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Oliver falls.
There is no slow-motion, no freeze-frame dread. It happens, and then it’s over. Oliver falls, and Oliver hits the pavement below, and the sound of it is so much quieter than I think it should be.
The silence is inevitable. I’ve heard someone die before, and it’s always quieter than you expect. It’s over before you realize it’s happening, and I’m left standing on the pavement with absence ringing in my ears, thinking this should be louder. This should be bigger. This should be something more than it is.
I think, The end of the world should be louder than this.
✧✧✧
I meet Oliver Davis on a Monday morning. He fits right into routine — wake up, coffee, stare at the wall for twenty minutes debating on a cold shower, take the cold shower, grab keys and mask from the kitchen counter, walk into the office with another cup of coffee in hand, meet Oliver. Just like that, one after another. He’s in my office when I open the door, sitting on the edge of the little black couch with a suitcase on the floor at his feet, shoulders rigid and hands under his legs.
The first impression I have of him is: He is incredibly small, for a superhuman. The file says he’s in the lifting-car range. My eyes tell me a strong wind could give him a run for his money.
The second impression I have of him is: He looks cold. I close the door behind me and say, “Sorry, I always forget to turn the AC off for the day when I leave. Management’s chewed me out for it least half a dozen times. You want a jacket?”
“No thank you, ma’am.” Resolutely, he folds his hands in his lap instead of under his legs. “I’m all right.”
Third impression: He is polite.
I shrug. “Suit yourself. You can call me O’Casey like everyone else does, or Flare, on the field. Stick with Flare if it’s gonna be hard for you to switch back and forth.”
The dream of a secret identity is just that, of course: a once-loved illusion I no longer have any claim over. But it’s protocol. Something Oliver will learn soon, and hopefully before he’s got a designation of his own.
“Oliver, yeah?” I know it’s Oliver. He nods, doesn’t correct me with a nickname, so I turn over another sheet of paper and study it. He’s left most of the intake form blank. No prior hero work. Or villain work. Which is weird, for a kid with as many powers as they’ve got listed under his name. What rock has he been hiding under for the last — I turn over the form again, check birth date — sixteen years and seven months?
Whatever it is, it’s none of my business. I don’t do the background checks. My business is to get him used to the field, make sure he’s got a handle on the half dozen-odd powers he’s been so uniquely blessed with, and then wash my hands and send him on his merry way for the world to chew up.
I look back at Oliver. He tries to smile at me, brown eyes narrowing slightly in the attempt. Kid’s nervous.
“Well, Oliver,” I say. I set the form on my desk and pick up a pen instead. “You have any ideas for a designation yet?”
The agency won’t let the youngest kids pick their own designation, usually; not until they’re eighteen and have a better idea of what name they want to stick to them. They’ll let you make a list and then they’ll pick something for you, or give you a different one that’s kind of similar. Oliver, however, is a special case. I’d call it nepotism, if it wasn’t that he seems to have appeared out of nowhere.
He says, “I think something about resilience?”
“The Resilient,” I say. “Resilient Boy. Cockroach Man.”
It has him cracking a smile. “That’ll strike fear in the heart of all who hear my name.”
“We’ll workshop it,” I say.
✧✧✧
I ask him as we’re walking back to my apartment, “You’ve got family in the agency?”
“No ma’am,” he says.
“O’Casey,” I say. “Friends, then?”
“No.” He shrugs. “Unless you count.”
We’ve just met today. “I do not count.”
“Right. Um, no, then. I don’t know any heroes, except in the regular way.”
We’ve gotten to my apartment building, so I swipe a card and let us in. He’s carrying his suitcase, swinging it laughably light in his teenage noodle arms. I don’t even bother asking if he needs help carrying it. “The regular way?”
“I mean, I had my favorites growing up,” he says. “I thought you were cool. And Alto.”
Alto. I roll my eyes. “He’s kind of a dick, honestly. Full of himself.”
“Really?”
“Never meet your heroes or whatever,” I say. Elevator dings. “Floor seven.”
Oliver presses the button. “I think meeting you has gone all right so far.”
“Well,” I say. “Maybe give it at least the week before you decide. You haven’t even seen the inside of my apartment yet.”
“I’m sure it’s fine.”
“I’ve lived alone for half a decade,” I warn him. “And I’m not there too often. You’ll have your own room that’s all yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, but the place is kind of bare.”
“That’s fine.” He shrugs. “I can handle it.”
