The Golden Age had been considerably less golden by the time Sabra was born, and the streets of Asclepion had symbolized it perfectly—broken and violent. Demigod’s greatest achievement, his masterminded haven from the horrors of the Collapse, fell from grace to become the most isolated city in the world. Her parents’ dream of a new home had evaporated into a reality they couldn’t escape.

  Geneva had felt so much like the opposite. A city that had grown in fits and starts, and the streets were picturesque enough to border on utopian, with not a single streetlight broken or even dim. Men and women walked down the street like they didn’t have to base their routes on which gang was controlling what territory that week. If the world could have healing or peace, then it appeared to have settled on peace.

  Until someone blew up a train station. Waiting outside the restaurant La Volière and thinking of her parents, Sabra frowned. Asclepion may’ve been ridden with Golden Age empowered gangs and the street violence that rippled in their wake, but she’d never heard of someone blowing themselves up. She felt odd and self-conscious, like she shouldn’t have been meeting up with her parents for dinner. But it wasn’t like she’d been affected. Nor that anyone she knew had been.

  Which made it okay, right?

  A taxi pulled up next to her and her parents climbed out—her father holding the door open for her mother. Sometimes, all it took was your father getting shot six times and a quest to find who’d done it to bring a family back together.

  “Sabra!” her father said, and gathered her up into his arms. “It’s so good to see you!”

  Her father had a way of reminding her of a big, friendly bear. He’d never quite regained the weight he’d lost in hospital, but that was probably a good thing in the long run. She lingered in his arms, savoring the warmth, before he released her and she exchanged a smaller, politer hug with her mother.

  “I’m good,” she told them both, her smile coming from the hug and not her words. “Real good. But perhaps we can get out of the cold before we catch up?”

  Her father held open the door for her and her mother. It was warmer inside, humming with activity, and as elaborate as the places in Asclepion they’d never been able to afford. Sabra led the way over to the ma?tre d’.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling. “We had a reservation for four, under Kasembe?”

  The ma?tre d’ looked them over, smiled, and said something in French. She wasn’t sure what to say, and something about the tone was like she was being condescended to. French may have been the language of Geneva, but sometimes it felt a little more pointed than that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t—”

  “Right this way,” the ma?tre d’ said, collecting three menus, and leading the way over to one of the tables. When they’d settled in, her mother watched him go with the cool gaze she reserved for the times Sabra hadn’t met her standards.

  Her father forced a smile—she could see it in the way it didn’t reach his eyes. “Well, how are you picking up the language, Sabra?”

  She grinned, sheepish.

  “Well, Rev translates for me.”

  “I thought you said she’d be here,” her mother said.

  “I said she might be here.”

  It was a subtle jab to the ribs. Revenant hadn’t said she couldn’t make it. Maybe she was stuck in some debriefing somewhere. Maybe she was still being repaired. Maybe she was too ashamed to admit she couldn’t make it. One of the first things Sabra had known about Revenant was that she wasn’t as cool, calm and eternally collected as she claimed to be.

  “She’s a bit of a workaholic,” Sabra continued, which was a lie, and the exact type of lie Revenant had reprimanded her for—but how could she even begin to explain her circumstances when the best word to use was slave?

  “I’m sure we’ll meet her before too long,” her father replied.

  “Speaking of work, papa, how has it been?”

  He sighed. “A few of our familiar faces have gone missing,” he said. “It happens. Between the limited number of beds, and the weather...”

  Sabra nodded. She didn’t know what to say to that. The idea of freezing to death here, in Geneva...

  “Mama, have you heard back from the hospital?”

  “Not as of yet,” she replied. “But perhaps soon. Or perhaps I’ll consider a different industry.”

  It’d be a step down—another step down. She’d held a doctorate in Egypt and held their family together in Asclepion as a nurse. Geneva had no need for either, it appeared. Nor need for an engineer from an obsolete field, but her father had found some meaning in volunteering at one of the emergency shelters. Still, it didn’t pay the bills.

  “We’ll work something out,” Sabra said. “And, if things get worse, well, Rev’s offered to help out.”

  “I’m certain that won’t be necessary,” her mother replied.

  Technically, she already was. The IESA had covered the relocation costs, and Revenant had stepped in about three months later, when finances had started to look tight. So, from her account, to Sabra’s, to her parents. It bothered Sabra. Self-reliance had always been a watchword in the Kasembe household.

