The William J. Hofmann Memorial Recovery Ward occupies the third floor of Jefferson Hospital's east wing. I've been here fourteen times in the past two years. The staff know me as Mr. Fairfax from Alcott & Associates, the small investment firm that has quietly become one of the ward's most reliable donors.

  "Mr. Fairfax! And Ms. Grady, lovely to see you again." Dr. Pemberton meets us at the nurse's station, her handshake firm and professional. She's the ward director, a woman in her fifties who has aged visibly since the courthouse attack. Everyone involved in this has aged. "Thank you for coming. I know you like to see where the funding goes."

  "I appreciate you making time," I say. Ophelia stands slightly behind me and to the left, her posture relaxed, her eyes tracking the hallway in both directions. To anyone watching, she is an assistant being patient while her employer handles business. "How is Mr. Whitmore progressing?"

  Dr. Pemberton's expression shifts - not quite a frown, but something more complicated. "Better than we had any right to expect, honestly. The new enzyme treatments are showing real promise. His tissue stability has improved markedly in the last three months."

  "Good. That's good."

  We walk. The ward is quieter than it was two years ago. Most of the survivors have been discharged, their transformations stabilized enough for outpatient management. The ones who remain are the difficult cases - the ones whose bodies did things that medicine had never seen before and is still learning to address.

  Seventeen dead. Hundreds injured. A courthouse turned into a horror show by teenagers with stolen powers and tainted drugs.

  The Phreaks distributed bad Jump by mixing it at random with whatever they could steal from pharmacies. Pop open a capsule. Add powder. Re-cap. No quality control, no consistency, no understanding of what they were creating. Just chaos for its own sake.

  Deathgirl's chaos. Which means my chaos. Which means Porcelain's chaos, too, but that man is not accountable to anything or anyone.

  Maya brought Deathgirl into the fold. Maya operates under me. After Patches was arrested, Deathgirl took the Phreaks in a direction no one anticipated. The courthouse attack was the result. Seventeen dead. And whatever number still breathing but transformed in ways that human bodies were never meant to accommodate.

  I could tell myself it wasn't my fault. The degrees of separation are significant. I never ordered the attack, never approved the distribution method, never even knew the Phreaks had access to that much Jump until after the fact. But I'm not interested in that kind of accounting. Responsibility doesn't evaporate just because it passes through intermediaries.

  So I fund the ward. I funded it early, when the crisis was still acute and the medical community was scrambling to understand what they were dealing with. I brought in resources - money, connections, pressure applied in the right places to get the right people involved. Metahuman healers who normally charge rates that would bankrupt small countries. Researchers who had been working on adjacent problems and could pivot quickly. Equipment, facilities, whatever was needed.

  A safe world is a profitable world. That's not cynicism. It's just recognition that stability benefits everyone, including people in my line of work. The infrastructure we built to handle the Phreaks' victims is now infrastructure that exists, period. The enzyme treatments Dr. Pemberton mentioned emerged from this crisis and will help people who have nothing to do with it. Medical science advanced because resources were concentrated on a specific problem.

  Two years is not long in medicine. But two years with effectively unlimited funding and metahuman assistance is different than two years of normal research. The experimental treatments are still experimental, but they work. The prognosis is better at the margins now. Fewer people will die from power-induced transformations because we learned how to help these people.

  I did not do this to feel better about myself. I did it because it was the correct response to the situation. But I won't pretend it doesn't help, some nights, to know that the money is going somewhere useful.

  We stop outside Room 317.

  "He's awake," Dr. Pemberton says. "He knows you're coming. I should warn you - he's having a good day, which means he's more talkative than usual. He may want to thank you."

  "I'm just an investor," I say. "The doctors are the ones who--"

  "Mr. Fairfax." Her voice is gentle but firm. "Let him thank you. It matters to him."

  I nod. Ophelia stays outside - her presence in a patient room would be harder to explain - and I enter alone.

