Sylvia's vision began to darken at the corners, a wreath of black bordering in the image she had of her partner and first love's face, gnashing and silently weeping.

  Then, just before the pressure mounting on her throat threatened to snap her spine, something huge and metallic blurred into view, crashing against the back of Shiv's head, sending her tumbling from Sylvia.

  Sylvia gasped in air, vision clearing, the vibrations caused by the impact telling her what had happened before her eyes did: a man, standing maybe twenty feet from them, had whipped an entire bleacher seat into Shiv.

  No, wait, not just some man. Peter.

  "P-pete?" Shiv rasped. "Peter? How did-"

  "Who are you?" Peter's chest was heaving, more with what looked like shock than any sort of exertion. His eyes were stretched wide, rimmed red, fixed with maniac intensity on Shiv. He leveled a trembling finger at her. "Who is she? What's her name?"

  "Peter, that's-"

  Shiv began to scream and writhe, pinned beneath the bleacher. Her arms clawed at it, her Aura fluctuating as she sapped some nearby power source for the force she'd need to budge it. Her gaze met Peter's and her eyes swam with even more agony and uncomprehension. Her mouth floundered around a word, repeated over and over again, puh-puh-puh-pee-puh-pee.

  Peter was crying now too. "Who are you? I know you. I know your face. I haven't known anyone's face since I woke up."

  Sylvia moved to approach him, one hand held up, like she was warding off a panicked animal. "Peter, it's me. It's Sylvia. Do you- We knew each other as kids. I'm in love with your sister, with-"

  "Sister? My sister? My sister?" Peter was blabbering now, too, repeating the word as if memorizing it. He let out a roar of frustration, clutched his head. "I don't remember! I don't remember! I'm supposed to remember, I see her and I feel that I'm supposed to remember, that I know her, but I don't! I don't!"

  "It's okay. It's okay, hey, shhh." Sylvia was only a few feet away from him now. "Peter, I don't know what kind of miracle happened to get you free, but you're here, and you… If you're free, we can free Shiv, and then you'll talk, and you'll remember, I promise, I swear to God, I'm going to make sure you both remember-"

  "THERE YOU ARE, YOU THANKLESS WORM," boomed a voice from yards behind them.

  Sylvia turned, her stomach a quickly calcifying ball of dread, to see that Phoenix was staring right at them, his Aura flaming around him, huge, too big, its borders maybe three feet from his skin. It almost hurt to look at him, like she was peering into the center of a raging bonfire and was feeling the heat even from this distance.

  Phoenix leveled a hand toward Peter, his voice amplified and distorted, shaking the walls with each word. "THE PHOENIX DOES NOT SUFFER DEFECTORS, BOY."

  Sylvia only barely managed to fling herself free of the blast that followed, a wave of devastating physical force that dug a gouge three feet into the floor and killed half a dozen acolytes and trapped civilians alike before slamming into Peter and sending him careening across the length of the gym. He collided with the far wall with a sound like an artillery shell, like thunder, the kind that follows lightning only when it strikes far too close for comfort.

  Peter hit the wall and slumped down, out of view. Sylvia darted over to where Shiv was pinned without paying the man any mind; she didn't have the energy or time to work out why Peter was here or what had happened to him. She needed to free Shiv with an intensity that blotted out her need to keep an eye on the furious attention of Phoenix searing the back of her neck like the sun.

  She made it two paces before another wave of energy hit her and sent her sprawling, tumbling across the floor like so much windswept trash. She'd been instinctively priming her Aura to absorb kinetic energy, and the impact had filled her stores to the brim instantly, before dumping the rest of its payload directly into her body, all over, all at once. The shockwave rattled her skeleton, fractured some of her ribs, she could tell, feeling her torso with the tip of a finger as she lay gasping for breath beneath a curtain of smoke and airborne debris. It must have hit her glancingly; where the focal point of the wave had been, there was a streak of blood and gore drawn across the gym's floor, leading to a hole in the wall that a truck could have driven through.

  The world outside, hazy and blurry, looked to be on fire.

  Somewhere behind her, Phoenix was roaring something, but Sylvia didn't try to make it out. She was craning around now, back over her own crumpled form, desperately searching for Shiv.

  The bleacher was nowhere to be seen. She could make out, however, an eerie stillness amongst the remaining crowd of people still in the building. Those that were still standing, who weren't drained and discarded as husks or crushed by falling rubble, were all wavering in place, stock-still, their actions and attentions mirroring Phoenix.

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  The man was rambling, now, in the throes of some great euphoria, hovering ten feet above the ground. His Aura was colossal, now, thrumming with tension and unspent power. Between the acolytes left alive and the newly-converted filling the building, Sylvia guessed he had a group of something like three hundred people under his control, with maybe twice that transformed, killed, and absorbed.

  She spent maybe a second dwelling on the idea that this man had become unstoppable, and then a green light flashed, a comet arcing in from the fresh hole in the wall, and lanced Phoenix's arm off.

