Squeezing the remote, I eyed the atlas on the coffee table one more time and sighed again. If I followed the instructions my grandma had left me, I should have relocated a year ago. For a while there, during high school, we had bounced around every semester. After I’d graduated, we had milked our stays for a year. Then we’d upped it a little more after that. Two years maximum, mi corazón. As long as you keep your head down and tell no one, you should be okay.
That was another rule: keep your head down.
I had. It was a lot of work to keep it that way, but I was alive, and that was the point. That had been the point of all this shit.
But this place was the closest thing to home I’d known in forever. I’d settled in. I had found peace and, honestly, part of myself too while being on my own. It wasn’t exactly at the top of the list of places I would want to live, but I still didn’t want to leave. I was comfortable. I didn’t want to start over for the twentieth time. But…
There was always the chance one day I wouldn’t have to. That’s what I kept hoping for. It was just another miracle I could dream of.
And maybe, eventually, someday, things might change. Maybe I would be able to get a passport and travel and meet someone awesome who didn’t ask too many questions. Find a companion… a friend. More than a friend would be great.
If I had to pick, that would be at the top of the list of things I’d want—someone.
He’d have to be okay with me being… me. Just shy of thirty. Mostly nice. I had a mostly steady job, even if I was never going to be rich. I could have done worse in the face department, I thought. I could have done a lot better, but I could have been unluckier. There was plenty of other stuff I could complain about, so facial features and the size of my waist weren’t worth worrying about.
And that was part of my problem. The source of all my problems actually. There wasn’t a plastic surgeon in the world who could fix my problems with a surgical knife.
I needed a whole new life, new DNA, for that shit.
I was in the middle of thinking that depressing shit when I saw it out of the corner of my eye.
A flash of pure purple light through the blinds that had me flinching it was so damn bright.
And it was a split second after that, that I felt it—the rumble. The frame of the single-wide shook. My cup rattled. The walls trembled.
What in the hell was that?
WHAT THE HELL WAS HAPPENING?
The interview on the TV suddenly popped up in my head.
Was it… an angel?
No, no. It wasn’t.
Was there a meteor shower tonight? Was a plane falling apart?
Oh shit. Oh shit, shit, shit.
Did that explain the blinding light? No. I was pretty sure nothing other than a spotlight could glow that brightly, but what the hell did I know? Did it explain the mini earthquake that had just rattled the trailer? Maybe…？ But there was something, and whatever it was, it had to be big to make the ground shake. I couldn’t think of anything off the top of my head that could be that big, other than Godzilla, but kaijus weren’t real, so…
There was nothing to be scared of unless it really was chunks of an airplane falling out of the sky, on the verge of crushing me.
Forcing myself to get up, I headed around the couch and went straight for the front door. I grabbed my flashlight, unlocked the door, and peeked before going out there.
But in the same way I should have expected, in the only way that seemed to work in my life, what I expected wasn’t what I actually got.
Down the steps of my tiny deck, I looked around the yard and didn’t see a thing. I hadn’t imagined the light or the shaking. Had I? I’d always wondered if I’d end up going nuts since I spent so much time by myself, but no, I was too young. And there weren’t active tectonic plates around here; I was pretty sure. I went around the side of the trailer and stopped. Midstep and everything because…
Oh shit.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
Tiny purple fires were scattered across my yard.
Hand already shaking, I lifted my flashlight and aimed it at the center of them.
I gulped.
I turned it off, then turned it back on, thinking I’d imagined it.
I hadn’t.
I fucking hadn’t.
There was a body there. On the ground. In the dirt.
A human body.
A big one.
My hand shook like crazy as the beam of light settled on what looked like a piece of cloth spread out under what I was fairly certain was a male frame from the muscle proportions I could see.
A piece of cloth that looked an awful lot like… like… a cape.
A cape.
Oh shit.
A fucking cape that was torn and tattered, but it was either a tablecloth or that.
And it was attached to a half-bared chest by a wish and a prayer.
My hand shook even more as I took in the color of it.
Oh boy.
Oh no.
It had been years since the last time I’d done the sign of the cross, but I did it right then.
I recognized the color of the suit that was more than half ripped off the body there.
Charcoal.
I knew exactly what shade of blue the cape was too.
The whole world did.
Cobalt fucking blue.
There was only one person who wore a cape and a suit with those colors, and it wasn’t a character from a Shinto Studios movie or comic book.
It was…
It was…
One of the members of the Trinity.
It was…
The Defender.
It was The fucking Defender.
CHAPTER
TWO
Fuck.
Shit.
Oh shit, shit, shitttt.
I opened my mouth to either squeal or scream—later on, I would probably be proud of myself for not straight-up fainting in the first place—when the body lying there started to writhe, then cough.
He coughed?
The figure, who I was 99.99999 percent sure was the being known to the world as The Defender—holy fucking shit—made another hoarse sound that sounded like clear and total pain. His hand extended out to the side, his fingers sifting through the dirt beneath and around him. He moaned. A deep cough rattled through his body, followed by a brutally pained sound.
What in the hell was going on? How the hell had he made it here? Where the hell had he come from?
I tipped my head to the sky again to make sure there was nothing up there, nothing coming after him. Only the clouds were there, at least as far as I could see.
How had this happened? I’d watched The Centurion survive a skyscraper falling on him. It had been all over the news for weeks. The world had witnessed The Primordial walk out of a building that had exploded without a single hair out of place.
I was going to cry.
Maybe throw up.
Maybe both.
The Defender had to have the same kind of invincibility too, shouldn’t he?
All three members of the Trinity were icons of seemingly limitless strength, speed, and a variety of other incredible powers, who remained a mystery even after so many years. That was part of the reason why so many people were obsessed with them. Why any footage of them instantly went viral.
The Primordial had been the first to make her existence known. The film of her carrying a “misfired” nuclear bomb into space was considered the most life-changing moment in history. This incredible, seemingly human woman in a forest green suit had shot through the sky out of nowhere as millions panicked from the ground, wrapped her arms around the weapon, and carried it through the atmosphere and so far out it couldn’t harm anyone or anything. Out of the view of thousands of cameras that had been aimed toward the sky, trying to follow her. There hadn’t even been a pinprick of an explosion visible. All anyone knew was that there hadn’t been mass casualties, as had been expected.