It didn’t take me too long to find the piles of dead bodies littering Lower Olympus, and it took me even shorter time to realize they’d been dumped in parking lots, buildings, some of them trapped inside cars that had burned to black char, and most of them turned into these mangled balls of bone and meat barely the size of my torso. I swallowed the bittering saliva on my tongue, landing on a rooftop of a burned-out building, smoke in the air just as heavy as the black snow drifting through it. This place looks like hell, I thought. Just like what Caesar showed me. The fires hadn’t stopped, but they’d slowed, and that’s what mattered. The death? I could still smell it, hear it—even taste it.

  I landed on top of a burnt-out apartment building, smoke still gushing from its empty windows, shrouding me in foul-smelling fumes that scorched their way down my throat every time I swallowed. The ledge I stood on was just about as stable as the entire city. Riots. Fights on the streets. The smoke had turned into a violent scarlet hue that hung in the streets like someone had sprayed a mist of blood into the sky. I crouched, breathed in through my nose and exhaled through my mouth, my heart rapid and lungs aching and, What the hell is going on? I looked up at the sky, then narrowed my eyes. Just about saw the stars through the gloom, and from just beyond the river, beyond the bridge that was now barricaded by police officers trying to stop people from rushing into the Upper West, the rest of the city was peacefully silent, glittering in the shroud of snow that was slowly falling over it.

  And through all of it, the Olympiad stood like some looming black obelisk through the smoke and the snow and the burning scarlet winds. I bit my tongue and stared at it, miles away from where I was, and it looked just as ugly as the day I had first seen it. It didn’t always look like a slab of black concrete and darkened glass. It once looked kind of like a temple, just a lot bigger, more modern—you don’t build a skyscraper on Olympus Boulevard. You build architecture that makes tourists and superheroes, well, when they were still around, want to live in this city. But now look at the fuckin’ place—the government’s got its thumb up its ass and the world is watching from news helicopters. I shook my head, looked down, and sighed through my nose, shutting my eyes and massaging my temples. Didn’t know where to start. Too many dead bodies in the streets. Dozens of more piling up. The river was probably fat with them by now, and Gods know about the Kaiju, where they were or what was happening with them.

  Then, suddenly, my skin crawled a split second before the shadows behind me spat Ava out onto the rooftop. I could have caught her, but she stumbled, grabbed onto a piece of scaldingly hot rebar, and left a patch of her palm on the metal. The stink of burning flesh rushed down my throat, right beside the sound of her swearing.

  “Do you have some kind of tracker on me?” I asked Ava, watching her hand heal in real time, strings of flesh slowly crawling over burnt and darkened muscle. “Because you sure as hell always know where I am.”

  “Call it intuition for my favorite superheroine,” she muttered. Ava climbed onto the ledge and stared at the fire, the pillars of smoke and the fights happening on the streets right below us. She didn’t say anything. Her lips pressed together as her glasses reflected the rioters below. Then, quietly, she said, “We’ve found several bodies.”

  “Sure they’re not too hard to find right now,” I whispered, slowly standing up, my knees popping and back aching as I stretched my arms. “But I guess I’ve also got some bad news. Rock, paper, scissors for who goes first?”

  Ava didn’t look at me as she said, “There’s been sightings of men hauling bodies into trucks. Dead, alive, mutilated—all of them are being cordoned off into containers, usually the kind of containers where you keep meat inside when you’re transporting it.” Her voice was flat, placid—maybe bored, or maybe that’s just who she was now, just used to having to deal with all of this. Then she looked at me. “They’ve all got the same demeanor, the people cordoning off the bodies, I mean. Zombie-like. Not dead, but they don’t react to fire, to death. I’m the daughter of a man who would behead gangsters who got a little too high off their own supply with his own bare hands, then come and kiss my forehead goodnight and tuck me in, grit still under his nails. Men vomit when they see enough death. There’s not a soul on this planet that wouldn’t get sick of it eventually. These guys?” She shook her head. “I don’t know what they are or who they are, but the last thing I need is another supervillain lurking around right now.”

  “Getting bodies off the streets isn’t a bad thing. Someone needs to do it, and I’m—”

  “Rylee,” she said dryly. I paused. “These men all have the same symbol engraved in them.”

