Ida stared at the wall-mounted screen in her cell, her vision blurring a little with exhaustion. The image on the screen swam: a blend of dusty beiges and scorched blacks, a technicolor skeleton caught in mid-screech emblazoned across its middle. “I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  “Qiang, the Chinese demigod.” Liam’s voice buzzed over an intercom. He hadn’t dared to step foot in the room with her in a week. Some nameless pair of troops came in twice a day to change out her restraints and let her use the bathroom, but other than them, she hadn’t seen a human face in days.

  “That’s him? That’s a person? Christ, what did you do to him?”

  “Classified.”

  “I can’t help you if you don’t-”

  “Whatever happens to his flesh, his skin and muscle, he regrows, but his bones seem to be protected from any damage whatsoever. Nothing ever penetrates farther than his skeleton. Why is that?”

  Ida rolled her neck. Her hands were numb, half-asleep as they’d been for much of the last week. Her current set of restraints were a size too small, and they were chafing her shoulders, now, too. “Liam-”

  “Agent Hatcher.”

  “Fuck you. Liam. This doesn’t look like something you, or your troops, pulled off.”

  “Well it is.”

  “This looks like damage incurred in a fight with another Sensitive. The background, too, the bit I can see, looks like complete mayhem. Big chunks of the city destroyed. Either you guys are even more dogshit at damage control than I thought, or a fight broke out between two Demigods.”

  “No, sorry to pop your alarmist fantasy, but the situation surface-side is under control. This image was taken in North Carolina, during our ambush.”

  “The one from a week ago? And you’re only getting it to me now?”

  “I’m a busy man.”

  “Either way, I don’t know what this is. I’ve never seen someone’s skeleton before.”

  “Fine. How about this?”

  The image on the screen changed. Now it was a short animated loop: an empty, smoking patch of asphalt at first. Then, a small clump of mass began to accrete silently in the center of the frame, growing, swelling up. Ida watched as this clump began to shudder and morph, its features defining themselves: a sped-up mockery of the development of a fetus. Eyes, mouth, arms, legs, head swelling to full size, body lengthening in shuddering jumps. Judging by the lethargic path the flecks of falling debris and drifting sparks made across the screen, all of this change was happening in the space of seconds, maybe faster.

  Then, just as the fetus was beginning to open its eyes, it was pulled apart from all directions. Patches of flesh ripped away, as if by dozens of unseen, grasping hands. Much faster than it had appeared, the fetus was gone.

  And then, in a different part of the frame, another clump formed, and the process began again.

  “What’s this?” Ida breathed. She had a pit in her stomach now.

  “Another Demi. Took damage from conventional weapons, but the damage never stuck. Even when fully obliterated-”

  “This video is- It came from-”

  Ida caught herself. Best not to let Liam know what she’d realized.

  This video must’ve been taken just feet away from the image she’d seen before. She recognized a structure off in the background, a bridge she’d crossed nearly every day during her brief time in college.

  Both of these Demigods had been in Minneapolis, and something even stronger had been trying to kill them. Something invisible yet devastating. The footage played its loop again, and a memory nagged at Ida.

  Mom, plucking the spider from Ida’s bedroom ceiling, letting it scramble over her knuckles while she smirked down at the frightened girl.

  “This is what had you so worked up?”

  “It’s gross,” Ida said, her covers still pulled halfway up her face, a protective ward. “It’s got fangs.”

  “Those aren’t fangs, they’re, like, extra legs. It’s not a tarantula.” The spider hurdled over Mom’s fingers as she put one hand in front of the other to keep hold of it, a tumbling treadmill. “But even if it was, why are you so scared? It can’t hurt you.”

  “It could bite.”

  “Biting is just an animal directing kinetic energy through their teeth into your body. Baby, we had you catching 90-mile-an-hour fastballs at the batting cages all day yesterday. A little spider’s never gonna be able to get through to you.”

  “But what if it got me when I’m not paying attention?”

  “You don’t need to be paying attention for your Field to be. That’s what’s so great about them. And even if it did get you…” Mom trailed off. The spider had frozen in place, suspended a hair’s breadth above her hand. Ida watched Mom’s Field wrap around it, enclosing the bug like amber in the dinosaur movie they’d just watched together.

  “You’re the one with all the power, here. You need to remember that.” The spider began to shudder and jump. Chunks of its chitinous body began to tear away from its center, legs and palps and abdomen all shearing in every direction, as if pulled apart-

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  Pulled apart by dozens of invisible hands.

  Soon, the spider was little more than barely-perceptible dust. Mom wiped her hands together, fixed them on her hips, and smiled down at her.

  “Baby, remember. You’re in control. Nothing gets to hurt you unless you let it.”

  Liam was droning on still about the image, his voice pitching up at the end of his statement, a question. Ida was no longer listening.

  She was mourning. There were at least three Demigods in the city, and one of them had a Field large enough to tear two people apart at the same time. The odds of the government being able to handle the situation were now near enough to zero not to matter. An evacuation wouldn’t make a difference anymore. Anyone within thousands of miles was in danger of dying.