  “Perhaps,” her father said. “Please, tell her we thank her for the offer, and that we’re eager to meet her.”

  They turned their attention to the menus then. Nothing looked appetizing; Sabra’s cheeks burned. Bringing her parents to Geneva had seemed the most obvious thing in the world. Now, she was reminded of a plant her father had helped her grow, or tried to. She’d been six years old, had transplanted it from one pot to the next, and it hadn’t grown, but it also hadn’t died—it had just stopped.

  Her father had said it was called transplant shock. Ever the gardener, he’d said it was just the stress of the plant being suddenly transposed to another location, that it wasn’t her fault. But, somehow, telling her that only made it feel all the more like it was.

  In the end, the meal was fine. But over dessert, Sabra wondered if humans could suffer from transplant shock—and if they did, whether her parents still felt the same way about her culpability.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  After Sabra watched her parents take a cab back to their apartment on the other side of Geneva, she did not head home immediately—she had an appointment to keep.

  Mythique was a nightclub in the Paquis district. A friend—the person she was going to meet—had told her that the name had been derived from the French word for pasture. Once, there had been nothing but grass and meadows where she was standing. That must’ve been a long time ago, because Geneva had built up. Perhaps not as dense as Asclepion, but more than it had been before the Collapse.

  Sabra missed the scent of salt in the air, the trace of the sea in her nostrils. It was a silly thing, such a small thing to notice, but it prevented Geneva from feeling like home. A woman in sheer leggings and heels that made her almost as tall as Sabra eyed her as she closed in on Mythique. It left her feeling off-balance. For some reason, some stupid reason, she had assumed the center of the Functioning World wouldn’t have a red-light district.

  There was a line out the door. Mythique always did good business, which was why Sabra had wound up there two weeks into her new life in Geneva. She waited in line and then, when the bouncers checked her ID, went in with a drink coupon and without the cover charge.

  Of all the places she’d been in Geneva, it was Mythique that made her feel like she was home. It was a nightclub that’d been converted from something industrial, something old turned into something new. The music pounded through her as she made for the bar, slipping through the crowd with ease. Not just because she was taller than most (and, to think, there’d been a time when she’d been ashamed of her height), but because she could slide through the gaps in the pattern about as well as she could dodge a fist. At the bar, she traded in her coupon for an Adios, Motherfucker and went off to find the boss.

  He wasn’t out on the main floor; she’d have known if he was, the same way a moth recognized a searchlight. So, she headed up the metal steps, along the walkway, and to the door on the far side of the club. The guards had the door open before she was halfway there, and nodded her through.

  Down a short hallway and around a corner, she came to a room that she wasn’t sure whether to call an office or a lounge. Julian sat at his desk, writing something, and he hummed with incandescence—there was no other way for Sabra to consider it. The man glowed so much that he was a human-shaped prism of radiance in a three-piece suit, and yet she could look at him without being blinded.

  Blueshift said, over and over, that the empowered did not fit within the standard model of physics. That to grasp her true potential, she had to let her mind loose from that frame of reference. She didn’t know what he meant, but had told him she surely had a head start on that because she’d failed high school physics.

  “Knock knock,” Sabra said.

  Julian looked up, and from the glowing shape that was his face, said, “Well, if it isn’t my favorite toreador!” She could see, vaguely, the movement of his jaw but no trace of his lips. “Come on in, make yourself at home.”

  She did, and sipped from her bright blue drink as he finished whatever it was he was doing. The human light bulb and the bullfighter. That was how they had met, when she’d come into Mythique one evening and bumped into the owner at the bar. She’d laughed and called him the best-dressed light bulb she’d ever seen. And he’d laughed and wanted to know just how she, some rookie from Asclepion, had brought the great Taurine down to earth—literally.

  Julian’s business was in the entertainment industry, but more than that, it was information. Back in the Golden Age, he’d been a full-on supervillain: Illuminant. He’d been into it more for the celebrity and the money and the big speeches, which was probably why the IESA let him run a nightclub in downtown Geneva.

  Blueshift had another idea, however. That Illuminant was simply strong enough to dictate terms, and diplomatic enough to be satisfied with a simple life of debauchery rather than a complex one of atrocity.

  But anomalous exothermic reactions, he had said, were only associated with the most potent of the empowered.

  And here she was, chatting with him like he was an old friend.

