I had never been on a houseboat before, but I figured tonight was as good as any to crash a party on one. Club Roho was barely a boat in the first place, with most of it being weathered, spray painted concrete married to large wooden pillars sticking up from the river, holding it in place over most of the other houseboats settled in the river beside it. It was a building in all honesty, and was really only a houseboat because the remnants of one were still stuck in its dark underbelly on the muddy river. Pulsing purple strobe lights shone down from the upper most floor, spotlighting the lower levels. People drank and ate, stumbled around because of the cheap liquor I smelt in them.

It wasn’t a party in the slightest—it was a group of half-dead civilians in filthy dinner suits and vomit-stained gowns that might have been gorgeous when I was still learning how to walk. I had flown here expecting a fight, a crowd, guns and ammunition and maybe, judging by my luck this week, a new superhuman to fight, and the noise was there, sure, and so was the thumping music that shook the concrete and rattled the beams of wood that held up parts of the overhanging cement floors, but it was just… pathetic, almost lifeless, bleeding out in real time as the night grinded onward, crushing them all in it. Not sad. I was too pent up with emotions to bother feeling that way for these people, but they all reeked of sweat and desperation. They shuffled around like zombies, high on drugs with their worlds warped by alcohol. Hell, they might as well be rotting.

And somewhere in that giant carcass was Cedric, the thing that kept the heart beating.

“Tempest,” Knuckles hissed. Her grip was tight on my wrist, way too tight, I’d say, for the measly height we were above the houseboat. “We have instructions not to engage the target by—”

“Look at where we are, Knucks,” I muttered, staring at the people, at their pale faces and stringy hair and those hollow, empty eye sockets. “Ava’s still tugging your leash right now?”

“I am not her pet,” she answered briskly, and hell, I almost heard myself saying those exact words. “This is our one chance to target the Triumvirate successfully, proving to them—”

I pulled her up, looking her in the eyes. “And what exactly are we proving to them?”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “That our war with them is not yet finished.”

My eyes narrowed, and I pulled out her earpiece and crushed it between my fingers. Ace, it must have been him in her ear, in her mind, like some tick telling her what to say to me. Or maybe it was O’Reiley trying to get things back in order, desperately trying to salvage anything he can of a mission that was already falling to pieces in his hands. I could hear the distant and muffled pop of gunfire coming from the little shanty town’s back alleys, muzzle flashes splitting the overhanging wispy mist spilling in from the river. I figured Knuckles wouldn’t talk that way on her own. She was a soldier, that much I knew, but I didn’t know her history, where she came from—but that didn’t really matter now, because one thing I knew for certain was shining in her dim blue eyes.

Knuckles wasn’t with the Jericho Triad because she wanted to be here. We’re in the same freaking boat, I thought. Except she’s doing what she’s told without a wink of hesitation in her.

It was how Ava spoke to her. How the others hardly acknowledged her. After Ava made it very clear what our relationship was right now, I went walking through the Guild, seeing the damage the Triumvirate caused (all of it internal, because they’d struck right in the heart of the place Ava thought she was safest to send a very, very clear message to her), and they’d given Knuckles a room on the lower floors. The floors with the most rubble in the hallways. The floors that still stunk of gunpowder and Kaiju remains. The floors that were dark and dingy and were silent except for the sound of her fists beating against a leather punching bag over and over again, as if being called her real name had snapped something deep inside of her. She was an asset to them, not a person. Nothing more. She had only stopped punching after she blew the bag apart.

I hated to sound like Lucas, but she felt like an empty bottle, or more accurately, a firearm without its magazine, and anyone who just so happened to have a couple of rounds could use her. And hell, maybe I am getting a little soft, or tired, or being a superhero is kinda just what I was used to doing, and helping people was (believe it or not), something that was simply in my bloodstream, but I guessed that I was the one holding Knuckles in my hand right this second.

A part of me, though, wanted to aim her right back at Ava.

I might not be smart, and my greatest weakness was probably the soft pink organ between my ears when it came to telekinesis or hypnotic spells, but getting Knuckles to think right was easy, because all I really had to do was show her what happened to people like Cedric in my city. I didn’t have the right to point fingers and judge, especially about second chances. Lucas knew that. I knew that more than anyone. And turning Knuckles into a superhero was crazy talk, but it would be a hell of a lot of help having someone with at least a few screws in the right place on my side. Who knows, maybe I could get her to leave all of this crap behind one day when it was all over.

