“Agh!” was all I had time to yell in surprise before a sound like someone forcefully spitting issued from the gun and there was a bright, focused pain in my neck.

I fell backwards and the back of my head hit the floor, making me black out just for a split second. When I opened my eyes coloured shapes danced in my vision, but I shook them away and our grey ceiling reappeared. My hand reached for my neck and with another tiny prick of pain pulled out something that had stuck into it. A slim little dart with a yellow feather flowing out of it. The tip was metal, but it had buckled up on itself—just like the knife I had experimented with a few weeks ago.

“Backup!” said an angry male voice in front of me. “Backup, requesting backup! Subject is still live, repeat, still live! Tranq did not have predicted effect!”

My survival instinct kicked in. I scrambled around on to my front and stumbled up, then pelted back down the corridor. The man had been dressed all in black, wearing a black balaclava to cover his face. I didn’t think about who he was or who might have sent him; I just knew he was attacking me and that I needed to get away.

I crashed into the kitchen, bumping into the table with my thigh and sending it screeching into the wall. Behind me I heard another voice speaking out of a radio, but I couldn’t make out all the words. “—immobilise—fail—kill—” My pulse accelerated to top speed.

I made it to my front door, opened it.

Behind was another black balaclava-clad man, pointing another silenced rifle barrel at me.

For the first time, I was shot with a bullet.

The man shot me in the arm. It was like being stung by a wasp or being hit by a paintball pellet. A little tear opened up in the upper arm of my shirt. The bullet made a metallic clang as it bounced on the floor. I took a couple of steps backwards, as much from shock as anything else, and clasped my arm. It had hit me, maybe punctured the very top layer of my skin, but rebounded off.

The eyes of the man in front of me stretched into two big white circles as they darted down to the bullet and then back to me. Before he had a chance to do anything else, I recovered my wits, grabbed hold of the front door and slammed it shut in his face. A muffled crunch and a cry behind made it sound like I broke his nose. The door shook on its hinges and some dust fell on me from the ceiling, but thankfully I had not used enough force to break that. I slid the door’s deadbolt across and turned the key in the lock to make it harder for him to get in.

My heart thundered between my ears. The men had been wearing clothes cut like army uniforms, except they were all black, and armless vests which I guessed must be Kevlar. I turned as another yellow-feathered dart thudded into the wooden frame of the door on my side at eye level. I was trapped. Someone, maybe more than one person, was outside my front door; someone was inside my apartment, shooting at me. They had shot me! They had actually shot me in my own apartment!

“Argggghhh!” The noise just ripped out of my mouth as I flung myself across the kitchen at the rifle-wielding man who now stood on the other side of it.

He managed to get off two more darts at me before I reached him, both of them zipping into my chest. Again I blacked out, just for a second, as I dashed towards him.

I tripped over my own feet and fell headlong into the man, bashing him in the chest with my head. He cried out. We went sprawling onto the floor in the corridor beyond the kitchen, he on his back, me on my front.

I managed to push myself back onto my feet before he did. That acidic taste was in my mouth again. The man reached for his gun a little way away which had fallen out of his grip when I headbutted him but I got to it first and stamped on it. Debris flew around the corridor.

He sat up, pulling a knife from somewhere, and quick as flash drew it across my leg, but it only glanced off.

I took aim and punched him hard in the jaw.

He smashed into the wall, making a crack in it, then fell backwards again and slumped on the floor. This time his eyes stayed shut. I bent over him and yanked his balaclava off with one hand. He was just a regular white guy, clean shaven, with a short haircut and a tattoo of a snake wrapped around a sword on his lower neck. I’d broken his jaw right out of joint.

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BAM! came a tremendous sound from the kitchen.

BAM! came the noise again, reverberating around the apartment. The walls wobbled.

The front door! They were trying to break through the front door!

Who were these people? Were they the government, come to detain me for using my powers without their permission? Were they the special forces, come to assassinate me? Or were they another group entirely?

BAM!

There wasn’t time to work it out. I was under threat. These people were either trying to kill me or incapacitate me. And where was Mom? Had they already got to her? I had to act fast.

BAM!

I turned back towards my bedroom, then changed my mind and turned back around. I couldn’t go out my bedroom window. They were probably watching the windows.

BAM!

