I didn’t have much to say to Caitlyn, and the conversation was as silent as the cavern felt. Her first thought was the world and all the tech it was going to miss out on, and for a brief moment, a flash of heat washed over me. Then I sighed and looked away, grunted as I watched her stand still for a moment in the ruins of everything surrounding us.
There was no reason for either of us to stay here now. I didn’t understand how these machines worked, and Caitlyn’s plan to save the world was bleeding into the same metal that was meant to save humanity. But I couldn’t think about that. Couldn’t think about much, anyway. My body was in ruins, and my costume was as good as done for now. I was missing a sleeve, and the one that was still here clung to my body because of the bloody cuts sticking it to my skin. My symbol was shredded and gone, and so were most of the parts that covered my torso, but I just didn’t care. I did not freaking care. Losing was part of the game, I knew that much. But this was…new. I had done the whole hostage thing before and came out with a win. I got all those kids out safely, as well as two villains, too.
And now I was standing here on this grass, wondering what the hell I did wrong. But that was easy.
The answer was everything.
Pitying myself was only gonna take me so far, though, and Caitlyn knew that. She told me that she’d leave, that this place was still valuable, and she’d keep watch over it, but…there was nothing left for her here, or even in New Olympus for that matter. Her father was either dead or missing. The Jericho Triad was a memory. Her home was a pile of rubble, or a den for drugs and sex for people who wanted to party in the ruins of an ex-villain’s hideout.
Her sister was MIA, and when I asked her what she’d do about Ava, she said, “Why bother?”
Not because there was nothing left, I figured, from the tone in her voice. But because Ava was so far below so many other things on the list of her priorities that she would only ever deal with her if they ever crossed paths.
That almost made two of us. The pit inside my stomach was only growing the longer I was here, my chest getting tighter and my mind filling with sounds and smells I was trying to block out. I needed to get out of here.
“I have friends,” Caitlyn said to me, grabbing my attention, “that might help with some of this.”
I paused before I could fully walk away from her, then turned around. “Are you insane?”
“They’re people I can trust,” she said softly. “People who won’t know what this machinery really does, or might not understand what it can fully do. But what they can do is make sure that it fulfills some of its purpose.”
I stared at her, weighing my options. I might be tired, exhausted to the bone, but not stupid. “Caitlyn.”
She raised her hands defensively. “If you don’t want me to, fine. But just know that someone else will find this technology sooner or later, and Caesar knows where this place is. With your electricity already powering it…”
Then I’m just asking for something bad to happen.
I groaned silently and massaged my temples, then came to a decision I hoped I wouldn’t regret. “Fine. But on the condition that you don’t leave this place unattended, and you make sure that if any of Caesar’s people come down here, you tell me. I don’t care if you’ve got to send Daisy pouring out of my shower head whilst I’m in there, you tell me, because I’m very tired of him. Very, very tired of him. And I swear if you’re lying to me right now—”
“I’ve got no reason to,” she said. “We’re in the same position. Slightly powerless, maybe helpless.” She sat on a short outcrop of stone jutting out of the ground, wincing as she did. “But not hopeless. We still have that.”
“Who are these friends of yours, anyway?” I asked her.
She smiled tiredly, looking through her locs. “The kind of people who want to see the world get safer.”
New Olympus was deathly quiet, and that’s what struck me as weird the most. As I crawled out of a manhole, reeking of blood and guts and so many other things that I scared off the gang of cats prowling in the alley beside me, I was met with rainfall and silence. Water that fell from the sky like someone had left the shower on, letting it run until the water was cold and the air was crispy. The quiet, though, felt like a full stop. Like the city had finally decided, in its hundreds of years, that it should finally give itself a break from making so much chaotic noise.
And I stood there in that alleyway for several minutes, leaning against a grimy brick wall, looking out onto a street that was all but empty except for the insides of restaurants, coffee stores and hair salons. Perfectly, painfully normal, like nothing ever happened. A clap of thunder made me flinch and my ears ring, then came the flash of lightning and the burst of white that carved through the sky. That’s when I first saw it, this giant mural above me on the wall. I backed away slightly, stumbling into several trash cans, making them clatter to the ground and roll over.
