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I shuffle the papers in front of me, arranging them until they’re perfectly fanned across the conference room table, the headline of each newspaper now visible. My gaze snags on the headline from the London Champions Daily , the third largest newspaper globally and the single largest newspaper whose content is exclusively dedicated to the Forty-Eight.

Taranis, master of lightning, saves pediatric surgeon from collapsing at hospital, states, “Some heroes wear white coats, not capes.”

I push the newspapers out of place so I can see the full picture dominating the space below the headline. I sigh, wishing that he was the clay I had to work with. A knight clad in a baby blue so pale it appears white, contrasting against his light-brown skin and accentuating his smile. It’s a smile that Margerie would—and has—called panty-dropping and that every single person on earth has universally concluded belongs to the most attractive man who ever lived. Except, well, he isn’t a man exactly.

I think about how effortlessly and elegantly he smiles for the camera. Six foot something. Perfect fade with a trademark lightning bolt shaved behind his right ear. Big purple eyes—not blue, not aqua, but bright violet—that have been on the cover of almost every magazine ever made—that could afford him, anyway. Scary likable. I’ve met a few folks from Selkie Global, the media firm that manages his PR, and though they’ve always been tight-lipped about what it’s like working with him, I imagine it’s a dream. One that I definitely won’t have a chance to take part in because he’s not the one I’m here to see.

I rearrange the papers so that the London Champions Daily is third down instead of right there on top, laughing at me. Because the truth is that I’m the teeniest bit grateful he’s not the client I’m coming to meet. Taranis is perfect. Too perfect. And just so ... pretty . I don’t do well with men, pretty ones in particular. I haven’t dated a guy seriously since college, and I haven’t dated a guy who looks like Taranis ever . Men make me nervous. Actually, everything makes me nervous, but guys who look like that? Terrifying.

“Aren’t you scared?” I jolt at the sound of Margerie’s voice, and she snorts out a laugh that she not at all convincingly disguises as a cough. My chief marketing officer and emotional support person leans into my shoulder and gives the back of my arm a pinch. “What were you daydreaming about?”

“How you move like a ninja in those shoes.” I scowl, glaring down at her feet. She’s almost six inches taller than I am without heels and chooses to wear stilettos every day to work. These are baby-pink satin and look more expensive than all the shoes in my closet combined. “You’d give any of the Forty-Eight a run for their money in those—literally.”

She laughs a little harder, voice more muffled as she covers the bottom half of her face with her notebook. She glances to the glass wall of the conference room, evidently trying not to be overheard by the members of the Champions of Earth Coalition standing on the other side of the glass. The staff are waiting in the hallway—lining the hallway—like a royal congregation welcoming a king. I try to refocus on the feel of the newspaper under my fingertips instead of my next breath, which fails to arrive as promised.

There’s so much on the line here—literally, possibly, the fate of the entire world—and somehow me and my small firm are the team that nabbed the short-term contract to convince this mysterious holdout to become a good guy.

A hero.

I shrivel at the thought. “Stop.” Margerie’s hand comes down on the newspaper stack like the blade of a guillotine on my intrusive thoughts. “Don’t panic. We got this.”

I nod, but the words I mean to repeat get stuck in my throat. I can’t not think about the newspaper lying right there on top. Two weeks old—an eternity ago in the eyes of the press—but not wrong ...

The Riot Creative is set to be the smallest firm to work with one of the Forty-Eight. Supernatural Defense Department chair says that this shows Mr. Singkham and the Champions “aren’t serious” about Pyro acquisition.

After weeks of assessment, my team arrived at the same conclusion. Though we’ll be paid for our work on the proposal we put together, there’s a strong chance we’ll be leaving this office today without anything more than that. Margerie keeps reminding me that to have made it this far is already a success—that we have other clients, that our team is highly skilled, that I formed a company capable of taking on a contract like this in only seven years. Even if there’s blowback from this and the Pyro becomes a villain, as we all suspect he will, we’re a PR firm specializing in crisis communications. We can recover. And if we don’t—if the world burns tomorrow and my company collapses with the rubble—we’ll all still be fine. My team is highly skilled, capable of finding new work, and I ... I could start a new company, but ...

I don’t want to do any of that. I don’t want my team to leave me. My social anxiety made hiring people hard enough that I resisted for the first two years, working myself into the ground trying to do everything by myself, until two things happened in the same month: my family staged an intervention and a client fired me. So, after a lot of work with my therapist, I managed to open my mind up to the idea of hiring staff. And I lucked out. I found Margerie.

My core team has been with me for four years now, Margerie for five. I know they’ll eventually look for new jobs, take their next steps, form families, move out of Sundale, do normal people things, but my hope is that maybe, just maybe, if we can nail this short-term contract and successfully convince the Pyro to become a hero in the next three months, I can get them the long-term contract. This sexy, massive ten-year contract to cover the Pyro’s PR for the duration of his contract with the Champions would take us to places I couldn’t have ever dreamed of when I started The Riot Creative; my team will all want to stay and I won’t have to change anything.

“Hey.” Margerie’s voice has gone all soft, and I look up at her, and she looks down at me, her perfect eyebrows drawn over a perfect nose. “What did I say?” She says each word carefully, speaking to me like I’m about to have a panic attack.

I am about to have a panic attack. It wouldn’t be the first time. I inhale deeply and think how annoyed my therapist would be with me. Not only have I not been doing my breathing exercises, I’ve stopped breathing altogether.

“We got this,” I repeat, knowing that it’s not just my fear of abandonment that’ll fuel me today. Looking up at Margerie, the truth is that I like my team. The fight for this contract feels like a fight for them in a way that no contract has ever felt before, based on the size, scope, and notoriety of this contract alone. All I can do now is hope and pray the Pyro turns out to be a decent, nice person—well, superbeing—and maybe, maybe, just maybe ... a hero.

Margerie frowns. “Make me believe it.”

“We got this?”

Margerie sighs. “We’ve gone over this. It’s worth the risks. The bad stuff is just speculation. All we know for facts is that the Pyro is a free agent. The VNA placed a bid. The COE placed another bid. We don’t know the amounts, but we know they’re attractive enough for him to consider working with the heroes despite the fact that he’s never worked with anyone on anything before and doesn’t seem to really give a shit about ... well, anything,” she huffs. “That’s why we got the bid,” she says, trying to be reassuring.

“That’s why we got the bid,” I repeat, taking another breath in and holding it for five seconds before releasing it between us. “He’s not special.”

“He’s not special.”

“We’re not special.”

“We’re fucking great.” She grins. “There’s a reason we got this contract.”

I nod, my lips thinning and my shoulders rolling back. “There’s a reason we got this contract.”

“We’re great.”

“ You’re great.”

She rolls her eyes, a little blush dotting the tops of her cheeks. Humble, Margerie dislikes receiving compliments almost as much as I do. I know that she’s uncomfortable anytime articles mention her as the face of the company—not because she’s a trans woman, which is often the source of a lot of mind-numbingly dumb controversy, but because she actually is the nicest person I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing and wants me to take credit for some of my ideas when I’d rather not take credit for any of them.

I like the anonymity of being behind the scenes, even if I did found The Riot Creative. It’s a bit of an irony, my brother Charlie once pointed out, that I hate being in the public eye even though I run a public-facing media company. But marketing and branding are about so much more than PR. I’ve always liked the creativity of it, the problem-solving side of it, and I like making good people and products shine.

Though I suppose the Pyro doesn’t need much help in the shine department, considering the terrifying scope of his powers ... I shudder.

“We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you, Madame President.” Margerie grips my shoulder and rubs the center of my back through my basic navy blazer. “And I promise we’ve prepared everything as best we can. We just need to make it through today, like we’ve practiced. Then you can go back to being the mysterious genius behind the most successful boutique marketing firm in all of North America, and I can go back to taking credit for all of your genius.”

She winks. I snort out a short laugh.

She and I both glance at the team scattered about the room, getting all the packets and snacks laid out and fretting over the projector for the thousandth time, and I can’t help the swell of pride I feel watching them, the comfort I feel with them. I take another breath, hold it, and sigh. “I know no one thinks this is real, but I think we can get this contract.”

“That’s the spirit.” She beams. “If today goes well—which it will—we’ll get the extended long-term contract to manage the Pyro’s PR, which will feed our children’s children’s children. So don’t go doubting us now, after all we did to get here.”

I nudge her hip with mine. “You don’t even want kids.”

“Damn straight. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to use my kids’ kids’ kids’ money to buy a yacht and retire at thirty-eight.”

“If you retire at thirty-eight, I will knife you.”

Margerie’s laugh booms through the room, loud enough to turn heads. It wrenches an unwilling, choked laugh out of me, and several other members of my team start laughing too, even though they have no idea what we’re talking about. Margerie’s laugh has that effect.

“Come on, let’s go reorganize the packets for the thirtieth time while we wait for his late ass to show up.”

“Let me check the presentation again ...”

“No ... you already did that four hundred times over coffee this morning. Let’s do the packets. Also, you never answered my question.”

“What question?”

“Whether or not you’re scared.”

“Of him? Of meeting one of the Forty-Eight?” I ask, genuinely confused.

She rolls her eyes, and her perfect mermaid waves shift elegantly around her shoulders; she’s the spitting image of Ariel. I have long, voluminous curls that are the same length as Margerie’s but lack all the civility of hers. “Of course.”

I blink again, still unsure if we’re speaking the same language. A small spike of embarrassment I don’t usually feel around Margerie shoots up the back of my neck as I try to make sense of what she’s said. “Oh. No?”

“No?” She smiles and follows me as I make a second round around the table, pushing packets around and carefully making sure everything is even and equidistant. Pen, packet, pencil—it’s all in a perfect line, all thirteen places around the table. I force myself to stop when Margerie suggests that the breakfast spread could use a little sprucing. “So you’re really not scared? Not even a little bit?”

“What would I have to be scared about?”

“I’ve never met one of the Forty-Eight in person, and I know you haven’t either. And it’s not like we’re meeting Taranis either,” she says, jerking her thumb over her shoulder toward the papers on the table and the most prominent recent London Champions headline. “This guy is kind of supposed to be the worst.”

“Not the worst , just ... unknown ...”

“Idle.”

“Allegedly ...”

“And when he does get involved, it’s to blow up shit that’s kind of important.”

“Never without cause.”

“Yes, it’s because he’s the worst. He blew up the historic Old Sundale Bank.”

“He was only twenty-one ...”

“He still blew it up!”

“While there was a robbery in progress ...”

“Everybody knows there’s no money in that place. The robbers were morons ...”

“And robbers . What they were doing was illegal ...”

Margerie’s raspy whisper rises up into a high squeak when she says, “He lit them on fire!”

I ... hesitate, snapping on gloves as I prepare to rearrange the croissants for the second time. I long to throw out three of them that are smushed or broken, but I force myself to move on to the fruit tray. “Well, I guess that’s true.”

Margerie coughs to cover her laugh. “Okay, I’m officially a bad person. I should not be laughing at that.” She looks up at the projector as the screen saver changes slides to a different historic landing spot—this one is Pele’s. She landed in Hawaii, fitting given that she can control lava with nothing more than her mind.

She was the fourth member of the forty-eight superbeings who crash-landed on Earth as children. With no memory of where they came from but with extraordinary gifts, the Forty-Eight were welcomed by humanity with surprising civility. After the initial arrival, they were placed within host families under the care of the SDD, the Supernatural Defense Department. They were studied, but overall an attempt was made to integrate them into our world.

It worked ... for the most part. But when the kids started to get older, some of them showed troubling signs. Some became ... destructive. The Meinad was then officially termed a villain —a young boy who clawed apart his host parents. He went on to join with the Marduk, whose power over thunder was used to wreak havoc on the city in which they lived—not far from Sundale, actually.

Together, only in their early teens, the two of them formed what’s now known as the VNA, the Villains Network of America. They have branches all over the world now, with seventeen supervillains contracted to cause chaos. They rob, steal, and take contracts to kill. They are indiscriminate in the kinds of mayhem they engage in. But why?

No one really knows. In a historic interview two years ago that my team would have done terrible things to be a part of, the Marduk was asked why he had formed the VNA and what its purpose was, and he’d just smiled at the camera, all cavalier and beautiful, and said, “I’m looking for something.”

“What?” the journalist had followed up.

“You’ll know when I find it.”

The landscape on the projector screen changes to Sundale’s very own Memory Park, where Taranis landed. The Champions of Earth Coalition was formed as a counter to the villains soon after the Marduk and the Meinad teamed up. That’s where capitalism came in, with the COE paying forty-eight members to join the heroes team. In his midteens, Taranis became the first to sign up. Some of the Forty-Eight have remained holdouts all this time, like the Pyro, but ...

“He’s here,” I say, clenched, eyes catching on the glass. People have started stirring. There’s some commotion outside. Jeremy and Dan are doing a power-suit sprint over to us—an event I decide should most definitely be entered as an Olympic discipline. They’re both huge comic book nerds, and meeting one of the Forty-Eight has been on their collective bucket list for years.

“You still want me to lead the presentation, Madame President?” Margerie whispers in my ear.

“Of course.”

“You sure?” She huffs quietly, “This is our biggest bid, and nobody knows his feelings on trans women yet.”

My nerves are disrupted by what she’s just said. I blink up at her. “Nobody said anything to you, did they?” If they did, I was fully ready to take a page out of the Pyro’s notebook and set the building on fire.

Margerie gives me a flat look. “No, Mom . Nobody’s been anything but nice and professional.”

“Good.” This wasn’t always the case. A Black woman–founded corporate consulting firm with a white trans woman CMO wasn’t always met with open arms. Don’t even mention the fact that the rest of the C-suite’s members were either minorities, queer, or both. A couple times, we’d even won blind bids and still been denied the contract, the client preferring to go with someone who had the kind of face they wanted to represent their firm.

“Then we go as planned.”

“You, our mysterious brain? Me, the face?”

“That sounds like the plot of a horror movie.”

Margerie laughs as we’re separated by Dan’s and Jeremy’s jostling bodies. Dan grabs my shoulders and shakes me.

“He’s here!” His voice is a squeal. He’s older than I am by a couple years, but right now he sounds like he’s six instead of that plus thirty. Dan grabs my arm too hard, pinching me above the elbow until I make a sound. “Sorry, sorry!” he whisper-shouts.

“Shush! And don’t bruise her damn arm.” Jeremy pushes me from behind, tugging down on the short cap sleeves of my white button-up. I paired it with navy pants that I think make my butt look gigantic and accentuate the pouch below my belly button, but Dan and Jeremy and Margerie said it looked good, even if they did try to convince me to wear the lavender two-piece— lavender . Maybe Margerie can pull off pastels, but I like the dark colors. They help me blend in to the wallpaper better.

“Would y’all stop it?” Margerie hisses.

Dan and Jeremy don’t stop it, and soon my entire team is crowded near the swinging glass double doors. I’m somewhere in the middle, Garrison on my left, Jem up in front of me, Vanya at my back.

“Y’all, assume the position! Not this position!” Margerie quickly shoves everyone back. “Not you!” She grabs my shoulder and wrenches me forward just as Mr. Singkham’s assistant comes bustling down the hall.

She opens the door and looks at me. “Ms. Theriot, the Pyro has just arrived. While we clear him with security, Mr. Singkham will be arriving shortly to greet you. When the Pyro comes up, your team can begin your presentation.”