I don’t understand how he can eat at a time like this. The thing about having a superhero for parents is finding out how weird they can be when everything around them is getting even weirder (or in my case, bloodier). Mom tends to be a little bit aloof sometimes in general, maybe because she’s seen enough death and destruction working with HazVac in her glory days to figure that she might as well enjoy life before it’s over. Dad, though, is a lot weirder.
He nudges me, one arm folded over his chest and the other holding his phone to his ear, “Toppings?”
I stare at him weirdly, at the look on his face as the fire consuming the warehouse smolders into towering pillars that climb into the sky. We’re standing not too far away from everything that just took place. The armored trucks and the lady I murdered, and suddenly it’s getting very, very cold. I hug myself, disguising it as a way to fold my arms over my chest as I watch the Protectorate Contingency Department make it seem like nothing happened here in this warehouse yard. Men are arrested and teleported away. Baldy vanished a long time ago, apparently, leaving behind nothing except blood on the concrete. The Technomancer shimmered out of existence, right into thin air probably with some kind of classified technology. That just left the woman to get scraped off the road.
I had helped pick up her hammer and load it into one of their trucks, then dad had pulled me aside.
Not for anything important. He just wanted some pizza right about now. Worst part? My gut grumbled, empty as can be. My mouth had salivated when I had just heard about the food, but then I had puked a little.
Because, you know, there’s more than enough dead meat on the asphalt right now.
But murder makes a girl hungry apparently.
“Uh,” I say, shaking my head, trying to get my bearings. “Pepperoni, I guess? Extra cheese?”
He relays the information to the Pizza King employee on the other end, says his thanks and slides his phone back into his pocket. He had come wearing his costume, but the man can change in the blink of an eye into jeans and a polo shirt. Well, a few hours ago it would have been a blink. Now it had felt like a very long minute.
I stay silent, rubbing my arms to ward off the goosebumps. Why isn’t he saying anything? I can’t even look at him for longer than a few seconds because of the growing pit of panic and unease bubbling away inside of me.
I just killed someone, and she’s right there in those bags they’re loading her into, and silence.
But nothing. Nothing at all. He stands beside me, his blonde hair unruly and his face unreadable as we watch the PCD boys start repairing the concrete. They’re in black and white suits, work with leather gloves on and wear hats that shade their eyes. A part of me thinks they’re the same person, some Supe with the ability to keep making more copies of himself, because even now, as a group of them try to lift a heap of rubble away, they get crushed. Both dad and I wince, but second later, like little worker ants, a few more of them arrive and finish the job.
No blood under the rock or broken limbs, just gooey paste that dissolves into nothing.
“Your heartbeat is very, very quick,” dad mutters. “You’re freaking out right now.”
I wait before I speak, then whisper, “I just killed someone. She died in my arms.”
He puts his hands on his hips, then yells out, “Great job, boys! Good as new.” And really, the place looks good as new, just ignore the burned up warehouse. Dad looks at me and pats my shoulder. “Shit happens, Kace.”
I blink and stare at him, then step away, shrugging off his hand. “Shit happens? She exploded and—”
“I’m kidding!” he says, punching my shoulder gently. “You’re in heaps of trouble when we get home, and don’t think I won’t tell your mother. But between you and me, Kacey, you did a really good job here tonight.”
“Huh?” I ask, sounding as dumb as the word that’s come out of my mouth. “But the dead lady—”
“You stopped a chapter of the Blackpenny Lane Syndicate tonight all by yourself.” I’ve never heard that name before, because now comes the part where the PCD gets to work dragging away the heavy metal containers out of the trucks they’ve impounded. “Any other unranked superhero, especially one your age, would have died.”
Oh, you’re gonna love that story, tell you what, old man.
“But I’ve just got to ask…” He lowers his voice, still facing the suits. “How did you know?”
“How did I know about what?”
“Their operation.” He turns to look at me, not tilting his head but flicking down his eyes. “I’m not sure you know this, but we’re off the coast of Mexico right now. Nowhere near home. But you got here in time to stop them.”
“Can’t say I really stopped them,” I mutter. “I came here looking for someone. The—”
“—girl with the pink hair, I should have known,” he says to himself. “Dumb luck, but good luck, too.” He stares at me for a while, that thin-lipped smile still on his face. “Say, how did you get here so quickly though, K?”
