ST – Chapter Sixteen: The Pariah's Arrogance (Patreon)

Chapter Sixteen: The Pariah’s Arrogance

“I did nothing,” I said. “I came here to view the activation. I have no idea what messed it up.”

Somehow I’d embraced my villainy. Scarlatte glared at me but I didn’t care. I hated this woman. I’d borne the glares and rage of hundreds of people to be here for this. I was going to try to fix it. I was going to the Array, and with that, even the scorn of all these people couldn’t destroy my newfound confidence. I played a different role in front of the crowds now. A darker roll, but no less powerful.

Before the Folly, I was an inspiration. I appeared on television as a youthful dreamer with proof of how I could improve the lives of everyone. I appealed to people's hopes and dreams, and I was a genius at that, too. Possibly even greater than my scientific acumen was my ability to sway a crowd.

For the kids, I offered space. I offered hopes of exploring new worlds beyond the stars. I made myself Gandalf, with the wisdom to show others how to learn, if they had the talent, and then proved what I could do.

For the adults, the common man, I offered practicality. Sunsoul could provide free power. Universal and effective unlike the solar panel movements of the past. The idea of eliminating the electric bill sat well with parents wishing they had an extra two hundred fifty dollars each month. Power companies initially wanted nothing to do with that so the simple solution was to let them invest, before it was too late. Eliminating power as a burden on everyone was something Sunsoul  absolutely could do. Soon enough it would, so if power companies wanted to stay viable, they’d best have a strong investment in the future!

Scarlatte had apparently discovered even more, but at its core, that was probably the most valuable thing about Sunsoul. That was power in my hands. That gave me money to start with the government.

For the politicians, I offered jobs. I offered a goal. I offered stability and I offered prestige. A politician supporting Violette Fontaine was supporting progress. Tax dollars sent to me were directly improving lives, making jobs, creating free power, and most of all, giving the people magic. What voter wouldn’t support that?

I had realized at a young age that people all wanted to feel special. Few actually were, but everyone wanted to feel that they were the center of the universe. There were a few obvious exceptions… the devout priests who actually bought into their religions, the nuns, the die-hards. The vast majority of people, however, fit the category and my niche was anyone who wanted to believe themselves to be a star. With my Helios Array, I offered the opportunity for that to be realized. I was like the lottery, but with my Array in the sky, anyone would be able to see if they were magic. If they were touched. If they were special. Everyone wanted their chance and my mission to the sun held all those dreams on its monumental wings.

No longer.

I was the villain now. I was The Traitor. The Betrayer. The destroyer of the world. Normally my presence might have been enough to cause a full on riot. Normally, I wasn’t channeling massive amounts of Sunsoul.

I’d saved the lives of three idiots when I’d realized the activation had failed. I was strong enough to maintain my shield and build custom ones to keep the morons from burning. The fools had left the safety of the human powered shields after the Activation began. Had the tower worked they would have been fine, but even I would think twice before trusting it immediately. No one was supposed to step out of the man-made shield for at least an hour, but there were always some people. I almost thought they deserved the Darwin award they’d earned, but since I’d been able to save them, I did. I wasn’t a monster.

It didn’t matter though. I’d suspected Sirahn would try something to ruin the activation but I hadn’t known what. Still, no one blamed Scarlatte. No. The reason it failed had to be me. They still wanted to spit on me. I could see it. I could feel it. Yet now… I felt untouchable. The shame I’d felt, all the self doubt, the loathing I held for myself. The fear, both of being hunted by a mob, or worse killing my attackers by accident. That was all gone.

I was going to the sun. I was going to the array. I had the chance to fix my mistake. I could finally find out what was wrong. If I couldn’t… well. I didn’t even want to think about that.

It was icing on the cake to me, watching Scarlatte and all her little employees scrambling. The barrier had risen for a few seconds, bright and wonderful. Scarlatte was giving the people everything I’d hoped to provide, once upon a time. Then it had failed, and I could not stop the smug grin. I didn’t know what Sirahn had done to sabotage the damn tower but it was no wonder the people protected by my shield glared at me. I was sure my face had a positively goblin-esque expression as I watched my one-time protege fail.

Still, they didn’t dare do anything. Not after seeing just how powerful I truly was.

The ability to use Sunsoul was not equal. To this day, I had never met anyone who could channel even close to as much as I could. It was like an internal capacity of some sort. I’d always equated batteries. Most of the people who could merely see Sunsoul were like dead Triple As. If you plugged them into an old flashlight they might still be able to provide some light but that was about it. Those who could manipulate it were like double A’s, or maybe C’s. Those were all the people helping with the barrier. Scarlatte herself was perhaps a car battery.