And if I was wrong and she couldn't change, well, what’s another dead supervillain, right?

Before I could give her a chance to speak, I flew us onto Club Roho’s highest floor, where a canvas tarp was used to create a faux open-air ceiling. I landed gently, and like she often did, Knuckles did the same. We were perched on top of a cement column, canvas snapping in the wind below us. I gave her the very simple instruction that we were not going to harm the half-dead civilians as we worked our way into the club. I didn’t know if she wanted to argue, or to question why exactly we weren’t going to deal with the civilians, but it didn’t matter as we started moving. I led the way down, leaping onto the concrete balcony. Nobody noticed—they really were like zombies, milling around, glasses in hand, chattering and mumbling unintelligibly. Plus they reeked.

It almost made me wish that my powers hadn’t ticked up in the past few days, wincing as I covered my nose with my elbow. Knuckles followed, tense, her hands tight and bunched as we slipped through the crowd. I made an effort to breeze just over them, past them. And when they bumped into me, they stumbled, looked around, then continued on their way, as if blind and numb and confused to the world around them, stuck in some kind of lucid dream. I was starting to get unnerved, feeling not quite right as we entered the main building itself. My skin crawled as we slipped into the dark. My ears prickled at the sound of music and its echoing din. A painfully sharp finger of ice ran down my spine, and I spun around, expecting to find a mercenary or superhuman.

Instead, all I found was a woman with straw-thin blonde hair staring at us from across the room. She had nothing in her hands, and wore a silk satin dress over her bone-thin curvy body.

Her eyes were pits of black, and I wasn’t exaggerating. They looked like they were missing, as if someone had pulled them right out, but it was hard to tell with her eyelids half shut.

What the hell is wrong with these people? Was this Cedric’s doing? Was this his power?

Knuckles tapped my shoulder. She pointed at a man not too far from where we stood.

My stomach turned at the sight of something moving underneath the skin of his skull. Something long and awkward, slender like some kind of worm burrowing around his body. He was docile, silent. Didn’t scream or tug at it, and suddenly he was looking at us, smiling widely.

I wanted to vomit, but I swallowed the bile and swept through one, two, three more floors of the exact same scene. Sometimes they lounged on couches. Other times there were just rooms filled with them doing nothing except chewing on moldy food that must have been weeks, or maybe months old. We noticed security cameras on the walls, but none of them looked like they were working, but that didn’t really matter as we started getting deeper into the bowels of Club Roho—the civilians were watching us now, staring. Un-moving. These, down here amongst the smells of sewage and stillwater and surrounded by mold growing up from the wet floorboards, were thinner, paler, looked rougher and were nearly dead and rotting on their feet. Not zombies, no, I wasn’t being ridiculous, because I could still hear heartbeats coming from their bony chests.

My hands were subconsciously balled, a fact I only found out when Knuckles glanced at them. You couldn’t blame me, not here in the dark surrounded by people staring at us with dead eyes and empty smiles and some kind of creature digging around their bodies as if it were perfectly normal for that to happen. But they didn’t move. Didn’t attack us. They stared at us and did nothing more than stand aside as we walked past them, creating a hallway of bodies that blocked off doors and exits, other side rooms and rooms marked off with red tape. Knuckles stuck to my shoulder, just a step behind me. She was silently muttering something behind her mask, something I couldn’t make out. A prayer, maybe, in a rough language that sounded garbled out of her mouth.

Minutes crawled past us, slow and uncomfortable as we got deeper and deeper. Down flights of stairs that spiraled into a darkness so deep that I had to guide Knuckles. It made the humans more ghoulish, less… human. Their joints creaked and ticked, groaned like they were rusting. Like mannequins, these ones on the lower level were held together by their flesh and loose joints, their limp appendages and stringy hair. Some wore wigs and had their filthy fingernails still painted in bright shades of red, purple, and hot pink, as if someone was playing dress up with them. Ill-fitting clothes. Shoes that didn’t match. Gods, the feeling of this place, how it was turning my gut into knots, was making my nerves flare up. I wanted to get to Cedric quickly. Soon. Now.

And soon enough, the hallways opened up. Several rooms were either side of us, with wilting yellow wallpaper peeling right off the walls. Cadaver-like humans stood in front of the doors, still staring and smiling, wearing jewelry and makeup, cologne that mixed together with their unwashed skin. Lightbulbs buzzed above us, shining sickly yellow light down the hall. They blinked, winked out, and came back on as we reached the dark mahogany door at the end of it.

