The man, thin to the point of looking skeletal, stood in front of the room shirtless. The left half of his body was of a handsome, athletic man with Nordic features, while the entire right side of his body was covered with a blackish-blue fungus with the occasional gray, orb-shaped outgrowth.

“Um…” the man stuttered. Then, in a confident, steady voice, he recited, “I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?”

Jeremy smiled and applauded sincerely. “Great job, Contagion. I can tell you worked hard on your lines. You got the part.”

Grinning, Contagion dramatically bowed and exited Jeremy’s office with a skip and a jump. During the performance, Jeremy had heard a low groan. Thankfully, Contagion seems to have been oblivious. He turned to a supply closet, which was large enough to be a New York apartment. Past the door was Dr. Gilman, slumped to the floor, dreaming a dream the Redeemer Arc gave him of becoming an award-winning doctor. He was reciting a speech to the graduating class of Harvard University, apparently to the acclaim of his wife (who divorced him years ago in real life).

Despite himself, Jeremy sighed. It really was a shame he had to do this. However, even with the success of the Redeemer Arc, which surpassed even his own expectations, Dr. Gilman had gotten feet so cold they might as well have been encased in ice. He threatened in considerable and unnecessary detail to alert the authorities at a very early delicate stage of the experiment. So, what choice did Jeremy have? His work was too invaluable to be derailed by a squabble over ethics. And he knew, once his work was allowed to come to fruition, Dr. Gilman would repent. In fact, he’d probably try to claim he supported the Redeemer Arc project all along. Maybe then Jeremy would be magnanimous and allow him to claim some credit. Certainly, he could afford to be when the time finally came.

For now, though, Mr. Gilman’s role was simply the former director of what used to be Oxrun Asylum and was now the Oxrun Reformatory. Jeremy was still not aware of the limitations of the Redeemer Arc and could not yet safely test them. In the meantime, this closet would be Dr. Gilman’s home, and he should be thankful that Jeremy programmed the Redeemer Arc to remain him to use the bathroom.

“Mr. Sanchez?!” A voice heavy with confusion rose from behind him. It was the voice of Jon, the resident janitor, with a push-cart beside him. “What’s wrong with him?!”

“Vinegar September cordovan fifty-nine.” As soon as those words came out, Jon stopped still, as if a switch in his brain had been turned off. In a way, it had. The Redeemer Arc had programmed everyone in its power with a series of unlikely code words that would stun the consciousness of the hearer. Instinctively, Jeremy’s hand cradled the Mantra gem he kept in the pocket. He had long gotten used to the idea of claiming it for himself, despite what had been done to him. But something about the gem scared him as much as it fascinated him. Still, though, he had read somewhere that an ancestor of Jon’s stole the gem. So he was only perpetuating a tradition.

Slowly and firmly, Jeremy said to Jon. “You do not see a man there and you will never notice that man again until I say otherwise.”

Jon did not move. Jeremy began to worry something had gone wrong when Jon suddenly nodded his head. “Whatever you say, Principal Sanchez.”

With a smile and a “good day”, Jeremy stepped out of the office. Jon picked up the waste basket to dispose of its contents in the push-cart. Then, as he pushed the cart down the hallway, a black-haired boy in a strange, fancy tunic stood in the hallway, blocking Jon’s path.

“Um, I need to…” he muttered.

“No, you don’t,” the boy said with a rigid expression. “I can’t explain. I’m more tired than I have been my entire life, even that time I pulled an all-nighter before the final exam in that godawful Theory of Subconscious Symbolism class but anyway, and my head feels like it might explode, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to do this again, so just listen. The gem is in Jeremy’s front-right pocket. Take it the first chance you get.”

Without knowing why at all, Jon agreed.

***

Hercules woke up on a bare, mattress, stained with what he hoped was food and blood. It wouldn’t be the first time, but he was not used to waking up in such confusion while sober. It was not long before his rage returned to him and thoughts of that night when Amar laid against his chest, speaking of his past as a supercriminal and how many enemies he had made. Then, Hercules vowed he would never let anyone hurt him. He had failed that vow.

As he let his anger dissolve what was left of his confusion, Hercules saw himself in a room with bare, cracked white walls. The sole decorations were faded newspaper headlines. THE REAPER “EXPERIMENTS” ON NURSING HOME RESIDENTS. SAINT-OR-SINNER HELPS SERIAL KILLER ESCAPE FROM OXRUN. RAMPAGE BY “THE MANNEQUIN” CLAIMS ENTIRE FAMILY.  16 FOUND DEAD, AZALEA SUSPECTED.

As Hercules read, what sounded like a young girl’s voice but…off squeaked from the corner of the room. “He put those all over the house. It’s supposed to be for our rehabilitation. But how is it for our rehabilitation when we never get to leave?”

In a dark corner was a middle-aged woman, who nonetheless talked and had the mannerisms of a prepubescent girl. She wore a bizarre dress that seemed to have been sewn together from pieces of fabric torn as ragged squares, all from discordant colors and patterns. Hercules also could not help but notice black platform shoes that would have been fashionable sometime around the 1930s and stringy white hair tied in a long, disheveled ponytail. Her hands were busy methodically making another dress for a naked doll sitting next to her. One by one, she pulled a doll’s dress from a pile, cut a square from it, and sewed it to a chaotic hodgepodge of fabrics she already made.

Hercules spoke to her in a tone like an adult would a lost child. “I’m Heracles. Who are you?”

“Um, on sheets of paper my name is Rhian Marsh, but my true name is the Patchwork Girl,” she replied indignantly, like this was the eighth time she had to explain all this to him. “And this is the Predatory House. You’re the first new resident we’ve had in years and years.”

The name “Predatory House” struck a nerve with Heracles. It was an unremarkable two-floor suburban house, “unremarkable” except for the fact that it was at least semi-sentient and teleported around the world, claiming victims. His sister often complained to him about how she and the Final Guard tried tracking it all over the world. It disappeared, apparently for good, but the fear that it was still killing just under the radar haunted her.

Now, he could brag to her that he found it himself, if he got out of this alive.

“We have to get out of here before this thing decides to…digest this.”

“The House won’t hurt us.” She still sounded exasperated.

“You yourself called it the Predatory House!”

Sighing, she gestured toward the walls and then the ceiling. “The bad guy who put us here called it the Box and said we’d just be kept here until we got fixed and we wouldn’t get eaten. And we weren’t.”

“We?” Hercules asked, choking down his impatience. “There’s more of you?”

The Patchwork Girl shook her head. “They took them all away, a few days ago. I was left behind because I drank so many of my own potions. I was a scientist once, you know, a very, very, very, very long time ago. So, my mind has become so enlightened they can’t wash my brain like they did the others.” She tapped a finger against her cranium for emphasis.

“And the house? How can you be sure it won’t hurt us?”

“We’ve all lived here for years and years and years. We can’t leave, but they give us food and the House has never hurt us like it did lots of people in the past.”

After awkwardly thanking her for her help, Hercules explored the house. The same bare walls covered with newspapers were everywhere with minimal furnishings everywhere. It had the look of a prison. Indeed, from what Heracles could gleam from the Patchwork Girl’s confused rambling, that’s indeed what it was. The layout was odd,  irrational, even impossible. In fact, he noticed that, dimensionally speaking, at least two rooms and one hallway shouldn’t have existed. There were enough rooms for 12 people individually, which was absurd enough in a two-floor structure.

All the doors were locked, except a large, oak door with carvings of Venus fly traps and sundews around the circular frame. “Clearly, you have no instinct for subtlety, Box or House or whatever you are.” Heracles punched the door so hard the entire house shook. No steel door, much less wood, should have survived his punch. Instead, the door proudly stood without a mark. He punched it again with force that had disabled tanks and collapsed buildings. Still nothing.

“I’m hungry.” The voice that came from behind did not sound pleading or questioning, but was simply offering a statement of fact.

“When did you last eat?”

“Five days and ten hours.”

Heracles stared back at the Patchwork Girl with disbelief.

“I haven’t had much of an appetite since I started drinking my potions. The board wouldn’t approve them for human experimentation, so I had to drink them all myself. And then when I turned the people who hurt me into stone by making them drink my special potion, they locked me up. I wasn’t happy again until I came here.”

Hercules knelt down, to get down on her level. Like with a timid animal, he kept a safe distance from her. “I know what it’s like to not have a home, a place where you can feel safe. My father once drove me from the home I’d grown to love. But we need to leave here, so you can survive and I can help my friends.”

The Patchwork Girl shook her head so vigorously her whole body shook. “No. This is the only home I’ve ever known. I can’t make my special potion that hurts people here, and that’s why I want to stay…”

“I understand, but there are a lot of people in danger. The people you lived with, my friends, a man I love very much and vowed to protect. We have to leave so I can help them and…and you have to leave so you can live and get healthy.”

The Patchwork Girl looked frightened, and Heracles was half-convinced that she would refuse to speak to him again while he would be left impotently punching the door and the walls. She paused for a long while, then, looking down at the floor, explained, “The House is, uh – what did the bad guy call it? – ‘a creature of the abstract, born out of Internet rumors and bad dreams.’ It eats ugly thoughts. But the bad guy lured it, trapped it, taught it how to feed without killing. That’s how he made a trap for all of us.”

“And you know all this how?”

“Because the House talked to me, duh. You only have to talk to it, but be nice.”

Sighing, Hercules said as politely as he could muster (which was not terribly polite), “Um, House? Or Box? Can we…talk? I have a request to ask of you.”

A small, fragile voice devoid of any emotion except a slight desperation echoed in his mind. “where is the food? most is gone. we haven’t killed the food but it’s gone.”

Heracles spoke aloud. “The…ah, ‘food’ was stolen. I can help you get it back, but you’ll have to help me, too. Can you teleport anywhere?”

There was a long pause. Heracles was about to repeat itself when the voice spoke again. “the body can move just think of a place a lot.”

“Fantastic. And, uh, many sincere apologies for pummeling your insides, House.”

***

It was a shame he had to put the entire psychiatric staff through the Redeemer Arc. No one could write the medical papers for him. As successful as the experiment had turned out to be, he still needed hard numbers to wow the Powers That Be. While Jeremy liked to think of himself as a Renaissance man, he lacked the knowledge and the patience to just learn how to mimic the language of medical experts.

Jeremy’s mind was so consumed with the problem he did not notice Jon standing around the corner nor did he take note of how wet the floor was. As soon as Jeremy got near the puddle of soapy water, Jon stepped forward from the corner and seemed to trip. His hand awkwardly grabbed at Jeremy’s midsection.

“God, I’m so sorry, Mr. Sanchez!”

Jeremy’s temper flared, but he held it in check. After all, Jon had been a janitor for less than a week. “That’s alright. Just please be careful. We can’t have a janitor who slips on his own jobs, yeah?”

Jon smiled stupidly and scurried away, probably hoping to avoid any further awkwardness. It was just as well, as Jeremy wanted to go back to contemplating the problem of evidence. Meanwhile, unseen to anyone, Jon clutched the Mantra gem in his hands. The words floated up to the surface of his consciousness: “Ul dinea.”

Beneath Amar was the battlefield, littered with the wounded and with corpses. It wasn’t quite that horrific in real life, was it? But he wasn’t sure. And somehow, he was staring down at this carnage from a rooftop café he really liked during the tumultuous month he spent in Barcelona as the Exile.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Amar said aloud. His voice was that of a child.

“Of course it does,” his own voice as an adult said back to him from behind. “You just need to realize what exactly is happening.”

Sitting calmly at a table with one cup of coffee in front of him and another cup across from him was Amar himself. Only this other self was an adult, dressed in the black and blue jacket-and-cape ensemble that was his supercriminal outfit as the Exile.

“This will sound dumb, but are you…me?” Amar asked.

