CHAPTER ONE

Iva

Failure is the first lesson of life. Every living creature fails in small ways, big ways, and everything in between. And that is okay because failing is often the best way we learn. Sometimes, though, failure is the worst. As I stood in a downpour on the outskirts of my hometown of Portal, facing down a tornado, this thought played on a loop in my mind.

Before being dragged to this tornado-killing field, my soccer practice had been winding down because of the dark clouds that had been chasing their way to my high school. Just as my fingers touched the ball to keep it from flying into the goal, my power came alive and tugged on my guts. Feigning stomach cramps, I begged off practice, grabbed my backpack, and ducked into a bathroom stall. My power teleported me to Osterman Park, a favorite local picnic spot where I had spent my fair share of lazy afternoons sprawled on a quilt. The park stretched out for at least a mile and shared a small lake with an adjoining forest, where a tornado currently spun through the trees. Apparently, my job was to stop the tornado before it got to town to wreak havoc on residents and infrastructure alike.

I did my best to ignore all the worry gnawing a hole in my gut and chewed harder on my Grapetastic bubble gum, desperately hoping inspiration would strike between chomps. I enhanced my vision, a minimal use of my power, and the tornado became clearer through the rain and the distance. This was a mistake and sucked all inspiration from my body.

I do not wear glasses. I do not pretend to be a dork to hide my secret identity. I am neither noble nor virtuous. And I do not have an overwhelming urge to save this planet. But my power does its best to cast me as a member of the tights and cape brigade. Right now, as usual, nothing about me resembled a superhero. My polyester soccer uniform clung to my body like unflattering wet cling wrap and my hair was plastered to my head, making me look like a drowned rat. While my clothes were beyond my control, I wrangled my wet clumps of hair into an elastic band I took off my wrist.

My emotional discomfort started to outpace my physical distress when I realized I was going to be late for dinner, which meant my parents and my little brother would be disappointed. Two years ago, that dinner would have likely included my best friend Kennedy, but I’d driven a permanent wedge between us to keep her as far from me as possible. I may have taken that approach with my parents, but their place in my life was immovable, much like my new cleats, which were doing an excellent job of keeping my feet planted in the wet ground while the wind knocked me around. It also helped that I had inherited my dad’s height and athletic build. My snazzy personality, though, was all Mom.

As I thought of my mom, I could hear her slight southern voice in my head. “Iva, honey, why has that damn power come back?” Her question would be rhetorical, of course. We never thought my power was gone for good, but I had enjoyed my three-month power hiatus that had let me live a semi-normal life again. Without my power flinging me from one part of the globe to another on a moment’s notice, I’d kept my job at the local college library and given my parents a temporary reprieve from the madness of my constant disappearing act. I had even taken the bold step of rejoining the soccer team when I started my senior year of high school a couple of months ago. I wasn’t a sports fanatic; I just needed a slightly aggressive outlet to get rid of some extra energy. Okay, a lot of extra energy.

In the past, my power had only gone dormant for a few days or weeks at a time. It usually disappeared after a particularly disturbing mission, but this time, its absence seemed to be tied to a person. A strange incident occurred in the Utah desert this summer. One afternoon, as I was putting away my laundry, my power yanked me without warning to the edge of a cliff. I’d come face-to-face with a guy I had been unable to forget since that afternoon. The guy had saved me from a raging river at the bottom of that cliff. I never puzzled out why my power had taken me there, and within a few hours, much to my annoyance, my power teleported me back to my bedroom.

And now here I was, facing off against a giant beast for the first time out of the gate in months. Thinking back, I shuddered at my past encounters with natural disasters. There had been a mudslide in California that I only partially slowed down. I took a disturbing and painful mud bath in payment for that fiasco. A year later, on an island nation halfway across the globe, my power pitted me against a tsunami. Yep, a motherfucking tsunami. I failed spectacularly and spent two days in a barely functioning hospital. Two days MIA nearly killed my parents.

Regrettably, even with two years of practice, using my power was still a guess-and-run, guess-and-scream, or guess-and-try-not-to-kill-anybody business. I didn’t get a handy manual or a Watcher to explain anything. Just a never-ending stream of semi- to full-on terrifying episodes, which left me with the sinking thought I wasn’t cut out to be a modern-day paladin. I definitely wasn’t a member of the A-Team, or even the B through Y Team. More like the Z-Team, the very last person you call when you have a problem. But my power didn’t care. I was subjected to unimaginable pain traveling to every cell in my body if I didn’t go where it pulled me, so here I was, facing down another nightmare unsure if my efforts would go in the win or lose column. I longed to flip the tornado the middle finger and walk away, but that was not an option.

When I teleported to Osterman Park, I had enveloped myself with an invisibility shield that moved with me. But maintaining invisibility drained my power supply. If I used another power simultaneously and the depletion became too large, I would lose my hold on invisibility. Unfortunately, I wasn’t equipped with a handy power-level update. This meant I had to be careful with how much power I used, so I didn’t reveal myself. I tried to stay invisible for as long as possible since I would never consider donning a mask or a sweat-inducing tight, leatheresque bodysuit. Just the idea of all my lady parts so prominently displayed made me shiver with anxiety. Not that I was a prude; it just seemed strange to me that being a superhero meant wearing what strongly resembled S&M gear. Not that there was anything wrong with S&M; it just wasn’t my thing.

Wrenching my thoughts from the mental picture of Catwoman with a whip, I noticed the tornado had picked up speed and was tearing through the trees like they were flimsy construction paper. My nerves took a hit, and my heart rate ratcheted up. I’d like to say I performed well under pressure. But, despite all the practice I’ve had, my brain still shuts down and coherent thought gets limited to only noticing the reverberating pulse spiraling through my body.

Before silent white noise could take over my thoughts, the wind picked up and my backpack began offsetting my balance, so I took a knee and planted my palms on the ground. An intense vibration rumbled underneath, like when you put your hand on a railroad track to check for an oncoming train. Only this train was channeling the Hulk. To ease this terrifying sensation, I turned my attention to the weather and felt the downpour had slowed. Fat rain droplets splashed all around, and I realized I was squatting in a muddy puddle. A slight breeze blew around me, and I shivered a little. Until the recent rainstorm, it had been unseasonably warm for the mountains in October. I ignored the chill in the air and pulled the straps tighter on my backpack to keep it from moving around.

As I held tight to my backpack straps, the only idea running through my mind to stop the tornado was a poorly pixelated version of comic book heroes racing around it in reverse. But I doubted that would work. And I knew I couldn’t run fast enough and for long enough to stop it. The last time I ran my fastest, I had old lady joint pain and tangled hair for two days. There had to be a way to move at super speed without the detrimental side effects, but I hadn’t worked up the nerve to experiment yet.

My fear kept ratcheting up the terror meter as the tornado wound its way in my general direction. If I didn’t act soon, I risked the tornado getting too close to town and prying eyes. My methods were unpredictable, and I was unsure how they would react with the tornado. A small tree branch plowed into my right shoulder, and I fell backward into the water-drenched earth. The mud stuck uncomfortably to my bare legs. I winced from the pain in my shoulder as I wiped the mud off and decided it was time to work.

I closed my eyes and tried to forget the tornado, the itchy grass, the dirt that covered my lower half, and the pinpricks of rain on my skin as the wind picked up. Most importantly, I did my best to block the thoughts about the inevitable worry that would trap my parents in a state of fear when I didn’t show up for dinner. Instead, I focused on the smell of the grass and dirt, the rain’s coolness, and the wind’s swiftness. The cold air suddenly reminded me why tornadoes rarely formed in the mountains, and I silently thanked my mom for her Weather Channel addiction. I concentrated on the cold air and felt my power sync up with the elements. The cold air became a presence in my mind and body. For whatever reason, my abilities with the elements far exceeded my abilities to move at the speed of caped crusaders. When I needed them, the elements flowed through me like additional limbs waiting to be used. They didn’t require creation, only control. Although my control still needed quite a bit of work.

I extended my power into the Earth’s upper atmosphere and searched for enough cold air to make my plan work. I found getting the air down to the tornado tricky since the tornado was a slightly erratic, moving target. But then it occurred to me it was also a giant bull’s-eye that sucked stuff into it with a hell of a gravitational pull. So, I just needed to gather up the cold air and get it near the tornado.

