Hopefuls (Book 1): The Private Life of Jane Maxwell

by Jenn Gott

  “Um, actually, it’s Amy?” Clair said. She tucked her hair back, the point of her bob curling below her earlobe like an accent shadow. “It’s nice to meet you.” She stuck out her hand.

  “You hate the name ‘Amy,’ ” Jane said automatically. Clair had abandoned it in the sixth grade, trimming down her last name, “Sinclair,” instead.

  Clair flushed. “Oh, it’s . . . it’s not that bad. I tried to change it once, but that was . . . that was ages ago, and . . . you didn’t—that is, Jane didn’t—well, not just Jane, nobody liked it much.” She shrugged it off, smiling. “Amy’s fine. I’m used to it.”

  She was still holding out her hand. Jane stared at it. The manicured nails, painted yellow. The soft pads of Clair’s—Amy’s—fingers. She was wearing fingerless gloves, a trademark sign of Mindsight. Jane swallowed around a dry lump in her throat as she accepted Amy’s handshake.

  So . . . not Clair. And yet, the grip of Amy’s hand, the traces of restoration solvent and perfume drifting off of her, the steady hold of her eyes, never once shying back . . .

  Clair.

  Not Clair.

  But the closest thing that Jane was ever going to get.

  There really was only one question left, anymore. “Why me?” Jane asked.

  Amy’s face softened. “Because our Jane is gone.”

  This is how the Spectral Wars began: with a single pigeon dying.

  That was the first panel, the entire first page. It was a beautiful sketch, far more realistic than the typical style found inside the pages of Hopefuls, more like something from a naturalist’s journal. Jane had fought hard to keep it that way. Her editor had fought her. Her boss had fought her. The other artists, the colorists, the inkers, had questioned her choice when they’d seen the first storyboards. The drawing was straight out of Jane’s sketchbook, a watercolor that she’d carefully torn from the binding and tacked up onto the wall of the meeting room that first morning, when the Spectral Wars was born.

  “This is the first page,” she’d said to them, and a trill of laughter had circled the room. They thought that she was joking.

  She wasn’t joking.

  The pigeon had a purpose in the narrative, of course it had a purpose in the narrative, but that wasn’t the real reason why the issue opened with it. The real reason is that the pigeon was the first thing that Jane had drawn after Clair’s death.

  It was three months, exactly, since the funeral. Jane hadn’t touched her pencils, her pens, her sketchbooks or drawing tablet, since the day that she’d gotten the phone call from the hospital, because she’d been drawing when the call came in. She was still holding the pencil when she swiped the call, tapping the speakerphone symbol so as not to interrupt her work. “Hello?” Jane answered it the old-fashioned way, because she did not recognize the number.

  A moment later, her pencil crashed against the sheet that she’d been working on. It had broken the tip, the collision leaving a burst of unintended scribble across the face of Doctor Demolition like a scar.

  In the weeks that followed, the sketch had gotten covered up by all the accumulated debris that follows a death. Piled-up mail, mountains of sympathy cards. Hospital bills. Insurance bills. Takeout menus.

  The morning that she started drawing again, three months later, her sketchbook was still buried. Jane ignored it as she made herself breakfast. It was actually morning, for once, and Jane was actually cooking, for once. Her mother had threatened to move in with Jane if she didn’t start taking better care of herself, so here Jane was: robotically going through the motions. Toast. Coffee. An apple, the one fruit that was still good (sort of) from the mountain of rotten fruit baskets that littered her fridge. Jane ate at the counter, her plate on the papers that covered her sketchbook. She didn’t remember where she’d left it, didn’t care.

  A shower. Showers would keep her mother from moving in. Jane let the glass fog up good and thick so that she wouldn’t have to look at her reflection in the mirror across the way. The hot water was already gone by the time she stepped in. She kept her gaze unfixed, the better to avoid looking at the bottles of Clair’s shampoo and bodywash, her pink razor in the soap dish. Jane hadn’t thrown anything out, not yet.

