Rai stood, fuming, her head tilted up toward the night sky. There were stars visible. She hadn't seen stars over the Cities since she'd arrived, but the metro, with so much of its electrical grid now ruined, no longer burned brightly enough to snuff them all out.

  She searched the little pinpricks of light, trying to discern if any of them was the exhaust plume trailing a missile, and not a distant ball of plasma and gas.

  "Three minutes out," Maldonado's voice, just a shade reedier than Rai had ever heard it, sounded in her earpiece. "Three minutes, fifteen seconds. It'll be coming from the West at an angle, from orbit, moving fast."

  "How fast is fast?"

  "15, 16 thousand miles an hour."

  Rai cursed. This was a feeling she had nearly forgotten: unconfidence.

  "That may be too fast for you to run down," Maldonado continued.

  "I won't need to chase it, just put myself in its path. Fields move quicker than thought. If it intersects with mine, I'll have control of it."

  "It's bigger than your field."

  Rai blinked. "It's bigger than the plane was?"

  "It's an ICBM, well over a hundred meters long, yes. Your Field's cubic volume is-"

  "I know bloody well how big my own fucking Field is," Rai seethed. "Let me think."

  She picked at the skin on her hands, her Field boiling around her, sending little pebbles skittering around on the asphalt of the ruined lot she stood in.

  "I'll fire off some EMP," Rai said after a few seconds of brooding. "Fry their electronics."

  "They'll be EMP-shielded."

  "Then I'll prime my Field for electricity, reach inside the missile with it. I'll be able to bypass the shields that way, and if anything it'll be quicker and neater. I just need to intercept it."

  "Won't work," Maldonado chirped, after an almost imperceptible pause. "The missile will still be able to function without electricity. Two minutes, fifty seconds out, now."

  "How? Even if there's some sort of dead man's switch installed, wouldn't it need electricity to trigger?"

  "It'd be kinetically triggered, if anything."

  Rai didn't know what that meant. "Then I suck kinetics out, too. I'll prime for both. It's not the easiest trick in the world, but I've-"

  "Even you can't absorb multiple forms of energy without compromising some efficiency," Maldonado said, fast and sure. "If there's even a whisper of energy still in the system, it might be enough to set it off. Two minutes, thirty seconds."

  "I thought it didn't need energy to-" Rai had a brief, irrational impression that Maldonado was deliberately thwarting her. She squashed the idea. She was just stressed, moreso than she'd been in years, and she couldn't afford to start second-guessing her single most potent intelligence asset now, of all times. "Fine. Fine! I'll just go intercept it, then. Slam into the thing while it's still in orbit-"

  "You can't fly fast enough. You'd have one chance to hit it, flying blind without me, and you'd probably miss and have to play catch-up, which you're not quick enough to do before it entered Twin Cities airspace. Better to just stay here and wait."

  "Fuck." She was right. Rai could fly fast, or fly accurately, but not both. Rai kicked the ground, the force of the mindless gesture enough to send a nearby building rattling on its foundations. "You could've told me that ten minutes ago."

  "I didn't know it was coming ten minutes ago. The fact that I know now is only because one of my source's bosses got cold feet and squealed at the last second."

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Rai had to let Maldonado have that at least. Getting even a few minutes' notice of an orbital missile's approach was a monumental achievement, and one that, God willing, would be enough to let Rai keep this potential disaster at least somewhat managed.

  She felt that familiar righteous fury flare up in her chest again. The instant that nuke is out of the air and her feet are back under her, heads will roll in the Pentagon. Rai wanted nothing more than to make sure of it herself.

  "I'll try. I'll try, and if it goes off anyway, I'll try to suck up as much of the blast as I can. If I can't stop it, I can at least hamstring it."

  "That…" Maldonado paused. "Could work."

  "Good to hear."

  "It could also kill you."

  "Perish the thought," Rai scoffed. "Haven't I said it before? I'm never going to die."

  She launched from the ground. Her first few seconds of flight were wild and fast, propelled by force siphoned out from her massive, hidden reserves and channeled out from beneath her feet and hands, flinging her up into the sky like a rocket. Once she had a few thousand meters beneath her, she switched to the other form of flight available to her: she suspended herself within the ample bounds of her Field and moved herself physically through the space, shifting her Field up as well when she reached its uppermost edge. This rapid inchworming effect still let her move far faster than most people ever could, but would never come close to approaching the velocity of a nuke, or even a particularly motivated plane.

