I would give Megan this: when she absolutely needed something done, and had the energy to follow up on it, that thing got done lickety-split.

Here I was, back in the office only a few days later, and I had everything she could get me on the three cases that would be heading my way. It was far from all the info, but to be fair, Megan wasn’t responsible for getting that to me. The District Court itself needed to formally assign me the cases first, at which point the judge could release the documents into my custody and I’d be able to meet my new pro bono clients. But something told me it would take until after the sentencing of Caleb Holder, at the very least.

So until then, all I had was what Megan could rummage up for me, which really just saved me about an hour of rooting through PACER and cursing whichever bureaucrat made every page cost money. Good, not great, but enough to let me start getting my ducks in a row, schedule-wise.

First item on the agenda: skim over the documents Megan sent over and, using those, try and figure out what was going on. I needed a basic theory of the case and a plan of attack before jumping in feet-first, especially since I would probably need to juggle all three of them at the same time. It was easier to keep the plates spinning when I could set one of them going for a few weeks, put it down, and come back later to review the documents I’d requested… or draft a politely furious motion for the court, demanding to know where the hell my documents were.

And based on my initial reads? Well…

One of the cases was a mystery.

One of them was a tragedy.

And the third… looked like a comedy, but was probably just going to test my patience. And it was also the case for which Megan’s documents were my only sources of information, owing to the case having spawned from a parallel proceeding. And since this was all I was going to get until the bureaucracy was handled, that made this case the easiest place to start.

My future client, the defendant, was the soon-to-be ex-wife in a messy divorce proceeding. The pair had worked out mutually-agreed-upon arrangements for their two dogs with little to no difficulty, but proceedings had stalled out badly when it came time to divide up assets. There was substantial marital property, including a large joint marital account, and the divorce went from ‘messy’ to ‘criminal’ when that joint account got emptied out.

The husband filed a police report, as one should in situations like this, but it still wouldn’t necessarily have been a federal offense… until the husband mentioned that his wife was Moonshot, and a former NMR super at that.

So thanks to a technicality, her case was removed to federal court, then the court granted a preliminary injunction to freeze her assets (because it was a financial crime), and since that meant she couldn’t hire a lawyer of her own, that meant I got to deal with it. Joy.

The worst part? I didn’t even know which former NMR super I was dealing with! She must have been in the same camp as Barricade had been, the ones who kept their superhero persona separate from their civilian identity. And far be it for me to judge them for that choice — God knows I would’ve loved to have the option myself — but it did make this whole thing more complicated than it had to be. If I knew who she was, I could get a rough idea of her powers, and start figuring out if there was any reason this actually had to be in federal court or if I could just chuck it to DC Superior Court. Which might also get the case out of my hands.

Regardless, I couldn’t actually do much more with this one at present — too little information to go off of.

So I turned away from the test of patience, and over to the tragedy. Of the three cases I was apparently set to receive from the District Court, it was the one I knew the most about, less from the few documents Megan had shared as opposed to other sources. It was also the one where I deeply hoped to realize that I didn’t actually know anything about it at all.

Because what information Megan had been able to give me, and the extras I’d found on my own? They did not paint a pretty picture. No, not at all.

Back in early January, a headline ran on the front page for all of ten minutes before getting pushed lower by an apartment building fire in Navy Yard — the same fire that took the life of my client. The article that those events buried spoke of joint FBI, FMB, and ATF investigations into a white supremacist group that had been spreading up from West Virginia and the southern half of Virginia, culminating in an averted attack from several such groups.

The investigation began somewhere in 2018, but other matters pulled the FBI off of those matters for a bit, and by the time they managed to return to the trail, things had escalated. Substantially. To try and compensate, the NMR hurriedly transferred one of their supers from elsewhere in the country over to DC, a Moonshot who had extensive experience with white supremacist groups, beyond even the lead investigators. How?

Well… because he was a former white supremacist himself.

