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Sludgy stillwater erupted in front of her, stopping Bianca dead before she could even get her fingernails inside the woman's throat. Barbed appendages shot from her back and hooked onto the sewer's grimy ceiling, yanking her upward and sticking her to the pipes and the bricks above the frothing sewer. She hung there, panting through her teeth, watching as the sludge bubbled and rippled and finally birthed a figure onto its surface. Pale, bone-white skin. Black sludge that spilled from her mouth and bled from her eyes. A bright yellow flower rose its way up her watery body and found a place on the crown of her head. And her eyes glowed. Soft. Golden. Bianca's eyes narrowed as she slowly edged backward until she had her back to the wall, still high enough to look down.

She sunk her fingers deeper into the stone, denting it.

The watery girl reeked. God, she fucking reeked. It was something so terrible Bianca vomited in her mouth and forced herself to swallow it. She dragged her arm across her lips. Licked the saliva off them. She smells like Rylee. Worse. No, Rylee smells better, more muted. This is something else. Disgusting. I want to puke again. God, what the hell is she?

The black and purple flesh on Bianca's body rippled with unease as the thing underneath her tilted its head and cocked an eyebrow. Bianca hated it.

She didn't know why she did, but she knew that she did, and she knew that it wasn't right.

The thing turned around, its arms behind its back, flowing summer dress torn and filthy and covered in trash and waste gushing down her tiny frame. She looked at the woman with the folded arms. "Who is that, Circe?"

"A problem," Circe muttered, chewing on her tongue. Bianca slid down the wall and landed on the opposite side of the river of waste, still crouched, still low—the tentacles coming off her back writhed and snapped and felt the ground around her like serpents. Circe sighed and rolled her neck, then said, "Daisy, I need a favor."

The thing's eyes lit up. The worms almost hissed against her skin. Bianca flinched, and— She blinked. For just a moment, she blinked. Stared. Smelled. Her head was…clear. Where was she? She was…in a sewer, but she'd been with Harper and Vic a moment ago, and she…she was going to… Bianca grabbed her head, pain erupting through her brain like a knife through her eyes. And then it was gone, and the fog was back, and so was the hate.

"Yay!" the creature said. "I've been so bored, Circe! And sad. So very sad. Is Olympia better? Is my big sister coming back?"

"Don't say her name," Bianca snarled. Bone spindles erupted from her fingertips. "Ever."

"Oh?" The thing turned around. Bianca flinched. The worms flared with agony as the creature's yellow eyes burned with soft light. Tiny golden flowers bloomed through the cracks around her feet. She leaped upward and impaled the concrete with the appendages. Bianca tasted blood in her mouth. She tasted iron and heat and something vile worming up and down her throat like living bile. The creature looked up at her, a curious smile on its filthy face. "Do you care about Olympia, too? She's my sister! And if you know her, and I know her, then we'll be friends!"

"No, Daisy," Circe said stiffly. The glowing flowers dimmed. "She's not our friend. She's a threat to us, and to Olympia."

"I'm not a threat to her," Bianca spat. Her jaw was so tense it felt like her teeth were going to crack.

But Circe ignored her and said to the creature, "Get me Ru, and get Cherrie back to her room. She wasn't supposed to get out, so it looks like I'm going to have to talk to my uncle again." She sighed, massaged her brows. Bianca held onto the rusted pipe above her, fingers denting the old steel. "And tell Ru not to hurt her too much. I'd like not to have Olympia hate us, but I quite frankly don't have the bandwidth to play nice with that fucking thing after her brother taught me drowning really is the worst way to die. And don't interfere. I need you with me. Let Ruslana work, and make sure everything stays like I told you, Ok?"

Daisy paused, pursed her lips, then nodded. "Alright." She looked up at Bianca. "Um…I'm Daisy. Hello." She waved. Bianca's mouth bittered. "Maybe we can be friends another time. I'll see you real soon, I promise."

The water surged upward and swallowed the squirming redhead and the woman with dreads. When it receded, Bianca was alone again in the tunnel. The flowers withered and died. The water gushed back into its flat black surface. And Bianca landed on the concrete, splintering the stone, so deeply angry she wanted to scream.

She was hungry. It was hungry.

So, so very hungry.

"Faster," Ben said, standing over her. "You should've been faster."

"I know."

