Chapter Text
The lockers at Winslow smelled like rust and old sweat. Taylor kept her breathing steady as Sophia's palm connected with her shoulder and drove her backward. The impact barely registered, like a moth landing on a brick, but Taylor let her body fold into the expected stumble, shoulders hitting metal with a hollow bang she carefully calibrated to sound painful.
Not too hard. Last time she'd left a dent and had to stuff a jacket over it before anyone noticed.
"Watch where you're walking, Hebert."
Taylor kept her eyes down. Counted floor tiles. Sophia's sneakers squeaked as she turned away, already bored. The real problem was standing ten feet back, arms crossed, green eyes burning holes through Taylor's skull.
Emma Barnes looked ready to commit murder. Which, fair. Taylor glanced at the expensive auburn wig that sat just slightly too far forward on Emma's head, its part not quite matching where her natural hairline used to be.
Used to be.
"You think this is funny?" Emma's voice carried that particular pitch, the one that gathered attention from every kid in the hallway like iron filings to a magnet. "You think I don't know what you did?"
Taylor opened her mouth. Closed it. What was she supposed to say? Sorry I knocked a beaker of industrial-strength depilatory solution onto your head during third-period chemistry? Because that was technically accurate. Also technically premeditated. Also technically—
Okay, she'd planned it. Sort of. The original idea had been simple: bump Emma's lab station, knock over her titration, tank her grade on the midterm project. Sweet, subtle, untraceable revenge for eighteen months of torment. A surgical strike. She'd mapped Emma's class schedule, timed her bathroom break to coincide with the passing period, slipped through the chem lab's back door—
She had not planned on Mrs. Patterson's advanced section working with chemical hair remover as part of some cosmetics-industry unit. She had not planned on catching her hip against the wrong table, sending the wrong beaker sailing in a perfect arc, landing with a wet splash across the crown of Emma's perfect red hair.
The scream still haunted her. Not in a guilty way. More in a she-recorded-it-on-her-phone-and-watched-it-eleven-times-that-night way.
Emma stepped closer now. The hallway had gone theater-quiet, kids sensing blood in the water.
"My hair won't grow back for months. Months, Taylor."
"I don't know what you're talking about." Taylor hugged her backpack straps. "I wasn't even in that class."
"Madison saw you leaving through the back door."
Shit. Madison. Taylor hadn't accounted for Madison.
"She's mistaken."
"You are dead." Emma's composure fractured for just a second, real hurt flickering underneath the rage, raw and wounded. Then the mask slammed back down. "You have no idea what's coming for you."
Emma turned on her heel and stalked off, Sophia falling into step beside her. The hallway crowd parted like the Red Sea. Taylor watched them go and felt the complicated stew of emotions she always felt these days—guilt, satisfaction, and something electric underneath both.
She flexed her fingers inside her jacket pocket. The fabric didn't tear. She was getting better at controlling that.
Three weeks since the accident, the real accident, not the Emma thing. Three weeks since she'd woken up hovering six inches above her mattress, her alarm clock crushed into a metal pancake under her grip. Three weeks since she'd stared at her bathroom mirror and watched red light bloom behind her irises like sunrise through stained glass.
She'd spent two full days on PHO after that, cross-referencing every known Alexandria package on record. The strength was right. The flight was right. The laser vision, that narrowed things considerably. Alexandria didn't have laser vision. Legend's energy projection worked differently.
But Power Girl had.
Taylor ducked into the girls' bathroom, checked the stalls, locked the main door. She pulled out her phone and opened her bookmarked folder, news articles, forum archives, blurry photographs from fifteen years ago. A woman in white, cape snapping in wind that couldn't touch her, lifting a collapsed overpass off a school bus on the I-95. The resolution was garbage. Every photo of Power Girl was garbage, like the camera itself flinched.
Most people lumped her in with Alexandria now. Just another Brute/Mover flying brick, overshadowed by the Protectorate's golden girl. But they were wrong. Taylor had watched every piece of footage that existed, read every eyewitness account. Power Girl was faster. Power Girl was stronger. Power Girl caught missiles and bent them into pretzels and grinned while doing it.
And then she vanished.
Fifteen years. No body. No retirement announcement. No sighting. The PRT's official position was "presumed deceased." PHO's consensus ranged from "killed by an Endbringer" to "secretly Alexandria all along."
Taylor didn't buy any of it. You didn't get to be that powerful and just die. Not without leaving a mark. Not without someone finding something.
She stared at the grainy photograph. White costume, blonde hair, a smile that looked like it could stop a war.
"Where'd you go?" Taylor whispered.
Her phone buzzed. Text from Mom. Pick up milk on the way home. And DON'T forget this time.
Taylor rolled her eyes, pocketed the phone, and unlocked the bathroom door.
Taylor dropped the gallon of two-percent on the kitchen counter with a deliberate thud.
"Milk. As requested. Unbroken. Unexpired. You're welcome."
Annette Hebert didn't look up from the stack of papers spread across the dining table, red pen moving in sharp, decisive slashes across what looked like undergraduate essays. Her reading glasses sat low on her nose. Her dark hair was twisted into a knot held together by what appeared to be a chopstick.
"It's one-percent."
Taylor looked at the jug. Looked back at her mother. "It's milk."
"It's two-percent. Which is not what I asked for."
"The difference is literally one percent."
"The difference is that I asked for a specific thing and you brought me a different thing." Annette circled something on a paper with enough force to dent the table. "This is why I write lists."
"You didn't write a list. You sent a four-word text."
"The text was the list."
Taylor opened her mouth, closed it, grabbed the milk, and shoved it into the fridge next to three containers of leftover soup that were developing their own ecosystems. She loved her mother. She did. She also understood, on a deep and molecular level, why some animals ate their young.
She pulled a granola bar from the cupboard and dropped into the chair across from Annette. The dining table hadn't been used for actual dining in roughly six years. It was a grading station, a research desk, a repository for academic journals and coffee mugs in various stages of growing penicillin.
"How was school?"
"Fine."
"Learn anything?"
"Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
Annette's pen stopped. She looked up over her glasses, that particular look she'd perfected, the one that said I know you're being a smartass and I'm deciding whether to engage.
"Mitochondria are. Plural."
"See, I did learn something."
Annette went back to her grading. Taylor chewed her granola bar and watched her mother work. The kitchen light caught the angles of her face, the jaw that Taylor had inherited, the stubborn set to her mouth that Taylor had also inherited, much to both their detriment.
On the fridge behind Annette, held up by a magnet from the Brockton Bay Aquarium, was the photograph. The only one they displayed. Daniel Hebert, young and lanky and smiling at something off-camera, squinting against the sun on what looked like a dock. Taylor had studied that photo so many times she could reproduce it from memory, the exact shade of his sandy hair, the way his shirt collar was popped wrong on one side, the laugh lines around his eyes.
