River Oaks is, bluntly put, stupid rich. Condo towers draped in warm light and with lush greenery at their heels rise above shopping centers designed to look classy. Actual infrastructure and roads connect all of this together, and the drone cover is heavy. Just goes to show that, given enough money, a pre-Affect way of life can be preserved.

The mood lighting they’ve scattered everywhere means many of the alleys are brightly lit, many of the roofs are plainly visible, and escape options are few.

Epione is waiting at the rendezvous point behind one of the shopping centers, hiding in between a dumpster and a hedge wall blocking the view of that dumpster from the street.

“Gabe,” she says, waving to me as I drop down into the alley.

Not wearing my mask has me feeling exposed. I duck my head and stick as close to the wall as I can in case of passers-by. “Abby.”

“No…” Epione smiles and shakes her head. “That sounds wrong, doesn’t it, Home Run?”

“Well, I’m used to Gabe.” I shrug. “But I can still call you Epione if you want.” Even without her mask, even knowing her real name, it’s hard to think of her as anyone but Epione. The same goes for Saw Off, Silent, and the others.

“Everyone else is on the way.” Epione points down the road. “We’re not far from the PK campus. This meeting is happening in one of the towers with luxury apartments away from the main building. You think this is nice, wait until you see those.”

“What was it like?” I ask.

“Stifling.” Epione’s gaze softens as she faces down her memories. “I had a hard childhood.”

“Sipping tea in a mansion?”

Epione shoots me a warning glance. “There are many ways for someone’s life to be hard. Abusive parents among them.”

I rub my neck, properly chastised.

“When I was young, before I knew I was an empath, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s. Back then, they still gave those kinds of diagnoses.” Epione folds her hands behind her back, putting on the armor of her proper posture. “I could scarcely understand why I was the way I was, but I felt everything so deeply. My parents were even less understanding. Especially my father. He hated me.”

“Ep,” I murmur, but it’s only to put some noise out there.

“I never hated him. Not until I learned about the mass dampeners.” Epione’s armor slips just a bit and her lips curl in anger. “Park Dae-seong was my first taste of evil. Seeing what he built for the capes, what he made people do with his power. His technology used to hurt people.”

“This’ll catch him, too,” I say. “They won’t get to spin this anymore. We’ll finally be the good guys.”

“Is that what we’re doing?” Epione asks. “It sounds like what the capes say.”

“Is there anything inherently wrong with it?” I ask, annoyed. “Wanting to save people?”

“There’s wanting to save people and there’s wanting to be seen saving people.” Epione makes no effort to be reassuring, or to act like she understands what I’m saying. She is as cold as she’s ever been, even without her mask. “Maybe they can go hand in hand. I don’t know. I’ve never known someone who prioritizes the latter to be good at the former.”

“This is a game of changing the world’s view, changing where they give their Affect,” I say. “I think being seen saving them is the same as saving them, this time.”

She frowns, and it feels less like she’s actually upset or anything and more like she’s finding something for her face to do to fill the space of physical cues. “You have a lot of faith that people will respond the way you expect. My experience of people leads me to worry that they won’t rally like you hope. They won’t see us as ‘the good guys.’ Most people are afraid, Gabe. And destroying the dampener didn’t make the Fear better, like I’d hoped. It still builds every day. They just want someone to tell them it will be okay, not someone who will pull back the mask of the entire world.”

“So then why are you doing this? If you don’t think we’ll succeed, why are you going on what amounts to a suicide mission?” I don’t know why she’s raising these doubts now, not after we’ve planned everything, as we’re on the edge about to move.

Epione apparently senses my frustration. She nods and says, “I just want you to be so sure we have to do this that you don’t care what the result is.”

I tilt my head, confused.

“Because we do have to do this. We have to wrench the mask off. You were right.”

“I’m… lost. What do you mean?”

“To answer your question, Home Run, I don’t know, and I’ve never known, if I am good or not. I am uninterested in being good if it means being docile or accepting of evil. I only care that we are free to be who we are. Which is why I’m here. I believe we must face it, regardless of the outcome.

Her cold demeanor thaws, just a touch, and she adds, “I hope you’re right. I hope that we do save the world from the Vanguard. I hope that we can go, this very night, into the Shrine and find Mateo and all the others unjustly imprisoned. I hope we can shut down every Affect dampener in the world. And that tomorrow’s sun rises on a world where people are less able and willing to control each other.”