I had expected to see something about Olympia, Cleopatra, or Zeus, or any one of the other Olympians.
Instead, it was a rain-soaked mural of Adam, and he was in costume. Not a suit and tie.
But in pure white and silver, with a torn cape that billowed past him. It made me pause. Freeze. With his jaw, his eyes, and this look on his face that reeked of arrogance, he looked so much like dad that I wanted to…
I didn’t know, because the rest of the mural was of some creature lying in sloppy mounds of meat behind him. Not a touch of blood on his hands or his chest or his face, and not even the golden symbol on his chest, either.
As if him just being here in this city meant that the monster had disintegrated into gore all by itself.
I could barely hold myself upright in the falling rain. It glued my hair to my face and my tattered costume to my shaking frame. I clutched onto the vial, onto this warm liquid that sloshed and slightly glowed. I stared at the grafiti, at this paint work that lorded over me, his eyes not even looking down, but upward, as if I wasn’t worth looking at, as if I wasn’t there to look at in the first place, just like all the rest of the murals that the humans had put up of dad. Never looking ahead or down, but upward, because that’s what it means to be a hero. You keep looking upward, because I’m sure as all hell that’s where you’ll find your hope. Fuck sake, I thought, staggering onto the street, walked a little hunched past stores and restaurants filled with people who silenced when I passed by them.
I heard a bell jingle behind me, and then rushing footsteps splashing through puddles. And not only one pair of feet, and not only one voice filling the formerly silent street.. “Wait!” a voice cried. “Are you…No way.”
“I thought she was dead.”
“So now she shows up?”
I glanced over my shoulder, and hey, look at that, I’d gotten them out into the freezing cold. Some of them with umbrellas, and more than enough of them with their phones out. I stared at them, looked at each of them, and I might have been flattered if I wasn’t clinging with every fiber of my being to consciousness. “Yeah, it’s me,” I said tiredly, waving my hand around. “Olympia, in the flesh. Sorry I look like shit. Nearly died again, but I doubt—”
A woman stepped out of the crowd, holding a large black umbrella over her. She was young, maybe just a few years older than me, with rosy cheeks and large circular glasses. Her breaths were mist as they poured out of her mouth, as if she was panting just being next to me. I straightened a little as she held out the umbrella toward me.
Does she…does she want me to take it?
“I…” I shook my head and gently pushed her hand away, making sure she wasn’t dousing herself in rain.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked me, stepping forward.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said, half-smiling. “I’m Olympia.”
She stared at me, they all did, for several silent seconds, as several phones lowered, revealing faces that were thin-lipped and pinched. Why are they looking at me this way? I turned around slowly, watching as the crowd got larger and the people on the street began muttering amongst themselves. They didn’t get close to me, but they were close enough for the bottom of their shoes to shine with the blood getting washed off my body. Oh, I thought, glancing at my sides, my arms, my thighs and my back in the reflection of a store window. There were deep gouges running along my back, tiny holes that littered my thighs and torso. They were healing, but they were still bleeding. What doesn’t kill us, remember? I would be fine in a couple of hours. Maybe not strong enough to fight for another week, in all honesty, but…what’s the matter? They’d all seen me bleed before, hadn’t they? I’d spat blood and knuckled it away, gotten bathed in it, but they’d never seen the times after the fight had happened.
The nights that getting my suit off would take nearly two hours, just because it hurt to peel it off. The days where I’d lie there on my apartment floor, panting in the sunlight coming through the window, because I couldn’t.
Their heroes aren’t meant to look like this, I thought. Hell, my brother looked perfect to the public.
It wasn’t just the mural, but also the posters, the billboards. Adam’s face was everywhere. With that same tight smile, those same shiny eyes, and in that costume that was sickeningly close to looking just like Zeus’ had.
Coming to think of it, I had never looked like this in public. Not in front of so many people, either.
The one time I save the world, and I look like I just lost.
But I also didn’t really feel like I’d won much of anything.
