The Hero-Killer's Burden

  Aley walked toward the Time Machine with the particular posture of someone who had finished something and was not looking back at it. The air around the device shimmered with pre-departure heat, the chronological seams of the present already beginning to loosen around it.

  Then a voice reached him from behind, and the posture changed entirely.

  "It's been a long time, Aley." Quiet. Familiar. Precise in the way that only a voice can be precise when the person using it knows exactly what it will do to you. "How are you?"

  He turned slowly.

  "Crystal." The word came out of him without inflection, which was the only way he could say it. "What are you doing here?"

  She looked the same. She also looked nothing like he remembered, because the warmth that had defined her face in every timeline he had known her was simply absent, replaced by something that had been through warmth and come out the other side of it and decided it wasn't worth the exposure.

  "Am I wrong to visit an old friend?" she asked. "Or have you forgotten who I am?"

  Aley's sword was in his hand before the sentence finished. His cards fanned out in his other hand, catching the light. "You should be dead. I know exactly what I did. Which timeline did you come out of and what do you want from this one?"

  She didn't answer. Instead, four shadows thickened and separated from the darkness at the edges of the street, resolving into shapes he recognised because he had put effort into each of them.

  Gale, whose speed he had copied and then surpassed. Shattered, who had taught him what invisibility looked like from the inside. Rogue, who had taught him what it felt like to be on the wrong end of a long gun. Luvn, who had been easiest to beat and hardest to forget. Sony, who had been neither.

  Five of them, standing in a loose arrangement that someone had thought about.

  "We are here to stop you, Hero-Killer," said Shattered, his voice arriving from no particular direction.

  Crystal stepped forward. She folded her hands in front of her with the composure of someone who has rehearsed a very difficult conversation many times and is finally in the room where it happens.

  "Let me remind you of what happened two years ago," she said. "In case you have found a way to carry it without looking at it."

  Flashback: The Lie of the Shield

  The timeline Aley had arrived in two years prior was the kind of place that looked functional from the outside and wasn't. He had learned to read that particular gap quickly, the distance between how a place presented itself and what it actually was underneath, and this city had a gap you could have driven a military convoy through.

  He had found Crystal the way he found most things in those years, by accident and at speed. She had been cornered in an alley by men who worked for someone with resources and no accountability. Aley had been passing through and wasn't passing through anymore. It was over in forty seconds.

  She had thanked him with the directness of someone who was frightened but had decided not to show it, and then she had asked his name, and something in the ordinariness of the question had stopped him from inventing one. He told her the truth.

  They became careful with each other. Then less careful. Then something that neither of them named because naming it felt like asking time to slow down.

  The city's problem announced itself gradually and then all at once. Valuables disappearing. Bank reserves eroding. Citizens reporting losses they couldn't account for. Then a hero appeared in the main square, broad-shouldered and photographed beautifully from the left, who told the assembled crowd not to worry. That he was Shattered, the city's finest, and he would find who was responsible.

  The crowd had needed someone to trust and he had arrived at the right moment, which was the first thing that bothered Aley. The second was that every criminal Shattered brought in was dead before anyone could question them. The third was that the recovered treasure was always partial, always described as all that could be found, always returned to considerable applause.

  Aley followed him on a night when the city was celebrating a recovery and therefore not watching. He watched Shattered descend into a basement beneath a building that didn't appear on any civic record, and through a gap in the foundation he saw what was down there. Billions in accumulated wealth. And in the back corner, in a room with no window, people who had been reported missing and whose faces had been altered just enough to make identification complicated.

  He didn't go in. He already knew what it meant. He went back to Crystal and told her, and she believed him without requiring him to convince her, which was one of the things he had come to depend on.

  The next morning he stood in the town square and said it plainly. "He is the thief. Shattered. Everything he has returned to you is a fraction of what he has taken. The people he has produced as criminals were kidnapped from your own streets."

  The crowd's response was not what it should have been.

  They didn't want to examine the claim. They wanted the comfort of the hero they had chosen, and Aley was asking them to give that up, and that was an ask too large to process in the middle of a square with the sun overhead and a crowd around them. They threw what was in their hands. They cursed his name with a conviction that had been building for a while looking for a direction.

  Shattered performed confusion beautifully. He spread his hands and shook his head and suggested to the gathered citizens that perhaps the real criminal had finally revealed himself, that speed without motive was suspicious, that no one had ever seen this young man's face before today.

  Someone slapped Crystal for defending him. An open hand, hard, in front of a crowd that was watching.

  Aley used a speed card.

  The man was dead before his hand had finished its arc. It was the kind of decision that takes less than a second and cannot be undone in any timeline.

