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

by Jenn Gott

  Cal took a breath. His hood was thrown back, but dark smudges still ran like warpaint across his face. “Okay,” he said. It wasn’t okay, and everyone knew it, but somehow it felt better to hear the lie aloud. “Okay, so . . . Obviously this is bad, but . . . we’re going to be taking her down soon anyway. The deadline is still almost three days away, so all that we need to do—”

  “It won’t work.”

  All eyes turned to Jane. She was still sitting against the wall, underneath the broken display. She pulled herself up, refusing to be seen as smaller and weaker than the rest of them.

  “UltraViolet saw me. She knows that I’m not Captain Lumen. She’s going to see through any attempt that we make to convince her otherwise.”

  Marie rolled her eyes. Keisha sighed. Devin frowned, Tony winced, the corners of Amy’s face turned down in a sad-puppy expression.

  Only Cal appeared undaunted.

  “No,” he said. He drew himself up. “No, this can still work. We can train you—I can train you. I know that we can still do this.”

  Jane laughed—a broken, bitter sound. “Even if I believed you—which I don’t, by the way, because I have a lot more knowledge of my capabilities than you do—but even if I believed you . . . don’t you think that she’s going to notice when I can’t display a single one of Captain Lumen’s powers?”

  Cal shrugged. “It might not be necessary to display them. But also, our Jane didn’t start to exhibit her powers until the Rift appeared. Maybe you just haven’t been threatened enough in your life to need them to come to the surface.” He raised an eyebrow. “Until now.”

  “What’s that supposed—?” Jane started to ask, but Cal glanced pointedly downward. Jane let her gaze be guided, as a hush overtook the room. She raised her hands, staring in disbelief. Her fingers were glowing a golden orange-red, bursts of light all but tearing themselves from her fingertips. Panic shot through Jane, and the glow flared so brightly that everyone had to shield their eyes and look away. When Jane dared to risk another look, the glow was gone, burned out from the force of her release.

  But that did not mean that it hadn’t been there in the first place. And if it had happened once . . .

  Jane’s mouth turned dry. She swallowed, trying to bring some of the moisture back.

  “Come on,” Cal said. He clapped a hand onto Jane’s shoulder. “I think it’s time we get started . . . Captain Lumen.”

  Cal drove. One hand on the steering wheel, his thumb tapping to the beat of music playing softly from the speakers, the other hanging out the window. They’d all agreed that their headquarters was unsafe, given the circumstances. So while Keisha and Marie and Tony stayed behind to revamp their security systems and keep an eye on the hostage situation, Jane was in an SUV with Cal and Amy and Devin, heading out of the city. There was really only one place to go: their original headquarters.

  Jane remembered it well. The drawings of it, anyway—she’d never been there in real life, and was both surprised and not surprised to learn that the building actually existed. In the comics, it belonged to Captain Lumen’s family, and was the house where Cal had grown up. Well, calling it a house wasn’t really doing it justice—the place was a mansion, a twenty-million-dollar estate on the most prime slip of waterfront property in the region. Homes here weren’t so much bought as inherited, passing down the long family line. Their neighbors were former presidents, and CEOs of multinational corporations. Jane had given Cal a pedigree that he could never live up to. It had endeared him to readers, that he would leave all of that behind to fight crime on the inner streets of Grand City.

  She watched the world slip past her window. Jane and Clair had taken a weekend vacation up there five years ago, just so that Jane could capture the feel of the place. It was in the months leading up to their wedding, and Jane’s mother had begged them to hold the ceremony up there, on the beach. “Wouldn’t it just be perfect?” she’d said, more than once, as she pulled up pictures on her laptop and turned it around for both of them to see.

  Jane had rejected it outright, though Clair was more polite about it. She smiled, agreeing that it was a lovely place, very nice—but they had a better idea for their venue, assuming that Clair’s promotion went through in time. “Besides, Charlotte’s Landing is just so expensive,” Clair said.

