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Chapter 190 – CeremoniesRay worried as he took in the scene.
Alex looked up at him, tears streaming down her face. “It didn’t work! Nothing worked!” She held her index fingers up and ran a foot-long spark between them. “I can’t make it go away! Ray, please make it go away. I don’t wanna be Terawatt anymore. I … I can’t do it anymore …”
He took the bottle from her hand. It was GC-161. One of the empty bottles on the workbench was GC-161 antidote. He figured the smashed bottle was more of one of the two. So she couldn’t make her powers change, and she couldn’t make her powers go away. He wasn’t really surprised. She’d had her powers for so long, and she’d been exposed to so many GC-161 related chemicals, it wasn’t really surprising that her powers were pretty much immovable. He figured she’d been exposed to tiny doses of antidote every time she’d splashed it on someone, so it just didn’t work on her anymore. And maybe that nasty anti-antidote stuff had had permanent effects on her.
He scooped her up and let her sob on his shoulder. Then he closed the garage door and held Alex while he wrote a one-handed message on a big post-it note and stuck it on the door: ‘WARNING: BROKEN GLASS ON FLOOR’.
He sat down on a kitchen chair and thought about it. “Alex? Honey? You don’t have to make your powers go away. You can just claim your powers are gone.”
“I don’t wanna lie to Jack and Willow,” she sobbed into his shirt.
He murmured, “Then tell ’em the truth. You can’t take it anymore. This is too awful and it hurts too much, and you need to stop.”
She nodded desperately and sniffled, “Ray, I love you so much, you’re so good to me.”
He hefted her in his arms and walked up the stairs to put Alex back to bed. He was just glad he was strong enough to carry her up a flight of stairs without hurting himself.
* * *
Jack flatly said, “Yes, Mister President. I understand, Mister President. Thank you for giving us this much notice, Mister President.” He carefully hung up the phone. Then he said several angry swearwords.
He stomped his way down the hall and downstairs to the little office the DHS had allocated to Willow. He knocked impatiently and waited for her to answer.
“Come on in, Jack. What’s wrong?”
Smart girlfriends. Tough to beat. He came in and flopped down in her good ‘guest’ chair.
Willow had opted for the office that had the most potential connectivity and power outlets, rather than a good view or a spacious work area, so no one else objected when she took what was widely regarded as the worst office spot in the building. It was small and had a single tiny window. If you had a regular office desk in front of you, then your back was pressed against the far wall and there was almost no room to open the door and sit in front of the desk.
But Willow didn’t care about any of that. Against the far wall, she had a six-foot-wide computer desk with three monitors. She had a huge, shallow bookcase on the left-hand wall. She had another smaller computer desk with two more monitors against the right-hand wall. She had a massive stack of hardware in the square gap in the corner between the two computer desks, so she had a massively parallel computer, a special air conditioning unit atop that, and about two hundred pounds of uninterruptible power supply underneath everything. She had a really nice ergonomic chair she sat in so normally her back was to the office door. She had a comfy armchair in the corner to the right of the door. She had two metal folding chairs folded up and standing behind the door on the other side of the room, just in case she had more guests and didn’t want to move to a conference room. And that left about enough room for a shoebox.
He threw himself into the armchair. “I hate Mondays.”
She gave him a worried look. “What’s the matter?”
He frowned. “The President just called me in person to tell me the official graveside funeral for Pyre is moved back from tomorrow to Wednesday. Three pm. We have special guests flying in from overseas for the funeral, and we have to accommodate them no matter what.”
Willow stared at him in shock. “But … but we can’t do Wednesday afternoon! That’s Shar’s funeral, and we have to go to that! Alex and George and Barb are counting on us!”
He gritted his teeth. “I have to do Wednesday afternoon here. You don’t. You can take the Cessna to Camp Atron and go to Shar’s funeral and be supportive and all that jazz, while I get to stay here and play political games.”
Willow thought for a second and asked, “Who’s coming from overseas?”
Jack scowled. “Emperor Akihito himself. And Tsurara, and Colonel Watanabe and a couple of other people. Plus at least two representatives of the Russian government, although the CinC didn’t mention them by name. But there’s no way I can duck out of this one.”
