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It was a slow process, a rolling wave flowing outward. By conservative estimates, it reached the ten-mile mark within an hour. Mathematicians jumped at the chance to calculate when it would cover the whole Earth; the first estimates suggested a couple years. Theologians tried to reign in excitement by either outright rejecting it or drafting hypothesis in how it all fit within their respective religions. Scientists were tentatively curious but were quickly curtailed by Corp-Co injunctions, NDAs, and lawsuits that sprung up overnight. The rest of the world was having a field day of mixed emotions and reactions.
At the epicenter of the chaos, two people had died, one delayed merely a day after the other. Soulcatcher had been a Mental, an extrahuman with a weak empathy power. All in all, a run-of-the-mill hero. On the day of his wedding, he claimed to have found his soulmate. On the day of her death, his soul died, too. His body just took a little extra time to pack in it properly.
The confidential Corp-Co reports said he went extracritical, driven mad with grief. And as he went extracirical, his powers exploded—and then just kept going. By the end of the day, the greater Phoenix area had discovered soulmarks fading onto their bodies. The rest of the Southwest UCSA gradually followed.
(The news, of course, spread much faster.)
By the time it reaches New Chicago, Lester Bradford is in Blackbird. He nearly laughs when he finds his wife’s name curled inside an elbow. He wonders where she is, at that moment, and figures it’ll be a year or so before his name appears on her skin. He strokes the name and sends a silent thanks that he had apparently managed to find his soulmate without help. Or maybe he made his own soulmate in Valerie, and this is just proof of his sheer bloodymindedness.
The next time Callie comes to visit, he rolls up the sleeves of his prison greys and discreetly flashes the mark. Callie catches it and her face works through several emotions Lester can’t name before finally breaking into a smile.
“And you, Callista?” he asks, knowing that if he and all the other Blackbird inmates and guards got their marks, the rest of the city should have as well.
Callie’s smile drops and she shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.” Her face is carefully guarded. Not for the first time, Lester curses that he doesn’t know his own daughter enough to read her. Another thing Corp-Co stole from him. “No one really knows what the marks mean, anyway. If they’re supposed to be the one person in the whole world who’s exactly right for you, the odds are astronomical that you’d have Mom’s name out of the billions of other possibilities. And it’s not like Corp-Co’s propaganda on it makes it any better.” She smiles again, that trademark grin she inherited from him carving sarcastically upward. “Soulcatcher’s Gift,” she says, rolling her eyes. “No one even knew who he was until he died. It wasn’t like he was the Captain Colossal of Arizona.”
Even if he can’t decipher his daughter, Lester knows deflection when he sees it. He lets her change the subject to her new flat in Wreck City and doesn’t bring up soulmarks again.
Joan doesn’t realize when Soulcatcher’s Gift reaches New Chicago. She isn’t paying attention to the phenomenon—or, well, she desperately tries not to. She’s always wanted a happily ever after, and the soulmarks look so much like a storybook romance. She collects dime-novel paperbacks that always, always end with the storied happily ever after. They’re worn and well-loved for a reason. A part of her yearns for a soulmate, the hope and possibility a mark would promise.
But there’s a voice—always the voices—that reminds her she is a Shadow. Doomed from the start. Who could possibly be her soulmate? Who could love a Shadow? Even if, even then, it could only ever end in pain and death.
There is no happily ever after for a Shadow.
The morning of (not that Joan is aware that today is the day, although she knows it’s too close for comfort), Joan has a routine physical. It’s been scheduled weeks in advance. Joan enters the sterile white room, and the doctor takes her vitals and inspects her lungs, joints, muscles. Joan’s shoulder is stiff today, but that isn’t uncommon.
It’s the doctor that notices it first, just as planned, and quietly pages for Reconstruction. Shortly later, a nurse comes in and explains she’s there for a routine vaccination. It’s time for some re-ups. Her voice is low and soothing, and Joan is distracted from what she’s doing. A quick jab and a special Corp-Co branded patch, and the nurse is off again to answer the next page.
It’s only two days later, when Joan is peeling her suit off after a particularly exhausting patrol that she notices it in the mirror. On the column of muscle, the right latissimus dorsi.
Her soulmark.
She cries. Relief and heartbreak and guilt and a grief that is still raw, all these years later, and the voices whisper of course of course
it would only ever end in pain
It makes sense, Joan supposes. Rationalizes. Now she doesn’t have to worry about hurting anyone else. No one else will be endangered.
Her soulmate is already dead.
