The sky had torn itself open, and now Bianca was wet, itchy and angry that she had to spend the rest of the night looking for a clone. Yeah, she understood why so many people wanted the clone. She was dangerous on her own, even more so because she followed orders, no questions asked. She was Rylee with a leash around her throat. She got that. It didn’t mean she liked the idea of finding the clone, apologizing to it, and trying to make friends with a creature they government had created to replace Rylee.

  Besides, if the clone was special, it wouldn’t have lost the fight so easily.

  At least, she figured it ended pretty easily. She couldn’t remember. Her memories from that night were a dark, rain-filled blur. Stumbling. Vomiting. Snarling at someone asking if she needed help. Bianca wasn’t in the mood, either. Not with all these thoughts racing through her mind. Not with everything they had told her, too.

  Zeus hurt Rylee. Rylee’s family nearly killed the Royal Bloodline. And she might be a queen, or some kind of fairytale hero sent to save them. Right. Of course. Totally made so much sense. Bianca cursed under her breath. She missed normalcy. She missed her bed and she missed her clothes and she even missed Harper arguing with the shopping mall vendors because they were trying to scam her out of a few more bucks. She also missed sleep. It was a mistress whispering sweet nothings into her ear, tugging her eyelids, blurring her head and smudging her vision. She would’ve thought the icy rainfall would do the trick and wake her up. Turns out getting punched in the face might do a better job of that.

  A rigid finger poked her ribs. Bianca flinched and turned to her right. Frankie smiled at her. “You Ok there, wormy? You’re spacing out. Are you gonna go all worm-feral right now and kill us? That would suck. Please don’t.”

  She rubbed her eyes and said, “I’m not going to go worm-feral, and my name is Artemis.”

  “Got it, wormy. Arte-wormy rolls off the tongue better, anyway.”

  Bianca wasn’t violent by nature. Not all the time.

  She wanted to be violent with Frankie.

  “The trail ends here,” Thalia said, crouched on the corner of a street that might’ve once had an ice cream shop and a garage on it. After so many fires, so many superhuman fights and gang wars, every building was the same pile of burnt bricks and melted rebar and shattered glass. Bianca might’ve also contributed to this mess. Maybe that body-sized hole in the wall was hers, or the clone’s—did it matter? Not really. Who gives a shit? Bianca watched Thalia drag two fingers across the cracked pavement, put them to her nose, and then the girl turned to look at her, eyes softly glowing in the lashing rainfall. “The Arkphage, this evolution of it, is smart. It’s not usually very good at hiding its tracks. It has a bad habit of leaving bits of itself behind as…markers, let’s say. But not this one.”

  “It’s not got natural competition on Earth to fight with,” Rhea muttered. “No reason for it to leave territory markers.”

  “Competition?” Bianca asked.

  “Evolution breeds variation,” Frankie said, turning her finger through the air. She was the only one with an umbrella, a large black thing with her name stitched on it somehow. “Kinda like the flu, except this one evolved to kill Arkathians. It must’ve had way more versions of it around the universe. All those different planets. Different races of Arkathians to kill. Maybe even a couple of alien species, too. It so happens that this version is the version we got.” She bumped Bianca’s elbow. “And we wouldn’t want it any other way, Arte-wormy. All those other variants wouldn’t be anywhere near as cool as you.”

  Bianca pointedly ignored her. “So how’re we gonna track where I left the clone?”

  “You can always ask it,” Rhea said with a small shrug. “Make yourself useful.”

  “It talks to talk, not to answer,” Bianca said. “And I doubt it would tell me that easily.”

  “Well, have you tried?” Icarus asked through the walkie-talkie hitched to Rhea’s belt. He wasn’t like the other Arkathians. Somehow still too weak to move around, meaning Rhea, Thalia, Bianca and (unfortunately) Frankie were the only ones looking for Sophie. The larger boy had stayed back to protect Icarus and the girl, which at least meant Bianca's skin wasn’t constantly on fire. “Maybe barter with it. Try to see what it wants. Negotiate with it.”

