An image of Victor swam, hazy and suspended in nothing. It wasn’t even a discernible, visual image so much as it was a snapshot of his essence: Madison sensed the smell of his cheap deodorant, the ruffle of his starchy polo, the warmth of his smile. She experienced these impressions without any actual sensory organs to accompany them: she didn’t know where her ears where, what she was seeing through, whether or not she had skin.

  Victor spoke to her, but didn’t speak. He had no voice, as he had no body, because he was there and wasn’t in equal measure. He said to her, all at once and in terms too loose to be defined in actual words:

  “He didn’t have my permission. But you do.”

  That image she had of Victor brightened, colored itself warmer. The incorporeal version of a reassuring smile and a faint nod.

  “Take it. You’ll be strong. Take it and get away. Please.”

  Madison woke up just in time to feel one final pop as her spinal cord snapped back into one long, unbroken structure. The force of the reconstruction jerked her body off the ground, into a sitting position. She felt a funny tingle in her mouth as fresh teeth sprouted from her gums, peeking out merrily like cartoon groundhogs.

  She saw, with freshly rejuvenated eyes, in vision sharper than any she’d enjoyed in life before, Qiang’s distant form, shuddering in place among the rubble of the stadium. He was picking at the skin on his face, viciously scratching it. Flakes of flesh were snowing from his skull, darkening to near-black in the time it took for them to drift to the turf. He was grimacing, lipless teeth bared in what could have been mild irritation or deep confusion.

  Both of Madison’s lungs re-formed in that moment, popping back into healthy volume one after another, causing her to cough, twice, sharply. Qiang swiveled his head at that, gaped at the sight of her sitting, unharmed, among the wreckage. He tilted his head, eyes darting from her to Victor’s spent corpse off to her side, putting two and two together.

  “That’s… that’s no fair,” he said, bemused. He took a few casual steps toward her, reached out with an open, expectant palm. “He-that’s what I came here for. Gimme it.”

  Something about the juvenile whine to his voice, the childish way he was tottering over to her, he who had the blood of her very first friends still spattered on his hideous jumpsuit, sent a knife of hot ire spiking through Madison’s chest.

  She was surprised to find that she didn’t feel any fear at the moment, or any of the resignation for death she’d been so full of moments ago. She was taken off guard by how the rage bubbled in her chest now, how it gripped and wrung her throat tightly closed. She didn’t realize until she was already off the ground that her body had begun to rise up, buoyed by an invisible tide of fury, and that she was already flying, now, dangling three inches, stuck in place over the ground.

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  Qiang tilted his head the other way at that, gurgled a laugh. “Hey now. My face is falling off and I’m not in the mood to chase anybody right now. Don’t go flying off-”

  Madison rocketed into the man, leaving some sort of ear-splitting explosion in her wake at the speed of it, hugging him tight around the torso and streaking off into the sky, covering hundreds of feet in the time it took for his last word to hiccup to a surprised end.

  So far, Madison’s flight had been propelled mostly by fear. It was largely automatic, she’d discovered, and her body piloted itself well through the air, generally operating by the principle of putting whatever she was afraid of far behind her, and moving just enough to avoid striking any obstacles. She’d become markedly better at controlling it, reining this impulse-driven flight with a little more finesse then before, but it was still largely an unconscious impulse, one that acted of its own accord, and one entirely designed around getting her away from something.

  Now, as she stared a tear-blurred hole through this horrible man’s disgusting face, as she felt her skin begin to slough off from the friction of the red-hot air around her, she realized that she’d been using her power in reverse this whole time.

  She’d been afraid, and flying away from things, and it had made her slow and clumsy.

  Now she was furious, and flying toward this man that every cell in her body craved more than anything to kill, and her rage was making her faster, more agile than she could have ever even imagined an object could be.

  In less than a second, the sky around her went from blue, to grey, to white, to black, speckled with streaks of starry white. She dimly felt the change in temperature: temperate to searingly hot to totally frigid. Her skin peeled away at the speed, her skeleted creaked and shattered and buckled, but that image of Victor’s smile welled up in her again, and her veins sang with power, and the pain was gone, and her body remade, over and over again.

  Qiang took a moment to goggle around, completely disarmed by this change in locale, body flattening in on itself briefly as their ludicrous momentum folded him backwards. He summoned his impossible strength, then, to raise his head and look at Madison, to look past her, at the empty space streaking around them, and his expression flickered from disbelief, to amusement, to panic, in moments.

  He reached up with one hand and cleanly severed both of Madison’s arms, kicking away from her torso, freeing himself. He hung briefly in the black of space, radiation-ravaged body still decaying and remaking itself in tatters, tumbling head-over-heels as his momentum kept him moving. He raised a hand to stop himself, found nothing solid to brace against, then let loose with a wave of kinetic energy. With a few more clumsy blasts, he managed to come to something resembling a stop, then looked around. He caught a glimpse of Madison, already very far away from him, and opened his mouth to say something, seemed surprised when no sound was carried by the empty void.

  Then Madison’s arm and chest healed, and she felt another fresh wave of hatred, and she barreled into him again.

  They continued like this for so long, Madison slamming into him at ridiculous velocity, dragging him farther out into the black until Qiang was collected enough to break free, that Madison felt her air-starved lungs give up and die twice. Such was her rage that she needed to suffocate to near-death twice before the embers of it began to cool.

  Qiang kicked away again, detonating most of her upper body with the blow, and began yet another of his attempts to clumsily right himself in the nothingness.

  By then, they were completely lost in the abyss. Whatever blue glow had marked Earth’s presence behind her was gone. They were alone, now, drifting in the not-dark, Qiang thrashing and exploding and tumbling, Madison hanging in the air with perfect, still grace.

  She stared at the corpse of the man, his eyes bugging, tears floating out in weightless orbs, filled with what looked like a childish fear of the aimless dark surrounding them, and felt no sympathy.

  He caught a glimpse of her, saw that she shared none of this fear, and it seemed to briefly infuriate Qiang. He reached out, let loose with a massive wave of heat, but he missed miserably, Madison’s power flinging her back hundreds of feet before he’d even let loose.

  She watched, fiery rage cooling to icy satisfaction, as he thrashed and gaped at the emptiness around him, and thought of Earth. She felt her power kick in, felt it maneuver her automatically back to where she wanted to go, and left the Demigod to soundlessly thrash alone in the dark.