The first thing I smelt was the sunburnt wheat and the gummy sunlight, then came the warmth of something in my hands, and finally, the sight of it all—lush wheat, a clear sky, an apple tree just off the road, and a set of white tea cups on a table just in front of me. I was sitting on a white porch on a thick couch, still out of my suit, and still with my head ringing and thoughts racing. Caesar had said a lot. Said so much it was hard to keep track of what was true and what wasn’t—I could barely trust a mirror nowadays, let alone a stranger, a guy telling me he had been born just an hour before we met and would go on a quest to constantly try to right my wrongs. It didn’t make sense. If he was that powerful, that smart, that knowing, then why didn’t he just…tell someone? Or hell, killed me outright, too?

  I couldn’t buy the fact that he saw a glimmer of humanity in me, just enough to hope I would change. Fuck, I thought, sitting back into the cushions, the tiny teacup in my hands still hot and steaming. Is he right?

  I mean, I didn’t want to be the person I was anymore. I didn’t want the year to turn over and I still saw the same person in the mirror. I shut my eyes and rested my head on the pillows, letting the buttery warm breeze linger on my face. I knew he was somewhere here, watching, waiting—making a judgement. But… But if I wanted that kind of change and I kept screwing up—which I have, so, so, so many times—then maybe…maybe I’d also want someone to not give up on me. Slowly, I leaned forward, hair loose over my face as I massaged my temples. How many people were there now that warned me about what I was gonna turn into? I’d lost count a while ago now.

  The evidence was there. The blood was on my hands, no matter which reality I was in.

  “You shouldn’t sit like that,” a voice said. I didn’t want to lift my head. I didn’t have to fully open my eyes to know who landed on the porch, slowly walked up the steps, and set a worn leather cowboy hat onto the couch cushions beside me before they sat down with a sigh. I swore under my breath and looked away. “I never listened when people kept telling me the same thing, but I had a bad habit of getting too deep into my own thoughts to really listen to many other people that didn’t have my name.” She drummed her fingers against the couch cushions, tapped her foot against the table, and made the brew of sweet-smelling tea dance. “Gonna look me in the eyes, Ry?”

  “What happens when I do?” I asked softly. “What changes if I stand up and try to leave?”

  “You leave,” she answered. “You leave, and you don’t turn back, and things end up differently.”

  “For the better?”

  “There’s only one way to do better, and it’s not by running away from it.”

  I sighed through my nose and picked my fingernails, a habit that I’d picked up and just couldn’t stop doing. I turned to my right and looked her in the eyes—the same blue eyes, except no, not really. Not at all.

  The woman beside me was slightly taller, had strong shoulders, a ring that glinted on her fingers and sweeping lines at the edges of her eyes that creased deeper when she smiled at me. Same scar over her eye. Same long hair that was just only starting to get a little more stiff, a little bit more grey, and not quite as blonde. She felt so different from dad that it felt like I wasn’t even sitting next to an Arkathian who’d gotten old enough to even start greying. She sipped from a teacup, let the warmth slide down her throat, and then gestured at the other one.

  “She left me the recipe a long time ago,” she said—same voice, same New Olympus accent, albeit one that was a lot more dull, like life had watered it down the longer she’d been alive. “I try to make it just as well as she used to, but I can’t get the balance right. Either tastes too much like citrus, or too little like actual tea. What matters is that this is the closest brew I’ve gotten, so if you don’t mind, I’d like your opinion, and I know you wouldn’t lie.”

  “How would you know I wouldn’t?” I asked, picking it up. “Not really a paragon of truth here.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d like to think that you’ve got the heart in you to tell yourself the truth.”

  I slowly drank it, expecting the illusion, this place Caesar had left me in, to water down the taste. I paused. Then carefully downed the rest of the hot liquid like I was taking a shot of liquor. Warmth spread through my belly, my bones, through my entire body. I sat back onto the couch, nearly sinking into the pillows, and said, “Wow.”

  She smiled. “I’m guessing that means it’s a lot better than I thought it was.”

  “But if you’re the one making it, that means she’s…”

  “Yeah,” she said quietly, the wind blowing her words into the sighing fields of wheat. “Yeah.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “You sure you wanna know?”

  I looked at her. “I thought we were telling the truth.”

  She nodded slowly, rubbing the ring on her finger and chewing her tongue. Finally, she sighed, then said, “Been somewhere around two-hundred years or so now.” I sat still, folded my arms, and looked at the wheat instead. The words hung in the air between us, sweet and sour like the hot tea in front of us. “Lost count a few decades ago.”

  I stayed silent, letting my thoughts wonder, before putting my feet on the table and leaning my head back against the cushions, looking up at the hastily painted rafters and the spider slowly spinning its web. “How old?”

  “Five-hundred odd years, maybe,” she muttered. “We’re not really keen on birthdays nowadays.”

