I had no idea how long I slept. The first part of it was endless black nothing, broken by the aches in my body from lying in one position for too long and the need to go to the bathroom, and then more black nothing like skips in time, like I was hitting the jump forward button on a DVD playback. Bathroom break, bathroom break, bathroom break, with nothing at all in between. Then I started having dreams, and waking up from them just enough to be aware I was having them. All the usual nightmares, my parents, Sonnebend, dead babies, same dramas I always get when I close my eyes and I'm not drunk or tired or well-laid enough to sleep through the dreams. And then the erotic dreams, reminding me that two weeks without sex was the longest dry spell I'd endured in years. And then the erotic nightmares, about which the less said the better.

By the time I was finally awake enough to get up and stay up, I was not in a particularly good mood. Also, I was starving, which never helps. I stalked out of the bedroom I'd been stashed in, which turned out to be in the medical wing (of course, can't let the supervillain into the main building, never mind that not only had I lived there for several years but my cats were there and I'd gone to visit them more than once), and went looking for Suri, or the baby, or somebody.

I found David first. Dr. Jansen was sitting in one of the recovery rooms in the medical ward, in a large, soft rocking chair, with David sleeping on her lap. It was the most adorable thing ever. This was the first indication that I'd had thus far that my bizarre emotional states from supervising the pregnancy might not have entirely been an artifact of my lack of sleep; I was as well rested as I could get and I still found myself entirely smitten by the baby. "Were you feeding him?" I asked Dr. Jansen. She nodded. "How's that going?"

"Well enough. He didn't seem to want to nurse the day he was born, but he woke up yesterday morning and was quite loud about wanting his first meal, and he's been nursing healthily ever since. He actually seems to want to nurse every two to three hours, and since you warned us it would take about twelve to replenish our milk, I'm somewhat concerned."

I sighed. "I can fill in if you guys all come up dry, but you might just step up lactation if he's draining you too fast. It'll just be important to eat more and get more rest if that happens." I walked over and looked down at him. "Can I hold him?"

"He might wake up," Dr. Jansen objected mildly.

"Not if I don't want him to," I said, though in fact I did want him to. I really wanted to see those adorable blue eyes open up and look at me. But he was a baby; he needed his rest, so I lifted him carefully and made sure to dampen any signals to awaken that my touch triggered in him. I snuggled him against my chest and shoulder as I examined him. "How long was I asleep?"

"Two days and a half."

"Did it occur to anyone that it might be a good idea to wake me up and feed me?"

"When Cyberna tried, you simply wouldn't wake up. Then Bobcat attempted it, and you tried to seduce him."

I went slightly red. "I don't remember that at all."

"You pulled him down on top of yourself, kissed him, and asked him if he had been to this party before. Then you fell asleep again."

That was really embarrassing. Not to mention dangerous. If I'd been able to talk and grab people in my sleep, I might have tried to use my powers in my sleep as well. Bobcat was lucky; he'd probably come in on me in the middle of an erotic dream. If he'd come in during one of the nightmares, I might have seriously hurt him. "I'll have to apologize to him later. I've never before attempted to seduce a guy and then fallen asleep before I could follow through." There had been an incident once where I'd been really drunk and a guy I'd been trying to seduce while I was still conscious enough to do so had decided to follow through on his own after I lost consciousness. After I woke up and managed to flush what was left of his body down the toilet, I made a resolve never, ever again to let myself get drunk enough to lose consciousness in the presence of other people. I felt kind of bad about it, because from what I remembered I had been coming on to him before I passed out, but he should have known better than to try to fuck an unconscious woman; I hadn't had any idea who he was or why he was on top of me when I regained consciousness for a moment, and I might be too drunk to remember that I might have made an offer before I passed out, but I'm never, ever too drunk to kill people who're touching me. As I said, Bobcat was lucky. I wasn't going to mention any of this to Dr. Jansen, though.

"I'm sure he understands that you didn't mean anything by it," Dr. Jansen said. Of course, it wasn't actually true that I didn't mean anything by it. I was incredibly horny, and while my rational mind considered it a terrible idea to fuck a member of the Peace Force, my body thought that the idea of Bobcat in my bed was an absolutely fantastic idea. All that wiry strength, and those super-attenuated senses. Mm-hm. But there's not much point to having total control over organic tissue if you can't control your own body, so I damped down my libido � didn't kill it, just turned down the gain so I could concentrate on other things.

