3

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August in Philadelphia is perhaps the worst August a person can experience in America, from my limited point of view. I’ve had Ventnor Augusts, where the heat turns the ocean water into a cooling, salty spray and ruins my hair, and I’ve had New York City Augusts, stuck inside the well air-conditioned home of an uncle or grand-uncle, and I’ve even had a Florida August where it’s so damp and muggy that it just sort of washes over you, and the sweat becomes something you get used to. Philadelphia Augusts, in my uneducated opinion, suck really hard. It’s just warm enough that I’m sweating without exerting any effort, and just humid enough that my sweat isn’t evaporating easily, making me feel like any movement is being done through a fine layer of molasses. My hair isn’t as bad as it is in Ventnor, but it’s still frizzed up to hell, collected behind me in a loose low ponytail.

There’s a basketball court near me, so that’s where I spend any days where the weather is just a little bit more tolerable than the average, like today. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still miserable, but misery loves company, and it’s easier with friends.

It’s your average basketball court – two hoops, outdoor, raw asphalt, painted white lines fading with age. The whole thing is surrounded with a rectangle of eight-feet-high chain link fence, and neither hoop has had any actual netting for years. I’ve told my dad to bug people in the city government about it, and he promised that he had, but evidently fixing the many basketball hoops throughout Philly isn’t a super high priority. Understandable. The sky is bright blue, with the sun flickering on and off through a parade of thick, dark clouds. It’ll definitely rain later today.

There’s a couple kids I don’t recognize, along with “the posse”, as my mom refers to them. Kate, Jenna, Tasha, Lilly, and Marcus, who I do basically everything with. My best-friends-forever-for-life.

Kate’s currently playing Horse, and when I say playing, I really mean annihilating this poor sixth-grader. Kate, or Kaitlyn Smith when she’s in trouble, is about as tomboyish as they come – short-cropped sandy hair, freckles splattered across her face like she just lost a fight with a pepper shaker, and constantly adorned in whatever was comfortable, fashion be damned. We’re sort of like weird alternate universe fraternal twins, except she’s got pinker skin than me and her hair isn’t curly and she’s good at basketball like how I’m good at soccer.

Marcus Johnson is lounging off to the side, deep in one of his books. He’s got these thick, round glasses that he pushes up his nose every few minutes, which would look comical if he wasn’t built like a linebacker. Marcus is our group’s token boy, the constant in our ever-changing girl dynamics. We don’t have much in common but we get along well enough somehow, and his presence is enough to ward off weirdos, so he’s sort of like the group’s bodyguard. Even though most of us could probably beat him in a fight, because he’s a huge nerd whose sole time-consuming hobby is superhero forum gossip.

Lilly Rodriguez is at the center of the chaos, as usual. She’s got this wild curly hair that’s somehow perfectly controlled and a dimpled smile that you can’t say no to, even when she’s being a pest, which is frequently. But, like, a pest in the ladybug way, or the Japanese beetle way, not a pest in the mosquito or spotted lanternfly way. She’s the one who brings all the music carts and her speakers to make sure we all get to enjoy her taste in bands, which, I’ll admit, I have some mixed feelings about. I think, from what I can overhear of the argument, someone tried to slap the off switch on her speakers, which is a real dick move even if I’m not really into hypersoul. Just ask nicely!

Off to the side, on one of the cracked, faded benches, is Tasha Reynolds. Tasha is the type of person who manages to make frizzy hair and large glasses look downright sophisticated. She’s always got a book with her, as usual, and right now, she’s half-watching the game and half-reading some thick tome that’s probably about quantum physics or something. We’ve been friends since kindergarten, and I would trust her with my life.

Lastly, there’s Jenna Nguyen. Jenna is leaning against the fence, casually dribbling a basketball as she observes the game with a critical eye. She’s my best friend since middle school, and possibly the only person I’ve ever met who is more willing to backtalk authority figures than I am. Jenna’s got this long, black hair that she always ties back when she’s doing sports, and her eyes are constantly moving, taking in everything. She’s the type of person who doesn’t take crap from anyone, and she’s constantly sketching in her notebook, turning our everyday lives into works of art. By far, the best artist I know. No, like, better than that. Better!