Willow primly said, “Well, the Japanese government ought to send someone like that, considering what would’ve happened if Pyre and Terawatt hadn’t gotten to Japan in time. And someone ought to give you a hell of a huge medal for that, because the only reason they were even on that side of the Pacific was you doing what you do so well.”
“What? Being a huge pain in the ass?”
She frowned. “You’re not. You’re really smart, and really intuitive, and you totally have a great feel for what these creeps are likely to do, and more people need to listen to you!” She paused for a moment and added, “Even if sometimes you are kind of a pain in the tuchis. But a sexy one!”
He still didn’t smile, even if Willow was just ridiculously cute.
He griped, “Going to Shar’s funeral and being there for the Macks is what matters. Walking with an empty coffin and listening to some dimwit who didn’t even know her spout greasy platitudes for twenty minutes? Not what I want to do for the afternoon.”
She took his hand and said, “I know. But you’ll have to behave. This is a huge deal. There’s never been a superhero buried at Arlington before.”
He tried not to wince, but he’d thought about it. A lot. “We’re pretty lucky she’s the first. We could’ve lost Tera or AG or Klar plenty of times. And Finn. And Lupo. And Carlson. I swear, that guy’s superpower is he’s a magnet for shrapnel.”
Actually, he thought Carlson’s superpower was a ridiculous ability to keep fighting at Navy SEAL levels even after picking up injuries that would have most people lying on the ground screaming for a medic. Some Orphans were smart, some were strong, some were aggressive, and some were tough as nails. Several of them he was proud to call fellow soldiers.
He admitted, “Alex wasn’t going to come when it was tomorrow, and there’s no way I could ask her to be a pallbearer at Pyre’s burial and miss Shar’s funeral.”
Willow glared at him. “Jack! Alex can hardly stop crying for more than a few minutes at a time! You can’t ask her to do Terawatt crap!”
He said, “I wasn’t going to. We’re going with Operation Tera-Twin 3: Urban Harvest. All I’m asking Alex to do is talk to our DHS headshrinker. She sure can’t find a psychiatrist in Paradise Valley who’d believe her.”
“Urban Harvest?” She pulled up a window on one of her monitors and typed away for a couple seconds. She turned and stared at him. “Really? You couldn’t go with ‘Return of the Jedi’ or something?”
He shrugged. “Hey, my brain isn’t a big ol’ national treasure, like you and Carter. Or the Granger kid. Or Alex and her sister. I just call ’em like I see ’em.”
“Thank you, Mister Cosell,” she complained.
He grimaced. “Seriously, I’d like you at Shar’s funeral, on the other side of the country, just in case someone in the Collective decides Pyre’s funeral is a really great target of opportunity. I’ve got Lupo posing as Terawatt during the funeral, but I’m pulling Carlson out and giving him Ultraman and Azure Crush for a squad, and they’re gonna be lurking in the vicinity and ready to put some major-league hurt on anybody who tries to pull anything.”
Willow worried, “Do you really think anyone’s gonna try anything?”
Jack frowned. “I have no idea. As far as I can tell, the India bloc and the America bloc are toast. But the primary bloc’s still out there. If they’re smart, they’ll attack someplace that Terawatt isn’t. So I’ve got Teams Three, Four, and Five on high alert just in case. I’m really hoping Wacky Maggie will send a team in with that anti-Terawatt raygun and take a shot at Lupo.”
Willow started to be crabby, but then she got it. “Oh. Right. It won’t hurt anyone except Alex.”
“And Atron.”
Willow continued, “So they might try it and conclude that it doesn’t work on GC-161 powers after all.”
Jack pointed out, “They probably tested it before they sent Ross’s team off to the Congo. That means Atron might be dead now. But I’m guessing they tested it on someone else. Some poor schlub who got the silvery morph ability, and they zotzed him to pieces. After all, they were pretty sure it would kill Tera. They had to base that on something.”
“Eww.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “These people pretty much make Emperor Palpatine look like George Washington.”
Willow complained, “George Washington wasn’t all that wholesome, you know. Have you ever read about his expense account he submitted for the years of the Revolutionary War? He was a crook!”
