Rocks Fall

"Well, that's unfortunate," he said, surveying the extremely large pile of rock.

He sat down across from me, just out of arm's length. The helmet had come off during the cave-in, and even in the sickly glow of his handheld, he didn't look much like I would've imagined. He had a nice face, pointed chin with laugh wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, and sandy blond hair. He ran a hand through it, scattering dust, and he could have been anyone: a math teacher or an optometrist or an accountant, someone not very important and not very dangerous.

"Are you in any pain?" he asked.

"I'd be better if you wouldn't mind shifting some of these boulders off me," I said.

He smiled, briefly. "No, I don't think so, but I do have some Vicodin I could toss in reach."

Alexander Bane offering me painkillers: brilliant. I wouldn't have minded something, although preferably served in a glass and out of a bottle of Macallan, but a fuzzy head didn't seem as though it would do me much good in the present circumstances. Not that the clear one was going to be particularly useful, either.

My right arm was still loose, but I couldn't reach around well enough to get hold of the big rocks pinning everything else, not with enough momentum to do anything useful. I picked one of the smaller rocks away and put it down on the cave floor and swung my fist down to crush it, more to amuse myself than anything.

"I wouldn't rely on the cave having stabilized," Bane said.

"I'm already under most of it," I said cheerily. A little anxiety wouldn't do him any harm. No one had a very clear notion of what his powers really were— there were at least fourteen different versions of his childhood records scattered about, with wildly different test results— but it was fairly settled that invulnerability wasn't one of them.

It wasn't, strictly speaking, one of mine, either, but I could hold up reasonably well under a pile of rocks, at least for a few hours.

"You might bring more of it down on whoever is digging us out," Bane said, and if I listened I could hear it, the distant rattle and scrape of shifting rubble, indistinct voices.

"Always comforting when the backup arrives only an hour late," I said, playing off my very real relief. I hadn't taken the matter seriously at first— a routine break-in at a small office building according to the incident report; nothing to merit the attention of anyone over a GS-3, except that I'd randomly been at the local precinct that morning to do a safety presentation for schoolchildren.

My call-in had been perfunctory. I recalled saying something like, "Alice, I'll look into this as long as I'm in town; send a spotter over if you have a minute, unless I'm done before they can leave. Bring you a latte on my way back!"

And then there I was, walking along an enormous room full of gray cubicles and outdated computer equipment— deserted; everyone had evacuated, for reasons about to become apparent— and out comes Alexander Bane from the corner office in his red and gold, carrying one of those old almond-colored midsize computer towers under an arm.

It was a pyrrhic comfort that he'd been equally surprised, and whatever he'd been stealing had been lost after our subsequent discussion. Along with a significant portion of the wall of the building and at least eleven million dollars' worth of structural damage to the nearest intersection. So much for my streak of six years in a row of safety-performance bonuses.

I wasn't going to regret it, if I pulled this off. The capabilities of Bane's suit were fairly well documented, barring the regular changes he made, but I hadn't reviewed his records in years. When Bane reared his shiny helmeted head, they called in the big guns: Marcus Leo, Tamisha Victoire; Calvin Washington if they could get him. Not that my gun wasn't perfectly respectable in every dimension, but there's a reason I'm a GS-12 in Maine and not a GS-15 in New York, and it's not for lack of scintillating conversation.

"I will take some of that, though, if you don't mind sharing," I said; he was drinking from a small flask.

"I'm afraid it's only Evian," he said, rolling it toward me. "You're a Macallan man, I think."

"Yes," I said, glumly. Well, that was horrifying. No reason he should ever have looked up James Wright Ellroy, twenty-eight, GS-12, Portland-based, outside his notice by any sensible standards; and it didn't matter whether he knew about my powers— he knew my drink.

I was grateful for the water anyway; the dust was settling, but my mouth was still thick with it. I capped the flask and rolled it back to him, and watched him put it away. He seemed remarkably unconcerned about the oncoming rescuers.

"Ah," he said, when I mentioned as much. "Not to make you uncomfortable, but they might be my people, actually. My suit sends an alert whenever it takes damage."

That gave the rattling and grinding outside a potentially more ominous character. "I don't suppose you can call them and find out for sure," I said, trying to listen to the voices. Would I recognize the nearest rescue crew?

"No reception," he said, raising the handheld.

"Really? No special secret network?"

"It's too annoying to keep it jailbroken," Bane said.

"Wait, what, are you actually using an iPhone?" I said.

