 
The Good Fight

An Anthology of Superpowered Fiction

Presented by the Pen & Cape Society

All stories Copyright their respective authors.

Published by Local Hero Press, LLC

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

Cover art by Jeff Hebert, inspired by Wonder Woman #21 (DC Comics) by Cliff Chiang

Ebook design by Ian Thomas Healy

"Bedtime Story" Copyright 2014 by Scott Bachmann

"Two Hearts" Copyright 2014 by Frank Byrns

"Omega Night" Copyright 2013 by Marion G. Harmon

"Zephyr Phase Zero" Copyright 2014 by Warren Hately

"Out of Mind" Copyright 2014 by Drew Hayes

"Archenemy" Copyright 2014 by Ian Thomas Healy

"Hunting Rabbits" Copyright 2005 by Hydrargentium

"The Fire of the Fly" Copyright 2014 by Michael Ivan Lowell

"Firedrake: A Frosty Reception" Copyright 2014 by T. Mike McCurley

"Who is . . . the Whitecoat?" Copyright 2008 by Landon Porter, reprinted with permission from descendantsserial.com

"Rocco" Copyright 2014 by R.J. Ross

"First Date" Copyright 2014 by Cheyanne Young

"Thawed" Copyright 2014 by Jim Zoetewey
Table of Contents

Introduction

Bedtime Story – Scott Bachmann

Two Hearts – Frank Byrns

Omega Night – Marion G. Harmon

Zephyr Phase Zero – Warren Hately

Out of Mind – Drew Hayes

Archenemy – Ian Thomas Healy

Hunting Rabbits - Hydrargentium

The Fire of the Fly – Michael Ivan Lowell

Firedrake: A Frosty Reception – T. Mike McCurley

Who is . . . the Whitecoat? – Landon Porter

Rocco – R.J. Ross

First Date – Cheyenne Young

Thawed – Jim Zoetewey
The Pen & Cape Society Welcomes You

If you must blame anyone for this anthology, you should probably start with Drew Hayes. After some back and forth social media discussion between him and me, he created a now-defunct Facebook group for superhero fiction authors in early February 2014, inviting many of the authors he knew. His circle tended to involve more serial authors, while mine tended more toward novelists, so between us we had a lot of folks to invite. You might be surprised just how many people are writing superhero fiction out there, and how much of it is really, really good. Then again, you're reading this anthology, so you might have an inkling of what kind of fantastic entertainment is barreling your way.

After a few fits and starts, the official Pen & Cape Society came into being, with a website designed by Jeffrey Allen, a mascot named Willow Wisp, whose badassness is gracing the cover of this volume, and content from some of the best authors working in the superhero fiction genre today. Want to know more about any of the authors whose work is in this anthology? Visit the Pen & Cape Society for all the information you could want.

As a group, we are dedicated to promoting the genre of superhero fiction, whether in online serials, ebooks, or in print. We are committed to providing quality stories for our readers, and to sharing each others' work far and wide. So whether you prefer gritty realism, fanciful romps, college re-imaginings, stylish alternate worlds, or a mashup of them all, you've come to the right place.

Ian Thomas Healy

May, 2014

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Bedtime Story

by Scott Bachmann

About the Scottcomics Universe

In the Scottcomics universe, super powers are simply a part of the continuum of normal to gifted people, plotted on the bell curve of average human abilities. Most of the gifted are impressive, like concert pianists or brilliant scientists, but a few have abilities beyond the rest of mankind. They are rare, but they have had a big impact on history. After World War II, when the organized use of the gifted as weapons happened for the first time, the nations of the world declared regulations on their use, along with nuclear weapons. The United Nations sanctioned a team of the strongest of the gifted to aid the nations of the world with dealing these individuals when they broke law or were involved in threatening other nations. This team became the Defense Force, led by the Paragon. Liza Lang-Ramiro was the fourth person to become the Paragon, and many of the Scottcomics stories revolve around her. The stories are told in both novel and graphic novel format, and are written for different age groups depending on the subject matter of the story.

About the Author: Scott Bachmann

Scott is the founder, publisher, and primary author for Scottcomics. Scott's works are available in both print and digital formats at http://scottcomics.com. He also has an all ages webcomic about Liza at http://oursupermom.com featuring the art of Scott D.M. Simmons. You can follow Scott's work at Twitter: ScottABachmann,  FaceBook: Scottcomics and the Pen & Cape Society.

* * *

"When's daddy gonna be home?" Markie moaned as he and his older sister Gail climbed onto his bed.

Liza, Markie's mom, hovered in the air by the nearby bookshelf, trying to pick a book they hadn't already read a dozen times, and one that she didn't hate. "Just two more weeks, hon, then his book tour will finally be over. Promise. I miss him too and he forgot to call again so he is in trouble." Liza straightened some of the mess on the shelf and found a book she hadn't seen in a long time. "What about the Jonas the Grumpy Plane? You used to love that one?"

Gail rolled her eyes as dramatically as possible, "Mom, that was my old book, when I was little. Could we at least have a chapter book?"

Markie barked, "No!" making Gail jump and Liza drop the picture book. "I want a NEW story! Daddy always makes good stories. I want one of those!"

Liza selected a few more books and floated over to the bed. Markie had a full on pouty face going as Liza settled into the big chair beside the bed. "We've been over this. There are some things I'm not good at, and stories are one of them. Now which would you prefer?" She held up two books, "The Powerful Puppy Adventures or Fairy Magic Quests?"

Gail groaned, loudly, making sure everyone heard. "Can I just read my own book?"

Liza ground her teeth, but took a deep breath so she didn't snap the books in half by accident. Super strength required a super temperament. "Young lady, this is family time, and it will remain so."

Gail knew better than to argue when her mother used that tone, but then an idea brightened behind her eyes. She tilted her head, the idea rattled around in it, and then fell out. "What about a REAL story?"

Markie's eyes went wide, knowing exactly what Gail meant, "A Paragon adventure! Please? Please? Please?"

Liza sighed, "You know I can't talk about a lot of them. They're classified."

Markie pleaded, "But some aren't crassified? Please?"

Liza stared at the ceiling trying to think of a way out of this, and coming up blank. "I suppose I could just leave out some of the details."

Gail said, "You're retired mom. And you're old. The statute of limitations must have run out by now."

Liza's brow furrowed, "Where did you learn about 'statute of limitations'?" Liza asked more out of habit then genuine curiosity. Gail's voracious studying habits were endlessly surprising—to the point that they weren't really surprising any more. It was like raising an encyclopedia, with an attitude.

Gail opened her mouth, but Markie interrupted, "I want fights! And super stuffs! A REAL adventure!"

Liza pursed her lips, thinking. "Have I told you about the Serpent Lord? That was back when I first started out. Before I met your dad even."

Gail shook her head, "No, but I know ALL about it. It's on Superpedia."

"Superpedia," Liza chided, "is more wrong than its right. But if you already know it and don't want to hear it . . ."

"SURFANTS! SURFANTS!" yelled Markie, bouncing on the bed.

"Serpents dummy," said Gail, "They're snakes. You're scared of snakes."

Markie's motions came to a dead stop. "I don't like snakes."

Liza reached over and scooped up her son and set him in her lap. "He wasn't a real snake. He was just a crazy guy that wore a snake mask." Liza spun her fingers next to her head to emphasize the crazy.

"Did he bite people?" Markie didn't look convinced.

Liza shook her head, "Not that I know of. He called himself the Serpent Lord because he could hypnotize people."

Markie asked, "What's, hippo-size?"

Gail leaned over Markie with a spooky look in her eyes and wiggled her fingers, "He could control your mind! Bwa-ha-ha! Though yours would be too easy."

Liza frowned, "Do you want to be sent to bed right now?"

"Do I get to read my own book?" Gail asked, hopefully.

Liza's frown deepened. "No."

Gail flopped down on the bed with her backside, head slapping the pillow.

"Good choice," said Liza. "Now let's see," she said as she tapped her lip with an index finger, "Who was actually on the Defense Force back then? It changed a lot back then. It was me, Cinaed, Shokkuchan, CyberSoldier—no, wait, he'd quit by that point, along with Blurr - um, it was before Rain joined, and the Serpent Lord was why Sci-mage formally joined so he wasn't there yet . . . There had to be someone else. It wasn't just the three of us."

Gail offered, "Superpedia says CyberSoldier was there. And Maximum Force."

Liza tapped her lip again, "No, Cyber was definitely gone. Maximum Force might have been there, but that's who CyberSoldier ran off with. Force wasn't on the team very long. He was only around for maybe a few months before he quit. I think he just wanted to date CyberSoldier."

"Story!" Markie yelled, pounding his little fists on his own lap.

"I told you I wasn't very good at this," said Liza. "You sure you wouldn't rather have a book?"

They both stared her down.

"Ok then, fine. I tried to warn you." Liza floated up a bit and settled into a better position on the chair. "The whole thing started in Sci-mage's lab. I can't say much about that because he was making things for the military when he wasn't on stage. You remember Sci-mage right? Markie was a toddler the last time he came by. He wore a lot of purple and gold, dark skin... ring a bell?"

"He pulled quarters out my ear," Markie said.

"I'm sure he did," said Liza. "He's always performing and doing tricks. But he's really a scientist. He designed most of the equipment we used on the Defense Force.

"Well, he had an assistant back then, Rodney Gilliam, and Rodney was a very jealous person. He thought that Sci-mage was taking credit for his work, which led to lots of arguments. Sci-mage was forced to fire him when Rodney created a scene in front of General."

"Where's the surfants?" asked Markie.

"We're getting to that," said Liza. "When Rodney was fired, he went off for a while and sulked."

"That means pout," offered Gail, cutting off Markie before he could ask.

"I know what 'soaked' means. Mom. Gail's doing it again."

Liza gave Gail a 'that's strike two' look. "Rodney wasn't heard from for almost a year, but then he returned one night and robbed the lab. They'd changed the locks and codes, but he still knew enough to get in. He stole a lot of Sci-mage's inventions and got away with them without being caught."

Gail shook her head, "How did you know it was him then?"

"Cameras. He didn't hide the crime, he wanted us to know he'd been there—he even waved at the cameras at one point. Like I said, he was crazy."

Liza paused for a moment thinking. "We guessed he went to ground and back to whatever hole he'd been hiding in. He resurfaced about three months later on the west coast. He robbed a few banks in San Francisco and got away without a shot fired. He just walked in and ordered the tellers to give him the money and they did. By the third robbery the police were ready, but he ordered them to..." Liza blushed as she recalled the details. "Errr, I don't think I should tell you that part. Let's just say a lot of people got hurt."

"Was he wearing a mask?" Markie asked, hopefully.

"I don't think so. He hadn't completely snapped yet. But maybe he had. I don't recall his face being in the papers. If he did have a mask, it wasn't the Serpent Lord mask. I'd have remembered that. That thing creeps me out. It's made out of real snakeskin."

Markie sighed, "You do tell bad stories."

Gail shushed her brother.

Liza sighed, but continued. "Anyways, he was getting away with some bad stuff, so the Defense Force was called in to apprehend him. I was technically in charge as Paragon, but Cinaed had seniority and was the one really leading the op."

"That means operation," whispered Gail.

"I know!" said Markie.

"Do you want to hear this or not?"

"Yes," the kids said in mopey unison.

"I'd only been the Paragon for a few months, and I was still in training, but to the public at large, a Paragon was leading the Defense Force, and that was what mattered. Plus, Cinaed hates being in charge. She likes to boss people around, but she doesn't like to take responsibility. Total back seat driver. Honestly, most of the time we just let CyberSoldier lead, until out of the blue he decided to finally come out, quit, and return to Canada."

Gail sat up. "Mom, you're rambling."

"Am I?"

Markie yawned, "What does 'come out' mean?"

Liza's face reddened, "I am rambling. SO! Before we could act on the west coast, we had to be cleared to apprehend him. We were still a U.N. team at the time and weren't allowed to act on U.S. soil without..."

"MOM!" Gail yelled.

Liza continued, "By the time we finally got there, he was wearing the Serpent Lord mask." Markie sat up, shrugging off another yawn. "He had over a thousand people in his thrall by then. All he had to do was look someone in the eye for a few seconds and then they would obey him. It was some kind of device in the mask I think, or maybe his belt. Anyways, people had to obey his orders as long as it wasn't something they would never do. There were limits. They wouldn't kill somebody, I think, but they would follow him around. He clogged the streets with a parade of zombified people, with a shield of civilians to protect him from attack," Liza ticked off points with her fingers, "Shokkuchan couldn't use her lightning, and Cinaed couldn't use her fire, and the police couldn't use force. That left me to deal with him because I could fly, and because average people couldn't hurt me."

Markie rubbed his eyes, trying hard to stay awake.

"The Serpent Lord marched his parade down through the city to the Golden Gate Bridge, shouting crazy demands from a megaphone as they went. I don't remember what the demands were, but they were crazy. Things like asking for tons of money, or to have Sci-mage fired from the Defense Force, and for a statue of him put up in the park. I flew down to snatch him, but he ordered the crowd to stop breathing!"

Markie sucked in his own breath and looked terrified. Gail had moved to the edge of the bed, listening.

"I backed up and he let them breathe again. I don't know if they would have really stopped breathing until they died, but I didn't want to take the chance. So I just flew up higher, trying to think of something to do as he marched the whole group onto the bridge and began to make even more demands. He wanted his old job back. He wanted everyone he'd worked with fired. He wanted patents put in his name. He wanted a national holiday named in his honor, and I think he also wanted a helicopter."

Markie's voice cracked, "What did you do?"

"I didn't know what to do. I just hung there in the air, trying to think of something. That's when he sprung the real trap."

Markie's voice squeaked, "Trap?"

"He must have known we were going to come after him, and had always planned to take people out onto the bridge. He didn't care about the chaos of dozens of cars slamming on their breaks and trucks spinning out. Half the bridge became multi-vehicle pile-ups, total chaos. Then the explosions came."

"Explosions?" yelped Markie as he grabbed and hugged his pillow.

"Explosions. Big ones. He had placed bombs on the bridge. On the big pylon. They sheared it off, taking out half the bridges support." She gestured trying to demonstrate the bridge tilting, "The whole thing dipped this way towards the water, and cables started snapping with pinging sounds."

"What did you do?" whispered Markie.

"I flew underneath and did my best to hold the falling end of the bridge up."

"Superpedia," Gail said, "Says you held up the WHOLE bridge."

"Nope, not true. The other pylon was fine, and most of the structure held, but it was full of vehicles and people, and wasn't designed to hold itself up with one pylon." Liza tried to show with her hands how she had to twist to hold up the bridge. "There wasn't a good place to brace myself or get a grip. It's not like they build handholds or paint big X's that say 'Lift Here'. I used my back and braced my feet against the remainder of the pylon, after I lifted it a foot. That alone almost broke me. I had to keep changing my position because the metal would bend or the concrete would crack and crumble. The thing made the most horrible groaning and whining sounds. It was so loud I had no idea what else was going on. Control was speaking into my ear piece but I couldn't hear him. The smoke and dust from the explosion and crumbling concrete was making my eyes water. I had to close them and couldn't rub them. I kept holding my breath so I wouldn't choke and cough, but when I did I'd almost lose my grip. But I never gave up. My shoulders and back were on fire with pain. My gloves and the back of my costume shredded whenever I repositioned and changed my grip. My body kept screaming at me that I couldn't do this, but I never gave up."

Liza's gesturing had gotten so elaborate that Markie almost fell out of her lap.

"What I didn't know, was that Sci-mage had seen what was happening on the news, and recognized the hypnotic control was based on a crowd control system he'd been developing. He also knew there was a counter to the effect that could break it—a strobing light pattern at the right frequency would snap most people out of it.

"While I was straining away, Control connected Sci-Mage to Shokkuchan. The Defense Force flew her out over the bridge in a chopper and she hung out the open door on a tether. They lowered her down on a cable and she strobed the sky with lightning flashes. I heard the effect was almost instantaneous. People snapped out of it and immediately knew what was going on. They all attacked the Serpent Lord. Some of the first people enthralled were police and they cuffed him and removed that mask." Liza shuddered. "Then the police took charge and directed people towards the end of the bridge that was still attached and started directing traffic backwards off the bridge. They rescued people in the wrecked cars. They were helped by helicopters lowering in emergency help. Slowly but steadily the load got a little lighter."

Gail wagged her finger, "Nuh-uh. You and the Serpent Lord had a huge argument on the bridge. Then when he threatened to kill everybody, you knocked him out by clapping. You made a huge sonic boom with your hands that knocked him over. He's also supposed to be half snake and there was no mask, and he makes half snake people that you had to fight."

Liza rolled her eyes. "Don't believe the internet. The snake people came later, years later, and none of that other stuff happened. The sonic boom was probably the explosion, and I can't knock someone over by clapping. I can make a loud enough noise to blow out an eardrum, but that's about it."

Gail frowned. "If none of its true, why don't you fix it? They're telling lies about you."

Liza shrugged. "I've tried, but people change it back. Myths become more true than truth over time. People believe and remember what they want to. Besides, it doesn't matter. I held up the bridge until Cinaed and Shokkuchan could weld the metal pylons together enough to hold before a real repair could be made. We know what we did. It doesn't matter if people remember what really happened, what matters is that they lived to remember it."

Markie yawned. "Thas it? No fights? I wanted a real super story. Ugh! So boring. Imma going to bed." He crawled down from his mom's lap and into bed, shoving his sister out of the way in the process. Gail began to yell about it, but Liza scooped her instead and flew her into her own room.

"Can I still stay up a bit and read?" she asked as Liza lowered her onto her bed.

"Well, as long as you get up for school in the morning."

"Mom! I always do. I want A's."

Liza smirked. She knew it was true, her daughter was an overachiever of the first order. "Then yes, you may."

Liza turned out the overhead light as Gail turned on her bedside lamp. As she began to shut the door behind her, she heard, "Were you scared?"

"Hmm?" Liza asked, pausing at the door.

"Holding up that bridge. Were you scared?"

Liza nodded as she turned back to her daughter. "Terrified. I didn't think I could, and if I didn't, hundreds would have died. It was the hardest thing I ever did."

"Markie's wrong. It wasn't a bad story. Even if there was no fighting, you were still a hero. Thanks."

Liza choked up, but got out the words, "Thank you. G'night honey."

A sleepy, "I love you," came from behind the door as Liza pulled it closed.

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Two Hearts

Frank Byrns

Frank Byrns lives in suburban Maryland with his wife and children, where he writes short stories and comics about superheroes, outlaws, and sometimes baseball.

He has seen stories published in a wide variety of markets, including Strange Horizons, Electric Velocipede, Everyday Fiction, Stymie, Powder Burn Flash, and the WW Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction.

Byrns has chronicled the continuing adventures of classic pulp characters like Jim Anthony, Super-Detective and The Black Bat for Airship27, and will soon be sharing a collection featuring his most popular original character, Adonis Morgan, through Pro Se Press.

His superhero fiction has been collected into three volumes: My Father's Son (2004), Requiem (2006), and Things to Come (2009), all recently re-released for the Kindle.

In a previous life, he was the publisher and editor-in-chief of A Thousand Faces, the Quarterly Journal of Superhuman Fiction, which ran for 14 issues between 2007 and 2010.

You can visit him online at www.frankbyrns.com.

* * *

As the last of Black Rhino's goons were dispatched, Scott turned to his partner, eager to finish the conversation that had begun earlier in the night on this same shadowed rooftop, before they were so rudely interrupted by an attempted bank robbery.

"I . . . well, uh . . . phew. This is tougher than I thought. OK, here goes." Lindsay looked away, then back up again. "I'm pregnant."

Scott's mind raced to a million different places, some of them a lot darker than he'd care to admit. Not for the first time, he found himself thankful for the thin mask that covered his eyes and face. "Shit," he said, the word slipping out before he could stop it.

"Wow," Lindsay said. Scott was glad for the mask covering her face, as well—her green eyes burned angrily enough in his imagination.

"Sorry," Scott said. "You surprised me, is all."

"I guess I hoped you'd be a little more supportive," Lindsay said. Scott could tell by the set of her jaw—even underneath the mask—that she was still pissed.

"I'm sorry, all right?" He pinched the top of his mask, pulling it up slightly, trying to get some separation between the fabric and his face. He was burning up in there. "Does Max know?"

"What are—Are you kidding me?" Lindsay turned her back on him. He'd seen this move before—she was gathering herself, trying to measure her response. When she turned back, he could see that it didn't work. "What kind of question is that? Of course he fucking knows."

Lindsay began pacing the rooftop, a bit carelessly for Scott's taste. The sirens were growing closer—the Containment Unit would be on the scene below any minute now to wrap up Black Rhino and his henchmen. If they were spotted up on the roof, it would only lead to a wholly different set of headaches.

Then, as if she were reading his mind, Lindsay turned on a dime and ducked back into the shadows. "Wait," she said softly, her anger subsiding. "You really thought I'd tell you first?"

Scott shrugged. _Did he?_

"I'm your partner," he said.

"And Max is my husband," she said.

"Does he even know about us?" Scott asked.

Lindsay looked away again—but this time she didn't look back up. She stared at the rooftop gravel, unable—unwilling—to answer.

This time, it was Scott's turn to be angry. Lindsay always told him not to bottle up, to let it out every now and then. But he never did. "Goddamit," he said softly.

"Look, I was going to tell him—a hundred times I started to, but something always came up, something got in the way. It was never the right time."

"You've been married for eight months." Scott kept his voice even, his neck quivering from the effort. "Where does he think you go every night? Where does he think you are tonight?"

"At the lab."

"At the—with me?" Scott closed his eyes, hoping for a different answer than the one he knew he was going to get.

"Yeah."

The Containment Unit roared up the street below. Standard dispatch—two rovers, two bikes, a prisoner transport. Lights and sirens blazing—subtlety was not their specialty. Tonight would be an easy night for them—Black Rhino was bound to the vault door inside the bank, his unconscious thugs scattered around him.

A vein spasmed in Scott's neck. He closed his eyes as he spoke. "Max probably thinks we're sleeping together."

"He doesn't."

"No?"

"He knows me better than that."

Scott took a look at Lindsay: the blue mask, the matching cape, the boots, the whole bit. He choked out a bitter laugh. "Sure he does."

"Oh, you do not get to do that to me." Lindsay stalked towards Scott—for a brief moment, he thought she might punch him, but she pulled up short. The point was still made. "Just . . .just don't. That smug, condescending, passive aggressive _bullshit_."

It was a fair point, one she'd made before. "You have to tell him," Scott said.

"I know."

"They're gonna do a Lampe Test on the baby, you know th –"

"I know."

"Max will know that's not _his_ half of the DNA testing positive."

"I _know_."

There was a loud roar down in the street as a couple of the ConUnit's bruisers brought a bareheaded Black Rhino out of the bank in shackles. Without his helmet, the metacriminal was nearly powerless.

Scott shifted his feet, watching the action below. As he did, he was poked in the back by the corner of a small envelope, one that he had tucked into the pouch inset beneath his cape before he left home for the night. He had nearly forgotten.

"Hey, I almost forgot," he said, pulling the envelope out and holding it up for Lindsay to see. "Probably a moot point now, but . . ."

"What is it?" Lindsay's hands rested on her stomach, a protective posture. Scott wondered if she was conscious of their position.

"The original thing I wanted to talk about," he said. "We've been shortlisted for membership in The Order."

"Really? I didn't know they had an opening." Lindsay shook her head. "I wouldn't have thought they even knew who we were."

"They have two openings, actually," Scott said.

"I'm going to be no good to anybody in a few months . . . They won't want me for long."

Scott shrugged. "It's a package deal," he said. "Both of us, or neither of us."

The fabric in Lindsay's mask crinkled around the eyes. "What are you saying?"

" . . . nothing."

"What are you asking me, Scott?"

"Nothing." Scott leaned over the edge of the building, watching the police wrap up their operation, not caring who saw him. "I'm not asking you anything."

Lindsay walked over to Scott. She stood beside him, watching the scene below.

"You could go it alone," she said, breaking the silence. "I could talk to them, explain the situation. Oceanna, maybe. She'd understand."

Scott was silent a long while before answering. "I don't know if this, this _thing_ that we do, these powers," he said finally. "I don't know that they would even _work_ if we were apart."

"I don't, either."

Scott shook his head. "The way it all happened in the lab . . . I just assumed that neither would work without the other."

"Me, too. You're going to have to find out, though." Lindsay took a deep breath. "Soon."

Scott began to agree, then cut himself short, his head frozen mid-nod. "Wait, what? What are you saying?"

"I . . . I, uh . . ." Lindsay turned her back on Scott, walked across the rooftop. Standing in the shadowed darkness of the far side of the building, she reached up and pulled off her mask. Scott watched as she shook out her hair, the long auburn tresses he'd give anything to run his fingers through one more time. "I can't do this anymore," she said.

Scott started towards her, then stopped. "Do what anymore?" he said.

Lindsay waved her arm in the air, a rough semicircle. "All of this," she said. " _Any_ of this. I'm going to be somebody's _mother_ , for crissakes. Can't exactly be jumping from roof to roof and throwing Black Rhino through a plate glass window, now can I?"

"Hey, c'mon, don't talk like that," Scott said, trying not to let the panic he was feeling creep into his voice. "You guys'll have this beautiful baby, and a few months later, you'll be right back out here, same as it ever was."

"You think so, huh?"

"I know it," Scott said. "I know _you_ , Lindsay. You told me not even a month ago that you'd never felt more alive—that you _knew_ , as sure as you've ever known anything in your life, that this is what you were born to do. That this is what you were put on this planet for. You remember saying that?"

"I remember."

"What was that guy's name? The one with that stupid water blade –"

"Hydrax," Lindsay said. "I said I remember."

"Primeval, Pogo, the Praying Mantis. You remember all those, too?"

"A lot can happen in a month, Scott."

"Dreamcatcher. Remember him? How scary was that guy?"

"People change, Scott."

Scott bit back the word that rose in obvious response, then changed his mind and said it anyway. "Obviously."

As he said the word, Scott braced himself for the angry response he was sure would come. But Lindsay's response was anything but. "Look, I don't know what I can say, other than I'm sorry," she said softly.

It was Scott's turn now to pull off his mask. He balled it up, squeezing it rhythmically, if only to give his hands something to do. "I don't think I can do this alone," he said.

"You'll be fine," Lindsay said, giving him a half-hearted smile. "Find a new partner, maybe."

Scott swallowed a laugh. _Like it was that easy_.

"I just . . ." He shook his head, started over. "You never even wanted children."

"I know," she said, chewing on her bottom lip. "But now I do."

"With Max," Scott said. "You want to have children with Max."

"Yes," Lindsay said, looking him directly in the eye. Scott could tell from her look—she knew what was coming next. He took a deep breath, steadying himself for what he was about to say.

"But you never wanted children with me," he said, his voice stronger and clearer than he thought it would be.

"Scott . . ."

"No, it's fine. I get it. Why would you?"

"Scott . . ."

"No, I get it."

"People change, Scott."

"Yeah, you said that already."

Somewhere in the distance, a siren sounded. Lightning flashed across the sky—horizontally. Lindsay looked up at the sky, then back down at her partner. The electricity was reflected by the twinkle in her eye. "One last ride?" she asked. "For old times' sake?"

Scott tried to smile, but found himself unable. He nodded instead as he pulled on his mask, watching as Lindsay did the same. Lightning filled the sky again, this time from the ground up.

"Let's do it," he said, reaching a gloved fist out towards his partner.

Lindsay took Scott's hand in hers and gave it a firm squeeze. He squeezed back, as hard as he ever had. A familiar faint blue aura enveloped her body; a comforting deep crimson energy washed over him from head to toe. Scott held on to Lindsay's hand a moment longer than he needed to, and then let go.

"Let's do it," he said again, and they launched into the sky.

Back to Table of Contents

Omega Night

A Wearing the Cape Story by Marion G. Harmon

Marion G. Harmon turned from financial planning to professional writing in 2010. He self-published Wearing the Cape on Amazon.com in mid-2011 and it quickly rose in the Amazon rankings to spend most of 2012 as #1 in its Amazon Category. He followed Wearing the Cape with Villains Inc. (2011-12), Bite Me: Big Easy Nights (2012), and Young Sentinels (2013), and all have enjoyed similar success. Omega Night is an Astra-adventure which takes place between the events of Villains Inc. and Young Sentinels. Marion is currently working on Astra's next adventure, Small Town Heroes (2014), as well as Wearing the Cape: the Roleplaying Game, a tabletop roleplaying game set in his superhero world.

* * *

The world turned into a stop-motion movie set in the middle of Julie's punch line, which meant the hand on my shoulder wasn't Megan's or Annabeth's. "We have to go now, Astra," Rush said when I twisted to look up from my chair. I dropped my pizza slice and it froze halfway to my plate. Rush was in full costume, his red and white racer's jumpsuit and helmet, but the unserious smirk that usually showed below the edge of his eye-covering visor was missing.

"Bike's outside." His grip slid down to my arm when I stood up, and he led me away from my friends, through the frozen crowd, out the door half-opened by a guy for his date, into the cool night and up the stairs to the street.

"What's happening?" I focused on not bumping into anybody—not that I could hurt them in their time-frozen state. It had to be bad, real bad if Rush didn't even have time to text me and let me get away to the lady's room. I tried not to think what it was going to look like to a room full of diners, mostly students, when I disappeared from our table. The Bees were going to be pissed—between my patrols and new training schedule, this had been the first night in two weeks that I could go out with them.

We hit the street outside the Pizza Cellar and headed for his custom made motorbike at a jog. Speedsters only ran everywhere in the comics; being able to accelerate their own personal time didn't mean they wanted to run for miles. He focused on our mounting up together, never losing physical contact so I could stay in hypertime with him, waited till I'd settled behind him, arms around his waist, and got us on the road before answering.

"Blackstone flashed an Omega Code to my epad," he said finally, and grunted when my grip tightened. "I listened to the flash-download on the way here. Somebody's launched a missile. A big, bad, nuclear one. Can you let me breathe, A?"

"Sorry!" I loosened my grip as we wove through frozen traffic. All I wanted to do was turn around and get my friends somewhere safe, but where was that?

* * *

Instead I listened to the gut-churning download as we road through time-frozen streets, headed for the Dome. Less than fifteen minutes earlier an unidentified module full of Verne-tech robots had clamped itself to the side of one of our navy's nuclear submarines. The robot swarm burned its way in, ignored the crew to hack the sub's computer systems, attached itself to one of the sub's ballistic missiles, and launched it. The sub crew had managed to radio word of the attack before the takeover was complete, so the U.S. military had the missile on radar when it broke the surface of the Caribbean.

Close range interceptors from a nearby carrier fleet had failed to knock it down. What was a nuclear sub doing patrolling in the Caribbean? And a fleet just happened to be in range? What was going on down there? Were they protecting Puerto Rico? Keeping an eye on Cuba? (It was a rogue state and sanctuary for supervillains.)

Regardless, the nuclear warhead-armed missile was flying faster than its specs allowed, and it was mutating as it headed for space. Nobody thought it was aimed at the Moon and the military had activated Operation Omega.

The Pizza Cellar sat just off the University of Chicago campus, so the long ride between seconds from there to the Dome gave me plenty of time to freak out over the details before Rush bumped us up off of Michigan Avenue to park the bike on the pedestrian avenue in the middle of all the frozen after-dinner strollers. Living in Rush's world never failed to give me the wiggins, but this time I barely noticed.

"Your turn, A," he said, raising his hands over his head. I reached up to grab hold so we gripped each other's wrists and lifted off, flying us up and over the Dome to drop through the open load bay doors. We touched down and the doors lurched into motion overhead when I let go—still opening, their rumble the first outside-sound I'd heard since Rush touched my shoulder at the restaurant to take us into hypertime.

Transit time from the Pizza Cellar to the Dome: one second.

"The missile is still in powered flight," Blackstone's calm voice filled the bay. "Keep speeding—we launch in one minute."

Rush had the grace not to smirk when I groaned and popped the latch on my own load rack to pass him my uniform bundle. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he took us back into hypertime.

We'd started practicing this cringe-inducing, absolute-emergencies-only, we-shall-never-speak-of-it maneuver after I'd gotten caught in civies by the Godzilla Attack; he looked the other way but kept one hand on me at all times while I stepped out of my shoes and skinned out of my Jersey top and skirt. He handed me my costume parts as I grabbed and pulled on the white tights and blue wedgy-inducing bodysuit, boots, gloves, mask and attached wig, everything but my cape. These days I always wore underwear that could double for workout clothes in a gym.

He stopped looking at the corner when I finished. "Set?"

I nodded and he let go. Time came back and I stepped into the new piece of bay equipment, there just for Watchman and me. Setting my feet in the stirrups, I reached up to grab the guide bars, and braced myself. Robot-arms came down and dressed me as I gritted my teeth and let it have its way with me. The intrusive machine bolted me into my harness-rigged armor and special loadout: counter-missiles, ECM modules, and the Gungnirs, the two short-range missiles that were the point of the whole thing.

Would I need all of it? Maybe not, but the military felt the Swiss Army Knife approach outweighed the extra weight.

Watchman burst through the door, running, Seven right behind him; they must have started down in Dispatch before Rush went to get me. Watchman had been on duty and already suited up, and he jumped into his own side of the loader to get intimately dressed. An inappropriately light-hearted ping signaled completion of my rigging and I stepped out of the loader, resisting the urge to give it a kick.

Seven unracked my pressure-helmet. In his blazer, matching thin tie, and natty fedora he looked like a 60s crooner, but he wasn't smiling for the audience. Leaning in, he pressed a quick kiss to my lips before dropping it over my head. His magic touch meant no adjustment needed—the heads-up display came online, and the green light told me the seal was secure.

Watchman followed seconds later, no kiss for him. And what had that been about? A kiss for luck?

Blackstone had to be watching the telemetry for our gear. "U.S. Shield satellite guidance linked in," he informed us. Though this was a military operation and our payloads where under their control, operations efficiency meant the joint military-civilian force coordinated through the Dome. "Astra, Watchman, you are good for launch!"

I "launched" with everything I had, Watchman right beside me.

Time from Omega Code alert and one dropped pizza till launch: one minute.

* * *

"I hacked the nearest power sub-station for you," Shelly whispered through the earbug attached to my mask as we shot upward into the night sky. Her gynoid body was back in the shop, but she could still be my Dispatch wingman. "The Pizza Cellar suffered a power blackout the second you disappeared. Julie just called to ask what the hell happened to you, but nobody but the Bees noticed your exit. She was worried."

"That makes two of us. Tell me something good." I fought to keep my course on the pip showing on my helmet as I poured on the speed and tried not to think about the kiss.

A reporter once asked me how it felt to fly; I told him that for me gravity was just a guideline—you might want to go this way—but tonight gravity was an enemy that pulled at every bit of me as I fought upward. Watchman angled in above me so that he was at least breaking the air in my path as the lights of Chicago dropped away below our feet and we raced for space.

Shelly slipped into her Dispatch wingman role. "Telemetry good. Green, green, green, green. Your gear is holding up to full acceleration."

"So nothing is going to fall off?" I gasped. "Goody."

Mom considered sarcasm impolite, and since being impolite could get in the way of what she wanted—which is other people's money—she had trained it out of her verbal menu. Mine too, but it was shaping up to be that kind of night and sarcasm beat fear.

Deciding I wasn't going to pass out from the gees and the strain (pushing the sound barrier means pushing a lot of air out of your way), I tried reading the information being fed to me by my heads-up display. Five green triangles in a cone tipped by a red triangle, tagged by a changing number.

"Only five launched? Who are the rest?"

"Rook in L.A., and ArcLight and Argonaut. They're out of Detroit and New Orleans; everyone else was outside the intercept radius or too slow."

Great. Our first real-life Omega Code, and only civilian capes were "rising to the occasion." Well, Watchman sort of counted as military—he'd been an Army cape until just months ago. But the response net had worked, even if I couldn't believe they'd made me part of it. I tried to pour on more speed; Watchman could fly faster, but was holding his speed down so I could stay in his wake.

And I would keep up. I had to. I'd learned less than two months ago, just one missile could ruin my whole world.

* * *

"Seriously? I mean, seriously?"

"Seriously, ma'am." The presenter, a truly serious navy captain, nodded as I flushed and looked down at my ring-binder. Blackstone had sent Watchman and me to Washington to take part in three days of seminars sponsored by the Department of Superhuman Affairs, the Department of Defense, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Lots of it was a review of the national response to the Big One, the earthquake that leveled Southern California in January, and nearly two hundred representatives from Crisis Aid and Intervention "superteams" around the country were here for that. This morning I'd learned the whole conference was just a cover.