  Shattered pointed. "There! There is your proof! Watch how quickly he kills! Is that the act of an innocent man?"

  Then he vanished.

  Aley stood in the silence of a crowd that had just processed what it had witnessed, and he felt the shift in them, the way they recalibrated their fear from Shattered onto the visible and present and therefore more manageable threat of the young man in front of them. They moved toward him. He let them get close enough for Shattered's absence to feel like safety, and then he pulled out the card he hadn't used before. The one that read like a mirror.

  Shattered thought the invisible space was only his. He was alone in it and then he wasn't, and then Aley's sword found him in the dark in a place no one could see, and when the visibility returned to the square there was evidence on the cobblestones that the city's finest had been something different than advertised.

  The crowd scattered. Aley took Crystal's hand and they ran.

  Flashback: The Price of Peace

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  The timeline they landed in was further forward than Aley had intended, which meant that what he had done had already become history by the time he arrived, and history in this era had a price on it.

  Rogue was waiting in an alley the way a good sniper waits, without impatience or announcement, simply present at the exact location where the geometry of the situation said his target would eventually have to be. He had the easy stillness of someone who did not find the work difficult.

  "Give up," he said. Not unkindly. "You're already history here."

  Aley moved fast. Not fast enough. The shot hit his leg below the knee and the world went sideways and he hit the ground with his full weight on the wrong side and lay there recalibrating.

  Rogue approached. He looked at Crystal the way a professional looks at a complication he didn't ask for but is prepared to resolve. "Step aside. I have no interest in you."

  Crystal stepped in front of Aley instead.

  Rogue's expression moved through something genuine and brief before settling back into professional. "Forgive me, Signorina. For the sake of justice, I cannot make exceptions. Not even for you."

  He raised the gun.

  Aley copied his skill in the same motion he used to pull Crystal sideways, and the shot that would have taken both of them opened a hole in the air where they had been. He got up on one leg. He slotted the copied marksmanship into his sword and changed the weapon's shape with a thought, and when Rogue brought his ultimate to bear, Aley was already ahead of the moment, already in the gap between the shot and its destination.

  He fired. Rogue ceased to be a problem in this timeline.

  In the quiet that followed, Crystal held onto him for a long time without speaking. When she finally let go, her face had made some kind of decision.

  They traveled together after that. Aley hunted the heroes he had identified as fraudulent and Crystal watched and said less and less as the list grew. He promised her that the end of the list was the beginning of something better. That when the work was done there would be a wedding and a life that moved forward instead of sideways through time.

  She listened to all of it. She said very little.

  One evening, in the quiet of a borrowed room in a timeline neither of them had been born in, Aley was describing the shape of the future he had been building, and he felt the cold circle of metal against his temple, and he stopped speaking.

  "Forgive me." Her voice was almost steady. Her hand was not. "I have to stop you. You've become the thing you went looking for. I've watched you, Aley. I've watched you for long enough. The people you've killed didn't all deserve it. You know that and you carry on anyway."

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he used the Shattered card and stepped sideways out of existence and came back behind her.

  He looked at her for a moment. The gun she had dropped. Her hands open and turned upward in a gesture that was asking him for something he could no longer give.

  He raised his hand and used Rogue's card.

  One shot.

  He left without looking at what he'd done, because looking would have required him to feel something he was not prepared to accommodate. He had work to finish. He went to the edge of Known Space where the Alien Wardens kept the Integrity Clock in a vault no one had ever entered voluntarily, and he fought his way through them because by now fighting his way through things was the only skill he had fully perfected, and he took the Clock and threw it backward through time into the hands of the boy he had been, who he believed was still him.

  He was wrong about that. But he didn't find out until now.

  Back in the present, the five heroes waited.

  Aley looked at Crystal. The scar on her stomach was partially visible above her collar, the kind of scar that a surgeon's hand had done its best with and time had smoothed but not erased.

  "You lived," he said.

  "Someone heard the shot," she said. "A surgeon. He worked for an hour in bad conditions and I survived, and I have carried that scar and what it means every day since." Her eyes were steady. "And now I have something else."

  They attacked together, which was the correct tactical decision. Gale came first, fast enough to be felt before he was seen. Aley read the air pressure of the approach and balanced his own momentum against it, parrying the strike and slotting a Gale card in the same motion, meeting speed with identical speed until Gale overextended and Aley put him on the ground.

  Shattered and Rogue tried the obvious pincer, one visible and one not, relying on the invisible angle to land what the visible one drew attention away from. Aley flickered between states using the Shattered card, fighting in the invisible space on Shattered's own terms, while simultaneously tracking Rogue's barrel angle from the sound of his breathing. He came out of invisibility directly behind Rogue at the moment the shot fired, and Rogue's aim was redirected into empty air.

