"This is bullshit," Sophia said. She scowled.

It was the first day of school since everything had shut down after the Slaughterhouse had attacked. We were walking to school together; Piggot had suggested that I make sure that Sophia get to her classes, as though she was afraid she would run away.

"What? School?" I asked. "You could always try homeschooling. Piggot won't let me do it."

"Yeah, I heard about that. She thinks that you'll get off by yourself or spend too much time with that Chinese asshole, and you'll forget what it's like to be normal."

"Well, I don't really get what she means," I said. "It's just... all of this doesn't seem very important. Not when you know the world is going to end."

"Yeah... and what do they think you'll do with all this... become an accountant? If you wanted to get rich, you'd be rich."

"I'm not going to turn villain, Sophia."

"Hey, I'm not going to judge. If you pay me well enough I'd be happy to be your number one henchwoman."

I scowled at her. "I'm serious."

"Who says you have to?" she said. "You could make a living moving things. You know what it costs to get a tunnel dug for a subway or an underground road? You could do it in a second."

She made a finger gun motion.

"I'd blow up half the continent," I said.

"So dial it back," she said. "You don't always have to be bustin planets, or whatever your next step is."

Arcadia came into view. At one time it had probably been beautiful, but for now it still had some windows that were boarded up. Half of them had been replaced, supposedly with special bulletproof materials that someone with Shatterbird's powers wouldn't be able to affect.

Considering that Shatterbird was dead, it was a little like closing the barn after the horse had died, but whatever. There were a lot of guards around, carrying rifles.

"If Sparta is supposed to be so scary, why all the guns?" I asked.

"About a quarter of the chuckleheads in the Empire managed to survive," Sophia said. "Not any of the big names, but some of the sub lieutenants. They've been forming little gangs of ten or twenty guys, and they like to kidnap people, trying to get the money to fight back against the ABB."

The AB had been slowly but surely taking over territory. They'd been doing it quietly enough that the Protectorate didn't feel like they had to go after them, but Piggot had talked about going after them.

Considering that I could sense the exact location of Lung and Oni Lee at this very moment, there wasn't much of a reason not to, except that Piggot was afraid that Lung was the only thing keeping the city from exploding into violence.

He'd formed the ABB from dozens of mini-gangs, and Piggot thought they would all collapse into fighting if he was captured or killed. She thought that a lot of people would be caught in the crossfire.

As strong as I was, I couldn't be everywhere. I couldn't stop every drive-by shooting, save every kidnapped kid, go after every criminal. Part of the problem was that while parahumans glowed brightly to my Ki sense, ordinary people blended together. Also, unless I'd met someone, I couldn't identify them by Ki signature alone.

I wasn't a detective, and I had no way of solving crimes, not really.

It still bothered me to let Lung alone; while he was a lot less aggressive than the Empire had been, and he wasn't selling drugs to kids like the Merchants had, he was still holding women in brothels. He still kidnapped and killed. By no stretch of the imagination was he innocent.

I was tempted to have a little talk with him; tell him that if he would stop the brothels then I would overlook the illegal gambling operations and shady real estate deals. However, Piggot would likely have a stroke if I did, especially since I didn't have the authority to make that kind of promise.

We couldn't look like we were making deals with criminals, even though the Protectorate did it all the time. They just made sure the details weren't written down.

As we reached the gate a line of students was forming. We were quiet as we waited our turn.

"Have your school IDs ready," the guard was calling out. "No one gets inside without the proper Identification."

There was a metal detector at the gate.

"All the new kids coming in have got them spooked," Sophia muttered, staring at the gate. "Afraid they're going to taint their little lily white country club."

A lot of people had left Brockton Bay in the exodus after the Slaughterhouse attack. Even more were coming back now that Sparta was known as the Endslayer. Apparently rich people liked the idea of living in the shadow of someone who could go toe to toe with an Endbringer.

Enough people were coming in that it was actually creating a small housing boom in the nicer parts of town. There were swarms of new students coming in to Immaculata and Arcadia, which meant that slipping me and Sophia in with the others wasn't going to be a problem.

"Is that why you didn't want to come here in the first place?" I asked Sophia. "You think these people are all racists? So instead you go to a school where half the kids were in the Empire?"

"I could do more good there," she muttered. "Kicking ass and taking names. Here they've got people looking over your shoulder all the time... including all the other suck ups."

She meant the other Wards. I'd never really understood her animosity toward the others, unless it was because they didn't fit neatly into one of the boxes she put people in. She liked to think of people as being either strong or weak, but the wards didn't fit neatly into either category.