The Exile smiled a little condescendingly. “Your guess is as good as mine. But if I recall my or your or…our Psychic Trauma and Treatment training correctly, you had a nasty shock and I am a disassociative persona generated by your subconscious in order to try to affect repairs.” The Exile gestured for Amar to sit.

“No offense, but why you? I mean, why are you taking that form?” Amar helped himself to the coffee. Of course, it was a blend he enjoyed at another time in his life, when he was hiding out in Boston.

“A time in your life when you still had a spine.”

“A time in your life when you were always scared or miserable.”

The Exile chuckled. “And look at you now.”

Before Amar could fire back a rejoinder, the entire world shook, as if there was an earthquake, yet the table and his coffee cup didn’t really shake. He got up rushed to where the battlefield. Suddenly, even though he was the same distance away, the battlefield looked blurry and even more distant. Through it all, the Exile remained drinking his coffee calmly.

“And do you know what that means?” The Exile asked, teacher-like.

Amar turned around. “Something or someone almost jolted me awake.”

***

“Don’t!” Jon screamed. Standing over the freshly ripped-up corpses of several of the long-needed robots, Hercules was microseconds away from ripping off the wires connecting his head to the sinister-looking cylinder device behind him. He whirled around, his face deformed by rage. “Look what they did to my prince!”

Jon flinched at Hercules’ term of affection for Amar, but still had the presence of mind to warn him. “Ripping those things off might hurt him!” Hercules jerked his meaty hand back like his fingers were just burned.

Hood had already unbound the woman in the chair. “Your friend is right. They turned him into…” She shook her head and gestured toward the man in the suit. “I don’t know what. But that thing they hooked him up to uses his powers to mess with people’s heads.”

As soon as she was free, the woman rushed over to the man in the suit and knelt down before him, looking him directly in the eyes. “Mr. Query? Are you alright?” she asked.

Mr. Query slowly shook his head, like he was relearning how to operate his body again. “I don’t know. I…I feel like a…highway has been blocked off inside my brain.”

“We have to get him out of here,” she said to no one in particular.

“And the prince,” Hercules said. Jon could tell that he was only one impulse away from ripping the machine Jon was strapped to apart, despite his earlier warning.

Jon took a deep breath. “We have to take everyone who can leave and get help. Bring back someone with the know-how to safely get Amar out of there.”

Hercules whirled around from Amar and gave Jon a look of rage that could make an army flee, and probably, at some point in the last three-thousand years, did. “What? You…how could you say we should abandon him?”

Jon knew this would happen, but still had no idea what to say. “Actually, the question is how could you be willing to risk killing him or leaving him braindead?” He realized as soon as he said that he just said the worst possible thing.

Hercules took a step toward Jon. “And we should listen to you, the man who laid with him only to abandon him as soon as you no longer needed his help?”

The tense moment that followed was shattered instantly by the Spider’s firm, loud voice. “Can we please hold off on The Real World bull*** until we’re on the surface?”

Everyone forgot their current grievances and their attention snapped in the direction of an annoyed Spider. After a moment, the Spider reluctantly asked, “Wait, what’s The Real World?”

***

“Something’s wrong,” Hood said. Since finding Jon, they had been trying to retrace their steps back to the surface for no one knew how long. Reluctantly, they had left Amar hooked up to the machine. Hercules and Jon had not spoken a single word to each other, and in fact unconsciously stood as far apart from each other as possible.

“What do you mean?” Spider asked, supporting an exhausted and confused Mr. Query as they slowly walked.

“Those creepy doctor robot things…they haven’t attacked us since we found the Ex…I mean, Amar.”

“Maybe they ran out. Even bad guys have budgets,” Jon offered.

“He’s right,” Mr. Query weakly commented. The Spider gently shushed him.

After another few minutes, they came across the pit Hercules dug out of the earth. Hood fired a grappling hook arrow. Hercules was the first to climb out, with Mr. Query clinging to his back, and on the surface he helped everyone else get out. Jon was the last.

With a sense of urgency heightened by the prospect of a successful escape, they carelessly rushed into the car. As soon as relief started to settle on them, however, they heard the sound of the ignition struggling as Hood tried to start the car.

“They must have known we were here and sabotaged the car,” Hood said. “We have to run.”

“Too late,” Spider said from the back seat. She was looking out the window. Behind them, a swarm of the long-fingered robots in gowns was gathering in the parking lot. At the lead was a man in a bulky silver mechanical armor: Jeremy Sanchez.

Slowly they got out of the car. With a voice that came through an amplifier, Jeremy shouted, “You have no authorization here. Julia DeMatteis, alias the Spider, and Conner Drum, alias Mr. Query, are convicted criminals and our prisoners. Surrender them peacefully and we will arrange transportation for you and not seek any further action. Otherwise, we will use force.”

Jon began walking forward and held up a hand directed to his companions. “Hold on. Let me try to handle this.”

He pulled out the badge that recognized him as a member of the Final Guard and held it forward like a shield. With his most officious tone possible, he said, “I am currently affiliated with the Final Guard. We found in our investigation that you have unlawfully detained and experimented on individuals. Let us leave and we will…” Jon stopped talking as their rental car flew over his head and landed squarely in the middle of the horde, causing the loud sound of crashing metal. “Never mind,” Jon muttered to himself.

They fought as the robots swarmed over them and Jeremy in his mechanical armor engaged Hercules one on one in a fist fight that made sounds not unlike what you might hear at an active construction site. At first, they did very well, and it even seemed they might be able to escape. Hood, who had run out of arrows and was reduced to using martial arts against the robots, was the first of fall, bellowing out an incoherent warning as the drugs in the robots’ needle-fingers overtook him and he fell to the ground.

Seeing Hood’s unconscious body disappear into the swarm, Hercules fought even harder. Yet he was next, as the former Galaxy Knight took advantage of Hercules’ fury and desperation to grab him by his arms and then give him a massive electrical shock that would have killed an elephant. For Hercules, it left him convulsing on the pavement.

Jon and the Spider continued to fight. Although the Spider had fought to protect him, Mr. Query was nowhere to be seen. But even with his heightened senses there was only so much Jon could do as more and more of the robots surrounded him. Finally, Jon felt the pinch of a needle in his back, and in only a couple of minutes Jon felt his muscles betray him. The last thing he felt before the darkness overcame him was the oddly tender way in which the robot doctors began to lift him.

***

Nowadays very few things truly unnerved Jeremy Sanchez. One of these things was the face of the Medical Director of Oxrun Asylum, Dr. Zedekiah Gilman. Jeremy was absolutely convinced that the face was incapable of expressing any emotion other than mild disdain.

“I had been led to believe that it would be at least two weeks until the initial experiments would be performed,” Dr. Gilman said.

Yes, well…” Jeremy said, hoping his words did not reveal his desperate hope that Dr. Gilman did not decide to call anyone in authority. “There were…several developments making it necessary to step up the timescale.”

He knew Dr. Gilman was faced with less funding and more patients. In fact, that need and Mr. Gilman’s lack of scruples in fulfilling that need were his only hope. Dr. Gilman grunted. “Very well. But if there are any…irregularities, I will not hesitate to throw you and even your friends in the government under the bus.”

“I wouldn’t have expected anything else,” Jeremy said with a smile, countering Dr. Gilman’s brimming hostility with arrogant confidence. In truth, Jeremy had risked burning his bridges with his government contacts, and that was before he had his little run-in with people affiliated with the Final Guard and was forced to subdue them. But he still knew, while there would be inevitable hiccups, even the typical bleeding hearts in the United Nations Commission on Paranormal, Extraterrestrial, and Superhuman Affairs would see the humanitarian potential behind his work. After all, what was better than using the natural talents of a man who had done great evil to unquestionably rehabilitate hundreds, if not thousands?

Once he was satisfied that Dr. Gilman had been distracted by his duties, Jeremy made his way to an old, half-abandoned operating theater that Dr. Gilman had granted him for his private use. Standing around the room, like medical interns waiting for a demonstration, were his true loyalists, all in the Silver Scorpion uniforms. He could not trust even any of the Archons with a task that had so many potential…legal complications. After the whole fiasco with the Spider, Mr. Query, and the Exile, most of them had already quit anyway. No worries; they would be redundant soon. In the middle of the room, where the surgery bed would be, was Amar, still strapped to the device Jeremy named and would trademark as the Redeemer Arc.

Bound in a titanium cuff that kept his hands bound in much the same way as a Chinese finger trap was Hercules. The superhero called Mantra, Hood, Spider, and Mr. Query all had more conventional bounds. They would after to wait until after he was done demonstrating his new device on the patients of Oxrun Asylum. But once he was finished, he would complete the rehabilitation of Spider and Mr. Query. The three so-called “heroes” would be won over or dealt with in time.

“I know you,” Jon said. Instinctively Jeremy felt his pocket where he kept the gem that made Jon “Mantra.” He felt a little guilty doing to Mantra what had been done to him in the past by stripping him of the source of his powers. But the guilt was nothing compared to his colossal sense of responsibility.

“Oh?” Jeremy said half-consciously, as he examined the monitors measuring Amar’s life signs.

“You were Galaxy Knight, right? You were going to join the Rooks.”

“And I didn’t, all because of your boyfriend,” Jeremy barked back.

“He’s not his boyfriend,” Hercules mumbled, just audibly.

“I know part of your story,” Jon continued. “Amar…he hurt you really bad, didn’t he?”

Jeremy rolled his eyes. “I really should have left you people unconscious. But no, the Exile didn’t hurt me. He destroyed my life. But he also gave me…a higher purpose, I suppose. I finally realized the severity of age-old threat of super-powered criminals and psychopaths, and that having glorified vigilantes running around is at best a stop-gap measure. One of these days someone like the Exile is going to wipe out the human race. All I’m doing is providing the only possible permanent humane solution.”

The Spider scoffed. “You call brainwashing ‘humane’?” Jeremy ignored her and turned to the Silver Scorpions. “Now then, here is a basic demonstration of what the Redeemer Arc can do.” He input a command into a small keypad. Suddenly, Jon and the others lost their desire to speak or struggle except Hercules, who kept wrestling in vain against his restraints.

Jeremy gestured to the Silver Scorpions. “Take them to the sub-basement in the back, where we’re keeping the back-up equipment. We’ll work out what to do to them later.”

He hit another dial on the controls of the Redeemer Arc. Amar made a slight noise, as if in pain. Jeremy grinned. “And in the meantime, we’ll start work on our first patients.”

Jon pulled the rental car (which he had to rent with his own money, since the rates if you were representing a superhero outfit were outrageous if understandable) into a barren parking lot somewhere near Old Bridge, New Jersey. The lot was as pocketed with potholes as the moon is with craters. Within view was a decrepit, old-fashioned amusement park, sealed behind a fence crowned with barbed wire.

“You sure about this?” Jon asked as he put the car into park. Hood nodded. “My FBI contact was, anyway.”

As they got out of the car, Jon glimpsed Hood’s face. Instead of the usual poker face he wore on the field or the look of arrogant indignation he countered with many times when the topic of Amar came up, he looked penitent.

Hercules already made a beeline to the fence and tore it down. He glared back to Hood. “Network of underground tunnels, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

Instead of finishing his thought, Hood looked on helplessly as Hercules kicked down an already partially decayed ticket booth. Then, with the sound of an earthquake, he punched and dug down past the cement. As he vanished into the ground, he roared, “I’m coming, my prince!”

“My prince?” Hood looked at Jon, who frowned in a way worthy of someone three times his age.

It was not long before Hercules climbed out of the now vast pit he had dug out with his bare hands and waved at them while grinning.

***

There was still a part of Jon’s brain that got a thrill and a high whenever he activated his gem.

Even though his senses were just heightened, it felt like he was a speedster, his every movement happening at 100 miles-per-hour. He moved with an unnatural grace while everything else in the universe was trapped in an invisible molasses. There was also in the back of his mind a feeling of connectiveness, as if he was part of something greater than himself.

