Chapter Text
When I get up in the morning I sit down in front of the computer and check my messages and the news, seeing whether there’s any movement, an attack, someone dead.
The second thing I do is check whether I have superpowers.
I have a list I printed out, 150 things to try, my own adaptation from a different list I’d found somewhere. I have a bunch of junk in my drawer, and I run through the whole thing, trying to move a piece of metal with my mind, trying to extrude some glass, using laser eyes, telekinesis, looking out the window and trying some mind control on whoever is walking by, running through my paces, checking things off one by one. Nope, nope, nope.
It was the same every morning, no superpowers, but I persisted, because if I did get superpowers, I wouldn’t want to out myself.
Two years ago a girl at my school used her laser eyes on the chalkboard during math class. It was probably an accident, though hell if I know. It was a single second of twin red beams right next to the teacher, and then all hell broke loose. Her life was over, she was snatched up, black bagged. She killed two of the bastards on her way out and left a scorch mark across the side of the school that’s still there today. Her life as a superhero was over before it even began.
That wasn’t going to be me.
I got dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, with a sports bra that needed a wash, slipped my backpack on, and was out the door five minutes after the morning testing. I cut it tight, when it came to school, and because of that I was on my fourth truancy. I’d been told that just one more would mean that I would be declared a legal adult and sent to the labor camps, but I didn’t take that too seriously.
I turned the corner and saw two demons on my route, and because I was feeling feisty, I didn’t switch to the other side of the street. They were lesser demons, wearing kevlar with submachine guns strapped across their chests and nothing else. Short, for demons, 6’5” with red skin, fangs, and claws aplenty. Their yellow eyes were on me as I skirted past them, and I knew they were thinking of giving me shit. I almost wanted them to, even if it would make me late, even if there was a chance I’d become a target of opportunity.
I’d never experienced real high school, human high school, and I was an orphan, so didn’t have parents to tell me what it was like. When the demons had taken over, they’d changed everything about what kids were expected to learn, making everything hands-on, focusing on shop and cutting away from the sciences and humanities. If you were in school, you were there to prepare for a trade of some kind, and probably you’d be placed into an apprenticeship right out of high school, if you weren’t put straight into service.
And while history, politics, and music had all been cut, there was one new class, my least favorite: Society.
Society had a human teacher, but it also had one of the demons assigned to the school. He had a kevlar vest and a gun at his hip, smaller than what the guys I’d passed were packing. His job was mostly to stare at us and listen in on what the teacher was saying.
I’d fantasized about taking his gun and shooting him just about a hundred times. It was clipped in place, so I was pretty sure I would have to do it two-handed, one hand for the clip and the other to draw, and then I’d have to cock it and fire it in one smooth motion, right where the kevlar didn’t cover.
I put my odds at maybe 10%, not high enough to ever go through with it, but while the teacher droned on, it was something to occupy my mind.
The teacher was a simp, fully bought into demonic rule, and he spent all his time reading from the prepared documents that some asshole had put together up on the Mothership.
But on that particular day, he mentioned Gaia, and so I actually paid attention for once, mostly because it was a thing I already knew a lot about. I wanted to know what the demons wanted us to think, to see what they’d let slip, but if it was being said to high schoolers, then I was pretty sure that it would be all over the net.
“Gaia, now known to be the lifeforce of this planet, gives an incredible amount of power to certain individuals,” our teacher said. “Confirmed by the Xrythex,” the demons, if you’re not a simp, “this power is often of incredible utility, but comes at a grave cost; those selected by Gaia as champions will die, whether in a month or a handful of years. The more power granted, the shorter the lifespan. There is no known way to avoid this grim fate, but the Xrythex will grant safe harbor to anyone graced by Gaia who turns themselves in willingly. Families and friends will be taken care of, in exchange for service to their noble purposes.” That meant being either a slave or a soldier on the frontlines.
I saw a hand shoot up in my peripheral vision and turned to look at Beth Pearce.
