Quinn stood in the bright morning sun tapping her foot impatiently. The downtown street was bustling with morning traffic, but Quinn had a few hours before she had to be in the lab, and she had an important morning ahead of her, which started as soon as Ethan brought out her desperately needed coffee.
She hadn’t slept well over the past few nights, questions keeping her awake, dancing in front of her eyes whenever she shut them. Quinn, however, didn’t reach the top of her grad school class by letting unknowns slide out of her mind like leftover spaghetti into the trash. When she didn’t know something, those questions lingered, and she usually didn’t rest until she did.
Presently, it was Ethan keeping her awake. He seemed nice enough, but she still wasn’t sure where Rainey was, or how he knew her name, but he and Titan both acted fishy in the lab during the firestone incident. Something was off about how Ethan got his powers, and she was determined to find out why.
She smiled upon seeing Ethan, the key to her answers, step out of the coffee shop holding his drink holder. He spotted Quinn waiting on him across the street and opened a portal in front of him, then another across the street, stepping out in front of her. A person jumped out of the way of his newly opened portal, forcing Ethan to apologize.
Before she even had time to say hello, Ethan downed the last of his coffee, then eyed the bottom of the cup, making sure he had gotten every last drop. He shrugged, tossed his cup in the trash, then caught Quinn, staring at him, bewildered.
“Normally,” she said, reaching out to grab the cup labeled ‘Quinn’ in the holder, “people sip their coffee?”
Ethan laughed, then handed her the remaining coffee. “I’ve, uh, had a morning,” he told her. “Plus, don’t you want me to be alert if I’m going to teleport us across the city?”
“I did offer to drive,” she pointed out, “and maybe I still should, because you look like you’ve had a rough night. Protector stuff?”
He paused, rubbing the back of his neck. “I was kind of…kidnapped by Sola.”
“This morning?” she exclaimed. “She held you hostage?”
Ethan nodded. “Part of the job, I guess. Don’t worry, I escaped!”
“Obviously! But why are you here? Why aren’t you getting checked by the medics, or reporting it to Apex?”
“I’m fine,” Ethan insisted, “and Raz is giving the report to Apex. Probably. I, uh, didn’t know that was something I had to do, exactly. Besides, we have something more important to do!”
“Which is?”
“You ever get bored in school and think, if I had the ability to just stop time and do anything right now, what would I do?”
Quinn smiled, folding her arms. “In college, I always wanted to go into the lab and read over all the instructions so I could get ahead and do the experiments twice.”
“You and I lead very different lives. We will not be doing that today. Instead, we’ll be doing something that I hope is a little more exciting and just a hair illegal.”
Ethan opened a portal in front of them and onto a nearby rooftop, gesturing for her to head through.
“Okay,” she tentatively put one foot through the portal. “Whatever we’re doing, don’t think I’m going to go easy on you just because you were kidnapped,” Quinn said. A passerby shot her a concerned look. She waved them off.
“He’s fine,” she assured them, stepping through the portal.
“Help!” Ethan exclaimed, acting like he was being pulled through. “She’s doing it again-”
The portal shut, leaving the person confused. Ethan opened one more portal, right in front of them.
“Seriously, I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t call my sister.”
“Who?”
“Nevermind.”
—
Once, for Ethan’s thirteenth birthday, his parents had gotten him and Raz “front row” tickets for the Ace’s game in Ascension. Ethan spent the week leading up to his birthday with visions of sitting right behind the catcher and snagging a foul ball dancing in his mind during a very distracted week of middle school. What he didn’t realize was that his parents meant not the first row in the entire stadium, but instead the literal front row of the 300 section.
As he watched that game, despondent, Ethan always told himself that when he had a real job that paid him the big bucks, he would get himself tickets and sit right behind home plate. Despite being several years out of high school, he never worked a job that paid well enough for those tickets.
Naturally, his jaw nearly dropped down to the infield dirt after he teleported himself and Quinn into the heart of the stadium, standing right on the orange clay of the pitcher’s mound.
“Welcome,” he said, arms outspread, “to my dream outing.”
Quinn narrowed her eyes, confused. “You want to…walk around the football stadium?”
“Football?”
“Hockey, whatever.”
“There’s…no ice here?” Ethan said, confused. Quinn held an innocent gaze for a moment, then burst into laughter.
“Do you really think I don’t know what a basketball stadium looks like?”
“You do remember that I was kidnapped, like, an hour ago, right?”
