Song Selection: Breakeven— Cover by Jocelyn

You never hear about broke supervillains, because hypothetically speaking, they shouldn't exist. Not with banks to rob, citizens to mug, and worlds to ransom. If you're strong enough to pulverize a man with a single punch and you don't care who you have to hurt, then you should be living it up. Two plus two equals four. Simple as that.

You never hear about supervillains who are scared of guns, either.

I won't pretend I'm a good person. It's not that I'm scared to rob or mug or ransom, it's that I'd rather gulp down a tin can full of worms than face one more gun than I have to. Bullets? Loud noises? No thank you.

I lick my thumb and hold it down to my wound, a makeshift bandage. Blood races down my upper arm and my side. As the hail thunks my head , I curl up under the branches of an old magnolia tree, a small and tight little coil. Bloodied, I swallow big puffs of air. I think of Monet, twitching at my feet, her soft voice obliterated in that instant. Dead? She's being sewn together from the inside, unless my dad popped a cap into the base of her skull, in which case, I don't know. To think she died for me makes me sick in the back of my throat, so I try not to imagine it. The click of the trigger, the horrible sound of the gunshot. The superhero, limp and defenseless, a heap on the floor of the same room where she flirted with me past midnight, her smooth voice sliding off the walls. That same voice stretched into screams.

I rub my back up against the tree's peeling bark, twine my feet into the roots. The branches whip in the hurl of ice and rain; wind crawls through my hair and chews my scalp. I open up my suede bag by its plastic buttons, click-click, pull out a ziplock bag of saltine crackers and a slice of goat cheese wrapped in foil. The cheese, thick and creamy, runs down my bloodied fingertips, and I slather it on to the crumbling crackers. Tastes like swallowing dry leaves. I eat until my stomach roils from stale grain and moldy milk. And then I stare down at my bag.

A plan is churning in the back of my skull. Not a full roadmap, just threads to weave together. I have to leave Silver Dollar. Non-negotiable. I should talk to Chip. Maybe. Next, money. I have fifty dollars pinched together from odd chores. Then, there are the thousands my father dealt me for the destruction of each super, split across six accounts. If I disguise myself, I can get an apartment. My breathing evens. I'll be fine, I tell myself, though my chest still aches.

I dig into my bag. I'd stolen some of Chip's clothes. A pull-over faded band shirt. An old hoodie torn at the sleeves with fishnet running under the holes. Chip's go-to fix. Made him look edgy, he said. And when I clench the faded black hoodie to my chest, with its tears and shoddy stitches, I can still smell Chip. He never wore cologne, not even the bottle of Dolce Gabbana Percy bought him when they pretended to date ("I'll tell Dad I don't like guys as soon as mom comes home, I promise! Just put on the stupid suit, Chip. And if we're gonna pretend date, you can at least smell presentable."), but he's always had a certain smell to him, cigarettes and cinnamon. Cigarettes because his aunt smokes, cinnamon because he's always popping red hots.

My hands tremble around the bunches of fabric. Chip's smell is so intense, if I close my eyes I can imagine he's behind me. But I don't. I stare back down at two bottles of black hair dye that have rolled out of my bag. Since it's cheap, familiar, and cliche enough to fade into the background, Chip's all-black punk look was the first disguise I thought to steal. If I throw up my hood, kept a sweep of black hair over my eye, and put in my gray contacts, then maybe I'll slip into the background. Just some goth twerp, nothing to look at. But slipping Chip's hoodie over my tattered shirt, surrounding myself in the whispers of his warmth, that spicy-sweet smell creeping up my skin, it makes my eyes flutter open wide. I think of him strewn at my feet, the bruises on his neck a chain of purple and green, blue and black.

I shake the dye bottles and lather my hair in the fuming suds. I don't bother with the instructions. Just hold my hands over my head to protect it from the rain. The planning must go on.

Below Silver Dollar, there's this city. Starlight City, crawling with supers. And where there's supers, there are people who want them dead. I haven't seen all of my father's records, and I don't know much about him, but I know who employed him, an organization. I saw the name dashed across the backs of his notebooks in clumsy script, looped over and over, as if it belonged to his high school crush.

Everyman.

Everyman is a dumb name for an organization, even to an English nerd like Percy, who deciphered it for me. Everyman, the type of fictional character who is supposed mirror its audience. Average. "They're saying the average guy should have a chance against the big burly dudes, story heroes, basically. That's what it means, I...I think. You're not one of those anti-super people, are you?"

My chest is pounding so hard it's nothing more than an ache anymore. I'm a super. I should defend my people, if that's what I'm supposed to think of them as, not as strangers, but "mine."

It doesn't matter. This Everyman will give me shelter and I'll work with them while I do what I do best, kidnapping and un-supering heroes, all until I'm human again. It'll be a new life for me.

Inky dye runs down my face in rivulets as I lower my head to sleep.

I squelch my sobs with a hard gulp. When I close my eyes, I hear Chip and Percy laughing, I feel Chips fingers knotted in mine, Monet's lips moving against my ear. I hear the gunshots clipping into her body. My chest is heaving with desperate little gasps. I wake up shivering to the beat of hail on my skin. Far, in the corners of the wood, echo the low howl of dogs.

