“It appears I find myself at your mercy again,” she had said.

It sounded like all of the fight had been knocked out of her. It was not a way I had seen Karu, even when she’d woken up in The Bunker. Maybe because this time she wasn’t afraid of what I’d do, or done?

“Seems so.” I wanted to mock her, but she’d somehow refrained from calling me a snake or invertebrate, so I, too, could be civil.

She laughed. Not the laugh she’d put on before the fight, but an honest, genuine laugh, tinged with sadness. “Not a good habit for a bounty hunter to fall into. I am weak, and weakness is one thing I cannot abide.”

My instinct was to console her, but…I owed this woman less than nothing. Another ass-kicking at the very least. But the Karu sitting in front of me seemed a very different person than the one who had hovered after me so menacingly before.

“Why are you so…calm?” I asked, tentatively. This, too, made her laugh. She had a rich, full-bodied laugh. She really gave 100% to whatever it was she did. It suited her.

“Why not? There is probably no safer place in the world than near you, Exhuman. Were a beast or bandit to appear while I was unconscious, would you not fight to protect my body?”

“I guess I would.”

“And with more force and efficacy than any officer of the law,” she sighed and looked up. Her green eyes were piercing. “I have always seen myself as a defender of goodness, a sword of God, and strong. Yet here I sit, whining like some brat at an enemy who has proven I am none of those things. I am just a…paltry amusement for the divine. Before He decides I am of no use and reclaims me.”

“Or maybe,” I said slowly, hoping to avoid the entire accusation-of-lies loop we’d had before the fight. “He’s trying to tell you I’m not such a bad guy, and you don’t need to fight me.”

She just stared at me quietly, her green eyes piercing. I felt like if Saga could read my mind, then Karu’s eyes could peer right down into my soul. In a way, it was even more threatening than the glowing red slits on her visor.

Eventually she spoke. “I am no fool, Exhuman.”

“I know.”

“I was not done. Do not make this confession more difficult than it needs to be.” She waited for me to reply, but I stayed silent, which was apparently the right answer. “I know you are not the absolute evil. You irritate me, infuriate me, defeat me, yet you strike with conviction and show diligence, patience, kindness, temperance, charity…a litany of virtues.”

She looked up at the heavens and the blue of the sky mixed with the green in her eyes. “And if you are a being of virtue, what does that make me? I thought at first I must simply be wrong about your moral nature, but then you spared me. Today, I thought to simply bury you and forget any moral qualms I may have accrued, but you have foiled me in this as well.”

She sighed and her eyes went back to me. “Which leaves me with only the option of sorting through my actions and discovering my missteps.”

“Never a fun thing to do,” I consoled. She just smiled sadly in response and I sat awkwardly. “You know, not to insult you, by dragging your life down to the level metaphor of a football game–“

“You should speak plainly. You need not speak politically to spare my feelings. I have strength enough for that, at least.” Speak plainly. From a girl who tells me ‘I need not speak so‘.

“Um, okay. Well, after football games, win or lose, we’d review the tapes.”

“Tapes?”

“It’s an old phrase, I don’t actually know what it used to mean. But ‘review the tapes’ means to watch a recording of our play. So we’d all sit down as a team and review. And y’know, even in games we won, where I thought I did great, I’d see all the things I could have done better. Even in great plays, I saw how sometimes I had gotten lucky, or hesitated when I should have moved, or acted when I should have thought.”

“I understand your meaning. You mean to say that even following the right path, upon retrospect and scrutiny, I may find that along the way I have erred.”

“I don’t think I’d say it in those words, ever. But sure. But what I was going to say was, the most important thing to review was to check our fundamentals. If I’m doing a bad movement when throwing, or not tucking in when getting hit, or have a bad habit or a blind spot, you can see it on the tapes and address it.”

“We could go over high-level play all day and maybe someday in the future, another play might happen which is kinda the same and maybe I’ll remember and do something different. And in that other play, maybe doing something different is wrong. It’s not really useful. But catching a fundamental issue, that changes how you play the game in some small way. It better prepares you for any situation down the road, it makes you a better player, just in general.”

“And in this metaphor, the game is life. And reviewing my fundamentals, those would be…?”

