When she was born, there was nothing to suggest that Ali was special in any way. She was perfectly average. One the first night she was at home, she was a perfectly behaved angel, and allowed her parents to sleep till morning. A week at home, however, led to her mobile dying. As she stared up at the immobile object with watery infant eyes, blue wisps began to dance around her room. Her parents were woken by her squeals of delight only to find her room lit by ghostly blue images of tiny trotting horses-just like the motionless ones above her head.

Her parents came to realize that strong lines of ancient magic had followed both of their families, and that they had miraculously surfaced in their second child. Thus came only the second mage to be born within the past two centuries. Witch hunting had driven the self-preservation instincts in natural magic to become dormant and only through the two powerful bloodlines connecting for a second time had the initial spark of power held and blazed into a growing flame.

It had quickly become commonplace for her older brother to rush home after school to find his sister sitting in the living room, staring at a TV that blasted static at her with a serene expression. Beside her always sat some animal she happened to read about that day in preschool.

The day before her fourth birthday, a murder of crows surrounded her. Her brother had not been let out of school yet, so when the doorbell rang, her mother bustled into the living room, flicked the TV off, shooed off the magical crows, and placed Ali upon her hip. When she opened the door with her special little girl, she dearly regretted it. A man in a crisp black suit stood in front of her and a simple black car sat in her driveway. On the door of the car was a clear white insignia for The Institute for the Training of Heroes.

The next day they are in New York. Ali is four. She’s crying. Her family is leaving. She’s still at the institute. They signed a bunch of papers. The man is holding her too tightly. Her new room is cold. It’s dark. The nice lady in the big white room full of sharp needles won’t let her sleep on the stiff beds. The Director’s last name is Jackson. They keep making her train. And learn. And train. And learn. She’s so tired. But she has magic, like the older man she keeps training with. Mr. Feldstrom. He’s bald. They call her Mage now.

Did she ever live in Nebraska? Did she ever really have a mother? Or father? Or brother? Were they just dreams? She’s turning eight. She’s finished four years of field training and now the people trying to grab the heroes’ pictures for the papers are calling her Miss Jackson. And why shouldn’t they, isn’t Director Jackson her father? Or, at least, her adoptive father? He’s the reason she’s at The Institute-he told her so. Did that make him her father? She supposed so.

She’s nine now and the Spiral Towers downtown are under attack. It’s the middle of the business district and there is no telling what will happen if her squadron-Delta Squad-can’t stop the buildings from collapsing.  They are inside the base of the first tower when they start to hear thumps from all around them. Jumpers. Ali can’t help but wonder what could possibly be so bad up there that the better option would be to jump. And then she is told to go as far as she can up into the third tower and not only try to stop the fires from the initial attack bombs but to also help people to stairwells and speed up the evacuation. She merely nods with a stern expression on her face and jogs to the elevator shaft of the third tower. The doors had been pried open earlier, so she climbs inside and begins to scale her way up. There is an ominous creaking sound above her. She looks up and something falls past her. More and more follows the first something until all she can hear is the grinding and breaking and snapping and crunching of steel bars around her.

The third towers falls with her in it. She throws up a magic shield just in time to create a small pocket of air for her to breathe in. She looks above herself to see nothing but darkness. She begins to dig.

A photographer on the street captures the picture of a bloodied hand raising from the surface of the rubble. He rushes over and begins digging in time with the hand and slowly but surely exposes the young girl coated from head to toe not only in cuts and forming bruises but also in the heavy dust that had settled like a thick cloud over everything.

Another photographer captured their exchange as the first photographer offers Miss Jackson a water bottle and then helps her to clean the dust from her face with it.

The pictures grace the front pages of magazines for months after the attack in New York. They last even after all of the debris from the collapsing of all four towers has been removed. What lasts even longer is the stump of a former arm her teammate now carries. He retired. Trains some new recruits. Ali can’t help but think he’s perfect for the job, what with being so kind natured that you just don’t want to let him down.

Five years later-on her fourteenth birthday-she celebrates her movement to a new squad of teammates her age by tattooing reminders of her Delta Squad members she saw slaughtered just a month earlier. She puts them on her right thigh, and on the left she gets a tally mark for every person in the four Spiral Towers that died. They wrap around her thigh a total of eight times.

By sixteen she’s in some sort of quasi-relationship with her teammate Warrior. She thinks. Technician is trying to keep his medical girlfriend out of the spotlight the team brings them so Warrior is posing as his girlfriend. Not only to protect his actual girlfriend but to also dispel the rumours of her and Mage. She… she isn’t sure how she feels about it actually. They hide away in their bedrooms at the Institute just cuddling and playing video games but they never go out for dinner or ice skating like Ali wants and she can’t help but think that it really isn’t a relationship.

Warrior insists it is.

She proves it when they do a series of charity videos. She came up for the ending of their rendition of Girls/Girls/Boys. It would be the first official exposure for both Patrick’s real girlfriend and Warrior’s real girlfriend. Her.

She’s positively shocked when Warrior gently grasps her hands on the stage and pulls their lips together.

It’s definitely real now.