Turns out being burned alive by an old Air Force firebomb was only good for about two weeks paid leave.

Denise and I spent a couple leisurely weeks at home, with her being doted on by her mother, and me being shamelessly pampered by Lydia, to the point where she was literally sitting on my chest feeding me grapes.

I had a growing sense of guilt over staying with Lydia. Denise and I kept growing closer, and I was getting way too comfortable with the way Lydia was spoiling me.

I kept trying to play games with myself, vowing to pull away from Lydia, but every night she came to me, and every night was a little sweeter, each time I gave in.

Then I got injured, and abandoned all pretense of dignity, as I let her wait on me hand and foot, waking up every morning to a hot breakfast, enjoying long, warm days in bed with her, cracking the miasma seal on my windows, opening everything to let in sun and fresh air.

Instead of having less sex with Lydia, I ended up having a lot more, as we just stayed in bed all day, with nothing better to do.

I started telling myself I deserved this, telling myself that everybody gets vacations, and this was my reward for saving the city, or at least one corner of the city, at tremendous risk to my own life.

I had been in bed with Lydia all day, alternately napping, eating, and making love, when Veazey called from Colorado, and said he and the guys had recognized me on TV, even if I was just a tiny blur on the ground.

They congratulated me on a big group video call and said they were having venison meatballs in my honor. Most of these guys had never been out of the city before, and some of them were getting outdoors for the first time in their lives.

Calvin was management now, and the whole city of Boston was stuck at a Code Orange threat level, so he declared the whole compound to be an off-site workspace and signed everyone up to work remotely for a few months, while Veazey taught them how to fish and shoot guns.

The guys looked healthy and happy, and the whole property was technically holy ground, so I encouraged them to enjoy themselves and admitted I was taking a little break myself.

I hung up the phone and realized I was happy. I was happy. Denise was happy. All my old Innovex buddies were happy. Even Lydia was happy, thrilled to finally be doing her job, doting on a Kovach, keeping me warm and safe in her arms, just like she always wanted.

I slept like a baby for those two weeks off, healing in more ways than one, as Lydia applied Cecilia’s treatments to smooth over rough skin, stretched and twisted by my overuse of healing spells.

The Massachusetts Historical Society and owners of the King’s Chapel Preservation Project were threatening to sue, but you can’t sue people for stopping a zombie attack, and VBC had already donated a few million dollars to help them rebuild.

Denise went back to work before I did and sent me an early morning video from HQ. She swept her POV over an elaborate spread of hot and cold breakfast foods, lingering on big platters of fresh fruit.

“Tim, look at this! VBC has been catering breakfast and lunch here, every day since you talked to Vanderhoff! They’re building a cafeteria! I don’t know what you said to him, but if this hero thing doesn’t work out, you could have a real future as a labor negotiator!”

I knew Elton Vanderhoff was just another greedy asshole trying to seduce me into something, but if he was willing to spend real money taking care of normal people in the process, well, that put him about three notches above every other billionaire on the planet.

* * *

I didn’t realize how much I was enjoying my vacation until it was over. The cylinder thing at HQ pronounced me fit for duty, and Denise picked me up on the roof.

She didn’t get out to hug me, she just popped the door up and said, “Let’s go!”

It was technically 9 p.m., but this time, I was the one bringing “breakfast,” hot chocolate and croissants from the new Berkeley Street cafeteria, a fully automated series of buffet lines that seemed to be stocked with decent food.

I handed her a bag of bread and fruit and offered her chocolate or coffee. She took coffee and left the chocolate for me, which is kind of the opposite of what I was expecting. That’ll teach me to try and anticipate women.

I was embarrassed by how happy I was to see her again, and she looked fantastic. The time off had softened her face and erased the bags under her eyes. She looked five years younger.

I noticed she wasn’t stretching her back or popping her neck anymore, and that made me realize I wasn’t stretching or popping, either, after finally giving myself time to recover from all those healing spells.

