CHAPTER ONE — THE GOLDEN DOORS
Today's main goal: don't die.
Simple enough. Everybody's got that one on the daily checklist, right between breathe and eat something. I've been running an unbroken streak for twenty-four years now—never died, not even once—so what's one more day? Just keep the streak alive. Literally.
I was speed-walking along the sidewalk with my arms pumping in this exaggerated, motivational-poster kind of stride, and if you looked at me from across the street you'd probably think I was power-walking for cardio. You would not think I was shaking. The sun hammered down on us like it had a personal vendetta against my forehead. Sweat had already colonized my armpits, my lower back, the creases behind my knees. I hadn't thrown a single punch yet and my body was already filing its resignation.
Leon walked beside me. Hands in his pockets. Slight smile glued to his face like it was part of his bone structure.
"You nervous?" he asked. Not are you nervous. Just you nervous—casual, like asking about the weather.
"Yeah, man. No biggie." In actuality, I was terrified in a way that made my teeth feel loose. I kept swinging my arms to disguise the tremor running through them. Casual. Breezy. The arms of a man who definitely did not rehearse his own eulogy in the shower this morning.
"I remember my first mission," Leon said, eyes forward, that half-smile still holding. "I was shitting bricks. Actual bricks. Structural-grade."
That was marginally comforting. But admitting it would mean admitting I was nervous, and I couldn't do that. Not on my first real mission. Not to a guy who probably knew my father.
"Go over the mission," Leon said. Not a request. It hit me like a jab.
"Uh, there's a guy in, uh, a bank..."
The smile cracked open into an actual laugh—short, almost barking. "There are guys at banks every single day, Maxey. Thousands of them. Checking accounts, depositing paychecks, arguing about overdraft fees. If you ever want to lead a team in the future, you've gotta know how to brief them."
Lead a team? Dude. It was my first mission and this man was already drafting my five-year plan. One crisis at a time. But he'd heard of my dad—I could tell by the way he said my name, the way it carried weight in his mouth that it didn't earn on its own. That meant expectations. That meant I couldn't disappoint.
I straightened up. Tried to sound like someone who'd done this before.
"We received multiple distress calls referencing a suspicious individual inside the bank. Final call, the caller was whispering—said get help before the line dropped. No communication since."
Leon didn't say anything for a few steps. Just nodded. I took that as a passing grade and tried not to trip over my own feet, which had been competing to see which one could tangle the other first.
"So, Maxey." He drew the name out, savoring it. "Based on the extenuating circumstances—God, I hate talking like that—what is most likely occurring at the bank, in your prooo-feessh-inal opinion?"
I half-heard his question. The bank had crept into my field of vision and now it sat there like a monument, swallowing my attention whole. Two massive golden doors dominated the entrance, framed in ornate molding that caught the sun and threw it back at us like a challenge. The rest of the town—squat buildings, cracked sidewalks, a barbershop with a busted sign—looked like it existed in a different tax bracket. These doors alone were probably worth more than every house on the street combined.
I get it. You have money. But who builds a vault door on a bank and dares people not to rob it? Sad part is, it was our job to protect these people and make sure nobody ran off with their shit. Let some working-class family three blocks over get mugged for their grocery money and see if anyone makes a call. They'd send Powerless Heroes for that. That's the official term—Powerless Heroes. Government-sanctioned meat shields. Failed sperms, in my less-official opinion.
Maybe one day I could run my own agency and actually help people. Rich, poor, didn't matter. That's what my dad was going to do. He had plans—real plans, filed paperwork and everything. Before—
"Dying," said Leon.
My blood iced over. For two full seconds, my mind was a blank page.
Leon snapped his fingers in front of my face. "Hey. Lock in. I said—" he pointed to the rooftop across the street, "—I have two sniper clones up top looking out for us. So we don't end up dying."
"Oh." My heartbeat came back in a rush, pounding behind my ribs like a prisoner testing the walls. "Okay. Makes sense."
"Kid, let me know if you're good to go. If not, you can wait out here and I'll take care of it."
