We just continued to look silently for a few moments. Then I just blurted it out. "Is Saber my mom?"

  In a way, why should that be so shocking? I was already used to having one of the first wave of Star Guardians as a parent, so in reality, Saber would have a higher chance of being my 'mother' in some sense than a randomly sampled woman from the whole global population. Still, the thought of it was almost surreal. I quickly attributed the feeling to the fact that I was used to Daniel—I'd grown up knowing he was my 'real' father—whereas this was something unexpected and new.

  "Yes," the man next to me confirmed, "or rather, she's your mother in the same sense that I'm your father. Your human genome has roughly equal contributions from both of us."

  Wow, what a clinical way to say it. To be fair, I got the feeling he was hedging his words like that because of the whole Anathema thing. That was a whole other can of worms that doubtlessly complicated the matter. Now that I thought about it, I had a weird, existential question come to mind. Was I a mutant chamelium designed to be more human, or was I a mutant human designed to have traits of a chamelium?

  I soon found myself dumping sugar in a mug of hot tea. The place really was a full house, and there was a fancy, slightly strange kitchen. 'Strange' because of some of the quirks of living in an isolated habitat on the surface of Mars. Which is still just bizarre. I kept bouncing along the floor, playing with the feeling of lower gravity. I also kept dropping the spoon back down on the counter, marveling at the disorienting way it fell slower than my brain wanted to expect.

  Mars was actually quite a bit smaller than Earth. That was something I felt like many people didn't realize—I certainly didn't for a long time—but at some point in the past four or five years I'd learned that it was only like a third of the size. I had no idea what the specific surface gravity was, but it wasn't hard to tell that it was definitely a lot lower.

  Regardless, I made my tea, put a metric fuck ton of sugar in it, and then we went to go sit in some lush and cozy private study. I was pretty sure he had been taking mental notes the whole time I was fixing the tea—I could already imagine the report on chamelium dietary preferences or some shit. Regardless, I was finally starting to get over both the Saber thing and the Mars thing, and I was now just about ready to hear out whatever it was he had to say. This better be good. I was going to be really disappointed if he still left ninety percent of everything out.

  He decided to lead with a question. "What do you know about Star Guardian politics?"

  That wasn't how I expected this would start, but I did my best to give a solid answer. I could have tried just brushing past it—I don't know, you tell me—but I decided to give him something to work with—at least at the start. "Not much? As far as anyone can tell, you mostly stay out of everything and just show up now and then to fight Anathema or do stupid motivational speeches."

  Well, only a few of them did that second part. Aurora was big on that. By contrast, Fabrica, the only other known Tier 9, had far less deliberate media presence, but she was also the closest thing to a representative of the Star Guardians as a whole. At the other extreme was Saber—the second or third strongest, according to most rankings, was more like a ghost being pursued by the strange half breed children of paparazzi and war photographers that had cropped up soon after the emergence of Guardians.

  Overall, though, Star Guardians weren't involved much in the international scene except for where Anathema were related. It was definitely a bit weird, since it was basically a small association of ridiculously powerful people—the exact sort of thing that should have become an immensely powerful player on the international stage. Naturally, then, there were plenty of conspiracy theories about Star Guardians secretly having their fingers in everything.

  Nevertheless, as far as the average person was aware, there wasn't a single Star Guardian politician—unless you counted the frequent meetings with various important leaders, but those were still confined in scope to Anathema, Incursions, and, well, Guardians.

  The normal, far more common Guardians were a different story, though. There were plenty of those in all levels of most societies, not least because a large number of them had no interest in cultivating their abilities and fighting directly in incursions. There wasn't much point in trying to limit the rights of people who happened to survive incursions and ended up with a unique party trick and near-perfect health for the next few decades.

  There was, of course, the question of accountability. How did a largely 'ordinary' exert the force of law on that minority of minorly powered, or in the case of those who did train and fight, majorly powered individuals? The answer was pretty simple. Most lower tier Guardians couldn't actually flagrantly ignore the rules of society for very long and survive. Even the more powerful still had to contend with the fact that there was still a very, very large number of people with similar levels of hard power who were willing to side with silly little things like court decisions.

