After the Credits

The rain came down like the city was trying to put itself out, and for a long time Chris stood at the edge of the roof watching it not work.

Twenty minutes ago the sky over the financial district had gone white. Twenty minutes ago something with too many arms and not enough face had walked through the combined front line of every cape in the city and kept walking. Twenty minutes ago the fight went from bad to over. He’d been thrown clear at some point, his glasses cracked and missing a lens, his left shoulder a hot dense knot of something that used to work, and he’d crawled to the ledge because he didn’t know what else to do with a body that had no powers and no plan and no business being here in the first place.

The skyline burned below him. Orange crawled up the sides of buildings he’d known his whole life. The comic shop was six blocks south, and from up here he could see the smoke rolling down the street where it used to be, and he couldn’t tell if the shape at the end of the block was his building or just the absence of it.

He leaned forward. The rain hit his face and the cracked lens fogged and he leaned a little more, and then a hand grabbed the back of his collar and yanked him off his feet.

Chris hit the wet concrete on his ass, hard, pain jolting through his shoulder and down his spine. A woman stood over him, six feet at least, maybe more, blonde hair plastered flat by the rain, blood running from a gash above her left eye and mixing with the water on her cheek in a thin pink stream. She was built like someone who’d been carved out of a gym and given a jawline that could cut glass. Her shirt was torn across the stomach and underneath was a lattice of bruising that went from her ribs to her hip.

“You gonna make me put a bell on you?” she said.

He stared up at her. The face was wrong for the size. The face he knew.

“Betsy?”

She was the Thursday regular. She came into Kay’s Comics and Curios every Thursday at four-fifteen, ordered nothing, bought something, and quoted Ghostbusters at him while she did it. She had a laugh like she’d been practicing it since 1984 and she wore vintage band shirts and she’d once spent forty minutes arguing with a teenager about whether The Goonies held up. She was five-six, five-seven maybe, and she was funny, and she was normal, and she was standing over him at six-four with blood on her face and abs he could see through the torn fabric and the world made no sense.

“Hey, Chris.” She crouched down, and her eyes were blue and exhausted and she had freckles on her nose that the rain kept washing clean of blood. “You good? You were about two inches from becoming a pavement smear.”

“You’re Min/Max.”

The name came out of him like somebody else had said it. Min/Max. The size-shifter. The one who’d gone toe-to-toe with the thing with too many arms and gotten knocked through two buildings for her trouble. The one the internet had been arguing about for three years, whether she was real or a hoax, and she came into his shop on Thursdays and talked about Ghostbusters.

“Among other things.” She wiped blood from her eye with the heel of her hand and it didn’t help. “Sit tight. Let me check on the others.”

She stood and walked across the roof, and Chris watched her and tried to make the two versions of her fit together in his head and couldn’t. She moved like she was used to the bigger body, shoulders squared, steps deliberate, but there was something in the way she kept pushing wet hair out of her face that was pure Thursday-afternoon Betsy, and the contradiction sat in his chest like a stone.

The rooftop was wide and flat, gravel and puddles and the squat bulk of an access door to the stairwell. Six people, counting him. Five who had powers. One who didn’t. He could feel the gravel through his jeans, cold and sharp, and his shoulder throbbed with his pulse and the rain kept coming down and he thought, I own a comic book store, what am I doing here.

At the far corner stood a woman he’d seen on the news. Lady Liberty. She didn’t move. The rain ran down her green skin and dripped off her jaw and soaked her long hair until it hung in heavy ropes against her back. Her crown, the headband shaped like a circlet, had a crack running through it from the left point to the center, and the fracture line caught the firelight from below and glinted when the wind shifted the smoke. She stood with her hands at her sides and her eyes open and she said nothing. The rain hit her and she didn’t blink.