Clockblocker had a power that could stop an Endbringer, if only temporarily, but he was an idiot. Vista was just as powerful, and potentially even more useful, but she was a child. Kid Wynn wasn't very impressive in person, but he was a tinker, and tinkers are always some of the most dangerous parahumans.

All of them were powerful, yet they had personal flaws that made them seem weak. It probably confused her, and when she got confused she tended to get mean.

"Still, at least it's just a half day of school. You could have had a lot more time for extracurriculars," I said.

I meant her vigilante career.

She shot me a sharp glance, as though to ask if I was stupid.

"During the day?" she shook her head. "Besides, the Arcadia track team is crap. The one thing the Winslow kids were good at was running."

"Sports isn't everything," I said.

I was aware that there were people ahead and behind us, so we weren't exactly free to talk directly. Still, if she'd gone to Arcadia my life at Winslow would have been a lot easier.

"When you are good at something, you should stick to it," she said.

Right.

I handed my ID to the security guard to my left, and Sophia handed hers to the one on the right. We passed through the metal detectors. A copy of my Sparta costume had already been delivered to the school should we need to suit up.

"You need to speak to Principal Howell," the guard said, once he'd looked at my ID. "There are some issues with your transfer."

I looked at him warily, then nodded.

Sophia was following me. "Quimby is new to the job. The last Principal was killed when Shatterbird did her thing. She was at the aquarium... there was a thing with a shark."

I glanced at her, uncertain whether she was joking or not. It seemed like a joke, but her face was totally serious.

Whatever. It didn't matter.

"I'll bet the Principal is scared of you," Sophia said, smirking.

I shook my head. "She's the principal of a school filled with... people like us. I hardly think she'll be shaking in her boots."

Sophia at least seemed to know the way, and so I followed her. We were escorted to the Principal's office.

As soon as the door closed behind us, the woman behind the desk smiled at me. She was a thin, almost gaunt woman dressed in pink. She reminded me a little of old pictures of Nancy Reagan.

"Miss Hebert, Sophia, it's good to see the both of you," she said. She smiled, and I couldn't see whether she was being sincere or not. Her hands were gripping the back of her chair tightly, though, hard enough that they were turning white."It's an honor to have Sparta at our school."

So she was in on my identity. While I suppose that it was necessary so that I'd be able to leave in emergencies, I wasn't sure how good an idea it was to give the identities of all the Wards to a woman who didn't have any powers and presumably went home to an unguarded house at night.

After all, a determined villain could easily capture her, and with enough torture almost anyone would crack.

Well, not me, but that had been in part because I'd known I was getting stronger and would be free sooner or later. Most people didn't have that kind of hope, and they didn't have that association with pain making them stronger.

It wouldn't matter that much to me, not now. Dad was strong and he was going to get stronger soon as I put him through the same training I put the others. I didn't have anyone else I had to worry about, not that weren't parahumans in their own right.

Was that part of the reason Piggot wanted me to come back to school? I didn't have a lot of ties to regular humans. Normal people followed social norms because there were consequences; either legal or social.

There were things that weren't illegal that would cause people to avoid you, like having a strong body odor, or belching all the time.

I was strong enough now that the only hope the Protectorate had of controlling me was by using masters, and they didn't have a lot of those. The ones who could control human beings were a smaller subset of masters in general. Most of them had time limits on their abilities too.

The ones that didn't have time limits were invariably villains, probably because having the ability to control minds without limits caused someone to lose all their perspective. They probably stopped seeing people as really being people.

The Protectorate didn't have many masters, and the ones they did have wouldn't be able to hold me for long. Once they had me, they could try to put me in the Birdcage, but I'd be able to break out easily. Thinks like vacuum or attack drones wouldn't matter much when you could destroy the entire top of the mountain with a single blast.

So their best bet was to make sure that I had as many ties to the human world as possible. If I cared about what happened to ordinary people then I was unlikely to turn villain, to turn against humanity.

After all, other than for my own intellectual advancement, what did I really need an education for?

Millions of dollars would be available to me if I really wanted it. The sales of my action figures had gone through the roof when I'd killed the Slaughterhouse. Now that I'd killed an Endbringer they were having trouble keeping up with the orders.

That money was going to set me up for life, and if I wanted more, all I had to do was to do celebrity endorsements. I could pull treasures from the sea floor, or destroy landmines in countries where those were still a hazard.

I could fly supplies in for charities, or I could do any of a dozen other things with my powers that would make me money.

