Heaven.
I've only flipped through a few books on the art of superheroing, but the advice they give on the Care and Keeping of Supervillains is all the same: don't trust supervillains, don't make deals with supervillains, and whenever a supervillain struts into punching distance, serve them a Nasty McBruiser with a side of Shattered Ribs. That'll show 'em!

As I shift on my knees, my hands dripping in the shiny, purple ink of my surrender note, I decide the authors of those books would add, "don't trust a supervillain when they make a promise with their fingers crossed, especially if that promise is 'I won't hurt you.'" But I don't care.

Larry the Russian Blue springboards off the couch and lands on Mom's best blue vase, toppling it over so it smashes onto the floor and shatters into millions of pieces. I care so little I can only mentally congratulate my cat for his ingenuity.

Why should I care about my dead mother's pottery? 

My boys are in danger.

I don't care what the authors of the superheroing books have to say and I don't care that trusting smiling, back-stabbing Catalyst will land me chained to a chair, pointed and monologued at by her sadistic villain friends; I have to trust her. It's a dumb and desperate move, but I have the same number of choices as I do friends to turn to: zero.

"Come on, Galaxy! We don't have much time." Catalyst squeezes my hand and yanks me to my feet with one sudden jerk. I wheel over, gasping from the shooting pain in my side. Who knew beatings from bat-wielding henchmen hurt so much? Sure, one might guess, but I'm used to taking punishment on a daily basis. For the hits to actually hurt is new for me.

"So how is this going to work?" I ask as I suck in a breath, the gray walls of my apartment closing in on me like a prison's.

"Hmm." She pulls me into the hall with a sharp tug, and I slacken the muscles in my face so she doesn't know how sharply I bite my cheek to quell the pain. "We need a car."

"Oh, no you don't!" roars Juniper from across the hall. I freeze, but Catalyst has probably found herself in situations like these before, so she bolts as soon as June's voice cuts the air. My feet drag as she yanks me along and I hobble to keep pace. After so much practice, I've gotten good at ignoring the pain. "You leave that apartment and I'll—"

"Bah." Cat waves a hand as she glances at me. "No sense of humor, you know?"

"Her son was kidnapped," I snap, each breath sending a shock of pain through my ribs. We pound through the custard halls, passing droopy potted plant after droopy potted plant, their leaves brown with neglect and their stems twisted as if in pain.

My heart feels like it's been thrown twenty feet. Here, I think about how Gatsby and I kissed in this very hall, the electricity that coursed my veins when he spoke.

I squeeze my eyes shut. I'm going to get him back. I don't know what I'll do if I don't get him back.

Catalyst shoves me into to elevator, smashes her fingers on the buttons, and laughs as the doors slam shut. She's always laughing at stuff that isn't funny. As I melt to the floor in a puddle of desperate, fractured, not-so-super superhero, she laughs at that, too. I guess she's rehearsing for the moment I wake up chained to that chair later.

"Did you see the delivery man come up here a few hours ago?" she asks. I shake my head no, thinking about how at the time I was screaming about Gatsby's kidnap and clutching bruised ribs.

Her eyes light up. They remind me of glow-flies, flickering and dimming, flickering and dimming. "Well, he has a van, right? And the passenger door is popped out and doesn't lock, but he never got it fixed, I'm assuming, because no one here would steal it. Well—"

"No." It's a knee-jerk reaction. No, we're not stealing a van. Catalyst narrows her eyes, her pink-lined lips pressed into a deep and sudden frown.

"What do you mean, 'no?'"

"We can't do that, Cat." My stomach churns, and not just from the elevator plummeting faster and faster, hopefully to quicken my slow and painful death. It's churning because I'm a superhero. I'm taught to believe the delivery man depends on that vehicle to feed his family, that if we steal it, he'll suffer. "That's illegal—"

"You know what's illegal?" Catalyst slams her hands on the elevator wall, caging me, all the muscles in her face crinkling like a particularly angry wad of crumpled paper. "The torture of your boyfriend and best friend. That's what!"

My lip quivers and I draw in one long inhale. I have duties, sure, but as I stare at the orange cat stitched on the villain's sweater, I think back to long ago, to the touch of Gats' hand on mine and the warmth of Angel's jacket on my shoulder as I sat on the floor and grieved over the death of Larry the Tabby.

Every muscle in me bunches up. The law applies to everyone, even me, but Angel and Gats are my friends, the closest people I have to family. How can I abandon them?  No matter my morals, no matter what's right, they're being hurt and I have to stop it.

The elevator jolts, the doors fly open, and I breathe out.

Catalyst leans in even closer so our noses are a fraction of an inch away from touching. "Well, princess?"

I hang my head, my clenched fists falling limp at my sides. "Let's go steal a van."

Poison.

My hands are steady on the steering wheel as Ceres grumbles on and on under his breath. "Angel. Proposition. You know what you are, Kitty Kat?" He doesn't give me a moment to answer or snap at him for the dumb nickname. "You're cliché." It's spoken in such a shaky, angry voice, you'd think 'cliché' was another word for 'puppy-kicker.'

I shrug and glance at the back window, dropping my gaze to Luce, whose strung up and sprawled out on the floor. He cracks his good eye open to shoot me a glare, twitching a wing in a meek show of resistance. Mine jolt in response. I'm unacustomed to seeing other people with wings; Dad hides his every chance he can.

I grit my teeth and shift my eyes back to the road. If I could kick Luce, again, I would.

"You can't handle Heaven," he insisted when Ceres ungagged him for the phone call. "I can't, and I'm her best friend. I mean, she's pretty cool, but boy, she can get pretty rough when she's mad. You sure you want that? As your prisoner, she would be pretty unhappy. You wouldn't like her like that, I'm sure." I assured him I'd like her any way and told him what to say. He pulled some "save yourself" crap and bashed out the window with his shoulder, the one with the black tint so onlookers couldn't catch an eyeful of him, him all tied up, I mean, with fresh black and blues dappling his olive skin. That's why we're taking long, narrow, stretches of road that curl around the city, awfully close the border of Old Newport, Starlight's giant unfriendly neighbor that whispers Starlighters are morons and supers are pests.

Ceres is tense, his mask crumpled in his fist and his face drained of any color. My muscles are wound tight too, so I listen to his prattle to ease up. He talks disjointedly, phrases and ramblings jumbled together, his eyes fluttering when he speaks. "They just let us beat him! Us! Does the mask really give people power to be judge, jury, and executioner? How do they know who's villain and who's hero? How did we get away with that?" 

He's shaking. I count to ten under my breath, watching him. He used to have fits and panic attacks every night, sometimes twice a night. I remember him as a thirteen-year-old, and how I would watch him, trapped in that little white room, screaming and crying. "Let me out! I want to go home! I want to go home!" I remember glancing through the little window and seeing him curled into a ball, trembling and silently sobbing.

Sometimes he reverts to those days, shaky and pale, hugging his knees to his chest, clutching his head, trying not to scream. I pull onto a shoulder with my lip between my teeth

We're very close to our destination; the big signs all point to it.

Ceres' shoulders quake even faster. I pull into the parking lot and throw open the door. On the passenger side, Ceres tumbles out, coughing and clutching his face.

"You okay?" I ask. We're at an abandoned minimall, the sky slowly darkening. The car drive was a long one. He sinks to his knees by the tire.

"What the hell did we do?" he asks softly. I shrug and wait for him to recover, when—POP! The back doors flies open. Luce bounds out, and for a second, I only watch, cursing my rope tying skills. But it's okay, I tell myself quickly, his dark form stumbling and kicking up chunks of gravel.

He has no idea what he's in for.