“Wake up!”

Why was someone hissing that at me? My mind was foggy, unwilling to make the climb out of unconsciousness. The blackness behind my eyelids was so much more comfortable than the bright lights in the RUBE conference room.

That thought woke me up. Prying my eyes open, I discovered that the light in the room was rather flickery, and for some reason there was a face looming above me.

“Sera?” I croaked out the question and then coughed, feeling as though my lungs needed to remember how to breathe properly on their own.

My thoughts were scrambling. I could remember all of the events leading up to the series of explosions perfectly, but that still didn’t explain two things: why had the bombs gone off without me pressing my red button, and what was Sera doing here? Had she been following me?

“There’ll be time for explanations after we get out of here,” Sera said when I opened my mouth to demand answers to these questions. “Right now I’m guessing you don’t want to run into the police after you’ve just been knocked across a room and had a solid wood podium and half a ceiling come down on top of you.”

She leaned down and grasped my arm, probably with the intention of helping me to my feet.

“Get away from me,” I hissed, yanking my arm from her grip and stumbling away. I tripped over a prone body and fell backwards, banging my aching head painfully against the ground. Before Sera could offer her hand again I scrambled to my feet. The world spun counterclockwise lazily and I closed my eyes for a moment to push back the nausea.

When I opened them, Sera’s brown eyes were just a foot from my own, peering at me worriedly. I made a more dignified retreat this time, stepping over the bodies on the floor as I backed away.

The room was a blackened shell of its previous glory. Moaning bodies littered the floor, the wallpaper curled away from the walls in charred strips, and half the ceiling had collapsed. The air was thick with smoke and plaster dust. Despite my pounding head, a feeling of warm satisfaction kindled inside of me. I had done this, all by myself.

“Delphi…” Sera began.

“Don’t even say that name!” I snapped, my reverie broken. Death’s Dancer was my name, not Delphi, never Delphi. She had brought nothing but heartbreak and uncertainty. But I wouldn’t be needing her any longer, not when I had successfully infiltrated the most secure meeting in the city. No matter that the hostage situation hadn’t exactly gone according to plan – I was still the most powerful person in the city, and I was Death’s Dancer through and through.

“I just want to help you.” Sera didn’t try to follow me through the wreckage of the room, but held out her hands towards me, beckoning me to come back to her.

“No, you just want to control me, like everybody else.” I was almost at the door now, the one behind the stage that was mercifully unblocked. “But I won’t let you. I’m the most powerful supervillain in the world! I can make the atoms of the universe dance to my tune, and I will not have anyone telling me what I can and can’t do. Not you, not your precious superhero, not the Rubes, no one!”

With that I yanked open the door and took off running down the hallway. I didn’t know if Sera would follow me, and I didn’t care, or at least I tried not to.

I only made it a few steps before I collapsed against the wall, the world spinning sickeningly around me. Black speckles danced across my vision. An arm wrapped around my waist, hauling me to my feet, and this time I didn’t have the strength to resist.

“Go away,” I muttered to Sera, whose arm was still wrapped firmly around me. Everything had started throbbing and I did not have the energy to break away from her support.

“Don’t be stupid, you can hardly stand,” she retorted.

I would have made a snappy response, but Sera had already started walking down the hallway, dragging me with her, and all my focus was on putting one foot in front of the other. I only looked up when Sera paused to push open a door. It led into a staircase, obviously used by staff and not the hotel’s guests, as it was just a concrete shaft lit by fluorescent lights. No carpets on the stairs in here.

We descended the stairs at a painfully slow pace, and had only made it down to the first floor when pounding footsteps approached from below. I barely had a moment to prepare myself before a security guard came barreling around the corner of the staircase. He stopped dead upon seeing us, frozen on the landing one below ours.

His hand inched towards his radio.

“Hi there,” Sera said cheerfully, giving him a little wave with her free hand. “Don’t mind us! My sister just had a bit too much to drink and we’re going down to get some fresh air.”

The guard blinked, looking confused for a moment, and then his face cleared. “Of course, ladies,” he said, stepping aside and pressing his back up against the wall so we could move past him.

We made our slow way down the stairs, squeezing past him on the landing. I kept expecting him to reach out and grab us, but he remained perfectly still as we passed.

“I hope you feel better soon, miss,” he called after us as we started down the next flight of stairs. Then he was off, running up the stairs towards the room we had left behind.

“What the hell was that?” I asked, once the slam of a door overhead had marked the guard’s exit from the stairwell.

