Ugh. It was like performing an autopsy on a living subject. A technical contradiction that perfectly summed up my life. The guy was technically alive, but the life-support system he was jacked into was basically a high-tech embalming machine, barely keeping his brain’s lights on while vast sections of his body had entered a state of advanced, pre-death rot.

  His lungs and digestive tract looked like they’d filed for bankruptcy weeks ago in subjective time. The whole scene screamed ‘pragmatic evil’—why waste resources on a functioning colon when you can just pump in nutrient slurry and let the time-bubble girl handle the rest?

  I was busily scanning, my power dissecting his molecular structure with the morbid curiosity of a coroner who’s just found a second body inside the first one. Okay, blueprinting his entire body in one go wasn't going to work; the file was corrupted, a legacy system running on bloated, dying code.

  His cell structure was already memorized, a depressing catalog of genetic betrayal and cellular decay. I was going to have to build this up piece by piece, like assembling IKEA furniture from a dimension where all the instructions are written in carcinogens. Fill in the blanks as we went along, and hope the final product didn’t spontaneously combust or try to strangle me.

  The suspension alpha was named Timesink, a classification that sounded more like a corporate efficiency report than a superpower. She was capable of freezing baseline humans and low-powered alphas in time bubbles. An incredibly useful non-lethal power set, probably much more useful than my own talent for turning things into other things and then having a metaphysical panic attack.

  But she’d been running herself into the ground for weeks, a cute Irish brunette whose aesthetic was now primarily defined by the pallor of a cavefish and the dark, exhausted circles under her eyes that looked like they’d been applied with a tire iron. She was a solid class four, which meant she had the energy reserves of a small nuclear reactor, but she’d been burning through her own physical stamina to control her metaphysical stopwatch.

  I looked at her after several hours of her maintaining the suspension field, a feat of endurance that deserved a medal or at least a very strong espresso. She looked utterly wiped, eyes closed as she sat near the old man with her hands on one withered arm. She could do it at range, but that required more power and control—the superpower equivalent of using a satellite link for a Zoom call instead of just yelling down the hall.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” I said, my voice cutting through the sterile silence of the room.

  Her eye cracked open, a sliver of exhausted green. “The deal?”

  I nodded, adopting my best ‘dispassionate medical professional’ tone, which usually just sounds like I’m bored with your impending doom. “This is gonna look pretty awful. He’s going to look like he’s disintegrating into a vaguely human-shaped gas cloud. Normally, it would be instant, a neat party trick, but with your time compression, you are going to be able to watch the lovely process in high-definition slow motion. I know what it looks like, because my power has a similar temporal compression feature, and it’s ugly… like watching a documentary about a landfill, but from the inside.”

  “I am suspending his active molecular structure right here.” I tapped the side of my head. “Including the memory and energy imprint of… well… whatever keeps the meat-sack animated. I like to think of it as the soul, or the spirit, but I know it works because that’s how I preserve myself when I apport. That’s basically what I am doing now: apporting him while I reconstruct his body minus the fatal design flaws, and hopefully keeping his nervous system intact, although he might need some time and retraining to do certain things, like talk or remember which son he’s not supposed to strangle.”

  “When I say drop the shield, drop it… that should get him breathing again, which I will need for the last part of the apport, resetting his energy pattern. If you leave him in the suspension field, I can’t reattach his pattern, and if it takes too long, the pattern will dissipate and go wherever… You know… dead people go. You will be left with a perfectly functional living body, but no one will be home. A meat-based automaton. Very high-end, very creepy.”

  She nodded, nervously, a flicker of something that wasn’t just exhaustion in her eyes. “You know, Wallace Maxwell is a very bad man. Before Adrian took over, he ran the consortium like a feudal slave camp. He strangled his wife with his bare hands when he found out she couldn’t give him another son, even though it was his disease that caused it.”

  I nodded, the cynicism a comfortable armor. “Not my problem. I’m just the mechanic. I don’t judge the car, I just fix the engine. The owner can then use it to go get groceries or run over protesters; my invoice looks the same.”

  She shrugged, a tiny, weary movement. “You could let me keep up the suspension field, so his… life dissipates. Adrian hired you to heal him, not to keep his soul intact.”

