It took another month of training before Athena and Clawson would even speak to Alice about participating in rescues.

  "Wait for the engineer, Alice," she heard Athena's voice crackle into her earpiece. "We don't want the whole place to come down on top of them."

  Alice was standing outside a partially collapsed house, the result of a thirty-three-foot-wide sinkhole. The structure was two stories high, or at least it used to be before the ground opened up underneath it and crumbled its foundation within minutes. The building was horrendously sagged and splintered, and it looked as though a giant had sat on its roof. The front door, once a beautiful design of wood and glass, hung crooked and broken with its bottom two feet underground. The garage, large enough for two vehicles, sat mysteriously unharmed.

  Alice hovered twenty yards away from it, waiting for instructions while she could hear a frail, tiny voice crying from somewhere in the debris. The failing light of the day started casting deep shadows shaped into nightmarish designs by the broken house. She couldn't see who was calling for help, but she knew for certain that whoever it was wasn't having fun.

  "I can hear a child," she said. "She sounds hurt." The microphone, a black, flexible strip of nylon and electronics strapped to her throat like a choker, transmitted her voice back to a control room in the command center, where Athena sat watching and listening to the whole thing. Alice was pretty certain Clawson was watching as well, wherever he was.

  "Like I said, wait for the engineer," Athena repeated herself. "If you start moving stuff around it might cause the whole thing to cave in even worse.

  "Ugh!" Alice hissed, frustrated. What was the point of having all these abilities if she couldn't pull someone out of a hole in the ground without a committee's decision first?

  Athena's trying to make things difficult for me again.

  She watched as a small team of men emerge from a black SUV that had arrived a few minutes after she did. The men were RaTS, rescue and tactics specialists, dressed in gear and body armor that made Alice think of a cross between a firefighter and a police officer in riot gear.

  One of them was Levi. This time, he was no mere driver, but Meta team's designated engineer, and he set to work right away converting the sensitive equipment installed in the vehicle into a mobile, temporary command center. A complex-looking array of antennae and dishes unfolded from the SUV's roof like mushrooms growing in a time-lapse video. Alice could hear the electronic click as his headset tapped into her communication channel.

  "Alright, Alice. We are all set to go," he announced into her ear piece. "Let's see about digging these people out of there."

  "I can hear someone, a kid, I think," she told him. Her eyes scanned the debris for something, maybe a tiny hand poking out of the wreckage, but she saw nothing. She'd watched television shows and movies about superheroes with x-ray vision, and she wished for a moment she'd been gifted with that among her other talents.

  "Don't you worry," said Levi cheerfully. "The drone will sniff out the survivors."

  The word "survivors" churned Alice's stomach. To her, that word was meant to designate the people that did survive a disaster from the ones who didn't. Which meant she might find more than survivors in that heap of twisted wood and crumbled drywall. She might find the dead.

  She watched as Ferguson retrieved a piece of equipment from one of several black cases in the vehicle. It was matte gray, and about the size of a beagle, only with two circular fans attached to either side of it like wings. A blunt snout made of highly sensitive detection equipment poked out like a nose with odd whiskers. He finished its assembly and activated it. The creature-like drone beeped and whirred to life, blasting its fans and bringing itself into a shaky hover above the vehicle. Then it made for the house and began to circle it like a vulture some sixty feet in the air.

  "I'm starting to get images," Levi announced. "I see five people inside the structure. One adult with three children on the north end of the house. I think they're in what used to be a kitchen. I have the other adult in the east end, but on the second story. Maybe in a bathroom."

  Levi was reading a series of monitors that showed him a hoard of data passed on by the buzzing drone above. Since Athena had already briefed Alice on the drones, she knew it was using a mixture of RADAR, infrared, and high frequency sound waves to scan the mess of a house.

  It was a marvel of military and rescue technology. It was also irritating in that it was slow.

  "Levi, what's the quickest way for me to get to those kids?" she asked, perhaps a little impatiently.

  "First, we're going to the adult by himself in the east side of the house," he countered.

  "But the kids!" Alice protested.

  "Going in that way first is the safest way," he said.