He let Willow lecture him on the subject for a good half hour. Some of the entries she quoted from memory were pretty damn funny. That kind of cash for ‘washerwomen’ and ‘laundresses’? The guy must have been buying hookers for his entire staff. And getting the U.S. government to pay for it later.
He finally got up, gave her a kiss, and went back to his office to call every single person he had lined up for tomorrow to tell them that the funeral got moved back a day courtesy of international political bullshit.
* * *
It was Wednesday and Alex was still feeling horrible. It just felt like someone had ripped her heart out of her chest. It just hurt so much she wondered why people didn’t die from stuff like this. It didn’t help that she actually knew people strong enough and fast enough to really rip someone’s heart out of their chest and kill them.
Ray and her mom and her dad had been so great, but it was Louis who had come through for the family. He had spent hours and hours at the house every day, just answering the door and helping visitors and putting away the food people kept bringing over, and a hundred other things like that so that Alex and her folks and Ray could just be together and welcome visitors and grieve. She knew Louis couldn’t cook worth beans, but the dining room table was always set for meals, and stuff people brought over was getting served — or heated up and then served. Plates got cleaned off and washed in the dishwasher. Rugs got vacuumed and floors got swept. Alex wasn’t doing any of it, and she was pretty sure her mom wasn’t, either. That meant it was Louis. And probably also Ray and Alex’s dad and sometimes Marsha and Robyn and Nicole.
She didn’t have a black dress except an LBD that wasn’t appropriate for a funeral, but someone went out and bought a black dress in her size, and it was hanging on the back of her closest door. It even fit well enough. She just couldn’t make herself care whether it fit well, but her mom sure did.
As they were driving over to the church, Alex’s mom warned her, “Honey? The President announced the burial service for Pyre at Arlington is at noon our time. That means a lot of people can’t come.”
She looked at her watch. She wasn’t carrying her tPhone anymore. She wouldn’t have carried it even if it hadn’t been totally fried. It was a quarter of twelve. The service for Shar was at one. She didn’t want to see Hanna anyway, even if it wasn’t really Hanna’s fault and she’d been a giant jerkhead to Hanna and she totally needed to apologize. And she didn’t want to see Jack or Riley and have to tell them she was quitting on them.
And anyway, how could a bunch of military guys in fancy uniforms show up and not blow the whole secret identity deal anyway? Alex was totally not going to be Terawatt anymore, and all she really cared about was not letting anyone else find out she used to be Terawatt so her family would be safe.
What was left of her family, because she’d already lost Shar.
They had to have a meeting with Reverend Bonnie about the funeral service, which was just grim, even if Bonnie was always mega-nice. Alex’s mom and dad had already picked out the hymns and picked out the prayer passages and written out what they wanted to say about Shar. Alex had written down two little stories about Shar that she thought really said a lot about how great Shar was, but Alex knew there was no way she’d be able to read the thing out loud without totally breaking down again.
Alex’s mom made her eat a couple of sandwiches they’d brought, even if Alex’s stomach just felt like she didn’t want to eat ever again. And then Reverend Bonnie just sat and talked with Alex about how much it hurt when you lost someone so close to you, and how a funeral isn’t for the departed, it’s to help the survivors deal a little better with losing someone like Shar. And just talking with Bonnie even helped enough that Alex’s stomach didn’t feel like she was going to hurl.
She’d never really understood why someone would drink too much or do drugs, but now she kind of got it. If you hurt so much inside that you couldn’t go on, then maybe doing something you shouldn’t, just to make the pain stop for a while … Not that she’d do something like that. But there had been times in the last couple days when she just clung to Ray and refused to let go. And there had been Sunday night when she hadn’t been able to sleep at all, and she’d gone out in the back yard and she’d gone silvery and she’d just jetted maybe thirty or forty miles straight up and just stared down at the earth for a while, reminding herself that she could feel stuff other than pain and misery.
And Annie flew in from Roswell, and Aunt Ashley flew in from Chicago, and even more relatives drove in just for the funeral. But Alex was most surprised when it was time for the family to be seated at the front of the church, and she saw just how many people had turned out for the funeral. There were a ton of people who knew the family from church stuff. There were people from the TV station and the paper. There were tons of her folks’ friends. And it looked like half the plant, and most of her mom’s co-workers, and a ton of their neighbors. Even both the Sliffs, although only Dottie Botswell came and not her husband. Mrs. Sliff was wearing her old-person wrap-around dark glasses, even inside. Alex figured Mr. Sliff had to come, just because Mrs. Sliff probably couldn’t see well enough to be driving.