“Spellcaster,” I say, even though his face and eyes are making me uncomfortable, like he can see that there’s something different about me. “There’s this barrier between these two stores, and I slipped through it and—”
“Mm,” he says, and I feel like I should stop talking. He nods, then folds his arms again. “Not so lucky.”
I scratch the back of my head, muttering, “Yeah, I guess not.”
We keep watching in silence until the last of the trucks gets whisked away by the mobile teleporter they use for such operations…or something. I can’t really think right now, or pull my eyes away from the bloody remains on the concrete that are getting scrubbed away with soap until there’s nothing left. There, now you’re innocent, kid, and enjoy the rest of your week. One by one the suited workers vanish, until one more is left. He turns to us and offers a smile to dad, then dips his hat to me before blinking out of existence as well. And just like that, it’s all gone. Sure, there’s a warehouse that’s still smoldering, but there aren’t any trucks or craters or even dead people here.
It’s just dad and I staring at the ocean, standing in the gummy breeze in perfect silence.
I look up at him, and he’s looking at the waves, so I look away again, because suddenly the ground is very interesting to look at compared to him right now, too. He’s like a statue, some replica that Medusa sculpted out of human remains and placed here to screw with me. C’mon, just say something already. Tell me I’m grounded, or that I’m going to go to the police and explain what I did. Prison orange isn’t my color, but I guess I don’t have a choice.
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It doesn’t matter if she just killed me, either. That’s the villain’s game. Not the hero's.
You’re supposed to make them feel even smaller by whittling away their confidence by beating them over and over until one day they throw their hands up in the air and mutter, Forget this, I’m looking for a better gig.
Dad sighs a little, and I finally look at him again. “I won’t tell your mother what happened here.”
I fully turn to face him now. “But…The woman I just killed, the Techie and the Speedster I let get away—”
“Kace,” he says, gently putting his hand on my shoulder and leading me toward the short wall keeping the waves from climbing onto the asphalt. The water slams against the wall, these huge waves that sprinkle us both with tiny droplets of water. He waves his hand out in front of us, then continues, “You see this ocean? This water. The sky and everything that’s in front of us?” I nod, wondering what’s going on here. “Pretty neat, isn’t it? Calm. Perfect. Your mom and I actually had our honeymoon near here on the coast of Mexico when we were a lot younger, too.”
“When are you gonna get to the part where I screwed up?” I ask quietly.
“That part doesn’t come,” he says. “I’m proud of you, Kacey, that’s what I’m getting at here. You took the initiative. You went against what I said, sure, and you maybe could have gone about all of this a lot better, but you also made sure we got our hands on stock that Blackpenny would rather we never knew anything about. They teach you that in the program, taking lead. Something I made sure of was put in place after the war. Too few people can do that naturally, K.” Dad pauses for a moment, saying nothing until he sighs again. His eyes are darker, and he hasn’t stopped picking at the scabbed skin on his knuckles. “Decades ago, this ocean was nothing but blood and smoke. So many people died right here. Left to bloat because we just couldn’t grab their bodies. You’ll find a Cape you got deployed with, a kid…Barry, that was his name, youngest of four, had a weird power—he could make copies of himself, but change something about each clone—and you find hundreds of his bodies here. The worst part, Kace?”
I shake my head when he looks at me, really now knowing what he’ll say next. He never speaks about what happened during the war, and I’m not talking about the skirmishes that happened after the president got killed, but the major one that left the middle of the US in nuclear limbo. He’d been young. By my guess, around my age, too.
He shrugs and leans on the wall, resting on his forearms. “You smile for the cameras when you get home.”
“I don’t think I get it,” I say quietly.
He’s silent for a moment, then says, “You’ve just gotta smile. It’s as simple as that. The civilians aren’t going to want to see you bleed, or struggle, because you’re not supposed to. So you’ll smile and cry later, because what you did tonight isn’t gonna leave you alone. I know that. I know that the Easy Mart is going to keep you up at night for a very long time, too. And you’ll feel guilty, we always do. But you just keep trying, just keep hoping, and then one day”—he pushes off the wall and faces me, smiling, too—“it’ll be better. You’ve just got to pretend a bit.”
“But what am I supposed to do about this?” I ask him, raising my hands for him to see the blood that’s still crusted under my fingernails. “I can’t just ignore it my whole life and hope it all gets better. Phil died tonight—”
“They always do,” he says plainly. “The civilians are always going to die eventually. All you’ve got to do is make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Now, I’m not saying you break the law…but we should get you a suit.”
I stare at him, blinking, wondering who this man is right now. “But those are for sanctioned heroes.”
