“I need you to explain this to me like I’m five,” Quarterback said, breaking the silence. “So you’re saying Bianca, Ben’s older sister, is gonna try to kill me? I think that’s pretty hard to do when you’re very much dead, right?”

  “Opposites, genius,” Suits said. “It’s Bianca for us, and I guess Ben for you. Shouldn’t be hard.”

  “Ryleigh’s on the money,” Olympia said, nodding. “Let’s get the basics down first, so this doesn’t get a little too hard to understand, so I’m gonna need everyone to focus and ask questions when they’re confused. We all flunked middle school and barely graduated high school, but if there’s ever in your life you needed to pay attention to anyone that isn’t the monologue inside your head, it’s right now. Clear?” She looked at all of us. We nodded, but come on, it’s us we’re talking about. We’re nodding just to find out more and to satiate her, but…well, according to her, Bianca is gonna be gunning to kill me soon. I was taking everything she said almost at face value. Didn’t want to end up in another whacky situation like I have for the past several months because some broad tricked me again.

  She snapped her fingers and we all visibly perked up. Olympia sighed. “See what I’m talking about?”

  “We’re listening,” Quarterback said, arms folded. “For sure, this time.”

  “Good,” she said. “I need you to take this very seriously.” She stood at the head of the wooden bench, and that meant it was time for the rest of us to focus and sit down. Tiny campfires crackled around us, snapping into piles of kindling and desert shrubs. The night was almost entirely silent. So deathly silent it was kind of hard to believe that it was Earth I was hearing. I’d gotten so used to the bark of gunfire and the shriek of someone in danger for the past five years that sitting here felt so alien.Wrong. “We’ll start with how you got here. When this happened to me, I got told that it was because several split second Fractures happened at the same time. Everyone following?”

  We nodded, some (the actress) a little more hesitantly.

  “Now, learning what a Fracture does is simple: it does what its name implies. Your reality is fragmented into shards, and through that, you’re able to see how every miniscule decision you ever make can change your life. For example, Riley?” He paid extra attention now, like his coach just barked at him. “Did dad ever play sports with you? He did the whole American nuclear family lifestyle, right? All-American kid next door. Football team. Good enough grades. Then when the world needs you, you go off and slip into your costume and try to save the day.”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess so,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “For a while that was true, yeah.”

  She then looked at me dead. “Dad hated your guts? He had specific cutlery he’d use that you weren’t allowed to touch because he got sick of the notion that you and him would ever even touch the same things, right?”

  They all looked at me. Even Glasses stopped staring at the table and glanced upward. I folded my arms and snorted, because what the hell kind of attack was that? “I mean, sometimes. Not all the time. He still kinda cared.”

  Olympia continued. “And that big of a difference was literally just because one thing was different during your conceptions. I mean, you three girls could have ended up like one another in a heartbeat, but at some point in time, your powers came in differently, and you all had different reactions.” She looked at me. “Some of us didn’t have any other option than to chase a ghost for most of our lives.” Her voice softened. “In short, this isn’t really the future, either. This is just a chance. But here’s the catch: anything that’s older than you guys is a chance for all of your future’s. All of this?” She waved her hand around at the eternally silent dunes. “This can and, for some of you, probably will be a possibility, because at some point, maybe even in the next few years, and if you’re unlucky, the next few months, you’re going to have to make a choice. And you’re gonna fuck up. Big time. Then you’re going to have to change because of that choice, and what that choice will lead you to become is either this, or something—”

  I put up my hand and said, “The Conquest. You’re saying that they’re gonna be here that soon?”

  My question hung in the air, drying the already hot and harsh winds even more.

  “Yes,” she said, straightening. “Soon, Earth will be at the Empire’s mercy.”

  “That’s kinda bigger than our school crush, isn’t it?” Suits asked. “Shouldn’t that be the Calamity Event?”

