I couldn’t remember the last time that I had felt so angry for a Kaiju. On one hand, the girl with the Mercedes had been right about Amy not having a family. Call it wrong, but I used her fingerprint to unlock her phone, and proceeded to scroll through her contacts and her call logs, trying to find someone who would want to know about Amy, or anyone I could question very gently about her to figure out what might have happened in her life to cause this, if there even was a reason why a person would just turn into a feral Kaiju suddenly. Nobody. Freaking nobody. She had broken up with her girlfriend a month ago and was talking to a boy who replied hours later. Her mom, when I tried calling her, dryly told me not to call her again, and promptly blocked Amy’s phone number.
Her wallpaper was of her with a parrot sitting on her shoulder, but even despite the lighting in the picture, despite the filter, her eyes still looked so distant and hollow and just so…hopeless.
I didn’t know Amy, and the last thing I wanted was to give a dead person faux emotions.
But she was miserable, judging by everything I found on her phone. No friends, a bank account that made me look like a millionaire, and just about nothing keeping her around except for an AA group she was going to every other Thursday that she had missed for a few weeks. I called the AA line I found in a group chat labeled Anonymous Aliens, and finally got someone on the other end who wouldn’t either swear at me, snort at me, or simply not bother picking up. I made my voice as deep as I could, putting on a Lower Olympus accent, the kind that blunted their words and elongated their vowels, masking who I really was. But having that talk with a guy I didn’t know felt like getting punched in the stomach repeatedly, because he wanted to listen to how Amy was found, where she was now. Fuck, I wish I could have called her earlier. I’ll go be with her.
I told him the police station, gave him the exact address, and cut the call. I stayed in the air for about ten minutes, staring down at the body on the stairs leading up to the precinct, waiting for someone to come out and do the right thing. The gray goo had even begun dissolving parts of her body, turning her chest into pasty viscera. It took a little longer for an officer to come outside, swear, and go rushing back inside to get other police and body bags, cautionary yellow tape and cameras ready to take pictures. The man on the phone had said Amy didn’t have anyone in New Olympus. She was from Texas, moved here, something about a falling out with her old man, her family, then life had just gotten rougher and rougher. Nothing much else. She was closed off, too shy, too afraid to talk to people. I just didn’t know her. We get so many kids who take months to open up. Amy just wasn’t ready yet. I didn’t stay long enough to see if the man made good on his promise of coming to see Amy. I felt like doing something about it would be more of a service.
Feeling like this was new to me, and it made me feel weird. A part of me hated it, feeling shitty for some human I didn’t know. It was thirty minutes in that store. Barely five outside of it.
I didn’t even know her last name, or what she really looked like. She was just a human.
Shouldn’t I be out there fighting villains? Threatening and frightening them? Killing them?
So why was I flying through the air, threading my way around skyscrapers, for a stranger?
For a human?
“Empathy is strange, isn’t it? Foreign to something not from a warm planet.”
And it wasn’t the time for the voices in my head to start pitching in their thoughts, either.
The only reason I left her body at the police station was because I felt that the world needed to see it. Somebody was always lurking around the precinct and its various branches, a camera in hand because they wanted their big break, or maybe just because they were the kinds of people who liked uploading pictures onto the internet about the police not doing much of anything in New Olympus. It didn’t matter, not really. I figured that people needed to ask questions, to feel sick about seeing Amy and even worse that something like that could even happen. The Olympiad wouldn’t have let the world so much as hear a whisper of her name, and Zeus knows that the SDU would rather bury the body and burn the shovel than let the public get a hands on look of such.
Was it the right thing to do? I didn’t know. My body was full of guilt, my veins icy with the stuff as I silently cut through the haze of light sitting in the blurry city air. Just as long as the humans see her face, then fine by me. I didn’t like the Kaiju as much as anyone, but…come on, what the fuck was that? I shook my head, not wanting to let myself get sucked in too much by my own thoughts. Maybe the Kaiju just needed some help. Someone who would try to figure out what happened to Amy, someone to just have their back sometimes and—I couldn’t believe I was saying this—have an arm around their shoulder, or whatever. Maybe I’ve got a concussion or something.
I had missed too much, it felt. All I needed was to find out more about what was going on with the Kaiju and why people were treating them worse than before. The truth was that I would simply never know everything going on in this city. Millions of people live here now. Countless interactions every single day. New tragedies that only three people will ever know about, and some heroic feat that’ll go down in history to groups of people I’ll simply never hear anything about.