We were on the night shift now, and the city was magical, in a disjointed, beat-up kind of way. Most of the tall buildings were still lit up, and the arcologies were beautiful, gleaming pyramids and ziggurats the size of city blocks, not quite as tall as the old skyscrapers.

Each one was a self-contained fortress, protected by hidden weapons and force field projectors, and any room in the place could be turned into a safe room with the push of a button.

In daylight, you could see people milling about on terraces, enjoying the integrated park spaces on every floor, and at night, the sides of the pyramids lit up in different colors, strobing with various kinds of advertising, celebrating holidays or memorial occasions, lit up with giant versions of artwork created by local designers.

I knew I was supposed to hate them, these soulless monoliths that were slowly digesting old Boston, but they didn’t look soulless to me. The parents and children in those parks looked happy and healthy, the trees and hydroponic gardens blunted the sharp edges of the architecture, and the giant digital displays of the buildings really did look cool at night, advertising the latest comic book movie or Bluestar toy promotion, before switching back to fantasy artwork or pastoral landscapes.

The darkness hid all the rough edges on the old buildings, so at night, parts of the skyline still looked like it used to be, a living monument to Old America, mixing new corporate architecture with old world charm.

The combination of coming back from vacation and working at night seemed to revitalize me, filling me with energy, and the fact that I was sitting less than a foot away from the hottest witch in Boston didn’t hurt.

Denise smiled and shook her head. “You look twelve years old.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I love the city at night.”

“Enjoy the view, but don’t get comfortable,” Denise said.

And as if it heard her, the radio popped on and lit our board up, as the squad car jumped into the priority lane and headed out of town.

“Fuck,” Denise said. “We really have been upgraded. This is the kind of call I used to get, before they moved me to animal control. Okay, Tim, this is not a rescue or a monster fight. This is a domestic disturbance calling for Bluestar backup.

“That means somebody at this scene is gonna have powers, and you can’t always tell which one.

“A couple important things to remember about domestics. First, don’t assume anything is what it looks like. The perpetrator can be beat to shit, and the victim can look perfectly fine. Don’t assume we’re just gonna take the meanest-looking person to jail.

“And don’t get bogged down in all their excuses. These things are always, ‘my third cousin fucked my sister and kicked my dog.’ But you don’t give a shit about any of that. We just need to figure out who needs to go to the hospital, and who needs to go to jail. Let them save their sob stories for family arb.

“And since these are normal cops calling for backup, we don’t even need to worry about that. We may just need to stand around and look tough while they take a guy with powers off to jail, or we may have to restrain somebody.

“Tim, whatever happens, do not punch anybody. You can get between me and a bullet if anybody draws a gun, but do not punch back. If anybody gets violent, I’ll restrain them with vines. That’s why I get so many of these. They know I can bring people in without hurting them.

The car was taking us well outside Boston, all the way west to Springfield; another indication that we were being treated like real super cops now.

We landed on the remains of an ordinary neighborhood road and were greeted by a pair of normal cops and an ambulance.

The ambulance was no longer a functional vehicle. It was resting on an emergency skirt that kicked in when the grav panel failed, and it was easy to see why.

The roof of the driver’s section had a big, ragged hole in it, and there were dents all along the body that looked like some kind of super strong animal had been trying to escape from inside. One paramedic was being patched up by another one, who was putting his arm in a sling.

The regular cops were already leaving, so Denise hopped out and asked the paramedics, “Who did this?”

The paramedic looked over at the tiny, ruined house and pointed, not at the hulking male on the porch, or the comically obese mom getting her hand wrapped up, but at a ten-year-old kid.

The kid was running around in jean shorts that clearly used to be a pair of jeans, shirtless, flexing and pacing back and forth on the lawn, like he was daring one of the adults to come at him.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Denise and I said, “Oh boy,” at the same time.

