She was in the middle of bringing down the roof from inside when Suprema showed up.

For the most part, Riptide hadn’t considered herself a villain for a few years now, but she’d cheerfully admit to being a criminal - had done, actually, while calling over her shoulder just before leaving one scene. Someone had had their phone recording, and the cheerful smirk she had as she called “Sure I’m a criminal, but the laws I break are bullshit,” had gone viral.

Riptide went viral a lot more than most of the other supercriminals she hung around with. It wasn’t intentional, but her preference for big stompy black leather boots over legs clad only in fishnets and tight back harness tops under sleeveless leather minijackets meant cameras got pointed at her a lot. Her attitude probably compounded that; like a lot of Goths she was more cheerful than those outside the subculture tended to think, but her sense of humour was so black that a lot of the time she was seen laughing was baffling to some.

She would freely admit that bringing down the factory roof was a criminal act, especially with all the technology still inside; on the other hand, she’d made a big enough deal of her presence the first twenty minutes on site that she knew the building had been evacuated. And the world really didn’t need more money and resource wasted on high-ticket self-driving electric cars that needed bribes to get them through safety testing, veered onto the wrong side of the road, and sometimes just ignited.

That was enough, in her mind, to contest the idea that anything she was doing was villainous. That stretch of her career was behind her; in hindsight, Macabre had been a bad choice of partner-slash-mentor. She even recalled being a lot angrier back then, which might have been Macabre’s influence or might just have been youth. Hard to tell sometimes.

In any case, her hands were both sunk into the wide concrete crossbeam at the centre of the main family room when Suprema arrived, tearing it apart so she could find the girder doing the actual structural support. Her more-or-less nemesis had a clear shot, especially at the speed she was already flying.

Riptide watched the blonde streak accelerating toward her for a fleeting fraction of a second. She tried to wrench the crossbeam down into Suprema’s path, not that it would have stopped the impact from hitting her as well, but it just didn’t break in time. The punch caught her in the gut, sending her flying.

She twisted in mid-air to land face-first. It was a bad habit - oh, how she knew it was a bad habit - that she’d started doing early in her career, because stunt people always twisted in mid-air after explosions in movies - but when you can shrug off most man-portable weaponry, you don’t have the same incentive to undo your bad habits.

She landed face-first into the empty chassis of one of the cars, which buckled around her from the impact. “Dammit, Caz,” she muttered to herself. “You’re better than this.”

She pushed herself to her hands and knees, the tortured metal creaking as she flexed out of it, then she rose to her feet and shook off the dust with a flourish, rocking her hips - another bad habit, this time one she’d developed when she realised how often she was being filmed on camera phones. It didn’t hurt your chances of getting away with things if a decent chunk of the public had a crush on you.

That bad habit was one she was trying to work on; usually that kind of flourish took a few moments too long, especially when she wasn’t doing team stuff. At the speeds flying superhumans operated on, a few moments like that was enough delay to open you up for a devastating strike.

But no such impact had come. She turned slowly, looking over her shoulder, figuring that in that case Suprema must be more preoccupied with shoring up the factory roof.

Instead the heroine was hanging in midair, watching her get up. She couldn’t make head or tail of the expression on the woman’s face, either. It looked like she wasn’t quite… there.

“Really?” she asked. “We’re doing this, huh?”

Whatever indecision or absence had been on Suprema’s features had gone now. She didn’t exactly put her hands on her hips and pose - she didn’t have that particular bad habit, possibly (in Riptide’s opinion) because her outfit didn’t show herself off as much, so why give in to the temptation - but she did tilt her head slightly. “You have to know by now I think there are better ways you could behave,” Suprema said.

That was the kind of comment that had pushed the young Carol Caterham to team up with Macabre not long after getting her powers. It was still a red rag to a bull even today. Riptide set her jaw firmly and launched herself into the air.

Suprema sideslipped her, catching her by the ankle as she did so and using Riptide’s own speed and momentum against her, flinging her toward a hole in the wall that already existed. Of course, by this point Caz was aware she was in a real fight and her reflexes were kicking in the way they should be.

She adjusted her trajectory just slightly, twisting in the air, and kicked off the wall when she would have hit it. Another slab of wall detached itself next to the existing hole, crashing down outside; Riptide let herself drop to the ground. She couldn’t help posing again, giving her hips a cheerful shimmy before looking over her shoulder back at Suprema with a smirk. Inside,

She’d learned a long time ago not to show it when she was angry. If the people who pissed you off thought you were laughing at them, that was a great revenge.