And then there’s me – plain old Sam Small. I’m here melting my skin off until it sloughs, sitting underneath a little parasol that someone had put into a concrete block and attached a solar panel to the top of. It wasn’t anyone I know, it’s just sort of been there for a year now, and having an outlet I can charge my phone and run a miniature fan through is the only thing making me not want to go buy a bag of ice and bludgeon myself to death with it.

Swish. The basketball hits the rim, rolls around a couple of times, and then plops straight down to earth. Three sixth graders all slap their hands down in rough synchronicity (that’s a SAT word that means “at the same time”) while Kate collects five bucks from each of them. Some day I worry that she’s going to get someone real mad by hustling them, but she can handle herself. I’d be up there playing ball with her, maybe to make the odds even more lopsided in her favor, but there’s something in the way.

I can smell everyone’s blood. Well, not everyone healthy and cutless, but Kate spilled herself over the floor earlier the day and I can still smell the crusted-up blood faintly oozing out of her knee, and her scraped palms, and with those open that means I can smell the rest of her veins and arteries – her “vascular system”, as my mom informed me. It’s not just the people in my immediate vicinity, though, because there’s blood everywhere. It gets fuzzier the further out it goes, like turning into a vague mist, but I can smell everyone that’s having their time of the month, everyone that’s scraped themselves up or cut themselves accidentally on a kitchen knife. In at least a block around me, maybe two blocks. It’s hard to explain because I’m not like… seeing them. I can tell where they are in space but without seeing them at all, like someone put a blood-compass in my brain. There’s no overlay on my vision like a pair of spy goggles. Just overwhelming information.

The other group that had been occupying the basketball court give up the territorial dispute in the face of Kate’s dominating performance and Lilly refusing to give up on her music. This suits me just fine, because the fewer things I have to focus on overall, eyes, ears, etc., the less overwhelming the blood sense becomes. I wonder if I could get a lobotomy to turn it off. I’m too busy paying attention to all the singing blood around me to notice when my actual eyeballs are filled with Kate, waving her hand in front of my face.

“Hello? Earth to Small. What’s good?” she asks, gently thumping her palm into my nose.

Now, I’m not super into superheroes, fictional or otherwise, but I know enough to know about secret identities and shit like that. The problem is that it’s kind of hard to hide the teeth. Everyone already knows about it, but not everyone knows about the blood thing, and it’s making me have to do a bit of momentary algebra in my head. I trust my friends, but, let’s say ten years down the line somehow I’ve gotten roped into being a superhero – if I reveal everything to them, am I putting them in danger? I mean, real supervillains going after someone’s family and friends is seen as a below-the-belt punch, but I can’t predict that everyone I’ll ever encounter in my life is willing to play above the table.

It feels weird that this is something I even have to consider now. I kind of hate it.

I keep it to myself. “Sorry, just dealing with… the teeth thing. You know how when you feel your teeth with your tongue it always feels way bigger in your like… in your head? Like the sort of mental image of what your tongue is feeling with the sense of touch. It’s a lot weirder when suddenly all your teeth are replaced with shark teeth.”

“Yeah, that sounds like kind of a shitty superpower. I’m not going to lie. You can still eat with them jawns though right? Like, you haven’t been starving yourself, yeah, babe?” Kate asks, showing an inkling of genuine concern in her blue eyes, bending down into a squat to meet me at eye level. I’ve never exactly been comfortable with eye contact but I maintain it to avoid looking guilty.

“Yeah, I can eat fine. I’ve still got like… molars and shit,” I answer, pulling my lips up to show. “Shee?”

“Oh, that’s so cool even if it kind of sucks as a power. You don’t even have like, a little super strength? Can you breathe underwater?” she asks, bending down and pointing her phone flashlight into my mouth so she can see what my molars have turned into. Which is to say, they still look mostly like molars, but the grooves and crevices have deepened significantly, giving it an appearance like it’s covered in serrated spikes.

I shake my head. “I wish. I think I can like… drink saltwater now? Like, I think it gave me super-kidneys, but I still need to breathe. I tried, trust me. Also, saltwater still tastes gross.”

“Man, that sucks,” Marcus’s voice rings out from the side of the bench I’m sitting on. “Super-liver? That means you probably can’t get drunk anymore.”

“No, super-kidneys. Actually, I’m not sure, what part of your body filters water?”

“That would be your kidneys, yeah,” he replies.

