The throaty hummm of the Black Swan's engines was the perfect white noise. It drowned out most of the sound of Alice's wet sobs as the cargo plane trudged eastward, taking Meta Team home again after their business in North Korea was complete.

  Alice's hands gripped the sides of the steel basin in the cramped aircraft bathroom, crying so hard it felt like there would be nothing left inside her when she was through. The things she'd seen at the ruins of the Ryungyong hotel danced in her mind, refusing to be subdued or quieted. Despite her best attempts to think of other things, to conjure up happier memories of her home, her mother, her father before he died, those images of broken bodies and smears of blood sank hooks in her mind and refused to budge.

  How could such horrible things happen to innocent people?

  There was a gentle knock on the door.

  "Alice," Athena called through the door, "I'd like to have a word with you."

  Alice looked in the steel mirror. Her face and hair were dirty and disheveled. Smudges of dirt and dust seemed to age her, adding false wrinkles and graying her hair. Her red eyes were puffy and wet.

  She ran the water in the sink and splashed it onto her face. She watched streaks of gray, dirty water swirl into the drain. She calmed her breathing as best she could, trying again to not feel, to not think. Neither worked.

  She opened the door.

  Athena stood on the other side, looking just as dirty in her dark uniform and equipment harness. Alice saw that Athena had removed all her equipment from the mission, including her combat rig, making her look a lot smaller than she had looked for the last ten hours.

  Alice realized it must be difficult to be a normal human being and to carry all that gear. The comms equipment, the weaponry, the medical kits, all of the things normal ORIGIN operators carried with them into the field had to feel oppressively heavy. The combat rigs helped, of course. Each one made the person wearing it stronger and more agile than ten men, but operating them wasn't effortless. Athena had expended herself, pushed herself to her own limits and beyond in that mission. They all had. Even the combat rig didn't save Priscilla from breaking her leg in the dangerous, shifting mountain of debris.

  So why, if she was built so much stronger on the outside, was Alice the only one reacting this way to things they'd seen as they cleared away the concrete, glass, and steel from the wreckage of the hotel?

  Why am I the only one crying like a child?

  "We should talk," Athena said. "Come with me, please."

  Alice followed Athena to a compartment separate from the one where her team members now sat in plush seats and sipped bottled water. This compartment looked like an office, and held a desk with a computer, switched off, and a couple of chairs.

  As Alice tried to take her seat, the plane lurched, and she remembered again that she hated flying in machines. She slumped into the chair.

  "You've had a hard day today," said Athena. It wasn't a question.

  It had been a hard day. After Alice overcame her shock at the indescribable human suffering she witnessed, after she'd wiped the vomit from her grimy lips and stood from where she'd been huddled and rocking and crying, she only saw more of it. It seemed to Alice that the deeper and deeper she dug into the rubble of the Ryugyong Hotel, the more and more likely she was to find a corpse instead of a survivor. She'd seen so many dead she eventually felt like she'd become one of them, a shambling, broken shell that was once a human being. She knew she wasn't past feeling. No, somewhere deep down, in her soul, she was sure, Alice felt things tearing. But the pain didn't reach the surface. Since Priscilla gave her what Alice was sure was the worst pep talk ever, Alice had been able to avoid having another emotional breakdown. Not until they finally finished.

  Not that a job like that could ever be finished. No matter how much debris she cleared, there was always more. No matter how many cries for help she answered, no matter how many people she clawed out of that hellish place, there were more.

  It wasn't that anything appeared to be finished at all. It was Athena's voice that called Alice and Ethan and the rest of Meta Team off the job.

  "People are starting to ask why we're here," Athena's voice crackled in her earpiece. "And military vehicles are coming this way. It's time for us to leave."

  In all that time digging and scrabbling to pull people from the wreckage, Alice had forgotten she was in a place that did not welcome her.

  The escape plan was simple. Since the Black Swan couldn't land in North Korea without being shot out of the sky, Alice and Priscilla would simply carry the team to the Swan.

  Athena, Ethan, Levi, and the twins gathered on top of the roof where Levi had set up his nest. All equipment gathered and stowed away in black bags, the team tethered itself together with thick, heavy straps and harnesses into two groups. Alice secured herself to a harness and Priscilla to the other. They took off into the sky, now orange in the west and bruised with purple. Even with only one good leg, Priscilla insisted on doing her part of the heavy lifting. She'd somehow bent her combat rig back into shape and used it as a splint to keep her leg straight as she stood on her Silf Jet. It must have been agony.

  No missiles came to knock them out of the evening sky. A few bewildered jets screamed by a few miles away, unsure of what to make of the spectacle of a young woman apparently flying without an aircraft and with a team of black-clad people in tow.

