I wasn’t the greatest decision-maker, but I was stubborn, and this was something I simply had to get done. It took me half the day from three in the morning to get from Oregon to the Alps, taking twenty minute breaks every once in a while before I wound up passing out in the middle of the Atlantic. The last thing the world needed right now was for its appointed savior to go smashing through someone’s house in Egypt because she wasn’t meant to be away from base for this long. But if Kincaid had a problem with me going AWOL, then he could keep it to himself, for all I fucking cared. By the time the Alps were in distant view, the bite of snowy wind hurtling across my face hurt bad enough to make me wince and sniffle. But I’d heaped a winter jacket over a hoodie, over two t-shirts and two pants.

  Feeling cold was new, and weird, and something I’d almost totally forgotten I could feel. Heating up my body used to be as easy as blinking, but I guess I was finding out a few more new and exciting ways that my body just wasn’t the same anymore. Scaling the peaks was also harder. Thinner air. Harsher wind. I kept a bandana around the lower half of my face, and was forced to shade my eyes from the burning glare of sunlight against the snow. I ached and I wheezed. I tripped and skidded and flew a handful of meters before I was pelted with snow and wind and blasts of sudden rainfall. This is fun. Next time, I’ll bring Ava along so she can suffer through this with me.

  Sheer rock faces quickly became my enemy. Towering slabs of black-gray stone, solemn and large and too tall for me to clear with one leap. A few months ago, and I would’ve made it all the way up. Now, I was climbing it, smashing my bright-red fingertips into the stone so I could struggle my way up the stone. I chewed on my tongue until I tasted blood. The snot that threatened to drip out of my nose froze on my upper lip. I flinched as a fist of snow shoved me against the rock face, forcing me to break the rock even more to hold on tighter. And then I was moving again, joints aching, my right shoulder burning like hell. I wanted to stop and give myself a break, but if I was going to get through what was coming, I had to get over the one thing I couldn’t ever stop thinking about, too.

  In a lot of ways, the plane crash changed a lot of things, not just for me, or Michael and Em and Grant, but for the world. Superheroes were illegal, we all knew that, and a bunch of dumbass kids had tried to take the plane down—is what a couple of news websites said at the time. Bullshit, I know. But people cling to stories that make them emotional, make them angry. And then, one day, Lucas picked me up from school and told me, Nothing happened in those mountains, and you don’t ever open your mouth about it again. I’d asked him what that meant. He’d adjusted the mirror, told me to buckle up, and said we’d be training until mom came home from her shift.

  Luckily for me, it had been a weekend, and she’d gone off to some conference somewhere in Washington, which meant a very, very long three days. Grueling. Painful. And he’d keep telling me, I handled it, now work.

  I always figured that meant he’d gotten to the journalists and the people who’d recovered the black box before anyone else could. I didn’t know what that meant for those people specifically. Just that I now owed him, just that he’d saved my bacon from the hellfire that would’ve fallen down on me if the world knew that Zeus’ kid had left one of her teammates to die because she wasn’t strong enough. There was a reason superheroes weren’t allowed to deal with specific kinds of crises. You don’t tell a cop to shoot at a giant skyscraper-sized Kaiju—you tell him to get people to safety so the Capes can handle it, the same way an untrained brat from New Olympus had no business lifting something heavier than she’d ever lifted before. I’d thanked Lucas once, tried speaking to him quietly, too.

  He’d shot me such a nasty look that I’d never brought it up with him ever again.

  We could add this to the list of things Olympia just couldn’t quite do.

  But Rylee pulled herself over the cliff face, and found herself face-to-face with a field of bone-white crosses blanketed in snow and buried in the jagged stones in front of her. I panted, making steam puff through the bandana around my face. I shakily stood up, ignoring the flare of pain in my shoulder that was spreading up my neck. Hundreds of tiny white crosses, each of them so deep in the stone, that not even the winds howling through the Alps could make them twitch. Families had begged the Olympiad for something. Remains. Trinkets and necklaces, at least some kind of memorial. In the end, the ELS put these here, one for each and every one of them.

  I wasn’t a massive believer. I doubt mom ever was, and it wasn’t like dad’s side of the family cared.

  But seeing this many crosses, buried in the snow, etched with names, dates…

  I pushed the hood off my head and let my hair snap and dance in the gusts of violent wind.

