The instant Witchling vanished, I felt a shift in the world around me.

  It froze me in the air, biting winds sweeping hair over my shoulder and tugging at my skin. A thrill of something wrong slid down my spine, like someone had taken a knife to each one of my vertebrae. Dad had a certain presence to him, and so had Titan—different, otherworldly. People and monsters on this planet most of the time felt like normal, living, breathing things. But this was a different kind of pressure—the kind that squeezed my chest so tightly, I had no other option than to swallow, land on the ground, shut my eyes and take a deep breath. I breathed out. Listened to my heart. My skin prickled and the icy finger going down my back suddenly stopped at the base of my spine. I can’t hear him, smell him—barely even feel him. I knew he was here, I knew he was watching.

  I knew, as soon as I opened my eyes, the figure standing in front of a warped canvas of air, was him. The wind seemed to die down, and even when he shifted on his feet, gravel crunching softly underneath his bare soles, a thin coat of rippling air coated his entire body. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, because now more than ever, I needed to hear something—a heartbeat, the rush of blood going through his body, hell, even the sounds of New Olympus—that gave the impression this was real. I wasn’t a big fan of illusions, and even less so when they’ve got supervillains involved. Right now, everything was muffled, muted, like I was listening to the world through cotton stuffed into my ears. It didn’t matter now. From dozens of feet away, he kept staring at me.

  At least, I think he was. The slab of metal—eye holes drilled into it and a rectangular hole acting as a mouth—on his face was melted to the flesh of his clean-shaven head. The skin was angry, red, blistering and fresh. So fresh I could still smell the stink of singed skin coming off his pores. What the hell is that thing? It looked like a mask, but it was too rigid, too put together, like someone had welded slabs of sheet iron together and taken a blow torch to his face to make sure it wouldn’t come off. The rest of him was…normal. In nothing except a navy blue prison jumpsuit, he wasn’t muscular, he wasn’t tall and leering—Caesar, by all accounts, looked completely normal.

  Apart from the jagged scars running over his head, veins and arteries bulging with every slow beat of his heart. Apart from the mask, the soulless eyes, the silent rasping breaths that came out through the slit of his mouth.

  Apart from the hooks and stitches that knitted together around the top of his head, so fresh, so recent, they were still bleeding down the side of his face, his neck, dribbling down the cold steel mask like an ugly red crown.

  “I’ll be honest,” I said quietly, breaking the silence. “Unless that isn’t really you, I’m underwhelmed.”

  “Was I not the opponent you were expecting all this time?” he asked—his voice felt guttural, not strained, but raw and hollow coming from deep inside his throat and out of the slit. “Not large enough, not flashy enough, not quite the buildup you wanted and not quite the show you expected of me—you wanted a spectacle tonight.”

  “I want your head,” I said, folding my arms. “It’s as simple as that. Hand it over, and this ends.”

  What the hell is wrong with my ears right now? I couldn’t hear a damned thing outside of our voices, my heartbeat, the sounds of broken bits of rubble underneath my boots, and the echo of his words. I was starting to get on edge. Starting to itch and feel sweaty under my suit. I’d catch him when he’s talking—put a fist through him and wrap this up before it even gets the chance to escalate, because he was right to some extent. I wanted a fight, I wanted to blow off so many pent up emotions—I wanted him to give me something I could chew on for months.

  He’d appeared in front of me with no warning, no sound—simply just there, as if he’d always been.

  I was used to hunting down my villains. I was used to getting to them after hours and hours of searching. I guess it was just different this time, more practical, since that’s what I wanted, and that’s what the universe gave me.

  A head-on fight, and a simple goal—kill Caesar.

  The moment I put my foot forward, I knew something was wrong. So, so wrong. I froze and stepped back, the hardness of the ground almost a surprise to me, because, well, when you’ve got my powers, the ground isn’t soft, but it’s a lot more giving, easier to dent, break and crack. It didn’t give this time. It pushed back against my foot. I flexed my fingers, tightened them into knuckles, and— I swore, my heart slowly starting to race. The air isn’t sweet.

  The Ambrosia that Wraith had lashed me with had been running its course, getting out of my body and off my skin and leaving my suit in a tattered mess, and that had been just about it. This was different. This was new.

  I didn’t feel weak, I didn’t feel like coughing up blood and falling to my hands and knees.