  Marcus Whitmore is sitting up in bed, which is itself a kind of miracle. Two years ago, he was a spreading pool of flesh on the courthouse floor, his body having lost all structural integrity, his organs mixing with his muscles mixing with his skin in a soup of undifferentiated tissue. The bulk of what was left was a mostly-functioning head, an entirely-functioning brain, lungs, and a heart.

  When the Jump wore off after three hours, fourteen minutes, and fifteen seconds, his body tried to reconstitute itself. It did not know how. The healers had to teach it, cell by cell, over months of painstaking work.

  He looks almost human now. The proportions are slightly wrong - his torso too long, his arms not quite symmetrical - but the skin is skin, the face is recognizably a face, the eyes that meet mine are clear and aware.

  "Mr. Fairfax," he says. His voice is rough, damaged in ways that may never fully heal. "They told me you were coming."

  "Mr. Whitmore. You're looking well."

  "I'm looking like a Picasso painting that someone tried to iron flat." He laughs, a wet sound that turns into a cough. "But I'm looking, which is more than I expected. Sit down, please. I want to talk to you."

  I sit in the chair beside his bed. The room smells like antiseptic and something else, something organic that I try not to identify.

  "I know you don't want thanks," he says. "Dr. Pemberton told me. But I'm going to thank you anyway, because I spent six months as a puddle and now I can sit up and read books and argue with the nurses about what's on TV. That's because of you. The money you brought in, the people you got involved - I know what that cost. I know what it took."

  "It was the right thing to do."

  "Maybe. But most people don't do the right thing when it costs that much." He studies me with those reconstructed eyes. "Why did you? You're not a doctor. You're not family. You're just some investor who decided to care. Why?"

  The honest answer is too complicated to give. Because I feel responsible. Because the chain of causation leads back to decisions I made or allowed to be made. Because a safe world is a profitable world and I benefit from the infrastructure this crisis forced us to build. Because I read comic books as a child and believed that with great power comes great responsibility, and I have power now, different than I imagined but power nonetheless, and I have to do something with it besides accumulate.

  Supervillainy is the most fun a boy can have without joining a hedge fund. There are some lines even I don't cross. Magneto vs a Goldman-Sachs executive is no contest, if you asked me to tell you which one is more moral.

  "Because I could," I say instead. "And because no one should have to go through what you went through."

  He nods slowly. "That's good." A pause. "Did you hear that Deathgirl went missing?"

  "Did she, now?" I ask, raising an eyebrow.

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  He looks ill-at-ease. "I heard something from some internet friends of mine. They never reported on it. And the rest of those Phreaks got transferred out of Daedalus too. Doesn't that scare you sometimes?"

  I don't respond. There's nothing safe to say.

  "I don't hate her," Marcus continues. "I thought I would, but I don't. She's just a kid. A fucked-up kid who did fucked-up things, but still a kid. The people I hate are whoever gave her the drugs. Whoever put her in a position to do what she did." His eyes meet mine. "You ever think about that, Mr. Fairfax? The people behind the people behind the people?"

  "Sometimes," I say. My voice is steady. "I think about a lot of things."

  "Yeah." He settles back against his pillows, suddenly tired. "Yeah. Me too."

  I sit with him for another ten minutes, talking about nothing important. The weather. The hospital food. The book he's reading, some thriller he says is predictable but entertaining. When his eyes start to droop, I excuse myself and slip out.

  Ophelia is waiting in the hallway, her expression neutral.

  "Everything alright?" she asks, falling into step beside me as we head for the elevator.

  "Fine."

  "You were in there longer than usual."

  "He wanted to talk."

  She doesn't press. This is one of the things I appreciate about Ophelia - she knows when not to ask questions. We ride the elevator in silence, walk through the lobby in silence, emerge into the Philadelphia afternoon in silence.

  "The car's around the corner," she says. "We have the meeting in New York at four. We should leave soon if we want to make it."

  "I know."

  We walk. Halfway to the car, a woman pushing a stroller smiles at us - at the well-dressed couple, the professional man and his attractive assistant, clearly people of means enjoying a pleasant day. Her eyes drop to my left hand, to the ring on my finger, and her smile widens.