"No, Bianca, you don't know. Now they know you're here, and they'll start hunting you down, and—"

"I know," she screamed. Her voice echoed. Bianca panted, staring up at the blurred face glaring at her. She swallowed and cursed and looked away, then ran her hands through her hair. "I know, OK? I'll find something else."

Ben said nothing. Just shook his head and looked away.

Bianca couldn't look at him. She wanted to. She wanted to apologize for shouting.

She couldn't. Not with the weight sitting in her gut.

Then the river shifted. First came the bubbles, the violent frothing. Something moved under the surface of the water, rippling and quaking until the sewers trembled and shed concrete dust onto her shoulders. What the hell? She stepped back from the river of waste, her spine against the sewer wall. It wasn't Daisy. This was someone else. Someone who smelt normal, someone that crawled out of the sludge and onto the other side of the platform.

Bianca watched them, stared at them, as they got onto one knee, coughing and gagging as sludge and waste and trash poured off their shoulders and back and out of their hair. They spat. Quietly cursed. Said something in a language that made Ben freeze. Then they stood up and rolled their muscular shoulders, arms exposed, forearms and fists wrapped in black tape torn at the knuckles. She had white hair, a shock of it that just about brushed her shoulders when she turned around to look at Bianca. She didn't glare, didn't tilt her head. She narrowed her eyes, maybe curious, maybe wondering what the hell she was looking at. A white dove glistened on the girl's chest, and with one more swipe of trash off her face, she stood taller.

Her fists were golden, dripping in it, as if she'd plunged her hands into liquid gold and left her knuckles stained.

"Ben," Bianca whispered. "Ben, who is that?"

Nothing. Silence. The echo of her own voice.

She glanced to her right. Nothing except the tunnel's darkness stared back at her.

The girl with white hair flexed her fingers. The cords of muscle running up her arms tightened and rang in Bianca's skull like bridge cables. Her stomach tightened, making her stand a little straighter. The bone spindles glistened on her fingers, sharp as barbed wire, long as her own fingers. The girl glanced at them, then looked at Bianca.

"I've fought something like you before," the girl said. Her voice was quiet, not weak. Strong. Tested. She unclipped a black mesh mask from her heavy belt and clipped it onto her face, covering her mouth and nose. Bianca shifted on her feat. Something felt wrong. The worms were still, not writhing, not alive. Her mind was clear. Her thoughts were hers. Pain pulsed in the back of her skull, maybe warning her. Maybe she should run away. Then her stomach snarled and felt like it was being torn in two, and it wasn't 'maybe; anymore, because she had to run. There was something wrong with the girl with white hair. Something in her eyes, cold and grayish blue, that looked…bad. Rebecca's eyes weren't quite like that. Empty, sure. But not this. That clone, too. There wasn't a soul in that thing. And there wasn't one in the girl opposite her. A husk of meat and torn, bloody knuckles, empty eyes and pale skin and white hair and a sharp glint in the edge of her stare. "And I killed it. Again. And again. And I hunted him down because he escaped from the prison Olympia put him in, and I found him, and I haunted him, and I made sure he won't ever hurt anyone again. I've heard about you. A lot of people have. You don't miss hearing about Olympia's clone getting taken out down here."

"I just need food," Bianca breathed. Not her words, not her voice. She wanted to clear her throat, but the second she did, vomit filled her mouth and spilled through the gaps of her clenched teeth. She swallowed, winced.

"What you need to do is make this easy for yourself and give up," the girl said. "I'm working on being more…heroic. I guess that means giving people chances. Someone gave me a chance once, a chance to stop being what I used to be. And I took it. So take yours, and leave, before I have to do something that neither of us will like."

The flesh rippled across her skin, almost…

Scared. It was scared, and it was bleeding into her own veins, making her shiver.

"I'm hungry," it said through her, rasping and desperate.

"Circe told me about you," she said. "You're a sickness, a virus. Right?"

The bone spindles grew, tearing through Bianca's fingernails. Pain. Hot, flaring pain rushed up her arms. Blood dribbled to the very edges of the hooked white claws. She bit back a scream, only because the flesh tightened around her throat. She gasped for air and lurched forward.