  “Of course,” Bianca muttered. “Negotiate with the alien freak of nature that wants to eat people alive.”

  “You’re cranky all of a sudden,” Frankie said, pouting. “What’s the matter? Rain bothering you?”

  Bianca pushed Frankie aside and stood under an old brick doorway with no door, attached to nothing, either. She scratched the back of her neck hard enough to leave blood under her fingernails. Her jaw was tight and so were her muscles, because the Phage wasn’t happy, and that meant it was throwing a tantrum and winding her up like some kind of old toy, and any second now, she’d lunge at Rhea and try to tear out her heart through the girl's throat. She watched Thalia keep searching the streets. She ignored Frankie when she waved. Rhea flew into the sky, caught in the sudden flash of lightning that turned her into a shadow. And Bianca, grudgingly sighing, leaned against the wall, pushed her hand through soaking wet hair, and thought, Look, if you can just do this one tiny thing, I’d—

  “No,” it snarled. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Kill them. Kill them before they kill you.”

  “They’re not gonna kill me,” she muttered, folding her arms. “Rylee wouldn’t let them.”

  It hissed. Maybe it was trying to laugh. “Torchbearer is dead. Nothing stops them from chewing on your guts and ripping you apart. Foolish. You’re foolish. You think they’re heroes? You think any of them are good?”

  “All due respect,” she said, “but what the fuck are you to say that about anyone? How do you know what being good means?” Her fingernails sank into her biceps. “You’re just…hatred. You hate everything and everyone and you always want to kill people. You’re evil incarnate and you’re making my life really fucking miserable right now, so if you could just get over yourself for one second and help get this over with, then that would be awesome.”

  Silence. In her head. Under her skin.

  Bianca waited, unclenching her hands, trying not to scowl.

  “Well?” she whispered. “Have anything to say?”

  “You have no clue what these creatures are,” it growled, reverb crawling through her bones. Bianca rolled her shoulders, feeling sweat trickle down her spine. “What they can do, who they’ve done it to—countless lives have been lost and raped and killed and turned into breeding cattle or slaves or to ash and gore. Planets turned to nothing except memories. Races of people far beyond your solar system turned to shards of bones drifting through the cosmos. Organs are eaten and spat and turned into fertilizer. There is nothing good about them. Not them. Not the Godkiller. An Arkathian’s destiny, its hard fate, is to suffer, and make those around them suffer, and to embed suffering so deeply into the heart of the universe that all life will fall to their scourge. I am hatred because they are pain. They are war. They are genocide. These are words to you, just words. You don’t know what suffering means.” Bianca clenched her jaw harder. “Your brother’s death pains us both. But your mind cannot quantify the terror and the fear and the collapse they have wreaked across the stars. Humans think they’re so special, they think they can be saved from what is coming. They created their own God and bestowed it upon themselves to be the one true owners of the stars, just like the Arkathians have—except they have power. Humanity falsely believes it does.”

  “There you go again,” Bianca said. Rhea looked down at her, eyes narrowing, lightning tearing through the sky. “Telling me about how terrible they are. You might be right. You probably are. And sure, after some point, I probably can’t even begin to understand how many people have died because of them. But they’re good. People don’t grow up hating everything. They’re taught that. You were made, or evolved, or whatever happened to you, to hate them, because that’s your whole purpose, right? Well, mine’s not to be a bad person. To try and be the reason a good thing happens to someone. I’m not the most heroic of heroes. I doubt I’ll ever be. That was Ben’s thing. I’m just…” I don’t know what I am. “I’m trying to keep my shit together, and that means helping people who need it.”

  “Too busy pacifying yourself with your minor deeds and false goodness to see what the world truly is. Benjamin died the same way.”

  Bianca froze, then whispered, “You don’t get to judge Ben for being a good person.”

