I want you to know who I am. That means everything. The good, the bad, the ugly truths, all of it. It has to be real, and honest, and it’s very hard for me to be either of those things when I think about this time in my life.

I did awful things. I did them to survive, sure, but I don’t think that’s a mitigating factor. Sometimes I think it makes it worse. Sometimes, I chose my survival over someone else’s. If that’s not the epitome of selfishness, I don’t know what else it could be. I decided that my life was more important than theirs, and I took steps to prove it. I never tried to kill anyone, but I never pulled any punches when the chips were down, and as much as humans can be surprisingly resilient, they can also be terrifyingly fragile. Most deaths or serious injuries that result from fist fights have nothing to do with one participant’s body impacting the other—they occur when somebody falls down and hits their head. That’s it. They get knocked over, smack, darkness forever.

See? There’s me not being honest. Here I am telling you about how doing terrible things to survive isn’t an excuse, and then subtly presenting it as a mitigating factor, even implying it was all accidental.

I did worse. Far worse. Because I wanted to.

Alex stayed with me for the rest of the day, at first to help me pick my classes. Heroforgers didn’t have to declare a major, but she encouraged me to think about it, and she outright prevented me from signing up for remedial classes. After that, we just talked. She made sure the Liebowitzes always knew what was going on in the outside world that they were barred from. She stayed for lunch, but she point-blank refused to eat anything, seeing as she could conceivably get food whenever she wanted. At the end of the day, she whipped out a pack of Uno cards, and the four of us played. She, like everyone, played Uno wrong, but I was magnanimous enough not to correct her.

Before she left, she pulled me into a hug. She whispered in my ear, “We’re gonna get you out of here, kid.”

I had realized, in the intervening years between then and prom, why I didn’t like touching people. It had been barely perceptible in all the noise of my broken power, but with my walls up, the silence made it perfectly obvious—touch heightened the sense of psychic connection to something or someone. That was, after all, the foundational principle of psychometry.

So, even with my mental defenses in place, I felt her sincerity, her hope, her affection. I knew what she wanted me to be. She wanted a little sister. Maybe a daughter. She saw herself in me. I thought I understood why. I didn’t really give her much to work with, and people saw shapes in the clouds all the time.

Alex was a godsend. She was exactly the hero I had needed all those years. She had somehow gotten me an opportunity to put my life back together, to make something of myself. She had convinced the school to bet on me, to take a stand against the authoritarians trying to subsume our world.

She was two years too late.

I was going to betray her.

Because I had a plan.

Because I wanted to.

I hugged her back and daydreamed that I was a better person, just for a moment.

----------------------------------------

After letting Alex out, I peeked into the living room. The Liebowitzes were winding down—for most people in the Skip, days ended with the sunset. You didn’t go out at night, and you didn’t dare keep a light on. Mr. Liebowitz was on the floor playing with the baby, and Mrs. was in her chair, reading. We had a few paperbacks that Alex had smuggled inside, and we had all read them a million times over.

Despite the relative relaxation of the scene, I saw Mrs. Liebowitz’s fingers drumming a staccato beat on the spine of the book, and her husband would pause every so often and stare at nothing, eyes distant. It was hard for them, I think, to no longer have the clinic. They were both highly educated, highly trained, and highly accustomed to taking action. They wanted to help. And they couldn’t. They’d been marked for death precisely because they’d been helping.

“I’m going out,” I told them quietly.

Mrs. Liebowitz froze. She and her husband shared a glance, then she said, “Surely you…don’t have to go. Not anymore.”

“Still a month at least before anything happens,” I said. “A month is a long time, here.”

“But if you’re getting out, then we should be safe, right? The only people hunting you will be other…?” She gestured vaguely with the book. She didn’t like saying “supervillains.” Honestly, it was kind of a melodramatic word to pull out in casual conversation.

Regardless, she was wrong, and in a way that would leave me questioning her intelligence if I didn’t know that she had made it through four years of college, four more years of med school, and two decades as a trauma surgeon.

There was a weird phenomenon I had noticed in people who lived comfortably their entire lives. Mrs. Liebowitz had completed schooling designed to test the limits of human endurance and years upon years of the highest stress job possible. She had seen some truly messed up things in her time as a doctor.

But, somehow, she still believed the world was a generally reasonable place, and she kept on believing no matter how much evidence to the contrary was provided. She was intelligent. She had struggled. But it was an issue of perspective. The world had always been an upwardly mobile place for her. She had always struggled to achieve, not to survive. Until she came to the Skip, anyway.

There was a brief lull, silent except for the sound of the baby babbling as she chewed on Mr. Liebowitz’s elbow.

He frowned at me. “Aren’t you happy, Anna?”

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

They wouldn’t like the answer to that question, so I didn’t give one.

I left them in the living room and went back upstairs. There, I changed into my colors.

----------------------------------------

I stood on the edge of the roof, my toes hanging out over the void. Beneath me, there was nothing but darkness, and the entirety of the Skip.

Around me, other rooftops stood suspended in the dying evening light, their near uniform height giving the impression of a giant shattered plain.

Above me, the rest of Sanctum City shone.

Its starscrapers reached impossibly high, clouds parting around them as they did around mountains. They gleamed in the red evening, still white and shining, overpowering the oncoming night. The glittering skyways between them gave it all the impression of a tiered city, and indeed, many people above never set foot on the ground, never dabbled in the darkness.

And above everything, as always, rose the burning peak of Pharos, shining its golden light on everything beneath it.

Almost everything.

I didn’t realize how tightly my fists were clenched until I heard my knuckles crack.

