There was little conversation in the room as Claire finished up our healing. Her orb steadily turned a darker green as it absorbed motes of green light that drifted up from our bodies. Soon, I felt good as new, as if the events of the day hadn’t even happened. I was brimming with energy.

And yet, my body felt heavier than ever.

It felt like I’d gotten barely half of the answers I’d been looking for, but I didn’t have it in me to ask any more questions.

Some USHA guys came in to talk to us shortly after. They asked for our perspective on what had happened in the practical test, but refused to answer any questions on what was going to happen to Sooyoung and Taeyong.

They didn’t need to, really. I already knew they were going to be sent to some juvenile detention facility, where they’d just meet up with prospective supervillains, maybe make some connections with larger criminal organisations, and in a few years they’d come out ready to be menaces to society.

It was tragic, in a way. Dad would’ve ranted and raved about it all until he was blue in the face, but no one would’ve listened to him.

Even so, I struggled to dredge up any sympathy for them.

Morphosis was waiting outside the room for us once we’d given our statements and received leave to go. He’d changed out of his costume and into his preferred black trenchcoat, exposing an angular face with a well-groomed moustache and beard combo, short-cropped hair, and a mouth that had gone decades without realising it could do anything other than frown.

He spent only a few moments staring us down before he recited a little speech congratulating us for finishing the practical exam and told us to expect our results to arrive in the mail in a few weeks. Before we could reply, he strode away, tense.

Mixed emotions mingled as I watched him go. “Which side do you think he’s on?”

“He stood in the middle of the two groups, didn’t he? Maybe he’s neutral,” Julia said.

“Feels like that’s still a side.”

Julia thought about that for a moment. “I guess so.”

It took a little trial and error and the help of a passing nurse to find our way out of the hospital building, but soon we emerged into the evening air, at the base of the massive domed gymnasium once more. From here, it looked like a mountain stretching into the sky.

The sun had set at this point, and there was a mild chill kicking in. They’d handed our belongings back and given us a chance to change into the clothes we’d arrived in, but this morning I’d been operating under the assumption it’d still be daylight out once I was done. Luckily it wasn’t too cold, but I couldn’t help a little shiver in only sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt.

Powering on my phone, I was unsurprised to find a dozen missed calls and double as many messages from Ashika. No doubt she’d finished hours ago and headed home. I sent her a message letting her know I was okay and on my way home, then stowed the phone away.

The campus was well lit despite the nighttime dark, and we started walking slowly towards the front of the gymnasium. Neither of us spoke. On my part, I was still waiting for my feelings on the day’s events to process. I’d been running on indignant anger, but I knew better than anyone that was unsustainable. For now, I was content not to think about things too hard.

Silver Road looked different at night. Spotlights shone from buildings overhead, turning the statues lining the long pathway into radiant beacons. The scene looked like something out of a dream.

We kept our place slow as we strode along the street. Now that it wasn’t choked by a horde of hopeful examinees, it was a much more pleasant experience. There were still people hanging around, despite the tannoy system declaring the school’s imminent closure for the night, but they were in small groups and easily avoided.

Half my attention was on the statues as we walked, glancing over the names and deeds that went with the heroic figures. So many great stories of courage, valour, and sacrifice. Candlejack, who gave his life fighting a wildfire, buying a few hundred people time to evacuate their small town in California. Ampersand, a respected crime fighter who perished in a car accident. Doppelganger, murdered for spying on a villain, but not before he uncovered information that exposed several nefarious plots.

Aegis Academy alumni or former staff, all.

Not every sculpture depicted heroes who’d passed away, but my thoughts lingered on them. The concept of that great, final heroic sacrifice had enraptured my attention for years, and I liked to read stories about them. I wanted to understand the mindset of the people who did it; what were they thinking in their final moments? Did it bring them satisfaction? Was it worth it?

What did that smile mean?

All questions that were virtually impossible to answer, but I pondered them all the same.