  “A cult,” I said tiredly, putting my hands on my hips. Should’ve dealt with that earlier.

  “Not a cult,” she said. “My father.”

  I froze. Suddenly, very, very suddenly, the air was bitterly cold and every breath I took left my lungs aching and my heart beating faster and faster. I stared at her, waiting for the punchline—nothing. Ava doesn’t kid.

  “Lucifer?” I asked quietly. The wind snatched his name from my mouth. “He’s missing. Maybe—”

  “A man that evil doesn’t die a quiet death,” she muttered, her eyes glassy, two mirrors reflecting the blazing fires and the glowing skyline. She didn’t speak, no for several screaming beats of silence, interrupted occasionally by the bark of gunfire or the eruption of superpowers happening on the asphalt below. Slowly, she took off her glasses, folded them, and slid them into her pocket. For the first time I could remember, she had bags under her eyes, the deep and swallowing kind that made her eyes look puffy and hollow. “Well, what’s your news?”

  I swallowed and folded my arms over my chest, standing beside her and letting the wind buffet my hair over my shoulder. Lucian? I shook my head. I wasn’t going to start chasing ghosts, but… My stomach tensed that little bit more. Enough to make me spit my saliva onto the concrete at my feet. “You know,” I said quietly, “I’ve got a laundry list of problems I need to get through, but your supposedly dead dad wasn’t meant to be one of them.”

  “Neither did I,” she muttered.

  “So are you sure it could be him, and not just someone else stealing his valor?”

  “Wrong use for that word,” Ava said, “and yes, I’m sure. You don’t steal my family’s crest just to intimidate and toy with people. I’ve got my theories and my gut is telling me to indulge in them, but for the sake of it all…”

  “Lemme guess,” I said. “You want me to go and find out what’s going on with them.” She said nothing, but I guess we’ve known each other long enough to not have to hear the words come out of each other’s mouths. I shook my head, then shook it some more. “No,” I said. “That’s not happening. Ava, the entire city is burning.”

  “And what’re you doing to help with that?” she asked quietly, an edge to her voice. I glanced at her. She looked at me, a hardness in her eyes that made her pupils an obsidian black. We said nothing. I ran my tongue over my teeth, waiting for her to keep going, which she finally did a heartbeat later. “If you’re waiting for some kind of apology, that’s something that just won’t ever come. I’m frightened of the possibility of what my father being here might actually mean, Rylee. I’m not here to tell you how I think things will go; I’m here to tell you what I know is happening. You understand how this looks don’t you? The fighting? The chaos? They’ll blame you for it, because you’re the one who started it with that speech, that chant, the fist in the air and the arcs of golden lightning, just for it all to come back to Lucian wandering around in the darkness, unrestricted, letting the fires sweep through the city just to play risen demon. He’ll promise people something. Something that we cannot match.” She swallowed, then bit her thumbnail, brows crewed tightly together. “He’s going to use this as an opportunity to make his return, Ry.”

  “Ava,” I said slowly, grabbing her shoulder and making her look at me. “We shouldn’t chase ghosts.”

  “You’ve chased your father for years,” she whispered. “And you know just as well as I do that the past doesn’t stay dead in this city. It seeps into the cracks of the whole fucking foundation and chews away at the entire goddamned thing until it all starts breaking away, bit-by-bit, until there’s nothing left behind except us to fix it.” She wasn’t breathing hard. All she did was stare dead into my eyes, lips thin, jaw set. “If there’s one thing that we are, it’s that we don’t give up even when we should, and right now? Right before he starts trying to force his way back into the city and fill a mold that we are meant to fill, is not the fucking time for us to stop, because how much longer are we going to keep stepping back from their shadows? Their legacies? Rylee, this has to end tonight. I’m not going to give him a chance, but I know myself, and I know my limitations—and I know what needs to happen.”

  “Yeah?” I said quietly. “And what’s that?”

  She pressed her finger against the crest on my chest. “I don’t care where he’s been hiding, and I don’t care what he’s been trying to accomplish—we need him crippled, beaten, embarrassed, and chained to a boiler in a basement so deep that not a single soul in this city is ever gonna know we’re harboring a supervillain like him.”

  I swept her finger off my chest. “Incase you forgot,” I said, “he nearly killed me the last time we met.”

  “You’ve survived this long, and now you’re afraid to fight someone just as strong as you?”

