“Vessel”
“Azure? Azure, can you, um... hear me?” I feel a dull stab of hatred behind my eyes at the sound of Eris’s voice, a pulsing throb of grinding fury that makes me instinctively want to spin around and lunge for her. It’s almost surprising to me how much rage I’m experiencing right now; normally, Eris is one of the few superheroes who doesn’t treat me like a fumbling idiot or an object of pity. But for some reason, the second I heard her come into the room I immediately wanted to murder her. I shouldn’t do that, though.
Instead, I continue to focus on the console. I look down to realize I’ve actually bent one of the levers in my anger, and a sense of calm and purpose sweeps over my mind again as I use my tactile telekinesis to straighten it out once more. I ignore Eris as she says, “Only you’re acting a little bit funny, you know? You don’t normally go to our satellite control station, and I... I mean, not to be rude, but I’ve never seen you do anything technical at all before. Like, I didn’t know you knew anything about our computer systems. Let alone how to, um. Reprogram them?”
She’s infuriating me. I can feel that anger building again, tighter and more controlled this time. Everything about her makes me want to hit her, from her squeaky nervous voice to the way I can hear her padding footsteps approaching me like she thinks I don’t notice her getting closer to her fucking goddamned stupid fucking superpowers. I’m not sure why, but her fucking powers piss me off the most right now. I find myself wishing I could rip them out of her genetic structure, cell by cell.
“And, um, your ankle bracelet, the one you got as a condition of... joining the Liberty Squad.” She’s a terrible liar. It’s another thing I hate about her. We both know that my acceptance into the Liberty Squad was nothing more than thinly veiled probation, Venus Ascendant’s idea to keep an eye on me after the whole mess in Mexico City; why doesn’t she just admit that she doesn’t trust me? God, it makes me want to smash her fragile body into a broken mess on the floor and hide it in a maintenance tunnel until I can finish... finish...
Finish doing what I came here to do. “What about it?” I ask, trying to keep my tone light and dismissive. Murdering Eris doesn’t feel like the right way to get rid of her, despite the constant pulse of rage in the back of my head reminding me just how easy it would be. I can just talk her out of getting in my way, convince her that everything’s fine and normal. Because it is. Everything’s perfectly normal, I’m doing perfectly reasonable things. I don’t know exactly what they are right now, but that’s normal too and I don’t need to worry about it. I’m totally calm, except for the violent hatred.
“It registered a sudden change in your vital signs about two hours ago,” she says, her voice getting closer and closer with every word. I work faster, my fingers pushing buttons and pulling levers, manipulating Doctor Frontier’s retro-futuristic technology like I know every single detail of its construction. “You were over Kansas City, heading to the site of the earthquake relief efforts in San Jose, and then all your vitals spiked and suddenly you were flying toward the Appalachians. That’s... unusual, Azure. Do you maybe want to tell me what happened?”
I tap a string of commands into a keyboard. I don’t know what they are, exactly, but they feel right inside my head and my whole body shivers lightly in pleasure once I finish inputting them. “Not really,” I say, the anger in my voice tight and controlled. “You know the security protocols as well as anyone, you probably read the results before you came in here. No foreign substances in my blood, not even alcohol. No signs of telepathic influence, even if my shields would let anyone into my head. No active magical spells or talismans on or about my person. All of Doctor Frontier’s technology tells you I’m doing this of my own free will. So why don’t you leave me to it?”
I hear her unclipping something from her belt. “Because it looks awfully like you’re reprogramming one of the Liberty Squad’s monitoring satellites to change its trajectory. To reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and crash somewhere over... looks like Nebraska, maybe? Where the Frontier Foundation is located? You sounded really angry when you said Doc Frontier’s name. Is there something you want to tell me, Azure?”
There’s definitely something I want to tell her. I want to tell her to shut up, to stop trying to talk to me like I’m some sort of violently unstable criminal who needs to be coddled and placated. I want her to tell her I’m not some sort of human bomb that needs to be defused, I’m a reasonable human being and I have excellent reasons for everything I’m doing right now and she should go away and leave me to my work before I have to pop her head like a grape.
I, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but... but I do. Really badly. It would confuse and frighten me, if I didn’t also feel totally sedate and calm right now. My brain keeps whiplashing through different emotions, like a sailboat being piloted through the perfect storm by a blind sailor on a three-day drunk. I can’t seem to keep a handle on my emotions. All I can do is keep doing what I’m doing and hope I finish before I can’t stop myself from hurting Eris anymore.
