A fight in Silver Dollar is nothing like a fight in Starlight City for reasons I wish I'd remembered before taunting professional power harvesters. Lying on the pavement with the coppery taste of my own blood filling up my mouth, I realize:

1. Most of the heroes I disarmed, I didn't disarm in combat. There are traps that can be set. Blackmail to be dredged up. Drugs that can be bought, and deals that can be made under the orange cast of dying light behind the Nickel Mackerel All Night Diner. Fighting is only a corner of a supervillain's life, and it mostly consists of hitting and hitting hard. Unfortunately, four years of Karate training as a child does not prepare one for professional fighters. In a back alley. With no exit nestled in the brick walls for escape.

2. They're not afraid of me here. No reputation to brandish, small, I'm nothing for them to fear.  And they attack without reprieve, unafraid, and probably pretty pissed.

3. None of my opponents down in old Silver Dollar carried super-powered weapons. I don't know anything about these weapons. Barely understood the ones I had back home. But I can say, when the man takes his pocket knife to my face, my healing factor sputters and fails. The cut swells and sears like a mother. I am a fish out of water and I'm suffocatiing. 

They get me. My first real fight here, minus the one with Gideon's would-be captors, and I lose. 

The man crowds me with his knife, closing distance with racing strides too quickl for human eyes to track. I get a punch in that connects squarely with the side of his neck, but by then, he's already left six cuts that bite deep into my forearm. I never even saw his hand move. Never saw the knife. But the slashes sting, and the blood that wells up drenches my sleeves in a thick, sticky, red goop, and I cuss with every contact he makes

 I defend the woman for about a minute. I get in kick to the chest, the stomach. But she is relentless with her punches. An uppercut snaps my head back and fills my brain with stars and circling birds. The base of my neck scrapes brick, and the man ducks low, slicing behind the knee-caps. The sloshing sound of my own blood as it pours on to the pavement and slithers toward the gutter makes sickness well up in the back of my throat, but before I can even vomit, concrete rushes up at me and I meet it on my elbows and shins. Blood that tastes of salt and metal wends behind my teeth. Mayday, mayday. 

 I try to fly. The woman slams her foot into the base of my spine, and under the hard tread of her fashion-forward combat boots, I understand what it feels like to be trapped. This is what the butterflies, the specimens preserved in shadow boxes must feel like, wings and feet pinned solidly to a panel. I twitch, bleeding from the gums. I think the man caught me in the mouth, but I can't confirm it, not with my slippery memory, which shimmers with one image before slipping back to that obsidian ooze of oblivion. I start cussing with a mouth full of pebbles and kicked up pieces of loose pavement. The man leans down.

"You don't look very old," he says, and I smell a whiff of mellow whiskey on his breath. That and mint. So much mint I start to cough and I don't stop. A minute passes. 

I still haven't stopped coughing. Or cussing. I don't bother with a nod. When I glance out from the corner of my eye, I see the copy of that Taoist book I bought, and its drenched with my own blood.

"Why a vigilante?" he continues. I try to memorize everything about him, every wrinkle in his crinkled brow, the gray glitter of his not-quite-blue-not-quite-green eyes, and the sheen of the white sun on his greasy blonde hair. "What could you have hoped to gain?"

A nervous feeling squirms in my stomach. He is wearing a wrinkled shirt, dark gray, almost black. His sneakers are a dirty white, the tread splitting from the sole of the shoe, ash black and peeling. But his jeans are clean, almost pristine. Designer? My heart pounds faster, my head spinning with that old, stupid adage about how if they let you see enough of them to get a description they plan to kill you.

"I'm not a vigilante. Not a superhero. I'm from Silver Dollar, actually. Masquerade? Yeah, that's me."

The man grunts. "Kids'll say anything to keep us from bleeding 'em."

'Bleeding 'em' is probably the most ominous term for power harvesting I've ever heard. I don't want my powers. I want to be human. But the thought of being 'bled' of anything makes fear rise from with me, something dark and cloying. I start to squirm, though moving makes fresh pain flare in my wounds.

"No, really. I was looking for you guys, Everyman, right? I think what you're doing is good. Those disappearances of the heroes? I did that. They don't have powers anymore. You want to know why?" I let out a barking laugh. Not because I have anything to laugh at, but because it makes me sound dismissive of them, and confident. I think. I pause my laughter after it trails on for another few seconds, waiting for them to hit me in the mouth. They don't. So I continue. "I did it. You can take my powers away, I don't want them. Mutants shouldn't exist and I think we're all clear on that. Right?"

I hear a murmured "hypocrite" from the woman. I quicken the cadence of my speech. "You think I'm lying? Check the mugshots." Which is probably not something I should say. I probably shouldn't have mentioned the whole Masquerade thing, either, what with literally being a fugitive and all. "My father is the mayor of the place, and I hear he's a prominent figure in your organization. Maybe—"

I'm finally socked in the mouth. Teeth crack and more blood wells up at the base of my gums and for several spiraling seconds I only see blackness. And then fingertipsare pressing into my throat, leaving colors on my skin I can only see out of the corners of my eyes. Purple, then black. "You should...take me to your leader..." I wheeze.

"You stopped us from getting that boy last night." The woman's voice is close to a hiss, closer to a hiss than you'd think the human voice capable of giving. Because I can't see her, my imagination warps her appearance. I see her with fangs protruding past lips smeared brown with drying blood. I see flaking, reptilian skin and a forked tongue darting out over a gaping mouth. My heart is pounding too quickly to speed up any faster, so it only skips a beat and leaves me anticipating heart failure.

