(continued from part one, preceding...)
***
Esteban Veracruz walked through the opened gate of the storage unit, cringing at the thought of what Rumi Moroboshi had to be thinking. The state he'd left this place in. How threadbare it had all become. He turned, expecting to see a dumbfounded expression... but she wasn't there at all.
*What are you worried about, Este?* Coco said, looking up from Los Pantalones, which the two-foot-tall bonobo was perched upon. Something pensive was in his friend's metallic expression. *She's seen it worse.*
"I'm not worried about all the constructs I left lying around," Esteban said. "It's... her. Her, here, right after Lemon. And I'm already screwing this up, just like..."
*Look behind you.*
Esteban frowned, but did as instructed.
Framed in the opening was his brother, Miguel, and a nattily-dressed, murder-intent werewolf frozen in mid-attack. He knew the moment well, though he hadn't seen the attack firsthand. His twelve-year-old self had been too busy having his mind blown by its first entry into what he had come to--for lack of a more sensible word--called 'Nectaspace.'
He'd tried dozens of times to change the scene. It was hardly fitting for a 'front-door' entrance to the notional mental/computational space within Los Pantalones. But it always wanted to revert to this moment... the one in which, long ago, he'd taken his first step into a weirder world.
*Do you know how far you've come, El Guerrero?*
"Not far enough. Maybe never--"
*Come.*
He turned... and the armored trousers and metal monkey were gone.
No, not gone. He was sunk in the oversized Pantalones, down to his waist. He could only dimly feel his legs, snug and surprisingly comfortable within. And whereas normally he needed his mask to see the geometric pictographs and image windows now floating before him, his face was bare.
The other end of the storage unit was open, and glowed bronze-gold.
Nectaspace! Within the nectarisite that comprised his mask and Los Pantalones, the medium through which his mental commands to pilot his battle pants traveled... and so much more. He'd come to understand it as something like how cyberspace was often visualized, though the visual form it took was constructed from memories. His, and others who allowed their memories to be imported for analysis. Coco lived in this space, even when he formed a bonobo body also made of nectarisite and raced about in the physical world separate from Los Pantalones. It was a space Esteban had only been able to visit sparingly in the early days... before Rumi gave the trousers a deep bioelectric zap.
A window with the image hovered before his eyes. Him, fifteen, gangly, black-shorts-clad, putting up a casual-if-slightly-forced chattering front to the fifteen-year-old half-alien girl he was technically meeting for the first time, even though he'd experienced visions of their yet-to-happen kiss several times prior to that day. Puzzling visions, given that, just a year before, he'd stopped being able to deny to himself that it was boys he preferred kissing. At least one in particular, who he'd met on his first trip to Malaga to see Cendra Seconds's old family friend, Shadebeam Moroboshi.
That day, a group of ordinary people mind-controlled into acting like zombies had invaded the apartment Esteban shared with Miguel and his then-girlfriend Cendra. During that struggle, Rumi had touched Los Pantalones... and had a tremendous amount of bioelectricity pulled out of her by, and into, the trousers.
Even as he remembered, the scene in the window shifted, showing the shock and alarm on her face as her electricity cascaded into the at-that-moment unoccupied battle pants. He'd later learned she'd needed an operation when she was young, the result of which had been to suppress her natural bioelectric abilities so they wouldn't painfully conflict with her burgeoning psychokinetic abilities. Though she had the organ that generated bioeletricity, she'd thought it untappable until that point, beyond minor usage to visualize bioelectric energies in others.
He'd little known at the time, but it had been the start of a new level of understanding. Of Nectaspace, of Los Pantalones, of Coco, of himself, of Rumi, of Lemon... and of how bad he was at expressing himself or even calming himself when he needed to most.
The image dissolved with the window, and he found himself looking at the woman who'd given her identity to others as 'Psywave.' Ruby-red shoulder-length hair, face partially hidden by a black mask with red lining over her forehead and down to her tanned cheeks, with red ovals where eyes should have been. More sinewy and athletic than he remembered, her costume a sleeveless formfitting black-and-red top that ended where her belly began, along with matching shorts and boots.
She leaned back against a railing and forced a grin.
"We never did figure out how your pants got me to zap them that way," said Rumi. "Or why having other Hottentottians hit it with their electrics only resulted in minor improvements in function. Unless you've had a breakthrough on that front since I've been gone."
Esteban shook his head, belatedly remembering that, in Nectaspace, she could actually see the image windows hovering before his eyes. He waved them aside.
"Coco thinks it's because we're as operational as we can get," he said. "Even though he has no data on his origins--beyond what we dug up from references in Richard Cartier's journals--or how he came to be a part of Los Pantalones. Isn't that... right?"
He looked around, but saw no monkey.
Rumi leaned back on her railing and pointed into the sky. Esteban joined her on what turned out to be a balcony overlooking a world far below, shaded in tones of bronze and gold by the light that seeped through the liquid sky. He looked up at the filtered light of the sun... and saw Coco's face *was* that sun, grinning back down at them.
*We're an enigma,* Coco said, voice reverberating through them. *Wrapped in a tortilla, stuffed in a roc. The metaphysics are awkward, but the metaphor is apt.*
"Now I see why you said 'monkey,'" he said to Rumi. "First time I entered, I saw millions of him, just milling around like extras in a Peckinpah movie. After a while, he worked out it was easier for me to deal with just one of him... but you know this." He sighed, dismissing the memory. "I meant to put this construct back..."
"It used to be off in the annex," Rumi noted. "My dad's one memory of being shown the world within the Hollow Earth in the Aetheric Dimension. It was good we got it transferred into here with Cendra's help before it faded altogether, but I wish he'd seen it in more detail."
