I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had practically heard those words from somewhere else before, almost from the same sounding voice, too, as if Caitlyn had copied someone. Supervillains are always trying to save the world or save someone they loved in some fashion that involved the literal detriment of everyone else on the planet other than themselves, ultimately, but I figured hearing it come out of both the Rivera sister’s mouths was some kind of bitter cosmic irony, except Caitlyn didn’t have a proposal for me afterward, and didn’t have that dull twinkle in her eyes that told me she had something in mind for me later. She stared at me, just as silent as the rest of the cavern, because her words, she knew, should mean something to me. A superhero is always meant to save the world, right?

But if she thought for one second that I was gonna believe her, then she had to be stupid.

She must have seen the skepticism on my face, because she soon said, “But I’m not going to pretend that you’ll trust what I have to say. After all, you’ve no reason to do so. And if it’s not my word you’ll take, it’s theirs.”

I turned to look at the others, especially at the boy struggling to stay on his feet. I know I still needed Caitlyn’s help, and knew that the only way I was going to get what she knew would be by helping her, but this was a lot more than I bargained for tonight. Maybe fate had it out for me somehow, because I had a bad track record of trying to find something simple, and ultimately finding myself in situations where shit’s already hit the fan a long time before I had anything to do with it. From where I’m from, we’ve got the equivalent of the Fates in our pantheon, except she’s a woman, according to legend, who was driven mad by what she saw and and thus led the universe in its entirety to be riddled with chaos and conflict because her brain got fucked somewhere along the way, and I had always kind of felt she had taken a special interest in me, because I was getting very, very tired of this.

Especially when the explanation had to come out of a mouth I knew I couldn’t trust. But fine, I thought, sighing a little. I could play pretend, listen to what they had to say, if it meant getting what I needed from Caitlyn.

The girl glanced at the boy beside her, then pursed her lips when she looked back at me. She couldn’t keep her eyes focused on me long enough to think she wasn’t lying, because with everyone I had met so far, they had looked me dead in the eyes when they were spinning their fairy tales. “Well,” she began, stopped, then got a slow nod from the boy next to her. “A…dispute took place here decades ago, a lot longer than any of us were here to begin with, but even by the time we arrived, the plans put in place had soon become the tools of war between us.”

They’ve been hiding underneath New Olympus for gods know how long. This whole time I had been watching the sky and the stars and the horizon, wondering when they would be coming. Turns out I wasn’t even looking in the right direction. But considering the state of this place, I figured not many more of them are here.

“Yeah?” I said. “And what exactly were these plans of yours?”

“Conquest,” the bigger guy grunted, in a voice so deep I felt it in my bones.

The smaller boy nodded, then quickly said, “But things soon changed.”

“You’re treading very thin ice right now.”

“Thin ice?” the girl asked, looking at her feet. “I do not—”

“It means that you’re making a lot of sense, but the kind of sense I don’t want to hear.”

“Remember,” Caitlyn said, maybe to all of us, maybe to me alone. “Our success will come through working together, and playing games with one another won’t get us anywhere. Speak of it directly, and leave the theatrics.”

“They wanted Earth,” the boy said, his words echoing in the silence. “We wanted Earth.”

I stared at him, not blinking, then asked, “We’re not known for having a change of heart.”

“I assume you mean we’re not likely to give up on our goals,” he said. “And you’ll be right. Nothing has changed, but then again, neither the Legionnaires or their guardsmen are here to enforce their ideals on us, too.”

I snorted. “So, what, you guys like how plush the Earth is and say ‘Hey, this place isn’t so bad after all, maybe we shouldn’t take it over and use it as some kind of festering little breeding planet.’ Bullshit.” I turned to Caitlyn. “This was a bad idea from the start, and your sister made it a lot harder for me to trust anything anyone in your family has to say ever. So you’re either gonna have to come up with something good, or get this charade over with and tell me what I want to know. These people don’t have a bone of change in their bodies. They’re talking this way because they’re hopeless and weak and are probably gonna be dead by next week. Now they want help, now they want someone to save them, but oh, I forgot, they also want to take over the entire fucking world.”

