“So nobody in here is a supervillain?” I asked, my eyes still darting warily around the room.

We sat in a booth that Riley had led us to, about halfway between the stage and the bar. The applause had finally stopped, but I still felt everyone looking at me, which I hated. It reminded me of the eyes that followed me at the Club Hellfire I knew, the real one—except everybody here was smiling, which was somehow even worse.

“Aside from you and me, no,” Riley answered, still looking annoyed. I don’t think she liked the fact that her own reception had never involved a standing ovation. “Not real ones, anyway.”

“What does that mean?”

Riley smirked. “You’ll see.”

I stared at her. “Riley, I need an answer to that right now.”

She sighed. “Snow, we’re fine. Do you trust me?”

I blinked. “Still no. Not even a little. Probably never.”

“Well, tough,” she said, blunt. “Because I'm pretty sure you can't find your way back to Alex’s alone.” She looked away as though the conversation was over, and then rolled her eyes after she noticed me watching her through now narrowed eyes. “For fuck’s sake, Jones, give me ten minutes and I'll show you something that’ll blow your mind.”

“I want to know that it’s safe, now,” I snapped. “I don’t want my mind blown.”

“Well, it’s not safe,” she snapped back. “All those clapping people and happy faces? Heavens, Snow. You might be in danger of having a good time.”

“Fat chance with you here,” I snarled.

“You didn’t have to come! I didn’t drag you out of bed! So either there’s something about me you like, or you’re addicted to misery.” She leaned forward away from Carmen and leered at me. “Best of both worlds, we can end the night with a vigorous hatefuck.”

I crossed my arms and glared at her.

“As long as it doesn’t get in the way of our plans, right?” Carmen said with the tone of someone marking their territory as politely as they could.

I thought I saw annoyance flash in Riley’s eyes, but when she leaned back and looked at Carmen, it was only smoldering lust once more. “Oh, trust me, baby. Nothing is going to get in the way of my plans for you tonight. Worst case scenario, I have two leashes. What do you say, Snow White? You could be one of the only people on the planet to lose your virginity in a lesbian BDSM threesome.”

From the tightness of Carmen’s smile, I could tell that even Riley’s social credit as a famous hot person had limits. On my end, I felt in no particular hurry to disclose to Riley Harper of all people the status of my virginity, so conversation lulled.

I tried to keep my eyes scanning the club, but this proved to be distinctly uncomfortable due to all the eye contact I was making. I considered just leaving, but one, Riley was absolutely correct to doubt that I knew the way back, and two, I found that I didn’t actually want to go back. A few nights in a comfortable bed with no morning panic attacks had spoiled me, and the last thing I wanted was to accelerate the process of returning to the status quo. It was like living next to a landfill. Your nose might get used to it, might be blind to it, but the second the smell went away was also the very second your started to dread its return.

So instead, I watched the stage.

The singer, in her slinky red dress, and the band, in their sharp formalwear, were the only other people who read as actual Club Hellfire types to me, like the guy at the door. They, like him, looked human, but there was something simply demonic about their presence—and no, it wasn’t the small pair of budding horns on the singers head. She wasn’t even the only person with horns in the room, and none of the others gave me the same vibe. The same vibe your pet cat has when it sees your pet bird. It might know better, but it still wants to try.

The singer looked at me from halfway across the room, and suddenly I knew beyond doubt that the intelligence behind those blue eyes was far from human.

“What is this place?” I asked, more wondering aloud than expecting an answer.

“Club Hellfire,” said a new, male voice approaching our booth. “And we are very happy to have you here.”

I turned.

A group of five walked up, the speaker at their head. He was a healthy looking, well-groomed man with pitch black hair, maybe in his early thirties, around Alex’s age. He was dressed, in as accurate terms as I can describe, like a turn of the century English laborer, in a sleeveless undershirt, suspenders, and a newsboy cap.

He flashed a pearly white smile as he approached. “Hot damn, Harper,” he said. “I thought you were talking out your bony ass. Did you not fill her in?”

“I told her, she’s just selectively deaf half the time I say anything,” Riley said. “And don’t talk about my ass, straight boy.”