  I felt like I was thirteen again—I felt like I was human.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked quietly. “Kill me, as you intended.”

  “What did you do to me?” I whispered. “I thought you wanted a fair fight.”

  He tilted his head. “There was never going to be a fair fight against you.” He vanished, the rippling air around his body swallowing him into its folds. His voice came from everywhere and nowhere, the shadows still dark and the beam of light shining down from the security light still dazzlingly bright, leaving me turning around, trying to catch it. “You came with a solution to a problem, and you’d rely solely on your crutch for the method.”

  “What the fuck did you do to my powers?” I shouted. “Fuck it, I’ll kill you with my hands, anyway.”

  “Mm,” he hummed. I spun. He stood behind me, taller than I first thought, grey eyes looking down at me as I squared my feet. “This won’t be a fight. This won’t be a spectacle. This is going to be an exhibition of why your death tonight matters so much more than the average person’s, but being frank, you don’t consider yourself average, no matter what you tell yourself.” I wanted to hit him, to try and see just how much he’d dampened my powers. But I knew better than that now. So I swallowed the urge, dragging saliva down a drying throat, and listened. “It’s simple,” Caesar said, the air around him warping and trembling, growing larger and larger. It slid over my skin like oily resin, sticky and liquid and painfully cold. But just that. No bleeding. No gory explosion of my body. All it did was strip me of my costume, leaving me in a white t-shirt, jeans and sneakers. My necklace hung from my throat, cold against my skin. “Let’s stop with the stupidity and the childishness for a moment as I make you understand why I’ve hounded you for months now. At least, to your knowledge, it’s been months. In reality, it’s been years.”

  “Years?” I whispered. “What do you mean years? Someone would have heard of you by now.”

  “In some sense,” he said, “that’s true, but in actuality—not quite. Walk with me.” He turned around and waved his hand, sending the air into a warped frenzy. I didn’t follow him. Caesar stopped and looked over his shoulder. He didn’t wait for me to ask where we were going, ask him what the hell his angle was—he moved his index finger, and I was swept up in the rippling corona around him and into the wall of trembling airwaves. I held my breath on instinct, eyes on stalks and body ready—barely knew what I was up against, and the adrenaline flooding my veins felt like it was starting to burn. And then we were in the sunshine. Bathed in heat that made my skin tingle. I held a hand up to the sun and the scathingly blue sky. Sand and hard dirt crunched under my sneakers as I looked around. Nothing for miles apart from bone-white concrete buildings turned into piles of rubble, some sticking out of the dunes like skeletal hands, a lot more of them in ruin and decay. “You know where we are, yes?”

  I turned to look at Caesar, the air still hazy around him. “The question is how you know this place.”

  “I come from here,” he said softly. “At least, I once did. A very long time ago.”

  “I’m having a hard time believing that.”

  “Whether or not you do isn’t up to me,” he said. The air around us shifted, and as if we were in an oil painting left in the rain, colors bled and twisted and reformed to bring us somewhere new—but no, not new, old. I’d been here just a few weeks ago. Except the large canvas tent I had slept in wasn’t so destroyed, burnt, torn up and left to snap in the wind. All the tents were in the same state, and all I could see in the rubble and the chaos was a single necklace, exactly like mine, hanging from a wooden cross driven into the dirt. A lightning bolt missing a ring. I walked toward the cross and climbed the rubble until I got to it. I reached out, keeping the pendant on my fingertips—old blood made it look rusted and old. It was scuffed and covered in soot and dust, and then its golden chain snapped. Brittle. Weak. I caught the pendant and stared at it on my palm. “Unfortunate what happened here,” he said, standing at the foot of the rubble. “But just another leap forward in the symphony of death you create.”

  “I didn’t leave her here,” I whispered. I turned around. “Where’s the ring? What the hell did you do?”

  “The better question, Rylee Addams, is what did you do?” The air enveloped us again. Nighttime, rainfall coming down hard and the echo of gunfire—a single barking bullet—tore through the darkness. We stood at the end of an alleyway, and through bursts of lightning and watery streetlights, I saw two figures in the shadows. One of them was short, her blonde hair wild in the wind. The other was a kid. Not young, but barely old enough to drink.

  He had a smoking gun clenched in his hand so tightly it shook, the barrel still spewing smoke.

  I turned to look at Caesar. “Guilt tripping me isn’t gonna work. I do that to myself.”

