Chapter 6
"I don't like any of this." I rubbed my right shoulder with my left palm and shivered from a creeping unease. Something like instinct — or more accurately, the lingering ghost of Herman's phobias — was whispering that this idea was going to end badly. "Let's just report it to the SDS and—"
"Oh, *please.* Stop." Amanda puffed out her chest — or rather, the vast unbroken plain that occupied that general region of her body — and thumped it with her fist. "Right now, *I am* the SDS. Besides, how do you think that looks? A hero at my level can't handle a gang of teenagers? They'd never let me live it down. I'd spend the next year getting assigned to change the sanitary pads of some director's side piece, or something equally degrading."
"Maybe, but…" My palms were soaked, and I could feel droplets forming across my whole body — getting harder to contain by the minute. The wet trail I was leaving behind was starting to resemble something a very large, very slow snail might produce. "Shouldn't we at least bring backup—"
"Herman. *Enough.*" She stopped dead, pinned me with a look of thorough disapproval, and jabbed a finger into my chest for emphasis. "We can handle this ourselves. I'm right here — stop worrying. Besides, this'll look great in your personal portfolio, so to speak. The SDS eats that kind of thing up. Those people absolutely lose their minds over a new super who shows up with actual field experience. You have no idea what they put me through when I first walked in. Sweet little white girl, five Black managers crowding around her…"
"Why do you need a portfolio?" I chose to ignore the tail end of that, deliberately not following whatever train of thought she was riding. "I mean, what's it for?"
"What do you *mean* what's it for?" Amanda had already turned away and was walking forward with complete confidence. "If you're serious about becoming a superhero, a little incident like this in your file is exactly what you need…"
It was night. Los Angeles spread out around us in its usual blaze of streetlights, but foot traffic had thinned to almost nothing, and the last random pedestrians had melted away entirely once we turned into what could generously be called the ghetto of the southern districts. This was not a neighborhood where you stopped to buy juice. Gangs ran everything here. Even in my previous world, South Central had a reputation — and in *this* one, instead of your standard cinematic Smokey and Loc Dog types, you might genuinely run into a Mexican demon, an alien, or some other variety of unhinged individual packing a superpower that could take your head off.
Shadows flickered in the alleys now and then. We'd almost certainly been clocked the moment we entered the area. Someone was keeping casual tabs on us, probably trying to figure out what exactly our little two-person parade thought it was doing in this part of the city.
A few times I caught the distant glare of headlights from cars that turned off well ahead of us at intersections, a hundred meters before they'd have reached us. Strange. I filed it away and let it go, turning back to the conversation.
"Probably…"
"Hold on." Amanda went completely still, then turned her head toward me with a slowness that practically creaked. Her green eyes blinked once — black sclera flashing through — but she pulled herself back. The tone and expression, though, I did not like at all. "What's with the wishy-washy crap? I'm not asking you to participate in some kind of Japanese perversion, or whatever. If you were expecting to identify your grandmother by taste, you're at the wrong address—"
"That's disgusting."
My words were dismissed with an ironic smirk.
"So grow a pair and let's go." But even she didn't follow her own instruction — she froze mid-step, clearly struck by something. "Or have you changed your mind about becoming a superhero?"
"It's not that I've changed my mind, it's just…" Under the weight of her expectant stare, I faltered like a ninth-grader at prom who's just found themselves face-to-face with something they weren't ready for in a very unpleasant bathroom. "I don't know if it's worth it. For me specifically."
"Oh for — *why are we doing any of this, then?!*" She stamped her foot. The asphalt held together, barely. She closed the distance between us and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. "Lizzy has been bending my ear nonstop about how her precious little dumpling dreams of being like Mecha Man, can't sleep, just *lives* to help people! How you spend hours alone polishing your rocket staring at the poster of that dead old man! And now what? *Well?!*"
I was off the ground. I hadn't noticed that part happening until just now. Both hands gripped her enormous green arms, and I could feel nothing beneath my feet. My whole body was soaked through, and the panic responses were kicking hard — but I was holding on. I was terrified, yes, but what scared me *more* was the thought of what Amanda would do if I vomited directly into her wide-open mouth, which was currently approximately three inches from my face. At this range, there was no missing.
"I thought, with all my phobias, and my weak powers, and everything else…" I tried to look away. She wouldn't let me — a short shake, and my eyes came back to hers. She'd gone full monster form, and her expression alone was demanding an answer. "I'd make a terrible hero. I'd just make things worse."
"I see."
She let go.
I hit the pavement hard and sat there, dazed, straightening my crumpled clothes and watching her walk away in silence. With each step she shrank back down until she was herself again — just Amanda, small and unhurried, moving toward the location Colm had given us, where the teenage delinquents supposedly gathered.
She didn't say another word to me. She didn't turn around when I called her name. She didn't turn around when the water started pouring out of my mouth either. She just kept walking, steady and deliberate.
