Pietro’s hand hovered over the doorknob. He’d been holding it there for well over three minutes now, paralyzed with a fear so flinching and self-generated that it tasted more of shame than anything else.

  Nobody had ever even told him that he wasn’t allowed to leave the apartment. Yelena, during the brief, unpredictable appearance she’d made at his bedside, had never said anything to that affect. M Corp had either stopped sending men after him, or she’d gotten good enough at pre-empting their arrival that Yelena was killing them before they had a chance to arrive.

  And yet, Pietro felt that if he were to open the door and leave, then the ghastly woman or some masked enforcer would cut his life short before he could take three steps outside.

  The idea of continuing to languish in that dark, unfamiliar apartment, however, was becoming so continually repugnant that, after another minute of trembling hesitation, Pietro juddered and threw the door open, launching himself out into the sun.

  It was a nice day out. The building he was in, an apparently foreclosed miniature apartment complex, was bordered by an unkempt lawn of weeds and creepers, scored by the pleasant hiss of insects. Pietro held a hand up to block the sun from his over-sensitized eyes, and felt himself enjoying the heat on his skin, despite his gnawing terror.

  He took a few rabbitlike glances over his shoulder, and, spurred by a need to flee the scene of his maybe-transgression, hustled out of the lot. He picked a road at random and followed it.

  Pietro had no large-scale plan, other than abandoning that dreadful apartment. He had nobody to go to, no family or friends to contact for help. The one connection he had to the world, the only source of money and security he knew, was actively trying to kill him for his perceived desertion.

  But he couldn’t go back. So he hurried off down a winding side road, his gait silent and even in that ghostlike way he’d spent much of his adolescence perfecting. Hiding from people was one of his few real skills, after all.

  And yet there was nobody to hide from. The streets were largely empty. Animals were encroaching on the city in a way that felt excessive: the trees lining the street were dense with the clamor of birds and squirrels, the lawns dotted with occasional rabbits. Pietro spotted a deer and its fawn picking their way through the vacant lawn surrounding one of the city’s cramped cathedrals.

  Many of the stores were closed, or shuttered, or otherwise silent. It was close to dusk, and the streetlights were on, but Pietro only spied lights on in a handful of windows.

  In the distance, a hazy cloud hung over the horizon, the last vestiges of what must have been a mammoth fire. Nearer by, its source just as hidden from view as the origin of that smoke, Pietro could make out a distant clamor of a crowd, maybe. It was too muffled to tell.

  He tried reaching out with that magic aura Yelena had awoken him to, tried to snatch the sound waves from the air the way she’d forced him to teach himself: the accelerated lesson, the bewildering download of a future Pietro’s knowledge about the aura, a process he still struggled to even really understand. All he knew is that, while he'd been tied to his bed burning, he'd "remembered" days' worth of memories. Memories that hadn't happened to him yet, memories divorced from all context, memories entirely focused on how to use his newfound power.

  Even with his effort to listen, he couldn't hear much. Those snatched recollections of techniques he'd yet to practice were incomplete and spotty, and his control was still awful.

  He stumbled to a stop, head pounding with the effort of the attempt, and found his eyes drawn to a flurry of activity up the empty road.

  A babbling mob of pigeons rustled and garbled around a nearby park bench, chasing tossed handfuls of seed. Distributing these was an old woman, painfully old, her back bent forward at a shrimplike cant, her face folded in on herself, her eyes scarcely visible. She chuckled to herself at the commotion, one gnarled hand passing in and out of a ziploc bag of nuts and seeds.

  Pietro looked around at the deserted stretch of uptown Minneapolis, weighed his anxiety against a lifetime's experience avoiding as much attention from strangers as possible, and felt his need to know what was happening win out. He approached the woman.

  "Excuse me-"

  "Ah!" the woman jerked, then settled, cough-laughing with a rueful rattle. "You're a sneaky one. Didn't hear you walk up! Not even a bit. What're you wearing, stockings?"

  "I-" Pietro coughed too, immediately awkward. "My apologies, ma'am, I'm just- I'm not wearing- I wasn't trying to sneak. I'm just quiet."