Watchman and I sat in a room full of other Atlas-types, some military, but mostly civilian. All of us were A Class, able to take a hit from a battle-tank's main gun and still punch it out or just bench-press it and laugh. More significantly, we could all outfly military jets (at normal thrust at least—firing up afterburners, they could leave most of us eating their fluffy white contrails).

We were quite a picture, the military capes in their blue or green uniform jumpsuits and military berets (Watchman looked like them but without the rank flash and unit patches), and all of us civilian capes in our primary colored jumpsuits or tights, masks, and even actual capes. But the navy captain facing us was made of stern stuff; he addressed us by our superhero codenames or "sir" or "ma'am," without the hint of a smile, and the subject wasn't funny at all.

Projected civilian fatalities: 50 to 150 million. Up to half the population of the United States. We'd had experience with small-scale EMP stuff. Lei Zi could do it, and it was part of the standard electrokinetic breakthrough's power-set—but still...

The captain looked around the room before continuing. "The threat posed by an electromagnetic pulse has been known since the beginning of the nuclear age. As early as the 50s, the military shielded electronic instruments and equipment against 'radioflash' during nuclear tests, and high-altitude tests damaged power and communications infrastructure nearly 15,000 kilometers away.

"The danger comes from the interaction of a high yield, high altitude detonation with the Earth's magnetic field; detonate a one megaton warhead 400 kilometers up, somewhere over Omaha. Gamma rays hit the upper atmosphere, ejecting electrons which are then deflected sideways by the Earth's north-to-south magnetic field. The free electrons radiate EMP over a wide area, with most of the United States under its penumbra."

Rook half raised a hand. With Atlas gone, he was probably the strongest Atlas-type in the room.

"Just to be clear, we're talking about another Blackout, right?"

"Correct, sir, but of a more permanent nature. The power blackout that was part of the Event was a worldwide power interruption, which cut power to electrical systems and instruments; an EMP creates a power spike, which damages them. Not all systems are equally or permanently affected, but we are talking about a massive assault to solid-state relays in electric substations, computer controls in power generation facilities, substations, and control centers, to power system communications, and to distribution class insulators. This would be followed by complete voltage collapse of power grids nationwide due to transformer saturation and damage to high voltage transformers from internal heating.

"But we're talking about more than just damage to the power grids. The problem is this." The captain placed an innocent-looking metal box on the podium. A couple of cables stuck out of it.

"This is a SCADA module. SCADA is an acronym for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and they are industrial computer systems that monitor and control processes, often over wide geographic areas. In the case of the transmission and distribution elements of power grids, SCADAs monitor substations, transformers and other electrical assets. They also monitor telecommunications systems, manufacturing systems, water, gas, and other pumping systems. Modern cars use SCADA systems to make engines hyper-efficient. All solid-state systems, from cell phones to computers, are vulnerable—but SCADA systems are the Achilles' Heel of our power, communications, and distribution infrastructures. Even temporary loss of SCADA control can permanently, catastrophically, damage dynamic systems."

Rook was quick. "So you're saying that we're getting more vulnerable to this kind of attack every year."

"Correct. The government is taking regulatory steps to guard against this eventuality, but for now we remain increasingly vulnerable to attack by any enemy capable of launching nuclear weapons."

I tried again, with less volume this time. "But, 150 million fatalities?"

"Yes, ma'am, that is the outside number. The truth is, computer modeling is inexact for problems with this many intractable variables; the true number could be as low as 50 million. What is certain is that in a worst-case EMP attack, it will take weeks to months to restore power to a significant area. With our transportation system compromised, our just-in-time food distribution system will break down immediately. Grocery stores will empty in days. Power loss means loss of refrigeration, spoiling a large percentage of the available food supply as well as many vital drugs. No power means no heating or hot water, in many places no water at all. Major cities will become completely uninhabitable as sanitation systems break down. Hunger will become starvation, infection and sickness will kill those weakened by malnutrition, and civil breakdown, widespread looting, fighting over vanishing food supplies, will kill many more."

"But the capes—"

"Ma'am, the lower number factors in the effective deployment of all superhuman assets, civilian and military. California's Big One was a good model of what to expect in this kind of situation; the difference is that the breakdown was localized and the rest of the country could pour in aid and resources as fast as we could get it there. In a successful central EMP attack, with the exception of Alaska, Hawaii, and parts of Texas and Florida outside the zone, we'll all be in the crapper together. Full and immediate international aid might save a few more million here and there, but that is all.

"Which brings us to the Gungnir Program. Everyone in this room has been approved for this program. In the case of all Crisis Aid and Intervention superheroes, approval includes executive approval by your state governors for full participation. If you'll all turn to page twenty-six in your binders, we'll review the installations..."

I turned the pages, and groaned. Spacesuit, armored harness and missile racks. Yippy. Marketing is going to make a new action-figure out of this the day it declassifies.

Not that I minded too much—it was just that bitching with my inside-voice over the military accessories helped me ignore my imagination's attempt to paint a picture of what might happen. I had a good imagination, but we were just talking about a precaution, right? Like a fire extinguisher in your kitchen or a gun in your nightstand you never use.

Right?

* * *

"You just went transonic!" Shelly called as the air went white around me, condensed water vapor marking the shockwave of broken air. I'd just broken my personal best speed, flying straight up in Watchman's wake. "Now leaving the troposphere!"

"What's the missile status?" I felt like I was going to pass out, but it was getting easier as the air thinned. Which was good—we were higher than jets flew and still had a long way to go.

"The launched missile is a Trident II; its unmodified top speed is 6,000 meters per second—13,000 miles an hour. But it's already into its third stage and will burn through it in less than a minute. After that it will be ballistic and slowing 'cause of Earth's gravity, but we'll be accelerating all the way."

"If I can keep this up," I gasped. "Will we get close enough for Gungnir?"

"Maybe. They're initiating Blackout Protocol, just in case."

Looking down, I could see Chicago's lights winking out in huge patches far below me as power grids shut down to protect their transformers from EMP insult. The Emergency Broadcast System would be sending the alert by radio, television stations, even phone texts: get off the road, get out of elevators, get down, get safe. All airplane takeoffs were being canceled, along with any landings that would take more than three minutes; any airplanes caught in the air would be turning away from urban areas. If the worst happened and they went down, they'd go down in open fields, killing no one but their passengers and crews.

It won't happen.

Our vapor halo thinned with the atmosphere as we passed through weather balloon territory and the horizon began to curve. Higher than I'd ever been.

"Watchman, Astra," Blackstone broke in. "We have just received word from 2nd Fleet. The missile capture and launch was made by The Overlord. A Navy superSEAL team located his current base on Culebra—part of the Puerto Rico island chain. They got him, but it looks like the robot module was part of his contingency plan."

"Got him?" Watchman asked.

"He's dead. The fight ended with a crater an hour ago."

Great. Scratch one Verne-type supervillain terrorist, but now he couldn't abort the detonation. At least now we knew what the Navy had been doing down there, like that helped. The knot in my gut, there since the second Rush put his hand on my shoulder, wound tighter. I'd only just turned nineteen—what was I doing in a race to save the world?

"Shelly?" I whispered, voice sounding unnatural in the close helmet.

"Yeah?"

"Mom and Dad?"

"Your Dad can take care of himself, but Rush promises to get them to the Dome if we don't make this. Do you want to talk to them?"

Yes. "No. They'll worry anyway, but if I call to tell them..."

"Yeah. This sucks."

"You'll take care of them? Everyone?"

"Pinky-swear. Acceleration good, Mesosphere coming up."

Nearly 100 miles up, it was getting easier. Lots easier. "Watchman?"

"Astra? What's your status?" He sounded like he was asking how an oh-so-routine exercise was going.

"I'm good and you don't need to break the air for me anymore." It was mostly true. "How much more speed have you got?"

"A bit. Okay, separating." I clenched my fists and braced as his feet drew away above me. Ten feet. Twenty. Thirty, and suddenly I was making my own bow wave in the thin air.

"Speed dropping," Shelly observed.

"I've got it." Things went fuzzy as I metaphorically leaned in and pushed.

"Speed steady. Climbing."

I focused on Watchman, willing his shrinking dot to stay in sight. "Time to target range?" I gasped.

"Two minutes to effective Gungnir range, three to optimal range. Remember that summer we— Crap on a cracker! The target has separated! The target has separated!"

The red triangle at the top of the cone split into five red pips, all flashing. Confusion filled the communications links before Shelly shut it all out.

"Multiple warheads? Why didn't anyone say?"

"It's not! The missile has a single, one megaton warhead. The robots have been changing it, but they couldn't have split the bomb!"

"Decoys?"

"Have to be," she agreed, a little calmer. "Five of us, five of them—it's adapting."

"Yippy. So now it's a shell game." This was not happening.

Blackstone entered the Dispatch link again. "Astra, Watchman, vector independently. The Navy is uploading new targeting solutions to your Gungnirs, we're putting two on each."

"Copy, independent vector," Watchman confirmed and I hastily echoed him. On my helmet screen one of the red pips flashed green and I turned to move it to the center of my cone. Below me the Earth was turning into a ball, lit along half its curve by distant sunset. All systems still green—good thing since we'd never actually space-tested them.

Okay. Two Gungnirs per "missile." We could still do this.

"Targeting range in thirty seconds," Blackstone reported. "Confirm lock and readiness." The designation Omega Four flashed on my helmet screen as we went down the roll.

"Omega One, Argonaut standing by."

"Omega Two, ArcLight standing by."

"Omega Three, Watchman standing by."

"Omega Four, Astra standing by." I fought and conquered the insane urge to add May the Force be with you.

"Omega Five, Rook standing by."

"Launch in ten, nine, eight, seven, six—hold launch! Target proliferation!" My heart dropped into my stomach as the flashing pip in my target-sights split again into five more. Which meant...

"Twenty-five confirmed targets, image and pattern analysis indeterminate," Shelly broke in, tearing into the new data like only she could. "Greater than 40% confidence is impossible to achieve."

* * *

Hurtling into space at hypersonic speeds is not the time or place to lose focus. I listened to the silence as Shelly, the super-intelligent quantum ghost of my BFF, Blackstone, our team leader and intelligence analyst, and what had to be dozens of military wonks on the other end of my radio link came up with nothing. Ten Gungnirs, twenty-five targets, at least 50 million lives riding on worse odds than a coin toss. We couldn't rely on luck—

Oh yes, we could. "Shelly, is Seven back in Dispatch?"

"Yeah. So?" She sounded distracted—probably taking over every CPU available to help her fight some kind of targeting solution out of the data.

"Tell him to look at the screen and pick a number!"

"Are you kidding? His luck only works when it affects him personally!"

"If he guesses wrong and we lose half the country he'll never forgive himself—how could it get more personal?"

Silence, then "He says twelve, but we're not linked into the Gungnir's targeting telemetry and the Navy's not going to hand it to us."

"Can you hack it?"

"Maybe, but Gungnirs are sub-kiloton nukes and once they're unlocked they're set to go off if tampering is detected. You're tough, but not that tough."

"How long till target reaches ideal EMP position?"

"Less than two minutes."

"Do they have any other ideas?" Please let somebody have an idea.

"Best-guess target selection from multiplication vectors."

So, no. "Do it." If she failed, I'd never have time to know.

"Hope..."

"Here we come to save the day, right?" That got a snicker; it had been our catchphrase back when we were playing Power Chick and Awesome Girl, before she'd died and I had my breakthrough. Before it had all gotten serious.

"Working on it—the Navy just lost its telemetry link. Sad malfunction..."

I turned into my new vector, lining up with the new green pip, and felt bad for all the guys on the ground watching what had looked like a straightforward cape-assisted intercept turn into to a complete FUBAR with nothing they could do about it. I was just an exhausted spectator too, pushing on and watching the Sun "rise" on my right as our height caught us up with the sunset. We were high into the thermosphere now, where the air was so thin I didn't feel the drag at all and refracted sunlight didn't wash out the stars anymore—much higher and they could wave at us from the Space Shuttle as we blew by faster than I'd ever flown.

Blackstone was back. "Stand by. Entering launch range in five, four, three, two, one—" Above me I saw the flares of Watchman's Gungnirs as their missile drives lit in the silence, burning away to close the distance on his two selected targets. The others were far enough away that even with my super-duper vision their burns looked like dim sparks against the fringe of blue horizon.

"Astra, Navy tracking shows your Gungnirs have failed to launch. Status?"

"I'm okay." So far. "Still closing with targets."

"Break away, Astra. Repeat, break away. You will be in the hot-zone."

"Understood." I shot past Watchman as he decelerated—breaking as hard as he could to put distance between himself and his missiles—and closed my helmet's blast shield to fly on instruments.

"Astra, you're not breaking."

"Sorry."

"Hope, break away now! Dear God—"

"Brace yourself," Shelly sang. I assumed the position. Arms straight ahead, fists together, back arched, head tucked, ready to dive into the cosmos. Watchman's Gungnirs fired.

Gungnir had been Odin's spear, a god's weapon that struck and killed whatever it was thrown at. The military was still at least a generation away from true nuclear bomb-pumped lasers, but one of their resident Verne-types had lovingly crafted the superscience modifications that made them real enough for us. The original sub-kiloton nuclear warheads were from Cold War infantry weapons—meant to be anti-infantry area weapons fired by tripod mounted recoilless rifles from a couple of kilometers distance (and how crazy was that?). They'd been remounted on missiles behind their "lens generators"—the Verne-tech gadgets that projected force field bottles that lensed and focused most of the bomb's energy into a death ray gamma laser with an effective kill range of forty kilometers. Interaction with the force field bottles turned the rest of the liberated energy into photons and kinetic energy.

Yup—a blast front in space. It was like punching through a wall.

When my link came back Shelly was babbling. "Hope! Hope! Are you there?"

"I'm here, Shelly. Still on target." Was I? Yes. "Suit ruptured but functional, helmet pressure steady." Our suits used mechanical pressure instead of air pressure to protect us from inflating in the near-vacuum and allow us to breathe (think body-wrapping heavy elastic bands), so I wasn't losing air. So long as my helmet stayed intact... "Did they get it?"

"No," she said disgustedly. "None of the Navy solutions targeted number twelve. It reaches optimal EMP range in forty-seven seconds."

"Have you finished retargeting?"

"Targeted and locked, but we'll be firing from spitting range! You can't—" I popped the covers on the manual triggers in my fists and punched them before I could think. The twin launches slammed me back and I turned the kick into a spin that put my boots ahead of my helmet, curled up and wrapped my arms around my head.

"Fire, Shell!"

This was going to hurt.

Would have been nice to finish my pizza.

But everyone will be okay.

Michael, defender of man, stand with us in the day of battle. St. Jude, giver of hope, be with us in our desperate hour. St. Christopher, bearer of burdens, lift us when we fall!

So much closer, this time the impossible blast front smacked into me like a windshield meeting a bug. The wave of energetic photons seared me, light like knives, and the kinetic blast-front flattened and spun me, a hit to every inch of my body. I heard things break, saw stars inside my helmet, and realized I was laughing.

"Here we come to save the daaaaay!"

"Astra." Blackstone's voice sounded thin, reedy. "Your helmet telemetry shows a leak; are you able to breathe?"

I nodded, still giggling at being alive. "Affirmative. Stand by."

Doing an airflow check, I found the leak in the pressure ring where my helmet met what was left of my suit. Foam and a patch sealed it and I raised the blast shield so I could see out again, still giddy with relief. I hurt in ways even my fight-training didn't manage, but nothing was broken (I knew what that felt like). Not bad considering I'd thought I might be explaining myself to Saint Peter now; The Rock might not have considered my setting off a superscience-warped nuclear bomb at close range any different than suicide.

Sixteen red pips remained on the screen with our five green triangles, so we'd got Seven's pick. Please, God... "How long—"

"The remaining targets are reaching optimal EMP range...now," Blackstone said.

Nothing. No flash. No storm of gamma rays plunging for the atmosphere to hit Earth's electromagnetic field and shower my home in a power-killing wave of free electrons.

"Yes!" Shelly shouted. She opened the link so I could hear the cheering of everyone up here and on the ground as the remaining decoys continued their flight into space.

"Blackstone..."

I could hear him smile. "The Navy does not have direct feed to our links, my dear. So far as they're concerned, officially you did a manual launch on your own cognizance and against my orders when remote targeting failed. We'll never know which target was the actual warhead."

I laughed before I could stop myself. Yeah, right. Seven got lucky again, and all was right with the world. I spotted Watchman far below me, a tiny black silhouette against the bowed rim of sunlit blue. Turning for home, I smiled as the lights below us began to come back on, patches springing up and multiplying as the undamaged power grids began to come online. World saved, for now.

Rush could get me back to the Pizza Cellar, and my slice would still be warm.

Back to Table of Contents

Zephyr: Phase Zero

Warren Hately

Warren Hately lives with his five children in Margaret River, Western Australia, where he works as a journalist, sub-editor and single dad. Previously, he has been a freelance travel writer, photographer and academic. He holds a doctorate in English and Comparative Literature for his dissertation The Discourse of Conflict, which reworked post-Foucauldian semiotics to examine the predominance of language-like models in the resolution of conflict (with the case study of the 1981 prison conflict in Northern Ireland). Warren also has an English with First Class Honors in post-structuralist theory and cultural studies specialising in the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Zephyr is an ongoing serial that has been favorably compared to Watchmen and similar classics. Like the comic books to which it owes a debt, Zephyr is episodic with an open narrative.

It's 2012 on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The place is Atlantic City: a sweeping longitudinal metropolis rebuilt following widespread devastation in 1984. Superhumans are not only real, they're human. All too human, as Nietzsche would say.

Zephyr is an alt.superhero adventure influenced by postliterary writing and Sturgeon's law. The style is cynical, cinematic and systematically against standard expectations of the genre. Imagine if Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho was about costumed vigilantes rather than stockbrokers and you have half the idea.

Zephyr tells the story of a major, if somewhat jaded superhero in an alternate universe where New York City has been abandoned and the Beatles were a superhero team. Zephyr is a regular guy, but with powers, and it's easy to wonder if his life might have been better without them as supervillains and other problems that only superhumans can deal with derail his efforts handling life.

Warren is on Twitter as @wereviking. Learn more on the Zephyr website.

* * *

RADIO CHATTER PUTS about six dozen police on the corner of Grand Central Avenue outside the Olympia Bank, but its the gunshots on my fly-by that get my attention. From this altitude, the weapons sound like a breakfast cereal preparing for gurgitation—and from what I can glean as I swoop down like a red-and-white falcon from high above, they're about as effective as throwing that breakfast against the bank walls.

I don't know what I'm doing up this early except to say I haven't slept yet, and the prospect of heading home to toddler ground zero doesn't really appeal, but I can't offer any excuse for the wannabe bank robbers. It's fucking early. The tired cliché of bank robbing itself notwithstanding, my mood is not leavened by the nascent sunrise embossing the twinkling lights of the myriad police and tactical armoured vehicles corralled outside the bulky, neo-Gothic monstrosity of the bank, itself like some vast stone cathedral to the gods of homo œconomicus, or perhaps more like a spaceship as envisaged by early medieval Christians preparing to wing all their earthly concerns into the heavenly vault above.

Even the cops look tired, many of them probably nearing the end of night shift and having more than just the danger to life and limb to hold against the ne'er-do-wells inside the Olympia. As I land, blood-red cape swirling around my left arm and making me flick it off with a flourish of minor irritation that's becoming increasingly common these days, I note the pock-marked walls of the bank and its shattered front turnstile, the rear end of a black four-wheel drive jutting out at such an angle it suggests the vehicle wasn't so much ram-raided into the lobby as thrown.

The closest cops lift their eyes from behind the vehicles they're using as a barricade, more than one or two lingering over my red-and-white bodysuit and domino mask, faces caught in rictuses somewhere between disdain, bemusement and tired relief. A senior cop I recognise from a bridge fire earlier in the year scurries down the side of his cruiser carrying a shotgun in the crook of his arm, motioning me down into cover with him despite my nonplussed expression, no immediate obvious signs of return fire from the bandits over yonder.

"What's going on?" I ask.

"Get down here before someone shoots you," Washington hisses.

"Let 'em try," I say with a shrug that probably only underscores my twenty-two years, irksome as that fact alone seems to be to most the cops, super powers just an added insult.

Before I can ask whether anyone is actually shooting back, the broken-ended four-wheel drive lurches backwards out of the gaping vagina dentata of the lobby and comes crashing madly into the street, cops behind the nearest cover abandoning their posts in record time as the cartwheeling vehicle clips the first cruiser and bounces off the roof of another with all the ensuing detonation of glass and crunching of metal you'd expect. Almost drowned out by this cacophony is a dire lowing from inside the bank, but I am distracted by the wind whipping up around us as I look up to see an FBI chopper descending for a spot a hundred yards further up the block.

"Who's in there?" I yell at Washington over the white noise.

"We don't know," the cop replies. "There's a bunch of 'em. Big guy, dirty hair, hammers for hands. Some other guys with spiffy tech."

"Did you just use them term 'spiffy'?"

"It's stuff we haven't seen before," the cop says. "Nothing you can get on the street."

I take this in, looking past him to where the first suits are disembarking from the FBI chopper, Parahuman Affairs crest like mechanical scabies on its black shell.

"OK, time to show these guys how it's done," I say and angle back on the bank.

"The Feebs are here," Washington says, and just looks at me, then slowly clues in to the echoes of what he's just said and shrugs as well.

"OK," he says. "Good luck."

* * *

I BUST A move sweeping low across the asphalt and in through the devastated lobby now open to the elements, unfazed by the dim lighting within.

I practically collide with the first of the bank robbers, a guy dressed in bright green mechanical armour with a helmet that is probably meant to suggest an insect carapace, ant-like antennae protruding from what I guess you'd call the forehead. Some kind of weapon's cradled in his arms, a shiny silver coil connecting it to a plug beneath one armpit. Unhindered by knowing any better, I grab the gun before the goon can react and wrench it from its socket, then club him with it across the exposed jaw.

"Ant-man's down," I snigger and rest my foot atop his unconscious shell as my eyes pretty much totally fail to acclimatise to the dark.

Some kind of energy weapon discharges close by and it's more by freakish luck than any fast reflexes that I drop back and let the particle stream whistle past me and out the door. The flash illuminates another one of these armoured guys, except his get-up is cornflower blue. I respond with a discharge of my own and I hope the guy's suit is insulated, because there's not much holding back when I've got the moral imperative on my side. The guy gives a shriek, feet rooted to the spot as I imagine his eyes rolling up inside his head under that awkward helm, just his jaw and mouth visible as he bites his tongue and drops to his knees and buckles sideways at about the same moment I dismiss him from my gaze and sweep deeper into the bank.

"OK, anyone else?" I call out. "Looking for a big guy. Hammers for hands? Shit for brains? Sound familiar?"

My words echo in the empty bank, fortunately not staffed at such an unfashionable hour. I track my way across the worn-thin carpet ensorcelled with corporate emblazons, eyes roaming left and right as I try to discern the next line of attack.

Nothing happens.

"You know, this is pretty pathetic, trying to rob a bank," I muse aloud to the room. "It's 2002, you know? You can do better than this. I'm embarrassed for you. Truly. Do you have any idea how many guys I've hauled into White Six 'cause they got some lame-ass idea about pulling gold bullion out of a bank and think just 'cos they've got super-strength that no one can stop 'em? Think again."

There's a clanging noise somewhere amidships and I am still standing there in the middle of the lobby with a cute smile on my mug when a hitherto unseen back door blows inwards and a huge guy in a grey body stocking storms through, bad 80s wrestler hair-do atop a seven-foot frame with the bulk of about six silverback gorillas taped together. Lank hair frames a domino mask not unlike mine, but his sneer is nowhere near as telegenic. His right hand is shaped into a huge hammer of the gods the colour of gone-off tapioca pudding, which is a pretty good match for his suit and indeed his eyes.

"OK," I say. "Did you hear all that or do I have to start again?"

"You're a smart-ass, Zephyr," the big guy says.

"I see my reputation's proceeded me. I don't think I've had the pleasure."

"I'm Hammersmith," he spits.

"I meant the pleasure of kicking your ass," I finish gleefully.

As if for added punctuation, I unveil my left hand and pour a few hundred thousand amps into the villain's chest. I barely notice as two more ant-men charge into the room from behind him (one red, the other a sickly yellow), and as Hammersmith staggers off from my attack with steam curling off him, I spend the next couple of seconds avoiding the armoured dudes' weapons' fire, speeding around the room and running up one wall before flipping off in a pretty-awesome-if-I-don't-say-so-myself spectacular of capoeira-like prowess, hook-kicking the yellow one in the side of the head before wresting the gun from the red one's hands and turning it on him.

The red suit collapses in a clanking heap as a surly-looking Hammersmith gets himself together to angle back at me, that big meaty right of his sweeping away a faux antique-looking desk-counter-type thing as flimsy as a kid's science project.

"You don't do that to me," the bruiser says as if just saying it makes it a thing, which, you know, it totally doesn't.

"Looks like I just did," I tell him and shrug.

He lumbers at me, left fist transforming into a spiked maul, but he's swimming in treacle compared to me. I layer a patina of punches up the side and back he exposes, then when he swivels around, I am all over him like a rash, fists not much more than ant bites themselves it seems as I pound up along his other side just like Tony Danza duking it out in the meatworks in Rocky.

"Give it up, Hammer-boy," I say as I back off breathing heavier than he appears to be from my assault.

"Fuck you."

"What were you thinking? Nab a sack of gold bars or empty out the safe deposit boxes or just haul ass with a fresh cash delivery? You know it doesn't work like that."

Hammersmith just looks at me all sullen and shit, lank greasy black hair over the eyes he blows aside more like a fashion model than some gargantuan future supermax prison inmate. And in that look there's a brief grunt of acknowledgement.

"You blew it, huh?" I say to him. "What was it? Die-packs? Those things explode, you know, mark all the cash. They've got DNA-scanning tech in half these places now. I mean, I know you could just pull off the bank manager's arm or something and get what you want, but they double-proof and triple safe these things."

"Sounds like you've done some thinkin' about it," the villain says.

"Well shit, I'm working for nothing over here," I say with a hurt shrug. "Yeah, I've thought about it. Who hasn't?"

Before Hammersmith can say we should team up and split the difference, I throw both palms open and empty everything I've got into him.

His eyes roll up in his head and he crashes to his knees with enough force I swear the fucking floor shudders, and then he's over on his face and the Feebs' tactical units come streaming in and everyone's shouting at me to put my hands up and I am just laughing at these dimwits, hands on my narrow hips as I angle around the room with my best cheesy grin anticipating the photographs, eyes scanning over the ballistic armour-clad figures that pass around me like water in a stream and wonder whether something more durable might be better for my costume than my peacock's spandex which now sports a great big tear under my right armpit.

* * *

THE NEWS REPORTER slips me her card with a meaningful wink as her crew pack away their gear, but just as I tuck it into my belt and contemplate doing the crouch thing and getting the hell out of here, a female voice calls my name with that ineluctable mix of desperation and frustration I find so appealing.

The agent's name is Siren, or so I think. Unlike the plebians in their off-the-rack suits, she wears a white business suit with a crème calfskin vest by Vivica Allen and high-heeled, cherry red Christian Louboutin boots under her slacks. Her short, crisply dyed black hair is long at the fringe like she's the last hold-out for some fashion trend from some far-flung parallel dimension, the contrast distinctive and memorable on her pale face. While not beautiful by any means, she is memorable, and her expression shows she means business as she strides up to me with a pugnacious leer itself worth the price of admission.

"I need to speak to you," she says.

"Siren, right?"

She tilts her head at me in surprise. "Yes?"

"Um, sorry," I say and try and remember where we met exactly. "What were you, um, after?"

"Nothing to do with this. You can stand easy. The anxiety's radiating off you like stink lines on a cartoon. Chill."

"If you're a telepath you can tell then I'm not anxious about anything," I say with a bit of starch in my voice. "I'm just wondering what shit you FBI queers are going to drop on me this time."

"Queers, are we? How nice of you to be so sensitive with your terminology."

"Oh, sorry. Are you a dyke?"

She just looks back irascibly.

"That's good actually. I thought maybe we . . . we boned or . . . something."

"You'd remember me if I fucked you," she says, then adds, "And I'd never forgive myself. Come on. Let's go somewhere we can talk. I need your help."

This is about the best offer I've had all morning and it's not quite 8am yet. Dutifully chastened, I follow her to the chopper trying to look as unobtrusive as a six-foot man dressed head-to-toe in red-and-white lycra can manage.

* * *

ARRAIGNED TO FBI Headquarters, I cool my heels for half an hour while bureaucrats and anonymous agents hurry hither and thither. Siren digs up some coffee for me and I move where I'm sitting three times before the handsome agent returns with a chagrined look.

"Sorry to screw you around so long," she says. "We're just scrambling to get everything in order. Will you come this way?"

"Lady, I don't get paid for this gig, but time's still money, you dig?" I say to her, grimacing at my accidental poetry even as I stand with a great show of reluctance. "How about just telling me what I'm doing here?"

"The short version is our hands are tied and we need your help with a case," Siren replies.

"Why do you need me?"

"You're a free agent," she says. "We're waiting on the chain of evidence and the chain of command, and when you cross two chains, you get a—"

"Clusterfuck," I say. "Yeah, I've heard that one before."

"Come with me," she says. "It'll be easier if you can see."

So I follow her down the corridor and a few right turns before we enter a partitioned interview room. Beyond the soundproofed one-way glass sits a pretty, delicate-looking woman in designer clothes, a handbag worth more than whatever's probably in it on the scuffed formica table, arms folded across her narrow chest as she makes like she doesn't know she's being watched as she waits for someone to show her the courtesy of actually entering the room. Her haircut looks like it'd cost a week's wages, but beneath the angled, blonded fringe I see blue eyes that water with pain and evoke in me the sympathy any red-blooded man would feel for a beautiful woman in such obvious misery.

"What's the story?" I ask in a hushed voice.

"That's Tiffany Le Garnier," Siren says. "She's the latest victim in a spree of sexual assaults that are continuing at an alarming rate."

Siren directs my gaze to a non-descript dude sitting at the table this side of the one-way mirror, but as the agent opens a manila folder and starts spreading women's mugshots on the table, I look back into the interview room and study the finely-etched profile of the despondent woman waiting for whoever is meant to see her.

"It's very sad, but I don't know what this has to do with me," I say.

Siren points at the photos and I acknowledge the spread that—apart from the running mascara and clear emotional devastation—could be headshots from a casting agency, given the women's obvious beauty.

"It's a parahuman behind these assaults," Siren says.

"A . . . super-rapist?"

"Yep," she says. "I don't know why we don't see more of these, to be honest. Or maybe your garden variety parahuman doesn't go for the top shelf like this one. Each of these victims is a model or a society woman or a high profile and obviously very attractive target. He's using some sort of mind control powers and we believe he's not operating alone."

"So there's a . . . gang?"

"Not a gang. Miss Le Garnier can give you a better description of the accomplice. She's waiting in there."

"For me?" I blink at Siren and the sheer unorthodoxy of this situation. Normally I am trying to ditch on the FBI and now they're courting me like I'm the Last Star-fighter or something.

"Does she even know I'm here?"

"I told her someone would be coming to see her who can help where our hands are presently tied," Siren says. "Is that you, Zephyr? Can you help?"

"I don't understand why your hands are tied."

"We're waiting on physical evidence to be expedited, and then we need to work up a prosecution brief—and we have no idea of the perpetrator's identity."

"So you're hoping I'm going to go all Rambo on this one for you?" I ask.

"I loved Richard Gere in that film," Siren says. "But you are no Richard Gere, Zephyr. It's just you and me here—"

I pause her with a look at the geek in the suit, but Siren just shrugs as if to say "ignore him".

"This is just you and me, Zephyr," she says again. "I'm offering you a direct line on a bad guy hurting innocent women and giving you the chance to do something about it."

"You're giving me a chance, or is it because she's one of the Le Garniers?"

Siren blinks as if scolded—and clearly surprised a dumbass like me can connect the woman in the room next door to hundred billion-dollar pharmaceutical company.

"Just talk to the woman," she says coldly. "Hell, you can shake her down for a reward when it's all finished, OK?"

* * *

MAYBE I'M A soft touch, but I find myself in the interview room moments later as if by osmosis alone, entering with the poise of a man afraid he might wake the baby, despite being dressed for Hallowe'en. The socialite looks up at me and double-takes and I am not entirely displeased to see the fraught look on her face lighten as she recognises me, then quickly tries to restore her aura of cool by standing and offering me her tiny business-like hand.

"You're Zephyr? Tiffany Le Garnier. They told me someone would come. I wasn't expecting you. Are you . . . FBI now?"

"Hardly," I say and slip into a chair and have to make an effort not to adopt my usual laconic grin that might weasel my way into this woman's designer pants if we were at the Flyaway or Crayons or the Silver Tower or sneaking in the back at Aubergine. However beautiful she might be, the pain is fresh and remains once her smile gives out under the weight of the moment.

"I guess they told you what happened to me," Tiffany says.

"In general terms," I say. "Obviously I'm . . . very sorry. And shocked. A super-human—"

"I'm surprised there isn't more of it, to be frank," she says, chastened.

"Hrm, Siren said the same thing."

"Well, if you asked most teenage boys what they might do with super powers, using them for such . . . personal gain . . . would seem more obvious than some of the . . . hare-brained schemes you people cook up."

"My . . . people?"

"Oh, I'm sorry Zephyr," she says quickly. Her hand darts across the table to check mine, which at first—coupled with her upper crust accent and sensibilities—I think is adorable, until I note the hint of panic in her face, her hand on mine as if to quell incipient violence even though none is coming.

"Siren said you had information that might help me find the person who did this," I say.

Tiffany nods.

"There were two of them," she says. "Not, you know, two of them, but there was someone—some thing—with him. The man who attacked me. The Storyteller."

"Storyteller?"

"That's what he called himself."

"I ain't heard of him," I say and wince at my own grammar.

"He can . . . he can twist you up in knots. He talks . . . and it's hard to explain. The police, the FBI, they said he must be a mind-controller to get me to do what I did."

"He commanded you?"

"Not exactly," Tiffany says. "He just explained things in such a way. . . ."

Her eyes drift to the corner of the room as she focuses on nothing.

"He just spoke in such a way that everything made sense, everything I did, every step of the way, I did willingly, until later, and the . . . words wore off."

I drink this in a moment and nod, play-acting the detective.

"Tell me about the other one, the thing."

"He had a head like a hyena," she says.

And Bingo was his name-o.

* * *

I LEAVE THE tête-à-tête with Miss Le Garnier, conflicted between my desire to help a vulnerable woman, and unease that mysterious forces way above my pay grade might have intervened to expedite the so-called justice she and others seek. It irks me to think wealthy elites might get retribution not afforded to people who can barely afford the price of admission to this game we call life. And yet, like the weaponised civilian I am, I can barely refuse the opportunity to right a very definite wrong if afforded the chance to do so. It's why I get up in the morning, after all. And she is beautiful. And what was done to her—scant on the detail that I am, other than to understand somehow she was coerced as a willing participant thanks to this Storyteller's mind-bending powers—was very much abhorrent.

And I also have a solid lead, thanks to her eyewitness account.

For weeks I've been hearing whispers about some clown with an animal head acting as muscle for an unknown mastermind getting into dust-ups with minor criminal gangs up the northern corridor. Now I have more than an inkling we're talking about the same person, which narrows down my next port of call considerably.

The Lyceum is equal parts strip shop, strip club and paramilitary academy. The clandestine nature of the thing and the fact guys like I have busted it too many times to keep count means it keeps on the move like a high class hooker with two pimps. But when your ear's still connected to the city, there are ways to find a gatekeeper, and on this particular day and occasion that is outside the Pool Room pizzeria in destitute Washington (the suburb, not the city, despite Atlantic City incorporating our capitol in its outer fringes). Izzy sees me coming while he's on the sidewalk smoking an old stoogie while the pizza crust burns. He takes off like the varmint he's always been, but up against the guy with the power of a hundred million light bulbs or whatever it is, his behaviour is still as predictable as it is irritating. I know it's broad daylight and not preferred visiting hours for the bulk of the city's lowlifes—among whom I can sometimes pass myself off as one despite the gaudy costume—but I'm still catching Izzy with the proverbial pants around ankles. I land the bottom of a fist like a sledgehammer between his skinny shoulders and he goes skidding along the sidewalk and into a fire hydrant. The oddly affectatious spectacles fall from his equally skinny and equally aging skull, the skin over his face like parchment, rendered chimpanzee-like by old age. And despite the inclement weather, the long-time rabblerouser sports his bare, tattoo-riddled arms, hands now shaking as he picks himself up, mouth agape, disbelieving that life's taken such a terrible turn in the here and now, let alone any other cosmic consequences.

