Sylvia could hear the screams from half a mile away as she rushed toward what she was now realizing had to be a high school gymnasium. She was barely even using her Aura to magnify any sound; the din was reaching her fine. Somewhere, distantly, sirens were approaching.

  She'd spent the last few days after having Shiv torn away from her in a fugue. The woman in the mask had spared her, disappeared in pursuit of Phoenix, leaving her to lay stunned in the dirt, surrounded by corpses and downed trees in a slice of unrecognizable woodland. She'd somehow found her way back to the hotel room she and Shiv had used some of their jewellery store money on, had spent a day, maybe two or three, sliding in and out of consciousness, an alien tug yanking on her Aura at unpredictable times, jarring her out of any attempt at rest she made.

  She could feel Phoenix. Vaguely, and only sporadically, but she could perceive impulses and echoes of his will, sometimes strong enough to make her spasm and jerk, her limbs briefly called to do something unbidden by her. These impulses had a directionality to them, an awareness of where the order had come from in relation to her. A vile, burning compass point periodically searing itself onto her soul and fading away.

  Yet compared to the agony of losing Shiv, the awful intrusions were painless. She'd always sympathized as best as she could have with Shiv and her situation with Peter, tried her best to understand the despair that comes with having a loved one not only taken from you, but overwritten, forced into the subjugation of a monster. Now she understood. It was a revelation she didn't cherish.

  Eventually her misery began to harden into resolve. She fed herself and cleaned herself and scraped together a few hours of sleep. At one point, she became dimly aware that the masked woman was near her hotel, when Sylvia's vibrational sense picked up the sensation of the woman's odd, alien gait a few dozen yards outside her window in the middle of the night. She was being watched, she figured. She couldn't quite bring herself to care.

  Banking on the knowledge that she knew the relative direction Phoenix was to her at all times, she set out to kill the man or be killed herself in trying.

  She didn't take the car. She ran, fully charged battery pack slung on her shoulders, no longer concerned with what might happen if someone saw her. It was faster, and easier, and felt right.

  As she approached, the signals and spasms caused by Phoenix began to multiply. They were happening every few minutes, now, every few seconds, intensifying and deepening as the interval between them shortened. Something major was happening.

  And then she heard the screams, and they resolved as she raced towards them, flattening into an impenetrable cacophony of fear and panic.

  Sylvia burst through one of the high windows inset into the side of the gymnasium and, balancing on a ceiling strut, watched in horror at the carnage unfolding below.

  Standing toward the edge of the room, obstructing the main exit as much as possible, Phoenix stood, swaying in place, body hunched and taut, eyes shut in sweaty concentration. Around him, robed acolytes were dragging crippled and maimed refugees towards him, shoving their protesting forms under his outstretched hands. As fast as he could manage, Phoenix was transforming them, awakening their Auras and leaving them to fall seizing to the floor. Other victims, having already passed through the initial shock of transformation, were dragging themselves to their feet, gaping wounds closing tight, ruined limbs re-straightening, and flinging themselves under Phoenix's hands again. These ones Phoenix killed. He'd slash out with a palm, quick and rough in between performing other conversions, severing spines or airways, scooping up the essence that would float, jellyfish-like, from their corpse as they fell and subsuming it into himself. With each fresh acolyte killed and consumed, the beckoning waves radiating from the man, the same ones searing themselves against the walls of Sylvia's brain, grew deeper, louder. He was getting stronger, and fast.

  Everywhere else in the gym, acolytes were slashing through the frenzied crowd, snapping femurs or breaking backs, easily trampling any attempts at resistance the stronger victims were making. Then, once disabled, they were dragging the terrified people over to Phoenix, sometimes two or three at a time, tossing them in a pile around him, a human stock of firewood. And the cycle would begin again.

  Sylvia saw the increasingly few remaining able-bodied people massing around the gym's farthest fire exit, where a handful of acolytes and that gaunt henchman of Phoenix's--what was his name, something French?--held the crowd at bay. She took a second to swallow the bolus of shock and disgust clogging her throat, and launched herself toward the blockade.

  She landed hard and clumsy, trying as she was to avoid barreling into any of the writhing mass of refugees beneath her, and pivoted, springing toward the acolytes. She'd only managed to hit one--a bolt of electricity that easily overrode the poor, half-baked acolyte's meager defenses, when that hollowed-out-looking henchman noticed her and flared his dreadful golden light to life.

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  Sylvia's stomach lurched and her eyes shut themselves as she stumbled to a halt. Instinctively, she reached out with her vibrational sense, felt the man--Bouchard, that was his name--lunge for her. She backpedaled just in time, narrowly missing a wave of superheated air that blast-burned another acolyte that had been approaching her from behind.

  Sylvia kept her eyes shut and felt a thrill of victory in her. This was a man whose entire battle strategy revolved around shining a light in people's eyes, and he'd had the shit luck of getting pitted against a woman who didn't need her eyes to see.

