Ali’s body skipped across several yards of dirt, and when his head finally hit a stone jutting from the ground the impact was enough to knock his vision away. He was blind for maybe five seconds as the back of his skull hissed and sputtered, un-fracturing. Soon he was blinking back up into the glare of the early morning sun, filtered around Marco’s impeccably tailored silhouette.

  “Your defenses are up in time,” Marco said, kneading the knuckles on his gently smoking fist. “I can see that you’re absorbing a good chunk of the energy. Heat AND kinetic, which is actually impressive as hell at your level. But you’re letting way too much bleed through.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t be if you’d explain how to keep that from happening,” Ali said, rising to his feet.

  “Nah, it’s really more of a learn-by-doing thing.” Marco slammed his fist into Ali’s torso again, splintering his ribs and sending the boy tumbling end-over-end across the deserted lot. They were just behind an old mill, and the earth was dusty here, kicking up big clouds of powdery effluvia where Ali hit the ground.

  Ali groaned, rose to his knees, his chest juddering as it healed. “I thought I got to hit you next.”

  “You want to hit someone, you gotta show initiative,” Marco explained. “Another, probably even more valuable lesson there, I think. Beating someone to the punch means getting punched less.”

  Ali grunted and threw himself at Marco. He reached for the energy that the two hits had deposited into his Field, the stores of power becoming easier and easier for him to notice, to reach for, as his “lessons” continued. Most of Marco’s training had involved him beating Ali senseless, more so he could ogle and stare at Ali’s wounds as they healed than to really teach him anything important, Ali suspected. But despite this, he could tell he was catching on, faster than Marco was anticipating.

  Ali shunted the fresh stores of energy into his fist, willed it to take a forceful, kinetic shape in the way Marco had taught him: focusing on imagery and sensation, the “feeling” of blunt impact, of explosive power, of raw force, exuded through his hand as the point of impact.

  His fist bounced off of Marco’s Field with a sound like a car backfiring, the blowback shattering most of the bones in Ali’s hand. Marco, for his part, was forced to take a half step backward and cough once.

  “Hey, there was some actual oomph behind that one. Any harder and you might’ve mussed up my shirt.” Marco grinned down at him, lupine and smug.

  “You’re being annoying on purpose.”

  “Duh, kid. Listen, your Field is an extension of you. You’re not gonna be able to muster up the muscle to do anything impressive unless you really want it.”

  “Yeah, sure. You’re being an asshole for educational purposes, not just because you are one.”

  “Eh, little of column A. My turn!” Marco leapt forward, blinking in that way Ali had yet to be able to follow with his eyes, and kicked him in the stomach.

  Ali rose several feet in the air and trailed in a lazy arc before thudding to the ground in another asthmatic cloud. He coughed out blood and dust as he rose unsteadily back to his feet. “I don’t wanna do this anymore. I’m calling it. I’m going home.”

  “We’re not even close to done today, kid.”

  “Too bad. I’m sick of this. You’ve been beating the shit out of me for three hours.” Ali started to turn around, to walk back in the direction he’d parked his mom’s van in, only to feel Marco’s vice grip around the nape of his neck.

  “Remember the deal we made, Ali. The consequences of breaking it. Think of your friends.”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  "Sorry to keep playing that card, but you need this as much as I do." Marco pointed in the direction of the plume of rusty smoke that had been haunting the horizon. "Because that? It's coming for you as well as me."

  That being the "terrorist event" that had occured just three miles from Ali's place two days ago. The official narrative had been scattershot and vague: something about a bomb, or a series of bombings by either a foreign national group or a white supremacist cell or (if you were watching the really shitty coverage) some sort of super-Antifa. Barely anyone seemed to believe it, even the anchors and pundits peddling the story themselves. Most had seen the footage by now, taken from dozens of angles by hundreds of smartphones and Ring doorbells and dashcams: the man in the suit of armor crashing through a wall, the man in the jumpsuit shot-putting cars, the woman hovering over the parking garage as it melted. Melted. The media could say what it wanted, and the police could put up their perimeter, but anyone willing to make the hike to the edge of the ruined city blocks could see the near-liquified slag of the building for themselves. Bombs just didn't do that.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  People were already filtering out of town. Jenny's brother had taken his girlfriend and fled to Michigan, Kendall's parents were talking about going up to Canada. Ben's family would already be gone, back to Atlanta, if he wasn't still in the hospital.