"I've been contemplating it, lately," said Esteban, looking down at the almost oval world far below. It was partially obscured by clouds, partially by floating islands closer in its orbit. When Rad had seen it, he'd been (holographically made to seem to him like he was) on the edge of the floating island of Cibola, one of the seven cities of gold, suspended above the world within the liquid nectarisite shell that had replaced the surface world in the Aetheric Dimension. But when he looked back, he saw only the storage unit he had come through, and the frozen figure of his brother at the far end. He looked back down again.
"Ever get better info on what's actually down there?" Rumi asked.
"No," he replied. "And I've been wondering lately if I still wanted to know."
She nodded, apparently unsurprised at his demotivational thoughts. Esteban saw that her mask was gone now, and her red hair had changed to its natural black. Her blue-green eyes fixed on his and wouldn't let him look away.
"Tell me," she said.
"We should be out looking for Kazza Lamissk..."
"Coco thinks different," said Rumi. "He wants us to deal with what I... with what happened seven years ago. And if there's one thing I actually learned before I left... the monkey is always right."
A 'bing bing bing bing' sound started coming from the Coco-face sun.
"Don't encourage him," Esteban groaned. "He's smug enough as it is."
The sun stuck out its tongue at them.
"Right, then," said Esteban, even as sent a mental command to the environmental controls. "I'll up the time dilation for a bit, so we don't have to hustle too much. Fly and talk?"
They took to the air, hovering over the hazy image of the inner world far below. The world in the dimension that was the source of the nectarisite behind the thought-constructs in Nectaspace. The world the _Subtler Than Light_ had traveled from. Hazy and vague at this altitude, though they both knew descending wouldn't improve the resolution. Only going to the dimension and world depicted would.
"I've... I've grown tired of waiting," he said, as they floated in free space above Rad's memory. "When you and Lemon left... after it became clear neither of you were coming back... I threw myself into the mystery. At one point, I was as deep in it as Dr. Gigawatt is, and nearly as incoherent. Miguel got me out."
"How?"
"Therapy," he told her. "It's not just for breakfast anymore."
She gave him a baleful eye.
"Miguel was taking his divorce hard," Esteban said. "Even though it was his choices, his cheating on Cendra with Bonnie that led to it. And my anger at him... me blaming him for thinking I had to stay closeted for so long... that didn't help. But his therapist thought I could help with his issues, that they were tangled up in mine, and his therapy became our therapy. I'm not saying it's all good between us now, but we talked each other off our ledges, got each other at least partially re-engaged with the world again." He paused, then laughed. "Hell, he even tried setting me up with Moon Moon."
Rumi looked dumbfounded.
"Moon Moon... the guy in his pack who we once saw climb over a glass wall to see what was on the other side?"
A window with the werewolf's image floated between them. Within it, Moon Moon gave them both a broad, cross-eyed grin, the tip of his tongue hanging out from his snout.
"That's the one."
"I remember him," said Rumi, shaking her head. "Definitely a 'good boy,' sure, but not so much a dim bulb as an empty socket. Never thought you and he'd have anything to talk about. Did you even...?"
"A couple times."
"Why?"
Esteban concentrated. The window expanded.
Rumi whistled.
"Now that's some therapy I can get behind."
"So I've heard," Esteban said, as he waved away the image window.
Rumi's face screwed up with exasperation. "Cendra told you...?"
"She told me what you talked about in her office, after you left," he said. "Didn't broadcast your identity, even on the encrypted connection, but did say you all but propositioned Johnny Clark."
"It was just... I didn't know it was him!"
"He has midnight blue hair, like his dad."
"I wasn't looking at his *hair!*"
"No kidding."
She sighed. "He's ten years younger than me. I had to hang out and watch him sometimes when his folks were visiting mine. Hell, I threw him almost-but-not-quite at a jet when he was five. It's just... no. Can't go there, even though he's fully grown now. It was just... I spent a long time chasing down leads on who'd taken the Heart of Hy Brasil from the Imperial Treasury, and it'd been almost a year since my last romantic relationship exploded under me, and since then, I haven't..."
"Being horny isn't a crime."
"Maybe not," she said. "But it's gotten me in trouble too often."
"Horny trouble. We used to say that was the best kind, remember?"
She snorted, despite herself, and looked ahead. Her eyes fixed on something that was getting closer.
"Is that...?"
Esteban glanced at what she was looking at.
"Yeah," he said. "Yesterday, after I farmed out a bunch of early-days interior STL scans to the Harxxon analyst teams I'm working projects with, I took it out to look at it again, hoping maybe to see something we hadn't the zillion times we looked at it before. Guess I forgot to put it back."
Before them was the _Subtler Than Light..._ but not the real version that had been planted on the Ventura Boardwalk going on sixteen years. It hovered in the sky before them, gleaming and spitting a huge electric bolt at a Mayan temple that was only partially there, as hazy in the sky as a cloud. Unlike the grounded one, this *felt* like a battleship, albeit one with maximalized rococo curlicues, sweeping c-scrolls and rocaille along the flanks, and other ornamentation of dubious purpose. A crew of demon monkeys was visible, frozen in place in their stations on the deck. Lady Capella Sandoval Ookanaptra, the human-sized, human-passing-if-you-didn't-look-super-close bonobo who'd brought the real STL to her dimension, imperiously stared at the ship's ephemeral target.
It was a construct built from Rumi's memory of being drawn into a century-old photograph of a battle that had taken place over a Mayan jungle, though what the Mayans had ever done to warrant such an attack had stayed stubbornly unclear. It was an image into which she'd gone immediately after involuntarily charging Los Pantalones, where the same Green Lady that had shown him a vision of his kissing Rumi had brought her to warn her about Lady Capella.
The Green Lady. She wasn't in this construct, but Esteban had a hunch Rumi was thinking of her now. She dreamcasted to them both, at least in the years between Rumi's arrival on Earth and the blowup in his relationship with her, and appeared with an initial green tint in those dreams.