My heart and brain were racing each other—every second brought a thousand beats and a thousand thoughts, each one louder than the last. This is it. First mission. First villain. I thought about my dad. Not in any clear or coherent way. Just the shape of him, like sunlight behind a curtain. A warmth I couldn't hold.
Be with me, Dad. I love you.
"I'm ready."
———
Two Years Ago — Highsmore Hero Academy
My pencil stared back at me. I'd been staring at it long enough that the eraser was starting to feel like a face—two pink eyes, judging.
I wrote my name. The teacher said you get twenty points just for that. Twenty free points, and somehow I was nervous about spelling it wrong. Maxey. Five letters. I checked it twice.
The teacher had called it a questionnaire, not a test. "Don't even see it as a test—more like a conversation about yourself." But it was still graded. You could still flunk a conversation about yourself. Which felt about right for my life.
Question one: What are Powers?
Softball. Powers are a genetic mutation that first manifested approximately three thousand years ago, granting individuals abilities that range across every category imaginable—elemental manipulation, biological augmentation, spatial distortion, you name it. No two powers express identically, even among blood relatives. They are inherited but not copied. I wrote all of this in the measured, textbook language they wanted, but what I was really thinking was: Powers are the reason my father is dead and I'm sitting in this plastic chair.
Question two: Can you explain how powers evolve?
Typically, a power evolves based on how the individual uses it, combined with personal characteristics—temperament, physicality, psychological makeup. Evolution is triggered by intense emotion, profound loss, maturation, or extended periods of deliberate practice. Scientists have isolated one certainty: it is not random. There's a logic to it, even when the logic is cruel.
Question three: Explain the ranking system used to judge Heroes.
The five-tier Top 500 model. Tier five at the bottom—street-level crime, petty stuff. Tier one at the top, where the air is thin and the paychecks are fat. The Top 500 are almost exclusively tier-one heroes, ranked by villains defeated, civilians saved, and raw power assessment, updated weekly by the School of Ranking. I knew this system the way most kids know the alphabet. I'd memorized the Top 500 list every year since I was eight. My dad had been number twenty-five before what happened. Before.
Question four—with a note that read: Does not count toward your grade. No wrong answers.
Why do you want to be a hero?
I stared at the blank space beneath the question. Plenty of room. Enough for the truth, the whole truth, and the complicated, knotted mess between the two.
Did I talk about my dad? They knew who I was. My father had ties to the head of the academy—that connection was the only reason I'd gotten through the front door, and everyone in this room knew it even if nobody said it out loud. I didn't want to be the kid riding his dead dad's coattails. I wanted to believe I'd have gotten in on my own merit, that my name didn't matter, that I was here because I was capable.
But that was the lie, wasn't it. The comfortable one.
I wrote: I want to be a hero because I want people to live in a world where they don't worry about getting robbed or beaten or having their fathe— I erased the last word so hard the paper nearly tore. A loved one killed.
I turned the paper over and sat back. Twenty points for the name. Hopefully enough.
———
Two Years Later — Inside the Bank of Austerium
Inside, the bank was a cathedral of silence.
The space was larger than the exterior suggested—high ceilings held up by dark oak pillars, every surface dressed in mahogany and gold accents that caught what little light filtered through the shuttered windows. Our footsteps sounded enormous in that hush. Leon dropped into a crouch and I followed, moving through the aisles of the lobby like we were wading through something heavier than air.
I started seeing people. Flat on the floor, arms over their heads. Not dead—I could see their backs rising and falling, fast, panicked—but they had that particular stillness that comes from choosing not to move, from having made a bargain with the universe: I will stay perfectly still and maybe the bad thing will forget I exist. A few of them looked up at us with wet, red-rimmed eyes, and I saw something in their faces shift. Relief. Faint, fragile, but there. Like we were the answer to a prayer.
I didn't feel like the answer to anything.
Leon spawned two more clones—they materialized beside him with a low hum, stepping into existence like they'd always been there. If I remembered right, his maximum was five. Two on the roof already, two new ones. Four total. His power was replication, and he used it the way a chess player uses pawns: precisely, and without sentiment.
The clones peeled off—one left, one right—while we pushed up the center toward the teller counter. Not a villain in sight. Just silence, and the smell of something burned.
