Growing up, I always knew I was different, and that didn’t bother me. I knew who my father was, and knew what he meant to not only the humans, but to my people, too. But from that point onward, it gets pretty complicated. I never knew everything, simply because if I did know too much, someone could very easily make the fragile little girl spill her guts out if you put a gun to her head. Sure, the Olympians probably would have made very easy work of anyone who tried to kidnap me, but I wasn’t talking about normal supervillains. I’m talking about my uncle. Titan, by all intents and purposes, was someone that I had no right to ever talk to, let alone look into his eyes or touch him. I was young when I left, but I had been old enough to know that some things stick with you, no matter where you run to.
And the reason knowing I was different than everyone else got complicated was because, well, Titan killed so many people that day that it did something drastic to my psyche. Yeah, dad had died, and the entire world had watched it happen right there alongside his hidden daughter, but one singular thought had kept circling my mind days after the fight, for weeks on end after schools had finally opened again months later: I can do that too. They had flown so quickly that no camera on the planet could trace them. They used satellites to track their locations, but when they skimmed through the atmosphere, their body heat alone had destroyed countless of them, too. The damage hadn’t just been surface level, a couple of buildings and some tarmac—no. They fucked the atmosphere and the winds, the cycle of different heatwaves, and even managed to warp entire coastlines. When S-Grades fight, they say humanity can feel it on the other side of the planet if it gets ugly. But when dad and Titan had fought?
It was a miracle that the Earth was still able to pull itself back together. By all accounts, dad should have lost. He was meant to lose. And I know I shouldn’t say that about him, and I know very well that wanting to be like him and trashing his name at the same time doesn’t make sense, but not many people have seen Zeus take a knee.
I was one of those people.
And the girl who walked up the stairwell had the same eyes as the man who had made my father do just that. We can always tell different families from the glow in someone’s eyes. How bright it is, how sharp and how much it pulsates with energy. It’s a feeling, a signature, that can only ever be felt when you’re around one another.
I didn’t feel it with Adam all the time, and that’s why I didn’t really care about him.
Her, though?
She felt like Titan.
And if this wasn’t Earth, and I wasn’t any less stubborn, it would be me on my knees. I could feel my muscles tensing involuntarily. Feel my heart thumping faster against my chest as she finally stopped in the gray corona of the dim light coming from behind me. It had taken a while before I was allowed to play with the other kids here, because I hadn’t known how to play with them. Our games are different, more…character building. It’s kinda rude to punch someone until they yield, or wrestle them to the ground and snap their arm if they don’t tap on this planet, and those customs had been beaten into us just as thoroughly. Don’t look up. Don’t shake hands. You stand and you wait and you shall not move until you’re asked or told. Hell, it was even more fun for little old me, the half-human girl who could barely get two inches off the floor, and who was lumped in with the rest of the more colorful approaches to child bearing my people have tried in the past. Now wasn’t any different. She stared at me with eyes of gold and a face almost as faultless as the power emanating around her. Memory told me to get down.
To yield under her eyes and her stare and the blood flowing through her veins.
Experience told me to narrow my eyes and say, “Rhea. Here I thought it was the sewage making me sick.”
She smiled a thin smile, the sharpness of her canines glinting in the light. “You have grown bold, cousin.”
“And you’re covered in the filth of your own excrement.”
I would like to say I was lying, but she did look and smell that way. Her black hair was wild, like a storm of shadows was curled around her head and resting on her shoulders. She looked unkempt, reeked of sweat and urine and the faintest tang of dried blood that clung to her toned midriff. Rhea wore nothing except torn white trousers, a bandage that wrapped around her shoulder, and a top that only held her breasts and nothing more. Still muscular. Still domineering. Still with proud shoulders and a straight back. Scars from childhood littered her arms, shoulders and stomach, and I knew about the ones crossing her back, and the several more on the bottom of her feet. Just like me, my cousin was a latticework of violence since the day we were born. The only difference being that hers came from the countless days and the more than countless other kids she had put to the floor at her father’s feet, only to be told not to stop when they start frothing at the mouth, but to keep digging her fingers deep into their throats.
