think I missed one.”

“Inequitable over-representation in government. We ain’t allowed to promote each other up the ranks, take over the world, and grind you typs into dust.”

“Shoot. I always forget that one.”

Christabel looked down at her hands in her lap while they continued to go back and forth, listing provisions from memory. She had been twelve or thirteen when the Convention was ratified, still perfectly typical and happily oblivious to anything happening outside her bubble of lessons and auditions. If suddenly manifesting magic had complicated anything since then, Dad or Jacob had handled it, and she hadn’t been aware; and after flying under the radar for the last few years—as bad as this sounded—she no longer mentally associated herself with supers as a group. It hadn’t occurred to her that living with atypical abilities as an adult might be a profoundly unstable undertaking.

“Anyway, have you ever met a clone?” Marissa said. “They’re not right. It's something in the neural pathways—I mean, wetware’s got inherent limits, you can’t just upload life experiences like you can with an android. And they wear out so fast that it's really not even fair to them.”

Baz raised a hand. “Okay, okay. I get it. You wouldn’t clone me.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Sheesh, Christa, don’t look so worried! I said I wouldn’t. I don't think I could sleep at night, knowing I was responsible for unleashing more of him on the world.”

“You know, I don’t have to sit here and listen to this,” he said cheerfully, standing up with his coffee while Christa hurriedly tried to stop thinking about things that would make her frown. “You ladies enjoy your gossip. Some of us have work to do.”

“That man needs to get a hobby,” Marissa said as he left, shaking her head. “Well, if I have to wait here for Dr. Marcos to finish up with the realtor, I’m going to go see if they still have any sandwiches. Do you want anything?”

“No, thanks,” Christabel said. She was just pulling out a sketchbook, which she flipped to a blank page before pulling her usual dress-design croquis out of the back. Her graphic design work was nearly all digital, so it was nice to pick up a pencil from time to time. While Marissa went to stand in line, she lightly traced her own form onto the page and then got out a thicker pencil to write a column of words next to it.

Radiance

Light

Joy

Power

Energy

Goodness

And then, because she had room for one more, she added Hope.

The lines flowed freely as she tried out various configurations, gradually darkening as she used the aspirations she’d written down to settle on the pieces she wanted. Something less cutesy, more practical, but still beautiful.

Something that would, without overwriting Lady Radiance’s previous place in the public imagination, make it clear that she had left childish things behind and was ready to face the real world, however ugly she didn’t know it was yet.

✨✨✨

On day five of the silent treatment, Christabel was making use of the evening sunlight to cut fabric under the tall living room windows when Jacob walked in. He paused and looked down at her work—the old costume on her mannequin, the sketches and ease calculations taped to a lap easel, the pattern pieces and slick knit fabric and makeshift weights scattered across the floor in between—while she tried to pretend she hadn't noticed him.

“Christabel, what do you think you're doing?” Jacob asked finally. It wasn't fair; she'd almost expected his voice to be rusty from disuse, but he sounded fine. Of course, he'd have been talking to other people.

“A sewing project,” she said, eyes firmly on the ruler as she checked her fold against the grain.

“I’m serious.”

“Me too.”

There was a low, frustrated noise, and she heard the couch creak as he sat down. “So am I still the bad guy here, then?” Jacob said.

“I never called you that.” She moved the weights away from the edge of the paper and started to cut. “You asked me to dust Lady Radiance off in the first place, Jake. Didn’t you think I could handle it?”

“I knew you could handle what we were dealing with then,” he said. “It was just my friend being paranoid. I didn’t think we would ever actually run into trouble. I guess I thought, worst-case scenario, it would get just bad enough for you to finally understand why we never wanted you going into the hero business for real.”

Christa added the piece to her pile and shifted her weight to look at her brother. He was nearly a foot taller than she was, but otherwise they looked far more similar than most fraternal twins did. Maybe he had a little bit more of Mom in his longer face, if their few old pictures were anything to go by. Maybe his eyes were a little closer to hazel than green. They looked genuinely concerned, not angry, and she did her best to soften her face in response. “We?” she asked.

