It was a Friday. The city was under attack by a giant bio-engineered blob. And I was in charge of protecting it.

  SQUELCH. SKRULP.

  The semi-translucent mass of grey-green gelatin made truly sickening noises as it swallowed plants, animals, and occasional people whole just from passing over them.

  Dr. Genesis’ video transmission continued.

  “You have two hours before my creation begins the rebirthing of its absorbed genetic material. Run or submit, it makes no difference. Either way, all will eventually become part of the prebiotic pool that will birth a new era of glorious evolution! It is not ‘goodbye’ you need to be saying. It is ‘hello’. It is ‘welcome’.”

  Bzzt.

  Cut.

  That was it.

  That was his manifesto.

  I hated the cries for help. I hated the scenes of disaster. I hated that they were directed at me.

  Focus. Focus. Just focus on what’s in this room.

  As if it’s a task. A simulation. A problem to be solved.

  You like those, right?

  Problems?

  “Oh. Sebi. Interface. Computer. Please pull up all gathered information on this Haldane Blob,” I spat out.

  A screen flew in front of my face and I started to read. Far too slowly, I’m sure.

  I could really use some more cocaine right now. Or even adderall. But I’m worried I’ll throw up anything I try to ingest for the next few minutes.

  “And where be this little man himself?” boomed Kid Klaus. “Let him meet my axe! ‘Tis a sign of the truly feeble to require others do battle on your behalf!”

  I hoped he never realized that was literally what I would be doing all of the time.

  “Our analysts are trying to trace the signal. Unfortunately, it looks like the video was recorded days ago. And possibly in another dimension,” Lydia replied monotonously.

  Most of us were in the room now. Anton Antichaos and Yan-Jani were presently occupied with other directives. A small mercy God granted me that two of the capes that made me most uncomfortable weren’t in the room with me as I was seconds away from panic at any given moment.

  Obviously couldn’t be spared number one though. But we needed her.

  That would become only more obvious over the course of this day.

  Lydia started rattling on facts as if she had memorized a script.

  “The Haldane Blob is an omnivorous living biochemical formula that exists to consume and assimilate. It’s essentially an ever-expanding genetic factory incubator with smart cells that can communicate terabytes of information with one another through the use of bio-electric waves. Its smart cells allow it to reform across vast distances unless it is damaged on the cellular level.

  All organic matter consumed by it has its genetic material copied, and is slowly dissolved while suspended inside of its body upon which after a given time — our adversary has been kind enough to supply us with a two-hour count — it will digest everything inside of it and begin spawning new organisms that combine the optimized genetic characteristics of everything it has eaten.

  If it’s not stopped, it could end up birthing dozens if not hundreds of powerful mutagenic superbeings.”

  Oh, this sounded very bad.

  “So how was it stopped before?” I asked. “You seem to have fought one of these already.”

  “I believe Incarnate drank all of it and then launched himself into the sun.”

  “I threw him into the sun,” Kaslan clarified, his purple horse face wearing a comically neutral expression, “he… licked my face just before I did it. Said it was one of the best things anyone had done for him. I suppose it was his way of showing affection.”

  I was somehow the only person who even reacted to this statement.

  Well. Good to know that even the Covenant heroes play fast and loose with HR guidelines over here.

  “And he’s, um, still dead?” I asked.

  “Most likely,” Lydia said, “or at the very least he hasn’t yet regained his memories in his new body.”

  Great. Cool. Yep.

  This was my job.

  Understanding these things was my job.

  I cannot overstate how little I missed this shit.

  “But regardless,” The Good Neighbor continued, “It was a very risky tactic, and one that we probably should not repeat. Incarnate’s lineage factor might be the most dangerous of all of ours for such a creature to absorb. If a single drop had escaped, it would’ve been disastrous.”

  “Yes,” Lydia said. “yes, we have to be careful about deployment here. Mr. Chairman, if I may speak on setting mission parameters?”

  “Go ahead, Ms. Liberty.”

  God that was weird.

  Did Dad even call her Miss Liberty? Or did he just call her her full name every time, like a gossiping high school girl? Just Lydia?

  “I think it is paramount that we selectively deploy heroes who are able to engage in long-range confrontation and under no circumstance are we to engage any heroes with lineage factors. We want to limit the amount of novel genetic material the Haldane Blob is exposed to, and we cannot risk the chance that a single cell of a lineage -factored hero’s body coming into contact with the Blob gives it the ability to copy their powers en masse.”

  So you’ve really become a creature of the Cause. God Dirk must have wished so badly to have you as a daughter instead of me. Child. I mean child.

  “Noted. Absolutely. Sebi, copy that directive to all possible response teams, and if anyone so much as looks at the Blob on a monitor, have that pop up on their screen.”

  Lineage factors. I remembered this term from school. It meant superpowers that were somehow contained in your genetic material, whether through mutation or inheritance. As opposed to capes whose abilities came from technology, esoteric martial arts, magical knowledge, or pure skill.

  That meant no Good Neighbor, who was a powerful space alien. No Brother Whale, who was from a line of rare deep sea super-organisms. No Kid Klaus, who was the son of Santa Claus, and as far as I could tell some kind of actual god.

  And especially no Liberty children.

