Cecil Stedman woke from the best sleep of his life and that realization annoyed him before he had even opened his eyes.
He stayed submerged in his vat of pink chemical bath, waiting for the usual stiffness in his neck, the pressure behind his eyes, or the dull ache that had settled into his lower back sometime during Nolan's first appearance.
Nothing hurt.
His thoughts were clear. His body felt rested. The one hour he had managed to steal earlier than usual had done the work of what felt like a full night's sleep.
Cecil opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling of his private quarters.
"Well, shit." He chuckled. "This is the best gift I've gotten in the past two decades."
His right hand emerged from the bath, showing off the silver ring wrapped around his ring finger. He planned on thanking Wild Card for it.
Cecil got out of the solution, dried himself off, and buttoned his shirt. He had just finished putting on his pants when the door opened hard enough to strike the wall. Donald entered without knocking.
That erased the last of Cecil's good mood.
"Sir, it's an emergency! We need to go to the hospital wing."
Cecil fixed his cuffs and started walking. "What happened?"
"Wild Card was brought into the emergency room twenty-three minutes ago. He's unresponsive."
Of course something happened to the kid the instant he took an hour to sleep.
Cecil stopped for half a second before continuing. "Who brought him in?"
"Panther Lily, sir."
They entered the hall. Donald moved just half a step behind him, tablet held against his side.
"What the hell did the kid do?" Cecil asked.
"We... We don't know. He requested transport to Saint Matthew Island earlier and said he intended to test something that could cause significant collateral damage. Ms. Popper took him there. Afterwards, Wild Card and his friends flew southwest to avoid endangering the island's local wildlife."
"And you just let him go out without supervision?"
"He specifically chose an uninhabited area, warned us in advance, and brought both his companions as support," Donald elaborated. "His judgment appeared sound at the time."
"That sentence usually gets people killed." Cecil's frowned. "You know plans like that almost always get hit with a reality check."
"We deployed an observation drone after they left the island as a precaution," Donald continued. "Cloaked, with full audio. Based on the footage, Wild Card intentionally activated an unknown object, and the object generated a storm of cataclysmic scale. Radius of over two thousand miles. Sustained winds of three hundred forty miles per hour. Then it struck him, and only him, with abnormally powerful lightning."
Cecil pressed the elevator button. "Just him?"
Donald pushed the bridge of his glasses up. "Our current theory is that the storm targeted him deliberately."
The doors opened and they stepped inside.
"That's just a description, Donald."
"It's the most accurate description we have, sir." Donald hesitated, thumb resting on the edge of his tablet. "Although... There is something else. The recorded audio is fragmentary since the winds and the thunder buried most of it, but we did get enough to get a picture of the situation."
"And?"
"And he was talking to it, sir."
Cecil turned his head. "To who?"
"To the storm." Donald said it flatly, disbelief coloring his voice. "He argued with it. He complained about it, accused it of cheating, insulted it, and challenged it to do worse. Sir, I've reviewed a great deal of combat audio. People swearing at their enemy is normal, but this was different. He was swearing at it, and it appeared he expected the storm to hear him."
The elevator hummed around them.
"You think it was listening?"
"I think he believed it was, and I think it behaved as though it was." Donald's jaw worked. "One further matter. The storm was too large to conceal. Meteorological agencies across four continents recorded it, and the footage is on every network as of this morning. Nobody can explain what generated it or why it dissipated in under an hour. The leading theory in circulation is an unannounced weapons test, and half the world's governments are asking whose."
"Of course they are." Cecil rubbed his eyes. "Anything tying it to us?"
"Not yet, sir."
"Then that's the only good news you've given me all morning." The floor indicator climbed. "How bad are his injuries?"
"He appears to be in a coma, sir."
Goddamit.
-x-
The hospital room contained enough equipment to keep a small intensive care unit running.
Wild Card lay at the center of it beneath a white sheet. Lily stood at the right side of the bed, leaning on his thighs, hands clasped together. Nyx occupied the rail near Wild Card's shoulder and had refused every attempt to move her.