Closer to the center of the roof, Diwata knelt beside Polly. He’d seen Diwata on the news too, the protector of Manila, the light-bringer. She had a cut across her forearm that was still bleeding, and her hair was loose and tangled, and she was pressing her other hand flat against Polly’s chest. Polly lay on her back with her legs drawn up, her raven-black hair spread across the wet gravel, and her breathing came fast and shallow and her legs wouldn’t stop shaking. Her costume was torn at the thigh and the skin beneath was bruised dark. She was crying. Not loudly, not with sound, but the tears kept coming and mixing with the rain and she didn’t wipe them away.

“Breathe with me,” Diwata said. Her accent was clipped and steady, and her dark brown eyes were fixed on Polly’s face. “In through the nose. Hold. Out.”

Polly tried. Her chest hitched and her legs shook harder and she grabbed Diwata’s wrist with both hands and held on.

“I can still feel it,” Polly said. “Everything. All of it.”

“Don’t try to block it. Let it pass through.”

Chris got to his feet. His knee almost buckled and he caught himself against the ledge and waited for the world to stop tilting. June was sitting ten feet away, cross-legged on the gravel, her hands pressed flat against her temples, her fingers buried in her rainbow-streaked hair. She was rocking. Her pink eyes were open but they weren’t seeing the roof, and her lips moved without sound.

He walked toward her. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He didn’t have powers. He didn’t have a first-aid kit. He had a cracked pair of glasses and a comic book store that was probably ash. But she was small and she was shaking and nobody was with her.

“Hey,” he said, crouching. “June, right? Can I——”

She flinched. Her whole body jerked sideways and her eyes snapped to his face and the pink of her irises was bright, too bright, wet with something that wasn’t rain.

“Don’t.” Her voice was thin and stretched. “Please don’t touch me.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“I can hear them.” She pressed her hands harder against her head. “I can hear everyone dying. All at once. The whole city. They’re screaming and they’re praying and they’re calling their mothers and I can hear all of it, every single one, and I can’t make it stop.”

He pulled his hands back and sat on the gravel in front of her and didn’t touch her. He didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say. He sat there and the rain came down and June rocked and somewhere below them a building collapsed and the sound traveled up through the concrete and into his bones.

Betsy’s shadow fell over both of them. She’d come back, and she was shorter now. Five-six, five-seven, the height he knew, the height that made sense. The torn shirt hung loose on her reduced frame and the abs were gone and she was just a woman with a bloody face and wet hair and freckles. She crouched beside him and looked at June and then at him, and something crossed her face that he recognized from Thursday afternoons. The look she got right before she said something from a movie to make a bad situation bearable.

She didn’t say anything from a movie.

She reached past him and put her hand on June’s knee. Didn’t squeeze, didn’t grip. Just rested it there.

“June. Hey. Look at me.”

June’s rocking slowed. Her pink eyes drifted from the middle distance to Betsy’s face.

“One at a time,” Betsy said. “You don’t have to carry all of them. Pick one voice. One. Follow it.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. One voice. Start there.”

June’s breathing changed. Something behind her eyes shifted, and she stopped rocking, and her hands came down from her temples. She was still shaking, but the shaking was slower, like a wind dying down. She looked at Betsy’s hand on her knee and then at Betsy’s face and then at Chris, and her expression was lost and open and raw.

“There’s a woman,” June said. “She’s singing. In a basement. She’s singing to children and she’s——” Her voice broke. “She’s not afraid.”

Betsy’s jaw tightened. She wiped blood from the gash above her eye again, and it wasn’t stopping, and the rain kept washing it clean and it kept bleeding. She looked at Chris and her blue eyes were steady and tired and full of something he couldn’t name.

“Nobody’s dead yet,” she said.

The word yet hung between them. It sat in the rain and the smoke and the orange light from the burning city and it didn’t go anywhere. Betsy held his gaze for a second longer and then stood and turned toward the others, and Chris sat on the wet gravel with his cracked glasses and his bad shoulder and watched her go.

Lady Liberty still hadn’t moved. Diwata still knelt beside Polly, stroking her hair back from her face, murmuring in a language Chris didn’t recognize. June sat with her hands in her lap, her fingers twitching, listening to a city scream.