They had asked people not to bring Shar’s little friends, because this was hard enough on adults. But Sophie’s mom and Maria’s mom and Danny’s mom and a bunch of other moms were there. And Shar’s teacher and principal. And Kelly was there with Counselor Jen and a couple of the other camp counselors, even if Alex had no idea how they found out and managed to get here while working around running a whole summer camp.
But mainly Alex was shocked at how many of her friends and classmates and stuff were there. Naturally, Ray was there, and his folks, and Louis and Marsha and Mr. Driscoll, and Robyn and her parents, and Nicole and her folks, and Gloria, too. But Mina was there with most of the yearbook staff. And Donna was there with about half the cheerleaders. And most of the basketball team was there, and a lot of the girls’ track team, and a huge number of other people off the sports teams. And a bunch of the Photography Club and Science Club and Computer Club and Robotics Team. And even some of the goths and emos and skaterbois and other people she totally didn’t expect to show up.
And Willow was there, too! She was wearing a knee-length fitted black dress and sheer black hose and black pumps, and a lot of men were having a hard time not ogling her because she really looked hot for someone going to a funeral. Alex looked around for anyone else SRI-ish, and naturally Jack couldn’t be there, but Alex spotted Hank Marshall and Bill Lee and Pete Bailey, partly because they were sitting together. Hank and Pete were wearing plain black suits, and Bill Lee was wearing a gray pin-striped suit that was probably as close as he had to a funeral outfit. There might be some people who recognized Willow, but no one was going to peg those guys.
At the last second, Frank West rushed in and sat down in the back of the church. It looked like he was in jeans, but she didn’t get that good a look. The church was built like a big quarter of a pie, so even if she was in the front row over in the left rows, she had a good view of people over on the far right-hand rows.
The funeral was kind of a blur, since mainly she cried through the whole thing. Ray got up and read the part she wrote, and people even laughed at some of it so she was glad she’d written it, even if it made her miss Shar so much she just ached inside.
And then after the funeral, they went upstairs to one of the big rooms in the church for a reception kind of thing. With tons of food that looked like lots and lots of different people had made stuff and brought it, just to be kind. Alex really wished she had her appetite back, just so she could take some from a lot of the trays and tupperwares to make people feel like all their hard work was worth it. Because right then, Alex wasn’t feeling like all her hard work over the last year or two was worth it, if this was the reward she got for it.
Alex stood in the reception line in between her mom and Ray, and just let people walk past and tell her how sorry they were. She hugged everyone she knew. Even Jackson. Maybe especially Jackson, because she really didn’t think he’d come to something like Shar’s funeral even if he was good friends with Ray. The way Mr. Sliff helped Mrs. Sliff along the line of people, Alex really wondered if Mrs. Sliff could see at all. But Mrs. Sliff hugged Alex and said, “I’m so sorry. When I think that the last thing I said to that poor child was to yell at her about a handful of stupid flowers, it just makes me feel ashamed.”
Willow walked down the line hugging everyone, and apologized, “Jack really, really wanted to come, but he got boxed in, and he had to do his stuff. He’s really of the grouchy about it, and I hope he doesn’t say something he shouldn’t to his boss’s boss.”
Alex figured Willow meant the President, and Alex hoped Jack did what Willow wanted, because Jack wasn’t exactly the best-behaved Air Force officer ever.
Because there were so many people who came to the reception, Alex didn’t have to pretend to eat anything. She just stayed in the reception line the entire time. And with the basketball guys and the football guys going through the line and then walking over to the food, Alex didn’t have to worry about tons of leftovers.
Even if there was some food left afterward. Not much stuff like cookies or slices of cake or deviled eggs. No, it was mostly some stuff that the jocks weren’t as interested in eating, like what was left on a couple trays of raw veggies with dip. But that was about it. Some of the church ladies helped Alex and her mom and Willow put the different raw veggies in some baggies to take home. And there was one baggie of the assorted cookies that hadn’t been inhaled. And there was like one slice each left from about five different cakes and pies. That was pretty much it. Someone really loved deviled eggs, because there had been at least four different trays of them and not a single one was left.