  Alice sighed. She had occurred to her more than once that day how much Athena seemed to want Alice to fail. Would she be willing to sabotage this rescue just to make her look bad? Was Levi in on it? "Okay, tell me which pieces are safe to pull away."

  She waited for Levi to start guiding her through the entry process, removing parts of the structure in order to get inside it without tearing the whole thing down. Her heart hammered in her chest as she flew to a crumpled window that at one time had been large enough for her to fit through, but no longer. She was perspiring, but not with heat or strain. She was stressed.

  "Don't move, Alice," said another voice over the radio. It was Ethan. "You might be saving one person instead of four."

  Alice froze. "What do you mean?" she asked. That was a voice she hadn't been expecting. She hadn't even seen Ethan that morning, and she wasn't told that he'd be a part of this.

  "You're not a part of this mission, Ethan," warned Athena. "Let Levi do his job."

  "He's wrong," Ethan warned. "I'm tapped into the data feed from the drone, too. That structure will probably give out in only a few minutes. There may not be enough time to save everyone. Go for the kids."

  "Wait," Alice said, looking to where Levi sat inside the SUV "is that true?"

  "Beaker's reading the data right," explained Levi, "but he's not seeing the whole picture."

  "Alice, there's no time for this," Ethan pressed again. "That structure's about to give out."

  What to do, what to do? Should she listen to Ethan? As far as she knew, it seemed like Ethan was hijacking the communications frequency to warn her. He wasn't even assigned to this mission. Listening to him, according to Levi and Athena, could spell disaster. On the other hand, Could Athena be trusted? Did she want Alice to succeed here?

  "Get off the channel, Ethan," warned Athena. "This is Alice's mission. Alice, do what Levi tells you."

  "Stay out of this, Beaker," joined Levi. "She needs to do this on her own."

  But it was too late. Alice was already moving to the north end of the house. She reached what looked like the remains of a sliding glass door just as she heard a groaning, crackling sound coming from deep inside the debris.

  Ethan's right. There isn't any time left.

  She blasted in through the glass door, spraying the inside of the room with shards. In the poor light, Alice spotted small, human forms huddled together among the rubble. She threw herself on top of the nearest one just as the house finally gave up the ghost and disintegrated around her. There was a loud crunching, cracking, and shattering in her ears, and then darkness.

  Then she heard the bell signaling the end of the examination.

  Athena's going to kill me.

  Still trying to hold onto the limp, life-like doll of a human child, Alice used her shoulders and one free arm to lift the wreckage off herself. Some of the wooden debris and nails caught on her black body glove, pulling at the tough, flexible material but not tearing it. Finally, she emerged on top of the wreckage with her survivor in her arms.

  She looked to the SUV, where she saw Levi dismantling and packing away the drone. He met her gaze and shrugged, a sign of quiet, contained frustration.

  The lighting in the Ready Room returned to normal levels as the solar generator above ignited, chasing away the shadows and the gloom that had added to Alice's stress and uncertainty.

  "Alice," roared a voice through the room. Athena's voice. "Why did you ignore your engineer's instructions?"

  Alice jumped from the top of the crumbled house and drifted to the ground near the SUV, where Athena was waiting for her. She held the lifelike dummy about the waist and held it up for Athena to see.

  "I had to save the kid," she answered. Then she braced herself for what she was sure would come next.

  I rescued one person, so that should be worth something. Who knows, maybe that's enough to pass the exam, she lied to herself. She braced herself for what she was sure would be a withering, face-melting reprimand at full volume.

  But to her surprise, Athena said nothing. She simply walked to where Alice stood, extended a hand, and plucked something from the face of the dummy. A long, sharp shard of glass about the length of a steak knife.

  "Thank goodness you were there to save him," she said, quiet, razor-sharp irony dripping from her voice like acid. "If it hadn't been for you, he would have been crushed under the house. But thanks to you, he'll bleed to death in your arms. The day is saved."

  Alice dropped the doll on the ground, where it crumpled and rested on its side. She put her hands on her hips and pressed her lips tight together. She was beginning to get used to these little talks with her trainer. She knew the best thing for her was to quietly listen to the criticism and say "yes, ma'am" and "no, ma'am" as many times as it took to get through it.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Was this all rigged too? Of course, it was. Just like the room inspection. Just like my classes.

