From above, Lower Olympus looked like a bleeding wound. Smoke and clouds had churned together, creating this thick and soupy hue that bled over the bay, so foul-smelling it hurt to breathe even from the clouds I cut through. I slid through the storm, thunder and lightning so violent and hot it filled the air with skin-tingling heat. Blight was gone, and so was the tar and the blood his body had gushed all over me. The blood slid off my arms, my face, my fingertips and my clothes as I skimmed through the rainfall, because it was creeping toward the time of year when the snow slowly stopped falling and the clouds began belching and pouring almost every single day. Wet. Dark. Slippery and miserable, but at the very least, as I escaped the cloud and fell toward the skyline, the fires were out.

  Lower Olympus had stopped burning, the smoke had cleared, and now its scars, its trenches, its streets that were filled with rubble, its entire blocks fat with shelters that the few Capes working around the city had managed to put up. But my job wasn’t done, not yet—I had two more things I needed to deal with before I could finally catch a breather. The devil’s only second on my list. I have to deal with the Kaiju first. Every inch of my body felt like it was electrified. On edge. So acute that almost every stab of ice-cold rainfall felt like needles against my skin. Sounds were louder, smells raunchier, and all that meant was more nausea. Bodies were underneath white tarps. The dying and the damaged and the crippled were being taken care of by exhausted-looking doctors and nurses. A few Capes in their odd costumes, ones I didn’t even recognize, were busy doing their best carrying people around, making sure they had water, and trying to stop the tarps from blowing over and the rivers of sewage water from touching the wounded. This city reeks, I thought, but at least that meant one thing: finding the monsters was easier.

  More than one Kaiju had gathered inside of an abandoned hospital building. An entire wing had slumped into itself, devouring most of the emergency equipment with it. I landed on a pillar and crouched, smelling them, listening to them, watching them as they huddled together in droves, streaming into the complex through windows and doorways and slinking out of alleyways. I counted dozens, no, it was beginning to breach the hundreds. Too many to properly count. Too many to notice one-by-one. Some slithered. Some flew. Most held themselves with torn hoodies and heavy blankets and clothes that didn’t fit their bulky, misshapen bodies. I lowered myself off the pillar, sliding down the side of it and landing on a broken ledge. I stuck to the shadows, light on my bare feet.

  “Hurry,” a man hissed, waving at the stragglers more hesitant, the ones who couldn’t commit to the dark building and its hidden gathering of monsters. He was short and bulky, had warts the size of eyes protruding from his neck and face. His hood was low, his hands covered by winter gloves. “The entrances close in minutes. Anyone who arrives later than what was allowed won’t get any leeway. Children first, then the women—hurry, all of you!”

  I found an opening into the building that wasn’t swarmed with hordes of Kaiju. I climbed through the window and landed softly, crouching and moving so my back was against the wall. Lightning lit the sky. Faces were painted in a shock of white the moment I glanced outside the broken window. I climbed up the wall and kept to the ceiling, because I knew Kaiju, and I knew how they worked—some of them were more in-tune with themselves. Some of them sensed air pressure changes like I did. Some could pick up heartbeats quicker than I ever could. But there were too many inside the building to pinpoint just one. It would be my smell they first noticed. The stench of blood clinging to my dap hair. The human sweat that dripped off my brow as I came to a dead end filled with stone.

  I cursed, looked around, and decided to go back outside again, using the ledge above me to flip my way up the wall and scale the side of the hospital. Rain lashed against my back, and if it wasn’t for my super strength, it would have made the climb nearly impossible. There was a hole in the center of the hospital, a gaping wound that looked like someone had smashed right through it and taken half the flat concrete roof right along with them. And it was also the largest gathering of Kaiju I’d ever seen in my life. Some perched on pillars, on network towers and old, rusted satellites that lay amongst the piles of stone. A lot of them hid in the dark, arms tightly hugging their bodies. Kids whimpered. Parents hushed them. I found a shadow cast by a pillar I could stick to, then watched, finally, as the sound of that grating, high-pitched voice, the voice of the man who’d forced Mr Campbell onto his knees, echoed through the rainstorm. A chant. A heretical slew of words and slurs that riled most and angered all.

