“Jane!”

He found her in the library of all places, sequestered in a corner behind an over-large medical textbook with sheets of paper strewn across the desk. She glanced up, looking mildly irritated as he approached.

“What?” she hissed, halfway between a whisper and a ‘shush’. Matt ignored her annoyance and slid down into a free seat.

“I know what it is!” he whispered, “The message! I know what Ed was trying to tell me!”

“‘Dawn’?” Jane whispered back, her irritation instantly vanishing, “What, what was it?”

“It’s his birthday,” Matt told her, making sure to keep his voice low so as not to be overheard, “Jane, Ed wasn’t telling me to get Dawn, he was giving me a lead!”

“His birthday?” echoed Jane. Her face scrunched into a frown. “But his birthday’s not til May third, I don’t get it, that’s ages away.”

“How do you just know that?” Matt wondered, shaking his head. He waved the question away. “Never mind. The point is, Ed was organising a party. A surprise party for Captain Dawn, because he was turning sixty.”

“Why wasn’t I invited?” Jane laughed, a little too high and a little too forced. Matt rolled his eyes.

“Really?”

“It was a joke,” she glowered defensively.

“Oh yeah, sure. Be sure to stretch your back out, don’t want to cramp up carrying that torch.”

“Shut up.”

“You shut up. Just listen for a second, stop frothing over your boyfriend-”

“He’s not my-”

“Jane!”

“Fine!”

“Thank you.” He rubbed his temples. “Ed had been tasked with organising this surprise party. But not so much a party, James said-”

“James, as in James Conrad?”

“Right. He’s the one who told me. He called it a ‘reunion’, and then mentioned something about stuff ‘old people like’. So I’m thinking, Ed must’ve been tracking-”

“Tracking down Captain Dawn’s old friends and relatives,” Jane finished, touching a knuckle to her lips. Suddenly, she snapped up, a look of understanding splashed across her face. “And you think he found something.”

“Or someone,” nodded Matt. He glanced around the shelves then back to her, leaning close. “Someone from Captain Dawn’s past, or, or, I don’t know, a whole group of someones. I don’t know who, I don’t know why, but somehow it got Ed killed.”

He could see the gears turning in Jane’s head. “Like what?” she muttered, the concentration in her eyes boring a hole in the desk. “What the hell did he find?”

“I don’t know,” Matt admitted, “Maybe he didn’t even find anything, maybe he was just getting too close, but either way it must have been something enormous – something worth killing over.”

“Something that could threaten the entire world,” whispered Jane.

For a few seconds, they just sat in stunned, horrified silence, Matt trying to steady his breathing, Jane slowly, unconsciously, shaking her head.

“So what do we do?” she asked finally, looking across at him.

“We do what Ed did,” said Matt, “Whatever Ed did. Follow his footsteps, track these people down. Try to do what he did until we find whatever he stumbled on.”

“Great,” Jane sighed sarcastically, “So repeat the workings of a genius. That’ll be easy.”

Matt shook his head. “Ed may have been able to think a hundred times faster than us, but he wasn’t insane. We’ve just got to go step by step, work this out this logically.”

“Right,” agreed Jane. Then she hesitated, “But not right now. I’ve got to finish this report on concussions for Lum by tomorrow, and I’ve got dwnagintonit…” She trailed off, the end of her sentence dwindling to an incomprehensible mumble.

“You’ve got what?” asked Matt.

Jane coughed unnecessarily and suddenly grew very preoccupied with a spot on the ceiling. “Dawn, I’ve got a, ahem, lesson with Captain Dawn tonight,” she mumbled quickly, her voice low and discrete. Matt rolled his eyes so hard it felt like they were going to fall out.

“Oh well that’s just great. Make sure to use protection!”

“It’s not like that!” she hissed at him, low and furious.

“Right, sure,” Matt spat, “Are you serious? A man is dead, the world could be in danger and you’re worrying about classes?!”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Jane snapped back. She kept her voice low. “We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know what the kid or Cassandra meant, we don’t know if we can trust them – hell, we don’t even know if they were being metaphorical! It could take months to figure this out, and I can’t just drop everything, put my entire life on hold just because you have a hunch. I know you don’t care about being here-” she continued, cutting off his protests, “-but I do. And you should at least be subtle. If this is real, if someone killed Ed because he got too nosy, what the hell do you think they’ll do if it looks like you’re searching for the same crap?”