The man was Wayne McCain, sometimes known as Pyre, though he preferred to use his actual name. As a Tennessee youth during the 80s, he fell in with a bad crowd, and had a hand in more than a few hate crimes. His group’s favorite targets were indie musicians in the Nashville music scene who stood out for what they felt were the ‘wrong’ reasons, and while I would love to tell you that Wayne never took part in the actual violence, that would be a lie. He was very open and honest about the blood on his hands.

Eventually, cops slapped a pair of cuffs on him and his cohort, dragging them in front of a judge to face justice. And this is where his story would have ended if not for being before the right judge on the right day.

Judge William White should have recused himself from the case — his daughter’s college friend was one of Wayne and company’s victims. But instead of recusing himself, Judge White did something else.

In a move that wouldn’t have been kosher outside of the American South’s judiciary and its culture, he spoke with each and every defendant one by one. He brought them back to his chambers, and asked them questions: what, why, how.

Why did they do these things? For what reasons? What did their victims do to them, specifically, that would have warranted this reaction? How did doing this make them feel? Did they feel strong, for having protected themselves and their communities? And if so, what were they protecting people from? How did hurting these people help anybody? What did they stand to gain from this?

And if it had been their family and friends that had been attacked, and they were in charge of choosing a punishment for their attackers, what would they decide on?

Ultimately, some of the attackers were properly incorrigible — true blue dyed-in-the-wool white supremacists. You cannot reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and the kind of unapologetic neo-Nazi who went around beating up minorities for kicks wasn’t the sort of person who considered such silly things as ‘remorse’.

But to his credit, Wayne McCain was not

one of those irredeemable monsters. He hadn’t slid so far down the slippery slope as to cross the point of no return.

And that’s why Judge White offered a choice to Wayne and four of the others: all five of them would plead guilty. At that point, all five of the potentially repentant men could either go to prison, or… they could enlist in the United States Army, and their criminal records would be put under seal. If they successfully served a full tour of duty without incident, the sealed records would be expunged, and they would henceforth be free men, changed for the better.

Unbeknownst to any of them at the time, however, was that Judge White would be going out of his way to stack the deck against all five of them — a fact he only revealed back in 2003, when he released his memoir. White was an ex-military man himself, and called in favors with an old wartime buddy, who was in charge of Army recruiting in Nashville. A few strings pulled here, a couple of favors there, and a few hours of help from the E4 Mafia to make sure nobody would ever find out (if you know, you know)?

When Wayne got to Boot Camp, he found himself separated from his fellow penitents and set up with a squadron of fellow recruits where he, a white man, was a minority. He found himself spending every hour of every day in the company of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims — hell, two of who might have been his ‘fellow’ white men were Jewish, and therefore didn’t count!

And in this environment? This acid test, tailor-made to push his prejudices, biases, and hatred to their breaking point, designed to see if his remorse was just lip service?

Wayne McCain thrived.

The four others Wayne had arrived with? They all washed out, traded in their camo for prison orange, their new leaves too brittle to survive a concentrated dose of the kind of pressure life would constantly subject them to as they tried not to slide back into hatred.

But not Wayne.

Wayne made it through Boot Camp with ease, consistently performing near the top of his unit. Combat skills, sharpshooting, physical fitness, unit cohesion… his background should have been working against him. By all apparent metrics, he was no different than the four men who’d been with him when he walked through the gates. But where they all left in prison jumpsuits, heads hung low in shame and disgrace, Wayne departed with pride in his eyes, a spring in his step, and eager anticipation for what was to come.

Wayne McCain served his first three-year tour of duty without incident, and so his criminal record was expunged. And if that wasn’t enough proof for Judge White? When his tour of duty was up, Wayne and two of his squadmates, Farid Abaza and Diego Garcia, turned around to sign right back up for another one, together. The three of them were thick as thieves, brothers in arms, their bond forged on the battlefield in blood, sweat, and tears.