  Is he controlling all of them? I didn’t know how to tell without angering them. Mr Campbell wasn’t sitting beside the man, though. He stood, a lumbering mass of muscle and fur that shone in the grey rainfall, breathing so heavily that slews of mist spilled from his maw. I narrowed my eyes. He was swaying, still in some kind of trance. The man in his rags and his patchy skin screamed to the crowd of growing Kaiju, and a lot of them had that same look in their eyes. Glazed. Blind. The longer it went, the more children fell silent, and the more Kaiju started stared.

  They all watched him as if they were starving, watched him as if their baser instincts demanded it.

  I’d seen this before. At least, I’d seen and heard about it twice. Once in my history class.

  And once on Arkath.

  Peacemaker had that very same effect on superhumans when he spoke. He demanded war and they’d wipe entire countries off the map. If he wanted peace, the most bloodthirsty would kill themselves for the greater good.

  Arkath was different, because it came from the gut as well. From a feeling that slid down your spine and told you to keep your head low and your teeth clenched and your eyes shut, because you can’t dare, no matter what, look at a being so far beyond you dead in the eyes. It was fear for our kind, but for the Kaiju, it was different. A lot different. Something more animalistic. Something that echoed through the air and made my skin itch. That greased their movements and massaged their muscles and made a few of them twitch and several more of them lean closer.

  I moved forward, then a hand grabbed my shoulder. I stayed still, then glanced behind me.

  Thalia, her smooth brown skin slick with rainfall and her choppy black hair flat on her scalp, hid behind me. She shook her head, her eyes glowing softly, then crept closer, so close her lips nearly pressed against my ear.

  “This human pretends to be a god,” she whispered. It was so silent a normal person would’ve barely heard it, and if anything, I felt it more through my skin as her tongue moved and so did her lips. “I have engaged with him. He does not fight. He uses these…things to do so.” She shuffled backward, and the gristly scars along her arms, and not just her people’s fleshy carvings, were still fresh enough to be a bright pink in the blanket of darkness. In her thick trousers and torn t-shirt, she looked like she’d been savaged, beaten, nearly torn apart—but if she was in any pain, it didn’t cross her half-bored face. “Rhea and the others are in other locations of the city. I will handle—”

  I put a hand over her mouth and shook my head. “I’ll deal with the Kaiju. Find my mother.”

  Her finely lined eyes narrowed, like a panther hidden in the dark. “Why so?”

  “You’re a trained hunter,” I said quietly. More yelling, more shouting. We both hid when even more Kaiju beat their wings through the night, maybe in a frenzy, maybe in frustration, watching as the man in rags continued screaming for them to listen, to bow, to understand just how badly this world treats those who don’t look anything like them—but he had a way, a way to make sure none of them were ever hurt or treated badly again. “You’ll find her faster than I ever would. Tell her Blight is dead and I’ll be there soon—get the others and get them to her. You guys need to get healed, get stronger, and get ready. It’s gonna get much worse.” I turned around, my back to her. She stared at me with the kind of intensity that felt like she was trying to burn a hole through my spine. “But when you find Rhea, tell her to send Ava a message from me: Focus on saving lives—I’ll deal with the supervillains.”

  “What of the bodies frozen under the rain?”

  I paused, then looked at her. “Blight’s slaves? Tar coming out of their mouths and eyes?”

  “I do not know what this ‘tar’ is, but if it is a foul black liquid, then yes.”

  “Are they hurting anybody?”

  “They’ve all suddenly stopped moving. Their muscles are locked.”

  I turned back around. “Then get them together and put them all in one place. We’ll fix ‘em later.”

  Silence answered me.

  Glancing over my shoulder, and all I could see was my own shadow being pelted by the rain. Lucas used to do just that, except now I know how he did—as for Thalia, I had no clue at all. I could barely hear her feet beating against the concrete, let alone her heartbeat thumping inside her chest. She’s got her job, Ry. Time to do yours.

