old songs. He watches her. Red- haired like a flame, short-lived as a match. To care about humans is to care about leaves, about the frost on the glass in the morning. Breathe and it’s gone.

Still, he surreptitiously cradles the overloaded plane.

THERE is ice on the lake, thick, hard ice, no fog. The kids wrap themselves up like packages in parkas, hats, mittens. Mr. Green takes the girls out back and gets them to make a shelter. He does something he hasn’t done in years, gestures a hemisphere of glowing green. “Pile snow over that.” “Oooh,” the kids go. “Ano ne!” When they cover it with snow, there’s nothing but an igloo glowing faintly like a neon light in a snowstorm.

Advice: “Anyone know why we cover it up? You protect your secret identity. You don’t want to advertise.”

They bob their heads in agreement.

“People laugh,” says the kid with the long braid bitterly, slouching out from the cabin. He has a butterfly on his jeans. Probably gay.

“No. Not just people laugh. Your enemies find you. People who are going to hurt you find you.”

The kid considers.

“Same thing. Laugh. Hurt.”

The kid knows nothing.

The boy and the men get settled down in the clients’ loft, and the girls giggle in the new igloo.

The red- haired travel agent gets the spare room in the cabin. She uses the shower until the mirror is steamy. He showers after she’s finished and smells lavender soap, woman smells. It’s been twenty years since Lana died. It’s been forever since he was a human man with Lana. He feels bothered and self-conscious with so many people in his privacy.

He pads out in socks to find the red- haired girl in front of the fire, toweling her wet hair from mahogany back to flame. She’s wearing a green sweater that goes too well with her hair and jeans that fit her like a thin coat of paint. He realizes, embarrassingly, there’s a question he hasn’t asked.

“My name is Lan,” she says.

He winces.

“I know,” she says. “Your wife’s name. I am sorry. My name is just Lan.”

He pulls herself together. “That’s your Talent name?”

She shakes her head, smiling. “Just my name.”

“Funny name.”

“Not as funny as the Green Force.”

“Green,” he says. “Bill. Bill was the name my foster parents gave me. The last name changes, but I’m always Bill.”

He looks into the fire, remembering streams of fire, falling, falling, gravity screaming around him, catching and shaping it in his pudgy hands, turning it into a cradle—

“Bill,” she says. “Nice. Why do you want to die, Bill?”

She’s probably twenty, twenty-five. Before he gets to know her, she’ll be dead.

He’s told his own story a hundred times, seen it in the comics, until he almost believes that Mom baked pies for church socials and Dad drove a tractor round the farm. But he remembers the First World War and the Civil War and the Revolution, and before his name was Bill it was Will and Gwillhem and Willa-helm, and his parents were Mutti and Dadu.

Demon, the villagers called him. The villagers tried to burn him, drown him, stone him. Fire flowed around him. When they threw him into the pond, he shaped air in a bubble around him. He is your angel, the priest said. Call him Willa-helm, Protector. Do not be afraid of him.

For a long time he protected them from a distance, like a guard dog, half-angel, half-wolf.

Then he got involved.

He had friends.

He fell in love.

Now he fishes.

“Death is what people do.” Not so long ago, a moment ago in his long life, the other Talents showed up. Each of them unique, wild, strange. Together, a gang. Friends. And Lana. He thought he was people. They proved he was wrong.

“What do those kids have for talents?” he asks.

“Oh, one thing, another. They look after each other,” she says. “That’s talent enough.”

Yeah. “They got long life?” he asks. “Is that one of their Talents?”

She sits with the towel on her knees, looking into the fire. “No. I’ve known lots like them. The others are dead.”

“What’s their story? Born with Talent? Made?”

“Made.”

“How?” Atom, an atomic explosion. Poor Elastic, a vat of chemicals. Himself falling like a star.

And he has touched something. The Chinese girl stares into the fire, her eyes dead black and her mouth widening into a grimace. Her hands tighten around the towel.

“I made them,” she says. “I cursed them. Me.”

And she gets up abruptly and leaves.

FOUR of them went on that long-ago fishing trip: Iguana Man, Astounding, Atom, and the