  She held herself in place a mile or so above the city, glanced down at its mauled footprint, a concrete sprawl dotted with lakes, bisected by the grey Mississippi, and raked across with two great furrows: one from that inexplicable blast of green energy that had nearly killed Phoenix but had succeeded in taking out several dozen square miles of city with it, and the long crater dug by that flying girl, as she dragged Qiang's body through the earth before streaking up into space.

  All around, pocking the city's surface like the moon's craters, were chunks of earth and infrastructure upturned by other Sensitives in their fighting. Most of the suburbs and the upper quarter of Saint Paul were largely intact, maybe scuffed or shuffled by debris. The heart of Minneapolis, surrounding the now-crumbling baseball stadium, had been razed near-flat by Qiang and Victor. And the corner of Downtown that Rai had fought the other Demigods in was fully unrecognizable, not even as a former city, but as an Earthly landscape at all.

  Lights danced below. Not nearly as many as their had been even a week ago, but still, dozens of settlements persisted, fed by portable generators or the few segments of electrical infrastructure over-engineered or lucky enough not to have been severed. People, fragile, mortal people, were living out their lives amongst this chaos, and any failure on Rai's part, here and now, would spell their excruciating end.

  No pressure. Rai steadied herself, craned to peer up into the thinning stratosphere.

  "Just under two minutes out, probably. Expecting a re-established visual any moment now," Maldonado's voice, tranquil and pleasant as ever, buzzed in her ear, half-muzzled by a weakened signal.

  "Right. Good." Just then, Rai had an idea. "Just enough time for this."

  She swiveled in the air, facing back down toward the city. She took a deep breath and primed her Field to avert any sound approaching her ears, then amplified her voice, enhancing it to forty, fifty times its usual volume.

  "CITIZENS OF THE TWIN CITIES," she boomed. Or, at least, she assumed she boomed, given that she'd rendered herself proactively deaf. "A NUCLEAR WARHEAD IS APPROACHING. I, LAKSHMI RAI, WILL DO WHAT I CAN TO SAFELY DESTROY IT. SHOULD I FAIL, IT WILL DETONATE ABOVE THE CITY SOON, WITHIN TWO MINUTES. GET UNDERGROUND IF POSSIBLE. TAKE ANY COVER THAT YOU CAN, NOW. "

  She felt a twinge of reassurance at having done that, at having maybe, potentially, alleviated some of the devastation with her warning. If anything, the ghouls who launched the missile would be pissed that she'd spoiled their precious tactical edge.

  "It's coming into view now. If you're maintaining altitude then you want to be thirty meters West, six hundred meters North."

  Rai molded her Field to a rough ballpark of five meters long, counted six inchworm hops left, a hundred and twenty back.

  "Close. Shift back another ten feet or so."

  Rai did as she was told, then floated, stretched her Field to its utmost, and set to priming it to suck in any electricity, then any kinetic energy, that it could.

  There she hovered, immune to the chill of the air, Field so sensitive that it snatched errant flickers of static electricity from the wind.

  Just above her, one of the stars began to twinkle just a little brighter.

  "Fuck," Maldonado cursed in her ear.

  Rai couldn't feel the cold in the air, but she shivered at the sound of Maldonado's voice. "What?"

  "It's a fucking MIRV."

  The star was bright, now, reddening. Rai could feel a chest-deep thrum as the energy-attuned sensors inherent to her power picked up on the approach of something massive and fast.

  "I don't know what that is."

  "It's not just one nuke," Maldonado hissed.

  The star above her grew, swelled. Rai could hear a distant engine.

  "It's twelve."

  The star burst, separated into a dozen glittering projectiles, each one growing, wickedly fast.

  The twelve missiles, trajectories ruined by the force of their split from the rocket's main body, spread around Rai, leaving her behind.

  She gathered herself, launched after them. She charged into one: a much smaller projectile than the main missile had been, and enveloped it with her Field, pulled it apart atom-by-atom, transforming it from a city-razing superweapon to a loose cloud of hydrogen in a fraction of a second.

  Then she sped off toward another, catching and pulling it apart even quicker. Then another. Then another.

  Then, screaming in wordless frustration and fear, her hand outstretched toward her next target, Rai's vision became a sheet of pure white.

  So blinded by that awful, all-encompassing light, Rai barely felt the impact, barely heard the blasts, as eight nuclear bombs detonated at once above Minneapolis.