Chapter Text
The girl in front of me is a slender redhead with startling green eyes and a solid Tier 4 powerset. Not quite enough juice to hit the big leagues, but nothing to sneeze at either. According to her file, she could electrocute a small kaiju and still have enough voltage left in her limbic system to jumpstart a 747. A heroine like her could take down a hundred wanna-be muggers without breaking a sweat.
Not that you’d be able to tell, looking at her now. Her eyes won’t meet mine. Her fingers pull tightly at the emergency mylar blanket draped over her shoulders, the material crinkling like foil. Her left knee is jittering like crazy. I’m no psych behavioral expert but I don’t need to be to tell that she’s in a bad place right now.
“I understand that there’s been a lot of people in to see you already,” I tell her as gently as possible. “I’ll try to make this as quick as possible.”
She nods, once, jerkily, like a bird.
“Lia Vaughn, 22 years old, from the seaport neighborhood, Tier 4 electrodynamic kinesis abilities. Is that all correct?”
Another nod.
“Can you tell me, in your own words, what happened last night?”
I can see her flinch, like I’d pointed a loaded gun at her. Or worse. The last thing she wants is to go over the whole incident yet another time. But she steels herself, draws a long, shaky breath, and starts.
“I was on patrol,” says Lia, staring at nothing. “Along my usual route. Harborside.”
“I know it. Rough neighborhood.”
“And I’m a goddamn superhero,” snaps Lia, eyes flaring electric blue, and for a second, I see her. The real her. The hero she was, every day of her life up until this day. For that second, she reminds me of the young woman I was ten years ago, when I was just starting out. A little shorter, a little flatter, but I can see the same fire.
And then the blue fades, and so does she. She crumples, folding in on herself. Shoulders slouching, spine shrinking. Like there’s something broken inside.
It’s a painful thing to watch.
I know there’s nothing weak about her. She’s stronger and quicker than the average Olympian. She’s fought city-ending villains without a second’s hesitation. She’s made of the real stuff, the stuff that nobody can teach you about being a hero.
But it’s something someone can take away.
“I’m sorry,” she says at last. She’s looking at her feet, not me. “I… I didn’t mean to snap.”
“Don’t apologize. I know how difficult this must be. But it’s important that we get all the details right.”
“Of… of course.” But the steel is gone. The fire in her eyes is snuffed out completely, and for the first time, I contemplate the possibility that this promising young heroine may never be the same again. That there are some things you can’t heal from, ever. “It was around one in the morning,” says Lia. “There was a girl. And… a guy.”
The age-old story. I wave my hand, and a pen and notepad materialize on my lap, as if by magic. “You saved her, I understand.”
Her lips twitch upward, in a corner, briefly. It’s not quite a smile. A mockery of one, maybe, as she remembers the moment.
“I told him to get away from her,” she recalls. “I told him to get away from her or I’d f-fry his nuts off.”
“Who was he?” I ask.
“He was nobody!” she spat, furious with him, with the world. But most of all, herself. I can see the self-disgust writing itself across her face. “A goddamn frat boy or something, he was drunk, he didn’t even know who I was. I had the costume on and everything and he didn’t take me seriously at all.”
I write her description down. “He was armed?”
Lia shakes her head as though nauseated. “Barely. Just a pocket knife, or something. Some piece of junk. He even threw it away when he saw me.”
“I see,” I say carefully.
“And then…” A tremor runs through her whole frame. “And then he took it out.”
“Took what out?”
She wrestles with herself, for a long minute, before she screws her eyes shut as tight as they’ll go and finds the courage to say it. “The collar.” Her fingers go automatically to her neck. The marks are still there, skin chafed raw in a plain band of pink and red. “That f-fucking collar.”
I note everything carefully. The way she shudders, how she closes her eyes, traces the raw ring of skin across her throat. “Did he say anything about it?”
“He said he’d come prepared for… for someone like me. He threw away the knife and then h-he took… he took it out.” The emergency blanket over her is heaving with her breaths. She’s practically hyperventilating already, and there’s still so much I need from her. “He said he wanted to see if he g-got his m-money’s worth.”
She may be young yet she’s a woman who’s seen countless horrors, fought countless monsters. Saved countless lives under the heat of battle. And here she is, diminished to a sobbing wreck.
My knuckles tighten white around the pen. But I keep my voice calm, and smooth. For her sake. “And then what happened?”
