HOURS LATER AND I am back across the Atlantic like a diligent alcoholic, having resisted the tidal scrum of London’s sweaty nightlife aided and abetted by it being only midmorning. All my customary playmates are in their hidey holes sleeping things off, and besides, I am a man on a mission guided by the smart phone in my pocket I carry like it might be some Nietzschean lantern to liberate my sanity.

Gumbel’s mansion is an abomination in the sepulchral New England dawn. Stucco walls and Spanish archways and red-tiled stables with their throwback to Andalusia and ancient Rome before them glimmer brightly in the morning light, the susurrus of twigs and other Fall detritus beneath my boots as I creep like a parole-breaking lowlife to case the joint. There is no point being here. The crime scene is more than three months old, the trail cold, not all that glimmers in my smart phone gold. Yet these are the clues I assembled, back when I made my Boy Scout’s vow to chase this thread to the very end of the weave. And so here I am, placing one awkward foot in front of the other.

Eventually it’s clear there is no one around. I make into the open, listening for the sounds or even the pluming nostrils of the horses that once dwelt in these wintry stalls. Nada. Moving along the leaf-strewn crushed pebble avenue between the stables and the back sheds, I scan the castillo ahead for signs of life, but there are none. None that I can discern, anyway.

When the one-time Avenger Tommy Hilfiger was killed, a veritable Aladdin’s cave from his secret life was found by the authorities. With Synergy now dead or in some kind of un-life, I can’t be assured the latest investigation was carried out with the same due acumen and I am in no rush to reacquaint myself with my fan base at the FBI’s parahuman affairs division. The longer I can put between me and having to own up to releasing a handful of the world’s most dangerous villains from secure confinement the better, as far as I’m concerned. In which case it falls to this little brown duck to move up to a glass side door and do what I seem to do best these days, elbowing out a pane and letting myself into the cool, positively frigid interior of the stylised mansion.

The noise tells me I am not alone. Unless my crashing arrival startled a family of rats, the pitter-patter of tiny feet suggests a human presence upstairs.

Although I don’t know the layout and I am normally not one for rushing entirely headlong into unknown danger – well OK, you’ve got me there – I burn some calories hurtling around the main lobby and up the ballroom steps so reminiscent of Twilight’s place in everything except décor. Gumbel’s home has a varied layout on the first floor, but its much the same in that basically its bedrooms and en suites and the end of the second hall betrays a flash of movement as I club through the door before Gumbel’s uninvited guest can get away.

I’M NOT PREPARED for naked women. Hard to believe, I know, but slip a nude nymphette in the middle of my fight-or-flight mode and I get confused.

Truth to be told, the girl is not entirely nude as she drops her other gathered possessions and struggles into an oversized t-shirt as soon as she realises the jig is up, big dark grey eyes like saucers staring back at me from a face fringed by a single shock of faded pink hair. The rest of her hair is shaved down to stubble in a move that somehow highlights the waif’s fragile beauty rather than undermining it. As I stand unmoving, trying hard to adapt to my circumstances and making sure the other shoe isn’t about to drop, the girl keeps eyes locked on mine as she slips bare feet into a pair of scuffed, weirdly-made leather boots, Dr Martens written on the tags protruding self-conscious yet proudly from the rear.

“Who are you?” we say at the same time.

The synchronicity gets a laugh from me. Less so the urchin. Those big eyes scan over me once more, nostrils widening like those of a feral beast as she sniffs and nearly whimpers.

“Bad man coming,” she says.

“What?”

I whip about, preparing for an ambush, but the seconds tick by and she eyes me even more weirdly and the feeling is so off-putting I’m momentarily willing to put my immediate safety at risk to shoot her a questioning look before glancing out the windows onto the grounds from which she could’ve easily seen me coming had she not been sleeping in what I presume to be Gumbel’s bed. The master bedroom has been defrocked of its many things in circumstances I can only hazily ponder, but the bed and sheets are twisted, mattress still depressed with the girl’s elfin shape. She shivers, the heat not on in the house, and I wonder how long she’s been holed up here.

“Since just after he died,” the girl says.

A chill goes down my spine.

“You’re a telepath?”

She nods.

“Do I know you?”

“Do you?”

“You don’t know?”

“You sound like you’re the one who knows,” she says, word her own, the voice somehow like a mockery of mine.

I can see this spinning out of control pretty quickly. I make a silencing motion she only decides to follow instead of obeying.

“Maybe you can tell me what you’re doing here,” I say.

“You first.”

I take a deep breath, refusing to blow this moment through my own impunity. I nod slowly, words trickling out of me.

“I’m hunting the people who killed my mother.”

“But you know who killed your mother and where to find her,” the girl says.

“Get out of my head.”

The girl shrugs, nods. Moves off a distance. I avert my eyes as she slips on underwear beneath the long tee which has CHOOSE LIFE in big letters on it.

“I know where to find Ono, but her base inTokyo’s impregnable. Last time I went there my . . . siblings almost killed me, and I lost my powers. The other place I know she’ll be is backwards in time. I don’t have any means to do that right now.”

“So you are after the man who killed Bryant,” the girl says.

I concur. “If we haven’t met before, tell me what I should call you?”

“Tessa,” she says.

