Around noon on the last normal day of my life, I went downstairs to breakfast late enough that I’d foolishly assumed everybody would already be out for the day. By the time I realised there was someone in the living room, it was too late. And that was only my first mistake.
The ground floor of our house was a wide open plan affair, and the kitchen was in the fashionable modern chic style, all smooth and white and shiny, with a wide breakfast island opening out straight into the living room, where two L-shaped couches had been stuck together to form a half ring around the giant TV covering the far wall. Currently, it was playing some crappy cape reality TV show about the love life of Sierra and Rosegold with the volume on low.
It seemed I wasn’t the only one who didn’t find the material particularly engaging, because my older sister rose from where she'd been lying on the couch the second she noticed me, blinking away sleep. “Emmett!” she said, blinking blearily a few times like the sight of me itself was a surprise. She stretched, letting out a deep yawn. “Feels like I haven’t seen you in forever.”
People had often described Maisie as an older, female version of me, but I couldn’t see it. Her hair was a much brighter shade of strawberry blonde than mine, for one thing, and her eyes were closer to what I remembered Mom’s being than Dad’s, honey gold rather than blue.
The biggest difference between us, of course, was in the superhero costume she was wearing. Her dark, skin-tight bodysuit was patterned with an ever-shifting nebula of stars, paired with a dark cape that looked like a window into the night sky, and she’d unzipped it and had it hanging around her waist, exposing the metallic camisole she always wore underneath.
She went by Vesper, and at 22 years old she was already the second in command of her team: Starforce.
“Maisie,” I greeted her in return with a little wave. “Didn’t realise you were home.”
“Have to come back every now and then,” she said with a shrug. She moved over to the counter and leaned lazily against it, arms crossed. “How’ve you been, Squirt?”
I rolled my eyes. “Literally taller than you now. By like two inches.”
“You’ll always be a squirt to me, Squirt.”
“Eugh.”
“And don’t try and dodge the question, Emmy. You’ll make me worry.”
“I’m not dodging anything. And don’t call me Emmy,” I said, sounding petulant even to my own ears. I let out a sigh. Moving over to the kitchen to carry out the task I’d come down here for in the first place, I spoke without looking at her, “Things have been okay, I guess."
"No progress on the power front?" she asked, because of course she did. That was always going to be the topic of conversation around here. My entire extended family lived and breathed superheroics; they didn't know what else to talk about.
As a kid, I'd loved it. Not so much anymore, when no one seemed to know how to act around me. I sighed. "Still trying to figure the whole power thing out. If I even have any.”
“Everyone has powers,” Maisie said, her signal briefly flaring as if she was trying to prove it to herself. It gave me the impression of distant beauty, like gazing up at the sky on a cloudless night. Human signals were so different to the unfeeling machines; there was so much individuality and life to them.
I wasn’t as familiar with the feel of Maisie’s signal as I probably should’ve been, but it couldn’t be helped when she was so busy with her own hero work. She had a room at Starforce’s HQ in Houston, but I couldn’t exactly blame our lack of interaction on that. She wasn’t there all the time.
I just tended to avoid her when she was here. I avoided everyone, really.
As much as I loved my family dearly, it was hard to be around people who couldn’t quite hide their pity. Walking into a room and having someone blink at you as if in bafflement that the Shaw family could ever produce someone with a power lower than C-rank wasn’t a pleasant experience.
Maisie wasn’t as bad as all that, but there was still some awkwardness. She was kind of the proto-Ashika, in that she’d been ranked abnormally high from the get go, and now, at age 20, was pushing towards the upper end of A-rank. For all that she loved being a superhero, I got the impression that it had always simply been the path she’d been put on and then never questioned, following the family biz. She hadn’t obsessed over it like I had. Hadn’t hungered for it. Hell, her first revelation, the very foundation of her powers, was literally just 'I want to see the stars.' Seven more levels had given her a variety of ways to do just that.
I didn’t resent her. It wasn’t as if she was some kind of glory hog. There wasn’t a bad bone in her body; she was as likely to spend her day saving cats from trees and helping old ladies cross streets as fighting evil aliens in the far reaches of outer space.
For a while, she’d been my closest confidant in power-related matters. Maybe even closer than Ashika. When my powers hadn’t immediately manifested, she’d been the loudest voice of encouragement by far. Every day, she’d been there—still attending Aegis herself at the time—cheering me on, insisting they’d manifest any day and we’d go out and train them together.
Naturally, that had tapered off over time as the reality of the situation set in. I’d like to put it down to the fact she was getting more busy in school, and then moving on up into the hero world after graduation, rising star that she was.
She hadn’t stopped completely, but it was obvious she knew something was off with me as well as everyone else did, and sometimes forced positivity could be as damaging as negativity.
I just didn’t want to put her in the awkward spot of feeling obligated to put on airs. Thus, avoidance. The Shaw way.
“Late bloomers pop up often enough, but they all establish their foundations eventually,” Maisie said as I set about frying up some eggs. “Don’t go getting all pessimistic on me, ya hear?”
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Case in point. The strain in her voice was palpable, and I was sure she felt horrible about it.
“Lots of late bloomers, yeah,” I said, affecting nonchalance with the ease of practice. “Never heard of anyone else whose signal gets weaker, though.”
There was a moment of silence, and I immediately regretted sharing that tidbit.
“What do you mean?” Maisie asked, voice soft.
