College was when I really started to put the pieces together. Not on my life. No, that was going fine. On Wanderer. The skills and talents I was picking up were going to use almost as soon as I could learn them, and more than one professor soon found that if they were going to let me pick a topic I could bring back towards the city’s elusive superhero, I was going to do it.
But I was making progress, realizing exactly how far I had to go. As a child, as a teen … I’d never bothered to truly dig for information. Oh, I’d searched for it, sure. I’d spent hours reading obscure interviews and pointless trivia. But in the end quite a bit of my time had simply been spent looking for information that was there. Now that I was a student, learning the art of investigative reporting and seeking out information, I was starting to see where I’d been going about things wrong. I’d been collecting what everyone else already knew.
The art of being an investigative reporter? It was about looking for what wasn’t there. The gaps. The voids. The blank spots in the story. Rather than backing off when a search turned up a dead end, I had to take two steps further, ask myself why the end was dead rather than giving up and going elsewhere. When I came across conflicting accounts that didn’t add up, I had to stand back and look at them both rather than just picking my favorite. Sometimes I had to assume that both were false until I could find more information. And as I worked, I started to get a more complete picture of who Wanderer was.
Or more accurately, who he wasn’t. Information on him was scarce, scarcer than I’d ever dreamed. As it turned out, he didn’t even own his own trademark—I tracked it down to some multimedia holding on the other side of the country that admitted they’d never even spoken with him but had a small stipend with his name on it if he ever came to collect. The gesture didn’t impress me. As much work as it had taken me to find out about who had owned the rights, Wanderer probably wasn’t going to be finding out about it anytime soon.
Unless he could. A lot of his capabilities were completely unknown, a fact that seemed to be a great deal of annoyance for both the state and federal government. His suit had never been scanned, most of the materials that it seemed to be made up of were theoretical, and even the cost estimates were both wildly disparate and off the charts at the same time. For what some estimates of his suit’s worth amounted to, he could have bought the whole city and a good chunk of the state besides. Or even most of the country.
Then again, there were the alternative theories, the ones that said the suit was a cover-up, that Wanderer was just super-strong and using it to conceal his own powers. It wasn’t a bad theory, but some of the footage captured of him seemed to indicate more that he was a man in a suit that gave him powers rather than the other way around. Or—and this was one of my more favorite out-there theories—that he wasn’t a man at all, but a runaway government super robot. That one I discounted almost immediately. I might have been willing to believe that there were superheroes out there that could breathe fire or move things with their mind, but government super robots were a little too far out even for me. Mostly because I couldn’t see any situation where those who would have control of such things wouldn’t take advantage of parading them in front of us at every opportunity.
Besides, the technological implications of such a machine were just too staggering. Even moreso than the suit, and that was impressive enough.
Still, even subtracting from the standard superhero weirdness and mystery, Wanderer had a lot of holes in his history. Most heroes tended to have an “inciting incident”: Something that made them decide to go out and do some good for the world. Magma’s, for instance, was attributed to a series of terrorist attacks on the southern half of her state. After the third strike, she’d shown up and started cleaning house, hunting down criminals and terror groups alike with her ability to create and control molten stone.
Heck, some other heroes had even made it a matter of public record. Ember: Parents died in a house fire set by an arsonist. Windstrike: Realized what she could do during one of the largest hurricanes of the last thirty years. Bioc: Result of an explosion at the chemical plant where he’d worked.
Wanderer? Nothing. Zilch. Zip. No crime spree out of the ordinary. No sudden jump in accidents. No lab explosion. No military black ops research project going up in smoke—not that I could find anyway. He’d just … appeared. The closest thing I could find at all that was remotely interesting around the time of Wanderer’s appearance was a scientific paper that had buzzed through the community about a week before detailing a surprising increase in neutrino emissions during the testing of a particle collider. And that result had been unrepeatable, and eventually attributed to faulty research equipment. Plus, it had happened almost five thousand kilometers around the curve of the Earth on another continent.
Blank spots. Blank spots everywhere. As an adult I was shocked that I’d never noticed them before. He had no funds, no public face. He rarely spoke, and when he did it was usually in as few words as possible. He was borderline impossible to track—no, make that impossible. Fans and investigators alike had tried everything from remote cameras to laser tripwires, but he’d somehow avoided them all. Even satellites lost him—and the fact that someone had actually tried scared me a little, not to mention that they’d failed.
Still, while was frustrating to again and again be reminded how little anyone actually knew about our city’s resident protector, the lack of information made for great project material. I passed class after class with flying colors, always willing to take the extra step to dig into why. I wrote papers on why Wanderer’s first few vigilante activities hadn’t been as successful, about why he’d sometimes managed only to stop criminal activity after the thefts had already been carried out. I looked into every possible result of his actions. I even dug into why he’d been so much more active after the wave of crime that had, unfortunately, been part of the wave that had taken my father … though admittedly, I was a little less enthusiastic about it.
