The thing about having no biological needs was that you filled the time however you could.
Rico had spent the morning doing what had become a loose routine — flying low over the east coast, no destination, no agenda. He'd stopped at a diner in Delaware because the smell coming through the ventilation was interesting and he'd wanted to see if he could still eat without it becoming a situation. He could. The waitress had handled his presence with the professional composure of someone who had decided, somewhere around table three, that today was simply going to be like this.
He tipped well. Flew north.
He was somewhere over Philadelphia, thinking about nothing in particular, when he felt it.
Not heard. Not saw.
*Felt.*
Ki signatures going out. Small ones — civilian level, the background texture of a place full of living people — extinguishing one after another in the specific rhythm of something being done quickly and on purpose. Not an accident. Not a disaster.
A choice.
He stopped mid-flight.
Felt for the direction.
Southwest. Far southwest. Across the Atlantic.
He was already moving.
---
Somalia in under twenty seconds.
He came in high and slowed and let the picture resolve below him and wished, for a moment, that it hadn't.
The village was small. Maybe three hundred people on a good day, the kind of place that existed in the margins of maps — a cluster of structures built from whatever was available, surrounded by dry earth and scrub brush and the specific poverty of a place that the rest of the world had decided wasn't worth the cost of attention.
It was on fire.
Not all of it. Specific buildings — targeted, he realized, the ones that had been locked from the outside before someone put a torch to them. He could hear what was inside them. His Ki sense didn't distinguish between the signatures of people who were running and people who weren't. It just registered the ones going out.
On the roads, military vehicles. Soldiers moving through in organized columns with the efficiency of people who had rehearsed this. Some of them were going door to door. Others had civilians lined up against a wall — men, mostly, hands behind their heads, kneeling in the dirt while someone walked behind them with a sidearm.
He saw the children.
A group of them, maybe eight or ten, running down a dirt road toward the edge of the village. Two soldiers behind them. Gaining.
He saw what the soldiers were carrying.
Scalps.
He stopped moving.
Just — stopped. Floating two hundred feet above it all, completely still, and felt the Ki do what it always did when he stopped holding it back — the ground below trembling, clouds pulling in overhead with unnatural speed, lightning starting to thread between them. The wind hit the village from all directions at once, scattering dust and debris, and everything on the ground stopped and looked up at the sky.
At the figure hanging above them, perfectly still.
Nobody fired. The specific paralysis of people whose threat assessment system had just encountered something it didn't have a category for.
His phone rang.
He didn't reach for it. The call connected anyway.
"Cell." Cecil. Controlled, careful, the tone he used when he was managing something delicate. "I'm aware of the situation. I need you to hold position. There is an established protocol for international intervention on sovereign territory — I am on the line with the UN Security Council right now, I am working on authorization to deploy the Guardians, but if you act unilaterally without—"
Rico watched one of the soldiers grab a child by the arm.
"Don't worry, Cecil," he said.
His voice came out completely calm. The specific calm of a decision that had already been made.
"*I'm* not going to do anything."
He landed.
---
The impact sent a shockwave through the earth hard enough to knock three soldiers off their feet fifty meters away. He straightened slowly. Looked around.
At the bodies on the ground he was trying not to count.
At the fires.
At the soldier who still had the child by the arm and was now frozen, looking at Cell with the expression of a man who had just understood something about his afternoon.
Rico looked at him.
His eyes went red.
He raised one finger.
Every weapon in the village left the hands holding them simultaneously — rifles, sidearms, machetes, the mounted guns on the vehicles, all of it — and streaked skyward at a velocity that left no time for reaction. Into the sky. Into orbit. Into nothing. The vehicles followed, lifted from the ground with their engines still running, flung upward until they were gone.
The child pulled free.
Ran.
Then Rico exhaled and let the weight of his Ki settle outward — not a blast, not an attack, just *presence.* The full unfiltered gravity of what he was, moving through the ground and the air like a sound too low to hear but not too low to feel. The part of the brain older than language received it the only way it knew how.
The soldiers went to their knees.
Not commanded. Not asked. The way a flame bends in a strong wind — just physics. The natural result of two things occupying the same space when one of them was what he was.
They knelt in the dirt in front of the people they'd been killing.