But if there was one thing I was good at, it was being stubborn about getting something done. Lucas would know something about Normals turning into Kaiju, however weird that was.
And if he didn’t know, then I’m sure Paul Macey would be willing to answer some questions if I knocked on his penthouse door. That, or I could storm the Olympiad for answers.
At this point in my life, it would just be a lot easier to demand answers than try to worm my way through politics and back alley conversations. If I was ever going to be any good at that, then my superpowers wouldn’t boil down to me having to hit someone hard enough to stop them from screwing with me repeatedly. So if nobody knew what was going on, add that to the laundry list of things I still needed to do, just under all my leads, Caesar, my stolen blood, and whatever the hell yesterday had been. Maybe a part of me was avoiding dealing with certain things in my life, and this was how I was coping. I was stressed out and tired. Exhausted. I’d had an ache in my upper back for the past few weeks that wouldn’t leave no matter how many times I rolled my shoulders.
Gods knew when the last time I had a full night worth of sleep had been.
But a good superhero keeps superheroing, no matter the aches, or whatever.
The Superhuman Defence Unit headquarters was a blight, there simply wasn’t any other way to put it. You have all these shiny skyscrapers and quaint brown brick buildings, some older than the Olympians and even older than Peacemaker, and some so new that it would probably be tomorrow when they finally opened their doors. Then you turned the corner and several blocks worth of the city (on the edge of it, at least they had the decency for that) would be consumed by reinforced concrete. Where the Olympiad, no matter the towering black skyscraper right in the middle of it, had tried to at least keep some of the old school temple look of its exterior, the SDU had modernized a hell of a lot after dad and Titan went to town on each other right here in the city.
It was very nearly a military base nestled in the woods near the edge of everything, close enough to the waters to have some of their armored boats on their own private docking, but deep enough inside of the vegetation to have a sweeping circular area filled with all kinds of aircraft. Of course, they usually kept some of their stuff around New Olympus for faster deployment, but their main headquarters spanned most of the forest, and who knew how many animals and people had accidentally wandered onto government land before suddenly coming across a drone that very kindly, and very thoroughly, told them to leave. The base itself was a long strip of white and gray cement, black windows that even I couldn’t see through, and dozens of floors that went deep underground. Sometimes for their sake, sometimes for making sure civilians had somewhere to hide just in case a Titan-scale incident ever happened again, but mostly because, when you’re torturing an S-Grade for information, you don’t want them freaking out and using their powers.
Oh, and that torturing superhumans part? You didn’t hear that from me.
If there were people who knew something, it would be these people. The Olympiad might as well be a clown circus where they kept the government agents who could fly and shoot lasers.
And considering I had been allowed in here a lot more than there, I was a little biased.
I circled over the base once and then twice, making sure their radars and scanners would pick me up before I landed near their very heavily modified F-22s and 35s. It was a running stop, which didn’t startle the group of guys who were busy underneath a wing they were taking apart. One of them glanced at me, went back to his work, paused, and under the bright white lights of the air strip, stared me dead in the eyes like he’d just seen a ghost. He lowered his arms, wrench still in hand, and so did the other mechanics around him. We stared at each other for a good few seconds, and, unsure of what I should do, indicated the main building with a jerk of my thumb, and walked onward without a word. I’d been here enough times to know not to provoke these people at all.
I knew in my heart they wouldn’t be scared of me, either. They actively went looking for S-Grades around the States, hunting them down as if they wanted to collect their bounties, even though the government and the DPIA were very adamant that these people were protectors and not murderers. Some of the jets even had little cape markings carved into their noses, several of them struck out on some of the more worn down fighter jets. The only problem right now was that every single pilot, mechanic, and groundsman I passed was staring directly at me, stopping dead what they were doing. Me and the airforce went way back, too, ever since some sixteen year old girl had accidentally totalled one of their F-22s down in Nebraska, but this felt…different. Cold. Hostile.
Lucas would usually have been here waiting for me near the airstrip, because the higher ups would have a problem with me actually being inside of the base for long periods of time.
All I could do now was stand near a row of enormous warehouses under glaring spotlights, being stared at as if I was some kind of alien. Was it something I had done? What did I miss?