We step out at the seventh floor. “If you say so. Welcome to your new home, then.”
✧✧✧
“How old were you?” Oliver asks, trying to make conversation while we stand outside the gym waiting for the other newbies to clear out.
“Hm?”
“When you, uh, started doing this,” Oliver clarifies. His face flushes, deep enough red to show the spray of lighter freckles over his nose.
“They put me on mentorship last year,” I tell him. A gesture at my eye finishes the statement. They don’t want a half-blind hero on the streets, even if she’s been the best of the best for the last five years. Had to take time off to make sure my depth perception wasn’t irrevocably fucked.
(It is. It took two weeks to stop hitting myself in the face when I put the mask on.)
“And before that?”
I look at Oliver. He flushes again, goes apologetic. “Sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”
“I started training when I was fourteen,” I tell him. “It’ll be a decade next year.”
“Wow,” Oliver says. “That’s a while.”
“I’ve got almost the record,” I say. “If I was on the field the whole time, I’d have it. But they kept me in training for two years and I’ve been on mentorship, so. Gotta get back out there for a while longer to get up to first place.”
Two kids run by, neither of them wearing a mask. Younger than Oliver. Behind them, Nova gives a quick, tired smile on her way out of the room. I nod, short acknowledgement, and step into the gym.
“Will you?” Oliver asks.
“Ey?”
“Get back on the field.”
“One can only hope,” I say, dry. I wonder if Oliver knows a hero’s average lifespan. It’s been a long time since I sat in on any orientation classes. I don’t know what they’re telling the kids these days, and I’m not gonna be the one to tell this kid he’s lowered his life expectancy by at least a couple decades by walking in this door. “What kind of martial arts training you got, kid?”
“Uh,” he says. “None, m–O’Casey,”
“Fabulous. Don’t hit me too hard when we start, then. I would like to avoid breaking bones today.”
He looks nervous. “I’ll try not to.”
(He’s a quick learner. He’s careful, maybe a little too much, wandering over the line into fearful caution, and I know this because when I tell him to hit a punching bag as hard as he possibly can, the thing explodes. I order reinforced ones and tell him to do it again. And again. And again.
He tells me, over dinner, “I think I need to learn something other than punching things.”
“Why’s that?” I empty half a carton of fried rice onto a paper plate. “You’re pretty fuckin’ good at it, if you haven’t noticed.”
“I know. That’s—” He goes quiet. Stabs a piece of fried tofu with a plastic fork, but doesn’t put it in his mouth. Eyes distant; watching something inside his head. “I couldn’t hit someone like that.”
It would kill someone, is the part he doesn’t have to say out loud. It would be messy. He wouldn’t be the same after it.
“You learn to,” I say.)
✧✧✧
It is the way the world falls when you’re in this business: I will go to Oliver’s funeral, or he will go to mine. One way or another, we will be buried in the park at the center of the city, and our names will be etched into the monument there in a ceremony where the world cries with whoever it is we leave behind. Maybe we’ll get a statue, if we die big enough. Alice has one. It looks almost like her, still in one piece and smiling without her helmet on. When I bring her flowers, I try to remember the statue instead of the last time I saw her take in a breath. It’s easier.
I don’t tell Oliver about funerals and flowers and trading grief for press conferences and reporters. He’ll find out soon enough if I don’t go to his funeral first.
✧✧✧
Three months into training, Oliver still has no designation. He is two months shy of seventeen. Upper management is pressing at wanting him out in the field, want to see those flashy powers of his at use in the world. That’s half the key of being a successful hero – the cooler your powers, the better. You want to show them off. You want to be able to set the world ablaze at the tip of your fingertips and step out of a burning building unscathed. You want to lift a vehicle like it ways nothing and set it, carefully, on the other side of the bridge.
Oliver’s got the strength. He’s got the resilience. He’s quick, agile, lands on his feet from ten or twenty feet up, but we don’t test from too much higher. I teach him how to land on his hands and knees instead, spread the point of impact out to four points instead of two, save him some of the rattling ache in his knees.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he tells me, brushing gravel out of his palms. “Or like, it does, but just for a second. Then I’m fine again.”
The brush burns on both hands lighten and vanish in seconds. There’s nothing left behind but smooth skin. Resilience.
“You never know,” I tell him. “Take it from an old lady. You wanna be kind to your joints before they start working against you.”
Oliver smiles, a tiny, momentary sliver of a thing. “Old lady? You’re twenty-four.”