  “Good person?” Another laugh. Another throaty, wet, ugly laugh. “He was far from good.”

  “Yeah, and why’s that? Because everyone seems to think differently except for you.”

  “Bodies lie in his wake. Countless. Torn apart. Slaughtered like pigs.”

  “Was that Ben, or was that what you forced him to be?” Bianca clenched and unclenched her fingers, almost feeling her joints grinding against one another. “Was that why he was always washing his hands, always so tired, because you were in his head telling him he should kill, kill, kill and just not stop killing? That was you.”

  “He killed of his own volition.”

  “Lucian killed him,” Bianca whispered. “The devil doesn’t get his hands dirty. He sends people to do that for him. And yet he went out of his way to kill Ben himself. What did you tell Ben that got him there in the first place? What the fuck did you tell my brother to make Lucifer hunt down someone like my brother just to rip him apart?”

  She was loud. Loud enough for her voice to echo. Loud enough for Frankie’s smile to fall and Thalia to curiously look at her. Rhea was sitting on a ledge across the street, eyes glowing sharply in the dark, rain sliding down her face and turning to steam the longer it sat on her shoulders. Silence prevailed. Thunder and howling wind tore through the street and the skeletal remains of buildings. Frosty wind bit her cheeks, her neck and her arms and her chest.

  Bianca could almost feel it running straight through her bones.

  “Don’t go quiet now,” Bianca spat. “What did you tell Ben to do? What did you make him do?”

  Again, nothing.

  So she grabbed the sharpest thing she could find—a shard of broken glass on the ground—and swung it toward her throat. Her arm locked in place. The edge of the glass pinched her neck, making tiny droplets of blood bleed into her t-shirt collar. Rhea narrowed her eyes. Thalia stepped closer, paused, then glanced at Rhea. Frankie went rigid, clutching onto the umbrella with both her bony hands. And Bianca, breathing sharply, clutched onto the piece of glass so hard it cut through her palms and spilled blood down her sleeve. She swallowed. Strained against her own muscles. Then her other hand flung to the piece of glass. She slammed her back against the brick archway, grip on the glass tightening. Tell me, she snapped internally, teeth gritted, fists shaking, bloody. Tell me or I’ll do it.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Stupid, stupid girl,” it hissed. “What would this achieve?”

  “That you spend days putting me back together, because if you wanted a better body, someone who wouldn’t keep fighting with you, who’d listen to every order you’ve got, then you would’ve left already.” Her arms trembled. Quaked and ached and burned with pain. The glass pushed deeper. More blood. More agony. She shut her eyes and snarled through her teeth, “And then you’d be scared. So, so scared.” She laughed, a sound that came out short and quick. “Because I know they wouldn’t hurt me. People care. There’s good people out there. I know that. But you don’t think that, and I don’t care anymore. I’d be doing everyone a favor, right?” Her fingernails sank into the back of her hand, nearly tearing through her flesh. “Besides,” she grunted. “You’d die without a host body.”

  A bluff. A lie. One last stupid, desperate string of saliva-riddled words to come out of her mouth.

  But if the Arkphage really did have any other options, then it would’ve already found one. It would’ve gotten up and bonded with Ru, maybe some other superhuman more willing to listen. Heck, why not a dead body? Why not infest something that couldn’t fight back? Bianca wanted to think it was desperate. Desperate to stay alive. Desperate to not wither away before the Arkathians did. It had its purpose and it had its reason to live, and so did she. Spite. That’s what it was. Bad people took Ben away. Bad people took Katie away. Bad people kept trying to take Rylee away. It was a violent cycle that would sometimes leave her staring at her ceiling, stuck on her bed for hours on end, wondering what the fuck she could even do. She thought about hurting people. She would shake her head and tell herself it wasn’t right. At least she could make that choice. Now the Phage wanted to make it for her. Make her life hell. Make things worse. Tell her everyone and everything was a threat that needed to be killed.

