A cool draft of air hit the back of my neck, or maybe it was a shiver, but it didn’t matter. This was my first time killing a man, and unfortunately, it felt amazing.

I struggled to keep from smiling as the Hero’s eyes fluttered from the impact, the hole in his torso glaringly wide, meat and organs replaced by fist and forearm, and as we stood there, two dancers frozen in time, I gave in and grinned.

Savoring the moment, I turned to see the others’ faces. Uriah looked horrified, his goggles pushed up on his forehead, revealing blue eyes that were wide as coins. Irish was panting heavily, doubled over, his brief bewilderment quickly morphing into fury. That was to be expected. But Tove – Tove’s lips twitched, just for a moment.

At least she was in my corner..

Eagerly, I snapped my attention back to Tenor. He was close enough for me to feel his warm, minty breath on my chin. Even as he stood dying, his presence was a crushing pressure around me, that stupid bassy buzzing sound that followed him around oppressive and all-encompassing. He grinned wide, his white teeth stained red, his unfocused gaze sharpening for just a moment, and with a raspy chuckle he leaned in closer and whispered two words in my ear.

“Bad decision.” The sentence rattled out of him like broken glass.

Between one moment and the next, the deep thrumming noise Tenor’s power made had ceased, and the light had gone out of his eyes. And — honest to God, I couldn’t help it – I let out a low chuckle.

“Knox.” Tove’s voice cut through the moment, my moment, and I turned to face her, pleased to see that I finally had her full attention. Despite the skirmish, her blonde hair still fell neatly down to her neck in straight, immaculate lines. It was as if always looking perfect was another power of hers.

“Help me get him off,” I said, my voice rough as rock.

Irish was beside me in an instant, accompanied by a pop and the whooshing of air. “You did not

just kill Tenor,” he uttered with half disbelief and half fear.

I could already feel my strength ebbing, my adrenaline levels dropping, my fist, arms, legs, all beginning to ache. I’d tanked a couple hits during the fight, so I’d be sore for a while, though my regeneration – the one upside of my deceivingly shitty power – would do most of the work. “We don’t have time for this. Hurry up.”

Uriah, looking disoriented and dizzy, lowered his paintball gun and sat himself down on a piece of scaffolding that had crumbled from the half-built warehouse’s ceiling. He rubbed at his temple, where Tove had accidentally clocked him with a rock amidst the chaos. It had been quite the nasty blow.

There would be hell to pay when it came to the damages to the building. Even more so when it came to Tenor’s death.

However, that was only if we got caught.

Realizing the others wouldn’t come to my aid, I groaned and used the last reserves of my strength to slide Tenor’s body off my arm like meat off a kebab. His lifeless form slumped to the ground with a heavy thud.

“We have to leave,” I muttered, shaking the ache out of my arm. I eyed the Hero’s corpse with intensity, half-expecting him to get up and keep on fighting. But he didn’t.

I should have known he wouldn’t. After all, I knew what a dead body looked like.

Once I was satisfied, I gave the warehouse a once-over. We were smack-dab in the middle of the wrecked building, which had been under construction when we’d entered, and would be under even more construction once we’d left. Beyond the incomplete roof, the sky was the dark-blue of dusk, and the air smelled of cinder blocks and granite and wood and dust and blood. The 4th of July was in a week.

America wouldn’t be too keen on celebrating it without one of their favorite Heroes.

Uriah hadn’t moved an inch, functionally catatonic, not doing his damn job of ensuring there were no witnesses, so Irish was teleporting all over the place, doing it for him. Meanwhile, Tove simply stared at me — perhaps even past me. She caught me looking, and raised a brow, as if awaiting an instruction.

I clapped my hands once, the sound echoing like a gunshot – perhaps the only other perk of my shitty power. “Time to go. Leave the mess behind.” I announced it with finality as I walked towards the exit.

–

The only reason I was at Publix was because Kroger had kicked me out for destruction of property a week prior.

It wasn’t my fault their oranges were so delicate. They’d just split and burst like eggs in my grasp. And that had set me off, so the entire crate had gone next, small round fruits tumbling down all over the linoleum floor like marbles.

Now, in the line to the register, I whistled a tune, something my therapist swore would help me destress. My foot tapped in time, grocery basket swaying back and forth, and as usual, I was drawing a few stares.

Maybe it was the whistling — I never said I was good at it. Or the huge black trenchcoat I was wearing in the beginning of an especially humid July. Or maybe it was the combination of my being a six-and-a half foot tall black guy with bandages on my knuckles and a fading black eye.

