“Let’s just get this over with,” he said. “This is what needs to be done. I’ll go out there and do it.”
“Good,” said Tapestry. “Good luck. And… please come back alive. The spaceship is lonely without you.”
She said the last sentence in a flirtatious tone, and Malcolm had to admit, it helped cheer him up.
“I will,” he said.
Tapestry depressurized the lander’s compartment and opened the door leading outside. Malcolm made his way to the edge, where a small, metal staircase had unfolded to make it easier for him to climb down.
“I feel like I should say something,” said Malcolm. “And I need to make these words count, don’t I? First man on Europa…”
“Savior was the first man on Europa,” said Tapestry. “Don’t waste time.”
“You are the queen of wet blankets.”
He hopped down from the lander, not feeling the need to take the stairs. His stomach lurched as he slowly descended. The sensation was strange, and the light tug of gravity was noticeable, but nowhere near the strength of Earth’s. When he landed, he felt the slick ice beneath his feet.
“Alright,” said Malcolm. “Where am I headed?”
“He should be to the northeast,” said Tapestry. “There is a compass built into the heads up display in your helmet.”
Malcolm grunted his acknowledgement and set off. It made more sense for him to take wide, leaping steps. He briefly pushed his awareness out to see if there was enough of an atmosphere on Europa for him to use his wind manipulation, but the air was just too thin for it to work.
He was on the side of the moon facing the sun, and there was plenty of light to see by. Still, Malcolm didn’t see Savior right away, as the cracks in the ice made visibility difficult. He moved slowly, checking in with Tapestry and the compass to make sure he was still on course. He was beginning to think that the probes had been wrong when he finally spotted him.
The body of a man in his mid-fifties, with salt and pepper hair and a clean-shaven face, lay prone on the ice. Malcolm’s heart sank as he drew closer and noticed the bluish tone to the man’s skin. Savior was dead, and the disappointment Malcolm felt made him question every decision he’d made over the past few days.
“I found him, Tapestry.” The tone of his voice as he spoke the words said more than the actual words. Tapestry let out a discouraged sigh and said nothing.
Malcolm drew closer to Savior’s body, part of him denying the truth of what he was seeing. With his powers, Savior should technically have been able to survive Europa’s harsh cold and thin atmosphere indefinitely. Of course, he’d have to use them constantly in order to do it. Malcolm wondered if the strain of attempting such a feat for months on end had grown to be too much for him.
He frowned, noticing that there were scratches on the ice next to Savior’s body. Scratches that formed letters, and sentences. Some of it had been covered by a thin layer of windblown ice shards, but Malcolm brushed it aside, revealing Savior’s last message to the world.
“Worst. Vacation. Ever. Send me to a tropical planet next time, preferably one with those tasty drinks with the tiny umbrellas. I did try to hold on, for what it’s worth. It wasn’t the strain that got to me, but the boredom. In the end, the one-person Savior couldn’t save was himself. How ironic.
Please don’t let the people give up without me. I die in peace only because I have hope that the world is strong enough to go on.
Dennis “Savior” Mathers”
The words contained enough of Savior’s quirky sense of humor to make the reality of his death all the more real. Malcolm let out a slow, shaky sigh, wishing that he’d held on for just a little longer. He wondered if maybe Savior deserved some rest, even if he only found it in death.
“Worst vacation ever,” he muttered. “Tapestry, Savior scratched his last words into the ice. I don’t want them to be lost after we leave. Can you take a photo of my visual feed from the ship?”
He waited a couple of seconds. She didn’t respond.
“Tapestry?”
Still no response. Malcolm felt panic slowly spreading through his body.
“Malcolm!” she suddenly shouted. “She opened the portal again! Multi came through, and–”
The connection cut off as quickly as it had opened. It felt as though the cold of Europa’s atmosphere was seeping in through his suit as icy dread gripped Malcolm’s heart. He turned and started sprinting, as much as he could in the light gravity, back toward the lander.
It took off without him before he’d made it a dozen steps. Malcolm stared at it in shock as the rockets accelerated the tiny craft hundreds of feet into the air, out of his reach, and then out of the moon’s atmosphere.
“Tapestry!” he shouted. “The lander! I… I’m stuck here.”
Again, there was no response. Malcolm felt familiar emotions of despair and hopelessness crashing over him. He’d been in this situation before and made it out alive. He could do it again.
He put all his willpower into gathering what little air Europa had into a stream that he could control with his wind manipulation. It felt like trying to drink water from the air on a humid day. There just wasn’t enough of an atmosphere on the moon for him to make it work.
He reached out toward Jupiter, but it wasn’t in sight, and Malcolm suspected that if he waited for Europa to rotate around far enough for it to be visible, it would already be too late. And that was assuming that he could pull off the herculean feat of coopting a planet’s wind from a massive distance a second time.
None of the other moons of Jupiter with atmospheres were in sight, either. Europa was the furthest out of Jupiter’s primary moons, meaning they were all on its night side, along with the planet itself.
Malcolm’s frustration manifested itself in the form of a headache and a tirade of obscenities. He swore into the inside of his helmet, hoping the communications line was still open, given that most of his vulgarity was in the form of threats directed at Multi.
Slowly, Malcolm made his way back over to Savior’s body. The dead man had his eyes open, and there was a slight smile on his face. It comforted Malcolm a little to know that he’d been at peace when he died. He sensed that he wouldn’t be afforded the same privilege.
“Damn it,” he muttered. “What would you do, Savior?”
He reached out and took Savior’s hand into his glove. It was like taking hold of an ice statue, and it was cold enough to penetrate Malcolm’s suit. He felt an odd prickling sensation and jerked his hand back, wondering if frostbite could set in so rapidly.
Wait a second… I know that feeling. Did I just… absorb his powers?
CHAPTER 28
Malcolm searched his awareness, hope burgeoning in him and then deflating in the span of a second. He had absorbed Savior’s powers once before, back when he’d first met the leader of the Champion Authority. And now, as had happened then, he couldn’t figure out how to make Savior’s abilities work.
And though he’d never attempted it before, Malcolm was reasonably certain that absorbing powers from dead bodies wasn’t something he was capable of, let alone doing it through his gloves. Or was it? How much had becoming a monster enhanced his abilities?
He examined Savior more closely, going so far as to push a finger out against his face. He was definitely dead, and frozen all the way through.
It didn’t matter. He was familiar enough with the sensation to know that he had, in fact, absorbed the man’s powers. Perhaps his mimicry had grown stronger since he’d become a demon. That had been the case with Second Wind, and the cause behind him losing his powers six months earlier, during their last confrontation.