“I, I don’t know. I didn’t know what t-to make of him, I thought he was f-fucking batshit or high or something.” She tries her best to laugh but it comes out choked. Strangled. “He just came at me and I didn’t want to kill him, I tried to move out of the way but he was f-fast, and, and then…”
“Did he touch you with it?” I ask.
“He clipped me, think. Along my arm, or, or my torso or something. He didn’t… he didn’t get me… yet. But he must’ve touched me with it, yeah.”
The doctors had already confirmed it. Bruising on the lower bicep, consistent with the size and mass of the object. First contact.
“And then what happened?”
Lia’s practically curled up in a ball, in her chair. Standard post-trauma instinct, to protect the vitals and reduce potential attack vectors.
“I tried,” she says quietly. So quietly I can barely hear her. “I tried to zap him. Just enough, to get him to back off. Maybe incapacitate him, to take him in.” She tries to control her breathing. She makes a valiant effort of it. One breath, two breaths, three, and then she’s collapsed again into heartwrenching, soulcrushing tears. “Nothing happened,” she says. “I couldn’t do it.”
I want to reach out to touch her, to hug her. To make her feel better, somehow. To say the right thing that would make everything all better. That’s what heroes do, isn’t? Make things right. Fix things. But I’m no healer. And I have no idea how to even begin putting Lia ‘Voltgirl’ Vaughn back together again.
“I couldn’t do it,” she repeats. She’s talking to herself now, more than me. “It j-just wasn’t working anymore. Like my p-powers had been sw-switched off. I reached and there was n-nothing there. I tried, I swear, I really tried…”
“I know you did,” I tell her. “Everyone knows you did.”
“I don’t know what happened,” pleads Lia even though I haven’t accused her of anything. “I c-couldn’t even… not even a spark, and then… a-and then he was on me, and then he…” She swallows. “H-he put it… around my neck…”
“Did you notice anything odd about it?” I don’t want to press her, but I have to. I have to trust that there’s enough of the old Voltgirl in there that she doesn’t snap entirely.
She just shakes her head, eyes hollow and empty. “Nothing at all. It was… cold. Cold metal.”
Goddamnit.
“Anything at all?” I ask. “Was there a noise, a glow, anything-”
She shakes her head harder. Violently. “Nothing. It was just… just fucking metal. That’s all. I didn’t think twice about it until he p-put it on me. Then there was…w-was… there was nothing I c-could do about… about…”
“Did you feel any different? Aside from your powers… disappearing. Physically, mentally, did you notice anything about yourself?”
But I’ve pushed too far. Lia’s gone. Hugging her knees to her chest, huddling under the thin foil sheet under the weight of the humiliation and shame and uselessness. I hate myself, in that moment, for not being the hero she needs. But I can’t fix her. I’m not that kind of hero. I have a different kind of mission.
“I’m sorry, Lia. I’m sorry I can’t do more.” I stand, touching her gently on the shoulder. A mistake in retrospect. She flinches away from me. She looks so small, like this. Small and helpless and… powerless. “But we’ll get whoever did this. I promise you.”
I can only imagine how horrifying it must be to have your powers stripped away. Akin to suddenly losing your sight, or your ability to speak. This intrinsic part of you that you’ve never questioned, never had reason to doubt - that has come to define you and your understanding of your own identity. Ripped away with such utter, complete totality that when you reach for it, you’re left grasping at nothing at all. All because of a simple, stupid, power suppression collar.
The only problem is, power suppression collars don’t exist.
–
I step inside the command room, where a half-dozen other heroines are already gathered. A monitor screen the size of a wall shows the camera feed from Lia’s room. The poor girl huddles in the corner of her cot, larger than life.
“Show me the video again,” I tell them. Wintress taps a few buttons and the screen switches to a grainy CCTV recording of an alley. Even with our technology, the camera quality remains poor - artificially upscaled and colorized to a scant 1080p.
The video plays. A young man with the appearance of an unemployed college dropout stumbles into frame, with a girl in tow. If she isn’t a hooker, she’s doing a good job dressing like one. Tottering on too-high heels, mini tube top to go with her mini skirt. I don’t believe in ‘she asked for it’ rhetoric, but several of my colleagues purse their lips at the sight. I get it. When your job is to save civilians from dastardly crime day in and day out, you begin to wish the civilians could do themselves a favor sometimes.
In any case, she’s clearly not interested. There’s no audio, but the automated subtitles generate based on the movements of her lips. No. Stop it. I said, I don’t want to. Please, don’t do this.
It doesn’t matter that she’s drunk, or that he’s drunk, or that her skirt is about two centimeters from showing everyone in the room what color her panties are. No is no. Rape is rape. He’s committing a class A felony.
