If hell was real, it’ll be the tunnels underneath New Olympus. The heat is what got to me first, the stuffiness and the humidity that made the walls bleed with condensation and myself with sticky sweat. I was forced to wear the top half of my suit around my waist, but that hadn’t helped me at all. The tunnel seemingly had no end, and it almost felt as if the darkness was having its way with me right now. The bricks seemed to groan and shuffle and shower me with dust every few minutes, and then it would be silent, leaving me standing in place, right there on those bent and broken train tracks, waiting to hear something coming my way. Nothing ever did. I was alone here in the dark, and the light I was making felt like an announcement to this endless maize ahead of me. I willed the light away. Better safe than sorry. That fleshy creature had taken a particular taste to my golden light—better to not give it any ideas.
One thing that did strike me, though, was that I needed to start coming up with more ideas myself.
I had allowed myself to just walk through Ryan’s office door, expecting his whole ‘it’ll take you where you need to go’ ramblings as some metaphor for what I had to do next. Being stuck in a tunnel that was seemingly shaking and shuddering with movement, trembling as if I was inside the guts of some gods-awful creature so large that it took up the entirety of New Olympus’ underbelly, was putting me on edge. This summer had taught me that I didn’t know this city as well as I had thought. Lower Olympus just scratched the surface. Down here? Hell, it felt like I had traveled through time, because the train tracks would sometimes vanish, leaving gravel underneath my boots, and then they would change to a flowing sewer the next moment and right back to the snapped train tracks once more. I would come across empty platform after empty platform, each and every one of them illuminated by the same fluorescent light fixtures. There was electricity down here, but you wouldn’t guess that from the dead phone lines that hung off the walls in odd places, or the bulbs that would sit like dead eyeballs on the ceiling.
It was kind of like this place wanted to be alive again, to be used, but the skeletons I passed, the ones laying down on benches, the ones that had been crushed by stones, and even a few that had somehow fused with large chunks of concrete, made it clear that it was also just one big graveyard. Entire sections of the tunnel forced me to crawl through gaps just about small enough to force myself through, and every now and again, I would find pieces of golden cloth glinting underneath stones. Dad’s cape, I thought, picking up another strip. His suit was never made on Earth, and it was designed for a man who deserved the statues on the planets they knew him on. It hadn’t been destroyed by the concrete Titan had put him through, or the oceans he shredded him against—Titan had done that. They had fought so viciously that, even now in this tunnel, slabs of warped stone had probably been melted because of their body heat alone. And yet, pieces of his cape and his gear were littered all over the place.
Believe it or not, I was never actually supposed to touch this fabric ever. It was like killing a Bald Eagle.
But nobody was here to stop me, and I figured a piece of my father being down here with me in the dark was a good enough reminder not to be afraid. At least, however calm I could be in this claustrophobic darkness.
Once more the tunnels groaned, and once more I was left standing, sweating, my heart racing and my body tense as I waited for something to appear from the shadows. Nothing. All that was down here with me were the scars of a long ago finished fight, the soft crackle of my electricity, and the sound of running water at my feet. Sewage.
Not running water, but sewer water. Great.
Did Ryan put me down here on purpose? I thought. But that wouldn’t make sense, because so many people wouldn’t trust him to help them if he had the bad habit of stabbing people in the back sometimes. What I needed was to find this symbol, but so far, that was as good as trying to find common sense in Caitlyn’s sister.
The worst part, though, was that I had seen this symbol before—a pentagram in a circle.
Cadaver had been littered with them, and so had that flesh-filled dimension Witchling took me to. I didn’t remember seeing them on Ava, but I also, admittedly, was never really focused on her body or her building whenever we got together to have a chat. Witchling had said something about this that night at the docks, but she had never really gotten around to explaining what it meant. It was another world entirely, something I still didn’t know about, but something I should know about by now. It was frustrating being left in the dark about so many things, but when being a superhero meant trying to just keep my two lives separate and hoping mom wouldn’t ask too many questions on why her bedsheets turned red and blue in the washer, things like this were never important.
