I looked up at the building that was standing in front of me. About ten floors high, give or take, the surface all polished glass. It was impressive, the tallest thing for miles around, standing in the middle of a sleepy suburb like a giant middle finger pointed at the sky.

The headquarters of the Association.

I’d been here a couple times before, to interview heroes for some pieces I’d written, but I hadn’t crossed the threshold since the Tragedy at Dallas had happened; security was noticeably tight, I could see armed guards walking around the block, giving me the side-eye. Undeterred, I rang the doorbell: I had an appointment to get to.

The front door slid open, and I walked into a wide open space. The entire ground floor was empty, save for a central column, which housed an elevator to the upper floors; a man wearing a black suit and sunglasses was sitting in a chair beside the column. A big man, I noticed as I approached and he rose to his feet, easily over seven feet tall, with bulging muscles that were barely contained by his clothes. He looked like he could squash me without breaking a sweat: he was clearly there to intimidate, to make anyone who would try to force their way into the building think twice.

“May I help you?” he asked, in a surprisingly gentle voice.

“Antonia Shaeffer, here to see miss Moonshine.”

“Please wait,” he said, then repeated what I’d said into the microphone that was pinned to his collar. Obviously I couldn’t hear the answer coming through his earpiece, but after a few moments he nodded. “Welcome, miss Shaeffer.” He placed his palm on a scanner next to the elevator doors, which slid open without a sound.

“Thank you,” I said, and stepped in. The doors slid shut, then opened again; I was standing in front of a corridor instead of the empty hall I’d seen just moments before. I’d experienced it a few times before, but inertial stasis fields were always amazing – the elevator had shot upwards close to the speed of sound, but I hadn’t felt it at all.

I stepped out the elevator and into the corridor: a man who’d been standing next to the door wordlessly pointed at the door at the far end of the hall. I nodded, and walked to it.

Inside was a… Living room? It sure looked like it. Smallish, two sofas, an armchair, a coffee table, and a TV. Some tasteful artwork hanging from the walls. Yep, living room. This, I realised, must have been one of the apartments the Association had at their HQ, at the disposal of heroes who preferred to live close to their work. As I took my surroundings in, a tall woman dressed in a midnight-blue gown rose from the armchair and came to the door to greet me.

“Welcome, miss Shaeffer,” she said warmly, shaking my hand. “Please, have a seat.” She motioned to the sofas, and I sat down, while the woman busied herself with some cups. “Anything to drink?” she asked. “Coffee? Tea?”

“Coffee. Black,” I replied with a smile. I’d heard rumours about it, but it was my first time experiencing miss Moonshine’s hospitality.

“Here you go,” she said, placing a mug in front of me, along with a small plate of cookies, and sitting back down in the armchair. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you something stronger, but I’ve been dry for five years and counting, and I don’t even have any alcohol in the house any more.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I took a sip of coffee. It was really good. Then I pulled out a notepad and pen from my purse; it may have been old-school but I liked to take notes that way.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” I began. “So, miss Moonshine...”

“Call me Helen, please,” she interrupted me, smiling. “Or miss Spencer, if we have to be formal. Moonshine is my work alias, and I’m not at work right now.”

I nodded. “Helen. I think I’ve mentioned it over the phone, I’m writing a piece about PowerJack.”

She nodded in return. “Yes, about him, and about what happened ten years ago at Dallas.”

“That’s right, the last time he was seen before disappearing. By the way, did you have any contact with PowerJack after that?”

“None whatsoever. I haven’t seen him or heard from him since then.”

Moonshine’s mouth twitched when she said that. A psychologist may have determined she was lying from that tiny movement, but I knew she was telling the truth.

New Humans, or Numans for short, had started appearing in the mid-sixties; no one knows what caused this development in human evolution (fallout from atomic bomb tests was one of the hypothesis, but it was ruled out in the seventies), but all of a sudden, about one in a hundred thousand people started displaying abilities beyond those of normal humans. Enhanced strength; super-speed; heightened intelligence; and so on. The magnitude of these abilities varied, for example some Numans were just barely faster than the fastest sprinters (despite not having to train at all), while others could run across entire cities in an instant. Those with weaker abilities were often bullied and discriminated against, the strongest ones… Not so much. (Who would be so stupid as to bully someone who can punch your head off?) Luckily those who decided to use what they were granted by nature for personal gain, becoming villains, were few and far in-between; as were those who chose to become career heroes.

No one knew how Numan abilities worked, or had even developed a way of testing for them: unless they consciously activated their “powers” (which sometimes required a specific trigger), Numans were absolutely indistinguishable from old-school human beings. This allowed those who didn’t want to reveal their being different to the world to keep living their lives without having to worry about being harassed for it.

Which was exactly what I chose to do when I was fifteen and realised I was a Numan too.

My ability was simple: I could tell truth from lies. By just hearing a statement being spoken, some part of my brain went ping, and instantly told me if that statement was true or false. Needless to say, this power had been extremely helpful in my journalist career, even though it had some limitations – I had to consciously “turn it on”, and it was extremely tiring to use it for any extent of time: I needed to take a nap and eat a lot of comfort food afterwards. That was why I hadn’t used it the day before, when I’d met with the soldier who’d given me the radar data.

But when I used it it was worth it. It allowed me, for instance, to determine that when Moonshine said “I haven’t seen him or heard from him since then,” that wasn’t a lie.