“Yes, Beth,” the teacher sighed.
“What happens if we don’t turn ourselves in willingly?” she asked. She was a simp too, which was the only reason he’d called on her, though I could tell he was getting tired of her schtik.
“Someone graced by Gaia can be a danger to themselves and others,” said the teacher. “The authorities would respond accordingly, and yes, with violence if necessary.”
Beth looked pleased with herself. The simps came in different flavors, and Beth was the cruel kind, happy to see people get their teeth knocked in and the “criminals” get strung up. There was a guy whose body was hung at the front entrance of the school for a while, rotting away, and she’d been one of the people who thought it was just great that he was made an example of. He hadn’t even been part of the resistance though, he’d been a thief.
I found my own hand going up, even though I tried to keep a low profile.
“If Gaia is blessing these people to provide them for the war the demons are fighting, why is it doing it this way?” I asked. “Why is it selecting people who fight against the demons?”
The teacher cleared his throat. “While it’s clear that some of those blessed have chosen violence against the Xrythex, at expense to themselves and their communities, not to mention the cause of progress and multi-dimensional war, it’s wrong to suggest that these are the majority of those selected.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “Gaia is picking people who will fight on the side of humanity.”
“To the principal’s office,” said the teacher with a sigh of resignation. “Now,” he added when I didn’t immediately move.
I gathered up my backpack and looked at Beth’s shit-eating grin, which was nearly enough for me to clock her as I moved past. The demon was giving me a look, and I thought that he might give me shit, but most of the ones stationed at the school didn’t even speak any English.
I got chewed out by the principal, spent some time in “quiet study” where I was given some pamphlets from the Mothership to read, and then got shuttled off to Mechanics.
If Society was a total waste of time for dipshits and simps, then there was actually something to get out of Mechanics: weapons and tools that we could use against them.
See, the demons wanted us as loyal soldiers if they could mold us into that, or slave labor if they couldn’t. But for us to be useful as slave labor, we needed to be trained in all kinds of things. One of those things was the operation of machines. Mechanics was especially concerned with standard human-made combustion vehicles, but also, demonic aircraft.
The school had a little four-seater coupe that we’d been working on all year, learning to change oil and replace various parts that could go bad, though it had been up and running since the first month, and the teacher had kept trying to get some kind of beater in for us to work on. But the other thing it had was a retired two-seater Stinger-class air vehicle, a scouting ship and simple shuttle. It was neutered, and anti-aircraft guns would be pretty likely to shoot it out of the sky, but I knew its ins and outs better than almost anyone, and I was pretty sure I could steal it if I ever had a good plan for what to do with it.
In theory, I could load it up with explosives and then smash it straight into the Cathedral, but that wasn’t how I wanted to spend my one life in this world.
I wanted to spend it on something bigger.
Demon tech was, as anyone who knew anything would tell you, just fucking awful. Whatever world they’d come at us from, it was maybe as much as centuries behind us, and there was a reason they were wearing kevlar vests with American-made firearms instead of some better thing they’d made on their own. Their aircraft used magic that we had never heard of and probably wouldn’t have been able to replicate before they came over anyway, and it was nightmarishly complicated and finicky.
If generation zero was the stuff they’d brought in with them, the Stinger we had was generation one, old shit that was out of date now, and would be even more out of date in another five years. The original Stingers had severe cooling issues around a certain part that limited their mobility and airtime, but when they’d come to Earth they’d seen that every household in the first world had at least one cooler. So this first generation piece of shit we’d been given to work on had a pretty standard coolant system you’d find in any fridge, which for some godforsaken reason vented heat directly into the cabin, and was hooked up to a car battery for power, which had to be swapped whenever it landed.
I spent most of my time cleaning out the cooling system, not talking to anyone, though most people knew not to talk to me. The cooling was at least human tech, nicely predictable. Most of the demon stuff was growing, which was just awful for a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that nothing was completely standardized. The demon way of doing things, before invading, had been to make everything bespoke. They still did a lot of that, but the current third generation stuff was supposedly much better than it had been, and three years ago, their new capital cruiser had hung above the city of Umberland as a promise of what “we” could achieve “together”.
