You are the brick/
I am so unpredictable/
Led by the current away/
Your solid stage is so necessary to save/
All those who stray/

Peter was in the White House. He could tell because he'd taken the tour several times while in grade school, as every kid who lived within two hundred miles inevitably did. It was quieter than he remembered, with a solemn, sterile stillness bleached by acid-wash white light. There was a man standing next to him, slightly scruffy-looking and vaguely familiar, glowering in an unpleasant way that Peter found oddly significant. He watched as a perky blond tour guide tapped him on the shoulder, saying, "We're heading outside now, Mr. Sprague."

He waved her away with a brittle smile, insisting that he wanted to look at the paintings a little longer, and she left him alone. The man—Sprague—began to move forward, and Peter felt vaguely, fuzzily, as if he should stop him, but he couldn't seem to move. A door swung open in front of him, and Peter could tell by the slope of the walls that it was the Oval Office. They hadn't been allowed in here in the tours—the President was off-limits to fifth-graders. He recognized it anyway, from movies and from the President in it, sitting on his desk with a pencil behind his ear.

Sprague strode toward the room with a quick-paced, fanatic purpose, and Peter felt the sense of disaster push against him, pulsing his veins to a frenzy, but still he could do nothing. As Sprague entered the office, people seemed to finally notice him, first with puzzlement and then with alarm as they saw the look in his eye and the direction he was heading. Too late—his bones were glowing orange through his skin, and he'd grabbed onto the President before the Secret Service could reach him. He sent them slamming back with waves of radiation, screaming something that Peter couldn't understand, mad-eyed and bursting with destruction.

Peter watched in horror as radiation began to melt their flesh away, charring them to skeletons and then to ash, blasting and splintering through the walls until they collapsed in and everything was toxic-hot and flaming, falling, red-hot-white-orange Nagasaki Los Alamos Hiroshima death death death—

Peter woke up screaming, tumbling Claire off the couch, yelling with enough raw terror to shred his voice to pieces. She scrambled to her knees and grabbed him by the wrists, hanging on grimly as he shuddered through the last of nightmare earthquake-convulsions.

"Peter!" she shouted, frightened, wondering what could make him scream like this, her uncle who was so suicidally brave. "Peter, what's wrong?"

Nathan came running into the room, yanked out of sleep by the sound of his brother's screams. It had taken him a moment of four-alarm panic to realize that Peter wasn't in his room, but in the library, where he'd fallen asleep the night before. After Jonathan's dramatic exit, Claire had burst into uncontrollable sobs, the kind that she hadn't cried since she killed Thompson. Everyone had been blankly bemused at her tears, none of them able to understand except Peter, who had sat her down on a couch in the library and held her for a long time. It was only when she'd stopped crying that he realized she had fallen asleep, effectively trapping him for the night. He had smiled, shrugged, and settled in to sleep with her snuggling her head against his shoulder, resigned to waking the next day with a dead arm. He certainly hadn't expected to be dragged out of sleep by a screaming nightmare, thrashing like a hooked fish.

Nathan knelt by Claire on the couch, taking Peter's chin his hand and forcing him to look him in the eyes. "Pete," he said, feeling Peter shaking under his hands. "Hey, Peter, calm down, man. Tell me what happened."

Peter jerked out of Nathan's grip, rubbing the cold sweat off his palms. "I'm fine," he said, fighting his breathing down to normal. "It was just a dream."

"Yeah, well, we all know your dreams aren't just dreams," Nathan said. "You'd better tell us what it was about."

"I'll make some hot chocolate," Claire said swiftly, remembering the nights when she'd wake up with nightmares and her dad would calm her with hot drinks and a quiet voice. Nathan and Peter, apparently not familiar with the fatherly tradition, looked at her askance, but she stood her ground. "Come on, come to the kitchen with me. It'll make you feel better, I swear."

The brothers followed her dubiously into the kitchen, where she began whisking around like a fifties housewife, busily brisk, making it appear far more of a production than it was. She set a pot boiling and then sat down on a stool, as close to Peter as she dared in his fragile state. They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the whistle of steam from the pot, carefully monitoring Peter for signs of damage.