Cue Voltgirl’s dramatic entrance. She emerges from the darkness, eyes crackling with electricity, hands balled into fists. In her powersuit, she looks every inch the fearsome guardian angel. She’s completely unrecognizable, after seeing the girl curled up into a ball under a foil blanket. On the monitor, she speaks wordlessly. Get away from her.
The man turns to her, dumb enough that his lips curl up in a smirk.
And who the fuck are you?
If she takes offense at him not recognizing the bolt emblazoned on her chest, she doesn’t show it. I’m not going to ask you twice.
He shoves the girl away, and his hand glints with knife-edged steel. Then he tosses that aside too.
Voltgirl narrows her eyes in confusion, but she doesn’t back away. She doesn’t take one step back even when he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a plain steel circle. He does a little baby monologue, about how he was hoping to come across one of you ‘supe bitches’ one of these days, how he’s been looking forward to this. He asks if she knows what this thing does. Voltgirl says whatever he’s got isn’t going to stop her from putting him away. He sneers at her, spits on the ground (disgusting habit) and goes on about how he’s spent good money on this thing, he could probably take her without it, she doesn’t look so tough, et cetera, so on and so forth. The usual tripe. It doesn’t interest me at all. I focus in on the collar in his hand.
On camera, it looks absolutely, completely, utterly normal. It gleams like stainless steel, or some cheap alloy. It has no glow or buzz of latent energy within it. According to our sensors, no types of radiation affect the camera feed. There is nothing special about the collar at all.
Except when he lunges forward, catching her by surprise, and the metal brushes against her arm -
And the electricity in her eyes winks out.
She gasps as she reaches for her power, and finds nothing at all. She’s reeling from the unimaginable, throws out a hand in desperation.
Nothing.
Not a single spark.
She backs away but he’s already pressing his advantage. She’s still good, still a trained combatant - she ducks reflexively under his wild haymaker, but she’s distracted and sluggish on her recovery and eats his right hook with her face, She staggers back and the collar is hinged open, reaching out towards her like a gaping maw, and then-
-it’s all over.
She’s pinned with her back against a brick wall. Eyes wide with fear. Shaking her head back and forth like she doesn’t believe what’s happening to her. Watching the feed now, I can barely believe what’s happening to her. None of the women around me can either. I can feel the rage in the room, roiling and seething like steam off of them.
But there’s fear too.
They watch what happens next, without so much as blinking. They’ve seen it before - this will be the tenth or so rewatch of this particular incident. Everyone wants to know as much as they can about what happened to Lia, as horrific and violating as the footage is.
She tries to fight the man off, physically. Kicking and bucking like a wild animal against him. Everything you’re supposed to do in that situation. He’s got a foot of height and maybe eighty pounds on her. He decks her across the face again and she stops struggling quite as much. Even when he pulls her suit down to start groping at her tits, she barely lifts a hand to stop him. I’ve seen it before. It’s a trauma response, like a deer freezing in headlights. A victim retreating into herself to escape from the situation. I’ve just never seen it from a superheroine before.
He doesn’t like it very much. He slaps her around a bit, until she starts crying, and starts apologizing. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please don’t hurt me. Please. I’m sorry for trying to stop you. He gets one hand wrapped deep in her hair and snakes one hand down her suit, between her legs.
Even in this piss-poor camera quality, I can see clear as day how wide his grin gets.
Fucking superslut getting off on this, aren’t you?
No I’m not, please don’t-
You’re goddamn dripping down there.
No, it’s not, I don’t, I don’t want this, please don’t make me-
I fucking knew it. All you bitches are the same. Prancing around, just waiting for a real man to show you your place.
What? No, no, no, please, stop, please, don’t do-
I want to look away before she screams. I want to look away, every time. I’m sure I’m not the only one. I don’t want to watch the poor girl as she discovers what rape feels like. I don’t want to watch the moment that will demand years and years of therapy to get through.
I don’t look away, because I can’t. Because somewhere, somehow, there’s a key to understanding what this goddamn collar is and how it’s stripping her power, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up now.
She is wet. There’s no denying that. His cock pistons in and out of her, practically center framed in the camera feed, glistening with the tell-tale sign of lubrication. It’s a natural stimulus response to penetration. It doesn’t mean that Voltgirl likes it, wants it, accepts it. Even as the heroine starts whimpering, breathing ragged breathes before mewling short, pathetic noises as she cums around his cock, her body betraying her utterly. She cums, and he keeps raping her. Because he hasn’t cum yet. He isn’t finished with her. He shoves her up against a dumpster I can practically smell through the monitor and fucks her like a five-dollar whore. Her eyes go glassy with terror and despair and sheer powerlessness. Her fingers clench and unclench, as though if she tries just hard enough her powers will come back to her.