She remembered when she would have swooped down and buzzed through those deviled eggs like a cloud of locusts. But she just felt like she wasn’t going to be hungry again for a century.
Willow rode in Ray’s car with Ray and Alex. Alex was a little surprised that Annie wanted to ride in the car with the Roswell guys, but maybe she was worried about making sure she had a ride back to their jet, which was probably way down at Edwards Air Force Base. Alex’s folks rode home in her dad’s car with the leftovers. Louis drove Marsha and Robyn and Nicole. Nobody wanted to ride in Frank’s old pickup truck even if Alex knew the front seat was clean.
Willow checked, “Are we gonna be able to … talk at the house?”
Alex grumbled, “I don’t wanna talk about that stuff anymore.”
At the same time, Ray turned his head a little and spoke. “I think everyone going to the house is … cleared. Even my folks.”
Willow answered Alex. “Oh, honey, I didn’t want to talk about that. I wanted to talk about how awful Hanna feels, and it really wasn’t her fault, and if you can’t make it to my wedding I can get someone else for my maid of honor, and —”
“Oh, crud!” Alex gasped. “I totally forgot all about your wedding! I’m the worst friend ever!”
“No! You’re not!” Willow insisted.
Ray added, “You’re a great friend, and a great girlfriend, and a great person, and I want you to stop saying bad stuff about yourself. Okay?”
Alex winced a little. “Okay. But the wedding’s only a week away!”
Willow gently explained, “A little more than that. But you don’t need to drive down early for a final fitting, because I constructed a wire-frame 3D model that they have set up on a mannequin so it’ll be just fine. And I got shoes and pantyhose and everything for you already. But I’d need you there Friday afternoon for the rehearsal and then the rehearsal dinner, and then the wedding’s late Saturday with pictures before and the dinner-and-dancing part after, and then helping us sneak out without anyone else knowing where we are, and then maybe you could skip out and drive home or you could stay for Sunday morning brunch and then drive home.”
“It’s not in West Virginia?” Alex asked. She was sure it was scheduled for West Virginia. She wasn’t sure why she had assumed it was West Virginia, when Willow had been talking about getting it in a synagogue and Alex didn’t even know if West Virginia had any Jewish temples.
“No, it’s Santa Barbara. Mom got our old synagogue to cooperate, and Dad got his friend Rabbi Weisberg from the UC-Santa Barbara religious studies department to agree to officiate. And we got a good deal on a big block of rooms at the Hilton resort hotel even if I think Jack cheated on that one.”
“Oh.” Well, Santa Barbara wasn’t that far away. She could drive down I-5, cut over, then come down 101 and get to Santa Barbara in maybe four or four and a half hours. She knew she could fly it in way less than that, but she was never going to do that stuff ever again.
Willow squeezed Alex’s shoulder. “Look, it’s okay. You just had the worst thing in the world happen to you. You’re not supposed to be all right now. And I’d love to have you there, but I’d really rather you healed from this so you’re okay before school starts.”
Alex whimpered, “But … but if I don’t show up, you won’t have a maid of honor and the whole thing’ll be ruined and it’ll be all my fault!”
Willow squeezed Alex’s shoulder again and reassured her, “It’s not that bad. I’ve got so many more friends now because of you. Janet volunteered to fill in if you couldn’t make it, and Hanna did, and Jo said she’d do it if she could wear her formal uniform instead of a ‘silly froufy dress’ and my cousin Marilyn and … well … I’ve got a lot of options. If you get there by the middle of the rehearsal on Friday, you can be the maid of honor, and if you just aren’t up to being in my wedding, it’s okay and I’d still like you to come and be there even if you’re not up for ‘happy time’ and dancing and stuff afterward.”
Alex sobbed a little. “I … I wanna be there on your special day, but I don’t wanna ruin things for you, and … and I don’t wanna start crying in front of the whole place in the middle of the wedding and ruin everything!”
Willow giggled a little. “It’s a wedding. Girls get to cry as much as they want. Everything’s fine unless Jack starts crying.”
Ray laughed and asked, “Is Jack gonna stomp on a glass? ’Cause that’s all I know about Jewish weddings.”