It took me a moment to realise there was no one walking beside me. I stopped, looking back.

Julia had paused in the middle of the road, facing the domed gymnasium. She was back in her crisp business suit, impeccably tailored to hug her form, and she made it look like she was born to wear it. The tracksuit had been unworthy of her, in comparison.

Her power sign blazed to life around her skull, shining with countless colours. I felt her signal grasp out, reaching for something it couldn’t find.

“I had some idea of how today was going to go,” she said when I came to stand beside her. “But I hoped it wouldn’t be that way. When you made that speech, offering to get everyone working together, I thought I’d finally found a place where people would live up to how I thought they should be. In the end, the disappointment was even greater than I anticipated when I set out this morning.”

“There are bright spots,” I said. “Not everyone was awful. Not even close.”

“‘Not everyone was awful,’” Julia repeated softly, making a half-hearted attempt to imitate my voice. “Even if I agreed with that assessment, I kind of thought Aegis Academy would provide a higher standard than that.”

“Keep in mind the people we worked with today are just candidates. Hopefully, the people who actually make it in and become students will be… better.”

“Hope.” Julia sighed. “The more I hope, the more I’m let down. I hoped one of the premier heroic institutions in the world with an overwhelmingly positive reputation would attract people who started off good in every sense of the word and only climbed higher from there. I knew better, of course, but I hoped I was wrong. Stupid of me, in retrospect. Should’ve listened.”

I frowned as some memories surfaced. “Back in the radio building, you said Herakles isn’t the only one with influence here. How much did you know?”

“I knew there were several things that could potentially cultivate this kind of environment. Marquise was just one of them.” Julia shrugged, finally turning away from the gymnasium, back towards the front gates in the distance. She didn’t start walking, though. “It’s not exactly a secret that the vice-principal holds sway over the place. The second in command of an organisation is always gonna have clout.”

“There’s a lot of rumours about her.”

“Yeah. And they all sound ludicrous, don’t they?”

“No way could a villain be trying to corrupt Aegis. It wouldn’t be allowed.”

“Another thing I hoped wasn’t true. But the possibility looks a lot higher to me than it did a few hours ago.”

I grimaced. “Are you planning to withdraw?”

“No idea. I’m not sure what the point would be, honestly. If the so-called best is like this, what will the others be like?”

Julia started moving, hands behind her back, pace unhurried, and I followed.

I thought about how I wanted to phrase things for a moment before I spoke. “I’m not gonna lie to you, I’m disappointed too.”

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“I would’ve thought you’d be way more upset about the whole thing than me.”

I smiled thinly. “Oh, I’m pissed. But, I dunno. I’m learning that I’m better at keeping calm than I thought.”

Julia raised one eyebrow.

“I want to be optimistic about all this. It’s not like every examinee was an asshole. It’s not like everyone was okay with just letting everything play out the way it did. Some candidates cooperated all the way through. And some teachers jumped in despite the possibility they’d get in some shit for it with Marquise.”

“I’d contest both those points, but honestly I’m too tired to bother.”

“I don’t think I’m wrong. The world isn’t totally populated by shitty, corrupt, selfish people. If that was the case, we’d never get anything done. There’s… just a hell of a lot of them, if we’re being realistic. But as long as there’s some good people still around, we can come together and make things better.”

“Do you actually believe that?”

“I’m trying my best to. We’ll see how it goes.”

Julia smiled, but said no more.

We traversed the rest of the Silver Road in silence, stopping only for a moment to say bye to Dad’s statue. A faint haze shimmered in the sky like the surface of a soap bubble as we neared the outer edge of the school’s grounds, and soon the towering front gates loomed. Without, a column of food trucks and vendors had set up on the other side of the road, beckoning in a swarm of hungry examinees fresh from hours of strenuous exercise. It almost looked like a festival had sprung up outside the school. The smell of hotdogs and burgers filled the air, and if I wasn’t careful I might be carried away by the smell like a gag from an old cartoon. My stomach rumbled.