  Jane’s mother waved off their worry with a deft flick of her wrist. “Let me worry about that.” She reached for the laptop, her fine jewelry catching the light as if to make her point for her. Ms. Holloway had hired a top lawyer during the divorce, a personal rival to Jane’s dad, and had managed to wrangle an impressive settlement out of her ex-husband. Since then, she’d invested wisely, renewed her real estate license, and started selling only the best properties—properties like you’d find in Charlotte’s Landing.

  Despite all of that, she had never moved out of the house where Jane had grown up. Jane secretly loved that about her mother—that she’d pawn off multimillion-dollar houses to spoiled city brats and rented high-rises to bankers who would spend most of their time in distant hotels, but never fell prey to the desire to live larger than she needed.

  Jane’s heart ached as they drove. Her mother took this route all the time. Jane pulled her phone out of her pocket, though even if she could manage to get it connected to a network here, her mother’s number in this world likely belonged to someone else. Which meant that somewhere, back in Jane’s real life, she’d up and left without so much as a text—and what, exactly, was her mother supposed to think when she found out? How many days would it be before she tried calling? How many more before she showed up at Jane’s door? Shit, Jane’s rent was due this weekend—if her stodgy old landlord didn’t get his check, would he just up and sell Jane’s stuff? Cal had insisted that the device he used to bring her here wouldn’t recharge enough to use again for another few days. She might get back in time, but if not . . . would Jane even have a home to go back to?

  Jane tried to put it out of her mind, because there was nothing to be done about it at the moment. She focused on the landscape. Outside of the city, the cloud of gloom from Doctor Demolition’s weapon turned to haze as the morning rolled in, then disappeared altogether. Sun beat against the highway, and burned the yellowing grass beside the road. They were in the middle of a drought, Devin had explained when he caught her frowning at it.

  “Really?” Jane asked. She had to twist around in her leather seat—Devin was directly behind her, sitting beside Amy. “For how long?”

  “Near on two years.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” Devin said. He brushed his hand over his head, smoothing out the loose curls that had sprung free of the manbun he’d donned that morning. “Funny thing is, no one can figure out what’s caused it. Weather patterns seem fine. They keep predicting rain, but . . . it’s just not happening.”

  “Global warming?” Jane offered.

  Devin shrugged. “Maybe. Doesn’t seem directly related, but . . . hell, it’s all so messed up these days.”

  Jane turned back to her window, oddly comforted. Not because of the weather, of course—it was just nice to find that some things hadn’t changed between worlds. The Devin that Jane knew, the one that had only ever pretended to be a superhero, would have been following this topic, too. Ever since he was a boy, he’d been obsessed with all things science. His specific field of interest had rotated on an almost monthly basis, but even after he’d settled on his love for astrophysics, he tried to keep abreast with the major news coming out of all subjects. Weather was a hobby; Devin collected barometric readings and temperature variations the way that some people collect stamps. He particularly liked to make fun of local weathermen. He had an honest-to-god dartboard hanging in his basement, with various weather patterns and percentages across the segments, and he liked to invite people down to throw darts at it and draw up what he guaranteed was a more accurate forecast than you’d find on Channel 7.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  Outside, th
e world moved on. City gave way to suburbs, suburbs gave way to open stretches of farmland. Dairy cows dotted the hillside. The traffic eased up around them, and Jane pictured the curve of the road from above, a slither of black cutting through struggling green and dying yellow. The contrast of a red barn to set the stage, one hundred percent pure Americana. A close-up of a bored cow’s jaw, caught midchew, bits of grass clinging to its wet lips. She’d show the inside of the car next, looking back at it through the windshield: the front full of nothing but Cal’s bright face and white smile, overpowering the smaller huddle of Jane herself. Behind them, in the shadows, you’d just be able to see Amy’s head, tilted forward as she read a book in her lap, and the closed eyes of Devin as he leaned his too-tall head back and tried unsuccessfully to take a nap.

  “So listen,” Cal said as he clicked his signal light on. He was shifting lanes, making way for a large white semitruck just getting on from the entrance ramp. “Before we get there, we should probably go over our cover story.”