Because the only reason the world was going to end is because of them. You know how many nutjobs I’ve dealt with in the past, yelling about the next great world ending threat? The next supervillain who’ll succeed in starting an unfortunate series of events that’ll end up killing millions? Hell, I could grab a few right now from the graveyards they were anonymously buried in and show you what I thought about their predictions. Fate and I were never going to be friends, and the only reason I shook Rhea’s hand was because Caitlyn hadn’t sprouted her end of the world crap on me yet. If she had been building some kind of superweapon, or trying to create some unstoppable army, then sure, I could deal with that easily. But she wanted to use a specific kind of energy, a specific kind of tech, that would only mean Earth became prime picking for the entire damned universe. Gods know why nobody’s tried to take this place by force alone, knowing how fragile the humans are, but hey, maybe they were all really lucky.

And that luck would end the second any one of those hexagons around the planet turned on.

“You would let us die here?” the girl whispered.

“A superhero,” the brown-skinned girl said, her voice raspy and dry. “Earth’s savior, champion, just like the Legionnaires. You’re sworn to help others, are you not? To ensure that their lives remain alight no matter what?”

“Right on the money,” I said to her. “Except I save people who don’t get millions of other people killed.”

“But we are your blood,” the smaller girl said. “Your birthright is the stars. It’s us, your people.”

“Keep talking like that, and it’ll hurt to be alive soon.”

“It’s unfortunate,” Caitlyn said quietly, rubbing her temples with her thumb and forefinger, “that when the world is very much in trouble, it lies in the hands of those whose grip is far too powerful not to break it. Olympia, I’ll extend my apologies to you, because I should have phrased myself much better, and I’ll do so on their behalf as well.” She gestured at our surroundings, at the metal and the stone and the greenery that was growing in their cracks and splitting them apart. “This place is old, and one could almost say it is ancient, and its purpose is even lost to me, because I’m not the one who found it, nor am I the only one to ever do so. There are people, very powerful people, who know of its existence. People who run the largest militaries in the world, and people who lead lives of masks and lies and deception to those around them. Do you want to know why I never remained in New Olympus?”

I remained silent, waiting for her to continue, tapping my finger against my bicep.

“It’s because there is a man, a man who holds power unimaginable lurking those streets, and it was that same man who made my own father understand that the world was changing, and the gods really are on their way.”

Quietly, I asked, “And what’s his name?”

Please, please don’t say dad.

“Caesar,” she said, and right then, my mouth went dry. Caitlyn walked forward, and where she stepped, flowers blossomed through the dirt and the stones. She stopped a few steps away from me, close enough to a chunk of metal the size of a backpack. “Intelligence will always trump authority if it’s used well, and with intelligence comes information, and with information comes the knowledge of secrets. New Olympus is a city that has seen too many lives and too many different stories to ever just be another city on the planet. What she hides can tear apart the continent and the world and, quite possible, seeing as you’re all arguing, even the stars. And it’s those same men who know these secrets, who are that intelligent to know these things, that made me turn away and leave Lucian.”

“So you ran away because you were scared?” I asked.

“No,” Caitlyn said. “I gave up on his vision.”

“And lemme guess, Lucian wanted to take over the city or the world or some crap.”

She smiled very thinly and shook her head. “No, he was content with what he had, because if a human like him could make a man like your father shake his hand, then he was the most powerful person on the planet. Things, as they always do, change, and my earlier anger at learning of his death wasn’t because I was hurt—though I’ll admit, I still can’t quite believe it—but it was because I had told him myself I was going to kill him with my own two hands. Choke the life from his lungs and keep his heart on the same mantleplace he hung our stockings from. He wasn’t the man I believed in any more, and maybe he was never meant to be anything more than my father and not a teacher, but those were the cards I was dealt, but the deck of fate wanted our paths crossed in blood, too.”

Hearing those words come out of her mouth almost felt like a slap to the face. Ava, a bit like me if I was being honest, only ever had good things to say about Lucian. She dressed like him, tried, I’m guessing, to talk the way he did and carry herself the same way. That leather chair she had sat in had always been a little too large for her, too much like a child sitting where they shouldn’t belong. Caitlyn was meant to be next in line, and yet here she was saying things that only made me wonder what exactly it is she’d gone through growing up to hate him. Dad hadn’t been perfect in his own right, but at least he’d never lied to me my entire life about how he truly felt about me, or used me for the tool he saw me as. His actions spoke to me, but Caitlyn had grown up loved, taken care of, watched over by thugs who would just as quickly buy her ice cream as they would murder a man who gave her a cone that was cracked. So, if I was being honest, I didn’t believe what she was saying, but a part of me couldn’t help but think that yeah, she was telling the truth, because I could also think of a few things I’d like to say to someone who had also raised me almost my entire life. And gods, wasn’t that a realization splashing me cold in the face?