I scramble to my feet. My hands are stained from my wounded shoulder and sloppy dye job. The rain has finally begun to die, the hail becoming dimes in size, nicking at my shoulder blades, face. Mist clouds my skin, freezing cold. The howling closes in, amplified off the old magnolias. The soft squish of footsteps in the undergrowth has my heart crescendoing in my chest, the quick beats becoming a horrible cloying ache under my ribs. I snap into a run. All above me, the trees form a prickly ceiling of branches. It's a dizzying darkness I don't want to break, and with my bag slung over my injured shoulder and the skin knitting over my shattered arm, I bolt.

Other than Monet, there are no superheroes left in Silver Dollar. There used to a lot of them: Black Ice, Yellow Star, Green Adder, Blue Rapids, and their leader, Red Comet.

None of them are super anymore. And it's all my doing.

But they're still heroes. Each of them impeccably trained, all muscle and years of bruises, beat-downs, and body-building routines that would shame some of the best of athletes. Black belts in several arts, some of them geniuses and rich geniuses at that. With their powers, they're unstoppable, without their powers, they're basically Batman. Which is another unstoppable all on its own, don't you think?

I keep my profile low to the ground, but I can't use my superspeed. Too many roots and bramble bushes. Too many low-hanging branches and trees twisted at wild angles. Too many traps to ensare me.

The footsteps become louder. I'm already short of breath, my wounds taking on new, fresh aches. The dogs are closer, but the sky is growing farther and farther as the canopy of branches above me thickens. They cut the sky into triangles, little slices of frowning darkness that falls heavily on me. I'm dragging my weight, the blood loss making my vision a haze between the skin sealing up the broken arm, my shattered knuckles, my wounded shoulder. "Come on, Max," I hiss to myself as I start to stumble. This is another habit of mine, talking to myself. "Just fly, fly low—"

The weight smothers me. I'm flung tumbling into a heap of brown leaves, roots gauging my face, chest. I get an eyeful of black fabric before swallowing up a mouthful of dirt. The calloused hands reach around my shoulders and grasp at my sleeves, pin me down by the folds of thick fabric I squirm and cuss, the figure so broad all I can see is his shadow.

"Black Ice?" His name is a squeak. Before he discovered his ice powers, the man used to be a SEAL. And, I mean, I think us supervillains are pretty good at what we do, but in a fight between us and the armed forces, frankly, we lose. I lose. My face is shoved into the dirt, the man is sitting on my back, the police are coming, and the dogs are so close now their barking drives splinters through my eardrums.

"Frankly, son, I'm embarrassed." He has a southern accent, so when he speaks, the words are drawn out and pronounced slowly, like he's talking through a throat full of honey. "I always pegged you as a good young man. What happened, Max?"

I give up trying to spit out the dirt and swallow it. It goes down dry and burns. "Superheroes shouldn't exist, that's what my dad says. Why don't you take it up with him, h-huh?" My voice cracks in a way it hasn't since I was thirteen.

"That's what the mayor thinks?"

"You sound surprised." I laugh so hard it hurts down deep in the base of my chest. And then I cut it off abruptly, because I sound crazy, and I'm not crazy. I wish I could say everything I've done was because my father abused me past sanity or something, but no, fully in sound mind, I tossed Monet to what was supposed to be her death, fully in sound mind, I beat Chip, kidnapped those supers, and made all those terrible one-liners. "I made you human again. I wish someone would make me human again."

Black Ice sucks in a sharp breath. Like he wants to throttle me, but he can't, because he's too much of a goodie to sink his fingertips into a teenager's throat. "Boy," he warns.

"You let me go," I say, the taste of mud still stinging on my tongue, "And I'll make sure your daughters won't lose their powers. Everyman is going to take out all of the supers, whether I'm in prison or not, but at least I'll make sure—It's Lilly, right? And Lorena? Cute little kids. Hate for something bad to happen to them—I'll make sure they stay intact. Isn't that what you want? To protect your children?"

Black Ice keeps his voice calm, though I can hear it tremble. "I can't do that, Max. I'm sorry you had to turn out this way. I'll talk to your father about this."

I let myself go limp as if in defeat. Let my shoulders tremble with sobs. I'm good at pretending to cry. "I'm so sorry. Everything I did was so wrong, I—"

"I'm not buying it."

I squirm over on my back so I'm looking up at him. I must look pitiful, crying and shivering, bloodied all down the front of Chip's hoodie. "P-p-please." I make my voice all whimpery and soft. He blinks down at me, sighing.

"Max—"

I swing up with my superspeed and slam my broken knuckles into the side of his face while he's still staring sadly at me with his ink black eyes. He collapses to the side with a 'pop', dead weight. My knuckles buzz with fresh pain and I'm up and running while the dogs explode through the foliage. I rocket up into the air, too scared to glance back at the sound of their barking and snarling. I hit trees and tear through branches until my head is a tailspin and my brain is mush behind my eyes.

I fly, pushing myself faster and faster, until the forest thins above me. A flicker of starlight winks through the cloud cover. And then I'm shooting over the forest, floating above Silver Dollar Strip. It's a map, scored with streets and sectioned full of sagging white homes on bleached sand, little checker squares of green grass, loops of telephone wire, dark and clumsy.

It's over. I let out a sigh of a breath. They can't get me yet.

And then I hear the ear-piercing purr of an engine above me, the clip-clip-clip of propellers, and I'm already diving through the air so quickly I can feel my stomach in my throat. I don't know if I'll ever have the life I wanted, sedentary and rich, all I know is that I may be on the run forever.

So before making everyone human again and becoming the lapdog of a big evil organization?

Let's start with getting out of this little city. Let's start with that right now.