Sixty-two years ago, Starlight City was a mess of squat clapboard houses atop rolling hills. Scored by tar and fresh asphalt streets, cursive coils of telephone wire, the click of cicadas, the buzz of crickets, and the occasional buff of dry, southern wind that left you hotter than the ninety-degree heat did. 

Sixty-two years ago, Juniper stood in the dirty gutters, blackwater sloshing in her buckskin boots. Neon signs flared above her head, a 'Motel 12,' a 'Cupid's Inn,' and the stench a diner that smelled of onions and feet. The alley was narrow. The darkness was crushing.

Shuddering, Juniper lifted her skirts to her knees, the bodice of her cotton dress bound tightly by a silk sash. Too stiff. Not enough room to run.

But there was a gun to the back of her neck, so she wasn't running anyway.

"This is ridiculous." Juniper held her chin high, her throat raised to the bite of the acrid city air. "Your insistence on a gun..."

The villain cocked the weapon. It clicked and Juniper flinched, staring up at the blackened sky in an attempt at calm she wasn't level-headed enough to make. After all, she wasn't immortal yet. The threads looped through her wrists— botched stitches of super skin samples grafted into her own—long pink scars down her forearms, chemical burns, they all proved it.

The voice was calm as the weapon butted the back of June's neck. A kiss of cold steel. "Either I hold a gun to you or I'll have your pet project follow us on our next excursion."

Juniper snorted and bunched up her skirts, her mincing steps quickening as she walked past garbage heaps and graffiti, splashing up puddle water as she teetered along in those brick-high heels. "You could tear me to pieces." June glared at the ground, breathing in quickdraws of sour air. "I can't possibly understand—"

"You think you're clever." The villain had a meandering voice, much like a philosopher's, low and rich. "But I thank you for your help finding... her."

Juniper nodded, another attempt at keeping a cool front when her head was swimming and her heart slammed so fiercely she thought her chest would burst. The gun, she could deal with, the villain for a chaperone, she could adjust to, a life of captivity, that was iffy, but June would survive cage bars if this lead turned good. June glanced aside, made out the faint glow of red peeking out from under a door. She slowed, smoothed the wrinkles from her dress, and the villain removed the weapon with a roll of her wrist and a dry rustle of her leather holster.

Sludge clung to her shoes, made walking heavy as she shuffled over potholes and crossed cracked cinder shards. With her breath caught in her throat, she stepped to the bare metal door with a rust stain for a doorknob. She rapped gently.

Silence answered.

Juniper ground her jaw down. Closed her eyes. "Hello?"

"Is this a joke?"  The muzzle of the gun prodded June's neck. It brought on a sharp ache that jolted June stiff.

Juniper knocked again, louder now, sweat snaking down the back of her neck. "It's Julia Redding," she said, swallowing hard. "Please don't turn me away. My husband is very sick." Juniper couldn't lie to save her life, so she tried to place her friend in that circumstance. His name was Alexander, a tall man with smoke-gray eyes full of light and honey-gold hair he kept long. Carried pistols on either hip and a bladed weapon over the shoulders of a leather jacket. He loved that jacket, all red leather with a dragon stitched in gold silk thread across the back. He went by many names, Axel, Grayson, Otis, but her favorite alias for him was Storm. That's what she thought of him, a force of nature with thunderheads for eyes. She tried to imagine the assassin, crumpled on a dingy little hospital bed, pale and weak. Tried to make her voice tremble. "Please, I need to see her. I'll pay anything."

The door creaked. "Are you a cop?" Cloudy green eyes peered out through the blackness. Blinked while Juniper ran a stick of lip gloss over her mouth. "You're not a cop. Come in. Who's your little friend?"

"Little me?" The villain pointed to herself. Frowned. "I'm unwell. I fear for my survival. Julia told me of your services, and I, I must see this myself."

"This isn't a sight for  ladies."

There was blood in June's mouth. A bad habit, tearing her own flesh to ribbons when she was angry, scared. Her right cheek was torn from the bite of her molars. "I have no other choice." Lately, rage and fear were the only two emotions Juniper felt. It scared her that instead of fearing the winged creature she tormented past sanity, she feared herself.

