Chapter 1:

I was a child celebrity in the way a tomato is a fruit. My picture was spread around the country, my name known wide, and for some time, I wasn’t ‘Sam Ward,’ but ‘that boy who was kidnapped by his father.’ 

My father being a criminal came as a surprise to me, though as a toddler, maybe that wasn’t unusual. So far as I was concerned, he fed me well and spoke softly; he was a model parent for a kid. 

I don’t recall much of the incident. There were flashes of blue and red, the stomping of feet, and the glint of something sharp in my father’s hand, but nothing more. I couldn’t remember the feeling of the blade to my throat. Even watching the footage later (it occasionally cropped up on social media, to my amusement) it was more of a blur of an incident than a trauma. 

That didn’t stop my therapist from telling me how much harm it’d done. Or the teachers. Or the counselors. ‘Depersonalization,’ whatever that meant. There was a trepidation everyone who knew my past approached me with. Like I had the fragility of pre-shattered glass. No longer was I another child in school like everyone else—I was Sam Ward, and I needed protecting. 

There’s a loneliness to fame. My mother would take me from school to school, and the neighbors would treat her like a battered house wife, and the children would treat me like a freak when they learned my past. Maybe not in a bad way, like a ‘this boy is weird,’ but like ‘this boy was on my tv last week.’ It was always fascination and innocent questions at first. Then they would realize I was a normal child, and I would be left alone. 

It wasn’t until middle school that the questions stopped. I aged past the world’s memory, and my mother found peace with a good neighborhood and a warm man she met at a dollar store. 

Paul was a good man. If Dale Ward was my father, Paul Spencer was my dad. When my mother became Annie Spencer, I thought to take the name as well, but I had a nostalgia for the name Ward and an amusement to being a mismatched set. 

That’s how I’d always felt—mismatched. I’d assumed everyone felt like they lived in the wrong body. It wasn’t until I’d told a friend in high-school I wanted to be a girl that I realized that wasn’t a universal experience. Afterward, I was treated like a freak again, but for a different reason. The news never made it back to my mother, thankfully, and I never broached the subject myself. I kept the topic close to heart my life after, and to this day I’d told no one else. I grew up, made new friends, and attended college for a degree I was told I needed.

So it was that I found myself walking home from class on a summer’s evening when the world exploded. 

It wasn’t fire or doom or death, but a shocking and blinding white that enveloped the Earth. 

Everything changed.

People changed. In spirit, yes, but in make, too, and that was more surprising. The news covered nothing but the flash of white for quite some time. It was inexplicable; the entire world united in one experience. There was no small amount of explanations: conspiracists and religious zealots alike rallied together. 

I remember the first time I saw somebody with powers. It was a few weeks after, and I’d seen strange videos popping up on my feed. People flying, spitting fire. A giant. I laughed. Was it a trend? I’d thought the special effects were quite well done. I realized I was wrong in person. 

The bus I rode from home to class was shoddy, smelly, and I loved it. The window seat made for a hypnotizing view, the world flashing by, and it was nice that I didn’t need to pick my own direction. 

I paid little attention when a man wearing a mask sat next to me. It was normal, and I rarely watched the world inside the glass. 

When the feeling of cold metal pressed my side, it took more than a few moments for me to glance down. I blinked when I saw the pistol pressed against me. I almost laughed. 

“This again?”

The man seemed confused for a moment, but shook it off. “Don’t scream, don’t say shit, give me your wallet.”

It made little sense to me for someone to hold up a moving bus, but then again, I wasn’t a criminal. He seemed almost put out when I handed him my wallet and looked back out the window. 

It hurt my ears when he stood and started yelling. When the bus lurched and the driver panicked, my head smacked the seat in front of me. I frowned. 

I’d looked over to complain when I saw a Radiant for the first time. The robber was standing, screaming, then he was pressed against the roof by a tall man and his one, strong hand. I’d thought my eyes were playing tricks when I realized the man was metal. 

I rubbed my eyes and blinked for good measure, but the robber fell slack and the metal man dropped him. The people in the bus were equally relieved and terrified.

The bus came to a quiet stop, the door opened, and the crowd rushed out, hunch-backed and mousy. 

The metal man sat in the leather seat with his jaw clenched and his hand pressed against the robber’s chest.

He looked over at me when he realized I hadn’t left. The confusion was clear; he stopped himself from asking. 

I scooted to the outside seat and spoke to him. “I thought you might want a witness.”

He looked good with a smile. 

When the police arrived, the man had turned to flesh again, and the robber was taken off in cuffs.

We were escorted to the police station together. The investigation didn’t take long. I told them about the man and the gun, and the metal man told them he stopped the robber, but not how. 

We walked out together. I slapped my forehead at the bottom of the steps, and he looked over, confused. “What?”

I shook my head. “I just realized I missed class.”

“That’s what you’re worried about?”

“I have an exam this week.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’re a strange guy.”

“You’re the one made of metal.”

He looked troubled. “About that. I would really appreciate it if you could…”

“Keep it under wraps?”

“…Yeah. Please.”

I smiled for the first time in a while. “Sure, but you owe me a drink.”

“What,” He said, laughing, “Didn’t I just save your life?”

I waved my hand and shook my head. “This and that are two different things.”

He shrugged helplessly. “Fine.”

The man held his hand out and grinned. “I’m Chris.”

