Battery City feels inherently wrong in a way no one can explain. The air sits still inside the walls, monochrome streets and signs split the city into even grid pieces. Korse remembers, more than anyone, the strange world that is the desert.
He steps back into the city, back behind the white walls and white lies, with a careful mask on. Not a physical one, no. A neutral expression, blank eyes facing forward, arms at his sides. Korse knows what will happen already.
He will step into the city and check in, swiping key cards and giving his gun back to officials for them to check. Then he’ll go to the checkup room, let doctors and nurses test his muscles and take brain scans and do whatever else they wish to. Korse will walk white hallways and try not to feel. Then the Director will call him up, and he will go to her, loyal dog that he is.
It is the tenth anniversary of the Fabulous Four’s death. It is the tenth anniversary of him pulling the trigger underneath Party Poison’s jaw, of him leaving the lobby of an office building with four ghosts watching his every movement, of the Director smiling her practiced, perfect smile and giving him an award. It is the tenth anniversary of him doing what he had been told.
The SCARECROW program is not kind. It leaves scars on his skin and numbing, cold pills in his system. The training leaves something twisted inside of him, a warped, wrong feeling sitting in his chest. He used to hold that feeling close as proof that the Director was right. That this feeling was proof that he was doing what had to be done. He isn’t so sure anymore.
He had just come in from the desert. It was hot, and he had detested it. He wasn’t supposed to detest things, he wasn’t supposed to feel, but he did. He had tried to shoot the Girl. She had been outside of the gathering he was investigating, He had seen the hatred in her eyes, saw the way her hand closed around her gun, saw the way she scrambled away from his shot. Korse had seen the Girl, and they had traded ray gun shots, but they both ended up alive. It’s a difference. She had walked away, and he had chosen not to take another shot.
He doesn’t know why he didn’t kill her. By all accounts, the Girl is a threat, too much of one to keep alive. She escaped twice from the city, she ran with the four most dangerous criminals, but Korse let her live.
Had she seen the change? Something has shifted now, the warped feeling doesn’t feel reassuring anymore, it just feels like weight. Shifting sands in the pit of his stomach, twisting and turning.
He writes his account of what happened during the week, but he leaves out the Girl. If he mentions her, then he will have to explain why she is still alive, why he didn’t kill her. He is in the checkup room, his blood being tested and a body scan being taken. He lets his mind wander, but he keeps his face blank. The doctors are efficient and quick, moving with careful, almost robotic grace.
He lets out a breath that isn’t quite a sigh. Battery City is clinical, cold. The doctors’ hands are equally cold, their rubber gloves sterilizing skin and taking samples. Korse knows he has a long day ahead. He will have to talk to the Director, which is an exhausting task in of itself, but Korse still has to file reports, train a few of the newer recruits, and hack into the cameras before he can talk to the man in the Battery City Privacy Gardens. He doesn’t know why he likes talking to the man. He just does.
He doesn’t know what the feeling that roots itself inside of him when he thinks of the man in the garden is either. It doesn’t matter anyway. The feeling is, by all rights, illegal. All feelings are. He understands, these days, the impulse to rebel that the Zonedwellers care so much about. But if he were to rebel, the man would be in danger.
Careful steps, he thought to himself.
Don’t let her win. Don’t let her take him away. Do what you must to keep him here. Lie. Smile. Kill. Don’t let him die.
He walks from the checkup room to the Director’s office. He takes a breath and schools his face to neutrality. He pushes into the room, a single thought playing in his head, over and over, almost like a heartbeat.
