"That's where Jenny lives."

  The words had been out of Ali's mouth for maybe two minutes before he was rocketing down the street, the clumsy battery pack Marco had been training him with slung over his shoulder. He'd filled it, draining the energy from a nearby stoplight, so quickly that Marco had balked, speechless for once, at his quickness.

  They'd seen the blast first on the horizon, during yet another of Marco's brutal training sessions. Even at a distance, even out of the corner of his eye, Ali had registered how immenste the explosion had been, had seen the otherworldly flash of green that had preceded it by a split second. Its inverse was still hanging in his eyes, a bright pink starburst floating, seared into his eyes by its brightness.

  "You don't know it hit her place," Marco said, racing just behind him. The buildings were whipping by, now. Ali didn't care if pedestrians noticed them, didn't register anything much more than blind worry for Jenny.

  "I know this city. The blast-" Ali paused as he grabbed and swung around a lamppost, keeping his momentum as he made a turn onto a different street, leeching some energy from it as he went, dumping it into his quickly-diminishing stores. "It came from her place."

  "Whoever was strong enough to do that, they're not targeting your friend. You guys are small fish, here. She's-"

  "I don't give a shit, Marco," Ali said. He was huffing, now, face paling with the exertion of all the conversion, storage, expulsion, maneuvering. He was moving faster than he'd moved before, faster than he'd driven before. The passing buildings were little more than a cobblestone pastiche of streaked grey and brown. The smoke looming ahead, the screams and sirens, were rapidly approaching. "I don't give a shit why or who. I just need to get her out of there."

  They cut away from the street, streaking through a park. Here, unobstructed by buildings, they got their first real glimpse of the carnage ahead of them. What used to be a hotel had been cleaved cleanly in half, furniture and wiring and loose insulation tumbling out from the glowing slag bordering its leftmost section. The right half of the building was gone. Fully missing, reduced to smoke and dust.

  Ali almost let the awe slow him down. The rising panic in his chest, luckily, spurred him ever forward.

  "This is what I need you for," Marco said as they passed the ruined building. Past the ruin were more just like it, cleaved and cut and blasted cleanly into neat sections, whole chunks of the city deleted in an eerily straight line. "The people capable of doing this," he jabbed a hand at the carnage, "they need to be stopped."

  Ali would've snorted if he wasn't completely beset by worry. "You picked the wrong guy, man. Whoever did this is making shit happen on a very different fucking level than you, let alone me."

  "You'll be surprised," Marco almost muttered. "We're going fast, kid. I didn't break into triple digits, mph, until I'd been practicing the better part of a decade."

  "We're not-" Ali was about to protest that they weren't moving a hundred miles an hour, but a quick glance at the scenery rocketing by quieted him. He felt a twinge of vertigo at the realization of just how dangerously quickly they were moving. One wrong move, and he-

  "Don't get nervous now," Marco said, following Ali as they vaulted over a parking lot. "You trip and eat ass at this speed, you'll just regenerate from it. You can't really get hurt, I think, kid."

  Ali shook his head.

  "Don't get coy, man." Marco met his eyes briefly, pulling up to sprint at his side. "What I've seen? You might be actually unkillable."

  "You don't know-"

  "I've been beating the shit out of you for a week now. You should be dead."

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Ali didn't have time to let that soak in. He was here, now, rounding around the street corner he'd set up a janky-ass lemonade stand at as a kid, past the dilapidated skate park where he and Ben and Jenny drank their first beers. Lurching before him, nearly toppled, was the obliterated skeleton of Jenny's apartment complex.

  "Fuck," Ali breathed. He slammed to a stop, the bones in his legs and spine creaking, breaking, and reforming in a second as he dug a furrow in the asphalt. The instant he was back to normal he was leaping off, hurtling toward the wreckage, tearing at debris.

  "Ali," Marco said, almost gently.

  "Shut up!" Ali was tearing through rubble, blasting it away with raw energy, punching through concrete, tearing through sheetrock. He almost stumbled over the crushed remains of someone's family dog, felt a sudden urge to vomit, and moved on, sifting through more. The world was growing soupy around him, the lights brighter, the sounds deeper and louder, the textures and smells more vivid.

