Just a few minutes ago, AEGIS had argued that this wasn’t an Exhuman event. Maybe she actually believed that, maybe there was some very specific textbook definition of Exhuman event she was leveraging and trying to get by on a technicality. It was true that the chase through the desert was unconventional; not many events were mobile, and I wasn’t sure I’d heard of any that took the form of a car chase. Usually it was running down some fleeing Exhuman, or one with extensive mobility or flight in their powerset.

But as we drew nearer to Lia’s place, nobody could argue this wasn’t an Exhuman event anymore. The damage to the city, the bodies, the stink of blood and burning in the air, it reminded me of every event I’d ever fought back. The terrapath who left impaled corpses hanging in the streets. The thousands subsumed by the animated headstone of Eryendria. The barrier girl in New York who’d arranged her kills in mutilated piles.

Tem was, at once, both more and less thorough. Buildings were, for the most part, untouched…except for the large holes burned right through them. Bodies weren’t desecrated or mutilated or moved, just transfixed with blasts of such heat and intensity they were melted to the concrete and charred to blackness. It was less something exploding in your microwave, more glints of razor blades stirred into a pot of mac & cheese. Precise. Deadly. Subtle, until you saw one in your spoon.

And as we got closer to home, the landscape shifted until it was more like glints of mac & cheese in a pot of razor blades.

XPCA were still everywhere, here. Dead, of course, but alive as well, rotating to new positions in sprinting single-file lines, recon units shouting and gesturing over projections of maps, squads of shadow ops, lurking and ready. There were dozens of vehicles, in a matching state of destruction and variety, some with a hole blown straight through them, a tremendous circle of nothing, front-to-back.

I’d always known Tem’s powers were freakishly strong, but I’d never considered if she absolutely cut loose that the damage could be like this. It was a war zone, there was no other way of putting it. The ruins of houses, everything desaturated with a coating of grey ash, the fire and death everywhere and the distant sounds of a battle still raging.

I saw hazy purple beams again, Skyweb firing, the lasers falling silently from space, slicing and re-slicing the same area again and again. They were so broad and so fast, they didn’t seem to shoot from anywhere, they just…appeared, and held for a fraction of a second before flickering away. A great big line of purple in the sky, just long enough that if you blinked, it’d vanish like a trick of the eyes.

We pulled in even further, driving past XPCA who emerged to tell us to stop, yelling and shaking their heads at us as we passed some threshold.

The nature of that threshold became obvious as we got within a block of the house. With the sound of tearing metal and burning air, everything was suddenly white.

The whole center of the van became a channel of pure energy, the front of it taking the brunt of the hit, and with it, our driver, instantly boiled away to nothing.

The rest of us had our feet and faces a foot away from the beam, the heat pouring off of it like sticking my face over lava. It felt like I had to close my eyes and turn my head to keep the white from burning through my eyeballs and into my skull. If someone screamed, I couldn’t hear them over the sudden rush of air that came with disintegrating air.

And then, in less than a heartbeat, it was over. The van rolled forward without a front half, the floor and back door melted and charred, Karu and Saga sitting opposite us, still intact, Karu’s legs drawn up close to her body and her face pale, Saga grinning like a maniac.

“Is everyone okay?” I shouted, unbuckling.

“I feel as though my face is on fire,” Karu said. “Any exposed skin is burned. But it is superficial.”

“That was a hell of a thing,” Saga cheered. “Think we can get her to do it again after I grab some marshmallows?”

“We need to let her know it’s us without dying,” AEGIS said, staring at the melted floor with wide eyes. “Even I couldn’t take one of those shots.”

Karu was already in motion before the rest of us even got out of our seats, shooting out of the destroyed van and into the air on blue-tipped wings. Immediately, she twisted and dove, and where she’d been only moments before, lasers tore the air. I swore as the rest of us escaped the van, rushing to behind the nearest house to put it between us and instant laser death.

Not that the house would do anything to protect us, but it might keep us concealed.

Another team was using Karu for a distraction as well. A line of XPCA exosuits moving from building to building, exactly like we were doing, but opposite us on the road, running quiet and fast. Not the standard soldier exosuits, something more elegant, with inertial dampeners to quiet their footfalls, and engineered to run without the screeching and hissing of a normal exosuit.