A faint feeling of static tingled on my skin, undoubtedly the attention of the school’s forcefield. It was considered somewhat of a wonder of the superhero community, one of the few examples of a directed power frenzy. Usually, a power frenzy was impossible to deliberately initiate or predict, and the final result was largely uncontrollable. There were very few cases where someone with a powerful ability had managed to trigger a frenzy, and so AA’s forcefield was the source of much study. They still didn’t really know how it worked, or the extent of what it did. The subject didn’t fascinate me as much as superheroes themselves, but it still gave me a bit of nerdy pleasure to experience it at work.

To me, it chimed like a power signal. Huh.

Before I’d taken a step outside school grounds, someone called my name. I sought the source, but it instead came to me, the crowd parting to let him through.

“Speaking of disappointments,” Julia muttered, and I shot her a glare.

Billy was a towering figure among the crowd of students, his bulk impossibly wide. He held three burgers in one hand and was making fast work of a hotdog in the other. Empty wrappers bulged the pockets of his jeans, and there were grease stains on his white sweater.

Cat followed quickly behind, decked out in blue jeans and a brown peacoat that looked a bit too normal when there was still a pair of cat ears sticking out the top of her head.

Helga was back in human form, short in stature, her mousy blond hair falling around her shoulders. Her white dress seemed a bit too frilly for the occasion, but I wasn’t going to begrudge anyone their taste in fashion when my wardrobe consisted mostly of tracksuits and homemade superhero costumes.

While I was happy to see they’d finished the test and were, for whatever reason, still around, I wasn’t too keen on facing their inevitable questions.

“Where did you go, dude?” Billy asked the moment he was in hearing range.

“Obviously he went to help Julia,” Cat said, whiskers twitching. “What happened at the tower? There was a lot of smoke.”

“Why did you run off without us like that?” There was a note of hurt in Helga’s voice, which… I was going to try not to get mad over.

With a sigh, I prepared to explain everything that had happened.

As it turned out, I didn’t manage to get a word in before Julia intervened.

“Why are you all acting like you don’t know exactly what happened?” she said coldly. “Are you just deluding yourselves, ignoring the elephant in the room, or do you genuinely believe you’ve done nothing wrong, and you can just approach Emmett as if you’re friends?”

I rounded on her, ready for a verbal spar. The icy look in her eyes stopped me short, pinning me in place. Her power sign was blazing brighter than I’d ever seen it, every colour in the spectrum rushing along the wire-like lines.

“I’ve said this to you several times now, but I think it’s only fair that everyone hears my opinion and gets to ruminate on how they’ve acted. You’re not going to hold them to account for their deplorable behaviour, so it falls to me.”

“Julia,” I warned, but even to me it sounded half-hearted.

Her attention was no longer on me anyway. “All of you knew where he went. Cat even said it herself. Why did he run off without you, you ask? Don’t pretend you couldn’t have followed him, if you wanted to. There was nothing stopping you, just like there was nothing stopping you from doing his tasks when our group passed within two-hundred metres of one. You didn’t even offer to help him, and now you act like the aggrieved party?”

Billy and Helga had frozen like they were under the scrutiny of a predator, but Cat had no such fears.

“Didn’t you hear his whole speech at the start? The group only worked together because he promised that he wasn’t using us all to do his tasks. It might have fallen apart if we’d done that.”

“Then fuck the group and fuck all of you. If the alliance’s success was predicated on one person’s sacrifice, it was a horrible alliance to begin with. What kind of hero is okay with throwing a comrade under the bus? None of you deserve to advance, and none of you deserve to stand here and act like you’re his friend. If you have any conscience, you’ll do everything in your power to make sure he breezes through any other tests.”

“It’s what Emmett wanted! Even right at the end, when we were preparing to cross to the tower, he wasn’t interested in doing his own tasks.”

“So what? You were going to let him ruin himself just because he said he was okay with it?”

