“She’s really there?”

  “In the flesh,” Benny said into his phone. Well, not his phone. One of the blocky black burners assigned to him by Maldonado. Her voice was tinny on the other line, but still pristine, professional. The kind of voice a GPS or automated parking meter has. “Or, somethin’ like flesh. Her skin looks… well, nasty.”

  On the other side of his incredibly unwieldy ultra-zoom camera lens, also assigned to him by Maldonado, a monstrous woman in a white dress swayed, slouching behind a rapidly decaying tree in a public park. It was a wonder nobody else saw her and screamed, or startled, or took out their phone to film. Benny was maybe a third of a mile away and ten stories up, and he still felt a base instinct to get up and flee, just looking at her.

  “She ain’t moving. She’s locked on the invisible woman, or the monk, or both, but she’s not getting any closer.”

  “That’s to be expected, but good data either way. Means either she’s able to perceive the limits of Pema’s sensory ability, or she’s not confident she could take him in a direct confrontation. Maybe both.”

  “Then what do we do?” Benny sat back in the camping chair he’d hauled to the top of the hotel. How Maldonado had convinced the security to stand down and leave the roof access unlocked was beyond him. “Thought the whole point was to see her in action.”

  “We will. I’ve whipped up a contingency for exactly this scenario. Hold tight.”

  As he watched, letting his camera wander briefly from the lanky corpse, he saw several people on the street, at the cafe, in the park, all pause more or less at the same time and reach into their pockets. Bemused looks and quickly re-stashed cell phones abounded.

  The monk, his face too obstructed for Benny to read, stood and said something to his, what, protege? Charity case? Benny felt for the poor woman, wrapped up in all this. He patted her arm, reassured her, and left.

  “The hell was that?”

  “A message, deployed to optimize the odds Pema leaves the scene and comes to us.”

  “What could you possibly offer that guy?”

  “Everyone has a lever, Benny. Him especially.”

  Benny decided to let that lie. He turned his attention back to Yelena. “She’s still not moving.”

  “She’s probably hoping that Mrs. Estevez eventually goes somewhere more private. Yelena’s no saint, but she tends to avoid making public spectacles.”

  “That thing’s shy?”

  “Not shy. Not even particularly worried about collateral damage, I don’t think. My theory?” Benny could hear the quirk of a self-satisfied grin in Maldonado’s voice. “She’s a romantic. Likes her kills one-on-one, intimate. Can’t have that in a cafe full of screaming civilians.”

  Benny shivered. “Jee-sus.”

  “Missing Provo, Benjamin?”

  “Reckon I’d be a lot safer back at my desk, sure.”

  “Oh come on, don’t act like you’re not excited to see what happens.”

  Benny frowned. She was right. He’d seen strong Field Manipulators before, he’d spent plenty of time around Victor. He knew what it was to witness a powerful person, out and about. This woman, though, she exuded something more than just power. She felt somehow entirely distinct from a human being. Some higher class, more alien and ancient. Primordial. If Victor died, he’d stay dead.

  Some deep-rooted part of Benny’s hindbrain wasn’t sure the corpse-thing standing motionless in the park would ever die. A sudden intrusive thought: far in the future, the last stars long exploded and the universe well on its drift toward an eternal zero-kelvin standstill, Yelena drifting, still alive, queasy smile plastered on her doll’s face.

  He shook the thought from his mind. Bullshit. Just nerves.

  He kept his camera trained on the woman for a while, then switched, watched Gloria. Ms. Estevez. The bait. Whatever.

  She was fidgeting with a lighter, sticking her finger in it, trying to keep it within the flame. Benny had seen variations of this test before, though Victor liked to do something a little less brutal when training the kids: he'd asked Benny to help him repurpose an old party game, a series of handles that emits an electrical shock after a timer goes off, zapping the last person to let go. Benny managed to rig it so that the current was always present, the shock constant. When zapped, it was enough to startle, but no more. Dylan, specifically, loved the thing.

