I know, I know. Long time, no hear, and it’s the same story as last time: that life thing gets in the way. (There is story coming though!)

In the meantime I just wanted to put a plug out there for a new site called The Fireplace, which while primarily being an RPG resource is looking to include and promote fiction blogs as well as well as other online material.

Even if it’s just to lurk come and join us! And you can find out where Randi actually is a lot of the time she SHOULD be writing Shimmer! Heh.

“It’s her.”

“I don’t know, man. Last time we crossed this bastard he stole her body. How do we know he hasn’t pulled the same trick again?”

“It’s her,” the second one said with finality. “I’m empathic, and I know what Laser Lass brand of pissed off feels like.”

Prying herself from the ground the costumed girl swatted away the hands offered to her. She didn’t need their pity to add to the shame of defeat. Satan, did her head hurt.

Vanquisher and King Claw stepped back with arms folded and let her stumble back to her feet: that was fine if that’s what she really wanted. “Look at you. Not even a scratch,” the senior of the pair scoffed. “I can’t believe he got the drop on you again.”

Laser Lass swatted at his bare shoulder where part of the Vanquisher’s costume had been burned away in combat. In contrast to her own near pristine state the other two looked pathetic.

“Something went wrong,” she muttered furiously. That much was obvious, but her memory was hazy. Where was she anyway? For a moment she wasn’t entirely certain, but then the sight of Sam with its frowny face emoticon smashed to a million little pieces had it all came flooding back.

The Technocracy wouldn’t just let her kill Jason. No, he was far too valuable them to allow her to just execute him, even at point blank range. They couldn’t just contain him with mechanical tentacles: they had to protect him with a force barrier as well making it so that she had to free him just to get the job done.

After that things went so quickly. It was strange what happened next, when Jason grabbed her finger and begged for mercy. He even tried to convince her that he wasn’t really who she thought he was, not that it mattered: but when the time came to blast him to kingdom come she just couldn’t do it, not because she didn’t want to but because… somehow… they were linked maybe? It was all a blur.

“How’s the jaw?” Vanquisher asked harshly.

Laser Lass didn’t answer. Yeah, the little punk had taken her by surprise this time, but that wasn’t going to stop her from getting revenge. Only then did she think to clasp her wrist and realized. “$#&%! Prick stole my transport key.”

Frustrating as it might have been for the others this new turn birthed a smile as wide as the blade of the one they knew as King Claw. “Does this mean we get to track him down and spill his blood together?” the red maned figure asked.

“We need that device back,” Vanquisher reasoned, “and where he goes the Technocracy is sure to follow.”

“Fine, you can come with,” Laser Lass hissed. “So long as you let me finish him.”

The three stopped to take note of the corridor they’d created. Something was humming at them and was drawing nearer. The Technocracy was regrouping: they didn’t have much time.

“You got it?” King Claw asked.

Laser Lass frowned at Vanquisher. “Got what?”

Vanquisher nodded. ‘It’ was a rather compact device: a small black cylinder that clasped to his belt until then concealed by the layer of imperial purple draped from his shoulders. “This,” he explained, “is a neutrino bomb.”

“I have a feeling that I should know what that is.”

“It comes from Gadgetron’s forbidden closet,” King Claw laughed. “It’ll disintegrate a solid chunk of the Earth: so much that the planet will be thrown off its axis leaving the rest to crumble. Definitely not the kind of thing we could ever use back home.”

“You sure we’re the only humans left on this world?” Vanquisher pressed.

“Far as I know,” Laser Lass told him. “And if we aren’t we’d still be doing them a favor.”

“If we do this and get the Inquisition breathing down our necks…”

The villain sighed and turned to her man, running her fingers down his chest then pressing him to the wall. She was in charge and he needed reminding. “I leave for an hour and suddenly you’re mouthy again,” she chastised him. “Relax. If it’s to keep the Technocracy out of our reality then anything we do is justified. It’s already killed one world: we’re not going to let it spread.”

Vanquisher tensed and fought the smile that wanted to crack the corners of his lips. She was right: he’d seen enough of this planet to know that it needed to be put out of its misery.

“Then let’s start the countdown and get the hell out of here,” King Claw snorted. “Killing robots is nowhere as fun as the real thing.”

Planting the cylinder horizontally Vanquisher released the cap and turned the mechanism inside. The neutrino bomb was activated. In thirty seconds it would erupt with a massive wave that would neutralize the electron charge of every atom across the continent and beyond. Everything it touched would become less than dust and the Technocracy’s homeworld would be neutralized.

In a flash the three vanished, leaving the industrial trash heap to a quiet death that was far overdue. There was such sweet satisfaction that came with causing the kind of unbridled destruction they were barely ever able to cause, but there were also more seriously matters to attend to. Somewhere out there Jason Cade was laughing his ass off like he was the king of the multiverse: it was time that the Young Scoundrels showed him a thing or two.

* * * *

It was 7:08 before the new Justin Cade managed to pry his eyes open, which was far too early considering he didn’t have school to worry about.

He stopped, caught his reflection in the mirror and took the time to admire it and all of its manly nuances. Pulling back his long hair he wondered how it would look cut short and what styles he might like. Throwing on some pants, a tee and layering it with an open shirt he sauntered down the steps and into his home. Gods, it was great to be home!

Such was the life he was starting to lead with no more daily disguises: except, of course, his life as Starbolt. Still, the life of Justin Cade didn’t feel like it belonged to him, not just yet. Oh well. It would in time.

Nobody would have ever guessed that only the day before a girl had owned his body. How could they? It had taken Kaira telling them flat out for them to finally know. All that had changed now. Nature was free to take its course, and for once that was fine. No more alienation, and a sense of self that matched the world’s expectation. Kaira was female, he was not, and this life belonged to Justin. It was only fair that he should have it.

Turning into the kitchen the young man was stunned to see what looked like his mother in very convincing drag, but no, he was his father in this universe, and for whatever reason he seemed just as stunned by his son’s arrival.

“Kaira?” he boggled. Yeah, this conversation was going to happen sooner than he expected it to.

“Um, about that,” Justin murmured. Gods, did he look like his Mom. The sight was almost overwhelming, but he had to act like everything was fine. Everything would go wrong if he didn’t. “I don’t think I want to be Kaira anymore,” he pressed.

The man… no, his father, Alan, tentatively nursed his coffee cup and blinked. For him this was all very sudden. “Is this because of what you overheard yesterday?” He gave that look, the one that said not to deny it, even though it was Kaira who’d heard those words.

Justin shook his head. “No, I…” He really didn’t want to have that conversation, at least not then: not when he was so overcome by visions of ghosts. What he wanted to talk about wasn’t important. The fact that he was home again, that everyone was alive, that was what mattered!

Alan started to say something, but he was cut off mid-sentence by the desperate embrace of a quivering teenager. What had gotten into him? He wouldn’t ever know, but whatever. All that mattered was that his one and only child was hurting and that was reason enough to hold him back.

“Hey, it’s alright, kiddo,” he said. “We’ll work this out, yeah? I know it’s hard going, but we’ll tough it out. We always do.”

“I love you,” he choked out to the man he wanted to be his Mom. Gods, he really was the spitting image of her.

“You too, Kaira,” he said, hitting again on that one word that completely undid the moment.

Justin stepped away, forced a smile and made up some crap excuse about having somewhere to go. That kitchen, that life, that family: they didn’t belong to him, at least not yet. It was going to take some time to adjust, but in the meantime he needed some air.

Okay, maybe living in this world, keeping his conscience dulled and adjusting to new people was going to be harder than he initially thought, but compared to the nightmare planet he’d come from it was a cake walk. He’d already taken the first massive leap, right? The rest only needed to be in baby steps.

Almost a block away from the house he was halted by what was supposed to be a familiar face. “Hey! Kaira!” Some Hispanic looking guy in a long sleeve t-shirt was very happy to see him: weird, Kaira hadn’t told him about this guy. The stranger looked puzzled. “What’s with the boy disguise, man?”

Justin smiled and shook his head. “I’m going to be Justin again I think,” he laughed wearily. “Girl thing just wasn’t working out. You know, just a phase and all that.”

The stranger nodded along. Gods, who was he supposed to be again?

“Does this mean you’ll be back at school soon? Ms. Berry’s English class has been crazy boring without you there to kick things up.”

“Maybe,” Justin smiled a little more confidently. For once the idea of school didn’t seem so bad.

The mysterious stranger frowned. This frown confused Justin. Did he say something wrong? It was only then that he thought to look down at the boy’s feet: he was wearing custom boots fitted especially for him, the kind usually worn by speedsters. Crap! The guy probably didn’t even go to his school: there probably wasn’t even a Ms. Berry.

Justin retreated a few steps and matched the serious gaze he was locked in. “So who are you really?”

“Go!,” the stranger informed him calmly. “Gee-oh-exclamation point.”

“Wow, I’ve never met a guy with punctuation in his name before.”

“I get that a lot,” Go! said. “I’m also one of the Young Sentinels.”

He was part of a team? Double crap. That probably meant he hadn’t come alone. “So you’re one of Glimmer Girl’s friends,” he determined. “Listen, I can explain everything!”

“You can try, but you won’t be doing it here.” The speedster raised his shirt ever so slightly to reveal the red and white costume underneath. In other words he was prepared if Justin tried to run. Triple crap.

And then it happened: a great crack tore across that stained the sky bruise purple. Justin reeled knowing exactly what was coming, and while Go! was otherwise oblivious to the exact danger he knew to be just as wary. Black flecks descended from the opening, from a distance appearing like a rain of ash falling on Milestone City.

Without second thought Starbolt darted for an obscure corner in which to change, which shouldn’t have been too hard with the handful of eyes on the suburb steet turned upward. Go!, however, seemed to have other ideas.

“Where do you think you’re going!?” he called keeping pace with the fleeing teen.

Justin gritted his teeth. Why did everything have to hit him at once? “Make up your mind, man! Me or the planet!”

As if it was that obvious. Actually, it was. Secret identity be damned, Justin threw off his civvies in the middle of the street and exploded into the sky. The Technocracy had come and something needed to be done: he wouldn’t let them do to this world what had been done to his. Go! could wait until later… if he survived that long.

* * * *

The radio crackled. “Gabby?”

“I’m here.”

“Mission compromised, big time.”

“You’re telling me! Ugh!”

Sprinting over cars the black-clad heroine raced against the human torrent as they fled from the shadowy swarm. Gathering as much kinetic force from the crowd as she could muster Touch launched herself from invader to invader, knocking the giant steel prawns loose as they planted themselves into the pavement: not that it seemed to be bother them much.

How many could she stop? Several dozen, maybe. Compared to what appeared to be thousands tumbling from a gaping wound in reality she may as well have been fighting a tidal wave with a teaspoon. Her actions might have been better served elsewhere given the number of people still trapped in their cars waiting for rescue.

“We’re going to need the full team on this one,” she roared into the headset and bounded to the bonnet of a red SUV. There were small children shivering inside. What kind of monster would just leave kids behind?

“Already sent out the alert,” Go! reported. “TASK are on their way. Our job is to evacuate the city. Any sign of GG’s body double?”

Touch braced as she put her fist through the windshield. It held shape as she pulled it away then reached inside for the abandoned human cargo fate had charged her with. Her forced smile did little to soothe them: the storm outside was greater than the calm in the middle of it.

“No sign,” she said while scooping the pair one by one from their booster seats. She wished she was surprised. “Maybe he’s not the hero type.”

“Maybe.”

Suddenly the skies were silent, leaving only the screams to drown out any rational thought. Touch looked back to the epicenter of the disaster where she could see the invading collective huddling together and piling between the skyscrapers like an alien ant hill. Slowly they began to climb, reaching far back into the crevice they fell from.

The little boy in her arms clutched to the neck of her costume. “What’s it doing?” he choked between sobs, but Touch didn’t have an answer.

“Go!, do you have an ETA on that TASK crew?”

“Fift…n min…es,” crackled his reply. That may not have been soon enough.

* * * *

Starbolt darted across the city in seconds, slowing only to guide himself to his destination. Time was not on his side, especially if the Technocracy were doing what he thought they were doing.

Milestone Energy Management was the closest station to the disaster and was already being evacuated. Only a skeleton crew remained behind to regulate the power surges being channeled into the heart of midtown, easily tripling the city’s annual electric bill. Little did they realize that by trying to keep the city running they were also killing it: someone had to make it stop.

“Where’s the foreman!?” Starbolt roared over the turbines, the urgency in his voice snapping the orange helmeted worker from shock at the sight of his lightning entrance.

“You’re talking to him!” he called back.

“We need to kill the city grid! Probably even the whole county!”

The foreman didn’t seem to take to the idea at all, saying something about power being dead for weeks if he hit the kill switch. Starbolt, however, with a burst of power and an impatient glare threatened to put them out for months: an ultimatum even a mere civil servant could easily decide upon when confronted by a pissed off superhuman.

Before he could even start for the central console Starbolt had the man standing behind the panel ready to put a forty mile radius into sleep mode. The flick of a dozen toggles was all it took to put a city down: hopefully that was enough to impede the Technocacy’s progress until some real help arrived.

An explosion rocked the blackened station, driving home for the innocent foreman just how little control he had. “What the hell’s going on out there?” he gasped.

Starbolt gritted his teeth dreading the battle ahead. “Oh, you know, just the apocalypse. Nothing we don’t kick the crap out of every other week.” The fact that the Technocracy had already wiped out the human race once before was conveniently left out of his explanation, but only because he was sure he could stop it this time.

Never again: not here, or anywhere. The machines already had one world and that was enough.

Time was growing shorter and there was still much to do. Killing the power was only stage one: Milestone needed to be back in the stone age if the Technocracy was going to be contained, which also meant cutting all major forms of communication in minutes. Not an easy task, even for someone moving at the speed of light.

FWOOM-THWACK!

Somewhere over the West Village there’d been a collision: too big and hard to be a bird, and he would have seen a plane coming. It sent Starbolt’s his hard light body on a sharp detour into the river. Of all the times for some piece of super-trash to pick a fight…

He shot up, arguing over whether or not he could make the one who put him down a priority: assuming he had any choice, of course. The faces he caught on the way back up confirmed he didn’t.

“$#&%.”

Laser Lass’ expression lingered somewhere between confused, disgusted and disappointed. “This isn’t him,” she told her teammate.

“It’s him,” Vanquisher said, though Laser Lass only thought him stupid for it.

Flashbolt trembled with uncertainty. After all this time they’d found him, albeit in a new body, and they didn’t even know it. Doesn’t matter! You’ve got more important things to worry about, his head screamed.

“No, moron, look! He’s got the same costume, but check his build. The one we know is a lot shorter… and squeakier. I’d even go so far as to say there’s a real man under that mask.”

The hero interjected: “If you’ll just excuse me, I’ve got a planet I need to go-” but the Vanquisher wouldn’t allow it. Those cold blue eyes knew the truth, and they weren’t going to grant him any mercy.

“It’s him,” he said. “Same guy we fought together, different body.”

Laser Lass twitched as the pieces started coming together. “So then the one I tried to snuff in the power core…”

“Was probably another girl like you,” the vicious empath concluded, “and tricked with the same promise, I’ll bet. Am I right?” Not that Starbolt needed to answer: the Vanquisher could feel the shifting guilt inside the boy.

Tick, tick, tick, Starbolt could feel the end of the world cracking away at him. They could fight later. Containment was the first priority. He turned, but Laser Lass cut him off.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked as if it weren’t obvious.

Starbolt clenched his fists. Why now!? There were better things he could be doing than talking. “I know what I did to you was wrong,” he spat, “but it’s the over for this planet unless I stop the Technocracy from spreading!”

“Oh really now!”

“Look, I know you don’t care about this Earth, but you’ve got to see the bigger picture here,” he pleaded. “You’ve seen what they’ve done to my world, and until now they’ve been content with just that, but now they’re forming a whole empire! We can stop it before it reaches any other worlds, including yours!”

The villains gave pause, perhaps stirred by Starbolt’s words. As if.

Vanquisher laughed and wrapped his bicep around the hero’s throat: were Starbolt in need of oxygen he’d be choking. “You stupid little punk,” the villain grinned. “You have no idea, do you? Your world has been destroyed. It. Is. No. More.”

“What!?”

“Let me make it easier for you to understand,” Laser Lass continued saucily. “We blew up your planet. Yes, we can actually do that.” She inched closer into flirtatious proximity. “They’re not looking to build a new empire, sweetheart. They’re just moving house, and now that they’ve lost whatever substitute battery you gave them they decided to come look for you, their oldest friend. Don’t you feel special?”

Starbolt glared. They couldn’t be serious: it was exactly the sort of thing some evil-for-evil’s-sake douchebag like Laser Lass would say to tick him off, yet the story fit. The Technocracy had never been so ambitious before: maybe this was a move of desperation on their part. Maybe what they said was true and his homeworld, the Earth on which he’d been born, was gone.

“Thank the gods,” Starbolt whispered. In some ways it was a relief to finally put it all to rest, but there was still this world to save. No time for grieving. He fought against Vanquisher’s hold, slipping through with a light-speed dash, but was cut down again when Laser Lass sniped him with a fingertip beam.

“I thought we made it clear that you’re not going anywhere,” she told him.

The hero reeled in confusion. “Okay, you blew up my planet. Good. Now there’s only a few of them left. We have to stop them before-“

“It’s already taken care of.”

“What do you mean?”

Starbolt’s body flew across the river before smacking into the pavement. Idiot! He should have seen it coming, and telling by the hard-light harlot’s grin she agreed.

“It means this planet’s already done for,” she told him. “Vanquisher! How much time do we have!?”

“Gadgetron says we’re safe for twenty minutes,” he called back. “Plenty of time for you to take this sucker!”

Had you asked Jason Cade several days before if there was any threat greater than the Technocracy he would have said no. Oh, how wrong he was.

“We can still save them!” he pleaded. “Six billion people! You can’t just let them die!” Not like they had back on his world.

“They were done for the second you set foot on this Earth,” Laser Lass told him.

“So then… why are you here?”

The villain laughed, viciously and condescendingly. Had he really not gotten the picture yet? “The problem with planetary annihilation is that it’s so impersonal,” she said. “I’m here for you, puppy. It’s revenge, pure and simple.”

* * * *

Yesterday was supposed to be the worst day of her life. Watching her best friend being dragged off by robots to a doomed world while a doppelganger took her place was supposed to be the most harrowing experience she could ever hope to live through, but no, an even worse day had to roll around and top it by plunging the whole city into panic.

Tap, tap, tap, her fingers rolled impatiently on the wheel of her stationary beetle as she tried again for a phone signal. She had to know that her Mom was okay, and Angie and Grant and even Seth, the annoying bastard. She didn’t know what was going on: all she or anybody seemed to know was that the sky had cracked open and that everyone needed to run as fast as they could.

Traffic was gridlocked on the way out of the city, even all the way out in the suburbs. It figured that there would probably be an accident. With judgment day at their backs people started abandoning their cars, as if that improved their chances of escape any.

Sadly, their only hope right now rested in Jason’s hands. Whatever was happening he was bound to be in the middle of it, but never in a million years could Tanya believe that he would be the kind of hero Kaira had been: not after what he’d done. That actually made things worse. How could a lying, traitorous monster like him ever protect a city?

As people fled like rats Tanya sat frozen still gripping the wheel. What was the point of running? Was this what absolute despair felt like? What on earth could she possibly do? Nothing. Even if there were other heroes in the world they didn’t seem worth believing in anymore.

Suddenly a bolt from heaven shot down, sending people running for cover. Even Tanya who was momentarily petrified found herself struggling for her seatbelt, but by then it was too late.

By some miracle she was still alive, and so were the bystanders. Despite the bright heat that consumed them all nothing had been harmed: the only thing changed was that there was a girl suddenly crouched between the lines of cars.

Yep, that was me.

Tanya couldn’t fumble out of the beetle fast enough. She was probably just as happy to see me as I was to see her: well, maybe not. Something about being tossed between universes and having your quantum superstrings ripped and reattached to membrane after membrane leaves you appreciating home a whole lot more.

“KC!? Is that you!?”

Yep. Definitely home. “Nice secret identity I had once,” I told her, but pulled into a hug anyway. Screw alter-egos: this was needed.

“Where have you be-“

“Time for that later,” I said. “Just remember that you were the one who lead me home, okay?”

