CHAPTER TWO: AT DEATH'S DOOR
I pushed through the golden doors and the world turned white.
For a horrible, weightless second, I thought I was dead. I thought the light was the last thing, the final mercy, some clinical brightness at the end that poets romanticize and dying men don't get to argue with. Then my pupils adjusted and the whiteness sharpened into sunlight, pavement, and the shape of something that shouldn't exist.
A man. If you could call him that.
He stood somewhere between six-eight and seven feet. His body was a geography of muscle. Not the sculpted, gym-mirror kind. The dense, functional kind, the kind built from tearing things apart rather than lifting them. He was shirtless. Veins ran across his arms like cables. His head was shaved, and even from this distance I could see that his skin was marked. Scarred, pitted, road-mapped with old violence. He probably weighed as much as a compact car.
And he was moving. Straight at Leon. Fast. Too fast for a body that size, the kind of speed that makes your brain reject what your eyes are reporting. He crossed the street in strides that ate the pavement.
I tried to charge my power. Planted my feet, opened my palm, aimed. Nothing. The wind wouldn't come. My arm was still buzzing from the blast I'd thrown in the bank, the nerves still running with static, and when I pushed for more, the air around me barely rippled. This is the limitation of wind manipulation that nobody tells you about. After a full discharge, the ability needs time to recharge. How much time depends on the user's conditioning. Mine was bad.
Useless.
The word landed on me the way it always did.
I was nine years old and every kid in my elementary class had manifested their powers. Fire, water, speed, strength, light. I sat in the back row with empty hands. My parents drove me to three different power therapy clinics. The specialists ran their tests and shook their heads. Give it time, they said. Like time was something I had in surplus.
Middle school. Marcus Hale shoved me into a locker and I snapped, felt the charge build in my fist, swung. Missed Marcus entirely. Sent a wild blast of compressed air into the hallway where it hit Sera Vasquez in the shoulder and knocked her into a water fountain. Sera, who I'd been trying to work up the nerve to talk to all semester. She never looked at me again.
The night my mother came into my bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed and said something happened to your father. I ran. Out the door, down the stairs, into the street in my socks. Running toward a fight that was miles away and already over. Running because standing still felt like agreeing to the loss. I ran until my lungs burned and my socks wore through and a neighbor found me six blocks from home, sitting on a curb, crying so hard I couldn't breathe.
Useless then. Useless now. Standing in the road with my hand raised and my power spent, watching a monster close the distance to the only man who could tell me how my father died.
Leon squared up. He spawned a clone, his fifth and last. All the others were gone. The clone rushed the behemoth head-on. It was like watching someone throw a house cat at a truck. The giant didn't even slow down. He caught the clone by the face with one massive hand and crushed it. No sound effect. No dramatic explosion. The clone simply went away, compressed to nothing between those fingers like smoke.
Then it was just Leon. No clones. No backup. Just a man with silver at his temples and a smile that had finally left his face.
They collided.
Leon was fast. Faster than I'd given him credit for. He ducked the first swing, a haymaker that would have taken his head off, and countered with a sharp elbow to the giant's ribs. The sound was dense, like hitting a side of beef with a pipe. The giant grunted, more annoyed than hurt, and backhanded Leon across the jaw.
Leon went airborne. His body left the ground for a full second before he hit the pavement and rolled, leaving a streak of blood on the asphalt. He got up. Of course he got up. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, spat red, and charged again.
I watched. My hand still raised. My power still dead.
The farther the target, the higher the arc.
The phrase came up from somewhere I wasn't expecting. My father's voice, patient and low. He used to say it whenever I practiced in the backyard, sending my pathetic little wind puffs at cans lined up on the fence. The farther the target, the higher the arc. Aim up, not straight. Let gravity and distance do the work.
I'd never understood why. A blast of compressed air isn't an arrow. It doesn't arc in any traditional sense. But my father had the same power. Wind manipulation. It's classified as a B-minus ability, middle of the pack, the kind of power that doesn't make posters. And he'd been number twenty-five in the world. He knew something about it that the textbooks didn't.
Turn it on its head.
Leon's voice, from training last month. The dirt lot behind the agency. I'd been trying to hit a target forty feet away. Missing. Missing. Missing.
"You keep aiming at the thing you want to hit," Leon had said, leaning against the fence. "Turn it on its head. Think about what you're really trying to move."
I hadn't gotten it then. I was too busy being angry at my power for not being fire or lightning or super-strength, for not being the kind of ability that makes a highlight reel.
Leon took another hit. Skidded across the asphalt. Got up slower this time.
I got it now.
I didn't aim at the giant. I aimed at Leon.
The charge built slowly. I pulled it up from my chest, fed it into my arm, let it accumulate instead of forcing it. The hairs on my forearm went rigid. The air around my palm hummed.
Leon was on the ground. The behemoth raised a foot to stomp. A killing blow.
I fired.
Not at the giant. At the ground beneath Leon.
The blast left my palm with a concussive crack that I felt in my teeth. It crossed the distance in an instant, hit the asphalt just beside Leon's body, and detonated upward. A localized shockwave that launched Leon off the pavement and sideways, tumbling him clear of the giant's foot. The foot came down a half-second later and cratered the road where Leon's chest had been.
Leon hit the ground rolling. Alive. Gasping. But alive.
The giant turned. Slowly. His eyes found me.
He started walking.
My arm was done. The charge was completely gone and I couldn't raise my hand past chest height. I tried. The muscles just quit.
Fifteen yards. Ten.
I didn't run.
I could see the scars up close now. Deliberate marks, ritual scarification covering his chest and arms in patterns I didn't recognize. His eyes were pale grey, almost colorless.
He didn't swing. He just shifted his weight, dropped his shoulder, and walked through me like I was a door that was already open.
My ribs compressed. The air left my body in a sound I'd never made before. Not a scream, not a gasp, something lower, something animal. My feet left the ground. For a fraction of a second I was weightless, and then my back hit the concrete wall of the bank.
The crack was either the wall or me. Maybe both.
I slid down. My legs folded and I ended up sitting on the pavement with my back against the bank's facade, my head hanging forward. Something warm ran down the side of my face. I reached up. Touched my temple. My fingers came back red.
The world was going soft at the edges. Colors bleeding together. The sun too bright and then too dim and the sounds arriving late, waterlogged, like everything was happening at the bottom of a pool.
I looked up.
The giant had already moved past me. I was nothing to him. Not a threat, not a challenge. He'd walked through me and kept going, the way you step over a crack in the sidewalk.
He stopped. Turned. And laughed.
Not a villain's laugh. Not theatrical. A short, genuine chuckle. The kind of laugh you'd give if a puppy tried to bite your ankle. He thought I was funny. He thought how weak I was, was funny.
Then he turned his back to me.
Leon was twenty yards ahead, pulling himself up, blood running from his mouth, his hands up in a guard he didn't have the strength to hold. The giant rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and started running.
"No." Leon's voice, distant. "No. No. No..."
I tried to move. I couldn't. I was pinned against the wall by the fact that my body had nothing left to give. I tried to raise my hand. Tried to open my mouth. Nothing.
The giant closed the distance. Leon braced.
I blinked. The world dimmed.
I blinked again. Slower. My eyelids were heavy.
The last thing I saw, through a narrowing tunnel of fading light, through the blood and the blur: Leon's face. Not his smile. His eyes. Wide. Terrified. Locked on the thing barreling toward him.
And the giant's back, getting smaller, getting farther, eating the distance between them in hungry, ground-cracking strides.
My eyes closed.
The dark took everything.