Very slowly, I turned around, facing the crowd. I gave them as best a smile I could and shrugged. I hovered, then landed back down onto the ground, stumbling, my head woozy, and getting caught by a man with bright orange hair. I didn’t want to, my first reaction was to push him off, because I didn’t need some human’s help to stand up, but my hand was on his forearm, and his hand was on my shoulder. I hadn’t fallen to the ground. Not yet. I was bent and I was feeling like I’d collapse any second now, but he didn’t let me. Another guy helped me straighten, and a young woman handed me the vial. I hadn’t even realized I dropped it. Get your head in the freaking game, Ry.
“Hey,” the orange-haired guy said. “Someone call—”
“No,” I said, finding, somehow, enough strength to hover. “An ambulance? Come on. I’m a superhero.”
They all stared up at me, and one by one, the phones that were still up lowered. Under the glow of the yellow street lights and the stores either side of the street, their faces were illuminated by soft colors. It made their eyes watery, if just for a moment in the rain. Adam was still above me, right there on a flashing billboard that turned everything white or silver or gold for brief periods, but barely anybody paid it any attention. Did I miss something?
Nobody gave me an answer, so I hovered a little higher, needing to leave.
Then, I heard a voice call out: “We’re glad you’re back!”
And I’ll admit that I paused, just for a second, as the pit in my gut stopped widening. I swallowed bitter saliva, then shot into the sky. Something felt off. So terribly wrong. The whole city was calm, quiet, docile. But there were entire city blocks that just didn’t exist anymore. Demolition rigs chartered away slabs of rubble. Entire roads were nothing but dirt side tracks still being filled in with asphalt. The further I flew across the city, the more destruction I saw. Large craters the size of several semi-trucks pock-marked the city, like gunshot wounds in the city’s flesh. A girl is gone for five minutes, and everything is weird. More than weird. Not to mention the dock, which was a crumbling mass floating off into the waters. Containers lay half-sunken in the water, rotting away.
But there was peace, and there was quiet, and the SDU had answers for me that I needed right now.
Because if I missed something this bad, then shouldn’t everyone hate me? I was getting used to being lied to and yelled at or simply looked down on by the general public for making such a mess whenever I tried to help them out. I owned up to some of that. I wasn’t the cleanest, most precise superhero in the world. But look at this place. At the missing skyscrapers and the empty streets. The ocean filled with rubble, and the silence that hung over so much of it. New Olympus had never been so quiet in my entire life. It almost made my skin crawl listening to it.
And again and again, right where the demolition of decrepit buildings was happening, Adam’s face would make the entire work site glow with a billboard put up right next to it. The city was always a mix and match of so many different colors it could give you a headache. Neon reds and soft yellows, bright white and flickering blue.
But now it was this glaring harsh white light making the nighttime glow, like the surgical light above an operating table. Maybe it was the rain, maybe it was the wind up here, but New Olympus felt freezing cold.
Nothing close to what I had left it like.
It turned out that I was still the SDU’s favorite little secret, because after I cleaned up, and they gave me a new pair of clothes to wear (to my surprise, they fit my perfectly), they told me to wait in a similar room to the one that I had first been brought into when they hired me. Except this time, they brought me two boxes of pizza, a large cola, and a phone to use as I waited for Overseer Two to get here. I finished both pizzas in less than five minutes, and half the cold was drunk before I barely got the cap off. After showering and getting my wounds cleaned, I felt sleepy. Felt like the weight of everything from the past several months since summer started had finally gotten the better of me.
But the phone kept me lucid and awake, but I left it there on the corner of the table. I wouldn’t really know who to start with or who I should even bother with, either. Mom, despite our many, many, many problems, deserved at least to know that I was somewhat alive. Michael and Grant, and Emelia too, also needed to know that I haven't died yet either. But my first thought, admittedly, went to Bianca. I knew her number off head, and when curiosity got the better of me, and I checked through the phone’s contacts, it was saved right there in the call logs, too.
I had shut the phone down before I could do anything stupid. Superhero-ing first, then real life.
