Question Shadowglass

Book 1: Blending In

11 PM, Friday, October 9, 2015—Lake Union (Seattle, Washington)

The main cool thing about Seattle is the shows, as long as you’re willing to accept a few problems. For one, national bands don’t really come through very often: why make the long trek north from California to hit the few cities in the Pacific Northwest and then have to head east across Montana and the Dakotas, when you could just cut over to Vegas and then down through more populated areas? But if you decide that you’re going to enjoy the local scene, and broaden your taste to whatever national bands do happen to come through, you can still enjoy some pretty good rock and roll in a variety of cool venues on basically any night of the week.

At that point, you just have to deal with the audiences. I’d grown up on shows in places where the audience really got into the music; even for bands that didn’t provoke a mosh pit, there was still jumping, dancing, hand raising, and singing along. Seattle audiences tended to plant themselves like a forest, with only some gentle swaying to indicate that they weren’t dead. Acts that were really good at getting the audience warmed up could get some decent feedback, but most had to deal with a crowd that was returning hardly any energy to the performance.

Still, tonight had been a pretty good show, at least as far as the bands were concerned. They were strictly local, but talented, and it had been a decent turn out. Some pretty girls in the crowd, too, not that I could figure out how to strike up a conversation. Even if I’d managed to put together a band since I’d been here, that’s the kind of revelation that works better at a party when someone brings it up. “You know I... play guitar a little,” is a pretty lame cold open at any time, even a concert. So I’d left the venue less energized than I’d planned, thoughts of all the conversations I hadn’t struck up and new friends I hadn’t made running through my head, slogging out into the Seattle fall.

For most of the year, the rest of the country is very wrong about Seattle. If you come to visit in August, you won’t even see a cloud. Most of the rest of the year, the rain will come briefly; overcast, but not wet. You’ll make a joke about how you expected it to be raining, and it barely has. The locals have heard it all before. It’s not even a secret that the stereotype isn’t true, but visitors never believe it until they see it anyway.

The exception is late fall and winter. Nobody wants friends and family visiting then. In the darkest part of the year, the city is exactly the dreary, dripping, damp, depressing destination that leads its denizens to deepening and desperate feats of alliteration just to stay sane. The summer where the sun didn’t set until after ten becomes the winter where you might have caught a stray bit of sunlight in the foggy haze that was all the light you were going to get for the middle of the day.

It’s the worst time of the year, if you’re already unhappy, is what I’m saying.

The sun had already been down for two hours by the time I had gotten to the show. When I got out, it was a full oppressive darkness of cloud-occluded stars, streetlights blurred by the rain. I made my way onto my bus, hoodie damp and squeezing as tightly as possible among the other people evacuating the concert to not have to wait another half hour for the next bus home.

I’d gotten a job and apartment that theoretically put me in prime position to get work at Amazon. Then I’d discovered that I didn’t have the coding chops to get in without working for years in customer service, and I had zero interest in being on the phone all day. My much-less-glamorous IT job was, it turned out, pathologically worried about training up people that would just quit to go to Amazon or Microsoft, and had carefully tuned their employee development to lock in people just like me for as long as possible.

I might have been a little bitter about the situation.

Seattle’s buses are very nice, but the lack of an actual train system is sorely felt in Friday evening traffic: the buses get just as stuck as everyone else. It’s yet another reason to kill time at a show before heading home; you won’t get home too much later than you would just leaving from work. By the time I got back to my one bedroom apartment, located in the only part of town I could afford since better paid Amazonians had driven up all the rents downtown, it was deep into the full-on, motivation-killing darkness that made me just want to crash for the evening.

But I wasn’t going to go down that easily! My first year in town, I’d basically hibernated for the winter, and emerged in spring with an exceptional amount of extra weight from sitting in front of Netflix eating junk food. I’d finally worked myself back into a workout routine over the last couple of years, and I was at least in shape if not anything special to look at.

I considered letting myself skip the night if I got in some musical practice, but I hadn’t touched the bass in weeks and rebuilding the calluses was always annoying. I was quite possibly the worst music major in history: the level of social anxiety that means you won’t work a call center no matter what it would do for your career is also a pretty strong roadblock when your high school career goal is “rock star.” I’d never been able to make myself put in the work required to actually build and promote a band. I couldn’t even really bring myself to put in the effort to become a bassist, the role designed for wallflowers.

Instead, I’d managed an arts school’s worth of student loans with even less to show for it in career prospects than your normal music major. It took me an embarrassingly long time in my twenties to realize that the computer-related stuff I’d taken for granted as a useful sideline for art-related applications was something I was actually really good at. And even the most entry-level IT job paid better than the kind of jobs available to an extreme introvert with a music degree.

So I’d started working the on-the-job path into the industry you have to take when you don’t realize you should have applied to tech schools until after you’re paying off a mountain of debt from society’s insistence on making teens choose their lifepath with little or no real explanation of what that means. Which meant I was getting dangerously close to 30 and hoping I’d be good enough for a big boy tech job by the time I was 40.

It was so depressing that I barely realized I was wasting time on the internet instead of practicing or exercising. But even the web wasn’t a particularly soothing balm. Social media was a window into the family back in Texas I didn’t really get on with, friends from high school and college that I’d completely drifted away from, and the few casual acquaintances I’d assembled in the Pacific Northwest. I’d been three years here before someone had me look up the Seattle Freeze: the city where it’s so hard to make friends that there’s a Wikipedia article about it. Extra special bonus: it’s one of the worst dating markets in the country for guys looking for girls, and being an average-looking, reasonably-fit, technology drone isn’t much help even with the musician angle.

I spent a while that evening working my way through the mantra my therapist really wanted me to stop using: I was a healthy white guy with a decent income, roof over my head, and no particular life drama, so I had it better than the vast majority of the world. Sadly, explaining the logic to yourself that you have no reason to feel bad doesn’t actually make you feel any better.

I wound up getting in bed before one and reading graphic novels until I fell asleep.

3 AM, Saturday, October 10, 2015—Northgate

I woke up in the dark and felt very weird. I’d been having a particularly vivid dream that I couldn’t remember a bit of, except for the strange sensation of traveling quickly down a tunnel. I glanced at my alarm clock and saw that it was just past three in the morning, and there was a strange reddish haze around the numbers. In fact, the entire dark room was swarming with a dull mist of various colors with no particular reason I could see, except there was another halo around my cell phone. I worried I’d somehow detached a retina while sleeping.

Despite the other physical sensations nagging at me, I reached over and flipped on my nightstand lamp to make sure I hadn’t gone blind. Both my eyes seemed to be working, as they adjusted to the light; the colored mist became subdued and didn’t seem to be interfering with what I was seeing; kind of like, if you have tinnitus, it’s much less obvious when it’s not totally silent, but you’re always aware it’s there in the background.

But being able to see wasn’t much comfort, because now I was struck by the fact that someone had subtly redecorated my room. There were nice blackout curtains over the bedroom window, where I’d just been using the venetian blinds that came with the apartment. I’d have to look to make sure, but it seemed like the spines of the books on my shelves were slightly different; some of my books seemed to be missing, and ones I didn’t recognize were inserted in various places. I’d had a big blunted longsword I’d bought when I thought I was going to get into learning historical European martial arts, but then just hung on my wall. It was replaced with a smaller sword that actually looked sharp and like it had seen some use. Perhaps strangest were the framed and colored drawings of comic characters I’d gotten at various convention art shows. All of them seemed subtly different, but the one that stood out the most was that a drawing of Loki had been replaced by Loki from the run where he was in Sif’s body.

All of that was taken in over a few moments before I really started to wonder what the hell was on my head. I reached up and felt some kind of metal headband, warm and vibrating slightly, with wires running out of it into a toaster-sized contraption on the bed next to me. I could feel fuzz with my fingers, and as I carefully pulled the device off, I realized that someone had buzzed my hair down to a crew cut. As I looked at it, the device was, indeed, some kind of electrode-laced scaffold, with contact points and blinking LEDs, each covered in its own halo of colored sparks.

The contraption was so bewildering I almost didn’t notice my hands against it, but I did notice the extremely unexpected distribution of weight under the covers of the bed, as rolled over to set the cap carefully by the connected device. “What the hell?” I asked the universe, about the unexpected sensation of parts of my chest continuing to slide for a moment after I rolled off of my back. And then, of course, I had to repeat, “What the hell?” one more time to confirm that the slightly nasal baritone I’d heard coming out of my mouth for my entire adult life was now a very clear contralto.

“I’m still dreaming,” I told myself, bemused by the voice, still just fuzzed enough from waking up to almost believe it. But my senses were taking in a huge array of data, the absence of which is not something you notice in a dream. The room was slightly cold against my bare face, neck, and arms. I could smell a faint aroma of flowers and cinnamon that were certainly not the Tide and “needs washing” smells I was used to in my sheets. I could hear the fan on my computer going in the living room. And everything in the room was distinct, not the filter of impressions so common to dreams.

“Just a dream,” I continued to assure myself as I began to take further stock rather than acceding to my first intention and closing my eyes and trying to wake up. I pulled back the covers and was not particularly surprised to discover that the odd weight on my chest was, indeed, a pair of breasts. If there was any doubt, as the cold room air washed over me I felt something that I could only associate as a pair of the largest goosebumps I’d ever felt. I could see nipples suddenly tenting out the front of the black Batman-logo t-shirt I’d worn to bed (now, it seemed, in a softer cotton and baby cut for my new figure). My torso had a much more pronounced curve that flared back up to hips wrapped in black pajama bottoms that, at least, seemed very similar to the ones I’d gone to bed in.

When I’d gone to bed, of course, the front of them had a bulge that was now completely missing.

Let me just sum up that I spent several minutes—more than was probably strictly necessary—taking stock of the changes and becoming less and less convinced that I was dreaming. About the only real legacy of the original dream assumption was that I had moved substantially onto acceptance that somehow this was happening before the urge to freak the hell out really kicked in. So, rather than screaming and stumbling around looking for an answer like I might have if this had just suddenly happened, I eventually got calmly out of bed and went to check the mirror in the bathroom.

My bathroom itself was the same structurally, but changed even more than the bedroom. All different soaps, shampoos, and other products littered the sink and shower, and a special shelf had been set up over the toilet to hold a half dozen mannequin heads wearing wigs in different colors and shades. Perhaps this was because the woman staring back at me from the mirror’s most immediately obvious feature was the closely-shorn scalp that I’d felt taking off the strange device, with maybe a quarter inch of stubble all over.

What I normally saw looking back at me from a mirror was a fairly largely built, just-under-six-foot man in a constant fight to keep off a few extra pounds of fat rounding out his middle and his face. I’d never been convinced that I was particularly attractive, more an intense average of dark hair, hazel eyes, and very slightly asymmetrical features. My normal mirror experience was an intensely boring one, perhaps a key to my anxiety because I never had the slightest idea where to start on grooming to make myself more presentable.

Other than the strange grooming choice of a crew cut, the person staring back at me made me catch my breath (which was, itself, a disorienting thing to see reflected back at me) for being such a reasonable approximation of my own dream girl.

I could tell I’d lost some height, by the way the counter was suddenly closer to me than I was used to, contributing to the disorientation, but I thought I was probably still fairly tall for a woman. Long legs climbed into a slender but still extremely curvy figure, with breasts that were obvious even loose under a t-shirt, and might be pronounced with the right support, but which didn’t seem in any way excessive or like they’d be difficult to manage. Rather than being the pasty white that was the most common skin color in the perpetually-overcast Pacific Northwest, my new skin was very slightly darker but completely unblemished. Coupled with facial features which seemed to be assembled from the best elements of lots of different races, my impression was of someone that could reasonably come off as anything from someone with Latin heritage to a white woman of mixed parentage from unknown stock. There were still hints I could see of my old face in the new configuration, with a cheekbone here and an eyebrow there making me look like, perhaps, my own half sister.

Most arresting of all, my irises were molten silver that, at a distance, barely stood out from the whites of the eye. But, looking closer, they were almost a mirror finish, seeming to catch reflections from the room, with flecks of purple drifting around them. Similar to the wigs, I noticed that some of the new supplies on the sink were contacts and contact-cleaning solution, and I got the impression that, rather than my own surreal irises being contacts, the supplies were there to help cover them up if I went out.

The total package, as I took a step back, was of an ethnically-obscure supermodel that for some reason had been shaved and dropped naked in my house to have to get by with my own geeky sleepware, and who was still managing to look more at home here than I ever did. Hell, I couldn’t even seem to slouch effectively; my posture now seemed to effortlessly correct itself every time I tried to settle into my standard rolled-shoulder hunch.

There was also a blue post-it stuck to the mirror that it took me a long time to notice. In thick black marker, it simply said, “Explanation for all of this on the computer.”

I obligingly went into the living room and flipped on a light. It was much the same as I’d left it, with more of the minor but obvious changes. Since I was walking to my desk anyway, the first thing that caught my eye was that my desk toy action figures of The Question (Vic Sage) and Huntress, who’d I’d always shipped since the Justice League Unlimited cartoon, were replaced with figures of The Question (Renee Montoya) and Batwoman. The computer they were sitting on was fairly similar to mine, but seemed higher-end somehow. I jostled the mouse to wake the screen, and the desktop was slicker and nearly 3D, with icons for programs I used and programs I’d never heard of. A video player window was already open in the middle of the screen, just waiting for me to press play. So I did...

A webcam view of this body sitting in this very chair appeared; I glanced behind to confirm that the background was the same, but this had otherwise obviously been pre-recorded—unlike looking in the mirror, this woman was making her own movement choices. However, I was shocked with her dress and mannerisms. I’d expected to see a graceful, cultured woman of the world whose body I was somehow inhabiting, but other than obvious differences, and subtle ones like better posture and the voice, the person in the video was extremely familiar. Body language and inflections were undoubtedly close or identical to my own, and she was wearing a close equivalent of one of my own dark hoodies over a t-shirt for a band I hadn’t heard of but which, from the style, seemed like it was probably my kind of show.

“Hi, Simon, I’m not really sure how to start this. I’d thought about it enough but, now that I’m doing it live, I really want to start again. I guess I’ll just get into it. If you’re watching this, it means I’ve stolen your life and left you mine. I’d like to use the term ‘swapped’ instead, but I don’t think either of us would buy that. Sorry.

“Where to start with the explanation? There’s just so much of it. I guess at the beginning. Up until I was fourteen, I think our lives were almost identical, except for some differences in the background of our reality that I’ll get to. I grew up in the same Austin suburb you did, I had the same parents and brothers and sisters, and... big shock... I was also Simon Sullivan, Jr. Like you, I hung out with the same neighborhood boys, talked about getting into the comics industry when we were grown ups, got shipped off to boy scouts as often as Dad could be bothered to drive me. You get it, hopefully; I just want to be clear that I’m not you if you’d been born a girl. That part came at puberty.

“Do they have mutants in your timeline? I was trying to find the closest timeline to mine where this hadn’t happened to me, but maybe it was inevitable in my world. Or maybe in a world with mutants, all the versions of us that stayed male went on to live very different lives than either of us. I’m not the best at using this devise. Regardless, I don’t think you have superpowers there except in the comics, so you’re going to have to bear with me. Hopefully waking up like this made you more accepting of the possibility.

“I’m a mutant. The summer before I was supposed to go to high school, my eyes suddenly changed color to look like this, and it’s pretty commonly known that sudden eye color change is proof that you’re a mutant. Most people don’t take that kind of thing well here: a lot of normal people have been hurt by bad guys with powers, so they’re pretty afraid of the whole deal. You’ve read the X-Men, so I don’t think I have to lay it out more thickly than that. Do put in the contacts before you leave the apartment.

“Anyway, Mom and Dad took that part better than some of my other friends’ parents did. Not well, mind you, but I didn’t exactly get kicked out on the street just for being a mutant. No, what did it was that I started changing to look like this, and once it started, it happened quickly. Part of my powers are what they call an ‘exemplar’ here: I’m stronger, faster, and smarter than a normal human. Think Captain America. I’m decently high up there in the rating too, so be gentle with the furniture until you get a solid idea of your own strength: you’re probably a fair bit stronger than you were even as a guy, and you’re way stronger than you’d expect to be as a girl.

“The deal with exemplars is that somehow all of it comes from what the science nerds call a Body Image Template, or BIT. Each exemplar has some idealized self that they slowly transform into. Well, ‘idealized’ is the common explanation, but I’ve met a lot of other exemplars like me that never asked to look like they look, and wouldn’t have chosen it if they were. Some of them are so monstrous they can’t even pass as human anymore. The shrinks told me for years that it was something my subconscious was expressing, and I should learn to accept it and myself. But I never did. I’ll get to that.

“Between being an exemplar and having a decent amount of regeneration, within a couple of weeks, the old me was gone and I was a teen version of what you’re seeing now. Mom and Dad took the mutant thing alright, and they might have even been able to work through it if I wasn’t a mutant and suddenly told them that I wanted to be a girl, but Simon Sullivan, Sr. was not able to process that his namesake was a mutant and a girl. Maybe if they’d been more accepting, I would have had an easier time accepting it. But it got bad, and they wouldn’t believe me that I was just as confused and messed up about the whole thing as they were. More, obviously. They thought it was something I’d done on purpose with my new powers, and spent a lot of time trying to force me to change back. Like that was even an option.

“Do you still talk to Mom and Dad? I haven’t gotten any impressions of it. Maybe you just slowly drifted apart from them, over the years, rather than in one traumatic week. I kind of hope you’re estranged from them, because I don’t know if I could bring myself to go to Thanksgiving or Christmas and pretend that I don’t know what they’d have done if their world had been slightly different.

“I’ll save you the details and me breaking down into a crying fit on camera. If you need to help you sell your identity for some reason, I’ve tried to create a pretty thorough set of highlights of my past in some documents on the desktop. They’re more in case you need to verify your identity for a credit card or something, rather than a psych journal so you can really get to know me. For now, let’s just say that it was not a very good summer. I ran away and did some things I’m not proud of to survive on the streets, got involved in some super-powered drama, and managed to get sent off to a boarding school for mutants instead of going to jail.

“But I never really accepted anything, and I kept making worse and worse choices like teenagers do until I’d screwed myself up on a deep, emotional level. I recall feeling like I was scoring points when the world-class psychologists they had at Whateley got increasingly fed up with my shit, and more and more exasperated about helping. It was a new school and I could have been anyone I wanted to be. Apparently what I chose to be was an angry butch lesbian who didn’t have any money for clothes, pushed away anyone that wasn’t another gay exemplar girl looking to try to reform a bad girl, and managed to live at the very bottom of the social order for the school the whole time I was there.

“You may look at yourself in the mirror and wonder how I messed things up so bad. As an adult, I’ve forced myself to sometimes dress up, flirt, and get my way. But it always feels wrong. And it wouldn’t have even worked at school. If you’re picturing Xavier’s school, don’t. You’d be better off picturing a rich boarding school where the elite kids are all supermodels with awesome superpowers. The charity-case lesbian with thrift store clothes never even had a chance. If I’d put some effort into it, I might have hit middle-of-the road status above the kids that weren’t exemplars, but I didn’t.

“Basically, I can only explain myself like this after years of therapy that mostly didn’t stick and to you, who are quite possibly the only person in the multiverse that might get it. Plus, you’ll probably need to know, sooner or later, why all your contacts from high school treat you like they do. Again, the detailed highlights are all in the files.

“I know a lot of mutants whose lives are totally defined by the things they learned at Whateley and the lifelong allies and enemies they made there. I kept my head down, learned what I could from the classes, and stubbornly resisted any attempts to help me. There are probably some kids I got along with okay that might help me in an emergency, and some kids I was a bitch to that probably would come after me but only if they got paid for it. I get the impression your high school and college course was way different than mine, so I’m not totally sure how we wound up in nearly identical apartments in Seattle. Maybe that’s another reason I had to look so far down parallel universes until I found the best match.

“I graduated in 2005 with a few weird skills you probably never had much chance to learn, and a few contacts. I heard through the grapevine that I may have just graduated a few years too early. While I was in school, there weren’t a lot of people like me. They call them ‘changelings’ there. It’s a big secret that the dorm I was in was the LGBTQ dorm; they like to pretend it’s for kids that need more psychiatric assistance, which is kind of bullshit but, well, don’t go telling anyone or you’ll ruin what protections the current kids there have. Anyway, while I was there it was much more the LGB dorm, and I hear right after I graduated it started getting a lot more of the T kids. Maybe if I’d have had some more to compare notes with... but, again, I’m getting off track in my own drama.

“Let’s get back on topic. I went to a cheap but decent tech school for college, and took odd jobs in my twenties, but I wasn’t really interested in any kind of career. My calling was to figure out some solution to my core identity problem: I’d have given up a hell of a lot to be a guy again. I’ll save you years of mistakes and false leads—again, check the documents—but I eventually landed on the solution I used to swap us across the multiverse.

“I came across a devisor who calls himself the Oneiromancer. He specializes in making weird technology to do things with dreams, and he had one particular gadget that’s probably still sitting on the bed in there, which he said would let you dream yourself to another reality. I doubt you noticed, but I’ve actually been sharing dreams with you for the past few weeks, doing my best to get a handle on your life. I had a few other false starts before I found you; you were the one whose life was the closest to what I wanted, and who didn’t seem to be using it. I get the sense that you’re stuck, and don’t even realize all the advantages you have. Maybe you think the same thing about me. Hopefully I didn’t yank you away from a life you loved such that you’ll move heaven and earth to try to take it back from me. If you’re watching this, I threw the switch last night to swap our minds totally and for good. If you’re watching this, it worked. Or maybe I’ve totally misunderstood how this contraption works and I just overwrote my own personality with a dream personality that I invented from nothing. Either way, hopefully it’s a better experience for everyone.

“You came to Seattle to try to get a good tech job, but have been stuck. I actually have a much more thorough tech background than you, between advanced classes in Whateley and going to tech school, but in my world I’m basically just talented for a baseline, and far behind what gadgeteers and devisors can do with code. In your world, I’m pretty sure I can get that job you thought would take you years in a few weeks.

“I came to Seattle to lay low. I showed up about the same time you did, but it was with that devise in there. You see, I didn’t exactly buy it or borrow it legitimately. There are people that very badly want it back. Sorry, again. It took me three years of odd jobs and tinkering to finally get it to work and then to tune in on you. I never had much savings, and I’ve spent most of what I earned on this quest. I wish I could have left you a safe life with a bright future like the one I took from you, but you’re going to have to start working pretty soon. Maybe you’ll waste less of what you get on an obsession like I did.

“Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to. I hope you’re better adjusted than me. I thrust you into an even more drastic change than I had, but I’m hoping you can take it better as an adult. I’m hoping you don’t immediately turn around and try to swap back. Selfishly, I didn’t document how I got it to work, and, like I said, I suspect I’m better trained in this kind of thing than you are. I know you’ll figure it out eventually, but I’m hoping it will take you long enough that you’ll decide to stay and let me have this. Can I apologize enough for my bullshit? One more time: I’m really sorry.

“I’m getting tired of talking, so let me just hit the last few things you’ll really need to know that I haven’t mentioned. There are a bunch of documents on the desktop, like I said, and one of them is a list of passwords, accounts, and various other useful details you’ll probably need to know to live my life until you can make it your own. I put my various IDs in the desk drawer. I’ve been using the Sarah Taylor identity and cards the most while I’ve been in Seattle, but obviously the Simone Sullivan documents are the legitimate ones. Like I said, though, there are people looking for me that might know about my real name, so you should be very careful about using those.

“The thing you might not expect is my mutant ID card. It has my legally registered code name on it, Shadowglass, and a bunch of summaries about my powers testing that I’ll give you in English in a second. The deal with that is that it’s how you’re registered, and you’re technically required to present it if you travel by air and in some other circumstances or they can arrest you as soon as they realize you’re a mutant. But, again, people are looking for you, and it’s mostly the heroes and other well-established types that bother. Make your own risk vs. reward assessment on if you want to use it. Even these days, they don’t have reliable mutant-scanning equipment. And with my powers, they’d be even less likely to work.