Between me and you, I was fucking terrified.
Gods forbid she ever found that out. Not for my sake, but for the first person to pop into my mind. A certain girl with brown hair and freckles doesn’t know who I am for many reasons, and one of which is right in front of me.
“Unfortunately, you are correct,” she said. “Our time here has not been one of extreme comfort.”
“I can do you one better and put you out of your misery then.”
That same flash of a smile, that same glint in her eyes that I had seen so many times before. “A challenge?”
“A promise,” I said quietly, digging my fingernails deep into my palms to make them stop shaking.
“However entertaining that might be,” Caitlyn said, “I have not lived this long just to perish in the crossfire between two warring children. Rhea”—she looked down at her—“why are you wandering through these tunnels when I told you otherwise? It’s for your own safety that you remain within your confines, is that clear?”
I stared at Caitlyn, then back at Rhea, amazed that a human would even have the nerve to—
Rhea shrugged. “I couldn’t help but be attracted to a voice I could never forget.”
“Olympia is more important than your own survival?”
Own survival? As far as I knew, we could damn nearly survive anything given enough time. But looking at her, at the other eyes of those behind her, their glow was fluctuating, dimming and then brightening. Their hearts were loud in my ears, not rapid, but slow and arduous, like they didn’t want to have to keep slamming against their own chests anymore. The stink of blood was in the air. But not human blood. The blood of champions and kings, queens and their legions, empires and the nations they vanquished and the stones they stole to build grander castles. This was the smell of graveyards of the weak on my planet. The ones that didn’t survive long enough to ever wonder what the sun felt like against our skin. Puke and defecation. Urine and saliva. The dark corridor behind them was like a throat that reeked of all these different smells, coming together to spit them out in the form of frail bodies (for us, at least), and placid hair, some even had sunken cheeks and had eyes that stuck out of their heads.
I almost smiled, but pressed my lips firmly together, managing to look disgusted. They’re weak.
“Olympia?” Rhea whispered, tilting her head. “Ah, you have decided to give yourself one of these silly human monikers, even though you still wear the colors of an infant incapable of escaping the Culling Rooms.”
Those behind her muttered amongst themselves in a tongue I would have rather left in my nightmares.
“It’s a title,” I said to her. “One that you’re gonna learn to respect if you don’t stop running your mouth.”
“My, you even speak like them,” Rhea said quietly. “You were never one of us from the start, were you?”
If it wasn’t for Caitlyn putting her arm out to stop me, Rhea would have found out how hard a human could put a head into the concrete at their feet. “Your survival, Rhea, and all of you as a whole, relies on trusting what I say. You know what can happen, and you know very well that Olympia is more capable than you are right now to win a confrontation. Unless, of course, you’d like to embarrass yourself,” she said, eyes narrowing, and her voice still as emotionless as it had been talking to me. When Rhea said nothing, only tensing her jaw and staring at me dead, Caitlyn continued. “Good. It’s unfortunate, but she can help with our shared problem, but in return, you have to listen to what I have to say, starting with you understanding very well that this will not be a fight you take.”
Silence. Very long, and very thick silence prevailed.
Then: “This half-breed is going to aid us?”
“And yet it’s you who can hardly stand on two feet without trembling, oh great warriors,” Caitlyn said. “Like it or not, the Daughter of Zeus is better equipped than I am in understanding your problem. In all honesty, however, I also want her for my own reasons. So please, your squabbling has to end, because I have a need for you, too, just like the way you do with me, and we can’t aid each other if your people are too weak to even raise a fist.”
“So your side of this acquaintancy ends because you’re incapable of ‘holding up the deal,’ like you say?”
