"Jeez, it's getting cold," Amy said with a shiver. She sidled closer to me in an attempt to leech off of my body heat, wrapping an arm about my shoulder. "How much longer until winter break?"

"A few days or so," I replied, squeezing her gently. "What's your family planning to do for the holidays?"

Amy shrugged. "I think we're just having dinner with family from out of town. You?"

"No idea, really. Dad might be planning a trip down to New York so we can visit Rockerfeller Center. We've had more cash to spend ever since I realized I don't need to actually eat."

"Another weird perk of being an alien, I guess," Amy said with a small chuckle. She rested her head against my shoulder, tickling my neck with her frizzy hair, and sighed.

As we walked back to my house, I considered telling her about the new things I had been seeing, the soft haze that seemed to emanate from her and everyone else. Each one was a plethora of colors and patterns I had never seen before, unique in its own way, and seemed to be coming only from living things. At first, the haze, the auras, had been barely discernible, but now it was a dazzling array.

After being so accustomed to the countless colors I could see, I had almost forgotten just how beautiful everything could be.

Finally, we reached her house. Amy kissed me goodbye, then hopped up the porch steps. Vicky was waiting for her, jokingly narrowing her eyes at me, then ushered her inside. As soon as she was inside, I took off and arrived at my house in a heartbeat. Dad was still at work, leaving me with a few hours to resume my cape activities. As I stepped inside and began to shrug off my clothes, however, I paused to think about the strange auras I had been seeing. Was it possible that the AI in the ship knew what they were?

There was only one way to find out. I removed the last of my clothes, leaving only the Kryptonian uniform underneath, and took off.

S

"An aura, you say?" Jor-El's hologram asked, calmly pacing about the cargo bay of the ship. "Could you describe it to me?"

"I'm not really sure I can," I replied. "It's just so... strange. There's nothing else quite like them; I've never seen colors and patterns like them before. They only appear around living things, and only then if they actually have a brain. Animals have less complicated and colorful ones, but people have really bright and complex ones, each one unique in its own way."

That seemed to pique the AI's interest. He stopped mid-stride and turned to face me, his brow raised in surprise. "You are progressing even further than I expected," he said, a warm smile on his face.

"You know what it is?" I asked.

The hologram nodded. "What you're seeing are the distinct manifestations of what we call 'the Source'."

"The Source?"

"That is what it was called on Krypton. Earth's own scientists were able to formulate an incredibly rough picture of it, which is known as vacuum energy. Imagine, if you will, purely empty space, devoid of any particles. A moderately educated individual, who has a basic grasp of physics, would assume that it is also devoid of energy, but it is not. Far from it. Within the vacuum itself, down on a level orders of magnitude smaller than even elementary particles, there is a seething inferno of energy contained in an infinitely dense mesh that essentially forms the fabric of space itself. While matter and energy exists mainly within a fourth-dimensional scale, the Source exists on an eleven-dimensional scale."

"I think I read about this when I decided to research M-theory," I said, absentmindedly cupping my chin. "I thought it was simply a concept in quantum theory, one that couldn't affect practical life."

"That's just what human scientists think, at least for now," the hologram replied. "The reason why we call it the Source is because it is the source of everything. The energy from the Big Bang was derived from it, as well as the auras you are able to see. It is the source of sentience itself, Zara, and everything will return to it. The auras will remain intact as they are subsumed into the Source, where they will be able to mingle in manners still unknown to us."

"Whoa whoa whoa," I interrupted, placing a hand to my head. "Are you actually telling me that the auras I'm seeing are... souls?"

"In a word? Yes."

"Holy shit," I muttered, leaning against the smooth bulkhead of the ship and sliding down to the floor. "This is fucking unreal."

"Such a reaction is to be expected, I suppose," the AI said. "The existence of the Source opened a great deal of philosophical debates on Krypton about the nature of the universe, just as it will to you and the people of Earth. Ultimately, however, I believe it will be a good thing. The Source was how we were able to produce the Phantom Drive, and it is why you have your powers."

"My powers come from the Source?" I asked. "You told me that it was sunlight that made me like this."

"That is only part of the picture, Zara. Did you really think that such titanic strength could be fueled by sunlight alone? No, yellow sunlight is a catalyst, an energy that unlocks your access to the Source and grants you virtually unlimited energy that manifests within your psychological confines."

I rose to my feet and pinched the bridge of my nose. "What do you mean by that? What psychological confines?"

"If your hearing was simply enhanced, you wouldn't be able to react to crimes halfway around the planet in real-time due to the delay caused by the speed of sound. Your eyesight shouldn't be able to zoom down into the microscopic, or shift into whatever spectrums you want to see. In actuality, what you have is total cosmic awareness, channeled through the senses you would normally have. Hence why you can see and hear things nothing else can."