Cedric had his name carved into the door and laced in gold, glinting in the dark.

What the hell was he playing at? A trap, my gut told me, because why would he—

A lock snapped aside behind the door. I tensed, watching as it creaked open.

“Finally,” a low, gravelly voice said. “It’s taken you people ages to get here.”

Standing in the door was… a man. Just a man. He was average height with blonde hair, had brown eyes the color of dirt, and a faint brush of stubble on his weak jaw. He wore a dirty suit stained around the collar by sweat. He picked at the skin on the back of his hands, nervous, or maybe because there was something in his veins. He looked so painfully normal that my anger morphed into confusion, which quickly returned, flooding my body, faster than it had before, because this was Cedric? This man who downed a glass of whiskey, only to cough and splutter? The thing buzzing around a dark, scarlet-colored office, a room that reeked of urine and drugs?

I had been expecting a monster. Something I could hate without even thinking twice. The locals made it seem like he was going to be the devil, but he was a man wearing a stained suit, hiding in a dark little room in the middle of a vast, ice-cold building. And all I could do for a moment was stare at him, seethe quietly, and watch as he swept up his briefcase off his desk.

Then I snapped out of it, and kicked his fucking coffee table against the wall.

It shattered, smashing into wooden shards, throwing empty bottles of liquor to the floor, breaking them into fragments. Cedric glanced at the mess, then looked at me with soulless eyes.

“Is there a reason that you—”

I grabbed him by the collar and slammed him down onto his desk. He gasped in pain, then I felt hands wrap around my shoulders and arms and yank my hair backward, trying to free him. The people in the hallway had moved forward, silent as, well, the dead, and grabbed me in seconds. Knuckles stood and watched, hovering in the doorway, unsure of what to do.

I wasn’t any better, because I didn’t know how to deal with these kinds of humans. Ripping them off of me would mean leaving their hands on me and the rest of their body not attached to them. They were brittle and bony, and maybe they were strong to a normal person, terrifying to a normal person, but I was half sure that shoving them off would blow them apart.

So I grudgingly let go of Cedric’s neck before his face could turn entirely white.

He clattered onto the floor, choking and coughing on his hands and knees. “What the fuck?” he wheezed, looking up at me, tears in his eyes. “I was promised no bodily harm!”

My brows furrowed. “And who the hell promised you that?”

I didn’t hear the next string of words to come out of his mouth. I stilled, stopped moving so suddenly that I was sure my heart would stop not long after. I stared at him. Looked down at him. Watched his lips move, but didn’t hear a single thing over the blood raging in my ears. My heart was loud, a drum beat against my ribs that echoed throughout my body. Heat in my gut, in my blood, flowing through me and wanting to form around my fingers and body and flood my eyes until I was laced with golden lightning and blazing heat that my powers wanted to drench me in..

Self-control was something I was still working on. It didn’t take a lot to piss me off.

But this kind of anger came from somewhere deep and dark, from somewhere I’d kept a lot of emotions over the years, giving them the space to twist and curdle and burn a hole through me.

I always figured it would take someone hurting Bianca or mom or anyone I cared about to make me feel this way, cold right through my entire body, but this was different. New to me.

Because all Cedric had to say was: “Your boss.”

Fingers snapped in my face. He was standing again, adjusting his collar. “They just don’t make henchmen… hench-girls like they used to,” he muttered. “You’re supposed to protect me, not stand around and gawk. Hello? Hello?” He flicked my ear. “You use these fuckin’ things, kid?”

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I grabbed his wrist, stared into his eyes as his bones began to crack. “My boss?” I must have whispered tensely, but my voice sounded far away. Distant. Like someone was imitating me.

“Fuck!” Cedric shrieked, just as his wrist popped and shattered. The civilians lunged, grabbing me, but what did I care? Their biting and scratching was nothing to me at that point.

Sounds from upstairs. Dozens, maybe hundreds of feet pounding against the floor, racing through the hallways and down the stairs to find their master. More were coming, trying to find their boss, the man who must have put those things inside of them. They were a tidal wave of bodies gushing down the stairwell, clawing over each other in some mad, raging rush toward the open office door. Their cry was horrific, blood-curdling. Knuckles was pressed against a wall, silent, because they were ignoring her, and were charging straight for me. But… I didn’t care. I didn’t fucking care. He had said Ava’s name, said it because she had sent us here tonight to…

I let go of his wrist as it dawned on me. She sent us here to get him out of here.