She hands me a sleek plastic rectangle with PK’s logo on the back, a handheld. I’ve never had one of my own before, besides the one Bedevil gave me, and that thing was old as hell. This is a nice one, a new one. “Tomorrow, the world will wake up to watch what we send out on PK’s network. With my privileges, it’ll go out as a bulletin to all PK employees and anyone who uses a handheld on their network. It’s not quite as far reaching as the Vanguard’s Templar network, but it’s enough. And then the news stations can’t ignore it, can’t bury it.”

I tap the device in my hand. “They can’t stifle this?”

“This isn’t a battle of shutting down information. You and I… we’ll be too difficult to ignore. We have a voice, for better or worse, without our masks.” She puts the handheld into my jacket pocket and says, “I want you to be the one. You can get close; they can’t do anything to you physically.”

I’ve had a question burning in my mind since yesterday, so I ask: “How come he doesn’t trust you with this? Why didn’t you know about any of these experiments, or that he was working with Pandahead?”

“He shared more with me, once,” she says. “But I shared a picture of how some of the workers are treated during their shifts. He had me disciplined for ‘leaking company secrets.’ He’s never fully trusted me since, though I managed to convince him I’ve fallen in line as an assistant. He just won’t share any real information with me. But I’ve explored on my own, after hours, when no one was looking. Everything I’ve learned about PK Resonance, I’ve had to learn on my own, one step at a time. It’s taken me two years just to learn all that I know now.”

“Jeez, just for a picture of people working?” I ask.

“It was just short of slavery. A shift that had gone on for thirty-six hours because they hadn’t met their quota. The strange thing is, Home Run… none of the workers remember it.” She looks afraid for a minute. “And I don’t know why.”

I don’t know if there’s anything to say to that, which is just as well, because right then, a mustard-colored box van I’ve never seen before pulls up to the alley, and the passenger door slides open. Saw Off beams at us from the van, patting the seat. “Gabe, sit next to me!”

#

Dark thunderheads prowl over Houston, growling with anticipation for the night ahead. Flashes of lightning pierce the thick black clouds, revealing for an instant their sheer size as they slowly crawl with us toward the PK headquarters.

Huge, iron-black walls rise up over the dozen city blocks contained within. Greenery grows on top of the wall, leaves and bushes dangling over the edge. A few buildings loom over the acres of campus. The main one is a strange, dark building shaped like an anvil, with small yellow lights betraying its form against the night sky. The others must be the luxury apartment towers Epione told us about. From here, they look like blades made of glass, but I hope as we get closer they’ll clarify into something real.

Unmasked, thirty people follow Epione and me up to the base of the wall, where Epione shows us a staff entrance leading into the campus. She waves her hand over the access panel, and the door swings open. We pass through a cramped hallway lit up by dim, orange lights. Silent goes ahead of us, using her power to listen for any threats. Despite her injured arm, she doesn’t struggle with the stairs at all.

PK has somehow captured Eden on its campus. A stiff breeze sighs through the trees, making the forest dance as though playful spirits live among the branches. Lush leaves whisper against one another, the woods snickering at our approach.

There’s at least one ghost walking among those trees. Gabriel. He’s followed me since the college, not left the corner of my vision. Sometimes, he’s so close I can almost feel his breath on my cheek, his eyes boring holes into my temples, but when I turn to stare him down, he’s gone. I still feel him, even then, but at the back of my head. He only comes back when my attention has moved on again. He never says a word.

While I don’t have his power, I’m not worried. Home Run’s engrams have been growing all week, my own pool getting larger and larger as the news spreads of my deeds. And I got a significant bump when I unmasked myself before the Front. It’s enough that I can call myself a real Heavyweight again. I’m not at the top end of heavyweight rank like I was before, but at least it’s something.

The luxury tower sits on a slight upward slope, right at the edge of the wall overlooking Houston. The field leading up to the tower is cleared of forest, but there’s no fence - no one who doesn’t belong should be able to get this far into the campus. The tinted windows barely hide the decadent rooms inside, with beautiful kaleidoscope tiled floors, paintings and sculptures and vases, classy decor. A driveway snakes up out of the woods to coil around a fountain before the front gate.

Two security guards share a cigarette on the balcony overlooking the driveway. Two more wait by the gates. “Metis, I’d kill for that cigarette,” Saw Off says.

“Me too,” Power Chord whispers.