I thought they might be trouble, and that we might have to break off and put them down before they got in range of Tem, but before I could even really fully process that thought, a darker purple beam tore out horizontally, cutting through two of their line and forcing the others to the ground, punching through their cover like tissue paper.

I was stunned for a moment. The color of the laser hadn’t been Tem’s white. Was Skyweb shooting at them…from the ground somehow? That made no sense at all, but honestly I didn’t know the full extent of Tem’s powers. It was possible she was capturing or redirecting Skyweb? But if she were doing that, why were they still shooting it at her?

I didn’t really have time to stop and think about it. Whatever it was, it fired again with unerring precision, vaporizing two more in the squad, leaving the rest to scatter in retreat. Even while they were being eradicated, Karu was still diving and dodging, getting closer to the source as she flit about erratically, beams of white shooting faster and closer, firing upwards in all directions at her in an insane light show.

I took off, running forward another house. This was all insane, we were all just subject to some divine whim whether we’d live or die, whether Tem took notice of us or not. The four still-smoking bodies across the street seemed a perfect reminder of what could happen to us in less than the blink of an eye.

Well, wait, I realized. I had a shield, and I’d been hit by Tem before. I might not be in danger here, but the others sure were. I needed to draw Tem’s attention to myself and away from Karu before she got fried for nothing.

“Stay here,” I told AEGIS and Saga, and left the shade of the building to stroll down the street. From every corner, I realized, XPCA were watching our movements. Some were trying to use us to advance like the last unfortunate squad, others were just dumbfounded by a civilian walking down the middle of the street in hell.

“Karu!” I yelled at her, with no response of course. She was full-boring her engines as someone fired death lasers through the air at her. Not for the first time today, I wished we’d brought comms, although we’d originally opted out of any form of communication which might have tipped Dragon off, it was sure an irritation at this point.

I looked around for any way to signal her as I continued running forward, and then a beam caught me straight on in the face.

It was like a tidal wave of heat and white, and if I ever wanted to know exactly the shape, size, or limit of my shield, I now knew who to ask. It was a perfectly spherical bubble around me that the laser washed over, blinding and burning me, but not charring my flesh off the bone, so that was a plus. I had to close my eyes and focus on the ground under my feet, the only thing I could see which wasn’t just burning white even through my eyelids. And so I wasn’t watching when I heard my shield unleash a retort with an echoing ba-boom of deafening thunder.

The laser stopped instantly, and I swore and swore and swore again. Fucking stupid idiot, what was I thinking, letting my shield take the laser hit? It didn’t matter that I was safe, my shield had a fucking mind of its own, it was a hundred times more dangerous than I was. If it had gone and hit Tem…

I ran forward, and all around me, the XPCA ran forward as well. With their exosuits and the loping strides of the recon, I wouldn’t beat them there, they’d be on Tem’s fried body before I ever got to her.

I swore one last time and prepared some handfuls of lightning to slow them down. I got two full volleys off on the leading XPCA before they even knew I was attacking, and then as another group turned and slammed into cover, readying their arms in my direction, they suddenly disappeared, erased by another of the darker purple beams.

These two events were enough to halt the rest of the XPCA advance, but also enough to get them to shoot me. My shield began strobing again as gunfire pounded it, but more concerning, this wasn’t your standard stall-and-wait XPCA grunt force. These were the killers, Tem’s window was known to be closed.

Attacks I didn’t even know existed were flying at me from all sides, and while I did what I could to chop grenades and bombs out of the air, they seemed the least of my worries.

Something was pulsing and making my head feel like it was going to explode. My bones were vibrating inside my skin, my teeth in my skull. I felt like I was falling apart, and I didn’t even know what was hitting me.

I was stumbling, running back for cover now. It was stupid to be in the open, stupid to have outed myself and attacked the XPCA, stupid to try to draw Tem’s fire. Everything I’d done was stupid, and still I was four houses away.

And then I went to take a stride and just fell. My leg wasn’t there anymore. As I pitched forward, my bones still shaking, my head still aching, I fell in slow-motion, seeing my leg left behind, a perfectly clean cut by some weapon I couldn’t comprehend severing it just above the knee.

