Trial by Fire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Book Details

  Trial by Fire

  About the Author

  TRIAL

  BY

  FIRE

  LORE GRAHAM

  All Elena wants to do is join the Hollywood Heroes, meet her compatriots, and slowly get into the swing of saving the world. What she gets instead is Consequence, who took out a full-page ad in the LA Times threatening to bring about an apocalypse.

  Between villainous masterminds, her fellow heroes, and her attraction to group leader Lacy, Elena is going to have to learn fast how to be a Hollywood Hero or the only thing she'll have to worry about is how to survive a post-apocalyptic world.

  Trial by Fire

  By Lore Graham

  Published by Less Than Three Press LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Amanda Jean

  Cover designed by Natasha Snow

  This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  First Edition May 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Lore Graham

  Printed in the United States of America

  Digital ISBN 9781684310234

  TRIAL BY FIRE

  Elena sat on a cushioned bench inside the lobby of Georgio's Italian Family Restaurant, an old-fashioned place in Hollywood Hills. It was a Thursday night, and while the restaurant wasn't packed, the staff were busy enough that they left her alone. Her hands rested on the worn leather seat, and she was only sweating the tiniest bit due to nerves. After a months-long process, she had finally hit the last stage of applying to the Hollywood Heroes. Each step along the way had gone smoothly, but she still had still felt a combination of excitement and relief when Archive had emailed her a few days ago to invite her to the group interview.

  Elena's dark hair was pinned up neatly and she wore dressy slacks and a blouse. Since her arrival a few minutes ago, she'd been keeping an eye out for her interviewers, but hadn't seen any of them yet.

  "Elena?" Two women pushed through a chatty crowd of twenty-somethings and approached her.

  "That's me." Elena rose to her feet.

  The woman who had addressed her smiled politely and offered her hand. She couldn't have been more than five feet tall and had a plethora of freckles scattered over her rose-tinted skin. She had short, curly red hair and wore a neat-looking charcoal suit jacket and skirt accented by a crimson-and-gold scarf. Her attire made Elena grateful that she too had dressed up.

  "I'm Archive. Thank you for coming to meet with us."

  "Thank you for having me." Elena turned from Archive to address her companion. "Hello, I'm Elena." She offered her hand to the other woman who had approached, but turned it into a polite wave when she didn't reciprocate.

  "Pleased to meet you, Elena. I'm Oculus. Ve/vir pronouns, please." This woman—person—was closer to Elena's height, with light skin and thick, square-framed glasses. A deep blue cap was pinned in the dark curls that fell to vir shoulders.

  "Our table should be ready," Archive continued. "Lightspeed texted me that she's already here. Have you been waiting long?"

  "No, not very."

  "She probably arrived shortly before you did then. Our apologies for the wait."

  "It's no problem," Elena replied earnestly.

  Elena followed Archive and Oculus past the host stand and through the half-full dining room to a table in the back corner. It was tucked away, partially obscured by a couple of large potted plants.

  "Hi, I'm Lacy," the woman already at the table said as Elena sat down. She offered Elena a dazzling smile, flashing her white teeth as she spoke. "Or Lightspeed, if we're sticking to code names for now."

  "Generally speaking, that's how we conduct these meetings, yes," Archive said. Elena guessed from the exasperation in her voice that this wasn't the first time people hadn't closely followed protocol.

  "Well, she'll learn our names soon enough anyway," Lacy replied before looking to Elena again. "If you're accepted, of course."

  Lacy wore a stylish black-and-white dress, with her flowing hair falling well past her shoulders. Her jewelry and bold make-up brought out the golden undertones in her skin.

  Elena was content to listen to Lacy, Archive, and Oculus chat as they waited for the others to arrive. She felt more nervous than she had during any other step, if only because she was so close to her goal.

  It didn't take long for the last two to show up, escorted by a waiter who handed out menus to everyone. Elena recognized one of them as Guardian even before she'd introduced herself with her code name. Guardian was a bearded woman who wore flowery garb and a turban, and had been one of the two present for Elena's powers demonstration.

