Alice spent the rest of that day experiencing something completely and utterly new to her: physical exertion. For her whole life, she had worked with her mother to keep her strength a secret. She even had to practice faces in the mirror for when she would be required to lift things around other people. Helping people move. Carrying the groceries. Hefting around a book-laden backpack in school. But most of the time, Alice simply avoided doing anything physical in public. No sports. Very little time at playgrounds.

  But for the first time in her life, she was being encouraged to run as fast, jump as high, and lift as much as she could. It was thrilling. Feeling the trembling in her muscles as she maxed out on the Megaton at thirteen tons was glorious. She relished in the burning ache in her arms and thighs and the joints of her fingers. And sweat! Salty, glistening sweat beading on her forehead and running down her back! Not from heat, but from effort! If she had any doubts about working with ORIGIN, they flew the first moment a bead of sweat trickled down onto her open lips and the tip of her tongue.

  Her bliss, however, was short lived. Athena had not invited her to five weeks of recreational exercise, after all.

  "We're going to increase the speed," she announced. "Try to resist the urge to fly this time."

  Alice was gasping for breath. She was running all-out on a belted machine that was, for lack of a better word, a treadmill. A reinforced, armored treadmill with a segmented, rough black tread for a belt that was roughly as wide as a pickup truck. The rest of the machine reminded her of a tank flipped onto its back, spinning its treads in a futile bid to right itself.

  The belt was moving very, very fast.

  She was breathing harder than she ever had in her life. Her arms and legs pumped so rapidly they were a blur, and every footfall shook the massive machine like a hammer strike. She focused on every movement, every muscle, every joint, trying her hardest not to stumble. She had a feeling that falling down at this speed would be very, very painful.

  She heard the whine of the massive motors powering the treadmill become even more high pitch as one of the men with Athena obediently raised the speed from sixty-seven miles an hour to seventy-six. She gritted her teeth and pumped her limbs faster, trying to keep up with Athena's raised expectations.

  But Alice could feel she was nearing exhaustion. She had already spent three hours that day on the Megaton alone. Using the machine, they had tested everything from her maximum lift weight from a dead rest to her muscular endurance. She lifted eight tons one hundred and forty-four times before resting the piston on the floor and collapsing next to it.

  She did fourteen more separate exercises after that. Somehow, she mentally slipped into a sort of trance during her tests, drowning out all sights, sounds, and feelings beside the Megaton itself. It was as though the entire world became nothing but the piston, the warm, dull metal and the whine of massive motors she couldn't see.

  That trance, that laser-like focus, was slipping away from her on that treadmill after one and a half hours of running. Her legs were becoming increasingly numb, and it was hard for her to keep up the machine-like repetition and speed of her movements. Alice knew, sooner rather than later, that she was going to stumble.

  "Um, Athena," she gasped, "I don't think..."

  Too late.

  Before the men with the clipboards had a chance to press the large, red emergency stop button on the machine's panel, she fell. She felt, very distantly, her left foot step too short and her right too long to compensate. Unable to keep up with the speed of the belt, her legs were quickly swept out from under her, and she twisted for a moment in the air before landing on her side on the belt moving seventy-six miles an hour. It shot her off like a clay pigeon, skipping her along the dirt ground of the Ready Room. Dirt filled her mouth and eyes, and her every attempt to fly up and away from the hard ground only sent her careening even harder down or in the direction she was thrown. She couldn't tell which way was up.

  When she finally skidded to a stop, she was on her back. She made no move immediately, too shocked and numb to even know what she wanted to do. She could hear a muffled yelling from somewhere, and her vision was obstructed by small pieces of grit that stood trapped on her eyelashes. Then, slowly, feeling came back to her. She immediately wished it hadn't.

  Her eyes stung, and she became aware of a gritty, dusty taste in her mouth. Her skin felt as though it had been burned and scraped off. She writhed in pain before she felt hands on her, and she distantly became aware people were asking questions.

  "Alice, can you hear me?" said someone. Alice had heard that voice several times that day. The man in the polo, the one with the bizarre eye wear that clicked and spun and extended like telescopes. "Do you know where you are?"

  "Move. I can lift her." Alice was pretty sure that voice was Ethan.

  "Step away, Ethan. This is no time to play the gallant hero. She needs to be examined by our med staff." Definitely Athena.

  As they spoke, her senses seemed to return to her, and she realized her body would finally obey her commands. She also realized the pain in her skin and eyes were subsiding. She sat up stiffly, using her hands to awkwardly brush the grime away from her face.

  "I'm fine," she said. "I can get up myself."

  Someone let out a sigh of relief.