Denise started heading toward the boy, but I ran forward and cut her off, making damn sure my wards were at full power.

I walked up to the kid and crouched down a little, into that incredibly condescending posture adults use when they’re trying to “relate to” a kid. “Hey buddy, what’s your name?”

The boy said his name was Benito. Then he thumped his chest and said, “Are you another big dumb superhero?”

“Not yet,” I said, “but I’m workin’ on it.”

“Who’s the pretty girl?”

“My name is Denise. My last name used to be Hardy, but he calls me Dammit.”

Benito wasn’t sure how to react to that, so he just thumped his chest again and said, “Are you gonna try and fight me?”

“Maybe,” I said casually. “Are you a badass supervillain already?”

“I ain’t no villain, but I don’t take shit no more.”

“Well, I can certainly see that. You wanna tell me what happened here?”

“Saturday night. I’m minding my own business, playing games, and somebody smacked me on the back of the head. Then somebody smack somebody else, and all the Saturday night shit starts. I got between them, but they didn’t stop. Somebody slapped me, and I slapped them back, and then somebody hit me really hard, but I didn’t fall down. Then Mom screamed real loud, and Tariq called the cops on me.”

I looked over at the giant, muscular man on the porch, sporting the kind of physique that meant he had a great job, that left him plenty of time to work out, or he was just out of a work camp, where he had been lifting heavy shit into the backs of trucks for a very long time.

I got closer and lowered my voice. “Does that big man hit you?”

“Nah,” the kid said. “Tariq never hits me. But sometimes Mom hits me, and then Tariq hits Mom.”

“You think you’re big shit now?” the mother said, waddling out to yell at her son. “You think you a big superhero now? Fine!” she said to me, “You want him, you take him! See if some fancy superhero school can make a man of him, because I tried everything and all I got was a busted hand!”

That’s when I realized Benito hadn’t broken his mother’s hand. His mother had broken her hand on him, when she punched his new invulnerable skin. And if she had done that much damage to herself, she must have been punching hard.

I wasn’t even surging that bad. My aura wasn’t even visible in the real world yet, but Denise yelled, “Kovak! In the car!” I spread my arms and shook my head like I was about to argue, and she repeated, “In the car! Now!”

So, I got back in the squad car and listened in on Denise’s throat mic as she took charge of the scene and got everybody’s side of the story. It took forever, because nobody could get through a complete sentence without yelling or lunging at somebody else. But Denise just wrapped vines around everybody and pulled them apart, before anybody else could get hurt.

Then I pulled up footage from the first responders’ body cams and watched what actually happened. Benito was passive at first, quietly going along with the officer as they put him in the ambulance. But then he started asking for his mom. The officer said Mom was going to be taken somewhere else for a while, and Benito flipped out.

He tore through his restraints, threw the paramedic out of his own ambulance, and tore chunks out of it until the whole vehicle crashed straight down on its emergency skirt.

The officers were clearly trying to get Benito away from his abusive mother, but the super strong, invulnerable ten-year-old was not having it and had declared his intention to fight any twelve cops who tried to drag him away.

That’s when they called us.

Denise went round and round with them, trying to calmly explain that this would be for Benito’s own good, when a shiny black DMA transport vehicle landed on the lawn.

Clearly the DMA had a bigger budget than Bluestar patrol, because their car was amazing – twice as big as ours - so much newer, it looked like a spaceship, with defensive force fields and a stealth kit that made it silent.

The agents were dressed in sharp black suits, made from some kind of indestructible nano stuff. I had read about it, but the articles said the manufacturing process was insanely expensive, and the actual formula for the cloth was secret.

All the commenters said it was alien technology, of course, but these guys said anything cool had to be alien.

I was supposed to stay in the car, but these agents were walking straight at Benito with their faces set in grim determination, like they had been ordered to not take no for an answer.