Chris thought about his comic shop. He thought about the long boxes in the back room, twenty years of inventory, his whole adult life in polybagged cardboard. He thought about Thursday afternoons. He thought about a woman who quoted Ghostbusters and turned out to be six-four and bleeding and brave, and he thought about how she’d shrunk back down to the size he knew because he was there, because she didn’t want him to see her as something other than the woman who came in on Thursdays, and the thought sat in his chest beside everything else and took up space.

The city burned. The rain fell. Nobody moved.

She had not moved in eleven minutes. Lady Liberty knew this because she had counted each one, the way she had counted minutes in the trenches of Valley Forge, in the smoldering ruins of the first capital, in every waiting silence between the wars that shaped the country she was born to embody. Rain collected in the cracks of her crown-shaped headband and ran down her temples like the tears she had never learned to shed. Her green skin had gone pale, the color of copper left too long in salt water, and her hands hung at her sides with the fingers spread wide, as though she had been holding something that was no longer there.

The city below was a wound. She could smell it through the rain, the way she had smelled Philadelphia burn in September of 1777 when the British took the capital and the patriots fled into the Pennsylvania farmland carrying what they could. She had stood in the smoke then, a young entity, barely a year old, watching the city she was meant to represent collapse into fire and occupation, and she had not understood yet that this was what freedom cost. She had learned. She had watched Atlanta burn in November of 1864, the flames visible for miles, the sound of it something between a roar and a moan that she could still hear when she closed her eyes on bad nights. Sherman had written that war was hell, and she had stood in the aftermath of his particular hell and known he was right, and the smell of it had never left her, not in a hundred and sixty years, not through two world wars or the Cold War’s long dread or the long slow burn of cities she could not save.

The smell was here now. Burning steel and burning glass and something under it, something organic she refused to name. She stood in it and let it fill her lungs and thought, I have been here before, and I will be here again, and there is no end to this.

“I have watched cities burn.”

Her voice came out wrong. It came out small, and cracked, and nothing like the voice she used in battle, the clarion voice that carried across rooftops and made enemies hesitate. It came out like a woman’s voice. She heard it leave her and did not recognize it.

The rain kept falling. Diwata looked up from where she knelt beside Polly, her dark eyes sharp, her hands still pressed to Polly’s trembling shoulders. June’s fingers stopped their twitching. Betsy, sitting on the wet concrete with her knees drawn up and her blonde hair plastered flat against her skull, turned her head.

Chris was the only one who did not react. He sat against the rooftop access door with his glasses fogged and his bad shoulder pressed to the metal, and he watched Lady Liberty the way people watched a building about to come down, with the understanding that looking away would not change what was about to happen.

“Philadelphia.” Lady Liberty said the word like a location on a map she had memorized and could not stop reading. “September, 1777. The British occupied the capital and we fled. I was new. I did not yet understand that standing for something did not mean standing with it, and I stood in the streets while the city burned around me and I thought, this is what I am for, this is the price, this is the cost of the thing I represent.”

No one spoke. The rain filled the gaps between her sentences.

“Atlanta. November of 1864.” Her jaw tightened, and the muscles in her neck stood out, and for a moment she looked less like a symbol and more like someone remembering something she would rather not. “I walked through it after. The fires had gone out and the smoke was still thick and the streets were full of what the people had left behind. A child’s shoe. A piano with its keys melted together. I stood in front of a church that had collapsed in on itself and I could still smell the wood burning and I thought, I am two hundred years old and I have learned nothing that helps.”

Polly pushed herself upright. Diwata’s hands tried to guide her back down, but Polly shook her off with a sharp movement of her shoulder, her raven-black hair swinging across her face. “Then what are we doing up here?” Her voice was thin, stretched, the voice of someone running on the fumes of conviction. “If you’ve seen this before, if you know what burning looks like, then you know we should be down there. We should be fighting. We should——”

Her legs buckled. Diwata caught her around the waist, one arm firm and steady, and Polly’s hands gripped Diwata’s forearm, her fingernails pressing crescents into that tanned skin. Diwata held her without effort, the way someone holds a door shut against a wind they know will keep pushing.

