There were days when life had thrown curveballs my way and I had stood there dumbfounded and confused. Rhea being taken from me had been one of those days. Older Me getting killed right in the middle of her sentence had been one of those days. But getting out done by someone who looked at me wasn’t going to be one of those days, too. I had to draw the line in the sand somewhere, but there were some things I couldn’t do on my own. I knew that, and I accepted that, and unfortunately, Adam was the only person I could lean on right now for help. I wanted the SDU fully focused on getting my mother and Bianca back and, well, I also didn’t know how strong she was.

  If she killed that thing in half the time it took me to get back to my feet after it smacked me out of the air, then I needed information that practically only Adam would know. I could go over to Poseidon and ask him, too.

  But I don’t think he’d be too enthusiastic about wanting me to kill their newest employee.

  “What you want is absurd,” he said. The lights were still off but the one above the kitchen counter wasn’t. Velocity had decided to grab herself some cereal, and she’d offered me a bowl that I’d taken, because why not? Adam wasn’t joining in, though. He sat there on these high stools beside Velocity, arms still folded. “Murder?”

  “Don’t act like you’re a princess,” I said. “You’ve wiped people out, too.”

  Velocity shook her head. “Not a single direct casualty, actually.”

  “I was made to be better,” he said. “Unlike you, I don’t get blood on my hands and wash it off, thinking absolutely nothing of it. What we’re meant to inspire is hope, and all you want to do is tarnish your name more.”

  “My name’s been in the mud ever since you saved the city,” I said around a mouthful. “Thanks, BTW.”

  “I had no other choice,” he said, arrogance in his voice. “You weren’t there to help, either.”

  “I was busy.”

  “With something more important than the city your own father died for?”

  I chewed, staring at him, then swallowed. “Back to business,” I said, pushing aside the bowl. He’d hit a nerve, and the old me would’ve hit him, too. But I was here to negotiate because I needed him, and I know it was a long shot, but I’d seen, like everyone else, the face he’d made during the news broadcast. The blank expression when that imposter had landed on stage was everywhere on the internet right now. The world was thinking everything I was, too, except I was the only one who really understood how it felt to get massively fucked over. “I need your help, because you’re probably the only person that isn’t Cassie Blackwood who can get close to her.”

  “And the investors,” Velocity added, pouring herself more cereal. She was a little bigger around the cheeks than when I’d last seen her that night on the boardwalk, but maybe it was just me. “Always has them around her.”

  Must be nice, I thought.

  “And because of that, you want me to do the honors?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I call first dibs. I want to beat her corpse a little bit after I’m done with her, but I also need to find out more. How fast she can fly. How hard she can hit. If she’s got the same powers that I’ve got or others that got added in along the way.” I leaned in. “I would’ve fought her in a heartbeat if I was stupid, but come on—we both know that she’s probably as strong as the two of us combined. Gods, I hate to admit it, but maybe even more.”

  “Since when do you talk down how strong you are?” he asked. “The real Olympia would never.”

  “Yeah, well, a lot’s changed since you last saw me,” I said. “I’ve had to grow up a lot more and actually think about what I want to do and how I actually want to do it. I want to be a good superhero, I want to save the world, and those things sometimes don’t mean the same thing, because I guess I have to kill someone in cold blood to keep myself from going insane, and if I do lose my shit, then I’d be a bad superhero and the world won’t be saved, so I think this is a pretty good cause.” I shrugged. “Besides, what I want is to show them that they can’t just play God and replace whoever they want. Dad is supposed to stay dead, and so are the Olympians. Their time came and went, and now it’s our turn. We might not like each other, but we’d be nothing in a world full of superheroes.”

  “I think ‘old news’ is a better term,” Velocity mumbled.

  “Who’s side are you on?” Adam asked her.

  “Neither,” she said. “Just here ‘cause you’re both in my house. Consider me invisible.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were a loyal little worker bee.”

  She snorted. “The Olympiad doesn’t have any use with a Supe that can’t even use her powers properly. If my folks weren’t pouring so much money into their bank accounts, I would’ve been cut from the program.”

  “So…you hate them now? You’d join my side?”

  “Fuck no,” she said. “That’s treason.”

  “And yet you sound like you want me on her side,” Adam said.

  “Like I told you,” Velocity said. “Color me invisible. Like the little voice in the back of your head that keeps the good and the bad nice and balanced.” She stood and kissed his cheek, which made his pale skin go a deep shade of red. For a moment, when she ruffled his hair and dropped her bowl in the sink, I felt a twinge in my gut. A weird little pinch that made me bite my tongue, watching as he complained about the milk-shaped kiss she’d left on his cheek as she headed down the hallway to the bathroom. Once the door shut, he wiped off the milk and glared at me. I put my hands up and pretended to zip my lips, but I couldn’t help smiling a little as he muttered.