Luckily, Overseer Two made sure that I couldn’t be Rylee for at least another few hours when he phased into existence on the other side of the table. As ever, he wore a scarf and reflective sunglasses, a suit that could probably buy me a new costume, and leather-gloved hands he kept firmly behind his back. But he was smiling.
And that made me uncomfortable, because it was thin, and didn’t reach his cheeks.
But he was smiling.
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“If our relationship was any more cordial, I would have shaken your hand,” he said, in what I guessed was his best way of saying he missed me. “I understand very well that there are many, many things you need to know—”
“How’s Bianca?” I asked, because my tongue was moving faster than a brain that was barely functioning.
He tilted his head and glanced at the phone, then back at me. “Safe,” he said. “Her track performances have been inconsistent, and her coach would much rather she gets her priorities straightened. She has skipped multiple early morning practice sessions to instead be around one Katie Clear. Her mother isn’t happy about it, and there is friction at home. She’s contacted you several times, but you’ve not been available. We don’t access the messages.”
Again I’m hearing that name, I thought, tapping my finger against the table, trying not to feel guilty that I hadn’t been there to help her through whatever it was that was screwing her up. Is Katie some kind of…Nevermind.
“Although,” he said. “She did have a major infection that put her in the hospital.”
I froze, staring at him. “What? When did that—”
“She’s fine now,” he said, ever deadpan. “It happened after a party on the night of October 26th.”
I relaxed into the metal seat, then paused again. “But…don’t you mean September 26th?”
Overseer Two shook his head slightly. He didn’t speak for a moment, as if he was trying to choose the right words to say right now, only making my heart thump harder against my chest. “Our team declared that we should take this in steps, your reintroduction into New Olympus. Our first phase consisted of medical aid if you needed—”
I stood up, pushing the chair backward, suddenly awake. “What do you mean reintroduction?”
He sighed through his nose, then cleared his throat. “You’ve been missing for nearly two months.”
I stared at him, through those dark blue lenses and into those pale white orbs. The room was silent, and so was my heart, skipping so many beats I thought I would pass out. “What…” I breathed out. “Two freaking months?”
“Yes,” he said. “November came to an end yesterday. Happy Holidays, indeed, with your return.”
“What the fuck?!” I said, forcing both my hands through my hair and turning around, because I couldn’t face him at that moment, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to. He said nothing as I paced the large room, my bare feet slapping against the floor until I spun around again and asked, “Then what the hell happened to the city? What about the Kaiju?” I gestured to the blue vial sitting on the table next to balled up napkins. “Oh, and I forgot to tell you that I got my hands on a godsdamned cure for that thing, too! So…forget everything else. Get that out and—”
“The Kaiju is dead,” he said, and that felt like Cadaver had punched me in the chest again, sapping the air right out of my lungs. “And the virus is now no longer an epidemic, but a mild sickness that can be treated with as much as a tablet in any convenience store around the corner.” He held out his hand, and a tiny golden-brown tab appeared on his palm. He placed it on the table with a clack. “And all thanks to Cassandra Blackwood and her pharmaceutical company, who kept the patent, but made the drug so cheap that Lower Olympians can buy it in bulk if they so wish to. Miss Blackwood is now the world’s greatest asset, because a human just saved them all for free.”
I stood there with my arms hanging limply by my sides, numb. “What?”
Overseer Two clasped his hands behind his back again, and I heard them tighten. “We…struggled to find a cure that wouldn’t result in death or comatose states of decay. Blackwood Pharma created one within a month.”
I slowly walked toward him and pressed my palms flat against the table. “What?”
“Rylee,” he said softly. “There’s nothing more that I can say except it wasn’t your—”
I held up my hand and shut my eyes. I swayed on my feet, fought hard to breathe.
Rhea.
I lowered my hand and gripped onto the metal chair, digging my fingers into it.
Cousin.
The chair slammed hard into the ceiling. So hard that it stuck up there into the burning light fixtures.
Overseer Two stood unfazed as sparks doused both of us. He watched me pant. Watched as I swore and screamed and finally just…stopped. I stood in front of the table opposite him, my eyes still shut, the buzzing sound of electricity humming above us background noise to the blood in my ears. I slid a hand down my face, chewed my tongue, and didn’t know what to do. I stared at the tiny pill, at the golden-brown color, at the sweetness of its scent.