  My dad nodded. "It would seem like that, wouldn't it?" He sighed. "But do you really think over two thousand people from all over the world with wildly different backgrounds and experiences would all agree to—what, keep things entirely hands off? Just sit back and watch the status quo?"

  Well, no, not really. Of course I didn't think that, which was the entire reason it was kind of weird in the first place, right? "No, I don't think they would," I said. "I think many of them would actually despise each other and that there would be many competing, contradictory goals."

  He snapped his fingers. "Exactly."

  I wanted to groan and pat myself on the back at the same time. Look at me! I'm so smart and clever and insightful! I can put things together right in front of the hotshot asking semi-rhetorical questions. Wow. I should be a host for those ten minute interviews with 'experts' on things.

  "Many of us do resent each other, and many of us harbor very strong feelings on any number of social and political issues. But here's the thing. There might be some commonalities in what kind of people are chosen to receive a Star Core, but overall, there's a huge spread. Anyone who feels strongly about one major issue has a decent chance of being directly countered by someone else. It's all a giant standoff. We never get involved in anything because there are enough of us who don't want to be the spark of another world war."

  Well, shit. That did make sense. "So what's this about Red and Blue, then? I'm guessing there are specific parties that the rest of the world doesn't know about."

  Once again, my dad nodded. "Precisely. We all do work together—Nevada is currently a major joint effort, to give one example—but there are several extreme divisions. The biggest is between Red and Blue." Chuckling, he went on. "All of the major factions ended up being named for colors, but Red and Blue were the first. Strictly speaking, Red was the first, but that was just a product of the factions reacting to each other."

  "And you're part of the Red faction?" Again, he nodded. Interesting. I guess that means Saber is also a 'Red,' but—wait. "Hold on. Is that what the Aurora-Saber fight was about? Back in 2011?"

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  The fight between Aurora and Saber almost nineteen years ago remained infamous to this day. There were plenty of incidents of Guardians fighting each other—more than could be counted, actually—but mid-tier Guardians battling each other was nothing in comparison with two of the strongest Star Guardians ever going for each other's throats. The world had never seen high tier Star Guardians fight like that before, and there was no readily apparent reason for it at the time.

  The majority of the fight took place over the South Atlantic, presumably because they were both trying to kill the other without wiping out a million innocent bystanders. None of that was an exaggeration, because from what pretty much everyone could tell, they were truly out for blood. Almost none of it was recorded, unfortunately, because it was a little hard to film two people who could break the sound barrier battling it out over the middle of the ocean.

  It was intense enough that major shipping lanes temporarily paused and flights worldwide were diverted or grounded for the half hour the battle lasted. Multiple coastal areas were even evacuated for fear of the large waves that the unrestrained use of their abilities kicked up at several points. And, to this day, no one really knew what happened. Aurora himself steadfastly refused to discuss the subject, and Saber never discussed anything with anybody. There was an immense amount of speculation, obviously, but to this day, none of the more convincing theories were anywhere near 'confirmed.'

  Those theories ranged from personal grievances to contemporary politics to some dividing issue splitting the Star Guardians themselves. From what I was now hearing, that last one sounded increasingly likely.

  "It was," my dad confirmed. Holy shit! The way he said it just sounded tired, though. "2011 was not the first time the factions butted heads, but it was the closest we ever came to true warfare. It was our Cuban missile crisis, if you will, and the aftermath marked a major turning point in the development of our internal politics."

  Damn. That was crazy. As far as the public was aware, Aurora and Saber were the only ones actually fighting. If there had been more of them involved—well, it was a fight between the very strongest Star Guardian and Saber, a combat-focused Tier 8 strong enough to have contended directly with a Tier 9. She also felt way stronger than my dad, who was also Tier 8. Still, there were on the order of a hundred others in that same Tier, so the collective firepower would still have scaled tremendously.

  I was pulled back out of my thoughts when my dad started speaking again. "That particular incident was about you, actually."

  I blinked. "...What?"

  "Well, not you specifically, but you and the others like you. The Blues finally discovered what we were doing, and well..." He shook his head. "Let's just say they weren't very happy. We knew they wouldn't be, of course, and we knew it wouldn't stay secret forever. So we planned for it, and that's why we were able to safeguard all of you while Saber intercepted Aurora and delayed him long enough for us to temporarily evacuate."