  "There's a whole building here. You're not going to find-"

  "I said shut the fuck up, Marco!" Ali rocketed over, mentally retracing a map of her building, trying to zero in on where her place would be. He felt himself following an invisible trail of stimuli, little hints and sounds and nudges, toward something familiar.

  "You're running out of juice, man. Find somewhere to-"

  "Here!" Ali spat, eyes red-rimmed and wide, straining. He jabbed his arm elbow-deep into a pile of shattered wood paneling and pipes, found something warm. He cleared away the debris around it with the last of the energy in his pack, revealing Jenny's face, caked in white plasted and red blood.

  "Jenny! Jenny, Jenny, it's- Jen, I'm here, it's me." Ali reached down, got his hands onto the small of her back, wedged her out from beneath the rubble crushing her.

  "Ali?" she breathed, barely audible. Her eyes swiveled, missing him entirely, focusing on some unknown point in the middle distance. "Ali, I blew up."

  "We're gonna get you to a hospital. We're gonna go, it'll be okay." He stood, went to leap away, staggered. He was out of juice. He looked around desperately for an energy source, came up with nothing other than some weak residual heat, and the kinetics of some concrete chunks shifting around him. Barely enough to keep his pack and Jenny, now cradled, crumpled, in his arms, off the ground.

  "People keep-" Jenny coughed, retched up a small, gristly bolus. "People keep blowing up. Ben's right, it sucks ass."

  "I said you need to recharge-" Marco was looking around now too. "Come on, power's out for most of the block. We'll need to-"

  "There's no time." Ali launched forward, blood hot in his ears, vision tunneling for a second. Before he knew what was happening, he was launching down the street, faster than before.

  "Holy shit," Marco's voice came from behind him. "Holy shit, where did you get all that energy?"

  "We're gonna get you to a hospital," Ali said. "Hold on."

  Jenny's head was bobbing crazily in his arms. She choked another word out, but Ali couldn't decipher it.

  "Ali, slow down, wait-" Marco's voice was father behind him. "How the fuck are you-"

  Ali's focus was a laser, a tunnel narrowing to a diamond-cutting pinpoint of pure intent. The nearest hospital would be destroyed, probably. He needed to get her to the Allina, three blocks down, Northeast, by the Potbelly's. He knew the route, knew it well enough to trace it without looking, to run it at insane, shrieking speed.

  "Hold on," he jabbered, his voice whipped away by the wind streaking around them. "Hold on, please, hold on."

  Silence from Jenny, now.

  "Slow down!" Marco's voice echoed from far off, from a dream. "Ali! You've got to-"

  Here.

  Ali landed in the hospital's lot like a meteor, shattering three feet of asphalt around him in all directions. His Aura caught most of the impact this time, but his shins still had to shatter and reform, in a fraction of a moment, and he was off again, hustling her to the already-bustling doors, now populated with several frozen ER workers staring at him in incomprehension.

  "Please, my friend, we need to-" Ali brandished her body at a nearby doctor, who backed away, stumbling, as if somebody had jabbed a gun at him. "She's hurt, she's-"

  He felt a strong hand clap him on the shoulder, heard a voice, usually so detached and smirking and edged turned so sweet and soft that immediately he knew, with a revolting certainty, that something awful had happened.

  "Ali, kid," Marco said behind him, his voice mournful. "Kid, I'm so sorry. I told you to slow down."

  Shuddering, shaking, Ali lowered his eyes to Jenny's body, limp in his arms.

  He sensed, his newly heightened senses so attuned to energy, that her body was no longer giving off any warmth. He saw, his vision sharper than ever, how her head was dangling, now, hanging as if suspended by nothing more than limp string.

  He felt, his touch so attuned to structure and vibration, how the vertebrae in her neck, her spine, had been shattered in dozens of places, broken in ways they hadn't been broken before he'd taken off with her.

  He heard Marco say something, but his voice was too far away to hear.

  His vision bordered black on the edges and closed in.

  Ali made a choking, rasping noise of awful comprehension, and then lost consciousness.