  The other woman introduced herself as Kinesis. She was a tall, conventionally-beautiful woman with medium-brown skin and wore her black hair in a long braid. She looked familiar, but Elena couldn't figure out where she might have seen her before.

  "This is everyone who'll be with us this evening," Archive said as the two newcomers took their seats. "Elena, thank you again for joining us," Everyone else quieted down as she continued. Kinesis looked at her phone for a second before stowing it in her purse. "You'd said in your emails that you were considering Fuego as your code name. Is that still your preferred alias?"

  "Yes, Fuego is fine." Elena glanced from Archive to the rest of the table. Everyone's eyes were on her, and their expressions ranged from inquisitive to friendly.

  "Fuego—that means 'fire' in Spanish, right?" asked Guardian.

  "Yes." Honestly, she wasn't terribly fond of the name, but she'd spent months thinking about it and couldn't come up with anything better. She'd researched superheroes and their names from around the Western Hemisphere—N.Y.C., Houston, São Paulo, Mexico City, Lima, Rio, and Santiago, plus a few superheroes who worked independently in other cities—and found no better inspiration there. A lot of the names—Raptor, Dauntless, Victory, La Mujer Valiente—weren't much more inspired than hers, and a few were bordering on vain. There were a couple that had a less obvious meaning, like Sprite, but they seemed to be the exception rather than the rule.

  "Just checking," said Guardian. "I took Japanese in high school, so my Spanish is atrocious." Guardian smiled. "I like the name. It rolls off the tongue, and it's to-the-point."

  "Elena, have you been to Georgio's before?" Lacy asked.

  "No, I haven't," Elena said, blinking a couple of times. She had been steeled to talk about her superhero credentials this evening, but Lacy's inquiry was unexpectedly casual. "What's good here?"

  "Lasagna," Guardian replied immediately, with Kinesis echoing her a second behind.

  "I've been to a lot of fancy Italian restaurants, and never found another place with lasagna this good," Kinesis said from across the table.

  "I've hardly ever had Italian food, but the first time we were here, I tried it on Kinesis's recommendation and loved it!" Guardian added.

  The waiter reappeared, bringing glasses of ice water. Oculus ordered a bottle of red wine, which Kinesis, Archive, and Lacy all offered to help drink.

  "And will you be having wine as well, ma'am?" he asked Elena.

  "No, thanks. Just a Diet Pepsi."

  "So, we know you've jumped through a bunch of hoops by now to get here," Lacy said once the waiter departed. "Archive shared your credentials with us, but what I want to know is why you want to join."

  "Sure." Elena looked past Lacy for a moment, gathering her thoughts. "I first heard of the Hollywood Heroes from my coworker, bac
k when I had gotten my first paralegal job in San Francisco, in late 2015. That android who'd gone on a rampage through LA had just been captured."

  "2020," Val interrupted.

  "Hmm?" Elena paused, confused. It dawned on her after half a second that Val wasn't correcting her on the year, but referring to the android's name. "Oh, yeah, 2020." In media reports, 2020 had usually been referred to as "the rogue android".

  "So, the article about 2020 discussed incidents through Los Angeles," Elena continued, "and how authorities had unsuccessfully tried to apprehend the person—uh, entity—responsible, but it was the team of Oculus, Flashback, and Kinesis that took the android down.

  "Before then, I hadn't heard of any superhero group efforts on the West Coast. As a kid, I remember a few members of the Heroic Fraternity flying out to handle Alpha and Omega's attack on San Francisco, but that was it.

  "I didn't think about it much, not until the Invisible Man died last summer." Elena took a sip of her water, watching the others' reactions. She felt a tingle of nervousness down her spine when bringing this up, but no one at the table looked hostile. Instead, they looked concerned.

  "In the coverage, there was a quote from Static. Something along the lines of, 'I didn't want it to end like this.'" Elena hesitated. "It struck a chord with me."