"'the fuck you want?" he stammers with falsetto bravado.

I laugh baldly and grab him by the Motorhead-emblazed vest, helping him upright as much as reminding him of my capable force.

"The Lyceum," I tell him. "Where is it?"

"Gimme a break, Zephyr," Izzy replies. "You know they'll do something horrible to me—"

"What?" I interrupt him. "And I won't?"

Izzy snaps his aged jaw shut with an audible clack. Desultory traffic passes by on the blacktop and slowly the old man's hair-feathered head bows and he nods, more reminiscent of a senile uncle than a one-time mid-level enforcer. They don't get to go out to pasture up this way. They finish their days in the yard with all the pretenders nipping at their heels.

"You want a gate?" he asks.

"Maybe. I'm looking for the Hyena. Is that his actual handle?"

"Yeah."

"Kinda stupid."

"Why?"

"It's the sort of name someone else gives you and you don't fucking like," I snap back. "I thought that'd be obvious."

Izzy trembles, then sniffles to make himself brave.

"If you want the Hyena, you can leave the Lyceum out of it," the old man says. "The . . . academy has a new Regent. And a new base. They're laying low and want to stay that while a while longer yet. You let 'em?"

I eyeball the wily old bastard and sniff my consent for him to explain.

He can set me up with a meeting, so long as I provide the ambush.

Except like everything in my life, it's never as simple as all that.

* * *

IZZY DIRECTS ME to an abandoned soap factory on the outskirts of Atlantic City's rust belt, in what used to be the Hudson's upper waterfront before 1984 and the botched "colours out of space" Kirlian Invasion. I don't have any nifty super senses beyond the barometric intuition linked to my powers, and it's not enough to warn me if I am walking into a trap—or should I say flying into a trap, as I appear out of the mysteriously piss-coloured, pollution-heavy cloudbanks roiling over old Connecticut as I zero in on the erstwhile hideout.

I know enough to know the soap factory is rigged with hidden surveillance. This is a villain's lair after all, one way or the other, or so Izzy sold it to me in his devil's bargain to keep the Lyceum out of my latest rampage. If this Hyena crank is hired muscle with a permanent deformity—though Izzy assured me the guy was no mutant, so I don't know how that works—then he needs places like this to hole up away from the prying eyes of the ordinary world.

With my usual subtlety, I come down feet first into the main warehouse roof, smashing down and through to land in a cinematic rain shower of dust and debris, a good portion of which is century-old pigeon guano, judging by the smell.

For all my grand entrance, the dying light exposes nothing but a big empty abandoned factory complex, ancient scaffolding and conveyer belts caked in spider-webs, old oil and crap, upper windows roseate with the sunset filtered through layer upon layer of built-up grime.

The last few bits of the roof clatter down, and as their echoes die away I start to move through the complex, trying to do what I do in lieu of the Zen calm that has escaped me my entire life, trying to send out gentle electro-magnetic feelers so I can detect any advanced tech hiding within. The electrical sense is a very flaky extension of my abilities and I am about as subtle with it as a kid trying to eat Chinese with a spoon, so it is no surprise that I'm almost on top of the motion detectors before feeling the tiny pinprick tingle of their charge ahead of me in the support beams of the middle of the warehouse.

And with a subtle grin, I deliberately trigger them and wait.

* * *

HYENA COMES OUT for a sniff in the same way a starving man attacks bacon. All I get is a blur, a slight whiff of wet dog, and then the snarling, clawing chaos is on me.

I'm prepared for the attack and when he gets a paw on me, he connects instead with my electrical field, sending Hyena into an interpretive dance routine that drama teachers the world over would recognise as the "bacon in the pan" exercise. There's an unpleasant smell I guess is inevitable in frying a dude covered in hair, but to Hyena's credit, he throws off the effects of the Taser field and leaps up, wide eyes ablaze and claws extended as he seeks to resume his rampage.

He's got a couple of inches on me and plenty of bulk. I put my boot into his solar plexus, but he blocks with a hairy forearm and swings a bedevilled haymaker that I barely escape.

"What are you doing here?" he roars. "What do you want with the Hyena?"

"All these questions," I say right back as I tap aside another fist and counter with a lightning jab.

Hyena snarls and goes at me two-handed, but again I am good for the deflect, elbowing him upside the skull and planting a knee into his bread basket. Unseen, one of those loopy long arms of his grabs me around the back of the neck and he tosses me judo-style into a few dusty old metal carts which I kick away in disgust as I free myself from their entanglement, turning to unleash hell on him with my electrical attack only to see a pair of hairy clawed feet launching straight at me.

He kicks me back and through the next conveyer belt array, machinery crunching as I trip back trying to retain my balance and basically failing as I flail and the bastard runs after me, leaping and kicking again, only this time I divert him with a jiu-jitsu defence, throwing on a burst of speed to lance a dozen punches up his torso and then finishing with a delicious left cross.

Hyena crashes to the ground under the baleful light of a row of disused factory windows, a storm building outside nothing to do with my hard-breathing glower. I pull off my cloak in frustration and cast it aside as I take a few moments in relief at having defeated my target, already clicking through how I am going to extract the information I want from this creep to find the real pervert at the end of this tunnel. "Zephyr?"

There's a slight movement behind me and I turn at the voice on my guard.

"Yes," I stupidly reply.

The man standing there is about fifty. The word "wizened" was invented possibly just for him. He wears a brown magician's cloak and weird, cylindrical head gear patterned with the same concentric mustard yellow lines that make it look like Venn diagrams have been having babies all over his costume.

The Storyteller slowly lifts a conversational hand and gestures before I really parse the movement as he speaks again.

"Have you ever thought about how strange it is, what you do?"

* * *

I AM BASICALLY fucked.

There's a deep, sonorous quality to the older man's voice that roots my feet firmly to the spot as I drink in every possible connotation and denotation of what he's saying, turning it over in my ape's mind like tiny universes of thought cartwheeling between birth and extinction within my cerebral cortex, a weird timelessness to my contemplation as the Storyteller advances in the least threatening old man shuffle any villain has ever adopted.

"Think about it," he says almost kindly, advancing further, every cell in my body screaming for me to lightning blast the old fucker even as those cries are suffocated beneath a wave of endorphins linked directly to hanging on every word of the old man's speech.

"Think about it," he says again. "And think—consider carefully—whether you really believe it."

"Wh-a-a-at?" I reply, an expression of punch drunk surprise bestilling my natural inclination to layer any response with heavy doses of sarcasm.

"I think that if you think about it like I have, Zephyr, you will find the facts of your existence rather . . . far-fetched," he says.

"I don't get it."

"I'm sure you don't," he says in that fucked up kindly perverse uncle way of his, moving closer to me without, you know, actually getting too close to me.

"You are designed like any other fiction not to question the essence of your own creation—the very conditions of your existence that make you what you are."

"And what's that?"

"I don't want to upset you, Zephyr," the Storyteller says calmly. "You know, I respect you . . . No, I admire you enormously, however much we find ourselves on opposite sides and opposite fences."

"You're the one who—"

"Listen," he says, and like a pussy-whipped halfwit, I do.

"I want you to really drill down on the facts as you know them so that you can understand—and so you can be free," he says.

"Free?"

"Knowledge is the ultimate act of liberation, isn't it?"

"I don't know," I say, floundering around, bewitched by whatever ability of his compels me to remain in the discussion instead of starting with the Biff! Crack! Ka-pow! already. And yet whatever ability I have to reason back at him is likely undercut by his talent.

After gaping for a moment, the best I can manage is, "Knowledge can be a kind of trap, can't it?"

"A trap for the ignorant only, my dear Zephyr," he says. "Do as I do and question everything about our world and you will reach the same conclusion—or I believe you have that power within you—and then you can join me in being free of these . . . conventions."

"Conventions?" I gasp back. "What, like . . . respecting women's rights not to be abused by—"

"You mount a spirited defence," the Storyteller says with a touch of snark, brown eyes beneath that weird helm glinting as if with enjoyment of the joust. "See how strongly you stick to your script?"

"Script?"

"Yes Zephyr. Look around you."

"What?"

And the Storyteller only laughs as he turns his back to me, completely defenceless as he motions—the gesture taking in not just the room, but I understand at once he means the very world in which we live.

"None of this is real."

* * *

I PAUSE DESPITE my inner shrieking monologue braying for blood. I find myself not so much intrigued as captivated, in the most literal sense of the word, and in that pause that follows, I do nothing more than take several laboured breaths waiting for the Storyteller to expound upon his thesis.

"You must have had an inkling of it before, Zephyr," he says and slowly turns back, including me in with that fraternising grin. "You are a clever man. Or clever enough. Super powers? Lightning bolts? Flying? Men and women dressing up in these ridiculous outfits and doing what? Fighting crime? Preposterous."

"What are you talking about, you—?"

"Don't see how ridiculous this proposition is?" Again he motions. "This world and everything in it, it is a fiction. We are not real. None of it is. We are some child's imaginings. Some fairy tale of the latter age. We are a glimmer in the eye of some mad child-god who imagines such things. Your life, Zephyr. Mine. It is just a comic book, don't you see?"

I stammer my spirited defence so hard I think I might puke up my teeth.

"Th-they say the universe has different levels of reality and they are plastic—"

"Oh really, Zephyr. Don't you tire of maintaining the illogic?"

I stare at him and he stares at me, a kindly benefactor wondering how much is that doggie in the window. I hang my head as I can palpably feel my universe crashing down around me.

"What are you saying?" I say as much to grab a life raft as to actually make sense of anything—because I have already glimpsed the awful truth he wishes on me.

"You are a fiction, Zephyr. You are not real. No more than am I. We are merely characters. Poorly-scripted ones at that. Frivolous. B-grade. Nonsensical. The product of some immature mind. We are a momentary distraction outside of a greater truth—and one we can never aspire to for ourselves, for it exists outside of us. Beyond us."

I believe everything he says, and it seems not because he wields some kind of dominating psionic power over me, but because somewhere in the intersection between the utter conviction with which he utters the lines and the inescapable, irrefutable logic of what he's mapped out, there is not a snowball's chance in Hell that his argument is flawed, that there is some logic he's overlooked, or that a sceptic might thwart his vision in the same way an atheist might triumph over God.

He is right and, in that instant, sweeps away everything that gives my life meaning—as well as the platform on which that meaning takes place.

"Th-then, what you . . . what are you saying . . . are you . . . you're saying. . . ?"

Storyteller gently laughs. Now I am cozened, he moves into whispering distance, every line of his sinewy body poised with anticipation.

"Do you know what you should do?" he asks.

The proposal blossoms in my mind's eye like a cosmological sculpture of suicide hewn out of the bleak fabric of the universe as great crashing black waves of futility smash against me.

I am so consumed with my own mourning for myself and my ridiculous life that I very nearly don't hear the gunshot.

At the second and third shots, my head whips up as I take in the sight of Tiffany Le Garnier marching forward, dressed to the nines wielding a chrome 9mm and flanked by two brooding hulks in Armani overcoats.

* * *

STORYTELLER DIES AND takes his vicious fantasy with him, slumping in shocked surprise to his knees as Miss Le Garnier continues forward, eyes brimming with hate as she empties the rest of the seven-shot automatic into the villain's increasingly frail body.

Despite her aura of tragic fragility, the young woman hands the gun to the goon on her left, and he calmly reloads the weapon and steps right over the Storyteller and snuffs out the candle with a further two gunshots point blank to the old guy's head.

"You . . . you killed him," I manage to say after the shots have finally stopped ringing in my ears.

"He would've killed you," Tiffany says. "You walked right into his spider's web—just like I did."

"But you killed him."

"No, Ralph killed him. Right Ralph?"

The goon holding the gun doesn't look capable of speech. He gives a hooded nod.

"But it was you," I say, admittedly nonsensically. "You killed him."

"That's what justice looks like, Zephyr."

"Not in my world."

"Your world very nearly became whatever he told you it was," she says. "That's what he does. He would've convinced you to kill yourself or do something else perhaps even more vile in his name."

I nod, unable to dodge the bullet on that one—not unlike the Storyteller, though with less spectacularly fatal results.

"What about you?" I ask her.

"What about me?"

"You just killed someone," I say.

"No, my bodyguard did it."

"Is that fair to him?"

The young woman shrugs and looks at the behemoth that is Ralph, who gives me a dry-eyed look and mimics his employer's indifference.

"If Ralph serves more than ten years he gets a bonus on top of the million dollars that I've put in an account that will be accruing interest between now and the day he walks free," she says. "That's a better salary then I bet you make, fighting crime out here."

"I'm not sure you can draw a comparison," I say.

"Look at you," she scoffs. "Two minutes ago you were struggling to explain you're not a cartoon character. Now you're going to debate justice?"

"It's not justice if only the rich can afford it."

The barb cuts her and the quick glint in Miss Le Garnier's eyes show it—and I wonder if this is the first time she has used money and influence to grease the pan of her life experience.

Her heavily lacquered lashes flick over me one more time, any eroticism turned to disdain for my thwarting her by daring to have a will of my own. I think for a moment about shitting in her nicely made little garden by reminding her I'm an eyewitness to her high society execution, but the truth is the perverted old bastard deserved what he got and the spoilt little rich girl probably saved my life.

Ralph walks over to the unconscious Hyena and executes him with the same measured indifference he shows to everything, including his own fate, then looks back at me with a challenging shrug.

"I'll leave you to the glory, then," I say as I retrieve my cloak and muscle past the other goon who towers over me.

Halfway across the warehouse I stop and look back. Tiffany swivels at her designer waist and lifts the brow of the expensive hat she wears.

"What is it?"

"Next time you're in the mood for justice, leave me out of it, OK?"

She doesn't nod or say anything, but the slight relaxation of her gaze conveys consent and I give her a wink I don't feel and move outside and do the crouch thing and vanish into the approaching storm.

Back to Table of Contents

Out of Mind

Drew Hayes

Drew Hayes is the author of the long-running web-serial Super Powereds, as well as its spin-off, Corpies. He has also written several standalone novels including Pears and Perils, NPCs, and the upcoming Unadventurous and Uninteresting Tale of Fred, The Vampire Accountant.

Drew graduated from Texas Tech with a B.A. in English, because evidently he's not familiar with what the term "employable" means. You can read more of his growing work at his website, DrewHayesNovels.com, send him mail and movie offers at Novelistdrew@gmail.com, or just follow his twitter: DrewHayesNovels. Drew has been called one of the most profound, prolific, and talented authors of his generation, but a table full of drunks will say almost anything when offered a round of free shots. Drew feels kind of like a D-bag writing about himself in the third person like this. He does appreciate that you're still reading, though.

Drew would like to sit down and have a beer with you. Or a cocktail. He's not here to judge your preferences. Drew is terrible at being serious, and has no real idea what a snippet biography is meant to convey anyway. Drew thinks you are awesome just the way you are. That part, he meant. Drew is off to go high-five random people, because who doesn't love a good high-five? No one, that's who.

* * *

"I'll have the usual." The man at Karen's booth hadn't bothered to pick up a menu. He sat there staring up at her, narrow frame and curiously wide shoulders, dressed in an uninteresting outfit of dark slacks, a grey shirt, and a black tie. Ordinarily, she'd have assumed she waited on him recently and simply forgot; neither his face nor his style were the sort of thing to leave an impression. The exception to all this mediocrity was his eyes: the irises were pale lavender, not the sort of thing that was likely to slip her memory.

"I'm sorry, the usual?" Her auburn hair fell to the side as she tilted her head in confusion.

The man sat silently for a moment, staring at her intently, then let out a small sigh. "Two eggs over easy, a side of bacon, and a cup of coffee."

"Right away." Karen jotted down the order and headed off, perhaps a bit more quickly than she needed to. There was something off-putting about that man, more than just his strange colored eyes. Lots of people wore wigs or contacts to try and look like Supers, people who got irregularly-colored features naturally (along with abilities no normal human could dream of). But still, he seemed different. Maybe . . . maybe his eyes were the genuine article.

Karen's white non-slip loafers squished as she crossed the diner's checkered tile floor. She tore the paper with the purple-eyed man's order from her notepad and slid it across the metal counter at the window to the kitchen. A cheerful young man in a hairnet snatched it from her immediately. Julian ran the line while the rest of the cooks handled the bulk of the food.

"Table eleven?" Julian asked as he placed the paper with the line of tickets waiting to be filled.

"Yup," Karen replied. She could see another of her orders being prepped, so she decided to wait for it to come up rather than to let it sit and get cold.

"Someone always orders this on table eleven, almost every day." Julian grabbed a pair of eggs and cracked them into a pan, a searing sound filling the air.

"Doesn't ring a bell," she replied, watching a plate of pancakes make its way toward the window. "I guess all the orders run together after a while."

"Uh-huh." Julian cast a curious glance at her, but the food required more attention than his coworker's odd lapse in memory. By the time he looked back at the window, Karen had gotten her food and was gone. He meant to ask her about it again when she came back, but it slipped his mind.

This was still better than Karen, who'd completely forgotten the odd man with the pale lavender eyes within ten minutes of him leaving the diner.

* * *

Establishing Link . . .  
Link Established  
Start Conversation

Msg – 0734 – DV: Local gang is planning to try and rob the bank on 43rd and Bishop this afternoon. Five known members, at least three are Supers. One has enhanced strength, one has telekinesis, third ability unconfirmed. Pictures for identification are attached.

Msg – 0735 – Dispatch: Notice put out. Will have three Heroes in area at time of robbery. Can you identify which people in the pictures are Supers?

Msg – 0737 – DV: The bald one is the strongman, the one in the green bandana is the telekinetic, and the one with red boots is unidentified.

Msg – 0737 – Dispatch: There are two men with green bandanas.

Msg – 0738 – DV: The one holding his leg in picture number four.

Msg – 0739 – Dispatch: Confirmed. Do I want to know why he appears to be screaming in pain?

Msg – 0741 – DV: I decided it was time to leave. Telekinetics can be a handful, so I gave him something to focus on besides me.

End Conversation  
Link Terminated

* * *

The unassuming man with the pale lavender eyes put away his phone. He'd been busy with that gang for nearly three days now; it was time to move on to something new. This target would be a little more interesting than just a few Supers who thought they'd reached the level of strength where rules no longer applied to them. The man shook his head; it had been over twenty years that he'd been on this job, twenty years since he graduated from the Hero Certification Program, and in all that time people hadn't gotten any smarter.

It wasn't like the concept should be that difficult to grasp: Supers with the most talent and power got to enroll in the HCP and try to become registered Heroes, the only people legally allowed to fight Supers committing crimes. Of the countless who applied, only ten from each school graduated with certifications. These were people who had brains, brawn, or raw power enough to be considered on par with unstoppable forces of nature. Yet almost every day some upstart with a decent ability thought they would be the one to buck the system. It wasn't just that the HCP got the best Supers, which they did: it was that the HCP took those top-tier candidates and trained them to be worlds better. It should all be so simple, yet some people kept right on trying to use the gifts they'd been given to overpower regular humans who they saw as weaker.

That was where the Heroes came in, giving such criminals a whole new outlook on the concept of "weakness."

Well, most Heroes did that. Those who graduated with a focus on the Subtlety discipline walked a somewhat different path. They worked behind the scenes, gathering information on all manner of topics to help the combat-oriented members of their community. After all, even the strongest, most powerful gang leader had to sleep sometime. It was the job of Subtlety Heroes to find out where and when.

The man with the pale lavender eyes walked along in the early morning sunlight, enjoying the relatively moderate temperatures that would give way to oppressive heat when the sun rose in full. He stopped in front of a brick building's glass doorway, reading the frosted letters denoting the address and occupant, then stepped into the marble foyer. At a circular desk sat a middle-aged man wearing a navy uniform and a laminated badge. His eyes watched the door without wavering, tracking this new person's entrance.

"Can I help you?" His tone was restrained and polite, but the distrust in his eyes betrayed the intent behind his question.

"I hope so; I've got a meeting with Alderman Douglas. My name is DV; I should be his nine o'clock."

The guard, for that is what he was, nodded and pulled up a calendar file on the silver laptop that rested in front of him. As he did, the man with odd-colored eyes released something from his hand. It was out of sight when the guard looked back up.

"Just DV?"

"It's what everyone calls me, though I've got a new secretary and she still messes things up on occasion. May also be under David Valance."

A few keystrokes brought up the alderman's full day, and nowhere on it was a DV or a David Valance. The guard kept his expression neutral, but his suspicion was raised. "You sure it was today?"

Those curiously-colored eyes flicked away from the guard, just for an instant, glancing at what should have been an empty wall behind the circular desk. "If it's not, I'm going to fire that damn secretary as soon as I get back. Just to be sure, it may be under the company name: Marbonics Industries."

Relief washed over the guard as he spotted the name on the schedule. He loathed having to turn away people that were supposed to be there; it always resulted in him being chewed out, even though they paid him specifically to not let the unscheduled pass.

"That's the one. Let me get you a guest pass and you can head on in." The guard pulled open a small drawer, removing a green badge that the man with the strange eyes would need to keep clipped to his shirt at all times in the building.

While his head was down, he missed the hum of electric wings that zipped from the wall behind to DV's waiting hand. Fingers curled around the strange creation, something the size of a dragonfly but made entirely from electronics, hiding it from view. By the time the guard rose from the drawer, all sign of the device was gone.

"Here you are, Mr. Valance." The guard handed over the small green badge. "Have a good day."

"Please, just call me DV."

The man walked past the security desk and stepped into an elevator, vanishing from sight as the doors shut and he ascended to the higher offices.

Twenty minutes later, a tall gentleman with greying hair and a fine black suit stepped through the doors. He was also greeted with the guard's stare; however, he did not bother affecting a facade of friendliness, instead proceeding to order the guard around.

"Gregory Butler to see Alderman Douglas, here on behalf of Marbonics Industries. Let's hurry this along; I'm already late due to some ruffian slashing all four of my tires when I stopped for coffee."

"Right away, Mr. Butler." The guard went to pull up Alderman Douglas's calendar then realized it was already on his laptop screen. Strange, he didn't remember needing to check it for anything this morning. Must have hit a wrong button without noticing.

"I'll just get you a badge and you can be on your way."

* * *

It took three hours before DV managed to get noticed in the wrong way. People saw him, certainly. Alderman Douglas was in the midst of a campaign for state senator, which meant that even here, in his personal business, the halls were frequently frantic with activity. Many of his aides and employees saw the man dressed in dull business-casual attire, but since he was wearing the proper badge, they had no reason to question his presence. True, it might have roused their suspicions to see him time and time again, led them to wonder just what it was he was doing that had him wandering about. That certainly would have gotten him busted sooner; however, it never came to pass.

Every time someone saw DV, they were seeing him for the first time.

It was an electronic safeguard that tripped him up in the end. Those were the bane of his existence, for they weren't as easily influenced by his particular talent. DV was captured in a server room that was locked, alarmed, and secured against exactly the type of entrance he'd perpetrated. Getting in had been simple; it was downloading the last of the incriminating files that had caused a digital alarm to sound and resulted in three armed guards, far less pleasant than the one downstairs, storming in and drawing their weapons.

Really, he had no one to blame but himself. Gearbox had furnished him (albeit not always knowingly) with equipment so cutting-edge that it should have easily bested these security measures; the trouble with tech-genius stuff was that it was only as good as its user, and DV was too old to keep up with all the advances in electronics. Luckily, he was not so old that his hearing had failed him, so as he noticed the stampeding footsteps converging on his location, DV pulled the small device free from the server and slipped into a hidden pocket in his belt. It wouldn't buy him much time, but sometimes a little was enough.

"At ease, boys." DV raised his hands in surrender as soon as the first lackey burst through the door. "You caught me, I'll come along peacefully."

"What are you doing here?" The biggest guard was the one talking; he must be in charge or too dumb to keep his mouth shut. Either worked for DV.

"Nothing much, just planting a virus. A virus that, by the by, will wipe your entire system in the next hour. Of course, I might be persuaded to stop it, if Alderman Douglas asks really nicely."

Any idiot could guess this was probably a bluff; not that it mattered. If the guard was in charge, he would run this up the line to avoid getting heat for his decision. If he was stupid, then he wouldn't catch on to the bluff. Or, if DV got lucky, he'd been so dumb that he'd try and attack the would-be-hacker. Having one of them within reach would open up all sorts of wonderful opportunities.

As it turned out, his guard was the responsible type. Without taking his eye, or his gun, off of DV, the guard tapped an earpiece on his right side. "Sir, can you get me the alderman? We've got a situation and he needs to be made aware."

DV let out a disappointed sigh. Oh well, this could still prove to be entertaining.

* * *

Alderman Douglas had an unsurprisingly nice office. Millionaires tended to enjoy their creature comforts, and Bertrand Douglas certainly had the money to qualify. A man who started his career as a lawyer then went in to investment and corporate accounting, Bertrand Douglas had made a fortune while helping other wealthy people protect theirs. All of which was perfectly legal, on the books. In the data DV had seen, however, there were more than a few anomalies. It wasn't what he was looking for, but leverage was leverage, regardless of how it came about.

DV sat in the very plush chair, hands zip-tied to one another behind his back, and marveled at the décor. Very chic, minimalist, with a few vintage accoutrements scattered about. DV had been in the lair/office of many a wealthy, wicked person over the years, and this was easily one of the better decorated. The guards behind him had no eye or appreciation for their surroundings. All they cared about was the man they'd been instructed not to let out of their sight.

They were so wound up and focused that when the door finally flew open, two jumped and one nearly squeezed off a shot by accident. Alderman Douglas paid them no mind; his employees may as well have been pieces of unwanted furniture for how often he looked at them.

"So, you're the man who claims to have taken my computers hostage."

"That I am. Derrick Vindreck is the name, but you can call me DV. Everyone does."

"DV, you say?" Alderman Douglas crossed the room and settled in to his own chair, positioned behind the wide wooden desk separating him from the clearly lying man with the strangely-colored eyes. "Well, Mr. DV, my technicians have been sweeping every server and servo since you leveled your threat and have uncovered nothing that matches the virus you described. Care to explain?"

"Oh, sure. I made it up." DV kept eye contact with the alderman, carefully working his hands in between the chair and his back. Nothing in his shoulders gave away the procedure currently underway, not even when his skin began to tear. Sometimes he wished he'd gotten one of the physically adaptive abilities like so many other Heroes, that way he wouldn't end up so sore after every job. Still, he shouldn't complain; at least the high-backed chair meant the guards didn't have direct line of sight on him. That would make this much easier.

"You made it up?" Alderman Douglas arched one of his well-shaped eyebrows, a motion he'd clearly practiced countless times in the mirror.

"Had to. I didn't think your goons would understand any of the real threats I could level."

"But of course; you had to dumb it down for the guards." The alderman started to motion for those same guards they'd been discussing, indicating he was done with this mad intruder's prattling. DV was tempted to let him – it would play well in to his plans – but he needed a little more time first. Besides, he wanted to bastard squirm at least a little.

"Sure, it's not like they even know about you hiring those Super thugs to intimidate your political competition. Pretty sweet gig, scaring the others out of the race so you run unopposed. Telling them I knew about that might seem the more clever option, but that's the sort of threat that only works when the person understands the truth behind it."

The manicured hands stopped in mid-air, the alderman's attention suddenly rapt on his still-seated guest.

"Or I could have used the financial stuff, but again, I seriously doubt they're plugged in enough to understand terms like fraud, embezzlement, and larceny. No, the virus was the way to play it. Big enough to get your attention and broad enough that even a layman would understand the threat." DV hid a wince of pain with a theatrical wink and his left hand slid free. Everyone thought zip-ties were so much better than cuffs, but anything could be broken if a person was willing to do enough damage to their hand. That was one step toward freedom down, two to go.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Come on, Bertrand, you're going to need to do a lot better than that when the reporters are hounding you. A canned response following a long pause? They'll tear you up for that kind of amateur-hour shit. Of course, it doesn't ever have to reach the press if you don't want it to." He gave the alderman a reassuring smile, hoping the ambitious politician wouldn't notice the slight change in DV's appearance.

"You're after a bribe, then? Forget it. I admit to no wrong-doing, and even if you did find some anomalous files, they'll be inadmissible in court. Breaking in to my office without a warrant is hardly proper procedure."

"Boy, if I were a cop you'd be spot on with that. Sadly, the rules I play by are a bit different. Let me ask you something; are you familiar with the Hendricks v. DVA case?"

"Any lawyer worth his salt knows it. It upholds the admissibility of preemptive investigations if the crimes directly involve violent Supers, but that only applies to . . ." That was when it clicked for Alderman Bertrand Douglas: those nearly-purple eyes were darkening, ebbing toward a shade that bordered on black. This was no man embracing the nation's trend of imitating Supers; he was the real deal. And if he'd come here investigating the Super violence Bertrand had funded, that meant he was the worst possible thing that could walk in the office: a Hero.

"Guards! Kill him!" There was still time to save things, still time to clean up this mess if he could stop his captive from telling anyone what he'd found.

"Um, kill who?" This was the first guard, who was looking at his coworkers with an expression of sudden confusion. The others were mirrors of him; not one of the three knew what their boss was talking about.

"Out of sight," DV muttered just before he sprang to action. In a single motion he leapt to his feet and kicked the chair back, sending it skittering along the floor and crashing into one of the guard's kneecaps. Without giving anyone a chance to react, DV continued his escape, racing toward the frosted glass door that secured the alderman's office. He slammed into it, propelling himself outward and smashing the door into the adjacent wall so hard that the glass shattered to bits.

The words "get him" died on Alderman Douglas's tongue as his brain scrambled to remember what had just happened. He'd been doing . . . something. There were guards here, one of whom was clutching his knee, and the door to his office was broken. That must be it; he'd called them in and one of the oafs had plowed his knee through the door, shattering the glass.

"That will be deducted from your paycheck," Alderman Douglas said, slamming his fist onto the desk. "How many times must I tell you idiots to be careful? Honestly, you've gotten me so angry I can't even remember why I asked you in here. Get out, and send someone from maintenance up to take care of this."

For a moment, the guards stared at him with dumbfounded gazes, but soon their own brains began filling in the memory gaps as well. The human mind abhors a vacuum, and memory is already such a pliable thing. It was almost no task at all to shift a few facts around until they formed a story that made sense.

"Sorry about that, sir," the first guard said, grabbing his injured coworker by the elbow and dragging him out of the room. "We'll get it taken care of right away."

"See that you do." Alderman Douglas sat back down at his desk as the last of the three exited the office. There was still a tickle in the back of his mind, some nagging sensation that there was an important thing he'd forgotten. He brushed it off as overactive worry. When one was as busy as he, there were bound to be a few things that slipped through the cracks. That was what the little people were there for: to clean up after him.

In the hallway, the guards passed a man whose dark-purple eyes cusped just on the verge of black who was calmly waiting on the elevator. They gave him a business-appropriate nod, which he returned, and then continued on their way, immediately forgetting about him.

* * *

Establishing Link . . .  
Link Established  
Start Conversation

Msg – 1422 – DV: Sending a data upload via the usual channels. Alderman Bertrand Douglas has been hiding and stealing quite a bit of money to finance his election. Some of it was going toward paying off a gang of Supers to scare or injure his opponents out of the race.

Msg – 1423 – Dispatch: How did that escape us? Those incidents are usually reported as soon as they occur.

Msg – 1423 – DV: From what I saw in the files, one of them can muddle memories. Not a full wipe or negation, but enough to leave victims confused.

Msg – 1444 – Dispatch: We'll send Heroes with appropriate resistances. Apprehension will occur within the next three hours.

Msg – 1445 – DV: While you're at it, can I get Fix-Up or someone to come patch me? Got captured during my recon and the escape left me short some blood and skin.

Msg – 1446 – Dispatch: If it's critical priority, we can get a healer and teleporter to you in five minutes. If you're stable and safe, it will be a few hours.

Msg – 1446 – DV: Hours it is, then. Also, I'll need to borrow some new toys from Gearbox soon. Running low on gadgets.

Msg – 1448 – Dispatch: I'll put something on the books, but you know he hates when you raid his armory.

Msg – 1448 – DV: Guess it's a good thing we're the only two who remember that.

End Conversation  
Link Terminated

* * *

"I'll have the usual." The man at Karen's booth hadn't bothered to pick up a menu. He sat there, narrow frame and curiously wide shoulders, dressed in an uninteresting grey shirt, a black tie, and a white-cloth bandage wrapped around his left hand. He had bruises beginning to show just along his hairline, small cuts running down the side of his face, and what looked a lot like dried blood splattered on his tie. Karen was so distracted by his evident injuries that she didn't even notice the pale lavender color of his eyes.

"I'm sorry, the usual?" Her auburn hair fell to the side as she tilted her head in confusion and concern.

The man sat silently for a moment, then let out a heavy sigh. "Two eggs over easy, a side of bacon, and a cup of coffee."

"Right away." Karen jotted down the order, doing her best not to stare at his injuries as she scooped up his menu and headed toward the kitchen. This was a relatively safe city, but things still went wrong on occasion. If he'd been jumped or something, she didn't want to make him feel more self-conscious about it. The diner was almost empty; it was too early for the late-evening rush. Thankfully, Karen would be gone by the then, the last hour of her double-shift finally over.

She grabbed a carafe of fresh coffee, a clean glass, and some cream, then brought the whole assortment to the injured man's table. He was staring at the television hung in the corner when she arrived, reading the closed captioning about some local politician's arrest that had gone down earlier in the day. Karen had been a bit interested at first, but after seeing the same minimal footage cycle several times, all her captivation had waned.

"Looks like some Heroes brought down a crooked politician." He didn't look over at her as he spoke, instead grabbing pink packets to dump in his coffee cup.

"My mother always says 'crooked politician' is a redundant term."

The man dropped his pink packets as he barked out a laugh of surprise. He glanced up at her, and for what was the first time and also very far from the first time, Karen noticed the strange color of his eyes.

"Your mother is a smart woman." He said it with more certainty than she'd expected, as though he knew firsthand just how right she was. "I'm glad to see the Heroes sweeping up the worst of them."

Karen nodded. Supers could be a troublesome bunch, and Powereds were a category all their own, but it was hard to dislike Heroes when they were out and about every day saving people. "My mother also said they were people doing God's work."

"Did she now?" This time he didn't laugh, but he did give her a gentle smile as he filled his mug with coffee. "And what do you think of them? The Heroes, I mean."

"I think they do great things, but they're also lucky sons-of-bitches," Karen admitted. "Flying around in beautiful costumes, greeted by crowds of people cheering when they arrive, knowing each night they go to sleep that they made the world a better place; who wouldn't want a life like that?"

"Do you ever wonder if they get lonely?"

"Lonely? With all those fans begging for their attention?"

"Fans and friends are different things," the man pointed out. "To me, bearing all the power and responsibility, it would get hard after a while."

"Still, seems a far sight better than being a regular old person, doesn't it?"

"Maybe for some. There's bound to be a few who are burdened by it, though. Ones who take the responsibility to heart, who live their lives so completely as Heroes that it consumes the other side of them. Heroes who never take off the mask, or remove all the reasons for needing one in the first place. Maybe they don't start out that way; it just sort of happens after too many close calls. They realize that the only way to protect others from the consequences of their choice is to ensure there are no others to protect."

The man paused to take a sip of his coffee, breaking the spell Karen all at once realized she'd fallen under. He seemed to sense it to, as his mood suddenly lightened.

"Sorry about that, I'm slowly reaching the age where I'll give my opinions to anyone whether they want them or not."

"No, it's an interesting thought. I never looked at Heroes that way. I mean, I always assumed Powereds were the only ones who had it rough, not being able to control their abilities and all, but Heroes may have some drawbacks too. You're pretty smart, Mister . . ."

"Verdant. Devin Verdant."

"How funny, my last name is Verdant. We might be related," Karen said.

"Could be, but I doubt it. There are a bunch of Verdants in this area."

"Tell me about it; I went to high school with three of them, one whose name was Kasey. Teachers got us mixed up all the time. Well, you sip on the coffee; I'm going to go see if your food is about ready."

"Thank you, Karen," Devin Verdant said.