  "Okay," Alice countered, "so I went through the glass a little fast. I won't do it again."

  "You think this is about glass?" she asked, her eyes narrowing to hard slits of obsidian. "You ignored Meta team's engineer. Because of that, you failed your mission. Instead of rescuing five people, you sacrificed four of them so you could badly injure one." She threw the glass shard into the dirt at her feet and turned to walk away.

  "But Ethan said..." she tried again, but Athena rounded on her so quickly the words caught in her throat.

  "Ethan was not the engineer assigned to you," she hissed.

  "But if I'm a part of this team, I'm not always going to have an engineer, am I? I'll sometimes have to work on my own!"

  Deep inside, Alice could hear a feeble voice reminding her that this would not help, even before the words left her mouth, but her patience had run too thin to give it much heed.

  "No. You're right," Athena agreed, "and if your performance today was any indication of what your judgment is like without experienced specialists to assist you, I'm having serious doubts about sending you into the field at all."

  "But I have abilities..." Alice began to protest.

  Stop talking, the voice inside her said.

  "And what good have they done you?" Athena cut in.

  Alice opened her mouth to answer, but she couldn't find a single word to say. Images of an overturned SUV on Airport Road flashed in her memory, her dad alone in the dark as she left for help. None, she knew was the answer to Athena's question. They haven't done me any good at all.

  Athena was, in Alice's opinion, the kind of woman who always knew how to get the final word in the conversation. Athena stood there, waiting for Alice to say something in her own defense, but no words were forthcoming.

  But what did it matter? She'd failed her test. Nine weeks of brutal effort, all wasted. She had never tried to achieve something so hard in her life, yet she still failed at doing the job she was sure she was born to do. Athena had made sure of it.

  "If you don't want me here, you should just say so," Alice managed to mumble as she turned to leave.

  Soon she was grinding her teeth in frustration as she stomped away from the test site. She took long, quick strides to put as much distance between her and the woman who'd made it her personal mission to make Alice's life as difficult as humanly possible.

  She found her way to the elevator blocked by the one person who might be able to make Alice feel worse. If making Alice miserable was a sport, Priscilla was gunning hard for a strong second place to Athena.

  "Priscilla, please get out of my way," Alice warned her.

  As was her usual demeanor, Priscilla had her arms crossed over her chest and a nonplussed expression on her face that made Alice seriously consider shaking her by the shoulders. She stared up at Alice's face with a mirthless smirk that showed just a corner of her sharp, white teeth.

  She was never far away whenever Alice was training. Alice had tried several times to be kind to Priscilla, to reach some kind of mutual respect at least, but her frigid, condescending attitude made that impossible. She was always sneering, whispering to her brother or to Levi or to any other staff member that would listen how she thought Alice was a waste of time. Her whispers were somehow never quite quiet enough for Alice not to hear.

  "Failed your test?" Priscilla jabbed.

  "I've never hit a person before," Alice seethed, "but so help me, Priscilla, if you test me..."

  She raised a fist and held it under the redhead's chin to make her point. Alice wasn't used to making threats, to showing so much aggression, but her previous encounter with Athena had made her seriously willing to try. If she was being honest with herself, the gesture fit her poorly, like a suit tailored for someone else. It made her uncomfortable to brandish her fist like that, but what choice did she have? Priscilla was getting in her face, and this seemed to be the only language the girl would understand.

  However, Alice didn't seem to be the only one who could tell she was uncomfortable playing the tough girl.

  "I wish you would hit me," Priscilla challenged. "At least then it would prove you might actually be suited to this life."

  Alice stared at her. For a moment, she had nothing to say. Without thinking about it, Alice dropped her fist until it hung by her side like a dead fish. Then it suddenly clenched into a fist again.

  "I don't know what your problem is Priscilla," she seethed. "Is it because I fly too? That I can do it better than you? Is it because you realized you're suddenly becoming the most useless person on this team?"

  Alice regretted it as soon as she said it.