  “Lila,” I turned to my friend, “did you inherit your powers?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, “not by blood at least. None of my half-siblings have them. I think it’s either in the guitar or only one person can have them at a time.”

  “Okay, good.”

  I asked her a silent question with my eyes, and she gave me a gentle nod.

  “Suit up, Sex Machine II.”

  “Will do.”

  WRANG. WRANG. WRANG.

  Eight confirmed casualties and counting. Halt live casualty count?

  I felt like throwing up.

  I ran up and squeezed her way too hard.

  “Be safe.”

  She snorted and ruffled my hair.

  “Please don’t do this every time, Chairman.”

  “Mr. Chairman, I think we haven’t been introduced yet,” a somewhat high, deceptively cute-sounding voice called out from a corner of the great hall, “I am 3rd Class Officer Nya-cha of the Order of the Shooting Star. Folks on your world call me Skyfall. I’m ready for deployment at your word.”

  Yes, Skyfall. I had read her file.

  Most people didn’t ever see what she actually looked like. She was a humanoid alien with somewhat feline features, including high triangular ears, leopard spots that ran across her skin, and sharp teeth. She had two smaller eyes slightly beneath her larger ones, which consisted entirely of a single turquoise pupil. With all due respect, she kind of looked like a cute cat-girl.

  “Oh. Yes. It’s an honor, Skyfall. Aren’t you an alien though? Don’t we want it to stay away from interesting DNA?”

  “Doesn’t matter, nya. My body is irrelevant to my capabilities, sir. Unequipped, I’m not much stronger than an earthling. And I can promise it won’t touch me, nya.”

  She had the mannerisms and speech patterns of a gruff middle-aged policewoman despite her appearance. Books, covers.

  “Okay. Very good. Deployment authorized.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Galahad was already there. That made three.

  That made a Covenant mission.

  “Mission authorized.”

  The lights in Liberation Hall seemed to dim a little, and then crackle as if responding to a heartbeat.

  Kaslan floated imperiously towards the ceiling of the dome, flanked by statues. His comet-tail hair swayed behind him, his eyes glowed radiant white.

  “To arms, my Covenant!” he said with a mighty whinny, swiping a great hand in front of him like he was trying to wipe the world clean.

  And he led the team in our blood oath.

  I raise my hand, my head, my heart to bring Utopia to the world.

  My breath for the Cause.

  My cape for the Cause.

  My blood for the Cause.

  My life for the Cause.

  Vivat Utopia!

  Sex Machine II and Skyfall launched from the tower in a MK2 Telebird skyship and I was dragged to the situation room on the 9th floor with equal fervor.

  And so it began.

  “Mr. Chairman.”

  “Mr Chairman.”

  “Mr. Chairman.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Chairman.”

  “Mr. Domino, I —”

  “Move,” Lydia said as we entered the Hundred Hands’ chamber, parting a swarm of analysts and technicians, the authority in her voice making the air itself tremble. It might as well have been accompanied by a violin orchestra and a bald eagle cry.

  The room was dark, and the screens, hundreds of screens, washed it in alternating blue and yellow light that made it feel like we were underwater, or inside of a giant brain.

  “Thank you, but you don’t have to escort me. You can get back to work,” I said.

  “What?”

  “What?”

  “This is where I work, Mr. Chairman. I almost always accompany the Chairman in the situation room during deployments. I am not a frontline fighter, and my abilities are best served by me having as much awareness as possible.”

  Oh.

  Oh, come on.

  You got to be fucking me.

  “Maybe he should have just fucking left you in charge,” I murmured.

  “He didn’t,” she responded blankly.

  No, she shouldn’t. Don’t be a child, Percy. A Liberty in the chair?

  Even you’re not selfish enough to wish for that out of convenience.

  But she seems like she’d be good at it—

  That is not the point and you know it.

  I was rapid-fire introduced to several analysts managing the station. Andrew, who I had met, was taking point in helming the Hundred Hands console directly, but it was taking around nine of them to use it in total. Dad, of course, had run this system by himself.

  Kyle. Kyle Something. Skinny, bearded guy. He was going to be our main point of contact here while Andrew was wired in. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a wrinkled blue shirt that was visibly too big for him, like he had recently lost a lot of weight.

  This was the least relaxed I had ever been on this job even though it was technically the task where the least was expected of me.

  I just had to watch and nod.

  As much as part of me wanted to look away.

  Where would I even look? We were in a membranous hall of mirrors that reflected the entire world.

  CRASH!

  REEET!

  “Help!”

  SKWULK. SQUISH.

  RATATATATATATATA.

  “Mommy?”

  VROOM! SCREECH!

  The Telebird had reached the site of the incident and our heroes were dispatched.

  Skyfall jumped out of the plane before it landed and did a screwdriver twirl as she was surrounded by sharp, glowing pink energy, and then, within a second, she had been transformed. It was the battle armor of an avenging angel crossed with a Japanese car commercial crossed with the hyper-efficient kinetic architecture of an insect, pink with undertones of red and gold. The most prominent part of her battle suit was a pair of wings, made of hundreds of detachable pink laser-edged feathers that became force-field generators when flipped in reverse.