"Do you know what fucking with someone looks like in a fight, B?" Katie used to say. "It's swinging, but not really meaning it." They'd been walking across the waterfront, a warm afternoon, chewing on overpriced salty bagels. Birds scrapping for crumbs and food. Kids on the pavement playing hopscotch. Olympia had flown over their heads, making people point and stare and take pictures. They'd stopped by the water, leaned on the railing. Katie had taken a big bite, nearly choked, played it off and rolled her hand through the air. "Listen, if you ever get into a real fight, which you will, because you're a Ross and God bless the idiot who you've got a problem with, is if you go for it, Bianca, you have to fucking mean it. Don't swing and stop. Don't lunge and slide. Getting into fights with supers is a whole different bowl game, B."

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"Why would I ever get into a fight with a freaking supe?" she'd asked. "I'd totally get murdered."

Katie had nudged her and smiled. "Not if I'm there, they won't."

"Yeah, but let's say you're not there, and I slide or stop or whatever, then what?"

Katie had paused, looked out at the ocean, chewing on her bagel as the wind played with her dark hair. She'd shrugged off her leather jacket and wrapped it around her waist, then patted Bianca's shoulder and said, "Well, on the off chance I'm not there, don't slide, don't stop—but if you do, then…well, just trust your head." She'd smiled again, all teeth, with bagel stuck between them. "That's what your brother used to tell me, 'cause it turns out thinking with your gut isn't too smart, since your brain isn't anywhere in there. You're smart, B. So be smart."

Bianca crawled out of the wet rubble, blood pooling in her mouth, agony splitting apart her jaw as bits of her teeth swam around her tongue. She choked on spit and dust. Tried to get up. Her arms gave out underneath her. She collapsed onto her chest and felt like shards of glass were tearing through her stomach. She coughed and wheezed, feeling the worms slowly drag her jaw back into place, snapping and crunching the bone and the joint until she could groan without her tongue sloppily swimming in a pool of blood. She blinked slowly. Everything hurt. Something was on her back, sharp and heavy and awkwardly pressing down on her spine. A tentacle, thin and withered, shoved it off her body, leaving her gasping for air. The rain stopped, leaving the air wet, the wind cold. She felt it slither deep into every single bone.

Bianca barely remembered what just happened. She remembered a lunge, then a slide as she'd stopped herself, and then the girl with white hair—

Right.

The girl with white hair. She'd lunged forward so fast and hit Bianca's jaw so hard that she'd sent Bianca through the sewer and out through the street above and cracked her mouth so open that her jaw had hung gory and loose. Then pain. Then darkness. Choking dust and debris. Crawling. Aching. Looking over her shoulder and waiting for the girl to appear from the hole she'd just used Bianca to make in the street.

Bianca groaned, then clutched her ribs and winced. She got onto one knee and bit down a gasp of pain. Come on, soldier, keep it moving. She struggled onto her feet, stumbled, fell forward and collapsed. She shook her head, and fuck, she'd never been hit that hard. Katie used to train her, sometimes even hit her, but not that hard.

Not so hard that she barely saw it coming. Not so hard that she couldn't think of anything but crying and running and trying to escape.

Then she saw fingers, saw them claw over the edge of the hole as the girl dragged herself onto the street. Her white hair danced in the moonlight and the harsh wind. Distant smoke drifted across the street. Silence. So absolute and deafening it made her ears ring and her heart race, and she tried to get back onto her feet, fell again, and willed herself to stumble and struggle until she was gasping for air and staring at the girl with the snow-white hair.

She stood there dozens of feet away, shoulders squared, knuckles held tight to her sides.

Bianca spat bloody saliva. Knuckled it away. "Wait," she gasped. "Wait, let's talk about this."

The girl walked forward. She didn't run. She didn't launch. She took her time, boots echoing on the asphalt with each heavy step. Bianca stepped back, tripped on debris. An appendage wrapped itself around a slab of stone and threw it violently through the air. It slammed into the street ahead of the girl, but that barely fazed her. Not when it exploded into dust. Not when it showered her in grit and gravel. Not even when more chunks of debris hurtled through the air and decimated everything around the girl with white hair—until one of them flew right toward her.

And for just a second, Bianca stood, watching, paralyzed with foreign fear and hot hunger.

The girl's fist connected with the stone, and an explosion of rocky shrapnel ricocheted through the air, shattering windows, cracking the street and smashing apart cars and trash cans. People ran and hid and ducked for covered. Bianca coughed in the cloud of dust, an arm in front of her eyes as it billowed past her and threw her hair into a frenzy. She tasted concrete. Smelt wet stone. Then watched the girl clench and unclench her fist.