  "I'll say! If I was the superstitious type I'd have bet you were a ghost!" The woman tossed another wide arc of seed, and the pigeons buffeted over each other in clumsy pursuit. "If you're going to try and tell me to go inside, or to get out of town, you can stuff it. I'm a grown woman and I've got plans for the day, damnit."

  "No, no, not- I- I- wouldn't presume to-"

  "No need to mumble! I promise I'm nothing to be scared of, scout's honor."

  "Right. I didn't mean to-" Pietro stopped himself, shook his head, took the effort to iron out his thoughts. "Ma'am, if you don't mind me asking… Where is… everybody?"

  The woman hacked up a sharp laugh. "Ran for the hills! A couple city blocks blow up, one measly parking garage gets melted, and all over a sudden everyone's got a cousin in Rochester with an empty guest room. No loyalty to your hometown these days." The woman smiled ruefully and fished in her bag for one last handful. It was only now that Pietro noticed the solitary pigeon roosting on the woman's lap, placid as a housecat. "Not the birds, though. I'm not complaining. All the more for me."

  "Sorry, a parking garage… melted?"

  "Huge lady in a dress flew over it and boiled it away with her mind," the woman said, as if rattling off a complaint about the weather. Pietro, meanwhile, felt his stomach nearly vice itself in half at the description. A huge woman? "Least, that's what I got told. Not much of an eyewitness myself."

  The woman waved a hand in front of her vacant face, eyes staring through her palm.

  "Right," Pietro breathed. "So, er, what does that mean, exactly? What's happening?"

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  "Nobody knows what the hell's going on. Official story is terrorists, but I've yet to talk to a single person who buys that. Lots of religious types, they think it's the rapture, something along those lines, but, I don't know, that seems wrong too." The woman paused, tilted her head. The wind rustled in the trees, the pigeons cooed and pecked. Somewhere in the distance a crosswalk was chiming, and farther away that drone of voices was slightly louder. "Seems too quiet to be the end of days. Me, I think it's wizards."

  Pietro blinked. "Wizards?"

  "Why not. Makes as much sense as anything. You know I saw a wizard when I was a little girl. At the fair. Lost my parents, was wandering around, crying my little eyes out. Old man hiding out behind the carousel waved me over, made me a balloon animal shaped like a little puppy, and, swear on my grave, the thing did a little flip in his hands and barked three times! Took my mind off my lost mama for a bit, that did." The woman's smile creased its way up her face. "Nobody ever believes me of course, but I know what I saw. People act like kids don't remember, but they do. They remember the important parts."

  Pietro frowned down at his clasped hands, took a seat next to the woman, spooking a loose bird out of the way. "Not all of them."

  "Oh?"

  "I don't remember anything before I was maybe twenty years old."

  "Not a thing?"

  "Well. Smells, sometimes. Pine trees, I think. Soaps, chemical solvents. A perfume."

  "What happened, you hit your head? Drink too much?"

  Pietro shrugged. "No idea."

  "You just wake up as a twenty-year-old one day, not knowing anything? Your name, your address?"

  "Well, no. No, I knew my name. And how to do my job."

  "And what job's that then?"

  "Cleaner."

  "Mm. Good work, that. I was a maid for a lot of the seventies. Beats the hell out of food service."

  "It can be quite meditative."

  "Everyone's gotta have a ritual."

  “Clearly,” Pietro said, gesturing to the pigeons. The woman didn’t seem to notice. “Also, I’m sorry if this is impertinent, but did you say you were blind earlier?”

  “As a bat!” The woman waved her hand in front of her face.

  “And you’re not worried about being out here alone?”

  “Child, I’m eighty-eight. If someone wanted to push me down and steal my twelve dollars and my Cub membership card they’d do it if I could see it coming or not.”

  “You can’t see the birds you’re feeding?”

  “No, but I hear them, and they sound like they’re having a hell of a good time. Somebody has to.”

  Pietro nodded, conceding the point. They passed about a minute together, alone amongst the muffled rabble of the birds, before the woman spoke up again with a thoughtful look on her face.

  “That’s a real shame, though, missing your whole childhood like that. Can’t be healthy for a young man, to miss out on those early memories.”

  “Sometimes I tell myself that I’m lucky. My life, well, I guess, up until very recently, has been very simple and easy to understand.” Pietro shrugged. “I don’t know very many people, but the few I’ve met seem… complicated. It seems painful.”

