“Oh no,” he said.

“In my defense, I was eight or nine.”

“I remember wondering what kind of experience Armsmaster gave the kids,” Kid Win said. “He was always kind of… grumpy.”

“Start out with a ride on the bikes the Protectorate had, including riding on the forcefield bridge out to the island HQ. Visit the workshop with what I have to imagine was a gruff ‘don’t touch anything I don’t say to’, trying out a bunch of tinkertech gadgets. Then patrol, with another member of the team pre-clearing the route, maybe a crisis point if the kid was old enough and the situation minor enough. Almost always the same formula and routine, but he was good at executing that.”

“Huh.”

“I think they were very selective with who they sent his way. Kids they thought he could get to. Serious kids.”

“I have no idea what selection process they used for me. Probably that Clock would be a bad influence, Aegis and Shadow Stalker were jocks, I think. Gallant was more sensitive—”

I looked off to the side.

“—which I’m not.”

“It’s fine. You were saying?”

Kid Win looked at Vista, who had settled down and sat on a box enclosing a bush of what looked like holly, talking to Dennis. He dropped his eyes back to the ground.

His eyes were strange, and the way he held himself now, he didn’t embrace the strange. There was a focus to him that I didn’t remember him having, but a new weakness too, because he wouldn’t meet my eyes and seemed to keep looking down or away, maybe because he was embarrassed of how he looked. I saw some red-tinted sunglasses in one of his coat breast pockets, but he didn’t wear them here. How much did he change if he had them on? Would he more or less look into my eyes?

He answered me, “I think they picked the kids for Vista’s sake, instead of picking Vista for the kids’ sake. And I got the leftovers. A lot of the weird kids.”

I smiled. “The fact you figured out there was a sorting system means you were capable of seeing what the ‘weird kids’ needed.”

“I dunno,” Kid Win told me. “I wasn’t very good at it. I had the impression Piggot or Armsmaster or Miss Militia wanted to cultivate something in me, for leadership or whatever, but then the leadership changed around, or the city changed, and expectations changed with. Nobody ever had the chance to follow through. Now Valkyrie’s asked me to do this thing, and I don’t know how.”

“Well, you’re kind of touching on it,” I said. The wind had changed direction, so I pulled up the hood of the plush black sweater, where the material of the hood felt like it was an inch and a half thick. “So you remember all that stuff.”

“I think because it’s superhero-adjacent.”