  I nodded again, the good little contractor. “Adrian hired me to wake him up. That’s what I intend to do. Apparently, the consortium is on a bit of a razor’s edge and needs the information in this guy’s head. That’s all I plan to do. Extract the data, not the man.”

  She sighed, a sound of profound resignation. “I know. My second gift is telepathic. I can tell you are telling the truth. His mind is still alive, if lost. But… he’s still an evil pile of shit I don’t want to see in control again. We could recover from losing his information, but I don’t think we could recover from him being coherent again. If Adrian had called me before the dementia, I could have recovered it, but afterwards, it’s too chaotic for me to dive.”

  I shrugged, the gesture feeling hollow. “You do what you need to do, and I will do what I need to do. Afterwards, I am out of here. You are aware that I can still use my abilities if you put a tachyon freeze on me, right? I will do what I have to do if you try to stop me afterwards. Please don’t make me hurt you to escape.” It wasn’t a threat, just a statement of fact. Another item on my ever-growing list of ‘Things I Never Wanted to Do But Probably Will.’

  She nodded, “You are telling the truth, but you are… protected from diving. Either your power has created some kind of shield, or you have been trained a lot. I don’t think your power is what the scientists think your power is.”

  I smiled a little, a thin, sharp thing. “It’s not,” I said, tucking my helmet under my arm. I was going to be out of here faster than a prom date if the vibe shifted even a little. I’d already scanned myself and my armor for odd quantum signatures and essence links. At least Adrian had kept his word about that. “One thing to remember is that he still has the genetic proclivity for ALS, and later in life, it becomes more likely to express. I can remove the heavy metals that helped trigger it, but eventually it’s likely to come back. So, you know, maybe don’t get too attached to the new model.”

  “Are you ready?” I asked her. It had taken several hours to rebuild a good blueprint pattern, but the actual assembly, now that I had a decent aural range, would be as fast as rebuilding after an apport. A flash of light, a moment of existential terror, and voilà, a new you. Or in this case, a refurbished, slightly-used, morally bankrupt you.

  She nodded, looking a little sad. Or maybe just tired. It was hard to tell with the whole ‘witnessing a potential miracle for a monster’ thing.

  With a flash that was more for dramatic effect than necessity—a habit from the rent-a-villain gigs—I disassembled his pattern. As a baseline, he had no real defense against it, although, as decrepit as he was, even if he were an alpha, it probably wouldn’t have provided any defense.

  Then again, I needed the organic molecules, and started feeding more essence into the flow of movements as I built new molecular structures from the inside out, like a god playing with the world’s most complex and disgusting LEGO set.

  I could see Timesink’s expression change as the whole thing occurred, from disgust to a grim, satisfied anger, and so I flipped around, reassembling and rebuilding his body on the carpet next to the expensive four-poster bed it had been a moment before. It took a lot more energy, since he had a lot more that needed to be rebuilt than I usually did when transmitting myself or even a guest, and each additional atom took real energy to assemble. My personal energy debt was going to be a beast after this, demanding a pizza the size of a truck tire.

  After a moment, he drew a breath as the essence pattern from his innate energy rejoined his body. He was remarkably quick to recover, and his eyes opened. My blueprint had not only restored his health, but all the alleles were rebuilt, and I built his body the way that his genetic pattern dictated, as a healthy, fit, and fairly muscular twenty-year-old man. I’d given him back his prime. A prime he’d used to be a monstrous bastard.

  The bodyguard, or clone number six, glanced at Timesink. Her eyes rolled back in her head in a gesture of pure telepathic confirmation, and I took a step back, the first cold trickle of dread in my gut.

  “Did you get it?” the clone said, his voice flat, devoid of any human concern.

  Timesink slowly nodded, her face a mask of grim finality.

  Wallace tried to lift himself on his hands, smiling, an expression chillingly similar to his son’s, and the big clone pulled out his pistol with the casual efficiency of a man swatting a fly and put three bullets in his head.

  ***

  I should have guessed. Of course. Pragmatic to the point of psychopathy. Adrian said that he needed the information his father kept locked in his head, not that he needed his father alive. I’d let my own pathetic, sentimental interpretation blind me to the fact that they didn’t need him alive, they just needed the data, the blackmail material, the contacts—all the dirty secrets before he died, and his contacts were freed from whatever eldritch or financial obligations they had to the old man and could begin to work against the consortium.

