Songs of Love & Death by George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois Page A

the guy who rescued you?”
    This looked almost like the binders the theater got from agents—catalogs of actors. The first round of cattle calls. Instead of headshots, the detective’s pictures mostly showed blurry full-body action shots of the masked vigilantes. She recognized a lot of them from news clips and reputation: the Invincible, dressed in red, white, and blue, who as far as anyone could tell really
was
invincible and could fly to boot; Black Belt, who dressed like a ninja and could shoot laser beams from his hands; Quantum Girl, a woman in a silver leotard and spike-heeled boots who could teleport; and more. There were maybe two dozen of them—more than she’d realized. No one knew much about them, where they lived or what they did when they weren’t out fighting crime. Maybe they had secret identities. Maybe they had secret hideouts, like Gothic castles. Maybe they were robots who only emerged when there was crime to be fought.
    In her play, she had assumed that her hero was a person with a heart to break like everyone else.
    She flipped through the whole book and shook her head. “He wasn’t anybody I recognized. He didn’t even have much of a costume, just a mask. Shouldn’t you be going after the thieves instead of him?”
    “I need all the information I can get for the report,” the detective said flatly.
    She finished making her statement, which she couldn’t see being very useful to any investigation. All she had seen was a swarm of masked men running around performing some mystery play.
    “Charlotte!”
    Dorian Merriman, hot-shot assistant DA, on the fast track after that Midnight Stalker trial—front-page stuff. She hadn’t called him about what hadhappened. He had just known, probably through one of his connections in the police department.
    He rushed to her side, heroically even, but she was a little too wrung out to be impressed by the feat.
    “Are you all right? What happened? I came as soon as I heard. Are you hurt?” He turned to the detective. “Is she hurt?”
    “She’ll be fine,” the man said. He straightened the pages on his desk, signaling that they were done.
    “Hi,” she said, her smile weak.
    He knelt by her side, smoothed back her hair like she was a child, and she beamed back at him. “Now let’s get you home,” he said.
    Dorian had brown eyes.
    Reporters had arrived at the police station, snapping pictures and demanding answers. Word had gotten out about the masked man, a new rooftop hero in the city, and they kept asking: What was his power? His name? Had he talked to her? What did he say? They already knew who she was; a witness at the restaurant had told them everything. She wondered what the papers would make of it; she’d been right there and she didn’t know what had happened. The detective told her not to say anything, so she didn’t.
    In Dorian’s car on the way to her apartment, she got a second wind.
    “You should have seen it; it was amazing, I don’t know who this guy was, and the way the cops were talking I’m not sure if they want to catch the thieves or him. You know, I’d have expected him to be wearing some suit or armor like the other ones do, at least maybe spandex, but no, just jeans, and you know how you joke around because you don’t think those flimsy masks would really hide anyone’s identity? But I can’t for the life of me remember what he looked like. I just saw the mask.”
    “You weren’t scared?” He glanced at her.
    “Well, yeah, sure.” But she let the thought fade. She only wanted to remember amazing.
    Charlotte shared an apartment with several other starving-artist types in too small a space, an arrangement that worked because most of them were gone most of the time, at their theaters or band rehearsals or projects or day jobs. The place was in a part of town that in another ten years would be hip and gentrified, and they were all hoping they’d have made their fortunes by then so they could afford to stay.
    He