Gods, I didn’t even have to fucking ask, did I?
“That’s Ambrosia, isn’t it?” I whispered.
He nodded.
I laughed dryly, bitterly, and turned away from the table. What the hell, universe?
What more do you freaking want from me?
“May I ask why you had such a reaction?” he said. “I presume the cure wasn’t easy to attain.”
“Tell your boys to stop recording,” I said quietly, flatly. I glanced at him, and saw him nod, then raise his hand to signal for dead silence. I only continued after several seconds. “There was a place somewhere under the city that’s like a labyrinth. In that labyrinth were several people. People who are just like me. People like my cousin.”
He tensed, his arms falling to his sides. “Your…cousin. I assume—”
“Yeah,” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose. “But it doesn’t matter now. They’re all dead.”
Silence, then: “My condolences.”
“She was an asshole, anyway,” I said, waving him off. “She was loud and annoying and she was always trying to show everyone how strong and capable she was, but, you know, in the end she died. She would have been a pain to work with, you know? So maybe it’s a good thing. The world would have hated her because of Titan, and what kinda life would that have been, right? Everyone always hating you, even though you’re nothing like your father or anything like what he did or was.” I cleared my throat and folded my arms, not because I was cold, but to keep my hands from shaking. “And she probably heard them all getting killed one by one, and she probably fought, but…that’s just what I keep telling myself, but knowing Rhea, she would have killed that bastard first chance, too.”
He let the silence sit between us, choosing to say nothing at all, and maybe for the better.
It gave me time to blink it all away and breathe in. “Who killed the Kaiju?”
“Rylee—”
“I really, really don’t need sympathy right now.” I looked at him over my shoulder. “Please?”
“Adam,” he replied, because of course it was. “We were sure that after your fight that he wouldn't be combat ready until further notice to the public. Two weeks after you disappeared, the Kaiju attacked the city, starting in the hospitals and gathering on the streets. Five hundred casualties, a thousand more injured. Remarkable by all means for what was classified as category five in its destruction. And for once we thought that bureaucratic fiddlings wouldn’t get in the way of better judgment, but it did. The SDU focused on evacuation and nothing more. We were made immobile, because the Olympiad was given rights to this problem in meetings that spanned far, far too fucking long.” He paused, then apologized for swearing. “It was Adam, eventually, who fought the beast.”
“Wearing a costume, too?”
“And donning something similar to your father’s wear, yes.”
I sighed, and felt like all my energy slipped out of my body with it. “Do you have a dossier or something?”
“We had scheduled a debrief with you and several of our—”
“Do you have a dossier ready or not?”
Overseer Two stared at me, then nodded.
I grabbed a remaining slice of pizza and the bottle of cola as I headed for the exit. “I’m fucking beat, and there’s too much to focus on right now, so I’m gonna go home and I’m gonna fall asleep on my own bed, then I’m gonna wake up and probably read a comic book in the bathtub until I’m all wrinkly. Then I’ll have Chinese for lunch and call Emelia and catch up at a coffee place probably. You’re gonna call me a week from now, and you’ll ask me how I’ve been doing and how I’m coping, and you’re gonna pretend that you haven’t been watching me the whole time. Then we’ll get to work figuring things out. I might hate Adam, but he saved the city. Gods knows I’ve spent two months doing ab-so-lu-te-ly freaking nothing, so congrats to him.” I stopped at the door, then turned around to look at him, pointing the pizza his way. “By the way, there’s this guy called Ryan Kennedy that you should definitely get on your payroll. He knows too much to not be an asset. And…right, there’s a bunch of tech—”
“We know,” he said. “Rylee, get some rest. Your new costume and the dossier will be ready for you in about a week’s time, and even though I know you need to get yourself in order again, I expect your help. It’s just the—”
“Order of business in the superhero industry,” I muttered, biting off a chunk. “Sucks, but that’s life.”
