Cut me some slack here. I fight. As fiercely as a teen drowning in his own sweat can.  I kick, land a hit in the soft flesh of my opponent's belly. Ram my elbow into the rib-cage with a hard crack to the sensation of jelly yielding around bone. Surprisingly painful, too.

My attacker gnashes their teeth together with a hiss of air. Behind me, stacked brooms hit the floor in a bump-bump-bump of aluminum on slimy floor, I try to scream, I really do. But as soon as I draw up a gasp of hair, a hard thwack across the base of the skull has my head smashed down into a blue plastic bucket. My nose is pressed flat and my mouth fills with blood. Kind of hard even to speak, let alone scream. I'm pinned down by fingers digging into my neck, holding my face to the bleach-smelling plastic as I squirm and shout "Spit, spit, spit, spit, spit!"

"Sorry!" The voice is murky to throbbing ears. "Sorry. Didn't mean to hurt you, Angelos. But you can't let anyone know we're here."

My brain is mush. It takes seconds for me to recognize that sweet, peppy voice. A whole minute for me to still my squirming.

"Sarah?" The nice Syndicate lady who phoned in an anonymous tip that had the city shut down during Owl's charge. I like Sarah and Ivy. Really. But it's hard to sound excited with your bloody face mashed at the bottom of a bucket. "You scared me."

"You scared me! And Ivy!" The pressure across my neck lifts. I jerk my head up to shifting stars and blurs of blue light, like a million Neptunes are orbiting around my eyeballs. Ivy's sitting across the pile of fallen brooms, bent forward and clutching her stomach. She raises her head, flicking her ponytail against her shoulders. Her eyes meet mine and narrow.

"Sorry," I murmur. "But, you know, you shouldn't fake-kidnap someone with a history of being kidnapped." I spit a big bloody glob into the bucket. Ivy rolls her eyes and flips me off to Sarah's nervous laughter.

"Old habits die hard. But that's not what we're here to talk about."

I shake my head. My cupped hands are filling up with black blood, but the sting in my mouth hurts far less than the truth. A truth that jabs and coils inside me like bramble vines. I can't even take out two friendlies. In a fight with my dad's guys, I'm screwed.

"It's isn't?" I snap, hissy. I don't consider myself a catty person, but after being beaten up by the two nicest people in the history of niceness, I could give Gats a run for his money. "Please enlighten me." I roll my wrist in a flourish. Sarah shakes her head, blue-gray eyes soft in the light trickling under the door.

"You sound like Fallout."

My bloodied teeth are bared. "Don't compare me to that freak."

"Don't be a brat." Sarah glowers. "Freak."

My pulse pounds in my left temple. I made a mistake, saying that. We're all freaks here, and if Sarah was more anger-prone, I'm sure she'd have my teeth for calling Fallout that. Freaks. Spraypainted on monuments, printed on picket signs. They aren't supers, they're just...

"Jerk, I mean." My face goes hot. Her arms are crossed over a heaving chest and I rush to fill the silence before she uses it to scold me. "It's not him being a super that makes him evil and weird and scary." I spit into the bucket again and run my tongue over my incisors. They're wobbly. "I'm Sorry." And I am.

Sarah lifts her fingers to her face, inspecting her cuticles.She scratches one with her thumbnail. "Whatever. You're just grumpy we're here. Messing up your perfect high school life."

"Huh?" My voice is a squeak.

Her eyes are dull. "You're not an average high schooler."

"Yeah." Don't you think I know that? Do you think I'm stupid? Of course, I'm not an average high schooler. Average highschoolers don't watch their mothers get run through with swords. Average highschoolers don't live with an evil entity trying to take over their body. Average highschoolers don't get kidnapped every freaking Tuesday.

These thoughts have me shaking, but I refuse to voice them. Hissy people are hard to talk to, and I'm already acting dangerously catty. "I know," I say. Bob my head, all calm and neutral. "I'm pretty aware of that."

"You have an obligation the organization your mother ran." Sarah drops her hands at her sides, tossing gold-white hair against the back of her neck. My pulse roars in my ears at the sound of her voice. "But here you are, trying out for a school play."

For a second my breath freezes in the corners of my chest. I never expected such sharp words to come from someone I pegged to be so kind. And then I rub the blood from my lashes, willing my hands to keep from balling. I'm shaking, and it's not just my being hissy that has my jaw ground and teeth clenched. It's real anger. "I'm going to help, but I need time."

"Time?" Sarah's voice, usually so sweet and demure, booms across the closet. Her face has gone beet-red, her veins twisting down her neck like branches. "Do you think we get time? Do you think Owl's prisoners get time?"

I thought it was impossible to sweat more than I did during auditions. Not true; I've just begun. And now sweat drips from my brow and races down my neck in perfect beads. "You're not gonna make me feel guilty for trying to have a normal life."

"Funny." She steps toward me. The woman's tall, wiry and slim. She's the only good guy beside Storm with enough height to thrust into my face. "I know six-hundred women who also want normal lives."

I swallow hard, trembling where I'm planted. If Luce is a manifestation of my dark side, then Sarah is the manifestation of my guilt. So, I shift tacts. "Sarah, you gotta understand. I don't know how to do this. I'm just a dumb kid with weird powers. I just found out about this a month ago. I'm really not qualified to be your liberation force."

Sarah lowers her head, deflated. "Who cares? Bad things are happening in Syndicate. Scary things." I go cold. Neck, hands, chest. All at once, I'm so cold it's like my soul's been replaced with a hunk of ice. "You're the only one who can stop them. You have to take your throne."

