Chapter 3: Paving the Way

"So let me get this straight," Gat said. "You're 'Miracle' Cura."

She nodded.

"You're the adopted sister of my former friend."

"Yup."

"And you want to join us as muscle?"

"That's what she said, though I'm having trouble believing it," Carlos replied. He hadn't expected his sister to be so okay with the idea; but then again, they'd both changed a lot this week.

"Well fuck it, I'm game. This ride just keeps getting crazier. What kind of muscle are you talking?"

She shrugged. "I've got to keep myself separate from the new persona, but I've always liked working with plants. I think I could pass as a different cape if I specialize in them."

"Okay, vague, but whatever. Plant girl and guy who won't die, it could work."

"I've got more than that!" Carlos protested.

"Like what?" Gat challenged.

"I've got some kind of weapon storage," he said, demonstrating. "There's these weird glowing things all over the city that only I can see, but I have no idea what's up with those… and there's the car thing!" he added lamely.

"So you have slightly more guns than me, you can jack a car like nobody's business, and you hallucinate," Gat said sarcastically, "I'm so impressed."

Carlos sighed. When Gat put it like that, he did sound pretty useless. He was barely more than an average person if you ignored the healing ability.

Amy winced in sympathy. "Have you tried interacting with the glowing things you mentioned? They might be important. Parahumans perceive their powers in all kinds of strange ways, believe me."

"To be honest? I've barely thought about them, with how I've been all week," he admitted. More than a few days had been spent just lying in bed.

"Well, we know our first step," she said, standing up and clapping her hands together. "You and I are going to go run some errands, while the wanted murderer and whoever she is stay here and eat our food."

He recognized this mood. She was channeling Mama, which meant she probably had a bunch of stuff to say to him once they were alone. This was confirmed when she swept the paperwork off the table. He groaned and got to his feet. Today had been a long day, and it looked like it wasn't stopping anytime soon.

"Finally," he said as they rounded a corner into an alleyway, "I thought we'd never find one at ground level."

His sister looked around. "Where is it?" she asked, her gaze completely missing the object of his attention. It took up much of the width of the narrow alley, looking like a cluster of vertically-aligned glass shards that shimmered and pulsed with a soft blue-white light. They chimed, softly but insistently, even audible from this distance, even around the corner. He led her forward, nearing the fire escape under which it sat.

"I'm not feeling much beyond the light and sound," he said after a moment. "I'm going to see if I can touch it."

"That sounds like a good plan. I'm going to step back now, in case you explode or something," she half-joked, doing exactly that. Once she was a few yards away, he reached out to the nearest shard of the cluster.

An addictive, overwhelming rush of power coursed through him. Like lightning in his veins, like cocaine in his cells, like the cluster was turning to ice water that rushed into every pore of his skin. He flashed with light, momentarily as bright as the shard had been. He let out an exultant, euphoric laugh, feeling like he could run a mile.

Then… it was over. He was normal, and Amelia was clapping a hand over his mouth to shut him up, then made a noise of disgust. "Ugh, it feels like you just had a massive orgasm, without the orgasm. Gross." she took her hand away. "I was going to ask why you started laughing like a maniac, but please do not fill me in."

"Wha- It's not like that!" he sputtered.,

"As someone who can instantly sense biochemistry, it is like that. It is exactly like that, and now I have the sensation of that burned in my brain."

"How would you even kno-" he stopped, not wanting the answer to that question. "Nevermind. Let's just forget this ever happened."

"Agreed," she said sullenly.

He tried running to the end of the alley and back. "I don't feel much different," he remarked as he returned.

"I think you might be running faster, or at least with better form," she commented. He shot her a look. "What? I'm not the one who tried out for the track team!"

"So, what, I get faster? I guess that's useful. Let's find another couple, see what happens?"

"Sure."

Ten minutes later, he spotted one on a rooftop. "You think we could get up a fire escape without drawing attention?"

She shrugged. "I'll keep watch while you try."

It took him five minutes to get enough height off the wall to catch the ladder, and he knew Amelia was snickering at his falls. At least he was healing away the bruises faster than they could form. He climbed the rusty fire escape, wincing when it squeaked loudly halfway up, but reached the roof without incident.

Another wave of euphoric energy later, he was back down the escape and running again.

"I mean, it's hard to tell if you're faster or not," she said. "Maybe it's a really minor boost, or something?"

"Only one way to find out," he replied.

Another shard was found and collected.

"No," she yawned, "You're definitely the same speed."

"So what, they just make me feel good? That can't be it, can it?"

"It could," she confirmed. "Lots of powers are one-note. You already have the other stuff, maybe this was just some weird extra thing you have?"

He frowned. "I'd like to get one or two more. Just to be sure."

She shrugged. "Sure. You owe me ice cream for earlier, though."

"Deal." He took the lead, spying another cluster on the roof of a distant gas station.

As it turned out, four was his lucky number. This became apparent mere moments after grabbing the last cluster. He turned to run back to the ladder before anyone noticed him up on the roof – and ran so fast he completely overshot the edge, falling with a yell.

Carlos hit the ground flailing, and bounded back into the air. He flew twenty feet in a graceful arc, landing in a flawless gymnast pose. He was distantly surprised to find his legs not only intact, but unhurt.

"Um… I think that did it," he said breathlessly.

"So, you glow now," Amelia remarked. "Oh wait, it's fading. Good. God this is surreal."

"You're telling me," he agreed, looking around to make sure nobody was watching. The area was deserted. He tried running again.

His skin glowed faint blue, and he took off like a rocket. Within moments, he was a hundred feet away from his sister; seconds later, he was by her side. "Super speed," he said. Then he crouched ant flew upward. "Super mobility," he amended as he landed.

"Yeah, seems like it." Amelia had an odd expression. "Anything else?"

He didn't feel any different, but that hardly meant anything. He'd just run at highway speeds without effort and jumped two or three stories like it was nothing, so why would he feel strange in other ways? He threw some experimental punches. When his knuckles lit up and his skin glowed again, he made an educated guess. He picked up a cinderblock nearby; it felt like a styrofoam block to him. "Super strength, too," he said as he tossed and caught the block a few times. Thankfully, lifting the cinderblock didn't trigger the glow; that would have been a pain. He set the block down.

"Seriously, this is so strange. My brother has superpowers."

"You've had powers for years, and I never looked at you weird," Carlos protested.

She shook her head. "My powers aren't very impressive."

"Your powers are amazing," he said earnestly. "You've changed more lives than I can count. You might be the only person on the planet who can give someone a flawless transition in ten minutes flat with little to no side effects, and you're definitely the only person in the world who can claim to have accidentally eliminated the common cold."

"We don't talk about The Incident!" she said sharply.

"Right, right," he lamented. "My point is, I can't do anything like that. Probably," he added as an afterthought. Who knew really. These newfound powers felt so natural it was like breathing, and he hadn't felt any kind of drain using them.

Would he have to hold back for the rest of his life for fear of a random glow giving him away? He couldn't say, but the thought worried him.

Carlos had been quiet too long. He mentally reoriented. "Look, we got some results, but it's getting late. I owe you some ice cream, and I know you wanted to do the paperwork today. Let's go to the Boardwalk?"

She smiled. "Yeah," she agreed.

"I'm thinking we should go for our GEDs," Amelia said as they watched the sunset from a bench on the Boardwalk.

Carlos looked to her, surprised. "You do? I thought you wanted to stick it out?"

"Winslow has never been kind to us, and with Milo gone..." she trailed off, clenched and unclenched her left hand, looking down at it.

He followed her gaze; the motion had brought out thin white scars along her forearm, long healed but forever present. He saw a series of fresh scabs and cuts on her palm. "Amy, please tell me-"

"I'm not," she said, already knowing what he would ask, "It was an accident. I saw you on the news and lost control for a moment."

He let it go. They sat in silence, watching the waves lap on the rocky beach, the sun glinting off the white spires and arches of the Protectorate headquarters. Finally, he spoke. "I hate to leave school when we only have a few months left, but you might be right. Things are going to be crazy from now on."

She nodded. "You're an ass for dragging me into this, you know. I love you, but you're an ass. You should have talked to me beforehand."

"I know," he said. Then, quietly, "I just miss him so much."

"I do too," she agreed, squeezing his hand as he began to cry softly. "I do too."

He knew it was stupid to blame himself for Milo's death. There was little he could have done to change things in the moment. But knowing something didn't stop doubts from creeping in, or keep him from lying awake at night thinking about what he might have done differently. There was so much left unsaid, so many things he wished they could have done together.

Carlos missed the sun's last moments on the horizon, finally drying his tears as twilight descended.

He wasn't the same. Even without these powers, he would never have been the same, never quite moved on. He had been so powerless to stop the violence that night, and it had just been the capstone on a life of hoping something would change. His brother died an ignoble death at the hands of people who didn't even notice him, and nobody in power was going to do anything to prevent it from happening again.

Well, now he had power. If the authorities wouldn't step up to protect people like Milo, he would.

"Let's go," he said softly, picking up the completed paperwork they had set aside. "We've got a big day tomorrow."