Recap: Nicole and Brandon returned to her team's base, where Brandon learned that Nicole had worked with Mandeville before Brandon was abducted. She did it to help Brandon, but became addicted to the genetic treatment that gave her enhanced powers. Nicole held Mandeville captive, and he might have a way to recharge Brandon's nanobots. Nicole's team went to Chicago to try and capture a Samsara clone, and Brandon had to decide if he should go and help or stay behind and work with Mandeville.
Winning Choice: ...Nicole doesn't want me along, and her team has done fine without me until now. As weak as I am, I'd be more of a liability than a help. I need to talk with Mandeville, see what he's doing, and figure out if he really can power me back up before I go back out and confront anyone.
"I'm going to stay here," I tell Tyler. "Nicole and her team seem like they can take care of themselves, and I need to talk with Mandeville."
"Did you want some more vodka before you do?" he asks.
"No, but I could use a change of clothes. Any chance you have something that might fit?" I ask. I pull off the old jacket from the car and toss it onto a battered folding chair.
Susan folds her arms over her chest and looks me up and down with a raised eyebrow. "You've really done a number on that costume, haven't you."
"It's been around. So, is that a 'no' on the clothes?"
Tyler rummages around in some duffel bags and pulls out a set of clothes that he tosses my way. "We brought some stuff for you from the Traveler. We figured you might need it."
"There's a bathroom through there," says Susan, nodding at a small door on the far side of the room.
It's clear this place was abandoned for a while before Nicole's crew set up shop. The bathroom's straight from the popular decor issue of Truck Stop Quarterly. It's tiny, dirty, and lime green paint peels from the walls. Times like this are when a heightened sense of smell is not a blessing, and I try to breathe through my mouth.
I peel off the costume, which is smelly and dank in its own right, in addition to being torn and burnt in quite a few places.
I drop it into a pile on the floor and splash some water on my face. The cool water makes me realize how disgusting I feel, and I lather up some paper towels with hand soap and try to get rid of some of my funk. The towels come away yellow and brown from the sweat and dirt.
I scrub my face and sunken, angry eyes stare back at me through the mirror. My face is sharp and thin, almost shark-like. Dark burns on my head mark where they had me connected to the apparatus that kept me unconscious. The burns don't hurt, but I'm surprised the mark is still there. Another sign of how far my nanobots have crashed.
I step back from the sink and look down at myself. I look like a circus contortionist, so lean and muscled. Even without the nanobots I'm still wickedly strong and fast. I can smell every chemical in the building, and hear Susan and Tyler breathing outside the door.
Tyler taps on the door. "Uh... everything ok?"
I look back up from my strange body to the stranger's eyes in the mirror.
"Just fine," I tell him. "I'll be right out."
I finish changing and toss my raggedy costume onto a table.
"Where did you get the Bruce Lee t-shirt?" I ask.
Tyler grins. "Online store. We don't get to really go out shopping, so have things drop-shipped to pick-up spots. You like it?"
"It's fantastic," I tell him. The shirt is black, with Lee printed in a dark gray. He's a shadow coming out of the night. His fists aren't raised, but he's tense and ready to strike. I loved Bruce Lee as a kid. It's a small thing, but it helps my mood.
Susan picks up my costume between two fingers like it's a dead rat. "Maybe we should burn it," she suggests.
"I'm hoping you can fix it. I've really come to like the thing," I admit.
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Okay, where is he?"
There's a pretty large lock on the door outside Mandeville's workroom, plus a padlock welded onto it. Tyler sees the look of surprise on my face and shrugs.
"Old ways are sometimes the best. We didn't have a lot of time to rig up an electronic lock, and this isn't something he can hack into," he says.
I nod. Makes sense. He opens the locks.
"Be careful," he says. I nod again and open the door. My heart pounds as I get ready to face this guy again.
The workroom is a lot shabbier than it appeared on the monitor. There are no windows, and faded patterns in the paint on the walls shows the outline of the machines and equipment that used to be here. The technology that's here now is strewn about everywhere, and none of it looks like it belongs. Probably stolen by Nicole's team to let him work.
It also reeks like a locker room. Sour sweat fills the air, mixed with the sharp odor of solder and electronics. He really hasn't been let out of here in a while, and I can't say I'm sorry to see it.
Mandeville looks up when I come in, and frowns. He drops the device in his hands onto the table and walks up to me. He's thinner than when I last saw him, and has a bit of a limp, but the superior, smug look on his face hasn't changed a bit.
He strides at me with such purpose I wonder for a moment if he's going to try and hit me, or give me a hug. I'm off on both counts.
He studies me up and down, stopping to frown at the burn marks on my head.
"They fried your nanobots but good, didn't they?" he says. "I'm guessing you can't fly, and no telekinesis?"
"I haven't tried the telekinesis, but if you like I could try using it to fling you across the room a few times," I tell him.
