By the time the police arrive at the store, there are slabs and mounds of charred black meat beside me on the curb, bleeding their hissing blood onto the concrete. I can’t get the growing smell of their singed hair and boiling blood out of my nose. I stumble and fall carrying the last one I can find. At least, the one that didn’t turn to fleshy, pasty putty when I tried to scoop them up off the floor and into my arms. I sit there in front of the charred store, not really there, not feeling like I’m there at all when the first police car comes screeching to a halt. I remember waking up, and then I remember the bodies—I’d tried to put the fire out, but I’m not there yet. Can’t blow ice like dad can.

So I had dragged them out and saved them, you know? Yeah, that’s what I did. I saved the bodies.

The families can bury them, that’s what I thought, but now I’m sitting here beside them, so close to them that they all look like…like these things, these perforated pieces of meat that can’t stop sizzling in their own fat under the shattered, flickering street lights above me. I look away, heave, and force myself to swallow my vomit.

You did this. You hesitated. You froze.

I knuckle away the vomit, shaking as I comb my sooty, filthy fingers through my hair. I stare into the grate I’ve vomited into, wishing I could melt right into it and ignore the voice that’s screaming I killed them in my head.

There’s almost no point in it. You can’t tell which is which. Some have their clothes melted into their skin, and a lot more than I’d like to know have these large chunks, these really big parts of their bodies just missing, and now I’m puking again on my hands and knees, right into the grate. An officer asks me if I’m okay, and more are here now. They must have come when I wasn’t paying attention. A lady is asking me questions, helping me stand. I try to pull away, try to point at the bodies, the store, and fuck, I can barely stand up straight. I stumble, and the next thing I know, I’m sitting in the back of an ambulance, a thin sheet wrapped around me as another officer hands me water.

I take it, look into it, and there’s a soot smeared, blood covered face staring back at me. The water ripples in the cup, shaking just as badly as my hands are as I cup the plastic tightly. The girl in my reflection stares at me.

And I stare back, trying to figure out who she is, because I wouldn’t have frozen. Kacey Wilde doesn’t freeze or hesitate. She wants her superhero license. She wants to be the next big thing. Yet all she’d done was…

What’s the point of having powers if you can’t even use them, Kacey?

I only stop hearing the ringing in my head when a hand shakes my shoulder.

Then the world feels like every single sound has been turned up to eleven.

I look up from the cup, and I expect to see another police officer. It’s not. It’s a man in a brown coat with a pen tucked behind his ear and sunglasses hanging from his loose collar. He smiles at me, but it’s flat and hollow.

The kind of smile you give someone when you don’t really know what to say.

He doesn’t speak to me right away. He sits down beside me and slides his notepad back into his pocket, taps out a slim cigarette, then pauses and decides otherwise. We watch the paramedics work, and I watch as a very young looking woman has to slip down her mask, puke as she’s forced to help put the meat on the concrete, sorry, no, the human in front of her into a sack that looks like a garbage bag. She spits, wipes her mouth, then gets back to work. They all work quickly, efficiently, with firemen putting out the rest of the flames, now dousing the entire street with very, very foul-smelling smoke. And there are more policemen here than I’ve ever seen in one place. Then a sound catches me off guard, like a high-pitched shriek. My head turns slowly, and my eyes slowly focus.

It’s a policewoman, because a paramedic just found what was left of one of the boys on the arcade machines. He got flung back across the street. Smashed his skull right open into a pillar outside a beauty salon.

He’s the lucky one. The other kid had the skin on his face melted by the heatwave right onto his skull.

That kid is still alive, still screaming as the paramedics have to figure out how to get his droopy, liquid skin clinging to half his body off the concrete it wants to stick to. I keep staring, keep watching as he screams.

Then he stops moving, and the woman stops screaming, starts trying to get herself together, trying not to say a name that sounds very easy coming out of her mouth, and I stare at all the paramedics in the dim neon lights, in the flashing red and blue of the police cars, of the deep scarlet of the firetruck, as they drape a sheet over him.

I chuckle, but don’t smile, don’t really move—I chuckle without opening my mouth.

