Athena touched down on the roof of the Owlery, the old office building in Historic Downtown Everett—the quirky market district of Nebula City—that she and her sister had converted into a bookstore and coffee shop.
Her sister, Minerva, stepped out of the shadows of the roof access doorway. Athena had been able to see her even before she moved. She did not possess x-ray vision, but her electric eyes allowed her to “see” by throwing off electro-magnetic waves, like high-resolution imaging radar.
“Can I get a tag back, sister?” Minerva asked. She was looking around nervously.
“You could have waited inside, if you’re afraid,” Athena said.
They came together and clasped hands. Half of the powers that Athena had been carrying flowed through their link into Minerva.
Minerva’s body grew stronger, and she now had the electric eyes. She relaxed as soon as she felt her skin harden. She could take a bullet… or a bullet train… now and walk away without a scratch. She couldn’t fly, but she could leap like nothing else. She could move faster than any normal human and even most super speedster. Her ears could now pick out a voice on a cell phone in a crowded room.
“I wasn’t afraid,” she said, flexing her arms and opening her senses. “Just justifiably apprehensive. I hate going powerless. That’s the perfect time for somebody to attack, you know… they could get one of us, and use her as leverage against the other one. Not like that sort of thing hasn’t happened before.”
“Well, that exact circumstance isn’t likely to come up again… and whoever did that would have to deal with one of us that had all the powers,” Athena said. “I can’t imagine that ending well.”
“Yeah, but, you know what hostage takers do when things don’t look to be ending well, don’t you?” Minerva countered. “I really don’t mind my ass being on the line… that goes with the territory… but if I’m going to have a target painted on my forehead, I’d like it to be for a good reason.”
“How would anybody even have known to attack tonight?” Athena asked. “In any event, it isn’t as though we do this all the time. It simply seemed prudent for me to have an extra edge, if things went poorly tonight.”
“If you were that worried, you could have just had me come along,” Minerva said. “Strength in numbers. Back-up. That sort of thing.”
“Then nobody would have been here to watch Claire,” Athena said.
“Claire’s a big girl,” Minerva said. “If anything happened that she couldn’t handle, I wouldn’t be much help without the powers.”
Athena sighed.
“Fine,” she said. “I didn’t want you along because the situation was going to be touchy enough without your presence.”
“”Of course it’s touchy… you’re staging a hostile takeover of your ex’s team,” Minerva said. “Have I mentioned how absolutely fucked this is?”
“They aren’t a team,” Athena said. “And it isn’t a ‘hostile takeover’.”
“It sure seems like one,” Minerva said. “I was pretty sure that was why you asked Evelyn to help in the first place.”
“I asked her opinion,” Athena said. “We three are the ‘grown-ups’ of the scene here. The others, except for the Binders, already look to us for their cues. I just felt it was time to… reach out to them. Bring them into the fold.”
“Did you tell the Kittens that I was against this?” Minerva asked.
“You agreed to abide by whatever the majority of us decided,” Athena said. “I didn’t see any need to break down the voting for them. Things will go more smoothly if we’re showing a united front. They need a firm hand…”
Minerva shook her head, her braids clattering against each other.
“There you go again,” Minerva said. “Athena, if you want a family so badly…”
“I have a family,” Athena countered. “I have you, and I have Claire. I also have responsibilities to the city, and to the other superpowered individuals who operate within its boundaries. I don’t consider turning my back on that to be a good use of the powers we’ve been given.”
Minerva snorted.
“Only you, sis,” she said. “Only you could take stalking your ex-girlfriend and turn it into a noble exercise of power and responsibility.”
“Don’t call her that,” Athena said. “We had… an arrangement. A private arrangement. She was never my ‘girlfriend’, and I’m certainly not stalking.”
“Athena… you know I don’t normally mess with it because it gives me the heebie jeebies, but when’s the last time you actually listened to the universal wisdom?” Minerva asked. “What’s it saying about this course of action?”
“That it’s correct,” Athena answered quickly. “That it’s necessary.”
Her pulse, which was now audible to Minerva, didn’t so much as flutter… but Minerva knew that was a sign of calmness, not one of truth.
That meant her twin sister—the mature, wise one of the pair—had just calmly lied to her, without hesitation or second thoughts.
“I’m going out,” Minerva said.
“It’s a quiet night,” Athena said. “I did a superspeed-sweep of the city before I came back.”
“Well, I’ve been cooped up in here all night… it’s time to stretch my legs a bit,” Minerva said.
“Alright,” Athena said. “Did you check Claire’s room for contraband?”
“Would there have been any point when I didn’t have any powers?” Minerva asked. “You know how she hides things. I’ll give it a once-over in the morning.”
“Okay,” Athena said. “Goodnight, Minnie.”
“Goodnight.”
Minerva watched her sister head inside and downstairs, and then she was off like a rocket, her powerful leg muscles propelling her more than triple the height of the building, almost straight up.
She loved the feeling of kicking off from the ground like that. She liked to fly just fine, but Athena usually took that power… her style was to stay above things and try to keep the bigger picture in view. Minerva was more about charging in and mixing things up. They were both named for ancient goddesses of war and wisdom, but they bore those properties in differing measures.
She came down in the street in front of the Owlery. Her feet were already moving in the instant she touched down, her physics-bending superspeed shifting the energy of her fall into forward momentum and saving the surface of the roadway from damage. She wasn’t patrolling, just letting off steam. She ran up the sides of buildings, bounced from billboard to billboard, leaped onto an overpass and joined the late night interstate traffic for a circuit around the edge of the city.