I studied other stuff too. I dabbled in forensic sciences, figuring it’d give me an edge with my sleuthing skills. I participated in a kickboxing club and got dang good at it. I took a few fun classes—firearms, dance, and other random offerings that were more for the experience than anything else. I even dated a bit, though never for very long. I wasn’t entirely locked up in my study of Wanderer.
But he was never very far from my mind either. I still didn’t have the answers to the questions I wanted most. I didn’t know why he’d chosen our city to be a hero in. I didn’t know what it was that had made him want to be a hero in the first place.
And after almost two decades of being in the dark, I really wanted to know. I wanted to be the one to track him down, to catch him in the act of foiling a crime and question him.
Others had tried. Some had even staged accidents, or criminal activity. Somehow, he never showed. It was like he knew.
How? I had to find the answers.
I graduated right on schedule, after four years of college and only a few tens of thousands in debt—most of which would have been a lot higher if I hadn’t been able to land the scholarships I did. My mother was ecstatic—neither she nor my father had ever earned a college degree, and even out of my distant relatives I was the first.
We celebrated that night—just her and me, crammed together inside her new, tiny apartment. She cooked up a storm for the both of us, everything from beef patties, jerk chicken, and plantains for the main course to gizzada and some cake for dessert. We ate and talked about just about everything … though mostly about me, which I suppose was the whole point of the evening. My mother wanted to know what I was going to do now that I was done, what sort of jobs I was looking at, whether I was going to move out of my apartment, and even if there was any chance I was going to start looking for a nice boy to settle down with. I had to laugh at the last one, especially when she teased me about only being interested in boys running around in armored underpants. Even if it wasn’t true, it was a good joke.
But it was nice to just enjoy an evening with her and celebrate together. She had a wide smile on her face that I hadn’t seen so bright in years … not since my father died, though I didn’t want to bring it up. Then again, I didn’t have to. She did. She was sure he was proud of me. And … I was too.
We didn’t talk about Wanderer at all. For once, it just didn’t feel that important.
The next day, I started hunting for jobs.
FOUR
It actually wasn’t much of a hunt. The economy wasn’t in the best shape, but news networks could always invent more news, couldn’t they? I had at least two places vying for my attention with paid internships and promise of a full job after a year, and in the end it came down to choosing between whichever one I thought would give me more freedom to track down my quarry. That ended up being the one further away from my new, single-occupancy apartment, but that was fine by me. I had a job—well, a paid internship with promise of a job—a home to make my own, and a goal. All I had to do was pull it off.
To be honest, it started pretty slow. I spent a year mostly doing fluff pieces and working my way up the chain from intern to employee. I worked hard, threw myself into whatever job they gave me to prove that I could be an asset … and that I had the skills they wanted. I didn’t let my work tracking down Wanderer dry up—though there really wasn’t much to do that I hadn’t already done—but I did let my social life slip a little bit. Not enough that I lost any of my friends, but just enough that I didn’t see most of them as much as I used to.
It didn’t matter. I had a goal. A mission. I was going to be the first to interview Wanderer.
The trick, though, was in the how. Wanderer had never given an interview before. Never once had he been caught by surprise by any kind of reporter. Faking a crime or an accident was a no-go, and the city frowned on that anyway. Which meant I needed another tactic.
I needed to find a way to go to him, not the other way around. The problem was, I didn’t have one. No one did—or at least no one that was open about it. And I was pretty sure no one who was willing to spill was sitting on that secret either. Or anyone at all, really.
Which meant I was starting from scratch. I had some vague ideas, and that was about it. I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get it. I’d hit a dead end, really almost before I’d gotten started.
But I couldn’t give up. I had to meet Wanderer. Somehow, some way.
I decided to start with the basics and work my way up from there. During my off hours, I went to work clearing off one wall of my apartment and setting up the biggest piece of cork board I could assemble, even walling off one of my windows in the process. I didn’t care about the loss of light. I needed to see everything at once, find some sort of common thread.
A map of the entire city went up first, with every major landmark highlighted. I would have honestly preferred something digital, as some of the city had changed over the years and the older sites wouldn’t be the same anymore, but I needed to make do with what I had. Both a map that could modify itself and a digital screen that large were outside of my meager budget.
So I did what I could. It wasn’t hard to mark the site of every single one of Wanderer’s known heroic moments—the internet had been busily mapping and tracking them for years—but marking them wasn’t where I intended to stop. I needed every detail, every little speck of information, in order to ferret out any possible patterns.
