Liz LeCrone

Before I've always known that my life would end with an explosion and regrets. I enter the crowded ballroom alone. Tiny cocktail tables are scattered about, each surrounded by handsomely dressed socialites looking ill at ease in their uncomfortable but undoubtedly fashionable shoes. Chandeliers overhead cast the cavernous room in warm hues that make me feel like I’m walking through a candlelit ball at Netherfield and not a fancy hotel in the city. Occasionally, I see someone I know in the throngs of people, but I politely nod, flash a smile, and gesture to the bar. I receive amused waves in return, but no one rushes to accompany me, much to my relief. The bartender watches me approach with a smile. “What can I get you?” “Champagne, please.” “Feeling celebratory?” she asks amiably as she retrieves a bottle from below the counter, black vest gobbling up the light reflected off her wrinkle-less white button down shirt. “Something like that,” I say with what I hope is a mysterious smile. In truth, I have so little to celebrate right now that I’m desperate for that small symbol of special occasions, of victory. I gently pick up the flute with gloved fingers and turn away from the bar, my skirts swishing around me. My glass raised to no one, I toast the air. To the end. I wander aimlessly, feeling the cold condensation of my glass through the tips of my gloves. The champagne traces an effervescent path down my throat, and I relax marginally. “Rey.” The quiet voice stops me as I pass one of those many tables, and I turn to see Jack Vera standing stiffly against a wall, looking very handsome and only a little bit awkward in a well-tailored suit. “You look quite lovely tonight,” he offers, the compliment given with all the frankness of fact. A genuine smile spreads across my face, and I feel the crease of the permanent frown between my eyebrows disappear. “Vera,” I say, with all the challenge of a boxer entering the ring. “You clean up nicely yourself. I didn’t expect to see you here.” “Adam made me come, to represent the paper,” he replies, his unenthusiastic words belied by the laughter in his eyes. “He's on his way,” he continues, answering my unspoken question, “but Najah just got back from Mali so they’re running late. I know for a fact he’s looking forward to arguing SAP policy with you, so be prepared for that.” My smile widens. “Well at least if something happens we’ll have multiple reporters on the scene to break the news.” “And at least one novelist to craft it into fiction,” Vera says, tilting his chin slightly in my direction. He likes trying to get a rise out of me with these little comments, but I merely shrug, denying him the satisfaction. “The best stories are based on something real. But I doubt there will be any action this evening.” “It would be in extremely poor taste,” he says drily. His dark gaze drifts out over the wealthy strangers who’ve opened their wallets in an increasingly pointless effort. Battles between those the government designated as “superabled persons” crop up so often that paying for the damages has become a common occurrence. So common, in fact, that I’d taken extra care to select a dress for the evening that I’d already worn at least once, in case irreparable harm befell it. “I have to imagine at least one superhero is in attendance in incognito.” “In a high-society party like this? More likely a supervillain,” Vera counters with a small smile. “Same thing, depending on who you ask,” I say. I modulate my tone carefully, idly fingering the fabric of one of my long gloves with my free hand. It works; Vera hears none of my bitterness, and a chuckle escapes him. “You sound like Fury.” I force a smile to my face and heave in a breath as the sound of a bell cuts through the dull roar of conversation to signal that dinner is ready. “Where’s Colton? I would have expected him to accompany you,” Vera asks as we make our way toward the dining room. The casual mention of my boyfriend is polite, the kind of small talk people make at events like this. I should have expected it, but it catches me off guard so violently that suddenly I feel smothered by the weight of the foundation on my face, and my hands start to sweat inside my fancy satin gloves. “Just me tonight,” I say lightly, but even I can hear the quaver in my voice as my carefully constructed calm cracks. Vera glances at me, fully aware that I didn’t answer the question, and for a moment I’m afraid of what he thinks he knows. “I hope… Is everything all right?” “Of course,” I say, gesturing vaguely with my now-empty