Danny laughed. “He’s the one with the dumbest powers! Power over rain! What use is that? You never hear stories about how he managed to use his abilities to do anything other than make a loud bang or cause a sudden downpour! Why not pick Apex? He was pretty cool.”

“Yeah, but no one knows much about him,” Colin said.

“That’s what makes him a good choice.”

Brian said, “Well, maybe you think that Thunder is a bad choice, Danny, but I’ve got a few ideas to make it work. Who are you going to choose, Col?”

Colin shrugged. “I don’t know… I’ll probably end up forgetting again and doing it when I’m having my breakfast on Monday morning.” He grinned. “I seem to work better when my Dad is standing in front of me telling me over and over that I shouldn’t put things off until the last minute.”

“You could always write it from the point of view of one of the villains,” Brian suggested.

Danny raised his eyes in disgust. “Brian, you’re a moron! He said we have to write about one of the heroes, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did. But look at it like this… Suppose that, say, Ragnarök thought that he was a hero.”

Colin looked up at this. “Yeah, he always believed he was doing the right thing.”

Danny nodded. “That’s true, but let’s face it; Ragnarök was a complete nutter. How the hell could robbing banks and holding the world to ransom be anything but the work of a villain? If you do evil things you’re still evil – no matter what the reason.”

They fell silent as they spotted a quartet of girls wearing the uniforms of St Mary’s.

One of the girls glanced at them as she passed. “Hi Danny!”

Danny was taken aback. “Er… Hi, um…”

“Judy,” Brian whispered.

“Hi Julie!” Danny said.

The girl gave him a filthy look and hurried a little to catch up with her friends.

Brian thumped Danny on the arm. “You idiot! I said Judy, not Julie!”

Danny rubbed his arm. “How was I to know? I’ve never even seen her before!”

Brian said, “Danny, two weeks ago she spent an hour listening to you going on about how Manchester City were the greatest football team in the world. She was all over you!”

“That was her?”

“How do you do it?” Brian asked. He got up from the wall, pushed back his sleeves and held out his bare arms. “Look at that! I’ve got muscles! Everyone knows that girls like muscles, but this lanky git gets more action than both of us combined!”

Danny said, “Maybe they go for quality over quantity.”

Brian sighed, shook his head, and sat down again. “So what time’s the party tomorrow night, Col?”

“About eight.” Like many people, Colin’s parents always threw a party for Mystery Day. For Colin’s mother, it was really just an excuse for a family get-together. Sometimes Colin felt that his parents only wanted the party so that they could embarrass him in front of his cousins. “You’re definitely coming, then?”

“Yeah, but… right, here’s the thing, OK? My folks are going out and they said it’s going to be hard to find a baby-sitter for Susie. So they asked me to ask you if she could come to your party.”

“I’m sure my folks won’t mind. And she’ll be able to keep my little cousins busy.”

“Speak of the devil…” Brian said.

The others looked up to see that Susie was cycling furiously back to them.

“She does not look happy,” Colin said.

Susie stopped her bike in the middle of the road and glared at them. “Brian!”

“Now what?”

“I’m telling on you!” She yelled across at her brother.

Brian laughed and got to his feet. “OK! OK! I’m coming.” He turned back to Colin and Danny. “Right, I’ll see you tomorrow. What time did you say the party starts, Col?”

“Eight,” Colin said. “You’ll be there, right, Danny?”

But Danny wasn’t paying attention. He was standing very still and staring into space.

“Danny?”

Suddenly, Danny screamed, “Susie! Get out of the road!”

Colin turned to see the out-of-control bus screeching around the corner. Heading straight for Brian’s sister.

Cell 18 was four metres to each side and a little over three metres high. It contained a narrow, uncomfortable bed, a single chair, a small desk, a large, full bookcase, a hand basin and a toilet.

The walls were made of reinforced concrete. There were no windows. The only light came from two small but powerful bulbs set into the ceiling, shielded by unbreakable glass.