“Kace?” Detective Monroe asks quietly, putting a hand on my back. “Let’s get you away from—”

I point to the grate near one of the bodies. There’s a pink wrapper teetering on the edge.

“Look at that,” I whisper. He frowns, then looks at what I’m pointing at. “She littered, too.” We watch as the tiny plastic wrapper slips into the drain, completely out of sight. I feel like going there and swimming for it.

It’ll at least be something she left behind that wasn’t pointless death.

“Sir?” a man asks, dressed in a deep blue uniform. Monroe looks up at him. “Borough President Lucy—”

Monroe stands. “Don’t tell me she fucking…” He glances at me, then mutters, “She called them in?”

“Not yet,” the man says, knowing that, even if they turned their backs on me, I could still very clearly hear them. “But she’s trying to get at least a few of them down. Some junior B-Listers from the Paragons. Media stuff.”

“New drafts from Alderman?” Morgan asks him.

“Green enough to get a cow fat.”

“Fuck me,” Morgan sighs, massaging the back of his neck. “That’s the morning’s problems. I need to know as much as I can about this place before lunch hour tomorrow. Get eye witnesses, security feeds, anything you can before the camera crews start sniffing around this place. Get it all onto my desk and as hush as possible. We don’t need to panic, and we’ll see what Guardian’s got to say. If you can, stall for time so the B-Listers don’t get here”

The man nods, looks at me, offering half a smile, and goes to relay the information to the rest of the force.

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“They’ll ask questions, you know,” I mutter. Morgan looks at me, pausing just before he can light his cigarette. I look at him and shed the blanket, letting the chill winds rub against my skin. “Why I survived, what I am, and why the fuck some kid got away in an explosion that should have killed her. The chief helps, but he—”

“Can’t keep a secret that big, I know,” Morgan mutters. “I’ll go through what we find, and make sure you’re a witness that was just close enough to the explosion to see what happened. We’ll wipe the feeds and send it over to the boys in spandex, ‘cause Heaven forbid your dad finds someone framing you. You said something about a ‘she?’ I’ll need to ask you questions, but you’re also not in good shape right now, kid. I’ll get your parents here.”

“I’m fine.”

“Kacey,” he says, cutting me off. “Just…I know what you just saw—”

“I just held someone who melted in my fucking arms, and I can sit here and watch their freaking body get scooped and scraped off the pavement right now! So I’m fine, they’re not,” I say, maybe too loud, maybe with more than enough anger and heat in my voice to make several people glance at me. I lower my voice, try to calm myself the same way mom always told me to: count to ten, then back down again, and keep your feet on the ground so that I don’t start doing things that will get me in trouble. When my heart slows, I open my eyes again and continue. “I don’t want a speech right now. I want to help you. I can’t just go home right now and shower and study for a test!”

“Kid,” he says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Your parents made it very clear about what you can and cannot do. When you’re alone, you’re my responsibility, and my responsibility right now is to make sure that you look clean, and you look good, and that you can get home and make sure that your parents see you’re okay, too. We’re going to sort this out, and you’re going to help me, sure, but I also need you as far away as possible from here and soon. You can get an absence tomorrow from school, and you’ll write me a report of what happened, okay?”

I fling my arm out to my side, to the blood-doused sheets and the exhausted paramedics. “And them?”

“Kacey,” he quietly snaps. I pause, still breathing hard, my brows still furrowed. “How will this look if someone finds out that you were here, huh?” He lowers his voice even more. “Guardian and Flare’s kid caught around an explosion downtown? What’s that going to look like on the news tomorrow if some reporter finds out who you are? Kids don’t just survive explosions like this. There’s bound to be someone who saw you taking the bodies out of the store, so we need you away from here before anyone starts wondering if you did this, alright?”

That makes me pause, even if it’s just for a moment. I’m forced to swallow my tongue, because speak of the devil, and my greatest enemies yet start rolling in like a hive of flies to a pile of steaming, smoking shit. I watch as news vans scurry as close as they can around the barrier the police put up around the block to keep civilians away and Supes who think they can snap a faux picture of themselves being heroic. But it’s not the major channels I’m worried about, but the twenty-something blonde woman who pops into existence past the police barrier, her phone already out and, I’m guessing, her livestream already going. A sensationalist. The sensationalist. Alice Whitman.