"A whim," I say. The sound is closer to a croak than I would like to admit. "I could...bring him to you. If I met your leader."

"I don't need to make a deal with you," she says, but she's quiet, mulling the words over in that hissy voice. And the man hesitates, his hand twitching over my throat. 

"Yeah, well, I could...get close to him? Maybe he has a sibling. I could give you that information." Sweat inches down my brow. Or they could just throw me in a van, take my powers, kill me, and then I would be out of the way. So I'm babbling, desperately babbling as darkness from some faraway point behind my eyelids spreads into a scattering of dark stains across my field of vision. "My dad's the mayor. He'll confirm that. I could be valuable. My powers, my record?"

There's another hard kick to my ribs. I'm not a big villain here. I'm just some kid about to get the shit beat out of him a back alley. In broad daylight. The woman winds her hand in my hair.

"Don't ever get in our way again, and maybe H will let you live."

I nod. I nod and I nod and I nod. "Great—"

A scream cuts from the mouth of the alley. A woman, small, teeshirt to her knees and brown bag of groceries pressed to her chest, wobbles on the sidewalk, staring at us, open-mouthed. An address is whispered into my ear. The man rises to his feet, switchblade extended. Another kick to my side that snaps something, and he and his cohort are already running toward her. They don't even touch her. Just dart past the bystander as something purple whistles across a brilliant blue sky. It whirls, a spinning flash. And then it still, hovering two beside the woman. A floating coat of purple armor, glittering in the midday sun. I vaguely remember the slash of face behind it, and those dark, glistening eyes, the same shade of purple as her visor.

"Are you okay?" she asks the bystander, and the woman points a quivering, knobby finger at me. I'm still lying on the alley floor, slashed behind the kneecaps and aching something horrible in my side. With every bob of my chest, I can feel the shattered little bones rising and falling. They click, already mending, but tears of pain are sliding down my cheeks and lending the taste of salt to my lips. You'd think, after having appendages crushed repeatedly, I'd get used to this feeling. But you never do. Not with pain, anyway.

"Holy shit, kid." Galaxy's purple eyes widen behind her mask. She's already bracing my side against her armor, and I wail. I didn't know that was a sound I could make. Screaming, maybe. But a wail, all long and high? "You're going to the—"

"No!" I wrench out of her grasp, which takes a considerable amount of super strength when you account that she isn't even holding me tightly and that her biceps are slack against her sides. "Gideon," I pant. "I have rapid healing. I'll be fine. But I promised him I'd pick him up. Look, fine. See?" I lift my sleeve to reveal the flesh she had bandaged last night, the wounds the man left now only a square of smooth skin.

She lifts up her head, her eyes narrowed into squints. Her lashes are lowered. The mask and her jaw guard leave only her eyes to read, so I'm left tense, unsure of her thoughts, emotions. "Do you need extra protection?"

"No."

"You should probably give me your address."

"No." I pick up my blood-soaked Taoist text and fan the pages open. The ink is smudged and bleeding down the pages. The Ying and Yang symbol is now all dark. "I'm really fine. He's fine. But I need to get him."

Her eyes are growing even narrower, the creases growing. I notice a wrinkle of a white blouse under the cracks of her armor. A dark curl left hanging against her shoulder that slipped from under her helmet. Disheveled, for a superhero. I doubt she's a professional.

A roll of bandage dangles from her fingers by a long strand. And then, before I even blink, she's tightening the gauze around my bleeding shoulder, patching the cuts behind my knees. "If anyone bothers you or that guy again, call me." She leaves a scribble on my shoulder. "Cool?"

"Cool," I say to get rid of her.

She whips around, eyes widening for half a second. Her supersenses must stretch across the city, because I hear nothing but the faraway honks of horns, the jibe of incoherent human voices and the rattle of garbage bins slamming over in the hot, southern wind. But her? She's hearing someone screaming. Why else would she tense like that? 

 "I'll call you." I shove her on the armored bicep. Doesn't move her an inch, and her eyes flare with the reflection of sunlight on the blood puddles at her feet. "Wouldn't want someone to die because you were too stubborn, you know?"

She slams her heel into the ground, spitting. "Just Angel," she says, as if I'd know who the hell Angel is, "but you really never know with him. He's probably falling to his death." And then she sighs resignedly, probably weighing whether to force me to go to the hospital or deal with her falling friend. I strain with my super-senses, but above the clamor, I hear the high-pitched squeal, so faint I wonder if I imagined it. And then she's gone, leaving only a trail of grumbled cuss words in the wind.

***

Gideon is leaned outside the coffee bar, chatting with the college students against the back wall. I only recognize him at first by the winding tract of tattoos down his arm. The bloody book is trembling in my fist. I'm stumbling, though there's nothing to stumble on. His eyes go big when he sees me, and he dismisses his friends with a wave over his shoulder. "Max?"

I collapse against the brick wall, limp. Blood trickles from the side of my mouth. I laugh. "I didn't get a job," I say, tossing my hair against the back of my neck.

And then, as the stains of darkness spread, I faint.

I have the address. I've got what I've come for, but a strange, sad pain fills my chest as I fall. How many more people will I sacrifice to get what I want? And when will their ghosts finally catch up with me?