  And I felt guilty as hell. The murder was my fault. I was the idiot who provided the freshly-stocked hard drive for them to download the data from before they smashed it with a hammer. I should have suspected things, but as Adrian said, I was a naive, stupid, ignorant child.

  I honestly thought he was desperate to get his father back, because if I were able to have mine back, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d projected my own broken heart onto a family of vipers and was surprised when I got bitten.

  But I couldn’t raise the dead, not really. Once their essence pattern was gone, they were gone for good. Technically, I could repair a dead body that wasn’t too far decayed, a neat trick that sits in the ‘morbid’ section of my resume, but my window of opportunity was usually less than ten minutes, and their brain had to be intact, since the essence pattern seemed to be linked to their mind and identity. I’m a mechanic, not a magician.

  When I re-materialized at the table in the apartment, Mindy jumped in shock. “You are back?” she yelled, “Sabrina said…” She stopped as she realized I had covered my face, and realized I was silently sobbing into my own hands.

  Yeah, big strong man. So self-confident and controlled. The stress, and someone getting murdered right in front of me—someone I had just spent incredible effort to bring back to a state of pristine health—was too much. The dam holding back the entire shit-show of my life finally burst.

  After a moment, I realized that Mindy had tugged her chair towards me and was wrapping her arm around my shoulder, just holding me as I broke down. No questions, just a presence. It was… nice. And that made me feel even weaker.

  I just couldn’t deal with it. Everything was hitting me all at once. Christine’s betrayal, the constant juggling and stress of trying to work jobs and go to school since then, my absolute lack of control as my life got flipped again and again, the expectations, the betrayal from someone I thought was the love of my life, my dad’s death, losing the company, my cousin’s backstabbing, and now I was a direct accessory to a fucking execution.

  “This is such bullshit.” I sobbed, my face still clenched in my hands as Mindy patted my back. “I am so sick of adulting. It’s not fair, and I know it never will be, but this sucks. It all just sucks.”

  She sighed and patted my back. “It sucks. I know. Can you tell me?”

  I shook my head, not trusting my voice. After a few more shuddering breaths, I managed, “I am only nineteen damned years old. I should have decades of stupidity ahead of me. But they shot him right in front of me. I still have blood on my armor.” The phantom splatter felt ice-cold on the nanoweave.

  “Wait, what?” she murmured, her patting stopping for a second. “Nineteen? I thought you were like... twenty-seven. I thought you were engaged.”

  I nodded slowly against my still-damp hands, trying to collect the shattered pieces of my composure. “Yeah, after I awakened and Christine helped my cousin take the company, I made myself look older so I could play stuntman. No one wants to fight a supervillain that looks like a skinny teenager who should be worrying about acne and prom.”

  “So that means you were engaged at seventeen?”

  I nodded, the memory a fresh bruise. “Yeah. The stocks were tied into a trust fund, but I was able to choose the management and draw dividends. Christine convinced me to let my cousin take over the management, and I gave her my will's five percent voting stock.”

  “I thought… but I was so dumb, so dumb. She left me and he stopped the management account’s dividends because I was pulling more than we were earning, and I was broke, and lost my dad’s house, and then Adrian put me in a room I couldn’t break from.” The greatest hits album of my failures, playing on a loop.

  I finally stopped sobbing quietly, and hiccuped, “And he said he wanted me to save his dad’s life, and I knew that I would do anything, anything at all to save my dad, so I saved him… and then they got what they wanted and shot him...in the face. Right in front of me.” I tried hard not to start sobbing again.

  Dammit, be a man! Children cry, not adults. Though, to be fair, most adults haven’t had their freshly-healed patient executed before their eyes.

  “Why did she leave you?”

  I shrugged a little, not sobbing but feeling… broken. Empty. “Because I was a loser. I didn’t know how to manage anything, and even when I awakened I got like, the worst power ever, and she wanted a real man, not a broke loser who could push dust around.”

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  “And she was sleeping with him, and I’d held out for years waiting for her to be ready, and she was sleeping with him the whole time. She said she was only waiting for me to get my inheritance, so she could support her career, but now that I didn’t even manage it anymore, she didn’t need me.” The classic story: boy meets girl, girl loves boy’s potential trust fund, boy loses trust fund, girl leaves with boy’s cousin. A tale as old as time.