Some of them were already crying. One was praying in a language Rico didn't speak, the words coming out fast and desperate, directed at something that wasn't there or maybe was. Another had wet himself and was staring at the ground with the vacant expression of a man whose mind had gone somewhere else to wait this out.
Cecil was still talking. Something about protocol. Something about sovereignty. The words reached Rico from very far away.
The village was moving.
Slowly at first — a door opening, a face appearing, the cautious emergence of people who had learned that silence sometimes meant it was safe and sometimes meant it wasn't and had no reliable way to tell the difference. They came out and they saw the soldiers in the dirt and they saw what was standing behind them and they stood still for a moment, processing.
Then someone made a sound.
Not a word. Something underneath words — the specific sound of a person who has been holding something enormous inside them and has just been handed permission to stop.
It moved through the crowd like a wave.
The grief came out first. Then the anger. Then both of them together, and the crowd moving, picking up whatever they could find — boards, rocks, the handles of tools left in the dirt — and advancing toward the soldiers with the slow collective weight of people who had been given something they hadn't expected.
Cecil's voice on the phone: "Cell. Cell, I understand what you're feeling but you need to think about what happens after this. If you become the arbiter of life and death you are not different from—"
Rico watched the crowd advance.
The first person reached the soldiers. A woman — middle-aged, a cut across her forehead still bleeding, holding a length of wood in both hands. She stood over the man kneeling in front of her. He looked up at her. She looked down at him.
She raised the wood.
Held it.
The man kneeling in front of her was crying. Saying something. She looked at his face and she looked at whatever was behind her — at the fires, at the bodies on the ground, at the specific shape of what the last hour had been — and she stood there with the wood raised above her head for a long moment.
She put it down.
Said something to the crowd in her language.
Rico didn't speak it. He didn't need to. The meaning moved through the crowd the same way the anger had — person to person, until the weapons lowered and the advance stopped and the people of the village turned away from the soldiers and toward each other.
Toward their dead.
Toward the slow, awful work of after.
The phone was quiet.
Rico looked at the soldiers still kneeling in the dirt. At the fear on their faces. At the one still praying.
"I told you, Cecil," he said finally. "Back at the cabin. I don't recognize borders as a factor in whether someone gets help. A line politicians drew on a map is not relevant information to me."
He paused.
"I meant that."
He raised his hand toward the mountain range in the distance.
The closest peak lifted from the earth — slowly, with the enormous patience of something that had been in one place for ten million years and had just been asked to go somewhere else. It floated toward the village. The soldiers watched it come and made various sounds. Some prayed harder. Some tried to run and found their legs weren't cooperating. One just stared at it with the blank expression of a man who had passed the limit of what his mind could process and was now just waiting.
Rico's fingers moved. Quick, almost casual — a conductor closing a piece. The mountain separated in the air into blocks of granite and basalt, each one moving to its position with the unhurried efficiency of a thing being built correctly.
Walls. Divisions. A roof.
A prison.
He looked at it for a moment. Then at the soldiers.
They went in.
The door — a slab of granite six feet thick — settled into place with a sound like the world making a decision.
Rico brushed his hands together.
On the other end of the line, Cecil said nothing. The silence had a quality to it — not approval, not disapproval, just the silence of a man who had watched something and was still deciding what it meant.
Rico looked down at the phone in his hand.
"I'm not a god Cecil. I am Perfect."
Then he looked up.
Way up.
His eyes narrowed.
Above the cloud layer, barely perceptible even to his Ki sense — a signature. Enormous. Still. The specific quality of something that had been there for a while and had not announced itself.
*Of course.*
He looked at the phone again.
"I'll be in touch," he said.
He set it down in the dirt.
Went skyward.
---
Fast. The kind of fast where the clouds were gone before he'd registered passing through them, the blue darkening, the curve of the Earth appearing and then the full sphere of it, and then the silence of space with no walls and no ground and nothing in any direction except distance.
He decelerated. Stopped.
Looked at the planet.
Thought about the woman with the board.
Thought about a lot of things.
Then, mostly to himself:
"I was really hoping this wasn't one of those cliché universes where Superman is evil."
"Excuse me?"
Nolan Grayson was ten feet to his left. Arms crossed. Cape moving in the solar wind. The expression he always wore — controlled, measured, something running behind the eyes that never quite made it to the surface.
He had been up here for a while.
Rico looked at him.
Looked back at Earth.
"You heard me, Bitch." he said.