It takes them four days to find Psyrena, ten miles offshore, locked in a soundproofed cargo container with half a dozen other attractive white girls, on a freight ship bound for the Ivory Coast. Despite the Hero Corps’ best efforts, human trafficking is still a real problem. The traffickers are slippery, cunning weasels. The only reason we even found her was because NovaGirl had gone for a joyride in the early AM, and had just so happened to turn on her x-ray vision for kicks. Fortunately for us, traffickers haven’t yet started to leadline their containers.

Unfortunately for us, Psyrena isn’t in any state to talk.

The recovery team made the mistake of removing her collar as quickly as they could. It's difficult to blame them for it. By all accounts, Psyrena had looked awful. Bruised, beaten, three cracked ribs and a fractured femur. She’d put up one hell of a fight. It hadn’t been enough, but she’d tried at least. And she’d suffered for it. Welted red from toes to tits from tasers and batons, concussed harder than a NFL linebacker. Every single hole raped six ways to Sunday. 

Of course the recovery team removed her collar. It’s the natural thing to do. In most cases, it would’ve been the correct thing to do. 

For a Tier 2 Psychic in six other horribly traumatized, brutally raped women after days of captivity, this had disastrous consequences. 

“She can put words together,” says Wintress to the room at large. “But not easily. And the words often don’t make any sense.”

It’s a war council, without a doubt. There’s enough firepower in the room to level a continent, if we wanted to. All the city’s greatest heroes are present - NovaGirl, Khanadra, Lady Lune, Key Knightess, and the rest. A rarity for the Corps. There’s always some emergency or crisis that pulls someone away. But today, it seems, there’s one issue that everyone agrees takes priority.

“Has anyone tried putting the collar back on?” says Knightess coolly. “Perhaps it would dampen the mental trauma.”

Wintress shakes her head. “We’ve tried. However she was affected, the damage has already been done. It’s difficult to explain. She hasn’t just been… abused. She’s experienced the simultaneous abuse of six other women, all at once. Have you ever tried watching six movies at once, layered on top of each other, all on the same screen? Now imagine that, but with all of your senses. For days. The psychological effect is incalculable. I’ve been told it’s the mental equivalent of an anti-tank round. For a hero as green as she was, it’s amazing that she’s conscious at all. But she’s not in any state to talk. It’s not even clear if she knows who she is.”

And it’s all my fault.

“We need other psychics on the job,” barks Khanadra. “Someone has to be able to put the poor girl back together again.”

“What do you think we’ve been doing?” says the Lady Lune acidly. “Twiddling our thumbs and leaving her to suffer? We’re doing everything we can to help her.”

“And that’s all very good and well,” says Hammergirl, “but this more than just one girl’s sanity. This is about stopping these damn collars, for all our sakes, and haven’t seen a single sign of progress on that front.”

The room shifts uncomfortably. It’s my neck on the line, I know. My investigation has turned up practically nothing so far, with all leads stymied. I’ve gotten no further to unravelling the mystery than when I first started, weeks ago. Nearly two dozen heroines have been collared now, and subsequently abused with great violence in some way. Not all of them were street-level vigilantes either. Some were well-established, respected heroes. Or, they had been respected, previously. Not so much anymore.

It nearly feels as though the city itself is taking revenge on its heroes - a sudden outpouring of rage through this new channel that has been made available to it. As though the people themselves harbor resentment towards us for being super. Even though we protect them, save them, they still hate us simply for existing. 

Or maybe it’s all in my head. 

I look at the heroes assembled in the room, around the table. Most are women. Not because superpowers have any biological bias towards the female gender. But give men an incredible ability, any ability he can use to exert over others, and see how many become heroes and how many become villains. See what happens when men gain power, earned or not, and you won’t be surprised to find that most superheroes just happen to be female. 

“We have a problem,” I say at last.

“No shit we have a problem,” grumbles Khanadra.

“It’s the nullium project,” I tell them, and their attention on me sharpens. Considerably. 

“The nullium project is a classified secret,” says the Lady Lune carefully.

“It is,” I acknowledge. “But the collars are clearly based on the original nullium alloy. Either someone’s engineered their own version, from scratch, or they’ve gotten their hands on the project files.”

Silence fills the room.

“The natural question,” says NovaGirl, who alone seems unruffled, “is how anyone knows about nullium in the first place. Isn’t that supposed to be top secret?”

“We only ever used it in the direst of circumstances,” says Herald gravely. “Only a handful of villains have ever required such an extreme countermeasure.”