She pulled away, confused. “Wait, what?”

“The first time the door opened you, Jason and the beetle were bombarded with vortex radiation. It’s not hard to track when you’ve got the right equipment. You were like a beacon in the fog, saving my ass all over again.”

“For real?”

I laughed, probably the first time in… gods, how long had it been? “You think now of all times I’d be yanking your chain?”

The moment was short lived. A second bolt erupted from the heart of the crack in the sky and down into the city. It was long, slow, wide, and could be seen from nearly twenty miles away. There wasn’t much time left.

“Time to do the hero thing,” I said and burst into the sky. I didn’t hear what she said as I went but was glad she said it anyway. One precious life and billions just like her: what else was there worth fighting for?

* * * *

TO BE CONTINUED…

Tanya launched herself to the nearest cover she could find even though the beetle stood exactly zero chance of protecting her against those… those… things! Machines, like out of the Matrix or Transformers or something, with hissing pneumatic frames, nerves of ribbed steel cable and layers of heavy, stained black plate from head to toe. She trembled at the sight of them but couldn’t resist having another peak. She didn’t know whether a shape closer to human would be more or less intimidating.

And Kaira! What had they done with her!? The first robot had already disappeared back through the doorway with two sentries guarding its exit. Now would have been the time to do something or risk losing her forever to what was definitely not a perfect life on the other side: but that was Jason/Justin’s job to take care of, wasn’t it? I mean, he was Starbolt: a hero! He was supposed to eat mecha for breakfast!

Instead the boy lay crouched in the grass barely visible from the portals light while tinkering with another strange device. Tanya barked at him to do something only to be told “I am doing something!”

The sentries turned. Crap! The mounted laser death rays made their intentions known: leave no witnesses. It didn’t matter that they were only a couple of local kids nobody would believe had seen a girl who didn’t technically exist in their universe being abducted: machines were generally notorious for their imperviousness to reason.

Suddenly Justin shot up and held out what looked like an iPod touch. Pressing a single button saw a violent wind blow: one that touched nothing but the deadly automatons. But their struggle was in vain: reality itself had rejected them, throwing them back to their home and slamming the door shut behind them. The battle was over, but one was still missing.

Tanya bounded immediately to the side of the curiously calm boy, the terror of seeing her closest friend dragged off to regions unknown still quivering like jelly inside her. “What have they done to Kaira!?” she demanded.

The boy thought about it for a moment, and then he forced a smile. “I know it wasn’t the send off you were hoping for,” he said, “but she’s safe. Those things were the Gremlin’s goons. They don’t stand a chance, especially against someone whose powers fry circuitry.”

Something was wrong. What had he done? Tanya couldn’t believe it. The ways he was like Kaira were uncanny, including the world’s worst poker face.

“Where is she really?” she gasped. If only it weren’t as bad as she imagined.

“I told you. She’s fine.”

“And you’re lying,” the girl declared and marched right up to his face with boiling malice. “Where is she, Jason? I need to know. Now.”

“She’s fine. Reall-“

The sharp slap across his face was less than convinced. Tanya continued to tremble, this time not in fear for her own life but that of her dearest friend. Did he know this was going to happen? Why did they ever trust him?

“Listen, you human sack of $#&%,” she seethed, “you’re going to tell me exactly what just happened or there’ll be hell to pay. You got that?” Justin leaned in to speak again but she cut him off: “And don’t you dare think about lying to me, because you’re just as transparent as she is and I’ll know.”

Justin stopped. There was no point in fighting it anymore, he supposed. “Tanya…”

“Tell me.”

“You need to understand-“

“Tell me!”

His fists clenched at his sides and rattled with uncertainty. The words clung to the back of his throat desperate to not find the open air, but then… a pang of guilt perhaps? Something. Jason Cade had been lying long enough.

“I would have done anything to get out of that place,” he told her. “An-y-thing. And I did. And now I have to live with that, and so do you.”

Tanya threw herself at him, gripped him by his sleeves and shook him like a ragdoll. “Where did you send her!?”

He didn’t fight back. “You don’t want to know.”

Definitely not the words she wanted to hear. As if her imagination weren’t dark enough, to know that somewhere Kaira had been thrust into something even worse defied any comprehension. What kind of a monster would do such a thing?

She looked to the device in Justin’s hands. He’d used that to send the robots away, right? “We can get her back,” she declared, “and you’re going to help me.”

Tanya made a grab for the device, but Justin reacted too quickly and held it just out of reach. A part of her couldn’t believe that the person Kaira had entrusted her body to would really do such a twisted thing. She thought that with a little guilt he might be convinced, but alas, he’d thought his plan through to the end.

A flash of light had her stumbling back as he charged his powers, but only for a moment. He stood with the smoking plastic in his hand: the only tool that could have liberated Kaira from whatever hell her replacement had sent her to had been destroyed.

“Not even if we wanted to,” he told her.

Stunned, horrified, Tanya gaped at the new Justin. How could he have done that? Without even thinking her hand flew back up to his face: all of her hate balled up into her knuckles and colliding with his cheek. It felt good, but he didn’t resist. Maybe he would when she hit him a third time, then again, then again, then again!

Justin accepted his punishment, like he agreed that he deserved it or something: not that it did Tanya any good. There was no satisfaction to be had from a moron like this. It wasn’t going to console her, even in the slightest.

A dozen blows must have landed before she finally gave up and turned back for the car. She couldn’t stand to be around him anymore. %#$&, she didn’t even completely know what he’d done! Just that it wasn’t good and that Kaira was as good as dead.

Down the road a safe distance Tanya pulled over and collapsed against the steering wheel. The tears weren’t going to stop for a long, long time.

* * * *

“Crap $#&% gods-damn father-#$%&ing son of a bastard!”

Can you tell that I was angry, or scared, or all of the above? Then again you would be too if you were dragged off to some desolate reality by robots never to see your home again. I was so stupid. How could I have been so dumb as to fall for this? Really, you’d almost think I hadn’t been screwed over by a body double before.

Hours had passed and they were still chasing me: machines waaaay bigger than the trio who dragged my disoriented self to this hellhole in the first place, and they were literally everywhere. Canada, Puerto Rico, Argentina, they were there. Hawaii, Indonesia, Australia, it seemed like the whole damn planet was teeming with these things!

I didn’t let myself panic. I mean, I’d been in worse scrapes, right? Stranded on the other side of the country? At least I could walk home, or on the other side of the world even, at least I could fly. Even the few times I’d been stuck on the other side of the cosmos I’d always found a way to hitch a ride home, but this was new.

Okay. This may have officially been the tightest spot I’d ever been in, but I couldn’t dwell on that while I had hovering robo-crabs and boomerang shaped jets constantly on my six!

Skipping from time zone to time zone it was soon became abundantly clear that there was something wrong with the world. Somewhere it should have been daytime but instead there were only ashen skies and empty streets. The avenues of Hyderabad were uncharacteristically desolate, as was Vladivostok, then Amsterdam, then Islington and home. Where were all the people?

“Okay, maaaybe starting to freak out a little…”

Back in Milestone there was something I had to see. There would only be a few minutes before the machines caught up, but I had to know…

The front lawn had grown wild just like all the others: it was even spreading to the road and cracking the pavement. Weird to see my own home in such a state, and even weirder to kick the door in and absorb the taste of stale air while watching cockroaches flee into dark corners. The place must have been abandoned for years! Definitely not the perfect life that Jason had promised.

“Mom?” I called out. “Dad? It’s… me, Kai… Caroline.”

It’d have been even spookier if they were there. So far as I could tell nobody was anywhere. Underground, maybe? Only then did the dreaded thought enter my mind: maybe they were all gone. Mom, Dad, Tommy… no, I couldn’t think like that. Not before I’d seen any bodies at least. Regardless the room felt like death: in or out of hard light form it was sucking the life out of me.

Oh gods, Jason! What have you done!?

Suddenly, a voice: “Jason?” From the front yard. It sounded human. “Jason, we need to talk,” it continued. Evidently this person wasn’t in on the switch plan. “Come on, buddy. You should know how this works by now.”

How what works? Did I really want to find out?

Curiosity won out in the end, along with the aching need to see another human face. A pity there wasn’t one to be found. Instead there was an emoticon standing on my front porch. Even stranger was how pissed it looked with the symbols: > : (

“We’ve been over this, Jason,” it said patiently. “This isn’t your home anymore. You need to come back to the factory.”

Pressing one foot outside I could see the machines again. It was clear whose side they were on, and who was staying their hand. The fight or flight instinct was itching at the back of my heels, but what good would it do without answers?

“I’m not Jason,” I told them. Would they really care?

The emoticon blinked into a question mark. “Fact: your physiology matches that of subject Cade, Jason. Fact: Your powers are identical to that of subject Cade, Jason. Fact: Subject Cade, Jason successfully evaded the network for seventy-eight hours.”

“I… guess so?”

The emote continued. “Fact: Subject Cade, Jason is not inclined to wearing culturally assigned female attire. Query: Who are you? Query: What is your connection to subject Cade, Jason?”

None of this was right. That itch to fly was crawling up my leg again. The second it hit my gut it’d be like a chain reaction and I’d be running again. Where I didn’t know, but there had to be somewhere safe if Jason was able to hide for as long as he did, right?

“Would telling you make any difference at all?” I asked the emote.

It switched from question mark to semicolon space close parentheses. “Not a lick,” it said.

No, I thought not.

* * * *

It was a long drive back to the suburbs, somewhere just shy of several hours, or at least it seemed that way. For Tanya Truman nothing seemed real anymore: her soul was numb and brain muted of all thought lest knowledge of the night’s events continue to play on her.

Kaira was in another universe, one that she could only imagine was some kind of Hell. How was she supposed to process that? It would have been less painful if her friend had simply ceased to exist, but to know there was a place so bad that someone had to escape an entire dimension to be free just made it so much worse.

Her arriving home came as a surprise. When had she gotten there? All that time she was on auto-pilot with her hands absently going through the motions, only then to snap to reality at the end and find herself the last place she wanted to be.

Tanya was still gripping the wheel as though she were clinging to life itself. There must have been something that she could have done to change things, like grab one of those devices that evil Justin had. Not that it was any good fretting about it now: any chance she had of crossing the borders of reality were fried with that hand gadget he had.

It was no use. She wasn’t hero grade material, just a mere mortal who couldn’t find any help outside of what she could Google: in other words absolutely useless.

She kicked the bottom of the dashboard and swore, then swore again and again and again. Screaming at her own impotence she found herself wanting to punch the horn, needing it to scream with her, and let the whole world know that gods damn it, she was in pain! Even if she couldn’t tell them what was wrong it still needed to come out somehow and with force that would shatter every window for miles.

Reason, or what seemed to pass for it, prevailed. The furious silence wasn’t any better or worse than an ever-tempting bout of insanity. Regardless she still didn’t want to be at home, or anywhere.

A muffled melody pulled Tanya from her funk. No way. That was Kaira’s phone! She must have dropped it on the ride over. Pressing her fingers between the worn out cushions of the passenger seat she searched out what had been explained to her was the Glimmer Girl hotline. This had to be a sign or something.

Unlocking the phone was easy: Kaira’s alter-ego stupidly used her same general password. The message read:

BIG GUY LOOSE ON SOUTHLAND DRV. NEVER SEEN HIM B4. BE CAREFUL.
From: Brandon, Today, 11:24pm

Brandon! Of course! The guy who helped Glimmer Girl out after that assassin hit her! He had to know something, didn’t he? Maybe he had other contacts or something, like to the Young Sentinels, or even someone with a working portal thingamajigger. It was worth a short, wasn’t it?

She dialed the number, but nobody answered. Weird. Didn’t he take important calls from superheroes? Trying again she got the same result: ringing out with no voicemail. The same thing happened a third time, and a fourth.

By then it was really starting to grate on her. He had to answer the phone eventually! After all, he was their only hope of getting Kaira back.

* * * *

Starbolt shivered through the luminescent numbness that encapsulated his form. Tanya was never going to forgive him, he knew that, but if only she understood…

A thought went out to his fallen sister, for without her he wouldn’t have this new life. He’d done a terrible thing, but her sacrifice would not be in vain. And it wasn’t as though he felt no remorse: hell, he was going to regret this night for the rest of his life, but it was just as he’d said before, compared to the alternative it was something he could learn to live with.

His regret was counterbalanced by the sight of Milestone City. It was just like he’d remembered from when he was a kid: Midtown with the Infinitech building planted dead in the heart of it, Centenary Park right by the edge of the river, and all the old turn of the century buildings scattered around the edge, just like it was before. He drank in the sight of this place untouched by horror: it was an even greater gift than his newly claimed manhood.

Then, just as the hero was taking in the lights reflected off the water something caught his eye. It may have been strange to see many cars out, even at this time of night, but Starbolt was pretty certain that they weren’t supposed to be feeding a bonfire in the middle of a main road.

Mere feet away there was something else: something vaguely resembling a chewed up wad of bubblegum with legs and shiny blades protruding from what he guessed was gooey flesh. As Starbolt few closer he could see a man inside the thing, if you could call it that, stumbling with a bottle of liquor in his hand.

Starbolt landed in the creature’s path. It didn’t matter if the thing was half his size or nine feet tall (which he was): whatever was going on stopped there. “Going somewhere, Big League Chew?”

The monster took another long swig and squinted at the gold clad youngster with the pony tail. He was probably expecting Glimmer Girl: well not anymore. “I was hopin’ for someone a lil’… bigger,” he slurred. “You ain’t Mr. Marvel.”

Mr. Marvel? Jason smiled: he must have been this universe’s version of Madam Marvel. “Well, you got me,” the kid grinned. “You see, Mr. Marvel fights A-listers. I’ve got no idea who the hell you’re supposed to be.”

The big guy lumbered, mumbling something about a smart-ass punk while pumping up his intoxicated biceps. “You know who I am!?” he demanded.

“Ya used ta be somebody?” Starbolt mocked, even adding a comical “hic” for effect.

“The name’s Krysus,” the chewed up gumball declared. “You know what I can do? I can stab you, punk! A hundred times! An’ once I’m inside you I can make your blood explode! Huh? How you like them apples!?”

And yet the young hero was less than impressed. “Yeah, 1992 called. They want their grim and dark motif back. You… are nobody.”

Krysus threw the bottle down. That little punk! Who did he think he was? Here was a monster who’d filled entire graveyards and that snot-nosed little $#&% thought he could get away with talking smack? He charged with a drunken roar from a mouth so wide you could practically see to his entrails.

Starbolt didn’t miss a beat. He eased back, put his arm forward, pointed a single digit and cocked his thumb. “Bang.” That was all it took: a thin sliver of a hard light bolt slamming with expert precision at the back of the monsters throat causing for him to choke and double over. He almost felt bad for the guy when he collapsed onto his face and knocked himself out, but a guy like that probably deserved it: especially if he was serious about that exploding blood thing.

Hearing the approaching sirens Starbolt smiled with melancholy. He’d done a terrible thing that night: maybe a lifetime of putting away jerks like this would make up for it.

* * * *

I could tell by the taste the way they’d caught me. Little known fact about tranquilizers: the exact dosage required to put someone out varies from person to person. Too little can paralyze but not knock you out, too much can kill. The machines knew exactly how much it took to take down this body, probably from past experience, so when I finally woke I had no idea exactly how much time had elapsed.

Crap! The roughly-less-than-twenty-four-hours frame to get home had turned into a terrifying question mark. Maybe I’d already missed the window of opportunity. Who could tell? Only the smiling emoticon knew for sure.

“Hello,” it said cheerily. “I am Sam. What is your name?”

I tried to crawl away, but that wasn’t going to happen. Every movement was like swimming through soup while rubber bands held me in place. Actually they were some sort of ridged metal, and the soup was the density of whatever barrier was holding me in place: I didn’t know what it was.

Enthusiastically the emoticon, Sam, shifted its expression to ‘: D’ and chuckled pleasantly. “Ha ha! Sorry. I know you’re used to freedom, but there’s no reason why we can’t have fun together, right?”

“Who,” was all I managed to get out. Even the air in the invisible cage was heavy while my body seemed to be swimming between the ever-snaking bands. Outside was only the surprisingly chipper prison guard in an ominous world of darkness.

“I told you. I’m Sam,” he explained with a semicolon wink. “I was Jason’s friend before he sent you here as his replacement. I play all sorts of games. Everything from chess, backgammon, free cell, all the way to the latest system games and beyond! Whatever you want to do, I’m here to make your term as comfortable as possible.”

“What,” I forced, “if I want… to get out of here?”

Sam laughed again. “You’re funny. Look, I know this has got to be hard, but just think of me as your prison concierge. Confinement doesn’t have to completely blow. All you need is the right attitude.”

Great, Hell came with an induction ceremony. The cheery tone made it even worse: ‘sure, the new world you’ve landed on is a desolate wasteland and you may be locked up for some unknown reason, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad. Look, it’s Wii tennis!’ Yeah, totally good news.

Suddenly it occurred to me, “how do you know I’m not…?” Gods, I was winded just trying to ask a simple question. Note to self: choose words carefully.

“Easy peasy,” Sam chirped with its vertical mouth blinked into a closed bracket. “You and Jason have different brainwave patterns. They’re similar, but they’re also completely the opposite. Get my meaning?”

I wasn’t sure I did.

“Besides,” it retorted, “do you really think you were the first person he’s tried the body swap scam on? There have been several attempts since his internment. Personally, I’m glad he succeeded. You seem like much better company.”

Yeah, I was over the moon. Wait, did he really say that Jason had made other escape attempts with other Glimmer Girls? Gods, as if one of me was trouble enough, but… how long had he been here, trying to escape this place? Despite being pissed beyond belief I was starting to understand why he would pull a trick like this.

“Anymore questions before we plug you in?” Sam queried.

“Plugged… in?”

“Correctomundo,” the emoticon bounced with another wink. “I don’t know if anyone told you this, but the only reason you’re still alive is so you can power the Technocracy. That’s who we are, by the way. Don’t try and talk to the other machines. I’m the only social one. They made me so you could have someone to talk to, so you wouldn’t go crazy or try to escape or anything. Heh. Whoops.”

“I’m… a battery?”

“Yup yup yup!”

From below I could hear the sounds of turbines or whatever they were starting to power up. The horrible things they’d been doing to Jason for years was just about to happen to me and there were probably only a few seconds left to squeeze whatever I could.

I fought against my bounds impotently, but it was no use: they’d been specifically designed to hold this body in place. “Where are the other heroes?” I blurted out. Maybe if there was a secret underground I could do something to alert them.

Sam paused uncomfortably and turned to a colon space slash. “Sorry to break it to you, dude, but there are no other heroes, not even you.”

“What do you mean… ugh! ‘Not even me’!?”

“I mean that you can’t be a hero when there’s nobody left to save,” it explained. “All that’s left is you, me and the Technocracy. We’re the entire population of the world. I’ll give that a minute to sink in.”

Yeah, right. In a minute I’d be feeding the machine through its tendrils. Not exactly the best time to be processing big thoughts.

“Not to sound flippant, but you can’t ignore the irony,” Sam pointed out in an all too jovial tone. “Jason had to become a villain to escape. It was the only way. I hope you don’t hate him too much for that. Who knows? Maybe in a few years you’ll try the same.”

The swaying noise below began to quicken its pace before releasing a high pitched whine. Neither of those sounds could mean anything good.

“So, you have the skinny on me. What’s your name?” Sam asked.

I looked over both hating and fearing its punctuated face. “Kaira,” I coughed. Gods, I couldn’t even enunciate my contempt in this thing.

“A pleasure to meet you, Kaira,” it said then blinking into a capital X and D. “I promise this will only hurt for a minute.”

“No, ple-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!”

One minute, it said. My screams filled the cavern. The worst agony I’d ever felt began to boar right into my chest and pulled at me like it was drilling my soul! Two seconds in and I already wanted it to stop: not that the Technocracy cared.

Sam stood idly by pleasantly with a closed bracket smile. It did nothing to keep me sane.

* * * *

Tanya stirred slightly at the sound of the blip. It was sharp and harsh laying somewhere around her pillow, invisible to her lazy hand. Ah, whatever: she’d be asleep again before she could find it anyway, so why even bother looking? Driving her face deeper into the pillow she flirted with the precipice of sleep, because who needed to get up when there was so many problems to take care of?

