Dynamo, I thought. What a stupid name. But then, they were all stupid names. Stupid names, stupid costumes; all I needed was a ski mask and gloves and the authorities looking the other way and I’d be able to do a lot more good in the world than I could with a silly name and a silly costume and these people—my friends—always looking over my shoulder.
But then I thought of the last night I’d gone out alone to dish out some vigilante justice, and I decided maybe having oversight and backup wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
Still … stupid fucking names.
“I’m El Cerebro.” The man standing before me was wearing a long beige jacket that hung down to his knees, a white shirt with a brown tie, brown slacks, brown shoes, and a brown fedora. His face was hidden by a solid white mask fit snugly to his skin. The mask had a handlebar mustache inked on in what looked like permanent marker. Now that’s a proper costume, I thought. And the name … ‘El Cerebro’, very cool.
We stood in an alleyway between two rundown apartment buildings. We were out of view of the street by virtue of a wooden fence that blocked most of the alley from sight. Farther back, away from the street, there was a collapsed tent and a tipped over shopping cart—evidence of recent human habitation. For now, though, it was just us. Us and the rats.
The New York team—we need to come up with actual team names, I thought, if only for practicality—told us that it was close to where Jaleel’s uncle’s apartment was. Near where he’d been killed. We couldn’t meet in the apartment itself; that was closed off to the public while the police conducted an investigation. I understood from Adam that two of the people we were meeting with were cops, but since they were currently operating outside the bounds of their duty or jurisdiction, they couldn’t participate in the official investigation.
A bold rat scuttled within ten inches of my feet and I suppressed a shudder. I hate cities, I thought. And it was true. I’d hated cities ever since my family had moved from Dallas to McArnold. Cities were full of too many unknowns, too many blindspots. There were too many places for rats to hide.
I shook the hand that was offered to me. “I’m … Dynamo.” Saying it out loud, I realized that the name didn’t sound half as bad as I’d imagined. And out of all of us who had just come through the portal from McArnold, Texas to New York City, I thought my costume was the least ridiculous. At least outside of Harper, who wasn't wearing a costume at all, which hardly counted.
“Good to meet you,” he said, and I could see his face muscles twitching up in a smile even under the mask. We were the last two to shake hands. The rest of his team—a woman in a white dress with a wooden door, slightly ajar, painted on it who introduced herself as ‘Ingress’; another woman in a similar getup to El Cerebro’s but with crossed javelins painted on her shirt in place of the tie who called herself ‘Quintain’; and a boy who looked like he was probably around Harper and Jaleel’s age whose costume was black with streaks of bright orange and yellow and a large lightbulb logo on the chest and back whose Hype name was ‘Flare’—stood arranged behind him.
They all looked much more professional than us, and I had to keep reminding myself that that was only an illusion created by the fact that they were—with the exception of Flare—older than us. They hadn’t had powers any longer than we had, and they hadn’t done anything more impressive with them than us.
And they lived in New York City, where better materials and bases for costumes would be easy to find; we’d found most of our stuff at a discount party supply store a couple towns over. It didn’t really compare.
“So how do you suggest we proceed?” asked Cyberspace, clearly deferring to El Cerebro. I saw Adam give him a look that I couldn’t read through his mask, but I could guess what it meant: he was jealous and upset at being upstaged. But I couldn’t resent Lincoln’s deference to El Cerebro; he had a certain charismatic leadership quality that Adam lacked.
Let’s not forget, we’re in this together, and we’re doing it for Jaleel. Adam’s voice spoke into the minds of his teammates. That was his way of compensating for what he lacked in charisma, I guess.
Before El Cerebro could respond, Harper—Mimic—spoke up. “Do we really have to keep calling you ‘El Cerebro’? How about just ‘Cerebro’ for simplicity’s sake. Assuming we’re not just going to jump to the part where we admit that half of us already know half of your real names and half of you already know half of our real names and the whole pseudonyms-while-we’re-in costumes bit is a little pointless?” She looked around at both teams, hoping she’d find agreement, but nobody responded. She sighed. “Whatever.”