“And we barely were able to make enough to do so,” says Khanadra. “Do we seriously believe someone out there is able to mass-produce this at scale, out of nowhere?”

“We have to confront the possibility,” I told them. “I’ve ran every possible test I could, every day for four weeks now. Every collar we’ve discovered so far has been confirmed to be made entirely of pure nullium.”

“We should’ve buried the project long ago,” says Knightess bluntly. “We knew this was a possibility. We knew we were playing with fire and we continued to toy with things that should not be toyed with.”

“I told you all that the research should’ve been erased years ago,” says the Lady Lune with disgust. “We never should’ve kept any of the files to begin with.”

I shake my head. “The files are encrypted, all access logged. Behind the biggest, baddest firewall Hall Industries has. Nobody has touched any of the nullium research in years. The only way for someone to know about the project is if…”

…if someone here told them about it.

If the room had felt silent before, it’s frozen over solid now. The implication is not one anyone wants to touch. 

It’s almost a relief when the emergency sirens go off, crimson lights suddenly strobing the room. “Meeting adjourned,” says the Lady Lune dryly. “We’ll talk about this later.”

And then the greatest heroes of the century are flying out of the Hero Corps Hall, spilling out into the sky in a superpowered kaleidoscope of lights and color. A month ago, I couldn’t have imagined a more powerful, awe-inspiring sight.

As I fly out with them now, all I can imagine is the worst.

-

The monster ravaging downtown is a fairly standard-issue kaiju. Forty stories tall, glowing blue veins, some sort of armored plating that’s half-organic, half-implanted. Lady Lune has a hundred bucks that it’s escaped from a lab, Khanadra has three hundred on it being some kind of extradimensional alien. 

As usual, NovaGirl hasn’t bet a thing. She’s too concerned on how to keep the thing alive. 

NovaGirl is, in many ways, the best of us. She’s genuinely kind, empathetic even to the worst of her enemies. She’s also one of the most powerful beings on the planet, without question. She’s faster than a jet fighter, as strong as a Titan. Her skin is bulletproof, her eyes can melt steel - she’s about as super as super gets.

I don’t know what she is, exactly. She plays cagey with the details but it’s common knowledge that she’s not human. Even if she looks the part - she looks like any other college girl next door (albeit with exceptionally fine bone structure). Auburn curls, earnest blue eyes, a slight spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, famous red cape fluttering from her shoulders. She could kill this monster in a minute flat, if she wanted to. But she doesn’t want to. That’s the thing about NovaGirl. 

She always does the right thing. 

“Circle around to flank it from the left,” she calls. “Try to hit it from the side, get it off balance.”

This thing is one ugly son-of-a-bitch, steaming toxic radiation from its plated hide. Wherever this thing came from, it doesn’t like our atmosphere, that’s for sure. It roars at the city, skyscrapers trembling in the air at the sheer power of the bellow, and all nine beady red eyes fix on us, the flock of heroes circling. We all dive, rocketing down to meet it head on.

NovaGirl meets it first.

She’s beyond fast, a mere blur of red and blue in the noon sunlight. And when she hits, she hits hard. Her fist slams into its chitinous chin with a crack that can be heard for miles away. The kaiju rears back, acidic slime slopping from its open jaw, wailing at the blow it certainly didn’t see coming. It swats at her, reflexively, but she’s not there anymore. She’s moved so fast that to the naked eye she’s practically teleported behind it, where she lands a right hook that sends ripples through the glass panes of skyscrapers blocks away. The kaiju screams, whirls in a clumsy arc to try and club her with its spiked tail.

In my mind’s eye, I see an anvil, as big as a mansion, made of pure tungsten, and then all of a sudden it's falling out of the sky and clocking the kaiju right on the head. Hard enough to hurt. It wails, enraged, making to turn, before the anvil melts and reforms into titanium chain, each link as thick as an house, grappling out of the earth and looping around its neck, and then it exists, in fully-fledged reality, silver metal glinting as the beast jerks, this way and that, but the chain holds fast, and within seconds all the heroes of our age dogpile on it, beating the poor thing black and blue. 

I get the sense that more than a few of them may be working out some frustration right now. 

NovaGirl watches, lips pursed, hovering in the sky. 

I soar up next to her. “You want to get out of here?”

She lingers, looking at our comrades below, before finally nodding. “Sure. Where’d you want to go?” 

“How about some lunch?” I say.

