I wanted to tear my hair out. Actually, scratch that—I wanted to tear someone else’s hair out, strand by agonizing strand, then use it to floss my teeth after I’d smashed my head into a wall until I bled. My life had become a cosmic joke, and the universe was a heckler with a particularly vicious and repetitive sense of humor.

  Once again, despite my best efforts to build a comfortable, low-profile existence as a useful team auxiliary—the guy in the van, the man with the plan who never gets punched—I found myself thrust into the starring role. Not the action hero, mind you. No, my current part was more along the lines of Lois Lane: captured, useless, and waiting for a super-powered idiot to hopefully not screw up the rescue. My grand plan of ditching this whole mess for a simple job at a trucking company was starting to look less like cowardice and more like visionary genius.

  Honestly, the promise of a free education was the worst deal since I’d traded my company for a girlfriend who turned out to be a corporate-sponsored succubus. Sure, with great power comes great power bills, a fact I was intimately familiar with, and I was more than happy to lend a hand against Kaiju attacks from a safe, fortified distance. But this was the second time I’d been kidnapped. At this rate, I was going to need a frequent kidnapper card. And this time, my captors had apparently done their homework, investing in anti-Jake Doyle countermeasures. It’s flattering, in a horrifyingly invasive way.

  Once again, I tried the old dissolve-and-ooze routine, attempting to become one with the wall. But whatever the hell this prison was made of—vibranium mixed with pure aggravation, perhaps—pushed back, a metaphysical bouncer telling my molecules the club was full. I had to restore my blueprint before I got stuck as a permanent red stain on the cheerful paint job. Apporting without movement is a neat trick, but it drains my energy reserves faster than a black hole drains hope. Unless I fancied reassembling myself as a sentient puddle of organic slurry, I was stuck. I couldn't even slip between the cracks. The very air felt thick and uncooperative, resisting my manipulation like a petulant child. It was enough to make a guy feel… well, powerless. And I hate that feeling almost as much as I hate needles.

  The room itself was a masterpiece of psychological torture disguised as a zen garden. Ten feet wide, with walls painted in a disgustingly idyllic scene of rolling hills and a starry sky that curved overhead in a perfect 3D dome. The floor was fitted stone I couldn't so much as scratch. In the center was a small, defiantly cheerful bonsai tree with little blue flowers that resisted every microkinetic insult I could throw at it, from yanking to disintegrating. It was like nature itself was giving me the middle finger.

  And, of course, no Sabrina. Not only had I gotten myself kidnapped again, but I’d let my team down. My newly acquired, multiverse-hopping, demonic-alchemist responsibility was out there somewhere, probably thinking I was the most unreliable sponsor since a screen door on a submarine. The rolled-up tatami mats against the wall felt less like furniture and more like a taunt.

  I’d tried everything. Decomposing the walls? Nope. Fabricating a blowtorch from my own bodily resources? The wall laughed. Trying to freeze a section to absolute zero? The wall continued, not caring. Even the kung-fu gi and pants they’d dressed me in—because of course my captors had a thematic dress code—were similarly immune to my abilities. I was trapped in a pajama-themed panic room.

  There was a single door, locked with a mechanism that scoffed at my best efforts to pick or break it. I even grew a protein-based carbon lattice lockpick from my own finger bone. It snapped against the impervious lock like a twig. I’m not exactly the Hulk, but on a good day, I could probably bench press a sedan. In here, I might as well have been a kitten trying to arm-wrestle Graviton.

  So, defeated by interior design, I did the only thing left: I unrolled one of the stupid mats, sat down, and tried to meditate. My internal energy sea was capped, a turbulent lake of liquid power with nowhere to go. I was still slowly, painstakingly expanding its borders, but it felt like trying to empty an ocean with a teaspoon. What came next? I had no clue. My cultivation manual was basically a sticky note that said “don’t die.”

  After what felt like a small eternity of meditation and fitful, paranoid naps, the door finally opened.

  I was on my feet in an instant, a blur of desperate motion aimed at the opening. A very large individual, who radiated the unmistakable aura of a super-strong Alpha, entered just as I dashed. He didn't even flinch. He just casually caught my charge and tossed me back across the room like a ragdoll, my body impacting the wall next to my mat with a humiliating thud. To him, I was simply… normal. Mundane. It was the most insulting thing that had happened to me all day, and the bar was already subterranean.

  He took up a position to one side as another, slimmer individual walked in after him. The master of this particular circus had arrived.

