Teacher Pavel, where did we come from?”

  Bless Allie Chambers’ little brain, Pavel Fisher thought, and curse it, too. Fisher wiped the notes of his latest world history class from the board, just so it’d buy him time to think of an answer. Of course, he had to blame himself, too. He was the one who’d told his class that they could ask him anything in the last five minutes of class, providing it was history related.

  Which, Pavel mused, it was.

  “That,” Fisher said, turning, “is a very good question. Does anyone here know the answer?” That’d buy him a little more time. He wasn’t sure how to answer it, and not only because the IESA didn’t know the answer. The greatest mystery in the history of the world: the advent of the empowered, the well from which they had leapt. He couldn’t fault Allie’s curiosity. Answering that question might just explain why she was living in Switzerland and not with her family in Australia.

  Murmurs ran around the classroom. Fisher picked up bits and pieces: evolution, Preceptor, aliens, God. None of them fit, and he was pretty sure the kids knew it. Too sudden for evolution, to say nothing of how they defied physics. Preceptor had been the first, sure, but the emergence of the empowered was so widespread that it appeared truly random—no single progenitor, no universal clues. And Fisher was pretty sure the IESA wouldn’t give credence to rumors of intervention from the skies above, be it divine or otherwise.

  The IESA liked to think they had always been here. After all, they predicated their authority and power upon the belief that the newest subset of humanity could be understood, and controlled. And it all started in the classroom. The students saw Teacher Pavel as the voice of God—if a tired, cantankerous voice—but didn’t understand yet that he was little more than a facilitator. So, he should’ve reprimanded her for that usage of we as it implied separation (“unconstructive language,” the handbook termed it) but, hell, it was his classroom.

  “The truth is, we don’t know,” Fisher said, giving his students a rueful shrug. “There are theories—a lot of theories. But the thing about history is that it’s more than facts or dates. It’s about learning to interpret those theories based on the evidence provided, and it’s about asking questions. If it was evolution, then why haven’t we seen any animals with these capabilities? Why did the first empowered emerge in 2021, and why was it Preceptor? Why was he a hero and not a villain? Maybe we’ll know the answer one day. Maybe one of you will be who figures it out. And, hey, if you do—well, remember me in your big speech.”

  The kids found his joke to fall somewhere between groaning and uncomfortable chuckling. Which was fine. Facilitator or not, he was going to take advantage of what little authority he had. A room of people hanging off his every word, or pretending to—it was almost like being back in the armorweave. Almost.

  Besides, if the next generation of the IESA’s empowered corps couldn’t handle a few bad jokes, what hope did the world have?

  “Sir,” Khan Oumarou said, raising his hand, “When are you going to tell us about being a superhero? What was the Golden Age like? Did you fight any supervillains? Is that how you lost your hands?”

  A momentary flash. That wound had only recently scarred. Tact, Pavel, Mark murmured, tact.

  “Don’t call me ‘sir’,” Fisher replied. “If you submit your next essay on time, Mister Oumarou, then maybe I’ll share a story or two.” He might as well have put a boulder at the base of Everest and told Khan to roll it to the peak, Surveyor and all, for all the enthusiasm Khan displayed for the concept of academia. Except the kid would probably end up doing it, just to spite him.

  Funny. Reminded him of someone.

  The bell chimed, and the students filed out. Fisher gathered up his materials and his computer and the work he had to grade, went around tidying the classroom, arranged the tables and chairs. He’d come a long way from his days as a superhero—back when the term meant something—and he couldn’t really blame Khan for his curiosity, either. All they’d had to do was search up his name and find the evidence. Pavel Fisher, Impel of the Millennium Brigade. It was a history class, and he was a living relic.

  But where to begin? Everyone knew the story: Preceptor came out of nowhere in 2021, and he heralded an age of advancement across every aspect of human society. The empowered were the custodians of humanity, standard-bearers of the Golden Age, and they brought with them wonders that the world had only dreamed of: fusion power, true artificial intelligence, hydrograv, workable carbon sequestration...