They don’t.
She snaps out of it, for an instant, when he pulls out to fuck her ass. No, please, you can’t, I’ve never-
He pulls on her hair like a leash, arching her back until she’s crying out in pain, like he’s having the time of his life. Shut the fuck up and be a good fucking rapebitch, supe.
And then he rapes her anal virginity out of her, grinning to himself as he ruins this promising woman’s life just for the hell of it.
Please please please, stop, please stop, it hurts so bad, please-
Shoulda thought about that before you put on the spandex.
Please, you don’t have to do this, just stop, just let me- wait, no NO NO PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T, THAT HURTS SO FUCKING BAD, PLEASE, I’LL BE GOOD, I PROMISE, PLEASE, PLEASE-
That’s right. Beg for me. I like it better when you’re begging. Gets me so fucking hard. Come on, keep going. Unless you want me to hurt you more.
Please… sir. Please, don’t… don’t stop raping me. Please, just fuck me, as hard as you want. Please just don’t hurt me sir. You can… can rape me as much as you want sir. Please.
There you go. There’s a good bitch. I knew you had in you.
He drags her down to her knees by her hair, ripping off her mask just so he can ejaculate across her face. To leave her physically marked by what he’s just done to her, because the mental damage just wasn’t enough for her. He makes her clean his shaft off in her mouth. She doesn’t fight back. She bobs her head up and down, eyes empty, face dripping white gluey strings. As broken as broken gets. She doesn’t even flinch as he snaps a few pictures as a memento - before jamming the mask back over her face and over all the cum and snapping a few more pictures, just to make sure it’s clear that the girl he raped wasn’t just just any girl, but a super-powered hero.
The pen in my hand snaps in two.
Wintress ends the feed and the monitor goes black. She turns to look at me. “Anything?”
“Maybe.” I try to keep my tone as neutral as possible, because there had been absolutely nothing useful in the video. “Did the techs get anything interesting out of the crime scene?”
She shakes her head. “Not a damn thing.”
“How about the perp?”
“We’re still looking. He can’t hide forever.”
Shit.
Behind Wintress, Captain Paladia’s staring at me, and I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. “Everybody out,” she says. “I need a private word with Materielle.”
One by one, the heroines file out of the room. Wintress touches me on the shoulder as she goes, before the door closes behind her.
Captain Paladia is an imposing woman, physically and otherwise. Like if you crossed a Navy SEAL with a supermodel. Six foot even in her boots, lithe musculature carved like marble even through her white-silver powersuit. There isn’t an official hierarchy among the heroes in the Corps, but if there was, she’s near the top.
“You need to get to the bottom of this,” says Paladia, like I don’t already know.
“I’m trying.”
“It’s not a criticism,” she says bluntly. “I’m reassigning you full-time to this case and elevating your access permissions. You’ll have carte blanche. Full backing of the Corps, for you to do whatever you need to do to figure this out.”
She’s skating around the words, but I can read between the lines. She’s giving me permission to apply ‘extrajudicial’ methods, guaranteeing me full immunity for whatever it takes to solve whatever the hell’s going on here. Desperate times, desperate measures. “I can’t say I feel fully comfortable-”
“She’s the fifth heroine this month,” Paladia says. Flatly. “This isn’t a one-off incident anymore. It’s become a pattern, and we need to end it before it gets any bigger.”
“I’m aware of the situation.”
“Then don’t fight me on this.” Her eyes are like twin silver lances. “We’re talking about an existential threat. To us, and the world we protect. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let another girl become a victim to these things.”
“I said I’m aware of the situation.” I keep my voice as flat as hers. “But I’m going to do this investigation my way. I have rules. We all do.”
Her eyes flash. “You have three doctorates and the most powerful transmutation powerset in the world, so no, you don’t get to wuss out on ‘moral standing’. You’re the most qualified hero I have on the team to figure out what these things are, so don’t give me excuses.” She tosses me a plastic bag, and I catch it out of the air reflexively before I even realize what it is. And when I do, every bone in my body is screaming at me to drop it. “Give me results.”
Captain Paladia stalks out of the command, leaving me alone with a sealed evidence bag containing nothing except a simple steel collar.