  Dressed. Clothes that more or less passed the sniff test, and to hell with whether they matched. While she’d been making breakfast, she’d noticed that she’d run out of milk sometime, somewhere, and she decided that she should go out and get some. Barefoot, damp-haired, Jane passed through her kitchen like a ghost. Did she need bread? Eggs? Everything felt distant, like she’d forgotten how to be a grownup. She knew, intellectually, that she and Clair used to go shopping together once a week, always spending more than they’d like, always running out of things, but for the life of her, Jane could not imagine what it was that they’d bought.

  Milk, then. Start small. Jane had no idea what she’d use the milk for—she didn’t like drinking it straight—but it seemed wrong, not to have milk in the fridge. She stuffed her feet into her shoes, and though she heard her mother’s voice in her head admonishing her for going out with wet hair, she ignored it. She remembered her phone, and her keys, barely, pushing the door back open at the last second before it slammed shut.

  Outside, the world shuffled on. It was a gloomy February day, but Jane thought that it was surprisingly warm. The snow that they’d gotten two weeks ago was melting, slowly, reduced to patches along the front of buildings, and a narrowing strip in the street gutters. Jane zipped up her jacket, and as she looked down to navigate the front steps, she spotted it.

  There was a dead pigeon on the stairs.

  It had probably been left there by a neighbor’s cat, “gifted” to whoever filled its food bowl. The bird’s neck was bent at an awkward angle, its beak slightly open. Glassy eyes stared at nothing. A few feathers were ruffled out of place along its wing and its belly, but other than that, it was surprisingly peaceful. To look at it, you might almost think that it had laid down for a nap, or simply grown weary of flying, and these were the closest steps to sit and rest on.

  Jane looked up and down the street. People were out walking, ignoring her as they hurried by. Nobody else had noticed the bird yet. Its passing had gone quietly, humbly, with none of the fuss that accompanied the death of a person.

  It’s hard to say exactly why Jane had rushed back to her apartment, why she’d thrown papers around in a whirlwind as she tried to find where she’d left her sketchbook. Sure, Clair had liked pigeons—despite the fact that they were a nuisance, despite being called vermin by everyone else. It still made no particular sense to Jane that morning, as she finally located her sketchbook and tore it from the counter—empty Chinese food cartons flying as she yanked it out from underneath them. She raced back down the stairs, terrified that someone would have spotted the pigeon by then and thrown it away. But it was still there.

  Jane sat down on the top step. The stonework was freezing through her yoga pants, numbing her ass. Jane ignored it. She ignored the people glancing curiously at her, as they squeezed by on their way in or out of the apartment building. She sketched the bird, over and over again, whole pages of its broken body. The curl of its tiny feet, as if clinging to the memory of a favorite branch. The chip along its beak, which Jane assumed was from an older injury that it had learned to live with. The tiny patch of blood underneath it, which she only spotted when she crouched down low enough so that she was almost nose-to-nose with the dead bird. The smell of it filled her face as she sketched the shadows underneath its useless wings, musty and already rotten.

  “Jane,” her mother had said to her over Skype, two days later when Jane was showing her the rough storyboard of the first several pages of the Spectral Wars, “it’s not that I’m not glad to see that you’re back at work . . . but are you sure that you shouldn’t be talking to someone?”

  Jane shook her head, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I’m fine,” she said, and at the time she believed it. Look: in the past two days, she’d done more
art than she had even in the last few weeks before Clair’s death. Jane had written out the plot for the Spectral Wars arc, everything—the beginning, which Clair had dreamed up and told her about just days before the accident, and the middle and ending that she’d had to come up with all on her own. And it was so good. It was perfect. It was heartbreaking.

  On the screen, Jane could see her mother’s skepticism. In the pull of her lips, a clear “hrmph” face turning her mouth into a slash. In the way she tapped her coffee cup, the one that Jane had bought her for her last birthday: her manicured nails tap-tapping against the athletic stretch of the letters that spelled out “café o’ pilate.” Jane’s mother was in her office, bright and sunlit, tasteful art prints of famous paintings hanging on the wall behind her. Jane’s own apartment, seen in miniature through the smaller square in the corner, was dark and even more cluttered than it had been before, but that didn’t matter. She’d be going back to QZero soon, pitching her story soon. Clair’s story.