  Holy shit. I didn't know what to say, or even think. On one hand, it all made some amount of sense—but on a real, personal level, it was almost too much to take in. There are more like me—I already expected there would be, if the cultists I'd met weren't proof of it—and we were created by Star Guardians—something I already knew, yes—and other Star Guardians want to destroy us—reasonable, I had to admit—and that's why Saber and Aurora ended up fighting each other—something that was neatly explained by the rest of it.

  But just—holy shit. I was left reeling all the same.

  It took me a moment to compose myself and start organizing all the different questions I had. The first one that came to mind was hardly the most important, but it helped me ground myself again. "Temporarily evacuate—do you mean bring us here?" I would have only been three or four at the time, so it made sense I didn't really remember anything.

  My dad confirmed it with a slow nod. That got me thinking, though. "Couldn't they have just followed you? If your side can travel here, can't the other side also do that?" I didn't really see how bringing us here would have been a good idea. Couldn't they have effectively held the civilian population hostage back on Earth? Both Saber and Aurora had to take some care not to wreak collateral havoc, and even then, they'd massively disrupted global transport.

  My dad just waggled his hand, though. "Yes and no. A small number of them possess abilities that would make the journey fairly trivial, much like myself. Aurora, for instance, could have arrived in a matter of hours if not less. Aside from a handful of individual supporters, they don't yet possess the means to make the trip en masse. We do, and that means we have the people, equipment, and the infrastructure. Aurora would be a fool to attack us here alone, and he is no fool."

  I frowned. "Are you saying that if Aurora showed up right now, your side could kill him?"

  Another hand waggle. "Short answer? Most likely, yes. It would not come without significant damage to our own operations, and I doubt he'd go down without bringing several others down with him. In reality, it's more likely that he won't attempt it in the first place—not without significant support, or perhaps a far more dire cause."

  Nodding, I mulled over everything I'd just learned. "So what even are the sides? I get that your side is making people like me, and the other side doesn't like that, but what else?"

  "More of the same, really," he admitted. "We are the smaller of the two major factions, but we make up for our lower numbers with higher average quality and passion. A large number of Blues aren't particularly invested in the conflict. We call those grays, and we have some as well—a large portion of Star Guardians are mostly independent and don't form strong attachments to our unique causes. The other major colors are Green, Gold, and Black.

  "To oversimplify—the Green Faction are stronger advocates for overall world peace and unity, and the Gold Faction want to be more involved in geopolitics and business. Those two are smaller but still substantial, and there's obviously plenty of color overlap. They're also far less strictly opposed to each other as Red and Blue—they're for or against each other depending on the specific context. As for the Black Faction..." I noted the man scrunched his face in distaste. "Those are Guardian supremacists, essentially. They're both the smallest ardent faction and the one no one else really likes."

  "What about Fabrica?" I asked. "Is she..."

  "Fabrica is a purple," he interrupted me. "One of a kind, really. Day to day, she's more of a Blue, at least in who she works with—but you really can't say she's loyal to one or the other. We joke that she's purple and not gray because she's solidly invested in the issues at the heart of the Red-Blue split. I suppose I should clarify what those issues actually are. We—the Red Faction—want to actually do something to advance our understanding of esotera. We want to understand Anathema, our own Star Cores, breaches—all of it. We've made substantial progress already, as I'm sure you can imagine."

  I certainly could, given my current situation. And just how much have you discovered? I was now quite curious. Taking another sip of tea—it was almost empty now—I waited for him to continue. He didn't, though, so I prodded him along. "And I suppose the Blue Faction doesn't share your enthusiasm."

  "Correct." Pausing for a moment, he looked a bit awkward. "All that being said, there's still another reason for bringing you here—more than just getting you in the loop, so to speak."

  I couldn't help but narrow my eyes. On the one hand, that was expected—they'd gone through the trouble to make me in the first place, after all. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to be suspicious. "And what would that be?"

  For the first time—first time in my life—I saw a glint of something in his eye. Something—predatory.

  "Something unusual has just come up," he began to answer, "something that could be important—and unfortunately, something that puts us in a bit of a tough position. However, there's also a big opportunity, and it would work best if we could include you in it."

  "Wait." Attention sharpening, I sat straighter. "Are you saying—"

  He didn't let me finish. "We want you to work for us."

  Discord Link