  “It’s not about guilt,” he said quietly. I didn’t watch when the gun went off again, when the split second eruption of light on the alleyway walls acted as a canvas to the murder that just took place—blood on the dumpster, blood on the ground, blood washing off her face and hands as the rain kept pouring down. I didn’t have to look because I remembered this night perfectly fine. The head I’d taken off his shoulders and the body I’d thrown into a dumpster. The sigh of relief and the call I’d made to Lucas to tell him that hey, yeah, I just got that kid you wanted. A checklist. A quota. I didn’t even find out why, because there wasn’t a reason—the guy was a criminal, right? So why bother. Why fucking bother. “It’s about the moments when you had a choice, and over and over again you—”

  “—could’ve made a better one,” I said, tensing my jaw. “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “Everything.” Another shift, another ripple of consuming air, and then we were atop a skyscraper—the bones of one, at least, as nighttime swept through New Olympus, and the cascading fires that chewed through the city made it glow a violent red. Ruins. Collapse. The waterfront doused the streets with oily waves of flame that turned the streets into stewing avenues of melting concrete, steaming metal, screaming bodies and burning buildings. I swallowed, putting one foot on the ledge. Caesar put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You can’t fly, you can’t help—your basic instincts have to be ignored.” I shrugged him off and stood on the ledge anyway, smoke forcing its way down my throat as I stared at the destruction. “This is real,” he said. “And this is all a possibility.”

  I bit my tongue, then looked over my shoulder. “I’ve had this talk before. What makes you so special?”

  “I’m sure you have,” he said. “We have the same conversation many, many times, and you don’t learn, and you always—so sure of yourself—make your bold and brave claim that you’re different, that you’re not going to listen to fate nor the universe and its plans for you. Naive, yet commendable, but it’s lost its shine on me, frankly.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I turned around to fully look at him, the fire consuming the base of the skyscraper we were on casting my shadow across the bricks and along his masked face. “So what now?” I asked him. “What’re you trying to prove?”

  “That you’ll simply never be anything of worth to anyone, and killing yourself would be for the greater good of not only mankind, but for the race of warriors who hound you from the stars, Rylee. You’re a parasite.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said, waving my hand over my shoulder, “that every single version of me ends up in some kind of chaos like this?” I scoffed and jumped down from the ledge. “Let’s get the talk over with so we can start trying to kill each other. I’ve gotten the memo about a dozen times by now, and I’m really just not buying it.”

  “Why,” Caesar said, and suddenly, like all the other times, we were somewhere else—somewhere quiet, lonely, dark and solitary. A classroom, illuminated only by hallway lights coming through the small glass partition in the door. Three people in this room, and the third was near the window, a hand pressed flat against the glass, another squeezing her phone until it nearly shattered. She was arguing, complaining, cursing and swearing, wearing a white shirt and loose tie and, even without my hearing, without my powers, I could hear the music coming from the auditorium, I could smell the sweat under her armpits from her dancing. Prom night. First kiss. Lucas getting under my skin, trying to rip me away from my normal life—at least, what was left of it by then. “Do you think you have any right to believe that you’ll be different? Countless versions of you have thought the same and perished. The oldest version of yourself died in a reality that wasn’t even her own to a girl who’ll go on to slaughter billions.”

  I paused, turned my back to the version of myself near the window, and said, “Glasses? She’s not—”

  “Strong enough?” He slowly shook his head. “Your variants aren’t equal, and by all measures, you’re nearly one of the weakest. Your development is stunted because you lack focus and guidance. Your adolescence is fractured and your adulthood, if you ever reach it, will be tumultuous and back-breaking. Sometimes in the literal sense, other times in the soul-emptying sense. The one you call ‘Glasses’ murdered her own father in childhood. She was powerful beyond measure, so powerful, in fact, your Emperor didn’t think of her as an asset, but as a threat. Why, by any means, should a hybrid of his golden, pure-blooded race be usurped by a child born through assault?”

  My mouth dried. “Dad was a lot of things, but he wasn’t that.”

  “Not your version. The other girl, however—yes, indeed.”

  I swept my arm through the air the same moment the version of myself standing by the window banged her fist against the window, fracturing it out of frustration. “Then why show me any of this, huh? Go and show them.”

  “We try countless times,” Caesar said. “And each time yields the same result. In fact, in the next five minutes, I expect to be attacked by you. In the next ten, I die by your hands. After that, your path is set in stone.”