Ten years they spent together, first as grunts, then as NCOs, then as Army Rangers.

And then, tragedy struck. Wayne, Farid, and Diego got stranded in hostile territory. After three weeks of Search & Rescue operations failed, their fellow Rangers had to face reality, and declared them MIA.

Only for Wayne to emerge from the fog of war, barefoot and ragged, Farid’s and Diego’s damaged and blood-stained dog tags hanging around his neck, and fists wreathed in impossible flame.

He’d gotten the vision while they were pinned down, he said. Wayne’s disorientation and incapacitation at suddenly becoming Moonshot distracted Farid long enough for a stray bullet to get him in the side of the neck, and Diego wasn’t able to stay in cover, protect Wayne, and stop Farid from bleeding out, all at the same time. It only took twelve seconds for Wayne to get his wits back about him — but in a combat scenario, twelve seconds was an eternity.

And by then, both Farid and Diego had fallen still.

Wayne McCain still kept their dog tags on him at all times, even to this day. They were the main reason he’d foregone the option to have a secret identity — he would be outed the moment somebody with halfway decent research skills got a clear enough picture of them, and he wasn’t willing to simply hide them away. He’d lived because they died for him, I recall him saying in an interview from… wait, when was it, again? Where was I when… I was still a superhero at the time, right? Okay, that would put it between 2004 and 2006. Somewhere around there. Anyway, he said during the interview that he was alive because Farid and Diego died for him, and he refused to hide that from the world.

It was during this same interview, in fact, that he opened up about his sordid, checkered past. Sent half the supers at the Chicago NMR into a conniption fit, and I was one of them. Suffice it to say, we were not happy. Well, until Wayne showed up in Chicago, got himself in front of a terrifyingly large crowd of at-risk youth, and gave them a very frank talk about what life would’ve been like for him without Judge White, about how the slippery slope would’ve dragged him into an early grave if not for a moment of kindness.

I would later learn that gang violence in Chicago following his visit — or at least, during the remaining six months of my time in the NMR — was roughly equivalent to the amount we’d seen in three weeks beforehand.

I wasn’t surprised to see notes in the file about similar such visits and speaking engagements in the Virginia/DC area, along with printouts of a few articles mentioning Wayne’s efforts. Chicago was far from the only city Wayne visited on his personal mission to deradicalize as many potential neo-Nazis as he could, after all, and Virginia was an unfortunate hotbed of domestic terror activity and logistics.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

But that apparent regularity and predictability was actually what had me worried. Wayne’s itinerary and a record of his activities showed he’d hardly stepped off the plane before diving headfirst into his usual affairs, and everything seemed to just be “business as usual” until it very suddenly wasn’t.

At the beginning of January, law enforcement interrupted an in-progress group lynching by one of the three white supremacist groups that had been making inroads over the last little while. FBI, FMB, and ATF officials managed to lock up no less than thirty-four men, armed with everything from baseball bats to a damn Uzi. Most of those men had tattoos or other paraphernalia identifying them as card-carrying gang members, and of the five who didn’t, the dried blood on their clothes and effects told as much of a story as the other men’s calling cards. But the feds didn’t manage to arrest everybody who’d been involved that night. Seven of the perpetrators got away.

And they escaped because Wayne McCain, hands ablaze and skin glowing with blood like magma, barred his fellows from chasing them.

They booked him on federal obstruction of justice, and decided to also charge him as an accomplice for the two deaths and eight attempted murders that had occurred before law enforcement could intervene.

I… honestly, I hadn’t been paying attention to the news when this happened. I’d still been riding high on my victory in court, and handling the necessary bureaucracy after getting such a massive monetary award took most of my attention until the end of March. By then, the media had already moved past Wayne McCain’s sudden week of infamy and onto the next thing it could obsess over for ratings, and journalistic disinterest meant I had nowhere near the amount of information that I wanted.