Only a day after their first meeting, Rumi had trusted him enough to tell him who the Green Lady really was. Akane Moroboshi... Radian... who the world still believed perished in 1995 in the near-apocalyptic events that had overtaken her trial. Still alive, and somewhere in the world. Secluded and, last he knew, still happy as a clam.
What had happened to that trust?
As he thought this, another detail nagged at him. Something she'd said...
"I thought it was Galaxy Hunter that tracked the Heart of Hy Brasil here."
"Yeah," said Rumi. She took a breath. "What we told Cendra was true... and also a lie. Galaxy Hunter did all those things she said she did... but the Galaxy Hunter who did them was me."
***
They settled on the deck of the _Subtler Than Light,_ avoiding the frozen-still demon monkeys as much as they could. Even though they were memories, and frozen ones at that, there was something in their bellowing howler monkey expressions that made Rumi want to keep a distance.
Anger. Exultation. Directed not at the phantasmal Mayan temple below them, but at a smaller figure off the port bow. A young man, shirtless with sun-reddened skin, the oversized gleaming form of Los Pantalones his lower half, firing at a floating bronze-gold bubble still farther away. James Cartier, nephew and ward of Richard Cartier, the late 19th-century occult detective known as the Dweller in the Shades. Though Dr. Gigawatt disputed the 'nephew' part, claiming he'd discovered that James Cartier had been 'Jimmy True,' a street tough Richard had taken in for reasons not stated in his voluminous journals.
James Cartier, Jimmy True, whatever. He'd been the first known wearer of Los Pantalones. Esteban's great-grandfather, though he'd only learned this well after being drawn to the storage unit where Los Pantalones waited.
Rumi didn't have to approach the reconstructed figure to visualize him... or see how much of Esteban was there in his young, screaming face. Involuntarily, she flashed on the memory of Esteban at her bedroom door, staring in open mouth shock at her and Lemon in her bed. Knowing there would be no coming back from that moment, no matter where they went with it.
A window appeared before her, but she waved it into oblivion before it could show her what she'd visualized.
"I'm better at secrets than I thought," she said. "My first squadbud said as much to me when she welcomed me into the Hunter Corps. I had to be... I didn't want anybody to know I was the daughter of their former Empress. Made my hair a loud violet in those years. Just another gal lookin' to do some good while not talking about her mysterious past. I didn't want them to know I was anybody."
"You didn't want to be who you were," Esteban said.
She felt the sting.
"No more than you, Este," she said. This time he winced. "I left Earth because I needed to clear my head of you... Lemon... my whole life to that point. Told Mom and Dad I was going to be back in a few weeks... and that turned into seven years, once I had the idea of joining the Hunter Corps. A mix of intergalactic crimesolving, peace-building, and ambassadorial partying, an outfit where I felt like I could keep doing some good, even as I learned discipline and structure and... all that happy crappy I never wanted to learn before." She paused. "As for what the Galaxy Hunter with me said in Cendra's office that she did prior to coming to Earth... that was me. Chasing the Heart of Hy Brasil thieves to Reptilos. Getting buried and left-for-dead for my trouble. Coming to Earth in renewed pursuit. And I'm trusting you with that like I trusted you with who my Aunt Akane was, and still is... and ask that you trust me when I say I can't tell even you anything more than that, or even *why* I can't say more than that, beyond what I told Cendra and she told you."
"Like who's under your armor now."
"That's not my armor," Rumi said. "That's *her* armor. I had to leave mine behind in that deep pit on Reptilos where I'm still buried as far as the bad guys know. She *is* a Hunter, in all the ways that matter. Follow?"
"A lie that's also the truth." He hesitated, then nodded. "So forget her for now. I get why you needed something like this... and I'm glad you found it. But... why couldn't you tell us?"
"Because the longer I was gone... the more I wanted to stay gone." She felt her face fall as she made the admission. "Because time doesn't always heal. Sometimes it multiplies the pain."
Rumi looked away from him. The look in his eyes made *her* eyes hurt.
"Elle Sanguine... my squadbud... I confessed some of this to her. In non-identifying terms, mind."
Elle's image formed in a window. Young, laughing, close, her face glittering like multicolored stained glass where it wasn't obscured by her ropelike blue tentacle-hair or the violet frame of Rumi's hair. Head propped up by an elbow buried in the red grass of planet Lanulos, their first posting. Rumi hurriedly dismissed the window, before it could morph into something later... and uglier.
Another window formed in its wake, and this time, she didn't wave it away. Within, sand rushed beneath feet. To her right was the ocean, an Earth ocean this time, dark and sloshing against the twilight beach. To her left was Lemon Rydell, racing her toward the pier. Only neither of them was really racing, except in their hearts. There was a joy between them, even a kind of innocence.
"Our first night together," she said. "At least, how it started. I'll spare you how it ended. It happened on the stretch of beach outside the bar our bodies are in. I thought about it when I touched down."
Esteban didn't entirely hide the hurt that flashed in his eyes... but he didn't look away, either. His expression held steady.
"Looking back... it was an almost perfect night. I felt... seen. Needed. Loved. Even though we both knew it wasn't *that* kind of love."
"What... what do you mean?"
"The one thing that kept this from being a perfect night for me... was that he wasn't *you.*"
His expression was thunderstruck. Had it not been for the railing, Rumi was sure Esteban would've fallen over the side.
"Elle listened to me beat myself up for not staging a breakup with you, so I wouldn't have to keep being your beard, even though I thought I could get you to play along. I... couldn't do it. And she told me I couldn't because I was in love with you."
"But..." he started, then started over. "I'm not even a little... If I was... as close as we were... we'd've hooked up. We used to joke about it, remember? But we both knew it was never gonna happen..."
