In her defense, the girl only tried to kill me a little bit as I closed the final approach on her. Through the slit in her fortress, I could see her moving around in there as she conjured more of her light-based attacks to crash down on Moon and my shared defenses.

Light exploded and lighting crackled and sparks showered all three of us as her half-hearted attempt ended in vain yet again. The familiar tang of singed air hung heavier down here than it had at the lip of the crater.

"We are in range," Moon informed me with a furtive whisper. "I am willing to conjure a blade at any time and end this for good."

"I could too. But I'm not."

"Nor am I," she said, her jaw set firm. I looked pretty dashing from this angle. I tried to set my jaw the same way and remember that for later.

Before she had time to conclude, probably correctly in this case that I was an idiot, I continued. "And I'm glad we see eye-to-eye on that. But I'm a little curious as to why? You've certainly never hesitated when you've thought you should kill before."

She lapsed into one of her trademark silences, but before I got another word out of her, light-whip girl was screaming at us again.

"Who the heck do you think you are coming down here? You blow up my house, set everything on fire, refuse to do the one simple thing I asked of you--"

"You mean, to die? Yeah, not doing that." She was also exaggerating about the fire. Between the glass and the flash blaze already incinerating everything around, there was hardly anything on fire.

"--and then you get all up in my personal space the second I feel sorry for you and go easy on you for a second? This is just why you can't trust the XPCA. Give them an inch, they take your whole life."

"Could you stop with the anti-XPCA propaganda for just a second?" I asked.

"Oh, sure," she said, and did shut up. And also began beating on Moon and me from all sides with sudden intensity.

"She is quickly overwhelming our defenses," Moon said calm as ice. "We will die soon if we do not take her out."

"It'll be fine, I said, clenching my jaw painfully as I focused on willing as many blades into being as fast as I could manage.

It was far from fine. We were beginning to lose badly, and the heat from the blasts and showers of sparks began getting closer and closer to us as the endless tides of her light tendrils bore down on us.

I had a desperate moment of wonder, if we just stopped, dropped our guard, would she really finish us? Were we pushing her towards violence with the simple frustration of being difficult to crush?

I wasn't exactly willing to bet my life on it, and especially not Moon's.

Beside me, she moved just as I did, as rigid and focused and tense as I was, doing her damndest to keep the both of us alive without even once popping a blade through the girl's face, even as the heat and blasts began to get painfully close.

I heard an inarticulate scream which made my blood freeze in my veins, burns and the heat of exploding powers be damned. I looked up and saw Tem standing there at the lip of the bowl, dark energies swirling around her.

"Tem!" I shouted up at her. "Do not laser down here. If you hit her powers again, you'll kill me."

She seemed to hesitate slightly but still stood there tense and imposing and dark as ever. "They are attacking you, Chariot," she said.

"Yes they are. But we're okay. Right...Moon?"

"We are unequivocally going to die."

"Moon."

"Erm. That is to say...we all of us die at some point. Who can say but the...wisest of the O-kami when we will be taken? It could be any time...maybe...fifteen seconds...or possibly even twenty."

"Jesus you're bad at this," I hissed at her.

"Then do not drag me into it. We could use her help. We could use the help of the shadow ops you dismissed. We could kill the target and end this farce at any moment. Why am I tolerating this suicide plan?"

"Because you trust me?"

She didn't respond, which I took to be a yes. Somehow, she was also the least of my worries right now.

"Tem, we'll be fine. Just...go back and wait for us, okay?"

Tem made a squeal and shook her head violently, her two silver bobs of hair bouncing as they flew up and down her shoulders. "I will not be away from you," she said.

And before I could convince her otherwise, she stepped over the lip, stumbled and rolled her way down the smooth bowl to stop at my heel. I was worried she was hurt until she gingerly reached out and gave the back of my calf a stroke which made me jump.

"Chariot, careful!" Moon shouted at me, but my lapse had invited the enemy in, and one of the beams of light raked across my side.

Just to be completely clear, burns suck. They are basically your own body disintegrating and breaking down and your nerves decide to help by telling you the whole while exactly how great and wonderful that feels. When you're burning, it hurts, you feel hot, and it hurts, and your body wants nothing but cold and soothing and stillness. And it hurts.

What your body does not want is another burn and sudden jumping and tearing flesh.