A strange mask covered Wild Card's face. It wasn't the featureless white one, but it hid almost just as much, leaving his eyes visible.
Weeks of working with the kid, and Cecil still had no idea what he looked like. The thought of reaching down and lifting the thing off lasted about a second and a half.
Several screens hung from mechanical arms attached to the ceiling and the biggest one was stuck on the wall over Wild Card's head. One displayed his heartbeat and brain activity. The others cycled through scans of his organs, skeleton, blood flow, and nervous system.
Green lines moved steadily across each monitor.
The lead physician turned when Cecil entered.
"How is he?" Cecil asked.
"Stable, Director. We found no burns, internal bleeding, fractures, or organ damage. His cardiovascular activity is strong. Brain activity remains within normal sleeping ranges."
Cecil looked at the unconscious teenager. "Then why isn't he waking up?"
"We don't know. He doesn't respond to pain, sound, light, or physical stimulation. Medically, this presents as a coma, but none of our scans show a cause."
"Any drugs in his system?"
"Nothing beyond his abnormal hormone levels. We also detected an unknown energy permeating all throughout his body, though it doesn't seem to be harming him."
Cecil glanced at the screens. Every image showed an intact body. Donald had said the kid fell out of a lightning storm, but the kid's body showed no signs of it.
"Keep monitoring him," Cecil said, sighing. "Send every result directly to me."
"Yes, Director."
"Thank you." Cecil inclined his head. "Give us the room."
The medical personnel disconnected nothing. They simply filed out, leaving the equipment running behind them. The door sealed after the last person.
Cecil turned to Lily.
"What happened out there?"
Lily's hands tightened. "He underwent a trial. The trial was more dangerous than we expected, but he survived."
Cecil arched a brow. "Care to elaborate a bit more?"
"He instructed Nyx and I not to disclose the trial's details if he fell unconscious."
"...Of course he did."
Cecil walked to the foot of the bed. Wild Card's exposed skin looked untouched. There were no scars or burns anywhere the sheet left visible.
"What did the trial do to him?"
"It tempered his body," Lily answered. "His physical capabilities should have improved."
"By how much?"
Lily's brows knit together. "I'm not certain, only that it is significant."
"Was that the only reason he went out there?"
"Yes."
Cecil studied him. Lily's expression remained fixed, and Nyx had turned her head away from the conversation entirely.
They weren't going to betray Wild Card's command. Cecil didn't like the secrecy, but he respected their loyalty.
Cecil nudged his chin toward the mask on Wild Card's face. "What's that?"
"Hypnos' Mask," Lily said. "When worn during sleep, the mask helps with recovery. I placed it on him after we returned."
Like the ring Wild Card gifted him? Interesting.
"How long does it take?" Cecil asked.
"Six uninterrupted hours restores his energy completely. He has also received a blessing from the same god, so his recovery should be accelerated."
That was the first useful answer Cecil had gotten. And it was also another piece of evidence to his current working theory about what Wild Card's true origins could be.
"And if six hours pass and he's still lying there?"
Lily's ears flattened a fraction. For the first time since Cecil walked in, the cat took his time answering.
"...I do not know."
Cecil filed that under things he would be thinking about at three in the morning. Six hours. That was a deadline now, whether or not anybody had agreed to it.
"One more thing. That storm went after him and ignored an entire ocean." Cecil kept his voice level. "Can it happen again?"
"Unlikely."
"Unlikely," Cecil repeated.
"Yes."
"Here's my problem." Cecil moved around the foot of the bed until the cat had to look at him. "If that thing comes back for a second round and he's standing in my building when it does, I lose the building, everyone in it, and everything for two thousand miles in any direction. So when you tell me unlikely, I need to know whether you're guessing."
Lily was quiet for a moment. His hands stayed clasped, and his eyes stayed on the bed.
"The trial required something he expended entirely," he said at last. "Obtaining another is possible, but it is not probable. A dragon suddenly appearing in this room and taking our lives with one breath is far more likely to happen. I cannot tell you more than that."
