Rai flexed her Field, clamped down once again on the screaming protestations of her conscience, and began to pick the child apart.

  The girl in front of her, a spindly thing who couldn't have weighed more than ninety-five pounds, all elbows and knees and jutting angles, cringed and crumpled under the pressure of her assault. Ensconced as she was in Rai's far larger Field, the girl's Field was pinned completely, desperately cycling through its defenses, flitting from kinetics to heat to electricity to light, unable to account for the all-encompassing unnature of the force now working on it, now intruding, ceaselessly, past its defenses toward the fragile body beneath.

  And yet, intruding slowly. Far slower than usual.

  Rai shook her head. Her thoughts were messy, disorganized, her control slipping. She'd been without sleep for a week now, and while regenerating the damage her wakefulness had done to her brain had kept her alive, it was an imperfect substitute, and she felt sluggish, disoriented.

  That wasn't enough to account for her suddenly halted progress, though. Rai searched herself, did a desperate inventory, thoughts frenziedly tilting towards the single scenario that evoked more dread in her than anything else: was she losing her powers? Was her control slipping?

  The girl before her wriggled and sobbed, cried out. It couldn't have been in pain; she'd already healed the impact injuries she'd sustained slamming into Rai's trap, and she'd yet to have penetrated the girl's Field. Claustrophobia, then. Panic. Rai could hardly have blamed her.

  Why wasn't she breaking through? She was one flex of her might away from the power that had so escaped her, from the means to finally begin her true work of correcting the world. Why couldn't she just do it? It would only be a moment. Less than that. It'd be as quick as the blink of an eye and half the effort. The girl wouldn't feel a thing.

  So why. Wasn't. She. Killing her?

  The girl before her managed, somehow, to seem to steel herself, to draw herself up despite being as immobile as an insect in amber. Her eyes met Rai's.

  And, like a reflex, Rai withdrew. The pressure threatening to crush the girl receded. Not enough to let her free; she was floating in a bubble, now, an open space within the sphere of Rai's Field, bordered on all sides but not touched.

  The girl studied her, chest heaving, tears drying on her cheeks. "Why'd you stop?"

  "I- I-" Rai realized she was trembling. She took a moment to stifle the movement in her hands, to clear her throat, and before she knew why, the words were spilling from her. "You should know why I'm doing this. That I never wanted things to come to this, that it's in no way your fault. You don't deserve what's about to happen."

  The girl studied her, wary, a cornered prey animal. She didn't speak.

  The silence ate away at Rai and in moments she was rambling again. "An awful burden's been forced upon you. That you ended up with Victor's power was a freak mistake, one that you didn't deserve to fall victim to. I know you didn't ask for that power. I'm sure you aren't planning on misusing it. But the sad, brutal fact remains that you have it, and I need it. The world needs it."

  "The world?" The girl's voice was almost imperceptible.

  "Yes!" Rai calmed herself. She was losing her grip. "Yes. There are only a few people as powerful as me in the world, and I'm the only one among them who has any intention of doing any good with it. The others, they're a homicidally insane woman, a megalomaniac cult leader, a feckless voyeur, an unknowable Mayan god, and a backwards relic who sees the whole thing as one big game. Were any of those to kill me and their competitors, they would ruin the world with their winnings. They'd kill everyone at worst, or sit back and watch the atrocities continue to unfold at best. I'm the only one who cares. I'm the only one who knows what it's like!"

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  A breeze drifted past them, carrying the song of insects and the sounds of burning shrub up from the savannah below. Rai realized, belatedly, that she had raised her voice, that she was panting. Something in her chest felt like it was coming apart.

  "Who knows what what's like?" The girl asked.

  "What it's like to be powerless," Rai said, voice flat and soft.

  A memory, usually diligently buried and shackled away deep in Rai's mind, bubbled to the surface, and she realized why she hadn't killed the girl right away. Madison reminded her of someone.