  Putting my boots through the snow in front of me was just about one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do in my life. My chest felt heavy. Muscles quaked with the kind of pain that made me flinch with every move. I walked deeper through the field of waist-high crosses, battling the wind and listening to it scream until, finally, I found the one with gold paint wind-blasted off its wood, the one with a beaded necklace of Jesus knotted around its stem, worn down and rigid, nearly falling apart. The one with Selina Gates, Forever Flying Higher etched into the aging white wood. I stood in front of it. Breathed hard, holding my ribs. I sniffled, then pulled down the bandana.

  The worst part about being bulletproof is that other people aren’t.

  I heard Dennie sometimes, you know that? Sometimes I stared at the ceiling at night, watching him gasp and wince and grab hold of me as he stared at that smog-filled sky. All that blood. All that quivering in his voice. I saw Rhea get hurt over and over. I saw myself finding their pods filled with gore and meat, and Cadaver standing over them, grinning at me so wildly he became some kind of animal in my nightmares. Sometimes I got so fucking angry that I wanted to go back down there and rip him apart again and again, and hunt whatever was left of Lucas, and pull him apart and make him suffer so fucking badly he’d beg me the same way he had when I’d held his head.

  The difference was always the timing. Dennie had spoken to me. Through all my screaming, all the things that had come out of my mouth, he’d grabbed me, and he’d looked at me, and he’d made me listen. Rhea and I were at each others’ throats. We hated each other. We’d been born to kill one another. The House of Korr would finally have one heir, and their two youngest daughters, their future queens, the ancestors to the Great fucking Conqueror Leona, were two kids who hated everything that Arkath had ever done to them, everything it ever stood for—she had made me promise, whispered it right into my ear, and I’d come back to find her dead. She’d lived, of course.

  Because Rhea wouldn’t die that easily. My cousin was just too damned stubborn to die.

  I guessed it ran in the family.

  Selina, though, never got that pleasure. She didn’t get to hold me, or whisper in my ear, or hold my hand and smile at me and tell me that I tried my best, and hey, one day, this will all be fine, and it’ll all be for something.

  I’d looked her dead in the eyes when the plane had come down on top of me, and I’d turned one of the only people who ever gave me the time of day into a bloody, smashed-up smear in the middle of fucking nowhere. I sat next to her in class. She’d passed me notes telling me how great my outfit was. She’d have parties over at her house, and the entire school would be there, and she’d beg me to come, and I’d hate it, of course, which always ended with me leaving early, and her walking me home, no matter how much it annoyed the fuck out of me. And… Gods, she was annoying. Always humming. And singing. And smiling and hugging and complimenting, and asking me if I wanted a bite of her sandwich, and telling me that Bianca was checking me out, and she’d drive me nuts, because why? What made her so fucking great that she was just so good all the time? And why me? Did she get off of tagging along on everything I did? She must’ve felt so superior not saying anything whenever I got to class late and I had blood under my fingernails that I hadn’t managed to scrub away in time. She’d smile. Smile. And offer me a wet wipe, a shrug, and ask if I’d gotten enough rest, because I looked just so exhausted, and then hand me candy.

  Fucking. Candy. A pocket mint from her seemingly infinite supply deep in her handbag.

  And it freaked me out to the bone, because Selina was probably one of the most powerful superheroes I’d ever met. It wasn’t just the wind she could control, but the air inside someone’s lungs, in their blood, in their skulls.

  She could kill half the city with a snap of her fingers. She could wipe out the Empire with a thought.

  And she would rather spend her days sketching out hopscotch grids for the kids in her neighborhood.

  I wanted to say that I got it now, or whatever. That it all just clicked now that I was older.

  A part of me was still violently jealous, even as I sat down next to the cross on the cold black stones. Even after I pulled a tiny red and white pint out of my pocket, unwrapped it, snapped it in half, and left one piece buried in the snow beside me whilst I popped the other into my mouth. Selina was everything. She was my Golden Age.

