Chapter 1, Episode 17

Stephanie waved her hand. “I’m sorry. I mean, no. Brent is the best guy I know. He’s just so unlucky.”

            “So you’ve said.”

            “And he never complains. More and more shit is thrown on him, and he never says a word. It’s like he’s God’s whipping boy. He didn’t even tell me he was broke.” He mind was wandering, spiting out random facts.

            “He’s in financial trouble?”

            “He’s a disaster magnet.” She was flaking out.

            The detective thought a moment. “Does he owe anyone money? Maybe a loan shark—“

            “Oh, God, no. He wouldn’t even know where to look or who to ask.” Stephanie inhaled. “I don’t have any idea who did this. No idea why. I know he didn’t deserve it.”

            “Well, take that up with God,” said the doctor. “As for the World of Men, Mr. Xenos is listed as serious.”

            “Will he die?”

            “We’ll do everything we can, ma’am.”

            She knelt to Brent’s side. “Brent?”

             “He was rambling before we put him under.”

“Rambling? Rambling what?” both Stephanie and the officer asked.

            “He kept saying ‘I never told you.’ And he was laughing.”

            Brent was shaking. Tears brightened his cheeks. His eyes focused on something not in the room, and Stephanie and Omri were no longer there.

            Stephanie, and not just her, pleaded with Brent to talk to Manny. But it was like the man imploded. When she suggested Manny ‘get into Brent’s head’—“Can’t you…um,” she asked, “just go in and fix the damage?”—Manny almost fell off his chair. Forcing himself in would be like another assault, he said. And considering Brent’s powers, Manny didn’t want to take the chance of pushing Brent further over the edge. They already had the thoroughly-snapped Vagabond. The position of “Super Crazy Man” was already filled.

Stephanie had wandered the streets that night and found herself, inexplicably, in front of a church. Saint somebody of the holy whatnot rama-lama-ding-dong. An admitted lapsed Catholic, she nevertheless wandered in. It was a small place, intimate. It had been ages since she had been in a church.

            There were no illusions. She knew she wasn’t the world’s best Catholic or even Christian. But she always had offered up a prayer now and then. Never for herself. She was a tough broad. She could take care of herself.

            Brent had often been in her prayers. Then all of them. The first few had been that he be granted some respite. When that didn’t work, Stephanie changed tactics and asked if there was some plan behind it all, some benefit that, ta-dah!, would make it all worthwhile. Then she started pleading. Finally, she began to ask, outright, if this were all some game getting very tired of.

            And, in the end, she wondered, that, as creations of another thing, if that creator considered all the emotions of its creations as ultimately artificial and thus, not legitimate or worthwhile.

            She knelt, looking up at the Crucifixion, but before she made the Sign of the Cross, her hand froze in midair, and she rocked back on her heels, slumping. Standing, she came from behind the banister and walked up the steps of the altar. Up to the cross itself.

            She slapped Jesus right across the face. And turned her back and left.

But Manny did confirm what Stephanie had long suspected. Brent was often called paranoid, or a misanthrope, but it wasn’t that Brent was suffering paranoia or even misanthropy.

            He was, for every waking hour, terrified.

            Brent was a panophobe. Pathologically afraid of everything. He had the power to swallow a city whole. He could sink islands, maybe even continents, and raise them again. Solid, molten, or even vaporized, stone and metal were to him like humanity was to fate. But he could not walk out the damn door to do it.

            And then there was Omri, who was just plain infuriating. Sure, he was a world-famous fashion photographer. Sure, with his concussion-power, he could create battering-rams of out “thin” air…or water, earth. And sure, he was genuinely, truly, whole-heartedly in love with Brent. And would not say anything. Probably the one thing that might give Brent some sort of “anything” to look forward to, and Omri always found some reason, some goddam stupid reason, and would not say anything. And Brent, far too paranoid, far to filled with hate, to believe it from anybody else. He’d see it as a trick. By the few people he actually could stand to see.

            So nobody did anything. Said anything.

            That’s why he walked away from everything. That’s why he lived in a boulder. He was a shut-in. He could simply sink into the Earth, as deep as he needed. He was perhaps the one person Stephanie knew that could literally run away from it all. What could hurt him a mile beneath the surface? How could anyone, Vahagn, Vagabond, anyone at all, hunt him down, when he had the entire planet Earth to hide in?

Omri didn’t know what do to, but he heard his voice continue to speak. “They’ll be coming for us.”

            A look of low-level panic skittered across Stephanie’s face.

It was Brent who spoke, then. “I’ll bet my bottom dollar on it.” And he drank his wine, all of it, in one go.

And you know what the amazing irony of it all was? Brent, having long taken the name Quartz, was the only one of them, of all of them, to beat Vagabond. Every time.