She found me before I had the chance to explain what I was doing here. We’d stared at each other for a long time, and she’d had so, so many questions behind those amber eyes. But something had stopped her from asking them, something had stopped her from asking me why I always came back here thinking I could get a free ride out of her when I was never there for her, and better yet, because I didn’t have an answer to anything she would have asked. Instead she had sighed quietly and shook her head, her brows pinched and lips pursed. What happened to you? It was the same question she’d wanted to ask that same day in the Alps when the plane came down and she found me.

  But she’d never said a word either time; she’d looked me in the eyes and simply just known.

  I’d fucked up again, and I didn’t really know where else to go.

  And somehow I’d ended up here with Emelia sitting on the curb of the soup kitchen, watching the snow and the light traffic, the changing stop lights and the mundane silence of Lower Olympus. She’d given me a bowl of soup and some bread. Both sat rigid and cold in between my feet on the icy pavement. I stared at it, at my hands and my fingers, the soot under my nails and how hard it was to get out. I kept rubbing them over and over again, as if the snow would be wet enough to clean the grit from my fingers. I felt like puking. Felt like asking myself the same question I’d wondered when I turned that giant snake into a soup of meat and sinew, bones and guts and burnt skin.

  What are you? What the hell actually am I?

  That had been the first time I didn’t feel in control. Like my powers had been dialed to the maximum in a heartbeat without so much as a warning. Even sitting here on the curb had me anxious and scared. If I hurt Emelia, then I’d never forgive myself. Hell, according to the other versions of me, she’d injure her back badly enough some time soon, which I could chalk up as something I’d somehow manage to fuck up again in the near future. I put my head in my hands and stared at the cold gray concrete, at the snow that dotted it, and my bare feet in the white fluff.

  “I can’t keep doing this,” I whispered to her. She glanced at me. I could see her in the blurry rims of my vision. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t look at her. “Over and over again, like I just can’t do anything right, Em.”

  She said nothing, just let her cigarette spew smoke into the sky. “Did anybody get hurt this time?”

  I slowly shook my head, then shut my eyes. “I destroyed Dennie’s place tonight.”

  Her eyes widened, her mouth opened, then she paused and lowered her shoulders. She didn’t say anything, and I don’t think I would’ve wanted her to, not just yet, not right now. Emelia dragged her cigarette again and nodded slowly, letting smoke slip out of her mouth as she looked into the sky. “You’re going to talk to him, right?”

  “I have to,” I whispered.

  More silence. More smoke. Emelia got a little closer. I looked up, concern on the tip of my tongue, a warning ready to get spat out, until she said, “Rylee, you need to walk me through what happened, alright?”

  “I…” I looked away and rested my forehead on my palm. “I freaked out. I lost control. I blanked, Em.”

  “You’ve never lost control before.”

  “Things aren’t the same as before.”

  “Aren’t they?” she asked me quietly. “The thing about chaos on the Superhuman level is how quickly things escalate. You know that better than anyone. Powerful people lose control, and it gets a lot of people hurt. Our mistakes aren’t just forgetting to turn off the stove. Our mistakes mean lives get ruined, and my biggest mistake is letting you leave that night, thinking you’re going to be fine on your own.” Emelia flicked the cigarette into a nearby mound of snow. We watched it both fizzle and darken, going dead. “I’m not going to press you for answers right now, because you’re not going to give them to me. Not yet. We need to get you home and off the street first.”

  “I can’t go there,” I whispered. “She can’t see me like this.”

  “Who?” she asked. “Who can’t see you like this?”

  “It’s not important.” I glanced at her, fiddling with my fingers, feeling like I was going to choke on my own tongue the more I kept talking. I could hear ambulances and police sirens, emergency services finally getting their way down to Lower Olympus, but who knows? Everything echoed. I felt dizzy. Not here and not real. My skin felt numb and the world had a dim grey filter layered over it, dulling color and noise and filling my head with jumbled thoughts. “Em,” I said, finding my voice. “Why am I so fucked up?” My eyes stung. I forced my forearm across my face, then swore and swallowed air. “I can’t save anyone. I can’t get anything done. What the fuck’s the point?” My voice cracked. I bit down on my tongue, trying to stop the tears from hitting the curb underneath me. Look at you, crying, when you’re the one who messed up. Dennie just lost his business, his home, all he ever had, and you took it away in just under a minute. Shards of pain dug into my sides. I held my ribs, gasping for air, crying in short bursts.

  Wishing that my head would stop pounding and the world would stay quiet for just one second.