I almost blacked out from the pain as I rolled on the ground, holding my side. Moon was trying her best to defend the both of us, though it seemed the Exhuman was hesitating to finish us off.

Tem was not hesitating though, and the world went dark and hazy around us as black energies billowed around the slight silver child.

"Pain for pain. S-s-suffering is too merciful. You will writhe! You will burn! I will rip you and rip you and rip you until there is nothing left for me to tear apart!" she screamed, her voice carrying unnaturally through the twisting darkness.

"Tem, stop!" I screamed at her. I clawed my way towards her, only inches away, but as I did I felt my side split painfully and felt like I had to hold it with both of my arms or I'd tear open and black out. But she was right there, right above me, and if I didn't stop her, all of us would be dead.

Tem squeaked and trembled as something purple wrapped itself around her. She blinked away the black in her eyes, and with it the black in the world around us.

"This is from him, do not get confused," Moon said. "I'm sorry, Chariot, but I had to peek in your mind again. It was practically screaming at me."

"No...no problem," I said, desperately trying to hide the wracking pain from Tem.

"You s-smell like him," Tem whispered.

"It is his same body. I'm just borrowing a copy of it."

"Your arms are s-s-strong like his."

"Yes. It is still a copy of his body. You do understand how my powers work?"

"You are warm like him."

"Oh dear. I am afraid this will have unhealthy repercussions."

"Moon...thank you. But can you please get the medical gel? I am...not doing great here," I grit out.

It felt like half of me was on fire, and I couldn't even show it because I risked setting Tem off again. So I laid there, as still as I could, holding my pain in while tears swam in my eyes and stars swam in my vision. Moon released Tem with jerky restrained movements, taking a step back as though to see if the girl would explode, before popping a canister off of Tem's pack, briefly skimming the instructions and warnings, agonizingly thorough as she was, and then unleashed a spray on my exposed side.

I wasn't sure if it hurt or felt good. It felt something, and given the current state of me, that was a bad thing. It was like an ice bath, in the moments before the local anesthesia kicked in, and it burned me so bad I really did just black out.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

But only long enough for Moon to be crouched over me and Tem to still be standing where I'd last seen her. I found it surreal to look up and see flaming, glowing tendrils and light and dark swords hovering in the air, wisps of shadow and motes of light from Tem's tantrum, all frozen like the apocalypse had been cancelled for the moment.

"You're patched," Moon said. "It is very peculiar doing this when I can touch the bandages but not you. Though somewhat convenient?"

"Thanks," I said, trying to sit up and realizing that wasn't happening without splitting myself open and going under again. "I'll try to keep you doing it to a minimum," I winced.

"So…" the girl said from within her fort, watching the entire sequence unfold with worry in her eyes. "...so are we...back on? We finishing this?"

"Oh, I will s-so finish this. You will be s-so finished--" Tem began darkly, but stopped as I meekly gave the gesture for a full-stop.

"Miss, if you were gonna kill us, you had a chance there and you didn't."

"I...I don't like hurting...injured people, okay!"

"Well, I'm injured. Still want to finish this? Give me your best shot."

"What? You're crazy. You're suicidal!"

"Kind of comes with the territory. You don't go around chasing down Exhumans every day and expect to live forever."

"What the heck is wrong with you people? That girl looked like she was going to destroy the whole block."

The girl was pointing, presumably at Tem, but seemed to have forgotten she was wrapped in a fortress of white noise.

"Maybe a lot more. Tem's kind of unbalanced sometimes."

"You s-said I did good though," Tem pouted.

I sighed. "Will you finally talk now?"

"I beat you. You should just leave."

"Well, we could have killed you at any time," Moon said, crossing her arms. "But our leader said not to."

"That's BS. I won. I beat him. I beat all of you. And I can do it again!" She raised her weapons skyward again but when none of us reacted she just put them down again. "You're just lying again."

"Look, what is your damage with the XPCA and lying?" I asked. I took an experimental deep breath and found, to no surprise, that fucking hurt.

"You lie about everything! I moved to New Eden, that was a lie. You said it'd be a new start, lies. A haven for Exhumans to be themselves, more lies. XPCA redevelopment, that was a lie! They threw me in a room with a Code-X and I felt hurt and pain like I didn't know was possible until she broke my brain!"