Matt opened his mouth to argue – then reluctantly forced himself to swallow an angry retort. For once Jane was actually right.

“Keep up appearances,” he muttered, the words tasting unpleasant in his mouth.

“Exactly,” said Jane, sounding a little relieved. Matt shook his head.

“Fine,” he conceded, “But in the meantime, we’ve got to keep this quiet. Don’t talk to anyone.”

“I’m not stupid,” she scowled.

“Not even Dawn. No, especially not Dawn.”

“For the last time, he’s not involved,” snapped Jane.

“I’m not saying he is,” Matt growled back, “But until we know what’s going on, it’s safer to keep this to ourselves. Deal?”

Jane glowered at him, but eventually she relented.

“Deal,” she agreed, “Now go away, you’re distracting me. I need to finish this essay.”

“Right,” Matt muttered under his breath as he got up and strode towards the library doors, “Don’t want to be late for the Captain.”

*****

“You’re early.”

Dawn’s voice hummed through her as soon as Jane walked through the auditorium doors. She looked up to find its owner floating effortlessly in the middle of the room, sitting calm and composed ten feet off the ground, his cape rippling as though moved by some invisible wind. Jane tried to hide her grin.

“So are you sir,” she responded. He smiled at her and her heart leapt.

“Come, join me,” he commanded, and so she did – flames licking at her heels, cold air nipping at her head, she flew over to where he sat and then likewise sat hovering opposite him – although with a lot more effort and a lot less grace. She felt so noisy, so clumsy, wobbling as she tried to hold still, struggling to stay balanced with fire rushing down and lightning crackling everywhere – Dawn could just sit, serenely, floating without a sound.

They sat, master and student, hovering for ten long minutes, until the sound of Jane’s laboured breathing must have penetrated Dawn’s thoughts and the Captain opened his eyes. “Enough,” he instructed, seeing her sweat-drenched face, and the two of them floated gently to the floor. Jane struggled to keep her descent from turning into an open fall. The second her feet hit solid ground, she doubled over, sucking in breath.

“I apologise,” said Dawn, “That was not intended to be a test.” Though his green eyes twinkled as he said it, and Jane had the momentarily insane thought that he might be teasing her. “Though if it was, you passed admirably.”

“Thank you sir,” she panted, wiping her face on her sleeve. She allowed herself three full breaths before straightening back up and standing at attention.

“Your week was pleasant I trust?” he asked, mirroring her pose, hands clasped loosely behind his back. Jane hesitated.

“Well… yes sir. Pleasant enough. Except for the, um…” her hands fidgeted slightly, “…the death. And the funeral.”

“Ah yes,” murmured Dawn, his mouth twisting in a grimace, “I heard. Such a senseless waste.”

“Yes sir.”

“Did you know him? The deceased?”

“Yes sir,” repeated Jane, “We were acquainted.”

“Ah,” lamented Dawn, “Then all the sadder for his passing.” He glanced up at the distant ceiling. “Still, the dead need not our mourning. They are beyond our reach. The future is clay but the past is stone.”

“Yes sir,” Jane said, with a small tinge of sadness. She dropped her eyes. This must be how he coped, she realised, with everyone he had lost. Keep moving forward, don’t ever look back.

There was a cold, quiet silence. Then Dawn spoke more firmly than before.

“Do you know what is ahead of you Jane?” he asked, his voice strong and clear, like great bells tolling across the land, “What is ahead of all of us?”

“No sir,” she answered, feeling a jolt of excitement pulse through her at the purpose with which he spoke, “I don’t.”

“Maybe we should ask the clairvoyant,” said Dawn, allowing himself a small smirk, but then the lightness turned to steel. “For ten years I’ve been waiting, preparing for rebirth, for the next step. I want to forge a new Legion – the chosen few, the strongest of the strong. I think, I hope, I am almost ready. And when the Legion is reborn, Jane, I want you to be a part of it. Would you like that?”

“Yes sir,” Jane replied, suddenly breathless, suddenly trembling, the blood in her head rushing through her heart, “More than anything.”