"She thinks I was in denial, even though in my head I did know all that," Rumi said. A tremble ran through her, and she forced herself not to look away. "She thinks I gave in to my Lemon-temptation because he was as you-adjacent as I could get."
"Did you think she was right?"
"I think..."
She pushed away from the railing.
"I think I was just a self-centered girl who did something she knew would wreck our friendship if you ever found out. Which you did. Which it did." She bit her lip. "Guess horny trouble wasn't so great after all."
Rumi flew away, toward James Cartier and the gold bubble he was in mid-attack against.
The light hum of Los Pantalones told her that Esteban followed.
She flew past James... Jimmy... whoever... without so much as a glance, stopping only when she reached the bubble. It was a small floating craft made of nectarisite, barely wider than the three beings within--Erasmus Fancy, the gorilla-sized bonobo who'd also turned up to cause havoc on the day the _Subtler Than Light_ came to Earth's surface in her dimension, a monobrowed Burrollan 'mole man' of uncertain identity, and a Reptiloid woman in a lab coat whom she now understood was possibly the Scaled Order cult leader and fanatic named T'Shamka. They'd been the ones who'd taken the picture of the _Subtler Than Light_ assaulting the Mayan Temple in 1897, whose existence she'd learned only after being drawn into the image by her Aunt Akane. The entire triptych of battleship and Cartier and bubble had been long-ago rebuilt from her memory and filed away in Nectaspace by her and Esteban.
What had T'Shamka... if current-day T'Shamka she came to Earth in pursuit of was indeed the same being... been doing with Erasmus Fancy, or whoever the Burrollan was? Had the frozen scene before her occurred before or after the Ottsamaddawiduans had stolen the Heart of Hy Brasil and placed it in the Treasury?
Esteban's reflection touched hers in the glass of the bubble's viewport.
"I forgive you," he said.
"I don't deserve it," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
"Tough," he replied. "I may not be able to forgive myself, but I forgave you well before now, and I forgive you even more now. You're just gonna have to deal."
This was too much. Just too damn *much.* She looked back at him, wanting to shout at him again... but found she couldn't see him anymore. The tears were getting in the way.
"No," she said. "You can't... I can't..."
But when he embraced her, she couldn't push way, even though his arms were light on her back. Even when she felt his cheek, wet, against her forehead, and he could feel hers, wet, against his chin.
"You... you know it wasn't the first time I caught him, right...?" Esteban asked, after a while.
"Yeah," she said, almost whispering the words into his scratchy beard. "I never asked about those other times. And for all he talked, he never told me anything real about them. Except, once, he said... 'the world...'"
"'The world is a giving place,'" Esteban finished. "It was the closest he could come to saying why he did it before. Like that should've been all I needed to know to understand."
"What did you say to that?"
"Same thing as always."
"Nothing. I mean, he never threatened, never even hinted, but I thought he'd... leave me. Just like I swore to myself I'd leave him if he did it one more time... before he did. With you."
She sighed.
Esteban looked down, and then at the three in the floating bubble. Rumi kept her tongue -- if there was judgment to be laid out, the constructs within the construct wouldn't be delivering.
"I was awful to him," he said. "I mean, when I saw him again, this morning, I just said, 'Don't trust a damn word this guy says.' And I flew away."
The image formed in a window. The moment the words cleaved through, quickly smothered under a smile.
"That had me beat," she admitted. "I just asked what he was doing here. Like he was a stranger in my house."
"Ha."
"He had it coming, though, from both of us," she said. He looked at her, shocked, even as the window vanished. "We all had, and have, various quantities of 'it' coming, for all we did to each other. But he's always had more, and because of it, it's been easier to blame him and his kissable, punchable face. For me, and I'm guessing for you."
Esteban stayed silent. She watched the struggle in his eyes.
"I still don't know if I can forgive him."
"There's probably only one way to find out."
He sighed. "I knew you were gonna say that."
"The easy way was never us," she said. *Now* she could wipe away her tears. "And, before I forget... I'm not any better at self-forgiveness than you, obvs, and I don't know why you think I blamed *you* for anything..."
"For not wanting to let you go," he said. "You said you thought you could talk me into staging a breakup... it would've been difficult. I would've made it difficult. It's... what I did. What I do, maybe a little less than I used to."
"I know... and I forgive you."
He flinched... then wiped away his tears.
"I guess I'll have to deal," he said, as he flashed a relieved, if slightly-still-mortified, smile. "So... uh... are we good here? For now?"
"Oh, honey," she said, as she caressed his cheek. "We're fucking awesome here."
They embraced again...
...and looked up in exasperation when Coco's voice intruded.
*Alert,* the bonobo in the sun told them. *Enemy incoming from Emerson Park. Homing in on this location.*
"What enemy?" Esteban asked, even as he and Rumi floated free of one another.
*El Esbirro del Traje,* Coco answered.
"No way," Esteban groaned, looking down at Rumi.
"El what now?"
"Some lore Dr. Gigawatt surfaced, a couple years after you left," said Esteban. "I... well, if it's really him, you'll see soon enough. But, hell, Lemon, you, then the Hench, all in the same day?"
"Trouble comes in threes," she said.
He nodded. "We'll have to continue this later..."
"Wh--"
The bronze-gold circus around them dissolved.
Esteban Veracruz walked through the opened gate of the storage unit, cringing at the thought of what Rumi Moroboshi had to be thinking. The state he'd left this place in. How threadbare it had all become. He turned, expecting to see a dumbfounded expression... but she wasn't there at all.
*What are you worried about, Este?* Coco said, looking up from Los Pantalones, which the two-foot-tall bonobo was perched upon. Something pensive was in his friend's metallic expression. *She's seen it worse.*
"I'm not worried about all the constructs I left lying around," Esteban said. "It's... her. Her, here, right after Lemon. And I'm already screwing this up, just like..."
