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My name is Escape Artist. I am twenty-five years old. This story is about five of those years. I am from Vancouver, Washington. I am officially a Mover 4, Thinker 4. My costume is a slitted blazer layered over a bodysuit with a broken padlock insignia, a visor, and grey arm and legbands intended to evoke the image of chains. I like it when the wind catches my blazer and makes it flap behind me like an actual cape. I also like sweets, botanical sketching, and knowing that I will never have to see my dead parents ever again. I’ve seen all the Endbringers. The Simurgh is the only one I’m afraid of. Unless you’re a Stranger or a Trump, or maybe a real high-level Shaker who could encompass my teleportation range, you’ll be hard up for ways to kill me. My power makes teamwork a real bitch. It makes me not so great at fighting and bringing in villains. Things a hero has to be good at. I have always felt like I didn’t get enough credit for trying to be one anyway.
I joined the Seattle Wards when I was fifteen. I was a Ward for two years, two months, twenty-five days, and about three hours. For a few months, I secretly dated my teammate Glade: my first—and I’ll really have to insist on this—only boyfriend ever. We parted amicably when he was transferred to San Diego. Then I served in the Seattle Protectorate for two years, ten months, eight days, and nineteen hours. All in all, this means that I’ve been a hero for about five years.
As it so happens, this story isn’t about those five years.
~ ~ ~
February 5th, 2013. 13:05:35.010.
I can’t think of the last time I’ve been afraid of a villain I was fighting. I guess I’m good at picking my battles.
I’ve done this dance so many times I could probably do the steps in my sleep. Rush headlong into danger; try and get close, figure out a weakness. The villain attacks, my power predicts it and whisks me away. I try to use what I’ve learned to come up with something that will work against the villain—maybe a Tinker weapon from Arsenal will be usable in my hands for long enough. Otherwise, I simply rush back towards the villain and see if I can figure out a plan the second go around. Of course, the problem is that the villain gets time to figure out one too.
It sounds stupid, but it does actually work… occasionally. I’m not strong or smart, not even for an unpowered person. Exploit your advantages, says Curvet. Well, I tell her, the only advantage I have is my ability to be suicidally reckless.
The way I fight villains is a lot more like a chess match than a fight. I make one move, the villain makes another move, I’m teleported away from the danger, we both think about our next move. And the first move is always the same. I rush in, the villain attacks; it’s like how both players always seem to start by moving the pawns up and making them kiss. Arsenal—the only other cape my age on the team—tried to teach me to play once. I asked why every game started like that, and he shook his head impatiently and said it was just the best move for beginners.
According to the earpiece that stopped working a few seconds ago, Arsenal’s last known whereabouts are on the other side of this little devastated town, some miles south of Olympia, with the unenviable job of trying to free Bonesaw’s hostages. He’s with Gasconade, who’s my usual field partner, thanks to our weird power synergy—but he’s over there so he can reset anything the little maniac lets loose during the fight.
Curvet, our Protectorate leader, is probably leaping from the rooftops, pulling civilians up from the streets out of danger. It was only us four that responded to the attack. Everyone on the Seattle team had the difficult decision of whether to go and fight the Endbringer or hold down the fort knowing that the Nine had recently been spotted nearby.
It’s clear now that we didn’t have to worry about choosing.
Khonsu’s teleported here! The Nine is the target—they will violate the truce, I repeat, they will—
The earpiece that spat out Curvet’s initial warning is now grimly silent. Our orders were to continue fighting the Nine, keep them occupied and, ideally, drive them away from the spatial anchor so they wouldn’t be teleported along with the Khonsu fight to the next location.
The concrete warehouse is cramped, with a haphazard clutter of machines, snaking wires, and stacks of ceramic and chain. A trailer is parked outside. It’s clear that this is a makeshift lab, with its equipment unloaded from the trailer and arranged unceremoniously inside the room. The only other occupant of the warehouse is the villain I have been fighting for twenty minutes. I rush in. The villain attacks. I teleport away. I rush in. The villain attacks. I teleport away.
I’m inside the warehouse right now. There are no windows. The door is open.
An arcing wall of light stands between me and the door. I know I won’t be able to move through it. A lot of good capes have died inside walls like these.