-

Burgers ‘n Bits is the best hole in the wall in the city. It’s greasy, untidy, surely has never seen a health inspection in its life. The lights are dim and the air is thick enough with grease to choke on. I don’t know what they do to their fries and I probably lose years of my life every time I order them, but damn if I can’t help it. Heroing takes a lot out of a girl. Sometimes you need the calories. 

“I’m not kidding, Kayla,” I tell her. “You need to take this more seriously.”

“I know, I know.” She’s not NovaGirl right now. NovaGirl wears knee-high red boots, red cape, sky-blue suit made from some absolutely invincible extraterrestrial bio-polymer that’s beyond even my understanding. She’s an icon the world over, as American as apple pie and Ford motors. 

Kayla Dunning is a farm girl in the big city, in denim shorts and a white tee with the midriff cut off. She wears her espresso-dark hair in a hairband and she taps her Converse sneakers against the floor with the beat of the tinny music. She looks like she could be my cousin.

“I don’t know what this stuff will do to alien physiology,” I warn her. “But it has a 100% success rate against every heroine that it’s gone up against.”

“I’ll be careful,” she says, wiping the splotch of ketchup from her cheek, and I know she’s only humoring me.

“You don’t really think anything will happen to you,” I say.

She flashes me a grin. “I mean, come on. They’ve got it on me first. Good luck to them, but I’m not planning on standing around waiting for them to try it.”

“They got Velocigal,” I remind her, and her grin dims somewhat.

“Do we know how yet?” she asks.

“We’re still putting it together. We think maybe someone tricked her - pretended that he needed help, then ambushed her.”

She shakes her head. I know she doesn’t like this. She likes believing in the good in people. I wish I could too. These days, it’s harder than ever. “That’s awful.”

“It is,” I acknowledge. I don’t know what else to say about it. “Look, I know you can handle yourself. I just want you to be careful out there.”

“I will. I promise. You don’t have to worry about me.”

“And if you want to train up, I’m always available. You might be the most powerful hero on the team, but it’s always a good idea to practice like you aren’t. Just in case.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Maybe-” She cocks her head to one side. “Do you hear that?”

I don’t hear anything, except the sounds of the street and city traffic. “What is it?”

“Alarm going off,” Kayla says distantly. She takes one last bite of her burger and stands up. “Bank robbery. Seventh and Western - they have guns. Automatics.”

“Wait, Kayla-”

But it’s too late. She’s already sprinting out the door, and it’s all I can do to follow.

-

By the time I get there, the situation is well in hand. Most of the bank robbers are already out cold or tied up. There’s only one left, with a massive machine gun cradled in his arms. He must be enhanced in some way, to even lift the thing - it looks like an artillery piece you’d find mounted on a tank or a helicopter, the kind of thing that's designed to chew through bunkers, not people. He’s roaring as he mashes down on the trigger, empty shells spinning to the ground as the gun screams, spitting bullets out at such an incredible rate of fire that it looks like he’s firing a laser.

NovaGirl stands there like he’s throwing confetti at her.

Slug after slug is flattening against her skin, her suit, the symbol emblazoned on her chest, each dropping to the floor in a useless pile of metal. She doesn’t move an inch. She stands there, smirking. 

I know why she’s doing it. The more he focuses on her, the less chance there is of him hurting the civilians, cowering to the side. She stands there and takes it because she can, because she’s NovaGirl and there isn’t a thing on this Earth that can hurt her.

Then in the blink of an eye, she’s right up in front of him - and with one hand, crushes the barrel of his gun.

“Goddamn ALIEN!” he roars, just before she lays him out flat with one punch.

She could’ve taken his head off, if she really wanted to.

Instead, he’s snoring by the time he hits the ground. 

NovaGirl looks around at the bank, at everyone around her. “Is everybody okay?” she calls. “Anybody get hurt?” 

People begin to applaud. One after the other, until everyone’s cheering for her, thankful that Centropolis has a savior. Someone they can trust to protect them. Even when the police arrive, the cops can’t help but join in and give her a few claps of appreciation too. They normally don’t like the capes - but nobody can dislike NovaGirl for very long.

“What?” she says later, as we fly off back to the Hero Corps Hall.

“I didn’t say anything,” I tell her.

“You were looking at me funny,” says NovaGirl, because she’s perceptive too.

I shrug. “You could’ve brought him down sooner.”

“I was playing it safe,” says NovaGirl with a frown.

