I didn’t know if right now was a good time to mention that seeing my mom in the flesh nearly floored me. In just a few hours’ time, maybe even a few minutes, I’d be going out there to hunt down a maniac that’s fucked with me for way too long. But my entire body—thoughts, emotions, everything semi-logical remotely resembling me—went out the window. It had been a short walk to a cruddy apartment building, one that had two thugs sitting outside it wearing heavy winter jackets, playing cards and smoking cigarettes that both came to a sudden stop when Ava walked up the stairs and through their card game. Someone opened the door before she had to knock on it. And then there she was, sitting at a weak wooden table, a bottle of beer beside her as she gazed over sheets of paper.

  I had stopped dead in my tracks so suddenly that the poor thug that had followed us winded himself when he bumped into me. I stared at her for a handful of seconds. Saw the sling her right arm was in and the eye patch covering her left eye. A thick bandage wove around her shoulder and forehead, and for once, she wasn’t in a lab coat or a loose suit or anything of the sort—she was in a top that had been ripped open to show her midriff and back, where Frankie was quietly humming to herself as she stitched an open wound that I could smell was bleeding. My stomach clenched when she looked up. Her eyes were blurred, almost unfocused, until they widened and saw me. Actually saw me. Too many scars on her body. I stepped forward, paused. Too many bruises. Too many wounds.

  I turned and looked at Ava. The sporadic lanterns around the room lit the darkness with sickly yellow light, taking the life out of nearly everything and everyone in here. Ten or so thugs in the room, some Asian, some Black, one of them older and weathered and pale, standing in the kitchen near mom, holding a torch over her shoulder. The house was silent. Decrepit. Reeked of mold and rotting wood, which I figured came from the blocked sewers underneath Lower Olympus and the snow seeping through the roof tiles. Everything about this place felt isolated and silent, depressed and disgusting, with its peeling wallpaper and quietly singing radio in the corner.

  “I held my end of the bargain,” Ava said quietly. “Frankie now works for me, and in short, she works for you as well.” The pale girl behind mom opened her mouth to speak, but Ava cut her off. “Think about what I told you, because in”—she pulled down her sleeve and checked her watch—“ten minutes, the others should be here.”

  My mouth was dry, my tongue flat. Mom had stopped writing and was staring harder now.

  Ava walked toward me and patted my shoulder. “I’ve tried to find Bianca, but the Talon are very adamant on keeping her whereabouts secret. The best I can do for you now is support. When the time comes, you’re going to deal with Caesar. I know how you work. Being alone offers you the space you need to kill without a second thought. The rest will destabilize and dismantle and make sure you have the opening you need.” She lowered her voice and leaned in, her lips nearly brushing my ear. “A deep, solitary part of your psyche might not even fully trust me, but I’ve always trusted you. These ten minutes are the most crucial of your life yet. Gather your resolve. Understand how important you are.” She leaned away and locked eyes with me. “You’re Olympia, and whether or not this city changes tonight will be solely down to how much you believe that, too. She’s a superhero. Trust her.”

  Ava spun her finger around and the thugs grunted and got off the chairs, stools, kitchen counter and wooden steps leading upstairs. Some of them glanced at me, giving me tight nods. Others were sweating under their winter coats, hands shaking inside their pockets as they walked past me. Ava and her gaggle of thugs left, shutting the door behind her. Frankie had stayed and quickly finished the stitches she was sewing up, gathered a medical kit that looked straight out of a soundless picture film from the Fifties, and nearly skipped toward me on her way out.

  She paused beside me, leaned in, smelling like wet soil and cold body parts, then said, “Told you so.”

  “Leave,” I quietly hissed.

  Frankie winked. “Whatever you say, teammate.”

  The door shut behind me, and suddenly the room was silent.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look up from the floor, the walls, the lanterns or anything else in the room. I shut my eyes and quietly breathed out, flexing my fingers and trying to steady my heartbeat. The next few moments were filled with nothing but the sound of a chair scraping against the floor, weak wooden tiles squeaking, and then she was in front of me. I know she was in front of me, standing so close the smell of cleaning alcohol was blending with the stink of old blood underneath her bandages. She’d hobbled as she walked, the sound of one of her feet lighter than the other. They hurt her because of you. They beat her half to death, all because of you, Rylee.