  She was what my dad was supposed to be. She was what I thought Cleopatra would be before I knew she was still alive. Her golden cape would snap in the wind, and I’d tense my jaw and ignore the sound, because I hated how much it felt like she’d earned it, whilst people spat at me and flipped me off and told me that if they could, they’d swap my soul for dad’s any day of the week. And then she’d try to tell me to ignore them, and I’d tell her to fuck off and mind her own business. God, like any of that was her fault. I massaged my eyes hard enough to see dark spots dance across my vision. The wind died down. Snowfall turned to harsh, lashing bouts of rain. Sunlight got choked behind darkening clouds, and I sat there, knees to my chest, chewing on the tiny mint until I glanced at the cross. This was all that was left, huh? No bones. No costume. All of that had gotten scattered and broken and torn and burnt in the wreckage. In the shock of kneeling there in what used to be the girl I used to hate so much, I had stood up, stumbled, and flown away so quickly that every single trace of her on my body had burnt away.

  I’d spread Selina across half the globe, right back into the same winds she loved so much.

  She once told me she wanted to be a pilot. Maybe an astronaut. She always failed calculus with me, and she once laughed so hard about how much we sucked that we’d both gotten kicked out of class early that day.

  She’d asked me what I had wanted to be. I’d told her I didn’t know yet. Maybe a superhero, I’d said.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Most people usually laughed. Skinny little Ryle Addams, with her braces and her awkward glasses, and her weird gait when she ran, a superhero? Please. Only the cheerleaders and the football team could say that, because being a superhero meant you were cool, it meant you were the real deal—it meant becoming a government dog.

  Sit. Stay. Roll over. Pretend that Zeus, Lord of the Skies, didn’t just glare his kid into submission.

  Selina had grinned and said we should both be superheroes.

  I’d stared at her, suddenly not feeling so light, and told her that was stupid.

  “Well, everything’s a little stupid, silly,” she’d said. “So let’s be stupid, silly superheroes.”

  Just like in the comics, right? Fighting giant monsters and stupid villains, against nameless bad guys and evil masterminds who’d ramble on and on about their crazy plans. We’d say things like golly! and wowza! and save the day after seeing stars dancing over our heads, because it was easier to day dream than actually save the world.

  “I never got the chance to ask if you liked my comic book,” I said to the cross. It didn’t reply. The wind howled in my ears, across the Alps and tore through the sky with a bellow of thunder. But lightning had never scared me, not even when it threw jagged shadows across the crosses in front of me. I glanced at hers. “You always said you were gonna get around to reading it, and I only gave it to you because you begged to see what I was doing sitting alone at lunch. You suck, you know that? My very first reader, and you probably threw that old thing away.”

  It wasn’t great, from what I remembered, but I’d colored it and stenciled it, and I’d shakily handed it over to her in class and not asked about it again, because at some point, I figured she was probably just being nice asking me if she could read it; it wasn’t like she actually wanted to read it. Who did? Like Dennie said, it sucked.

  It was just too much…me. Too violent. Too bloody.

  Just not quite enough superhero.

  Like clockwork, the world stopped spinning, the rain hung suspended, splashing on the outstretched arms of each cross, and there it was, shimmering, hazy, and hellish, right in front of me. Figured. I didn’t bother looking at It. I didn’t bother when it got closer, turning crosses black, the sky white, my own skin a softly burning fiery red. It stopped in front of me, turning the air into static, making my head fuzzy and my eyes blurry. I stretched my legs and leaned on my palms, then looked at the sky and the crystalline rain drops hanging right above my head, too.

  The universe was gorgeous when it wasn’t moving. It had a bad habit of hurting when it did.

  “You know,” I said to the creature of silent, humming fractured light, “I had a feeling you’d get back to me eventually. I almost thought I could get away with stealing my soul back from you. But I guess I’m not that lucky.”

  Silence, then It’s voice filled my skull with harsh sound. “The Witch wishes to see you live.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a problem with her and not me.”

  An explosion of pain shot through my skull. I doubled over onto the snow, clutching my skull. The pain vanished, then It got closer, hanging over me, swiping away the raindrops around us. “Let me explain something to you, Goddess of War.” Closer. I knuckled blood off my lip and glared at the thing above me. “When you barter with the Old Gods, they expect nothing but obedience to your oath. Your rebellion against us is insolent. You think you are above all, above the universe and its rules—you are not. You are not the exception. You are not the rule. You are, like the others before you, and the others after you, nothing. You are an imbalance. A plague. A virus and a problem. And as you have done to many others, the Old Gods want to cull the problem from this thread of reality.”