  “You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid if you think I’m gonna let you live after any of this.”

  “And why should you let me live?” he asked. “You are the Goddess of War. Your reputation goes beyond the bounds of reality and space—a multiverse of chaos and destruction, all linked to your ever significant life. You are special, Rylee Addams. More so than anyone in existence. You alone decide who lives and who does not. Kill me.” Electricity erupted around my hands, golden, lashing, loud and violent. It crackled and burned and turned the classroom a deep shade of singed gold. Caesar walked closer, so close that the tendrils of lightning tried to snap and bite at his clothes and his skin and his metal mask—so close we were face to face. “Do it. End my life, Olympia.”

  I snuffed the light and folded my arms. “You’ve bought yourself five minutes.”

  “Predictable,” he muttered. The version of me by the window hung up the phone and cursed, pushing a hand through her hair and softly banging her forehead against the window—until the door opened, and there stood Bianca in her white dress; the one that clung to her waist and hips and stopped midway up her thighs. I couldn’t help but glance at her, watching as she stalked into the room and asked the other version of me what was wrong, why I’d been acting so weird—We were meant to have fun tonight, and you promised. “Always so bloodthirsty.”

  I swallowed and looked away. The other version of me couldn’t come up with anything to say. She stumbled over her words, fought with her own thoughts, wondering if she should just tear open her shirt right that second and show Bianca the suit under her clothes. But it didn’t happen. She made up an excuse, another lie, and left the room, walking between Caesar and I. It left Bianca staring at the doorway, listening to the sound of her sneakers hitting the floor. “I’m not bloodthirsty,” I told him quietly. Bianca followed after her, shouting her name, running down the hallway—she’d never reach me, she was never fast enough to see me tear through the clouds. “I just want to make sure that life keeps being able to live without it being fucked with by people just like you.”

  “And what life, specifically, have I taken?”

  “You’re the leader of the Triumvirate.”

  Caesar laughed. The classroom bled into shadows and shipping containers, into a sky filled with flakes of snow and a ground covered in sludge-like ice mixing with broken stone. “All these months, and you believe that?”

  I stared at him. Really, really stared at him. “Why’re you laughing?”

  “It’s amazing that you haven’t killed more people,” he said. “You’re told nothing, and in turn, you know nothing at all. You’re left chasing ghosts, running after phantoms and secrets and directly into webs of lies. Rylee Addams, you poor, poor child—the Triumvirate is as much a criminal enterprise as you are a saint. Your existence is puppeteered not by supervillains, but by people who you know.” He slowly shook his head. Caesar spread his arms. “There is no battle to be turned into a spectacle. There’s no sweeping grand fight to claim your crown and throne. You lost nearly two decades ago, even before you were born, to people who see you as nothing more than a tool in their game of politics and profit.” He got closer. “Dear child, you lost. You only lose. It’s one of the main reasons you end up as you do—ruthless, efficient, a force that trumps the shadow that is your father by tenfold. Your life is dictated by tragedy and back stabbings. Your journey as a superhero concludes in a matter of minutes. What you become is worse. False gods draped in bright linen, offering their lives to a world that is ultimately better off without them, are below you. Your powers come from beyond the soil of Earth. You’re not a superhero, you’re a ruler. To some, even a goddess.” Caesar, through the slit open for his mouth, smiled. “Rylee, you always lose.”

  My voice was silent, strained, lifted by the biting icy wind. “I didn’t live this long by losing.”

  “You might live longer than most and still never truly win,” he said.

  “I marry the love of my life and become a superhero, I’ve seen my—”

  “No, you haven’t,” Caesar said quietly. “That version of yourself was false. True in her actions, steady in her beliefs, but as you are right now, in this period of change, contemplation, of instability—you’re just not her.”

  “You want me to show you how much I’m not like her?” I whispered, fingers clenching.

  “She kills Bianca Ross in her sleep on the night of your honeymoon.”

  I froze.

  “Next is the Olympiad—dismantled in hours, its heroes in days. What comes next is totality—a shedding of your humanity. Gone are your friends and your enemies. Unbound, next is the thorough lesson to the entire world that evil, in any capacity, is not tolerated. You manufacture a utopia, and tell yourself how wonderfully quiet it is.”