“Yes, but if you didn’t want to lose in whatever we’ll be doing at this baseball stadium, you shouldn’t have invited me out.”
Ethan smiled. Despite how nervous he always felt in the lead up to seeing Quinn, actually being with her always felt so easy. In fact, he hadn’t felt this relaxed all week.
Eyeing both dugouts, and spotted what he was looking for: a bucket of balls and a few bats that were left behind after the Ace’s season ended, predictably, without a playoff berth. He opened a portal in front of him, and another inside the dugout. Reaching through, he grabbed a few balls and the bat. “This was the first place I ever teleported to, after getting my powers”
“You never talk about what that was like,” Quinn said softly. “Gaining powers.”
“Oh, well…” Ethan trailed off. He didn’t want to lie to Quinn, but he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone he got his powers at a different time months after the Surge, but he had also spent so long lying he had almost stopped interrogating himself about what it meant when he did. He didn’t want to start a relationship with Quinn based on lies, but he couldn’t just exactly spill the whole truth to someone who, despite being very cute, was still just a stranger.
He couldn’t tell her everything, but he would have to start somewhere.
“Okay,” he said, “how about a game?”
Quinn nodded vigorously.
“Did you play any softball?”
“All-conference in undergrad,” she beamed proudly. “Small school, very small conference, but still.”
“Is there anything you don’t excel at?”
“I cannot draw, or paint, but I’m a decent knitter.”
“Noted. Have you ever hit a home run?”
“Of course, but those softball fields are a bit…smaller than this one.”
“Well, no excuses if you want to ask that question. We’re going to take a round of batting practice and whoever hits more home runs wins. If you win, I will let you ask me one question and I’ll answer no matter what.”
“Didn’t you literally get stronger after the Stillrock incident gave you powers, kind of like radioactive steroids?”
“Yes, but you also had the opportunity to gain powers and chose not to so I think it’s fair. Play ball!”
Ethan left Quinn on the mound with the bucket of balls, jogging to home plate. He pictured himself under the lights with the roar of the crowd, but the fantasy was shattered when Quinn’s first pitch nailed him in the back. Luckily, she didn’t throw too hard.
“Protectors are tough, right?”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Some of us. Over the plate might be nice,” he called back. Quinn wound up, then tried again, this time lobbing a pitch way outside.
“If you just put those two together you’d really have something!”
Quinn rolled her eyes, then finally threw one over the middle of the plate. Ethan loaded up and cracked it off the wall in left field.
“Yes!” He pumped his fist, grateful that the Surge had altered his strength more than he knew. Each pitch Quinn managed to get over the plate (not many in total) was met with a loud crack of the bat, sending the ball flying into the outfield but never quite making it over the tall fence. When the first bucket was empty Ethan jogged out to relieve her.
“Your turn,” he told her, “hit one out and you win.”
“Easy,” she laughed, taking a practice swing that showed a little rust but a lot of skill. She was smooth through the zone, with little wasted motion. Ethan threw her a meatball down the middle only for Quinn to smack it right back at his face. He gasped, throwing up a void for the ball to crash into harmlessly, dropping to the grass. Quinn held a hand over her mouth.
“Are you okay?” She called out.
Ethan dropped the void. “All good. I guess I need to throw a little harder.”
“Guess you thought I was joking about being all-conference.”
Ethan put a little more heat on his next pitch only for Quinn to tag one halfway into the outfield. After putting several more impressive swings on the ball he was wondering if Quinn hadn’t also gotten powers and failed to tell him. Despite her skill, she still couldn’t reach the outfield wall. Down to their last ball, Quinn needed a miracle.
“Alright,” Ethan called, taking the rubber. “Tie game, bottom of the ninth, two outs, and…here’s the pitch!”
He lobbed the ball over to Quinn, who, looking intensely, tracked it and swung much like an ogre would swing a tree trunk, knocking the ball nearly straight into the air for what would’ve made an easy fly out to end the game. Ethan, however, had other plans.
He watched the ball just about to fall back to earth and, instead, allowed it to turn, gathering momentum. With a wave of his hand he opened a portal underneath it and another one above the stands. The ball sailed through, flying weakly out of the park and into the stands for what was undoubtedly the world’s weakest hit dinger.
“A home run!” he yelled, throwing his arms up. Quinn laughed, running the bases and pumping her fist as she jumped on home plate.
“The Ace’s win! The Ace’s win!”