glass. I can’t even tell if I’m lying to him or not. I search desperately for the steadiness I used to pride myself on, and I feel my body doing its level best to regulate my heart rate. “I just…” I trail off, biting my lip. I’m painfully aware of the crowd around us, pressing in on me as I cave in on myself. “We could stay out here for a minute longer and you can talk about it?” Vera says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, back toward the now empty reception room. “Or, you know, just catch your breath.” I pause, feeling the calm I always associate with Vera soothe the edges of my anxiety and sorrow. Jack Vera, more than anyone, would understand. Maybe tonight doesn’t have to be about endings. Maybe it could also be a beginning. Finally, I nod, and we turn against the tide of people, apologetically pushing our way through until we step into open space. Vera plucks the empty glass from my fingers and joins the stragglers at the bar trying to refill their drinks before dinner. I turn away, counting as I breathe in and out, a technique I haven’t needed since I was a teenager. I tug at the glove on my left hand until my clammy skin releases the fabric, and my breathing eases slightly. The lightest of brushes against my shoulder heralds Vera’s return with a fresh glass of champagne, as well as water. “Thank you,” I say. “Of course.” I’ve nearly finished the water by the time I’m ready to speak again, but Vera is unhurried, leaning back against the wall, gaze turned toward the window. I look out at San Francisco sprawled below us, twinkling in the oncoming dark of the brisk summer night that this city is infamous for. My city. My home. And up until yesterday, my prison. “Reina…” There is something akin to horror in his voice, and instinct has me looking over my shoulder to find the threat. My darting gaze finds nothing out of the ordinary in the now empty room, and when I finally turn back to him, a question on my lips, I realize he is looking at me. At the bruises adorning my left arm. My pulse spikes. Stupid. I am so stupid. Even the sparkling mood lighting of the room can’t hide the discoloration that works its way up my wrist. The look on Vera’s handsome face is so full of righteous anger that it almost makes me want to laugh. It’s too perfect, too narratively right. If it were one of my novels, he would demand to know who did this to me. But Jack Vera was never one to waste words on questions he already knew the answers to. He reaches out to me, palm up. His fingertips halt the moment before they meet mine, trembling ever so slightly, as if he were too afraid to touch, to cause more pain. Maybe it is that hesitation, the deference, that makes me close the distance instead of flinching away. To want to open up, instead of shut down. I am so, so tired of being strong. Vera’s fingers wrap gently around my hand as his gaze meets mine, devastation, confusion, and knee-weakening determination warring on his handsome face. I open my mouth, searching for the words and wondering where to begin. Before I can make a sound, the dining room behind me explodes. After I They won’t stop talking about it. The Fairmont Incident. The networks act like they’ve never seen a supervillain before, as if they don’t have hours of footage of New York City being decimated by different individuals over the years, as if they’ve never reported the number of times now that the White House has been rebuilt (the current total is nine, as of last fall), as if Atlas himself hadn't posted his own manifesto on Twitter before he proved to the world that superpowers were no longer fictional. Supervillains aren’t exactly creative when they choose their targets. Something big, something symbolic, something in the United States. Perfect. So the fact that the Golden Gate bridge has once again collapsed into the sea is really no surprise. And even the great Jack Vera would have been hard-pressed to turn this everyday supervillain attack into an actual news story. Except. “The world still stands silent in shock and horror after watching the Sound and the Fury die at the hands of the evil Vulcan just one month ago at a charity gala in San Francisco. The White House has declared a state of emergency in California as more local governments fall to the superabled individual calling himself Vulcan. We’ll keep you informed, as always, on the situation as it develops there.” The handsome news anchor ends his report with dutiful solemnity, throwing it over to a sports guy who toothily assures his viewership that college sports will