His food was ready, and she quickly brought it over to him. Though she meant to talk more with the odd man, her tables began filling up. The longer she worked, the harder it was for her to remember why it was she'd wanted to speak him, or what they'd talked about in the first place.

He finished his food quickly, keeping an eye on her as she scuttled about. She'd forget him soon: his ability was far more dialed down than it had been at the alderman's office, but it wasn't off completely. No one had ever really been able to figure out what his power was; it overcame telepathic and illusion defenses with no trouble at all. Only those with outright immunity to mental alteration were able to hold on to their memories of him. Even on film, he would be seen and forgotten in the same minute; the same would happen even if it was just his voice. Of course, he could have always turned off his ability if he really wanted to be remembered.

With minimal rummaging in his wallet, DV produced a hundred dollar bill and set it on the table to pay his eight dollar tab. She wouldn't remember which table had given this to her; that was for the best. If she'd known, she might have realized he always tipped in such a way, and that would have led to questions that he didn't want her asking.

He headed out into the early evening air and checked his watch. Fifteen minutes until his meeting with Fix-Up, and then on to recon work for his next project. DV wasn't a fan of downtime; it gave him time to dwell on all the things he'd sacrificed along the way. With a final glance through the diner's window at the young auburn-haired waitress scurrying about, DV headed off toward his next meeting.

There was work to do.

Back to Table of Contents

Archenemy

A Just Cause Universe Story

Ian Thomas Healy

Ian Thomas Healy is the author behind the Just Cause Universe, a series of superhero fiction novels spanning more than seventy years of history in a world very similar to ours, but with superheroes. Centered primarily around three generations of speedsters—Colt, Pony Girl, and Mustang Sally—the heroes of Just Cause are always at the forefront of the most dangerous challenges to the safety and order of the world.

The first five novels of the JCU are Just Cause, The Archmage, Day of the Destroyer, Deep Six, and Jackrabbit. All JCU books are available in print and ebook format from online retailers as well as from Local Hero Press, LLC. Book Six, Champion, is scheduled for release in November 2014.

Ian can be found online at www.ianthealy.com, on Twitter as @ianthealy, on Facebook as Author Ian Thomas Healy, and all over the Pen & Cape Society forums.

* * *

Once again, Mustang Sally wished she could run across water. She'd tried, of course. Dozens of times. She'd spoken to physicists about it and it wasn't a question of speed, especially for someone who was the sole member of the world's most exclusive club of people who had broken the speed of sound on foot. According to every scientist she'd ever spoken with, she should glide across the surface like a jet boat on hydrofoils. She'd tried running faster, slower, stomping, and tiptoeing. She'd tried shuffling her feet like a supersonic speed skater, all to no avail. No matter how fast she was going, if she hit water, she was going for a swim.

Jason always laughed at her, but not in an unkind way. "Babe, I've seen you jump across gaps at speed that would terrify me, and I'm a lot tougher to hurt than you are."

And it was true; she could do running long jumps that made some people think she could fly. But still, the water thing frustrated her to no end. "I should be able to," she complained.

"Maybe it's all in your head," said Jason. "Maybe you need a parahuman psychologist."

"Are you calling me crazy?"

"You'd have to be, to do what you're doing. Let me examine your head, though . . ." And then of course, things had been better.

With the change in presidents had come a dramatic reorganization of Just Cause, going from two teams to eight. Sally had expected she might get promoted to a leadership position somewhere in Just Cause, but she was completely floored when they asked her to take over the New York branch.

And so she and Jason, and a couple of her friends from the Denver team, packed up and moved to the City That Never Sleeps. It was hard leaving behind so many people she loved, but the adventure of a lifetime awaited her amid the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan.

The new headquarters, officially known as Just Cause New York but colloquially as Fort Justice, wasn't even within the confines of Manhattan. Instead, the government had purchased a floating oil drilling platform and refurbished it into a secure, mobile headquarters with nearly all the comforts of home.

There were lots of ways to get to the mainland. A regular ferry serviced the facility every four hours. Speedboats were available for faster response, and for full emergency deployments, the team had a brand new VTOL jet called the Dorothy, after Dorothy Dandridge.

But Sally wanted to run, and she was impatient, and she couldn't run across the water.

It was only her second day in New York. Every minute of hers and Jason's arrival had been filled with unpacking, getting to know the layout of Fort Justice, getting lost and then found again, greeting new team members as they arrived, meetings with everyone from the chief of staff to the legal and public relations directors to the chief cook and bottle washer. Oh, and paperwork. Reams and reams of it. Sally wondered how many forests had been leveled solely for the purpose of having triplicate copies of every single form and document that a government-run superhero team might require.

At last she couldn't take it anymore. She left Jason in charge of getting their apartment in order, since her husband was far more organized than she was, threw on her thermal costume (it was ridiculously cold in a miserable way that made Sally's bones ache for the warmth of her home state of Arizona), and hopped onto the departing ferry for Manhattan. She didn't get seasick—and thank goodness for that!—but she felt a nervous queasiness lapping around her edges like the cold gray waters of the Upper New York Bay at the hull of the ferry. She was barely twenty-four years old and the President of the United States had asked her to lead the most important branch of the most important superhero team in the world. That she wasn't running to the bathroom to throw up every few minutes was a small miracle.

The ferry bumped up against the Pier 11 slip and people filed across the gangplank onto the pier itself. Everything was shades of gray; gray clouds reflecting upon gray water, the gray walkway with gray railings. Sally found herself scanning up and down the pier, focusing upon any splash of color she could see. Although the passengers on the ferry from Fort Justice were Just Cause employees, inured to the brilliance of superhero costumes, many of the pedestrians on the pier were staring and snapping pictures. Even the lifelong New Yorkers, which Sally equated with a certain willingness to step on another human's face, lost some of their blasé, already-seen-it-all expressions as they took in the crimson and gold of her costume, from her traditional horse's-head logo to the horseshoes slung at her waist to the tremendously expensive running boots that had been created by an unlikely partnership of an Italian footwear designer and a NASA engineer. She made herself smile at the citizens; part of her job was to be a visible representative of the parahuman community and to do whatever she could to cast Just Cause in a positive light.

"Mustang Sally, checking in at Pier 11," she murmured. The microphone button sewn against the collar of her bodysuit picked up her voice and relayed it across the water back to Fort Justice. "I'm going to patrol."

"Control, receiving you," said the disembodied voice in her ear. "We'll monitor you and inform you if you're needed."

"Copy that." Sally took her goggles off her forehead and shook out her hair. She was still getting used to her new short hairstyle after years of having long braids hanging down her back. She'd felt like she needed a look that was more grown-up given her new position, and had spent an entire weekend flipping through webpage after webpage of hairstyles until she'd found one she thought she could live with. Jason had given her his blessing, and she'd cried when almost two feet of her hair hit the floor. Once the stylist had finished giving her a layered cut that accentuated her natural waves, she had to admit that she looked pretty good. At least it was easier to manage and could all fit beneath her cowl so it didn't get windburned. She pulled the cowl up and over her head, tucking any flyaway locks beneath the edges. The goggles went back on over the cowl, connecting to tiny catches that would keep them from being ripped away due to wind friction. She wouldn't be running fast enough to need the breath mask to protect her lungs, but she wore it anyway because there was nothing worse than aspirating road grit at triple-digit speeds.

Her face fully protected from the wind, she waved at the onlookers, and then lit out. Her perceptions accelerated along with her speed, giving her plenty of time to avoid collisions. She zipped across the pier and turned right to follow FDR Drive along the East River. She'd checked the GPS map on her phone on the ferry, and she knew to count bridges. The fourth one would be the Queensboro, and taking a left there would bring her right to Central Park, which was where her mother had run when she was in Just Cause back in the Seventies. The Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges flashed past, great titans sprawling across the icy waters. Sally kept well to the right of traffic, running along the breakdown lane as much as possible. It had been her experience that running too close to the speed of traffic tended to be a distraction for drivers as they actually had time to look at her. Going two or three times faster than the flow meant she was gone from most drivers' vision before they really registered what they'd seen. When there was no breakdown lane, she dipped down an exit ramp to run beneath the FDR viaduct, having to weave around ubiquitous construction sites.

The buildings in that part of Manhattan were much more reasonable, reminding her of Lower Downtown in Denver. She passed by a lovely park near the Williamsburg Bridge, which was a welcome relief from all the gray. It was too early in the season for any real greenery, but a few hardy crocuses were pushing their way up through the dirt. Horns honked and a police siren blared and she wondered if she should stop, but one of the things Juice had told her was that Just Cause wasn't supposed to respond to every minor infraction or incident. If local law enforcement needed parahuman assistance, there were avenues for them to request it, whether from local-level Champions or escalating to Just Cause if needed. "It's important that local police don't grow to resent you," he said. "We want them to be willing to call for help, and they can't do that if they feel like you're trying to replace them."

"But how will I know what to do to help, then?" Sally asked.

"You'll know in your gut. You always have, Sally," said Juice. "That's why we chose you."

The buildings went from brown stone to gray as Sally continued her trek northward. She skipped off of FDR to run along a bike path right alongside the river. "Sally, Control," said the voice in her ear.

"Go ahead, Control."

"We've got some unusual activity on social network monitoring. Your name has popped up tied to Central Park and we don't show that you're anywhere near there yet."

Sally skidded to a halt, startling several joggers. "What do you mean, my name has popped up?"

"We're seeing images tagged with your name. It looks like someone has burned letters spelling out your name into the grass on the southern end of Central Park. We're seeing multiple mentions of it as well as pictures."

"I'm heading there to investigate it now, Control. Is the fire out?"

"We have no information on it at this time."

"Copy that." Sally launched into motion once again, blowing well past a hundred fifty until even in her accelerated perceptions, the buildings and cars blurred past. She spotted an exit ramp and turned down it to head inland, towards Central Park. She had to be very careful on the narrow and congested road, and there were a lot more pedestrians milling about. She zigged and zagged around them, outrunning the confused and typical-New-Yorker angry shouts in her wake. She realized she'd turned the wrong way up a one-way street but it didn't matter; she was moving fast enough that the cars seemed like they were standing still.

She slipped between a bus and a panel truck and then she was crossing a plaza into Central Park. "Control, I'm at Central Park. Where's this fire?"

"Roughly a hundred yards from the southeast corner," said the voice in her ear.

Sally slowed her headlong rush and lowered her rebreather. The chill air made her skin prickle and sting. The trees that would be so lush and green by the spring were still mostly bare black and gray trunks with branches like skeletal fingers. She sniffed at the air and there was indeed a tang of smoke present, which she recognized as the burning of dry grass, a common enough scent in Colorado during fire season. She raised her tinted goggles and tried to pick smoke out against the cloudy sky, but with no success.

"Hey, Mustang Sally!" someone called. She looked to see a young man waving at her. "Somebody wrote your name on the ground."

She moved beside him in a flash. "Where?"

He jumped at her sudden appearance. "Whoa!"

"Sir, please."

"Oh, sorry. Right over there, behind those trees." He licked his lips. "You, uh, you seeing anyone?"

She smiled at him. "I'm married."

"Yeah, but is it working out?"

She didn't dignify his query with a response. Instead, she zipped past him, through the trees, to confront whoever had called her out.

A woman in a tight-fitting turquoise and black bodysuit similar to Sally's in cut and design stood there, arms crossed, looking impatient. She was several inches taller than Sally—no real feat there, given Sally was barely over five feet tall herself—but with a much more muscular build. She wore a blue helmet with a gold-tinted visor and a rudder emerging from the back. Her boots were much more stylized in design than Sally's high-tech utilitarian clunkers. Instead of matching the blue-and-black color scheme, the other woman's boots were orange and red with a flame design upon them that reminded Sally of hot rod paint jobs.

"About time you showed up," she sneered at Sally. "For a speedster, you're pretty slow upstairs."

Sally felt her ears burn. She'd faced down some of the world's most dangerous supervillains and not only lived to tell about it, but in many cases been triumphant. How could this unknown woman get to her with such a simple insult? She made herself shake it off. The snide statement demanded a response, and although Sally wasn't the wittiest conversationalist in the world, she could at least hold her own. "If you were in that much of a hurry, why didn't you just call? I had to wait for social media to catch up." She folded her own arms. "Who are you and what do you want?"

The woman smiled behind her visor. Sally didn't recognize her face. It occurred to her that she ought to have cameras built into her goggles so she didn't have to take time to use her phone to snap a picture. She could take a picture faster than anyone could move, but she invariably moved too fast and the camera would only ever show a blur. "I'm Afterburner," said the woman. "And I'm here to take you down, Mustang Sally."

Sally snorted. "Just like that? You show up out of the blue, set some grass on fire, and now you're going to . . . to fight me like some kind of stupid archenemy? Who writes your dialogue, George Lucas?"

"Who's that? I don't . . . oh." Sally got the distinct impression that the woman was speaking to someone else. And then in a flash of motion the woman was in front of her. Sally's accelerated perceptions kicked in a fraction of a second too late—a side effect of never dealing with anyone whose speed could approach her own—and the woman shoved her backwards. Sally stumbled and fell onto her ass, bruising her tail bone on the hard-packed dirt with its layer of dead grass. "I'm not afraid of you. You ain't jack shit. Get up, or are you gonna just let me kick your ass laying down?"

Sally sprang to her feet, her heart hammering behind her ribs. In her life she'd encountered only two other parahumans with what she'd categorize as extreme examples of enhanced speed. Carousel was an advanced android who'd been a member of the Lucky Seven team where Sally had trained before joining Just Cause. Johnny Go was a good friend who'd gone through the Hero Academy and now one of the trainers for Champions. Neither of them had even come close to approaching Sally's level of speed; they were like thoroughbred racing horses trying to compete against a Formula I car.

This woman, Afterburner, was dangerously fast. Maybe even as fast as Sally. She was also bigger, stronger, and knew how to fight by the way she carried herself. Smoke leaked from beneath her feet and Sally realized she had another, even more sinister power. She could ignite the ground where she stood. Hence the name, Sally thought. Sally hadn't ever trained in physical combat very hard; with her speed, standing and fighting an opponent was a poor use of her abilities.

Afterburner leaped and spun, her right foot arcing around in a devastating roundhouse kick. Flames trailed off her heel, making a whooshing noise. Sally just barely ducked out of the way as Afterburner's foot flashed through the air where Sally's head had been a moment before. Sally tried to remember all her basic combat training, which she'd had in her very first year at the Hero Academy. She hadn't paid attention then, trusting her speed to get her out of a dangerous situation.

She hadn't ever planned for this. She threw a punch the way she'd seen Jason do it when he sparred with other bricks.

Afterburner laughed, slapped aside Sally's ineffectual blow, and smashed her helmet against Sally's face. Sally felt her nose break and her mouth filled with blood. She staggered back, tears of pain blinding her. Her foot caught against something and she fell. Afterburner leaped into a forward tuck. She extended her right foot as she came up and around, lashing downward with an axe kick that could have broken any bone it struck. Sally rolled aside to avoid the strike and kicked at Afterburner's ankle. Afterburner turned her foot enough that Sally's kick only glanced off the edge. "That's more like it. Ain't no fun when they don't have any spirit."

She stomped down on Sally's leg but Sally's heavy boot absorbed the worst of the blow. Sally tried to fight back by grabbing at the woman's foot, but it was like grabbing a pan out of the oven without a hot pad. Sally yelped as she burned her fingers through her gloves. Blood ran down the side of her face and dribbled onto her logo.

Afterburner lunged and grabbed Sally's neck. "There's a new sheriff in town, bitch."

Sally felt her lungs burning and she struggled against the woman's grip. Afterburner lifted her off the ground. Sally tried to kick but she had no strength left as the life was being choked out of her. As a last-ditch effort, she let go of Afterburner's wrists, grabbed the woman's helmet, and twisted it hard to one side. The helmet turned faster than Afterburner's head did and the edge of the visor opening cracked hard across Afterburner's nose, breaking it much like she'd broken Sally's. Afterburner dropped her and struggled with her helmet, cursing and spitting out blood.

Sally ran. She couldn't stand and trade punches with Afterburner; the woman fought like a martial artist, and Sally barely had basic brawling skills. Afterburner was after her in a flash and they raced across the park, a red streak pursued by a blue one. Sally's head cleared as she ran, but she had to keep spitting out blood so she wouldn't swallow it, and she couldn't breathe through her shattered nose so her breath mask was out of the question.

They raced through the trees, whipping up a storm of dry grass, dead leaves, and twigs in their wake. Sally realized that not only was Afterburner a much better fighter, but the blue-garbed woman was keeping pace with her. Sally put her head down and poured on the speed. She'd broken the speed of sound once; she could outrun Afterburner. Everywhere her pursuer set a foot down, the ground was left smoldering. Sally quickly discovered her best bet to get away, or at least to gain an advantage, was to turn and change directions much faster than Afterburner.

She doubled back twice, forcing Afterburner to skid to a stop, cursing each time. "I know, I know," she yelled at whoever was on the other end of her radio.

That gave Sally an idea. She headed across the gigantic meadow where she could really unleash the speed. With her attention no longer needed to keep her from smashing into a tree trunk, she called in to headquarters. "Control, Sally. I'm engaged with an unknown parahuman assailant," she gasped out between breaths. "Enhanced speed at my level. Scramble backup."

"Roger that, Sally," said the voice in her ear. "The Dorothy will be airborne in five minutes. ETA to your location in thirteen minutes, plus or minus two minutes."

Sally wasn't sure she'd last five minutes against Afterburner. Her backup might arrive to find themselves claiming her body. "Sooner would be better, Control. Also, she's in radio communication with someone. Try to locate and track that signal."

"That may be difficult given your speed and altitude, but we'll work on it. You could shave five minutes off the response time if you came to the southern tip of the island."

"Negative," said Sally. "Central Park is the safest place for this. Sally out." Being late winter, the park wasn't nearly as crowded as it might have been had the weather been warmer. She dashed across a bridge and around a rocky outcropping, trying to outmaneuver her pursuer.

"You won't get away like that," hissed Afterburner. She sounded winded to Sally, which suggested that perhaps she didn't have Sally's stamina for long sprints.

"I don't have to get away," said Sally. "I just have to outlast you." She grabbed hold of a sign pole and swung, letting her momentum carry her around it like a tether ball. Her feet flashed over a sliding Afterburner's head, just missing a double kick that might have decapitated her assailant, or broken every bone in Sally's legs, or both.

Afterburner rolled into a combat crouch to face Sally as Sally dropped down beside the sign pole, her sides heaving. Behind her visor, Afterburner's face was crimson and evaporating sweat rose off her body like steam in the chilly air. "That was dirty," she said. Smoke curled upward from around her feet as the grass beneath them ignited.

"You want to call this off now, before one of us gets really hurt?" asked Sally. "Come on, I'll buy you a beer and you can tell me what I did to earn your wrath." She held out a hand. "What's your name?"

"Martina," said Afterburner. "What? I know, I know!"

"Who are you talking to?" Sally asked. "Sounds like they're being a real pain in your ass. Somebody putting you up to this?"

"Shut up, I got this."

Sally couldn't tell if Afterburner was talking to her or to whoever was on the other end of her radio. "Look, if you're in trouble, let me help you. You might have heard that me and my people are pretty good at this sort of thing."

"I know!" screamed Afterburner, and she charged at Sally.

"Shit." Sally found herself engaged before she had a chance to flee. She danced backward, ducking underneath Afterburner's punches and jumping to avoid her kicks. The flurry of limbs seemed to come at her from every direction. A hard roundhouse kick caught her hip and made her right leg go numb. Afterburner followed up with a hard punch straight to Sally's face. Blood splattered up Afterburner's hand from Sally's already-broken nose, and she yelped from the pain. Her hands found her horseshoes where they were still clamped to her belt. Over the years she'd used them as brass knuckles when she needed a little more heft to her super-speedy punches, and if there was ever a moment where that was required, this was it.

Afterburner punched at her again and Sally dropped her chin so Afterburner's fist smashed against her forehead, breaking her goggles. Sally responded by driving the twin forks of the horseshoe clutched in her right hand hard into Afterburner's visor. The yellow-tinted faceplate cracked and the sharp plastic ends lacerated Afterburner's face.

She staggered back, shrieking incoherently. Sally knew she should have pressed the advantage while she had it, but her entire face hurt, and her nose and lips were swelling like an allergic reaction. Her vision was growing blurry but she didn't know whether it was because of swelling around her eyes or something worse. She'd suffered concussions before and knew she was high risk for them.

She hooked the horseshoes back on her belt and ran again, hoping that she could outrun Afterburner. With her goggles destroyed, she couldn't get up much faster than two hundred or so before the stream of icy air against her tender face became too much to bear. She skirted the edge of the large lake. When she looked back over her shoulder, she didn't see any sign of Afterburner, and thought perhaps she'd escaped the mysterious speedster at last. But then she glanced back across the lake and got the shock of her life.

Afterburner was crossing straight over the surface of the water, racing toward Sally like a speed skater. Her feet kicked up steamy rooster tails of water vapor with every step.

"No. No way," said Sally. That wasn't fair. Not only was Afterburner fast, setting fires with every step, and a superior hand-to-hand fighter, but she could run on water too? Sally slid to a halt among the loose rocks along the lake shore as Afterburner tore towards her. She gathered up a handful of suitably flat rocks and hurled them at Afterburner, using her speed to accelerate the stones like bullets.

Afterburner stepped around the first couple of skipping stones but then one caught her in the knee and another followed immediately after, striking the top of her foot. With her accelerated perceptions, Sally saw the blood splatter from each wound. Afterburner yelped and lost her balance. She fell sideways, kicking up a tremendous wave as she plowed into the water. At Sally's speed, the water seemed to move like molasses, and she saw Afterburner tumble into it in a jumble of twisting limbs. Sally didn't like the way Afterburner's head snapped back when it hit the water, and she slowed her racing senses to get a better feel for time passing. Seconds ticked away and still Afterburner didn't emerge from the water.

At some point, Sally realized that the other speedster wasn't going to come up. "Shit," she said, and raced to unlace her tall boots. "Control. ETA to my location." Speaking hurt her face, she discovered, and so did wincing at the pain.

"Less than four minutes," said Control.

Sally shook her head. "Not fast enough. Tell them to prepare for a water rescue, and get some paramedics out here stat!" She yanked off her thick socks, cringing at the cold on her bare feet, and charged into the water.

She still couldn't run across the water, but years of trying had necessitated her becoming a good swimmer, and she struck out toward the area where she'd seen Afterburner go under. The icy water seeped into her uniform and made her hands and feet go numb instantly. At least the cold would help with the swelling in her face, although the broken nose made it impossible for her to swim in any way but a dog paddle.

It was a speedy dog paddle, though, and she found Afterburner after only a few seconds. The waterlogged woman was a few feet below the surface, unmoving. Sally took a deep breath and dove down beneath Afterburner, moving her legs in a blur to push the woman back to the surface. Their heads broke water and Sally grabbed Afterburner beneath her arms and kicked backward, pushing for the shoreline.

She was so cold that she barely felt her feet brush against the soft bottom, and a moment later she was dragging Afterburner up onto the sand at the water's edge. Both women choked, coughing up lake water. Sally's shivers seemed to take over her entire body. As the water drained from her ears, she heard the distant roar of the approaching Dorothy, loud enough to drown out the much closer howls of emergency vehicles. "Y-you all r-right?" she managed through chattering teeth.

Afterburner gagged and spit up a lungful of water onto the sand, so weak that she couldn't even raise her head. Steam rose from her feet as the heat they produced evaporated the lake water. Sally could feel the radiance from them and wondered if it would be too weird to use them to warm herself back up. "W-why?" asked Afterburner. "I t-tried to . . . You still s-saved me."

"I'm a hero," said Sally. "That's what we d-do." Her chattering teeth made her broken nose throb.

"What? No. I'm not—" Afterburner paused and her eyes narrowed. "What do you m-mean no longer required?" She started to say something else but Sally's perceptions accelerated to their maximum and for a moment she didn't understand why, but then she saw Afterburner's face tearing apart as slow-motion flames forced their way through her skin. Sally was fast, but she was exhausted and injured and the shock wave of the explosion caught her as she turned to flee and sent her tumbling along the sand of the lake front. When she rolled over to look back at Afterburner, she saw the woman's helmet split in half and nothing but ruin above her neck and below her wrists.

Feeling like she'd failed, Sally lay back and cried silent, painful tears as the Dorothy circled overhead, spilling colorful heroes from its bomb bay doors.

* * *

Sally had been very fortunate not to suffer a concussion, said the base doctor, given her history of them and the amount of trauma her head and face had suffered in the brief time she'd shared Afterburner's company. "You're off duty for a week," he said. "That means no patrolling, no training, and no running." He glared over the top of his glasses at Sally. "And no buts."

Sally would have pouted, but the bandage over her nose, her swollen lip, and two black eyes made any kind of facial expressions extremely uncomfortable. "All right," she said. "I heal fast, you know. I might be good to go in a couple of days."

"One week, and if I'm not satisfied, I won't clear you." The doctor looked at Jason, who sat beside Sally. "You have my permission to sit on her for a week if she won't listen to reason."

Given that Jason outweighed her by some two hundred pounds, Sally knew he'd take his job of ensuring her rest and relaxation seriously. "Fine," she grumbled.

"It's all right, babe," said Jason. "I got you some new DVD box sets. You can nerd out to your heart's content."

"Sounds great," said Sally, registering the same enthusiasm as she might for a root canal.

They left the doctor's office to return to their quarters, far more spacious than they'd shared in the Just Cause base back in Denver, and filled with chunky wood furniture that they'd picked out together after learning of their reassignment. "It's probably best that you spend a few days on downtime anyway," said Jason. "You know I'll always think you're beautiful, but you look, um, pretty rough."

"I know. Any word on the autopsy? Have they identified Afterburner yet?"

Jason shook his shaggy blond head. "The lab says that she had residue suggesting C-4 was wrapped around the base of her skull and wrists, along with some kind of advanced detonators. Whoever did it wanted to make sure she was very difficult to identify. No dental records, no fingerprints. They have DNA, but the only way that will help identify her is if her DNA's on file somewhere."

"She said her name was Martina. She was a good fighter. Like she was trained," said Sally. "And that combination of parapowers was really unusual. Super speed and flaming feet. There's nothing about her in the PRA files?"

"No." Jason looked troubled. "And there wouldn't be." He opened the fridge and got out a beer. "Want one?"

"Why wouldn't there be anything about her at the PRA? Yes, please."

Jason popped off the cap for her and handed her the bottle. Sally held it up against her face, letting the cool glass soothe the ache. "They ran the tests three times. Babe, she wasn't a parahuman. She didn't have any of the genetic markers. No nanotech anywhere anybody could find. No advanced technology of any kind in her suit or in her, um, her remains." He took a pull from his beer. "She shouldn't have been able to do any of the things she did."

Sally shivered. "What does that mean? How is that possible?" She set down her beer without tasting it. "What if there are others?"

But Jason couldn't answer her.

Nobody could.

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Hunting Rabbits

by Hydrargentium

Hydrargentium is a construct of the Internet, a homogeny of blood and bytes, bits and breath. He writes stories, and songs, and poetry, and sometimes thinks he's funny or clever. Occasionally, he's right.

Previously, Hydrargentium's stories have appeared in A Thousand Faces and The Whetstone Report.

His currently active work is 100 Words A Day. (http://hgwords.wordpress.com/)

Or read more of his writing on his blog. (http://hydrargentium.blogspot.ca/)

So, what the *&^% is a Hydrargentium anyway? Look it up, silly

* * *

"Cops'll never catch us now, Brodie. This junkyard has too many ways in, too many ways out for them catch all of us."

"Scratch is right, boys. If we see any cops, just split and scram. Run any which way. We'll meet at the usual spot in two days."

After swarming into a jewelry store, the gang of fifteen boys, most under eighteen, had run as a group to the nearby junkyard, seeking refuge inside the warren of crushed cars and piles of discarded appliances. Armed with hammers and knapsacks, the gang had smashed and grabbed, carrying away most of the store's display stock in less than a minute.

The plan was Scratch's, a bright 18-year-old whose need for speed and other amphetamines had derailed his ambitions for a college education. Scratch had explained the idea to his charismatic friend, Brodie. Brodie smiled, and Scratch scratched at a rash on the back of his neck, and the plan came together.

The gang stood in a loose circle, surrounded by stacks of rusting automotive wreckage, and panted from their ten-block sprint. Scratch worked his fingernails across the skin under his sleeve, and winced when Ronald spoke up. Ronald was slow, and Scratch knew what his question was going to be the moment Ronald took a slow breath before speaking.

"Uh, whatsa usual spot? Brodie?"

"Geez, did we have to bring him along?"

The other boys laughed. Even Ronald laughed, but only because everyone else had, and he didn't want anyone to know he hadn't got the joke.

"Hey, Scratch, the more the merrier."

Ronald took another slow breath. "So, uh, Brodie . . ."

"Behind Morrison's garage."

"Oh yeah. Right. Morrison's garage."

Scratch suspected that Brodie was going to have to round up Ronald and bring him to Morrison's. He was just about to mutter as much to Brodie, when his thoughts were interrupted by a thump behind him. He looked up at the others, and then turned to follow their surprised gazes over his shoulder.

The dust was still settling around the enormous leather boots of the biggest guy he'd ever seen. He was easily eight feet tall, with huge hands and large features that seemed to crowd each other for space on his face. His voice boomed.

"Thanks boys. I thought for a moment no one was going to say where 'the usual place' was."

Scratch looked at Brodie. Brodie looked at Scratch. Their response was in unison. "Run!"

Scratch ran one way. Brodie ran another. The big guy grabbed Ronald, who was too slow to react to their panicked instruction. Everyone else followed Scratch or Brodie.

Ronald started yelling his head off. "Hey, wait for me! Guys?! Don't leave me behind!" Then he stopped. He was sure that, a moment ago, there had only been one big guy, the one who had his meaty hands wrapped securely around his shoulders. Now there was a second one. Maybe, thought Ronald, he just hadn't counted correctly.

Ronald blinked. Now there were three big guys. One of them started running after Brodie and his gang, his gigantic feet kicking up small clouds of dust. The other watched the last of Scratch's followers disappear around a wall of cars. He took three running steps directly at the wall, and then leapt to the top. The cars wobbled a little, and little bits of metal and plastic skittered down the sides. The crunching noise the top car made as the big guy landed on it was immediately followed by muffled yells of surprise from the other side. Ronald heard Scratch's strained, frantic voice. "Split up!" Ronald was sure he saw two of the big guys jump down to the other side of the wall.

He craned his neck around to get a look at the big guy with the ugly face who held him, just in time to see yet another one, just as big and just as ugly, reach out at him with a rusty iron bar held crosswise between two hairy-knuckled fists. One of them held Ronald, and the other wrapped the bar around his arms and chest -- Ronald just wasn't sure which was which. Next he was lifted up, feet four feet off the ground, and another steel rod was twisted around his ankles. Four big guys left him dangling head-down from a pile of wrecks, and Ronald's laughter rang off the scrap piles as he watched their legs working upside down, a pair each in four different directions.

By the time the police appeared at the gates to the junkyard, a small pile of juvenile miscreants had formed in the churned-up mud by the entrance. Some were bruised, or sported black eyes. Others pressed their sleeves against their bleeding noses. All of them were immobilized by the scraps of metal that bound their arms and legs.

The officers had drawn their weapons when they first jumped out of their flashing black-and-whites, and holstered them again when they saw the teens were not going anywhere. Three of them were standing, hands on chins, trying to figure out how to disentangle the captives from their rusty bonds, and one of the officers had gone back to her squad car to radio for a metalworker, when the big guy came sailing over a wall of cars with another metal-bound perpetrator across his shoulder.

"Morning, officers. Here's another one, " he said in a cheerful English accent as he unloaded the boy beside the others, splashing mud on the boy's cohorts in the process.

The police officers, clearly in the presence of a superhero, didn't bother drawing their pistols again. Two of them looked at each other, as if to say, "Hey, I've seen this guy before . . . what's his name?" The third looked directly up into shadows of the big guy's solid brow, and said, "Hey, I've seen you before . . . what's your name?"

The big guy held out his meaty hand in a friendly gesture. "U2. Pleased to make your acquaintance." The officers stared at his muscular digits, clearly amazed by the size of each one.

After an awkward moment, when the first officer failed to shake the proffered hand, he turned and headed back into the maze. "There's still a few more of these rabbits in here," he called back over his shoulder. "Guard the main entrance here. I've got the other exits covered."

The officer who'd gone to call for help came back to see the big guy disappear around a corner. "Hey, I've seen him before," she said to the others. "What's his name?"

"I dunno. We asked him, but I'm not sure he answered."

The officers were still conferring among themselves about what the superhero had said, when he came back, from a different direction, dragging another gang member behind him. This one was bound at ankles and wrists with heavy rubber timing belts salvaged from car engines.

"Hey, there's Brodie!" one of the teens shouted around a fat lip.

The big guy dragged his quarry up to the jumble of teenagers, and flopped him in the mud.

"Had a bit of a fall, this one. Chased him around a corner, and he tripped over a couple of old tires. Must've hit his head too hard when he fell. There's no blood, but he must have a concussion. Make sure he gets to the hospital." He turned to face one of the officers. "Have you called for an ambulance yet?"

"Paramedics are on the way." She pointed at his cheek, which was bleeding slightly. "Looks like you've cut yourself there."

"That's alright! I've got all my shots. Need 'em, in this business." He reached out his hand again, and this time, the officer shook it.

"You folks guard the main entrance here. I've got the other exits covered," he said as he turned to go. "There's still a few more of these rabbits in here."

Two of the officers looked at each other. "Didn't he say that already?"

"Hey," one of them called out as he rounded a stack of spent steel drums. "What's your name?"

The reply was hollowed by the drums between them. "U2!"

The officers looked at each other again, perplexed. "Me too?"

Three of them at once opened their mouths to speak, unintentionally initiating a babble of miscomprehension. Their confusion was interrupted, or perhaps increased, by the fourth officer, who pointed between the other three, and exclaimed, "Look!"

When they followed the fellow's arm, they saw the big guy jogging into the main entrance area with two more of the teenagers, one under each arm. Again, both were bound by metal from the junkyard twisted around them.

"Morning, officers! Lovely day!" he called out cheerily as he jogged up to them, and dumped the two struggling youths into the mudpile.

This time, all four of the officers started to talk at once. The big guy smiled, his face softening. He was still ugly, but when he smiled, he wasn't as hard to look at.

He waited for a moment, until they finished interrupting each other. After the other three had given up, the fourth, who had noticed the cut on the big guy's cheek before, pointed again.

"Hey, your cheek has healed already!"

The big guy reached up, and touched his unmarked cheek. He started to speak, but was interrupted by a flurry of curses coming from somewhere behind him. Everyone, including the boys tied up in the mud, turned to look.

Standing there, panting and swearing and scratching, was Scratch. His faded blue jean jacket was torn at one shoulder, the front of his white T-shirt was marked with rust, and the knees of his jeans were covered in mud. Dust rose from his hair as he shook it, shouting, "No, no! No way!" and pointing at the hero standing with police officers.

Scratch turned to run, back the way he'd come. The police officers fumbled at their hips for their pistols. The big guy pivoted on the ball of one huge foot, and took a step toward his quarry. Ronald, bound and muddy in the middle of the pile, shouted, "Whoo-hoo! Go Scratch!"

Scratch never got any further. He made an awkward stop in the middle of his start, and then swore again, twice as loud as before. He even stopped scratching, as his hands dropped limply to his sides. The officers, weapons now drawn, slowly lowered them until their muzzles pointed at the ground, and then stood, staring. Ronald started another "Whoo-hoo!" but it quickly drooped into a timid, confused silence. The big guy smiled again, this time with his grin stretched almost ear to ear, and made two more long strides in Scratch's direction. He was only one who wasn't confused.

Not that he could say he was expecting it to happen, but certainly, he was not at all surprised to see himself coming at a dead run, from the other direction, to catch up with Scratch.

The two met at Scratch. They smiled at each other, identical friendly smiles, as if each was smiling at his best friend in the whole world. The one behind Scratch reached out with his massive right arm, and dropped a heavy hand on Scratch's right shoulder. The one in front did the same thing, with his hand landing on Scratch's left shoulder. Then they both laughed a big, hearty laugh -- almost in unison.

As their laughter died down, the officers approached them. One of them had his handcuffs out.

"Can we just cuff this one?"

More laughter followed, from the quartet of officers, and from the twin heroes. Ronald started laughing too, like he always did, just to make sure people didn't think he didn't get the joke. Scratch wasn't laughing.