The cashier looked about my age, maybe a student at my old college – technically, my

ex-college, since I’d been the dropout of our little group of four. Her brown hair fell in loose waves, and she wrung her hands as the customer in front of me took his goods and left.

The store was mostly empty at this point in the evening — Irish often pointed out my habit of procrastination, and this would be no exception — and there was no one behind me in line. So perhaps that was why she thought it acceptable to stare at me for ten seconds far too long, seemingly lost in thought, before finally finding her voice as she picked up my first item. “I’m glad he’s gone.”

It had been near-inaudible. I ignored her at first, unsure if she was actually speaking to me or just to herself. Taking a deep breath, she emphatically jabbed a finger at a tabloid on a nearby stand

for effect. The cover was dominated by a photo of Tenor, mid-flight, everything framed so perfectly that it had to have been a staged indoor shoot. His smile was too white, his short, blond hair was too well-groomed, and the lines of his muscles were edited to show through that stupid, way-too-tight, red-and-gold suit of his. Beneath the image, the headline read: Tragedy Strikes the South – Beloved Regional Hero Found Dead.

“I never liked him,” the girl said as she scanned a bottle of cranberry juice, her mouth twisting with mirth and disgust. As if it was a completely normal thing to say to a stranger.

I scrunched my lips, unsure whether to bite. But Tove had just bought me a copy of Cape Crimes: The Dark Decade of Heroes, one which my favorite historian Derek Howden had signed – a gift for “no particular reason”, although we all knew the reason – and I was planning to stay up all night reading it. Thus, I was already in a relatively good mood. So I thought, Why not see where this goes?

“Why’s that?” I asked, eyes drifting away from Tenor’s photo, up to the ceiling fans twirling lazily above the rafters.

The girl’s eyes lit up with a kind of nervous excitement, since she’d finally found a poor sap to discuss this with, and she raised my jumbo-sized bag of Lays to poorly conceal her half-grimace. “The way he dispatched criminals… It was brutal. Barbaric. Whatever happened to rehabilitation?”

I nodded, thinking back to the last time I’d watched Tenor “fight” a criminal — firing a sonic blast through the unarmed man’s chest, a blast that scientists had calculated to contain five times the power of a gunshot.

And I truly doubted that had been the first life he’d taken in private.

“Heroes have too much power, and we all just pretend that it’s fine.” She scanned the Lays bag and grabbed the tabloid, the paper crinkling under her tight grasp. “Know what I mean? They’ve got their hands in everything — the government, the media, industries that don’t even make sense. And they can basically kill without consequence!”

What exactly is she getting at? I picked up an orange and tossed it absently from hand to hand; but it didn’t help with the anxiety I was now feeling.

“But it looks like he got his just desserts,” I noted, nodding towards Tenor’s photo, his face morphing under the pressure of her nails. I didn’t like his new expression one bit.

Of course I agreed with her sentiments. But I’d never had someone agree with me on such a subject so… openly. Not even my friends.

“Yeah, yeah…” she said softly, matching my energy, and she placed the tabloid back nicely, neatly, with care, and then she turned and leaned in real close to me and whispered, “Tenor killed my uncle.”

Ah. There it is.

She lifted her chin with pride, as if glad to have finally gotten it off her chest, but I cut her moment short. The orange burst in my fist, citrusy liquid splashing into my eyes and onto my coat and across the girl’s face.

Funnily enough, the way it burst reminded me of Tenor.

The conversation was over. I shuddered, totally stunned, and the girl clenched her jaw tight, but she simply wiped at her face with a sleeve and went back to scanning my items in silence, as if she regretted saying anything at all.

–

“You shouldn’t have done it.” Irish didn’t look up from the mess of equations spread across his lap.

“I haven’t even entered the damn room yet!” I took one stiff step into the house, slamming the front door behind me and lowering the grocery bags down to the floor.

“You’ll break the door again,” he grumbled,still not looking at me. He was sitting on our

beaten-up couch, writing up some physics paper of his for research. I could never make sense of the math he scribbled on every piece of looseleaf we owned. “I’m not paying for the repair this time.”

I snatched the bottle of cranberry juice from the bag and pitched it at him; it struck him square in the forehead with a dull thud. He cried out, tumbling backwards into the couch cushions.

I had actually expected him to dodge it. Irish always dodged.

