The Sunshine Boy and the Weaver King

Chapter Eighteen

Maddox was asleep. At least, he looked that way. His hair was messily splayed across his forehead, headphones on, completely still. In the low light of the dorm room, he looked eerily other. Like he wasn't supposed to be here at all.

Anthony swallowed hard and flicked a glance at Maddox's closed laptop sitting on his desk. Maddox was smart. Smart enough to not leave his stuff open, just asking for someone to rifle through it. His phone, Anthony knew, was password locked.

Anthony's own phone was not locked. Anyone could check his list of contacts and find a couple classmates, former lab partners, etc., but nothing Anthony didn't want them to see. He memorized the important numbers and deleted the others. He didn't text with anyone he'd mentally blacklisted. Phones kept everything.

He could remember all the phones discarded over the years by his parents. The way they'd take one glance at a new number and hold it in their heads for years. There were no mistakes, no slip ups. They'd guess a password by the sound of a person's fingertips touching the keypad. They had taught him some things. Enough to get by. Not enough to thrive.

Sometimes, if Anthony let his mind wander, it would take him back to summer drives in the back of a car where his mom would sing along with the radio and his dad would listen in happy silence. It was only in moments like those that he ever felt like they were a family. Never mind that the car had been stolen, or that his mom had just spent the last hour frantically scrubbing her hands in their kitchen sink.

Right before Anthony had left, they'd had one last normal night. His mom had touched his hair and mentioned a haircut.

"You need to practice your blocks," his dad had said, reading the news on his phone. He had an earbud in, mind always halfway focused on something far away. "Your hair can wait until you learn to stop a kick without hesitating."

She mom tsked her tongue, and without looking up, he pointed at her. "One of these days, I am going to break his fingers, and it will be both by accident and design."

"That doesn't make any sense," she shot back. "Mudak."

"God's design," he countered, in his gruff voice and barely-there accent, "my accident. And don't curse at me, woman."

Anthony breathed in the cold, stale air of his dorm room, and the memory fell apart. Slowly, he sat up, letting his blanket slip off his shoulders and pool at his stomach. He reached for his laptop and pulled it onto his lap, plugging in his earphones and shooting a quick glance at Maddox to make sure he hadn't stirred.

With the all clear, he opened a new tab and began to search.

His first location was Arrow Valley. It was the first name Anthony could remember. There was a giant black hole in his memories where the ages before seven were supposed to exist, and now all he had were crumbs.

If the Weaver was so powerful, he had to have powerful enemies, allies, clients, and henchmen. That meant checking the deaths of people with money, influence, or both. Of course, numbers there were lower. People with obscene amounts of money, it turned out, didn't like to die. But they were still just people, so they did.

Heart attacks, car accidents, cancer, strokes... The list went on. Hardly any of them didn't make the front page, and so it was easy to check the autopsies, police statements, and what family had to say.

Anthony moved on to the next city. Edgewood, New Mexico. Salina, Kansas. St. Louis, Missouri. Traipsing across the country, then circling back again toward the West Coast. They didn't always do states directly next to each other, and they skipped many altogether. They didn't go north very often, and they didn't go too far east, either.

The more he dug, the more he realized he knew so little about his parents that he couldn't even begin to narrow the list of deaths down. But he couldn't call Jesse, and he couldn't call on Alicia Martin, or Burke. He was on his own with this, so he retraced his steps and started again from scratch.

The Weaver. A name that struck terror into people's hearts. The video Anthony had watched before said that he had been around for a weirdly long time, so many guessed that part of his powers gave him immortality, or at least a prolonged lifespan. It was a highly debated topic, but links had been made connecting his powers to others-- similarities between his threads and the mass of lines that made a European villain look like he'd stepped out of a moving sketchbook. Of course, that villain hadn't been spotted in fifty years, and the Weaver now didn't cover himself like that.

No, the Weaver as he was known now took the spotlight thirty-ish years ago. He rose to fame after brutally murdering the brightest star at the time, a woman who went by Griffin, or just Griff. She had wings, a tail, and the ability to manipulate sound waves. She was twenty-three when she rose to fame, and her odd appearance matched with her voice made a lot of people start to call her a god, or deity. Something divine and other. There was no footage of the attack. Griffin died with a scream that desecrated the surrounding area. People who stood too close went deaf. The Weaver, did not.

Some witnesses said there was more than one villain there. Others said it was just him. But the ones who said there were more never matched. Some said a man, some said a woman. Some said they couldn't tell. Some said the buildings moved. Not shattered, not broke, but moved. Warped. Some said they stood directly in front of Griff while she screamed and didn't even flinch. Some said the reason the buildings fell wasn't because of Griff or the Weaver.

The one thing agreed upon was that there wasn't one scream. There was two. An echo. The echo was the one that leveled the ground and deafened hundreds. Griff was found buried. Her organs had swelled and exploded. Her body had a million holes in it. She wouldn't have been recognized at all if not for the wings and the tail.

Her death marked a new era. One where the Weaver ruled with the help of mass panic and-- Anthony could hardly breathe past the pain in his chest-- what could have been his parents.