I look at the girl like she’s kidding, but she means it, so before the echoes have even died I shake my head. “No no, that’s not gonna fly. Don’t you know how much confusion this is going to create if you have that name? What’s your middle name?”

“I don’t like my middle name.”

“Then give me another name.”

I scowl again, re-examining the petite face, the prescient look to her eyes, her almost fairytale complexion, the mildest slant to her ears. Another face and time and place swim before me and I actually hold up my squared-off hands to frame her like a fashion photographer, but I can’t place where we may have met before, if at all.

“What drew you here?” I ask.

“I will tell you my story, but I need a name.”

“Are you . . . Bellwether?”

“Does that name means something to you?” she asks, almost playful given she knows most what I know.

“I don’t actually know,” I say. “I only met . . . her . . . briefly.” My confusion addled by mixed memory.

“Well that will do,” she says. “Belle for short.”

I unwittingly grunt at the cuteness. Nod again. Always fucking nodding. “OK.”

“I want to stop the man who killed Bryant as well,” the girl says.

“Arsenal,” I say. “Steve Seagal.”

“Will you let me help you?”

“OK, but you gotta tell me your story first.”

Belle nods and sits on the edge of the bed like this is going to take a while.

SO, THE STORY goes we have this girl from theMidwestand she starts going through the lady changes and all that jazz, only the part they don’t explain in the Where Do Babies Come From book her parents give her is the part where suddenly she can start hearing what almost everyone’s saying. Fair enough, our girl goes a bit loony tunes and despite the overwhelming prevailing evidence of superhuman powers in the world, Belle’s folks – maybe they were a bit churchy or maybe just a bit stupid – eventually they put her in that Angelina Jolie movie except it’s a lot darker than that and the wardens make the girls fight each other because apparently they all secretly have powers or some shit, like the way she explains it isn’t very clear because her story’s full of more than its fair share of logic bombs, but perhaps there is some guy in the middle of the system who knows these misguided or troublesome teenage girls are probably parahumans instead of ordinary freaks, but they all end up in there together and yeah, it’s pretty bad, but Belle manages to come to grip with her psionic abilities and she and another girl, her girlfriend in fact, they break out one night, only the girlfriend is killed or they get separated in the escape or something (it gets confusing here) and Belle makes her way by railroad (yeah I know, by railroad? It’s at this point I ask her if she’s making this but up because it’s starting to sound like a bad episode of Lassie – that’s not to imply there’s a good episode of Lassie, unless you’re a dog-person, which I’m not, or a pervert, which I definitely am not, or at least not like that – but Belle insists everything she’s said is true and offers to something like “download” her experiences into my mind, which I politely decline) to the east coast where Belle makes her way up from the south of Atlantic City in Georgia. Long story short, she hears about a guy who’s putting money on the street looking for people who can tell him more about something weird that’s been happening to him, and once our girl passes on word that she can read minds, a black limousine pulls up for her and its soup kitchens no longer for Belle as she’s whisked into the lap of luxury approximately, oh, about six hours before Arsenal turns up and incinerates Gumbel while he’s out inspecting the horses. The Feebs turn up and do a frighteningly good job of scaring everyone including the squirrels into the wilderness and after a couple of days they hand over the property to the family, who promptly ransack the joint and put the murder house on the market. Its been discounted twice since, people either less than keen on the idea of buying a palatial estate where someone was recently killed or perhaps just not keen on the somewhat idyll-destroying aesthetics of flamenco in their multimillion dollar real estate portfolio.

“So I’m meant to just assume it’s coincidence that one of the Twelve turns up here just a day before the guy who for some reason has a vendetta against all y’all also turns up and kills the guy you know, who. . .” and I hold up a hand, knowing I am losing the battle against time, tide, logic and grammar. “Hang on, I’ve got this. The guy who you knew in a prior life, if you really are Bellwether, but that life was erased . . . erased when you. . . because you’re only . . . how old are you. . . ?”

“Erased from before I was born,” Belle says.

I blink and nod, saying nothing about another infiltration into my head if this time it actually helps me get something straight. Her fey grin tells me she’s just stolen everything of what little I know about the Twelve and probably understands it better than me already.

“I don’t know why I would’ve agreed to that, but it’s possible,” Belle says. “You said – or your memories say – somehow the Twelve were world weary and disliked what they had become, and your father . . . no, not your father . . . that’s a doozy, that one . . . the Preacherman, he convinces them to willingly undergo some kind of bizarre cosmic surgery in order to return to normal lives. Or, you know, normal for successful millionaire artists and writers and fashion designers and that sort of thing.”

“He was in league with these . . . things. In subspace,” I say. “I don’t even want to say their name. I think they can listen in, somehow.”

“You know this?”

“Just being paranoid.”

“So if future me agreed to that . . . erasure, then she was agreeing to have her whole life unmade and to start over again. To maybe risk not even being born.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s some pretty hardcore self-loathing right there.”

“Well, we are not the same person,” Belle says. “We lived entirely different lifetimes, if what you say is true.”

“And it would also mean if Arsenal is trying to kill the Twelve, you would be the hardest of them all to track down.”

“Except . . . I’m here.”

We both nod, looking around ominously like the assassin might appear at any moment.

Zephyr 15.5 “Signs Of Life” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose