MY NAME IS . . . Well, I’m not going to tell you my real name. What’s the point of having a secret identity if you blurt it out all over the place? My superhero name was Thunder. This was back in the days when I had superhuman powers.

It’s weird talking about this now, after all this time. When we superhumans lost our abilities it came as a bit of a shock to all of us. Especially for me, because I was in the air over Iceland at the time. I was about eighty meters up, moving pretty fast.

The Shark and his gang had just pulled off a pretty big heist, and as soon as they heard I was after them, The Shark ordered his men to slow me down while he made a run for it. I don’t know why the bad guys always did that. I’d rounded up The Shark’s men and was after the man himself when—bam!—suddenly my powers were gone and I was falling like a lead potato.

I was lucky: I landed in a lake. Nearly broke my neck when I hit the water and nearly drowned trying to get out. I’d never learned to swim, you see. Didn’t need to. I could fly. Why would I ever need to swim?

I’ve learned to swim since, of course.

The Shark got away. Never heard a word about him again. I can only hope that when his powers vanished he found himself in a similar position.

So this story that I’m going to tell you . . . It might ramble a bit but that’s because I’m really not used to talking about these things. You don’t know what it was like, holding on to these secrets for over a decade.

No, before you ask, I didn’t know Titan’s real identity, nor Energy’s. I had no idea who Quantum was. I met Paragon once or twice, didn’t really get to talk to him. But I knew Apex. Knew him well. They’re the Big Five, the ones everyone wants to know about. Like they were the best of us or something. Max Dalton—excuse me while I spit in disgust—was and still is a self-obsessed jerk with an ego the size of Texas. The way his publicity people work, you’d think that Dalton was the only effective superhero in the business and the rest of us were working for him.

But I’m not here to talk about Titan and his gang or the Daltons, not really. I’m here to tell you about the Footsoldiers.

I doubt you’ve heard of us, but that’s not surprising because we never made the name public. It was kind of a joke name, a dig at Dalton’s own High Command. See what I mean about his ego? He chose a name for his superhero team that deliberately gave the impression they were in charge.

Most of the time there were four of us in the Footsoldiers. Myself, Apex, Hesperus, and Thalamus. Now and then Impervia and Octavian worked with us. Once, Josh Dalton worked on a kidnapping case with us because he’d split from the High Command after a fight with his brother. He was all right. Smart kid. Always in the shadow of his siblings, though.

But Octavian was the most frequent of the team’s casual members. You might not remember him. Strange guy. Styled himself after the Roman emperor for some reason we could never figure out. Dressed like him too. Toga, laurel-leaf crown, sandals. His powers were pretty basic: flight, energy rays from his eyes, a good left cross. Useful in a fight, but that was about it.

One funny thing about Octavian before I go on: he only showed up for a couple of days every three weeks, and it was always at night. He never said why this was, but he implied that it was something to do with “the phases of the moon.” It was Thalamus who figured it out: Octavian was married and his wife didn’t know he was a superhuman. Every three weeks she had to go out of town on a business trip, and Octavian would grab the sheets off the bed to make his “costume.” And he could only do it at night because they lived in his mother’s house and he had to wait until she was asleep.

It was shortly after we solved that kidnapping case that this story starts.

I didn’t like the way Apex was running things. But then I didn’t like much about him. I mean, the rest of us knew each other’s real identities, but Apex never even removed his helmet. And you couldn’t see any part of him under his armor.

Like Paragon, I guess. But at least with Paragon you got the sense that there was a real guy under it all. With Apex, there were times when I wondered if maybe he was a robot.

Even without visible features it was pretty obvious to anyone who cared to take notice that Apex was a strange-looking guy. He was short, not much taller than Hesperus. And he was stocky. Not exactly overweight—hard to tell through all the body armor—but he was kinda chunky.

And that voice of his. Perfectly clipped British accent. But a very fake one, you know? Like a guy doing an impression of a newsreader on the BBC World Service.

Apex and Thalamus got on like a house on fire. A really strange boring house, that is. It was probably because neither of them had any social skills. They’d known each other for years and as far as we could tell they didn’t have any other friends.

Thalamus, now . . . I’ve got to say, I kind of liked him. Sure, he was puny and ugly and sometimes if you asked him a question he’d answer with more detail than you really wanted. Like, one time I asked him what he’d done the previous weekend and he started telling me. “I woke up at a little after seven-seventeen on Saturday morning and got out of bed and walked the eight steps to the bathroom. The door was closed, so I opened it before I went in. I closed the door after me but I didn’t lock it because I live alone, so the likelihood of someone unexpectedly walking in is less than one in fifty-one thousand.” And so on. I stopped him when he started telling me exactly how many corn flakes he’d had for breakfast.

I used to drive him crazy by asking him stuff like, “Hey, Thalamus. What time was it yesterday?”

Hesperus was a little odd too, but in a good way. I’d known her since we were teenagers. We grew up in the same town and pretty much discovered our powers together. Most of us in the superhero community had secret identities, but Hesperus kept hers very private. Around people she didn’t know—or just people she didn’t like—she often came across as quite cold and abrupt, all business and no fun. Among her friends she was smart and funny and bubbly, with a grin that was amazingly infectious and made you feel good to be alive. She laughed at silly jokes and would become embarrassed when you told her that her hair looked nice.

She wore handmade armor and carried a sword and an ax, and it didn’t bother her in the least when Thalamus pointed out that the Greek god Hesperus was traditionally considered to be a man. She counterargued that Hesperus was an early name for the planet Venus, which is associated with women. That shut him up.

I could tell you of at least a dozen instances when some bad guy just assumed she’d be a pushover. That was not a mistake anyone made twice.

I remember the time Slaughter tried to kidnap her. Forget Ragnarök: Slaughter was easily the most vicious excuse for a human being I’ve ever met. She was like Genghis Khan crossed with Vlad the Impaler, only worse. Seriously. One time she killed a guy for looking at her. According to the news reports, she was walking through the city wearing a purple and red costume. Who’s not going to look? But she spotted this guy staring at her, and she stopped and punched her fist right through his neck.

So she kidnapped Hesperus. Swooped down out of the sky and grabbed her, dragged her into the air. And Hesperus didn’t even struggle. Didn’t even say a word until Slaughter had taken her to her hideout, an abandoned house on the outskirts of Seattle.

Slaughter cuffed Hesperus’ hands and feet, blindfolded her, and threw her down the cellar stairs.

Hesperus was out of the cuffs before she even hit the ground. She was back up the stairs even as Slaughter was closing the door. She smashed her way through and proceeded to beat the living snot out of Slaughter. I think it was the first time that anyone had managed to lay a decent punch on her.

Of course, Slaughter was out of prison within a week. But she never again tried to take on Hesperus without someone backing her up.

Anyway.

Yeah, the Footsoldiers were a bit weird. But we were superheroes. Weird goes with the territory.

When Thalamus and Apex decided that they should form a team, they asked me. I wasn’t going to bother—I was doing pretty well on my own—but then they told me that they were going to ask Hesperus too.

That changed my mind. If Hesperus wanted to join, I would too. As we’d grown older, we’d grown a little apart, and I enjoyed spending time with her. Plus there aren’t that many women in the superhero game. Maybe whatever it is that makes us superhuman mostly works on men. Or maybe it’s like Thalamus said once: “There are certainly superhumans out there who have never discovered their abilities.”

He could be right about that. I only discovered my own powers by accident. I was able to create and shape sound waves. A lot of people have asked me about that, how it works, but it’s hard to explain. It’s like I was able to see them, like an extra layer on top of normal vision. And I could make the sound waves do what I wanted.

I was sixteen when I discovered this. My folks dragged us all to my little sister’s school concert. Let me tell you, there’s nothing more annoying than a bunch of seven-year-olds attempting to sing the latest pop songs.

By the time the last kid appeared, I was pretty much ready to cry. Naturally all the old folks went “Aw!” at the sight of her. Then she started to sing. Fractured and uneven sound waves hit me like a shower of broken glass.

Man, she was bad. Up and down the scales searching for the right notes and not finding them. She even hit a few that really shouldn’t have existed. I swear I’ve heard more tuneful car alarms.

Then one particular note just sort of slammed into me. It should have been a Middle C, but it was cracked and chipped like pottery in a cement mixer—which, to be honest, would have sounded better. But the thing is, I could see exactly what was wrong with the note, and I fixed it. And the next one, and the next. I didn’t realize at first that it was me doing it.

All of a sudden that little girl could sing. She was pitch perfect.

Around me, the parents’ fake grins turned into looks of astonishment.

My mother leaned past me to whisper, “Isn’t she amazing?” to my dad, and that broke my concentration. The little girl’s voice returned to the noise of a wildcat desperately trying to scratch its way out of a metal garbage can.

It took me a long time to learn how to properly control sound waves, but when I was at my peak I was pretty powerful.

Sound waves aren’t just noise, vibrations in the air. Well, OK, on one level they are. But they’re more than that. They’re communication, emotions, alerts and alarms. And properly directed, sound waves can be a devastating weapon. Certain singers can shatter a wineglass through sound. They do it by issuing a note that’s perfectly in tune with the glass. The harmonic resonance builds, causing micro-vibrations that shatter the crystalline structure.

At my best, I was able to shatter brick walls. Instantly, too. No messing about trying to find the correct frequency. I could whisper and direct the sound to someone miles away. They’d hear me perfectly. And I could do the opposite: I was able to listen to passengers talking in a 747 at thirty thousand feet.

I could deaden sounds—handy when sneaking up on someone—or enhance them. I could create a wall of solid sound that could knock a train off its tracks, or lift me into the air.

I could change the weather by using sound waves to gather or disperse the clouds.

Even in complete darkness I could tell where everything was in a room from the echoes.

So, yeah, I was pretty powerful. A useful guy to have on a team. That’s why Apex wanted me.

Every superhero team needs a good balance of powers. Apex was the agile one, the natural fighter, the leader. Thalamus was the brains, the strategist. Hesperus was the weapons expert, and I was the powerhouse.

Now, as a leader, Apex was pretty good. Even back then, I’d have admitted that. He was courageous and cunning. Enemies feared him, as well they should have.

But he was not a nice guy.

That’s what this story is about. That’s why I’m telling you this now.

Everyone knows the truth about Mystery Day now. There’s no need to keep it a secret any longer. We didn’t all die in that final battle with Ragnarök. I wasn’t even there that day. I know that’s the same thing Max Dalton always told everyone, but I genuinely wasn’t. And I happen to know that Dalton was there.

We didn’t all die. We just lost our powers. Forever.

Or maybe not.

There’s a new generation of superhumans out there now, and one of them is Titan’s son. I’ve seen him on the news. He’s brave, but a bit . . . Well, he needs experience. That recent situation in Topeka could have been handled a lot better, if you ask me.

But back to Apex. After we lost our powers, Max Dalton called a few of the heroes together to talk about the situation. Apex was one of them. He showed up wearing his costume. The full armor, the helmet. Everything.

Not being a superhuman anymore, Apex had to get there by car. How he did that—in light of what I found out later—I’ll never know.

At the meeting, they discussed what they were going to do next. I heard that Apex was pretty cut up about what had happened to Thalamus during the final battle, but this wasn’t a memorial service. This was a “cover your own butt” strategy.

The Daltons had no choice but to pretend that they weren’t involved in the Ragnarök massacre. They were public figures with no secret identities to hide behind, no “normal lives” that they could return to. Most of the others, though, were a long way from home without passports, civilian clothes, money, or a good excuse for being away for so long.

Max Dalton took care of everything.

He took care of Apex too.

I said before that Apex wasn’t a nice guy. This is how I found that out.

I wasn’t happy with the way he was running the Footsoldiers. I wanted to go public, make us a household name like the High Command or the Poder-meninas. Apex claimed that he wanted to keep the team as it was. Informal, in the background, and out of the news.

Our HQ was a warehouse on the waterfront in Chicago. One day, I was maybe ten miles away when I realized I wasn’t going to make the start of a meeting, so I focused my hearing to listen in on them.

I’d never done that before—there had never been the need.

I heard Apex say, “And what say you, Hesperus?”

In her small voice, she replied, “I’m not sure.”

“You are abstaining?”

“For the moment.”

“Thalamus?”

“You already know my thoughts on the matter.”

Apex said, “I would never presume to know your thoughts, Thalamus.”

The two of them laughed like that was a good joke, then Octavian said something like, “This meeting is pointless! We should be out there fighting in the arena of crime, not squabbling like vulgarian peasants over trivial matters. The Gods do not care for agendas and the tabling of motions. And we are closer to the Gods than we are to the mortals.”

At that, Hesperus said, “If so, then that’s all the more reason to behave like mortals. Because we are not Gods. We are people with gifts. That’s all.”

Apex said, “The girl is right.” He often called her “the girl” even though she hated it. He went on, “I am sure that Thunder would agree with me, so I will cast his vote for him. That makes three against one, with one abstaining. The Footsoldiers will remain in the shadows for now. Making a press announcement seems so . . . crass. It will make us look like we are seeking fame. That is not what we are about. If the public are to become aware of us, it is better that they do so through our deeds, not our words.”

Now, that annoyed me. Apex knew that wasn’t what I wanted. I would have voted for taking us public, letting the world know who we were and what we could do.

I could have thrown my voice then, allowed them to hear my point of view. But Apex’s words had really bugged me. I didn’t like him speaking on my behalf.

So I shut him up. I was still a couple of miles away at this point, but I didn’t want him to say anything else in my name. I blocked the sound of his voice from reaching the others’ ears. It was a simple trick, one I used mostly at the movies so I could concentrate on the film without being distracted by people crunching popcorn, crinkling bags, coughing.

At first it was kind of fun listening to the others speculating about what was happening to Apex. Octavian said, “I don’t get it. What’s wrong, Apex?”

“His voice . . .” Hesperus began. “Apex, nod if you can hear me . . . OK, that’s something at least. The speaker in his helmet must be malfunctioning.”

I heard the rustle of paper, and Thalamus said, “Just write it down.”

Then there was the sound of Apex shoving the paper aside. I could hear his boots scraping on the floor, pictured him shuffling about.

“What is this? Are we under some sort of attack?” Octavian asked. There was the spark of panic in his voice.

I was close enough now for the sounds to form an echo-picture of the room. Apex was backing away from the others, gesturing wildly, trying to keep them away.

Hesperus said, “Octavian, hold him. I’m going to get his helmet off.”

The warehouse was directly ahead of me, the skylight open as usual. I arced toward it, dropped through.

Just in time to see Apex whip his massive right arm in Hesperus’ direction. The back of his hand slammed into the side of her head with enough force to knock her across the room.

I immediately created a cushion of semisolid sound in Hesperus’ path and slowed her down before she hit the wall, then I released Apex’s voice.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I yelled at him. “She was only trying to help!”

“I did not mean . . . That was an accident.”

“That was no accident, Apex! You think I can’t tell the difference? I heard your muscles tense as she approached. That was a calculated move.”

He whirled around, glared at me. “You did this! You silenced my voice!”

I walked over to Hesperus, helped her to her feet. “Yeah. I did. And you deserved it. But you overreacted, you moron.”

Apex was standing still now, the dark visor of his helmet fixed in my direction. I remember wishing that I could see his expression. You never really knew what he was thinking.

Hesperus pulled away from me. “I’m all right.” She glared at Apex, then quickly turned away. “I don’t need this. We’re supposed to be a team.” She picked up her ax and sword, then looked back to me, Thalamus, and Octavian. “We have a job to do tonight. When it’s over, you have another decision to make. I will not work with Apex again. So it’s either him or me.”

She turned away, leaped up to the skylight, and swung herself through.

Octavian followed next, carrying Thalamus, who didn’t have the ability to exit that way himself. Physically, Thalamus was actually weaker than the average human. That’s the thing about whatever it is that makes superhumans—you never know what you’re going to get. Most of us looked perfectly normal physically, but there were a few who changed. For some, like Brawn or Metrion or The Hive, the change was so great that there was no way they could ever pass as a human again. Others, like Thalamus and Apex, seemed normal at first glance, until you looked closer and realized that they were just a little too thin or too bulky, or had an unusual stance. But even then you might not be able to tell.

Apex moved to go next, but I stepped in front of him. “I don’t want the others to hear this, so I’m stopping my voice from carrying that far.”

“What do you have to say?”

“You hit her. I don’t care why. But if it happens again—”

“I am aware of my actions, Thunder. It was an error of judgment.” Then he jabbed his finger at my chest. “But you caused this. You silenced my voice.”

“You told the others that I agreed with you about keeping the team secret. You know I think that’s the wrong move. I’ve told you often enough. But that’s not the point here, Apex. You hit one of your own teammates.”

“I intend to apologize to Hesperus when the time is right. But not now. Now we have a mission to complete, and you are slowing me down.”

I stepped back and watched as he leaped for the skylight. Despite what most people thought, Apex couldn’t actually fly, but he didn’t really need to. He could leap huge distances—well over a hundred yards if he had to. And he was fit, easily the most agile superhuman I’d ever seen. It was like he was able to bend his joints at any angle. Even with all that armor he was incredibly flexible, and had a sense of balance that would make a cat cry with envy.

Once, I saw him run up a vertical ladder without using his hands. Now that takes skill.

I followed him out through the skylight. The others had assembled on the edge of the roof, waiting for us.

“So what’s the mission?” I asked Thalamus.

“Oh, so you weren’t listening in to that part, then?”

I was a little taken aback at that. It wasn’t like Thalamus to make snide comments. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Let’s not pretend to be friends, Thunder.” He turned away slightly, almost as though he was dismissing me. Louder—more for my benefit than anyone else’s—he said, “My sources report that three known members of the Chaingang have been spotted in different parts of southern Wisconsin in the past two days. The other three can’t be far behind. Tonight a shipment of weapons-grade nuclear waste will pass along a route that intersects with what I’ve projected are the paths of the members of the Chaingang.”

Hesperus shook her head. “We don’t do nuclear. We leave that to people like Impervia and Titan who are immune to radiation.”

“She’s right,” Octavian added. “I’ve no problem with going up against the Chaingang in most circumstances, but not in a situation like this. The government transports nuclear waste in secret, and that’s the way it should be. The plebeians don’t need to know that sleeping dragons are carried through their towns in the dead of night. I say that if we have to act, then we wait until we know for certain that the Chaingang is after the shipment.”

I looked at him. “Plebeians?”

“The common people,” Thalamus said. “The lower classes. As the Roman rulers saw them.”

I sighed. “Man, that Roman emperor act is getting old real fast.”

“Enough discussion,” Apex said. “But Octavian is right. As is Hesperus. We go after the Chaingang one by one, before they can assemble.”

The Chaingang mostly kept out of the press, so you might not have heard of them. Actually, I should put it the other way around: the press mostly avoided reporting on the Chaingang. Much later, a couple of years after we lost our powers, I saw one of them on television: he had inherited his parents’ media empire. It’s pretty clear now that his parents knew about his bad side and used their influence to hush up his activities.

There were six of them: three guys, two girls and one we were never sure about. His—or her—codename was Spite. I’m pretty sure he was a guy; Octavian was certain Spite was a girl. It was hard to tell because he had a very lean body, no real muscle structure, dressed from head to toe in solid black, and almost never spoke. He was rarely seen too. He had this power that allowed him to teleport, but only when no one could see him. Hence the black costume—it enabled him to hide in the shadows.

The others were Muscle, Torture, and Incendiary—the guys—and the two girls, Vortex and Paranoia. They didn’t dress alike, or have any team motif. I believe they called themselves the Chaingang simply because they thought it was an intimidating name.

I’m not going to tell you which member of the Chaingang is now running that media empire, nor am I going to say which media empire I’m talking about. I’ve no physical proof to back up my story and they’d sue me for everything I have.

We were going after Torture first. Octavian carried Thalamus on his back, Hesperus and I flew, while Apex bounded along behind us, leaping from rooftop to rooftop.

Now, the Footsoldiers weren’t like the High Command. We didn’t have unlimited funds for equipment or a team of private security guards backing us up like Dalton and his crew. None of us were billionaires, or mechanical geniuses like Paragon. We had no government support. We had to make do with what we could scrounge from others, or stuff we “acquired” in battle.

We were the poor relatives of the bigger teams. I wasn’t happy about that, but, hey, it was better than not being in a team.

So when we fought, we didn’t have dinky little communicator headsets. The only way we could communicate was through me. I could hear the others and pass on messages. Once when we were fighting with Impervia she started calling me Switchboard. I guess she thought that was funny.

Thalamus told us that Torture had been spotted by “one of his sources” in a café in Watertown, which is about halfway between Madison and Milwaukee. Thalamus had a lot of these “sources” but he never revealed who they were or how they got in touch with him. Sometimes the information just seemed to come from nowhere.

I’d fought Torture a couple of times, before the Chaingang had been formed. On the supervillain scale—where you’ve got Ragnarök and Slaughter at the top end and that dipstick who called himself Cake-Man at the other end—Torture would be closer to the Cake-Man end.

Torture was strong, cruel, and he had a bad temper. That was about it. On his own, any one of us—apart from Thalamus—could have defeated him. That was also pretty much true for Incendiary, the pyrokinetic. Definitely second-string villains. But with the rest of the gang they could be extremely dangerous.

I took the lead, because it had been over a day since Torture was spotted and I was the only one who could track him down. You see, what most people don’t realize is that the human body is not silent. Not even counting the voice, every human makes noise all the time. There’s breathing, the heartbeat, the digestive system, the creak of ligaments and muscles, drops of perspiration being pushed out through the pores. The scrape and rustle of body hair as it moves and grows. The twin thumps of eyelids blinking.

The firing of neurons in the brain.

All these things combine to give every person a unique sound signature, and when you’re a master of sound—like I was—that signature is as distinctive and recognizable as a face.

Now that I knew what to listen for, I was able to pinpoint Torture’s location from over thirty miles away.

“I’ve got him,” I told the others.

From a few miles behind me, Apex said, “Stay focused on him, Thunder. We do not want to lose him.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know how to do my job.”

He ignored that. I screened out the pounding of his large feet on the sidewalk as he leaped, and heard him say, “How are the others holding up?”

“They’re fine. Octavian is muttering a prayer to the war-god Mars under his breath. Hesperus is gearing up for battle—I can hear her tightening her grip on her ax.”

“And Thalamus?”

“His heart’s racing. He’s starting to sweat. I think he’s actually more scared of Octavian dropping him than he is of going up against Torture.”

Hesperus asked, “Thunder? How much longer until we reach Torture?”

“Ten minutes tops,” I said. “Any particular reason?”

“No. Just . . .” She paused, but even without that I knew there was something wrong. Her voice was strained, the words a little forced. Her question had been filled with tiny delays—imperceptible to anyone without my abilities and experience. They told me her mind was on something else. Her question had been a mask for what she really wanted to ask.

I directed my voice so that only she could hear me. “What’s wrong?”

And she told me.

I didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed impossible, too crazy to even consider. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

See, this is something that we never talked about with anyone else. As near as I can tell, Hesperus died without even giving the slightest hint. I swore that I too would take the secret to my grave, but not now. Everything has changed.

When word first got out about this new generation of heroes I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of my time as a superhero, but that was in the past. The world had moved on and managed to survive without us.

Now we have these New Heroes and it looks very much like it’s starting all over again. I’ve heard some stuff about the situation in Topeka—and about the destruction of Las Vegas—that actually has me scared. Most people probably can’t see the bigger picture, but you have to remember that I’ve been there. I’ve seen things you can’t imagine. Because of the New Heroes this whole world is going to change, and probably not for the better.

The future doesn’t belong to us. We shape it from the present, then pass it on to our children. They reshape it and pass it on to theirs, and so on.

Most of the time the shape is only marginally different from one generation to the next. But sometimes the changes are huge. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time with the Footsoldiers—and in particular from this mission that I’m telling you about—it’s that no matter what you do, you can’t ever change the shape back to the way you want it.

Pandora’s toys will never all fit back in the box.

By the time we reached Torture, Hesperus’ words were weighing so heavily on my mind that I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what was happening on the ground. I’m not blaming Hesperus for that, I’m blaming myself. And Apex. Mostly Apex.

Or maybe I should be blaming Paranoia, because she’s the one who sensed my anxieties and magnified them.

All the members of the Chaingang were waiting on the ground below. They had managed to mask themselves from my senses.

They had a prototype sound-muffling device. You may have heard about these things. They cancel out all noise within a specific radius. As I’ve already explained, this was one of my own tricks and I’m still annoyed with myself for allowing it to fool me.

What really, really bugged me—and still bugs me even now—was that a few months before that mission, I’d done some freelance work for one of Max Dalton’s research foundations. No one talks about it, but sometimes we did that sort of thing, used our powers to earn some money. I know Thalamus did it quite a few times. Like I said before, we weren’t all billionaires. A full-time superhero can’t keep a full-time job going.

My abilities gave me an instinctive knowledge of everything to do with sound-generation. I thought I was helping Dalton’s researchers create a new type of soundproofing that came in the form of a paper-thin membrane. But instead they were developing a device that could be used directly against me.

Torture was outside the device’s sphere of influence, so he was the only one I could detect. If I’d been paying attention I would have spotted that there was a “hole” in the echo picture of the area.

He was walking along a narrow street on the north side of the town, and for the life of me I still don’t know why I didn’t see the word “trap” written all over the situation.

We approached in the usual pattern: Hesperus and Apex came at Torture from the side while I blasted him with disorientating sound waves. But I was a little off my game, because all I could really think about was what Hesperus had told me about Apex. That concern quickly became a worry, a fear, a kind of sick queasy dread that made me want to throw up.

Paranoia was a bit like Thalamus in that she rarely got involved in any direct fighting. Her power was a sort of reverse empathy. She could greatly magnify your fears and anxieties. One time Gladius went after her and she left him a quivering wreck. For weeks he was unable to do anything but panic over whether his costume made his butt look big.

Sounds stupid, I know, but when you’re in the grip of an irrational fear, you can’t tell that it’s irrational.

I touched down directly in front of Torture, tried to hit him with a wall of sound powerful enough to knock him off his feet. Then suddenly I had the feeling that it wasn’t going to work. I was convinced he’d become immune to my powers and he was going to kill me.

He charged. Torture was a big guy with powerful fists and a long reach, and all I could do was stand there.

Then Apex struck, leaping out of the darkness and slamming right into Torture’s back. Took him down immediately.

Octavian and Thalamus landed then, followed by Hesperus. “Tie him up,” Apex told her. “Thunder, contact the local authorities, tell them where they can find him.”

I wasn’t able to do it. I just knew that it was pointless. The police would come and they’d find us and assume that we were bad guys. That was something I’d always been a little concerned about—we do operate outside the law, after all—but now it was getting to be a full-blown panic attack.

Hesperus was the first to notice that there was something wrong. She walked up to me, frowning. “Thunder? What is it?”

“I can’t. I can’t do this anymore. Don’t you see where it’s all going to end? We’ll be killed. Or worse. We’ll be forced to kill others.”

Dropping his Roman emperor act for a moment, Octavian said, “What’s got into him? Torture didn’t get close enough to even touch him.”

Hesperus whirled around to him. “Octavian, get him out of here—now! It’s Paranoia! It’s a trap!”

He barely had time to say, “What?” before Spite appeared out of the darkness, wrapped his arms around Octavian’s neck, and dragged him to the ground.

Still in the grip of panic, I could only watch as Muscle and Vortex charged at Apex from opposite directions. He saw them coming, leaped into the air at the last second—and was struck down by a fireball from Incendiary.

From the light of the fireball I could see Paranoia nearby, standing perfectly still as she concentrated on me. But even though I now knew what was happening, I couldn’t do anything about it.

I’m not sure, but I think I might have been crying at that stage.

Spite hit Thalamus next, materializing inside his own shadow and tripping him up. He twisted around onto Thalamus’ back, slammed his head face-first into the ground.

Octavian ran to help, but was hit by another of Incendiary’s fireballs: it immediately set his toga ablaze and he was forced to rip its burning shreds from his body.

Then it was down to Hesperus, the smallest of us all.

Maybe they’d left her for last because they thought—like so many others had in the past—that she was weak.

Muscle had Apex pinned to the ground, Torture was still tied up and Paranoia was busy with me. But that still left three of them—Vortex, Incendiary, and Spite—against Hesperus. Outnumbered three to one.

They didn’t stand a chance.

Vortex struck first. She darted in at Hesperus so fast that I almost couldn’t see her. Hesperus stood with her sword in one hand, ax in the other.

Vortex leaped into the air, spinning and twisting as she did so, aiming a flying kick straight for my teammate’s head.

Hesperus pivoted, her arms a blur, and Vortex was suddenly on the ground, screaming, clutching at the stump where her right foot used to be.

Vortex didn’t scream for long: Incendiary came next, twin columns of white-hot plasma erupting from his hands directly toward Hesperus. But the plasma streams didn’t find their target. In one fluid movement Hesperus threw her ax at Spite, clipping his shoulder. She grabbed Vortex by the throat and used her as a shield against the fire.

Vortex’s costume was lined with a fireproof insulation, but I don’t know whether Hesperus knew that. I never asked. I didn’t want to know. Vortex’s exterior costume immediately became an inferno.

Hesperus threw Vortex’s burning body at Spite. Trapped under the blaze, Spite was unable to escape into the shadows.

Two down. Only Incendiary to go. And Hesperus still had her sword.

Incendiary erupted in a pillar of flame so hot that the asphalt at his feet instantly became a boiling mass. Hesperus’ sword would melt before it even got close.

For the first time, one of the Chaingang spoke. It was Muscle, his arms still pinning Apex to the ground. “Drop your weapon!” he yelled at her. “Right now. Or I will break his neck!”

Even through my artificially induced fear I could see what Muscle was thinking. It was a standoff. He knew that he couldn’t beat Hesperus, and he was sure that she wouldn’t let anything happen to Apex.

He was wrong about that.

“Go ahead,” she called back. “It’ll save me the trouble later.”

“Incendiary—burn her!”

But Incendiary didn’t do anything. He had seen his own flames possibly kill both Vortex and Spite.

Muscle tried another approach. “Paranoia—increase your hold on Thunder. Tear his mind apart!”

“No!” Hesperus shouted. Hesitating, she held her sword out at her side, at arm’s length. “I’m putting down my sword.”

“Don’t trust her,” Incendiary said. “Throw it out of reach!”

“All right,” Hesperus said. She slowly looked around, and then turned back to Muscle. “I’m throwing it aside.”

Almost casually, Hesperus flicked her wrist and the sword arced behind her into the night sky.

There was a scream, and suddenly I no longer felt afraid.

I whirled around to see Paranoia sitting on the ground, Hesperus’ sword protruding from her thigh.

Then I moved into action.

The Chaingang had been wise to take me out first.

The first thing I did was deaden all the sound in the area, then I hit Incendiary with a shock wave that lifted him off his feet and smashed him—still burning—into the side of a building.

I directed a narrow blast at Muscle’s head. The blow knocked him aside and Apex immediately jumped to his feet, balled his fists, and began pummeling.

I turned to Paranoia, still silently screaming from the pain in her leg. I shattered her eardrums, ripped into her vocal cords.

A wide-band shock wave separated Spite and Vortex, dousing the flames at the same time.

Incredibly, they were both still alive. Spite instantly melted into the shadows, but in his wounded state he wasn’t able to go far. He rematerialized partly underneath a parked car. He began to crawl away, but four quick pinpoint bursts of sound and the car had four flat tires, pinning Spite to the ground. Unable to move completely into shadow, he was trapped, his power useless.

The car’s alarm went off, but silencing that was child’s play for me.

I turned back to the others and saw that Apex had—once again—taken charge. “Thunder, Incendiary’s fire is getting out of control. We need rain. Octavian, Hesperus . . . Get Vortex and Spite to the nearest hospital. I will not have their deaths on my conscience.”

“Right. But they were trying to kill us,” Hesperus said.

Apex ignored her and turned to me. “Thunder, where’s that rain?”

“It’s coming.” The first drops were already beginning to fall.

I picked up Vortex’s severed foot and tossed it to Octavian, who caught it automatically, then yelped and dropped it when he realized what it was.

Within seconds the street was drenched, Incendiary’s fire doused. I concentrated again on the clouds, dispersed them with a subsonic blast.

The rain had already stopped when I reached Paranoia. She was lying flat on the ground, unconscious, Hesperus’ sword still protruding from her leg, the pool of blood now diluted by the rainwater.

Apex said, “Throwing your sword was a reckless move, Hesperus. You could have pierced her heart.”

“You think I need to see what I’m doing in order to hit my target?” She turned away in disgust. “You never had any faith in my abilities.”

“Apex, they knew we were coming,” I said. “They were waiting for us.”

“That is not possible.”

I wanted to ask Thalamus—he was good at this sort of analysis—but he was still unconscious.

I quickly searched through Paranoia’s damp costume and found the sound-muffling device. I didn’t immediately know what it was, or the part it had played in the ambush, but I took it anyway in case it might be a weapon. “Hesperus? Want your sword back?”

“Leave it,” Apex said. “The paramedics will remove it. Hesperus, Octavian . . . Vortex and Spite require immediate medical attention. Go. Now.”

“No need. There are four teams of paramedics on the way,” I said. I could hear their sirens, the tires hissing over the wet ground. “A couple of miles away, but coming fast.”

Hesperus said, “Then we’re done. Apex, I told you that when this mission was over I was quitting. You are not our leader. We just followed you. There’s a difference.”

He folded his arms, and in the darkness his opaque visor was as impenetrable as ever. “Then go. There are others who would be willing to take your place.”

“And my place?” I asked. “I know what you are, Apex. And I . . .” I looked over toward Octavian, who was watching with interest. “I’m sorry, Octavian. But this is not for your ears.” I sealed him off from the sound of our voices.

For almost a minute I stared at Apex’s unmoving, impassive, slightly misshapen body.

Hesperus broke the silence, and it was then I realized that she and I were not on the same wavelength after all.

When we were in the air, Hesperus had told me that she had suspected Apex for some time. “There’s something not right about him. He’s not one of us. I don’t trust him, and if you think about it you won’t either.”

Well, I thought about it. I considered Apex from every angle. Of all of us, he and Thalamus were easily the most famous. Even today, some people talk about him the same way they talk about Titan.

But then the people today don’t know what Hesperus and I had figured out. Even though we’d both figured out completely different things.

No one knows what made us superhuman. Or if they do know, then they’re not telling.

It could be something genetic. Certainly the fact that Titan’s son is also a superhuman lends strength to that idea. Or maybe it’s more complex than that. It could be that we are chosen by some higher beings—gods, aliens, time-travelers, whatever—to be the Earth’s champions. That’s a nice theory, but it has one great big hole in it: the higher beings are also doling out powers to the bad guys.

The events of that night led Hesperus and me to look at Apex in different ways. Not just different to each other, but in ways that we had never looked at him before.

For the first time, I used my control over sound waves to map out Apex’s features on the inside of his helmet. I saw his face.

Hesperus used her instincts to analyze his motives. She saw his soul.

Apex was ambitious, and—like all of us—he had a touch of a savior complex. Anyone who becomes a superhero has one. We wanted to be the good guys. Righting wrongs, helping the innocent, foiling evil plans. We did it because we could, because we liked it, and because someone had to. We wanted the admiration, even if we were always going to remain anonymous.