  Julian pushed his chair back and rose to his feet, pulling something from a drawer in his desk. “My apologies, Sabs, but you wouldn’t believe the importance some people place in a handwritten letter, even in this day and age!” He underarmed the item to her, a little bag packed with vials. “Here you are.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Now, if I may possibly overstep: I don’t think you should be taking these.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t be selling them to me.”

  “No transaction has taken place, but point taken.”

  The nightmares were getting worse. Had been getting worse. Military-grade stims were her solution to the nightly front-row seat to the apocalypse—her apocalypse.

  “That said,” Julian continued, “I do have a favor to ask.”

  There was something in those words. A subtle tremor in the air, an awareness of currents. Déjà vu. “Okay,” Sabra said, focusing on the now. “Shoot.”

  “I imagine you’ve heard about the incident at Cornavin station.”

  “Incident? How could I not? Eighty-three people were killed.”

  Julian nodded. “And with any luck, Sabsie, that number won’t be revised higher.”

  “What’ve I said about calling me that? I don’t see how this is connected to me.”

  Julian sat down at the other end of the couch, arm resting high. “It’s connected to you because you lack any connection to it.”

  “What're you talking about, man?”

  “Eighty-three people are dead. A hub of the Swiss railway network has been shut down for two to three months, at least. The nation is in shock—a suicide bomber, here, in Geneva? It’s a historic first after almost half a century of dodging historic firsts.”

  Sabra said, “I don’t need the whole speech,” but Julian kept going—and it was, to his credit, delivered well.

  “Our diligent gendarmerie are doing great work, but I know one thing they are keeping secret for now: the identity of the bomber. His name was Andreas Adams, and he was a member of the homeless community.”

  “Yeah? Then how’d he get enough explosives to blow up a train station?”

  Julian raised a finger.

  “That,” he said, “is what I’m concerned about. I also know that he is not the only person to go missing from the compassionate shelters around the city.”

  Hadn’t her father said something about that? But he’d thought it was more like exposure...

  “Why would someone turn someone like that into a living bomb?” Her fingers clenched around her glass. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Precisely, Sabs. It’s also not the only bit of recent news that has drawn my attention. There’s been a significant influx of people-of-note into Geneva over the past three or four months. People who have been taking care not to be noticed. American PMCs, foreign supervillains.”

  “Me,” Sabra put in. Julian laughed.

  “Which brings me to you, yes. I believe something is happening within this city. Something I would like to get ahead of before the authorities do. If necessary, I would like to shut it down before the IESA gets involved.”

  “You think they will?”

  “If they don’t, I’ll paint myself in musou black and go into another line of work.”

  “And cost us all your dazzling radiance? Please.” She took a long drink from her glass, finished it off. “But I know how these things go, Julian. I know you must have your own people. Why me? These—” She waggled the bag, “—have never come with strings before.”

  “Because you’re new in town, Defiant,” he said. “Because you have just enough of reputation that you can lean on it without being known for it. You can ask around without letting people know that I’m involved. I’d rather avoid the possibility of a Golden Age brawl in the middle of Geneva.”

  His words rippled through the world. She was there, in the streets, and ash was falling around her. Sirens were screaming, and bodies lay broken in the streets. Her hands—no, her gauntlets, she was in her armor—were coated with blood, and her breathing came in a seething, terrifying rush—

  “Sabra?”

  “Sorry,” she said, and the room was normal again. “It’s just a lot to take in. What do you need me to do? I’m not going to kill anyone.” She wondered how much he really knew of her, and the dark irony of that statement, the unspoken again.

  Julian laughed. “Sabs! I’d never ask for such a thing. All I want is information. If we find out who is behind it then, yes, perhaps I’ll dust off the old uniform and we can play superhero. But I have to know what is happening, and who is behind it.”

  “And if I get into trouble?”

  “Then you’ll have my full assistance. Besides, you’re the one who mentioned your custom-rigged combat suit.”

  Sabra nodded. And it had been some time since she’d taken her baby out for a spin. “And if I say no?”

  Julian tilted his head in a way that Sabra was pretty sure it meant he was smiling. Pretty sure.

  “Honestly,” he said, “I didn’t think that far ahead.”

  Sabra swirled her glass, the last dregs of blue booze spinning about. It was what people did when they were thinking about something, or pretending to think about something. Her skin prickled—causality swept through the room like a riptide—and she had a distinct thought: well, if Rev can have secret missions, so can I.

  “Alright,” Sabra said. “I’ve got some gaps in my schedule, anyway. Let’s talk payment.”