"I need something to eat, and I need to examine this baby," I said. "Can I take him with me while I go get breakfast?"

"How are you at taking care of babies?"

"I'm perfectly capable of changing a diaper if he poops," I said.

"Then I suppose it's all right. I'll go with you." Because plainly I needed an escort or I would get up to all sorts of nefarious deeds. And why did I need to know how to take care of babies if she was going to go with me anyway? I didn't point this out, though, because I actually didn't know where the closest place to get some food was; the medical wing had changed substantially since I had lived here, and for all I knew the kitchen had been moved.

As we walked, I checked up on David. He was doing quite well, actually � physical brain development approximately the equivalent of a two to three month old infant, with fewer connections made in the brain because he had had two or three months' less experience with the world outside the womb he'd lived in.

(skip and add later; somewhere in here I set up that Suri actually names the baby David in honor of all the work Meg's done to save him)

Getting out of Tycho Building was the best idea I'd had in some time. I made some phone calls, scheduling appointments that I'd put off to do this work. I wandered around the city for some time, reacquainting myself with the sights and smells of my true home; I hadn't even been able to visit New York City for many years. It made me angry in retrospect that I'd denied myself something I'd wanted, badly, in order to protect myself from a threat that didn't exist; if Suri had been letting me go, then it wouldn't have been dangerous for me to visit her home turf.

So I went and visited places that I remembered from my childhood, or my days in Peace Force Tau. I spent an inordinate amount of time in FAO Schwartz, buying stuffed animals (I believe I may have previously confessed to my extreme childishness); I shopped for clothing in trendy leather boutiques, because I can transmit my power through organics like cotton, wool and leather, and leather is just infinitely cooler-looking than the other options. I spent too much money on fancy chocolate and bakery treats and indy DVD movies about gay dudes in soap-opera-esque plots. I splurged on jewelry, which is totally useless to me, completely impervious to my power, and therefore a personal symbol of extravagant self-indulgence. And for some stupid reason I found myself buying adorable baby clothes decorated with spiders and crocodiles and turtles.

That was dumb. In a few days, when I could safely give the baby a full, clean bill of health, I was going to walk out of his life and probably not see him again until he was a grownup fighting me. The thought made me sad, and getting sad makes me angry, and being angry in public isn't good for the health of the people around me. Plainly I needed something to get my mind off David. So I went to a nightclub.

The band was local, and not very good, but they were loud and that was what I needed right now. I bought fruity girly drinks because it's so hard for me to get drunk, there wasn't even a point to trying, so I might as well go for taste. Men came up to me and chatted me up, and I flirted back, and danced with them, and squeezed their butts through their denim jeans. Denim's organic, not artificial. I wasn't going to sleep with those guys, but the next women who did were going to get a payload of retrovirus from their semen, which would hit the women's unfertilized eggs and convert all their future children to Proximas. Two weeks spent saving a baby meant two weeks not increasing the Proxima population, and I had to make up for lost time.

By then, I'd had a chance to thoroughly check out the population of the nightclub, identify a few possibilities for tonight's entertainment, and prioritize them. Number One was waiting for a friend, meaning either he had a date or he wasn't interested in me. I moved on to Number Two, a tall, wiry brunet dude with a clean-shaven face, lightly tanned skin well in the white guy range, and thick, slightly shaggy hair just begging to have my fingers running through it. He turned out to be the kind of guy who was A-OK with my desire to cut to the chase... or cut the chase short, as it were.

I'd already gotten a hotel room � now that I wasn't on call for David's survival every two hours, I had no intention of staying in the Peace Force headquarters � but we went to his; he was from the Midwest, in the city tonight on a business trip. Someone I'd never see again, just the way I liked it. My dude du jour and I got the foreplay out of the way in the taxi, so by the time we got into his room, we were both ready to go. He threw me on the bed and more or less flung himself on top of me; I grinned, flipped him over, pinned him and started ripping his shirt off with my teeth. He objected to that on the grounds that he liked that shirt, so I stripped him the more mundane way, adding just a little bit of power to make the fibers in his jeans loosen up and let me pull them down off his hips more easily. My own dress was barely in the way to begin with � hike up the bottom, slip out of the straps and pull down the top, and I let him take care of the thong by yanking it out of the way with his tongue and teeth while I sat on his face.