I was cornered. I was going to have to fight my way out. I ran back into the kitchen.

BAM! CRASSSSH!

At the same moment that I arrived in the kitchen the front door came off its hinges and fell onto the tiled floor. In poured three more figures with rifles, taking aim.

I took another bullet in the chest, one in the forehead, one more in the arm. They ricocheted off of me and clattered around the kitchen.

“BASTARDS!” I yelled, full of fury, hot hatred spewing from my mouth. “STOP TRYING TO KILL ME!”

I reached one of them and snatched away his gun, then smacked him in the chin with it, sending him heels-over-head onto the kitchen table, which collapsed underneath him with a splintering crack.

I took two more bullets in the chest as I shouted again and rushed the next man, tackling him into the third standing just behind him. The three of us ended up in a heap on top of the fallen front door.

I looked up. Outside the door, in the entry corridor were three more people, all with guns. Another round of silenced shots went into me, three more stings registering on my chest, but I stayed standing.

The lights went on in the corridor all of a sudden. I could hear voices from the floors above, from Mr Mashida in the apartment next door. A loud, piercing ringing began—our apartment’s fire alarm. The men outside looked at each other as if unsure of what to do next.

Letting my body act for itself, I snatched up the guns of the two men I had tackled to the ground and threw them, one after the other, like a pair of frisbees at the men outside. One bounced off the head of the first man, sending him to the ground immediately. The other whirled into the second man’s arm and then went off, miraculously shooting the third man in the leg, who also dropped to the floor, rolling around and clutching himself where he had been wounded.

Hey, I’m actually pretty good at this, I thought, emerging from the bubble of my rage just for a moment.

Keeping momentum, I hopped backwards off the door, slid my fingers underneath it and lifted it up, rolling the two groaning men lying on top of it back into the entry corridor like I was depositing dirty clothes down a garbage chute.

As I did so yet more men appeared in the corridor—I didn’t have time to count them. I shoved the door back into its place in the frame where it stayed upright again, at least for now. There were more spitting sounds and some bullet holes appeared in the door, but I didn’t even feel these ones hit me.

Too many of them! I thought. Can’t get out that way without being chased, what do I—I know!

I’d had an idea.

I raced back through the kitchen, back down the apartment corridor, to my bedroom door at the end and, in the wall next to it—the garbage chute!

Am I really going to do this?

It was chaos in my apartment block now. The fire alarm was still ringing, but even with it going I could hear screaming from above the ceiling, shouting from behind me. I heard the sound of the front door crashing over onto the floor again from the kitchen. I had to decide now. Hopefully whoever it was that was attacking me didn’t know about the garbage chute of the apartment block.

I pulled down the metal handle of our opening to the garbage chute and it slid agape to reveal a black drop. My skinny fifteen-year-old frame was just small enough to fit inside. I dived in hands-first, the sound of more bullets snapping into the wall behind my feet as I fell.

In half a gasp I hit the cushioning of the garbage bags in the bin below. It stank. I was glad that some people had thrown their bags down recently that hadn’t been collected yet, so I was greeted by a soft landing—though I’m not sure what would have happened to the bin and the floor had they not been there.

“—can’t fit!” I heard someone shouting from above. “Find out where this goes, now!”

Go, Gonzalo, go!

It was dark in the basement laundry room; only the winking red lights of the four massive washing and drying machines against the far wall gave me illumination. But I knew it well enough to flop clumsily out of the bin, tipping it over, and stagger my way as fast as I could over to the stairs to the back exit. I took them three at a time then found myself in front of the double doors at the back of my block. There was no keypad for these—we all had a key.

I pulled my keys out of my pocket and fumbled with them for a moment. Where was that key?

No time!

I punched the door handles, smashing them and the lock apart, then shoved the doors open.

Nearby streetlamps and lights from the rooms of the erupting building behind me lit the concrete courtyard. It was empty.

I charged across it and leapt onto the steel mesh fence that marked its border, scaling it in a matter of seconds.

I landed on the ground on the other side of the fence on my shoulder and rolled, not that the impact hurt at all—in fact I left a round dent in the asphalt.

I was in a side alley. There was no one else here, no balaclava-clad men and no silenced rifles. My chest rose and fell rapidly with my ragged breath.

Where now?