DAY TWO, AND I wake to find Tessa sitting on the end of my bed. The good feelings have gone and she is sobbing quietly, unmindful of me nearly naked beneath what passes forManchesteraround here.

“Hey,” I say, the words malformed by the detritus of sleep, me sitting up, wiping phlegm from my freshly-shaved cheek. “What’s the matter?”

“I was so worried you were dead this time,” Tessa says and takes the hand I offer. “You know, really really dead this time?”

“I get it. I’m not. I don’t know how, but there you have it. I’m here.”

Tessa sets to sobbing again and I sigh in a fatherly way, pulling sheets securely around me before pulling her closer for a hug.

I notice the Wallachians have laid out a new costume for me and redesigned it in the process. With my darling daughter quietening beside me, I give a bemused look in the hopes my relative humour might catch on, stretching, aided and abetted by her to drag the alarmingly one-piece outfit into my reach.

“OK, what the fuck is this?”

“I think one of the monks might be a frustrated fashion designer,” Tessa sniffles and laughs. “They’re often leaving little presents like this around.”

The first thing I take in is the white lacquered zee on the chest and nod to myself, the symbol of the past returned, my anarchist-inspired redesign no doubt gracing a trashcan in some unknown parallel cosmos wherever the Wallachians dump their rubbish. My recently purloined leather jacket hangs over the back of the room’s sole chair, something unsettling about Ikea creations finding their way to even here. The new costume cuts at wrist and ankles, but otherwise a curious mix of space age fabrics clearly designed to imitate all the benefits of my leather outfit without actually mirroring the look. The fabric is thick, though seems to respond to my touch. It’s hard to get too het up about it, knowing it’ll probably be in shreds by the end of the week if not the end of the day. Still, as Tessa turns her back with a giggle and I ease into the weirdly slippery thing, it feels a bit like wearing a body stocking, right up until the point where the back seals itself up and a warm clinch settles about my gonads.

“OK, what the hell is that?”

“What?”

“I think this suit is . . . blowing me.”

Tessa laughs. Laughs hard. I smirk too, glad for the sudden levity as she struggles for breath and explains there’s a variety of interdimensional tech factored into the costumes the Wallachians frequently supply their enigmatically supported guests, including Dune-style still-suit technologies to basically eliminate the need for eliminations, if you follow my drift.

“Well OK, but this is awkward,” I say.

“My costume, it’s like being gone down on by goldfish,” my daughter says matter-of-factly. “You get used to it after a while. It’s handy.”

Our hilarity settles. I slip on the acid-etched jacket and find my boots. Contemplate wearing gloves again even though it makes me look a bit like a gay biker. Tessa settles into a clinch and I kiss the top of her head, she resigned that she’s probably never going to top either me or her mother in height. She smells like everything good in the world and I close my eyes a moment as safe and secure as if we are holidaying at some French farm house, fresh-cut tulips on the wind, bread baking and wine airing on a freshly-painted window sill nearby. Sadly not. I re-open my eyes to the reality of the Wallachians’ clinical hospitality, the suit still settling on me like tiny fingers probing my every crevice, and I realise the gift of the new duds is really just an adumbration of something mysterious and yet to be explained.

“I’VE BEEN AWAY,” I say needlessly to Tessa. “How are things with your mother? You guys patch things up?”

The moment the words are out I realise I have walked into a shit-storm. All my carefully woven good feelings disappear as Tessa starts stuttering.

“She’s gone,” she says. “No. Short answer. No. Fuck.”

“Don’t cuss, honey –”

“Dad,” Tessa scowls at me, struggling to rein in her raw emotions. “She moved toEnglandwith the Harald Hardrada.”

“Hardrada?”

“Look it up,” Tessa snaps. “We barely spoke. The custody thing’s still a . . . a thing, I guess, but me up here, there’s not a lot she can do about it.”

“Christ,” I say. “And the apartment?”

“Jeez, thanks for making your priorities clear, pops.”

“What, I can’t wonder at where the hell I’m going to sleep tonight?”

Tessa gives me a new, fresh-out-of-the-packet variety of her hurt look and I quiz her back. “What?”

“I sort of thought you were going to stay here . . . for a while?”