It’s awkward to twist around to trace the letters. It pulls her shoulder, which is already tender. The words are black, like a fresh tattoo, and ever so slightly raised from her skin. It’ll become habit, over the weeks and months, to palm the name when she curls up to read or sleep.
Joseph Rogers
Years later, Lester’s crashing on Callie’s couch. Technically, he’s free from Blackbird, although he’s once more under Corp-Co’s thumb. He bristles at it but keeps his cool so that the rest of the team doesn’t act out and ruin the opportunity they have.
Callie is anything but calm. She’s young, he reminds himself, and as impulsive as he once was (sometimes still is). He can’t really expect her to be anything but furious for having to deal with Corp-Co after five years of relative independence. She doesn’t get on well with his team (or, at least some of them; she seems to like Protean all right). Her home has been invaded by a group of ex-prisoners. The whole of New Chicago is being overrun by rabids. So Lester thinks Callie has every right to be less-than-calm.
Lester rubs the inside of his elbow, a tic he’s developed since his soulmark appeared. He watches Callie snap at Nevermore yet again for something petty, although Lester’s pretty sure Nevermore’s doing whatever it is for the express purpose of riling Callie up. There’s something else he’s missing, something else that’s turning Callie into the raging ball of furious unease that she’s become. She’s made up of half his gene stuff, and he recognizes some of the signs Valerie used to call him out on. He wonders if he’d know what Callie was going though if he’d been around as a father and not stuck in Blackbird for the majority of her life. He wonders if Valerie would know what was wrong, just like she’d been able to do with him.
It’s not until he sees her with the Greene girl that things start to click into place. There’s history there. Lester remembers when a much younger Callie, still in the Academy, would visit him and talk almost non-stop about her roommate. And then suddenly Callie had dropped out of the Academy, gone rogue, and never talked about Greene again. That smacked of a bad break-up to Lester.
Right now, though, he has to deal with Hal and an encore of the Siege of Manhattan, so the revelation his daughter might be a lesbian takes a back-burner until more pressing issues are taken care of.
Hal knows the moment Soulcatcher’s powers expand through Blackbird. He is a Mental without equal, even drugged half to hell, and he knows the touch of another Mental’s powers. He takes it apart and examines this supposed gift. Guards and prisoners alike share gossip on what it all means. But he knows, now, exactly what it does and how it works.
He declines the gift, lets it out of his grip to wash over him like water on oil. His skin remains unmarked.
He decided long ago. He will hold Holly in his heart forever, and he does not wish for another.
Then he walks out of Blackbird and into stolen freedom. He knows his powers are wild and uncontrolled, so he ducks from Lester’s little group and holes up in an abandoned factory to sort out his next move.
People wander into his warehouse and get caught in his powers. He takes his time to investigate them, to learn what has happened in the years he’s been imprisoned. Guards only know so much, and someone somewhere will know something they do not. A pair of extrahumans get caught in his net. He feels the discordant tingle of Corp-Co’s touch on their minds. Something is wrong, something isn’t right. He knows what Corp-Co has been doing to its Squadron, what he, himself, was forcibly complicit in. But this new wrong goes beyond that. Another Mental’s power overtop of what he recognizes as Soulcatcher’s lingering touch.
Hal digs in and discovers a new depth to Corp-Co’s meddling.
Then another extrahuman enters his domain. He can hear her calling for the other two. She, too, has been touched by Corp-Co. He can feel the deep-rooted nettles choking her mind.
But then, there is also . . .
He knows this mind. Or no, doesn’t know it. It’s familiar to him.
Holly.
Holly’s daughter.
He reveals himself, and to hear her talk is like hearing a ghost. A very pleasant ghost, one he would not mind being haunted by.
He cares for this girl, Holly’s girl. In another lifetime, she might have been his.
He helps her the best he can. He cannot repair everything Corp-Co has torn asunder, but he mends what he can. He shores her defenses against the Shadow’s voices. And then the takes hold of the foreign Mental power masking Soulcatcher’s and rips it free.
Then he lets her go, along with the two she came for. But she has left him with an idea. With a purpose.
Yes. Corp-Co’s hold has been weakened. And now Hal could repair what Corp-Co and the world has damaged.
He knows how Soulcatcher’s powers were able to reach as far as they did, and he can do so as well. Hal is a Mental without equal, and he will build a better world.
Of all the things Lester had expected to deal with today, being sucked into a disturbing fantasy world inside his own head was not one of them. At least the whole ordeal didn’t last nearly as long as Manhattan, and when all was said and done the casualties were a hell of a lot less than half of Manhattan. Lester marked it as an overall success. Getting his records cleared was the icing on the cake. And Gordon’s death? A satisfactory end to a satisfactory day.