If they ignored the personalities here and tried to strong arm him…

I jumped out of the car and intercepted them. “Hey, I’m Tim Kovak, Bluestar Adjunct. Listen, I’ve been talking to this kid. You are not going to sweet talk him into this, and you sure as hell can’t intimidate him. He’s already hurt two people today, and he’s still itching for a fight. Please don’t give him one.”

The female agent looked at me through her cool Fed shades, obviously pulling up my file in her HUD. “Are you a trained social worker, Mister Kovak?”

“No.”

“Well, I am. And I’ve handled about a hundred of these calls. So, I appreciate your concern, but you can get back in your squad car now, and kindly leave your personal opinions out of your report.”

I puffed a big whistle of air through my cheeks and backed off, but I did not get back in the car. Good thing I didn’t because they needed me about a minute later.

The woman knelt down in that same condescending “talking to kids” position and started talking to Benito, who had his arms crossed and was starting to smile a little – an evil smile, like this lady was about to give him an excuse to do something fun.

The woman raised up and raised her voice at him, and then she was flying across the lawn. I used levitation to catch her and lower her down, while I got between Benito and her partner, who was about to draw a fancy chrome ray gun on a ten-year-old kid.

I got between them and yelled at the fed, “Back off! Fucking idiots, back off!”

Then I turned back to Benito, deciding not to kneel down this time. “Sorry, man. Fucking feds don’t get it. Family first, right? Even if they suck. Just chill out a minute, okay? I’m gonna try and explain some shit to them.”

Benito thought it was really funny to hear a grown man cuss in front of him like he was a grownup, so he just giggled and crossed his arms again.

The female agent was on her feet, brushing grass off her invulnerable skirt. She looked like she was already mad enough to call in an air strike.

I whispered, “Denise, please back me up!” and ran over to the agents.

“Whatever you’re thinking about doing,” I said to the DMA woman. “It’s not gonna work. Look, the only way you’re getting that kid in a car today is if you let his mom come with him.”

The woman shook her head. “We can’t let that kid stay with his abuser!”

“You have to. You’re not strong enough to contain him, and I’m not strong enough to get him in that car without hurting him. And even if I manage it, I can’t be your superpowered babysitter forever. After I get him in the car, you are gonna be trapped in a big black box with a wild animal, and if you say one wrong word on the ride to Quantico, he’s gonna tear the roof off and send you assholes flying through it!

“Here’s the only thing that might work. You’re gonna go talk to his mom over there and offer her a shitload of money to do the right thing. Offer her whatever it takes for her to come with you and bring that kid with her.

“Then you’re gonna take both of them to your secret training academy or whatever the fuck, and you’re gonna teach him to be a superhero, while you teach her to be a better mom.”

The woman shook her head. “We don’t let the parents come with them. They get in the way and undermine the instructors.”

“Well, you’re gonna bring this one, or me and my partner are gonna get back in our car and let your mundane ass social work this situation all by yourself. But I promise, even if you get him in the car, if you take that kid away from his mom at ten years old, he is absolutely gonna go villain on you. I guarantee it.”

The male agent looked over at Denise and said, “Can you deal with your partner, please?”

“Sounds like my partner is doing just fine,” Denise said, crossing her arms while she took her place beside me.

The agents spent a few tense moments talking with Benito’s mom, then one of them touched a credit chip to her phone, and her face lit up. Suddenly, she was all smiles, as she called Benito “her big strong boy” and helped him into the DMA car.

Denise took a statement from Tariq as they flew away. Benito’s mom hadn’t even said goodbye.

* * *

“I can’t take you on domestics anymore,” Denise said. “You have too many triggers for this shit.”

“I was not surging,” I said, insulted. “I was a little pissed and protective of the kid, but I was not losing my shit. Not even close.”

Denise shook her head. “I can’t risk it. Look, Tim, I should have explained this earlier, but I wanted to give you time to make up your own mind. You know how I got so famous?”