  Her daughter’s best chance, now, was for Ida to escape and go find her personally. This was assuming that the agents were bluffing about assassinating a young girl in cold blood.

  Ida felt that the odds of this were also extremely low.

  She allowed herself a few seconds to feel the loss, the grief. Gifted herself a few quick memories as a comfort: Bailey on her tiptoes, swinging a sparkler on the beach. The weight of her asleep on Ida’s chest. The first Christmas she’d been old enough to really anticipate, the lights reflected in her eyes upon seeing their tree in the morning.

  And then she turned that grief into a cold blue flame of anger, and turned that into fuel.

  “I’ve seen anything like that before,” Ida lied, indicating the fetus on the screen. “But I have a hunch. I’d be willing to bet you could kill her if, when she got to that point, you-”

  Ida strangled the sound of her voice before the soundwaves could leave her Field, garbled them, made them sound static. She wasn’t entirely sure how the effect played on the other side of an intercom, but she hoped it sounded believably technological, like a microphone fault.

  “What was that? I missed the last bit.”

  “All you have to-” she distorted the answer again.

  “One more time?”

  She responded with a string of unintelligible screeches and skips vaguely resembling a human voice. She waited to see if he’d buy it.

  “Fuck. One second.”

  Ida settled in, laid on the floor, as close to the door as she could manage in her restraints. A minute later, heralded by a beep and a hiss, the door slid open and Liam stepped in. He was wearing a thick pair of goggles that dominated his whole face, and a thick bulky vest under his shirt, some kind of armor. He glanced, tic-like, over his shoulder as he entered, hinting at the presence of some sort of armed guard outside.

  “Nice shades,” Ida intoned. She was exerting herself, now, hoping he wouldn’t notice the effort in her voice.

  “The method you mentioned,” he said. “For killing the-”

  “What do they do? Let you see Fields?”

  “Something like that. Our intercom broke, and I didn’t hear your-”

  “I don’t think they work.”

  A little noise of exasperation wormed its way out from behind Liam’s smirking mask. “What?”

  “I don’t think they work. The goggles.”

  “What makes you say that? I can see your little energy aura just fine.” He pointed at her, finger tracing an outline around her body.

  “I think you can see it in the air, but it doesn’t seem like you can see a Field if it’s hidden behind a solid object. Like, I don’t know, the ground.”

  Liam tilted his head, confused about her meaning for a fraction of a second. Then, too late, he looked down at his feet and jerked away, reaching for the door handle.

  Ida’s Field, compressed to its absolute thinnest and stretched under the floor like a reedy, grasping tentacle, poked up through Liam’s shoe and barely brushed the nerves in the sole of his foot.

  Immediately, Ida sucked the electricity from his nervous system into her Field and shot it back into his body, ten, twenty times in a second. The effect was as violent as it was instantaneous, and Liam seized, crashing to the ground.

  Ida managed to get a bit of his ankle bone into the range of her elongated Field, and as she released it from the almost painful distance she’d had it stretched, the tendril snapped back into place, dragging Liam’s thrashing body over to her.

  She palmed his skull as he flailed. He was foaming at the mouth.

  "I want out of here!" Ida yelled up at the intercom. "I demand to speak to Steiner. I demand to be let free. I'm going to get walked out of here, unharmed, or Agent Hatcher dies."

  Silence. She repeated the request again. Then again. Then, as she was about to repeat a third time, despite a growing kernel of doubt that anyone was listening, the door beeped and whooshed open again.

  A masked, armored soldier holding a large handgun stood several feet back from the doorway. A device strapped to his chest buzzed to life, and Agent Steiner's voice crackled out from it.

  "What's your plan here, Ms. Miller?"

  "Doing the hostage thing again. Been working for me so far."

  "You've killed your daughter. Do you know that?"

  "No you've killed her!" Ida roared. "You're responsible for all of this! I came here to help you jingoistic freaks. This is because you couldn't cooperate!"

  "The woman threatening to kill a federal agent is lecturing me about cooperation?"

  "My daughter's dead no matter what. If you don't kill her, the monsters you let gather in the city will." Ida was crying now. "So I figured I'd at least play the cards I had left."

  "I'm going to ask once, nicely. Please release Agent Hatcher."

  "Fuck you."

  "Please," Liam breathed. His eyes were open again, struggling to focus on Ida's face. "Don't- Don't do it."

  The soldier tilted his head incrementally, listening to some unheard order.

  "Well. Can't say I didn't ask."

  The soldier lifted his gun and took aim. Despite herself, through the tears choking her, Ida scoffed.

  "You can't be that stupid. You can't still think that anything you could shoot at me could possibly hurt-"

  The soldier fired once, and Agent Hatcher's head exploded.

  Ida froze in shock. Her ears rang, her Field not attuned against the sound. Arterial blood jetted onto her neck restraints in feeble bursts.

  "Agents can be replaced," Agent Steiner's voice graveled. "You, Ms. Miller, still have quite a lot to offer us."

  Then, without the soldier even motioning to collect his dead comrade's body, the door slammed closed again, leaving Ida alone.