by Zoe Quinn
I didn't look back.
I trudged through Sweetbriar, barely aware of the force of the wind that whipped against my face and through my hair. If I hadn't had superstrength, it would have knocked me over. I just kept my head low and walked with firm strides into the fury of the storm. The rain pelted me like little steel balls, and thunder exploded again and again behind the clouds.
I could have made the trip home at superspeed since there was no traffic to speak of; the weather seemed to be keeping people indoors. I could have run, but for maybe the first time since I'd found about my powers, I just didn't feel like using them. It suited my mood to walk as slowly as a regular person and get completely soaked.
I was nearing the Sweetbriar River. The high metal bridge that crossed the deepest part of the river had just come into sight when the most brilliant flash of lightning I'd ever seen lit up the darkened sky. That got my attention! I raised my eyes to the gray-black clouds in time to see a long, jagged blade of lightning strike the tall electrical tower that stood on the far side of the river, just beside the bridge. A huge crackling and hissing noise burst from the tower and a shower of sparks sprang to life, slicing through the midsection of the narrow metal structure.
I gasped and ducked, covering my head with my arms. There was a weird—and yucky—burning smell, and I could feel the hairs on my arms standing up from all the electricity in the air.
Behind me, I heard the sound of an engine, followed by the screech of brakes, but I couldn't look; my eyes were glued to the top portion of the tower, which was swaying, severing itself from the base. Its long tentacle-like electrical wires flailed against the angry sky, sputtering and buzzing, shooting off more sparks. I was aware of more screeching coming from behind me—the desperate sound of someone slamming on the brakes and not being able to stop—and I whirled around to see that a school bus from Sweetbriar Elementary was skidding straight toward the side of the bridge. The driver must have seen the electrical tower get hit by the lightning and tried to stop before reaching the bridge, but the road was covered in at least two inches of rainwater and his brakes were useless. The bus barreled onto the bridge just as the electrical tower came toppling down.
My first thought was to jump up and catch the falling tower. But I wasn't wearing my supersuit and I had no idea if an out-of-uniform superhero could be electrocuted. My guess was yes. Hadn't I just gotten a major shock from wearing new slippers on my bedroom carpet last week?
I could catch the bus and carry it safely to the opposite side of the bridge, but I was bound to be seen.
As these thoughts raced through my brain at warp speed, I watched the bus swerve to avoid being crushed by the falling, spark-spewing chunk of metal tower, which had just hit the surface of the bridge. In the space of a heartbeat, I heard the bus tires squealing on the wet pavement, and stared as the long yellow vehicle skidded sideways toward the thick metal guardrail of the bridge.
The sound of the impact was almost unbearable—metal grinding against metal as the bus came to a hard stop against the rail. The weight of the bus bent the rail to the point that it looked ready to snap like a Popsicle stick.
ZOE, DO
SOMETHING!
Moving faster than the lightning itself, I flung myself behind a mailbox and dug into my backpack for my suit. I peeled off my wet clothes and wriggled into the suit just as a megagust lifted the mailbox from the sidewalk and into the sky.
I ran for the bridge.
The bus was shimmying in the strong wind; the girders of the bridge were creaking loudly as it struggled against the wind, and the rail was straining under the weight of the vehicle. As I ran toward the bus, I could hear the kids inside screaming for help. I figured screaming was better than no sound at all.
The door of the bus was crumpled against the guardrail, pinning the driver into his seat. The windows on that side were over the river, so the children couldn't climb out of them. Some of the kids were struggling to open the windows on the bridge side, but they were little and scared, and without the bus driver to help them, they couldn't figure out how to release the safety glass. The broken tower slid closer and closer to their bus, pushed along by the force of the gale. Its live electrical wires reared up like giant snakes, snapping like whips toward the bus, throwing sparks into the air every time they moved.
I know from science class that cars and buses can ordinarily withstand electrical currents because the rubber of the tires acts as a ground. But the fact that the bus was pressed against a metal guardrail was a problem. The rail would act as a conductor, overriding the grounding effect of the tires. So if the electric wires made contact, the current would shoot straight through the bus—and the kids.
The first thing I had to do was move the broken tower and its wires, which were scooting ever closer to the bus.
No. The first thing to do was to move the bus away from the broken rail. Then the rubber tires would save the kids inside from the electrical cables.
But what if the wires struck the bus before I could get a good grip on it? I should get rid of the tower first.
But what if the rail gave way while I was moving the tower? The bus, with all those kids and the driver inside, would fall over the edge and into the rushing river, which seemed to be rising by the second.
My pulse was racing. I tried to tell myself not to freak out, to stay calm, to think clearly. Just then, a clap of thunder made the bridge shudder under my feet, as though the universe were urging me to act, and fast. There was no time to stop and think clearly. But so much depended on my doing things in the right order. So much …
“Arrrrghhh!” I let out a shout of frustration. “What do I do first?”
A bolt of lightning illuminated the sky.
And I heard someone shout at me:
“Chronology is always the toughest part.”