“He thought there was another part to the test, a bonus for cooperation.”

“‘Thought’ being the operative word. He didn’t know, and neither did you. But you didn’t think about that, because you only care about yourself.”

Something flickered in Cat’s expression, and she took an aggressive step forward.

I’d been frozen in place by the argument, but that movement snapped me out of my stupor, and I stepped in to block her path, holding my arms out wide. Having seen her strength, I knew she could throw me aside with negligible ease.

I also knew she wouldn’t do that.

“Enough,” I said, facing Julia. “That’s enough. You’ve made your point.”

She was unfazed. “Are you going to tell me I'm wrong?”

“In a way.”

“Okay. Go on then.”

“If I was in their position, I would have offered to do the tasks,” I said. There was a sharp intake of breath behind me. “But not doing so isn’t some irredeemable sin. It was a mistake. A lapse in judgement. Everyone’s under immense pressure here, you can’t berate people for thinking of themselves in that environment, especially given what we now know about it.”

“Oh, I absolutely can.”

“We were talking earlier about having hope, believing things can be better. Well, the same applies here. I’d rather have faith that this was just a stressful situation, and in the real world things would be different.”

“That’s totally valid. I really admire your optimism.” Julia smiled, but her eyes were still icy as they stared at something over my shoulder. “The sentiment would hit harder if one of them hadn’t taken the opportunity to escape once your back was turned.”

I whirled around.

Cat had done the same, her ears twitching back and forth like satellite dishes. Helga was still standing in the same spot, staring down at her feet with teary eyes.

Over the crowd, I could see Billy’s hunched shoulders and ducked head as he walked away.

“You can believe what you want, Emmett. I have no power over you.” Julia said, moving to stand beside me. She nudged my shoulder with hers. “For what it’s worth, I genuinely do admire your optimism. I just think it's misplaced here. Save it for people who deserve it, okay? Thank you for everything you’ve done today. I hope Aegis turns out to be a place worthy of your admiration.”

With that, she too disappeared into the crowd.

Helga was next to leave, not once looking at me. I thought about reaching out to her, but my arm wouldn’t leave my side.

That left Cat, who let out a low groan. “I was going to make a big old deal of this, but my name isn’t actually Catherine, and I’m not always a catgirl.”

I panned my gaze to her head. I intended to let the ears sitting atop her mane speak for themselves, but instead I was left blinking. Where once her hair had been thick, wild, and streaked with orange stripes, it was now straight as a ruler and brunette. Her face was whiskerless, and her eyes had gone from slit and alert to half-lidded and hazel.

She rolled her neck. “My name’s Monica. I can take on the aspects of any five animals I’ve, uh, ‘marked’ is the word the power scientist guys used. I was gonna hold the prank for aaages, waiting for the right moment to strike. Cats can be pretty patient when they’re hunting… or something. I dunno if that’s true. I’m not really a cat.” She cringed a little, shoulders hunching. Her eyes were darting all over the place, landing anywhere that wasn’t me. “Look, uh. Sorry. I’ll make it up to you.” She paused, coughing as if it would fix the tremor in her voice. “Yeah. This is really awkward, so I’m just gonna… leave. Sorry again. The girl was right. I fucking suck. Sorry. Bye.”

Words caught in my throat, and I could only watch her leave.

The street outside AA was bustling. There were still hundreds of people around at this late hour, enough to create a cacophony of noise as they browsed the expansive selection of food vendors lining the road.

The world is imperfect.

I want to make it better.

I turned to stare back at the school, at my dream.

Sometimes you have to tear something down in order to build it up to something greater.

The words felt like they should’ve been a revelation. They were certainly ones I’d never tried before, a concept entirely new to me. If there was any moment in my life that surely deserved to be a foundation to build off of, it was this one.

But no power surged. No concept clicked into my soul. Nothing happened at all. None of the stuff people online described.

I felt alone.

But I wouldn’t give up.