  "I have contingencies to attend to right now. Call me back when things develop on your end," Maldonado chirped, before hanging up.

  A half hour passed uneventfully. The unwitting woman at the cafe played with her lighter. The grinning cadaver watched her, unseen, from the park, as the pines on the tree she hid behind turned increasingly dire shades of black.

  Then a patch on Gloria's scalp began to glow.

  Benny could see it, even at this distance. A pale, golden light, barely filtered by the thin hair behind her ear. His stomach turned. This kind of expenditure was noticeable, he knew, to other Sensitives. Maybe back in Provo, if this had been one of the kids messing around, the signature would’ve extended a few dozen yards. Victor could often sense if they were roughhousing from across the camp.

  Here, though, all the evidence he’d seen from Maldonado so far pointed to energy signatures being amplified in the Cities. Part and parcel of the odd, suffusing effect of whatever alien field was boosting everyone’s abilities so much. Benny wasn’t a Sensitive himself, didn’t know exactly what it was to detect someone else’s power, had no baseline for how much energy it took to glow, and how far that energy drifted, and how appetizing it’d seem.

  But his gut told him that Ms. Estevez was in even more danger than he’d initially thought.

  He turned his lens back to Yelena. She was unmoving, now, locked in place, her eyes clearly fixed on the woman’s scalp. Benny thought briefly about warning Gloria, running down and yelling at her to get as far from the city as she could immediately.

  But that would ruin the data. Maldonado needed him here to watch Yelena, to document, in as high a fidelity as possible, evidence of Yelena dying and coming back. This was Maldonado’s pet theory, that the cadaverous woman had died multiple times by now, fully died, not just briefly dallied in a brain-death milliseconds long like most Sensitives had. They’d seen some evidence of this via satellite, others from scraped CCTV logs. They’d gathered some compelling eyewitness accounts too.

  It struck Benny as not only completely impossible but not even remotely in line with what Sensitives were even normally capable of. But he remembered the video, the five-second clip of the man in Singapore. He remembered his sucking abdomen wound welding itself shut, over and over, looped on his screen.

  So he was here, waiting for Maldonado’s trap to spring, for Diyantyi, that scowling mercenary Rai kept around, to blow the woman apart. He was stowed away, on some distant rooftop, waiting for an opportunity to snipe at her with a high-powered rifle.

  Or he was coming. Or still setting up. Maldonado hadn’t explained much, other than that Yelena had finally reappeared on her radar earlier that morning, and was on the move, headed right for a highly-populated section of the city, full of buildings and outcroppings and fire escapes for an enterprising sniper to set up shop in. And she wanted him to get some footage.

  So he waited, mammoth camera lens propped on a tripod, shoulders and back already protesting at the awkward angle he’d contorted himself into. He missed his desk chair. He missed camp. He missed not having to worry about Maldonado, having to try and decipher the actual motives lurking behind her businesswoman’s smile, to constantly be on the look out for shaded threats or hidden malevolence on her end. He didn’t trust her. He didn’t-

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Something exploded in the distance. Benny whipped his head up from the camera's viewfinder just in time to see something orange and white streak above his head. Several hundred yards away smoke was rising in lazy tendrils from a fresh crater on top of a bank. Benny craned around to catch a glimpse of what– of who had just catapulted above him.

  He cursed and rang Maldonado.

  "We've got a rando, here."

  "Excuse me?" Maldonado's voice was clipped and polite as ever.

  "Some third party just flew in. Barely got eyes on him."

  "Flew?"

  "Well, jumped. Launched off a building I think. Can't see him anymore."

  "Description?"

  "Barely caught a glimpse. Looked like a shorter guy. Brown hair, black maybe. Wearing, like, orange pants? Baggy. Maybe overalls."

  There was an uncharacteristic silence on the other line. Benny heard something that might've been a whispered curse from Maldonado, or else just some fuzz on the line.