  My feet lifted off the ground. Debris and rocks skittered in the miniscule gap underneath my shoes. Caesar stopped talking. I didn’t say anything for several seconds. Not until I could hear my own thoughts over the raging tide of blood flooding past my ears. “Not…” I breathed, put my feet back on the ground, and swallowed. “Not every version of us is like that—you’re lying, I know for a fact that you’re lying, because there are lines I’d never cross.”

  Caesar smiled. “Not now, but there will come a time when you consider it.”

  “You don’t know me enough to even guess something like that.”

  “I know you well. I know almost all versions of you. I know, Rylee, that deep in your heart, right this second, that you understand why you would cross that line—and it’s simple, really: for the greater good, isn’t it?”

  “Both,” I argued, folding my arms. “I don’t have to cross a line to save the world.”

  “Other heroes, maybe. You? Not entirely.”

  “You’re on thinning ice.”

  “And you’re one decision away from becoming what you’re meant to be.”

  “You’re buying yourself time,” I snarled.

  “From what?” he asked. “I’ve lived countless lives, and I’ll continue to live countless lives. Death is secondary to me, just as much as it is to you—don’t pretend to shy away from what you are, truly embrace it.”

  What the hell is he talking about? “Someone who used to work for you told me—”

  “My God, what do you not yet understand?” he asked. “Falsities. Lies. Wrongful truths. How should I say it in a way that you’ll understand? The stories you’ve heard of me precede me. My goals, my aspirations—none of what you have experienced this year is me. Your stolen blood and bone marrow. The experiments. The chase for immortality. These are things I would be after. Why? Bountiful resources? Guns, ammunition, manpower and food and water and territory—all so arbitrary for a man whose life has just been birthed as of just over an hour ago.”

  I grabbed him by the overalls and pulled him close. “I will kill you,” I said. “And slowly. Make. Sense.”

  “My power is complex, but for your sake, it’s akin to Clementine’s, only a lot more nuanced. I will go to school once my mother succumbs to bleeding from my birth in the Upper West. I will fall in love at the age of ten and be able to graduate from college early. And then the visions will begin. And then I will be approached by people you’re yet to meet—people you might never meet. I’ll remain here until your eventual failure, and then I will go to the next reality to tell you the same thing again and again in the vague hope you will finally change.”

  “If that’s true,” I growled, “then why don’t you just kill me? You took away my powers. You can do it.”

  “Don’t you think you have the capacity to change?” he asked quietly. “Are you not any better than the same people who beat you, nearly killed you, who stripped you of your dignity and your childhood, Rylee?” He looked me dead in the eyes, barely blinking—only staring. “Or is this the sum of all your parts: a failed hero?”

  “You’re telling me,” I whispered, “that there’s not a single version who does the right thing?”

  “To you, Rylee, your genocides, your erasures of history, your march against villainy, are all the right thing. Even this year, just months ago, you were more willing to tear petty criminals limb from limb than to go after those who harm our land, rape our resources, kill us in their financial wars, and all because fighting supervillains was a lot more…fun, entertaining, joyful, than actually dealing with matters that concern the rest of the world.” He slipped out of my grasp. He patted his overalls down. “It’s the same bedrock foundation of selfishness that’s left countless worlds in states of decay and hellish ruin. You survive your adolescence a lot more than you think, and you grow grey a lot more times than you can guess, but they always end the same way—alone, fulfilled, and in silence. None left to criticize you or lie to you. None left to hurt you and make you bleed. Even now, just moments ago, you wanted to shed the name Olympia, and you do so many times in exchange for something more determined. The few times you do, Bianca dies, and so do your friends and your mother, and your name is feared—not revered.”

  “I don’t believe half the shit coming out of your mouth,” I said. “Let’s get to the part where we fight.”

  He remained silent, hands in his pockets, the wind howling and the raging echo of the fighting in Lower Olympus ringing through the night. “Rarely do you learn,” he said. “Rarely do you listen, other than to yourself.”

  “I listen to people, but I’ve gone through a couple of months when everyone’s just lied to me.”

  “You lie to yourself constantly, and yet you remain faithful to your promises.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I bit my tongue and stared at him.

  “There is,” Caesar said, “a way I can ensure you will listen.”

  “If it involves a fight, then you’ve got me.”

  “No,” he said, waving his hand. The air warped again, melting away colors and sounds and light to the point where I had to raise my hand and let lightning curl around my fingers. “But it involves tea and a farm.”