  “Mister Doyle, that’s hardly polite.” The man said. He was around six feet tall, the kind of generically handsome you see on daytime television lawyers, save for the carefully-styled goatee and sideburns leading up into his windblown brown hair. He looked like a villainous used car salesman.

  I shrugged, sliding down to sit back on the mat, trying to salvage a shred of dignity from the situation. “And kidnapping, beating me unconscious, and trapping me in...whatever this aesthetic nightmare is counts as the most marvelous courtesy possible?” I asked, layering on the snark like armor polish.

  He shook his head, a picture of mock disappointment. “Of course not, but I have sent you four letters requesting a meeting, and you ignored all of them. Even when I sent people to politely invite you to a meeting, you avoided and evaded them. What else was a man to do?”

  “You could fuck yourself, Mister Maxwell,” I replied, crossing my arms over my knees. It was a mature, well-reasoned argument. “And that is precisely the reply you are going to receive every single time. Go fuck yourself. I have no interest in the Maxwell consortium, I will not work for you, and I reject you and everything you stand for. My answer comes in one flavor, and it’s ‘get bent.’”

  “I could do that,” he said, as if considering it, “but unfortunately, that would lead to my being neglectful of your needs. Leaving you alone would quickly result in you perishing.”

  I shook my head. “I doubt that. My survival instincts are second only to my cynicism. But you do you, and I will do me. See you in a week, and I can guarantee that my answer to whatever it is you desire will be the same thing it is now. Go fuck yourself.”

  His eyebrow raised slightly, and he glanced outside the door. In a moment, a guy who looked exactly like the one who’d planted me on my ass—clones, fantastic, my least favorite party trick—shifted a simple wooden chair into the room. Maxwell sat down, looking at me like I was an interesting bug, while the second clone carefully closed the door. “Unfortunately, gently allowing time to resolve my issues is not an option. I require your assistance.”

  I barked a laugh. “Oh, you must be desperate to tell me I have any sort of negotiating power. Is this the part where you monologue like a second-rate supervillain or try to tell me about your terrible spoiled childhood to evoke sympathy? Let me save you the time: mother beat you, father was distant, now you have a pathological need to control everything. I’ve seen the movie. I have more than enough information to know I want no part of your little superhuman army.”

  “So what do you want, Mister Doyle?”

  I smiled, all teeth. “I want you to go away and never come back so I never have to look at you again until I decide to have my team come out and crush your little block party like an overripe watermelon. It’d be messy, but cathartic.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “What brought you to the conclusion that my request would be so utterly immoral?”

  I smiled slightly, crossing my legs. “When your little teamsters decided that murdering a road full of innocent people was an acceptable price for keeping my disappearance quiet. Up until that point, I might have even forgiven the kidnapping incident, since you chose not to murder any of the academy guards. But after that, I realized that anyone who employs people willing to go to those lengths was someone I had no interest in dealing with. Ever.”

  “What do you mean? What lengths?”

  I looked at him, genuinely baffled. He didn’t seem to be lying, but then again, my deception detector was calibrated for teenage superheroes, not pragmatic sociopaths. “Magazine. Baelfire. I distinctly heard them discussing exactly how to deal with any witnesses, wall guards, or casual bystanders. Is Baelfire really capable of burning anything in a half-mile radius?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Baelfire was. She isn’t anymore. And neither is Magazine.”

  I was a little shocked. “You killed them?”

  He shrugged, a gesture so casual it was chilling. “Not Baelfire. She’s potentially useful, but has to be carefully controlled. Magazine, however, was in charge of the mission and failed not just spectacularly, but in a way that ensured that you would never willingly cooperate. He was a poorly-chosen mercenary, I confess. It was his job to ensure that we gained more knowledge, not alienate you.”

  “So you killed him.”

  He shrugged again. “He was an assassin. What else was I supposed to do? Give him a bonus and cut him loose? He would have killed half my employees to make a point. Baelfire, however, is in exactly the same position as you.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Locked down. Someone with a similar power to yours, who is able to prevent molecular manipulation in a large area. Once we realized that quantum disabling was ineffective on your abilities, we found another option. If you like, I could have you meet her to assure yourself of her health.”

  “What about Sabrina?”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “We took you. She ran. She is a clever girl, raised on a planet even more dangerous than this one. She did her unintended job, which was lure you out of the academy’s lockdown. It’s amazing how predictable you hero types can be. She requires materials to use her abilities effectively, and you just went out of your way and out of safety to help provide them.”