  "Are you sure?" Athena asked. Her face, Alice could finally see, had the slightest signs of concern hidden beneath the natural hard lines on her face. "You took a pretty hard fall."

  "Really, I'm okay," Alice assured her. Then she spit on the ground. Her saliva was swimming with little pieces of grit.

  Athena said nothing for a moment. Then she said, "Corpsman? What do you think?"

  The man with the strange eye gear began prodding her with his gloved fingers and examining the parts of her most covered in dirt. Then he took out a small flashlight and shined it in her eyes.

  "She doesn't appear to have any injuries," he announced. "She doesn't have a mark on her. No lacerations, no abrasions."

  "It sure hurt, though," Alice added.

  The men with the clipboards scribbled furiously. Athena let out a sigh through her nose. And Ethan looked positively delighted.

  "Girl, you are so boss!" he laughed.

  "Alright, we're done for now," Athena announced. "Go back to your room and clean up. Then go to the Galley. You'll be having dinner with the Director tonight."

  "And me!" Ethan chimed.

  "And all of the Meta team," added the man with the eye gear. He was still examining her and watching his telescoping lenses of his eye gear extend and retract as they tracked up and down her body was beginning to make her feel uncomfortable.

  She picked herself up, feeling filthy but otherwise unharmed. Her hair, which had started out pulled into a simple ponytail, was as disheveled as it was dirty. She noticed, embarrassingly, that her shirt was torn at the shoulder. She was missing a shoe, one of the sock-like boots Athena had given her. Ethan had picked it up once she was on her feet. Her shorts managed to mostly stay on, only pulled down low over her right hip. She was thankful for that. It would have been worse to be dirty and immodestly exposed. Especially in front of Ethan.

  Most of the scientists and other observers were leaving the room, and Alice found herself with the closest thing resembling privacy since she'd arrived for her orientation. He'd shown interest in her ever since she'd arrived, perhaps as much interest as she had in him. She could see he had a curious look on his face, and she wondered what exactly this boy wanted from her, and more importantly, what exactly she wanted from him.

  There's only one way to find out.

  Alice approached him and held out her hand.

  "Shoe, please," she said.

  Ethan had a something like mischief on his face, and he held the shoe above his head, as though to keep it out of her reach.

  "What, this thing?" Ethan teased. "I tell you what, you can have it if you can take it from me."

  "What?" said Alice.

  Alice puzzled at Ethan. She was still learning to read him, to understand him as a person, and she wondered whether he was somehow trying to antagonize her or play a practical joke. She took in Ethan's muscular build and his height. What she once took as handsome and ideal now seemed intimidating and even a little frightening.

  When she stood for a moment without speaking, Ethan's smile grew wider.

  "Not feeling up to it? Okay, how about this. I'll give it back to you if..."

  Ethan was cut off as Alice suddenly darted forward. He reeled backward, caught off guard by her sudden motion, and he nearly fell onto his backside as she launched herself upwards right in front of him. He felt the boot neatly snatched from his hand by hers, and he looked up to see her hovering a few feet above his head, the boot twirling in her hand, and a smile spreading across her lips.

  "If I what?" she laughed. "You'll give it back to me if I what?"

  Ethan looked at his own empty hand and then up at the girl above him. He shrugged.

  "I was going to ask if you wanted to spend some time together," he admitted.

  She laughed again, a sound which seemed to make him grin against his will.

  "First, let's see just how much free time I'll get from Athena." Her laugh faded to a sad smile. "I have the feeling she won't be giving me much."

  She drifted back to the ground again. As she made her way back to the elevator alone, shoe in hand, she looked back over her shoulder. She saw Ethan, grinning at her with his beautiful, prize-winning smile.

  The last thing she noticed as she boarded the elevator back to her room was the thirty-foot-long groove in the dirt leading from the mammoth treadmill to the spot where she got up from her fall. The long, crater-like line in the ground was bordered by clods of dirt and small rocks. It looked more like a the site of a plane crash than an exercise accident.

  It was then that she realized yet another aspect to her unusual physiology.

  I am very, very hard to kill.

  **********

  Alice's key card allowed her into the Galley, just as Athena told her.

  On her way to the table reserved for their meeting, this one in its own separate banquet room Alice assumed was reserved for important dinner meetings, she saw that the Galley was busier than the last time she had been there. Maybe a couple hundred people laughed and dined and talked to each other in tight knit groups.