My first thought is to rush at Mannequin—he’ll attack me, I’ll be teleported away, and he’ll be trapped here.
I’m not one to second-guess myself. Without a moment’s hesitation, I charge towards him.
He doesn’t attack.
He’s thought about his next move.
He grabs both my arms and twists, turning me around, my hands behind my back in his grip, which is unyielding but gentle—and eminently undangerous. I’m faced away from him, looking at the blurry entrance to the small concrete room, open to the world outside, on the other side of the wall of light. He holds me still, as if forcing me to see.
And I’m afraid, afraid for the first time.
~ ~ ~
February 5th, 2013. 13:05:35.011.
The Manton Effect really sucks for me because I’ve always been able to hurt myself. Don’t ask me how I know, but I can push a knife into my hand and my power won’t register it as something I need saving from. Because how would I be able to teleport from myself?
Unfortunately, this means that I need to provoke Mannequin into attacking me before I die of thirst.
“Come on, you asshole. Hit me. Kill me! Imagine what your dead wife and kids would say if they saw you now—they’d be laughing at how much of a little bitch you’re being. Come on—”
The words split off into a wheeze in my throat as he tightens around me. The chain that connects his arm to his shoulder is extended and wrapped around me, binding me to the chair next to his. His clawed hand hangs loosely from the chain, limp in my lap. He’s taking notes about some other project in some scrawling shorthand with the other. I’ve spent the last few hours looking over his shoulder, trying to decipher it, to no avail. Maybe he’s trying to make something that will get him out of this little room.
Of course, the other person in this predicament is a porcelain cyborg with no need for food or water or air, so he’s fine. I growl under my breath, and say, waspishly, “So what’s the plan? Just going to let me die and then what? Sit around for fifty years with nothing to do? I know there’s a brain in there. I know you’re not just some robot. You can’t be alone for that long, you’ll go crazy. How long until you use all the parts in this lab? Before you’re all tinkered out? Maybe you'll start chewing on the wires for something to do. Or you'll crack and just start playing puppet with my corpse.”
His pen stills. His featureless face turns to mine, and I shiver. He is, by appearance alone, one of the most terrifying members of the Nine. The indent that resembles a mouth is slightly parted, in an uncanny imitation of lips. I realize that what I have unwittingly offered him, the only thing that has caught his attention, is my companionship.
With a whirr, he reels in the chain. My arms, sore from being pinned to my sides, relax for a second before I scramble out of the chair, creating distance between me and him.
I need him to attack me. I can destroy a project, maybe—it’s the only other thing I can think of that will get him angry enough. I take a bar of scrap metal and whip it like a baseball bat against the machine that I now know is a specialized kiln. In the past few hours, I have watched, helpless from the chair, as he used it.
The impact reverberates painfully through my arms, and the rebar falls from my grip and bounces on the floor with an ugly clang. Seeing my ineffectual attempt at wreaking havoc, Mannequin rises from his chair, and lightning-quick, is upon me. He lowers me gently to the ground and keeps me pinned there.
“Damn you,” I mutter. “God damn you.”
He shakes his head from side to side in mocking disapproval. His weight bears down against me. I am splayed out like a starfish underneath him. Foot against foot, hand against hand.
~ ~ ~
February 5th, 2013. 13:05:35.013.
“Okay,” I say weakly, my voice thin and struggling to escape my dry throat. “Fine. Help me. I need your help.”
He turns at the sound of my voice and looks at where I’m curled up in the corner, as far away from him as the space affords, delirious and dying.
This is, in all likelihood, a decision that I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting. But being alive and regretful is maybe better than being nothing at all.
He stands, curling and uncurling his fingers one by one. It’s a habit of his, I’ve noticed. Rather than walking, he drags himself towards me, and the spidery motion feels foreboding. In that moment, he is not human. He assembles himself into a standing loom; he has over three feet of height on me. He cocks his head and throws a hand out, unslackening the chain like a fishing line, claws catching in my hair. The message is clear: I have placed my life in his hands.
I cough. "Please."
He pulls me to my feet, and I have to lean against the wall to stay upright. With a gesture, he tells me to take off my clothes. The process of dying has already stripped me of my modesty, and I turn my back to him so he can unzip my costume with little more hesitation than I would have at a doctor’s office.