  “Don’t fucking start.”

  “You’re afraid.”

  “Of course I’m afraid!” I snapped, then swept my hand out toward the city. “But are you seeing this? I can’t go chasing phantoms through the night again, not when people actually need help here and now, Ava.”

  “Then let me handle it,” she said. “Let me focus on the ground, the people on the streets.” She grabbed my shoulders and cut me off. “My end of the bargain was to get your mother back, and that’s what I’ve done. You—”

  “You ruined my life,” I said, “and you want to cash-in just because you’re helpful now?”

  Ava stared at me, then stepped back. “You can’t be serious,” she said quietly. “Rylee, there are three days left of this year, and all that’s left of it is chaos and fire and death, and all you want to do is carry the weight of this city’s heroes and villains into a new decade entirely? How much longer? How much fucking longer? When is it going to be our turn? Dennie was killed because of the past, a past that should have died a long, long time ago. Your own mother rewrote history one fateful day decades ago and we’re still feeling the affects of it—fuck me, it’s one of the only things on this planet that can kill you! You keep saying how much you’re ready to let go of the past and write your own destiny, but you keep fucking running, Rylee! You run when you get the chance to change that. You pull your punches the second you get the shot to bury the past. You get distracted. You end up doing things that mean nothing.” I stared at her, she stared at me—I bit the edge of my tongue, and she quietly said, “Don’t run away again. The only reason you never get anything done is because that’s what you do, because deep down, a part of you is terrified of having your life in your own hands for the first time ever. But you need to take that chance. So fucking take it. If it isn’t my father, then fine—you’ve dealt with a problem before it arrived. But if it is Lucifer?”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  She let her words hang in the air between us, and then, in a shroud of shadows, she vanished.

  I swore quietly and looked down at the streets, her voice still ringing inside my head and making my temples pulse against my skull. What the fuck does she know about getting anything done? And if dad decided to shake Lucifer’s hand instead of killing him, then what the hell was I meant to do to him if he really was alive? But… Fuck me, I guess I already knew the answer to that, didn’t I? I knew myself. I knew the warmth in my gut that was spreading through my veins was a lick of fire that would only keep gnawing away at me as long as I stood here watching the city get devoured by chaos and smoke. I breathed in deeply, then leaped off the edge of the building.

  The plan was simple, and it was easy, because a handful of people knew about Lucian, and most of them were inside the Olympiad and not very willing to play along. The rest? It boiled down to one single person I knew.

  I was at the safehouse they were keeping mom at in about ten minutes, mostly because I had to keep stopping every other second to throw pieces of rubble off people, or to stop some superhuman from rampaging through a gang of people trying to run for safety. My boots skidded against the asphalt as I landed, then I jogged up the stairs and banged my fist against the heavy oak. It opened after several deadbolts, revealing an eye that peaked at me, looked me up and down, and then vanished again to open the door fully. I pushed past the thug and found mom still at the kitchen table, this time with a pen in her hand and a sheet of paper beside several vials of reddish liquid. It stank of sulfur in here, so badly I coughed and beat my hand through the air. She looked up, the gas mask on her face warping her features. She covered the vials with stacks of paper and switched on an electric fan that swept the fumes away. After a minute, she slowly took off the mask as I pulled the seat beside her and sat down.

  Both thugs behind us cleared their throats. One of them coughed and beat his chest with his fist. Mom kept one of the vials slightly open, meaning I sneezed and cursed at the same time another woman did exactly the same.

  What the hell is she even making?

  “You look like you’ve got some more questions,” she said quietly. “I guess I owe you that much.”

  “Lucifer,” I said. The thugs in the house froze, and so did mom—I looked over my shoulder at them, and they looked away, going back to standing at the doors and windows. I turned back to mom. “I need information.”

  She leaned in her seat, the wood groaning against her back. “Isn’t that friends of yours—”

  “She knows just as much as me, and she’s acting pretty weird right now.” I scooted a little closer, sweaty and sooty and smelling like roadkill from the burnt dead body I had to shovel out of a pile of rubble just a few minutes ago. “If there’s one time I need you, it’s right now—dad beat almost everyone when he was around. The Night Corps. Overleague. The Sanctum. Fuck me, he turned Wasteland into a shut-in that’s still in an oil drum somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.” I jabbed my finger against the table, making the vials quiver. “But not Lucifer. He never fought him. He never even tried to kill him. He shook his hand and played by his terms. Why?”