“What does any of this have to do with the end of the world?” I asked her, my voice light.

“There were more of us,” the boy whispered. “But that changed not so long ago.”

“People…humans…found us,” the girl said to me, finally looking me in the eyes, but all I could see were circles of sleepless nights etched deep into her face. Exhaustion. A haunted look that made it seem as if she was seeing things just over my shoulder, things that surrounded me that I couldn’t see, but that I could hear. I had gotten better at ignoring those whispering voices, but they hadn’t stopped ever since arriving into the cavern. “It was as much of a surprise to us as it was a surprise to Circe and the one you call Daisy. We should have known earlier, but we didn’t, and despite even our best efforts, enough blood flowed on this grass to make it grow fresh once more.”

At that moment, I heard the sound of another heart beating that little bit harder. I glanced at the hexagonal tunnels surrounding us, and saw Rhea sat inside one, a speck of a thing clouded by the darkness surrounding her.

We met eyes for just a brief second, and the next, she was back to looking at her hands.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“They didn’t kill,” the girl still crouched opposite me said. “They stole.”

My mouth soured and my stomach tensed, because suddenly, this wasn’t a conversation I had been expecting to have, and suddenly, I understood why it was such a big problem to have for the entire world. I sat down on a small boulder, elbows on my knees as I cupped my face and wiped the sweat sitting on my cheeks. Why can’t it ever just be one problem at a freaking time? And to think this all started because I packed my Olympia costume in my backpack before leaving for graduation that morning instead of leaving it there in my wardrobe. In some ways, Lucas had been the catalyst in all of this, but in other ways, I wished that the city would have been a lot smaller, a lot more manageable for me to handle like it had been for heroes gone past. So far, most of my problems weren’t even mine to begin with, but problems that had started when I was probably only old enough to chew on my own fingers and think shiny lights were the most entertaining thing that could happen to me. I wasn’t complaining, I just needed…Gods, I don’t really know what I needed to do or what I needed to start with or who I needed to focus on.

“Are you alright?” the larger boy asked to my surprise. “You look frail.”

“Tired, more like,” I muttered. I looked at Caitlyn. “How many did they take?”

“How much is a better estimate,” she said. “As much metal as they could transport, five of them, too.”

“How the hell did a bunch of humans stop you guys?” I said. “I mean, you’re an easy A-Grade, Circe.”

The smaller boy coughed once and then twice, with the third time leaving him dizzy enough to be sat down by the girl beside him on the grass. I smelt metal on his throat, and watched as he knuckled away a trail of blood that seeped from his nose. “I believe you would call it a drug,” he said, wiping his nose on his tattered shirt. “We’ve never encountered anything like it before, because the few of us that remained aren’t the few who are here right now. It left us weak, confused, unable to stop them from descending on us like the Tralgen-kin have so many times before. And, quite frankly, without Rhea, Thalia and Circe, we would never have survived this long, too.”

I paused, sat on the rock, letting his words ring in my ears. Then I stood up and flew backwards, staring at each of them, at how they winced as they moved their bodies, how they wheezed and how loudly their hearts sounded in their chests. I hadn’t noticed it for a while because I had thought it was Circe and her flowers, the pollen or the nectar or just the sweetness of her overwhelming scent. But there it was in the air, in their lungs. In mine.

The saccharine scent of death was flowing through all of us. Not enough to kill, but enough to tranquilize.

“Fuck,” I whispered, then said it louder. “Who was it that came down here? Did you see faces?”

Caitlyn said, “No. They were armed and protected, and only engaged when sure.”

I dragged a hand through my hair as my head began pounding. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me right now, when am I gonna find something simple to do in this damned city? “And you said they took metal, too?”

“As I had said,” Caitlyn muttered, “the end of the world is coming, and will not cease unless power is harnessed by us before it is done against us. What they’re planning to do is beyond me. I cannot leave this place, and thus I cannot be sure of their objectives with what they have collected from us, but one thing is clear: they will return eventually, and when they do, it’ll be with clearer thoughts and an understanding of the treasure they have gotten their hands on. Governments the world over are soon going to find out what unmatched power really is.”

I swore, then said, “Then why the hell didn’t you tell anybody about this?”

“And what would the world have done, finding these people here?” she asked. Then, quieter: “What would they have done, these people so afraid of their own superhuman brothers and sisters, to the Daughter of Titan?”

“Does it matter?” I asked. “The world is about to get fucked if those people understand what they stole.”

“What of our lives?” Thalia, I’m guessing, asked. “Are we not worthwhile enough to protect?”