  “I need you to look at me,” she whispered. I didn’t move. Her hand found my cheek, her thumb rubbed against my jaw, brushing against the scar at the corner of my lip and the one just underneath my eye. It was almost funny, stupid, that I’d fought and killed so many things this year, that I’d nearly died so many times over that had left me waking up sometimes bathed in agony I couldn’t even understand, and yet…yet this was the one time my eyes stung. The one time I wanted to use my strength, each and every ounce of it, to push her away from me. I tried. I barely had enough in me before she wrapped her arm around me and pulled my face gently into her chest. My arms went rigid by my sides. My fists tightened. A faint stink of electricity filled the air around us, burning my throat.

  “Why…” The word jumped out of my mouth, muffled by her shirt. She kept stroking my hair, just like she used to when dad passed home and made some days harder than most. I swallowed, then stepped back, untangling myself from her and knuckling the stinging tears away from my eyes. I pinched my nose and swore, because I had a headache that kept pounding hard against my temples. “God,” I whispered. “Why’re you just so fucked up, V?”

  Mom stared at me, her brows furrowed and face soft. I hadn’t called her mom directly to her face in months now, and that single letter echoed through the house. She sighed through her nose and pulled a chair from the table, sitting down with a bit of a grunt. For a while, she massaged her knee and stared at the floor, taking off her glasses and letting her torn, frayed, wet blonde hair fall around her face. She looked like a ghost. Her cheeks were sallow, her eyes almost looked horrified by everything she saw. Mom licked her cracked lips, then looked at me. But those were mom’s eyes, always so cool and stable, barely ever an ounce or flicker of emotion crossing them. But just for a moment, the mask slipped, and her jaw tensed, her eyes reddened a little and she shook her head and looked away.

  “Well?” I said, throwing my arm out to the side. “All this time, and you’ve got nothing for me?”

  Veronica said nothing. She sat in the old wooden chair, staring at the shadows behind me.

  “Fuck,” I said, turning around and pushing my hands through my hair. “Fuck. Me. You know how many times I blamed myself for not being there to save you? To look for you? I kept having this weird dream that maybe, just maybe, I’d be there to rip apart whatever cell they’d thrown you inside and you’d look me in the eyes and—”

  “There’s not a day that goes by that I wish someone took you away from me.” My mouth snapped shut. Mom kept staring at the floor, deep swallowing circles around her eyes. “I was never ready to be a mother. I was never ready to show compassion or love. I learnt those things bi-proxy. I learnt them through watching others. But I’m fundamentally ambitious, and far too much for my own sake.” She looked at me. “I see the necklace around your throat and I know who gave that to you. It was mine, a gift from her to me as a reminder of the day I spat in her face and told her I could do fine on my own. She made me promise to raise you right. To nurture you.” Mom massaged her eyes slowly. The lanterns surrounding her quietly burned. “God, the gravity of my mistakes and the fuck ups of Veronica Addams.” She chuckled cynically, almost spitting it out of her mouth. “There were days I wished she would come and take you, and there were days when you fell asleep with your head on my lap in front of the TV and I’d look at you and wonder if I’d kept my end of the promise. I don’t know what else to tell you—”

  “Apologizing right now isn’t going to fix anything,” I said, barely above a whisper. “You threw me out of the house and told me I was a mistake. You kept making me feel like I didn’t have anywhere left that I could go.”

  “I failed,” she said, looking at me dead. “Rylee, I failed, I kept failing, and the only thing I can tell you is that making sure your DNA, the human DNA that I gave you, wouldn’t be the reason you died is the most amount of care I could fathom. I understand biology and chemistry and the structure of the human condition, but holding you in my arms as you began coughing blood onto my chest was the first time in my life that I realized what it might actually mean to care. I didn’t love your father, my ambition led me toward him as he sold me a lie. He told me that I’d be the matriarch of a new race, a new beginning.” She spat on the floor, and I took a step back—mom wasn’t the kind of person to do that. “Bullshit, all of it, so much bullshit. I never wanted to be a mother, and God, I hate that you even had to hear your grandmother’s own words, but I guess that’s me, your dear mother—the woman who created…” Mom paused. Her voice went flat. She chuckled quietly and smiled emptily. “I created Ambrosia.”

  The floor tilted underneath me as I stared at her. It was a knee jerk reaction to suddenly be in front of her. It was restraint that stopped me from grabbing her throat. I looked down at her quizzically, my brows furrowed, not really getting what she just said, because I must’ve misheard something. I must have heard the wrong thing. Mom was looking up at me, her eyes hooded by the shadow I cast over her face. She straightened in her chair, her heartbeat so level, so slow, it almost seemed as if she was barely alive. We stared at one another. My fists tightened.

