Trance

For all the girls who ever closed their eyes
and dreamed of being a superhero.

T
his book is the culmination of more than sixteen years of work—from the first inkling of an idea to the final product in your hands. A lot of people touched this manuscript over the years, and I’ll probably forget to thank someone, but here goes.

Mega-hugs to my fabulous agent, Jonathan Lyons, for believing in a trunked manuscript and helping me smack it into submission shape. More hugs and chocolate to my editor, Jennifer Heddle, for falling in love with my take on super-heroes and making this book even better than I imagined.

To the amazing peeps who read this book in its various stages: there have been a lot of you, but especially to Melissa, Sassy, and Nancy. You three were troopers. A special thank-you to Jeaniene Frost for seeing something special in my query and first pages, and for offering some amazing advice to a novice.

And even though they don’t know me, thank you to Marv Wolfman and George Pèrez for creating a comic book series that captured the imagination of a preteen and launched her obsession with superheroes. This book wouldn’t exist without your Teen Titans.

Finally, thanks to my dad for having that copy of
The New Teen Titans
#9 in your box of comics, and for letting me swipe it.

TRANCE

T
he bronze man’s head was melting. It oozed fat splats of liquid metal and swirled down the front of his old-fashioned suit jacket to puddle at his feet. Some of it hit the bronze duck below him, adding layers of new metal that mutated it into a nightmarish goose. The molten metal cooled and hardened as it hit the sidewalk. Mayhem’s heat blasts were concentrated above the statue, and metal needs a constant heat source to stay liquid. I learned that in class.

Gage had told me the statue was of a once-famous man who wrote stories for kids. I don’t know for sure, but if Gage says so, it must be true. He’s in charge while the adults are fighting for all of our lives, and he kept us quiet and hidden. For a while.

Until Mayhem found our hiding place.

“We have to run for it,” Gage said.

I didn’t want to run. We’d been running for hours, from the southernmost point of Central Park to where we were now. I don’t know how many blocks, but a lot, and it was raining, too—light, chilly rain and heavy, splattering rain.
Sometimes it stopped and just blew cold wind; then Ethan would use his Tempest powers to try to redirect it so we didn’t freeze.

Hours of it, and I was exhausted. We all were. Each time the Banes gained ground and pushed the last of the grown-up Rangers north, we kids ran ahead and took cover. We were there to fight if we had to, but the grown-ups didn’t want us to—not until absolutely necessary. At fifteen, Gage was the oldest; I’m the youngest at ten-almost-eleven. He says we’re the last line of defense for the city of New York.

We’re the last line of defense for the rest of the country.

And we’re just a bunch of kids.

Mayhem kept blasting.

Ethan stepped out from the shelter of the stone wall, all wiry and red-haired and cocky thirteen. He raised his hands to the sky. A blast of wind shot away from him and swirled toward Mayhem. She was a good hundred yards away, across a cement hole that had once been a lake or something, near a statue of a bronze girl on a mushroom. The statue was losing shape, turning into goo from her being so close to it.

Ethan’s air blast slammed Mayhem’s heat back at her. She was wearing street clothes, just jeans and a black shirt, and they were nothing like our special uniforms. No armor to protect Mayhem from her own powers or ours, so she flew backward with a piercing shriek. Her braided black hair flipped around like snakes, and she landed out of sight on the other side of the mushroom.

“Go!” Gage shouted.

Mellie ran first, as fast as she could across the cement
ground, toward the nearest clutch of unburned trees. Renee went next, a streak of blue skin and honey-blond hair, with William behind her. He carried Janel, who was unconscious from power overload; William had superstrength so he could run and carry her at the same time, while I could barely run and carry myself.

I followed the big kids, including Marco, who was still in panther form, and fifteen of us streaked across the way, rounding the edge of the cement pit, seeking our next place to hide. Just like we’d done all day. My lungs were burning, aching with smoke and cold and overuse and unshed tears. I just wanted to curl up in a ball and cry myself to sleep. I was sick of being cold. I didn’t want to be afraid anymore. I didn’t want to have to think about tomorrow—if we had a tomorrow.