I explained to her how my tests had gone two days ago, how I’d felt the signals from the machines and how doing so had apparently weakened me even further. It wasn’t a long story, but it gave me enough time to finish frying my eggs and plate them up with some buttered toast. Maisie was stunned into silence at the end of my explanation.
I took a bite of my toast, and I had to fight to stop my eyes from rolling back in bliss. Uncle Adam had shelled out for some arcane glass contraption that yielded slices of toast precision cooked to just how one liked them. A scientific advancement born from studying Nova’s power, apparently.
“That just doesn’t happen,” she said eventually, wide eyed. All trace of fatigue was gone from her expression.
“Apparently it does,” I said with a chuckle. It wasn’t actually funny, but like hell was I going to let it get me down. Especially when I had perfect toast.
“I don’t even know what to say to that. I don’t think I ever even sensed power signals at all.” Maisie frowned. “And the eggheads couldn’t figure anything out?”
“Not in the time or budget we had. Ashika’s bullying could only get us so far.”
Maisie’s gaze trailed out the window, and her lips pursed. “Well, I’m sure it’ll work out. There’s plenty of unique scenarios when it comes to powers. You’re just… even more unusual than usual. You’ll be kicking butt at Aegis in no time, I’m sure of it.”
I stayed silent, taking another bite of my toast to hide my grimace. This was exactly the reason I generally avoided interacting with Maisie; stilted conversations like this were just painful, juxtaposed with my memories of how close we’d once been, when I’d followed her around like a little fanboy. The encouragement she gave was well-meant, and it was a hell of a lot better than seeing me as an embarrassment like some of my other family members did.
But it would’ve been nice to have a normal conversation with my sister. Granted, I struggled with talking about anything else just as much as she did, but that was the other side of the problem. We were both acutely aware of the elephant in the room at all times. I was just as culpable in the rift that had grown between us, really.
“Aegis, huh?” I mused, absently poking at my eggs. “Y’know, I feel like I asked you a million questions about AA over the years, but I don’t actually know all that much about your time there.”
Maisie didn’t reply, and when I turned my attention to her to see why, I found her looking back at me with a pensive expression. “We haven’t had a chance to talk since your entrance exam,” she mused.
“We haven’t,” I agreed, meeting her gaze levelly.
“What was it like?”
“... Not what I expected.”
“Hm.”
Another long stretch of silence. Maisie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, then averted her eyes with a sigh.
“When I was a kid, Dad told me that there’s no single correct idea of what heroism is,” Maisie said, apropos of nothing.
“Sounds like Dad,” I said, eyeing her. “Pretty sure he told me something similar at least once.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. He was getting really philosophical about the whole hero thing, towards the end. Opening his mind, he said.”
“Where are you going with this, Maisie?”
She sighed. “It’s just… Certain ideas of heroism are, as I'm sure you’ve experienced now, rather rare. That’s not to say you can’t aspire to be a flawless paragon or anything. If you wanna be like Dad, I’ll back you all the way. But you gotta understand that most people won’t be like that, and you shouldn’t judge them for it. Imperfect doesn't equal bad.”
“I’m not trying to be perfect, and I wouldn’t hold people to such an impossible standard,” I said, arching an eyebrow at her. Did I really come across as that kind of person?
“I’m sensing a but there,” Maisie said.
“But,” I said with a nod, “I will judge people for cheating. If there are any incorrect ideas about heroism, it’s anything that involves screwing over other people to get ahead.”
“Okay. Sheesh. How bad was your entrance exam?”
“One of the cheaters almost killed another examinee. Tried to kill me.”
Maisie snapped to attention, her eyes blazing like twin suns and her power signal exploding to life, filling the room with her presence. When she spoke, her voice sounded like the roar of her namesake star.
“What?!”
Once again, I found myself explaining recent events to Maisie. She got more and more agitated as my story went on, though she briefly stopped to beam at me when I got to the part where I’d convinced a bunch of our exam group to team up for the practical. She went right back to seething as I covered the details of the saboteurs nipping at my alliance’s heels. I had to warn her to turn off her power after I covered the collapsed building, but lost hope of getting control of her when I described the traps around the finish line.
In the end, I hesitated to tell her about the final confrontation in the radio tower. Her glare compelled the words out of me anyway. It was only when I got to the standoff between the teachers that I really, really started to wish I’d never brought this up at all. Maisie wanted the names of the teachers who’d been on ‘the other side’ of things—no points for guessing which side she was on.
I was reluctant to give them, worried about what she was going to do with that information.
“Emmett,” Maisie’s voice cracked like a whip, carrying the full authority of the second in command of Starforce. She was unnaturally still, clearly forcing herself to remain that way.
“I don’t want you getting in any trouble over me,” I said.
“It’ll be over a lot more than you, don’t worry,” Maisie growled.
I ended up telling her. She started pacing back and forth in the living room, fists clenching and unclenching at her sides. Her power signal was blaring like a siren, gaining heat at the same time as the glow in her eyes.
“Please don’t start a fire,” I said with a wince.
“I’m not thirteen, Emmett. If I burn something, it’ll be because I want to.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, “but you really look like you want to burn something right now.”
Maisie stopped, stared at me with blazing eyes. “You know what? You’re right. I would fucking love to burn something.” She strode towards the front door. “Let’s go do just that.”
I yelped and chased after her. “What? Go where?!”
“Aegis Academy, obviously.”