I knew something was wrong with this place the second Ava told me it was the right one. For starters, it was a strip club along the same avenue that her guild used to be on, but was now a pile of festering rubble, pillars, and rebar she barely even mentioned. This place, though, almost looked like the Kaiju had avoided it specifically. It was an old building. The kind that filled Lower Olympus and made the streets glow purple with neon lights every night.

It also kinda had police tape crossing the front entrance, and what might be a chalk outline in the alleyway beside it, but I figured that the police must have already had a handle on that…I hoped. I was perched on the roof of a nearly empty grocery store opposite the club, leaning on its large cursive sign and watching the streets below. The attack had left everything so…silent, but I guessed a better word was afraid. Even the Upper West, all the way from here, sounded painfully silent. Not to say I’ve got a degree in marketing or whatever, but I figured this would be as good a time as any for Adam to be flying through the sky and giving people something to root for, but hey, if the guy was useless at more than just fighting, that wasn’t my problem. But still, the city had a growing unease in it.

And I felt it all the way in my gut, kind of like a rumbling sense of nausea.

Guilty, was probably the feeling, but…

I sighed and pushed off the sign, figuring I should stop wasting time lamenting on how bad I felt for not being here when the city actually needed someone to fight the big bad monster. I know they’re gonna start asking those kinds of questions eventually. Where were you when we needed you? And I wouldn’t have a proper answer.

Hell, all I had for my efforts was a few scars and a vial of glowing liquid.

“Rylee,” Ava hisses from my backpack. I paid the bag at my feet no attention. “What’s happening?”

For a second, I considered turning Ava over to the SDU. The thought sprung up out of nowhere as I stared at the strip club. At its three-story build and the broken windows and shattered glass that sprinkled the sidewalks around it. Being helped wasn’t a bad thing, I should know that by now. Overseer Two could probably give me a massive helping hand with trying to find Bianca, or explaining to me why she would be getting watched, but I stood there, thumbing the pendant on my neck, feeling the cold golden metal and swallowing bittering saliva.

The truth was that I was tired. Pretty fucking tired. When was the last time I slept?

Going by normal time, it must have been two months ago, and even before that…

Right, the day I went to see Cleopatra. I shut my eyes and held onto the raised wall of the building, and I know, I know, it was Bianca I was looking for, and it was Bianca I was trying to save, and being selfish just wasn’t part of the superhero package, was it? You lived and you died in the costume, but…Fuck it. Whatever. Fine. Still have the Triumvirate to deal with, as well as Cassie Blackwood, and Adam, too, and at this rate, I’ll be balding before I even turn twenty. Then I opened my eyes and slung my backpack over my shoulder, my hoodie around my waist and jacket hooked to my backpack. I climbed the wall and leapt off it, landing discreetly in front of the store, but nobody had any money to spare, and that meant the place had been robbed dry of anything it had, so even if I startled the old man sweeping away the glass shards outside of his store in a winless battle, I didn’t really care.

Not much traffic to avoid, either, apart from the occasional beaten yellow taxi and a Cadillac parked outside of the strip club, half on the pavement and in front of a fire hydrant. Doubt any cops around here care.

“Sister!” a voice called. I froze. Don’t know why but I did. A hand appeared beside me and thrusted a white sheet of paper into my face. The face attached to the hand was a painfully pale one, kept hidden from the sun under a large sun hat. Platinum blonde hair kept long, and feminine features that came with the masculine hitch in his voice, or theirs? I didn’t know, and again, didn’t care. “Can I just say that you bare a striking resemblance with—”

“Olympia, I know,” I said. “Try the other two million blondes. I don’t want to star in your student film.”

They chuckled and tugged at the scarf wrapped tightly around their throat, as if, despite the sun and the growing humidity, they were cold to the bone. “Whilst I am a student of our great leader, Purity—blessed be those who follow his teachings—I am simply offering you a chance through these very, very trying times in this city.”

I looked at the paper he waved in front of me again. Don’t have time for this, Ry. Out of curiosity, though, and maybe because their smile was creeping me out, and because of how many teeth appeared behind those slit-like lips, I took it and read it over, and nearly balled it up and threw it over my shoulder. It was a White Capes rally. Some kind of social event where this guy, Purity, would be headlining some kind of ceremony. For a second, I forgot these guys ever existed. I folded the paper and handed it back to them, then said, “I’m fine. Good luck—”

They forced it back into my palm and closed my fingers around it. I stood still, not liking how frigid and frail and slender their fingers felt against my skin. “Our city lies in ruin and our heroes are made to watch from their castle of steel and glass, like birds in a cage watching as the cats squabble with the mutts and tear each other to bits and pieces of blood and bone. Olympia abandoned us. Adam is a false god. The bastard creation of humanity’s ill intent to mimic the beings who have long since hidden among us.” They got closer. Their breath reeked of milk and

almonds—their tongue white and filthy. “Join us or not, but do not ignore us. Watch us. Learn from us. Grow with us and amongst our growing family. There will be order again, and you, my sister, can stand amongst the strong.”