Punch the supervillain, save the day, go back home, do my homework and sneak over to Bianca.
A part of me hated that Lucas might have been right about pulling me away from my normal life as much as possible. Focusing on the city would have probably meant I wouldn’t be stuck down here in these endlessly spiraling tunnels. Then again, he also fucked me into almost being homeless and tricked me my entire life.
The darkness was doing wonders to my psyche, and I desperately needed something to focus on that…
Noise. It wasn’t a lot of noise, but it was enough noise to make me glance down at the sludge that had very slowly risen to my knees. Walking had been slower, but that meant I could search better for the tiny symbol.
It also meant that what I thought was sewer water had climbed up my legs.
And I would have kept believing it was sewer water if it didn’t have a heartbeat.
Very slowly, I lowered my left hand into the water, almost crouching. I waited for just a moment, making sure to listen, to use my skin to feel if I wasn’t just making things up, then I let electricity pulsate through the water.
Nothing.
And then it began seething, simmering, frothing and churning.
I hovered over the water, nonplussed as the foul black-green molasses congregated into a heap that only kept growing the longer I waited. If it was a threat, it would have attacked. If it wanted me dead, it would have tried to drown me when I was inside it. My goal wasn’t whatever the fuck this thing was, anyway, but it gave me something to focus on that wasn’t just the darkness or the shadows or the filthy brown skeletons floating along the tunnel. It finally stopped shifting and seething, coming together in a mound of garbage and bones and pieces of rock that created a vague person standing on the surface of the water. It looked like a woman, I figured, judging by her curves, but she was dressed in rags and garbage bags, and her hair was the same filthy green that rippled under her bare feet. Gods, she stanks like, well, a sewer, but when she looked up at me, her eyes were glowing a soft yellow. I backed up a little, unsure of what she was going to do, but it was only her head that turned, nothing else.
She was pale under my light, her skin chalk-white, but lost deep under the filth smeared over her jaw and cheek and across her forehead. She was a mess, but somewhere in there was something kind of beautiful…I think.
It was hard to tell when she stank of human remains.
The creature—or woman—didn’t speak or move until a tiny yellow flower emerged from the water and flowed up her feet, her side, her neck and finally settled in her hair. Then she tilted her head at me, curious.
“Um,” I said quietly, because what should I say to her? “I’m looking for directions?”
“You feel…funny,” she said. Her voice thrummed through the air, making the water ripple. “Empty.”
I laughed dryly. “What’re you, a shrink?”
The woman rose on an undulating pillar of filthy water to meet my eyes. I wanted to puke right there and then, but held my breath and swallowed the bitterness of the orange tea Cleopatra had given me. “You’re not meant to be here, no no, you’re meant to be like them.” She pointed to the waters below, still staring directly at me. I glanced downward, and saw the skeleton bobbing on the water. The creature drew closer, because that’s what she was so close to me—her skin was made from silt, her teeth from stones, and yet she looked so human, so very human that it was hard to think she was just some pieces of garbage held together by dirty stillwater. “You’re not them.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, backing away. “I’m not them because I’m still alive. Now, if you could help—”
“Not from here,” she whispered. “Your blood is what flows in the water, through the city’s veins.”
What the hell are you talking about? “Look, I’m trying to find this one symbol. Here, it looks like—”
The thing smiled at me, and a torrent of black, slimy water spilled out from between her teeth and poured down her jaw. But she kept grinning, nice and wide so I could see her crooked teeth. “You’re his daughter.”
I glanced around us, but nobody was coming. I heard nothing but my own heartbeat. “Zeus’, yeah.”
She pointed a finger at herself. “Daisy.”
“Nice,” I muttered. “But I need to save the city, so if you could just point me where to go, that’ll be fab.”
She pointed her finger at me instead, her fingertip gingerly touching my necklace. “Sister.”