  Her arms wrapped around me, pulling me into a hug that forced something inside of me to give up, give in, to let down the walls and put down the gloves. I pressed my face into her shoulder and cried. Cried because I hated that I was crying. Cried because it felt so pathetic, so frustrating, to sit there with all these powers, with all these things I should be doing, and instead here I was, Daughter of Zeus, Heiress of Lightning, the Golden Gal and the fucking person meant to get her statue for doing nothing all year long, letting the tears soak into Em’s coat until I had nothing left and I was a heaving mess clinging to her like she was a life preserver and I was lost out at sea.

  We didn’t move. We didn’t speak. She ran her fingers through my hair. Em smelt like coffee. Her hair smells like shampoo. I shut my eyes and didn’t move, hating myself even more for every second I stayed on her shoulder. Dad would’ve watched this play out from the sky, his arms folded, his chin set and his jaw tight. Pathetic would be the word slipping through his thin frown. Disgusting would be the look coming from his pale golden eyes. And look at me, still thinking about that bastard, as if he was here. As if he was there in the sky pressing me harder and harder into the concrete from his sheer presence alone. I felt like hiding. Slipping through the cracks in the pavement and vanishing. This entire year had been one long slew of nothing. I’d done nothing. Achieved nothing. Made more enemies than I’d made friends. Killed more people than I had ever come close to saving. I just…

  “I want to give up,” I whispered. Her fingers stopped moving through my hair. “I want to quit.”

  “Rylee…”

  I pulled myself off of her and sniveled, laughing bitterly as I pushed my hair out of my face. I sat in a stew of my own thoughts, knees raised and arms resting on them. “I can get some kind of acting gig. Throw in the towel.”

  Em frowned but stayed silent, her hand still on my back. I shrugged it off.

  “I mean, it worked for you, didn’t it?” I said hoarsely. “Got millions in the bank and the world loves you. Wake up every morning and you can hug your mom and do whatever you like, not worrying about anything else.”

  “Stop it,” she said. I couldn’t face her even if I wanted to. “It’s cold, Rylee. Let’s go inside.”

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  I shook my head slowly. “Can’t even trust myself to not destroy the place.”

  “I know that you’re not—”

  “That I’m what, huh?” I asked her. “You know, that day in the shopping mall, when I killed that giant snake, I turned his guts into a pile of hot stew, you know that? And just with these things.” I showed her my hands, the scars and the grit and the dirt on them both. “I’d lied there inside his corpse, Em, trying to figure out what the fuck I actually am. I’m not human, but I’m also not them. They understood their powers. They never freaked out and destroyed a building just because they were emotional or fucking sad.” I felt like spitting, my saliva getting more bitter by the second. “And yet,” I continued quietly, “I can’t seem to really understand who Olympia is, y’know? What she stands for and what she’s actually trying to accomplish…her goals…her vision…even what she wants.”

  Or who she even is.

  At the beginning of this year, it had been easy to separate the two of us. I went to school. She fought. Rylee missed the bus because she overslept and flunked her history test because she didn’t study, and Olympia would be on the news that night for wiping out a terrorist cell that had been trying to set up explosives in Olympus Square.

  But then, all of a sudden, high school ended, and real life began. Now she was me, and I was her.

  And neither of us knew who we were or what we were.

  I’d spent more time being Olympia than Rylee this year, and I guess I never knew just how bad her life had been all this time, and I guess I never paid enough attention to how much my normal life was falling apart, too.

  I had a headache just thinking about it. Now imagine how I physically felt. Drained. Beaten.

  Exhausted.

  Tired of being me.

  Tired of being Olympia.

  But I didn’t just get to stop. Didn’t have the luxury. That’s only for the dead to stop and breathe.

  Emelia took my hand in hers and said, “I’m not losing another friend to this life. I left because I was afraid, but you’ve never been afraid, Ry, and sometimes that’s what people need, but sometimes it’s not what you need.”

  “What I need is to figure out what the fuck I’m going to do now,” I muttered.

  “What you’re going to do is realize you’re more afraid of Olympia than you are of your dad.”

  I paused and looked at her, eyebrows screwing together. “What?”

  “You keep trying to turn her into something she’s not,” she said, poking my shoulder. “And you keep trying to turn yourself into somebody you’re not happy being. You’re miserable because you’re not him.” I’m about to ask what that means, to let my boil of emotions spill onto her until she continued. “Olympia is the daughter your father would’ve wanted, and Rylee is the daughter your mother would have wanted, but what about you, Ry?”

  “What about me?” I asked her quietly. “I managed to hit neither target. Fuckin’ flawless.”