“Who knows! Maybe it means you can drink a lot of bad stuff before it starts poisoning you. You could just become the hardest partier on the block,” Kate chimes in, standing up to her full height and leaning back to crack her spine.

“Well, I’m not a supe doctor so I don’t think I can really say authoritatively one way or the other,”

“‘Authoritatively’, you’re such a nerd,” Kate says, flicking my nose with her finger.

“If you think that’s nerdy, watch this; your kidneys are probably fine,” Tasha chides, not even looking up from her book. “The problem with seawater isn’t necessarily that it’s toxic to your kidneys. Basically, when you have too much salt, you pee it out, but if you don’t have enough non-salted liquid in your body, your kidneys will start to fail because the salt will build up and it will be drawing freshwater from the rest of your body that it doesn’t have. So what’s probably happening is that either your body can spontaneously generate new water internally in response to too much salt, which basically makes you immune to dehydration, or, what I think is more likely, you’ve probably developed some sort of mechanism to forcefully excrete excess salt without requiring water. I would be surprised if you just somehow had super-efficient kidneys that violate physics when processing urine.”

“Gross!” “Ew,” Kate and I shout in unison. “Dude, don’t talk about pee like that,” Kate says for me.

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Tasha replies. “Just drink some seawater and then see if you can notice any sort of alternate excretions, like maybe developing some sort of salt powder on your skin. Or maybe you just sweat it out and have brine sweat? It’s honestly kind of fascinating.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re really weird sometimes, Tasha?” Kate says, once again vocalizing my thoughts for me.

“Can we please stop saying the word ‘excrete’?” I ask politely.

Tasha adjusts her glasses and laughs at my misfortune. Jenna and Lilly have begun meandering their way over to the bench, presumably to see what all the hubbub is about, when I see another person getting closer. Well, I notice them with my weird brain before I see them with my eyes, and bend over, craning my neck, watching them approach.

Everyone else turns around to try and get a look at what I’m looking at. But I know immediately, because her silhouette is unmistakable, from the way she walks to the way she pushes the gate in the chain link open.

Her name is Liberty Belle, leader of the Delaware Valley Defenders. And she’s headed straight towards us. Lilly goes white as a sheet and turns her music off immediately, I assume fearing a noise citation. Marcus shuffles along behind me, while Kate cocks her hip out with a hand on it like she’s trying to intimidate an adult with, like, half a foot of height on her. Jenna immediately whips out her notebook and starts drawing, Tasha scoots over on the bench to give the rest of us a wide berth so she can read uninterrupted, and I can only stare.

“Hey, hey, don’t let me interrupt you. Everything okay around here, citizens?” she asks, the most confident grin in the world across her face. I’m distracted immensely for multiple reasons, but her smile is definitely one of them. She’s easily six feet tall, with dark skin, kind eyes, and a round cloud of locs around her head like a halo that floats and bobs with her movement. On a patrol like this, she’s wearing a lighter version of her normal uniform, with what looks like a black unitard, several bands around her arms, and some well-shined brass armor pieces – a breastplate, shoulders, and shinguards over top of red-lined sneakers. “What’s the matter? Y’all see a ghost up in this jawn?”

“Are we about to get arrested?” Kate asks. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Tasha pinching the bridge of her nose, but Liberty Belle just laughs.

“I’m sure some people would like me to hassle a couple of middle schoolers playing basketball without supervision, but y’all know that’s probably not necessary. I don’t see any weapons or drugs or dead bodies. Y’all not hiding a dead body from me, are you?” she asks, breaking out into more boisterous laughter. Her voice is deep and comfortable, like the verbal equivalent of a pillow, and I realize that my mouth has been hanging open for about the past twenty seconds.

“No, ma’am,” I break the silence.

She smiles at me. “Hey, kiddo, pass me a ball, yeah? Or are we just gonna sit on a bench instead of enjoying this beautiful summer day?”

Kate snorts. “You’re, like, thirty, and a superhero. Not a fair match for me.” She says, passing her the basketball that had been tucked under her free arm anyway.

Liberty Belle catches it with one hand. “Oh, I’m not that great at basketball. But, if you want to make it a little fairer, why don’t we do a little six-on-one? It’s been a quiet day, nobody’s dying, I could really use the distraction.”

That gets everyone’s attention. She passes the ball back to Kate.

---

Even six on one, it is not remotely a fair match. Or at least, it doesn’t start that way.