“Just ‘Cerebro’ is fine. And yeah, your Ganzfield at the very least already knows my name, and the names of my teammates. Maybe he’s shared that information with the rest of you and maybe not, but we introduced ourselves to you, Mimic, and to Foresight. And no doubt Cyberspace knows who we are, either because Ganzfield told him or because his power allowed him to figure it out. The point of the pseudonyms isn’t so much to protect our identities from each other; we’re way past that. The point is so that we don’t slip up by using real names when we’re in front of other people, and that starts by establishing a pattern and a way of doing things that becomes second nature.”
“It’s like with being a parent,” said Ingress. “At first, you think you’ll never be able to remember everything you need to remember, to watch your kid carefully enough to make sure they’re always safe, to pack their lunches and get them on the school bus on time. But before long, it becomes second nature. You do it without thinking about it. If you make it a habit, it becomes habitual.”
She seemed to be speaking from experience. A mother, I thought. And yet she’s out here playing dress-up and fighting crime. I wasn’t sure how that sat with me. On the one hand, women with power doing what they could to make the world a better place was rarely something I’d find fault with. On the other hand, children needed protection, and how could they be protected when their parents were running around in silly costumes with delusions of grandeur instead of watching over them?
The other two members of their team looked … maybe not bored exactly, but … impatient. They stood looking around, only taking in half the conversation, not engaging. They just wanted to get things moving. I could relate.
I’d never been good at sitting still, talking things over. I’d always been more into movement, action, even if it was rash and poorly thought out.
But that wasn’t entirely true, either, I thought. There had been a time, early in my life, when I could have laid and watched the clouds shift by overhead for hours and spoken about nothing of any consequence at all and wanted nothing more than to keep doing it. My sister had brought that side out in me.
But she was gone.
“As to your question,” Cerebro said, turning toward Cyberspace, “we were hoping you could help us with that. Based on what our attacker—and Talib’s murderer—said, he’s from the future, just like Ganzfield. He seems to have a … rather different mission in the present though.”
“Can you elaborate on that?” asked Adam. “For the rest of my team, I mean.” He looked pointedly at Lincoln, and I understood why. Lincoln had a tendency to distrust things that Adam said. Maybe if he heard the story of what had happened in New York from a neutral third party, he’d believe it.
“He seemed intent on killing us,” said Cerebro. “He did kill Talib. I believe he’s targeting people and events that he remembers from his last life—or lives—and eliminating them, methodically. Why? I couldn’t tell you.”
He’s got an idea, though, Adam added to us. And so do I.
“He was sent back more than once, we established that. I said the other day that I think the process broke him eventually. What I think now is that he’s—”
“He’s not just mindlessly murdering for the love of mayhem,” Adam supplied. “He’s getting rid of roadblocks. Things that stand in the way of the apocalypse. He wants to ensure that he can’t ever get sent back again. He wants to ensure that they win.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Jaleel asked.
Adam didn’t respond with words; instead, he sent an image into our minds: something like a person, but much taller, with limbs and heads where no limbs or heads should be, with skin that only covered part of its body, with exposed muscle and guts, with machine parts sticking out in places that suggested that without them, the whole thing would just collapse into a sopping heap of half-rotted flesh. The same things he’d shown us when he’d first confided in us that he had memories of a different future.
More than any of the visual imagery though, what impressed upon me was a deep sense of foreboding, a menacing itch in my mind, like this wasn’t just something I was being shown, but like it was something real. Something that could step out of my thoughts and destroy me on a whim.
Something that wanted to.
“What are they?” asked the only child on their team, Flare, his voice somewhere between awe and horror. I realized then that while we'd had time to accept the things that Adam had told us and shown us, and were all on board with trying to help him avert that eventuality, it was all brand new for these people.
And it was scary.
“I don’t remember much about them, besides that they’re the ones that bring the end.”
