I am awake before my eyes are open. A door is creaking open.
I can hear the firefly. She is electricity. There is a humming and a quavering in her voice that no one else can hear. There is another voice too. One that I do not know. A man. He sounds young.
A new neighbor. Another prisoner.
That cell used to have another inhabitant. She was very young. Seven years old and so afraid and lost. She does not remember. She would run from the room in terror if she did. But the firefly does not remember.
I can hear the snip of scissors. She is cutting his hair. It will be short and out of the way. That is The Company. Inconveniences, human or otherwise, are eliminated.
They talk to each other. The way she talked to me the first time she came into my cell with a paper cup of pills. She was nine. She had already forgotten.
I listen because I am interested.
She is cutting slowly, because she does not want to leave. This is odd, because the firefly always wants to leave. She has not left since her father brought her here. But she always wants to fly away like the firefly that she is.
Something about this man makes her want to stay. I am intrigued.
They talk for a long time. She teases. He brushes her off. Theirs is not the strangest conversation I have ever overheard, but by the standards of the average human, it is strange enough.
Peter is his name. He became a human bomb. He almost destroyed New York City, but his brother, who can fly, stopped him somehow.
I am glad he did not destroy New York. I have always held a fondness for it.
Peter begins to say strange things. He is happy to be here. The Company is helping him. The poor child is mislead.
The firefly, of course, does not correct him. She hardly knows any different herself. She knows they hold him to keep him there, to keep him from the world. To her it is right . Her father tells her this, I am sure. Her father's word is law.
As Peter goes on, I know that they do not keep him for the same reasons they keep me. He talks of what a danger he is to the world when his powers go beyond his control. For a fleeting moment I wonder if he means powers in the plural sense, or if he, as so many do, mistakenly refers to his singular ability as his "powers."
He tells the firefly that he wanted to save the world. Even before he discovered his ability (What is it? The quesion burns in my mind.), he knew he was meant for something more than what he was doing. His ability was just the means to an end. He wanted to save the world by saving people.
He tells her this and I know that he is not like me.
He is a hero. I knew a man like him once. When Adam Monroe was Takezo Kensei, I knew a man like him. I have known a Hiro.
They are the love in the world. They save through life.
I am the hate in the world. I save through death.
We are the balance.