The winter-chill of the Pacific Northwest is not as evident in the microclimate of our tiny world. No breeze carries the airmass of the ocean inland. Still, it is bracingly cold. I shiver uncontrollably as he picks me up and places me on a worktable. A needle flashes, and my querulous limbs go limp. My awful, useless, good-for-nothing precognition decides that this all continues to be fine.
I watch, paralyzed and naked, as he looks down at me, turning his head this way and that. My heart skips along like a frightened rabbit across a plain. I’m suddenly terrified that he’s going to dissect me, which is utterly irrational—if he tried, I’d be saved. It’s as though being unclothed on the table has reverted my emotions to their most primal variants.
The moment is broken when he turns away, to his ceramics. To his tubes and hydraulics.
I realize, then, that he’s going to make me a suit.
~ ~ ~
February 5th, 2013. 13:05:35.055.
I am roused gently, as I am every day, alongside the steady presence of the sun, but not by it. Rather, I wake because Mannequin changes the setting on my suit, adjusting temperatures, energy levels, draining the artificial haze of sleep from my body, to maintain a rigorous, 24-hour cycle.
Both of us sleep. We are at least allowed that luxury, to fight against the fourth Endbringer with a little time travelling of our own. It’s our secret weapon against the tide of hours: claiming them as our own in chunks of seven or eight. Mannequin sleeps sitting up, his legs lotused around him. Sometimes I sleep on the floor, on the other side of the room from him, lying down, my joints not as flexible as his. But most often I sleep outside, through the hole to the alley that we punched open in the wall (which I think of as the “back door”), in the little space by the trailer still sectioned inside the time field (which I think of as the “backyard”). On one horrifying occasion, I fell asleep by his side, against the wall, and woke to realize that I had slumped over, my head jammed against the crook of his knee.
My daily routine goes like this. I stand up. The suit, ceramic and unmarked—a mockery of his own—is impressively light, adding little to the burden of my body. If I’m not already outside, then I duck through the back door and go outside. I trace the perimeter, back and forth, trying to see if anything has changed about the world past the blur. Back and forth, back and forth, until the repetition exhausts me.
When I come back inside, Mannequin is waiting for me. I promised him companionship for my life, but I am loath to give it to him. Still, daily maintenance is necessary. I have no doubt that it would not be if he wished it so.
I sit on the workbench. His posture is relaxed, but he leans forward. He enjoys the work. It satisfies him. Sometimes it will take no more than five minutes. He hooks me up to the diagnostic machine he built for my suit, will peer at the readings, open panels in my limbs and chest. The suit does not provide enough of a barrier when he gets close. Sometimes it will take longer, because he will be inspired to make a modification to me. He will explain what he is doing, through writings and gestures eerie in their forbearance: a hydraulic system that will prevent various muscles from atrophying, a cleaner solution for biological processes, a helmet upgrade that will make more efficient the photosynthesis that feeds my body, and so on.
When he is finished working on me, he will take a cloth from a drawer and polish me. He will drag the cloth over my head, over the specialized paneling that obscures my face but allows me to see, over my neck and chest and back, each arm, each finger, and each leg, from boot to hip.
He will do so with an almost reverent care. My nerves, locked inside my porcelain exterior, will not respond to his touch. But I will feel it, nonetheless.
And I will think, in these despairing moments, on how the suit has become body, how the shell has become skin.
I will then flee through the back door outside, and stay there until I can no longer bear the boredom. I will come back inside and watch him work, and he will occasionally explain some of his work to me—after all, he is still a Tinker—a parahuman—a human. He has many other projects; I am merely his avocation.
I have grasped some of the basics of his sign language. Not out of any effort on his part to teach me, nor on my part to learn, but simply because I have been exposed to it and only it for weeks. Whether it is standard or an impromptu pidgin of his own invention, I don’t know.
In the evenings, I will pace, and prowl, and read, and write. I will write and write and write. I write in a journal every day, pages and pages of rambling scrawl. I have not yet learned to write neatly with this hand. I write to track the passage of time, and because I’ve come to know the companionship of a blank, featureless white: an empty page. I will play games with myself, I will draw. Trees and plants and flowers, an endless secret garden in ink.