It took me a few minutes to pull myself together. Shaking, cursing my own weakness under my breath, fighting down the fear that had been clawing its way up, I got to my feet and looked for her — but the street was empty and quiet.
She clearly wasn't going to wait.
Had her emotions gotten the better of her? Was it a certain time of month? I had no idea. The reaction genuinely surprised me. I'd gotten used to thinking of Amanda as a friend first and a woman second — a woman stuck in a young, hormonal body, but still.
*I should apologize. For not being what she expected.*
I'd already made the decision to take the easy road and pulled out my old button phone when something hit me from behind.
I dropped to one knee, grimacing, head still catching up with what had just happened. I didn't have real fighting experience, and nothing in my brain was giving me useful instructions right now. None of Amanda's lessons had prepared me for this — being jumped from behind in the dark.
The second hit landed on my collarbone. I caught a glimpse of a rusted pipe fragment before my wet hands slipped and I went down. Voices. Several people, with distinctly Mexican accents, gathering around me.
I groaned and scrabbled for my phone, trying to grab it from where it had fallen — and then a boot connected with my stomach, driving a fresh surge of water out of me. Laughter above. Curses mixing Spanish and English. Another blow to the kidney.
I cried out, and I knew: a few more seconds and the panic attack was going to take me completely. Water was hammering out of every pore. The puddle under me was expanding fast enough that the people standing in it had stopped laughing and started muttering to each other in tense, urgent whispers.
I peeled my eyes open. The streetlight above — which felt at that moment like the Lighthouse of Alexandria burning in the deepest darkness imaginable — gave me just enough to work with. I reached a hand out in front of me and started pulling.
Nothing happened for a few seconds. The local thugs burst out laughing.
Then a solid column of water detonated toward the sound of their voices.
It hit like a pressure hose. The roar of it swallowed everything else — screaming, swearing, the ugly crack of something breaking — and it all ran together into chaos I could barely parse. I stopped trying to understand it and just kept directing the water at any new sound that reached me.
The effort was catching up fast. My body couldn't produce it quick enough. I could feel the pressure dropping with every second, the stream thinning, weakening, until finally it cut out entirely.
Breathing hard, dragging air in and pushing it back out, I looked at what I'd done.
The gang members were scattered across the street in various states of distress, some of them slowly being carried along by the thin current still running between the curbs. The entire block was ankle-deep in water. The house across the street had a wide gap where a wall used to be — the fence, the patio awning, the door and its frame, all of it gone, swept through and into the old single-story building that was now quietly flooding.
But there were no screams. No calls for help. No sounds at all.
Just the terrible quiet of a night street, and me, standing ankle-deep in water in the middle of it, slowly getting back to my feet.
"…Holy hell."
"*Weak* powers, right?" A familiar voice came from the nearest shadow. Amanda peeled herself off the building wall and walked over, lips twisted in dry appraisal, surveying the mess with the detached eye of someone reviewing a contractor's work. "Mm-hm. I can see that. Oh, and did you know I'm actually the daughter of a count and attended a private school for young ladies of distinction?"
"What? Seriously?" The whiplash of the topic change worked exactly as intended — I latched onto it immediately, already bracing for whatever absurd tale she was about to spin. "You? *Distinguished?*"
"Of course not." She rolled her eyes with the exhaustion of someone who'd been doing this a long time, then stepped closer and started brushing off my clothes, checking the bruises the gang had left, running careful hands along my arms and sides to feel for breaks. "It's as much nonsense as your whining about weak powers."
"Sorry, I—"
"Oh, Herman." She crooked a finger at me, waited for me to lower my head to her level, and then cheerfully ruffled my soaked hair. "Sometimes I think I've gotten used to you being a complete wet noodle of a person, and then you pull something like this. Why exactly are you apologizing right now?"
"I don't know, someone always told me it was the best strategy with women." I shrugged — and realized, despite everything that had just happened, that I was actually smiling. The fear had moved somewhere further away. I felt, genuinely, fine. "Apologize, listen, and then—"
"Easy there, Casanova." Amanda flicked the water off her hands and made a face of theatrical lewdness, eyebrows doing most of the work. "We're friends, so you're not getting anywhere near *my* waterslide, Aquapark Man."
"Oh, shut up." I rolled my eyes. A beat of silence, and then the adrenaline aftershock hit me in the form of a short, helpless laugh.
Amanda joined in a moment later. She punched me in the shoulder — her standard greeting and farewell — and waved for me to follow, steering us both away from the neighborhood. We'd come back and finish the actual job another time.
So we walked through the dark city, under the scattered orange glow of streetlights. Soaking wet and absurdly pleased with ourselves.
---
A couple of days later, when the worst of the bruising had started to fade — superpowers really were cheating, though my natural regeneration was laughable compared to Amanda's, let alone the Hulk or my therapist, who could apparently regrow entire limbs — we were back.
