“Aliss, my love. Better lose the piercing.” The guy in line behind Billie is now up at the counter beside her. His hand is stamped, like Aliss’s. Smudgy licks of black eyeliner around his eyes. “Unless you want management to write you a Dear John.”

“Oh, shit.” Aliss’s hand goes up to her nose. She ducks down behind the counter. “Conrad, you asshole. Where did you go last night?”

“No idea,” Conrad says. “I was drunk. Where did you go?”

“Home.” Aliss says the word like it’s a blunt instrument. She’s still submerged. “You want something? Room need making up? Night-shift Darin said he saw you in the elevator around three in the morning. With a girl.” Girl is a dagger.

“Entirely possible,” Conrad says. “Like I said, drunk. Need any help down there? Taking out the piercing? Helping this kid? Because I want to make last night up to you. I’m sorry, okay?”

Which would be the right thing to say, but Billie thinks this guy sounds not so penitent. More like he’s swallowing a yawn.

“That’s very nice of you, but I’m fine.” Aliss snaps upright. The piercing is gone and her eyes glitter with either tears or murder. “This must be for you,” she tells Billie in a cheery desk-clerk robot voice. It’s not much of an improvement on the stabby voice. “I’m so sorry about the confusion.” There’s an envelope in her hand.

Billie takes the envelope and goes to sit on a sofa beside a dentist. He’s wearing a convention badge with his name on it and where he comes from and that’s how she knows he isn’t a superhero and he isn’t Paul Zell.

She opens her envelope. There’s a room key inside and a piece of paper with a room number written on it. Nothing else. What is this, FarAway? Billie starts to laugh like an utter maniac. The dentist stares.

Forgive her. She’s been on a bus for over twenty hours. Her clothes smell like bus, a cocktail of chemical cleaners and other people’s breath, and the last thing she was expecting when she went off on this quest, Paul Zell, was to find herself in a hotel full of superheroes and dentists.

It’s not like we get a lot of superheroes in Keokuk, Iowa. There’s the occasional flyover or Superheroes on Ice event, and every once in a while someone in Keokuk discovers they have the strength of two men, or can predict the sell-by date on cans of tuna in the supermarket with 98.2 percent accuracy, but even minor-league talents head out of town pretty quickly. They take off for Hollywood, to try and get on a reality show. Or New York or Chicago or even Baltimore, to form novelty rock bands or fight crime or both.