I don’t sleep anymore.
My apartment is cramped, little more than a closet. Space enough for a few childhood mementos and some clothes, nothing more. No bed.
I was ten years old when I woke one morning to a blazing house and my parents burning alive and myself unscathed in the middle of it all.
“Who does she think she is? The daughter of a villain, trying to be a hero?”
A punch hit me square on the cheek, smacking my head against the road. Fingers tightened around my throat, and I struggled to breathe—an all-too-familiar feeling.
Decay’s superpowers activated. I gasped as my fingertips began to shrivel
The glass roof of the museum’s atrium shatters, and I duck behind a pillar. Twenty-three rotund robots rappel through the jagged opening on extensible steel arms. Riding atop the center bot is a short, pudgy man in a purple-and-green-striped lab coat. Frizzy orange curls encircle his bald scalp like clouds around a shiny mountaintop.
Read it now
“If it bugs you so much,” I said, “why you don’t just levitate my stuff back to its proper place?”
“Because,” Steven shouted, “I actually use my powers for good. I don’t levitate things to clean up your messes, you—”
Expletive deleted.
Yeah, I often provoke that sort of reaction from my
“It’s all over, Psycho-Metric! Drop the kilobomb!” I practice the command sotto voce as I scan the harbor, searching for the crimson lights of the mad mastermind’s speedboat.
Bloodbath Bridge looms above the dark water, a line of gold lamps tracing the gentle arcs of its suspension cables. Psycho-Metric has commandeered the six-lane crossing, and his goons are
“What if I told you that you could just go home?”
Toby almost believes the words… until he remembers it’s a villain speaking them, and he shakes himself. He forces a laugh, but pain stabs through the wound in his side, and he stops laughing with a gasp.
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
What human being, given the Gift of flight, would wish he had another one?
You’re looking at him. Er, reading about him.
Does that even make sense? Zoiks. I’m as clumsy with words as I am with people. And I’m clumsier with flight.
I hate heights. I hate speed. I hate the breathlessness
We’re a ragtag team, if ever I’ve seen one. Gathered around Major’s battered table in the dimly lit bunker, there’s no less than five kinds of crazy.
Jones, the intellectual, dissecting a cicada under a magnifying glass.
Flint, the muscle; he’s too big for his shirt, probably on purpose.
Qora, the gadgets girl.
You’d think that meeting a dog made of stars and an old friend of my parents would prepare me for anything. But I still gape when the glowing, nebulous portal appears. Auburn and purple swirl together in a maelstrom of color suspended in the air.
Major turns, hand at his wristwatch—which
Surrounded by the bustle of the Holuvian Interstellar market, I finally admit how bad of a pickle I’m in.
No, not just a pickle. This is worse. It’s a situation.
This situation has left me stranded on an unknown planet with nary a coin nor friend to my name. I grip my hat,
“When Super Guy is busy, call Super Gus!”
My purple-and-orange logo fades into a montage of my greatest work set to a dramatic score. To be fair, most of the guys I’m pummeling in the amateur cell phone videos are not actual villains but Justice Lounge drunks hoping to look tough by beating up
Mrs. Smith smothered the flames bursting from Cade’s hair with a dishcloth. Brushing back her messy curls, she studied me out of the corner of her eye. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Kyle?”
I grinned at her. “Of course I do! I may only be eleven, but I take care of
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