  Priscilla didn't change expression, but Alice thought she could see her face flushing with color. She wondered if Priscilla's pale skin would flush until it was as red as her flaming hair.

  "You know what your problem is, Fillmore?" Priscilla asked, her eyes narrowing conspiratorially, as though she were about to impart a valuable secret to Alice. "You don't bleed enough."

  Alice felt her stomach tie itself into a knot. "What did you say?" she squeaked.

  "Relax, Fillmore," Priscilla laughed. "It wasn't a threat. It was a fact. You don't bleed enough to do what it is we do. You've never suffered. You've never had to struggle. Not you, and not Ethan. You have no idea what it's like for the people we rescue. So, to you, this is all just a game.

  "But not to me. My brother and I? We joined the military as soon as we were old enough. We both made Special Forces before we turned nineteen. We both rotated to Iran twice. I did a tour in Nicaragua. He did one in Kurdistan. I've been shot, blown up, and broken. I've been stabbed," she reached out a finger and pressed it to Alice's stomach just above her right hip, "right here. I've come that close to death. So has he. Because we're human. We're soldiers. We know what it's like for normal people out there. We have the training and the understanding of what people really go through. We're acquainted with death.

  "I may not be able to fly without my Silf Jet, and I might not have your strength, even with my rig, but I can do my job." Priscilla pointed a finger at the site of the collapsed house, where human-shaped dummies were being pulled from the debris as ORIGIN construction crews prepared to sweep away Alice's failed test. "Can you do yours?" Priscilla asked.

  Alice felt her fury and rage and threatening posture melt away until nothing but a puddle of shame and frustration was left.

  Priscilla took a step closer, until her face was so close to Alice that they would butt heads if either of them sneezed.

  "You failed for a reason. You're not suited to this life. I suggest you go and use your talents for something you'd be suited to. Show business, maybe. You were good enough at acting like you belonged here with us. For a while, anyway."

  Priscilla stepped aside enough for Alice to pass. Alice did, but slowly, unsure, no longer knowing what to think or do in her situation. As her desire to get away to wherever no one could see or talk to her grew, her footsteps grew faster.

  She refused to talk to anyone until she'd had a shower. It was strange for her to simply walk to her room without being told she had permission. For weeks she'd been living like a soldier. She'd eaten when they told her to eat, trained when they told her to train, and slept when they told her to sleep, which wasn't often. To suddenly make her own decision, even one so simple as to take a shower, made her feel as though she'd dropped something heavy, like she was suddenly unburdened, at least a little. She kept waiting to feel the crash, to experience some harsh consequence, for someone to stop her. But no one did. She walked through those hallways alone, and everyone she passed ignored her.

  She somehow managed to peel off her body glove, a nearly skintight garment that covered her from her neck to the bottoms of her feet. Clawson and Athena had made her wear it since the day they'd tested her flight capabilities over an old, abandoned airstrip a few miles away. Her flight test had allowed Jolly and some of the other medical staff members to see her airborne and identify some her shortcomings. They saw that she tended to become very cold the higher and the faster she went, and that regular clothing could rip to rags under the force of the wind when she flew quickly. The body glove was the answer.

  But in truth, she hated the thing. She hated wearing something that tight to her skin. It made her feel naked. She stared at it, now a pile of gray glistening with her sweat.

  At least I might never have to wear it again. After today, I might be done playing the hero. I suppose that's the upside of failure. Once you've failed, you don't have to keep trying.

  Alice felt the sting of tears behind her eyes and resisted the urge to sob with frustration. She stood under the water, turning it on as hot as her skin could stand it. She knew that she couldn't simply rinse away all the pain and the fatigue and the anger she felt, but it didn't stop her from trying.

  **********

  "I need to leave," she stated in as calm and frank a voice as she could muster.

  Clawson leaned forward on his desk and laced his fingers together thoughtfully.

  "You're already cleared to have a week of leave in two days," he reminded her. "Are you telling me you can't wait until then?"

  Alice shook her head.

  Clawson stood from his desk, and looked Alice in the eye, but with no sign of an attempt to intimidate her. He just looked disappointed.

  "Is this about what happened today in the Ready Room? Your rescue examination?"