  There was a lot more that Elena could say, but she didn't want to linger on the sensitive topic, even though Static wasn't present. A dozen news stories flashed through her mind: the media coverage about superheroes that she'd grown up on, and the black-and-white morality of the Heroic Fraternity versus supervillains. By the time she'd discovered her powers as a teenager, she had known morality wasn't that simple, so the idea of becoming a superhero was uncomfortable.

  "Anyway, last year, I got laid off," Elena said. "One of my college friends was looking for a roommate in L.A., so I decided to move down, find a job here. Since I'd finally be in a city with a superhero group, I started researching more about the Hollywood Heroes. I had—I have—never really done anything with my powers, and now that I had a structured opportunity to do so, I was no longer content with living a normal life and pretending I didn't have powers." Elena spotted the waiter approaching with drinks and let her story taper off there.

  "Cool, thanks for sharing," Lacy said with an appreciative nod.

  Guardian and Kinesis simultaneously thanked her as the waiter reached the table.

  The waiter handed Elena her soda first before opening and pouring the wine. Once everyone had their drinks, he asked if they were ready to order. He was met with chorus of yeses as Elena glanced down at her menu, realizing she hadn't had a chance to look through it yet. Well, at least she had a recommendation.

  "Are you comfortable talking about how you discovered your powers?" Guardian asked once the waiter had taken everyone's order and departed again.

  "Of- oh, yes." Elena's immediate instinct was to say, "Of course,", but she switched to a "yes" before the words quite came out. She realized, a moment belatedly, that people ended up with superpowers in a lot of different ways. Some of them probably had origins that weren't as easy to talk about as hers.

  "Sure," she continued, composing herself after the momentary hesitation. "I was sixteen at the time, far enough into puberty that I figured I'd already lost my one-in-a-million shot at being a superhero, and I didn't think much about it."

  "Any successful pop star or superhero gets their break by the time they're sixteen, right?" Lacy quipped when Elena paused.

  "Exactly." Elena grinned at her, encouraged by someone else chiming in. "In retrospect, a few little things had happened that hinted at my powers, but I hadn't thought much of it. When it actually happened, well, it was sort of anticlimactic. I was working on my end-of-the-year presentation for my world history class, talking about Pompeii. History wasn't my best subject, but I had crush on the teacher, so I was determined to practice until I was perfect. The first time I practiced it, I knew I was too rigid, not animated enough. Our teacher was all about bringing the presentation alive, not just reading off the poster.

  "So I started talking through it again, going through the stages of the volcanic eruption. When I hit the part about the volcano spewing ash and fire onto the city, I thought vividly about it, the smell of sulfur and unbearable heat, and I made enthusiastic motions. I was trying to capture the intensity so I could impress the teacher, imagining the volcano as I talked. With the weight of my imagination behind it, in one gesture I could feel the volcano's heat, bursting from my chest and down through my arms. It wasn't until I saw it that I realized I was shooting flames out of my hands, and had just lit the curtains on fire.

  "I was so surprised, I didn't put them out before the fire alarm started going off. Luckily, no one else was home. I have no idea how I would have explained it to my mother! I had to get rid of the curtains, so I lied to and said I'd spilled something on them. How was I going to explain burn marks?"

  "How'd you do on that presentation?" Lacy asked, corners of her lips twitching.

  "Not great," Elena admitted, smoothing out the napkin on her lap. "I was terrified it'd happen again, so when I presented I was really subdued. But once the project was out of the way, I knew I had to find out if I could replicate it on purpose. At first, I just tried turning a burner on in the kitchen, and held my hand over the flame. It felt hot, but it didn't hurt. I could touch it without hurting myself. Thinking back, I had never burned myself cooking or anything like that. One time when I was young I picked up an ember that had fallen off the end of the sparkler, and it didn't hurt me. I assumed it had just cooled off quickly, but my mother panicked when she saw I had grabbed it the moment it hit the ground. She was too busy pulling me back inside and putting ice on my hands to realize anything unusual had happened.

