Domino: Strays: A Marvel Heroines Novel by Tristan Palmgren

Author:Tristan Palmgren [Palmgren, Tristan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: superheroes
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

It took me a minute or two to come to terms with what she was saying. I sat there for a moment, absentmindedly feeling out my bonds, trying to adjust to what she’d said.

She was the reason I’d come here.

Want to know the punchline to the joke my memory had been telling me all this time?

Her face wasn’t the one I’d been chasing.

It was close enough that I could see where my memory had gotten the image. There were some similarities, especially around the eyes. But memory is a fickle thing. Age and a hard life had taken more than their fair shares out of her, remolded her like potter’s clay. I’d thought of her so often, and for so long, that I had stopped remembering her. I’d remembered the memory, and then the memory of the memory. I’d taken a real face, made an echo of it, and twisted it into an illusion. I’d clung to it like a teddy bear until it had worn out and fallen apart. Trying to convince myself there had been something worthwhile in the place I’d come from.

The best way to think of memory is as a terrible roommate. It leaves junk on the floor just to trip you up. Dirty dishes piled in the sink. Barges into your room unannounced. And it sure doesn’t pay its rent.

More importantly, it’s not reliable.

I wished I’d never come here. I’d made myself into some kind of cosmic joke. And, punchline told, the rest of the joke – me – didn’t have a reason to be here any more.

“Ah,” I said, quietly. Then, “Ampersand.”

“You’re more shaken than I thought you would be,” the woman said. “I’m sorry. I should have taken you to get a medical exam before bringing you here. My mistake. I’ll do better next time.”

“‘Next time,’” I repeated. Much as I’d thought she’d been about to kill me, I liked the sound of that even less. I asked, “You expect me to call you ‘Mom’?”

She looked at me like a disappointed schoolmarm.

“My name is Beatrice. You can call me that.”

The woman50 took my silence as an excuse to expound a little more. “Much as I hoped we wouldn’t meet again, I’ve kept tabs on your life. Things have changed a lot since the last time we met. And you’re right – terrible things were done here. I used to be just as much a prisoner as you.”

“Just as much as Lazarus is now?” I prodded. There was no mistaking what I’d seen of Lazarus’s living quarters. It was a cell.

“Lazarus is under guard for his own protection,” Beatrice said. “And you demonstrated even that might not be enough.” She tousled Lazarus’s hair. Lazarus, I noted, didn’t react. “I wish I could have protected you the same way. They were close to killing you, you know. When you were younger. You would have been the last of your batch to go.”

In spite of everything I was trying to do to keep my cool, I could not keep a shiver from spreading down my back.

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