He'd died when she was fourteen months old. Car accident. Black ice on the highway, a truck that couldn't stop in time. Annette never talked about it. Taylor had learned early that pushing got her nowhere, just a tightening around her mother's eyes and a change of subject so abrupt it left conversational whiplash.
She wondered sometimes. What the house would sound like with a third voice in it. Whether he'd have been the buffer between them, the translator who could turn Annette's bluntness into something softer and Taylor's stubbornness into something her mother could hear. Whether the walls would feel less like they were closing in, year by year, as Annette's edges got sharper and Taylor's patience wore thinner.
It had been enough, though. Just the two of them. It was enough. Annette's tenure at the university was enough to keep the house, to keep Taylor fed and clothed, to keep the lights on. She showed up to every parent-teacher conference with a pen and a list of questions that made educators sweat. She left sticky notes on Taylor's bathroom mirror when she had early morning lectures. Little reminders. Eat breakfast. Take your vitamins. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
That last one appeared with suspicious frequency during the worst months of Emma's campaign.
She'd considered it. Telling her. The words had formed in her mouth a dozen times over the past three weeks. Mom, something happened. Mom, I can fly. Mom, I can see through walls and melt steel with my eyes and I'm pretty sure I could bench-press the house.
But she could see exactly how that conversation would go. Annette would get quiet first. Then she'd get practical. Then she'd get angry, not at Taylor but at the situation, at the danger, at another thing she couldn't control. And control was the hill Annette Hebert would die on every single time.
It would become a fight. Everything became a fight these days.
So Taylor kept her mouth shut and chewed her granola bar and thought about the weekend instead.
She had the design sketched in the notebook under her mattress. Blue and red, because the classics were classics for a reason. A cape, because Power Girl wore a cape and Taylor wasn't about to disrespect the legacy. She'd found a sewing pattern online and ordered fabric with her saved lunch money, shipped to a PO box she'd set up with creative use of her school ID.
She'd practiced at night. Three AM flights over the bay, so high the city looked like a circuit board. Laser vision against the rocks at the base of the ship graveyard, where nobody went and the scorch marks blended with the rust. She'd caught a falling seagull once, on reflex, and felt something slot into place inside her chest like a key turning.
Saturday. This Saturday. Her first patrol.
She even had a name picked out. Had written it in block letters on the first page of her notebook, traced it so many times the ink grooved the paper.
Supergirl.
The stairs creaked under Taylor's feet. Each step landed harder than the last, a deliberate percussion of teenage displeasure that rattled the framed photos on the stairwell wall. The door to her room didn't slam. It thunked shut with the particular restraint of someone who wanted to slam it but knew the lecture that would follow wasn't worth the satisfaction.
Annette set her red pen down and pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose.
She shouldn't have snapped about the milk. It was milk. Two percent. Not a crisis. Not a referendum on Taylor's character or her ability to follow simple instructions. But the words had come out barbed, the way they always did now, wrapped in that tone she could hear from the outside but couldn't seem to stop from the inside.
The kitchen was quiet. The refrigerator hummed its one steady note. Danny's photograph smiled at her from the fridge door, frozen in that single perfect afternoon on the docks, three months before the truck, before the ice, before everything split into before and after.
She'd made him a promise. Sitting in a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic and grief, holding his hand while machines beeped their countdown. Taylor had been in the nursery down the hall, fourteen months old, sleeping through the worst night of her life without knowing it.
I'll keep her safe. I'll raise her right. I won't let her become a casualty.
Like he had.
Because Danny Hebert hadn't died on black ice. That was the story for the police report, for the insurance company, for the neighbors who brought casseroles and sympathy cards. Danny Hebert had died because Power Girl had enemies, and one of them had figured out where she lived.
The truck driver had been paid. The "accident" had been engineered. And Danny, ordinary, wonderful, stubborn Danny who'd married a woman who could punch through concrete and loved her anyway, had died in a crumpled Honda Civic while his wife was three states away stopping a building collapse.
Annette had retired the cape that same week. Buried it in a lead-lined box in the basement, next to the boots and the leotard and every piece of the life that had gotten her husband killed. Power Girl vanished from the public eye. The Protectorate searched for six months, then a year, then quietly reclassified her as presumed dead. The conspiracy theorists built their shrines online. The cape geeks argued about her power classification on PHO forums. And Annette Hebert took a teaching position at Brockton Bay University and white-knuckled her way through fifteen years of civilian life.
Just another couple of years. That was the math she ran every morning when she woke up and every night when she crawled into bed. Taylor would graduate. Taylor would go to college, somewhere far from Brockton Bay, somewhere safe. And then the box in the basement could come open. Power Girl could fly again.
The itch was constant. Had been constant since the first week. A low-grade burn under her skin, a buzzing in her teeth, a restless energy that coiled tighter with each passing year. She understood the theory. Parahumans weren't meant to sit idle. The conflict drive, the researchers called it, that invisible hand on the back of every cape pushing them toward confrontation, toward use. Suppressing it didn't make it go away. It just redirected.
Into snapping at her daughter over milk.
Into eviscerating a sophomore's thesis so thoroughly the kid had cried in her office for twenty minutes.
Into the reputation she'd built in the English department as someone you didn't cross, didn't question, didn't approach before she'd had her coffee. Her colleagues walked wide arcs around her in the hallways. Her student evaluations contained phrases like "brilliant but terrifying" and "would rather face a Brockton Bay villain than ask her for an extension."
She wasn't proud of it. She was aware of it, which was almost worse. Watching herself from the outside, cataloging each sharp word and cutting remark, knowing the source and being powerless to stop it. The irony wasn't lost on her. A woman who could lift a battleship, helpless against her own neurochemistry.
She'd make it up to Taylor. Tomorrow. Pancakes, maybe. Taylor still liked pancakes, or at least she had last year. The year before. At some point there had been a Saturday morning routine involving pancakes and terrible movies and Taylor's feet in her lap on the couch, and Annette couldn't pinpoint exactly when that had stopped. It had eroded gradually, like the shoreline, each small retreat unnoticeable until you looked up and found the water a hundred yards from where it used to be.
She picked up her pen. The stack of freshman essays sat in front of her, each one a small crime against grammar. She worked through them with mechanical efficiency, her handwriting growing smaller and more precise as the hour crept past ten, then eleven. The house settled around her, popping and groaning in the November cold. Upstairs, Taylor's light went off at ten-thirty. Early for her. Either tired or making a point.
Annette finished the last essay at midnight. She'd given two B-pluses, six C's, and four D's. Generous, by her recent standards. She stacked the papers, capped her pen, and pushed back from the table.
The stairs were quieter under her feet. She knew which ones creaked and avoided them by habit, a holdover from years of coming home at odd hours, back when coming home meant peeling off a cape instead of grading papers. She paused outside Taylor's door. No light from the gap underneath. No sound. The steady rhythm of breathing, just barely audible through the wood, so faint that no ordinary person could have heard it.