Pushing away my mild concern for him, I trudged forwards and collapsed into the armchair, praying Irish didn’t rehash this subject. “Drop it,” I said, my voice gravelly. “Tenor’s doornail-dead. Nothing I can do about it now.”

Irish fixed me with a frustrated glare, rubbing his forehead as he sat back up. “Gotta get the idea into that thick skull of yours: when you screw up, you face the consequences.”

“Yeah. Like a bottle to the head.”

Before Irish could retort, Tove’s voice floated in from the backyard. “Knox?” Her face appeared in the doorway, hair falling to the side as she smiled warmly. “See? I told you you had nothing to worry about.”

Her presence alone cooled some of the heat rising in my chest. She’d told me I had no reason to worry about being identified as Tenor’s killer, and finally convinced me to step out of the house after days spent inside. And apparently, she’d been right.

I got up, embracing her in a much-needed hug. “Right as always,” I said, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “How’s training going?”

She flexed her fingers. “Steady progress,” she said, but her bright grin didn’t fool me.

Tove always said the same thing, code for “No big improvements just yet.” It was odd; she was great with her power, but for someone who trained so relentlessly, she should have been leagues ahead.

I always caught the touch of melancholy to her grin. “You’ll make a great Hero sooner than you think,” I said. My typical platitude of choice, but she knew I wasn’t good with words, and she appreciated the sentiment behind it.

She offered me another smile, this one more earnest, more crooked, more real. Then she turned towards Irish. “Lay off him, or I’ll pull the moon out of orbit and send it crashing down into this place.”

Irish shrugged, head back down, already back to scribbling on his sheet of paper. “I’ll simply teleport away if you do. And you’ll have a big-ass mess to clean up.”

Tove stared daggers at him, and squeezed my hand tight before slipping back outside. As the door clicked shut, I sank back into my seat. “You heard her, Ire. Lay off me.”

He shot me another glare. “She’s been training so hard,” he said, voice turning solemn for a moment. “And now you might have ruined everything for her.”

I scoffed. “We’re not going to get caught.” Because if we did, I didn’t know what I’d do.

And what he didn’t know was that it had been Tove who had given me the idea of settling my grudge with Tenor “when the time felt right.” In some sort of fair duel or something.

Unfortunately, when we stumbled upon him that unfortunate evening, my power had flared up and I’d lost control, forgetting the plan to bide my time. Wrong place, wrong time, and the others had had no choice but to help me.

The intent had never been to kill Tenor – or at least, that was what I told myself. And ultimately, I’d never intended to get Tove involved. It had always been between me and Tenor alone.

Wanting to drop the topic, I reclined and reached for the remote, but Irish used his bullshit power, and the remote appeared in his hand with a small pop.

He clicked a button, and the TV blinked to life. A news channel was already on — go figure, since that was all Irish watched as of late. We were in that period where the news on Tenor was

no longer breaking, but a funeral service still hadn’t been held. The period where “details” were still coming out, although I knew none would surface.

Pictures of Tenor from childhood to adulthood cycled on the screen, accompanied by an unbearably syrupy string arrangement that made me want to tug my ears off and swallow them.

Looking Into The Last Moments of Colton Wright’s Life. I audibly groaned as I scanned the words drifting across the bottom of the screen, and turned to Irish, but Irish rewinded a couple of seconds and pointed right back at the TV.

“Witnesses are coming forward claiming to have found evidence on Mr. Wright’s death,” the anchor that had just appeared announced. “Authorities are taking this information with skepticism after a wave of Villains and Normals have also come forward, taking credit for killing the Hero.”

I creased my forehead. “You said you were thorough.”

Irish’s green eyes flew wide open. “Me? You’re pinning this on me?!”

Gauging from his reaction, I thought it wise to pivot to a slightly different topic than the blame game. “All I can say is that the country’s better off with him dead.” The girl at the grocery store had agreed; why couldn’t my best friend?

Irish turned off the TV and tossed the remote up, flicking his wrist lazily, and the remote appeared back on the TV stand with a wobble, as if it had never left

“It is. But I don’t think it should’ve been you who killed him. You don’t need this blood on your hands.”

“Someone had to.” I stood up too fast, growing mildly dizzy. Irish and I fought more and more these days, but Tenor’s death had drastically exacerbated things. I’d been losing sleep. “You’ve seen what he’s done.” But I hadn’t told him everything yet – only Tove knew the main reason for my grudge.