“Which is basically ancient in superhero years,” I say. “Now go climb to the balcony and jump off it again. Land the way I told you.”
“That sounds terrible, you know,” he says, but he heads for the fire escape anyway.
“We still need a name for you,” I tell him after he lands on the ground beside me again. Still on his feet, still stumbling forward and scuffing his palms on the ground after he makes contact. “I’m thinking about Stubborn Boy. The Man Who Doesn’t Listen.”
“Sorry.” He gets to his feet. “I’m trying, it just–it feels wrong when I’m in the air. I don’t know.”
I shake my head. “We’ll figure it out.”
“What about something with water?”
“What, landing in water? It’s gonna be no different from concrete if you guy up high enough, you know.”
“No, not that,” Oliver says. He picks at his fingers. One of them is scratched, and then it’s not anymore. “I mean for my name. Like, water’s resilient, right? Water can’t be destroyed, just modified. Give a river enough time and it can carve out rock.” He grins. “Kind of like Stubborn Boy.”
An ache takes up residence between my ribs. Pounding, like a heartbeat, like a bird turning restless under a cage covered for too long. “Maybe not water.”
“Why?” His eyebrows furrow.
I flounder for a moment. “You don’t have water powers. That might be misleading.”
He shrugs. “I guess. I’ll think about it.”
✧✧✧
Oliver has his six-month assessment when he’s only been in the agency for four months. Accelerated schedule, they say, because he’s moving ahead at an extraordinary pace. I don’t know about that. I spend his assessment pacing outside the gym until they come to find me.
“He passed,” Argent says, one of the guys in upper management. The one in the suit with his hair slicked back who always speaks like he’s memorized every word in a mirror. Like he never enters a conversation without a strategy. “With flying colors, I’ll add. Everyone’s impressed. No surprise, of course, with that power set.”
He laughs. It’s got something twitching under my skin. I should be pleased, or proud, or something. Oliver’s done well, which means that I’ve done well preparing him.
That’s the part that makes my stomach twist.
“He’ll be assigned to one of the other heroes,” Argent goes on. “And they’ll–”
“Hold on,” I interrupt. “What?”
Argent raises an eyebrow, clearly annoyed that I’ve interrupted his carefully crafted script and strategy. “A hero for his field training,” he says, slowly, a note of condescending. “He’ll begin next week. We’re looking at Pearlescence, or maybe Alto.”
Absolutely not, I think. I imagine washing my hands of Oliver. I imagine never seeing him again until it’s through the news.
Out loud, I say, “I assumed I would be training Oliver on the field.”
“You aren’t field certified, O’Casey,” Argent says. “We’re looking for an active hero to train him on this stage.”
It crackles under my skin, the heat playing on the underside of every nerve and the oh-so familiar taste of ash on the back of my tongue. Deep breath; fingernails in my palms. The crescent-shaped marks do not heal the way Oliver’s hands would.
“I was an active hero for seven years,” I say. “Has Oliver not passed his assessment, two months ahead of schedule?”
Argent hesitates. “Yes. But we feel–”
“Then you know I’m still fully capable. I should be out there with him,” I say. “I am his mentor, and I am not willing to sit inside while you assign him to someone else.”
“I know we’ve been keeping you indoors for awhile,” Argent says, attempting to smooth things over without giving a word of real meaning to it. “I’m sure you’re itching to get back out there, but you must understand, you’re–”
“It’s less of an itch,” I snap. “And a lot more like a match. Let me out there with my trainee, or something might catch on fire.”
The air in the room goes silent and still. He raises both eyebrows.
I add, “Please.”
(They cut me a deal.
I’m allowed on patrols with Oliver, allowed to oversee this leg of his training, but that does not make me a fully active hero. They’re adamant about this part.
Legally, there’s no reason for me to still be off-duty. I’ve passed my physicals. I’ve passed my psych evals too. And anything that makes me dangerous, that makes me volatile, is carefully locked away under layers of confidentiality and fudged reports.
I do also get written up for threatening management. Oliver hears this part and laughs; he hears nothing else about it.
We order pizza. I pretend it’s a celebration.)
✧✧✧
“What happens if I don’t want to be a hero anymore?”
We’re sitting outside, watching streetlights come on one by one as dusk settles over the city like a blanket. From the top of a bank, eagle-eyes view of the whole world under us, I’ve never found that the world seems smaller. It just seems more helpless. Like when the world’s under my feet, I’m realizing how much they all rely on me, and how little I can really do to help anyone.
