One breath in, one breath out. Three seconds per breath. Structure was necessary, now more than ever. Did the others see? Henry couldn’t let them. There they sat, eyes nearly glazed over, waking from their stupor only to pull the cord once they pass a certain street.

He held his golf bag closer. Was he strange to see so far past the witching hour? The sky was still pitch black, but it had been a long night. He listened to the news on his cell. It felt restrictive; he was used to a multitude of screens, a high-flying angle of all things that occurred. It gave him a sense of power and control, the kind he never got when the meteors fell.

As the streets rolled lazily past he thought of Clarissa, his wife, trapped an ICU like a fly in amber. The only sign of life within was a crawling green line. All those moments sitting beside her, watching that monitor. He remembered how often he used to talk to her. About anything, really. They said it was supposed to help. Somewhere along the way he realized it was to keep him sane. Why would words heal what she had suffered? So he had stopped talking, stopped kidding himself, and just stared at that green line. He admitted that at his lowest, a part of him had hoped to see the line even out, so he would never have to see its jagged waveform ever again, feeding him a drip of hope that had long stopped being believable.

He looked again at the other passengers on the bus. An old lady leaned on the shoulder of a younger man, one exhausted of life, the other of living. Two girls sat close to each other near the back next to the doors. They wore backpacks and uniforms that looked some days old. Meanwhile men shouted excitedly on the screen of his phone in pristine rooms, sat around a kidney shaped table. They faced each other, but mostly towards him, the viewer, them. The people.

He was doing this for the people. They didn’t understand how bad life could get, and how much better it could be. It was all because of the gifted. The men on the screen argued about the ethics of what Whitworth had done, what Henry had spent months building towards to show the world who their neighbors were. That was his work. Everyone would see. Everyone would understand.

--

Her body felt different. She was only vaguely aware of the Caretaker, the Self that was likely not even sentient. She barely understood what she or it did. More powerful than regeneration, yet extremely limited. It took time to restore between uses. Days, weeks, she couldn’t say. The Caretaker did something to take into account the downtime.

It began as a suspicion at first, but now that she was engaged in combat, she was sure. Every time her body rebuilt, it came back slightly different, stronger, more resilient. She should have run out of stamina a long time ago, but she was parrying the enemy’s blows and delivering her own. In their last encounter, she had not seen their abilities before. Now she that she had, the fight was… different.

The woman with a magnetic gift swung a metal beam at her like a bat. Lyssa stopped it with her own. Their two fields collided and metal filings in the air formed misty black loops around their hands. She read the surface level of her opponent’s mind as they fought. Bella Fitzgerald was the woman’s name. There were layers of anger there, reinforced with rivets of desperation. In the handling of disaster, there simply wasn’t enough attention in the world to make sure every victim was taken care of. Heroes took care of the front end. Infrastructure took care of the long business after. Bella was the victim of three supervillain events. And humans were creatures of pattern recognition if anything.

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The man with the steel skin swung his fist. Lyssa batted it away with her claws. She left hot, red lines on his body. He was tougher than a skirmisher bot, but then again, Lyssa wasn’t trying very hard to hurt him. The man was named Herman Bewale. An immigrant who came to the west for its opportunities. He had known of the prevalence of supervillainy beforehand and took the risk. But just because accidents were unlikely didn’t mean one was safe from statistical variance—bad luck. He had lost everything. A carefully constructed paragraph reduced his insurance payout and government social programs were simply too slow and too ineffective. All good samaritans believed in welfare until they’ve had to work with the bureaucracy and inefficiencies themselves. He had concluded the system was broken, and that the only solution was to tear it down.

The chameleon girl was her age, who Lyssa ignored; there was no feasible way for her attempts to attack her to penetrate Lyssa’s stone skin. Her name was Sarah Delange. A clichéd backstory. Dead parents. Hero malpractice. All brushed under the rug. Lyssa didn’t need to imagine a world where people were desensitized to having dead family. The difference was Lyssa didn’t care about hers as much as a good daughter should. Sarah’s family were loving, nurturing, and were taken at such a young age that she had no other plan when they died. She was with the villains because she needed people with similar pain to be around. That was it. She was participating in chaos for its community.

The bear’s name was Larry Bergensen. He used to be a factory worker. Supervillainy destroyed his workplace. He never got hired again. As a man in his thirties with such a messy gift, there was no way any hero program would find use for him. He had been picked up off the street. It was a better fate than riding a unicycle, he had supposed.

Lyssa retreated from their minds. This was the part of hero work she had not been taught the intricacies of. How much force was she supposed to use?

A jab of pain struck her mind, causing her to lose focus. That’s when they attacked all at once. Lyssa growled and swept them all aside with Eury’s force-fire. Bodies rattled against lockers and cracked stone as they collided with support pillars in the room. Then she returned the psychic blow with brute force, stunning the old man.

The teleporter decided to make his move then. But Lyssa put a mental grip on him, mimicking what Oscar had done earlier. She was inexperienced, and supplemented finesse with raw force. The teleporter grimaced with pain.

The woman maintaining the shield was unguarded. Beads of sweat traced lines down her face. Her eyes were still closed, unaware of her surroundings. The basketball sized bubble in her hands warbled. Lyssa didn’t want to prolong the fight any longer. She walked over and swiped a claw down onto the bubble. It popped.

The shield unraveled like the fall of a curtain. The static in her ears became words again. The woman gasped, falling over as she returned unsteadily from her deep concentration.

Lyssa took out her earpiece and covered it in her fist.

“You people should leave,” Lyssa said.

“You’re letting us go?” Sarah said.

“I’m not a hero yet,” Lyssa said. “I don’t understand why we do the things we do.”

“You will understand, soon,” Oscar said.

“I also know I can’t rebel against the world just because it wronged me,” Lyssa said. “I’ll figure it out on my own. I don’t need your answers.”

Even as she said that, something recoiled inside her, the part of her that wanted nothing more than to rebel. Her unity was intact; the urge was her own. She wondered if containing it would be a lifelong process.

She watched them pick themselves up and exit through the doorway. They glanced warily over her shoulder, as if expecting some deceit or change of heart. When they all disappeared, Lyssa put her earpiece back.

“I found a gifted who could make shields,” she said. “I interrupted them, but they got away.”

“Well done,” Jackson replied quickly. “Don’t worry about the leakage.”

“…Why?”

“We’ve had Fleetfoot on patrol all night. Nobody can outrun him. No one is getting away from this one.”

Lyssa stood there for a while longer, unsure of what to think.