I found Rhea sitting on the edge of the chasm, slumped over like some corpse left out to dry. Her hands were still clenched tightly by her sides, as if she was still ready for some kind of fight that wasn’t coming. Not now, at least, because a fight between us would just be murder. I stood beside her, dripping with plasma and exhaustion, my own sweat like a slick coat on my skin, oiling the layers between my costume and flesh. I stared at her, looked down at her under the glow of humming golden pipes. Yeah, I had done it. I had stood in that room and let myself run dry until the pipes began to hum and electricity began flowing through everything around me, through the gauntlets and surging into a dormant system. For once, the tunnel was alight, and that had left me needing to climb upward.
My hands had healed, but the climb had turned them red and blistered and bleeding. Chipped fingernails and broken palms, scabbed skin and scars from being burnt by the feedback of my own electricity when I had put my hands in those gauntlets. It had hurt, and I had screamed, and then when I ran out of breath, I stood there and let my body slump over the gauntlets until the machines took what it needed from me. A part of me felt sick, like I had been touched in a way that left me feeling violated. The gauntlets weren’t a willing give-and-take. No. The system here took the energy right from your bones, your blood, your entire body, and if you had enough, maybe you’d be able to yank your hands out from them and collapse into the plasma, thanking the gods that your hands weren’t entirely burnt black and raw and red. I hadn’t given myself to this place. It had ripped away the electricity from me.
I hoped it wasn’t permanent, and I hoped that these fuckers hadn’t just stolen what little I had.
I wasn’t so much tired as I was angry, but it was the kind of anger I swallowed and bottled away, because Rhea was barely conscious enough to argue as I slung her over my shoulder. She was dead weight, and a lot heavier than I thought she would be like this, but it didn’t matter. She needed my help, right? She wouldn’t have wanted me trapped down there with all those dead bodies if she needed me, right? Gods, I was late to the party, but I’m noticing a trend with these kinds of people. They needed a superhero until it was time to tell me why they actually needed me. I wanted to think it was the humans who had done that, killed all those creatures, but it didn’t change the fact that not a single one of ‘my’ people had told me what was going on down there. Not a single heads up that, hey, the system isn’t gonna ask you for your powers, but we designed it to take them from you. Some transparency would be nice once in a while, you know, but I guess I was overreacting, or underreacting—I don’t really know, and I was too beat to really give a damn right now. Did I still trust what they would all have to say about changing a new leaf?
About wanting to help humanity after what they’d done to their own people? The humans had come down here and destroyed almost everything, and it was a miracle that the system was still in good enough shape to stay on, but that didn’t sit right with me. Why would they still want to help the humans, when the first time they ever came across a big group of them, they got massacred, enslaved, and infected by a drug that was slowly killing them.
The worst part is that…yeah, I kinda did believe that they had wanted to change the page and try to help out the humans. As I trudged past the debris in the tunnel now illuminated by pale golden light, through empty chambers of broken machinery, and dead bodies now rotting to nothing but fleshy corpses, I figured that the people down here hadn’t had a good time either. I was angry because I hadn’t been told the full story, but that, I realized, must have just been residue from Lucas. The heroes in the comics make it look easy, made it look like trust was a game you played that either meant yes or no or maybe, but here, nobody ever had a reason to tell me the truth, because it was rarely ever anything I wanted to hear. I might be an S-Grade, but I was just their little puppet.
A reasonable person would probably say it was my fault for making it hard for people to tell me the truth.
But in response to that: just don’t piss me off with something stupid. The longer I spent down here, though, now looking up at the hexagon far, far above me, and the pale light cascading through the cracks in the metal that shone down on us, I also figured that there just wasn’t any point in being angry at these dying people. I didn’t have the capacity to think as I climbed, having to use the top half of my suit as a sling to keep Rhea on my body as I reached again and again for the next ledge, the next scalding hot metal pipe, until finally, a slew of thick vines reached down from above, wrapping around my waist and dragging us up out of the hole. I didn’t bother answering Caitlyn’s questions, or looking at Thalia—the brown-skinned girl—as I bodily handed Rhea over to her. I walked past the pair and sat on a short rock, pushed my hair out of my face and wiped the sweat clinging to my cheeks.