Mandeville ignores that and taps his nose with one finger, thinking hard. "Are any of them still working?" he asks. He answers himself before I can. "No, some would have to survive," he mutters. As usual, nobody else's opinion is worth listening to.
"Screw my nanobots. Nicole came to save me. I saw what she can do, and I know how she got that way. I know what you did to her."
He blinks, as if hearing me for the first time. Shaking his head, he turns back and heads towards a large office chair. "Oh yes, you want to yell at me about it. Let's get through this quickly, please."
I grab his shoulder, spinning him around to face me. "Get through this? It's bad enough what you did to me, but you were ruining her life even longer. You turned her into an addict. A junkie for your genetic drugs."
"We needed info on you, and it was the best way to get it. It also gave us data on how the latest round of genetics would work on a new subject. We needed to get the addictive properties out before we used it on our final subject." He says it calmly, as if explaining it to a child.
"She wasn't a guinea pig to experiment on," I say, grinding my teeth to try and keep calm.
"She made her own choices. I didn't force her to do anything. Doesn't she take any responsibility for what she did? Do you?"
The rage that I'd been holding back breaks free, and hits me in a smashing wave. I grab the edge of a table and send it sailing end over end across the room, crashing into shelving on the far side. Screaming in fury, I raise my fist to smash that smug face of his into pieces, to end him. To end his influence and the shadow he casts across my life.
He steps back and looks me right in the eye. "Do it, if you must. You'll regret it later," he says.
My hand stops, shuddering in the air. I want to be free of him. Even without my nanobots I know I'm strong enough to kill him.
"What's done is done, Brandon," he says levelly. "You know my motives. You can despise me all you want, but I've been honest with you, even if you don't agree."
My rage recedes, but a voice in the back of my head tries to fan it back to life. This man always manipulates me, always gets his way. End it once and for all, screams the voice.
"And you didn't come in here to kill me or you would have done it as soon as you opened the door. You want something else, namely my help restoring your nanobots. If you want them back to be able to help your friends, you should at least let me do that before killing me."
I drop my hand.
"Addicts don't make their own choices," I tell him. "They can't."
"We all have our addictions, Brandon. If you can't see that, you're a fool."
"You're addicted to being right," I say. "That's why you'll help me fix the nanobots, isn't it?"
"I want you to succeed, and that means fixing this design problem they keep exploiting," he replies with a sniff.
"So what do you have in mind?"
He turns to the workbench he was at when I came in, and pulls together bits of gear. He waves vaguely in the direction of the camera I was watching him on earlier.
"Oh, and I met your friends, who I assume are watching. Interesting partners. You could do better," he says.
"I don't think I could."
"Your nanobots are a colony living inside you. They work together to make you stronger, heal you, help you fly, and so on," Mandeville explains as he drags some smaller tables into the center of the room.
"They read my thoughts?" I ask, a bit uneasily. The way he's been describing them give me visions of a mind-reading parasite living in my blood.
"No, they read your neurological impulses, like your arm or your leg. When you want your arm to bend, it gets the message and bends. You learning to use their abilities has been like trying to learn a new limb."
Mandeville clears a large worktable in the middle of the smaller ones and puts some thick rubber pads on top.
"These should be enough. We don't want you grounded," he says. "Get up here," he adds, patting the table. I hop up on the edge, the thick rubber mats shifting under me.
"But they communicate with each other with electricity?"
"Yes, at the moment. We need to do two things. We need to knock your remaining nanobots out of their sleep mode, and get them wired into your nervous system more deeply. You still may be vulnerable to electric attacks, but they'll have a backup channel to organize a defense."
"Do you know why Samsara and Dr. Dayley wanted my nanobots?" I ask. He stops, frowning.
"No, and that worries me. They're after something different with their bots and I haven't put it together yet. They're already rewriting DNA at a detailed level to get their duplicates." He shakes his head to clear his thoughts. "Hopefully your wife will capture one that I can study."
"Nicole. Her name is Nicole," I remind him. He ignores me, fastening a large band around my skull.
"Take off your shoes and lie down," he says. "Where's your costume?" he asks.
I lie down, kicking my shoes onto the floor. My feet hang over the edge, so I shimmy up the table a bit. "It's getting repaired," I tell him. "I thought you didn't like my costume."
"It's asinine," he says. "Childish."
"You should try wearing one," I tell him. "You may change your mind." I know he isn't trying to wind me up. He's just naturally an ass.
Mandeville clamps two clips from a jumper cable to my toes. "Ow, hey, what the heck? My battery isn't dead."
"It is, in a manner of speaking. And stop complaining about a little clamp. You're still basically bulletproof. If you want comfort, get me a larger budget. We need to run the power through your entire body, head to toe, and wake up every functioning nanobot you have left."
"This is going to hurt, isn't it?" I ask, staring up at a stained ceiling tile.
"Yes," he says, turning to a keyboard next to him. "Quite a bit, I'd imagine."