–
My lab, to some extent, is my home. I spend more time down here in the basement level of the Hall Industries tower than I probably should, though for someone with my type of abilities, I’d argue research is something of a necessity.
I pull over an overhead lamplight and snap on white latex gloves before opening the evidence bag. Slowly, carefully, I reach in and extract the collar. Again, I’m struck by how completely normal it feels. Slightly cold, through the latex. Weighty, but appropriate for a ring of solid steel. But it’s just steel. There’s nothing else to it.
I put it next to the four others.
The four others that we know of, at least. The four identical artifacts directly responsible for the defeat and rape of four talented, brave superheroines, now all out of commission for the foreseeable future.
I’ve catalogued them all. Put them through the same wringer of spectrography analysis, material assaying, x-rays, gamma rays, ultra-violet rays, arcane divination, every goddamn examination under the sun. Hundreds of times over.
They’re all just plain stainless steel.
There’s literally nothing interesting about them. They’re the same stuff your fridges or countertops or saucepans are made of. They’re cold rolled, unmarked bands of steel that hinge open on one side and lock shut on the other. They’re durable, but not any more so than you’d expect steel to be. There are no hidden components, batteries, runic glyphs.
And yet, simple physical contact is enough to completely suppress any superhuman abilities. Which makes no sense at all.
Think about it. Superpowers come in a million different forms. Some people are born with them, some people get them from a freak accident, or infected by a space virus, or get a spell cast on them, or get bitten by a radioactive arthropod. Some aren’t even people but extraterrestrials who somehow look exactly the same as earthlings. There is no single ‘superpower’ switch that can be flipped on or off. The concept is absurd. It’s so absurd it’s ridiculous.
And yet this very phenomenon has been verified across the five documented cases, and even more in the testing bouts we’ve done. Every single superheroine who touches a collar is reduced to a completely vanilla human. It lasts for longer than you’d expect, minutes or up to hours. The victims are physically, medically fine. There’s nothing abnormal about them. There are no indications of bodily damage, or any sort of harm. For all intents and purposes, all subjects appear completely healthy. Except for the fact that they are rendered entirely powerless.
The first one appeared four and a half weeks ago, when 28-year old metamorph Anne Harris confronted a mugger lurking in the backalley bowels of 40th Street. We found her two days later, naked and concussed and leaking the semen of eleven different men from various holes, chained up in a portapotty with the remnants of her supersuit clogging the toilet. A band of metal fastened around her neck. Before that day, nobody had ever seen or heard of anything like it.
The natural question: where did it come from? And try as I might, I’ve found no clues at all. Every single collar has been identically frustrating. There’s traces of minerals that suggest a Chinese manufacturing plant, but some metallurgic hints towards an origin in Rust Belt, yet microbial evidence that maybe South American ore is involved. Four and a half weeks later and I still have no idea where these damn things are coming from.
But I slide the fifth collar under the scope, because there’s no way in hell that I’m going to give up on the five girls who may never put on the mask again. I subject the collar to every test I can think of. I sample and scrape and blast the molecules until I have proved, conclusively and irrefutably, that they are nothing but plain, mundane, stainless steel.
I shove myself back in my chair, groaning. Glaring at the confounding ring lying on my desk, beneath millions of dollars of cutting edge equipment.
“Another one?”
I didn’t even hear her come in. But I’m glad she’s here. She comes up behind me, wrapping her arms around my midsection as she leans down and plants a kiss on the top of my head.
“Another one,” I tell her.
Reina Hall kisses me again, and says, “You’ll get him. I know you will.”
I know she’s just trying to make me feel better. I’m determined not to. “How did your day go?”
“My day?” She laughs, and the heaviness in my heart lifts ever so slightly. “Acquisition paperwork and lawyer talk? About as exciting as usual. Don’t change the subject on me. You’re getting in your head about this, I can tell.”
“She’s 22, Reina. She’s 22 and some random asshole put a collar on her and she’ll never be the same again. I don’t know if she’ll ever take up heroing again. And I can’t figure out how it happened. I want to get this guy more than anything in the world but I don’t see how.”
She spins my chair around, forcing me to look at her. So I look at her. My girlfriend is gorgeous, every inch of her. Long, straight, chestnut hair falling like a veil - she knows I love it when she takes her hair down. As much as I love her wearing her armor - an impeccably tailored business suit built for the board room, cut lean and mean along her subtle curves. That’s her in a nutshell. Strong and subtle and everything in between. Her grey eyes flash as she looks at me. “None of that. You’re going to catch him, Maddie. You hear me? These villains are all the same. Overconfident sons of bitches. He’s going to mess up, make the wrong move, and you’re going to take him down. The same way you took down the Tyrant.”