The others weren’t here, but I heard voices coming from the smaller tunnels in the cavern walls, probably from the medical bays. The tunnels that weren’t brimming with debris were lit with gold, and so was the darkness.
Thalia took Rhea with her, leaping from the lush cavern floor and into the hexagonal tunnel, vanishing from view. I was left sitting there on that hard rock, my head in my hand, and wondering if I’d just fucked up.
No going back now, I thought. Gotta make the most of it now, Ry.
Whatever that would mean for Earth here on out.
“I suppose asking if you’re alright would be foolish right now,” Caitlyn said. “Still, how are you?”
“I might have just saved the world,” I muttered. “I’m ecstatic.”
“You feel like you’ve made a mistake.”
I scoffed quietly, still looking at the trampled grass at my feet, at the bullet casings and dried blood that still soaked deep into the thin soil. “For people like me, we make a mistake, and the entire world feels it sooner or later. If this goes to shit, and any of them starts acting like they were raised to, then it’ll be my fault, and the humans won’t really care if I was trying to save them if it means that their entire freaking planet gets taken over soon.”
Caitlyn remained quiet, then said, “I think you’re underestimating humanity. You should know that.”
“Oh, trust me, I’m not. A bunch of humans with guns came here and stole several of them.”
“No,” she said, sitting beside me with a sigh. So close to her, I started seeing the resemblance she shared with Ava, if her sister was bigger, calmer, and less prone to having things go her way by any means necessary. “You, is what I’m talking about. When you came here demanding for my help, I didn’t want anything to do with you because I understood that you could very easily kill these people, and would do so knowing how you act. I have a responsibility to protect them, which you might not understand, but making sure they survive is what anyone in my position would do. Once I realized that we could help each other, me and you, I took a gamble, but…frankly, you’re the one that I was worried about most.” She turned her head to look at me. “The Daughter of Zeus isn’t known for her kindness and generosity, nor is she known for her patience and helping hand. Yet all this for some information?”
I tensed my jaw and picked off the dried plasma from my hands. “It’s not about the information. It’s about trying to figure out what the Society is doing about the Kaiju Virus, too. Don’t know if you’ve been watching the news down here, but shit’s not been sweet for anyone in the city recently. And I should have known about it earlier, but I was busy playing superhero with people who only ever used me for whatever it is they wanted. So yeah, it’s not just about the information. I save New Olympus, I have a clean slate. I prove that I’m not just some little dog.”
“Ah,” she said quietly. “I now understand.”
I glanced at her. “Understand what?”
“Your father’s presence still pesters you, even long after his death.” She shook her head slowly, and I watched as the grass at her feet began to sprout with tiny flowers. “You want to prove that you’re capable of being what the planet needs, but let me ask you a question that I doubt anyone else has: what do you need, Olympia?”
“What kind of philosophical mumbo jumbo is that?” I asked her. “What I need is for you to tell me—”
Caitlyn said, “It’s superficial, what you’re after, that everlasting glory you seek. It doesn’t exist.”
“You’re the daughter of a supervillain, who are you to tell me otherwise?”
“Are you saying that in the sense I’m a supervillain so my opinion does not matter to a hero like yourself, or just because I’m Lucifer’s daughter, and I would have no idea how to grasp the meaning of glory like you do?”
“Does it really matter?”
“No,” she said, “I suppose it doesn’t, because your feelings are human, and so yes, nearly everyone on the planet has experienced at least some of what you’re going through in some form. Expectations, worries about your future, whether or not you’ve made the correct decision.” She raised her hand to stop me. “And yes, I know. Being a superhero does exaggerate a lot of your problems, but at the end of the day, you need to eventually help yourself.”
