Still, he surreptitiously cradles the overloaded plane.

THERE is ice on the lake, thick, hard ice, no fog. The kids wrap themselves up like packages in parkas, hats, mittens. Mr. Green takes the girls out back and gets them to make a shelter. He does something he hasn’t done in years, gestures a hemisphere of glowing green. “Pile snow over that.” “Oooh,” the kids go. “Ano ne!” When they cover it with snow, there’s nothing but an igloo glowing faintly like a neon light in a snowstorm.

Advice: “Anyone know why we cover it up? You protect your secret identity. You don’t want to advertise.”

They bob their heads in agreement.

“People laugh,” says the kid with the long braid bitterly, slouching out from the cabin. He has a butterfly on his jeans. Probably gay.

“No. Not just people laugh. Your enemies find you. People who are going to hurt you find you.”

The kid considers.

“Same thing. Laugh. Hurt.”

The kid knows nothing.

The boy and the men get settled down in the clients’ loft, and the girls giggle in the new igloo.

The red-haired travel agent gets the spare room in the cabin. She uses the shower until the mirror is steamy. He showers after she’s finished and smells lavender soap, woman smells. It’s been twenty years since Lana died. It’s been forever since he was a human man with Lana. He feels bothered and self-conscious with so many people in his privacy.

He pads out in socks to find the red-haired girl in front of the fire, toweling her wet hair from mahogany back to flame. She’s wearing a green sweater that goes too well with her hair and jeans that fit her like a thin coat of paint. He realizes, embarrassingly, there’s a question he hasn’t asked.

“My name is Lan,” she says.

He winces.

“I know,” she says. “Your wife’s name. I am sorry. My name is just Lan.”

He pulls herself together. “That’s your Talent name?”

She shakes her head, smiling. “Just my name.”

“Funny name.”

“Not as funny as the Green Force.”

“Green,” he says. “Bill. Bill was the name my foster parents gave me. The last name changes, but I’m always Bill.”

He looks into the fire, remembering streams of fire, falling, falling, gravity screaming around him, catching and shaping it in his pudgy hands, turning it into a cradle—

“Bill,” she says. “Nice. Why do you want to die, Bill?”

She’s probably twenty, twenty-five. Before he gets to know her, she’ll be dead.

He’s told his own story a hundred times, seen it in the comics, until he almost believes that Mom baked pies for church socials and Dad drove a tractor round the farm. But he remembers the First World War and the Civil War and the Revolution, and before his name was Bill it was Will and Gwillhem and Willa-helm, and his parents were Mutti and Dadu.

Demon, the villagers called him. The villagers tried to burn him, drown him, stone him. Fire flowed around him. When they threw him into the pond, he shaped air in a bubble around him. He is your angel, the priest said. Call him Willa-helm, Protector. Do not be afraid of him.

For a long time he protected them from a distance, like a guard dog, half-angel, half-wolf.

Then he got involved.

He had friends.

He fell in love.

Now he fishes.

“Death is what people do.” Not so long ago, a moment ago in his long life, the other Talents showed up. Each of them unique, wild, strange. Together, a gang. Friends. And Lana. He thought he was people. They proved he was wrong.

“What do those kids have for talents?” he asks.

“Oh, one thing, another. They look after each other,” she says. “That’s talent enough.”

Yeah. “They got long life?” he asks. “Is that one of their Talents?”

She sits with the towel on her knees, looking into the fire. “No. I’ve known lots like them. The others are dead.”

“What’s their story? Born with Talent? Made?”

“Made.”

“How?” Atom, an atomic explosion. Poor Elastic, a vat of chemicals. Himself falling like a star.

And he has touched something. The Chinese girl stares into the fire, her eyes dead black and her mouth widening into a grimace. Her hands tighten around the towel.

“I made them,” she says. “I cursed them. Me.”

And she gets up abruptly and leaves.

FOUR of them went on that long-ago fishing trip: Iguana Man, Astounding, Atom, and the Green Force, who kept the mortals safe and dry. In ordinary ice fishing you shine a light into the murk under the ice. At the bottom of the water, they shone Atom. They could barely see past the yellow ball of light that Atom threw. They were all wasted, laughing so hard they were falling down. Suddenly scales turned in the murk like ragged hands and a single dark eye glared at them before it flashed away into darkness. The world’s last monster, trapped in her lake.

“Shit, boys,” Iguana said.

“It’d be bad to be like that,” Atom said soberly.

“No,” the Green Force said. “Not us. We won’t be like that.”

He thought there was an us. They’d all live forever. There would always be big, colorful villains to fight, Nazis and Yellow Perils, and beings like himself to fight them. He had seen something but it took him years to know it: the Great Fish, trapped in her size and strength, with no path out; too big to get out; without the talent to die.

IT’S two days into an endless fishing trip before he finds out what their talents are.

As far as he can tell, they’re normal annoying teenagers. They bundle themselves up in parkas, stare into the ice hole for fifteen minutes, get bored, and move the light around so they scare the fish. They forget to watch the flags. They play with Game Boys and plug their ears with iPods. They giggle and bicker, and kick and punch, and yell “Pow! Wham!” like they are making up their own soundtrack. The boy with the long braid farts like an elephant; nothing worse than the smell of teenage boy. The fathers are polite and heat endless hot water for tea.

It’s clear what Lan’s talents are. She makes popcorn and sushi, cleans the trout they occasionally catch, braids pigtails, dries little-girl tears.

On the afternoon of the second day the fog comes in.

“We aren’t going fishing today,” Mr. Green says. “Probably not tomorrow. You can play with your Game Boys in the cabin.”

They give him the big-eyed stare.

“Ice is dangerous. Can be a foot thick one step, two inches thick the next. Worse when there’s a thaw. Where the Muskeag comes into the lake, the river water’s eating the ice from below. Where the ice got broken up by our old fishing holes, where the fish gather, where there’s a lot of weed, the ice is thinning out and not healing yet. By the shore the level of the water goes up and down and the ice breaks. But it’s foggy, so you’re not thinking about that, just trying to find your way to the shore. Unless you know to respect the ice, and you kids don’t, you don’t fish.”

The kids mutter in Japanese.

He and Lan go outside, and she checks the weather report on her magic phone. “Above freezing for the next two days,” she points out.

“You foresaw that, right? So it’s your problem.”

“Come on. They could have a more interesting time.”

Their boots slush through the runny snow.

“You could do for them what you did,” she says. “You and the others. Back then.”

“That’s what you want for your kids? Bam, pow, monster? I don’t do that anymore.”

“They can’t even go out in this,” she says.

“Just can’t fish.”

“They can’t. No. I mean they don’t want to go out in this. It sets them off. Their Talents.”

“Which are?” he says.

“They’re shape-changers.”

He waits for more. She doesn’t say anything.

“You did it to them?” he prompts. He’s given her plenty of chances to talk about it. They’ve been fishing from the same ice hole for two days. She hasn’t said a word.