Killing Olympia

Sophie was starting to think they actually wanted to kill her. She hadn't thrown up so much in the short amount of time she'd been alive, especially not this painfully. It felt like her ribs were pressing against her lungs. It almost felt like she was going to pass out. She spat, she forced herself to straighten, put her fists on her hips and took a deep breath. Sweat ran down her face, down her back—she dragged the back of her arm across her face and blinked salt out of her eyes. For a clone, she was oddly very human. You'd think they would have made her a lot less…sweaty. She blamed it on Olympia. If her genes had been better, so would Sophie's, but hey, that was just life sometimes.

"I'm ready," she yelled. Her ribs ached from breathing so hard. Sophie bent over and rested her hands on her knees, short blonde hair falling over her face. The room she was in technically didn't exist to the general public. Capes in the Olympiad called it the Gauntlet. Sohpie called it home. Some of her earliest memories all came from here, however fun and exciting it had been to get shot at and torn apart and nearly killed over and over again.

Well, the sixteen previous versions of her had been shot, torn apart, and killed in here, anyway. Sometimes she can still see her own blood between the white floor tiles. But she ignored that and stared straight ahead to the opposite wall. She'd taught herself not to think. Not to live in the past. Hell, she's died enough times to know that pain really is temporary. Nightmares didn't count. Nor did the ticks that her psychologist said would eventually go away. Sophie shook her head. Focus. The ceiling was several stories above her, and right at the top, a bank of blue windows was watching her. She could see through the one-way glass. Hear their muttering, their scribbling, their breathing and every time one of them leaves—seemingly unimpressed. Faceless, noisy, judgemental investors.

Assholes. They were assholes. But Sophie couldn't say that to them, because 'apparently' it was rude.

Whatever.

A buzz echoed through the cavernous white room. "Ready on your mark."

A hologram flickered beside her. It took several seconds. Long, silent, several seconds.

Gayne stood next to her, making Sophie look like a child in comparison. She straightened and jumped on the balls of her heels, bare feet smacking against the tiles. She'd seen him enough times in the past several hours to know exactly what he looked like. Massive. Muscular. A creature so abnormally god-like he almost made the old simulations of Zeus' data look average. But what that meant wasn't her problem. All she had to do was beat him.

Sophie bent. The muscles in her legs went taught. Gayne's hologram flickered, still motionless.

"Count of five," Sophie yelled.

It happened at an instant. Seconds peeled back and the ground bent underneath the air pressure beneath her feet. One leg shoved her forward. The other arched upward, slammed down in front of her. Head down. Arms ready. Shoulders tensed and back arched. Then, in that same second, she was halfway across the room in a gust of wind strong enough to snatch the air out of her lungs. She skidded to a half past the yellow halfway marker going from one wall of the Gauntlet to another. She stumbled, tripped, her legs going weak as she collapsed onto her hands and knees. She retched. Nothing came out except saliva and mucus. Gross. She knuckled it all away again.

Gayne's hologram had been standing at the yellow line from the moment she launched toward it.

The time it took her feet leaving the ground, he was already halfway there.

Sophie had been doing exercise to curb her anger issues lately. Sophie slammed her fist against the ground and dented solid titanium. "Fuck," she hissed. His hologram vanished. "I swear to fucking God. It's a straight—"

"She's slower than the previous runs," a voice muttered. She kept her head down, panting like a sick dog. The voices came from the bank of windows above her. "It's trending toward two tenths of a second every run. The more exhausted she gets, the bigger the gap. I'm not one to talk, man, but Cassie might've wasted a lot of dough."

"Tell me about it." Another voice. She tenses her jaw. "We could've gotten a sweet little payrise."

"What's it fuckin' matter?" someone muttered. "The world's about to end."

"I can hear you, assholes," Sophie shouted, getting onto her feet. Spots danced across her eyes. She nearly stumbled walking back across the room, leaving Gayne's hologram behind her. "Super-Hearing, remember that?"

She heard one of them press a button, and suddenly the windows above her went dead silent.

The large gray pressurized doors beeped, then decompressed and slid open. That usually meant it was time for lunch. Ever since yesterday, it's meant get the fuck out. Sophie grabs her towel off the floor and loops it around her neck, then throws both her middle fingers toward the windows as she walks backward out of the empty white room. Jackasses. The doors slid shut behind her. Sophie used the towel to wipe herself down as she made her way down the empty hallway. The locker rooms were equally as empty (thank God), and that meant she could crank the heat up all the way when she showered and max out the PA's volume when she told it to play rock music. She might not know a lot of things about 'normal life,' and she hadn't been made to—but something about music just made all the noise in her head go silent. The louder, the faster, the more screaming, the better. She ended up showering so long her fingers pruned and her skin had started to go bright red. It wasn't like she had any meetings to go to or any scheduled appointments. Those all stopped yesterday for the foreseeable future. If there even was a future tomorrow.

