Giselle Pixus stared quietly out of her office window, slowly tracing her gaze across the cloudless sky. A thousand emails cried out from the laptop in front of her – a thousand problems, a thousand requests. Giselle sat silent, opening none of it. Her fingers shifted, and a pen slid idly over and around her knuckles, looping in pointless circles, petty and inadequate.

W.Reid, the engraving read, carved into the silver. An heirloom or a collectible, arguably. Giselle toyed with it regardless.

An outdated relic from a bygone era, some might claim. The wrong tool for the job, outmatched, dried out, empty. Yet she held it all the same. The pen remained mighty, and though the world’s troubles grew ever greater, with time it might surmount them. Surely, she mused, as she turned it slowly between her fingers, hope could still prevail.

The world churned with problems. Jane Walker and Matt Callaghan remained missing, vanished without any trace or explanation. Word of Pastor Fredericks, the resurrected soldiers and New York had leaked, though thankfully not of the Cao Duan twins, who remained safely contained in the Academy for guard, therapy and study. Yet the greater social crisis loomed – the notion of undeath did not go easily back into the bottle. There was rioting in the streets; not since the Year of Chaos had the superhuman world been so wracked with violence, with panic stemming from a new discovery, a fundamental rewriting of basic laws. Freaking Divines, freaking celestial phenomena. Although this time it seemed mainly the religious and the spiritual who were having trouble settling down.

Then there were the missing. An entire subway car, a quarter train of unremarkable people, vanished into nothingness like they never even got on. That would have been enough of a headache on its own, had the bastards not then started reappearing. In drips and drabs at first, irate busybodies and crazy people, only for others connected to the missing to inexplicably vanish. And then, all of them returned at once. In their hundreds. Speaking of a world, a god, impossibilities that sparked international inquest and concern. A thousand more questions unanswered. Every knot untied entangling a dozen more.

Peter Walker had disappeared. Giselle had no idea what that was about. Had he likewise been abducted, or had he simply learned of his daughter’s disappearance and set to walking? Him gone, but not the Callaghans. What in the flaming hell was Jane playing at? What was she doing? Why wouldn’t she communicate?

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If she was even still out there. Jane Walker absorbs the powers of God and then vanishes, and not twenty‑four hours later Matt Callaghan vanishes with her, neither seen nor heard from again. The pen spun round and round Giselle’s fingers. Is your perfect world still up there, Jane the God, are you still taking your time to build it? It’d been months now, almost a year. The disappearances had stopped, the vanished had returned, wide‑eyed and drenched in stories. All quiet on the transcendent front. Had Jane given up, Giselle wanted to know – had Matt talked her out of it? Or had she broken under the strain – had she snapped and the poor, defenceless boy finally fallen victim to her explosive temper? Or were there forces more sinister at work, other gods jealously guarding the cosmos, and her friends’ bones lay broken amongst nameless stars, solar winds scattering their ashes.

Or maybe Matt, maybe, bearing blood mundane human, had pulled off the one thing that could stop her… the most unlikely, remarkable play…

Giselle no longer knew what to think. There was work to do, constantly, and though damaged by the storm of mysteries swirling around the late Lady Dawn, the Legion endured. It had pulled the world from crisis once, it could do so again, better ready this time. One by one, these problems would be beaten.

And then. And then.

Her bare hand slowly closed the thin laptop, her mind racing far afield from mundane tasks. Giselle Pixus rose to her feet and walked quietly to the window, gazing out at the sun‑drenched land beyond. The Academy lawn bristled with the tips of rockets, receiver dishes and unlaunched satellites. Teleporters trying techniques in custom‑built chambers, flyers testing polycarbonate space suits. Azleena’s war machines stomped around the grounds, eyes soulless and unblinking, enough room inside for a person.

Answers weren’t forthcoming? Fine. They’d make their own. Earth was the start of the Legion’s jurisdiction, but it wasn’t the end. For so long the world had never looked beyond itself, convinced without convincing that everything worth watching was already happening here – hopes and needs and dreams, families, neighbours, nations. They had all stared sidelong at their sideways little problems, rarely looking beyond their homes, rarely watching beyond their lives.

But everyone looked up now. Everyone paid heed.

Giselle Pixus, leader of the Legion of Heroes, stood against the fourth-floor window, spinning the pen of a dead Divine, staring up into the sky.

The White World stared back at her, silhouette pale against the clear blue.

Giselle’s face remained steady. Her lips twitched into a smile.

Soon, she whispered to no one: Soon.

The sphere stood silent.