*Look behind you.*
Esteban frowned, but did as instructed.
Framed in the opening was his brother, Miguel, and a nattily-dressed, murder-intent werewolf frozen in mid-attack. He knew the moment well, though he hadn't seen the attack firsthand. His twelve-year-old self had been too busy having his mind blown by its first entry into what he had come to--for lack of a more sensible word--called 'Nectaspace.'
He'd tried dozens of times to change the scene. It was hardly fitting for a 'front-door' entrance to the notional mental/computational space within Los Pantalones. But it always wanted to revert to this moment... the one in which, long ago, he'd taken his first step into a weirder world.
*Do you know how far you've come, El Guerrero?*
"Not far enough. Maybe never--"
*Come.*
He turned... and the armored trousers and metal monkey were gone.
No, not gone. He was sunk in the oversized Pantalones, down to his waist. He could only dimly feel his legs, snug and surprisingly comfortable within. And whereas normally he needed his mask to see the geometric pictographs and image windows now floating before him, his face was bare.
The other end of the storage unit was open, and glowed bronze-gold.
Nectaspace! Within the nectarisite that comprised his mask and Los Pantalones, the medium through which his mental commands to pilot his battle pants traveled... and so much more. He'd come to understand it as something like how cyberspace was often visualized, though the visual form it took was constructed from memories. His, and others who allowed their memories to be imported for analysis. Coco lived in this space, even when he formed a bonobo body also made of nectarisite and raced about in the physical world separate from Los Pantalones. It was a space Esteban had only been able to visit sparingly in the early days... before Rumi gave the trousers a deep bioelectric zap.
A window with the image hovered before his eyes. Him, fifteen, gangly, black-shorts-clad, putting up a casual-if-slightly-forced chattering front to the fifteen-year-old half-alien girl he was technically meeting for the first time, even though he'd experienced visions of their yet-to-happen kiss several times prior to that day. Puzzling visions, given that, just a year before, he'd stopped being able to deny to himself that it was boys he preferred kissing. At least one in particular, who he'd met on his first trip to Malaga to see Cendra Seconds's old family friend, Shadebeam Moroboshi.
That day, a group of ordinary people mind-controlled into acting like zombies had invaded the apartment Esteban shared with Miguel and his then-girlfriend Cendra. During that struggle, Rumi had touched Los Pantalones... and had a tremendous amount of bioelectricity pulled out of her by, and into, the trousers.
Even as he remembered, the scene in the window shifted, showing the shock and alarm on her face as her electricity cascaded into the at-that-moment unoccupied battle pants. He'd later learned she'd needed an operation when she was young, the result of which had been to suppress her natural bioelectric abilities so they wouldn't painfully conflict with her burgeoning psychokinetic abilities. Though she had the organ that generated bioeletricity, she'd thought it untappable until that point, beyond minor usage to visualize bioelectric energies in others.
He'd little known at the time, but it had been the start of a new level of understanding. Of Nectaspace, of Los Pantalones, of Coco, of himself, of Rumi, of Lemon... and of how bad he was at expressing himself or even calming himself when he needed to most.
The image dissolved with the window, and he found himself looking at the woman who'd given her identity to others as 'Psywave.' Ruby-red shoulder-length hair, face partially hidden by a black mask with red lining over her forehead and down to her tanned cheeks, with red ovals where eyes should have been. More sinewy and athletic than he remembered, her costume a sleeveless formfitting black-and-red top that ended where her belly began, along with matching shorts and boots.
She leaned back against a railing and forced a grin.
"We never did figure out how your pants got me to zap them that way," said Rumi. "Or why having other Hottentottians hit it with their electrics only resulted in minor improvements in function. Unless you've had a breakthrough on that front since I've been gone."
Esteban shook his head, belatedly remembering that, in Nectaspace, she could actually see the image windows hovering before his eyes. He waved them aside.
"Coco thinks it's because we're as operational as we can get," he said. "Even though he has no data on his origins--beyond what we dug up from references in Richard Cartier's journals--or how he came to be a part of Los Pantalones. Isn't that... right?"
He looked around, but saw no monkey.
Rumi leaned back on her railing and pointed into the sky. Esteban joined her on what turned out to be a balcony overlooking a world far below, shaded in tones of bronze and gold by the light that seeped through the liquid sky. He looked up at the filtered light of the sun... and saw Coco's face *was* that sun, grinning back down at them.
*We're an enigma,* Coco said, voice reverberating through them. *Wrapped in a tortilla, stuffed in a roc. The metaphysics are awkward, but the metaphor is apt.*
"Now I see why you said 'monkey,'" he said to Rumi. "First time I entered, I saw millions of him, just milling around like extras in a Peckinpah movie. After a while, he worked out it was easier for me to deal with just one of him... but you know this." He sighed, dismissing the memory. "I meant to put this construct back..."
"It used to be off in the annex," Rumi noted. "My dad's one memory of being shown the world within the Hollow Earth in the Aetheric Dimension. It was good we got it transferred into here with Cendra's help before it faded altogether, but I wish he'd seen it in more detail."
"I've been contemplating it, lately," said Esteban, looking down at the almost oval world far below. It was partially obscured by clouds, partially by floating islands closer in its orbit. When Rad had seen it, he'd been (holographically made to seem to him like he was) on the edge of the floating island of Cibola, one of the seven cities of gold, suspended above the world within the liquid nectarisite shell that had replaced the surface world in the Aetheric Dimension. But when he looked back, he saw only the storage unit he had come through, and the frozen figure of his brother at the far end. He looked back down again.
"Ever get better info on what's actually down there?" Rumi asked.
