She decided it wasn’t doing her any good to get down on herself so she flipped to the back of the magazine to where the word games were printed. They all shared a common theme: superpowers. Chris groaned at the irony. Although it is a magazine about transitions, she reasoned as the old man shuffled past her again to his seat. She didn’t have a pen, but she did her best to answer as many crossword puzzle questions as she could.
Those able to alter the laws of physics? Evokers, Chris thought.
She checked the answer on the backside of the page. She was right. She must have picked up more knowledge about this superhero stuff than she thought. She flipped back to the puzzle.
Those who can apply superhuman technologies? Technicians. Those with clairvoyant abilities? Visionaries. Those with the ability to alter physical matter? Chris didn’t know the answer to this one so she flipped the page.
Transmuters.
The last clue in the puzzle brought a smile to her lips. Ability to protect others?
“Guardians,” she said out loud, although the sound barely left her lips. She leaned her big mascot head against the headrest and closed her eyes, remembering Athena’s words. You fit into the Guardian classification, just like Sanctuary and Saint.
At that moment, a new thought overtook her. Just because I’m not with the Wardens doesn’t mean I can’t protect people, she realized. It just means I can do it on my own terms. For the first time since last night, she felt a flicker of hope inside her. Maybe things would be okay after all.
She fell asleep to the gentle rocking motion of the train.
***
Chris awoke with a start to a flash of burning pain. When she opened her eyes, she saw the train was passing through the densely populated outskirts of Seattle.
The flash of pain subsided, but was soon replaced by another and then another. Each one felt a little different, and even the intensity of the sensation varied. She was reminded of what she sensed the previous night right before the car crash. Once the suburb was behind them, without anything except forest and fields surrounding them, the pain disappeared. She soon realized that she was sensing brief moments of danger that popped into her range just as the train passed by them.
Chris braced herself as the train entered another populated area. Flash upon flash of pain overtook her limbs, her head, her torso. Athena hadn’t been kidding when she mentioned that there might be changes in how she experienced her new power in the days following her transition.
Stop. Please stop, Chris begged. After a while, as the train moved on, the sensations reduced to brief flickers, dull and distant. Why did I have to become a Guardian? she thought miserably. I didn’t ask for Saint’s martyr powers, and I don’t want them.
Maybe it was karma. The universe restoring balance by rubbing other people’s pain in Chris’s face. She knew all about the concept thanks to her dad, a strong believer in any sort of Eastern wisdom that might help him to rein in his younger daughter. For the first time, the idea didn’t sound so farfetched to her.
Apart from the new element of pain, Chris’s supersense was providing the kind of feedback that she experienced the night before. Her inner eye caught snapshots of potentially harmful situations. A flicker of fear here, a distant cry there—all faded before she could guess their origin as the train made its way past.
As the train neared Seattle’s heavily populated downtown core, the frequency of those visions—and their associated pain—increased. Since she couldn’t do anything about them, Chris did her best to shut them out of her mind.
The UNEOA’s rules will make it hard to do anything about anything, she thought, peering out the window as the train rolled into King Street Station. But I can’t just do nothing. She thought of Prophet, the Turkish teenage boy who was younger than she was. He was a rogue who didn’t need to follow any instructions. I’m just gonna have to break some rules, too, she decided. Again.
Chris got off the train without a specific destination in mind, regretting that she hadn’t used her time on the train to work out a more concrete action plan. How was she going to protect people exactly? Was she just supposed to wander around and see if she stumbled across someone who needed her help?
If I was a cool movie dude, I would stand in the middle of the station and stretch out my arms and the bad guy would just appear.
As she left the King Street Station, her danger sense flared lightly. A brief vision of a child falling from a jungle gym filled her mind as a sharp pain shot through her knee. She winced.
“Are you okay?”
Chris looked up and realized that she was doubled over, grasping her knee with both hands. A chubby kind-faced woman in a railway blazer was standing in front of her, her heavily made-up eyes looking at Chris in concern.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just….”
“Looking for the local Wardens office?” the young employee asked as she eyed Chris’s armband. “It’s on First Avenue.”
“Actually, could you tell me where the nearest playground is?” Chris asked.
The worker looked surprised, but was eager to help. “Oh, sure. The closest one’s just down the street. Go through the main entrance, and it’ll be on the west side. About a block or so away.”
“Thank you,” she said. The pain in her knee had subsided. No doubt the child was safe in his mother’s arms by now.
Chris crossed the station hall, with its polished wooden benches, terrazzo tiled floors, and candelabra. She ignored the pointed fingers, stares, and whispers as more and more people noticed her.
She reached the main entrance and headed west. After a short walk she spotted the grassy clearing that served as a playground, complete with a jungle gym, swing set, and sand pit. The distance was about a block, give or take.
So my range is at least a city block, Chris deduced. Maybe more.