Ava sent me here to make sure some god-forsaken lowlife made it out of this place alive and in our custody. I didn’t know. Didn’t have the mental capacity to guess. To think. To figure out why she wanted us to get this… this thing out of Old Town in one piece tonight. Noise all around me, from inside of me, from my racing heart and whining blood, to the civilians and the terrible groaning, mewling, screaming sound they were making as they clustered around Cedric. I stepped backward, not because I was pushed, not because I was scared, but because I knew what I was going to do next was going to kill a lot of people, and I had to remind myself these were normal people, people with lives once upon a time, but it was hard to think, hard not to act—impossible not to want to do something that my instincts up until now were screaming at me to do right now.

I want to kill him and hang his body from the bridge for everyone to see.

I want to use Ava’s guts to wrap a noose right around his throat.

I want to tear this entire place down right-fucking-now.

I grabbed him by his scruffy hair and pulled him into the air. He kicked and squirmed, clawing at my hand, panic in his eyes. “The Kaiju,” I said quietly. “You’re selling them. Where?”

Cedric smiled a sick smile, like a snake’s maw pulling open. “That’s between me and—”

I threw him into his desk. His body slammed into the reinforced mahogany, and I heard a healthy crack of ribs as they met the sharp edge. I hovered over him as his humans clawed at my trousers, picked at my skin. “The Kaiju,” I repeated, angrier. “Where are the other Kaiju, Cedric?”

He laughed a little, his voice rattling, and I figured the bone fragments in his lungs were helping with that. “Yo… You think I’ll tell you? Your boss told me one of you was difficult.” Cedric looked into my eyes. Had the gaul to smile, bloody teeth and all. “You’re not worth that kind of information, so how about you do as you’re told and get me out of here like agreed, kid.”

Like agreed.

“Tempest!”

It was the one word that stopped me from putting my fist through his skull. I looked over my shoulder and saw O’Reiley, Jane, Ace and Mr. Campbell in the doorway. Cedric’s collar was in my fist, and I might have hit him in my daze, because his jaw was loose and crooked, with several teeth missing, and I figured the bone was still attached to his face only because of the strips of flesh connecting them. He was sobbing quietly, pissing himself. His bravado had vanished right along with most of his tongue that didn’t have bits of bone in it. I blinked once, stood, and dropped him. He slumped at my feet, and I turned to face the five of them, including Knuckles. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken. She had remained in the corner, a weapon without a hand to aim her.

“Jesus Christ,” Jane whispered, lowering—what I was just noticing—a special grade rifle.

“Well, I guess she’s found our P.O.I.,” Ace muttered. “At least, what’s left of the bastard.”

I pointed at him. “You knew,” I whispered, looking at O’Reiley. “You knew and didn’t—”

“Didn’t what?” he said measuredly, finger still on his trigger. “Tell you we were doing an extraction job? You’re not special. You’re new. Fresh. We had reason to suspect that you were—”

“The mole?” I asked, bitterness curling my tongue. “You didn’t tell me that we were going to extract someone who traffics fucking Kaiju because you think I’m ratting on your little gang?”

Silence, because yeah, I knew he was lying. There was another reason. There had to be.

A part of me didn’t know if I wanted to know the godsdamned reason.

“You still want to play hero?” Ace asked, waving his arm around the room. “Look at this. Look. These people, kid, were normal people. Normals. So tone down the sanctimonious crap—”

“Ace,” I said, shutting my eyes. “I’m not in the mood for you, so keep quiet.” I opened them again, now staring at O’Reiley. Bodies littered the floor, dead and torn apart—not bleeding, all hollow. Dead before they touched me. “Tell me the truth. Why does this bastard know Ava?”

Cedric answered, looking up at me, blood frothing in his mouth. “We’re partners.”

I shut my eyes, squeezed them closed. “O’Reiley,” I whispered. “I have had a very, very long week, and now, this person who helped the Triumvirate attack your people”—and possible most of the city for all I knew; my anger needed a face, and it was going to be the one that had caked my knuckles in red—“is the same freaking guy you want to help? He sells Kaiju. Sells them to get eaten alive. He sells them to the Triumvirate for all I know so they can kill your little game.”

“So now you have morals?” Jane asked. She spat saliva at my feet. “Go to hell. I’ve seen you kill with your bare hands. Rip things in two with nothing but your fingers. Kaiju are Kaiju.”

