Superheroes saved the day.

Noah had grown up during the emerging metahuman phenomenon, when the heroes of his comic books had started to become the heroes of real life. People like Captain Starflight, the first hero, or the Guardsman, the greatest of them. Lady Aegis, a personal favorite of his teenage self for predictable reasons—and, much later, his first wife, due to the deep and mutual personal respect they’d developed as colleagues. She had been an amazing person, and a real hero. They all had been. They had protected innocents, championed justice, and most of all, solved problems.

The hardest lesson for him to learn was that some problems not only couldn’t be solved, but shouldn’t be.

Dr. Wallace Liebowitz sat across from him on a plush sofa, head in his hands, tears streaming down his face, and Noah wanted nothing more than to find out how to help him. He wanted to fix it. He wanted to solve his problem for him.

But his problem was that he loved someone.

“It feels like part of me is missing,” Wallace sobbed. “Every morning I want to go make sure that she’s okay. That she’s eating. She doesn’t take care of herself.”

Noah leaned across and laid a hand gently on the doctor’s shoulder. Comfort was the best he could do. This kind of pain was, in many ways, good and necessary. But it was still pain.

They sat in the living room of the modern, comfortably appointed house in the Boston suburbs the Organization had provided. Noah had told them to spare no expense to make the Liebowitzes comfortable after what they’d been through, and they certainly hadn’t. It had even come equipped with a fully stocked wine cellar, a bottle from which was currently on the table between them next to empty cups.

Noah felt the doctor’s emotions surging—emboldened by the wine, yes, but it hadn’t taken much for them to come spilling out. They had barely gotten past the exchanging of pleasantries before a simple, “How are you and your wife adjusting?” had brought them forward.

Wallace asked, voice tremulously hopeful, “Have you heard from her?”

Noah shook his head. “Not yet.”

“But you will?”

“I think so.”

The doctor leaned back, looking up at the ceiling and taking several deep breaths. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, down his cheeks. “Patty and I, we tried so hard to have children of our own. Two miscarriages and a stillbirth, and then we were told that a fourth attempt would put her life at risk. We were thinking about adopting before the Horror, and then—” He cut off, chin dropping, eyes distant, before he shook himself. “Obviously, we couldn’t do that in the refugee camp. Or as they called it then, the ‘temporary housing solution.’ And we could have gotten out before that Hyperion fellow took it. We had the money and the connections. But healthcare was already so sparse, we did what we thought we had to do. We gave up on the idea of ever having a family of our own. We knew we were needed.”

Noah nodded, pouring more wine into both glasses.

Dr. Liebowitz took one and drank deeply from it. “And then, suddenly, it was like we had two children, two daughters, one already a moody teen. A moody teen that could destroy the house, sure, a supervillain, sure, but still. She was just a kid. She’s still just a kid. She needed us and we needed her. And she’s gone.”

“You’ll see her again,” Noah said. “I know it. I believe it.”

“Something’s been bothering me, though,” he continued. “She could be here. She could be with us. You could have brought her with us, right?”

“I could have.”

“Then why didn’t you?” The doctor took another gulp. “I’m not criticizing, I just don’t understand why she stayed there.”

“Well, for starters, she probably wouldn’t be kept with you and your wife,” Noah said. “Even if she had come. She’s too high profile right now. She’d probably be in a safehouse somewhere.”

“Alright,” Wallace said. “But still, why did she stay there? That awful place?”

Noah shrugged. “She wanted to. She thought it was best.”

The doctor shook his head and wiped tears from his cheeks. “But, if she’s so important right now, couldn’t you have made her come along? I understand she’s powerful, but you’re Paragon.”

Wallace didn’t have to finish the sentence for Noah to hear it. And Paragon saves the day.

Noah smiled. “Should I have knocked her out and dragged her along?”

Wallace sighed. “No, of course not, but—I mean—” He paused, then leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. “I don’t know what I mean.”

Noah sipped his own wine, thinking. “How’s Patty handling things?”

“Her way,” Wallace said, not looking up. “She’s at Home Depot with Diana. She’s determined that the child is going to have a treehouse, never mind that she’s barely more than a year old, and she’s probably going to end up building it herself. She needs to be doing something. She needs a goal. It’s her way.”

“I know how she feels,” Noah said.

The doctor was silent for a few moments, and Noah let him be. He could still feel the emotions in the other man turning over, and that was fine. He needed to process them. In his hundred and five years of life, Noah had never seen a situation where trying to control someone’s feelings was better than simply letting them feel them.

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On his own time, the doctor looked up, eyes dry. “Help me understand.”

Noah obliged. “I’ve been a superhero for a very long time. I’ve spent a lifetime in costume, and in that time, I realized something. Saving people is easy. If there’s a monster, you defeat it. If there’s a disaster, you stop it. It’s a one-step process.”

Wallace chuckled. “I’m sure it’s easy for you.”

“Well, that’s the kicker,” Noah said. “Because as easy as saving people is, saving a person is tremendously difficult. It doesn’t matter how strong you are, how many freight trains you can bench press, how fast you can fly through the air. You can’t force people to accept help that they don’t want. At the end of the day, when it comes to helping a person, saving a soul if you want to be poetic, we’ve all only got the power the other person gives us.”

The doctor frowned. “What does she need saving from?”