  “Oh, you poor thing, you have no idea what you’re missing,” the woman tutted. “No, those complications, you need those. They’re the only way to learn anything. Now, have I had some really nasty strings of bad luck, sure. I used to paint, got cataracts something fierce, and now I couldn’t see an easel if you were hanging it off my forehead. My daughter, I raised her, gave her forty years of my life, and she hasn’t talked to me since, I don’t know. Pre-Obama.”

  “And that’s… good? For things like that to happen to you?”

  “Oh hell no, my life has been needlessly shitty and I’d kick God in the shins if he walked up to me right now. But those misfortunes, they’re part of who I am, and there’s joy to be found in them too. I like remembering how it felt to paint. I need my memories of my daughter. I wouldn’t want those taken from me.”

  “Even though you’d feel better?”

  “I wouldn’t feel better, I’d feel less.”

  Pietro studied his perfectly sanitized hands in silence for a moment. “Hmm. I understand.”

  “And even though things worked out badly, it brings me so much comfort to think of my daughter, out and about, even without me.” The woman’s smile took on a wistful slant. “I don’t need to see her. I just like knowing she’s out there.”

  “Like your birds,” Pietro mused.

  The woman cackled. “I guess so! I guess so. For a boy with no memories, you’ve got an insightful streak.”

  “Thank you.” Pietro felt a private glow of satisfaction at that. “I don’t think anyone’s ever said something to that affect to me befo-”

  His voice stammered to a stop as a wash of green invaded his vision, like a suddenly encroaching tsunami of color. He grasped his head and yelped with the sudden pain of the image, of the phantom heat of the wall of energy he saw slamming across the landscape, flash-burning everything, the whole park, the birds, the woman, the buildings behind them, reducing all free-standing matter to char and smoke.

  “Hey now, hey, what’s the matter? Are you okay?” The woman tilted her head toward him.

  “Get- Get-”

  “What did I say about stammering? I’d hope you’d know by now that I’m not gonna bite-”

  “You need to get down!” Pietro yelled. He rushed forward to grab the woman, to throw himself on top of her, his Aura already flushing out instinctively to its full breadth, opening itself to receive the wave of energy that Pietro knew would be coming any second.

  The distant voices and screaming suddenly reached a fever pitch, followed by an ear-splitting thunderclap.

  Before Pietro could reach the woman, the wave of green he’d already seen once was upon them, impossibly fast and huge, horizon-swallowing, both a wave of color and a terrible, hulking mass. Pietro was sent flying, ragdolling through the air, burned and crushed in equal measure.

  When he landed, his Aura was full to bursting with energy, and the rest that had leaked through had ruined his body. He couldn’t see, his eyes were filled with angry starbursts of light, but he could feel the creak of his ruined skeleton beneath his flesh, could sense the parts of his arms and legs that had been flash-burned free of skin.

  He spent an unknowable stretch of time writhing on the ruined grass, gasping goldfish breaths, blind and burned, before a loud thump heralded the sudden arrival of a huge body just behind him.

  When Yelena’s sighing voice reached his ear, he was surprised to find that he wasn’t startled by her sudden presence. He was becoming used to her suddenly appearing during the worst moments of his life.

  “Don’t cry, child. Don’t cry. The pain will be over soon.”

  “D- d- d-” Pietro’s throat burned with the effort to croak out a question.

  “Shhh,” Yelena cooed. Her waxpaper hands alighted on the ruined flesh of his back, and he felt a warmth spreading from them. “Don’t trouble yourself so.”

  “D- d- d- did the- the woman-” Pietro forced out. “Did the woman- Is she okay?”

  A pause.

  “Nobody is here but you and I, child. Whatever friend you’d made, here, I see no sign of her left.”

  Pietro felt his chest lurch. The sudden grief was confusing. He hadn’t known that woman for more than ten minutes.

  “Stay your tears, my Pietro. Whoever she is, I promise she’s at peace. She’s in a world free from pain, now.”

  Pietro couldn’t muster the energy to speak any more, but if he could, he might have responded. He might have said that a life without pain didn’t sound like something that woman would have wanted.

  He wasn’t sure if he wanted it either.