Willow smiled. “Probably. It’s symbolic. It’s derived from the Talmud. Mom told me the story before I read the Talmud, though. A rabbi broke a vase during the wedding feast to warn everyone against excessive fun, because bad stuff happened to Jews — and still does — and it was a reminder of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Dad then said that it was because that’s the last time the husband gets to put his foot down in the marriage, but he was making a joke. But there’s a lot more interpretations, which shouldn’t surprise you, because everything’s subject to interpretation and argument in Judaism, even the Old Testament passages. But the one I like the least is the idea that breaking the glass is a symbol for the groom breaking someone’s hymen in a few hours. The silliest is that it’s to drive away evil spirits. One I like is that the glass is really fragile, as a reminder that love and marriage are fragile, and you need to take care of them and not stomp all over things. But there’s a bunch more.”
Alex asked, “Am I gonna have to read a file on Jewish wedding stuff first?”
Willow shrugged and said in an exaggerated ‘New York Jew’ accent, “It couldn’t hoit!” She got Ray to laugh, but Alex was just not in a ha-ha mood. She switched back to her normal voice. “No, not really. Not unless you want to. There’s not gonna be anything weird, and we’ll keep the Hebrew to a minimum. It’ll just be a nice, normal wedding thing, except with a guy in a uniform instead of a tux.”
Ray parked the car at the curb, because the driveway was already full of cars, even with Alex’s mom’s SUV lost forever because Terawatt wasn’t smart enough to protect the people she loved, and she wasn’t good enough to save the day, and she wasn’t powerful enough to rescue Shar. At least, that was how Alex felt.
She gave Willow a big hug. “I’ll be there for you. All I gotta do is stop crying long enough to drive down to Santa Barbara.”
Willow hugged her back. “Hey, you can bring a plus-one. Ray can drive! I’ll even make sure there’s a room reserved for him in case he comes, too.”
Ray winced a little. “Thanks a ton. But I’ve gotta work. I already promised Mike I’d work that whole weekend, since I thought Alex would be gone to a fancy wedding, and Tom’s laid up with a back injury and Mike’s gonna have two other guys gone on vacation next week. Mike’s been really good to me, and I can’t go back on a promise like that. He’s gonna be short-handed that weekend anyway.” He looked at Alex and murmured, “Sorry, honey.”
Alex hugged him, too. “It’s not your fault. Who knew this would get so awful and so messed-up and so … I don’t know. And you didn’t ever complain when I dropped everything to run off and … go do stuff. Even when it was your birthday party. So I can’t complain when you’re being all responsible and helpful and all that.” After all, those were some of the things she loved about him.
She rushed inside and found her mom in the kitchen, putting food away. “Mom! I forgot about the car! I lost the car! I ruined your car and lost it in the desert! I’m a bad person!”
Her mom stopped and hugged her and insisted, “Alex, you’re not a bad person. You’re a great, amazing person. And the car’s electrical system was fried from the electro-something.”
“Electro-magnetic pulse. EMP,” Alex supplied without thinking about it.
“That. And the body was wrecked from rocks and stuff falling on it. Jack called and said he was going to have to scrap the car and buy us a new one and make it look like we traded in the old one when we bought the new one. But they rescued all our camping gear and your clothes out of the back, even if all your electronics were pffft.”
She couldn’t think of anything electronic she wanted to keep. Her tPhone and Terawatt-tablet? No. She didn’t want to see those things ever again. What else did she even have on the trip? Oh. A tiny flashlight and her dad’s battery-powered camping lantern. That was probably about it. Well, she could buy her dad a new lantern.
She whimpered, “I’m really sorry about the car.”
Her mom held her and stroked her hair. “Honey, it’s not like you got drunk and crashed the car. You were saving the world, and the car happened to be in the vicinity.”
That really made things sound a lot better than they sounded in Alex’s head. In her head, it sounded more like ‘you messed up everything and you got Shar killed and you’re the worst person ever.’
But she didn’t get a chance to say so, because she had to introduce everyone to Frank and explain who he was, and let him know that everyone else in the house was a part of Team Terawatt. Or what used to be Team Terawatt before she quit. She was so done with Terawatt. Being a superheroine was so not tera.
