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Jordan flicked his wrist scornfully. “Oh, calm down, nobody has mentioned Patrick by name. It’s not about him. It’s about you. You’ve been taking fewer gigs. Not showing up for the story hour. Faye is worried about you. All the girls are. It’s like now you’ve found your straight-acting fantasy, you don’t care about your community anymore.”
Will bristled. “Maybe you want to ask yourself why,” he said coolly, “after all these years of being such a beloved hero in our community, you still haven’t found anyone to love you.”
He knew he’d gone too far before the words even left his mouth, but out they tumbled, and he saw the hurt blossom like a bruise across Jordan’s beautiful face, a wound that had already been right under the surface. A pain Will had known was there.
“Fuck you, Will,” said Jordan. “And fuck your coward of a boyfriend, too.”
He turned and walked away, and Will let him go, too ashamed to even try to apologize. His tendency to shoot from the hip was nothing new. Unfortunately, he’d always had terrible aim.
Chapter 27
1950
The headquarters of Wonder Magazine consisted of two rooms above a deli on the Lower East Side. Walter Haywood welcomed Charles and ushered him through the first room, where his secretary Sheila sat hammering away at a typewriter, into the second, much larger room, his office.
“Sit, sit,” he said, circling the large desk and taking his own seat opposite Charles.
“What’s this about, Walter?” Charles asked.
Walter’s fingers drummed over some papers on the desk, and Charles recognized them immediately. It was the final Captain Kismet story he and Iris had been commissioned to deliver. An open ending to the current saga, leaving opportunity for further adventures in the future, just as had been requested.
“I like you, Charles,” said Walter. “Your work is decent, you do it on time, and you make me money.”
“Thank you,” said Charles. “I really think there are so many exciting directions for Captain Kismet to go. So many more stories—”
“I agree,” Walter interrupted. “But this?” He picked up the pages that Charles had mailed over the day before. “This, Charles, is pornography. We are a family magazine.”
“Pornography?” Charles frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Walter sighed and flipped to one of the last pages of the story. Penny Haven’s experiment had torn open a vortex in time and space, and she was on the very brink of being pulled in when at the very last minute, Ranger and Axel had arrived to grab hold of her. Or, at least, one version of her. For every instance where Penny was rescued, there were other possible realities where she had fallen into the rift, causing her body and mind to scatter across the omniverse, atomized. Iris had been especially pleased with that twist: The reader got the satisfying moral ending of seeing Penny saved from the dangers of her own boundless ambition, but now there were countless versions of the same woman out there in the ether, primed to show up as heroines, villainesses, or whatever else future stories might require. One woman’s multitudes.
But what’s this? While Penny, restored to her senses, is busy shutting down her machine and closing the vortex, who should appear from nowhere but Omega Man! He has been plotting for months now to destroy Captain Kismet, not by fighting him one-on-one, but by taking what he holds most dearly. Kismet sees Omega materialize, wielding an energy gun, and leaps in front of Penny to once again protect her…but Omega’s dark aim falls on Axel, his most trusted friend. Omega has time to fire off just one deadly shot before, with a terrible “NO!,” Kismet punches him so hard that the monstrous being is propelled out of the moon’s gravity, condemned to float endlessly in the void of space for as long as his shattered exo-suit can provide air.
Kismet rushes to Axel’s side, cradling his friend’s broken body, and begins to weep. He has fought so hard to protect the people of Earth and has been able to do so only because of Kid Kismet, the boy who fell from the stars and pledged to be his ally.
“His wounds are too severe,” cries Penny. “There…there is nothing we can do.”
“How lucky I have been,” says Axel softly. “That of all possible planets, I crash-landed on yours…”
Ranger frowns. These words! They are so familiar. In a distant world, he held a woman in his arms as the life bled from her and she thanked the universe for bringing them together.
“Sura?” he asked.
“I told you,” the voice of the princess comes from Axel’s lips, “that when the people of Zalia die, they do not perish, but ascend to a higher dimension. I have been watching you, my dear captain, all these years. It was my hand that guided Axilon to you, to be your friend, to save you from your own loneliness.”
“Sura.” Ranger sobbed. “I already lost you. I cannot lose another.”
“You never lost me,” Sura spoke through Axel. “And there is still time. An ancient Zalian magic that might yet revive your fallen prince.”
“What is it?” Ranger asked. “Anything.”
“We must reach across planes,” Sura told him. “My life force in this new dimension is strong. I can lend Axilon some of my own energy, to heal his broken body.”
“How?”
“To bridge our worlds, I need a conduit,” she said. “My energy must pour through somebody else into him.”
Axel’s hand rose up to meet Ranger’s cheek.
