Halfway around the world, four men and two women skulked into the gloom of an unlit parking garage. They wore tattered old coats, combat boots, and fatigues that were decades too old for modern military. Their faces were hard and in varying states of uncleanliness, some with makeup to suggest homelessness, some with scars and crooked noses that betrayed a life of hard conflict to a anyone with a trained eye. There was no need to cover their faces. The weakness in the security here, they'd discovered weeks ago, was that the cameras relied on the lights for a clear picture. If one cut the power to those lights, they could render the cameras useless. And so they did.

  Even with the cover of darkness, they were careful to remain unseen. Even if the cameras footage could never identify them, they wanted to leave nothing to chance. They scurried along the walls low to the floor like rodents. They carried gas cans that sloshed with something that was certainly not gasoline. They stacked these containers at the bases of four different concrete pillars and waited.

  One of them, the only one with a cleanly shaved face, went to each pillar one-by-one and deftly arranged wires and electrical devices with the speed of long, careful practice. As he worked, the sleeves of his shabby coat rode up his arms, revealing elaborate tattoos inked in large Gothic letters. They read, "No Gods. No Devils. Only Men."

  The job was done thirty-seven seconds faster than they'd planned. It gave them more than enough time to disappear into the city alleys and derelicts before the show began. They saluted the man with the tattoos before scattering in different directions, each one of them taking a different planned route back home across the sea. Only one stayed behind with their leader. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, admiring a job efficiently and discretely done.

  One of them stroked his beard thoughtfully. His face was creased with concerns.

  The other one pulled the sleeves of his coat back down over his tattooed arms and looked at his brother's face.

  "What's got you so worried, Eustace? It was a pretty clean job."

  The one stroking his beard looked down at his brother's tattoos and back up to his face. The tattoos were recent, and he wasn't sure he cared for them. He just wasn't sure why.

  "When I signed up for this, I knew we'd be fighting enemies." He gestured to the bombs they built around the pillars. "I just didn't know it would be like this, Virgil."

  Virgil shrugged his shoulders, like he didn't see what the big deal was about the eighty gallons of explosive gel they'd placed in the garage.

  "Demolition was one of the first things he taught us, Eustace. It's part of our core doctrine." Virgil made the holy sign of the arsenal with his hands by bringing his them together and lacing his fingers together, pointing them straight out.

  Eustace did the same, but his face didn't soften.

  "That's not what I mean. I guess I mean that I didn't think our enemies," he pointed up to the concrete ceiling and to the building above it, "would look like this, you know?"

  Virgil turned to his brother and placed his hands on his shoulders almost tenderly. He looked at him like a priest might look on a wayward soul.

  "Brother, this is why you were never chosen to be a cleric. You have the skills, that's for sure. You've got the grit. But you lack the vision. You know who the real enemy is." He pulled up his sleeve once again, baring the illuminated words "No Gods" so colorfully and artfully rendered, Eustace could still easily read them in the dark.

  Eustace bowed his head and nodded. He was a man with doubts he could not articulate, with convictions and fears that could not quite reconcile themselves into outright acceptance or denial. All that left him with was complicity.

  But Virgil seemed unconcerned with what he saw in his brother's eyes. He slapped him on the shoulder and led him out of the garage into the streets above. They darted between shadows with the training of covert military operatives. As soon as they'd reached the city park, they stood beneath a tree and looked back at their target. A vast, gaudy, ugly hotel loomed above the parking garage they'd just fled.

  "How do you catch a god, Eustace?" Virgil asked as he produced a small flat device from his belt. He fiddled with it, turning a key set into it and flipping open a cap, revealing a button. "You bait them with their favorite food: men."

  With a look of pure rapture on his face, Virgil made the hand sign of the arsenal again and pressed the button.

  A moment later there was a cracking, crumping explosion, and a cloud of hot dust and ash began to billow out through the city. The Latigo brothers disappeared into the night, leaving only cinders and the wails of the dying behind them.

  Alice started awake to the blaring of trumpets and drums that constituted Darth Vader's theme music in Star Wars. It was a ring tone she thought appropriate for Clawson, and so she'd set it some weeks before, even though it was against the terms and conditions she'd been given when she received her Motherboxx. After all, the other Meta team members had loaded their Motherboxxes full of television shows and games. All the better, they said, to pass the time in between training and travel. Was is such a big deal she'd loaded her entire music collection onto her own?

  "Hmmmm?" she moaned at the device. She'd meant to say "Hello", but it never quite made it out.

  The holographic screen projected by the Motherboxx was of Clawson's face, though it took her a moment to recognize him. "Alice, we need you to come into the office. Right now."