“I’m telling you, this feels different. The Tyrant wanted control, power, money - whoever’s behind this is a different animal.”
“And you’ll put him behind bars too. Anything new with this collar?”
“No. Nothing. Nothing about it makes any sense.”
“Do you need more equipment?”
“The equipment isn’t the problem. The problem is I don’t know what the hell this thing is doing. It’s just steel. Completely ordinary steel, like the others. How is plain steel suppressing superpowers?”
“Maybe it isn’t the steel. Maybe there was a coating on it, that wears off or evaporates after a while.”
“There’s no coating. We ran tests on the skin samples from the girls. No results. It’s something about the metal, but there’s nothing wrong with the metal. I don’t understand it.”
“Did you eat yet?”
“What? I’ve-”
“Been working. I figured. You’ve been down here three hours. I checked. Come on, you’re taking a break.”
“This is important.”
“Yes, it is, so I’m not going to have you burning yourself out before you have to fight the bad guy. Come on, I got takeout. I want to hear about your day over dinner. You’ve got two minutes to finish up and get your pretty ass up to the kitchen, or I’m selling your lab to MIT.”
I scowl at her, but Reina just winks in return. It is her skyscraper, after all. I raise a hand and a pillow materializes out of thin air for me to throw at her - which she dodges nimbly with a smirk. “One more pillow,” she warns, “and I’m selling it to Brown instead.”
The only downside to being married to a genius billionaire heiress who spends her days running a multinational technology corporation is that she’s completely unimpressed by my superheroing.
–
It’s late at night when I arrive at the gym. I usually don’t work out this late but I’m itching to blow off some steam. Clear my head. Work a muscle that isn’t my brain.
The Hero Corps’ gym is a monumental room filled with specialized equipment for the multitudes of superheroes who want to keep their abilities sharp and bodies in shape. Hyperdense weights, enchanted resistance bands, treadmills that cost millions of dollars just to upkeep. It’s ordinarily a bustling, busy space.
The room is almost empty. Almost. There’s only one other person here, a sculpted specimen of a woman, benching approximately two Humvee’s worth of plates and barely breaking a sweat. Her hands and arms shine like titanium as she lifts and lowers the bar - because they are. Her powerset is unique, even among superheroes. I can conjure metal practically out of thin air but even I can’t physically transform my body into a supertough alloy. I’ve seen Paladia walk out of the blast crater of a Tomahawk missile, completely unharmed and gleaming silver. But she’d looked pissed, though.
“Evening,” says Captain Paladia.
“Evening,” I say back.
I slip the duffel to the floor and start stretching. I don’t have anything for her, and she knows it. She doesn’t blame me for it either. She’s just frustrated. We both are.
She racks her weight and stands to her full height, the titanium draining from her skin. Leaving her looking like a completely ordinary Victoria’s Secret model. “How’s Ms. Hall?”
“Reina’s good.” I walk over to the squat rack and do a few warmups. “Busy. Finishing up an acquisition.”
“Damn,” says Paladia, smirking. “How many companies does she need?”
“Girl’s gotta have a hobby.” I settle into position and flex my fingers, and will a metal bar into materializing over my shoulders, along with just enough weight to make me grunt. My powerset isn’t exactly on the physical side - I won’t be benching cars any time soon. But I’m still about as fit as an average Olympian athlete. Maybe a touch more. I start myself off at six hundred pounds and figure I can work my way up from there. “And don’t complain. She’s the one signing all our checks.”
“I wouldn’t dream of complaining.” Paladia lifts a dumbbell that weighs triple of me and starts curling it with one arm. “Rich, smart, and hot? Some girls get all the luck.”
“I thought you were going out with, what’s her name, Starshot? Silkshot?” No, not all superheroines date women. But with the type of crimes you see with our jobs, it’s not a surprise most do.
“Songshot? Old news,” says the superheroine, with a grin, like it’s the old days and we’re just shooting the shit with no existential threat hanging over our heads. “And she didn’t have half the ass Rich Girl does.”
Who am I kidding? There’s always been an existential threat. DoomSayer, Universalis, the Tyrant - we hardly ever have a moment of real peace. We live and breathe the fight between good and evil.
But this one does feel different. More personal. More targeted, somehow, at us. Not at the world at large, but its protectors.