And then I will sleep at last, and dream of Glade and Curvet and Gasconade and everyone else on the other side of the universe.
Who am I? I am an escape artist. I am an unwitting lab experiment of a scientist-turned-serial killer. I am a companion, a statement piece. I’ve come to learn that he is satisfied by what he has created of me. He has turned his enemy into something that resembles himself. I am a captive to his care—in short, I am his dog.
But I was, and will one day again be, a hero.
~ ~ ~
February 5th, 2013. 13:05:35.497.
I’ve seen my arms cut to ribbons by my hand. I’ve been shot at, swung at, every attack in the book has been directed at me. I’ve gotten most of the way to death by dehydration. But this, without a doubt, is the most cruel fate of all.
“You feel it too,” I say. Out of habit, my hands make signs to him as I speak, underlining every fifth or sixth word, even though he can hear. “Going crazy in here. Every day the same shit. I know you feel it, because your projects are getting weirder. I mean, you’re gardening in the fucking backyard. You’re not even growing anything useful. You’re growing weeds. How dumb is that? What would Jack say if he saw you now? You’re just trying shit. I mean,” I loosen and wave my retractable chain-hands around, whacking him with them to punctuate my point, “there was no logical reason why you’d give me something this stupid. You’re bored.”
I remember that at some point, months ago, I was once firm in my resolve not to speak with him more than absolutely necessary. Maintenance in the morning, his work in the evening. Over time, that resolve has crumbled into nothing, and now between us is a constant chatter, a dialogue of words and signs and letters. We have, by virtue of being the only two moving objects in the world, been pulled into each others’ orbits.
He looks up from the soil, which he has been tilling with his bare hands, clawing at it like an animal. He gazes at me. I am well-versed in his expressions, even though they are little more than an angling of the head, an arrangement of limbs, the parting of a sealed mouth.
He strides inside through the back door, out of sight.
Every salvageable material in our circle has been assembled and disassembled several times over by him, projects dismantled into new ones. I am the only project that has survived through all of his whims. When I see him next, he shows me what he has remade of scraps: thirty two pieces of porcelain, arranged in four neat rows, two and two, facing each other, a field of checkered squares etched in between.
I sit across from him, looking over a world in miniature—termite-like. I think of Arsenal, on the other side, teaching me the moves. I laugh and laugh.
~ ~ ~
February 5th, 2013. 13:05:36.108.
“Just let me win, you asshole! Don’t you ever get bored of winning?”
He reaches out, towards my chest, stopping an inch away from it—he nudges my bishop off of the board with his castle.
Bored of everything. You might as well earn your victory, he signs.
I take my king and chuck it at his head, and he allows the piece to hit his face with a sharp crack. “You better be so damn grateful that I’m here with you,” I say. “Otherwise you’d be playing chess against yourself again and again like a madman.”
He does not get an opportunity to respond. An alarm—two tiles operated by hydraulics to chatter together like teeth—signals an atmospheric change in the garden of crabgrass and dandelion outside. He has controlled the garden ecosystem carefully, and Mannequin perks up at the disturbance, his head swiveling like a cat that has sensed prey.
I follow him outside to a miracle.
“Oh my god,” I say. “It’s raining. It’s actually raining!”
Whether it’s from the evaporated moisture of upturned soil, or the water vapor that has gradually collected over the years, somehow, the slice of sky trapped inside our cylinder has managed to put into motion its own water cycle.
Enraptured and joyous, I spin in circles. The shell is skin—the droplets splatter against my helmet and it’s as though I’m dancing bare underneath the rain.
Thoughtlessly, I leap towards Mannequin and pounce on him. Instead of twisting away and letting me fall on the floor, he catches me.
~ ~ ~
February 5th, 2013. 13:05:36.961.
I punch and kick and rage against the light. Unlike the concrete, which crumbles against my fist in a cloud of dust and rubble, the circular cage is unyielding.
I scream, my voice raw.
“Let me out! Let me the fuck out!”
Mannequin sits and watches me, impassive. He has borne solemn witness to many such breakdowns from me before. He waits until I am exhausted, and then he picks me up and places me on the workbench.