I made a note of that.

“But you two were close,” I said. “You were always together. There were even rumours that you were lovers.”

Helen waved her hand dismissively. “Ah, no, those were just rumours. There was nothing of the sort between us, we were just really good friends.” Truth. “We’d joined the Association and went through orientation together, so we bonded.”

“Alright. If you don’t mind, could we go over what happened that day?”

Her face darkened. “I...” she began, then stopped. “Why are you asking me? It’s all in the public record.”

“I think the readers would like to hear it from one of the protagonists,” I pushed.

She scoffed. “Some protagonist. I didn’t even get there until after the fact.” But she sighed, and continued, “Jack was in Dallas for a court appointment; he had to show up so the judge would validate the arrest of a burglar he’d caught a week or so before.”

I nodded, and Moonshine kept going. “So when Solaray started rampaging through the city, Jack was the first one on the scene.”

“Do you have any idea why Solaray would do such a thing?” I asked. “He was a hero, and a high-ranking member of the Association.”

Moonshine nodded. “Yes, deputy leader, along with me.”

“So why? Why would he just… Attack civilians like that?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure.” Truth. “I’d seen him a week earlier, before he went off on a mission, and he seemed normal.” Truth. “It’s been ten years, and the Association has put a lot of resources in trying to figure out what caused him to behave like that, but we haven’t turned up anything,” Truth, “Even though we have some suspicions.”

Truth. Huh.

“And what do you suspect?”

Again, she paused. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Please, forget about it.”

I really wanted to press the issue, but I could see it wouldn’t have been a good thing at that time. “Okay. So, what happened next?”

“Ray and Jack started fighting,” said Moonshine. “But Ray seemingly didn’t want to concentrate on Jack: he kept finding openings, to take pot-shots at civilians. And Jack… Well, I can’t possibly know what Jack thought, but I think he figured the only way he could stop Ray from hurting any more people was to kill him.” She gulped. “So he did.”

I’d seen the footage. Analysed it frame-by-frame. It had been shot with a mobile phone, and recovered from its half-melted remains; it showed PowerJack punching through Solaray’s chest, and then… Nothing. One frame of pure white, and the recording ended.

“He couldn’t have known,” I said.

Helen shook her head. “No, none of us did. We couldn’t even begin to guess that when Solaray died, all the star energy he’d accumulated would be released into a single blast.”

The official report had estimated the explosion to be a few dozen tons of TNT in magnitude; it was considered a miracle that less than a thousand people had been killed.

And PowerJack had taken it at point blank range and wasn’t even singed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. And I meant it.

“Thank you,” replied Moonshine.

There was a long pause, and then I asked: “What happened next?”

“Jack had sent out a distress signal to the Association before going in, so we were there within a half hour. But by then it was too late, the fight had lasted less than ten minutes. All we could do was assess the damage, and help dig bodies out of the rubble.” She turned her gaze away from me, and I could see her eyes were moist. “Some… Some weren’t even bodies, just… Parts.”

I recalled that of the nine hundred and twenty-eight casualties, only about half were identifiable. The identity of the rest had been discerned through fingerprints, dental records, and DNA. Some, about fifty, had never been found: they’d been added to the casualty list because they were in Dallas that day and simply… Disappeared.

I could see remembering that day was difficult for Moonshine, so I said, “Are you alright? We can stop if it’s too hard.”

She shook her head, and dried her eyes with a tissue. “No, no, it’s okay,” she replied. She took a deep breath and continued, “After that… Well, there was the official inquiry. Which, by the way, completely cleared Jack of any wrongdoing. It was an accident,” she said, fixing her eyes into mine.

So don’t even think about blaming him for it in your article, sister. Those words went unspoken, but were clearly hanging between us.

I nodded. “I understand. It must have been difficult, losing two Association members like that. The leader and the deputy leader, even.”

“No, not really,” she answered. “Those positions are mostly for PR purposes anyway. We managed. It’s just...” She sighed. “It was hard. Personally. They were friends. They were my friends. And all of a sudden, they were gone. Just like that.”

Again, I found myself saying, “I’m sorry.” And again she thanked me.

Then we talked about the Association for a while, how things had changed since the Vigilante Act had been passed – a direct result of what had happened at Dallas – and some other things, until I ran out of questions to ask. I looked over my notes. There was nothing really new in them, but I could work several details into my article.

“Okay, I think that’s all for now. Do you mind if I contact you in case I have more questions?”

“Please do,” replied Moonshine, smiling. “It’s good to get it all out. And to get this story out there.”

I nodded. We got up, shook hands, and I started for the door, then paused.

“I’m sorry, just one last thing,” I said, turning around towards her. “Do you know if PowerJack had friends or family in Montana?”

Her eyes widened, very briefly, but then she gave me a puzzled look. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, nothing, just a rumour I’d heard,” I replied.

“Well, I really don’t know. If he had, he never mentioned it.”

I nodded. “Okay. Again, thank you for your time.”

A few minutes later I got into my car, but instead of driving away immediately I opened the glove compartment. That’s where I kept the snacks: I reclined my seat all the way back, and relaxed for a while, eating a couple chocolate bars to recover.

Using my powers had been extremely tiring, but it had been worth it: thanks to them, I knew I was on the right track.

Because the last thing Moonshine had said was a lie.

 

To be continued in: MONTANA