  “Holy shit, that absolute bitch!”

  I nodded, a bitter laugh escaping. “I guess, but I was also a loser too. I can’t really blame her. Hell, I am still a loser. An ignorant, stupid, immature loser.”

  I dropped my hands, wiping off my face, and then waggled them in the air with a mock flourish, “woo woo! Look at me! I can make stupid gewgaws and fix booboos! I have a power that I never asked for, don’t want, and that people will kill me for. It’s the world’s most dangerous parlor trick.”

  I slapped my hands on the table. “I should have just gone back to school, let people beat me up for publicity, and then faded out. Maybe when I hit twenty-five and can claim my trust, I might be able to sell it to a bank and get a truck or something, if the company isn’t completely dead by then.”

  She shook her head, a frown of disbelief on her face. “Even like things are, you could get so rich from your inventions!”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me oddly, “Why what?”

  “Why get rich off of them? I don’t want to. It’s not my money, it’s my stupid power. My Dad always talked about raising yourself on your own merits, and being responsible for your own failures.”

  “This stupid power isn’t mine, it belongs to someone else. I don’t know how or why I got it, but it’s not my merits, it’s a cheat, a sham, a fake boost, like finding a lottery ticket in a sewer that wins you millions. It feels… dirty.”

  She scooted around to face me directly and bent forwards a little as I rested my forehead on one hand, my elbow on the table. “Okay, rewind. What could you do at first? When you first got it.”

  I shrugged, “Push dust around. Exciting, right? I was the world’s most underwhelming janitor.”

  “And every other thing, how did you learn to do it? The healing, the shields, the teleporting, the… all of it.”

  I shrugged again, “I just kept experimenting and pushing at it, going smaller and smaller until I did something that worked. Trial and error. Mostly error. I have the metaphysical scars to prove it.”

  “So you gained a tiny little power, the ability to push dust, which you can do with your fingertip, and you worked your ass off until you turned it into a gift that could heal people, create things from nothing but energy, throw fireballs, freeze, alter entropy, walk on air, disintegrate, teleport, create kinetic shields, and probably even fly. You make brilliant little microscopic computers, break the comm barrier, and make incredible armor, shields, and maybe even weapons. Every single step of that was your effort, your labor, your mind, and your pain.”

  She was leaning forward now, her voice intense. “You did that, no one else. Lots of people get powers, but most of them never do anything more than what they were first born with. Maybe they get tougher over time, or their powers get stronger, but no one has stretched their abilities like you have… you might as well be saying that you don’t deserve to be tall, or you don’t deserve to be handsome, or you don’t deserve to be as smart as you are.”

  “One thing you are not, though, is a loser. A loser would still be pushing around dust.”

  I smiled slightly, a real one this time, wiping my face off again, “I do still push around dust. Just… lots of it. And sometimes I arrange it into fancy shapes, like a human body or a bullet-resistant faceplate.”

  She sighed, and quirked a hint of a smile herself. “Now I understand why you don’t have any interest in alpha girls. It sounds like she tore you apart and used the pieces to light her path to the top.”

  I shook my head, “Not until I was stupid. I tried to do that stupid John Cusack radio thing, I kept pestering her, texting her, and then she finally came out and let me have it, and explained exactly why. Because I was being a stalker, and a moron, and she even threatened to end me if I didn’t leave her alone. She didn’t just break up with me; she went for a full character assassination.”

  She nodded slowly. “Damn. That’s… okay, you were kind of acting like a loser.”

  I laughed bitterly, “See? See? I told you. My self-deprecation isn't a hobby, it's a rigorously tested fact.”

  She nodded. She was dressed in pink flannel pajamas covered in cartoon penguins, with no makeup, and honestly I thought she was a lot prettier that way. Real. Also, she hadn’t re-dyed her hair, which meant that the first few inches were starting to come in its natural orange-ish hue. She hadn’t been lying about that, either.

  “To be fair, now? Most girls would gut themselves just to get seen with you. Heck, I already know I have had to keep Abigail from sneaking into your bedroom when we were...uhh… having a girl’s night while you were working.”