She slammed her powers down against the side of the bowl near us making them rupture against the glass into a blinding, explosive rainbow.

"But don't worry, everything will be fine, they lied. When the XPCA came for the resistance, they told me to kill my friends! And I did it! I watched myself do it like it was the most natural thing in the world! How frigged-up is that? You put something in my head! And when I escaped with the rest, with the Defiant Unchained, they offered me safety and freedom, and all I could think about was how you'd used me before to kill other Exhumans, saw all my dead friends faces on them."

Her tone had become dark and cold and she was gathering her powers again. "I was doing okay. For an Exhuman. Until I fell for your empty promises, fell for XPCA lies so many times, I'm embarrassed to even think about it. And now you show up, saying it's going to be okay? Like I'll believe that!"

"This seems...justifiably paranoid, Chariot. And bad," Moon said.

"Let me fry her," Tem pleaded.

"Listen to me Tem, very carefully," Moon said and pulled her aside. Tem didn't seem half as interested in what Moon had to say as she did the concept of being held by me, even if it was only a ghost and only around the shoulders.

"I get it," I told the girl. "I do. And I don't know that there's anything I can say which will let you believe that. But I was just like you. The Code-X you met? She's one of my closest friends. And the resistance storming out and fighting the XPCA? That was because I led them in attacking the facility there."

"Well this is just the stupidest lie, if you're not even going to--"

"I'm serious!" I yelled at her, loud enough to start coughing, and then writhed as pain flooded through me, filling me up so much I thought it would make my eyes burst from inside.

She lowered more of her barrier until I could see her face peering out at me, a look of concern written across it as she watched me cough and writhe. A little younger than me, maybe, but not more than a couple years. Still just a fucking kid, and just another victim of Blackett's machinations. I felt my hate for the man seethe through me, hotter than the burn but a pure, purifying heat. I thought I'd already let that hate go, I was surprised to find how quickly it sprang back, how close to the surface it hid.

I reached towards Tem and sent a spark of electricity across her body. She shuddered as it danced up her flesh and buried itself in her comms, which hissed and popped in her ear, making her flinch. I turned my comms off too.

"I killed Blackett," I told the girl. "The XPCA director. And Captain Targa, the base administrator. Because of all that stuff at New Eden. Because of all the betrayals you had to face. I don't want the XPCA to be like this, and that's why I'm talking to you now instead of just killing you or dragging you back. Every day, they send me out here to fight people like you, to make you do what the XPCA wants, and every day...I feel so lost. I wonder why I'm doing it. What I'm fighting for."

I looked her in the eyes again. Green eyes. Orange hair. Pale skin, mottled with freckles. Like AEGIS but more pronounced in every way.

"I...I still don't know, exactly. But I'm glad I heard your story. I need to hear things like that. I need to know, on a personal level, what the XPCA does to people. I need to be reminded why I'm trying to change it, why I'm fighting so hard and giving up so many--I mean, so much. I want to feel your pain and remember it, so that next time I'm faced with an obstinate Exhuman like you, I remember there's pain behind them, there's a story behind them. There's a reason why they hate us, and a reason why we should hate ourselves. A reason to try to change who we are, and what the XPCA is."

The more I spoke, the more I didn't know what I was saying, but she seemed to hang on every word just the same. I struggled for words just like I'd felt like I was struggling for the meaning behind them.

"I've been thinking a lot recently that the XPCA makes a lot of sense. That all these Exhumans I deal with every day, like...holy shit they're dangerous. You're dangerous. Look what we did to this building. Look what you did to me, and what I could have easily done to you. I see people making these political moves and forming alliances and threatening the whole world for their own safety...and I see the XPCA trying to stop them, trying to push everything back to the status quo, where it's safe, where it's calm, where people don't have to worry about the whole world waking up dead one day. And I get both sides, and it's scary."

Tentatively, like a scared animal, she left her fortress and came over to us. The walls behind her faded away into motes of light, and I recognized them as hard light constructs, the same as Tem could conjure given enough time and effort. No wonder she'd survived the blast, if she was hiding in a shell made of impervious light.

"I don't want to like the XPCA, but they're trying to save the world. They just really really suck at it, and I want them to be better. I know you just want to be left alone, but look around. This is what Exhumans do, whether the XPCA comes for them or not. So what are we supposed to do? What am I supposed to do?"