“I already mentioned the exemplar thing and the regen, right? It’s officially Exemplar 3, Regenerator 3. You’ll be above-peak human capacity for all kinds of physical and mental things, and you’ll pretty much heal from anything extremely quickly but not so fast that it will be obvious if you get off the scene as soon as you can. Both of those powers are pretty calorie-intensive, and I don’t know if you’ve checked the kitchen yet. A lot of my income goes into groceries. You don’t have to work out to stay in shape, but you’ll kill yourself if you try to diet. Yet another little benefit that most humans, let alone most women, would kill for and I’m screwed up enough to give up.

“How I got my name, though, is my other powers. I’m listed as a Warper 1di and Esper 2. What that means is that I interact weirdly with energy, particularly electromagnetic energy. You’ve probably noticed the weird colored haze in your vision by now? That’s all the energy in the air around you. If you focus, you can see anything from wifi to invisible laser tripwires. Well, you can at least see where it is and where it’s going; I never figured out how to read the data out of the air, just see that it was present. That would have been a hell of a useful trick to figure out.

“I can also bend all of that stuff around me. I was never strong enough at it to actually become invisible, but I can certainly fuzz out my outline enough to be a lot harder to spot in the dark or when I otherwise mostly blend into the background. It works even better on more specific wavelengths, though; I can walk right through a laser security grid and lots of other types of scanners without them noticing I’m there. If you can see the energy, you can probably bend it. Be careful about people with sensors that use magic, though. It also helps out a lot if someone tries to shoot you with lasers or other energy attacks, though I’m certainly not encouraging you to get shot at. Hopefully activating that power will be reflexive, because I sure as hell don’t know how to sum up the years of practice it took me to figure out how to use it effectively.

“With all of that said, I figure you can add up everything I’ve told you to realize that I make most of my money as a thief. I’m especially good at getting into technology firms and skating out with data that they don’t even realize is missing. But, like with the devise, sometimes I take other things. I wouldn’t advise trying to jump right back in unless I’m missing that you were also some kind of master thief on the side in your life. There may be people that come looking for you to do some jobs for them, though I think I’ve kept them all from knowing I was operating out of Seattle. I’m not positive though. One more apology? I’m sorry.

“Hopefully you sat through all of this. You should obviously lock everything down and delete it so other folks don’t get hold of it. I’m getting tired of talking, and more and more anxious about what I’m going to do tonight. I did you a bad turn by stealing your life, and I hope I’ll at least do you the favor of living out some of your dreams better than you were able to. I’ve tried to leave you every advantage I could think of so it will give you a chance to do the same thing here. I know you didn’t ask for this, and my life isn’t nearly as stable and safe as yours is, but I hope you’ll like it a lot better than I did.

“If everything goes to plan, I’ll never speak to you again. Good luck.”

That was... a lot. I’d spent nearly a half hour listening to Simone unload her life story. I’d paused it from time to time, confirming the presence of the documents she’d mentioned, searching the internet for confirmation, and gradually coming to the conclusion that, as mad as it sounded, it was the best explanation for everything.

After she finished, I started going through the documents in more detail. Her finances were particularly complicated, with accounts under various aliases and banks with instructions for how to use VPNs, proxy servers, and a souped-up equivalent of the Onion Router to get to some of them undetectably. There were detailed instructions for the kinds of legitimate employment and freelance that could go into the Sarah Taylor accounts, where to put money from less legitimate sources, and how to launder it if I needed it to pay rent and credit card bills. It was becoming increasingly clear that she had not been kidding about her criminal activities, or the bottom line she’d left me: rent was paid this month, and was about the same as I’d been paying for the same apartment in my own version of this world, but there wasn’t enough left to make rent next month. It was a far cry from the careful nest egg of thousands of dollars I’d been saving up by virtue of being very, very boring.

I started to hand-write some of the more complicated information that I might need if I went out, but I was surprised to find that, having read it once, I could remember it without a problem. And that stopped me cold and numb for several minutes as I thought about what she’d told me: somehow she’d swapped our memories, maybe our very souls if there were such things, across realities. But memories were stored in the brain. Would I gradually forget everything about myself as her memories took over from deep storage, or could I expect massive headaches as the physical mass of my brain rewired itself to record my own memories? Had that already happened while I was asleep and I just didn’t notice? Could I easily remember the information from the documents because it was already something recorded in Simone’s brain, and I was just reactivating it, or was it all to do with the “exemplar memory” she’d mentioned and I’d looked up to confirm?

It all hit me in a wave, after over an hour of going from dreamlike acceptance to information overload. Some other me from an extremely alternate timeline had gone looking for some other version of herself that had the life she’d wanted and who didn’t appreciate it. Now that I’d had her perspective, I was kicking myself for the first world problems I’d thought were so important: my career wasn’t going as well as I wanted, I didn’t really know how to self-actualize, and I was having a hard time making friends. Now I had no career, no idea how to even keep the roof over my head for more than a few weeks, didn’t recognize the person staring back at me out of the mirror, and the few people I did consider loved ones didn’t even exist anymore except as strange copies.

I broke down in the kind of sobbing fit that my therapist had been trying to get me to let out and I’d stoically resisted because of how firmly my parents had taught me that boys don’t cry.

It was about five AM by the time I’d cried myself out, and I wasn’t sure if I felt better, exactly, but at some point in the catharsis I’d decided to move forward rather than curl up and die. I’d always prided myself on my ability to set goals and make progress toward them. Sometimes they were the wrong goals, and sometimes I realized that there was a wall of my own limitations in the way and I needed to give up and try something else, but I didn’t feel like I’d ever stagnated. I’d certainly always felt like my ambitions were always a decade away, but I’d never felt like I’d gotten as far as I was ever going to get. Step two would be to set some new goals, but step one was to get moving again.

Despite the physical residue of the ugly cry I’d had, when I rolled off the floor and back into the bathroom any evidence in my face had already faded; a splash of water, and all evidence was gone. I’d felt the tightness from the sobs leaving my face over the few steps to the bathroom. Was this regeneration? In a fit that I’m almost certain was more curiosity than self-harm, I walked back into my bedroom and ran my left thumb across the sword on the wall until I drew blood. It was harder than I’d expect with such a sharp sword, as if my skin were more durable than it looked, but it still hurt. Blood welled out for a moment and then stopped, and a few seconds later the cut was closed. Moments after that, it was imperceptible except for the lingering blood. Another of Simone’s stories proved true.

Back in the bathroom, I looked at the stranger who was becoming slowly less strange. It wasn’t me in the mirror, and it might not ever be. But I couldn’t go home anytime soon, maybe never unless I pursued the same obsession she had with the contraption still sitting on the bed. She’d stripped me of everything I knew, but she had tried to make as fair a trade as she could, so I couldn’t hate her. If she’d really wanted to make certain, she could have left me with no instructions, or, even worse, in a locked room with a ticking bomb. I didn’t have a firm grasp on my reality, but she’d left me a road map... no, a character sheet.

I’d never gotten very deeply into RPGs, because even when I’d had the friends in school to get a game together I’d always preferred to spend my time and money on CDs and live shows. But like any good comics geek at an arts school, I had a solid grounding in the experience. The woman in the mirror wasn’t me, but she came with lists of resources, contacts, attributes... and superpowers. I couldn’t just slide into the life of another person, but maybe I could view this as the most immersive roleplaying game ever long enough to keep myself from going insane.

Decided on my strategy for maintaining my own sanity, it was time to start moving... if only into the shower to start the first day of my bizarre new life.

6 AM, Saturday, October 10, 2015—Northgate

Most. Immersive. RPG. Ever.

By the time I’d exhausted the hot water in my apartment, I’d learned more about female anatomy than I ever had dating. Not that I’d been a Casanova, especially since I’d started on the IT nerd career track in one of the country’s worst dating markets, but there were a few things that being musically talented was good for, and one of those was getting dates with the right lead-in. It wasn’t great for turning those dates into long term relationships, and I had obviously been lacking some key insights. What I’m saying is that, having committed to moving forward with this enterprise, I wasn’t going to treat this body like a loaner and be timid about where I put my hands.

The fogged-up mirror kept me from wasting a bunch of extra time exploring visually what I’d just spent the long shower appreciating kinesthetically, and the benefit of Simone’s crew cut was that I didn’t have a lot of hair to dry. I thought about certain assumptions I had about skin care and being more gentle toweling dry, but her bath towels were softer than mine and regeneration excuses a lot of rough care. I was not particularly gentle with myself drying off, and didn’t notice any downsides from the practice.

Simone’s closet was... unexpectedly similar to my own. Again, I hadn’t had a lot of relationship luck over the years, but I’d been in enough women’s bedrooms to be aware it would be strange for their closets to be almost entirely t-shirts and jeans. Admittedly, everything was in women’s cuts, but the Batman shirt I’d worn to bed was not the only piece of my wardrobe that had translated directly. If anything, I could start making some pretty firm assumptions about which bands still existed in this reality by which concert shirts I recognized. Whether or not she’d pursued music in college, Simone had shared my love of supporting performers through the purchase of merch.

Other than the change in band logos, I could also start putting together an understanding of how our lives differed, possibly just so far as some things were unavoidable for women. My own handful of dress shirts, slacks, and suit jackets for interviews and funerals was replaced by a similarly small number of subdued blouses, skirts, and dresses. She actually only had half the number of jeans that I had, the rest replaced with a few more casual skirts and a thorough collection of those fandom-patterned graphical tights that every male geek secretly envies the girls having access to. There were more shoes here than I was used to; the amount wasn’t excessive, but there were certainly more than my own daily boots, sneakers, and running shoes. Again, the difference seemed to hinge on the sheer variety available to women that wasn’t available to guys: I’d have bought that pair of knee-high Doc Martens if they’d been available in men’s sizes.

Strangely, my own collection of exercise clothes didn’t seem to be represented. I guess she was serious about not having to work out. Some intuition led me to pull out a ratty old suitcase that was mostly obscured by the other clothes, and the clothes inside weren’t exactly what I was looking for but bore investigation later: it seemed like a skin-tight outfit of some strange black material, with gloves, soft boots, and a mask. Yep. This was crime gear. But not exactly good to go running, particularly in public.

I finally settled on a t-shirt from a band whose subsequent albums I hadn’t liked, the set of graphic tights that seemed to already be the most worn out, and a lightweight gray hoodie. And then underwear was a bit of challenge, but at least the sports bra was easier to figure out than some of the others appeared to be. And it had a built-in pocket for ID and keys, which solved my worry about how I was going to be able to get back into the house without pockets on my pants.

It was still probably an hour until sunrise, but the streetlights in my neighborhood were decent, sidewalks were abundant, and it hadn’t gotten below 50 overnight so I didn’t have to think hard about whether I wanted to dig for Simone’s equivalent of the merino wool underwear I’d gotten for exercising in last winter. I did, when I was almost out of the house, realize that I hadn’t done anything about a wig or contacts. A beanie on her hatrack served to at least mostly deal with the hair issue, but I grudgingly went back into the bathroom to put in contacts. I’d never needed them, and it took me five minutes to psych myself up to jab my finger in my eye. Strangely, my new muscle memory was apparently used to the behavior, and they went in without incident. Blinking a couple of times, a much less intimidating set of eyes my own original hazel stared back at me (matching the color listed on the driver’s license for Sarah). The whole package staring back at me was every inch the Seattle jogger; I probably wouldn’t cause traffic accidents the way I would if I was in the exercise gear more common for women back in the South, but nobody would accuse me of not pulling the look off.

The last step was grabbing Simone’s cell phone, eventually finding earbud headphones, and making a futile search for an armband phone case before just wedging it in the bra and hoping the phone was sweat-resistant. I didn’t like running without music, and I was especially looking forward to getting a sense of what music was like here. I queued up a bunch of bands I had never heard of, locked the apartment, and set off.

I took an easy run through my usual 5k route around the neighborhood. Or at least I thought I had. Between all the new music to consider, getting used to the visual halos around everything electromagnetic, and making mental notes about everything in the area that had changed from my world (like why the hell was Target called G-Mart here?), I must have lost track of time. Sunrise was a surprise, because I was usually about exhausted after half an hour of running, and the sun’s arrival meant I’d been going for nearly an hour. I thought back, and realized I’d already passed my house twice and was well into my third loop of five kilometers: not only had I been running for an hour solid, I’d probably beaten my best pace without even trying hard!

I was barely sweating, my body felt warmed up but otherwise exactly as ready to keep going as it had when I started, and the only indication that I’d probably just done over seven miles in an hour’s relaxing jog was that I was getting hungry... starving, actually, now that I thought about it. I’d been up for a few hours and hadn’t thought to grab breakfast before leaving, but it felt like I hadn’t eaten in a day. Fortunately, in Seattle you’re almost never more than a couple blocks from a coffee shop.

Everything in the shop’s bakery case looked delicious. They had four different types of giant muffin, so I ordered one of each. And a smoothie. And a large coffee. And a cookie. As someone who’d been forced to learn the lessons of carbs after getting a desk job, I really hoped this body knew what it was asking for and that Simone was right about not worrying about dieting. I was certainly going to have to revise my expectations about how long the money in Simone’s accounts would last if I needed to eat like this all the time, particularly at coffee shop markup.

The barista didn’t even ask if I wanted everything for the shop, but proceeded to bag up all the baked goods as if I was buying breakfast for a whole hungry troupe. I started to work on the blueberry muffin while I waited for my drinks to be ready, lounging at a table conveniently near the pickup counter. I barely had time to taste it, as desperate as I suddenly was to get it in my stomach. Polishing off a muffin bigger than my old, much larger fist took the edge off for a moment, and I leaned back and resolved to at least wait for the drinks before I dived back in.

I was still waiting for the drinks when the door opened and a man in jeans and a button-down shirt entered; between the nice shirt and the high-end electric car he’d parked on the street, I was guessing he was upper management working on a Saturday. I glanced away after sizing him up, and assumed that would be the end of the interaction, but I noticed from my peripheral vision he was still looking my way. My second, questioning glance was apparently the permission he needed to start a conversation. “Someone lucky at home getting Saturday breakfast delivery?” he asked.

You have to understand that I’d lived in Seattle for three years and couldn’t remember anyone ever striking up a conversation with me in a public place. I barely got a polite “excuse me” when I was blocking the doors or the condiments. So is it any surprise that my response was a scintillating, “No?”

That emboldened him, and, seeing that the barista was still blending up a storm to make my smoothie, he stepped over and confided, “Week’s breakfasts then? You know the bakery they use is just about a half mile down 125th, right? You can get those a lot cheaper.”

While not exactly applicable that was... useful advice actually. Still wrong-footed by the unexpected conversation, I admitted, “Cool. I was just out for a run and it was convenient.”

He nodded, seeming to accept that as an answer. “Gotcha. It’s a good day for it. Wish I didn’t need to spend the morning at the office, but deadlines are deadlines, right?” I must have acknowledged my own mutual understanding of being a slave to deadlines, because he continued, “I think I may have seen you out running at some point. Those tights are pretty distinctive. I usually only manage night runs. Of course these days, it’s hard to find any daylight to run in.”

I shrugged, “I’m trying to get back into an exercise routine, but I don’t really like to go out in the rain, so that limits my options, you know?” All true, of course, but probably not the reason he couldn’t place me from regular running encounters.

“I hear that,” he smiled. “Only nine more months until it’s July again, right?”

My own smile was rueful, since that was the kind of thinking I would have to work around if I was going to make it through this. “Yeah, but I’ve gotta figure out how to stop living for the summers.”

He glanced over and noticed my drinks were almost ready, he suddenly offered, “If you’re looking for a running buddy, I can give you my number and we can see if our schedules overlap some day when it’s not raining?”

Oh. Oh! Shit. Right. I was a pretty girl, and this was the most immersive RPG ever. Somehow I managed to cut off the first thing I was going to say, which was probably something like, “Bwah?” Instead, I caught myself and gave him the more politic, “If you want. I’m always looking for more friends. But it would have to be just buddies.”

I watched him get a slightly puzzled look. His eyes darted to my left hand, then the bag of muffins, before he finally asked, “Boyfriend?”

I gave him what I hoped was an apologetic smile, “Gay.”

He had the same look that was probably on my face when I’d tried to pick up a lesbian back in college and gotten a similar response, but he cut it off quickly and handled it better than I did. “Gotcha. But, yeah, sure thing.” He handed me a business card. Matt Cooper was, not so shockingly, VP of Production at some tech startup that I’d never heard of and couldn’t tell from the name what kind of software it made.

“Cool, thanks. I’ll let you know,” I told him, glancing over to where the barista was setting my drinks on the counter. Not wanting him to feel awkward all day, because I’m too much of a softie, I gave him a, “Sarah, by the way.”

He grinned and nodded, relieved, “Good to meet you. Definitely let me know if you want to run.”

The barista shot me a look as she went to take his order that seemed like it was maybe a cross between amusement and pity. I was probably going to have to get better at reading girl looks; the subtle nuances I’d heard about didn’t come with the electromagnetic vision. I nodded to her and took my drinks, juggled them and the bag of muffins, and went back outside to avoid any more awkward conversation.

Then I promptly chugged the smoothie and polished off the cookie before I’d reached the next cross street. The conversation had seemingly been just long enough for my body to process the muffin and demand more. Matt passed me and waved from his car as I was disposing of the smoothie cup in my nearest appropriate recycling receptacle, and I waved back, albeit with the bag of muffins because my hands were full. I didn’t recognize the badge on the back of his car; did they not have Teslas in this world? The whole thing shimmered in an electromagnetic haze that was quite beautiful in its own way, and I realized he had his hands free of the wheel and didn’t seem to be risking an accident by watching me instead of the road. Was this world advanced enough that they’d gotten farther with self-driving cars than mine had?

I realized I could probably profitably use the rest of the morning on the internet trying to eliminate more things I might take for granted and get myself in trouble.

10 PM, Saturday, October 10, 2015—Capitol Hill

If you’d asked me yesterday what I’d be doing tonight, I doubt “Goth Karaoke” would have been anywhere on my list. Hell, it wouldn’t have been on my list this morning.

I’d gotten back to the apartment, finishing the last muffin and the coffee as I walked in the door, and finally taken a long look at the pantry. Cooking was something both Mom and Dad insisted I knew how to do, and part of my savings came from not eating out nearly as often as most other IT bachelors did, so I usually kept lots of food in the house. But nothing like this. Simone’s pantry and fridge were both so full they barely closed, and there were various other high-calorie snacks taking up cabinet space that I used for cookware. It was all very well organized and arranged, with no space wasted that I could tell. Very little of it was components for meals of any complication. There were about a dozen bags of protein-infused granola cereal, three dozen eggs, four loafs of bread, stacks of lunchmeat, and the like. It was all stuff that could be cooked quickly or not at all and wolfed down in an assembly line fashion. Make the sandwich, eat the sandwich, make another sandwich while eating the first sandwich. A Costco card was taped inside the pantry door for my use when I needed to replenish.

Even committing myself to staying in most of the day and doing more research on my new situation, I was hungry enough by lunch to eat what ought to be a whole day’s worth of food in the form of hasty sandwiches and milk. I was quickly moving “can eat as much as you want without worrying about gaining weight” from the pro to con column of my new experience.

At least I was able to find the information I’d been looking for. From what I could tell, this world was different from mine in some pretty major ways going back at least centuries, maybe forever. But something kept them from diverging the way my limited understanding of quantum mechanics insisted they should. They had most of the same superhero comics, even in a world with superheroes. Villains regularly took whole cities hostage and slaughtered indiscriminately, but I saw a ton of famous names that I recognized and who basically seemed to be the same people. Businesses and brands were familiar, except when they weren’t, and the new ones often had someone deeply involved with mutants or magic in their backgrounds. Honestly, someone that knew details about both worlds and had a sufficient physics background could publish forever on theories for why they weren’t drastically different.

One of the weird minor differences was something I noticed once I finally got around to checking through Simone’s emails: the Mercury goth/industrial club from my world was apparently called the Quicksilver here. No telling what caused the divergence, but I’d put a guess on supers having something to do with it. I noticed this discrepancy because Simone, via an especially flimsy alias named Joanna Reichs, was a member and received an emailed invitation to come to the karaoke night. It came with a notice that the karaoke was supposed to be next weekend, but the cat-themed dance night originally scheduled for tonight was considered to be in poor taste after some recent debacle with an anthropomorphic cat villain down in Portland.

I’d never even been to the Merc. Goth wasn’t really my thing, dancing certainly wasn’t my thing, and, well, I’d never been cool enough to get a membership. I understood intellectually that I worked with several of their members who were not the coolest people in the world, were probably indicative of the general clientele, and who could probably get me in as a guest if I asked them nicely. But pursuit of admittance to a members-only nightclub was exactly the kind of thing that set off my anxiety. What if I asked for a membership after going the required number of times and was told that, indeed, I wasn’t their type of patron and maybe I should even stop showing up as a guest?

But Simone had gone, at least enough to be a member. There was even a membership card with the Joanna Reichs name on it buried in the stack of documents in the desk; its depth indicated that she didn’t really consider it super important, but she’d renewed it this year. Just like I knew, deep in my heart, that Texan IT nerd Simon Sullivan, Jr. would stick out like a sore thumb at such a club no matter how goth I tried to dress, I knew that the super-thief that went by the code name Shadowglass could probably fit in without a moment’s difficulty.

Plus, I was curious about the name change. So, if I wasn’t honest with myself that I was taking the chance to meet some emotional need I didn’t even realize I had, I could at least say I was investigating a clue. Roleplaying characters investigated clues. It’s how you found the plot.

Fortunately, Simone’s extremely limited closet worked nicely with my level of commitment to the enterprise. If she’d had a slinky black dress, fishnets, and a corset, I might have lost my nerve. The cool knee-high Docs, purple graphic tights, black skirt, and a black button-up blouse were almost too far. I had a huge surge of anxiety getting dressed, especially with the skirt and figuring out the bra. My brain was screaming at me that I was cross dressing and everyone was going to notice. That I should just go for the much safer jeans and t-shirt. But I wandered into the bathroom before giving in, and caught a good look at myself. They weren’t going to notice. They were going to be glad I’d worn them. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I was getting a little turned on just modeling for myself.

The real kicker was makeup and wigs. Even deciding that I was going to do the minimum I thought seemed necessary for what I’d expect a girl dressed like me to have done with cosmetics, I still found out that eyeshadow was a lot harder than it looked and burned time looking up tutorials online. I agonized over the wigs before finally settling on the short black one in some kind of bob that I was sure there was a proper name for; it won by virtue of not suggesting any questions like “how should I style this hair?” and “how do you even style wig hair without potentially ruining it?”

Finally, I realized jewelry might be necessary, and remembered seeing some miscellaneous stuff in a drawer. Clearly, Simone hadn’t cared about jewelry, but was as much of a convention magpie as I was: she didn’t have a single string of pearls, but had a silver raven-head torc, a spider-ring, and a couple of skull ear studs. The earrings vexed me for a moment, since I didn’t think I’d seen piercing holes in the mirror. Then I felt stupid, because I’d forgotten about the regeneration. I couple of pinches and a wipe to clear the blood, and my ears were pierced... or at least they would be until I took out the studs.

I put on a lightweight black leather jacket I’d found in the closet in case it was too cold for just a short-sleeved shirt, and definitely approved of what I saw. Honestly, what few video game RPGs I’d played, the best part of having a female avatar was that it was more fun to put together a good-looking outfit. I fixed that comparison in my head, and insisted to myself that tonight I was going to be Shadowglass, cool goth babe, instead of some nerdy dude totally out of his depth.