Suprema had the same odd expression back on her face. Her lips seemed to be moving, but Caz couldn’t make out what she was saying. Why did enhanced senses always seem to end up with the status quo defenders?

She grabbed the nearest machine, wrenching something four times her size from its moorings, and hurled it toward Suprema, accelerating into the air behind it. It was a trick she’d used a few times in the past and knew could be very effective; the target would either take evasive action or smash what she’d thrown aside, either of which left them as open to a follow-up strike as she had been while trying to rip the roof apart.

Suprema was fast and smart, but she didn’t like leaving things flying around. Her response was to swat the machinery back down to the ground, knowing there’d be nobody in its path. Less than a heartbeat later, Riptide caught her under the jaw with a rising uppercut.

The blonde flew up off the impact, crashing into the weakened concrete of the roof, which was exactly what Caz had wanted; the impact had exposed part of that key girder, and Riptide was right behind the other woman.

She grabbed her by the ankle, swinging her around to crash her into the girder by the small of the back. Against someone like Suprema, it might as well have been a slap for all the long-term damage it was going to do, but long-term damage wasn’t the point. Caz kept her grip on one ankle and surged up; as Suprema’s arms flew back behind her from the impact, she caught hold of a wrist with her other hand. Now she had something of a material strength much, much greater than the girder wrapped around it, which meant that breaking that apart was going to be easy.

“Hold still,” she gritted out between her teeth, and flew backward, straining with all her might. It didn’t take long before the girder gave, the bolts anchoring it to the rest of the building’s structure the weakest points. It came away and the roof began to cascade downward.

Caz was no slouch in a fight, but she wasn’t on a level with the Ms Miracles and Macabres of this world. Defeating Suprema had never been in the cards, and it wasn’t in her plans now. She let go of the heroine and headed for the horizon as fast as she could go, not in the direction of her actual home; she could circle round later, when she was sure she’d outdistanced the blonde’s enhanced senses.

As she flew, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the fight had gone better for her than it really should have done. Suprema had been slower to react than usual twice, both times just after knocking Riptide to the ground, and…

…well, it sounded crazy.

She was sure Suprema hadn’t moved a muscle while she’d used her to bring down the roof. If she’d wanted to, she could have made that much harder to do; maybe even stopped it, although Caz reckoned she could have just about got it done.

Instead she’d just stayed exactly as she was, offering no more objection than if Caz had gone with her original plan of wrapping heavy chain around it.

Maybe, she thought, Suprema just didn’t care much more for that car company’s bullshit than she did.

*

Standing in her shower rinsing the concrete dust out of her hair, Renee Wilson, known more popularly as Suprema and still a little annoyed with the journalist who’d chosen it, reflected ruefully that at least it had been that asshole who lost a factory when she failed to stop Riptide.

It hadn’t been her finest hour, she’d certainly admit, thinking about the fight. The destruction would probably have been even worse if she hadn’t showed up, but it was still mentally marked down in her ledger as a loss, and one she’d probably need to avenge at some point. Riptide wasn’t the worst person she fought by any margin, but she was outside the capabilities of a lot of the other local heroes; Renee was fairly sure she was the most powerful hero based in the state these days.

It didn’t help that Riptide had been on her mind plenty in the past couple of weeks. Emerging from the shower, she put her long blonde hair up in a towel for the time being and, after a brisk toweling-off, she shrugged on her bathrobe and headed back into the living room, squinting thoughtfully at the walls. She still wasn’t completely sure she’d picked the right colours, but didn’t want to go through the whole annoying process of redecorating until she was sure.

She paused in the doorway to stretch. From experience she knew her back would stop aching in another couple of hours, but anything she could do to ease it in the meantime was worthwhile. For the same reason she sat carefully on an upright wooden chair and exhaled slowly.

She picked up her phone and ran a quick search. If there had been any footage of their fight, it hadn’t been released; Renee wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed. On the one hand, it might be useful to see what had happened so she could understand. On the other, it would probably not be pleasant viewing.

The news sites all agreed that she’d failed to stop Riptide from destroying the factory. That, Renee had no problem with; she was a fair woman, and it was true that she’d failed. There was no point complaining about accurate reporting. It just made it more important to be successful next time.