  “Weirdly enough, no, it isn’t,” Olympia said. We all had something to say in that same moment, but got silenced when she put her hand up. “What makes a Calamity Event is the coincidence of specific situations we’ll all face. Dad’s death is a Calamity Event. Meeting Cleopatra is a Calamity Event. What I’m trying to say is that they aren’t always bad things, they’re just life changing things. I mean, the Olympia who exists in this reality probably thinks that it’s a good thing the Empire is here. She’s one of them. She’s a Legionnaire, just like dead old dad, and she’s working her way up the ranks, and who knows, maybe she’ll one day be in the King’s Guard.” She took a moment to scan our faces, to listen to our silence. “But what’s going to happen with Bianca is what makes Earth’s fight against the Arkathian Empire not a Calamity Event. Now, if you’re all paying attention, can someone—”

  “We die,” Glasses whispered. We all looked at her, some a lot more bitter than others. “We die before…”

  Olympia nodded slowly, her lips thin. “I mean, look at us. In almost countless possibilities of our birth, our lives, and every single thing we do, only about seven of us make it far enough to even hear about any Calamity Events. The rest of us die when we’re kids. Some hit this age and get into a situation they can’t power their way through, and the rest of us…we get here, we listen to this, we come back home, and we die because of Bianca.”

  “Hold on a fuckin’ minute,” Suits said. “So quintillions of us exist at some point, right?”

  “Right,” Olympia said, nodding.

  “And by the time we’re all, what, eighteen, maybe nineteen, we’re almost all dead?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Honestly, I’ll give you all a pat on the back for even getting this far.”

  “Dude,” Quarterback muttered, running a hand through his hair. “We are fucked.”

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  “My head hurts,” murmured Actress, massaging her temples. “I need an iced tea.”

  “Rylee?” Olympia asked. I looked at her. “You’re more quiet than I thought you’d be.”

  “I’m just wondering why I’m here and not back home,” I said, resting an arm on the table. “‘Cause I’ve been hearing the same shit for the past, like, six months. About how my existence is some kind of blight on the universe, and now fate wants me dead, and blah, blah, blah. She’s tried. She’s failed. Last I checked, I’m alive. I deserve to be at least a little bit cocky compared to the rest of these guys. I’ll figure out how to save Bianca, too.”

  “What makes you so confident that you’ll survive?” Suits asked me. “There were nearly countless—”

  “Lemme guess, they also said the same thing, all brave and strong, then died?” I scoffed and waved my hand through the air, cutting through her bullshit. “Difference between me and them is that I’m actually strong.”

  “Not strong enough,” Olympia said. “True, you might have the most field experience, but you’re also way too overconfident for someone I found getting beaten into the dirt by just one Legionnaire, never mind a higher ranking officer, or even someone from the royal bloodline. Trust me. Confidence only takes you so far, you know.”

  “I mean, she’s got a point, doesn’t she?” Actress said. “You didn’t save dad from dying, did you?”

  “I was a kid,” I said. “I couldn’t even fly back then.”

  “Kids on Arkath have their full glowing eyes by the time they’re thirteen,” Suits said. “They’d rip you in two if you fought one of those little bastards right now. And if we’re talking field experience, you’re second best.”

  “What, to you?” I asked, laughing dryly. “I’d shatter your jaw the second you tried to touch me.”

  “You know what? I’d like to see you fucking try.”

  “Guys!” Glasses yelled. Both Suits and I were already standing, and only paused when she spoke up. We both glared at her. She seemingly shrunk, nudged her glasses, then quietly continued. “I…I don’t want to get more people hurt. Where I come from, life is…good. Great. I want to keep it that way for as long as I can, but I also don’t want to hurt Bianca to do it.” Her voice faltered, and so did her confidence, dragging her eyes back down onto the old wooden table. “I’ve lost one girlfriend before, and I don’t want to lose another. Not Bianca. I promised her.”

  “No way,” Actress muttered. “She’s the only one of us who asked her out?”

  “I think you’re missing her point,” Quarterback said. “Because it’s sounding a lot like she’s right. We need to do a whole lot more right now to keep Bianca, or Ben, safe from the world, but also to stop them from hurting us, and we kind of all have a bad track record of accidentally putting our hands through chests, and I doubt anyone here wants to look either Ben or Bianca in the eyes as we do that. So let’s chill out and actually learn something.”

  “Thank you,” Olympia said, smiling. Dork, I thought, and judging by Suits’ face, she had the same thought as we both grudgingly sat down again. “Like I was saying, the chance and of us have of seeing our twenties is slim to almost none, but it’s a chance. Thirteen didn’t know he was going to smash us all together like this, because he’s nowhere near where he needs to be mentally to cosmically envision his interactions with the universe.” We stared at her, and she sighed. “Thirteen is mentally unstable, and has been since the moment he iced his father for his power.”