  The spindly Pakistani girl, whose name Rai didn't know and would never learn, looking at her with her watery, beseeching eyes. "I don't think they're going to give us back our passports."

  The panic clawing at Rai's chest as she realized what the woman was saying. The desert moving outside the truck's windows, blurring past. Just sand and road: no buildings, no other cars, no people. No witnesses, no laws. Anything could happen now. Nobody would know.

  The girl's half-whispered panic. "What are we going to do?" Their minder, the massive man sprawled in the backseat, gun conspicuously holstered to his hip, either not listening or not caring. "What's going to happen to us?"

  Rai's heart hammering, the quaver of her voice when she spoke. "I don't know. I don't know what to do."

  It would be the last time she ever let herself say that.

  The girl before her continued to study her quietly. Then something in her face softened. "You'll do it? You'll try to fix things?"

  "That's all I've ever tried to do."

  "But you need to kill me to do it."

  "Yes. I'm so sorry, but it's the only way."

  Madison nodded, slow and dreamy, her eyes distant. They were silent again for a while, spent a minute listening to the night insects and crackling ash.

  "Fine then."

  Rai felt her breath catch in her lungs. "Fine- what? What is?"

  "Kill me, then." Madison suddenly looked thirty years older. "It's okay. I spent most of my life in one room, stuck to a bed. Other than Gramma, and people like you, nobody who's alive even knows I exist. I'm clueless about the whole world, I don't know where anything is or how anything works, I don't have any- any skills. Really, I never really expected to live very long anyway." Her eyes glittered a little as she gazed back over her shoulder, toward the ground hundreds of feet below, in the direction her lions had fled to. "I got to see what I wanted to see. I've done the thing I wanted to do."

  Rai, inexplicably, felt fury well up in her. It wasn't directed toward Madison. "Don't say such things."

  "Why?" Madison's eyes were level with Rai's now, unflinching. "Why should you care? You're about to kill me. What, am I making it too easy for you? Then how about this: I'm worthless. I'm a nothing, I've barely ever even really existed. I'm not a person. Until the whole world went crazy a few weeks ago, my destiny was to linger around in my Gramma's basement for a few more years and then die and get forgotten forever."

  "Don't-"

  "Kill me!" Madison was yelling now, almost screaming, flecking spittle into the air. Her fists were balled tight enough to etch cuts into her palms. "Do it! I'm giving you permission! I'm telling you it's fine! It's not even a waste! I'll disappear like I was always supposed to, I'll go away without ever seeing any more of the world or growing into any more of a person, and you, and all the important people who actually matter, will go on to keep the show running. Do it! I'm! Ready!"

  Rai paused for a few heartbeats, then, slowly, almost defeatedly, opened her Field, releasing Madison. Rai retreated, her Field shrinking back toward her, congealing back to its only-somewhat-huge ambient size.

  Madison floated, trembling with emotion, eyes widening with confusion. "What? What are you doing?"

  "What am I doing?" Rai shook her head. Her face was hot with shame and rage. "What the fuck did I think I was accomplishing here?"

  "Is this- does this mean-" Madison's voice was shaky, the last vestiges of her defiance seeping out of her. Her hands were trembling.

  "The strong eating the weak, convincing themselves all the while that it's for the right reasons. That's at the heart of all of this. I know that, I've always known that. I should never have let myself get this far." Rai sounded as if she were cursing herself. She fixed Madison with the full intensity of her stare, a gaze she'd known to level heads of state and titans of industry. "Go. Be with your animals. I'll find a way to clean this mess up, and once I do, I'll find you, and I'll apologize."

  "Why- I don't-" Madison began. Rai cut her off with a sharp gesture.

  "You are a real person, Madison," she said, in a voice as definite as God's. "You've been one this whole time."

  And with that, Rai shot away through the night, arcing with furious purpose back West, toward the beacon of energy beckoning to her above Minnesota.