  Effortlessly parsing and weaving her way through the mammoth stream of tactile information flowing into her through the soles of her feet, the skin on her face, the tips of her fingers, she threaded her way through the crowd and ducked under two more frenzied strikes by Bouchard. His heartbeat, just barely perceptible in the din, accelerated as he, she assumed, realized that she wasn't as blinded as she seemed.

  Too late for him: Sylvia was up and behind him now, driving a fist into the aura just behind his kidneys, unloading enough kinetic energy to flatten a small truck. His defense was good, better than she'd have expected, but he let enough leak through that the blow he took to his organs was enough to send him keeling over, retching and disoriented.

  Another blind strike from his one free arm--idiotically, he was still using one hand to keep his strange light shining--arced wide and killed another acolyte.

  Sylvia let the fury boiling in her now drive her forward, and she hit once, twice, three times: heat, kinetic, heat again. In seconds, Bouchard was gasping and rattling, his windpipe collapsed, the skin on his face and right arm boiling off.

  Her batteries already almost dry, Sylvia slung the pack from her shoulder and swung it like a ten-foot-square flail, caving Bouchard's torso in, sending splinters of ribs through his heart. In seconds, she felt its beat stutter and stop, and she opened her eyes.

  The mass was surging around her, now, people diving for the exit, whatever initial shock they might've felt at the sight of this woman burning and crushing one of their captors to death already forgotten. She kicked the door open, shattering the chain that had been looped around the handles, and people began to stream out into the parking lot. Just outside, she saw the flashing blue-and-red of approaching police cruisers.

  Before the crowd could get much more than a few steps out of the door, before the police cars could come to anything much more than a sliding halt, what looked like a man with his head entirely obscured by flames landed in the lot. He stretched his arms out, the flames wreathing his face flickering, and the air around him detonated. The crowd was launched back into the gym, the more unfortunate bystanders at its head burned by contact with the superheated air. The flaming man turned and gestured towards the police cars, and another explosion rent the air, sending the two cruisers tumbling onto their backs and skidding away.

  Sylvia rushed to the door, hoping to at least divert some of this newcomer’s attention so the crowd could reform and escape, but he beat her to it. With a flourish of his hands, and a cock of the head that somehow managed to read to her as smug, he slammed the doors shut. Sylvia felt a burst of heat as he flash-welded the metal doors together on the other side, a feat that must have required such an unthinkable amount of energy that Sylvia recoiled away instinctively. The man hadn’t been wearing a battery pack.

  The crowd around her groaned in newfound panic and began to wheel around, searching for another escape route. Sylvia was turning to join them when she felt the unmistakable rhythm of the footsteps she knew best, better than almost any other sound, pounding toward her.

  “No, no, no!” Sylvia leapt away from the sound, not daring to turn and look, but Shiv had always been the faster of the two.

  She was on her, now, and she looked awful. Shiv had been forced into one of those gauche, ridiculous robes. Her face was pale and streaked, her hair matted. Her mouth was shut tight in a rictus of struggle, her eyes watering, whether from emotion or pain Sylvia couldn’t tell.

  Sylvia drew up her defenses, unwilling to strike first, and prepared to absorb the kinetic energy she knew Shiv always liked to lead with.

  When electricity crackled through the border of her Aura, she felt the briefest surprise, before her muscles seized and she was sent clattering to the ground.

  Right, she thought, deeply disappointed in herself. It’s not really her. She wouldn’t fight like herself. It’s him.

  In the center of the room, still blood-drunk like a shark tearing through a bait ball, Phoenix’s Aura was palpably radiating strength now, filling the atmosphere, making the room humid with profane, raw strength. His eyes were rolling into the back of his head, everything from his knees down obscured by a barricade of spent human bodies.

  Sylvia turned her head from that sight to take in one far worse: Shiv bent over her, pinning her to the ground, arms raised to rain blows down. Sylvia knew she could, in Shiv’s clumsy, remotely-operated state, probably overwhelm her and throw her aside. It would take the last of her energy reserves, but she could do it.

  But that would kill Shiv.

  It wouldn’t be right to kill Shiv. It wouldn’t be fair. Not after all she’d done to keep her living.

  Shiv reached down, hands gnarled into claws, and grabbed Sylvia by the throat, pouring enough kinetic energy into the gesture to shatter her defenses. She felt Shiv’s palm against the skin on her neck, and she felt for her heartbeat once again.

  It was strong. Perfectly healthy. The best she’d ever heard it.

  Sylvia smiled, tears squeezing from her eyes. “It’s okay,” she garbled, barely able to spare the breath.

  Shiv, above her, was heaving, her chest juddering and jumping. Her eyes were red and raw, warped into an expression of misery that hurt Sylvia deeply to witness. Her mouth jumped open and closed, desperately failing to form words.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Sylvia croaked. “It’s okay if it’s you.”