Then we heard the moaning.
Behind the counter, a man in a business suit was crumpled on the marble floor. His right arm was smoking—literally, thin tendrils of grey curling up from what used to be a sleeve. The fabric had melted into his skin, fused to the flesh in a bubbled, blistered weld that made my stomach clench. He was trying to blow on it, small pathetic puffs of breath, and when his eyes found us, he used his good arm to point at the vault. His lips moved: He's in there.
Leon gave a single nod and kept moving. I looked at the man's arm one more time. The skin beneath the melted fabric was the color of raw steak. Could that happen to me? If I moved wrong, flinched wrong, blinked at the wrong second—could that be my arm?
Whoever did this had fire or high-thermal powers. Heavy hitter. The kind of villain that earned his tier honestly.
At the vault, we found him.
A man, kneeling. Both palms pressed flat against the vault door, and the steel around his hands was glowing cherry-red, sagging inward. Heat rolled off him in visible waves. I felt it hit my face from twenty yards away—dry, fierce, the kind of heat that thins the air and makes you taste metal.
He was maybe mid-forties. Sun-beaten skin, spiky black hair, thin mustache, industrial goggles pushed up on his forehead. The kind of face that had been handsome once and then life happened. Leon raised his hands, palms out, his voice settling into something almost friendly.
"Hey, man. How have you been? Sorry to bother you, but FYI—robbing a bank isn't, you know, technically legal. So could you maybe come in with us? We'll get you a coffee. Whatever you want."
The villain turned fully, and his hands were glowing. Not a dim glow, either—a deep, furious orange, like holding two handfuls of dying stars. He smiled. The glow intensified.
He raised one hand toward Leon.
A foot came out of nowhere and smashed into his wrist—one of Leon's clones, dropping from above like a hammer. The blast meant for us tore into the ceiling instead, punching a hole through plaster and oak and sending a rain of embers down on the marble floor. Before the villain could adjust, the second clone drove a knee into the back of his neck. Both clones seized an arm each, locking him in place.
Leon looked at me. "Do it, Maxey."
I planted my feet. Opened my palm. Aimed it at the villain. This was the moment—the first time I'd use my power against a living, breathing enemy. Everything I'd trained for, crammed for, stressed over. Every night I'd stared at my ceiling and imagined this exact scenario.
My fingers trembled. My arms shook. My whole body was vibrating like a struck bell, and for one terrible second I felt that old, familiar freeze—the same paralysis I'd felt in elementary school when every kid around me was manifesting their powers and I just stood there, my parents booking emergency appointments at the power therapy clinic, the specialists shaking their heads like I was a broken appliance.
I pushed my palm forward.
Nothing happened.
Leon's eyes went wide. "Maxey. You good?"
Before I could choke out a response, the villain's body erupted in light. Smoke boiled from the clones' hands where they gripped his arms, their synthetic skin blistering and peeling. He ripped his left arm free with a wet tearing sound, pivoted, and fired a concentrated beam of flame point-blank into the clone on his right. The clone didn't scream—it just ceased, dissolving into a shimmer of heat haze and nothing. Then the other. Gone. Both of them, in under two seconds.
The villain aimed his palm at me. His eyes were flat, bored, the eyes of a man swatting a fly.
"Must be a rookie," he said.
And fired.
———
Three Months Ago
The building was the kind of place that made you wonder if the elevator was safe. Three stories of stained concrete and windows that hadn't been washed since the previous administration. I stood outside reading the letter for the fourth time: Room 302.
Room 302. Third floor. My last chance.
I'd finished the academy two months prior. Graduation day, the auditorium had been electric—every other graduate clutching offer letters, shaking hands with agency scouts, posing for photos with their futures already mapped. I stood near the exit with my phone in my pocket and nothing in my inbox. My grades were decent. My combat scores were decent. My power assessment was... present. Zero stars. The only graduate in three years to receive a classification of zero, which wasn't even supposed to be a real classification—it was a placeholder, a bureaucratic hiccup that someone forgot to remove from the system.
Zero stars. My father had been five.