Before I left and the doors opened behind me, I stared at the tiny tablet sitting on the table. Cassie didn’t come up with that. I knew that much at least. So thank you, mom, for making everything I’ve done mean nothing.
Because now she finally wanted to start playing hero. Priceless.
I hated to wake Dennie up this late at night, but I brought him his favorite whiskey on my way home (borrowed it, but whatever), and I couldn’t think of any other way to make him smile that big. He’d hugged me a lot tighter than I thought his frail arms were capable of doing, and I had to laugh him off me. The guy didn’t even look at the whiskey as he dragged me inside the shop and sat me down on a bar stool. The entire place was lit by the tiny yellow bulbs above the coffee stands, meaning it was just me and him. He talked, and he brewed coffee, and that’s all that happened. He didn’t ask where I had gone, or what had happened after Lucas and I had fought in my room.
He didn’t question why I had suddenly appeared almost two months later covered in scars.
All he wanted to talk about was his crazy new neighbors and the old fox that wanted to reignite a flame that burned out back in the Naughties. About this one customer who wanted to dine and dash, but trust old Dennie Heart to catch him on the back of his knees with a broomstick. And I sat there listening to him, pretending my hands didn’t shake as I lifted the coffee mug to my lips. Acting as if there wasn’t a permanent ringing in my ears that just wouldn’t leave. How my foot wouldn’t stop bouncing and how I sometimes laughed and then winced, pausing to catch my breath because the pain that just shot through my side nearly knocked me flat. He would stand there with his back opposite me as I caught my breath, pausing for a moment, then bringing me another mug.
We probably went through tomorrow’s stock, tell you that much. He said I didn’t have to come in tomorrow, and that if I wanted, hell, he could even call Bianca over here so she could hang out with me. It was sweet, I’ll be honest, because he probably knew I didn’t have the guts to call her over myself. I declined, and he shrugged, smiling at me underneath those tiny light bulbs. He stared at me, nodding as he wiped our cups.
“What?” I asked him, not stopping the smile on my lips. “Something wrong with my face?”
Dennie set the mugs back down next to the machines and leaned on the counter. “You know, kid,” he said, almost quieter than the rain beating against the windows. “I think you woulda been just fine without your powers.”
I snorted a little, and laughed, too. “Yeah, and where’s this coming from?”
He shrugged. “My eyes might be shot, but I know a superhero when I see one.”
“‘Cause of the costume and the flashy powers?”
“‘Cause New Olympus ain’t give you so much as a dime to buy new shoes for those bare feet of yours,” he said, which was almost true—I had walked back barefoot on the cold concrete. “But you still keep comin’ back.”
“Where else am I supposed to go, D?” I asked quietly. “Mom kicked me out, and I wouldn’t go to the Olympiad or their training program even if I had the cash. Olympus U does look kinda nice, but there’s also…”
“That girl you can’t seem to stop swooning over,” he said. “Somethin’ about you heroes, I swear. You can split the Earth in two if you sneeze, but get yourself a girl, and suddenly you can’t even walk straight either.”
I laughed, and honestly, it came from deep down. I raised my hands. “She’s my kryptonite, I’ll admit.”
Dennie patted my shoulder as he rounded the bar, shaking me a little. “See?” he said, walking toward the stairs that led to the rooms upstairs. “Don’t need my eyes to see why you keep coming back. You’re a lover, kid.”
“Hey!” I said, smiling. “Not for everyone, you know!”
“Still got enough in there for everyone, buck.”
I let him head into his room, hearing as he chuckled to himself. I went up to my room not that long after him, and I stood in the doorway for a while, looking at the space where my desk used to stand along the wall near the window. At the closed blinds and the neatly made bed. Dennie had gone through the hassle of putting up a few shelves to keep my comics off the ground, and won’t you look at that, sitting on my bedside table? A picture of me and him, but I had been young enough to still have those large buck teeth sticking out of my mouth as I grinned.