“Yeah,” said the woman next to him, leaning into his arm and smiling up at him. She was nice looking, with a healthy kind of normalcy about her, and around the same age as him. “Don’t talk about her ass, straight boy.”

“Can we sit the fuck down?” said another man, older by a significant margin, black, and dressed in enough denim and chains to make an entire motorcycle gang jealous. “If I don’t get to drink soon I’m going to be in serious danger of sobering up.”

The original man looked at Riley.

She shrugged. “Might introduce yourself first. Snow White over there is getting twitchy.”

I was getting twitchy because of the last two people in the group. The first, a blonde about our age, hung on the arm of the last like she didn’t mind falling if he stepped forward too fast. She wore her hair up in a style that was both elaborate and messy, with loops and braids and the occasional spout of unsecured strands giving an unbalanced, chaotic impression. In terms of raw sluttiness, she made Riley and Carmen look conservative, in a sheer pink romper with matching, barely present underwear.

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But the guy was the one setting off alarms.

He looked familiar. I couldn’t place him, but it wasn’t a faded impression. It was strong, like the face of someone you see at work every day but never have had the opportunity to talk to. But I’d remember if I had seen him around, at the very least because he was dressed up like a 1950s greaser, complete with a leather jacket and too much hair product molding his pompadour. It was a style that had come back into favor with the advent of the technophage, at first ironically, and then not so much.

He was also about our age, and regarded everything around him with an expression of bored contempt—except me. When we met eyes, his narrowed, and his lip curled.

“Right,” said the first man, taking my attention back. “Introductions. My name is Miles Judge, and this is my club.”

“My name is Ella, and this is my boyfriend,” said the woman next to him, before reaching up and pinching his cheek. “Ain’t he pretty?”

The third man in the denim just grunted and said, “Smoke.”

There was a brief pause where it seemed like the next two should have shared their names, but they didn’t. The blonde just grinned and looked up at greaser, who nodded and sat down without saying anything, scooting into the booth next to Carmen. And then he just watched me with amused, almost challenging eyes.

And he still looked so familiar.

The other three sat down as well, and I scooted in to accommodate. I didn’t have any worry about being trapped inside the booth. Even with all my recent physical trauma, I felt confident in my ability to blast my way free of any potential situation and get to the door.

And if the as-yet-unnamed pair didn’t stop staring at me, I might.

“Did we mention,” Miles said, hesitantly, watching the staredown happening between the two parties, “how glad we are you have you here?”

“You did,” I said, only then turning my eyes to him. “When you said this is your club, what did you mean? You… own Club Hellfire?”

He smiled. “I own this Club Hellfire. You’re probably familiar with the one in the Skip.”

“You could say that.” At least that mystery was kind of solved. “I didn’t know there were two.”

“Oh, there’s a lot more than two,” Riley said. “There’s been one in every major city I’ve been to, which is most of them in the Western hemisphere while I was touring.”

The unnamed guy snorted, and Riley shot him an unamused look.

“Think of this as a franchise location,” Miles continued. “The point of Club Hellfire is to be available to free thinkers. Rebels. Anyone considered dangerous by the institution they live within. When the Skip got cut off, so did the Club. So I made a deal with Management, and got them to open a second, more accessible one.”

“I don’t know if I’d call the Roots accessible,” I said. “There’s only a few bridges and tunnels in and out, and they’re usually clogged with traffic. Most people who come Downtown go through the Jungle. And they cracked down on unregistered flyers in city airspace years ago.”

“It’s not ideal, true,” Miles conceded, “but it’s way better than trying to get through a wall of cops and laser weapons.”

If I’d wanted to be pedantic, I would have mentioned that I’d gotten through that long before I’d ever set foot Downtown, but while I could probably make an argument that I was more of a free thinker and a rebel than anyone who lived in the city center, that was also probably just the rage from earlier today rearing its stubborn head again. Even I could hazily parse the line between outraged and whiny.

“So everyone here is a rebel of some sort?” I asked, looking around.

The answer to my question was obvious, but Miles said it anyway. “Well, most of the people here are metahumans, so by default, yes. Maybe not through their choice, but the world decided to make it that way.”

