“It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” Sera said, looking ruefully down at her now-useless mask.

“Sera?” I said again, stupidly, still trying to figure out what in the world Bea’s innocent little sister was doing on a rooftop disguised as a superhero’s sidekick.

She took a step towards me, which was when I realized that in my shock I had inadvertently released the roof’s hold on her legs.

“Stay back!” I said, flinging my arms out to fend her off. To my surprise, she stopped, and held out her hands in a gesture of peace.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Sera said with a faint smile. The absurdity of that statement made me snort out a laugh. I was the one who had murdered someone not ten minutes ago. Sera should be afraid of me, not the other way around. Then again, I had thought she was just Bea’s innocent sister from the country. For all I knew, she could be a mass murderer.

“Really?” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm and tamp down the panic. This could ruin everything...no, it would ruin everything. That was the first rule they taught us at the Academy: if someone finds out your real identity, you’re dead. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you. Everything I thought I knew about you...how do I know you were telling the truth about any of it?”

“I wasn’t.”

“But you’ve been lying this whole time...” I trailed off, Sera’s words entering my panicked brain at last. “Wait, you admit you were lying about everything?”

“Of course.” Sera shrugged.

I blinked at her, opened my mouth to say something, then closed it again. I refused to believe that she had managed to outsmart me, when I had thought myself so clever with all my little lies and deceptions. How could Sera have managed to fool me so completely?

“How did I manage to stumble across the only person in the city with a superhero lunatic for a sister?” I asked, more to myself than to her.

“Oh, I thought you would already have figured that one out,” Sera said, sounding surprised. “You didn’t.”

“That ridiculous cape you’re wearing says otherwise, although I suppose the lunatic part could be a matter of opinion.” I became suddenly and painfully aware of the tattered red tutu I was wearing, and clasped my hands behind my back to prevent myself from straightening it fussily. I didn’t have any ground to stand on when calling her outfit ridiculous, given what I was currently wearing.

“No, I fully admit to that part,” Sera said.

I glowered at her. “Then what...?”

That was when it struck me that there was one other fact I had stated in that sentence. “You’re not her sister?” I blurted out, then immediately regretted my question. How could you fake being someone’s sister? But Sera was already nodding.

“How did you manage that?” I asked, bewildered. “Do you have some sort of mind control powers?”

“Not exactly.” She nudged her discarded mask with the toe of her boot, carefully avoiding eye contact.

“Does “not exactly” mean yes?”

“Sort of,” Sera replied, still staring at the ground. “It isn’t mind control, not exactly. I can’t make people do what I want, or anything like that. Mostly I can just suggest to them that certain things are true when they actually aren’t, like making Bea believe that I was her sister. Sometimes I can also make people forget things, but without constant attention the effects are not permanent, so I rarely bother.”

“So you just talked to Bea and she believed you were her sister? Just like that?” I asked, shocked and slightly terrified of the amount of power she had, despite her efforts to downplay it. I had thought my superpower was formidable, but it gave me no control over humans themselves, only their surroundings.

“Yes, but it wasn’t that simple,” Sera replied, finally looking up from the ground and meeting my gaze. Her face was twisted into a grimace. “You might have noticed how snappy she’s been since I got here? It’s because she has a strong mind, and subconsciously she knows it’s being manipulated. But because she can’t figure out exactly what is going on, she can’t properly fight it, so all that fighting spirit translates into anger and frustration.”

“Oh,” I breathed, the pieces beginning to fit together. Now that Sera explained it properly, I couldn’t believe I had bought her story about Bea just being worried about her little sister. In retrospect, it should have seemed much stranger that she wouldn’t get over her emotions and welcome her long-lost sister with open arms. It actually made a lot more sense that she was under mind control. However, that also raised another very important question.

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“Why did I go to all this trouble?” Sera said, as if reading my thoughts. I snapped my head up to stare at her, but she only grinned, her pained expression melting away so quickly I could almost have imagined it. “I don’t read minds, don’t worry. It’s just the logical next step in your questioning.”

I scowled, not pleased that she was so easily able to guess my thoughts. I would have preferred if her superpowers had given her some advantage; at least that way I would know it wasn’t my fault for failing to conceal them properly. “Yes, indeed, oh All-knowing One,” I said sarcastically. “Why would you spend so much time and effort on making Bea believe that you were her sister?”

“To come see you,” she replied, winking in a manner that suggested she was completely unfazed by my sarcasm and hostility.

“Ha. Ha.”

