This was probably going to be the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I would rather fight Cadaver again than do this. Hell, give me next dibs with the Kaiju that Adam killed. There were still chunks of the thing spread out all over the city, with cleanup crews doing their best to dissect and section away the meat and the bones away from the public as fast as possible. See, I could probably do that tonight instead. Go and help the Damage Control boys with their heroics, even if Cassie would probably piss herself insane if I got even a glimmer of the news’ attention right now. I guess that ship already sailed, I thought, walking past a large display of TVs in a storefront. Look mom, I’m on the news. Olympia was back, and like moths to light, almost everyone I passed on the street was either looking at their phones, at the screens in store fronts, and even in the occasional newspaper being sold in several corner stores.

It’s only been a few hours since I came back, and Adam saving the city was seemingly old news.

Any other day, and I’d be in my costume, skimming the sky, screwing with the media as I gave them nothing at all to use in their articles except for a smile and a wink. I’ll be honest with you right now and say a very tiny part of myself wanted to revel in the attention. Not tonight. I had something important I needed to get done.

With a hoodie underneath my varsity jacket, a heavy, lump backpack, jeans and sneakers that were only getting more and more wet in the rainfall, I looked like just another kid. Down on their luck, lost everything in the Kaiju fight. I could see so many of them around this part of the city. In the boroughs that are just statistics to the people who were already throwing their Christmas parties in the Upper West. They’re sitting on street corners, on curbs and in alleyways, ghastly little shadows so pale and thin and wet that they looked like some freakish things that Frankie would sew together from any spare body parts she could find. And, for once in my life, I felt sick.

I didn’t know what it was, or why my gut felt so heavy walking past their outstretched hands, but…

Being a superhero meant playing a game with guilt every other day. You see someone get hurt and your first thought is always gonna be, I should have been there. Adam might have saved the city, but come on, look at this place. At the destroyed buildings and crumbling roads, at the entire blocks worth of destruction and the back alley hospitals I could smell festering with all kinds of diseases right now. The city was just getting worse. Sicker.

The big bad might have been defeated, but New Olympus had lost a bit of its shine.

Or maybe I was too high up in the sky to realize it never really had it.

As I waited for the light to go red so I could cross the street, a girl my age tugged my sleeve. There were five other people waiting around me, all of us getting pelted with the rain, waiting for the traffic to finally ease, but none of them were paying attention to her. She was like a shadow that went from person to person, finally landing on me. I had watched them ignore her, check their phones or just keep listening to music or watch the rain instead. I didn’t have anything to give her, and I would have, really, I would have—but I guessed that wasn’t an excuse.

And then she tugged my sleeve again, making me look at her. She was hunched over a little, with a black eye and busted lip, her hair drenched and wet. My lips thinned when I saw the smaller boy clutching to her hoodie, his eyes on the ground at my feet. In some bitter kind of irony, the little kid was wearing a red and blue Olympia hoodie. Tattered, torn, old, and filthy, smelling like the days these two had probably been wandering around here.

“This isn’t the time,” Ava mumbled from my backpack, her voice muffled. “You said one stop, and—”

Ava had a pretty good set of eyes for someone whose head was in a bag. I didn’t care, though.

“Please,” the girl whispered, her one good eye on me. There was some kind of contempt in that eye, some kind of glistening envy that twinkled in her irises. But that was desperation, helplessness. These two didn’t care that Olympia had gotten back from her sudden disappearance, and nor did they really care that Adam had just saved the city either. Zeus is back! was yesterday’s news to someone trying to get their stomach to stop aching with hunger today. What good was an Adam billboard ever going to do for her? “If you’ve got anything to spare, anything at all, I’d really appreciate it. Even a dollar. I’ll work, and…I’ll…I’ll even do anything you want, too.”

She swallowed and winced, trying to smile, but all I saw were missing teeth and bleeding gums.

“The Rylee I knew wouldn’t have cared right now. Bigger problems, remember? Let’s get this moving!”

The light finally turned red, shading the glistening asphalt and the shiny streets a deep crimson.

I sighed a little, then turned to the girl. She backed away a little, the same hand she’d used to tug at my clothes being raised in front of her, like I was gonna hurt her or grab her, and judging by the bruises on her throat…

“You guys don’t mind soup, right?” I asked them. The boy lifted his head to look at me. “I think it might be chicken, but she’s also got this weird green stew mix. Gnarly stuff. But it’s not that bad at the end of the day.”