  Luvn rose and rained energy from above with the patient superiority of someone who has learned that height is a decisive advantage. Aley copied the levitation and went up to meet him, and the fight in the clouds was brief because Aley had the card and Luvn had the original skill and the original skill always has small habitual errors that the card's copy does not inherit.

  He came down from the fight with Luvn and Sony was already at his feet.

  The explosion went off before he had fully landed, and it was large. Aley hit the ground hard and the world was noise and heat and he lay in it for a moment longer than he should have, long enough for Sony to stand over him and prepare the finisher.

  He slotted the Shattered card and was gone. He reappeared in front of Sony and drove his sword forward. Sony caught it and they locked against each other, both pushing, neither giving ground. Aley reached for the Gale card with two fingers and then Crystal's telepathy arrived like a spike driven through the center of his skull.

  The memories she poured in were all his. The mob. The blood on the cobblestones. The quiet room and her upturned hands and the sound he had made by pulling a card and pointing it at the person who had trusted him most. She didn't need to narrate them. The images were enough. He folded to one knee, the sword dropping from his fingers, his free hand going to his head in a gesture that accomplished nothing but expressed the need to hold the pain in from the outside.

  "End him," Crystal said.

  Sony raised both hands.

  And then something shifted in the space behind Aley's eyes. The memories that Crystal was forcing in began to encounter other memories, ones that had no business being in Aley's head because they had never happened to him. He saw them arrive the way you see light arriving from under a door, slowly and then all at once.

  A cheerful boy with bad teeth who kept smiling anyway, wearing his kindness like a shield that was slowly shattering. A neighbor named Nurin who stepped in front of every insult and made it smaller by refusing to agree with it. A city built entirely from clouds where the bridges and the lamps and the trees were all made of the same soft luminous material and it felt like walking through a gentle argument between air and architecture. An Empress standing in a garden whose laughter rang through it with the warmth of someone who has decided to love without conditions and keep that decision regardless of evidence. An Emperor who lost a sword fight to a twelve-year-old and had to be carried to the healers and found this genuinely funny. A girl with an umbrella whose laughter sounded like bells and who said things directly and without apology and looked at Mizi like he was worth something she intended to protect.

  None of these memories were Aley's. They belonged to a boy who had been given the Integrity Clock not because Aley and Mizi were the same person, but because the Clock had decided something that Aley hadn't intended when he threw it.

  And the memories were warm. Not triumphant, not powered, just warm, the specific warmth of someone who has been treated with consistent decency and has let it become part of how they move through the world, and that warmth pressed back against Crystal's telepathy the way a hand pressed against a cold surface and transferred heat into it.

  The pain receded.

  Aley stood up.

  Sony swung and Aley slotted the Rogue card and fired once, low, non-lethal, and Sony went down without being destroyed, which was a distinction Aley had not been making for a long time and made now deliberately.

  Crystal stumbled back. Her eyes were wide, the glow of her power flickering and failing. "No. No, that isn't possible. Why haven't you broken? Why won't you break?"

  Aley walked toward her. His sword was at his side. He did not raise it.

  "Because I finally looked at something I should have looked at a long time ago," he said. He stopped in front of her. "I was wrong, Crystal. Not partially wrong. Completely. I told myself I was removing corruption and I was also just angry, and I stopped checking which was which somewhere in the middle and I kept going because stopping would have meant sitting with what I'd done."

  She stared at him.

  "I am not going to kill you. I'm not going to kill anyone else today." He exhaled slowly. "Go back to your timeline. Get as far from this as you can and build something that doesn't involve me in it. I love you. That's real. But this ends here, between us, because continuing it would finish destroying you and I've already done enough of that."

  Crystal made a sound that wasn't quite a word. Then she crossed the distance between them and held him, hard, for a moment that was long enough to count, and Aley stood still and let it be what it was.

  Then, gently and with both hands, he pushed her back.

  "Take care of yourself," he said. "That's the last thing I'm asking of you."

  She faded back into her own time slowly, the way people leave when they want to make sure they are seen going.

  Aley stood alone in the quiet street and looked in the direction of the Habas Defense Center. He could not see it from here, but he knew the direction. He had always been good at knowing where things were.

  "Grow strong, Mizi," he said, to an empty street and a sleeping boy a mile away and a timeline that had already begun to diverge from every other one he had touched. "You have the memories I never knew how to keep. Do something better with them than I would have."

  Then the Time Machine opened around him and he stepped into the stream of time and was gone, leaving the five defeated heroes in the quiet and the city of Habas to its long, necessary work of putting itself back together.