  Not a moment too soon, the Swan appeared, her cargo bay door wide open, and Alice flew into it, careful to maneuver her passengers into the bay without bashing them against the black hull of the jet.

  And only after hours of back-breaking rescue effort, after a white-knuckle escape from an unfriendly military force, after unharnessing herself from her team and excusing herself to the tiny bathroom aboard the Swan, did the numbness go away and the white-hot feelings surface.

  Alice cried so hard she thought she might die from the pain of it. The rest of the team no doubt took notice, she knew, and so here she was with Athena, puffy-eyed and fragile.

  "People who go into this line of work typically have experience with...hardship," Athena said quietly, almost softly. "Most of my staff spent time overseas in combat zones or refugee camps. They don't usually have this kind of emotional difficulty by the time they get to us."

  So that was it. Athena was concerned that she had a na?ve, emotional girl on her hands. She wanted a soldier, Alice realized, because she is a soldier.

  But she got me.

  Alice smirked, a task that was surprisingly painful. She'd never been so exhausted that it hurt to make a facial expression. But she found it darkly funny that she had all the power in the world a person could possibly ask for, and yet she was still a little girl.

  "There's someone I want you to see when we get back," Athena said. She opened a drawer in the desk and rummaged through it, producing a small, white business card. "She's a counselor, and she can help with these kinds of things. Go see her, get your head right, and get back in this."

  She placed the small card face down on the desk in front of Alice. Alice didn't take it. She just stared at it.

  "Why?" Alice asked. It was the first word she'd uttered since emerging from the bathroom, but it felt like her first word in weeks. It rasped out of her mouth like a hot, dry desert wind.

  Athena steepled her fingers together and rested her elbows on the desk. Her gaze was piercing, but somehow gentle. The look on her face confused Alice. It looked completely different from the normal range of facial expressions she was used to seeing on Athena. It looked somewhere between discomfort and sincerity.

  Alice realized that Athena was trying to be sympathetic. As hard as it was to believe, this hard, salty woman, the deputy director and training instructor for ORIGIN, was trying to show sympathy.

  "You were invaluable today. You saved a lot of lives. Many of the people you saved would not have made it if they had to wait for their own rescue workers to reach them.

  "Lives were lost, and that can't be avoided. It's a terrible reality we live in, Alice, that people like us are never called on until after people have been hurt. And it's never pretty to look at. You're not the first person to hurt inside from what you've seen today. But those losses, those deaths, are not your fault. You did good work today, and you saved hundreds of people.

  "I may have been hard on you in the past. I may even have had doubts about you. But not after today. You belong here. I hope you know that."

  Alice gave a brief, hollow thanks and left the office. Somewhere in that aircraft were sleeping compartments, and Alice was determined to find them. Her exhaustion was becoming unbearable, and she wished to fight it no more than she wanted to go back to North Korea.

  She tried to squeeze past someone going the opposite way in the aisle, looked up, and found herself face to face with Priscilla. The redhead was balanced on a pair of crutches, and Alice could see she was already wearing a proper splint bandaged around her leg. Her brother's work, no doubt. But even in her injured state, Alice could still see the hard look in Priscilla's green eyes. Her heart, which already seemed to be at its lowest point, dropped further.

  Here we go, she warned herself.

  Priscilla opened her mouth to say something.

  "I know, Priscilla, I know. If you hadn't been there to babysit me, I would have let more people die," Alice said for her. "It should have been you out there in the rubble."

  Priscilla stared at her for a quiet moment, as though considering carefully what to say. She shifted on her crutches and one good leg.

  "Actually," she said, "I was going to tell you that you did well for your first time. Better than I expected. And I was in the rubble." She looked down at her leg. "And it was you who pulled me out."

  It was Alice's turn to stare. She listened to the redhead's words again in her memory, trying to see if she had understood her right.

  Priscilla reached into her pocket and drew out a chunk of gray concrete the size of a golf ball.

  "Here," she offered, placing it in Alice's hand. "I usually bring something back from missions, but I was more of an observer in this one. Or maybe a victim. You should have it. To remember."

  To remember what?

  Priscilla didn't give her a chance to ask. She turned and continued her way through the bowels of the aircraft with the awkward gait of one who is unused to walking on crutches.

  "Did she give you a hard time?"

  Alice turned and saw Ethan coming the other way. That hallway, it seemed, was a regular place to find Meta Team members. He leaned against the wall with his thick arms crossed over his chest. His uniform was torn in a dozen places where the material had snagged on rebar or given way to friction with massive slabs of concrete. He had that expression on his face again, the same one he had when he took the pillar from her earlier that day: a strange mixture of irritation and concern.