“When I first approached Anna, she attacked me,” Noah explained. “And that was after starting a brawl with four other supervillains. She damaged herself to hurt me just a little bit, even though it was futile. When she finally calmed down, when we talked, she told me a bit about her situation—more than she intended, I think. She said she was reconsidering going to Aurora University at all.”

“But she worked so hard to get in,” Wallace said. “Why would she change her mind?”

“She’s angry,” Noah said, frank. “Furious. With everyone who failed her. To the point where she’s willing to hurt herself to cause someone she blames for what she’s been through one one-thousandth of the pain she feels.”

The doctor had started shaking his head halfway through that last sentence, and he crossed his arms over his stomach like someone who was about to throw up. “No. She’s not like that.”

“I agree,” Noah said. “But that’s the nature of trauma. It’s what happens when pain builds up to the point that it can’t be borne anymore. The self buckles, warps. It changes who you are until you’re the sort of person who can live with it—or, you can’t.”

The other man’s face went pale. “You think she’s—that she’ll—”

“Here’s what I think, Wallace,” Noah said, looking the doctor in the eyes. “I think she’ll end up at Aurora, one way or another. I think that, there, we’ll be able to help her. We’ll relieve that pain, we’ll deal with that trauma, and I think, when we’re done, she’s going to be the person you think she is—the one that she wants to be.” He squeezed the other man’s shoulder. “And I think that if we tried to put her on a leash, or in a cage, it would only hurt her more. She’d only balk. It would only stoke that fury. She’s got to be the one who comes to us. She, at the very least, has to want to be there.”

“And she will?” the doctor asked, voice barely above a whisper.

The hero nodded. “I think that any day now, any minute now, I’m going to get a summons. And I’ll tell you one thing—you’ll see her. I promise you that.”

Wallace finished his glass of wine and leaned back into his couch cushions. He looked around the house that was newly theirs, and Noah knew that he was as mollified as he could be. The only thing that would help him, solve his problem, was Anna.

And she would. He believed it.

He had to.

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Paragon drifted in the twilight and cold wind over the tops of the glittering starscrapers of Sanctum City, staring down at the second tallest building therein.

Tomorrow Tower rose from the infinite sprawl. It was a truly gargantuan building, a kilometer high neoclassical monolith in the shape of a capital T. It was still less than half the height of Pharos. That had always grated on his father. Not even he had been rich enough to justify the amount of ultratech construction a taller building would have taken at the time.

He came up here to think sometimes. To remember. He had told Sheriff Grey that his father didn’t have the capacity for embarrassment—and that was true. But grief? Remorse? Trauma?

His father hadn’t just buckled beneath the trauma. He’d been destroyed.

And Paragon thought that was a good thing.

Wasn’t it right to destroy a monster if the result was a man?

He shut his eyes, and felt the simple emotional presence of the city with his powers.

Or rather, with Anna’s powers, which still had somehow not faded.

It had started to worry him the next day. Two weeks later, he was beyond worry—he was wondering what exactly she was.

Generally speaking, powers faded after a few hours out of contact with their wielder. They didn’t come or go gradually—their full measure was his within minutes, and they stayed at full strength for most of the duration he had them, until the last five or so minutes, when they began to wind down.

But Anna’s powers hadn’t wound down. They hadn’t gone. It was like she was somehow still right next to him.

He had experimented with them, since he’d kept them for so long. The results had been equally unsettling.

In his professional opinion, as the metahuman with the most experience with the widest range of powers perhaps ever, rogues didn’t exist. Not really. Not as most people imagined, misfiring superpowers as the product of some kind of manufacturing error. There was no such thing as a broken power. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it was simply that the metahuman in question didn’t know how to use the power as it was—”intended” was a bad word, as he didn’t have any more clue than anyone else if powers were intended at all. But there did seem to be some kind of structure to how they worked, and even the trickier ones, he could figure out with a little time.

At least, that had been his opinion.

Anna’s powers were changing his mind. He had decided to test their limits, and simply hadn’t found them. It was like getting into a Ford Pinto and finding out that it sprouted rocket boosters and wings once you got into higher gears. They evolved the father you took them, and they kept evolving, and not in ways that made sense to him. They felt dangerous, unbalanced, like he was one mistake away from derailing catastrophically. Damaged.

He’d felt powers like these once before, in their working form.

He didn’t think she was a psion.

The thought of what she might actually be scared him more than he cared to admit.

But that changed nothing. Whatever was going on, she would still be safest at Aurora University.

They all would.

And he would help her. He would guide her. He would make himself a bridge for her to walk over, so that she might find peace, and so that she might help others find it as well. Together, they would pull the world back from the brink of the abyss. They would lead it into a future where nobody lived in white towers while others scratched a living in the rust. The future, he knew, he believed, was bright.

He was tired, but saw the finish line coming. One final stretch, and he could rest.

But that was yet to come.

Until then, there was another girl who needed his help.

Paragon used Anna’s abilities to bend light, heat, sound away from him, shielded his mind against detection, and pointed himself towards the Skip.

Because as many questions as Anna raised, she was still only a secondary priority.

There were machinations at play, in conflict, cyclopean and cold, uncaring where they weren’t vicious, and vicious where they weren’t abhorrent. He had to stop them. He was one of the few with the power to oppose them. He had to do what he could, even if it cost him everything. Even if it cost him his family. Even if he was so, so tired.

Because he was Paragon.

He was a superhero.

As high up as he was, he still looked up to the shining peak of Pharos.

After all, superheroes saved the day.