  I stood up and walked toward the center of the building, where the rain was being channeled down the mound of rubble Kaiju-Man was speaking from. Rivulets carried bits of stone and plaster into the broken sewers beneath the hospital, overflowing with waste and backed-up snow that clogged and reeked of months of neglect. I swallowed as the first Kaiju began noticing me, the ones that I passed and the ones that jolted when my body brushed against theirs, shocking them with tiny jolts of electricity that cleared the cloud that had fallen over their eyes. The unease started to grow into panic that morphed into a dispersal of bodies in front of me. They moved out of my way, all of them sweating the kind of chemicals that shrieked fear. I kept my hands up and my walking slow, but the bodies I passed each got a jolt of their own that stung just enough to wake them up. It was subtle. Slow. Until I was at the foot of the mountain of rubble, looking up through the rain at the Kaiju-Man’s weak silhouette.

  I could very easily go through him, or maybe even give Blight some company near the moon.

  Instead, I found a slab of stone to sit down on and stretch my back, because each and every single muscle of mine hurt like hell, and at some point on my way back through the atmosphere, my chest had started hurting, kinda like Witchling’s telekinesis was crushing my ribs and sending daggers of pain shooting through my lungs.

  I coughed into my palm once. Iron tinged my saliva. I wiped my hand on my thigh, then said, “‘sup?”

  The larger Kaiju crept closer, unsure but protective. These ones weren’t mutated. Normal men and women with manes and spots and teeth like yellow daggers stuck in their gums. Eyes that glowed and fingernails that grew.

  But these weren’t killers, not really—most Kaiju naturally weren’t, believe it or not.

  Their society was barely a secret, and it wasn’t some kind of hate clan.

  It was for their own protection. Think of it like a support group. A helping hand. Got a problem? Join the society and support one another. Housing, loans, car payments, insurance—all the boring stuff that most Kaiju would get denied if they went through any other normal office. At least, when Ava and I spoke way back in my bedroom before I destroyed Dennie’s coffee shop, that’s what she told me. So was I afraid? No, not all that much.

  If anything, I was the one who reeked of blood. Who still had grit and bits of flesh stuck under her fingernails and threaded through her hair. My body was still hot enough to make the rainfall steam off my skin, creating a veil around me that clung to the stone I sat on. I rested back on my palms and looked up at Kaiju-Man.

  He stared at me, half his body turned away as if to run, but then he looked at the masses around him, at the faces that expected something from him, and that meant resolution, which melted into a snarl on his face that twisted into a disgusting grin. “Olympia,” he said. The name echoed. Kaiju whispered it, shuffling on their feet, their hooves, the ones with wings flapped and rustled uncomfortably. “So, you’ve already butchered my friend.” He shook his head, then flung his hand toward me. “See?” he shouted. “This hero, this daughter of the man who once–”

  “Gonna point out that if you finish that sentence, you won’t have a jaw to say anything else with.” What’s everyone’s deal with dad, anyway? So fucking obssessed like he just died yesterday. He stuttered, looked around, then I looked over my shoulder to wave at the rest of them. A little boy with antlers waved back, then his father snatched his hand and pulled him behind his tree-trunk of a thigh. “Listen, tonight’s been a pretty long, pretty shitty night. Lower Olympus is fucked, and I’m not gonna sugar coat it for you, but you already know that. Life’s only gonna get tougher in the next few weeks, and trust me, the last thing you wanna do is make it even harder.”

  “She threatens you!” he screamed. Mr Campbell shuddered, then growled—a deep sound that came from his gut and echoed around his thick throat. Several Kaiju inched backward as he lowered, his maw frothing and pinprick eyes staring down at me. “And yet all we want, all that you want, is a home, is your own space! How much more suffering must you all endure at the hands of people like her?” I let him finish. His heart was rapid and spit was flying from his mouth, and it also gave me a second to catch my breath and clear my head. Besides, I was never planning on screwing with the Kaiju. They had enough problems as it is, nevermind throwing me into the mix. “And now is our glorious time! He has deemed it so!” He spread his arms. “He has given us our chance, our moment to seize what is truly yours! As the humans cower, we can prowl, we can fight, we can earn our land, our buildings, we can take it all for ourselves, build a home to raise our children without fearing persecution!” He took a deep, haggard breath, tilted his head back, and bellowed, “We will not be made small! The Kaiju will again stand tall!”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Sure,” I said in the silence that followed, waving my hand through the air. “That works.”