But even without that? I wanted — no, I needed

there to be more to this story. Even ignoring my own experience meeting the man, I refused to believe that Wayne McCain could ever be the type to just — throw away all that time and effort, that devotion, that loyalty. Someone like him? A man who’d pulled himself off of the slippery slope by forging unbreakable bonds with the exact kind of person he might once have hated?

That wasn’t the kind of man who let seven members of a lynch mob just disappear into the night. Not without a reason. There had to be something more, some piece of information that would make this puzzle make sense. There had to be something more to this, something that wasn’t just the unfortunate reality of a man backsliding into hatred.

There had to be.

Ugh. Part of me wanted to curse Megan right now. Having incomplete information was almost worse than having nothing at all. At least if I’d been starting from square one, I wouldn’t be asking myself difficult philosophical questions on the nature of man, or if hatred was as a disease as addiction was, or—

KNOCK, KNOCK

“Eep—ow, fuck!” I jumped in surprise at the sudden noise, banging my knee against the underside of my desk in the process. Every curse beyond the first stayed under my breath, though I put a stop to that too as I stood to go see who was stopping by my office.

Once I opened the door and saw who it was, though, I wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or disappointed, so I split the difference by letting my ears roll back in surprise before lowering one in question.

“Wait, I thought you had finals through next week. Why aren’t you studying?”

“I took my last one yesterday,” my unexpected guest answered, a smug little grin on his face as I stepped back to let him in. “I am officially done with all of my law school coursework!”

“God, time flies, doesn’t it?” I shook my head in minor disbelief as I closed the door behind the young man. “I would say congratulations are in order, but damn it, Casey, you’re throwing a monkey wrench into my plans! I got you a graduation gift and everything, but it’s at home!”

I crossed my arms and lowered my ears, trying my best to look angry and suitably chasten the soon-to-be law school graduate in front of me. But Casey’s eyes fell from my face to my tail, following it back and forth as it wagged away behind me because I couldn’t help the excitement, and just let that smug little smirk of his grow even wider.

“Mm… fine, you win! Congrats, hun. You’ve earned it.” I opened my arms to offer a hug, which Casey gladly accepted.

Casey Allen was a young man in his mid-twenties, with brown hair, hazel eyes, and the kind of slim build that pushed through crowds with ease. He had a predilection towards large, almost loose clothes that helped make him look stockier than he was, and today was no exception — a loose short-sleeved button-up helped provide the illusion of broader shoulders, and keeping it untucked kept people from seeing the narrow waist on his khaki slacks. I was used to seeing him with a slouched, somewhat lax posture, so seeing him stand so tall and proud at his accomplishment really drove home his actual height — my three-inch heels had me at five foot seven and staring at his nose, when I was used to looking him straight in the eye.

Take this to heart, people: posture makes a world of difference.

Casey was the firm’s latest straight-from-law-school hire. He’d worked for us in the summer between his second and third years of law school, and the firm extended an offer of post-graduate employment on his last day of work before the school year started back up. Then he’d gone and surprised us by asking if he could work part-time during that third year, so we’d gotten him all set up with an externship so he could get course credit for his time at the firm.

Now, I didn’t know what expectations he’d gone into the externship with, given that he couldn’t properly shadow our attorneys the way he’d been able to during the summer — but I could guarantee he didn’t expect me to swoop in and scoop him up. The last case I worked on was a massive wrongful death suit, less in terms of body count than the sheer scope of the issues we’d uncovered while pursuing our claim. One didn’t normally go into an apartment fire expecting to find cartel-like behavior, complete with all the associated criminal trappings: fraud, embezzlement, offers you couldn’t refuse, and sleeping with the fishes. But that was indeed what my team found, and we pursued it with every ounce of diligence necessary for such a situation.