"No," he replied. "And I've been wondering lately if I still wanted to know."
She nodded, apparently unsurprised at his demotivational thoughts. Esteban saw that her mask was gone now, and her red hair had changed to its natural black. Her blue-green eyes fixed on his and wouldn't let him look away.
"Tell me," she said.
"We should be out looking for Kazza Lamissk..."
"Coco thinks different," said Rumi. "He wants us to deal with what I... with what happened seven years ago. And if there's one thing I actually learned before I left... the monkey is always right."
A 'bing bing bing bing' sound started coming from the Coco-face sun.
"Don't encourage him," Esteban groaned. "He's smug enough as it is."
The sun stuck out its tongue at them.
"Right, then," said Esteban, even as sent a mental command to the environmental controls. "I'll up the time dilation for a bit, so we don't have to hustle too much. Fly and talk?"
They took to the air, hovering over the hazy image of the inner world far below. The world in the dimension that was the source of the nectarisite behind the thought-constructs in Nectaspace. The world the _Subtler Than Light_ had traveled from. Hazy and vague at this altitude, though they both knew descending wouldn't improve the resolution. Only going to the dimension and world depicted would.
"I've... I've grown tired of waiting," he said, as they floated in free space above Rad's memory. "When you and Lemon left... after it became clear neither of you were coming back... I threw myself into the mystery. At one point, I was as deep in it as Dr. Gigawatt is, and nearly as incoherent. Miguel got me out."
"How?"
"Therapy," he told her. "It's not just for breakfast anymore."
She gave him a baleful eye.
"Miguel was taking his divorce hard," Esteban said. "Even though it was his choices, his cheating on Cendra with Bonnie that led to it. And my anger at him... me blaming him for thinking I had to stay closeted for so long... that didn't help. But his therapist thought I could help with his issues, that they were tangled up in mine, and his therapy became our therapy. I'm not saying it's all good between us now, but we talked each other off our ledges, got each other at least partially re-engaged with the world again." He paused, then laughed. "Hell, he even tried setting me up with Moon Moon."
Rumi looked dumbfounded.
"Moon Moon... the guy in his pack who we once saw climb over a glass wall to see what was on the other side?"
A window with the werewolf's image floated between them. Within it, Moon Moon gave them both a broad, cross-eyed grin, the tip of his tongue hanging out from his snout.
"That's the one."
"I remember him," said Rumi, shaking her head. "Definitely a 'good boy,' sure, but not so much a dim bulb as an empty socket. Never thought you and he'd have anything to talk about. Did you even...?"
"A couple times."
"Why?"
Esteban concentrated. The window expanded.
Rumi whistled.
"Now that's some therapy I can get behind."
"So I've heard," Esteban said, as he waved away the image window.
Rumi's face screwed up with exasperation. "Cendra told you...?"
"She told me what you talked about in her office, after you left," he said. "Didn't broadcast your identity, even on the encrypted connection, but did say you all but propositioned Johnny Clark."
"It was just... I didn't know it was him!"
"He has midnight blue hair, like his dad."
"I wasn't looking at his *hair!*"
"No kidding."
She sighed. "He's ten years younger than me. I had to hang out and watch him sometimes when his folks were visiting mine. Hell, I threw him almost-but-not-quite at a jet when he was five. It's just... no. Can't go there, even though he's fully grown now. It was just... I spent a long time chasing down leads on who'd taken the Heart of Hy Brasil from the Imperial Treasury, and it'd been almost a year since my last romantic relationship exploded under me, and since then, I haven't..."
"Being horny isn't a crime."
"Maybe not," she said. "But it's gotten me in trouble too often."
"Horny trouble. We used to say that was the best kind, remember?"
She snorted, despite herself, and looked ahead. Her eyes fixed on something that was getting closer.
"Is that...?"
Esteban glanced at what she was looking at.
"Yeah," he said. "Yesterday, after I farmed out a bunch of early-days interior STL scans to the Harxxon analyst teams I'm working projects with, I took it out to look at it again, hoping maybe to see something we hadn't the zillion times we looked at it before. Guess I forgot to put it back."
Before them was the _Subtler Than Light..._ but not the real version that had been planted on the Ventura Boardwalk going on sixteen years. It hovered in the sky before them, gleaming and spitting a huge electric bolt at a Mayan temple that was only partially there, as hazy in the sky as a cloud. Unlike the grounded one, this *felt* like a battleship, albeit one with maximalized rococo curlicues, sweeping c-scrolls and rocaille along the flanks, and other ornamentation of dubious purpose. A crew of demon monkeys was visible, frozen in place in their stations on the deck. Lady Capella Sandoval Ookanaptra, the human-sized, human-passing-if-you-didn't-look-super-close bonobo who'd brought the real STL to her dimension, imperiously stared at the ship's ephemeral target.
It was a construct built from Rumi's memory of being drawn into a century-old photograph of a battle that had taken place over a Mayan jungle, though what the Mayans had ever done to warrant such an attack had stayed stubbornly unclear. It was an image into which she'd gone immediately after involuntarily charging Los Pantalones, where the same Green Lady that had shown him a vision of his kissing Rumi had brought her to warn her about Lady Capella.
The Green Lady. She wasn't in this construct, but Esteban had a hunch Rumi was thinking of her now. She dreamcasted to them both, at least in the years between Rumi's arrival on Earth and the blowup in his relationship with her, and appeared with an initial green tint in those dreams.
Only a day after their first meeting, Rumi had trusted him enough to tell him who the Green Lady really was. Akane Moroboshi... Radian... who the world still believed perished in 1995 in the near-apocalyptic events that had overtaken her trial. Still alive, and somewhere in the world. Secluded and, last he knew, still happy as a clam.
What had happened to that trust?
As he thought this, another detail nagged at him. Something she'd said...