“Good,” mused the Captain, surveying her eagerness, her shaking face and pleading eyes, “Then prove yourself. Become stronger. Show me the height of your power – not just in here but out there.” He raised a gloved hand and pointed at the far wall, the door leading to the rest of the Academy. “Against them. In the coming months, leave no doubt in mine or any mind that you are what I believe you capable of being.” He paused. “Then – and only then – when the time comes, will you be worthy to stand amongst my Legion.”

“Yes sir,” she breathed, and for a second all the visions from her old life, from those countless nights spent laying alone in the dark, came pouring back – her, standing victorious over everyone around her, donning the armour, the Legion’s crest, triumphant and unstoppable, alongside her hero. Respected, feared, loved by all. Suddenly they were so close, so real, she could almost touch them – all she had to do was-

“I’ll do it,” she whispered, and without even realising it she’d twisted her hand across her chest, a fevered salute, “Everything. Every day. I’ll prove it. I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t,” Captain Dawn said simply. He stared down at her, his eyes twinkling like emeralds in the night. “I believe we have a great future together Jane.” And for an instant, a single moment of desperate elation, she saw a small smile dance across his powerful, chiselled face – a smile that maybe, just maybe, in her wildest, wildest dreams, meant more than he said.

“Now prepare yourself, and let us begin.”

*****

The bedroom was dark, the blinds closed. The only light came from the lamp on the desk, a yellow circle that streamed out and cast warped shadows over the unmade bed and clothes on the floor. Matt Callaghan sat alone, leant over the wooden desk, silent and unmoving save for the occasional keystroke or mouse-click.

Where would Ed have started?

Captain Dawn was almost sixty years old. He’d been married once, to his high-school sweetheart – but his wife had died. Everyone knew that. He’d spent decades assembling the original Legion of Heroes – but they were all dead as well. Everyone knew that too. What did that leave? Well, mused Matt, power of a hundred suns or not, everyone came from somewhere – everybody had a family. Who better to invite to a party but relatives? Especially for an old person, they loved that kind of stuff. That’s where Ed would have started.

The miracle of the Internet was that there was such an amazing wealth of knowledge so well indexed and freely available, all within the touch of a few buttons. Unfortunately, in this case, the information Matt uncovered was not particularly useful – he only had to travel as far as Captain Dawn’s Wikipedia page to realise that this train of thought didn’t have much track laid out. Both of Captain Dawn’s parents were deceased – which, given their age, Matt didn’t find surprising – and of his two siblings, older brother David and younger sister Amelia, one had died childless in the Year of Chaos while the other had managed to have a child before dying to stroke in ’91. That boy, Captain Dawn’s nephew, Matt thought might be worth finding – but a few pages deeper into Wikipedia and he was greeted with the news that young Angus McDonald had apparently felt his mother’s death particularly hard and taken his own life not long after his she’d lost hers.

So not the luckiest family, the Dawns, Matt was forced to conclude. If he’d been Ed (and there was a lot of ‘if’ coming off that statement) and he’d been trying to organise a surprise party, Matt thought he now would have reached the small hurdle that Captain Dawn seemed to have no living partner, friends or immediate family, somewhat stunting the guest list. Then again, he mused, Mister and Missus Dawn Senior might have had siblings and it was conceivable that, low on loved ones, Ed might have tried to track down some of Dawn’s distant relatives. He pulled an unused notebook out of his desk and began scribbling the outlines of a family tree. Aunts, uncles, cousins, maybe even cousins’ kids… beyond that, he’d be entering “first-second-third-once-twice-removed” territory, which he secretly hoped – already feeling the familiar lethargy of study settling over his brain – Ed had not been dedicated enough to get into. Still, he made a little note on the side of the page to check out the greater family forest, should he run out of ideas.

I need a plan of attack, Matt thought grimly to himself as he surveyed the rough sketched lines and realised the potential enormity of his investigation. Family members, old friends, enemies, dignitaries, acquaintances – any one of them might be involved, any number of them could be important. A single oversight might mean missing the entire answer and Matt wasn’t prepared to let that happen. He had to be methodical. He had to think like a genius, who had been thinking like a recluse. Great. Where the heck did he start?!

At the beginning, Matt decided. And so, the light of his desk lamp burning bright into the darkness, he bought a digital copy of Captain Dawn’s most comprehensive biography and began to read into the night, pencil in hand, tapping the tip on his notepad.