“The end of what?” asked Flare, as if he didn’t already know the answer.
“Everything,” said Adam simply.
“So your goal is to stop that,” said Ingress. “And you think this guy—this ‘Adversary’—wants to make it happen.”
“Sort of,” said Cerebro before Adam could speak. “I think he believes the end is inevitable, he just wants to make sure that no one else gets sent back in time to try to stop it. He sees that as a waste of time, just delaying something that can’t be stopped. The idea of someone else, or him, going through another cycle of pointless fighting is hard for him to bear.”
“So how do we stop him? How do we find him?” Harper was looking around impatiently. I couldn’t blame her. I felt the same way. All of these people with their mental powers or enhanced senses or memories of the future had a tendency to talk around the point for a long time before getting to it.
“We go to where we know he’ll be,” said Adam, speaking slowly. It was a wonder to me that he was having to guess at the point that Cerebro was getting to, when he could just read the man’s mind. Maybe his power has limits? I thought. Maybe Cerebro’s mind is harder to read? Maybe he just doesn’t want to cross that ethical boundary with every person he meets?
“And how exactly do we know where he’ll be?” asked Lincoln, and I could see that, like his sister, he was growing impatient. Probably even more than her, because if there was one thing that Lincoln hated, it was being excluded from what seemed like a meeting of the minds.
“Because we know what he’s after. Because we know what happens in this area in the foreseeable future. Familiar names, faces. People he’ll want out of the way,” said Adam.
“Do you remember the priest?” asked Quintain.
“The priest?” I couldn’t see Adam’s eyes but I could imagine them going unfocused, staring off into the middle distance as the words knocked something loose in his memory. “You mean the priest? Gethsemane?”
“The very same,” said Cerebro. “I think Adversary will target him. If we find the priest, we find Adversary.”
“I remember him. He was a thorn in a lot of people’s sides. Caused a lot of trouble, killed a lot of people. He founded The Soldiers of Calamity.”
“What the hell are ‘Soldiers of Calamity’?” I asked.
“Never mind that. He hasn’t done it yet,” said Adam, his voice full of just enough condescension to get my blood up. “But his efforts were always beneficial to the monsters, to them. His whole purpose became to bring about the apocalypse, Judgement Day. It doesn’t really make sense for Adversary to want to kill him. It seems like they’d be on the same side, if anything I remember about him is true.”
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“But you guys said that Adversary’s unhinged; he’s not thinking straight,” said Jaleel. “He’ll want to take out anyone he knows will amass power who might use that power to stop the apocalypse, or even to delay it long enough to get someone else sent back in time. And who the hell knows? If you guys are right, and this Adversary guy has lived through the same years over and over again, maybe there have been permutations where this—what’s his name? Gethsemane?—did use his power to fight against those … things.” Jaleel had to have been nearly as lost as I was, but he was managing to contribute something to the conversation, making me feel completely useless.
Several members of both teams had taken to pacing, or slipping into little nervous tics. I found myself flashing tiny bursts of light and heat out of my hands every few seconds. I noticed the young New Yorker, Flare, staring at my hands.
“Curious?” I asked him.
“The light, where’s it coming from?”
“From me,” I said, smiling behind my mask.
“That is so cool. Can you make it any brighter?”
I answered by bringing my hands up to shoulder height, pointing them at him, and pushing out a burst of light that should have been blinding. Not full force, but enough to make an impressive demonstration. Instead, the light exited my body and something happened to it. It was split into bands of color, as if by a prism, and those bands traveled in sweeping arcs and swirls around the alley, moving slowly enough for my eyes to track them. It was a dazzling display, and for a moment I almost believed that I was its source. Then I looked back at the kid and I could tell that he was smiling under his mask, too.
“Neat trick,” I said.
“Ah, but I can only manipulate light. You can create it.”
“There’s already light pretty much everywhere. I would say manipulating it is cool enough.”