  “Not that many people left to spend them with?” I asked quietly.

  “Plenty, actually,” she said, taking another long sip from her cup. She had an apple in one hand, something she kept bouncing on her palm before she split it in half and offered me a piece. “I just never look at the number on the birthday cake. It makes me feel like a hag. I mean, look at me—no wife, no kids, not even a dog.” She laughed. The wind picked up again. “But I guess it isn’t so bad. Last year was chocolate, this year was marble. Pretty nice.”

  “So,” I muttered, “someone finally decided to start throwing us birthday parties every year?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Something like that.”

  I shut my eyes and breathed in slowly. “You’re me.”

  “I’m you.”

  “I thought only one of us got to adulthood,” I whispered. “I saw her die right in front of my eyes.”

  “I’m surprised you’re taking all of this so—”

  “—easily?” I asked, then chuckled quietly. “The amount of shit I’ve seen this year, and this barely gets into the top ten. Well, I guess it will once I really, you know, think about it. Really sit down and digest all of it.”

  “You better do it soon, because you won’t have the time for a lot of contemplation eventually.”

  “So,” I said. “I guess this means things work out, huh?”

  “Caesar brought you here to explain something,” she said, sitting forward—the wooden frame creaked as she shifted, maybe getting something, maybe stretching. I guess it was nice to just put our feet up for once. “And it’s a very simple fact—we don’t really have a good run of it most of the time. We’re so fundamentally handicapped in one way or another that we make drastic choices that influence other people way more than we really think. You’re more powerful than you’ve ever been. It’ll take a lot of resources and manpower to take you out. Your consequences only matter to you because of your humanity. The second you kill that part of yourself, your life changes forever.”

  “Everyone keeps saying that,” I whispered. “I’m not planning on being any less human, y’know.”

  “It’s your capacity to be more than human that scares everyone the most. People are afraid of what you can turn into, but they keep beating on your humanity, relying on the one weakness they know will always work.”

  My brows screwed together. “So should I not be human? Should I just be, what, this demi-god of justice?”

  “You’re nineteen right now, aren’t you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Be that,” she said. A crunch of an apple, a slow chew, a gust of wind and a flare of warm sunlight. “Be a teenager and enjoy it before you become an adult, and then enjoy being an adult before you turn a hundred, Ry.”

  “Easy to say when your entire life amounts to living on a farm and drinking tea.”

  She laughed quietly. “Why be so cynical about this if you want it deep down as well?”

  I smiled. Just a little. “Doesn’t it get boring out here?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “But there’s always something to do. I’m learning how to knit. It’s taken me a few decades to get really into it, and Bianca was the one who loved to crochet—I just liked sitting beside her and going through my phone. Never really learnt until I had to teach myself. I’ve got a yoga class on Mondays and Saturdays. I go to the occasional conference and unveiling ceremony here and there. The kids are all grown up now, so I can’t really train ‘em anymore. Quick as bullets now. Old Rylee Addams can’t quite keep up like she used to.” She sighed, but not in a pained way, but in a softly humorous way. “My best days are behind me. An Arkathian at this age would be in their prime, nearly the strongest our species has ever managed to be. But I’m human, so that’s a no.”

  I opened one eye and turned my head to look at her. “All this time, and we age ‘cause we’re human?”

  “Imagine that?” she said, smiling. “Turns out we are just human deep down, no matter how long we live. I hit my peak abilities not too far into my twenties. My thirties were honing my skills. Forties, and I was now learning to actually build and understand technology. Ever since then, I’ve all but retired when I hit three-hundred. There was a time when I was the governor of New Olympus for a term. Shitshow. Absolute shitshow. I don’t even know how I got myself into office, but hey, my name’s on a fancy portrait in City Hall, and I even became head of national security, too—at least, the Cape Branch of national security. But I’m tired. My brain’s fuzzy, and my eyes aren’t healing themselves anymore. The rate I’m going, I’ll be pushing myself in a wheelchair in a few years’ time now.”

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  “But you sound so…young,” I said. “And what the hell were we doing in a government office?”

  She laughed and threw the rest of the apple far, far into the field. “I’m young at heart. I promised—”

  “Right,” I said quietly, looking away. “Right.”

  She sighed and said nothing for a while. Not for several minutes. The sun hung suspended in the sky, bathing everything in sunburnt orange hues. “I miss her sometimes,” she whispered. “You never really stop.”

  I swallowed. “Did you marry her?”

  She smiled. “Maybe.”

  “But you’ve got a ring on your finger.”