While two of the officers took Scratch to a squad car, the other two asked questions. Each one addressed a different twin, but both asked the same question.

"Who are you?"

One of the big guys offered his hand to shake. "U2. Glad I could be of assistance." The other smiled his friendly smile and said, "Like I said before, the name's U2. Y'know, like the band."

The two officers turned to look at each other, trying to hide their confusion, but hoping to see that the other one understood. Before they could exchange more than a glance, however, they were surprised to see yet another big guy walking up to the other two police officers as they returned from incarcerating Scratch in the squad car. This one approached with hands spread open, calloused palms turned upwards.

"I think that's all of them, officers. That's quite a warren back there. Speedy little rabbits, too! By the way, my name's U2. Y'know, like the band."

Now all the officers were looking to each other, hoping for a sense of comprehension.

Before they could find any, their thoughts were interrupted by a melodic buzzing sound. Each one looked to the nearest of the big guys, and saw a cellphone, encased in brushed aluminum, with a single red LED flashing, attached to the big guy's belt. Each one reached down with the same hand, pulled the device off their hips, and flipped the casing open. They all frowned at what they saw on the display, but only one of them, the last one to arrive, spoke.

"Sorry officers. Got another problem to handle. Guess I'll be off, then."

At this, the other two big guys stepped toward the first. They each held out an arm to him, and he reached out to them. None of the officers were sure whether they had blinked. The teens on the ground, those who were conscious, couldn't say for sure whether they been looking directly at them either. Regardless of the vantage point, all they really knew was that one moment there were three, a triad of outstretched arms, and the next, there was only one of them, leaping high over the nearest wall of junkers, looking back and waving.

The silence that followed was finally broken by Ronald, who started to laugh uncontrollably again. He kept on laughing, until one of the other gang members managed to twist around and kick him in the chest, feet still held in their rusty bonds.

Back to Table of Contents

The Fire of the Fly

Michael Ivan Lowell

Michael Ivan Lowell is the author of THE SUNS OF LIBERTY Series of superhero novels. Lowell holds a PhD in sociology. What has all that education done for him? He's learned how to be a Geek and get paid for it. He lives in Florida with his wife and an army of domesticated beasts.

You can find his novels The Suns of Liberty: Revolution and The Suns of Liberty: Legion at online retailers everywhere. The third book in the series, The Suns of Liberty: Republic, is scheduled to be released later this Fall.

Michael can be found online at www.michaelivanlowell.com, on Facebook, Goodreads, or on Twitter as MichaelILowell and of course, at the Pen & Cape Society.

WHEN INJUSTICE BECOMES LAW, RESISTANCE BECOMES DUTY.  
The Second Great Depression  
In the future, misery scars the land. Democracy is dead. Corporations take control through what they cynically call the Freedom Council. They have the police, the courts, the military, the gangs. They are everywhere. They protect their wealth by any means necessary.

A Man Who Stands Against Armies  
But one man rises to stand in their way. A one man army. A perpetual soldier. His name is The Revolution and he's the world's first superhero.

The Suns of Liberty  
Inspired by his rebellion, the Suns of Liberty, a team of unique heroes, each with their own special skill, are born. They will restore the American republic.

Or die trying.

* * *

In the Not-Too-Distant Future . . .

The sleek, black stealth fighter streaked across the California sky.

The pilot, First Lieutenant Veronica Soto, plotted her course to Lake Tahoe, calculated her flight time, and set a countdown for the release of a single GBU-65/B Massive Ordnance Air Burst—a thermobaric, GPS-guided smart bomb—on the designated target. She called it _the Mother Fucker_ for short.

The bomb would blast its target with the equivalent of fifty tons of TNT. It was like a small nuclear weapon. The flight would take her thirty minutes from Edwards Air Force base.

Operation FLY SWAT was under way.

She flew a single-pilot B-12 Spirit Stealth Bomber, the most sophisticated stealth aircraft in the Air Force armada.

She would need it. Her target was the most dangerous enemy on Earth. A single individual.

A seventeen-year-old girl named Fiona Fletcher.

The Fire Fly.

"Seventeen for a few more minutes, anyway," the lieutenant smirked to herself.

Of course, assassinating an American citizen on American soil was hardly a popular thing to do. The Council had the authority, since they had pretty much given themselves the authority to do anything they wanted ten years ago. The CEO's of the twenty-five largest corporations in America now had the power to write any legislation they wanted and carried a veto over the other three branches of government. All in the name of fighting the good fight. But they still had to proceed with some caution.

The plan was to report the bombing as a case of domestic terrorism carried out a by a pro-Council militia taking revenge on the Fletcher girl for the events in Boston a few months back. Media Corp would repeat the story until people either believed it or knew not to contradict it. That's how things had always worked. And that was the point.

It worked.

* * *

It was Fiona's eighteenth birthday. And she was putting on a show. She loved two things above all others: science and dancing. Right now, she was doing both.

But mostly she was dancing.

She twirled and bowed, shimmied and posed. At once graceful and seductive, she stretched her body, threw her head back, reached her arms behind her, and then she flipped, feet over her head, head over feet, her long hair splaying out behind her. But her feet were not touching the ground. Not during her leap, not before it, and not after it.

She was in midair.

Her long lithe body, her naturally tanned skin, long blonde hair, gorgeous young face, were all enveloped in radiant energy. She glowed in the immense power of her bioluminescence. Yellow-green. Only the whites of her eyes and the pink of her lips, which bloomed like a cherry blossom against the chartreuse glow, remained unaffected.

Her movements would have been graceful enough being performed by a regular girl on a regular stage. But as the Fire Fly, her motions were breathtaking. She glided through the air like a time-lapse photo of light. Hundreds of feet off the ground.

Had she wanted to, she could have transformed into pure light. Had she wanted to, she could have burned Lake Tahoe to a desert, or boiled the water away, reducing it to a muddy crater.

She danced in the air high above the hilltop on which Becky Collins watched her. Becky was athletic, thirty-seven, blonde, and for the past six months, the de facto guardian of the most powerful human being on the planet.

Below where Becky stood, and certainly below Fiona, was a large open field, the grass trampled down, and in many spots, barren entirely. It was filled with onlookers feeling blessed that they got to see the Fire Fly at all, let alone to watch her dance on her eighteenth birthday. Fiona had become the biggest news story in the world, bigger even than the Suns of Liberty themselves, whom most of the world associated her with now anyways.

Few knew the truth.

She'd just as soon kill the Revolution than join his team. He had betrayed her, tricked her. Turned her into this thing. Not that being the Fire Fly didn't come with some pretty cool privileges.

She had invited the group of girls with whom she had become the closest to a special event. No one, including Becky, knew exactly what to expect.

Fiona had built a large open-air stone "Palace" out of the pink and brown granite from the Sierra Nevada. Large pillars and deep pools of shimmering water made up its inner sanctum.

The ability to mold and reshape even the hardest stone and steel was breathtaking to Becky. Fiona's remarkable powers had given her such ability, an ability she executed with intricate precision. And now they _owned_ a miniature palace built into the hillside.

Now, if Becky could just get Fiona to remodel her kitchen!

In the past several weeks, Fiona had grown especially close to a girl Becky knew only as Diana, but whom Fiona had nicknamed Arcadia. A tall, beautiful brunette who was Fiona's own age, and shared a passion for dance as well.

As Becky looked on, Fiona picked 'Arcadia' out of the crowd, swooped down, and, holding her tightly, lifted her into the sky. At the same time, with a single sweep of her hand, Fiona created a solid field of sparkling energy below them. A dance floor of bioluminescence. She gently lowered Arcadia down onto the energy field, and after a moment, the girl found her footing.

Becky felt her jaw clinch as she watched the duo. She retreated back behind a rock formation, left over from Fiona's excavations of the hillside. She didn't want to be seen as she watched them. She couldn't say why that mattered to her.

It just did.

They danced. Arcadia was good. Very good. After a moment, she was matching Fiona, move for move. Mimicking her every motion. Becky brooded. To her, it seemed the girls Fiona had been inviting up into the Palace were slowly but surely molding themselves into little carbon copies of the now famous Fire Fly. Her personality, her likes and dislikes, everything.

It was creepy.

And Fiona herself had changed over these last three months. The quiet, distrustful young girl Becky had found shivering in the woods, naked and betrayed by those she thought had loved her, had transformed into a more flamboyant, witty, and confident young woman.

And yet, the fight with the giant robot called the Man-O-War—that had very nearly destroyed Boston—had taken a very strange toll on her. When Fiona had first explained to Becky how she had defeated the Man-O-War, Becky thought her solution had been ingenious. She'd not realized that there could be long-term side effects for the girl.

Fiona had explained that she had thought back to her initial transformation into the Fire Fly. The Revolution had tricked her into entering the Fire Fly chamber alone—the machine that had killed everyone else it had been tried on—and then he had turned it on. She, too, thought she would be killed. But instead of death, the machine had forced a different change on her. She'd had no choice but to let the machine's energy be absorbed into her. To become one with it.

When she faced the Man-O-War, she tried a similar strategy. She had absorbed the giant machine into her own internal sphere of energy. At least that's how Fiona had described it. It had pierced her pulsating skin, entered her energized organs, and been consumed by them. And just as she had been transformed into the Fire Fly by absorbing bioluminescence, the process of absorbing Man-O-War had also changed her. She was less emotional, more calculating, overly logical. She could be cold as ice. Snarky teenager and calculating machine. It was quite a combination to behold.

But she was also using her powers to help others. Becky was proud of what she had done in Boston. Proud that she was helping these girls. "I am their North Magnetic. They come because they feel betrayed," Fiona had told her when she first started to reach out to the thousands who made the trek to Tahoe every week.

But Becky couldn't help but fear for what Fiona did on her missions to help the girls that she chose to help. She had the power to end a human life at the flick of her finger, and Becky feared that was exactly what she was doing. There were already reports of that kind trickling in from all across the country. They could just have been paranoia from those who feared the Fire Fly rather than worshipped her, but Becky knew firsthand how powerful Fiona really was. It was a power she was not sure anyone should have, let alone an emotionally vulnerable seventeen-year-old girl.

And as the dance ended, Becky knew Fiona would choose another girl to help.

It was like she had become some kind of faith healer. What made Becky especially uncomfortable was the fact that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people below them at any one time, waiting, hoping to be called up. But inevitably, Fiona would send out for a young girl close to her own age. And then, she would "do her thing." Which meant teleporting to wherever the girl told her the trouble was happening. And Fiona would "take care" of it.

Becky had tried to intervene, but Fiona wasn't listening these days. In the last three months, since the events in Boston, she had become the most famous girl on the planet. Becky no longer carried the same weight with her. She wouldn't have known what to tell Fiona to do about the throngs of desperate people, anyway. But she was pretty sure that just picking young girls that reminded Fiona of herself was probably not the best approach.

* * *

Today, Arcadia was allowed to choose one person, a girl from the throng below, and bring her into the Palace. She chose a small, mousey girl with dirty blonde hair named Kristen. She told Fiona, in her shy, quiet voice, that her little sister had been kidnapped by "thugs" and they were threatening to kill her unless her older brother paid them back the money he owed or agreed to do "jobs" for them.

These were the kinds of things people brought to Fiona.

"Do you have a picture?" Fiona asked the girl.

"Yes. They said you would want addresses too."

Fiona took them from the girl and scanned them. Then she lifted her head slightly, concentrating. "Just a sec," she said. Fiona detached an invisible part of her essence and sent it teleporting to Cleveland. She was not sure how she did this. It was second nature, though difficult.

In her mind she could see it all. The street the girl was speaking of, the house. She could travel inside, map out the rooms, see where she needed to go. She spotted the girl's sister, along with many others, in the house. Drugs, guns, trash everywhere. The place was wretched.

In one room, a young tattooed man was handcuffed to a steel pipe that had been built into a concrete wall undoubtedly for the purpose of holding someone indefinitely. He was naked and looked to have been beaten unconscious.

Fiona snapped back. "I see her."

The girl squealed in delight and Arcadia shot Fiona a knowing grin.

Fiona did not grin back.

"There's not much time. I need to go now," Fiona said just as Becky interrupted the group.

"Fiona, its Elders again. The town council has met. They voted to sue if we don't move the Palace," Becky said.

"So let them. We've just as much right to be here as they do."

And with that— _flash!_ —she was gone. In fact, by the time Becky finished letting out her sigh of frustration, Fiona was already in Cleveland.

* * *

The house in Cleveland was in an older neighborhood that had once been an upper-middle-class section of town. Now it was old and dilapidated. The house itself was a classic two-story A-frame, with a big porch and a swing. Or at least what used to be a swing. It had long since broken from its chains, and the rotting carcass was left crumbling on the porch.

Fiona had materialized, glowing in the chartreuse power of the Fire Fly, on the front walk that led to the stairs. If anyone noticed her, they made no fuss. She marched to the front door and passed through.

A millisecond before she moved her molecules through the door, she disappeared. It was so fast it appeared she just passed through, like a ghost. But in order for her to pass through solid objects, she had to phase into the end of the luminescent spectrum that corresponded to x-radiation. The kind of light that is invisible to the human eye. It had taken her a while to get the hang of it. Windows and the places visible light could go were still so much easier. But she was getting better at the ghost thing.

On the other side of the door she materialized but remained invisible. She passed through the small entryway and hung a left through the front living area, into a long hallway. She passed the concrete room where the naked man was chained to the wall. And finally she got to the back den where three members of the gang were hanging out and Kimberly Connors was being held.

The three were taking turns playing video games, smoking pot, and watching the girl. One was fat, one was tall, and one was just plain ugly. None of them looked like guys you'd want to bring home to mom. They all had shaved heads, and a swastika flag hung on one wall right next to an old flag of the Confederacy.

The very sight of it boiled anger through Fiona's mind. She had no tolerance for intolerance.

Fiona strolled into the room and flashed to life in front of them.

"Oh shit!" the tallest one yelled. All three lunged for their pistols. From the terrified expressions on their faces, they knew exactly who she was and probably what she was capable of.

_Well, some of what I'm capable of_ , she thought.

"Let the girl go," Fiona said. "Or I will boil your eyeballs in your brains." _Wow._ That was impressive. And on the fly too. _Anger can make you pretty creative,_ she thought.

The three moved as one. They all simultaneously moved their pistols to aim at Kimberly's head.

Didn't see that coming. Who knew these potheads would have discipline and coordination?

"Fuck you, man! You can't take us all down. I heard you move at the speed of sound or some shit, right? But not with all three of us you can't."

"Yeah," added the fat one ."You might stop one of us, but you ain't stopping us all."

Time for new tactics. "I really like what you've done with the place. What style were you going for? Early dipshit?"

The three geniuses glanced at each other, confused, and then the taller of the three blinked and his face turned red. He started to speak but Fiona cut him off.

"I tell you what, since this is my birthday and I'm feeling generous, I'm gonna give you three fine gentlemen a break."

And with that she was gone.

"Don't fucking move!" the tall one breathed to the others. "Not 'til we know the bitch has gone." Kimberly just whimpered. The first sound she had made since Fiona had entered the house.

And Fiona heard it of course, because by now she was standing right behind the three thugs. Invisible.

She held out her hands and fired a beam from each. From her right hand, where she had more control, she split the beam so that it penetrated the backs of two of the thugs. With her left, she sent a single, more powerful beam into the heart of the taller, more mouthy asshole.

And then she turned up the heat. And materialized.

Not only did the beams burn instantaneous holes in the three men's chest, but they were also focused on the three guns the thugs held. To get the angle right for all three, it took a great deal of concentration. The effect was to incinerate the guns the instant she incinerated their hearts. That way, even if the men's reflex reaction in their death throes was to squeeze their triggers, the guns would be burned to oblivion before they could do it.

Blood, tissue, and other gore exploded from the gaping holes left in the men's chests and from their severed wrists, which were burned away along with their weapons. It sloshed all over Kimberly, who screamed in mortal terror. She collapsed to the floor and scampered toward the corner of the room, terrified even of Fiona.

"I'm the Fire Fly, Kimberly. Your sister sent me here to save you. You're okay now."

Kimberly peered up at Fiona through her blood-stained face and meekly breathed, "Really?"

"Really." Fiona looked down at the thugs, blood pooling around their bodies. "Becky's not going to be happy about this. But I think they look better that way, don't you?" Fiona frowned at the gory corpses. "And its light speed, dumb ass. I move at light speed."

Kimberly started to cry again.

"Be right back."

She flashed into the room with the young man. He was badly hurt, and she saw fresh wounds that were still bleeding. Fiona instantly cauterized all his cuts, which also brought him back to consciousness.

She'd seen enough gang signs in Boston to know a gang-related tattoo when she saw one. The Resistance had been obsessed with tracking them, convinced the gangs in Boston worked for the Freedom Council. Many gangs used colors, others used body art. In Boston they tended to use both. "You in a gang, Romeo?" Fiona asked him.

"No."

Fiona narrowed her eyes.

"I mean, yeah," he said, bowing his head.

She looked down between his legs. "Cold in here, huh, big fella?"

"Yeah."

It was, actually. The concrete trapped the morning's coolness, or they were pumping air in there on purpose to torment the poor guy.

"Well, I'm letting you out and letting you live on one condition. You tell your boys that they had better protect that girl in the other room and her family. If you don't, if I hear anything has happened to any of them, I'll come back here and do to you all what I've done to those racist assholes in the other room." Fiona peered right down into his eyes. "You feel me?"

"Yeah, yeah, I feel ya," he grunted.

Fiona burned away his cuffs.

She retreated back into the den where Kimberly was still curled into the corner. "Come on, honey. It's time to get you to your sister."

Fiona led her outside, where a few folks had now gathered. It seemed her arrival had drawn some attention, after all. "All right, I need you not to move a muscle, okay?"

Kimberly nervously nodded her head.

"Don't be afraid, this will just last a second." Fiona squinted and reconsidered. "Maybe it's best you just close your eyes. Don't move a muscle," she repeated. Her hands flew up and she opened her palms wide. Beams of light shot out and a wide field of light surrounded Kimberly on all sides.

Flash!

"Okay, you can open them now."

They were standing in the middle of the Palace at Lake Tahoe.

It had taken exactly one second.

Kimberley was completely thrown, not sure what she was seeing.

But her sister, Kristen, saw her immediately, and tears began to stream down her cheeks. She squealed her sister's name and rushed toward her, and in the same moment that Kimberly realized who it was, Kristen had her in a bear hug.

"Oh, thank you! Thank you!" Kristen cried, smiling at Fiona through her tears. "How bad are you hurt?" Kristen asked her sister, releasing her from the death grip, trying to see where all the blood was coming from.

"No, it's not my blood."

'Whose blood is it?" came an accusatory question from behind them.

Becky.

"They resisted," said Fiona, defiantly.

"Nice," Arcadia laughed and held up a high five to Fiona, who returned it as carefully as she could, still glowing in her own power. She didn't want to rip her friend's arm off, after all. Especially with Becky watching.

"This is not a game, girls."

Arcadia shot Becky a look that said she was the biggest prude on the planet and that she just didn't get it. There was also a bit of _fuck off_ in the look _._

"Can we not do this here?" Fiona said, nodding toward the two weeping sisters.

Becky's eyes shot past Fiona, and it was in that very instant that something tweaked Fiona's consciousness. It was like a memory that flashed for a second, or an image from a dream recalled and then forgotten just as fast.

Fiona shook her head.

Had she heard something? She listened, but Becky was squawking. She squinted, tried to concentrate. Something was wrong, but what the hell was it?

"Fiona!" Becky finally barked. And the girl peered up at her, confusion clearly mapped across her face. "Are you okay, honey?" Becky said in a softer tone, recognizing a look on Fiona's face she'd seen before..

"Yeah, uh, what were you saying?"

Becky motioned behind her and Fiona turned. "They wouldn't take no for an answer."

It was Fred Elders, mayor of South Lake Tahoe, flanked by two state troopers from the CHP. "Ms. Fletcher," Elders said as politely as he could, but his impatience was clear in his voice, "I can't hold off any longer. The city council voted to take legal action if you don't move this encampment. Now, you're on city property here, and this commune, or whatever you call it, is chasing away all the tourists."

"What do you call those," Fiona asked him, motioning to the thousands camped out below them.

"They don't spend any money. It's hurting our bottom line. Our town lives and dies on tourist dollars, and if I can't get you to move, then the state's gonna have to do it. Now, you don't want that kind of trouble."

One of the state troopers beside Elders nodded, "Nope, you sure don't."

But Fiona wasn't listening. The sound was back. Or was it a memory? She still couldn't tell. But something was wrong. And as she concentrated on what it was, a solitary chill of light and energy ran down her spine. A feeling of complete and total dread like she had never felt washed over her.

She lifted her burning eyes to Elders. And the old man wilted. The power that radiated off the girl was immense. It grabbed every molecule in the air and suffocated them.

"Uh . . .okay, now. We can talk about this. I'm not threatening you, now. You know that, right? We just want to talk, that's all."

"Something's wrong," Fiona said finally, looking past Elders, past the troopers.

"Oh, no," Becky said. "I hate it when she says that."

* * *

Lieutenant Commander Veronica Soto was locked on.

"I have missile lock and am preparing to fire on target . . .now." She said over her throat mike.

Her B-12 Stealth fighter was blasting across the California Central Valley.

She flipped up the cover on the launch console and pressed the red button.

" _Roger that, Commander,"_ came back the reply from Edwards AFB.

Below her, the missile bay doors opened and the GBU-65/B dropped from its holders. The weapon ignited and shot through the sky, seeking out its target ahead.

Veronica checked her lipstick in the small mirror she had attached to her dashboard instrument panel and smiled. _Perfect._ "Bird's away."

The missile zoomed ahead at breathtaking speed. It disappeared over the horizon. Veronica watched it on her radar.

"Two minutes to impact," she told the boys at Edwards.

* * *

Fiona flashed away.

She reappeared a quarter of a mile away and a thousand feet above the encampment. She still wasn't sure what she was looking for. But the feel of it was wrong, threatening. She scanned the sky. Nothing.

She scanned the lake. Calm and normal.

Her awareness of the luminescent spectrum wasn't all knowing. She could sense things, feel them. But on a broad scale. The details were elusive. She wondered if she would get better over time, or if like sight and hearing, it simply was what it was.

Her eyes probed skyward again. Then she saw it. Moving fast, unmistakable. The missile had to be as long as a city bus. Impossibly long for something moving so fast. As it got closer, Fiona could see it was as long as _two_ city buses.

The Council was trying to kill her!

As if.

Her mind flashed to Becky. A lump burned in her throat as she thought of her hurt. _No, that was not going to happen._

She teleported right in front of the missile. The bomb itself was only about the size of a person. Its vicious fire trail was what had made it appear to be so long. Fiona had never seen such a weapon up close and in action.

She lifted both arms, brought her hands together, and blasted the missile with the most powerful beam of energy she could muster. She would take no chances. She wanted to incinerate the thing, midair.

She didn't.

Below, Becky, Arcadia, Elders, and the others had run out to see what the commotion was. When Fiona had teleported, some in the throng had spotted her floating far above them in the clear California sky. That started a rumble in the crowd as everyone looked up. Then they saw the smoke trail of the missile. The rumble of the crowd grew into a roar.

The brilliant beam of light shot out from Fiona's hands. From the ground, the beam's flash was like a long mirror reflecting sunlight for split second, high above.

The flash came first.

It was like the sun exploding across the sky.

Then sound. A deep, ominous BOOM. They could feel it in the pits of their chests.

For Fiona, it consumed her world. Fire, heat, and unbridled energy swirled around her. For the first time in her life as the Fire Fly she had met a conventional weapon that could hurt her.

The shockwave blasted her across the sky. The bomb hadn't burned up like she'd expected. It had exploded right in her face. The fire and heat was but a mere irritation, but the shockwave hit her full force She had not been prepared for it, and as she reeled, she knew that the only chance she had of saving Becky, of saving the others, was to absorb the explosive power of the detonation.

It all happened in the course of single second. Fiona blasted her energy across the sky, creating a massive shield against the deadly energy. But the blast was simply colossal. It pushed her even as she absorbed it into her body. There was simply too much of it. She closed her eyes and pushed back. And to her absolute horror she realized that she was falling not just out of the sky but out of consciousness.

Fiona splashed into the waters of the lake, sending an almighty gout of water and foam high into the air.

The shockwave hit next. She had lost consciousness only for a second. And she flew out of the waves as water geysered again—at the speed of light. She held out her palms and built the massive wall of energy for a second time. She literally held the power of the blast in the palms of her hands. She pushed with all her might away from the shore, away from the Palace and her throngs of followers. Away from Becky and Arcadia and the Connors girls. The energy of the blast shot off in the other direction. And then, as a reflex, she teleported back to the Palace. And collapsed.

* * *

Darkness. She dreamed of darkness. Stars spread out above her, and the great glorious colors of the Milky Way galaxy beckoned her. She wanted to follow them, to go to them. To seek them out and discover the secrets of the universe. It seemed that all she had to do was will it and she would be there.

But a voice was breaking the black. A voice she knew. A voice she loved. A voice she needed to return to.

Fiona opened her eyes. And she heard Becky scream her name once more. But her head was throbbing and all she could hear was an awful hiss. Fiona shook her head, tried to get the water out of her ears or whatever was making the god-awful noise.

Fiona spun to her feet—and realized that she was in human form. And completely naked in front of the Connors girls, Arcadia, and worst of all, old man Elders and the two troopers. The mayor had the good sense to look away. But the troopers were getting an eyeful. _Wonderful._

She transformed back into the Fire Fly. And scowled at the troopers.

The sound was still ringing in her ears.

"Fiona, the wave!" Becky yelled at her, pointing to the lake.

"Ms. Fletcher, please, you have to stop it."

"What—" Fiona turned to look out toward the lake and saw what they were talking about.

_The hissing sound._ An enormous wave had pulled the water on their side of Tahoe way out, and now what could only be described as a massive _tsunami_ was headed toward the other side. Toward South Lake Tahoe. She'd protected her little enclave, but now the wave threatened the very people who wanted to take her home from her.

Fiona scoffed. "I'm not such an irritation now, huh?"

"Fiona!" Becky breathed like a scandalized mother.

Fiona raised her chin. "Drop your opposition."

The mayor's face turned red, and he stammered and stumbled on his words.

"Fiona!" Becky was shouting now as she watched the wave. It was approaching the first set of boats. In only moments they would be capsized.

"There's no time! Please!" Elders begged.

"Not so tough now, huh?" shot Arcadia.

Becky seethed at her. The girl would do or say anything to get in Fiona's good favor!

"Okay, anything you want, just please save my city!"

"See, that wasn't so hard." Fiona teased.

_Flash!_ She was gone.

Fiona materialized just behind the wave—and watched in horror as it swallowed a sailboat with three on board. A luxury yacht was swept up by the monster wave next. The big boat fought against the swell and finally tipped. Rolling under the wave, it smashed into the bubbling water. Tiny figures fell, slipped from the deck, as it turned, and Fiona watched as they tumbled into freefall.

She saw a girl no older than herself, blonde hair, string bikini. Probably very pretty. Screaming, fighting to get inside, as if that would save her. She slipped and rolled down the deck, slammed against the yacht's guardrails, and went limp, only to go spinning head over heels into the deadly, monstrous surf. The ship and it occupants were consumed by the roiling waters. There was nothing Fiona could do for them. There just wasn't time. She had to stop the wave from striking the shore and the inlet where a whole host of boats lay helpless in the gigantic wave's path.

She shot out a massive wall of energy in front of the wave, and like water sloshing in a bathtub, the great wall of water hit the barrier of energy with an all-powerful BOOM! Water wrenched backwards with a pounding, colossal roar.

_Great._ But now it was headed back toward the encampment. Fiona raised another wall behind her as the great wave passed through her now ethereal form. _Why didn't I think to turn to light-form when the missile blasted?_

The water sloshed against the back wall and headed again toward South Lake Tahoe, but some of the water began to slosh in other directions as well. Fiona raised two more walls, boxing the water in from all sides.

It took twenty long minutes before the water calmed enough for Fiona to dissolve the energy walls. But when she did, she was miles away. Because . . .

She had gone to seek revenge.

* * *

Veronica Soto never saw it coming. One second she was sitting in her cockpit watching as the impact spread across the target area and wondering why the signal was coming back so goofy. It was a direct hit and yet the reverberations seemed to be going psycho.

The next second, the world exploded.

The lieutenant found herself in freefall. She'd blacked out. Her whole body was numb. When her brain finally registered what was happening—that she was falling, from 30,000 feet, toward the Earth—that's when she noticed the blood.

Her arms, her legs, she still had them, but they were ripped to shreds. Those shreds flipped and flopped and rippled in the wind as she fell. She should have been in agony, but she felt nothing.

She peered down at the ground below her as she spun. The great Sierra Nevada mountain range rising to meet her. And she realized that the ground was coming up far too fast. She'd had no time to hit the ejection seat. She hoped she still had a chute in her suit. She hoped it wasn't ripped to shreds like the rest of her.

* * *

Fiona watched as the stealth fighter exploded in front of her. The fireball was tremendous. She could have just burned the jet into oblivion, but instead she had blasted the engines and waited to see what would happen. She thought the plane would just fall from the sky.

And when it did she was going to incinerate the parachute of the pilot and let he or she plummet to the Earth. That seemed like it would be sufficient payback. _Payback is a bitch._ And she was feeling very bitchy at the moment.

When, contrary to what she had been expecting, the aircraft had exploded and flung the pilot free, Fiona had let out a whoop and a laugh that she had almost felt guilty for.

Almost.

* * *

The lieutenant hit the ejection button on her suit with the bloody clump of flesh that used to be her right arm and hand.

The chute opened.

But she kept falling. The chute was ripped and some part of the mechanism wasn't working right. It took it a full fifteen seconds to fully unfurl and even when it did, the rips in the fabric were limiting its effectiveness. Her descent was twice as fast as it should have been.

Veronica Soto fell to the Earth. When she hit, she bounced. Blood splattered into the air. Limbs, already torn and burnt, shattered. Her body lay twisted unnaturally in the green forest of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Bent and curved in ways no human body should be. A pool of red gathering around it.

* * *

Back in Tahoe, Becky pondered what it meant for a teenage girl to be given superpowers. Why is it so many stories and myths revolve around just that idea? Hormones raging through them, moral judgments not yet fully formed.

At that very moment, Fiona materialized in front of her. She simply walked past her, glowing in her powerful Fire Fly form, head down, not making eye contact. Becky knew where she would go. The savior of mankind was going to go play a video game.

In fact, she already had.

Becky gave her several moments and then followed her in. She was surprised to find Fiona in the den, sitting alone on the couch in human form. The fading light of the afternoon sun was bleeding through the window. She had changed into sweats. She just sat there in the half light.

She'd not touched the video game console.

"There are still a lot of people out there," Becky said, finally.

"I know." Fiona peered up at her and then glanced away out the window. "I'm tired. I can't help them all."

"It's hard to fight the good fight, isn't it?"

Fiona kept on staring. Finally she took a deep breath. "What is the good fight?"

Becky smiled and shrugged. "I don't know."

"I'm good though, right?" Fiona's eyes were wide now, child-like. Sometimes it was hard to remember that she was only eighteen years old. Becky always found it jarring when she was reminded of just how young Fiona really was.

Becky smiled and nodded. "Yes."

"I mean, if I do things they're good, right? By definition, because I'm doing them for the right reasons."

Becky shook her head. "I don't know, honey. Maybe right is just _right_ , wrong is just _wrong_. It doesn't matter who does them or why."

Fiona sat there a long time and Becky finally strolled over and sat next to her. They held hands and were quiet until the sun faded behind the trees.

Fiona rose from the couch. "Where are you going?" Becky asked.

"To fight the good fight."

Back to Table of Contents

Firedrake: A Frosty Reception

by T. Mike McCurley

About the author: T. Mike McCurley started writing superhero fiction in 2004, and his short stories soon formed the backbone of what became known as the world of The Emergence, describing events and players in a world of metahumanity that began in 1963 and has continued to grow since. From there came the stories of the metahuman cop known as Firedrake, whose adventures have now filled three books, with a fourth in the works.

Follow him on Twitter: @TMikeMcCurley

Facebook: Author T. Mike McCurley

www.tmikemccurley.com

www.penandcapesociety.com/t-mike-mccurley/

* * *

Flagstaff, Arizona

August 9

0755 hours

"Oddest damn thing I ever saw," the detective said into the phone. "I've seen dead folks in all kinds of situations, but I ain't never seen one froze to death in the middle of an Arizona summer.

It was hot enough in his office to remind him exactly what that summer meant. The tiny air conditioner unit in the window rattled and wheezed as it pushed sightly cooler air that barely kept the room livable. Outside, he knew, he could add a good twenty degrees to the temperature.

"You stated the victim was a metahuman?" asked the voice on the other end of the line.

"Yes, ma'am, he was. Not, y'know, big time stuff like y'all are probably used to, but Shake was fast. Faster than anyone from around here. They called him that 'cause he could shake a pursuit in no time flat."

"I see."

"We all knew him. He was a dope runner for the Broken Angels. That's an up and coming gang we're dealing with. Mostly meth and a little weed, but lately they've been bringing in Hype and Kamikaze from California. He had half a dozen bindles of Kamikaze in his pocket when he died."
"And he froze to death?"

"Yeah. Doc says he was fighting it but didn't make it. He's got frostbite burns all over, too. Even if Shake hadn't been the vic, we'd have been calling you, 'cause I have no doubt whoever did this isn't . . ."

She broke in as he paused, knowing from past experience that he was searching for a word other than 'normal', and not wishing to listen to him fumble through his vocabulary.

"This information will be passed on to Director Hart, detective. Someone will make contact with you shortly."

"Okay, well, I wanted to—"

She once again cut him off. "Not meaning to sound rude, sir, but I am not an investigator. It will save you time and the effort of repeating yourself if you wait for the call."

"Oh. Yeah, I guess that makes sense."

"Thank you, sir. Again, contact will be made soon."

The line disconnected with a dull click, and Detective Max Lahey was left staring at a silent handset. With a shrug, he dropped it back onto the cradle. While he could appreciate the businesslike manner in which the lady at Metahuman Response had conducted the call, he himself was in favor of a more congenial discussion.

* * *

Washington, D.C.

August 9

1421 hours

Drake looked across the desk through half-closed eyes. Colleen Hart, the Director of Metahuman Response, had been railing at him for almost half an hour about his failings, and he was tired of hearing her words. Factoring in his jet lag, he was actually amazed he had managed to stay awake this long. Her voice had become a drone in the background, a sound that existed only to lull him further and further into a relaxed state. He felt a tugging sensation on his eyelids as they fluttered and the room seemed to be illuminated by a strobe light. Slowly it slipped into gray and then to black.

"Drake!" Hart roared. He jerked awake, eyes blinking a rapid beat. Behind him, his wings rustled and his tail thumped against the floor as he sat up higher in the chair.

"What?" he asked, matching her volume with his own deep tone.

"Stay awake while I'm talking to you!"

"You ain't talking, you're bitching. You coulda done that in an email, and I wouldn't have had to come in."

"And you wouldn't have read it."

"Well, no, but I'd still be home and asleep. So there's that."

Hart took in a long slow breath, a calming gesture she used often while dealing with the big reptilian booster. When that was ineffective, she moved to Plan B and sparked a fresh cigarette. Twin columns of thin grey smoke issued from her nose and she shook her head. For his part, Drake tried to hide his amusement as he realized he was—for the moment, at least—winning in their continual battle of wills. He failed miserably, as his lip peeled back across his fangs and a sudden chuckle erupted from within his chest, accompanied by a gout of sulfur-scented breath.

It was not everyone who could hold their own in a meeting with the seven-foot dragon that was Agent Francis Drake. Of those that could, Colleen Hart, the Director of the Department of Metahuman Affairs, was one of even fewer who could do so without being intimidated. Her position required her to be in contact with some of the most destructive geneboosters on the planet, and she rarely ever so much as mussed the silk of her tailored suits.

"Agent Drake," she said, her tone low and words delivered in a slow, methodical manner, as if speaking to an angry child. "While you captured your assigned target, the collateral damage to the surrounding infrastructure is going to be difficult to explain to our Senate oversight committee."

"The chick throws energy bolts and blows shit up! Did you think she was gonna come without making a mess?"

