Unmasked Read online

  And then came the one thing I had been hoping for since the start of the year, the one thing I thought would make my life truly complete: an invitation to Missy Sinclair’s slumber party. Mom didn’t want to let me go. It would be my first night spent away from her since the news went wide, and while they could station security on the street, they couldn’t put them inside without permission from Missy’s parents, which seemed unlikely, since Missy’s parents had already complained about my security—who they described as “strange, unrelated adults”—being on campus. They were willing to let me into their home. The people who kept me alive would have to wait outside.

  What people don’t necessarily seem to understand was that up until the slumber party, the security had been nothing more than a precaution as far as I could tell. I’d been locked down as soon as the world learned that I existed, and the security had only increased after it had come out that I didn’t have any powers. That didn’t mean anyone had tried anything.

  People had, actually. Several people, several times. Bad people. The kind of people who looked at a ten-year-old girl and saw an opportunity to hurt her parents. The kind of people for whom the words “collateral damage” had never cost them so much as a moment’s peace. The kind of people like the Sinclairs didn’t believe would come to our sleepy little suburb for the sake of one brown-haired little girl without powers.

  But they came. I went to the party, which started promptly at seven. I knew I was only there because Missy wanted to get a glimpse of Mom when I was dropped off; she didn’t like me, had never liked me in the first place, and I wasn’t foolish enough to think she’d suddenly changed her mind about inducting me into the hallowed ranks of the popular and the perfect. None of that mattered. I was there, I was an attendee at the fourth-grade social event of the year, and as long as I didn’t throw up during pizza time or wet my sleeping bag from excitement, no one was going to make me leave. I could stay until morning and partake of Ms. Sinclair’s famously delicious waffle bar, which Missy bragged about every time she had the opportunity, and feel as normal as anyone else, not like the freak with the superhero parents.

  The pizzas showed up at eight. The supervillains showed up at eight-thirty. If the order had been reversed, there might not have been any survivors, but Missy and I had found a strange point of camaraderie in our mutual aversion to bell peppers—I’m allergic; she just thought they were disgusting—and so the two of us were the only ones at the coffee table, splitting a ham-and-pineapple pizza, when the footsoldiers burst in through the picture window.

  I’ll never forget the sound of a sheet of broken glass slicing through Ms. Sinclair’s neck, or the way her head bounced twice before it rolled to a stop. Missy screamed. I panicked, and as I have always done, when I panicked, I froze. Fortunately for Missy, I froze in the act of reaching for another slice, so that my body halfway blocked hers from the footsoldiers in insectile armor now occupied with the messy but apparently essential task of slaughtering party guests.

  Kids I’d known since preschool came apart into messy piles of tissue and bone, filling the air with a smell that was horribly reminiscent of summer barbeque, only bloodier and somehow more unforgettably primal. People ask me why I’m a vegetarian. That moment, that horrifying handful of seconds, that’s the real reason why. Animal welfare has never been a major concern of mine. The day when I inhaled the aerosolized bodies of my classmates, that’s a major concern of mine, and will be every time I close my eyes from now until the day I die. It’s not their fault that I see them every time I even think about eating a hamburger.

  One of the black-armored figures pointed at me, snapping something in a buzzing, insectile language that made my skin try to crawl right off of my body. Two more surged forward and grabbed my arms, pulling me away from Missy, who had keeled over in a dead faint during the pause between their appearance and my abduction.

  They didn’t see her on the floor. They didn’t realize they were leaving a survivor behind. They were too busy hauling me out through the hole that used to be the window, their fingers digging into the soft, untested flesh of my arms, the blood of my classmates soaking into my skin.

  Their ship was outside, hovering ten feet above the lawn. The first of them stepped into the beam of light emanating from its belly and were pulled away, vanishing. For some reason, that was the step too far. Murder made sense. People were made of meat, no matter how much I didn’t like to think about it. A flying saucer hanging over the Sinclair’s front lawn? That didn’t make sense. That was something that happened to superheroes, not to ordinary people.

  I screamed. High and shrill and hysterical. The footsoldiers who were holding me turned to look in my direction, one of them snarling a command that I had to assume meant “stop.” I didn’t stop. The dam was broken, and all the screams that had been building up behind it were finally free to pour out of me, going where they would.

  None of the security people who were supposed to be keeping an eye on the house appeared to save me. I did my best to dig my heels into the lawn, to no avail; the footsoldiers continued to drag me inexorably forward, toward the waiting beam of light. They were going to take me. They were going to take me away, with the blood of my classmates still drying all over me, and I was never going to get to taste Ms. Sinclair’s waffles, and somehow that felt like the greatest tragedy of all.

  The grass was wet—I didn’t want to think about with what—and my heels slipped, bare feet sliding through muddy green. Nothing changed. We were still moving. At least Missy would get to be famous, like she’d always wanted; with me gone, she was going to be the only survivor, and she could spin the story however she wanted to. She could be a hero, if I was gone. That wouldn’t be enough to make up for the fact that she’d only invited me to her party because she was hoping she’d get to meet my parents, the heroes, and instead she’d managed to arrange an introduction of her parents, the civilians, to the kind of villains girls like us should only have to hear about on the news. So maybe losing me would give her the chance to make a few headlines of her own.