  Sex Machine II wore a skintight black bodysuit with cursive white musical notes drawn in naughty lines that emphasized her sex organs, with an unfastened blue trench coat flowing behind her. She brandished her father’s guitar, beautiful polished ochre wood that looked like a pirate ship’s vagina, in front of her like a wizard’s staff.

  Sir Galahad had already been on site for several minutes, leading a dispatch of Utopian Knights, the unit he used to command before joining the Covenant, who were presently focused on laying suppressing fire and civilian evacuation.

  His Special Class ALICORN unit was five meters tall, powered by a miniature nuclear reactor, and looked like you had weaponized the tomb of a Catholic saint. Dirk Domino did everything he could to give the legendary knight a bigger and more explosive version of the gear he was already used to working with. This wasn’t a robot as much as futuristic medieval armor. The metal plating somehow looked embroidered. Where most mecha had sleek minimalistic designs, this one was teeming with symbols on its deep greys and reds. Gold and silver decorated crosses right out of illuminated manuscripts lined the robot’s limbs and midsection. Scenes of unicorns, dragons, saints, kings, and maidens filled the margins between the mech’s joints. There was a human face carved out of gold at the front of the helm, and on its forehead was a silver cross that extended upwards into a unicorn’s horn. In his left arm was a shield that bore the coat of arms of Camelot, and in his right was a cross-hilted gunblade almost as big as the unit itself.

  Sir Galahad was holding together the collapsing body of the George Washington Bridge to give all the civilians time to evacuate it. Lila aided the effort with invigorating music, granting everyone who heard it a burst of energy and strength akin to a horse’s, and wounded civilians started sprinting off the end of the bridge and lifting cars off one another while the Utopian Knights covered them.

  The analysts buzzed around us like bees.

  “Poppy, is its thermal index stabilizing?”

  “Negative, sir.”

  “Danica, sift faster. We aren’t browsing Facebook here.”

  CRASH.

  RATATATATATA,

  “Bridge cleared. Bridge cleared!”

  Lila now went on the offensive, strumming sonic bursts from her guitar that shattered every window on the street around her and tore into the biochemical mass like she was taking a high-powered leaf blower to a mound of sewage.

  “Fuck. Fuck. Camera #3441 to thermal, #9087 to electron reading.”

  “Is that microwave radiation?”

  “No our frequency readers are just getting fucked up by Skyfall’s battle suit.”

  A family of five desperately tried to start their car before the blob swallowed them whole, and was intercepted at the last moment by several of Skyfall’s feathers flying in front of them and encircling the car in a pink energy bubble.

  “I thought we fixed that.”

  “When would we have fixed that?”

  “Ow! Watch the fucking coffee!”

  “Sorry big man.”

  FUE! FUE! FUE! REEN!

  Dozens of hypersonic pink streaks shot out of Skyfall’s wings as she launched her laser blades into the Blob’s mass at all angles, effortlessly weaving through its expanding sludge-grip.

  These bursts of energy illuminated the Haldane Blob’s interior enough that you see what was inside it a little.

  Some trees. Hundreds of fish. Half a dog.

  People who were counting on us.

  “Dem nuh supposed to have on some modified hazmat suit?”

  “They never listen to us about that. Say it’s bad for morale.”

  “Fuckin’ capes.”

  Oooooooon.

  SHIU!

  A beam of radiant light from the barrel of Sir Galahad’s gunblade tore a two meter wide hole in the Blob, blinded several of our cameras, and probably ended somewhere in Delaware.

  “Reboot the fucking cameras,” Kyle said, “can that asshole aim lower for once?”

  Novel mutation identified.

  Assessing. Assessing.

  GREULP.

  The Blob was rising now. It was breaking past the established perimeter. Our capes were falling back.

  Drip. Drip.

  Squelch.

  Several Utopian Knights were now being swept away into its gelatinous void.

  “No!”

  “No!”

  “Guh! Ugh. Fuckin—”

  Skyfall dove in, withdrawing her ultimate weapon, a two-pronged spear that resembled a giant tuning fork, which began to vibrate with pink energy. With a furious two-handed swipe, she hewed off a third of the Blob’s upper mass, which burst into undifferentiated liquid upon separation from its main body, allowing several people trapped inside it to escape before being dissolved.

  Sput. Sput. Sput..

  Wep. Wep.

  They said that you needed to hit it on a cellular level to really do damage.

  But Skyfall’s blades cut through molecules.

  Maybe this would be alright.

  Maybe they would just handle this quickly.

  But what were we actually doing right now?

  Just pushing it back. Slowing it down.

  It was still here. Expanding.

  What was the game plan?

  Was that supposed to come from the computer guys? The field team? Me?

  Definitely not me.

  I kicked a chair in frustration as I saw what the cameras to my left were picking up.

  Our heroes were now engaged in a firefight with a couple armored vehicles’ worth of men in helix-emblazoned tactical jumpsuits brandishing assault rifles.

  For the most part, this could barely even dent the MK1 SWORD units piloted by the lowest ranking Utopian Knights.

  But that wasn’t the point.

  “Oh of course this asshole is meatpacking. Is it really as common as they said?”