I stared at them, into those painfully blue eyes that dug into mine. The few people on the sidewalk gave us a wide berth, hot-stepping away from the person in white as I carefully pried their fingers off my hand. Just another person who’s fallen into some kind of cult. It wouldn’t be the first I’d seen. People from the White Capes were thugs that were angry with the world for whatever reason, but they loved to brand themselves. Loved to have this odd little symbol carved into the palm of both of their hands, almost like a cross embedded into a triangle. Theirs was new. Fresh. Still pink enough to leave blood on the back of my hand as I pushed their hands against their chest. I had come across symbols like that in alleyways. On clothes. Even now, on the strip club, the door had been tagged.

The spray paint was still wet enough to dribble down the door, the neon yellow bright.

I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with cults and crazy people now, though. I was heavily betting on some kind of other underground group of superheroes who dealt in the occult to be dealing with that problem, ‘cause I was getting really tired of sticking my nose into every single problem this city had. Let someone else have their time to shine or whatever, because come on, in a city of millions, you’re telling me that I’m that important?

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

That I’ve got to handle everything from weird, to horrific, to rogue science experiments?

No!

“Yeah, listen buddy,” I said. “I don’t want to join your youth church or whatever.”

They smiled thinly. “Please, at least attend our sermon. Every Saturday night at Millman’s Church. We offer food and shelter to those who need it. Surely, someone like you wouldn’t turn a blind eye to those in need?”

I stared at them, and they only smiled back, tilting their head. “If I say yes, will you leave me alone?”

“Most certainly.”

“Then sure, now leave.”

They raised a palm, not to wave, but as if to show off how deep they had gouged at their skin. “Purity’s blessings to you and your glorious, superhuman heart!” With that, they turned away, stopping someone else to preach about the wonderful findings of their religion. I muttered under my breath and stuffed the poster into my back pocket before heading into the strip club, ducking under the police tape and slipping past the bent doors.

When I glanced over my shoulder, simply just to check, the person in white was gone, leaving nothing but the poster they had tried to hand to another pedestrian slipping into a grate not too far away from the strip club.

A city full of weirdos.

I turned and searched the floor in front of me, and gods, this place was a mess. For one, the stink of blood and bodily fluids was ripe in the air—too ripe for a place that looked this trashed. I stepped over broken tables and downed stripper poles that impaled the walls and floors, as if someone had thrown them like spears. I slowly turned, searching the ceiling, seeing the light fixtures hanging by thin, sparking wires, and the tiles that actively fell as I looked at them, crashing down beside me and sending dust into the air. I waved my hand twice, sweeping away the dust and clearing the air, and that’s when I saw the first body part. I had said something felt wrong about this place.

And that was because it felt like a graveyard.

I lifted a solid table, something that had probably once been where some of the wealthier guys would sit around and wait for the girls to come to them. Beneath it was a woman’s torso, her fishnet laced legs askew and awkward, and the rest of her paste bleeding into the carpet. I found the next body in the rafters, and the one after that a meaty mangled mess of a man and a woman that seemingly looked as if they’d been forced to be one person.

I remained crouched, looking at the abomination of organs and skin and bones and meat. This was behind the curtains, where the strippers would get dressed and dolled up with makeup. Some of the lights around the mirrors were still on, flickering a broken yellow, making the entire place feel hollow, decrepit, and so much more quiet than what this place had ever been before. I pinched my eyes, then dragged a hand down my face slowly.

Nothing, not even backstage, had been left untouched by this rampage. The curtains were shredded and the mirrors were shattered. Tables and chairs were shattered. Dead bodies and bullet casings all around. A fight had broken out not too long ago, because when I did eventually start finding guns, or the bent remains of them, the smell of gunpowder was still hot in their barrels. The police tape wasn’t official. I stood and searched the dress up department, where different costumes were now torn and shredded, covered in blood and littering the floor. Police women. Nurses. Teachers. Props, too, like batons and rulers and whips, and…there. A roll of cut police tape, too.

Someone had played a very funny joke, leaving this place in ruin like this and cordoning it off.

