I always thought Pax was a funny name for a city that’s never at peace. In grade school, we learned that it got that name when the first settlers in this region made peace with the Native Americans that had lived here long before they arrived. A double dose of irony. They gave the city a name in a language the natives didn’t speak, in honor of a treaty they had no intention of honoring. I don’t believe in curses, but that feels like the beginning of where it all went wrong for the Treaty City.

This city hasn’t been kind to me. Any sane person would have gotten out as quickly as they could. I guess you have to be a little bit crazy to do what I do, though. And I’m not just talking about being a so-called ‘superhero.’ The world has more than enough of those. I’m an unregistered vigilante, as criminal in the eyes of the law as the people I hunt. Plenty of people want to do what I do. It’s a reactionary fantasy, where you can enforce your own rules, bring order to a chaotic world that seems to care nothing for you. A lot of people think that’s why I do what I do, but they couldn’t be more wrong. I learned a different way. A better one.

My mentor was a man named Jason Hunt, but the world knew him as Hawkshaw. He wore a mask, but unlike most people, he wasn’t interested in fame or fortune. He wanted to punish the guilty and protect the innocent, no matter which side of the law they were on. Ruthless gangs and homicidal cops alike were his prey, and he would stop at nothing to bring them down. Not just using his fists, but with his head. The world called him a vigilante, but if you asked Jason what his job was, he only ever had one answer- detective.

For twenty years, Hawkshaw protected the city of Pax, solving cases the system couldn’t handle, or simply didn’t care about. I was at his side for more than half that time, as the Harrier, his sidekick and protege. Jason always told me that I’d have to succeed him one day, but I always thought I’d have more time. Then, six months ago, he disappeared.

Now he’s gone. Now it’s just me and the city. And the city is screaming.

Sometimes the scream is quite literal. Other times, it comes in the form of a silent alarm, triggered at a nearby convenience store. No blaring siren, just a digital alert intercepted by my suit on its way to the police. Their response time in this part of town is eight minutes at best. Poor people aren’t who the police exist to protect, after all. But something tells me they’re going to take a lot longer than eight minutes. The Burners operate in this part of town, and most cops who patrol here know to look the other way when necessary. That means it’s up to me. As usual.

Most of my nights aren’t spent responding to this kind of thing. Pax may have more crime than most other cities in the US, but it’s still a massive place, and the odds of a mugging or assault taking place while I happen to be nearby are low. That just makes these Burners particularly unlucky.

The gang gets its name from a habit of torching homes and workplaces of people who defy them. That’s not what’s happening here, though. These are just a handful of low-level thugs operating under the gang’s banner, sticking up a convenience store because they have nothing better to do. I might not intervene under different circumstances, considering the people in this part of town often have no other option than crime to pay their bills or buy their next shot of insulin. If that was the case, though, they wouldn’t be wearing red armbands, and they wouldn’t be this organized.

Even the bottom-feeders of a gang like the Burners are getting more organized. If Pax is an ecosystem, Hawkshaw is the apex predator, but my prey are adapting. Observing the store from a distance, I make four of them. One at the register, one patrolling the aisles, one keeping the pair of bystanders under control, and one watching the back entrance. Not exactly displaying military discipline, but it’s still more than Jason had to deal with when he was just starting out. Back then, he was wearing the kind of body armor ordinary people can buy, and half of his gear were things he made himself. The equipment I inherited is quite a bit more advanced.

Thanks to my helmet’s thermal scanning, I know exactly where all four of my targets are. All of them are armed, but that’s not a concern. My suit’s taken harder hits than from a street piece and come away without a single scratch. What I need to worry about is collateral. Three civilians inside of the store. Two huddled against the wall, guarded by one of the Burners, while the third is at the register, filling a bag with bills. There’s a car out front, still running, but empty. Things could get complicated if they get inside, so my window to act is small. There aren’t any good entrance points, so I take the best of the worst- the back. Guarded, yes, but the Burner is looking down, cigarette and lighter in hand.

