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might also become a superhuman.
    Colin forced himself to focus on his homework. A single four-page essay. That shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours; then he would be completely free of homework worry for the rest of the weekend.
    He was lying on his bed, on his stomach, with his homework book open on the floor at the foot of the bed. He had half a page done and he wasn’t happy with it. He’d been trying Brian’s idea of writing from the point of view of one of the villains, but it was proving to be tougher than he’d expected.
    OK. Concentrate! Suppose I had superhuman powers…Say I could fly. That’d be cool!
    While he was daydreaming about joining the school’s athletics team—if he could fly, he’d be a champion long jumper—a thought came into his mind: I wonder if Danny will be able to fly?
    Maybe Danny won’t want his powers and he’ll find a way to give them to me.
    Colin sighed and looked down at his homework again.
    “I’m not getting anywhere with this,” he muttered to himself. OK. Start over.
    He turned to a blank page and began to write: “If I was a superhero, I wouldn’t even tell my best friends because that would put them in danger. I would have to come up with some good excuses for always disappearing to go off and save people.”
    Danny’s never done that, so maybe he’s not a superhuman after all. But then, how did he do it? How did he move fast enough to rescue Susie?
    Colin looked at the few lines he’d written, put his homework book away and wandered downstairs to the sitting room.
    “How’s the essay coming along?” Colin’s dad asked.
    Colin sat down on the floor with his back to the television set. The sound was off and clearly his parents hadn’t been watching it. “Not great. I don’t really know all that much about superhumans. What was it like when they were around? It must have been strange.”
    His father said, “I was about your age when the first superhumans began to appear. You know the way they always keep weird stories until the end of the news? Well, that’s what it was like, for a while. It was all, ‘And finally, it seems that in New York there’s a new force fighting evil.’ That kind of thing.”
    “But weren’t people scared?”
    “No, because for a long time most people didn’t really believe it. Not until Paragon went up against Façade.”
    “Why? Why was that any different?”
    “Because everyone saw it happening live on television. It was in Detroit, one of those charity telethon events, like Comic Relief. They were trying to raise twenty million dollars for…can’t remember what it was now.”
    “Education,” Colin’s mother said.
    “Right, education. Anyway, it’s all just about over, and they’re going on about how much money they’ve raised, then all of a sudden one of the guest musicians comes out and he just transforms himself into Façade. He’s got a whole bunch of thugs with him and Façade demands fifty million dollars or the studio audience and all these celebrities will be killed. Façade is strutting about, showing off his powers by shape-shifting into different people, when Paragon just drops out of the ceiling and lands on top of him. Bam! One punch to the head and Façade is out cold! A couple of his henchmen turn their guns on Paragon, but he just flies right into them, knocking them over. Then he launched a dozen gas grenades. The gas instantly sent everyone in the studio—even the hostages—to sleep. The cameras were still running, though, so we could watch him tying up Façade and his men.”
    “It would have been a great court case too,” Caroline said, “if Façade hadn’t escaped from custody on the way to the trial.”
    “What about Paragon, though? If he arrived so quickly, doesn’t that suggest that he lived nearby? I mean, from what I’ve read about him he wasn’t able to fly very fast.”
    “Maybe he just happened to be close by for some other reason,” Caroline said.
    “Yeah,