Second-String

Opening scene

Picture it: a Guild office that smells like laminate and burnt coffee, a folding table, and eight manila folders fanned out like the world's most dangerous menu. Each one's a hero nobody quite remembers — a name, a power, a district, and a stack of unpaid consequences.

The caseworker taps the folders. "Pick one. You get the license, the costume, the abilities, and" — she flips a folder open to a page of angry sticky notes — "everything they left hanging. Rent's due on all of them, by the way. Metaphorically and literally."

Outside the window, forty stories up, an A-lister streaks past trailing camera drones, and nobody down here even looks up. The caseworker slides a pen across the table. "So. Who are you going to be today, and are you ready to clean up after them?"

Turn 1 of 10

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

You lean forward in the molded plastic chair, its seat still warm from whoever sat here before you, and let your eyes travel across the eight folders fanned on the laminate table. Each one has a name tab written in that particular shade of blue that only government ballpoints produce. Some names you almost recognize—whispers from neighborhood forums, half-remembered sightings on the local news before they cut to weather. Others mean nothing at all.

The caseworker watches you without watching, her attention split between your hesitation and something on her phone that keeps buzzing with what sounds like a cartoon spring. She's been doing this long enough to let the silence work. You pick up the folder second from the left, its edges softened by handling, coffee rings on the back cover that suggest whoever held it last did their crying in diners.

"Rook," she says, not asking. "District Fourteen, the industrial flats. Gravity manipulation, limited range, line-of-sight required. Last incumbent left three months ago—quit, didn't retire, which means the license lapsed clean but the situation didn't." She taps the folder and a photograph slides out: a warehouse complex at night, something burning that shouldn't be, a figure in dark panels hovering three stories up with arms spread like they're conducting an orchestra of falling debris.

"Her name was Sera Okonkwo. Twenty-six, talented, couldn't afford the therapy. The Guild covers medical for A-listers, you know that. B-listers get a pamphlet and a phone number that rings to voicemail." Mars Kelleher says this flatly, like she's reading a grocery list, but you catch the way her thumb presses a crease into the folder's edge.

"She left a tenant in her apartment. A cat. And something she was fighting that didn't get finished."