Hart tapped ash from her cigarette and drew in a another lungful of smoke. As opposed to the rest of her fastidiously maintained office, the ashtray was full almost to the point of overflow with retired, crushed butts, their white surfaces marred only slightly with a trace of her pale lip gloss.

"I will not debate the issue further. Instead, much as it amazes me, I have received a personal request for your assistance."

Drake leaned forward in his chair, his interest suddenly piqued. Gone was the banter of a moment ago. His eyes narrowed as he tried to read the documents in the open folder on the desktop. From his angle, though he could read nothing. He could make out aphoto of a body and what appeared to be the interior of a house, but that was all.

"Apparently you know a Max Lahey, who is a police officer in Arizona?"

Drake rolled his eyes and laughed. "Yeah, I know him. Worked with him years back. Long before I worked for you. Back when it was me and Monster on our own."

The mention of Drake's younger brother pushed Hart into motion. She knew if she did not distract him further at this point, he would find a reason to complain about the conditions in which his mentally challenged sibling was kept. She slid the dossier across the desk, careful to jerk back her hand before she actually touched him.

"He called with a case, and the followup call established that he knew you. Consequently, it is now your assignment. The short story is that they found a body, frozen to death, in a tenement without so much as air conditioning. Local gang member, as the detective explained, but also a metahuman . . .as was whoever froze him. The long story, you can read in that file while you're on the plane to Flagstaff."

"So will the plane at least land this time?" he asked. Hart's usual method of transport was to have Drake shipped via military aircraft and allowing him to jump out, using his wings to glide down. It allowed for a certain level of stealth and occasionally a dramatic entrance, but in the instance of meeting with law enforcement it would be far more convenient to simply meet them at the airport.

She paused, and Drake silently cursed as he realized she was considering his recent behavior and taking that into account. One day, he knew, he would really need to learn to keep his mouth shut.

* * *

Flagstaff, Arizona

August 10

1033 hours

Max Lahey was waiting when the plane touched down, and although he did flinch once when Drake poked his scaly head out of the door, he regained his composure without delay and greeted the booster with a hearty handshake.

"How've you been?" Drake asked as he folded himself into the Chevrolet SUV that Max was driving. His wings were cramped, and he knew without doubt that he would have pain from sitting with his tail cinched up behind his back. The safety belt not stretching far enough around his massive torso was a foregone conclusion.

"Other than this case? Pretty good. Mia got her first adult tooth last month, Sean is nine going on forty, and Alyssa for some strange reason has stayed married to me."

"You'd think she woulda learned better by now," Drake quipped as Max drove them out of the airport property and onto the city streets. He drove with the effortless grace and speed of a seasoned street officer, using one lane after another to cut through traffic with little effort.

"No kidding. Eh, one day she'll figure it out."

Max turned into an alley and slalomed around the Dumpsters behind local businesses, drifting through one alley and into another, and coming out next to a ramshackle building. The paint, once white, was now a dull, dirty gray and peeling. The porch roof had been supported by four carved posts, though one of them had succumbed to age and weather. It had broken about a third of the way down, leaving part of the roof sagging. Most of the flyspecked windows had at least one crack in them, and some had been shattered. Max parked and killed the engine, jerking a thumb toward the structure.

"This is where we found him," he explained. "Thought you might wanna look here first."

Drake nodded sagely and exited the vehicle, stretching his wings out wide and thrashing his tail about to break loose the kinks.

Yellow tape crisscrossed the entryway to the building, and two large padlocks secured the door. Max produced keys and opened them both, locking them together and placing them on the ground.

"Got locked inside a building once 'cause I left the lock hanging," he explained. "My partner thought it was funny as hell. The Chief? Not so much."

He pulled on the handle and the door opened with a shriek of rusted hinges. A blast of hot air rushed out to meet them, the ambient air heated even further having been sealed for days as a crime scene. Inside, it was easily a hundred and twenty degrees. Sweat began to run from from Max's face, and he felt it inside his suit as well. Drake seemed unaffected, strolling casually through the room and examining everything he could see. Light filtered in through a pair of skylights and a few windows, illuminating some sections in stark clarity, while leaving deep shadows elsewhere.

"The techs cleaned up most of it," Max said as he and Drake stepped into the main room, what might have once been a living room. He fished out a small flashlight from one of his pockets and shined it into a dim corner. There was still an outline on the floor where the body had been sprawled. "There was evidence of a gunfight: shell casings, spent slugs, some buckshot pellets. They found a couple of bloodstains, but none were related to our stiff."

"So these Broken Angels . . .you know who they got a beef with?" Drake asked, using a light of his own to scan the areas the sun didn't cover.

"The Six-Three Cutters had a hold on the drug trade here until the Angels started taking it over. Never heard of them running with a meta before, but I guess there's a first time for everything."

"We're all over these days," Drake said with a smile that had been known to terrify grown men. "You think these Cutters could be the ones?"

"Well, no one has turned up any evidence to say conclu—"

"You, Max. Just you. Do you think they did it? Don't think about the lawyers and the boxes of evidence and shit. You're the guy on the street. Tell me what you believe."

Max stood in silence for a moment before nodding his head. "Yeah. I think probably so. It's the only thing that makes sense. None of the other gangs get this far up north. The Cutters have always held them back. I mean, until the Angels showed up."

Drake made a chuckling sound. "That's good enough for me. I trust your judgment."

"Yeah, but you can't get a warrant based on my judgment."

"Who says I need a warrant?" Drake asked. "I'm just gonna go talk to them."

"Don't screw up my case, man. I've got men in this working their asses off, and I damned sure don't want it to be in vain."

"Not an issue," Drake assured him, hands raised in a gesture of surrender. "I'm just working the meta angle here. Y'all got a booster freezing people alive, and I sure as hell wanna find out who it is."

Max was satisfied with the declaration, and he continued to show Drake around the scene despite the fact that the heat was taking a toll on his body. It wasn't until they were back in the SUV, with the air conditioning turned to its highest setting and with a bottle of cool water from a chest in the back of the vehicle, that he realized how much it taken out of him.

"Jesus, Drake," he said, sipping slowly on the water. "I gotta start watching what I'm doing."

"Sorry about that," Drake said. "I'm totally at home in the heat and I didn't think about you having problems."

"I usually don't, but that place, man . . ."

"Take your time," Drake urged, slipping a cell phone from his pocket. He tapped information on the tiny keys with the tip of a talon. He typed in a quick description of what he had seen inside the warehouse, knowing that if he simply relied on memory he would likely forget something very important. He had the official report, with all its accompanying photos, but everything was different when viewed in person. Documenting it from his own point of view kept his memory clear.

After some time had passed, Max proclaimed himself ready to proceed and they drove away from the beaten house. He drove Drake through the outskirts of the city, through to the warehouse district where the Six-Three Cutters made their home. Graffiti splashed the walls of every building in sight, some of it decent street art but primarily signs and phrases coded for other gangs. It was nothing new to the detective nor to his passenger.

What caught Drake's attention was the lack of people. With any operations he had ever conducted in a gang-ruled area, there were street soldiers in place both as security for the working gangers and as visible muscle to deter an incursion by the gang's opponents. Here there was nothing.

"They all go to church or something?" he asked. Max chuckled.

"Prime dope-selling hours deeper in town," he explained. "They're making bank and dodging our gang units. There are signs up, though."

He pointed to the graffiti as they passed a bar that was closed until later in the evening.

"Crown pattern. It's on this side of the building so we keep going this direction. It indicates where the King can be found at the moment."

Drake nodded as if he understood what the man was saying. Trusting the detective with the street savvy years of patrol had given him, Drake simply sat back to enjoy the ride. His relaxation was short-lived, however, as they drifted up near a rusted warehouse with an open door.

"We're here," Max said. He checked around them, seeing no other vehicles in the area.

"Sweet. Let's go see who's home," Drake said, opening his door before the car was even in park. He stepped out, his size seventeen feet landing on the gravel with a crunch. Max dug under his seat, fishing out out a spare magazine for his pistol and dropping it in his pocket. Cops did not generally come to this section without backup, and usually that meant the entire gang unit. Operating with Drake, however, carried its own set of risks and rewards. One got close to the truth in a big hurry, but one could also find that the odds were definitely stacked in the enemy's favor.

"What do you think?" Drake asked as they neared the doorway. "Looks like an invite to me."

"Seems so," Max agreed. He followed Drake as the enormous booster simply walked through the gap. Within seconds, they were staring at one of the Six-Three Cutters, across the barrel of a large-frame revolver.

"This is Cutter turf!" the youth said in a voice just a little too aggressive and cocksure.

Drake laughed aloud. "You honestly think I'm gonna piss myself over that little popgun?" He reached beneath his left arm, gripped the butt of the weapon that hung in the holster there, and dragged it out: a massive, slab-sided handgun with a bore that looked large enough to crawl into.

"This is full of high explosive rounds," he said in a casual tone, as if he was describing the weather, or a rock. "I use this to shoot boosters. Now you can bounce a slug from that .38 off my scaly ass, but you better know I'm gonna shoot back. With this. At your funeral, there won't be enough of you left to fill a kid-sized coffin, and your mom's gonna have to wonder why they couldn't go open casket. So you call it, slick. Do we talk or do we call a janitor in here to squeegee you off the walls?"

The revolver drooped toward the floor and then dropped from the fingers of the Cutter to clatter as it landed at his feet. He took a step back, raising his hands up in submission.

"So what you want?" he asked. Even with the weapon on the floor, he maintained a semblance of invulnerability and superiority, seeming to act as though he was merely tolerating the presence of the two badges in his sanctum.

"We wanna talk to the King," Max said. "Business."

The thug looked at the cop for some time, finally nodding his head and motioning for them to follow behind. He kept looking over his shoulder at Drake, unable to suppress the shudders that ran down his spine. Happy to continue the impression, Drake favored him with a smile that had been known to make lifelong convicts quiver. Somewhere in the brains of man is a tiny spark that remembers the mythical dragon, and Francis Drake had grown accustomed to fanning that spark into a terrified flame.

For his part, the Cutter merely picked up the pace and led them to the opposite side of the warehouse, weaving past boxes that carried no visible markings. A new set of doors was there, this one closed.

"Yo, King Cutter," the thug called out. "Cops. They said they got biz."

A thin man with a hawklike nose and a long knife sheathed at his left hip stepped out from behind a crate. He looked at Max with a dismissive glance, but Drake made him take notice. The massive, clawed feet, the tiger-stripe patterned BDU trousers, the huge pistols holstered beneath each heavily muscled arm, and the elongated triangular head that appeared to be simply there as a carrier for the shining fangs and pointed teeth, all tended to attract more than the lions share of attention wherever he went, and the warehouse was no different.

"Yup. I'm a dragon. What do you want? An autograph?" Drake asked.

"I don't see one like you every day," King Cutter said. He walked with slow, measured steps, looking Drake up and down as he moved.

"Weird," Drake answered. "I see me every day in the mirror. You know, when I shave," he added, dragging a claw along the line of his chin. The sound it made was not pleasant.

King Cutter wheeled on his subordinate. "You bring cops in here?" he demanded. "You just let them walk right in?"

"I tried to stop them, King, I—"

"Get out of my face, Barry. Go find Jet and Star. Bring them here to me. Get it right or . . . Yeah. I think you know what happens." His hand trailed across the sheath of the knife at his hip in an obscene caress.

"Got it," the thug replied with a rapid nodding of his head. He took off for the door through which Drake and Max had entered.

King Cutter turned back to Drake and Max. "What brings you here today . . .without a warrant?" he asked, smiling in a manner not entirely unlike that in which Drake frequently did. The expression might have generated fear in his subordinates, but it certainly had no effect of Drake.

"Looking for the booster that ganked Shake the other day," Drake said.

"You waste no time with small talk, huh?" responded the Cutter. "Direct. I like that. Could use to see a little more of that in my boys sometimes."

"Well, seeing as how I'm not here to educate you on group harmonics and personal growth, how about you answer my question?"

The Cutter laughed, shaking his head back and forth. He stepped away from the two cops, moving further into the warehouse and then seating himself in a leather recliner beside a miniature refrigerator. An end table with a bottle of Hennessey and an ashtray marked this as his personal chamber for the area, a portable throne from which he could hold court. Sitting in the chair gave him a psychological boost of power.

"What if I don't want to?" he asked. "It ain't like you're gonna shoot me or nothing. The two of you are cops. That ain't how it works."

Drake sucked at a tooth and then nodded. "You're right," he said. "We ain't gonna shoot you unless it's necessary. That being said, maybe I should let you see the sights. From altitude. I mean, I see a citizen asking me for help on looking over his distribution routes. It would only be too kind for me to take him into the air and let him get a look."

He flexed his wings for emphasis and the Cutter paled for a second, and then regained his composure.

"So we hired some muscle. So what?"

"Who's hiring out?"

"The Brotherhood," King Cutter answered, his tone implying that he had never heard a less intelligent question in his life. "Seems like you oughta know about 'em, being a booster and all. Hell, maybe you could get a real job with them and stop being a rat-ass cop!"

"A job with them? To do what? Knock off Jolt slingers? Make fifty bucks working for your scrawny ass?"

King laughed. "I wish it had been fifty! The Brotherhood ain't cheap."

"Well, you put me in touch with them, and I'll get you a Patriot coloring book. That should about even the score. I've seen them things on eBay, slick, and they ain't cheap either."

"Look, man, I ain't saying shit no more. I don't care about you being a cop coming up in here," he said, pointing a finger at Max. "And some big-ass dragon looking bitch of a genebooster? You ain't scaring nobody."

He pushed back in the chair, unfolding it and elevating his feet. As he did so, the door behind Drake opened. More than a dozen laughing, jeering voices washed over him and he looked over his shoulder to see a group of raggedly dressed young men, most in their late teens, but a few older. They carried an astounding variety of weapons and handled them with a casual ease. Rifles and shotguns seemed to be the preference, though handguns abounded and one particularly large ganger had a massive sledgehammer.

"Meet the Six-Three Cutters, cops," the gang boss said with a guttural laugh. He held up his cell phone, showing off the fact that it was on. In the group another phone was lifted by Barry, the thug who had escorted them into the sanctum, and Drake knew how they had been caught. Worse than that, he could see that the Cutters had a clear line of fire without jeopardizing their leader.

"Take big boy back there," Drake told Max, jerking a clawed thumb at King Cutter. "I'll deal with the rest."

In response to his words, the rest of the gang brought their weapons to bear. Drake felt his lips peel back, exposing rows of glistening fangs. A deep, bass rumbling sound built deep in his chest and erupted as laughter with a demonic cast to its tone. His tongue flicked out as if to taste the air and a second later a thick stream of golden and red flame shot from his mouth to splash onto the floor in front of the men. He swept it from left to right, building a wall of fire between them. He pushed Max back with his right hand, essentially throwing him at the gang leader and interposing his own bulk for a moment as gunfire erupted.

Rather than drop to the floor as the group might have expected from their prey, Drake leaped into the air, his wings pumping. Another fiery blast spat from his throat, this one close enough to spatter flame onto the feet of the front ranks. They jumped back and many of them dropped their weapons and ran for the door. Others adjusted their point of aim and continued to fire, and Drake felt a few bullets get past his armored hide. Roaring in pain, he flew into the shadows of the ceiling, banking hard and then diving to engage his attackers once more from a different angle.

Max Lahey landed atop the gang boss, his sudden arrival tipping the recliner and sending them both sprawling. He rolled twice, losing his grip on his weapon and hearing it skitter away. With a curse, he made one final roll and came up in a crouch. King Cutter was slowly staggering to his feet, a long-bladed knife in his hand. Max remembered all through the years being shown videos of knife defense and the difficulties of it being done without serious harm. He flashed back to the Tueller drill, where he was taught that twenty-one feet could be covered and a stabbing occur before he could even get his weapon out of the holster and on target. His sidearm was gone, so even an attempt at a quick draw was out of the question. The derringer he carried in an ankle holster might as well have been at home.

"Gonna cut ya," the ganger said. Max braced himself for the fight.

Another blast of fire, this time from above and on an oblique that shattered their ranks, and the gang broke. Weapons fell unheeded as escape overpowered the desire to avenge their leaders honor. Those with burning patches on their clothing slapped at them to extinguish the flames even as they ran. Above them, Drake wheeled about once more, avoiding the random gunshots thrown up by those attempting to flee. He roared loud and long as he dived for the ground, adding an additional measure of terror to any who dared remain behind.

For his own part, he could feel at least three rifle bullets inside him and knew that he bled from a few more that had torn holes in him. He was covered in impact spots that would be bruises by morning. His wings had several small holes in them from the gunfire, and ruptured capillaries leaked blood to streak the deep green flesh of the appendages.

He flared those wings wide as he neared the floor, lifting his head and driving his feet onto the concrete. His talons threw a shower of sparks that were masked by the flames into which he confidently strode, grabbing the last few Cutters and hurling them toward the doorway, where they struck the backs of their comrades and added to the general confusion.

"Run!" Drake thundered, raising his arms and standing to his full height. Backlit by the sulfurous flames, he appeared no less than a denizen of Hell to more than one member of the gang.

King Cutter waved the shining blade around, reflecting the firelight from Drake's breath weapon as he stalked the detective. His face was a maniacal grin and he flipped the knife from one hand to another in a dexterous display that spoke volumes to the cop. He opened his mouth to taunt the man, but his words were drowned by the gunfire from the other side of the warehouse.

Max ignored the speech and moved in, trusting that his years of training would pay off against a foe that he hoped had simply threatened with the knife to get what he wanted. King came in low and left, throwing the blade up and catching it with his right hand at the last moment to change his attack angle. Max jumped forward, getting inside the arc of the knife and grabbing King's wrist in his own hand. He drove a vicious upward elbow strike into the gang leaders chin, following with a knee to the groin. As the younger man began to slump downward, Max added his own body weight and pulled them to the floor, using the inertia of the fall to plant a second elbow into King's head. He took advantage of the stunned state into which King had been plunged to wrench the knife hand up behind King's back and disarm him, followed within seconds by the ratcheting of handcuffs. With a whoop of exhilaration, he sat up atop the downed gang boss and threw his hands into the air, an urban rodeo star completing his hogtie.

"And you're the King?" he asked with a grin. "No wonder the Angels are taking over."

Drake forced the last of the Cutters out of the warehouse door and glanced over his shoulder to check on Max. He could see the cop starting to stand, his prey prone and restrained, and Drake gave him a thumbs-up gesture before turning back to the door.

His vision blurred and everything before him took on a grey, misty appearance. On his back he could still feel the comforting warmth of the fires he had generated, but the entirety of his ventral side was in agony as whatever he had walked into was turning his scales to ice. Shimmering crystals became thicker and thicker as Drake let out a muffled roar. His lips were going numb, and protective membranes had flashed into place across his eyes. Wings had wrapped tightly around him like a coat to try and hold the warmth in, but they, too, had been coated in the frigid spray. What had started as a freezing mist was now fast becoming a solid sheath of ice across his body. His pulse rate slowed and a dreamy feeling surpassed even the cold. He felt dragged down, like a weight pulling him under water, and his consciousness began to slip away from him.

Drake fought to flex his arms against the ice, to shatter the coating that held him fast, but the most he could manage from them was a wiggle. Realizing he had gotten himself into a situation from which he might easily never recover, he squatted low to the ground in hopes of being able to jump clear. In the process, a fresh coat of the ice sealed his nose and mouth and panic set in. He pushed up and back with his legs, throwing his body into the area behind himself and landing in the flame that still burned on the ground. The jolt of adrenaline from realizing he was working with only the air in his lungs had pushed aside the lethargy that had taken over as his blood slowed, but that wouldn't last long, he knew. He rolled back and forth in the fire, feeling the ice begin to give way as he thrashed his muscles against it. Spots began to appear in the grey field that was his vision. He felt his chest tighten and flex inward against itself as he struggled to breathe.

His left arm broke through the coat of ice with a crunching sound and he began batting himself in the face with all the strength he could manage. He cracked the icy shell and a section fell away, the heat of the fire melting enough to keep pieces sloughing off. Most importantly for Drake, he managed to open a small space along his jawline through which he could suck in air. It was boiling hot and oxygen-deprived from the flame but he gulped it in as hard and fast as he could get it while still slamming himself in the face. His efforts paid off as the rest of the ice shattered away from his face, although it cost him a tooth. His vision cleared as the nictitating membranes retracted. Sucking in a lungful of what air there was, he exhaled a blast of flame down along his right arm and then onto his abdomen, reveling in the warmth.

"So you are the mighty Firedrake, eh?" called a voice from behind him. It reminded Drake of the voices he had heard from Ivy League graduates, a particular feel that some might call 'cultured'.

Ignoring the tingling feeling that spread through him as blood flowed into his extremities once more, Drake ducked and threw himself into a shoulder roll away from the voice. He came up facing the doorway to see the man who had frozen him standing there, pointing and laughing at Drake. He wore what looked to be a wetsuit of some variety, painted in a light blue color, that covered him from his feet to his neck. His hair was a shaggy mess of white, and sapphire-hued eyes watched Drake.

"Who the hell are you, slick?"

The man bowed from the waist in a classic, elegant manner. "I have no name to supply, so you may call me simply . . .Frost."

Drake nodded slowly. "Well, okay, then, Frost. Nice to meet you. I'm Drake, Metahuman Affairs. Oh, and by the way? You're under arrest."

Frost giggled then, a high-pitched tinkling like glass. "Do you honestly think you are in any shape to stop me, Firedrake? Only a minute ago, you were writhing on this very floor, my ice nearly ending you. You are no threat to me."

Wagging a finger like a parent scolding a child, Drake shook his head. "You've got ice, slick, and I've got fire . . .but you forgot these," he said, drawing both of the pistols from under his arms. He aimed carefully, distinguishing his target despite the waves of heat rising that caused a shimmering effect.

Frost patted his chest and giggled yet again. "Bulletproof!" he declared.

It was Drake's turn to laugh. He pointed one of the massive slab-sided iron beasts and squeezed the trigger. A hole nearly half an inch in diameter appeared in one of the steel girders that supported the roof.

"Armor piercing," he replied.

"What? Who carries those? You just walk around with armor-piercing bullets?"

"I hunt boosters for a living, slick. You know how many of us have armor?"

"If you come after me, then the Brotherhood will hunt you."

"Yeah, I hear y'all are some kinda fraternity or something. Y'all get together and swallow goldfish? Spank each other with paddles?" Drake asked. Behind him, Max Lahey was strolling toward the two boosters, his pistol forgotten and one of the gang's AK-47 rifles clutched in his hands.

There was a pause for a moment as the mercenary judged his odds. He looked at the detective for a moment, and then dismissed him with a sneer as being no threat. A thick fog formed around his feet, slowly billowing outward and thickening.

Drake readied himself to jump aside but the fog remained in place. Instead, Frost thrust his hands forward in a sudden movement. Foot-long shards of ice filled the air, two from each hand. They shattered against Drake's chest rather than penetrate, but the force was akin to a shotgun blast at close range, and the reptilian booster was knocked backward. That was the cue for the fog to climb skyward in a grey cloud, becoming a wall of ice that filled the doorway. In a second it was an inch thick and growing fast.

Drake triggered the pistol, punching a perfect hole through the ice and being rewarded with a yelp of pain from behind the shield. He could make out the figure of Frost limping away from the doorway at a speed faster than he should have with a hole in his leg.

Drake raised and fired the other pistol. The micro-explosive in the tip of the round shattered the icy barricade into fragments. Those that fell beyond the door skipped and skittered across the pavement, while those that bounced inward melted quickly in contact with the heat of a floor that, in places, still bore bits of flame left over from Drake's breath attack.

"You got him?" Max asked, coughing in the thick, smoky air.

"Winged him," Drake said, holstering his pistols. He could already see Frost lifting from the ground on a frozen cloud and flying away, and after the ice cloud incident, Drake knew there was no chance that chasing him would end well. His body was still wracked with pain, and the cold that had sapped his strength was exactly the thing against which he knew he was weakest. Flying into that in midair would be a death sentence.

"Sumbitch didn't even have the decency to flip me off," he complained with a sad shake of his head. "Go get your prisoner and let's get outta here. I need a couple gallons of coffee soonest."

As Max nodded and walked away, Drake pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He hoped that the ice and fire routine had not damaged it too badly, and for once he was rewarded when the screen lit up. He pushed a speed dial setting and waited for the rings. Clicking sounds told him he was being routed through several hubs.

"Director," Hart answered. Her voice was deeper than usual, and Drake thought she sounded fatigued.

"Hart? It's Drake. We've got a problem. Looks like there's a team of boosters setting themselves up as a rent-a-crook firm."

"Expand."

"Local gang here in Arizona hired a booster to knock off one of their competitors. He's working with others. They call themselves the Brotherhood."

Hart sighed. "Why must they all choose names like this? It makes me want to buy them matching football jerseys."

"Turns out, the guy they sent was just the one that got sent. It wasn't a case of analyzing the opponent and sending the best guy for the job. My money says they'll save that for big-time prey. Oh, and for me."

"You suddenly have a very high opinion of yourself, Agent Drake."

"Nah. I just put a bullet in their hitter and let him go back home. I figure he's gonna be mighty pissed off about it for a while."

"You . . .shot someone . . .and then let them go." Hart asked.

"There you go again," Drake chastised. "Only seeing the negative. I can hear it in your voice. You've got that no-cookie-for-Drake tone going on."

"It is a sad thing that you have heard it often enough to recognize it. What does that say about your methods, Agent?"

"That they ain't yours."

"Correct. Are you returning to headquarters?"

"Think I'm gonna follow up on this, and see where it leads."

"I see," Hart said. "In that case, keep me apprised of your needs."

"Damn, lady. That's kinda personal."

"In the case, Agent Drake," Hart shot back, her tone one of disgust at the implication.

"I'll do that," he promised as Max lead the half-conscious King Cutter from the warehouse and toward his car. He smiled briefly at the thought of the hot coffee that would soon warm his belly, and then continued, warning the Director of possible consequences in his own style.

"If this Frost guy is only a small part of their organization, Hart, I'm probably gonna be requisitioning a nuke."

Back to Table of Contents

The Whitecoat: Who is . . . the Whitecoat?

Landon Porter

Alan Roschard, the Whitecoat, is a hero hailing from the web serial universe of The Descendants.

Scientific experimentation in the twentieth century caused later generations to give birth to a new breed of human gifted with the genetic potential for superhuman feats, both mental and physical. In the United States, the Psionics Training and Application Academy was founded to train the most powerful of these psionics and the Enforcer Corps was created to stop those who used their powers for ill purposes.

But the Academy had a more clandestine agenda, one that has recently been discovered by three of its former students. Their desperate crusade to save the children exploited to the Academy's dark ends leads them to the city of Mayfield, where they face not only the threat from the Academy, but from a powerful crime lord, an ancient witch, and all manner of villain in between.

They are heroes. They are people. This is their story.

Styled after works from the Bronze Age of Comic Books, The Descendants is presented in a unique manner: as an all-prose comic book complete with issues, specials and annuals, each telling a complete story that ties into the overall tale of the titular superheroes set in the 2070's.

It is also written as a throwback and love letter to an earlier age of superheroes, to a time before everything was grim and gritty and when comic books were fun.

Follow the action as it unfolds at http://www.descendantsserial.com and hear what the author has to say on Twitter @ParadoxOmni.

* * *

Wherein Our Hero Reconsiders Trading Keys With His Girlfriend

(This story takes place six months prior to Descendants #0)

It had been a very long day and I was suffering from a serious deficiency of vitamin sleep. Not only is playing prelate (I've given up on trying to get people to say 'superhero'; the media has won this battle) tiring in and of itself, but it was October, meaning that midterms were coming up, and on top of that, the Hip Sing Tong criminal organization had smartened up and hired their own super-strong muscle.

My body was aching with what would soon become bruises courtesy of a spark jockey bruiser with the oh-so-creative name of Tank, who had served up a punch hard enough to completely ruin several sections of the armor hidden in my namesake coat. It really sucks that Alan Roschard gets bruises when the Whitecoat gets punched.

Home was a distant, beautiful oasis where no one was trying to hit me, shoot me, ignite me, or otherwise annoy me. Luckily, I don't have to worry about getting stuck in rush hour or sitting at the bus stop. For me, home is only a few leaps and bounds away.

Yes, leaps. Super strength is a wonderful thing; I can jump six vertical stories from standing and if I get a running start, I can launch myself almost sixty yards.

And no, I don't call it 'enhanced strength'. We, as a society, have called it super-strength for well over a century; ever since the first graphic novels featuring characters sporting it appeared in the 1930's. I don't see the point in changing that now, just because in the past thirty or forty years super-strength is a reality thanks to psionics being born and cybernetics taking big leaps forward, and the media thinks that's a reason to make it sound scientific.

I'm super-strong. I'm not 'enhancedly' strong or whatever crap they want to call me.

But we're veering away from the point. I can leap pretty much wherever I need to go and I've developed my costume just for that purpose. My boots and gloves contain powerful electrostatic generators that can adhere to most building materials. That means that if I can't leap a given tall building in a single bound, I can stick to it and jump again rather than falling in an embarrassing and decidedly coyote-like fashion.

It may not be flying, but if you've ever tried to drive into Brooklyn during rush hour, you understand why I'm a fan.

"Whitecoat!" someone shouted from below as I sailed overhead. My adoring public. I must hear someone shout in recognition five or six times . . . a month. But every time, it makes a crappy day where people have tried to kill me seem a little less crappy.

Me and the handful of other prelates that smack around the Big Apple's criminal element are just the junior varsity squad in the eyes of the people. The star quarterback, as prelates go, is John Harding, Infinity. He's the heavy hitter; armed with flight, super strength and super toughness. Of course, he can't be bothered stopping the mundane baddies that could make day-to-day life utter shit for everyone. He only fights escaped mutants, rogue psionics, and other 'powered' threats. Conveniently, he usually does this in view of a news camera or fifty.

God, I hate him. He's even got a goddamn dimple in his chin. I can't prove it, But I think they built the bastard out of parts of lesser prelates. You know, like me. Damn it.

Of course, my girlfriend is one of his biggest fans. I go over to her place and get to see every piece of merchandise Infinity is getting royalties on that the Whitecoat isn't. I often wondered if she'd lay off worshipping him if she knew who I was.

Still, I think it's pretty crumby for any guy to try and impress his girlfriend while in the shadow of Captain Dimple Chin.

But I digress; Janine's a fan of all prelates. She has bootleg T-shirts with me and Sister Sacred and poor, deceased Firebug on them. Hell, she even buys the stupid Prelates of New York comic (which, I might add, recently pitted me against a fish monster I have never met and convinced me that I will leave any aquatic baddies to Johnny Harding).

I looked to wave at the guy that shouted my name, but he was gone; probably wandered off in the time I sat there, clinging to the wall, thinking about how much I hate New York's greatest son. Damn, I think too much. Normally, that doesn't bother me, but I really think I owe the people that support me at least a wave. Hell, I owe them an autograph and a hug.

Sighing, I gathered myself up and leapt to the top of the building. My building was the next one over. When I first moved in, I bitched and moaned about the fact that my window faced a blank wall. Now that I'm the Whitecoat, I couldn't be happier; it lets me come and go as I please.

My first warning should have been the open window. I'm not a fresh air person even when I'm inside the apartment. Give me air that's been cycled through fifty or eleven dozen filters first and I'm happy. Call it a holdover from when I still had allergies.

So the window should have told me something was up, but I remind you that I was sleep-deprived, overdosed on fists to the body, and stressing over exams. I demand absolution.

The second warning was that the lamp on the nightstand was on. I'm dirt poor; mostly because of the prelate gig. Even buying scrap parts and assembling all of my gear myself, most of the check I got from the University for the my traumatic experience the year before goes to keeping the Whitecoat on the streets and kicking Tong ass. I do not leave lights on. Ever.

Again, though, I reiterate: Alan need sleep. If it wasn't for the fact that I really needed to survey the damage Tank did to my coat, I probably would have just collapsed on the bed and slept in costume. I've done it before.

Weary, I climbed through the window, sat on the sill and worked the controls of my boots. The blue glow of the electrostatic generators faded and there was a low hiss as the air cushions deflated around my feet. My best design ever. I may get smashed to bits, but damn it, my feet will be comfortable. If only I could submit those boots as my engineering thesis without totally blowing my cover.

Next came the gloves, with similar effects. The gloves are more complicated than simple gauntlets. With proper gestures, I can harden the armor in my coat, activate and deactivate the generators, and control the heads-up display in my very fine hat.

Normally, the coat would be next, but it was unusually warm and the bandanna that hid my face was stifling me. Why was it so warm? I normally kept the place cold, not only to keep heating cost low, but because that's the way I like it. I'm a polar person by nature. If I had my way, I'd sleep in my skivvies in the arctic with a penguin for a pillow.

I only turned up the heat when I had Janine over . . . It was about that time that I really noticed the room around me. The bed was made—something I never did unless threatened—and turned down. The cases for all my flat format discs were neatly restored to their cabinet. And my ConquesTech Walkalong portable gaming system was on the bed. It was still on and paused, showing me that someone was playing Wolf War IV.

Compulsive cleaning, plus playing my video games equaled . . . I stopped untying my bandanna.

Fate is a smarmy bitch. If I had figured it out a split second earlier, I could have kicked my boots under the bed and skedaddled out the window (I'm sure I'd survive the fall). But I didn't and as a result, the next thought that went through my head was drowned out by a scream.

I looked up to see Janine standing in the doorway. Janine Kazhdan, my girlfriend of the past year, is a vision most of the time. She's about average height with frizzy, dark brown hair, big brown eyes and a body that I'd got ten rounds against Tank daily for. She's also got other qualities, but seeing as she was dressed only in my #3.14 jersey with her bare legs coming out from underneath, the body was pretty much all I could think of.

Also, the screaming. I had to do something about the screaming.

"Wait!" I said, throwing out my hands like that was going to convince her. I remembered I was still 'the Whitecoat' and put on what I like to call The Voice and tried again. "Wait, citizen, this isn't what it looks like."

I don't know if it was The Voice, or the fact that she finally recognized one of the prelates she follows religiously, but she calmed down quickly in any event.

"Ohmigod." She squeaked, eyes widening. "You're . . . you're you. I mean, of course you're you, but . . ."

"The one and only Whitecoat." I said with a confident nod and a tip of my Stetson.

She mouthed a few words I figured were 'wow', and then looked around. "But, uh . . . why are you in my boyfriend's bedroom?"

One would think that being a prelate—which entails maintaining a secret identity (unless you're Infinity), skulking about the city and generally being adept at deception—would help with coming up with lies on the spot. One would be wrong.

"Uh . . . yes. Your boyfriend's bedroom . . ." I stammered, looking around in hopes that someone had left a copy of One Thousand and One Reasons to Traipse Around Strange Bedrooms thereabouts. "Well, you see, I'm in the middle of an . . . investigation?"

I swear to god, I'm better at trading barbs with Tong goons. Seriously, I never figured on having to come up with an excuse for being in my own bedroom.

"He's not in any trouble is he?" Fear flitted in Janine's eyes. "Alan couldn't have done anything. He's a good guy and even if he wasn't he wouldn't even have time to. Right now, he's off tutoring high school physics. He does that four days a week. And any time he's not doing that, he's with me or his friends." The words tumbled out of her mouth. I suddenly felt guilty, hearing her use my cover story as an alibi.

"No, I'm . . . he's not in any trouble. I just need to . . ." my eyes fell on my computer over in the corner. " . . . I need to access his files." I took a step toward it, but it was about that time that Fate decided to pay me back for that 'smarmy bitch' comment.

I'd been in the process of untying the bandanna around my neck when Janine interrupted. Gravity now took over the rest of the job. Trooper that I am, I tried in vain to catch it with my teeth. But down it went and the cat I'd kept in the bag for over a year came yowling out.

We just stood there in silence for a while as the bandanna fluttered to the ground. Part of me was terrified. Part of me prayed that maybe, just maybe, the hat covering my eyes would fool her. A little part of me, outnumbered by the other two, was relieved.

I saw Janine's eyes dart to the gloves I'd tossed on the bed. She was making certain I wasn't just wearing some cheesy Halloween costume. Then she looked at me. Her expression was unreadable.

"Janine." I said, just to break the silence. I really didn't know what to say after that. Luckily, she did.

Taking the three steps it took to reach me, she reached up and pulled off my hat. My own light brown hair dropped almost to my shoulders. As usual, I needed a haircut something fierce.

Not taking her eyes from mine, Janine held my hat with an odd reverence. The Hat. Almost as much of a trademark as my cheap, plastic trench coat. Janine had been delighted to find a strip mall in Jersey that sold fake Stetsons that looked exactly like the Whitecoat's. Little did she know that it was the same place I ordered mine from.