  Why wouldn’t the kids want to learn about that? Why wouldn’t they want to know about the crash that followed? Supervillains, AI rebellions, nuclear exchanges, the reshaping of the entire world—political and geographic. The difference was written all across history.

  The apocalypse was twenty years old. Their parents may have lived through it, if they’d been lucky. The Golden Age Collapse was a bogeyman to them, and to some perhaps not even that. It’d happened to other people, and yet nothing had changed.

  That was the salient point. The empowered—hell, the entire Golden Age—hadn’t done anything to the world beyond deepening the valleys and elevating the peaks. The Collapse that had ended it was nothing more than a system of extremes oscillating wildly out of control, shaking half the world’s population to pieces in the process. Systemic contradictions had driven cracks into the world, and the empowered merely had the sharpest chisels.

  But good luck explaining that to a classroom of middle schoolers. What they got was an account of heroes and villains, all of it rendered through a lens of self-justifying apologia that papered over the fissures of atrocity. A narrative of good and evil. The IESA-approved narrative.

  And he was part of it.

  He hadn’t wanted to become a teacher, that was the thing. The first time Pavel had thought he might be able to teach someone, he’d just about gotten her killed. In the process, he’d stumbled out of the bottle and into something he was still trying to make sense of: a tangled mess of prophecies and conspiracies. The knowledge base of the IESA academy in Geneva was his best opportunity to untangle it all into something coherent.

  He hadn’t known where to start, so he’d started with empowered capabilities. Even now, going over his notes, all he had were questions. Why were some born with conditional power, and others bordered on the abstract? Why had seven people been granted powers beyond even that, to such an extent that even academic literature called them transcendental, and how did no one know who they were?

  How was that possible?

  The evolutionary hypothesis had to be bunk, and yet the IESA favored it. Baseline parents (the academic term) could have empowered children, and empowered parents might only have baseline children. The Dynamis testing suite demonstrated a link between the brain and the potential for empowerment, and there was a moderate correlation between moments of high stress or strong emotion and actually developing anything. Maybe it was related to puberty, maybe not. People talked about kids learning to fly before they walked, but it wasn’t generally true.

  Just occasionally.

  But then: why were superpowers bolstered by, if not dependent on, line of sight? Why was there an inverse correlation between range and power? How had Quarry shattered the Moon when no powers functioned outside Earth’s magnetic field? What mechanism could explain these rules? And what accounted for the myriad of exceptions and inconsistencies? After losing his own powers, how had he reignited them, and why at that particular moment of absolute necessity?

  Why did no one know?

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Naemah asked. “What’re you reading?”

  Naemah stood a few inches under the average, and yet always found a way to command attention. Like him, she wore the deep blue uniform of an Academy instructor. Like him, she’d been a hero, too, but one of the new breed that exemplified the world as it existed. Might’ve been why she still had her hands.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said, “Just some light reading. Some detective work, you could say. Golden Age supervillains. Exarch. I never did much work in South America.”

  Naemah adjusted her hijab. “I wouldn’t mind a second pair of eyes on the most recent set of training results from the senior year. Need to start winnowing down who gets earmarked for SOLAR and who doesn’t make the cut.”

  The sun was setting, and the twilight life of the Academy Square buzzed around them. Uniformed faculty passed by with respectful nods. A trio of older students spied him and Naemah, drew the wrong impression, and called out to try and get his attention. One of them whistled.

  “Sure,” Fisher replied. “Tonight?”

  “Tomorrow, actually.”

  “Works for me. Hey, Naemah. Speaking of SOLAR...”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think of Blueshift?”

  “My old team member?”

  Fisher nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I respect him,” she replied, with a tone that implied respect in the sense of a venomous snake. “Why?”

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  “He has his hooks into a friend of mine.”