She sat down on a bench, unsure of what to do next. She decided to figure out if she could create one of those energy protection shields at will—the same kind she created last night when the car crashed. After a moment of concentration, she willed a force field into existence. Its charged energy caused the air that surrounded her body to vibrate. It wasn’t visible, but it made every inch of her skin tingle. She knew from last night that the force field had incredible protective powers. Even a speeding car couldn’t breach it.
I wonder how big I can make it. She already knew she could cover at least two people. She gave the force field a mental nudge, willing it to expand. A test with her extended finger confirmed that she had extended the energy shield to cover a larger area. Not huge, but enough to cover a car or a person.
Enough to cover three people, not just two.
She pushed the thought from her mind before it could settle there and become a pain in the ass. Her powers had evolved even more in the last few hours, just like Athena had said they would. She had to believe her powers were stronger and more reliable now than they were last night.
Her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything in nearly twenty-four hours, so she decided to head to the downtown core for something to eat. As she walked, Chris picked up some minor conflicts and accidents. A drunken brawl, a man falling down the stairs. But to the local police’s credit, her physical instincts noted a distinctive lack of crime anywhere nearby. Seattle didn’t need a superheroine.
While spending some of her last money on Chinese food in the International District, Chris overheard two women gossiping about the nightly occurrence of gunfire recently in an area known as White Center. Apparently three gang members had been found dead that week alone. Chris took in as much information as she could. This was her chance to do some good. Maybe not peace-in-the-Middle-East good, but it was still something.
With that decision made, she spent the rest of the day by laying low in the Community Garden, undisturbed by anything but insects. As night fell, she made her way across town.
Time to prove what you’re worth, she challenged herself.
1.
4 Mascot
Seattle, Washington, USA
Sunday, the 27th of May, 2012
11:58 p.m.
After taking off her headpiece to get a better view of the partially constructed husk of a mall, Chris strained her eyes against the darkness of the overcast night. She had to get in there, but the only option was to enter through a gaping hole where the construction of the fourth floor’s facade had not yet been completed. Four stories up, without any footholds for climbing.
Her danger sense had led her here after hours of aimless wandering in the White Center area. The danger feedback she had received had been intense enough to suggest that an entire group of people was in trouble. It felt like there were ten or so of them, but she couldn’t be sure.
She had already checked for other ways in, but she hadn't been able to find any. The main entrance was guarded by men with barely concealed guns—probably put there by whoever was causing her danger sense to flare—and she didn’t want to put them on alert. Access to the underground was blocked by industrial garage doors reinforced with steel bars.
Her senses flared with someone else’s irritation again
toying with the idea of ending this farce
as she considered the building’s exterior. Everything she knew about the target location came from the people who triggered her danger sense. She couldn’t exactly see the place through their eyes, but she had received vision flashes that painted a mental picture of a large underground car park. The information she gathered that way was sparse—dim flickering lights punctuated the darkness to reveal a huge empty space filled with nothing except rows upon rows of vacant parking spaces. Beyond the dim illumination, darkness extended in all directions.
Even though she had to get down to the underground parking garage, the only way to do that was to first get four stories up. She thought about rigging up some sort of ladder out of wooden construction palettes, but soon dismissed the idea.
Her thoughts gave way to the third intense bout of physical intuition in half an hour. She dropped her headpiece, and almost fell to her knees in pain when she once again sensed the kind of bodily threat the people inside were facing when her flesh was pierced by a hail of phantom bullets, scorched by broiling flames, and torn into pieces by too many kinds of weaponry to identify through the pain. Whatever it was that threatened so much agony and ruin, her stomach lurched at the sheer destructive potential of it.
Her danger sense deactivated after a few seconds, and the painful barrage stopped so she sucked in a breath and steadied herself against the mall’s facade. She remained propped in place until her mind cleared and her new senses stopped forcing the experience of all those potential deaths on her.
At least not until the next time her danger sense flared.
Whoever thought about pulling the trigger changes their mind every other minute. That was a good thing because it meant she wasn’t already too late to stop them.
Once she felt more or less herself again, Chris peeled off the rest of her costume and pushed the bundled-up gear beneath an overturned wheelbarrow. With the streets as deserted as they were, there wasn’t any point in handicapping her movements with bulky layers of fake fur.
She could tell that this was going to be something big, and, for a moment, she was overcome with the feeling that she was in way over her head. When she had decided to go off on her own, she had expected common thugs or gang wars at most, not something where the threat level almost made her puke. Maybe it would have been wise to wait for the Covenant to deal with this one. They had the experience to deal with this kind of thing. But since they hadn’t shown up yet, they most likely didn’t know.
Chris looked around the deserted construction zone, devoid of all confidence and unsure of what to do next when her eyes landed on one of the construction cranes. Its graceful silhouette stood poised against the overcast night sky like a heron ready to dive for the kill. Suspended from its boom was an enormous wrecking ball, just waiting to pass sentence on anything that stood in its way. But what caught Chris’s eye was the logo of the contracting company emblazoned on the side of the machine. Beside the words Imperial Construction, Ltd. was a metallic gray coat of arms.