I rolled my eyes a little. “How could I forget the time when everyone on the planet watched their dad, oh, right, wait a second, they didn’t watch their dad die for the sake of the entire world, because sure, maybe I am a little scared that I made the wrong decision, because one of the people I just helped is Titan’s daughter, so how about—” The only reason I stopped talking was because of how she was looking at me, her head tilted, and her heavy locs draped over her face, slightly obscuring my view of her expression. It wasn’t patronizing, so much as it felt like the way mom used to look at me when I was explaining something she already knew, but was willing to hear me out. I already knew what she was going to say before she even said it, and that bittered my mouth just that little bit more.
“Everyone watched your father die,” she said. “That’s true, but he was also their protector, their friend, their boss and the reason some of them woke up every morning. Only you know what he meant to you, just the same as how everyone else has had their feelings about it. I had the chance to meet him several times, and you know what was most fascinating about your father?” I wasn’t gonna speak anyway, but I figured she paused to let the words settle between us before continuing. “I watched him kill my father’s subordinates without so much as a break in his sentences, and yet whenever he saw me, he would do this…thing, I suppose you can call it, of complimenting me.”
Oh, now this is fucking priceless. Please, please tell me more!
“I should probably go check on the others.”
“And I hated it,” she said, just as I stood up. “He would sometimes gift me candy and ice cream, and I would assume that he poisoned it, or that he wanted information from me, but he would simply pat my shoulder, tell me to have a good day and greet my mother for him, and he would leave. My father loathed it, told me that I should never take anything for free, especially from the hands of a man like him, but when he eventually died…it hurt, and that’s what surprised me most. The skies were empty, the streets were quiet, and all I had were wrappers in my pocket to show what Zeus meant to the daughter of a man who had shaken his hand out of necessity for his own survival.”
“You know,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “Everyone has a story about my dad, and that’s great, I’m really happy he gave you sweets and reaffirmed you, but I get it, alright? I get what you’re trying to say, and he was just such a swell guy, but I’m not like him, and helping people that way isn’t what I do. I save the world—”
“And when are you going to save yourself?” Caitlyn asked me. She wasn’t looking at me, but at the flowers she made curl around her fingers, at the petals she plucked from the bud. “When will you shed the fear of the constant nightmare you let yourself wallow in? That day undoubtedly changed you, hurt you, and I might sound brash, but I was never taught to be soft handed. But…people possess the capacity to change, and what you did here today will change them, too. You can masquerade your reasons for wanting to help them as much as you want as means to an end. You can say you want to save the world and those you love, and healing your people is just a bi-product of all of it, but truth be told, Rylee, you’ve known from the start about the Kaiju, haven’t you?”
I had made it two steps away before freezing. “What’re you talking about?”
“You’re stalling,” she said, her voice soft—maybe to keep it between us, maybe to make sure the cavern wouldn’t carry her voice. “I had Daisy go and check the surface and the sewers attached to this labyrinth for any signs of the kind of Kaiju that might even frighten the likes of you, and what she found is terrifying, yes, but it’s also something you know all about. Why come all the way here for some information, when the creature you seek has been searching for you? When you know that all it would have taken is staying in New Olympus for it?”
I turned to face her, my voice catching in my throat. “I’m not running away from anything. I came because I needed your help and information, which I’m still waiting for, by the way, and what’s this about it being here?”
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
“Not here,” she said. “But close enough for it to know that you’re here as well.”
For a second, it felt like I’d been impaled as my stomach dropped and my heart skipped a beat. I walked closer to Caitlyn, dropping my voice so only she could hear me. “How long have I got before it comes for me?”
She glanced upward. “For a being so powerful, your entire life has been nothing but fear.” Caitlyn let the petals sitting on her palm fall to her feet, where they dissolved into the grass. “You can sense it, right? Feel it in the pit of your stomach, this sense of unease. It isn’t worrying about the right or wrong decision you’ve made today, but the knowledge of it being here, too. I knew what your father was capable of, and I also know that you’re beginning to get to that stage, too. The only reason you came down here was because, in some twisted way, all you wanted was for this Kaiju to come for you in a place nobody else will be around to see anything happen. If you perish, you die alone, and the world won’t have to watch Zeus’ daughter fail. But if you win, then you live knowing you’ve bested even God at his own game of attempting to kill you. For a girl who wants to be like her father, the darkness tends to be your friend a lot more than it ever was his. It’s almost as if you’re ashamed that you’re his daughter, is it not?”