Irish sighed, and I knew it wasn’t just because he was annoyed, but also because his power tired him out quickly — he loved to show off, as if I needed constant reminders that he’d had the better luck of the draw. In a short pop, he was gone, and I heard the fridge open behind me, a can of energy drink cracking open. “We don’t make waves, Knox.” I turned to catch him in the kitchen taking a sip, quirking a brow at the sugary taste. “I’m alright with being a vigilante or whatever every now and then, but we don’t make waves.”

Violent memories surfaced at the sound of those words. I’d heard them far too many times. “You know full well th—”

He finished chugging and slammed the empty can down on the counter. “I don’t care. You knew better. I’ll be pissed at you until this whole thing’s blown over. Probably afterwards, too.” He crushed the can by teleporting the air right out of it, and then it disappeared from the table to God-knows-where.

“Stop drinking those,” I mumbled, concern slipping into my voice despite myself. “I got you that cranberry juice so tha–”

“Don’t get distracted.” He planted his palms on the counter to keep himself upright.

I threw my arms up, totally exasperated. “Alright then. How do I fix this? How do I make you happy, Ire?”

Irish smirked, the same smirk I first saw in physics lecture freshman year, before I’d switched my major to History. He’d been seated beside me by chance, all precocious and cocky, and he’d grinned because, even back then, he knew the answer and I didn’t.

“Make the investigation disappear. Stop the most powerful people in the US from finding out that it was you who killed their Hero Number 9.” He shrugged. “Or sit idly by and take my rightful chastising for once.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, and after a moment of consideration, got to my feet. Opened the front door. Slammed it shut behind me.

Intentional or not, the doorknob came away with my hand. –

The authorities came at night. Perhapsthey’d taken a page out of Irish’s book: the fewer waves they made, the better.

Tove had been closest to the front door, absentmindedly lifting and lowering the cinderblocks she kept by the door for “emergencies” with one hand, a glass of vermouth pinched in the other.

She’d always preferred the fancier stuff.

She froze as a shadow flickered across the peephole, her grip tightening on the glass. Before she could act, the door burst inward with a muffled boom. Four AntiVillain operatives stormed in, black uniforms gleaming like suits of armor. I remembered reading once that their gear was resistant to x-rays, sonic attacks, electricity, cognitohazards, heat… the damn list didn’t end.

At the end of the day, I should have been honored that they’d brought in the big guns for us.

Tove’s drink spilled all over the hoodie she was wearing – my hoodie, unfortunately – as one of them shoved her out of the way and came straight for me. I was sitting hunched over on the couch, eyes glazed over as I “watched” the football game, but upon hearing Tove cry out, I was up on my feet. A laser hit me dead in the chest, and I froze, incapacitated.

Just like that, I was now immobile in my own body – it was a horrible, inexplicable feeling. Electricity shot through my nerves, but my muscles didn’t respond, didn’t listen. Adrenaline built up in my brain, and I could feel the anger my power supplied pushing me to act, even though I didn’t actually want to hurt anyone just yet. I just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

Through the building haze of static in my mind, I watched a Hero stride in with exaggerated, elegant languor: Vitesse, in her black, skin-tight suit that was both stylish and necessary for her power. My breathing – the only movement the Stun Ray would allow me – caught in my chest. They’d brought her in from out of state. Her power was exceedingly rare, after all.

National Hero Rank Number 6 eyed me with equal parts curiosity and nonchalance, if that was even possible, in a way that seemed to say, You’re an interesting little thing, but my time is still being wasted here. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Uriah peek out of Irish’s room down the hall, paintball gun in hand, his face twisted with determination. He fired three custom-made paintball pellets squarely at the helmets of three operatives.

Naturally, they didn’t even flinch. Perfect shots, all three – of course they were – but pellets made with chemicals that rendered people unconscious typically didn’t work on people with helmets.

Vitesse sighed and seemingly disappeared, reappearing with Uriah instantaneously, and a rush of displaced air shot through the room. Uriah, that brilliant idiot, was now in handcuffs, pinned against the wall, his black hair ruffled by the speed at which she’d displaced him. He looked pale, sick, like he wanted to throw up, but he kept his mouth shut.

If I could, I would’ve raised a brow, knowing full well that Irish had been in that room with him. Vitesse should have seen him.

That is, unless he’d teleported away.

Tove uselessly twisted against the handcuffs she’d been placed in, looking plainly foolish, as if struggling would accomplish anything – the cuffs prevented use of powers, and, of course, free movement. “Please, don’t do this!” she pleaded, tears falling from her eyes. “Please!” I hated when she pretended to be helpless.

