dresses. Maybe even the castle. I mean, look at what your mom lives in. And she’s got her MBA; your dad’s a professor. You’d still be brilliant. You’d still be special. You’d still be beautiful. You’d still be famous, even. You would still have changed the world.”
“Yes.”
“But you wanted to save it.”
“They gave me the chance,” she said. “You’d have said yes.”
I was still shaking; I wondered when it would stop. Out of the corner of my eye I still seemed to see Drozanoth raising its feeler, moving it towards her face. All I wanted to do was turn and run. It didn’t matter where. Just out of the stupid white house, away from the smashed glass and water, out into the street. Helter-skelter down the middle of the road.
I restrained the impulse and said, “You could weaponize a nuclear power plant too. And there are lots of those.”
“This weapon is not like that. Trust me.”
“So it... could be made into that? You were lying?” I swayed, and sat down with a squelch on the soaked armchair, re-soaking my pants, which had just begun to dry. “Jesus Christ! Johnny, how...?”
“With the amount of potential destruction available to it because of the amount of power it could generate, yeah. They could hang that over our heads and ask for anything They wanted. The main thing that humanity has learned from thousands of years of dealing with Them,” she added, “is that only evil comes from evil. That They only give with the expectation—not the hope, the expectation—that Their gift will always go wrong. I knew that, and I knew this day might come. I still said yes.”
“What are we going to do now?” I said, after several minutes of trying to work through that and failing.
“What’s this ‘we’ business?”
“I already said I can’t let you deal with this alone.”
“And I already said that you have to.”
“Sucks to be you then.”
She sighed, running her fingers through her wet hair. “They know how to find both of us. And They will, if that’s what They want. So I’m gonna sleep here. Go home and see if you can get some sleep. No, don’t look at me like that. I’m not sending you away so I can sneak off and do something stupid. I’ll have a plan in the morning.”
I waited for her to say something else, then gave up and left, just walked back to the car, my shoes squelching, smelling of fish and death.
I should have guessed. I should have known. How else could she have known so much about Them if she hadn’t been dealing with Them her whole life? Thinking about her watching me watching her all those years, knowing I could never be told, was too dumb and ordinary to be told. Once, just last year, I had watched her walk away from me at midnight and had paused teetering on the corner, on the verge of sprinting after her and begging forgiveness, when a police cruiser had come by; and all I could think about was the light, watching the light. I thought I had changed but I have never changed enough, and all I will ever be is the boy on the corner waiting for the light to change. And I thought she was a hero. But could you be a hero under those terms?
This wasn’t like Clark Kent getting his powers from a yellow sun. This was bargaining with the Devil, like in that play we’d gone to, The Black Rider. How she must have been laughing at me inside, knowing what she knew. That she was a made thing, no different from that young clerk with his handful of magic bullets. Except he’d done it for love, and she’d done it for... what? Power. Dealing with the Devil deliberately, consistently, willfully, for years and years and years. More power than anyone on Earth had. Maybe more than anyone should have.
Remember. Don’t forget. Remember the day Johnny told me the story, remember that I didn’t doubt her credibility, too young to know the word, only the word ‘prodigy,’ know that it meant she was better than me, had been born better than me, that the only thing joining us at first had been that bullet, and that nothing should have joined us when we got out.
Coming home that night, I scrubbed at grass stains in the shower and ran my fingers around the puckered edges of the scar. The way the surgeons had fixed mine, it