I turned to see someone wearing a glittering eye mask and an impressive yellow outfit. It was clearly not as new as mine; Emily might even call it retro. The pants had giant bell-bottoms and the top had huge cuffs and lapels. It looked … well, the only word I could think of to describe it was groovy. Her hands were on her hips; her legs were braced apart.
“Lightning Girl?” I cried in disbelief.
“Close enough,” the yellow-clad figure replied.
I gasped as I recognized the voice, then smiled. “Electra!”
My comic-book mentor and fellow superhero smiled. “We don't have time to talk right now,” she called over the noise of the rain. “You grab the bus. I'll handle the wires! Go!”
It was way easier with two superheroes.
I crouched at the back of the bus, slid my hands underneath it, and lifted it with only the slightest effort. I had to be careful not to tilt it too much because I didn't want to send all the kids shooting to the other end.
Walking quickly—and as smoothly as I could, given the circumstances—across the swaying bridge, I carried the bus to the solid ground on the other side. Then I ducked out of sight behind a billboard to watch Electra do her thing. The short, spiky blond hair, the musical lilt to the voice—I'd been working side by side with this person for two weeks. I knew it with certainty: Lightning Girl was real … and she was Electra Allbright.
I watched her grab the live wires (without even flinching) and tie them off into a neat bow, as if she were wrapping a present, then lift the hunk of twisted metal and fly it away from the bridge, where she deposited it safely on the ground. It only took her a couple of seconds, and she looked so efficient and … and … experienced while she was doing it! I could still hardly believe I was watching my mentor.
When Electra joined me behind the billboard, I could hear rescue sirens in the distance.
“Let's get out of here,” she suggested. “I think we have some things to discuss.”
I nodded, suddenly feeling worn out to the ends of my toes.
She hooked her arm around my waist, careful not to dig my tool belt into my side. With the dark clouds roiling ab
ove us, we flew back to her house.
I was sitting at the counter in Electra's kitchen again, just as I'd done every weekday afternoon for the past two weeks—only this time, I was dressed in an indestructible supersuit.
And so was she.
She'd made hot cocoa for the two of us; the chocolatey smell filled the kitchen while the rain carried on hammering at the windowpanes.
Electra picked up a can of whipped cream, shook it, then poised the spout over my steaming cocoa. “Say when,” she instructed.
I let her continue to swirl the cream into the cup until she'd created a fat white mountain.
“When.”
She shook the can again, then put twice as much cream into her own cup. “I think I burned enough calories this afternoon to justify this.”
We sipped in silence for a while.
“Well,” she said at last, “I might as well start at the beginning.”
“That would be good,” I said, resting my elbows on the counter.
“I was a working superhero for many, many years. Like you, I received my powers on my twelfth birthday. I was known as Electra Girl.”
“Not Lightning Girl?” I interrupted, puzzled.
Electra laughed. “Anonymity, remember? Anonymity and poetic license, actually. I think Lightning Girl sounds much better! I had—well, have—the power to generate electrical currents, as well as to withstand high voltage—and to fly, of course. My uncle Illuminoe trained me. Once I was ready to undertake missions, I got in with a very elite Super crowd, let me tell you. We were the best of the best.”
“I think my grandpa Zack was part of that crowd,” I said, recalling the articles I'd read in his scrapbook. After all, how many superhero elites could there be? There weren't very many of us in the first place.
Electra nodded, and her eyes looked kind of dreamy. “Zip. He was a hero even among heroes. We went on a lot of missions together back then. We were a good team.”
Her voice had definitely gotten softer when she was talking about Zack. I was dying to ask her if she and Grandpa had ever been boyfriend and girlfriend before he met my grandma, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Thinking back to the times I'd seen them interact in the dry cleaner's, and the day at the ice cream shop, though, I had my suspicions. And then there was the tension between her and my grandma—Gran acted exactly like someone would behave around her husband's old sweetheart. Whoa, this was turning out to be way more information about my family legacy than I had bargained for!
“The comic-book thing came about quite by accident,” Electra went on, taking us back to a less personal topic, much to my relief. “It wasn't that I didn't enjoy my superhero job. I did, very much. Saved this planet more times than I can count. Went all over the world … saw everything I'd ever want to see, and plenty of things I'd rather I hadn't seen. On my fiftieth birthday, after a rather amazing bash thrown for me by the Superhero Federation, I sat down and took stock of my life. After deep thought and long deliberation, I came to this profound conclusion: I was tired. Just plain tired.” She paused to sip her cocoa.
I smiled, remembering how I'd felt the day I saved the little boy from the tiger, not to mention just moments ago, after we'd moved the bus. “Yeah,” I said. “I can relate.” Maybe too many days like that would get to you in the end. Not that I was in any hurry to get through my next thirty-eight years of superheroism!
“The funny thing was that while I was sitting there thinking and deliberating, I had picked up a marker and begun doodling. Without even realizing it, I had covered several pages, depicting my superhero beginnings. And that's when I knew what I wanted to do. The next day, I submitted a letter of resignation to the Superhero Federation and submitted my doodle pages to an editor at Fusion Comics.
“Well, the editor loved my concept and bought the series. The Federation, on the other hand, had a less enthusiastic response. They were okay with my retiring, but they absolutely forbade me to publish a comic book about my adventures.”