“Olympia,” a woman said. I turned and saw a strong-jawed and straight black-haired woman striding across the tarmac from one of the warehouses. Like Lucas, she wasn’t in fatigues, but in a suit with a black coat on her shoulders. She stopped about fifty meters away from me, the men around her priming rifles that…wait a minute, I had seen those rifles before. Hell, they had sent me flying through half the city just a few weeks ago. When the hell did they get those?!
I put my hands up, making sure I didn’t look like too much of a threat. Drones were silently hovering somewhere above me, cloaked by tech I didn’t understand and the darkness of night.
“Special Agent Bowers,” she said, flashing me a badge she pulled out of her pocket. Gods, she was so spick and span it made Lucas look like a deadbeat who stumbled his way into work every morning half-drunk. No offense, of course. “And I have to request that you don’t take another step either forward, backward, or in any other direction if you want this to go smoothly.”
I laughed a little dryly, maybe nervously, because the ominous thrum of those rifles, the sight of their silent golden light, had me on edge. Who gave them those weapons? How did they even get their hands on them? I glanced around, but I didn’t see anyone else with them, but…was that what they were doing with some of the aircraft? It wasn’t unusual for me not to recognize some fighter jet they had cloaked in black and crammed deep inside of a warehouse, but some of them looked new, and had turrets that didn’t look like they either fired armor (and sometimes skin) piercing missiles, or shrieking sound waves for those of us with super hearing, but beams of light.
The same beams of light that could very well make this night go from terrible to horrible.
“I, uh, came here in peace,” I said, raising my voice for her to hear. “I need to talk to—”
“Special Agent Freeman, yes, we know,” she said curtly. Her brown eyes were intense, cutting the distance between us without even trying. “And that’s unfortunate, because we have clearance from the United States government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress, and you bet your mother nearly half the population on our soil to take you into custody if you breach our policies.”
Gods above, I’m gone for a week and this freaking happens? “Listen, I know I’ve screwed up in the past, but if you could just do me a solid this one time and let me by, that’ll be great.”
Very icily, and very clearly, she asked, “Are you breaching our new state of law, ma’am?”
“And what exactly is this new state of law?” I asked. Some of the soldiers surrounding her had heartbeats banging against their chests. The air crews had cleared out, leaving just us few.
“You are familiar with the Black Capes Act, yes?”
I nodded slowly, inching away. Where was Lucas?
“All beings who possess abilities beyond the capabilities of man will be seen as hostiles, as well as threats to their community, society, and our nation as a whole, if acting independently,” Bowers said. Her tie flapped over her shoulder, and her coat snapped in the cold wind. She was as pale as the dry concrete underneath my boots in this lighting. “But I’m guessing you already know this, but considering your disappearance over the past week, and your behavioral profile that we’ve accumulated, you’re not inclined on learning that the act was just recently changed and modified to ensure the further safety of our nation. Simply put, do you or do you not identify as an American?”
I felt like that was a loaded question, a little too personal, and if we were talking about matters of national security, then I decided to keep my mouth shut for her sake. And the last time I checked, I was the one who kept at least some of this nation secure. I was a political deterrent, from what I knew. Like some nuclear warhead for the government to name drop every once in a while as if I was their attack drone. I had a hard time listening to anyone, let alone a group of humans who thought they could tell me what to do and how, so being made into their little toy wouldn’t happen any time soon. What Bowers was saying just didn’t make any sense to me then. Had they really changed their anti-superhero law because of me…being a superhero sometimes?
And all of this happened as I was dealing with things I still didn’t understand, with people I didn’t understand, either. Of course. Maybe I did have to start paying more attention to more than just the supervillains, because the longer I remained quiet, the longer that Bowers glared at me.
“I just want Lucas,” I said to her. The boys around her leveled their rifles. “Just for a sec.”
“I have orders to take you in for questioning and possibly trial,” she said, eyes sharpening. “The world wants you to answer for what you’ve done, and to know who exactly you stand with.”
Are you freaking kidding me right now? “Listen, lady. I’ve got thing to do tonight—”
“And you won’t make it a meter into the air before we shoot you down and bag you.”
I stared at her, listening to the hardness in her voice. No hate in Bowers’ tone, just a statement of fact, like they’d all practiced this. “There are people turning into Kaiju right now.”
“I need you to listen very clearly and come with me. I would prefer not to have to harm a teenager, but I’m afraid, by law, that you should be dealt with like any other national threat.”