  Then two lines of brilliant white light, bright as the sun itself, shot through the air and through the head of the footsoldier holding my right arm, blasting it clean off. This blast didn’t smell like barbeque. It smelled like char and oil and something unidentifiable, like grasshoppers being fried with a magnifying glass. It hurt my nose. The body remained upright for a long moment before it crumpled, losing its grip on my arm in the process.

  The remaining footsoldier said something in that terrible, unfamiliar language, and even though I couldn’t understand it, I knew it was swearing. Then it did the truly unbelievable, under the circumstances:

  It let me go.

  I stumbled away, watching in horror as the remaining footsoldiers turned to run. More of those blasts of searing light shot across the yard, vaporizing the soldiers where they stood. I recognized it now, even though it still made no sense at all: it was something that belonged on television, safely distanced by the magic of film, not here, where I could smell the charred flesh and the plasma burning through the evening air. This was a thing for stories, not real life.

  Zenith’s laser vision. A moment after the realization, the man himself appeared, blazing down the street with one hand stretched out in front of him, fingers balled into a fist. He hit the saucer like a wrecking ball, punching right through the steel plating. The whole thing shook and trembled, nearly falling out of the sky. He blasted two more of the fleeing footsoldiers with his lasers, and then another figure appeared, soaring high, but already descending, feet pointed toward the ground to ease her landing. Mom.

  “Mom?” I whispered. She’d shown me the costume, of course, after the news broke; she’d explained how sorry she was that she’d always had to keep the truth about her career from me, and the even bigger truth of who my father was. By that point, I knew that what was being said about her was true; she was Galatea, the most powerful woman in the world, and my father was Zenith, an
d I was their useless, defenseless, powerless daughter. But knowing a thing isn’t the same as seeing a thing, never has been, and this was the first time I’d seen her in all her glory.

  She was spectacular. She was impossibly beautiful, so beautiful that it hurt my eyes to look at her, that I felt like I wasn’t worthy to be in the presence of my own mother, and then she was landing on the lawn, amidst the gore and shattered pieces of footsoldier. One of the few who was still standing drew a complicated sidearm and fired it at her, sending a bolt of blue lightning streaking at her, faster than I could yell to warn her.

  She raised a hand, almost lazily, and batted it away. Then she strode toward the footsoldier, grabbing it by the throat and lifting it over her head before she flung it brutally and bodily away. The sound it made when it hit the side of the building was one more thing I’d remember for the rest of my life. I was racking up quite a number of them, and it wasn’t even midnight yet. Who knew what wonders tomorrow would hold?

  What terrible, unbearable wonders. But Mom saw me on the lawn and ran to me, wailing, “Hope! My baby, what have they done to you?” as she gathered me into her strong, familiar arms and crushed me to a bosom that smelled of ozone and acceleration rather than diner coffee, and I buried my face against her shoulder and cried and cried and cried, and in that moment, I was sure everything was going to be okay. She was here, I was here, my father was ripping a spaceship apart, and we were going to be okay.

  Then Missy screamed from inside the house, and I remembered that nothing was ever going to be okay again.

  That was the night we moved to the Association of Heroes housing complex. I couldn’t go back to school, not with half my classmates dead and the other half understandably afraid of me. I couldn’t go anywhere for a while, not without having panic attacks so bad that I blacked out, or wetting myself, or screaming and screaming until I ran out of air. Therapy was the word of the day, and then the word of the year, and meanwhile Mom and Zenith were working out how to live together as a couple, and with me as a family.

  Zenith had a hard time adjusting to the fact that I was a person, not just an idea, and an even harder time with the fact that I refused to call him “Dad.” Couldn’t even think about him that way for the first year. And then the interviews began, and didn’t stop until I turned eighteen, changed my name to something a little bit less on-the-nose, and snuck away to go to college like a normal person.

  And I never looked back, and I never developed superpowers, and I didn’t think anyone knew where I was until yesterday, when the box appeared on my doorstep.

  “My beloved Anesidora, my hope in these dark times, if you are reading this, then I have fallen in the endless fight against the forces of evil, and the mantle of our family has fallen upon your shoulders. I have done my best to protect you, as is a mother’s duty to her child, but alas, I cannot protect you from beyond the veil.”

  My mother’s handwriting was as familiar as it had ever been, as was the subtle smell of her perfume, permeating the paper. It would have been more reassuring if it hadn’t been eight years since the last time we’d spoken, and if the news hadn’t been playing behind me, reporting on the deaths of Zenith and Galatea, along with half the Association, all of them fallen protecting the Earth from one more alien threat.