  “Rylee,” she said, sighing. “Caesar brought you here for the same reason he’s brought so many others. We do have the capacity for change, because out of the countless versions of ourselves who do manage to make it, one of us actually does, and not because I killed dozens of people or, hell, had some dark and checkered secret I need to hide from you—I made it this far because I did three things, and I need you to listen, and I need to you understand what I’m saying.” I nodded and shifted, my body partly facing her. “One: listen to other people. Two: listen to your heart. And three: the longer you keep neglecting yourself and who you really are, the worse your decisions are going to get. Some people don’t deserve to be around you, but that doesn’t mean they should die. Some people aren’t on your side right now, but that doesn’t mean they’re enemies. You have the power to impact the world on a scale that’s impossibly hard to understand, and that’s a hell of a lot of pressure to put on someone’s shoulders, especially for a kid your age. But you’re young. You’re eighteen. Be a teenager. Let your emotions run wild. Enjoy being young and enjoy making friends, and if people think it’s naive, if people think it’s stupid, then don’t go out and prove them wrong—you don’t have to spend your entire life doing that. Life because you want to live. Be a superhero because it’s what you want to do—not for the statue or for the old man. or because you hate the world and just want some peace, because trust me, the world might be loud, but it’s warmer with people surrounding you, Ry.”

  “I’m just so tired,” I whispered, resting my head on the wood. “I’ve screwed up so many times.”

  “And unfortunately, you’ll never always get it right—but that’s life.” She leaned forward and squeezed my hand—her fingers were strong, her palm padded and thick. “So many people are relying on you to do the right thing and to figure it all out, but Jesus Christ, nobody’s even taught you how. An alien taught you false morality. Mom always tries her best, and so do our friends—all you’ve done is rely on yourself for a lot of these answers.”

  “‘cause every time I try to go somewhere to find them, I don’t get a straight answer.”

  “You’re going to people who know a version of Olympia that they’re terrified of,” she said with a shrug. “You’re a hot mess, kid. You’re emotional and you’re brash, and the adults in your life who would usually try to get you under control can only ever manipulate you, because they know that’s the only way you ever get to do what they want you to do. They can’t force you. So they bend your world so that you have to, even until you believe it.”

  “So what do I do?” I asked, pulling my hands away and leaning forward. “I’m lost here.”

  “There’s not one answer I can give you that’ll magically fix everything,” she said. “But there’s people who see you as Rylee, and there’s people who see you as Olympia, and they’re a lot more terrified of Olympia, trust me.”

  “So I let her go?” I said quietly.

  “You turn her into you.”

  I laughed a little. “Funny, I’m not that great either.”

  She punched my shoulder. I swore and rubbed my bicep. “That’s the kind of shit that wears you down. Stop thinking you’re nothing at all. Stop thinking you’re so little. Goddamit, Rylee, it won’t fix everything, but try to love yourself once in a while. You’ve done bad shit. Each variation of us does at some point. And then the world, the people we keep surrounding ourselves with, grind us down into hating ourselves so much that we’re not afraid to bathe ourselves in blood every night, rationalizing that it’s normal for us to shower in gore for the greater good. That’s not normal, kiddo—it’s a sign that you let other people win, and don’t you think you’re better than that?”

  “Thinking I’m better than other people got me here to begin with,” I muttered.

  She put her hand on my shoulder and shook me. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying. You’re better in the sense that people like Lucas, like dad, beat your mind into a place where they had you doing what they wanted. You killed when you were told and you turned yourself into something you’re not. And you know why that’s true?” I shrugged. “It’s as simple as the fact that, in your first few months on Earth, all you ever wanted to do was play.”

  “Really?” I asked, half-smiling. “Because I played games as a kid, that means I can still be normal?”

  “If you acted like the Arkathian kids your age, then it would be a different story, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, because I’m not like those kids.”

  “So why do you hold yourself to their standards? You keep wanting to be on top, be the one people look at, and that’s what they hammer into your brain—you clung to those beliefs and let them fester for way too long.”

  I massaged my eyes, my hair a mess as the wind toyed with it. “You’re a one in a trillion chance.”

  She smiled a little. “I’m really just you if you squinted.”

  “Are you even happy?” I whispered.

  “I am,” she said. “I’ve seen generations come and go. I’ve seen newborns get so old they can barely walk, and I’m still there to make sure their kids can reach that age. It’s not always smooth sailing, but with good people on your side, with people who believe in me as much as I believe in them, the world gets better and better.”

  “You’re a superhero,” I said, “just…because?”

  “Yeah,” she said, shrugging. “It’s pretty neat seeing the kid you once saw playing in the park have a family of their own. People call me a guardian angel, but at the end of the day, I’m not lonely anymore, I’ve got friends, I’ve got family, I’ve got people I can trust.” She smiled at me. “And it’s because I stopped trying to overcomplicate things. Do the right thing, stop the bad from happening, but don’t cross a line—but make sure you have people who are there beside you who can tell you when you need to ease up. We’ve got a bad habit of relying on extremes, and that’s just not the way it should go. Being a superhero is simple, dude—wear a costume, fight evil, and enjoy everyday as it comes. Zeus and Lucas and so, so many other people want to turn it into a game, into a structure, into an outlet for their beliefs. Fuck that, because, Ry, at some point, putting on a costume used to be exciting, cool. Fun. And I can see it in your eyes now—you find it weird, too much responsibility. Too heavy. Personally, I’m ashamed.”