I was only ten. Almost eleven. I wasn’t ready to die.

None of us was.

Mellie sure wasn’t when one of Mayhem’s heat blasts caught her full in the face and melted her skin down to her bones. Mellie didn’t even get to scream. I screamed plenty. So did Renee and Nate and William. Only panther-Marco paused long enough to sniff her, then loped past.

Ethan cried out, and then he wasn’t running with the group anymore. I didn’t stop to see what happened, but a few seconds later, Mayhem shouted again. This time, the roar of wind was louder. I hoped he tossed her into a tree or something.

We left poor Mellie on the ground and kept going, like we’d left three others behind already. My jelly legs didn’t want
to keep running, and one by one the older kids moved ahead of me. Toward the trees and the promise of safety somewhere else. I’d get left behind and it wouldn’t matter. My powers were stupid; I couldn’t help in a fight. My ability to hypnotize people and alter their thoughts worked only if I looked them in the eye. That was hard to do in the middle of a war zone. I hadn’t done anything today but cry and scream and get in the way.

Not like my dad, Hinder, one of the greatest heroes in the Ranger Corps. He was fighting south of us with the last half dozen grown-up Rangers, keeping the horde of Banes (sixty-something of them, Gage had said) from overrunning us. We were kids training to be heroes. If our parents and mentors died, how did anyone expect
us
to stop them?

We could barely save ourselves from one Bane with a superheat blast. Once the line fell and the Banes got through, sixty-something of them would crush us in seconds.

No, the line couldn’t fall. Not with my dad in charge. He’d save us.

A hand grabbed my arm and yanked me forward. I nearly tripped. Gage didn’t let go as we ran; he was practically pulling me along. It was as close as we’d ever come—or ever would—to holding hands. I’m still a baby and he’s a teenager. He’s just helping me because he’s in charge. He can’t let me lag behind.

We found a wide path. It took us under a stone archway and we emerged onto an open lawn. If it was ever green, it was now brown and rutted and overrun here and there with clumps of dried weeds. A lot of Central Park looked like that now. After New York City’s first major battle in the War, most of the city had been evacuated and a lot of the buildings destroyed.
I’d seen it from the helicopter that brought us here this morning—burning, crumbling skyscrapers, gutted old theaters, debris in the empty streets. William had pointed at a tall, skinny building called the Empire or something, and said it used to be twice as tall. I didn’t believe him.

Manhattan was a good place to fight, we were told. Early evacuation meant fewer civilian injuries. One of the major rules of the Ranger Corps code is protect civilians at all costs. Even the dumb ones who stand there and scream, instead of getting out of the way.

I once overheard Gage’s mentor, Delphi, say that any civilian who didn’t get out of the way of battling Metas was too stupid to save. It had made the other adults laugh. I didn’t know why it was funny, and I couldn’t ask her to explain it. I shouldn’t have been listening in the first place. But Delphi was smart, so it had to be important. She’d mentored a lot of kids who didn’t have anyone to teach them about their powers and how to be a Ranger. If I’d been an orphan like Gage, I’d have liked Delphi to be my mentor, too.

No one else attacked us on the lawn, but it was too open. Gage changed our direction, sideways instead of across the lawn. It felt like forever before we hit the cover of trees again. In the distance, peeking through the crisping, late summer leaves, was the turret of a big stone building.

“Head toward the castle,” Gage yelled toward the front of the line. William and Renee altered their path just a little. We passed what had once been a pond of some kind, and soon we were all going up.

“Can we hide there?” I gasped. The cold and wet made my lungs burn.

“I think so.”

Somewhere south of us, something exploded. It sounded like a truck got dropped from the sky and hit another one on the ground. I felt the rattle of it in my bones. Gage looked over his shoulder. I couldn’t. Every ounce of my attention was on not falling over my own tired feet.