As a plastic hand reached for him with a small needle protruding out of a tiny hatch on the palm, he dodged it easily and shouted back, “Watch out! They got tranqs on their hands!”

“That’s cheating,” Hood said, as he fired an arrow at the computer monitor that just seconds ago had a middle-aged man’s face on it.

Around Hercules, shattered electronics and ripped pieces of plastic flew everywhere. “I’m impervious…I think. I hope so, anyway. At least three of the fiends got me.”

Once Hood had disabled the last of the robots, they took the opportunity to size up their surroundings. Large brick tunnels stretched to the east and the northwest and the south, with no markers whatsoever except built-in florescent lights.

Jon looked at Hercules with concern. “Uh, hey, Herc, are you feeling okay?”

Hercules shrugged. “Just a little woozy.”

“Do gods get woozy?” Hood asked, as he instinctively went over how many arrows he had left.

“I’m half-human and half-god, actually,” Hercules answered.

Jon started trying to steer the conversation to where they should go next, but his comments were interrupted by the appearance of the first actual human they had seen since they infiltrated the place. He was an older man, dressed meticulously in a white polo shirt and white pants with dirty blonde hair that looked a little too neatly trimmed. Hood instinctively targeted the man with his bow, but with a gesture Jon told him to stand down.

The man didn’t look alarmed. At most, he looked a tad puzzled. “Would you mind keeping it down? It’s time for my siesta.”

“Uh, sorry,” Jon asked. “We were just…”

“Cleaning up,” Hercules added uncertainly.

“Yeah. Uh, I’m Jon, this is Hercules, and he goes by the name ‘Hood.’”

“I…used to be called Death Mask myself. But the doctors and the other patients call m Arthur.”

Hercules, Hood, and Jon briefly shared puzzled looks. Hood politely asked, “We were looking for the people who manage this…place?”

There was a flicker across the man’s eyes that was impossible to interpret. “Uh, I guess you mean the warden.” He turned and walked down one of the corridors. “Follow me,” he called back without really lifting his voice.  

Through an open portal the shape of a bank vault was a vast white room. Art decorated the room, but it was the most banal art imaginable, pseudo-impressionist portrayals of dogs in the countryside and girls at outdoor cafes. In fact, the whole place gave an impression somewhere between a doctor’s waiting room and the games room of a nursing home. People, all dressed in similar white, sat listlessly at tables, playing cards and board games and portable video games or reading. Two were having a listless conversation, but everyone else was silent.

“I’m not around normal people a lot so maybe I’ve just forgotten how they act, but…is there something off here?” Hood asked Jon, whispering.

Jon gave Hood a knowing look. He felt the vibe, too. He looked closely at the people, at least as closely as he could without arousing more suspicion. A mythological figure, a guy in a spandex costume with a gem sewn into it, and another guy in a cloak with a bow and a quiver of arrows should have aroused at least some curiosity. But aside from a few casual glances, they might as well have been invisible. Then Jon noticed that several of the people had bruises around one eye. An idea clicked in his head, and he gasped a little when it did.

“I think they’ve been lobotomized,” Jon whispered just to Hood, not trusting Hercules’ reaction.

“How do you know?”

“I just…read a book once, but notice the bruises? And the way they’re acting? Or not acting?”

Hood was quiet for a few heavy seconds. Then he said quietly, “And I almost worked with those people.”

Jon was still furious at Hood, but he was about to give in to his desire to put a comforting hand on his shoulder when Arthur, né Death Mask, suddenly stopped and turned around. “We’re here.” He pointed toward an otherwise nondescript door.

“Thanks, Arthur,” Jon said.

Arthur walked away, without a trace of lingering curiosity or concern.  

Hood glanced around. “Alright, now we…” Hercules already had ripped the door off its hinges and tossed it aside. “Or that. That works,” Hood mumbled.  

Beyond the door was a vast, sterile laboratory. Thin, silver robots turned, dressed in surgical gowns, masks, and caps with glistening claw-like hands, turned in their direction. One of the robots was holding an unconscious man in an old-fashioned suit. There, in the middle of the lab, was a tall woman strapped to a chair. Above her, strapped to an upright bed and with various wires connected to his shaved head, was Amar.

By the time Hood realized what was happening, his car door had already been torn off and he was flying several feet through the air. He only saw the fleshy blur of an enraged Hercules.

“This violates so many rules, you *!(& pricks!” Hood said, as he fell into a roll on his own front yard.

Jon shrugged. “Hercules is currently unaffiliated. And he’s a citizen of an extradimensional realm that doesn’t have good relations with the United Nations.”

“No one would want to do the paperwork,” Hercules agreed, while he rushed over and caught Hood before he could resist. Holding Hood up by both arms, Hercules turned him around to face Jon.

“You were working with the Silver Scorpions,” Jon said, matter-of-factly.

“Oh, come on, Jon. This is beneath you.”

“No, I’d say getting someone kidnapped is beneath you,” Jon replied, carefully betraying no emotion.

Hood looked thoughtful, and for a moment Jon thought he would talk. Then, suddenly, Hood swung his legs up and put Hercules in a chokehold. Soon Hercules fell, shaking the ground. However, Jon had already activated his gem, which made the chaos of the moment looking just like a slow ballet. Calmly, he pulled out an innocuous golden object, which looked like a small spear. He pointed it at Jon and fired. Even if he wasn’t distracted by Hercules, Hood, even with all of his martial arts training, wouldn’t have had much time to react.

Suddenly Hood looked around. Strange ultraviolet shadows slid and floated around him. The sky was filled with shimmering lights, giving the familiar landscape of his own house the appearance of an alien world. An odd creature, resembling a cross between a manta ray and a giant butterfly, flew past him, making a bizarre gurgling sound as it went.

“What the hell did you do?!” Hood shouted.

Jon shrugged. “I just put you slightly out of sync with our normal dimensional frequency. Kind of nifty. It was in the Final Guard’s trophy room. I learned it was the preferred weapon of one of their regulars from the ‘80s, Professor Paradox.”

Hood began to violate his first and most important rule by letting himself feel panic. “Has getting laid by that supercriminal totally turned you evil? You could kill me.”

“Oh, calm down. You’re not so out of sync anything here can hurt you. Physically, anyway.”

“When they find out…”

“They already know. Do you really think the Technocrat would let me take even a stapler out of the confiscated weapons room without a reason? I snitched on you the first chance I got.”

“There’s nothing to snitch!” The Hood screamed defiantly. But then, sheepishly he added, “Nothing I meant to happen, anyway.”

Something in his voice made Jon’s resolve soften, just a little. “Look, if you were ever my friend…if you get in trouble, I’ll talk to them. I promise. Just tell me what happened.”

“They contacted me. Before you ask, I know it had to have been a burner phone,” Hood shook his head. “They flattered me, talked about how unfair it was that the guy who got me hooked again was let go just because he was the right guy for one job. But I swear, on the years we were on the Rooks together, I didn’t know they were going to kidnap him. They just said they had evidence he was getting the Vandals back together, was plotting something big. They just needed someone to help keep a watch over him. They even showed me the proof, or what I thought was the proof, but now…” Hood shook his head.

“I see”, Jon said flatly, as he pressed a button on the device again, causing the strange lights and beings to vanish and returning them to the front yard of an isolated rural house out in northern California.

“What now?” Hood said, more to himself than Jon.

Hercules was in a pose signaling that he would attack again, but Jon stopped him by holding up his hand. “Now if you want a chance of not getting suspended or worse, you’re going to give us what information you have, and then we’re going to wherever they’re keeping Amar.”

At that very moment, Amar was hooked up to an inclined hospital bed. His head was shaven and wrapped in sterile white bandages. Wires of green and blue and purple colors ran from glowing connectors strapped to his skull to a large terminal that buzzed contently.  

Grant Devas looked bored as he observed Amar and the machine. His assistant Tonya stood beside him, tapping detailed notes on a tablet that she carefully but not obviously kept from the anxious eyes of Jeremy Sanchez. Just like he was a high schooler again giving a class presentation, he shuffled his feet nervously. “What do you think?”

“Of what you’re trying to do here, I find the potential intriguing,” Devas replied. “Of my providing financial backing, I will have to consider the proposal carefully.”

“If it’s the legality you’re worried about, my lawyers already have arguments. I mean, he’s not just a criminal, he’s not even…”

Devas shook his head. “I’m not too concerned about that, especially if we’re talking about U.S. law. I’m talking about potential, Mr. Sanchez. Potential.”

The tremble in his voice was the only suggestion of anger. “What greater potential could there be than using telepathy to literally reprogram the minds of criminals? Using the living mind of a criminal telepath to do it no less?”

Mr. Devas chuckled, an unnatural sound. “You may be right, Mr. Sanchez.”

The talks continued. Mr. Devas preoccupied his mind with the question of whether Sanchez allowed his desperation to show because he could not help it or because he genuinely thought it would sway him. In any case, he had already decided not to fund his little plan for a criminal-free paradise. His only job now was to make Sanchez believe it was possible he would agree, while keeping Sanchez eager enough to agree to share some of the technology.

“What do you think, Tonya?” he asked as the limo pulled onto the interstate, on its way back to the airplane.

“For lack of a more elegant and scientific term, I would say Jeremy Sanchez is completely deranged, and you have been stringing him along.”

Mr. Devas smiled, but only internally. He could not let Tonya see how much her crude bluntness amused him. “Quite right. Also, our people just told me he’s burned through the inheritance and the company’s resources. Within a year, his entire operation will be running on fumes, at best. I presume you know what to do?”

“I’m already thinking up the best way to hint to him that the only thing keeping us from agreeing is the fact that our tech team wants to look at his schematics,” she said.

“I did mean what I said about potential. His obsession with law and order and his personal vendetta against the telepath have completely blinded him. Imagine hacking not just several minds, but the entire collective unconsciousness of humanity…” He smiled, looking out at the thick rain drops that hammered away at the window of the limo. “Just imagine…”

Back inside the former Galaxy Knight’s compound and inside Amar’s mind, he – or rather the psychic representation of himself – laid on top of a barren mountaintop. The shadow of an ancient monastery whose towers scratched impotently at the sky, fell over him. He was a child of four years again.

A voice spoke, coming from nowhere and everywhere. “Poor Amar. Punished over and over for the same crime.”

“Who are you?” he said. In this dream, although he had the body of a child, he spoke with the voice of an adult.

“You just managed to reconstitute your ego,” the voice said. “Don’t undo all your hard work by overtaxing yourself.”

Amar looked around, his eyes eventually fixing themselves on the baked brick walls of the monastery. This is where they took him, crying and pleading for his mother, leaving him to be trained by the priests of Enki in the arts of truth-reading.

“The earliest, most primal memories are the only safe place for now,” the voice said. He realized this was also his voice.

His child self tried to stand, only to crumble into the dirt. No, this isn’t reality. This is my mind, he gently reminded himself. He willed the source of the voice to him. In an instant, the monastery was gone. Instead, seated on a throne with his legs thrown over the armrest, was himself. Only he was dressed in his own costume as the Exile except it was more ragged somehow.

The figure who was him smiled down on him. “Oh, good. I was wondering when you would get around to asserting yourself a little.”

Amar sat down at the cleanest and most polished picnic table he had ever seen.

On one level, he was slowly eating a reasonably bland bologna sandwich. On another, he was telepathically reaching out for signs of people. He had been enlisted to use his telepathic senses to find people who might be inside any theoretical maintenance shafts. The effort was exhausting, wearing down the entire body and causing a sensation not unlike standing on top of one’s head for too long.

What kept him going was anger. Anger at being cheated once again at a chance at a quiet life. Anger at having been drugged for he didn’t even know how long. And even anger at how Jon rejected him, as soon as they were safe.

However, just beneath the anger there was a kind of hopefulness. Not much, just the slightest of touches. However, it was enough to protect him from falling into the old indigo rage that colored the old days.