He pulls open my palm to see a crack, a hairline fracture spreading across like a life-line. He holds my hands in his, hunched over, assessing the damage. He hooks me up to the diagnostic machine. I say nothing, but he signs to me in efficient motions, cold and clinical as always, explaining to me how he is going to fix me. The procedure is routine enough that, Tinker brain or not, I’ve long since learned the ins and outs of it. He rebuilds my hands, the joints, the claws—he does not take them away. He could make me smooth and harmless and inept. But he does not, no matter how much destruction I impart in moments of anger upon his warehouse, his projects, or him. He never has.
I hang my head and begin to cry. My suit detects the change in moisture and folds the tears away into nothing. He pauses his work, and then loosens one arm, wrapping it around me. I'm reminded of a lifetime ago, my human body bound to my chair. It isn’t a hug. In no world, not even this tiny one, could it be called a hug. But I go limp anyway, pitching forward until my head knocks against his torso. He leaves one arm snaked around me and continues working with the other.
He cleans me, and as always, I lean into the touch of the cloth. My eyes lowered, my forehead still pressed against him. He runs the cloth between each reconstructed finger, brushing up my arms in spirals—and although the rest of my body has been scrubbed that same morning, he is driven by ritual to do the rest of me too. I’m glad that I don’t have to ask.
I straighten up, lifting my head, and look around as he tends to me. As always, I turn and twist, cooperating limply as he angles my head this way and that, then lying on my back so he can care to every part of my body. In doing so I can take a full inventory of the room. The scarred concrete, the little paneled window we have made that watches over our overgrown, gnarled imitation of a garden. The workbenches and tables shoved up against the light in a gentle arc. Lining the perimeter that cuts us off from the front door—rather than the sun, it is the soft glow of the time field's edge that illuminates our respective writing and tinkering. Bookshelves embedded in the wall, fashioned from rubble and smoothed into orderly shapes, lined with my journals and his. The notes on my desk—I’ve become something of a lab assistant to him, offering menial help for a lack of things to do. I’ve had to become more economical with my words, as Mannequin’s stash of spare journals has dried up. With paper a precious resource, I'm spurred to take old drawings of spruces, swordferns, silverweeds, and find a use for them. They litter the walls in a poor attempt at decoration. I'm caught up making ridiculous comparisons between the two, for the thousandth time: Glade always complemented my drawings, while Mannequin regards them with cool indifference.
This is more than my home. This is my world. The person that I am is tied to this place, now. My life is documented in the pages on the shelves.
He lifts me up and brings me to our sleeping corner. He sits up, as always. His legs petal open to create a space for me. I sit on the floor and curl up, fenced in by his lap. The arrangement is awkward, but I get comfortable with practiced ease. When I stop shifting, he bends forward like a gymnast, draping himself over me.
We are like two dovetails slotted into each other. Foot against foot. Hand against hand. In the vast landscape of time, the hours are as precious as they’ve ever been.
~ ~ ~
February 5th, 2013. 13:05:37.425.
On the 1,921st day, the wall of light winks out without ceremony.
The earpiece, which has been made to last, somehow remembers its purpose and crackles to life after 5 years of dormancy. Detached from its helmet, it sets itself automatically to the speaker setting.
—status, team?
The unfamiliar sound emerges from years in the past. Muffled as it is by the desk drawer, it seems to rip through the silence like a gunshot. Mannequin and I look at each other with almost comical bewilderment.
As if approaching a bomb, I gingerly walk to the drawer and open it, and wince as the sound grows louder.
This is Two and Seven, Jack and Bonesaw spotted fleeing upon Endbringer arrival. Some leftover surprises keeping us busy here.
Gasconade and Arsenal. I remember their call-signs. The thought is vague and dreamlike.
Two and Seven, I see you now. Guess it was just a fly-by from Khonsu. Status, Six?
Mannequin does not move to stop me as I pick up the earpiece between my finger and thumb. I am trembling from shock, but the suit will ensure that I do not drop it.
Six?
I respond to the cape who was once my captain, with a voice raspy from disuse. It has been a week and possibly much longer since I have felt the need to communicate to Mannequin in anything other than sign.