“Your mom was a superstar, of course you’re famous.”

“That was part of it, when I was young, but the reason I really took off - there are a million videos of me because I made my media rights public domain. Anybody who sees me on the street can record it and make money off it, without ever being flagged by a revenue bot.

“I do it for the same reason Mom writes books. We want people to love heroes again. Everybody is so cynical. Even before the corps took over, people were getting burned out on superheroes. Started with the CIA files about Captain Cobalt, and spread to all of them, as they all started to get rich on movies and action figures.

“Then the corps started granting exclusive broadcast rights to team sponsors, and making money off any footage anybody ever took. You can take all the video you want of superheroes fighting outside your window, but every dime of ad money goes to their sponsor, and all you get is a thirty-second spot on the news, so you can talk about how scared you were.

“If somebody records me fighting, or working with an animal, they get to keep the money, and I told you not to sign with Vanderhoff because I was hoping you would do the same.

“Your powers are so much more dramatic than mine, and you’re gonna be a better hero. I can already tell. You’re good with normal people because you still see yourself as one of them, in a way I never have.

“I didn’t just pick up this badge again because I wanted to help you. I guess I wanted to recruit you, and see if we could be a real team, just the two of us, turning back the clock and making things like they used to be, when anybody could take video of superheroes, and people were happy to see us coming, instead of just rolling their eyes.

“I wanted to prove that we’re not all in it for the money and see if I could make people trust us again. And you, you’re so real, you’re such a good person, deep down, you would be perfect for this. You’re gonna be big, Tim. Your media profile is gonna be so big, once you get going, if I can get you on board early, I really think we could turn this whole thing around.

“But that’s why I can’t take you on domestics anymore. You’re so new right now, so new at controlling your powers, if you were to surge out and hurt a normal person in the middle of one of these calls, you could ruin everything and take me down with you.”

“You really think I would hurt somebody?”

“No!” Denise wailed. “I trust you, I believe in you, but you’re so new, and the stakes are so high. One wrong move, one accidental swipe of your arm and somebody could get hurt or killed. And then we don’t just lose that person, and I don’t just lose my stupid media rating, it would scare you and change you and make you hold back, just when you’re starting to get your confidence up.

“Please be careful, Tim. That’s all I’m saying. Please be careful, and don’t let yourself get in situations where you might lose control. Learn when to walk away, and let me handle stuff, okay? That’s the whole reason people get partners, so one person will be there to keep the other one cool, no matter what happens.”

I nodded. “I get it. I really do get it, thank you. I’ll try not to get defensive next time. And I get the media stuff, too. I may not like being poor, but I’m used to it, and I’m definitely not doing this for the money. I would be happy to do the public domain thing with you, but I’m on this HDI blacklist, so I couldn’t, even if I wanted to.”

“Yeah,” Denise said. “We’re gonna have to go deal with that, eventually. Right now, I think that blackout is protecting you, keeping you out of the news until you know what you’re doing, but eventually… Eventually you’ll have to go see the people at HDI, and you might even have to deal with the man himself.”

“Tamerlane? You think I’ll get to meet Tamerlane? Like, in person?”

“Get to? Tim, the man is terrifying. The richest, most powerful man in the country, and probably the world, since he finally bumped that oil and asteroid guy out of the top spot.”

“But he makes all those cool robots!”

“He makes goddamn military death machines. Please don’t tell me you’re a fan!”

“No!” I insisted, defensive again. “I’m not a fan, but growing up with Dad, those were the only action figures he let me buy. HDI Panthers and Battle Hounds, Incendiary Mosquitos and stuff. I even had figures of the old humanoid ones, back before they were outlawed.

“Obviously, the guy is an evil prick, but he’s an evil prick who makes cool shit, so it would be cool to meet him, just to have the conversation.”

Denise sighed and dropped us on the roof of a burger joint. “I’m putting us off duty on a meal break. Let’s go inside.”