  “Yes,” Lydia said, her face breaking into the slightest frown as she drew the same conclusion, “and to be clear, they don’t like using the term ‘meatpacking’ anymore. They think it sounds dehumanizing and vulgar.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

  “My bad. What do we call it then?”

  “A morale curtain.”

  “That almost sounds worse.”

  Beat.

  “The prattlers on Floor 11 are very concerned with making our calling sound nice and opaque.”

  Huh. It almost sounded like she was being funny. Just a little bit.

  Must have been my imagination.

  2012

  Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.

  Somehow his leaded boots sounded like cannonballs whenever he took a step, despite his relatively normal size and weight. I sometimes wondered if they were modified to do that on purpose.

  Malachi Crimstone, the former supervillain turned instructor of the euphemistically named Theory of Conflict class, paced across the front of the lecture hall menacingly. Well he did everything menacingly. That was kind of his thing.

  He still wore his brown and red mid-century military regalia covered in skull decals with a symbolically torn and bloody red cape hanging behind him that he would never fix nor clean. His hair had receded into a sharp widow’s peak, and he had a virile mustache. Even in his old age, he was disturbingly charismatic. He always smelled strongly of smoke, in the hot way and not the grimy way. Lodged right through his heart was half of a broken-off bronze spear that he never acknowledged and no one was sure where it came from or how he was still alive.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Now can anyone tell me what ‘meatpacking’ means?”

  “What I did with your mom last night,” muttered the big eyed, gap-toothed, black-haired, feathered, perpetually smirking idiot sitting in my row, to a chorus of snickers.

  “Dude, shut up,” I whispered, trying and failing not to laugh myself.

  “Would you care to repeat that, Mr. Corvin?”

  Everyone stared at Professor Crimstone. Then at my friend.

  “Oh, just musing that meat packing is what I did with your mother last night, sir. But I wanted someone else to get a turn to give the answer.”

  “Now see,” Crimstone said without skipping a beat, “Mr. Corvin is actually allowed to make these remarks, unlike the lot of you, because we have to remember that it is both literally in his blood and the source of his powers to be a joke.”

  Resounding oooooooohs.

  His eyes went blank and pupiless and a single giant bead of sweat formed on his forehead.

  “Yeah you got me there on this one,” he said, defeated.

  Malachi Crimstone added a tally mark to a section of the whiteboard that read:

  CRIMSTONE: 21

  MURDERFACE: 13

  Predictably, the blonde girl sitting in the front row, raised her hand at a perfect 90 degree angle.

  “Yes, Ms. Liberty?”

  “‘Meatpacking’ is a hostile tactic popularized and codified by notorious super villain Malachi Crimstone, who has been directly linked to at least 612 civilian deaths—”

  “We are perhaps getting a bit off topic here.”

  “— wherein a villain will include the presence of arbitrary armed minions in their schemes, not for any intended tactical advantage, but rather to deliberately create as many ethical and logistical obstacles to the heroes in opposing their plots as possible. For example, when Reichmaster in the 1981 Christmas bombings included human pilots in his Dreadnought that could have been controlled fully remotely in order to prevent Spartacus from simply destroying the machine with artillery fire. It is widely considered one of the most harmful strategic innovations in super villain history.”

  “Very good. Very good.”

  “I don’t need your praise, sir.”

  I was smiling even wider than my stupid friend now.

  Lydia’s eyebrows narrowed slightly while she otherwise remained affectedly expressionless.

  “It couldn’t be helped this time,” she said, “but for future reference, it’s risky to deploy Skyfall in situations where a morale curtain is being utilized, especially when Kaslan isn’t there either. She doesn’t seem to have the same ethos about kill avoidance as those of us raised in the Cause. So the use of armed human shields hardly gives her much pause.”

  “Noted. But Kaslan?”

  “She knows that it upsets him. And she cares about that at least.”

  “Okay,” I looked at the monitor screens where she had dispatched Dr. Genesis’s soldiers and was pretty sure this was going to be a stupid question.

  “So those guys are just dead then.”

  “One could assume.”

  Aw man. I didn’t love that.

  But you know. Utility. Cost benefit. Efficiency. Calculations. Just war theory.

  “We keep letting her do it of course, though.”

  “It can get expensive, but yes.”

  “Cool.”

  “It’s best not to focus on this right now. You can speak to her about it later if you’d like.”

  “Yeah.”

  I took a breath.

  “Yeah. Got it.”

  Well. We were having a normal conversation.

  Here? This qualified.

  “Sorry, can I ask who else? Is fine with killing, that is.”

  “Kid Klaus follows a code, but it is an ancient warrior’s code.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  I remembered how he became the mascot of St. Paul.

  “And Incarnate doesn’t subscribe to any ethical boundaries at all. Fortunately, he tends to consider fighting unpowered humans ‘beneath him’ for the most part.”

  “Hm.”

  “Galahad and Kaslan are very vocal in their opposition to it. Anton Antichaos and Brother Wave follow the rules. Sex Machine II and Yan-Jani are rarely in a position to make that call, but they’d likely follow protocol as well. Especially considering Sex Machine II’s image consciousness.”

  She didn’t even say that as an insult. Just an assessment.

  “And you?”

  A pause.

  “I intend to follow the example set by my mother and father. Mr. Chairman.”

  Oh.

  Right.

  A longer pause.