For one, not only is Liberty Belle a trained athlete with super strength, she’s also got like half a foot on me, the tallest of the group. It takes her extremely little effort to flick the ball out of her hands and across the court, whereupon she proceeds to miss several times. There is, of course, nothing preventing her from just keeping the ball out of our hands with her arm-span, striding past us, jumping three or four feet in the air, and dunking.

She does this. Repeatedly.

Each time, it’s matched with a boisterous yelp or exclamation of some point, usually a “Boo-yah!”. But, still, it’s not all as one-sided as I’m making it sound, because as strong as she is, she’s not quite as nimble as we are. And obviously, there are six of us, even if only two of us are really good at basketball. Kate grabs the ball out from under the hoop and passes it to me – I catch, dribble it down the court, and shoot from the two-point line. It sinks in nice and easy. Even if she jumps all the way across the court in a single bound, which she probably could, but is refraining from doing, she can’t match someone passing a ball behind her and shooting from there.

It’s honestly a lot more evenly matched than it has any right to be. She’s getting points on us, because every second and third time she sinks it in, whoever’s at the basket can’t get around her or passes it wrong. Most of my non-soccer team friends aren’t exactly what I’d call “coordinated”, so realistically it just ends up being a game of Kate and I versus Liberty Belle. Pass, pass, shoot. She takes possession, simply jogs up slowly, and smashes it down into the hoop. Kate catches it, and Liberty Belle wipes sweat from her brow. There’s a couple more exchanges like this, with Kate managing to actually slip out through Liberty Belle’s grip and take possession of the ball, and before long, the score actually starts catching up.

“Man, you kids are good. You ever thought about going pro?” she suggests, but I have a feeling she’s just being a good sport about it. Her mouth hangs open a little to catch some air, and my nose flares and twitches of its own accord. “One sec, breath break. Halftime. Seventh inning stretch.”

Something has been burning at the back of my head for the past fifteen minutes. “Wrong game,” Tasha says, having spent most of the time avoiding the action at the center of the court and hanging on the edge instead, occasionally checking her phone. Liberty Belle coughs twice into her elbow, and it flares in my head like a lightbulb going on.

She’s bleeding internally, and badly. I’ve been feeling it all game, but only when she coughed did it really come out and into vision. She thumps her chest twice, does a couple of jumping jacks, and boxes the air. “Right-o. Let’s get back at that jawn.”

The rest of us are still willing to humor her, because it’d be a fun story to tell at school when we can say “we challenged a superhero to basketball and won.”, even if that might be a slight stretch of the truth. Marcus and Lilly are starting to get in the mix a little more instead of letting just Kate and I do all the work and only occasionally trying to pass. Jenna swoops in from under Liberty Belle and snatches the ball out of her hands, swings sideways, and shoots on what seems entirely like impulse before clattering over and tucking into a roll. “I’m okay!” she yells as the ball bounces straight vertically off the rim, hits it, ricochets between the rim and the backboard a couple of times, and sinks a neat three pointer.

“Woo! Go Jenna!” Kate cheers, helping her up from the ground and slapping her a high five. Slowly but surely, whether it’s through us getting more involved in the game as a possible victory approaches, or because of whatever’s going on inside of Liberty Belle’s stomach, we actually start to gain on her, and then gain a lead.

I’m a little out of breath myself, sucking in air through my mouth to handle the burning in my lungs and the splits in my side after the latest two-pointer. I stretch my arms out over my head, my t-shirt pulling up a little bit and baring just a little bit of my scars to the wind. Liberty Belle takes possession of the ball, tries to dribble around a quietly chortling Marcus, and aims for a half-court shot, and misses. It bounces off the backboard, and I watch it aim right for me, lost in thought as it beans me in the nose.

The noise I make is extremely undignified (that means it’s embarrassing). It’s sort of like “Ough!” like air forced from my lungs, but it doesn’t really hurt.

“Oh, shit,” Tasha says as the group rushes to make sure I didn’t get a nosebleed or a concussion or something. I stumble backwards a step or two and then maintain my footing, flashing them a thumbs up, watching Liberty Belle immediately begin jogging towards me out of concern. I gently move the thumbs up in her general direction, and she shoots me a smile.

“We’re good!” I shout to Kate, who is at the other end of the court dribbling the ball.