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  When she didn't answer him, he tried again.

  "I said, did she give you a hard time? Priscilla, I mean. I saw you two talking just now."

  Alice shook her head and fiddled with the chunk of concrete in her hand.

  "No," she said, hardly aware of the words coming out of her mouth. "That was nothing. Don't worry about it."

  Ethan looked down at the egg-sized piece of rubble. He frowned. Alice shoved it into her pocket and folded her arms.

  "Well, I can understand why she'd say something. Here at ORIGIN, we have a tradition. It's called, 'let's make sure you know all the stuff you did wrong.'"

  "What?" Alice said, not following.

  "I'm just saying, the day's incomplete without a little constructive criticism. For example: you did fine on all the training. You knew what we were here to do. You knew what was happening to the people here. Why'd you get all...I don't know. You started acting like a deer in headlights. You freaked out. Why?"

  Alice felt like those words were coming from somewhere far away, like she was hearing them through a telephone with poor reception.

  "I don't know," was her soulless reply. "Sorry."

  "Sorry isn't good enough," said Ethan. "I mean, this is what we are, you know? This is what we do, you and I. No one else in the world can do the things we do, and that makes us special. We have to be above all this, so suck it up, okay?"

  When Alice was quiet too long, Ethan's face split into a kidder's grin.

  "Oh, c'mon," he chided, nudging Alice with his fist. "I'm just kidding. You know I was just kidding, right?"

  Alice felt sick. She didn't have the energy to answer him. She turned to leave, to find somewhere quiet where she didn't have to talk to anyone.

  "I'm sorry!" He cried. The smile was gone from his face, replaced by a twisted look of shame and misery. "I didn't mean it. Alice please...I'm sorry."

  She took her leave without answering him. She didn't see Ethan grimace and reach for his head as though to nurse a headache. She just stumbled away in search of a sleeping compartment.

  She found it: a small, almost closet-sized space that held small sleeping niches on one wall. Each bunk was no larger than a coffin, and each one reminded her of the refrigerated compartments where bodies were kept in morgues. She grabbed the handrail to the nearest bunk and lifted herself in.

  The space was cramped, but comfortable. She wormed her way into the featureless sheets and blanket and pulled the pillow over her face. There, in the dark, it was quiet except for the distant drone of the Swan's engines. Her breath quickly warmed the small space, stifling the air. The tight space, the taste of the stale air, made her feel like she was buried alive in that bed.

  The door opened a crack, letting in a growing cone of light. A broad-shouldered, tall silhouette slid inside, feet padding soft on the floor. There was a bench beside a locker in the room, and the figure slumped onto it.

  "I don't know what's wrong with me," he said into the shadows. "I don't know why I said any of that."

  Her eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, making it nearly impossible to see his face, but she was sure she could hear a quiet sobbing.

  Alice acted without thinking. Her legs swung out from the bed and stood and carried her to sit beside him on the bench. Her side pressed against his, and she could feel his warmth through the fabric of their filthy clothing. She softly nudged him, and a moment later he nudged back.

  The memories of that day were with them in that little room. The images of what she'd seen beneath the rubble seemed to linger like stains on her eyes, and before she knew it, she was wringing her hands together, her fingers desperately gripping and twisting and pressing into the meat of her palms, but the tension would not leave.

  She felt a hand in the dark take hers. Strong, dexterous fingers slowly, firmly massaged her hands, her fingers, her thumb.

  "My mom used to do this whenever I was stressed," she mumbled. "But she couldn't press quite hard enough."

  In response, he pressed more firmly still. She knew it was enough pressure to break a grown man's hand, but to her it was a relief.

  Athena strode through the halls of the Black Swan, her back ramrod straight, her sharp, dark eyes taking in the tasks of each crewman, each team member in a moment, ticking off boxes on an eerily accurate checklist in her mind. Each person, each job, each piece of equipment was stored there, and she assessed them all until she was satisfied.

  Only then did she permit herself the luxury of privacy. She excused herself to one of the private offices, locking the door behind her. Once the bolt slid into place with a metal click, she sank to her knees and let out a long, ragged breath. Her body trembled with the strain of that day's hard work, with the pain injuries. Some of them were fresh, a thousand bruises and abrasions and minuscule cuts from digging through a mountain of concrete, broken steel, and shattered glass. Many of her injuries were old, leftovers from previous missions and heavy training sessions. With each passing month, they took longer and longer to heal, compounding on each other like interest on a bad loan.