  I smiled slightly. “I knew I could get you monologuing. Typical supervillain. So what is it you are so desperate for? I am certain you already have someone poking and prodding at my armor. Good luck with that.”

  He shrugged. “It’s tinker tech. I doubt very much we could reproduce it, but our best researchers have used what they have learned to formulate a reasonable hypothesis as to how your power works.”

  I shrugged, trying to look bored. So far he had given away a lot of secrets. “What did they discover?”

  He grinned, a predator’s smile. “More than you would like, probably. You are a molecular assembler, able to create and modify micro-machinery to perform a huge variety of tasks, including strengthening your own body, disassembling and reassembling your body, and repairing damage on a molecular scale… as well as creating some sort of self-replicating power supply to break the power limitations most tinkers possess. Brilliant, really. Even now, I am relatively certain you have packed your own body with machinery capable of activating a broad variety of practical effects, from producing fire and cold to teleportation.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Not a bad guess. Subtly wrong, but clearly they had witnessed my attempts to escape. “So what is it you want? Super-armor? Things that mimic superpowers in baselines?”

  He shook his head. “Actually, it is quite simple. I want you to do what heroes do. I want you to save my father’s life.”

  It turned out his father was a victim of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The old man was on life support, had been for over a year, and had recently lost his ability to even communicate effectively. The causes were a genetic proclivity exacerbated by heavy metal exposure from his military days. After the Crash, he’d started collecting land and the Alphas needed to protect it, creating the Maxwell collective. And according to his son, extreme pragmatism—including the occasional bribery, murder, or kidnapping—was required to keep it from being nationalized.

  “So what is it you are hoping I can accomplish?” I asked him. I doubted very much that this was a one-and-done deal, but the more freedom I had, the more options I could fabricate. To be fair, I had zero emotional investment in whether or not his farmland got nationalized. I didn’t think it would be better or worse, but I had serious problems with this particular monster’s operating system.

  “I need his list of contacts, which means I need him to be able to talk. Neither he nor I are Alphas. It would cost billions to rebuild the list of carefully cultivated connections and their debts to the collective. He’s never trusted me, which I cannot blame him for, but now that he’s incoherent, half of our power is simply gone.”

  “Of course,” he added, “while I would love to have a fleet of armored guardsmen and a communications network that could pierce the Crash interference, that would be a separate issue. In exchange, I could offer you vast wealth and a seat at the table, but I doubt your superhero mentality would settle for that.”

  I chuckled. “What’s to understand? I like Earth. I live here. Right now, Alphas seem to be the only thing keeping it intact and not overrun by overpowered monstrosities. Something you don’t seem to care about.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think I don’t care? I live here too.”

  I shrugged. “When was the last time you sent your hand-picked Alpha killers to help out a Kaiju invasion?”

  He looked at me directly. “This morning.”

  “Huh?”

  He laughed. “You really have no clue, do you? The coastal kaiju are an absolute abomination and terrifying, if rare. The interior, however, is also packed with energy-enhanced monstrosities. The Maxwell consortium operates over two million acres of active farmland… We have nearly half a million employees, and hundreds of Alphas as well as high-impact technological combat units.”

  “We have nearly twice as many Class Four and above Alphas working constantly to keep areas outside of the city safe from predatory enhanced animals as the cities themselves. We also sponsor twelve straight-up superteams that help the surrounding territories deal with both the occasional eruption and the psychotic random supervillain.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “The one thing that you city folks have absolutely right, though, is that it’s not a democracy. It cannot be. We have unincorporated businesses and non-citizens, but we also have slavery. Or at least, those who choose to violate our rules and endanger our people are offered the option of paying off their debt to the consortium with labor or death. We also have prisons and police. I like to think the towns within our bailiwick are friendly, peaceful places with opportunities for growth, but no, we don’t cotton to the concept of democracy.”

  “The non-Alphas support the Alphas, the protectors, and the consortium. We have taxes. People can elect representatives to bring concerns to the leadership, but how useful is the vote of an unemployed drunk, an ideological warrior, or someone who cares so little they aren’t willing to pay taxes? If they don’t like it, they are welcome to leave. The cities welcome anyone, or they can try their luck in the unincorporated territories until something eats them. I hear Manitoba’s nice and dangerous this time of year.”

  “So tell me,” he finished, “what makes someone like you a superhero? Besides ignorance, of course.”