Maybe the agencies were spooked. Maybe signing the son of Maxamillion—a five-star legend who'd died on a mission, whose death had been plastered across every news feed for a year—was too much pressure, too much narrative baggage. Or maybe I was just bad. Maybe zero was exactly right.
I climbed the stairs because I didn't trust the elevator. The stairwell smelled like cleaning solution and old carpet. Each landing had a window that looked out onto a parking lot with three cars in it. When I reached the third floor, the hallway stretched out in front of me, dim and narrow, doors on each side numbered in brass-colored stickers that were peeling at the edges.
Room 302. I knocked.
"Come in!" A woman's voice—young, bright.
The door squealed when I opened it, a long audible screech that announced my arrival better than any receptionist could. The office was small but clean. A tiny lobby, an office to the right. At the far end of the lobby sat a desk, and behind it, a woman typing on a computer that looked like it predated the power mutation.
Blonde hair. Light hazel eyes. Chewing gum with the kind of rhythmic dedication that suggested she'd been doing it since breakfast. Couldn't have been older than me—twenty-three, twenty-four. She looked up and smiled, and it was the first genuine smile I'd received from anyone in this industry since my dad's memorial.
"Hey, Maxey?" she said.
"Yeah. That's me. Nice to meet you."
"I'm Alia." She slid a few papers across the desk. "These are for you, and Mr. Leon is waiting in his office." She pointed to the door on the right.
I smiled, gulped—in that order—and pushed through into the office.
The man behind the desk had black hair going silver at the temples, and a beard that matched. Mid-forties, maybe. His nameplate read Leon Martin. He stood up, extended a hand, and smiled—a different smile than Alia's. Hers was warm. His was knowing.
"You must be Maxey."
I shook his hand and sat down. "Hey, yeah. I'm Maxey. Nice to meet you."
"So." He sat back, laced his fingers over his stomach. "We're willing to pay minimum wage for a year. Then, depending on how that year goes, we can restructure."
Minimum wage. I'd never heard of a hero—even the lowest tier, even in the most forgotten municipality in the most backwater province—getting paid minimum wage. The number sat in the air between us like an insult with a handshake. But I had no other offers. Not one. And Leon probably knew that, too, because he hadn't flinched saying it.
I looked at his hand. I thought about my empty inbox. I thought about my father, who wouldn't have hesitated.
"Sounds like a deal."
I shook his hand. Then, because curiosity is a disease I've never been able to cure: "What's your rank, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Tier one," Leon said, without hesitation, like he was telling me the time. "Just not in the Top 500."
He stood, walked around the desk, folded his arms, and leaned against the edge. The knowing smile got wider.
"I was a big fan of your dad's work, so I'm excited to have you on."
There it is, I thought. The real reason. Not my grades, not my potential, not my power. My last name. A ghost's autograph on my forehead. Leon hadn't scouted me; he'd collected me. A souvenir from a dead man's legacy.
"Now." Leon clapped his hands once. "I've got a few questions for you. First—what is your power?"
I blinked. "Wouldn't my file explain that, sir?"
Leon laughed—a real one, loud and unguarded. "I never read that shit."
This man didn't even scout me. He was a fan of my dad and he'd hired me on a whim, like picking up a stray because it had a familiar face. I had a bad feeling about this. But feelings don't pay rent, and rent was due in nine days.
"My power is—"
———
Three Months Later — Inside the Bank of Austerium
The fire blast screamed toward me.
I closed my eyes. Every nerve in my body clenched. The heat was already on my skin, that close, that fast—
And then it wasn't.
I opened my eyes. Leon—or his clone, I realized, because clones dissolve on fatal impact—had stepped directly into the path. The fire poured over him like water over a rock, splitting around his body, the edges of it singeing the air on either side of me. The clone held that same half-smile Leon always wore, even as the fire ate through him. Two seconds. Three. Then the blast faded, and so did the clone—he flickered once, like a bad signal, and dissolved into a fine mist that smelled like ozone and burned sugar.
The smoke cleared, and through it, Leon—the real Leon—was already running. Full sprint. No hesitation. He closed twenty yards in what felt like a single breath, and just as the villain raised his other hand to take another shot at me, Leon kicked it skyward.
