Wraith grabbed Frankie’s wrist, and darkness engulfed them both. Cherry appeared in their place, his ham-sized fist raised high, bulldozing through the air as he swung down at me. I darted aside, letting him punch a hole into the earth. Debris flew upward as he bellowed a cry of rage. His eyes glimmered, reflecting the golden light pouring from my fingers. The wet bandages covering his shoulders and forearms, dark as if dipped in ink, unraveled to reveal a patchwork of stitches as he swung his other first. I stepped back again, ducking underneath his blow. Two steps forward, then slam my foot into the joint of his knee. A snap. A shriek of agony as he collapsed onto one knee.
I watched the muscle fibers tense visibly underneath his skin. Bunch and contract.
Then he lunged at me, grasping with those fat, gnarled fingers. I grabbed his forearm and swung him around, slamming him into the side of a train carriage as hard as he had me, just to return the favor. Wood and metal and a shriek of destruction tore through the night as I kept a hold of his arm, carrying on the momentum and plowing him through the side of the archaic train. Then I twisted him over my shoulder, gritted my teeth, and flipped him onto the ground with enough force to shake the earth. One leg over his forearm, fall to my back, twist and twist until I heard it—
Just like Lucas taught me, with enough pressure in an arm bar, you could snap any arm.
This, though, as Cherry writhed and shrieked to get free, sounded like a crack of thunder.
I’ll admit, it felt good to just breathe again. To hear and see and smell so much more than I could a few seconds ago, like the stench of raw blood that oozed from Cherry’s bandages, and the tiny sounds of his broken forearm grinding against one another as he flailed, throwing me off into a crouch. But I didn’t have time to revel in this freeing feeling. Wraith and Frankie were out there somewhere, maybe watching and waiting to see what happened next as I grabbed Cherry’s head in my hand. His dome was huge, far bigger than anything I could crush with one squeeze like you would a human. Besides, his skull was thick—thick like bedrock shaped around his head. Frankie must’ve done something to make the softest, most vulnerable part of him nearly impossible to get to. But I was, well, you know who I was; it didn’t matter if his skull was hard to crush for me.
I could always just squeeze his brain right out through his nose, or his eyes.
Or pop his head open like a zit, I thought.
Cherry stirred, lumbering onto one awkward, stump-like leg, then tried to lunge at me. I forced him down onto the ground, planting his face square in the gravel at my feet with bone jarring force. He flailed, kicking and slamming his giant fists and one good leg into the dirt. He shrieked and mewled, this terrible, animal-like sound that shouldn’t come from any kind of mouth. It echoed around the train yard, heard only by the shadows watching from carriage windows.
To be really fair, I would be doing him a mercy by turning off his lights.
I knelt on his back, putting my weight and several hundred more pounds of force between his giant shoulder blades. I saw a litter of scars and stitches, a patchwork of skin that wasn’t his.
How many people made up this… thing? My stomach turned, sick at the thought, hoping they weren’t civilians that had been butchered and put together for some crazy girl’s experiments.
This wouldn’t exist if you’d do a better job as Olympia, I thought. More time actually in the streets, away from Rylee and the rest of her mundane, miserable little life. I shook it away. Not now. I raised my hands, wincing when Cherry barked and cried, as if his tongue was trying to create words, a sentence, some kind of plea, but was too fat and warped and trapped in a maze of razor-like teeth that stopped him from saying anything at all. I tightened my fists, raised them, and brought them down on either side of his head. His skull caved in instantly. Brain matter bulged from the ruptured skin stretched over his wide dome. An eyeball liquified as it got pressed into white, visceral jelly that oozed from the pocket in his skull. The worst part? He was still screaming.
It didn’t matter that I tried smashing his jaw into bits. The sound came from his chest.
From deep, deep in the chests of whoever had been sewn together to create him.
“Cherry!” a voice shrieked, ripping apart the shadows. From the corner of my eye, I watched Frankie stumble out of the darkness, then pelt toward me. I picked skin off my chest, wiped blood off my brow. Desperation in her voice. Anger in her eyes. She was a mess of thin arms, wild black hair, and blood red lipstick on trembling lips. “No. No! Don’t die. Don’t—”
I stood, and she stopped dead in her tracks. Frankie breathed hard, panted as if oxygen was going out of fashion. “Two things are gonna happen.” I held up my finger; blood trickled down my forearm. “One, you’re gonna stop screaming, it’s annoying. Two, you’re gonna tell me who Ceaser is.” I thought for a moment, then added, “Plus you’re gonna tell me who your informant is, too.”
