Adam flicked through the paper. Another news story—another death. He frowned. The papers were... dedicated. They covered the dead and delivered the news like a message from God. It had been almost a year, hadn’t it? Another kid dead near a lake in Minneapolis—drowning, officially, but possibly murder. Another shop closed down in the search of... what? And another bank robbed in the search of... there was no money! Did they even know just how much they were destroying? He'd thought... he'd thought that if they knew how much they were hurting people, they'd stop—but no. They kept on, and on, all claiming the same thing: the world would be better off if they took out this or that or the other. Bunch of bullies, maybe, but really?

Adam wasn’t of the race of men that could stand aside when faced with something as plain as a bunch of bullies.

Sure, he wasn’t the most experienced – no super powers, no extensive training – but he was no way a pushover. He was quick. He was careful. He’d got some training to become great.
Adam looked at the paper. Even though he'd been doing a lot of research in a very quiet place, he was still quite calm. He had no sense of urgency. He’d been planning this for a long time.

Because he believed in virtue, it would be wrong for him to let the bad things go on. It was a common mistake to... well, to think that you could change the world by yourself—but he could. Without any superpowers, without any physical strength, without any tools or weapons, he could still make the world a better place. That was faith—and faith was the source of morality.

It had been foolish of him to have wanted it to come quickly and easily, he decided, but really, this was the right time.

The idea of virtuous revenge—you have to remember that he believed that this was right—was not unfamiliar to Adam. He'd had it a long time.

A long, long time.

From birth, he’d been told that he was special and chosen—special and chosen for God. Isaac had wanted him to become a priest, but he’d only managed to become an altar boy. His parents had not been the worst parents anyone had ever heard of—they’d not been the best, either. When he’d been little, he’d had a few friends, but it was hard to fit in when you didn’t have a father, and it was even harder to fit in when you didn’t have a mother.

When he’d gotten a bit older, he’d noticed that he could do things that other people could not. His best friend, for example, had found it hard to believe when he’d managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat—the little good-looking thing had escaped him in pretty much the same way as the hat that Adam had tried in the first place. He was good with animals, and that was a nice skill, but it was the people that were funny—it was the way they were when with him that was strange. He tried to explain this to them, but they had looked at him like he was crazy. And he really was crazy—wasn’t he?

There was a girl, Shelly, that he liked. He suspected that she liked him, too—she always smiled at him, even when he looked silly. They’d taken to sitting together at lunch, and on the bus home after school, and they’d often be the same thing after class. He’d started to notice just how beautiful she was. He’d started dreaming of her.

He’d noticed that he was different from the other people in other ways. He stopped eating meat. He started to hate hunting, and he couldn’t understand what all the fuss over bone broth was truly about. He prayed really hard about it, and his prayers seemed to be answered. At the same time, Shelly had started going out with one of his friends—a big, strong guy who was great in sports, and who was always up for a fight.

Why would she do that? Adam had been angry. She’d told him that he was crazy, that he was insane . And he had been, hadn’t he? He’d been seeing things that weren’t there.

He started running away from home. And he did a lot of thinking.

And then he met Deborah. And Ethan. And Mary. Before he’d known it, he’d become part of something, something that allowed him to do good things. He still visited his parents, but much less frequently. They had tried to get him to go to the seminary, but he’d moved out. They had started to warn him against experimentation, and how he was damned, but he did not reject their warning. He had just hoped that they would come to understand. And maybe if he could find the strength to confidently explain why he was the way that he was. To present the evidence.

He’d done some asking around. He’d learned that not all of what he’d suspected was true, but that some of what he’d suspected was worse than he’d thought. They were not just bullies. They didn’t just go looking for things. They were parasites. They fed off people. They took away people’s money and their safety and their sense of self-worth. They made people sick. They were doing God’s work.

And so Adam decided that God must have wanted him to be extra vengeful.

It sounded crazy, but it was the only thing that made sense.

But what was he doing? He’d wished for clarity in the past, but now it was different. Something had changed inside of him. Until tonight, he’d felt like he was doing the right thing. But now he was feeling something else.

Adam knew that he could choose a path without consequences. He knew that there was an easy way to make this easy. He didn’t need to decide anything. He could be like Etheline. He wouldn’t have to kill people. He could just make them wish for death. He could just make them so miserable that it would be easy to let their life slip away.

But he needed to be sure.

It was just that, lately, he’d felt like he’d lost control.

And understood, all the more clearly, why he needed to have control.

He wanted her. And he wanted her now.

He was going to do something that would change the world.

He was going to make it better, or he was going to make it worse.

What to choose?

That, perhaps, was the greatest question. And it didn’t seem like such a distant future.

He’d made his decision, now.

She couldn't stop thinking about him—the way he'd smelled, the way he'd touched her, the way he'd looked into her eyes and asked her what she wanted.

"I want you to hurt me."

She stared out the window at the lights below her. She was floating, watching over a city she'd never seen before. She had a choice. She could change things, or she could let them be. The Butterfly was in charge of everything—and so it followed that she was the Butterfly.

The man who'd hurt her had told her that he'd do it again—the man who was going to change the world had told her she didn't deserve to be hurt. Two totally different men, offering her totally different futures.

He'd told her that he wanted her—and she realized that she'd wanted him for so much longer. Without even looking, she found him.

As the Butterfly, she floated towards him—and she smiled.