My family hadn't been poor. Upper-middle class, comfortable. But I remembered the lean years before my dad’s consulting business took off, the careful budgeting, the quiet relief at a full pantry. After Pop lost his long, brutal war with cancer right before my high school graduation, the comfortable veneer cracked. The life insurance fought a valiant but losing battle against medical debt. There was no way I was going to beg my mom for tuition money, not with my little sister still at home. Hence the leaky rowboat. Hence the desperate need to expand my power pool.

  I held the wet towel to my face as Jerry pulled me the rest of the way up. At 6’3” and heavily muscled, I towered over his 6’1” frame, but he had the defined, aesthetic build that was his primary currency in his favorite game. His crowd was refreshingly apolitical. They didn’t wave flags or start crusades; they just didn’t give a shit what anyone thought. Yeah, I got hit on occasionally, but a simple “not interested” was always met with a shrug and respect. The kids of powerful elites knew better than to make a scene. A harassment scandal looks terrible on a law school application.

  Obviously, if I wanted to skyrocket my social status, I could just reveal I was a much higher-category Alpha. The predominantly female hero academies would probably trip over themselves to recruit a male with potential Class Five or Six specs. Did I like girls? You bet your ass. But I was also self-aware enough to know I’d be less a person and more a resource to be captured and utilized. I’d learned that lesson the hard way in high school with Christine, who saw me as her ticket to easy street until my dad’s death derailed that particular gravy train. She dropped me faster than a villain drops a monologue when the heroes show up. It was a heartbreak that left a cynically humorous scar.

  “Tell you what. Spot me for five sets and we are even,” I said, carefully dabbing my face. The bleeding had stopped, but working out in Energy Debt was like tightrope walking without a net. I’d built a reputation as overly cautious, not a whiner. They had no idea how close I was to face-planting on a bench press every single time.

  Jerry nodded. “Yeah, no problem,” he said, waving a dismissive hand at the wiry, curly-haired Greek Adonis he’d been eyeing. After I’d cleaned up and stretched out the new kinks in my body, he met me by a cable machine. Free weights were for people who didn’t have to calculate every joule of energy expenditure.

  “Do I have to bitch about safety?” I asked, settling into the seat.

  Jerry laughed. “Probably. One of the new guys…” He nodded toward his current object of desire. “…is a freshman.” He licked his lips with theatrical relish. “Yummy freshman, too, but he’s a little excitable. On a class night, you are probably going to have to lay down the law a little and scare him. I mean, you got popped, but imagine a girl had come through the door? She’d probably be in the hospital.”

  I shrugged, pulling the crossover handles. The weight was pathetic for show, but perfect for my actual purpose. “Probably would have gone right over her head, to be fair, but yeah. I think you might want to consider going over gym discipline with him a few times. Remember last year’s broken window incident? I don’t want to lose this place after hours, and there’s no way the school will spring for a trainer off-hours.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  He nodded, a slow, predatory smile spreading across his face. “Right. An excuse to use a little discipline. I got it.”

  I chuckled, switching to leg lifts. “Seriously, though. Real discipline, not sex games. Do you ever think about anything but sex?”

  He shrugged, scratching the back of his neck below the man-bun he sported. Workout Jerry was a different beast from Seducer Jerry; today, the hair was functional, not slathered in enough product to make a 90s boy band member blush. “Yeah, every once in a while I think about school, or working out. Other than that, not really,” he remarked, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I mean, sometimes I think about the future, but mostly that’s just putting in the time and getting the grades, and then letting the future take care of itself, you know?”

  I snorted. “Nope, absolutely not.” The concept of a future that just “took care of itself” was as alien to me as a sensible magic system. “But I’m not going to criticize. You do you. I kind of get a rush out of overdoing it.” And by ‘overdoing it,’ I meant ‘constantly living on the metabolic edge of total collapse.’

  He grinned, glancing back at his Greek muse. “I’d rather be doing someone else, but I get it. Oh, did you hear about Mindy Pearlance? She awakened a tier 4 power after that ski trip thing two months ago… I bet it has something to do with the cold.”

  I nodded, my internal alarms blaring. Glacier Girl. It fit. She was painfully new, her costume almost homemade. It made a twisted kind of sense: hire a cheap, reputable villain for a public debut, get a glowing review, then parlay that PR into a scholarship. My fee was a pittance compared to a year’s tuition at a place like Trafalgar. If it was Mindy, a girl I knew only as a name on a class roster, I had to keep my mouth welded shut.

  After a few incidents where gossip rags doxxed heroes, leading to murdered families and subsequent city-leveling rampages of vengeance, revealing a cape’s identity became a felony. It was the kind of charge that got you shivved in prison faster than being a kiddie-diddler or a snitch. It was also deeply unprofessional. What was once an unwritten rule was now very, very written in blood and legal code.

  “Well, better her than me,” I stated, my voice a masterclass in bland disinterest. “With my luck, I’d get a second power and turn myself into an icicle or something. Still, a ski lift snapped, right? I’d bet on something like flight, or telekinesis, or metal control, or something. The ski thing was just incidental. Not like making things colder would save her from falling to her death, right?”

  Of course, being able to conjure a giant cushion of snow or an ice shield would be perfect for surviving a fall. But I wasn’t about to tell him that. Call it professional courtesy. A hero getting doxxed this early would wreck her career unless she had no family, no ties—which meant no sponsors. She’d be relegated to making ice sculptures for rich people’s parties. The world needed Glacier Girls, not living snow machines.

  Jerry nodded, buying my completely logical and not-at-all-misleading explanation. “That actually makes a lot of sense. Power awakenings are weird like that. I was actually thinking of changing my thesis to the arbitrage and legal rights of the powered. I mean, it’s a little uncomfortably close to criminal law, which would make my dad shit a brick, but right now, most powered have to choose between a lawsuit attorney or a criminal lawyer, both of which are kinda stopgaps. Being a specialist seems like a potential goldmine and way to make my name for myself instead of just being my dad’s appendage, you know?”