“Mind control, remember?” Sera said, flashing me a cheeky grin. I almost grinned back, before remembering that I was still mad at her for rescuing me when I hadn’t wanted her there.

We stumbled down the last flight of stairs and Sera pushed open the door at the bottom, which deposited us into the alley behind the hotel. Even though all I wanted to do was curl up into a red and black ball of pain, Sera hauled me over to a black car that was parked just a few feet from the door, as though anticipating this exact situation. She pulled a bundle of keys from her pocket and the car beeped open, the sound making me jump nervously.

Sera pulled me forward again, but this time I resisted. “How do I know you aren’t taking me to the police, or your good friend Fireball?” I asked.

Sera rubbed a hand through her hair.

“Look, we can stand here arguing until the police and firefighters all show up, or you can come with me and not spend the rest of your life in jail. You’ll just have to take my word that I’m not going to turn you in.”

I favoured her with a long stare. Now that she mentioned the police, I realized that I had been hearing faint sirens since we stepped outside, and they were definitely getting louder. This was a decision that had to be made quickly, but the throbbing in my head was making it difficult to properly consider my options.

“Fine,” I said at last, and pulled myself from her grip, stumbling forward and yanking open the passenger side door. I practically fell inside, but Sera was too polite to mention that fact as she sat much more gracefully in the driver’s seat.

We pulled out of the alley a few moments before the first police car rounded the corner. I held my breath, but the car roared past us and came to a screeching halt beside the hotel. Letting out a slow breath, so Sera wouldn’t notice my fear, I settled back in my seat and turned my attention to Sera.

“Where are we going?”

“Away from here.” Sera slowed to a halt at a red light and glanced over at me.

“Ha.” It wasn’t so much a laugh as an accusation, fired directly at her guileless face.

Sera took it without blinking. Her hand darted out and grabbed hold of my shoulder, fingernails digging into my thin black bodysuit, pinning me in place.

“No traps, no mind control, no superheroes, and no cops,” she said softly, her gaze intense. “I promise.”

Our eyes were just a few inches apart, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t even think. Sera’s dark brown eyes flashed silver for a split second, and then she released my shoulder, turning her eyes back to the road, and I could move again.

I took a deep, shuddering breath, and turned my head to look out the passenger window, giving myself a moment to recuperate. Was that a taste of her ‘not exactly’ mind control? Or was she actually just being sincere? I wanted to believe her. All my instincts screamed that she was telling the truth, and that scared me more than anything else. I hardened my heart to her words, resolving to keep a sharp lookout. There was something very disconcerting about Sera, and I didn’t want to be caught off guard.

I cleared my throat. “So what’s this all about? How did you know I’d be at that conference, and why’d you pull me from the rubble and bring me here?”

Sera sighed, drumming her fingers against the steering wheel. “How do I start...?”

She dropped her hands and leaned forward, fixing me in place with those mesmerizing eyes. “The truth is; you aren’t the only one here who was trained by RUBE at their Academy in the far North.”

“What? But...how...” I couldn’t have been more surprised if she had told me she had trained with a colony of squirrels on the moon. Closing my foolishly open mouth, I rallied my thoughts and quickly realized that Sera had to be lying. “You can’t be much older than me! I would have seen you there.”

“I started probably a couple years before you, and I think I left just a month or two before your arrival,” Sera replied easily. “I was ten when the Rubes brought me to the school. But I was only there for a few years before they decided that my power was too useful to waste on supervillainy. Instead they took me to their head office in Geneva to work for them.”

“At ten years old you went to work for the Rubes,” I repeated, raising a quizzical eyebrow, which I realized with a twinge of frustration was invisible behind my mask. Not to mention Sera was keeping her eyes firmly on the road.

“No, I was twelve by that time,” she replied, as though that made any difference.

“Okay, sure,” I said. “Assuming for the moment that I believe you, which I don’t, what exactly did you do for the Rubes?”

Sera would not meet my gaze, which I found rather odd given that I was an established murderer and aspiring supervillain. Whatever she had done could not hold a candle to that.

“Nothing huge,” she said at last, staring down at her fingers as they traced patterns in the cracked concrete floor. “I was taken to important meetings. It was my job to convince people who disagreed with the Rubes that they were wrong, and to persuade them to give up their secrets.”

I gaped at her. Subtly manipulating the minds of world leaders? I took back everything I had thought earlier. Now that was supervillainy. “That’s pretty damn huge, if you ask me.”