So it came out of an object. One use, hard to replace. Cecil could work with that. He also noted that unlikely was not never, and that nobody in the room had offered him the word impossible.
"Good. Contact me the second anything changes."
Lily nodded in silence. Nyx lowered her head until her beak touched Wild Card's shoulder.
Cecil looked away. "Let's go, Donald."
They left the room without another word.
-x-
The Hub's main screen was the focus of everyone's attention.
Cecil stood at the center of the floor with Donald beside him. Analysts had gathered at nearby terminals, though nobody spoke. The footage from the observation drone waited on the screen.
"Start from the island," Cecil ordered.
The recording began.
Saint Matthew Island filled the lower half of the display. Wild Card, Panther Lily, and Nyx rose from the field and flew southwest over the water. The drone followed at a distance, keeping them inside the center of the frame.
Wild Card stopped once the island had nearly disappeared. The footage showed his transformation in full.
A cloak of lightning, accompanied by golden armor and by flame-like hair.
The armor was new. Cecil had seen or heard of the other abilities separately except that one. Regardless, seeing them activate together gave him a fresh appreciation for how much force the kid carried around inside him.
All of it also made him look like the farthest thing from a human.
Wild Card produced a piece of paper and tore it. A sphere of light shot into the sky and dark clouds spread across the horizon.
The storm covered all of the visible ocean. Wind battered the drone, forcing its stabilizers to compensate.
Somehow, Wild Card remained still beneath the storm.
"Increase magnification."
The image tightened around him. Minutes passed without an attack before the sky lit up, and the first bolt swallowed him.
The drone's picture vanished into static. It recovered seconds later, revealing a ring of steam expanding across the ocean. The water beneath Wild Card had been driven downward across what looked like hundreds of feet.
Nobody in the Hub spoke.
Wild Card caught himself near the surface. Green light covered his body.
The audio came through the Hub's speakers, torn and half-drowned. Most of it was gone, chewed up by the wind and thunder. What survived arrived in fragments between the thunder.
The second strike hit the shield held above his head, and the shield survived. Wild Card fell anyway.
Cecil's jaw tightened as the footage continued.
One strike became two. Two became three. The armor came apart in pieces with each volley, and what was underneath came apart with it. From the footage alone, Cecil could name the injuries. Burns through muscle, ruptured organs, broken bones. Any one of them would have killed a normal man, and several of them would have killed an unprepared superhuman.
But green light would envelop the kid's body, the injuries would close, and he would climb back up to meet the next one every single time.
Cecil kept his eyes on the screen while the analysts stayed silent around him. The boy currently lying two floors below in the hospital wing had a body that read as intact on every scan the GDA owned. No burns, fractures, or scarring. Nothing to indicate that a few hours ago he had been cooked and broken and drowned in sequence, over and over, and had repaired himself between each round like a man dusting off a jacket.
Four bolts descended. The drone retreated to a farther distance when the resulting shockwave reached it.
Five followed. The ocean beneath Wild Card turned into another, bigger cloud of steam. His appearance came through the static, mangled almost past recognition. When the picture steadied, the helmet covering the kid's face was gone.
Cecil eyes widened. They'd been trying to get a look under that mask ever since they worked with him, and a bolt of lightning had just done it for them.
What the drone showed was purple skin stretched tight over a jaw, eyes black from lid to lid except for the white pupils, and flame-like hair rising from the scalp. Blood streamed from his eyes and mouth, and combined with everything else they were seeing, it formed a bloody image of a good-looking young man in dire straits.
It told Cecil nothing, though. He'd simply traded one unknown for a different one.
Wild Card said something that was unmistakably profanity, and unmistakably aimed upward. Afterwards, clear as a bell in the gap between thunderclaps, the kid told the storm to do its worst.
Cecil fixed his eyes on the screen as the final volley formed. Every cloud on the screen filled with white light and seven bolts merged over Wild Card.
The drone lost him for three seconds.
When the picture returned, the armor was gone. So was the rest of the kid's transformations.