The bus ride into town was a good test of it, because I got a lot of stares, most of them appreciative and overly interested. I really hoped it hadn’t been an oversight that I hadn’t found any car keys. Did Simone ride the bus to do crime? Fortunately, the bus ride was much more of what I expected from Seattle, and nobody worked up the nerve to break the etiquette of public transit and try to talk to someone they didn’t know.

My membership card was all the proof I needed to get in the door fashionably late, but early enough that the club hadn’t really started to fill up. Inside, it was about what you’d expect from a goth club in October: a black canvas with every inch trying to outdo every other in Halloween decorations. I’d walked in on a guy finishing up a truly mediocre rendition of Thriller, and he gave way to a girl doing a passable Evanescence. The music was coming from the DJ booth instead of a live band, but I guessed it would either be insanely expensive to try to get a band with enough instruments to cover a reasonable cross section of relevant music. The violin section alone would take up most of the part of the room they’d devoted to being a “stage.”

I considered hitting the bar and seeing what it was like to have people buy me drinks (not that I was sure I’d get much out of alcohol, from what I’d read about regeneration). I considered breaking my rule and seeing what dancing was like (after all, it’s not like goth dancing really even featured any kind of rules most people could tell I was breaking). I considered just pestering people to try to make friends (and to investigate the history of the club). But as soon as I heard the amateur performances washing over me, I realized the real secret motivation that had been pushing me through my layers of discomfort to show up here at all, and to not be underdressed.

I wanted to sing.

As Simon Sullivan, Jr., despite my expensive music degree, I had allergies that resulted in a perpetually stuffed-up nose, an undisciplined diaphragm, and a pair of lungs that could never really manage the level of breathing control necessary to hit notes exactly. Despite years of effort, my singing was never really more than “acceptable,” particularly to my voice instructors.

As Simone Sullivan, however, I now had an exemplar’s freedom from biological flaws, regeneration that would probably let me hold a note indefinitely that would ruin a normal singer’s throat in minutes, and a sexy contralto voice that would let me try out a bunch of songs that I’d have had to rearrange for a male voice previously. Somewhere in the back of my mind I’d wanted to know what I could do since I first heard my voice that morning.

So I wended my way through the milling bodies of the club and found the song menu and sign-up sheet. It was early enough that I got to go one song later, after a guy that did a reasonable run at the Cure. The crowd perked up at the opening refrain of Heaven’s a Lie, which I’d picked because Lacuna Coil’s female lead was probably one of the more famous contraltos in a band that could be clearly considered appropriate to a goth/industrial karaoke, and it was a song that featured much more of her vocals than their male lead’s. Also, it seemed like it was pretty well known in this world.

I had the opening refrain to psych myself up and remember the lyrics (they came to mind instantly and fully, with details of pitch and tempo that I probably couldn’t have remembered before getting exemplar memory). And then I started. Just not screwing up at karaoke is enough to get the crowd’s attention, but by the time I hit the first chorus, I clearly had their favor. An open mic night like this was probably the smallest taste of what it’s like to be a rock star, but I’d never even managed a taste. If the engagement of a friendly crowd that thinks you’re not butchering your cover was this good, what must it be like to do this for real? And what would it be like in a town with better audiences than blase Seattle?

As I wound down the song, I actually got a pretty wide range of applause from the half-full house. And then more people wanted to talk to me in the five minutes after I got offstage than had in the entirety of the last three years. One guy wanted to sign up with me for another Lacuna Coil song where he could do the male vocals, a blue-haired girl wanted to talk about where I’d trained and whether I was in a band, and several other guys and a couple of girls seemed to be trying to find the right lead in to ply me with drinks.

Naturally, that was about the time it all went to hell.

10:30 PM, Saturday, October 10, 2015—Capitol Hill

I’d noticed the man in the motorcycle helmet and tuxedo earlier, and had assumed he was doing some kind of Daft Punk thing, even if they weren’t strictly appropriate to the genre. I happened to be facing the stage when he got up for his set a couple of songs after mine, and focused on him out of curiosity about how he was going to sing in the helmet. That attention may have been the only thing that gave me the moment I needed to prepare for what happened next.

In one sweeping gesture, he pulled off the helmet, revealing that he was a white guy in a black leather half-mask with small devil horns. Something about that seemed familiar, and that was all my newly enhanced memory needed to kick up something I’d skimmed through earlier: reports that the mind-controlling villain, the Ebon Devil, had been active in the city recently. I really, really didn’t want to be mind controlled today, on top of all my other problems.

“Everybody, stop what you’re doing and hold still!” he yelled in a wall-shaking bass, the sound system spreading his command throughout the club. I thought I saw waves of orange sparks jumping from his mouth and the speakers. Everyone around me froze, and I felt the faintest of urges to stop too. But I didn’t think I had to. I sidestepped out of his line of sight behind one of the guys I’d been talking to, then tried to hold still while I figured out what was going on.

“If you can’t see me, turn to look at the stage. If you still can’t see me, move to a spot you can. Don’t do anything else but get into position. Now put your phones and other recording devices away. This is just for us, tonight.” He looked out on the now incredibly silent club. Everyone was standing stock still, as if they were paralyzed. Well, not exactly, because they were still breathing and shifting their weights to stay standing. It was more like he had the rapt and undivided attention of the crowd. “I suspect one of you is not holding as still as I ordered.” Shit! “He’ll be a big black guy, about six feet tall.” Wait, what? “If anyone sees someone like that, I want you to grab him. Yell if you found him.”

Several people yelled out some variation of, “Here!” from the various places around the club.

“More than one? Bring them all forward, please.” Three medium-height black men were pulled into the light of the dance floor by small clusters of people in the crowd. Most were not moving at all under their own power, but one, a particularly strong looking guy, was struggling slightly, more against the compulsion than the people holding him. “It’s that one,” said the Devil, pointing at the guy trying to move. “You can let the other ones go. Everyone that’s not holding that one, go back to holding still.”

Their captive looked familiar somehow, but the more pressing question I had was why I was not under this guy’s sway. Each time he said something, I had a passing urge to follow the command, but it was easily ignored. What if... I glanced surreptitiously down at my hand and noted that it did, indeed, seem to be slightly translucent and fuzzy at the edges. Was whatever the guy was doing actually some kind of energy wave? The orange sparks would make me think it was. And if I’d reflexively turned on Simone’s power, maybe it was just washing around me like the light.

The Ebon Devil continued his monologue for a captive audience, “I know it’s terribly gauche of me to meet you like this, out of your power armor. But when I heard that the Tin Phoenix liked to hang out here on his nights off, without those annoying sonic disruption gadgets that keep spoiling all my fun, I decided I’d have to live down breaking whatever unspoken truce you have here in Seattle where goths don’t mind hanging out with mutants. I came here to make a buck, you see, and you’ve been making that all but impossible. Without you, the rest of the Emerald City Heroes riff raff won’t be much of a problem, and I’m not nearly high profile enough for the Seattle Knights to worry about. You should have stuck to being a stay-at-home gadgeteer, instead of putting yourself in the line of fire.”

Tin Phoenix? Emerald City Heroes? Wait, was he this world’s version of the MMA fighter that wanders around my Seattle trying to stop crime, but with a Wizard of Oz theme? It wouldn’t be that surprising, honestly, given the other translations. No wonder the guy looked familiar. The Devil was fixating pretty hard on the poor out-of-costume street hero, I didn’t like where this was heading, and I was wearing mostly black against a black-painted, poorly lit club. I started to inch toward the stage, keeping as many people between me and the villain as I could.

I was immediately proved correct as he pulled a pistol from the back of his jacket. “Let’s make this a clean little cover-up, shall we? A pretty little hate crime, just in case someone would otherwise be inclined to make an example of me? Does anyone here not really like black people? It’s okay, you’re among friends, just put up your hand if you’ve ever used the N-word in private conversation.” A few hands went up. “Good, good, let’s pick the bro in the back who barely even tried to dress up, and is probably just here to pick up chicks in black latex. Come forward my good man.” The college boy in black jeans and a black exercise shirt shuffled forward, and the villain handed him the revolver. “Now please, if you will, go right over there with this next to our friendly Phoenix. Everyone else continue holding very still. Don’t worry, most of you won’t remember a thing except this senseless act of violence. And you, my poor little racist... you’ll just have to tell them that the Devil made you do it.”

The hero was still fighting it, and the kid seemed to be fighting it a little bit, but it didn’t look like either of them was going to snap out in time to avoid a tragedy. It was probably in my interests to get out of here. The coincidence of me even being here was pretty damned unlikely, and that might worry me later unless I found out this kind of thing happened all over the place in this world. I’d only be risking my own safety by intervening.

But, oddly, despite a running internal monologue about all the reasons I should just let this happen, I’d never stopped moving into position. I’d crept around the outside of the stage area, crouched behind a large speaker out of the Devil’s line of sight and presumably most of the crowd’s. It would have been so easy to just slip out the back, but here I was.

Seeing that the Ebon Devil was about to give the final order to pull the trigger, I vaulted over the speaker, covering the distance before he even registered me coming. I aimed a fist straight at his face...

And somehow he rolled out of the way such that I just gave him a bloody lip. “Stop!” he yelled at me, falling into a martial artist’s stance. I didn’t, instead trying to take another swing at his midsection, which he also managed to deflect. Well there went the element of surprise; I was just fighting a guy that was so much better at me at fighting that he’d barely been tagged by a blindside.

But... was he better than me? The first couple of swings I’d made had felt wrong, somehow. I planned them out, thought through them, and they might not have connected purely because I was fighting my body’s own muscle memory. So I tried to stop choking and just do what came naturally. A kick felt right, then a roll to avoid his backhand, followed by a grab and throw, and, holy shit, I was in a kung fu fight. I’d certainly watched a lot of movies and taken a few classes as a kid, but this was real and I was suddenly not losing.

“Halt! Freeze! Kneel! Crap! Do you not understand English? Um, detener!” It was quickly becoming clear that, while this guy knew how to fight, he relied on his commands actually working and was probably not an exemplar. I was starting to connect. I felt like he had some kind of body armor on under his tuxedo, but I was still hitting him harder and harder. Finally, I barely understood why my fist was flying the way it was other than I’d sensed some kind of opening and managed an uppercut that physically lifted him off his feet and then dropped him unconscious to the floor.

And then everything was very quiet. I realized I’d just had a martial arts brawl with a supervillain in front of a captive audience. A glance off the stage showed me that many people in the club seemed to be struggling to move; he’d repeated his commands to hold still enough that maybe they didn’t really work for very long. I had to get out of here before my cover was completely blown!

With one last glance to make sure the Ebon Devil was really out for the count, I slipped out of the stage area and through the sea of barely-moving people, trying not to bump anyone or dwell on how surreal this all was. I hit the door and out onto East Union Street with only a few minor collisions with clubgoers that had been clustered too tightly for me to get by easily. My plan was to cut further up Capitol Hill and hope to get lost in with the other Saturday partiers—the collection of bros and woo girls that the locals hated so much should at least serve as a distraction if anyone came after me. But I hadn’t counted on the Tin Phoenix being more interested in me than the downed villain.

“Wait!” I heard a deep voice shout from the door of the club before I’d gotten more than a dozen yards away. I probably should have bolted, but I turned sharply, hair hitting my face a sign that I’d managed to keep the wig on during the fight but it was slightly askew. I locked eyes with him and saw recognition there. “Simone?” he asked. Shit. Less than 24 hours and I’d already met someone else with powers who knew Simone. This might be the part where he decided I was as big a threat as the Devil in there. Apparently I didn’t fake not knowing what he was talking about very well, because he continued, “I didn’t know you were in town. I didn’t even know where you moved after high school.”

Of course, he looked like he could be within a couple of years of my age. Simone hadn’t mentioned that there was only one mutant boarding school. Did every supervillain and superhero in the country who were within four years of each other go to high school together? Didn’t that make things very awkward, or at least very personal when they fought? “Sorry,” I shrugged, and tried for what was hopefully mostly true, “I didn’t really want to stay in those circles. Just trying to keep my head down. I didn’t plan to get involved tonight, but he was going to kill you and I could help...”

“But why are you running? Are you in trouble?”

I shook my head, hoping I was right, “Only if I get in a habit of being associated with mutant fights.” I pointed back inside, “You better make sure he’s going to stay out. Can I go?”

Apparently I’d gambled correctly about his need to get back in, his eyes flicked back to the door and then he nodded, but he didn’t look satisfied. “If you’re in trouble, you can let me know. We have a contact form on our website if you want to get in touch.” Then he went back inside, tossing one last glance at me as he did.

I was two blocks up, had fixed my wig, and was in a dense crowd of bar crawlers before I started to hear sirens heading to the club. But I didn’t really feel like I’d dodged a bullet. Even if there hadn’t been anyone recording, which I wasn’t totally sure about, there were maybe a hundred people that could possibly recognize me, including one disapproving hero and one likely-to-be-pissed-but-at-least-arrested villain. I made sure to take a much longer bus route than I needed to for getting straight home, crossing several blocks between stops and trying to keep an eye out for cameras, just in case someone wanted to try to follow me back.

Was I being paranoid, or had I brought Simone’s enemies down on me by not being paranoid enough earlier?

12:00 PM, Sunday, October 11, 2015—Northgate

I’d still been wired when I got home from the club. A late bus ride home is usually a good time to decompress and think, but I’d been too alert for surveillance, too worried that I’d already be easy enough to trace back by anyone that thought to check the right recordings. Did the buses have cameras? They were almost certain to. And even though there were only a handful of people riding the bus with me at that time of night, several of them were giving me surreptitious glances. Even when I convinced myself that it was just something I’d have to get used to as a pretty girl, rather than some kind of team watching me, I worried that they’d remember me if anyone thought to ask them.

Nothing about the fight besides the Ebon Devil having been arrested downtown was showing up on a web search by the time I got home, but I set some news alerts up anyway. And I was still too high-strung to sleep. I needed to burn off some of this energy, but everything I thought of just keyed me up more. Until I’d remembered that I’d only gotten in one song, and I’d been looking forward to more.

So now, having finally collapsed and gotten a surprisingly good night’s sleep, I was looking over the webcam videos I’d taken the night before. My covers were unaccompanied, the apartment didn’t have the best acoustics, and the microphone on the computer was terrible, but I was still pleasantly surprised how well they’d turned out. It was weirdly easier to judge because I still hadn’t accepted that the person in the videos was me, so alien was the idea that the beautiful woman singing a cappella could be anything but a random person on the internet, even though I remembered doing it all and could easily confirm in the mirror.

It didn’t hurt that I was clearly emotional and energetic because of it, pushing out music as a way to exhaust myself to sleep. But it was amazing that, after years of wanting to sing and hating how limited my vocal options were, that such a bizarre life change would result in the best music I’d ever made.

I’d be insane to post them online. I’d spent hours the night before terrified that just people remembering me from the club would be a danger. I’d already found out that people recognized Simone, and might easily use any information I provided as a way to find me.

I needed to start thinking about how to make money for food and rent, and I knew there were streaming stars with much less going for them that had quickly found enough paying subscribers to quit their day jobs.

I’d been quietly setting up a new video channel over proxy servers while I tried to talk myself out of it, rationalizing that it would hurt to have it. By the time it was all set up, I’d convinced myself that it might be worth the risk... after all, what was the point of the most immersive RPG ever if you didn’t get some fantasy wish fulfillment out of it? On a moment where I’d convinced myself it might not be a disaster, I hit the upload button.

I was going to get myself killed.

Maybe I could at least get a taste of being a rock star before I managed it?

2:00 PM, Wednesday, October 14, 2015—Northgate

The rest of Sunday I’d stayed in to do more research, trying to get an even broader understanding of all the little discrepancies that were likely to mess me up. I’d also been trying to assure myself that it was just a bizarre coincidence that I’d wound up in the right place at the right time to stop a murderous villain whose powers specifically didn’t work on me. Between the research and keeping up with the news after the weekend, I was getting there: Seattle had at least a dozen heroes that seemed to treat it as close to a day job, which meant there were enough villains to keep them tasked. The plots ranged from the bizarre and grandiose, like trying to kidnap all the Seahawks right before the playoffs, to more boring but lucrative robberies, murders, and racketeering. On Sunday evening, the Seattle Knights had to stop a no-shit army of clockwork men which had turned out to be a distraction from a successful heist of a shipping container full of unspecified-but-cutting-edge tech at the harbor.

I was actually becoming less worried about how I could have run into a villain my first night out and more worried about how this world stayed so similar to my own in so many ways. Mutants were real. Magic was real. Super science was real. People that didn’t seem quite as much like lunatics as they would where I came from seemed convinced that the secret history of the world had something to do with a three-way war between the characters of Lord of the Rings, Call of Cthulu, and American Gods. And other than their versions of Reed Richards not being totally useless such that the world was probably a decade ahead of mine in technology, most political and social institutions were completely recognizable. Rather than spending all day screaming at the enormity of it all, they went out and invented chain coffee shops, Washington D.C. political gridlock, and reality TV just like we had.

It was kind of fun, actually.

I’d gone out on Monday to look for a better camera, a microphone, and some instruments and had another run-in, or was at least run-in adjacent. I was just sitting there in the second-hand music store parking lot debating how much of a balance it made sense to carry on a credit card (I’d almost always paid mine off completely every month), when a ferocious aerial battle between a man in a cape and a woman in a rocket pack had passed a hundred yards overhead. I couldn’t even really tell which was the hero and which was the villain, but I could definitely tell that here was another pair of supers who knew way too many martial arts. I wondered if half the prejudice against mutants had to do with them suddenly breaking out extremely technical Bruce Lee shit when law enforcement had their powers handled.

Regardless, the parking lot had suddenly been full of people from the various stores of the strip mall shielding their eyes, trying to make out what was going on, and casually making bets. It didn’t seem like it was in any danger of crashing into our part of town, so people just accepted it as the aerial equivalent of street theater.

Honestly, the thing that was hardest to adjust to about the world was just the difference in experiencing it as a woman, in ways that I felt horribly certain would have been the same regardless of the presence of superpowers. And I don’t even mean the physical aspects of it—other than some obvious adjustments regarding center of gravity, height, having to sit down to pee, and being regularly aware of what was in my shirt instead of what was in my pants, I could probably have gone hours without thinking too much about it. However, if I was out in public, that wasn’t an option, because I was constantly being reminded of it.

Within less than five days of barely leaving the house, I’d already had a half-dozen encounters similar to the one with Matt the first day: cold approaches that initially seemed like a possible new friend with similar interests, but who weren’t looking for a friend so much as a friend. Most of them had been similarly awkward but accepting as Matt, but one had been kind of a dick about it and one had been creepily unwilling to believe that I wasn’t interested in guys. Even discounting the brave pickup artists, there was just an odd sense of people being aware of me in a way I’d never experienced. Any hope of just forgetting about my difficulties for a moment while I shopped, went jogging, or had a quiet, contemplative coffee was dashed by being a magnet for attention.

And all that was before I’d made the mistake of reading the comments on my videos.

To be fair, most of that was hardly unexpected. I wasn’t exactly unaware of the kind of things that got said online, and I’d thought my distancing tactic of treating this like an RPG might not make it feel personal. Hell, I’d known I was banking on my appearance for a big part of this, and wasn’t exactly cropping the videos so my singing was the only important part. I wasn’t wearing push-up bras or low-cut tops or anything, but Simone’s t-shirts were reasonably tight and I certainly framed things so my chest was on full display. But even knowing all of that, some people said some truly vile things in the comments section.

It wasn’t like I’d even had that many comments, the first few days. I could read them all, individually. It was hard not to, as I obsessed over my view numbers while agonizing over how to balance my need for anonymity with a desire to go viral. By Wednesday afternoon, I’d managed to shock myself off of constantly checking purely because I didn’t want to have to read the brain droppings of internet deplorables anymore.

Which was why it was surprising to get a notification from my donations account that I’d hit $100 that day, when I’d been getting a dollar or two at most the last few days.

I navigated back over to my video dashboard from the Wikipedia trap I’d fallen into after lunch, and noticed that my subscribers had leapt into the hundreds, my view counts into the thousands, and, indeed, the comments threads were all getting repeated hits. I wasn’t planning on digging through them all to figure out how I’d gone viral, but fortunately I could dig into the metrics and find out that quite a lot of the hits were coming from a particular Reddit thread.

I clicked over and found what was basically a relatively well-summarized account of Saturday night from someone that claimed to have been at the club. He didn’t have any video or pictures, fortunately, and hadn’t seemed to have noticed the blurring effect of my power. But he did end the post with a link to my video channel with a note that, “And I’m not 100% positive, but I think this might be her...”

Fine. I’d hoped to not go viral by virtue of my super-brawl, but I also had considered it a possibility. After all, I hadn’t even changed wigs, figuring that one was more or less blown for a street identity anyway (and, if I’m honest, because I didn’t have the presence of mind to worry about it when I was singing myself to sleep). I felt like the channel was firewalled pretty firmly from my identity, and I’d made sure to keep any identifying features of the apartment out of the background. But it did mean I would probably have to read the comments again.

They were pretty mixed, with a fair amount of arguing over whether or not I was a mutant that only sometimes devolved into “Someone that hot has to be a mutant” vs. “Someone that hot couldn’t be a mutant.” A lot of them were straight-up directed at me, asking me to make a video answering them one way or the other. I guess this was why so many performance streaming channels wound up with talky bits for the fans.

While I was thinking about what to do on that front, I realized I needed to check the email account that the karaoke invite had come in on. Sure enough, there was a smaller amount of mail there, but of a similar vein: people that had managed to snaffle my email address from the club somehow. Most of them were pretty hesitant, in the vein of, “If this is the wrong person, sorry, but if you were at the club on Saturday night...”

One of them, from a “Katrina Voss,” stood out. It read, “Hey. Sorry to have gotten your email from the club. I know that’s not cool, but I didn’t have a better way to get in touch with you. We talked briefly after your song on Saturday night. You were really good there, and I can see from your videos that you’ve got a lot of talent. My friends and I have a band that could use a singer. Please check us out to see if you’d be interested in talking to us about it.”

She included a link to a video channel for a trio, calling themselves “Voss Populi,” where everything was mostly taken on phones of tiny club performances with a few static-shot videos with a better camera in someone’s garage. A short, stocky white girl with blue hair that I assumed was Katrina was their bassist, an excited Asian kid was their drummer, and their guitarist was a lanky white guy that bore a family resemblance to Katrina. I did remember talking to her for a moment at the club. Despite clearly being just out of college and not having much in the way of resources for their videos, they weren’t bad. Well, they weren’t bad at playing their instruments. The singer didn’t seem to have had much vocal training, and their songs weren’t particularly catchy, but they were doing some pretty technical stuff.

I replied back to her and set up a web chat for that evening.

7:00 PM, Wednesday, October 14, 2015—Northgate

“Sorry if I come off as a little paranoid,” I told the trio who’d assembled in front of their own webcam, each in a slightly different dark hoodie. “I don’t think there should be any problems from Saturday, but I’m not certain enough to not be careful.”

Katrina’s voice was a reedy alto, with a Pacific Northwest accent, answering, “No, that’s cool. I assume you didn’t mean to get in a fight?” Her question came with a weird delay, due to all the onion routing I was doing to my signal.

“Exactly,” I nodded. “I’ve been keeping my head down, and didn’t expect to be, well, outed.”

All three of them nodded, like they got it. They were clustered together in mismatched chairs in front of what appeared to be a family den. There were hard-to-make-out framed photos on the wall, and I could see the edge of some kind of shelf covered in bric-a-brac. “Anyway,” she continued, “I’m Katrina. This is my younger brother Dominic, and this is our friend Hunter. And you’re Joanna, or at least that’s what you have on your membership card.”