  Behind the door to the banquet room, she saw Clawson, Athena, and Ethan already sitting at a beautifully set table, larger than the one Ethan and Alice had when they had lunch together not so many days ago. Clawson looked the same as she remembered. He wore his suit and tie with the distaste as one who would rather wear something far more comfortable but must look more presentable for work. Athena was dressed identically to Alice, albeit with dark boots instead of colorful sneakers, and Ethan was, once again, wearing a tailored shirt and slacks. Alice could smell his cologne Above the scent of the food.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  There were several others there as well. The red-headed young woman was there, who Alice recognized had been exercising in the Ready Room when she'd first come on the tour. There was also the man that had the strange eye gear. Now that the two of them were standing beside one another, Alice was sure the two of them were closely related, almost certainly siblings, perhaps even twins. Levi was there as well.

  "Welcome," said Clawson, standing from his chair. Athena, Ethan, and Levi did the same. The twins, Alice noticed, did not. "We were just about to get started. Have a seat," he instructed.

  She did. Alice glanced around the table at the others. The red-headed girl seemed least pleased to see her there, perhaps even annoyed. She affected a thinly veiled scowl when Alice looked her way.

  "Before I have the staff bring us dinner, I thought it would be a great opportunity for us to give you a bit more formal of an introduction to ORIGIN. I also think it will be a good time for all of us to get to know each other. After all, we'll be working very closely together as a team."

  "As a team?" the red-headed girl asked Clawson, her eyes narrowed. "As in, part of our team?"

  "Yes," Clawson answered. "Many of you know that we've approached Alice about becoming a special research subject here to further our understanding of metahuman physiology. What some of you may not know is that she is also enrolled in our candidacy program. She will undergo an expedited training schedule to prepare her for examination. If she passes, she will join us on Meta Team."

  The red-headed girl seemed dumbfounded, and nearly everyone else at the table seemed surprised as well. Athena was as stone-faced as ever, which made sense. She already knew about Alice's chance to join the team. Ethan alone seemed excited by the prospect, a grin nearly as wide as the table spanning his face.

  Clawson, indifferent to the others' apparent need for explanation, turned to Alice.

  "If you are going to be working with us, you should know exactly what we are and what we are trying to achieve. ORIGIN is comprised of over five hundred employees, many of them specialists. Technology. Engineering. Counterterrorism. Human resources. Things like that. And each department is headed by its own leadership."

  Alice tried to wrap her head around that. ORIGIN was an even more diverse collection of people and credentials than she'd imagined.

  "You, however, will be assigned to the metahuman Response Department, or Meta, as we've come to call it around here. Athena and I personally oversee this department since it makes use of some of our most valued assets."

  Ethan grinned at that, apparently taking Clawson's statement as a kind of compliment.

  "That's us," he whispered to Alice for all to hear. "You and I. We're his most valued assets!"

  "We have all already had a chance to learn about you, Alice," Clawson went on after shooting Ethan a warning glance. "Your history. Your family. Your hopes for the future. We want you to know us, as well. But in order to know us, it's important you understand a little more history."

  Clawson reached across the table and placed a small device in the center. Alice was beginning to recognize a hologram projector when she saw one. This one was about as big as a hockey puck, but the image that sprouted from it was six feet wide. It turned on, the display showing a faded color photograph that might have been taken from a newspaper. Alice recognized the figure shown flying through the air in the tight, white and gold body suit and cape.

  "A few days ago, you and I talked about metahumans. Tell me how much you know about Divinity," said Clawson.

  Alice shrugged. "Other than what you told me the other day?"

  Clawson nodded.

  "You know, this is going to sound really odd, but when I was a little girl, I thought he wasn't real. I heard about him when I was nine. I assumed Divinity was just folklore. Just a popular myth for kids. When I was a little older, my friends tried to convince me he was real. It took a while before I believed..."

  "That you weren't alone?" Ethan finished for her.

  "Yeah," she answered. She couldn't hold back a smile. She quickly looked back up at the hologram. It had begun scrolling through more photos of Divinity, of him flying, talking to reporters, and even one of him harnessed to a freight train, pulling it like a draft animal while he smiled at the cameras.

  "Other than that I don't know much. Nobody I knew did. I'd heard a lot of rumors. He was in a chemical accident. He found a magic jewel in an Indian burial site. He was the last son of a dying planet who'd come to Earth as a baby and raised by farmers. Things like that. The comic books and the movies all seemed to have their own ideas. I never knew which of them was telling the truth."

  Clawson chuckled. "I wish it were that simple. But no, there's no truth we know of to these rumors. Reality, it seems, is more full of mysteries than fiction. We really don't know where his abilities came from, not even those of us who were close to him."

  Alice looked up from the slide show on the hologram with a raised eyebrow.

  "You knew Divinity? You were close to him?"

  Clawson shrugged and leaned back in his chair.