Vitesse disappeared once more, and everything was displaced at once.

Every door in the house flew wide open, and this second wave of air slammed into us like a semi-truck, kicking up Tove’s petrology papers, Uriah’s half-assed chemistry lab report, my dog-eared copy of Catch-22. The wave knocked over the beer I’d hidden under the coffee table because I hated vermouth, the beer Tove knew I’d sip whenever she wasn’t looking but that she pretended not to know about, if only to allow my quiet rebellion, if only to indulge in our little game of half-truths and half-lies.

Vitesse reappeared, no worse for wear. “Clear,” she said in that stupid French accent of hers, one I was half-certain was fake. “Bring all three of them in.”

My brain struggled to piece it all together. How did they find us? Irish wouldn’t have sold us out, not to prove a point to me, and definitely not if it meant getting his little brother involved.

As thoughts and possibilities whirled through my head, Vitesse grabbed me by the shoulders.

Irish had never teleported me before – he’d never tested it on living beings other than himself, fearing the worst – but I imagined this would be what it was like. Colors flashed before my eyes, and then I was suddenly elsewhere, my brain lagging behind the change in temperature, my ears popping from the pressure difference.

Suddenly, I was in the back of the straight truck they’d parked outside our place. The speedster grinned at me through the darkness of the open trailer. She leaned in close, her breath sharp with the bitter tang of vermouth. My nose wrinkled as I realized why – she’d had a taste of it for herself at some point using her ridiculously broken power – and all she said to me was, “Bad decision.”

–

Prison hadn’t been a breeze, but it wasn’t the hell I’d imagined.

Someone had clearly pulled some strings to put me into Whitefish Villain Penitentiary instead of Brockton Solitary, and I knew it was because they hoped I’d get killed by some grudge-holding inmate. But all the other prisoners steered clear of me for one of two reasons either because they somewhat respected what I had done, or because they didn’t want to end up as a donut like the ninth-strongest hero had.

They’d let me wear a vest lined with cold packs similar to my coat, to help regulate my body heat. I was grateful, but also conflicted by the mercurial treatment I’d been receiving. Three square meals. An obnoxiously early curfew with no lights to read with at night. Access to a massive library stocked with all the history books I could ever wish for. A twin-sized bed for a man who was 6’5”. It felt less like punishment and more like containment – like they didn’t know what to do with someone like me.

A year and I was out, thanks to a cocktail of factors no sane individual could untangle. The criminal system for Supers was a labyrinth of contradictions. Many people wanted me serving life, and a few wanted me dead, but a loud vocal minority had protested for my release, calling me a Hero in my own right.

Being called that disgusted me. Heroes were the real Villains, after all.

Hearing agreement from the girl at the grocery store had pleased me, but hearing my actions being turned into a political movement really, truly didn’t.

The police had analyzed the evidence again and again, even having hired an Agent with one of those niche powers — technopathy or some bullshit — to check if it was doctored. It wasn’t. The witness had opted to keep his identity hidden, but the video was bona fide. They’d shown it to me right before they put me in Whitefish.

The memory was a blur of adrenaline, but the video brought it all back with cold precision. The day of Tenor’s death, we’d been at an empty construction site downtown, dismantling surveillance equipment set up by ValorTech Industries – one of those Hero-backed corporations that had fingers in every pie. Tove had pitched the idea, as a way to send a “message” – to

whom, exactly, Irish had said he couldn’t tell. But I was on board before she’d even finished her pitch. I always was. The brothers buckled under the pressure soon after.

We’d thought we’d be in and out. A clean job. Then the alarm went off. And Tenor had shown up. Go figure.

The second he arrived on the scene, he was all cocky and grinning, as if he’d already won the battle. The bastard didn’t even hesitate before opening fire, scattering us like bugs, and the skirmish had spilled into the half-finished warehouse where the fight turned vicious – and where the video began.

The person recording had been hiding behind a stack of cinder blocks, and the footage started right as Uriah had nailed Tenor in the face with a paintball containing an anesthetic he’d synthesized in chem lab. Despite having sustained the accidental cranial bash from Tove, his aim was still inhuman.

Now disoriented, he’d missed the second but landed the third, hitting Tenor’s right shoulder even as the Hero zoomed through the air at unfair speeds, riding on supersonic waves like a surfer who’d won the wave lottery. A deep, bassy sound filled the warehouse as he did so, and I remember how relieved I’d been once it’d finally stopped.