“Okay, sick. Check out this three-pointer!” she says, drawing everyone’s attention as she tries to jog a little bit up to the half-court line, shoots, and gets it swatted out of the air by Liberty Belle. Lilly tries to grab it out of the air and it skids past her fingers, bouncing past her and rebounding off the chain link fence.

“Come on, kiddo, don’t announce yourself like that. Useful advice for when you become a hero!” Liberty Belle chides, bouncing a little bit on her heels.

“Heads up!” Lilly shouts, as the ball hits me in the head again. I stumble a step or two to the side but still manage to keep my footing. “Sam!” She half-shouts, half-asks, with an unspoken ‘why did you just let yourself get hit with the basketball’. Liberty Belle takes the ball and shoots in an easy two-pointer, the first one she’s actually landed this game.

“You alright, kiddo?” she asks, watching as the ball just rolls down the rim and starts bouncing unattended on the ground. “Let’s not get any concussions on pickup games, yeah? I’d feel bad.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I say, waving her off. “I’ve had a soccer ball kicked into my face at full speed, I’m very concussion proof.”

“Pff. Wish I had that power,” she jokes, as Marcus tries to waddle over and start unconfidently dribbling the ball while standing completely still. “Do we need a time out?”

“I, uh. Hey, Kate, you good if we call it here?” I ask. She looks at me and shrugs.

“Yeah, whatever,” she says, in an accepting way, not a dismissive way.

“Cool beans. Um, Mrs. Belle, can I have a moment of your time, please?”

Jenna, Tasha, and Lilly all “Oooo” in unison, while Marcus tries really hard to dunk the ball like Liberty Belle did. Kate walks over to him, snatches the ball out of his hand, and starts shooting two pointers. I hear her instructions, but I’m tuning them out. “Ittle Sammykins has superhero business for Liberty Belle,” Lilly teases.

“Yeah, yeah, superhero stuff. Y’all mind giving me a minute? I just got hit in the head with a basketball,” I say to the onlookers. They sort of share a collective shrug and join the other two over by the rim to shoot two pointers, which will inevitably turn into a game of Horse, or something like that, in about three minutes time.

Liberty Belle approaches and squats down a little so we’re closer to eye level. “Yeah, I noticed them teeth but I didn’t want to say anything about it. All good, chief?”

I take a couple of steps back and then turn around so I don’t trip over the bench. Then, I sit on it, and pat the side. “Can I have a minute, Mrs. Belle?”

She laughs, sitting down next to me, looking all ears and empathy. “Please, if you’re going to be formal, it’s Ms. Williams. No Mr. Belle in the picture. Probably won’t be. You already asked for a minute, so a minute you can have.”

I knew what her real name was, since it wasn’t exactly hidden information. All Registered Superhuman Entities have their names in a database, and the real important ones are disclosed for accountability reasons, unless they’re in, like, witness protection or something like that. At least, that’s how I think the system goes, but superhero regulations are really, really not my forte, although you could probably ask my dad and he’d know a thing or two. Either way, calling the local superhero by their full name is sort of a weird thing to do though, like… That’s not her name. Her name’s Liberty Belle, not Diane Williams. That’s just some lady. I heave my shoulders a little. “Are you okay?”

She laughs nervously, pulling some of her hair back with one hand. “Yeah? Why, what’s up? Were you worried about me nearly losing a six-on-one? ‘Cuz I promise, I’d stomp you all in tennis, or gymnastics. Or track.”

I shake my head and adjust my ponytail. I suck in a loooot of air through my teeth and feel my chest inflating. “I’ll try to make this as quick as I can. Don’t tell my friends, obviously, but I can sort of smell blood,” I start, and she narrows her eyes, opens them again, and then gets a look of resignation. She sighs, and her body folds in a little. “You know, like, shark powers. I think that’s what G-d decided my theme would be. When you coughed, I think I could smell all the blood in your cough, and, like… are you okay? If it’s confidential or something you don’t have to tell me, but you’re sort of a big deal and, I mean, like, do people know? Did this just happen? Did I do that?”

She chuckles a little bit. “You know, for a second there you sounded just like Steve Urkel. You know who that is?” she asks, and I shake my head no. “Way before your time. But, uh, you can keep a secret, right… Sam, was it?”

“Samantha Small. You don’t have to call me Sam, unless you want to.”