“That’s my Rich Girl’s ass,” I fire back. “Go get your own.”
I ease into my set, sinking into the burn. Letting the exertion wash over me. It’s gratifying, at least, to feel some sort of progress towards anything. I get through eight reps before Paladia walks up.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s talk.”
“No thanks,” I grunt.
“Don’t be a bitch,” says the Captain.
“I’m just here to lift some weights.”
“I’m apologizing for earlier.”
I lift the weight back up and slide it back onto the rack. “You don’t need to. We’re both just doing our jobs.”
“These damn things just have everyone on edge.”
“I know.”
“It’s bad enough that they exist. But it’s not the worst thing about them. I think you think that too.”
Unfortunately, I know exactly what she’s talking about. “I don’t understand the game behind them.”
“Exactly,” says Paladia. “Whoever made these things has to be smart enough to understand what they could do with them. With the element of surprise, and an actual plan. But instead these things are showing up in the hands of street trash. Petty thieves, robbers, rapists - it doesn’t make any sense.”
“None of it does.” That’s the problem with the whole case. The pieces are there but none of them fit together.
“They’re just steel, aren’t they?” Captain Paladia is one of the few people on the planet with an understanding of metallurgy that rivals mine. I might be the foremost materials science expert on the team, but there’s something about being able to turn into metal that makes you want to understand the stuff a little better. “Nothing new, nothing added.”
“Just steel,” I confirm. “No special sauce.”
She grimaces, tossing perfect silver-blonde tresses over one shoulder. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
None of us have.
We stand there in the gym, alone. The room is massive yet the emptiness feels claustrophobic, somehow. As if within the Hero Corps tower itself, at the heart of our power, there’s still a sense of dread that none of us can shake.
Or maybe I’m just paranoid.
But as the saying goes: are you paranoid if they really are out to get you?
“Have you tried it?” Paladia says suddenly. I’m not sure where the question comes from.
“No. Of course not. Have you?”
She shrugs. “Of course. I had to try it. You aren’t even a little curious?”
I look at her blankly. “Curious about what?”
“How it feels,” says Paladia as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
I don’t know what to say to that, so I settle for laughing. “I can’t imagine anything worse.”
“That’s the point,” she says. “To see what the worst possible thing feels like.” She shudders. “It really is… that horrible. It’s terrifying. I’ve never felt anything like it before. It’s more subtle than I thought. You don’t feel anything, any different at all, until you try something, and it doesn’t happen.”
I try to contemplate what she’s describing. Like trying to stand, only to realize your legs no longer work. Or trying to speak, only to realize your tongue won’t form words.
“Thanks but no thanks,” I tell her. “I’ve seen enough of it already. I’ll pass.”
She smiles at me, a lopsided smirk that would’ve sent my heart flipflopping if I wasn’t a happily taken woman, thank you very much. “You think I’ve gone off the deep end, don’t you?”
“If I did, I’d tell you.”
Captain Paladia just shakes her head. “I didn’t do just for kicks. I wanted to see what it felt like so that when one of those fuckers tries to slip one on me…”
And in a silver flash, her entire form shifts to blazing, shimmering perfect metal. Liquid titanium, poured into the perfect form of a twenty-first century Valkyrie, beautiful and radiant. When she speaks, her voice echoes within itself in a beautiful chorus.
“I can show him exactly what it’s like.”
–
It’s four in the morning and I can’t sleep. I’m trying, but it’s not working. The silk sheets lie rumpled around me, Reina’s breathing form curled up against me. I stare up into black nothingness. I can’t get Lia out of my head. Or any of the other girls. Or even Captain Paladia, for that matter.
It’s terrifying.
Of course it’s terrifying. What else could it be.
I’ve never felt anything like it before.
My fingers twitch, and form around a stuffed bear plushy I’ve imagined in that moment. For as powerful as some of my fellow heroines were, I’ve never once wanted any other power than the one I have. What’s super speed or strength or flight next to the power of sheer imagination?
You don’t feel anything, any different at all until you try it.
I slip out of bed as quietly as I can. Reina murmurs something but doesn’t wake. I pull a robe off a hanger and make my way to the hidden elevator in our suite. The doors hiss open and shut quietly, something whirrs and then I’m speeding down, down all the floors, down to the basement level of my lab.
Everything’s how I left it. All the tools and scanners lie dormant, waiting.
I walk over to the fifth collar, still sitting on my workbench.
I should put on gloves, and probably three other protective layers.
I reach out and touch it with my bare fingers.