  And she’d be damned if some thing inside of her was the reason Rylee died, or…

  Fine, maybe she was the reason Rylee had gotten so much more powerful when they weren’t together. Sure, maybe her aunt had a point. And maybe… Fuck, maybe being together will only ever be a story I like telling myself.

  Whatever happened, she was going to be the one making the decisions. Good or bad.

  If she was going to rip open her throat, then she was going to rip open her fucking throat.

  If it meant the Phage was incapacitated for days, maybe even weeks, then that was a price she was willing to pay. She had passed out after the fight near the river, and not once had it taken over her body, made her fight Ru and hunt the Witch and try to eat everything in its path. It had stayed inside of her, exhausted, hungry, and silent.

  For once, it had listened to her, and she hadn’t even realized that until now.

  “You’ve got no authority over what I do,” she snarled. The glass shard bit deeper. “You listen to me.”

  “I listen to my creator’s one true vision.”

  Her arms jerked. Her body darted to the left. The glass shard tore open the side of her jaw and grazed her neck. It dropped out of her hands, clattered onto the pavement. Bianca panted, cringed when she raised her hand to her face, feeling blood trickling down the side of her throat. It stung. But not enough to make her cry. At least, not anymore. She knuckled the wound and leaned her head against the wall, mouth parted, chest rising and falling.

  “We’ve gotta work together,” she whispered. The wound still bled. “Where did you take the clone?”

  “I’ve no obligation to heal every wound or tell you what you ask.”

  “Then tell me about your creator,” she said, tasting blood in her mouth. “Who were they?”

  A beat of silence. Rainfall. More wind and thunder and quietness.

  “And why is it that you would care?”

  “Like I said,” Bianca muttered, “we’re kinda stuck together, and you know everything about me, and I know nothing about you. I hate you. I’m pretty sure you hate me, too.” She thought she must’ve heard it laugh silently. “Now that we’ve gotten over that fact, tell me something: what are you? You can’t just be a weapon.”

  “I am an arbiter.”

  “Yeah?” Bianca spat blood and crouched, body exhausted, cold to the marrow. “What’s that mean?”

  “I bring judgement to the gold-blooded.”

  “Right.” She forced her hair into a ponytail. “But why?”

  “You think these animals don’t deserve judgement?”

  “When does it end?” she whispered, staring at the ground, at the broken needles and soggy cigarette packets, the teddy bear trapped underneath a mound of rubble and a severed arm clogging the gutter next to the pavement. Bianca brushed her fingers against a magazine, smearing colors, revealing an old headline wondering who Olympia might be beyond the costume: Actress, Celebrity—Nope, just a Kid Trying her Best to Save the World. Bianca smiled. “If all you do is hate everything your entire life, you don’t really have a purpose. You’re just this…thing that lives because it’s alive, not because it’s got something to live for. Isn’t that kinda empty? Don’t you want more?”

  “What I want is to see the Arkathian race dead. They have caused too much suffering to live.”

  “I’m not arguing with you there,” she muttered. “But what do you really want? Past that?”

  “I wasn’t made to think. Just accomplish. That is my goal and that is my purpose.”

  “You wanna know what my purpose is?”

  Silence.

  “C’mon,” she said quietly. “I thought we were having a breakthrough here.”

  “Your goals don’t matter to me. You are a vessel, and a vessel is to be used and discarded.”