A man stood in the centre of the room, staring at the blank wall. He had not moved for over an hour.

Later, he would sit on the bed, or perhaps lie on it; he hadn’t yet decided. Then again, he might just choose to remain standing.

The wardens referred to him as Joseph.

He was in his early forties. He was tall, thinner now than he had been ten years ago, but by no means skinny, and had long, unkempt black hair and a greying beard.

A decade ago Joseph had been carried, unconscious, into the cell. On his clear days, when he was aware of his situation and his surroundings, Joseph knew that officially he was not a prisoner; there had been no trial and no legal proceedings of any kind. He didn’t even know where this cell was located. But the clear days were few; most of the time, Joseph existed only inside his own head, living with his memories and nightmares.

Joseph continued to stare at the wall. Last night he’d had the nightmare again, the same terrifying, recurring dream: visions of blood, pain, murder and death on an overwhelming scale.

Joseph was often glad of his imprisonment. Here, he was safe. No one could harm him. And likewise, he couldn’t harm any one else.

If I’m here, he would say to himself, then everyone is safe.

This thought was always followed by a conflicting one: But I’m not just here, I’m out there too. And if I’m out there, then no one is safe.

Joseph slowly turned and looked towards the bed. I could sit. Or I could lie.

He smiled.

Why not? I’ve lied before. Sometimes it seems like my whole life has become a lie.

He wondered how long he had been here.

Then he wondered how much time he had left.

How much time the world had left.

COLIN UNZIPPED HIS anorak and hung it in the hall. As he was pulling off his rain-soaked runners, he heard his father shouting from the kitchen.

“What time do you call this?”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Colin shouted back. Colin went into the kitchen, where his parents – Warren and Caroline Wagner – were sitting at the table.

“It’s never your fault,” his father said.

“No, really it wasn’t.”

“Your dinner’s in the oven,” his mother said. “Another ten minutes and it would have been in the bin. If you’re going to be late, the least you could do is let us know.”

His father said, “How come your mother leaves the school at the same time that you do and she’s always home hours before you are? Maybe the teachers have access to a special short cut that the students don’t know about – is that it?”

“But it wasn’t my fault!” Colin said. “Let me tell you what happened.” He sat down at the table and looked at his parents.

They looked back at him and he could see from their expressions that they were both thinking, “This had better be good.”

“OK, well… Me and Brian and Danny were hanging around at the corner of the park…”

His mother interrupted him. “What were you up to?”

“Nothing. We were just talking. Anyway, Susie came up on her bike to tell Brian that he had to go home and then…” Colin paused. “I don’t really know exactly what happened – someone said that there was a fight on the bus and the driver turned around to look – but anyway, the thing is, Susie’s there in the middle of the road and all of a sudden the bus comes screeching around the corner. Heading right for her. And the next thing we know there’s this really loud crunch as the bus hits her bike.”

Caroline Wagner put her hands to her mouth. “Oh my God!”

“No, no!” Colin said. “Mum, she’s OK, she’s fine! I don’t know how he did it, but Danny saved her! He ran across, picked her up and saved her life! It was brilliant! She went all white and she was shaking and everything, but apart from that she was OK. Her bike was wrecked, though. And she wouldn’t let go of Danny for ages. Now she’ll be even more nuts about him. The police came and an ambulance and everything, but they didn’t need it. No one was really hurt.”

“You’re sure she was OK?”

Colin nodded. “She was. It only took her a few minutes to start blaming Brian for the accident, so that means she was back to normal.”

“Who were the ambulance crew?” his father asked. He was a paramedic, based at the local hospital.

“I didn’t recognise them.” Around a mouthful of mashed potato and peas, he added, “but they checked her over and said she was OK.”

Colin’s mother gave him her famous thin-lipped look, the one that told him she wanted to believe him, but wasn’t so sure. “You promise you’re not making this up?”