She spat to her side so hard it punched a hole into the asphalt.

Then glared at Bianca, and sprinted right toward her.

Katie would have wanted her to think, to pause and rationalize, and maybe even use her words and her head.

Primal, horrified survival threw those thoughts right out the window.

Bianca ducked. The jab that rocketed past her ear sounded like a gunshot. An explosion of violent wind erupted behind her, throwing trash and people into dark alleyways. Bianca flipped onto her hands and darted away, but the girl with white hair followed, swinging for her gut, her chin. Bianca blocked. Moved. She stepped back, sprung upward, and leaped onto a streetlight. She panted, stood, and watched the girl glare at her from below. Then she crouched and launched upward, splintering the concrete at her feet. Bianca didn't have time to curse. Worms burst from her back, snatching onto the ledge across the street and violently swinging her onto the ledge. She landed hard on her shoulder, rolled, and ran. Ran as fast as she possibly could, feet slamming against the rooftops as she heard the hollow splinter of the girl landing on the rooftop behind her. So she sprinted. Sprinted so hard her heart felt like it was ripping through her chest as she lunged over one alleyway and the next, across gaps so large she landed on walls and flipped over ledges and swung onto roofs.

Until, finally, when her lungs were flaring with heat, when her chest ached and throat burned, she was alone. Alone enough to spin around, searching the darkness as her stomach growled and she buckled over to vomit.

That was her first mistake, because the girl with white hair darted out of the darkness and slammed her boot into Bianca's ribs, sending her crashing through an A/C unit, across the rooftop and through the ledge and hard onto a fire escape, denting the thing. She groaned. Wheezed. Tasted and smelled blood. Then the girl landed on the fire escape, making it snap off its weak, rusting bolts, sending them both slamming into the alleyway below. Bianca hit a dumpster, landing in trash. She gasped for air, tried to crawl out, and landed hard on shards of broken metal.

Her second mistake was staying down. Too long. Too in pain. Too delirious with hunger.

And bleeding. Bleeding from her nose and mouth. Bleeding from the gashes the metal bars and rungs had torn through her arms and torso and palms as she tried to get up again. And naked. The flesh had gone, vanishing deeper into her skin, leaving her in nothing except her tracksuit, shivering and aching and staring at the girl.

She wasn't panting. She wasn't breathing hard. She stood there, staring down at Bianca. Hair glowing in the moonlight. Grime on the white dove on her chest. Dirt smeared across her black ski mask. Frozen and solid.

"Wait," Bianca gasped. Tears. She was crying. Pain. Maybe something else. Her mind was foggy, confused. Felt as slow as she was moving. "Wait. I just— It's not me. It's this…this thing. I don't know what it is. I can't…"

The girl wasn't staring at Bianca, though. No. Something else had her attention.

A phone. Cracked, splintered, with a flickering screen. It lit the alleyway, painted strange colors across the graffiti-covered walls and across the dumpster, but also onto the white-haired girl's stony face. Her eyes were wide, even white. She stared at the phone, silent and unmoving. Bianca flinched as her ribs moved, digging deeper and deeper into her ribs. She wanted to puke. She didn't even know what she would puke, but fear was in her veins, pain was throbbing through her skull. The girl only crouched and picked up Bianca's fallen phone, staring at the screen.

She stared, and stared, and finally, looked up from the screen at Bianca. Her dim eyes glowed in the screen's soft, flickering blue light.

"Is this…is this actually you?" the girl said quietly.

"What?" Bianca said, then cringed with pain.

She turned the screen. The brightness made her wince.

White-hair tapped the phone, then said, "Is that you? Sleeping next to Olympia?"

It felt like the world had stopped spinning. Suddenly.

Bianca stared at the photo, grainy and strange, almost from another lifetime entirely. She'd lied about not taking pictures of Rylee when she'd come over to her dorm room. There had been plenty, enough to keep as an album, and more than enough to keep on her screen ever since the sky had split open and spat the gods onto Earth. Bianca blinked, grit wedged into her eyes, a cut on her forehead spitting blood under her eyelids. She winced and ran her arm across her face, trying not to let her teeth clench or her stomach spin. Rylee was…soft. She acted so strong, so stubborn, so responsible—but she'd put her head on Bianca's chest, curled her arm around her stomach and laid her leg across hers and not wanted to let go. She'd muttered and she'd flinched and she'd had nightmares, but for a brief few seconds, her face had softened, her body had relaxed, and she'd pressed herself against Bianca and breathed softly against her neck until she'd woken up.