Nathan met Claire's eyes over his head and she smiled, surprised at how easy it was after telling herself she'd never smile for him again. They'd finally passed through their state of awkwardness, run the gambit of relationship and had come out of it bloody but still walking. He was not her father, biology be damned—that had been established clearly and comfortably. He had bowed out of the job in favor of his better, the man who'd bandaged her scraped knees and kissed her tears. He'd stopped trying to play father, and now it was time for them to form something new, what they were and what to do about it.

"So tell us," Nathan said.

Peter sighed and ran a hand through his hair, looking down at the fingerprints he was making on the sleek ultramodern kitchen table. "You guys remember Ted Sprague? Nods from both of them, thoughtful from Nathan and vehement from Claire. "I, um…jeez, how do I say this? I think he's going to kill the President."

Claire copped out of responding to his announcement by pulling the heated water off the stove and mixing in packets of hot chocolate that coalesced into powdery clumps on the sides of the mugs. That effectively left Nathan to deal with his spectacular statement, who promptly did the worst thing possible, and burst out laughing.

"Oh thanks," Peter said waspishly. "That's really supportive, Nathan, thanks a lot. You think this is a joke? Every one of my dreams has come true, every one of them. Well," he admitted, "all except the exploding one, but who knows how long before that happens, too. My point is, if I dream Nuclear Man blowing up the President, it's going to happen."

"Sorry," Nathan said. "I wasn't laughing at you, Pete—or at least not completely. It's just—this," he swept a hand out, encompassing them and their hot chocolate and the world. "Somewhere along the line, we got stuck in some sort of a sci-fi melodrama where you say things like 'I'm going to blow up New York City' and I have to believe you. It's all so ridiculously larger than life."

"Doesn't mean it's not true," Peter said mutinously.

"Well, no, that's the problem. I keep waiting for someone to jump out from behind the backdrop and tell us that this is all a huge joke, but it keeps not happening. How are we supposed to deal with this kind of stuff? Things like this don't happen in real life."

"I'll tell you how we're supposed to deal with it," Peter said, still testy from Nathan's reaction. "We're going to save him, that's how. We don't exactly have a choice."

"Says who?" snapped Nathan. "We didn't get any instruction manual for this hero thing, Peter. Nobody asked me if I wanted to run around saving people, nobody gave me a costume or any papers to sign. I'm not obligated to do anything."

"Yikes," Peter said. "Don't tell your voters that, Mr. Served-His-Country-In-Vietnam. Only patriotic for the posters, is that it?"

"Something like that," Nathan said. "I am not about to go haring off to the White House yelling that the sky is falling, okay?"

Peter shook his head, managing to pull together a smile for Claire as she pressed the hot chocolate into his hand. She was wisely staying out of this, choosing to blend into the kitchen and play waitress rather than risk getting slashed open on their focused sarcasm. She wasn't sure whose side she'd take, anyway—she agreed at least partially with both of them, feeling that this was all very ludicrous, but also feeling obligated to do something about it. President Cordova was an extremely popular Commander in Chief, smart enough to appeal to the elite, charming and Kennedyesque enough to appeal to the middle class, and good-looking enough to appeal to Claire's cheerleading squad. Unlike many former Presidents, people would be very upset if he was killed—Dallas and Hiroshima rolled into one.

"You didn't see it," Peter said. "I watched it, Nathan, I watched him blow up the whole damn White House! If you're going to hide in your shell, fine, but I'm going to do something about it." He stood up, apparently planning to go charging off at two in the morning and burst into the Oval Office with the news.

Nathan grabbed his arm with such violence that hot chocolate sloshed over Peter's hand, dragging him back. "Oh, no you don't," he said grimly. "You're not stepping a foot outside this house, Peter."

Peter went white with fury, trying to pull out of Nathan's grip. "What?"

"In case you've forgotten," Nathan said icily, "your picture is on CNN every fifteen minutes—you can't just go waltzing out of here. Besides which, there is a very unstable ticking time bomb somewhere in this city, and if you come within fifty feet of him, we are all dead."

"So, what, I'm grounded?" Peter spat, finally jerking his arm away. "Newsflash, Nathan—you can't stop me." He began to go transparent from his fingers, melting into the background fast enough to make them dizzy.

But Nathan was a realist—he'd lived for thirty-five years without these abilities, and he planned to do without them for the rest of his life as well. He stepped forward quickly and punched Peter in the jaw, sending him crumpling to the linoleum. "Yes, I can," he said.