Chapter Four Monika #2
The guy next to me slams his elbow into his door as he leans back. Not sure if it’s intentional or accidental, but it punctuates his next words when he says, “You keep it up and you just might.”
Taranis snorts and looks over his shoulder at the man on my left.
The expression on his face is utterly mesmerizing, only because I don’t recognize it.
Like the voice that spoke earlier, the one that’s his, there isn’t one single thing about it that harkens back to the man—the male—who rescued me from the elevator, who I’ve seen before a handful of times, who I’ve photographed laughing alongside other Champions who aren’t half as charismatic.
I blink and keep blinking, watching as Taranis’s eyes glow a cataclysmic purple, the buttons on the dashboard brightening with them.
I suddenly worry about the cell phone in my pocket and remove it, slipping it into the seat back in front of me, rather than risk carrying it or putting it in my pack, where it might explode.
Taranis’s voice bottoms out into the lowest whisper, “You think your friend lost his leg by accident?” He chuckles and turns to face forward.
All the words thrown back and forth are hard to absorb.
I hesitate, wanting to document the look—that exact look—on Taranis’s face, but he’s turned forward again, and I get the feeling that this version of him isn’t something he’d approve of being published to the world.
And if his last words rang with even a hint of truth, I’d also like to keep both my legs.
I’m nervous at the sudden way my reality has been tipped, but as the man sitting beside me hands me a bulletproof vest marked Press, I, too, become a different me as I slip it over my head and fasten it tight around my body.
I pin my hair back with thick silver clips while the adrenaline in my body thickens my blood to molasses.
Everything slows. We drive for another half an hour in silence before we pull into an underground parking garage in East Sundale, one that was once used for commuters traveling to and from Old Sundale Station.
Fifty years ago, this area was the center of commerce, and Old Sundale Station was the city’s primary train station.
Then the Forty-Eight were discovered, and Sundale bid to have the US regional Champions’ offices here.
Sundale beat out larger cities, but the influx of new commerce—plus the COE headquarters themselves—required more space than what the then–city center could afford.
So they moved Sundale twenty miles west, and what was once known as Sundale became East Sundale.
Just like that. Because Taranis’s pod fell right in the middle of Sundale, in Memory Park, and the world loved him first and loved Sundale for the happy accident.
Back when he was a boy and I was a girl with posters of him on my wall, taking portraits with a disposable camera.
The car bounces over potholes and trash spread out over the ground of the entrance in a thick blanket, as if placed there intentionally to ward off newcomers.
Now Old Sundale Station is known to be a hub for squatters and even a meeting spot for gangs and other criminals.
The parking garage even has its own name: the Gallery.
A name I find particularly fitting, given my background, as we enter it.
A bottle or two hits the outside of the Humvee as we descend to the lower levels of the garage.
I feel like Judge Dredd making his way through Mega-City One.
I snap a few pictures through the windows.
They won’t render well, and I likely won’t use them unless this turns into a longer story and some outlet, or the COE itself, wants to use these photos to set the scene.
Though if this is really only about restoring the electrical grid for the Old Station—why it’s out, I’ve got no clue, and why any higher-ups would order it turned on, given that the station is no longer in use, I’ve got no clue either—I can’t imagine these pictures will be of much use for anything.
“Taking pictures of the dark there, sweetheart?” the guy next to me says. I can feel the energy radiating off him, and want no part of it, so I just ignore him and keep my focus on the world outside the thick glass window.
As the car finally slows, coming to a stop on the lowest level of this subterranean city, a dozen people skitter out of the rays of the Humvee headlights before the car stops, the headlights power off, and Taranis opens his door. I follow.
My feet hit the concrete, and my adrenaline has fully settled.
I’ve got the resting heart rate of a sea turtle.
I’ve got my camera bag looped over my back, my zoom lens and my 200mm lens in my cargo pocket—though I don’t expect to be able to use the latter in this low-light setting—and the 50mm lens attached to the Nikon around my neck.