I blinked. What? “You must be thinking about someone else. I’m an only child.”
Adam doesn’t count—siblings don’t tend to want to murder each other in front of their mother.
Daisy shook her head, and said, “Sister, you’re my sister. We share blood, like the others.”
My mood changed almost immediately. It was the same reaction I used to get in school when someone would say they knew what my dad really was, even if, to them, he was just a deadbeat absentee. It was the feeling I got when Lucas had properly sat me down and told me that he knew what I was, and that he’d known since I was born. Secrets like that are meant to be kept. I was the lucky girl, the one who got multiple superpowers when a human was meant to get just one. I wasn’t the exception. And then someone would theorize that I wasn’t human, and that ball would roll for a few weeks, maybe a month, but that would get shot down, because Zeus was special, and so is his daughter, and that’s just how things worked. But sometimes…sometimes people get a little too close.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The problem with humans is that they think their planet is the only one like this. No. Far, far from it.
And finding out there are more of us on this planet was like being told aliens are real.
I just couldn’t fucking believe it.
“Bullshit,” I said coldly. Daisy’s smile dropped as she shrank, almost physically. “You’re lying.”
She quickly shook her head. “No, Daisy doesn’t lie. I swear it.”
This time, I was the one to get closer. “Where and how many?”
“You want me to show you?” she said quietly. “I’m not allowed to do that, sister.”
I was forced to unball my fists before my fingernails cut too deep into my hands. “I’m going to ask you this again, and I’m going to ask you very, very slowly, Daisy: how many are there, and where the fuck are they now?”
She said nothing, and I figured that hitting her wouldn’t do anything to change her mind on talking.
So I breathed in, then out, and muttered, “Please?”
“You’re going to hurt them, hurt my family.”
“Why would I ever do that? I’m a superhero. I just want to see them and talk to them and just ask them a few questions. That’s all,” I said, trying very hard to sound as friendly as I could be.
“That’s not why you came here, was it?” she asked. Daisy was beginning to look defensive, with her body slightly shielded from me, and the waters around us begging to ripple violently. If she managed to disappear back into the waters, I doubted I would ever be able to find her again, and who knew when I would ever come across something or someone else who wasn’t dead and gone down here? Whatever Daisy knew, I also needed to know, and that could only happen if I didn’t look like I wanted to attack her and throttle her non-existent throat for the answers I wanted.
I put up my hands. “You’re right, it wasn’t. I came here because I need to find a woman who knows where to find another group of people I need to find. If I can do that, then I can save a lot of people, including your family…our family”—Gods, Rylee, really?—”so I need your help doing this, because I’m lost, and this place just keeps going on for eternity. I don’t know how long I’ve got, but I know it needs to be dealt with soon before more people get killed on the surface.”
Daisy stared at me, then crept a little closer. “You’re a hero? Like the ones on the posters?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
She turned around, but didn’t disappear. It was almost as if she was having a conversation with herself, and that’s exactly what it was, because I was forced to wait several minutes as she muttered under her breath for a while. I didn’t want to believe that more of us were somewhere down here, because my people didn’t really do subtle existences. If they were here, I would have found out a long time ago, and the humans would have also found out that nuclear weapons to them were like chimps finding out that throwing stones at each other hurt. Well, for the others. I didn’t know what it would do to me, and I hoped I never had to find out. At the end of the day, I was still half human, and that wouldn’t change. But that also meant I was questioning what Daisy meant when she said we were sisters, because if she was half of me, then I was closer biologically to a pile of sentient sewer water than I was my own people, which… ha-ha, universe. Very funny.
It didn’t stop me from wanting to find out what her ‘family’ was to her. From what I had seen as she drew close, her eyes had been the only thing that looked somewhat solid. Her pupils, too, had shone. Had pulsed with life that wasn’t damp or colorless like the rest of her entire body.