The purple had drained out of his skin. The black had left his eyes, which were half-shut. His dark hair hung flat against his forehead. What came down out of that sky was a naked kid, arms loose, no injuries on him anywhere, dropping toward the water without a sound.
Before the kid fell into the water, Lily entered the frame at full speed. He caught Wild Card above the ocean while Nyx circled them.
They flew back to Saint Matthew Island, where Lily pulled the Portal Gun from his storage bag, and fired at the ground. An orange portal opened, and Lily carried Wild Card through it and Nyx followed. The portal collapsed a second later.
The footage ended there. Cecil had just been handed a face he'd wanted to see for weeks and hadn't earned.
He looked around the Hub. Every analyst had stopped working. Donald's usual professional calm was gone, and several people were staring at the screen with open fear. He understood.
The GDA dealt with aliens, monsters, mad scientists, magic, and natural disasters. They could examine those threats, establish patterns, and eventually find something useful.
Wild Card and the shit he pulled continued refusing to fit into any category they had.
Cecil had accepted calling his knowledge precognition because it gave an acceptable name to an impossible problem. The kid knew about specific major events before they happened, including threats hidden from every intelligence network on the planet. He had identified Sinclair, the Flaxans, the Order, the Maulers, and Nolan. His visions even contained details Cecil had only confirmed after acting on them.
Then there were his abilities.
Wild Card could touch the ground and detect people through hundreds of feet of concrete. He controlled earth, metal, fire, and lightning. He healed injuries, broke curses, opened portals with unknown technology, created food from nothing, stored objects somewhere nobody could access, and had a cat companion that was unlike anything the GDA had in its records.
The list grew every time Cecil saw him.
During the Midnight City operation, Wild Card had formed a spear of lightning containing the power of sunlight. That weapon had burned through vampires and ended a curse that had ignored every previous attempt to break it.
Now Cecil had a silver ring around his finger that had turned one hour inside a chemical bath into the best sleep he had experienced in decades. Lily had called the mask on Wild Card's face the Hypnos' Mask. He had also said Wild Card carried a blessing from the same god.
Hypnos.
The Greek god of sleep.
Cecil shut his eyes.
Wild Card's transformation returned to him. Purple skin. Black eyes. Flame-like hair. Golden armor forming over his body. Lightning covering him until the cameras struggled to record his figure.
Then he tore a piece of paper and summoned a storm large enough to consume the horizon. The lightning had ignored the ocean and every other available target. It had pursued Wild Card alone.
What was even stranger was all the audio their drone managed to record.
A remark of disbelief before the first strike. Later was outrage, sharp and personal, accusing the sky of cheating. It was followed by Wild Card's challenge, shouted at clouds that covered the entire visible horizon, demanding to know if that was all it had.
Cecil had heard men pray, beg, and threaten God or some other higher figure at the moment of death, and nearly every one of them had been talking to an empty room. This was not that. This was a kid arguing with something he was certain could hear him. And the timing of the strikes, the pauses, the escalation after each insult, did nothing to argue him out of that reading.
Lily called the entire thing a trial, and that surviving it had strengthened his body.
What if it was a divine trial?
Cecil had avoided the conclusion because it sounded fucking ridiculous.
But that excuse had expired. Wild Card could truly be a god. Or a demigod.
A demigod was the version Cecil could stomach.
Maybe the boy himself didn't know. Maybe his claims of precognition came from an inherited connection to fate. His control over the ground could belong to another divine parent or patron. The sunlight, the healing, and the blessings could have come from separate gods.
Or maybe Cecil was trying to force human mythology onto an entity that existed long before humans started giving names to things they feared.
"Sir?" Donald asked.
Cecil turned his attention away from the screen.
"Pull every classified file we have on gods, demigods, divine bloodlines, and verified contact with old pantheons. Include cults, artifacts, avatars, and anything the Immortal and War Woman has reported from before the twentieth century."
Donald stared at him for a second. "You... believe Wild Card may be of divine origin?"
"I believe calling him a superhuman is becoming fucking useless. You've seen what the kid can do. The sheer amount of random bullshit he pulls out of his ass every time we see him is ridiculous."