Finally, my voice came back. "About now would be a good time for truth, huh?" I tried to give her one of the cheesy smiles I give her when I do something stupid. Whatever she was thinking, it didn't stop her from thinking it and it didn't get her to say anything either.

"Well, obviously, I'm not doing any tutoring. I'm the Whitecoat."

Maybe I can change my name to Blindingly Obvious.

Janine nodded slowly and looked down at the hat, noting the organic LED I put in there to let me see even with the brim pulled all the way down. "Yeah, I gathered." She said sarcastically. Idly, she flipped the hat over onto the bed. "But . . . I mean, how?" Her soft hands reached up and touched me on either side of my face. "You said you were a psionic, is this . . .?"

Psionics. Another media term for people born with weird physiologies that give them even weirder powers. I shook my head. "No, the only psionic power I have is a souped up immune system. I didn't lie about that."

"I wouldn't call keeping this secret a lie." Janine said, trying to sooth my guilt. "But now that I know, a little explanation is in order, Alan. If what you do isn't a psionic power, what is it?"

I sighed. I really didn't want to discuss that, even with her. But she was right, I did owe her this. I stepped back from her and shrugged out of my coat, tossing it aside. It made a loud thump sound as it hit the floor. Thanks to the titanium and ceramic armor plates, the thing weights around one hundred pounds. "You'd better sit down; it's a bit of a story."

"I've got plenty of time." She said. "I was going to sleep here anyway; my roommate is having a party."

I nodded and waited for her to make herself comfortable on the bed before sitting down beside her. Letting out another sigh, I started at the beginning. "Remember Professor Caldwell?" It wasn't much of a beginning, but I had to ease her into this.

She nodded. "You were his lab aide last year, before we started dating. He got a grant and left for Sweden, right?"

"Not right." I said gravely. Funny, I usually adore all this 'dark secret' crap when it's happening to a fictional character. Not so much when it's my dark secret. Normally, I can push it to the back of my mind even though Caldwell is the reason pretty much everything in my life has happened the way it has. Even getting together with Janine. "He's dead."

Holy hell, why did I just drop it like that? In my head, I had planned on tip-toeing around it, maybe glossing it over wholesale. My adrenaline must have been having a field day with my speech center.

Janine gasped. Caldwell had been her adviser as well as my professor and part-time boss. "What?! How? And why didn't you tell me? That has nothing to do with you being—"

"It has everything to do with me being the Whitecoat." I interrupted her. Hesitantly, I put a hand on her shoulder. She was near to tears. Caldwell had played a big role in her life. Both our lives. The shoulder just wasn't cutting it. I put my arm around her and drew her close.

"Then why, Alan? What happened?" She almost pleaded. Janine doesn't plead. She tells you to do something or she tricks you into doing it. Hearing her getting close to that broke my heart.

"The Prof . . ." I started. Oh sure, now I was able to dance around saying things straight out. "He . . . The university denied him an extension on their grant for his nanite research. He had already invented a new type—Type VII to be exact. They were amazing, hon; they got their instructions from electrical impulse transmission instead of being pre-programmed. They were ten times as efficient and could be reprogrammed on the fly."

"Alan, please . . ." Janine started. She must have thought I was going off on a tangent.

"It'll be important later." I promised, a bit more bitterly than I would have liked her to hear from me. "The point was, he knew he was on to something big. All he needed to do was figure out a way to fit them with a failsafe. As it stood, if the impulse control was lost, Type VII posed a very real threat of going uncontrolled and starting a grey goo scenario; end of the world stuff. Or at least end of a few city blocks stuff. They're not that efficient."

"So he made a deal with the devil. The Hip Sing Tong would give him the money to continue in exchange for getting some nanites of their own to play with. I honestly don't know why they wanted them, but there we were."

"Did you know about that?" Janine looked up at me and I felt a dagger in my chest. In retrospect, the evidence had been there. I should have put it together and stopped the Prof before this whole mess started. Hell, I probably should have encouraged him to trash Type VII the second we realized they were potentially a weapon of mass destruction in a jar. But the student doesn't question the master and in Prof's own words, 'one does not throw potential away out of fear'. Thanks, Prof.

"Not then." I replied. "Not until . . ." About that time, I choked up a little. The events of that night were still burned in my mind. They always will be unless I manage to find and pay off a mentalist to erase them for me. And don't think I wouldn't do it in a New York minute. Finally, I collected myself, hugging Janine a little tighter. Not too tight though; I can bench a half ton after all.

"Not until that night. He came in and told me we had to dump the whole line of Type VII into the lab microwave. Burn them all out. Seems the Tong had grown impatient and was sending a guy to take the nanites whether they were ready or not."

I remembered loading ampoule after ampoule of liquid the color of tarnished silver into the microwave. It had thrown off crazy blue sparks, then collapsed into blackened chunks after ten seconds. If I hadn't been scared of getting shot or sank to the bottom of the Hudson, I would have thought it was cool.

"We didn't make it." I continued. "We almost did. The beakers holding the main colonies were still out and we were about to nuke them when the Tong hitter came in." I decided to spare Janine the gory details. "He got the Prof. Got me too because it wasn't good to leave a witness."

She looked up at me. I don't know when she had started actually crying, but her face was red and tear-stained. "He shot you? But you're fine. I remember you spending a night in the university hospital, but they would have kept you for longer than a night, wouldn't they?"

"If they had found a bullet. Or proof I'd been shot, yes." I agreed. "But the hitter shot me through one of the beakers. The bullet lodged right in my spine . . . along with the nanites."

Janine stopped crying and sat up, away from me. "Are you saying . . . they're in you?"

Honestly, I don't blame her for that reaction. They should have killed me. Medical nanites are one thing; stimulating cell growth, attacking cancers and whatnot. But they aren't for long term use and usually, they're implanted by doctors, not hitmen. "They saved my life." I said. "They also disassembled the bullet into more nanites and repaired my spinal column – all before I even got to the hospital."

"Are you serious?" She gasped. "That's impossible. I've never heard of anything like this . . ."

"You never heard of type VII." I pointed out. "They take their instructions from my own body's electrical impulses. And apparently, my body's instructions are 'stronger, faster, tougher'." That didn't make her less incredulous. She'd just found out her boyfriend was a real life superhero, but this was giving her trouble. "Look, I know it's hard to take, but I'll prove it." I looked around for a convenient iron bar to bend, but I was fresh out. "Uh, pick up my coat."

If it were possible, I believe Janine would have looked even more incredulous. My coat looks like a cheap, light, plastic trench coat. I buy them in bulk and unfortunately, the cheapest mass produced trenches are the stupid white number made in Maine that have since become my unfortunate namesake.

I slit open the linings and fill it with plates made of ceramic material lined with titanium. With a command from my gloves, the plates magnetize and lock together, becoming a bulletproof armor. The upswing is that hiding the armor in the coat makes dopes like the Tong's gunmen think I'm bulletproof. The downside is that after a few bullets, the coat falls apart. Hence my bulk buying.

But the other effect is that my coat weighs more than some large dogs and it's awkward to lift without super-strength. Case in point: my tiny, tiny girlfriend. She gave it a good go, grunting and trying to get better footing, but she just couldn't lift it all the way off the ground.

Smirking, I picked it up with one hand and tossed it on the bed. "See?" I asked.

"I guess I'll have to take your word for it." She said.

"Good." I nodded, letting her come sit next to me again. "So, I woke up in the hospital the next morning with a spokesman from the university offering a non-disclosure agreement. Apparently, the other beaker full of Type VII had gone missing and the university was trying to cover its ass by covering up the Prof's death."

"And you took it." Janine said, disapprovingly.

"I'm only human." I said lamely. There really was no excuse. He offered me free tuition and a monthly check for the next decade in exchange for my silence. I took it because my student loans were already piling up and I couldn't imagine a lifetime of debt. "I should have gone straight to the news providers with the story," I said, "but I reasoned that doing that might not only cause panic, but cause the guys who took the nanites to panic as well." This was true; though I came to this conclusion somewhere further down the line. Janine didn't give up her disapproving glare, so I changed the subject quickly.

"Anyway, the Tong had the other nanites and without safeguards, they could have ended a lot of people by tripping." I said. "So I went after them myself. Back then, I hadn't built all my gadgets, so all I had was a bandanna to hide my face and a Kevlar vest I stole out of my dad's closet." My father the cop. He still doesn't appreciate 'busy bodies' like the Whitecoat being in his business.

"You stopped them?" Janine asked.

I sighed. Sore subject, you see. Not painful like what happened to Professor Caldwell, but it pisses me off. "I got the nanites back and nuked them . . . but none of the goons I rounded up talked. The higher ups – the guys that ordered the hit, the guys that wanted Type VII for god knows what – they're still out there."

My wonderful understanding girlfriend smiled at me. "And you've been fighting them all this time. You even got a sidekick in on it too." More tears, happy tears, sprang form her eyes. "You're amazing." She put her arms around me and kissed me.

"The, uh . . . sidekick wasn't my idea." I added hastily. I do not take responsibility for my super-powered fanboy. It took me three months to get him off my back and convince his parents to send him to the Academy in Langley. "But I promise, Janine, I'm going to get those guys. I'm going to stop them from doing this again and I'm going to make the Prof proud."

Janine kissed me again. "You will." Then she giggled; a very scary thing when it comes from Janine. "I bet you've gone all this time saving the city with no thanks or reward . . ." She put her arms around my neck. "I think I can think of something for my new favorite prelate."

Somehow, I doubt I'll have to depend on the shouts and waves of strangers to help me keep my spirits up anymore. In your face, Infinity.

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Rocco

R.J. Ross

R.J. Ross is the author of the Cape High Series, a YA superhero series that focuses on the teenage children of known superheroes and villains in the Cape High universe. The stories center around a newly found high school called Cape High, where the main characters go to school to learn to control their powers and decide which side of the "photo-op" game they want to be on, Superheroes or Super Villains. While there are a few true super villains in the series, mainly the series is a fun, light-hearted approach to the genre, one aimed at all ages.

Follow R.J. on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/capehigh, read her blog and check out her store at http://capehigh.wordpress.com/ and follow her on twitter @nosidekickhere!

* * *

Have you ever done something that seems like a good idea at the time, only to wind up on the most wanted list? Yeah, probably not, huh? Well I have. It all started some . . . what, four years ago? I was thirteen at the time, normal kid, as far as that goes, one parent household. My ma, she never told me who my old man was. Said he was dead, or gone, the story changed depending on what mood she was in, but it always ended with the fact that I should stop asking. I decided a long time ago that he was just some random guy she met. Nothing too big to worry about, really. Lots of kids grow up without a dad, right?

Thing is, not many of them can travel through shadows. It freaked me out the first time I did it—I had no idea how I did it in the first place, much less where I was going to come out at. Heck, some of the time I still don't know. Shadows aren't like doors. All shadows are connected through a giant space I like to call Shadowland. At least, for me they are.

The only explanation I could come up with is that my dad, that useless guy that I never met? He's probably a super. Not a very good one, I bet, since I've never heard of a Hall member that could travel through shadows, but a super. It's not that shocking. I mean, sure, there's only a handful of them compared to normal people, but they exist. They even form a group called the Hall in America, one that has five branches of super hero teams.

So now I should probably say what I did to get on the most wanted list—and whose most wanted list that might be. Or maybe what my name is, huh? I will—give me a minute—

"I told you that you were supposed to be here at two!" The guy saying it is one of those creepy high dollar suits that do charity in the front of their shops and send out pre-teens with drugs in the back. How do I know? I'm watching him with a pre-teen right now, one that I like to consider a friend of mine. I wince as he backhands the poor kid across the room. "We have customers, Jamal!"

"I had to go to school," Jamal says, wincing and barely touching his face as he tries to get to his feet. "If I miss any more they'll call my ma—"

"Forget your ma! We had an agreement!" This is my cue. I step out of the shadows, right behind the kid. The man in the suit stares at me, until he sees the wooden bat in my hands. "You—" he says, reaching behind him. For a second I think he's going for a gun, then he brings out a bag of white powder. "Here, on the house. Don't say I never gave you nothin', kid," he says, tossing it to me. I automatically catch it, looking at it for a moment.

Do I look like a druggie? Tall, skinny mixed kid with reddish braids, torn up jeans that need pitched, a Panther T-shirt that's seen better years, and run down sneakers that should be tied—okay, maybe a little, but still! That's profiling! I toss the bag of drugs to the side. "Get out of here, Jamal," I say.

The kid looks up at me, a worried look on his face. "But Rocco—" he starts out, only to stop and run as fast as he can to the door. I almost curse as the suit pulls out a small pistol, bringing it up to shoot at Jamal, but I don't have time. I grab the man's wrist, feeling the bones start to crack. The gun drops to the floor, going off. It's only pure luck that it doesn't hit Jamal.

"You're finished, Mister," I say as he futilely tries to punch me in the stomach. It doesn't hurt—he's got no skills and hardly any muscle. Like I said, business man. "You either stop peddling drugs through kids or I finish you for good, got it?"

He looks at me with a snarl on his lips and I'm certain I've got him. Then he does something I don't expect. He bellows for help. "HELP! I'M BEING ROBBED! ANYONE!"

I wince, almost letting go of his wrist. "You really think that's going to—"

The door bursts open and I dare to glance behind me, staring in shock at the very familiar looking woman standing there. Oh. Crap. I forgot that this was Central Hall territory. They're the most famous of the Hall branches—and in my position at the moment? The most dangerous.

"Let the white boy go, kid," Firefly says, "and I'll try and make it easy on you."

I let go of the "white boy" and slowly raise my hands in the air. Can I accuse her of racial stereotyping for that term? Probably. I've never called anyone a "white boy" in my life. But will I? When it's an S Class super heroine with electric abilities? Oh hell no.

* * *

"Who are you?" The demand comes, as usual for me, from the other side of a table. There are some shadows around, but I can't look at them yet—besides, none of them are big enough to walk through comfortably. Also, I'm not going to lie, I've always wanted to see the inside of the Central Hall. They were right, it is classier looking than the others.

"I have that information for you, Firefly," a woman in a black suit says, stepping out of the corner and handing over a folder. I want to argue right now, tell them I wasn't doing anything that deserves an interrogation, but nobody ever listens to me at this point. Or at any point, if I'm honest. I watch Firefly flip through the folder, focusing on her hair. I'm almost positive she bleaches it to get that white color, but with supers you can't always tell. She's white, with a white, blue and yellow uniform, and short, spiky white hair. She's not bad looking, really, in a sharp way. She's got blue fingernail polish that's starting to chip on the edges. I didn't expect that. I mean, you don't usually think of super powerful beings painting their fingernails.

"Someone get a power blocker collar on this kid!" she bellows abruptly, making me jump. She must have found my power type. Otherwise I don't think she would have bothered. There's no way a seventeen year old kid—super or not—would be a threat to her.

"This is unjustified detention!" I say. I'm rather proud of that one. What? When you don't go to school you have to watch a lot of news and Judge Judy for your education!

She just looks at me as two men in suits come into the room and try to snap a nasty looking metal collar around my neck. I shove them off, sending one of them across the room. "I didn't do anything," I say, only to find myself slammed down into my seat again—by a single blue nailed hand. She doesn't even strain to pin me to my chair and snap the collar around my neck.

"I'd rather you didn't run off in the middle of our little conversation," she says, "Rocco."

"I wasn't robbing him," I mutter, feeling drained. Not only is the collar making me feel choked, it's making me feel a bit light headed, too. "I hate these things. Whoever invented them should be shot," I mutter, swaying slightly.

"That's my brother you're talking about," she says. "Please, go on, give me more reasons to want to throw the book at you—more than robbing Fort Knox."

Yes. That's what I'd been leading up to. Surprised? Not nearly as surprised as I'd been at the time. It'd been a mistake—I listened to the wrong guys, and wound up in the middle of the nation's gold collection, surrounded by guards with really big guns. Back then I thought people would listen to me if I told the truth. Stupid concept, I know—I mean, I was in Fort Knox.

It was actually pretty cool, you know, on a level of one to ten, it's definitely a ten when it comes to conversational pieces—

But anyway.

"Why did you rob Fort Knox, anyway?" she asks, now sitting on the table right in front of me as she reads the file. "It says here you were barely old enough to have powers at that time. Looking for drug money?" she asks.

"I'm not a druggie," I mutter.

"Then why were you robbing one of the local drug dealers?"

"You KNEW?" I demand, jerking back to focus with that statement.

"Of course we know," she says. "The cops have been looking for evidence on him for months—you almost ruined their sting."

"Oh. Sorry." I feel really stupid right now, not going to lie. I look down as much as I can with the collar on, wondering if Cape Cells will be as terrible as the stories I've heard.

"I'm going to be honest here, Rocco, nothing I've seen here is going to keep you out of the Cape Cells. Marigold wants your head on a platter for that little Fort Knox trick, you realize that, don't you? Breaking in on her watch in her district—boy, I'm surprised you're not a road pancake already!"

Marigold is the leader of the East Branch of the Hall—remember I told you that there's five different branches of the super hero group? Well, Marigold runs one of them. How do I know this? Marigold's almost caught me a million times. "Marigold's a pain in the neck," I mutter.

"She's got good reason to want you in the cells," she points out. "Take him away, put him in one of the temporary cells," she says to the men that hadn't been able to collar me. "Let him wonder which Hall leader I'm going to call first," she adds evilly as I'm hauled to my feet and dragged away. I am so screwed.

* * *

It's a terrifying image. Jamal stares up at the gigantic statue of Lady Justice. She's always scared him, he admits silently, especially when she's the first one he's got to look at before going into the Central Hall and admitting his sins to the most dangerous guys in the world. But—but Rocco had been helping him, so he sort of doesn't have a choice, right? Not after Rocco swore he'd save him, and did, sort of.

He's stood there too long, he realizes as a tall white man stops next to him. Jamal glances over quickly, turning back to the statue as if he hadn't looked. There's a cold chill running down his spine from that one little glance. Sure the guy is wearing a t-shirt and a pair of jeans with his face mask, but he knows he's seen this guy on TV before.

"There a problem, kid?" the man asks casually. "With the statue, that is."

"N—no?" Jamal offers. Man, why did he EVER get involved with the rich guy? A handful of cash for running a tiny errand turned into something that has him standing on the steps next to the most dangerous new guy in the Central Hall, looking at a stupid statue of a woman in a sheet! He really wants to run right now. Sure, Rocco's a nice guy and all, and he's got a bad rep, but this isn't something a twelve year old can deal with!

"Then maybe it's a problem with the Hall?" Technico asks, turning and looking him straight in the eyes. Jamal takes one step back. Another. Then turns and runs as fast as his legs can take him in the opposite direction.

"Sorry Rocco," he pants. "I don't wanna die."

* * *

"ALL BYY MYYSEELLFF!" I belt out at the top of my lungs. "DON'T WANNA BE ALLL BYY MYYSELLLFF ANYMORE!" Yes, it's an ancient song, one that I don't remember most of the lyrics to. But I don't have to. What I remember is plenty enough to irritate whoever can hear me. So far, though, nobody's seemed to notice. Man that's boring.

Yes, I realize I'm in a cell with a laser wall in front of me strong enough to turn me into cinders. At least it's not one of the soundproof cells like they have in the South Branch. Yeah, they caught me for a while, too. But I can get out! These stupid collars just take a well placed shadow and a little focus to get around—

Focus . . .

Focus . . .

Isn't doing a freaking thing this time. I let out an angry bellow and kick the wall. All it does is hurt my foot. I drop down in the corner, taking off my shoe to look at my toes and make sure they're not broken or something. Not that I've ever had a broken bone in my life, no matter what stupid things I do, but I'm powerless at the moment. Like a norm. It could happen.

I glance up as someone pulls to a stop in front of my laser door. What am I, some sort of animal at the zoo? "Whaddaya want?" I ask, moving my toes. They don't seem to be broken! "Visiting hours are over."

"Oh, I'm not here to visit," a familiar voice says. I go perfectly still, feeling something like dread forcing my head to raise. "Hello, Rocco. Miss me?" Marigold asks.

I've changed my mind. Being all by myself would be great right about now.

* * *

Jamal falters, tripping over a curb and face-planting on the sidewalk. He's run MILES and he can't go any longer. "Are we done yet?" Technico asks from above him.

"What's wrong with you, man?" Jamal demands through gasps. "You don't just go chasin' down a twelve year old! That ain't right! That's harassment!" he demands.

"I chased you for an extremely simple reason," Technico says, landing in front of him. "You ran. Any kid that runs as soon as they see a Hall member usually has a reason for it."

Jamal looks at him, frowning. "Why aren't you wearing a uniform?" he demands.

"I'll tell you—if you tell me why you almost wet yourself looking up at Lady Justice," he says, walking over and dropping a hand on Jamal's shoulder. "Over here looks good," he adds, leading the boy to a bench.

Jamal looks at him, chewing on his bottom lip for a second. "You used to be a super villain, right?"

"Yeah, I was."

"Was it by mistake? Cuz that's what happened to Rocco. And now he's stuck in the Hall and they might stick him in the Cape Cells, just cuz he was trying to save me from that guy who kept making me sell drugs! It's not right! How is that justice?" he demands, his outrage making him forget just who he's talking to. "They need a different statue if they're going to treat people like that! He's one of you, even!"

"One of us?" Technico asks.

"A super!"

* * *

"Lower the laser wall, I'll be taking the boy," Marigold says. "He's got his dues to pay." The lasers spark, then disappear, leaving nothing between me and this massive tank of a lady. Marigold is an ironic name for a woman that can bend steel with her pinkie fingers, or whatever. She's got massive brass red hair and shoulders twice as broad as mine. She wears a red and gold uniform that nobody ever seemed to tell her clashes with her hair. She also towers over me by a foot.

"Hey, why ARE you called Marigold?" I ask as she reaches in and grabs my arm, practically breaking it with her hold. My hands are handcuffed in front of me, so I can't even try to shove her off. "Is it some sort of ironic thing? Like 'I am the night, I am Marigold'?" I ask.

"Quiet," she says, dragging me along behind her. "You've been eluding me for too long, boy. The fact that you broke in during my watch—" she growls at the thought and suddenly I'm not that eager to make fun of her name. I wish it fit her. "You're lucky I'm a super hero, boy," she snaps. "Otherwise you'd be in serious trouble right now."

"I thought the whole reason I'm in trouble was because you're a super hero," I have to say. I also have to say that I need to learn to shut up. I also need to learn to stay away from Firefly. Far, far, faaar away. Because she totally just sold me out.

* * *

"Son of a monkey!" Firefly yelps and almost drops her phone, seeing the image in the central monitor. "Who called Marigold?" she yells at the group of black suits that do the background and clean up work for the Hall. "WHO CALLED MARIGOLD?" she demands in a bellow when no one answers.

"She must have seen something on TV, Firefly," one of the tech guys say. "You know you've got a camera on you ninety percent of the time."

Firefly lets out a curse. "I'm so going to blow up their cameras tomorrow," she growls, still holding the phone to her ear. "Come on, Nico, you're wasting precious time," she mutters, waiting impatiently for the phone to be picked up. "She's going to drag him back to the East Branch—oh forget it, I'm calling Mastermental," she mutters, hanging up and dialing another number.

"Why were you trying to call your brother first, in the first place?" the tech guy asks, flushing slightly as she leans closer to look at the monitor.

"Because the kid would fit in perfectly at Cape High," she says.

"But . . . didn't he break into Fort Knox?" the tech asks hesitantly.

"Exactly!"

* * *

"I think I feel sick," I say, vying for time. "No, seriously, I always feel like puking whenever I wear things around my neck," I tell her, giving her the most pathetic look I've got. "Is there any way you can loosen my collar?"

"Really," she says, giving me a dry look. "Do you really think the head of a Hall branch would fall for a line like that?"

I stare at her for a moment longer, then shrug. "It was worth a try," I admit, reaching up and touching the collar. It shocks me. "Ow! When did they add that?" I demand.

"Central always gets the newest toys," she mutters. The light over our heads flickers. I look at her, but she doesn't even seem to notice until the hallway we're going down goes pitch black. I reach up, touching the collar around my neck. No shock.

Awwww yeah. Goodbye, Marigold! I take a step back, sliding into the shadows—except she's still got my arm. "Leggo!" I snap, jerking at my arm. My powers are back, but she's a tank. I'm not nearly as strong as she is!

"I'm not letting you get away this time!" she says, even as we step through Shadowland and into—I have no idea where we are right now. I look around, since my night vision is excellent, then stare, my mouth dropping open.

"Seriously, Mega? Tidy whities?" I ask of the man changing in the middle of the room. He's got his mask on, and his underwear, and is in the middle of stepping into his uniform. It looks like he froze the moment the lights turned off, which makes it even funnier. "Hey, Marigold, you really shouldn't use me for your peeping habits," I add evilly.

"I'm not—I never—" she says, letting go of me quickly. "I have no idea what he's talking about!" I take a step back, leaving her there. Time to blow this joint! I stop into Shadowland, glancing around hesitantly. This place I travel through, it's creepy. I swear that there are unidentified living objects running around, but I need to get this stupid collar off. I jerk at it, finally pinching the right place, and drop it. Good luck tracking that one, suckers.

I feel something brush against my leg. Time to get out, I think as I step forward. Hopefully it'll be a shadow that's not inside—I stop, staring blankly at the white haired woman who caught me in the first place. She's got a phone in her hand and is staring blankly right back at me.

"Wrong shadow," I say and take a step back, leaving her behind again.

* * *

"You just took out the entire Central Hall's electricity?" Jamal asks the man standing next to him.

"I left the ER up and running," Technico says, with a shrug. "But the generators are going to come up at any moment. Not much more I can do unofficially to save the kid, sorry," he says, reaching up slightly to pat Jamal on the head. "If he's as good as you seem to think he is, he should be able to escape sooner or later, now." He reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out a cell phone, checking it.

"But—what if he can't?" Jamal asks.

"He's a shadow walker, right? He'll be fine," Technico says, shoving the phone back into his pocket without calling anyone. "You up for a milkshake? I could seriously go for a milkshake about now," he adds, walking away.

Jamal looks at the Hall, then looks at the crazy super that just chose what part of their electricity to kill.

"Hey, wait up," he calls, chasing after the crazy man. His class would never believe he had a milkshake with Technico. Maybe he should get an autograph, too!

* * *

It's a maze. I have no idea where the shadows in this place are going to wind up. I've popped out in two different rooms with heroes already, not to mention a room with a million and one guns that look like they're from outer space. Did I steal one? Hell no! Who knows what they really do? And frankly, supers that use guns just seems like cheating to me.

What? The baseball bat? That's different, I'd just been using it as an intimidation factor, okay?

Either way, I think I've got it this time. This definitely feels like . . . a . . . good . . .

I look around the obvious cafeteria, staring at half of the Central Hall blankly, but not as blankly as they're staring at me. "Um . . . how's the meatloaf?" I ask, climbing out from under the table just long enough to wave at everyone and get a good look (What? When else will I get the chance to see some of the biggest names around?)—man, Falconess is FINE in real life! Er, right—"Enjoy your meals," I say before diving back into the table's shadow.

Or trying to. I grunt as I feel someone grab my ankle. I'm dragged straight up, until I'm staring at a pair of seriously nice legs. I look up, blinking at the sight of . . . are those sequins? You know, I always wondered when I saw Star Spangled on television! Remember how I said I never thought of an S class wearing fingernail polish? Well, Star Spangled would be the exception. I could absolutely see this blonde beauty wearing nail polish. Probably in red, white, and blue.

"Can I ask," she says in a surprisingly sweet voice. "Why you're in this part of the building? I'm afraid it's for Hall members only."

"Star Spangled, don't drop him!" I hear Firefly shout from across the room. "He's a slippery little brat," she complains as she crosses the room. I look over at her, still hanging upside down. (Star Spangled? She's a tank, too. I've heard she's a higher class than Marigold, but I'd rather see that fight on television than in person, thank you.)

Just as Star Spangled is about to hand me over to Firefly a giant hole is knocked through the cafeteria wall. Star Spangled automatically drops me and turns with raised fists to the intruder. I dare to glance back for a second just to see.

Marigold. "He's MINE!" she bellows. "Don't let him run! He's going straight to the Cape Cells!"

I would laugh, but I don't have time. I dive through the shadow under the table and race through Shadowland at top speed. I don't care what's in here with me at the moment, nothing is as dangerous as that old lady right now! I am leaving Central behind—and never going back, ever.

I pull to a stop and step through the nearest portal in Shadowland, leaning against the closest wall so I can get my breath back. It isn't from the running, it's from being plain old fashioned terrified—

This wall feels funny. Cold and with ridges . . .

I slowly turn, almost scared to look.

That looks an awful lot like a stack of gold bricks, doesn't it? The sound of an alarm going off is quickly followed by the sound of several guns being cocked.

"I should have turned left at Albuquerque," I mutter, lifting my hands in the air.

\\* * *

So here I am—no, not in a jail, norms will never be able to catch me—I'm sitting on the top of Lady Liberty's tablet, enjoying the breeze and wondering, just for a moment, if I'll ever be a hero. I mean, all I really want to do is help kids like I was—kids that talked to the wrong guys and wound up in situations that they shouldn't be in. If I was a hero, I'd be able to do that. As it is, every time I try to do that now I wind up in more trouble than I started in.

Now both the East Branch and Central Branch are out for my head—I'm never going to be able to join. Maybe if it had only been East Branch I could have gotten away with it. I've seen them on TV, when all the Heads have to meet for something. Mastermental from Central and Marigold don't like each other very much at all. In fact, I'm almost positive that none of them like each other—they're just faking it for the camera really poorly. But now that Firefly, the golden child of the Central Hall, has it out for me, well, I'm screwed.

I jerk as I hear the sound of a straw rattling in a cup. You know, that annoying sound that comes when the cup's pretty much empty? Well, it's coming from above me. I turn, twisting to see the person sitting on top of the statue's shoulder. It's obviously a super, it's probably one from one of the branches out for my head. I am SO busted. And I'm too exhausted to run away right now, even though I know I'll try.

"Nice night, don't you think?" the man asks. He's just lounging there, trying to get that last drip out of a paper cup, wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. The only concession to his super state is a simple black face mask.

"How did you find me?" I ask, moving an inch closer to the largest shadow nearby.

"Tracking device," he says. "It's on your shoe," he adds helpfully. "Beautiful view from up here. I can see why you like it so much." You can see the city from here, lit up for the night. It really is pretty, at least I've always thought it was. And just being able to sit here, watching it? It's like being a real super hero. But I've got bigger issues to deal with, according to him. I bring my foot up, running my fingers over my shoe in search of the tracker.

"I didn't do anything that deserves you hunting me down," I mutter. "Marigold's just got it out for me."

"For robbing Fort Knox," he says.

"I didn't rob it! I just . . . got in," I say. "But I shouldn't even bother, you capes are all the same—"

He ignores me completely, digging into his pocket and pulling out a piece of paper that's been folded into a square. He flicks it at me, hitting me square in the face with it. I grab it before it drops into my lap and unfold it, forgetting about the tracker for a moment.

There's a silver shield with wings at the top of the page. It gleams in the moonlight. Underneath the shield are the words, "Cape High." I read the page twice as I try to wrap my head around it.

"Where we teach the capes of tomorrow, both hero and villain. Now accepting any bearer of this page as a student with full scholarship, food, and boarding. Just present this page to the Central Hall," the man above me says in a bland tone, as if he's memorized the sheet. "Signed by Technico, Principal of Cape High, and Mastermental, Central Hall Leader," he adds.

"But I can't go into Central—" I start out, only to stop as he flies away. "Hall," I finish a bit lamely, still staring at the paper. I wonder how long he's been carrying this, I think as I look at the worn creases in the paper. It looks like it's been through the wash a few times, and folded more times than I can count . . .

But . . .

I'm almost surprised when the first laugh escapes me. I give in, though, laughing my head off over the entire thing. That had to have been Technico—who's from Central Hall—and I must have passed my entrance exam with flying colors, even if I'd had no clue it was one in the first place.

Supers are weird, you know?

And me?

I'm just super.

Back to Table of Contents

First Date

Cheyanne Young

Cheyanne is the author of several Young Adult books and the Powered Trilogy is her first venture into the superhero genre. Powered is about sixteen-year-old Maci Might's goal to become a Hero despite overwhelming evidence that she was born with villain DNA. The first book is available now and the following books will be released in the fall of 2014 and beginning of 2015.

You can find Cheyanne at http://www.CheyanneYoung.com and follow her on Twitter @NormalChey. If you're interested in pictures of junk food, nail polish and her dog, you can find her on Instagram at NormalChey.

* * *

I tug the hair tie out of my ponytail and give my head a good shake, letting the long strands of platinum blonde perfection trail down to my waist. The perfection thing was Revlon's words, not mine. I just left my third meeting with their stylists and scientists. Humans have always had an obsession with trying to look like Supers so I was only mildly flattered with the hair dye company approached me, asking to study my follicles to see if they can replicate the perfect color knockoff to sell to consumers.

I glance at the reflective surface of the Atrium's glass walls, checking out my reflection. My bright blonde hair is only part of the equation. My Hero suit is where the magic happens. Black boots, black gloves, deep maroon bodysuit with curves in all the right places and a plunging neckline designed by Pepper, the greatest suit designer in history, may he rest in peace.

Good luck replicating this hot mess, Revlon. You're welcome to try though.

My best friend Maci got her Hero status a few months ago and she's been trying to convince me to have my suit altered with a new chest plate. I know she means well, but hiding this cleavage won't do me any favors. Half the villains I take down end up losing because they couldn't keep their damn eyes up where they belong. I look down for a moment and smile.

What can I say? Women want to look like me and men want to do me.

It sounds self-absorbed, I know. But I use my powers for good. I didn't get into the Hero Brigade for nothing.

Case in point.

"Hey Crimson." My admirer gives an unsure little wave from across the Atrium as he does this walking jog thing in an attempt to close the space between us as quickly as possible without seeming desperate. Fail. Desperation just hangs in the air above his head, growing wider and stinkier as the time passes.

I pull off my thin black eye mask and shove it into a hidden pocket on my sleeve. I had to keep my identity a secret for the humans from Revlon. Now that I'm in the Atrium at Central, a place in King City that is forbidden to humans, I don't need it. Plus my face is way hotter uncovered.

"Miles," I say with a girly inflection in my voice that takes my intimidation down a few notches. "Sorry I'm late. Do I need to go home and change into regular clothes, or..?"

"No, you're perfect. I mean, you're fine. Um, yeah we can just go like this because our reservation is in a few minutes."

I flash my sweetest smile and hook my arm around his, allowing him to lead us to the King City Accelerated Passageway to Operations Worldwide. I never planned on changing clothes and I certainly wasn't late on accident. I need to be dressed in Hero attire for this date tonight. As a Hero, I'm on call all the time. You never know when someone might need a heaping dish of justice and I'm always happy to deliver it.

Miles and I don't look like a couple on a first date. I'm a Hero and he wears black slacks that are a little tight in the ass and a white pearl snap shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I'm loving the way the shirt pulls over his well-defined muscles though. If he wasn't a suspect I might think about dating him for real.

The screen on my wrist MOD pulses a blue light when I slide closer to him in the tiny KAPOW pod. It picked up on his energy and if I were to activate the MOD, it'd tell me all I need to know about him. I ignore the screen and place my wrist in my lap, MOD side down. How rude would that be to check out all of the info Central knows about this man while I'm sitting right next to him? He probably doesn't even know that Heroes have access to that stuff.

Besides, I remember it all because I've already read it in private.

Miles Mason: A Super aged twenty-two. Son of a stay-at-home-mom and an architect who helped reconstruct much of the Atrium after a villain attack a decade ago. Only child. Dropped out of Hero training after only six months and opened his own gym when he finished high school.

Now I guess he spends all of his time working out. I don't know what he learned in those first six months of Hero training as a child or if he plans on doing anything with that knowledge.

But I'm going to find out.

The conversation is a little awkward as we ride the KAPOW to the restaurant Miles chose. It's a fancy frou frou place where they cook the food in front of you and although humans run the establishment, they only serve Supers. They're the kind of whack-a-do humans who fetishize the Super race and write fan fiction about popular Heroes that all have happy endings that find some way to give humans power, too. All humans respect Supers and appreciate the work we do to keep the community safe and to protect from natural disasters, but some of them take it too far.

