Rai ignored the incessant pins-and-needles itch of her continuously reforming flesh as she whipped through the lower Stratosphere. The Atlantic ocean yawned beneath her, slightly blurred by her passing, even at this great height.

  "Two seconds out. Look for the orange lights."

  She heeded the buzzing in her ears, rendered a little more muffled by the fluctuating condition of her eardrums.

  She'd absorbed the lion's share of the energy of eight nuclear explosions. She'd nullified all of the heat, most of the kinetic energy, and a great portion of the sound and light that had hit her, but the radiation had proved trickier. Her cells didn't lose their radioactivity when they died, and kept poisoning their surrounding cells unless they were completely destroyed. So she had been flash-burning off her own cells, killing and regrowing one patch of body at a time, like a firefighter razing swaths of woodland to contain a forest fire. It worked, slowly, agonizingly, but it worked.

  All while rocketing across the planet and systematically obliterating as much high-profile American military infrastructure as Maldonado could point her to.

  "There."

  Rai plummeted from the sky toward the amber glow far beneath her. In an instant the light resolved into a shape: a hulking aircraft carrier. She felt the thrum of its twin nuclear reactors as she arced toward its surface, and the still-radioactive flesh below her ears itched.

  With a gesture, she drew from her immense, hidden reserves. The energy came to her, diminished and sluggish compared to the absolute control she'd enjoyed when bathed in the inexplicable field suffusing Minneapolis.

  It was less than she was used to, but still more than enough to do what she wanted.

  With a swing of her fist, she released the energy she'd stored. The front of the ship detonated as the force of her blow folded the structure in on itself, sending a chunk of ship five stories tall lurching upward and plunging almost half of the rest into the water. Immediately a chain of other explosions began to ring out as the ship's systems collapsed in on themselves. The sound was deafening, a roar that somehow drew on even as the massive carrier began slipping sideways under the waves.

  Rai was already up and away.

  "Full speed to your two o'clock. You'll be there in six minutes and two seconds."

  Rai arrived at a nuclear refinery and within moments the facility was little more than ruined concrete and glassed desert.

  "Now three minutes and thirty-nine seconds due South. Look for the dome-shaped building."

  Forty-five experimental aircraft, each with a nine-digit price tag, left broken like discarded toys.

  "Nine minutes and nine seconds out. You'll know this one when you see it."

  A sprawing five-sided building, wreathed in city lights and nestled by the Potomac, razed before the scrambled fighters can begin to intervene.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  "Five hundred fifteen feet down, you'll come through above him"

  Rai used her Field to pull earth from below, depositing above her, an earthworm's advance played in fast-forward. She hurtled through strata of dirt and rock and concrete before bursting into a fluorescently-lit bunker.

  The President of the United States, dead and bleeding on the floor of his panic room before she can lift a finger to hurt him. A Secret Service agent was still brandishing his gun when she burst through the ceiling. Three others surrounded him, weapons drawn and ostensibly aimed at the defector, conflicted and agitated. Nobody felt for their triggers.

  Rai stared at the assassin, nonplussed.

  "Don't- please don't- Look, he's already dead." The man dropped his gun, stared at her. He clearly had no idea what she was, but he knew enough to be afraid. "I had to kill him. I-"

  "You beat me to it." Rai studied the quickly paling corpse on the ground. The man's toupee had been mostly blown from his head and hung hinged by a strand, ajar.

  The man looked from Rai to the President's body. His hands were shaking, from rage or nerves Rai couldn't tell. "My mom lives there. Lived there. Saint Paul."

  Rai nodded. "My condolences. Don't worry, this all ends now."

  Rai rocketed back out of the tunnel she'd left, and Maldonado's voice fizzed back into her (by now, significantly less itchy) ear canal.

  "Up fifty meters and then two minutes of flight to your five o' clock. Hurry, his jet's almost on the runway."

  A minute later, Rai had crashed through the fuselage of a large business airliner as it taxied away from its gate. She strode through the scrap littering the plush carpet and scooped John Darrow from the booth where he'd been cowering alongside what looked to be his wife and adult son.

  "-fuck, wait, stop!" Darrow choked as she snatched him into the air, her hand viced around the base of his throat. "-wasn't my call. I was against it. I was against it!"

  "You had the authority to stop it, Darrow. You're one of the three men in the country who could've called it off."

  "-overrode. The President-"

  "Is dead now. Besides, the man could hardly pick out a tie without delegating it to a lackey. You could've taken the reins. You didn't, because you hoped it'd kill me. Kill us."

  "Please!" The elegant-looking woman cringing away from Rai in her booth managed to say. "Please, he didn't- He didn't know-"

  "Ma'am, your husband knew. Knowing was one of his duties. Along with leading." Rai leveled a look of cold, blank hatred at Darrow. "You and your ilk are drunk at the wheel, Darrow. You've officially burned your final bit of good will. I'm revoking your power, your control of the country, today."

  "What, so you can take over?"

  "You've left me no choice."

  "Convenient." Darrow, to his credit, managed to make the thin exhalation that escaped his cramped windpipe sound defiant. "No choice but to rule the world. I'm sure you're devastated."

  "I watched you nuke a city," Rai hissed. "I'm never going to be able to forget what you made me see tonight."

  Her hand clenched tighter around his neck. Darrow spared the other two passengers a single glance.

  "Please, not in front of my family."

  Rai felt a twinge of hesitation. Only a twinge. "Why? It'd be hard for them to see? What, you suddenly care about bad things happening to families?" She jostled him, hard enough to crack his collarbone. Darrow cried out. "You nuked. A city."

  She squeezed his windpipe, slow. She could have killed him hundreds of times over in the time it had taken her to have this conversation, but the fury gnawing at her chest stayed her hand, made her draw it out.

  Darrow had enough air left in his lungs for one last sentence. "I can't believe I'm going to be outlived by Aldo Hatch."

  "Well you can rest easy," Rai said. "I killed Hatch forty-five minutes ago."