“Not like this,” Diwata said. Her accent was thicker when she was exhausted, the rhythm of Manila pushing through the English. “Not empty. You go down there with nothing left and you die, and then what? Then who does your sister call when the next one comes?”

Polly’s mouth opened. Then it closed. Then it opened again, and what came out was not an argument.

“It’s been weeks.” She was shaking, and the shaking had nothing to do with the cold rain on her bare legs. “My speed, it’s—— I’ve been getting slower. Every day a little slower, like something’s draining out of me and I can’t find the leak. I ran twelve miles this morning before the fight and I was winded. Twelve miles used to be nothing, used to be a warm-up, and today I was winded, and I thought, this is the day, this is the day I find out what happens when it runs out.”

Diwata’s grip on her waist tightened. The glow at Diwata’s fingertips brightened and faded, brightened and faded, the light pulsing with her breathing.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” Polly’s voice broke on this, and the word came out in two pieces. “I don’t know how much longer I can be Speed Bumps. I don’t know if there’s a version of me in a month that can run at all.”

June looked up. Her pink eyes were wet, and her rainbow-streaked hair hung in damp ropes against her pale face, and her hands were still in her lap but they had gone still in a way that was different from before, still the way a radio goes still between stations, listening for a signal.

“I can hear you,” June said. Not to Polly. To all of them. Her voice was the softest thing on the rooftop, barely audible under the rain. “I can hear all of you, I can’t help it, I never could, and right now you’re all so loud I can’t think straight.”

Betsy shifted against the concrete. “June——”

“You feel guilty.” June was looking at Diwata now, and Diwata’s face went rigid, the way faces go rigid when something true and unwanted lands on them. “You feel guilty because Manila’s sister city is burning and you weren’t here to stop it and you think that makes it your failure. You think if you’d been faster, if you’d seen it coming, if you’d stayed instead of going home, you could have prevented this. You think you abandoned them.”

Diwata said nothing. The glow at her fingertips went out.

June turned to Lady Liberty, and her pink eyes were filled with something that looked like apology. “You’re terrified. You’re terrified that if you can’t save this city, an American city, your city, then you’re not what you say you are. If America’s symbol of freedom can’t protect an American city, what are you? You’re afraid the answer is nothing. You’re afraid the answer is that you were never real, that you were always just a symbol, and symbols don’t bleed and symbols don’t fail and symbols don’t stand in the rain watching everything they were supposed to protect turn to ash.”

Lady Liberty’s throat moved. She did not speak.

June’s gaze moved to Betsy, and Betsy’s blue eyes met hers with something defensive in them, something cornered, and June said, “And you. You keep quoting movies because if you’re quoting movies then this is a movie, and movies have endings, and endings make sense. You’re scared. You’re more scared than anyone here because you’re the only one who keeps pretending you’re not.”

Betsy’s mouth opened. The shape of a quote was visible in it, something from Die Hard or Ghostbusters or The Goonies, some piece of borrowed courage ready to be deployed. But it did not come out. Her mouth closed. Her jaw worked. She looked down at her hands, her normal-sized hands, the hands that had been enormous and powerful twenty minutes ago, and she pressed them together between her knees.

“I don’t know what happens next.” Betsy’s voice was flat. The playfulness was gone, the wit, the charm, the Thursday-afternoon performance that made Chris smile every week at the comic shop counter. What was left was a woman in a wet shirt sitting on a rooftop saying something true. “I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a movie reference for this. I don’t know if we go down there and fight and win or go down there and fight and die or sit up here until the rain stops and the city’s gone. I don’t know.”

The silence after that was physical. It pressed down on the rooftop like a weight. The rain fell through it, and the fires burned below it, and six people sat or stood or knelt in it and breathed it in and held it.