  She tried to check the time on her device, realized she was looking at the battery icon, and tried again.

  "Dude, it's, like, two-thirty in the morning. Can this wait?"

  "No," he answered coldly. "You need to be here in five minutes. I suggest you get ready."

  Alice tried to wipe the film of night sweat and oil off her face with her hand. It had been nearly a month and a half since she'd passed her test. Alice thought that once she'd proved her worth to Athena, her training would slow to a pace that was, if not easy, then at least less strenuous than her preparation for her examination had been. How wrong she was. It was true that she could now return to her own home every night after training, but Athena seemed to compensate for Alice's newfound freedom with higher expectations in both her physical training and her classroom studies.

  Because of all of this, Alice had come to love sleep with a passion that bordered on religious worship. The bed was holy, and sleep was divine. To be woken before her routine five o'clock alarm—just so she could arrive at work by five-thirty—was a grievous sin.

  "Clawson, are you for real? Is this another drill? If it is, let's just skip it today, okay? I really need to catch up on some sleep."

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Alice had already responded to two drills in the past month. At first, she'd been ecstatic, believing she was about to be sent on her first mission as a metahuman rescuer. But every time she arrived at ORIGIN headquarters only to discover Athena with a stopwatch and a long list of exercises for her to do, she secretly told herself the day would never come when she'd do it for real.

  "It doesn't matter if it's a drill or not. Be here in four and a half minutes," he warned.

  And then he hung up.

  Alice lay staring at her Motherboxx for a full minute before she finally dragged herself out of bed and into some jeans. She didn't bother with a real shirt and just left on her over-sized pajama shirt with Christmas print. After realizing that she could hear the pattering of a cold winter rain outside, she also donned a raincoat.

  A sharp ache stabbed at the muscles in her arms and legs as she stretched and walked toward her window. She'd been working like a dog for Athena in the past few weeks. She'd only had a break from her brutal routine on a day when there'd been a training accident in the Ready Room. Alice had arrived to see a wall demolished and several pieces of construction equipment turned over, as though some kind of explosion had tossed them aside. Alice had been instructed to continue her classroom instruction for two days after, as mentally exhausting as work on the Megaton was physically demanding. Still, it had offered her a chance for her body to recover from the punishment of her workout routine.

  Alice had meant to ask Ethan what had happened in the Ready Room, but he'd been mysteriously absent during that time. A few days later, when he finally appeared in the Ready Room for physical training, she'd forgot to ask him.

  Alice flew her assigned route to The Farm. Athena and Clawson had prescribed her a flight path to take in emergencies, one that would ensure her the least likelihood of being spotted and identified by pedestrians below. Luckily, the rampant tree growth throughout the state made that easier than one might imagine.

  Levi was waiting for her at the front entrance. Had she not been half-asleep and half-frozen from her flight, she might have noticed the look of urgency on his face.

  "Let's go, Alice. You don't want to be late today."

  "I know," she said, stumbling in from the dark like a member of the living dead. "Last time Athena made me squat under the Megaton for an hour. I wanted to die."

  "Good morning, Miss Fillmore," said Yancy brightly as she shambled past.

  "Morning, Yancy," she yawned.

  Why can't everyone treat me like Yancy does? He's always happy to see me.

  Besides the cheerful security man, the whole building seemed empty. Levi escorted her past ghost-quiet hallways and hibernating copy machines. He opened the door to the elevator for her and practically shoved her into it.

  "Hurry, please," he said. "Today is, uh, not like those other days."

  Instead of reporting to the Ready Room, Levi guided Alice through ORIGIN's upper levels towards the parking garage. He nearly had to drag her through the double doors and into the concrete space towards a grouping of black vehicles.

  "Rise and shine," Levi said as he gently nudged her towards the cars. "Get into the lead car. The rest of our team is waiting for you."

  It took her mind a moment to register the word "team", but when it did, the sleep fell away from her eyes like a torn curtain from a window.

  Wait, is this the real thing?

  She dashed to one of the black Suburbans in the parking lot. It was the only one not currently being loaded with bulky, black equipment crates by staff. She pulled open one of the doors and jumped into one of the pilot seats.

  "Top of the mornin'," said a cheerful voice to her right.

  She turned and saw Ethan sitting in the other pilot chair, dressed in flannel PJs and holding a mug of something hot in his hand.

  She turned and saw the seats behind her were occupied by the twins, Priscilla and Joshua sitting shoulder to shoulder. They were dressed in black coveralls and had the distinct no-expression she had come to be familiar with whenever the two were particularly focused.