She bit her lip. The temptation was back. It was a dumb temptation in the first place, and she knew it. It wasn’t just dumb to be tempted at that moment; it was slightly embarrassing, too.

But habit took over, as it usually does. And it was just a couple of taps and a swipe to go from her news feed to over to Spotlights, the social media video platform. She started to scroll.

Spotlights was the main reason Riptide had already been on Renee’s mind before she even heard of the disturbance at the factory. They’d fought a few times, but Riptide wasn’t unique in that. Renee didn’t consider herself to have a nemesis or, really, a particularly fixed rogues’ gallery; she’d fought quite a few people who were more associated with Ms Miracle or Bulwark or the Warrior Queen. Riptide hadn’t handed her any huge losses - usually, at minimum, she’d been able to limit whatever Riptide was up to. Today had been the exception.

But Riptide showed up in Spotlights a lot. Renee was never sure if the woman had surprisingly savvy PR or if her natural looks - there was no way she didn’t do a workout specifically aimed at making her ass look that good - and personality just fit the platform properly. She’d ended up in a lot of video edits that caught people’s attention.

Quite a few of them also featured Suprema, using any footage from their fights that surfaced online. That had been how Renee had first started watching them, crossover from seeing herself (and good grief, she’d had no idea how often she flipped her hair back out of her eyes in a fight until then).

There weren’t any yet that even referred to the factory fight. If they didn’t get any good footage from it, hopefully there never would be, she thought. Watching a defeat pop up on her timeline didn’t seem like the most pleasant of experiences.

After swiping through a couple of the videos that didn’t catch her eye, one with a filter to give a slight suggestion of film grain popped up, the image monochrome shaded to pink. Renee smiled, recognising this as something of a signature of one particular creator.

On the screen, Riptide had her back to the camera, and might even have been unaware of its presence. Renee’s eyes went immediately to the woman’s perfectly formed ass and her hips. This, she thought, was getting to be a problem. Not that that stopped her appreciating what she saw. The music that had just started was upbeat, and poppy, and had probably been found somewhere obscure; it had no vocals and wasn’t something Renee had ever heard outside these videos.

On the screen, a caption popped up:

#RiptideSways

Her lips parted and she mouthed the words herself, just as, onscreen, the villain began that signature slow roll of her hips.

It’s OK to Stare, the screen added. Riptide glanced over her shoulder with that damn grin of hers, confirming she’d known she was being filmed the whole time.

She Wants you to Stare.

Suddenly the screen was a grid, nine identical smaller panels each focused on the way the woman’s hips swayed when she was working it. A subtle shift in focus led the eye to picture after picture on the grid; top right to top left to bottom left to bottom right to mid-right to centre, then starting again. The shift was matched to the music’s backbeat.

Riptide Sways

Renee was staring (it was OK to stare). By now, as there always was with this creator, there was a lovely fuzzy tingle across the front of her brain when she watched these.

Her crowd Obeys

Her lips moved along with the captions. She was aware she was doing that, and aware she hadn’t really decided to do that. She wasn’t aware she was muttering the words quietly to herself.

Riptide Sways

From the grid of nine the video went back to a lot of other footage of Riptide, often fight footage, but every shot eventually came back to that same hip-shimmy, and every single time careful editing made sure her ass was centre of the screen and the shimmy fell exactly on the beat.

Her crowd Obeys

More and more, the video cut in the woman’s smirk between the motions, closed in on those dark-stained lips, that bright, confident smile.

Riptide Fights

Thankfully, this still wasn’t factory footage. There was the One Woman Army, going toe to toe with Riptide. Renee wasn’t even sure what that one had been about.

Stand Up For your Rights

It was hypnosis of some kind, she thought, wasn’t it? Not the full fledged stuff - she’d had a run-in or two with Mesmerio before, After that she’d been helpless to do anything other than what she was told. It had been embarrassing, although it had also felt exciting.

When she’d realised these videos were having some sort of impact, especially with all the use of ‘obeys’ in them, she’d gone looking for Riptide, found her in the middle of looting artworks out of a billionaire’s mansion. They’d fought, and that had been enough to reassure Renee that Suprema was uncompromised. She hadn’t needed to obey the other woman, and Riptide was still working alone. So it was probably weakly hypnotic at most, Renee had concluded.