Jacob sighed and held his hands up as he shrugged. “I didn’t want to pull this card, because it’s not fair—”

“Like that ever stops you.”

“Chris, I promised. I promised Dad I would take care of you, and keep you from getting into anything over your head. You know you don’t really stop and think about the consequences before you do things.”

“You’re right. That’s not fair,” Christabel said, pushing herself up to her feet and standing with her hands in fists by her sides. “And it’s not fair to you, either. You’ve done great at that! I’m sure I don’t know half of who and what you’ve protected me from since then. But he couldn’t have asked you to put your life on hold forever to do his job.”

Jacob stood up again too and walked over to her, stepping carefully on the cluttered floor. “What life? I mean, what else was I going to do?”

She shook her head. “That’s what I’m saying! I mean, I think that’s what I’m saying—look, whatever you want to do, you should—you should do that. But we don’t have to keep doing everything together.”

“What if you need me, though?” he said.

“When I’ve really needed help, haven’t I asked you for it?” Christa pointed out.

“Yes,” Jacob admitted.

“All right, then.” She folded her arms. “I hate it when you don’t talk to me.”

“Talking doesn’t help when you’re not listening, Christa,” he said.

She was about to ask what on earth she hadn’t been listening to when a rush of heat hit the side of her face. Jacob grabbed her by the arms and suddenly—she squeaked in surprise—they were behind the couch in the back corner of the living room, looking across the room at a fire roaring in the corner opposite, the flames arcing together in the form of a portal the height of the ceiling. As she caught her breath, she realized the noise was composed of layers of faint shrieking.

A voice spoke commandingly above the wails. “Lady Radiance.”

Christabel dropped behind the side of the couch, just poking her head over to look into the flames. She wasn’t in costume. She wasn’t ready for this. How did he get in her house—

Jacob put a hand on her shoulder, and she took a steadying breath. “Yes,” she said, slipping into the Lady’s confident tone. “Can you see me?”

“No. The idea seemed intrusive.” The air of authority had already dropped away, and he sounded amused. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

“Not at all,” Lady Radiance said. She touched her brother’s arm gently and pulled away from him, walking slowly towards the portal. As she approached, the flames subsided and the heat ebbed until she was able to stand almost next to it without being burned. Still, somewhere beyond it, she could hear the sounds of terrible pain. She held herself back from going any further. “What do you want?”

He laughed, and the flames flickered with a howl. “So demanding. You must allow me to introduce myself first, my Lady. I am Lord Hades, commander of the One-Winged Army.”

“Hades—”

“Yes, just so,” he said. “Lady Radiance, I hope that you have enjoyed the illusion of victory. I am the Lord of the Dead, and you must know you cannot kill vhat is dead already.”

Lady suppressed a shudder. “Don’t tell me you just called to gloat, Hades. It’s bad enough you’re condescending without being smug as well.”

“Precious daughter of the light! Don’t pretend to me that you have no sense of drama. You vill never last in this business vithout vone.” Lord Hades sighed, and a hot draft like industrial misery washed over her face. “Yes, of course I called to gloat, as you put it. I have also called to remind you that I will be rallying my forces. The honor of your presence will be expected vithin the month.”

She searched the flames, but still saw nothing. “Where? When?”

“You vill know,” he said. “Until then, my Lady.”

“Lord Hades—!” But the portal had already closed, her outstretched hand still hovering in front of it. Lady Radiance lowered her arm with a huff. “He’s always running away from me,” she muttered.

“What would you do if you caught him?” Jacob said, walking up behind her again.

Christa sighed. “I’d make him give me some real answers for once.”

“Sure you would, Chris.” He put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. “You know what? I think you're right. You can handle this.”

“You're sure?” she said, looking back at him suspiciously.

“I mean—maybe not by yourself, just yet.” Jacob frowned thoughtfully at the wisps of smoke drifting through the room. “And there has to be some way we can keep him from just showing up like that. Dame Guinevere still owes me a favor, if you want to ask her to teach you some wards.”

She considered it. “Do you think they would work for me? I really only do the solid light thing.”

“You won’t know until you try.” He let go and smiled as he left for the stairs. “Don’t stay up too late, okay?”