Suddenly she remembered that something was wrong. What she couldn’t exactly remember, but just knowing was enough to have her spring up into a waking haze. That was Kaira’s phone pounding at her eardrums! Kaira was in another universe! She was supposed to be calling for help: time was running out!

Still above her sheets and fully clothed Tanya searched for the portable device she soon discovered had fallen between her bed and the wall. The screen was dim but still she could read ‘1 NEW MESSAGE’ on the main panel. Her fingers fumbled at the keys with as much skill as they could summon at six thirty in the morning as she opened the text.

HELP IS COMING.
From: [ID blocked], 2:11am

Jeez, it had taken all that time for a message to go through? More likely the Glimmer Girl hotline had been screaming for attention but she was just too exhausted to notice before now. Still, that was over four hours ago. Where was help?

“I really hope you’re alright, KC,” she whispered to the empty room. Somehow, even with the anonymous three word promise that didn’t seem likely.

* * * *

“Kaira?”

I couldn’t stop trembling.

“Kaira, can you hear me?”

They’d carved my heart out but still I could feel it beating across the room, or at least that’s what it felt like.

“Earth to Kai-ra,” Sam said in a sing-song tone. “Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey!” Semicolon space capital D. The relentless cheer was really starting to grate.

Was it over? The only way to tell was to feel the sting of tears as they rolled down my cheeks. Gods, I’d never felt anything like that before: not at such intensity. I had to escape or else I was going to break.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Sam mused, “but there’s no getting out of here. Besides, even if you did somehow manage it where would you go? You don’t belong anywhere. Your life belongs to Jason now. If you took it back you’d both be freaks again, am I right? I don’t know much, but I know his insecurities, and I know the kind he must have exploited to get you here.”

“Not a freak,” I coughed.

“If you really believed that then you wouldn’t have been so quick to give your life away. You belong here now, Kaira. I know it hurts, but your contribution is valuable, and the Technocracy appreciates you. Never before have we had such an efficient and abundant source of power.”

I wanted to fight but I was just too drained. It was like they’d amputated the parts of me that were Glimmer Girl and leaving me, the pathetic, weak human part behind. Even though I could feel embers of her lingering in the corner of my psyche it just wasn’t enough for a charge. It would take time for her to recover, but before then the Technocracy would drill again, and keep doing it over and over and over…

“You might not believe me now,” Sam continued, its emote shifting to ‘<3’, “but we love you, Kaira. We need you and cherish you for who and what you are, and it breaks our heart that you would want to leave us.”

“Liar.”

The emoticon paused. “It’s true. We will tell you so every day. In time you will come to believe us. It is the only truth that remains in this world.”

Yeah, right. Only a crazy person would ever believe that a torturer using you for power was capable of love. But I didn’t need empty words: I needed a way out before round two began. I couldn’t stand another bout with the soul drill.

The earth trembled with the sound of nearby thunder: that or the machine was preparing itself. No, it couldn’t have been… Sam was completely baffled, emoting colon space open bracket sad face. What was going on?

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

An explosion tore through the wall behind me with flames illuminating the cramped little space I’d once thought was an ominous cavern. Whatever had caused it had Sam stumbling back in faux terror.

“Please don’t-“

“Shut up,” a familiar voice groaned before unleashing hard light destruction on the mechanoid. No, it couldn’t have been… Jason?

I struggled against the bonds to see his face but couldn’t quite reach. No matter. I was going to be out of there in no time. “You came back for me,” I cried. Thank the gods!

Jason, however, sounded less than enthused. “Of course I came back for you,” he seethed. There was something strange about his tone: it was higher, practiced, the way I used to do it. “After what you tried to do to me I would have been happy to leave you rot, but when the Technocracy began to invade my universe, well, I simply had to come back to finish you off.”

Then it became all too clear that the figure slinking into view was not Jason, though whoever she was appeared to have my body all the same. I blinked in awe at her costume: it was just like Glimmer Girl’s but so… not! The black lace fishnets, amber boots as high as her hemline was short, the long gloves and the velvet mask pointed to a character far more sinister than I was expecting.

“Who the hell are you!?”

“Playing dumb,” the witch scoffed, “or did I really not make that strong an impression the last time around?”

Sam had told me that Jason had pulled the body-swap scam before. Oh hell. And there I was taking his comeuppance.

Her finger pointed like a loaded pistol and was primed with force that would leave me with an instant lobotomy. “The name’s Laser Lass,” she said, “and it’s the last name you’re ever going to forget!”

* * * *

TO BE CONTINUED…

Her name was Super Sonic Woman and her taste for nostalgia was just as obvious in her costume: v-striped silver one piece, large collar, winged boots and so much glitter even I had to turn away from the glare. She was also covering a lot of ground and the next thing I knew we were three counties away leaving local sheriffs with impossible numbers on their radars.

Something else you also find in the d-grade villain pile: a lot of them are in it for the chase. Victory? Dominion? That’s for the big baddies. Super Sonic Woman, she just liked to stir the pot. Hell, she wasn’t even close to winning and couldn’t keep from bragging.

“Hey hey! Can’t stop me! Can’t stop m-!”

THWACK!

What was I saying? Oh, right. D-grade villains: sometimes they like to get so drunk on their own sense of excitement that they don’t see when holographic heroines shift light spectrums and block the road with invisible fists. At that velocity you better believe it put her out cold. Also, thank the gods for her ability to redirect kinetic energy or else we’d have made street pizza.

Okay, that was the first thing out of the way. All I had to do was fly her back to Milestone then take care of her partner: a fierce mustachioed pyrokinetic laid out in a smoldering crater that was once the corner of 3rd and Crown.

“That was a close one,” Starbolt bounced. “You should have seen it! Burning through the sky then right through the asphalt!”

I shrugged before unloading my heavier-than-she-looked human cargo. “That’s why they call him Mr. Fahrenheit.”

You could tell from his grin that Starbolt was getting off on it. Gods, it was like his bones wanted to leap out of his skin and dance, like he’d never taken out a pair of low-level super-powered thrill-seekers before. Then again who was I to get in the way of his victory?

“So,” he asked, “do we wait for the cops to show up?”

Not that we needed to wait long. I could already hear the sirens. “We should be good to go,” I told him.

He lingered a moment, shuffled from one foot to the other. “Listen… I know this is going weird, but there was this coffee shop I used to go to…”

“The Lovin’ Spoonful?”

His eyes lit up. “Yes! You have one too!? That is so friggin’ awesome! Unless… you know, you have school or whatever.”

“Suspended indefinitely,” I told him, “or at least until I decide to ditch the skirts and man the #&$% up.”

Even though he was trailing behind I could hear Starbolt smile. “I feel your pain, lady,” he said. “And that’s why you should follow my plan: so neither of us ever have to deal with that again.”

* * * *

Out of costume Starbolt, or that is to say Jason looked a lot younger than he was. That I’d heard was the trans man curse, and one which I knew to be a real sore point, but his child-like exuberance wasn’t helping his cause at all. Not that I could blame him: I’d probably be endlessly fascinated with a new universe as well.

It was eerie to look at him. At first I couldn’t see, but the more hours we spent together the more similarities between us were eventually uncovered until I really did believe: ‘this guy is me from another universe!’ Words cannot even begin to describe how bizarre and awkward that is.

My mind kept floating back to the night before. It was only minutes after we’d met that he was describing where he’d come from.

“I know this is going to sound weird,” a disclaimer he would use many times over again, “but I come from a universe almost exactly the opposite to yours. Not like as in good is evil or up is down or anything, we still seem to have a lot of the same laws and history and whatever, but men and women have been swapped around.”

“So women are the dominant class,” I mused, “and you’ve got matriarchy instead of patriarchy?”

Starbolt shook his head. “I’m not explaining it right. The guys still think they’re in charge, but it’s a different set of guys. It’s like… from what I can gather, anyone who was born a man on my world was born a woman on yours, and anyone who was born a woman on yours is a man on mine. Get it?”

“Uh.” I wanted to say yes, but it was just so stupid. What was this: a bad sci-fi novel?

He leaned closer. “Who are your mom and dad?”

It was a personal question, especially from another mask, but what the hell? He seemed to know a lot about me already. “Alan and Liz,” I told him.

“My parents are Ethan and Alana. Close enough?”

“Still not buying it.”

“Okay,” he pressed. “Best friend?”

“Tanya.”

“Tanya Truman?”

“Yep.”

“There we go,” he grinned as though that were all the proof he needed. “My best friend is Tommy Truman. Real tough artsy type whose step-mom teaches karate? Has an awesome little brother you babysit all the time? Doesn’t sound remotely familiar?”

“It does and it doesn’t,” I told him. “Okay, if everyone here has the opposite sex on your world then why are you still a Cade? My mom, who I guess would now be your dad, should be a Sinclair. So unless you have different rules on how a traditional marriage works…”

Starbolt was dumbfounded. I had a point. Clearly he hated that I had a point. “$#&%!”

“Got anything else for me, chief?”

The boy sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. I was really putting him through the ringer. Then again in a world filled with clones, doppelgangers, shapeshifters and all sorts of other nastiness it was impossible to know who to trust: but he wanted me to believe him so very badly. It was almost sad to watch.

Pacing in front of me he searched for the right words. Finally he asked, “what happened to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I was thirteen when Regina and Adrianna Dempsey gathered up a group of jock boys,” he started shakily. Oh gods, I knew this story. “I used to do track and field back then. One day I rolled my ankle, and as I was limping home they chased me, called me a dyke, threw sharp rocks and sticks… and all because I had short hair and wore pants.”

It was the same. Gods help me…

“Next thing I know I’m running for my life. Only place I could think to run was into the reservoir… ha, and right before a storm. I fell, and got lost underground and…” He sat next to me, his eyes wide with mirrored horror, “and I nearly died. If that… I still don’t know what to call it: alien? If it didn’t come to make me a hero then I would be dead. Their hate would have killed me, and it would have killed you too. And that’s why we’re the same, Kaira.”

I had to admit I still had suspicions and wasn’t totally convinced until he took my hand. Liquid gold ran over his skin and his costume, soon spreading to our joined fingertips and then swallowing my entire body. It was that familiar sense of warm and numb that I’d been become all too used to, except it didn’t belong to me: it was his.

Gazing into my soul he asked “now do you believe me?” He knew my answer, even before I broke the connection and snapped back to human state.

“What do you want?”

Starbolt smiled. Ah, there was the rub. “You’ve run into your fair share of mad scientists, right?” he asked. “Well, there was one I ran into recently: Dr. Janus. He had this weird gun thing, see, and he was going to use it to switch bodies with one of the Vigil, except they found him out and locked him up before he had the chance.”

“Okay, so where are you-“

“I have the tech,” he explained. “I went and found it right after I found out about this world. We can make use of this, Kaira.”

Suddenly I found I couldn’t move, not because of anything he’d done but because I was too perplexed to process anything. It was a frightening plan, but even more frightening was the practical rationality behind it.

“So what you’re saying,” I said, “is that you want my body.”

“I don’t just want your body,” Starbolt explained. “I want it all. I want to be a regular guy: a cis guy with working organs who doesn’t have to argue with idiots just so he can use the right bathroom. And in exchange you get the life I don’t want which is suited perfectly for you. The real question is why would you say no?”

What an absolute mind bend. What’s a person supposed to say to that? Somehow it seemed like he was asking me for a lot: more than I could stand to part with even.

There was a coherent thought in there. “I just don’t know if I could give up…” Too bad it didn’t have an ending.

“Giving up what, Kaira?” he asked gently. “If you’re anything like me then you’ve only got one real friend. The rest of the people who say they care about you really want a guy like me around while my family… they want you, Kaira. They want the good daughter. You can do that, and you’d be loved and accepted and cherished. There is no downside to this.”

That was the part where he lost me. “I need to think about it.”

Starbolt blinked. It was the same kind of look I’d get when telling people that I didn’t eat chocolate. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“All I’m saying is that there’s maybe a few things worth considering that have been missed in your proposal. So give me some head room, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” he conceded, “but there’s only thirty nine hours until our realities drift apart and the bridge between them collapses.”

I shot him a deadly look. Funny, but that seemed like an important detail to leave out.

Since then I couldn’t get his offer out of my head. All night and all day I dwelled on the implications of it, about whether it was moral, whether it was kind to my family and friends, and about whether it was kind to myself. So many thoughts went spinning around, but I couldn’t grab hold of a single one. This was going to be a hard decision to make.

Jason turned to me before pressing open the doors of the Lovin’ Spoonful. “So who do you have instead of Glen and John?” he asked.

“Who are Glen and John?”

“The cute gay couple who run this place,” he explained.

“Oh. Uh, we have Gloria and Jean. Gloria is the Norse goddess of the bean.”

He nodded along as if he were not unfamiliar with the concept. “Are they gay too?”

“You know I’ve gotten vibes but never thought to ask.” Desperate for my usual chai latte I pushed him inside. The need for caffeine > the need to know the sexuality of whoever was serving.

Jason stood amazed, at what I didn’t exactly know. There didn’t seem to be anything special about chalk signs, sofas, coffee tables, pot plants and bookshelves, or maybe that was just me.

“Everything okay?”

The boy shook himself back to reality. “Yeah. Yeah, fine. Just different to what I’m used to is all.”

Oh well. I could leave him to his wide eyed wonderment for the moment. In the meantime Gloria was waiting for me at the counter, but she too seemed just as fascinated by the young man as he was his surroundings.

“He’s a wild boy from the Yukon,” I told her. “Never seen a coffee house in his life.”

“You dragged in a second chai latte, extra sweet,” she mused. “This is very, very unusual.”

I had to laugh. Lady, you’ve got no idea.

“KC!” That was all the warning I got before the creature pounced and damn near took me off my feet. Not that I could blame her or anything: she was probably worried sick. “Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, woman! Where the hell have you been!?”

Without even thinking about it my head collapsed onto her chest. Once upon a time when boobs were supposed to be alien and the wrath of women terrifying I might have thought twice, but given the circumstances I was as happy to accept the refuge as she was to offer.

“Tanya, the last few days, just… I don’t even know where to begin.”

She wrapped her arms around me gingerly, ‘like any big sister would’ apparently. “Here, let me pay for your drink and… why are there two?”

Oh, right. Funny thing, I was so preoccupied with finally letting myself be exhausted that I forgot all about Jason. My head turned, my arm pointed at the idle confused boy, and Tanya was no more enlightened for the experience.

She boggled at him. “And he is…?”

A silent conversation communicated entirely through eyebrow signals took place between Jason and I revealing that yes, I had buried a good portion of my face into the shirted cleavage of who he suspected it might be. “You’re Tanya,” he said: a simple statement that again did nothing to help the poor girl out of her pit of sad ignorance.

“KC, who is this guy and why does he know my name?”

I smiled, probably out of delirium, and told her “you’re going to love this.”

* * * *

Minutes later saw me being thrust into a bathroom with the door being locked behind me and a near hysterical Tanya standing between. It quickly turned into one of those times I wish I hadn’t told her my secret identity because everything that went with it caused her mind to blow a gasket.

Her back to the door she slid down onto the tiles, staring seemingly into nothingness. She’d gone from disbelief to shock in a very short time. Sometimes it was hard to remember that some people weren’t as used to the impossible as I was. Crap, it was really beginning to feel like I’d screwed up.

“Let me get this straight,” she began. “That guy sitting out there: he’s you, as in a boy you, as in a trans boy you from another universe.”

I joined her on the floor and nodded along. “Yep.”

“And he’s come along because he wants to trade bodies with you.”

“Yep.”

“So he can be a cis guy on this Earth and you can be a cis girl on his Earth.”

“Well it becomes my Earth,” I laughed weakly, “but yeah, that pretty much covers it.”

Her glare was painted with desperation. She didn’t understand how I could laugh at a time like this. “KC, you need to jump on this,” she gasped, then crawled over and began yanking my arm. “Seriously, you need to do this or you will regret it for the rest of your life!”

“Are you saying that because you mean it or are you saying it because you think asking me to stay is selfish?”

Even after I leaned forward to hold her steady her eyes were still trembling. “Maybe,” she croaked, then injected her tone with some rage flavored courage. “And stop reading my mind!”

“Hey! You started it,” I teased, which then bought me a punch in the arm. I don’t know why, but it seemed deserved.

She was quiet for a while, maybe because angry bravado wouldn’t cover what she had to say next. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she admitted shamefully. For so long she’d been so sure of herself as my protector that something this big with no certain answers blew her completely out of the water.

I drew close and let her rest on my shoulder in the vain hope that it would help keep her together. It did, kinda. That and the comfortable silence: nothing else would get broken while there were no more dangerous ideas being thrown around.

Only then did it occur to me it was only 1:15. “Hey, why aren’t you at school?”

Tanya grunted and propped herself up. She was looking a lot more stable, what with rage being the superglue that turns a stunned girl into a tank. “Assistant Principal Ferguson is why,” she hissed. “You know they called a special assembly?”

“No. Why?”

“To give us a special reminder about the dress code, specifically how boys are expected to dress, and how girls are expected to dress, that every day is not Halloween and that gender roles are there for a reason, blah blah blah.”

“You’re kidding,” I gaped. “He said all of that?”

“Yuh-huh.”

“So what’d you do?”

Tanya furrowed her brow for a moment in thought. “Well, first I stood up. Then I told him to go and have sexual intercourse with himself. Then I extended my middle finger.”

“What? Seriously?”

“Even if you’re not around, KC, I’m not going to let people pour that kind of bull$#&% on you.” Gods, was I lucky to have a best friend like her or what?

“So then what happened?”

“Then,” she explained, “there was a lot of yelling, some cheering, and I walked to my car and left. Then they called my mom.”

“Damn. What’d she say?”

Tanya smiled infectiously. “She also told them to go and have sexual intercourse with themselves and hung up. Then she called me to say how proud she was, and to go see if you were okay.”

My grin stretched until it hurt. I must have done something right in a past life. “Gods, I love your mom,” I told her.

“I know, right? She’s a pretty kick-ass lady.”

“You’re pretty kick-ass too.”

“Shut up, baby. I know it.” We laughed at the stupid reference probably a little too hard. Maybe it was because deep down neither of us wanted to get up and unlock the door.

It was then with cold clarity that I realized that this was how we’d survived all of these years. Maybe Tanya did too. We’d been best friends through grade school and walked hand in hand through Hell: even if Jason could offer me everything I ever wanted it still meant sacrificing the few good things I had.

Her head propped back against my shoulder. “Any idea what you’re going to do?” she muttered. A sigh was all she got back. “Well you’ve only got a day and whatever to decide.”

“Yeah, I know.”

We lingered a while longer. Getting up really was the last thing we wanted to do, but there was little choice when someone came knocking on the door.

“$#&%.”

“There’s probably a line,” I told her while dragging my sorry carcass upright.

Tanya stood but she didn’t move. Even when I tried to prod her she remained firmly planted with a look of contemplation on her face. Something was wrong. Before I could even ask what it was she had her arms around me with her face buried in my collarbone.

“Just do me this one thing quickly while we’re alone, okay, Kaire-Bear?” she sighed.

I held her back uncertainly. “Dude, I’m not going anywhere yet.”

“But just in case, yeah?” She squeezed tight and looked up at me as if I was an idiot, or a liar, or both. You could see it like a rock on the bottom of a clear pond her knowing that my mind was already made up. Still she played along, and even though I thought I was just humoring her I didn’t want to let go either.

Gods, what was I going to do?

* * * *

When we finally returned to Jason there was a new addition. Andy turned his head, grinned and pulled down his glasses. “I was wondering what was taking you two so long,” he grinned.

Tanya didn’t miss a beat in informing him that “we were having wild lesbian sex of such ferocity and fervor that nuns for miles around were crying and didn’t know why.”

I flopped down beside Jason who was sporting far too enthusiastic a grin. “She didn’t mean that,” I told him. The idea that he would be putting the moves on Tanya the second I left the dimension wasn’t helping to sell me on his plan.

Shifting her gaze between the men Tanya pursed her lips suspiciously. “So, you two are getting to know each other?”

Andy nodded. “Yeah, we were just talking about-“

“College,” Jason interjected. “Since, you know, I’ll be graduating and… you know, stuff. I still don’t know what I want to do yet.”