“Why would I ever tell you anything?” she cried. “Get off him. Now. Now!”
I put my foot on his head, threatening to turn him into paste. “Don’t test me.”
“Cherry!” Frankie shouted, her voice growing more hoarse. “Get up. Get up.”
Wraith peeled out of the shadows beside Frankie, eyeing me through the messy black strands of hair falling over his forehead. He stumbled, missing one step. Then he raised his hands at me, making the darkness surrounding Cherry and I froth and bubble like he was conjuring some invisible fire to burn me alive. But it wasn’t the same as before. The shadows weren’t as tame, as willing to snake around and dart at his command. They bulged, yeah, like something was underneath them, but no matter how hard Wraith tried, the shadows remained a mess around me, pushing against whatever it was he was trying to do. He swore quietly, sweat beading on his face.
I smelt some kind of stench coming from him. Not just the musty smell of days-old sweat clinging to the tattered remains of his t-shirt, but from deep inside his gut, gushing out of his mouth every time he took in a deep breath of air. It was almost like he was rotting from the inside out.
You half-breeds aren’t ready, Frankie had said. I squinted, looking at him. He looked normal enough to me—at least, as normal as a boy who could control darkness could be.
I guessed I should probably get him to some kind of morgue for an autopsy. I was never good at biology, and I still had several armored trucks to catch before the end of the night. Lucas would want to know what Frankie meant, and I did too, and all those secrets were locked away underneath that pasty layer of skin stretched over his lanky frame. He was coming with me, but I actually had to get information from Frankie before anyone was going anywhere with anybody.
Least of all the monster struggling underneath the heel of my boot.
So I raised my foot above Cherry’s head and said, “Do it, and I kill him.”
Frankie grabbed his wrists, forcing them down. Wraith blinked, confused, watching as the shadows dissipated into faint outlines. “There. Now let him go. Right now. Right fucking now.”
“See, I would, you know,” I said. “But you still haven’t answered my questions.”
“What, is the great Olympia two-timing the bad and the good guys now, too?” she snarled. “I’m not telling you anything. Nothing at all. So you get your damned foot off his head before I—”
“Do you want this damned thing alive or not?” I snapped. This is why I didn’t talk with supervillains—they were a pain of morals to deal with. Frankie nodded yes, silent as she stared. “Then answer my questions, and I’ll think about giving you two a head start before I kill you, too.”
Frankie’s lips pulled into a smile, the kind you would make by dragging a scalpel across a piece of pale skin. “Do you really think I care about what you’ll do to me?” she asked. “You kill villains, I know, but that’s nothing to what Ceasar will do to you if you anger him, Olympia.”
My brows furrowed. The wind picked up slightly, blowing bitter wind across my bare arms. “Sounds like one hell of a threat. Tell him I don’t really give a shit about what he’ll do to me, just as long as he keeps his little pets like you and Wraith in the dog kennel with the rest of ‘em.”
Her eye twitched. She moved forward a single step. “We’re not his pets. We’re the futu—”
Wraith grabbed her shoulder, then doubled over and coughed. I smelt blood spring from his throat as he hacked and wheezed and finalled puked a slew of black saliva, similar to the kind that Cadaver had bled when I had ripped him open. Right down to the sludgy thickness. He staggered, pressing his hand to his throat as if he could somehow pull it out. Considering how my night had gone so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did just that. Instead, he reached his fingers into his mouth, pressed against his tongue, and vomited a stream that mixed into the dirt and gravel.
“Hey, I think your friend over there is about to have a heart attack,” I said, then shrugged. I guessed it made things a little easier for me, seeing that explaining to Lucas why I only had a torso, an arm, and part of a head on an autopsy table (again) wouldn’t be a very fun conversation to have.
“Could you not pick a better time to start coughing blood?” she hissed at Wraith.
“Frankie,” he rasped, spitting blood. It smeared on his lips as he wiped his mouth across the back of his hand. “I need more. Caesar was right. I wasn’t ready for tonight. Not yet. Home.”
“I’m not leaving without Cherry,” she said, stepping away from him as he reached toward her. I, for one, agreed—they weren’t leaving without giving me answers. “He’d kill us. Kill me.”
