The last time I had an older Arkathian train me, it didn’t go so well. Most of them rarely ever had off buttons, and the ones that did treated you like a roach that just wouldn’t die. A part of me, a very small part of me, was just a little scared. Sweaty. Nervous. But those were things I stuffed deep down inside of myself because, in case you all forgot, the people around me could tell those things in a heartbeat, and now wasn’t the time for any of that stuff.

  If this was how I was going to get prepared for the inevitable worsening of my life, then I needed to start paying a lot more attention, and for once take orders and carry them out, which was…tough, to say the least. Lucas was my last older influence, and one that still made my throat dry every time I thought about him. Trusting Older Me would take time, and maybe I never fully will, but what the Actress had said still hung over my head like bad fruit. About me being jealous, maybe intimidated by the fact that she was everything I was ever hoping to become.

  Even now, as we all flew in a cluster behind her, I watched her, the furthest away from the point. She’d said that a morning flight would get our blood pumping before we got down to actually doing the ‘easier’ things like hand-to-hand and all that rest of that jazz. According to her, we’d spend less time doing that, and more time getting used to flying at higher speeds for longer amounts of time. Just faster than the speed of sound right now, and fuck me, I was getting pretty exhausted. The sun was coming down hard on my back, my neck, and was burning my shoulders raw and red. Sweat flicked off my face, blown away in seconds by the hot, harsh winds berating us.

  It kinda felt like sticking your head into an oven whilst you get sandblasted in the face, too.

  Arms out in front of you, chin up, mouth shut, and your eyes have a film of tissue over them that stops things from blinding you, so don’t worry about having to squint in the wind. Get used to the sting. Let that piece of your eyes get stronger, and for the love of the Gods, just keep up. If you feel like you’re gonna pass out, just do it.

  So…yeah, amazing advice. We were paired for that same reason. Quarterback and Actress. Glasses was with Olympia up front. Suits and I were on Olympia’s left. She was a sweaty mess, tell you what, with her shirt snapping in the violent winds and her teeth gritted as she struggled to keep up. Actress was fading fast, and if it wasn’t for Quarterback sometimes tugging her along, she would have smashed into the ground by now, or puked more times than she already has from pure exhaustion. The only one of us that didn’t sound or look like she was having a hard time with any of this was Glasses, who kept pace with Olympia, not even breaking a sweat as we slowly got faster.

  “Alright!” Olympia yelled, turning around mid-air, but still keeping pace. “We’ll kick it up a little!”

  “Fuck,” came our collective groan.

  Olympia grinned, flipped over, then pulled ahead by inches, feet, then nearly a mile in the time it took any of us to even try to keep up. Another sonic boom split the sky ahead of us, and we all watched, Glasses included, as she spiralled ahead into the painfully bright blue sky. Hundreds of thousands of feet in the air, twisting around like a fighter jet in a dog fight. We watched her carve through the air like this was all second nature to her. I glanced at Suits, who was glancing at me. Actress hurled again, this time with only saliva coming out of her mouth. She fell back, which looked like she’d just been flung backward by several miles. Quarterback was next. Glasses, unsure, also slowed. Suits and I kept going, and I guess this is where stupidity and ego smashed together, because she started it by bumping into me, throwing me slightly off course as she followed in the same arms-spread spiral that took Olympia far, far into the sky above, then darting toward the ground below in some twisted crazy death spiral.

  So, of course, I had to show Suits that I was better than her.

  I’ll blame it on my empty stomach, though, because as soon as I reached the apex where we both spun around and shot toward the ground, the g-forces smacked the sense right out of my head and my stomach right out of my mouth. Suits, glancing over her shoulder, barked out a laugh. Then her eyes rolled into her head as she fell.

  I, too, laughed at her, before my brain spazzed and we spiralled through the air together. Loose limbs and wild hair. Two bodies that bumped and fell like stones in water until we came to a sudden and very, very fucking painful stop on this hard thing called the Earth. I didn’t know how long we laid there in the craters we’d made, gasping for air and getting burnt up by the scathing sunlight. Everything ached. Each and every single one of my cells felt like they were on fire. I shut my eyes and kept panting and wheezing, hoping for some kind of moisture to slide down my tongue any moment now. My ears kept ringing, though, and my heart kept thumping painfully against my chest. I almost thought I was gonna have some kind of heart attack, lying there in blistering agony.

  “Hey,” Suits said weakly. Her voice was strained and scratchy, struggling to come out. “You alive?”

  I swallowed and winced. “You’re the one who landed head first. Guess your skull is just thick.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Blow me.”