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  “It was late June,” she said quietly. “My mother was dead to rights and my father forced himself to keep working. I was young, grew up when superheroes were celebrities and the sky was always filled with the sound of capes in the wind. Except for Lower Olympus. Except for the Lower East End, right beside the river, where every summer it smelt like hell had been lit on fire and God’s dumpster had been thrown into the flames to emulsify. I hated everything. I hated superheroes. My father worked on the docks and had his legs crushed because some young superhero was trying to make a name for himself trying to save the day.” Mom’s eyes were empty, not even wet. “He killed himself trying to catch a container, and himself and a dozen others left that day without a way to work or walk or barely even hold themselves together before the attractiveness of what chewing at the tip of a gun could offer in the way of euphoria.” Mom tapped her finger against the table. I hadn’t moved. Barely moved. I doubted the world was spinning right now. Nothing but this room existed. Nothing but the millimeters of space that separates us. “So every night I would watch him melt deeper into his alcohol and his stool, sitting by the little window that looked over the river. At night, the river was dark enough to ignore. You could see the city and all its lights. I stopped going to school around then. Started having to provide somehow that wasn’t by using my body.”

  “You created the one thing that could kill me,” I whispered. “Dad…Did you—”

  “Let me finish,” she said quietly, tracing her fingers over my forearm along the tight spandex. “I started making a name for myself. People wanted a quick fix so I’d make sure to give them the high they wanted. The main reason was to get us out of there. To move us two blocks away where the smell wouldn’t stick to your hair and you could wake up without someone trying to break into your house. I was realistic. I’d never make enough to put my father into a hospital with healers. What I could do was make his life that little bit easier. And then I thought, well, if these fucking superheroes are only ever going to do it for the limelight and the attention, then why not just make something that’ll buck the boat. That’ll make the world realize it’s better to rely on yourself for saving rather than some freak who wore pajamas and sold their soul to corporate America and turned a blind eye to the real world.”

  “Just…like that?” I whispered. “You just wanted to destabilize the Golden Age, just like that”

  “It was only ever golden for the people who could afford it,” she muttered. “Why not have a real Golden Age where everybody could be a superhero and people like my father could walk again without a problem?” Mom leaned back in her chair. “Ambrosia was never meant to be some kind of…of drug. It was a tool. There were variants of it on the streets a long time before I ever got there. Most of them were either steroids for superhumans, or something with the same effect of heroin or cocaine on a superhuman level. But it would always affect Normals, too, so I figured if I worked it out and stole from the gangsters and thugs who I worked for to fund it, then I could make something revolutionary with it. Your aunt was the first person I ever gave it to. She was never going to get far in life, Maggie. Too swept up in the grit of the city long before anyone could tell her to stop pinching needles and cigarettes off the curb. When she started flying all on her own because of Ambrosia, I knew I had done it.” Mom smiled at me, her face cold, eyes dead. “And then I made so much money off it that I bought a graveyard for your grandfather and built a mausoleum for just the two of them. Maggie died a few years later—hit and run. Me? I paid for my own college tuition, got handed prize after prize, and nobody knew where Ambrosia came from until the government came knocking one day and told me that I either shared the goods or came and worked for them.”

  My head was a mess. I turned around and slowly walked away, but mom still continued.

  “I worked with the Olympiad for a long time. Made sure that, during the Golden Age, that superheroes were more…super. The Golden Age had three periods, and I was the reason it hit its peak and shed off the previous decade’s grimy, gritty, edgy facade.” Mom waved her arm through the air. “An architect of the ages. The Woman of Tomorrow—that’s what Time Magazine said before your father made himself known to the world and stole the show. From then on, it was always a matter of being undermined. Here comes this strange man with his odd way of talking, stronger than any other superhero in history. I was asked to make Ambrosia more potent. I told them the human body doesn’t work that way. It has a limit. You push that limit, and people become less human, more…I hate the theatrics, but monstrous. Abominations. Wasteland, for one, was one of them. And I guess that’s why I entertained your dad’s words. I wanted more. I always wanted more. He was more. But he wasn’t willing to give me his blood. He was willing to give me more in…other ways.” Her voice quietened. “Your entire life has been based on the foundation of ambition, of wanting more, of wanting to be great, of wanting to be remembered. I say it’s hereditary, but the doctors told me it was just dumb luck.” Mom silently laughed. “I don’t need a DNA test to know that you’re mine, because you’re my spitting image of a younger self who lost herself chasing after the impossible.”

  So that’s why you hate me? I thought. You think I’m chasing the impossible, and I’ll end up like you?

  “I was your lab experiment,” I whispered. “All I ever was to you was a means to an end.”