“Caesar does not kill,” he said quietly, almost automatically, as if they were words he had said so many times they just slipped out of his mouth. “He’ll forgive us, I know he will. Let’s go.”
An idea clicked: if the shadows protecting the other convoys of armored trucks were connected to Wraith, then being this far away from them would be putting one hell of a strain on his powers, hence, by my guess, the blood he was puking and the shaking running through his thin body. It would feel like overextending several muscles, pulling and pulling until they snapped. If he got out of the picture, then I would have a lot more of an easy time cleaning up Ava’s mess.
But Frankie must have figured out the same thing, because her eyes flitted from Cherry to just over her shoulder at the distant dockyard. Gunfire still echoed throughout the night, joined by the stench of s-grade rifle fire. I cursed to myself, knowing it was just about to get a lot harder.
Whoever Caesar was, he was relying on these two to make sure everything went smoothly tonight, but I guess with me in the picture, every bit of that plan had gone straight out the window.
Frankie pursed her lips, and for the first time tonight, I saw something on her face that wasn’t spite or anger: wariness. It spread throughout her tight features like cold seeping through the cracks of your clothes on a winter’s day. She turned to me, considering something I couldn’t read behind her hollow, bone-chilling eyes. “You want something to tell your friends in the SDU, right? Something you’ll use to hunt us down and pick us off like we’re scraps off your freaking plate?”
I spread my arms, helpless. “I’m a superhero, it’s just what I do.”
“Will you give me back Cherry if I give you something in return, then?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Aren’t you scared I’m gonna come after you and, you know, smear you across whatever room I find you hiding inside? Because I’m totally going to do that.”
“A name,” Frankie said. “I’ll give you a name if you give me back Cherry.”
The beast beneath me was weaker, less enthusiastic about slamming his arms and legs into the earth. His breathing was labored (which usually happens when your skull gets caved in), and his heartbeat—multiple heartbeats, I noted—fired off in odd, soft beats against his chest. He wouldn’t be alive for long, and the logical part of me figured I should just kill him once she gave me what I wanted. But on the other hand, if I wanted to wean out whatever cancer was spreading throughout the underbelly of Lower Olympus, I had to have at least some kind of information on whoever Caesar was. Keeping Frankie and Wraith alive wouldn’t make sense on a normal day.
But it hadn’t been a normal day today, and it seemingly didn’t want to end.
I needed a lead, at least a few faces I could attach to this mess. Ava didn’t have to know. Her main goal was keeping the city safe, and forcing her superhumans to do the dirty work. If I could just figure out what Caesar was planning to use the weapons for, where he got them and how, as well as having superhumans this powerful in his ranks that I had never heard of lurking just past my reach, then I could finally clean up a large chunk of what dad left me to protect.
Rylee Addams didn’t get kicked out of the house for being Rylee, and so, sighing under my breath and forcing a hand through my hair, I nodded reluctantly, because Olympia was who I was, and mark my words, I would get a statue of my own one day. For now, I had to deal with this.
Something told me I would regret agreeing to this someday, but I wasn’t a fortune teller, and whatever the future held was a problem for future Olympia to punch her way through like always. It would just mean getting into the Olympiad would have to take a little longer.
“Juliana Cortez.”
I waited for Frankie to continue, watching as the wind tousled her hair. She remained perfectly silent and stock still as Wraith moaned in pain and continued coughing specks of blood.
“That’s it?” I asked quietly.
She nodded. “That’s it. Now, give me back Cherry.”
“Who is she?”
“A woman.”
“No kidding,” I said, growing frustrated. “What is she to Caesar? Where is she?”
“That’s for the superhero to find out,” she said. “Get. Off. Cherry. We had a deal.”
The night wasn’t getting any younger, and the armored trucks weren’t getting any closer. Any other day, and this would have ended with me leaving Frankie in orbit after I made her spill her guts, but then Lucas would have told me that I hadn’t been smart about it. That I wasn’t doing a good enough job by gathering the information I needed. Shrike was one of the greatest detectives on the planet back in his day, back when the Olympians were mighty and I only ever saw dad save the city from the living room couch, but being a detective was one thing; letting supervillains walk away because you needed information from the later was an entirely different thing all together.
I’m sure dad would be more than proud of you, Ry. Great job so far.