"NOW!"
I didn't think. That was the difference. The first time, I'd stood there processing—running mental checklists, worrying about aim and stance and what would happen if I missed. This time, my body moved before my brain had time to interfere.
I raised my open palm. Behind me, the air changed. I felt it before I heard it—a pressure drop, like the world inhaling. Then the wind came. It roared through the golden doors, ripping them wide open, howling into the bank's interior and wrapping around my body like a second skin. My arm pulsed. The hairs stood. Every cell in my hand felt like it was screaming.
I pushed.
The blast tore out of my palm—a concentrated column of compressed air that hit the villain center-mass and launched him backward like he'd been struck by a freight train. His body cracked against the vault door with a sound like a car wreck, then slid to the floor in a heap.
Leon was on him in seconds, snapping villain-rated cuffs onto his wrists, and then—because he was Leon—he stood up and started clapping.
"See? Wasn't so hard, huh?"
He walked over and looked me up and down the way a father would check a son after a fall—hands, face, ribs, legs, eyes. "Seems like you're alright. You're a natural. Like your dad."
"Yeah." My voice was hoarse. My hand was still tingling. "I never actually saw him fight. But I've heard the stories."
Leon started helping civilians to their feet, guiding them toward the exit. I watched him move—efficient, gentle, that smile softening into something almost kind. The hostages filed out through the golden doors, blinking into the sunlight like survivors emerging from a bunker.
When the last of them had gone, Leon turned to me. The smile was still there, but it had changed. Deeper now. Older.
"I saw your dad fight," he said. His voice was quieter than I'd ever heard it. "I was his partner, after all. I was his partner until the very end."
The sentence hit me in the chest. Not hard—harder. It didn't feel like being punched. It felt like something inside me cracking open, slowly, the way ice fractures under pressure. My mouth was open but I couldn't form a word. Leon. My father's partner. Standing in front of me in a backwater bank in a nothing town, wearing that infuriating half-smile.
Then the smile died.
Leon's hand shot to the back of his head. His eyes went wide—not wide like surprise. Wide like fear. And I had never, not in the three months I'd known him, seen Leon afraid of anything.
"Both of my clones outside," he said, his voice flat, stripped of all its warmth. "Just got killed."
My stomach dropped. "Are they with him?" I pointed at the unconscious villain on the floor.
"Why show up late to a bank heist and let your partner get caught?" Leon shook his head. He was crouching now, moving low. "Maxey. We're being ambushed."
He lowered his voice further. "Someone followed us here. Someone who knew we were going to be here."
I noticed his hands. They were trembling. This man who'd walked into a bank robbery with his hands in his pockets, who'd cracked jokes at an armed villain, who'd taken a fire blast with a smile—his hands were trembling.
Goosebumps crawled up my arms.
"Stay here," Leon said. "I'm not risking your life." He raised a finger before I could argue. "I know you felt like your life was at risk already, but I knew that villain wasn't much. Whatever is outside—" He paused. The pause said everything his words wouldn't. "Whatever is outside will kill you. Stay here. I'll call for backup and handle it."
He keyed his radio, called it in, and before I could say another word, he was running—sprinting through the bank, past the hostages' abandoned purses and briefcases, and through the golden doors into the light.
I stood there. The vault hummed. The unconscious villain wheezed. Somewhere outside, the world had gotten very quiet.
I was terrified. A villain was stalking us—not the low-rent bank robber wheezing on the floor, but something worse, something that had killed two of Leon's clones in the time it takes to blink. Backup was on its way, which probably meant higher-ranked heroes, and I did not want them arriving to find me hiding inside like a child in a closet.
But more than the pride, more than the shame—I needed to know. Leon was my father's partner. He'd been there at the end. He had answers to questions I'd been carrying for years, questions that woke me up at three in the morning and sat on my chest like stones.
I can't let him die.
I ran.
Through the lobby, past the moaning banker, over the scattered papers and broken glass. My legs didn't feel like mine they felt borrowed, temporary but they carried me to those golden doors and I threw them open and stepped into the light.