Irish popped in and out of frame, knocking the Hero about with teleported debris. He’d even tried out a new trick he’d shown me, teleporting air away to create a vacuum, jostling the hero about, and replacing it just as quickly to shove him back. Whenever Tenor targeted him, he’d disappear and restart the onslaught, fatigued but still pushing on.

Fortunately, once the pair had weakened him enough, Tove had slammed him down to earth with a levitating, almighty chunk of concrete the size of a car.

I loved it when she used her power.

Tenor, veritably pissed and still somehow standing, had set his sights on me. I’d been pretty useless the whole fight, hucking barrels and debris at the Hero since, much to my chagrin, I couldn’t get close without him blasting me away. My aim was nowhere near as good as Uriah’s, and I wasn’t as effective as Tove and Irish, but when I landed hits, they did serious damage.

Tenor likely figured he could take me out the easiest. What an idiot.

He changed course, flying towards me at breakneck speeds. I grinned with glee. All I did was stick out my arm.

A cloud of blood exploded on impact as he skewered himself, much like a burst tangerine. It had been near-comedic — for me, at least. He coughed up the color red, and in the low-quality video I looked panicked, even terrified, but in the moment, I’d felt truly alive.

“That’s for Knox Williams.” In the video, my lips only moved without sound; the audio hadn’t reached the camera. But I knew exactly what I’d said to Tenor that day.

He’d died shortly afterwards, and the last thing I noticed in the video before the person filming booked it away was Tove. She had been looking straight past me, in the direction of the camera, with a curious glare.

As I watched that part of the footage, I frowned. Had she noticed the camera? Had she missed it? Was her negligence the reason I’d gone to prison?

I figured it didn’t really matter, because it was Uriah with the hyperkinesis. He was the one who could measure all physical factors in a fraction of a second and line up the perfect shot at the perfect moment, and he was the one who could detect changes in air pressure or sounds in dogs’ hearing range or the difference in scent between every bottle of sriracha in the Kroger condiment aisle.

He should have noticed.

The cop showing me the video had stood up a little taller, as if he’d filmed it himself and was proud of his handiwork. “Anything to say about that?”

I shook my head. What was I meant to say? My bad?

Against all odds, my friends got off easy. Community service, a slap of the wrist. Superhuman laws were bullshit, after all, and the string pullers likely figured it was easier to have one victim to blame, to put a single face to it all, and naturally, I was the perfect scapegoat. But ultimately, I was happy to take the fall for an act I was proud to have committed.

By some technicality – or ten – the sentence was laughably short because it was “manslaughter,” and even shorter because at the end of the day, I hadn’t truly, actively killed him. An “accident,” they’d called it. I was an immovable object; Tenor, a stoppable force. Strings, all over the place, being pulled like crazy – I’d think I was in a puppet show.

But some strange, sick part of me wished I could have stayed in prison longer. I wish I could have served more time. It would have further justified the satisfaction I felt from killing Tenor.

Because killing him had felt so damn good.

–

The night I was released, the gang welcomed me home with open arms. But the tension was so thick it could be sliced with a knife.

Tove barreled into me, pulling me in close, her wiry arms fitting around my torso like a puzzle piece. “Holy shit,” she breathed, and I stiffened at the heat of her face on my chest, realizing how much I’d missed it. “We missed you so so so much.”

She pulled away, and I could tell her tears were real this time, unlike the night we’d been taken in. Tove tilted her head and glanced down at my feet, and then clenched her fist tight, but to no avail. “Sorry. Can’t do anything about that.” Her power had detected the metal around my ankle instantly.

She looked to Irish, who had embraced me straight afterwards. The man was rocking a new goatee, and his eyebags were more pronounced. I considered pushing him back, considering he’d run away the night we were arrested, but I’d missed my friend too much to act so petty. My anger wasn’t really directed at him, anyway.

Irish looked down at my leg and bent down to roll my sweatpants up to my knee, revealing the ankle bracelet they’d fused into my bone at Whitefish, the one Tove had been unable to break. He focused, the strain visible on his face — it always was, these days — but he was unable to teleport it off. “How the hell do they do that?”

“I’ll try to corrode it off later.” Uriah was standing behind them, that wide, innocent smile on his too-young-for-college baby face, and he was holding a chocolate ice cream cake, with Welcome

Back! written in red cursive icing. There were 21 striped candles on it, catching me off guard at first before I remembered I’d spent my birthday in Whitefish’s library. And now my friends were offering me a make-up, bless their hearts.