  But the twins' unreadable facades were broken when Priscilla saw Alice climb in. Her expression turned sour, the sort of look that told Alice exactly what Priscilla thought about her being there. You're about as welcome on this mission as a bag of horse crap, that look seemed to say, but if that was what Priscilla was thinking, she never vocalized it. She just broke away her stare and resumed looking as serious as an undertaker.

  If Ethan weren't in the car, you'd think we were going to a funeral.

  But they weren't. That much was clear. Wherever they were going, it was some place serious. Some place real.

  "What's going on?" Alice asked, suddenly filled with more energy than she knew what to do with.

  Ethan grinned and saluted with his mug to the front passenger's seat. "You might want to ask her," he said.

  The passenger in the front seat turned her head and looked at Alice. It was Athena.

  "You're late," she said, "but not as late as I thought you'd be."

  Alice didn't have time to react before the interior of the vehicle was suddenly filled with an almost unbearable light. Several small projectors came to life and painted a holographic screen in midair in the middle of the vehicle's interior. Alice squinted at it. She quickly realized she was staring at Clawson's face again, yet another live holographic feed.

  "Good morning, Meta Team," he said in a flat, professional drone. "You're on your way to Pyongyang, North Korea."

  The image on the screen changed, and Alice had to rub her eyes as they resisted adjusting to the changing light. She found herself looking at a tremendously ugly building. It looked like it wanted to be a pyramid, a skyscraper, and a cartoon rocket ship at the same time. Alice found herself wishing someone would destroy it.

  "Four hours ago," Clawson continued, "the Ryugyong Hotel collapsed, trapping or killing as many as eleven hundred people inside."

  The image changed again, this time to what Alice assumed was a live feed from a Korean news network. The camera angle was the elevated, slowly rotating point of view from what was undoubtedly a helicopter. Behind a veil of smoke and dust lay a mountain of smoldering concrete and steel. Arcs of white water streamed from fire trucks onto the wreckage. Alice was no firefighting expert, but even she could see the feeble number of emergency vehicles around the corpse of the Ryugyong Hotel were not enough to deal with the calamity on their hands.

  Alice had learned about North Korea while at ORIGIN. She'd only been briefly instructed on world politics, a class she took from Clawson himself. Financially bankrupt, culturally reclusive, and politically abrasive, North Korea seemed like the kind of place that would rather see its people starve before asking for America's help, and yet Alice was on her way there to provide emergency disaster relief.

  "Hey, Clawson," interjected Joshua, who seemed to be thinking the same thing she was, "why go out of our way to help North Korea? Did they ask for American help?"

  "No. As a matter of fact, North Korean political leaders were quite insistent that Americans stay out of this matter. But their emergency response services are too underfunded and undermanned to handle something like this. There are likely hundreds of people still trapped under that rubble, some of them American expatriates, and without our services they will all probably die. You will be responding to this emergency unofficially. You must infiltrate, provide support, and exit without the consent of the North Korean government. Their law enforcement and military are too busy to spend much effort apprehending you, but they might try. Avoid arrest at all costs. Your primary objective is to assist in the rescue of any survivors. You are also to determine the cause of the building's collapse."

  Priscilla and Joshua nodded their heads in understanding. Ethan took another noisy, slurping sip of his cocoa.

  Alice was shaking with anticipation. She'd been trained in several practice scenarios just like this one. Collapsed buildings were as much a part of her education as were forest fires, avalanches, floods, and earthquakes. Athena had even talked of training her in counterterrorism in the near future. But now the training was over. Whatever she'd been trained to do, she'd never had anyone die as a result of her failures in the Ready Room. Now, lives were on the line. Now, people were going to die, and probably dying that very moment, without her help.

  "Clawson," Ethan interrupted, a chocolate mustache clinging to his lip "why not just stay out of this? Why risk being captured by North Koreans to give them help they don't want?"

  Immediately she felt the eyes of every passenger in the vehicle shifting to Ethan. Even Athena had turned in her seat to glare at him.

  Clawson's voice was tinged dark with irritation.

  "Ethan, your focus right now should be on your mission at hand. If you have any more questions, ones that are relevant to the success of your mission, you may direct them to your team leader."

  Athena gave Ethan a look that dared him to say another word to her or anyone. Ethan slumped back into his seat and slurped his mug and shrugged.

  Alice wondered what could possibly bother Ethan so much about this mission. People needed help. Even if they were North Koreans, wasn't their need more important than petty politics?

  Or is this your way of punishing Clawson for treating you like a prisoner?

  "I wish you all the best of luck," said Clawson. "I'll see you all when you get back."