They have to know, I'm in charge. They don't get to pick me. I pick them. And if they agree, then they do what I want, when I want, how I want. I tell them exactly how I want to be touched, and I make them hot and eager to do it by spiking their arousal so it turns them on to do exactly that to me. I don't have to be physically on top to be the one who's in control. I'll let them pin me down, for a while, because it's hot, and then I'll flip them, so they know they were never dominating me, that I could break loose from their grip any time I wanted to.

This time I wanted it hard and I didn't want to have to micromanage it, so I let him bend me over the bed, pull my hair and fuck me. The usual words ran through my head � not the dirty ones I might actually say, but the ones that really get me off. �I chose you. I'm controlling you. Everything you want to do is what I want you to do, because I won't even let you want it if I don't. You have no power over me. "Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!" Do what I want you to do. "Harder, oh god, right there, yes!" This isn't about you, it's about me, You'll like everything I do to you and you'll like doing everything I want from you because your body is mine now. "Fuck yes, do it, do it, oh god oh god oh god YES!" You're not using me. I'm using you.

After I'd gotten as many orgasms as I wanted from one fuck session, I let him come, harder than he'd probably ever come in his life. And then, after we'd showered, and room service brought wine and a light dinner, I ran my hands over his skin and made him want more. He was tired, he might not have been up for it without my powers, but I cleared the muscle fatigue out of him, hardened him up and got him ready to go. I sucked him off and made him scream for me, begging for it, more than willing to hand himself over to me and let me play him like a guitar. And then I made him want to give me the same treatment, badly enough that getting me off got him ready to go for thirds.

By the time I was done with him, he fell asleep almost instantly, completely exhausted, floating on a cloud of endorphins and probably happier with the sex than he'd been in any other casual encounter. I didn't clean up any of the marks I'd left on him (and I'd left quite a lot), but I healed the ones he'd left on me, got dressed, and returned to my own hotel, which was a lot nicer than his anyway. Sometimes I let myself fall asleep beside them, but this time I wanted him to wake up and know he'd been used, that I'd been the one using him to scratch an itch and not the other way around. I ate some of my bakery pastries, because sex always makes me hungry. I took a long, sudsy bubble bath (those are bad for you, and as a doctor, I cannot recommend them, as they're known to irritate the vagina and urethra. I, though, am free to take as many bubble baths as I like.) And then I went to sleep naked, sprawled out to cover as much of the king-size bed as I could, on top of the sheets where the air conditioning could dry me off.

Suckers can find one guy and spend the rest of their lives fucking him, secretly moaning to themselves about whether or not they're good enough for him and can they keep his attention and does he really love them. I had total freedom to do whatever I wanted, and I couldn't imagine why it was that anyone was ever willing to give that up.

A voice in my mind woke me up. Meg. Come back. Now.

I was up and moving before I realized it hadn't been my own thoughts. There was the afterimage of a star in my head, a glowing blob as if I'd been staring at a light bulb, except I hadn't had any of the lights on and the blackout curtains were drawn. Angrily I stopped still in the middle of pulling my pants on, and concentrated. You don't give me orders, I subvocalized, because you don't have to make audible sound for Suri to hear you, but moving your lips and tongue in the shape of the words as if you were talking focuses the specific thing you want to say in your head, in a way that makes it easier for her to pick it up.

This isn't an order, the sun whispered in my head. It's a request. Please, come quickly.

Oh, god. Is something wrong with David?

Something is wrong, but it's not medical. Hurry, Meg.