“No, actually,” Sera said. “I needed to get near you.”

“For my charm and wit?”

“Yes, precisely,” Sera replied, straight-faced.

We engaged in a brief staring contest, but I broke down first. Stubborn as I was, my curiosity was stronger.

“Alright, why did you go to such lengths in order to come see me?” I asked.

“I came to warn you about the Rubes.”

I snorted. I couldn’t help myself.

“No kidding!” I said sarcastically, my confidence creeping back from wherever it had been hiding. If that was her only concern, then we could wrap this impromptu meeting up quickly. The early morning sunlight pouring over the rooftops was already making me uncomfortable. “I’ve already been warned about them once in the past twenty-four hours, thank you very much. So if that’s all you’ve got to say, you’re wasting your time.”

“Would you just listen for a minute?” Sera said, all joking set aside. “The people at Researchers United are using you to terrify everyone in this city, so that they will blindly follow along with whatever the superheroes say.”

“But why would they...?”

“Because RUBE doesn’t just train supervillains, it trains all the superheroes as well.”

“What?” I blinked foolishly at Sera. Everything we had been taught at the Academy revolved around the fact that the Rubes trained us as supervillains to provide balance to the world, and just a bit of well-organized chaos. Why would they train the very people who were responsible for the death and imprisonment of almost every villain who had graduated from the Academy? The solid foundation I had built my identity as a supervillain on was in serious danger of crumbling to pieces.

Sera took a step towards me and I threw up my hands, retreating until my tutu was crushed against the low wall surrounding the roof. I tried to call up the molecules in the roof, begging them to rise up and wrap themselves around Sera’s legs, but my mind was in too much turmoil.

Although Sera stopped walking forward, she didn’t stop talking. “They’re using you to create chaos so they can rule a world blinded with fear. I know it sounds melodramatic, but the Rubes are already well on their way to the kind of world domination a supervillain can only dream of. Your role is to make people scared, and when they’re done with you, they’ll arrange things so that their pet superheroes can take you down easily.”

That was taking this ridiculous conversation one step too far. At the Academy they had always been supportive of us. They had taught us how to fight, how to keep going when the rest of the world was against us, and how to always win. I couldn’t believe that they would do all that just to send us out into the world to be killed by a bunch of vain, pompous superheroes. I wouldn’t believe it.

“You’re wrong,” I said, shaking my head firmly. “You know nothing about the Academy, and nothing about me.”

“Coal!”

The unexpected shout brought an abrupt halt to the conversation. I whipped my head around, squinting across the rooftops in the direction of the voice. A red cape snapped sharply in the breeze, and sunlight played across an eye-smarting yellow outfit.

“Great, another superhero come to tell me that it’s all hopeless and I should just leave villainy behind and go start a sheep farm somewhere,” I said sarcastically.

“Delphi, you need to go. Now,” Sera said, her voice tight. I looked at her, frowning. She was the great Fireball’s sidekick, wasn’t she? Why was she, of all people, telling me to leave before he got here?

“Run, now!” Sera crossed the space between us in three quick steps and shoved me sideways, away from the direction Fireball was approaching from.

I gaped at her for half a second, before shutting my jaw and turning on my heel. Now was not the time for questions. I still didn’t have a plan to defeat Fireball, and I certainly didn’t want to face him right now, not when my mind was buzzing with questions, and the memory of the dead weatherman’s face lurking just beneath those.

Leaving Sera behind to face the approaching superhero, I took off across the roof, my legs settling comfortably into a pounding rhythm. I jumped across the gap, pulling the edge of the next rooftop towards me with my mind so that I landed easily and could keep running seamlessly. Glancing back, I found that Fireball had stopped beside Sera, a bright outline beside her pure black outfit. He showed no signs of following me.

Despite the lack of pursuit, I ran the whole way back to my warehouse. There was the occasional shout as a pedestrian on the streets below looked up in time to catch a glimpse of a mad ballerina dashing over the rooftops.

As I stumbled down the stairs into my dim and silent warehouse, my mind whirred furiously, trying to process all that had happened. I wasn’t sure how much of what Sera, or Coal, or whatever her real name was, had told me was true. But one thing it had confirmed for me was the extent to which the Rubes were trying to mess up my plans. First Gran’s note, now a conversation with a superhero’s sidekick who apparently knew an awful lot about the inner workings of Researchers United. Both had agreed that whatever the Rubes were up to, it didn’t include making my success as a supervillain a top priority. It was time to show that organization exactly who had the superpowers around here.