“Hey, Av’?” I said quietly, walking back into the main room, and left with no other option than to start looking upstairs. The stairs creaked under my feet, and I eventually resigned myself to hovering over the cascade of suited men that had been left gouged open on the red, spiraling staircases, guns beside them and faces frozen in sheer horror or pain, maybe both. “You said this was the right place, but unless you know a medium, it’s not.”

Because that means your trusted confidant would be dead somewhere around here, too.

After a few seconds worth of the silent treatment, I heard: “I’m sensing a lot of death.”

“Is the stench of gore giving it away?” I muttered, tracing my finger along the wooden bannister, through the sheen of dark red liquid that made it shine. Handprints on the wall. Claw marks gouging it open. I crouched at the top of the stairs and picked up a piece of pink fabric, because it smells…weird. Familiar. I brought it to my nose and breathed in deeply, shut my eyes and waited to get past the stink of blood, but no, I was wrong. The perfume was old, but nothing I had smelt before. I stood up and continued checking the suites, finding nothing but bedroom after bedroom of the same bloody chaos of gleeful destruction that had ravaged the entire building, inside and out.

“No,” Ava said. “I don’t have lungs to properly notice that, remember? It’s the feel of the place. I’m sure that you can feel it too, pressing against your skin, trickling into your bloodstream—you’re more powerful than you’ve ever been, and I know for a fact that it means you’re experiencing something new being here, right, Ry?”

You’re not wrong. You’re so, so not wrong.

“My friends call me that,” I said quietly. Up the next flight of stairs, and the same thing like the floor below, except with a dash of cocaine on the floor and needles that stuck out of someone’s head like the quills of a porcupine. I shut that particular door and swallowed bile. “So don’t start getting chummy. What did your informant look like? From what I’m seein’ right now, I might have stepped over a piece of their chest cavity a moment ago.”

“No,” she said. “He’s alive, or he will be very soon.”

That made me pause for two reasons.

One, because that meant her informant was probably just like her.

And two, I heard the click of a gun being cocked behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder, a hand on the office door I was about to enter. I was on the top floor. The one with the most shattered windows and the pale sunlight making the glass on the carpet shine. The wallpaper was flimsy and old, coming off the walls in drapes. Body after body along the hallway, all of them slumped and dead. Bullet casings glinted on the carpet like shards of gold, but wherever the bullets went, they hadn’t gotten their target. I looked up, and I figured that’s why I hadn’t seen this particular guy before. He was impaled halfway through the ceiling, his body kept in place with the writhing, tiny little purple maggots of the Kaiju both Adam and I had killed. My mouth soured as I looked up and tensed my jaw. My body had been sensing and feeling way too much for me to really notice the specific odd things making my spine tingle, but suddenly, that was all I could feel.

The irritation of its being alone made my skin crawl.

Still lurking around in the dark, huh?

The worms were burrowing into his wrists and legs, into his gut and into his eyes. He was a hive of them, and yet, he was still somehow alive enough to clench a gun so tightly his palm bled. But he was writhing, his face contorted in agony and his eyes screwed tightly shut. Stark naked. Bruised and bleeding and with holes in his body that let the worms and the tentacles burrow around just underneath his skin. My stomach turned. I spat on the floor.

Then I raised my hand and filled him with a burst of golden light. A bang so loud and sudden it shattered the silence and the shadows around me. Then he fell, and I caught him, letting the worms rot and die at my sneakers.

I stepped on the damned things just to make extra sure, then looked back at the ceiling where they had left him there, glued in place by their own saliva and secreted juices. They’d burned a hole right through the ceiling.

And I could hear even more of those things in the darkness above, and that left me wondering if the worms had been in the bodies I’d passed, in the mounds of corpses that had sometimes been left to attract flies in rooms. How long had these things had to embed themselves into the walls and the bodies and into the sewers, the filthy bathrooms, the and even inside of the stray cats that came looking for an easy fleshy meal?

Just for an extra, extra measure, I took a wild guess and stamped my foot on the floor, surging electricity through the building, or as far as I could. Figured. If it worked with my hands, why not with my feet? Quickly, the sounds of squelching organs in the dozens of rooms and ensuites silences, leaving me with a corpse of a man that was still clinging onto his gun defiantly, despite how hard he gritted his teeth in pain.

Then the man spasmed in my arms, shook and tensed and arched his back as if an invisible force was reaching through his chest and tugging his spine out through his ribs, and then he vomited black squirming tendrils that squelched onto the floor, splattering around me in piles. He choked, and I was forced to reach into his mouth and pull as hard as I could, dragging most of his organs out, too, along with the rest of the tentacles.

And yet, as he lay there, a sack of skin and bone in front of me, his heart still beat, and he never let go of the gun.

“By any chance,” I said to Ava. “Did the informant kinda look like your dad?”