“No,” she said calmly. “I’m offering you aid in the form of Olympia, but she would only help you in return if I bargain with her on my own terms. She has no reason to help you, judging by the hatred in her voice. Your fathers murdered one another, and now here you stand underneath her, unable to fly, unable to fight, covered in layers of filth, and she can certainly send you to whatever afterlife your people believe in. Try as I might, I probably wouldn’t even be able to stop her from doing so, and it’s by her good graces alone that she hasn’t. She has no reason to help you, none whatsoever, and she can leave you here to rot.” Caitlyn glanced at me, then said, “Or she can let you live, but that’s only if our agreement reaches a conclusion that satisfies what she wants as well, Rhea. So yes, the child you call a half-breed will be your savior, but that’s only if you don’t sour your relationships more than you already have. We need one another to succeed right now, and for that to happen, you must also hold up our deal.”
She didn’t like being spoken to that way, and you could see it in her eyes, in her posture and how it briefly tightened, almost as if she wanted to see if she was as weak as Caitlyn had pointed out. That part had probably pissed her off, but maybe Cat had done that for me, to make me know that these people weren’t that big of a deal as I had feared. Rhea stared at me through the tongues of curly black hair that fell over her eyes, then looked over her shoulder as one of the figures standing behind her coughed harshly. The sound echoed, sharp like a gunshot in the tunnel that rang through the dark. With it came the scent of saliva, a dry mouth, and specks of blood on their hand.
She turned back around, glancing at the floor, then back at Caitlyn. It was a while before she spoke, but before she did, she muttered something in our tongue that would have probably gotten that tongue pulled out of her throat by her own father. “And it’s true,” she said, “ that this cousin of mine is capable of helping all of us?”
This time, I answered. “I’m a superhero. I help people sometimes, unless they act like a pain.”
“A…superhero,” she repeated, mulling the word around her mouth. “Once again I hear that word.”
“Like one of the Legionnaires,” I said to her, to the rest of them below me. “Without all the genocide.”
Her nose scrunched up, as if she’d just smelt something terribly rank. “You dare consider yourself as—”
“Rhea,” a voice whispered behind her, this one from a stick-thin boy with gaunt cheeks and eyes so dim they barely emitted light. His voice rattled out of his mouth from deep in his chest. “She may not wear their colors, or have been Blessed by the Graces to own the title, but if Circe speaks of her so reverently, then who are we to say otherwise? Your fathers are dead, and with them, your hatred for her should, too.” He took a step forward, staggered, then with the help of a shorter girl with hair cut to her scalp, he managed to climb up the stairs to stand just behind Rhea. “She is a champion of this world, and by all accounts, she should have killed you for speaking so ill of her.”
Champion is a bit of a stretch, but I’m not gonna stop him.
“She is right,” the girl beside him said. Her eyes flicked at me, then at Rhea. “She…smells like them, may not feel like one of us, but as Circe has said in the past, there are people who would rather us dead than healed.”
“And she’s the only one who can make sure that this foul darkness is not our grave,” the boy said.
The two others behind Rhea remained silent, not backing up their friends, but not intervening either. One was still large enough to make Adam look like he had just begun lifting weights a few hours ago, and the other girl was something different entirely. She had tanned skin and short brown hair, eyes like golden amber, and two scars crossing over her cheek, going from her ear to her mouth. It may have been dark, but the thread-like scars that snaked around her arms were clear. Her arms remained folded and her head tilted, as if she didn’t want me to see the nasty infection I could smell festering in one of her eye sockets. She stood a little shorter than the blonde-haired boy beside her, but from where I’m from, her people are almost a different breed entirely. What the hell is this place? How long had they been hiding down here? Some of them looked barely strong enough to walk. The rest of them looked as healthy as they probably would have back home, maybe even more so. But none of them looked alive.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
Hell, they were rotting from the inside out. I could smell it.
Rhea sighed through her nose, unclenched her hands, and said, “Circe, our bargain remains.”
“Naturally, I suppose that’s only on the grounds of your survival,” she said, glancing at me.
Rhea very, very slowly raised her fist, then thumped it against her heart, staring at me.
“We shake hands on this planet,” I said, sticking it out toward her. She glared at me, and I waited.
Finally, when the two beside her pressed her with a whisper, Rhea grudgingly shook my hand.
And my Gods, I was more than sure I could rip her hand clean off her wrist.
It almost made me smile.