Fearing Taranis’s explosivity, I’d left my iPhone back in the car, which means I’m relying solely on my smaller Nikon Zfc, now safely tucked into the front of my Kevlar as a backup.
Farther away, I can see folks watching us around the lit rings of open fires, some in trash cans, some set up in metal dishes of all kinds. There must be two hundred people down here.
I snap a few shots with my 50 while the driver, a dark-skinned man who’s almost as tall as Taranis, moves ahead of our cluster to the wide service doors. He has a key.
“Come on, Press.” A fist shoves me from the back, and I stumble toward the dark opening beyond the doors. I don’t let him get a rise out of me. Taranis, even though he sees, sneers at the guy—or maybe at the both of us—but says nothing.
Taranis steps through the doorway first. I follow, the dickwad right behind me. The driver with the key is last to enter the service corridor before shutting and locking the door behind us.
Lights flicker on, illuminating the darkness.
Recessed high in the walls, only half seem to have bulbs, but even the broken bulbs are still glowing—purple.
Taranis glows the same color too. I take a few pictures, watching the tall, athletically built superperson walk down the wide, dry corridor like he’s bored, even though, in the distance, you can hear all kinds of sounds that would make a grown man piss if he were caught here alone.
Wailing, the sound of a faraway engine running, a cough, a scream, a thud.
The wide corridor has no places to branch off and makes no turns.
Eventually, we’re spit out through a set of service doors that match the first we passed through, and I’m shocked to see the world open up before us and so glad that I came on this assignment, even if it’s just routine electrical work.
The Old Sundale train station is beautiful.
The space is half the length of a football field, and the glass ceiling vaults high above our heads.
Most of the ceiling is still intact, but there are a few panels missing, letting in the cool night air.
Moonlight streams in. It looks to be full from where it hangs directly above us, partially obscured by clouds.
I snap a few photos, spellbound by the space, until I remember who I’m actually here to photograph: Taranis. The Champion in front of me with the attitude so sour he’s either having a really, really bad day, or he’s the world’s most clever con artist.
Turning my gaze to ground level, I watch as Taranis struts out across the tiled floor.
It’s covered in debris, a few dried leaves, plastic bags, scattered trash, a few broken bricks that look like they might have fallen from the ceiling.
It doesn’t matter what’s covering the floor, though.
He could be wading through knee-high shit and still look like the King of Olympus.
That was Zeus, wasn’t it? Wielder of lightning? Seems fitting.
I glance at a couple photos I’ve taken and silently toot my own horn.
The exposure on these, with moonlight cascading over his glittery uniform, is exquisite.
The impulse to send them right away to Vanessa and her team is strong, but I have to keep reminding myself that this isn’t the Wyvern, that Taranis has his own PR team, and that sending anything to anyone right away isn’t part of the agreement.
I linger near the door, waiting and watching. One of the guys—the dickwad from the back seat—shouts, “Mind giving us some light?”
Taranis makes a disapproving click that would have given my Korean halmeoni a run for her money.
At the same time, lights around the perimeter of the room start to buzz and emit a bright-purple glow.
Taranis’s skin illuminates in tandem, and small sparks of electricity flare over his skin, across his back, over his shoulders, and down his arms to his exposed hands, which flex and clench automatically.
I capture it all, watching in fascination as he makes his way right, toward the dark opening where trains once came and went.
Shaped like a backward D, the curved edge of the room to my left is where the entrances to the train station once were, a few staircases leading up to broad landings where coffee shops and restaurants once sat.
It’s immediately clear why we came in through the strange entrance in the lowest, scariest level of the Gallery.
The entrances to the Old Station aren’t just boarded up; they’re boarded up and reinforced from the inside with huge concrete barriers.
Between the boarded-up doors and the barriers are piles of barbed wire.
It looks like some folks tried to make it through at some point and stopped.
There are a few sections where the boarded doors are broken inward, but nowhere where the barbed wire or concrete barrier has been breached.