This girl was possibly a little too sharp. “That will do for now,” I hedged, and then changed, the subject, “Can I just ask up front why you’re not worried that I’m a mutant?”

“I thought you said she was a member?” Hunter asked in a California surfer dude accent.

“He means that you don’t really get to be a member of Quicksilver if you’re anti-mutant,” Katrina explained, elbowing Hunter in the torso. “Well, if you’re any kind of bigot, really. Weeding out assholes is one of the main reasons they make you come several times with a sponsor before you can be a member.”

Hunter nodded, rubbing his rib, “Yeah. I have two cousins who are mutants, down in San Francisco. The family’s pretty proud of them.”

“And my boyfriend’s a mutant,” Katrina admitted.

“I just know her boyfriend,” Dominic shrugged. As I expected from his singing, he had a fairly nasal tenor, and the same accent as his sister.

“Got it. Being a mutant is not a dealbreaker,” I said.

Katrina nodded, and added, “Actually, I’m more worried about why you’re suddenly showing up at the club and making a video channel out of the blue, when people had seen you around before but had no idea you were a musician. Plus why you’re paranoid.”

How to put this in a way that wasn’t a lie, but didn’t give even more away to a girl that was clearly very sharp? “Like I said, I’ve been laying low for a while and working through some things. I finally got to a point that I felt up to pursuing an old dream. And part of what I was laying low about was trying to avoid getting into any kind of space where another mutant might try to punch me.”

They all glanced at each other with a look that read to me like they were going to let it pass, but might talk about it in private once they were off the line with me. She said, “Okay. Let me go ahead and break down the main reason we’re talking to you. I think we’re pretty good. We’re self-taught, and we’ve got a lot of room to grow, but playing our instruments isn’t going to hold us back. Dom’s not the vocal talent you are, but, again, room to grow. The bald truth of it is, though, it’s a huge help to have a lead singer who could be a model, so people will watch your videos and stuff. And I’m honest enough to know that’s not me.”

“You want me to be your figurehead?”

She shrugged, “Like I said, you’re really good. It’s not like it would be us doing you a favor by putting you in our band; we know you’re probably better than us. We’re just hoping that we’re the first ones to try to recruit you, and that will give us an advantage. But, sort of, also, yeah. You being a beautiful mutant ass-kicker could absolutely be the thing that takes us from a decent local band that plays Seattle forever, to a group that’s important nationally, maybe globally.”

Honest, sharp, and they had reasonable talent. “Alright,” I told them, “let’s get together for real and do a rehearsal, and we’ll see how it goes.”

9:00 PM, Sunday, October 18, 2015—SoDo

It’s amazing how fast the strangest situations can fall into a routine, if you try hard enough at it. After that first surge of donations, my income from the video feed had gone back down, but to a fairly steady rate that had me more confident about being able to make rent for the month. I’d started hitting up various freelancing lists for IT, web design, and light programming work, but hadn’t gotten anything significant from that yet. I was keeping my spending on credit fairly low, but it was still climbing; I’d probably be more worried about whether this was financially sustainable in the long term if I’d yet adapted to thinking in the long term. But despite the routine, this still felt very unreal to me, and I was focused on doing the bare minimum to not get evicted next month and spending the rest of my time exploring my new options.

Of all the superpowers I’d acquired, I was growing to appreciate the exemplar memory the most. I’d fiddled with some online IQ tests and I didn’t really seem to be that much smarter, per se, though some mental calculations were a lot easier. This was largely due to the ability to keep more details in my working memory, and thus visualize bigger problem spaces without resorting to paper. And this helped a lot with programming too: concepts that had previously stumped me—because they were so interdependent and I couldn’t really grasp the whole causality chain—had become drastically easier. And this was only improved by my ability to retain concepts. It also made it easier to understand programming options when you could actively compare them to all the other ways of solving the problem.

The memory didn’t just extend to improving my coding confidence, though. I’d found I could get the gist of even fairly technical concepts by simply glancing across a page of text, and if I took the time to read it, it stuck without difficulty. I’d always been a good student, but I wasn’t the fastest reader in the world and often took a of lot time to really grasp technical details. Now they were easy, and going through various forms of nonfiction was fast and enjoyable. In addition to buttressing my programming and musical knowledge, I’d spent some time trying to digest enough physics to get a handle on how my other powers worked.

And I’d been doing some experiments. I wanted to see which energy forms I could affect, and how much. I was also curious whether I could figure out how to bend some wavelengths without making it obvious I was a mutant by fading visually at the edges. Getting a laser pointer had been the cheapest test and, in line with Simone’s expectations, it was fairly easy to let such a narrow effect pass right around my distortion field without bending it. I was still waiting on some other energy emitters I’d bought for cheap online, but, in general, it seemed like she’d been right that narrower sources and more finite wavelengths were easier to affect. The broad spectrum of “visible light” was tough to do much with all at once, but I’d had limited success in desaturating various colors to a greater degree. I was also trying to find a cheap infrared camera so I could find out how completely I could mask my heat signature.

One interesting trick I’d found playing around with the laser pointer was that, if I concentrated, I could bend it to a greater or lesser degree, directing it to another spot rather than just straight “through” me. From certain angles and with a lot of focus, I could almost wrap it 180 degrees back around. I didn’t know whether I’d ever get reflexively good enough at it to, say, flip a laser beam back at someone attacking me, but it was fun to think about.

Knowing it would be pretty easy to just get totally distracted with one thing or another, I’d set myself some fairly regimented boundaries on my day. I spent a couple hours reading and trying to grow my practical knowledge of technical subjects, an hour or so browsing the internet for differences in this world and learning about powered individuals and politics, an hour or two practicing music and making videos, an hour exercising (I didn’t really need it, but it was fun to be able to do it so effortlessly and was getting me more aware of existing in this body), and then a few hours alternatively looking for work, experimenting with powers, and more specific projects. For specific projects, I’d gotten a lot more comfortable with makeup and wig maintenance from various online tutorials, started to narrow down which martial arts Simone had trained in so I could actually understand what my body wanted to do in a fight, and discovered that my fingers had detailed muscle memory for picking locks.

And that still left me some free time at the end of the day that I was trying not to blow on passive entertainment. I’d only been moderately successful, since there were quite a few media properties that were unique to this world but apparently pretty important to the pop culture, and some of them were good enough that they were very tempting to binge.

I’d at least gotten out on Saturday night to do an in-person meetup and rehearsal with Voss Populi. It had gone pretty well. I wasn’t totally willing to sign onto some long-term thing with them yet, but everyone had some pretty good input on how their sound could change to complement my vocals and any instruments I wanted to play. As I’d thought, they were all largely self-taught; they’d had some lessons from their instruments at music stores and the like, but hadn’t gone to music school. I was trying not to sound too pretentious with my non-specific bachelor’s degree in music from the University of North Texas College of Music (especially since I couldn’t exactly tell them where I’d gone to school or produce any proof) while still giving them insight into how they could improve their composition. We were going to try to get together again the next weekend with everyone having written some lyrics and/or melodies to try out.

I’d also managed to make it to a couple of cheap shows for local bands, just because it was the most comfortable thing I could do that took me out in public. Tonight I was at the Showbox seeing some band that seemed unique to this world, so that caught my interest. The Showbox wasn’t my favorite venue: the floor was pretty hard, and it was level so didn’t have the best sightlines in the back (and that was becoming a new issue since I’d lost a few inches of height and could more easily have my view obstructed by other audience members). It also kept the alcohol to the bar off to the side and behind a fence that extended from the bar to the sound booth, so if you wanted a drink you had to accept that you’d be a good ways from the stage.

And I needed a drink. I needed, due to the efficiency at which my regeneration processed alcohol, a lot of drinks. It might be the only way to make this music tolerable.

I’d expected something on the same order of Lacuna Coil: their wiki page had said they’d been touring for over a decade, and there was usually a particular arc for a band that had been together that long but was still playing small- to mid-sized clubs like this one. They were usually pretty decent, and had dedicated fans, but lacked the mass appeal and/or stage presence to ever graduate to larger venues.

This band, though, was a mess. The female vocalist was decent, but played a synthesizer which was extremely new wave for the screeching industrial jag the rest of the band seemed to be into. The lyrics seemed to be trying to go for some biting, sarcastic commentary on pop culture through an unholy merger of Rage Against the Machine and the Dresden Dolls, but, again, something that might have been interesting from a Fiona Apple/Tori Amos type on a keyboard didn’t really translate to operatic death metal. And each of the three guitarists was trying something completely different from the others at all times, barely kept in synch by the drummer.

The whole thing, though, had a kind of technical intentionality behind it. They were a band that clearly could play real music, and chose to play this, so people might be forgiven for believing it was good. It was a conspiracy theory given musical form: if you bought into the band’s sheer audacity, you might convince yourself that it was too smart for you, but you were almost getting it, and anyone that didn’t like it got it even less than you did. Given that the crush of people near the stages were in their early 20s and were probably in high school when the band became known nationally, that would about figure. The relative thinness of the rest of the crowd said what the rest of the world thought. Just about everyone else here seemed to be like me: people that would try just about any concert for a $10 ticket and no cover charge.

It gave me ample time for crowd watching, as I maneuvered between the bar and the sound booth. I’d have preferred to just hold down a table, but I didn’t want to raise suspicions by sitting in one place and knocking back cheap beers. “Don’t cut me off, I know I’ve had a case all to myself tonight, but I’m barely even buzzed,” was not a great argument. At least if I got three beers at a time at the bar and then walked back into the dark venue, the bartenders could convince themselves that I was taking drinks to friends. Most of the crowd I was passing was standard Seattle fare: jeans and hoodies. But one girl kept catching my eye.

She was probably just a couple of years out of college—younger than me but not by more than a few years. Extremely pretty, she could have been a classic blonde girl-next-door, but she was rocking the Natalie-Dormer-in-Hunger-Games look pretty hard: half shaved head with tattoos and pseudo-military black clubwear. Also, she was putting out way more electromagnetic “sparks” than anyone else in the club, so must be carrying more than just a cell phone. I had to admit she was more interesting than the band, so I’d spent some time trying to figure out her deal. She’d spared me a few looks too, and I’d even noticed some when it wasn’t just her noticing me noticing her. Last week, if that kind of thing happened, I’d probably totally chicken out and convince myself I was just being a creeper and didn’t have half a shot. But, hey, between actually being confident that I was definitely in her league if she liked girls, and ongoing attempts to treat this as a game, why not try?

Getting over to her during a break between songs was easy in the thin crowd, though I’d had to finish and trash my last beer before leaving the adult beverage pen. I approached from her left side, the shaved half of her head facing away from me so I was facing a wave of golden hair, through which she shot me a glance to show she’d noticed I’d wandered over. “Fan?” I asked, gesturing at the band.

“Of Brass Monkey? Ha, no,” she smirked. “You?”

“Nah,” I shook my head, “But I’ll come out to see just about anything if I’m bored and the tickets are cheap enough. If you’re the same, I’ve somehow missed you in the usually thicker crowds.” Of course, that was a gamble, because there was always a chance she had seen Simone at a concert before. It was weird having to treat ordinary life like some ongoing grift.

She turned a little more and took in my Seattle-live-music-nerd ensemble. I’d wanted to be comfortable, so I was dressed pretty far down in a concert t-shirt, hoodie, and jeans, though that was about par for the course for my—formerly Simone’s—closet. At least it wasn’t like it contradicted my story, so she admitted, “I don’t really get out to shows much. But I knew a girl in high school who was obsessed with them. So when I saw they were in town, I decided to see if maybe there was something about seeing them live that improved on their albums. It doesn’t.”

I nodded and said, “Yeah,” just as the band kicked into another speed metal values statement, so I just nodded back to my left and shouted, “Bar?” She shrugged and nodded, so we wandered back over to the seating that was in the back corner of the bar area, as far from the stage as possible. It was still loud, but at least at a level of decibels where you could carry on a conversation if you were both willing to raise your voices. When she sat across from me, I finally got a good look at the buzzed side of her head. What I’d taken to be tattoos were actually some kind of scarification: what looked to have started as surgical scars had been extended into graceful intertwining knotwork. But before I assumed she was trying her best to own some terrifying accident, I realized that a lot of the signals I’d seen from her were coming straight out of her head, and her right eye had a faint electromagnetic glow.

She caught me staring and offered the cover story that she probably used with everyone, and which I would have bought without my enhanced vision: “Bad accident in high school. I’d rather show it off than have people constantly catching little bits of it.”

For some reason I was feeling feisty, and I tried to jokingly ask, “Bad accident getting cyberware installed?”

Her face immediately became guarded. “Why would you say that?” Wait, was full-on cyberware actually a thing here? This random encounter was totally on me this time.

I couldn’t think of a lie that wouldn’t sound creepier than the truth, so I just admitted, “Shit, sorry. I can see EM waves. I thought it might just be a cochlear implant or something. If it helps, the wifi coming out of your head looks really pretty?”

She might live in as much fear as I did about someone twigging to her secret who wanted to hurt her for it. Apparently, my awkward answer was not what she was expecting from a threat. I guess I went from being a potential MIB that had lured her into a corner back to just being an interesting stranger, because she nodded and said, “The guy that put them in was kind of a jerk. He could have done it without leaving much of a scar, but wanted me to embrace being enhanced. So I stubbornly stepped it up further. It’ll probably all heal up on its own eventually anyway.”

Working off what I’d been putting together from mutant sites this week, I asked, “Exemplar?” Off of her nod, I added, “Me too, with actual regen. I couldn’t get a tattoo or brand that would last more than a few minutes. It does look really cool.”

She gave me a real smile, accepting the compliment, then glanced around. I saw her cybernetics flare a bit, so I guessed she was scanning for eavesdroppers. Not finding any, she turned back to me and said, “Well that was one hell of an icebreaker. I know there are a fair number of mutants in town, but I never run into them out and about. Whateley?”

I nodded, hoping she wouldn’t ask too many questions about it, “Graduated 2005, then went to tech school, but I’ve actually been working on getting back into music lately. You?”

“2011, and a little bit the same. But I’m getting my masters in electrical engineering at U-dub. You don’t strike me as a gadgeteer or a devisor?”

I grinned, mostly at the memory of Simone’s annoyance at not being taken seriously as a computer scientist because she wasn’t, “No, I just like computers. I take it you are?”

“Gadgeteer. I like transportation solutions. I’m hoping to do my thesis on better ways to improve the transit around here. Because, seriously, almost all buses for a city this big? It’s ridiculous.”

“Well, it would be a big step if you could just tell them how to get Bertha to avoid hitting any more Native burial grounds...” I grinned, joking about the boondoggle tunnel boring machine that was just as stuck under downtown in this world as it was in mine.

She turned a little pale, “I did look into it. That’s just the cover story. It hit something old, powerful, and dark, and it’s so bad that I can’t get anyone to tell me anything other than to shut up about it. I actually had to psych myself up to come down here just in case tonight’s the night Mythos creatures come boiling out or something.”

We just kind of chewed on that for a second, not talking, her clearly reliving some dark shit in her past, and me thinking about how, yes, this was a world where terrors dreamed up by H.P. Lovecraft were all too real, and the kind of things you might accidentally unearth trying to put in a new transit tunnel.

She recovered first, shook her head as if to clear out the dark thoughts, and asked, “So... we’re alums, and I could probably get your real name from one of my sister’s old yearbooks. Want to go with names instead of code names?”

I shrugged, “Sure. Simone.” It felt a little weird to say that out loud for the first time. I’d been using nothing but aliases for the last week, and kept a little space for the name Simone as belonging exclusively to my distaff doppelganger. Finally using it for myself made all of this incrementally more real.

She smiled, “Chelsea. Glad to meet you.”

“Likewise. I take it that you’re not a huge fan of your code name?”

She grimaced cutely and started off on what would prove to be a long and amusing story. “In case you didn’t know, if your big sister cons you into taking a stupid code name when you’re 13, it’s basically impossible to change it later...”

10:00 PM, Friday, October 23, 2015—Ballard

I’d been texting pretty regularly with Chelsea all week, and we’d even gotten together to see a much better band in the university district on Tuesday; the Neptune was a much cooler venue than the Showbox, with a whole underwater-Roman-mythology decorating theme, better floors, and no restrictions on taking your drinks closer to the stage. We’d gotten coffee after, and talked more. I worried I was being sketchy with my deliberate vagueness about Whateley, though I was getting a better impression of the school from what she said about it. From some of her stories, I could see why Simone had kept her head down.

It was going so well that, when Katrina mentioned she was inviting her boyfriend to the rehearsal for that week, I asked if I could bring a date, too. I was still enough of an awkward dude at heart that, “Wanna come see my band?” seemed like a winning gesture, romantically. Also, I wanted to subtly make it clear that if either Dominic or Hunter had designs on me, they could let them go. Chelsea agreed, but said she was missing enough work on her project for the week that she might need some help from me on Saturday, so I said “Sure.”

I needn’t have bothered with my strategy to keep the guys from hitting on me... they had clearly been getting handsy with each other before I showed up. Off my amused grin, Katrina mentioned, “Yeah, I guessed you were a mutant and was pretty sure I saw you scoping chicks at the Quicksilver, so there were multiple reasons I thought you might be our kind of people.”

We were set up in the garage of what was by no means a mansion, but was a pretty big house with a view of the canal in Ballard; it looked like it had been in the family for a while, so they’d probably gotten it cheap, but it had to be worth a million dollars today, easy. The Voss parents could probably afford to indulge their grown children’s dreams of becoming rock stars.

I was introduced to Katrina’s boyfriend, Rick, who was an average looking redheaded guy who apparently worked as a paralegal over at Microsoft. He had eyes that were constantly dilated with a rim of orange around them. He’d never bothered going to Whateley because his power was so minor he’d easily gotten it under control: he was a low-level Energizer whose powers meant he didn’t need much sleep and was incredibly focused, which was good for keeping an office job and didn’t make the MCO or his parents even a little nervous. He showed me his MID, which had him listed as Captain Adder, and admitted in a husky tenor, “I was trying to play it all off and joked that they should call me Captain Adderall... someone in the office shortened it to avoid a trademark dispute, and stuck me with it. I sound like a villain in a British farce.”

Neither Chelsea nor I took the invitation to show off our MIDs as well, and she changed the subject so deftly that I barely even noticed she’d done it until afterward. She and Rick sat off to the side and we started to practice.

It turned out Hunter was a bit of a poet, and had been working on lyrics in various meters that he thought might go well with different drumbeats. Dominic had been messing around with some musical hooks. Inspired by the various bands I’d seen that week, I’d bought a secondhand keyboard, and had some ideas for working that in. Katrina actually took a step back from the whole thing, and had looked up some sheet music for various bands with contralto singers. She said, “I don’t think we’re necessarily locked into being an industrial rock outfit. If we have a strong vocalist, we shouldn’t leave off doing something a little more mainstream and poppy, and seeing if we like it. So I figured we could cover a few different genres and see whether any of them are more fun to play.”

It went well. By the end of the night, we’d, in my estimation, fully left the shores of industrial metal and were trying things that were somewhere in the spectrum of indietronica, trip hop, and synthpop, particularly after Chelsea had used a snack break to reprogram my keyboard and load it with a bunch of electronic loops that meshed well with what we’d been trying. I thought everyone had felt like their contributions had mattered, and that we were all getting close to the same page on what we wanted to do. I certainly felt more comfortable with everyone. We all resolved to listen to a bunch of stuff in the same space over the next week, and meet up again the next weekend to try some more specifically targeted stuff.

Rather than lug the keyboard back home on the bus, I just left it at the Voss house, we said our goodbyes, and I walked with Chelsea back to the bus stop. “That was neat,” she said. “The only kids I knew in high school that really tried the whole band thing were... not my social circle by any stretch of the imagination. And I’ve been so wrapped up in college since, I wouldn’t have even thought to look for that kind of thing. But it’s cool to see music in its unfinished state like that.”

I nodded, “It’s been a long time since I really tried to join a band. I got wrapped up in my career, I think I forgot how much I enjoyed it.”

“Speaking of which,” she segued, “like I mentioned, I really should get some work done on testing my thesis project. You’re still up to help, tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah,” I shrugged, “but what did you have in mind?”

“I’m going to be doing a live test of some of my tech. I’m about 90% certain it will either do nothing or work without a hitch, but there’s enough chance of something going wrong in a dangerous way that I’d appreciate having someone competent around to help me put out fires.”

I mulled it over for a second, then agreed, “Sure thing. 90% chance of sitting around bored watching you mark off a checklist, 10% chance of explosions?”

“Something like that,” she grinned. “By the way, do you have an armored costume? It’s probably overkill, but better safe than sorry.”

“I do, but it’s a little...” I started, just as her bus pulled up.

She gave me a quick but extremely thorough hug, and I lost my train of thought to the pleasant sensation of our chests squishing together. “Great! I’ll text you the details! Seeya tomorrow!” she said as she released and stepped up onto the bus.

I vaguely remembered catching my own bus home, and then realized I had to actually grapple with the catsuit I’d been avoiding in my closet. I finally pulled it completely free, and was interested to realize that it wasn’t entirely what I’d expected.

Rather than a patent leather bodysuit with a zipper up the front and high heels, it was eminently more practical. It wasn’t actually leather, though it had a similar feel and weight, and was matte rather than shiny. There were subtle variations in grays and textures across the whole thing, almost in a camouflage pattern that probably helped to further break my silhouette while my powers were running. The front, rather than a central zipper, seemed to work more like one of those old asymmetrical aviator jackets: a reinforced panel that was something like a flexible breastplate covered the front, and zipped up the right side.

There was no help for it, so I tried it on. It was so tight that I could basically only get into it with underwear but no underclothes, which seemed a little risqué for Simone’s fashion sense, but maybe it helped some of its protective properties? Despite not having nearly the chest-compressing function of a sports bra, the reinforced front did a really good job of keeping me from flopping all over the place. I realized that what I’d taken to be a padded collar was actually a rolled-up attached cowl, which pulled over to cover my face completely. Two eyeplates of some unknown material were dark from the outside but managed not to inhibit my regular or super sight. In fact, they seemed to somehow passively enhance my low-light vision and give me a little wider range of the color spectrum: I could swear I was seeing a little infrared and ultraviolet. They didn’t appear to include any electronics in them, so I wondered how they worked. To finish it all off, the suitcase included a set of high boots with a sensibly low heel, a matching pair of incredibly supple gloves, and an honest-to-God utility belt (which mostly contained lockpicks and other catburglary tools like snips and glass cutters).

Looking at myself in the mirror, I had to admit that I looked hot as hell. I was basically a pinup silhouette, with shades of symbiot-suit Spider-Man without the white accents. Give the outfit a few more color highlights and an ostentatious wig and I wouldn’t look out of place as an anti-heroine in a 90s comic book. As it was, this was very clearly something you’d only wear if you were up to something dangerous... and oddly sexy.

How did it reflect on whatever scraps of masculinity that I was trying to hold onto that I was wearing something this provocative to impress a girl?

7:30 PM, Saturday, October 24, 2015—Somewhere in Seattle? Hopefully?

No matter how much I’d adjusted over the last couple of weeks to being female, I realized that I was still clearly enough of a guy to make some really, really bad decisions when trying to impress an attractive woman. This revelation was brought to me by the ringing claxon, the red emergency lights highlighting the armored military-style vehicle bay we’d arrived in, and the intercom from which blared a madman’s tenor, “What has Dr. Orbweaver caught in his web today?”

It had started innocently enough.

7:00 PM, Saturday, October 24, 2015—University of Washington

I’d found Chelsea’s lab at the university without too much difficulty off of her texted directions. I’d found that, with the addition of a gray hoodie and black skirt, I could just wear the stealth suit on the bus without standing out too much more than my normal clubwear. Walking around campus, I’d been gratified to learn that the suit’s boots were at least as comfortable as my running shoes and it breathed enough to keep from feeling sweaty as I wandered the campus to find the row of technology bays that were apparently afforded to U-dub grad students in this reality.