In the midst of the silence, the sound of muffled whimpering came from the hallway. It had been there for several minutes, and I had thought it might have been Mr. Campbell making those sounds. But then Cedric started laughing, spittle and bloody saliva pouring from his mouth as I glanced down at him, then past O’Reiley. I took one step forward, then another. Cedric was saying something, mumbling through the torn meat of his mouth about Kaiju just being Kaiju. Monsters. Things. And when I pushed past O’Reiley and Jane, made Ace stumbled against a wall, and flew past Mr. Campbell (who hadn’t raised his eyes off the floor), it was hard for me not to disagree.

At least, I agreed on some level until I saw the tiny naked bodies in the rooms down the hallway. Behind the doors marked x with red tape and red paint. Each and every one of them was the same: dark, wet, stinking of urine and defecation, of unwashed… fur, not skin, but fur and scales and feathers that were wilting and patches of green skin that was shed in pale sheets. I swallowed my tongue, put a fist to my mouth to stop myself from puking. Tiny bodies. Not adult bodies. The things cowering on stained mattresses on the floor and on bunk beds, in cages hanging from meat hooks coming down from the ceiling, were small. Small. Their wings were tiny. Their claws were no bigger than my fingernails on some. They cowered as I walked past each of them, huddling together, twitching, nervous, baring their teeth, retracting their claws, flapping their wings and hissing and spitting and grabbing at one another so they stayed tightly packed together as one..

Because I must have been the first person in here that hadn’t come to buy children.

I looked over my shoulder. O’Reiley was in the door, a shadow.

The kids had tags hanging around their throats like collars—Meat. Muscle. Medical. Only three categories. The largest children had meat around their necks, the strongest-looking, the ones who stared at me not with anger or hatred, but with this cold understanding that they knew what was coming next, had muscle on their necks. The rest, though, simply had medical on them, and those were the ones who were the smallest, the weakest, and most commonly the dirtiest of them.

I turned around and walked toward the doorway, but O’Reiley didn’t move.

“You’re gonna think about what’s gonna happen next,” he said quietly.

I nodded, then whispered, “I’m thinking of putting my hand through your chest.”

“And what exactly are you going to do, Tempest?” he asked. “Save them? How?”

“I’ll…” I swallowed as the doorway behind O’Reiley was pushed open by Mr. Campbell—the kids in there were mostly all medical. “I’ll get them out of here, and then—”

“Then set them up somewhere nice, right? Get them blankets and food and a nice warm bed to stay in because everybody in this damned city would just love to have a little Kaiju in their goddamned house, right?” he said, staring at me. Not once did his finger move. Not once did the special grade rifle lower from my chest. “We came here for a job, and this is not part of that job.”

I bristled, anger flaring in me as I waved a hand behind me. “They’re fucking kids!”

“A Kaiju is a Kaiju,” Jane said, eyes narrowing. “We’re just here to make sure nobody else gets them on their side, and that piece of shit on the floor is gonna make sure we get some, too.”

Get some. Get. Some. “These are kids you’re talking about!” I snapped. “Kids! I saw some butcher in the market cut one up and put him in a pot to stew! And now you want to help the same guy who sold one to her? You want to help the same guy who keeps children in the dark like this?”

Jane raised her rifle and fired into a room of them—they didn’t have a chance to scream; the golden beam of light turned them into pulpy red-gray ash in seconds. “There, problem solved.”

I slammed her through the opposite wall, sending her skidding into the dark. “What the hell is your problem?” I shouted. I spun around, just as O’Reiley raised his rifle. “This is insane!”

“Insane, darling, is thinking you can help ‘em,” Ace said. “You wanna know why the boss lady sent us here? Fine. Cedric was owned by the Triumvirate. Now, he has information we need. He has resources we need. He’s a rat that lives in the shit that just so happens to have a lot of pull in the Kaiju Society, and hell, believe me or not, but these kids are here because they were sold to him. You want insane? There it is. They’re not wanted by their parents. Not by anyone from birth. Their poor folks got married and that’s what popped out, and they’re better off being useful to some capacity than just monsters lurking around aimlessly just waiting to kill the people you seemingly want to protect so fucking badly. If you want to save them, leave these damned kids.”

My hands curled into fists. “I’m leaving with these kids, and you’re not stopping me.”

“So that’s what you’re gonna choose?” Ace asked. “You’re gonna let them kill people?”

“They’re not going to kill anyone, all right?” I snapped.

“Yeah, and how do you know that, kid?”

“Because killing is taught,” I growled, and I could almost hear the person who taught me that right here in this room—Lucas would have never said it. “They don’t have to learn that.”