  She pulled off her body glove until the peeled upper body section dangled at her waist like partially shed skin. The effort was nearly more than she could manage on her own. The office had a mirror in the inner door of a storage locker, and she stumbled to it and stared at her sweat-soaked undershirt, the mottled bruising along her arms, the old scars, and her ever-deepening wrinkles. She took out a med pack and tore open the paper pouches of bandages with her teeth, carefully taping them and cold packs in place. She popped six pills into her mouth and swallowed them dry.

  Only once this familiar ritual was completed did she power on the computer at the desk and key in the command to make contact with ORIGIN headquarters. Pixels of light blossomed in the dark until they formed a face. Clawson's head hovered above Athena's desk, his eyebrows creasing as he took in Athena's condition.

  She was lounging in her chair, a clinking class of ice water in her hand. She winced like she was finally allowing herself the luxury of feeling pain. Clawson seemed to watch her for a time without speaking.

  "We're not as young as we once were," he reminded her. "Maybe we should step back and let the younger ones start taking over." There was tenderness in that voice.

  Athena took a sip from her moisture-beaded glass.

  "I will once they can do the job as well as I can," she answered. "Until then, I'll be with them to make sure the job is done right. Would you do it any differently?"

  Clawson smirked. "Good point." Then his smile faded. "I want you to consider retiring. For both our sakes."

  She seemed to glare at him over the rim of her glass. Ice crunched between her teeth.

  "I'm bored of this topic already," she warned him. "I flew all the way out here for a reason. Let's talk about that."

  Clawson opened his mouth as if to apologize, or perhaps to say something else, tender words that seemed to hang out over the edge of his open lips to fill the empty air between the two of them. But in the end he said nothing and simply nodded his consent.

  Athena pulled a data card the size of her thumb nail from her pocket and loaded it into the base of the holo-projector. The card was from her combat rig, and it contained all of the imagery collected from her scans of the hotel debris.

  "Data package is uploading now." Then she collapsed back into her chair and continued sipping from her glass. She closed her eyes while she waited for Clawson to look over her findings.

  Clawson's head was replaced by a floating schematic of Ryugyong Hotel. The image focused in on the base of the structure, where several pillars stood in a parking garage, each of them highlighted by a glowing halo.

  "This was no accident," Clawson said as the image continued to turn and magnify. "This was a carefully planned attack. Chemical traces of a homemade yet potent explosive are all over the debris of the lower levels, explosives applied to these key points."

  Athena nodded, unsurprised by this analysis. She had seen enough demolished buildings to know a controlled demolition when she saw one.

  "Has North Korean intelligence identified any suspects? Terrorists? Freedom fighters?" She asked.

  "No. No one has claimed credit for the attack. In fact, as far as the public and much of the North Korean government is concerned, this is just an accident. They may try to pin this on some political rivals later, maybe the South Koreans, but they're not even trying to gather evidence."

  Athena knew this tone of voice. "But you have an idea," she probed. "That's why you sent us in, isn't it? Not just because you thought the North Korean government needed a little help. You think this is connected to whoever burned a whole village of Somali pirates."

  Clawson's glowing head nodded.

  "So why not tell Miss Fillmore? The rest of Meta Team knew we were looking for evidence of terrorism. Why leave her out of it?"

  "She's not ready. I don't want our newest recruit jumping at shadows because a clandestine terrorist cell is gathering information on metahumans. This new world is scary enough for her."

  Athena let out a mirthless laugh.

  "Well, maybe you shouldn't have told Ethan either," she commented, tilting her chair back and resting her legs on top of the desk. "I think he's scared now. He's been snapping at his teammates all day, been overly critical of them, especially of Alice. It's a stress reaction. He's afraid, and his fear limits his leadership ability. You shouldn't have involved him in this investigation."

  Clawson sighed. "I wonder if that boy really is cut out to be a team leader."

  Athena's eyebrows raised so high they nearly left her forehead entirely.

  "That's an interesting thing to say about a young man you spent nearly twenty years and billions of government dollars training to be the future team leader of Meta," she observed.

  Clawson said nothing. He simply nodded. His creased forehead seemed twisted in serious thought, and expression Athena knew meant he was bracing himself for a hard decision he'd have to make soon. Athena waited for him to say more, but he seemed to have nothing more to say on the matter at present, so she chose to move on.

  She pointed back to the projection of the building. "So, what are we dealing with here? What do we know about these people?"

  Clawson was silent for a long time.

  "Sir?" Athena prompted.

  "Please don't call me that."

  It was Athena's turn to sigh.

  "Sorry. Habit. Greg, tell me what you're thinking."

