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Billy shakes.
The water washes against the pebbled beach, and the men’s voices rise and fall, and Billy shakes.
Because he can’t get out of this one. He can’t. He knows he can’t. He was stupid and didn’t keep his distance, and he doesn’t know anything about escapology, about slipping ropes or plastic zip-ties like these, and no matter how he twists, he can’t break them.
Someone else could. But he can’t. Billy can’t.
The Lokhagos isn’t him.
The Lokhagos took two and a half years to let him go, last time. And he didn’t do it because he wanted to, then.
Two and a half years gone by, and Billy was still ten.
It’s been months since then, at least half a year gone by in his cave overlooking the rocky beach of this abandoned cove, and Billy still thinks of himself as ten. He has always been ten, maybe. He will always be ten. Has he grown? He can’t tell. There’s been nobody to ask. He’s not sure there’s even anyone left who would know.
Mary might be still alive. He hopes she’s alive, back home in Fawcett. Or even better, alive and safe somewhere else. Somewhere harder to find. Because he has to never again know where she is. Because the Lokhagos always liked her.
He liked her because Billy did, because she’s family and he loves her, and Billy wishes the Lokhagos hated her instead because then he’d just kill her. But he wants her close, he wants her like him, so if he gets the chance he’ll grab her and put part of himself inside her the way the wizard did to Billy. And then Mary won’t exist anymore.
But if she ever existed again after that happened she’d have to remember not existing, and what happened while she didn’t. And what the person who existed instead of her did.
It’s not true, you know, Billy, he remembers the Lokhagos saying, during those two and a half years, gazing into a cracked mirror in a house recently bereft of its owner and grinning wide and focusing, driving in the memory deep and hard. A message, in case Billy ever existed again.
It's not true, he'd smiled.
Because of course he knew what Billy used to tell himself, in the desperate sickened hours after midnight, back when the Lokhagos was still building his strength or setting up shop or whatever had made him dismiss himself so easily, back in the early days. After Billy’d stopped believing he’d gained a protector, but before he’d learned to keep his promises to himself not to say the word again, no matter how scared he was, no matter how bad it got. Of course he knew. He could remember everything Billy could, after all.
You tell yourself that I’m not you. That I’m just a monster trapped inside you, and all you have to be ashamed of is letting me out. But that’s not true.
It was, though. It was true. It is true.
Billy is who he is, and the thing inside him is something else, something alien and leaden and blazing hot, like he swallowed a burning coal from the fire it took him three grinding weeks of rubbing sticks to finally kindle, back when he first started living in his cave.
I am you. You know that. The only real difference is, I’m actually worth something. And you can’t do anything for yourself.
Maybe he can’t. He definitely can’t do this. Billy shakes, and bounces with every step the smuggler takes, every time the huge shoulder drives up into his stomach, and he’s feeling seasick already when they haven’t even made it to the boat yet, or maybe that’s just being afraid. The hand that slung him up here, that’s clamped across the backs of his legs now, was covered in a bright red knitted glove.
Bright, scarlet red.
That isn’t sneaky at all but Billy knows it is. That at night, in the dark, red fades to grey faster than anything. Even blood bleaches black, under the stars and moon.
He wonders what they’d do if he threw up all down the man’s back. If they would kill him quicker. He wants them to kill him quicker. Give him less time to have a second of weakness, maybe, but mostly just…at this point he’s less scared of dying than of having it hurt. He’s watched so many people die, from behind someone else’s eyes. (Not watched, only remembered, but it’s easier to think of it as watching. Because it wasn’t him.)
Not that he ate enough today to throw up much on anybody. With the rag stuffed into his mouth, he couldn’t have thrown up on anyone very well even if he had eaten, any more than he can insult them to try to get it over with, or scream. Or say the magic word.
Not that they’d understand it if he did insult them, probably. He didn’t understand their language, though it was pretty obvious a lot of what they said when they were chasing him down earlier was swearing. He doesn’t actually know what country the Lokhagos left him in, he’s been avoiding people so well all these months. He’s seen sheep sometimes. A lot of places have sheep.
They’ve reached the shore, and now the smuggler lifts Billy overhead with his knitted gloves and tips him up over the side of the boat, onto the deck, because there’s no dock to stand on, here in his cove, but the boat isn’t so tall you can’t reach the top, if you’re a big man like this one. More than six feet tall.
When Billy first started living here, he sometimes reached for things too high or far for him, because he kept expecting to be that tall, to have arms that matched that height. He stranded himself halfway up a cliff with no further handholds once, had to jump into the ocean. He was slow and clumsy at even something as simple as picking berries, because he kept misjudging his reach.
Not recently. He taught his body its real size again. But at first.
It was April, when the Lokhagos left him. It’s November now, probably. The cave has been getting chilly, especially at night, and he’s doubted he has the fuel stockpiled to get him and his fire through the winter. But who knows? He isn’t sure where this is. Maybe this is as bad as their winter gets.
But it doesn’t matter now, because he screwed up, and got spotted and grabbed by the sort of men who put ashore in hidden coves in the dead of night, with flashlights shielded on one side so they don’t beam out toward the sea.