“Do you sense anything?” a woman’s voice demanded from the back of his head. It was the voice of one of the two people who had given him a reason to hope, Julia DeMatteis, a.k.a. the Spider. “We have ten minutes before the Archons will show up to make sure you’re not up to something.”

“Nothing yet,” Amar said, his exhaustion beginning to overcome his willpower. “I can usually sense something even if someone is trying to hide their thoughts. I’m not even getting that.”

“Damn. At least Mr. Query thinks there could be at least five more.”

While she was speaking, Amar made one final push. It was faint, but there was a mind, far under the ground of a suburban house near the edge of the park. His anger forgotten, Amar grinned.

***

One week ago, Amar was sprawled out on his couch, trying to wrestle with the nausea that seemed to be killing him. The Spider leaned against his living room wall, absent-mindedly playing with a set of keys in her left hand. She wore a dark blue blouse in a way that revealed more of her statuesque figure than the other women in this place. Mr. Query never told his real name to Amar, and Amar didn’t care enough to extract the information from his brain. He was  a tall, thin, and sickly man, perched on the edge of the recliner.

“I hope you are finished vomiting,” Mr. Query said.

“I hope I’m dead,” Amar whined.

The Spider stopped jangling her keys. “I’m really sorry. The medication doesn’t wear off without a fight.”

“So you saw who took you, and it was someone in a Silver Scorpion costume, right?”, she asked Amar, abruptly changing the subject.

“Yeah. Two of them, actually.”

“We were regulars of the Silver Scorpion,” the Spider explained with no small hint of pride. “The original, real one, I mean.”

Mr. Query chuckled. “We were the best regulars any so-called superhero could hope for. I trust you heard of us?”

Amar was too sick to politely lie and shook his head. Mr. Query grunted his displeasure.

“We can worry about our legacy when we get out of this hellhole,” the Spider said.

Amar sat up, trying to get his bearings. “Didn’t the Silver Scorpion die years ago?”

Mr. Query and the Spider exchanged glances. “We actually do not know how many years we have been here,” Mr. Query explained. “We attempted to keep that knowledge, but even I lost count. However… yes, he died.”

“How do you know?” Amar asked. “He could have gone into hiding or something.”

An indecipherable look overtook the Spider’s face as she signed. “No, he’s definitely dead. I would know.”

“How?”

“I just do.” Amar could tell from her tone it was in his best interest not to pursue the answer.

Mr. Query cleared his throat. “It may be useful for you to know that it turned out that the Silver Scorpion’s civilian identity was the heir to an electronics and automobile fortune, Christian Scott. He retired the identity of the Silver Scorpion and died two years later. After all the death traps, serial killers, and international shadow organizations he survived, it was leukemia that finally claimed him.”

“He quit the game because…well, there was an incident,” the Spider added.

A gloom descended upon both of the former supercriminals. Mr. Query, whose eyes had been watching Amar, now wandered the room. The Spider took off and began absent-mindedly to play with a silver ring on her finger.

“He called himself Zoltaro the Magnificent,” Mr. Query said. “His entire modus operandi was based on acting like a stage magician from a century ago.”

“I hate saying it, but he was brilliant. No prison could hold him, and it looked like nothing could keep him out either,” the Spider added. “Some people thought he actually did have supernatural powers.”

“He certainly may have been a literal demon,” Mr. Query said, more to himself than anyone else.

The Spider could not help but nod in agreement. “The first few years he was active, he wasn’t that dangerous. I mean, he stole millions and took people hostage, and a security guard or a cop would get hurt once in a while, but then, well…”

“He started killing people. At first, it was just…occasional collateral damage from his plans, but then he just killed. It became murder as performance. Even the less…stable among us not only stopped working with him, we shunned him.”

Amar suddenly remembered something through the fog of sickness. “Wait…Zoltaro? I think I saw a documentary about him. They called him one of the worst serial killers in history.”

“’Serial killer’ doesn’t quite cover it, but yeah,” the Spider answered. “At the end, it got really awful. This elementary school was supposed to have career day, but instead the teachers and students went to the cafeteria and instead found an unscheduled, impromptu performance of Zoltaro the Magnificent. I don’t even remember how many survivors there were, anymore.”

“18 out of 353,” Mr. Query said without hesitation.

“Anyway, after that, the wife of one of the teachers who died gunned Zolatro down. The day after that happened, there was a message sent to all the major local news networks around the city declaring that the Silver Scorpion would never show up anywhere again. I never knew why he did that; if he thought he inspired people to become vigilantes or if he blamed himself for not stopping Zoltaro sooner. But, anyway, the Silver Scorpion never walked the streets of New York again. Not the real Silver Scorpion.”

“Before you ask, we have no idea who could have taken up the Silver Scorpion’s mantle,” Mr. Query added.

“Whoever it is, the real Silver Scorpion would have hated what they’re doing,” the Spider added. Mr. Query solemnly nodded his agreement.

“Well, that does me a lot of good, doesn’t it?” Amar said. “So why stick your necks out to recruit me?”

“Quite simply, you are a bigshot,” Mr. Query explained.

“No, I’m not,” Amar protested.

“That’s not what he means,” the Spider said in a manner that sounded like a teacher elaborating on a lesson to a slow student. “That’s what we used to call supercriminals with powers. Damn, how long have we been gone?”

“We hacked the database of new arrivals. Well, I should say, I hacked it, along with parts of the surveillance system so that it won’t register me and the Spider,” Mr. Query said, not bothering to hide his pride. “Unfortunately, the system is highly decentralized and encrypted, so there’s only so much we can do. We haven’t even been able to access a map of the entire facility or whatever this damned Tartarus is, and it took me literally years to accomplish what we have done.”

“That’s where we’re hoping you come in,” the Spider said. “The Archons are all remotely controlled, but there must be actual human beings working on an operation this massive somewhere. We’re hoping you can use your telepathy to find them, and through them find a maintenance shaft, a tunnel, anything, so we can go straight for it and not get caught looking.”

“All of that is assuming we are not off-world or in another dimension,” Mr. Query said. The Spider glared at him, and he mumbled an apology.

“We do have to consider that kind of thing, like it or not. We have no idea what kind of resources are at work here,” Amar said while getting up. Already the nausea was passing, but he still felt wobbly. “Let me rest for a day, and we’ll see what I can do.” Then, suddenly, the obvious question leaped from Amar’s mind. “Um, so, how close have you all come to escaping before?”

The Spider’s expression at least showed Amar that she was hoping he would not breach the subject. “Yes. Starting two years after the original Silver Scorpion died, his regulars began disappearing, one by one, including us.”

“All of us ended up down here, even the minor league ones like Death Fly, the Patchwork Girl, and Were-Scorpion,” Mr. Query interjected. “Most of us tried working together to find a way to escape. Azalea, the Reaper, Professor Volt, Saint-or-Sinner…all of them are gone now.”

“Gone?” Amar felt a chill. “Where?”

“We don’t know,” the Spider said after a lengthy pause. “But we call it the Box anyway. Whatever it is, they never came back.”

***

Whatever the Box was, a week later, Amar found he could not banish it from his mind. The three of them had snuck into the house at the edge of the park. It was identical, the Spider explained, to every other cookie-cutter, one-story house in the town – except for the small matter of the large, perfectly round pit with a gleaming silver ladder attached to one side of it where the bathroom should be.

The Spider couldn’t help but do a little dance. Mr. Query smiled for the first time since Amar met him. Amar wanted to shout for joy. Having to pretend to remain under the power of the drugs whenever he went to work or encountered the Archons was as taxing as it was nerve-wracking.

“Be sure to keep a couple of feet behind me. I’ll keep scanning for minds ahead,” Amar thought at them.

The tunnel was made of pale concrete and was given a dim, ugly glow by a series of green florescent lights lining the top of the tunnel. The ambiance was unnerving, giving Amar nothing less than the impression than the tunnel his people said led to the Underworld. He could sense the fear even in the Spider, who Amar knew had the steeliest nerves of all three of them.

As they silently dived deeper into the tunnel, though, their anxiety gave way to relief when they saw a light ahead. Even though Amar knew for a fact there was no one ahead, he moved as cautiously as a cat in a dog kennel. Amar could not help but exhale with relief when he saw the end of the tunnel led into a cozy little breakroom, complete with a cutting-edge coffee maker and a snack vending machine. Amar had the nearly overwhelming urge to sneak a cup of coffee.

Besides the tunnel, there was a nondescript metal green door. The Spider carefully tried to open it. “It’s locked,” she thought. “But it seems to be a pretty standard lock. I guess they don’t think anybody would get this far.”

As she pulled out a makeshift lockpick she made out of a paperclip, Mr. Query rested on a cheap, plastic chair and Amar leaned against the wall, his eyes closed. The initial presence he sensed was apparently gone, but he still scanned the tunnel ahead for thoughts. Suddenly, without warning, he felt an aura that was too familiar.

“We need to get out of here!” Amar shouted.

Before any of the others could say a complete sentence, the green door was flung open. Behind it was a young man in faded jeans and wearing a vintage Silver Scorpion t-shirt that looked ancient. He was flanked by two Archons with smiling faces.

“We are very sorry you are dissatisfied with the conditions of your rehabilitation center, but I am afraid you must be reprimanded for attempting to escape,” one of the Archons said blandly.

“Rehabilitation?!” The Spider screamed. “You psychos were planning to keep us drugged up here until we die!”

“But even you have to admit, this facility is an improvement over Oxrun or St. Helena,” the man said, his eyes fixed on Amar.

“Having trouble violating my mental privacy? Or trying to do something even worse?” The man scoffed and tapped his own head. “A nifty little device, surgically inserted right into the tegmentum. It generates an electromagnetic field that interferes with the connections that make telepathy work. I know how it sounds, but we ran plenty of tests and it’s quite safe. Please don’t worry about me.”

“I know you,” Amar said, quietly. The man smiled.

The Spider made as if she was quietly going to place herself into the custody of the Archons. Instead, she leapt for one of the Archons, launching a kick mid-air. Effortlessly, it grabbed her from the air. With the other hand, it stabbed her in the neck with a needle that was protruding from the ring finger. The Spider passed out in a matter of seconds. The man looked down at the Spider’s unconscious body with no interest. “The usual,” he told one of the Archons. The other one walked toward Mr. Query, who meekly accompanied the Archon. Before he disappeared into the doorway, he smiled weakly at Amar. “Sorry,” he whispered.

“I’ve played this moment over and over in my head for years,” the man said. “And now, I’m forgetting all my lines.”

“Hello, Galaxy Knight,” Amar said. It felt as if he was talking in a dream.

“It’s just Jeremy now,” he replied, sneering. “You of all people know that.” Before Amar could react, Jeremy punched him. Amar fell over to the ground.

“Can’t do anything without your telepathy, huh?” With that, he began kicking Amar in his stomach. Through the pain, Amar was thinking how this was very much not how he wanted to die. “Sir!” a worried voice shouted. Amar looked up to see that one of the Archons had placed a calming hand on Jeremy’s shoulder.

“Right,” Jeremy mumbled, panting. “I’m not a thug. Or a monster, like he is.”

Jeremy leaned over and looked down at Amar. “Besides, we can finally put him to good use.”

Jeremy Sanchez’s hands shook as he handled the envelope. He had almost fully expected a rejection, but the contents of the letter were too fat for that. Or were they? Still, he hesitated before he ripped into it.

“What is it?” Lamorak’s voice, which spoke clearly from the back of his mind, was mechanical and alien, yet it was the most comforting thing in Jeremy’s life.

Jeremy scanned over the letter and the paperwork that were inside the now destroyed envelope. “The Rooks. I think they’re saying they’ll give me a provisional membership.”

“Just provisional?” Lamorak asked. He would be scoffing if he was capable of such an emotion. “We almost single-handedly exposed the Sahara Corporation and stopped them from opening up the Veil of Tears.”