Looks like there’s some kind of meeting happening on the bottom floor, in an expansive conference room with a huge table made of sparkling blue resin and oak wood. About six people sit around the table, and another person stands at the head of it, speaking to them. The one standing is definitely Park Dae-seong, a middle-aged Korean man in a well-tailored suit. I also recognize Highheart from the other night, although now she isn’t in her cape uniform, just business casual. Tim Prince, the city’s communications director, is there, too. The other four must be capes out of their costumes or guild masters.

“What do you suppose he’s talking about?” Asperity asks.

I can’t help it: “I think he’s saying, I have anal fissures and warts upon the tip of my penis and lately the herpes around my mouth has-”

Saw Off slaps my arm.

“Do you think Pandahead is there, unmasked?” Epione says, furrowing her brow as she watches the meeting unfold.

It’s impossible to say, considering we still have no clue who he is. “What should we do?”

“Those guards, they’re all cruiserweight. They shouldn’t be too difficult to deal with, especially if we get the drop on them, but they’ll be tougher than the average fighter,” Epione tells us. “They’ve got an empath.”

“I can handle the ones on the balcony.” I roll my neck, finally ready to kick some ass after all this time waiting and moping. “What’s your dear dad’s power?”

Epione sighs and looks me in the eyes. Then she says the most horrifying words she could say: “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Asperity hisses.

“I’ve suspected for a long time that he might be an empath himself, but it may also be some kind of sharing power. He blurs the line between technology and Affect so much that I can’t tell. Trust me, I’ve spent quite some time studying him.” Epione shakes her head.

“Well, we’re not completely blind. We can assume he’s not a fighter,” I say. “But he might have tech to fight for him. Jean Jacket said they were building something together to topple the capes… can only assume it’s a weapon.”

“How do we know it ain’t gonna fuck us up?” Power Chord asks.

“You’ve never had me on your side.”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

#

Time to bust down the doors. Gabriel’s awful, but he’s always been right about one thing: I’m a weapon. And even without all of Megajoule’s power, Home Run’s engrams are more than enough to get this job done.

I rocket over the trees, above the cleared field, aiming right for the balcony. My flight is so fast the trees shake with the hot gusts trailing behind me. Epione and Saw Off take off after me, leading the charge of masks. We outnumber them, out power them. When the capes show up, see my face… they might join with us, too. I hold onto that hope as I crash into the balcony, rupturing the railing and shattering the glass windows as I land. The pair of men sharing the cigarette both panic, one screaming while the other jumps away from my attack. I knock out the screamer with a kinetic strike to his jaw immediately, but as I go to do the same for the one that jumped out of the way, he stretches his body unnaturally out of my attack, like some kind of off brand Mr. Fantastic.

The guy’s leg stretches to almost twice its normal length and he whips it at my temple. I absorb the first hit, but my power is slower than I’m used to, and it actually manages to hurt me. His second kick I block with my forearm braced against my head - he’s gotta be stronger than a bullet. When his third kick comes, I grab the elastic leg by hooking it against my body, then slam it into the wall, and suck all the heat I can out of it. The skin sizzles and blackens from frostbite, and the brick frosts over as they freeze together. The guard shrieks in pain, falls over, passes out.

I look down and see the masks swarming over the other two guards. Whatever powers they had were no match for thirty pissed off people.

Behind them all, Gabriel watches with a wide grin on his face.

I flip him off.

Down in the conference room, a massive cold spot waits, like a hole poked into the fabric of the universe. That same void I’ve felt every time I’ve been somewhere that Pandahead’s been.

“Got you.” At fucking last. I slip my hand in my jacket pocket and turn on the handheld’s broadcast,

I warp into the tower, down the stairs, as fast as I can. I blow the door off its hinges, blister the air and blacken the lush carpet of the conference room. Someone yelps, another person ducks under the table. Highheart rises to her feet to tackle the problem. One of the four people I don’t recognize draws a small revolver, pops off a few rounds that hit my body and feed my furnace, and then stops. Every single jaw drops, every eye goes wide, when they see who I am.

“What is this? Is this a power? He looks like-” the man who shot me asks.

Park Dae-seong meets my gaze with a little smirk. “Megajoule.”

Tim Prince clutches a thermos to his chest like a crucifix. He’s muttering to himself, watching me like I’m a tiger. “You can’t be real.”

“I- I don’t know who you are,” Highheart says, glancing at the burly man to her left. He stands, looking ready for a fight. He must be a cape, too.

“I’m your cloak. I’m Home Run. And I’m all that’s left of Megajoule,” I tell her.

“Ah, Gabe.” Park Dae-seong’s voice cuts through us all. I freeze at the mention of my real name–of course he’d know it.. He adjusts his suit, smiles at me, and says, “You are a product of Lilac, I assume.”