Once upon a time, I would have had some sort of quip about the dangers of smoking ready before I took him out. Now, I just fire my gauntlet’s taser at him from the shadows, and watch as he crumples to the ground, a nonlethal electric shock rendering him momentarily immobile. Before he can recover, I zip-tie his wrists and toss him into the alleyway behind the store. Once the feeling in his face returns, he’ll probably try to warn his friends, but it should be too late by then. His gun fell to the ground as he went down, and I pick it up, disassembling the weapon in six swift moves, just in case.

Closing the back door behind me, I advance into the store. The harsh halogen lighting isn’t ideal, considering Jason’s uniform was designed to blend into shadows. The aisles are just barely tall enough that none of the other Burners can see me, but the store is small, and my presence won’t go unnoticed forever.

One aisle over, I can hear a Burner moving. From the sound of it, he’s grabbing candy bars off the shelves and pocketing them. Keeping my footsteps as quiet as possible, thankful that the insipid music blaring over the store’s speakers is masking me, I come up behind him and tap him on the shoulder. He whirls around, scattering his ill-gotten goodies in the process, and yelps. To the man’s credit, his fright lasts only a moment, before he takes a swing at me. Brave, but stupid. I catch the right hook with my right hand and hold firm, refusing to let him pull away. The momentary bravado is replaced with terror even greater than before, as he realizes what a mistake he just made. Then I strike his elbow with my free hand, bending the bone the wrong way. It’s not the worst possible injury I could inflict, but it’s still incredibly painful, worse than the average person can handle. It’s much more difficult to actually knock someone out than the movies have led people to believe, but having your arm broken generally hurts badly enough that you won’t be able to move for a while.

There’s no time for zip-ties now. His screaming is almost enough to drown out the music, and certainly sufficient to alert his friends. The one nearest to me is watching the two customers, and I have no intention of letting them come to any harm. Instead, I topple the nearest shelf over, knocking the others down like dominos, until they push over the one the Burner was standing next to. It pins his legs, but he manages to keep ahold of his gun, and as I approach, he twists around painfully to fire at me. The moment I see what he’s up to, I raise my arm and activate my hard-light shield. A glowing yellow oval roughly equivalent to a riot shield in size appears, projected from a small device built into my left gauntlet. It’s totally weightless, yet hard to the touch, and more than capable of absorbing gunfire. So is my armor, but letting him hit me wouldn’t be good. Hawkshaw isn’t a person, he’s an idea, and ideas don’t get shot in the chest. In the eyes of the civilians, the Burner, and anyone they told, Hawkshaw would become fallible. Using the shield shows them that I’m unassailable.

When the thug’s gun runs empty, I walk over and kick him in the face. Judging by the blood, his nose is probably broken. The gun falls, and I slide it away with my foot before heading to the front of the store.

The bag of money is on the ground, bills spilling everywhere. His loot forgotten, the last Burner’s objective is now to escape. He’s dragged the cashier out from behind the counter, and has his gun to her head, body pressed close to his own, as he backs towards the door. There’s fear in his eyes, not just because his crew got taken down in less than a minute, but because of who’s doing it.

“Hawkshaw? Y-you’re dead!”

He’s not threatening me. The Burner, like most of the city, assumed Hawkshaw was gone for good a few months after he disappeared. Before, Jason could have made all of these thugs run without having to lift a finger. But he’s been gone six months, and I’ve only been in the suit for two. The city’s forgotten who to fear. It’s time for them to remember.

“Those reports were highly exaggerated,” I reply, and immediately regret it. The quips were my thing when I was Harrier, but they don’t exactly work for Hawkshaw. Emboldened by the fact that I’m not acting like the vigilante he fears, the thug regains some confidence, and starts inching towards the door again.

“It doesn’t matter. I-I’m getting in the car, and she’s coming with me. Try to stop me and I’ll sh-shoot her.”

With the gun an inch from the cashier’s forehead, things certainly don’t look good. However, I’m far from helpless. In fact, I won’t have to lay a hand on him.

“Watson. Disable.”