Mom had taken this photo. I remembered that much, and sitting down on my bed, sleep hit me like a rock, almost as if she was here to drag my duvet over me again. I remembered blacking out that way, the picture frame on my chest, my body strewn across my bed like I’d just thrown myself on it, and a line of drool snaking down my chin. But I say that because it wasn’t sleep. Not really. I had expected the exhaustion to come at me with a vengeance, a vendetta, for me ignoring it for so long. But it was just out of arm’s reach. Just out of the way ,because I kept seeing the same gory images flashing past my ears. Kept hearing the shrieking sound Cadaver had made when he started laughing. I tossed and I turned, I curled up and splayed out, and finally I gave up and opened my eyes. I glanced at my phone, and it had only been an hour. Funny. I had a week of freedom, and I couldn’t rest.
The worst part? If my costume wasn’t in bits and pieces, I would have gone and done something.
Maybe not fight someone, or hurt someone. Maybe just…gone to do something.
Not quite help a cat out of a tree, but why not, you know?
Anything to stop my mind from burning the vile image of seeing Cadaver’s blood soaked grin.
I sat upright and blew a strand of hair off my face, still tired to the bone and deeper even than that, but I had no answers for my body right now. My bed creaked as I swung my legs off of it and onto the floor, my necklace swinging as I stood up and crossed my room. I opened my closet and crouched, digging through old clothes and old bits of costumes that I hadn’t really gelled with over the years. I smiled as I saw a mask I had once wanted to wear, and the hoodie that had once been a staple of my stealth outfit. But then, at the back in a box, I found all of them.
I pulled the box out of the closet and sat on my haunches, flipping it open.
And every single one of them was there. Ever colorless, half-finished stencil of my comic book.
Got nothing better to do, I thought, picking the box up and heading to my bed. Besides, it should be easier this time around. I placed the box on my bed, and found my pencils and pens, rulers and character sheets—
My window smashed apart as something crashed through it. I sighed through my nose and shut my eyes as the wind and the rain pelted my carpet. Then my nose wrinkled as the stink of blood leapt right toward my face.
“Oh my God,” I muttered, looking at the thing on my floor, bleeding onto the clean carpet.
“Unconventional, I know, but as you can see, I’m not in the realm of reasonable action right now.”
I put down my pencil and folded away the glasses I sometimes used, mainly to just make me focus, and also because staring at my laptop screen with eyes like mine could become a pain after a while. I almost didn’t want to even bother with this right now. “Should I even ask where the hell the rest of you is, or is that too much to ask?”
Ava—well, her severed head—rolled over to face me, her gristly stump of a neck spitting blood. “That’s equally as important as you getting me back in one piece,” she said. Gods, why is it always you? “So you—”
“No,” I said. “Nuh-uh. Nope. You’re the last person I wanted to deal with. How did you even get here?”
“It doesn’t matter!” she said. “Because if you don’t help me, Bianca might get killed.”
That makes me pause, then roll her head onto her neck with my foot. “Ava, if you’re fucking with me…”
“Cross my heart and, well, I’d do it if I had hands or my torso.” Her lips thinned. “I know it seems too convenient for me to come to you right now, and I know you would much rather see me like this forever—”
“You’re finally right about something, congrats.”
“—but I’m not lying. Not about this.” She was…panting? How? Were her legs running off somewhere right now? But those weren’t the questions I needed to be asking, not if she wasn’t lying, but it was Ava we were talking about here. “But if there’s one thing I have right now, it’s the sense of mind to know that she’s been in danger for as long as you stopped being around her. Rylee, Olympia, I wouldn’t be begging you right now if I was lying, but God above, I literally can’t even run away if I’m lying to you! Bianca could be dead, very, very soon. Next week soon.”
I stared at her, wondering what my life had come to. “Who?” I asked quietly, rubbing my hands, because maybe I was wrong—maybe I do want to fight someone, hurt someone, maybe put someone in a hole somewhere.
“I’d tell you,” she said, “but you’ve got to find the rest of my body first.”
“You’re making a deal like that in this state?” I said, standing up.
If she had shoulders, she would have shrugged. “I’m the devil’s daughter, of course I am. Now what do you say? You save the girl you love, and I get my body back, and you can even keep me on your nightstand. Deal?”
Fuck me, when does it ever end?