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I sighed through my teeth, then stepped off of Cherry. Wraith, his eyes bloodshot, his teeth smeared with scarlet, raised his hand, then clenched it tight. Darkness swallowed the three of them, and I watched, a deep pit forming in my gut, as three supervillains got away because I chose to let them leave. Seconds later, the train yard was silent. Destroyed. Littered with the ruins and remains of carriages and twisted metal railways that had leaped off the ground when both Cherry and I had slammed so hard into the dirt that the shockwave must have forced them loose. I was there, too.
The idiot who was still playing dress up supervillain.
I massaged my temples, letting the electricity die out. It was a boost in my strength for now, but I didn’t know how much longer it would last. I guess I would just have to find out the hard way, because I was Olympia, and Rylee too, sometimes, and I didn’t know any other way.
***
I found Knuckles about five minutes away from the trainyard straddled on a rumbling motorcycle. She’d somehow gotten her hands on a pair of night vision goggles and some binoculars, and must’ve been watching the tangle of shadows Wraith had brought with him for the past few minutes. And when I landed beside her, she jerked around, readying for a fight, but then relaxed when I put my hands up in a mock surrender of the pistol she had pointed right at my chest.
I knew I was right—she was a soldier of some kind, despite her superpowers. Too young for extensive military training (and trust me, knowing Lucas, I knew how much time that took), but had the decisive movements of someone that had been trained their entire life for active combat.
But superhumans weren’t allowed in the military—at least, from what I last heard from the news broadcasts Denny always listened to—so who trained her and for what was beyond me.
“You’re alive,” she said, stating a fact as she slid the gun into a holster.
“Seems like it,” I replied. “And you came looking for me. How sweet.”
“I watched you get thrown what should be several blocks,” Knuckles said, turning the bike around. She eyed me curiously, her cold, intelligent eyes searching each of the faint scars littering my arms, and the large wound now healed over that Cadaver had given me. “You look fine.”
“Take a girl out to dinner first,” I said, hovering. “C’mon, we’ve got to get back to the armored trucks. We can cut across the dock by being closer to the actual port, where the old ships are. We’ll spring up on their left and hope to the heavens that they don’t know we’re coming.”
“What about the boy with the shadows?” she asked, voice husky. “Or the girl.”
“They won’t be a problem for now,” I muttered.
Knuckles didn’t ask any more questions, maybe at the sight of the dried blood crusted underneath my fingernails. If there was one thing I was good at, it was appearances. The heat my body generated came in handy in more ways than one, and now, swelling with energy, I flew just above Knuckles, making sure she followed my path as I sliced through the musky air above the dock. Entire avenues between warehouses were clogged with debris and dead bodies, either ours or the Triumvirates, dashed across the desolate yard like scarlet sprinkles on a rotting black pastry. I say pastry because a saccharine stench was in the air, so sweet it was sour, like sun boiled sewage. It was the same smell that had come from both Cadaver and Wraith, and it was only getting stronger. I swallowed bitter saliva, flinching at the terrible taste it had formed on my tongue.
I couldn’t go looking for it now. Maybe it was something else, like dead fish.
Really, really dead fish, left to decompose under the relentless summer sunlight.
I slowed my flight, dropping through the air for Knuckles’ sake. She was adamant on staying on the ground, so threading our way through the darkness took longer than I would have liked. Still, it gave us time to regroup, to settle back into this weird, unsaid rhythm between us.
It took several minutes, and I had to eventually rise through the air to avoid low-hanging electrical wires, but up so high in the sky, the darkness of Lower Olympus grew closer, more loud, as we approached the weaving, throaty hunks of armored metal that was one of the armored convoys. And it was just our luck that Witchling was here, too, alongside O’Reiley. He was squatted low in the bed of the back of our trucks, returning what little fire he could before he and three other mercs had to duck down. Witchling had her arms spread, using rubble to block whistling bullets and pepper against the trucks in front of us. But she was doing more than that.
She was using her powers to keep the trucks together, stopping them from driving their own separate ways, spreading us even thinner. We were closing in on the dock’s large, rusted gate. If they went their own ways, we would have lost two convoys worth of shipment tonight.
And we had to stop them sooner rather than later, because if they continued racing toward the exit gate like this, Patriot Broadwalk was only three or four blocks away. Then pedestrians.
A lot of pedestrians, and I hadn’t signed up to this stupid idea to get them killed.