When Overseer Two had sat me down for a talk a few weeks ago and told me that my people had been here for millenia, I’d brushed it off as just another way of him trying to get me on his side. Maybe to make me feel accepted, known, like one of them because I had enough of a claim on this planet as the humans did. And the thing was, these Olypians weren’t the first Olympians. They were the second. And the only reason I know that is because Dennie had told me that years ago, which I had also brushed off. I had been young, it had been hot, the summer break had been long and the lemonade I had gotten from a corner store had been perfect, and I had been trying to read the newest issue of that week’s release without being bothered. But then he’d peaked over my shoulder, chuckled, and said, You shoulda seen the first group. They made these ones look like chumps. Of course, being me, I had argued with him, because Cleopatra, Heka, dad, looking like chumps to anyone else at that time was just pure nonsense.
I had only really started believing both Dennie and Overseer Two just a few minutes ago.
Circe had led the way through the dark tunnel, tracing her fingers along the walls to make tiny golden flowers blossom with light as we walked. It had been silent for an eternity, interrupted only by the painfully loud echo of hacking coughs. Then, ever so slowly, the darkness had begun to recede, and the tunnel had gotten wider.
Wide enough, eventually, to open up into a cavern large enough to house pillars of stone so grand I was more than sure they were connected to the stalactite-filled ceiling. Ruins littered the space in front of me, with stones the size of small cars in piles, and some still together enough to form the skeletons of buildings that might have once been down here. I couldn’t help but leave the others, floating above it all. Gods. The enormous hollow had enough space for it to fit in trees and vines so large they looked like they shouldn’t even belong on Earth. The pillars were coated in those same vines, each of them blooming with those golden flowers, as if they were keeping the weak stone together. But amongst the vegetation and the stone lay heaps of metal and slabs of steel. A hexagon in the ground made from white metal was coated in dust, with most of it in bits and pieces, revealing an even deeper hole beneath it. Hell, most of the chunks of metal were warped by the stones that looked as if they had been thrown into them. In some respect, it kinda looked like a battlefield. The kind of battlefield where nobody had ever won.
And I guessed that just meant it was a graveyard.
Large pieces of the floor were nothing more than craters turned into shallow pools by leaking pipes spitting out sewer water from above. Some of the walls were littered with similar hexagonal tunnel entrances to the one we had walked out of, as if I had just entered some kind of hive. Some were shut, others looked as if they had been forced open by strained bodies, and others gushed nothing but rubble from their openings. Tattered pieces of fabric hung off the few broken pillars that dotted the space beneath me, and…Gods, right there on one of the larger pillars, hung a banner I thought I would never see again in my life. A banner that knotted my stomach and turned my saliva bitter. But in its current state, it would have made the Emperor and his sweeping bloodline collapse in dismay. It was tattered fabric, filthy with dust and age and covered in mold. And not just that, but the bones that littered this pillar specifically, the collection of skeletons that lay around it, were all grasping for their kingdom’s banner. Our kingdom’s banner. Hell, the entire place was littered with shattered bones and rotting imperial regalia.
What the hell happened here?
For a moment, it almost seemed as if I wasn’t on Earth anymore.
“Stunning, isn’t it, what time can do to anything,” Rhea muttered. I turned and saw her sitting atop one of the broken pillars not too far from me, her elbow on her knee and her fingers constantly in a cycle of clenching and unclenching. She hadn’t spoken to me since we had shaken hands, and that same hand was the one most covered in a dusting of dried blood. “Back home, anyone would have considered this holy grounds. Slaves would have made temples out of this rubble, and the bones would have been set alight to burn for millenia. Now it’s just an old pit.”
“Mind telling me what the hell happened down here?” I asked her.
Rhea stood and faced me. “Earth,” she said. “How far along is it?”