“Those would be the assumptions you base everything else off of, I guess. Stuff like ‘All Exhumans always lie.’ Because if you can realize that assumption is wrong, everything else might make more sense because you’ve just come closer to the truth, I guess.”

“But,” I warned, “there’s a problem a lot of players have. Especially ones who have been playing for a long time.”

“Which is?” Karu leaned forward, her eyes smoldering with intensity.

“If you play a lot with bad form, it gets ingrained into you. If you learned how to throw wrong at the start and never improved it, it’s the only way you can throw. Oftentimes, trying to correct your form and throw like you’re supposed to just makes you worse. At that point, you have the choice of just doing it wrong because that’s the way you’ve always done it and it’s comfortable to you, or throwing away everything and trying to start over.”

I swallowed hard as the implications of my metaphor hit me, too. “Not many people could start over. It wasn’t worth it for them, took away everything they’d been playing for in the first place to try.”

Karu relaxed and leaned back again, seated in a kneeling posture with her feet under her and her eyes downcast again. I could see she had a lot going on in her mind right now. Curious though I was, I didn’t want to provoke her when we may be very close to a breakthrough.

After what felt like most of an hour, she shifted, pulling my attention from my own thoughts. She placed both hands flat on the grass and prostrated herself before me.

“Exhuman, I have much to think about and discover about myself, and am genuinely grateful for your advice, as much as it may or may not apply,” she said, her voice clear and strong, seeming to come from the earth, from her position. I sat, politely confused by her sudden outburst, and more than a little embarrassed.

“I know not where my final thoughts will land, but I do know this: I must ask for your forgiveness in behaving so rudely towards you.” She sat up and fixed me with the most serious stare I’d yet received. “I am a trained professional. To goad you, to mock you, before your death…attempted…death, these are not the actions of a virtuous and just killer.”

“Are you serious?”

“I have seen my transgression and know my sin. I bare apologies to you, whom I have wronged.”

“You are seriously apologizing to me.”

“I am.”

“And you’re still not sure if you’re going to try to kill me again or not?”

“I am.”

“And you don’t see any…hypocrisy in this?”

“I do not.”

I didn’t know how to reply. What did people normally say when others apologized? ‘It’s okay?’ ‘I forgive you?’ None of that seemed applicable to what was going on here.

“Karu, I’ve had an epiphany of my own over here,” I said. “I want you to carefully understand the enormity of what I’m going to tell you.”

“I shall hear your words.” She sat at rapt attention.

“I am a guy who can shoot lightning out of his hands. I live in a bunker in the middle of a ruined facility, with a roommate who is half the time a loving, doting dream-wife, and the other half the time a mentally unstable little girl. I have been outcast by society because one day I woke up and your God decided I should be a little more lightning-ey.”

“My God did–“

“I mine quartz, pick mushrooms, and fish. I make friends with the weirdest damn people, and am strongly considering a fitness program because I miss playing football, even though I’m almost starving a quarter of the time. Last week, I chopped down a tree, dissimilated it into its component parts, and ate molecularly-reassembled tree for a day. It was extremely awful. “

I paused to let it all sink in. She continued to stare at me, waiting for me to finish.

“And Karu, you…you are so, so, so much more weird than I am.”

She continued to stare for another few moments before a snort escaped her, and she began to laugh.

“I shall endeavor to take that as a compliment, I suppose.”

“Take it however you want, it’s true.”

“I shall. I thank you for your perspective, Exhuman. It will be another thing I consider while reviewing my life’s decisions.” She rose and turned to leave, the spindly arms of her jetpack emerging.

“Good luck with that. I hope you like what you find, and…might be personally invested in hoping you realize all Exhumans aren’t so bad. Oh, and hey,” I realized I had her visor at my feet this entire time and threw it to her. “Need that for the trip back, yeah?”

She smiled and donned the visor, her green eyes vanishing behind red lenses. “‘Til next we meet.” She lifted into the air, and with a roar and trail of blue plasma, was gone over the treetops.

“Well, at least AEGIS doesn’t have to add an unexpected guest to the list of her current worries,” I mused. I cast my line back into the water and sat down on the shore.