She shrugged, still not looking at me. “I guess so, but it never seemed like that. It was all just little things: nudging a person this way or that way, nothing big and earth shattering.”

“So you mean to tell me, that for the past six years or so the Rubes have had a super powered girl in their back pocket who can control what everyone thinks, and you didn’t think it was a big deal?” I asked, looking at her in absolute astonishment. I had thought Sera was intelligent – she certainly knew how to outwit me, which was no small feat. How could someone as smart as Sera not see the kind of power she had given the Rubes? No wonder they faced so little opposition.

I already knew that the Rubes had been doing some pretty messed up things, like training supervillains to keep the general public afraid and compliant, even if it meant dozens of innocent citizens suffering casualties. Still, it was one thing for them to do something odd and slightly insane like that, and quite another to undercut the very democratic principles on which most of the world’s government was founded. I had always considered myself an anarchist at heart. However, somewhere deep inside I must have believed in democracy, because I was strangely upset to hear about the Rubes’ machinations.

“Something like that,” Sera replied, her voice the barest whisper, as though it was being dragged from her throat. She turned her face away from me staring up at the tiny window. I wondered what she was seeing – if she was looking at the night sky, or back through the years she had spent working for the Rubes.

I cleared my throat loudly, firmly pushing away such fanciful thoughts. It was all very well to come up with imaginative schemes in my lair, but right now I had to stay focused. “So you’re a supervillain too. Great,” I said sarcastically. “You still haven’t explained why you’ve been messing with my life.”

Sera turned back to face me, her eyes refocusing on mine. A shiver ran up my spine, and I willed my muscles to remain perfectly still so Sera wouldn’t see my discomfort.

“Didn’t it ever strike you as odd that RUBE, the most powerful organization in the world, a force of law, order, and reason, trains supervillains?” she asked.

I shrugged. I had never considered it beyond the brief paragraph we had been taught in history class back at the Academy. “They wanted to control supervillains and regulate our powers; it’s the same concept behind legalizing drugs. If you make it legal then you can put all kinds of restrictions in place to make sure that things only happen the way you want them to.”

“And why don’t they just kill us all?” Sera countered. “It would be a lot easier. Cheaper, too, since they wouldn’t have to train a bunch of kids.”

“Because that’s something a villain would do, not a good guy. You can’t go around killing innocent babies who just happen to have special powers.”

“Yeah, if the babies had special powers to begin with,” Sera muttered.

“What?” I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. Was she implying that we weren’t born with our powers?

“Well, then why don’t they lock us up where we can’t do any harm? Don’t tell me it’s better to subject thousands of even more innocent people to our terrible powers than just lock away the few of us that they manifest in?” Sera spoke nonchalantly, and I peered at her out of the corner of my eye. Why had she changed the subject?

“If we weren’t around, other supervillains would just take our places. Ones who didn’t hold any allegiance towards RUBE, ones with no rules and no honour,” I said firmly, glad to hear my voice didn’t waver. It was one of the fundamental lessons at the Academy, one that I had never once questioned. Now, however...

Sera shook her head, taking her eyes off the road for a few seconds to examine my face. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

I found myself shaking my head, without even realizing what I was replying to. I pinched myself hard to block out Sera’s too-convincing words. “Why, you’ve got a reason I shouldn’t?” I ask defensively, scowling and crossing my arms. I hated having my mind messed with, which it seemed like she was doing despite her promise of ‘no mind control’.

“Oh, do I ever, Delphi,” Sera said in a soft, sad voice that sounded like a thousand angels were weeping at the same time. My eyes welled up with tears and I dashed them angrily away.

“Out with it then,” I snapped. “If you’ve got something I should know, then tell me.”

Silence stretched between us, thick and expectant.

“Are you hungry?”

Of all the things I had thought Sera might say, that was never one of them. “Hungry?” I repeated, stupidly.

“I find it’s always better to hear difficult things if you’ve got a full stomach,” Sera said, sounding entirely earnest, which only made me more suspicious. I stared hard at her face, but she appeared to be entirely focused on the road.

“What, are we just going to pull over and grab a pie?” I asked sarcastically.

“No need,” Sera said. “I’ve got one in the back seat.”

“You’re joking.”

“Take a look.”

I was already twisting in my seat, although the movement made my ribs ache in protest. There, sitting on the back seat, was a white, pie-sized cardboard box. As I grabbed the box, I caught a flash of yellow and red through the rear window. My breath caught in my throat – was that Fireball? But no, a second glance revealed only streetlights and a white truck driving in the opposite direction.