“In the Fortress of Doom? I don’t think so,” I say and laugh and stop laughing when I realise this is touching on some serious daddy issues. “There’s something not right about this place, honey, and not right about these monks. I’m not comfortable with you being here either, truth be told, but we sort of arrived at this whole situation kinda sideways and, well, I guess you’re a big girl now. Or I should say, you know, in the interests of full disclosure, I think that’s complete bullshit. You’re sixteen. You’re still sixteen, right? An-an-and there’s no way you should be living away from home, let alone part of the crappiest superhero teams this city’s ever seen. No offence. But we both know this situation way overcooked itself long before I disappeared for three months.”

Tessa blinks back at me. “Sorry dad. Having overload. This is the longest we’ve spoken in months and months,” she says.

Before we can speak any further, a shadow appears in the doorway.

Manticore.

“Uh, group meeting,” he says. “And you’re both invited.”

The hair model gives a serious curt nod to me and withdraws. I raise my eyebrow at Tessa, but my daughter looks away with the air of a guilty conscience.

SO I TRAIPSE into the ready room and note the others standing or lounging about. There’s been a slight roster change since the Titan Situation. In the room are Vulcana, Manticore, Smidgeon and my daughter. Mastodon, Susurrus and Heracleon are out, and of course so is Brasseye, the magic robot last seen getting his head torn clean off in the ruins of our nation’s capitol. Replacing those members are the cutesy young gravity-wielder Syzygy and the brick Coalface, though he’s not on fire at the moment and in his dormant state resembles an overlarge Ving Rhames with slightly smeared, blunt, plasticine features. The big screen TVs behind them play images of some cataclysmic fight between man-gods in another parallel or something and I am just about to state the obvious, like maybe we should be going to see what we can do, when Tessa whispers to me that it’s just a DVD.

Vulcana shoots me a tight and strangely welcoming smile.

“Thanks everybody for coming so quickly,” she says, then motions to me. “I asked Zephyr to sit in with us because I know you’re all eager for me to. . . well, I’ll just cut to the point.”

All eyes are on me. For a nanosecond I fear it’s the costume, which makes every slight swelling of my gonads apparent, or so I think, even with the strangely light-absorbing quality of the plasticky black fabric that wants to be leather a bit like most high school kids want to be me (or at least once did).

I home in on Vulcana’s glassy, uncomfortable, I’m-eating-a-shit-sandwich-but-at-least-I-used-thick-bread smile. My own empathising best manners wilt.

“OK. What gives?” I say, sotto voce.

“We want you to rejoin the team,” Manticore says.

“And more than that,” Vulcana says. “The guys want you to lead us.”

A tiny bomb goes off inside my head (that’s a metaphor, don’t freak). Everything since my return suddenly makes sense and I nod slowly, the nod just as slowly becoming a furious head shaking.

“No. Thanks, but no.”

I stand up, smile, actually dust my hand together, which I know is kind of a bad move, you know, considering people’s feelings and everything, and I start towards the door hoping against hope that I can actually get away with this. Foolish, I know, but I’ve always been an optimist.

“Hang on,” Vulcana snaps. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“Sorry, I didn’t realise I encrypted it,” I answer her. “No means no. You’re a chick. You understand that.”

“But. . . .”

Vulcana looks around the room emptily. She’s got nothing, I realise suddenly. And then Connie makes it worse by bursting into tears. And then her “team” make it even worse by looking away awkwardly and it sort of falls to the new girl Syzygy to comfort Vulcana, or at least try (she gets her hands slapped away angrily), even though it’s clear she barely knows the erstwhile team leader from a bar of soap, and I scan the other new New Sentinels (in the interests of accuracy I should probably say new new New Sentinels, but that joke is getting old) and realise, like I am probably the last one to the party here, that Vulcana has been on the outer for a while now and without Smidgeon and maybe the ‘Don to back her up, she doesn’t have the group’s support.

“Well this is awkward, but I still mean no,” I say. “I’m really sorry, ‘Cana, but I have other things to do and leading the Sentinels isn’t it. Maybe in the future. I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you.”

“You reformed the team, Zephyr,” Vulcana blurts. “You promised.”

“I am not a wizard, Connie,” I find myself saying nonsensically, unable to switch off that particular tap. “If I was a wizard and I had magical powers and I could tell the future I can guarantee you I would be somewhere else doing something else right this very instant, OK?”

I leave the room with the others’ irritable looks pricking at my back, and Tessa, trying to play it cool, gives it about three seconds before hurrying after me while Manticore tells everyone else in the room what they’ve probably known for weeks now, which is that Windsong is my daughter.

Zephyr 15.2 “Eliminations” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose