it.
He tried to come back down, but he lost his balance and landed in an ungraceful heap on the floor.
The routine repeated itself time after time.
Jack flew up, hovered, and came in for a landing that just turned into a horrible crash.
He was wrecking havoc on the gym. Mentally, Jack made a note to himself to clean the gym up before he left.
He tried again. Flying up, he killed his altitude and fell down, trying to control his descent so he wouldn't tumble.
The crash happened so fast, his mind couldn't even track it. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the polished wooden gym floor, entangled by the basketball hoop.
Jack groaned. It was one thing to crash, but taking a basketball hoop down with him? He would never figure this out.
"You came down too fast," a faceless, deep voice told him.
"Is that you, Rust?" Jack asked as he struggled to detangle himself from the twisted basketball hoop.
Rust walked out the shadows.
"How long have you been here?"
"I got here before you," Rust informed him. "I've been watching you crash for ages and, honestly, it's getting too painful to watch now."
Rust stood over Jack as the teenager bent the distorted metal to free himself.
"I mean, seriously. How can anyone be that bad at landing?"
"Like you can talk," Jack said, bluntly, as he tried to straighten out the metal pole and replace it. "You haven't flown for as long as I've been alive!"
"Longer, actually," Rust admitted, frankly. "I haven't been in the sky for eighteen, almost nineteen years."
Jack looked Rust up and down. For the first time since Jack met him, Rust had been engaging him in conversations over the past two weeks. But Rust rarely shared anything personal with the teens. Actually, he didn't share anything personal with anyone.
"What happened?" Jack asked. He had never been the one to pry, but he figured it was time Rust spoke about something other than teamwork, superheroes, strategies or powers.
Rust looked at the teenager, about to be the leader of his team, the same weighty position Rust was in, decades ago. Rust could see how hard Jack was trying: his practising landing on his own, this late at night, proved it.
Rust sighed. "Do you really want to know what happened? It's a long story..."
Jack shrugged. "I wouldn't have asked if I didn't want to know," he pointed out. "I want to know why you didn't come back: you were a great hero. Why did you go into hiding?"
"The truth is: I wasn't really hiding. It started out that way, but, eventually, I wasn't running and hiding anymore. I was trying to pretend none of it had ever happened in the first place..."
17
"It all started when me and my siblings were born," Rust began. He and Jack sat on the bleachers in the half-lit gym. "First I was born, a year later Jason, two years later William and a year after Will, Carla. We were each born on a day with a gamma ray burst from the sun. We discovered our powers early, as all gamma accidents seem to. We were the first siblings in Hero History to all be gamma accidents. It was an amazing coincidence, but we were born in a hotspot, so-"
"What defines a hotspot for gamma accidents?" Jack interrupted.
"Well, generally, it's a very warm environment, usually coastal, like Crashton. It makes sense: more sunshine equals more chance of a gamma accident happening. Nonetheless, it was still impossible to find gamma accident siblings. But we weren't going to go down in the Guinness Book of World Records...
"We didn't know we were gamma accidents, not until I reached high school age. I knew a superhero who told me about Hero High. He suggested I enrol. You and your friends didn't have to do this, but, normally, you had to go through an audition with all the other freshmen, to prove you have powers or extraordinary abilities.
"I passed the audition with ease. Actually, I stunned the teachers: they hadn't seen a hero with the classic Superman powers for over a decade. They accepted me into the school. Actually, it was this school," Rust said, looking around the gym that had obviously been renovated since his time.
"I gotta say: I enjoyed that first year of high school. I was learning from the best superheroes in the world, training to use my powers properly and figuring out how to eat the slop they dished out in the cafeteria without gagging." Rust and Jack laughed.
"It was when Jason auditioned that trouble began. That year, they introduced something new to the auditions: a test to see how you got your powers. I guess it was a survey of some sort. When they discovered Jason was a gamma accident, and I was, too, they kicked us out. Literally. I still remember the way the principal said, 'gamma accident,' as if it were a curse word.
"I did a little bit of digging after that. I snuck into the Hero High's library and read every single book, paper or pamphlet I could find on gamma accidents. Not once were we labelled as heroes, only ever as traitors, felons, criminals, disasters and villains. I told my brothers and Carla about the blemished history of gamma accidents. I even remember Carla crying. 'But we're not like that,' she said, and I knew she was right.
"So, I did what every person who gets rejected by the system does: I bucked against the system," Rust continued. "We found an old stadium rarely used, snuck in and began training ourselves. My brothers and sister said I should do the training because I had gone to Hero High for a whole year.
"We trained for years," Rust laughed, lightly, as he remembered. "But it was worth every moment. Jason was fast, like me. We used to race each other, all the time. But he was more than just super fast. He could somehow channel that kinetic energy and turn it into heat energy. If he ran fast enough, he could catch fire. It was his signature trick to create a speed vortex and set it alight.
"William could control gravity. When we started training we discovered he could control his own gravity, as well as the gravity of other objects and people. He used to fly alongside me.
"Carla started out by just glowing, like Bella. Bella reminds me a lot of Carla," Rust said, sadly. "But Carla figured out how to create hard light. She would make a long stream of this hard light and she'd ride it on an old snowboard. She could do anything with that hard light: make a lasso, grab things, ride it... it was incredible.
"We became a team," Rust carried on. "We stayed up all night and figured out the name G-4: G for gamma and 4 because there were four of us. Yeah, I still can't figure out why it took us three notepads, twenty sodas and an entire night to come up with that one.
"We started saving people, towns, cities, states, the country, entire continents and, on a number of occasions, the world. The superhero community hated it. They hated us so bad, you won't believe how many times they tried to stop us. Lynch mobs, pitchforks, flaming torches, petitions... they ran us out of town countless times. But we never gave up. When we were chased out a city or a town, we left and settled down in another one. We were determined to change the name gamma accidents had been given because that name says too much. People don't believe you deserve your powers because you're just a mishap, a freak of nature... an accident. It's up to you to prove them wrong and show them you can be a hero. We wanted to prove we were heroes. And it took what felt like an eternity and another day, but eventually... the superhero community accepted that we were heroes.
"Samuel Danger, the previous Global Director of Hero Education and Training, invited my team to his office. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think it was trap. But, once we were there, he told us his plans for the future of gamma accidents all over the world. He made it clear that he was still suspicious of us, but being a 'fair man,' as he called it, he said he was willing to give us a chance. That was the year gamma accidents were allowed to attend Hero High and save people, publicly.
"I was surprised at how many gamma accidents there actually were. I'm telling you, there were thousands. Many of them had spent the previous decades saving the world in secret, avoiding the eyes of the public to the greatest extent possible just to carry on doing what they loved most: being h
eroes.
"I remember this one teenager that came up to me," Rust said, smiling at the memory. "He was so excited, he actually hugged all four of us. He became an amazing hero. He actually joined my team for a while."
"It sounds like everything was going great," Jack commented. "What happened?"
Rust drew a sharp breath. This was the hard part. "Things were going great... until one day. I really can't remember it, I don't know what happened, but I remember the news reports, the pictures, the aftermath... it was terrible. The story you've probably heard is; my team, G-4, turned evil and went on a massive rampage through the city, leaving a path of destruction and terror behind. Sure, we'd broken a couple of lampposts in our battles with villains before. But this... if you've ever seen pictures of the city after that rampage, the first thing you'll think is, 'A hurricane, a tornado, a super storm, an earthquake and a tropical low had a party.' Buildings were destroyed, roads were cracked, cars and buses were smashed and shattered glass was everywhere."
"Did your team really turn evil?" Jack asked.
Rust shrugged. "No one knows."
Jack frowned. "But you were there... weren't you?"
"I was there," Rust nodded. "I've seen pictures of me tearing up taxies and bending street lamps, but I can't remember anything. The destruction lasted for hours and ended with my team dead.... I woke up two days later, in a private hospital for heroes. Samuel Danger