  "Well, what was it like to know a superhero?" she asked.

  Several people at the table smiled, as though Alice had told a joke. The red-headed girl gave a humorless laugh.

  I'm kinda getting tired of her attitude.

  "I really don't like that word," Clawson corrected Alice. "Superheroes are for comic books and bad movies. It's a word the media uses to sell toys and lunch boxes. They see someone doing something they couldn't imagine, and they invent these ridiculous stories about chemical accidents and dying planets, anything to get readers, all the while ignoring the simple truth. Divinity was a metahuman. Just like Ethan. Just like you.

  "And yes, I knew him. When we first began working together, I was working for law enforcement in Washington DC. I was new to my position, struggling to do something about the organized crime in the city, which was really bad back then. He showed up, and we started cleaning up. When we finished doing that, I suggested he start broadening his area of influence. Soon he was working all over the country, and even the world, fighting dictators, rescuing refugees, disarming drug lords.

  "As soon as he'd established himself as a global presence, he asked me to join him. I quit law enforcement, and I became an intelligence gatherer of sorts. We worked together a long time. Right up until he died."

  "He died?" Alice repeated, surprised. She had read the theories for his disappearance, and death was one of the more prevalent ones, but it was hard for her to imagine it being true. "But wasn't he special? Invulnerable?"

  "Yes, but not immortal," answered Clawson. "In fact, you could argue he was just as mortal as any other human being."

  "Wait," Alice said, as the image scrolled by another photo of Divinity hefting an enormous tank while soldiers watched in awe. "What do you mean?"

  Clawson looked her in the eye and leaned forward on the table with his fingers laced together.

  "What I mean is this: in all the years I spent with Divinity, in all the years we spent studying him, we never could find a reason for him to be anything more than a normal, healthy human being. DNA collected from his hair and saliva confirms he was human, not an alien. He performed normal human bodily functions. He ate. He slept. He cried. He even shaved. He was nearly impossible to harm in any way, so we never were able to open him up to take a look inside his body. Not until his autopsy. When we did, we found nothing out of the ordinary, besides a pair of bad kidneys."

  Alice was speechless. This flew in the face of everything she had previously thought about the legendary hero the people called "The American Titan". To find out that he was so normal...it was frustrating. Absolutely, inescapably frustrating. Like running around in a maze with no solution. Only dead ends.

  "What about Ethan?" she asked.

  "We're running into similar problems with Ethan," Clawson answered quickly. Alice waited for him to say more on the matter, but he didn't.

  "And me?" she asked.

  "Well, today we discovered you have incredible muscular strength and endurance, with a cardiovascular system to match. We've already recorded your maximum lift capacity at over thirteen tons. We also know you can fly. And, due to an unfortunate accident you had with the equipment just a few minutes ago, we also learned you have an incredible resilience to physical injury.

  "As for why, we haven't discovered that yet. But we hope to. That's one of the biggest reasons you're here."

  "And the other reasons?" she asked.

  "We want you to understand what Divinity's work meant to us. The man wasn't just a do-gooder with superpowers. He was a great visionary and leader, and his work brought the human race closer to stability and world peace than it ever had been before."

  Clawson's face was solemn, his voice low. Athena's expression was the same. Their reverence for Divinity sounded to Alice something akin to belief in a holy martyr.

  Ethan, on the other hand, was fiddling with his fork.

  "Divinity accomplished a lot more than cleaning up the streets of our nation's capital," Clawson went on. "More than lowering the crime rate in the nation to record lows. He inspired people. He made them believe there was a right and a wrong. That good could conquer evil. Our nation became religious again. Communities became safer.

  "But he didn't just help the U.S. All over the world, people began taking up arms against dictators, putting drug cartels out of business, and putting aside petty tribal feuds. Sometimes, he would help them, but often he didn't need to. Across the entire planet, people were inspired by Divinity to change things for the better.

  "We felt like we were part of something incredible. A great change for humanity. A crusade."

  "We?" Alice interrupted. "You mean you...and Athena?"

  Clawson smiled and waved his hand at the hologram. The long slide show of photos scrolled by as though he'd physically touched them before stopping on one. Clawson seemed to grab the image and stretch it, enlarging it to zoom in on one particular portion. Alice saw that it was the group photo she'd seen before, the one of Divinity's team. The Champions. By the aging of the photo's color and the hair styles of the people in it, she guessed it was taken some decades in the past.

  Immediately she recognized Divinity among those posing for the shot. He was in the middle, wearing the same white and gold body suit as he did in his other photos. She saw his face more clearly than she ever had before. He was grinning from ear to ear, apparently very at home among the people with him. His bright, toothy smile reminded me, in a way, of Ethan's.