She let me in and showed off a bolted-together contraption that looked like a bumper car or roller-coaster cart that had aspirations of becoming a city bus some day. It turned out that was exactly what it was. Chelsea gave me a running explanation as she fiddled with a computer and tweaked various things with a volt meter and pair of pliers. “Like I mentioned, I’ve always been into transportation tech. I had personal-scale stuff mostly working by the time I started high school; flight rigs, teleporters that could take my friends short distances across campus, that kind of thing.”

“Wait,” I interrupted, “you were making transporters when you were 13?”

“Teleporters,” she corrected. “No atomic disassembly required. The science on it is pretty well researched at this point, particularly when you have places like Whateley where workshop kids get all kinds of metrics from mutants that can teleport on their own. So, like I said, I’ve been able to get a small group of people short distances for years. But that kind of thing is mostly useful for shenanigans, you know? It’s not going to solve any global transportation problems.

“Thus, this. If I’ve done the math right, my current apparatus should scale pretty indefinitely with size and distance. So if I can get this cart to travel across town, it would just be more power to get it to go across the country, or to take a bus across town.”

I boggled at how she was so cavalierly talking about relocating matter, but I got the thrust of what she was saying. “And you’ve solved Seattle’s transit problems because you can just send a box full of people directly where they’re going.”

“Exactly,” she beamed at me, her eyes distorted by a pair of magnifying goggles she’d been using to inspect a small component.

Trying to show just how much I was following, I asked, “Is the power draw linear? Or is there a size and distance where it’s not going to be economical?”

She grimaced, ceding me the point, and admitted, “That’s the big problem right now. I’ve been trying to get the efficiency way up. I’ve got it targeted at an anchor point down in Renton, and having a fixed destination with its own power feed helps a lot. But the draw is geometric if not exponential, so it would currently take the whole power output of the city for an hour to get a bus full of people about six blocks. I’m hoping that if I can at least prove that it’s possible at this scale and that I’m already improving the efficiency, it will lead to grant money to keep refining it.”

“You’re a gadgeteer, not a devisor, right?” I asked, having done the research on that point pretty thoroughly. “If you can get it working, you might be able to collaborate with another gadgeteer that’s good at efficiency?”

“Yeah. I miss the workshops, where that kind of thing happened all the time. It’s almost impossible to schedule another gadgeteer for a consult now that we’ve all gone our separate ways, let alone actually getting someone to drop what they’re doing to come out and work on your project. Anyway, that should just about do it.” She started a diagnostic of some kind running on her laptop, then headed for the back. “Feel free to take off the street clothes. I’m going to go get changed myself.”

I folded up my skirt and hoodie on a shelf under my wig, and got an appreciative look from Chelsea as she headed back out of the bathroom a few minutes later, not seeming the least nonplussed about her first sight of me without the wig. I was appreciative myself: she had her own armored costume that was almost as tight-fitting as mine. It had a mesh underlayer that was the same gold as her hair, and it was covered with tactical hardpoints, straps, and accents in a glossy black. “Very nice, but I thought you were trying to avoid the whole bee motif?”

“I am, but I haven’t really had access to the fabricators to make a new one since Whateley, and this still fits so... Yours looks really cool, too. Is it adaptive camouflage?”

I shook my head, “Just some materials that make it easier to use my powers. I’m a little paranoid about active electronics, since they’re so obvious to me and so I don’t associate them with being stealthy.” That seemed likely, and I was trying to project the confidence that I actually knew what tech was in my costume.

“Fair enough. Not many people have your powers, though, and you’re passing up some pretty heavy advantages to avoid that kind of scanning.” With that, she flipped a switch on her belt and I could see lines of fire lace through her outfit, with sparks leaking out of several of the hard points. It was probably all invisible to anyone else.

“Don’t electrocute yourself on your own outfit,” I grinned. “What next?”

She chuckled and pointed to the passenger seat in the teleporting bumper car. “Your chariot awaits, milady.”

I slid into the indicated seat and fastened the attached safety harness. She handed me a motorcycle helmet, which I dutifully put on, and she put her own on before sliding next to me and buckling herself in. The seats were pretty tight, and I was scrunched up against her in a very distracting way. Since I didn’t actually have any controls to worry about, I put my left arm around her shoulders to give her more room, and she nestled in appreciatively as she started flipping switches. Weirdest parking date ever. Something that had been nagging me finally percolated through being scrunched up against a pretty girl in a skin-tight outfit. “Wait, didn’t you say something about a small chance of this exploding...?”

“Should be fine!” she said, with a bit of a nervous laugh, before slamming her palm down on a big green button and brought on a brief moment of perceptual nonexistence before we were suddenly somewhere else.

And that’s how we wound up in the red-lit, blaring, military-style base that was probably not our destination in Renton.

7:30 PM, Saturday, October 24, 2015—Somewhere in Seattle? Hopefully?

Back in the present: ringing claxon, red emergency lights, military-style vehicle bay, and a madman over an intercom saying, “What has Dr. Orbweaver caught in his web today?”

“Was this supposed to happen?” I asked, all but yelling between the shock and the klaxons.

“No!” Chelsea shouted, furiously mashing buttons on the sled.

“Can we throw it into reverse?”

She shook her helmeted head, “It’s not responding. We must be interdicted!”

“Was that a risk? What’s a Dr. Orbweaver?” I was unbuckling myself from the seat and taking in the room.

“A guy that’s not even supposed to be anywhere near here!” she said, also starting to unbuckle. “There aren’t even any teleporters to catch!”

The room was some kind of bunker, maybe thirty feet on a side with a generous vaulted ceiling of smooth concrete that looked like we were in a half pipe, so I’d call it fifteen feet high, with vertical cinderblock walls capping either end. Several floodlights had cut on moments after we arrived, and I could make out wifi signals through the glare that I assumed were cameras. “Cameras there and there,” I gestured, since Chelsea was also squinting against the lights.

“Thanks!” she said, and suddenly produced a handful of metal spikes from somewhere on her costume. Before I could ask what those were for, she flung a few in each of the directions I’d pointed, and the wifi signals went out with a destructive burst. “Got ‘em?” Once I nodded, she threw the rest to take out the lights, with huge crashes of sparks as they failed one by one. “Get your cowl on,” she yelled over the klaxons that were the only electronics left active.

I felt her moving next to me, as if she was changing out her helmet. I ducked down into the cart as well I could just in case I had missed a camera, dropped off the motorcycle helmet in the floorboard, and pulled on the cowl. The lenses helped a little; the blackness was no longer total, but rimed with faint light from the LEDs of the teleporting cart, and I could actually get a pretty good sense of the shape of the room by how electrical signals interacted with solid objects and walls. The room was, basically, like a dim multicolored fog, gradually coming into focus as my eyes adjusted.

Chelsea was also coming into focus, the electronics in her costume and cyberware setting her off from the rest of the room. “He said ‘web,’” she said loudly, easier to hear crouched down the cart. “I don’t think we’re getting out of here without finding whatever devise he’s using and shutting it down. It will probably either be in the next room, or under us.”

“How are we going to get to the next room when they’re clearly going to come in with a bunch of guys to murder us any minute!?”

The colored cloud of electronics that was Chelsea shrugged against the darkness, “He’s C-list at best. I’m hoping he has really terrible minions. Unless you have a better idea?”

I really, really wished I did have a better idea. I was honestly caught up in the weirdness that instead of freaking out, I was just a little bit upset. My hands were steady and my heart rate seemed normal. Had Simone gotten up to enough things like this to create more muscle memory for sheer terror? Or had I just gotten so good at not really treating any of this as particularly real? I didn’t know, but I at least ventured, “Even if the cart is bulletproof, getting shot could break it. Shouldn’t we be over by the doorway?”

“Good idea!” she said, and we left the sled and took up positions to either side of the doors. With the lights out, there was no real reason to crouch or flatten ourselves against the wall, so we both fell into fairly relaxed stances. I noticed that mine wasn’t that different than hers, so I assumed it was more training from Whateley.

The doorway was a pair of reinforced double doors that opened outward, presumably so they could be barred from the outside. But that also meant that they wound up providing a funnel from the room directly into the people opening them, rather than getting in our way. A minute later when someone finally opened them, with the admitted foresight to toss in some kind of grenade, we were already dashing out, past the flashbang grenade and into the face of the hapless mook that had gotten room-clearing duty and didn’t expect the darkness to have fists and feet.

Outside, there was more cinderblock brickwork in a hallway of less substantial height than the bunker, dim lighting showing off a half dozen armed thugs in matching, web-themed tactical gear. They were this close to risking a lawsuit from Marvel over being derivative of Spider-Man, and only the palette swap to yellow webbing patterns on black differentiated them. The first thug got a kick from me and a punch from Chelsea. In the hallway light I could see that she’d put on a face-concealing cowl of her own, with rounded goggles that were reminiscent of bee eyes. I didn’t have much time to watch though, as we both had more mooks to deal with.

Fortunately, the rifles needed to create a firing line into a bunker are not quite as effective when you’re dealing with two exemplars with martial arts training right up in your face. Maybe they’d gotten overconfident about people they were likely to catch in this trap being alone and off balance due to not being able to teleport? Getting to just let my body do what it wanted in this situation was kind of liberating, and I found myself spinning and diving through the crowd, smashing my foot into knees and my elbows into throats with abandon. Even in the light of the hall, they seemed to have a hard time keeping track of the blur that was my fully-powered-on silhouette.

Meanwhile, the glimpses of Chelsea I caught in the chaotic melee were much more practiced. She didn’t dive around, but mostly held position and maneuvered her opponents around her own fulcrum. She easily ducked or dodged swings, moving just enough to throw her opponents into one another. When a few got in a lucky swing, her suit seemed to take it without a problem, and delivered back a painful shock of its own. Basically, while I was just winging it and had no real idea what I was doing other than what felt right, she’d clearly been doing this kind of thing since she was a child.

My first real martial arts brawl seemed to take forever at the time, but was clearly just a few chaotic seconds in hindsight. The minions were only human and not even exceptionally trained; they might have had a chance taking us by surprise, but their boss’ announcement and taking too long to show up ruined it for them. In less than a minute, there were six spider-themed mooks on the ground and the two of us standing, none the worse for wear. Chelsea gave me a thumbs up, then started looking around, obviously trying to figure out the layout of the place.

Unless there were a bunch of secret passages we just weren’t seeing, we were at the end of a hall with no doors for at least thirty feet; chances were not good that there was just an adjoining room with the interdiction technology. “Try to find stairs down?” I asked her.

“Here’s hoping it’s the closest door,” she replied, setting off down the hall to the door in question, a security door to our right a dozen paces away. The alarms were much more muted out in the hall, but an intercom every few dozen feet still blared the klaxons so it would be clear this place was still on alert. Did he have more minions that were still getting their boots on? We opened the door, and it did, in fact, lead into a narrow vertical shaft with metal rungs affixed to the wall next to the door. Presumably there was a more convenient way up and down further in, but we shrugged and started climbing down. Within the much quieter confines of the shaft, Chelsea mused, “I can’t figure out why he’d even be set up here, especially with such a small force. Maybe he’s just trying to catch teleporting couriers?”

I thought about that for a minute, then asked, “Why doesn’t every teleporter work as a courier? Seems like you could make more money doing that for legal stuff than most other crimes, and even more money smuggling.”

“I’m an engineering student, not a sociologist,” she replied, “but most of the ones I know with good range and reliability do. There aren’t many of them in the first place, and I don’t even know of any that rob banks or something. But there’s no accounting for stupid or for crazy. Or, I guess, for people with bigger ideals than just a comfortable income.”

“So what about you?” I asked, stepping off the ladder onto the floor I’d reached at the bottom and giving the exit door as much of a once over as I could in the dim light. “Going to license your sled to a transit company and live comfortably off the proceeds, or going to use it for ideals?” I remembered I had something useful here, and pulled out a little fiber optic camera kit, slid it under the door, and started looking around.

She dropped down next to me in the shaft and broke out her own tools to check the door, her leg pressed up against my side as I knelt and filled up most of the space. “Well, obviously I want to use my Jaunt for public transit. But there’s no telling whether, as soon as I get it all working and file a patent, a bunch of other places might not show up trying to buy it from me. Not sure what I’d do if I had to choose between something obviously good and something much more sketchy that would pay a lot more. But, no, I don’t plan on, say, handing it out to help people I like cross borders or anything.” She folded up her scanner and said, “Seems clear to me.”

“Agreed,” I said, rolling up my camera. “Let’s hope this guy really is just a dumb C-lister and this isn’t a trap.” I carefully opened the door out onto the unfinished sub-basement that I’d spied through the camera. It had a very low ceiling that I might have risked hitting my head on back before I’d lost several inches of height. Unsmoothed cinderblock walls had plastic sheeting tacked up to cover most of them, presumably to keep out moisture. Vertical steel girders traced a rough grid throughout the space, bearing the load of the complex above. And, to our left, back in the direction that was more or less right under the room we’d appeared in, an odd pile of technological gadgets was emitting one hell of a cloud of EM sparks. The normally visible light in the room was mostly coming from monitors and LEDs all over it.

“Cover me while I try to shut this thing down?” she asked, approaching the contraption and pulling a multi-tool from her belt.

“I’ll do my best,” I replied, starting to do a walk-through of the floor to make sure there weren’t any other ways in. “By the way, the biggest emission is coming from the bit that looks like an evil sci-fi claw.”

Sure enough, back to the right of where we’d come in, there was what appeared to be a service elevator door. It was hard to make out a few dozen paces from the machinery’s light, but it seemed like it was big enough to bring down large technological components... or another squad of minions. I stood by it while trying to also keep an eye on the door we’d come in through, even though I could barely make it out even with my light-enhancing lenses.

Fortunately, before any new attack teams showed up, most of the lights went out, including the ones only I could see, and a low hum ended that I hadn’t even noticed until it was absent. Chelsea flicked on a red-hued flashlight, and I moved back over to her position where I could see she’d found or been carrying a backpack, and was stuffing pieces of technology into it, her red light beam flickering back and forth as she loaded up. “Drives and core components,” she answered the question before I asked it. “If we take them, it should be harder for him to get this running again soon, and there may be something interesting on here that I can use.”

It seemed like an unnecessary risk compared to just blowing up the thing, but getting into an argument about it would just slow us down further. “Let’s just get out of here,” I said instead, heading back toward the ladder. Chelsea zipped up the pack and headed after me. “Not to tempt fate,” I said, “but do we have a plan for if the villain and more minions have made it down by the time we get up there?”

Chelsea held up a pair of grenades. I hoped she’d taken them off the minions earlier and they weren’t just something she carried with her.

We took the ladder back up as quietly as possible, and snaking my fiber optic periscope out was more complicated hanging from metal rungs than crouching on the floor. Sure enough, I could see yellow-and-black clad figures in the hallway, seemingly backed up to our right to cover the door and the elevator. I signaled to Chelsea to show her where they were, she nodded, and gestured for me to climb up the ladder so she could go out first.

This time, the door wound up being a bit of an obstacle, opening out and to the right, so it was in between us and the guards. Any other way of opening would have probably been better for a stealthy throw, but at least the door was reinforced and easily soaked up the automatic gunfire that started as soon as Chelsea opened it. She had to lob the grenades around the door left handed, and opted to try to bank them off the wall rather than exposing her hand to bullets. Then she yanked the door back closed, cutting off the sound of someone shouting, “Gren—!”

There was a pretty solid bang and a thump against the door, but it was strong enough to mute the worst of it. Chelsea was out and running a moment later, and I swung down after her. I thought about looking, but if I didn’t see what had actually happened I could keep telling myself they were flashbangs and we hadn’t just blown up a bunch of people.

As soon as Chelsea crossed into the darkened bunker, she seemed to realize something was wrong but not soon enough to duck out of the way as some kind of wide-beam energy ray erupted at her from the right, causing her to lose control of her limbs and sprawl painfully across the floor, sliding to a boneless stop. The element of surprise gone, the assailant, who could only be Dr. Orbweaver, stepped around the corner and aimed his futuristic-looking rifle at me. He was wearing glossy yellow and black body armor, which looked hastily donned from several loose straps and buckles. His face was concealed behind a fully-visored mask that was some kind of weird cross between a motorcycle helmet and a spider face, mandibles and all. The mandibles even moved as he started monologuing. That didn’t stop him from pulling the trigger to blast me with the same paralytic spray.

“You are clever interlopers, but no match for—” and he grunted in pain and surprise as I turned my feigned stumble into a forward somersault ending in a heel kick right into his groin. Obviously, the ray hadn’t done nearly as much to me as it had to Chelsea, though I felt a little tingle, but I was congratulating myself for thinking to pretend for long enough to get closer to him. Also the somersault kick thing worked out even better than I’d expected.

Rather than give him any time to recover, I used my momentum to sit up, grabbed his armor by a couple of the dangling straps, and then leaned back again, flipping him behind me using the fulcrum of my foot, still firmly planted in his junk. The costume’s mandibles chittered amusingly as he squealed during the flip and then landed on his head behind me. I kept going myself, rolled over my shoulder and landed kneeling next to him, delivering a few more punches to his torso and head until I was sure he was going to stay down. Then I grabbed the rifle and went to check on Chelsea.

She was already struggling by the time I crossed the few strides to her, and I helped her up, made sure she still had all of her gear, and staggered with her to the Jaunt. “Ow!” she said a couple of times, but it sounded more like she felt stupid than she was actually seriously hurt.

“You going to be alright?” I asked, helping her into the sled.

“Yeah, I think so. Guess his specialty is all about various fields to shut things down. I wonder if—”

“Analyze his specialty later, teleport us home now. Please,” I interrupted.

She nodded and tweaked a couple of dials until the lights settled into something she liked, made sure I was also loaded up, then punched the big button again.

A moment of existential crisis later, and we were back in Chelsea’s engineering bay, where my clothes and wig sat to the side as if nothing odd at all had happened. I gratefully pulled off my cowl so I could breathe freely, slumped back in the chair, and took a cleansing lungful of air not provided in a supervillain’s bunker. I could feel the freakout coming on that my adrenaline and conditioned responses had been keeping at bay while we were in danger, and my first thought was to turn to Chelsea to start listing all the things that were so not right about what just happened.

“That was amazing! You were amazing! You saved my ass!” she said in a rapid-fire staccato of gratitude. And then she was kissing me.

That short circuited my worries for a little while.

8:00 PM, Saturday, October 31, 2015—Mercer Island

The week had gone very well. We’d filmed some of the cover songs we’d done at the last rehearsal and posted them to my video channel and the one for Voss Populi, cross linking between them. That had wound up raising both of our viewership numbers and gotten me some more donations. Coupled with a couple of small freelance jobs finishing and paying promptly, I was able to make rent and even pay more than the minimum on the credit cards. I still didn’t like living this close to the edge of an empty bank account, but I thought I’d done really well for being dropped into such an alien situation.

Things with Chelsea had continued to go faster than I’d expected—faster, really, than any prior relationship—and I hadn’t had a lot of time to stop and process. Part of that was how much our rapidly escalating physical relationship tested my detachment with the whole situation I found myself in: it’s difficult to remain objective about your vastly different physical configuration when a beautiful blonde is determined to explore every inch of it. Also, while my prior experience with sex was much more limited than I would have liked, it at least prepared me for a certain level of normal human stamina which absolutely did not apply to two exemplars. So if I seem like I wasn’t making some obvious observations and connections that would become more apparent to me later, just understand that I was extremely distracted.

In bed at her apartment on Wednesday night, nestled against my chest with the shaved side of her head brushing against my skin, she asked, “What are you doing for Halloween?”

“No real plans,” I said. “The band is talking about going to Quicksilver, but I’m not that into a DJed dance party. Why?”

“Want to go to a party with me?”

“Sure. I don’t really have a costume...” I admitted.

“It’s more of a masquerade ball than a costume party. If you have a nice party dress, I can make you a mask.”

“This isn’t an Eyes Wide Shut kind of thing, is it?” I joked.

She paused for longer than I expected before answering, “Probably not. I haven’t been to this one before. I didn’t have a date that could handle herself, last year.”

My brain kicked through the “probably not” after a moment and reached the more important part of that sentence, “What do you mean handle myself?”

“Well...” she stalled, then admitted, “I got the invite through some of my sister’s friends who want me to make some connections out here.”

“Your sister the aspiring supervillain?”

“She’s not really trying to be a supervillain. She at least got over getting her hands dirty in high school. But, yeah, some of the people there are probably not going to be paragons of virtue. Is that a problem?”

I struggled to articulate whether it would be, to give a good excuse for why it bothered me that she was implying this was a party for criminals, if not exactly for villains. I had not admitted that I was totally out of my depth on this, even to her, so I answered with a lame, “I mean, I moved out here to lie low for a while. Maybe go legit.”

“I get that. We don’t have to go at all, but it would be really good for my career. It won’t just be bad people there; I hear there are council members, lawyers, lots of super-rich tech folks, and that kind of thing. And it will be masked, so we don’t have to tell anyone who you are. I’d just feel a lot safer having you around to watch my back and just in case anything dangerous happens. Do you have protection against psychics? I can build you some psychic static generators to go in your mask and under your wig. I’m over-helping, aren’t I?”

I’d let her talk while I thought, getting increasingly worried about the implications. If someone had suggested this to me a month ago, I would have probably said no. If someone had suggested it to Simone, she probably would have said no for different reasons. But there was also a very large part of me that realized an invitation to a hellfire club Halloween masquerade ball was not something that normal people received, and which would be incredibly interesting and I’d feel like I’d missed out if I skipped it. Also, the part of my brain that I’d trained to treat this whole thing as an RPG was screaming, “Quest hooks!” So I finally answered her with, “No. It’s fine. Just thinking. Let’s do it. But it does sound risky, so let’s go as prepared as we can. This isn’t exactly the kind of scene I’ve ever had the opportunity to get used to, so you may have to coach me on a lot of it.”

“Yay! I’m going to make sure you don’t regret it!” she said, then rolled back over onto me and started early on making sure I didn’t regret it...

And so, after a few more days of prepping as best we could and another good rehearsal with the band on Friday, I found myself so far outside my comfort zone that I was basically walking in an anxious fugue and just struggling to piece everything together in real time. One of the nods to occasional feminine costuming requirements in Simone’s wardrobe had, indeed, been a pretty nice little black dress, which only the last month of building up tolerance to the whole idea had allowed me to wear. I’d found some actual dark hose to wear against the November chill, and opted for a pair of shiny heeled black boots rather than actual high heels (which Simone hadn’t seemed to own anyway). The leather jacket seemed a little too much, though, so I’d gone with a black blazer that made the whole vibe shift from goth glam to an Annie Lennox new wave type of deal. It was so apt that I almost did without a wig, but I needed the cover for the little gadget discs that Chelsea had made to provide some psychic static, so I went with a longer black wig that I hadn’t used yet. Topping it all off was a very cool mask she’d made which was a little too on-topic for my code name, but I wasn’t overly worried: it read as a unblemished sheet of obsidian with sharp edges, wrapping around the upper half of my face with only the vaguest of facial features. Most of it was solid and packed with electronics, with the eyeholes covered in seamlessly blended tinted glass.

Meanwhile, Chelsea was less interested in keeping her identity totally secret, so had worn a long and slinky gold dress and accented it with black heels and gloves and onyx-and-gold jewelry. If that didn’t imply the bee motif, her mask was made to look like a collage of gossamer gold bee wings. She’d put her hair up but not done anything to hide the shaved and scarred side of her head, but at least I’d confirmed she’d managed to hide more of the anti-psychic measures in her updo. She didn’t seem to be as confident as I would like that they’d actually protect us from a dedicated psychic assault, but she thought they’d at least keep casual psychic eavesdroppers at bay. She’d mentioned something about missing the “Canon of Psychic Ethics” that was in force in high school.