  "It's..." Alice tried to say, but she felt a sharp lump in her throat. "It's a lot of things. But yes. You promised me a chance at becoming a member of this team, but you lied to me. That test wasn't fair. My training hasn't been fair. You and Athena have put me through two months of..." her breath shuddered with the effort of expressing all the pain that was in her at that moment, all of the anger she felt towards Clawson and Athena and Priscilla and Ethan, and even herself. "Athena thinks I'm unqualified for this, and she made sure I would fail that test. And you know something, she's right. I'm not ready."

  The words tasted bitter. They were the words that had been slowly forming in her mouth since her failure in the Ready Room, congealing like spoiled milk. She had imagined herself becoming something different from the little girl who'd done nothing while her father slowly died in the dark, but it seemed she could never be anyone else. And she certainly wasn't Divinity.

  "I know you're not ready," Clawson conceded. "Your training program has been designed to put you under immense stress to see how you would respond," he explained. "You are a metahuman, but emotionally and mentally, you are as fragile as any other person. We intentionally put you under extreme duress to test your commitment and your ability to act under pressure. And nothing brings that out more than an unfair test."

  "But why?"

  "In our line of business, we frequently must deal with hardship. You will have to face some of the most horrible scenarios conceivable by man. You will be confronted by enemies who want to kill you. You will hold people while they die. It will all be terribly, unapologetically unfair. We needed to be sure you could handle all that."

  Alice's eyes stung. She wiped at them with the heel of her hand.

  "I don't think I can," she admitted. "I'm not a soldier. I wasn't raised to this. I want to help. I want to be involved, I really do, but I can't stay here like this. I have to go home."

  Clawson nodded. When he looked at her, she thought his eyes looked sad, as though he truly sympathized with her.

  "Perhaps it was a mistake to train you like a soldier. Divinity certainly wasn't one."

  The two of them walked to the wall-sized window that looked out over the Ready Room. Below, Alice could see crews of workers operating heavy machinery, using them to scrape away the landscape that had been the sinking house. Her exam, the evidence of her failure that day, was being wiped away.

  "Divinity never did feel partial to military training," Clawson explained. "In fact, he was a sensitive man. If I hadn't seen him punch a hole through a main battle tank, I would have thought him a soft man, incapable of doing what needed to be done in a serious conflict." Clawson stole a glance at the young woman beside him. "You remind me of him in that way."

  Alice stared. In that moment, she didn't think it was possible to feel more different than the decisive, unshaken hero she'd seen in all those pictures, all those videos. Besides the fact they were metahuman, what did they have in common?

  "I remind you of Divinity?"

  Clawson suddenly smiled, and his eyes twinkled as though he were suddenly remembering something fondly.

  "Oh, yes. Soft and strong at the same time. People close to him used to tease him for being so sensitive. The media never really captured that side of him, the man who cried for hurt children, who became sullen and frustrated whenever he made a mistake. He would sometimes disappear for days, just to be with his loved ones. It was his way of processing it all, of staying sane."

  Then Clawson looked at her, a curious look on his face. "Do you know, you've already lasted longer than many of the people we consider for employment here? Athena's succeeded in making hundreds of people quit, people who lacked the commitment to stick with the training. Most of them didn't last as long as you."

  She didn't know how to answer that. What did it matter how long she lasted? She'd failed, hadn't she?

  Clawson turned back to his desk and dropped back into his chair. He seemed to be considering something.

  "If I give you leave to go home, will you come back?"

  Alice sniffed and wiped at her eyes again.

  "Come back?"

  Clawson nodded, looking like he'd come to a decision. "Yes. Come back and take the test again. If I gave you some time to recover, would you come back and recommit to this program?"

  She knew she didn't have to. She could be done with it all, with the unfairness, with Athena, with all of it. But maybe there was a part of her that hated her failure more than it hated the unfairness and the cold and the pain. Maybe there was a part of her that still hoped to become something more, whatever the cost.

  "Seven days," Clawson warned her. "You have seven days to decide. If you come back in a week, we continue your training."

  He didn't have to tell her what it would mean if she didn't come back in a week.