  She directed my attention to a screen above us, where several of Dr. Genesis’ armed goons were left sobbing on the ground or asleep by the psychic resonance of Lila’s music.

  “Fortunately, Sex Machine II is very effective at disabling morale curtains. We’ll likely have above 50% casualty avoidance here.”

  I nodded.

  Okay. This was starting to get on my nerves.

  It couldn’t be just me.

  “Wait,” I said, “is this thing getting smaller?”

  “Well parts of it are being blasted off and don’t seem to be healing, but that’s not the issue,” Kyle said patiently, “it’s about the rate of growth.”

  “No I’m talking about the rate of growth. Sorry. The flickering of the upper left screen’s readings are bothering the shit out of me. The cumulative mass index (CMI) and dynamic density coefficient (DDC) will fluctuate even when the center of gravity remains the same. Which means it’s shrinking. Like from its core. It’s growing too, but—”

  “Um. You can’t really track those numbers with the naked eye, Mr. Chairman. Don’t worry yourself with that.“ Kyle responded.

  Percy, why are you distracting them? I chided myself. This is serious.

  Sue me. I had nothing else to think about here.

  “No I was actually thinking the same thing,” responded another analyst, a round faced pink haired young woman in a Sonic hoodie.

  That’s how you knew these science types were good at their jobs, by the way. If they were allowed to dress like children.

  “Interface. Isolate a five second frame with no biomass accumulation,” she said. Poppy. Her name was Poppy.

  The system obeyed and spat out a clip.

  “Now run nine-factor growth rate analysis within that frame.”

  Negative.

  It was a negative number.

  “Oh shit, he’s right,” Kyle said to his credit.

  “He’s right. Yeah.”

  I was right?

  I heard the lightest of murmurs caught in Lydia Liberty’s throat.

  “It looks like the entity is growing faster than it’s shrinking as long as it absorbs a certain amount of living tissue, but its default state cannot sustain itself without constant growth. We’re going to isolate the exact amount of biomass in a second, but this suggests it actually needs to keep expanding or it will just … cease to be. Okay. Okay. Category C weakness identified. Victory condition identified. Alert all stations.”

  Then Lydia snapped right back into field commander mode.

  “Right. Containment protocols. Draw back firefight engagement. No need to risk harming the civilians trapped inside if they’re still alive. We just need to ensure it doesn’t touch anybody else for— a certain amount of time. Do we have a read?”

  “Twenty-seven minutes, Miss,” Poppy said.

  “Twenty-seven minutes?” Lydia repeated.

  “It’s possible it’s going to decelerate,” offered Nagee, the guy who had spilled coffee earlier.

  Wait a minute.

  I knew what to do here.

  Or at least what would help.

  “When you got Utopia Tower hovering above the city, we often don’t really get first dibs on the real flashy problems. Not when you have the Covenant on retainer and like 80 Utopian Knights patrolling this shit. Sometimes you wonder if I didn’t have so much clout if people would even remember their city is being protected by us first.”

  “Any deployment of three or more Covenant heroes is classified as a Covenant mission, which requires the presence of either the team leader or the Chairman in the monitor room to proceed.”

  There was no reason we needed to be tackling all of these big problems in New York ourselves. Not when we had a perfectly capable team in our backyard.

  I darted over to a corner of the room and called Nora.

  “Hey Percy? We’re kind of busy right—”

  “Listen to me. I’m sure you’re doing important stuff. But I’m handing you a fucking underhand pitch that you can make a home run. You know how you’ve said people overlook you guys as New York’s protectors?”

  “Percy that’s not what this is about—”

  “Oh can it Nora, this is me. I know you’re a good person but be so fucking real with me for a second. Be hungry. Be greedy. This is for all of you. Anyway. Go deploy yourselves to the epicenter of the Genesis problem. Bring whoever you need and whoever needs you. We’re running containment protocols. Total bio-organic isolation. One sec — I’ll send you the info.”

  “Interface!” I barked. “Forward all combat data from today’s Covenant deployment to the Skyscraper Sentinels.”

  “Transferring.”

  “Um. Were usually meant to hang back from the epicenters of local Covenant engagements because of the chain of command and—”

  “I’m the boss. I’m the boss. Nora. Baby. Mi caramelita guapa. (I heard her mutter ‘don’t say that’ faintly) This isn’t an order. But maybe it should be. I say go for it.”

  And then I just put my hands behind my head, looked at the monitors like I was a mob boss and they were broadcasting a sports game I was rigging, and waited.

  Ten seconds.

  Thirty seconds.

  Forty-five seconds.

  A minute and a half.

  And one of her urban portals, her metaphysical hubcaps, emerged from the street, and I swore I could have heard theme music.

  She craned her neck in the direction of the cathedral-sized blob monster behind her.

  “Ah. This you?”

  City Girl clapped her hands and the four closest buildings to the blob twisted like liquid fingers. A very important question entered my brain as I saw this which was immediately answered in a way that raised so many more.

  What about the people in them?

  Oh. The buildings just spat them right out. All of them. En masse. Vomited forth from their metal vessels, some many, many, stories in the air.

  Was she fucking nuts? Did City Girl just throw hundreds of people to their deaths?

  No. No of course she didn’t.

