Pietro gasped as his eyes cleared, the ghost of that horrible whiteness finally clearing, allowing him a thin tunnel of vision.

  "You saw it." Yelena's smiling face filled that tunnel. "You saw into the truth of it, that power. Yes?"

  Pietro nodded feverishly, his breath coming in infantile little hiccups. He'd seen it. He knew now, dimly, what she meant.

  The world around him was flattened, blackened, shimmering somehow.

  "I've healed you, but you need to succor yourself. Look to the blessing that the nuclear light left. Look to the bounty now surrounding you."

  It took a moment of mental groping around for Pietro to perceive what she meant: the otherworldly shimmer suffusing the land around them, like the trembling air rising from hot asphalt. He reached toward the shimmer at his feet with his Aura, drank in the free energy greedily, and felt himself grow stronger.

  "There you go. There you are."

  Pietro's vision cleared further, and he recoiled backward from the hellish vision surrounding them, the leveled onyx scrapyard that used to be a corner of the city he'd spent his adult life inhabiting.

  He reflexively drew backward, away from the reality surrounding him, and bumped into Yelena's cold torso.

  She reached around him and drew him closer, and Pietro was surprised to feel a spark of comfort in that, in the security of her cool arms. He paused, then let himself draw in closer.

  *  *  *

  "What the fuck are we going to do?"

  Sylvia had been repeating this mantra, more to herself than to Peter, for nearly ten minutes now. They stood together, braced behind their acquisitioned home's front door, and stared out into the windswept streets. Garbage and debris fluttered through the dark avenue. Off in the distance, toward the city's center, fires were already burning, smoke climbing in evil pillars, tendrils reaching up to start choking the sky. Distantly, Peter could hear screams.

  There was energy radiating from the ground. He could feel it, intuitively, knocking at the border of his Aura.

  Radiation.

  He knew that, somehow. The energy-

  ("-ionizes atoms, which is bad, obviously, if you happen to be made of them. It's why we make you wear the bib, it's why I have to go over and hide every time I get rads on a patient like you-"

  -was poison, would kill him if allowed in. He set his Aura to catch the ambient radiation and turn it into something more useful, to store it as raw energy, hold it in reserve for later use. He was already feeling oddly vitalized, charged by the surplus.

  "What the fuck are we going to do? What the fuck are we going to do?"

  Sylvia was alternating between touching the door frame and jolting her hands back as if burned. Sensing. She was reaching out too, using her touch to detect the world around her in bursts, pausing every few seconds as some new horror doubtless revealed itself to her.

  Against the thin cacophony of car alarms and whipping wind and creaking foundations, Peter realized he could hear screams. Rising from the city around him like that smoke. He took an unconscious step onto the stoop.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Stay here with Shiv," Peter breathed. "I-"

  "It's not safe out there-"

  "It's safe for us. I think-" Peter stretched, flexed his hands, his Aura. "It might actually be better for us."

  He tilted his head, listened to the growing chorus of moans and cries.

  "But it's not safe for them." He jerked his head toward the city. "I'm going to go help."

  *  *  *

  Fitz coughed up another lungful of black blood, spewed it over the sidewalk in a guttering curtain. He felt something shift and crumble in his chest cavity, felt the sluggish machinery of his power shudder into motion and heal it.

  His armor was glowing, still, dimming from an angry orange to a simmering red as the whipping wind stole snatches of heat from it.

  He stood and stretched, rubbed a gauntlet against the exposed skin on the back of his neck. He glanced down at the gaps on his arm, where he'd been exposed to that unholy glow from the sky.

  The skin there was bubbling, frothing, popping, decaying, growing back.

  "Lord, Matthieu, you were right," he breathed. Fitz barked a laugh of disbelief. "You were right. They've outdone themselves with this."

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The healing was going too slowly for his liking. He reached into his reserves, opened the floodgates, directed as much energy as he could into the regrowth. He felt briefly glad for the five years he'd spent studying the regeneration with Matthieu, running drills together, seeing how quickly they could repair themselves from burns, cuts, frost, rot. He hadn't had to apply himself quite so earnestly to this in maybe a hundred years.

  "Why even have a standing army when you can lob one of those monsters? There's not a stronghold in the world that'd stand up to a wallop like that. I thank God above that King Charles never got his leper's mitts on one." Fitz asked the wind. "They've made the soldier obsolete, Matthieu. You got your wish. But-"

  He flexed, checked again. The skin on his arm was only slightly rumpled, now. The last of those awful pustules were closing up. What had that been? Poison? Was it not enough that the force of the damned thing could level cities, that the heat had scourged the metal around him into slag? They had to dump poison into the air too?