"All right, here's the plan." We sat in a stereotypically derelict building — half the walls were missing from whatever construction had been abandoned here years ago, and the place now served as a general refuge for South Central's various marginal residents. "We go in, put everyone face-down on the ground. Anyone who doesn't go down gets hit where it counts, as the great master Colm taught us."
"Do we have to be that aggressive?" The memory of Amanda's instructional demonstration on the subject made something in my groin send a sympathetic twitch. I looked out at the gang of scrappy teenagers currently arguing over a large bag and apparently on the verge of coming to blows among themselves. "Can't we just scatter them and get the money back?"
"Are you *kidding* me, Herman?!" Amanda's furious whisper was completely inaudible over the noise the delinquents were making. "How many times do you have to eat a pipe before you stop acting like a Disney princess? If you like catching big hard brown sticks from behind that much, I can *arrange* something—"
"All right, enough." I'd run out of patience for the jokes — and over the past few days Amanda had been completely incapable of dropping them, constantly steering everything toward crude commentary on my sexuality, orientation, and general spinelessness. "I already admitted I messed up—"
"Our *governor* messed up when he decided any random idiot could claim squatter's rights after two weeks." She was gesturing now, apparently having forgotten why we were here, relitigating a grievance that had clearly been building for some time. Mental note: don't befriend women. Mess up once and they hold it over you for the rest of your natural life. "But *you* managed to make an even bigger mess without even taking your pants off, just sitting there enjoying the warmth—"
"Yes, yes." I knew exactly what she was doing. The crude jokes, the constant digs — she was trying to make me angry, because angry was better than panicking at the critical moment. "Can we go? It's late. Grandma will be worried."
"Don't you *dare* bring Lizzy into this. I bought her a bottle of top-shelf bourbon, nearly three hundred dollars." She flipped me off, but fell into step behind me anyway, her body beginning to shift and change as she walked. "So your ass belongs to me until tomorrow morning. And I swear to God, if you don't use everything I taught you tonight — this hand—"
A massive green paw appeared directly under my nose. Each finger was the size of my whole hand. Each fingertip ended in a claw that looked sharp even in the dark.
"—is going to check your prostate. Are we clear?"
I swallowed hard and nodded frantically at the generous offer, only realizing how hard I'd clenched afterward when walking became uncomfortable.
"Now get in there and *tear them apart,* tiger!"
She slapped me on the backside and shoved me forward, directly into the light, directly into the sightline of approximately a dozen teenage delinquents who immediately clocked the unexpected new presence in their *very secret* hideout.
"The hell are *you,* skinny?" A large bag — twenty, thirty kilos — hit the ground. It toppled over and split open, spilling its contents across the floor. Contents I was not expecting to see.
Money. A genuinely ridiculous pile of it, bundled into neat stacks held together with rubber bands.
"Oh hell — this guy saw the money." The speaker, apparently second-in-command, rolled his eyes and started toward me with the most carefully performed threatening walk he could manage, pulling a butterfly knife from inside his jacket. "We just erase him and move on."
He snapped the knife open, stopped two meters away from me — and then nothing happened.
We stood there looking at each other.
"…Are you just going to stand there?" I asked.
He pressed his lips together and didn't answer. He snapped the knife again, as if trying to shoo away an invisible fly.
"Why are you *talking* to them?!" Amanda's impatient hiss came from behind me. She was clearly unimpressed. "No honorable combat, no fair fight — this is a *man's* struggle for the title of gym boss!"
I let that one pass entirely without processing it, and took a careful step forward. The kid with the knife stepped back.
"Look, you've taken a lot of money from a lot of people. So how about you just give it back and walk away?"
"Yo, this guy's SDS!" someone in the crowd suddenly shouted, and the group immediately erupted. "We gotta bounce! What if Phenomenon or Blondie shows up?! This is a raid—"
"*Shut up!*" The leader barked, and the panic settled slightly. "What makes you think he's a super? He looks like the water aerobics instructor at my mom's gym."
What followed was a complete circus. My entire fighting spirit quietly packed up and left. The teenagers dissolved into argument among themselves — shoving, laughing, shouting over each other, making their cases to anyone who would listen, and paying absolutely no attention to me whatsoever.
"Yeah, we know what he teaches your mom…"
"Honestly he looks more like those action figures my little sister used to play with."
"Used to?"
"Now she uses them differently."
"Respect."
"Hey, guys?" I raised my hand. No one looked. I waved. Still nothing. They were far more invested in their internal dispute than in either me or the money sitting on the floor beside them.
Well.
I walked over, unhurried, and picked up the stacks of bills one by one, loading them back into the bag. It was satisfyingly heavy. There was genuinely a lot of money in here. When I was done, I said a polite goodbye to no one in particular, and walked back into the shadows.
Behind me, the sound of Amanda rhythmically hitting herself in the forehead followed me into the dark.