  It was the only thing that mattered anymore. Let the rest of Jane’s life fall by the wayside; she hadn’t ended up buying the milk after all. The work would continue. The work would get out there. Clair’s brilliance would shine on forever, her last and greatest idea brought to life. Jane would get this story published, dammit, or die trying.

  * * *

  “We first noticed something was wrong when the pigeons started dying,” Amy said.

  “You mean you noticed,” Jane said.

  Amy flushed. “Well, yes. But that’s not the point.”

  Maybe not, but it was important to Jane. In the comics, she’d modeled the Heroes of Hope physically after her friends, but she’d given them different names, different lives. Instead of becoming an accountant and then running for the city council, comics-Tony was a policeman. Instead of marrying rich and moving to the affluent suburbs, having three kids, becoming a food blogger, comics-Marie was a technology genius who ran a multimillion-dollar startup company. Instead of pursuing restoration science and eventually branching out to become the assistant curator of the Grand City Museum of Fine Arts, comics-Clair worked as a nurse in a children’s hospital.

  “You realize that I could make you a doctor, right?” Jane had asked her once, at the beginning of her stint at QZero, when she was just starting to pitch Hopefuls to her boss. “You could be Chief of Staff, and run the entire place if you wanted to.”

  Clair had smiled. She had just cut her hair short, and Jane was sitting on the couch sideways beside her, sketching the new lines of her bangs, the curl at the end of her bob.

  “Doctors are great,” Clair had said, “but nurses are the ones who are there all the time, helping inch children toward their recovery. I want to be there for someone.”

  A nurse it was, then. With the same face, but a different name. Different home, different habits, different hobbies. Except for one: when Jane started writing the Spectral Wars storyline, she gave comics-Clair an interest in birding. She’d written it in as a side interest, fairly new, but to Jane’s delight and surprise, when she went back and reviewed some old issues, there were already a few hints that comics-Clair might be fascinated by birds. It was a seamless retcon, and it had allowed comics-Clair to be the one to first raise the alarm.

  It mattered.

  Because without it, they never would have discovered Doctor Demolition’s plan in time.

  Jane listened to the story all over again. Clair’s voice—Amy’s voice—washed over her. They had eventually sat, on opposite sides of the curling couch that Tony had abandoned when he realized that the next twenty minutes were going to be nothing but exposition and backstory. He and Marie left the room, retreating to the other parts of the headquarters, but Cal had stayed. He positioned himself on the couch between Jane and Amy, and he kept leaping into the recitation at the most inconvenient times, as if Amy didn’t know her own tale.

  Except, no, Jane tried to remind herself. It’s Clair’s story, but it’s just been Amy’s life.

  She wasn’t ready to begin processing what that might mean. For now, she just sat and listened.

  To Jane’s relief, a few of the details were different. She didn’t think that she could take it, to listen to Clair’s story again, in Clair’s voice again, and have it be exactly the same. As if time had folded back on itself, as if they were lying in bed, unwilling to shut up and actually go to sleep, goddammit, and instead were hashing out different plot lines, different possibilities. Laughing and getting sidetracked, saying goodnight and then starting up again five minutes later when a thought occurred to one of them.

  She listened. She listened as Amy described their discovery, the process of tracking Doctor Demolition down. How the team had divided, one group pursuing Doctor Demolition to the top of Woolfolk Tower, one group following a seemingly unrelated investigation into a set of caves that they’d found beneath the city. The two storylines played out in tandem, as they slowly revealed themselves to be more closely interwoven than it at first appeared. Two epic fights, sprawling across the pages. The dramatic reveal at the end, right before they’d defeated Doctor Demolition at the last possible second: that Doctor Demolition was not, in fact, the mastermind that they’d always assumed. That he was a puppet supervillain, answering to a shadowy figure known to him only as UltraViolet.

  This is where Amy’s story diverged. This is also as far as Clair’s storyline had taken her. Jane had built the rest of it up on her own, one painful step at a time as she realized that plotting was not anywhere near as much fun by herself.