Knuckles gunned the motorbike’s engine, swerving to avoid boulders that Witchling ripped out of the road behind the truck. Once she got right up close, she leaped onto the bed of the truck, startling one merc too zoned in on the fighting in front of us. I landed beside her, straight into a crouch, and felt a bullet punch against my shoulder. I half-turned, surprised by how much the impact hurt. I cursed and rolled my shoulder, the same one I had used to stop the gangsters at the beginning of the night. If it kept up like this, I’d probably need shoulder surgery before I’m twenty.
O’Reiley looked at us, somewhat glad. “You two got anything to do with those shadows?”
Or lack thereof, Witchling said in my mind, something I hadn’t missed.
Knuckles jerked her thumb at me. “She took him out.”
Took him out was a stretch, but I wasn’t going to burst their bubble. “Where’s Damsel?” I yelled over a sporadic burst of gunfire. The rapid succession of bullets was tight, aimed. They weren’t wasting their ammunition, but I could hear the heavy iron crates inside of their trucks banging against the side of their walls, jerking the trucks from one side to the next as the drivers helplessly tried getting the several ton beast in a straight line. Witchling, sweat bubbling around her neck, concentrated on keeping the furthest truck close enough to use to not peel away, but far enough away that they couldn’t return fire accurately enough to butcher us as we crouched.
“A phone call away!” he said. “We’ve gotta get these at least. Charlie squad’s got one of the other convoys, but these three are on us. Beta’s been dead silent since arrival. One down.”
“Two,” I shouted over the wind and the roar of the engine. O’Reiley blinked, looking at me. “We got attacked by Wraith, the shadow guy, and he put me out of the picture before we could get the convoy back. This and beta squad are probably all we’ve got left. Fuckin’ SNAFU.”
“Where’d you learn that kinda language?” he said.
I shrugged one shoulder. “Same guy who taught me how to kill a man.”
“You know,” a younger mercenary shouted at me, “you look kinda familiar.”
I grabbed his shoulder and forced him to the bed of the truck, narrowly avoiding a bullet between the eyes. “That’s because I’ll probably be the last face you’ll ever see, idiot.”
“Why can’t Witchling stop the trucks?” Knuckles said, getting closer to the front. “Pulling concrete from the ground would stop the trucks, or we could divert them toward home base.”
“Because—”
The shrill sound of electricity’s whine sliced through the conversation and deep inside my brain. I flinched at the sound, like hearing what a dog whistle actually sounded like for the first time. Then came the stench of ozone, huskier than when Emelia used her powers, more potent than when dad used his in public. O’Reiley barked to get down, slammed his fist against the side of the truck to get the driver’s attention, and the truck swerved hard to the left. I tensed, using my flight to stay in place, and got driven into my by two mercs who slammed into the side of the truck bed.
I heard the sounds of metal doors banging open. Heard a mercenary yell something foul.
Golden light blossomed from the rear of the armored truck ahead of us, and I watched, almost as if the world paused, as the gunman hefted the slick black rifle to his shoulder and fired.
The golden beam of light shot forward, far faster than our truck was swerving away.
For the third time tonight, I was left with no options as the lead armored truck barreled through the dock’s gates and onto the Lower Olympus streets. Witchling was still standing, her eyes widening, her powers pushing so hard you could just about see the warped air around her.
Her telekinesis wasn’t working on the beam of light. It ripped through the air toward us.
I was already up on my feet, then up in the air, shooting toward the shrieking beam of golden light. I wasn’t thinking, just doing. Maybe it was being practical, logical. Ava’s heaviest hitters were in this truck bed, and my plans of joining the Olympiad relied on hers working out.
Or maybe it was just instinct taking over my mind—instinct that came from wearing dad’s symbol, from being his daughter—as I shot ahead of the truck, crossed my arms, bit down hard onto my tongue, planted my feet, and felt the impact of the beam slamming against my forearms.
It wasn’t the pain I felt first; it was the breathlessness of flying through the air. I weighed nothing as I soared. My mind was distant, my body further. Sky, sky, more sky, then the earth and tarmac, my skin rubbed raw and red and bloody grating against the sidewalk. Then the impact. Then the silence. Then the crashing and crunching of glass and metal and thunderous echo of concrete and bricks being blown apart and turned into unbreathable dust that choked my lungs. It lasted for hours, seeing the sky, feeling the earth, then came the sudden pause. No, those seconds before the pause that never comes, and you’re stuck waiting and waiting until it finally does.