  "I think we're up against a tough, motivated, well-trained enemy. These are not just some fanatics in a training camp. They're more than that. A lot more dangerous. Better trained. Careful planners. Patient. They might be as dangerous as we are."

  "Why do you say that?"

  Clawson nodded to the holographic building. "The way they did this..."

  "Yeah? What about it?"

  "It's the way I would have done it."

  Virgil Latigo stalked through the tight corridors of the bunker with his brother trailing behind him. They passed storage lockers of carefully cataloged and stacked ammunition cans, rows of recruits learning how to meticulously clean their weapons, and shrines built from gun parts and combat knives. When they reached the door to the chapel, Virgil signaled for his brother to stay behind.

  "He only wants to see me," explained Virgil.

  The look of hurt on his brother's face was clear, even beneath the tangle of his beard.

  "That's not how we used to do things!" he hissed, careful to keep his voice low so as not to be overheard by the others. "I've been here as long as you! I've been on as many missions! I have just as much a right to see him as you do!"

  Virgil shrugged.

  "He's changing. He's becoming more than he was. You know this. You're changing too. You didn't always use to be so faithless." He disappeared into the chapel before the look of outrage finished crossing his brother's face.

  The inside of the chapel was lit with candles and the glow of a holo-screen. A high-backed chair of dark, hard wood stood before a round table in the center of a circular room. The walls were lined with shrines, benches, and intel boards. The wooden work benches were covered in pieces of wire, mason jars of sharp-smelling chemicals, tools, and ammunition. Wrinkled schematics of a bizarre hotel, one that had until recently stood in North Korea, were pinned to the wall.

  As Virgil entered, he removed his olive-green shirt, exposing the taught muscles of his back, the skin there inked with one word in lovingly elaborate script, "APOTHEOSIS". Virgil knelt and laced his fingers together in the sign of the arsenal.

  "Well, isn't she something special?" hissed a voice in the dark. "When I asked you to bait the gods into the open, I had no idea you'd find something so...interesting."

  The man was tall, very tall, and dressed in nothing but a pair of camouflage pants. Even his feet were bare, and if metal shavings and other sharp detritus from the work benches threatened the soles of his feet, he showed no concern for them. He stroked his gray-streaked beard and sat back on his chair. He stretched his long legs out and crossed them in gentlemanly fashion. His shirtless, naked torso rippled with bulky muscle under time-worn, leathery skin.

  Virgil stood and approached the screen.

  The television showed news footage of a collapsed building and of a young woman seemingly floating across the top of the debris. She stopped here or there, either to lift Volkswagen-sized pieces of rubble away or to draw frantic, dirty people from the wreckage like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

  "A New Hero in Town?" read the headline.

  "Is she a government lapdog, too?" asked Virgil.

  "Oh, I'm sure she is, Cleric," hissed the tall man. "She wasn't when we first saw her in North Carolina, but I think she is now. I think the first time she was just looking for the others. Now, she's one of them. She's just like the other one now, just like the boy." His eyes followed her form across the screen, watching with a sort of wonder.

  "She's just another false god, just like him. But she might be more dangerous than him. She can fly," observed Virgil.

  "Yeah. Isn't that something?" The masked man reached his hand forward and brushed the image of the girl with the tip of his finger. There was nothing physical for him to caress in that image; it was nothing but floating pixels of light. However, there was a faint crackle of static as his finger traced the shape of her jaw, like the rough hiss of skin brushing on skin.

  Virgil watched this gesture and shifted uncomfortably. "Does this change our plans? You promised me a chance at glory. Witnesses."

  The taller man looked at him then, and something in his stare made Virgil shiver.

  He chuckled, a mirthless, cheerless sound. "This doesn't change a bit," he answered. He looked at the wall above the work benches, where another schematic was taped to the crumbling wall, this one depicting the sweeping lines of a passenger jet. "In fact, I couldn't have hoped for anything better. Fear not, Virgil Latigo. Your great and dreadful day is at hand." The man placed a hand on the crown of Virgil's head, which was bowed in reverence. "Carry out your missions. Lure them out. Make them careless. And finally, once they've thought they've won," the man paused and gazed once again at the schematic of the aircraft, "take everything from them."

  Virgil shook with adoration and fear. He knew the road ahead of him was a hard one, that he was challenging forces more powerful than he could ever hope to be. And he knew he would win. He licked his teeth, pressing his tongue against one of his incisors and grinned like a wolf.

  "When the time comes," said the man, "be sure to leave Eustace out of it."

  Virgil nodded.

  "I know he's not ready."

  "It's not that. It's just that I have a purpose for even him."