A roach landed beneath her right eye and scurried down her face.

  Janis no longer cared. A warm, almost pleasant fuzziness was filling her head. It reminded her of the time when she was eight and being anesthetized to have her tonsils removed. But she wasn’t inhaling sevoflurane now, and she wouldn’t be waking up to a cup of chocolate ice cream when it was over.

  Fight, she urged herself from a dimming distance. Fight, damn it!

  But the hands that pried at the grip around her throat no longer felt like they belonged to her. Neither did her throat. Or the strangulated tears streaming down the sides of her face. She was drifting, disassociating. Even the roaches were fading from her vision, turning to gray motes.

  She felt her hands drop to her sides.

  From her passive vantage, she watched the gray motes combine, assuming the shape of a person. She squinted the shape into focus. Tyler was struggling to his feet, one hand glowing with electrical energy.

  Please, Tyler…

  Voices burst into the capsule.

  “There he is.” Agent Steel said.

  A new panic rose in Janis as she remembered Agent Steel’s orders from earlier: Shoot to kill. Janis’s will rushed back into her. The muscles of her throat contracted. No! she tried to shout. Tyler’s himself again. He’s not trying to hurt me! But she only gargled.

  Two reports slammed through the confined space. Tyler fell away, and suddenly Janis was coughing, her lungs heaving for air. And oh God, did it ever hurt. Her chest felt as though it had been battered by a medieval weapon. With her next cough, blood speckled the legs of her jumpsuit.

  Agent Steel appeared above her, rifle in her hands, lunar eyes staring down. It reminded Janis of the day in the woods Agent Steel had executed Mr. Leonard. The same despair she had felt then threatened to drown her now. Janis’s coughing deepened and took on the rhythm of sobbing.

  “You’re safe now,” Agent Steel said.

  “You … didn’t…” Janis managed, but the rest was lost inside her.

  “Help her up,” Agent Steel ordered.

  Hands lifted her from behind until she was standing. The person turned her, and a pair of blue eyes searched hers, their concern intense and total. The person dabbed her bloody lips with his sleeve, then wiped Trips’s phlegm from her cheek. She had to fight the urge to embrace him.

  Instead, she held Tyler’s arms until she had her footing. “I’m all right,” she whispered.

  Clearing her throat, she looked down to where Trips lay, circuitry and wiring blown from his head, his bulging red eye staring at nothing. Both of Agent Steel’s shots had found their mark. They had driven Trips’s influence from hers and Tyler’s minds, and his hands from her throat. Agent Steel had saved her life.

  Janis turned and found Agent Steel staring up at the countdown display:

  00.00.00

  Scott gasped upright from his console. He stared around, the color gone from his cheeks.

  “Scott?” Janis said.

  “I didn’t get to all of them.” He seemed to be choking on the words. “I ran out of time.”

  At that moment, the capsule around them began to rattle. Binders and thick operating manuals wiggled from shelves and spilled to the floor. A light above one of the switches flashed red. The commanders, who remained absorbed in their consoles, held to the sides of their desks. Seizing the back of Scott’s chair, Janis looked from Agent Steel to Tyler, then back to Scott.

  “How many?” Agent Steel shouted above the noise of the launch.

  “One,” Scott said. “The biggest.”

  The commander stooped over his console. “And its destination appears to be … Denver, Colorado.” He swiveled sharply toward his deputy. “How in the hell did that happen?”

  “Denver?” Janis repeated.

  Grams.

  All day, and at the oddest times, Scott had been having flashes of issue #119 of the Uncanny X-Men. Probably because the scenario was similar to their own. Now, from Scott’s seat at the backup console, with the full horror of his failure sinking in—and reflected on the pale faces around him—his mind fled there once more.

  In that issue, a villain, Moses Magnum, demands that the Japanese government turn the country over to him or he’ll destroy the island. The X-Men are sent to stop him. They battle Moses and his armored minions gamely, but Moses slips away, activating his giant laser—Magnum Force. All seems lost. But they’re the X-Men, damn it, and the X-Men don’t lose. The X-Men’s Banshee counters Moses Magnum’s weapon with the full fury of his sonic scream, which destroys his base.