My eyes narrowed. “You talk a lot of bullshit, just like your sister. Unless you can survive getting split in two, then I suggest you keep your mouth shut. I saved these people because I’m saving the planet. As soon as—”
Caitlyn shook her head and stood up, squeezing my shoulder. “Thank you for your aid. You’re a good superhero, Olympia, but you would be an even greater one if you allowed yourself the chance to be Rylee Addams.”
That felt like a slap to the face. “How the hell do you know—”
“Oh, please,” she said, walking away. “Who doesn’t?”
I grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. “Hey, don’t walk off on me after sprouting all of that,” I said. “The Kaiju, how long have I got before it comes here? And no, it’s not because I’m worried about those people.”
“It can be both, you know,” she said plainly. “Fear for them as well as for yourself.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said, maybe with a little bit too much of an edge in my voice. “I just need to prepare.”
“Mmm,” she hummed. “There’s nothing wrong with fear. It can sometimes be the best of any too, if you know how to use it at a time when you need it most. To answer your question: you need not worry, you’ll be fine.”
“You expect me to take your word on that? What if you want me dead because you’re done with me?”
“Your trust issues are quite concerning.”
“Bite me.”
An inkling of a smile flirted with the corner of her mouth. “I have no reason for you to die. If anything, if you did die, it would pose a problem for a lot of people, and I’m currently attempting to aid a lot of people, too.”
“So…you’re gonna protect me from this Kaiju, or what’s happening here?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “I am capable, but I understand my limits. You, on the other hand, don’t. Whether you survive this encounter or not is completely up to how much you’re willing to die for other people.”
“Other people?” I asked. “If I’m killing this thing, it’s because it’s killed so many already.”
And it also nearly killed me, too, I thought, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Rylee,” she said gently, now smiling thinly. “You often have roundabout ways of saying the same thing again and again. Earth may not love you fully, but you do, and a lot more than you like to admit. If you have the strength in you to save people you hate, then you have the capacity to be strong enough to save the world.”
It took me a second before I realized where I’d heard those words before. “Zeus Almighty, issue one.”
Gods, I’d never hated a smile and a sly wink so much before in my entire life.
The medical bays down here were almost like something you’d see in a normal hospital wing, except for the slightly shattered see-through screens displaying heart rates and medical statuses. They were almost all confined to one large chamber, with cylinder-like tubes acting as beds filling up entire rooms, with most of them empty, and some of them still splattered with long ago dried blood. Getting into the medical chambers alone was a bit of a hassle, with the tight and twisting corridors, sudden blocked hallways, and slag-covered exits meaning it took a lot longer than I would have liked getting to the others. By the time we even got there, the heavy set metal doors stood in place, not wanting to open for me (like I said, half-breeds aren’t meant to touch certain things), and we had to wait for one of them to get up and call to the system, telling it to grant access to the chamber for both Caitlyn and I.
“Seems a little bit of a hassle to keep doing that,” I muttered, as the doors sealed shut behind me.
Icarus, the skinnier boy, was hunched over and sitting on the edge of his medical cylinder. A snaking cord was attached to the base of their necks from behind, and even if most of them were out cold, it meant that Thalia was still awake, still sitting on her bed and occasionally glancing at a wheezing Rhea. “It’s no problem,” he said, his voice still rattling in his throat. “I don’t mind having to get up if it means we’re getting another chance at life.”
“What are these things, anyway?” I said. “Like some kind of hospital bed?”
He tilted his head, then nodded. “I guess that would be the equivalent, but once the screens are closed over them, they are able to regenerate lost muscle fibre, heal open wounds, perform surgeries…their capabilities are almost endless, but most of those actions also require a lot of clearance that we don’t have, and energy we lack.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I’ll make sure to carry more half-dead half-breeds with me next time.”