In the same second that the Burner’s expression turns from fear to confusion, there’s a gunshot, but it’s not from him. It’s my ‘partner,’ a drone that Jason named after another famous detective’s assistant. The less-than-lethal rubber round hits him in the back through the store’s front window, and he tumbles forward, releasing the hostage in the process. She scrambles away, and I place a boot on the thug’s head before he can move.

“Tell your friends. This ghost is hunting you.”

I rarely stick around to talk to the cops. Jason had always hated them. When I asked why, he told me that in his experience, most of them were no better than the criminals he fought. The only real difference is that when a cop kills someone, they’re much harder to convict. That was why I watched from a distance instead, observing through Watson’s video feed as a riot van pulled up. It’s taken some time to get used to working with a mechanical ally, but the utility it provides is a convincing argument. Jason started using it after I began operating independently, though he was very clear that a machine could never truly replace me as his partner. It does offer certain advantages that I lack, though- such as being able to watch the arrests take place without being seen.

Considering the number of killer cops and corrupt prosecutors Jason exposed over the years, the Pax Police Department is never going to like Hawkshaw. Once the worst of the worst were thrown behind bars or otherwise dealt with, the people who replaced them did begin to warm to us somewhat. Eventually they gave up on actively trying to arrest us entirely, though we’re still technically on the Most Wanted list. The shoot-on-sight order was revoked some years ago, but not every single officer has gotten that message, either- particularly those whose friends we made sure were sent to prison. Still, short of building his own prison or executing every criminal he ever fought, Jason had little other choice but to hand the people he stopped over to the criminal justice system. He set up a system to make untraceable calls when he needed a suspect picked up, and after a while, the PPD established a standard procedure. They send a SWAT unit every time, in case it’s an ambush, and because the people Jason and I take down tend to be dangerous. Everyone at the scene gets cuffed and brought in for questioning. If necessary, countermeasures for metahumans are also employed. Fortunately, the cops who respond to this particular call aren’t stupid. They bring everyone on the scene into the back of a truck, including the cashier and customers. None of them protest as they’re cuffed, though some seem anxious about being kept in the same vehicle as the Burners.

Once they get to the precinct, they’ll all be placed in special cells and kept isolated. Ordinary people would call the PPD’s measures extreme, but Jason had approved. When I asked why, he said “It means they’re finally taking us seriously.” If he’d wanted to get inside a police precinct, this was exactly how he’d have done it- disguised himself as the victim of a crime and called it in as Hawkshaw. We only pulled that trick once, to get close to the new police commissioner and deliver a warning, and now they treat everyone they pick up from one of these calls as if they might be him. But once they’re certain that none of them are secretly me, it’ll be a fairly standard case. The perps will be charged, and most likely convicted. If the victims are smart, she’ll testify, to help make sure of it. And if a jury is dumb enough to let any of them go free, I’ll track them down and deliver my own verdict.

Before the van leaves, I use Watson to fire a tracer at it. According to normal protocol, they’re supposed to take anyone they pick up back to the precinct, but it wouldn’t be the first time that a couple of cops decided to make a ‘detour’ on the way there. No matter what the people in the back of the van did, it doesn’t give the arresting officers a license to knock them around for shits and giggles.

Too many crime-fighters feel that their responsibility ends once they’ve given the perps over to the police. Jason taught me better than that. When he was sixteen, his best friend had been shot in the back by a cop. He’d spent years trying to build an airtight case to prove that the man was guilty, after a jury acquitted him shortly after. But even with all the evidence that he’d assembled, the courts declined to retry the cop. It was then that Jason’s faith in the system finally broke. The only way to get justice would be to take matters into his own hands, so he decided to do exactly that. It would have been an impossible task for an ordinary human, but Jason had discovered years prior that he was part of a small subset of the population termed ‘metahuman.’

While the first confirmed metahumans emerged in the late 1930s, historical evidence suggests that they’ve existed for hundreds of years. Sometimes mistaken for demigods or practitioners of magic, we now call them superheroes and supervillains. When their powers manifest, most metas decide to get rich quick, either by turning to crime, or cashing in on the instant celebrity that comes with superhuman abilities. Jason had never been interested in either, and his ability was subtle enough that he kept it a secret for years. But once he came to realize that he needed to operate outside the law to see justice for his friend’s murder, he had little choice but to call upon it.