She puts her hand on my head and pats it a little bit, very gingerly, like the way I’d pat a fragile newborn kitten or puppy. The way someone pats something they’re afraid of snapping like a twig. “Okay, Samantha, I’ll keep this on a superhero-to-superhero basis, then,” She says, winking at me and withdrawing her hand. “I got into a real bad fight a couple years ago, with a real bad villain. One of the worst, even. He just messed me up real good and sometimes my body’s still a little angry at that. What’s it look like in there, if I can ask?”

I take a second to think about it in my minds eye. It’s impossible to visualize in a way that I understand, but I can still sort of see it, sort of feel it, a weird combination see-feel. But I take a second to think, and smell her breath, and shut my eyes, and squeeze them shut, and unsqueeze them. “Coffee grounds. That means you’re bleeding into your stomach, right? It’s like… Coffee grounds, and some blood in your lungs. You’re not cut open, you’re just sort of leaking. I don’t know, I’m not a nerd that reads medical textbooks for fun. You’d have to ask Tasha about that.”

Over in the distance, Kate shouts out the letter “H!”. The Horse game has begun. Kate will almost certainly win.

“I’ll keep her in mind for my next eval,” Liberty, uh, Ms. Williams says, although I can tell she doesn’t mean it. “Yeah, he, um… The guy got me good. That’s sort of the problem with getting into fights as a career, Samantha, is that sometimes you get some damage that you just gotta live with and fight through. It’s the same way as with athletes, like footballers and soccer players. They conk their head a lot, they break their legs, you know, them jawns all fucked all sorts of ways, but they keep doing it ‘cuz it’s what they good at,” she tries to explain to me. I open my eyes and she’s looking right at them, and I’m not sure who, exactly, she’s trying to reassure here.

If it’s me, she’s not doing a good job of it, although that may be just because she’s still bleeding into her stomach and she hasn’t done anything strenuous in the past five minutes. “Can I ask you a serious question, Ms. B-Ms. Williams? Like, a real for real serious question?”

“Man, you are one nosy-ass middle schooler,” She cracks, leaning back with her arms folded over her chest.

“I’m concerned! You’re, like, my favorite,” I sort of yell-whisper, trying not to make any of my concern apparent to my friends. “I mean, I don’t really pay attention to the superhero stuff as much as some other people do but you’re, like, the number one. You keep us safe. You keep Philly safe. Also, I’m a high schooler now, I start high school in, like, three weeks.”

She sighs, and her chest heaves a little up and down. “That’s what they sayin’. Yeah, you can get real for real serious. And you’re a middle schooler ’til you start it, baby.”

I fold up a little and don’t respond to the teasing. “Are you probably going to just keep going until you die?” I ask. I immediately feel significantly worse for asking it, and avert my gaze directly downwards at my feet, where I don’t have to witness the change in her expression. It’s no use, though, because I can feel her heartbeat quicken and push more blood into her organs. I hadn’t realized that was something I could really do, but I guess that makes sense. I feel her heartbeat spike, and then slow back down to resting.

“Yeah,” She says, just as bluntly. I turn my head a little to the side so I can look at her better, since it feels a little disrespectful to not. “Yeah, I am. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. You gonna play basketball until you die, Sam?”

I try to stifle an extremely inappropriate seeming laugh. “No, I’m going to play soccer until I die, but I could do without basketball,” I reply, looking back away from her. It feels like a cold knife in my sternum, dragged right down to cut me open like a dissected animal. Confronting one of the only superheroes that really exists in my consciousness with her own mortality feels like kind of a morally wrong thing to do, but I can’t explain why.

“Yeah, yeah, you know how it is. There’s just something that’s such a part of you that even if it started hurting your life you could never stop. I bet you’d still try to play soccer even if they put you in a wheelchair, wouldn’t you, Sam?” She asks, turning sideways on the bench so that neither one of us has to face the other.

“I would roll that f-, uh, da… I’d roll that ball right in with my wheels if I had to, ma’am,” I answer, and she roars with laughter, thumping me on the back with her open palm. For a split second, I am extremely worried about being turned into a fine mist and a pile of gore, but evidently her control over her power is more than good enough to avoid atomizing me (that means reducing me to atoms. Duh).