  "After the burner experiment, I went out to a parking lot—so I couldn't accidentally light anything else on fire—and practiced my powers there." Elena adjusted the position of her water glass on the table, feeling self-conscious about her terribly mundane story.

  "Good, I keep worrying someone will have a self-discovery story that's actually cool and puts the rest of us to shame," said Lacy, laughing. "For me, I always liked running, and I was the star of the track and field team in junior high. By freshman year of high school, I was unnaturally good, and I realized I didn't need to put in my full effort to more than outpace everyone else. But a couple of jealous upperclassmen accused me of doping and started a bunch of shit that ended with me quitting the team a couple of weeks later."

  "I always want to say my moment of discovery was when I was thirteen and pushed my brother out of the way of a car to save his life," Guardian said. "But honestly, by then I had already figured out that most things didn't hurt me."

  "You were hit by a car when you were thirteen?" Elena was slightly awed, even though she was familiar with Guardian's power. "If you don't mind me asking, actually, have you ever had a serious injury?"

  "Nope," said Guardian. "Not once, since I'm resistant to most forms of physical harm. It's not painless, but I do have a gift. And now I have an opportunity to use it to help more people."

  "Guardian takes helping people very seriously," Lacy said to Elena.

  "We all do," Guardian replied.

  "We do, but especially you. I'm just a superhero part-time."

  Elena looked back to Guardian, who clarified, "I'm training to be a nurse as well."

  "What else are you passionate about?" Kinesis asked Elena.

  "I work as a paralegal," she replied automatically. "Oh, and I do some cooking, occasionally baking. I also run several times a week." She paused. "Honestly, part of the reason I'm joining the Hollywood Heroes is because I'm also passionate about helping people, and I feel like this group would be my best opportunity to do that. I haven't tried to be a superhero before, but the longer I have these powers and don't do anything with them, the more I feel like I should."

  The rest of the questions throughout the meal seemed to be a genuine
effort to get to know Elena rather than a barrage of interview questions. The lasagna was as good as Guardian and Kinesis had promised, with a particularly delicious sauce. By the end of the meal, Elena still couldn't place where she had seen Kinesis before, but she felt at ease with everyone's friendly smiles and sincere conversation.

  After the check was paid, Elena took her time finishing up. She felt tired, but in a content sort of way. She sipped on the remainder of her soda and only stood once everyone else had. The others started to file out, everyone giving a word or wave of goodbye as they headed towards the door. Archive shook Elena's hand again before leaving with Oculus, with only Lacy lingering back.

  "The interview's mostly a formality, but you did great," Lacy said quietly, reaching out and squeezing Elena's hand. Elena smiled, feeling a warm spark from both the gesture and the sentiment. "Archive's already done all her research on you. You wouldn't have gotten this meeting if she wasn't damn sure you were legitimate."

  "Thanks," Elena said. "I was fairly confident, but it's still nice to be reassured."

  "You're welcome. Have a good night."

  "It was lovely meeting you," Elena said. She wanted to give Lacy a hug, but even though Lacy had been friendly, it seemed a bit too forward when Elena wasn't even positive she'd be in the group.

  "You, too." Lacy grinned and slung her purse over one shoulder. "I'll see you again soon."

  Elena headed to use the restroom while Lacy left, Lacy's words ringing in Elena's head. Both her words and demeanor said that she sincerely thought she would see Elena again soon—and that she wanted to. It hit Elena that she wasn't just excited for the opportunities to protect people and fight corruption; she was looking forward to getting to know the rest of the team, not just as heroes, but as friends. Now all she had to do was wait to hear from Archive again.

  *~*~*

  For all the gravity of Thursday evening, Elena's Friday was as typical as they came. She took a quick run around her neighborhood before showering and getting ready for work; her hour-long drive into the city put her at Greenman & Greenman at 8:25 on the dot. The day flew by in a flurry of court papers, with a brief respite at lunch hour. She joined her fellow paralegals for sushi at the same place down the block they went every Friday. The traffic was as terrible as usual on her way home, another hour to get her in the door to her apartment at a little past six p.m.