  He swiveled in the air, all easy grandfatherliness replaced by mania and exuberation, now draining into something like stunned confusion. Tenderly, in disbelief, he glanced from the oddly clean wound demarcating the space where his elbow had once been connected to his forearm, to the hole in the wall.

  Standing in that opening was the masked woman, one of her hands held outstretched, the other still shimmering with more energy than Sylvia had ever felt concentrated in one place. That so much power could be contained in a single spot, so dense and small, seemed impossible to her on an instinctive level.

  And yet there it was, held in the palm of this strange woman, who was leveling it toward Phoenix again, aiming for his chest.

  He made a noise somewhere between a roar and a gurgle, and dozens of new acolytes leapt into action, either lunging for the woman or throwing their more meager Auras in her way, trying to absorb the blast. Phoenix drained half of his reserves in one go as he blew himself to the side, rocketing away fast enough to leave a small sonic boom in his wake.

  The blast of light that just missed him cleaved through the wall of the gym like it was open air, and arced out into the city beyond. The ground shook beneath Sylvia at the force of it, and she heard distant explosions, the dim roar of huge structures coming undone.

  She felt, more than heard, the vibrations of the masked woman as she cursed under her breath and tensed to leap up, to pursue Phoenix. But he was faster, now, and stronger, and had turned in time to propel himself toward her, hands outstretched.

  The masked woman ducked just in time, Phoenix's fingers missing her face by inches, and flung herself away with twin blasts of energy from her feet, one more from her free hand to swivel and change course in the air, arcing up toward the gym's ceiling. Her other hand was glowing again, the aura around her fist pulsing and redoubling in on itself in that strange way, charging up.

  Phoenix, though, didn't need time to build up strength. He was on her again, not letting up, pursuing her through the gym, each vault and launch in her direction strong enough to knock girders loose from the ceiling, blast holes in the brick of the walls.

  Soon he was floating above her, bearing down, as she knelt almost fetal, her Aura packed into a dense, compact dome protecting her. Phoenix poured energy on her, stripping away the dome in layers just barely faster than she could erect them, fractions of inches at a time. Acolytes poured around them, shoved their hands and energies toward the dome as well, obscuring the masked woman from Sylvia's view.

  She took the chance to rise unsteadily to her feet and hustle over toward where the bleacher was. Shiv was laying beneath it still, but unconscious now, completely spent by her efforts to writhe out from beneath its weight.

  Sylvia dropped to a knee beside it and used some of her freshly-renewed reserves to lift the structure off, to pick Sylvia up, cradling her close.

  "It's okay, it's okay," she muttered, voice drowned out by the increasing din of Phoenix's wrath, of the masked woman's defenses being eroded. "I've got you. I've got you. I'll get you out of here. You're okay-"

  Another blast, a roar of victory from Phoenix, cut her off. She felt, more than saw, that the masked woman's shield was nearly gone, and she was lashing out at him, on the offensive as a desperate last resort, bathing him and the surrounding acolytes in hot energy.

  Wait, not heat. Radiation.

  "A NASTY TRICK," he boomed. "A FITTING END, I SUPPOSE, FOR A COWARD."

  Phoenix caught himself, switched his massive Aura to absorb this new form of energy, and began bearing down again, his efforts redoubled, his one remaining hand growing ever closer to the woman's masked face. He had to lower himself to the floor to get close enough now, and was standing just above her, walking her into the corner.

  Then Sylvia felt something surreal and incongruous that it somehow tore her attention away from the furious titan's raving.

  A pair of footsteps, divorced from any body, pattering up toward Phoenix's back. She looked, and even through the thin mist of smoke filling the room she was sure: there was nobody there. The space was empty.

  Yet she felt footsteps all the same, sensed as they came to a brief stop to scoop a jagged shard of ruined rebar from the ground, then continue to hustle up to Phoenix.

  She felt the vibrations outlining body that she couldn't see: short, light, maybe elderly, heartbeat racing along at a frantic rate, hands shaking around the spear of rebar.

  She felt the woman who wasn't there sprint up to Phoenix and plunge the rebar directly into the back of his chest, easily bypassing his Aura, primed as it was against the radiation bathing the area.

  Phoenix sputtered to a stop, his hand closing around the metal lanced through his chest, right into his heart.

  He gasped, stumbled in place, and sputtered for a moment. He turned, eyes filled with a naked, sudden fear, and looked for the attacker. He sent out an almost obligatory attack in her direction, but she was already gone, Sylvia could feel, already ducking around him to flee through a hole in the wall.

  Phoenix looked back down at his wound, blood welling up through his mouth, and, paling, flinched away from the masked woman, who was already drawing to her feet.

  He used the last of his immense, new reserves to fling himself out and away, catapulting himself through a hole in the roof, the rest of his acolytes fleeing in all directions, swarming out and away faster than the masked woman could find and kill them.

  The world outside was in flames, but she could feel the gym's foundations tottering, and knew that staying inside would be even more dangerous than braving the heat without.

  Sylvia gathered Shiv in her arms and ran.