  Mom slowly sucked air through her teeth. “I had a feeling you’d eventually find out about that,” she muttered, fishing a cigarette out of her pocket. As she searched for a lighter, I sent a tendril of electricity to the butt of the tar, lightning it. She raised an eyebrow, then dragged on the cigarette. “It was…complicated. There was so much going on that time, so many different opinions… The Olympians never saw eye-to-eye after that day, and there’s a reason why Cleopatra wasn’t there the day your father died to try and save him, even though she was probably one of the only superhumans on the planet who could.” I sat back and swallowed, my saliva like ice down my throat. “Not saying that she did it on purpose, but, well…” She shrugged. “Lucian, though, was different.”

  A deep boom rolled through the Earth, swaying the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling. The lanterns flickered and a thug standing in the hallway stumbled against a shelf, knocking over a vase that shattered on the floor. Then, seconds later, a deeper boom tore through the foundation, shaking concrete dust right off the ceiling.

  A man standing beside the window tapped his earpiece, then swore. “Nothing.”

  “We gotta move ‘er,” the guy closest to the door said. “You can keep talking when we get the bitch—”

  “Finish that sentence and I’ll rip your spine out of your chest,” I said. They all paused, fingers on triggers probably out of reflex, but I really wasn’t in the mood to deal with them. Not until mom put a hand on my shoulder.

  “I’ve been called worse,” she said, smiling. “But, boys? If there’s someone I’d trust to keep me safe, it’s Olympia.” No, my gut didn’t just spin itself into a knot, and no, a rush of warmth didn’t just surge through me. She looked at me and continued. “Your father, though, had the final say, which was often the case. Who could say no to the Lord of the Sky?” She moved closer and dropped her voice. “Between me and you, though? It was simple.” Mom put her hand on the largest vial full of red liquid, fingers curling around it so tight they turned white. “He was always so fascinated by humans, especially the ones who dripped with malice and evil, because they were exactly like the society he left back home, except on Arkath it was normal. Hammered into their system at an early age. It’s normal to be nice on Earth. A duty to your fellow man to not murder without reason, if at all.” She pulled the vial closer. The thugs flinched again when another explosion echoed, sounding closer. They stepped around the table, itching to grab mom and get going. I could hear their heartbeats—irregular, frantic, some of them… some… Mom’s foot tapped mine, keeping my eyes on her. Behind me—he doesn’t have a heartbeat. Two of them. “He didn’t kill Lucifer because he was afraid of him,” mom said. “The only reason he didn’t kill him was because of a promise.”

  “A promise?” I asked. Ice slid down my spine. I wanted to spin around, to flinch—mom’s foot tapped my boot again underneath the table, keeping me focused on her. Another boom. Another dusting of concrete powder.

  “I know,” she said. “You must be wondering what a man like your father could ever get from a human.”

  “Something he couldn’t get with brute force alone.”

  Mom smiled. “And what’s one thing even he couldn’t escape?”

  I thought for a moment, then it clicked. “Death,” I whispered.

  “Atta girl.”

  Silence. A long, dreary pause. A lantern extinguished, plunging half the room in darkness. Slowly, quietly, I turned to look over my shoulder, meeting a pair of eyes staring directly at me from behind a ski mask. Hollow. Dark. My golden irises turned the shadows a burnt haze, light enough to just about see the movement of his thumb over the safety of his rifle. He swallowed, glanced away—I looked over mom’s shoulder, then lunged and stuck my fist through a woman’s skull, my fingers erupting from the back of her head in a gush of sludge. Not meat, not bone, and not brains—tar splattered onto the floor, burning craters into the wood that sizzled and smoked and slowly died. Her body dissolved into the same molasses, leaving behind a corpse so stripped of any kind of meat or organs it looked like a newborn baby, which would be… which… I stepped back and stared at the tiny pink quaking fetus. I stared at it, the mangled limbs and missing chunks of its stomach, all of it filled with the foaming black liquid.

  A rush of bile rose up my throat. I swallowed the harsh, chunky liquid, then I looked over my shoulder.