The memory of Helen’s pendant flashed through Chris’s mind as she felt her gut wrench with a different sort of pain, a pain which cut deeper than any phantom bullets, flames, or blades ever could. If she didn’t take this opportunity to do something positive and help some people, then she might never get another chance to prove to the world—and to herself—that she wasn’t a monster.
Emboldened, Chris turned her attention back to the four stories of cement in front of her. If she was going to help anybody, she had to make it up to that fourth-floor opening first.
Focus, she told herself, pressing her knuckles to her temples. Every problem has a solution. Think about the solution.
A gust of cool night-time air hit her so she pulled up the hood of her trusty hoodie. Too bad it wouldn’t help her climb three floors of cement. Why didn’t I get a superpower that lets me scale walls, like in those Chinese Wuxia movies? Chris thought dryly.
And then an idea struck her. Maybe I have that power after all. Once she realized that she had nothing left to lose, Chris faced the wall head-on and ran directly at it with maximum speed. Around her, reality slowed to a crawl. As her body tingled with the boundless energy, a rush of adrenaline surged through her. It felt awesome.
Her years of parkour experience had blessed her with exceptional body awareness and balance. In the elongated seconds that passed, her horizontal charge easily converted into a vertical one. Stunned, she realized that running up the wall was easy.
She didn’t have the time to feel smug about it, though. She didn’t know how long before her danger sense would flare again, and she didn’t want to be incapacitated by phantom pains when she was in a vulnerable position. She had to get down into the underground parking level because there wasn’t any way to know how much time those people had left before they got hurt or killed.
Because the unfinished mall’s fourth floor was cleaner than the construction zone’s exterior surroundings had been, a quick scan told her it didn’t reveal any immediate threats. It was dusty, but free of building debris. A shadowy framework of steel support beams stood out against the tall windows, breaking up the completed walls on three sides. Pale streaks of moonlight revealed a gaping hole cut into the middle of the vast cement floor. The heavy wire cables that ran up through it suggested it would turn into an elevator at some point. A metal spiral of temporary stairs, installed next to the empty elevator shaft, descended to the lower floors.
If I’m fast enough, nobody should see or hear a thing.
Chris rushed down the circular stairway at maximum speed. She was able to make out some distant voices on the main floor, but the words were too distorted by the time-slowing effect for Chris to make out what the speakers said. A quick glance revealed a group of armed men by the main entrance, and none of them were paying any attention to the stairs.
In a mere second Chris reached the ground level of the underground parking. A few dim flickering light bulbs illuminated a familiar scene: rows upon rows of vacant parking spaces surrounded by darkness. The underground parking lot was a massive circle of concrete with a floor-to-ceiling hub of concrete in the middle where the elevator shaft ended. A skeleton of metal beams supported the ceiling above the dirty concrete floor throughout. She couldn’t see anyone from the doorway, but she recognized the place from her vision flashes.
Then a man’s voice drifted in from somewhere on the other side of the concrete elevator shaft.
“Ah. The time is upon us, then. I do beseech ye to pay attention to this humble demonstration of his marvelous work.”
The antiquated speech and accent should have sounded fake, but he managed to pull it off with casual ease. Chris cocked her head, listening for more.
The ground rumbled, followed by a distant screech of machinery which echoed off the garage�
�s concrete walls. Chris heard a shift of gears, followed by the noise of parts clicking into place, along with the sound of shoes scraping over pavement as several people stirred in response. The memory of the destructive potential she sensed earlier was enough to make her stomach lurch again.
“Holy shit, motherfucker!” The words came from the same direction, but were shouted by a different man. “Don’t point that thing at us!”
As she slipped through the doorway at a slow human pace, Chris held her breath. Her danger sense flared as she approached the concrete cavity surrounding the empty elevator shaft. With each step the sound of grinding machinery neared, but she forced herself to move slowly because she couldn’t be sure that there weren’t more guards positioned nearby. The last thing she needed was for someone to start shooting at her.
She hesitated for a second before rounding the concrete structure. No turning back now.
More angry shouting echoed, but the rattle of grinding machinery drowned out the voices. As the ground beneath her feet rumbled and the noise faded away, Chris came to a halt on high alert. In an instant the vast space was silent except for a persistent mechanical hum that filled the stale air.
The antiquated voice broke the stillness. “We art in agreement, then? Surely you, my cunning friend, need no reminder of this unmistakable truth.”
The speaker’s voice was full of derision. Chris suspected that his Shakespearean act was just a guise intended to mock whoever he was talking to at the moment.
She moved to one of the metal ceiling supports at maximum speed and crouched low behind the pillar, using it for cover. It was more than a foot in diameter, making it a perfect place to get a look at the action while remaining unseen. From her first glance she saw two groups of men facing off in the open space between rows of vacant parking spaces.
The leader of the group closest to her was so strangely dressed that she couldn’t help but to focus her attention on him first. A ceiling lamp which dangled ten feet above him illuminated an outdated choice of clothing that might have been amusing under different circumstances.
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