“I’m—I’m fine,” I say. “This is Six. I’m here.”
The comms go silent. Then, Curvet says, in a false-casual voice: Roger, Six. Shoot us the password while you’re at it?
Tears well up in my eyes. I am not Escape Artist, I am not Six, I am not myself. I am a suit, I am a shell. I do not remember the password. Why would I remember the password? A fly-by? Try five years—
The tears are already gone, the suit having absorbed them, but I go further, destroying the tears from within myself. I crush the speaker between my fingers with little effort. My hands, my claws. He has given them to me and he has never taken them away. Sluggishly, I recall the details of the fight from five years ago. They’ll probably assume I’ve been mastered. In a way, perhaps, I have.
Sun shines in from the window. The faraway noises of destruction, the rustling of trees, the wailing of birds: after the complete serenity of the blurry wall, even quiet noises are almost too much to bear.
“Well,” I murmur, “I think it’s time to take the suit off.”
My hands sign the words to him as I speak. It has never been necessary, and yet I have acquired the habit. We are the only two objects in the world, and we are in orbit.
To my equal relief and dread, he seems to agree. He nods at the workbench, and I hop onto it. He hooks me to the machine one last time—takes one final smattering of notes on the backside of a piece of paper, littered with diagrams of fly agaric, annotated in my messy scrawl. I know, in that moment, that he will keep the notes. He will keep my drawings and my journals. I know that he has read them all, from cover to cover.
He presses a button on the machine and turns back to me. Carefully, carefully, he watches as I come apart, piece by piece.
First are the hands, the claws. The interlocking seams twist and open. My gloves come apart in two and fall to the floor. I stare in uncomprehending awe at my human skin. My fingers shake like a spider dancing on its web.
Then are the arms. He works, his chain spooling and unspooling with a whirr that I have come to find pleasant to the ear. My arms fall apart. My arms are bare, fine hairs standing on their ends.
The chest and back are next. I crack open and bloom out of the ceramic. Tubes unfurl and fall limp on the ground. I look up at him, my chest heaving, wound tightly enough to snap. He looks down at me, emotionless, continuing to work. He is focused on the work. He looks back at the machine. I cannot help but wonder, jealously: will he miss this suit? Will he miss having another person to experiment on? Will he miss having something to keep alive for once? Will he miss—as absurd as it sounds—my company?
My waist. Here the working is complex, and it takes a while for it to undo itself. Each panel in a ring turns, expanding the entire arrangement. Unlike the other parts of my body, it does not fall away on its own, and here Mannequin unclasps the ring with his own hands, leaving the most intimate part of me bare. He does not touch my skin, but I can feel the closeness of him like a vibration in the air, and I’m overtaken by freshly uncontrollable shivering.
Now he is no longer paying attention to the machine. He holds each of my legs in one hand. Without thinking, I hike them up, leaning back on my elbows. Dexterously, curling and uncurling his fingers—they bend back at unnatural angles—he plucks the foot panels that are coming apart and peels them away, and the legs follow suit, revealing my calves, my knees, and finally my thighs.
I sit back up, and he reaches with both hands for my head, which is still firmly on. It is one contiguous piece, and does not come apart. Ever so gently, he pulls it off and sets it behind him on the other desk. My hair is mussed. In a daze, I shake it out of my eyes, and look at him, for the first time in five years, with absolutely nothing in between.
This time, I am ferociously aware of my nudity. I vaguely recall my costume, stuffed away in one of the desk drawers. When I make a miniscule motion to get off the workbench, his hand flashes out and grabs my arm. I stifle a scream. My skin has known nothing but the steady inside of a shell for so long, and the burning sensation of a cold hand on a wrist is almost overwhelming, on the edge of torture. Like every other moment in the past five years, my precognition has nothing to say of it.
His fingers open, one by one. I stare at him, my eyes wide, panting like a dog. The analogy is apt, because he then reaches up slowly to caress the top of my head, carding through my hair, which has been kept from growing by the suit. His fingers travel down to my face, where he drags lines across my forehead, my cheeks, my jaw. Each gentle touch is explosive to my understimulated skin and I squirm from where I am sitting on the table, straining to keep quiet.