  Jane turned. Cal’s powder-blue polo shirt and prep-boy shorts were reflecting so brightly that she almost had to shade her eyes just to look at him. “What cover story?”

  “I just don’t think that it’s the best idea to tell your mom that the real Jane’s missing. Ow!”—Cal turned, his eyes off of the road for several terrifying heartbeats as he glared at Amy behind him—“What’s that for?”

  “This Jane is just as real,” Amy said, which was sweet, though Jane only sort of heard her; she’d grabbed the console in front of her the instant Cal’s attention drifted, her knuckles turning white. Jane tried to keep her breathing steady, willing her heart to calm back down.

  Though Cal was focused on merging back into the right lane, Amy noticed as Jane pried her fingers free and returned her hands to her lap.

  “Are you okay?” Amy asked.

  Jane forced a nod, and a shaky smile. “I . . . get nervous in cars.”

  “Oh,” Amy said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

  Jane tried to shrug it off, though she couldn’t bring herself to look at Amy. “No, well, why would you?” Jane asked. You’re from another world, one where you never fell into a coma after flipping your car in the tunnel coming home.

  “Can we get back to the cover story?” Cal asked. They were cruising straight again, just another gleaming silver fish in a school headed toward the shoreline. “We’re going to need some other excuse for bringing Jane home.”

  “Wait, ‘home’?” Jane reached over, abruptly turning off the car’s stereo. “I thought that we were going to Charlotte’s Landing. The first hideout.”

  “Um, we are?” Cal said. “I don’t know where it is in your world—or, well, your comics, I guess, if we’re going to believe that. But here, it’s always been in the basement of Captain Lumen’s house.”

  “Captain Lumen,” Jane repeated. Her voice was dead, and she leaned back against the seat’s headrest with a groan. “God, you don’t really mean to tell me that I lived there?”

  “Don’t sound so happy about it,” Cal said.

  Amy cleared her throat. “It’s a lovely place, Jane. Very nice.”

  “Yeah,” Devin said with a snort, “if you like water polo and racism.”

  Cal rolled his eyes. “You make everything about race.”

  “Everything is about race, White Boy.”

  “Whatever,” Cal muttered. “So does anyone have any suggestions? I don’t think that Mrs. Maxwell is going to be thrilled that we’re out here rather than dashing out to rescue her husband.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Devin said, chuckling under his breath.

  Jane frowned. She caught Devin’s eye in the rear-view mirror. “You mean they’re still married?”

  Devin shrugged. “If you can call it that.”

  “More important than the cover story,” Amy said, leaning forward, “is probably how to handle the . . . well, the fight. Especially if Jane’s going to be posing as our Jane. It’s going to make it harder.”

  “Mm,” Devin said. Cal’s mouth set into a hard line, his brow creasing as he stared straight ahead.

  Jane looked back and forth between all of them. “Are you really going to make me ask?”

  Amy sighed. “Jane hasn’t spoken to her mother in over a year.”

  “Why not?”

  “No one knows. She wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Great,” Jane said. She threw her hands up. “That’s just great. So basically what you’re telling me is that I am supposed to convince my mother—who’s not my mother, by the way—that I am her daughter, here to . . . what? Make amends or something? Without even knowing what it is we were fighting about?”

  “Sorry,” Amy said. “But . . . well, yes. That’s more or less it.”

  Jane turned away from them. She leaned her forehead against the window, her glasses clanking and skewing crookedly on her face.

  “Hey, but on the plus side,” Cal said, with entirely too much cheer, “you’re in for some great eats! Juanita makes a mean lobster bisque.”

  Devin snorted. “You know that’s not really her name, don’t you?”

  “What?” Cal said. For a terrifying moment, Jane thought that he was going to turn around to boggle at Devin—but just then a gray sedan with a pile of kayaks strapped to its roof swerved, cutting them off. Jane braced herself, but Cal had the situation well in hand.

  “Yeah. That’s just what she lets you call her.”

  Cal frowned. “Nah, man. I visit her all the time when we’re up there.”