She stared at me, then nodded once, slowly, then nodded again. She put the boy in front of her. “He…he can eat first. I don’t mind anything else. Just, uhm, get him back to me? I’ll be here. Just…please get him full.”

“Don’t you also want to eat?” I asked her.

She nodded, then shook her head. “We need the money. I have work that I sometimes do, and—”

I put my hand on her shoulder and shook her a little. “Between you and me, I think you deserve the day off.” I jerked my head for her to follow me across the road. She stood there on the street, staring at me through the gloomy downpour. Cars beeped and taxi drivers yelled, and I gestured for her to follow me, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t used to having people clinging to me as they crossed the street, let alone a little kid who wouldn’t stop staring at me. It took her brother holding my hand for her to follow me across the road. She hung back a little, her head still low, her hand close to her brother, maybe because she was afraid I was lying, maybe because she thought I was going to try to run off with her brother. But it didn’t take long before I had more than just two people with me.

It started as a curious trickle of people, like gathering stray cats from alleyways. Maybe it was my face or something in my eyes, but I had blue contact lenses on, dampening as much of the glow in my eyes as possible. Right now, I just looked like Rylee Addams. Nobody that special. Then more of them got dragged along by their friends, even if they didn’t particularly want to. Ava kept grumbling in my backpack, but I ignored her, because she wasn’t in any kind of position to shove me along on whatever quest she had in mind anymore. I was in control now.

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Even if that meant I had dozens of people following me curiously.

I only found out how big the crowd following me was when I stopped at another junction, because suddenly, there were a lot more than just five people wanting to cross the road, but about twenty. What the hell am I, some kind of sheep dog? A lot of them were looking at me through their hair or from just underneath the brim of their hoodies and hats. When I glanced at them, they quickly looked away, like they were embarrassed for even being here. A lot of these kids were younger than me, or somewhere around my age. The few older than me hung around the back, their heads the lowest and their hands deepest in their pockets. The first girl I had met was also looking at the crowd, just as stunned, because when she looked at me, she smiled again, lips still tightly pressed together before she looked away, too. That’s when I slowly started noticing the shining lights illuminating us.

It was from a larger tv screen behind a reinforced store window. Fewer people around this part of the city were brave enough to stand and gawk, but as we waited for the red light to turn on, all I could do was stare at the screen. Every so often it would douse us all in different colors. Red, blue, white, and the brightest of all: gold.

Because that was me in the window’s reflection and passed that to the broadcast showing Olympia. Some special segment that flipped through pictures and videos, all from phones and cameras, of me skimming through the sky and past the sky scrapers, a dart of golden light that would vanish from view just as quickly as it would appear.

And then, finally, a picture of me. The picture of me. Grinning and in costume, crouched, just about to fly. Ready to take off as a crowd of people had huddled around me. I couldn’t even remember when that was taken. All the banner underneath the picture read over and over again was: She’s Back. The Golden Girl Shines Once More.

My heart was slow in my chest, thumping hard against my ribcage. Turns out they do kinda care, Ry.

I looked back at the girl standing beside me, her eyes shining with the glow from the TV screen. “You know,” she whispered, voice catching a little, stuttering for a moment. “You look a lot like Olympia, by the way.”

“If we didn’t know any better,” an older boy said quietly, “you probably are.”

I swallowed past the lump in my throat and shrugged. “Just a coincidence.”

“E-even if you’re not,” the girl whispered. “Thanks for coming back.”

“I…Well, she wasn’t a great superhero anyway,” I said. “Didn’t really help a lot of people either.”

“She was always here, though,” another boy with darker skin said. “Scared off the bad guys.”

“So yeah,” the other boy said. “Not bad. She’s, you know, pretty cool or whatever.” The other boys shoved him a little, making fun of him until he started blushing. I couldn’t help but smile and turn back to face the street.

The little boy holding onto my fingers squeezed them a little tighter, and I made a spark light up his face. Just enough juice to make him tense and then look up at me. I winked as the light turned red, making him gasp.