Nothing happens. The metal is smooth and cold to the touch, completely ordinary. Exactly what you’d expect out of a plain steel band.
I take a breath, a deep one, before unhooking the collar. I tilt my head to one side and brush my hair out of the way-
-and close the steel over my throat.
Nothing happens. My heart rate skyrockets, I can feel my pulse hammering at my heart, at my wrists, but nothing happens. I feel… entirely normal.
I extend a hand, and envision the same stuffed bear plushy.
Nothing happens.
I imagine it harder. Every detail, every bit of fuzz, down to the molecular level.
My palm remains empty, outstretched. Full of nothing but empty air.
And I start to panic. I’m gulping huge swallows of air, feeding my hyperventilating lungs, fingers scrabbling at my throat to unhook it, to get this fucking thing off me, knowing I’ve just made a huge mistake, I’ll never be able to get this thingoff, I’ll be powerless for the rest of my life-
-the collar comes off, and clatters uselessly to the floor.
I throw out my hand again. The bear springs to mind, and into my palm. I’ve never felt so happy to see something so ridiculous. I summon another one, and a third, and I hold them tight for a long moment, gasping for air, letting my heartrate settle back to normal.
The collar sits on the sterile floor, unmoving.
I stare it.
I don’t understand it. There’s nothing about it I don’t understand, and the effect is completely, inarguably real. But the effect itself is impossible. I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s something I’m missing, a key, fundamental component to all this that’s eluding me.
Slowly, I reach down and pick up the collar.
I brush my hair out of the way again.
I fasten the collar over my neck. The hinge works smoothly, the catch clicks shut.
I reach out a palm, and imagine the bear, and nothing happens. I imagine a million different objects, picturing them in my head, and none of them appear.
I close my eyes, and sit like that.
Powerless.
Helpless.
I breathe in, and out, trying to calm myself. Attune to the sensation my body is feeling.
For some reason, I recall a memory from long ago. Nearly fifteen years ago now, before the particle collider accident that gave me my powers and my new life. I was a freshman in college at the time, on a shiny scholarship and a head full of wonder. I used to study with a guy, a friend, I guess you could call him. We were friendly, after all. I’d never meant for it to be more than that, but he’d interpreted our relationship differently. One night after finals, after a few drinks, he leaned over and tried to kiss me. We were both sitting on the couch, and I can still remember the weight of him pressing down on me, over me, my eyes going wide as I felt the sheer difference in mass between us. I was a tall girl, but he was taller, and bigger, and I panicked in that moment. I tried to get him off, and he didn’t realize what I was doing, because he was drunk or something, and it took him a minute to back off and let me go. He was apologetic about it, but I don’t think he ever really understand what had just happened.
I don’t know I ever really understood it either.
In any case, our relationship was never really the same after that. I never told him I wasn’t into guys. I just let the friendship fade, and we stopped hanging out until gradually I never even really thought about him again.
Until now, for some odd reason.
Then I hear the elevator descending, and my eyes fly open, and I scrabble at the collar again before I even know what I’m doing. I barely tear it off me and set it back on the bench, innocently, before the doors hiss open and Reina comes padding out.
“Maddie, do you know what time it is?”
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep.”
“It’s okay. I just…” She’s full of compassion, and understanding, but I can see the frustration on her face. Her inability to help me. “This is really getting to you, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is.”
“I know, I didn’t mean to-” She looks away and bites her lip. I didn’t mean to snap. I feel like an asshole.
“I’m sorry. I’ll come back to bed.”
“It’s okay. I have to be up soon anyway.”
She looks at the collar on the table, and at me again. She’s not dumb.
“I’m telling you,” I say. “I’m okay. Really. I just wanted to try some new tests.”
“Anything?” says Reina.
“Nothing.”
She touches my shoulder. “I’m going to get dressed. You should come up too.”
“You’re right. I will.”
As she heads back towards the elevator, I can’t help but look at the collar one last time as I stand. And as I do, there’s a peculiar sensation, and I realize with horrifying clarity that there’s a damp spot on the leather seat of my chair. Where I’d been sitting, with the collar around my throat. It hadn’t been there when I’d first sat. I look down only to see the glistening wetness painting my inner thighs, and my heartrate spikes again.
It takes all my willpower to tear my attention away from the collar and to give Reina a weak, reassuring smile, and to follow her to the elevator, tightening my robe around me, even as my head whirls round and round at a hundred miles per second.
Because something very, very wrong is going on here, and there’s something very, very wrong with me.