“No, it really happened!” Colin waved his cutlery around, demonstrating: “The bus came brrrrrmm around the corner, really fast, and Susie was here, OK? And we were on the corner and all of a sudden Danny was like … zoom! One second he was right next to me and the next he’d scooped Susie up in his arms and was lying on the far side of the road, holding on to her. Then the bus went screeee because the driver hit the brakes, but it was too late because he still hit the bike.”

Colin’s parents looked at each other. His dad said, very quietly, “I see.”

“It’s true,” Colin said. “I swear! You can ask Danny or Brian.”

“That was… very brave of Danny,” his mother said, “and very stupid of Susie to just stop in the middle of the road.”

“Yeah, I know. You should have seen Brian’s face, though. I thought he was going to throw up or faint or something.”

Mr Wagner pushed himself back from the table and got to his feet. “I’d better phone Susie’s parents, see if they need anything. And Danny’s parents too.”

“He’s fine,” Colin said. “There wasn’t a scratch on him.”

“Well, I’ll phone them anyway. Danny might have gone into shock.” He went out into the hall, closing the door behind him.

“So,” Colin’s mother said, “will Danny be coming to the party tomorrow?”

Colin nodded. “Yeah, I think so. And Brian says his parents are going out and they wanted to know if Susie could come too. So I said it was OK. Who else is coming?”

His mother began to list the friends and relatives that had been invited to the party. There were the usual last-minute cancellations and changes and Colin found himself wondering why they couldn’t go to someone else’s.

“And I don’t want you staying up late tonight. We’re going to have a full day tomorrow getting everything ready.”

“But I want to see Max Dalton’s interview!”

“You can tape it and watch it in the morning.”

“You just said that we’re going to have a full day tomorrow!”

“Then you can watch it the day after.”

“Then I’ll be the only one who hasn’t seen it!”

Caroline Wagner sighed. “All right, then. You can stay up for it. Now finish your dinner.”

After dinner, Colin phoned Brian. “So are you coming out tonight?”

“Are you kidding?” Brian said. “My folks went mad about what nearly happened to Susie! They said it was my fault for teasing her. I added up all their punishments and apparently I’m grounded until I’m sixty-one. They’re not even letting me go to your party tomorrow night!”

“You could tell them that you have to come so that you can thank Danny for saving Susie’s life.”

“I already thought of that, but they told me to phone him instead. You know what Susie did? Remember when I had my camera last summer? Well, she took all my photos that Danny was in and she put them up all over her bedroom wall.”

Colin laughed.

“Mad, isn’t it? And you know something else? You know the way we have to write about one of the heroes for homework? Well, Susie’s class has to write an essay called ‘My Hero’, and she’s going to write about Danny.” He let out a long sigh. “God, he’s going to have even more girls after him now! And it’s not as though he’s really a hero. I mean, he just happened to have been looking in the right direction to see the bus. Any one of us could have done it.”

“There was no way he could have seen the bus coming from where we were standing. He must have heard it.” Colin paused. “Though I’ve always had good hearing and I didn’t hear it coming. Did you?”

“No.”

“Then how did he know?”

Brian didn’t have an answer for that one.

“And how did he move so fast?” Colin asked. “I mean, one second he was right next to me, the next he was picking Susie up.”

“I suppose… Col, I wasn’t looking in the right direction. I heard Danny shouting at her, so I turned to look at him. I mean, I was looking right at Susie. I turned to look at Danny when he shouted, but he was gone. And then I looked back and they were on the ground on the other side of the road. I didn’t actually see it happen. Did you?”

“I did,” Colin said. “He was just a blur.”

“But my point is this: he did it in the time it took me to turn my head twice.” They both fell silent again, then, slowly and carefully, Brian said, “Col, that’s not possible. No one can move that fast.”

“Not these days, anyway,” Colin said. “Not since all the superhumans disappeared.”

There was another long pause.

Brian said, “What if…?” He stopped. “Nah, that’s crazy.”

“What?”

“Well, what if Danny is a superhuman?”