  He continued breathing, then looked down at me, puzzled. “You…agree?”

  “Yeah,” I said, putting one leg over the other so I could massage the soles of my feet. Gross, I stepped in sewage and didn’t even notice—how thick are my freaking soles? “You guys need to be kept safe, and the best time to make sure of it is right now before all those rich assholes in the Upper West buy up all the burnt up blocks and turn them into apartments literally none of us can afford, ‘cause trust me, I’ve made zilch from this gig, and I doubt anyone’s making a hell of a lot of money from Lower Olympus in the next few months, either. So how about we sit down and figure this shit out together, because at the end of the day, it’s your boss who fucked the entire city, right?” I stared at him. The silence lingered. He stepped back, shifting on his feet. “Lucian destroyed most of this city, and…why? Just for you? C’mon, man, let’s not start trusting a guy who calls himself Lucifer? He tricked you.”

  “Lucifer?” a man whispered, ears flicking nervously on his head. “H-he’s returned? I thought he was—”

  “Don’t say his name,” a woman hissed, her scales glistening in the rain. “Don’t you know the tale?”

  “Never!” Kaiju-Man shouted. “Who is it that has given us work? A name? A way to gather resources and join arms against a species who has slaughtered us so many times over? It’s through his leadership, his oh, so glorious leadership, that we have managed to acquire weapons to protect our children, homes to house our families, doctors to treat our people and jobs to feed each other! None came to help but him! Who is Olympia to speak? She has done nothing but force us deeper into the shadows! She has done nothing except terrify all of our children!”

  “I’m gonna ask everyone a question,” I said, louder than the growing arguments could get. I stood up and faced them, spreading my arms as I spoke. “How do you think the next few months are gonna pan out for us down here, huh? If we don’t work together to fix this place, we’re going to starve, we’re going to freeze, and we’re going to get eaten alive by every single government agency that wants to scrub this half of the city clean.” Suddenly, everyone was silent, still, watching me intently, their eyes clearing from the fog he’d smeared over them. “I know I haven’t been a great superhero, alright? But I also know that I don’t see that many other ‘real’ superheroes coming from the Olympiad to make sure Lower Olympus doesn’t keep getting fucked with every other day. I want to do better, and there’s a reason I always take care of this part of the city, because my dad ruined it, and the guy who’s bankrolling the crazy guy above me who turned one of your own people into a monster, one that can’t even really think for itself, is also the same guy who’s been using your helplessness to his advantage. The Triumvirate wants you to feel shitty for yourselves so they can keep throwing you into the Upper West to distract the entire world.”

  “Distract us from what?” a man whispered.

  “The truth,” I said. “Which is pretty freaking simple: life sucks right now, and nobody’s coming to save us, and the last thing we need is to keep fighting each other. You were tools on 12th Avenue and if you listen to this guy you’ll keep being used as tools so you can all keep lying to yourselves about finally being able to help your society, but the truth is, all you’re doing is hurting it.” I let my words hang for a moment, let them seep deeper and deeper into their cold skin. “I’m not all that smart,” I said. “I’m not the one who’s got a plan to fix this city and how we’re gonna do that, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s that powerful people hate you. They despise you. They look down at you and feel disgusted, and who the fuck are they to feel that way? If Lucian wanted to help you, he would have already done it. But he hasn’t. He’s turned on the meat grinder and kept feeding the ones who believe they’re making a difference into it.” I swallowed and scanned their eyes, my heartbeat slow and my saliva bitter. For just a moment, as lightning flashed above us, they all looked like children. The ones I’d grown up with, the ones who hadn’t lived long enough to ever really know what being free felt like. I swallowed again, then raised my voice. “I would rather fucking die,” I said, “than ever let Lower Olympus get this bad again. Not in my lifetime, and I’m gonna live pretty freaking long—so long I’ll probably still be making the same shitty speeches to your great grandkids, and meanwhile Lucian, and that thing behind me, are gonna be dead, gone, and stains on all Kaiju.”