  Japan is saved! Hip, hip, hooray!

  If only Scott could say the same for Denver.

  With the quake-like tremors dying down, he wavered to his feet. “Is there any way of intercepting the missile?” he asked faintly. “Shooting it while it’s turning in space?”

  The commander shook his graying head. “The Air Force doesn’t possess that capability. Especially not with the time we have. Our intercontinentals were designed to hit the USSR in under thirty minutes.”

  Janis said, “Meaning this one will hit Denver in…”

  “Approximately ten,” the commander answered.

  Scott looked at Agent Steel, who was speaking into her helmet, communicating with the military commanders outside, then at Tyler, his blood-soaked arm hanging at his side. Finally he turned to Janis, who was staring at the ground, loose strands from her ponytail hanging damp beside her face. Her grandmother lived in Denver.

  “I’m so sorry,” he told her. “I was inside for a moment, I almost had it disabled, but then…”

  When Janis looked up, Scott was surprised to find her eyes bone dry.

  “What do you know about these Viper missiles?” Her voice was raw, all business.

  “I, ah, I did a report on the Viper II for seventh-grade science. Mr. Holden’s class,” he added, for no reason that he could think of.

  “Do you know their flight sequence?”

  “Yeah.” But why in the world are you asking?

  “C’mon,” she said, grasping his hand and pulling.

  They squeezed past Agent Steel and two of her team and then through the ruined blast doorway. Jesse, who was sitting against a wall and being treated by a third member of Steel’s team, watched them emerge. Other team members were cuffing the armored goons in the equipment room.

  Inside the elevator, Scott began to close the manual door.

  “There’s no time,” Janis said. Then to Jesse, “Mind giving us a boost, big guy?”

  Jesse pushed himself to his feet and lumbered over. He seized the elevator beneath the floor. “Hold on,” he said.

  Scott managed to grasp the metal bar that ringed the inside of the compartment as Jesse’s face disappeared from the doorway. The elevator blasted up the shaft like a cannonball. He had no idea what Janis had in mind, but at least they were moving. Man, were they moving.

  “Get ready to jump!” Janis hollered.

  The elevator slowed in its ascent. Within seconds, the scene through the doorway changed from the cement shaft to the security room.

  He and Janis leaped out at the same time, stumbling to a stop against the security desk. Behind them, the elevator compartment crashed into the shaft’s ceiling then plummeted down, a snake’s nest of loose cables trailing behind. Jesse must have caught the compartment, because the cacophony Scott expected to come banging up the elevator shaft never arrived.

  When he turned, Janis was already racing through the doorway he had blasted open earlier. Scott caught up with her beyond the security fence and then sprinted alongside her out into an open field. The sun had just set, and the landscape was suffused with pink light. Janis reared to a stop and searched around with dark eyes, her breaths heaving in and out of her chest.

  While the distant ring of military vehicles remained in place, the personnel had drifted eastward, Scott saw, many of them pointing out ahead of them. Scott aligned his orientation to theirs.

  “There,” he said to Janis.

  In the far distance, a smoky plume was still growing from the Earth, a thin contrail rising above it. It was strange for him to think that he had been at the launch site only minutes before, inside the cable. He followed the contrail into a sky the color of a ripe nectarine until he spotted a tiny flare.

  We can see it, but what’s the point? he thought. By now it’s going a mile a second.

  “I need you to tell me what’s happening, sequence by sequence,” Janis said, closing her eyes. She raised an arm in the direction of the ascending rocket. “I’m going to try to prevent its reentry from space.”

  He knew her powers would never reach that far, but he didn’t say so. He stared at the distant flare another moment, brooding on its deadly payload. “All right,” he said quietly. “The booster just separated from the missile, which means it’s in its second stage. It’s going to keep speeding up.”