“Okay,” Christabel said, smiling back. That was enough poking at him for one day. For now, she’d just be glad that they were talking to each other again, and that he seemed to have changed his mind. If he was really that resistant to explaining himself, she could wait. And as for her solicitous enemy…

Her eyes flew open wide as she glanced back toward the corner of the living room. “Shoot! I didn’t even ask how he found me!”

✨✨✨

The next few weeks passed uneventfully, as far as Christabel knew. The house became relatively pleasant again. They invited a few of the neighbors for board games, and Christa did not forget which was Kate and which was Lulu. She turned in several projects at work, having triple-checked for any stray doodles of a pale, red-eyed face and—at the eleventh hour—caught one last sketch lurking in an invisible layer. She started getting up earlier to jog to the office now that the heat of summer was easing. Lady Radiance unexpectedly debuted on the neighborhood Facebook group over what turned out to be a leftover fireworks incident, but really could have been serious trouble. (Christabel had no idea how the screenshots found their way onto a fan blog. Nope. None at all.)

Lady also found she was perfectly capable of setting up wards against Lord Hades’ presence—not strong ones like Guinevere could, but these didn’t need more maintenance than a weekly run around the block. She wasn’t sure if they would completely block his ability to open portals. Obviously it would be preferable if he couldn’t get into the house at all, but voice calls really weren’t so bad, were they? Besides, she’d rather have him call her at home than when she was out on the street with civilians. She wondered if there were a way to provoke him into testing it.

Dr. Marcos got his lab set up again and found an actual apartment this time, and Christa spent a few evenings figuring out the best routes across the river and helping Dr. Marissa reorganize her paperwork. In a fit of generosity, and because she'd gone an embarrassingly long time without one, she even consented to a basic exam. It hadn't gone too badly, except for the part where Dr. Marcos had insisted on waving all four vials from her blood draw in front of her face.

(“What is this? You want to fight super-crime, and you don't like seeing blood?” he said.

“I don't like seeing my blood,” Christa said, her glowing fingertips curling into a set of chair arms that would surely have needed reinforcing before long anyway.

“Ah. Well, phobias are very easy to treat. We’ll get you over that.” Dr. Marcos’ tone was reassuring, but there was a spark of glee in his eyes that undercut the attempt. “Marissa! Come and look at these samples! They shimmer!”)

At least she’d gotten a couple of vitamin prescriptions to go along with the lecture on common nutritional deficiencies in vegetarians and magic-users. Oh—and then, of course, there was the fact that she'd been added to a new group chat.

Don’t Dead, Open Inside (4 people)

Marissa Cotlin: WHOEVER

Marissa Cotlin: ATE

Marissa Cotlin: MY

Marissa Cotlin: PIZZA

Marissa Cotlin: ROLLS

Marissa Cotlin: WILL

Marissa Cotlin: REGRET

Marissa Cotlin: IT

Christa Jones: Again??

Marissa Cotlin: YES again (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Sebastian Grimes: lol

Jacob Jones: can’t help but notice that you’re putting this in the group chat like you suspect one of us, when there are people in and out of that building all the time? is it because I can ignore walls? this is profiling, Marissa. Lady Radiance would be disappointed in you.

Christa Jones: Jacob!!! OMG.

Marissa Cotlin: ur awfully defensive there for a non pizza roll thief

Jacob Jones: I know my rights, and this group is going on mute until I figure out exactly what they are.

Jacob Jones sent an image [i_can_has_lawyer.png]

Marissa Cotlin: you can run but you cant hide from JUSTICE

There was not a breath heard from Lord Hades, however. So, overall…an uneventful few weeks.

Christabel was walking home from work one evening, just considering making a detour to see the Botanical Gardens, when that very suddenly changed.

<#1, Part Two || Directory || #3 >

Thanks so much for reading! So far I've been updating once every three weeks without trouble, so expect #3 to be posted August 1. In the meantime, follow me on Notes for progress updates, sketches, teasers, and sleepless ravings messages from the Oracle.

If you enjoyed this installment of Radiance, you can show it by leaving a like or comment, sharing this post, or just continuing to read. :) Everyone’s welcome in the fan club!