I hadn’t been totally prepared for how Seattle McMansions worked, at least on Mercer Island. The black towncar that had been sent to pick us up navigated down a narrow and looping road and dropped us in front of what initially seemed a fairly small house. But then I realized it was built into the side of the cliff overlooking Lake Washington, and which descended for six floors down to the water level. It probably had an amazing view of Mt. Ranier during the day. Given what kind of gathering this was, I wondered how much of the mansion wasn’t visible because it had actually tunneled into the hill beneath my feet. Looking at the profusion of stairs I could see descending the decks on the outside, I was glad I hadn’t had truly appropriate party footware. I gave a meaningful look at Chelsea’s pumps and whispered, “We should probably try to get as much mingling done as we can on each level rather than circulating.”

“It’s fine,” she pouted, “I have a levitation rig worked into my dress.” I wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not; it seemed like the kind of thing she might have. “You ready?”

“No, but we should go in before I fully realize that,” I said, trying to put on a brave smile.

She gave my arm a squeeze and we walked the rest of the way down the drive as our car carefully left to provide room for more drop-offs. The door was manned by an impeccably dressed—but not intimidatingly large—man who nonetheless looked like he knew how to handle himself. He scanned Chelsea’s proffered invitation with his tablet, and I could see an answering flare of an RFID within the card. “Enjoy the party,” he smiled, and opened the door to let us in.

I didn’t really have much of an architectural background, but the inside of the house let me to believe classifying this as a McMansion wasn’t too far off. Someone had really tried to give it a classical look, with the inside all done up in columns, marble tile floors, and faux-stone painted walls. But it still had the vibe of a beach house putting on airs. I’d stayed somewhere similar-looking with some college friends on Lewisville Lake right near my school in Texas. It couldn’t shake the feeling of being what a tech millionaire thought a classy home would look like. Maybe it was just that all the fittings looked brand new and somehow fragile, when my expectation of a hellfire club party was the kind of New England mansion that had settled into its quality over centuries.

But if you’d asked me what my joking expectation was for a Seattle fancy dress party, I would have been more right than I’d imagined. From the moment we started mingling, my new game to manage my social anxiety was trying to figure out which guests were actually comfortable in formal clothes. Some of them had even punted and went with some very expensive jeans and a sweater-and-button-down combo. And the only thing that could make a Seattle party full of mostly-strangers more stilted and awkward was putting everyone in masks so it was harder to read facial cues and recognize the few people you might know. So, while the vibe was admittedly Kubrickian, it was more like if he’d been asked to direct a Tom Stoppard play about the futility of house parties.

What I’m saying is, if there was anything kinky going on, it was well away from the masked, uncomfortable people trying to make small talk around spooky snack tables over the house soundtrack which was a randomized playlist that switched haphazardly from Wagner to White Zombie.

Chelsea was at least way better than me at dealing with this kind of awkward situation, and she seemed to be accomplishing her goal of making small talk, trying to identify the people that were worth talking to, and gracefully extricating us when they weren’t. We actually generated a bit of a wake with our circulating, periodically winding up with people that followed us away from one conversation and used us as a way to get into the next. A number of them were single guys that used some variation on, “So what are two unaccompanied ladies doing at a party like this?” Chelsea was also better at shooting them down quickly and politely. On the other hand, I seemed to have additional muscle memory that I only became aware of when one of them walked up between us and put his hands on our asses while delivering his line, and I reflexively nearly broke his fingers for him.

“Maybe don’t maim anyone you don’t have to but... that was awesome,” Chelsea told me quietly, after he’d walked off to find an icepack.

An hour or two into the party, Chelsea had finally found someone worth talking to in depth, and had moved her conversation with him to a little more private alcove while I hovered nearby and tried to keep other people from intruding while feeling super-duper awkward. So it was with great surprise that a woman approached me and said, “This music sucks, right?” She was a little shorter than me, thin and athletic, and seemed to be Asian, from skin tone and hair, though I couldn’t be sure with the mask. Her dress was appropriate but subdued, and the mask was just a simple silver-glitter domino mask that seemed fairly cheap. Some instinct that I didn’t know I had screamed “Cop!” at me, but I couldn’t point my finger at exactly why. Maybe it was her body language, maybe it was the brutish guy that seemed to be her “date” but was casing the room, maybe it was that they had loose enough outfits that they could be carrying, and maybe it was that, unlike everyone else, their cell phones were actively broadcasting, and I detected matching ear-implanted microphones as well.

But, whether or not she was a cop, she was right. “Everyone who knows how to make playlists fancies himself a DJ,” I replied with a nod.

“They at least could have organized it with some kind of flow, rather than hitting shuffle,” she frowned. But what I could make out of her eyes under the mask were trying to read my own mostly-concealed face and body language for a response. It was hard to tell whether she genuinely cared about music, or whether she was just trying to get a read on me for some reason.

“I expected them to hire a band,” I shrugged. “Or at least a blindfolded piano player.”

That actually got a laugh, but it was a little stronger than my joke had justified. “I admit, I was expecting something a little less tame.” She gave my outfit a look. “Maybe you were too?”

“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way,” I told her, trying to see if I could get another forced laugh out of a dated reference. Did they even have that movie here?

Apparently not, or at least she hadn’t seen it, because I got a half-laugh and a quizzical head-tilt like she got that I was making a reference and didn’t get it but wanted to be polite anyway. “Yes, well, I guess a body image template really isn’t something you can control, right?”

If I hadn’t already figured out she was a cop, that might have thrown me. Since I was expecting the fishing, I gave her my own, matching head tilt, and tried to sound confused. “What’s a body image template?”

I saw her eyes narrow behind the mask, as if for a moment she bought it, but then she doubled-down. “Well, I saw you with Apicula over there, and the way you’re pulling off that dress... was it wrong of me to assume you’re an exemplar as well?”

I guess both of us could double down. “I think that was a compliment, right? I’m not sure what you’re talking about though, but I do appreciate you noticing all the exercising I’ve been putting in. I like your dress, too.”

Her smile went a little fixed, stretching slightly into what I interpreted as a competitive grimace. But then her partner/date moved up and touched her lightly on the arm. So instead, as they were walking away, she just said, “Well it was lovely to meet you, I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”

I looked where the big guy had glanced, and saw the doorman from earlier making his rounds through the floor of the party. When he glanced my way, I beckoned casually with a finger for him to come over, and then told him quietly, “That couple I was just talking to seemed to be incredibly inquisitive about me and my date. I’m not sure they’re cops digging for information...”

He nodded his approval at me telling him, and replied with, “Thanks for the tip. We realized one of our invitees was taken into custody by the MCO, and his invitation had already been used by the time we found out. I’ve been looking to see if I could figure out who didn’t belong. It’s much appreciated.” Off my own acknowledging nod, he walked off after the interlopers.

I had gotten about a minute into questioning my own reaction of immediately trying to get a law officer kicked out of a party of criminals, when Chelsea, done with her conversation, wrapped an arm around my waist and asked, “What was that about?”

“MCO agents crashed the party and were trying to get me to self-incriminate about us,” I said, only actually putting it together as the words came out of my mouth.

“I knew she looked familiar,” Chelsea groaned. “Her name’s Yael Lee, and she’s not as bad as a lot of them but she’s persistent. She’s been by my lab a couple of times to make sure I’m not doing anything she can lock me up for. I’ll probably hear from her soon.”

“Can she get you for anything?” I asked, concerned.

“Not unless she wants to suggest that everyone else here is such a criminal that just attending the party is illegal activity. Which I doubt she’s dumb enough to try. You’re right, she was probably just fishing. You didn’t tell her anything?”

“I don’t think so. But she obviously put together that we were together and that I’m an exemplar. So that’s more information that she has.”

She shook her head and gave me another squeeze, “I’m sorry I dragged you here. If my last conversation had gone worse, I’d say this night was a total failure, but as it is, it was kind of a wash. You pick the next party? Or do you want to go home and get straight to making sure you get your Eyes Wide Shut mileage?”

I grinned, despite my worries, and said, “Well, there’s no reason we can’t do both, right? Do you think we could get the car to drop us at Quicksilver, see if that’s any good, and then we could head back to your place from there?”

“Suits me,” she said with one last squeeze before breaking off, “I’ll go get the staff to call our car back and make our goodbyes.”

11:30 PM, Saturday, October 31, 2015—Capitol Hill

I felt a little weird walking back into Quicksilver three weeks after having my first supers brawl there, but the club was dark and loud enough that hardly anyone seemed to recognize me, much less hassle me. I tracked down the Vosses and let them know we were there, and that turned the evening into another attempt at networking, as Katrina and Dominic worked to talk up the band to anyone who would listen. Even Chelsea got into the act, feeling bad about the boring party she’d picked, and tried to use her own networking skills to talk us up.

Not too terribly long before midnight, we’d gotten separated as she talked to some people while I’d gotten pulled off to talk to someone else, then I’d stopped by the bathroom. When I exited, Tin Phoenix, in his civilian guise, was waiting for me. He obviously had something on his mind, and had cornered me to have the conversation. “You’re with Little Bee,” he started without preamble.

“She hates that name,” I nearly had to yell back, over the loud club music. I also still wasn’t used to the sheer height disadvantage I now had in fraught conversations: while I could rely on my exemplar gifts making me a match for nearly anyone who wasn’t similarly powered, the sheer fact that he towered over me and outmassed me by a large amount made a real difference in my conversational confidence.

He let that line go for a minute and started talking about something else. “Look, shit, Simone, you were always cool to me at school, even if you didn’t keep in touch afterward. I knew you must be in Poe for a reason, have some issues to work out that were worse than mine, but I felt like we were friends. Both a couple of outcasts from Texas, ya’ know?”

I needed to stop this memory lane trip before he asked me something from Simone’s past that I didn’t know. “Look, I had it really rough at school. I know all of you remember it more fondly than I did, but I really wanted to move on after graduation. I didn’t keep in touch with much of anyone, but I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“That’s the thing,” he explained, “you might not have kept in touch, but other people kept tabs on you. I asked around after you ran out of here, and I wasn‘t the only one asking about you. Especially after you started that video channel right away so it was easy for people to show other people what you looked like...”

“Are you saying there are people after me?”

“Simone, I’m saying they already found you. Little Bee was in here a couple of days after the fight asking around about you. Did she track you down directly, or did she just ‘happen’ to run into you somewhere else? Do you even remember her sister? She was only a freshman when you graduated, but I had more time around her. She worked really hard to be one of the nastiest kneecappers on campus, trying to get in good with the jerks Freya turned the Alphas into after we left. And I heard Little Bee started a couple of years after that and learned from her.”

There were a lot of concepts being thrown around that I didn’t have much reference for, and maybe I could ask around about them later. I really needed to find a Whateley student that it was safe to come out to about my “memory loss” and ask questions. But, honestly, “We were all teenagers! It was a decade ago. I think you should just let it go.”

He shook his head again, frustrated that I still wasn’t getting it, “What I mean, is that I think you’re underestimating that these are people that have been training to manipulate others and do underhanded things to get what they want since they were little. You may not remember Queen Bee, but I bet she remembered you. You always underestimated your powers, but us workshop kids loved it when you’d help us with stuff. Anyone who knows what you can do, they might take steps to get you to help them out.”

I narrowed my eyes, finally getting where he was going, “You’re worried she seduced me so I’d use my powers on her behalf?”

He nodded, “Finally! Yes! When I asked around, I heard some rumors that you’d dabbled in some less savory things, never got caught, and went legit. Good for you! But the Horton girls never went legit. And if you keep hanging with her, whatever work you’ve done to stay on the right side of the law could just go away. I bet she’s already got you helping out on things that are pretty illicit? Maybe not even telling you until you’re in a position where you have to rescue her? It’s only going to get worse.”

Some of that struck a little close to home, and set off worries of my own that hadn’t been registering before. But I was also a little annoyed that this stranger, who may or may not have even been someone Simone considered a friend in high school, felt like he was in a place to corner and lecture me. “Thanks for the warning. But I’m an adult. And up until about a minute ago, I was probably the happiest I’ve been as an adult.” It hit me how true it was as it slipped out, and how with a drunken cornering he’d smashed the cage of denial I’d been building to protect that happiness. “Just... don’t try to rescue me. I’ll sink or swim on my own.”

He looked at me sadly, nodded, then headed back out into the club, leaving me with a lot to think about.

12:15 AM, Sunday, November 1, 2015—University District

The bus ride home had been pretty quiet. I’d told Chelsea that I was ready to go right after the talk with Tin Phoenix, and I could tell she was getting worried. She’d tried to engage me in conversation a few times, and I’d finally just said, “In private, okay?”

So it was incredibly tense when we got back to her apartment. I felt almost sick, like I had on the verge of big fights in prior relationships. Chelsea sat on her bed, and frowned when I remained standing. “What’s going on?”

“I talked to Tin Phoenix.” Off of that, her frown deepened and her eyes narrowed. “He doesn’t think that we just happened to bump into each other. He thinks you’d been looking for me ever since word about the fight at Quicksilver got out.”

“Busted,” she said, but there was a slight smile to it. “Alright, I admit it, I was interested in the idea that there was a mutant in town that I didn’t know about, then when I saw your videos... you were hot and I wanted to meet you. Especially once I got confirmation from Patty that she was pretty sure you were queer. Well, ‘a big ol’ dyke’ is how she put it, because my sister is not the best people ever. And I might have been more keen to go out and do stuff in the hopes that I ran into you. I was pretty excited when you came up and hit on me.”

That all seemed reasonable, but I’d just been seeing all night that she was better socially that I was. I still had doubts. “He was worried it was about more than that. That it was about getting an exemplar to back you up. And... well, I would have just laughed him off if I hadn’t been having some of the same worries since the bunker.”

After a significant pause where she looked deep into my eyes as if gauging whether I was serious and formulating an answer, or just pausing for dramatic effect, she said, “Look, there’s, like, three possibilities, right? In one, I teleported us to Dr. Orbweaver’s base deliberately, and lied about us being trapped, just because I wanted to rob him. And for some reason I tricked you into it, instead of just asking you to go along, even though my friends with Syndicate connections said that’s exactly the kind of job you’d go in for. Maybe I just thought you were mercenary enough to charge me if I asked, but not mercenary enough to demand payment after the fact?

“In the second, I knew that there was a chance that could happen, and wanted you along just in case because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to escape on my own. And maybe I hoped you were good enough at what you do that, if we did get trapped by that asshole, I could turn a profit from the whole situation. But, again, it’s the kind of job you do, so why wouldn’t you be up for it?

“And in the last one, everything was exactly like I told you and you probably saved my life and were amazing doing it. Sure, I wound up profiting by the coincidence, but that’s just because I’m good at my job and know an opportunity when I see one. And you still seemed to have a really good time getting to cut loose.

“The thing is, in none of these scenarios did I betray you or even get you to do anything you wouldn’t have wanted to do, as far as I knew. If you think the absolute worst of me, I conned you a bit to save a buck and didn’t let you know the risks that we’d both be sharing. I never tried to get you hurt, and maybe I was just over eager to get you to be my partner in crime.

“I’ll admit I’m not a very good person, in the grand scheme of things. I was never on the hero track; in fact, it was pretty much the opposite and I think I’ve done well to be as neutral as I am. I thought we were kind of the same, from what I heard about you, but I get that maybe you want to go legit and be a big time rock star that’s never in trouble with the law for more than wrecking a hotel room.

“I can’t even promise that I’ll never manipulate you. I’m not a very good person, and I don’t feel confident enough about that to make you a promise I can’t keep. I can try not to. Try to actually make sure you know any risks I know about. And I can promise that I’ll never intentionally put you in any danger I don’t think you can get out of, and I’ll intend to be shouldering at least as much risk as you are.

“Because I really like you. And I think you’re great at this kind of thing, and I want us to keep doing it together. I get why you’re worried. And I’ll get it if you don’t want to take the risk of being with me, because that’s not the kind of life you want to lead. But if you’re honest, and love it as much as I secretly think you do, and like me as much as I hope you do... all I can do is ask you to keep trusting me as much as you can until someday you realize that’s completely.”

I took it all in. I was tearing up a bit, processing. I’d kind of expected her to reveal that it had all been a big con, and to turn cold when I tore it open. I hadn’t expected her to double down on actually liking me, to provide such a logical explanation for why it would have made so much more sense to try to just employ me. Because that’s what Tin Phoenix hadn’t really seemed to know: just how deep Simone’s reputation as a criminal went. She probably didn‘t have any good way to know that I wouldn’t have accepted a deal to work with her.

Yeah, she was dangerous, and I’d known that almost from the outset; she’d told me enough about her sister and their high school business on our first meeting that I would never have thought she was an innocent. If I was honest with myself, that’s part of what I’d liked about her. Simon Sullivan, Jr. would have never even met, must less landed, a beautiful evil genius, but Shadowglass could. Because I liked that Simone had left me a reputation that was as morally gray as it was. I really needed to better consider what my moral compass said about doing crime, but I liked being known for having done crime.

Phoenix was right, about one thing: I was afraid of being caught for crimes. Particularly butting heads with that MCO agent tonight, it had become obvious that everything I was starting to like about this life would be much easier to take away if I got caught doing something illegal. But that meant we needed to be careful, not necessarily that we needed to walk the straight and narrow.

I started to say something else, but my voice caught as I realized tears were flowing and there was nothing I could do to get them to stop, and what actually came out of my mouth was, “You’re the first person that I’ve really cared about in a long time, and I was afraid you were just using me.”

“Oh, honey!” her worried frown cleared up, removing the pensive look she’d been regarding me with silently as I had time to process. She stood up and folded me in a deep hug, then pulled me down to sit next to her. She put a hand on my cheek to turn my face to hers, and told me the most perversely romantic thing I’ve ever heard. “Of course I’m using you. I hope you’re using me. That’s what a relationship is. We use each other, over and over, until we can’t even conceive of not having the other one to use.”

I was so nonplussed by her absurdly pragmatic definition of love that my tears stopped and I must have burst into a grin. Maybe I was just being naive, and this was going to end with me dead or in jail, Chelsea skipping away and leaving me to rot. But it all made so much sense coming from her, and if she was lying, she was so good at it that I’d never see through it. And, I realized, she was right. Nobody had needed me in a long time. I wanted her to use me.

I think she got it, without me having to say it in words. Because she fished out the masks, and with a laugh, said, “Now if that’s settled... I think we had a plan for our own Eyes Wide Shut party?”

1:30 PM, Sunday, November 1, 2015—Ballard Locks

Chelsea and I had gone out for breakfast, and picked a small bakery mostly because it was empty enough that we felt comfortable talking. Over a regenerator-sized pile of muffins and scones, I started, “I’ve thought about it. I’m with you on this. I want to help you do what you want. But I have some requirements.”

“Okay, hit me,” she said, tearing into her own, only slightly smaller, non-regenerating-exemplar-sized pastries.

“I don’t want to die, and I have a strong aversion to going to jail.”

“Likewise,” she allowed.

“So whatever we get into, I want to make sure we fully understand the risks, and have plans. Like, last night, I don’t think we wound up needing most of what we prepared, but I felt a lot more confident having it.” She nodded that she was in full agreement, so I moved on to, “Which means I need you to be honest with me about what we’re actually doing. Accept that I’m with you all the way, and I’ll give you plenty of warning if that’s changing. But no more surprise lair raids, right?”

“Fair enough. Like I said last night, that kind of shit is what I grew up doing, and I don’t know if I can get it right 100% of the time. But I’m going to try hard, because I don’t want to fuck this up.”

I figured that was all I could ask for, because there were a few very important things that I didn’t feel comfortable enough to share that might affect her, but I figured I could start opening them up, “Something of a tangent, but related: I’m pretty damn rusty. I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to maintain most of the more applicable skills, so you need to know that I might not be able to pull off the kinds of things you’d expect from a recent Whateley grad. So don’t make any assumptions about my skill levels from what you’ve heard I used to be able to do: if you need me to be able to do something, ask and I’ll let you know whether I’m confident about it or need more practice time before we’re relying on me getting it right in a crisis.”

She seemed a little confused, and I was worried she’d call me on being able to forget important things when she knew I had exemplar memory, but she just said, “I keep forgetting you’ve been legit for a few years. I’ll keep that in mind. I did notice you were a little rusty with the martial arts. As it happens, I haven’t had a good regular sparring partner to keep my skills up since I left Whateley, so if you want to make that a regular thing...”

“Absolutely,” I smiled. I’d wanted to try to do that kind of thing anyway, but didn’t have the money for martial arts classes. Spending more time with my girl was a win-win, even if most of it would be her kicking my ass. I decided to mention something else that I was worried about, “Also, you said ‘legit’ and it’s really closer to ‘laying low.’ One of my last big jobs went sideways, and there may be some people looking for me about it, and I’m not really sure who I pissed off. So the more we do that interacts with other people in the community, the more risk you have of getting sucked into my drama.”

She gave me a rueful grin, “I owe Patty five bucks. She had guessed it was something like that, when I asked her about you. Honestly, that’s a risk, but I think you’ll find it balances nicely with my issues. To wit: the worst I’ve heard anyone say about you from Whateley is that you were kind of antisocial, but nobody I know about has any kind of grudge for things you did in school. Because of Patty’s fuckups, I had pissed off some of the most powerful kids on campus when I was still in junior high. Some of them are pretty big deal heroes these days. I think I squared things with most of them before I left such that they’re not actively trying to find something to stick to me, but you already saw last night with TP, the toilet paper that avenges, that I’m not exactly going to get the benefit of the doubt from any cape that knew me or my sister.”

I nearly snorted coffee at her joke about Tin Phoenix’s initials, and nodded that I accepted her drama in exchange for her accepting mine. “Last thing, I really do want to make this music career work, and that’s going to have to take priority over a lot of things we could be working on. Honestly, if we start touring, it could make things hard for a relationship in general.”

She gave my hand a squeeze and just said, “I started off thinking I was going after a master burglar who happened to like music, and realized it was way hotter than I expected that I was going after a rock star that happens to also break into buildings. Let’s just say I’m on board with being your groupie.” She ended the squeeze with a leering grin, “I am turned on by this.“

This time I did snort coffee with my laugh, “Ow! Okay. Now that I’ve talked about me nonstop, it’s your turn. What do you actually want out of this?”

Chelsea sat back and gave it some serious thought, while both of us worked on our pastries in silence. Finally, she said, “I wasn’t lying about wanting to make things and sell them for legitimate ends. I’d love it if I was a billionaire off of my public transit contracts. But nobody at school really ever took me seriously as a gadgeteer. People like Loophole, who made fucking Kevra when she was a sophomore, have always had an edge on me. I’m just getting into prototype stage on tech I’ve been working on since I was in junior high. So I kind of feel like I need to cheat.”

“Orbweaver’s research,” I nodded.

“Exactly. I’m already learning a lot from how he made his stuff. They’re mostly devises, so not a big help, and that paralysis gun broke immediately, but his theories about subspace are giving me ideas. And I may come up with some other targets like that, whose research can help with my own projects.”

“Makes sense to me,” I allowed. “Obviously, I’m way more onboard if we’re going after villains, since that seems like there’s less risk of going to jail. But if you needed to go after a cape... I think I’d be on board as long as we weren’t endangering the public and we could do it with as minimal as possible a risk of getting caught.”

“Definitely,” she said. “We’re totally on the same page about this. I have no designs on being a villain. I don’t want to sign on with the Syndicate. I just want to make my inventions, become fabulously successful and wealthy, and be caught in scandalous tabloid photos with my smoking hot rock star girlfriend. That last one is a new one, but it’s getting pretty high up there in my goals list.”

