“She was sweet. I saw her outside of class once… totally different person. Hanging out with a bunch of guys.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Amy said.

“No,” Hunter agreed. “But I would have pictured her as someone who knit. She wasn’t even that old. The masks we wear, right?”

“I suppose so,” Amy said, just to keep the conversation going.

“I was thinking, powers and heroics and the stuff we do, if we ever got this thing of mine under control—”

“We will,” Amy interrupted. “And when we do, you’ll go back to school?”

“Do I have to, though?” Hunter asked. “I have powers. My life’s pretty set, you know?”

“There’s lots of options. Going back to ballet—” Amy started.

But Hunter was talking over her. Amy’s heart sank.

“Hunter by day—” Hunter intoned, hand flicking her hair out of her face. Her hands covered her face. Amy jumped to her feet, and it was Mark who hauled her back over the back of the cloth-layered lounging couch Amy had been sitting on.

Hunter’s hand dropped, exposing one eye, too much of the whites showing, “Mincemaid by night!”

The couch detonated, an explosive going off beneath—Amy hadn’t even seen Mark drop it. It lifted up the couch, and Mark, still with an arm around Amy, caught it and oriented it in the air, using it for cover.

The scene looked like a window cracking. Black lines speared up, down, from one another, all around Hunter. Threads, hair-thin, spiderwebbing out to make contact with everything within thirty feet of Hunter, which included most of the furniture. The couch was almost lifted up, and Mark hauled it down, using his back to keep it in position.

“You done?” Chris asked.

Amy looked. Chris had been at the edge of the effect. His arm and part of his upper body were mangled, shredded by the wires.

“I’m done,” Hunter said.

The wires began retracting. Once all visible wires were gone, Mark grunted and shifted position, letting it fall to one side.

A webwork of bones blocked the way too. It seemed Marquis hadn’t left the spot just beyond the door.

“Thank you,” Mark told her father.

“Of course,” Marquis said, eyes narrowing. He smiled.

“The masks we wear,” Hunter said, eyes wide, both showing too much white, her smile macabre. She laughed. “In all the television shows and movies, they’ve got to have that episode with the guest starring hero, don’t they? And there’s always the mystery, and there’s always an unmasking.”

“With the convenient stunt double,” Marquis said, sounding way calmer than Amy or Mark were.

“What happens when you don’t wear a mask?” Hunter asked. She smiled, hands going to her face. “Nobody here does. A lot of heroes don’t. Your old team—”

“Terrible secret identity discipline,” Chris said. He was acting very cavalier about his mangled arm.