There was a soup kitchen nestled amongst the smoke-smothered apartment buildings close to the industrial sides of the city. The stores were squatting around here, close to the ground as if they’re ducking from the smoke drifting in the sky. It’s a place I’ve only ever seen through pictures, and once before high, high up in the sky a few years ago. By the time I got there, though, it was full enough for some people to be sitting outside the kitchen, the rain now a thing of the past. Still cold enough to keep our breaths steaming around us like smoke of our own, but as soon as the smell of food and bread reached their noses, I was just a bystander to the steady flowing rush of kids too hungry to think straight. At least, until they got to the large glass doors and collectively paused, stopping short of entering.

So I did them all a favor and pushed the doors open for them, taking away whatever thought they had that they weren’t welcome around here. And c’mon, the place was huge. Large enough for them all to find places to sit.

For all I knew, this was probably the warmest place they’d been since before the Kaiju attack.

The little boy that had clung to my fingers seemingly didn’t want to let go yet. He stared at the people ladling out stew and handing out bread, at the forty or so other people already eating, hunched over bowls and plates. Neither him nor his sister took a step forward, not until I found a place for them to sit and got them food. The hard part of my night was about to get a lot harder, and my stomach was in knots as I watched the siblings wolf down the food in front of them. Maybe a little too fast, because the boy started hacking up a cough that ended up with him in a laughing fit because his sister made a face at him. I ruffled his hair and stood up, nervous as hell.

“Y-you’re leaving?” the girl asked me. Her face slowly dropped, then she shook her head. “Sorry. I—”

“Hey, you know that old coffee place near the boardwalk?” I asked her. “There used to be comics there.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t think I’d be allowed in there.”

“Just knock on the door and ask for Rylee. If I’m not there, just tell the old guy where you’ll be.” I smiled and offered her a fist, which she tentatively bumped, and now she was the one fighting off a smile. “I’ll find you.”

“Thank you, Olympia,” the little boy said, his mouth full of soupy bread.

It made me pause, and not just me, but my heart, too. I looked at him.

And he looked at me, grinning so wide that soup dribbled down his chin. I shook my head and ruffled his messy hair, then asked, “I guess you’ve got a nickname for me, since I’m not her, you know. But what are yours?”

“Amanda,” the girl said. “And he’s Bryce.”

“And you two are great,” I said. “If you need a job, just stick around here, alright?”

“Oh. I…uhm, I’d need somewhere away from Bryce to…well—”

“Amanda,” I said, leaning across the table and patting the back of her hand. “You’ll be fine, I promise.”

Something on her face hardened that little bit more, and a part of me figured that it probably wasn’t the first time that she’d heard those words come out of someone’s mouth. I couldn’t do much about that right now, or anything to the people who’d said those words to her as they’d taken her into some filthy little apartment, and I had already broken far too many promises to count, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt recently, it’s that I’m stupid. Not stupid stupid, but stupid in the way that I probably don’t know when to give up. I’m a sucker for the hero stuff.

So I’d just have to try again this time, and do a much better job.

It’s what Rhea deserved from me, anyway.

I left her smiling into her bowl of soup, the faintest of tears shining on her cheeks getting hurriedly wiped away on the back of her gloved hand. The rest of the kids might have been wet and reeked of the streets of Lower Olympus, but who cared, really? I mean, Rhea would have said… But that wasn’t the point of me coming here. I shook my head a little and headed into the kitchen, or I would have if a burly guy serving up soup didn’t stop me in my tracks. I figured it would happen eventually. I looked just as tired and wet, smelling of sweat and grime, just like the dozens of people chattering behind me. This time, when my stomach tensed, it wasn’t because of being afraid.

It was because I just heard a voice that was probably going to chew me out very soon.

“Hey, kid, I know you might be hungry, but you’ve gotta eat with everyone else. Just a policy,” he said.

I didn’t move when he gently tried to turn me around. I doubt even a fist to the face from Cherry could.

The door behind him opened, briefly letting the steam and the laughter and the overwhelming smells of simmering stew and boiling soup wash over me in a sticky, humid wave. Then a girl wearing a purple bandanna paused at the door, her hair tied back and her lips still pulled in a smile as she carried a tray of freshly baked bread in her arms. The smile dropped, and she would have probably dropped the tray of hot as well if I hadn’t just caught it.

“Hey, Em,” I said, smiling nervously, handing the tray to the guy beside us. “Long time no see.”