"Saving the world," he said.
It stopped me. Bane's never been captured, of course, beyond five minutes here or there in theoretical custody where they didn't even get around to working off his helmet and getting photographs of his face. There aren't any prison-cell interviews, and he doesn't go in for monologuing in reality, despite the very inventive scenes in Vengeance of Bane 1, 2, and 3. There aren't any records as to why he does the things he does. There aren't even good theories, really.
There are a handful of supervillains who go in for the world-saving routine. It's usually an excuse— dramatic speeches, hijacking the airwaves, self-righteousness and posturing, and it's amazing how saving the world always seems to boil down to giving them personally what ever they want. But Bane didn't do any of that. He just popped up here and there, stole something or sabotaged something else or set off a natural disaster, occasionally wrangled some top-rank superhero for a while, vanished again.
"Saving the world . . . in the environmental sense?" I said, wondering if he was in the eco-terrorism line.
"No," he said. "No. Long-term, the Earth is going to be fine. I'm more of a people-person."
"Which is why you kill substantial numbers of them."
"A few hundred people a year is trivial. You have no idea of the magnitude of—" He bit off the words. "It simply isn't meaningful on a global scale," Bane said. "Only a personal one."
"That's the one all of us human beings operate on, in the end."
"I know," Bane said, sounding tired. "That's the problem."
So that was encouraging, having arguably the smartest person on the planet tell you he's going around regretfully killing people to prevent something worse.
"You don't believe me," he said.
"I'm not stupid enough to think you're flat-out wrong. It's just not a good enough excuse."
"I was pretty sure you'd say that," he said, and fell silent.
"Not going to argue with me?" I said, a little suspiciously.
"No," he said. "You're a fourth-generation superhero, you grew up on the squad training grounds, you've got minor empathic abilities and your personality profile is outgoing and humanistic. There's no reasonable chance of convincing you to break with the entire framework of your life in the amount of time we have." He glanced at his phone.
"I have minor empathic abilities?" It was news to me.
"They don't show up using the standard test-evaluation methods," Bane said. "I've developed more rigorous analysis tools."
"How the hell do you get our raw results to . . . never mind. I'm sure I don't want to know."
We tried some word games on his phone after that, but it's not satisfying playing intellectual puzzles with someone with an IQ of four million or what ever, just vaguely depressing. I gave up after he managed to break five hundred points on a round of Boggle without even a piece of paper to scribble on.
"So, any holiday plans?" I threw out, half as a joke, as he picked the phone up from the ground. "Do you have people you go home to for Thanksgiving?"
"My wife's family."
"Right," I said blankly. "That's nice. Been married long?"
"We were married for two years before she died," he said. "I keep up the connection for my son."
"Oh," I said, even more stupidly. "I've got twins on the way," I added, because it was what you'd say in an ordinary conversation with an ordinary person.
"I know," he said. He looked down at the phone in his hands, greenish light flung up into his face.
It crept up slowly on me from there, while we talked— going from stilted to oddly easy, until I was telling him about the time Su Kwan had put food coloring in the coffee that none of us noticed, and we all spent a week walking around with blue teeth, not remotely confidence-inspiring; and the time Dr. Morbius had seized the capitol building and taken the governor hostage, and we'd had the entire Liberty Squad storming in to surround the place.
"Do you ever hang out with him?" I interrupted myself to ask. "Is there a social for supervillains or—"
"I've used him a few times," Bane said. "But sociopaths are inherently unreliable."
Used him like a hired hand, the single most powerful supervillain in the world; possibly the single most powerful of all of us, except for Calvin.
"Morbius isn't what you'd call a good time," he added, and that was what made me realize that Bane was, wholly unexpectedly and in defiance of sanity: someone I'd ask to come over and have a drink some night, and stay up late talking. Someone I'd like as a friend.
"They're all wrong, aren't they?" I said; it came out of nowhere, almost, and yet I couldn't have been more certain. "Those fourteen test profiles in the system. Everyone thinks you planted the extras to divert us from the real one, but they're all fake. Your powers don't show on the standard test. You were never classified at all."
He was silent, and it was dark; I had nothing to go on but his quiet breathing.
"You're an empath, too," I said. "Low-level . . . not enough to be projective—"
He sighed. "It's a general misconception that the degree of empathic power always correlates with the ability to project."
"You can feel people die," I said, not even needing him to confirm it. He could feel people need, also; could feel when they were interested or bored. Or in pain. Of course he was charming. Empaths almost couldn't help it. "Sorry I didn't take the Vicodin."
"Don't worry. You learn to deal with it."
He'd learned to kill, too. How would that feel, I wondered, to kill when you died along with your victim, every time? There was a reason the tests only measured projective empathy: they were looking for something that could be a weapon, not a weakness.
"It's not that hard," he said. "I feel people dying all the time."
"What's your range?"
He didn't answer. The rules said empaths and telepaths whose range went much further than their immediate vicinity went crazy before they were old enough to learn how to filter things out. A thousand voices in your head, all of them real. People all around you suffering, rejoicing. Enough to make you hate the whole world, or fall too deeply in love with it, I suppose.
There was a little daylight filtering in, through the rocks. The rescuers were getting close. "Don't you know if it's your people?" I asked.
"Anxiety fits either way," he said. "That's drowning out the details."
"Alexander?" a voice called softly from the other side, a woman's; he paused.
"Yes," he said. "I'm here."
"We'll have you out in a few minutes," she said.
"All right."
We sat in silence, while they opened the mouth enough for him to scramble out.
"I'm sorry," he said, watching the rocks disappearing out of the way, one after another.
It wasn't much comfort to know that he truly was. "You don't have to be," I said, with the desperation of the rat in the cage. I was thinking of Caro, and the twins; I'd seen them in black and white on an ultrasound screen two weeks before, one hand held up waving at me, hello. I tried to pull my arm free again, tried to kick loose; I'd been trying the whole time.
He didn't come in reach. He didn't have to.
Tamisha stood up silently from the body: cooling already, only the small scorch mark at the base of the neck still warm.
"The cold-hearted son of a bitch," Marcus said, low and angry. "Ellroy couldn't even chase him."
"He'd seen his face," she said. "Bane's killed for that before."
The local enforcers were huddled outside the cave looking in, hollowed-out and tear-streaked faces; he'd had a family, she understood.
"You'd better clear them away from the mountainside," Marcus said quietly. "I'll bring him out."