THREE: 90 seconds

Time passed. Things changed.

Alden’s wayward aunt, Connie, was finally located by social services, and the two of them became a family. Their relationship was loving, but far less functional and sheltering than the one he’d had with his parents. Aunt Connie had, as one of Alden’s elementary school teachers very kindly put it, an unconventional parenting style.

When he was eleven, his baseball coach, chewing an enormous wad of gum behind the dugout after a game one day, was less discreet. “Listen, Alden,” he said around noisy smacking sounds. “You’ve got your head straight on your shoulders, so I’ll just tell you. It’s not right that you have to be the grown-up in the relationship. That woman’s got nuts loose in her brain and a bunch of squirrels chasing after them.”

Alden had frowned and looked down to the place where his shoe was scuffing a small divot into the clay. He didn’t like people badmouthing his aunt, but it wasn’t easy to argue with them. “She’ll come pick me up eventually. You don’t have to wait with me.”

“Kid, she left you here until after the rec department closed last game. Don’t think I didn’t hear about it.”

Alden wondered if he should mention that he’d used his aunt’s name and id number to put an app on his phone so that he could use the adults-only e-scooter rentals around the city when he really needed to. But maybe that would only prove his coach’s point.

So they waited together, and she did come. Only an hour late that afternoon, with an excuse about traffic and six pints of melted ice cream in the backseat of the car.

It was fine.

They dumped the ice cream and bought more for dinner. Then some of Aunt Connie’s friends from the salon where she was working at the moment came over to their house with pizza and beer and loud music. Alden disappeared to his room after the impromptu party became uncomfortably messy.

He slapped on his favorite set of headphones and played games on his computer for a while. Then, he did his homework.

It was just reading—a simplified history of the System’s arrival and the ways it had changed Earth. There wasn’t much new information in it.

The Artonans unleashed the System on Earth, as they had on many other planets in the past. In exchange for powers, arcane knowledge, and tech, humans had to agree to help the Artonans when they were called upon. Plenty of humans took them up on the offer, and the first superhumans were created.

That was seventy years ago, in the early 1960s, and almost everyone agreed it had been a good deal for humanity. Without the Artonans, most people thought that Earth might not even have internet or cell phones. And when heroes were summoned by Earth’s alien benefactors, the Artonans were fair in their dealings. Sometimes they assigned difficult missions, but they always offered rewards equal to the task given.

Alden had already known all of this. At the end of the assignment, his online textbook included a poll for all its readers asking if you’d like to have powers or not. He clicked “yes” after only a moment’s hesitation.

You’re in the majority! the screen announced. 96% of the students reading this chapter also said they would like to have powers.

You’re all super brave. Being a hero is an important job.

But did you know that only 0.07% of the people on Earth will be offered access to the Interdimensional Warrior’s Contract? (Reminder: that’s the proper name for the System. It might show up on a quiz.)

That’s around 7.6 million superhumans. It’s a big-sounding number, but it means that more than ten and a half billion people who would like to have super powers will never even get the chance.

That’s a lot of disappointed people, Alden thought, feeling more than a little disappointed himself.

He answered a few reading comprehension questions, earning a 10/10 and a burst of fireworks across the screen.

At midnight, the house was still noisy, so he gave up on the idea of sleeping. He sneaked into the den to grab a cold slice of pizza, then settled back at his desk for his on-again off-again hobby. Researching the accident.

Three years dulled things, but on nights like this, he missed his parents acutely. Digging into their deaths was a painful compulsion. Superheroes were a source of fascination for most people—96% of them apparently—so there was plenty of information.

Alden was beginning to learn how to sort fact from fiction. It helped that Hannah hadn’t lied to him that day in the hospital. The things she’d told him were a guideline that helped him find the other pieces of the story.

The pieces that were uglier.

For example, there were pictures of some of the Body Drainer’s victims. They looked even more dead than dead bodies usually did. They were twisted up and gruesome. The only photographs of Body Drainer were nice ones, though— school pictures showing a smiling, pale boy in a shirt and tie.

Superhumans usually came into their powers between fifteen and seventeen. He was a senior in high school when he killed twenty-seven people. Most of the deaths happened at the nightclub. But there were a few before that. And three while the heroes were in pursuit.

There were either none after he was cornered in the building across the street from Alden’s bedroom, or two. It depended on how you looked at it. Some websites counted Alden’s parents among Body Drainer’s victims. Others listed them as bystanders. One wrote their names out— Richard and Leah Thorn—and placed them beside the words collateral damage.

A couple of superhuman-hate sites even listed them as victims of Arjun Thomas and Hannah Elber. Like they’d killed them on purpose.

“You just know ‘heroes’ do shit like this all the time when they’re not on camera,” a user named wakeuptheresbacon said. “Easy way to hide a couple of murders. Like ‘Oops. It was an accident while I was fighting crime.’ I’ve thought about it a lot before. And look at those stupid suckers. They were definitely hero lovers. The lady worked at a House of ‘Healing’.”

Alden had seen this comment before several times. He kept coming back to this site to stare at it even though it made him furious.

He’d gone through phases over the past three years where he was angry at the heroes for messing up their fight with the Body Drainer. But he wasn’t currently in one, and he’d never been confused about where the ultimate blame lay.

And now he was just…so, so mad at wakeuptheresbacon. He knew in his head that it was weird, but he thought he hated bacon more than he’d ever hated the actual supervillain responsible for ruining his life.

He didn’t know my parents. He doesn’t know anything. How dare he say stuff like that about them! My mom’s job was important.

Everyone was so proud of her. Houses of Healing usually had just one healer—a superhuman or even an Artonan—plus an apprentice or two, and a small handful of regular human nurses who had to go through years of extra training and be granted special authority to use certain healing wordchains.

His mom being chosen for the job was such a big deal that his family had moved to Chicago for it. She was amazing, but bacon and his internet friends were acting like she was dumb.

He glared at the screen until his eyes started to water. He wanted to tell everyone that bacon was the stupid one, even though the comment had been posted over a year ago, but the thread was closed.

He let his forehead smack into the desk and started a breathing exercise a school counselor had given him not long after his parents died. It had been months since he’d remembered to do it, but at one point, he’d had to use it almost every day. He fell into the rhythm easily.

When he felt better, he sat back up and closed the infuriating website. He turned the volume up on his headphones. It was one of his rainstorm playlists. In theory it would help distract him from his lingering tinnitus, but in practice, he mostly used it to drown out Aunt Connie.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

He typed in the name of another website,one he’d found recently, and read through it again. It was the blog of an elderly man named Marv who was extremely geeky about super abilities.

Marv went into minute detail about the physics of them. He discussed the intricacies of the magic/chaos dynamic. He had pages and pages of skill listings and stat theory. And he did breakdowns of the more obscure powers.

Alden couldn’t understand most of it. But he was trying to understand everything about a post the man had made three weeks ago.

It was about Body Drainer.

And because Drainer had only really made one appearance in the public eye, the entire breakdown of his skills was based on that night. Alden had read it several times, and every time he did, he felt his mind shifting a little. Like it was trying to make room for a different perspective than the one that had been deeply entrenched in him for so long.

It wasn’t that Marv had much new information to offer about what had happened. He didn’t. But the facts he chose to focus on in his discussion of Drainer’s powers weren’t the facts Alden had always focused on.