  The security fence rattled, and Creed and Margaret ran up beside them, their faces peering from Janis to the darkening sky. Neither spoke, but Scott knew what the other Champions were thinking, even if not in the same words that he was thinking them.

  Will Janis be our Banshee?

  With her eyes closed, Janis’s mind strained toward the heavens. The air thrummed around her. She could feel the missile, a flickering on the verge of her consciousness, but it was diminishing, speeding away from her.

  An ache grew behind her forehead as she reached.

  Mrs. Fern was always telling her that time and space weren’t absolute in the plane Janis could perceive. A plane of light-infused lines that supported the physical world. A plane Janis could manipulate, if only she could learn to accept her abilities, to not partition herself from them.

  Her powers had hurt people: Amy, Mrs. Leonard, and she had nearly strangled the life from Agent Steel—Agent Steel, who had just spared her the same fate. But now Janis was in a position to spare millions, including one very special grandmother.

  Just need to get a finger on it, she thought. The same thought as when she’d stretched for that soccer ball eight months before, trying to tip it up to preserve a tie with the state’s top-ranked team. Only this wasn’t a soccer ball, and the distance separating subject from object was miles, not inches.

  Time and space are not absolute.

  For an instant, the missile grew large in her awareness, large enough to touch. But when Janis went to nudge it, an explosion rocked through her mind. She grunted and fell back, an untethered cosmonaut. When she reached again, the missile had shrunk back to a flicker.

  Damn it!

  “Second stage separation and thrust.” Scott’s voice surprised her, so near and yet so grim and distant. “The missile is lighter now. Accelerating to fifteen thousand feet per second.”

  I need more power, Janis thought, the missile flickering farther and farther away.

  The morning she had strangled Agent Steel, she had become huge, almost god-like. Now, despite that she was pushing her abilities to their mind-straining limits, she still felt like Janis Graystone, a high school sophomore. No match for the most powerful missile on Earth.

  I’m going to have to risk more fear.

  She invoked the mushroom cloud from her dreams, the one she always tried to flee but could never escape. She pictured its black stem, its blooming corpulent cap. She inhaled its toxic scent of death and incineration. Hungry, hydrogen mouth… Toothless and voracious… The thrumming around her grew louder, more violent. The pain behind her forehead deepened, like someone was sliding a knife between the hemispheres of her brain. She fought the urge to clasp her head, afraid she would disrupt what was happening.

  She was becoming larger.

  A familiar ecstasy seized her. She closed the range to the missile, threads of space billowing violently. She grasped handfuls of those threads and held on. She couldn’t arrest the missile, she knew. It was spewing too much thrust. But maybe as the missile slowed at its peak, she could give it a push, keep it from returning to Earth.

  “Stage three separation should be underway,” Scott said.

  His words were just registering when the space around Janis blew out in a white-orange burst. She flailed, the threads unraveling from her grasp, her ecstasy slipping.

  No!

  “The Viper’s going to be about a hundred twenty miles above the Earth now,” Scott said, “traveling at twenty-three thousand feet per second.”

  She felt herself falling again, the missile pulling away from her. Janis concentrated, calling on all of her fears and the fears of her teammates and those of the military personnel ringing the launch facility, watching the same nuclear-tipped archangel ascend into the heavens so that it could rain hell on Earth.

  The thrumming around Janis became deafening. No ecstasy now, only the head-splitting pain that threatened to double her over. But she was around the rocket again. And it was slowing.

  “If my timing on this is right,” Scott said, “the missile should be reaching its apogee. There’s going to be some small propulsions to position the reentry system. Then it will release the … the warheads.”

  Janis began to push.

  Just have to keep it ascending. Keep it from turning.

  The reentry vehicle pushed back against her, jets of gas shooting out.

  Don’t even have to win, she thought. Just have to fight this damned thing to a stalemate.