Ah, so we’re doing this right here and now. I had been wondering when she was going to ask, and a part of me figured that she hadn’t liked when her group had sided with me over her. We were roughly the same age, maybe she was older, but age didn’t mean too much when power trumped all. We can live for hundreds of years, some of us, and those are the ones you have to watch out for, or the ones you ridicule most for being too cowardly to fight anyone of our caliber. Not all of us were made for war, that was just a given, like the skinny boy who was now sitting against a pillar, swaying as if he was dizzy, looking forlornly at the metallic hexagon on the ground. But the ones that are meant for war and conquest only lived that long because they won or played it smart. It so happened that neither Rhea or I was very keen on seeing out our graying years ever since we first met each other. And I could see it in her eyes, that look of disdain and anger that, after all these years, she was looking up at me now. The half breed who shared her blood. Who, by her thinking, had watched her own father get butchered on a secluded planet.
The question she asked came from a place in her heart that was so cold and hard that it would take Barbaria’s warhammer and dozens more Olympias to so much as crack it. My cousin had been sent here for a reason.
And that really sucked for her, because she was at my mercy now. Harper might have been a bully.
Rhea had always been a threat. The bigger one. The older one. Our fathers may have been brothers, and may have seen countless wars and countless more victories on who knows how many worlds, but shit’s changed since then. We’re not kids, and I wasn’t going to feel threatened by a girl who’s rank meant nothing around here.
So, very slowly, I floated toward her, looked her dead in the eyes, and said, “Strong enough to kill you.”
She scowled. “The humans are capable of killing me?” Rhea said, spitting the words out of her mouth as if even saying them made her sick. “After you left, I was ranked and even burned.” She raised her right hand to her chest, and there on the back of her palm was a latticework of golden markings that wove around her fingers and up her arm, turning to black when she lowered her hand again. “I shed first blood in a conflict on distant moons, led dozens of those older than me onto battlefields that saw them get slaughtered because of their weakness, and I alone had the Emperor himself ask me for guidance. I was to be the next Legionnaire in our line—in my line, and—”
“You’ve got to be as thick as concrete if you think you’re helping your case right now,” I said icily. I got closer, but Rhea was too proud to step away from me. “I don’t give a shit what you did or who you did it with. You’re here on Earth, Rhea, and the truth is, you’re sick. You’re dying. You think I can’t smell it? Your breath reeks of decay, and your gums are black. Fuck me, you probably don’t even have all your teeth in that mouth, do you?”
For once she remained silent, and for once I thanked the gods she shut up.
“So let me make this clear,” I said, dropping my voice,and using our tongue, butchering it in my mouth so I could see that shock of disgust cross her face, “I’ll help your friends and kill you the first chance I get if you keep talking like your dad did. You’re not Titan. And there was never anything great about him, anyway. He lost to the bastard child of the family, and you know what? Let’s not make it two-and-o on the tenth anniversary of your loss.”
Silence, then: “You reek of humanity. Of weakness and betrayal.”
I smiled, then leaned in close to her ear. “And I’m still better than you’ll ever be.”
Rhea scoffed. “You’re not even half of what I am.”
Shrugged one shoulder, tilted my head, and said, “Hand on your throat, other on your shoulder, and let’s split you in half and really figure out if you’re still worth more than me when your guts are spilling out of you.”
We stared at each other for a very long time, neither of us moving, meaning I was close enough to smell the stink of death that sat in the base of her throat. Look at you, so afraid of finally dying—except there’s nobody who’s gonna miss you, but there’s a whole load of people that are gonna praise your murderer. If I was any more human than I was, I would have felt bad for Rhea. But you don’t forget years of being told, of being taught, that you’re less than someone just because they were about to kick it. I was a superhero. I saved people. And who am I kidding? She was better off dead and rotting in some pit in the sewers than being allowed to see the sun, and oh, gods, Caitlyn was going to find out very quickly that I had no actual intent on giving her whatever it is that she wanted. Her sister had stabbed me in the back and ran away into the dark, leaving me in the shits. I was just returning the favor.
As for my cousin…
There was a reason Titan’s body was never found—I doubted there was much to find, anyway.
I gave her a once over just as Circe called my name. Like father, like daughter soon.
