A Once Crowded Sky Read Online Free Page A

She thinks of Soldier. How clear things were then, when she was wrapped in the clouds.
    Her voice soon joins the chorus of shouters, and she commends her resolve for choosing her new family and her old life; and in her mind she is already on the way back: she is pulling aloft across the horizon and turning ahead of a westerly wind; and it worries her—never has she been more at ease, never has she felt more grounded.
     
    The Soldier of Freedom #518
    The Soldier of Freedom stands in front of a grave, his gun drawn. Pull the trigger.
    “Next time,” he says. Soldier hesitates, licks his lips. “Until next time.” Soldier breathes in deep.
    Though his joints object, Soldier sits on one knee and points his gun into the dirt. He stares for a while at the tip of his pistol, at the metal going into the ground. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he looks up, takes in the markers that surround him, that tell the story of the Villains’ Graveyard. There’re so many of them. So many men he once fought. So many dead. They almost go on forever.
    Soldier’s eyes finally rest back on the headstone in front of him. On top of a curved rock sits a bust of a man’s face: Survivor, Soldier’s ever-ready archnemesis, looking younger than how Soldier remembers him. But then again, the man always did look young for his age.
    Survivor was born at the beginning of man, and he had done his best to drown his toe in every puddle of human misery that lay across his path over the last few millennia. He’d been a slave owner both in Egypt and Virginia. When Mongols were popular he was a Mongol; when Nazis were popular, he’d been a Nazi. Only thing he ever gave to this world was a generation of his evil offspring, each competing to be as cruel as the old man, excepting one.
    It was death, other people’s deaths, that kept him going. All he ever wanted was another year, and he was always willing to trade whomever orwhatever to get that particular commodity. The suffering that came with these transactions didn’t seem to bother him.
    Hell, pretty much nothing bothered that villain until Soldier, really. Not until he met a man who also had some history was Survivor ever really stopped.
    They seemed to cross each other’s way at least once a month for years on end. Survivor always had some latest scheme, and Soldier was ever willing to sniff it out and, inevitably at the last second, foil it. He’d belted Survivor so many damn times the contours of the man’s face still tingle around Soldier’s knuckles. It’s possible Soldier’s guns, Carolina and California, don’t even need to be aimed at the man: they’d probably find his vulnerable spots by rote memory. But it didn’t matter how many times Soldier’d beat into him, Survivor was back soon enough, killing more, waiting patiently for Soldier to draw again.
    How’d Survivor always gotten loose? How’d he always found a way to come back with another damn plot? Survivor’s got a knife to the president’s throat at a UN conference. He wants to disrupt it for some forgotten reason, killed twenty-seven people getting in the door. Pull the trigger. Soldier draws and fires two shots. One goes into Survivor’s hand, and the other hits a chandelier that cuts between the villain and the hostage. Another battle won. Well done. Well done. And a month later, Survivor was back again.
    Man was polite enough about it though. “Until next time,” he always said before his unavoidably predictable escape. Until next time. Next time. Soldier racks his weapon and rests his free hand on the ground for leverage.
    Survivor’d died like all the rest of the villains just as The Blue started ripping apart this world. If you asked him, Star-Knight’d give you some fancy explanation for it, why it all tied together, some suicidal virus spitting up out of The Blue making them all kill themselves. Star-Knight had gathered their bodies together, buried them here in the newly christened Villains’ Graveyard,