  “You’re making it sound a lot easier than it turns out to be,” I muttered.

  “That’s because it’s true,” she answered. “Like anything in life, it can be hard, it can be tiring, and sometimes you kinda just don’t know what you’re doing. But at the end of the day, it’s as simple as trying, Rylee.”

  “So that’s all you want me to do?” I asked. “Try? So many versions of us end up doing—”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “For one reason or another, we fuck up somehow. And when we do, it doesn’t stop until we find ourselves in the thick of it all. But if bloodshed and tragedy is the kind of legacy you want to leave behind, then be my guest. I know that when I eventually call it quits, my funeral isn’t going to be quiet.” She stood up and walked toward the front door, pulling it open and standing in the doorway. “But if you want to keep rebutting everything I’m saying and digging yourself a grave of bad decisions, then here’s a word of advice that I know you’re going to listen to, because it’s your mouth that’s saying it: funerals are a lot easier to plan when there’s other people there to make sure your box goes into the ground—with how you’re going, you’ll just drop dead and the first thing people think about is your biological material and how much your blood is worth. If you want to be worth more than you are now, if you want to be better, then start thinking of yourself like a superhero and less of a judge and executioner. You’re neither. You wear a costume, spit one-liners, and fight evil. It’s your job, your duty, and your promise, the moment you put on that costume for the first time, to everyone around you to be better.”

  She stared at me for several moments, her lips thin and jaw tight. I didn’t know what to say.

  So I stayed perfectly quiet.

  “Now,” she said. “You all tend to come around at the same time of year, and I’ve had horrible luck with the few of you who sit there long enough to try out a new costume that doesn’t cling to a version of you that doesn’t exist anymore. If you think you’ve got all the answers, then that’s fine. You can leave. If not, there’s a costume near the fireplace where Bianca liked to sit when her arthritis started getting a little worse. It was the last one of mine she ever made.” She nodded, swallowed, and kept staring at me. “I never got the chance to wear it. So if you think you’re not worthy of loving yourself enough to be better for the sake of being better, then don’t even try to wear it.”

  I stopped picking my fingernails, the sound of them clicking getting a little too loud in the silence. I sat back, sighed through my nose, and drummed my fingers against my thighs. Eventually, she left, closing the door behind her. I sat alone on the porch, but I had the feeling Caesar was watching me from somewhere, seeing if I was going to head down the stairs, or go inside the house. It really can’t be that simple. What, just do better, and poof, all my problems are fixed? But…no, she’d probably smack me upside the head and tell me I still didn’t get it.

  My problems weren’t just gonna leave. I had to do something about them. I had to fix them.

  “But I guess I don’t always have to do it the way I know,” I muttered, looking at my hands.

  I wondered how many of us had sat here on this couch, stood up, and left. We were stubborn, that’s just how we were wired, but it was also easy to realize things could be easier if I did just take all of my problems out. I go back and do what I do best. I could sweep up Lower Olympus, annex it, and make the world watch as I did. But that would be the start. I knew Ava. I knew the kinds of people in that city. They’d fuck with me until I either killed them or I made sure if anyone touches it, then things get even worse. Gods, I could just see it now. The Olympiad would label me a national threat. They’d send superheroes after me. The more of them I beat, the worse it got as the world saw me put more and more of them into the ground. The worst part? I also knew myself. It wouldn’t stop.

  Not until the entire city was clean, as it should be, but…Gods, what does that even mean?

  How the hell should I know?

  I’ve never even seen a perfect city, and I wasn’t even taught what ‘superhero’ meant.

  Maybe I was doing it again, thinking too hard. Maybe I needed to finish one more cup of tea, stand up, and walk toward the edge of the porch, hands in my back pockets as I stared at the wheat and the sun and the gravestone laced with flowers at the foot of the apple tree—no, the gravestones. Mom’s. Bianca’s. Emelia. Grant. Michael. So many times I didn’t even know, each of them carved into the bark of the tree. They died knowing things were good.

  And don’t the people around me kinda deserve that as well, too?

  I’d live long enough to see it, but they wouldn’t if I kept doing what I was always doing. Maybe that was why Emelia was so frustrated with me half of the time—your best friend can move mountains, and all she’s doing with her life is vanishing for months on end without a single bit of progress to show for it. I smiled and shook my head, then took a step back, turned to face the white front door, and headed inside, leaving the teacup half empty.

  Because maybe one day, I’d like to think I could finish the rest of it, knowing I earned it.

  Earned this—peace.

  For now, though, I had a city to save and supervillains to kill.