The older guy smiled with puzzlement. Something was going on. “You don’t have to be embarrassed because the girls are here,” he said. “We’re all friends. We all wonder about this kind of thing, especially trans people.”

My gaze was focused directly was on my other self like a heat lamp in a windowless interrogation room. “What kind of thing?”

Jason shuffled and glared back so that I knew he wasn’t going to be intimidated, not that I cared. “If you really must know,” he replied sharply, “I asked him what he’d do if he could just switch bodies with a cis guy.”

Gods, I just had to ask. Was I really reading too much into it? Because those kinds of questions felt like a personal assault. As if I wasn’t stressed enough about the situation already.

Tanya broke the silence out of discomfort or even boredom and asked Andy what he’d said. The eldest of our group kicked his foot onto the coffee table and took a contemplative sip at his drink. “Honestly? I think I’d feel too bad for the guy. As much as I’d love to swing some pipe around I’ve also had a lifetime of getting used to being trans. It’d kinda suck having to throw some poor schmuck in the deep end like that.”

“What if it was some douchebag who really had it coming?” Jason laughed.

“What, like Charlie Sheen?”

“How about Seth?” Tanya murmured.

Andy nearly spit all over the table. “Okay, you want me to switch bodies with my ex. That is totally not the creepiest thing I have ever heard in my life!”

“At least you’d have an intimate working knowledge,” she jabbed. Of all the times for them to have a moment.

“What about a trans woman’s body?” I leaned in and asked. They could tell I was being serious: more than I should have been.

“I don’t want a trans woman’s body,” Andy said plainly, “and honestly she probably wouldn’t want mine either. I mean I’ve got bad skin, I’m hairy, have an epic goatee… which isn’t so bad for me, but it’s probably the worst thing in the world for a good portion of women.”

“What if neither of you had transitioned yet? No hormones, nothing.”

Suddenly he stopped, and as he leaned back into the sofa all jokes vanished because Andy had something to say: something he appeared to be very conflicted about.

“Honestly?” he started. “I would in a heartbeat. No question. In that ideal situation I would make the switch.”

Nobody dared speak, but I had to know: “why?”

Andy just shrugged. “You know I’m only saying this because it’s you guys, and Jason, I’m sure you’ll know what I’m trying to get at too, but… Jesus. We’re not normal people. I mean, being trans is normal for us, but somehow we were forgotten by the status quo, so we have to run, and yell, and fight to say ‘hey, I exist, damn it, and I am a man.’ And they make us jump through hoops and run their tests so they can justify to themselves that we are who we say we are. Meanwhile, every other man on the planet doesn’t get question one about whether they’re in the right bathroom or if sleeping with someone makes them bi-curious.

“And I’m not saying that to be cruel,” he continued, “and I’m not saying it because I think that trans people are inherently brave or broken or deserving of pity or pride. I say that because I’m selfish and because in a world as cracked as ours it’s the only way to escape. I just want to be a guy, no questions asked. If trading off would get me that then yeah, I totally would.”

A part of me wanted to argue, but nothing came. For a moment I wasn’t sure if I was uncomfortable because his words hurt or if it was because I didn’t want to believe him. Jason on the other hand gave me a knowing glance and a sympathetic smile: his point had been made.

* * * *

Later I flew home as Glimmer Girl. Usually it was a solitary trip, one which would let me gather my thoughts, but since Starbolt didn’t seem to have anywhere else to go I let him follow me. At least he was quiet save the tentative attempts at “I’m sorry” I pretended not to hear over the wind.

Silently I found myself hating him. His proposition had me questioning everything I had in the world. It made me want to cling tighter to the precious things while at the same time shoving in my face that I was one of the have nots. Just by virtue of being born, growing and wanting the things I wanted I was less than the rest of the world, and I couldn’t stand it. Gods help me, I might have been just as selfish as Andy thought he was.

We landed, looked away as we changed into our civvies, and walked the last block to my door. “You really sure this is okay?” he asked.

I shrugged. Where else was he going to go?

“I could always crash in an empty hotel room,” he offered. “Raid the mini-bar, steal the little soaps. The only thing I won’t have is cable.”

“Dude, you’re not breaking into a hotel. It’s wrong,” I told him sharply. “Besides, they’re keeping my mom in hospital another night for observation. My dad’s going to be stuck by her side. We have the place to ourselves.”

At least that was the plan. The car sitting in the driveway told a completely different story. Crap.

Jason laughed facetiously. “So, empty hotel room?”

“You stay here,” I told him. “I’ll get you some snackage, some towels, my GameBox if you’re desperate for entertainment… and stuff for the shower because you are not going to steal mini-soaps you didn’t pay for.”

Could you tell I was in a bad mood? It didn’t help to know that time was running out. The night before he’d given me thirty-nine hours, suddenly it was less than twenty-four. I was pretty sure it wasn’t healthy to make life altering decisions this big in under a day.

I’d just made it to the front stair when I heard voices. It was my parents and they were loud: not quite bloody murder loud, but they were definitely in a heated debate, and with mom being fresh out of hospital. Wow, it must have been serious.

After slipping off my clunky shoes and turning the knob gently I crept inside with all the stealth naturally afforded me. The argument was coming from the kitchen so they definitely hadn’t seen me come in. Finding a spot behind the bookshelf I listened to their back and forth.

“No way will a new school accept him this late in the year,” Mom argued. “We’ve got to make do.”

Dad was trying to be Zen about it, but you could hear him struggling. “After everything the current school has done to us? Come on, Liz. You of all people aren’t interesting in bending over backward for them.”

“Maybe not, but we’ve got to be practical here! Justin needs an education, so we ask him to wait until graduation to do whatever it is he wants to do. That way he at least has the basics to function in an adult world.”

“We could always just put him in another school,” he pleaded. “One that accepts him for-“

“Alan, you put him in another school and he’ll have to repeat junior year!”

“So what? He repeats! You say that like it’s such a bad thing! At least this time around he’ll be better prepared!”

Oh gods, they were fighting over me. Another waking nightmare to come home to. Suddenly I felt like I was twelve again standing by helplessly the first time they separated, and now they were at it again, why? Was it so hard to accept me as I was?

I could hear Andy again in my head. Just to exist we had to challenge the status quo: just to have integrity we had to hurt the ones we loved. It wasn’t fair, but at the same time…

“It’s all my fault.”

The fighting stopped. The two adults dashed into the living room but found nothing. Just this once I’d violated my own rule of ‘no powers in the house.’ I couldn’t stand for them to see me so ashamed, especially when it was my life that was causing them so much friction. Gods, what was wrong with me?

Seconds later I was back on the street. Jason was there waiting patiently. I think he’d heard some of what was going on: or he was seeing me cry again… damn it! Why couldn’t I keep it together?

“You okay?” was all he managed, as if it weren’t obvious.

I forced a smile. That it was just as transparent as my poker face didn’t matter. “Let me ask you something. How long have you been out as a guy?”

“About a year. Why?”

My hands were trembling so hard that I could only safely hold them under my arms. “How did Ethan and Alana take it?”

His jaw dropped. He didn’t answer and kicked the pavement instead.

“Jason…”

“Kaira, it…” Say it. Don’t say it. Even before he opened his mouth again I knew what was coming. “It destroyed their marriage,” he reported bitterly. “Apparently having a son was so bad that… you know what? Screw it. My parents aren’t your parents, or else they would have fallen apart years ago, right?”

If only he knew.

Then at that moment I decided. There was plan and purpose. Suddenly there was a right thing to do. My nerves steeled I turned to my doppelganger. “Jason,” I told him. “I want to go through with your plan.”

He nodded with complete understanding then turned to lead the way. Nobody could fail to argue that what we were doing was selfish, but what mattered more than anything else was having a right reason to do it.

* * * *

8:45 and we were on the road. I decided to drive, not fly: that is to say that Tanya was driving me. If it was going to be my last day on (this) Earth then there was no question that she was going to be there. The journey was silent: no music, no jokes, just the two of us dreading the inevitable.

My baggy jeans and X-Men tee were almost like a ceremonial garb. They didn’t belong to me: just the entity that would be inhabiting this body and taking my place in the world. That was the real Justin Cade, this guy who called himself Jason: and I was going to be Caroline, just like my mom had always wanted. The irony was not lost on me.

“Stop that,” she said.

I knew what she was talking about. It had been cycling between us all evening. “Stop what?”

“You know.”

“No,” I replied flatly.

“You’re… being all noble,” she explained, “like this isn’t the saddest thing in the world for me right now. I can’t, I just…”

I could almost hear the arguments screaming out of her head: ‘you don’t have to do this. Parents break up all the time. Some people just aren’t meant to be together. I mean, what if it doesn’t work out anyway?’ She thought it, but she would never ever say it. Besides, my answer would have still been the same: inevitable or not I couldn’t let it be my fault, not if there was a chance I could save them.

Tanya shook her head and tried to laugh it off. “Sorry,” she said. “I keep forgetting that this is also an amazing opportunity for you. A chance at a normal life… you are going to shine, missy.”

She called me ‘missy’, I thought. It never failed to make me smile, not just because it was my best friend recognizing me for who it was but because it was so familiar, like the way an older sibling would talk to her little sister. She’d protected me since grade school and seen me grow up into someone who protected the world: it only made sense that we’d get attached.

The glare of the headlights against her glasses made it hard to tell if she was crying. Probably not: Tanya was a sympathetic crier and her dam wasn’t going to break until mine did. Not that there was any chance of that happening soon: my nerves had to be steeled for what was coming next.

“You know I’ll never forget you, right?”

The hi-beams glinted off her toothy smile. “Yeah, you will,” she said. “Hundred to one odds say that this Tommy guy will be an even better best friend.”

“You think so?”

“Well, yeah,” she laughed. “He’s me with a schlong. It’s like everything you ever wanted in a soul mate!”

Gods help me, she won a smile. In any other company such a thing might have been impossible, but for her it was like a gods-damn super-power. Maybe next time the Carbon Man popped up I could call her and make him laugh himself into custody.

Nah. Those guys were Starbolt’s enemies now. There was probably a Carbon Woman waiting for me in my new home.

The car stopped on a grassy hill overlooking the city. We had arrived. Jason stood in the path of the headlights looking extremely uncomfortable in a skirt, denim jacket and pink sneakers. Combined with the short trim hair he looked like G. I. Jane after a night with Barbie. It suited him even less than me with a ponytail and Justin’s usual geek un-chic.

“Note to self,” I called stepping out of the beetle. “The second I get to my new home I’m buying a whole new wardrobe.”

“I haven’t worn girl’s clothes in three years,” he explained. “This was all I had. I thought you’d appreciate the effort.”

It’s a weird thing being a jerk to yourself, but for some reason I was utterly compelled. There was just something about Jason that rubbed me the wrong way, maybe because the universe didn’t like being invaded, or maybe it was just because he was a little too much like me. Still, that didn’t stop me from trusting him. I mean, if you can’t trust yourself then who can you trust, right?

He held in his right hand a small blue plastic laser pistol so ridiculous that it could have easily been mistaken for a child’s toy. For a moment I even though about calling him on it, but miraculously held my tongue.

“So that’s Dr. Janus’…”

“Yep,” said Jason as he cradled it uncertainly. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but it’ll make me you and you me. After that we send you back to my world.”

Tanya sprung up from where she was perched on the hood of her car. “You mean right away? We don’t get to hang out or anything before the clock runs out?”

“Every passing second makes the return journey even more dangerous,” he continued. Not that he couldn’t have told us before or anything. Tanya fumed, but I signaled her to cool down. It was business time between myself and I.

I looked again at Dr. Janus’ gun remembering the advice I’d been given once before: never look a toy gun in the mouth. “So what do we do?” I asked.

Jason grinned. “Easy. You stare right into the barrel here, I pull the trigger and insto-presto, we switch bodies.”

Somehow I imagined a more pleasant experience than that. “Why do you have to shoot me? Why can’t I shoot you?”

The boy in drag huffed and offered me the weapon by the handle. “Do you want to do it?”

I thought about it for a moment, but decided I didn’t trust myself enough. Sure, I’d held a gun before, but I’d never shot one. What if I missed and switched brains with a squirrel or a stray cat or something? “No, I think I’ll let you handle this one.”

Staring down the sights and locking me in his gaze Jason took steady aim. “This might sting a bit,” he told me before counting down. “5… 4… 3… 2…”

“I can’t watch,” was the last think I heard Tanya whimper. And then…

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFVVVVVVVVVVVVVVZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAPPP!

* * * *

Things were a little hazy after that. What… what was happening? The ray must have had a side effect I wasn’t warned about. It was hard to think coherently: whatever that device had done seemed to have messed with my short term memory.

Gods, I was probably going to be having this conversation with myself again in five minutes, wasn’t I? I could only laugh. This, I imagined, must have been what getting drunk felt like: light-headed, nauseous, blurry and slow like watching a film with too few frames to keep it smoothly animated. The hangover was probably going to be even worse.

“KC,” I heard Tanya call, then realized she was holding me by the shoulders. “Can you hear me, KC? Come on. Don’t make me worry.”

“Is CC now,” I giggled. “Remember? Myyyy naaaame is Caaaaroline… not Kaira. Nope nope!”

Tanya turned suddenly to another figure still standing in the grass. He seemed in a lot better condition than I was, but even more surprising was that he was… me. Wasn’t he? I mean he had my face. He looked like me in dreary boy mode, but there was something different about him. Hard as I tried to think at him he wouldn’t move the way I wanted him to.

“The shock hits some people worse than others, especially the first time,” the me person said. Woah, that’s what I sounded like? It’s bad enough hearing yourself on tape, but when you’re having an out of body experience? Gods damn.

That’s when I realized that it wasn’t my body anymore. It was Jason in there! Well, Justin now. All these names sound the same but they’re different and… yeah, he had my old body which meant that I was someone else!

My first instinct was to look straight down, and lo I was amazed. In my drunken state I couldn’t keep my hands away and tweaked and prodded for sensation. “My gods,” I laughed, “they’re actually real!” Playtime went on like that for a while until the new Justin rolled his eyes and pulled it away.

“Come on, Kaira. Leave them alone,” he urged me. “They’re boobs. Not Nintendo.”

I shook my head. “Nope nope nope! I’m Caaaaaar-o-liiiiiiiiiiine.” Weird that I clung to it so tight. I didn’t even like the name.

Tanya remained close by. “You didn’t give her brain damage or anything, did you?” she asked. Her face was contorted with worry.

“It might take a few minutes before she’s fully cognizant, but yeah, she’s fine.”

He stepped away, probably to do whatever it was that… I don’t know. All I know is that he left me alone with Tanya and she was fretting and I couldn’t stop smiling, rolling my eyes and putting my hands everywhere. All of these new sensations: it was a lot to get used to.

With a heavy sigh and a forfeited smile she asked, “so how does it compare?”

I told her honestly, “I can’t feel my toes.” Luckily she thought it was as funny as I did and this time even showed off some teeth.

“My advice?” she said. “Stock up on aspirin.”

“Why?”

“When the time comes you’ll know.”

What did she mean by…? Ooh! Stupid me for not getting the hint, but then I could hardly be held to blame, could I? I’d just had my brain sucked out and placed into a new body while my otherworldly doppelganger wandered around with my unwanted boy parts. It had been an exhausting week and an even stranger day: I was starting to think nothing could surprise me anymore.

KRAK-THOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

Deafening thunder and blinding lightning made the earth itself tremble as a bright thing appeared before us. It was a wall, probably the size of a small aircraft. Bolts arced from it, singing the grass from the heart of the swirling doorway born from reality torn asunder.

Before I could even ask what the hell it was a giant machine stepped out. It seemed entirely unconcerned by Tanya when she attempted to drag me from its three prong grasp. “SUBJECT RE-ACQUIRED,” it droned flatly.

In my condition I was helpless as she was and could only watch as she screamed. Justin on the other hand could do something, but instead he remained completely frozen. Why wasn’t he changing into Starbolt? He could still do that, right?

Tanya beat his arm trying her damndest to prompt him into action. Instead the otherworldly boy just said both to her and to me “I’m so sorry.”

Sorry. Sorry for what!? He knew this was coming!? I knew I shouldn’t have trusted him! Right from the start this whole deal had seemed seedy.

The machine turned and thrust me into the doorway. I watched my native world disappear before my very eyes. I truly had left my old life behind, but at what cost? What had Jason signed me up for? What special hell was awaiting me on the other side?

* * * *

TO BE CONTINUED…

Just received something today that is very much worth sharing: namely a piece of fan art featuring Glimmer Girl from a guy named Richard Fawke. See below:

It’s a recoloring of another piece, but I’m impressed particularly with how he incorporated the Glimmer Girl logo into his design. What say the rest of you?

Thank you, Rick. It was just the random ego boost I needed.

[EDIT: The piece is also now part of the fan gallery on The Shimmerverse Facebook Page, bringing our grand total of works to one!]

I looked to Chantal. “Maybe we should try one of the shelters,” she suggested blandly. Gods, even she didn’t want to entertain the thought, but as much as the scars and living nightmares haunted her they were preferable to starving and freezing to death.

Still, I shook my head to tell her that we weren’t that desperate: or rather I wasn’t that desperate. Even when all other options had run dry the shelter was the last place I’d ever go. When you’re homeless everything you have is public property, including your body. As the most vulnerable of the vulnerable the last thing we needed was to offer ours up in a packed house of potential predators.

“There’s still one last place I want to try,” I told her. She was wary, and for good reason. As many bums as there were like me who only wanted to do the right thing there was an equal number who would do anything to get ahead: violent things especially.

We probed further into the bad part of town. By ‘bad’, of course, I mean poor. It was the kind of place you’d have to be crazy to not get out of, which Is generally how the middle class and up looked at anyone without the means to escape. For others it was walls, floors and roofs with the occasional door or window thrown in for good measure. Keep your head down, don’t make too much noise and it’s a safe place to camp for the night.

There was no light in the back alley except for the drowned out stars. Squelchy fetid piles created tangy sick aromas as my paper soles pressed blindly into them. Sadly, I’d smelled worse, and I hadn’t had any lunch to lose over it anyway. Chantal on the other hand was fighting her gag reflex.

“Hold it in. We’re almost there.”

Our approach was anything but silent, and when we finally arrived the burning contents of the tall drum stood alone serving absolutely nobody. It didn’t take a genius to work out that it had been suddenly abandoned.

Desperate to absorb the heat Chantal tried to move for the fire only to be stopped short by my arm. “Someone might still be here,” I said. “We need to be careful. We don’t want to step on any toes.”

“My toes are freezing,” she whispered painfully. I knew she was suffering and the heat would do her a world of good, but I couldn’t just let her race in. There wasn’t much use in saving her if she was just going to get attacked or worse. No, I was going to have to go first.

Slowly I crept toward the drum while scanning every visible corner. Actually there were no visible corners. Somebody could have been standing there and I would never have known, but unlike my companion I could defend myself from things unseen.

“There’s food here if you want it,” I offered the darkness. Pulling my satchel open I laid out the contents on a blanket: a pair of frozen steaks, a turnip, two brown onions, four carrots and a 1.5 liter bottle of water. “We give you food, you let us sleep in the corner. Deal?”

Silence. Chantal took that as a signal to approach until I shooed her away.

And then the darkness replied. “That’s very generous of you, Angel,” he said gruffly. When the bearded stranger stepped out of the shadows I was amazed to find I recognized him. He was one of the bums who slept during the day sleeping at train stations and bus terminals passing himself off as an enthusiastic traveler. I’d never had the chance to get his name.

“I’m not an angel,” I told him sternly. “Just trying to find a safe corner for me and my friend.”

‘Safe’, of course, meant relatively safe, from wind, from police cruisers, and a few other specific things I won’t touch on. Real safety costs more than the change you scrounge after a day in the Walmart parking lot. Our mysterious host knew this, and since he’d seemed to claim the area for the night ‘safe’ rested entirely on his generosity, or hunger.

He looked over the blanket, but was more interested in me than he was the food. “You ever heard of the Urban Angel?”

“No,” I lied and turned to avoid his gaze.

“Rumor has it she lives among the destitute,” he began. “Blond hair, green eyes, tall, soft but boyish face like a cherub.”

“My hair is brown,” I stated, even though it was that way because it hadn’t been washed it properly in months. “Besides, the Urban Angel is just a myth. Nobody believes that stuff.”