He met her at home plate with a high-five, then Ethan took a few minutes to open portals in front of each ball and put them back in the buckets.
“Since I was the hero of the game, it looks like you’re buying lunch,” Quinn punched him playfully in the shoulder.
“Gladly, but I’m in a ball park mood now so I hope you like hot dogs,” Ethan told her. He opened a portal outside of the stadium to a lunch stand that was thankfully open early. Ethan paid for their order and they found a flaked wooden table that had, at one point, inexplicably been painted blue, away from anybody else, enjoying a break in the shade.
“Also, considering I’m not exactly a Protector, I’m also not exactly getting paid.”
“You had to train for three months without being paid?”
Ethan wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Yep,” he said in between bites. “I’ve basically spent three months living off Alex while people beat me up.”
“Wait, so you got kidnapped for free?” Quinn asked, incredulous. “Even I got paid to do my masters.”
“How exactly does one get a job working in a lab that technically doesn’t exist?” Ethan asked.
“I was one of the few people to write papers on the deep underground radiation found in the old mining tunnels in the Black Hills,” Quinn explained, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “Amory or someone on her team saw them, reached out, and asked me every researcher’s dream.”
“To risk their life working on an unquantifiable energy source?’
“To take that research,” Quinn said, “and putting them into practice, to fix something, you know?”
Ethan nodded. “Well, you certainly went big with your first practical job.”
“Well,” she said, taken aback, “why wouldn’t I?”
Ethan’s eyes lit up. He spied her hand resting on the table and, for the first time, took it in his, as if her confidence could radiate through her skin and into his, making him more like her.
“Now, for my one question…”
“Don’t tell Amory I let you ask me something, but go ahead.”
“Where did you really get powers?”
Ethan paused. If he wanted a real relationship with Quinn, he couldn’t just lie to her whenever it was convenient. “From the Stillrock site incident.”
“I knew it!” Quinn pointed at him, louder than he would’ve liked. “That’s why your energy signature is the same as the Firestone you brought in: you really did get your power during the same burst that hit the Firestone.”
Ethan nodded. Oddly, despite telling Quinn his secret, he felt nothing but excitement at sharing this part of him. It welled inside of him; There was no going back now. “I…kind of caused that incident.”
Quinn’s eyes widened. “You destroyed the mines?”
“Yep, and nearly killed myself in the process, but it got me these!” He flexed his palm, a purple swirl appearing above his hands.
“Wait,” Quinn said quietly. Ethan could practically see the possibilities racing behind her almond eyes. “If you got powers after the Surge, then others could, too. Hell, there’s nothing stopping me from going down in the mine and finding my own breach point. I could get better powers than yours!”
Ethan’s face darkened. “That’s kind of why Apex wanted me to keep myself a secret. And, there’s really no better powers than mine. I can go anywhere I want.”
“So, where do you want to go?”
“Today?” Ethan smiled. “I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else.”
Quinn rolled her eyes. “So, you knew you weren’t supposed to be able to get powers after the Surge, but you found a way to do so?”
Ethan nodded. “Working in the mines was going to kill me eventually. I had to find a way out, no matter what anyone told me.”
She smiled, meeting his eyes. “Maybe we’re alike in that way. You found your own way to get powers, then ran head first into the museum to stop Sola from stealing a Firestone before you even knew what it was, and you fought Bramble head on after Apex stacked the deck against you.
“Maybe neither of us know when to say ‘no’,” Ethan chuckled.
Quinn’s face suddenly had a mischievous quality to it, one that made his heart skip.
“I think,” Quinn leaned forward to the center of the table, putting her face in her hands, “that instead of settling for a no, both of us know when to push life for a ‘yes’.”
It took Quinn one sentence to summarize how Ethan felt for a year after the Surge, after Alex gained powers and fame while he spent his nights working in the mines and wondering what else could be out there for him. He felt, maybe for the first time, like he had not only been seen, but understood.
A no meant spending his life wondering what could have been, wondering how far he could have gone if he hadn’t been afraid to make a mistake. Going into the tunnels was his way of pushing life to give him a ‘yes’, of taking more than the world was willing to give him.
Ethan was practically buzzing. Quinn’s hand felt perfect in his, and he leaned forward to meet her, only to be interrupted when her phone buzzed on the table.
“Ugh, sorry,” she shook her head, putting her phone back down. “It’s my sister, finally calling me after weeks of ghosting me. I’ll get her later.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Ethan noted. “Is she also an invulnerable superhero beloved by the entire city?”