For all anyone knew, Gayne could have been lying. That Empire he'd been talking about could be right here on their doorstep, and then bang, they're all fucking dead. It would really suck. Sophie wouldn't mind, she guessed, because death stopped scaring her after the first couple of times, and the only reason she does care is because beating them all on her own would make her look good. It would make her look legendary. Olympia?

Please. Out with the old, in with the new. Heck, they might as well pull whatever plug is keeping her alive. It wasn't like she'd be the same person after the mess they'd found her in, anyway. Unlike Sophie, her body parts couldn't get replaced so easily. She was meat. Not even very good meat. Which also meant she was probably dead.

They should just hand over the mantle and the costume already, but that was her thinking out loud.

Sophie turned off the shower, toweled down, and slid into baggy black pants and a t-shirt she ripped in half that stopped just above her ribs. She saw the look in a magazine once in Cassie's office and thought it looked cool. She didn't own many clothes. She wasn't allowed to. But it felt good, they felt comfortable, and as she fit a pair of old headphones onto her ears, she at least didn't have to think about the fact she still looked exactly like Olympia.

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The mirrors were covered in enough mist to blur out the resemblance, and once again, thank God.

Sophie dialed up the music on the tape player she hitched onto her waistline.

The Olympiad had several training facilities. Various Cape power levels meant different facilities. Where she was staying for the next few days was so deep inside Nevada it might as well not exist. What did exist was the heat as soon as she stepped out of the training building. Dirt crunched under her beat up sneakers. Dust howled through the air. The wind felt abrasive, even to her skin—a little like the sandpaper they used to use to figure out how durable her skin used to be fresh out of the womb. Sophie shaded her eyes and stopped walking across the giant dusty quad, glancing into the pale blue sky. No clouds. No Empires tearing apart the atmosphere on a war path. Just another sweaty day on a dull military base. She kinda hated it here. New Olympus was way more fun.

But she wasn't allowed to be there for 'PR' reasons, according to Cassie. Whatever that meant.

She could have stepped into the fight. Hell, if she'd been there, Gayne would've run so fast. Instead, she'd been in fucking Florida trying to impress a billionaire who'd started to get cold feet about the Olympus Protocol.

Like some goddamned seal clapping for fish. Except she didn't get any fish. Or a reward.

Her stomach growled. She glanced at the canteen across the dirt quad. A bunch of army guys and Capes in civilian clothes were already eating what smelt like perfectly bland meat and bread and punch. Something, something, world trade was slowly collapsing because people were afraid of what was going to happen next. Sophie didn't care. She could go days without eating, just like the tests had shown when she was younger. But some food wouldn't hurt. What she had for breakfast was now all over the Gauntlet's floor, anyway, so she made her way over.

She ignored the glances she got. She ignored the odd gestures and weird looks they gave her. She thumbed the music even louder, got to the buffet, and served herself watery meat and hard-as-stone bread. Her favorite. She turned around, tray in hand, gym bag over her shoulder, and found no space at all. The canteen was a large green canvas tent with metal benches underneath it and a dirt floor. Food, blood, and vomit had mixed into the soil, and when she finally found a place to sit in the corner of the canteen on a turned over bucket, her stomach was aching.

Sophie dumped her bag on the ground, sat on the bucket outside of the canteen, and dug in.

Until someone nudged her shoulder. She glanced up. A female soldier stood beside her, saying something that Sophie couldn't hear over her rock music. She shrugged and went back to eating. The chick nudged her again.

"Oh my God, what do you want?" she said, taking off her headphones and looking at her. "I'm hungry."

"Captain Gold-Star wants to see you," the woman said. Fuck. Sophie watched the woman walk off.

That was the on-base nickname for the guy in charge of this place. Technically, the Capes and the soldiers shouldn't be working together. So, for legal reasons, they weren't—they just so happened to share a couple of old buildings in the middle of the desert surrounded by nothing except dirt, cacti, dead animals and a diner that sells the nastiest sloppy joes Sophie has ever had. Captain Gold-Star, though, technically also didn't exist either. He had to be a ghost, because at the end of the day, superhumans running secret branches of the military was a little iffy.

Again, Sophie didn't care. No, sir, not one fucking bit. She spooned in three more mouthfuls, grabbed her duffel bag, and left her lunch tray on the bucket as she flew across the yard. This was her favorite part of the day.