  I didn’t know what to say for a second. My train of thought had been knocked. I guess I just never thought he’d find someone who tolerated him. I swallowed and nodded as he went and washed her bowl, tapping my finger against the marble countertop. It was a nice place. I could only imagine the sunsets you could see from the large windows. Bianca would love it, having her feet up on the table, cocoa in her hands as the snow fell from above.

  Adam finished and dried his hands, then spoke to me without turning around. “You’re being serious.”

  I blinked, then shook my head. Focus. Rylee wasn’t useful right now, and neither were any of her feelings and sticky emotions. I had problems to deal with that looked exactly like me. “Of course,” I said. “She’s a threat.”

  He threw the rag over his shoulder and turned around, folding his arms and leaning against the sink. “Do you want to know something?” I shrugged and waved him on. “I think of you as the antithesis to everything Super.”

  I leaned back a little. “I think I’ve known that for a while.”

  “Your publicity stunts over the past few days don’t erase what you’ve done,” he said. I was about to say I knew that, too, but he spoke over me. “Your father wouldn’t be proud of you any more than the public, because you leave however you like and come back to do little else than walk old ladies across the street and walk children home. I’ve read your files, and there are many, many files the government keeps on you. You’re surveyed as much as possible and maybe even more than the president himself. They classify you as an American Threat. Your dossier is going to be pushed to the ICC at the beginning of next month so they can consider upgrading you to a Global Threat. You’re wild and uncaring. You are a heartless psychopath that decimates without further thought of her actions and thinks she’s above the law in all its facets. A Superhero who can’t do their job to the American people is a Superhero who isn’t useful to anyone. You’re meant to be a public servant, but all you are is a public hindrance.”

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  I smiled, letting the lump in my stomach dissolve. “You wanna play this game, then?”

  He said nothing, only narrowed his eyes.

  “You’re a clone, Adam. You’re nothing but a clone. I hate that you look like my dad, and I hate it even more that you’re nothing like him. The world is done with you. They’re making Zeus because, and you’re gonna hate this, they find you pretty useless, too. I’ll admit that I haven’t been great, but neither of us have. For some reason, they’re putting you back on the shelf right beside me, because we’re so bad that they’re bringing back people from the Golden Age to try to put hope back in people’s hearts.” I spread my arms. “But what do you want me to do, huh? I’m bad at this, Gods, I get it—join the queue of people who keep telling me that, but I don’t care, I really, really don’t care! Why? Because I’m gonna make sure I get that statue whether people like it or not, and I am not letting a society who hates their own superheroes tell me that they want the old ones back when they don’t even know anything about them.” I laughed a little, shaking my head. I spoke after a while. “Adam, we are Olympians.”

  He scoffed. “And what right do you of all people get to say we stand amongst them?”

  “None,” I said, shrugging again. “But I know it’s what I want to be, and I know it’s how good I want to be, so why can’t I say that’s what I am? Most of them were assholes. Half of them are dead. We’re the new ones that are meant to keep the legacy going. I hate your guts, but look around—there’s nobody else who can do what we can.”

  “You’re missing something,” he said. “I’ve actually saved the city. They love me.”

  “Whoever’s making the Olympians doesn’t,” I said. “Bad products get trashed.”

  Take it from me, because I don’t think the world has ever thought otherwise.

  “I am not a bad product,” he said quietly.

  “Then why are your eyes so dull?”

  He said nothing. His heartbeat was fast against his ribcage, and I could almost taste the bitterness of his adrenaline coursing through his blood. Velocity, though, was still in the bathroom, and he didn’t want a fight.

  “Back home,” I told him, breaking the silence, “on the planet I come from, kids whose eyes don’t start glowing by the time they’re five are taken away from the larger populace. There’s not really a name for it, but I never really paid attention to that language and my cousin was always better at it.” He straightened, because I knew he was going to ask if Titan had offspring, and maybe even on this planet, but I wasn’t going into that tonight. “Anyway, they have to go through training. A really hard and painful kind of training that forces their powers to develop. A lot of kids don’t make it far enough to see the end of training. Most of them just lie down and never get back up.” I kept tapping against the countertop, kept staring at the floor. “You either survive and succeed, and make sure you don’t water down future generations, or you crawl your way to the finish without any powers, still alive.”

  He stayed silent, then asked, “What happens in the second scenario?”

