"Azure? Azure, can you, um... hear me?" I feel a dull stab of hatred behind my eyes at the sound of Eris's voice, a pulsing throb of grinding fury that makes me instinctively want to spin around and lunge for her. It's almost surprising to me how much rage I'm experiencing right now; normally, Eris is one of the few superheroes who doesn't treat me like a fumbling idiot or an object of pity. But for some reason, the second I heard her come into the room I immediately wanted to murder her. I shouldn't do that, though.
Instead, I continue to focus on the console. I look down to realize I've actually bent one of the levers in my anger, and a sense of calm and purpose sweeps over my mind again as I use my tactile telekinesis to straighten it out once more. I ignore Eris as she says, "Only you're acting a little bit funny, you know? You don't normally go to our satellite control station, and I... I mean, not to be rude, but I've never seen you do anything technical at all before. Like, I didn't know you knew anything about our computer systems. Let alone how to, um. Reprogram them?"
She's infuriating me. I can feel that anger building again, tighter and more controlled this time. Everything about her makes me want to hit her, from her squeaky nervous voice to the way I can hear her padding footsteps approaching me like she thinks I don't notice her getting closer to her fucking goddamned stupid fucking superpowers. I'm not sure why, but her fucking powers piss me off the most right now. I find myself wishing I could rip them out of her genetic structure, cell by cell.
"And, um, your ankle bracelet, the one you got as a condition of... joining the Liberty Squad." She's a terrible liar. It's another thing I hate about her. We both know that my acceptance into the Liberty Squad was nothing more than thinly veiled probation, Venus Ascendant's idea to keep an eye on me after the whole mess in Mexico City; why doesn't she just admit that she doesn't trust me? God, it makes me want to smash her fragile body into a broken mess on the floor and hide it in a maintenance tunnel until I can finish... finish...
Finish doing what I came here to do. "What about it?" I ask, trying to keep my tone light and dismissive. Murdering Eris doesn't feel like the right way to get rid of her, despite the constant pulse of rage in the back of my head reminding me just how easy it would be. I can just talk her out of getting in my way, convince her that everything's fine and normal. Because it is. Everything's perfectly normal, I'm doing perfectly reasonable things. I don't know exactly what they are right now, but that's normal too and I don't need to worry about it. I'm totally calm, except for the violent hatred.
"It registered a sudden change in your vital signs about two hours ago," she says, her voice getting closer and closer with every word. I work faster, my fingers pushing buttons and pulling levers, manipulating Doctor Frontier's retro-futuristic technology like I know every single detail of its construction. "You were over Kansas City, heading to the site of the earthquake relief efforts in San Jose, and then all your vitals spiked and suddenly you were flying toward the Appalachians. That's... unusual, Azure. Do you maybe want to tell me what happened?"
I tap a string of commands into a keyboard. I don't know what they are, exactly, but they feel right inside my head and my whole body shivers lightly in pleasure once I finish inputting them. "Not really," I say, the anger in my voice tight and controlled. "You know the security protocols as well as anyone, you probably read the results before you came in here. No foreign substances in my blood, not even alcohol. No signs of telepathic influence, even if my shields would let anyone into my head. No active magical spells or talismans on or about my person. All of Doctor Frontier's technology tells you I'm doing this of my own free will. So why don't you leave me to it?"
I hear her unclipping something from her belt. "Because it looks awfully like you're reprogramming one of the Liberty Squad's monitoring satellites to change its trajectory. To reenter the Earth's atmosphere and crash somewhere over... looks like Nebraska, maybe? Where the Frontier Foundation is located? You sounded really angry when you said Doc Frontier's name. Is there something you want to tell me, Azure?"
There's definitely something I want to tell her. I want to tell her to shut up, to stop trying to talk to me like I'm some sort of violently unstable criminal who needs to be coddled and placated. I want her to tell her I'm not some sort of human bomb that needs to be defused, I'm a reasonable human being and I have excellent reasons for everything I'm doing right now and she should go away and leave me to my work before I have to pop her head like a grape.
I, I don't want to do that. I don't want to hurt anyone, but... but I do. Really badly. It would confuse and frighten me, if I didn't also feel totally sedate and calm right now. My brain keeps whiplashing through different emotions, like a sailboat being piloted through the perfect storm by a blind sailor on a three-day drunk. I can't seem to keep a handle on my emotions. All I can do is keep doing what I'm doing and hope I finish before I can't stop myself from hurting Eris anymore.
"You should stay back," I say, casually lifting a monitor I don't need anymore and holding it up like a club. "This doesn't have to involve you, Eris. Just turn around and walk away and let me do what I came here for. Walk away and you won't get hurt." I'm a little confused at my own words. I didn't come here to do anything, did I? I just decided to move in a different direction. I just decided that now would be a good time to visit the monitoring station. I just decided to... to... I look down at my fingers, still typing one-handed on the keyboard. Something's wrong, I begin to realize.
And then I stop. I can literally feel the train of thought halting on its tracks, the firing synapses simply refusing to fire any further. My brain shuts down the dawning understanding of my own activities, then shuts down my awareness of the shutdown. I feel a momentary lurch of confusion, then that same calm placidity again. "You know who I am," I say. My every effort to think about why I'm saying it stops before it can start. "Don't you."
Eris carefully circles around me, stepping into my field of vision. Her body language is incredibly tense, like she's facing down some kind of deadly threat-a supervillain dangerously out of her league, someone who could crush her skull in a split-second if she didn't keep herself in a state of cat-like readiness. "Let's see. You have a sudden and violent hatred for me, a sudden and incredibly violent hatred for Doctor Frontier that's prompting you to crash a satellite onto his HQ. You're intimately familiar with his technology, as though you've spent years working with it. It doesn't exactly take a detective, does it."
I keep thinking about crushing her skull for some reason. I wonder why. "You're not a detective," I snap, as my brain stops wondering all over again and then stops wondering why I stop wondering. "You're a chemist who got lucky, that's all. A jumped up lab monkey with delusions of grandeur, simply because your accident left you with a fortunate genetic happenstance instead of-" My head swims for a moment. I can almost think straight again, like whatever's steering my mind and body is so distracted with fury that it's not even trying to control me.
I have just enough time to realize I'm being controlled before the thought rewinds out of my brain and I sink back into calm, comfortable obliviousness. Then I stop noticing the obliviousness. When Eris says, "Your life is what you made it, Derek, not just what happened to you. You didn't have to become the Criminal Element. You could have done wonderful things with your powers, but you chose to blame Doctor Frontier for what happened to you. It's that choice that made you a monster, not your unstable body."
The Criminal Element. I know that name. I recognize it from a whole bunch of tedious briefings that Venus Ascendant made me sit through, my eyes glazing over as I skimmed my way through the entire Liberty Squad database of known supervillains. He was a colleague of Doctor Frontier's once, before an accident destabilized his molecular structure and left him capable of metamorphosizing his body into just about anything on the periodic table. But the elaborate structures of carbon, oxygen, calcium and phosphorus and potassium that made up his original body were simply too complex for him to maintain for any length of time.