  “Oh,” we all said in unison, dumbly.

  Silence lingered.

  Then: “Why?”

  “Like he told all of you, I’m guessing,” she said, shrugging one shoulder. “His father had a realization, and like us, their family is intertwined with almost everything, except he’s way off his rocker. It’s better you kill him.”

  Suits shifted uncomfortably. “Kill him? He’s a Threat Level Scarlet back home. Titan level shit.”

  Which, for the uninitiated, meant that we’d all die very quickly and very suddenly if we tried.

  “He’s already a supervillain back in your reality?” Quarterback asked her.

  She nodded. “We’ve monitored his home for a decade now, before I joined. Clementine made sure to keep the psychokinetic check marks around the manor in place to see if anything strange happened, but it was radio silent until the day he spazzed out and attacked me personally. It’s been hell since then. Not because he’s hard to deal with, even if he kinda is, but because the government has a hard time trying to figure out if we should just kill him on sight, or if a strike force is put together so he can be subdued, studied, and made to be an American patriot.”

  “And you still choose to lick Uncle Sam’s nuts,” I muttered.

  “Fuck you, actually. I’ve done more for the American citizen than you ever have.”

  “So how do we do this?” Quarterback said louder than me, cutting off our argument. I was starting to really hate her, you know that? Gods, it was a good idea not joining those pricks in suits. “Because he’s hard to catch.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “But honestly, I think I can take him.”

  “No, Rylee, you can’t,” Olympia said. “He wanted to subdue you when you fought. He was toying with you, his mind wasn’t fully settled—he was seeing voices and hearing shadows, the ones that cling to you and the ones that you haven’t claimed yet. The guy’s barely able to focus on anything more than a fractured train of thought, but if he did want you dead, he would have turned you inside out and ended this debacle in seconds.”

  “Then why didn’t he?” I asked. “Because now he’s gone and drawn a line in the sand.”

  “Yeah,” Quarterback said, nodding. “Now we have time to regroup and actually hurt him.”

  “He’s confident,” Olympia said. “The same moment we’re all here together, he’s gathering an almost endless amount of experience through his multitude of lives fighting against us. This Fracture moment isn’t just for us, because he’s gonna have a split second realization of what all of this means. For the first time in nearly a decade, he won’t be hearing his dad’s voice shattering his mind—it’ll be silent, and he’ll be conscious, and he’ll be ready to either kill you, or he’ll turn a new leaf, but that’s such a small chance of happening, you might as well not bother.”

  Glasses shook her head. “I’m not gonna kill him.”

  “It’s the only way something like this, or something worse, doesn’t happen,” Olympia said.

  “He’s broken,” Glasses said, her naturally light voice pitching even higher. “We should help him.”

  “He’s kinda got our death in his dream journal,” Suits muttered.

  “It’s a hard decision, but being Olympia means making hard decisions,” Olympia herself said. “You might not like what you’ve got to do, but you have to do it, because nobody else is doing to save the day except you.”

  “But…” Actress pursed her lips as she fiddled with her fingers, then she said, “I’m not strong enough.”

  At that, we all stayed silent.

  “I don’t want to kill him,” Glasses whispered, squeezing her eyes shut, shaking her head. “Nobody else.” Her fingernails dug deep into the meat of her palms, drawing blood that stank of ozone. So raw and disgusting that my stomach turned the moment it hit the table. We all smelt it. We all suddenly looked at her and the liquid scarlet oozed out from between her fingers. She startled, then put her hands under the table, still shaking her head slowly.

  “I think we should call it a night,” Olympia said quietly, mouth thin as she looked at Glasses. “It’s been a long day for all of you, and I’m pretty sure there’s been enough talk to make your heads hurt. Think it over tonight and understand everything. I’ll be awake if you’ve got any questions. But Gods, if you can, try to get some sleep. I know we don’t do that enough on a regular basis, and some of us”—she looked at me—“haven’t slept in literally several months, so catch some rest, then we’ll wake up early for some breakfast and start what I need to get done.”

  “And what’s that?” Quarterback asked her.

  “Training,” she said. “It’s time you all started fighting like your blood is actually made out of gold.”