“The sooner you end an encounter,” I tell her, “the safer you are.”

“Safe for everybody else, I meant. I’m trying to be careful, I promise.” 

“Then why are you acting like everything’s normal?”

“I know what this is,” NovaGirl tells me as she banks right. “You’re feeling guilty about Psyrena. That it’s your fault, what happened to her.”

It startles me to hear that. Is NovaGirl really that perceptive, or am I just that transparent?

“It wasn’t your fault,” she continues. “She knew what she was signing up for. Everyone with a mask has heard about these collars by now. And I’m not her. I’m not a newbie who’s just picked up the cape. I can handle myself.”

“Nullium is dangerous,” I told her. “Especially to you. If anything happens to you-”

“I know that it’s dangerous,” she says frustratedly. “But we’re being hypocrites about it. We use it to take down supercriminals all the time, but now it’s this super taboo, scary thing that we’re supposed to run away from? What happens if there’s a bad guy doing bad things and he’s got a nullium collar with him? Am I supposed to run away from him, or fight him? Because I’m telling you now, I’m going to fight him.”

“Of course you can fight him,” I tell her, but I feel the frustration too. The impotence. “But you can be smart about it.”

“Smart or not,” argues NovaGirl, “at the end of the day, it comes down to me versus him. It doesn’t change that I still have a job to do. You remember taking down the Tyrant, don’t you? You had to make a choice, and you chose to take him down all by yourself. Don’t tell me you played that smart.”

The Tyrant had barely been more than a kid at the time, nineteen or so when he’d come into his powers. But he was one of the most dangerous adversaries I’d ever fought.

Partially because I hadn’t even known I was fighting him, at the time. As far as villains went, he was one of the smarter ones. He had been slowly experimenting with his psychic abilities, flexing them carefully, until nearly everyone in the city was convinced that voting Tyrant for Mayor was a brilliant idea. After months of infecting the populace, he’d been polling at 95% approval rate without anyone noticing something was amiss. He would’ve won in a landslide if my powers didn’t make me naturally resistant to mental compulsion. Psyche-sensitives have told me that something about the particle accelerator accident must have rewired how my neural activity functioned - which made it that his powers of implicit suggestion, as strong as they were, couldn’t take hold of me as strongly. 

Even still, I’d nearly caught on too late. He’d suborned half the heroes in the Corps into acting as his bodyguards, servants, secretaries, and worse by the time I’d realized something was wrong. I’d pretended as though I was under his influence, long enough to get close to him and take him by surprise - but if I hadn’t managed to subdue him fast enough, I don’t know if I would’ve won. If I’d had to fight all the heroines he had under his control, things might’ve ended very differently.

He was securely locked away now, in the supermax prison for villains we like to call the Hole. Regularly dosed with neuropathic drugs to keep him in a semi-lucid state, to ensure he never recovers his powerset again. No longer a threat to anyone or anything.

But NovaGirl’s point is valid too.

If we’re too busy protecting ourselves, who will protect everyone else?

I don’t have an answer for her. Not yet, at least.

I don’t know if I ever will.

-

I trawl through the Hero Corps file system with a pillow bunched up between my bare thighs and a nullium collar wrapped around my throat.

I’m not going to make a habit of it. I promise myself that, after every orgasm. Every mindmelting climax at the mercy of this fucking band of metal.

I can stop any time.

It’s a trite line, but in my case it’s true. I’m perfectly functional throughout the day, and I’ll be certain to destroy all these damn things once this case is resolved. I’m only using it as a temporary fix, while I’m working long hours and don’t want to think about Reina possibly fucking her colleague. Business deal, my ass. I know Reina. I know how she operates. It doesn’t take weeks of late nights to close on a deal she’s been prepping for months. The worst part is how blatant she is about it. Like she thinks I’m stupid. I don’t care how many times she texts me throughout the day, telling me she loves me, she misses me. I don’t trust her, and it hurts. And I don’t want to hurt right now. So I distract myself, with the best toy I know how.

This toy is just… unusually effective.

No matter how long I keep the collar around my throat, my body doesn’t ever seem to acclimate. I feel warm, too warm. My heart rate stays elevated - I can feel it jackhammering in my chest. Trying to warn me that something is off, something is wrong. And I already know it.

Why does it feel so good?

I’ve rubbed my way to four orgasms so far tonight and I’m well on my way to my fifth. I bite my lip as I read through case file after case file, research log after research log, doing my best to focus. I don’t know how well it’s working. My vision blurs sometimes, or doubles, because of the sensation, and it’s hard to read anything at all when I’m so, so close to the edge. 