“What’s with this stick up your butt, young lady? You can say damn and you most definitely ain’t gonna be calling me ‘ma’am’, that’s for damn sure. Call me ma’am when I start going gray, okay, Sam?” she requests, and I laugh, and she laughs too. For a second, I forget about her internal injuries, and everything feels really cool again. It’s awesome that I’m just sitting here on a bench, shooting the shit with a real life superhero, not the fakey-fake kind like I am, with no costume, name, or goals. This is someone who’s really important, someone who has opinions that matter and the power to change things, even if it’s just changing things in Philly. It’s like meeting a celebrity, but instead of only being famous for looking pretty or owning a company or whatever, they’re famous because they’re a good person who helps people in a way that nobody else can.

She’s dying, though. It kind of puts a damper on things. “Yes, ma’am,” I croak out, and she thumps me on the back again. This time, I’m prepared for it, and it’s not scary at all.

“You’ve got a mouth on you, Samantha Small. Careful with it,” She says, folding her arms back over her chest. She looks at me, and I look at her, and I see a glimmer of something in her eyes but I really can’t place it. Her heartbeat is slow, steady, and even, something I can feel from here, like another rhythm overlapping my own.

“S!” Kate shouts from out in the distance as the end approaches. Kate, harbinger of basketball desolation. I have all confidence that she will make it into the WNBA some day. Liberty Belle glances over to her, and then back to me.

“Are you gonna keep fighting bad guys even if they put you in a wheelchair? That sounds hard,” I ask.

She smiles the confident smile of a woman who has been doing this job for longer than I’ve been alive. “Don’t worry. I’ve got people that will make me a super-wheelchair. They gotta get my arms, too.”

“What happens if they get your arms and legs?”

“Just a scratch. I’ll bite them into submission,” She says, laughing at some private joke I don’t understand. She gets up, thumps me on the back one last time, and does a couple of stretches. “Hey, I ain’t wanna make this abrupt, but it’s been like half an hour and I do gotta finish my patrol. You kids will play nice and not graffiti anything or kill anyone, yeah, Samantha?”

I give her a thumbs up. I follow up with a big, toothy smile, my teeth interlocking into a shining array of dazzling white as the afternoon starts to shift into the late afternoon, and the sky starts taking on an unmistakable creamsicle hue. “I’ll make sure to keep these rowdy kids in line, ma’am.”

“I swear to– You, you better-…” she says, getting up, mock-offended. She harrumphs. “I told you, call me ma’am once I’m greying. I’d prefer Ms. Belle to that, girl.”

I grin a little wider. “Yes, Ms. Belle.”

She lets out a grunt of frustration, messes up my hair, and does a little stretching. Then, she’s out with a jog.

---

My home life in the Small household is uneventful outside of holidays and family meetings, but especially uneventful in the summer. I’m not stupid, I know that soccer probably can’t be, like, my career, especially since the high school I’m going to doesn’t have a soccer club. I didn’t ask my parents to burn money on training camps. I’m relaxing. I’m decompressing. I’m a pretty strung-up person and I think, all recent events considered, I’ve earned a summer of downtime before I start the rest of my life.

But a lax schedule doesn’t equate to an idle mind, not for me. I may not be glued to a screen all day like some of my friends, but I can find my way around tech and the NetSphere. My parents made sure my horizons extended beyond the soccer field. When I sink my teeth into something, I can become razor sharp – like now, for instance, with Liberty Belle’s injuries.

My Sunday night finds me knee-deep in the web, combing local forums for clues. Philly and Camden have their share of unsavory types—Tornado Allie, Black Velvet, Syringe. They’re not big enough to have clashed with Liberty Belle though. Their modus operandi is quick, petty crimes. Smash and grab, then evaporate before the real heroes show up to stop them. My research leads me to a few names that crop up with increasing frequency, the real bad folks that can inflict some real bad damage.

First, there’s Doctor Necrosis, a villain apparently infamous for his ghastly organ-dissolving toxins. The Doc operates on the fringes, causing his share of havoc in Detroit, but he has always been a loner. Could Liberty Belle have crossed paths with him? Her symptoms could align with some kind of late-stage poison. I stumble upon a thread suggesting that Doctor Necrosis was in the Philly area a couple of years back. But, it’s a stretch; he’s always been more about chaos than taking down heroes.