We went up a set of stone steps. The paths intersected at the top and seemed to go off in four different directions. To our left was the castle—a stone building that had so far avoided complete destruction and shone like a hopeful beacon. Thick, round stones made a sort of patio that led to the castle itself, and it had two fancy pavilions on the left and right of the steps we came up. Except for a few blown-out windows, the castle was intact. Past it, farther to the north, was something that looked like an outdoor theater surrounded by bony winter trees.

A figure emerged from the castle, and everyone ahead of us came to a clumsy, jumbled halt. Gage let me go and jogged to the front to see. I sidled closer to Renee, who stretched one blue arm out to grasp me around the shoulders. She was twelve, almost a teenager, and my best friend. I loved her Flex power that let her bend and twist into funny lengths and shapes. It was a useful power, too. When we first got here, she’d used it to yank me out of the way of Mayhem’s heat blast.

“You gotta keep up, T,” Renee said. Her teeth chattered and, instead of red, the cold made her cheeks look purple. “Can’t lose you, too.”

“I’m trying,” I replied.

“Who are you?” Gage asked the stranger. His voice was still changing, going unpredictably from high-pitched to deep in timbre, so it squeaked a little when he tried to be bossy. Like now.

I peeked around William’s bulk—twelve and almost six feet tall—to get a better look.

A dirty man in ragged clothes was leaning hard against the stone wall. His face was sunken and filthy, and he probably stank, if the look on Gage’s face said anything. All five of Gage’s senses were hypersensitive and picked up on all sorts of things. Something about the stranger, other than being homeless and in our hiding place—was bothering Gage.

“Sir, you shouldn’t be here,” Gage said. “It isn’t safe.”

“Nowhere’s safe from your kind nowadays,” the man said. His voice was slurred, thick, like he was both drunk and half asleep. He wouldn’t look up from some interesting spot on the stone. Loose, torn clothing hung limply, covering his hands and feet, as if he’d shrunk inside them.

“There’s a battle moving this way. You can’t stay here.”

The man shrugged.

Another explosion, similar to the first, rocked the ground. It was closer this time, louder. One of the younger boys whimpered. Panther-Marco stalked around the group to stand sentry next to Gage and hissed at the man. The two boys with the best noses knew something was wrong.

Nate’s voice rang through all of our heads as his telepathic warning blared like a neon sign:
Back up and get out of—

The stranger raised his right hand as he looked up. His
sunken eyes glowed with yellow-orange power as he fired the little revolver in his hand, creating chaos.

Her arm still around me, Renee practically dragged me toward the larger pavilion. We all fled there while three more shots were fired. I couldn’t see for the flurry of moving bodies. I didn’t know where Gage was. Someone was screaming about Nate.

At the back of the pavilion, more stone steps led down to a rocky surface that overlooked the dried-up pond. We crouched there, using what little cover our hiding place provided. Fear clutched me colder than the January freeze, but I still glanced up and around a stone column, heart kicking against my ribs, a bitter taste in my mouth.

Nate was dead on the ground, a hole in his chest. The homeless man looked on, his eyes glowing death, smug like a Bane. He threw back his head and laughed—it might have been scarier if he weren’t so hoarse.

Nearby, under the pavilion and behind a stone wall, William was bleeding at the hip. Down on the rock floor with us, Ethan was shot in the left shoulder. Both were panting, trying to be brave and to not cry. I looked away before I started crying, too.

“We’re ending this tonight!” the man shouted. “Your pathetic Rangers are falling as we speak. You’ll see your parents in hell soon enough.”

I shivered.

“Specter,” Gage said, and I jumped at the sound of his voice right beside me.

It couldn’t be Specter, the leader of the Banes. My dad said
he was the one who’d rallied them together and initiated the War that had raged and ruined the country, killed hundreds on both sides, and left Metas nearly extinct. The last surviving Metas in the world had descended on Central Park to fight each other today. Dad said Specter could possess anyone who was unconscious or had a weak mind—take them over like a puppeteer, and make them do whatever he wanted.