Monroe and I sigh under our breaths as she begins speaking.

“I’m here downtown, everyone, and it really is true,” she says, spinning her phone around so that she’s also included in the video she’s taking of the charred store and the paramedics now finished with the bodies. A police officer shouts at her, but when they go to grab her, she simply pops up behind him. “A massive explosion just happened on 7th, but I’m not seeing anything really supervillain-y lying around, and you know the Protectorate would have been here ASAP if there was, so between me and you, the police are probably going to talk it down to being a gas leak or something, anything to make the superheroes look like a million bucks, am I right? I mean, what kind of superhero wouldn’t know how to save people from an explosion!” She raises her voice, and I can’t help but let my hands curl into tighter fists. “The kind of hero we need to get back to putting in dog collars, that’s who!”

Dog collars, or what they used to put on us if we ever misbehaved. A quick jolt to the system and now your powers aren’t working, and now you’ve got to be a good boy in public, OK? Now we have to carry around a special ID card that says, Hi! I’m a divergent person, pleased to meet you! Along with our Category and ability. Not any better, I guess, but I was too young to ever have to get one fitted around my neck. Weird that a Supe is saying it?

Oh, you don’t even know half of what Alice is capable of yet.

“I bet I can fit her inside that fanny pack she’s got around her chest if you give me ten minutes.”

He grunts, and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Get home, get clean, and tell your parents.”

I ignore Alice, even though she’s digging a pit in my stomach the more she talks, and the more she plays a game with the police trying to grab her. The paramedics are working overtime trying to make sure she doesn’t get a view of the bodies or the sheets, but there’s too much blood, too much sizzling gore lying around to not hide.

Saint’s Borough is meant to be perfect. This tiny jewel in a very big city that keeps on shining.

Now there are people’s burning guts still too hot to scrape off the pavement for everyone to see.

And you stood there and watched it happen, Kacey.

Morgan shakes me again. I blink and look at him. He frowns, tilting the cigarette down. “We’ll get you to talk to Suzie about what you saw. She’s not licensed, but she’s good with some of the guys. Knows what to say.”

I swallow the lump in my throat, and force myself to speak past it. “Can I at least tell Sally?”

He must not have thought about it, because he pauses, slides the cigarette along one corner of his mouth to the next, then lets his shoulders rest from the rigidness they’re always on. He curses again, and I wonder how many cigarettes and cups of coffee are going to get ingested in the next week. “No,” he says, then firmer: “No, the kid—”

“I’ll see her tomorrow before class,” I mutter. More people are on their way, and Alice just turned the camera to us, meaning it’s time to get out of here. “Just let me do this. Please? God, Morg, I didn’t even see it—”

“Not tonight,” he whispers. tossing his cigarette to the ground. “Get home first. She’s coming.”

“Hey, blonde girl,” Alice says, and I barely give her a glance as her too bright phone flashlight beams right into my eyes—so bright you’d think she was trying to carve her way into my mind and see what kept playing over and over in my thoughts. “I’m Alice Whitman, and everyone’s wondering the same thing about you right now.”

Morgan puts his hand between my face and her phone before it’s my fist getting between her brain and her mouth. “We’ve done this charade before, Alice. Don’t need you getting arrested again because you’re being a pain.”

She pops up behind me, so now we’re all in her livestream. “I heard a little rumor, wanna hear it?” she asks. I don’t get to respond, because she grabs me by the shoulder, even if I’m sooty and filthy, and I look ghastly on her screen, like the living picture of something right out of the war. Then she grins and says, “Is it true you’re All-Star?”

Every other blonde girl gets asked this eventually, but the difference is that I’m here right now, not in school or at the skate park or on stage playing lead when someone in the crowd barks out the drunken question.

Even if I am, what else are you gonna say to me? That I fucked up? That I should be in prison?

I don’t feel very super right now, anyway. The live chat is saying exactly the same thing.

All I feel is the gristly meat underneath my nails, and the blood still on my face that’s starting to itch..

“As if,” I say. “She wouldn’t have let so many people die. Besides, I just watched it all happen.”

I’m just a bystander.