  It’d been bothering him since Sabra had told her he was training her to fight legends, because confronting the Seven was completely insane, but by then he’d known better to try and dissuade her. Now, with what he had read, maybe he should’ve. The heights of Blueshift’s intelligence and depths of his amorality made it clear that knowledge without conscience really did come at the cost of one’s soul.

  Naemah said, “He has a protégé?”

  “Is that how he puts it?”

  “I haven’t spoken to him since I left SOLAR.”

  “Ah. Well, she was my sidekick first.”

  Naemah raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure that’s how the record puts it.”

  “It leaves a lot out.”

  “That’s SOLAR for you,” Naemah replied. “Anyway, I need to knock together some lesson plans. Drop by my quarters tomorrow. I’ll buy pizza.”

  “Sure.”

  Academy faculty lived in a set of apartment buildings on the northern side of the complex. Fisher’s flat was on the tenth floor of Rho Building—the Greek alphabet was one of the many aspects of that culture that had resurfaced during the Golden Age. Letters, fashion, names. All of those had, for a time, settled into vogue.

  Fisher’s place was nice enough. Better than the apartment he’d used to have, anyway. The moment he stepped through the door, Octopus yowled at him from the couch. The fat cat drew himself upward and stretched, like his day had been so difficult.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Fisher said. “Quit cracking the whip. I’ll have you fed in a moment.”

  The first rule of the Fisher household was that Octopus came first. He took up a can of something that insisted it was fish and poured it into Octopus’ bowl, and only then did he take off his shoes and uniform jacket, walk over to the small cabinet by his bed and take out a bottle of scotch. Poured himself out a glass.

  Then, he looked to the bedside table and poked at his scars.

  Mark Fisher was there in holographic portrait, with Fisher—younger, thinner, happier— beside him, arms around each other, both of them smiling forever. Mark, with his raven black hair and his piercing blue eyes. The image had to be twenty years old, but it was the best one Fisher had. It was how he wanted to remember him.

  Fisher raised his glass towards the smiling couple, and drank it down.

  He didn’t miss the Golden Age, not really. But he did miss the people. The Millennium Brigade had stood within the upper echelons of the Golden Age. Fisher had seen almost the entire world, had fought to protect all of what he saw. But the job had picked off each storied member one by one, or just worn them down until they hung up the capes and armorweave and settled into civilian life again.

  But there was the third category, of course—neither dead nor retired. That was the one that Mark fit into. He wasn’t dead, but it was so much easier to think that he was. But after coming face to face with the woman who’d thrown him into the ocean, the wound had healed into something like a scar. Hurt only when he poked at it. One drink, and one poke. Two things he’d been addicted to.

  “Good evening, Mister Fisher.”

  Fisher turned towards the voice. There, seated at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in his hands, was a short man in a formal suit. He looked about Fisher’s age, but he had never seen him before. Nothing about his black hair or brown eyes or fair skin spelled out recognition.

  And he wasn’t in an Academy uniform.

  Fisher’s demand couldn’t make it from his brain to his lips. His body failed to respond. He was sharply aware of the beat of his heart, the rhythm of his lungs, his blinking. Of how quickly his blood was cooling toward zero.

  “Relax, Mister Fisher. Think, and I will see it.”

  You’re a tele-

  “A telepath, yes.”

  There was a rule of thumb with so-called psychics. If you knew they were using their abilities on you, there was much less threat. The IESA had a whole class on counter-intrusion tactics. In a sense, most telepaths were in conversation with your mind, and the human brain resented their influence. But there were others, the ones who—

  “Can manipulate the brain itself. Very minutely, very precisely. It’s why you didn’t see me when you came in. Strictly speaking, I’m not a telepath, I can’t read your thoughts like a book—merely see the shadow of what’s casting them. You could say that I inhibit the gap between your desire to move, and the ability to think to do so. There isn’t much of a difference, really, but it pays to be correct.”

  You know who I am?