Most of us, I’m sure, led pretty ordinary lives most of the time. But by donning a costume and fighting crime we were able to have people look up to us, think of us as heroes.

Certainly, that was one of the reasons I did it. I loved the idea of being a hero, and these past ten years it’s been pretty tough not being able to talk about it with anyone.

In that regard, Apex was no different to the rest of us.

But there was a difference. And that was in how far we were willing to go for the admiration we craved.

“You did this,” Hesperus said. “You and Thalamus. You set us up.”

“I did not,” Apex said.

The lie in his words was as clear to me as his rapidly beating heart.

But like I said, Hesperus and I had been looking at him in different ways. I’d never even considered that Apex had planned the attack.

It was all I could do not to blast him apart right there and then.

“You wanted the fame that the High Command has,” Hesperus said. “What was it you said back in the HQ? ‘If the public are to become aware of us, it is better that they do so through our deeds, not our words.’ You’ve got what you wanted. After this battle everyone is going to know about us.”

“Preposterous,” Apex said. He turned toward the approaching ambulances, then turned back. “Even if that were true, you would not be able to prove it. Leave if you want, Hesperus. You too, Thunder. Octavian, Thalamus and I will carry on without you.”

“You would have died here if it hadn’t been for Hesperus,” I said. “Do you really want to rely on Thalamus or Octavian to save you next time?”

Again, he turned his back on us.

“I know your secret,” I said.

I could hear his heartbeat increasing.

Hesperus looked at me. “What is this? Something else?”

“Yeah. Something else. You want me to tell her, Apex? Or are you . . . man enough to do it?”

He slowly turned back to face me. “Who else would you tell?”

“Apex, I won’t deny that you’re good at what you do. And I believe that you act in the best interests of the human race. But what you’ve done today is . . . inhuman. Despicable. Innocent people could have been killed. We could have been killed. And for what? For glory.”

“To raise our profile. To let the people know that there are others protecting them. Your idea of a press release would not have worked, not to the degree that my plan will.”

“So you admit it?” Hesperus said. “I’ve had it with you, Apex! Give me one reason we shouldn’t arrest you for this.”

“I cannot be arrested,” Apex said. “Nothing I do is illegal. And Thunder knows why.” He stepped back. “Tell her if you feel that you must, Thunder. If you think that it is going to make any difference. But you know what will happen if it becomes public, do you not? I will no longer be able to operate. I am one of the most effective and best-known superheroes. Reveal my secret and you will destroy the public’s confidence in all of us.”

He walked away then, scooped up Thalamus’ unconscious body in his long arms and carried him to an ambulance.

I only met Apex a few more times after that. We spoke, but only on neutral topics. Then the events of Mystery Day happened, and suddenly there were no more superhumans, heroes or otherwise.

I told Hesperus everything that night, as I understood it. Afterward, we spoke about it often, but only between ourselves. We never told anyone else how Apex had betrayed us. How it had been for nothing—with myself and Hesperus out of the team, the Footsoldiers disbanded. Octavian was still tied to his wife’s business schedule, and the injuries Thalamus received from Spite’s attack kept him out of commission for a couple of months.

We visited Thalamus in the hospital, and he knew that we knew about Apex. He filled in the missing details about Apex’s background, swore us to silence.

Hesperus and I worked together for a while, but it wasn’t long before we drifted apart. Sure, we still liked each other and got along, but our personal lives were quite different, and the bonds of Apex’s secrets were either too small or too great to keep us together.

And now the greatest secret of the superhumans—that we didn’t all die or vanish on Mystery Day—has become public knowledge.

There are still many more secrets. Some of them you will never know, but this one . . . Apex’s greatest secret, and his greatest fear . . . This one I shall tell you now.

There is something that makes us superhuman. We don’t know what it is. But there are a few of us who know that this process is not as selective as one might think. It chooses people seemingly at random.

Apex wasn’t one of them.

He wasn’t a superhuman.

He was the result of an experiment conducted in Max Dalton’s labs by Thalamus. The purpose of the experiment was to test certain subjects to see whether a tissue graft from a known superhuman would allow the recipient to gain superhuman abilities.

There had been twenty-three failures—each one named for successive letters of the alphabet—before they found success.

Thalamus had donated some of his own stem cells. They were cloned, grown into brain tissue, inserted into the unwilling—and unknowing—subjects. The twenty-fourth one worked, but they were never able to successfully repeat the experiment.

For reasons they could never fathom, Apex was the only one that worked. Some of the other subjects had died; most had simply shown no effects. But Apex . . . He was a triumph of genetic engineering and just plain luck. His mental and physical development was staggering. Within a year of the experiment he was smarter than the average man and much, much stronger. A further year and he was almost as powerful as Titan.

But Thalamus and the other scientists knew that they couldn’t keep Apex a secret. He was just too good, too powerful. At the same time, they couldn’t reveal what they had done.

So they fashioned a costume for him to disguise his real shape. They gave him an opaque helmet so that no one would ever see his face.

And they let experiment number twenty-four out into the world. They didn’t even have to change his name, because the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet is X.

All in all, it’s a pretty good name for a superhero. Ape-X.

 

 

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