I take my time answering Oliver’s question. Another streetlight blinks to life.
“You don’t really get to quit,” I tell him. “Maybe you can retire someday, if something goes wrong and you can’t do the hero work anymore.”
“Could you have retired? Because of your eye.”
Could I have? Tonight, I feel the way the communicator in my ear feels. I hear the tiny electric crackle more than ever.
“They probably wish I did,” I joke. “It’s easier to have a star hero take a tragic retirement than have her show back up all pathetic and mentorly. You’re gonna overshadow me before you know it.”
It’s easiest of all when they get to bury you and tell your death any way they want it, is the obvious thing. I’ve been a thorn in their side for years as a result.
Oliver’s being bashful. Still hung up on my self-deprecation, like it’s his job to deflect any of the praise that might fall his way. The cameras’ll love that about him. “I don’t know about that.”
“Oh, trust me. You will.” I bump his shoulder with my arm and get to my feet. “They’re calling for back-up at corner of 17th and Aspen.”
Obediently, Oliver follows me.
I spend the whole walk there hoping that no one was listening to our side of the communications tonight. And when we get home in the early hours of the morning, I spend a moment too long looking at the camera outside our door.
“O’Casey,” Oliver says, in the living room, mask in his hands.
“Sorry.” I close the door.
“Do they watch you?”
I look at him, sharp. I say, “I don’t know what you mean.”
This part, I can’t teach him out loud. But I watch him learn it. I watch the way his eyes turn it over. Watch the way it settles.
“Get some rest,” I say. “Goodnight, Oliver.”
✧✧✧
“Can I ask you something insensitive?”
I raise an eyebrow at him. “I’m terrified, but go ahead.”
“Your eye,” Oliver says. “What happened?”
Almost reflexively, my arms go stiff. I force them to relax, careful line of easy posture. “I thought you already knew. Got injured out in the field a year and a half ago.”
“I know that,” Oliver said. He’s watching my every move, gaze steady. His voice is careful. Low. “I meant, what happened?”
“An explosion,” I say. I dance as close to the truth as I’m willing to get. “Me and my teammate were ambushed by a villain, and a hero who’d just defected. I was the only one who got out, but, uh. Not without this.”
Brown eyes flicker, across my face, but he’s not looking at my scar. It’s like he’s looking everywhere else. “And that’s why they’ve benched you since then.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You probably heard about it on the news.”
“In the news,” Oliver echoes, softly. “Who were the other people?”
I frown. Discomfort rises in my stomach. “Like I said, you can find it all over. Why the sudden interest?”
And just like that, the moment snaps. He looks away, arms folding over his chest. “No reason. I was just curious.”
✧✧✧
Oliver is smart, because the next time he asks me, he does it somewhere there are no cameras and no microphones. He’s catching on, which is dangerous and exhilarating and terrifying. He’s learning the things I can’t teach him. One day, he will know as much as I do.
He turns seventeen next week and says he wants to take the bus out to the countryside to breathe fresh air. Hiking is easy for him; he doesn’t break a sweat even walking uphill. I’m always running a little warm and feel drenched.
I’m ready this time, waiting for him to ask the question, but what he says is, “Who is Jodi Bea?”
I feel ice-cold.
Jodi Bea, I think, is dead, which isn’t true, but I wish it was. I’m a little like the ones I work for in that way. It’s easier when I can bury her.
Jodi Bea is dead to me, which is also untrue. Jodi Bea would drown me before I had a chance to light a match. Jodi Bea is a traitor, Jodi Bea knew more than I did, and we’d all still be alive if I let her tell the truth.
“Who told you her name?” I say, instead of any of it.
He’s quiet. Kicks a stone, sends it skipping across the creek parallel to the hiking trail. “I found it. There’s—these records.”
“You shouldn’t be reading those.”
Oliver looks at me, and then he looks at the water. “I don’t know if you get to tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing, O’Casey. I read a lot of things in there.”
The name sounds uncomfortable, suddenly. Formal. Stiff. I hear Jodi Bea’s voice, I hear her say, There’s a lot they’re hiding, Dia. Oliver is still looking at the water.
“I’m your mentor,” I say. “Textbook definition of getting to tell you what to do.”
Oliver does not smile. “I know you killed your teammate. I know they covered it up to protect you.”
The world is in flames, or maybe it’s just me. Fingernails in crescent marks along my palms. Alice has gone still and quiet in my arms. Water up to my knees, creek or flooding city streets, Jodi Bea—
“To protect me,” I whisper. I take a step back — foot falls into the creek, and the water is cold against my ankle. “You think they were protecting me.”