That was before Captain Greenwich had slammed it straight into the Cathedral in the biggest victory for humankind in a decade.
Greenwich was my hero, and just the thought of that moment sparked a deep, visceral joy in me, enough to get me through to lunch.
I ate alone, as I did most days, sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, back to the wall. The school had been built for a much larger number of kids than it had now, and though official reports were five percent of humanity dead, it felt like it was much larger. Maybe it was flight to the suburbs or the country, I didn’t know, but the school felt cavernous sometimes, waiting to swallow its students whole and spit them out into the demon’s systems of labor come graduation.
I ate a sandwich that I’d grabbed from my minifridge, made two days before. I’d learned that you couldn’t make them too far ahead of time without getting food poisoning, which was annoying. In my ideal world, I wouldn’t need to care about food. As it stood, I gave myself what I needed to get by, putting as little of my orphan fund money toward it as I could. At home, I ate beans, rice, and chicken, prepared in batches ahead of time, and then an occasional apple or carrot for roughage.
I had already finished eating by the time Beth came over to my table. She didn’t have food with her, so I figured either she’d rushed through her lunch like I had, or she was skipping a day. Her family had money, because they were simps too, and sometimes the demons rewarded that.
“You’re going to get killed if you keep mouthing off like that,” she said. Her eyes were locked on me and she was leaning forward. She’d always had a radiant aura of malevolent intensity.
“Yeah, and you’re looking forward to celebrating?” I asked.
“Of course,” she replied, baring her teeth. “It’s not every day that someone’s idiocy gives them a slap across the face. I'll be there cheering when they string you up for rebellion.”
“Simp,” I seethed.
“Idiot,” she replied. “You understand that they put a demon in that class to listen for dissent, right? I always wondered how people lost to them, and now I know, it’s because of drooling morons like you.”
“Go suck a demon cock,” I said. They didn’t actually have genitals, which made it a better bit of incentive.
“The next time something bad happens, some act of arson, someone getting blown up by insurgents, you know who they’re going to go looking at?” she asked. “It’s you, fuckstain.”
She stood up from the table and walked away in a huff. I watched her go and thought about killing her. I thought it probably wouldn’t be too difficult, since I knew where she lived, but if killing a single demon wasn’t worth my life, then killing Beth Pearce definitely wasn’t. Besides, I wasn’t sure I could do that to another human, not even her. She’d used the word ‘demon’, not ‘Xrythex’, so maybe there was a part of her that knew what they were.
I skipped out on the rest of the school day, which promised to be more of the same old shit, and went to my favorite place in the city, a ten story tall abandoned building. It had been full of offices at one point, but the demons didn’t want us for clerical work, or whatever they used to do at offices. The whole place had been gutted in a hurry, and while it had been picked over in the ten years since the invasion, there was still plenty of stuff hanging around, artifacts of an earlier time.
I hiked up ten flights of stairs and got to the roof. I had a setup there, which thankfully no one had trashed yet, though I figured that was only a matter of time. I sat in my plastic folding chair, looking out on this part of the city, angled so I could see the city center, and watched to see what I could.
I was hoping for superheroes, obviously, but it was the middle of the day, and the most active among them didn’t come out until nightfall. Plus most of them couldn’t fly, and wouldn’t fly if they could help it. Scarlet Scarab was my best bet, since she often did daytime runs. She had come on the scene seven months ago, and had increased her pace in the last few weeks. The chatter on the forums was that she was reaching the end of her lifespan, and that always meant increased activity. Six days ago the side of an apartment building had exploded out the side, and it wasn’t clear who it had been or why, but Scarlet Scarab was implicated — maybe her secret identity had been compromised.
But I didn’t see her, just the city of Umberland, going about its day.
