Pinnacle City

by Matt Carter

We aren’t gatecrashing; technically this gala is in our honor, my mom and my uncle’s thank you to the Justice Juniors for last week’s successful containment of the gas main explosion down in the Seaside Shopping District. If Uncle Ethan had his way, we’d remain mysteriously unseen until prime entrance-making, speech-giving time, and then become mysteriously unseen again after convincing the guests to double their donations to the Seaside Economic Relief Fund.

  I don’t mind helping to remind everyone that we’re partying for a purpose here, other than to celebrate Thanksgiving’s end and Christmas’s approach, but I don’t see why that has to mean missing out on half the fun.

  My friends follow me more hesitantly into the mingling crowd of donors in their tuxes and jewel-bright gowns.

  “Bloodhound!”

  A teenage girl in a blue chiffon frock notices Mason as we creep not-so-covertly toward the bar.

  “Oh my gosh, do you think I could have your autograph?”

  “Um …” Mason grunts. “Sure, I guess. Do you have a pen?”

  “Always! I have the complete Bloodhound stationary set!”

  The greetings snowball from there.

  “Makeshift! Remember me?” Derek poorly feigns a look of recognition for the excited young man accosting him. “I helped you foil that bank robbery a few years back? You asked if anyone had an inhaler and some mustard packets? That was me!”

  “Oh yeah.” Derek forces a slightly more convincing look of recollection. “Good work.”

  “Gothique?”

  Leah tries to hide behind her hood, which doesn’t do her much good, considering that her hood is at least as famous as her face, if not more so.

  “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you,” says an older man I recognize from the board of Pinnacle City’s premier news station. I believe he goes by Rickie Maroon. “I’ve got a killer idea, completely groundbreaking, for a celebrity investigative journalism program, and I think you’d be perfect … both of you!” he adds as an afterthought, passing me one of his cards over Leah’s shoulder.

  I palm the card and slip away quickly, then have to wait up for Mason, Derek, and Leah to stumble for polite exits to their conversations.

  Gala attention is a little different from the regular kind of attention. Fans who call out our names on the street usually just want to be able to say they’ve met us. Guests at functions like this one want to be able to say they know us.

  Instead of I love your new costume or I named my pot-bellied pig after you, we get a lot of Remember me from that one time? or When are you going to take up my invitation to go waterskiing?

  It’s like a mad memory game of names and faces. Names and faces of people we matter to. It’s weird, but always a bit awe-inspiring.

  The first person to pull me in for a hug, a tiny older woman with bottle-red hair and cat ear spectacles, is one of my favorite regulars at these sorts of affairs.

  “Glitter Girl! I swear, you get more beautiful every time I see you.” She squeezes me with all the surprising strength in her boney arms.

  “Then I’ll have to make sure we see each other more often,” I joke, squeezing back. “You’re looking great too, Aggie. How are the boys?”

  Aggie doesn’t spare a single glance to check whether the other guests noticed that I know her name.

  “Little Brad’s sounding out words now!” she exclaims, releasing the hug but keeping hold of my hands. “He loves reading his picture books for his old granny.”

  After Aggie spilled my code name out loud, someone in the crowd must have taken a census.

  “Brisk Boy isn’t with you?” someone asks us, and I turn to look at where Cory was standing last.

  It doesn’t take long to find him across the ballroom behind possibly the most delicious-looking refreshment table in the city, waving mischievously back at us, his hand a blur of superspeed.

  “Oh, darn, did we lose him again?” says Leah dryly. “Guess we’d better go looking.”

  She turns translucent and intangible again, drifting straight through the still-pitching Rickie Maroon and then through the rest of the startled gathering toward Cory. Mason and Derek follow at crowd-shuffling speed, impatiently beckoning me.

  “Save me a dance, yeah?” I call to Aggie as the tide of mingling cuts between us. “Something fun!”

  Derek’s made a gyroscope out of pretzels by the time I reach the refreshment table, spinning it between his fingers.