“More than that,” Smoke grunted.

Miles nodded. “And some are more than that, yeah.”

Before I could ask what he meant, our server came by, tray already loaded with drinks. I’d ordered just water, but Riley had ordered herself and Carmen mixed drinks, and shots all around, which just meant herself and Carmen again. He also had drinks for our booth’s new additions. By reflex, I found myself searching my brain for the most inconsequential secret I knew, because at the Club I knew, not even the water was free. The server, however, left before I was even consciously aware of what I was doing, much to my confusion.

Miles’s eyes twinkled at me. “Drinks on the house tonight. And actually, I think we can make that forever, in your case.”

I was taken aback, though I probably shouldn’t have been at this point. “Why? Why all this? The applause, the looks. Free drinks. I don’t get it.”

His eyebrows raised. “I mean…” He paused looking around at everyone, as if for support or clarification. “Anna. You struck a blow. You spat in the eye of the system. This is a room full of rebels. What else did you expect?”

I didn’t think that anyone could possibly know about my prison break yet, especially since I had never even heard of the prison at all. That couldn’t be what it was all about.

Paragon’s words, once more, came back to me. You’re the talk of the metahuman community.

Me going to Aurora must have still been an even bigger deal that I’d considered, and not just for sticking it to SCAR. I’d read somewhere that people don’t often recognize the import of historic events that they’re part of until later, when they’re far enough away from them that it loses its immediacy. News is something that happens on TV, not to real people, not to you.

In this case, maybe it was the first spark of hope they’d had in a long time. I could understand that, maybe. It seemed like the bad guys had been winning for so long. Like every time we turned around, another atrocity, another disaster, another violation of personal liberty was happening and nobody was doing anything about it. The establishment that was supposed to protect us was standing idly by while obviously evil people chipped away at it, threatening to bring it all down on our heads if they didn’t get their way. It seemed insane, that something so stupidly, obviously, cartoonishly evil was allowed to keep on happening, and the insanity just kept on coming. Maybe this was the first time they felt like someone was fighting back in a long time.

Maybe they had hope, because of me.

“Well look at that,” Riley said, sounding smug. “She can smile.”

“I’d be smiling too,” the silent greaser finally said, grinning, “if I had killed Paragon.”

I guess that’s what I get for smiling.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard a sentence that was was so bafflingly unexpected that your brain couldn’t process it. I’ve read about people who, going in for a routine checkup, are told that they may have something devastatingly wrong with them, cancer or the like, and need that very simple pronouncement repeated a few times before it sinks in. What he said was like that, except nobody repeated it. I just got to sit and stew in it, while he grinned at me from across the booth.

Needless to say, the tiny smile that Riley had noticed melted off my face faster than an ice cube in an incinerator while my brain started frantically trying to connect words to reality and everyone watched.

“I…” I shook my head. “What?”

“Oh, you killed Paragon?” Riley said, not sounding particularly surprised, and I was almost relieved someone else had followed that up. “Alex is gonna be pissed.”

“No, I didn’t…” I shook my head, and looked around at everyone. Miles was watching me, curiously. Smoke did the same, impassively. Ella, Miles’s girlfriend, looked worried, eyes darting to me, then around to everyone else. The blonde in the sheer romper looked like she was savoring my reaction.

My eyes finally settled on the greaser, and his nagging familiarity was finally too much to bear.

I demanded, “Who are you?”

“You can’t tell?” he asked, spreading his hands, his voice a James Dean impression that was just as affected as the rest of his outfit. “I guess my costume did have a mask. Junior Hero requirement and all. Still, I thought the family resemblance would tip you off. He was my uncle after all.”

There was a brief beat where my confusion endured, and it was just long enough that I only understood after he continued to speak.

“I’m the Tomorrow Kid,” he said, standing as his eyes began to literally glow. “Paragon’s former sidekick. But you can call me Darby, killer.”

Before he finished, I drew in energy, bursting alight with power in the booth, and raised my hand to blast him.

Carmen let out a terrified wail.

Poor thing.