  “Yeah, I don’t believe that. Not for one second, because you talk about Ben just as much as I do, and whenever you say his name, you get still.” She ran her fingers across the back of her hand, up her wrist. The worms weren’t moving, not right now. “He must’ve meant something to you, like how he meant something to me. I guess I shouldn’t be hard on you, because you had to live through what Lucian did to him. And you must’ve been scared.” She clenched her fist. Bruises. Cuts. New, fleshy wounds on the back of her hand. “You must’ve tried. You must’ve kept him alive for as long as you could. You keep me alive, and you hate my guts. You loved Ben, and I like to think that you kept his heart beating and the fear he must’ve felt as far away as possible. Ben was always so brave, wasn’t he? At least, he liked to act that way. But he was a kid, barely older than I am now, and at some point he must’ve known it was over. That he was never coming back home. He was never going to see mom or dad again. Not another birthday. Not another date with Katie.” Not another chance to pester his little sister one last time. “I don’t wanna know if he cried, because everyone’s looking, and I don’t want to cry in front of ‘em.” She already was. A little. She hid her face by turning away, facing the dark. “We’re on the same side. Being in pain for so long has taught me one thing: tomorrow always comes, and you’ve got to find a way to just keep going. When you…when we stop the Arkathians from hurting people, there’s gonna be the day after, and I don’t want to be eating cereal and you’re still in my head trying to convince me to kill someone else. So please, work with me here.”

  It felt like an hour before it spoke again. Then came the worms, knitting together the cut on her cheek, healing the welts and the bruises on her knuckles.

  She’d have the scars, but heck, she didn’t mind anymore.

  “Benjamin…he made me make a promise when he died,” the Arkphage said. “To you.”

  Bianca steeled herself. Her eyes already stung. She kept them shut. Her breaths got ragged and hot.

  “Yeah?” she asked, breath shuddering. “What did he say? Something stupid, right?”

  “To keep you safe, and to know that he was sorry.”

  She rubbed her eyes, sniffled. “Moron. What the fuck did Ben even have to be sorry about?”

  “Me,” it said quietly. “He wanted you to have a piece of himself, more than his clothes, his bike, more than what he left behind. I was with him during the longest nights, the quiet days. He had…friends. Many. Some of them were heroes. Most of them were normal. All of them were good. Benjamin felt undeserving of their love. Of yours. Of your mother’s. He drifted through school like a ghost. A shell. He smiled, he laughed, he played his pointless stick and ball games. He became a man on a rooftop with Katie Clear. And he was still so driven. He was diligent. He was smart. He also knew that being around you would only hurt him more. He was selfish, but he was also afraid. Too many of his friends died, as they did in those Golden Years of Heroes you humans always speak of. Children in caskets. Families grieving prepubescents. Corpses turned to gore and ash that would get swept into the gutters of this city. Families broken. Promises never fulfilled. It was…” Bianca almost felt it sigh through her body. “I am a collective of thoughts and minds across the universe. Even now, I hear my brethren screaming. I was sent to this planet to protect one of the few bastions left in the universe that have yet to fall into the Empire’s grasp. My duty, Bianca, is to protect the people of this planet. Benjamin taught me to look further than just that. To protect all. To try to. But there is so much evil in your society. So much death. So much bloodshed and backstabbings and liars. Even your precious Torchbearer, so powerful, so important, is used and discarded by the humans like any child in uniform, sent to fight an adult’s war. Your race ought to be ashamed.”

  “Oh, trust me,” Bianca whispered, “I get it.”

  “Humans are no better than Arkathians,” it said through her mind. “You’re just less powerful, unable to get yourself off this rock to spread your violence and your ideologies. You tell your children it’s heroic to die in colorful costumes, selling them ideas of greatness through hardship. On many planets, sending children to war is deplorable. Humans might like to think yourself better, but you’re not. Benjamin’s generation is gone. Their dreams dead. Their hopes tarnished. So tell me, Bianca—do you really want to march down the same path that left your brother with nothing? It is lonely. It will most certainly not end well. He was most sorry for cursing you with my being, burdening you with a weight he shouldn’t himself have ever borne. The clone will not help.”