  “Well, I for one sure am glad we decided not to be fashionably late.” He directs a teasing gaze at me.

  “You guys didn’t want to bother blending in until show time,” I say. “You have no one to blame but yourselves.”

  I twirl until the skirt of my new, shimmering violet ball gown bells out around me. My Glitter Girl outfit is fully concealed beneath it, its accessories jammed into my purse. The others are already prepared for speech time, dressed in the same old super suits they wear every day.

  “There should be laws against having to change clothes more than twice a day,” says Derek.

  “Totally. Intolerable waste of time,” adds Cory, who can change his clothes in one one-hundredth of a second.

  “There should be laws against those clothes,” Leah whispers, nodding at a passing dress with a runway collar twice as high as its wearer’s head. “You ever think about how much more we could raise at these things if everyone chipped in their wardrobe budget for the night?”

  “We’d raise zip,” says Derek. “If they didn’t get the chance to show off their threads, no one would show up.”

  “Be nice,” I bump his elbow and catch the pretzel gyroscope in my mouth. “Everyone here bought tickets.” I swallow. “Every bit helps … ooh!”

  The quartet’s broken into a warbling cover of “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

  It’s my favorite, so naturally I pretend not to check whether Mason’s pretending not to check whether I’m pretending not to check whether he’s going to ask me to dance.

  He broods predictably against the wall, so I lift the top layer of my skirt and groove to the strings by myself, because to hell with Mason and his moods and his slouching and how his creepy Bloodhound super senses make me want to bathe in Febreze.

  I mean it this time.

  Cory smells the awkward in our little circle faster than Mason ever could, and in half a blurry second he’s gone and back again with an entire tray of the harmony juice known as champagne, probably leaving a very confused waiter empty-handed somewhere.

  Another blink and the glasses are in our hands, sloshing precariously. I slow down to let mine steady.

  “To the Seaside Shopping District,” Cory proposes. “And to its mostly un-explodedness.”

  “Cheers!” My glass clinks on contact with Cory’s, in spite of how even my reaction-enhanced brain insists that he’s currently several feet away, toasting Leah.

  Before I met Mason, I’d have said it was impossible to brood and drink champagne at the same time.

  I’d have been wrong.

  He looks at me piercingly over the rim of his glass, which seems exponentially more delicate in his not so delicate hand, and leaves me wondering what he’s thinking about so hard.

  “Miss Kline, could I trouble you for a dance?”

  Mason’s slightly open mouth snaps rigidly shut when the question comes from my other side.

  I hardly turn to see the asker before saying yes. Lucky for me, it’s not that producer wanting me to put in a good word for him with Leah.

  I’m halfway across the dance floor holding Quentin Julian’s pleasantly fluffy hand before realizing I’m still holding my glass as well.

  Quentin doesn’t seem to mind the impediment. There are maybe fifteen years between us, and he puts his hand on my shoulder instead of my waist as if I’m five. We’ve often spoken for a few minutes on occasions such as this—he asks about the team, I ask about his work running the shelters across town—but the dancing is new.

  “Slim pickings for partners
tonight?” I ask, trying to gauge if there’s a shortage of dresses among the tuxes around us.

  “What? Oh, no, everyone’s been perfectly friendly,” he says, watching the dancers behind me distractedly. His pointed bobcat ears, relic of his mother’s rebellious years of self-splicing, back before all those supervillain DNA bombs set off the gene-job panic and put a stop to the trend, are perked up and twitching in all directions.

  “Are you waiting for someone?”

  He shakes his head and then, apparently satisfied with our surroundings, leans abruptly closer and whispers, “Have they asked you yet?”

  “Have who asked me what?”

  “Nothing,” he says quickly.

  “Woah, no way. Don’t you open that door and leave me hanging. Who’s going to ask me what?”

  “You’ll know soon enough.” He shakes his head, and like waiting to open my Christmas presents, I allow myself a couple seconds of pouting and then try to let it go.

  “You’re going to have a chance to do a lot of good for a lot of people,” he goes on, whispering faster. “It won’t be easy, or safe, and you’re not going to like hearing it.”