So where most would have simply highlighted a spot and moved on, I went further. First, I marked them off in chronological order, numbering them as I went and moving in sets of ten. Then, once I’d completed a set, I went about printing out anything and everything I had associated with each particular incident and collecting it nearby in numbered folders.
Then I read through all of it. Every single line. Eyewitness reports, transcriptions of news reports … Everything. If there was information on it, I was dredging it up.
I didn’t stop there. As each group of ten drew to a close, I would collect the addresses, take the most complete retellings of the events, get on my bike, and go see the scene for myself. Take it in on my own, walking the same steps as the individuals who’d been involved as I reconstructed a my own mental set of events.
I would miss nothing.
It wasn’t exactly the easiest operation to carry out. I still had work to worry about, as well as the occasional social gathering to consider. And I could generally only make it to four or five locations before I needed to head home for the night, provided I wanted to be off the streets by dark. Which in some of the places I visited was a wise move.
There were other challenges too. Buildings had been torn down. Streets removed. The city was changing under the new mayor’s “Rebuild and Revitalize” campaign, and because of that some of the old locations that had served as a site for Wanderer’s heroics had been leveled. Bulldozed. I visited them anyway, just to be thorough.
I even toured the old labs that had been the site of Wanderer’s first vigilante act, the one I had seen on the television all those years ago. Oddly enough, though I’d lived in the city my whole life, I’d never once gone to visit the place. The thought had just never occurred to me.
But I could feel it as I stood in the lobby, eyeing the glass front. The colors were different from what I had seen almost twenty years earlier, the building a little more modern in style than the old, fuzzy shades of my father’s television set. But it was still the same building.
I felt a shiver on my spine during that tour, and I knew I was on the right track. I was on the path to once and for all finding Wanderer. There, standing in the same lobby that our city’s hero had once stood in as he’d begun his work to help us, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction swelling inside my chest like air inside a balloon.
The tour guide didn’t mention Wanderer, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t need to. The odds were that I knew more about our resident superhero than anyone in the building.
She did reference him once. Indirectly and without intention to, but it was a reference all the same. It was during the moments when she was speaking about the history of the installation, and how the current owners had purchased it from the last after they’d gone bankrupt.
I knew why that was. The theft of the scientific equipment that Wanderer had been too green to put a stop to. He’d shown up near the tail-end of the robbery, catching the thieves before they could get away with anything else, but the more valuable equipment had already been gone. The thieves had never given up the location, and claimed to have nothing to do with the theft, as criminals did. The equipment had never been recovered. None of that was Wanderer’s fault. After all, it had been his first public case of stepping in.
No, the real blame for that failing had been the owner of the labs, who’d neglected to pay for insurance and installed a substandard security system. A month or two of legal wrangling, and Systemant Labs had disappeared, the current company taking its place.
I didn’t get anything new out of the tour, and in the end I simply moved on to the next site. But it felt right all the same, striding through the same building that Wanderer once had. If it had been up to me, there would have been a plaque somewhere on the grounds, marking the location as the first appearance of our city’s hero. Maybe someday there would be.
After that, passing through the rest of the sites was an exercise in determination. In the end, I only skipped one, one that I knew all too well because I had been there. I didn’t see the need to go back to the same place and try to imagine myself in the bus once more. I could still see him standing there in my mind, tall and strong, the lights of the bus barely reflecting off his visor, pausing as he looked around to make sure the rest of us were all right.
Still, as I worked, the days turning into weeks, and then into months, I began to see a few patterns emerging. There were gaps—holes, really—in Wanderer’s movements. There would be months that would go by without a single sighting, and then a flurry
of them, dozens in a few short weeks. Then there would be another gap, another pause that would last for another period of time.
I wasn’t the first to see them—the forums I followed on the internet had mentioned them before. But it was the first time I was tracking them so closely, and I’ll admit I wasted a few evenings pouring over the data trying to figure out why they existed. Unsurprisingly, I came up empty-handed. If there was a rhyme or a reason to Wanderer’s strange comings and goings, I couldn’t see it. I even started making use of a few of the connections I’d made at my job, pulling up travel itineraries for wealthy or notable individuals, just in case there was a connection.
Nothing. Whatever reason Wanderer had for his periods of inactivity, it would take a more knowledgeable mind than mine to figure them out. I marked them all down—months active and months inactive—on a giant chart next to my map and moved on.
My mother began expressing concerns at my increasingly distracted behavior. “You never go out anymore,” became a common observation, followed by a questioning on when I had last seen my friends. I gave her the same answer every single time: That I was busy with work, trying to get ahead in life, and that I would reconnect once the push was over. She accepted it, though not without comment that work wasn’t everything. I told her I knew that, but at the same time I didn’t tell her what I was up to. I was fairly sure that she still saw my interest as some sort of holdover from when I was a child. Which, to be fair, it sort of was.
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