carry on, evil overlord or no, and irreverently jokes that other schools might have a chance now that Stanford is out of the picture. The shocking plot twist that comic book readers dread: the hero doesn’t survive his own story. The Fury is dead. And his plucky sidekick, the Sound, died trying to save him. “I just can’t believe it,” my dad says yet again, absentmindedly chopping onions over the sound of a hoarse basketball coach claiming a well-deserved victory. “The Fury is dead.” Yeah, well, so is half of San Francisco, I think to myself. My dad’s face contorts as he turns to me, remembering. “Honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” He loses the end of his apology as he realizes I don’t want it. I say nothing, biting back a sigh. I want desperately to leave the room, but I know that will only make him feel guiltier, so I settle back into the stool at the kitchen counter and idly flip a page of the book I’m not actually reading. It never ceases to amaze me how few people consider the collateral damage that results from an epic clash between good and evil. Even my own parents have a harder time accepting that the Fury is dead than they do the countless nameless citizens who met their end alongside him—and their own daughter was nearly one of them. I got out of the city the day after half of it burned at the hands of Vulcan, desperate to get as far as possible from the wreckage of buildings that had nearly taken me with them. Michigan seemed as good a place as any. I had family here, after all. But if I thought I could escape the constant reminders of everything I lost that day, I was wrong. Everyone here sees me for what I am: the unlikely remnant of a blazing fire, built of ash and horrifically delicate. “I’m so glad you got out of there, Reina,” my mother says as she enters the kitchen in her usual rush to save me from the news. She stops, TV remote forgotten in her hand, as she remembers that someone else didn’t make it out, and that her happiness at my survival is inappropriate. My poor mother. She hated my boyfriend. She can’t hate him now that he’s dead. My mother has taken to hiding any news of San Francisco, for fear that it might cause me a mental breakdown. She even disappeared all her Veronica LeRey books, as if contemporary superhero fiction will be my downfall. My father, being a product of the twelve-step program, thinks that talking about it will help us all cope with the tragedies that happened there. The resulting power struggle in my house is threatening to tear me apart. I don’t have the heart to tell my mother her efforts are in vain, that all the good and the bad she’s experienced in those superhero novels came from my own investigations and experiences living in a battle-worn city. There’s nothing I could see in the media that I haven’t already written or personally weathered. I can’t pretend to be okay any longer today, so I gather my things and head upstairs to the room that was once mine. It’s a guest room now, the vibrant colors I painted it as a teenager masked by an inoffensive light tan paint that I’m sure was labeled something cliche like “Soothing Sands.” It feels like a hotel we went to once, before Eliana was born when we tried to go on a vacation as a family. This color makes me want to scream. Soothing, my ass. My phone is buzzing on the nightstand when I sit down on the bed. It’s been sitting there since I got here, buzzing incessantly, desperate to deliver its messages to an unwilling recipient. I don’t know why I don’t just turn it off. I guess part of me just isn’t ready to leave San Francisco yet. My laptop is around here somewhere, too, the first draft of my next novel trapped in the lifeless hunk of metal. I must be close to a deadline, if I haven’t missed it already. Charley deserves better from me, but I just… can’t. I haven’t been able to for months, even before everything happened. I flop face down on the sensible full size bed that replaced the queen I once sprawled on, trying to shut out the sounds of my parents worrying about me downstairs. What do we say? What do we do? How long is enough time to grieve? I want to scream at them, make them understand that time is the one thing I do not have enough of, that I will never again be their whole and perfect daughter—that thanks to their efforts and mine, I never was. But I say nothing. I stay quiet. Somewhere downstairs, I hear my mother exclaim as a pipe bursts beneath the sink. Good. They’ll have something else to talk about besides my dead boyfriend and the burning city I left behind.