  I laughed. “What makes you think I am a superhero?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “So far, your demeanor and moral inflexibility have both suggested it, as has your attendance at Kellar Academy.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not. However, as I said, I do value lives and this planet. I attend Kellar because it puts me in touch with people doing a job I respect—fighting monsters and killers—and they provide decent training on how to support them. If I have to personally fight off monsters, I will, but that’s not out of some ‘with great power’ nonsense or a desire to be worshiped.”

  “So what is it you want? Everyone wants something.”

  I looked at him. “Okay, I’ll try being polite. I still think you are absolute scum, but I can sort of see your twisted logic. I want a planet like it was before the Crash. A world where people can live free from fear, and where I can settle down to a rewarding job, a beautiful wife, and fat babies. To be honest, I’d happily trade away my Alpha powers if it meant all the rest were gone too.”

  He laughed, a sharp, condescending sound. “Oh, you sweet, naive, ignorant child.”

  I glared. He’d officially used up his quota of ‘polite’.

  “What do you think caused the Crash?”

  “It’s pretty well documented. Q-bombs from the Russian empire.”

  He shook his head, grinning. “Yeah, to the victor goes the truth. No. Q-bombs were invented by our researchers. An offshoot of nuclear research. Only one Q-bomb, in fact. After the end of the Kaiser’s war, Eastern Europe and Germany started getting antsy, trying to out-empire each other. Our researchers started trying to create the ultimate weapon to win a world war.”

  “We succeeded, but so did several others. Suddenly you had bombs that could split the atom, bombs that could alter reality, and bombs that could unleash quantum hell… and on a beautiful day in 1938, someone decided to use them. An unimportant little country named China decided it was a good time to punish Japan and dropped a bomb on a little island called Kyushu.”

  “It wasn’t very big. Killed fewer than ten thousand people, most from radiation sickness. But in response, everyone started lobbing their own superweapons around, which led to the Crash. Next thing you know, monsters and people started popping up with powers no one understood. There’s a good argument that the American Q-bomb dropped on Czechoslovakia was the straw that broke the camel’s back. A big push in Normandy got eaten by a giant fire-breathing boar, and after that, the new cold war developed…”

  “Before that, humanity was in constant warfare. Almost no one lived in peace and prosperity as you wish. If anything, now that humanity has a common enemy, things are more peaceful than ever in history.”

  “What happened to ‘power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The desire for power corrupts. Ironically, because awakenings are so random, simply desiring power isn’t enough to obtain it. Sure, there are a few sickos with disgusting levels of power, but compared to before the Crash? I’d much rather have things the way they are now. Most people in the consortium live relatively peaceful lives. Even your cities are a thousand times less crime-riddled and deadly than they were before.”

  He grinned. “Monsters, kaiju, and enhanced animals are terrifying, but the most dangerous animal always has been and always will be humans. The rise of the hard-line interweb has simply allowed propaganda to be controlled more easily. Think about who designs your information networks and educational programs, and what their motivations might be.”

  I scowled. “Fine. I will… try to heal your father.” Not that I believed his revisionist history lesson, but he’d given me food for thought. I could do my own research if I could ever get back to a library that wasn’t designed to contain me. “Assuming, of course, you let me go afterwards. I won’t be joining your army, no matter what story you spin.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough, but I will expect to be given a chance to make my case in the future. As will the Maclelland consortium, the inter-Ohio farmsteads, and Atlantic command. They are my competition, but not my enemy. None of them wants the city to annex them with millions of supersoldiers wearing magical supersuits.”

  “Don’t send murderers and threats.”

  He nodded. “And what is your price?”

  “Huh?”

  He spun on his wooden chair slightly. “What is your price? For any of it? Healing, if you can do it, the armor, if you can make it work; the communicators, if you can make enough of them. What are your prices?”

  I ran my hands through my hair. “I am not really motivated by greed. The healing, I’ve already given you my price for. No more kidnappings, no more threats of killing everyone in a half-mile radius, and you let me go.”

  “That’s it?” he asked in surprise. “You said you weren’t a superhero. That’s pretty heroic.”

  I shook my head. “I said I wasn’t a hero, and I mean it. But I absolutely support superheroes because they do a stupidly dangerous job. Some are corrupted by money and fame, but they are still out there fighting kaiju. As long as they aren’t slaughtering and raping people, I don’t really care about whatever twisted shit they get up to.”

  “What happened to ‘with great power’?”