  “I thought Abbey was an innocent virgin.”

  She nodded, “She is, but she was kind of drunk, and she’s a geek… she’s watched porn and started talking about what she’d like to do to you. And Candace got into it too, although she was a lot more descriptive. Even Akyo got into the action a little bit.”

  “And you?” I asked her curiously, the question slipping out before my brain could filter it through the ‘recent trauma’ protocols.

  She shrugged, her platinum ponytail flopping off her shoulder. “I might have mentioned that I wouldn’t mind seeing you walking back from the bathroom in the throes of a creative frenzy again. It’s a good look. Very focused.”

  I sighed, the topic veering into dangerously complicated territory. “Well, Kate wants me to go out with her. Flat-out stated it. Like she was placing an order for takeout.”

  “Do you want to?”

  I shook my head, vehemently. “Not a fucking chance. I honestly think she’s blocking me from talking to Quiet Code, because she’s on her team. She acts like the weird dual-core resonance thing was some kind of meaningful connection, but I think she just wants to do it again for the power boost.”

  “I have zero interest, but I don’t want to blow her off completely because I think Quiet Code might be my answer to the software problem, and I don’t want an angry mean girl walking around claiming I psychically raped her.” It was a pathetic calculus: endure the attention of a powerful, unstable and apparently horny speedster to get access to a shy technopath. My life was a badly written teen drama with superpowers.

  “Did you?” Mindy asked, her voice neutral.

  I shook my head, “No, I did what I had to do to hold her together after she had a power overload. It felt… intense. Great, even. But it wasn’t sexual or anything, and I am not sure, but I think it could work with other people too if their power has anything to do with molecular motion. It kind of crippled her power at first, but after she pushed it out, I think she gained a lot of power from it as well, and might gain more.” I was babbling, trying to justify it.

  She nodded slowly, a thoughtful look on her face. “Would it work with me?”

  I thought about it. Freezing and heating were literally all about molecular motion. “Probably. The theory is sound. But it’s really intimate. Like, soul-baringly intimate. Not exactly sexual, but damned close, and from what Sabrina says, it works better if it is sexual. So umm… not a good idea.” I could feel my ears getting hot. This was not a conversation I’d imagined having while covered in the metaphorical blood of a man I’d resurrected for a firing squad.

  “Why not?” she asked, blinking with an innocence that was almost certainly feigned.

  I smirked a little, the cynicism returning like a worn-out security blanket. “Yeah, so now I am wondering if you want me for my powers. Not exactly reassuring. I’d like to think I have more to offer than being a metaphysical battery charger.”

  She laughed, a genuine sound that lightened the mood in the room. “No, but you did help me out hugely, although admittedly I paid for that. Do you mind if I give you some advice? From mentor to sidekick, big sisterly advice, or something like that?”

  I shook my head, “Not at all. I’m fresh out of good ideas.”

  “You have four options. The first one is going to a councilor. Let them know what is going on with Kate, and see if they can offer options. I mean, it’s admittedly weird power shit. But Kellar Academy is the home of weird power shit. I can’t promise it will end well, but it will end better than just letting her string you along. You already know from experience what the end result of letting yourself get strung along is.” She gestured vaguely at me, encompassing my entire tragic history.

  I nodded, “I definitely do. The lesson was taught with a sledgehammer.”

  “Your other option is to find someone to date. Make it clear that you have moved on. It doesn’t have to be serious, or sexual, it just has to be obvious. That way, if she starts to grumble about psychic rape or whatever, well, it’s been weeks since the event that you rescued her in. No one, literally no one, would take it seriously because it would sound like sour grapes.”

  “And shut down completely the only avenue to get to Quiet Code, the only serious instinctive cyberkinetic, the one who might be able to create code for my armor and comms that could make them useful to people in the field, and potentially save thousands of lives.” I grumbled. “It’s a catch-22. Tolerate the unstable speedster to access the shy hacker.”

  “Have you tried another route? To get to Quiet Code directly?”

  I nodded, “Yeah, Frost Phoenix rules her team quarters with an iron hand, and she’s third and second year… I can’t even get into her classroom areas without getting shut down and accused of being a stalker or raider. She’s built a fortress of solitude and social pressure.”

  “Lunch? The cafeteria?”