His grimace deepened at the obvious denial. He probably wouldn’t have said anything if he didn’t know outright who I was. Still, even with nothing left I had a secret identity to keep. You’d think powers would make homelessness easier, but you’d be wrong.

“Show me your arms,” he ordered. Without question I rolled up my sleeves and let his thumb press on the inside of my elbow. Like I said, on the street you don’t even own yourself and I was trying to appeal to his better nature. “Now your teeth,” he followed, but this time kept his fingers to himself as I showed them off.

Satisfied with what he’d seen so far his attention turned to Chantal who was still shuffling about. “What about her?” he asked.

“She’s clean. Six months. Won’t cause any trouble.”

“See that she doesn’t,” he muttered and bent down to inspect my offering.

I gestured for Chantal to come fireside, which she did while plotting a delicate path around the man before us. For the most part he was distracted, sniffling the vegetables and slicing into them with a Swiss army knife.

“Aren’t you going to look me over?” she asked.

The man didn’t even bother looking back. “Your friend vouched for you. Junkies usually stick to their own kind, so I’m willing to cut you a break. Use the fire at your leisure. There’s some stairs on the far left corner behind you and some empty rooms to squat in. Mind the smell.”

We stood on the opposite side of the barrel making sure to keep a comfortable distance. The stranger, who later introduced himself as Finn, unpacked a large cooking pot and threw everything in it to make a beef stew. He asked us about our lives and seemed only vaguely interested when Chantal told her story, about her abusive family, about the state taking her baby, and instead was more vested in the name that I wasn’t going to give.

“We can’t be friends if I don’t know your name,” he reasoned.

Too bad for him I wasn’t interested in being friends. My name belonged to me: it was the most valuable thing I had left and I wasn’t going to share it.

Once we’d eaten Chantal left to find a room. Finn warned her to not get too close to the other bums while I told her to call if she needed me. With her disappearing into the darkness it was Finn and I alone by the fireside where I was going to camp wide awake for the entire night.

“You two known each other long?” he asked between mouthfuls of stew.

“Only a couple of nights,” I told him. “Found her under a bridge, freezing, half naked and covered in cuts. I think someone might have taken her, used her, then thrown her away. I don’t know. She won’t tell me.”

Finn nodded, not so much with sympathy as it was sober comprehension. “Pretty thing like that, it doesn’t surprise me. Girls living rough have got to make themselves plain, ugly even, or else the wolves come and do all sorts of things, especially to a colored girl nobody’ll listen to.”

“Black, white or whatever, she’s still lucky to be alive,” I observed bitterly.

“But we can agree she’s been taught a hard lesson. Pretty’s not a commodity girls like you or her can afford.”

He watched me from across his tin bowl as he slurped and savored the dark broth. It was unnerving, like sitting under a spotlight with live eels being slipped under my clothes, but at least he was only interested in me and not my companion.

“Is that something you do?” he asked. “Save people, I mean.”

I rolled my eyes at him. He was going to start that Urban Angel crap again, I knew it. “Sure. Why not?”

“Better question is why at all,” he continued. “Someone like you, I reckon you’ve got a hard enough time keeping your own head above water. Why put yourself out for total strangers?”

“Because,” I told him, “people matter.”

“Do they now?”

It was an argument I’d heard a billion times before. ‘You can’t stop all the suffering in the world, so why even bother?’ Arguing with people that thick never usually went anywhere, so I leaned close and I told him seriously, “yes.”

“Very noble of you,” Finn observed. “Makes you wonder. You must see a thousand tiny little deaths every single day. If you could stop all of that, bring an end to all the suffering in the world… would you?”

“Yes.”

“No matter the cost?”

The question halted me in my tracks, but only because I’d heard those words before. In the blink of an eye the hollow pipe slid from the arm of my coat and connected with the bum’s skull. I wasn’t going to take any chances, especially after all he’d done.

Finn stumbled away with one hand on his temple to hold back the freshly opened river of blood. He stared, shocked, but didn’t scream for help. No, he didn’t need any help.

“What the hell are you doing!?” he growled.

I jerked forward and ordered him, “show yourself!”

“What are you…!?”

A burst of light erupted from my eyes to show him I wasn’t kidding around. Through it I could see everything, including the tiny cracks in his façade. “Show yourself. Now.”

Finally Finn stopped. The terror and fury in his features quickly faded into ambivalence. So too did the color of his hair fade, as well as the tears in his coat, the layered slacks he wore for warmth and over-worn hiking boots. His hand, however, continued to linger by his wound. That part was all too real. By the end of the process he was a new man: one that I had hoped never to see again.

“I only want to talk, Miss Cade,” he stated flatly.

“Why? So I can listen to you preach like a Nazi Spock!? ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’ and all that crap!? #@$% you!”

“I understand there may be some reluctance…”

“You killed my family,” I spat, “and everyone I ever loved. If that weren’t bad enough you want to kill everyone else too! Why in the name of all that is sane do you think I’d be reluctant!?”

Dr. Vortex shifted and tilted his head like a curious bird. “Remind me again, Miss Cade, how exactly did I murder your family?”

No time for games: just the battle for survival. In a burst that lit up the entire slum I charged with fists blazing! And then he was gone. Damn it! I hated that portal trick of his.

“It’s a serious question,” drifted an aimless voice. “How did your mother and father die?”

Just then a phone rang. It rang like a stab to my chest and resonated deeply, like it had been there all along and I’d been ignoring it. Why? It was just a stupid phone… so why I didn’t want to answer it?

Vortex was toying with me. Maybe he’d implanted something in my head or… I don’t know. He was sick. Even after everything we’d been through I still wasn’t completely sure of what he was capable of.

The phone rang.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” he prompted. “There’s somebody who really wants to talk to you.”

It rang and I lingered in spite of it.

“How,” the theonaut pressed again, “did your parents die?”

With each subsequent ring the knife plunged deeper. He wanted me to pick up, and for that reason I had to resist, but…

“No,” I spat. “You killed them! I saw you! I was there! I remember!” Except that I didn’t remember, not exactly. I knew it all factually, how Dr. Vortex murdered in cold blood every person dear to me, how I came to be on the street, how I grew from Glimmer Girl into the Urban Angel, but I couldn’t picture it like it had really happened.

“Answer,” he said. This time I listened.

Highlighted under a streetlamp was a payphone. It hadn’t been there before. It had arrived just so it could call to me, just to let me hear the sound of her voice. I reached for the handle with the same caution a lion tamer places their hand in the mouth of a beast. The very moment I picked up it all came flooding back.

“Are you beginning to understand?”

My Mom explained it to me, not in words. Actually I had no idea what she said, but in an instant I knew names and faces of people I’d never met who might have never even existed. Jenna, AJ, Demon Dog, the Pride, Phillip Diamond, even Chantal: they weren’t real. The only thing that felt solid anymore was the argument, followed by a crash and ending with her body as it collapsed against the asphalt.

“This is a dream,” I seethed. No, more like a #$%&ing nightmare, one after the other.

The doctor shifted back to the street with bum clothes replaced by his garish costume. “Not a dream,” he explained, “but universes in miniature. All the things you have seen are quite real, but they were all born from you. These micro-worlds, Miss Cade, are the future as you’ve envisioned them.”

“Are you the real Dr. Vortex?” Gods, to crack every single tooth out of his mouth…

“I am a Dr. Vortex,” he muttered. “There are as many of me as there are microcosms. When you defeat one of us another rises to talk his place. Ingenious, don’t you think?”

“You really hate me so much that you would destroy life after life, world after world…”

He glared. I hated it when he glared. “You are the loose string holding together a multiverse of pain. That makes you alone responsible for all the suffering that was, is, and ever will be, and yet you are willing to do nothing. Miss Cade, if there is anything worthy of hate then it is you.”

Okay, Kaira. Enough talking. You’re in a mini-multiverse prison thingy. Just beat the $#@& out of him and get out of here already! If only it were that simple.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” I pressed.

“A foolish whim. I’m not as callous as you think I am. Time and again I’ve been appealing to your better judgment. Help, don’t hurt my cause. As lowly as I think of you I would be less of a man if I robbed you of final redemption.”

“It hasn’t worked before,” I laughed. “What makes you think I’d join you now?”

Dr. Vortex turned his nose up and sniffed the air. I was glad I couldn’t taste the putrid back alley, but I guess that was kind of the point. “Because it wasn’t until now that you knew absolute joy, and absolute despair,” he explained.

“I wouldn’t call eating scraps and roasting pigeons absolute despair,” I told him. “Yeah, it’s rough, but people are tougher than you give them credit for.”

And that’s when I got the plan, when he smiled at me again like he never usually did. Twice in a night, that had to be some sort of record. “I’m not talking about this place. You don’t remember, do you?”

“Remember what?”

“The wasteland of Milestone littered with the undead, the Galaxy Crusaders and the wonders of the thirty-first century, a world enslaved under Konquero and the new Crell…”

It seemed like I should have known these things, but I didn’t. None of that mattered. Rage came pouring back. “All I know is that this started when you tried to kill my mom. She nearly died!”

“Means to an end,” he sighed as if she was nothing.

My fists had run out of patience. They exploded with lances of petrified light shooting right through the doctor’s ghostly form. Funny thing about fighting bad guys who could side step reality was that you never knew where they really were unless you looked really closely. Meanwhile Vortex took full advantage of the confusion and brought me down with a hard blow to the gut.

It hurt more than it should. Pain was supposed to go out the window in hard light mode, yet there I was doubled over with the taste of bile on the back of my tongue, maybe blood too. It wasn’t his normal kind of strike: where in the world did he learn to hit that hard?

“Are you ready to talk now?”

The angry flail gave a clear answer. He hit me again, in the face this time, and I was rolling in the snow.

Getting up was harder than anything I’d done before. Something was broken, several cracked teeth rolled in my mouth and my cheek throbbed. Yet still I had to resist, just because I could.

This was the way it always was with Dr. Vortex: he wanted to talk while you’re left throwing punches in a tumble dryer. By all accounts it should have been useless, but still I would keep fighting: and fighting and fighting. There was no alternative, but I would do it forever if I had to. As much fear and anguish as he’d caused there were much higher things at stake.

For a moment the storm stopped. My bones ached but I could breathe. Meanwhile, Dr. Vortex had another million dollar question. “Why?”

Get up, Kaira. Get up!

“Why… what?”

“You’re fighting for a broken world,” he said. “Since its inception there has been pain and it will continue to be there unless drastic action is taken. I don’t understand. Are you really that scared of living in paradise?”

Gods, I wish he’d shut up. He didn’t care. He never did before. My consent was not required for him to unmake the universe, so why did he keep asking?

“Because,” I told him, hating his cynical eyes that demanded more, “I haven’t… given up on them yet…”

He looked at me like I was stupid: maybe I was, and he was going to punish me for it. Didn’t matter. I was going to take it, and still get up, and beat him and… and…

The world cracked apart. Every piece flew by showing me places and times I’d forgotten. San Fransisco, New York, Manchester during the Crell occupation, Mars in the thirty-first century and so many more roared through memory as harsh gravity pulled my back down to the earth.

I hit the ground hard: bleeding, bruised and in shock. Wherever I was it was packed full of TASK soldiers, and I was seventeen again, fresh out of a car wreck and crying on the cold cement.

Artemis bent down and turned me over. Was he real? He seemed real, but that entire ordeal left me wondering. His assurances that everything was alright meant nothing, even when he tried to tell me over and again that “we got him.” That still didn’t make anything safe, or right, or good.

“Where’s my mom?” I demanded. “I need to see my mom!”

He nodded knowing exactly what I was talking about, thank the gods, but he wouldn’t let me go. “We need to get you checked out,” he said sternly, “then I’ll take you to her personally. I promise.”

Not that I could argue. I couldn’t stand at all.

* * * *

True to his word Artemis gave me a ride to the hospital. No way would I have had the strength to make the trip on my own, what with having been pulled through a kaleidoscope of universes in an attempt to break my spirit.

Every so often I’d catch his eye wandering from the road and to the passenger seat. The first few times it was okay and I was too exhausted to complain, but after a few minutes I was getting paranoid.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, then reevaluated his answer. “I’ve never seen you like this before.”

Like what? It took a few moments for my tired brain to pick up on his meaning. “You mean the whole girl thing? Come on, Crowe. You’ve seen me in costume a ton of times.”

“But not in civvies,” he explained, then chuckled. “Don’t get me wrong. It suits you and I’m happy you came out, but it’s going to take a while to adjust in my mind.”

I looked down again to inspect myself. My dress was torn at the bottom, the neckline was stained with the blood that was earlier seeping from my brow, my hair was a frizzy mess: and apparently that ‘suited’ me. “Thanks,” I told him. “I hear car wreck abduction chic is in this year.”

Somewhere in there I tried to let him know that I wasn’t in the mood to talk. Pity the suggestion didn’t take.

“You need to be more careful,” he warned. “We almost didn’t find you this time. Ted Fellows is a dangerous man.”

“He says to the girl that creep has stalked since she was thirteen.”

Artemis nodded. “Okay, that’s fair. But still you need to watch out. Every time he gets out his plans become more sophisticated. Our lab boys have a theory that he’s somehow skipped an evolutionary step and isn’t limited by linear thinking. Even when we pull apart his tech it can take up to a year just to find out what it does.”

“Fascinating,” I told him. It wasn’t.

Long story short Dr. Vortex was a bad guy that only got badder, as if I somehow didn’t know that.

Finally Artemis clued onto the fact his words were wasted and left me to the not so peaceful silence. All I could think about was my Mom on that road. Yeah, they told me she was okay, but after skipping from universe to universe and hearing her voice I had to see it to believe it.

We arrived at our destination shortly after. Once Artemis had a quick word with the nurse at the front desk one of the orderlies appeared to escort me from the triage. There in the emergency room was my Mom laid out on a bed: the doctors wanted to keep her overnight for observation, but she was alive, lucid and smiling, that was good enough for me.

When she caught sight of me she darted up. “Justin,” she gasped and threw her arms around me. Even while I was still a girl she was happy to see me. That was a relief.

I managed to squeeze back shakily, wondering if or not I should have said something about her botching my name. Somehow the semi-crowded ward didn’t seem a good place to talk about it. “Hey, Mom,” I croaked. I must have been in worse shape than I thought: I was crying.

She pulled away and looked me over as if surprised to see me in one piece. “Where have you been? I was worried out of my mind!”

Time for the official cover story cooked up by TASK. “I got lost, I think. I don’t know. I don’t really remember much of anything before the cops picked me up. They said I just wandered off. Then they brought me over here and…”

“Well, I’m just glad that you’re safe.” She pulled me back into another squeeze. The scare had brought out in her the kind of warmness usually reserved for alcohol.

I looked around the area and saw no sign. “Why isn’t Dad here?” I wondered aloud. Weird, because he was usually right on top of these kinds of emergencies.

“He’s gone to fetch me some real food.” Her smile was even wider this time.

“Let me guess. Crab cakes from that place that does the fish?”

“Mhm,” she nodded in slow motion, salivating at the mere mention. “That makes it twice this week. Your father, he spoils me rotten. May as well enjoy it while it lasts though. A bill from the hospital may break the bank if our insurance doesn’t pull through.”

Oddly she didn’t seem all that stressed about that last part. Gods, she was really out of it. “You okay, Mom? Did they give you anything? Painkillers, morphine?”

“Don’t be silly. They don’t give morphine to people with concussions. That’s actually quite dangerous. I’m just shaken up from the accident, that’s all. You too, I’ll bet.”

She stopped before I could answer, and looked at me in a way that was oh so rare for her, then reached over and stroked my cheek. There was pain in her eyes born from hours of worry, and something else. Emptiness? Longing? Like she was trying so hard to peer through me to find someone.

I took her hand and pulled it away. I hated when she looked at me like that. I hadn’t done anything wrong, so why did I feel so guilty?

“Where have you been, baby boy?” she whispered vaguely. It was too painful to even look at her. I knew she was worried, but did she really have to rub salt in the wounds? “You don’t like it when I call you that,” she observed.

“No.”

“Well it’s what you are. You’ve grown a lot, but you always have been and always will be.” In her mind that was probably supposed to be assuring.

“Still…”

Awkward silence, the kind they cut out of movies to make life look more interesting from the outside. It dragged on hellishly as we avoided eye contact and cycled through the myriad of unspoken words that were too frightening to say. Like it or not the talk was going to happen, and damn it, it was probably going to happen there.

Ultimately she was the one that shattered the silence, and I cringed as each piece struck the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen like this. We didn’t mean for you to have this kind of life.”

“It’s not your fault I’m transexual, Mom,” I murmured so low I’d be surprised if she heard.

“I think I know that, but… it’s still sad. Nobody who has ever had a sex change is happy. If you go down this road the most you can ever hope for is half a life, and Justin, you deserve so much better than that! You deserve to grow up and get married and start a family with whoever you want. It would just be a shame if you just callously threw that away for…” Her hands ran up and down, putting the focus back on my clothing. “This.”

Her words burned like acid. If only she knew what she was saying. “Half a life is better than no life at all,” a part of me moped. The other half of me wanted to fly off the handle and scream about how wrong she was, but I held back.

“Justin…”

I didn’t want to look at her. Even though I could hear the regret thick in her voice the damage had already been done, and I was pissed.

“You don’t know any of that,” I pleaded quietly. “How do you know this won’t make things better? I mean, gods, how many miserable trans people do you know personally to be able to say something like that, huh? Because I’m pretty sure I know more than you and they’re all perfectly happy with who they are.” Silently I had to concede, okay, maybe not a hundred percent, but it was truer than she thought it was, and if you knew them you could see how they’re better off. Not that she’d ever listen, of course.

“Please, Justin, you’re young. You don’t know-“

“I know myself,” I sniped sharply, “and I’ve had a whole lifetime to figure out who that is. Now I’m stepping up and expressing something honest about myself, you come along and tell me that it’s wrong. And that I don’t know who I am as well as you do. And… and that I can’t be trusted to define myself because I’m not old or grizzled enough.”

“What if you regret doing this?”

“Yeah, but what if I don’t, Mom? Even worse, what if I did listen to you and regretted that later on? You’re so quick to assume that I’m making a bad move without even thinking about what I need!”

“Please don’t do this right now,” she croaked, like she wasn’t the one who started it. Still, there were at least a half dozen people in plain view and all of them were turned away uncomfortably pretending they hadn’t been eavesdropping.

I had to agree that it really wasn’t the time for it, but I was still pissed. This was going to be one of those things that took years to resolve, I knew it. Why did everything have to be so difficult?

“Justin,” she sighed, reaching out for the hand pulled stiffly to my side. “I’m glad you’re okay. I was really worried about you.”

“I’m glad you’re okay,” came the dutiful reply. I meant it even though I didn’t think about it. My mind was somewhere else.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” I said, but gods knew that wasn’t ever going to be enough.

* * * *

The hospital visit lasted for as long as I could stand. I had to get out of there: the situation had left me compromised beyond my capacity to handle. I ran as far as I could, then changed into costume and flew even further.

Save the gentle wind blowing atop the InfiniTech building Milestone City was quiet. There was nobody around to cause havoc at two AM on a Tuesday and for that I was glad. I’d had enough drama for one day, hell, for one lifetime. It almost had me thinking about putting the mask away for good: then I could be one of those people who are able to take the still moments for granted. Then again I couldn’t, even if I tried.

It had been a close race but finally the nightmare week had caught up with me. Between being poisoned, suspended, the drama with my Mom, watching her being laid out by a stun-gun and being pushed through countless realities by a genocidal psycho I was at my wits end. Gods, how was I supposed to handle this?

There was only one thing left to do: I cried.

I cried, and I cried, and I cried. I can’t say for how long. It might have been minutes, or even hours. All I knew was the weight of my burden and how lost I felt in an uncertain world. I cried until my emotions were numb: not feeling better per se, more that I just wasn’t aware of myself for a while.

Okay. Glad I got that out of my system. There was still more recovery to be made, and a lot of dramas to follow, but at least I’d regained some ground.

Inhaling the thick, chilled air I was certain that I was in the real world: dreams just didn’t taste this good, not even the elaborate kind whipped up by Dr. Vortex. He’d only taken a day and in return had given me several lifetimes, none of which were as solid or as crisp as what was laid out at my feet. I had to wonder, how had I not noticed it before?