  “From what I heard, it’s only happened once,” I said, looking at him. “I didn’t nearly die from my own father’s hands just so a bunch of humans tell me when to quit and hang up the cape. Fuck that. I earned a chance to live and I’m gonna make sure that when I do die, it’s not without a statue and some fucking respect. I’ll earn them both, but you’re gonna have to understand that, in my eyes, you didn’t deserve to be alive, and neither did she. I was born with nothing. She was made with everything. Call it hate. Call it spite and jealousy. Whatever you wanna call it, I want her dead. The world doesn’t get to decide what’s perfect and what’s not. The world doesn’t get to decide if I’m good enough or not. They want their Olympians back then fine, fuck it—make a hundred Hekkas and a thousand Zeus’, and I’m still gonna be better than each and every one of them. So yeah, you wanna talk down on me, Adam, then fine, be my guest. But if you think for a second that you’re off the hook, you’re not. Soon enough you’ll be the imperfect one. The one they’ll start thinking isn’t anywhere near good enough to save them, too.”

  I stood up, pushing the stool backward. “You were manufactured in a lab, made to be great. I was born into two worlds that hate me for living, wanting to be great. She’s going to be everything we aren’t and more, Adam.”

  “You want her dead out of spite,” he said quietly. “Because you feel inferior to her.”

  “I feel like I’m the one who doesn’t deserve to be quit on by the entire world, and if you don’t think you’re not worthy enough to at least try to mean something to this planet, then I don’t know why they even made you.”

  He slid his tongue across his teeth, staring at me with his plain, dead eyes. “I hate you even more.”

  “Now imagine she’s the one telling you how useless you are, except she can kill you in a split second.” I rested my hands against the counter, leaning on it. “At least against me, we’d knock a few screws loose before that.”

  “Lesser of two evils,” he muttered, massaging his temples.

  “Except I can make you stronger.” He paused, then looked at me. “I can make your eyes glow.”

  He tilted his head, confusion on his face. “You’d make me stronger? You know I’d just kill you.”

  “Just as long as she’s dead before that, then fine. You can try for a third time.”

  “A third time?” he asked. Then the realization dawned on him. “YOU—”

  I waved my hand through the air. “If you don’t beat me to death a third time, then I’ll tell you all about my weird and wacky summer. But first I need to know that we’re going to help each other out. I know Cassie is gonna make it seem like we’re animals for killing her, that we’re against progress and peace and whatever, but I want them to know nothing they make is ever going to be good enough.” I let my words sit in the air, because I was also kinda just realizing how big of a gamble this was. Killing her in broad daylight would mean we get to be the villains in the world’s eyes, but she didn’t sit right with me—there was something wrong with her, and call it anything you want, but I’d like to call it instinct. She was rotten inside. I wanted to know how by pulling her apart. “Well?”

  He sighed through his nose and brushed back his hair, lost in thought. “Officially,” he said. “I decline.”

  My heart sank into my gut.

  “Between us, though,” he said. “I’m willing to find a logical reason to see if she’s as bad as we’re making her out to be. But trust me, I want to think she’s nothing but grating. If she turns out to be an asset, then that’s it.”

  “And what about Cassie?” I asked him.

  “I’ll stick to the other version of you,” he said. “Killing my boss isn’t what I’m planning on doing.”

  “It could solve a lot of problems, you know. Save us a lot of hassle in the future, too.”

  He folded his arms. “We were starting to see eye to eye, let’s not push it too far.”

  I figured that was the most I was going to get out of him, anyway. I wasn’t expecting a full flip, but the fact that he’d even entertained the thought of watching her for me meant that, however little, a part of him understood that things were changing, and not in our favor. The old Adam would’ve fought me every step of the way, but I guess neither of us have had it easy since the underground lab fight. People change, even clones, apparently.

  We both heard the toilet flush, then the sink, and finally Velocity came back. She looked at me, then at him, and said, “Well, nobody’s bleeding, and my place is still in one piece, so that means everything is a-okay?”

  Adam grunted. “We’d tolerate each other for the time being.”

  “Awesome,” she said. “So, Olympia?”

  I looked at her.

  “Mind getting the fuck out of my house?”

  I obliged, but not before I took her cereal boxes with me. I stopped at the broken door and turned. Adam was at the end of the hallway, looking at me. “Before you leave,” he said. “I suppose this means a ceasefire?”

  “For now,” I said. “I left my number on your fridge. I call it the Olympia Hotline. Ring if you find out anything interesting, and anything about her physicals. If you want to get stronger, call me and make it happen.”

  “I still don’t fully understand why you’d help me,” he said. “Especially if this is all a dud.”

  “That’s simple, dude,” I said, stepping over bits and pieces of their door. “I feel really bad beating you so easily over and over again. At some point, I need a fair fight, just to prove to you that I’m always gonna be better.”

  His jaw tensed, but if that wasn’t a flicker of a smile, then I didn’t know what was. “Truce, then.”

  “Truce,” I said.

  “Are you going to start planning what to do next right now?” he asked.

  I shook my head and threw cereal into my mouth. “Gotta deal with something more important first.”

  "What could possibly be more important right now?"

  Seeing my old landlord, for one.

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