Now, to deal with Callie.
He takes her aside before he leaves the country (it’s well past time he found his soulmate and see if she’s got his name plastered on her arse yet). His cloak drapes heavily on her shoulders, and she stands nearly at a height with him. Pride swells in his chest and he allows himself the emotion, even if some not-so-small part of him says he doesn’t deserve it. (Hal’s fantasy world still rings with awful truths in his head.)
“Look, I know I don’t have much credibility as your father,” he starts and winces at the look she gives him. Right. Maybe now’s not the time to point out how much of a failure he is. “Look, Calista.” He sighs and just decides to dive right into it. “Don’t waste your time philosophizing it. It doesn’t matter if she’s the one and only. It only matters if you want to make it work.” He strokes over his mark and hopes Callie understands and hopes that he correctly deduced her soulmark. If not, this conversation just got even more awkward than it already was.
Callie averts her eyes and clenches her fists before taking a breath and relaxing. “Tell Mom hi for me,” and her smile is sad and strained, but in it, Lester knows he got at least one thing right. He gives her one last hug before he leaves, trying to pour in all the words he can’t bring himself to say. She hugs him fiercely right back.
Callie has always known she wasn’t quite the same as other people. She watched from the sidelines as people in Second and Third Year paired off. She’s seen enough tv shows and read enough on the internet to know what other people want out of a relationship.
Callie doesn’t want those things. The few times she’s tried kissing was uninteresting, and everything she’s seen and read about sex sounds downright revolting.
So she doesn’t really pay attention to the progress of Soulcatcher’s Gift. She reads about it, especially a year after it first starts when enough people have been affected, so there’s a bit of a handle on what’s going on. She thinks that, maybe, the gift will pass over her, or something. She’s not into relationships, so she probably won’t have a soulmate. Sound logic.
She knows the day Soulcatcher’s Gift reaches New Chicago. The hype the entire month preceding it has been unbearable, with ads running non-stop soulmate-finding services and romantic paraphernalia. Callie is very done with it all before the marks even appear. When the first marks start fading in, on the West Side, the news outlets immediately pick up on it and happily trumpet it our for everyone. By the end of the day, New Chicago has officially received Soulcatcher’s Gift.
Callie waits until the evening, when she’s alone in her apartment in Wreck City. She’s not expecting a mark, doesn’t want one, but she’s never heard of someone not getting a mark, so she’s hesitant to hope.
Callie strips down in front of a full mirror, leaning unfixed against a wall. She hesitates a moment, tracing her tattoo on her left shoulder. She takes a breath and steels herself and looks down. She twists this way and that, but it doesn’t take long until she finds an unfamiliar smear of black on her calf.
She lands with a heavy thud on the hardwood floor, curling over her leg to get a better look even as her heart beats madly and something creeps up her throat.
Joannie Greene
Callie’s heart stops. Everything goes blank.
The world returns in fits and starts. Callie doesn’t know what to think, much less what to feel.
She has a soulmate. And not just any soulmate, her once-best-friend.
The friend who betrayed her.
Joan. Joan was her soulmate.
(Was Callie gay? Christo, was Joan??)
Callie stays up all night with spinning thoughts, unable to settle on any one emotion.
The next day, Callie realizes something. Joan’s in New Chicago, too. She would have Callie’s name on her skin. She would know they were soulmates.
Callie maybe spends more time than usual picking her outfit that day. She keeps outside, walking between well-travelled landmarks. She’s already established a name for herself in Wreck City, Joan will know where to find her.
But Joan doesn’t find her. Not that day, and not for the whole week after.
After a month of radio silence, Callie’s fluxuating emotions settle into indignant anger. Hot and electric.
How dare Joan abandon Callie. Again. How dare she ignore her mark and write Callie off so callously. Fucking perfect Joannie Greene, Hero of New Chicago. Of course she wouldn’t sully her reputation by claiming a rabid as her soulmate.
(Nevermind Corp-Co’s stance on queer relationships.)
It’s five years since the Academy until Callie meets Joan again. Half that since Soulcatcher’s Gift hit New Chicago. Joan treats Callie like she had back then, like Callie is nothing more than a rabid that needed to be caught and put down. It feeds the anger that has been simmering these past years.
And then Callie fries Ops, and saves Joan from Night and some fucking weird-ass Shadow world domination plot.