  “It’s easy for you to say,” a slender, hunched man said. A mix of a ferret and a balding, blinding fifty-something. His shirt was torn and filthy. His glasses hung off his slightly bent nose. “You’re Zeus’ daughter.”

  “Yeah,” a woman said, flapping her tiny pigeon wings. “You’ve always had power.”

  “You don’t know what it means to be afraid,” another woman said. “You don’t know what it means for your own kids to be terrified of leaving school late because they don’t even know what the other kids will do to them.”

  “What I do know,” I said, their voices echoing throughout the empty building, “is that you all deserve better than to keep bleeding just to keep living. We can work this out. Together. So what if my dad was Zeus? That guy shook Lucifer’s hand and allowed Lower Olympus to keep rotting under his thumb, and look at where that’s gotten us now—our streets are in ruins, our buildings are falling apart, there’s gangsters in every shadow and Supes who kill for spare change and some food. I’m fixing that coward’s mess. The Olympians are gone, and so is their shine, and I think it’s about time everyone starts realizing that they did a whole lot of fuck all in their time, and it’s our turn to make sure we can leave something behind when it’s our turn to get written down in the history books.”

  “She’s pedantic,” Kaiju-Man spat, making them all look upward. “She cares more about her legacy.”

  “Sure, yeah, a little bit, but so does everyone else on the planet—we all want to mean something to the people who come after us, otherwise all of our parents would be shitty, and all of the people we know would kill us.” I looked around, my muscles finally relaxing and the deep, resonating ache finally trickling out of my body. I was starting to feel refreshed, re-energized—focused. “But let’s cut this short—the city needs my help, but more importantly, Lower Olympus needs everyone inside of it to stop taking the easy way out. A handshake isn’t gonna fix our problems. So far, it’s only ever created more of them for us to suffer through. Fuck the supervillains. Fuck the gangsters. And fuck everyone,” I glared at Kaiju-Man, “who starts to think they’ve got the keys to solving this shit, and all you’ve gotta do is sell your soul to their ideals. We want this city fixed, and we’re gonna fix it, own it, and make sure that the people coming next aren’t even gonna believe that Lower Olympus looked this way. I care about this city because it’s my city. And anyone who threatens its people is my enemy—and trust me,” electricity crackled around my fingers, lightning the darkness and warming the Kaiju closest to me, making their hair stand on end and the rain soaking through their clothes slowly evaporate and dry, “if you think you’re gonna make it big time as a villain in my city, then you’ve probably never met me properly before. The name’s Rylee Addams, and you either leave and don’t come back, or you stay here, and I make an example of what happens when you try to fuck with a single one of any of my people.” They were all staring at him now, all with the same silence. “The Kaiju are with me, and that leaves you all alone. I’m gonna snap your neck if you don’t go running, and if you do decide to run?”

  I was in front of him in half the time it took a flash of lightning to shatter the darkness.

  “Then tell Lucian,” I said quietly, “that this is gonna really, really hurt.”

  He stared at me, his eyes wide, frantic, white and terrified. I gave him the count of three.

  And then he scampered down the mound of stones, tripping and stumbling and scraping his feet open and cutting his shins and palms into bloody messes that streaked against the shiny wet stones. He streaked into the dark, his scent of blood flustering the carnivores amongst the Kaiju. Mr Campbell snarled, then followed right after him.