My knees bang together. "I—I can't." The words are whispered truths. I barely survived last time. I almost destroyed the city. I almost destroyed myself. My chest rises and falls in shallow swells.

"You're willing to let people suffer because you want a normal life?"

That's a gut punch. And telling by Sarah's red face and ground jaw, a very intentional one. My head fills with air, and all at once, I can't breathe. So, I gush. Let all the words escape me in a rush of air and sound I can hardly hear through red-hot ears.

"It's not like that. I didn't ask for this, but—I'm—trying! Everyone's trying to kill me! Everyone's trying to kill my friends! Gatsby's a wreck. Heaven's going crazy—my mom crushed her throat! And you think I'd willingly put my friends through that again?" I'm panting, dizzy with adrenaline and a hurt that wells up from deep in my belly. I can't do this. Why can't they see that? They're dumping the world on my shoulders and expecting me to carry it. All they're gonna do is turn me into a bright red splat under its weight.

Ivy rises, still glaring at me. Sarah stares up into my eyes. Her fists are clenched like mine. "I hope you're not as heartless as your father, Angelos. Make your decision quickly. Your brother is being tortured as we speak."

Sarah doesn't even glance outside for students. She grabs Ivy's wrist and lets the door slam behind her, sweeping me up in darkness and the stench of my own blood. Tortured.

My head's still spinning from my lack of breath. My weak legs finally go limp under my weight and the floor rushes up at me. I collapse forward and hit the tile. Knees first, then hands.

Poison, the psychopath so in love with Heaven and so terrified of my dad. His name is Katris. He speaks softly to his friend, Ceres. And I hate him, hate him, but the thought of him being hurt like that makes me hurl.

I hate Sarah, for telling me this and leaving me. I hate myself because tears won't come. Just blood and vomit.

I punch the plastic bucket over and over, until blue shards bristle from my skin like quills. Between my knuckles, up my forearm. Blood fills my hands, dribbles down my arms in long red rivulets, smears my finger pads. If Heaven learned this, she'd do something about it. Storm the place. Fight back. If Gats had, he'd be capable of feeling real emotion. He'd cry. But I'm neither of them, and When I stuff my collar into my mouth, it isn't so no one will hear my cry, but so no one will hear me scream.

***

As far as birthdays go, I'm sure some are worse than Heaven's. People die on their birthdays, or get kidnapped. Since none of the above happen to her or Gats or Jaylin or me, it's a pretty good day relative to the ones we've been having. But birthday-wise, the first day of Heaven's seventeenth year alive is still pretty sad. None of us got her gifts between falling to our deaths, being stabbed, being evil, and being trapped. I'm an awful baker, too. I burn my muffins black and bake my soufles into a sagging dough bags. So, when I try to make Heaven a cake, it's sadly no surprise when I scrape it out of the pan and find a hollow disc with crusty edges. Storm makes a run for a bakery and returns with an abandoned wedding cake. It tastes like paper, but with every bite Heaven makes a little happy squeak. "This is delicious." She shovels more cake into her mouth. "This is the best birthday I've ever had!"

Jaylin rolls her eyes as Tangled fizzles on screen, since that's the onlt birthday activity beside Monopoly we can bother with that won't take us out of the house (and maybe into enemy hands).

Gats sulks in a bean bag chair. Shiro sketches in his drawing pad in the room's far corner. Heaven and Jaylin sandwich me on the couch, plates of cake balanced on our knees. I stab it with my fork until it becomes a yellow mound, bleeding creme.

And that's how Heaven spends her birthday: lying to make us feel better, staring at a Disney musical she probably doesn't even like. When she leaves with Jaylin in tow, she smiles weakly at us. Kisses me on the cheek and ruffles Gats' hair. He cowers at her touch.

At nine, I crawl into bed and Gats crawls in with me. I make no mention of it. I let him sleep with the covers pulled over his head. And sleep comes painfully to me.

This nightmare: Poison's wings are severed. Silky white feathers float on a breeze of ash. The limbs are broken and the exposed veins opened and ground to milky power. tossed on a mountain of charred bones.

In the dark of the night, Poison's sprawled across strands of bone-white grass. I kneel. I pick him up by his shoulders. His face is stained with blood, and he's cold in my hands, bony thin.

My brother's last breath is a scream.

I wake up cussing in a puddle of sweat. I need to take a shower. Heck, I need to stop sweating. Silver glints over my throat.

In blue-black blur of night, it takes me precious seconds to make out its shape, curved and thin. The teethed edge, leaving a pink impression just below my Adam's apple, like a little chain.

And I thought today couldn't get any better.

"I don't want to kill you," Shiro blurts. His eyes are wide, blacker than mine. It makes his face even whiter in the clip of moonlight. The vinyl handle of the kitchen knife trembles in his hand. "But if you're the leader of Syndicate, I will."

My breath leaves me in a whoosh. I lift my hands slowly from the sheets. Shiro freezes, and in a second, I have his wrist plucked from my throat. I don't know when I learned to act so quickly, just that when people try to kill you, you sort of get in the habit of acting first. Shiro yelps, and its so soft its a grunt.

"That's it," I say, throwing over the sheets. Gats is a lump under the white wool, the heat of his skin bleeding into my ribs. He rolls over and sighs, his snore a little purr. "I'm resolving this Syndicate crap right now."