“What do you have to say to me?” I hope he’ll take the bait and give me everything for my recording. He seems like one of those guys that loves explaining their evil plan.

Park Dae-seong’s smile doesn’t leave his face. “Please, everyone, take a seat.” He gestures to Highheart and her cape friend, as well as the man who dove under the table. Highheart doesn’t look like she wants to do that. She looks like she wants to jump over this table with the other cape and do what they do best. “Please. Highheart, you might be able to shut off his power, but this boy is very fast and very strong. There are more masks on the way, as well, so fighting here may be risky.”

Then, he turns his attention back to me.

“I suppose you think that, because you look like Megajoule, you’re going to simply march in here and save the day. Whatever that means to you. That all these people will simply fall to their knees and begin worshipping you as his second coming. I can tell you, though, that none of us feel that way toward you. Not a single person in Houston- in the world- will look at you with adoration or respect. They’re only going to be scared of you.”

“You should be scared of me,” I retort. “You kidnapped people and stuck them into your fucking dampener. You work with a human trafficker. And the capes are turning a blind eye or even helping you.”

“You know why they’re doing all that?” Park Dae-seong asks.

Wow, I didn’t expect him to just own it. But it’s on tape now, broadcasted to the PK network. I can’t help my smirk as I win.

He continues: “Because up to now, PK Resonance has been vital to the reconstruction of the Vanguard. Our fingers are in too many pies.”

I pull out the handheld, point the camera at them all. “You think so?”

Park laughs at the camera, gives a little wave. His smile falters a little when the rest of the masks finally arrive behind me, pushing into the room with Epione at their head. He looks at her briefly and says, “Daughter.”

Epione only frowns at him in response.

“He’s admitted to it all,” I tell her.

“Yes,” Park says, matter-of-factly. He’s projecting an aura of absolute control, and to be honest, it’s kind of working. The people sitting around the table calm down, and the masks behind me exude hesitation. We’d expected a simple battle… but here he is stalling us out just by talking. “Because, after today, it doesn’t matter. The individual engrams that a person has won’t matter. What they say or don’t say, what they are or aren’t.”

“I don’t give a shit about any of that!” Saw Off shouts. “Where the fuck’s my Lugs you bitch?!”

“I assume you’re referring to one of the masks Pandahead took,” Park says. “Tim, could you elucidate?”

My heart stops. I glance down at Tim and then I recognize the thermos he’s holding in his hands. The same one that I saw Pandahead with that night. He looks back up at me, his terrified expression transforming into a grin that he stole from the devil himself.

Tim Prince is Pandahead. The city’s communications director. The man on the screen every day. Someone with their finger on the pulse of the entire world.

“Sure,” Tim says, cheerfully. He pops the top off the thermos.

A wave of ink shoots from the mouth of the thermos and washes over the entire room. Epione shouts and holds her hands up against it, parting the torrent from hitting her, Saw Off, and a couple of the masks behind her, but I’m right in the splash zone.

Suddenly, I’m in two places at once. The real world, the conference room, and back in the lab in Lilac, surrounded by the dead bodies of my brothers. A mass of limbs swarming me in the dark, fists that burn, eyes that blaze. There is no floor, there is only their melting flesh.

An earphone in each ear, one playing an elegy of dissonant strings, the other the sound of cars crashing into each other. The weight of mountains falls on my shoulders, but my feet can’t touch solid ground. Hands tear free of the mass of bodies, black, mottled, twisted like they had been thrown in a fire. Corpse fingers grip my ankles. These voices, these images, they’re coming up from within me, like I’m puking them up.

I sink into

the floor

/corpse void

/death.

And then the world merges and I’m in the corner of the conference room, clutching my head. Epione is next to, her empath’s touch banishing the vision that just fell on me.

The guild master who tried to shoot me screams bloody murder. He reaches up to his cheeks and rakes them with his own fingers, as if he’s trying to pull the skin from his face.

Not trying. He’s succeeding. He wails in pain as he claws under his eyes and blood starts to seep between his fingers. “Please, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to!” The woman sitting next to him pulls out a pen from her pocket - and stabs it into his jugular.

“You have to stop!” Highheart, pale as a ghost, shouts at Tim. She tries to stand only to stumble against the wall. “Whatever you’re doing, Tim, you need to stop it!”

Tim is now partly in his Pandahead outfit - he’s still dressed in a suit, but now the white-and-black helmet is over his head. Park Dae-seong is gone, having taken advantage of Pandahead’s opening.