  “Like I said months ago,” she said. “They’re not meant to be different people and one’s not meant to be better than the other. One of them just wears a costume but shouldn’t have to put on a mask, too. You are who you are, the good and the bad, the great and the ugly, but finding out who you are is gonna make you realize that you’re meant to be your own person. Your dad’s time came and went, and you’re not your mother, Ry. You can suffocate yourself all you like trying to fit into their molds, or you can let yourself breathe trying to find out what fits you.”

  “You read that off a brochure?” I muttered.

  “I’m being serious,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “Rylee, you need help. Professional help.”

  I really didn’t want to say she was right, or say anything at all. The world around us was silent, cold. Each window was dark and each streetlight was dim and yellow. It made my stomach turn thinking mom and Bianca were out there, too, not knowing what was going on, where they were, in some cold, dark room digging their fingernails into their arms, trying to keep themselves together as they shivered. But I couldn’t do anything, not a single thing. The Triumvirate won the turf war. Lucas vanished into thin air. Caesar is still out there, watching, waiting, planning and gathering. I held my head and shook it slowly, because growing up, the comics made this look so easy. Find one person and go to the next, break into the secret base and destroy the world-ending threat. But I guess real life was a lot more fluid than that. A problem here and a problem there, unrelated and an issue in its own right, and too much of one not to fully ignore. At some point, I didn’t know when, I started hoping that everything would pan out.

  That this would all somehow go down one direct path, everything would fall into place, and voila.

  There’s the bad guy I’ve got to defeat, and here’s the fist I’m going to do it with.

  Then my cousin was slaughtered, and I haven't understood anything since.

  Thanks, dad, for not mentioning that Supervillains sometimes just win. Sometimes it’s not even outright.

  Sometimes they do it slowly, wear you down until you’re exhausted, because you’re the one playing catch up. You’re the one trying to figure out what exactly they’re planning whilst you keep your normal life from falling apart. They’ve got no social life to uphold, nothing they’ve got to keep playing catch up to. What I find is last month’s news, because last month, I was busy with something else entirely, and on and on the cycle goes, it’s just…

  Impossible. Too much. Just too much.

  To that, I didn’t cry. To that, I felt empty. Hollow. Tired.

  Beaten.

  “Ry?” Emelia said, breaking the silence.

  “I’m here,” I whispered. Come get me.

  There’s nothing much left of me to take.

  I got to my feet, standing on the edge of the curb. “I’m gonna go…somewhere. I don’t know where yet, and I don’t know for how long, or if I’m even gonna come back before the year ends, but I’m not gonna stay in New Olympus for a couple of days, and I think it’s better I fix myself before I try to fix this city, so…bye, for now, Em.”

  She stood up, flickers of purple electricity in her eyes when she faced me. “Then I’m coming with you.”

  “No, Emelia. You’re not. People actually need you here.”

  “And I don’t need my best friend?”

  “No, actually, I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve been gone for months on end—”

  “And I’ve felt every single one of those days,” she said quietly. Emelia pursed her lips, the cold turning them a slightly darker shade and her skin a paler color. “I didn’t want to tell you, but Selina made me promise this.”

  “Promise what?” I asked, feeling the wind’s worsening snap against my skin.

  She stuck out her pinky. “She made me promise that we’d be teammates one day.”

  “I don’t think now’s the time,” I muttered. “Least of all for promises.”

  “And then she died,” Em said, “and we split up, stopped being heroes, apart from you.”

  “I don’t need a fucking pep talk right now, Em.”

  “So let me be with you,” she said. “Let me make it not so lonely.”

  My brows screwed together. “You want to be on a team? There’s no team, Sparky, it’s just me.”

  “Us,” she said, taking my pinky in hers. “Because however dark it gets, I’ll make sure you’re not lost in it.” I was about to speak again, but as usual, she was quicker than me. “I sit around all day long hoping you’re okay when I should have been there with you. I goaded you into being a superhero so you’d have a roof over your head. Let me at least make things right, starting now, and starting with you.” She smiled softly, looking at me with the kind of goodness and glowing truthfulness in her eyes that made me stop and stand there in front of her. My chest felt tight. My lungs felt hot. I swallowed and waited, my eyes slowly starting to sting again. “You’re not alone, Ry. You’re not meant to be alone. Nobody is, not with the city in a state like this, but if we’re going to be teammates, then you’re going to first get yourself in order. Then, and only then, should you put on that blue and red costume.”

  “What, you want me to go to therapy or something?” I asked her.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Sabine’s dad has been waiting a long time to see you, anyway. A very long time.”