  A beautiful grease-stained orchestra, order from chaos, erupted from behind City Girl as soon as she moved, ready to catch the waste products of her prep work. With a grunt of effort, she swirled open a massive portal to a patch of Central Park earth, from which a water tower sized bouquet of soft flowers was raised by Liptunia the Flowered Princess to catch their falls. Ildorian the Feathered Prince flew amongst the falling crowd, flitting between bodies with impossible speed, grazing them with his fingers and causing feathers to sprout from their clothing which gently glided them to safety. Engine Girl III fired rounds of a bubble gun into the crowd which encased the civilians in harmless slow-falling soap spheres. Dozens were grabbed by prehensile ropes wielded by bondage heroine and trans icon Rope Bunny, who coordinated with Fare Jumper, handing him the ends of her ropes which he tagged people with mid-air. Paparazzi, the French photographer hero in an orange suit, snapped photos of the crowd with his camera and held them at eye level as the camera spat them out, causing his photographed subjects to cease all moment in time for them to be rescued. It was mind blowing coordination. This was City Girl. This was how she moved on her home turf.

  That’s my fucking girl.

  But that was just the sideshow. The real event was what she did with her arsenal of infrastructure. The buildings twisted together, pooling around the entirety of the Blob’s body, and then raised their makeshift capsule of steel and cement and glass 50, 100, 300 feet in the air, morphing from a wine goblet into a full sphere once it got high enough.

  Full containment. Complete and utter containment. It couldn’t have taken her more than four minutes.

  “Fuck outta my city. Fuck away from my people. Fat ass goopy ass bitch.”

  City Girl landed in front of the assembled heroes of the Covenant, my Covenant, and raised the two fingered Utopia salute, which they returned. Galahad, Skyfall, and Lila Davenport, whom she had carried to safety on an asphalt wave with a flick of her wrist.

  Oh. Oh this was more than I expected.

  This was going to be a whole thing, huh? This was going to be a conversation.

  Sorry babe.

  City Girl then tapped her ear in one of the most put-on gestures I had ever seen her make, and spoke into her headset, meaning to the cameras, meaning to the entire country, as if she didn’t know I was watching her ass from the monitors.

  “Mr. Chairman. This is City Girl. Intel has been received. Threat neutralized. Vivat Utopia.”

  Oh, you bitch.

  That was not part of the deal.

  But it was good. It was fine.

  A surgeon couldn’t have removed the shit eating grin on my face right now.

  This would set a precedent. The Skyscraper Sentinels were capable of handling the big juicy front page worthy supervillain assaults in the Big Apple. The Covenant could hold back when it came to deploying in Utopia’s home city. Less Covenant missions meant less mandatory monitoring sessions for Percy Domino. With all these flashing screens. With Lydia.

  Ha. Total victory. I was happy. Nora was happy. We should pop champagne at Hang Street Hall over this later.

  This was immediately followed by a mission briefing. All heroes and analysts who participated were present, in addition to the contingent of Utopia Knights that had joined us and their Captain, who stood in the corner crossing his arms.

  We went over numbers that flew over me in a blur. Estimated damages. Injuries. New threads in the hunt for Dr. Genesis. Scientific findings. Deaths. We said “Vivat Utopia” several times. I needed a drink badly. Or several.

  Pushback was fast and hard.

  Skyfall lectured me that disrupting centralized order will be disastrous to my long-term efforts to protect this planet and that I had indirectly encouraged looseness and disobedience across my sector.

  Sir Galahad wore a hollow and sad expression and bowed, asking me if he had failed the Cause, for he could think of no other reason to be subject to such a dishonor.

  Lydia said nothing.

  I bit my tongue, needing to think about what I would say. Usually I wouldn’t care if my decision was being rebuked, most of the time I would agree, but this was supposed to set a precedent that would help my friend and I’s goals and I couldn’t let it be delegitimized right away.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” Lila huffed as she entered the room, back in civilian clothes, hair freshly wet from the shower.

  Oh. Okay.

  So this was how this would go, then.

  I couldn’t deal with this right now.

  Why did I have to deal with this right now?

  I knew she would have more to say and she wasn’t interested in my answer right now, so I let her keep screaming for a bit.

  “Do you have any grasp of the implications of the Chairman of Utopia not trusting his own flagship team, the one we expect everyone to trust with the safety of the entire planet, to handle an emerging threat in HQ’s own backyard? Do you have any idea how fucking unreliable that makes us look?”

  Okay. I actually hadn’t thought about that at the moment.

  But I still had to stand my ground.

  Lydia still said nothing.

  “I was just effectively managing our resources. I saw one that could be put to better use, and I acted on it. And many lives were saved. That was my focus. And I don’t understand why Utopia heroes aren’t all just on the same side.”

  “Yeah. You don’t understand anything!”

  “Alright, calm down for a second. I will note you were making the exact opposite argument the other day, Delilah.”

  She flipped me off.

  I felt heat rising to my head.

  “And since when did you two get so close? Why are you hanging out with her all of a sudden?”

  “Ugh. You could have admitted that’s what this was about earlier before you brought it up at work.”

  “No! No you’re not allowed to do that. Some of us have principles. Not everyone just makes every single thing personal like you!”

