Excerpt from Jane’s Secret Radio Broadcast 4/23/0089:

  “The Church has said, quote ‘we have no evidence that John Sullivan has experienced demonic possession of any sort,’ and that ‘we, along with his parish, pray for his recovery’ end quote.”

  “Hmm. They would say that. As a man of the cloth, I am keenly aware that the Church has not always taken responsibility for its mistakes.”

  “So, you think this is a mistake?”

  “Not so much as an abdication. Three people died, criminals sure, but people with families. I cut short their opportunity for redemption in this life. God will provide for them in the next, but what we do here matters. I become home to a demon, and am a danger to all.”

  “That’s very interesting John, and I’d like to get back to that, but what would you say to someone that believed what you did, and what the disgraced hero Atlas did to that man he killed in a drunken brawl as not any different. You don’t have to be possessed by some kind of demonic force to give in to rage.”

  “I’d say they don’t know me. I am not a man prone to drunken rages. I only drink wine during communion. And even then it’s not exactly wine anymore.”

  “So you’re incapable of it?”

  “Maybe not exactly incapable, just not in the habit of it.”

  “Why not use this strength for good? You were named after the world’s most famous Superhero, why not follow in his footsteps?”

  “Because no matter what my father named me, and no matter what’s popular, I don’t follow in his footsteps, I follow the Lord’s. And His example says that I should seek humility, not power.”

  “That’s very interesting. And commendable. I take it your mother, who seems to have had a more direct influence over you, didn’t like Superheroes?”

  “You’ve done your research. What do you know of my family history?”

  “I know your mother is Haitian. And that your father is second generation Irish. I also know that they both had a presence in the Church.”

  “My mother considered herself a Christian and a sèvitè. She didn’t see a neat separation from what the church said, and what she’d learned from her family in Haiti. Most people would call it Voodoo, but she didn’t use that word. Real faith doesn’t like to be boxed in like that.”

  “What did your father think about all this?”

  “Oh, he loved her. So he knew to leave the room if she wanted to talk family stuff from Haiti.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Anyway, my mother said that when her family would pray to the spirits of craft or of battle, that they are inhabited by these spirits. This is different from my belief, from what I’ve been taught, but I do believe in the Holy Spirit, that it inspires us in our best moments.”

  “So in your worst, you believe some kind of evil spirit inhabited you?”

  “Evil, demons, the Rhiastrad, something moved me to hurt those people. If I don’t believe in that, how can I be a man of faith? To believe that good and evil are just base functions of humanity is to close off your soul to the truth of the spirit.”

  Red Fox Action Log 43 cont:

  The man called himself Atlas. I’d fought him the night my friend had broken his ankle.

  At 6 foot 6 inches tall, and over 400 pounds, he wasn’t a giant so much as a wall of muscle and bulk. And that was even before he gained his powers, with his superdense muscles, and tough skin.

  When last I fought him, he’d been wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Today, he had a head-to-toe reinforced supersuit. The symbol on his chest remained the same though, an 'A' over a stylized globe. Simple, to the point. I would have liked it, had it been on someone else.

  Levitron threw daggers at Lady Lovely. Atlas put his bulk in the way, knives clattering to the floor, but for one that slipped between the armor on his forearm.

  Jill and I stood. I had no time to start the battle cadence.

  “You go high!” I yelled, giving Jill the standard cue to go low.

  I leapt into the air, executing a flying kick that crashed into his uninjured arm. Jill’s sweep bounced off of his shin. Had we timed it a little better, we’d have maybe gotten him on the backfoot. Again, I was reminded that we couldn’t go back to the people we were.

  His massive hand grabbed my arm, and he pulled me into the air.

  At the same time, Lady Lovely — pale skinned, tall, wearing a black dress — ran her fingers under her long hair. She flourished her hand and a dark mist, my guess was some kind of spores now, wafted over Levitron. He fell to the floor.

  Things were going bad, fast. What was Barry doing? Or Bunny?