First Assignment: The Act of Story Statement Reina must face her own traumatic past to defeat the supervillain Vulcan Second Assignment: The Antagonist Vulcan is a pyrokinetic supervillain whose main goal is to discredit society’s faith in super-powered people, despite being one himself. He firmly believes that superheroes are a threat to democracy and that relying upon them will only make the world more dangerous. He kills two prominent superheroes and takes control over the state of California, just to prove he can, reigniting a contentious debate around how society should treat—and regulate—super-powered individuals. Third Assignment: The Title After You Kill Your Heroes The Last Superhero in San Francisco I’m Not the Hero I Play on the News Supervillains and Other Fragile Things Fourth Assignment: Comparables Genre: Romantasy Burn for Me by Ilona Andrews This is an urban fantasy romance with a strong female character, Nevada Baylor, who is a reluctant heroine who has to accept both her power and her place in society at the urging of the handsome male love interest. Like my novel, this story is set in modern-day USA, with some characters who have magic and others who don’t, which creates an interesting political landscape. My protagonist is also a reluctant, secretly powerful heroine who requires cajoling by a handsome male love interest. There are strong familial relationships and similar-scale disasters to prevent. House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas This is also an urban fantasy romance. This world is bigger and has a more fantastical setting than my novel, but the main character, Bryce, is very similar to my protagonist in that we see her most traumatic memory to kick off the story, watch her struggle with grief, and realize very late in the game that she’s an unreliable narrator who has been hiding key information from the reader. She also has to face the reality that she’ll have to give her life to save her city and the people she loves, a fact which devastates and infuriates her handsome male love interest. Fifth Assignment: Hook Line After losing everything to Vulcan, a dangerous new supervillain, Reina Smith flees San Francisco to wallow in her grief. But when her friend and famous reporter Jack Vera makes himself Vulcan’s next target, Reina must accept that she has a responsibility to defeat the monster she had a hand in making, before it’s too late. Sixth Assignment: Two More Levels of Conflict Inner conflict Reina’s biggest secret is that she used to be the superhero Sound, and everyone thinks that her alter ego, the Sound, died when Vulcan rose to power. In that confrontation, she used all of her powers to clamp down on Vulcan’s explosion, locking it away inside herself and turning her into a ticking time bomb. She firmly believes that without the Sound, without her powers, there’s nothing she can do except keep those she cares about at arm's length so that they aren't subjected to more grief when she dies. Jack, who has loved her for years and already experienced the grief of losing her, fundamentally disagrees that Reina was only ever useful for her powers. Reina needs to reconcile her bold, fearless alter ego with the person left behind in her wake, and Jack is a major catalyst for her ability to do that. Scenario Reina expresses to Jack in a heated moment that nobody back in San Francisco needs Reina, nobody noticed that she was gone, they only noticed the Sound’s absence. Jack, in a rare emotional outburst, says he needed her, he noticed. He felt the hole in his life so acutely that he kept sending her emails because he couldn’t quite let go of her, and if she had bothered to pay attention—if she had let someone, anyone in—she would know that her life is and was more than just being the Sound. Secondary conflict Vulcan killed hundreds of people the night of his debut, most prominent among them the superheroes the Sound and Fury. But not all is as it appears in the news spilling out of San Francisco, and Reina is proof that heroes don’t go down easy. Her reluctance to face Vulcan is not just that her powers are locked away. No, it’s that Vulcan knows her, perhaps better than anyone else ever has or ever will. He’s killed her before, and she’s afraid she won’t be enough to stop him this time either. Scenario When Reina and Jack finally make it to San Francisco and come face to face with Vulcan, Reina makes the choice to pull off her disguise and show him her face. Jack watches with growing dread as Vulcan recognizes her and calls her by name. Final Assignment: Setting My novel is set in an alternate universe of the modern day where superheroes are rare enough to be prominent when they emerge but common enough to not be surprising when new ones crop up. The story takes place just as a new supervillain rises to power in San Francisco, and dated news articles, email exchanges, social media posts, and flashbacks will help us piece together what happened on that fateful day when Vulcan killed the Sound and Fury. This will also give us glimpses into politics, popular culture, and people with and without powers, and how they have all been shaped by the existence of superheroes—for better or worse. The main narrative will give us an explosive glimpse of San Francisco before trapping us in the isolation of rural Michigan, where Reina fled after nearly dying in San Francisco. Her parents’ house is not without its own traumas, however, and she cannot escape the truth she has ignored at every turn: her story is written in her scars. Her attempts to avoid the news are in vain, and she learns more and more of what happened to her city in the wake of her unlikely escape. As her conscience grows ever guiltier and her determination to do something stronger, she’ll leave the safety of her hometown to make the trek across the country with Jack Vera, meeting with superheroes in Chicago, Denver, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas, before finally facing her destiny back where it all started. Each city is marked by the presence of larger than life superheroes, each with their own personalities, flaws, and reasons for staying exactly where they are—and leaving California to burn. San Francisco is a shell of its former self—news reports have told us of the power vacuum under Vulcan’s reign, the lawlessness without any government presence and the danger it presents to those unfortunate enough to still be living there. Classified documents reveal failed attempts to remove Vulcan that underscore just how dangerous facing him will be.