He stilled, stiffening even more than before. “Ah,” he said. “Yes, the Cooling Chamber. It wasn’t—”
“Don’t bother,” I said, waving my hand as I folded my arms. “The humans killed them, anyway. Maybe it was a good thing putting them out of their misery.” Doesn’t mean we’re good, though. “So how long is this gonna take for you guys to heal and get the rest of the machines out there working? I know you almost kicked it, but I’ve done my end of the deal, and now it’s your turn, too. And I don’t think I can wait for very long down here either.”
“You wish to leave so quickly? Why?” Thalia asked.
“A superhero has to do superhero things all over the place.” I shrugged. “Can’t stay here forever.”
And sure, maybe that gods-forsaken Kaiju was coming here as well and I didn’t want them dealing with it in this state, because dead people aren’t very good at turning on machines and saving the world. I was still sick to my stomach with dread, knowing it was getting closer and closer, forcing itself through these endless tunnels, on my scent and shuddering and shaking and vomiting up its own organs in disgusting glee as it neared me. It was Caitlyn who glanced at me, and it was her quick look that made me stop digging my fingernails into my bicep.
“Thank you,” came the gravelly words from the larger boy. He was lying on his side, facing away.
“Not long,” Icarus said. “But as it stands, these machines are acting as secondary temporary bodies. They’ll ease our pain and make sure we don’t decay, but it’s only slowing our deaths. We can’t survive for long like this.”
“In short, and from what I understand,” Caitlyn said. “They require a sample of your blood.”
Icarus must have seen the shift of mood on my face, because he quickly added: “We learnt that it’s not just the drug or chemical you claim that’s affecting us this way. We were already weakened before any of this took place, and at first we hypothesized that the teleportation here drained us of our abilities and strength, but our bodies began to ache and our minds began to blur.” He slowly stood up, despite what the girl in the bed next to him was telling him to do, which was not to chance passing out and knocking his skull against the pod. He had a screen in his hands, one I couldn’t read anyway, but one he chose to show me. “On the right, that’s the decay of one of my cells that was taken and preserved before we arrived.” He swiped. “This, however, is what it looks like once we arrived here, and this was long before anything was introduced to my bloodstream by the humans who came.”
I couldn’t understand the scribbled annotations he had taken down around the tiny cells, but the decay chewing away at the cells was gruesomely clear in my hands. In some ways, it looked like cancer was eating it. A slow rotting decay that was taking one cell after the other, meticulous, slow, deadly, and hungering for more.
And in some ways, it kinda looked like the vials of my blackening blood Frankie had shown me.
“The blood samples of all Unranked Legionnaires are taken before leaving Arkath,” the smaller girl said, resting on her elbow. “It’s–no offense, as you say—done to maintain and ensure that we’re still pure-blooded.”
“And just in case we encounter any foreign environments or creatures that affect us, it gets logged, and that data then gets sent back home.” Icarus set down the screen, sitting beside it with a hand firmly on the side of the pod to keep his balance. “From there, samples are created, cures are made, and thus, we can prepare for anything.”
My brow furrowed. “I thought we could, you know, adapt to anything.”
“Which is true,” Icarus said. “But having Legionnaires adapt to foreign environments even before they have been introduced to it means that the Conquest can continue without hesitation of sickness and diseases.”
Yeah, that still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
“But we’ve been here for years, maybe hundreds or thousands if what the humans tell is right,” I said. “And you’re telling me that not a single cure to whatever’s happening to you guys ‘cause of Earth was ever sent back?”
Silence from all of them, because the answer had dawned on them first a long time ago.
Dad had something to do with that, and if nothing had been left back on that planet, then several others had probably done something, too. Is that why they hadn’t come here yet? Because they knew something would happen if they did? Gods, that just made a lot more sense to me now. I had wondered why there weren’t any Legionnaires down here, why not a single ranking officer was here, either. These guys had been sent down here, not because they probably wanted to, but because they’d been forced to. Holy shit, I thought. Whether they knew it or not, these guys were the skeleton crew. The ones who were supposed to die, to get sick, so that everyone else on their way wouldn’t have to bother with any of it. But that thought just left me looking at one person in particular.