  Silence. We stayed there staring at the empty, cloudless sky, panting hard. Olympia was somewhere far off in the distance, and the others had slowed down just a touch, but at those speeds, that was miles and miles away.

  Very slowly, I sat upright, even though my body was content with staying in my Rylee-shaped hole for the rest of the foreseeable future. I hung my head, and let the French braid my hair was in come loose and hang around my face. It was dry, almost stiff, and stank of sweat as the wind battered it aside. I sat there with my eyes shut, waiting for the pain in my joints to slip away. I rolled my shoulders, then massaged my neck. Weird. My skin felt like it was sunburnt. Didn’t even know that was possible. But I guess I’m tanned for a reason, being in the sky a lot.

  I heard a click beside me, and I watched Suits, from the corner of my eye, light a cigarette she’d kept somewhere on her body. She huffed out a small plume, her body rested like she was trying to make a snow angel. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and her shirt was undone halfway to reveal the sports bra she had on under it. She had tattoos I hadn’t noticed before on her forearms. Not many, but enough to tell me that she’d probably been at least a little bit of a problem before she joined Uncle Sam in the never ending war against American evils.

  “Mind telling me what you’re lookin’ at?” she asked me, sitting upright as well, offering the cigarette.

  I shook my head and muttered, “I just stopped hearing her sonic booms. Four of them in a row.”

  Suits glanced into the sky, shading her eyes with her hand. “You really think she’s legit?”

  I shrugged, which hurt every muscle down my back. “Dunno. But she’s strong, that’s a fact.”

  “And so was dad, and so was his brother, and so is every other adult Arkathian,” she muttered, taking another drag, “apart from us for some reason. Hey, you ever get the feeling that, in some other life, we were normal?”

  I glanced at her strangely. “Meaning?”

  “Like, I don’t know… Like all of this just wasn’t meant for us.” She stared at the endless, hard-baked dessert in front of us. At the dunes that spiralled and the thousands of crashed satellites that sprinkled it. “All we do ever since we get our powers is fight bad guys, and we barely scratch the surface of what we can do, and it’s still not enough to save the world or Bianca or whatever.” Another drag. Another sigh of smoke. “Adam comes along and—”

  “—puts on dad’s costume and gets a billboard and a news hour and the world freaking loves him.”

  We both chuckled, maybe bitterly, maybe jealousy. Maybe ‘cause our stomachs grumble at the same time with hunger. Superhero or not, we still needed to eat. I’d lied to myself and said my body was capable of giving me all the energy it needed from my powers, but jokes on me, because it turned out I just wasn’t pushing myself to my maximum. I’d been riding the wave of my powers, because supervillains used to have a hard time fighting me before I ever got a boost, but now it was just plain easy if I actually focused on trying to take them the fuck out.

  But this was different, because Olympia was another ball game entirely.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I muttered. “We’re the ones with the powers.”

  “And all those amazing responsibilities,” Suits said quietly.

  Then we both stilled. Her cigarette didn’t touch her lips. I stopped moving almost immediately. It was a feeling. A sensation against our skin, an irritation and an annoyance and something that said, we’re not alone.

  But…we were. I scanned my right and Suits searched her left. Nothing for miles. Not in the air or land.

  Underneath.

  My hands were on the hard soil where I’d been sitting, resting on my palms. There were tiny vibrations. A weird hollowness, followed by echoes and sounds and maybe I was hearing voices, too, but just couldn’t find them. They sounded muffled and distant, but no, I wasn’t hearing them. I was feeling them through the palms of my hands, and so was Suits. She glanced at me, an eyebrow raised as we both nodded, figuring that we weren’t both going crazy out here in this terrible heat. Something was underneath us, and that something sounded like voices and boots and…hell, every single inch of my body was feeling them. But this wasn’t the first time this happened, was it? When I’d gotten that suit with the cape, that guy had said my skin was sensitive enough to hear through it.

  I hadn’t paid it much attention at first, considering where I’d been at the time, and mom kinda threw me under the bus so Adam could play a big shot superhero in front of her. But it came back to me like a dash of water.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Holy shit,” Suits muttered, slowly getting into a crouch. “Do you think—”

  “Humans,” I said quietly, almost smiling. “It sounds like them, right?”

  Gotta give it to ‘em. Even when there’s no chance, there’s still one more shot.

  “Fuck, man,” she said. “I thought they’d been wiped out or enslaved.”

  “I fought a version of me that’s with the Conquest,” I said. “She was talking about Clones, and how she told them that the humans weren’t really finished in this war. Maybe that’s why she was out here in the first place.”

  “She knew deep down that they were still out here somewhere,” Suits muttered. “But she didn’t know.”