Chris watched them. He watched the woman who quoted Ghostbusters sit with her hands between her knees and her head bowed, and he watched the immortal symbol of American freedom stand with her cracked crown and her pale green skin and her two hundred and fifty years of memory, and he watched the fastest woman he had ever seen tremble in the arms of a woman whose light had gone out, and he watched the telepath curl her fingers into fists against the noise of a dying city, and he thought, these are the people who save the world. These are the people the world depends on. And they are sitting in the rain with nothing left.

Lady Liberty’s hands curled at her sides. She felt the rain on her skin, each drop distinct, each one a small cold point of contact with a world she had spent two and a half centuries protecting and never quite belonging to. She thought about Philadelphia. She thought about Atlanta. She thought about the smell.

June’s voice, when it came again, was barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say all that. I can’t—— the filters, they’re gone. I’m hearing everything, and everything is so loud, and your thoughts are the loudest because you’re right here, and I’m sorry.”

Betsy lifted her head. She looked at June, and something in her expression softened, and she said, “Don’t apologize for being right.”

The rain kept falling. The silence held.

The silence had weight. It pressed down on the rooftop like something physical, something with mass and texture, and Betsy felt it settle across her shoulders the way the rain settled across everything else. Nobody argued anymore. Nobody quoted anything. The fight had drained out of all of them at different speeds, Polly first and then Lady Liberty and then the rest of them in a slow chain reaction, and now they were just bodies on wet concrete breathing in the smoke that drifted up from below.

Betsy’s legs folded. She slid down against the rooftop access door, the metal cold through her soaked shirt, and she sat there with her knees drawn up and her arms draped over them. The gash above her eye had stopped bleeding, the rain doing the work she hadn’t bothered to do herself, and she could feel the dried blood cracking along her temple when she moved her eyebrows. Her body ached at its normal size. It ached worse when she was large, every square inch of expanded skin pulled taut over expanded muscle and bone, and she’d been large for too long tonight. The shrinking back down felt like letting go of a breath she’d held for six years.

Chris sat down beside her. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that she could feel his warmth through the gap between them, and she was grateful for the distance because she didn’t know what she’d do if he tried to hug her right now. She’d probably shatter. She was holding herself together with movie quotes and sarcasm and the stubborn belief that if she kept talking, kept being funny, kept being Betsy Jones from the vintage cinema with the quick mouth and the encyclopedic knowledge of John Hughes films, then she wouldn’t have to be the other thing. The big thing. The thing that scared her more than any villain ever had.

“I come into your store every Thursday,” she said.

“I know.” Chris pulled his knees up, mirroring her posture. His glasses were fogged and smeared and he took them off, wiped them on his shirt, put them back on. They fogged again immediately. He gave up and held them in his lap. “You always buy something. Even when you don’t need anything.”

“Supporting local business.”

“You bought the same issue of Watchmen three weeks in a row.”

“I keep forgetting I already own it.” She pressed her forehead against her arms. The rain ran down the back of her neck, cold and relentless. “There’s a lot going on up here.”

She didn’t gesture. Didn’t need to. He was sitting close enough to hear everything she wasn’t saying, and for a woman who filled silences with film references the way other people filled them with breathing, the quiet between her sentences was louder than anything she’d said all night.

“College,” she said. “Junior year. Geology field trip, of all things. We were studying meteorite impact sites in the Arizona desert, and there was a fragment the professor couldn’t identify. Collapsing star matter. I touched it.”

Her hands tightened on her arms. The memory was vivid in a way that never faded, the way the heat had rushed through her palm and up her arm and into her chest, the way her bones had hummed, the way she’d looked down and watched her fingers grow and her sleeves split and the ground get smaller and smaller and smaller. She’d screamed. She remembered screaming. She remembered the professor’s face.