When I stopped, the world stopped with me. Metal followed me into the tiny crater I lay sprawled in, followed even faster by the damning gust of air that shoved dust down my throat.
And finally, the pain came calling. Whispering at first, then turning into a cry of agony that came out of my mouth as wheezing, breathless gasps of pain. I bit down. Swallowed. Breathed slowly, but couldn’t stop myself from letting my lungs expand faster and faster as I tried lifting my arms, but I felt like a kid trying to hold back tears, and all I could really do was ground down my tongue between my teeth until that pain was what I could focus on. Anything but myself right now. Anything. My first thought came like a knife to the gut: get up, get up, someone’s screaming, and I knew it wasn’t me because I didn’t have the air to scream without passing out, so it was someone close, someone who was close enough to shriek so loudly that it cut through my daze.
Smoke rolled off my skin and chest. My black shirt was singed, reeking of melted plastic fibers that stuck to my body. I was barefoot, I noted, as I felt grit between my toes. Okay. Not okay, but okay, get up, help whoever’s screaming. I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head. A spike of pain shot down my spine, rendering me motionless for a second. More screaming. Who was that? I pried open my eyes, blinking through grit and dust and stale, hardened tears.
I was in some kind of store. At least, what used to be a convenience store.
Shelves were crumpled around and underneath me. Food was smeared across chunks of rubble just as large as the armored trucks. Right, the trucks. I got shot. Fuck, alright, get up, get going, get those weapons and get home and get into bed and pretend this night didn’t happen.
But first I had to stop the screaming. Had the store been open just now?
I couldn’t tell. The fluorescent lights were buzzing and blinking, spitting sparks.
I didn’t remember getting up. I must have fallen at some point, because I found myself on all fours, shuddering and weak, reeking of smoke and flesh, coughing, spitting, and the next moment I was standing above a lady. She was old. That’s all I knew, as she backpedaled away from me, screaming and crying. I looked down. A man trapped underneath rubble. Heart still beating. Life was still in his eyes. I grabbed hold of the rubble with one arm and lifted, then used my other to pull him out. I didn’t think he was paralyzed, guessing from how fast he staggered to his feet, wary and worried and so terrified he reeked of those damn human pheromones.
“Sorry ‘bout your store,” I muttered, or at least tried to. “I’ll fix it later. Anyone else?”
A cry from two little voices. I found them huddled in the back of the store. A boy and a girl, both a lot worse off than the older man and woman. The girl’s leg was underneath some rock. The boy had a tiny piece of metal lodged in his thigh. They’d live. The girl might not be able to walk for a few months, but her foot didn’t look crushed as I carried her out of the rubble, just awkward and maybe a little out of shape. She was crying, burying her face into my chest, something I heard from far away as I bodily handed her to the graying woman. The little boy refused to let go of my fingers, squeezing until the man had to pry him away from me. They were staring at me strangely, and so I stared at them back. I guess we were all a little confused right then.
“Hey,” the man said. He stepped on slippery rubble, reached out. “Are you—”
I was out of the store and above the city in seconds. Anger couldn’t even begin to describe what was brewing inside my gut right now. I spotted the convoy, watched as they drove toward Patriot Broadwalk. The ocean was near, a stone throw away for even a human from there. The dock reached into the dark expanse of water, carrying carnival machines and music and strobing purple lights that grasped far into the sky and grazed the brewing storm creeping toward the city.
The convoy was snaking further away from Lower Olympus and toward the crowds clustered on the dock. A broadwalk bustling with people partying away their night. A ferris wheel took children up toward the sky and back down low. Teenagers sipped alcohol discreetly from bottles they stuffed inside of their jackets as soon as a police officer came into view. Too many people for a public fight; too many civilians who would get caught in the literal crossfire.
The entire night had been one massive fucking failure, and it wasn’t easing up.
Gods, it never ends, does it?
I took a deep breath, wincing, hearing how air rattled down my throat, into my chest, and then into the laboring sacks of my lungs, then carved through the sky toward the armored trucks.
The first truck was underneath me in a heartbeat. Men shouted, aimed their rifles at me. I had no idea where Ava’s truck was—I was alone in this, but I couldn’t really care right now.