As I finished throwing my clothes on I morphed them into soft, flexible leather, supple enough not to restrict any of my movements, tight enough that it wouldn't catch on anything, and went out the window. The rooftop immediately below me was heat-absorbent asphalt, warm on my bare feet even now that the day was long over. I jumped down the fire escape, catching every other landing to keep my fall controlled, and flipped off the second-to-last landing to swing around a lamppost and fling myself down on the awning to a fancy restaurant. As I ran for Tycho Building, my legs lengthened, my lungs expanded, and my body shifted into my costume-shape, the long-legged, golden-skinned creature the world knew as Dr. Mystery. Because I needed aerodynamics for speed, I didn't grow the oversized breasts or the high heels, yet, and I let my hair stay in the shorter cut my natural body was using nowadays.

Something that was wrong that wasn't medical, and yet needed me, was a supers thing. Was the Peace Force under attack? Did Suri expect me to fight alongside them, after so much bad blood and so many years, like I had when I was younger and she hadn't sold me out and left me at Sonnebend no matter how many times I screamed in my mind for her? More to the point, was I actually going to do it? Suri had an entire team of superheroes to protect her and her baby. Why was she calling me?

If something had come through and near-killed the entire team, leaving them bloody and dying, and Dan Foster was one of the victims... maybe then I'd be needed. But she'd said it wasn't medical. So what was it?

I didn't stop once. New York City streets are full of cars even at night, many of them driving significantly faster than they ought to, but just because I'm scared of cars when I'm trapped in one myself doesn't mean I can't deal with them just fine when I have full mobility. As I ran out into the road my legs morphed again, shifting optimization from running to leaping, and I threw myself up into the air and on top of one of the speeding cars, much like they do in the movies. The car kept driving. No actual New York city residents are all that shocked when a Proxima lands on their roof; we've all seen that trick in the movies, and most of us who can pull it off do so when we can. I leapt off of it at my intersection, rolled out of the way of a bus, jumped over another car, and was on the sidewalk again, calloused bare feet hitting the pavement hard enough that if I wasn't healing them as I ran, they'd have been bloody by the time I got where I was going, despite the callouses.

The door to Tycho Building had been programmed to let me back in, and obediently swished open. The door to the staircase did not; the elevator was programmed to take me only to the fifth floor. Suri! Where is David?

We are all in the war room. Third floor. You can safely take the elevator; the crisis isn't the sort that you need to take the stairs for.

So why had I run so fast, if it was acceptable to travel on a slow elevator rather than leaping up flights of stairs? Well, too late now. I took the elevator, and followed directions Suri gave me to the Peace Force "war room". A surprisingly militaristic name for a group with "Peace" in its name to have. I wondered, not for the first time, why it wasn't called the briefing room or something.

I slammed the door open, and stared. The entire team was in the room, and they were... standing around talking?

"Ah, Dr. Mystery," the one person who was not a member of the Peace Force said. "I should have guessed you were the wild card. I meant to be here before the monster was actually born, but I suppose I have you to blame for his premature birth."

Morrow, the time traveler. He was a man of completely indeterminate race, with brown eyes that had just the slightest hint of epicanthic folds, deeply tanned skin, and curly black hair that walked the border between Middle Eastern curly and African curly. He wasn't very tall, which I'd always found somewhat surprising because humanity had been steadily getting taller over the centuries, but maybe we hit the peak of that and then evolution started pushing us back the other way? Morrow's outfit � it was hard to even call it a costume � consisted of black pants in an unnameable plastic-like material that looked like what would happen if you made vinyl about as shiny, or unshiny, as denim is, black boot-sneakers � there was really no other way to describe them, they rose far beyond the level of the highest high-top but were plainly made of sneaker material, with no visible laces � and a black hoodie made of the same bizarre material as his pants, bulky enough around him to hide the fact that under it he wore several straps like suspenders, but running to a neck collar and a leather-like belt rather than holding his pants up, with numerous small electronic-looking devices clipped onto the straps. Kind of like what if Batman's belt consisted of five or six straps running up and down his torso and therefore actually had room for all the stuff that Batman supposedly keeps on his belt. (I'm not much for gadgets, but on my few forays into that territory I've come to realize that the only way Batman could store everything on his belt that he supposedly has in the comics or TV shows would be if he had the waist of a morbidly obese man, and maybe not even then.)

