telling them what to do, which is a load of crap. It’s nothing like that.
“You know how, some mornings, you just feel a little angry at the world?” she continued. “Or you’re irritable, so that small things—things that normally wouldn’t annoy you—set you off? It’s like that. Only mixed with an inability to care about consequences.
“Even that’s kind of normal—I’ve been there, felt like that, long before I got these powers. You know how it is when you’re up late, and you know that if you don’t go to bed, you’re going to hate life the next day? Then you stay up anyway, because you don’t care? It’s like that. As an Epic, you just don’t care. After all, you deserve to be able to do what you want. And if you go too far, you can change later. Always later.”
She closed her eyes as she spoke, and I felt a chill. I had felt like she’d described. Who hasn’t? Listening to her, it seemed perfectly logical to me that an Epic should do what they do. That horrified me.
“But you’ve changed,” I told Megan. “You’ve resisted.”
“For a few days,” she said. “It’s hard, David. Really, really hard. Like going without water.”
“You said it’s easier when you’re near me.”
She opened her eyes and glanced over at me. “Yeah.”
“So there’s a secret to beating it.”
“Not necessarily. A lot of things relating to Epics don’t make any sense.”
“Everyone says that,” I replied, standing and walking to my desk. “We say it so much, I wonder if we just take it for granted. Here, look at this.” I dug out my research on Epic weaknesses.
“What’s this?” Megan said, standing up as well. She walked over and leaned down next to me, her head so close to mine. “You going all-out nerd on me again, Knees?”
“I’ve been finding connections between Epics and their weaknesses,” I said, pointing at my notes on Mitosis, then Sourcefield. “We say the weaknesses are random, right? Well, there are some large coincidences related to these two.”
Megan read. “His own music?” she asked. “Huh.”
“What about Steelheart?” I asked, excited. “His powers were negated by people who didn’t fear him. You knew him—is there something in his past you can connect to his weakness?”
“It’s not like we went to dinner parties together,” Megan said dryly. “Most people in the city, even the higher-ups, didn’t even know about me. All they knew was ‘Firefight,’ my dimensional double.”
“Your … what?”
“Long story,” Megan said, distracted as she looked over my notes on Sourcefield. “Steelheart wanted to keep everything about me as secret as possible. So he kept his distance from the real me, so as not to draw attention. Sparks, he kept his distance from pretty much everyone.”
“There’s a connection here,” I said, flicking the papers with one hand. “There’s a connection to all of it, Megan. Maybe even a reason.”
I expected her to object, like both Prof and Tia had. Instead, she nodded.
“You agree?” I asked.
“This was done to me,” Megan said. “Against my will. I became an Epic. I’d sure like to know if there was more meaning to it all. So yeah, I’m willing to believe.” She still stared at the page. “More than willing, maybe.”
It was hard not to notice how near to me she was standing, her cheek almost brushing my own. The urge to reach out and pull her even closer was so powerful that, in that moment, I thought I understood how she must feel being drawn to use her abilities.
“If there is a connection to the weakness,” I said, to distract myself, “there might be a secret to overcoming the influence of the powers. We can get you out of this, Megan.”
“Maybe,” she said, then shook her head. “So help me, if this is related to ‘the power of love’ or some similar kind of bull, I’m going to strangle somebody.…” Her face was right next to mine. So close.
“The power of w-what?” I stammered.
“Don’t read too much into that.”
“Oh.”
She smiled. So, figuring it couldn’t hurt—the worst she could do was shoot me—I leaned forward to kiss her. This time, remarkably, she didn’t pull away.
It felt fantastic. I didn’t have much experience, and I’d heard these things were supposed to be awkward, but this time—for once in my life—nothing went wrong. She pressed her lips against mine, head tilted to the side, and wrapped her arms around me, warm and inviting. It felt like … like …
Like something fantastic I didn’t ever want to end. And