“I think they do it to everybody,” Jeremy said as he re-entered the house, not realizing his stepbrother Fernando was within earshot in the living room.

“What’s that?” Fernando – or as he demanded everyone call him, “Nando” – asked disinterestedly.

“Uh, just…I joined a Professor Lore fan club,” Jeremy said, hoping Fernando wouldn’t look up from his phone and come over to grab and skim through the contents of the letter, as he might have done.

Fernando snorted. “Figures you’d be into that kiddy crap.”

Jeremy should have countered by pointing out that Fernando was a year away from going to college, but he still read fantasy and sci-fi novels for middle schoolers. He knew, though, that this was the worst possible time to let matters escalate. “Where’s Luis?”

Jeremy froze up when Fernando stood up. Instinctively Jeremy tried in vain to hide his letter and its contents behind the back. Instead of grabbing for it, though, Fernando “playfully” slapped him against the head. “You’re losing it, bug. Dad teaches two classes tonight.”

“Oh, right,” Jeremy said, choking down his anger and ignoring how the voice in his head literally growled. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“And what else is new?” Fernando said, heading into the kitchen. “Oh, don’t forget to take the trash out today.”

“What? It’s your turn!”

“It’s called delegating, bug,” Fernando called from the kitchen, the tone of his voice a sneer. Jeremy stormed up to his room.

“I cannot wait until the day I can turn into Galaxy Knight right in front of his fat face and then throw him through a window or something,” Jeremy thought. Lamorak answered calmly, “Pride is the warrior’s worst enemy.”

“I know, I know,” Jeremy answered in his head. “The Rooks have a no-hiding-your-identity-from-family policy, anyway…”

“And, at any rate, soon he will be undergoing the four-year rites of adulthood the bourgeois and elite ranks of your culture thinly disguise as advanced education,” Lamorak observed.

“And I can’t wait,” Jeremy said aloud. “Anyway, since Mom’s going to be at work and Dad’s at the college, I guess we can go out on a mission today.“

Lamorak was silent for a few minutes while Jeremy scanned his phone for news, and then suddenly spoke up. “You just received a communication from Dr. Bilatz.”

“You mean an e-mail?”

“As you say,” Lamorak said. “It sounds like Dr. Bilatz needs our help again.”

Jeremy sighed. “I hope he hasn’t ripped the fabric of space and time again,” he said. He had to read over the e-mail three times. The word that stood out each time was “the Exile.”

“How should we respond?” Lamorak asked, with a hint of timidity in his voice.

Jeremy fished out his special watch from the drawer on the nightstand. Lamorak made him promise he would never keep it on him, especially not when he went to school, but it still felt weird keeping the watch that could teleport him anywhere in the world and to sundry dimensions in a cheap piece of furniture. “We go and show the Rooks we can bag one of their regulars.”

***

In one minute, Jeremy was still standing in his bedroom. Then one minute later, he was standing at the end of a long, gravelly driveway that winded up a mountain and ended at a large metallic gate, flanked by two stone satyrs. Behind it was a massive gothic castle.

As they walked up to the castle, Jeremy wondered, “Why on earth did Dr. Bilatz set up his main laboratory in a scary castle in the middle of Nowhere, Colorado?”

“If I recall correctly, he said something about ambiance. Also the castle was reportedly haunted and he wanted to investigate the physics of post-biological survival as a side project. May I suggest we suit up?”

“Right,” Jeremy said, silently cursing himself because this was not the first time he forgot to fully activate Lamorak just when he was about to step into danger. With a thought, the ring Jeremy wore glowed and suddenly he was surrounded by an aura of purple energy that took the shape of Lamorak’s own form, a knight in armor that looked like he had walked out of an average person’s imaginings of Europe’s High Middle Ages.

“PASSWORD PLEASE.” An electronic voice chirped out of seemingly nowhere as they stepped near the gate. Jeremy was surprised that the gate had not been left open for them, but he supposed it was possible that Dr. Bilatz had been in some way incapacitated. According to the e-mail, he had just been robbed by a telepath, after all.

Lamorak read the password to Jeremy, who recited the numbers back awkwardly. He didn’t know exactly how Dr. Bilatz’s security system worked, but he had a vision of nothing left of his body except a small, smoking crater in the ground if he messed up too badly. “7069 zeta xi 891705 tau iota gamma 62875231486.”

The gates opened with a melodramatic creaking. Across the threshold was an elaborate garden, split precisely in half by a literal yellow brick road. On the left was a scene of classical gray statues that reenacted the Greek philosopher Archimedes defiantly contemplating a mathematical diagram under the glare of a Roman soldier about to slay him. On the right were statues playing out the execution of the occultist Jacques Cazotte by guillotine during the French Revolution. The theme was the destruction of knowledge by thoughtless brutality, or so Dr. Bilatz once told him.

Inside was not some cold, sterile scientific complex but a Baroque palace with a chessboard floor and walls and high ceilings in shades of gold and black. Jeremy called out for Dr. Bilatz, but there was no answer, not even from any of Bilatz’s assistants.

Jeremy began climbing a grand spiral staircase downward into what he knew was Dr. Bilatz’s main laboratory.

“You do realize…” Lamorak began.

“What?” Jeremy asked in his mind.

“If you do join the Rooks, you’re going to have to start working out regularly and perhaps even sacrifice Oreos.”

Despite the situation, Jeremy scoffed aloud.

The central laboratory looked little different from the main hall and the residential rooms, just with computer terminals and technical equipment interspersed and in some cases built into mosaics and statuary. Jeremy stopped at a terminal that was part of a body of a classic European Gothic gargoyle. Without him asking, Lamorak took over Jeremy’s fingers and skillfully hacked into Dr. Bilatz’s mainframe so quickly and gracefully Jeremy’s conscious mind could not keep up.

“I’m scanning the raw data from security and there is absolutely nothing of note, much less anything related to a break-in by the Exile. Also…” Lamorak became ominously silent.

“What’s wrong?” Jeremy whispered aloud.

“Dr. Bilatz is away in Addis Ababa for a conference and has been for this entire month. I suggest we teleport away immediate-.”

“Lamorak?” Jeremy whispered. Then he nearly shouted, “Lamorak?”

Jeremy reached for his watch and began inputting the coordinates for home. Without warning, though, he could no longer feel or even see his watch. With the speed and uncertainty of a nightmare, he was suddenly once again pounding on the closet door while he heard Fernando laughing at the other side of the door. Jeremy was once more choking back his frustrated sobs and threatening to tell Fernando’s dad, who was then about to become Jeremy’s new stepdad. Still, he knew he wouldn’t because he was terrified of Fernando and knew what Fernando was capable of doing when his father was away on campus and his mother was working. And that was only if they would even believe that Fernando, who was a straight A student and was flawlessly polite to all the adults in his life, could be such a bully.

Even though the closet was barely big enough for two people, Jeremy stopped hitting the door when he became aware that someone was standing behind him. Not only was that person behind him, but he was standing several feet away, even though that shouldn’t have been physically possible in the space.

“As someone who knows a thing or two about sibling rivalry, you almost have my sympathy,” the voice of the Exile said. “Almost.”

Jeremy whirled around and saw the Exile in the black and gray cloak he usually wore. Apparently the cloak was a mark of shame in his homeworld. On Earth, he made it into something of a badge of warped honor.

“Lamorak, enact the psychic assault protocol now!” Jeremy screamed.

The Exile chuckled amiably. “Don’t excite yourself. It’s too late.”

“Lamorak!” Jeremy shouted. “I need you now!”

The Exile suddenly dropped the almost amiable façade and practically growled in anger. “What did I just say?” Before Jeremy could react the Exile shoved him through the closet door. Instead of a mocking Fernando and a carpeted hallway on the other side was a half-collapsed temple out on the Jordanian steppe. It was the exact spot where Jeremy as the Galaxy Knight, along with half the Rooks, managed to stop the Exile from summoning some mad, forgotten Babylonian god.

“What did you just do?!”

The Exile sneered. “A computer virus uploaded to this laboratory’s online network, perfectly calibrated for an alien AI consciousness dependent on a human mind. Prodigy is going to want me to thank her periodically for the next 50 years, but it’s so worth it, don’t you think?”

As he backed away, Jeremy tripped over a collapsed column half-buried in the ground. He knew he was inside his own mind, but the fresh bruise he felt on his buttock definitely seemed real.

“What did you do to Dr. Bilatz?”

Rolling his eyes, the Exile replied, “Try to keep up. I’m not after Dr. Bilatz. I’m after you.”

Suddenly, the Exile was holding a shotgun that appeared from nowhere and began pointing it right at Jeremy. “This is a tad less imaginative than I like to be, but I’ve got better things to do with my day and would like to wrap this up. Goodbye.”

Jeremy closed his eyes. Even though he was not quite sure if the Exile could kill him in his mindscape, he was still absolutely confident that this was the end of his life. The reality that his career as a superhero could end this way had always been in the back of his head. Facing the reality in the form of a gun was very different, so different that he could not really comprehend it until now.

Then there was a sound of flesh cutting and the Exile whimpering. The familiar purple-energy broadsword that Lamorak usually wielded when in his physical form was sticking through the Exile’s stomach. He gurgled and whimpered, as if trying to say something, before he slid forward and collapsed to the ground. In compliance with dream logic, the Exile’s body crumpled into dust and blew away, even though Jeremy felt no wind.

Lamorak reached out and Jeremy grabbed his hand and stood up. To his embarrassment he realized his eyes were stung with tears. “Thank God it’s you, Lamorak. He was…he was…”

Lamorak’s embrace felt like being hugged by a life-size plastic figure. Still, the gesture was very much welcome. “I know. It will be alright now. He must have wanted revenge for the last time you and the Rooks thwarted him.”

“What a lunatic,” Jeremy sighed. He had been instrumental in defeating the Exile’s scheme, but he was hardly the one involved. “We better get back before Mom gets home or Fernando notices I haven’t taken the trash out.”

“Oh, the watch…” Lamorak said, his robotic voice betraying a hint of concern.

Jeremy looked down and there was a dent on the edge of the watch. “Oh. Do you think it might have damaged the teleportation apparatus?”

“Possibly,” Lamorak answered. “But if so, it will only be minor damage. I should be able to affect repairs right here.”

Jeremy sighed in sincere relief. “Thank God. Here you go.”

The instant he handed the watch over to Lamorak, everything changed. Instead of Lamorak standing before him, it was the Exile, who triumphantly held the watch before him like a trophy. They were also no longer in the Middle East, but back in Dr. Bilatz’s laboratory.

“That was really easier than it should have been,” the Exile said, laughing. It was not the menacing laughter that Jeremy always expected out of lifelong supercriminals, but the laughter of someone who had just pulled off a smart move in a card game. “It looks to me like you’re not even Rooks material, Galaxy Knight.”

The Exile started walking away and waved with one hand while messing with the watch with the other. “Good luck getting back home.”

Jeremy closed his eyes and called on Lamorak to appear on his own and stop the Exile, more than he ever wished for anything in his life. Suddenly a blurry figure, which looked like a video game glitch manifested in reality somehow, appeared close to the floor and grabbed at the Exile’s legs, tripping him.

“Destroy the watch before he can focus and use his powers,” Lamorak’s voice hissed in Jeremy’s mind as the deformed figure of Lamorak kept wrestling with the supercriminal. “I will not be able to manifest in this form for long.”

“But I won’t get home and my family will know-“

“Please, you can’t let him have it,” Lamorak pleaded.

You have to act like a hero, Jeremy sternly told himself as he joined the fray and tried to wrestle the watch out of the Exile’s hand. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but he thought he could feel the Exile telepathetically clawing his way back into his consciousness. It was this fear that gave Jeremy a strength beyond even his normal ability. He slammed the watch against the floor repeatedly with a demented energy. The Exile screamed in rage while broken pieces of precious alien technology flew everywhere. At least Fernando will now find out I’m a superhero, Jeremy thought bitterly.