"I thought it was Galaxy Hunter that tracked the Heart of Hy Brasil here."
"Yeah," said Rumi. She took a breath. "What we told Cendra was true... and also a lie. Galaxy Hunter did all those things she said she did... but the Galaxy Hunter who did them was me."
***
They settled on the deck of the _Subtler Than Light,_ avoiding the frozen-still demon monkeys as much as they could. Even though they were memories, and frozen ones at that, there was something in their bellowing howler monkey expressions that made Rumi want to keep a distance.
Anger. Exultation. Directed not at the phantasmal Mayan temple below them, but at a smaller figure off the port bow. A young man, shirtless with sun-reddened skin, the oversized gleaming form of Los Pantalones his lower half, firing at a floating bronze-gold bubble still farther away. James Cartier, nephew and ward of Richard Cartier, the late 19th-century occult detective known as the Dweller in the Shades. Though Dr. Gigawatt disputed the 'nephew' part, claiming he'd discovered that James Cartier had been 'Jimmy True,' a street tough Richard had taken in for reasons not stated in his voluminous journals.
James Cartier, Jimmy True, whatever. He'd been the first known wearer of Los Pantalones. Esteban's great-grandfather, though he'd only learned this well after being drawn to the storage unit where Los Pantalones waited.
Rumi didn't have to approach the reconstructed figure to visualize him... or see how much of Esteban was there in his young, screaming face. Involuntarily, she flashed on the memory of Esteban at her bedroom door, staring in open mouth shock at her and Lemon in her bed. Knowing there would be no coming back from that moment, no matter where they went with it.
A window appeared before her, but she waved it into oblivion before it could show her what she'd visualized.
"I'm better at secrets than I thought," she said. "My first squadbud said as much to me when she welcomed me into the Hunter Corps. I had to be... I didn't want anybody to know I was the daughter of their former Empress. Made my hair a loud violet in those years. Just another gal lookin' to do some good while not talking about her mysterious past. I didn't want them to know I was anybody."
"You didn't want to be who you were," Esteban said.
She felt the sting.
"No more than you, Este," she said. This time he winced. "I left Earth because I needed to clear my head of you... Lemon... my whole life to that point. Told Mom and Dad I was going to be back in a few weeks... and that turned into seven years, once I had the idea of joining the Hunter Corps. A mix of intergalactic crimesolving, peace-building, and ambassadorial partying, an outfit where I felt like I could keep doing some good, even as I learned discipline and structure and... all that happy crappy I never wanted to learn before." She paused. "As for what the Galaxy Hunter with me said in Cendra's office that she did prior to coming to Earth... that was me. Chasing the Heart of Hy Brasil thieves to Reptilos. Getting buried and left-for-dead for my trouble. Coming to Earth in renewed pursuit. And I'm trusting you with that like I trusted you with who my Aunt Akane was, and still is... and ask that you trust me when I say I can't tell even you anything more than that, or even *why* I can't say more than that, beyond what I told Cendra and she told you."
"Like who's under your armor now."
"That's not my armor," Rumi said. "That's *her* armor. I had to leave mine behind in that deep pit on Reptilos where I'm still buried as far as the bad guys know. She *is* a Hunter, in all the ways that matter. Follow?"
"A lie that's also the truth." He hesitated, then nodded. "So forget her for now. I get why you needed something like this... and I'm glad you found it. But... why couldn't you tell us?"
"Because the longer I was gone... the more I wanted to stay gone." She felt her face fall as she made the admission. "Because time doesn't always heal. Sometimes it multiplies the pain."
Rumi looked away from him. The look in his eyes made *her* eyes hurt.
"Elle Sanguine... my squadbud... I confessed some of this to her. In non-identifying terms, mind."
Elle's image formed in a window. Young, laughing, close, her face glittering like multicolored stained glass where it wasn't obscured by her ropelike blue tentacle-hair or the violet frame of Rumi's hair. Head propped up by an elbow buried in the red grass of planet Lanulos, their first posting. Rumi hurriedly dismissed the window, before it could morph into something later... and uglier.
Another window formed in its wake, and this time, she didn't wave it away. Within, sand rushed beneath feet. To her right was the ocean, an Earth ocean this time, dark and sloshing against the twilight beach. To her left was Lemon Rydell, racing her toward the pier. Only neither of them was really racing, except in their hearts. There was a joy between them, even a kind of innocence.
"Our first night together," she said. "At least, how it started. I'll spare you how it ended. It happened on the stretch of beach outside the bar our bodies are in. I thought about it when I touched down."
Esteban didn't entirely hide the hurt that flashed in his eyes... but he didn't look away, either. His expression held steady.
"Looking back... it was an almost perfect night. I felt... seen. Needed. Loved. Even though we both knew it wasn't *that* kind of love."
"What... what do you mean?"
"The one thing that kept this from being a perfect night for me... was that he wasn't *you.*"
His expression was thunderstruck. Had it not been for the railing, Rumi was sure Esteban would've fallen over the side.
"Elle listened to me beat myself up for not staging a breakup with you, so I wouldn't have to keep being your beard, even though I thought I could get you to play along. I... couldn't do it. And she told me I couldn't because I was in love with you."
"But..." he started, then started over. "I'm not even a little... If I was... as close as we were... we'd've hooked up. We used to joke about it, remember? But we both knew it was never gonna happen..."
"She thinks I was in denial, even though in my head I did know all that," Rumi said. A tremble ran through her, and she forced herself not to look away. "She thinks I gave in to my Lemon-temptation because he was as you-adjacent as I could get."
"Did you think she was right?"
"I think..."
She pushed away from the railing.
"I think I was just a self-centered girl who did something she knew would wreck our friendship if you ever found out. Which you did. Which it did." She bit her lip. "Guess horny trouble wasn't so great after all."