Whatever the case, I was beginning to question just how much dad’s fight with Titan had cost the planet. Not just for the lives that were taken, or the billions of acres that were destroyed as they scarred the Earth. But the actual soil they had fought on and what that meant for people like Daisy, because there had been joy in her eyes and smeared all over her face when she called me that word—when she had touched my chest and probably felt my heartbeat. I had to admit that it sometimes felt like wherever I went and whatever I did, it was still dad that I was chasing, even if he was gone. What he meant to Daisy was pure joy, and you could see it as she turned around, you could see it in the way she smiled widely at me, because she had come to some kind of conclusion and figured that his daughter wouldn’t ever do anything to harm the people she deeply cared about.
The people who didn’t know me tended to know Zeus. The people who did know me tended to shake their heads ever so slightly, because no, I wasn’t him, even if we shared blood, powers, his might and his speed and his strength. It felt like a betrayal looking into her eyes, at her face and that smile filled with gooey black saliva. She trusts you, even if you could be lying to her.
“Alright,” she said, almost breathing the word out like a sigh. “I will take you to them.”
And just like that, she trusts you because of who she thinks I am.
Because she doesn’t know me like the rest of the world does.
I didn’t know how to feel about it, and Daisy didn’t give me the chance to keep thinking about myself. The water at her feet surged upward, filling the tunnel in seconds and leaving me nowhere to go and with barely a gasp of air to hold in my ever tightening lungs. I turned slowly in the thickness of the water, lost if not for the two small soft lights coming from all around me. I figured those golden blurs were her eyes, or something of the sort, and as they floated around me, passed over me and nearly through me, I began wondering what she was doing. And then I felt the water around me tighten, clench, and move. I flipped over in the water, spinning around with my feet over my head in endless circles that nearly made me vomit. I tried to burst into the open, to rip my way out of this raging current that was silent and numb and disgustingly warm against my skin.
But I couldn’t find a way up and out, and whenever I came close, it would be a wall or a chunk of stone or a slab of metal that would slam me back inside the tide of garbage. I swallowed some, threw up most. Tried to breathe and inhaled fumes and water and choked on the stench and taste that was curdling in my throat and frothing in my stomach. I was thrown against a wall, ragdolling against the bricks, with the blow only being softened by the sludge-like water that wrapped around me like a protective blanket. I didn’t know when it would end. I prayed (me!) to whatever gods would listen, even the human one, to stop the surge of trash and rot and algae and what I hoped was just something thick and warm like grease that would rush for my mouth every other second. My heart hammered away against my chest. I wanted to yell for her to stop, but she was giggling. Giggling. The water was shaking, and she was saying something too, but that didn’t matter to me because I was struggling to so much as form a thought that wasn’t breathe in air!
Eventually, after I gave up trying to fight the churning tides, as I was left to float and shove and bang against every wall and piece of debris flowing through Daisy, it all suddenly stopped.
How quickly it became peaceful was like a breath of fresh air, except the gasp I took as soon as she gently nudged me onto something hard underneath me smelt of anything but pleasant air. I hacked and I coughed, wheezing and puking up water and bits of stone that had forced themselves into my throat. I reeked like a wet dog that had been thrown into a mound of trash out in the sun. The humidity was worse, enough to make me sweat even more as I sat on my knees and shut my eyes and angled my head upward so that my hair (and all the fun things now stuck to it) would get into my mouth. I spat, then wiped my mouth on my arm, but that didn’t help at all, so I let the saliva sit on the corner of my lips as I breathed in the stink of sour air and body odor, soil and fish and all of it was caught by a sickly sweet scent underneath everything, like it was hiding.
Not as sweet as ambrosia smelt, but something like flowers. Very pollinated flowers.
I wanted to be sick because of the sweetness. It clashed too violently with the rankness of the sewer for me to appreciate it. Then my stomach tensed, and I was back to puking my guts out.
Sometimes I wished I could go back to turning off my powers, because, as I shook from sickness, from having finally emptied myself, the smells were far, far too aggressive to my nose.