The Lokhagos only let him go, back in April, because he thought Black Adam and his magician friend wouldn’t kill a child. Billy hid from them less because he thought that wasn’t true than because he was afraid it was. That they would be kind, and try to help him, and treat him like—like he was ten years old, and make him go live with people who’d only get hurt when he screwed up again, no matter whether they were good people or the thing that hurt him enough to make him break his promises.
So in a way, getting caught by men like this is better; it’s not the worst thing. Not the worst mistake he could have made. They’ll only kill him.
It isn’t that Billy doesn’t want to live. He wants to live desperately, furiously, he wants to live with the kind of want that makes stomachs growl and mice bite cats. The kind of want that makes a city boy figure out how to start a fire with nothing but driftwood and eat anything that’s even a little bit like food and climb out of the ocean every time he falls in, no matter how heavy his limbs feel.
The kind of want that makes you set a monster on the people hurting you, even once you understand what you’re doing.
He has always, always wanted to keep living.
Even now, he wants to live.
The smugglers have finished whatever their business was on the beach, or given up on it, and climbed back into their boat, one after another. One hefts him like a parcel and he hangs in their grip like one, because he can’t start fighting, because if he starts he can’t trust himself to stop. If he gives in to that want. He has to let this happen. Because there’s only one thing he can do that would make any difference now, and he can’t.
A smothered sound bursts out of him as he’s dropped into the belly of the boat, not protest or fear or even pain, but just the impact of his ribs against steel driving the breath out of him.
He rolls a little, getting his weight off his nose because suffocating is too slow a death to risk, and a second after that his eyes finish adjusting to the slightly thicker dark, and he can see. He sees the glint of eyes in the shadows.
It turns out there were five other kids in the hold already. Their wrists ziptied, their mouths gagged much better than his, duct tape holding the rags inside, and oh.
Oh, no.
He hasn’t just been captured by smugglers, determined to keep their secrets at the cost of a child murder or two.
This is much worse.
He’s left where he was dropped for a while, as the men climb down the ladder into the hold one by one, and someone turns on a light as the cramped space fills up.
Eventually there are enough ankles between him and the kidnapped children that he doesn’t have to look at the dried tears on their faces, the ground-in terror, the anger in one kid’s eyes that Billy knows is at him for not running hard enough, for failing to be someone able to bring rescue, for tricking them even briefly into hope. The blank indifference in another’s, who’s either been caught longer or learned long before this to break easily and get it over with.
The people-smugglers are arguing. Billy doesn’t know what about exactly, he isn’t the Lokhagos with his magical grasp of every language known to man. He can guess, though. Opportunism, probably. The possibility on the other hand that someone might notice his disappearance.
The fact that you can tell just by looking at him that there’s nobody who cares if he goes missing.
Red-Gloves, the one who caught him, wins the argument, and looks very pleased about it. He turns back to Billy, taking the gloves off, and Billy—doesn’t brace himself, exactly, for a beating. He’s learned better, over the years. Bracing only helps if you have the strength to get through what’s coming. What works better is to go away inside yourself, and wait until it’s over.
Red-Gloves stuffs those gloves into his coat pocket, and reaches for his belt, and.
And.
The thing is, the Lokhagos always does what Billy summoned him for. Every time. Billy doesn’t know if that’s built into the magic, or just to keep him saying the word even when he knows he shouldn’t. But the problem always gets handled.
He started trying to stop when they started to be handled in ways he couldn’t deal with, but he gave in again and again because the problem always, always gets handled.
What Billy knows is, these men will never threaten anyone ever again, if he lets his monster at them. He knows it. They will be dead, horribly dead, and these kids…well. They’ll be free, either way. This won’t be happening anymore.
What will happen after that? He doesn’t know.
He only knows he won’t have any control over it.
He can almost lie to himself enough to think that means it won’t be his responsibility.
He curls up until he’s nearly sitting; ducks his head, like he’s afraid to look at the man coming at him with his pants open, at the way the other guys are rolling their eyes and bitching while they climb out of the hold, like their friend is insisting on watching an annoying TV show. Billy catches the trailing end of the rag wedging his jaws open between his stiff cold fingers, and tugs.
The man who’s not wearing red gloves anymore says something, not even mad, just making fun. Probably there’s no one out here to hear you scream.
Billy knows that.
That was part of the point of staying here so long.
He tugs again. The gag pops out.
Billy breathes.
He wishes, stupidly, with the same stupid hungry wishing that’s kept him alive all this time, that his last breaths could smell like the wind off the water or smoke on stone, or the smog and hot cooking oil of Fawcett City, or anything almost that isn’t the grimy metal of a prison ship. But he probably doesn’t deserve that.
“Okay, Captain,” he says, and lets his head fall back, but it doesn’t go back so far he can’t see the man with red knitted gloves in his coat pocket grin, at the sight of a boy who has been ten forever growing resigned before him.
It’s almost funny he thinks it’s about him, that he’s the scariest thing in the room, except for how it’s not, because to any other kid he would be. Any other kid wouldn’t have any choices left. Billy closes his eyes. Okay, Captain. You win.
“Shazam.”
Lightning blows through the decking overhead and strikes his heart, and for a second Billy does not have an ember burning grim inside him he is fire.
And then he’s gone.
The man in white and gold and red smiles like fresh-stripped bone and arcing plasma.
“Now,” he says. “Where were we?”