But Annette Hebert was not an ordinary person.
Her bedroom was at the end of the hall. Small, sparse. A queen bed that Danny had picked out, the one indulgence she hadn't been able to replace. His pillow still sat on the left side, though it had been washed so many times his scent was nothing but a memory of a memory. A nightstand with a reading lamp and a dog-eared copy of Middlemarch she'd been working through for three months. A closet with clothes that could generously be described as "functional."
She went through the routine. Teeth brushed. Face washed. Hair pulled back into a loose twist. Then came the part of the evening she both dreaded and relished.
The compression bra was a feat of engineering. She'd designed it herself using materials sourced through channels that would have raised eyebrows if anyone had thought to trace the purchases. Three layers of reinforced polymer weave sandwiching a carbon-fiber lattice, with titanium micro-clasps rated for several tons of tensile stress. It looked, from the outside, like a slightly bulky sports bra. It felt like wearing a straightjacket around her chest for sixteen hours a day.
She unhooked the first clasp. Then the second. Then the third, fourth, fifth, working down the row with practiced fingers.
The bra came off and Annette exhaled.
A stupid quirk of her powers. That's what she called it, because the alternative was screaming into a pillow. Her strength, her invulnerability, her flight, all of those had stabilized years ago. But whatever biological process governed her physiology had apparently decided that one particular area needed to keep developing. Gradually. Relentlessly. Year after year, with no sign of stopping.
It would have raised questions. The kind of questions that led to cape investigations and identity exposure and everything she'd spent fifteen years avoiding. So she'd built the bra, and she wore the bra, and she compressed herself into a silhouette that wouldn't attract the wrong kind of attention.
She was grateful, at least, for the invulnerability. An ordinary woman wearing that contraption for any length of time would have been in agony. For Annette it was merely uncomfortable, in the way that wearing a hat two sizes too small was uncomfortable. Noticeable. Annoying. Not painful. Just one more thing she endured because the alternative was worse.
She pulled on a sleep shirt and caught her reflection in the dresser mirror. Without the bra, the difference was significant. She turned away from the mirror and climbed into bed.
The left pillow sat undisturbed beside her.
Two more years. Taylor would graduate, leave for college, build a life somewhere beyond the blast radius of whatever Power Girl's return would inevitably attract.
Two more years and the box in the basement could open.
Annette reached over, turned off the lamp, and lay in the dark listening to her daughter breathe through the wall.
Dennis hated Saturdays.
He'd said it before and he'd say it again. Saturdays were a cosmic punishment for whatever he'd done in a past life. Weekday patrols had a rhythm to them. Predictable. You walked your route, waved at civilians, stopped the occasional purse-snatcher, filled out paperwork. Saturdays in Brockton Bay were when the universe decided to get creative.
The Oni Lee clone materialized six feet to his left and Dennis pivoted, slapped his palm against its chest, watched the grey stillness spread across the figure like frost on glass. He was already running before the ash started curling off the thing's edges. Frozen clone. Frozen grenade. Both irrelevant in about four seconds.
Another appeared. Then two more.
Dennis tagged the nearest, ducked under the arm of the second, rolled, came up with his hand on the third's ankle. Three frozen. He sprinted.
The explosion behind him sent him stumbling forward, heat washing over his back. Too close. Way too close. Because these weren't standard grenades. Standard grenades he could handle. Standard grenades, he'd freeze his costume, let the blast wash over him, walk out of the smoke looking cool. Easy.
Someone had given Oni Lee Tinkertech grenades.
Tinkertech.
The first one had gone off and melted a dumpster into slag. Not fire, not concussion. Something that turned solid matter into a soup of its component elements. His costume would freeze just fine. He'd still need to breathe through whatever chemical cocktail the blast produced. And his lungs were decidedly not part of his costume.
"Aegis, status?"
The comm crackled. Something wet and horrible came through that might have been words.
Dennis didn't look. He'd caught a glimpse of Aegis ten minutes ago after the kid had tried to intercept a cluster of clones. Carlos could survive almost anything. That was his power. Surviving didn't mean looking good doing it. What Dennis had seen resembled something from the ground beef aisle more than it resembled a person. Carlos would put himself back together. Eventually. But he was out of this fight.
So it was Dennis. Alone. Playing tag with a teleporting suicide bomber who had an unlimited supply of bodies and, now, grenades that turned the air into poison.
Three more appeared in a loose triangle around him. Dennis got the first, pivoted to the second, tagged it. The third pulled a pin.
Dennis ran.
The blast caught the edge of his boot and he felt the sole go soft, weirdly liquid, before the effect stopped. He kicked the ruined boot off and kept going in one sock on wet pavement.
"Console, where's my backup?"
"Three minutes out, Clockblocker."
"I might not have three minutes!"
Two more clones. He froze both. Kept running. His sock was soaked through and his foot slipped on a patch of something he didn't want to identify. He went down hard, knee cracking against asphalt, palms skidding. Pain shot up his leg and he rolled onto his back.
Three Oni Lees stood over him. All holding grenades. All with that blank mask tilted down at him with the same dead expression.
Dennis looked at his own hands.
Freeze myself. Hope the blast doesn't cook the air too bad. Hope someone gets here before I suffocate.
It was, he reflected, a genuinely terrible plan. He reached for his own arm.
Something blue and red tore through his field of vision.
Not past. Through. The air displaced so violently that Dennis's hair whipped sideways and his ears popped. Where three Oni Lees had stood there was nothing. Dust. Not ash, which was what the clones normally left. Actual particulate dust, hanging in the air like the aftermath of a demolished building.
Dennis blinked.
Four more clones materialized on the rooftop to his left. The blur ripped upward, a streak of color that his eyes couldn't track, and when it passed through the space where the clones had stood there was that same cloud of pulverized nothing.
"What the..."
A third batch. Six this time, appearing in a ring formation around the mouth of the alley. The blur came in low, a foot off the ground, and five of them simply ceased. The sixth flew backward and didn't turn to dust. It hit the brick wall of the building behind it with a crack that Dennis felt in his teeth. The body slid down, leaving a dark red smear on the brick, and crumpled.
The blur stopped.
It was a girl. Tall. Cape. Homemade costume, blue fabric with a red S on the chest, red cape that was slightly too long and dragged on the ground. Dark hair spilling from under a domino mask. She was looking at the body against the wall and her hands were shaking.
"Oh shit. Oh shit. I didn't mean to hit him that hard. I thought it was a clone. Oh god, is he dead? He's not moving. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit."
Dennis opened his mouth to tell her that while yes, she had just nailed the real Oni Lee hard enough to embed him in brickwork, and while that was genuinely concerning from a use-of-force perspective, she had more immediate problems. Specifically the problems dangling from the belt of the body she'd just cratered. The grenades. The Tinkertech grenades. The ones with the pins that were now rolling loose across the pavement because the impact had jarred them free.