“Sister,” Daisy said excitedly. I opened my eyes, not too happy to see that she was grinning at me. A tiny flower was blooming on the wall above her, glowing a soft gold light in the dark. “We are here. The others are already on their way. Can you feel them approaching? Their excitement?”
“The only thing I feel is sick, Daisy. I feel like I’m gonna puke my organs.”
Daisy frowned, rising a little from the waters and closer to the rubble-strewn platform she had placed me on. I was knelt beside a wall littered with veins, and on those vines were dozens of golden flowers. She had brought me to a place that looked a lot larger than all the other platforms I had passed on my way through the tunnels. Flowers blossomed on the walls and the ceilings, all glowing the same golden color, turning the shadows into lanky creatures stretched out on the river that split two very, very expansive platforms, and the rickety bridge that connected the two. The two sides were big enough for there to be tents and make-shift little beds on each side, and with them came tiny…things, creatures with heads that were unfurled, and bodies made from vines.
“Please do not vomit your organs,” she said, distracting me from the creatures. “Your insides seem vital to you, and I do not think any of us is capable of placing them back inside you.”
I slowly stood, looking at the things still on the opposite side of the platform I was on. This side was a lot smaller, a lot slimmer, with a lot more rubble covering it, but a lot more hatches on the wall amongst the roots and the bricks and the glowing plants. The other side was teeming with life, with those creatures with flowery open heads, and more of them that milled around a lot further away. The platform seemed to slope downward into some kind of abyss, vanishing from sight. If I flew higher, I might have gotten the chance to see more of the entire thing, because the ceiling was impossible high, like I really was inside of a cavern. I couldn’t even see the top from here. There were just vines and their flowers pouring their light down from above, sometimes shedding their petals and making it drizzle tiny golden leaves. They would collect along the water, on the floor, and they would simply continue to blossom, growing into tinier plants of their own, too.
“Daisy,” I whispered, glancing at her. She was sitting cross-legged, almost right next to me, albeit on the water. “Where exactly did you take me when you said your family was coming?”
“Home,” she said, still smiling.
“And what about the help that I needed? To, you know, save your family?” I couldn’t help but keep staring at those things, those creatures with the flower heads! They were curious little creatures that would run and hide and vanish into the darkness, closing themselves up in a heartbeat before slowly coming back out to lean over the river and stare at me. I couldn’t tell if they spoke, or if they even could speak, but they acted like children, with how they shoved and pushed and nearly tilted into the river if it wasn’t for Daisy stretching out her hand and making the water gently push them back onto the platform. She wouldn’t complain, and most times, she would only douse them in enough water to make them shudder and excitedly run off hurried tiny groups.
“Circe will know how to help you,” Daisy said to me.
“Who the hell is Circe?”
Daisy didn’t answer me, because there were more things on their way. I could hear feet slapping against the pavement, roots stretching and bodies shuffling from somewhere in the dark. I raised my hand and made it bright—bright enough for me to see, for the tiny flowers to seem to glow even brighter around me. And there, coming out of the darkness, was a woman dressed in a filthy, torn, tattered three-piece suit, tie and everything, excluding her shoes. She had deep black dreadlocks snaking over her shoulders and down her back, a few over her chest and just enough of them to perfectly clasp her angular face. She walked amongst the tiny flower creatures, and they followed, running around her, to catch up to her, and not once did she stop staring at me. Not once did she stop her gaze as she halted on the wooden bridge. The bridge was arched, so it meant I had to look up at her, because of course I would be—judging by her face, her sister would have done the same to me, just to make sure the message was clear: I came to her, not the other way around.
I needed her help, and she would probably rather have my body used as fertilizer.
“Circe!” Daisy exclaimed. “I brought you a superhero, and she’s going to save us!”
The woman remained silent. The tunnel seemed to shift again under her watch.
And suddenly, I didn’t know how I felt having to save Ava’s big sister.