Most of the prison was underground. From the air, it looked like a small, isolated farmhouse. Its exact location was known only to a small handful of people. Even the prison doctor didn’t know how to find the place on his own; he was driven to and from the prison in a truck with blacked-out windows.

Warden Mills stood in the doorway, squinting his eyes to shield them from the dust stirred up by the twin rotors of the descending Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopter. Even before the copter touched down, the rear ramp was dropped and fourteen people disembarked. The woman was dressed in a simple black trouser suit with a white blouse and flat shoes, but the thirteen men were wearing crisp army fatigues and all were heavily armed.

“What’s all this?” the warden asked.

“Random inspection,” the woman said.

“But we just had one last month!”

“I think you’ll find that the key word is ‘random’. It wouldn’t be a random inspection if you knew we were coming, would it?”

“Guess not.”

Mills led them along the hall and down into the storm cellar, where a hidden door slid back to reveal the wide stone stairway that led into the prison.

As the men began to unpack their equipment, Mills turned to the woman. “How long will this take?”

“Not long,” she said. “Anything to report?”

“No.” That annoyed the warden a little; they were aware of everything that happened – they even monitored his vital signs – but they still felt they had to ask him stupid questions.

One of the men sat down at the warden’s computer and began tapping away at the keyboard. The other men took out sophisticated scanning devices and started to check the integrity of the doors and walls. Two men made several trips back up to the helicopter, bringing in heavier equipment.

“So,” Mills said to the woman. “How’s life in the outside world? It’s Mystery Day, right?”

“You know I’m not allowed to discuss such things with you.”

“I kind of miss the celebrations.”

The woman didn’t respond to that. Instead, she examined her clipboard. “Now… I’ve been ordered to check on the prisoners.”

Another test, the warden said to himself. “Not possible. No one but me and Doc McLean get to see the prisoners. You know that.”

“We’ll need your access codes to override the locks,” the woman said.

“Yes, you would. If you were getting to see the prisoners. Which you’re not.”

“I’m not asking you, Warden Mills. I’m telling you. Give us the codes.”

“You know I can’t do that without a signed order from Central Command,” Mills said with a smile, to give the impression that he was playing along. Inwardly, he was beginning to get worried. They occasionally sprung surprises on him, but this one felt wrong.

The woman turned to one of the soldiers. “Davison?”

The soldier stepped up to Warden Mills, saluted, and said, “Sir! Direct order from Central Command, Sir! You are to provide us with the override codes necessary for us to access the cells, Sir!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, soldier.”

The warden found himself facing the dangerous end of a gun. He sighed. “Son, put the gun away. You’re embarrassing yourself.” He turned to the woman. “Now, I know that you’ve been ordered to put me to the test, but let’s not, and say we did, OK?”

The soldier fired.

Mills glanced down to see a tranquilliser dart protruding from his chest. He collapsed to the floor.

Davison leaned down and smiled at him. “We know you’ve got a biometric implant that will trigger an alarm if your vital signs fluctuate, Warden Mills. Can’t have that happening.” He reached out and pulled down on the warden’s eyelids, closing them. “Don’t worry, you’re not dying. I’m just closing your eyes to prevent them from drying up. You’ve been dosed with a muscle relaxant. You’ll be paralysed for about seven hours.”

“We have to move fast,” the woman said. “Get those doors open!”

One of the technicians said, “We won’t have time to open them all.”

The woman said, “We don’t need to open them all. Just…” she checked one of the computer screens. “Just Cell 18. The man we’re looking for is called Joseph.”

LATER, AS HE was attempting to do his homework, Colin couldn’t get the thought out of his mind: Suppose it’s true? Suppose Danny is a superhuman? Maybe he’s been one all along, but kept it secret. Or maybe Danny didn’t even know. This could be the first time he’s ever done anything like that.

If super-powers are inherited, wouldn’t that mean that one of Danny’s parents is a superhuman too?

Colin dismissed this idea almost immediately; Danny’s parents were just too ordinary. Danny’s father was a manager in the local supermarket and his mother was a driving instructor. Danny also had a seven-year-old brother, Niall. If Danny inherited superhuman powers from one of his parents, then that would mean that Niall might also become a superhuman.

