Feather by Feather and Other Stories Read online

  I didn’t know what to do, so I just went through with the rest of the preparations. I offered the Professor a cup of tea to calm him down, but he only threw it at the wall and I had to clean that up instead of trying to console him.

  It seemed an eternity before the superheroes finally showed up. We’d only invited a couple, just the Professor’s staunchest enemies. The first to arrive were the Masked Crusader and Cinnibird. They took one look at the situation and Cinnibird went to fetch cake while the Masked Crusader knelt beside Professor Apocalypse and started talking to him. Asking questions about the device and what it’d been for and you might not think that the reminder of his failure would help, but it did and the Professor was soon lecturing away to his heart’s content with a piece of strawberry cake in his hand.

  It was Cinnibird who listened to him while the Masked Crusader took me aside to ask me questions. I won’t say I’d never been so close to a superhero before, but everyone’s heard of MC. I’d never met the guy before and… I was a bit of a fan when I was smaller and here he was talking to me. That’s pretty overwhelming. You lot don’t have a grain of his charisma to split between you, you know. I struggled to answer his questions on what had happened and how. It was pretty surreal.

  Since I’d been the one to stop the doomsday device, the Masked Crusader offered me a job aiding the superheroes. I figured that Professor Apocalypse was probably going to fire me, so I said ‘yes’. The pay’s not as good as a villain’s, but the medical package extends to your whole family. Turns out, not every supervillain has a manual and some like kidnapping you, your sidekicks or your family members. It only took a month for a supervillain to accidentally give me powers of my own. I can become a ghost in a machine whenever I want, but you already know all that.

  You really picked the wrong hero to join you, you know. I only ghost digital machines, for a start. This thing… It’s mechanical. Not my area. You need to listen more carefully. I tried to warn you not to involve me. Now you’ve got about five minutes to defuse this thing on your own. No, I told you. I’m not a hero. I’m selfish. I love my family. And I’ve got a way out through that computer there. I’m too useful to risk like this.

  One last thing: I noticed there’s a power cord in the corner below the flatscreen. It worked for me.

  This is the final draft of a revision project I ran for the first two to three years of publishing my work. That means that I’ve shared all drafts publicly and discussed why I made the changes that I’ve made.

  I think All Our Good Intentions is the best possible story I can create at my current skill level, so it’s time to put it to rest officially and let my brain focus on other stories.

  It’s my first superhero story, though it focuses on one of the mad scientist’s minions. It’s a silly bit of fluffy storytelling that I hope people will enjoy as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I had a lot of fun with Rodrigo.

  Once upon a time…

  Thrice-bled was the care of her

  In vain. Oh! In vain.

  Death speaks morning comfort dear;

  The wind-child sings to a stove.

  Condensing fairy tales into brief poems is a delightful challenge. I really enjoyed fitting all of the essential parts of The Goose Maid into this poem.

  It’s one of my favourite fairy tales and I was delighted to discover other people retelling it. I owe this particular poem to Shannon Hale’s version of the same name because it was the first one I’d ever encountered and taught me that there is an interest in retelling comparatively obscure fairy tales like this one.

  Surprisingly, the library was almost as noisy inside as the festivities outside. Pearl had expected things to be quieter. Usually the world beyond the building’s dark-bricked walls and shelves crammed (respectfully) full of books faded once she was inside, but today she could hear the parade just as clearly as if she’d been standing in the throng of spectators. She’d hoped to finish a fair bit of work in the afternoon as well the morning, but she couldn’t concentrate. Forget coming up with her own arguments, she could barely focus on the text she was reading; the trumpeters heralding floats in the parade kept distracting her from the words.

  Pearl sighed. The parade should only be passing for an hour, and it was actually a good excuse to take a break. She’d already spent most of her morning at the desk, sifting through books in search of useful articles. Even if she decided she wasn’t interested in lunch after all, she’d at least be able to stretch her limbs. The ones her human body had anyway.

