Sam looked tiny lying on the bulky hospital bed, connected to what seemed like a million tubes and wires. A monitor clipped to his finger, IV tubes taped to his arms, oxygen tubes in his nose, sheets piled in messy folds around him. A plastic neck brace immobilized him, and his face was covered in cuts and bruises, swollen and purple. His left arm and leg were broken, his pelvis had cracked, his ribs had broken. His spine had survived, he wasn’t paralyzed, but several vertebrae in his neck had cracked, and once he was more healed he would need surgery to repair them. He’d arrived at the emergency room with a head injury, a cracked skull, and excess fluid in his brain, but he’d gotten there quickly enough that doctors had been able to mitigate the worst of the damage. They hoped.
Sam would get better. Everyone said so. But it would take awhile. Anna gave a heavy sigh. She’d been holding an unconscious breath. This could have been any of them. Thinking about that made her numb.
“Can I touch him?” she asked, and Mrs. Stowe nodded. Anna lightly brushed Sam’s hand, squeezing his fingers. Maybe it would help. His skin felt cooler than she expected.
“Mr. Stowe, Mrs. Stowe, I have some information that I think you need to hear,” Celia said in her steady, calming voice. “Do you have a minute?” They did, they agreed. Would here be all right? They liked to be here for the moments Sam woke up.
“Mr. Stowe—”
“Call me George, please.”
“All right. Your father is Gerald Stowe, yes? Do you remember him ever talking about a job he had when he was young, at Leyden Laboratories?”
“No—he had a lot of jobs when he was young. Kept bouncing around, you know?”
“This was a lab owned by my grandfather. The scientist in charge was Simon Sito, the Destructor, and there was an accident. A kind of radiation that affected everyone who was there, including my grandfather. Over the years we’ve found that the children of those affected have about a forty percent chance of displaying some kind of superhuman ability. I know you were probably asking yourself why this happened to Sam. Well, there’s a reason for it. I bear some of the responsibility for this, I’m afraid. I’ve been tracking the families descended from those who were in the lab. Indirectly, I’ve been encouraging some of them to use their powers. Including Sam. Including my own children.”
“Wait, what?” George Stowe furrowed his brow, baffled. “But I never—”
“No, but your nephew is Justin Raylen, yes? Breezeway? And you might ask your younger sister how much she really knows about Earth Mother.”
“Margaret?” he exclaimed. “Margaret is Earth Mother?”
Celia put a finger over her lips. “You should probably keep that quiet, since she never went public. I’m trusting you with this information, George, because of Sam. You deserve to know. But it’s not for public consumption. You understand, yes?” The Stowes nodded emphatically. “Also, all Sam’s medical bills will be paid for. It’s coming out of the Compensation Fund for Extraordinary Damages, the trust my mother established. Your family won’t have any financial concerns, if that’s all right with you.”
“Yes. Thank you, yes.”
Sam’s fingers twitched under Anna’s hand. His eyes were open, and he managed a smile with his swollen lips.
“Hey,” she said. “How are you?” What a stupid question.
“Crappy,” he murmured, his voice barely a scratch. “We won?”
“Yeah. But this … this sucks.” She blinked fast to keep the tears back.
“Yeah,” he said, the air going out of him in a sigh. He squeezed her fingers, but his eyes closed, and he slipped back into sleep.
This did, indeed, suck. But she finally believed he’d get better. Blaster would return.
Celia touched her shoulder. “We should probably get going, let him rest.”
“Okay.”
The leave-taking was awkward and drawn out. The Stowes seemed more stunned than when they arrived, not less, and Anna felt washed out. Just seeing Sam like that was exhausting. But she had to be thankful that he hadn’t died. How much more awkward, to be standing at his funeral?
She didn’t want to think about that.
They were in the elevator, descending to the lobby, when Anna felt a ping on her radar. “Mom, Eliot Majors is in the lobby.”
“Oh?” she said. “That’ll be interesting.”
They couldn’t help but meet him on their way out and his way in. Anna didn’t show any surprise at all, but Eliot’s eyes went wide, and he hesitated, as if thinking of turning tail.
“Hi, Eliot,” Anna said. Any embarrassment she might have felt had faded to trivia. “I don’t think you really had a chance to meet my mom?”
Celia smiled graciously and offered her hand. “So nice to meet you, Eliot. I never got a chance to thank you for what you did.”
He had a bouquet of tulips, which he awkwardly shifted from one hand to another so he could shake Celia’s hand. “Um. Hi. It…” His shoulders slumped. “I wish I could have done more. I wanted to come visit.”
Celia said, “He probably won’t be awake. But his parents are there, I think they’d like to meet you.” He blanched.
“So,” Anna said, jumping in to fill an awkward silence. “Are you going to stay in Commerce City, at the university, or go back to Delta?”
“I think I’m going to stay. I mean, as long as my father is here, I think I should stay.”
“A more urgent question for me, is Weasel going to stay?” Celia asked.
Eliot rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe that’s the name that stuck.”
“Told you,” Anna said. “You’d have been better off with Leapfrog.”
“My advice?” Celia said, grinning. “Since you’re never going to beat it, just own it. Put fur on your costume. Get a theme song.”
He didn’t look happy about any of those possibilities. “Ms. West, I’m sorry. For what my father did. If I’d had any idea, if I’d known what he was going to do, I’d have—”
“Eliot, it wasn’t your fault. None of it. I speak with great authority when I say that children cannot be held responsible for the actions of their parents. Now, let it go and just worry about being a good person, okay?”
Nodding, he continued on to the elevators, and Anna and Celia continued outside.
“Not a bad-looking kid,” Celia observed, smiling vaguely.
“I suppose,” Anna said, realizing she hadn’t actually thought much about Eliot over the last few days, beyond his superheroing. “We still going shopping for a prom dress tomorrow?”
“Yes. Is it all right if Bethy comes along? Girls’ day out?”
Anna’s first impulse was to argue. Bethy would talk too much and complain and she didn’t know anything about prom dresses. But she stopped herself, because really, having Bethy along might be kind of fun.
“Okay,” she agreed.
Among several news stories lost and buried amid the feverish reporting of the Executive and the battle at Horizon Tower was the report that Judge Roland had quietly resigned his position in the city court—and fled the country. The whereabouts of the criminal lowlife Jonathan Scarzen were also unknown. After his release, he, too, seemed to have fled. The Commerce Eye refrained from speculating that the two disappearances might be connected, and in refraining raised that exact possibility. The website Rooftop Watch had no such compunctions and praised the work of the superhuman vigilante Espionage in drawing attention to such activities when no one else could.