Madison roused awake amongst dust and reeds and the chitter of night insects. She blinked, scratched some crust from her eye, and worried at the odd, inexplicable feeling of panic pooling in her gut.

  She sat up straight and looked around. It was a clear, starry night, and bolstered by her Field's ability to snatch and interpret even meager light, she managed a good scan through the darkness around her. The savannah was quiet. Maybe a few hundred feet off, the pack of lions she'd been shadowing were lounging, half of the pride asleep, the other half rolling lazily, grooming, batting at fidgety cubs.

  She'd been here for a while, now, following the lions. It had turned out to be a simpler task than she'd expected; with her power, she could hover after them at a respectful distance no matter their speed, and, though none of them had tried, her Field would protect her from the claws and teeth of any of the pride who became spooked enough by her presence to try and attack in the night.

  They really were beautiful animals. She'd worried at first that the sight of the cats, a dream she'd clung to for so many lonely years, would be a disappointment and leave her stranded, bereft of any purpose, but to her delight they had turned out to be even more fascinating and otherworldly than she'd dared hope. The whole landscape, was, in fact.

  The animals that roamed here, in this corner of the world, were magical, larger-than-life, an embodiment of ideas about animals that she'd only up until now had vague, theoretical concepts of. She'd known elephants were large, but the beasts that rolled across this savannah were titans, placid grey behemoths, that actually, literally shook the ground. She'd known the giraffes were tall, but the real thing had a head that cantilevered two stories in the air, had legs taller than a man supporting a body twice her size. And they could run, could lope around at a clip that had shocked her, a girl who, by now, had an extremely firm conceptual grasp on speed.

  And the lions. They were incredible. Madison felt, now, after having spent a few days watching their lives from afar, immersing herself in their rhythms and patterns, that if the whole entire earth had been created solely so that lions could come into existence, then the whole four-billion-year endeavor been worth it.

  The thing that really struck her, beside their sleek, powerful forms and preternatural athleticism, was just how social they were. These were animals that were born into a group, into a pre-existing structure, and who belonged. From the moment they were born to the day they died, as far as Madison could tell, a lion belonged somewhere. It knew who it was, and what it was supposed to be, and did what it needed to do, all in lockstep with its family and pride, never alone, never abandoned, never confined.

  The thought of it was enough to make her weep, sometimes. In envy, in her worse moments, and in secondhand joy, in her better.

  She wasn't feeling misty now, however. As her head cleared from sleep and her Field lazily pulsed, repelling a biting fly that had been persistently trying to land on her shoulder, she felt a growing sense of urgency. The familiar, driving fear that piloted much of her flight had been activated, mobilized like some kind of autopilot, but by what she couldn't tell.

  She glanced around again, saw nothing of note in the savannah around her, and then upward, to the sky, where an odd looking star caught her attention.

  She studied it, a thin, twinkling light in the dark above her, for three seconds before her power kicked in and she streaked a hundred yards up and away in a second.

  Where she'd been sitting, the earth beneath had been obliterated, cratered by the arrival of a blurry figure, wreathed in the largest, most muscular Field Madison had ever sensed. It was twice as large as Victor's, bigger even than Qiang's had been.

  Distantly, the lions perked up, troubled. They began loping away from the sound of the explosion.

  The figure in the crater solidified into a clearer shape. Madison saw her better now: a severe-looking, dark-skinned woman dressed, oddly, in what looked like a spotless blazer and perfectly tailored trousers. She couldn't have been much taller than Madison, maybe 5 foot 3 at best, but the woman radiated such power that another swell of fear sent Madison rocketing up another thirty feet.

  The woman stared up at her and frowned. She extended a hand and loosed several blasts of energy toward her. Madison's power pre-empted these before she'd even known what was happening, piloted her effortlessly around the attacks, leaving her pirouetting, unharmed, in the empty sky.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  The attacker launched herself up after her, now. A series of deafening explosive blasts propelled the woman to blistering speeds almost instantly, but she may as well have been drifting along a gentle breeze with how close Madison's power let her get to making contact. Every time the attacker darted toward her, she flew effortlessly out of the way, weaving and bobbing clear of the line of fire well before the woman had had a chance to reorient.

  After a few seconds of this, the woman returned to the ground, grimaced up at Madison, and cursed under her breath. Her voice sounded slightly accented to Madison, but she wasn't quite worldly enough to place where it might be from.

  "You're not going to make this easy, are you?" The woman called up to her.

  "Who are you? What's happening?" From her place roughly three hundred feet above the ground, Madison swiveled, checking: good, there they were, the lions. The pride was fleeing, now, moving at a good clip northward, clearly eager to get away from the unnatural clamor.