"GRENADES!"
The girl's head snapped toward him. Then toward the body. Then toward the grenades.
Then the world turned white and hot and wrong, and Dennis felt the air leave his lungs not because of the chemical reaction but because something seized him around the chest and back and pulled. G-forces crushed him into something warm and solid. Wind screamed past his ears. The ground vanished.
When his vision cleared he was looking at clouds.
Not from below. From the side.
He was in the sky. Hundreds of feet up, at least. Being held in a bridal carry by the girl with the homemade costume and the shaking hands, who was now flying, actually flying, straight up at a speed that made his stomach flip.
"Wow." She let out a breath that shook almost as much as her hands. "That was a close one."
Dennis sagged. Every muscle in his body went slack at once, the adrenaline crashing out of him like a wave retreating from shore. His head fell back against her arm and he stared up at the sky, breathing hard through his mask.
Then he got a good look at his savior.
The costume was definitely homemade. Someone had cut the fabric with kitchen scissors and sewn it on what was probably a home machine. The S on her chest was slightly off-center. The red cape had a tear in its hem. The domino mask was the kind you bought at a party supply store.
But the girl wearing it all was... Dennis felt his brain stall and reboot. She was around his age, maybe fifteen or sixteen. Dark hair, pale skin, wide brown eyes behind the mask that still held a frantic edge. Strong jaw. And she was holding him like he weighed absolutely nothing, one arm under his knees and one behind his shoulders, and she wasn't even straining.
She also, Dennis couldn't help but notice because he was a teenage boy and the observation was involuntary and immediate, filled out the blue costume in a way that was frankly improbable for someone their age.
"So," she said, looking down at him. "You're welcome?"
Dennis had always figured his first bridal carry would involve him doing the carrying. Life had other plans.
She set him down on a rooftop three blocks from the explosion site, gentle as anything, like she was placing a glass figurine on a shelf. His legs wobbled when his feet touched concrete. Hers didn't.
"I'm Supergirl, by the way." She stuck out her hand. Then pulled it back. Then stuck it out again. "Sorry, is that how this works? I've never actually met another hero before."
"Clockblocker." He shook her hand. Her grip was careful, deliberate. Like she was concentrating on not breaking his fingers. "And yeah, that's how it works. Although usually there's less exploding."
"Right. The exploding." Her face fell. "Is that guy... did I kill him?"
"Oni Lee? Probably not. He's survived worse." Dennis wasn't actually sure about that, but the girl looked like she might throw up if he said otherwise. "The grenades going off while he was unconscious though, that's more of a coin flip."
Supergirl made a small sound in the back of her throat.
Velocity arrived first. Red blur up the fire escape, feet barely touching the metal steps. Then Miss Militia on a PRT transport, rooftop landing, rotors kicking grit into Dennis's eyes. Armsmaster rolled up on his motorcycle two minutes later, because Armsmaster always rolled up on his motorcycle, and took the building's exterior ladder three rungs at a time in full power armor.
"Report," Armsmaster said, before his boots had fully settled on the rooftop.
Dennis straightened up. Professional. Concise. The way they'd drilled into him.
"Oni Lee ambushed me on patrol near the corner of Broad and Fifth. Multiple clone waves, escalating numbers. I was pinned down behind a dumpster when Supergirl here engaged. She neutralized the clones and hit the real Oni Lee with... significant force. Impact dislodged several grenades from his person. They detonated. Supergirl extracted me before the blast."
He paused.
"She can fly."
"I noticed," Armsmaster said.
"Like, really fly. Straight up. Fast."
"I noticed."
Supergirl had gone very still during the report, her eyes ping-ponging between the adult heroes like a spectator at a tennis match. When Armsmaster's visor turned toward her, she bounced on the balls of her feet.
"Oh my god, you're Armsmaster. Your halberd is so cool. And Miss Militia! I did a report on you in seventh grade. And Velocity, you're..." She trailed off, visibly searching for something. "You're also here!"
Velocity gave a thumbs up and good-natured chuckle. "I get that a lot."
Dennis watched her gush and felt something warm and stupid bloom in his chest. He recognized the feeling immediately because he'd spent the better part of a year mocking Gallant for the exact same expression Gallant wore whenever Glory Girl flew him anywhere. The memory of every joke he'd ever made about it lined up in his head like a firing squad.
He was never bringing up the Glory Girl thing again.
Miss Militia stepped forward, the green energy at her hip cycling through shapes before settling into nothing. A calming gesture, deliberate. "Supergirl. That's the name you're going with?"
"Yes ma'am."
"You engaged Oni Lee alone. Without backup, without comms, without any apparent training."
"I mean... he was attacking Clockblocker. I couldn't just watch."
"No," Miss Militia said. "You couldn't. And that instinct is exactly why we'd like to talk to you about the Wards program."
Armsmaster took over with the smoothness of a man who had rehearsed this pitch in front of a mirror. Dennis suspected he actually had. "The Wards program offers training, equipment, legal protection, and a salary. You'd work alongside Clockblocker and other young heroes your age in a structured environment designed to develop your abilities safely."
"We also have dental," Dennis added.
Armsmaster didn't look at him. "We also have dental."
Supergirl's bounce had stopped. She chewed her lower lip, and the excitement that had been radiating off her like heat from a furnace banked down to something more cautious.
"That sounds... really great, actually. But I can't. Not right now."
"Can I ask why?"
"My mom." The word came out heavy. "She doesn't know about any of this. The powers, the costume, tonight. She'd lose it. Like, completely and totally lose it. She's already kind of..." Supergirl made a vague gesture that somehow communicated an entire complicated maternal relationship. "She worries. A lot. About everything. If she found out I was out here punching terrorists into walls, she would ground me until I was thirty."
"We work with parents regularly," Armsmaster pressed. "The program is designed with parental involvement in mind. Confidentiality agreements, structured patrol schedules, academic accommodation..."
"You don't know my mom."
Something in her tone put a period on the sentence that even Armsmaster couldn't talk past. He stood there for a moment, jaw working behind his visor, then produced a card from somewhere in his armor. "If you change your mind."
She took it. Turned it over in her fingers. Slipped it into a pocket that Dennis suspected she'd sewn into the costume specifically for moments like this, because it had a little velcro flap and everything.
A fat raindrop hit Dennis on the nose.
He looked up. The sky had gone wrong. Not overcast, not gray. Black. A wall of cloud had rolled in from the northeast, dense and churning, the kind of sky that belonged in tornado country and not coastal New England. Lightning pulsed inside the cloudbank, illuminating shapes that moved and shifted in ways clouds shouldn't.
"That's not right," Velocity said. "Forecast was clear skies through Wednesday."
Another drop. Then three more. Then the sky opened and rain came down in sheets so thick that Dennis lost sight of the street below. Wind hit the rooftop sideways, hard enough to make him stagger. Supergirl didn't move. Her cape whipped behind her like a flag in a hurricane but her feet stayed planted.
"How did they miss this?" Miss Militia had her hand to her ear, pressing her comm piece in against the noise. "Console, this is Miss Militia, we're seeing severe weather downtown, was there any..."
She stopped talking.
Dennis watched the color drain from the visible part of her face, the part above the scarf, and felt ice crystallize in his stomach because he had never seen Miss Militia look scared before. Not once. Not ever.
Then the sirens started.
The sound cut through the rain and the wind and the thunder like a knife through paper. That rising, falling wail that every person on the Eastern Seaboard knew in their bones. The sound they tested on the first Tuesday of every month, the sound that teachers played in classrooms during drills.
Endbringer sirens.
Armsmaster and Miss Militia locked eyes. Something passed between them. A conversation that took less than a second. Then they both moved at once, Armsmaster vaulting the rooftop edge toward his motorcycle, Miss Militia sprinting for the transport, Velocity already gone in a red streak toward the Rig.
"Clockblocker, with me!" Miss Militia shouted over the rising wind.
Dennis ran. His boots slipped on the rain-slick rooftop and he caught himself, pushed off, made it to the transport just as the ramp began to close. His heart hammered against his ribs so hard he thought it might bruise. The transport lurched skyward.
Through the closing ramp, through the curtain of rain, he saw Supergirl still standing on the rooftop. Alone. Cape plastered to her back by the downpour. Looking up at the black sky with her fists clenched at her sides.
She looked small. She looked young. She looked exactly like what she was: a teenager in a homemade costume on her first night out who had just heard the worst sound in the world.
Then her jaw set. Her shoulders squared. Her feet left the rooftop.
She rose into the storm and followed them.
The sirens turned Annette's blood to ice.
She stood in the kitchen, phone pressed to her ear, listening to Taylor's voicemail greeting for the fourth time. The cheerful recorded voice of her daughter played against the backdrop of that awful rising wail outside and the contrast made her want to put her fist through the refrigerator.
"Taylor, call me back. Now."
She hung up. Dialed again. Voicemail.
The Boardwalk. Taylor had said the Boardwalk. Meeting friends. Which friends? Taylor didn't have friends. Not since the falling out with that Barnes girl. Annette had known it was a lie when Taylor said it, had seen the way her daughter's eyes slid left the way they always did when she was being dishonest, but she'd let it go because she was tired and grading papers and sometimes it was easier to just not fight about every single thing.
Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.
She took the basement stairs three at a time. The concrete floor cracked under her bare feet when she landed, a spiderweb of fractures radiating out from the impact point. She didn't care. The storage unit in the corner, the one she'd told Taylor held old tax documents and Christmas decorations. She ripped the padlock off with her thumb and forefinger like pinching a grape.
The costume was folded neatly inside a vacuum-sealed bag, white and blue, exactly where she'd left it fifteen years ago. She tore the bag open and shook it out and held it up against herself and immediately saw the problem.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."
The last time she'd worn this she'd been a C-cup. The compression bra handled things during normal life but there was no compression bra on Earth that was going to make this work. She pulled the suit on anyway, yanking and tugging and contorting, and got it up to her chest where physics delivered its verdict. The material stretched. Kryptonian fabric was virtually indestructible but it had its limits, and those limits apparently lived somewhere around the letter H.
The center seam split. Not a tear exactly. More of a controlled failure, the fabric parting in a clean circle right at the center of her chest, her cleavage spilling through the gap like it had been waiting fifteen years for this exact moment of revenge.
She stared down at herself.
"Fine."
She grabbed the cape. Fastened it. Pulled on the boots, which at least still fit. The gloves went on easy. She caught her reflection in the water heater's chrome surface and saw a woman who looked ridiculous and furious and scared, a combination she hadn't worn since the night Danny died.
The plan was simple. Had always been simple. She'd rehearsed it in her head during every Endbringer attack for the last fifteen years, lying in bed with her fists knotted in the sheets, listening to the distant sounds of battle through the walls while heroes died and she did nothing. Find Taylor. Get Taylor out of the city. Get Taylor out of the state. Drop her somewhere safe. Then come back and fight.
That had been the hardest part. Not the retirement itself. Not the secret identity, not the lie, not watching her body change in ways she couldn't explain to anyone. The hardest part was the Endbringer fights. Lying in the dark, knowing that she could make a difference, that she could save people, that her strength and speed and invulnerability could pull someone out of rubble or catch a falling building or buy thirty seconds for an evacuation corridor. And staying home. Because she'd made a promise to a dead man.
Twenty-three Endbringer attacks since Danny's funeral. She knew the number because she counted. Every single one.
She pushed through the basement door into the backyard. Rain hammered down, instant and total, soaking through the parts of her costume that actually covered skin. The wind tore at her cape. Lightning split the sky to the north, over the water, and in the flash she saw the clouds rotating, spiraling, forming a pattern she recognized from news footage she'd watched with sick fascination from the safety of her living room.
Leviathan. It was Leviathan.
Her feet left the grass. She rose above the roofline, above the neighborhood, above the city. Brockton Bay spread out below her in the dark, pinpricked with streetlights and headlights and the red-blue pulse of emergency vehicles already converging on evacuation routes. The sirens wailed from every direction, overlapping, creating a chord of sound that vibrated in her chest.
The wave came first.
Not a wave. A wall. A forty-foot slab of ocean that rose from the bay like a living thing, its crest curling white against the black sky, and behind it, inside it, something moved. Something massive. The water parted and Leviathan stepped through.
Taylor watched from three hundred feet up, hovering in the rain beside the PRT transport that had brought her here. Her cape snapped behind her. Her hands trembled. She clenched them into fists and the trembling stopped, or at least moved somewhere she couldn't see it.
Thirty feet tall. Green scales catching the lightning. Four glowing eyes, cracked and wrong and asymmetric, burning through the sheets of rain like headlights through fog. The creature walked on two legs, swaying, its massive upper body rocking side to side while that impossible tail dragged behind it, longer than the thing was tall, whipping back and forth with each step.
Water clung to it. Not rain. Something else. A shroud, a skin, water that moved when the creature moved, that trailed behind its limbs like afterimages made liquid.
Taylor had seen the footage. Everyone had seen the footage. Grainy cell phone videos, news helicopter shots from a safe distance, the careful clinical recordings the PRT released after each attack. She'd watched them on her laptop in the dark, cross-legged on her bed, studying the way it moved.
Footage didn't capture the sound. The deep, wet percussion of each footfall. The groan of buildings leaning away from the displaced water. The screaming.
There was a lot of screaming.
Below her the heroes assembled. She recognized some from the transport, others from the sky, descending in ones and twos and clusters. Legend arrived in a streak of blue-white light that left afterimages burned into her retinas. Eidolon materialized from nothing, green energy radiating from his body in shifting patterns. And Alexandria.
Alexandria dropped from the clouds like a bomb. Black costume, steel-grey visor, cape that didn't move in the wind because Alexandria didn't acknowledge wind. She hovered thirty feet above the staging area and the heroes below oriented toward her like compass needles finding north.
Taylor's stomach flipped. She'd had posters. She'd had action figures. And now Alexandria was right there, close enough to touch, and the Endbringer was right there, close enough to die to, and this morning she'd been eating cereal and worrying about Emma's wig and now she was at the end of the world.
"Hey." A hand on her shoulder. Dennis. Clockblocker. He'd come up beside her somehow, standing on the edge of a rooftop, rain plastering his white costume to his frame. "You don't have to be here."
"Neither do you."
"I signed a contract."
"I punched Oni Lee into a wall."
He stared at her. She stared back. Something passed between them that was too new and too raw to be called anything yet.
"Stay near me," he said.
"You can't fly."
"Then stay near Alexandria." He pointed. "Brutes go to the front. That's you. Blasters second line. Movers on search and rescue. That's the playbook."
Taylor looked at the front line. Alexandria hovered at its center. Beside her, a blonde girl in white, Glory Girl, New Wave's heavy hitter, floating with her arms crossed and her jaw set and her eyes locked on the monster in the bay.
Taylor dropped to their level.
"Who are you?" Glory Girl's voice was flat. Battle-flat. No warmth, no curiosity.
"Supergirl."
"Never heard of you."
"It's my first day."
Glory Girl's head turned. The flat expression cracked. Something that might have been pity or might have been respect flickered across her face. "Hell of a first day."
Alexandria spoke without turning. "Can you take a hit?"
"I don't know."
"You're about to find out. Stay behind me. Hit it when I hit it. Don't get grabbed by the tail."
Leviathan charged.
It dropped to all fours and the change was instantaneous. The awkward, swaying biped became something fluid and terrible. It crossed the distance between the waterline and the front line in seconds, water exploding from its body with every stride, and the sound it made was not a roar because it had no mouth. Just the noise of displaced air and shattered pavement and thirty feet of muscle moving at speeds that shouldn't have been possible for something that size.
Alexandria met it head-on. She hit the creature's chest with both fists and the shockwave blew out windows for two blocks. Leviathan rocked back. Glory Girl came in from the right, golden aura blazing, and hammered a punch into its flank. The creature staggered.
Taylor was already moving before she'd decided to move. Instinct. Reflex. Something deeper than thought, wired into whatever part of her brain had changed three weeks ago. She came in low, feet skimming the flooded street, and drove her shoulder into Leviathan's left knee.
The impact traveled up her body like an electric shock. Not pain. Resistance. Like hitting a wall made of compressed sand, something that gave slightly and then pushed back. But the knee buckled. Leviathan's leg folded and the creature dropped, its weight shifting, its balance broken.
Taylor pulled back. Stared at her hands. She'd just knocked an Endbringer off its feet.
"Again!" Alexandria's voice cut through the rain.
Taylor hit it again. Harder this time. A straight punch into the creature's ribs, putting her whole body behind it, rotating her hips the way she'd seen boxers do on television. The scales cracked under her knuckles. Not broke. Cracked. Hairline fractures spiderwebbing out from the point of impact.
She'd never tested herself. Not really. Lifting cars in empty parking lots at three in the morning, bending rebar behind the ship graveyard, those were parlor tricks. She'd never pushed because she'd been afraid of what pushing would reveal. Afraid of the scope. Afraid of the ceiling.
There was no ceiling.
She hit it again and the cracks deepened. Hit it again and a scale the size of a dinner plate sheared off and spun into the flood water. Leviathan swung its arm at her and she ducked under it and the water afterimage slammed into her face and blinded her for half a second but she was already punching by feel, her fist finding the seam between two plates of armor and driving in.
Alexandria was beside her. Glory Girl was above. The three of them worked the creature like a team, which they weren't, but the rhythm emerged anyway. Alexandria drew its attention. Glory Girl flanked. Taylor hit it from below, targeting the joints, the knees, the ankles, the places where the scales thinned.
She was doing it. She was really doing it.
The realization bloomed in her chest and it felt nothing like she'd expected. Not triumph. Not excitement. Something quieter and more fundamental. This is what I'm for. This is what the powers meant. Not stopping muggers. Not punching Oni Lee into walls. This. Standing in the rain at the end of the world and pushing back.
Leviathan's tail whipped toward Glory Girl. Taylor saw it coming. Saw the trajectory, the speed, the precise arc it would follow. She moved.
Her hands closed around the tail twenty feet from its tip. The scales bit into her palms. The tail writhed, pulled, tried to tear free. Forty feet of prehensile muscle thrashing against her grip.
Taylor held on.
She planted her feet on the flooded street. The asphalt buckled. Water geysered around her calves. She pulled. The tail went taut. Leviathan's hindquarters lifted off the ground. The creature twisted, those four green eyes rotating toward her, and for a moment their gazes locked.
Taylor started to spin.
She turned on her heel, pulling the tail with her, using her flight to add force. Leviathan came off the ground entirely. Tons of Endbringer, airborne, rotating. The water shroud exploded outward in a spiral. Taylor spun once. Twice. Three times. The centrifugal force built. The rain bent around her.
She released.
Leviathan flew. Not gracefully. Not like a thing with wings. It flew like a thrown boulder, tumbling, limbs flailing, tail whipping. It hit the first building and went through it. Hit the second and went through that one too. The third building was an old warehouse, brick and steel, and Leviathan went through it sideways and came out the other end in a shower of debris and dust.
Silence. Just for a moment. Just the rain falling and the dust settling and the broken buildings groaning.
Then the cheering started.
It came from behind her, from the second and third lines. Blasters and movers and support capes who had watched a teenage girl in a homemade costume grab an Endbringer by the tail and throw it through three buildings. The sound swelled, ragged and fierce and desperate the way only battlefield cheering could be. Not celebration. Defiance.
Glory Girl appeared beside her, golden aura pulsing, grinning with all her teeth. "What the fuck was that?"
"I don't know." Taylor was breathing hard. Her arms ached. Her palms were raw where the scales had scraped them. She was grinning back. "I just grabbed it."
"You just grabbed it."
"Yeah."
"You just grabbed Leviathan and threw it through three buildings."
"Is that not... is that not normal?"
Glory Girl's grin widened. "No, Supergirl. That is not normal."
Alexandria hovered above them. Her visor was cracked down the middle. She was looking at Taylor with an expression that was difficult to read through the damage.
"Incoming," she said.