I was a fucking power plant.

I enjoyed reminding all of these normal people that I did have the ability to kill them. I was always armed. That as special as they wanted to find themselves it was me who had brought Sunsoul to life. It was honestly a wonder I hadn’t slaughtered anyone already. More than enough mobs had come at me just asking for it, but I’d always refrained. Always assured of my guilt despite never fully knowing what had happened up there.

With the chance to fix my mistake ahead, all of that doubt was gone. I felt like a new woman, and once upon a time, I had lived for my audience as much as I had for science. A villain? I could be a villain. It was just another role to give the people. If everything broke, and I truly did destroy the world, at least I could be the one everyone blamed.

“What do you know about the attack, Violette? You haven’t shown your face in years and our activation fails right as you decide to attend? I don’t believe it.”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. It sounds to me like something burst up there,” I said with a grin.

“This was not a mistake, or a failure. This was direct sabotage. A murder attempt. Gunshots were fired up there, Violette, and one of the attackers died. Do you understand?” Scarlatte said, her oh-so-wise condescending attitude making me want to stab her.

I sneered. Of course, I understood. Always nagging me, always pretending like she knew anything, forgetting that she was my protege. My student. Not the other way around.

“Well it sounds to me like you should have made your towers more secure. No one sabotaged my Array,” I said with a shrug, leaning into the sneers and jeers I could feel around me.

The people heard my words and they glared at me. I wasn’t even wrong but they knew who their enemy was, no matter what I said. Their anger rolled off of me like rain off a windshield. Knowing that I would finally get the chance to fix everything the array had broken all those years ago was a barrier every bit as potent as Sunsoul for me. They hated me now, but when I reached the array and fixed the Sun, everything would change. They would adore me once more.

Perhaps then, I might deign to keep Scarlatte’s little towers running. They certainly were pretty things.

Scarlatte sighed in exasperation. “Don’t you care at all? Is greed for glory and fame all there ever was to you?”

I sneered. “What ever made you think that? I wanted to propel this world into a new age of comfort. I wanted to help people. I didn’t even get the chance to make a mistake, but I’m the scapegoat, and don’t you dare deny it. You rode my downfall straight to the top, so don’t spend even one minute pretending to be high and mighty. No one’s ever cared about me these past twenty years. I’ve been demonized, ridiculed, and outright attacked more than once. I don’t know what went wrong up there any better than anyone else down here, but it certainly didn’t have anything to do with me. I just wanted to watch the show, and maybe provide a little extra security. Without which your towers would’ve gotten three more people killed, I might add! So do I care about some random employees of yours getting killed? No. I don’t give a rat’s ass. Knowing you, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this were just an accident that you were trying to make look like a sabotage. Three out of five towers work. Sixty percent reliability. On billions of dollars in construction. That’s a failure in any high school in the country, Scarlatte, and it has absolutely nothing to do with me.”

Scarlatte seethed and I preened. Even better, I got to watch as some of the opinions of the crowd around us began to turn against the aging doctor.

Truthfully, I did care. I didn’t want anyone to be hurt, but what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. Yes, I’d attended the activation unexpectedly, but I’d always been invited. I hadn’t done anything, nor had I even really colluded. I was just asked to show up.

Did people really die up there?

Inwardly, it gnawed at me, a little. I wasn’t a monster. If I was, there would be a damn site more people dead at my hand, and I would’ve been fully justified by self-defense. Being an outcast, a living cause of the apocalypse, the real wonder was that someone hadn’t shot me.

“Just… go, Violette. Before you start a riot,” Scarlatte said with a sigh. “I know you, of all people, can walk out whenever you wish..”

The old woman had spent nearly two hours up there in her tower somewhere, doing who knew what. Getting her story straight sounded like a perfectly good excuse to me. Sirahn might not have done anything and it might have been a legitimate accident!

I honestly did not know how her towers worked. I had my suspicions, and I didn’t think they were very ethical. My guess was that people were somehow used to refine the Sunsoul. Less wild and chaotic, it was probably more valuable. If I believed the conspiracy nuts, those people had become human sacrifices to power the Towers. A surprisingly large amount of people actually had cut ties after going to work for Tellanex, but I didn’t want to buy into all that. Scarlatte was a tough woman, but not evil.

“If you insist. Does this mean I’m not invited to the next activation ceremonies any longer? I’ve had such a good time!”