I held them in front of my face, opened them. My hands were shaking. Violently. My breathing sounded like a bellows in my own ears, overpowering even the constant wind that came with the elevation. That same wind stung my forehead, a thousand icy needles in my skin as beads of sweat formed.

Rivulets of white light ran across my body, fractal flows of power coalescing into whirlpools around psionic nexus points as I unthinkingly pulled in energy from my surroundings.

They thought that they could send for me now. That I would come when I was called. That I would fall in line and smile for the camera.

They had ignored me. They had left me.

And they still thought they owned me.

No, I wasn’t happy. Not at all.

I stepped off the ledge.

I fell.

Pharos fell out of sight. Darkness swallowed me. The ground rushed up at me.

I flew.

The ground went away, and it took everything else with it. Everything but the wind.

Two years before, I came to the Skip broken physically, mentally, and emotionally. I had been pieces of a girl. I had thought the pieces were me, but it turned out they had been a shell, and inside that shell had been hiding the things that mattered. Will. Rage, burning with nuclear heat. Dad jokes to puncture melodramatic moments.

The Skip had become the cast in which I was reforged.

Beneath the roofline, in the cracks between the buildings, there was life. Most people, outsiders, probably wouldn’t have called it that. They’d see shades gliding between pools of weak, greenish chemlights. Sometimes, two shades would meet and only one would walk away. But once your eyes adjusted to the darkness, you saw people doing what they had to do to survive in a world that gave them nothing.

The heroes had abandoned the Skip, just like they’d abandoned me. The best we got were bounty hunters like Alex, who delved deep into the underworld looking for specific fugitives, trying to cull what they saw as the worst of the worst.

And SCAR.

I cut through the air, pulling in and expelling energy to keep myself aloft and moving, shedding a trail of quickly dissipating white light as I went. I saw a shape in the air beneath me, like a wickedly curved glider wing, black enough to be invisible if you weren’t looking for it.

A SCAR Hunter drone.

It hovered along, scanning the ground for high priority targets, oblivious as I positioned myself above it and matched its speed. This would have to be quick. Those things packed a punch.

I dove, drawing energy to my hands, which then bloomed with a luminous aura. The psionic glow was caused by a tiny inefficiency in the process converting potential energy into something usable, with some of it changing into light instead of the desired kinetic energy. Supposedly, with training and focus, you could remove this inefficiency, which would have been great for me at that moment. Launching a surprise attack when your power involved sudden flashes of bright light was…difficult.

Indeed, as quickly as I closed the distance, the Hunter still picked up something on its sensors, jerking up to bring its main fixed gun to bear on me.

It was still too slow. I spun fully around once and flung the kinetic blast in a shearing white arc. It ripped the Hunter drone in half before it could fire, and it exploded. As I tumbled through the gap between the halves, I gathered up the excess energy of the explosion and blasted it into the halves, ripping them into even smaller pieces and flinging them harmlessly into the upper levels of nearby buildings.

Then I booked it, pulling all of that power back in and blasting myself down the street. Where there was one Hunter, there would be more.

SCAR had gotten their start as simply a unit in the Sanctum City Police Department. They were originally something like a SWAT team, but specialized to respond to metahuman emergencies. Over time, it had been deemed necessary to standardize response practices in such situations, and SCAR teams had popped up in every major city, before it had all been consolidated into its own separate federal law enforcement agency. These days, they were often accused of being a militarized, anti-metahuman hate organization, but that wasn’t true in the slightest.

The military didn’t have equipment nearly as good as SCAR’s.

SCAR was the primary representative of institutional power in the Skip, the token gesture pretending the institution had any power here. They didn’t. It belonged to us.

Seven years ago, in the fallout of the Horror, after the passing of the HERO Act, metahumans had been backed into a corner. We could now be branded as supervillains for even being suspected of crimes, and while many decried the HERO Act as extrajudicial and even outright fascistic, it had still been voted through both houses of Congress. While the superheroes had been largely unwilling to enforce it, organizations like SCAR had more than picked up the slack, their ranks suddenly flooded with ultratech that made them a threat to even the most dangerous metahumans, especially in numbers.

Before the Horror, supervillainy had been largely about showmanship. Some had called it the modern professional wrestling. With the defeat of Revenant, the world had become a significantly less dangerous place, and rivalries between heroes and villains had largely been friendly, sometimes even fabricated for entertainment value. It had led to the rise of the term “glamor villain,” referring to “supervillains” whose only villainous activities seemed to be picking public fights with heroes and then miraculously escaping after taking a narrow loss.

After the Horror, those same toothless villains had found themselves hounded, as public interest in staged superfights died and was replaced with reactionary terror.

So, one day, an enormously powerful villain named Hyperion gathered together a band of persecuted metahumans and, in the course of a single night, they took control of the Skip, the abandoned borough of Sanctum City. Formerly abandoned, anyway. It had recently been packed full of post-Horror refugees, making any kind of potential counteroffensive come with a guaranteed massive loss of civilian life—especially considering Hyperion’s statement that such a move would provoke him to unleash his powers and nuke the district.

Thus, the Skip became the world’s biggest hostage situation, but more importantly, it became a haven for metahumans who found themselves on the wrong side of the law. And as the HERO Act created ever more of those, the situation became ever more volatile.

It couldn’t last. People were starving, SCAR was getting bolder, and with more years between the Horror and the present, more “concerned citizens” were starting to wonder why a large section of America’s largest city was still under criminal control.

Something had to change.

And as much as I liked Alex, she had just handed me exactly what I needed to change everything.

Aurora University wasn’t just a school. It was one of the most secure, protected facilities on the planet.

And I knew what they were hiding.