“Definitely,” he said.
She was halfway across the lawn when she stopped and turned. He was still standing in the doorway, watching her with lips that leaned in the same pleasant stance as his tall frame. A new memory struck her. They were outside a humming jet in the early morning. She was holding his face, and they were telling each other goodbye, maybe for the last time. He was going to reprogram some sort of … doomsday machine, and she was going to…
Her mind’s eye squinted, not quite able to inch the memory—an incredible one, it felt—back into view. But it would come, in time. Another assurance from her stirring intuition.
She walked up the lawn until she was standing in front of him again.
“I forgot something,” she said, rising onto her toes. “Welcome home, Champ.”
Scott’s lips turned up at the corners as he leaned down to meet her.
“You too,” he whispered.
The End
From the Author
For me, the XGeneration Series was part comic book and part nostalgia piece. I was a child of the ’80s, that period that teetered on the edge of the computer revolution before it became all-consuming.
I grew up in a neighborhood much like Oakwood, in a house much like Janis’s. My friends and I played in the Florida woods, built forts of varying quality, splashed around creeks in search of fossils. There was the occasional run-in with a dog who is long gone but whose name still brushes up against old fears. Bullies, too. We had those, their threat more real to us than a simmering war whose explosive potential was too annihilative to grasp.
We rode belly-down on skateboards through a cave-like network of storm drains beneath our streets. We played Dungeons & Dragons in cluttered bedrooms and on back patios. We collected comic books, the X-Men our hands-down favorite. We moved in the same quarters as our parents—and adults, more generally—but inhabited a very different plane. One we had mostly to ourselves.
In a way, getting to write this series was getting to go back, Janis, Scott, Tyler, and the rest of the Champions not just defenders of humankind, but of those old worlds we know and cherish in our own ways.
I’m sad to leave XGeneration behind, but the universe of storytelling is vast and exciting. There are other worlds to discover and orbits to explore. Thanks for taking this particular journey with me.
Truly.
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Books by Brad Magnarella
PROF CROFT
Demon Moon
XGENERATION
You Don’t Know Me
The Watchers
Silent Generation
Pressure Drop
Cry Little Sister
Greatest Good
Dead Hand
XGeneration 7: Dead Hand (XGeneration Series) Page 29