The door creaked all the way open and the man turned around. Pink light silhouetted his form of broad shoulders and a slim waist. Juniper's eyes trailed down to the pistol holstered on his hip. She was beginning to hate guns, but as soon as he turned from her she scurried after him into the darkness. That soft pink light illuminated on the dirty floors and concrete stairs, lifting into an oak balcony and broken columns. The smell of antiseptic hung thickly over the complex, that and dust. Dust clumped in every corner. Thick and choking.

Lounging on couches, slumped across embroidered pillows, more men with guns. Across their hips, on the slatted floors. The villain unclipped her holster and kicked it to one of the men playing cards across the couch arm.

"Can never be too careful." The villain shook her head. "This is a mad place."

"That it is, pretty lady." The green-eyed man tousled his dirty hair, waltzing upstairs with one hand on his sidearm and his fingers trailing the banister. Juniper followed. Each creak of the sagging steps wrenched her heart farther and farther into her throat. A hall led into darkness and branched into two oaken doors. The man, whistling, stood before one and turned to them.

"You don't need to see the muttie. I can fetch whatever parts y'all need."

Juniper lifted her head. "I can't pay until I have. P-please." Her voice rose an octave and squeaked without her having to think back to her sick Storm. The thought of leaving without this woman, this trove of secrets about human life, this legend of a super dragged oceans from home to Starlight, so special, so so rare...it managed to prick June's eyes with tears. "Understand."

"But for two ladies—"

"Damn you, I'm not a lady!" I'm a monster. June had just spoken the words when the villain rammed her elbow into her spine and had her doubled over in agony, cursing silently to keep from breaking the calm sort of veneer of this 'lady'-hood any further. The man in the doorway was a pair of dirty green eyes to Juniper, an obstacle. She'd forgotten how important it was he see her as this delicate, shaken thing, and now she was beginning to sweat.

"You have to understand," the villain's voice wasn't as much rich now as it was cool. "Bless Julia's heart, her husband is dying—"

"Don't say that!" This time, Juniper played along easily, because shouting at the woman eased the pain a little. She hated that the supers could toss her around like this, and she hooked her fingers into the vinyl stitches that ran across her wrists, twisted one and watched the blood bubble up to her pale fingerpads. I hate this. I hate you.

"Do it for her. I assure you, I have seen much in this life that whatever condition this...mutant...may be in won't disrupt me."

The man shrugged. His eyes lingered on Juniper, who was still bent forward, a hand clutching her aching back. They lingered too long for her taste, since they forced her to consider how a woman whose Storm was dying would look, and if there was anything Juniper hated more than acting, it was acting vulnerable. 

He finally turned away, dug a hand into the pocket of his blue jeans, and fished out a rusty key. It fitted into the lock, twisted, and after one hard shove, the door moaned open with a rattle of heavy chains. Juniper held her breath. 

The room had fallen into even heavier darkness than the bottom floor. An attic room, stuffy with sticky, humid heat. Yellow curtains, tattered and lined with ribbons of mildew. A stench of rotting flesh and putrefied guts. And there was blood. Splattered across the walls, the slatted floors, the sheets. A spoked iron bed glinted in the slivers of moonlight that broke through the curtains. And there was a woman.

By anyone's standards, she was a beautiful woman, broken as she was. Ink black hair fell down her shoulders, back, in a river of whirls and blood-tangled mats. Her pressed lips glistened with a black lacquer of still-sticky blood. And she had dark, mournful eyes. She was contorted, chest facing the opposite direction of her hips, her body long and slim, bone jutting against bruised skin. Ancient chains clipped her wrists to the bed frame, and down across the links, Juniper spotted faded splats of blood.

The villain's mouth snapped open and her face paled. "What cruelty—"

"Don't waste your sensibility, lady. The woman's a freak. Probably too dumb to understand what's happening," the man said, unbeknown to him that he was speaking of the villain's people, and that the person glaring up at him was a storm waiting to surge. Juniper felt nothing. She scurried up to the super and ran her fingers over the prisoner's tough skin, felt the raised stitches where her stuffing had been torn out. 

