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,

When I think of the photograph of the girl I used to be, a stranger now, I think how much I miss her, and how she was never really happy in the first place. I still don’t know why she went to Brazil, or if she meant to stand in front of a dump truck or not. But she probably couldn’t see in the dark, or walk on the bottom of the ocean, or take a

Absurdly, Jason actually took the time to try to read and even review my work. I think he raised some churlish objection about Calabi-Yau manifolds. It was one of our last conversations, and in retrospect, perhaps I should have listened. That was probably the last time when I could really have done something differently. He’d done some

And if Jason hadn’t been there, I’m sure someone else would have stepped in to save her. He just happened to be standing there, right in position to play the hero and push her out of the way. The zeta beam caught him full in the chest, and he was silhouetted in a shimmering golden haze of particles, penetrating his body, infusing him with the

But—and I stress this—it’s not enough. You can be as smart as you want to be, you can be the smartest man in the world, but if you try something like this, a Special Forces reject is still going to rappel over the wall and punch you in the stomach. And then you’re going to be the smartest man on the floor sucking wind. You need to prepare for this

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

I wonder who did do it, if it wasn’t me. I pick my way down Amsterdam, among the mourners, walking faster now, until I’m lost among the thousands there, lost among people who can’t fly or teleport or turn to water, just going their way, until I could be one of them. She’ll tell them I’d been there. She’s in that world now, and I suppose I

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