  Slumping over the desk with her hands in her hair, Pearl pondered whether she should take the book she was trying to read with her so no one else could borrow it while she was gone. She decided against it. Her assignment wasn’t due for a while yet; she already had a fair amount of useful articles; and the book didn’t seem to contain the information she’d been looking for anyway. If someone did check it out, as unlikely as that was, she’d certainly survive the loss.

  So she shut Sivellus’ Flowers: Metamorphosis in His Later Years as she got up. She packed her stuff into her bag, returned the book to the shelf it belonged on and left. Out in the grand hall, the parade was even more audible and Pearl stopped at the balustrade. At least navigating the stairs down wouldn’t require too much concentration. On the ground floor below a white-haired security guard-slash-library attendant sat at the entrance desk, his back turned to her. Apart from him, the hall was empty, its supposed-to-be-white-and-blue floor tiles basking in the sunshine and the music.

  On impulse, Pearl took a deep breath to catch the scent of building in her mouth and let it tickle across her tongue — no unexpected result there, really, but it was nice to try — then walked down the helix staircase and made her way to the cafeteria in the right wing. When she was halfway across the hall, the guard swivelled on his chair and nodded briefly at her. Pearl did the same and watched the man turn back to face the entrance before walking on. As she hurried down the corridor that led to the cafeteria, she could hear someone ask for directions to the main library.

  When she got to the cafeteria, it was downright cacophonous and Pearl fled back the way she’d come before she’d even gone through the doors. It sounded like half the university’s students had gathered there for a shouting championship. She’d take the parade and trumpeters over that any day.

  Her stomach rumbled at her, though, and she’d forgotten her food and her rucksack was cutting into her hand. She shifted her grip and wondered whether she’d ever develop calluses. Lesley, one her friends, was always trying to get her to wear the thing over her back, the way it was supposed to be worn, but Pearl hated the sense of entrapment that went with it. It felt wrong.

  When Pearl got to the entrance hall again, she stopped and scuffed her feet across the mosaic as she thought. Where was she going to find affordable, accessible food with the parade and festivities clogging up the nearby streets? The stall owners would be charging a small fortune and she’d struggle to get to the stores in a decent time frame. She’d never make it back before the evening.

  At least with the parade starting to fade off into the distance, it was getting easier to keep herself focused. That was something. Before she could decide whether to brave the streets and give up on her library research or to go back upstairs, her stomach rumbled again. The guard-slash-attendant turned to face her, almost like he’d heard the noise. For all she knew he had; if the library had magical security, they wouldn’t be advertising it. “You just going to stand there?” he asked, not unkindly.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Pearl paused, then continued, “I’m waiting for it to be safe to go out onto the streets again.” With it being Liberation Day, if she trusted her self-control in the press of people after all, she might still be able to find something wonderfully nice and affordable if she was lucky. Or over-priced and tasteless fresh fruit and bread. A fish sandwich might be the best find; her stomach approved of this idea. It might actually be worth trying her patience and self-control for. Pearl shook her h
ead, certain something the man had said had caught her attention. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I just asked if you’re hungry.”

  “A bit…” She shifted her weight and her rucksack banged against her knees. “I forgot to pack food when I left, and the cafeteria’s crammed. I didn’t realise the date until I got here.”

  The man shook his head. “Kids these days don’t hold with tradition,” he muttered, but he didn’t look annoyed. “I’ll be off-duty in a few minutes. I can get you something if you’d like.”

  Pearl started, but smiled when she interpreted the words. “That’d be very kind of you. I’m not picky.” That wasn’t true, but she didn’t want to be seen as demanding. It was the nicest thing a stranger had done for her in ages.

  The man laughed, making the wrinkles on his face even more pronounced. “You’ll have to pay for it yourself, you know.”