  She was flustered, losing her words.

  Sigh.

  My anger deflated.

  There it was. That was it.

  That was this entire argument distilled.

  She has just taken a giant eraser to everything she had said before.

  I didn’t even feel smug about it. Okay I felt a little smug. But mostly I wanted her to be smacked upside the head in the most loving way possible. Like by a boarding school nun.

  I was embarrassed on her behalf when I saw the looks the room threw at her at this moment.

  It was a look that I was fine with. Welcomed sometimes, even. But I didn’t want it to spread to her. I didn’t want to take her with me. She wanted to be here.

  The look said “this is a child pretending to be an adult”.

  Lydia still said nothing.

  “Don’t waste your breath,” Maximus said, uncrossing his arms and stepping forward, “this is falling on deaf ears. He rejects your logic and your sentiment. What makes you think this man respects anything we are doing? Was it the pornographic robots? Or the soap line he used to enrich his own sister?”

  “You forgot the Utopia Games. And the ice cream machines. Plus I don’t think you should knock the Floor Gals, Maximus. Speaking as the Co-Director of Utopia Wellness, you seem like you could benefit a lot from getting laid.”

  “A boy opining on a man’s needs.”

  “Maximus,” Sir Galahad said, “mind your tongue. The Devil feeds us these assumptions to turn us against our brothers and sisters.”

  And Maximus… just gave a little nod. A tiny bow, almost. And relented, though the fire didn’t leave his eyes.

  Interesting.

  Was that your new daddy now? Not a bad choice.

  Does he know what you’re made of?

  Oh God it was funny that he wasn’t on the Covenant. Oh it was so fucking funny. I was about to start braying like a donkey.

  And he was wearing a fucking power suit to do cape work. Not as armor but as a condom. Maximus Liberty. In a power suit. It was like seeing an adult wear middle school gym clothes. Maximus Liberty who probably could have kicked my father’s ass when he was 16 years old now patrolling around as a “knight captain” in a modified SWORD Unit that my father built like I would be doing if I had been a cape. Because everyone knew his powers were fucking useless unless you were attempting to reenact Nagasaki.

  Oh God that was so funny.

  Fuck you and your whole family man. Enjoy guarding me on my work trips.

  A fucking Liberty and he couldn’t make it onto the Covenant. Unlike, unlike—

  — his sister. His brilliant, talented, driven sister.

  I had been doing a good job. With the eye contact. I think I managed to avoid it the whole time. It was funny. I used to tease her for that, you know. How she wouldn’t look people in the eye enough. How her mannerisms looked to the only person willing to actually look at her.

  Yeah yeah I see the irony.

  You couldn’t tell that at all, looking at her now. All her nerves had been smoothed over. She had grown so much. She was always so good at that. Learning things. Even hard things.

  Did she get her nose fixed? Did she seriously do that? That slight asymmetry she would bitch about? So she could go from a 9.6 to a 9.7? Why did that make me angry? Who told her to do that? I was going to fuck them in the ass. No. I needed to calm down. Bad thought. I promised I would stop making jokes like that in 2016, remember? It looked fine. It looked good. I didn’t care at all. I don’t care about anything. Plastic surgery should be illegal. Except for my sister. Because she did it in like an artistic way. Enhancing her visual identity not erasing it. Right. Yeah. Hm. Actually I didn’t really like it when she did that either.

  I needed a Xanax and a gun.

  Fuck this. I need to get out of here. I literally did work today.

  All of you can suck my cock.

  I hate that I hurt Lila’s feelings.

  Was this whole thing wrong? Did I fuck up then?

  No. No.

  There is no ‘right thing’.

  Percy we saved lives.

  Percy we saved people’s lives.

  Good. Fine. Just.

  Get something in you. Or get in something.

  As we exited Liberation Hall late into the evening, I rapidly went from being unappreciated to very appreciated.

  But it wasn’t for saving the city.

  We walked out to see droves of Utopia employees gathered around the big monitor screen on the floor’s common lounge and looking out at the windows around it.

  Obviously, I had to see what the commotion was about.

  I couldn’t help myself. I loved commotion.

  Several employees made very deliberate half-second eye contact with me, giving me beaming smiles, flashing a little blue orb on a pendant in my direction with a conspiratorial look, and vanished into the crowd.

  Huh? Wait a minute.

  I looked at the screen. At the cameras pointed right outside the tower.

  I looked at the night sky.

  Oh.

  Oh.

  The moon was lit up again.

  Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were gathered outside the tower.

  The moon was lit up again.

  They wore their triangular grey hooded robes with their gleaming blue eye ornaments.

  And they were throwing a fucking party. For me.

  I always figured I’d be happier the first time I saw massive posters of my face being waved as people danced in the street.

  Some capes were at this rally too, actually willing to show their faces.

  The Sweet Tooth clan showered the festivities with blasts of candy. Gemstone heroine Amethyst One made a show of the moonlight gleaming off her lustrous skin. Paul Bunyan Jr. waved a flag the size of a city bus and lit a rainbow cigarette with a full bundle of dynamite.

  Jazz legend turned superhero turned vodka mogul Bottle Boy, in his fedora and white feather boa, was playing saxophone, while his half-human children with former Covenant hero Luminesca flew through the sky as living fireworks.