“The density manipulation kicked in during the ambulance ride. I grew four feet in thirty seconds and cracked the vehicle’s roof off its hinges. They thought it was an earthquake.” She laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that had no humor in it, a reflex more than a feeling. “Spent six months learning to control it. Six years pretending it’s something I wanted.”

Chris turned his head to look at her. She kept hers down. She couldn’t look at him right now, couldn’t sit here in the ruins of her secret identity and watch it register on his face, the recalculation, the moment where Betsy from the cinema became something else entirely.

“Every Thursday,” she said, “I come into your store and I talk about Ghostbusters and Back to the Future and I buy comics I already own because for forty-five minutes I get to be a normal person who likes normal things. That’s what it is. That’s what you gave me. A place where I could pretend I’m not the woman who gets sixty feet tall and bleeds from the effort.”

The rain filled the space between them. She heard him shift, heard the wet concrete scrape under his jeans, and then his hand was on her shoulder. He didn’t squeeze. He didn’t say anything. He put his hand there and left it, and she breathed.

Across the rooftop, June sat with her legs folded beneath her, her rainbow hair dark and heavy with rain, hanging in streaks across her face. Her hands were pressed to her temples, fingers white with pressure, and her pink eyes were open but unfocused, staring at something none of them could see. The city’s psychic noise was still pouring through her, she’d said. Everyone dying at once. Everyone afraid at once. Betsy had watched her flinch when Chris tried to help earlier, watched the way contact made it worse, and she’d filed that away in the part of her brain that kept running tactical assessments even when the rest of her had given up.

Then June’s hands lowered. Her eyes focused. She lifted her head with the slow, careful motion of someone surfacing from deep water, and she looked at the group with an expression Betsy couldn’t read.

“There’s something else,” June said. Her voice was thin, scraped raw, but it carried in the rain the way small sounds sometimes did, clear and distinct against the white noise of everything else. “I can show you. If you’ll let me.”

Diwata looked up from where she knelt beside Polly. Her dark eyes were steady, watchful. “Show us what?”

“Not in words.” June held out her hands, palms up, and the gesture was so small and deliberate that Betsy felt something tighten in her chest. “I’ll share what I’m hearing. Just a piece. I won’t push. You’ll feel it and you can let it go.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. The rain fell. The city burned below them in silence.

Lady Liberty, still standing at the far corner, turned her head. She said nothing, but she was listening. Betsy could tell because the statue’s posture changed in some minute way, a fraction of a degree, her shoulders shifting from rigid to attentive.

“Go ahead,” Betsy said.

June closed her eyes. Her fingertips glowed, faint and pink, like bioluminescence under water, and Betsy felt it come into her mind. Warm. It was warm. Not the heat of fire or the sting of smoke but something else, something that arrived like a hand on her shoulder the way Chris’s hand was on her shoulder right now, and it carried sound with it.

A woman singing. Voice cracking, pitch imperfect, singing something Betsy didn’t recognize in a room that smelled like smoke, and the woman was singing to other people. To people sheltering behind her. The melody wavered and broke and started again, and the fear was there in the singer’s chest, Betsy could feel it, but underneath the fear was something stubborn, something that had decided it was not going to be afraid, and the decision was louder than the fear.

Betsy’s breath caught.

There were more. People in a basement, ten of them, twelve, their thoughts a tangle of prayers and practical plans. Someone had found a first aid kit. Someone was rationing water. Someone was telling a child a story about a dog to keep the child from crying, and the story was boring and long and the child was listening, and the love in that voice was so ordinary and so enormous that Betsy’s eyes burned.

The fragment faded. June opened her eyes, and her pink irises were wet.

“That’s what’s down there,” June said. “That’s what I hear when I stop hearing the fire.”

Diwata’s fingertips lit up. The glow was faint, amber-gold, the light she carried in her blood, and it pulsed once and dimmed. She stared at her own hands as if they’d betrayed her, as if the light had no right to come back, and her jaw tightened.

