I step over to the wall of windows and look out toward the ocean, where a vast dark shape is sliding through the water, heading straight for shore. Homer starts screaming again, beating me to the punch.
Nemesis has come back.
8
The ocean grew warmer as she rose from the depths, moving steadily toward shore, toward the life-force drawing her attention. She had lurked in the deep for a year, healing, until the tug of mankind’s wrong-doing became impossible to ignore. But her strength had not fully returned. Struggling to ignore the ever present urge to lay waste to mankind, she fed on whales, giant squid, schools of fish, sharks or anything else she could find.
With her strength returned, she felt herself pulled in all directions. Evil was everywhere, calling to her, beckoning her wrath. As she swam toward a city she knew was called Rome, she felt pulled in the opposite direction, back toward the site of her birth.
Vengeance for a legacy of wrong-doing was so close, she fought against the desire to return home. But in the end, the mighty Nemesis lost the battle. She turned around, just twenty miles from the coastline of Italy. With every beat of her tail, a sense of urgency blossomed at her core, mixed with a strange new feeling she didn’t understand.
She had struggled over the past year, trying to understand what she had become. Her thoughts were primal. Driven by emotion. She knew who and what she was—Nemesis. Her place in the world went without question, and in her absence, a darkness had consumed mankind. It was her place to purify the world. But her thoughts and feelings were muddled. Confused. There was a time when she sensed only the energy emitted by vile acts. Now, she felt so much more—sensations for which she had words: love, forgiveness, mercy—but which she did not fully understand or enjoy. If anything, she longed to unleash her wrath more than ever before.
The long ocean crossing gave her rage time to fester and build. But it also gave her time to think...something she’d rarely done before.
Her identity was called into question, dual sets of memories coming and going. Separate goals, desires and morals had been fused.
I am Nemesis, she thought, but the very idea of thinking so specifically called her identity into question. Nemesis felt. She didn’t think.
As she neared the coast of her home, her emotions rose, drowning out the smaller voice tucked away inside her mind. She wasn’t drawn to any particular source of wrong-doing. This time, it was a person calling to her.
Visions of destruction filled her thoughts. Of fire. Explosions. A battle with humanity. Her massive heart beat faster, surging hot blood through veins big enough for a person to swim through. Her thirst grew as the new continent’s population and all their dirty secrets reached her. Beckoning retribution.
But it was the man who held her attention.
Her...target.
Why him? she wondered, and then she sneered at the wondering. Why, didn’t matter.
As she slid through the familiar waters, her belly hovering just feet above the bottom, a surge of confusing emotions made her flinch. She’d felt intense pain here. Both of her halves had. The memories stung, but they were being smothered by something darker. An intense evil drowned out her small voice, sending her into the purest of rages.
Her tail beat harder against the water, kicking up billows of silt and clouding the ocean water above her. The closer she got to shore, the more intense her feelings became. But there was something else there, mixed in with the rage. She had no word for it, but it somehow intensified her anger. She hadn’t felt so driven and focused since Boston, when she’d...
The images were squelched.
Her thirst for justice surged once again, powered by a second source of evil.
Something familiar.
Something confusing.
With a roar heard by every submarine monitoring the Atlantic Ocean, Nemesis rushed toward the coast, the energy and force of her body generating a wave above her. All thought vanished. All that remained was the unceasing desire for vengeance—for what, she couldn’t recall or detect. But her thirst would soon be quenched.
9
In the silence that follows my discovery of the approaching shadow, I head to the white board, grab a dry erase pen and head back to the window. The shadow is moving in a straight line, its trajectory predictable.
“What are you doing?” Cooper asks. “We need to coordinate—”
“She’s been spotted,” I say, placing a black dot on the glass, at the front of the distant shadow. “All of our protocols are going into effect right now. What we need, is information. Why is she here? Who is she after? What’s her target? The quicker we figure all that out, the sooner we can redirect her.”
Several of the President’s military advisors suggested that we simply offer criminals up to Nemesis, that she be allowed to exact her scorching justice. After all, it worked for me, and it saved Boston. But that was a decision made out of desperation, after thousands of people had already been killed. After pointing out that such a plan was illegal and unconstitutional, which was hard to do without incriminating myself, we opted for an alternative—find the target and move them. Far away. From there it would be a waiting game to see whether Nemesis would give chase and how far she would go.