I stood up, weighed down by my sopping wet clothes and backpack, and wished for a dome of solidified air to keep the rain from my eyes. The dome sparked the idea of creating a net using the same method. Air comprises several elements. The obvious oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and some other elements depending on where you are. In heavily congested areas, avoid looking up those other elements. I can take these elements and make them into a solid form. Like most things with my power, I’m not sure how it worked; it just did. You know, the opposite of when the dipshit politicians and sanctimonious media get together to make the world a better place.

I placed my feet apart, dug my cleats in as much as possible, raised my arms, and used my power to bring the elements together to form an impenetrable net of air for miles in the clouds. Then I took the air outside the dome, used it to make the net contract, and directed it toward the tornado. When I sensed the tornado near the net, I created an opening at the bottom. My link to the cold air helped me sense the tornado doing its job as it sucked down the air. I cycled through this process a half dozen more times. If I were visible, I’m sure I would have looked deranged, flailing my arms like a mad conductor.

The tornado sputtered and slowed down after repeated attempts to smother it with cold air. But it also looked like it was growing in size. The cold air was doing its job, but I doubted it would get it done fast enough. Large identifiable objects, thankfully none of which were cows, were flying through the field in front of me. I needed to speed up the process before I got knocked out by a dresser drawer.

Frustrated, I chewed faster on my now flavorless bubble gum and began humming the tune for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” only I changed the lyrics to “my power really wants me dead.” Putting more cold air in the funnel didn’t seem like the best idea. What I needed was a wall to envelop the tornado. I thought about my bubble gum and wondered if it would meld with the air to create the barrier. The single piece of Grapetastic bubble gum couldn’t stretch to create a sufficient barrier. My next best option was to multiply the gum and combine its ingredients with the air. Cold air was unusable in this situation, though, because it would harden the gum base, defeating the entire purpose of my plan. I needed a lot of power to implement my plan, so I reluctantly relinquished my invisibility. Hopefully, the rain and growing darkness would hide me because I didn’t need someone in a passing car to stop and ask if I was all right. I definitely was not, but there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it.

I gathered up a bunch of air, applied a small amount of heat from the atmosphere, and sent my gum sailing into its middle. The gum and the warm air combined and formed the wall I wanted. I poured my power into my creation and started spanning it across the field in the tornado’s path. The tornado hit the elastic wall, and the wall expanded out. I pushed more of my power into the barrier to keep it in place. I fervently hoped this would slow the tornado down and stall it like an old, worn-out motor. As usual, I was wrong.

The tornado made a noise like a chesty ingénue in an old horror film, magnified by a thousand, and exploded behind my flimsy elastic wall. I was not prepared for what happened next. The explosion rebounded back in the span of one Mississippi, and it picked me up and hurled me through the air like a rag doll.

One of the many perks of having unknown powers and not a damn soul to explain them to me was the unexpected, pee-your-pants fright that came right after using them. I screamed as I flew like a human whirling dervish. Natural Disasters 3, Iva 0.

Somehow, my power kept working despite my inability to form a coherent thought, and it placed a cocoon of air around my body the second before I slammed into the ground. The world slowly came back into focus as I lay flattened like a pancake. Instead of spitting out the slew of curse words that had spilled into my head, I lay there gasping for air.

When reality stopped making its Tilt-A-Whirl impression and my breathing became more natural, I tested out my limbs. I hadn’t broken my back because pain swept through every inch of my body. As I lay there wishing I had some 2,000 mg ibuprofen, I wondered what the hell had just happened. Slowly, because I was incapable of anything else, I looked through the rain and realized I wasn’t in Munchkinland. Instead, I had landed in the middle of a street. I saw stores that looked like buildings I recognized from town. This meant the blowback had thrown me at least two miles. That seemed unbelievable. How had I traveled that far? It only seemed as if I had gone a few hundred feet.

I noticed it was getting dark, and with the rain, it meant most drivers wouldn’t see me until it was too late. Just my luck—surviving a tornado boxing match only to get run over by a truck. But everything was spinning, and I couldn’t stand up. I rolled over onto my stomach and tried to crawl toward the side of the road. This feeble attempt came to an abrupt halt when I realized any pressure on my left hand caused agony, and my head went back to fuzzy town. I sensed someone beside me about that time, and then it all went dark.

Some later called my adventure with the tornado a success. Others, one in particular, called it the beginning of my end. I remained firmly on the fence.