In the middle of this, I’m digging up articles on varying kinds of injuries. I leave no stone unturned. Stabbings, bruising, gunshots, burn scars, and plenty of images I kind of wish of didn’t see. Frostbite, maybe? There’s been sightings of Cold Snap in the Delaware Valley area, and she freezes her victims from the inside out, but does that cause this kind of long-term damage? And furthermore, had she actually run into Liberty Belle? There’s plenty of people freaking out about her, especially during last year’s snowstorm, but nobody has any concrete proof, no articles, no photos, no videos. The forums are wild with theories, but the details don’t quite add up, at least not to anything actionable (that means anything I can act on, but I think that’s obvious from context clues).

I continue to dive into the underbelly of the NetSphere, getting lost in the twisting threads of my amateur investigation. The infamous Pyrausta, a villain who supposedly controls some sort of fire-breathing dragon, seems to have battled Liberty Belle once. There are a few photos of burn scars on Liberty Belle, but they seem to be older, not recent, and Pyrausta is too new. They’re probably from a different fire villain. No, I discard this one. Red herring.

In the midst of these villains, one name does stand out, Chernobyl. He’s been blacklisted, essentially ghosted from most of the superhero forums. I barely find any credible information, especially since he shares his name with one of the most infamous nuclear meltdowns of all time. A villain tied to radiation, could that be the missing piece? Maybe his radiation caused her injuries to be irreparable, but it’s just one of many possibilities, and frankly, that might not even be his powerset. Everything I can find has been wiped clean outside of a name, and in just one backwater forum, some blurry photos with heavy artifacting.

Suddenly, a breakthrough, or what feels like one. Texts from Marcus with more information. Professor Franklin died six years ago, taken down by a villain whose name is suppressed. A common practice in the superhero community. It’s a mark of respect, but it also helps to avoid increasing the villain’s profile. Franklin was Liberty Belle’s predecessor in the Delaware Valley Defenders, their paths must have crossed.

The info from Marcus adds a new layer of complexity to my search, and he’s right there with me, deep in the trenches, even though I haven’t told him why. When he asks, I tell him that I’m just curious about Liberty Belle’s w/l record, and he goes along with it without question, just happy to help. The fact that Professor Franklin was killed by a suppressed villain six years ago could be a key clue. It narrows down the list, excluding anyone who surfaced in the villain scene more recently. The villain responsible for Franklin’s death has been around for a while. Could it be the same villain that Liberty Belle battled two years ago? Could it be the same one who inflicted these severe injuries on her? The possibilities seem to line up.

I sink back into my chair, deep in thought. Doctor Necrosis and Cold Snap have been around for more than a decade, which keeps them on my list. Pyrausta, though, is a newer name, only active since 2021, and this new clue, if I’m accepting it as relevant, pretty definitively rules her out. But Chernobyl… he’s the enigma, the ghost. His timeline is uncertain. Has he been around long enough to have been the villain that killed Franklin?

An unsettling thought gnaws at me – what if Liberty Belle’s been carrying this grudge for six years? It’s not unheard of. Superheroes are only human, after all. It could explain why she’s fighting outside of Philadelphia, even taking on national and international threats. She could be hunting the one who killed her predecessor. My gut tightens at the idea. It’s conjecture, but it could make sense… and really, all of this is conjecture. She might’ve even been there when the Professor died.

At this point, it’s easy to let my mind spiral into all sorts of wild theories. Is it possible that her injuries weren’t just a result of a recent fight, but an old wound flaring up? The pieces are there, they just don’t quite fit together yet.

Suddenly, another text from Marcus. It’s a long shot, but he mentions a villain named Blast Shadow, a figure who can create concussive blasts strong enough to rupture internal organs. His whereabouts for the past few years are unknown, and he has a warrant out for his arrest and containment. The stomach bleeding and coughing up blood could align with internal trauma from a blast, but would it become a chronic injury?

I add Blast Shadow to my list and continue sifting through the data. Each villain could be the culprit, each theory has potential. The truth is somewhere in there, in the mishmash of theories, guesses, and half-remembered anecdotes from the NetSphere. I just need to find it. My eyes are stinging from the screen glare when my dad interrupts again. “-ve got someone here to see you!”

“Hold on!” I call back, hastily pulling off my headphones. With my mind still swirling with theories and eyes stinging from a full all-nighter spent performing my conspiratorial delving, I stumble over and throw the door open to reveal a smiling Liberty Belle, inside my house.

---

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