My normal reaction right now would be to threaten her, but doing that to a government agent wasn’t smart, I knew that much. Those rifles were tracking me. The drones above me were watching me, recording me, learning and analyzing. I could give them what they wanted and act out in the way they probably thought I would. But these were good people, people that the world, however messed up the SDU might be behind closed doors and on foreign soil, needed, and it also felt like I was having to convince myself that these people weren’t nuts. All I needed was Lucas, answers, a sit down and one of his stupid pep talks and jibes because I hadn’t been around lately, but his phone hadn’t gone through, and his apartment had been empty. There wasn’t any other place I could go for answers. This wasn’t something I could just search on the internet right now.
It was also something that made me question why I was doing this just for a human.
I sighed through my teeth. “If I come with you, you do know that I can leave whenever I want to, right? A couple of inches of concrete isn’t going to stop me for a second, you know that.”
She raised a thin eyebrow. “Is that a threat to our lives?”
“More like a warning if you don’t give me something in return,” I said. “This is a talk, and nothing more. A play date, if you’re gonna warm me up with some food, because I’ve got things to do tonight that can’t wait, and answers I need, so if I come with you, I need something in return, and if you want an answer of if I really am American, then I’ll also give you that if you talk to me.”
“Destruction of government property, refusing arrest, personnel harm, violation of law—”
“Just arrest me already, dude,” I said, “so we can get this over with. But when I do leave, which I will, tell your bosses that I don’t care, and don’t take it too harshly. It’s not your fault.”
Bowers’ eyes narrowed. We waited, staring at each other, rifles primed, and my hands still in front of me, not sparking or glowing, but splayed out. My guess was that someone more important than her was in that little earpiece of hers, telling her what to do right now. It would, by my guess, also be the person who would want to question me first before trying to hand me over to the government, which just wasn’t something I wanted to do tonight. Maybe some other time when the city wasn’t being held together by spit and tape I’d sit down with the people who wanted to rip the lightning bolt off my chest, but not now, not soon. Come on, already. All I needed was a few answers, one of them knowing where Lucas had gone off to, and then I’d be on my way and out of their hair so they could continue putting those rifles onto their jets and in their soldier’s arms.
Finally, the woman jerked her head, indicating for me to follow her, so I did as asked.
This wasn’t the first time I was in an interrogation room, but it was the first for Olympia. The walk had been silent and long, spiraling down corridors and hallways that looked exactly the same until we reached floor levels that were leveled Subterranean Level One and so on. No flying, they said, not wanting to hear a word out of my mouth either, and eventually, Bowers led me into a room that didn’t look any different than the police one I had been inside of before. A one way mirror on the opposite side of the room, a thick slab of shiny metal in the center, and one steel chair. After she shut the door and I heard a silent hiss as it sealed itself air tight, I was left alone near the table.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
They had put cuffs on me, the kind that supposedly dampened powers, but I doubted that was true. I figured it was just an excuse for the government to force your hands into fists so tight that your fingernails dug into the meat of your palm until it hurt. I could leave at any time, I knew, fly right through their ceilings and floors and get on with my night, but a camera was watching me, its little red dot blinking continuously. Every sound and movement I made was being stored away somewhere for later, filling up their files on me. Good luck with that. My eyes were glowing, and naturally, my body was larger, stronger, and that was the most they would be getting from me.
And soon enough, after pacing the room, sitting on the table, counting the seconds and trying to scratch an itch on the bridge of my nose without touching the cuffs, the door opened.
A long and pressurized hiss, a thunderous groaning of metal, and finally it dragged itself aside as a man with brown skin and salt and pepper hair let himself in. He was tall, domineering, you could just feel it in the way he looked down at me as he caught me trying to get rid of the itch, as if he was looking at some insect skittering around his shoes. He wore a blue scarf, a navy blue suit, had tinted blue sunglasses over his eyes, and smelt of…nothing. I couldn’t hear his heartbeat properly, either, as if it were being muffled by his clothes. I stood up, only a little bit wary of him.
With his hands behind his back, he walked toward the table and stopped in front of it, then indicated the seat on the other side. It felt like I was back in high school getting detention again.
“The cuffs,” he said, and my Gods, his voice was so clear it felt like the ones I’d been hearing in my head lately. “You’ve decided to keep them on your hands for almost an hour.”
I shrugged. “Felt like I’d hurt someone’s feelings if I broke them.”