"Does that also extend to my other powers?" I asked. "Is that why I can lift things without them breaking? Why I can fly without making huge sonic booms or turning the atmosphere into plasma? Because I'm subconsciously fucking with the fabric of space?"

"Crudely put, but yes," the AI replied. "It will take time for you to fully unlock your powers, Zara. Human psychology and Kryptonian psychology are remarkably similar, and it is no easy thing to pry into the subconscious. As you mature, and your exposure to yellow sunlight increases, you will become even stronger than you are now. You will be able to see the universe as it truly is, something that even we could not do. In time, you will know no limits, Zara. And that will enable you to defeat that which threatens this world."

"You know, I never actually got around to asking you just what that means," I said. "You sent me here for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest one seems to be that "threat" you keep on mentioning. Do you realize just how ominous that sounds? What the hell is it?"

The AI sighed. "Have you ever wondered why parahumans appeared?"

S

"How much longer do we have to wait?" Burnscar asked, finishing off another cigarette. "Two months of lying around is getting a bit boring."

"Patience, patience," Jack replied, lying back in his chair. "The fun is about to begin soon. Mannequin, you know your part of the plan, right?"

The nine foot-tall cyborg bobbed its faceless head up and down, a yes.

Jack smiled. "Good. Now remember, we have to make this as quick as possible, I don't want to get her attentionjuuuuuust yet, otherwise she'll spoil it all. You go in, you grab what we need, and you go out. Of course, you'd probably have to make mincemeat of that idiot Tinker along the way, but that's just a bonus."

A low tone rang from Mannequin, but nothing else.

"I want this over with as soon as fucking possible," Crawler rumbled, resting his head on his front paws. "I'm itching to give her a try."

"Don't worry, you will," Jack replied, rising from his chair and stretching lazily. He turned to Shatterbird. "Ready?"

S

I shrugged. "Everyone has, but no one hasn't actually found an answer yet. It's not a mutation, or magic, or anything like that."

"I know what gives parahumans their powers," the AI replied. Another hologram flickered behind him, showing some strange thing, convoluted and wormlike in appearance. There was a fleshy texture to the thing, and I realized that it was fringed by countless appendages. "This is what we call a Destroyer. It is a species of highly adaptive organisms that evolved on some long-dead planet in an unknown star system. Despite possessing amazing computational abilities, alongside an array of different biological mechanisms, they themselves are not very intelligent. They are parasitic in nature, traveling from planet to planet, where they grant the natives abilities for experimentation."

"That's why parahumans appeared," I breathed. "They're just part of some experiment."

The AI nodded. "Destroyers have one goal in mind: reversing entropy. Doing so, they can truly exert their control over the universe. They work to achieve their goal by collecting data on how intelligent life uses the abilities granted to them, often spreading the organic mechanisms across countless alternate versions of the planet in order to obtain as much data as possible. They themselves understand their abilities poorly, as they have stolen the knowledge from advanced cultures and species."

"What happens once they've collected the data?" I asked, though I already had a feeling I knew the answer.

"They destroy the planet, Zara. Every inhabited version of it is obliterated by the Destroyers to ensure that there are as little threats to their goal as possible. Countless species have been exterminated by them, an unimaginable number of lives snuffed out by instinct-driven monsters." He sighed before continuing. "There was a theory prevalent on Krypton that has also emerged on Earth, one that attempts to explain why extraterrestrial life had never been encountered by either planet. A so-called "Great Filter", an event in a species' development that ensures that they never make contact with others. They are the Great Filter, Zara. Slowly but surely, they are wiping all of creation free of life. Krypton was spared their attention, due in part to the fact that alternate Kryptons are practically nonexistent, but others were not so fortunate. One such world was actually the planet you call 'Mars', though the natives called it Ma'aleca'andra."

"Jesus Christ," I whispered, putting my head in my hands. I tried to imagine what the AI told me, destruction spreading across the universe on such a scale, but I just couldn't. "What the fuck can I do?"

"Everything," the AI replied. "For all of their power, the Destroyers have a weakness: they have no knowledge of the Source. They tunnel through it in order to enter other universes, but they never considered just what they were tunneling through. They are limited by their own lack of creativity, and the conservation of energy. We can use that against them, Zara. The people of Earth will not share the fate of Ma'aleca'andra. You can save them, Zara. You can save them all."

I straightened, trying to brush the horrific thoughts out of my head. "What should I do?"

"For now, we must avoid drawing the attention of the Destroyer on this planet. This particular cycle has been botched by the loss of the creature's mate, but it will eventually destroy Earth regardless."

"What does it look like?"

The hologram opened his mouth to answer. Before he could do so, however, a high-pitched whistle reached my ears. I turned my head to where the sound seemed to be coming from, located somewhere around Brockton Bay. Despite being in the ultrasonic range, it sounded almost like a scream...

Suddenly, my eyes widened when I realized what was causing the noise. Or rather, who.

Shatterbird.

The Slaughterhouse Nine were in Brockton Bay.