I'd met Morrow a few times in the past. He always seemed surprised to see me, for some reason. We were neither enemies nor allies, most of the time, but he'd briefly assisted me with my scheme to market vitamin pills that would immunize the Proxima population against the bio-plagues I'd been forced to create, by bringing me samples of said plagues, because after Sonnebend shut down most of the evidence had been destroyed or squirrelled away so deep even the President of the United States couldn't get it back. I figured he was a reasonably decent guy � like me, he was the kind who was more interested in saving the world than conforming to society's standards for good or evil. But if that was my baby he was referring to as a monster, he had another think coming. His clothes weren't organic but his hood was down, exposing his entire head, and I knew for a fact that he wasn't faster than me. I took a step forward, calculating angles and vectors, preparing several lines of attack if he moved against me. "Excuse me, are you talking about David?"

He chuckled, but there was no genuine mirth in it. "What a normal-sounding name. I'm talking about Caesar Omega, but of course he wouldn't have that name yet, not the way things are working out this time."

Someone sniffled. I turned to look � so far as I knew, no one in the Peace Force had allergies, that being a thing Dan could clean up for them � and observed wet, red eyes on many members of the team. Glittering tracks on Ciana's face. Ciana had cried exactly once in my memory, and it was when she was a teenage hero and I was a teenage thug and I'd attacked her. Dana was sniffling, choking down a sob. Jason was sitting down � Jason was never sitting down when he could stand up, and he had his head in his hands and was shaking it back and forth in a "no" gesture. Rebecca was crying, silently. Raymond was leaning against the wall with one hand, looking like he wanted to throw up.

What the hell was going on here?

Suri spoke up. She was at the far end of the room, still in her wheelchair, still too thin, but unlike most of the others here, her face was impassive. "Meg, Morrow has just been explaining to us why he believes he needs to kill my son to save the world."

I whirled on Morrow. "What?"

Morrow sighed, an exasperated sound. "I don't believe it, Doctor Sun. I know it. I am still receiving updates from the future. The timeline hasn't changed. The child you're referring to as David Nishant Chandrasekhar is destined to become Caesar Omega, the overlord who has tormented humanity for the past two hundred years." He looked at me. "I thought � I hoped � that saving Margaret Santoro's life would change things, but Mystery's existence hasn't done anything to change the future, and now I know why."

"You never saved my life!" I said, startled. "No one even saw you around before 1992."

"There's... no other way?" Ciana said, a pleading note in her voice I'd never heard before. "This is a baby, Morrow. Now that we know what his future is supposed to be, isn't there some way we can change it?"

"Eight billion people have been murdered since he took power in 2026. Prior to that, he killed his mother and every single one of you who opposed him, rather than going into hiding to create a resistance movement. None of you can stand up against him once he reaches his full power." He stroked his chin. "Well, possibly Mystery could survive him; she wasn't a factor in the original timeline, so I don't know for certain. But she wouldn't be able to kill him any more than she can kill his father; I'm not sure if the two of them have ever fought, but I have the DNA analysis of Mystery's power mitochondria and Primus', and Primus was � is � stronger. And given that Omega was powerful enough to kill Primus, I don't think Mystery could survive him unless she chose to make a tactical retreat very, very early in the battle." Morrow looked around the room. "Now. Given all that. Are you seriously willing to risk all of your own lives, and the lives of eight billion people, on the possibility that you can raise Omega to be a decent human being... when Primus is even now seeking to take him away to raise himself?"

"We can stop Primus," Algernon said. "We have before."

"You didn't stop him from taking Doctor Sun."

"They weren't even there," Suri snapped, the first sign of anger I'd seen from her in... well, nearly ever. "I do not normally need my team to bodyguard me, and the number of individuals who are invisible to my power, planetwide, is in the single digits. So I attended a conference, alone, as I have done many times before. It was... simply unfortunate that Caesar Primus happens to be one of that scant number. If he had sent his minions rather than going in person, he would not have succeeded in kidnapping me."

"What are we even talking about?" I demanded. "Suri, you called me here, fill me in."

"I wish you hadn't done that, Doctor," Morrow said. "Mystery did not need to be involved."

"It's Doctor Mystery," I said. "You can be all Doctor Sun this and Doctor Sun that but you don't give me my title when I'm, you know, an actual medical doctor?"