He didn’t smile and nor did his face twitch, leaving my words flat in the air between us. All I could see of his eyes was my reflection in his glasses. “I think there’s no reason for pleasantries, because we know who you are, how you talk, your mannerisms and your quirks. I know that your foot is tapping not because you’re nervous, but because you hate sitting in one place. Your mouth is dry because you are nervous, and you’re sweating underneath that supersuit, wondering what exactly it is that I’m doing here. You wrack your brain for answers and clues, your nose is twitching, trying to locate smells, and right there, your eyes flick to my neck and my pores, trying to see any traces of nerves on my part. You’re a being of immense power. A nuclear arsenal”—just wanted to say that I told you so—“that is rather unfortunately being piloted by a girl two years past being allowed to get her license. If you wanted to remove the cuffs, you would have, but a part of you enjoys playing this game with us, just to make us feel safe. You pretend you don’t care about humans, but my goodness, the act can only go on for so much longer, Olympia. Am I correct?”
No, I didn’t swallow saliva, and neither did I stop moving my foot. “Please, I don’t like humans. I do this gig because I’ve got nothing else going on for me right now. It’s spring break.”
“You’re a social reject.”
That…stung. “I’ve got plenty of friends.”
“That’ll never know what you are. The same friends who you schooled with, laughed with, went on trips with and shopped at the mall with, will simply never know what makes you…you.”
A pit was forming in my gut. He hadn’t moved. Couldn’t even hear him blink. The people on the other side of the one way mirror were louder. “I’m not the insecure kinda teen hero, dude.”
“But what you are is an experiment that your own people spat on and made an outcast out of as soon as they had the chance,” the man said quietly, and this time, I did stop moving entirely. “Your body is worth trillions of dollars to us humans in the right hands, did you know that?”
“I’m not liking where this is going, so you better stop beating around the bush.”
“Do you know why superhumans had such little involvement in World War Two?”
Great, a history lesson. “I said not to beat around the bush. I came here for something important. There are people in the city who are turning into Kaiju, but nobody seems to care.”
“It’s because, at that time, you were all considered assets. You were more valuable fighting a proxy war on television, standing alongside the president and the troops, flying with our bombers but not stepping a single foot in Europe. There were people who wanted to use you. Of course, why would you not want to have men and women who could render entire battalions deceased in the time it took for a phone call back home to say that entire countries have fallen? But they all refused it. The Axis, the Allies, everyone, because we knew it would be a gateway into something that would change the world forever. Criminal, isn’t it, that we were so willing to kill each other tooth and nail, and shake bloody hands underneath tables. Naturally, countries like Russia and ourselves held greater advantages. A larger population means a greater likelihood of superhumans being present. One in roughly one hundred is the unofficial guess. The numbers tend to vary.”
I stared at him for a moment, then said, “So you wanted to keep us as circus monkeys.”
“A crude way of putting it, yes, but I can’t fault you.”
“Just because you were too scared of what would happen if you put us in uniform?”
“You haven’t experienced what it’s like to be crawling through mud, excrement, blood and the remains of your cohort simply because a young man’s powers Awakened in a high pressure situation.” His voice didn’t rise or fall. It remained flat, deadpan, as if he was reading me a grocery list instead of telling me about how awful digging yourself out of a pit filled with string meat and wet mud and red sludge was. “The boys wouldn’t have fought the way they needed to, and we wouldn’t have won in the way we intended to. If our flag had been buried into the remains of each city we claimed by a glowing hand instead of a bleeding one, then what would that mean for us?”
“And by us,” I said quietly, “you mean the Normals, everyone else on the planet.”
He nodded, a short movement of his head. “And although a certain man across the oceans would have wanted a new world with certain specimens in charge, that wasn’t going to happen. The fallout for us humans would have been too great. Quite frankly, it was fear that made us win that war, and it’s fear that’ll make us win the wars that are to come and the wars we have no clue about yet. The SDU was created for such purposes. We were the branch of the government that, unlike our many brothers and sisters, did not hide, nor did we cower, but we murdered. That’s the truth. Humans outnumber Superhumans in droves, and each Super is claimed by only one ability, minus those whose powers are of no use—the ability to conjure soap bubbles, to hold their breath for hours on end—then that number is significantly smaller. The truth is, we won that war before it began, but then something changed, but that’s the wrong way of putting it: we found change.”