“Interesting,” I grinned, “because my own goals have recently turned from just being a rock star to being an international woman of mystery, rolling into town, selling out shows, and no one being the wiser that I and a beautiful femme fatale were the ones who stole the microfiche.”

“Shit,” she gave me a mock frown, “I thought I had another decade or more to grow into being a femme fatale. I’m going to need to work harder at it if you need me to have that ready to go soon.”

We bantered for a while longer, finished our breakfast, and then I got a text from Katrina that they wanted to talk about some contacts they’d made at the club. Chelsea said she actually had some things to work on in the lab, so I ran home to change out of the little black dress that had been pretty heavy overkill for a Seattle Sunday morning breakfast, then met the band for a late lunch at a cool little seafood place near the locks.

“So you looked pretty pissed last night, but you’re looking real happy right now,” Katrina observed while we were waiting for our order.

“Yeah, we had some stuff to work out that seems to mostly be worked out,” I told them. “And while it wasn’t initially related, it came with a bonus of making sure we were on the same page about my rock-and-roll lifestyle.”

“Well good, because Chelsea was actually a big help last night,” she elaborated. “We got an invite this morning to play a locals night over at the Crocodile in a couple of weeks.”

“Awesome. That’s a pretty good little venue.”

“Right. It sounds like we’re all up for that then?” Nobody disagreed, so she went on, “But before they can book us... we need to decide on a band name. Are we going to stay Voss Populi, or keep that as our side project and have a new name that’s all-inclusive.”

“Here’s the deal,” I admitted, “I’m not necessarily opposed to keeping the name, except that, well, it’s your actual name. And I should probably include you three in a little bit about what Chelsea and I talked about this morning.” Three pairs of eyes narrowed, so I hastened to explain, “We both have enemies, and may get some more. We’re both in agreement that we’re going to do our absolute best to avoid it, but I can’t promise that some of my extracurricular activities won’t blow back on the band. So I’m not sure you want it to be so easy to get at your real identities, and I’m kind of afraid you’ll want to back out entirely because I’m putting you at risk.”

The three of them shared a look, and it was Hunter who asked, “Are you a supervillain?”

“Definitely not,” I assured them. “But, well, I’m not a superhero either, so any powered activities I get up to are likely to be more on the gray middle of the spectrum.”

“But we’re not going to be accessories, before or after the fact?” he said.

“It is my foremost intention that you will not. What I’m worried about is that I may piss someone off that connects me to the band and either comes after you directly or comes after me while I’m with you and you’ll be in harm’s way.”

There was another minute of silence as they looked at one another while thinking it through. Finally, it was Dominic who explained, “That... actually doesn’t seem that much worse than what we’d already talked about, which was H1 bigots causing problems.”

Hunter added to that with, “Yeah. ‘Local Band Survives Supervillain Attack’ is a way better headline than ‘Humanity First Protests Rock Group.’“

Katrina finished up with, “Maybe I’m just too young to confront how scared I’d actually be... but we kind of knew what we were getting into when we asked you in the first place. I mean, we did meet you based on you having a martial arts battle with a villain in the middle of the club. And Rick doesn’t have nearly the powers you have, but I’ve thought about that kind of thing when thinking about our life together in the future. I say bring it.”

I was glad they weren’t running around in fear, but I worried they didn’t really get what they were signing up for, so I asked, “But what about your family name?”

She shrugged, “It’s probably too late. If we’d all used stage names to start with, we might have kept it a secret. But it’s all online at this point for mildly clever fans to put on our wiki page as soon as we’re popular enough to have a wiki page.”

Dominic added, “We should probably make sure Mom and Dad are cool with it, but they already signed off on it for the band before. If things get so bad that villains are coming after them to get to us to get to you, it’s on us for not dealing with the situation way earlier.”

“I’m fine with it,” Hunter finished.

Katrina mused, “It’s a little weird that we’ll all be like, ‘We are Voss Populi! I’m Katrina Voss, this is my brother Dominic, his boyfriend Hunter... and our frontwoman, Joanna Reichs.’ I’m not sure it plays.”

“Well...” I added, “you know my name’s not actually Joanna, right? It’s just the cover ID I use to make it harder for people that might know my real identity to find me. It’s not even my main cover ID, but I didn’t want to make it easy for people to find my apartment based on knowing the ID that’s under.”

“I’m annoyed I didn’t even think that would be the case, since it makes a lot of sense,” Hunter said.

Katrina just said, “I figured.”

“So it wouldn’t be that hard for me to take on a new stage name, if you don’t mind me being an honorary member of the family.”

“Like, Eurydice Voss?” Dominic asked.

“God, please no,” I said, “I’d sound so pretentious.” I’d been posting my videos under a channel named Eurydice Replies, mostly because I’d been in a very goth mindset the first night I started recording them.

After the food arrived, we spent most of the rest of the meal workshopping stage names for me, and also deciding whether Hunter was ready for the level of commitment implied by taking his boyfriend’s last name, even if just for a stage name. In the end, he got talked into it, and I got the sense that somehow this had all been according to Katrina’s plans to step up the eventual wedding of her brother to her drummer. For me we settled on Natalia, which I liked the sound of and which was apparently one of their old family names.

I mentally added “aka Natalia Voss” to my growing list of aliases, and we got into the details of planning Voss Populi’s big debut as a four-piece.

4:00 PM, Friday, November 13, 2015—SeaTac

I’d chosen a vantage point that gave me a clear view of the door below, but where I wouldn’t be easily visible from those exiting in a hurry. They’d killed the lights in the alley before they started their heist, but that made almost no difference to me, even without the special lenses in my own suit, since there were ample ambient EM signals to get a good idea of the space and my targets. I honestly would have preferred my own costume to the tactical gear I was wearing, particularly since this paintball-style facemask wasn’t very comfortable. But what my employers wanted, they got, at least in terms of costume and tactics.

Right on time, the trio burst through the door, each in their own night-black tactical outfits. They knew something was likely to try to stop them, but they didn’t know when, and their backpacks full of stolen cash made them ungainly going through the door. One actually did a full upper sweep and nearly spotted me, but got bumped by her partner exiting the door behind her for long enough that I could duck down and then pop back up once she’d looked away. They started for the getaway car they had parked just down the alley, and that was my cue. I triggered the explosive in the vehicle, and it erupted in a flash of light, smoke, and some brief flames. With the distraction, I dived down to the alley.

The observant woman had expected the trick, and turned in time to see me drop, starting to dodge back while croaking out a warning. I wasn’t aiming for her, though, and I arrested my two-story fall onto the man in the back. He landed on his sacks of money, so I didn’t think I’d seriously injured him, particularly since I was able to pull off the roll I’d been practicing and redirect a lot of my downward momentum into leaping forward off of him onto the man in the lead.

To his credit, the robber on point was the best among them at fighting, and he managed to hear my landing and turn in time to roll with my shoulder to his midsection, turning my inertia against me and forcing me to do an ungainly cartwheel to arrest my upset plans and recover back to my feet, facing him. The woman was already bolting the other way down the alley, the man I’d tackled was struggling to get up, and I was in between the leader and their getaway vehicle.

He had his own face-concealing mask, but he was a big guy and his stance was cocky. Rather than running, he dropped the bag in his left hand and settled into a fighting stance. He thought he could just take me down here. With nearly a foot of height and over a hundred pounds on me, it probably didn’t even occur to him that he could lose.

It took me about ten seconds to have him on his face and in cuffs.

That had been long enough for the man I’d originally tackled to get up. He was fatter, obviously not going to win in a sprint, so he’d pulled a pistol while I was cuffing his partner, and started firing. Faint pops of the air-jet cycling sent pellets past me as I was already rolling out of the way, trying to stay under his likely arc of fire and move unpredictably. It was a maneuver that came surprisingly easily, but would have been harder dealing with bullets moving at actual supersonic speeds. As it was, I still felt a faint hit to my left arm and a voice in my ear said, “Flesh wound. Arm mildly immobilized.” I felt mechanisms in my outfit tightening up the arm along with the voice, making it harder to move. But the guy was out of bullets.

He was the kind of asshole that runs out of bullets against a hero and then throws the gun. I caught it out of the air with my right hand and spun around to toss it back into his midsection. He grunted and fell back onto his ass and the bags. While I was impressed at my own reflexes allowing me to pull that off, I didn’t let that slow me down. I cleared the few yards back to the guy, shoved him back down, rolled him over, and cuffed him. I wanted to get in an admonition about throwing the gun, but it wouldn’t have been professional. Besides, I had a runner to catch.

She had a good lead on me, but hadn’t had the time I’d had to memorize the layout of the maze of alleys and obstacles back here. I made a guess where she’d get funneled, and took a shortcut over a fence and around a corner. Sure enough, I caught the fuzz of her comms in the air, and then a glimpse of her trying her own parkour escape a dozen yards away. I scrambled up a drainpipe onto the top of a building, more out of sheer muscular talent than really having an effective idea of how to do a wall climb, took a running bound to the next rooftop, and dropped down a few yards behind her as she was exiting the alley.

The area ahead was a cluster of parked cars and sidewalk obstacles, and she actually tried to use them to get out ahead of me. She was pretty good, and the chase reminded me of the start of Casino Royale: she was much more graceful at freerunning, but I had her heavily outmatched on speed, strength, and endurance. I just ran alongside the cars, dodging the parking meters and trees on the sidewalk, and then took a flying leap over the hood of a car as she decided to make a break across the street. When she heard me land five feet behind her, her back exposed and in the middle of a two-lane street, she had the good sense to just take a knee and put her hands up so I wouldn’t tackle her.

“And that’s the scenario, everyone!” our comms all said in the Indian-accented tones of Ms. Washington. The floodlights in the warehouse roof came on, ten feet above the “rooftops” that had been mocked up into a labyrinthine cityscape. In the dark, the obstacles had done a good job of looking like real objects, but the bright lights revealed them as the lightly-painted foam over structural supports they really were. I had to hand it to my new employers: they’d made a pretty convincing and useful cityscape obstacle course in a relatively small space and on a reasonable budget. “Mr. Iredell, Ms. Ellsworth, and Mr. Peckham, meet me back in the training room for the debrief. Ms. Hayes, you can hit the showers.”

The generically named National Training System liked to use the last names of supreme court justices for its guests and presidents for its staff, or at least that was what they were doing this month, and since I was working under the alias Ms. Hayes, I gratefully hit the showers. Chelsea had suggested this gig after a few days of sparring, as a way to get some more practice where they’d actually pay me. Earlier in the week I’d done work for some more legit-seeming operations in another location, where they had me pose as a powered hostile to train police in group tactics. But since I’d been referred by Chelsea, they had me sign some NDAs and for the past couple of days I’d been down in a nondescript warehouse near the airport helping criminals figure out how to handle heroes that might come after them. I somehow bet the first group didn’t know about the second group.

I’d had time to get showered, dressed, and wolf down some snack bars after the workout by the time Ms. Washington came in to debrief me. She was a tall Indian woman of slightly above-average appearance in a nice but non-threatening suit: exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be heading up a training seminar in the Pacific Northwest. I suspected she could step herself up to “extremely above-average” with some cosmetics, and “very-threatening” with the right clothing. Her English was so good that I suspected the slight accent she maintained was another one of her ploys to keep people from realizing that she was dangerously competent. I hadn’t really worked out whether she was powered, but that probably wouldn’t matter.

“Good going out there, today,” she complimented me. “We’ve really enjoyed having you working with us. I’ll email you the schedule for next week, and your payment has already been wired to the account you specified.”

“Thanks,” I said. “This has been a lot of fun.”

“We’re always happy to have a powered individual as a resource. There’s a lot we can do with highly trained professionals and gadgets, but a lot of our guests don’t really understand what they might be in for until they experience it directly.”

“Until a 250 pound gorilla gets put on his butt by a girl, you mean?”

“Exactly,” she smiled. “I do have a debrief for you, but I doubt it would be anything you don’t already know.” Off my nod, she continued, “You’re good but unpolished in your martial arts. I think your referring contact said you were rusty and working on it? I’d suggest working on that as much as you can. And your parkour skills are extremely raw. We’d like you to improve those. There’s a gym we use on the north side that has good freerunning classes, and as a bonus we’ve gotten you a six month membership there. Think of it as a way of saying we hope you stay on the team.”

“Awesome, thanks!” I told her, meaning it. Free training was free training, and I wasn’t going to pass it up.

“On the positive side, I was very impressed with how you maintained your composure and professionalism out there today. We had a long talk with Mr. Iredell about taking women for granted and Mr. Peckham about throwing his gun at you.”

“They were just in their first week, right? At this rate, they’re not going to survive their first encounter.”

“Sadly, they only paid for the one-week seminar,” she frowned, “and I share your worries. We’ll be keeping tabs on them. There’s already a betting pool for how long it takes them to be arrested.”

This whole thing was very strange. I’d swallowed my ethical considerations about training criminals to be better at crime because Whateley students on both sides of the law already came with a lot of this training, which seemed unfair to normal criminals, and because the outfit seemed to stress avoidance and evasion over combat. The freerunning gym was all about getting them comfortable trying to get away from heroes, and as far as I could tell their martial arts emphasized distraction and redirection as a way to escape. They gave them guns because they might have them in the real world, but these training scenarios seemed largely geared around pointing out what a bad idea it was to try to shoot or fight a hero: you’d probably just piss her off. “Ms. Ellsworth might do alright,” I ventured.

“Yes, of all of them she did have the most sense. But she did abandon her team at the first opportunity, which will be an instinct that serves her well in the short term but not in the long. But you look dressed and ready, so I shan’t detain you any longer. Have a good weekend.”

“You too!” I told her, and headed out. Fortunately, the way they had this geared as a business training school, they hadn’t tried to get me to work nights yet, so I had plenty of time to take the train downtown and get over to the Crocodile for our gig tonight.

The way everything was going so well, I didn’t even really notice that it was Friday the 13th...

8:30 PM, Friday, November 13, 2015—Downtown

Our set had gone remarkably well for a half dozen songs we’d just written and rehearsed in the last few weeks. The audience had liked us, Rick and Chelsea had seemed to be getting good video from the crowd, Chelsea had cobbled together a camera drone for some hopefully good aerial shots to cut in, and Katrina knew the sound guy so was going to get a recording straight from the board. In these multimedia times, the fans you made in the room were just the first thrust of the ones you were going to make online.

We’d just gotten off stage and were decompressing in the club’s small green room before heading out to meet Rick and Chelsea when there was a knock at the door. Dominic opened it to a cute young woman with platinum blonde hair that was still darker than her pale skin, wearing black leather pants and an extremely tight red leather jacket. “Was excellent set,” she exclaimed in a thick Russian accent, “You are very good at music. Very good.” Everyone in the band let their guards down, myself included, until she shoved Dominic out of the way, seamlessly drew a sword with a thin, red-tinted blade from nowhere, and dived at me across the tiny room. “Is shame I have to deliver message now, but was only place I know to find you,” she said, brutally stabbing the blade into my torso again and again. I tried to dodge, to fight her off, but she was faster than me and had surprise on her side. She walked one final thrust all the way through my abdomen, catching me in a hug to hiss in my ear, “The Oneiromancer sends his regards.” Then she was gone, dashing out of the room before the others had even realized what was happening.

The pain was worse than anything I’d ever felt. To be fair, being run through multiple times with a sword was probably at least a couple orders of magnitude worse than any injury I’d had before. I thought about screaming, I thought about trying to tough it out, but, instead, I just fainted.

I came to only a few minutes later, but at the time I had no idea how long I’d been out. I still hurt, but the pain was much less: an itching ache throughout my torso. “—should have called an ambulance,” I heard Hunter saying.

“No, you did the right thing,” Chelsea replied, close at hand. “See, the wounds are already closing up. All calling an ambulance would have done was get the cops involved in something we probably don’t want them in. Are the rest of you okay?”

“Just a bruise from where she palm-checked me,” Dominic said. “The little Russian maniac was strong.”

“Rapier Red,” said Rick. As my eyes fluttered open, I could see him checking his phone, “At least that seems the most likely from a Russian woman that uses a red sword. Mutant assassin, from what people seem to know about her. I mean, she’s an assassin who is also a mutant, not that she exclusively assassinates mutants and... hey... she’s up.”

I glanced over at Chelsea, who was sitting to my left, holding my hand in her right while I could see she’d moved a blood-soaked towel away from presumably applying pressure to my several sucking chest wounds. A smile overtook her face when she saw I was awake, and I got the sense that she hadn’t been quite so certain as she was trying to pretend. “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to fight any assassins without warning me, babe,” she said. Her voice almost caught, so it was just more cover over how worried she’d been.

“Sorry,” I told her, then glanced around to the group. “Sorry everyone. This is the kind of thing I was warning you about. Didn’t expect it so soon, though,” it hurt to talk that much.

“Should we pretend you died for a while so she reports back that she killed you?” Katrina asked, obviously not enjoying that idea right after our first big gig.

I looked down at my chest, and started taking stock. I’d been propped up on a jacket, so I was able to get some kind of vantage over my own chest to see that one of my favorite t-shirts was ruined and it felt like at least one of my bra straps had been cut in the attack so that was barely holding things together. I used my right hand to probe the rapidly healing wounds. She’d gotten me less than I thought: one right into my right breast, one along my left side, one that glanced off my left shoulder, and the big one through my abdomen. I met Chelsea’s eyes and saw she’d reached the same conclusion I had, so I explained, “She wasn’t trying to kill me. She hit a bunch of things that weren’t particularly lethal unless I bled to death. This was a message. She’ll probably be back.”

“I don’t get it,” Hunter said.

“Unfortunately, I do,” I said. “And I don’t think it would help anything for you to know why. It might just make you a target. I’m just glad she didn’t seem to care about hurting any of you.”

“Yeah, really, we don’t heal nearly that fast,” Dominic said.

That jogged Chelsea’s attention, “Speaking of which, everyone that got any of her blood on you, clean it off right now, and as completely as you can. I doubt she’s a strong enough regenerator for her blood to count as a biohazard, but better safe than sorry.”

I hadn’t even know that was a possibility, so I shrugged sheepishly and said, “I don’t know either.”

Fortunately, the green room did have a full sink, and everyone hurried to get clean. I scraped off what I could with the ruins of my shirt, trying to keep my right breast from flopping loose of my damaged bra, and then pulled on the hoodie that I’d fortunately not been wearing when I got stabbed, zipping it back up to preserve what was left of my rapier-removed modesty. We did what we could to clean up where I’d bled on the floor, got everyone cleaned up, and were ready to head out before the next band wanted the green room.

I was back to feeling nearly 100%, though starving, when we pulled into a diner in Fremont. At least the Vosses had a van, because I hadn’t wanted to take the bus. It was a tight squeeze with all the instruments, but we made it work. Chelsea must have said something to them as we got out, because the four of them got a booth a few down from the one that she picked for the two of us.

“We’re going to get you fed, then you’re going to spill,” she said, and cut off my immediate objection, “Not to the band, just to me. I agree that they’re better off not knowing anything that Russian assassins may be after, but I have a better chance of defending myself.”

I nodded, we put in our order, and I actually started explaining before the food showed up. “I mentioned some people might be after me. Apparently, one of them hired her. I have something from the job that went sideways, and I think she wants it. So they probably don’t want to kill me until they get it.”

She desperately looked like she wanted to ask who and what it was, then decided not to pry if I wasn’t volunteering. Instead, she just said, “But it doesn’t make sense to just try to gut you. She should have tried to track you back to your safehouse.”

“Yeah, I know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either. She said that was the first time she’d been able to find me, which could be true. I’m pretty paranoid about making sure nobody follows me home, though, but I don’t know how she’d know that if she hadn’t tried to follow me before. Maybe she’s just not very patient...”

Something about that nagged at me as we made small talk waiting for the food, and then while I busily ate a couple of hamburgers and drank a milkshake. It took the edge off, but I could tell I’d still want to eat a bunch more when I got home. Was she following me even now? Would I have to tell everyone to try to avoid a tail? Did she have powers that would make it easier to follow me? Was my cell phone in the wrong pocket?

That last worry flickered across my mind, and I caught it before heavier thoughts suppressed it. Why was I worried about where my phone was? I felt my left front pocket, where I usually kept it because I still hadn’t worked myself up to using a purse. And as I thought about it, I realized that it wasn’t just its weight that let me know where it was: I could see regular waves of radio signals washing out of the phone, but I could also feel them if I wasn’t looking. I’d gotten used to the sensation of them washing over my left thigh. And there was a similar sensation coming from near my tailbone.

Curiously, I reached my fingers down to where I could feel the radio waves, Chelsea tilting her head in curiosity as she watched me struggle with the back of my pants. If I hadn’t had the enhanced senses, I might not have noticed it, but something flexible but not fabric was definitely affixed to my underwear. I carefully pulled it loose, and showed it to her. It was a little black circle, barely wider than my thumb, but I could see faint traceries of electricity running through it. “It’s a chip of some kind,” I explained. “I think Red must have planted it when she was stabbing me.”

“Not very patient, indeed,” Chelsea smirked, finally solving the puzzle. “She stabs the hell out of you and you go back to your safehouse as soon as you can, just in case she tries again. And she’s got a micro tracker to lead her right there. Probably emits in bursts so you’re unlikely to find it with a bug scanner... unless being a bug scanner is one of your superpowers.”

“Or if you have really sensitive skin and notice someone’s put a sticker in your panties,” I joked lamely. I wasn’t great at jokes. Chelsea was so fascinated by the chip that she didn’t even give me a pity chuckle. “Can you figure anything out about it?”

“Definitely. And if my guess is right about its broadcast frequency and how narrow the communication channel has to be... I think I might be able to take us straight to a surprise round two...”

11:00 PM, Friday, November 13, 2015—University of Washington

I’d been walking across town for about an hour. I was taking my time, and the to-go sandwiches had been a big help, but my hoodie with no undershirt wasn’t exactly the best protection against the chilly, wet Seattle evening. Plus the way my right breast bounced due to the cut bra strap had gone from distracting to annoying over the course of the hour.

But such was the life of an ambulatory stalling tactic.

The band had driven Chelsea to her lab while I stayed and had some more to eat, then began walking this way. If Rapier Red was watching, we were hopeful that she’d think I’d sent them away to protect them, and was taking a back way to my safehouse. In actuality, Chelsea needed the time to prepare. We figured if I’d gone straight to her lab with the bug, and then we stayed put for however long she needed to tinker, Red might just burst in assuming it was where I’d gone to ground.

At least, in the dripping wetness of a late Friday night, I had the campus to myself. The raindrops looked beautiful against the lamp posts arrayed across the massive greenway between the stadium and the fountain. And I could be reasonably certain that, if she was trying to follow me discretely, wandering across a few blocks of wide-open pedestrian-only student recreational space was giving her fits.

My phone rang from Chelsea’s number, and when I answered she told me, “You can start heading in, I’m just about done. I’ve got your suit and some weapon options laid out and ready.” Fortunately, I’d finally relented to her desire to add some useful tech to my suit, so we hadn’t had to figure out how to go get it from my apartment. “By the way, you might have mentioned that Red was in the class ahead of you at school. That’s probably how she recognized you from your videos.”

“I didn’t really pay much attention to the foreign exchange students,” I hedged, then pivoted on the touchy subject, “But I guess thank you Whateley, and your quite possibly insane setup that means most mutant heroes and villains are going to have no useful secret identity from one another.”

“Yeah,” she grumbled, “most people are much classier about it, but it’s a pretty big flaw. In this case, though, at least it means my sources also knew something about her: pretty strong exemplar and manifestor who can create metal in contact with her body, and likes to use it to make swords and armor. Anyway, text me when you’re a couple minutes out. See you in a few.”