  I glanced at them. Barry had his arms crossed, and a smug look on his face. The White Rabbit looked sad, but unsurprised.

  It had been a set up.

  The bastards had set us up. It hadn’t been one supervillain, but four. Maybe more. We were dealing with a Supervillain Syndicate. We weren’t just out of our depth, we’d stumbled upon a giant, the kind of monsters in stories.

  Where was Captain Iron when you needed him?

  I just barely saw Atlas’s arm move, then it was all stars and blackness.

  When I came to, I was somewhere else, somewhere with fewer windows.

  Lady Lovely was gone. As was Atlas. I lay on my back, strapped to an angled table of some sorts. To my right, Jill. Past her, Levitron. An empty table past him.

  Not for long. An unconscious Barry was being loaded onto the table by four shadowbats.

  In walked White Rabbit. Beside her, a woman I didn’t recognize wearing trendy thrifted clothes with the amulet of a necklace clutched in her thin fingers. She seemed nervous.

  “We don’t know if it’s ready,” she said.

  “I know it’s ready, Amulet,” Rabbit said. “No need to worry.”

  “I know you have these powers, but please try to understand that as a woman of science —”

  “You have a magic amulet that spits out demons.”

  “Shadowbats,” the woman corrected.

  “Whatever. The device working is a constant. Get it warmed up.”

  I was the only one awake at the moment. White Rabbit’s eyes widened as she recognized this.

  “Oh good,” she said. “You’re awake!”

  “You planned this?” I asked. There are a hundred reasons why you should get a supervillain talking. The first, is that if you somehow make it out of captivity, you have prime intelligence. The second, well, was to distract them. It’s a classic ploy for a reason. No use not trying.

  “Oh, you didn’t think me capable of it?”

  “Well, I figured you had previews longer than 12 seconds, but I couldn’t be sure.”

  “12 seconds? Try more like 12 months.”

  I felt the implication of that sink in and panic rise to take its place. 12 Month previews. She could live a whole year of her life in advance. How did that work? In a second? In months? Did she hole up somewhere for a year just to glimpse what would happen next?

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Screw Tier 2, hell this made whatever we thought about Tier 3 seem like a joke. She was the most powerful pre-cog in history.

  “Time previews are compressed. It takes me a full hour to look ahead 6 months.”

  “Got it,” I said, trying to remain calm. Focusing on the puzzle of ‘how’ helped. Also, maybe if I kept her going, Jill would wake up, and we could work together on a way out.

  “Keeping me talking isn’t going to help,” she said. “I have to let the machine warm up anyway.”

  She glanced up. So did I.

  A maze of wires and pipes all converged onto a single point above me. It sort of looked like an industrial laser, with its tapered point and reflective nose. Somehow, I imagined it was worse.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’ll get to that,” she said, leaning on my arm to gaze at me with interest. “You know, over 32% of the previews of this moment have you escaping.”

  “Not bad odds,” I said.

  “Not bad, indeed!”

  She smiled, and I found it hard to see her beauty. Funny how something that seemed so immutable could change in a single moment. An hour ago, her blue eyes held hopefulness, and sweetness. Now those same eyes just reminded me of my own failures and her malice.

  “You think I’m evil,” she continued.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said, truthfully.

  “I’m not evil,” she protested, stepping back. “No! I’m not! I can see what you’re thinking.”

  “Then, explain why.”

  “Okay,” she paced off as she talked, still full of that bouncy energy. “See, the world is stuck. There is a true path, a final pass as it were, where everyone is stuck living these lives they are unable to break free from. Poor Glue Guy was always going to get shot, and he was always going to die protecting Sniffer Sleuth from our minions.”

  I cursed.

  “Indeed,” she continued. “But every time I look ahead at — well, at a certain point in the future — it all stops. I can’t see past it. Does that mean the world ends? No. I’m an optimist. I am good. That means that the people of the world are finally free to live their lives. I can’t see past it, because you all are finally free!”