Rumi flew away, toward James Cartier and the gold bubble he was in mid-attack against.
The light hum of Los Pantalones told her that Esteban followed.
She flew past James... Jimmy... whoever... without so much as a glance, stopping only when she reached the bubble. It was a small floating craft made of nectarisite, barely wider than the three beings within--Erasmus Fancy, the gorilla-sized bonobo who'd also turned up to cause havoc on the day the _Subtler Than Light_ came to Earth's surface in her dimension, a monobrowed Burrollan 'mole man' of uncertain identity, and a Reptiloid woman in a lab coat whom she now understood was possibly the Scaled Order cult leader and fanatic named T'Shamka. They'd been the ones who'd taken the picture of the _Subtler Than Light_ assaulting the Mayan Temple in 1897, whose existence she'd learned only after being drawn into the image by her Aunt Akane. The entire triptych of battleship and Cartier and bubble had been long-ago rebuilt from her memory and filed away in Nectaspace by her and Esteban.
What had T'Shamka... if current-day T'Shamka she came to Earth in pursuit of was indeed the same being... been doing with Erasmus Fancy, or whoever the Burrollan was? Had the frozen scene before her occurred before or after the Ottsamaddawiduans had stolen the Heart of Hy Brasil and placed it in the Treasury?
Esteban's reflection touched hers in the glass of the bubble's viewport.
"I forgive you," he said.
"I don't deserve it," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
"Tough," he replied. "I may not be able to forgive myself, but I forgave you well before now, and I forgive you even more now. You're just gonna have to deal."
This was too much. Just too damn *much.* She looked back at him, wanting to shout at him again... but found she couldn't see him anymore. The tears were getting in the way.
"No," she said. "You can't... I can't..."
But when he embraced her, she couldn't push way, even though his arms were light on her back. Even when she felt his cheek, wet, against her forehead, and he could feel hers, wet, against his chin.
"You... you know it wasn't the first time I caught him, right...?" Esteban asked, after a while.
"Yeah," she said, almost whispering the words into his scratchy beard. "I never asked about those other times. And for all he talked, he never told me anything real about them. Except, once, he said... 'the world...'"
"'The world is a giving place,'" Esteban finished. "It was the closest he could come to saying why he did it before. Like that should've been all I needed to know to understand."
"What did you say to that?"
"Same thing as always."
"Nothing. I mean, he never threatened, never even hinted, but I thought he'd... leave me. Just like I swore to myself I'd leave him if he did it one more time... before he did. With you."
She sighed.
Esteban looked down, and then at the three in the floating bubble. Rumi kept her tongue -- if there was judgment to be laid out, the constructs within the construct wouldn't be delivering.
"I was awful to him," he said. "I mean, when I saw him again, this morning, I just said, 'Don't trust a damn word this guy says.' And I flew away."
The image formed in a window. The moment the words cleaved through, quickly smothered under a smile.
"That had me beat," she admitted. "I just asked what he was doing here. Like he was a stranger in my house."
"Ha."
"He had it coming, though, from both of us," she said. He looked at her, shocked, even as the window vanished. "We all had, and have, various quantities of 'it' coming, for all we did to each other. But he's always had more, and because of it, it's been easier to blame him and his kissable, punchable face. For me, and I'm guessing for you."
Esteban stayed silent. She watched the struggle in his eyes.
"I still don't know if I can forgive him."
"There's probably only one way to find out."
He sighed. "I knew you were gonna say that."
"The easy way was never us," she said. *Now* she could wipe away her tears. "And, before I forget... I'm not any better at self-forgiveness than you, obvs, and I don't know why you think I blamed *you* for anything..."
"For not wanting to let you go," he said. "You said you thought you could talk me into staging a breakup... it would've been difficult. I would've made it difficult. It's... what I did. What I do, maybe a little less than I used to."
"I know... and I forgive you."
He flinched... then wiped away his tears.
"I guess I'll have to deal," he said, as he flashed a relieved, if slightly-still-mortified, smile. "So... uh... are we good here? For now?"
"Oh, honey," she said, as she caressed his cheek. "We're fucking awesome here."
They embraced again...
...and looked up in exasperation when Coco's voice intruded.
*Alert,* the bonobo in the sun told them. *Enemy incoming from Emerson Park. Homing in on this location.*
"What enemy?" Esteban asked, even as he and Rumi floated free of one another.
*El Esbirro del Traje,* Coco answered.
"No way," Esteban groaned, looking down at Rumi.
"El what now?"
"Some lore Dr. Gigawatt surfaced, a couple years after you left," said Esteban. "I... well, if it's really him, you'll see soon enough. But, hell, Lemon, you, then the Hench, all in the same day?"
"Trouble comes in threes," she said.
He nodded. "We'll have to continue this later..."
"Wh--"
The bronze-gold circus around them dissolved.
(concluded in part three, following...)
--
Subtler Than Light #5 (c) 2023 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
For behind-the-scenes notes on this episode, visit my posting in
the Superguy List community on LiveJournal:
https://superguy-list.livejournal.com/41779.html
Gary W. Olson LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/gwox
Superguy List: https://lists.eyrie.org/mailman/listinfo/superguy/
Superguy/Sfstory Discord: https://discord.gg/xuhYChvAPK
Superguy/Sfstory LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/superguysfstory
Subtler Than Light #5 (c) 2023 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
For behind-the-scenes notes on this episode, visit my posting in
the Superguy List community on LiveJournal:
https://superguy-list.livejournal.com/41779.html
Gary W. Olson LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/gwox
Superguy List: https://lists.eyrie.org/mailman/listinfo/superguy/
Superguy/Sfstory Discord: https://discord.gg/xuhYChvAPK
Superguy/Sfstory LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/superguysfstory