  Balling the fist she wasn’t using to carry her rucksack, Pearl wished she were right-shaped and none of these pleasantries were even necessary. “I wouldn’t want it any other way,” she said, struggling not to bare her teeth. She put her rucksack down on the tiles and tried to relax, but she couldn’t move the way she wanted to. After a moment or two, the man gestured at a small bench. It was hidden in the shadows just beside the archway that separated the locker room from the grand hall. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see a couple more empty benches along the walls. Pearl frowned; she should have noticed them before and she never had.

  “Have a seat.” If he’d noticed her initial hostility, he wasn’t showing it. “I’ll be a few minutes.”

  Pearl nodded as she retrieved her rucksack and looked at the benches to see which one allowed her to oversee most of the activity in the hall and settled onto it. She perched on the edge of the seat, careful to keep her back away from the wall and give some space to the wings she could only feel. The better to keep it with her, she pressed her rucksack between her legs. The guard was watching the entrance again and didn’t try to make small talk with her. Pearl was glad; it gave her a chance to continue Daughter of Light, Sister of Night, which she’d started reading that morning.

  While she was digging the book out of her rucksack, she caught a glimpse of another person dressed as a guard appearing from a staff corridor. Her heels clicked loudly on the tiles as she walked towards the desk. Pearl repacked her bag carefully, simultaneously trying to flip her book open to where she’d left off. She’d only managed a couple of chapters so far and it was fascinating. The book was so clearly based on one of Sivellus’ lesser-known (and Pearl’s favourite) poems that she was considering using the book for her dissertation topic in the next semester. She’d already given up on simply enjoying the experience and had started pencilling notes in periodically.

  About twelve pages later someone tapped Pearl on the shoulder. She almost tried to snap the slightly hairy hand off before remembering that such behaviour wasn’t considered polite. And, anyway, she didn’t have the right teeth for it and the owner of the hand had promised to bring her food. Pearl laid her index finger a little below the line she’d just finished reading and looked up. Smiling, the elderly man straightened. “What d’you want?” he asked.

  It still took Pearl a moment or two to realise what he was talking about. “Oh. Uh. Just…” She considered, then made her herself smile back as she met the guard’s eyes. “Just a sandwich with ham or something meaty. Please.”

  “All right. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  “Thanks.”

  The guard gave her an exaggerated salute that teased a laugh out of her as he turned and sauntered towards the cafeteria. His replacement turned out to be a young, blonde woman who looked vaguely familiar and smelled, very strongly, of cherries and roses. She ignored Pearl, though, and Pearl elected to ignore her in return.

  Pearl settled back into her novel and dug out her notebook and pencil to mark a quote that she wanted to double-check when she got home. She tapped the pencil against her cheek, rereading the page to check if she’d missed anything. Caught up in annotation instead of the story, Pearl was actually aware of the heavy footfalls approaching her even before she smelled steak and ham.

  She looked up. The male guard-slash-attendant was carrying three plates as expertly as if he’d once been a waiter at a restaurant. He stopped at the reception desk. What he murmured to his colleague was too low even for Pearl to make out from so close. Whatever the exchange was about, it gave her enough time to use an old receipt as bookmark and to pull her wallet from her rucksack so that by the time the guard set her plate beside her she didn’t have to fumble around for it.

  Pearl thanked him, paid him what he asked, put her wallet back in its proper place, and tried not to be annoyed when the man plunked down at the other end of the bench with a whole, albeit small, three-course meal that included a mostly-rare steak while all she had was a big cheese-and-ham sandwich. It wasn’t nearly enough and Pearl normally disdained cheese, but she was too hungry to care.

  “So,” the man said once Pearl had finished licking the crumbs off her fingers, “what are you studying?”

  Though her stomach demanded that she eat his steak (and possibly him too; she was that hungry), she pointedly ignored it and focused on the question. He’d already been exceptionally nice; she knew what cafeteria prices were like.

  “Literature. I’m in my fourth year.”

  The guard ate a forkful of salad before responding. “Are you enjoying it?”

