Songs of Love & Death

Charlotte and her rescuer looked at each other. He was nondescript, but the mask made all the difference. Without it, she’d have glanced at him once, maybe admired the muscled shoulders under the almost-too-tight T-shirt. No uniform, just T-shirt and jeans, plain black boots, well worn. But he wore a mask, a length of black cloth with eyeholes over his head and tied in back. She stared at his eyes, brown, rich. With the mask, it was like looking at someone through a window. She wasn’t sure she could really see him. He held her arms—maybe she looked like she was going to faint, falling backward, making him rescue her all over again.

Imagine it—her, rescued at the last second by a real-life hero! Just like one of her plays. Unbelievable. Thrilling.

He was breathing hard. The feat hadn’t been easy for him; sweat shone on his neck.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I should be asking you that,” he said, smiling. He had a very nice smile.

“No… well, yes… but you—that was amazing.” She sounded a little breathy. “I’m fine. Are you?”

“Just fine,” he said. He never stopped smiling.

Then, just as a crowd of police trooped up the stairs, he ran—and yes, he was fast. He sped to the other side of the roof, to the back of the building, where a fence gave him a chance to jump off, climb down, flee, and vanish—all in seconds. She couldn’t see movement, arms and legs pumping, just this shape that flowed away. Then it was dusk, and she couldn’t see anything.

“AND YOU HAVE no idea who he was?” the detective asked again.

“No. I have no idea.” When she arrived at the police station, someone put a blanket over her shoulders and a cup of coffee in her hands. Then she started shivering. She hadn’t realized she was cold.

The detective stared at her, annoyed, because she was clearly making his job more difficult. Sighing, he pulled over a three-ring binder, opened it in front of her, and started turning pages. “Are any of these the guy who rescued you?”

This looked almost like the binders the theater got from agents—catalogs of actors. The first round of cattle calls. Instead of headshots, the detective’s pictures mostly showed blurry full-body action shots of the masked vigilantes. She recognized a lot of them from news clips and reputation: the Invincible, dressed in red, white, and blue, who as far as anyone could tell really was invincible and could fly to boot; Black Belt, who dressed like a ninja and could shoot laser beams from his hands; Quantum Girl, a woman in a silver leotard and spike-heeled boots who could teleport; and more. There were maybe two dozen of them—more than she’d realized. No one knew much about them, where they lived or what they did when they weren’t out fighting crime. Maybe they had secret identities. Maybe they had secret hideouts, like Gothic castles. Maybe they were robots who only emerged when there was crime to be fought.

In her play, she had assumed that her hero was a person with a heart to break like everyone else.

She flipped through the whole book and shook her head. “He wasn’t anybody I recognized. He didn’t even have much of a costume, just a mask. Shouldn’t you be going after the thieves instead of him?”

“I need all the information I can get for the report,” the detective said flatly.

She finished making her statement, which she couldn’t see being very useful to any investigation. All she had seen was a swarm of masked men running around performing some mystery play.

“Charlotte!”

Dorian Merriman, hot-shot assistant DA, on the fast track after that Midnight Stalker trial—front-page stuff. She hadn’t called him about what had happened. He had just known, probably through one of his connections in the police department.

He rushed to her side, heroically even, but she was a little too wrung out to be impressed by the feat.

“Are you all right? What happened? I came as soon as I heard. Are you hurt?” He turned to the detective. “Is she hurt?”

“She’ll be fine,” the man said. He straightened the pages on his desk, signaling that they were done.

“Hi,” she said, her smile weak.

He knelt by her side, smoothed back her hair like she was a child, and she beamed back at him. “Now let’s get you home,” he said.

Dorian had brown eyes.

Reporters had arrived at the police station, snapping pictures and demanding answers. Word had gotten out about the masked man, a new rooftop hero in the city, and they kept asking: What was his power? His name? Had he talked to her? What did he say? They already knew who she was; a witness at the restaurant had told them everything. She wondered what the papers would make of it; she’d been right there and she didn’t know what had happened. The detective told her not to say anything, so she didn’t.

In Dorian’s car on the way to her apartment, she got a second wind.