  The man behind me raised his rifle and fired a single bullet—that’s about as much as he could do before I grabbed him by the throat and lifted him up, the bullet whistling in my free hand until it came to a dead stop. He didn’t kick. He didn’t struggle. I slammed him down onto the table and tore off his clothes, the thugs watching, eyes wide and swearing and guns raised at me—and then I found it: the upside down pentagram burnt on his chest.

  Mom stood up and doused him in the scarlet liquid—suddenly, flames erupted from his corpse, lighting the entire room one blazingly hellish color. Then she poured the rest on the fetus at her feet without looking at it. They both burned. They both hissed and shrieked as the black liquid smoked and dissipated, turning into nothing more than a dark stain on the table, almost like a faint chalk outline. We stared at the remains, at the tiny patch of skin that was now on the table. The tiny singular patch with the scarlet pentagram and the fetid, dead grey skin.

  “Figured,” mom muttered. We all looked at her as she put the vial back on the table. She sighed and looked up, taking a moment to pick up her fallen cigarette to inhale a deep breath of smoke. Mom looked at me and smiled, smoke pouring from her mouth as the lantern illuminated half of her face. “I think it’s time we take a walk.”

  “What the fuck was that?” one of the thugs said, panic in her voice. “What— I— Was that a baby?”

  “Sort of,” mom said, sweeping documents into her arms. “But it’s both above your pay grade and your education to explain it, so in the simplest terms, our camaraderie ends here, and I’ll be taking leave with Olympia. If I were you, you should each take a milligram dose of Ambrosia within the next hour—the powder, not the pill and neither the liquid; if you take those, they’ll most likely cause cancer or internal bleeding. Cassie is selling a faux product that the government flagged but enough billionaires funded to make sure it stays on shelves. Once that’s done, make sure you spread the word. The sick should get the first doses, and anyone who’s got burns or any other kind of injuries to their bodies should get about ten grams. There’s nothing else that can happen afterward except to stand beside them and hope the Ambrosia kicks their Divergent Gene into production. Once that’s done, keep spreading the word.” She straightened, spat out her cigarette, and said, “Anyone who dissolves and turns into the creatures that got turned to black ash deserves to die. It’s for everyone’s sake and better interest if that happens.”

  I was the first to break the silence. “If Ambrosia could kill them,” I said, “then what was the red stuff?”

  “A brew of acids.” She shrugged her good shoulder. “Potent enough to only make certain people react. You, for one, because of your sense of smell—and the two thugs that couldn’t stop themselves from coughing, too.”

  “Goddamn,” one of them muttered, looking at the stain on the floor. “And I thought doctors were good.”

  “You heard the doc,” another barked. “Come on. Asses moving. Ava needs to know and so does everybody else running around all wild and loose through those fuckin’ streets. God knows who else is one of these things.”

  “Speedsters,” I managed to say, choking on the word. I cleared my throat. “Grab Em— Elektra. Tell as many speedsters as you can and make sure people get to know. Teleporters and literally anyone who can help.”

  They nodded, then started grabbing their gear and ammunition and gas masks.

  I grabbed mom’s wrist, stopping her from moving. “Are you gonna explain what that was?”

  “He used to call himself Blight,” mom said. “And if he’s back, then it also means his boss is back, too. That friend of yours has a good head on her shoulders, because if those fetuses were that far along in their development, then it means they’ve been watching us all for a while now. God knows how many other people are one of them without even knowing it. Come on, there’s a place we need to get to and quickly—before Lucifer ever gets there.”

  The thugs left the house, but I wasn’t going to let her, not that easily. Not as we stood in the dark.

  “So you’re saying there’s a chance he’s actually here? Right now?”

  “Very likely,” she said, shrugging. “And if you give the devil an inch, he’ll take your soul.” She walked past me, then stopped beside me. “Just like he did with your father. Now let’s go. I’m not great at walking, so I really hope you don’t mind carrying me, for however much dignity I’m going to lose doing that.”

  I stared at the floor, at the scorch mark and the stench of sulfur burning my throat raw. I swallowed again, then spat and knuckled the saliva off my lips. I looked up at her, let my thoughts run, then said, “To where?”

  “To where they buried your father,” she said.

  “At his statue?”

  “No,” mom said. “That was the decoy, the false. We’re to go to your father’s tomb.”