It would take a lifetime for most men to master the skills necessary to do what Jason planned. His power bypassed that, by allowing him to instantly master any technique he observed. It took him hours to learn what most people spent years studying. And with access to the vast fortune of his parents, who’d perished in a yachting accident while he was in college, he could travel the world, seeking out the most accomplished individuals in every field imaginable. Once he’d amassed a skill-set vast enough to arm him for any scenario, he returned to Pax.

Even with everything he’d absorbed over the course of his journey, and the equipment he secured using his family’s wealth, Jason wasn’t yet ready. He required an identity that was larger than life, something that could come to represent the very ideals he was fighting for. So he created Hawkshaw, the ultimate investigator. Capable of solving cases that the ordinary authorities wouldn’t or couldn’t touch. And the first person he brought to justice was the man who’d murdered his friend.

Jason made his rules very clear to the world. He’d solve a case, bring in the perpetrator, and give the system one chance to do its job. If they didn’t convict, he’d punish them himself. Some called him a psychopath. Some called him a hero. I called him my partner. As Hawkshaw and Harrier, we fought for justice in Pax and beyond. As I got older, I became more independent, and started working on my own, but whenever I needed help with a case, I would call on him, and whenever he needed someone to back him up in a fight, he’d call on me. That is, until he disappeared.

It’s not the first time that he’d gone missing, but he’d always come back sooner or later. This time, I’m not so sure. It took four months for me to accept that his return wasn’t imminent. The world convinced itself he was dead after two weeks, of course. Masked heroes have a habit of dying, or simply dropping off the map. But I watched Jason cheat death a hundred times. Even now, after half a year, I’m still waiting for him to step out of the shadows and ask for his mask back. But I made him a promise, that if he ever went missing, or found himself unable to continue fighting, I would take up the mantle in his stead. And until he gets back, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

My confidence in Jason wasn’t the only reason I hesitated to take up the name, though. I didn’t feel like I was ready. I still don’t. Hawkshaw’s trenchcoat feels like it’s weighing me down, metaphorically more than literally. It’s actually rather lightweight, but its presence is unfamiliar, and every step I take has to take its existence into account. When I slide underneath a shutter a second before it closes, I have to make sure the coat isn’t about to get caught in it. I have access to all of his equipment, but I’m new to using half of it. It’s only in the middle of a fight, where I don’t have the luxury of doubting myself, that I feel perfect clarity. But now, as the adrenaline rush fades, insecurity begins to creep back in.

Adopting Jason’s identity was one thing, but now all of his responsibilities are mine as well. Not just the city, but his team, the Front Line. I’ve worked with them on occasion, but being a full-time member means I have to be ready to face down world-ending threats at any moment. Jason gave the name Hawkshaw a reputation, making sure the world would take him seriously even without the same sort of superhuman strength or speed as his allies. Now I have to live up to it.

Luckily, I’m a quick study. Preternaturally so, in fact. My power doesn’t work as fast as Jason’s, but it has a broader scope. He could instantly absorb any technique he saw, whereas I learn everything at an accelerated rate. That means I can pick up more intangible skills, like forensic investigation, far faster than Jason could. He spent years studying to become a master detective- I picked it up in a matter of months. But he could become a black belt in multiple martial arts over the course of a day, while it took me weeks to master just one. He had more depth, I’ve got more breadth. It’s not the most exciting ability, but it made me the perfect apprentice. Not just that, but the ideal successor. Jason told me as much. He felt he was plateauing, running out of new talents to incorporate into his vast library. But according to him, my powers gave me infinite potential- not just to reach his level, but to surpass him. I always thought I’d have more time before that became necessary.

Hawkshaw is supposed to be prepared for everything. Jason always seemed to be, and he did his best to make sure I was too. But as my vision goes black without warning, and my consciousness begins to fade, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not even remotely prepared for what’s going to come next.