  This was classic unhinged supervillain shit. How had I not seen it? Was it really just because she was pretty?

  I forced myself to stop, and consider what she was saying. She’d lived a version of this year over and over, and so in her mind all of the predictable elements of her visions are some kind of destiny.

  This is nonsense. Just because people are predictable, doesn’t mean they aren’t free to choose their fates. Just because my mom always buys the ribeye when they go on sale at the supermarket, doesn’t mean she was fated to do that. She just likes ribeye, but is too poor to buy them all the time.

  If she had all the money in the world, she could choose differently. It’s not some villain with foresight that has us trapped, it’s just money, power. With her power, she could be helping people but she’s decided to chase this stupid fantasy of a world that revolves around her point of view.

  “Why not let us help you?” I asked.

  “Because you won’t listen! I tried over, and over. I know you! I know your stupid, naive little heart. You think I’m this cute 22 year old girl, but I’ve lived lifetimes.” She walked over and grazed the tips of her fingers across my cheek. “I’ve kissed your face a thousand times. I’m still a little pissed you turned me down on the final pass, but I know you. I know what you taste like. In more ways than one.”

  My blood boiled. Something about her kissing me without my permission, even if only in her mind, didn’t sit right with me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jill touch something on her belt, almost reflexively in her half-sleep.

  “We’re good together,” Rabbit said. “But you aren’t my everything. It’s all up there,” she said, pointing to the ceiling. “He’s everything.”

  Yeah, I had nothing for that. She had stopped making sense.

  “It’s ready,” the woman, Amulet, said, poking her head in from a side door.

  “I know you aren’t going to like this,” Rabbit said. “But it will all make sense soon.”

  White Rabbit stepped back, and waited at a small clear plastic hatch in a machine near the wall.

  The laser above me moved on a track, like the claw of a prize machine or some kind of crazy CNC machine, then began emitting an enormous racket. The tip of the machine glowed. Then, a beam of energy blasted into Barry’s hand.

  He woke up screaming. His body glowed incandescent, to no avail. Whatever they’d used to strap him in, seemed resistant to heat.

  His hand disappeared. The beam of energy moved down his arm, disassembling it. When it reached his chest, Barry stopped screaming. In less than a minute, he was gone entirely.

  I felt sick. I swallowed bile.

  White Rabbit smiled, and popped open the hatch, revealing a small glowing vial of liquid. She popped the cork, to Amulet’s astonishment, and drank the solution in one gulp.

  She fell back against the wall, fought to stand for a moment, then seemed fine.

  White Rabbit curled her fingers into a classic, finger gun shape, then blasted a red hot beam at the empty table where Barry had been. It crumpled.

  She laughed and laughed — a schoolgirl on a merry-go-round.

  I clenched my jaw. I hadn’t liked that guy, but this was sick.

  I saw Jill stir, but immediately looked away from her. If we were gonna get out of this, I had to buy her time to make some kind of play. I had to keep White Rabbit talking.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “A lot of work, cutie, and a lot of planning.”

  I’d finally put two and two together, and realized that she’d been the woman on the bike from the adventure that had started all this. It had always been about getting us here, at this moment.

  “I thought Barry was on your side?” I asked.

  “He did, too. But he wanted recognition. He wanted to be a Superhero? What a lame-o. And only an okay lay. Now, his powers in me… What do you think I could do with them? A hell of a lot more, I’ll say.”

  I thought back to her guiding his hands in the hallway. Yeah, a precog with a powerset like that was dangerous.

  I looked at Jill. She still fought to wake. Damn it. We were next.

  “30 seconds to cycle,” Amulet said.

  “I can’t wait!”

  The panic coursed through my body. The Fox Instinct screamed at me. I didn’t strain at my bonds, because I knew better, but I clenched my fists, trying to keep from it.

  The machine moved. Levitron screamed. I could smell burning flesh.

  Tears welled in my eyes.

  It couldn’t be like this. I couldn’t die like this.

