Over Winter Break, Chuck went down to Florida to visit his grandfather. The senile old man didn’t know who Chuck was, but Chuck enjoyed seeing him. After all, he was the only family Chuck had left.

Zayde, as Chuck called him, had grown up as the eldest of seven children during the Great Depression. His father had committed suicide when he was young, and after his mother died, it fell on him to take care of his younger siblings. He ran a small shoe store that became a big shoe store that became Comfies, a national chain with over sixty retail locations. When he met Arlis, Chuck’s grandmother, Zayde was still only the owner of a small shoe store, but he told her that one day he’d buy her a beautiful white house right on the ocean, and she’d believed him. And then he did.

Of course, Arlis had died not long before Chuck’s own parents. They’d had just enough time to help Zayde sell the big white house on the beach and move him into a nursing home before their plane went down. Chuck tried not to think about it. That was just how life went sometimes.

Through a small window on his desktop, Chuck saw Meg sitting in her own room, a thousand miles away.

“Well?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

“I got in.”

Meg squealed and jumped out of her chair. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!” She ran to her bed and grabbed Robyn, her favorite stuffed animal, and waltzed around the room holding its ratty wings. “The boy genius strikes again,” she said. She raised the stuffed animal up to her face, pressing her lips to its soft ear: “Did you hear that, Robyn? Our Chuck is going to Yale!”

Chuck laughed. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” he said. “And we need to celebrate you, too. Chatham University! They said you’d never make it.”

Meg hadn’t retaken the SAT, but Chuck had fooled around with her transcript a bit and the Dean had called Meg personally to offer her a merit scholarship. Meg squeezed Robyn to her chest and shrugged.

“I guess it’s cool,” she said. “But nothing like Yale.” She tossed Robyn onto the bed and sat back down at her desk. “So how’s Zero Beach? Ready to come home yet?”

“It’s Vero Beach,” he said. “And it’s actually not so bad. I was walking by the ocean today and saw someone catch a tiger shark. Ever seen one? They’re big.” Chuck held out his arms. “Like, this big. And scary. I thought about trying to create a shark-themed superhero but the more I thought about it the stupider it seemed. I mean, what if he needs to come out of the water? How many crimes happen in the ocean?”

“Ever hear of Deepwater Horizon?”

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“You know what I mean.”

Meg laughed. “Well, you’re missing awesome things in Pittsburgh,” she said. “Like, today it snowed.”

Chuck took a sip of tea from the mug on the desk beside him. “Don’t even pretend like it’s boring,” he said. “I read the latest. Our girl struck again.”

“Two escaped sex offenders chained naked to a lamppost,” Meg said. “And don’t forget the ribbon. Jaybird tied them up with ribbon. There was a note pinned through one of their biceps. ‘A holiday gift,’ it said.”

“See? Interesting.”

Meg laughed. “Maybe it is interesting,” she said. She leaned over and lifted something from the floor beside her. “You know what else is interesting?” Slowly, she raised the object into view. “Oh yes,” she said, as Chuck’s jaw dropped. “2112, the fourth album from Rush.”

The night before school started for Chuck’s final semester, Monster stood by the window, staring into the dark backyard. He stood completely rigid, and then turned around and licked his lips, whiskers twitching.

“Go to bed, Monster,” Chuck groaned, as Monster whined. He put a bookmark between the pages of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and reached over to turn out his lamp. His bedside clock read 12:03 AM. “It’s just a squirrel.”

He turned out the light. Monster went back to staring out the window. Chuck put the book on the bedside table and slipped deeper into his covers.

Monster began to growl. “Quiet,” Chuck hissed. “I’m serious. You’re fine.” Monster barked. He almost never barked. Chuck jumped out of bed and grabbed the dog by the collar.

“You want to go see what’s out there?” he said, pulling him toward the door. “You want to go into the cold? Fine. Go have fun in the—”

He stopped. There was something in his treehouse: he could see a dim light moving behind the window.

“Well,” he said, stroking Monster’s head. “Good boy.”

Chuck pulled on a pair of grey sweatpants. The year before, he’d used a stun gun, some metal studs, and wire to create Faraday’s Fists, an invention that let him deliver 1.5 microCoulombs of charge to his target with a single punch. He slipped The Weapon onto his right hand, clipping the stun gun to his waist band, and then put on his puffy red coat, a pair of socks, and his boots. Before he left the room he checked the tree house again. Yes, there was definitely something inside. It occurred to him that maybe he should call the police. It also occurred to him that this was a chance to live his dream.

He walked down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he slid open the glass door that led to the backyard patio. Silently, he stepped outside and slid the door shut. His hands were shaking. He couldn’t stop his boots from crunching in the snow, but he stepped lightly, walking on the outer edges of his feet. When he reached the base of the tree, he grasped the rough wooden plank above his head and was surprised to find that it was wet. He sniffed his fingers: blood.

Carefully, he began to climb. A foot from the top he stopped. His heart beat inside his ears. He took a deep breath and straightened his knees, peaking into the treehouse.

Someone sat in the corner, sewing a gaping calf wound by the light of a cellphone. Chuck watched the needle dip into the flesh and come back out again, trailed by yellow thread. Though hair obscured the person’s face, Chuck could tell that it was a woman. She wore black motorcycle pants, pulled up around her left knee to reveal the wound, and a black T-shirt. On the ground beside her sat a slingshot, a black ski mask, and a burlap sack. Chuck recognized her from the video.

It was Jaybird.

Chuck gasped and the woman looked up.

It was Meg Shaw.