Nobody survives a flying car crash.

That was the first thing I learned in my first two weeks as a superhero. We were called to a lot of crash scenes for crowd control. Denise used her vines to seal off the area around a wrecked or burning vehicle, while I tried, and failed, to rescue the people inside.

The first time I tried it, reaching in to rip doors off a burning car with my warded hands, I didn’t even realize what I was looking at. I was ready to levitate them out and heal them right there in the road, but what I saw when I opened the door…

Flying cars were too heavy for batteries, and big power crystals were insanely expensive, so modern vehicles were powered by hydrogen fuel pellets, tiny octagons made of aluminum and gallium that slowly released hydrogen when you got them wet. The hydrogen powered the fuel cells, and the fuel cells powered the grav panels that let the cars float, up to a weight limit of about two tons.

Grav panels were super simple and reliable, made from some kind of superconducting miracle substance that pushed against gravity when you ran a current through them.

The process of making them was so complicated, a lot of people thought they were magic, or maybe even alien technology stolen by HDI.

Flying cars had appeared all at once, a few years after corporations took over the government, a miracle gift from our new corporate overlords, promising to free the human race from the tyranny of national borders and turn us all into one big family, united under the banners of ten companies that had basically carved up the world between them.

The same technology that let the vehicles float made it cost effective to mine rare materials out of asteroids, so we had no shortage of grav panels, or the gallium required to make them work.

It should have been the beginning of a new golden age for mankind, but somehow, the golden age never got here. The corporate towers just kept getting higher, while the promises of Old America slowly faded away.

Hydrogen pellets were harmless as long as they stayed dry, but hydrogen gas is dangerous as hell, so when an active hydrogen fuel cell hits the ground from fifty feet up…

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The cars were supposed to have emergency crash fields that would create a kind of force bubble around the interior if it crashed, but once I started working accident scenes, I learned what those emergency bubbles were really for.

Sure, sometimes they could slow a car down enough to save your life, if you were falling slowly, or from the bottom lane, but their real job was to contain the hydrogen explosion, and keep any debris confined to the bubble. But that meant if the fuel cell did explode, the explosion would just incinerate anybody inside.

“I can’t believe they let these cars fly,” I complained to Denise. “They have this miracle antigravity stuff, and all this alien technology, and all they managed to do was reinvent the Hindenburg.”

“Just remember it used to be worse,” Denise said. “Boston used to lose like four hundred people a year to traffic accidents. Now we’re down to fifty. It just still looks like a lot to us here on the ground.”

No one survives a flying car crash, but I kept trying to pull people out, reaching out my hand to charred black things that weren’t really people anymore, trying to heal piles of ash.

You couldn’t make out details or facial features from anything that burned that hot, but you could kind of tell how big the victim was by how much ash they left behind. You could tell the women from the men by what kind of jewelry was left in the pile, and it was pretty obvious which ones had been children.

I handled the deaths of children way better than I expected, doing my job so efficiently I started to wonder if I was a sociopath again.

I instinctively turned off my emotions and just did what I had to do, and I didn’t really do anything unprofessional until I found the dog.

I identified the husband and the wife and the kid in the back, but when I saw a tiny white thing sitting in a pile of ash on the other side of the back seat, I realized it was an indestructible dog tag made from some kind of ceramic shit. The name on it said Luna.

Something about that, the innocence of a terrified animal, dying in a flash with no idea what was happening. I fucking lost it. Denise leaped forward and wrapped her arms around me as I surged, lighting up both of us in the middle of the night, our auras making weird, jagged patterns on the highway as the car burned behind us.

Denise stuffed me in the squad car and said, “Go home!” I didn’t want to leave her, but she repeated, “Go home!” and slammed the door.

I was full on sobbing, almost hysterical when I stumbled in my front door.

Lydia jumped down, held me close and said, “Tell me when you’re ready.”

My voice still broke a little as I tried to compose myself. “I just had a really shitty day, and I need you to do your job.”

Lydia washed me, fed me, took me to bed, and held me, until I had nothing left to cry.