Getting told she's nothing quite like Olympia never gets old. Like, at all. It's just so, so fun.

Sophie tries to smile when she lands outside of the squat, temporary building acting as a HQ, because Cassie was standing there in her open-collar suit and coat, as if the heat wouldn't dare make someone like her sweat. Captain Gold-Star stood rigid beside her, fatigues folded up to his elbows so that his beefy forearms could tighten.

"Hey, mom," Sophie said, landing in front of Cassie. "I didn't think you'd come all the way here." She had to swallow a spark of excitement. Cassie's new assistant (they were always new) handed Sophie a piece of paper. Sophie looked at the three adults. Cassie wasn't smiling, and neither was Gold-Star, which meant bad news, kiddo.

She tried not to crack her tooth, tensing her jaw, when she glanced at the piece of paper.

Sophie frowned. "What the hell?" she whispered.

"If you don't like it, I really don't care," Cassie said dryly. She was wearing sunglasses, which meant that Sophie could still perfectly see the wrinkles of exhaustion around her eyes. It had been a very busy several hours ever since the attack. Washington pulled her to one side, the Olympiad the next, and Sophie guessed that Cassie not having a clue where Kincaid had taken Olympia was chewing her up inside. But she wasn't going to say that out loud. She hated it when mom got angry at her. "It's what we came up with on a whim. It'll appeal. It's something new. And it doesn't look like hers. I need you ready to leave in three hours' time. New Olympus is westward."

A new costume, Sophie thought. She fought the urge to grin. She did anyway. Massively. My own costume!

She shot toward Cassie.

Cassie put up a hand, stopping Sohpie from hugging her. Instead, she patted her shoulder. "This isn't some kind of game you're going to play there. You're going to work hard, you're going to stay focused, and you're going to do what you can, the best you can, in the most heroic way possible. I need you to be a superhero right now, Ok?"

Sophie nodded vigorously, clutching to the costume designs on the sheet of paper. She didn't have a birthday. Not really. She had a day when she was deemed alive, sure, but she'd never gotten anything before. Not from mom. Not from anybody. She guessed Olympia gave her that red and white costume, but the government had taken that away from her so they could 'study' it or whatever. But…her very own costume. Not some hand-me down. Not someone else's leftovers. This was hers. This was hers to the bone. God, she almost wanted to scream.

But she wouldn't, because that would make mom mad, and that was always a bad thing.

Cassie never smiled. Not with her, at least. She would one day. And soon.

"So whaddya want me to do there?" Sophie asked. "Kill another Kaiju? A new villain?"

"Establish control, gather resources, and strip Lower Olympus of its wealth." Sophie blinked. Cassie slid her hands into her pockets and continued. "They're sitting on a gold mine of information there. I want you to go and clean those streets up as much as possible. We're in a race to the finishing line, and right now, I need a way to get a headstart. I need information. I need people who'll work for me. Your job isn't to negotiate. Your job is to look good doing what Olympia won't be able to do until she comes back. If she even comes back." The assistant shifted on her heels, seemingly uncomfortable at that. "I've got an old friend in Lower Olympus who's giving me a little trouble. If you run into him, make sure he knows his place." Sophie was about to ask who she was talking about, but Cassie continued talking over her, anyway. "And one last thing: you're not her, Seventeen. Don't even try to be."

She swallowed past the lump in her throat, then smiled and nodded. "Got it. I'll be me."

I'll be better than her.

Cassie gestured at Gold-Star. "He'll go with you and keep tabs. He'll sometimes accompany you."

"What?" Sophie groaned. Gold-Star raised one bushy eyebrow, nudging his green hat. "But he's old."

Cassie stared at her. Silence and wind and the distant sound of noise from the canteen filled the air.

Sophie cleared her throat, her voice much quieter. "I…I understand. Got it."

"Good." Cassie walked past her toward a waiting black SUV. "And be careful. I'd hate to lose billions of dollars worth of R&D because the world's most expensive nuclear warhead underestimated Lower Olympus."

Sophie scoffed quietly. "It's a landfill with a couple of buildings. I can handle that so easily."

Cassie muttered, "I fucking hope so," as she slid into the backseat of the SUV.

She watched the SUV drive deeper into the desert. Sophie waited until the rooster tale of dust behind the car was out of Normal eye-sight range, then looked up at Gold-Star and nudged him in the ribs. "Ready, old timer?"

He grumbled under his breath and walked away.

It left her standing alone under the spiteful midday sun, staring at the costume designs in her hands.

Sophie Blackwood was about to be her very own superhero, baby.

Lower Olympus isn't gonna know what it hit.