“Five lives traded for the billions more on the planet,” I said. “Scale tips to one side.”

“I now understand why Circe wasn’t willing for you to help us,” Rhea said. I turned, and found her crouched atop a jagged piece of metal riddled with holes and torn to chunks embedded deep into the floor. “I also understand that being this so-called superhero to you, cousin, is a way for you to pretend you are their savior.” She spat saliva onto the floor, but I wasn’t stupid—saw the blood in her spit. “You’re nothing like our fathers, and if you think you can fool the humans that you’re their champion, then choosing not to save those of your own blood will ultimately lead to your pathetic slaughter. Your pathetic, backwards little planet would be nothing more than a speck to those who’ve both stolen from us, and those who’ll rain down from the heavens like hellfire very soon.”

I glared at her, chewing my tongue before I said, “First of all, Earth isn’t pathetic. It’s better than any home any of you have ever known. And second of all, yeah, I might not be like dad, but I’m also not gonna let my home get turned to ash by the same braindead idiots living on it. I don’t give a shit about you or the Conquest, because the Emperor and the Grand Admiral and every godsdamned Legionnaire can come and try to take this place away from me, but they’re gonna have to rip my hands clean off if you think I’m letting go. In case you forgot, cousin, you made it clear that I didn’t have a home amongst you, so I went and found myself one, and letting you all keep talking means that I know enough for none of you to be useful anymore. Five deaths means nothing when I can save several billion, and giving any kind of power to the Devil’s Daughter would be suicide for everyone, too.”

“You’re too adamant on labels,” Caitlyn said, making me turn around. “Certain things mean a great deal more to you than they do to other people. Some would call that passionate. Others would call that detrimental.”

“Being a superhero means saving the world,” I said icily. “If there are people out there who have this tech, and who have people like them weak enough to control, and controllable to make work, then Earth is screwed.”

“And is it not the greater good that I’m after?” Caitlyn asked. “Harnessing this technology—”

“Isn’t gonna freaking happen,” I said, rising a little. “Not in your hands.”

And then Rhea chuckled, then laughed, and it took everything I had not to fill her wide open mouth with my fist and some knuckles. Eventually, gasping for air, she said, “My! You’re no hero, you’re just afraid that when the humans finally understand how to harness our technology, the Emperor will take it as a beacon for our arrival!”

“I’m saving them from themselves,” I snapped, my voice echoing. Both the smaller girl and boy flinched. I flew closer to Rhea, getting close enough to make her laugh, but she still didn’t move, and still remained with that smile on her face. “They don’t know half the problems the universe is hiding them from, and if they learn to—”

“If they learn, they won’t require your services anymore,” she said, grinning. “They’ll be powerful, and you will be nothing more than a creature no more powerful than one of them donning our technology, cousin.”

“There’s not a single human who’s gonna match me just ‘cause of some broken tech,” I growled.

“But you said it yourself,” she said. “You may not be half of me, but neither will they be once they learn. Then again, you alone are the one who can kill us all right here and now, and your blood is only half of ours.”

“So you’re finally gonna admit that you’re weak? That you got your own people stolen?”

Her eyes darkened, and the smile faltered and vanished. “Say what you wish about my efforts, but your precious home will soon not require your services any longer, and you’ll be better dissected and studied, Ry’ee.”

“Unless,” a weak voice, from the boy on the grass, said, “you save us, and we can thus save you.”

All too quickly, my saliva turned bitter. “I’d rather sit here and watch you rot if you think I’d let any of you trick me into helping you. You’d kill me the second you have enough strength to stand on your own two feet.”

“Trust is best forged when strained,” Caitlyn said to me. “This technology will save countless lives.”

“Or kill countless more,” I argued.

“Yes,” she said. “It could, just the same as with the first stick that humanity ever picked off the ground, or the first rock he used to kill the creatures that hunted it. Any leap in progress will always be a double edged sword, because humanity is never going to be a simple species, and this next step will change the world forever. Nobody knows more about this technology and the power it holds than those in this cavern, and yet look at us, hiding in the darkness of a maze long forgotten, afraid because of what humanity would do to itself if it ever gets its hands on this power. But in the right hands, in the hands of someone who can protect this world, it’ll change everything.”

“Or we could all just leave the technology alone,” I said. “And I could go back to finding a Kaiju.”

“Similarly, you could protect the lives from those who stole your people and your resources.”

