Gloria had been invisible for three days now, and she was beginning to forget herself.

  She'd followed the crowd of dazed and injured passerby, the stunned masses that had flowed out of uptown following all the violence. She saw people dragged on by friends and strangers, legs having been crushed by debris, others that had crawled out of the wreckage of the melted parking garage, faces rendered inhuman by dark soot and fresh scars.

  She'd followed the flow of human misery, silently anonymous in the crowd, had milled around with them until she'd ended up where most of the others had: a high school gymnasium, repurposed as a sort of temporary shelter for the displaced.

  She'd lined up with others and wordlessly received rations of prepackaged sandwiches and styrofoam cups of soup whipped up by dazed-looking relief volunteers. She'd curled up onto makeshift cot on the glossy hardwood floor and struggled to sleep in the half-dark, surrounded by the raspy cacophony of coughs, whispers, little sobs.

  On the second day, she'd awoken to find herself invisible again. She counted herself lucky that nobody had stepped on her "empty" cot in the night and trampled her.

  The invisibility felt welcome, this time. She didn't want to be seen or recognized anymore.

  She had caused all this, after all.

  This devastation had only begun to unfold because those people–that awful, shambling woman and that filthy cackling man and that misplaced knight-pretender–had come to eat her. The image of that kind barista, the instant after he'd been reduced to strips of char and gore for the crime of showing her a little kindness at the wrong time, kept leaping to the forefront of her mind, electric and unbidden. It brought hot tears to her eyes every time.

  She considered killing herself. She'd thought about it before, after all. Only this time, there could be no witnesses, no fantasy of being noticed and understood and pitied in the act. She couldn't bear the thought of anyone recognizing her, putting two and two together, as irrational as that fear might be.

  It was the image of Pema returning, of the smiling monklike man with his placid smile, materializing again to whisk her away, that stayed her. That and the fear of what would come after the act. She felt childish for both.

  She knew that, if at any point, she began to glow again, she'd have to flee. Her presence would become another hazard to these innocent people who had done nothing to deserve what had unfolded around her, around them. But she was afraid to be alone, and the crowd of anonymous, devastated strangers felt, if not comforting, then at least familiar. She saw exactly how she felt written on all of their faces: confused, and afraid, and dreading what came next.

  Plus, her apartment had been destroyed, and she needed the food, the shelter. It was cases exactly like hers that this improvised aid station was set up for, after all.

  And so, for two more days, she snatched food from the meal trays and slept propped in the corner, completely invisibly, passing the time by shamelessly eavesdropping on oblivious passerby. She flagellated herself with the details of their overheard conversations: the apartments destroyed, the jobs ruined, the loved ones missing.

  All because she'd been glowing and hadn't noticed in time. Because she didn't have control over her powers.

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  She stole a lighter from a woman dozing on a cot, picked it effortlessly out of her purse. She watched it disappear as, what did Pema always call it, her Qi, enveloped it. When she wasn't hovering inches away from yet another devastated passerby and raking herself over the coals of their misery, she was burning her thumb with the lighter's meager flame, trying Pema's exercise over and over again, pausing every few minutes to ensure that she wasn't glowing.

  Then, on the third day, as she was practicing with the lighter, she saw someone notice her.

  It had been a young man, with dark, baggy eyes and long, unkempt hair. One of the aid workers, or a volunteer, maybe. He'd been busy helping an old, dirt-caked man with a bandage on his leg, talking to him in soft tones while clumsily redressing his wound.

  She'd flicked the lighter open as she watched, and the moment she had begun absorbing its heat, the young man's head jerked up, as if startled by a noise. He stared right at her, through her, looking as perplexed as Gloria felt.

  She glanced down again, briefly sure that she'd been visible, or worse, glowing, but no. She was completely transparent.

  And yet the young man's attention was fixed on hers. He stood, the bandage hanging limp in his hand, mostly forgotten. The old man barked something, upset at being ignored, but the younger man waved him away.

  "Hello?" he called, across ten yards of gym, directly toward her. Several heads turned his way, and he ignored them. "Hello? Are- You. Right there."

  The young man pointed directly at Gloria, and her heart raced. She backpedaled, again sure that she must somehow have become visible, yet completely unable to see herself. It was now that she noticed the thin skein of shimmering aura surrounding the young man, and her gut froze.

  "Are you-" the young man faltered. "You're like me. You're, what, invisible? But you're like me."

  Another one of them. He'd try to kill her, eat her. Might hurt the others in the gym just to get to her. More collateral damage in her name. She needed to get out of here.

  "Wait, don't run!" the young man stood and hustled toward her, hands held out as if he was moving in a dark room, unsure if he'd crash into something unseen. "I'm just- I need answers! I don't remember-"

  Gloria turned and, bowling over an unsuspecting woman crossing behind her, sprinted out of the gym. She'd been stupid to stay here, selfish to put all these people who'd already lost so much because of her at risk of losing even more. What's more, she'd been childish for holding out hope that Pema would return for her and somehow make things better, this completely unknown god-stranger who barely knew her. She knew now that she should be striking out alone, trying to leave the city. She knew she should do this, and now.

  She was already making a plan to sneak onto the nearest bus, to huddle on in between offboarding passengers and hide herself in the vehicle's back corner, to stowaway unseen on Greyhound after Greyhound until she was as far from the Cities as possible. She was already committed to this flight, to this being the last day she ever spent in Minnesota, when she barreled out the gym's fire exit and came to a stumbling halt at what she saw in the school's parking lot.

  Shimmering with a livid light so much angrier and more pointed than Pema's, or the boy's inside, stood an old man in robes. He was surrounded by maybe two dozen more, each blank-faced or grimacing, in matching tunics, stumbling after him, cutting a swath through the parking lot, directly toward the gymnasium.

  She saw this man and, despite the paternal smile gracing his withered features, knew exactly what he intended for those inside. She felt a pang of fear and turned to flee, perpendicular to the approaching wave of demons, and then remembered the shooter at the mall.

  An ember of fury kindled in her chest and she slowed to a halt. Watching the man and his peons stalk toward the gym, another plan began to form in her mind.

  Gloria stood still, unseen, stuck between two courses of action.

  She remembered the stupid, slack expression of the shooter that had, if he'd been able to see her, would have doubtless taken her life. She remembered his inane, over-ornamented weapon, the ridiculous tugging at his waistband to keep his poorly-sized pants from sagging. She remembered the fury of almost being wiped from the planet by something so moronic.

  She watched this old man dotter toward the waiting mass of helpless people, and the anger in her won out. She, in disbelief at herself, began to follow the others back inside.