But I can still watch video just fine. And I do. I have been, for… hours. I’m not proud of it. I tell myself it’s for research. Tactics, and strategy. I’m studying the enemy, that’s what I’m doing. 

On my screen, I watch Lia Vaughn get raped for the sixth time tonight. 

I have the scene memorized, pretty much. I know how Voltgirl screams, how she pleads. I know exactly how he ignores her, every time.

I’m not masturbating to her getting raped - it’s obviously a horrible, terrible thing. The poor girl will never be the same again. It’s more about… the concept. The situation which enables the rape. 

Because it’s one thing to be powerless. It’s another thing entirely to face what happens next. 

If the collar itself has a stimulating effect on me, the videos alongside it are like an adrenaline shot straight to my arousal. I can feel my heartbeat through my clit. I’ve never felt that before, in my life, and it’s all I can focus on now as a random drunk ruins the future of one of our brightest vigilantes as he pins her against a brick wall and fucks her. Fucks her like she’s worth nothing at all. And there’s nothing she can do about it. 

There’s no part of it that’s an actual fantasy, to me. I don’t actually want to ever be in her position - utterly depowered, at the mercy of some sadistic brute of a man. It’s a horrifying prospect. Not something I ever want to return to. I still remember how my boyfriend would whore me out, sometimes, to his friends, for beer money and kicks. Look at Maddie, he’d tell them. Dumb slut’ll do anything you tell her. And it was true, I did. I was scared back then. Scared and weak. I never stood up for myself. Even when his friends got off on roughing me up, yanking my hair, slapping me around, I could never say no. I don’t know why he had such a thrall over me, or why I could never muster enough self respect. It just wasn’t who I was then.

I’m a different person now. Stronger, more confident, more myself. I’ve left the victim behind. 

But that doesn’t mean I don’t remember her sometimes. 

Then Lia gets replaced by Valerie, and I watch the same video that 1.6 billion people have already watched, the same video I’ve watched fifteen times now. It’s worse than horrible, watching her sob and plead just for this man to laugh. He laughs like it’s the funniest fucking shit in the world, watching a supe crawl around, helpless, until he drags her back just to keep fucking her ass. As weak as any of us are with a collar of nullium around our necks, Velocigal is subjected to an entirely different hell. Her legs are worse than lead weights as she tries to fight him off, again and again, until she realizes how useless it is. She lays there, shaking, as he dumps load after load into her. Wringing climax after climax out of her - because no matter how much she hates it, as much as she wants to hate it, her body says differently. Every time she cums she cums violently, like she’s just taken a taser to the clit or a shot to the heart. Gasping and panting and crying out for anyone, anyone at all to help her. She screams so many names. My heart breaks a little when I hear mine, more than a few times. I practically see stars as I cum with her.

And then Valerie’s video ends and Paladia’s begins. There’s limited footage of her actual rape - the Hero Corps has managed to scrub most of the original video off the Internet somehow, with only clips and bits surviving online. I can’t tell whether to be thankful or not for that. But there is plenty of video from the first responders who found her, from the bodycam recorders. I see what they see. I see the blonde sprawled with her legs open and her head lolled against a dumpster. I see TIN CAN WHORE sprayed above her head, and the silver paint sprayed across her body. The bruises, the tally marks. The cum caking every inch of her face, and most of her cleavage. Most of it dried and crusted over but plenty still wet and dripping in thick, ropey strings. 

I can hear the intakes of breath, the oh fucks as the responders realize what they’ve stumbled across.

One of the city’s most powerful, famous heroes.

Defeated.

More than defeated.

Ruined.

And even as they check over, for a pulse, for bone-breaks, I can tell they’re rattled. Because this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re supposed to work under our aegis. How many first responders would work these streets without us on patrol in the skies above? We are the guarantors of their safety, their security - and as they check over this poor woman, they realize that security is no longer as ironclad as they thought. It’s the same realization the entire city is coming to, slowly but surely. That maybe their protectors are in need of protecting. 

I’m teetering on the precipice of my sixth orgasm of the night when the lights flare red, and the crisis klaxon goes off. Again. All hands on deck. All heroes report for duty. 

As I stumble out of the chair on unsteady legs as I do my damndest to get this fucking collar off me, my heart can’t help but fill with dread. 

Because I have a sinking feeling I know who the next girl up on that screen will be.