I inhaled to blow them out, but then stopped myself. I could feel my adrenaline levels surging, which was strange, because they only did that when I subconsciously felt like I was in danger, or about to be.

Or whenever a grudge I’d held for a really long time had an opportunity to be rectified.

I forced a smile and in a saccharine tone, said to Uriah, “Thank you! Why didn’t you notice him?”

Slowly, Uriah’s smile slid off his face. “Huh?” he grunted, slack-jawed.

All of a sudden, the levels in my brain spiked. The muscles in my legs fired, fast-twitch and deadly, and suddenly the cake hit the floor in a mess of frosting, and I had Uriah pinned against the far side of the room, the drywall cracked from the impact.

“The person who was filming us,” I snarled, my voice low and deadly. “Why didn’t you notice him?”

Irish was in front of me the next moment, using a gust of displaced air to shove me away with all the restraint of a freight train. “Don’t touch him,” I heard as I slammed into the dining table, tumbling to the floor.

My eyes went wide, heart pumping blood like my life depended on it. I jabbed a finger towards Uriah, who looked like a deer caught in headlights. “We all saw the video, no? This dumbass didn’t pick up on the bastard recording us from five goddamn feet away!”

“Because Tove brained him with a chunk of rock! Were you not there?”

I scrambled to my feet, but Tove had already brought out the cinder blocks she kept by the front door for emergencies, and pinned me back against the wall by my arms with a flick of the wrist. “Calm down, babe.”

For a second, it felt like my heart shattered. Here I was, on the day of my grand return, and everything was meant to be perfect. And now, with the time that had passed with me away, I snapped for one second and suddenly Tove now thought of me as an emergency. That night we’d been arrested, she hadn’t acted fast enough to stop the AntiVillain operatives. But she’d been plenty quick to stop me.

I grabbed hold of the blocks and smashed them together, and they exploded in a cloud of dust. Figured I’d do the same to Uriah once I got my hands on him.

Head thumping, I burst through the smokescreen I’d created and lunged at him; thanks to his power, he sidestepped just in time. I turned on my heel, closing in as he sprinted away, but the armchair appeared in front of me with a pop. I flicked it aside as if it were filled with helium, only for a cinder block to come flying at my head.

I blocked with my forearms and snagged the hem of Uriah’s hoodie, drawing him in, my fist already flying towards his face, but then everything… stopped.

I was surrounded by cold night air, by wispy clouds and flocking birds, and I could see the full moon above me, bigger than I’d seen it in months. And then we began to fall.

Irish was gripping me by the collar, and he barked something, furiously, but it got lost in the wind and the dark as we plummeted from the sky, down, down, down.

And then, without a sound, he disappeared, as if he hadn’t been there in the first place. –

I didn’t feel safe making my way to the hospital – doubted they’d treat me anyways – so I stayed put in the ditch my impact had made in the yard and lay there as my bones repaired themselves. Irish had definitely wanted this — wanted me to sit and think about what I’d done.

I watched the trio clean up the party from outside. Uriah held his brother steady as they cleared away the nacho dishes. Tove had only looked at me once before she’d shut the blinds.

Irish had moved out a day later. I never saw him leave.

Typical. He’d always been so good at disappearing; about time he did it for good.

Naturally, Uriah stopped coming over, too. But Tove still visited. The first time she did, she’d brought me groceries. She addressed the topic head-on, saying she still loved me, saying she always would. She’d said it with a smile. I forced myself to believe her.

She came by twice a week after that, checking up on me during her small pockets of free time. I wasn’t looking for a job — not that anyone would hire an infamous “Villain” history dropout.

Tove told me not to worry, to just rest up and get “back at it” once I was back in fighting form, whatever “it” was.

The isolation was driving me nuts. Tenor had ruined my life, and I’d made sure to ruin the parts that had remained intact. There was nothing in my future and no one in my life but Tove. And when she wasn’t around, no one was. Except for my intrusive thoughts.

The third week in seclusion, I snatched up the newspaper she’d slipped into the grocery bag. We’d agreed to let me read the papers instead of watching the news, because, from experience, it was much better to tear a newspaper up out of anger than beat on a TV.

Eagerly, I perused it. A number was scribbled below an article titled, “Witness of Tenor’s Death Still Refusing to Step Forward.” Beside the number, the initials “CH? Look into….”