Chris and I became fast friends. Within a month, we saw each other or spoke every day, and not long after, we were roommates. Times were hard, especially for a college student and his tin man. 

The world discovered the Changed and named them Radiants. Not all of the Radiants got their powers at the beginning. They appeared at random, in anyone, and in many forms.

Chris could turn to metal, his strength would increase. Others could shoot lasers or slip through solids. 

It wasn’t long before those with bad intentions found theirs. It was even faster that people fought back. Whatever they named themselves, the public changed it. Those who sinned were villains and those who stopped them were heroes. 

Being roommates with a hero was as fun as it was bothersome. I liked hearing his stories, though I grumbled that I kept the house. Could I complain about cleaning the bathroom when Chris was stopping villains?

Life moved on. 

And today, I found myself walking down the street, aimless and lost. 

The air was cool, and the sunlight dimmed as it crept over the horizon. The people around scurried through the streets like ants returning to the nest. I pulled my phone from my pocket and read the message my girlfriend—ex-girlfriend had sent. 

It was something about our lack of communication or my distance. I’d hardly read it. I saw the paragraph wall and read the last sentence: “I think we should take a break.”

That was all I needed. I’d sent a simple, ‘okay,’ and that was it. Clean, concise. 

I felt nothing. 

Maybe it was unfair to her. When she’d asked me out, I had said yes in part because she was pretty and kind, and because I envied her. Dating her was as close as I could manage to being her. 

Maybe she’d realized there wasn’t much in me to begin with.

I arrived to the crosswalk with a peace settling in my gut.

Sam Ward didn’t need to be anyone else. Sam Ward didn’t need to be. 

I felt a little bad for Chris. It might be tough to manage rent a person down. Hopefully the driver wouldn’t be too shocked. 

The light turned red and that meant ‘go.’ 

I’d barely taken a step when I felt a pull on the back of my shirt. I turned, surprised, and saw a woman with a shocked face. She yanked, and I stepped back up on the sidewalk.

She said something. I didn’t hear her. I turned away and waited with the crowd. I didn’t ask why she saved me, and she didn’t ask why I needed to be saved. She stood next to me, gripped my sleeve, and walked with me until we reached the other side. 

The woman glanced at me with a complicated expression, but released me. 

“Sorry,” I said.

She bit her lip. I smiled. “Don’t worry. I’m fine now.”

She hesitated, but pulled her phone from her pocket and held it out. “If you need to talk, I can listen.”

I’d never needed to talk. No one deserved suffering me. 

“No, I think I’m fi—”

There was a crack, a flash of gold, and the sound of air displacing. Our hair whipped as a thunderous boom met my ears. There was a sudden heat, and a push, and I fell from my feet to the sidewalk. 

I glanced up, dizzied, and saw a person darting through the air. It was a man who flew, held aloft by golden light, his jacket flaring out behind him as the wind caught it. His hair was golden like shining sunlight, and he raised a hand toward a figure that pursued him. 

The figure shot toward him, sailing through the air,  narrowly dodging the projectile loosed from the man’s hand, and drove a fist into his gut, sending him flying. 

The golden man crashed into the sidewalk, indenting the concrete, and bounced to a rolling stop in front of me and the stranger.

She and I looked at each other, shocked. The city was quiet for a moment. The figure who struck him floated over, her body clad in a purple bodysuit and a matching cape. Her hair danced in the wind, and she smiled at us.

“Sorry about that. You two alright?”

I opened my mouth to answer when the man moved. He careened another projectile to the hero, forcing her to dodge, and in that moment jumped up. 

The man looked between myself and the stranger, and moved to her, hand outstretched, face desperate. A hostage?

I almost let him. It would be easy to sit back. It wasn’t my problem. 

But when I saw that deranged face, it wasn’t a golden man in front of me, but Dale Ward, and he was holding a knife and not light. 

The stranger who saved my life froze. Her face warped in fear, and I saw the phone she’d held out to me shattered on the concrete. 

I pushed her aside before I realized I’d done it. The man grabbed my throat, surprised at the change, but adapted. “You’ll do.”

Golden light surrounded us, and we lifted from the ground. I could breathe, but barely. 

The hero had recovered, moved to pursue, but the golden man held a  gilt finger to my temple. “Move and he dies.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t do this.”

“I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.”

He floated backward and up, soaring into the sky. The ground shrank beneath us. I felt a sinking in my gut, a fluttery panic and loss of control. I could feel his breath on my face, the sickly mint sticking in my nose like sludge. The buildings shrank beneath us. 

He’d gained a sizable lead on the hero, and I heard him let out a tense breath. 

“Thanks for the help,” He said, smiling, and let go. 

Gravity claimed me. The man flew off with a flash of light, and I felt the whooshing of wind in my ears as I spun. There was the ground and the sky, the sky and the ground, and I felt the coming death. 

It was strange. There was no peace like before. The chilling numbness of my heart lifted as I thought back to the stranger. There was a gladness that it wasn’t her. 

Purple flashed in my vision, and I saw the hero soaring to me, hand outstretched. She was close, and our fingers brushed. 

A blinding bolt of gold struck her in the side, and she cried out. I missed her grip as she was careened away. I caught the glimmer of light in the distance. 

The ground rushed to greet me. My heart pounded, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to keep it. A burning spread through my core.

I felt a tingling, an itching, a sense of something new birthed in me. 

White light flashed, and the world went dark.