Scarlatte sighed. “There… probably won’t be a next time, Violette. Unless you are far smarter than I think you are and find a way to stop that second mission to the Sun… I suspect we’ll all be dead soon.”

I blanched. What… was she talking about? Could she know!? Well of course she knew. I was sure anyone with a lick of sense knew about the green-lit mission to the Array. It was remaining stable much more often, and the chances of finding it within a reasonable timeframe were almost sixty percent.

After how I’d just accused Scarlatte, that suddenly felt ominous. It didn’t matter though. I could fix what my stupid ‘colleagues’ broke. Where they failed, I would succeed. Smart as all of them were… As good friends, and as good people as anyone I had ever known, the lot of them, I’d always known I was superior. Whatever they had broken, wouldn’t have broken had I just been there.

I turned and walked away before anyone could see the wetness in my eyes, and stopped dead as I came face to face with Matt.

“M-Matt?” I asked, shocked. I somehow hadn’t expected to find him here. My relationship with the old bartender had felt separate from all of this. Distant. “I didn’t… isn’t the bar open right now?”

Matt frowned.

“Closed. Wanted to see all this. I thought you said you weren’t coming?” he replied, arms folded across his chest.

I stepped beside him and we began to walk off towards one of the exits. No one would be able to leave for at least another hour or two, though Scarlatte was right about me. I could make a barrier of Sunsoul and go wherever I wanted, sunlight or no.

“I changed my mind,” I said.

He grunted. I hadn’t been with him long enough to be sure, but it seemed like dissatisfaction to me. He was often quiet like that.

“You sounded pretty smug about this whole thing,” he said. “Thought everybody really had you pegged wrong, y’know? You were shunned and mistreated for something that wasn’t even really your fault. Seein’ you up there, laughing at all the folks that have staked their lives on this…?”

He sighed and pulled out a cigarette before lighting it up.

“I wasn’t laughing at that. I was mocking Scarlatte. There’s a difference.”

“Don’t feel that way. Don’t feel that way at all. Seeing you up there, all snide… It was like watching a different person from the woman I’ve been speaking with these last few weeks. Like you just… turned off the real you for a show. Why? What do you gain by watching this fail?” he asked.

I flinched. Dammit. “I… they hate me anyway. I just… so I’m not fucking perfect. It was nice, watching someone else fail. Especially her after the way she dragged my name through the mud!”

He leaned against a wall and I joined him there. I held out a hand and he handed me a cigarette, and lit it for me.

“Guess I can’t blame you for that. But… do you want to be better than her? Or do you want to feel good?” he asked.

“I—What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Just… feel like you’re better than that. You can be better than that. Better than all of this. You weren’t here to protect anyone, and you didn’t save those people because you cared. You did it out of spite.”

“So… what, are we done? You no longer want anything to do with me, now that you know I can’t live up to the… the fucking fantasy I put on the tv when I was younger?”

He grinned. “Nah. It’s not like I’ve been dating you for your boundless altruism. You’ve still got a great rack after all.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Really?”

His grin widened as he leaned back against the wall and put his hands behind his head, staring up through the barrier of Sunsoul into the sinking sun. “Still. Would it be so bad, trying to live up to what you were?”

I didn’t really know what to say to that. I watched the barrier of Sunsoul with him as they finally began closing the hangar doors. The doctors and workers maintaining the shield all looked exhausted. They hadn’t anticipated needing to keep the barrier up for so long.

“I’m trying, Matt,” I said. “I…. I’m gonna be gone. Maybe for a long time. I’m not really sure. But… I’m going to fix this. Fix all of this. Then these stupid towers won’t be needed anymore. Things will grow green again, the animals will stop turning into huge monsters, and we’ll be able to fly again. I’m going to fix it all. This was just the first step.”

He grinned.

“Wish I had a beer. I’d toast to that,” he said. Instead of toasting, he plucked the cigarette out of my mouth and kissed me.

I flushed from head to toe. His business!? He’d lose customers! He’d… he…

After a few minutes, I stopped worrying and just melted into the kiss.

When we finally parted, he winked at me, before handing back the cigarette. Then, he headed off into the crowd, wading through an ocean of disapproving glares, and amused laughter. The damn bastard.

Somehow, though, he’d convinced me that I’d played this wrong. I wished I’d behaved differently. The despair in Scarlatte’s voice nagged at me, and I wondered if I’d caused that somehow. I feared what she might know that I did not, with my years separated from academia. That doomed look…

I had to go on this mission. I had to fix my mistake. That was the way forward. The best chance for me to be a hero again.

…Isn’t it?