  “What does that even mean?” I asked.

  “Think about it for a sec,” she said, getting closer. “Legionnaires always work in twos, but she’s still not accepted into the fold, is she? She was all by herself when she attacked the rest of us, almost like she was out here searching for something when she also felt something strange in the air. She literally felt our universes fragment.”

  “And this whole time, she was just feeling her way through the air, hunting for humans,” I whispered.

  “But I guess that also means something else,” Suits muttered. “True-blooded Arkathians can’t do it. Some kind of weird mutation, maybe.”

  “So she got sent out to do the donkey work,” I said, biting my thumbnail. Still a freaking outcast.

  “You two,” a voice said. We startled, looking up into the sky, shading our eyes as Olympia came into view. The sun behind her head made it nearly impossible to make her out, or even focus on her. “Why did you stop?”

  “We got pretty exhausted,” I said, getting up, cringing with the effort. “Then something weird—”

  “She puked on herself, and I figured she shouldn’t be alone as she vomited up her guts,” Suits said, folding her arms over her chest. I looked at her quizzically. “You said we should watch out for our teammates, so I did that.”

  Slowly, Olympia lowered until she was just inches off the painfully hot soil. Arms still folded, jaw still tightly clenched. Her eyes watched us, hardly blinking or even squinting in the heat sitting on the surface of the Earth. “Hm,” she hummed quietly. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing that you two were put together. I figured that one of you would at least try to do what I did and end up not quite getting there. Remember, this is a test of endurance, not just raw speed. We’re building up to get to that raw speed.” She lowered her voice and smiled, showing off a sharp row of pearly whites. “Between me and you guys, you’re probably the ones I’ve got the most hope for.” She looked at both of us, the smile waning, not quite reaching her eyes yet. “Just don’t waste this chance because you think gossiping will make you any stronger. Remember, it’s Bianca and the world we’re training to save, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Suits said, maybe a touch sarcastically. “In the major leagues now.”

  Olympia smiled and patted her shoulder. “Great stuff. Now, the others have caught up with me. We’re thirty miles South-East. Since you two have already caught your breaths, you’ll be the first two to face me down, cool?”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. “Dandy.”

  “Great.” She stayed for a moment, staring at us, the toes of her boots just about grazing the ground. The sensations of sound coming from underneath us still pricked my skin enough to make me slowly scratch my bicep. Olympia nodded, then blasted into the sky, filling our mouths and lungs with plumes of thick, choking brown dust.

  I turned to Suits. “Why’d you cut me off like that?”

  “I signed a contract,” she said very, very quietly, facing me. “Not just with the government or the president or even the Olympiad and the Pentagon, but for the people of Earth itself. I’ve got a mission, superhero, and that’s to protect any remnants of life that’ll ever cling to it, and if you think for a moment I’ll ever trust her, you’re insane.”

  “You really think she’d hurt the humans?” I asked her. “I mean, that’s just not our M.O., is it?”

  “No, it’s always been our M.O., Rylee. We just pick and choose which ones we should hurt.” She pointed to the ground, where her cigarette butt lay. “Those ones down there are frightened, scampering around in what I’m thinking are tunnels they’ve built like roaches in the walls of someone’s house. They’re running from our kind.”

  “And who wouldn’t?” I asked. “But they’re still fighting. Still trying to reclaim their home, right?”

  I might not trust Olympia, but… she wouldn’t hurt them. Why would she hurt them?

  “Look,” Suits said, running a hand through her hair. “Something’s just nor right. Maybe I’ve been doing espionage for too long to trust anything anymore, but I know what my gut is telling me, and I also know when something isn’t the truth, and the chick in red, white, and blue, is not the truth. Just look into her eyes, Rylee.”

  “Her eyes?” I asked. I was straining to listen to the wind and the sky, but she was fast. Ridiculously fast, because she’d been right there in the sky without so much as a warning. “The only thing about them is that—”

  “They’re blue,” she whispered. “And she’s a stronger superhero than a fully grown Legionnaire? Call me crazy, call me whatever name you want to come up with, but that’s impossible, and you know that wholeheartedly.”

  I stared at her, the wind howling around us. There’s only one other person with blue eyes that I know.

  Someone who’d made me, even with my powers as they were, even with my golden eyes, bleed.

  But, the thing with him was that, well…

  “You think she’s a clone?” I asked.

  “If she is,” Suits said quietly, hovering, “I’ve got a rough idea of what her reality looks like. When I joined the Red Cape Division—something you’re probably not even cleared to know about—when I hung up my costume, I learnt the government has a contingency for Olympia’s death. Usually it’s a strike force. Most times, it’s just us.”