I flew low, grabbed the rear of the truck, and flipped it over. It careened through the air, throwing heavy industrial sized metal crates onto the road. The truck slammed into the second one, a sound of metal punching down hard on metal. Mercs cried out as they smashed into the ground, snapping their legs and spines. I made sure to twist their rifles around their wrists, leaving them bound in a heaping, miserable bloody pile against the side of the road. I was working on autopilot, my head buzzing, my muscles aching. Nearer to the broadwalk and up into the air again. Closing in on the leading truck firing rapidly at me. The rear doors swung open, revealing another slick black rifle. Another gunman with a knife strapped to his thigh and a wolfish snarl on his face.
I flew right over the truck, skidded to a stop in front of the road, and let the truck slam into me. I buckled, sure, and I’d feel it in the morning like a bitch, but so would the mercs driving the truck. They did for a moment, I’m sure, when they were alive, before they slammed into the windshield and smashed their skulls into boney bags of pink mushy brains. I swore, pulling myself away from the wreck, climbing onto the hood, groaning for a moment, and jumping down onto the street with a grunt. I staggered as I walked, feeling eyes on me as the civies on the boardwalk skulked closer, pop music following them, neon lights turning the streets shades of red and blue.
We were way closer to greater New Olympus than I had thought. A few more blocks and the river slicing the city in half would fill my nostrils. Further than that, and Ronnie would…
A mercenary was still alive, the one with the knife. One of the iron crates had bent open, revealing a sealed packet of golden-brown powder inside of it, the warm golden color of roasted marshmallows over a gentle fire. Heroine? I couldn’t tell. I’d always struggled picking drugs apart, but it didn’t matter, because he’d already gotten one packet open, his nose buried in it. And… I paused, tensing, as that stench of rot, of decomposing sewage and bodies, filled my lungs.
Was it the powder that reeked like that? What was it?
Who made it? I thought. Why?
The merc didn’t let me ask any questions. His eyes were ablaze, more electrified than any junkie I’d ever met. He slid the knife from his belt, then lunged. Moved so fast that, if I had been anyone else, his knife would have dug so deep into my gut that it would have come out of my back on the other side, pushing my intestines right out along with his arm. Instead, the blade shattered against my stomach. I felt the pinch of the snapping metal, then looked him dead in the eyes.
He didn’t give up. He swung the broken blade, whistling through the air. I dodged, stepped back, and slammed the side of my hand against his wrist. His grip on the blade broke. I grabbed it in the air, pulled him close, and plunged it into his chest. But I wasn't stopping there, even if the civies were watching, even if they were filming—I dragged the blade down his torso, splitting him open from left shoulder to his hip, spilling his guts onto the ruined tarmac like a hot heap of goo.
His body sagged, empty and useless, and I let him drop to my feet. The blade clattered to the ground, a noise that echoed through the silence. I nudged him, but he didn’t move an inch.
You couldn’t blame a girl for checking if he was dead, not after tonight’s experiences.
I breathed hard, panting, trying to stop myself from passing out. I put my hands on my hips, hung my head, and tried to ignore the chattering civies to my left. Air felt like soup down my throat and inside of my lungs, like my body was flooded and lazy. Exhaustion was calling, and so was the first glimmer of early morning sunlight, turning the sky a faint orange on the horizon. Glancing down the street, I heard the distant sound of O’Reiley barking orders. I still couldn’t see them, but they were getting close. Just one phone call back to Damsel, and this mess would be gone in seconds. The powder, I had to deal with that, but I felt the weakness in my joints. Felt how so terribly tired I was going to be when I woke up later today. I’d just have to trust Ava not to sell whatever this drug was. For now, I just had to wait for O’Reiley, then pack it up for tonight.
And I could finally go home and wash the blood from my hair and fingernails.
I heard civilians audibly gasp. I thought it was just a group of teenagers getting their eyes on the corpse at my feet and the now cooling scarlet spaghetti beside me, snapping pictures for social media, probably live streaming because, I reminded myself, normal teenagers have social lives they’d want blown up by fame during spring break, instead of actually getting blown up and sent flying through the air and into some poor family’s store. Instead, every single one of them was looking up—up and up to the top of the apartment building on the other side of the road that overlooked Patriot Broadwalk. I froze, too, feeling as my blood turned to ice in my veins.
Four figures stood on the apartment’s edge. Two men and two women.
All wearing black suits and white ties and thin, challenging smiles.
Each of them resonated power I felt deep in my bones.
Capes.