“Admit it,” Rhea said in the silence. “You are afraid, cousin. Humanity’s progression means—”

“Rhea,” the boy said, almost snapping. “We are dying. We will continue to die. This planet will never trust us, but they will hate you, fear you, but not her, because she is the one they chant for, her’s is the name they cheer. Fine, so be it if we perish, but let our deaths mean something more than just…just another sacrifice to a pantheon that has left us here to rot in the caverns of a planet who would much rather butcher our bodies and study our souls than ever let us see the light of their sun. We owe humanity their protection, and let it be the first step in us—”

“Thirty,” she said, staring at him through her curls. “Thirty of us have perished due to the drug or the disease they have spread to us. If it was protection they seeked, then it is a handshake they should have requested.”

“Is that so?” he asked, staring at her. “And how many more of us would you rather see dead?”

“How many more of us have to suffer, just because you wish the humans death?” the girl whispered.

I folded my arms. “Her dad killed millions. She’s just trying to live up to the name.” I turned my head to her and said, “But I think you should know that Zeus left him so bloodied that nobody could recognize him.”

“And all for the sake of humanity,” the boy said, again coughing, and again shuddering in pain. It took several seconds for him to speak again. Seconds in which his breathing rattled and his frail torso shook. “When I was young, the stories of your fathers is what allowed me to continue fighting. Brothers in battle and blood and victory, and yet here, on this quiet blue planet, I learn that these brothers of legend butchered each other, and all because, in my thinking, one fell in love with humanity, whilst the other resented them for their hidden strength.”

“Humanity, strong?” Rhea said scornfully.

“Well, you’re bleeding right now, and you haven’t even faced their best yet,” I said to her.

She dragged her forearm under her nose, smearing blood across her upper lip and forearm. Glaring, she said, “You let humanity learn the secrets of the stars, and it will begin an age they are not yet prepared for.”

“And that’s where you all come in,” I said. They looked at me, including Caitlyn, as if I had just announced that the Conquest had already started. “Listen, the more I stand here, the more I understand that we’re all in the same degree of screwed. My life’s been pretty shitty in the past few weeks, and no matter how I look at this, it’s just gonna get a lot worse. Now, I could kill you, or leave you down here and pretend I never came across you as I search for whoever has all that technology, or I could save the entire world, and keep you guys alive, because you know what that’ll mean to anyone who the Emperor eventually sends down here to check what’s happening, don’t you?” I waited for their answer, but they were seemingly all thinking the same thing, judging by the looks on their faces, some ranging from a hollow distance in their eyes, to anger, to resentment, to an unreadable mask that was right there on my cousin’s face for all to see. “Correct. Humanity isn’t weak, because trust me, I would have cleaned this place up years ago if they weren’t so stubborn, and if they can make you all rot, then they can do it again. And on the other hand, we get all of this shit working, and the Legion will see you as nothing but filthy little deserters who helped the humans protect their planet against what was coming. Either way, it’s a win for me.” Finally, Gods.

“Did you not hear what I said?” Rhea spat. “They will be brought by the technology, by what it will do to this planet. You yourself not moments ago argued for it to not be tampered with, and now you change your words?”

“I’m changing my words because I’ve got no choice,” I said. “It’s either I keep chasing my own tail, trying to find out information that I can’t get in that city, or I make a decision that’s gonna save countless lives.”

And to hell with what that creature had said about me killing billions. Fuck It and fuck fate.

That, and I wasn’t going to let Rhea think for a second that I was afraid that the humans would one day not have a use for me anymore, because whenever that day came, it would be the day I died, and the day they erected my statue.

Let me be the one to make a decision for once. At least it would make my life a little bit easier.

“What do you say, Rhea?” I asked, clapping her back and making her grunt. “Wanna save the world?”

Besides, who said a superhero can’t be two things? Good and bad, right and wrong. To hell with that, because I could save the world by using this technology, and kill these people afterward, or take them as they were, weak and fragile, clinging to life, right to Overseer Two. If he couldn’t turn them, then hey, at least it’ll be an interesting biology lesson on how to kill the unkillable beings that would eventually come down from the sky.

And at the end of the day, there was no stopping what was coming, but only bracing for it. Caesar knew about this place, and by my guess, his boys had been down here, armed with enough Ambrosia to kill several and weaken almost all of them. He was arming himself for something, with experimental rifles powerful enough to send me halfway across the city, and now pieces of technology that would make Aegis Tech salivate.

Shit hit the fan even before I was born, and I guessed it was going to be my responsibility to clean it all up.