I had those few minutes wandering through the middle of campus to muse on whether this at least meant my secret wasn’t totally blown. Would a powered assassin share what she knew about me with the client, or just hold onto that advantage? Had trying to have public success basically doomed me to a whole succession of Simone’s enemies tracking me down? Was this just the first of the maniacs trying to exact retribution for something I hadn’t even had a part in?

As instructed, I texted Chelsea when I was almost there, took a couple of turns around a building I didn’t have to just in case she was actually on my tail and not just monitoring me remotely, and dashed into the lab. As announced, my costume was laid out, and she’d even had the foresight to have a dry towel next to it. I gave Chelsea a grateful kiss on the cheek as I handed her the bug. She was already in full costume except for her cowl, the outfit loaded down with a few rounded, thick plates—almost bricks—attached to various mounting points I’d noticed before on the costume. I wasn’t sure if they were modular gadgets, or just extra batteries for her built-in ones. Maybe both. She grinned, took the chip, and waved me to get ready while she finished tinkering with the pad upon which the Jaunt sled usually sat.

I’d gotten over modesty with Chelsea after the first couple sleepovers, so I just shucked out of my clothes and wig, including the defeated bra but keeping the mostly-dry underwear, toweled off as quickly as possible, and hastily struggled into my costume. I could tell there was something a bit different about it, probably to do with the wires I’d noticed running through the lining. It now had a few sewn-in and reinforced mounting points of its own to more easily attach optional extras.

Chelsea gave me the run-down while I dressed, managing to multi-task with whatever she was doing at her console. “I got the anti-grav working, but power’s going to be an issue because you’re limited to the batteries I could fit in the belt. I figure you’ll have less than a minute at full weightlessness, but proportionately longer at lower ratios. The dial on the left of your belt controls it. I wanted to put in a personal forcefield generator but they’re not really my specialty and I couldn’t figure out a good solution for one that would do kinetics only and ignore your own powers. But I was able to add a little more Kevra and flexible trauma-plates to some major areas. I wasn’t planning on swords, though, so try not to test it. I made the wifi screamers you asked for, and they’re in the front right belt pocket. Those should be weirdly useful. One of my old Cobra pistols is already on the belt; it’s mostly full of web canisters, per your request. You still need gear to fight swords, so I put out the sais and I’d suggest a sword, too, and maybe those bracers if they’re not going to interfere with your mobility.

By the time I was done buckling everything on, I was feeling substantially more like Deadpool than Spider-Man. Sais and pistol on the back of my belt at an angle to hold still without poking me in the butt, a wakizashi attached to the hardpoints on my back so the handle poked over my left shoulder, and thick metal bracers that covered my forearms and the back of my hands. I just wished I’d had time to actually practice with all of this stuff. At least in our sparring, I’d worked out that Simone’s martial training had included melee weapons and guns, too, so I’d only be mostly ineffectual against a stronger exemplar assassin who specialized in swords.

I tried the dial on the belt like Chelsea had instructed, and I could feel and see the wires she’d woven throughout the suit radiating some strangely colored energy. Simultaneously, I felt a little lighter, or at least more buoyant, like wading through a pool. With an experimental hop, I could definitely feel how much higher I could jump with this tech running. I didn’t think it would make a huge difference, but it might be a nice trick to be able to pull off. I dialed it back off, then headed over to the platform.

Chelsea had attached the bug to wires via three alligator clamps, and mounted it under some small contraption that made sense to her, the whole kludged apparatus hooked into her laptop and thence into the console for the platform. “Without the sled, this will be a one-way trip, so let’s hope Red didn’t give up and get halfway back to Russia already,” she noted. “It will probably drop us within a few yards of her, depending on how good my triangulation is. You ready?”

As I pulled on my cowl, I asked, “What if she’s in a building so that within a few yards puts us in a wall? Are there safeguards against materializing in a solid object?”

She gave me a thoughtful calculating look, ran a finger across her pursed lips in consideration, slowly pulled on her own cowl and goggles, said, “I’m sure it’s fine!” and pressed a button before I could try to talk her out of it.

We did not, in fact, materialize in a wall.

Instead, we appeared in the middle of a tiered parking lot, in the drizzling rain, behind a multi-story red brick building that I thought might be one of the campus halls or dorms. We were definitely near the lab. Even late on a Friday night, the lot had several cars parked across its surface, but the one we were nearest was a fairly nondescript gray rental sedan which my exemplar memory told me I’d caught sight of a few times during my walk across campus. Standing less than ten feet away from the driver, it was obviously Rapier Red, leaning back in her seat, having a coffee, and watching the screen of a laptop.

To her credit, her peripheral vision was totally on-point. I wasn’t sure whether we’d appeared in a flash of light, but we’d definitely appeared out of nowhere in a pretty well-lit parking lot. I saw Red glance over, then seamlessly dive across the passenger seat and slide out the far door, putting the car in between us. “Plan Ah was much easier,” she yelled over the car, “you go to ground, I find what I am looking for, I kill you quickly. You will not like Plan Bey as much. In it, I kill your friend and torture you until you tell me what I need to know.”

As much as I wanted to get into my first verbal sparring match with a nemesis, it was pretty clear Red was just stalling to give herself time to adjust to us appearing out of nowhere. Chelsea was already moving left to get around the hood of the car and I flanked right around the trunk. Deciding to make good on her threat, Red dove at Chelsea as soon as she was in line, manifesting another red rapier as she charged.

I had a moment of worry that she was going to impale my girlfriend just as easily as she had me, but even with Red’s presumably superior exemplar rating, Chelsea was both much better at fighting that me and much less surprised. She did have a PFG, which sparked as she brush blocked the blade off line and past, then engaged Red in a series of kicks and punches that were almost too fast for me to follow. It was fairly clear that Chelsea was probably not going to win against a much more powerful opponent with a sword, but it gave me time to catch back up, and try to engage.

While I’d timed my strike well enough that I wasn’t in danger of hitting Chelsea, and it looked like I was going to nail Red in the small of her back, my bracer suddenly clanged off of the back of a breastplate that appeared just long enough to halt the strike, and then faded away. Apparently, “she can make armor” wasn’t specific enough. She could make armor where she needed it and only for as long as she needed it.

But at least we had her in a position that she didn’t want to be in: surrounded by two prepared fighters that probably weren’t her equal individually, but who might be close enough that she didn’t want to fight both of us at the same time. She suddenly created a second sword in her off hand and thrust them at both of us, opening up just enough space that she rolled away and then started running. Chelsea triggered her own far-superior anti-grav rig and made a leap after Red that was more like flying, while I just hoofed it after her, fumbling in my front belt pouch. I got close enough to tag her in the back with an open palm; she made another flash of armor, but when it disappeared the object I’d planted fell down and managed to catch on the small of her back. Let’s see how she liked having a tracker in her butt. The “wifi screamers” Chelsea had made for me did what they said on the label: the simple little gadget started emitting a bunch of radio noise that lit Red up like a firework to my senses, and which Chelsea could track on her suit’s scanners if needed.

Red was fast, and went up the ivy-covered embankment at the back of the lot at a speed that seemed frankly inhuman. Chelsea was barely keeping up with her bounding, and I twitched on my own rig to a slight decrease in gravity, making it strangely easy to race up the hill. We crested onto the road, and immediately across there was a towering, brutalist gray concrete dorm. It was easily fourteen stories tall, and after a three-story rise of what was probably common space, large balconies began to jut haphazardly from the walls, as if only two or three rooms per floor were allowed one and had been assigned randomly. I saw one set of three balconies right above one another, while they were much more widely spaced on the parallel set of windows. It was probably some architect’s crowning achievement, but it didn’t make a lot of sense visually.

What made less sense was Rapier Red making a break for it with an honest intention of climbing it.

Maybe she hadn’t actively noticed that her two opponents could selectively ignore gravity, or maybe she was just thought her superior prowess would give her an advantage on the confined balconies, and we’d be more likely to chase her there than into the building itself. Regardless of the reason, she manifested climbing spikes in rapid succession, slamming them into the wall and ascending rapidly toward the balconies. Chelsea followed easily, using some kind of small rockets built into her costume to let her ascend at zero G. I had to dial my own suit nearly to the top and wedge my fingers into the edges of the concrete to keep up, all the time worried about how much of my battery I was using on the climb.

We all hit the first large balcony in rapid succession and began a painful, close-in brawl. Between Chelsea’s force field and my bracers, we managed to block Red’s manifested knives and swords as they appeared, or at least turn them into glancing blows. But she was a skilled martial artist, and frequently an attack with a bladed weapon was a feint to deliver a solid kick or elbow. Out of my peripheral vision, I noticed students clustered at the nearby windows, recording us on their phones and chatting like this was the sporting event of the season. I just kept hoping Red figured we weren’t white hat enough to respond to threatening bystanders.

Through a combination of luck and experience learning one another’s fighting styles, we eventually got Red backed up to the edge of the balcony, where she had much less room to maneuver. Quickly realizing her predicament, she opted to bound away with an impossible-looking backflip that she turned into a wallrun, hooking around the edge of the building. We turned our anti-gravs back on to follow, and caught her ascending the oddly spaced balconies on the other side. This strange impasse continued for several more iterations: we’d catch her at a balcony, take a beating that never turned into a rout, finally get her into a bad position, and watch her flee further up the building. It was almost a stalemate, but I was keenly aware that Chelsea and I were reliant on battery charge in a way that Red wasn’t, and Chelsea didn’t have my regeneration or Red’s superior exemplar rating to keep her from becoming fatigued. Maybe Red was just trying to wear us down to the point that she could win in a rout.

Eventually, we climbed to the top of the building, a long flat space indented with the corners of the joined towers, and a spine of HVAC units running down the center. It gave an amazing view of the city, for what little I could spare of it, but was nearly pitch black. I could make out Chelsea and Red from their EM emissions, and get a sense of where not to blunder from the power running through the machinery, but the ground itself was hard to make out, and slick with rain. I lacked the language to really understand what was happening, other than a brutal fight against a murderous, superior opponent who neither of us could afford to let up on for a moment. Rather than a thrilling kung fu battle at the top of the world, it was a wet, dirty brawl in the dark. All she had to do was wear us down until we missed a thrust of a manifested blade, and all we could really hope for was to slowly maneuver her to the edge of the building and try to find an opportunity to knock her loose so she’d miss a balcony. Would a fourteen-story fall even matter to her?

It wasn’t looking great for us. Chelsea’s forcefield was running low on power, blunting but not stopping strikes, and I had no idea how much power my belt had left from the climb. I’d missed with two web shots that I’d tried in odd moments, and given up on the gun in such close quarters. Both of us had slices all along our costumes; the interior weave had held up, but it was only a matter of time before a cut penetrated. And Red had been easily using the HVAC spine as an obstacle to keep us from controlling her movement as we had on the balconies. At least she stayed busy enough not to gloat. It was a long, slow slog that seemed like it would inevitably result in Chelsea’s death and my torture.

And then reinforcements showed up.

“You’re under arrest!” a voice shouted from nearby, and I spared a glance to see a strange, almost-angelic figure in a hood, stitched-together rags, and “wings” of the same patchwork material. His wings and costume bristled with needle-like spikes. I recognized him from my research as the Thorncrow, one of Tin Phoenix’s teammates in the Emerald City Heroes. And I wasn’t sure who exactly he was trying to arrest. It probably started as all of us, until the assassin negligently flung a handful of manifested knives at him. To be fair, he was complicating a fight that was slowly but surely going to her benefit, but it probably wasn’t a very wise reaction to have. He did have to hastily dodge out of the way, and the knives ripped his wings a bit before dematerializing, but it helped him pick sides. Pissed, he flung a volley of his own thorns at Red as Chelsea and I jumped back. Several of them glanced off of her hastily materialized armor, but a few lodged in her face, neck, and hands before she could get her defenses raised.

Angry and maybe feeling the beginnings of a mild reaction to whatever chemical he used on his thorns (the internet suggested they were paralytic), Red growled and charged at Thorncrow, manifesting a large pike like she was going to impale him out of the air. She was fast, and, if my research was right, he was about on my level as far as capabilities went. The Emerald City Heroes usually took on fairly minor crimes. The poor guy might have been about to get skewered and ridden to the ground.

But he’d provided us some breathing room, and I snapped out the pistol again, unloading the rest of the clip to send four wads of expanding web foam at Red’s back and legs. Three of them hit, and her armor meant next to nothing as the chemical just expanded around it. It couldn’t get a good purchase on the slick roof to actually stick her feet to the ground, but it was a great distraction at the right moment. It slowed her and threw her off balance enough to miss Thorncrow with her charge, but Chelsea had been right behind her with a gravity-manipulating dropkick to knock her off the building.

Neither of us was willing to bet that it would be an incapacitating fall. Chelsea dived after, and I, with a moment of hesitation, turned my anti-grav back up and hopped down, desperately hoping I had enough juice left to feather fall to the ground. Somehow, it held out until I was only about ten feet above the ground, and I was able to roll with only some minor, easily-regenerated bruising from the sudden acceleration at the end. Chelsea floated down next to me, with Thorncrow not far behind. Rapier Red had managed to use the expanding web foam as a cushion and bounce off of the roof of a gazebo and a giant umbrella over one of the many tables in what seemed to be the dorm’s outdoor eating area. She looked pissed, and had bits of canvas stuck to what was left of the web foam coating her back. And she was fighting two other heroes.

I hadn’t seen Tin Phoenix in his actual costume before. It was reminiscent of what his counterpart from my reality wore: a sleek and somewhat bulky outfit in black and metallic highlights. But where in my reality, it was bulky because it was homemade from off-the-shelf body armor, here it was bulky because it was a deliberate tradeoff between power armor and fighting flexibility. The guy was basically MMA Iron Man, the ease with which he kicked and dodged almost ludicrous in the large suit. Beside him, less graceful but more powerful, was Buster Lion, a low level Superman-type that had compromised with the other two’s Wizard of Oz fetish by basically dressing like Hercules: a lion pelt with the head as a hood over a pro wrestler’s physique. He didn’t seem to have laid a finger on Red yet, but his slow swings clearly had enough power behind them that she had to at least keep an eye on him, and casual strikes with manifested blades just glanced off of his skin.

By the time the rest of us joined the brawl on the ground, it should have been obvious to Red that she needed to quit. She’d been slowly winning against two of us, but five was much different math. For some reason, she kept going, raging at the heroes’ arrival destroying her inevitable victory. Maybe she was just hoping to keep us off balance long enough for something to go her way, or for a window to open where she could escape. But we were in a fairly large outdoor area and doing a good job of keeping her away from the dorm itself, while not leaving her space to break for the tree-bounded roadway. The same grinding math that worked against Chelsea and I was now in our favor, and finally a combo between Chelsea and Tin Phoenix left Red distracted for long enough that Buster could actually land a hit. With a thump like a slab of beef hitting a stone wall, Rapier Red finally crashed unconscious to the ground.

Chelsea and I immediately took a step back, trying to stand in a nonthreatening posture, but the way the heroes kept their guards up it was totally clear that what had been a team-up of convenience might end suddenly now that the primary threat was down. At least TP was willing to start off with a question, “Shadowglass, what the hell is going on here?”

Figuring that there was no particular benefit to standing on my already fragile secret identity, since Phoenix already knew who I was even if his partners might not, I pulled up my cowl so he could see my face. When trying to convince superheroes not to kick your teeth in and arrest you, eye contact is a big help. “Rapier Red tried to murder me earlier and tracked me back here to finish the job when it didn’t take.” It was at least truth-adjacent, and sounded better than admitting that we’d tried to get the drop on her despite not being in truly immediate danger.

“Why didn’t you just call the cops?” he asked, not unjustly.

“We barely had time to get into costume, and we figured if she saw cops she’d either start killing them, or she’d disappear until she could get at us later while we’re trying to explain to the police why we were in costume on campus.” Again, it wasn’t completely untrue, and I hoped I wasn’t a terrible liar.

I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of look I was giving him, but I was trying for some combination of matter-of-fact, put-upon, and pleading. After he stared at me for what felt like forever, he finally said, “I don’t know if I buy that, but either way I’m not happy about this. Red was always a mega-bitch at school, and maybe you popping back up gave her an opportunity to settle a score, or maybe she was here on someone else’s dime. I’m just not sure if—”

He was interrupted by the flash of rockets as power suits leapt from a matte-black armored vehicle that had quietly pulled up the road below us. I cursed and pulled my cowl back down as we were bracketed by a trio of individuals with the MCO branding on their suits. While smaller than the near-mechs that they used in old episodes of Tales of the MCO, they were still far larger than TP’s suit. And they appeared heavily armed with various weapons. This... was a lot of people in power armor when all I had was some Kevra weave and a couple flexible trauma plates.

They didn’t blast us immediately, and there was a tense standoff as another squad of six MCO agents in lightweight tactical gear came out of the doors of the dorm now that their heavy armor squad was in position. I recognized the woman in the lead from the Halloween party: Yael Lee swaggered forward. When she was close enough to be heard with a raised voice, but not so close as to be in the line of fire if the power armor went to work, she announced, somewhat sarcastically, “Good job, Emerald City Heroes. You’ve finally bagged some real criminals. We’ll take the three of them into custody now.”

I watched TP’s body language as he thought it through. She was right; this was way beyond what his trio normally dealt with. And I wasn’t exactly his favorite person. Certainly Chelsea wasn’t. It would have been really easy to wash his hands of all of this, and let us get taken in. I wasn’t totally sure we didn’t all deserve it, to some extent or other.

Maybe if she’d been just a little less sarcastic, he might have done it.

“Rapier Red is under arrest, and will be turned over to the Seattle Police Department. I’m sure they can handle her with some brick cuffs and a few other precautions. She needs to answer for her murders in court, not disappear into some MCO black site. And Shadowglass and Little Bee were just engaging in self defense. Unless you’re saying it’s illegal for a mutants to use powers to defend themselves against serial killers?”

Yael frowned, stumped at a street level hero standing up to her in front of her squad. “I didn’t say this was a debate. We’re taking them into custody.”

Phoenix shook his head, “You don’t have any jurisdiction here, so you only get to take them if we back you up and say you were necessary to keep the peace. Which we’re not going to do. I’m going to bet you know at least two of us have the technical expertise to make your power armor not the advantage you think it is. Even if you could beat all of us, how’s it going to look that you assaulted a team of heroes, kidnapped two private mutant citizens who weren’t doing anything illegal, and, I’m betting here, distracted everyone long enough for the actual villain to wake up and get away?”

I really wanted to toss in a quip, but I was never very good at quips, and TP seemed to have this whole thing handled. He stared Agent Lee down for a good thirty seconds before she finally nodded, waved for her men to pack it in, and threw out one more barb so she’d get the last word, “Welcome to the big leagues, gentlemen. I’m sure we’ll all be watching your exploits very closely in the future.”

It wasn’t too much longer before the actual police started to show up. Buster Lion had sat on Red in case she woke up, and the other two stood to make it very clear that Chelsea and I weren’t leaving without giving a statement. He didn’t say anything else to us, though, probably afraid he’d say something he’d regret. Maybe if I’d actually had the memories of our high school friendship to draw on, I could have salvaged the situation. As it was, I expected I needed to stay off of his radar for as long as possible after this.

We finally got to go after telling our fibs again to the police. We checked each other for trackers, took an overly paranoid route back to Chelsea’s lab, and gratefully changed back to street clothes. We didn’t talk on the walk back to her apartment, just held hands and thought. Once we got back, though, over a bottle of wine we didn’t stop talking about the evening until we both fell asleep on the couch, exhausted and in one another’s arms, closer in our shared survival than we’d ever been before.

5:00 PM, Thursday, November 26, 2015—Ballard

Upon learning that I didn’t have family and that my girlfriend wasn’t going to make the trip back to New Orleans for hers, the Voss parents had insisted that Katrina and Dominic invite us to Thanksgiving at their house. There must have been some kind of discussion about keeping it light, because we didn’t have to work hard to deflect questions about our pasts and less savory activities. Instead, it was a pretty chill conversation over an early dinner about this and that. I liked Kat and Dom’s parents: they were aging ex-hippies who’d fallen into well-paying jobs despite themselves as a Boeing engineer and art gallery owner. It was pretty apparent why they didn’t have a problem with their kids’ choices in career and relationships.

It was... surprisingly nice. I hadn’t been able to make it back to Thanksgiving with my family in years, and in this reality that wasn’t even an option. My last couple of years it had just been a couple of days off to sit alone in my apartment. Honestly, I really hadn’t felt like I had much to be thankful for. Suddenly, in what seemed longer but was really only a few weeks, I had a place to go for the holiday and friends that wanted me to be there, a romantic relationship that was quickly becoming very serious, and a rapidly growing capacity to actually pursue work that I found fulfilling and exciting. It didn’t really all hit me until we were between courses, and I was able to excuse myself to the bathroom to have a cry.

There was a tap on the bathroom door and Chelsea said, “It’s me.” I let her in, closing the door behind her, and even with my regeneration handling the puffiness, she could tell I’d been crying. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

I still felt weird about having so little control over my emotions, and I don’t think I would have cried about this as a guy. Voice breaking a little, but smiling through it, I explained, “Nothing. I’ve just had a pretty bad last few years and,” a slight choke, “it’s nice to have people to spend the day with, you know?”

Her eyes glistened a little as well, a break in her armor of being unflappably mercenary about things, and she admitted, “Yeah. I don’t know if I’ve actually had anything like this... ever. So many people I know, you have to keep your guard up at least a little all the time, in case they’re planning something. Here it’s like... nobody has an agenda that I have to worry about, and I can just relax.”

I’d gotten hints from her that her path to criminality wasn’t all her sister, but had even more deep rooted family ties, so this wasn’t exactly a revelation, but it still hurt to think of her having to be on constant guard even around family. I pulled her into a hug and told her, “Welcome to normal life, babe. It’s people you worry about getting hurt because of you, not trying to hurt you themselves.”

“That’s silly,” she grinned, trying to play it off, “it’s no fun if you’re not worried that granny’s got a knife.” But her heart wasn’t in the joke, and she trailed off, nestling into me. I still was never sure I had a great read on her motivations, but, if I could be a little poetic about it, it felt like the hold someone might have on the only real anchor in a sea of shadows. Maybe I was just being foolish, and all of this was just an ongoing seduction from a master manipulator who’d long ago purged her core human drives in the pursuit of power. It was harder and harder to worry about that, though, because the simplest explanation seemed to fit the evidence more and more every day: this was a troubled, beautiful, smart, and wonderful girl who’d never been prepared for something real, and was just as surprised by it as I was.

I still had worries. I hadn’t told her any of my real secrets, out of pure cowardice about how she might react if she knew. Despite two weeks of quiet, I had no illusions that there wouldn’t be more like Red Rapier coming for the devise that Simone had stolen. And that machine itself sat like a constant weight in the back of my mind, daring me to learn to use it. Because for all that was going well for me in this world, experiencing it all as a woman was still a profound shift that I hadn’t chosen. In the darkness behind my eyes, I was still a man piloting an avatar through the world, rather than successfully creating an identity that incorporated all of my self and situation. I’d had enough therapy to know this was probably dangerous in the long term, and I had so many secrets now that I couldn’t even think about getting a new therapist to help me wander through this minefield.

Maybe tomorrow the worries would return, but, today—holding onto a woman that I was starting to think that I might love, full of a regenerator-sized helping of turkey and fixings, and in the home of new friends that were helping me with one of my deepest and earliest dreams of becoming a rock star—it was enough. I could forget my secrets, forget my enemies, and even forget the body that was my interface with this strange and oddly wonderful world. There was just me, Chelsea... and the smell of dessert?

Katrina knocked on the door and said, “If you two are done making out in there, the pie’s ready!”

We giggled, Chelsea helped me fix my makeup, and we headed back out into the strange world where granny may have had a knife... but it was just to cut you a slice of pie.