“Not until it’s done,” he says.

I climb to my feet. It’s that thermos. I rush forward, grabbing Tim Prince from behind, wrestling the thing from his hands. He tries to open it again, but I rip it out of his grip and hurl it across the room before shoving him against the table.

Instead of screaming in agony, he laughs through the electronic filter. “Man. What a rush.”

“I’ll show you a fucking rush!” I say, reeling back to punch his head off.

“No!” Highheart shouts. “Home Run… Megajoule… Whoever you are, we need him alive. We need him now.”

“Oh, bullshit,” I shout back. “Like you’re not fucking in on this!”

“I swear to you, I’m not.” Highheart holds her hands up. “We don’t know what’s going on. We came here because Park said he had a way to keep the city safe from you and others like you. But whatever this is, whatever Tim’s doing, I didn’t know.”

I don’t know if I can believe that. I look down at Tim, still laughing in his Pandahead outfit. “Tell me what this is.”

“My power? Or what’s going on? Be more spec-“

I slam him into the table again. “I don’t mind if you never fucking speak again.”

His laughter dies out, and he’s quiet for a moment. This isn’t how I imagined this meeting going. After all this time chasing him down, this isn’t how I imagined it at all.

“Fear is the oldest emotion,” he says. “It is the deepest and the darkest and it makes people do insane things to protect themselves. Fear is a fundamental part of being a human. It’s fundamental to the universe. It’s around us, above us, always in us. All I ever did was open people’s eyes to it.”

I glance over at Epione. Her eyes are wide. The Fear she talked about.

“I’m not even an empath,” he laughs.“I’m just a guy who can show you what you’re afraid of. It’s not my fault that it’s so bad people tear their eyes out.”

Then, his laughter picks up again like the wind of a hurricane. It becomes loud and gleeful.

“What happened to the masks you took?” Saw Off shouts. “Where’s Lugs?”

“You’re about to find out,” Tim says. He relaxes in my arms.

My kinetic sense blares. Something like a human shaped missile just launched from below us and is about to punch its way into the room. I barely pull Tim and Saw Off out of the way before the floor beneath us explodes upward. Shards of epoxy and wood pelt us as I pull them to safety.

What’s come up from the floor reminds me of Danger Close’s armor, although this one is strangely organic looking, with interlocking motors and hydraulics that look kind of like a muscular structure. A single sapphire eye has been fitted onto its head, but aside from that the creature has no facial features whatsoever.

From what I can see, it looks just like one of those people who were trapped in the dampener.

The creature floats there, with no visible jets to hold it up, as if it has the power of flight. It hardly makes a sound as its sapphire gaze scans us. Then, it holds out a hand, and all the metal in the room suddenly zips into its palm as if it has a super-charged magnet embedded in its skin. Highheart’s earrings rip out of her ears, making her cry out from pain, and the belt buckle on her compatriot’s belt pulls him up before being stripped clean of the leather. I feel the metal in my jacket pulled toward this force, but then it relents.

“You wanted to know where Lugs went?” Tim asks, still laughing.

Saw Off screams.

Highheart’s compatriot finally snaps, screaming as he jumps forward. The creature whirls around, shooting its handful of metal at him. It amounts to a close-range shotgun blast, shredding the poor man’s chest and blowing out the other side. He tumbles forward into the hole the creature made in the floor, never even getting his power off before he dies.

A second creature, identical to the first, claws its way up the hole that the first one created.

“Holy Metis, dad,” Epione says, shell-shocked by what she’s seeing.

I stand, rising to fight. “Epione!” I shout, hoping that her empathy will be able to shut off these robot monstrosities so I can kill the bodies inside.

Epione finally gets a hold of herself. She jumps to help me, her hands shimmering with power. But when she gets to her feet, the first creature zips silently toward her through the air, tackling her and pushing her down the hall. Power Chord and Asperity give chase.

Two more creatures burst from the ground, surging into the ranks of masks still crowded into the room.

Saw Off, meanwhile, jumps onto the back of the thing in front of her. She rocks a shotgun sneeze into the back of its head. At the same time, the machine whirs, and its whole body vanishes into vapor. Both the bullet and Saw Off pass right through, and she falls to the floor. The machine returns to solid form a second later, standing over Saw Off.

Then it drops its knee on her chest and with mechanical precision, begins to beat her face in.