“I don’t know what to think.” Oliver raises his arms, frustration clear. “I want to trust you. I want to know who you are. Tell me who Jodi Bea is, and why she’s been erased from every single record I look at.”
Jodi Bea is water up to my knees and boiling, anger and a match. Jodi Bea is when water and fire don’t cancel anything out but burn.
It was a game, once. Fire versus water, and Alice is a shadow in the middle. A hero’s trio is rare, so they never let us be a real team, but we were close enough to make up for it. Close enough to explode under pressure.
The dust settles, and there’s just me left with water up to my knees and Alice, who is not breathing, and Jodi, who is never coming back.
I keep thinking, I wish I died there too. But I didn’t, and if you’re not dead yet, you’re not allowed to die. So I get up.
I get up, and Oliver’s waiting for me.
“Oliver,” I say, lowly, fighting to get my voice out around everything raging in my chest, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“Then tell me.” No wires. No cameras. They will find out anyway. “Tell me.”
✧✧✧
I never do train Oliver how to fall from high enough. I never teach him how to watch his back when there are people standing behind him. He learns it on his own.
The way the world plays out is like a game of rock-paper-scissors. Fire beats the dark. Water beats fire. No matter how strong you are, you drown in all of them anyway.
Jodi was resilient enough to find the truth and angry enough to set a fire into motion. I was stubborn enough to strike a match anyway, and Alice was caught in the middle.
The way the world plays out is like this: I am someone who burns, and Oliver is fresh kindling.
Oliver falls.
✧✧✧
I heard about Oliver.
I look at the phone for far longer than it takes to read the message, unknown number and everything; a throwaway, surely. She isn’t stupid. One hand over my eyes, willing away the spots floating in my vision. The time blurs slightly; I do the math anyway. Nine hours. It’s taken seven hours for the news to get all the way out to Wisconsin.
Briefly, I wonder what the news is saying about it. Even more briefly, I consider turning the television on, letting it crackle out over the cramped hospital chair I’ve been living in all night. In the end, I decide it doesn’t matter.
She knows to keep quiet.
He’s alive.
Barely, I don’t say. Don’t tell her about the black-and-blue twig of a kid in the bed beside me, all tangled up in bandages and IVs. Don’t tell her I’m terrified of when he wakes up, not because I’ll be relieved he’s okay, but because I already know he’s going to be okay.
If the fall did not kill him, nothing will. Nothing is ever going to kill Oliver Davis.
And the agency will already be adding the word invincibility to his list of powers.
I keep thinking about it. Keep seeing him fall, keep seeing the blood feathered out on concrete and the way his limbs bent and the way he laid there, and the way I was almost too scared to touch him. Afraid to make it real. Afraid for this to happen again.
(Alice, as much of her as I could hold, stayed in my lap til the very end. They let me hold her all the way up until the bag zipped shut around her.)
What are you gonna do this time?
And this question, I do not answer. I type a message, delete it, look at Oliver, type something else. What am I meant to say? That I’ll go back to my job like nothing happened, play at hero-work until someone else dies in front of me or until I die in Oliver’s arms instead, brave and big and heroic, or die alone scared and helpless, or die foolish and inconsequential and mean nothing. I’ll be dead all the same either way.
I’ll watch Oliver live. I’ll watch him do this, watch him fall again and again, and watch him keep getting back up off that pavement. I’ll watch him survive.
She knows I will. I delete everything, and I lean in close to Oliver’s bedside when he stirs.
“We’re going to leave,” I tell him softly, before the doctors rush in and no one gives us a moment’s unmonitored quiet ever again. “It’s going to take a while. But we are going to get out of this.”
Oliver’s eyes flutter. He stares up at the ceiling, face twisted in confusion, in fear, and then–
He nods.
The hospital door opens. I lean back in my chair and wait.
✧✧✧
“Tell us to leave,” I say, before she can say a single word. Eyes wide, confused, peering out where Oliver stands behind me on the porch surrounded by light-drawn moths in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin darkness. “Tell us to go, and I will. We’ll find somewhere else, and we’ll never have been here. Don’t forgive me. Don’t let me in. Tell me to leave.”
Crickets hum in the background. A moth hits the light fixture above us.
“You’ve come a long way,” she says, and I know she doesn’t mean the distance. Jodi Bea opens the door.