Panting, Jeremy tried to stand up, but his legs failed him. “Don’t bother,” the Exile said, also audibly exhausted. “I just managed to make your brain temporarily forget how legs work.”

The Exile stood up. Lamorak was now gone from view. Jeremy tried to crawl away, but the Exile was quickly on top of him, grabbing at his hand.

“Leave me alone!” Jeremy shouted. A part of his mind thought how this wasn’t playing out like any encounter with a supercriminal he ever managed. He kept trying to resist, but the Exile managed to grab his hand and violently jerked the ring off his finger.

Jeremy realized what the Exile was doing and screamed, even pleaded with him to stop. The Exile held the ring up and looked at it, almost admiringly. “So this really is the source of your power.” Pulling his body with his arms, Jeremy tried to reach the Exile but he slowly walked back, mocking him. “I did my homework, you see. And you’ve been way more open to the public than you should have been. I don’t know your real name, but I do know your ‘Lamorak’ is an artificial intelligence copy of a dead alien mind. Centuries ago, there was some interplanetary peacekeeping force that was betrayed and destroyed, and the survivors uploaded the dying minds of their greatest champions to these rings so that their legacy could live on. Plus they could keep fighting for the sake of civilizations that enter perilous periods in their technological and social evolution in conjunction with the minds of heroic natives. Or something like that, right?”

“Please,” Jeremy begged.

Faintly, Jeremy could hear Lamorak’s voice. It was barely coherent, but he could still make it out. “I’m so sorry, Jeremy. I know – I know what he’s about to do. Please listen to me.”

“And they adapt to the culture of whatever native they choose to enter a symbiotic relationship with, and hence we had Galaxy Knight,” the Exile chuckled.

Lamorak kept speaking. “Don’t let this break you. Don’t let this change you. Just keep-.”

“Shame, really,” the Exile said just before he dropped the ring to the floor and stomped on it several times, until the glass on the ring was utterly shattered.

Jeremy felt not only Lamorak’s voice but his very presence fade from his mind. Even though he felt exhausted, both physically and mentally, he still found the strength to scream one more time, “You murdered him!”

“Your Lamorak was just the memory of a ghost, if that,” the Exile said with an infuriating matter-of-factness, nonchalantly kicking what was left of the ring that once contained Lamorak’s essence across the floor.

“You murdered him,” Jeremy repeated, this time in a whisper.

The Exile shrugged and began to walk away. “You’ll be able to walk again in five minutes, at most.” With that, he was out the door.

 

 

 

 

By the eighth day, Amar had gotten into a routine. He would wake up and eat his mildly flavorful and protein-rich breakfast , which was delivered through a vending machine-like device that fed right into the kitchen (coffee was nowhere to be had in this place, but he couldn’t remember ever minding that, just noting it). Then he stepped out of the simple, tiny one-floor house he found himself in and walked out into the street (which no cars ever drove on) with other one-floor blue-and-white houses perfectly lined up on both sides. He walked about a mile to work, an office in a lovely, colonial-style building. There he sat down at a cubicle where he sat down and proofread medical and legal transcriptions from all over the English-speaking world for four hours. He had co-workers whom he socialized with, although their conversations were brief and never went beyond petty annoyances with work or how good the meals from last night were or what was on television last night. (They would have talked about the weather too, if it wasn’t always sunny with just a few clouds; the only “rain” came down in broad daylight).  Then he would go home and watch television. There was only one channel, though, and it was full of cheerful sitcoms and light dramas with just a mild infusion of conflict. His own favorites were Murder She Wrote and Three’s Company.

He dimly remembered how his rage and despair burned brightly that first day, how he felt that once again he had a normal life stolen from him. However, he felt much better by the second day. Even the fact that his telepathy was muted, to such a degree that he could barely even go inside his own mind, didn’t bother him that much anymore.

Nothing did, really.

Amar was only slightly disturbed by his supervisors. They said nothing, but his co-workers and friends called them the Archons. The men always wore black, white, and gray khakis and pollo shirts while the women dressed in colorful blouses and slacks. Where their heads would be were sleek black-mirror screens on which faces were usually shown, although occasionally they would flicker with flashes of blue dancing through the dark. The faces were always pleasant and uninspiringly attractive. And they never failed to be anything but polite.

The only breaks in the routine were picnics and sporting events and community theater and the like. He thought of auditioning for the role of Macbeth, even though the play didn’t have the scene where Macduff’s family gets killed. And Lady Macbeth goes to prison, instead of committing suicide. Still, something about the role of the Scottish king spoke to him.

What was this place called, he sometimes wondered. No one ever told him, and it never occurred to him to ask one of the Archons. It didn’t really matter, anyway. It was now the whole world to him.

***

The only thing that bothered him, aside from the fact that the rice and vegetable meals that were provided on Wednesdays always tasted over-salted, were the dreams.

He dreamed of an old-fashioned ship that sailed through the sky and the feeling a man’s beard rub against his own while they kissed and of leading an army into battle down a mountain path while drunk on hate. He also dreamed of his own blood and the feeling of a cold, metallic wall against his back as he slumped against it.

One afternoon on the weekend, he had walked down to the nearby library, a sleek, stylish building that was like being inside a state-of-the-art cell phone. All the books were works of classic literature, moral philosophy, and self-help books. It barely even occurred to him now that this was something that should be questioned.

As Amar perused the literature signature, trying to find a decent translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh and only faintly annoyed he could not find a copy with the original Sumerian, he became aware that a man had been staring at him. He was a tall, thin, middle-aged man who somehow gave him the impression that he had walked off the set of a 1950s television show. Amar could not shake the feeling he had seen the man before around his neighborhood.

It took a surprising amount of willpower, but finally, Amar asked, “Can I help you with something?”

Unfazed, the man chuckled and said, “It’s nothing. Well, a small, little thing. I just thought I would test something out.”

“Test?”

“My companion, whom I suspect you’ll be meeting later, asserted that this was a bad idea, but I usually prefer the direct approach. And, besides, for people in your condition, a little confusion goes a long way.”

“My…condition? But I’m perfectly fine.”

“Exactly.” With that, the man theatrically leaned closer, even though he was still a couple of feet away, and asked, “Query: Can you guess what number I’m thinking of? Your clue is that it is between the numbers 1 and 50.”

Any thoughts as to the man’s identity and what he wanted were chased out of Amar’s mind. Suddenly, he could only think of the odd question asked of him.

“I guess I could try…but why?”

The man smiled paternally. “Just a test, just a test, like I said. Please try clearing your mind.”

Amar closed his eyes. Within seconds, the answer came to him. “Um…23. No, actually, 23.5726.”

The smile grew larger. “Excellent.”

“Do you need help finding anything?” a woman’s voice spoke beside him.

Startled, Amar whirled around. An Archon stood near him, the beaming face of a young blonde woman looking down at him while taking up most of the screen. “Oh, no, but thank you. Thank you very much.”

As the Archon moved on to reshelving, Amar looked around for the bow-tied man, but he was nowhere to be seen. Even stranger was how he supposedly guessed that very specific number and supposedly got it right. The whole thing must have been some prank. Although…wasn’t he able to guess what other people were thinking accurately before, a long time ago? He couldn’t really remember.

***

“So first thing’s first: your number-one suspect is dead.”

Jon thought that he had misheard Liz. After all, she was just on speaker via his cheap and nearly kaput cell phone. “What was that? I’m not…”

“He’s dead. He’s been dead for 11 years now.”

Jon looked at Heracles, who was reclining majestically on his couch as if he was on a throne overseeing the inspection of plunder taken from an enemy. Also, for some reason, he was wearing a t-shirt and a blazer tailored to leave none of his muscles to the imagination. It would have been better if he had met Liz in person at her home or her office on campus, but Jon found himself surprisingly hostile to the idea of Heracles coming in contact with Liz. Having him seduce Amar was bad enough, and Liz had a thing for superhuman muscles herself.

“Are you sure?” Jon asked the phone perched on the table.

“Of course I am!” He could almost hear the eye roll. After a pause and a few audible clicks of her mouse, she continued, “There was only one Silver Scorpion, and he was apparently really well known back in the day. Are you sure you’ve never heard of him?”

“No,” Jon replied. He looked again at Heracles, who shook his head.

“Well, he was a pretty big deal in New York City history, more than even Sparrow and Viper or Cerberus. In fact, he once…”

Jon cleared his throat, his usual signal to get Liz off lecture mode.

“Okay, okay, sorry. But it might be important that he was so respected he was one of the few vigilantes in New York to ever be granted an exemption from the McIntyre-Cranston Act.”

“So he was allowed to fight street crime?”

“Yep. You really do remember what I tell you. But most of the time he was asked to deal with supercriminals. Then things with a particularly nasty supercriminal went south and he retired. He passed away not many years afterward. The producers of some documentary found out he was the heir of an electronics fortune.”

In a gesture of impatience, Heracles leaped to his feet. “I thank you for following our clue so extensively, as always, Elizabeth, but this does sound like a dead end.”

“Could be. There is one really weird thing, though, that makes me think it’s at least worth looking into.”

“What?”, Jon asked.

“You know how it’s not that unusual for supercriminals to just up and disappear, right? Either they’ve gone straight and gotten new identities or they, well, die. Or worse. Even then, it doesn’t seem likely that every single one of his surviving regulars, whether they were in jail, in a mental hospital, or reformed vanished without a trace one by one after he retired, and they kept disappearing even after he was dead.”

Relief washed over Jon. Now here was a lead. “What’s the time frame we’re talking?”

“Five years.”

Jon definitely thought they were onto something, but suddenly he realized that Heracles had invited himself into this investigation. Reluctantly, he turned and asked, “What do you think?”

Heracles grinned. “Comrade, it seems as if we’re finally getting close to me being able to just punch someone.”

***

Although the incident at the library was so brief, Amar’s thoughts kept straying to it. What did that man want? And why was such an innocent little thing make him feel so unsettled? If it was a joke or whatever, why did he guess such a bizarre number to begin with?

Then, on his way home from work, he encountered a tall, athletic-looking woman who looked like she was in her 40s. Her black hair was in a tight bun, and she moved down the sidewalk with a tense grace. Unlike any other woman Amar had seen since he…relocated here, she wore her blue shirt in a way that rather complimented her breasts. It occurred to Amar then that everyone other than the Archons wore a blue shirt and gray pants. That was also what his entire wardrobe consisted of.

That didn’t sound right either.

“Amar, right? Hello. Good to see you,” she said cheerfully and aggressively, grabbing his hand and shaking it.

“Um, hi. Do I know you?”

“Oh, we haven’t met, but I’ve been keeping tabs on you.”

Amar would have normally been afraid or startled or perhaps even angered—or some combination thereof—but he wasn’t. Instead he only felt a dull curiosity. “Why?”, he asked.

She smiled. “We’ll catch you up soon, I hope, but in the meantime, you take our advice.” Suddenly, she shook his hand and then disappeared, moving fast without sprinting, down a side street. It took about a full minute to realize he had a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand.

“IT’S IN THE FOOD THEY GIVE YOU. AND DON’T LET THEM SEE OUR GIFT.” It was signed with a sketch of a spider.

Amar’s thoughts were consumed by the mystery of the note, especially that second sentence, as he made his way home. Then, almost as soon as he stepped through the door, he found that someone had somehow broken into his house only to leave boxes full of food on paper plates that were carefully wrapped in plastic.

“No, this is too…” Amar couldn’t find the word.

“Intense?” Dr. Phan replied as he looked around a bloody battlefield with a professional mild interest. The corpse of a man who couldn’t have been much older than a teenager was at his feet. “This was your first memory to surface.”