And it felt really good. After one of the #RiptideSways videos crossed her feed, she felt oddly happy for hours afterwards, and her scalp seemed to tingle deliciously. So if it wasn’t affecting her, that was fine. Wasn’t it?

*

So long as she didn’t go sleeveless in the bar, at which point people noticed her arms immediately, Caz’ secret identity was actually pretty robust. De-Goth her makeup, slouch a little so she wasn’t quite so standout tall, and especially wear baggy pants, and people didn’t really register how similar she still was to Riptide.

She’d gone drinking once and been sat in a bar where a news report on what she’d done earlier that day played and nobody had put it together.

For the most part, between actual jobs, those she was paid for or those she did for fun, Riptide entirely disappeared. Caz got to live her life cheerfully between those times. All the same, there was a small handful of people who knew her secret. Nobody she’d had a relationship with - Macabre had underlined for her just how lucky you had to be to get away with that one - but inevitably, some close friends get past all out walls and distractions and start to sense our secrets.

When supervillainy is one of those secrets, there are two ways you can go. If you’re frequently involved in supercrime at the end that looks more like terrorism, there’s only one, and it isn’t pleasant. Since parting company with Macabre and going her own way, Caz had been able to tak the other; tell them the real story, before their imagination feeds them a worse version of events.

The day after the factory came down, she visited with one of those friends. A bulky leather jacket dis most of the work of hiding her figure, and her short dark hair was brushed back and largely hidden under a baseball cap. Then she went out to the park where Denise coached kids’ soccer.

She found her friend on one touchline as always, standing where she could make herself heard by her team and by the referee whenever she needed to, but also far enough down to one corner that the parents by and large weren’t going to move away from their group and go talk to her. Denise gave her a nod and a smile before returning her attention to the game; Caz stood next to her and wondered if she should have bought a coffee first or not. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” Denise gave her another quick glance with an amused smile. “Don’t tell me. You got turned down when you went to pre-order a car.”

“As if I’d be willing to put up with that overpriced crapheap,” Caz retorted. Another sidelong glance from Denise confirmed that she’d been joking, and Caz smiled ruefully. “Hey, it could be worse,” she said. “At least I didn’t get arrested.”

“Yeah, well, keep it that way,” Denise said. “Don’t you have enough money or something?”

“I get by fine,” Caz said. “That’s not the point. Even when I go after a bank.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I guess I just don’t really understand what the point actually is.”

“Not all of us have your patience.”

“Hm.” Denise raised her voice. “Hey, Lucy? You gotta make space for the girl with the ball!” She smiled. “You’ve got the speed, girl. Use it!”

Caz watched the kids play for a bit. It looked like Lucy had listened. “We all do stuff our friends don’t get the point of,” she said eventually, and Denise laughed.

“Just don’t say something like that when I’ve got kids in earshot,” she said. “Some of them think you’re cool, remember?” And then, lowering her voice almost to a mumble, she said “At least one of them thinks you’re cool whatever name you’re using.”

Caz blinked in surprise. “Kids this young shouldn’t even have heard about Riptide.”

“You’re all over ClipClap, girl.”

“I don’t really go on ClipClap,” she said. “It’s for millennials. I knew I was all over Spotlights.”

“Hm.” Denise let that go for a bit, raising her voice to a shout again. “Good, Abby, good! Keep that up!” After a few moments of quiet, watching the game, she said “I thought you were putting yourself on Spotlights.”

It wasn’t a question, but Caz could hear the curiosity in her voice all the same. She frowned. “No,” she said. “I don’t have the time for any of that crap. I look at whether or not I’m trending, that’s basically just an ego thing though.”

“The videos of you on Spotlights are very different to the ones on ClipClap,” she said. “It’s just dance mixes on ClipClap.”

Caz laughed. “That has to be old footage.” There was a stretch of time about four years ago that she’d been clubbing a lot in costume. It had ended with a mess, but by that stage a lot of people had filmed her dancing among other things.

“I wouldn’t know.” Denise probably hadn’t been to the clubs in even longer. Some people found ways to keep it up during motherhood. Others had different priorities, and Denise was one of those. “The Spotlights stuff has been weird.” She squinted back at Caz. “You saying you have nothing to do with RiptideSways?”

Caz blinked.