A few months ago, and I would have wanted the world to see me kill her, because maybe that was going to be what I needed to get a statue. I would have survived a fight against the one person who matched me, who was maybe even stronger than me, but you know what would be even better than that? Killing her in this damp, dark, forgotten little graveyard, and leaving her body as one of the many skeletons that had no face or pride or voice to tell anyone about who they were. That kind of satisfaction trumped any I would get seeing myself immortalized in gold. And I said this all with full confidence, because Rhea hadn’t always been this way when we were little kids.
But ever since she had learnt to fly, she had made it very clear that our period of friendship was over.
Like I said, I was just returning the favor and reciprocating her energy. Oh, gods, I bet she hated seeing the hopeful glint in her friends’ eyes when I landed on the grass. How they stood, swayed, but watched me reverently.
Who would have thought being a nice person could feel so good?
“I take it your conversation with Rhea wasn’t fruitful,” the sickly boy said, watching as Rhea briefly glowered down at us, then leaped from the pillar and into one of the hexagonal tunnels, disappearing from view.
I shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter to me if she wants to sulk all day just ‘cause I’m here to save you.”
Maybe.
“I still don’t quite understand why,” the girl who kept helping him stand asked. “You were treated—”
I waved her off and said, “It’s whatever. I’ll be honest, I don’t trust any of you, but I need Circe’s help, and the only way I can get back to what I needed to do is by helping you guys out, and not because I like any of you.”
The boy smiled thinly. “If nothing else, you’re straightforward.”
“You should see me in action. Some people think I’m boring because I deal with my supervillains quickly, but what’s the point of staying for a chat when you can knock their heads clean off their shoulders, you know?”
And to my surprise, it was the girl beside him who giggled. “A champion who doesn’t show mercy!”
“Are you sure your mother is human?” the boy asked, then coughed, paused, and smiled weakly.
The biggest one of them grunted. His hair was long enough to sweep his shoulders, and it covered his eyes as he sat down on a warped piece of metal and leaned forward. The girl with the eye infection hadn’t stopped circling me, the same way a shark would a bleeding victim. It was slow and it was meticulous, and I figured it was the training in her that was making her so wary of me. Sickness be damned, she was still willing to think that she could win in a fight against me, and in all honesty, I couldn’t fault her spirit for that, because I would do the same. Hell, all I’ve done this summer is nearly die but think so highly of myself that I’ve somehow managed not to croak yet. When she finally stopped pacing, she crouched, her short black hair wispy enough for her to stare death at me.
She wouldn’t speak to me unless necessary, and the larger guy would more than likely hurt me. I had to admit that facing off with Rhea had left me a little tense, a little tightened up and ready for something to happen. I had provoked her, I knew I had, and I relished it, but I also knew she didn’t take kindly to being ignored or insulted, because at the end of the day, human or otherwise, she had a heart, however cold it was. We could whisper and we could murmur, but everyone would have heard what we had said to each other. No, I didn’t feel bad ridiculing her, and yes, it felt good hearing the girl laugh and knowing Rhea heard it too. If it weren’t for Ava’s sister walking up beside me, I would have continued talking to them, continued rubbing it in, but I had a city to save, so pent up anger and hate and long-standing family feuds aside, it was time to get down to why I was here in the first place
Because it wasn’t to catch up with Titan’s daughter.
Circe said, “I would much rather be honest with you too, if we’re to help each other’s causes.”
“Before I tell you about your dad,” I said, “you’re gonna have to tell me what you want with them, ‘cause me and you are gonna have a problem if you’re thinking of using them to take over the world. Not happening.”
She pointed across the cavern, past the towering pillars, and the banners that hung stiffly off shattered white stones. I narrowed my eyes, then pursed my lips when I saw what she was pointing at: the metal hexagon embedded in the ground with a chunk of it missing and even more of a hole underneath it. I knew what that was, knew what it could do, and the next moments of Circe’s life could very well be determined by what she said next.
“Pure unbridled energy,” Caitlyn said. “And the new frontier for humanity. All of it right here, rotting.”
I turned my head to look at her, folding my arms. “Do you know what’ll happen if you use it?”
“Yes,” she said to me flatly. “Because I also know that without it, the world might end soon.”