  "You two make a lovely couple," she says as she passes.

  Ophelia laughs, a short sharp sound. "Oh, we're not - I'm just his assistant. Secretary, really."

  "Just his assistant," I confirm, holding up my ringed hand. "Mrs. Fairfax is at home. This is Ms. Grady. She keeps my schedule organized."

  The woman laughs, embarrassed. "Oh, I'm so sorry! I just assumed--"

  "It happens," I say. "Have a nice day."

  We continue walking. Ophelia's expression hasn't changed, but I can tell she's amused.

  "Lovely couple," she murmurs.

  "It's the blue," I say. "Very striking. People notice."

  "Maybe I should wear grey. Blend in more."

  "Please don't. The aesthetic has value."

  The car is where we left it - a nondescript sedan, the kind of vehicle that disappears in traffic. Ophelia drives. I sit in the passenger seat and watch Philadelphia slide past the window, thinking about Marcus Whitmore and chains of causation and the people behind the people behind the people.

  The meeting in New York is about something else entirely. A different project. A different set of problems to solve. And all the while, I will make more money than I have ever dreamed of. I will steal it from the mouths of the undeserving. There are gangsters in this world. Mobsters. Low-lives.

  And they deserve none of it.

  They flow in and out of local prisons with striking regularity. Superheroes bundle them up by the dozen like cigarettes. They hustle for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. I hustle on a scale they could never even comprehend. They're the real enemy. What else is there to do? Become a government superhero for eighty thousand a year plus healthcare? Maintain my modest salary as a lawyer and be unable to keep the world safe with my dollars?

  I hold no illusions about what I am. But I think 99 out of 100 Mr. Antithesises live in a much worse world than I do.

  I check my phone. Three messages from Maya about the Rogue Wave situation. Two from Wesley about the Atlantic City expansion. One from Sarah, asking if I'll be home for dinner.

  Probably not, I type back. Meeting running late. Don't wait up.

  Love you, she responds.

  Love you too. I tell her. And I do. I miss her dearly.

  I put the phone away and watch the road, thinking fondly about our first time at the shooting range together.

  The prison is called Curran-Fromhold. It's a city facility, overcrowded and underfunded, the kind of place where people wait for trial or serve short sentences for minor crimes. The guards know me as Trent Fairfax, attorney. My credentials are legitimate - I passed the bar, I maintain my license, I occasionally take cases to keep the fiction plausible.

  Today I'm here as his new legal counsel. Tremont & Fairfax passed the case to Alcott & Associates. We have a better criminal law division than they do. They're all mergers and corporate law. I took a different tack after 1L.

  The interview room is small and poorly ventilated. He's already seated when I enter, his hands cuffed to the table, his eyes covered by a blackout mask that prevents him from using his abilities. The mask is standard protocol for him, though I'm told he's been cooperative enough that they're considering removing it.

  He looks smaller than I expected. Younger. He's the smallest six foot something person I've ever met. He used to have a very striking undercut, but in prison it's become a wet mop of greasy hair. Slight tan - ethnicity? Or lots of time in the yard? His right arm is fully encapsulated in some kind of medical brace, sling, sort of situation. Wrist to shoulder.

  I guess that was Samantha Small's doing.

  "Mr. McKinley," I say, taking the seat across from him. "I'm your new lawyer, Trent. Everyone outside calls me Mr. Fairfax, but you seem like a straightforward type of man to me. No last names."

  "What happened to Huang?" His voice is rough, suspicious. "They're putting one of the big guys on my case?"

  "Mmm... not quite. Huang has been reassigned to something a little less dangerous. These sorts of matters are my specialty as the criminal law expert they contract out to."

  "You're the guy on the name, right? Tremont & Fairfax."

  "Hahaha, no." I let myself smile, let the amusement reach my voice. "That would be my grand-uncle. I do... investments. I don't, technically, work in his company. I'm just a lesser scion."

  "A what?"

  "Just someone with the same last name. Don't worry about it. I'm here to talk to you about your case."