Polly was still on the ground. Her legs hadn’t stopped trembling, the vibration running through her like a current, and Diwata had one hand on Polly’s back to keep her upright. Polly’s massive frame was folded in on itself, her raven hair plastered to her neck and shoulders, and she looked up at Diwata with eyes that were red-rimmed and exhausted.

“Is there anything left to protect?” Polly asked. The words came out raw, like she’d bitten them off, and her hands were shaking where they rested on her knees.

Diwata looked at her. The rain ran down Diwata’s face, tracing the line of her sharp jaw, and her expression was the one Betsy had seen her wear in every fight they’d shared: still, resolved, certain in a way that had nothing to do with ego and everything to do with something deeper. She reached down and took Polly’s hand. Their fingers interlaced, Diwata’s grip firm, Polly’s grip desperate, and Diwata said, “Yes. Always.”

Polly’s face crumpled. She pressed her free hand over her mouth and her shoulders shook and she didn’t make a sound, and Diwata held her hand and let her shake, and the rain kept falling, and Betsy watched the two of them and felt the warm fragment June had shared still glowing in her chest like an ember.

Then the light came from below.

Betsy saw it first because she was facing the edge, her chin resting on her arms, her eyes half-closed. A flicker from the street. Not fire, not the orange-red pulse of the burning blocks. Not lightning, not the white flash of the storm. This was deliberate. A flashlight, maybe. A phone screen. Something controlled, something with rhythm, and Betsy’s brain, the part of her brain that never stopped cataloguing and categorizing even when the rest of her was falling apart, parsed the pattern before she consciously recognized it.

Three short. Three long. Three short.

SOS.

She sat up straight. Chris’s hand fell from her shoulder and she was already moving, pushing herself to her feet, her soaked clothes heavy and her legs stiff and her body protesting every motion, and she walked to the edge. She gripped the concrete ledge and looked down through the rain and the smoke, and the light was there. Six stories below. Someone standing in the street between two burning cars, flashing a light up at the rooftop, and they knew. They knew the heroes were up here. Someone down in that burning city had looked up and decided to call.

Betsy wiped her face. Rain and blood and something that might have been tears, she didn’t know and it didn’t matter. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and she felt the familiar words rise up in her, the movie quotes, the armor she’d built out of decades of cinema, and this time she didn’t fight them. This time she let them come because they weren’t a cage. They were a door.

“Welcome to the party, pal.”

Her voice was rough and wet and it cracked on the last word and she said it anyway, and she turned around and looked at the five people on the rooftop behind her. Diwata, kneeling with Polly’s hand in hers. June, still sitting cross-legged with her faint glow fading. Lady Liberty, standing at the corner with her cracked crown and her centuries of grief. Chris, beside the access door with his fogged glasses in his lap, looking up at her.

“Who’s coming with me?”

Diwata stood. She pulled Polly up with her, and Polly’s legs were still shaking but she was standing, and Diwata’s fingertips glowed brighter now, the amber light pushing back against the rain.

June rose. Her movements were unsteady, her hands dropping from her temples, and she looked at Betsy with those pink eyes and nodded once.

Lady Liberty turned from her corner. She walked toward them with the slow, measured stride of someone who had watched cities burn for two hundred and fifty years and had never once walked away from the ones that still had people in them. Her green skin was pale, her crown cracked, her hair dark with rain, and she stopped beside the group and said nothing, because her presence said it.

Chris put his glasses on. They fogged. He took them off, put them in his pocket, and stood up. He couldn’t do what they could do. He wasn’t large or fast or luminous or telepathic or immortal. He sold comic books and played guitar badly. He stood up anyway.

Betsy turned back to the edge. She looked down at the light, the small deliberate signal from someone who refused to stop calling, and she felt the ember in her chest, the woman singing in the burning building, the man telling the dog story, the hands rationing water. She felt June’s warmth and Diwata’s light and Polly’s stubbornness and Lady Liberty’s grief and Chris’s hand on her shoulder and the six years of pretending and the thirty seconds of courage it took to stop pretending.

She looked at the city. The city looked back.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go down.”