“I know, I just…” The battlefield abruptly faded into black like a show on TV. Amar was back on a steep hill that inclined down into a lush forest. The hillside was an old and happy place he knew in his childhood and was what Dr. Phan termed his “neutral place”. “Sorry if that was too…forceful,” Amar said. “I know I’ve been your patient for a while, but I’m still not used to sharing my head with another telepath.”

The body of Dr. Phan was gone. Instead he heard his voice, sounding a bit like a voice coming the other end of a landline telephone. “Just think of it as like talking, only more…visceral.”

Without consciously willing it, the grass under his feet gave way to a carpeted floor and the other side of a room was his own body, bleeding from his wrists and slumped against a wall. “Oh, Ishtar,” Amar whimpered.

“I could sense the thought of your suicide at the fringe of the consciousness when we began our session, and you said you wanted to talk about your sense of guilt and responsibility,” Dr. Phan explained. Somewhat poetically, as he talked Dr. Phan was standing on the other side of the transparent barrier of Amar’s cell. Amar wondered if it was deliberate.

“No, it isn’t,” Dr. Phan said with a smile. Now he was standing in the cell with Amar.

“Sorry,” Amar said. He was about to mutter out another line about how he was unused to dealing with another telepath again when Dr. Phan interrupted him.

“Clearly there’s some sort of connection that might be worth investigating here. Do you remember what you were thinking just before you decided to take your life?”

Amar was shocked by how little he really thought about it and how much he tried not to think about it since his little adventure with Jon. “I’m not sure. I just know, when I decided to do it, I really did feel like I had no future, that I might as well have been a corpse.”

“I don’t doubt you were thinking about the future, but it seems the past was on your mind as well.”

Unbidden, their surroundings began to shift at the speed of thought: a ritual Amar participated in to bring back the undead serial killer Lonnie, giant arachnid robots marching on the streets of Miami as he grinned from a penthouse window above, a teenager screaming at Amar in rage, and Amar’s only sibling sobbing, pleading with him not to take her memories away…

“Stop,” Dr. Phan said, gently but firmly reaching further into Amar’s mind and pulling his psyche back to that lovely green hillside. A nice breeze blew under the flawlessly clear sky. Now where Amar was standing there was now a red couch and a red cushioned chair.

“Maybe for the rest of our time together it’s best to slow down and just talk the old-fashioned way in this lovely memory,” Dr. Phan said helpfully.

***

Amar lingered in a small café over a mediocre vanilla latte. He wasn’t there for the coffee, but for the view of the wide green spaces of a nearby college campus (the fit, shirtless guys who played touch football or frisbee were not his only motive for frequenting that cafe, but they were an added perk). Also the shop never had a solid clientele, so it was easier not to have to shut out other people’s noisy thoughts.

Amar liked Dr. Phan, but he couldn’t honestly say he liked their sessions. It had been too long since Amar lived in a place where running into and dealing with other telepaths was a routine occurrence. And where he came from, telepaths were the ones who worked as the closest thing his society had to psychologists, but then he never experienced what his people called “the treatment of the inward gaze”. He could only imagine what it would be like for people who didn’t have telepathic gifts and couldn’t even go inside themselves to construct their own mindscapes.

It was especially disconcerting because Dr. Phan wanted to talk about Amar trying to take his life far more than his past as a supercriminal. Amar hadn’t even really thought about his suicide attempt. It felt as if it had happened to someone else, after all, and he had only attempted it because Yori came to loathe him and he had the new life he built ripped away. Or was that the only reason?

His thoughts were still burdensome as he realized he might as well brood at home than waste more money on not-too-good coffee. On the way home, he cut a shortcut through a narrow street, as he usually did when he didn’t feel like lingering. Halfway down the street, he sensed someone behind him who was deliberately masking his thoughts. Amar looked behind him only to see an object that looked like a spearhead, attached to an electric wire and flying right towards him. With only microseconds to spare, Amar fell backwards and caught himself against the pavement with his right arm. It wasn’t exactly graceful, but the pain from the fall was negligible at least. He shouted out, but no one answered. No doubt his assailant made sure to attack him in a place where there wasn’t a single pedestrian anywhere nearby.

The taser or whatever it was fell harmlessly near Amar as he rolled toward the closest thing to cover, a jeep parked on the curb. From there, he darted into an nearby alleyway as quickly as he could.  Amar glanced over and saw a man in a silver costume that had the emblem of a scorpion on the chest and a mask with an insectile look, not far behind but just far enough.

Amar rushed over behind another row of parked vehicles, reaching out again to find any pedestrians. There. He located the minds of a group of teenagers coming back from the movies and slowly making their way down a nearby avenue. Amar was prepared to make another dart in their direction, but under a truck, he could see the silver boots of his stalker on the other side of the street.

“Time to stop playing defensive,” Amar thought. His attacker had some rudimentary psychic shields up, making it difficult for him to find a foothold. But before too long, he could feel a tingle of fear, a stray thought of worry that he had lost sight of Amar.

That was all he needed. Amar blasted his attacker’s mind with gibberish-filled, incoherent thoughts that no doubt severely disoriented him, enough to buy Amar enough time to find those teenagers or some other pedestrian. Just as Amar was emerging from cover and preparing to take a photo of his attacker with his cellphone, he heard a fire escape somewhere nearby rattle and the sound of a heavy weight dropping to the cement. Just as he was turning around to look, he felt the prick of a needle on his neck and the feeling of his muscles melting into liquid.

***

“You are a hard man to reach these days, you know,” Heracles said, grinning.

“Yeah, I know,” Jon said. “They haven’t quite worked out the kinks of communication between the universe and outside the space-time continuum. But I really do appreciate you letting me know.”

Heracles shrugged. “Of course! I know you…ah, care for Amar.”

Jon chose not to pursue that implications of that “ah”. “Well, yeah. I’m just surprised that you…”

Heracles gave Jon a confused look. “Do you think I shouldn’t care about his well-being?”

“No, I’m just – well, uh, are you two dating?”

Heracles’ face darkened. “Do we need to be in some sort of courtship for me to be concerned that the prince may be in danger or, may the Fates not will it, worse?”

Jon gulped. Earning the ire of someone who could break his neck with a twitch of his fingers was not on his calendar. “No, what I mean is – I’m just wondering how close you two have gotten since I went away.”

Heracles seemed to ponder that for a moment before the storm clouds apparently lifted and he laughed again. “Ah, friend Jon, I understand now. No, the two of us have only shared a bed and good conversations. And even then, our talks would too often end in him asking me to swing him around and…”

“Shh!” Jon said, noticing amused glances from the bar’s other patrons.

From what little Jon knew of Heracles, he was no doubt proud of his “lovemaking” with a rogue royal from a kingdom in another dimension. This was probably far from the only time he let certain details slip. Now this time it was Jon’s turn to feel his mood darken.

Before Jon could mull over Heracles and Amar’s relationship for too long, their food was delivered by a group of cheerful yet menacing-looking robots with sleek red metallic skin and a somewhat devilish look. When the Final Guard first established their own official café for members and associates in 1968, Club Limbo, they had used the appropriated robots of an old regular of theirs at the time, Dr. Daedelus, as staff. Since the robots had mostly kept themselves in good working order over the decades and, more importantly, lacked free will according to multiple psychological and engineering tests and still actually seemed happier as servers than as a madman’s soldiers, there was no reason to replace them. It took only one robot to deliver Jon’s meal of a Reuben and fries and iced tea. It took three to deliver Heracles’ one-man feast, which includes roast lamb, figs, fried lampreys, grape leaves stuffed with rice, an entire jug of wine, and half a chocolate cake.

“Besides,” Heracles said with a smile, “you should know I take care of all my friends. In the old days, I sailed all the way around Greece to try to save a woman I did not know that well and had only laid with once.”

“How did that turn out?”

“Oh, I not only saved her, but I went to war against the entire clan that took her and then…” Heracles stopped himself awkwardly. “But that was a very different time.

As he ripped into his banquet, Heracles happily changed the subject. “So who do you think is responsible for Amar’s disappearance? Some former ally or rival of his from his former nefarious career?”

That was Jon’s own first suspicion, but after thinking it over, he had changed his mind. “I doubt it. God knows the supercriminal community has plenty of backstabbers, but they’re generally pretty good at regulating themselves when it comes to their own just going berserk against each other. Any act of hostility without a really bad act of provocation is a sure way to get oneself quietly disappeared one day, even if the victim had gone legit. And it should have been old news long ago that Amar got his pardon because he helped me stop the reality warp, not because he ratted anybody out.”

Heracles signaled his agreement by grunting with a mouth full of lamb. “Some rogue superhero or law enforcement agency then?”

Jon sighed. “That’s my fear. Josephine Manners swears she investigated her own turf over it and I believe her, but she’s not omniscient.”

“Close to it, though,” Heracles said with no small bit of awe.

“There was a big crackdown on vigilantes sometime in the mid-‘90s and there hasn’t been a resurgence since, if I remember one of Liz’s impromptu history lectures right,” Jon said.

“Hmm. But it wouldn’t be the first time a hero snapped or had a grudge against one of their regulars that drove them to break the law and their own supposed code of honor.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Jon said. There was a strong third possibility, though. Human trafficking of the superpowered and paranormally empowered was a lucrative international black market that sometimes involved rogue governments and terrorist organizations. And the rarity of telepaths made them particularly valuable. But Jon suspected that Heracles didn’t want to consider that hypothesis anymore than he did, at least not until they exhausted the more likely and less frightening possibilities.

“I read everything I could about Amar’s past as the Exile and there were…a few candidates,” Heracles said. He paused, clearly weighing his words, and continued. “But that said…well, the last time you saw Amar was at the anniversary party, yes?”

Jon nodded.

“Did you see your friend and former teammate, who goes by the name ‘Tell’?”

“Well, yeah,” Jon felt his heart sink. His involvement honestly did not even occur to him until now. “What are you thinking?”

“I was with Amar most of the night, and a few times I saw Tell staring at Amar from a distance. Indeed, I thought about confronting him, but he left long before the festivities were over.”

Jon shook his head. “He definitely has a grudge against Amar. But that doesn’t –“

Suddenly, Jon’s cellphone came to life with an old-school landline ring. “Um, sorry. I better answer in case it’s about Amar.”

“Of course,” Heracles said, his full attention already dedicated to his meal.

“Hello?” Jon said, rising from his seat and ducking into a quiet, empty corner of the café.

“Um, hey. Is this Jon?” A nervous teenager’s voice said.

“This is he. Who is this?”

“Hey. I’m Juan Romano. So I was walking home from the movies with my friends and, uh, I got this…message.”

“Message?”

“It was crazy! Like I just blanked out for five seconds and your name and number was in my head and I just knew the whole thing was from some guy named Amar.”

Jon, who was confused and thought this was some bizarre hoax, audibly gasped. “Wait. Amar? Is he okay?”

“I don’t know, man! I just got this message and your phone number in my brain and this feeling that I better call you. And I’m crap at remembering numbers, you know? But I don’t think I can forget your phone number now even if I try.” Suddenly his voice raised with a real note of panic. “Is – is something going to be wrong with me?”

Jon choked down his impatience. “No, Juan. You’re safe.” You might remember my phone number for the rest of your life, though, Jon thought, but did not dare add. “Just tell me what the message was, please.”

“It was weird, but I swear it was all of it,” Juan said, talking as if he was sharing state secrets. “It just said, ‘It was the silver scorpions.’”

It had been six months since Amar had been arrested by the Final Guard, and it was actually a relief that the most evil thing he had done since was forcing his seven students to master the Sumerian language’s sexagesimal numeral system in one class period.

Here he was, about to step inside his townhouse with something called a “pizza Margherita” hot on his arm. He was even able to go by his real name or rather a version of it that fit with his new manufactured life story as a scholar from the Middle East. Luckily, he was never nearly as famous a supercriminal as someone like The Roman or Mr. Punch. Even in an age of everyone carrying around digital cameras on their phones, plausible deniability would be his friend, or at least that’s what Josephine Manners assured him on three separate occasions.