  "No. You're well-profiled, and you did no work to hide any evidence. You burnt down several dozen houses and businesses and committed assault and battery on many people, including two juveniles. They're also aware of your drug dealing and general ill behavior from before your... revenge spree. The only reason you're in here instead of in Daedalus is that you've consented to specialized containment and semi-permanent blindfolding. Good deal. Shows a desire to perform good behavior for the guards."

  He doesn't like that.

  "Then what the fuck are you good for? Making me get out of fucking bed to tell me I'm not getting out of here." He speaks through grit teeth. His voice is wheezy, thin, trickly. The medication regimen they have him on is impressive, given how much he ruined himself with ill-advised power tests and general smoke inhalation.

  "That's not what I said." I keep my voice level, patient. "I said I can't help you get out. But I know how to help you help yourself."

  "Stop speaking in riddles, old man."

  "Samantha Small." I pause, watching what I can see of his face beneath the mask. His jaw tightens. His breathing changes. "You're familiar, right?... I take it from the silence I've struck some nerve. So I'll tell you what I've been up to for you in the past month and you tell me your thoughts once I'm done, alright?... Excellent."

  I lean back in my chair, making myself comfortable.

  "I work for an organization called the Kingdom of Keys. You may recognize that name as the one that you used to work for, tangentially, through your drug supplier."

  "No, they have fucking cameras and shit, man." His voice drops to a hiss. "You can't say shit like that out loud."

  "Don't worry about it. I have an associate working on that angle." I reach into my briefcase and withdraw a small case, setting it on the table between us. "You might not be able to see it due to your current blindfold-type situation, but that noise you just heard is a single dose of Fly, to be administered intramuscularly. I went through great pains to locate some for one of my associates, and it just so happened that they had extras. I can't give it to you yet. But given your pyrogenetic powers, I think this particular dose is the perfect match to multiply your lethality. Something synergistic."

  His jaw works. I can see him thinking, calculating, trying to figure out the angle. "You want me to kill someone?"

  "I always do, Mr. McKinley. There's a vacancy in my organization, and only the superpowered are permitted to fill the gap. So, here's my proposal. You be on your best behavior from now on. Swallow your pride. I'll work from my end. And in six months of your rapidly passing life, we should be able to get you transferred to a lower security ward. Or a lower security prison. After that, you get this." I tap the case. "You make your own jailbreak. Take who you want with you. And if you can make your way back to Philadelphia and kill Samantha Small, we'll make sure to keep you under our auspices for the foreseeable future."

  Silence. His breathing is faster now, shallow.

  I can learn, too, Mr. Espinosa. My wheels versus your own.

  "Yeah? And what's in it for me, old man? Another life in prison when I get caught?"

  "Much better than that. But sharp. I know compared to living underneath the overpass playing poker with stupid people, prison must be positively comfy-cozy." I allow myself a small smile he can't see. "No, while revenge for some is sweet, it's simply a means to the end. We offer you membership. Protection. A racket of your own. Your own fiefdom - how does ruling Camden sound?"

  "..."

  "And, of course, millions of dollars," I sweeten the pot.

  His face twitches. I can't tell if the money even matters to him. "What's the catch?"

  I am very good at reading people. Here is the subtext; none of that matters. The revenge is enough. But he's fishing. He wants to know if we'll take care of him afterwards, or if I'm using him as a guided missile. He's smarter than I took him for. "There is no catch. It's a win-win situation. But you will need a new name."

  He looks at me funny. Well, tries to, looking where he expects my voice to be from. Adjusting his head. Whether or not he's a guided missile, that depends on his performance. Can you unfuck yourself, Aaron, or are you a stunted brat forever? Mr. Mudslide is a case study. Even the most unusable lout can be sculpted into something professional. Refined. Turning pig iron into a rapier. "What?"

  "Something distinguished. Refined. Not able to be mistaken as 'McKinley' over a wire." I stand, straightening my jacket. "How do you feel about 'Mr. Prometheus'?"