Pema hurtled through the air, the blackened hulk of the city passing in a blur below him as he arrowed toward the Qi-signal pulsing like a lighthouse.

  He hadn't slept in the two days since his encounter with the knight. He'd been too occupied helping to round up the few remaining Qi users left, getting them situated in his makeshift colony with Gloria at the hotel. The duo and their ailing sister had been joined by a young man he'd found, a boy called Ali, who had been wandering, unresponsive and on the brink of mental breakdown, in the ruins near Downtown. That boy was partly comatose, now, stowed away in one of the hospital beds.

  He'd located Yelena and the young man she had taken as her captive, or companion, or experiment. He hadn't peered too deeply into her mind for context; any attempt he'd made on penetrating Yelena's psyche had filled him with a reflexive, self-defensive urge to pull back out, as if there lurked knowledge within her that stood a psychic risk to him. Perusing her mind had felt like blindly groping around a box filled with used syringes, liable to poke and infect him at any time. He knew better than to approach her with any offers of cohabitation.

  The knight himself had disappeared quickly after their battle. Whether he would be returning for his dirk, Pema had yet to tell. The fact that Fitz had managed to completely elude him thus far made him a little nervous. He'd beaten him before, but the reality that he'd be unable to kill the man, and that, in his opinion, very few other people on the planet stood a chance of overpowering Fitz, troubled him.

  He'd sighted a young man, his head ensconced in flame, darting through the wreckage of a department store earlier that morning, but the young man had fled before Pema could get a closer look.

  His top concern, however, was that he'd seen no signs of Phoenix or his cult. There was a chance that this was because the man himself was dead, but Pema had lived too much life to buy into so convenient a possibility this early. He'd never met Phoenix, had managed somehow to avoid any run-ins with the acolytes that made up his forces, but trace looks into Peter and Sylvia's mind had given him plenty of reason to worry about the figure's absence.

  So when a flare of powerful Qi began to stir toward the city's center, near the river that bisected it, he'd started over as fast as he could. He arrived at the source within seconds, dropping from the sky just in time to see what looked like a young woman clad in all black, sprinting from the mouth of a tunnel set just alongside the riverbank.

  The woman detonated a blast of Qi at her feet and hurtled away from the tunnel, and when Pema moved to intercept her with his sensory field he became gripped with a sense of vertigo strong enough to wring a gag from him.

  The woman's mind was warped, broken. Her memories were wrong, fundamentally, and even glancingly experiencing them had wrenched at Pema's own mental architecture.

  He withdrew out of reflex, then arced after the woman. She noticed his approach far too late, had only enough time to ready a single blast of energy his way. Pema was still outside her mind, but he read the attack easily enough to prepare his Qi Field well ahead of time.

  And yet the burst blew past his defenses, overwhelming him in a moment, shattering the bones in his shoulder. Pema gasped, more in surprise than pain (a sense of his that had largely atrophied decades ago). The blast had been folded in on itself, had delivered several orders of magnitude more force than the volume composing it should have been able to contain.

  Unbearably curious now, Pema dropped toward her, arm already healing, and dispatched the fleeing woman with a series of gentle strikes to her joints; just enough to penetrate her defenses and ruin the landing she was attempting to make.

  As she stumbled, he alighted next to her and expanded his Qi to its fullest size, large enough that he was able to tangle her arms and midriff within it, pinning her still.

  She was wearing a mask, he saw now. A sheer green covering over her face, devoid of eyeholes. From behind it she garbled what sounded like a sibilant sort of bark at him, feral and furious.

  "Peace," Pema breathed, hands raised, palms open. "Calm yourself. I have no desire to hurt you, child."

  If the woman understood what he was saying, she didn't show it. She struggled viciously against the Field binding her, wrenching her shoulder joints nearly out of their sockets, all the while chattering her strange, rapid-fire hiss-click growls of protest.

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  Something about the rhythm of those vocalizations struck Pema as interesting. He listened, focusing on the movements of her mouth beneath the mask as she garbled.

  She was speaking, he realized. It's just that her words were moving far faster than normal speech should. It clicked for him then, why his foray into her mind had been so disorienting.

  Pema reached up and peeled the mask up, revealing her face: the grimy, unwashed features of a young woman. Her hair, where it peeked below the top of the mask, was pitch black and frazzled, dotted with dandruff. Her eyes were bloodshot and sunken, the pupils darting around crazily, flitting from one of Pema's features to the other nearly in a blur, moving like hummingbirds. Her lips were dry and cracked.

  He steeled himself, more prepared now for what to expect, and glanced into her mind again. The experience was still deeply disorienting, but he was able to make out glimpses, outlines of her memories and thoughts.