Don’t be so skittish, I reprimanded myself, turning back around to face the front. I set the cardboard box on top of my tutu and lifted the lid.

A warm cloud of steam drifted out of the box, bringing the smell of fresh pastry and cinnamon to my nose. Inside the box was a full pie, perfectly round and flaky, with two paper napkins and a plastic knife and fork tucked in beside it.

“You brought this for me?” I asked, tearing my eyes away to look at Sera. What sort of game was she playing here?

“Yup, it’s all yours.”

“What is this, a picnic or a kidnapping?”

“If you don’t want it...”

“No! I want it, sheesh. I’m just saying, would it kill you to make up your mind?” I peered at the pie, but as far as I could tell it was a perfectly ordinary pastry. It was possible it was poisoned. At the same time, my stomach was growling insistently, reminding me that I’d eaten only a bag of chips all day.

I picked up the fork and dug directly into the pie. The warm apples melted on my tongue, and I closed my eyes for a moment, savouring the sensation. “Alright, out with it,” I mumbled, my mouth still full of pie. “What’s this ‘difficult news’ you’ve got to tell me?”

“RUBE won’t let you live,” Sera said. “They’ve already got plans in place to take you out.”

“You’re lying,” I snapped. “They said I had a month to prove myself.”

“If that’s the case, why did they try to blow you up today?”

“Today?” My stomach clenched, but I took a big bite of pie to give myself time to think about this. I had been assuming that something had just gone wrong with my explosives at the RUBE conference. After all they weren’t designed to be shoved inside solid walls – it was entirely possible that as the wall reformed around them it crushed some vital components. The smug smiles of Mr. Falcus and Ms. Ishida rose up before my eyes. No. It wasn’t possible. How could they possibly have messed with my explosives when I only planted them minutes before walking into the room?

I swallowed my mouthful and stabbed my fork viciously into the pie. “How could you know that?”

“I told you I worked with them – “

“So you, what, helped plan my murder?”

“No!” Sera met my eyes at last, and I was shocked to see that there were tears trickling down her cheeks. “I ran away from RUBE months ago, and adopted a secret identity as Fireball’s sidekick Coal, figuring they wouldn’t think to look for me so close to their organization. But I’ve still got my sources of info at RUBE, and when I found out what they had planned for you, I just had to warn you, even if it meant blowing my cover.”

“But why? Why would you do that? You didn’t even know me.”

“Oh, it just seemed the right thing to do,” Sera said distractedly. Her hands were clenched so tightly around the steering wheel that her knuckles were white. She swallowed visibly before continuing. “Look, there’s one more thing I have to tell you.”

“What?” I snapped, suddenly fed up with Sera’s absurd stories. I couldn’t believe them; I didn’t want to believe them. If even half of what she said was true, it meant that all of my goals and dreams had been built on a foundation of quicksand. “What more could you possibly have to say?”

“It’s about your powers,” Sera said. “They’re...they’re not natural.”

I giggled, regaining a small vestige of my carefully cultivated insanity. “Well of course they’re not natural! Why do you think I’m a supervillain?”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” Sera’s voice was strained, and my mocking laughter died in my throat. “What I’m trying to say is that RUBE gave you your powers. They implanted some sort of device in your brain, in all our brains. I don’t have a clue how it works, but that little device is what gives you, and me, our superpowers.”

“Shut up.”

“Delphi...”

“Shut. Up.”

The fork dropped from my fingers, and I clasped my hands together tightly, as though that simple gesture could hold in my confidence.

There was a faint cracking sound, and I realized that my hands were clenched so tightly I had snapped the plastic fork in half. I dropped it on top of the pie, and shoved the whole box onto the floor of the car. With trembling hands, I unbuckled my seatbelt. “I’m leaving now. Stop the car.”

“What?”

“Either stop the car, or I’ll do it for you.”

“Wait a second, Delphi. What are you planning to do if we stop?” Sera kept driving, arms stiff as she gripped the steering wheel as tightly as she could. That wouldn’t help her.

I smirked, and closed my eyes briefly, wakening the molecules of concrete a dozen metres in front of us. When I opened my eyes, a waist-high wall of asphalt was blocking our process.

Sera slammed on the brakes, bringing us to a screeching halt just inches from the wall. Before she could say another word, I shoved open the car door and stumbled out onto the street. As soon as I was outside, the asphalt oozed back down into a solid road.

“Well, well, well. Looks like I’ve caught myself a supervillain.”