  "See anyone familiar?" asked Athena with a smile.

  She immediately noticed a young woman standing beside Divinity. She did look familiar. Her dark skin was smoother when the photo was taken, not yet lined so much by age and stress. The hair style was the same: slicked back and pulled tight, though the photo showed none of the gray streaks Alice was familiar with. Her clothing was different, but the gray, sleek, harnessed body suit did nothing to conceal the broad shoulders and athletic lines that she saw sitting across the table from her at that exact moment.

  "Athena, you worked with Divinity, too?" she asked.

  "I did," she nodded. Alice was sure there was a hint of a smile at the corner of her lips. "He was such a public figure. And for all his strengths, subtlety wasn't exactly one of them. When there were situations where he needed someone to accomplish something more discretely, he'd talk to me."

  "She also worked quite closely with me," said Clawson. "Athena's incredible training made her ideal for gathering information."

  "So, you two are old friends of Divinity? You worked with him, hung out with him? Like friends?" she tried to sum up.

  Clawson shrugged again, the subtle smile on his face making him seem younger for a moment.

  "We were concerned citizens trying to follow a great man," he clarified. "We admired him."

  "So why did he die?" she asked.

  Clawson and Athena's expressions fell again.

  "The autopsy revealed some kind of kidney failure," Clawson answered grimly. "One day, about twenty years ago, he got sick. And he stayed sick for a little while. And then he died. There was nothing we could do to help him. The same invulnerability that kept him being hurt by bullets and bombs made him absolutely impervious to any help from us. We tried everything, but there's never been a needle made that could pierce his skin. Not while he was alive."

  They were quiet for a moment, the only sounds being the muted chatter coming from the busy dining hall on the other side of the door and the metallic thud of Ethan's fork as he continued to play with it.

  "We want to rebuild what was lost when he died," answered Clawson, breaking the solemn silence. "After we lost Divinity, the world slipped back to the way it was before he came. In fact, it's worse. Civil war, disasters, terrorism. The worst things our species is capable of. Those of us who worked with him did what we could to carry on with his work, but it just wasn't possible. Many of our number split up and went off to try to make things better in their own ways. But some of us knew what was necessary for things to keep improving. We needed Divinity back. Without his metahuman abilities, we simply didn't have the resources or the manpower to accomplish so much.

  "That's why we brought Ethan on," said Clawson, gesturing to him across the table.

  Ethan looked up from his fork and gave Alice a smile, but then his attention slipped back down to his dinnerware again, the smile just a memory. He was clearly not enjoying the conversation.

  "But this work seems to be too big, even for him, to attempt alone. Which is why we have assembled a team." Clawson gestured to some of the others at the table. He pointed to Levi. "Levi Seraydarian you already met. He's not just a simple driver. He's our team's vehicle and remote drone specialist. His call sign is Roll Cage." Clawson gestured to the red-headed siblings. "These are the McGuffin twins, Joshua and Priscilla. Joshua goes by the call sign Corpse, and he's our team corpsman, or medic if you like. Priscilla is our combat support specialist. Another flier. I think you two met in South Carolina. She goes by the call sign Fox Fire."

  Alice knew that red hair was familiar. This was the girl on the flying machine. Alice tried a friendly nod, but Priscilla simply turned her head to whisper something to her brother, a snide smile on her face. Joshua seemed to shrug at her comment without enthusiasm, as though her words didn't matter to him either way.

  Alice squirmed uncomfortably in her chair. She'd underestimated the scale of what it was she'd demanded of Clawson, to let her become a part of the team. Before, she'd thought of these people as high-tech rescue workers. But now, Clawson made it sound like they were part of a crusade to return the world back to a golden age when it was watched over by a god.

  "That's cool," she said uncomfortably. She reached for the glass of water in front of her and took a sip.

  "Is something wrong?" asked Clawson. "I know this is a lot of information to digest."

  What was I thinking? How could I possibly think of myself as being a part of...all this?

  Had she made a mistake? Was this all too big for her? Metahuman, she might be. But was she so important a person that she could consider herself to be a part of a cause this grand?

  And then she finally began to understand the looks on the faces of the others at the table. That's why they were so surprised to hear Clawson's declaration that she might become a part of all this. Levi and the red-headed boy named Joshua, they were clearly surprised she was even being considered for it. Priscilla, with her scowl and narrowed eyes, was probably disgusted by it. Was Athena frowning at the monumental task of taking someone as ordinary as her and turning her into someone that would fit in a place like this?

  Only Ethan seemed to believe in her, and Alice wasn't sure that gave her much comfort.