"I like Plants vs. Zombies," he said, unrepentantly.

"Of course you do," I said. "So we'll just sit here until we find out who's being rescued."

"Unless you have a better idea," he said.

"None you'd like," I said, and sighed. If I could have at least worked my other arm free, or even just the shoulder, I could probably have built up enough momentum to knock myself loose, but as it was, I was stuck.

The screen on his phone went off again, and he didn't bother shaking it back to life right away. The darkness made the scraping outside— and the sound of his even breathing— seem louder. I tried not to listen to my own. I was under two tons of rock; I had every right to breathe heavily.

"I don't suppose you'd care to tell me what you were after, just to pass the time?" I asked.

"Hm? Oh, Lockheed just outsourced some of their HR department to this company," Bane said. "They made a mistake and sent over the entire company's records, including executives who should have been under top secret clearance. They'd have caught it in the morning, so I thought it was worth picking up while I was passing by."

"So it's coincidence and bad luck all around."

I could hear the smile in his voice. "Apparently."

We sat quietly.

"Not to give you ideas," I said suddenly, "but doesn't your suit have all sorts of weaponry and things?"

"The fusion cannon does come in handy, but it's not really designed for use in a cave that might come down at any minute."

"I was thinking more about something you might use to shoot me in the head," I said.

He didn't say anything for a moment. "Pinpoint nanolaser. The beam penetrates even hyper-dense body structures," he said finally. "Fired into the medulla, it would kill you in less than a second."

"Right, comforting," I said. "And you haven't used it because . . . ?"

"There's no advantage to killing you if we're about to be picked up by a rescue squad. I'll be taken into custody anyway."

"And yet we were doing our best to kill each other fifteen minutes ago," I said.

"When I was hoping to escape without compromising my identity," he said. "I don't go around killing people for the hell of it."

"Was that an injured tone?" I said, incredulous. "You were directly responsible for ninety-three casualties last year alone!"

"One hundred and thirty-two," he said. "I'd tell you their names, but I'm feeling morbid enough at the moment."

"And do you think anything justifies that, makes it better than your being a nutter who likes to kill people? Making a billion dollars, taking over the world—"

"Saving the world," he said.

It stopped me. Bane's never been captured, of course, beyond five minutes here or there in theoretical custody where they didn't even get around to working off his helmet and getting photographs of his face. There aren't any prison-cell interviews, and he doesn't go in for monologuing in reality, despite the very inventive scenes in Vengeance of Bane 1, 2, and 3. There aren't any records as to why he does the things he does. There aren't even good theories, really.

There are a handful of supervillains who go in for the world-saving routine. It's usually an excuse— dramatic speeches, hijacking the airwaves, self-righteousness and posturing, and it's amazing how saving the world always seems to boil down to giving them personally what ever they want. But Bane didn't do any of that. He just popped up here and there, stole something or sabotaged something else or set off a natural disaster, occasionally wrangled some top-rank superhero for a while, vanished again.

"Saving the world . . . in the environmental sense?" I said, wondering if he was in the eco-terrorism line.

"No," he said. "No. Long-term, the Earth is going to be fine. I'm more of a people-person."

"Which is why you kill substantial numbers of them."

"A few hundred people a year is trivial. You have no idea of the magnitude of—" He bit off the words. "It simply isn't meaningful on a global scale," Bane said. "Only a personal one."

"That's the one all of us human beings operate on, in the end."

"I know," Bane said, sounding tired. "That's the problem."

So that was encouraging, having arguably the smartest person on the planet tell you he's going around regretfully killing people to prevent something worse.

"You don't believe me," he said.

"I'm not stupid enough to think you're flat-out wrong. It's just not a good enough excuse."

"I was pretty sure you'd say that," he said, and fell silent.

"Not going to argue with me?" I said, a little suspiciously.

"No," he said. "You're a fourth-generation superhero, you grew up on the squad training grounds, you've got minor empathic abilities and your personality profile is outgoing and humanistic. There's no reasonable chance of convincing you to break with the entire framework of your life in the amount of time we have." He glanced at his phone.

"I have minor empathic abilities?" It was news to me.

"They don't show up using the standard test-evaluation methods," Bane said. "I've developed more rigorous analysis tools."

"How the hell do you get our raw results to . . . never mind. I'm sure I don't want to know."

We tried some word games on his phone after that, but it's not satisfying playing intellectual puzzles with someone with an IQ of four million or what ever, just vaguely depressing. I gave up after he managed to break five hundred points on a round of Boggle without even a piece of paper to scribble on.