“Your father,” Rhea wheezed, turning her head very, very slowly to face me, “killed us all.”
“The Emperor probably did that first,” I muttered.
“He sent us,” she said, still wheezing, still panting as she sat up, “because we’re capable.”
“He sent you down here to die so he can use your blood to strengthen the others. You’re a sacrifice.”
“Icarus,” Rhea spat. He turned quickly, as if given an order. “I’m not taking the blood from a half-breed, no less one like her. Caitlyn’s blood would work just fine. There’s no point in wasting time with my cousin right now.”
“You’re dying, and I saved you, and you’re still being difficult?”
“I saw the look on your face,” she said, glaring. “You would never let your blood be taken.”
It had been stolen before, so she was right about that.
The bigger guy, still facing away from us all, quietly said, “If she wanted us dead, she would not have turned the darkness so bright for us. She would have left us here to rot and die.” He turned his head to look at me, the jagged fleshy scars on his back twisting. “You are no Legionnaire, but you wear your father’s crest, and your father was the reason I lived several times over when I shouldn’t have. He is the reason both Thalia and I survived the Kelnak Divide, and the reason we can sit here and look you in the eyes. Whatever your judgment of us, fine. Who am I to talk but a slave of war?” He turned back around, facing away. “But if the grass below us on the cavern floor is rumored to cover the entirety of your planet, Ry’ee, then it would be an honor to walk through fields of it.”
Silence prevailed for a very long time, and when I glanced at Thalia, she looked away, because Rhea was still behind her, still close enough to hear the hand that slowly rose and rapped two fingers just over her heart.
It was a simple gesture, but one that meant loyalty. Where you go, I’ll go, ‘cause I know that even if death came for both of us, it wouldn’t get so much as a chance in hell to make me think we could not survive. Our language was a little different, smooth like honey one moment, bitter like a throat full of hot gasoline the next. But there were also gestures, movements, things that meant nothing to a human, but almost everything to us, because our bodies were all we really had for some of us. Thalia, for one, had probably been bred for war and nothing else. Her people were kind of like the humans, if only bigger, not smarter, but built for war and born on a planet that made the deepest pits of any Alternate Realm look like a walk through a candy store. She was loyalty, she was power, and most importantly, for a fact, she had seen more war and death and chaos than Rhea probably had.
So, going by that thinking, there was a ranking here, and Rhea was almost bottom rung.
She’s just got a mouth and a reputation.
I sighed a little, then came to a conclusion that would have made Ceaser salivate.
“Fine,” I said to Icarus. “You need my blood, right?”
He nodded slowly. “Your body has had nearly two decades to beat any human illnesses.”
“And you’re sure it’s gonna heal you and not kill you?”
“There’s a chance, yes, that it might kill us.”
“Listen, if there’s another way—”
“There are other ways, other methods,” Rhea said, sweat glistening on her face. “We must—”
“Speak out of turn, Rhea, and you’ll be bedridden soon,” the larger boy said. Man, was a better word to use, because he must’ve been just slightly older than me. “As of now, she outranks you, so give her time first.”
“Outranks me?” she said shrilly. “On what grounds do you—”
“Rhea,” Thalia said softly. She faltered. “She has saved us, and she has cared for us, and now she will grant us new life with her own blood. I may not be full-blooded, but I also understand that, if she were, you would have again been punished for speaking out of turn. On my planet, she would have received Gnar’s Blessings tenfold. You, however,”—and now Thalia’s voice softened, and Rhea’s shoulders relaxed just a little—“would be executed.”
Rhea looked at me, and every sick, vile little thought stewing in her mind didn’t pass her lips.
I couldn’t help but smile, because that’s what heroes did when they were being heroic, right?
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s make this quick. Don’t want you guys dying on false hope.”