  “Different schedules. They don’t like to let the years mix. It’s like a high school cafeteria with more existential dread and better food.”

  She nods, “So option three is, bang Kate’s brains out, get the casual fling and her victory lap out of your system, and then hope that opens up your access to Quiet Code.”

  “No thank you. I am not going to spend my V card on something like that. I’d like my first time to not be a strategic maneuver in a superpowered cold war.”

  She looked at me seriously, “I thought you were joking about that. The virgin thing.”

  I shook my head, “Nope. One hundred percent genuine article. Another reason Christine found me lacking, I’m sure. We did… other stuff, lots of other stuff, but nothing that would risk pregnancy. When you are talking meta strength, even my lackadaisical meta strength, they don’t MAKE condoms that can stand up to that level of abuse.”

  “So option four. Pull a stunt. Get Quiet Code’s attention somehow, and let her know you need to talk to her. Cut out the middle-woman.”

  I snorted. Weirdly, I was feeling a lot better, talking through the absurdity of it all, though I’d probably have nightmares about Crystal blowing someone’s brain out all over me or something. “What kind of stunt? Hold up a radio in the parking lot playing ‘blinded by science’ and hope she notices? That didn’t work out so well last time. I think it just attracted a confused physics professor.”

  She looked at me like I was an idiot. “You are aware, that your teammate is possibly the most powerful information manipulator in existence. A walking, talking, adorably clumsy supercomputer. So I suggest part of column two and part of column four. Take someone out on a very visible date, and have our darling Abigail practice her control by getting a message to Quiet Code through means only she understands. Abbey may not be a programmer, but I am certain she could set it up so that Quiet Code notices. A pop-up ad in her brain, a message spelled out in the school’s electrrical strength bars… something.”

  I looked at her a little confusedly, “You want me to take Abbey on a date? As a… what? A mission?”

  She went thoughtful at that, and then smiled a little, “Yes, absolutely. You could use a date as a bribe for her help. Even if it doesn’t work out, just make sure you do something for her that no one else can, she will probably be tickled pink and call you her straight gay best friend.”

  “Her what?” My brain short-circuited trying to parse that particular social configuration.

  She chortled at my shocked tone, “Straight gay best friend. A gay best friend is kind of a status symbol, but you are straight, but as a rare male alpha, it’s still a status symbol. You’d be like her gay best friend, but straight. A Shray. A G-bestie. I don’t know, it’s a thing.”

  “Uhh...I am not sure I could do that. If she wanted me to help her change clothes and paint her nails naked, I’d probably try to grope her. I’m only human, and my willpower is primarily reserved for not disintegrating people who annoy me.”

  She shrugged, “Well, then people would be really convinced that whatever went on between you and Kate was over. Mission accomplished.”

  I sighed, the weight of the world feeling slightly more manageable, if no less bizarre. “Well, would you like to do something with me as your straight gay best friend?” The offer was out before I could stop it.

  She actually looked surprised and pleased, “What’s that?”

  I glanced at the minikitchen. “I think I could really use a pint of ice cream. My body is screaming for calories and my soul is screaming for sugar. Want to split a bananaberry with me while we whine about how evil men are? I promise not to stare at your boobs too obviously.”

  She laughed, a bright, clear sound. “Hell yes! But only if you promise to complain dramatically. It’s not a proper pity party without theatrics. And honestly, I don’t mind that much if you stare, since I tried to get your attention for weeks before I finally gave up.”

  What the hell?

  ***

  “Are you trying to bribe me?” Abbey glared at me through the phone’s video panel, though the effect was ruined by the slight twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth. She was at her parent’s house, but we had each other’s call codes just in case something happened, and she had looked surprisingly happy when her mother had waved her over. Miss Snow was nearly as petite and gorgeous as her daughter, and I almost wished she was a cougar. Almost. My life was complicated enough.

  I looked at her thoughtfully, cradling the phone. “That depends. Is it a good enough bribe?”

  She shook her head, trying to maintain her faux-stern expression, “not quite. I could get into serious trouble messing with the school’s databases, especially the data labs. The nerd crew gets very upset when so-called idiots mess with their work. It’s like kicking an ant hill, if the ants were all armed with cryptographic algorithms and a deep-seated hatred for jocks.”