  Tears stung my eyes. My parents couldn’t be dead. Denial is always a stage of grief, but I think there’s something reasonable, realistic even, about denying the death of your parents when they’re the most powerful people on the planet. We hadn’t spoken in years, but they were still superheroes, untouchable and above us all. I turned my attention back to the letter.

  “I would have told you this long ago, my dearest, if you had stayed with us; I would have found the right words, the right ways to give you the secret truth of our family, which is of necessity concealed from all around us. I am sorry that I cannot give you this in person, but listen to the memory of my voice and believe that what I never said is true:

  “I never for a moment regretted the fact that you were born without the power of flight, or your father’s burning vision, or my own super strength. I knew you when you rode inside me, sole passenger of a heavenly chariot, and I knew you would be as I had been, mortal clay, meant to carry your jar and walk the world until your mother fell, as mothers must inevitably do. That is the secret of our line: we are never born with powers, and even when we seek out husbands who carry the fire of Prometheus in their veins, our blood wins out. We are born as cold and common clay. The power we wield is our burden, not our gift. I would take it with me to the grave, were it so allowed, but now the choice is fallen unto you. Now the decision is yours.”

  Under the letter, a mask. The famous marble mask of Galatea, licensed by every Halloween costume company in the world, unlicensed by a million cosplayers. But the shape of it was subtly wrong, no longer quite my mother’s forehead, my mother’s brow. It looked more like my own.

  I stood in silence, looking from the mask to the letter and back again. Galatea’s marble sword wasn’t in the box, but somehow that didn’t matter. I didn’t need it. If I put the mask on, I knew, the sword would come to me, or something else would, a spear, or a vase filled with potions and poisons, ready to heal or harm at my desire. I would be as great as my mother had been, and as unbeatable, until the day something bigger than I was slapped me out of the sky.

  My life—the life I had worked so hard to build for myself in the years since I’d slipped away, since I’d put Hope to the side and become Dora, whose name had never graced a tabloid cover and never would—would end. Immediately, and with no going back. The diner where Mom worked had never fired her, being smart enough to fear the optics of dropping a superhuman from their payroll, but she had never worked another day there after her identity was revealed to the world. She hadn’t even tried to live a civilian life until she was pregnant with me, preferring the comfort of the Association, the nearness of the world in need of protection.

  If I put on the mask, Dora Green would die. Hope Anesidora Smith would rise in her place, and take to the sky, to defend a world that had been all too happy to devour her. I looked, hopelessly, back to the letter.

  “I am sorry, my daughter. I am sorry for the years we lost, for the cost of defending this world, and for the need that will come upon you if you take up my mantle. Aphrodite is a jealous goddess even now, and we the descendants of her masterpiece. She will ensure the mask is passed to your daughter, even as I pass it now to my own, even as your grandmother passed it to me. But she cannot make you claim it. All she can do is guarantee that the next child of our line will exist to be offered the choice, to stand where all of us have been. Will you choose stone, as all of us who came before you have done? Or will you allow one more god to fade from the world, and choose clay? Whatever your decision, I love you, my daughter. I died loving you, and losing you remains my sole regret.”

  Slowly, I lowered the letter, staring at the closed door of my apartment and the great wide world beyond, and I couldn’t have told you, in that moment, which I was going to choose.

  The mask, silent as stone, did not rise to aid in my decision.

  Seanan McGuire lives in an idiosyncratically designed labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life. Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013, she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.

  La Marionnette

  Alicia Cay

  Porcelina’s fingers trembled in the cold February air as they moved along the worn strings of her violin. Berlioz’s Rêverie et Caprice floated on the breeze. She sat on the edge of the fountain in the Place de l’Opéra,
where she came daily to practice and perform in front of the Palais Garnier, the great opera house she dreamed of one day playing.

  The whole of Paris was alive with activity. It was the week of Carnival and la promenade des masques, a time when the citizens hid their faces behind bright papier-mâché masks and the streets bustled in celebration.

  A man in a boater hat and a mask painted with silver fish rode past on his bicycle, racing the carriages in the street and ringing the tinny bell.

  Porcelina looked up at the sound. Her gaze drifted through the crowd. A familiar face caught her attention. His pure white mask stood out from the others, a rebellion against the sea of painted colors around him. Porcelina’s pulse thrummed. The man had come to watch her play every evening for the past four days. He was handsome, well-dressed, and carried an air of mystery about him—as though in his company anything was possible, even magic.

  Two women stopped to listen, blocking the man from Porcelina’s view. Their pastel masks were decorated with lace and silk to match their high-buttoned dresses. One of them dropped a franc in the beat-up violin case at Porcelina’s feet.

  Porcelina sighed. She could not afford flour to eat, much less to spread on decorated paper and wear. So, she played before them, unmasked and vulnerable, the way she’d felt since coming to Paris.

  She’d been in the city a month now. Still unmarried at twenty, Porcelina had left home to follow the song in her heart and audition at the Palais Garnier. Seats were coming open in the opera house’s symphony, and they had sent word of an open call for musicians—including women, an unheard-of proposition.