  “Just us?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Better, stronger clones. Adam was just the test run. The next is the real deal.”

  “What’s so bad about that?” I asked her, joining her in the air. Even if we really are dead.

  “What’s so bad about it, Rylee, is that you can make a clone whatever you want, however you want, and make them think exactly how you want. You wouldn’t trust Adam with your first name as much as you wouldn’t trust him to help you tie your shoe laces. They’re created to be weapons that’ll snap to attention and listen to every single order given to them by whoever’s at the top, and between you and me, anyone who has power like is on call at any given time, is someone who’s gonna want to clean up the Earth and make it clean. Better yet, purify it all.” She flew a little closer. “And before you argue with me, think about it. All we’ve ever wanted is some peace and quiet, right? Some time to put our feet up and enjoy the silence of it all. The only way someone like us gets that kind of chance is when evil stops being evil and there’s not a single criminal around who’s ballsy enough to try.”

  She…had a point. I barely had enough time to ever sit and talk and just hang out with my friends, let alone try and get Bianca to understand why I’d been so shitty to her lately. And yet, somehow, Older Me had gone and married her. Unless things got a lot better in her reality than it ever does with mine, I couldn’t even see that ever going down. Not because I didn’t want that (because maybe, just maybe, a part of me does), but because everything in my life was such a shitstorm of chaos and poor decisions and freaking negligence from everyone including my own mother kinda left me in a position of stomping out fires every single day of my life for several months on end.

  It was that skepticism again. That wayward touch of jealousy I had for Older Me. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I could ever get my shit together long enough to be this amazing, glorious superhero that the world loves and that also gets to marry her best friend and stop the continual rot of New Olympus. At first, this was all about getting myself a statue. Getting recognized. But at some point, that kinda all got lost in the rubble and the bloodshed, the lies and the betrayal and the days I’d spent licking my wounds and the other days I’d spent chasing ghosts, hoping that I’d finally save someone. And, hell, the reason it all felt pretty hopeless was simple.

  The reason why a vision of being an adult for myself only ever included days when my bones would ache getting out of bed in the morning, and my head would always pound if I didn’t take painkillers from the years of fighting and listening to decades worth of death and destruction around New Olympus, day-in and day-out for years on end. Constantly. A future where I was still scrambling for that gilded golden statue on Olympus Hill, whilst I checked Bianca’s socials and the family she was building with some girl I’d never even heard of before. How Dennie would one day die, leaving that old coffee shop a shell of memories I’d confine myself in until it all fell apart, and I probably wouldn’t look a day over twenty-one by the time everyone I knew was long dead and gone.

  It was all a very, very simple reason.

  The Olympia in Older Me’s reality didn’t crack that code. Her clone did. I wondered if her Earth knew that she wasn’t the original. That she’d died and gotten replaced, and that was just how things went because she was better than ever before. Fuck her old mistakes. Forget how many civilians she’d gotten killed in all that crossfire.

  She’s blonde, she’s hot, she’s got daddy’s smile, and she’s the most powerful being on the planet.

  The humans had done it. They’d finally gotten what they’d wanted, didn’t they?

  They’d gotten themselves Olympia, the superhero.

  Not Rylee. She didn’t go by that name anymore.

  Remember?

  “We’ll keep an eye on her,” Suits said. “We better get going before she starts suspecting something.”

  She left in a gust of wind and dust, nowhere near as violently as Olympia. I stayed there for a moment under the painfully hot sun. I slowly crouched and pressed my fingers to the dirt and shut my eyes. I wasn’t making anything up. Those really were voices down there. People, maybe just a few hundred, all working and running around, and then the occasional burst of laughter would interrupt the mundane rumble of technical jargon. I opened my eyes and stayed there, arms resting on my knees, still squatted above the ground, sweaty and very, very tired.

  I’d humored Suits a little, just to hear what was so wrong with clones. A contingency for my death made sense, didn’t it? Gods, I should’ve known better. The humans would get the version of me they deserved. The one that grinned. The one that looked human but really wasn’t. Just like her old man, they probably now said to her.

  But the clone wouldn’t care one bit about that, would she? She’s got memories that aren’t really hers. Scars that don’t belong on her skin because she didn’t earn any of them. That ring on her necklace wasn’t hers. It was stolen, but that was only because the original version of me in her reality had kicked the bucket trying to be a hero.

  Or maybe I was wrong about her, and she was the original, and just had her shit together.

  I sighed and stood, my hair buffeting over my shoulder. I wouldn’t know either way.

  All I could do now was focus on getting strong enough to save Bianca.

  And the world, too, of course.