“Could you two stop dicking around?” Lincoln asked, at the same time that Quintain shot both of us what I assumed was an annoyed glance.
“Actually, I don’t think it’s the worst idea in the world for us to all familiarize ourselves with each other’s powers,” said Adam, and Cerebro nodded in agreement.
“We’ve got the start of our plan, but let’s make sure we have all the information we need to determine everyone’s part in it,” the leader of the New York team said.
I had been too busy showing off my power with Flare to realize the others had come up with a plan at all. It wasn’t my usual M.O. to blindly follow along with something other people had come up with. I was usually more of a make-your-own-decisions-and-do-what-you-want kind of gal.
“I’ll start,” said Ingress. “As you all already know, I can create portals. All different sizes, always rectangular. Big enough to walk through or small enough that you can’t even see through. Stationary or moving. I can do it all.”
It sounded more like a pitch than an off-the-cuff explanation. But then, I’d spent enough time thinking about my own power and how to describe it that I would probably sound rehearsed when it was my turn to speak, too.
Quintain didn’t speak right away, she just plucked a dart out of the waistband of her outfit and hurled it with incredible force down the alley away from us. It flew in what appeared to my eyes to be a perfectly straight line at an unbelievable velocity and hit a political campaign poster that was taped to an electrical pole probably a hundred feet away. I hadn’t been familiar with the face on the poster before she’d thrown her dart, and now the poster and a chunk of the pole it had been attached to were obliterated to the extent that I couldn’t even tell there had been a face on it.
“I throw stuff,” she said. “Very fast, very accurate. Enhanced eyesight for tracking moving targets. Enhanced arms to be able to launch things that quickly without tearing my muscles and snapping my bones.”
I was glad to see at least one person on their team had a solidly offensive power.
I stepped forward. “You all saw a little demonstration there, but I’ll give you a better explanation. My power is a little hard to explain, but essentially I absorb energy, store it in my body, and convert it from any form to any other form.” By way of demonstration, I put my hand against the wall, and without any preamble caused a massive spike of directed kinetic energy to shoot through it, creating a crack in the wall that was at least as tall as me. It was accompanied by a sound like a gunshot and several of the members of Cerebro’s team ducked their heads in surprise.
I signaled to Harper to come over and punch me in the face. The other team gasped with shock when she hit me with as much force as she could, and Flare laughed with joy when I used that stored energy to shoot a tiny lightning bolt from the tip of my finger into the sky.
“There’s an implication there,” said Cerebro, “that nothing can actually hurt you. If you just absorb the energy from any attack, then …” He let the sentence hang, allowing us to draw our own conclusions. Obviously it was nothing I hadn’t already thought of and discussed with my own team. I spent a lot of time wondering if there was an upper limit to the amount of energy I could absorb, and what would happen if I hit that limit. Would my body finally start being damaged, or would any excess energy merely be shunted off and redirected. Would my body start shedding energy involuntarily in the form of heat or light or some other form of radiation in order to absorb more?
The answers to those questions mattered because I knew that I might eventually find myself in a situation where knowing what would happen would be the difference between life and death, for me and others. And the way I tended to charge headfirst into situations, it was a near certainty that I’d get to that point sooner rather than later.
“You could probably still drown her,” said Quintain, with a curious inflection in her voice, like she was enjoying the mental exercise of thinking up ways I could be killed. “Starve her, suffocate her … I bet she wouldn’t last any longer than the rest of us in the fuckin’ vacuum of space—”
Felipe laughed again. Harper did, too. Adam shook his head and Jaleel was bouncing around, hardly paying any attention to us at all, probably more impatient than ever.
“That’s more than enough, Quintain,” said Cerebro.
She shut up.
“Ganzfield?” said Flare.
“Oh,” said Adam, as if he hadn't expected anyone to be interested enough to ask about his power. “I have telekinesis.”
“No, I meant, what kind of a name is ‘Ganzfield’?”