It’s kinda like giving some kid an Olympian’s cleats just because she ran a little faster than everyone else in her school’s track and field day. A costume is a rite of passage. It’s what the public will know you for and what the bad guys will start noticing you as. It’s, at the end of the day, kind of a target on every back you care about.
And I’m not feeling very super right now. Not when my shirt is still wet and dark red, reeking of iron.
“I’ve got a friend who can kit you out. Nothing much, just something to kick start this.”
“Isn’t that a little, I don’t know, weird that you want to talk about gear right now and not Paul?”
He folds his arms and leans against the wall, his back to the moonlight making the waves shine. “I would have spoken to you about it when you were younger, but you’re going to be attempting to get your license again soon, and before you know it, you’ll be finished with the program and getting draft offers from all over the world.” Dad ruffles my hair, just like he used to when I was even younger. It’s kind of the reason why I keep it short and wild
now, because at least there isn’t a big difference anymore afterward. “I wish your first ‘big’ outing went better than this, but you’re going to start coming across people who play rough. People who’ll kill a kid like you and not think twice about dumping your body in the ocean and going about their day. What I want you to be right now is strong. You need to promise yourself that you’ll be the best kind of superhero you can be, and on the days you fail, don’t take it on the chin, because c’mon, K, you’re my daughter—we can take a warhead to the chin and get up again.”
“Because as long as you’re standing,” I say, finishing his sentence, “there’s always a chance.”
“Or you could, you know, open a bakery or keep ‘rocking on’ with your friends in that band.”
I flush with heat and say, “I don’t know what you're talking about, old man.”
He makes an air guitar and wiggles his fingers across his stomach. “I can join you cool kids if you’d like. I got your mother to trip over herself when I knocked on her door and played her a song at one in the morning.”
“Mom told me she fell in love with you when you spilled ketchup all over yourself,” I say.
Holy hell, did Guardian himself just blush a little bit?
“I was still getting a hang of my powers,” he says, waving me off. “But speaking of ketchup, we should get ourselves moving. The pizza should be ready back home, and we should probably get to the delivery boy before your mom finds out I’m feeding you junk food on a school night.” He hovers, then stops. “Or we can grab a plane.”
I know what that means, because he’s probably seen the look still on my face, or the bags underneath my eyes. We’ve flown in the past, but if there’s something I can’t do for a long time, it’s that. It’s like sprinting, but a lot harder to do. But I’m also not a quitter. Besides, I think. I’ve got a little more juice in the tank now. It takes me a moment, and all the brain power I have right now, however tired I am, to hover beside him without sending myself on a one-way ticket to the orbiting decrepit space station somewhere above us. I smile at him, and he’s probably wondering why I’m panting, but my body feels like a horse at the races, stamping away at the soil and wanting to get out of here. Keep it cool, Kace. I give him a thumbs up and say, “I get to skip school if I beat you in a race.”
He puts his hand on my shoulder, stopping me. For a second I think he’s going to distract me so he can get a head start, but his face is suddenly serious, and his blue eyes dig into my for several seconds too long, wiping the grin off my face. “You’ll be fine,” he says. “I won’t always be there to protect you, but trust me, K. You’ll be fine.”
For a moment, I can’t say anything. And in that same moment, suddenly the past few hours come rushing up toward me again. If there’s one thing I got from mom, it’s her ability to ignore things and play them off, because there’s still things to get done no matter what. So I swallow the lump in my throat and let it sit heavily in my gut.
I’ll digest it all later at night in bed. The blood in my hair and the smoke still on my tongue.
Later, I tell myself, if I ever muster the strength to do that, because…well, people need help now. Not later.
Superheroes kind of don’t get that luxury. Like grandpa always said, “Ponder later, pound ‘em now.”
“Thanks,” I mutter. “I’ll try to be.”
Then his eyes squint as he locks onto something behind me. “You said the Techie got away? How far?”
I turn suddenly, and…
There’s nothing.
Dad’s laughter echoes through the sky as he erupts into the clouds, throwing dust into the air.
I can’t help but smile too, smashing apart the concrete as I rocket upward, letting the ocean wash away the miniscule remains of the woman I had killed. Through the sky we went, and it only took me a second to catch up.
But I didn’t pass him, because like I said earlier, Earth is stunning when you’re this far above it.
All you’ve got to do is keep going faster to leave it all behind.
I guess this must have been how Icarus felt flying through the sky.