  The intruder smiled. “Come now, Pavel, surely you don’t think I’m in the business of hanging out in just anyone’s room. I think you can figure out why I’m here.”

  He did. There was only one answer. The events that had transpired with Monkey and his insane plan had been one part of a broader gambit. One that’d snared him, his old nemesis, the head of the Syndicate, a SOLAR team, a mad oracle, and perhaps one of the Seven themselves. The architects of that gambit had been the only group who might challenge the IESA: ruthless pacifists, benevolent monsters, the last scions of the Golden Age, masters of the cold calculus.

  You’re Concordiat.

  “An outstanding deduction. No wonder you’re on our tail.”

  You know.

  “It’s why I’m here.”

  You’re going to kill me.

  The intruder shook his head. “I’d rather not. I certainly have the capability. I could do that, or I could irrevocably alter your personality with a flick of my wrist. But neither that nor killing you serve our purposes at this time.”

  So, you must be... The Concordiat were practically ghosts, but the IESA kept tabs. If he was manipulating magnetic fields...

  Magnetar.

  He smiled. “I see my reputation precedes me.”

  One of Throne’s lack—

  “Ooh, right letter, wrong word.” His smile was thin and patronizing. “One of Throne’s lieutenants. As a show of good faith, Mister Fisher, I’m going to give you back control of your body.”

  Nothing changed, but Fisher could speak. “What do you want?”

  “I’m here to strike with you a concord. To borrow a phrase from salespeople everywhere, Mister Fisher: I’m here to make you the offer of a lifetime.”

  “I’m not interested. I’d like you to leave.”

  Magnetar didn’t move. “Actually, I think I’ll finish my coffee first, and my pitch. Then, we’ll see if you’re still so set in throwing this opportunity away.”

  “What could you possibly offer me?”

  “Why, Mister Fisher, the same as we offer anyone else: the one thing they’ve always wanted.”

  “Yeah? And what’s that?”

  “You see, we can give you something back, return to you something thought lost. Something utterly irreplaceable.”

  A horrific, gnawing wound opened in Fisher’s heart, the scar throbbing raw.

  “You see, Mister Fisher,” Magnetar said, “We can give you Mark Fisher.”

  Mark. The memories. Too many to count.

  There he was, the first time they met. When Fisher was drunk on his own heroism, his own status, and Mark brought him back down to Earth with a word and a look. From there glances, touching. A kiss. More.

  And there, in uniform as the invulnerable Blackguard. Sleek and athletic and all in black, the ostentatious feathered cloak and mantle that somehow Mark made work. Medals and magazine covers.

  Fighting Taurine, horned and vengeful. Mark spread his arms and hurled feathers that he made sharper than steel, shredding her again and again. With Fisher’s ability to twist distance around his hands, Mark could never miss.

  She had her revenge, of course—she tied Fisher down and hacked his hands clean off. But Mark? For him, Taurine had something special planned. To drown him forever.

  “Is this a fucking joke?” Fisher growled, stepping forwards, clenching his fists. “I said, is this a fucking joke?!”

  Magnetar stirred his coffee, making a show of focusing on it and not Fisher. He wasn’t concerned. Why would he be? He was in control here, and all it would take was a slight motion from him, and Fisher would find his grey matter scrambled.

  “It’s not a joke,” Magnetar replied, “About fornication or otherwise.”

  “Do you think I want a fucking clone?! Get the fuck out!”

  If Magnetar noted his anger, he made no sign. “Do you think I would come here to bargain with you for some imitation?” He scoffed. “Please, Mister Fisher, have some respect for our great work.”

  “You can’t find him. No one can. It’s impossible.”

  “To most, perhaps. But the Concordiat is not most people. Reports of our capabilities have not been vastly exaggerated.”

  “Tell me where he is, or so help me God...”

  Magnetar’s face split in that subtle, sarcastic smile. “You’ll what, Mister Fisher? You’ll beat it out of me? We both know that isn’t possible. So, no, I won’t tell you where he is. But I can explain how we found him.”