  Right. Right. I forget their family was looney like that.

  That’s who these people were. Who I had totally failed to take account of.

  The music was a blend of prog rock and electric jazz, and the song they were singing had the rhythm and fervor of a hymn.

  Oh we

  Will vanish to the stars

  We’ll vanish to the stars

  Light the eternal dark

  Oh we

  Will vanish to the stars

  We’ll vanish to the stars

  The promised land is ours

  Oh we

  Will vanish to the stars

  The sky is not so far

  To become who we are

  Oh we (All of we)

  Will build (Lumagoria)

  Will raise (Lumagoria)

  We are (Lumagoria)

  We are (Lumagoria)

  We are (Lumagoria)

  We are (Lumagoria)

  We are

  Lumagoria!

  The Children of Lumagoria. Lunars.

  “I would think you would be more pleased by this, Mr. Chairman. Which makes me think this somehow was not on purpose,” Lydia said next to me.

  I almost jumped.

  “No. No. I— Oh God, I had forgotten about the fucking Lunars.”

  “Well, you won’t be able to for very long, seeing as you have just handed them their biggest victory in decades.”

  “I was doing something nice,” I said, “wasn’t trying to do anything political. Or symbolic. Or any big deal. There was a young scientist who believed in the moon program. She had a proposal. She was half Quori, she looked like, like, I — I let them take a fusion reactor to the moon. Told them they could keep it if they fixed it.”

  The smallest of sighs.

  “I see.”

  Wait. What was that?

  That little eyebrow twitch.

  Hold on.

  I flicked my eyes across the hallway.

  You can’t be serious.

  Fucking fluorescents. Fucking flu—

  I ducked into a conference room and called building management.

  “Excuse me why the fuck are there fluorescent lights installed in Hallway 12? Why are there any in this level at all?”

  “Huh? Sir? What seems to be the problem? Do you—”

  “Get rid of them. All of them. By Sunday. Now. You mean to tell me that Lydia Liberty has been dealing with minor headaches up here for years? She hates those. Fucking imbeciles.”

  Did anyone here know how to do their fucking job?

  Pop. Pop.

  Clink.

  I finally got a much-needed dose of camaraderie and comfort when I headed over to Hang Street Hall with a cruise ship’s worth of champagne to celebrate Nora’s big victory.

  Yeah. I was calling it Nora’s. I’d had enough of it.

  It was kind of mine too.

  Lots of Sentinels were there, not just Nora’s core posse I tended to see. They almost all had nice things to say to me. I was touched and kissed. We drank a ton. I did coke with Fare Jumper, Flicker, and Rope Bunny in their bathroom. We screamed to “Mr. Brightside”.

  Ah.

  Life.

  I couldn’t hold it in for that long. When it was just the two of us, in a lull, I told Nora about my argument with Lila. I hoped I wouldn’t regret this.

  She nodded thoughtfully as I spoke. Touched my arm a little. Wore the smallest of frowns.

  “Hey,” she eventually said, “I’m sorry, king. I’ll talk to her. Sort this out for you.”

  “What?”

  “For real.”

  “Wait, but why would she listen to you if you’re the one she’s most upset about right now? Would she even believe you?”

  “She will if I’m an asshole about it. Sound like I’m bragging,” she grinned.

  “Nora, I don't want you to just take an emotional bullet for me and make her hate you instead of me.”

  “Ah ah. Ain’t none of your fucking business. Lila loves your ass, Percy. Y’all are ride or dies.. Up there, you both need all the friends you can get. I got hundreds. So I’m not tryna fuck up your relationship cause of a favor you did for me, for my city. Not how I operate. Not ever.”

  I was far too aware of my heart right now. Gross.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  We clinked glasses.

  “And look,” I said, getting serious.

  “This time it was my call. And it was incidental. And it was the right thing. And she was kind of just being a bitch.

  But it did hurt her feelings. And I don’t like that. I don’t think it’s funny that it did. You might, and that’s fair game, but you’re going to have to keep that far away from the field.

  Please be nice with her. Too nice, even. Not like a Stable Friend Group Ex. Like a Guilt Ex. Like an ex you gave AIDS. Please. For me.

  And if you actually ever try to get cute and use our alliance to humiliate or hurt her on purpose, I am going to be very upset.”

  She gave a snorting, disapproving laugh, but her eyes were getting a little shiny beneath all that.

  “So glad she has you, man,” she said quietly. “I worry about her up in that tower.”

  I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

  “You’re very good at worrying,” I said sincerely. “Must suck to be you.” I winked.

  “Hey Percy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m glad to have you, too. We’re going to do good things, really.”

  “Don’t count on that.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  As the night was winding to a close, after drunk-flying the Unibird back to Ironheart and being bathed and clothed by my robot servants, I found myself, against all odds, thinking about work.

  On a Friday, no less.

  Maybe I should be thinking a little more about the politics of my decisions here.

  At least enough to avoid causing myself more headaches.

  I thought about Joan’s words when we had lunch on Wednesday.

  “You don’t have to like your allies. And you don’t have to respect your friends.”

  Sigh.

  I didn’t like it one bit.

  But I knew what I had to do.