  I laughed. “If you were especially tall and became a basketball player, would you feel obligated to spend every moment and every dime on the needy? Some would. I don’t. With great power comes great opportunities, but responsibilities come from your own mind and morality. I will happily help people, but that is my choice, not the inevitable consequence of having a gift.”

  He chuckled. “Then we may be able to work together.”

  I shook my head. “No, we won’t. Not you personally. You are still on my fuck-off list for hiring killers. Even if you are right, you broke the rules. But that doesn’t mean you can’t send someone with an actual moral compass to do business. I also want my armor back. You can’t use it, and it’s incomplete. You also can’t reproduce it.”

  “How do you know? I have my own tinkers.”

  I grinned. “Because I am not a tinker.”

  “So what are you?”

  I shrugged. “Complicated.”

  This dude was messed up. On giving my word not to run—a promise worth exactly as much as the paper it wasn’t written on—they had removed the restriction Lockdown had placed on my environment. But looking at the senior Maxwell, the guy was an absolute basket case. He was strapped down to a symphony of machines regulating his oxygen, blood flow, nutrition, and a dozen other things. I hadn’t known this level of life-support tech even existed. It was like a museum exhibit for "How to Keep a Corpse Animated."

  “How much neural damage does he have?” I asked, peering at the withered form. It probably didn’t help that he was in his seventies. I could detect all the cellular flaws in his system, a cascade of genetic typos and systemic failures, but I was unsure how much I could safely blueprint and correct.

  “He was beginning to have extreme senile dementia before his system started to shut down, but from what we can determine, it didn’t seem to propagate to his gray matter. It was entirely nervous system damage. Demyelination. His autonomic system shut down nearly a month ago. Right now, we have a suspension Alpha coming in every day to lock him down for about eighteen hours, which is how we’ve kept him alive, as well as a nerve controller, but she can’t keep it up continuously.”

  I nodded. “How is she locking him down?”

  “Time compression. Technically, he’s almost a year younger than his actual age because of it, but if she tries to keep it up longer, she passes out from energy loss. The projection speedster from the Monster Hunters is even harder to… ask for assistance than you were.”

  “No one else could help?”

  The doctor, a man with flyaway white hair that seemed to have a life of its own, shrugged. “There was a healer from Atlantic Command who tried, but she said she couldn’t affect genetic damage. She did what she could, which is probably why he’s still alive, but he’s in worse shape than he was.”

  I nodded and checked his skin. The cells were extensively degraded from replication, normal for his age, but a complicating factor. I was worried about what would happen if I fixed him. Would I just be enabling another generation of Maxwell-brand tyranny?

  “I am willing to try,” I said, the words tasting like ash, “but I need you to do something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Lockdown. I need proof she’s hundreds of miles away. I refuse to work if I don’t have assurances I’m not going to get locked in a cage the second this is over. I also need your suspension Alpha available to keep him suspended while we unhook him from this Rube Goldberg nightmare of a life-support system.”

  The doctor shrugged. “I am sure you won’t take my word for it, but Mister Maxwell is well-known for keeping his word.”

  I nodded. “Yes, but he’s also utterly pragmatic. I don’t want him deciding that it’s worthwhile to keep me around permanently. I think I can do it, but afterwards I am gone. He needs something again; he has to go through channels. I am not a slave, and I won’t let him make me one.”

  I laid out my terms, my paranoia crafting them into an impenetrable contract. “We are going to the Voice Hotel on the eighteenth. Make sure your Alpha is fresh, unhook this guy completely, and we will go there. I will do my best to wake him up, but anything artificial could screw things up. I can detect Alphas. If I detect any Alpha but the staff, certain guests, and the cloning brick he has protecting him, I am gone.”

  “If I don’t have my armor, I am gone. If I detect any artificial modifications to my armor—a tracker, a tracer, even a magic spell—I am gone. I can’t detect magic directly, but I can smell the traces a magical Alpha leaves behind. I know what Lockdown’s powers taste like. If I detect her anywhere within a block of the hotel, I am gone.”

  “What’s to keep you from just leaving?” the doctor asked.

  I shrugged. “My word. I will do this, but on my terms. I am tired of getting pushed around by bullies. Adrian was right about one thing… corrupt people are attracted to power, and he’s one of the worst of them. Word or not, I trust him about as far as I can throw him with both hands tied behind my back.”

  “Are we clear?”

  The doctor slowly nodded, and one of the bodyguard clones left to go inform Maxwell of my decision. The terms of my temporary, miracle-working servitude were set.