And nobody needed a cruddy superheroine who got people killed and blew up huge chunks of the planet and stuff like that. If that nuclear blast had been in any city anywhere on earth, it would’ve been almost as bad as Lanzhou or Beirut.
Somehow, Alex had missed that Frank still had a house not too far from Seattle, and he had been up there during the summer, so Jack had called him and told him about the funeral, and Frank just drove down even if it had to be a fifteen-hour drive. He was the best mentor ever.
She worried that she wouldn’t be able to keep him as a mentor once she told Jack she was through. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to keep anything. Maybe not the apartment. Maybe not the admission to Corcoran College. Crud.
Maybe she didn’t deserve any of that stuff anyway.
But Willow stayed and helped, and Alex helped fix dinner for the first time in maybe days, which her mom said was a good sign. And then Louis and Marsha drove Willow back to Camp Atron to take her SRI Cessna home. And Alex’s folks tried to get Frank to stay overnight before heading home, but he headed on out anyway.
* * *
Willow stepped off the Cessna and sank into Jack’s strong arms. “Oh, Jack, Alex is hurting so much! And the way she’s talking, it just sounds like she’s all done with Terawatt. This is totally of the bad!”
Jack hugged her and scooted her into his car. At least he didn’t say ‘I told you so’.
He started the drive up to their new home and said, “I did warn you this might happen.”
Oh, wait, there was the ‘I told you so’ after all.
He sighed. “You know I hate talking about Sarah with you, just because it either feels like I’m not being fair to you, or else it feels like I’m not being fair to her. Sometimes both. But after Sarah died, I was a basket case. I … If I hadn’t needed to be there for Charlie, I don’t know what I would’ve done. And if it had been Charlie instead of Sarah? I don’t know. I’ve seen guys who ate their gun over stuff that grim. And Alex has been treating Shar like a daughter more than like a little cousin. She needs time, and she needs to talk to a therapist with enough clearance … and she needs really great friends, like you. Me? I didn’t even make it to the funeral.”
So Willow asked, “How’d the big state funeral go?”
“Just as shitty as I expected. Maybe even worse. The chaplain blathered on for a ridiculous amount of time, and then the CinC gave a speech, and then he let the Senate Minority leader speak, and that was even worse. And then the Emperor gave a speech about the importance of international cooperation and blah blah blah. It went about four times longer than I thought it would. And Carlson’s team got even more of a workout than I figured.”
“Oh, no!” Willow gulped. “A Collective attack?”
He slowly shook his head no. “Nothing that bad. But you know those three cyberstalkers you’ve been tracking?”
“Oh, no.” She couldn’t help cringing.
He nodded. “Oh, yeah. Two of ’em showed up. The one you had tabbed as a possible serial killer? Brought a rifle, two handguns, and five World War II era grenades. And a partridge in a pear tree. Fortunately, Ultraman is the fastest goddamn thing on two legs I have ever seen. The other one was waiting near the funeral cars with a bouquet of roses. And a carving knife. Presumably, if Terawatt didn’t want to accept the flowers, he was gonna go Norman Bates on her. He certainly tried using it on Azure Crush when she spotted him. Funny thing: knives aren’t your best defense against people whose skin can stand up to rifle fire.”
Willow just cringed. “What would Jo have done?”
Jack grimaced. “Well, we are better prepared for that now. The science guys built a pretty powerful taser into the first two fingers of her left glove, with a pretty massive gel-plasma battery pack that’s in her boob padding. So she can do the Terawatt zap to someone who gets too close.”
“Jack? Thanks for letting Mister West know about the funeral. And thanks for texting Louis and telling him this was his big chance to be the hero. Marsha surprised him with some Grade-A reward-nookie.”
He snorted in amusement. “And how do you know that part?”
She hesitantly admitted, “Well … maybe Marsha asks me for advice now and then, and tells me stuff she can’t talk to Alex about, and maybe a few months ago, Marsha asked me for some tips on what guys really liked, and I explained how to do the old ‘deep throat’ and a couple other things …”
“Will, honest to God …”
She fussed, “Stop it.” Then she wiggled her eyebrows. “Or you won’t get the old ‘deep throat’. And a couple other things …”