Sophia was right. I was never going to be an accountant, and I probably wasn't going to be some kind of an investigative journalist with a secret identity. I didn't need glasses anymore anyway.

The Principal was talking, and I realized that I hadn't been listening.

She was going over what was expected of us and the measures used to protect our secret identities. As though I hadn't already heard about those from the other Wards, who were excited to finally see me in school.

Apparently they were intimidated by me, but school was the one place where being able to bench press a continent didn't matter.

Maybe that was why there was a small bit of apprehension deep in the bottom of my stomach. It had been a while since I'd really been afraid of anything; this wasn't something I could punch or blast out of the way.

I was going to have to make nice and try to be popular, or at least try to get along well enough that people didn't try to bully me. Me losing my temper would be the worst thing that could possibly happen.

"What's the policy on bullying?" I interrupted her.

The principal stopped speaking. She looked startled, and for a moment a flash of something undefinable came over her face. "Nobody would try to bully you."

"Not if they knew who I was," I said. "But I've had some experiences before, and I think I'd have a hard time watching someone else being bullied either."

I glanced at Sophia, who had the sense to at least pretend to look mildly embarrassed.

"We have a zero tolerance policy for bullying," she said. "Although we'd really prefer that you bring any issues that do come up with a teacher instead of trying to handle them yourself."

"Oh?" I asked.

"That's true of any student, but considering that you could likely turn them into chunky salsa by sneezing..."

I blinked. Had she actually said that?

She flushed, but forced a smile. "It wouldn't even be fair for you to let someone try to beat you up; they could hurt their hands seriously."

"They'd never lay a hand on me," I said. I frowned. "I could probably make it look like an accident that they missed."

"I doubt it will come to that. Arcadia isn't that kind of school. However, we have had a heavy influx of new students, and so it may take time for them to acclimate to our culture."

"Told you," Sophia muttered.

"I'm not going to destroy half the state because some kid looks at me wrong," I said. "I was bullied for more than a year and I never lashed out."

Sophia looked disgusted that I was bringing that up. It still confused her that I hadn't stood up for myself. It was another thing that didn't fit with her limited world view.

"Just let us handle it, and everything will be fine," she said.

I nodded and forced myself to smile. Those lessons from the publicity department were really starting to come in handy, even if they kept sending me substitutes from other cities on a rotating basis. Apparently they were excited to get to work with me until they really got to know me.

Why that was confused me. I would have thought someone like Sophia would have caused them more problems, but they hadn't had many problems with her. Apparently she fit into one of their boxes a lot better than I did. She was dark and edgy, sure, but there was precedent for that.

I, on the other hand seemed to intimidate people, at least in my alternate identity. It might have been because I'd killed a lot of people, even before Hawaii, and people didn't know how to deal with that in the shape of a fourteen year old girl.

It might be because they were all hyper aware of how easy it would be for me to kill them in turn.

They'd tried a variety of tactics to make me look less threatening; putting me in more girly colors, changing my clothes to be more sexy, trying to make me younger and cuter. I'd refused all of it, only agreeing to change my helmet so that it was open at the top and would show my hair.

As we left the principal's office, I turned to Sophia and said, "She wasn't scared of me."

"She was about to piss herself," Sophia said. "Trust me; I've seen enough gangbangers trying to look big to know the difference."

"Whatever," I said, rolling my eyes. I looked down at the schedule I'd been handed. "At least it's only half a day. It can't be that bad..."

"Taylor? Is that you?"

I froze. Behind me I heard Emma's voice.

Slowly I turned.

She was standing there, and she already had a group of five girls surrounding her, like the queen bee she'd been at Winslow.

"This is Taylor," she said as an aside to the others. "I'm so proud of her."

I blinked. What?

"It must be difficult to take all those hormones, and she's never really going to be a boy, but you can just look at all the muscles and see where she's trying to go with it," Emma said. "Still, I think steroids aren't healthy for someone her age."

I closed my eyes, I'd promised not to blow up the school, and so I needed to keep myself under control.

"She always was more of a boy than a girl anyway. Couldn't grow where it counts, but just kept getting taller and taller."

The other girls were hanging on her every word. I didn't have anything against people who were gender fluid, but Emma obviously thought I did, and she was trying to make me feel less feminine, something that had been a minor problem.

"I think she's going to be the first girl in school who's going to need to shave," she said. "Or maybe she'll try to keep the mustache, who knows?"

Sophia put her hand on my arm.

The girls behind her tittered, and I found myself gritting my teeth.

I could always turn her into chunky salsa later. I just had to get through the day.