  "Pardon?"

  "Nothing. This is good. Not ideal, but an opportunity."

  "Who's the new guy?"

  "Chinese Demigod, most likely. The failed experiment."

  Benny felt suddenly very unsteady, exposed here at the top of the lofty hotel. "Aw shit. Feel like I'm sitting on a bomb now."

  "You'll be fine. When things get dangerous-"

  "When?"

  "Lennox will come intercept you."

  "Who's Lennox?"

  "You'll know when you see him. Rai's en route."

  Benny's head spun. "No, no no no, wait. You wanna add a third freak to the mix?"

  "Fourth, probably. Pema's bound to follow her out. He's been… less cooperative than our models had anticipated."

  "Four? Four demis in one place, that's- I mean, shit, this thing might just wrap itself up here."

  "When Rai gets there, it very well could. This is good, Benjamin," Maldonado said, sounding more like reassurance for herself than him. "This is unexpected, but potentially a huge boon. Rai's gifts counter Qiang's. She's almost definitely stronger than Yelena-"

  "We still don't know if she's even killable," Benny protested. He heard another distant bang, his eyes snapping back to the park. Yelena was gone. Another glance: Gloria's table outside the cafe was empty. Somewhere, distantly, he heard a growing whining sound, like a cartoon bomb being dropped from an airplane.

  "But she hasn't demonstrated anything on the scale it would take to scratch Rai. Pema's not a combatant, and if he, for whatever reason, joins in, he's easy enough to distract."

  The whining was getting worse. Benny stood, stomach churning with vertigo, and shadowed his eyes from the sun. The sound was coming from the sky. Maldonado's voice kept chirping at him through the phone, now left forgotten by the camera.

  "If Rai draws first blood, and she should, she'll rocket to a level of power that'll be instantly untouchable by anyone on the planet. The game will end. No apocalypse, no destabilization of the USA or the global economy. Hell, Minneapolis might even come out mostly unscathed. So long as the fifth doesn't show."

  "The fifth?" Benny called. The whistling was ear-splitting now. Where was Yelena?

  "You know, one half of the Sinai couple."

  The whistling became a shriek as a cloud just above Benny's head parted explosively. A silver bullet screamed from the heavens into the street below, leaving a crater a yard deep. Standing in its center, smoking faintly from the sheer violence of his entrance, was a man clad in medieval armor.

  "You're not talking about the knight, are you?" Benny breathed.

  Another silence on the line. "Shit. He's-"

  "He's here."

  More quiet. The knight paced off toward the cafe, which, just then, exploded. Benny saw people scrambling out, boiling into the street through a growing wake of smoke and debris.

  "Lennox is coming. He'll pick you up. Try to get your footage in the meantime."

  "Footage? Footage of fuckin what?" Benny felt his pulse in his ears, now. His palms were sweating. Why did he have to be so damn high up? "What happened to Diyantyi? What happened to shooting the lady?"

  "He might still land a shot. More likely, one of the other interlopers will beat him to it. Get video of that. You've got three minutes before Lennox arrives."

  Benny felt like arguing, but, looking around at the empty rooftop, he wasn't exactly in a position to drop his shit and flee. Maldonado had him in yet another bind.

  "Fine. But no chewin' me out if the photos are shit. Didn't sign up to be a wartime photographer."

  "You'll do your best. You have to, after all."

  Benny grimaced and hung up. He hustled to the other end of the roof just in time to catch Yelena, down in the alley far below, stooping over Gloria. He raised the camera and hit record a half second before the man in the jumpsuit - Qiang, Maldonado's called him - shot out from a ruined building and obliterated the tall woman's head.

  It took a few seconds to find where she'd landed, but soon he was collected relatively legible video of what looked like the woman's own head sprouting from a blasted hole in her throat. The edges of the wound steamed visibly, even in the murky image produced by the lens at full zoom. The new hairline lurched upward through her neck as she stood, a fresh head birthed upwards. Benny bit back a sudden desire to vomit over the edge of the roof and kept filming.