“It’s the name of an early pioneering researcher in the study of extrasensory perception,” supplied Cerebro, nodding appreciatively. “And telekinesis seems useful. Care to demonstrate?”
Adam did. He drew the four knives out of his belt with his power while floating off the ground. The knives moved around him in a deadly orbit.
It wasn’t lost on me that he hadn’t mentioned his telepathy. He’d been pretty insistent that no one outside of our team was to know about that unless we had determined we could trust them as well as we trusted each other.
Holding back a major aspect of his power was one of the few decisions Adam had made as the de facto leader of our group that I actually agreed with wholeheartedly. The element of surprise was important, and even letting potential allies know everything you’re capable of runs the risk of them leaking that information to someone you don’t know and can’t trust.
I barely trusted my own team. I certainly wasn’t ready to extend my trust to these people I’d just met.
“And Flare, you said you can manipulate light, but what can you do with that besides make a pretty light show?” I asked, looking at the kid.
He didn’t respond, and at first nothing happened. But within seconds of speaking, I found myself completely and utterly blind. It was like light had existed one second, and the next the universe was only darkness. I kept checking my eyelids to reassure myself that they weren’t closed. I waved my hands in front of my face again and again, but it was useless.
“You look like an idiot, waving your hands around like that,” said a woman’s voice. I was pretty sure it was Quintain’s.
“How can you see what I look like?” I asked her.
“The kid manipulates light. Just because he blinded you all doesn’t mean he blinded us.”
Suddenly light and color filled my vision again and it was almost staggering. I took a step backwards as my eyes adjusted.
“Now that could come in handy,” I said.
“I can do other stuff, too: concentrate a bunch of light into a point to start a fire, use what little light is in a dark room to give myself night vision, see around corners … I bet I could charge up your internal battery really quickly.”
His power was a lot more versatile than I'd at first assumed, and his enthusiasm about it was endearing, if a little childish.
“And you, Cerebro?” said Adam. “With a name like ‘the brain’, I’m expecting something pretty cool.”
“Then I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’m afraid my power doesn’t lend itself well to visual demonstrations. It’s effectively a sort of supercharged intuition, where my brain draws connections between things, and gives me a pretty good guess at whether those connections are right or wrong. I think about things, and answers just come to me.”
“Useful skill for a detective,” said Jaleel, coming back into the conversation for the first time in a while. Probably he knew that all of the really visually impressive powers had already been shown off and the remainder of the discussion wouldn’t take long.
“Well we already know the gist of your power, given your vision of the events that were supposed to take place at Grand Central,” said Ingress. “Is there anything else we should know about it?”
“I can look forward to exactly forty-eight hours in the future. Once I’ve looked ahead, that time that I’ve seen is all I can see when I use my power until after it actually passes. That allows me to see if anything changes, so I can get an idea of whether whatever we’re doing will work or not. And that’s basically it.”
It was almost funny hearing him downplay what, just a few months ago, would have been the most amazing power that any human being had ever possessed. Now it was only one power in a sea of powers, highly situational, and not nearly as flashy as moving things with your mind or creating bursts of light with your hands or stepping through a portal to the other side of the country at will.
Still, it was this power that had helped us save all the lives we'd saved so far. The only tragedy was that it couldn't save his uncle.
“What about you, Mimic?” asked Flare quietly. His face was aimed straight at the ground in front of Harper’s feet, and I wondered if he was blushing under his mask. I realized my impression of him as bored or impatient had been wrong. He'd been acting aloof and withdrawn because he was nervous. And no wonder, he was the only kid on his team, and he was suddenly thrust into a world where he was meeting a bunch of people around his own age who had already faced down a superpowered criminal and helped stop another one from blowing up a train station.
His own resumé wasn't really any less impressive, but at his age—and I knew because it wasn't so long ago for me—self confidence is a fickle thing.