  “She will,” Bianca said. Swallowed. Held her face in one hand. “God, I hate that I’m saying this, but she will, because she’s got to. She’s not Rylee. I don’t think anyone has to expect her to be, because nobody’s expecting me to be like Ben, either.” This sucks. Sucks so fucking much. “There are good Arkathians out there, like how there’s good humans here, too. It’s our job to make sure more good people step up and less bad people have the courage to speak out. They killed the idea of superheroes, but that never stopped Rylee. They can change their costumes all they want, rip off their capes and burn their symbols to ash—but everyone’s gonna need a hero eventually, just like you.” She lightly thumped her chest with her knuckles. “Don’t hate ‘em. Be someone’s hero. That’s a goal. That’s a purpose. That’s a reason to let me remember where we put Sophie. For me, please.”

  The Arkphage remained silent.

  For a moment, Bianca thought it wouldn’t speak again.

  Then, slowly, sounds, smells, and violence flooded into her mind. She gasped and clutched her skull, teeth clenched and shoulders tight—until she froze, blinked, and slowly stood up again, her mind suddenly very clear.

  “I know where she is,” Bianca whispered. Rhea stood, then dropped onto the pavement, splintering the concrete. Frankie clapped her hands. Bianca looked at her palms, flexed her fingers, and smiled. “Heroes, buddy?”

  “Grudgingly,” it sighed. “Whatever it is that your human mind makes of it, anyway.”

  “I’ve got no idea what it means either,” she said, laughing a little. “I guess we’ll find out, right?”

  “Right,” it whispered.

  There was more inside of her head. More than just that night when she’d attacked Rebecca or nearly killed Rylee’s clone. A lot more. A dizzying amount of flashing, water-faded memories that laughed and cried and fought and murdered. But she shook her head and filed it all away for later. She’d know who Ben was soon enough, maybe even know why Lucian himself had to kill him personally. Until then, for once, her body would be on her side.

  For a price. It wanted something in return. If it was going to be complacent, it wanted safety, too.

  The Arkphage wanted power. Power to protect itself.

  To protect her.

  If it was going to work with Arkathians, to trust them, it had to have a way of guarding itself.

  There’s more of you on Earth, she thought, leading them away from the street corner. Frankie was talking to her. Thalia and Rhea were speaking in a language she couldn’t understand. The rain kept falling, her filthy sneakers somehow managed to keep taking one step and then the other. She looked at her hands. There’s more of you here.

  The Arkphage said nothing—it didn’t have to anymore.

  Bianca knew where the rest of it was hiding.

  She stopped. So did the others.

  “What’s wrong?” Rhea asked. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

  “You guys go ahead, I’ll catch up. Sophie’s down by the old dock. It’ll be quicker if you flew there, and I’d be slowing you down. It… I buried her under the concrete and a web of the worms. Tear through enough shipping containers and get rid of the crane I dumped on her, and you’ll pull her out. The worms shouldn’t attack if you try to get her. She’s unconscious, that’s what I can tell. Still alive. Just really weak. Besides, it’ll probably be a good idea if you get her when I’m not there. She’d probably rip my head off my shoulders.” Bianca walked backward and jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “I’ve got something I need to do. And tell Sophie I’m really, really sorry I attacked her. I was going through a phase in my life and shit got way out of line.” She turned and jogged, then paused and said, “Oh, by the way! Don’t come looking for me. I’ll find you guys. See you around!”

  “Arte-wormy,” Frankie yelled, then pouted. “You’re leaving already?”

  Bianca shrugged. “Superheroes do that sometimes.”

  “Tell me about it,” she muttered. “O never stayed long, either. They’ve both got major commitment issues.” Frankie shook her head. “I wonder how that’s ever gonna work out if neither of them ever stays in one place for more than a couple of hours. That’s why I’m single. Relationships are messy, y’know what I mean, Rhe-Rhe?”

  Bianca heard Rhea punch Frankie and tell her to keep quiet.

  She could also hear Rhea tell Thalia to trail Bianca.

  Bianca didn't care. For the first time since Ben died, she felt...

  Hell, she felt like she actually had a beating heart in her chest.