  “So how do I up the ante?” I asked, playing along.

  She looked thoughtful, and then held up a finger, “Hold on” she said, stepping away from the screen. I heard some murmuring that sounded like her mom? And then a moment later she stepped back to face me on the screen. “Okay, I will do it, but it’s going to be more.” She said it with a finality that suggested she’d just negotiated terms with a higher power, possibly her mother.

  “More?”

  She nodded, “Yes, more than just a simple date. No dipsy-duo of a dinner and a flick. I require an experience.”

  I nodded, putting on my best attempt at a charming rogue persona. “Ma’am. You wound me. Did you honestly think I would be so callous as to offer nothing more than a two hours of bad comedy followed by filling your stomach?” I looked around, and said, “Err… I mean, of course something better. I just realized how dirty that sounded. It was better in my head, and smoother.” My smoothness was apparently still under construction.

  She laughed, “Like that wasn’t intentional innuendo. Okay, you promise something better than dinner and a movie, and then afterwards I want a kiss.”

  “A kiss?” I blinked. This was moving faster than a speedster with a vendetta.

  She nodded, “A real kiss. Like mouth and maybe tongues and everything. I figure there’s a very real chance that you are going to wind up going out with all of us, and I want a legitimate chance. Especially since, if you ever go out with Candace, there’s absolutely no way she’d ever let you get away without a lot more than a kiss. She has made that very clear.” She said it with the matter-of-fact tone of someone discussing the weather.

  “Wait, seriously? You guys have actually talked about this?” My brain was trying to process the concept of a dating roster. Was there a sign-up sheet? A tournament bracket?

  She nodded, “Yep. No one is allowed to try to take you to bed or try to talk you into marrying them until you have dated all of us except maybe Sabrina, although she might join the club later. But I want to make sure that I get a full chance before Candace or Mindy rip you away.” She said it with utter seriousness.

  “Is Akyo part of the club?”

  She nodded, “Absolutely, although she sorta made it clear that she just wants to have a romance with a handsome gaijin before she goes back home. She has to go back to Japan, no choice, and figures there’s no way you’d fall in love with her and follow her home like a hungry puppy.” This was surreal. My love life, or distinct lack thereof, was apparently a subject of team-wide strategic planning.

  I was dumbfounded. “Are you really serious?”

  She looked at me oddly, and then her eyes went wide as she realized what she’d just revealed. “Umm… no? Of course not. I was just trying to be uhh… clever. Yeah, clever.” She was a terrible liar. “But yes, I will get something to her if you give me a date, and a kiss, and maybe a snuggle.”

  I smiled slightly. She was adorable, in a sweet and innocent way that was probably a highly effective and well-practiced weapon. “Tell you what, even if it weren’t a bribe, I’d give you a kiss and a snuggle, if you really want one. I just wasn’t aware you were… affectionate like that.” Or that I was part of a collective dating agreement.

  She nodded, “Well, you were so busy dealing with Candace acting like a sl… aggressive person, that you probably didn’t notice that your team is getting pretty close. I am pretty sure any one of us would like a hug or snuggle, especially Candace, but she’d probably want ropes and handcuffs and latex underwear too.” She said the last part in a stage whisper.

  I saw a hand dart out from beside the phone and smack her shoulder.

  “Was that your mom?”

  She shook her head, “No that was my sister. She told me to tell you that if you get tired of superpowered girls, that she’d be happy to wait for you at least two years, since she’s only sixteen.” another hand darted out to smack her shoulder again, and she said “Ow! She said to tell you she’s eighteen, but she’s lying.” Another smack, and this time she turned to glare off to one side. “I am going to tell mom that you are trying to play jailbait and she’ll take away your Sybian and furry hentai collection.”

  “What the…” I asked before I saw her tackled and a fall of two different colored hairs. After a few moments of oofs and a loud smack, I finally said, “Hey Abbey, I will see you when you get back.” After a moment, I saw a thumb raised from the tangle of limbs, and I laughingly hung up. Damn, she had a heck of a family. It was chaotic, and loud, and strangely comforting. It was everything mine wasn’t, and for a moment, I felt a pang of envy for the normal, superpowered chaos of it all.

  Then again, it could be worse. She could be a twin. Wouldn’t THAT be a hellish irony?