In response, Harper started shifting her face through a cycle of famous faces she’d memorized. Her body shifted subtly beneath her clothes, but as we’d learned early on, she couldn’t change her mass too drastically, which meant that growing or shrinking significantly were off the table. Small changes in apparent height, weight, or body composition were possible though, and we all laughed when she turned herself into a slightly shorter, skinnier version of the President of the United States.
“My fellow Americans ….” she began, earning a loud chuckle from flare and applause from Ingress.
Lincoln put a hand on Shannon’s shoulder and she stepped forward. “I can only demonstrate things I’ve learned using my power,” she said, voice quiet and slow at first. Then she launched into a routine that was part dance, part gymnastics, and part martial arts display, with many thrusts, parries, and slashes with her sword. “But the power itself is learning.” Her voice was bolder and more certain after the others had been visibly impressed with her display. “Memorization, recall, muscle memory. I can pick up any skill with ease in hours and recall it perfectly. The only caveat is that if I don’t keep practicing a skill, it fades away and becomes harder to pick up a second time. And sometimes I have to let things go to make room for others.”
“That feels like it could come in clutch in a lot of situations,” said Quintain. “Very versatile; I like it.”
“And that just leaves you,” said Cerebro, pointing at Lincoln. “I think we got a pretty good idea of your power the other day when you forced your way into my computer, but you might as well give us a quick rundown.
I wondered if Lincoln was seething at having been left for last. I wondered if he considered himself so far above all this that he didn’t care.
“Basically, I can interface with anything digital via touch. My mind can move through computer networks and file structures with ease, and no amount of digital security can stop me. I can access and manipulate any systems, even remote ones, as long as there’s a chain of connections linking them to something I can touch.”
I saw him fiddle with something in his pocket, and everyone’s phones started playing Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley at the same time.
Flare laughed harder at that than he had at anything else so far, and Lincoln’s mask twitched. Even he wasn’t immune to smiling when he got a laugh out of someone.
“And now that that’s out of the way,” he said, “how do we find the priest? I imagine my power will be helpful, but I also imagine he’s not an idiot. He probably covers his digital tracks pretty well, and he probably doesn’t carry a device on him at all times.”
“We don’t have to find him,” said Adam. “Sorry to do this, but I looked in your mind.” He was staring at Cerebro, who looked utterly unphased at the announcement, as if he’d already guessed that part of Adam’s power. “You were stumped with the guns, right? Ahmed with the guns in his locker. You assumed he’d be connected to Talib somehow, but you couldn’t find any connection there.”
Cerebro nodded. “I was starting to consider the possibility that his hoarding of guns in his locker at a restaurant at Grand Central at the very same time that Talib was planning a bombing there was pure coincidence. Are you telling me that it isn’t?”
“No, actually. There really isn’t a connection between the two of them.”
“Oh,” Cerebro sounded dejected.
“The connection is between Ahmed and the priest. The priest started out on one mission, making sinners repent and ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven. Ahmed started on another mission: instigating violence against Hyperhumans. The two of them met up, and their missions became entwined. And that’s how the Soldiers of Calamity came to be.”
Adam had been having these flashes of insight more and more frequently lately, as one thing jogged his memory and caused a flood of a bunch of connected memories to rush out of him. We all hoped it was a sign that he was getting close to remembering his past life clearly enough to start working towards preventing the apocalypse in earnest.
“So we don’t have to find the priest. We have to find Ahmed, and wait for the priest to come to us.”
“And then wait for Adversary to come for the priest?” I asked, incredulous.
“It's as good a plan as any,” said Jaleel. “Let's just do something. The fucker who executed my uncle needs to be caught.”
I didn't bother to point out that his uncle had been planning on executing a bunch of other people. It wouldn't have helped anything. And besides, I agreed with him that getting started as soon as possible was the way to go.
“There's one other complicating factor,” said Cerebro. “We found bomb making equipment in a storage locker that Talib was renting after you guys went back to Texas. But we never actually found the bomb.”
“What do you think happened to it?” asked Harper.
“… Adversary?” said Adam.
“Adversary,” replied Cerebro.