In front of me, in the house I was running to for cover, there was an XPCA standing in the shadows, the crossbow-looking thing in his arms now aimed at my other leg. He raised it to his shoulder to unload again.

And then his brains splattered through his cracking helmet against the wall which crumbled into an explosion of stucco as AEGIS kicked him with a leaping strike from an entire front yard over. She ran forward, impossibly fast, and caught me in hands that burned at the touch, apologizing with a frown as she threw me bodily into cover, before a series of blasts slammed into her from another assailant.

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Karu had opened up from the sky, micro-missiles pouring off of her like steam, arcing through the air and slamming into every piece of cover we weren’t in. The violet beam from our house fired again and again and again, turning multiple XPCA into slag with each shot.

And I just looked down at my leg where it bled onto the grey, ash-coated grass. A perfectly clean cut, like someone had taken an infinitely-honed wire and just slipped it right through me. My body didn’t even seem to recognize that it was gone, and I was disgusted to see just how much it looked like raw meat when cut so cleanly.

Saga stumbled into me, took one look down, and then shrugged out of her one-armed, bloodstained sweater to the blank tee underneath. She jammed the sweater into my wound, but if it did anything to stop the bleeding, I couldn’t tell.

I could tell it did a lot for the pain, though. My body figured out all at once what had happened, and I found myself on the ground, several seconds in the future as the first wave of it knocked me right out.

In those several seconds, AEGIS had taken over for Saga, her skin missing in several places and scorched in others, but her touch was both much stronger and much less painful than Saga’s. For the second time in my life, she was cinching an improvised bandage on my freshly-amputated leg as a tourniquet, her face creased in focus, her hands smattered in blood up to the elbow.

“Get them to stop shooting us,” she growled at Saga. “Where the fuck is Karu? I can’t believe how fast this all went to shit.”

“I can’t…can’t…” stammered Saga. “That thing, it’s like it’s in my head. And something else is making my bones break every few seconds. I can’t do more than force people to fall asleep, if I can find them.”

“Then find them,” AEGIS shouted. “Athan’s going to die if they hit him with any more of those bullshit exotics. You find whoever’s got the really dangerous stuff and you turn their mind off if you have to.”

“I’m trying!” Saga whimpered back, before a bullet caught her in the back of the head and she collapsed next to me. AEGIS let out a hugely inconvenienced sigh as she waited for the girl to get back up. She looked down at us both, and then with a defeated shrug of her shoulders, went digging in the pouch at the small of her back.

What she pulled out of it was a hypo, and she read it closely before popping the cap and jamming it into my leg above the injury.

It took…maybe moments before I felt like my leg was fine again. I propped myself up, disbelieving, to look down and see what drugs could make a whole leg suddenly reappear in an instant.

There wasn’t any new leg. Just a bloody sweater wrapped around my stump. I blinked in confusion.

“That,” AEGIS explained, pulling me upright over her shoulder heavily, “was a painkiller, and not just any painkiller. It completely disrupts pain signals across the body. Extremely illegal. Incredibly dangerous. Not something I ever wanted to have, or to use.”

I felt like I could stand up fine, but my leg just…wasn’t there, despite everything feeling absolutely normal. I found it unnerving to have to lean against AEGIS, but the fact was…there was no leg. My brain knew it, my body didn’t. But my body was the one that typically handled all the walking, and I almost face-planted trying to step away from her just by habit.

“The fuck are they even shooting us with?” AEGIS asked. “I haven’t heard of or seen half of these weapons.”

“This is what it looks like when they’re legitimately trying to kill an Exhuman,” Saga said, holding her head. “When they’re done playing around, when it’s not just guard duty or making a show of force. Small teams, big guns.”

Something crystalline and floaty came towards us, thrumming with energy as it pulsed its way through the air. Almost like my ball lightning, but blue and apparently made of equal parts plasma and glass shards from the look of it. I took a few hopping steps backwards before AEGIS took me under my shoulder and was the legs I didn’t have.

“What the fuck is that?” I asked, watching it glide closer. It wasn’t fast, but it wasn’t exactly slow either. As we rounded the building and headed for the next closest, my question was half-answered — I still had no idea what it was, but I discovered what it did, and by extension, what it was for.