Rylee didn't know this, but she knew she'd watched Bianca sleep. Rylee had toyed with the fringes of her hair, rubbing it between her fingertips, like she was terrified she would wake her up. And Bianca had loved it. Ached for it. She wanted to turn over and pull Rylee closer.

But Rylee hadn't looked that peaceful since their sleepover years ago when they were kids. Just kids. Stupid little kids who wanted to be superheroes and save the world together.

When Ben was still around, and Katie was the girlfriend her mother kept warning him about. When Olympus U was a pipedream and the biggest problem she had wasn't finishing a test.

When fighting for her life meant homework.

When falling in love with someone meant you didn't have to watch them almost die on national television.

"Yeah," Bianca whispered, then sniffled. It was cold. Freezing. The clouds thundered above her, threatening to rain. "Yeah, it is."

The girl slid the mask off her face and hooked it back onto her belt. She stood up, then offered Bianca a hand. The worms, for once, were silent. Quiet underneath her skin, quiet inside of her skull. She reached for her forearm and got helped onto her shaky feet. The girl with white hair handed back her phone and quietly sighed.

"So," the girl said, eyes unblinking, face a mask, "is she alive?"

"I don't know," Bianca whispered, clutching her ribs. "I'd like to think so."

Because I can't take anyone else dying on me.

Anyone else, just not her.

Please, God. Just not her.

The girl ran a hand through her hair and left the other resting against her hip. She was shorter than Bianca, but strong, slightly muscular. Her arms were scarred, and the tape on her fists had torn open during her assault. Bianca watched her, trying to wrap her head around the fact that someone like this was walking around New Olympus. Someone who could tear a whole through several feet worth of concrete with a single swing. When she'd sprinted across the rooftops, she'd felt fear. Terror. So raw and pure she thought there must've been something wrong with her. Was that what Rylee always went through? Going out there every single night, fighting people that could send her through buildings, and still stomach having to go to school and arguing with her mom and…oh, God, fuck. All this time, that's what she was really dealing with? Just…how?

But she figured that's what Ben had been dealing with, and so had Katie to a lesser extent.

No wonder Rylee had felt different before the attack. Almost desperate. She'd never really tried to plan dates or movie nights or whatever, especially not after high school when she stopped answering her phone, but she'd made an effort. She'd called. She'd texted. She'd rambled when they met and told her about all these strange and weird and awesome things she kept having to deal with daily, and Bianca would sit there nodding, trying not to get distracted because she had more freckles on her cheeks than she'd noticed, or how her eyes sparkled every time she described how hard she'd hit someone or how fast she'd gone. Now look at her, buckled over in an alleyway.

With Rebecca's blood under her fingernails and a billion dollar piece of meat chained up in the dark.

Any other day, any other time, she'd have been exactly the kind of person Rylee would've fought.

Maybe even killed.

And that thought almost tightened her throat, almost made her eyes sting and her teeth clench.

Instead, Bianca took a deep, shaky, painful breath, and said, "Do you still wanna kill me?"

"If I did, I'd risk Olympia hating me," the girl said. "And too many people already do."

"You know her?" Bianca asked. "Were you guys some kind of...enemies, or something?"

"Partners." Bianca blinked, then the girl said, "We worked together for some time, only that I didn't realize it until months later." Her voice was a whisper, smoky and hard and almost strained. "She was…good. I tried to find her, but she was hard to catch. I can do a lot of things, but I can't fly. So I watched the sky, and I just wish I could've been there to help her."

"I think we all wish that," Bianca whispered.

The girl with white hair jerked her head. "Let's get out of here. Circe won't let you down there, not unless you're dead or you're unconscious, but I have somewhere else you can get something to eat. Will you attack me again?"

"I…I hope not," Bianca said, hugging herself. The wind rushed through her tracksuit, her sweaty skin and into her muscles. She smiled weakly. "But I dunno, I usually don't follow strangers who almost tried to kill me."

"Learn to do that, it's how you make friends in Lower Olympus," the girl said. "Are you allergic to magic?"

"I don't think so?" she said, slowly following the girl out of the alleyway.

"Good," white-hair said. "Then I hope you like villains, because a witch is making us dinner tonight."

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