  “For the free food.”

  “No! Well—yeah, sure. It’s damn good. But me and ’Nita, dude, we’re tight.” He took his hand off the wheel, crossing his fingers as he waved them in Devin’s direction.

  “Uh-huh. Tell me, how many kids does she have?”

  “Shit, you can’t expect me to remember something like that,” Cal said. He glanced over his shoulder at the approaching traffic, hopping lanes as he attempted to get back ahead of the kayak-happy sedan, which had greatly reduced its speed now that it was in the lane it wanted.

  “Cal!” Amy shouted. “The exit!”

  Cal muttered something wordless as he slammed the pedals. The car lurched forward, tires squealing, as he whipped back into their lane just in time to sail down the exit ramp. Jane gripped the door handle and the seatbelt over her chest, so tightly that her knuckles ached. She didn’t release her hold until they’d tapered toward a more reasonable speed. Her fingers were radiating golden yellow, and Jane balled her fists as she tried to will the . . . the power, she guessed, back to wherever it had come from.

  Luckily, no one else seemed to have noticed. Traffic concerns had overtaken the conversation; at this time of the year, the main thoroughfare into town was jammed with day-trippers seeking a relief from city life. Cal and Amy and Devin bickered lightly about which path to take through town, if there was a parade this weekend, which run of the ferry they were more likely to catch (though Jane didn’t see the point of arguing about that one—they ran, apparently, once an hour).

  No one paid attention to Jane, so she shut her eyes and tried to focus on her internal sensations: the steady pattern of her breathing, the thrumming of her heart, the subtle vibrations of the car against her legs . . . the tingle in her hands. She wanted to see if she could trace back where, exactly, the power was coming from. Though she’d been pretending it and drawing it and writing about it for roughly half her life by now, Jane was finding that she was still no better equipped to deal with it than the original Captain Lumen had been, back when Jane wrote his origin story in Hopefuls #14. It was one thing to understand the science she’d made up—it was another to actually feel it. The weight of it as it filled her up, dragging against her like she was swimming with her clothes on. The faint buzz in her head, like her whole body was operating on a different frequency than it used to. The whisper in her mind, a siren song of everything that she was now capable of, how she could manipulate the world ar
ound her, control it, bend it, conquer it—

  Jane wrenched her eyes open. Her heart pounded in her ears, her breath was shaky in her chest. She tried to bring herself back to the present—the car, the chatter, the world outside of her window. The farms were gone. They were inching into town. Narrow streets cut through canyons of buildings, rising tightly on either side of the car. Cafés and art galleries, churches and bed-and-breakfasts. Old New England clapboards were painted white and blue and yellow, cheerful flowerboxes blooming, the brick sidewalks shaded by the branches of elm trees. On the corner, an old house was being renovated, its siding stripped off in a way that made Jane avert her eyes as if it was shameful. Pedestrians ambled along in bright white shorts and designer flipflops, straw purses and cloth shopping bags hanging from their arms. Jane pressed a button to lower the window, and the smell of fried seafood drifted out of a dozen different shopfronts. They stopped at a crosswalk and an old man dressed all in red, white, and blue strolled past, a giant Uncle Sam hat perched atop his head, little American flags stuck in the band. Absolutely everybody outside was white.

  She stared at her hand. Was it just her imagination, or was her own pale skin reflecting more sunlight than was normal? Jane focused on it, trying to will it back. A few moments later it did seem less pasty, although it was hard to say if she was successful, or if the sun had gone behind a cloud.

  One thing was certain: she could no longer just passively go along with whatever the rest of the Heroes of Hope wanted from her. Going home was not an option until she learned to control these new abilities, and the only way that she was going to do that . . .

  Jane glanced sideways. Cal, in the driver’s seat, his thumb still tapping along to music long since shut off. In many ways, he was a spoiled doofus, Jane knew this. But in the comics, he’d always managed to dig down, find the inner strength necessary to conquer problems. He’d learned to control these powers, when he was Captain Lumen. Maybe he really could help her do the same.