I had half a view of the Cathedral, blocked by one of the skyscrapers. It had been summoned in Nichol’s Park over the course of three months ten years ago, right when the invasion started, and it was the headquarters of the demonic forces in not just the city, but across the entire Earth. They had satellite offices in other major cities, with portals to move between their bases, but I was sitting there looking at the big one.
It was a huge, ugly thing that sat there with too many spires, like someone had scooped up a handful of cutlery from the drawer and jammed it down into the ground with all the points sticking up. It was a porcupine building, with a thick mass of rooms sitting beneath it, including the huge chamber for the New Congress. It was a vile place, the hive of demonic presence, and if I had my way, I would murder everyone in it, demon and human alike.
They kept the Cathedral pristine. Even after Captain Greenwich had smashed their precious ship into it, they’d repaired it in three months, at enormous expense. It was a symbol of their power, the highest spires visible from most places in the city, and certainly anywhere on the lake beyond. Most sources put the death toll from Greenwich’s strike at close to six thousand dead, but so long as the Cathedral stood, they could pretend that they’d bounced right back.
Three years had passed though, and there was no second capital ship, nothing of that size and power.
So the way I figured it, eventually this project of holding onto us as slaves had to end. Eventually we’d bleed them of too many bodies, too much in the way of resources. You couldn’t lose the fight if you just never tapped out, you could scratch and claw and struggle. It might take another decade, but we could win. And then humanity would drag itself up from the ground, bloody and bruised, but no longer a slave species.
I caught a flash of pink from one of the skyscrapers and brought up the dinky pair of binos I’d found in one of the offices. It was the old TransStar building, still in active use if a little worse for the wear, and the magnification was poor enough that I could mostly make out the lights.
It had to be Pink Slip, but what the hell she was doing there in the middle of the day was anyone’s guess. I got a notebook out of my bag and jotted down the time and location, but it would probably be some time before I got back to my computer to report it on the forums.
I looked up just in time to see one of the windows explode outward in glass with a flash of pink and a woman go tumbling out the side. I could barely make her out, a white blouse and a pencil skirt, black hair whipping, body flailing. Then there was a trail of pink behind her, solid and translucent, and I realized that this was Pink Slip herself.
Hard light followed in her wake, a streak of it that matched the trail of her body, ten stories tall, then another ten stories, until she finally arrested her fall by holding onto the hard light that clung in the air.
“Come on, come on, fucking come on,” I said beneath my breath.
She wasn’t in her costume, which meant they’d ambushed her at work. She’d been a staple of the city for three years, and supposedly had been mentored by Captain Greenwich for a bit before his big sacrifice. Her powers were B-tier, too defensive for striking hard targets, but she had racked up almost a hundred kills, at least as far as the forums accounted things.
Her cover was blown now, and unless she was very good about going to ground, she was toast. There might be a place she could hide for a while, if she had friends, but if they got to her in civilian clothes, they’d have her face plastered across every channel and site in short order. It was hard to survive that.
This was what watching from the rooftop had gotten me, a glimpse of one of my heroes running for her life.
Still, as grim as it was, I watched until she’d done a controlled descent down into the city below, blocked from my line of sight.
“Godspeed, Pink Slip,” I said.
I put the binocs away and folded up the chair, putting everything back in the stash spot. I didn’t have the stomach for more watching, and wouldn’t get news for another few hours unless Pink Slip got torn to shreds just after hitting the ground. She had a speedster power, but it was weak, not much faster than a person pedaling their heart out on a bike. No news was, in this case, good news: the demons would always crow when they caught a hero, and with someone like Pink Slip, a B-tier hero, they would probably string her up for a public display, whether alive or dead.
The whole thing left me feeling hollow as I made my way back down the stairs. I wanted to be one of them, and I knew it was a life that no one lived for long, one way or another. But seeing that, seeing the end, it didn’t sit right with me.
Maybe she would make it another few months, living as a fugitive. I guess I didn’t know.