Unlike their fictional heroes who obtain power by radioactive spiders or a magic wish-granting genie, our powers aren't magic or fantasy. It's in our DNA. We may look like humans on the outside but we have a second set of veins under our flesh that holds our power.

It was his restaurant choice that made me know I'd chosen the correct suspect off the list. Though many Supers live segregated from humans for their own protection, I don't exactly like the idea of humans outcasting their own race.

We exit the KAPOW a few minutes later and I slip on my eye mask. We're somewhere in South America. The restaurant overlooks a cliff and the beautiful blue water that rivals CIK Island. The fresh stir-fry is the best I've ever eaten and if I wasn't already so judgmental about this place and its human owners, I might actually bring Maci and come back for dinner.

"So you work at a gym?" I ask in my sweet voice. The last time I let my normally throaty voice go all sugary sweet was when I had to convince a five year old to climb into my arms so I could jump us out of a four story window in her burning apartment complex.

"I'm the owner. And I work there too, obviously." He gives me a sheepish grin and then takes his cell phone out of his pocket. I slide to the far right of my barstool, grab his arm and make some comment about his watch but it's all an act so I can sneak a look at his phone. If he's going to alert an accomplice or do anything less than legal, I'd like to know about it.

But to my disappointment, he doesn't do anything with it except switch the volume off and shove it back in his pocket.

So he's the kind of guy who ignores his phone while on a date? Blah.

Back on the center of my barstool, I continue talking about his stupid gym, eat my food and try to think of some more ideas to bait him.

Miles sucks down the last few drops of his sweet tea and glances longingly at the bar. I've told him he can order a drink if he wants but he's refusing because I'm under age. Yes, even the Supers have age limits on alcohol. I could capture villains and save the world at sixteen, but ordering a glass of wine? Not until I'm twenty one.

"If you ever get tired of training in SLAM, you could always stop by my gym. It's on the south wing of Central, not too far from there actually."

SLAM is the Heroes only training facility. I'm there at least two hours a day. Of course, Miles knows all of this because he likes to hang out in the corridor at the very convenient times of day that I happen to be there. That's how we officially met three days ago. I had seen him hanging around lately, handing out flyers for his gym to any Supers who passed by SLAM, usually teenagers who daydreamed of being a Hero but not enough to make them actually sign up for Hero training. He had looked so familiar and it took me an entire three hour boxing session to finally remember where I had seen his gorgeous mug from.

Then of course, the moment I knew who he was, I flirted up a storm and left a trail of hints until he got the balls to ask me on a date.

And here we are.

Miles stabs his fork into a beef fajita. "No cover fee for you, ma'am."

"Aww, that's so sweet of you." I brush my fingers across his arm again, stopping when chills prickle across his skin. "I haven't trained outside of SLAM. Training with you could be fun," I say with a sultry wink.

He clears his throat. "Yeah, um, maybe you could teach me some Hero moves."

I rub my neck and then let my index finger trail down the shiny maroon fabric of my neckline, stopping right where it makes a V at my cleavage. "Maybe you could teach me something."

Miles swallows. A steady hum of power radiates from his body. It's almost cute how little power the regular Supers have compared to Heroes. It definitely is cute how much he sucks at hiding it. I lean forward on my barstool, bringing my elbows together on the table, squishing my boobs up for his entertainment. This move is so blatantly obvious, I'm almost embarrassed that I'm being so uncreative.

I smile up at him.

He smiles back.

What the ef?

I can't believe he just did that! I brought out the big guns, the luscious double D bazongas that I'm famous for and he just sat there and smiled back at me? While looking me in the eyes?

Shit. I'm getting nowhere. I straighten up and gather up all of that dignity I left on the table. "So why did you choose this restaurant?"

He gives me a sheepish grin. "I asked my MOD for recommendations of good date restaurants."

I take a long sip of sweet tea. "So you haven't been here before?"

He shakes his head. "It's nice though. I love the view."

I focus on his pupils. "Do you know anything about the owners?"

He shrugs. "No, do you?"

Dammit. He's telling the truth. The only clue I've had to go on was the idea that maybe he hates humans and eats at establishments that have similar views. He doesn't give a shit about my sex appeal and he hasn't once suggested that I join him in a secret evil plan. Besides a follow up visit to his gym where I can hack into his computer, I don't think there's any reason to keep investigating Miles.

I scarf down the rest of my food and thank him when he foots the bill.

The ache of disappointment fills my veins as I fake a smile and kiss him goodbye. The food was pretty good, but the date was pointless.

* * *

Mom and Blue argue over the last slice of pizza. When I walk in the room they start in on me. "Honey, tell your brother to respect his elders and give me the last slice," Mom says. She's dressed in a tight-fitting skirt and a silk button up blouse so that means she's been at work all day. It's nice to see her finally getting back to work after her breakdown last summer.

"Crimson, tell Mom that I'm a growing Super in Hero training and I need all the energy I can get," my brother retorts. With his six foot frame, Blue hovers over the both of us but he's so freaking skinny he's not the least bit intimidating.

I roll my eyes. I just came in here for a glass of water, not to get in the middle of their food war. "Blue's right," I say, stepping between them and the pizza box. "Heroes need lots of energy and since I'm the only Hero in this room..." I grab the last slice, fold it in half and take a bite. "It's mine."

The collective groan of my beloved family members puts a smile on my face.

"Why are you even here?" Mom asks. "We had all that construction work done and yet you're still here!" She gives me a playful shove as she takes the empty pizza box to the trash. Our homes are built into the Grand Canyon and with the exception of one glass wall that overlooks the canyon, everything else is underground, covered in rock. I love my family, probably more than a nineteen year old should, but I'm a freaking Hero. I needed my own place.

For my birthday last year, my parents and I had an extension built onto my room, expanding it further into the canyon so that I had my own apartment, complete with my own front door entrance from the KAPOW that was just around the corner from my parent's place. So Mom's question of why I came home into their house and not mine was pretty valid.

"I just got back from a date who refused to drop me off at the KAPOW. He wanted to be all romantic and shit and walk me to my door," I say with an eye roll. Mom lifts an eyebrow in curiosity. I toss up my hands in defense. "Well I didn't want him knowing where I lived! He liked me way too much. He's probably clingy and I can't have that."

"So you let him know where I lived instead?" Blue says with an epic eye roll. "As if I need more guys trying to be my friend just to get to you."

Mom gives both of us a look. "Was this a real date or one of those fake dates?"

My MOD lights up and I skim the message before giving her an answer. "It's not a fake date. It's a Hero thing. It's all part of the job."

"These aren't assigned Hero missions, Crimson." Mom makes that little tisk tisk of disappointment. "You do this for fun. Frankly, I think it's just cruel to those poor guys."

My MOD lights up again. I stick out my tongue. "It isn't cruel! If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to worry about. Besides, one of these days I'll be right. I'll catch someone before they go villain."

Mom's eyes narrow. "And how many hearts will you break in the process?"

I can't help but smile as I read the message I just received from Maci. "Looks like I'm about to add one to that list. Don't wait up for me."

* * *

Maci Might is the newest Hero to join our ranks. Technically she's on a probation period, but we don't talk about that. Not if we want to keep her happy. She's also my best friend and probably the only girl on the planet who can put up with me.

She meets me in the corridor between our houses. "Did you run here?" I ask curiously, taking in the sight of her in full Hero suit, leaning against the wall almost as if she were tired.

Heroes don't get tired. At least, not the skilled ones.

"Yeah," she says with a slight pant in her voice as she bursts into a grin. "From the Empire State Building. Just beat my record. Two and a half minutes."

"Nice. I love your new hair. Reminds me of espresso."

She rolls her eyes and shrugs her hair behind her shoulders. Maci was born with light hair like the rest of the Heroes but right about the time she was old enough to take her Hero exam, her hair started darkening. Now it's a deep chocolate brown. And it's kind of delicious-looking.

"Hair dye just doesn't work anymore," she says with a sigh and a glance at her MOD screen. I swear I'm not trying to snoop, but her hunky nerdy boyfriend just sent her a text. "I wish they'd make Super quality dye because the human stuff just washes out after a few days."

"Why are you dying your hair? Just embrace the dark."

She frowns and types out a quick reply to her boy toy on her MOD screen. "I don't mind my hair so much. It's everyone else who seems to be bothered by it."

I put my hand on my hip. "You're not a villain. And I will be happy to kick the ass of anyone who thinks your damn hair color has anything to do with your credibility."

"Thanks, Crimson." Her smile is genuine but annoyance shines through as well. I know she hates the topic of her dark hair, her probationary Hero status and the rumors that she has villain DNA coursing through her veins. But I have faith in her and that's all that matters.

I'm serious about kicking ass if anyone wants to cross her.

"So what's the deal with this guy?" I ask. I'm practically salivating at the idea of taking down a villain tonight. Too many of my dates have been dead ends lately.

She holds up a finger and gives me what I'm guessing is supposed to be a serious look. Like she means business. "I'm only doing this because I think this guy might actually be up to something bad. But Crimson, listen..." Her hands twist together. "You've been working too hard lately. You have to take a break soon."

"Blah." I stick out my tongue. "I am not working too hard. I'm a friggen Hero."

She rolls her eyes. "I'm just worried about you."

"Duly noted. Now what's the deal with this guy?"

Maci pulls up a photo on her MOD. The guy in question is younger, probably around eighteen. He's tall though, tan and filled out. His hair is all buzzed off, but surprisingly, it looks good on him. He's definitely past all the awkwardness of puberty.

She pulls back her MOD and deletes the image quickly, making a gagging sound as if having his photo on her MOD any longer would make her literally puke. "His name is Ares Fleet and he has slime ball written all over him."

"Fleet as in The Fleet Room?" I ask. She nods. "The very same. Ares is the youngest son of Adrian Fleet. I just ran into him in New York. He was desperate for a date to the opening of their newest Fleet Room tonight. Even after I told him I happily had a boyfriend he wouldn't let it go. He wanted a Hero there."

"So you volunteered me." I lace my fingers together and flex them in front of my chest. Maci smiles. "I'm almost offended at how excited he was when I said the famous Crimson Carlow would be happy to join him. He dropped his pursuits on me instantly." She takes my wrist in her hand and types in the address of the newest Fleet Room into my MOD. "He'll be waiting for you."

I lean in and kiss her on the cheek. "Thanks, you're the best."

She points her finger at me like she has some kind of authority. "When you get back we're going to have fun girl time. Relaxing time!"

"Yeah yeah," I call out over my shoulder as I summon a KAPOW pod. "We can relax when we're dead."

* * *

The Fleet Room is a Super-owned chain of entertainment centers that are basically just a Chuck-E-Cheese for adults. They have arcade games, pool, bowling, tons and tons of bartenders and on top of all of that—they're human friendly. Every Fleet Room guarantees to have Heroes visit once a month. I've received an invitation a dozen times but have always declined. I like being famous for my Hero achievements, not for my drunken schmoozing with the humans.

But I'll make an exception tonight.

The new Fleet Room is a spectacle even from far away. The metal building is a three story shining beacon with massive neon green lettering that spell out the establishment's title while casting a ghoulishly green glow on everything. Humans step out of my way as if by magic as I walk down the streets of Manhattan. I smile for the occasional photo and pretend to be understanding as teenage humans shake nervously while gathering the courage to say hello. It's cute how excited they get when they meet a Hero for the first time. The ones that annoy me are the humans who try to sneak a photo of me with their smart phone because they're too chicken shit to just come up and ask me for a photo. I mean, who does that?

Obviously my Super senses have me keenly aware of my surroundings at all times. Did they think I wouldn't notice a camera pointed directly at me while their head turns another direction?

My face mask fits snugly over my brows and down around to the top of my cheekbones but I reach up and check it anyway. A Hero has never revealed their identity to a human before, and I sure as hell won't be the first one.

The bouncer is a Super standing about six feet tall and almost that wide with all the freaking muscles he has. His arms cross over his chest like they were designed that way—folded and overbearing and intimidating. His massive size isn't the only indicator that he's a Super; his average power level has been trained to radiate as strongly as he can manage. Which, you know, is about as powerful as I was at three. Maintaining my power seems so easy now, but it's a skill that's only taught in Hero training. All Supers are superior to humans in strength, agility and power, but the average Super is no threat because they have no idea how to harness their internal power and use it as a weapon. For good or evil. Still, I applaud him on his amateur efforts of strengthening his power level. I can totally feel the vibrations of it from five feet away. I bet it's frightening to humans.

He smiles and steps aside when I approach. "Hero Crimson, so great to see you," he says.

I smile back. Say thanks.

What else am I supposed to say?

The Fleet Room is a chaotic mash up of brightly lit arcade games, waitresses in neon barely-there uniforms, and the top 40 dance tracks on repeat at a volume that would make even the hearing-impaired cover their ears. Ares Fleet finds me a fraction of a second after I walk in the door. How unsurprising.

He wears dark slim-fit jeans and a black shirt under a leather jacket. Quite the teen vampire heartthrob look he's got going on here. "Hero Crimson." He says it like I've just gotten caught doing something naughty. His arm slides around my back, hand running dangerously close to my ass. He places a welcoming kiss on my cheek. "I'm psyched that you were able to join me tonight."

Maci was right. I can practically feel the aura of slime ball that floats in a five foot radius around him, and now me by default. Ugh, I've got his slime on me. I suck back my revulsion and lean into his shoulder as he guides me around the crowd and up a flight of stairs to a VIP-only balcony.

"I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting you, Mr. Fleet." My words are honey and my smile is so convincing I almost believe it myself.

"Call me Ares," he says with a southern-style rich boy drawl. "Mr. Fleet is my father." A hint of disdain flickers across his features as he leans back against the balcony railing, exposing more of his black shirt which I can now see is snugly fit around a sculpted six pack. "Mr. Fleet is also my eldest brother . . .and my other brother. I am simply Ares."

"Well at least you're still young," I say a little sarcastically before I remember I'm supposed to be flirting as well as secretly scoping out the place. I lean forward and run my finger along the collar of his jacket. "I prefer my men young."

Ares doesn't shrink back like Miles did when I turn up the heat a little bit. Instead, there's a fire in his eyes that tells me he likes what he sees. Now I'm getting somewhere. "So tell me about yourself," I say over the thumping of an overtly sexual R&B song. "And why would you want to invite me to this shindig? I'm no one special."

"Nah, are you kidding? Hero Crimson? The pleasure is all mine." He peels his vision away from my breasts long enough to glance around the room. "It's opening night and I'm the only Fleet who could bother to show up. I'm the one who doesn't get a dime of this fortune and yet I managed to get the lovely, and extra beautiful I might add, Hero Crimson to join me. This will probably be the most profitable location now."

"Aww, you're too sweet," I say, throwing a hand over my heart for emphasis. "What do you mean about not getting any of the fortune? Isn't it a family business? I bet this place earns way more than my shitty Hero salary."

Hero salaries aren't shitty. I'm just planting a seed.

He shrugs. "I have a trust fund but that's about it. Dad loves my big brothers more than me. They're all owners of the business and I'm just the kid that gets in the way, as far as they're concerned." He grabs a drink off a tray from a passing waitress and takes a sip. "It sucks being the baby when your brothers are a hundred years older than you."

"Maybe they'll let you in when you get older," I suggest. I glance around the room. This probably won't go anywhere. Sure Ares is a typical cocky teenage guy, but he hasn't displayed any signs of villainous activity yet.

"I don't need to be older," he says. The tone of his voice makes the hairs on the back of my neck perk up. My senses pick up on more than just the sparkle in his eyes. His fingers trail up my arm. "I'm making plenty of money now. Without them."

"Are you hiring?" I say with a wink. "I'm afraid my handbag collection has swallowed up my paycheck lately."

He lets out a little snort. "You're a Hero. I don't think you'd be interested in my methods." He watches me over the rim of his glass. He's testing his limits.

Ah, man, this is so easy.

"Fiiiiine," I whine. "Treat me just like everyone else and don't tell me cool things because you're scared of the badge. Ugh. Sometimes I'm not even sure why I became a Hero. I wanted to go on adventures...." Ares watches me intently as I tug a strand of my hair and twist it around my finger, looking as dejected as possible. "But instead of adventures all I get are people being scared of me, thinking I'd turn them in."

"Well isn't that your job?" His eyes rake me up and down. His power level is next to nothing, meaning he's not even suspicious of me anymore.

I shrug. "Sorry Ares but I should probably get going. All this stupid money talk has me realizing how broke I am after my last shopping spree. I think I just want to go home."

I take a step forward and he grabs my arm. "Wait. I'll show you."

"Really?" I say with an innocent smile.

He leans forward and, oh my god I can't believe he does this, but he bops me on the nose with his finger. "Of course. A pretty girl like you should be able to shop as much as you want."

Oh man I love it when a guy treats me like a shallow dumbass.

It means they've totally let their guard down.

Not even five minutes later, Ares and I are behind a private door to what looks like a closet-sized server room. The glow of LED lights bounces off our faces. Ares types a string of nonsense into the main computer. I sigh. "I don't know how any of this will help me. I don't know shit about computers."

He laughs. "It's all good. I got you babe."

I suppress a shudder. I can't stand being called babe by someone I'm not dating. Ares opens a drawer and takes out a stack of generic gift cards. He turns on his heel and wraps an arm around my shoulders. His breath smells like liquor. "Okay babe, I'm about to let you in on a little secret. Now promise me you won't go arresting me or anything."

I roll my eyes and press tightly against his chest, letting him feel the curves of my body as I trace my finger down his abs. "I promise I want to make out with you after this," I whisper. He swallows. "That's . . .yeah . . .yeah okay let's get this done so we can get the hell out of here."

I lick my lips. "Please."

He turns back to the computer and proceeds to explain his plan to me. When he's not watching, I set my MOD to record his confession and then I stand patiently with my hands clasped together behind my back and watch him reveal what will be his undoing. "So basically I've set this to funnel extra money to the server. It doubles the ATM fees, takes a quarter from each transaction at the bar, stuff like that. When it builds up I unload it on these gift cards." He taps one on the table and then slides it through a card reader to load it up with a thousand dollars. He hands the card to me. "We stole that in only five minutes. Imagine how much money we'll have if we stay in here all night?"

I take the card and slide it into my bra.

Maci will be so proud of me.

"Hey, Ares?" I blink my eyes up at him and watch as he practically turns into a pile of hormone-crazed goo.

"Yeah, baby?"

I extend my palm until it touches his chest and let out a burst of power that drops him to the ground. My knee digs into his ribcage as I drop on top of him, yank his hands behind his back and slide a pair of power-blocking cuffs over his wrists.

"I am Hero Crimson. And you're under arrest."

Back to Table of Contents

Thawed

by Jim Zoetewey

Jim Zoetewey grew up in Holland, Michigan, near where L. Frank Baum wrote some of the books in the Oz series. Contrary to what you may have heard, Jim has never met a munchkin or been attacked by flying monkeys.

Jim is best known for the web serial, The Legion of Nothing which updates twice weekly at his website http://legionofnothing.com. The first year of the serial has been adapted into a novel, and Jim hopes to adapt two more by the end of this year.

This story, "Thawed" is set roughly a year before the beginning of the serial. The Legionverse includes a variety of ways to receive powers—mutation, genetic engineering, and scientific experimentation. Not only that, but the world was invaded by Faerie in the 1960's, and there are a few lingering effects.

* * *

Nicole stood on the front steps of the high school. Her backpack lay on the ground next to her duffel bag, which was currently filled with her soccer uniform, and a towel.

It was a warm day. It could have been summer. The grass had turned green. The trees had leaves, or at least buds. Nicole was barely noticing any of it. She was on the phone.

"My boyfriend? Mr. Noshow, you mean? He's still not here, and soccer ended twenty minutes ago."

Over the phone, Melissa said, "Well, he might have a good reason."

Nicole shrugged. "If he does, he has a good reason an awful lot. I don't think he's ever been on time."

Melissa laughed, and then, more seriously asked, "So is this it? The end?"

Nicole thought about it. "I don't know. It depends what he says, but as late as he is now? I'm going to call him. If he doesn't answer, that's it."

They said goodbye. As they did, she noticed a black dog in the shade of a tree across the street. She stared at it. The dog was huge. God, she thought, it's the size of a small pony.

And there was no question about it, it was looking at her. She wondered if she should run. Then she blinked, and when she looked again, it was just a normal dog. A Labrador Retriever maybe.

She laughed, deciding not to tell Melissa about that. Melissa would joke about it for weeks.

Then she started looking through her phone again.

She found his number as he pulled into the drive in front of her school. The car splashed in the puddles left over from the afternoon's rain.

Adam drove a sports car, not one of the well known ones, but a nicer car that she would have expected. He didn't have a job, and his family wasn't wealthy from what she'd seen.

She couldn't think of the model, something that struck her as odd because she ought to have known the model, or recognized that she didn't. She'd tried to ask her brothers what it was, but she couldn't remember what it looked like when it wasn't in front of her—not even the color.

He pulled up the school's driveway, and opened his door, waving her over. "Hey Nicole, I was thinking instead of coffee, we'd take a drive. I've got something I want to tell you."

He grinned at her. He looked better than the last time she'd seen him. It was nice to see him make an effort. Between the green, button down shirt, blue jeans, and short haircut, it was step better than the muddy t-shirt, he'd shown up in for their last date. She wasn't even sure how he'd found the mud. It hadn't rained in a week.

Last time she'd seen him, she'd given him an ultimatum, "Explain why you didn't show up last Friday, and make me believe it, or we're done."

"I've been thinking about what you said last time we talked, and you were right. I should have told you what I was doing. I'll tell you now, but . . . inside the car. It's not something I want to say where everyone can hear."

She thought about it, and decided almost in the same instant. She'd give him the chance. At least he was trying to explain now.

"Okay," she said, "let's talk."

"Great," he said, and sat back down in the car, unlocking the door.

As she opened the door, and stepped inside, she wondered what she was letting herself in for. Family drama? Medical problems? Was he on drugs?

She put her seatbelt on, and looked over at him. Drugs? Who was she kidding? He was almost boring—a complete straight arrow—except that he became a little intense at times.

He started the car. "There's a park down the street. We could stop there and talk. Maybe take a walk afterward? Anyway, what we're talking about has to stay in the car."

That brought her back to wondering about drugs. Well, she thought, it didn't have to be that big a secret. It might just be embarrassing.

"Nicole?" He sounded a little worried.

"Don't worry about it. I won't say anything."

"Good," he said, and they drove to the park.

It wasn't a big park. It had a small parking lot on one end, kids' playground equipment, and a baseball diamond on the other end.

Three kids, two boys and a girl ran around, sometimes climbing on the wooden structure in the middle of the lot, sometimes swinging on the swings. A woman in blue jeans and a light, green jacket sat on a park bench and read something on her cell phone.

Spring in Chicago, Nicole thought.

Adam grinned at her as he took off his seat belt. "You don't know how much of a relief this is. You're never supposed to do this. I've been told not to every time I even thought about it, but screw them. This is it. I'm a superhero. I'm Dark Cloak."

She couldn't help it. She giggled, then stifled the giggled, and then she blushed.

It seemed so unlikely. Okay, it fit. She had to admit that. It fit every superhero stereotype she'd ever heard of—the disappearances, being late, and all of it.

It wasn't like she lived under a rock. She'd seen comic books, not to mention the real supers on cable—on the SuperTV channel and all the TV shows.

Maybe, she thought, it wasn't that he'd claimed to be one, but who he'd claimed to be. Dark Cloak was one of those dark avenger of the night types, practically a ninja. He'd taken down leaders in the Outfit, Chicago's mob, on his own.

Adam was a little short, and kind of cute, but not the kind of guy she expected to come out of the dark like an avenging angel, or however the cliches put it.

He stiffened, not moving.

He probably hadn't expected that response.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I was surprised. You don't seem anything like him."

Deciding that might have sounded insulting, she decided to distract him. What would he want to talk about? She had a terrifying moment of not being able to think of anything, and then blurted out, "What can you do?"

From his expression, he'd been waiting to answer this one for years. "I don't ever talk about that on TV, but at this point, I might as well . . .

"I obscure things. People can still see them, but they don't pay attention to them. That means I can hide myself, but I can also make things disappear. Like if I was being chased, I could obscure the first or second step of a stairway, and the next thing anybody knows they'll be falling."

She thought about some of the stairways she'd been on. "You could kill somebody."

"Well, yeah," he said, slowly, "but if somebody's chasing me, they're part of the mob, or a supervillain. Those guys don't die on stairways. I'm lucky to make it out ahead of them. Besides if they did die, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. They're trying to kill me. That's self-defense."

She wasn't sure what she thought about him talking that casually about killing. She agreed he had a right to defend himself, but still they were people, and sometimes you might be wrong about whether they were trying to kill you.

He paused as if waiting for her to respond. When she didn't, he said, "I've never done it. Even when I brought Malone and his guys down, all I needed to do was sneak in and bug them. I installed some keyloggers on their computers too. Pretty soon I knew all their passwords to everything. It was enough to put them all away. Did you see me on TV? I got on the Tonight Show, Letterman, and all that. I did a few shows on SuperTV too, but you're not a capewatcher, right?"

There, at least, she was on firmer ground.

"No," she said. "I never watch that stuff."

He leaned forward in his seat, smiling at her. "I completely understand. It's kind of like following any other celebrity, but with more violence. It's pretty fun being a cape though—at least after the hard parts are over. Running for your life's not fun, but once the police have the guy in custody, it can be fun to talk to the press.

"Plus, everybody likes you and acts like you're a big deal. You get limos and endorsements, and stuff. I've got a business manager that handles licensing my image, and it's pretty crazy. I've put away enough for college just in the last two years. Of course, I can't spend much of it in real life or people would wonder where I got the cash, but I'm working on that. Anyway, I can spend a little without drawing attention. That's how I bought my car."

She thought about how nervous her parents got when they talked about paying for college. Forcing a small smile, she said, "I can do without the attention, but the money would be nice."

He nodded. "I get that. Sometimes, the attention is a bit much. I get sick of autographs the most, and sometimes I'm trying to catch somebody, and out of nowhere a fan shows up and wants to chat. Crazy, right?"

Then he leaned back in his seat. "So, are we good? I'm not trying to be late. Sometimes things come up. Like that time I didn't show up, someone was getting mugged, and I stopped it, but an Outfit hitman saw me, and it only got crazier after that."

She reached out and squeezed his hand. "We're good. I can't fault you for stopping a mugger. I definitely can't fault you for trying to escape a hitman. Just don't lie about it next time, and I won't get angry."

He squeezed her hand back. "Don't worry about it. I won't have any reason to lie from now on. Besides, who says I was trying to escape that hitman?"

"You're kidding, right?"

He grinned at her.

"That is so crazy," she said. "I can't believe you told me, but I'm glad you did. This would only be better if I could tell Melissa. I know I can't, but—"

He pulled his hand away. He screamed at her, "Don't tell anyone!"

He was loud enough that the woman watching her kids turned around, looking up from her cell phone, and staring at the car.

Then he blinked. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. I get this way sometimes. I'm so sorry . . ."

The woman didn't look away, and for a moment Nicole thought the woman changed, her body becoming more muscular, tusks extending from her mouth like a boar.

When Nicole checked again, the woman was watching her smartphone. She didn't have tusks at all.

* * *

Nicole didn't call Melissa that night. Sitting on her bed, she pulled out her iPad and searched Google for "supervillian women with tusks." She considered searching for "shapeshifting dogs that shapeshift into dogs," but decided it was stupid, and settled for "shapeshifting dogs."

She didn't find anything.

She sat and thought before she did it, but ultimately did search for "Dark Cloak temper."

She didn't find anything for that either.

* * *

They came for her two days later.

She stood in front of the high school. Melissa, her regular ride home from soccer, had gone home sick after lunch. This left her standing on the front steps of the high school alone, waiting for her mother—who hadn't sounded happy about leaving work early so that she only had to wait half an hour instead of an hour.

The weather was warm enough that she'd put her coat in her backpack. Tulip stems were poking their way out of the soil near the bushes.

She could have called Adam. He probably would have come, but she wasn't sure she wanted to see him.

He'd been apologetic afterward, and he'd even told her a little more, probably to see if he could recover what they'd been feeling before he'd shouted.

It hadn't worked, leaving her to think that if there were a "magical council" that handed out superpowers to humans, she wasn't impressed with their vetting process.

A blue SUV rolled up the driveway that ran in front of the school, stopping in front of her. Still tired from practice, she didn't think much about about it until the two men got out. Both of them looked at least thirty. They wore jeans, and frayed jackets. Only one of them had shaved.

It didn't occur to her that they might be coming for her until the unshaven guy grabbed her arm. "Shut up, and don't make trouble. We're going to the car."

He stood at least six inches taller than she did, and even if he had a potbelly, he wasn't weak. When he started to guide her down the steps the wasn't any question if she was going.

The other man didn't say anything, catching her eye, and pulling a pistol halfway out of his jacket pocket before pushing it back in.

Glancing backward, she realized her backpack lay at the top of the steps. Was that good? At least her mom would know that she had been here.

She realized that her heart was racing.

They brought her to a warehouse. She didn't know where it was, or even how long it took to get there. They wouldn't respond to any of her questions, and they'd blindfolded her, and taken her phone.

At first she didn't even know it was a warehouse. She only knew that from the sounds of their footsteps, they had to be in a big room. She recognized the sound of a forklift in the distance just before a door opened. The door sounded much closer than the forklift.

She felt the cold before she even stepped through the door. Realizing that they were pushing her into a refrigerator, or worse, a freezer, she tried to stop, but one of them, she couldn't tell which, pushed her forward, and she fell.

It hurt, but she tried to push herself up. If she could get her hand in the door, or foot . . . Something . . . Then maybe she could get out.

They shut the door before she even got up on one knee.

The door muffled the sound on the other side, so she couldn't understand what they said, but one of them said something. The other one laughed.

Then something clicked. They'd locked her in.

She ran to the door. It had a handle inside. She turned it. She pushed out.

It didn't move. She should have known better.

She turned around, checking out what was in the freezer with her. It wasn't much. Empty metal shelving took up half the room. Boxes filled with bags of frozen chicken breasts lay on the floor.

She was going to die in here.

No, she told herself. She wasn't. She was going to find a way out. Maybe she could break a leg off one of the pieces of shelving. They all looked old. She could batter it with one the boxes of chicken breasts?

At that she gave a laugh, which even to her ears, sounded a little hysterical.

She took a deep breath, and even if it felt like she was breathing in winter, she felt a little calmer.

She counted to ten. What did she know? Nothing, but she had some guesses about what was going on. This had to be connected with Adam. He'd brought down members of the mob as Dark Cloak, and they had to be using her to get at him.

They must be trying to get him to come down here, she thought. He'd be able to get around them. Hadn't he already? Not being noticed was his thing. He could be here at any moment.

All she needed to do was wait—that and not freeze to death, but she decided to try to get out anyway since he might not make it.

As she walked back to the shelves, she wished she hadn't left her coat in her backpack.

* * *

She woke up later to the sound of voices talking. She couldn't quite understand them.

He hadn't come. She hadn't been able to budge the door on her own, and eventually she'd sat down and fallen asleep.

She still felt cold at the memory. No, she realized, she still felt cold. It was dark. They must have turned off the lights, and then the voices must mean that they'd thrown other people in too, or she was hallucinating.

A voice spoke—clearly this time. "She's awake. She hears us." It was high pitched, but somehow sounded male to her.

"Another one, and sssoo soon. This doesss not bode well." This voice sounded like the wind.

A third voice, this one deep, but definitely female said, "Her fate hangs in the balance. She should stay."

Something growled, "Yes, she should stay."

Nicole got the impression that that voice didn't talk very often, and also that it was very big. She could feel the rumble of its growl in the air.

"Then let her stay," the high pitched voice said. "Our question for tonight's meeting lies more with him than her in any case. It is, put simply, what do we do with Dark Cloak? He's nearly gone over to the Shade Circle. Do we bring him back, or let him go?"

The voice that sounded like the wind asked, "How would we bring him back?"

"A means has presented itself. This mortal girl. They've set a trap for him. If she dies, it will cause him to reflect, to rethink where he is going."

She struggled to speak, but her mouth wouldn't work. The sounds that came out weren't speech.

Her tongue felt cold in her mouth.

The speakers didn't seem to notice, talking over her as if she'd made no noise at all.

The voice that sounded like wind made a tuneless whistle that turned into speech. "And then if he were visited and reminded of his purposssse... Yesss. It might work."

A growl. "I don't like it. It's too like what we fight. Didn't we—"

The high pitched voice broke in before it finished. "Sacrifices are inevitable. We regret it, but we know it must happen. Our champion faces a long, lonely road. Even the shadows stand against him—"

"Especially the shadows," the deep voice muttered.

"Yes, exactly," the high pitched voice said. "It requires someone who can work without help, without family or friends, and without rewards. If it helps, consider that the girl would not be in danger were it not that she'd been told. The universe works to keep things as they should be—one man standing alone against the dark."

"Hardly without rewards," the deep voice said. "It sounds as though rewards are part of the problem, and I doubt it's the universe working to keep things as they should be. It seems more like a bit of bad luck, or deliberate eavesdropping. You know they've done it before. You picked him. I think you need to admit your mistake and move on."

The high pitched voice sputtered. "I—"

Nicole had stopped listening at the phrase, "keeps things as they should be." Did that mean that she should be dying in a warehouse freezer? At that thought, she had to ask herself, was that what was going on here? Was this her last gasp of consciousness before it all went dark?

She couldn't feel her limbs anymore. She couldn't be sure, but wasn't that one of the symptoms of hypothermia?

In the background, the voices kept on talking, and there were more of them. She could almost feel the bodies around her. She concentrated, trying to hear them better, trying to open her eyes so that she could see.

She felt something. In fact, she felt many things, but two of them were close. One of them held noise, laughter, and she thought she saw a firefly glowing. In the other she felt a quiet watchfulness, and she suspected, fear.

She aimed toward the firefly.

As she did it, she felt something inside her change, and she knew that she had been about to die, but now she wasn't. She felt warm.

Their voices became clearer, and feel their heat. As they spoke, she had visions—a flash of an enormous, black dog, a woman with tusks, a small man—less than two feet high, and a dim, smokey campfire. Eyes appeared in the smoke, and sometimes a mouth.

Eyes in the darkness reflected the fire's red light. She couldn't see any of the beings around it clearly—only shapes, and sometimes a glint of light when their fangs reflected the fire.

"The mortal," a voice grunted. "She's fully here."

The short man wore clothes she would have expected to see at a Renaissance fair—a pointed hat, pointed shoes, and a coat held shut by buttons. He stared up at her, the tops of his ears sticking straight up.

"There's something wrong. She shouldn't be able to do that. This council gives its champions power. She can't simply claim it. She—"

The dog sneezed, and lowered its head to the man, tilting it quizzically before snorting, and announcing, "The council is over. Our new champion is here."

When she woke, the door was open, and she could hear sirens. The police, she thought. Finally. Then she wondered who had opened the door. She suspected she knew.

She stepped into the warehouse, seeing it for the first time. It was nothing special—concrete floors with yellow lines, and steel beams holding up the roof.

One of the loading docks was open. She could leave. She walked over to it, and looked out. The men who'd kidnapped her lay on the ground, both of them to the side of the stairs next to the dock. She couldn't know for sure, but they looked dead.

* * *

She checked the news on an iPad that night after the ambulance ride, questions from the police, and riding home with her parents. They were less hysterical by then. It helped that somehow, miraculously, she wasn't hurt.

The news reports didn't mention her, but did mention "a downtown warehouse where the first two bodies were found."

There were seventeen bodies in all, each with "reported mob connections," and no reports on who had done it.

A part of her thought she should call Adam, telling him that she wasn't dead, and he could stop killing people now.

"No." She could hear the woman with the deep voice in her head.

Nicole dropped the family's landline phone. The police still had hers.

It landed on her bed.

"Is this what's its going to be like now? You're going to drop in whenever you want?"

"We'll drop in when it's necessary. We've taken of him. He's stopped killing people. He'll be taking a break from all this, and even seeing a healer. A therapist. You call them therapists."

"Will I see him again?"

"Maybe, but not soon. He believes that you're dead. Do you want to see him?"

"I . . ." She thought about it. He'd killed seventeen people. "No. I don't want to become like him either."

"No, you don't. So, don't make his mistakes. Find someone you can trust and tell them before you lose yourself. Then listen to them."

She nodded, but then realized the woman might not see it. "I will."

The voice didn't reply.

Nicole picked up the phone. After a little while, she called Melissa.

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