And then they were working together. Kind of. Callie helps to bring in the waves of rabids and rogues. It was partly her fault, anyway, for destroying Ops and the brainwashing signal. Her dad’s there, too, and that’s strange and wonderful on its own. Really, Callie doesn’t have much time to think, except that every time she sees Joan, she thinks about her friend from years ago, and her heart aches. And maybe they can be friends again? But Joan will go hot and cold, and Callie remembers how Joan hasn’t brought up their soulmarks once. Callie is angry and confused and hurt.
Doctor Hypnotic’s dream world only confuses her further. Callie’s a Shadow power, the Hero of New Chicago, and . . . married to Joannie? She doesn’t remember it all when she wakes up, but in the weeks following, details come back to her. She wonders how much Doctor Hypnotic knows about soulmarks and Shadow powers, how much of Callie’s dream was colored with reality. The implications are damming enough.
Her dad leaves her. Again. But this time, at least, she got to hug him goodbye. And maybe he’ll be back. The weight of his old cape is comforting, even as it reminds her that he’s been gone for most of her life and is choosing to leave again. His parting words are less comforting, but maybe there’s merit to them, too.
Callie takes a moment and decides she doesn’t care about the soulmarks. Not right now. Right now, she wants to be Joan’s friend again. She misses her best friend.
They go out for quesadillas and margaritas. It becomes a weekly thing as they work together to build Joan’s new idea. The Protectors—a joint effort between New Chicago’s service departments and extrahumans, independent from Corp-Co, bound by the same laws and expectations as municipal services. They also build their friendship again. It’s halting and awkward. There’s so much still they’re keeping from each other, hesitant to ruin this thing by knocking into the wrong landmine. But they both seem to want it—Callie certainly does—so Callie hopes it’ll work out in the end.
Lester finds Valerie in Denmark, and although it’s not on her arse, it is his name etched onto her beautiful, gorgeous, Christo-he-missed-this-woman’s skin. It quickly becomes his favorite spot to kiss.
They take some time to themselves, finding a new life with each other in Valerie’s small flat outside Copenhagen. They have to learn how to be with each other again. Lester figures even soulmates have to slowly communicate through over a decade of separation and all the obstacles that come from it. But they’re both willing to make it work, and every day, even the bad ones, Lester is reminded of why he fell in love with this woman in the first place.
It’s difficult. It’s a struggle. And Lester has to swallow his pride and anger so often he wonders how he’s not choked himself to death. Valerie often sequesters herself in the garden to cool off. Lester watches her stab at the semi-frozen ground with a spade as she works through her frustrations. He thumbs over his soulmark.
The weather slowly warms, and the fights lose their bite. They remember how to banter without striking too deep. They learn where time and an ocean apart changed them. They don’t return to what they had before, instead they make something entirely new. Stronger, now, in the freedom Denmark affords. No Corp-Co, no Squadron, no Runners, no powers.
Just two soulmates, growing love between them.
In the end, the garden is glorious come spring.
The first few months since the Protectors are officially established are hectic for Derek. He’s bounced back and forth between departments and teams, helping to set up the technical equipment. He’s the head of IT, as well as on an official training regimen and light patrol schedule, and there is a lot of hardware being installed in their new headquarters.
Just as important, though, is continuing to decrypt the hundreds of terabytes worth of stolen Corp-Co data. Discovering the Moore data, the Ops brainwashing, and the extracritical phenomenon were fucking awful, but it was extremely vital information. If Corp-Co had any other nasty surprises waiting, they needed to know as soon as possible.
It’s a nondescript Tuesday when he finds the first files that reference Soulcatcher. The Soulcatcher Extracritical Event, it’s called. Derek reads this one thoroughly, interested to know what Corp-Co found out about the soulmarks but never made public.
And, well, as he reads on, in true Corp-Co fashion, his intrigue turns to horror.
Well, that explained why is soulmark has been steadily fading from Emily Quesada to reveal an absolutely mesmerizing scrawl of characters. (He doesn’t have much time for research, not with Corp-Co’s files, but the he’s relatively sure its Gujarati script and has almost figured out a rough phonetic translation.)
He reads it once, then thrice over, taking notes and copying summarized parts of the files for a presentation. He works late into the night. The next morning, he brings it forward at the daily core founder meeting.
The story he tells is thus:
Samuel Garcia, codename Soucatcher, goes extracritical, triggered by his wife’s death. Soulcatcher dies in the event, but his powers do not die with him. They spread at a measured rate, and wherever the extracritical event reaches, names appear on every human. The marks cannot be removed, and if the skin is damaged, the words will repair as the skin does. The marks are usually the name of someone already close to the individual in question, and in general signify the possibility of a successful romantic relationship.
Corp-Co pays close attention to the phenomenon and are the first to notice a hiccup of sorts. A problem for Corp-Co’s self-made image.