"What's your name?" Juniper asked.  She checked the woman's pulse. Over two hundred beats a minute. And she wasn't even moving. The super turned over and met June's eyes. 

Sometimes, two trapped creatures don't need words to communicate. June felt her heart beat and the heat of the woman's gaze seared her.

Help me. 

"Your husband needs a new lung?" asked the man. He flashed a knife from his pocket, and Juniper knew at once that though the operating itself was complex, these operators were crude. 

This super had been captured some decades ago when she battled to protect a small group of supers from a militarized capture attempt, fallen into criminal hands and been pedaled for her organs. They grew back when they were cut out. And when her body was missing kidneys and lungs and even chunks of brain, she was too weak to fight them. A powerful warrior, harvested for parts, sanity waxing and waning as she shifted in her chains.

Most of the time, she couldn't even remember who she was.

"I-I need a demonstration," Juniper said quickly. The man shrugged and brought his knife down across the woman's throat.  All at once, the storm finally surged. The villain growled and launched an attack. A single kick to his ribcage sent the man sailing over the bed frame and through the window. He screamed,  and men pounded up the stairs, weapons handy. 

The villain leaned over the prisoner, picked up her chains, and crushed the fine metal to powder in one clench of a mighty fist. The bleeding super tried to stand and collapsed at her savior's feet. She blinked rapidly, clenching the sheets as she clawed to stand. The villain scooped her up and fit her against her body. "I have come to save you," she said in a practiced language now long dead.

The super returned it. "You waste time on me. This, I can take, but my people cannot." She had a voice like silk, and as she lay limp across the villain's small arms, she struggled to speak. For years her jaw had been wired shut, and now her tongue felt heavy and uncoordinated, the words like the steps of a dance she had long forgotten. 

"That's my mission." The villain glanced out the window as the first gunshot rang across the floor below. Juniper flinched and squirmed up against the glass. "Serve me and I will free our people."

The super lifted her head. She was beginning to fade, drinking the woody smell of the villain's perfume, appreciating the sting of feeling in her fingertips. Her eyes fell shut, rolling up in the back of her head. They cracked open one more time, fixating on the villain. Some heat kindled in her chest, something akin to love. Adoration. Her head tipped into a bow. "Yes, mistress."

The villain smiled.

One year from now, seven super-powered government agents will escape a prison similar to this woman's, and a battle will begin.

Four years from now, the super will calm the project that wants Juniper dead. They will marry.

Fifteen years from now, she will nearly die at the hands of one of those agents or "superheroes." A woman like her, Nebula, Rebecca Brooks. She will find purpose trying to murder the person who has made her taste defeat.

Twenty-three years from now, she will adopt a child.

Forty-one years from now, the child will die. He will live just long enough to see adulthood.

Forty-six years from now, she will carry another boy. She'll care for him, love him in the most profound way a mother can, and then he will be taken from her and used. The boy will grow into a stubborn thing, a protagonist of his own story in which she will only be the villain, and while she's alive, he will hate her.

Forty-nine years from now, she will kill her rescuer's only love. 

Forty-nine years from now, she will finally murder Rebecca Brooks, helping to orphan a little girl who will play into her downfall. 

Forty-nine years from now, her rescuer will be taken from her, too. Like her memories. Like her home. Like her children. She will search desperately for the woman, and she will never find her.

Sixty-two years from now, she will die at the hands of Juniper's son. Fittingly, she will be kilt on the blade that belonged to the man she murdered long ago, the one her rescuer loved. 

But she can't know that now, bruised and helpless, unable to recall more than exchanging hands from captor to captor. The person who saved her she calls 'mistress' out of habit, the thought of real freedom too sweet to believe in. For forty-nine years she will fight at this mistress's side as a faithful servant. Even when her chosen mistress is gone, she will still serve her, never quite able to escape the course which will end her, never quite free. 

"My name is Owl."