  “This again,” I muttered, pushing myself off the snow. I dusted my hands, and watched as the flares of scarlet light in my hands flickered and softly burned. This is new. Last time it was a bright white color. “So what happens now? You take my soul away from me, you take over my body, and I watch you ruin my life for me?”

  It remained silent. Deathly silent.

  I knuckled my nose and pushed a hand through my hair, then said, “What if I don’t want to?”

  “There are no other choices left to make. Your fate has been sealed.”

  “Yeah, but what if I really didn’t want to?” I asked quietly. “I came here so I can finally go on with my life. I came here because I needed some peace and quiet. I came here because I wanted to wash my hands clean from—”

  “There will never be a reality where your hands remain clean.”

  “Blood-stained, I know,” I muttered. “You’ve told me that already.”

  “Your ink is crimson, your pages are flesh—the heart of your story is the gore of humanity’s fate if you remain alive. Death is Earth’s salvation. You will not succeed against the Empire. You will falter, you will fail.”

  I let It’s words sit in the air, slow and heavy, like the stale wind surrounding me.

  “Is that fate?” I whispered, staring at It, “Or what you just believe I’m capable of doing?”

  “There isn’t a difference with you.”

  “You’re not getting anything.” I watched It flare. I stood up. It grew larger, more encompassing. The crosses surrounding us darkened, shadows thrown across the Alps like bits of fractured bones. “I tell you why? Because I’m not done yet. I die in the end, I get that. My life is miserable, and happy endings don’t happen to people like me, I get that—I fucking get that, because it’s all anyone’s ever told me since I was barely able to walk. Bad people have bad endings, but not yet, so it looks like I’ve got a universe to save, a girl to kiss, and a pantheon of Gods who can get on their knees and blow me for all I care”—my voice was louder, hotter, not screaming, but declaring, because I hoped the Old Gods could hear me too, loud and fucking clear—“because if I was going to die, I’d be dead already, and you wouldn’t have made a deal with someone who you knew was going to be difficult. And if you even think for one second that Witchling is a problem for you, then you’re gonna find out fast how much it hurts to get hit.”

  “‘Hit,’” It whispered, almost spitting the word, flaring with light. “Can you even conceive my being?”

  “I can conceive what happens for the next eternity if you and I are stuck together in the afterlife,” I said, getting closer—close enough that my flesh burned and every since nerve in my face prickled and spat. “You don’t get a lot of things I say, so let me spell something out for you: I’m bad at this job, and sometimes I wonder why the universe chose me, and then I go out there and do it anyway. Why? Because nobody else does. And I used to be so angry about that, until I realized that I don’t have to be, because being a superhero is about getting the job done, and making sure whoever comes next can walk their dog, date whoever they want, and not have to worry about who’s gonna kill them next. My life sucks. It really does. And I hate myself every single day of it. But that doesn’t mean I’m done. And that doesn’t mean I’m just gonna let you take my soul from me right when I’m needed most.”

  “Needed? You think you are ‘needed’?” Malice and hate echoed through my mind and poured from its body. “Ry’ee Addams, Daughter of the House of Korr, you are nothing. I do not care about your claims anymore. What I came here for was your soul. The Witch can only do so much from so far away. Say your goodbyes to the souls you took on that horrible day, and pray that I understand your human ways when I take your body as mine.”

  “You know,” I said quietly, after a moment. “I think I figured you out. You’re a prison, aren’t you?”

  It said nothing.

  “You fucked up somehow,” I continued, “and now you’re looking for a way out. Maybe you just clung onto the first stupid kid to make a deal with you, or maybe you were hunting for me specifically, because you wanted to feel important when you finally took over. Just how badly did you screw up to want a shot at trying to fix my life? You wanna fix the universe? Then do it. But…right, you’re on some kind of leash the Gods put on you.”

  “Don’t speak of me like some hound.”

  “A mutt would be a better word, that’s what we call them down here on Earth.”

  A wave of nausea flushed through me, curdled by pain and rage and hatred.

  But I stood there, staring at It, waiting for it to stop lashing out at me.

  Because I knew anger, and I knew hatred, and I very much knew pain—and it all felt like mine. So deeply ingrained it might as well be part of its entire being, woven right into the fabric of whatever kind of soul it’s got.

  Like that’s gonna impress me.