I warp over to intervene. But as fast and strong as I am… this thing is insane. It’s like it’s built to fight me. As I try to lay hands on it, it turns to vapor yet again, reforming just to smash a vicious blow into my liver. I almost go down, unable to absorb all the kinetic energy. It hits me again, this time across the jaw. Then another blow. I try to respond but it batters me into the wall where I can’t retreat our mount a counterattack. I slip down, trying to get out of this horrible position, but it hooks its arm around me and wrestles me back in.

Gabriel, for the first time in days, speaks up. “There’s a simple solution. Let me take the reins.”

Saw Off blasts another sneeze, forcing the machine to turn into vapor, and giving me an opening to jump out of there. She also tries to get free, but the machine is deadly fast, snatching at her ankle faster than a viper’s strike.

“No!” I shout.

The machine whips Saw Off’s leg up, knocking her off balance, and kicks her in the chest, catching her with its shin and rolling her like a soccer ball toward me. She slams into my body, knocking us both back into the wall.

Not missing a beat, I scoop Saw Off into my arms and warp down the hallway, running away. Her face is a bloody pulp, and even more blood spills from her mouth, and I hope to Metis it’s not internal.

Not even the engrams I’ve added to Home Run’s store over the past few days are enough to get over such a power mismatch and the unreal strength of these things. Whatever they are, they’re perfect weapons.

I sprint down the lavish hall toward the exit, my only thought now on escape. I’d stay to fight, but Metis, I promised Lugs I wouldn’t let anything happen to Saw Off.

She coughs, heavy and wet. She manages to open an eye and focus it on me. “Can’t breathe, Gabe,” she manages. She spits blood from her mouth. Her eyes flutter.

“No, no, come on, come on!” I can only imagine what’s happening to Epione right now – I hope she’s still alive.

Fuck. I charged into this. But I’m not strong enough. Not strong enough, not fast enough… I’m so weak and powerless with only Home Run’s engrams. I thought they’d be enough.

What’s worse, I can feel all of Megajoule’s power inside me, roiling and ready to be used. More than enough to crush these abominations PK has created and protect Saw Off.

I make it out the doors of the tower. Some of the other masks are also fleeing, and we’re all being chased by these horrifying constructs. I vault for the tree line at the edge of the clearing. Saw Off holds on to me, wheezing. Fuck. Fuck, just a little further and I’ll make it-

The monster chasing us skids into the forest right behind me, moving like an ice skater with rockets on its heels. Deadly blades unfold from its arms.

It is unlike anything I’ve ever fought. It moves impossibly, with ultimate precision. Even as I block one attack and try to kick it, all while holding Saw Off in my arms, it becomes vapor again, reforming just to try and strike again. It’s not aiming for me, but for Saw Off. The only thing I have going for me is that it can’t seem to attack her without solidifying. But every time it vanishes, I lose track of it with my kinetic sense.

There’s no one else to help - I don’t even see where Silent, Epione, and the other masks are.

Maybe if I only touch his power for a second. Just use it to get her out of here.

I do it. I draw in all those engrams, and his power is mine again.

The touch of temperature falls away. Heat and energy flow into me freely. I surround myself in his power, and now I can even sense the flow of this thing’s vapor form. My fist whips into the mist, freezing it into a block of pure ice before it can return to its normal form. It falls over and shatters into pieces.

I’m okay. I’m alive, and I’m in control. I laugh, setting Saw Off down gently. “It’s going to be alright. I can fight them-“

A black hole opens inside of me. My body goes cold and numb; I can’t even speak. Behind me, the battle outside the tower falls away. Out in Houston proper, the grumbling sound of a storm recedes.

My hand moves of its own will. I try to walk, to turn, to go back to the fight. But I don’t. My body doesn’t respond to my will.

“It’s my turn, little brother.”

I know I am screaming but I can’t hear anything at all. I am a ghost inside my body. I am a ghost.

He walks over to Saw Off, who’s coughing up blood. She’s utterly helpless as he kneels on her chest. “What a pity. You won’t survive that kind of wound. Here. Let me help.”

“G-Gabe?” she asks, fearfully.

“Not quite,” he replies. He pushes his burning hand into her chest, smiles at her. She grabs at his -my- arm. But she can’t stop it. I can’t stop it. He begins to channel heat and other forms of energy into her, kinds that even I can’t harness. Her body starts to glow and she falls backward, her mouth open in shock. I scream without sound as she dies, dissolves into nothing.

Gabriel stands up, dusts off his hands with a grin. “Now, little brother. I’ll show you how it’s really done. Let’s start with that bastard Park Dae-seong.”