  “I like what I’m hearing so far.”

  He looks dubious and relieved all at once.

  “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think you could make all the difference. We’ll need to speak confidentially … trust doesn’t come easily these days.”

  I get invitations to discuss mysterious subjects with strange men in private places several times a week, but I know Quentin well enough, and I know what he does. He not only funds those shelters for the involuntary gene-jobs; he’s out there almost every day giving free legal counsel, helping them build résumés, apply for housing, you name it. If he says there’s helping to do, I’ll bet he knows what he’s talking about.

  The song ends and the quartet announces a short break, leaving the dance floor to disperse around us.

  “Kimberly!”

  I try not to look too sheepish when my mother’s voice cuts through the music’s absence.

  Quentin drops my hand.

  “Kimberly, I can see you,” she says, gesticulating in my periphery as wildly as her red velvet sheath dress allows.

  “Email me,” I tell Quentin, backing away. “Whatever I can do to help, I’m in.”

  I prance innocently over to my mother. Now that I’m here, she can’t possibly kick me out and tell me to come back later … or so I hope.

  As soon as I come within reach, she makes a point of brushing invisible bobcat hairs off of me and confiscates the champagne glass from my hand.

  “Mom, I’m twenty-three,” I protest, reaching to take it back.

  “Shh!” She holds it out of reach, or out of reach without the use of my super reflexes or flight, and looks over both shoulders as if expecting to see people jotting down my easily verifiable birth year.

  “And I have an accelerated metabolism.”

  “Believe me, dear, not a day goes by when I don’t envy you for both those things,” she says, dropping the glass—about a fiftieth of what it would take to give me a noticeable buzz—onto the empty tray of a passing waiter and then pulling me paradoxically toward the bar.

  Leah’s already there, nursing a cranberry vodka, and at the sight of my mom she instantly vanishes into the floor.

  “Hmm, I didn’t notice,” muses my mother, looking me over.

  “Notice what?”

  “How revealing that dress would be on you.”

  She tries almost discreetly to hike the bodice up higher over my cleavage, making the spaghetti straps go slack and fall down my shoulders.

  “A circus tent would be revealing on me,” I say, wiggling it back into place.

  She reaches for the straps. “Maybe if we—”

  “Mom.” I catch her wrist carefully on its way and deflect it with the bottom edge of my strength. “My boobs are fine. My dress is fine. You would know, you picked them out. Can you please, just, relax?”

  This was the subject of a three-month argument between Mom and Uncle Ethan, after all the lab visits to test my limitations revealed my sensitivity to Jovium, a synthetic version of Jupiter core matter. It’s the one known substance in the solar system that can knock me unconscious or cut my skin in a controlled, non-nuclear-concussion kind of way.

  On the one hand, the discovery meant that I wasn’t perfectly invulnerable, and my family had to rush to patent the substance to make sure it couldn’t be manufactured and sold to supervillains to use against me.

  On the other hand, the existence of something that could both cut and anesthetize me also meant I was suddenly possible to operate on, opening the door for a more in-depth wave of image consultations.

  Mom and Uncle Ethan couldn’t agree on an ideal bust size for me, between wanting to give me the maximum long-term career advantage without prematurely aging me out of the Justice Juniors image, which at the time referred to the team being in our junior year of high school.

  Mom’s D-cup insistence ultimately won out.

  She backs away now and shakes off all the little worries, the way she always does.

  “You’re right. I suppose it won’t matter so much soon anyway. I just wanted this evening to be perfect for you.”

  “Seriously? It is perfect. It’s almost Christmas. There’s a fondue fountain!”

  “It wasn’t supposed to go this way.”

  “Mom, a fondue fountain! It has macaroons in it!”

  “You make it really hard to throw you a surprise party, you know.”

  I open my purse and pull out the stiff, oversized envelope that barely fits inside. “Um, actually, I think sending me an embossed invitation is what makes it difficult to throw me a surprise party.”