“Why?” I asked. “No one would ever believe they were based on your real-life experiences. People read about Superman and Spider-Man and no one believes they're real.” I raised an eyebrow. “They're not real, are they?”
Electra laughed. “Pure fiction. Which was what I tried to tell the Federation. But they were afraid someone out there would figure out that the superheroes I was writing about really existed. Well, I'd been a hero long enough to respect their decision, so although LG number one had already been published, I had to pull it from circulation.”
“So that's why no one can find it!” I said, thinking of the hours Connie at Connie's Cosmic Comic Shop had spent searching for that one particular issue. “So what happened? How come you published the rest of the series?”
“I had to promise to be very careful not to give too much away. I could use my own adventures as inspiration, but I could never use real superhero names or descriptions.”
“I have to ask …,” I began, placing my empty cocoa mug on the counter. “The other day when you sent me home—was it because you had snooped through my backpack and used my grandpa's scrapbook for inspiration for all those storyboards?”
Electra didn't seem at all angry at the accusation. Instead, she held up her hand and used her pinky to trace a lightning bolt over her heart—the Lightning Girl pledge sign. “I promise you, Zoe, I did not look in your backpack.”
“But the storyboards were almost identical to the adventures I read about in Grandpa's books.”
“Well, there's a good reason for that. You see, Zoe, you remind me so much of your grandfather that having you around these past two weeks has made me very nostalgic. It really got me thinking more and more about the old days, and I started remembering a whole bunch of adventures I hadn't thought about in years. I didn't have to look at those books to know about those missions, because I was there for most of them.”
I wanted to hug her! She hadn't betrayed me after all. Then another question came to me.
“If you retired all those years ago, why did you use your powers today?”
Electra blushed. “To tell you the truth, lately I've missed the hero gig, and I'm thinking about asking the Feds to reinstate me. Zack seems to be having such a wonderful time training you— I guess I wanted to get my hand back into the rescue game.”
It occurred to me that Electra didn't have a grandchild of her own to train. “You never got married?” I said, hoping it wasn't too personal a question.
“Never found the right guy,” she replied softly. “I came close once, but it didn't work out and he found someone else. Someone perfect for him.”
I wanted to ask who that almost right guy had been … but I didn't.
Electra looked out the window. The rain had almost stopped, and the wind had died down to a vigorous breeze. “C'mon, Kid Zoom. Let's get you home.”
MY parents were a nervous wreck.
I wasn't surprised. They worried about me when the weather was perfect—naturally they were in major panic mode to think I could be out somewhere in that crazy storm.
“Where have you been?” Mom cried, throwing her arms around me as soon as I walked through the door.
I let her hug me and didn't even complain. It had been a rough day and I needed a little TLC. I was back in my school clothes now; I'd changed out of my supersuit at Electra's house before she drove me home.
“We tried calling you at Electra's, but the storm knocked out the phone lines. Daddy sent a police cruiser over there, but they said no one answered the door.”
“Her studio is in the attic,” I said, thinking fast. “I guess with all the thunder and wind and being all the way up on the top floor, we never heard them at the door.”
When Mom finished hugging me, Dad came over and hugged me, too.
“I'm just so glad you're home safe.” His voice was troubled. “When I think of all those children on that school bus, and how badly they could have been hurt …”
“School bus?” I ec
hoed, opening my eyes wide. I'm getting used to acting like I don't know about some things. “What school bus?”
That night Grandpa and Gran came for dinner, fresh from their vacation, with suntanned faces and lots of presents.
While Mom and Dad cleared the table, I sat in the living room with my grandparents.
“I heard you had a busy week,” Grandpa said, straightening the giant sequined sombrero I was wearing, my favorite souvenir from their trip.
“How did you hear?”
“Thatcher and I go way back,” he replied. “I had a whole string of messages from him when I got home.”
Gran raised her eyebrows at me. “And what about the bus that almost went over the bridge during the storm? The one I heard about on the news on our drive home.” I could tell from her voice that she'd already guessed I'd been involved.
“Was that you?” Grandpa asked, his face filled with pride.
“Er, kind of. Me and … Electra Girl.”
I looked from Grandpa Zack to Gran, then back to Grandpa. They both looked totally shocked.
“It's okay, I know all about her,” I went on. “How she was a great hero in her day, and how she retired and how the Federation got angry over the comic books.”
“But Electra has been classified inactive for decades,” Grandpa said.
“Well, she wants to become active again. She misses the excitement and she misses helping the world.”
“She always was an unpredictable one,” Gran said, shaking her head.
I was glad to hear Gran describe Electra as unpredictable and not … well, something worse. I wasn't exactly sure where we all stood at the moment. It seemed as if maybe Gran felt kind of jealous about Electra and Zip's past connection. And I was afraid Grandpa might be angry with me for working with her without his (or the Federation's) permission. And then there was the whole comic-book thing. I decided I might as well address that issue here and now.
“While we're on the subject of Electra,” I began carefully, “why didn't you just tell me who Electra was from the beginning?”