Donald recovered quickly and reached for his tablet. "Any specific pantheon?"
"Start with Greek. Hypnos, Gaia, Zeus, Apollo, anyone connected to prophecy, sleep, earth, sunlight, or lightning. Search the rest afterwards."
"Understood."
The thought of a possible god living inside his headquarters should have terrified him. And it did. A little.
"Don't forget to run his face," Cecil added. "Every database we have, every one we've borrowed, every one we're not supposed to be inside. Birth records, school photos, missing persons, morgue intakes, the works."
Donald's stylus stopped. "Sir, if I may. We have run every parameter we have on him for weeks."
"We've never had a face before." Cecil looked back at the frozen screen. "Run it. And if it comes back empty, I want to know that, too. Empty is an answer."
Whoever Wild Card really was, he had no records or family the GDA could find so far. The kid also acted confident until something caught him off guard, and sometimes covered the gap with reckless decisions. He threw himself into every crisis that came his way, and had nearly died because an unknown object promised to make him stronger.
Cecil pinched the bridge of his nose.
Nolan was preparing to conquer Earth. The Guardians remained days or hours from an ambush. Two teenage Viltrumite hybrids had developed their powers, and somebody inside the GDA was feeding information to the Order.
Now, Cecil might also be responsible for a teenage demigod with no sense of self-preservation. He reassessed the situation anyway, just like he always did every time something involving Wild Card occurred.
Against Nolan, none of Wild Card's methods mattered. Sunlight, lightning, curses, sealed rooms full of dead vampires, none of that would leave a bruise on a being of his caliber. Send the kid at Omni-Man tomorrow and he'd be dead in a minute, and Cecil would be down one of his best and still short a plan.
But something else caught his attention.
Wild Card had shown up with a mask and a warning and nothing else. Since then, Cecil had rewritten his file after Sinclair, after the Walking Dread, after the Maulers, and again after an entire city got its sky back and its vampires purged. Now the kid had walked into a storm on purpose to make himself stronger, and it had worked, making the file out of date again.
On the other hand, Nolan's power had been sitting at a ceiling since before Cecil had this job. Wild Card didn't appear to have one. So the question now was how fast Wild Card's power was rising, and whether it would get where it needed to be before Nolan stopped pretending to be a keeper of peace.
There was no way to run that math, and Cecil hated problems he couldn't run.
"...Donald."
Donald looked his way. "Sir?"
"Put the island under quarantine until we know what that storm did to the water and local environment," Cecil said. "And keep the recording locked to this room under the highest encryption we've got. This footage should be known to no one else but those in this room right now. Nobody outside this floor, nobody with a clearance below mine, no exceptions."
"Understood."
"And put a lid on the storm," Cecil added. "Every agency on four continents is looking at that thing right now and half of them think it was a weapons test. Push the anomalous-weather angle, seed it through the usual channels, and get our people in front of the meteorological societies before somebody with a telescope and a grudge starts triangulating."
Donald's stylus moved. "The satellite records will be difficult to contest, sir."
"Then don't contest it. Confirm the storm, bury the cause. It's easier to sell a mystery than a lie." Cecil started walking. "Wake up whoever handles the Pacific fisheries council and get me a plausible reason to keep a hundred-mile exclusion zone around that island for two weeks. Environmental hazard, unstable seabed, whatever they'll swallow."
Donald paused. "And Wild Card, sir? Do you intend to speak with him when he wakes?"
"When he wakes, I'll have about four hundred questions for him, and he'll answer maybe six." Cecil stopped at the teleporter pad. "Until then, he's asleep with a cat and a bird guarding him, and I've got a planet to run. Ping me the second his eyes open, not one second later."
"Understood, sir."
Cecil activated the teleporter and appeared in his office.
Steeling himself for a long few hours in the office, Cecil sat down and cracked his knuckles. Somewhere below him, a seventeen-year-old who might be a god was sleeping through the largest cover-up the GDA had run in six years.
Cecil spun the silver ring on his finger once, and got to work.