As Amar awkwardly managed his keys and his pizza, he turned his head and called out, “You want any?”

Out in the darkness beyond his porch, a gruff voice replied flatly, “You knew I was there?”

“Don’t worry,” he said, opening the door and leaving it open for his guest. “You’re really good at silencing your thoughts for a mindblind, but you also give off some of the strongest psychic radiation I’ve ever experienced.”

Abu Oginyae silently followed. As much as he tried to convey the sense that he could shut down his entire nervous system in a minute, it did unnerve Amar how Abu Oginyae managed to move without even making the floor creak slightly.

“Would you like any pizza?”

Adu Oginyae was silent for a few seconds. “No, thank you.”

“Well, the offer’s open. I guess you’re here to spy on me, making sure I’m not hanging out with the wrong crowd again?”

“Something like that,” he answered.

Amar set down on the table two plates with a slice of pizza on each.

“Why you, though? Is the c-team off fighting a demonic invasion of Manhattan or something?”

“Let’s just say I’m personally curious,” Abu Oginyae said. “You likely know that I have seen very few people reform in my time, especially not among my own regulars. I do hope you will be different.”

Amar quietly ate, wondering if Jon’s preemptive break-up did make the Final Guard nervous that Amar would revert back to his old career. Just as Amar was starting to wonder if Abu Oginyae would simply stand there and watch him eat, he spoke again.

“You will be receiving an invitation in the mail, but I might as well tell you. You’re invited to the 430^th anniversary of the Final Guard’s founding.”

“Oh. Well, thanks.” In spite of himself, Amar asked, “Will Jon be there?”

“Most likely.”

Amar got up and made his way to the fridge to get some iced tea. “Can I at least get you a drink?” When he next turned around toward the front door, Abu Oginyae was gone along with the second slice of pizza.

***

The boat pulled up to Citadel Island, an artificially built island lying roughly six miles east of Cobb Island, Virginia. Since the 1970s, it had been the main base for the Final Guard. Once upon a time, the Final Guard had been located in Manhattan. It took a surprisingly long time for people to realize that collecting Earth’s most powerful humans and miscellaneous beings, who were also routinely targeted by deadly superhuman, paranormal, and extraterrestrial forces, in a densely populated urban area was a terrible idea or at the very least outweighed the benefits of having them conveniently at hand.

Liz had been silently watching the water since they departed from the village of Oyster. As they got off on the dock, Jon asked her teasingly, “Thinking back to the time when you were a cape?”

Liz chuckled. “A little, actually. I still can’t believe I thought I was being all feminist by taking the name ‘White Witch.’”

“I thought it was clever.”

They reminisced all the way into the tower and through the multiple body scans (making sure they had no weapons or explosives, ensuring they were not shapeshifters or androids, etc.). They stepped into a ballroom that were a rainbow of superhero costumes, here and there broken by much more mundane tuxedos and dresses. Jon himself was in his Mantra costume, even though he had been working with Dr. Bilatz for weeks now doing random tasks and using the Mantra gem to help him monitor and manage mystical energies. Liz was in a red dress that was at least an unconscious homage to Lydia Deetz.

“What are you doing in that…interdimensional nexus or whatever anyway?” Liz asked.

“He’s calling it The Outside now.”

“Really? Nice and simple. It’s better than the White Witch.”

They separated and mingled, Liz eventually chatting with a rapper who was also rumored in the cape press to have lycanthropy, Jon making the rounds of his various former teammates in the Rooks. Standing alone, apart from the crowd and nursing a Shirley Temple, was Tell in his full classic Robin Hood-esque get-up.

They exchanged awkward and token greetings, but it wasn’t long before Will got to the chase.

“Amar is supposedly coming tonight,” he said, clearly scanning Jon’s face for a reaction.

“Really? That was nice of them to include him.”

Tell didn’t even try to suppress a groan. “Hm. I bet it was Sans Pareil’s idea.”

Jon couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “Probably, but you never know.”

“Look, I didn’t – I’m glad you’re not dating Amar. Seriously.”

Jon was surprised at the slight chill in his own voice. “I didn’t do it for you.”

“I know. Liz told me. Well, she didn’t tell me everything, but she implied you had other reasons. Still, though, I should…” Whatever Tell was about to say, he trailed off.

“What?”

“It’s nothing. I really need to go find my plus one. She’s some journalist I met on a mission and I better make sure she’s not trying to score an interview off somebody. See you.”

Before Jon could engage another of his colleagues, the band that had been alternating between soft rock and something not unlike jazz surrendered to Athena, who took to the stage to give the requisite speech in her full breastplate and tunic.

After speaking eloquently but briefly on all the triumphs and the tragedies that had been experienced in the past year, Athena turned to the organization’s history. “Contrary to popular belief, I actually wasn’t on this plane of reality at the time, but I have heard this story told to me so many times in so many ways I may as well have been. 430 years ago, frustrated at the failure of his grand armada to conquer England, King Philip II of Spain, in a grotesque act of hypocrisy, had one of the kings of Hell, Viné, summoned and sent him against the English people. In response, Queen Elizabeth I gathered together the strongest but also the most unusual champions in her dominions – the Boggart, Sir Bedwyr, the Brass Head, Madam Pigot, and Jack-in-Irons. Only by using their gifts in tandem were they able to prevent tremendous loss of life and completely defeat what we would today call a class-A1 paranormal threat. It was a grateful Elizabeth herself who gave this menagerie of misfits the name the ‘Final Guard’, deeming them the last protection of her country when all other defenses failed.

This group continued to ultimately through tumultuous shifts in membership and even periods of total disbandment such as when Oliver Cromwell furiously condemned them as demonic and drove them all underground or out of England, but the Final Guard would always return in one form or another whenever the need was great. We have evidence that such gatherings of – let’s say – unique and exceptional individuals existed even as far back as ancient Rome and Nara Japan, but – and Liz, feel free to correct even the goddess of wisdom on this one [sincere laughter came from the audience] – but none lasted for longer than a generation. The Final Guard did, however, even after all of its original members had passed on or faded into legend.

However, its service still strictly belonged to the English monarchy until the horrors of the Seven Years War provoked the Masked Dragoon and Jill Holland to reach out to France’s premier champion, the Vicomte de Calbec, and set out to establish a new Final Guard that would no longer serve as the arm of any one government and would instead fight for the entire human race against exceptional threats. This mission has rarely been a simple one and many times the Final Guard has had to take sides in spite of our own ideals, most famously when we agreed to work in conjunction with the United States Army during the Second World War. But even in these tumultuous times we have kept true—“

Jon was listening with rapt attention until he thought he heard heavy footsteps coming in his general direction followed by a familiar laughter. He casually looked behind him and for reasons that were a mystery to him his heart stopped at the sight: a tall, very muscular, shirtless man, dressed only in leather boots and what could only be described as some kind of ancient man-skirt, along with perfectly combed and trimmed facial hair, long hair crowning his shoulders, and a forest of curly chest hair. It was Athena’s half-brother, Heracles, and walking with him with a hand against the chest that was far broader than Jon’s own was Amar.

Amar waved at Jon in such a way that it was almost theatrical. Jon fired back with about half a nod.

He was shocked out of his reverie by the room’s applause. Jon half-heartedly joined in and tried to go back to mingling, but his eyes kept turning back to the site of Amar fawning over the giant trash heap of hair and muscle.

Unable to do anything else, Jon walked casually up to Heracles and Amar. “Hi, Amar. I didn’t think you’d come.”

“Jon! I’m glad to see you again. It’s been a while.”

“Well, well, Mantra,” Heracles said with a grin. “I haven’t seen you since…”

“The Nero Imperative. Particularly that escape from the New Millennium Faction’s base.”

“Yes!” Heracles playfully slapped Jon on the shoulder, very nearly knocking him down. “I remember that well! Your friend here has quite the knack for running away from explosions,” he told Amar.

“Oh, I’ve seen him in danger, too,” Amar replied.

“Oh? We should arrange some kind of deadly, absurd adventure so you can say the same about me.”

“Well, you have taken every possible chance to show off,” Amar said before turning to Jon, almost as if he had forgotten he was there. “Did you know he’s so strong he can bench press a ten-wheeler? He did it as part of a workout routine while I was visiting him. Barely broke a sweat.”

“That is impressive, although I can name four or five people off the top of my head who can do the exact same thing,” Jon replied, trying to make it sound like just friendly teasing and failing.

As the war of barbs continued, Athena stood back in the crowd of talking people. She was making a beeline for her brother to confront him about yet again coming to an event uninvited when he hadn’t been a regular member of the Final Guard since the 1950s, but instead she stopped to observe Jon’s interactions with Amar and Heracles.

Sans Pareil saddled up next to her. “It’s a shame that Amar ended up with Heracles. I really was rooting for him and Jon.”

Athena was about to explain to Sans Pareil what was going on in the same tone one would talk to a too-old child about the non-existence of Santa Claus, but thankfully Adu Oginyae, who appeared out of nowhere as was his custom, did it for her. “You’re joking, right? You do realize that he’s trying to make Jon jealous, don’t you?”

Sans Pareil twisted his face in disgust. “You’d think someone who can read minds would just communicate his feelings honestly.”

“He’s still a human being,” Athena countered.

“And it’s still wrong,” Adu Oginyae added.

“So says the man who dates gorgeous yet love-starved celebrities and the saintly heads of affluent non-profits just to keep up his secret identity.”

Suddenly Heracles grabbed Amar, lifted him four feet in the air, and kissed him briefly yet deeply. Laughing, Amar then made his way to a door leading to an outdoor balcony. Jon said his farewells to Heracles – his words were terse, Heracles’ boisterously sincere. Seeing her moment, Athena walked up to her brother.

Forgoing the greeting, she simply said, “I trust you actually know what this is about, right?”

“You mean make some boy jealous?” Heracles said, chuckling. “I haven’t spent as much time with the mortals as you have in the recent centuries, sister, but I’ve never been that naïve. We’ve just been having a good time the past few months. And besides, I haven’t been with either a woman or a man of royal blood since that one glorious night in Edinburgh.”

“Please consider breaking it off gently,” Athena said, even though she suspected Heracles would ignore her advice as he always did in matters that did not involve storming enemy strongholds. “You shouldn’t even be involved.”

Heracles shrugged his massive shoulders. “He seems fine to me.”

“You’re worse than Father,” Athena growled. “At least he has the decency to delude himself that he’s in love.”

Amar pretended to be making the rounds, but only ran into former adversaries who had either played a role in foiling some plan he at least was involved in or knew him by reputation. The most Amar could be grateful for was that the shallow greetings outnumbered the icy glares. The only one who struck up a conversation with him was the Sentinel, who stood out even from the blindingly colorful crowd in his costume and its red, white, and blue motif.

At first, they chatted and joked about a little incident where Amar tricked the Sentinel and some British superhero, the Ebony Knight, into gathering together the scattered pieces of some superweapon or another. It soon turned into an argument about the merits of monarchy versus American democracy.

“I respect your people and their long history, but after living in this world for so many years, how can you still defend a system where power passes from one person to another just because of what family they were born into?” the Sentinel asked, gesturing so passionately that he nearly spilled his drink.

Amar rolled his eyes. “Yes, exactly. Why do you think I still believe in my people’s government, even after getting overthrown and exiled? I absolutely think that some societies could use at least a nominal leader who’s trained from birth for the role and isn’t some corrupt, unqualified lunatic who managed to game the system…”

Neither man was aware that their argument was being observed at a distance by Tell. Retreating further back, Tell whispered into his cell phone, “No, of course, you shouldn’t even think about taking him. He’s dating a veteran cape apparently, Heracles. So you’ll have to be more careful. Sure, we’ll keep watching until we finally get the opening we need.”