  Fisher gripped the back of one of the chairs, shaking. The whole thing was impossible. Had to be. What could they want from him? Revenge made sense, but this?

  “Please.”

  Magnetar sipped at his coffee. “The world is really quite simple when you get down to it, Mister Fisher. It’s all just a matter of equations. Ultimately, when you have enough information in front of you, you quickly find that everything is quite deterministic.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “I am. It’s important to provide context. Besides, you’re an old cape—you understand the importance of theatrics. So, please, allow some time for them. It’s not often that I get to make a speech like this.

  “Really,” Magnetar continued, “That’s one of the core ethos of the Concordiat: that the world is deterministic in its entirety and that we, as humans, can master it. That by doing so, we can fulfill our solemn duty to prevent another Collapse. But the answer to this problem isn’t morals or symbols or education or regulation or debate: it’s merely information and computing power.”

  Magnetar rose from his chair and crossed the kitchen, set the mug in the sink.

  “Now,” he said. “The location of Mark Fisher was a problem that required a fair amount of information and a fair amount of computing power. It was a clever strategy of Taurine’s, really. How could anyone find a single person, empowered or otherwise, within the depths of the ocean? Add in eleven years of oceanic currents, and it’s like looking for a needle in a typhoon. But, as I said, you just need enough raw power.”

  Fisher swallowed. “So, you’ve found him. You know where he is.”

  “Yes. And recovered him, in fact.”

  “Is he...” Alive? Sane?

  Magnetar nodded.

  Relief flooded Fisher, and how he hated it.

  “When did you...”

  “Now, Mister Fisher,” Magnetar said, wagging his finger, “that would be telling. Suffice to say, he is with us, and he is, shall we say, on the mend. But he is whole and, in time, he will adjust. Now, with everything I have just said, would you still like me to—how did you put it—’get the fuck out?’”

  Something about this felt wrong. The Concordiat was impenetrable to outsiders, and that was how they liked it. Wherever the Concordiat held sway, no one entered—and no one left. They didn’t make their deals for anyone but themselves. Here and now, all Fisher could think of was of someone adjusting a cold, inhuman abacus.

  And he was one of the beads.

  “I’m still waiting, Mister Fisher.”

  “No,” he replied. “Stay.”

  “Excellent. Now, as much as I would like to just give Mark back to you, my superiors would be unhappy with me. So, as I said, I am to strike a concord that will benefit everyone involved—you, them, me, and even the wider world, if you can believe it.”

  “I used to think I’d do anything to get him back.”

  “Such a romantic sentiment,” Magnetar said, with mocking enthusiasm. Then, his voice grew grim and serious: “Would you still?”

  The question was as pointed as a knife to the heart. It demanded an answer.

  Fisher began, “I...”

  He wanted to say no. How desperately he wanted to say no. The older, wiser part of him was screaming a warning. But the younger part of him, the one that still poked and prodded at that scar to see if it hurt (and it always did, it always did) pretended not to hear it.

  To say no or I don’t know. That would have been so easy, had the idea of finding Mark still been impossible. But the Concordiat wouldn’t lie about it. They didn’t lie. They never lied, and that was what made them so terrifying, that very real promise: we can give you precisely what you want, and we know you’ll do anything to obtain it.

  “I would. I’d do anything.”

  “Then we may yet strike our concord,” Magnetar replied. “This one, Mister Fisher, you’ll find is quite straightforward. Your reunion with Mark Fisher is predicated upon one simple task.”

  And even though Pavel Fisher found himself thinking of his father, found himself remembering something about smiling devils bearing gifts, he could only ask, “And what’s that?”

  Magnetar’s gaze was piercing.

  “One simple thing. A conversation. To fulfill your part of this concord, to see Mark Fisher again, you only need to do one simple thing.

  “Tell me everything you know about Sabra Kasembe.”