  “In some ways, at first, you were,” mom said. “And then you opened your eyes and saw me, and something inside of me realized just how rotting I’d become. Just how much of that Lower East End stench had stuck with me all these years, stewing and brewing and coagulating inside of me like the sickness that chewed through my mother’s brain.” Mom shrugged. “I was always bound to be a terrible mother. The extent of it was just always unforeseen, almost…spectacular. The lengths I’ve gone to understand my emotions toward you must be the longest time anyone has ever spent researching anything. And I think, up until a few moments ago, I had given up, too.”

  “Given up?” I sneered. “What, on me?”

  “On trying to assume my emotions didn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve tried to convince myself, tried to rationalize constantly that what I did to you was correct in some sick and twisted way, but ultimately, the simple truth is that you don’t need to hear an apology from me—you’re right. What you need from me is what you’ve always needed from me, but…not anymore, and not to the extent I thought. You’re not the same girl I watched learning how to walk on her own or make friends with the neighbors, or even the same one from summer.” Mom swallowed and massaged her bad shoulder. “You’ve grown up so much, but at the end of the day, you’re eighteen. Just eighteen. At your age, I was the exact same. Late nights. No sleep. A goal in mind that nearly killed me several times over, and all it’s gotten me is wealth, acclaim, trophies and certificates that nobody is ever around to look at or speak about, because my home is empty and the living room I drown myself with wine in, so large that it would fit that tiny apartment we all shared several times over, is all so pointless. I’ve made a life not worth living. And if it wasn’t for that friend of yours, then I really doubt any reason for my being anymore. You moved past needing me a long time ago. All you want now is closure, and I’ll let you have it as soon as tonight comes to an end. Whether that’s a permanent goodbye or words you want to throw at me, that’s entirely up to you. Regardless, I think it’s best if I stepped back from your life. I’ve done nothing but damage it. So many people rely on you, and I haven’t smiled since just a few moments ago when you walked through the door. I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if the last time we saw one another, it was with you in pain and bleeding and screaming that terrible scream I hear every night.”

  The silence lingered and lasted, so painfully loud and dull my ears began to ring.

  “So,” mom said, struggling to stand up. I almost reached out. But I planted myself to the floor. “I’ll make sure if there’s anything you want from the house, I’ll send it over to where you’re staying. You’ll have access to the account I set up for you when you turn nineteen, anyway, so you should be fine for a few years if you spend it all wisely. Nobody else is in my will apart from you, and one day, when I do die, all I ask is that you find a little bit of time to water the flowers. I had a bad habit of forgetting to do that, and you’re a lot more dutiful than I ever was.”

  I stared at her, my mouth twisted in a frown. “…just like that, you’re gonna leave?”

  Mom looked around for a moment. “I thought that’s what you’d want most.”

  “Oh my Gods,” I muttered, shaking my head. “You still don’t get it.”

  Her lips thinned. “Educate me.”

  “You!” I said loudly. “Fuck, mom, I want you! I want a mom who’s gonna be there for me and not be an asshole about what I choose to do with my life. You think I liked not having you there to watch my soccer games or play rehearsals? God, it sounds so stupid coming out of my mouth, but I don’t want you to fuck off, alright?” I was breathing a little hard, drying my throat faster and faster. “I want someone…Gods, I don’t have a family! Dad is dead. I don’t have aunts or uncles or grandparents. I have strangers who know me through and through and nothing else, because the only person I’ve ever really known is you.” I stepped closer and pointed at her. “You fucked me up pretty good.” I choked on my own words and took a second to swallow. “And you do not get to leave until you fix it, alright?” I tensed my jaw. My vision blurred. Fuck, Ry, stop crying in front of her. “Or I swear on dad’s statue that I’ll never, for however long I live, even if that’s one year or one thousand years, I’ll ever forgive you, is that clear?”

  All I heard for a long time was my own breathing, my own heartbeat, my own rushing blood.

  “I hate you so much,” I whispered, my words broken and strained. “I hate you for trying to quit.”

  “Rylee…”

  “You’re the worst mom on the planet,” I quietly cried. Then my face was against her chest, and her arm was around my shuddering shoulders. I couldn’t push her. Couldn’t step back. My body failed. “I hate you so much.”

  “I know,” she whispered into my hair. My arms raised on their own and wrapped around her. “I know.”

  And for the first time in months, I didn’t have to put on a face, to be a superhero.

  I wasn’t Olympia.

  I was eighteen, terrified, exhausted, and crying against my mother’s chest, standing because she had her arm around me, not letting my weak legs buckle, not letting the exhaustion sweep over me—not letting me fall.

  “You can’t just walk away,” I whispered.

  “I’ll never, for as long as I live.”