He flips a switch and a wave of searing energy sizzles through me.
The stained ceiling tile disappears in a wave of red. My senses wail, and I think I'm wailing, too, but I can't be sure.
Steely cold fire melts me, dissolving me into a puddle of pain and blackness. If atoms could scream, every one in my body would be losing their voice.
Reality floats away on a river of agony.
###
I try to breathe and the hot smell of slag pulls me together. The ceiling above me is now a sooty dark wood. A boot catches me in the ribs, and I roll over, prickly bits of hay sticking to my face.
"Get up, boy, there isn't much time," says the looming man wearing the boot. He grunts down at me and turns away.
Sparks fly and fade out before reaching the low roof, and I push myself up from the ground until I'm sitting against the stone wall next to me. My ribs aches where he kicked me. I rub my side, and my hand meets a rough, burlap tunic.
My pants are made of a similar cloth, thick and stiff, and my feet are wrapped in straps instead of shoes. My kicker retreats into the center of the room where a red-hot forge spits sparks into the air.
I blink after him, trying to remember where I am. I feel like I should know, but I can't capture the thought. This isn't a dream, but it is. Real and not real. Around and around I chase it, but it keeps slipping away.
My feet scrabble in the dirt and hay as I try to stand, and I have to pull myself up on the stone wall behind me. It's warm beneath my hands, and as I wobbly regain my feet, I feel the heat of the air of the place on my face.
My kicker stops in front of the forge, one hand on his hip, his back still to me. I steady myself and approach.
Drawing close, I see an impossibly large hammer in the man's right hand. It looks heavy as sin, yet he dangles it lightly in his grip.
He looks back at me as I approach, and his face is thick like rock. The light from the fire shines off the sweat on his face and the curls of his thick beard. His matted hair is pulled back by a strap of cloth, keeping it away from his eyes, which are hidden under a protruding brow.
I circle around the forge and he turns back to watch the fire. As I get to the far side I see he is wearing a leather apron, worn and torn over his frame. Even through its bulk his muscles pull and twist it as he breathes. He is a Blacksmith.
"The hordes approach. You can hear them in the night, howling and screeching. They can feel the death upon the fields below the mountain, and it makes them bold."
"Are they coming here?" I ask.
He nods, turning from the forge to an alcove on the far side of the room. I follow him, peering around his massive bulk to a small cot. Upon it a man lays on his back, unconscious in the remnants of tattered armor. In the center of his chest is a grievous wound. He is a Knight.
"They know he has fallen," he says, solemnly. "He was our greatest warrior that none thought could be bested, but they got his heart. They tore it. He will not live to see the sunrise, if the sun comes up again for any of us."
The Blacksmith towers over me by a good foot, and doesn't move as I slip between him and the cot to examine the man. The Knight's face is perfect, golden and clear. His skin is flawless, his arms strong and lean. The jagged hole in his chest is the only blemish on him, but through it I can see his ribs. A dark pool of blood burbles up from the wound and seeps across his chest where it drips slowly into the dirt below.
The Blacksmith turns away, and I follow again.
He reaches onto a workbench and picks up a large piece of ore. It shines and dances in the light of the forge, not like a lump of iron, but of something much more.
"This is the soul-stone," he says, turning it over in his hand reverently. "I could save him with this."
"How would you save him?"
"I could forge him a new heart with this. One of stone. He would rise again, even stronger than before. It would fuze into his very being. He would be a titan with this in his chest. But I am no longer sure that a titan is what we need."
"Could he repel the horde?" I ask.
"Perhaps, but he would still be one man. He would still be flesh, and could be hurt and killed. If he died again, that would be the end of us."
The Blacksmith continues to turn it over in his hand, the sharp reflections of the forge off the soul-stone dancing around the room.
"Instead, I could make this into a weapon," he says. "The purest, mightiest weapon the world has ever seen. Any who wielded it would be a force of nature. A Fury in the hands of a man, but if the man fell, another could pick it up. We would not be victim to a blow like our Knight suffered. There would always be another to take up the charge. It could inspire a legion of heroes and drive an army."
"Can you not make both the blade and the heart?" I ask. "Such a weapon in his hands would surely turn the tide."
"There is only enough for one, the blade or the heart. And there is another matter. To hone the blade sharp enough, to give it the power it needs, I would need to quench it in blood. Powerful blood. His blood. At least his death would go to a good use."
He sets the soul-stone back upon the bench and steps away. It seems to pulse with life on the bench, churning in the heat, wanting a new shape.
"I can give us a champion with a heart of metal, or a weapon of metal fed with blood."
He turns to me, hefting his hammer up to his shoulder.
"Which do I make? Which do I forge?"
1. Forge the heart. Raise the champion and let the stone power him from within. He may still only be a man, but he will be a force to be reckoned with the stone powering him from within.
2. Forge the blade. Craft the weapon than cannot be broken, so even if the flesh that holds it falls the fight will continue on.
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