  Ali's mom had barely paid the news any notice, but that was just like her. Bombings, or the rapture, or an invasion by super-soldiers from China, or whatever had caused the commotion, these were things that happened to other people. Nothing to cancel a shift over. And his brother probably hadn't even heard about it in the first place; Ali doubted he'd emerged from his room in the basement at all in the last two days.

  "Yeah, you're doing this out of the goodness of your heart, man," Ali said, wiping blood from his lip. "It's not like you were choking out two girls last time I saw you."

  "Wouldn't have had to if you'd just played ball from the start." Marco shrugged, visibly completely unbothered. "Besides, they're fine. If I wanted you all dead you'd be dead."

  "You keep saying that." Ali could feel the residual kinetic energy from the last hit leaching out of his Field already, but he couldn't find it in himself to care. "That's gonna backfire, man. If you really do teach me how to be this super-badass you want me to be, what's gonna stop me from just killing you?"

  Marco barked a laugh. "You wouldn't."

  "You don't know me."

  "I am fantastic at knowing people, but even if I wasn't, I wouldn't be scared. Kid, you look like you're about to hurl every time you throw a punch. You're on the verge of tears constantly. I'd be more worried about my fucking childhood hamster revenge-killing me than you."

  "If I'm so harmless then what's all this for? You wanna beat someone up, do it to, I don't know, whoever just blew up the city."

  "See, that, that's what this is all for! Because the people who did that?" Marco jabbed another thumb at the looming smoke. "I could train and train and train for fifty years and have about as much chance as putting a scratch on one of them as my aforementioned hamster taking down Mike Tyson."

  "What, so I'm supposed to do it?" Ali shook his head. "What happened to me being so totally harmless?"

  "I didn't say harmless," Marco wagged his finger. "I just said you weren't the 'murderous grudge' type. You're far from fucking harmless. You're a prodigy."

  Ali sighed, aghast. "If I'm such a prodigy then why have you spent the last three hours kicking my shit in?"

  Marco barked a laugh. "If you gave me a year, no, two years after I had my awakening and got my Field, and you hit me as hard as I just hit you, I'd be paste. Dead on my feet. Doneso."

  Ali took this in and felt an odd tingling in his fingertips, his gut. He'd been feeling this more and more lately, when his newfound powers elicited shock or fear or awe in people. He'd felt it being gawked at by the strangers in the alley, he'd felt it when the masked murderer had fled from him, he'd even felt the earliest inklings of it on the drive to the hospital after nearly killing Ben. He wasn't sure he liked it.

  "Not only are you picking up the fundamentals way, way too fucking quick to be at all fair, you've got your whole unkillable regenerating zombie man thing going on. A thing, I'll remind you, that crazy lady and the jumpsuit guy were doing on those Twitter videos from two days ago. You saw those, right?"

  Ali nodded. Of course he'd seen those. Most of the people in the country had by now, he assumed.

  "Those people, not only can they get half their face caved in by a flying Mazda and keep going, they can make energy out of nothing. Like, I've been in this game for a long time, seen a lot of Sensitives, I've never seen anyone pour out enough heat from thin air to just obliterate a whole concrete building before. It doesn't line up with how our whole energy-in-energy-out thing is supposed to work. There isn't space in ten, fifty, a hundred Fields to store that kind of juice. Which means they're pulling it from somewhere." Marco leaned in, studied Ali closely, eyes twinkling like a scientist's inspecting a Nobel-winning specimen. "And I have a hunch that those two things are connected. The regeneration and the extra energy. And you're gonna be the key to figuring out how."

  "I'm honored," Ali grumbled.

  "And after we crack the secret and I make you into a god, you're gonna keep me safe from all the other, nastier gods, because even though I may or may not have kinda choked out your little girlfriends the other day, you'll eventually grow to begrudgingly love me, because everybody always does." Marco's grin was blinding and nauseating. "It's a fantastic plan that leads to you wielding immense power and me not being killed by India's scariest CEO. So hit me again and let's get learning."

  Ali rubbed his shoulder and thought about just how jealous he was of the version of him that existed just moments before he threw that god damned baseball, back when his biggest problem was that his friends were going to out-of-state college.

  Then he poured the dregs of the energy into his Field into another punch, failed miserably, and got kicked across the lot again for his trouble.