It just floated right through the house like it was nothing. There was a noise like a faint scraping as the crystals touched the wall, and then when it left, there was a perfectly spherical hole. I slashed at it with my swords, doing nothing at all.

“Magnet it, Athan,” AEGIS said, pulling us further steps away. Either she was reluctant to engage her strength for the sake of our injuries, or to keep a modicum of stealth, or she was hurt worse than it looked, because we weren’t moving very fast at all.

I worked on winding up my magnet as best I could, but the head-pounding intensified, seemingly in proportion to how hard I tried to focus. It felt like every time I was making progress, my head suddenly screamed in my own ears, and my efforts began slipping away, the delicate magnetic fields I was winding collapsing back into neural charges.

It got closer. It hummed ominously. I threw lightning at it with no effect, slashed at it, hopped away a little bit faster.

Suddenly Saga was there, diving for it like she was making an endzone catch. Where her arms entered the crystalline sphere, they just…vaporized into red mist. Her eyes went wide as she looked down at her stumps.

“Don’t touch it,” she informed me, before falling down on her ass and trembling for the few seconds it took for them to regrow. “Holy bitch that hurts. It’s like being torn apart by sandpaper.”

“I can’t do anything to it,” AEGIS said, her voice slightly synthetic-sounding in her panic. “Athan you really need to magnet it away.”

“I’m…trying!” I said. “I can’t focus!”

“It’s this neural dampener they’re broadcasting somehow,” Saga complained. “It’s screwing with my focus, too. I don’t know how the rest of the XPCA are unaffected but whatever they have, we need.”

I looked around and couldn’t find a single XPCA near us. Not nearer than the crystal shredding orb, anyway. They’d all gone to take better positions near the house, unloading whatever fire they could in between blasts of the violet laser.

“It’s getting closer, Athan,” AEGIS warned.

I could see that. I could smell that, it had the same tang as Karu’s jets, definitely using plasma propulsion to keep floating after us all ominous-like. I gave a desperate last prod at my magnet and forced power through it even if it was shit.

It barely tugged at the orb, diverting its course no more than a few inches. It kept coming, silent and deadly.

“Um, then run faster?” I told AEGIS.

“I don’t know about you but I just ate two rockets to the face,” she sniped back. “I am…loaded with shrapnel right now, and it’s a fucking miracle I’m on two feet.”

We were only three houses away now. I could make out details on the ruins of Lia’s place. Half the walls were gone, the garage and her bedroom and the bath were the only rooms which were still rooms. The living room was just open air now, rubble piled high around the furniture, and on the couch there, laying motionless, I saw Moon, one arm hanging off the edge, bruises and blood stains visible from here on the white sweatshirt she’d picked for today.

Saga came after the orb with a stick of all damn things, and after swinging right through it, had half a stick, looking at the end of it with frustration and disgust. “What the fuck am I supposed to do about this thing?” She picked up a rock and a chunk of cement and chucked them, and they also seemed to vanish with a grey cloud of smoke and no apparent impact.

A bullet, a big one, slammed into my shield and detonated into grit, with AEGIS taking the brunt of it. She swore and stumbled, and I realized looking down that I’d been hit too, angry red lines across my body I could see but not feel. At the echoing gunshot, Karu seemed to jolt straight into the air, retreating from her dance with the white lasers and instead shooting off in the direction of the shooter.

Which, one one level, I appreciated, but on the other hand, this fucking orb thing was just going to kill us. What an incredibly shitty way to go, considering if I could even jog slowly, I’d outpace it.

It was only ten feet away now, and Saga was just picking up every single thing in our path like a puppy on a walk and chucking them into the orb. Handfuls of grass, a light sconce, bits of fencing, a broken piece of rebar, snapped-off parts of dead people. Nothing even made it slow down.

Two and a half houses away, and only six feet on the orb. Weapon fire was more intense up here, the closer we got to the house, the more things seemed poised to kill us. Again and again, AEGIS and I had to turn and throw ourselves, or hack ordinance out of the air to avoid having even more of me blown off, or render her even more broken. And when we couldn’t, she’d grab me, toss me like a ragdoll, and bear the brunt of a hit herself, staggering and reeling, just to turn around and pick me up again.