  This poor young woman, Hannah Zhou, a former kickboxer from Saint Louis, Missouri, was experiencing the world at one tenth the speed she should be. Ever since she'd crashed her motorcycle and experienced the paraplegia that had derailed her career, ever since she'd had the misfortune of hearing about Phoenix from an undercover Acolyte sent to spread the word surreptitiously at hospitals and care centers, ever since she'd submitted to his hand and been made and un-made again, coaxed into Qi Sensitivity, healed, and nearly consumed, she'd been stuck living her life in a world that flowed agonizingly slowly around her, in a timeline thick and viscous as mud.

  The woman's mind was fraying at the edges, had been for years now. Her condition, Pema could dimly surmise, was a product of a powerful Knack she'd awakened when Phoenix had converted her: namely, her ability to fold her Field in on itself, to compress impossible amounts of mass and energy into small volumes, worked similarly on time, constantly and without abating, trapping her in this slow-motion existence. This warping of her lived experience, this relative acceleration of the pace of her thoughts compared to those of the people around her, had made her impossible for Phoenix's power to control, freeing her only a day after her conversion.

  And it's been her single-minded obsession with killing Phoenix that has kept her going since. In a world where time moved too slowly for her to communicate with anyone around her, where even the acts of using the bathroom or eating became interminable slogs, the keystone she managed to construct her remaining motivation to keep living upon was the death of Phoenix at her hands. She repeats it to herself like a mantra, clings to it like a talisman: Phoenix will die for what he did to her. She doesn't plan on living much longer after that.

  Pema withdrew from her mind and frowned, heart swelling with sympathy. Focusing on the control his power gave him over his own sense of time, he did his best impression of what a vocal delivery at 10x speed should sound like.

  "Oh, you poor thing," Pema chattered.

  Hannah's body froze at that, her red-rimmed eyes ceasing their frantic bouncing to focus, still, on his face. Her lower lip wobbled a touch, and she hiss-garbled something else, short and clipped but still noticeably tinged with a raw, ragged hope.

  Pema ducked back into her brain, just a fraction, focusing on the part of her mind centered around speech. "Yes, I understand you. No need to talk, I can hear your thoughts, if you focus on them."

  Hannah's eyes didn't well with tears, but something hard just beneath the twitching mask of her face relaxed at that, dropped a weight it had been carrying for years.

  "You understand me? You can hear me now?"

  "I hear you."

  Hannah's lips twitched; not a smile, but something gesturing in the direction of one. "I haven't had a real conversation, one that wasn't in writing, in three years."

  "And, given your condition, I imagine it's felt a lot more like thirty." Pema was pleased to find that he was getting the hang of speaking at such a rate.

  Hannah nodded, eyes focused on the middle distance, now, the faraway look of someone recounting an impossible ordeal. "Who are you? How are you doing this?"

  "My name is Pema, and I fear that the answer to that last question would be too complicated for me to do justice talking at this speed. Let's just say that I have a Knack for understanding things."

  "Can you- Would you let me go?"

  "Oh, of course, where are my manners?" Pema dropped his Qi, letting her backpedal away from him, even her stumbling footsteps quick and precise. "You seem very, understandably, tired. I wanted to let you know that I've established a safe haven nearby, for those of us still remaining here in the ruins of this city. You're welcome to come and rest."

  Hannah shook her head, a gesture so quick that only Pema would have noticed it. "Can't rest. Can't let myself rest. Not until-"

  Hannah stumbled, straightened, and then fell to a knee. Concerned, Pema peered into her again and saw what was happening: she was deeply wounded. She'd been in several dozen fights with Acolytes of various strengths in the last few days, had barely slept, hadn't eaten. She was operating now with three cracked ribs, a sprained ankle, and a fractured tailbone. The shock of this conversation, of allowing herself to loosen just a fraction, to suddenly find herself in the presence of someone who could understand her, had halted the sheer momentum that had been keeping her conscious.

  "Not until I-"

  Pema darted forward, caught her before she collapsed. "I'm going to take you with me. I'll get you set up in a bed, arrange for some first aid. You should rest."

  She shook her head again, a touch more lethargically, but still so quick that her features blurred. "Can't rest. Can't rest until Phoenix is-"

  "Is dead?" Pema looked out past her, toward the mouth of the tunnels. He turned his attention back to Hannah. "How's this? Hannah, I myself am, as you've seen, quite powerful. Almost definitely stronger than the monstrosity who did this to you."

  He saw a flash of that wounded, wary hope in her eyes again.

  "I'll go take care of him," Pema said. "I'll do it, but only on the condition that you come to my haven and rest. Does that strike you as fair?"

  Hannah Zhou mustered just enough energy to Pema him a blink-fast nod of her head, and then she passed out in his arms.