The marks do not subscribe to Corp-Co’s methodical mantra of cisgendered, monogamous heterosexuality. Corp-Co has spent its entire existence carefully weeding out undesirables from its ranks. Soulmarks, and the newly-formed mythos around them, have the power to tear down what Corp-Co so diligently maintained.
The first instance, the one that alerted Corp-Co to the danger, was when Phoenix Squadron’s Coyoto had two names appear on his skin. It was happenstance a Runner caught it in time, before it had turned into a PR incident. Corp-Co was able to keep him quiet long enough for an emergency trip to Therapy.
After that, Corp-Co made extensive plans to get ahead of the extracritical event. They start a new department, titled Reconstruction, doubling under medical and Mind. They know nearly down to the moment when the names would appear on each of their assets. On the day the marks appear, each extrahuman is brought in for Reconstruction. If the mark doesn’t fit with Corp-Co’s image, a dissolving patch is placed over the mark, chemicals altering the top layers of skin to read another name—a very fancy tattoo, nearly indistinguishable from the original mark. The real names still exist underneath—Corp-Co hadn’t yet figured out how to remove them entirely—but they are hidden. A Mind power changes memories, so no one is the wiser their mark was tampered with.
Derek watches the others as he talks. It’s the Moore data, the Ops brainwashing, and the extracritical phenomenon all over again. Shocked, stony silence. Callie’s fists are clenched above the table. Joan is pale. Sheila’s scowling darkly. Tyler’s fidgeting, but he’s paying rapt attention. Harriet and Kai glance sidelong at each other, and Derek can guess some of what’s going through their minds.
They really should be used to Corp-Co’s depth of fuckery by now.
It’s nearly summer before they’re boarding a round flight to New Chicago, Valerie just as excited and nervous and scared to see Callie as he is. They both could have been better parents, but they’ve now resolved to build a stronger relationship with their daughter, whatever sort she’d let them have. They send word in advance and book a hotel (their Swedish nest egg grew nicely in that decade) and make as many arrangements as possible to be independent of Callie, just in case she wanted minimal contact. From the USCA news, she’s quite busy building an organization from the ground up. Lester can understand if she doesn’t have the time for them.
Callie meets them in the foyer of the Protector Plaza. Lester thinks it’s a stupid name, and Callie agrees when he says this aloud.
“They wanted alliteration,” she says, rolling her eyes. She’s grinning Lester’s grin and he is too, and he lets himself hope that they can make this work. “Some people just couldn’t shake Branding,” she says loudly and directly at someone rummaging in the gutty works of the front desk computer across the room.
“I didn’t vote for it!” the blue-haired man called back indignity. Lester vaguely remembers him from the fight with Hal and the cleanup after. Frostbite—that was his name. “Blame your Shadow and the lovebirds.”
“Who’s that?” Valerie asks, raising her eyebrow and nodding to Frostbite.
“Derek.” Callie waves her hand dismissively. “Best friend. Water power. Dating the team leader from Squadron: India.”
Valerie gives Lester a look. He shrugs and gestures for her to do . . . . whatever. He’d shared his theory on Callie’s soulmark, and she’d expressed interest in the outcome same as he had. She rolls his eyes at him. They look up to see Callie staring strangely them.
“Right, how about a tour, then,” she says.
Callie takes them through the building, describing the structure and purpose of the new organization. How it works directly with New Chicago’s emergency services and, although an independent organization, still operates within municipal law. There’s several departments in the works: elementary-, junior high-, and senior high-aged after school programs; a physical health department to work with unique extrahuman biologies; a mental health department to help unpack all Corp-Co did and the general stress of being law-enforcement.
“Half of Derek’s job is figuring out what Corp-Co did to us so we can undo shit they did or fix problems they wrote off,” Callie explains. She's a lot more relaxed, now. Lester can see that the Protectors, the purpose of it, has been good for her. Her smiles are easy and she’s much less guarded than she had been last year, perhaps since the Academy. “Actually, you both should probably be briefed on some of it. I’ll have Shelia set up an info packet or something. Oh, hey, Joan!”
They had come to a workout room, and Lester recognizes Greene’s kid. At Callie’s call, she gets off of the elliptical she’d been on and comes over with a hesitant smile. Callie throws her arm over Greene’s shoulders and tugs them close together. Her hand slips down to rest at Greene’s waist.
“Joan, this is my mom and dad. Mom, Dad, this is Joannie,” Callie’s grin stretches wise, the Bradford trademarked grin Lester had given her, “my girlfriend and soulmate.”