Suddenly the sky lit up as a comet shot past. The blazing fireball plummeted toward the earth, threatening to take out the entire business district. In a split I was after it, my brain racing to think of a potential solution in the scant few seconds before impact. Gods, it never ended. Quiet one second, apocalypse the next!

I’d nearly cleared the distance between us when the tumbling inferno arced back into the sky and spiraled to the east, leaving me behind to watch in awe. There was obviously something guiding its path, perhaps from inside the comet itself. A sharp turn had me soaring after it again until finally it stopped and made a gentle landing in the middle of Centenary Park.

The flames died away and sure enough at its heart was what appeared to be a skinny boy with cropped blonde hair and a domino mask. He wore gold and orange tights not dissimilar to my own, and smirked when he caught sight of my approach on foot.

“Finally,” he practically squeaked. Gods, his voice hadn’t even broken yet. “I’ve been trying to get your attention for days!”

Again my reputation preceded me. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “Looks like you have me at a disadvantage, kid,” I told him cautiously. There was still a chance he could be one of those blowhard villains who wanted to monologue or announce himself before an ‘honorable’ battle.

“Who are you calling ‘kid’?” he growled with acid thick in his tone. Note to self: the kid was sensitive about his age. “I’m freakin’ seventeen,” he continued, “same age as you.”

“And you are?” I replied with my trademark world’s worst poker face.

The stranger smirked, the insult already forgotten. “This is going to blow your mind,” he beamed. “My name is Starbolt, but my real name is Jason Cade.” …What? “I’m you from another dimension.”

Me? No. He looked nothing like me. He sounded nothing like me. Actually, there might have been a vague resemblance, but “no. I don’t buy it.”

“It’s true,” Starbolt protested. “You and me are the same person! The only difference is that while you spent your whole life hating your boy parts…” He paused for effect, then continued: “…I spent mine hating my girl parts. Capice?”

It was jarring to hear a stranger talk about my gender so casually. Maybe that’s what had my mind jump back twenty feet and utter “no way.” He knew a scary amount about my secret identity as well, but lately that seemed to be a trend.

“You want proof? I’ll unzip my costume, show you my binder, my packer, all that stuff if I have to, but it’s the truth.” His eyes didn’t break with mine for a second. Good gods, he was serious. Cue my brain exploding in five, four, three, two…

“Well what do you want? Our universes aren’t going to collapse on each other, are they?”

“No, nothing like that,” he explained. “I’m here to make you an offer. You give me everything I want, I give you everything you want, and we live happy. Ever. After.”

* * * *

NEXT ISSUE: Jason Cade arrives in Kaira’s life to make her an offer she’d be stupid to refuse. But is there more to him than meets the eye? Things change big time for Glimmer Girl next in “Crossover.”

STAY TUNED…

Yeah, I know, it’s been a while, and some of you have been worried about me which is actually very sweet of you, and I’ve been very slack in letting you all know that right now I’m perfectly fine. I feel bad for taking so long in getting back to people, but there’s a myriad of reasons for that which I’m probably going to touch on in my little ramble here.

First thing is that I was recently caught up in a natural disaster. January was not a good time to live in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia with torrential rains and an overflowing dam flooding the entire city and putting entire suburbs underwater. I am very lucky to say that I was unaffected initially, mostly because I live on top of a very tall (and painful to walk) hill, but the areas geographically beneath me were utterly destroyed. No shops, no transport, and roads blocked for days. Couple that with a loss of power and clean water for a week and it was no picnic.

Things have mostly picked up since then. Actually I really am surprised by how fast a lot of the community is bouncing back. Some places you can’t even tell had been drowned out, but there they are now. Still, recovery has been going strong for a while and it doesn’t feel totally like a valid excuse to not return to writing.

The other thing which I’ve found myself focusing on is getting healthy mentally. It’s a hard thing to talk about, but at the same time it’s a profound thing to be able to express that I am not a well woman. A few of you that have done things like add me on Facebook and the like have gotten a glimpse at some of the issues I face, but here where I archive my stories there’s not really been a forum for it to come up.

I don’t want to sell this as a sob story, because that’s how a lot of people frame it when I put it out there. It’s just the truth. It’s what I’ve been focusing on the last two/three months. Still, here it goes.

For the past three years, roughly since the beginning of my transition, I’ve been dealing with social anxiety and panic disorder. Neither are very pleasant things. Not being able to walk outside ten feet without looking over your shoulder and feeling like your heart is literally going to explode in your chest with fear is not pleasant. At one point it was so bad that I couldn’t leave the confines of my home for six months. (Amazing what you can get done with the internet handy.)

It’s a terrible way to have to live, and I’m honestly ashamed of it, especially in light of the idiots who come up and say I didn’t go anywhere or do anything because I’m just lazy or lack the determination to do something. It’s a lonely way to live, even for someone like me who is blessed with an amazing, loving partner. It also leads to depression and eventually you become convinced that you’re the lesser of other people because you can’t do things everyone else can like go and get a slurpee from the 711 just around the corner. For a while it even lead to self-harm, and for anyone who has lived through it or watched someone live through you will know that’s a pretty dark road to go down.

That’s the not so pretty story. However I’m very fortunate to say that 2011 is looking like my year. This year I’ve finally found the help I need (medication also helps, despite some of the lectures I’ve received), and I’m well on the road to recovery. I’m more active, social and balanced, have started exercising, and have even applied for a number of jobs: the first I’ll have had in years. My sense of value as a human being has risen exponentially, and unfortunately the cost of that has been footed by some of my creative endeavors.

Shimmer will be back soon. It’s my baby, after all, and I’m probably going to be writing about Glimmer Girl forever (or at least until the elusive chapter 300 which is how far I’ve got things planned. No joke.) In the meantime I ask for your patience. Feel free to hate me a little bit (gods know I get impatient with me too), but it’s for a good cause.

For those of you who stick around, thanks for letting me know you care. It means something to me that even when I’m gone you still keep coming back. It makes this all feel worth it.

In the meantime I hope you’re well, and I’ll try get something out soon. No promises when, but soon.

Thanks,

Miranda Sparks

For everyone who celebrates Christmas have a good one. For everyone else having an awesome holiday and enjoy the cookies while they last.

* * * *

Glimmer Girl soared
as the snowflakes did fall;
from Vancouver to Milestone
in no time at all.

She would have rather patrolled
than to have family near,
and because she felt different
it was hard to feel cheer.

And even on a night
such as this Christmas Eve,
the fate of her city
to chance she won’t leave.

While carrying on
o’er lands covered with snow
she saw a faint light
and someone stranded below!

Ready to help
to him she flew down,
for the poor lonesome traveler
was miles from a town.

She said “It looks like
you’re in a bit of a fix,”
and was then stunned to see
that it was old St. Nick!

A guy in a costume,
she thought to herself,
for there was no real Santa,
flying reindeer or elves.

“My sleigh is stuck,”
he confessed with dismay.
“I could use a hand from this muck
so I can be on my way.”

“Not even a problem,”
she said and looked down below,
then used a faint heat beam
that melted the snow.

“Ho ho ho!”
he roared loudly with cheer,
though with a whiff of his breathe
she was sure she’d smelled beer.

She studied the man
whose smile was wide as the ocean,
and wearing an elaborate suit
for a role he’d had much devotion.

And also the detail
on his Christmas sled,
complete with eight reindeer,
plus Rudolph who led.

“The kids must love you,”
Glimmer Girl then remarked.
“And most adults too,”
old Kris Kringle did laugh.

“Before you go,”
he said with a rumble,
“I want to give you something
for all of your trouble!”

Glimmer Girl smiled and said
“I need no reward.
I do good ‘cause I can,
I’m just paying it forward.”

“No no no,”
Father Christmas protested,
and after arguing a while
the hero relented.

He said “I should hope this
would make your night,”
and gave her a necklace
shining silver and bright.

Glimmer Girl stared,
her chattering halted;
How did he know what
she’d secretly wanted?

As a child she was fascinated
with her mother’s chains,
though her parents preferred her
to have toy cars and planes.

She remembered the necklace
and wanting one of her own,
but her mom wouldn’t give
or even loan.

She looked to St. Nick
in a curious way
to see a man who knew secrets
but what he won’t say.

How did he know?
she quietly wondered.
“There goes my identity,”
she openly mumbled.

Santa Clause chuckled
and held his fat tummy,
then happily said
“Look! It’s just like your mummy’s!”

The hero then struggled
in containing herself.
Old wounds had been opened,
yet she held back a yelp.

And though it was a gift
that came from the heart
it came from a time
both forgotten and dark.

“I haven’t believed in so long”
she made clear.
“And now look at this.
You’re standing right here!”

Kris Kringle then smiled and said
“You were never forgotten.
I’m sorry, dear child,
for a life very rotten.”

“It wasn’t that bad,”
the hero confessed.
“And I’m doing okay,
so it’s all good, I guess.”

“All the same this gift
is now yours.
Merry Christmas, dear child,”
said old Santa Claus.

He took to the sleigh and
the reindeer took flight,
pulling a cargo of toys
deep into the night.

Glimmer Girl pulled the necklace
close to her chest;
Of all the gifts in the world
hers was by far the best!

So our hero did learn the lesson
to this mere rhyme;
that while most wishes are granted,
some take more time.

Something was very, very wrong. Actually a lot of things were very, very wrong. For some reason my clothes were gone, replaced by soft, white Egyptian cotton sheets: the carpet was gone too, replaced by a large bed in a wide, empty room I hardly recognized. Where was I? Could it have been… my bedroom?

“Oh my gods,” I sighed, for a moment completely oblivious to the other naked form occupying the space beside me.

He turned, rolled onto one arm and reluctantly opened a single hazy eye to greet me. “Good morning,” he moaned cheerily. He was definitely a lot happier to see me than I was to see him. Part of me wondered if I should scream or not. I didn’t think so: he didn’t seem out of place even though I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name.

“Uh… who are you again?”

The grungy yet incredibly buff figure gave me a confused glare like what I’d just asked was the stupidest thing in the world. “Really? Last night you told me you were a big fan.”

“You’ll have to excuse our dear hostess,” another handsome fellow muttered: this one fully clothed. “Her memory leaves a lot to be desired before her morning coffee.”

“I don’t even like cof-“ I laughed, then stopped. What was I talking about? Of course I liked coffee. I drank it every day almost religiously since I was twenty one. Without it I probably wouldn’t want to get out of bed. Something weird was going on and I didn’t know what.

The newcomer who was decidedly unfazed by the partial nudity placed a silver tray on the side table with two cups, saucers, cream, sugar and a large, steaming pot. What was he: some sort of butler? No, he was something else. He was… my manager! Well, manager, publicist, personal assistant, legal counsel: the kind of person whose skills and talents were more deserving of recognition than the people they represented. Gods, how could I have forgotten about AJ?

“Lots of milk, lots of sugar,” he remarked to me as he prepared the drinks. “And for you, Mr. Diamond?”

“Black,” the stranger muttered while scratching his beard. “And the name is Phillip, not Mr. Diamond.”

Suddenly it all came back to me: the buff rock star and the night before. Some sort of party for network executives, Phillip Diamond’s new reality show, a few too many glasses of champagne, a secret admission… Ugh. I’d picked up another bi-curious boy toy.

The two men just started at each other for a moment while I fumbled about in between them. There was something else missing here, I knew it. Wasn’t I fighting Dr. Vortex? No, I couldn’t have been. He’d been dead for years.

“Dude, you want to maybe…”

AJ shot the star a sincere smile and turned back for the open double doors. “Of course. An escort will be waiting for you downstairs to help avoid the media. Kaira, your driver will be ready in two hours to take you to wardrobe. We’ve got a solid promotion schedule this afternoon.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

With that he was gone, leaving me alone with an eager rock star who I had no idea what to do with. He didn’t seem all too pleased with my distance.

“So… I had fun last night,” he started awkwardly.

Images flashed through my head of everything that lead us to that moment. If they were any indicator then clearly I had as well. “Sorry. My head’s in a weird place right now. Every so often I get these flashbacks. They kind of $#%& me up sometimes.”

“What, like post-traumatic stress?”

“Surprisingly common among superheroes,” I told him. “Especially when you’ve been stalked for years by genocidal sociopaths who think you’re a god.”

Phillip shrugged and dragged himself upright into the tiles. “Nah, just God’s gift,” he chuckled indifferently. “I know I’m bad, but I’m not that bad.”

“Please. You’re a puppy dog,” I teased. That seemed to captivate his attention once more and had him launch on top of me. One quip out of line and he was determined to prove me wrong. Talk about a rock star ego.

* * * *

The long, hot shower didn’t do anything to help my mood. Stepping out in my robe and into the main living area of the apartment I could help feeling out of place. I had to keep reminding myself that San Francisco wasn’t littered with high-rises and was the length of a continent away from the upper east side of Manhattan. Why California? It wasn’t as though I’d ever been there for any great length of time. A couple of appearances on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon did not constitute being a native.

Slumping onto the sofa I picked up the phone and dialed the number for home: well, home back in Milestone City that is. For the whole morning I’d been worried about my mom and I couldn’t explain why. It wasn’t as though I wouldn’t have heard anything, not so long as there were the bodyguards I’d hired for them since my coming out.

The phone rang, then rang again. And again. And again. Anxiously I picked my nails and began negotiating with myself how long I had to wait before flying there myself, but before I had the chance…

“Hello?”

“Dad!” I exclaimed with more relief than I perhaps should have.

“Hey, kiddo! How’s life in the Big Apple? I, uh… got that present you sent me. A car? For my birthday? It’s wonderful, but it’s a bit extravagant, isn’t it?”

Hearing his voice was definitely making me feel better, especially because of how oblivious he still was. “Dad, I make a half mill every episode and another mint on top of that in endorsements and sponsorships. I can afford to give you a new car.”

“I just don’t see why you couldn’t give the money to one of the million charities you already give to,” he reasoned.

“Well maybe it’s because I love you and think you’re a good cause as well.”

He smiled audibly from several states away. “Well thank you, sweetheart. It was very, very thoughtful and just my liking. Lord, you should have seen me when I first got it. I nearly cried. Ask your mother, she’ll tell you all about it.”

“That’s actually why I called,” I murmured. “Is mom around?”

“No, she’s out for the day,” he reported. “Why? Is there something wrong?” The tone of concern was heavy in his voice: you’d be worried too if your sole offspring were in chronic, mortal danger. “Maybe I can help with–“

“No, it’s okay,” I lied. “Guess I just wanted to hear your voices. I might stop by for a visit.”

“It might have to wait, sweetheart. We’re off to Jane and Carol’s tonight to see the new baby.”

“Maybe some other time then,” I grinned to mask my disappointment.

“Thanksgiving?”

“For sure.” The morning was drawing on and I only had thirty minutes before my driver arrived. Crap. “Anyway, dad, I’ve got to go. I have to be in wardrobe in the next hour or so. Give my love to mom, okay? And tell her I’ll call her later.”

“Alright. I love you too, Kaira.”

“Love you too, dad.”

That was all we ever seemed to have anymore, those five minute conversations where we pretended to have anything in common. A lot of our relationship seemed to be stripped down to polite payback with me returning the favor of them giving me what they could as I grew up. No, it was more than that. I genuinely cared about my family: I just… wasn’t like them.

The phrase ‘you can never go back home again’ echoed in my mind, mostly due to the fact that we always had conflicting schedules. Hooray for life as an adult.

For a moment I entertained the idea of trying my mom’s cell. I had time, right? I could afford to be a little bit late for a publicity event. It’s not like they could start without me: and besides, if I put my fears to rest I would be able to do my job better, so who was anybody to judge?

I dialed the number and waited for the tone. Instead it jumped directly to voicemail and when it did delivered something far from its usual message:

“You were never that sort of child. You liked playing with tools and trucks and soldiers. I remember you wanted to be a robot or a ninja turtle when you grew up.”

The phone slammed down. I couldn’t have heard that, could I? It just wasn’t possible. It was just déjà vu, right? It had to be.

Déjà freaking vu.

* * * *

The limo rolled over Times Square providing a backdrop for my fascinated reflection in the back seat window. What a strange thing it was to have such a recognizable face, one that had adorned television screens that once told stories that seemed to happen a million miles away but was now so utterly significant. At least in a former life I could divorce myself from my fame with the aid of a mask, but such luxuries were a thing of the past. Not that they would be missed however.

“I’m almost tempted to send those hate-mongers a check,” AJ cackled from his own plush leather corner. “Since godhatessuperheroes.com started making headlines blog hits and merchandising have doubled! This is why we need another book, KC, so we can ride this and be relevant while the show is between seasons. Any press you make will have the bastards kicking the spotlight straight back at you.”

Sometimes I wasn’t sure he was my manager so much as he was my keeper, directing my actions with the grace and skill of a ringleader while ushering me into the limelight. Or maybe he was like an older brother rebuffing my belligerent remarks, like this one: “I have the condemnation of a church. How very proud I am.”

“You should be,” he exclaimed. “Half of being a hero is having the right enemies. I’ll have a talk to the publishers this afternoon, see if we can’t squeeze an advance out of them.”

“Any chance we can hire a ghost writer this time?” I asked. It wasn’t like I had time to write books between promotional tours and saving the world.

“This isn’t high school, Kaira, and you’re not an ex-President. You can’t just get by using somebody else’s notes. You have to do at least some of the work yourself, understand?”

It was a rare pouty moment, the kind only he ever got to see. Some days it got to me: who would have thought being rich and famous was such hard work? Not that I could really complain. There were people who worked a lot, lot harder than I did for much less. They were the people I were trying to save by selling out, the faceless lot that were consumers and the consumed. What I was doing helped make their lives better, or at least so I told myself.

“Sorry, AJ. I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately.”

He leaned forward probing the intimate space between us and lifted my sunglasses to inspect my eyes for bloodshots. If I didn’t know better I’d think he was searching me for signs of drug use. “Anything I should know about?” he asked.

“Nothing important,” I lied: just the feeling that the whole world was going to come apart around me.

AJ, apparently, was more interested in the mutterings of the television on the rear of the driver’s compartment, which could only be a good thing as I wasn’t in the mood for interrogation. The volume rose to a solid thirty so that the nasally voice of the plastic Hollywood reporter on screen was clear.

“-as we cross the nation to Sunday night’s elimination of Demon Dog from the set of ‘So You Think You’re A Superhero.’ Demon Dog, a long time fan favorite, caused controversy on the show after sparking a rivalry between panelist Kaira Cade, the former teenage heroine Glimmer Girl, now Shimmer, and author of the best selling tell-all book, ‘Girl, Unmasked.’”

Silently I hated her and wished that the TV would explode. My kingdom for an end to all the gossip! “Must you, really?” I queried pointedly much to AJ’s bemusement.

“Don’t you want to know what they’re saying about you?” he teased, but I wasn’t biting.

“Not particularly.”

The vision then cut to a figure draped in crimson with a costume decorated by flames and whose mask was like a muzzle with the horns on his crown turned back. Once again Demon Dog was ready to spew his bile, this time as an ‘Entertainment Insider Exclusive.’ Yeah, right. Truth was that he was a cocky kid who would spout off at anyone who gave him even the slightest attention. How he’d become so popular among our viewership was a mystery I was never going to solve.

“You ask me she shouldn’t even be there in the first place,” the fledgling ‘champion’ raged. “Let me ask you something: what’s freaking Glimmer Girl doing up there with Mr. Marvel and Jet Sparrow, huh? This show is about super-heroes. That means something, man! And here we are being spoken down to by a lady who’s only in it for the money, who we know will sell out her allies if it can make her a quick buck.”

Piss ant little worm. “Turn it off,” I said sharply. For once AJ was smart enough to follow. What did that stupid kid know about anything? Time and again I’d tried to explain it, but he was determined not to listen, least of all while the cameras were off. Hell, I’d even tried to explain it to him while he was up on the platform: he’d had no choice but to listen to me then, but still he was obstinate enough to dismiss me, my words and a whole life of experience out of hand over some misguided principal. Gods, I hated that kind of person.

My manager regarded me with a trace of concern. He who was closer to me and more familiar with the intimate details of my life than any friend or lover I’d ever had knew when something was getting under my skin. That was his job, after all. “All this starting to get to you?” he pressed.