  "-But it's still not enough to keep up with us. So, in a way, we're both right." Fitz looked around for his sword, frowned. It had been blown from his fist by that first shockwave. He sensed it, a few hundred meters from him, embedded in a toppled car, and hobbled over to retrieve it, the bones in his right ankle still busy mending. "They still can't hold a candle to us. The fight remains with the other Consecrated. The tourney is still-"

  It was then that Fitz noticed that the blackened shape crumpled along the curb, just ahead of him, between him and where his sword laid, was moaning.

  He studied it. The shape wasn't just another lump of slag.

  Its voice was high and reedy and tortured. Its body was shattered and ruined.

  He remembered, briefly, the burning villages in Orleans. The women behind the walls.

  Something in his still-roiling, still-rotting guts froze over. He reached down, tried to find a pair of eyes to look into, and failed.

  He flexed his Shroud once, and the moans cut mercilessly short. He walked over and retrieved his blade.

  Fitz stood still for a moment and listened to the haunted wind. He frowned.

  "This isn't fun, anymore, Matthieu. I keep trying, but I can't find the glory in this."

  *  *  *

  "Marco?"

  Ali called out, blind, the light still dancing in his eyes.

  "Marco?"

  No response.

  Ali shuddered, pushed a blanket of rubble from himself. His body was already back, fully healed, spotless and perfect.

  He rose to his feet and looked around.

  The man who had been, one minute ago, begging for Ali to follow him, was shuddering on the ground, on his hands and knees, gasping. His limbs looked ruined, barely supporting him.

  Ali took a stumbling step toward him, feeling dreamlike, watched himself from above. This wasn't real. That was it. That was the explanation. Nothing that had happened in the last few weeks was real.

  "Marco?"

  Ali was at his side now. The young, handsome, well-dressed man was now a bulging, gasping mess. A single eye rolled up to face Ali, blank with fear, uncomprehending.

  Marco shuddered and fell and died.

  Ali stepped back and away. He raised his head to examine his surroundings, the imagery flitting across his eyes like a slideshow, a tv screen watched from a distance, an abstraction.

  Minneapolis, the city he loved, was gone.

  *  *  *

  Simon withdrew from the mouth of the tunnel. The flames around his head had extinguished themselves, his face locked in a tight rictus as his brain whirred with activity.

  They'd been nuked. They'd been nuked. Minneapolis had been hit with a nuclear bomb.

  The world outside shimmered with ambient heat, radiation, energy. A buffet for someone like him. Even as he reeled with the horror of what had happened, part of him was planning, thrilled at the sudden bounty that would be available to him.

  Yet he was crying. Warm tears trickled down toward the corners of his mouth. This was too much. This was too much for him to conceptualize. The reality of what had happened was too sharp for his brain, the spikes of its shape were injuring him. He cast it out, resolved to think about it later, turned back into the comforting dark of the tunnel.

  He realized, ambiently, that Phoenix's drones were the lucky ones now. They'd been spared.

  He thought suddenly of his father. Was surprised at the juvenile hope he felt, that he'd been out of town, at his second home, when the bomb had gone off.

  Much to think about.

  He lit his flames again and wandered back into the dark.

  *  *  *

  "Will they be okay?"

  Pema and Gloria watched as the cardinals hopped out from the cage door they had opened. It took a few moments of tentative hesitation, but they had eventually found their way out, darted up and off towards a thatch of trees.

  The birds had been, in fact, spared. They hadn't been facing westward when the bombs had gone off, hadn't been blinded by the light that still hung in Gloria's vision like a sunburst. Pema had shielded them from the force of the blast, the thinning heat.

  They had been far from the epicenter, but she could already sense the radiation creeping in, a form of energy she hadn't sensed before but innately recognized as sinister, insidious, suddenly abundant. She used her Qi to hold the energy at her border, blocked it from reaching her body.

  Pema arched an eyebrow at her. He glanced back toward the ruined city, the walls of noxious black roiling up from the leveled skyline. His eyes ran over their surroundings, busy and alight, clearly absorbing an incomprehensible amount of data. The lights were all off now, the few errant streetlamps extinguished. An eerie wind had kicked up, artificial and ominous, blowing their way from the city's fresh grave.

  "Maybe the birds will be fine. Maybe they won't. The thing you learn quickly about power, about wielding it, Gloria," Pema looked back toward the empty cage. "Those without it are more fragile than you can imagine. Even with all we have at our disposal, our might matters little. There's only so much we can do to help."

  Gloria shivered as the evil wind began to gust around them. She found herself nodding in agreement.