There were no other heroes out that she could see or hear, with her extended senses. The Thunder Brothers were college students in their civilian identities, and they did most of their heroics by the light of day, before or after classes. Evelyn Everett rarely went out as Storm Siren unless there was a specific disaster or threat to counter. Any or all of the city’s heroes would respond quickly to an emergency, but the brightly lit Nebula City didn’t have a population of nocturnal vigilantes prowling its streets like Star Harbor did.
Without any specific plan or goal in mind, Minerva found herself outside of town, standing before the gates of Dunwich, the supermaximum security mental hospital. Her half-sister, Pallas, was incarcerated there… incarcerated, not treated. Nobody held any illusions that she was remotely treatable.
“Ms. Wisdom?” a crackly voice from the intercom box by the gates asked. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yes,” she added, with more confidence. The Dunwich staff tended to treat their most famous patient a little bit like a nuclear bomb. Anything having to do with her—which usually included a visit by either of the Wisdom sisters—was bound to make them jumpy. “Everything’s fine. I just need to see my sister.”
She didn’t bother to explain that this was essentially a social call. It was outside normal visiting hours, but the woman who called herself Rhyme didn’t receive normal visitors. It would have been as irregular for Minerva to walk into Dunwich in the morning and ask to see her as it was for her to do so in the middle of the night.
“One moment,” the guard said. “I just need to phone the director…”
“Oh, don’t bother waking him up,” Minerva said. “This can wait until morning.”
“If it’s an emergency…”
“It’ll keep,” Minerva said. “Sorry for disturbing you.”
She zoomed away, back towards the city lights. What had she been thinking?
Hey, Pallas… just thought I’d stop by and shoot the breeze. Threatened to eat any interesting faces today?
When they’d all been much younger, Minerva had looked up to her sisters—she hadn’t thought of Pallas as any less her sister than Athena, at that point—more than anybody in the world, including her mother. Athena was fearless and wise, and Pallas was the smartest person in the world. She’d been a little creepily intense, even then, but when Minerva had needed something explained, or had questions that their Amazon tutors couldn’t answer, Pallas had always been there.
Say, Pallas… remember that time I almost killed you because I didn’t realize I’d just inherited my father’s powers? And then we dropped you in the fountain of life and turned you into a freak? Good times!
Minerva would always blame herself for her sister’s condition, though that tragedy had actually been in the making for some time. Like most of the world—but unlike the twins—Pallas had always been conscious that her father was unique among the trinity in that he lacked any powers more earth-shattering than his Darkwell-enhanced intellect. She alone had really understood how far beyond the accepted norms their parents’ relationship went, and the consequences if the truth of the trinity was exposed to the wider world, beyond the Amazons’ valley of mists.
It was almost inevitable that things would come crashing down someday, but when they had, she’d taken it all the harder for having seen it coming, for having watched it unfolding over the years in slow-motion.
Hi, Pallas… I think our sister’s going a little crazy and I thought of you.
That was it, in a nutshell. She knew Athena hadn’t “snapped”… but the pressure was definitely getting to her. Minerva still had Athena to talk to, when things got tough, but who did Athena talk to?
They’d both recently had their free will taken away, but where Minerva had been rescued almost at once, Athena had remained in bondage and been made to fight—to try to kill—her own sister. What had that done to her?
Athena wasn’t a control freak. Nobody in their circle could be called a control freak, compared to Evelyn Everett, but she had always been in control. She’d always taken care of herself and her sister, and in recent history, of her “youthful ward” Claire Clevenger. Under the control of the toymakers, she’d been unable to help herself, to say nothing of her family or anybody else.
Now that Athena was free, she wasn’t satisfied with reclaiming her life… she was reaching out and staking a claim on others’, as well. She’d dated—or had “an arrangement” with—Lily Binder once, and now she was taking it upon herself to manage the Binders’ lives.
Minerva wasn’t a psychiatrist. She didn’t carry the burden of the universal wisdom. For all that, she could still see that there was something profoundly unhealthy going on.
A bit of movement on an empty sidewalk caught her eye as she zoomed past. She looped around the block and came to a stop in time to catch the rest of it. The manhole cover over a storm drain had been raised up from below. That was rarely a good sign, in the middle of the night. Her EM vision wouldn’t penetrate the metal and concrete, but now that she was alert her other senses were picking up clicking and clanking noises, along with electrical hums.
She felt disbelief rising up within her, but she could not pretend to be surprised when the first of the robots popped its head—a framework of plastic tubing with three camera phones for eyes and ears—and shoulders through the opening. It pulled itself out, and then another shambling creation followed, this one with joints that had obviously once belonged to rotating desk fans.
By the curb, the grating over the drain itself was also pushed aside by two more ‘bots exiting to street level. Many smaller creations erupted from both openings, boiling up out of the ground like a swarm of ants.
Minerva had never seen these particular robots before in her life but she recognized the haphazard design, the scavenged materials.
They were portalien probes, viral constructs sent to earth millennia before to build up the local technology until it was sufficient for building jump gates through which their masters could invade. That goal had been reached once, decades before, and the resulting interplanetary war had led to the death of Minerva’s parents.
Since then, there had been scattered reports of the probes, but it had been years since they’d been seen in Nebula City. Athena and Minerva had rooted them out every time that they appeared, and it had seemed as though even the probes’ limited intelligence could understand in a dim sort of way that operating in this particular urban center was a bad idea.
“Well, now,” Minerva said, announcing her presence to the robots that were still streaming forth from the underground. “Either you guys got a whole lot stupider or I just got really lucky… but either way, it’s not your night.”
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