The rubble shifted. Leviathan emerged from the wreckage of the warehouse. Standing upright. Those four green eyes locked on the front line.
Something had changed.
The water around the creature moved differently now. Before it had been passive, a shroud, an afterimage. Now it surged. It climbed the creature's body in spiraling tendrils, wrapping around its limbs, pooling in the hollows of its shoulders and chest. The flood water in the streets began to flow toward it, feeding it, and the level rose from ankle-deep to knee-deep in seconds.
Leviathan dropped to all fours and ran.
It was faster. Much faster. The thing that had charged them before had been quick. This was something else. This was a blur of green and white water that covered a city block in the time it took Taylor to blink. It hit the front line and heroes scattered. Glory Girl went first, caught by a sweep of the tail that she hadn't even seen coming, the golden girl launched sideways like a baseball off a bat. She crashed through a fire escape and vanished into the dark.
Alexandria intercepted. The two collided and the shockwave cratered the street. For a moment they grappled, Alexandria's hands locked around Leviathan's wrists, the two of them struggling in the rain like titans. Then the water moved. A column of it, dense as concrete, rose from the flood and hammered into Alexandria's side. She broke free of the grapple and tumbled, catching herself in the air thirty feet back.
The water was everywhere now. Not just the flood. The rain itself changed direction, pulled sideways, drawn toward Leviathan like iron filings to a magnet. It formed shapes. Tendrils. Walls. Waves that moved with purpose and struck with force.
A tendril caught a cape Taylor didn't recognize and slammed him into the pavement. Another swept through the second line and scattered blasters like bowling pins. A wave rose behind the third line and crashed down on the support capes, dragging three of them into the flood.
Leviathan wasn't fighting everyone anymore.
It was fighting Taylor.
She realized it a half-second before the first blow connected. Those four green eyes had tracked her through the chaos, locked onto her position, dismissed every other target. It crossed the distance between them in a single bound and its fist caught her in the chest.
She'd never been hit before. Not really hit. Sophia's shoves were mosquito bites. The water afterimages during the earlier fight had been splashes. This was something else entirely.
Pain. Real pain. The kind that started in her sternum and radiated outward through her ribs and spine and filled her lungs with a burning pressure that made her vision white out at the edges. She flew backward, hit a building, went through the exterior wall and the interior wall and out the other side.
She caught herself in the air. Gasping. Her chest throbbed. The S on her costume was torn, the red fabric hanging in a flap.
Leviathan was already there.
It hit her again. Backhand. She went sideways this time, skipping across the flood water like a stone. Each impact drove the air from her lungs. She dug her fingers into the asphalt and stopped herself and looked up and the creature was above her, thirty feet of monster silhouetted against the black sky, all four eyes burning.
Its tail swept low and knocked Alexandria out of the air as she tried to intervene. A wall of water rose and caught two Brutes who'd been charging in, launching them backward. It was clearing the field. Making space. Making it just the two of them.
Taylor got to her feet. Her legs shook. Her vision swam. She raised her fists.
Leviathan hit her with the water.
Not a wave. Not a tendril. All of it. Every drop. The flood, the rain, the moisture in the air, it all converged on her at once from every direction. A sphere of water closed around her body and compressed. She gasped and the water rushed in, filling her mouth, her throat, forcing its way into her lungs with a pressure that was deliberate and intelligent and cruel.
It was trying to drown her.
She thrashed. Her arms moved but the water moved with them, filling the space she created, pressing against her from all sides with a force that increased every second. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't see. She couldn't hear anything except the roar of pressurized water and the thunder of her own heartbeat in her ears.
She screamed and the scream came out as bubbles and silence.
Annette heard the scream.
Not with her ears. The rain and the wind and the sirens and the chaos of a hundred capes fighting for their lives swallowed sound like a black hole swallowed light. She heard it somewhere deeper. In the place where fifteen years of suppressed instinct lived, in the coiled spring at the center of her chest that she'd kept wound tight through two decades of PTA meetings and faculty reviews and arguments about milk.
Her daughter was drowning.
She didn't think. Didn't plan. Didn't calculate angles or assess threats or consider the implications of Power Girl's return on her carefully constructed civilian identity. She folded her arms against her sides, dipped her chin, and dropped out of the sky like a white star falling.
The sound barrier broke around her at three hundred feet. At one hundred she was a streak. At fifty she was a comet. At ten she was the fist of an angry god.
She hit Leviathan in the chest with both feet.
The impact cratered the creature's sternum. Scales exploded outward in a spray of green shrapnel that shredded the facade of every building within a block. Leviathan folded around the point of impact, its massive body bending in ways its anatomy was never designed to accommodate, and then it was moving. Not running. Launched. It left the ground at an angle, hit the flooded street two hundred yards away, bounced. Hit again. Bounced again. Each impact tore a trench in the pavement, sent geysers of floodwater forty feet into the air. It skipped across the ruined cityscape like a stone across a lake, once, twice, three times, before slamming into the base of a parking structure hard enough to bring the entire building down on top of it.
The sphere of water around Taylor collapsed.
Annette turned and saw her daughter on her hands and knees in the flood, coughing up water in great heaving spasms, her dark hair plastered to her face, her torn costume hanging off one shoulder. Alive. Breathing. Coughing but breathing.
Taylor looked up. Their eyes met through the rain.
Annette didn't stop. Couldn't stop. The spring inside her chest had finally, finally, after fifteen years, come unwound.
The battle rush hit her like a drug she'd forgotten she was addicted to. Every nerve ending lit up. Every sense sharpened until she could count the raindrops between her and the pile of rubble where Leviathan was already stirring. Her muscles sang. Her blood burned. The compression bra was gone, left in pieces on her bedroom floor, and the ridiculous split in her costume's chest meant nothing because nothing meant anything except the thirty-foot monster pulling itself free of a collapsed parking structure four blocks away.
She went after it.
Power Girl crossed the distance in a heartbeat. Leviathan was still rising when she hit it again, a right cross that connected with the side of its jaw and snapped its head sideways so hard one of its four eyes went dark. It staggered. She didn't let it recover. Left hook to the ribs. Right uppercut under the chin. She grabbed a fistful of the scales along its neck and pulled, tearing a strip of armor away from the flesh beneath like peeling bark from a tree.
Red light bloomed behind her eyes.
Twin beams of heat vision carved across Leviathan's exposed flesh. The creature's skin blackened and split. Something that wasn't blood, thicker, darker, sizzled and popped under the concentrated thermal assault. The smell hit her and she didn't care. She poured more energy into it, widening the beams, searing a channel across the creature's chest that glowed white at its center.
Leviathan screamed. Or made the closest sound to a scream that something without a mouth could produce. A subsonic vibration that cracked windows for a mile in every direction and turned the floodwater into a roiling froth.
Its tail came around fast. Faster than she remembered Endbringers being capable of. The tip wrapped around her waist and squeezed and for the first time in fifteen years Annette felt something she could almost call pressure. Not pain. But close. The tail constricted and lifted her off her feet and she hammered her fists against the coils but it had her pinned, arms tight to her sides, the scales grinding against her costume.
Leviathan drew her close. Those three remaining eyes studied her with something that looked almost like recognition.
Then something blue and red slammed into the tail from above.
Taylor came down on the coiled appendage with both fists locked together, a hammerblow that hit with enough force to crack the scales and loosen the grip just enough. Annette wrenched one arm free, then the other, and tore herself loose. The tail whipped sideways and Taylor rode it, digging her fingers into the gaps between scales, refusing to let go.
Leviathan thrashed. Taylor held on. She pulled herself up the tail hand over hand, found a joint where two segments of armor overlapped, and drove her fist into the gap. Something cracked. Not the scales. Something deeper. Structural. The tail spasmed and went slack for half a second.
Mother and daughter converged.
Annette took the left side. Taylor took the right. They hit the creature in tandem, not coordinated, not planned, just two people with the same instinct attacking the same target with everything they had. Annette tore scales from its flank while Taylor cratered its knee. Annette seared its shoulder with heat vision while Taylor ripped a chunk of armor from its hip. They weren't elegant. They weren't strategic. They were a pair of wrecking balls on parallel tracks and the thing between them was coming apart.
Leviathan swung at Taylor. Annette caught the arm. Leviathan kicked at Annette. Taylor caught the leg. The water surged around them, tendrils and walls and columns crashing in from every direction, but they were both moving too fast, hitting too hard, giving the creature no room to breathe or think or plan.
Annette grabbed the creature's face. Forced it to look at her. Drove her forehead into the bridge of its skull. Stars burst in her peripheral vision and a crack split the bone plate between its eyes.
"UP!" she shouted. The word tore from her throat raw and absolute. "Above the clouds! NOW!"
Taylor hesitated for a fraction of a second. Looked at the monster. Looked at her mother. Looked at the sky.
Then she grabbed Leviathan's right arm and pulled.
Annette seized the left. They rose together, hauling the creature between them, and the sensation of flight after fifteen years of grounding herself nearly broke something loose in Annette's chest. Wind tore at her cape. Rain stung her exposed skin. Leviathan thrashed and writhed between them, its tail whipping against buildings as they climbed, shattering windows, tearing fire escapes from their moorings.
They punched through the cloud layer and the rain stopped.
Above the storm the sky was clear. Stars burned sharp and cold in every direction. The moon hung fat and white to the east. And the sun, still just below the horizon, sent its first pale fingers of light reaching across the curve of the earth.
Taylor gasped. Annette felt it too. The sunlight hit her skin and something deep inside her woke up. Reserves she'd forgotten she had flooded back into her muscles, her bones, her blood. She felt stronger. Felt the fatigue of the fight burn away like morning frost.
They climbed higher. The air thinned. The temperature dropped. Leviathan struggled with increasing desperation, its movements growing wild and unfocused. Without water. Without its ocean. Without the rain and the flood and the moisture it used as weapon and shield. Up here it was just meat and bone and scale, and it knew it.
They broke through the last layer of atmosphere. The sky turned from blue to black. Stars multiplied. The earth curved away below them, vast and silent.
Annette locked eyes with Taylor across the creature's body. Her daughter's face was bruised. Her costume was shredded. Her hair floated in the near-vacuum like a dark halo. But her eyes were clear and bright and waiting.
"Wishbone," Annette said.
Taylor's brow creased. One second of confusion. Her eyes dropped to the creature stretched between them, one arm in each of their grips, legs dangling, tail limp in the void.
Understanding hit.
Taylor grabbed the right leg. Annette grabbed the left. They braced against the creature's torso, feet planted on its chest, and pulled.
Leviathan thrashed. Its body convulsed between them, every muscle firing at once, spine arching, tail whipping in the vacuum without finding purchase. Its remaining eyes blazed. It twisted and bucked and fought with the desperate, animal fury of something that understood what was about to happen.
It was strong.
They were stronger.
Taylor pulled right. Annette pulled left. The creature's pelvis creaked. Its scales split along the center line. Annette felt the resistance build and build and build, felt the Endbringer pour everything it had into holding itself together, felt the dense strange matter of its core straining against forces it was never designed to withstand.
She pulled harder.
Taylor screamed and pulled harder.
Leviathan tore in two.
The halves separated with a sound that had no right to exist in vacuum but existed anyway, a deep resonant crack that Annette felt in her teeth and her ribs and the marrow of her bones. Dark fluid sprayed outward in a frozen cloud, crystallizing instantly in the cold. The two halves of the creature tumbled away from each other, limbs still twitching, eyes dimming, trailing ribbons of something black and viscous that froze into glittering streamers against the starfield.
Annette floated in the void. Half an Endbringer drifted past her, rotating slowly, already going still.
She was breathing hard. Which was impossible because there was no air, but her body did it anyway, chest heaving, lungs working on nothing, her physiology doing whatever it did that let her survive in space.
Taylor floated twenty feet away. Clutching one massive leg to her chest. Breathing just as hard. Eyes wide. Staring at the two halves of the monster she'd just helped rip apart with her bare hands.
Their eyes met across the gulf.
Annette's mouth twitched.
Taylor's mouth twitched.
Annette snorted. The sound was silent in the vacuum but her shoulders shook with it. Taylor's face crumpled and she pressed her free hand over her mouth and her shoulders started shaking too. They let go of the legs. The pieces drifted away. And then they were both laughing, soundless and breathless and stupid, bodies curling in on themselves in the void, tears forming and floating off their cheeks in tiny perfect spheres that caught the sunlight and glittered.
Taylor crossed the distance between them. Annette opened her arms. Her daughter crashed into her chest and they held each other, spinning slowly in the space between the earth and the stars, laughing until the laughter turned into something that wasn't quite laughter anymore. Taylor's fingers dug into the back of Annette's cape. Annette buried her face in Taylor's hair. They held on.
They floated down together. Through the thinning atmosphere. Through the cloud layer, where the storm was already breaking apart, shafts of early morning light piercing the grey. Through the rain, which had gentled from a torrent to a drizzle. Taylor was still laughing, a hiccupping, giddy sound, her face pressed against her mother's shoulder.
Annette pulled back just far enough to look her daughter in the eye.
"You are SO grounded."
Taylor's laughter died. Her mouth fell open. She stared at her mother, at the white costume, at the cape, at the ripped chest panel, at the face she'd known her entire life now wearing an expression she'd never seen before. The gears turned. The pieces fell.
"You... you're..."
"We'll discuss it at home. After you explain to me exactly what you were doing out here in a homemade costume fighting an Endbringer on your first night."
"But... you're Power Girl."
"And you're grounded. Those two things can both be true."