However, such a… ugh, damn it. Such a dogged pursuit (oh, God, I feel dirty now…) had the unfortunate side effect of leaving us with tunnel vision, a problem that grew consistently worse the longer one spent in the legal field. So when it came time for jury selection and the trial itself, I pretty much monopolized Casey’s time to have him act as a fresh set of eyes, even going so far as to provide letters for his professors so they’d exempt him from having to attend class. Pulling Casey onto the team turned out to be an excellent idea, because not only had he hunted down details through avenues I hadn’t even begun to consider, but his very presence furnished us with an additional resource: somebody who could enter and exit the courtroom inconspicuously, bringing with him fresh research and resources that we couldn’t access at counsel’s table.

Was it any wonder that after Casey’s performance during the trial, I’d gone to my boss and basically called dibs on him?

“Thanks, Naomi.” Casey gave one last squeeze before he let go of the hug and sat down in one of the chairs I had in front of my desk. “How was England?”

“Pretty good,” I said, taking my own seat behind the desk. “Plus, um… how do I put it? I get a lot of odd looks for a whole host of reasons, and it doesn’t help that DC is a major tourist destination. But apparently people at Oxford still remember me, even though it’s been a whole decade since I left, so there was basically none of the staring. It’s one of those things you don’t really notice until it’s gone.”

“That sounds, uh. That sounds really nice.” If Casey’s awkward tone hadn’t been enough to tell me that he wasn’t sure how to respond, his fidgeting would’ve clued me in pretty quickly. “I — sorry if this is the wrong thing to ask, but if that’s the case… why didn’t you just stay?”

“You wanna know the honest truth?” He nodded. “Spite. I came back to the US after university almost entirely out of spite. Maybe not the best motive, but…” I just shrugged. “And then I kept coming back because all my stuff is here, and I like my stuff.”

“You know what? That’s fair!” Casey offered a brief smile, which I gladly returned. “Oh, did you get to see any shows in London?”

“Mm, yes, yes I did, thank you for reminding me!” I turned to wake up my computer and opened up my internet browser (Firefox, of course, I do have a brand to uphold) to check the Kennedy Center’s schedule. “One of the shows I saw is gonna be in DC, it looks like… okay, good, you’ll have sat for the Bar by then. Now, I’m not gonna tell you what show it is, nor am I going to just give you the dates to look it up, you’re just going to have to trust me that it’s good.”

“You’re evil.” Casey crossed his arms over his chest and gave an exaggerated frown, which practically became a pout when all I did was plaster on my best Mona Lisa smile.

“No, I’m practical. I want you focused on the Bar. Oh, speaking of—”

“Bar Exam prep course starts a week from Monday. And before you ask,” he added when I opened my mouth to ask another question, “yes, it’s Barbri.”

“Okay, good. Wait, morning or afternoon?”

“Evening,” he corrected. “Six to ten.” Casey glanced down at the desk, and saw the pair of legal pads I’d been scribbling notes on. “New cases?”

“Hm? Oh, right.” I turned my third monitor so Casey could see it, and started dragging the PDFs over to it as I answered him. “Yes, but not, and also not yet. When you’re admitted to practice in a federal district court, you also get added to the pro bono rotation for federal criminal cases. Now, I assume you know about how jurisdiction gets when Moonshot are involved?”

“Federal courts have original jurisdiction,” he answered.

“And in what capacity does a Moonshot have to be involved to trigger mandatory removal?” Casey shot me the stink-eye. “Hey, it’s gonna be on the Bar Exam, may as well get some practice answering it now.”

“A Moonshot defendant triggers immediate mandatory removal to federal court; this removal occurs regardless of whether or not the Moonshot’s powers were used in the commission of the crime.”

“Almost,” I said. “It also means that you forgo a choice of law analysis and apply federal law, except for those weird few cases where the charge being brought doesn’t exist at the federal level. Such as taking a roadkill moose carcass in Alaska when it wasn’t your turn to claim it — and yes, that will be something they expect you to know, it has been on every single sitting of the Bar Exam for the last twelve years.”