I shook my head slowly, only slightly confused and uncomfortable on the chair. “Explain to me again why you’re dumping all of this on me? What’s this gotta do with my city right now?”
“Your kind,” he said simply, dryly, and suddenly the people on the other side of the glass fell silent. “Your people just had to arrive here, but you’ve been here for millennia in plain sight.”
I leaned back in the chair, spine pressing against cold hard metal. “I’m just lucky that I got the powers I have. I had about three Awakening incidents when I was a kid, a real pain in the—”
“The Greeks, Romans, supposedly the Christians, the Aztecs and even the Mesopotamians all believed in higher beings. Creatures from the heavens. Men and women who could perform miracles simply by existing. We found change in those ruins, under their cities, and all it had to take were several warheads and tides of blood to force us to dig for cleaner soil underneath it all.” He finally moved, but it was only to tilt his head. “Rylee Addams, your blood is so valuable that there won’t ever be any government on the planet who would be able to pay for even a test tube’s worth of it. You are an asset and a liability. A social reject because your kind simply doesn’t exist here anymore, and a girl who will never fully understand her importance in the world around her.”
He leaned a little forward. “We found gods in those ruins, and yet here we were, thinking that the real threat was each other, the superhumans. No, Rylee, your kind needs to be our assets.”
All I could do was stare at him, mulling over his words. My heart was slow, my body relaxed, because I was very quickly starting to realize that a lot of people knew more about what I was than I ever would have liked. “I’m not that surprised that you know who I really am.”
“We’ve been watching you for years, since before you learnt how to speak English.” He moved again, if only to lean in closer, making my stomach twist. “Do you know your tongue?”
The cuffs shattered, falling to metallic shards that scattered onto the table as I pulled my hands apart. Flexing my fingers, staring at him, I said, “You can ask as many questions as you want, and you can come up with as many crappy theories about me, too, if it’s what gets you off, but there’s on thing I’m gonna make very, very clear: I’m fine with you watching me, but if you’re watching my mom and my friends? I’ll make it look like it was an accident when the government eventually finds your upper half somewhere in the ruins of this damned place weeks from now.”
And now the man smiled, showing an upper row of perfectly white blocky teeth. “I believe wholeheartedly that you’re capable of doing that and so much more. Isn’t this the reason you left home and abandoned your friends? You were afraid something like this would happen eventually. A supervillain who learnt too much, hounding the noble hero and the only weakness they know she possesses: her loved ones. How tragic that is, and how very predictable as well, isn’t it?”
I grabbed his stupid scarf and yanked him close. In the next second, the air behind me shimmered, and three soldiers with glowing golden rifles were standing behind me. I glanced at them, then looked into the reflective blue lenses of his sunglasses. “Very, very thin ice right now.”
He didn’t look alarmed or frightened. His face hadn’t moved from its almost unimpressed but somewhat entertained look as he stared right back at me. I finally saw his eyes, if milky white orbs were what you could consider eyes. “We want you to work alongside us starting as of today.”
I blinked, waited for him to continue, but when he said nothing, I snorted and shoved him away from me. He didn’t stumble or lose his footing. He simply patted himself down, flattening the wrinkles on his suit. “So you sprout bullshit for ten minutes, and then ask me if I want a job?”
“You’re either an asset or a liability if you wear a costume and call yourself a superhero. The current system we have is weak and doomed to fail, put in place at a time when people were just beginning to understand that the Supers they watched in their movies and shows, bought products from and cheered for in the Olympics, could so easily destroy entire cities, murder thousands, and topple governments in mere hours if they simply wanted to, or had someone who manipulated them to. Your father and Titan changed the world for decades to come. It made us afraid of what you are, what you can do. My God, you alone are classified as a top priority for so many organizations around the world that I’m sure the president himself wakes up everyday thanking God himself that your costume is almost the color of our flag. Trust is a fickle thing. But it can be bought. It can be forced. Everything has a value, but right now, the Olympiad doesn’t.”
“That’s fine and dandy, but I’ve got actual people to save and politics to ignore.”
“To satiate the Supers, they built them a temple and called it their base. They told the Supers who never fought in the war that this is where they would make their future stands, and for a while it worked, but now all they are is a shadow of the men and women who bled on those beaches and died in the mud of Europe hiding their true abilities out of fear. The Olympiad was meant to be a monument, did you know? Not a headquarters. And now it houses false heroes.”