It’s when he rubs my neck, his palm rocking back and forth as he drags it horizontally across my sensitive throat, that I understand what he is doing.
He is polishing me.
Gasping for breath, on the verge of hyperventilation, I allow him to tilt my head this way and that, tugging my chin up and then down as he does. Slower than he has ever moved with the cloth, at a deliberate pace that could only be achieved by someone truly relishing in their actions, he moves his hands lower to my shoulders. And then lower still, to my torso. A cry escapes my lips at last when he does, and he pauses for only a second before continuing his ministrations. His hand is at a right angle to his wrist as he rubs circles on my chest, my solar plexus, my stomach. When he moves to my back, I inch closer, scooting to the edge of the table, and so does he, pressing himself down, reaching around with his arms behind me until we are in a loose sort of embrace.
Then he cleans my arms, rubbing from the socket of my shoulder, gripping my bicep with one hand and the tricep with the other, smoothing his hands down to my elbow, then continuing to my hands. I am no longer quiet, my breaths escaping in feverish, harshly vocalised bursts. He caresses each individual finger, stroking the webbing in between, tracing a thumb over the edge of each nail.
I know the routine well, as well as I know anything. Next are the legs, from boot to hip. As I have a thousand times before, I pitch backwards until my back is against the cold metal of the table—forgetting that I am nothing but bare skin, I react to the shock with a full-body flinch. I hiss and whine as his hands encircle my feet, tickling my calves and my thighs. I arch up, as I always do, as he reaches my hip. One hand curls around my bottom, the other grips my inner thigh. As intimate as the touch is, his hands administer the same exacting treatment as they do the rest of my body, even as I writhe and gasp.
Then he levers me back up so that I am sitting. As if to finally dispel the notion that this is simply another routine maintenance, he places his hand between my legs. My hands fly to my mouth, swallowing a shriek. He keeps his hand there, completely still. For a second, my world is blank white. When my surroundings cohere, I realize that this is because I am pressing myself down against his touch. The seconds, the minutes fall away. I skip through time, throwing it behind us with reckless abandon, looking ahead past the present as my power does, until I fall apart and am cleansed. I take heaving, exhausted breaths, and then I curl forward and rest my forehead against him. He wipes his hand on my stomach, smearing my skin, and I laugh weakly.
Now everything has come undone.
After some time—there is no need to keep track of it, now—the distant sounds grow less distant, and I realize that the members of the Seattle Protectorate threaten to approach and see one of their teammates in a very unusual and compromising position. I slither down onto the ground and walk on shaky legs to the desk.
I don’t enjoy the prospect of putting on underwear that has been collecting dust for five years, but the microfabrics of my bodysuit are good at keeping clean. Still, I feel very dubious about my own hygiene, unfamiliar in its humanness, when I allow Mannequin to help me put it on.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
He stares at me. For so long, I have structured my life around him. I have woken up and fallen asleep at his direction. And his presence has informed everything in between. Now, he is motionless, passive. I have no idea what to do.
I take a step forward. To be at eye level with me, he has let his legs fold from underneath him, giving the impression that he is kneeling. I caress his face with one hand.
I leave it there for one, two seconds: enough for eternity.
Then I tell him, “Goodbye.”
He does not respond. I turn around. I take one step, then two, then three, and each step is more certain than the last, and then, finally, I cross into the very edge of the room, the part where my drawings suddenly stop covering the walls, where the floors are unblemished, the concrete intact.
I am a captive. I am a dog. I am a companion and an assistant and an experiment. I am an artist about to make an escape.
The sounds grow louder. I think I can make out Curvet's voice. I don’t know what I will tell her. I think that I will tell her the truth, or most of it, anyway. The heroes will probably deem me unfit to be one of them until I am exhaustively evaluated, treated, recovered. They will want to be certain that my name has escaped the shadow of his.
Also pouring in from outside is a gentle breeze. It catches my blazer, which flutters behind me with a mild flourish. On the threshold, my face is warmed by the sun, which draws a shadow behind me, casting it into the room at my back.
I wonder if he is watching me.
I don't turn around to look. I am not certain why, but I am certain: I will see him again someday.
My fingers curl and uncurl, one at a time, and I walk through the front door, which, for five years—for two seconds—has always been open.