  Yelena was lifting Qiang from the ground now, strangling him. Then he burst into flame, and Benny had an epiphany.

  He turned off the camera, fumbled with the zipper pocket on his jacket, and produced another SD card. He slotted it, formatted it, and kept filming.

  This footage wasn't for Maldonado. It was for him, to nourish a theory that he could almost physically feel coagulating in his brain. It was a dangerous theory, one that he knew he wasn't supposed to be investigating, but he had never been the type to be able to help himself when it came to a juicy secret.

  As he filmed, the fighting intensified, and as the two drew energy, flame, electricity out of seemingly nowhere, Benny watched as data point after data point began to fall into place.

  They weren't making energy. They were catching it, just like any other Sensitive, converting it, and stowing it away. Not into a physical medium, but into themselves. Deeper, somehow, than their Fields. He watched as the Knight exploded into the fray and sent a wall of blue-hot flame careening down the alleyway. He captured clear, definitive evidence of a section of that flame colliding with Yelena and – not dissipating, not being reflected or redirected – funneling itself almost too quickly to see, into a point on her body just above her heart.

  Seconds later, Yelena leapt after the fleeing Qiang, rocketing her body a hundred yards away with a blast of energy that Benny just knew was the same energy stored within the wall of flame that had hit her moments ago.

  He felt a dangerous, perverse little thrill as the pieces clicked together. The invisible medium, this pocket dimension the demigods were shunting their energy into, it had something to do with their miraculous regeneration. It had to. They weren't two separate miracles that Demigods could perform, they were two sides of the same coin.

  But how? How could raw energy lace a nervous system back together, build a destroyed limb from scratch? That was a leap in complexity that didn't-

  The knight hurtled out from the parking garage he'd pursued the others into and slammed into, through, the hotel below Benny's feet. The roof rocked underneath him, lurched precipitously enough to throw him to the ground.

  There was another series of explosions, and the building began to shudder and shake, a prelude to a total structural collapse.

  Benny hugged the camera close to his chest and began to hyperventilate. He was seconds away from deciding to fling himself from the building and hope for a lucky landing when a man crashed into the roof beside him.

  "JE-sus!" Benny flailed in surprise, nearly dropping his camera. The man stood and brushed himself off. He looked like an extra from a biker flick: muscled and tatted, maybe an entire head taller than Benny.

  "I'm Lennox," the man said, reaching out and grabbing Benny by the back of his shirt collar, scruffing him like a puppy. "Maldonado wants you extracted."

  "Wait, wait wait wait, extracted how-"

  Benny's protestations died in his throat as he was ripped away, sent hurtling through the sky along with Lennox, who had pulled him into a sort of rear bear hug and leapt a hundred yards clear of the hotel.

  Briefly, during the second he was midair, Benny got a better look at the city around him.

  Two, three city blocks around where the cafe had been was already reduced to a smoking shambles. Fires, multiple fires, were stretching up from buildings now. People ran in dizzy, spinning conglomerations, panicked waves of fleeing crowds orbited by stragglers. Corpses of the less fortunate dotted the street.

  Above, visible for a moment as Lennox pivoted mid-air to prepare for their landing, Yelena was hovering, arms outstretched and white sundress fluttering. A sword, a full longsword, was buried to the hilt in her face, and it seemed to bother her about as much as a loose piece of lettuce caught in her teeth would have.

  She held her hands together, pointed toward the ground below, and tensed. An explosion of heat, powerful enough for Benny to feel hundreds of feet away, reduced the tottering concrete structure beneath her to a shimmering wreck.

  Benny realized with awe, just before he and Lennox hit the ground hard enough to drive the air from his lungs, that the undying woman was melting the parking garage.

  Maldonado was wrong, he decided. Maybe not about the world, or about the country. But this city was not going to be able to survive this.