Jason enrolled in physics, and at the beginning of each term I cringed to find his blue-eyed smiling face waiting in the seminar room, my fair-haired double. We still competed for the top of the class, he with his plodding intellect and I with my eccentric brilliance, sudden leaps and bursts of calculation that carried me alone into unknown planes

“Before…How old are you, Elphin?” She turns away, ignoring it. I guess it was a rude question. But something about her is starting to make sense. For the first time, I can see past the teenage waif look and see how old she really is. And what she is now—a being partly sylvan goddess and partly animal, a fairy. She’d been left behind by everyone she

When you can’t bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn’t you anymore; you’ve changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all.

Invincible. It’s what everyone wants to claim they are. Not just tough, but downright invulnerable. Damsel is, nearly, and Lily’s about equal, but either of them would fall after enough pounding. It’s happened before. I’m well armored, but where I’m not metal I’m an ordinary woman.

The thing of it is, I actually liked Erica, even afterward. Even after the headline HERO THWARTS WOULD-BE WORLD CONQUEROR appeared over her byline. She was a sharp writer, although her book of short stories never got much attention. I didn’t see her much after that—she was swept away into the bright lights of the superhero world and the society pag

If you haven’t been this close to superhumans, you don’t understand what it’s like to fight them. Even when you’ve got powers yourself, the predominant impression is one of shock. The forces moving around you are out of human scale, and your nervous system doesn’t know how to deal with it. It’s like being in a car accident, over and over again. You

When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don’t just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

There’s no further comment. The Scepter of Elfland has been placed, diplomatically, at the close of my list, without comment, and I wonder about that. Am I being sent to face our worst foe? Maybe, but it’s like a secret between Damsel and me. I’m going to meet the woman who raised her after her mother left, and that’s an odd little intimacy, especi

My world is a sphere of rock that circles an orb of nuclear fire, and science and I are setting our backs against it, and it will move. That much is clear. In my island fortress, I keep an elephant tusk, 32,000 years old, incised with a few scratches marking the phases of the Moon, made by the hand of a Paleolithic supergenius, the progenitor of th