I was caught up in my thoughts, and when I hit the bottom of the steps and came out into the lobby, there was a demon waiting for me.
“This building is closed,” he said, mouth moving carefully to shape the words. It was a butchery of our language, subhuman.
“I know,” I said. “I was exploring.”
He was one of the little ones, two heads taller than me, no partner in sight. He was red like a lobster, skinny in the legs and arms, not even wearing their standard issue kevlar, though there was a machine gun slung across his back. He was alone. Usually they traveled in pairs, for the obvious reason of having some backup, but it was just him, and just me. I had my backpack slung over my shoulder. Probably I was breaking some laws being here, but fuck if I knew what they were. Trespassing, maybe.
“Bag,” he said, holding out his hands. I didn’t know how much English he knew. Probably not much.
I unslung my backpack and handed it over, eyeing his gun. It could just see the butt of it sticking out. Would he keep it loaded? I thought so, though probably not with a round chambered.
He took the bag from me. This kind of demon, the smaller ones, had two fingers and a thumb, with matching three-toed feet that were usually splayed out. He took the zipper with his claws and ripped the backpack open, then dumped everything inside onto the ground. It was a power play, but maybe he didn’t see it that way, because he picked through the books and binders, spreading things out more.
My heart had started beating faster. I was in a bad spot here. We were alone, and I didn’t think anyone would hear me scream, not that they would help me if they did.
Whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find it there, and he looked up from my scattered belongings, eyes scanning my body.
“Pockets,” he said.
I turned out the pockets of my pants and took off my jacket for good measure, dropping it on the ground. I was worried he was going to shred it. They were vicious fuckers like that sometimes, if they had you alone.
“Upstairs,” he said, when that was done.
I hesitated at that. I wasn’t supposed to be here, but I was pretty sure that he wasn’t either. He definitely wasn’t supposed to be taking me further into the building. I swallowed hard, feeling the staccato of my heartbeat. He was taller, stronger, and had a gun.
“Now,” he growled.
I turned and started walking, feeling his eyes on the small of my back. He was faster, which meant that I couldn’t just take off and lose him up the stairwell, and if he was fast on the draw, he’d just shoot me. The building had once held an elevator, now long out of commission, but it was old enough that it had a proper central staircase, which was what I normally used. I took the steps quickly, hoping that he’d tire out faster than I would — the demons had famously little stamina, being creatures of quick and brutal violence. If I could get him winded, then maybe I could wrestle the gun from him.
While I was moving fast, making him work to keep up with me, he didn’t tell me to slow down or stop, and when we were at the top of the building, he was panting and out of breath, much more than I was. I kept in reasonable shape: cardio was one of the things you needed if you were a superhero.
“To the edge,” he said, without pausing for breath.
He was going to make me jump. I had heard of them doing this before. Demons couldn’t kill themselves, their survival instincts were insane compared to a human. It was a point of curiosity for them, seeing that they could make us kill ourselves, sometimes after a bout of torture.
I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
I turned and ran like I was going to go past him, and briefly grabbed the butt of the gun before being cuffed in the back of the head. I pitched forward and went sprawling onto the ground, and he picked me up like I was a plaything.
I screamed, kicked, scratched, and tried to bite him, but he carried me, one-handed over to the edge of the roof, holding me by my secondhand t-shirt, which dug into my ribs. I stopped thrashing around as soon as we were at the edge, worried that he’d lose his grip on me. He used his other hand to grab onto one of my legs and held me there over the edge. We were both breathing hard now and my eyes were wild, sweat dripping down my face. This was it, this was the end, killed for sport by one of these subhuman fuckers.
“Scream,” he said.
I kept my mouth shut, so he squeezed my leg, digging his claws through the denim and into my skin. But like I said, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction, so I kept my teeth gritted. I’d been working on my pain tolerance.
“Scream!” he said again, yelling.
I realized, then, that I wasn’t sport for him, I was bait.