I turned and glared at him seriously. He of all people should have known that I was no stranger to pressure. Hadn’t I proved that I would do whatever it takes? The last thing I needed was to be questioned on my own capacity of conscience, even by the likes of him.

“Good,” he conceded before burying himself once more into his Blackberry.

The truth was that things were getting to me, only not in the way that AJ was always worried about. There was something… bigger… out there. Something just wasn’t right with the world. That weird phone message that I thought I dreamt… whatever. I was probably just hallucinating.

“Am I the only one,” I laughed bitterly, “who is entertained by the wicked irony that a young wannabe hero who goes onto network television, signs a contract and competes for fame and recognition has the gall to call anyone a sell out?”

“That’s why in five years he’ll be nobody,” AJ grinned, “beating up smack dealers and pissing off petty hoodlums. He’ll call himself a ‘fearsome urban legend’ but guys like Konquero and the Savage Seven won’t even blink when they see him coming.”

There was no satisfaction to be taken from that. Really it was more sad than anything that the world didn’t have another champion it could count on. Gods knew it could take all it could get.

“You know Glimmer Girl back in the day would have never even passed the first audition,” I mused. Funny, that. Funnier still was remembering what she was like and knowing that she really wouldn’t have cared one way or the other.

“Do you think that says something?”

Looking to AJ he seemed almost surprised by the nostalgic smirked I served to him. “Only the obvious,” I said, “that we’re making superstars here and not super-heroes.”

Not that it was without reason, mind. Everything had a purpose, even if it was to remain hidden.

* * * *

Pulling into the back of the complex we were greeted by a nervous looking woman in a suit, probably the event organizer wishing that she could chastise us for our lateness: not that she would say anything, of course. I was the draw card, a temperamental star with fickle sensibilities with whom the absolute maximum amount of diplomacy was required, or at least that was the idea. Her impatient frown quickly turned at the sight of my face, relieved that I was only fashionably late and not a complete no show.

“Welcome, Miss Cade. If you’ll please step this way.” She ushered me to the rear entrance eagerly, which was fine. The sooner I got in and signed autographs the sooner I’d be out again and able to hit the town, assuming of course there were no other delays.

Turns out that a delay was exactly the thing that was waiting for me.

I hadn’t even made it to the building when I heard his voice. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest that he would ambush me there: seemed exactly the sort of thing he was known for doing. “Yo, where do you think you’re going, Glimmer Girl?” Demon Dog hissed with vitriol thick in every syllable.

There was a small entourage assembled: AJ, our driver, the event organizer, his assistant and a handful of security guards, two following us, two watching the door. Of the gathering it seemed only my manager and myself were unshaken by the sudden unannounced arrival of a pissed off superhuman in that undercover loading area.

“Either Kaira or Shimmer,” I told him. “Points to you for having the cojones to spout off in my face, but I’m kind of busy right now. If you’re still interested in being a hero go find a bad guy to beat up. You’re wasting your time talking to me.”

Landing dramatically on the roof of the limousine the red-clad anthropomorph snarled brazenly in my direction. No longer a disembodied voice he probably thought himself more intimidating. “And what makes you think you aren’t a ‘bad guy’?” he argued from above in a striking stance.

Great. More proselytizing from another self appointed moral crusader: like I hadn’t had enough of that in one lifetime. I didn’t have time for it from the preachers, and I didn’t have time for it from him. “Move along, kid. I’m just a TV contest judge. Go find an actual menace to society.”

Honestly, diplomacy was the last thing on my mind. I knew he wasn’t going to listen and was probably itching for a showdown just as badly as he was. AJ sensed that of course, which was why he was quick to have the entire crew scramble inside for safety before they had a chance to get caught in the crossfire.

“You sold me out just like you did the Young Sentinels,” he spat, then drew a pair of flaming daggers from thin air. Oh yeah, he was good and pissed.

I told him for the last time, “walk away,” knowing full well that he wouldn’t. My body language and the discarded high heels sent exactly the right message, that I was ready and all the more willing to throw down the second he delivered the first blow.

“Make me.”

Demon Dog lunged with a degree of savagery and hatred he’d never revealed before the cameras. This was personal for him, though I was at a loss to explain why: he was lost to his zealousness and blindly lashing out at anything that offended his sensibilities, namely me.

It was far too easy to flare into hard light mode, side step him and watch him thrash helplessly. Had he learned nothing in the last several weeks? With all that time in the spotlight being offered daily the wisdom and experience of more well established heroes he chose instead to revert back to his hot-headed rookie ways, probably damning the idea of ever thinking TV was a worthy means of achieving status.

“You know,” I told him between swipes, “I can do this all day.” Assuming I could keep up my concentration, of course. It would only take a single hit to lay me down flat, but first he would have to match the speed of light.

He was tenacious, I had to give him points for that. Such relentless determination was exactly the sort of thing that would have made a great hero… or villain. It almost seemed a pity that he was so stupid, watching him try the same techniques again and again knowing that they just wouldn’t work. A part of me was tempted to let him go until he tired himself out but screw it, I had other places to be and work to do.

In a burst of light I clasped his collar and darted into the sky, high enough for him to feel it if he dropped and close enough for the photographers gathered around the front of the junket to get a clear shot of the two of us together. “Enough,” I told him, “we have an audience now.”

My plan was successful. Demon Dog didn’t struggle but still seethed at the sight of me. That was twice I’d humiliated him, and twice for his own good.

“Admit that you’re in this for the money,” he demanded. It was such a sad request, one so simple and naïve.

“That’s your problem, is it? ‘Shimmer isn’t a real hero because she made a few bucks off her costume.’ Now you and I may have some problems with capitalism as a whole but I’m damned if I’m going to apologize for making some hard choices, especially to the likes of you.”

“You sold out your friends,” he spat. “Told the world their secrets, humiliated them… you’re a disgrace to all of us! You have no right to be up there judging us! Being a hero… it’s supposed to mean something, god damn it! For you it’s just a giant cash cow with a dollar sign.”

The sad part was that I couldn’t argue with any of it. Didn’t stop me from hating him for throwing it in my face, though: him and every other moral crusader who wouldn’t let my sins fall behind me. I never understood people like that. Seriously, where the hell did they get off!?

But none of that mattered. I was justified. If only they could listen to reason…

“Listen, Nick,” I began, my tone suddenly gentle for whatever good it would do, “there comes a time in every hero’s journey where you have to ask yourself, ‘just how far will I go to save someone? Is a human life worth my reputation? Is it worth the reputation of my allies?’ One day you’re going to have to make a hard call just like I did, and like me you’ll probably learn to live with it.”

Stewing in his humiliation he considered the crowd again, wondering if he could get away with another shot. It wasn’t likely. “You think you can justify being a filthy sell out?” he snarled, probably in an effort to enable him by making me strike first.

“I don’t have to justify my actions, especially to you,” I explained. “I’m just telling you how it is, Nick, giving you the one lesson they can’t teach. In a way I envy you and your ability to live so simply, but here in reality it’s not about good and evil. All there is in the world is suffering and the gods given ability for us, as heroes, as human beings, to do something about it. Until you get that as well as getting over your damn pride then I’m going to have no qualms about letting you get voted off a stupid TV show.”

Demon Dog just stared, suddenly confused. “What have you done for anybody, huh? Answer that for me. How was being a fat $%&@ing money-making whore done anything good for the world?”

It was confronting to hear it said so directly, though it was the same question I’d asked myself for years. Sad, really, that the young hero was so short sighted. “Because for every dramatic death we prevent there’s another we don’t stop in a dark corner,” I told him. “Today you save a kid threatening to throw himself off a bridge, tomorrow I make sure he doesn’t starve to death or worse. That’s what money does, and for all the parties, the fancy apartment and the limousines I give so much of it back, but nobody wants to focus on that. People are too preoccupied with the scandal and outrage, which sometimes they really should be, but that’s why it’s important, Nick, oh so important that you find something actually deserving of that anger. Right now you just want to use me as your punching bag. The only person you’re fighting for is you. It’s a waste of your damn time.”

He was eerily silent as we came back down to earth. Whether or not he’d listened to a word I said, that was harder to tell. Still, I wasn’t going to hold my breath. Even some young dogs were too stupid to learn new tricks.

Cameras went off by the dozens eagerly grabbing the exclusive scoop unfolding before their eyes. AJ was going to have a lot of work to do, but even from outside and on the opposite end of the building I could practically hear him creaming his pants over the kind of exposure this was going to get us. Oh well, at least he was happy.

Suddenly the noise stopped. The photographers, the fans lined up at the entrance, the security, Demon Dog, everybody had vanished off the face of the planet leaving me solitary in a wide concrete clearing. Great, just what I needed: another fight.

“Greetings, Miss Ca-OOF!”

Gotcha! None of his portals were going to stop me, not when I could see the path of invisible light passing through them. Dr. Vortex collapsed against the pavement with my hand still latching onto his gaudy purple coat. The other didn’t waste a single opportunity in bashing his jaw, determined to take him out before he even had a chance to be a threat.

“Next time stay dead!” I warned him furiously. Yeah, like that was going to happen. How many years had he been stalking and tormenting me? Once upon a time it had made me so paranoid that I couldn’t step outside without looking over my shoulder. I hated him for that, for making the world even less safe than I knew it to be. Never again.

Blinking from one place to the next he tried to regroup but I wasn’t going to let him. It wasn’t going to be the same cat and mouse game all over again of him stalking me, telling me that life was meaningless and taking the whole world hostage unless I gave myself up to him. Not this time, or even again.

“Not that it isn’t a pleasure, doc…” THWACK! “…But this time you’re going down for good!”

It wasn’t the same as it was when I was a kid. He was getting to be an old man, and though his mind was as sharp as ever his reflexes were getting slower. Me, I was in my prime, and I knew my powers inside and out. For everything he’d try I had another trick up my sleeve that left him reeling. To think that he’d once been the absolute bane of my existence, the monster at the end of my bed: looking at him in the present he just seemed so… lacking.

“TASK will be here any moment to drag you in,” I said to the pathetic bloody pile. “You’d better not have hurt those people you zapped out of here or you’ll be wishing you were still in the afterlife.”

Strange that it didn’t bother me seeing him outside of a pine box. It could have been that I was becoming accustomed to these dramatic returns and was used to the reality that I would never have true catharsis. Wasn’t that something I should have been sad about?

Dr. Vortex lay there, ‘inert’ seems the best word for it.“Should have quit while you were ahead, Teddy. There’s only so many battles you can survive before losing the war as well.”

I moved in to give him a solid kick: something that would put him out before he pulled the inevitable ace up his sleeve. Little did I realize that it was already in play and it hit me like a truck from straight out of nowhere.

Bowled off my feet I darted into the air then searched around for the giant screeching machine that I’d been struck by, but it was gone: where? Gods, I was trembling in hard light mode when it shouldn’t have fazed me at all. The doctor was up to something.

“Call Triple A,” a voice muttered. It couldn’t be… mom?

The invisible vehicle struck again, this time sending my body plummeting to the ground. The impact was enough to see me snapped out of hard light mode, but that was nothing next to the sudden psychological trauma that had been inflicted.

Dr. Vortex was back on his feet, not even swaying despite the flurry of blows I knew had landed. Hell, his whole face was dripping with blood, but underneath he frowned disappointedly as though it were jelly.

“I told you. You have no power here,” he repeated, then thrusting me back to the college dorm room I knew I’d never been. “Try as you might, Miss Cade, but it is no use. A god is beyond space, time and measure… as well as such primitive concepts such as life and death.”

The van came once more crashing violently into the tail end of the car leaving me to spin helplessly. It was solidly marked in history. It could never be changed. I was nothing against my own past and he kept hitting me with it over and over, rewinding and hitting play until I finally got the picture.

“These are the facts of life,” my mom said from the abyss. “I know it’s hard. I really know, but…”

SCREEEEEEEEEECH! CRASH! And again. SCREEEEEEEEEECH! CRASH! And again. SCREEEEEEEEEECH! CRASH! And again, and again, and again, each time wearing down my resistance presumably until I couldn’t get up again.

My body flailed. I was going into shock. Everything was falling away so fast while my brain tumbled inside my skull. I needed help: gods, did I need help! What was I going to do?

Staring down from above the mysteriously unbloodied Dr. Vortex tilted his head in bemusement. “Are you cold, Miss Cade?”

* * * *

Cold. So, so cold. Things were tough between the transitional seasons where the street can either freeze you or cook you depending on the time of year. The nine to five crowd with roofs over their heads didn’t know how good they had it. Even if their boss hated them, even if they had no money for luxuries, even if they were no closer to their dreams than they were ten years ago they still had a place to go safe from the indifferent shifts of nature itself.

Pulling the blanket tighter I was thankful at least that the temperature helped stifle the musty smell. There were probably warmer places to take refuge than a concealed cubby hole in a scrap metal yard, but even contending with trained guard dogs it was a lot safer than the city, and definitely a lot safer than most sponsored shelters, especially for someone with no conventionally determined gender.

Even among the dregs and cast aside I felt like the lowest of the low, but that didn’t matter for the moment. I had all that I needed: a small wad of accumulated cash, cans of food, a bottle of water, clean-ish clothes to last the next few days and a worn out toothbrush that still had some use left. Some new shoes would have been nice but keeping plastic bags over my socks was enough to keep my feet dry. It was more than some bums had, so who was I to complain?

Curled up in the darkness and shielded from the wind I prayed for it all to end. It had gone on too long, this game against the gods. I was just a human being, after all. What chance did I have?

You can never win against gods. That’s just how it goes.

* * * *

TO BE CONTINUED…

Assistant Principal Ferguson urged her to be calm, but that was probably because he was new. Little did he realize that he’d started a war and that telling the scary woman with throbbing neck veins to cool her jets was the last thing that was going to help, not that I felt much sympathy: it was oddly satisfying to see him squirm, especially after the smug talk he’d given me when we were alone.

“Mrs. Cade,” he began again, “I can understand you’re upset,” (bull$#@%), “but there’s a specific code of conduct here at Andrew Jackson that all students are expected to adhere to. One of those expectations is to follow the basic dress code, which I am sad to say Justin is not.”

She turned and looked me over, not forgetting to stab me disapprovingly with her gaze as she did. “With all due respect, Mr. Ferguson, I’ve seen far more provocatively dressed students walking through these halls. Heck, what he’s wearing is something I see a lot of girls wearing to church.”

Of all the things that would leave me reeling from that meeting that was probably the thing that made my head spin. I didn’t think I was dressed all that conservatively. Not that it was that short, like probably a couple of inches above my knees, but still… whatever. More important things to worry about, remember, KC?

“Exactly,” he retorted. “Girls. This is not by any definition male appropriate attire. There are rules, Mrs. Cade, and they do not exist to be bent. Justin’s sudden mode of appearance constitutes a disturbance and warrants intervention.”

Oh gods. It was like he’d read the playbook on how exactly to piss off my mom. I had to fight not to laugh maniacally in my solitary chair while she morphed into a steel eyed, fire breathing dragon of unbridled hate and fury.

“In that case you might want to review your harassment policy,” she practically spat, “and why certain star athletes have yet to receive any serious disciplinary action.”

There was that ghost again, and like usual it wasn’t worthy of comment. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Ferguson lied. Right, like he hadn’t read my file the last time he had me in there when my history with Adrian Dempsey was explained in an empty bathroom. Hell, I’d only broken his jaw two weeks ago: he’d seen the proof!

“I’m sure you don’t,” she seethed.

“Mrs. Cade, if there’s something you need to get off your chest…”

She stood, reclaiming what little power they let her have on her side of the desk. “Save it. I’m just as interested in bureaucratic games as I am trying to search out and appeal to what little humanity you have left. This is my son’s education you’re playing with here. Whether or not he’s spitting in the face of God is completely irrelevant. Taking that away from him, especially over something so trivial, is downright un-American, sir.”

I was floored by her statement. So much for her sweeping in and saving the day. Only a mom could be that progressive and passive aggressive at the same time: it had to be some kind of skill written in their genes.

“Come on, Justin. We’re leaving.”

That was that. No pleasant goodbyes, nothing. There was only Mr. Ferguson’s impatient grimace to see us out telling us that there would be no victory today. Yeah, that I wasn’t going to miss at all.

Being marched back into that hallway was some kind of déjà vu. Things had at least been simpler two weeks before: at least for the administration there was the cover of ‘fighting in school’, you know, not calling it what it really was. This, I was starting to think, might have been the point all along.

“Mom,” I started cautiously discerning how safe it was. The wrath of the gods had settled. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry, I guess.”

“It’s okay,” she said, an eerie calm washing over her. “We’ll talk about it later, alright?”

“Sure.” Later, yeah, that was fine. Never would have been even better, but the nervous butterflies would have eaten through me by then.

* * * *

The ride home was anything but comfortable. Maybe it was the silence, maybe it was the anti-venom still freshly working its way through my veins, or maybe it was even the way the sun cast shadows at unusual angles, I don’t know. Whatever it was this Monday had already peaked and was beyond recovery.

I turned to my mom in the driver’s seat and wondered if she’d notice if I fell asleep. She seemed pretty far gone, pushed to a plateau beyond her anger where she could only stare out into the wilderness and ask ‘what’s the point of it all?’ Usually she only got this way when she’d had a really bad day at work or when she found out I’d been cutting class, so I knew it was serious.

Tempting as sleep was the silence was worse. It was like water torture and was begging to be broken. “So how long am I grounded for?” I asked. Seemed as pertinent a question as any.

My words took her off guard. She shook, her eyes wavering off the road for only a split second. “What makes you think you’re being grounded?”

“Because,” I shrugged, “that’s what happened last time.”

The uncertain cogs in her head were rolling slowly. You could hear them as she was struggling for a diplomatic answer. “I don’t know yet,” she concluded. “We’ll see.”

Funny, but I couldn’t shake the feeling like all of this was my fault somehow, like things wouldn’t have come to a head if I hadn’t pushed this whole Kaira thing, not that it mattered. Playing a pretend boy for the sake of others was way too tiring and I wasn’t going to do it anymore. Damn the consequences. It was my life, wasn’t it? So why did I feel so guilty?

Finally she spoke. “I don’t agree with what you’re doing,” she stated flatly, “but they have no right to do that. At all. I mean how dare they!”

“They’re just transphobic douchebags, I guess,” I muttered without thinking, probably because I was too exhausted to keep the brain filter working.

She fumed lightly. “Stop saying that, Justin. You’re not a transexual.”

That, actually, kinda pissed me off a little. “How would you know? Who are you to decide that?”

“I just know you, okay?” she pleaded. “Look, I understand that you’re special, different. We’ve known that for years, and we’ve always tried to love you and give you room to explore, and then suddenly, completely out of the blue, ‘mom, dad, I’m a girl’, as if it’s as simple as that.”

“It is as simple as that,” I whimpered. Gods, she was tearing me apart.

“Then why come out with this now, Justin? It’s like you suddenly decided overnight that… Lord, I don’t even know. You were never that sort of child. You liked playing with tools and trucks and soldiers. I remember you wanted to be a robot or a ninja turtle when you grew up.”

“So?”

“So,” she concluded, “these are things that little boys say.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She wasn’t serious, was she? “Is that what this is about? You don’t actually think that being trans is wrong, but you won’t let me have it because I’m not like those kids on that Barbara Walters special? Gods, mom. Sometimes it takes a while to figure this stuff out! It’s not new!”

“On the one hand I can understand it,” she continued to reason terribly. “I know it’s hard sometimes being skinny and… well, pretty, but that doesn’t make you less of a man no matter what the jocks say.”

“I’m not a man,” I told her for the millionth time, but of course I was wasting my breath.

“How can you say that when you haven’t even tried? If only you had more confidence in yourself and realized that there are different kinds of men out there, then maybe you won’t feel like such a failure at manhood. Get a girlfriend, or… or a boyfriend even! Join the track and field team again, and who knows? You might actually find that you like it.”

It was all I could stand. She didn’t know what she was doing. I didn’t know what I was doing. The entire last month snapped back with all the violence and yelling and rejection, aliens and mind control, all while recovering from an assassination attempt from only two days before. They were built around me into walls a mile high, teetering on the edge of collapse, ready to crush me into paste. It was too damn much for a kid to handle!

I couldn’t hold it together, keep myself from cracking. Shameful tears burned down my cheek as punishment for not being stronger. Gods, what was wrong with me? What was I supposed to do?