"The woman who saved my son's life at great personal cost deserves to be involved in the discussion of whether he must be killed to save the world," Doctor Sun said.

"No. Nope. Absolutely not. It's not happening," I said. "Find another way to save the world. No one is killing that baby."

"No one wants to kill a baby, Meg," Algernon said. "If we can find any other way... but you didn't see what we saw. You have no idea what the stakes are."

"So show me."

"The psionic memory projector needs to recharge," Morrow said. "I could show you what I showed them, tomorrow, but by then Primus may have already retrieved the target. I don't think we can wait until tomorrow, and I don't think it's your decision anyway."

"You don't actually think it's any of our decision," Suri said. "The purpose of this discussion is simply to determine whether we will fight you or not."

"Of course we're going to fight!" I snapped. "You � you can't seriously be considering this bullshit?" I prepared to jump Morrow, muscles tensing.

"Stand down, Mystery," Morrow said. "This is still a civil discussion."

Okay. So he saw it coming, and if he saw it coming, he probably had a device or something he could use to incapacitate me before I could touch him. "What did I say about calling me Doctor?"

"You're not even a medical doctor," Dana snapped. "Don't even pretend."

"Because I was kidnapped a month before graduating medical school! You try getting a degree when the government kidnaps you right before you get to graduate!"

"And in the timeline I escaped from, before I changed it, that was the original catalyst," Morrow said.

"Catalyst for what?" I was getting very frustrated with the dribs and drabs of information I was getting here, particularly when there was an implication of a baby's life at stake.

"He showed us his memories of the future," Ciana said dully. "It's... horrible."

"Beginning in 1994, Proximas began to die of bioengineered plagues," Morrow said. "In 1998, Caesar Primus campaigned for President of the United States � a position he was unqualified for because he was not born in America, but he was operating under one of his better established pseudo-identities. He had no intention of winning, of course; he simply wanted a national platform to reveal that the diseases that were disproportionately killing Proximas had been engineered by the government at a secret military installation called Sonnebend. Proximas turned against the government en masse, supporting Primus even after he revealed his true identity. The Peace Force was branded traitors by the majority of Proximas, and lost a great deal of moral authority to negotiate with fellow Proximas. At the same time, being Proximas, they were tainted by association. Many members of the team actually left and joined Primus' side. The rest were forced to go underground, fighting to try to prove that Primus had a hand in the creation of those plagues, defend ordinary humans from Proxima terrorists, defend ordinary Proximas from human hate crimes, and find a cure.

"In 2002, a team of CDC researchers, which included among them Rebecca Jansen, isolated the plague and developed a vaccine, with a treatment coming out in 2003. But the damage was done, the world torn apart on the lines of loyalty to species versus nation � and the rhetoric claiming that Proximas are an entirely separate species was so loud, from both sides, that the few scientists more loyal to the truth than a tribe couldn't make themselves heard. Isak Spiegel, who as Malach had fought to protect Israel for thirty years, publicly turned against his nation, because Israel sided with the government of the United States rather than the Proximas.

"The Peace Force took an action they might never have previously considered. They annexed the states of North and South Dakota, where Ursula Bear Woman had originally come from, and declared it to be a sovereign Proxima nation, renamed Esperance. An attempt to use nuclear force on it resulted in the nuclear weapons that had been deployed against Esperance being returned to Washington DC, where they hovered over the nation's capital for eighty-six hours. When the President of the United States refused to stand down and sign a peace treaty recognizing Esperance � while in hiding at Camp David with his family, having fled DC when the threat began � he was kidnapped and brought to Esperance to stand trial for war crimes. Diplomats from Japan, with its high and well-integrated Proxima population, helped to defuse the threat, return the President to US territory and force the acknowledgement of Esperance in exchange for reparations being paid to US citizens of those states who chose not to remain in the new nation, also the relocation of Mount Rushmore.

"For three years things seemed stable. Then in 2006, Caesar Primus � who had lost considerable power and influence among the Proximas since the creation of Esperance � kidnapped and impregnated Suri Chandrasehkar, who survived the pregnancy with her child's life intact only because Lifeliner was called on to save her. Several days after the child was born, he was taken by Primus' supporters.