Colin forced himself to focus on his homework. A single four-page essay. That shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours, then he would be completely free of homework worry for the rest of the weekend.

He was lying on his bed, on his stomach, with his homework book open on the floor at the foot of the bed. He had half a page done and he wasn’t happy with it. He’d been trying Brian’s idea of writing from the point of view of one of the villains, but it was proving to be tougher than he’d expected.

OK. Concentrate! Suppose I had superhuman powers… Say I could fly. That’d be cool!

While he was day dreaming about joining the school’s athletics team – if he could fly, he’d be a champion long-jumper – a thought came into his mind: I wonder if Danny will be able to fly?

Maybe Danny won’t want his powers and he’ll find a way to give them to me.

Colin sighed and looked down at his homework again.

“I’m not getting anywhere with this,” he muttered to himself. OK. Start over.

He turned to a blank page and began to write: “If I was a superhero, I wouldn’t even tell my best friends because that would put them in danger. I would have to come up with some good excuses for always disappearing to go off and save people.”

Danny’s never done that, so maybe he’s not a superhuman after all. But then, how did he do it? How did he move fast enough to rescue Susie?

Colin looked at the few lines he’d written, put his homework book away and wandered downstairs to the sitting room.

“How’s the essay coming along?” Colin’s Dad asked.

Colin sat down on the floor with his back to the television set. The sound was off and clearly his parents hadn’t been watching it. “Not great. I don’t really know all that much about superhumans. What was it like when they were around? It must have been strange.”

His father said, “I was about your age when the first superhumans began to appear. You know the way they always keep weird stories until the end of the news? Well, that was what it was like, for a while. It was all, ‘And finally, it seems that in New York there’s a new force fighting evil.’ That kind of thing.”

“But weren’t people scared?”

“No, because for a long time most people didn’t really believe it. Not until Paragon went up against Façade.”

“Why? Why was that any different?”

“Because everyone saw it happening live on television. It was in Detroit, one of those charity telethon events, like Comic Relief. They were trying to raise twenty million dollars for… can’t remember what it was now.”

“Education,” Colin’s mother said.

“Right, education. Anyway, it’s all just about over, and they’re going on about how much money they’ve raised, then all of a sudden one of the guest musicians comes out and he just transforms himself into Façade. He’s got a whole bunch of thugs with him and Façade demands fifty million dollars or the studio audience and all these celebrities will be killed. Façade is strutting about, showing off his powers by shape-shifting into different people, when Paragon just drops out of the ceiling and lands on top of him. Bam! One punch to the head and Façade is out cold! A couple of his henchmen turn their guns on Paragon, but he just flies right into them, knocking them over. Then he launched a dozen gas grenades. The gas instantly sent everyone in the studio – even the hostages – to sleep. The cameras were still running, though, so we could watch him tying up Façade and his men.”

“It would have been a great court case, too,” Caroline said, “if Façade hadn’t escaped from custody on the way to the trial.”

“What about Paragon, though? If he arrived so quickly, doesn’t that suggest that he lived nearby? I mean, from what I’ve read about him he wasn’t able to fly very fast.”

“Maybe he just happened to be close by for some other reason,” Caroline said.

“Yeah, but… I suppose the police had the TV studio surrounded, right? That means that Paragon would have had to get past them in order to get into the studio. So you know what I’m thinking?”

“What’s that?” his father asked.

“Maybe Paragon was a cop. In his real life, I mean. Maybe they knew all about him.”

“I doubt it, Colin. Even if he was, he wouldn’t have let anyone know that he was Paragon. The only heroes whose real names we knew were the Daltons. And that was only because they were already rich enough to protect themselves. All the others probably had ordinary lives.” Warren looked up at the television set. “Speaking of which… Only a few minutes to go before Max Dalton’s interview. Right, Colin – put the kettle on.”

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