I said nothing, only watched as his cool exterior momentarily slipped.
“They force those people into suits and train them in cold concrete rooms, give them shiny badges and licenses that ultimately mean nothing and tell them to hold station, to wait and watch as New Olympus falls into disarray, and you wish to join them?” He shook his head, straightened his tie. The camera in the corner stopped blinking, and the other side of the glass wall was dead silent. He met my eyes, his own just over the rim of his tinted glasses. “You’d be wasting your talents.”
“And, what, they would be better used by some other branch of the government?”
“Precisely.”
“You’re ridiculously full of shit.”
He stood still for several moments, staring at me until I felt seen through. “Lucas Freeman, Shrike, how much do you really trust him? His main job as an Olympian was always espionage.”
I folded my arms, hovering slightly off the floor. “More than anyone.”
“Dani Danger, you know who she is, correct?”
It’s pretty hard not to know when Harper wouldn’t let anyone forget who her mom is.
“Poseidon,” he said, getting my full attention. “His wife makes a wonderful casserole.”
“What’s with all the names?”
“People who have stood right there over the years. Some easier to crack than others. Some riddled with guilt, some with bitterness. At the end of the day, they signed the contract with us.”
I paused, didn’t move. “What do you mean they signed with you?”
“It means we worked with them. Studied them. Helped them.” He put his arms behind his back again, then said, “We work with heroes, it’s as simple as that. Normal and Superhuman, both extraordinary and vanilla to their core. Poseidon doesn’t reside in this city, did you know? Right now he’s somewhere off the coast of Taiwan, shifting global tides to ensure at least some stability. Dani was useful for a time in the eighties, but money can only change a girl from a trailer park so much, meaning she was a dud. I suppose drugs will do that to a person, but we have countless others globally. What we have here in the SDU is a system which works. A system governed for the people, by the same people who just want the world to stay afloat. The Olympiad is a talking point, a hot topic for those mouthbreathers who read the Olympus Bulletin. It stopped being a home of heroes, forgotten and current, experienced and green, the very same day that your father perished on Olympus Hill for the entire world to see. And now, Rylee, it’s your turn. How much longer will you waste your talents fighting futile little gang wars instead of saving the world?”
A lot was going through my head. A lot more than I had planned to learn tonight. Was that why Poseidon didn’t go after us properly on the dock that night, because they wanted to study me?
Had he stood there because he’d had orders not to engage, but just to test what I could do?
How long had these people been looming over me? Gods, years of my life. Every single moment with Bianca, Em, Grant and Michael. Every moment I dressed up as a superhero with a blanket tied around my neck, leaping around my room. Every argument I had with mom, and every night I spent hating myself for what happened to Selina, and the countless days I spent trying and failing to muster up the courage to tell Em and everyone else that it was my fault that she never went home that week. And every single godsdamned time I nearly died protecting this city, too.
“You’re not any better,” I said icily. “New Olympus needed help starting yesterday.”
“And you think we have the jurisdiction for that?” he asked. “By law, we only engage with classed villains and nothing more. Gang wars are not our priority, but those of the police alone.”
“Yeah, according to who?”
“The mayor, and thus the government,” he said to me. “Including her daughter.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Just send someone in there to at least freaking do something.”
“Exactly my point,” he said, nodding. “You’re going to be that person.” Before I could say something, he raised his hand, silencing me. “The world looks at you, and we need that. Poseidon, Ares, Heka, they are all heroes gilded in gold and myth and legend, but their time has passed. The Olympians are statues at the foot of Olympus Hill, and figurines children collect in cereal. Olympia is what’s next, and there’s no time better than right now for the world to start seeing that. I’m not one for glory, it’s trite, but utilizing your skills to their best degree is the symbol more heroes need right now. Fifty vigilantes operate in Lower Olympus, thirty of whom are worth the costumes they wear at night. Hundreds of Superhumans in the entire city, maybe thousands if counting those who haven’t been tested, and now we have a rallying point. Simply put: the world needs its heroes.”
“And you want me to be the reason they all stop being so afraid to help people?”
“Humans help humans every other day. We want them to go above and beyond.”