“Ooookay…”

“Anyway, where was I? Oh, right, criminal cases.” I moved my mouse over to my third monitor and waggled it back and forth, drawing Casey’s attention to the screen. “So, I received word that since my case calendar is less full than it usually is, and the Chief Judge is sitting on three Moonshot defendants’ cases to assign out, he’s going to be giving all three of them to me. And these,” I waved the cursor around the screen again, “are the details that a friendly contact was able to get me in advance about two of them. Now, you’re welcome to do some work on these for me, though I won’t be able to credit you on any filings since you’re not barred in the District Court, let alone in any larger jurisdiction quite yet. But fair warning that what you learn is probably not going to be very useful until you’re admitted to the District Court and get a similar case of your own.”

“I mean, not being useful right now isn’t that much of a problem, is it?” Casey challenged. “I mean, I haven’t even sat for the Bar yet. And who knows, something like these cases might show up on the written sections of the exam.”

“... you know what? That’s fair,” I agreed. “Let me forward these documents to you. Go review them, do whatever background research you can with what we have available, and we’ll discuss it over lunch. Sound good?”

“Definitely,” Casey agreed as he stood up. “Better than writing essays, that’s for sure!”

“Oh, I completely — wait.” I looked up at Casey, ears folded low in concern. “Casey, didn’t you have that term paper you wanted me to review? For that seminar class you were taking, what was it called? Moonshot in International Law?”

“... um. I, uh,” Casey hedged. “I kinda finished it early and turned it in already?”

“But—” I stopped, taking a breath and trying to work past the sudden hurt I was feeling. “Casey, hun, if there was something you didn’t want me to see, I would’ve understood.”

“No, I, it’s just…” he trailed off, chewing on his bottom lip as he looked anywhere in my office but at me. “I, um. Kinda, changed topics last minute, to… well. You. As a case study.”

… oh. That was, well, not what I’d been expecting. And presented a complication Casey couldn’t have known about, which would jeopardize his final grade.

“Okay. Um… your sources. Where did you get them from?”

“Just the usual places?” Casey’s confusion was clear in his tone. “Lexis and JSTOR, mostly?”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” I murmured, thinking over how to solve this. “Okay, uh. I’d recommend emailing your professor, give them a white lie about how the version you sent in was a cloud backup of a previous copy that overwrote the actual finished document without your knowing, have them set it aside, and let them know you’ll need until the actual due date to rewrite the version that should’ve been sent in.”

“I don’t—”

“None of the sources you cited actually have correct information; they’re not legally allowed to publish the real stuff,” I interrupted, more to make sure I actually finished saying what I wanted to than anything else. “And Professor Brenner would know that, he’s seen the stuff that’s actually accurate, and he knows you’re working for me, so… okay, let me think. You technically don’t need to come to the office until after Commencement, and I’m going to be working from home on Monday and Tuesday. So I’ll expect you on Monday, I can correct all the published misinformation on this topic, and you get to cite a primary source. Okay?”

“I — o-okay.” His voice was quiet, hesitant. “Sorry I — just, sorry.” Casey turned towards the door, still unable or unwilling to meet my gaze.

“Casey.” His hand flinched back from the door handle, and I finally got him to look me in the eye. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Just remember that my door is always open to you, alright?”

Casey worried at his lips a little bit, and nodded in lieu of saying anything as a response. Then he was out the door and headed just across the hall to the interior office directly opposite mine, and closed his own door so I couldn’t see him. I just sighed, finished forwarding Casey the documents from Megan, and spun around in my chair to look out the window.

That… could’ve gone better. Hopefully Casey has his head back in the game come Monday. When he came in all bright-eyed, it was easier to keep myself bushy-tailed to match him. But… well, it wasn’t like I could do much else about it right now. Nor did I have the time to agonize over things.

There was still a workday to finish out, after all.