Quinn laughed, pulling up her phone. “You would’ve thought so, by the way my Mom talked about her. I still remember when I was little and she was pregnant, she would always say that she could just feel that the baby was in charge, so she started calling her the Queen. So, when she was born, they gave her a name fit for a Queen.”
“What was it?” Ethan asked.
Quinn smiled, holding out a photo of the two of them. It was clearly a few years old, maybe early college, but Ethan’s heart sank immediately, recognizing the raven colored hair.
“They named her Rainey.”
Ethan choked on his hot dog, then tried to play it off by coughing into his shoulder. He forced it down, sucked down some water, then used his go-to response for when he was truly stumped.
“Oh?”
Quinn gave him a concerned look. “Are you okay?”
Ethan waved her off, coughing into his shoulder. “I’m fine,” he choked out, sounding anything but. Quinn shrugged, checking her phone, scowling at the time.
“Well, beating you at baseball was fun, but the Surge isn’t going to monitor itself,” she sighed, pushing herself to stand. “Maybe we could get together at a bar after you capture Sola and become a full-fledged Protector to celebrate?”
Ethan hopped to his feet. “I’d love that,” he said shakily. Quinn still looked concerned. Ethan tried to shake it off. “Need me to drop you off?”
She shook her head. “I’ve spent enough time walking through portals that shouldn’t exist this morning, I’ll call a lift. Besides, you look like you could use a break. I think your lack of sleep last night is getting to you.”
Ethan nodded, hugged Quinn goodbye, and opened a portal to the nearest rooftop, far out of view of everyone else around. He crouched, letting out a deep, angry exhale that turned into a scream.
“I nearly died getting powers, Apex won’t let me become a Protector, and now Quinn’s sister wants to kill my sister?” Ethan yelled at no one in particular. He threw his hands up. “Why can’t anything just be easy?”
As if on cue, his phone buzzed. It was a text from Alex, vaguely sinister as almost all of them were. Enough time. Need to talk.
Right, he thought, speaking of, Alex and I still haven’t discussed Rainey’s attack in Maybell at all since I snuck out last night and never made it home. She’ll have reported Rainey’s existence to Apex by now and they’ll all be wondering where she came from and how she got her powers. That’s…not a conversation I’m looking forward to having.
Ethan sighed heavily, then opened a portal and headed towards their apartment disappearing from sight. Quinn sat on a bench near an empty park, watching Ethan teleport away.
One mystery was solved: Ethan didn’t get powers like everyone else. He had been responsible for the Stillrock incident, the same one that produced the Firestone Sola had wanted to steal. Quinn wasn’t sure what, exactly, any of this had to do with Rainey, but she couldn’t shake the feeling it was all coming together soon, like multiple trains on overlapping tracks.
As she pondered that, her phone rang. Her eyes lit up when she saw Rainey’s name. This time, she answered on the first ring.
“Where have you been?” Quinn demanded to know, eschewing a traditional greeting.
“Busy,” Rainey answered blithely. “Working on something. It’s almost done. I should be in the city soon, we can meet up when I’m done.”
“Oh, did you finally get a job?”
“Kind of. I’ll tell you all about it soon. But, hey, I called to ask you something.”
Typical, Quinn thought, shaking her head. She only calls me when she needs something.
“What is it?”
“I’ve kind of been working on something and…in about a week, I’m going to text you to leave the city. I need to know you’ll actually do it.”
Quinn stopped. “You’re going to what? Why on earth would I leave the city?”
“It’s just…you’ve got to trust me, okay? I’m making up for your last birthday.”
The mention of Quinn’s ill-fated birthday froze her blood. Ironically, Quinn had been born on the same day as the Surge hit, and an unfortunately timed hike led to Quinn spending a few weeks in the hospital.
“That night wasn’t your fault. You know that, right? You don’t have to make up for it.”
“I do,” Rainey answered, a sense of finality in her voice. “And I will. Just wait for my call and be ready to run.”
Rainey hung up, leaving Quinn sighing angrily. She had no idea what Rainey was planning, but after finding out her sister was alive she was left with even more questions than before.
Needing something in her control, Quinn walked to her car and headed to work. She thought her mind would be put at ease after finding out about Ethan’s powers and whether or not Rainey was still alive, but finding those answers simply led to more questions.
Driving towards Apex Tower, she resigned herself to another long day. The sleep she vitally needed wouldn’t come tonight, either.