"The child was named Omega. His power was fundamentally similar to Mystery's, here, but he didn't need to touch anyone to activate it � he could use it at a distance. At the age of eight, he began supporting his father in the military takeover of Esperance. At nine, he murdered his mother in combat. Esperance's government fell to Primus that year, and within the next ten years, Esperance conquered the entire Western Hemisphere, beginning with the United States. Omega was crucial to the fall of the US; he smuggled himself into DC at the age of 14, and killed all of Congress, the President, the Vice President, and most of the Joint Chiefs within an hour, as well as a huge number of citizens of the District.

"In 2026, he had a falling out with his father, an argument over where to conquer next. Omega won by murdering his father. He crowned himself Caesar Omega, and within the next ten years had conquered the entire world.

"Since his takeover, might has made right. Sapiens women who test positive for power mitochondria are forcibly taken as breeding concubines for the elite; all other Sapiens toil in abject slavery. A hierarchy exists of power, with the most powerful Proximas ruling over the less powerful. The murder of Sapiens isn't even a crime; the murder of Proximas is only prosecuted if the murderer is of lower status, and if the murderer manages to use his successful assassination of his better to move into his victim's place, then the murderer is of higher status than the one he killed, so promotion by assassination is common, even expected. Children with useful powers are taken from their parents early and raised in government creches; children of powerful Proximas who turn out to be Sapiens or have powers considered useless are often killed, and almost always abused. The government has the right to demand that particular individuals breed with each other, so most high-ranking Proximas are either in arranged marriages, or never bothered to marry, bearing children with the partner Omega's government has chosen for them. Only the elite receive an education at all."

"What were you?" Algernon asked calmly.

"Born into the Resistance. That's all you need to know." He looked around the room. "The part I haven't shared with any of you yet is what we discovered three years ago, when we excavated Sonnebend. We were working on developing a time machine, a way to let a Proxima with a time-based power take a one-way trip into the past to alter it, and we needed to find the crucial point. Caesar Primus is far too old; history tells us very little about him, not nearly enough to find him and kill him as a child. Suri Chandrasekhar was responsible for so many of the positive developments for Proximas before everything went to hell, we immediately rejected the notion of trying to prevent her birth. The thought was that stopping Omega's birth wouldn't be enough, if the political situation remained the same; Esperance would always be too tempting a target for Primus. So we felt that the best place to change the future would be to prevent the plagues from being engineered. We dug out Sonnebend with a psychometrist on staff, someone powerful enough to read the psychic impressions left behind by the people who'd been in the building two hundred years ago. And we found her." He pointed at me.

"Me?"

"Your bones, to be precise."

My bones, at Sonnebend. I had to use my powers to keep myself from trembling. None of the Peace Force knew what had happened to me at Sonnebend. Maybe Suri, though I couldn't help thinking that if Suri had ever cared, it wouldn't have happened in the first place. I've admitted to having been kidnapped by the government a month before graduating medical school, and that's all. Nine months later I was a supervillain. The Peace Force could do the math, if they cared, which they didn't. None of them had ever shown any sign of curiosity as to why, when I'd declared that I was quitting the superhero business, leaving Peace Force Tau, so I could go to medical school and learn how to save lives more directly than a superhero could, I'd turned up a year after I should have graduated med school, as a member of Primus' World Unity Collective.

"She was executed at Sonnebend," Morrow said to the Peace Force. "Our psychometrist recovered her final memories from the skeleton we excavated near there. She had been tortured into creating the biological weapons to destroy Proximas that were deployed two years later. Sonnebend was an extreme dark project, need-to-know only; George Bush had been the director of the CIA, and had a number of trusted aides who could liaise with the dark projects while maintaining deniability for the President. This wasn't the case for Bill Clinton, so when he was elected, the powers behind the anti-Proxima dark projects recognized that they'd get no support from the new administration. They needed to liquidate Sonnebend; thus she was of no further use to them. So in December 1992, a month before Clinton's inauguration... they shot her in the head." He looks at me when he says it.

He was talking about me. My skeleton. My final memories.

