Villain. Майкл Грант

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СКАЧАТЬ who consumed it, but how would it manifest in Malik? The alien virus was clever, subtle, and opportunistic. It had used the DNA of Dekka Talent’s own cat to shape Dekka’s morphed self. It had used starfish DNA to grow Vincent Vu into a monster. But the rock had other tricks as well—it had turned Tom Peaks into a fearsome creature that was surely not the product of any earthly DNA, but rather a creature of half-remembered movies whose images lay buried in Peaks’s memory. And an unfortunate child in Islay, Scotland, had been transformed into a creature from a children’s board book, a creature that had had to be annihilated by shells from a Royal Navy destroyer.

      Cruz herself, formerly known as Hugo Rojas before she’d come to accept the fact that “Hugo” was simply never going to be authentic as a male, had acquired a power that had no analogy in nature: she could appear as anyone. Anyone she had seen, or even seen video of. She had only to form a picture in her mind, and as if she was some sort of overhead projector, she could reflect and embody that image. Nature was brilliant at disguise and could make an insect look like a leaf, but nothing in nature matched what Cruz could do.

      Had the rock virus used her own gender transition as a text in creating the morphed Cruz? It would almost imply that the virus had a sense of humor.

      Cruz had stayed in morph for hour after hour while Malik was in the hospital, playing various roles, shifting her appearance with increasing ease and speed. And for all of those hours she had endured the vile, insinuating attentions of the Dark Watchers, those voiceless, faceless, formless observers who emerged any time a morphing happened. At times it was like being whispered to by a pervert—not words, just slithering, leering tones. At times she felt she could almost glimpse them. Like when you suddenly turn your head and have the feeling that you just missed seeing something out of the corner of your eye.

      Shade Darby had come and gone several times. She would stand by Malik’s bed, talk in quiet tones to Cruz, wince at Malik’s pain, and brush tears away with quick, impatient gestures, as though her tears were an irritation. Eventually Shade managed to convince an exhausted, emotionally wrecked Cruz to come with her to their latest stolen vehicle in the hospital parking lot and eat something, and hopefully sleep. She settled Cruz into the passenger seat of the Mercedes and tucked a woolen throw around her, like she was putting a child to bed. Shade turned on the engine and the seat warmers, and despite being sure she could not sleep, Cruz did just that. After several hours Cruz woke from a troubled sleep and found Shade sitting in the driver’s seat, opening a Subway bag.

      “I have an Italian cold cut and a ham and cheese. Also chips.”

      Cruz said nothing, but pushed open the door, leaned out, and vomited onto the concrete.

      Without a word, Shade handed her a bottle of water. Cruz swirled and spit, then drank the entire bottle and dropped the empty. Then she took the Italian cold-cut sub, wolfed down half of it, swallowed, and mumbled, “Thanks.”

      Shade nodded and looked away.

      This was a new Shade Darby. Cruz had always seen her strange, brilliant, ruthlessly determined friend as two people in one body: there was the pretty, vaguely punk-looking girl with the interesting scar up one side of her neck. That Shade Darby was amused, kind, a bit distant but supportive. Then there was what Cruz thought of as the shark: the cold, calculating young woman with the brilliant mind.

      This was a different girl, neither easygoing Shade nor the shark. This was a wounded Shade, an uncertain Shade. A girl who had made decisions that destroyed her relationship with her only surviving parent, dragged Cruz into a life of felonies piled upon felonies, and, finally, left Malik screaming in unbearable agony, a charcoal and melted-flesh version of the boy Shade had once loved and been loved by.

      “How are you?” Shade asked, practically cringing, as if she expected Cruz to berate her.

      But as Shade had come to recognize the damage she had done, Cruz had come to accept her own complicity. No one had put a gun to her head to force her to follow Shade. Cruz had been the new kid in school, a mid-semester transfer after being kicked out of a Catholic school for wearing dresses. Evanston, Illinois, was still a bastion of relative tolerance, but the nastiness that had come to be a part of American life, even at the highest levels, had threatened her. Until Shade. Shade’s friendship had spread an umbrella of safety over Cruz at school, and Cruz had leaped at the chance to have a friend. She had quickly seen that Shade was obsessed with the death of her mother on the day of the Perdido Beach Anomaly four years earlier, when the FAYZ dome had fallen. And Cruz knew that Shade’s head was filled with fantasies of revenge against the monstrous being called Gaia who had used her powers for slaughter. But Cruz knew as well that Shade’s revenge fantasies were just that, fantasies. No one can get revenge on a dead thing, and Gaia, that evil child, had died, destroyed in the end by the courage and sense of justice of an autistic child called Little Pete, and the charming sociopath Caine.

      And yet, step by step, Cruz had gone along with Shade. She had chosen to take the rock herself, to become Rockborn. She had then acquired and learned to use a superhuman power. And she had raised nothing but the most token objections as Shade used her super-speed to steal money and cars and phones to keep them going.

      Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa, Cruz thought, an echo of her upbringing in the church. My fault. My most grievous fault.

      Hero, villain, and monster, that was the three-part taxonomy of superhumans, according to Malik. Shade was meant to be a hero, intended to be a hero, wanted to be a hero, and Cruz, to the extent she’d really thought about it, imagined herself as a sort of Robin to Shade’s Batman, a sidekick.

      I’m not even starring in my own life.

      But at the moment, the hollow-eyed, quiet, sad girl beside Cruz did not inspire notions of heroism. She looked like Cruz imagined soldiers must look after far too long in battle.

      “What do we do?” Cruz asked, hating herself for the question, hating the weakness that made her turn to Shade for the answers even now, even with Malik a few hundred yards away with tubes in his throat and veins, with tubes collecting his blood red urine, with acres of gauze and gallons of salves hiding the horror show his body had become.

      Shade lowered her head to look through the windshield and up at the hospital. “I guess they’ll do skin grafts and—”

      “No,” Cruz said. She shook her head. “They’re not thinking of fixing him, they’re waiting for him to die.”

      A spasm twisted Shade’s face, squeezing her eyes shut, making a grimace of her mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and these she did not brush away.

      Cruz said, “His only hope is the rock. Too much deep-tissue damage. His legs . . . I was there when they changed the dressings. His legs are just bones with chunks of burned meat attached, like, like those turkey legs they sell at fairs. It was awful. Terrible. There’s no coming back from that, Shade. Malik is dead unless the rock . . .”

      Shade cried silently for a while, her forehead on the steering wheel, hands limp in her lap.

      “I don’t know what to do,” Shade said finally. “I don’t—”

      But Cruz did not hear the end of the sentence because at that moment a wave of unspeakable pain assaulted her with a suddenness and violence that wrung whinnying, panicked screams from her mouth.

      Shade, too, shrieked in agony, her face distorted like a figure from some medieval painting of hell’s torments.

      And it wasn’t stopping; it wasn’t lessening; the two girls writhed and shook and bellowed in pain as if they were burning alive inside the car. Shade screamed СКАЧАТЬ