Saga got in on it too, throwing herself into attacks where she could, apparently pissed and frustrated that she had nothing to contribute here but her immortality. Though I suspected there were plenty that she was disabling or distracting in some way, it wasn’t enough for her, or for us.

Two houses and four feet to the orb. And then one and a half and two. In the rare moments that it was quiet, I could hear it, humming and thrumming, plasma flooding out of it in a small, constant rush instead of a roar like Karu’s jets. Karu, whom we had not seen since she darted after the sniper. But we hadn’t been sniped either, so…it was difficult to tell how good that was for us.

But the simple fact was, we were out of time. Even without the constant attacks and distractions, even if Tem stopped throwing lasers in our direction without apparent concern for what she hit, the fact was, we were too slow and the distance was too great. This fucking orb was going to catch me, touch me, and erase me, and that would be the great anticlimactic end of this chase. From the next state over, hundreds of miles, thousands of casualties, and billions of dollars of destruction, for it to all end with me hop-limping away, while Saga tried to beat it back with a fallen For Lease sign.

It was just pathetic. Lia deserved better.

AEGIS stumbled again, and this time she went down. I went down with her, and we hit the sidewalk together, rolling as one to see the death orb still advancing, Saga crying and screaming as she beat on it with fists that evaporated into a bloody spray.

“I’m sorry guys,” she said.

“I’m sorry too,” AEGIS added, turning to me. “I’m so disappointed in myself.”

“You guys shouldn’t be,” I told them. “This was all my fault. I’m the one who should be sorry.”

For a moment we all just looked at each other and smiled, almost laughed, as the orb closed the distance. A foot away. Half a foot. Inches.

And then the world was a hazy purple. I could still see the house through it, could see Saga, only for an instant before she disappeared like smoke. The orb just…burned away as well.

I looked up and saw the outline of my shield, a perfect sphere, the purple washing around it just like it had protected me from Tem’s laser before. But before the shield could get too angry and strike back, the beam ended. The world looked yellow in the violet’s absence, and I had to blink like crazy to feel like I could see anything again.

Saga popped out of nothingness where the orb had been and frowned. “Ow,” she said. “But at the same time, yay, you’re not dead anymore.”

“What…was that?” I asked. “I’ve been wondering about the purple lasers this whole time. It’s not Skyweb, is it?”

“Over there,” Saga said, pointing. AEGIS staggered to her feet and pulled me up, and we picked up on limping towards our goal, towards where Saga was pointing.

Through the holes in the half-destroyed garage, I saw what Saga mentoned, and as we rounded the last house in the way, she came into view.

A barely-human shape made of churning black smoke, hunkered and hunchbacked, two pinpricks of pure white for eyes, snapping in every direction like a predator jealously protecting its kill. Without gesturing or speaking, beams formed around the garage, the hazy smoke of Tem turning light into energy, and shot off every few moments like her gaze had a destructive wake.

She was boiling, seething darkness, hate and anger as I’d never known, I could feel through Saga, even with her powers diluted. But everything about her from her stance to the booming roar of her powers firing constantly to the entire scene of destruction around her spoke of how she felt. I didn’t need Saga here to feel my heart breaking at the hunched-over little girl lost in that darkness somewhere.

And standing on top of it, a purple shadow, the same color as the lasers which had been carefully aimed at our pursuers, sporting a strange set of goggles and gear which looked completely out of place on her monochrome violet, half-lost in the cloud of black below her. an effigy.

It was Moon. Her shadow gave us a wave from her copy of Tem’s body, and then turned and blasted yet another beam through the ever-advancing XPCA.

“I guess that’s our savior,” I said. “The people we came to save.”

AEGIS nodded. “But now who’s going to save us?”

“We are,” I said. “Now that we’re together, we’ll be fine.”

“Athan, I love the optimism but…” she looked down at my leg. At her body. At Karu flitting in the distance and Saga, who was still ineffectually throwing random shit at the erased orb in vengeance. “We’re a mess.”

“It’s fine,” I told her, knowing that at least part of my current confidence was just drug-induced. Not that it mattered. I had the words I knew she wanted to hear, more than anything.

“I’ve got a plan.”