He was a single demon, standing on top of one of the tallest buildings in the neighborhood. We’d be visible to anyone watching from below, or another building nearby. Probably there were already eyes on us. And as soon as I started screaming my lungs out, I would be a siren for any hero in the area.
He poked and prodded at me, telling me to scream, twisting my limbs and changing his grip. Where his claws dug into me, I bled, and I could feel the divots he’d made. I won’t say I was quiet, but I kept from going full volume. I was a sweaty, bloody animal, drenched in pain, but if this was going to be the end of my life, it was going to be on my own terms.
Eventually I screamed. I couldn’t hold out forever. I wasn’t the master of my own body, my own impulses.
I don’t know how long we were up there, or how long it lasted, but eventually there was a streak of pink below us.
No, I thought, as blood dripped from my mouth. No no no.
She was supposed to be on the run, laying low, hiding out with confederates, hidden in a closet or something, changing her hairstyle, or making her way into a campsite in the woods.
But it wasn’t long before she was up on top of the building. I was thrown down onto the roof as soon as she was up there with us, landing hard enough to knock the wind from me, banging my knee and elbow. I lifted my head and looked up at Pink Slip.
She was bleeding and worse for the wear, in her armored mode now, covered in translucent pink light, which was frayed and tattered. She’d ditched the pencil skirt for athletic shorts, or had been wearing them beneath her office worker disguise, and the blouse was gone too, just workout clothes.
“You picked the wrong day, buster,” said Pink Slip.
The demon slipped the gun from its position on his back, and was met with a beam of light from Pink Slip. Her beams couldn’t penetrate even a weak demon like this, but they landed with the power of a strong punch, and knocked the gun from his hands.
He growled and ran at her, claws fully extended, mouth open and ready to bite. She shifted to the side, leaving a trail of light, then back, putting up a barrier between the two of them. When he tried to go around, she dodged back again, more hard light. He wasn’t well-read on her powers, I could see that, because he tested them with his claws, then struck at the hovering pink light, trying to break it. He had no luck.
“Run!” Pink Slip shouted at me.
My eyes went to the gun. She shouldn’t have come to save me, she was battered and bleeding. She must have booked it after falling out of the TransStar building, and only stopped to save me because … because she was a hero, a truly good person who was using her limited remaining time to save me.
I got to my feet as she circled him. She was leaving her trail of pink light as she went, boxing him in, and if he didn’t realize what she was doing until it was too late, that would be it for him. She was a boa constrictor, able to pin someone in place, then slip through her own hard light to make the room for maneuvering even smaller, and eventually, get out her signature spear of light and get him in the belly.
Unless he climbed over it, which wasn’t the most difficult thing to do for a demon. It was why Pink Slip mostly went up against people — collaborators, simps, and human soldiers.
I had grabbed the gun up from the ground by the time he figured it out, and had checked that it was loaded with the safety off by the time he was up and over.
He took a swipe at Pink Slip that caught her directly in the head, and I watched as she fell to the ground. The pink lights went out all at once, her armor and the trap she’d been trying to place, and I knew that was incredibly bad.
I aimed for center mass, held down the trigger, and watched the bullets rip through the demon, six in total before I had much time to reconsider. The gun jumped in my hands, barking loud and too powerful, but the bullets all somehow hit, and when I let go of the trigger, the demon was bleeding on the ground. I went to his body and aimed at his head, wanting to fire off another shot, but he was clearly dead, and some stray rational thought was on what would come next.
I put the gun into Pink Slip’s open hand. I was breathing hard, bleeding, and confused, but I knew that I had to act fast. The gunfire would have been heard, and that would attract someone, if the streak of pink light directly to our location hadn’t.
I stared down at the demon and at Pink Slip, now dead. She’d been injured worse than I had figured. She’d given her life for me, and I wished that she hadn’t, because she was more valuable than I was. She had another year left, at least, and what could I even accomplish with the whole rest of my life, if the powers didn’t come?
And that was the moment that Gaia blessed me with powers.