  There was silence, there was a pause, and then—

  “Do you…” I looked down at the Kaiju around the mound of stones, surrounding it in a huddle—the heat rolling off my skin was just enough to evaporate the rain before it even got close, making the air sticky and humid. The man who spoke, a thick black mane around his head, got closer and tilted his head. “Do you keep your word?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it and landed on the stones. They were looking up at me like some kind of…being, something that was so far removed I barely even registered to their brains. No, not like this, so I climbed my way down, landed in front of him, and said, “All I’m gonna be to you guys is a protector, like I always should have been. If you need help, call me—I’ve got a hotline. If you need food, shelter, and all the rest, I’ll try to sort something out.” I put my hand on his shoulder. He flinched. They all did. Got a lot of groundwork to do here, Ry. “So don’t look at me like I’m some demigod. I’m a teenager who’s just trying to figure things out and help where I can, however I can, in the ways I know I can. Get everyone warm and in doors. Find emergency tents and tell them Rylee sent you—and if they refuse or give you any kind of problems, then breathe, relax, and tell them Olympia’s the reason you’re here, and if they’ve got a problem with that, then they can talk directly to me.”

  “I…I don’t understand,” a younger woman said, her whiskers trimmed and a scar cut across her face. A literal stray with heterochromic eyes, ones that glinted in the faint light. “We were always told that you hate us.”

  “What?” I said quietly. “Who the hell told you that?”

  “You hunt monsters and villains,” a mouse, literally, of a man said. “You kill us and hide our bodies.”

  “I kill human supervillains, ‘cause those guys suck.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “Like the guy who just ran into the dark, for example, isn’t gonna get far—he’s in the sewers, I can hear him screaming Lucian’s name, but his boss isn’t picking up, and that means he’s desperate. I’m gonna follow him, and I’m gonna end this.”

  They all stared at me. Some whispered. Most remained deathly silent.

  “…did I say something wrong?”

  “No,” the lion-man said, shaking his head. “We just…we’re confused and a bit bewildered, is all.”

  I backed away and smiled. “Don’t be, you’ve got a superhero watching your backs. Get out of the rain, the kids are gonna get sick and I’m not sure how much medicine is left in the city. I’ll be back soon and, oh, right.” I paused before I flew off, put my hand on the lion-man’s chest, and sent a shock of electricity through him that leapt from one body to the next until the entire crowd, up until the ones so far back they were hidden in crevices and shadows, received just enough to make them jolt and fill them with energy and warmth. Then my vision flickered and my saliva bittered, tasting like blood as my head swam. I stumbled, feeling light headed. The lion-man grabbed my arm and made sure I didn’t fall. I blinked. Still fuzzy. I massaged my eyes and took a long, solitary moment to breathe through my nose and then my mouth. Head ringing. Banging, aching pain drilling into my temples. I spat on the ground, and this time, it was only blood that came out of my mouth. What the— Then came the nosebleed, the warmth that dripped down my upper lip and into my mouth. They stared at me, and a few even reached for me.

  I backed up and dragged my arm across my nose, then smiled at them. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “It happens.”

  “Are you hurt?” a man with glasses perched on his fleshy, crooked beak said.

  “It must be strain from too much work,” a woman said. A panther from head to toe, standing on two legs just as normally as anyone else. “The poor girl does nothing but fight. When was the last time you ate and slept?”

  “I advise some rest,” the lion said. “Before you hurt yourself too badly.”

  “You can only protect us if you are healthy enough,” the mouse said.

  “Most importantly,” the panther said, getting close enough to look me up and down, “she needs help.”

  “I said I’m fine.” I swallowed the blood this time. Bitter. Vile. Tasting like bile and iron. “Now go and get yourselves to safety. Keep close, keep watch, and don’t get sidetracked. There’s people out there who want to help.”

  “Olympia, miss?” a voice whispered.

  I glanced over my shoulder.

  A kid, barely to my waist, clung to his mother’s leg—human, through and through. Not a Kaiju, not with a single feature on him that screamed animal. Dark hair, blue eyes, and a bright red running nose. “Come back, Ok?”

  “Sure,” I said, smiling. My chest hurts. My heart felt like it was on fire. “Always bet on the golden girl.”

  I just had to fight through whatever was killing me slowly—but the night wasn’t over.

  And my supervillain wasn’t dead yet either.

  So it looked like I still had a job to do.