  "My name is Lakshmi Rai, and I really am sorry about this." The woman below, Rai, flung herself from the earth again. She was nearly as high as Madison in the blink of an eye, and still far too late to reach her. Madison swiveled and drifted easily away, watched as Rai rocketed past.

  Then, hell rained from above. Rai had seemingly detached little particulates of her own Field, a trick Madison hadn't known was possible, and was flinging them down toward her, carpeting the savannah with them. Each bloblet of Field detonated massively upon making contact with anything solid, each exploding with a different array of energies: thunderous claps of lightning, blinding bursts of light, withering waves of heat.

  "Stop!" Madison yelled as her Field piloted her around the onslaught, narrowly jerking her out of the way of each new projectile that streaked toward her. Behind and below her, the savannah was being annihilated. Already fires were starting, rifts were yawning open in the ground below, swallowing trees and scrub. All around, animals were fleeing, birds were taking noisy flight.

  Rai continued, heedless. If anything, the rate of her attacks increased, each new chunk of Field replaced with fresh material as fast as she could fling it out. The woman seemingly couldn't run out of Field.

  Deafened and blind, navigating solely by the preternatural instinct her powers gave her, Madison whirled in the air. She arced out from under Rai, shot high into the air, intent on getting away. Rai was after her, now, too slow, and as Madison's body screamed through the smoky night air, her attacker quickly began to shrink behind her.

  She'd thought she was safe. Besides the occasional nightmare starring Qiang, in which the ruined man's body somehow, miraculously, found its way back to her, she'd never even begun to consider that people might still be coming to kill her.

  She'd never be like the lions, she knew now. There was nowhere on this earth where she belonged, where she could roam, safe and free. There would always be someone who wanted to take her, or kill her, or use her.

  And the thought turned to bile in her throat, and the fear propelling her away turned her into rage rocketing her around, toward Rai again. She'd kill this one too, then. She'd grab her and fling her into the depth of space like she'd done to Qiang.

  The Madison of a month ago would have struggled with the thought of this. The Madison from a year ago would have trembled at the idea of so much as hurting a stranger, even one as clearly malevolent as this.

  But that Madison had been destroyed, killed by the same man that had levelled her hometown and slaughtered her only friends before her eyes.

  Madison screamed. Her body accelerated through space, obliterating the sound barrier, leaving roaring explosions in her wake as she scythed through the air, a vengeful missile locked perfectly on target.

  In an instant, Rai was visible again on the horizon, and in another, she was merely feet away from impact.

  And then Madison stopped. The sheer force of her sudden deceleration, even with her Field straining to hold her body together, snapped nearly every bone in her body, sent blood gushing up from her mouth, her nose, her eyes.

  In a few seconds, she was healing, forming back into shape before she'd even begun to process what had happened, before she'd really felt the pain. It took her a few dazed, delirious moments to put the picture together:

  Rai had doubled, tripled the size of her Field in an instant, inflated it to the size of a small house, and had completely enveloped her in it. She couldn't move a muscle. Her Field, thin and tight as it was around her skin, preserved her body, but she couldn't get it to move.

  Rai looked at the girl with something approaching a mixture of pity and awe. "You'd lost me. You could've left."

  Bitter tears welled up in Madison's eyes. The realization that she was trapped began to burn in her, set her heart beating wildly. Claustrophobia gripped her throat. "Let me go, let me go, please, let me go-"

  "Were you going to do to me what you did to Qiang?" Rai asked, contemplative. "Drag me out into space? Hm. Bad luck on your part. That probably would have worked on, probably, anybody but me."

  "Please, please, I don't know you, I didn't do anything to you."

  "No," Rai said, voice soft. The slight woman's shoulders were bowed, as if struggling under an increasingly heavy weight. "No, you didn't do anything wrong. You're just a child."

  "Then why- Why does everyone want to hurt me? Why can't I go anywhere without someone trying to hurt me?!" Madison was sobbing bitterly, now.

  "Because the world is cruel, and unfair, and broken." Rai said. "It's why it needs me to fix it."

  Madison wasn't listening to her. "Please, please just leave me alone. I'm so tired of running from people."

  "You'll be able to stop soon," Rai said, almost soothing. If it weren't for the monstrously strong mega-Field pinning the two of them in space, she might have reached forward to touch her shoulder. "You won't have to run any more. I'm truly so sorry."

  And with that, the Field that was surrounding Madison flexed once. Then, inexorable, incomprehensibly strong, it began to crush inward, all around her.