Ace shook his head slowly. “Don’t you know, even our resident superhero murders people, so what’s stopping actual monsters from doing it? Morals? Nah, kid. We’re way past that stage.”

I heard a whir of noise behind me, followed by a blossoming golden light. Jane had her gun raised at me, still on the floor. I watched her bare her teeth, watched hate seep from her eyes.

“Try me,” I said. “Let’s see how long you last without anything inside your body.”

O’Reiley shouted, “Enough! We’re wasting time. Ace, grab Cedric. Campbell, take his files and make sure you get a backup of his laptop on a hard drive. The Triumvirate isn’t too happy that we’re trying to steal their dealer, so let’s get our asses moving before this place becomes a shooting range! Ruslana, on me—you’re on my shoulder; make sure nothing happens with these goddamned rugrats. Kill ‘em if you have to. Lieutenant, put down that rifle and take point. Now.”

It took a second for Jane to follow orders like a good little bitch, but I wasn’t focused on her anymore. The kids were my priority, they all were—however many dozens of them there were.

“Tempest,” O’Reiley said. “I suggest you start picking off any hostels upstairs.”

“And leave you with the kids?” I snarled. “No chance in hell.”

His eyes narrowed, then he nodded slightly.

The whir behind me hadn’t slowed down. I spun, but Jane wasn’t aiming at me.

She was aiming at the wall, and the room beyond it and further than that. Those guns could send the likes of me through the air for blocks on end. On full power, they would decimate a Kaiju.

Never mind what it would do to a child’s body.

I lunged, splintering the floor, aiming myself at Jane’s body.

Then O’Reiley fired at me, sending a bolt of golden light slamming against my body. I smashed through a wall and hit a concrete pillar, knocking the air right out of me as I collapsed. I shook my head, stumbled to my feet. Another blast of light square to my chest punched me back against the pillar. Two more sent me through it. A fifth shot left my skin smoking and hair singed, my body weak and frail and my tongue curled up and dry. I wheezed, tried to see through the smoke of burning wood, but all I could see was… sludge, red and gray sludge smeared across dozens of rooms. No. No. NoNoNo. I willed myself into the air, then onto the ground to stand.

Every single one of the rooms was empty. Nothing. Not even carcasses. Bodies.

The faintest spark of golden light zapped between my fingers as I crouched over the visceral remains of… something. Something glowing red hot and producing noxious vapors. That must have been a child, but I couldn’t tell, couldn’t focus, not as I stood up, and not as I stared at Jane and her vague form through the hazy smoke just beyond the holes she’d burnt through the wall. She didn’t have the time to put up her rifle. I punched her, and that’s all it really took to put my knuckles through her jaw, her neck, her head, and carried me into the next wall to a stop.

Her body collapsed behind me, slumping to the ground. I looked at O’Reiley next.

His mouth went thin—not angry, nor frightened, just simply not amused.

“You know what’ll happen if you try,” he said to me, and… I froze.

And all I could do was watch as they left, gathering what they needed and nothing more. Not blinking and not talking, but working, because they had a goal, and were doing just that.

“You’ll ask us ‘why’ one day,” Ace said eventually, brushing past, “it’s ‘cause we’re the bad guys. Nothing more, nothin’ less. We all want L.O. to be what it once was, and that can only really happen if we do shit like this to get the upper hand.” He nudged me with his elbow. “Don’t beat yourself up about the Kaiju. Millions of ‘em die every single day, just like regular old people do all the time, and just like superhumans do every other week, am I right? It was probably for their own good. Olympia would have killed them, anyway.”

“She wouldn’t have,” I whispered, so quiet I barely heard it.

“Never understood why you defend her so much,” he said, climbing the stairs behind Mr. Campbell. “She’s just like us, kid! It’s just that she’s got a different way of phrasing her business, 'cause at the end of the day, we want peace, and so does she..”

Knuckles was the last to leave. She hadn’t stopped staring at the warped slagheap of iron that was once a birdcage for a girl small enough to fit inside of it, though not comfortably. Her wings weren’t anywhere near the right shape for that, but… My stomach sank as I turned away from the rooms and the stairwell, my wet scarlet hands quaked, my throat tightened and tongue fattened as I chose to ace Cedric’s now empty, ransacked office instead. I felt Knuckles’ eyes on me, felt her almost reach out and touch me, but as she always seemed to do, she vanished silently.

And I was left alone in the bowels of Club Roho, letting my eyes burn.