  In moments, Levitron was gone too.

  “I’m gonna wait for this to cool a bit. Last one burned my tongue,” Rabbit admitted.

  I couldn’t help myself. I glared at her with what must have been hostility.

  “Oh, get over yourself,” she said, waving me off and opening the hatch. “One Superhero is worth ten of him. Once this is over, I won’t just be a Superhero, I’ll change the world forever. People won’t be calling me Bunny. They’ll be calling me Her. They won’t even be able to say my name.”

  “So it’s just about power?” I asked.

  “Not just about power. It’s about what the world deserves. They deserve a hero like me.”

  She downed the vial, then threw it across the lab.

  “Hey!” Amulet admonished.

  White Rabbit ascended into the air. She barked another quick laugh, then wiped a tear from her eye.

  “I’d always dreamed of flying. To finally get it, after all these runs, in the final pass.” Then in a whisper to herself, “It’s wonderful.”

  “If you know I’m going to escape, why not just kill me?”

  White Rabbit floated toward me. She rested her chin on her hands, kicking her feet in the air behind her like a girl at a sleepover.

  “That’s just it. I don’t know how you do it. Isn’t that weird? I don’t often have gaps in my previews. Something exciting must happen in this room.”

  “I’m gonna kill you,” I said. I couldn’t help it.

  A peal of delightful laughter issued from her as she floated away, tossing her golden braid. Even in my rage, a small part of myself couldn’t fail to appreciate how cute she was, how feminine, how pretty. That just made me madder.

  I growled.

  “Suddenly you’ve abandoned ol’ Rick’s ideals. You’re just a vengeful thug. How boring. This is my great rival? This is the Red Fox?”

  “We’re ready for another round,” Amulet called from her bay.

  “Oh, now, isn’t this going to be interesting,” Rabbit said.

  “Jill!” I yelled.

  The beam crashed into her hand. The sound she made broke whatever I had left of my heart. No matter how I hated her for what she had done to me, she didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve to die. The beam traveled down her arm.

  The lab moved. Something, an explosion, rocked the whole building. The beam disappeared, and the machine crunched to a stop.

  “It’s her,” White Rabbit said. She glowed white hot all over, then flew through the exit.

  Amulet stood and rushed to a readout on a machine, cursing.

  Jill screamed in agony and distress. I had to ignore her. I had to find a way out.

  My badge on my chest, the Fox Badge, it had been damaged in the fight. It was loose. If I stretched my neck I could possibly nudge it with my chin.

  The badge contained a one of a kind, masterwork dark energy device. With it, I could change my body’s mass. But what would happen if I exploded the damn thing?

  Dark energy behaved in unpredictable ways.

  What would the Fox do? The Fox would chew their own arm off to escape.

  More explosions. White Rabbit must be fighting someone out there. Carla Quick? Maybe Jill had summoned her.

  Carla Quick had gotten her powers from the Dark Energy Event. If I made a mini DEE here, maybe I could gain some kind of power to help us escape. Or maybe it would crush me into a ball the size of a dime.

  No matter what, this was gonna hurt.

  Amulet pushed a button, then crowed in elation as the machine above us powered back on.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “Not her! Don't do her! Do me! Please!”

  “You’re all getting it. Why should it matter?”

  “Because if you don’t do me next, she said it herself, if you don’t do me, I could escape!”

  She shrugged.

  “Good point. I know you think this will somehow matter, but you’re cooked, kid.”

  The nozzle on the machine moved to hover over my hand. Jill whimpered on the table next to me.

  I had to block her out. It was going to take everything I had. I had to focus.

  Blinding pain seared into my hand as the beam connected with it. A scream tore through my throat, an animal scream. It sounded nothing like me.

  I stretched my neck. My chin nudged the badge. The beam traveled down my arm. I nudged the badge again.

  Right as the beam reached my shoulder, I dislodged the badge and it fell into the beam.

  I didn’t hear an explosion. I didn’t feel anything. I was just gone.