  “Well, all right, the party itself wasn’t supposed to be a surprise,” she says, “But we wanted to have the guests break the news to you. We were supposed to have a chance to address them before bringing you in, so we could catch your reaction onstage, but since you’re here …”

  She pauses interminably, and my impatience after Quentin’s hint flares back up.

  “Mom, what?”

  She summons the bartender and orders two Wonder Whiskey and Cokes. The real stuff, designed for people with enhanced constitutions like myself.

  “I think you’ve officially graduated from champagne for the night.”

  I like champagne, but I’m too curious to argue.

  The glasses are set before us, and Mom raises hers to me, a suppressed smile bursting free.

  “You made it, honey. You’re in.”

  I know exactly what I hope she means, but I’m terrified I might be wrong.

  “I’m in . . ?”

  “The Pinnacle City Guardians,” she confirms. “You made the winter draft. Congratulations, sweetie.”

  I can’t keep my feet on the ground, and neither can she when I fly at her for a hug, the bartender and all the guests within about three yards of us turning to stare after the volume of my squeal.

  “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod! You’re joking! You’re not joking! I love you! You’re really not joking, right? Have I mentioned that I love you?”

  Mom pats me on the back, and I set her down.

  “The Pinnacle City Guardians. Like the real, grown-up, city-saving Pinnacle City Guardians? Does this mean I finally get to call myself Glitter Woman? Wait, that sounds kinda weird. I’ve never said it out loud before. Maybe just Glitter? Is that better? Captain Glitter? Madam Glitter?”

  “Oh, it’s better than that. Your uncle’s made arrangements for an official passing of the mantle, his gift to you.”

  “You mean—”

  My mom puts a finger to her lips, and I lower my voice.

  “You mean I’m joining the Pinnacle City Guardians, as the new Solar Flare?”

  She raises her Wonder Whiskey again and holds it up until I finally mirror her.

  “To Solar Flare the sixth.”

  “And to making history,” I answer and drink sh
akily, glad for the sheen of calm the WW gives me.

  Solar Flare is one of the longest, most famous legacy superhero titles on the West Coast, and I’m about to become the first woman ever to carry it.

  A mic taps and squeaks with feedback, heralding Uncle Ethan’s voice.

  “Thank you all for coming. Yes. Thank you,” he waves politely from his floating leather chair, presently hovering over the room’s main platform. His suit is unwrinkled by sitting, and he looks as comfortably at home as when the chair is parked in his study.

  The guests gather closer, and several journalists click pens and focus cameras. I can even see the Pinnacle Looking Glass evening show's award-winning field reporter, Fadia Bakkour, up near the front. If I’m going to be giving interviews on what it’s like to be the first female Solar Flare, I’d like her to be the first. She’s always been my favorite, partly because she’s the only reporter I know who never spends most of an interview asking about what I’m wearing or my love life.

  Her eyes briefly meet mine, and we exchange polite smiles.

  “I could say a few words about why we’re here tonight, but I’m sure you’d rather hear it from the admirable young people of the hour. Please give a warm welcome to the Justice Juniors!”

  I down the rest of my drink, lift off spinning into the air, and send out a few of my famous, sparkling energy blasts from my fingers. I don’t charge them enough to damage anything, just enough to hide me in a cloud of lavender fireworks while I strip down to my pleated Glitter Girl minidress with the GG emblem on the chest, maybe for the last time.

  When the smoke clears, I fly to join my gathering friends on the platform, and the room explodes with applause.

  CHAPTER 3: THE DETECTIVE

  It’s a fitful, hot nightmare with flashes of madness and violence.

  A war.

  A war in the streets. A war overseas.

  They’re not that different anymore. Both of them senseless and full of fire and blood and broken promises.

  A man in a chair who can’t move or see me.

  “We just need you to find where this asshole was; find out who he’s been talking to.”

  “Come on, use what god gave ya.”

  “It’ll be a whole lot worse if you don’t. You don’t want him to suffer, do ya?”