  In Jane’s version: the Heroes defeated Doctor Demolition, incarcerating him in the Vault, a specially designed cell in the basement of their headquarters. The superweapon was dismantled, and the team began to pursue a line of logic to attempt to unravel the mystery of UltraViolet’s identity. The Spectral Wars began to unfold, a massive effort on UltraViolet’s part to seize control of the city for herself.

  In Amy’s version: the weapon went off. Though the Heroes did manage to capture Doctor Demolition, and did currently have him locked away in their basement, a hole now existed in the heart of downtown. Thousands of lives were lost. Gas from the superweapon had plumed up, blocking out the sun, poisoning the populace. Panic had ripped through the streets. The police were trying to keep hold of a frightened city, but crime was running rampant. They hadn’t had the time to try to find UltraViolet.

  And now Captain Lumen went missing. Jane went missing.

  This hit Jane harder than it should have. She did not, after all, know this other version of herself. She didn’t even have her own comics to help fill in an imagined version of Jane’s “double,” the one that actually was Captain Lumen. It wasn’t until several minutes later when Jane realized that it wasn’t that she was concerned for this other her—this other her only barely existed, in Jane’s mind—but that instead, her chest was hurting just thinking about what Clair was going through now.

  Or, you know, Amy. Whatever.

  And yet, Amy kept herself remarkably composed. Which really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Jane: Clair was always levelheaded, always collected in a crisis. She rarely worried, believing that everything would work itself out in the end; and even when she did worry, she always did such a good job of keeping her worry in check that sometimes even Jane had a difficult time spotting it.

  She tried to spot it now. She couldn’t see it at first, and a flare of pain wrenched at her heart—was she already out of practice? But then, there, look: the tiniest pull of Amy’s lips, like she wanted to frown but wasn’t letting herself. The way that she rubbed at her forehead as she paused for thought.

  “The problem now,” Cal cut in, so abruptly that Jane jumped—she’d almost forgotten that he was there, “is that UltraViolet has stepped up her game. Last night, she raided the mayor’s office. Six people are dead, as far as we know, and the rest, including the mayor, are being held hostage. Just after midnight”—Cal paused, as he pulled out his phone and tapped it awake, as he sele
cted something and held it out to Jane—“she issued this.”

  A video was already playing. A posh office, full of sunlight and modern furniture. In the center of the frame, a figure faded in and out of view. Her face was obscured by a full mask, only her mouth visible, but that wasn’t what made her difficult to identify. She kept shifting: purplish gray one moment, invisible the next. It was difficult to keep your eyes fixed on her. Jane’s impression came more from what artists call “negative space,” the shape that emerged from the edges of the woman’s silhouette. She looked even more convincing than Jane had ever managed to draw her.

  “To the people of Grand City,” UltraViolet said. Her voice filtered out of Cal’s phone, already warbled to be unidentifiable via the use of a voice changer. “Let’s make this simple, all right? I’m issuing the following demands, in exchange for the safe release of your mayor and his staff: five million dollars in cash; a helicopter, delivered here, plus guaranteed free passage while I cross the border; sixty pounds of bromeric acid; an official state holiday honoring me, to be celebrated every August sixteenth; a dozen crates of the new AF-72 assault rifles . . . and the personal surrender of the so-called ‘hero’ known as Captain Lumen.”

  “Is she serious?” Jane asked.

  “Shh,” Cal said. “Wait.”

  In the video, UltraViolet continued: “If I do not receive these items, hand-delivered by the unarmed and fully cooperative Captain Lumen, then I promise you that the fate of these sixteen men and women are going to be the least of your worries. And just in case you think I’m not willing to make good on my promises . . .”

  The camera panned. A handful of men and women in rumpled business suits huddled in the corner of the office. Most of them were sitting, cross-legged or with their knees drawn up, but one was sprawled out in a prone position on a pristine white throw rug. Someone had rested his head on a swiped couch pillow, while his suit jacket laid over him, the best substitute for a blanket that they could manage. His shoes were off, and at first Jane thought that someone had left his socks on—but then she realized, as the camera drew closer, that his feet had turned the deepest shade of forest green.