Gods. I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, trying to think. “You’re not the first person this summer to tell me how much I mean to this city, you know that? You’re all like broken records. I get it, I don’t do enough. I’m not good enough. Rylee, just do better. I’m trying, alright? I came here tonight for answers, and I want those answers. I’ve been fucked over too many times in the past few weeks by people like you who think they know me inside and out, who think a contract and some history lesson and some grand thing about New Olympus needing her heroes will be the thing that keeps me at the end of your leash. I am not your dog or your weapon. What I am is Zeus’ daughter, and she’s pissed as all hell that you’ve not answered any of her questions.”
The man almost smiled. Almost smiled. “Lucas has disappeared. Don’t fret, he is safe, but he’s a very intelligent man, hard to keep track of if he wishes to vanish. As for the recent Kaiju Awakenings and Evolutions, there’s little else I can say except that it’s a growing epidemic.”
Where the hell did you go, Lucas? It’s not the time for you to slip into the dark.
“And what’re you doing about the Kaiju? You know what’s happening?”
“Like I said before, Cassie Blackwood managed to get her hands on more Kaiju than we can, and she keeps them locked away in Blackwood Pharma for testing and dissection, I’m sure.”
So if I really wanted to learn anything tonight, I’d have to go right to her doorstep.
Amazing.
“I know what you’re thinking, and it’s ill-advised. Putting a target that large on your back by going into her headquarters is tantamount to killing any chances superheroes have of returning.”
“How else am I supposed to figure out what’s happening in my city?”
He produced a card from the inside of blazer’s pocket and set it onto the desk, sliding it across. I looked at him, studied him, then glanced down. It had my bugshot in one corner and a set of numbers and letters right next to it. My full name, including my middle name, was on it, as well as my date of birth, my sex, height and weight, and underneath power grade, it said ‘classified.’
“It’s currently deactivated,” he said as I picked up the car—metal, maybe something harder than steel as I tried to bend it. “All it needs is your finger recognition, and we’ll be in contact.”
“Back to me being on your payroll,” I muttered, looking back at him.
“No, not officially. These cards do not exist, and if the government were to find out what we were doing here, there would be a fallout of many great magnitudes. We can’t pay you, or offer you a home, nor any benefits. You can train here, eat here, have a place to stay if you must, and house your friends and mother if the time ever arises for a city-wide evacuation. You’ll receive real-time data from across the globe, work alongside heroes on almost every continent, ensuring that these people keep playing their game of dress the Superhuman, as you do your civic duty to put superheroes back onto the negotiation table. And on Christmas, we host a costume party, which I’m sure that girl—Bianca Ross, was it?—would love to attend. We serve her favorite kind of marble cake, and have a gala afterward that would more than make up for your missed prom.”
“Let me guess,” I said quietly, my voice tight in my throat. “I have to follow orders.”
“If you have a problem following an order to stop a terrorist attack, then talk to me.”
“And what happens if I piss you off? You use my mom against me?”
“Rylee,” he said, hands now in his pockets. “What does your mother have to do with this?”
“I…don’t know. She’s used against me all the time by everyone who finds out about me.”
He shook his head, only a little, before saying, “We want you to work with us, but not for us. I have worked alongside enough superheroes to know that their secret identities are worth more than gold to them. With you, however, I would be risking innocent lives by hurting your mother.”
This sounded too good to be true. I’d been hurt and lied to so many times recently that I struggled to believe anything out of anyone’s mouth nowadays. “When I die, I want to make sure that New Olympus was just as great as when dad finally left. That’s never gonna change.”
“How else is one supposed to get a statue without great sacrifice for what they love?”
“I’m only doing this so I can stand next to him one day.”
The man smiled. “And not because of the humans, of course.”
It felt like minutes as we stood on opposite ends of the table, him looking at me, and myself at the card still in my hands. He explained that the charges against me wouldn’t be dropped, that just wasn’t something he was capable of doing, but he could make it harder for them to find out who I was. My identity would remain secure. Mom and my friends would be a lot safer. All I had to do was just be a superhero. No pay, no housing, I’d have to figure that out on my own, but I didn’t become a superhero for the pay. A flashy penthouse wouldn’t be the reason I picked myself up off the floor as tonnes of rubble rained down on me. And…hell, this was a silver bullet, too.
Ava couldn’t hold my family over my head anymore. She had nothing on me now.
Fuck me, is this what good luck feels like?
“If you’re screwing with me in any way…”
“Then God himself will have to stop you, because heaven knows we won’t be able to.”
All right then. Okay. I guess that meant I worked for the government now.