Carrie Vaughn - Discord's Apple

“I should help him,” she murmured. “I don’t know how to help him.”

“I’ll leave,” Alex said softly, and turned.

“No.” She winced and looked away, floundering for words, wondering what she was doing. “I mean, you don’t have to. Do you have a place to stay? Mr. Alvarez said you weren’t at the motel.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been here and there. I’ll find a place. I always do. But if you think you could use a friend just now . . .”

If she asked him to stay and he did, she might find out more about him, she rationalized. Once again she asked herself, If the sword was Excalibur, and the woman was Hera . . . who was he ?

“I could use the company.” That sounded a little more honest.

“All right.”

They stared at each other across the living room for a moment. Evie, tense and shaken, rubbed her hands and tried to keep her shoulders from bunching. Mab had settled down between the bedroom doors, lying with her head resting on her paws, looking dejected.

“You hungry?” Evie said abruptly, making a dash for the kitchen. “I’ll make sandwiches.”

“Can I help?”

“No, just sit down, make yourself at home.”

She got as far as getting the bread out when her mobile phone rang. She ran to the living room, grabbed the phone off the coffee table, glanced apologetically at Alex, and answered the phone as she returned to the kitchen.

“Hi, Bruce.”

“Have you had a chance to watch the news yet, or should I just tell you how world politics are fucking with our storyline?”

She didn’t mean for her sigh to sound as forlorn as it probably did. “Things have been a little crazy here. I still haven’t seen the news.”

Bruce waited a second before asking, “How’s your dad?”

She almost used her father’s line: Fine, okay. Just like Frank’s daughter. But Bruce was her friend—she should have been talking to him all along. She should have called him, instead of him calling her all the time.

“Not good. He isn’t getting treatment, he’s in pain, and there’s nothing I can do. He won’t talk, he’s pretending like nothing’s wrong—” Her voice cracked, and she shut her mouth to keep from breaking into a full-blown sob.

“Evie, I’m sorry. If there’s anything—”

“I know, I know. Thanks, Bruce. I think I just need to keep working. Keep busy.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. So tell me, what’s the President done now?”

“Well. Russia came up with proof that China’s been funding the rebels. So the E.U. is siding with Russia and India. The U.S. is still waffling. Britain is waffling, and the E.U. is threatening sanctions on them for siding with the U.S.”

“And we’ve got a whole storyline with the U.S. and Russia being friends. That’ll never fly.”

“This whole mess is playing like someone’s idea of a fucked-up war game. It’s just so unreasonable.”

“Is it ever reasonable?” Evie said. She knew what he meant, though. She couldn’t help but conjure this image of stern generals and power-mad heads of states standing around tables with tactical displays, shuffling around troops and weapons, with no thought to the people on the ground—the real lives their decisions impacted. “Do we wait and see what happens?”

Bruce said, “We could be waiting for ages. I say we just keep going with what we have—the new stuff that you just sent—and play it by ear.”

“Do you want me to keep e-mailing scripts?”

“You know—I haven’t been working much. You can if you want. Definitely keep writing. Write anything. We’ll do something with it, at some point.” He sounded tired.

“How are things there?”

“Citywide curfew, but that’s nothing new. Callie finally got out of West Hollywood. It’s not too bad.”

“Hang in there.”

“You, too. Call me if you need anything.”

She needed to reverse time and live in last month, before her life had run away from her.

She made ham-and-cheese sandwiches, but her heart and appetite weren’t really in it. Eating would give her and Alex something to do while they stared at each other. She brought two plates with the sandwiches into the living room.

She had her work spread all over the coffee table: her laptop, powered down; pages of handwritten notes she’d collected when ideas hit her late at night, in bed, in the car, and the like; and a few back issues of Eagle Eye Commandos she used as reference.

Alex, sitting on the armchair, was reading one of these.

The faces staring back at her on the front cover belonged to Tracker and Talon. He was about to fall off a cliff; she was holding on to him, grimacing. Eagle Eye Commandos number 42. She wanted to snatch it out of his hands and hide it away, apologize for it. It wasn’t that she wasn’t proud of her work. It was—well, sometimes she felt guilty for being proud of it. It wasn’t exactly high literature.

“What do you think?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

He smirked. “I like how the flying bullets leave trails.”

She set down the plates, slumped onto the sofa, and smirked right back at him.

He said, “You write as E. L. Walker. Why don’t you use your full name?”

“Thirteen-year-old boys wouldn’t take the book seriously if they knew a girl wrote it.”

“But—” He opened to a page featuring Tracker. At Evie’s insistence, Bruce didn’t draw her in the stereotypical comic book manner of portraying women in skintight clothing, antigravity breasts and all. She wore functional black fatigues, had a reasonably normal athletic figure, and most of the time—splicing wire in the middle of a jungle, for example—looked downright scruffy. “—this is you, isn’t it? This isn’t about thirteen-year-old boys’ fantasies. It’s about thirteen-year-old girls’ fantasies.”

In another life, a parallel universe, Evie had enlisted in the military. Army, air force, whatever. She didn’t know what she would have done as a private or an airman. Administration, probably. Mostly, she’d wanted to have a bit of an adventure—basic training, for instance—and it seemed an easy way to go about it. Never mind that adventures weren’t supposed to be easy. College and independence diverted her. To this day, she wondered if she could have hacked it, and wondered if she should have tried, just to see.

When she didn’t answer, he turned back to the book, flipping pages without reading. “The presence of a nominally talented, self-sufficient woman hasn’t seemed to hinder sales.”

Alex was right. Evie never wanted Tracker to be a sex symbol. She wanted her to be a role model.

She stared at the page, her words in the speech balloons, and smiled fondly. “If just one girl out there picks up the book, and it makes her think she can do anything, I’d be happy.”

Evie looked at the old covers. Tracker featured on all of them. One of the ongoing storylines focused on her, her coming-of-age, her increasing confidence in herself and her abilities. Through all the other storylines—Talon’s insubordination, the unit’s rebelliousness, the fight against terrorism—Tracker’s personal development played a part. Often, the progress was uncertain—two steps forward, one step back as some tragedy undermined her faith in herself. At this rate, the storyline could go on forever, with Tracker never developing much beyond where she was now.

No, Evie ought to do something about that. Tracker needed to become independent. She needed to become a leader. Talon’s equal, not his hero-worshipping subordinate.

“Is Bruce your boyfriend?”

“Hm?” Evie glanced up. Alex had a sandwich in hand, but he hadn’t taken a bite. He looked at her questioningly.