“You should stay back,” I say, casually lifting a monitor I don’t need anymore and holding it up like a club. “This doesn’t have to involve you, Eris. Just turn around and walk away and let me do what I came here for. Walk away and you won’t get hurt.” I’m a little confused at my own words. I didn’t come here to do anything, did I? I just decided to move in a different direction. I just decided that now would be a good time to visit the monitoring station. I just decided to... to... I look down at my fingers, still typing one-handed on the keyboard. Something’s wrong, I begin to realize.
And then I stop. I can literally feel the train of thought halting on its tracks, the firing synapses simply refusing to fire any further. My brain shuts down the dawning understanding of my own activities, then shuts down my awareness of the shutdown. I feel a momentary lurch of confusion, then that same calm placidity again. “You know who I am,” I say. My every effort to think about why I’m saying it stops before it can start. “Don’t you.”
Eris carefully circles around me, stepping into my field of vision. Her body language is incredibly tense, like she’s facing down some kind of deadly threat—a supervillain dangerously out of her league, someone who could crush her skull in a split-second if she didn’t keep herself in a state of cat-like readiness. “Let’s see. You have a sudden and violent hatred for me, a sudden and incredibly violent hatred for Doctor Frontier that’s prompting you to crash a satellite onto his HQ. You’re intimately familiar with his technology, as though you’ve spent years working with it. It doesn’t exactly take a detective, does it.”
I keep thinking about crushing her skull for some reason. I wonder why. “You’re not a detective,” I snap, as my brain stops wondering all over again and then stops wondering why I stop wondering. “You’re a chemist who got lucky, that’s all. A jumped up lab monkey with delusions of grandeur, simply because your accident left you with a fortunate genetic happenstance instead of—” My head swims for a moment. I can almost think straight again, like whatever’s steering my mind and body is so distracted with fury that it’s not even trying to control me.
I have just enough time to realize I’m being controlled before the thought rewinds out of my brain and I sink back into calm, comfortable obliviousness. Then I stop noticing the obliviousness. When Eris says, “Your life is what you made it, Derek, not just what happened to you. You didn’t have to become the Criminal Element. You could have done wonderful things with your powers, but you chose to blame Doctor Frontier for what happened to you. It’s that choice that made you a monster, not your unstable body.”
The Criminal Element. I know that name. I recognize it from a whole bunch of tedious briefings that Venus Ascendant made me sit through, my eyes glazing over as I skimmed my way through the entire Liberty Squad database of known supervillains. He was a colleague of Doctor Frontier’s once, before an accident destabilized his molecular structure and left him capable of metamorphosizing his body into just about anything on the periodic table. But the elaborate structures of carbon, oxygen, calcium and phosphorus and potassium that made up his original body were simply too complex for him to maintain for any length of time.
I remember him. Then I unremember him, just as easily. “Don’t you dare patronize me!” I shout, without the slightest understanding why. “You have all the gifts I should have, chemical synthesis without any attendant instability! You stand there, smug and serene, taking your bones and your lungs and your beating heart for granted like every other human being on the face of the planet, and you criticize me for... for not handling my pain gracefully? For inconveniencing you with my suffering? You’re going to pay. You’re all going to pay.”
I don’t know how they’re going to pay. I can feel the same disconnect between my thoughts and my actions as I do between my thoughts and my speech, my thoughts and my memory, my thoughts and my other thoughts and what was I thinking again? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. My anger isn’t mine, but it might as well be. The control I don’t even notice is becoming more precise, more total. I feel an unnerving certainty that by the time I murder my friend, I won’t even realize I’m doing it, but that fades away pretty quickly.
“It’ll be over soon,” I say, continuing my manipulations as I speak. “A swift, certain end to Doctor Frontier and his Foundation, to you and your smug condescension, and then... this is only the beginning, Eris. Hormones and peptides and neurotransmitters are easy for me, now that she’s unlocked my gifts to their fullest potential. I can live among you again, feel the sun on my borrowed skin and enjoy the taste of food. I just need closure. She said I could have it. She promised me, Eris. You wouldn’t make her break a promise, would you?”
Eris sighs. “Any other day, I would just love to keep you talking and find out who ‘she’ is, but...” She gives a tiny shrug. “There are five hundred people working at the Frontier Foundation. They didn’t do anything to you.” And she lunges for me.
I try to swing the monitor at her face, but my coordination seems to be slightly off for some reason, like there’s someone else in charge of my body and they’re not quite certain how to make it move just yet. Eris ducks under my swing and... kisses me full on the lips? I don’t quite know what to make of that. She’s cute, and all, and I thought she might be bisexual, but I never really thought about her as a potential lover. I’m shocked into total immobility by the suddenness of it all.
Her tongue slides into my mouth, fiercely dueling with my own, and I finally snap out of my fugue enough to push her away. “I’m really sorry,” she gasps, just before she leans back in to kiss me again. “I know this is embarrassing, but...” The rest of her words are drowned out in a moan as her lips mash against mine. I try to use my telekinesis to shove her away with my mind, but somehow that seems too complicated for me to bring to bear right now. I can just about handle using it to enhance my strength, but something—maybe even me—seems to be resisting the use of my abilities.
Instead, I stagger backward, dropping the monitor in my haste to push her off me. But my limbs seem suddenly drunken, flailing randomly as if my brain’s motor centers are suddenly misfiring. I can’t control my arms and legs, I can’t even really control my lips and jaw, and Eris has no trouble keeping up with me and forcing me down onto the floor so that she can kiss me even harder. I bite her tongue accidentally, but it’s not enough to get her to stop. If anything, it just seems to make my head swim all the more.
It’s a strangely passionless embrace, for all its intensity; it feels less like she’s hungry to feel my lips against hers and more like she’s just trying to rub her face against mine as hard and as often as possible. I try to speak, to tell her to let go of me, to rant that I know what she’s trying and it won’t work, but it just comes out as a series of muffled grunts. She’s all over me. I can feel her saliva smeared onto my cheeks, taste her blood in my mouth. It makes me suddenly and inexplicably feel panicked, and I finally figure out how to shove her away in my terror.
She goes skidding back into the far wall, hard enough to dent the metal casing of the computer bank, and I rise to my feet as she struggles to stand. “You think you can stop me with your tricks?” I shout, my voice high and shrieking with rage. I begin to advance on her, my body lurching drunkenly as the chemical soup in my brain tries to reassert control over my motor centers. “You think you can just smear a few of your cells into my mouth and neutralize me like I’m some kind of pesticide? I’m too strong for that, Eris! You’ve only delayed your death for a few seconds! I’m going to take her over again!”
Eris looks up at me, more annoyed than frightened. “She’s a tactile telekinetic, Derek. One of the most powerful in the entire world. And literally every single molecule of you is touching her right now.” She looks at me, and for the first time I really believe that she’s seeing me and not the creature hiding inside my head. “How do you think that’s going to go now that she knows you’re there?”
I feel him writhe and wriggle inside my skull, trying to stop the neurons from firing that would allow me to continue to understand what happened to me, but I’m in control of myself now. I lock him down at the molecular level, freezing every atom of his being before gathering them up into a single chemical strand and shunting them down my veins. It’s not the most pleasant sensation in the world, but I’ve dealt with worse. I push him out through my pores and hold him in a gooey, struggling blob. “God, this is so fucking gross,” I mutter, watching him wrestle against my telekinetic control and trying not to think about the fact that he was literally inside me a few moments ago.
Eris stumbles to her feet, hobbling over to the computers and undoing my sabotage. “He’s kind of a gross person,” she grumbles, her voice betraying more than a hint of pain. “Plus, he has superpowers that turn him into a blob of chemicals.” I feel pretty terrible about hurting her now that my brain is working again, but I’m not quite sure how to apologize. There aren’t exactly Hallmark cards for that kind of shit.
“There,” she says at last, straightening up most of the way before her body reminds her what a mistake that is. “Doomsday averted, satellite rerouted, and Captain Tomorrow is en route with a hermetically sealable force container to take custody of the Criminal Element. We lost about five minutes of surveillance footage of North Dakota, but I think we’ll live.” She grins at me. “You’re getting better at this superhero thing. We may make a proper Squaddie of you yet.”
I roll my eyes. “Do you have to call it that?” I ask. “It always makes you sound like some kind of salty old Navy sergeant or something.” Beneath my sarcasm, though, I admit the praise makes me at least a little bit happy. Eris is the real deal, the kind of hero I know I’m never going to be. If I can do something right in her eyes, I figure it can’t be too bad a day... and I catch myself thinking that maybe if I keep impressing her, I’ll get her to kiss me like that again sometime.
I wish I could pretend that thought belonged to someone else. But there’s nobody in my head right now but me.