  “Very.” And then, because he seemed willing to listen and had been kind, Pearl launched into describing the research she’d come to the library to do. She was studying the alterations in Sivellus’ poetry as he grew older, she explained. It wasn’t just, or so much, that his mastery of language improved or that his themes changed (sometimes seemingly radically, such as in The Lay of Saltroad Rock) but the way those themes actually, subtly, stayed very much the same underneath the surface. Though the political climate of the time had changed drastically, Sivellus kept on referencing his earlier works as well as that of his contemporaries, weaving commentaries on contemporary literature and events throughout his work. Sivellus, she posited, had only been pretending to change his feelings on most matters. At least, proving that theory was what she was considering for her dissertation topic next semester. It would require a lot of historical research she hadn’t yet started, so, for now, she planned to write only a short essay tracing the lines of her argument in a trio of poems for one of her classes and to see whether her professors deemed it worth exploring in greater depth.

  When she ran out of things to say and breath to say them with, the man said, “Sounds impressive.”

  The woman at the reception desk laughed, startling Pearl slightly as she hadn’t thought the other guard had been paying attention. “You don’t sound very impressed, Greg.” He truly didn’t. Pearl’d watched his eyes grow larger and larger as she spoke on, but she didn’t mind that he didn’t sound impressed or interested. Having someone else listen without trying to interrupt or change the topic was a pleasant novelty enough. Pearl’s fingers ran circles along the rim of her plate, unsure of what to do. She’d gotten good at ignoring her stomach over the years, but she was still hungry and she still had work to do.

  Greg’s colleague went back to seemingly ignoring them at some point; Pearl didn’t much care when. No one tried to fill the silence until Greg had finished half his salad and most of his steak and Pearl asked him whether he’d studied anything.

  “Neh. I’m not made for a bookish life.” He said it in such a way that Pearl couldn’t help but laugh. “Not the job I envisioned for myself,” he continued and grinned at her. “But I like it. It’s good to see the younger generation get ready to face the world and improve it.” He paused and stretched. “And it doesn’t involve a lot of hassle.”

  “Greg’s a bit lazy, you see.” Before either Pearl or Greg could respond to that, the woman snapped ‘You’re not allowed to take your bags upstairs!’ at someon
e. Pearl turned to find two sheepish-looking students standing in the hall and then gazed down at the rucksack tucked between her legs. Guess I’m lucky. She’d never had problems taking her bag upstairs with her. Maybe it’s because I carry it in my hand? It didn’t really matter, but it was odd.

  “— stealing the books, Julia,” Greg said, pulling Pearl out of her thoughts. “The wards’ll keep the valuable ones more than safe.” In a low voice he confided to Pearl that it was Julia’s first week on her own and he was close to retirement. After that there didn’t seem to be anything more for either of them to say, so Pearl picked up her book and let the man finish his meal in peace. She continued reading about star-crossed lovers and ill-fated spells and the guards let her be, though Julia collected their plates somewhere during one of the hero’s monologues and Greg left them during a magical duel to win a sword. Pearl might have grunted a goodbye at him; she wasn’t sure.

  Finally, she managed to force herself to put the book down at the end of a chapter. A look at the big clock opposite the entrance and then again at her watch for good measure told her that she’d lost a couple of hours. Pearl snarled quietly before catching herself and turning the sound into a cough as well as she could. She stuffed her things back into her rucksack and returned to the literature faculty’s section of the library. If Julia protested her taking her rucksack along, Pearl didn’t hear it and wouldn’t have cared if she had. She had sources to hunt down.

  When Pearl emerged from the library to go home, it was twilight and drizzling, and she was only leaving because she’d been too severely tempted to bite another student’s hand off. He’d been reaching for a book too close to her head while she was putting back The Golden Age of Poetry for being entirely useless. Now she wanted privacy, to let herself experience her feelings instead of suppressing them constantly. The library wouldn’t provide that privacy and the city even less so, but she couldn’t go home just yet. She still had to buy groceries. Snarling softly under her breath, Pearl made her way through the city streets to the nearest tram station. The people were loud, the streetlights garish, and the rain was starting to get heavier.