The Peace Force were staring at me. "Did you actually do that?" Ciana asked, sounding as if she couldn't believe that even I would sink so low. "You created biological weapons to use against your own kind?"

This was why I hated Ciana. She was a pampered child of privilege � yeah, she's dealt with racism both for being Asian and being Proxima, but outside of that she was the All-American Girl. Daughter of successful Korean-American immigrants. World-renowned athlete who could have represented America in the Summer Olympics in 1988 if the Olympic Committee hadn't been anti-Proxima racists. Superhero. She saw the world in black and white; she didn't know what it's like to be helpless, tortured, knowing you have no friends, no one coming to save you. Powerless, a chip in your head to block your powers and a collar around your neck to blow your head off if you try to do anything about the chip. Beaten, burned, arms twisted up behind your back and shackled above your head so it feels like your arms are ripping out of their sockets, and men pulling up your shirt and pulling down your pants and taking photographs. Strangled. Shocked until you lose consciousness. Raped.

I knew they were going to kill me when they were done. I knew I would only live as long as I was useful. I never thought I would be rescued. But I didn't have the strength to resist, to spit in my captors' faces and make them kill me right away, all right? I didn't want to be tortured anymore. I couldn't make them stop raping me, but I could stop them shoving my face in the toilet and half-drowning me in shit, or shocking me, or putting lit cigarettes out on my stomach, if I cooperated. So I did. I created those weapons, and when Caesar Primus had Shadow rescue me and I got free, I created antidotes to every weapon I'd made, released viruses into the population that would protect Proximas from the work I'd been forced to do.

Ciana Kim wasn't going to understand any of this.

I shrugged. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," I said flippantly. "But I was rescued. I wasn't shot in the head. Primus--"

"Primus had nothing to do with it," Morrow said, shocking me, because I'd believed for over a decade that Caesar Primus saved my life. "He didn't want you rescued; he wanted those bioweapons released, because they would radicalize the Proxima population, and he'd more easily be able to get the Proximas to rise up under his leadership and overthrow humanity. I told Shadow about you, and what you were being forced to do, and Shadow's a true believer -- she thinks Primus is telling the truth about wanting to make the world better for Proximas. She thought, if she rescued you, that you'd undo what you did. And you did. And Primus thought you'd make a better ally than enemy, so he never told Shadow that she had ruined one of his plans by saving you; he made both of you think it had been his plan all along. It never was.

"The US government shot you in the head, Mystery, and I thought that saving you would change the timeline so that Primus would never take power. But all you did was block those bioweapons. It wasn't enough. Esperance doesn't exist yet, but Omega's just been born, and the future I come from is still intact. He's still going to take over."

I couldn't wrap my head around this. Everything I knew was wrong. Primus didn't save my life, Morrow did. Morrow set Shadow in motion. Because I was supposed to be dead. Because in the timeline he didn't change, soldiers took me out behind the building (and no, I didn't know any of this, I'm no telepath, I couldn't read Morrow's memories, but the images spooled through my imagination as if they were real), they took me out behind the building in December just a few days short of Christmas and it was cold but not snowing yet and my breath made clouds in the air and it was the first time I'd seen the sun in months and I stared at it hungrily because I knew what was going to happen, I knew why I was being brought out into the sun, and they told me to kneel and I knew what they were going to do, I'd known all along this would happen eventually, and I started to cry for the first time in months, not because I was going to die but because I was so so sorry I'd been so weak and I'd cooperated and they were going to kill so many people, so many of my kind, with what they had made me create, and I was going to die now and never have the opportunity to stop it, and the soldiers made snide remarks about my sniveling and ordered me to kneel down again and I said fuck you, I know you're going to kill me so just do it, and then I heard the gunshot and then I never heard anything ever again...

It never happened. I was alive. Alive. Dead and alive at the same time, Schrodinger's Meg, the cat in the box. One time Morrow didn't open the box, and I died. One time he did, and I lived. I was alive.

And if Primus had been planning on letting me die, letting my work be used to destroy our kind, then I owed him nothing. Everything I thought I owed to Primus, I owed to Morrow instead.

That didn't mean I was going to let him kill my baby, though.