  “Last year, some asshole gave me a piece of advice,” I said. “Don’t be someone else’s good little dog. Stand up for yourself. Know what you want. So what if they’re Gods? So what if they wove together the universe? As far as I’m concerned, I’ve still got a world to save, and they’re gonna do nothing except sit on their asses and watch me do it. And you’re gonna join them, sitting there beside their thrones, angry and bitter, because you’re so fucking useless that you’re going to steal my life so you can get another chance. Oh, cry me a river, dude. We’ve all got our crosses to carry. Do a better job of bearing yours so the rest of us don’t have to lumber around with yours.”

  Because perfect, heroic Selina, wasn’t perfect, and she wasn’t always heroic, because that’s what life is all about. Nobody’s got it perfectly down, nobody’s ever going to get it fully right. But she never let her feelings get in the way of doing what was right. She never hated supervillains. Selina just had a job to do. The right thing to do.

  It sounded so easy it was almost silly, stupid, and just a little bit childish. Do good, be good.

  But I was going to be a little bit silly, I’ve always been a little bit stupid, and being a superhero was always going to be a touch childish, so I guess Selina would be pretty damned proud of me when I punched It in the face.

  Because there’s nothing quite like punching a problem square in the jaw to save your life.

  For the longest time, I always thought It wasn’t real. As in, real enough to get sucker punched.

  It turned out I was wrong, because the moment my fist met its hazy, fractured surface, brilliant golden electricity exploded outward in lashing whips of light. The impact felt atomic. The shockwave was enough to clear the skies of their clouds and rain bright golden sunlight onto the mountain of crosses. And I was alone. Entirely alone. My knuckles steamed, left with the remnants of oily liquids that slid off my fingers and hissed against the snow at my feet. The air stank of ozone. The sky above me burnt a brilliant bright blue color. And it felt like the universe had moved. Shifted just enough to make the back of my neck crawl, like someone was now watching me, watching me so intensely that I felt their eyes digging into the skin of my skull. I shaded my eyes, then looked up.

  I squinted. Stayed silent. Waited for my hand to stop smoking and burning.

  It was in the sky above me. A glaring black shimmer there, and then gone in the next instant.

  “Coward,” I spat, lowering my eyes. I glanced at Selina’s cross.

  The golden electricity had snapped against the wood, creating bright yellow veins in the wood that sparked and glowed, almost pulsing with my racing heartbeat. I flexed my hand and turned it over, feeling warmth under my skin, burning in my blood. I took a deep breath, and I could almost smell the sugary sunlight in my lungs.

  If I focused enough, I could feel the Earth shifting right under my feet.

  And Bianca. There, somewhere to my left—I could hear her. Miles and miles and millions of miles away.

  There.

  Asleep. Peacefully, silently asleep.

  I felt like a chain wasn’t around my throat anymore. Like a weight wasn’t sitting on my chest.

  I breathed in deeply, then let it all out with a shudder and a smile as I bounced on the balls of my feet.

  I lifted off the ground, snow swirling around my legs and feet. I let the electricity curl around my fingers and arms, climb up my torso and run through my hair until there wasn’t an inch of me that wasn’t drenched in it.

  Finally, I looked at Selina’s cross, sparkling with golden light, shining in the field of crosses, almost like a star perched on the peak of the mountains. I backed away slowly, and felt something move around the cross, shift and turn and almost look up at me. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe this feeling was getting through to me in a way that I wasn’t used to yet. But I smelt her. Or I heard her. My head wasn’t spinning, but the world definitely was, and I knew the promise I had to make, and I knew that the Old Gods wouldn’t like what I’d done just now, but if we’re all being honest, I don’t think anyone’s ever really been happy about me making any kinds of decisions.

  So what does it matter, anyway, if I made another? One more for the road, right?

  I smiled at the cross. “The next time I come back here, the Empire’s gonna be a thing of the past, and I’m gonna be writing comic books full time. I guess I can do this superhero thing on the weekends, like on Saturdays.”

  The kids have to watch something every Saturday morning, and what’s better than the real deal?

  For the first time since I got here, the wind that blew across my face was soft, like fingers sliding through my hair, against my cheeks, through my clothes and bones and deep into the crevices of my lungs. I let it clasp my hand and squeeze, let it swing around my shoulders like a cape I couldn’t see and billow softly in the warm wind.

  I nodded slowly, turned around, and aimed for the sky.