I froze. So Tove had a lead. Of course, she hadn’t meant for me to see it. But in life, some mistakes are fortuitous.

I felt the anger building in my head already, an unstoppable force, a train in motion, and against my better judgment, I went to my bedroom and turned on my computer.

–

Conrad Holt stared up at me, terrified, cowering in the corner between a brick wall and a dumpster, looking so damn small. “Please! You have the wrong guy!”

I frowned. His demeanor, his helplessness… It reminded me too much of Tove’s acting from the night of my arrest.

“You’re right,” I said, knitting my brows. My ankle collar was beeping like crazy, but the calm, cool timbre of my voice carried over it. “I’m sorry.”

He removed his hands from in front of his eyes, babbling like an idiot. “S-s-she made m–”

“Thanks for moving your hands.” I slammed my fist into his face. His head lost a dimension as it flattened against the brick wall, reduced to pulp, and his corpse collapsed forwards to the ground like crumpled paper.

This was my second time killing a man, but this time was far different. Again, adrenaline pumped through my brain like a train down hot tracks. But without my friends around to steady me, rather than cooling down, my breathing accelerated, veins bulging from my temples as I thought of Conrad, the snitch; Uriah, the idiot; Irish, the coward.

I thought of my father’s dead body, remembered scrambling up to him as soon as Tenor had left the scene, remembered turning him over, the bullet-shaped hole in his chest far too clean, too neat for death, the light already gone from his eyes. Don’t make waves, Junior, he would always tell me. Stay out of trouble. Especially around powerful people. Just don’t make waves. That stupid mantra I could never bring myself to listen to.

The adrenaline shift that typically ebbed and flowed like waves on a beach was now less of a shift and more like a switch.

A switch, simply set to On.

–

A pebble hit me in the midst of my rampage. A city block had already been leveled, and I was feeling proud of my power – why had I ever restrained myself? At first I didn’t notice the impact of the rock, but then another landed, and another, and finally, I turned.

My coat was off; I was delirious, incomprehensible, steam curling my skin, but Tove was the opposite, calm and lithe and elegant. We’d always been opposites, hot plasma and steady stone, the two poles of a magnet. She drifted down on a small island of earth — I’d never seen her use her power to this extent before. Despite my unease and my lost mind, I couldn’t help but feel proud.

“So this is you,” she called out as I slid down the wall of a high rise, dragging concrete and glass down along with me. I landed on the ground and prepared to leap at her, only to find that my feet were trapped in the pavement. She dragged me down to my waist, and I drummed my fists down onto the ground, but the rock reformed faster than I could break it.

Tove grinned, and even though I was gone mentally, I still noticed that she’d never worn this brand of grin before. More crooked than any before it — the image of power and beauty. She stretched out a hand, and shards of metal came together from the wreckage of cars and signs and buildings below, forming an almighty spear the length of three buses. She leveled it above her head, straight at me.

And as the metal tip glinted in the afternoon sun, I finally snapped out of it. I realized that she’d never been helpless, never been powerless.

It had always been me.

“You’re an idiot, Knox,” she spat, as if finally getting out something she’d been holding in. “And you thought Uriah was stupid.” She listed the items with her fingers. “You’re too frank. You’re unambitious. You can’t control yourself. And you bottle things in, let them out, and you end up

like… like this.” She curled her lip in disgust, and if Past Me had seen me now, he’d do the same.

Had this all been for my father? Justice for him? Revenge? Or was it all just a way to make sense of my own ever-present, underlying, seething anger at life itself?

“I thought of killing you back then, you know,” she continued, her voice colder now. “When we were fighting Tenor. I thought about teaming up with him to take ‘a group of Villains’ down, but I couldn’t find it in myself to do that to the others. Plus, murder doesn’t look good on tape – you should know. But no one’s recording now.”

She sighed, and for a second, I thought I saw her mask slip. I thought I saw a flicker of apprehension, a shadow of regret. But in my state, it could have simply been a hallucination.“I’m tired of letting you drag me down with you. I’m putting myself first. All I had to do was make you tip, and look at me now – I’m going to be a Hero.” She sighed, a breathy, wistful sound. “Knox, killing Tenor was a…”

I hadn’t taken credit for Tenor, but Tove would sure as hell take credit for killing me.

She leveled the metal spear, the afternoon sun glinting off its edge. The moment before she sent it through my heart, her grin sharpened, and her lips curled into two final words.

“… bad decision.”