  The missile seemed determined not to let that happen. Its propulsion system went into a long burn, a machine’s programming against Janis’s human will. For the moment her will was holding, but barely.

  The reentry vehicle began to tremble. One of the jets of gas sputtered before catching fire again.

  It’s exhausting itself.

  But so was she.

  Though the power source she drew from felt inexhaustible, it was being channeled through her, Janis Graystone. Someone whose limits had already been tested that day… Tallahassee, her encounter with Director Kilmer, the blast from Tyler, the choking by Trips. How much longer could she hold on? Seconds? A minute? Her mind shuddered with strain. The bitter taste of copper filled her throat. And in the center of her head, the pain was becoming unbearable, turning her world black.

  Or was that her consciousness dimming?

  She gathered what she could and gave a final, primal shove.

  The heavens lit up white. For a flickering instant, the entirety of the universe was there for her to see and behold.

  So beautiful…

  Then she collapsed.

  40

  Gainesville, Florida

  Monday, August 19, 1985

  6:15 p.m.

  When the image appeared on the conference room’s large screen, Tyler thought it was a joke. He peeked around. No one was laughing. Director Kilmer had said someone wanted to address them, but him?

  “Good evening,” President Reagan said. “Yesterday was a historic day, perhaps the closest our country has come to suffering the unthinkable. But that catastrophe was averted, and I understand I have you to thank.” His head leaned, as though from the weight of his steep side-part, but his words were surprisingly tender, his aging face suffused with warmth. “True heroism acts without expectation of reward or even of recognition. And so it must be with you. Millions awakened today as though it were just another morning in America. Adults went to work, children lined up for school buses, the flag under which they live and learn, produce and serve, waving with as much vigor as ever.” When he smiled, his eyes shone. “On behalf of the United States, I thank you; my wife, Nancy, thanks you; and our nation, by virtue of this new day you have bestowed upon all of us, thanks you. So long as you continue to serve, everyone will rest better—whether they know it or not.”

  “This has been an honor, Mr. President,” Director Kilmer said. “Thank you.”

  President Reagan nodded and the screen went black.

  Turning back to the conference table, Kilmer crossed his arms. “Well, that’s not a call we receive every day. But let me add my thanks to the president’s. Were it not for your tenacity this past spring, pulling the curtain back on the Program, we wouldn’t have begun training this summer. We wouldn’t have had a team capable of thwarting yesterday’s launch.”

  Tyler’s face stung at the knowledge that he had been much more of a hindrance yesterday than a help. He adjusted his arm in his sling.

  “Now,” Director Kilmer continued, “this week was to consist of final testing. At its conclusion, Agent Steel and I were to select the team. Suffice it to say that yesterday’s events were more of a test than anything Agent Steel or I could have come up with. As such, we are going to forego the final week. Summer training is concluded. We have selected four of you to continue.”

  Doesn’t look like I made the cut.

  A week ago, the thought would have relieved Tyler. No further obligation to the Champions Program, free to live his life again. But he felt a closeness with the others now, and a closeness to one girl in particular. Faced with the prospect of leaving them, leaving her… He wasn’t ready for that.

  “Agent Steel?” Director Kilmer said.

  Agent Steel stood and stared around the table with her pale eyes. “Based on the data we gathered this summer, the following trainees have been selected to be inducted as Champions: Creed Bast…”

  “Hell yeah!” Creed said, pumping a fist.

  “…Jesse Hoag…”

  Jesse continued to stare straight ahead, unblinking, even when Creed clapped his shoulder.

  “…Margaret Graystone…”

  Margaret sat straighter in her chair and gave her hair a small toss.

  So it’s down to Janis or Scott, Tyler thought. Which doesn’t make any damned sense. They were the ones who stopped those missiles. They should both be on the team, not one or the other.

  Bandaging covered Scott’s temple where he had suffered burns when his helmet burst into flames. Even so, he had gone on to blow the computers on nine of the ten Viper missiles. Missiles meant for New York, Los Angeles, Chicago…