I'd talked myself out. I hadn't said anything worth anything, but she'd listened all the same. Even come out of her shell, physically at least. I still felt the lingering heat from my burns, but also the heat from the hate I was carrying around. Laying there, bearing my heart to this girl who'd almost killed me, it suddenly felt all so unfair.

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked her again, more pointedly.

"I...I don't know," she said, startled. "I'd never thought about all of that from your side. I just thought…'XPCA lies'."

"Yeah, that'd be real simple," I snorted.

She sat in silence for a long time next to us, her green eyes flashing up towards me sometimes, but otherwise just smoothing out her linen mint-green dress and retying up her hair. I think she looked as lost as I felt and seeing her like that, feeling Moon attached to me feeling the same, it pissed me off the same way looking at Tem for too long did.

Here was a girl who was willing to look at the world in black and white, good and evil, and fight evil where she met it. And I'd gone and dumped my insecurities on her and now she was...this. A twisted reflection of what I wound up being. Infirm. Unsure. Weak. I hated seeing it in her, just like I hated seeing it in myself.

And that's why I was completely surprised when she stood up and dusted herself off and spoke.

"You're right," she said. "It's a mess. And it's not fixing itself. People have got to fight to fix things, not just to tear down what they don't like. And you know what? I'm a people. I can fight. So sign me up or whatever."

It took me a long minute to process. "Really?" I asked. "Like...join the P-Force? Join us?"

"It's better than hiding and waiting for the XPCA your whole life, innit? I'm sick of people lying to me because I don't know any better. I'm sick of hiding because I don't want to fight. I'm sick of the XPCA kicking people like me down because I'm trying to pull myself up. So I can sit around and mope, or I can do what you did and fight."

I grinned at her as best I could manage, feeling like her words were a balm a thousand times more potent than the medical gel. But more, if she could face these problems, knowingly, head-on, and decide to fight, then I could too. Maybe there were even more like her. Maybe my stupid dream of a P-Force wasn't so stupid. Now that Blackett was dead, we could be what I'd always meant for us to be, protecting people from dangerous Exhumans, not icers.

I felt like...behind those hard light constructs, at the bottom of that bowl, I hadn't just found a girl, I'd found myself. Cheesy as that sounded.

I offered her one of my arms as best I could manage. "I'd stand up but you kind of wrecked me," I apologized. "I'm Athan, but my callsign is Chariot. This is Kaori, who's 'Moon', and Melanie, but everyone calls her Tem.

"Nice to meet all of you. Sorry about the...fighting. Well, sorry about the injury anyway. A quarrel's as good as a tryst, me dad used to say. And I'm--"

She stopped and blinked, rocking back and forth a little bit unsteadily on her feet. Then she coughed and I felt something wet and sticky fleck onto my offered hand. Thick red droplets clung to my skin, fat and heavy, and she looked down at her chest where just left of central, at the edge of her breast, a red bloom grew across her green dress.

She looked at me, confusion and pain and...and a million times worse, dawning comprehension. The realization of a betrayal, yet again.

And then she fell forward, her face cracking against the unyielding glass without her so much as stirring or uttering a sound.

The air trembled and shifted as the shadow ops materialized from where he had stood behind her, and he crouched to wipe the blood from his blade on the hem of her dress.

"Bleeders. Am I right?" He asked with a shrug. "Fucking Exhumans, one and all."

I...I didn't know what to say...what to do...what to think. I was just staring at the body of an Exhuman girl murdered in front of my eyes. It was so impossible. She was so strong, so sure. She'd faced down what I had, and instead of blinking, she'd stood up. She couldn't die. Someone as strong as that couldn't die so easily as that.

I waited for her to stir, to move, to breathe. I was deaf to Tem and Moon's screams, blind to the rippling of the air and the swelling darkness, numb to his desperate clinging and begging, to the filthy drops of his blood which landed on me as hers had. I felt nothing as Moon tore him apart with lightning from the inside-out, his ribcage glowing like far-off thunderclouds as she savagely enforced her own order on the world. Good guys stop bad guys.

But we hadn't stopped him.

Beneath the midday sun, it was dark out, and I was lost again.

But not as lost as that girl who for one fragile moment was leading me towards the light.