The Marvels

Ep. 42 | A Promotion

Vidya jerked awake and was blinded by oncoming headlights. After the brightness passed by, she opened her bleary eyes again and realized she was in the passenger seat of a car. Her head hurt, and she swallowed the bitterness in her throat, resisting the urge to throw up.

"You were only out for five minutes, in case you were wondering."

It was David, sitting next to her. The recent events came rushing back, and Vidya's face twisted in anger. She raised her block-encased hands to hit him, but within that second, he took one hand off the wheel, grabbed a gun from his side, and pointed it at her face.

"Don't even think about it," he said calmly. He'd never taken his eyes off the road.

Vidya's hands froze mid-air. She stared into the barrel of the gun, eyes growing wide. This was the first time she was truly in danger of being shot, and the fear that seized her was unlike anything she'd felt before. Her gaze traveled from the gun to David's face, maskless and changing colors with the traffic lights. Gone was the friendliness, the warmth. This was a different person.

Vidya finally dropped her hands into her lap. David stood down, too, but he didn't put away the gun completely. He kept it in his hand and rested it on the wheel, and though it was pointed away from her now, she knew he was capable of shooting her dead before she ever saw it coming.

They were in a van, not a car, but a divider blocked her from seeing what was stored in the back. Where were they going? Did she dare ask? Vidya stared out the windshield, stunned by her situation. Her fingers, positioned awkwardly in their prisons, were becoming sore. She couldn't keep up with all the random past details that suddenly felt sinister. It's a surprise, he'd told her when she asked about the tube-machine. And the heavy, uncut blocks of metal? Also a surprise. And, holy shit, scanning her prints: it wasn't because David trusted her to have access to the greenhouse, it was so that his gridlights could identify her hands as targets, so that he could cuff her before she fought back too hard. He had been playing her for a long, long time—could she even call it a betrayal, when he might've never been her friend at all?

"Well?" he said suddenly. "Are you going to ask?"

He was just so different. His demeanor, his personality, all of it had changed. Vidya glared at him, this stranger who she'd considered her greatest ally, and remained silent.

"We've got a few minutes," he said, glancing at the time, "so you may as well get an explanation out of it."

Vidya's eye twitched. She didn't want to give in, but she also wanted to scream at him. "Who are you," she asked harshly, "and what have you done?"

"I am exactly who I said I am. I'm the fifth member of the true third iteration of the Marvels, until I was unjustly fired." He smiled. "Though I wasn't honest with you about the reasons behind it."

Vidya waited for him to say why he actually got fired, but he laughed and skipped over it entirely.

"As for what I've done," he continued. "I was...angry when they relocated me. I'd been discarded and turned into one of their little hush-hush secrets. I wanted to get revenge by killing Juggernaut, but that was impossible, so instead I decided to kill whoever they got to replace me. It turned out that the guy they replaced me with would also be pretty hard to kill, so I gave up without even trying. I stayed in a little house in Missouri, seething with hatred, but eventually I returned to Los Angeles in hopes that I could start over, and then broke the news of a new Marvel." He looked at her sideways. "You had no experience, nothing to your name other than a fancy manifestation and interesting powers, but you easily became a Marvel. Every bit of hatred I had for Celestro came rushing back, and I decided to get whatever revenge I could. I thought, if I can't kill Juggernaut and I can't kill Phase, why not kill others? I knew things from my time working there, details about their systems, about the way missions worked and even people's locations. Fairy was easy. Achilles was manageable. I didn't know Eagle Eye was Armogan's assassin until we crashed their meeting, but, hey, they didn't seem to really give a shit, anyway. And Talia..." David trailed off, shaking his head. "I didn't want to kill her. She was too high profile, and her death angered Celestro a little too much. I shouldn't have done that."