"So, any holiday plans?" I threw out, half as a joke, as he picked the phone up from the ground. "Do you have people you go home to for Thanksgiving?"

"My wife's family."

"Right," I said blankly. "That's nice. Been married long?"

"We were married for two years before she died," he said. "I keep up the connection for my son."

"Oh," I said, even more stupidly. "I've got twins on the way," I added, because it was what you'd say in an ordinary conversation with an ordinary person.

"I know," he said. He looked down at the phone in his hands, greenish light flung up into his face.

It crept up slowly on me from there, while we talked— going from stilted to oddly easy, until I was telling him about the time Su Kwan had put food coloring in the coffee that none of us noticed, and we all spent a week walking around with blue teeth, not remotely confidence-inspiring; and the time Dr. Morbius had seized the capitol building and taken the governor hostage, and we'd had the entire Liberty Squad storming in to surround the place.

"Do you ever hang out with him?" I interrupted myself to ask. "Is there a social for supervillains or—"

"I've used him a few times," Bane said. "But sociopaths are inherently unreliable."

Used him like a hired hand, the single most powerful supervillain in the world; possibly the single most powerful of all of us, except for Calvin.

"Morbius isn't what you'd call a good time," he added, and that was what made me realize that Bane was, wholly unexpectedly and in defiance of sanity: someone I'd ask to come over and have a drink some night, and stay up late talking. Someone I'd like as a friend.

"They're all wrong, aren't they?" I said; it came out of nowhere, almost, and yet I couldn't have been more certain. "Those fourteen test profiles in the system. Everyone thinks you planted the extras to divert us from the real one, but they're all fake. Your powers don't show on the standard test. You were never classified at all."

He was silent, and it was dark; I had nothing to go on but his quiet breathing.

"You're an empath, too," I said. "Low-level . . . not enough to be projective—"

He sighed. "It's a general misconception that the degree of empathic power always correlates with the ability to project."

"You can feel people die," I said, not even needing him to confirm it. He could feel people need, also; could feel when they were interested or bored. Or in pain. Of course he was charming. Empaths almost couldn't help it. "Sorry I didn't take the Vicodin."

"Don't worry. You learn to deal with it."

He'd learned to kill, too. How would that feel, I wondered, to kill when you died along with your victim, every time? There was a reason the tests only measured projective empathy: they were looking for something that could be a weapon, not a weakness.

"It's not that hard," he said. "I feel people dying all the time."

"What's your range?"

He didn't answer. The rules said empaths and telepaths whose range went much further than their immediate vicinity went crazy before they were old enough to learn how to filter things out. A thousand voices in your head, all of them real. People all around you suffering, rejoicing. Enough to make you hate the whole world, or fall too deeply in love with it, I suppose.

There was a little daylight filtering in, through the rocks. The rescuers were getting close. "Don't you know if it's your people?" I asked.

"Anxiety fits either way," he said. "That's drowning out the details."

"Alexander?" a voice called softly from the other side, a woman's; he paused.

"Yes," he said. "I'm here."

"We'll have you out in a few minutes," she said.

"All right."

We sat in silence, while they opened the mouth enough for him to scramble out.

"I'm sorry," he said, watching the rocks disappearing out of the way, one after another.

It wasn't much comfort to know that he truly was. "You don't have to be," I said, with the desperation of the rat in the cage. I was thinking of Caro, and the twins; I'd seen them in black and white on an ultrasound screen two weeks before, one hand held up waving at me, hello. I tried to pull my arm free again, tried to kick loose; I'd been trying the whole time.

He didn't come in reach. He didn't have to.

Tamisha stood up silently from the body: cooling already, only the small scorch mark at the base of the neck still warm.

"The cold-hearted son of a bitch," Marcus said, low and angry. "Ellroy couldn't even chase him."

"He'd seen his face," she said. "Bane's killed for that before."

The local enforcers were huddled outside the cave looking in, hollowed-out and tear-streaked faces; he'd had a family, she understood.

"You'd better clear them away from the mountainside," Marcus said quietly. "I'll bring him out."

She nodded and brushed her hands off against her thighs before she stepped out to guide everyone away, out of the path of the landslide. The rockfall shuddered and more of the cliff face collapsed inward; Marcus lifted out of it a moment later, shrugging away boulders, bent sheltering over the body in his arms.

They found the recorder that evening before the autopsy, tucked into the pocket under Ellroy's arm; he'd had it running all the while.