My mom was suddenly quiet. She knew she crossed some kind of a line even though she didn’t know which one. Her uttering “I’m sorry” even almost sounded genuine, or at least it would have if she just left it at that.

“These are the facts of life,” she said. “I know it’s hard. I really know, but…”

“You have no idea,” I choked, and that was that. I wasn’t going to listen to her anymore. What did she know? Everything she thought she knew about me was from somewhere else, a gathering of ideas from news clippings, headlines, and her own inability to live outside her experience. What was the matter with her that she couldn’t ask me who I was and what I wanted!? Huh!?

“Justin…”

The conversation was halted by the roar of an engine. There was only the briefest moment to catch the black streak in the passenger mirror before the immense jarring force collided with our tail and sent the car veering off the road. After what seemed like forever but was no more than an instant we were stopped against the pavement, my mom clutching at the wheel, me pressed against the dashboard, and both of us rattling from the screams of terror we’d managed to stifle.

“Are you okay?” she asked in a panic. I told her I was fine at least two or three times before it began to sink in for either of us. Holy crap, that was terrifying.

I stared into the mirror again and to the black panel van with the collapsed grille, aka the monster that had taken us out. Anger started to creep up as I hated the driver in silence. Of all the days for some idiot moron motor head to not pay attention to where he was going!

Mom was still shaking, but she was okay she said. “Call Triple A,” she told me placidly. “I’m going to… talk… to… the other driver.” It was a simple plan that would keep her from losing her mind until she could get it together again, so I did as I was told, took her cell phone and dug through her purse for her insurance information.

The phone rang twice and then I was put on hold. In the rearview mirror the back of my mom narrowed away toward the van. Something about it didn’t seem right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. That tint job couldn’t be legal and the plates… weren’t there. Gods!

“Mom!”

By the time I was out on the street she was already unconscious face down on the ground. The man standing over her with the heavy coat and the stun-gun didn’t seem at all phased by this and was more concerned with his next intended victim. He lifted his head so that I could see his face, his scraggly beard, his thinning gray hair.

“We meet again, Mr. Cade,” Fellows mused flatly. “Or is it Miss Cade now?

I froze. What was I going to do!? Why him!? Why then!? $#&%! I had to think of something! I only hesitated long enough to remember how little my secret identity was worth compared to the rest of my life, but even that was going to cost me.

In my civvies I flared brazenly into hard light form and shot forward. “Leave my mom alone!”

Dr. Vortex, it seemed, had anticipated exactly that reaction and held out an open palm. I don’t know what happened next because that was where it ended. The whole world was suddenly dark. No mass, no weight, no definition. I was nowhere and everywhere, trapped again in unspace and left absolutely helpless within it. The mad theonaut had tricked me again.

* * * *

I snapped awake to the sound of music, wailing, cheering, and a wild carnival scene. What happened? Where was I? Something didn’t seem quite…

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

“Head in the game, Firefly!” the big man in brown roared as I recovered my position on the ground. He struggled in vain to wrestle down the immense bulk of creature who seemed more than a little frustrated by his presence.

There were people in animal costumes: not like the furries that were marching behind us before, but wearing spandex and masks in a definite hero motif that was vaguely familiar. Shaking myself back to reality I immediately recognized them, Bear, Cheetah, Flamingo, Minx and Hawk: they were the Pride, San Francisco’s own native queer superteam. It seemed weird that I should forget them, I mean… they were my teammates after all.

In the middle was our clear and definite enemy, the white supremacist douchebag known as ‘K-Bomb’. His power? Blowing up. That’s right: he beats people up, collects their kinetic energy, then explodes using whatever power he can muster, and to top it all off he regenerates in order to do it all over again. In other words the harder we hit him the more damage we could end up doing to the neighborhood.

“Ah, hell.” It was no coincidence that he’d chosen that day to make himself known. Guys like him thought that nature made them better than ‘them filthy queers’, and what better way to express that hate by blowing up a portion of them the day they decided to have a parade?

Cheetah zipped to my side and placed a pawed leather glove on my shoulder too keep me from swaying off balance. “You okay, Firefly?” he asked.

Firefly… Firefly… that was me, wasn’t it? Gods, what was wrong with me? I kept forgetting all of these little bits and pieces; it was almost like we hadn’t been planning this march for weeks and I should have been somewhere else entirely.

“Just a dizzy spell,” I told him. “Too much homework, not enough sleep, I guess.”

The muscular pink clad queen in feathers and fishnets bounced back from the action figuring that his trademark flurry of punches and kicks probably only made the situation worse. “Methinks miss thang has had too many late nights keeping unsuspecting straight boys on their toes,” he quipped. You’d almost think we weren’t in the middle of life or death combat.

Minx swept in and tripped the villain’s leg. With bear on top K-Bomb was contained for the moment but ready to go off at any second.

“We’ve got to get rid of him!” the team leader bellowed.

K-Bomb, however, just laughed as his immense mass hardened. “I swallowed nearly twenty pounds of C4. It doesn’t matter what you do to me, because when I got off I take a whole lot of Jew loving homo-faggots with me!”

Funny, I thought idiots like this were supposed to disappear into obscurity after high school.

Hawk unfurled her wings and charged toward the flattened foe. “Cheetah, I need lift! Firefly, follow me!” she ordered. We followed suit oblivious to the plan because there was no time to explain. Teamwork, trust, and all that jazz: we’d work it out as we went along.

In a flash the Cheetah was on his feet, racing from one end of the Castro to the other in seconds with the ever-growing K-Bomb swept up in his momentum. Hawk was next, then me, working in tandem for the very next step: the one that would either save hundreds of lives or spread the carnage even further.

K-Bomb howled as Hawk’s claws dug into his flesh and guided him with borrowed force into the air. It would have been impossible for her to move him by her own strength, but at escape velocity all he needed was a little nudge upward… and upward… and upward…

The villain screamed, “put me down now, you insane bitch!” Maybe he was scared of heights. Too bad.

Soon Hawk began to look strained. There was only so much she could do before the forces of inertia enacted itself on his super-dense form. “I can’t hold him much longer,” she grunted.

“I got it!”

Her claws released and for the briefest of moments the hold of gravity had forgotten about K-Bomb and his unfortunate placement high above the streets of San Francisco. His aimless flight began to arch downward to where the powerhouse quivering with pent up energy was going to blow a crater into countless lives and homes: or at least he would have if I didn’t make that shot.

CRAK-KOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

K-Bomb’s body detonated with a shockwave that left me and the winged woman reeling, but to the people on the ground it was nothing more than a loud noise and distant fire. Our job was done, the day was saved, and all that needed doing was to wipe up the spray of supervillain terrorist that would take weeks to reform.

The crowd cheered as we returned to solid ground, celebrating the murder attempt turned harmless firework display. I almost wished I could be more impressed, but it was all in a day’s work.

Parting for the burly Bear they roared eagerly as the team reassembled. Cheetah, Minx and Flamingo gathered around, waving for the cameras and posing under the hail of flashes going off from all directions. This was the part I was least comfortable with, but I guess it’s just part of the package when you’re an out and proud superhero with a message to send.

“You did some good work today, people,” Bear grinned while stretching a large paw over my uncovered shoulder. “You saved a lot of lives. Doesn’t get much better than this.”

No, I grinned, it probably doesn’t.

* * * *

Things started to slow when the ocean swallowed the end of the day, leaving behind pink highlights to rim the clouds. No more drag queens, no more leather clad biker lesbians, no more music or banners, and no more super-humans with animal motifs, myself included. Unless another maniac suddenly wanted to spoil a perfectly good Saturday by blowing up half of San Francisco I was done with Firefly, thank the gods.

Away from where the action had taken place Jenna sat balanced on the railing just where she’d said she would in her text. She wore the same tired look she always did when sobriety had been so cruelly thrust upon her. Her aura was as dark as the long dress hanging over her combat boots, chasing any anyone who’d dare get close with the same level of muted resentment as brandished by the bible bashers.

She picked me eagerly from across the street as I negotiated the slowly bleeding traffic. Her rolling eyes said it all: ‘finally!’

“What took you so long?” she chided, as if somehow her being there was my doing.

I frowned sarcastically at her and crossed my arms. “Better question. What are you even doing here? I thought we weren’t going to meet up until later tonight.”

We stared long and hard, shuffling the rest of the world out of our focus, both of us determined to be the hardest and the surliest. It could have gone either way, but this time she cracked first. “And let my Kaire-Bear go home by herself with all those psychos and maniacs out there? No way in hell.”

“Audrey was busy, wasn’t she.”

“Yeah, for like a month now,” she complained as she hopped back onto the sidewalk. “Okay, she meets some girl and gets laid for the first time in forever, then suddenly she forgets she has friends? And with you zipping around here and there I’ve got nothing to do with my Saturdays anymore.”

I laughed like I always did when Jenna got into a rant. It was a hobby of hers and with a world full of stupid people and her very particular sensibilities there was always going to be new material to draw on.

“Still, to drag yourself all the way down here…”

“Tell me about it.”

The smell of exhaust ushered us away from the sidewalk and gently to the sand: not that we could enjoy it for very much longer by the look of the tide. Hooray for something else to whine about! (Not sarcasm at all.)

“So how did it go?” she finally asked. Already I could hear the venom collecting in that secret gland she had: figured I may as well just let her have at it.

“It was good,” I admitted. “Lots of fun, though I’ll never get used to people lining up for autographs, not in a million years.”

Jenna gritted her teeth uncertainly, like she was trying to hold back. 3, 2, 1… “I don’t know how you can stand it,” she lamented. “It’s not like they wouldn’t throw people like you and me under the bus if it were convenient for them.”

“Not all of them,” I protested, but not strongly enough to think she would ever be convinced by it.

“That there’s any at all is a problem. Listen, transphobic a#$holes are like pieces of dog $#&%,” she explained. “It only takes one to wreck your whole birthday.”

“Still,” I laughed caught up in the imagery. I wasn’t sure if there was an end to that statement or not. If there was it had been washed out to sea.

The salty air gave us pause. At any moment I expected it to be shattered by a building speech, one in which it was only an invisible T at the end of LGB, that I was letting myself be used as the token tranny to make the Pride seem more friendly and inclusive, and that the term ‘transgender’ was an evil drag queen conspiracy to begin with. It always came back to drag queens with Jenna and her borderline obsessive hatred for them: especially Flamingo, not that I could blame her for that.

Instead there was silence, at least from the two humans on the shore. The sea still hissed and the engines of cars still turned, and we were lost in the slowly falling blanket of darkness drawing from the east.

“Can I ask you,” Jenna began, “a really stupid question?”

“Shoot.”

“You. In the Pride. Why? You were your own hero for a long time, and now you’re a token figure on a team of super-furries. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

I thought about it for a while. Gods, that was a hard one. I but my lip and prepared for the hundred times I was going to attempt to articulate… “Lots of reasons, I guess. Okay, yeah, I was Glimmer Girl for how many years? And I was on my own, doing my thing, yay, go me. Sounds great, right? Like being your own boss, but…”

“But what?” she asked after a moment.

It was hard to say. Actually, I think my mouth might have run away with a random sentence before my brain had fully processed it.

“But,” I began again, finally settling on a train of thought, “I got over it. One day I realized that I’d finally grown up, and there I was, right on the cusp of having to build another new identity. I realized that what I really needed was to stand for something, and to belong. Jorge and Bear asked me into the Pride and… well, the rest is history.”

“That’s it?” she pressed.

“No, that’s not all of it,” I grumbled, “but if I had to pick a main reason…”

Jenna, like usual, wasn’t satisfied. That was her other hobby. This time though it seemed serious: you could tell by the way she couldn’t summon the energy to argue or soapbox like the know-it-all jerk she always pretended to be.

I wandered closer to where she stared vacantly at the waves and nudged her shoulder. “Something on your mind, sailor?” As if I needed to ask.

“Can I ask you another really dumb question?”

Somehow I doubted it would be that dumb. “Always.”

She turned to me seriously like I was the one dangling answers over her like a carrot she couldn’t quite reach. The words struggled along the length of her tongue, but soon they found their way. “When you’re out there as Firefly and you’re in those rallies, marches, parades, all that… are you really proud of being trans?”

It took a moment to register that yes, what I’d been asked was a real question in an earnest tone, that perhaps somehow what was obvious to me was not obvious to the rest of the world, perhaps even my own college dorm roommate.

“Of course I am,” I told her. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Jenna laughed scornfully. This time I was the one missing the point. “Because… #$%&, lady. You think this is some great life we’re living? You think fighting to get even basic recognition, medically and on paper, by employers, teachers, you name it, that it’s some great, noble and enlightened struggle? That never quite feeling at home in your body even after you’ve finished transition, no matter when you started, is somehow a good thing to be flaunted? Because from where I’m sitting it %&$#in’ sucks.”

What was I supposed to say to that? It wasn’t like she was wrong. We knew ourselves, but the world said we were something else. From there the battle began and ended with so many being snowed under. It was the unquestionable truth that we were born into, and yet…

“I’m not sure I can believe that.”

“Oh, so it doesn’t suck?” Jenna retorted.

“No, it sucks,” I confirmed. “It really, really %&$#ing sucks, but at the same time…”

She gave me that look, ‘oh please’: you know the one. As far as she was concerned I was deluding myself with what I was talking straight out of my ass, and maybe I was. “You’re not going to heap me with that ‘greater perspective on life and gender’ B-S, are you?”

“No,” I shrugged, “but at the same time I can’t be that pessimistic. I don’t think pride works the way you think it does.”

‘Oh please’ switched quickly to the much more sarcastic ‘oh, do enlighten me.’ Gods, she could be caustic.

“It’s about not letting the bastards win,” I told her. “There are so many boxes and names people try to jam on us, they have forever, and told us that… we’re not normal. We’re deficient. We’re only the way we are because there are pieces missing.”

“That’s kinda true,” she interjected. “Most trans people are #$%&ing psycho. Myself included.”

“Yeah, but even if that were universally true whose fault is that? When an indifferent world stomps someone on the sidewalk again and again and again do you really expect them to come out with all their marbles intact? It’s messy, but it’s not without cause.”

Jenna rolled her eyes and sighed in sage disapproval, the kind that said ‘you’re young, you have all the time in the world to become bitter and jaded.’ If you asked me she was the one who was determined to be that way, but what the hell, she was entitled.

“So you call out the shame and you throw it off because it doesn’t belong to you,” I continued, “and what’s left behind when you’re just you living your life honestly and as best you can, that’s pride. I mean, don’t you think that’s worth standing up for?”

Realistically I didn’t expect an answer. She wasn’t the sort to just brush her pessimism to one side, even for words tainted with what passed for realism in my worldview. Instead I let the bay reply for her and let the point rest under the inky black sky robbed of stars by the city below.

Suddenly Jenna stopped as she was hit by a flash of realization. “We need booze,” she grinned, then dragged me back to the sidewalk.

Actually it sounded like the best plan I’d heard all day.

* * * *

It was late when I made it back to the dorm room and I was feeling less than stable. Tequila shots will do that to you, for sure. Still I felt confident enough to cross the room in the dark, ignoring the main light and going for the bedside lamp, knocking over an awkwardly placed frame while doing so.

While putting it back in its place I stopped for a moment and considered the picture: it was me and Tanya on our graduating day of high school all the way back in Milestone City. Gods, I looked like such an awkward young brat in that shot, and if I looked hard enough I could still see traces of the boy I was determined to leave behind. But they were good times, and with the help of close friends I’d found a way to scale the mountain of crap laid out before me and get a real start on an adult education.

I pondered for a moment whether or not I should call her: after all we hadn’t spoken in months except online, but it was late and I was far too drunk to have a coherent conversation anyway. I knew my limits: I knew I was more wasted than I’d intended to get.

That’s when I noticed my phone sitting on the side table. Crap, what was it doing there? Had I forgotten to take it with me? Weird, because I could have sworn Jenna and I had texted earlier that afternoon…

There were several new messages: none hopefully from the Pride. Since Jenna had found herself the target of a hot older dyke’s affection through the course of the night I was alone and free to play my voicemail out loud without complaints.

“First message,” the automated voice stated as I collapsed on the bed, weary, numb and exhausted, “two. Fifty four. Pee em.”

First came the beep, then the message. “Hey, it’s Audrey. Just wanted to let you guys know that I’m still alive and junk. Can you also tell Jenna that I’m sorry for standing her up the other day? I overslept and—thanks, hon—and I had a biotech paper I was slaving over the night before. I don’t mean to keep bouncing you guys around like this, but my schedule is hell. Anyway, see you guys Tuesday… I hope.”

Always the responsible one, I mused silently. If only she weren’t so prone to over-committing herself then maybe she could relax more, spend some time with her friends, and maybe finally admit her feelings for Jenna: or at least that’s how it always played out in my mind. Considering the soap opera that was my social circles it seemed bound to happen eventually.

The string of voicemail messages continued: “Second message. Three. Forty-one. Pee em.” Beep.

“This is my son’s education you’re playing with here,” a familiar voice seethed. “Whether or not he’s spitting in the face of God is completely irrelevant. Taking that away from him, especially over something so trivial, is downright un-American, sir.”

I darted up in my bed. “…Mom?” The words were so familiar, but they were entirely without context. Was this some kind of a joke? Because if it was it wasn’t very funny.

Ignoring the old, lingering sense of alienation I played it back again. There had to be something more to this. Even if it were a prank it wasn’t the sort of stupid, insensitive game my mom went for even after years of estrangement.

“This is my son’s education you’re playing with here. Whether or not he’s spitting in the face of God is completely irrelevant. Taking that away from him, especially over something so trivial, is downright un-American, sir.”

She was serious… no. No, she couldn’t be. Why bring this up? Why then? Why like that? Why not just say something more direct? I sobered up quickly enough to try and call her back but nobody was answering: not on her cell, not at home, even my dad wasn’t picking up. Something was seriously wrong in the state of Denmark.

There more messages. For the moment my mom could wait, at least for as long as I could get through the rest.

“Third message. Three. Fifty-seven. Pee em.”

“On the one hand I can understand it I know it’s hard sometimes being skinny and… well, pretty, but that doesn’t make you less of a man no matter what the jocks say.”

I remembered the words so clearly: it was that day assistant principal what’s-his-name kicked me out of school for wearing a dress. All I’d wanted was to be myself but nobody believed me, so I acted out like a brash idiot and…

None of this made any sense. I clicked the next message.

“Fourth message. Four. Twenty-two. Pee em.”

“Are you okay?” she asked hurriedly.

I recognized what had to be my own voice except it was deeper than I thought it was, even back then. “I’m fine. I think. I’m fine… oh, gods. What, I… I’m fine.”

“Call Triple A,” she said placidly. “I’m going to… talk… to… the other driver.”

It took everything I had to keep from screaming out to her. That memory of years before was so vivid: I could still hear her shoes clicking against the pavement, the faint hiss from under the hood… and the sound of her body as it hit the warm tar.

Suddenly I was very, very worried. There seemed every chance in the world that this wasn’t just a weird string of calls but a very real threat. If I were smart I would have called the Pride in on it right away, but I had to know she was alright. If there was even a slight chance that she was safe at home in her bed then I had to take it just so my heart wouldn’t explode with fear.

Three rings. Nothing. Four, five, six, they dragged on. After the next dozen or so my panic was reaching critical mass, but still I had to keep trying. It had me on my feet and pacing the room, but it did little to cool my mood.

Then for that brief split second I found him in the mirror. I should have known he was there all along: he was behind everything.

“You.”

The villain wasted no time in thrusting me into the reflective glass and leaving shattered pieces to fall after my body had collapsed to the ground. Suddenly I was dizzy and could no longer support my weight. The pain in my head along with the steady stream from my brow was probably from cuts and a concussion that left me feeling like I’d been thrown from a moving truck.

“Don’t try to use your powers, Miss Cade,” Dr. Vortex said as he leaned to my side. “They’re useless here.”

“You’re… dead…” I moaned.

And then a weird thing happened. He smiled at me. Dr. Vortex never smiled and yet there he was, grinning like a madman. I couldn’t quite comprehend it, but I knew it wasn’t a good sign.

“You can’t kill a god,” he said. Crap. Somehow I’d gotten the feeling that the whole world was about to come to an end. Actually that probably wasn’t far from what he had planned.

* * * *

TO BE CONTINUED…