Chapter Five
Hannah
Hannah sensed the wrongness long before she could articulate it.The entire city felt as though someone had slipped a glass dome over it, muting the nightlife, muffling the traffic, flattening the usual rise and fall of sound that defined New Athens after dark.She and Gray had been sweeping the rooftops for hours, moving in a steady rhythm born from days of working side by side, but the only thing they found was unnatural silence, heavy with threat.
Five cities had already been hit.Five simultaneous crises timed to spread the Initiative thin.New Athens should have been the next target.Instead, the quiet stretched on until even her breathing seemed too loud.
“It doesn’t feel like they backed off,” she said finally, letting the electricity that gathered along her fingers spark once before she forced it still.“It feels like they’re waiting for us to relax.”
Gray stood at the edge of the rooftop, his gaze fixed on the city as though he were reading the patterns of darkness and streetlight like a map.Even without touching him, she could sense the low hum of his power, steady and contained, but threaded with a tension she recognized as unease.He wasn’t a man who rattled easily, and that made the current running under his skin feel even more startling.
“They’re saving this one,” he said quietly.“Whatever they’re planning, they want an audience.”
Hannah turned toward him.The wind caught the fine strands of hair near his temple, lifting them just enough that she saw the faint glow of electricity playing beneath his skin.It tugged at her own power like an invitation, the connection between them warming with every hour they spent side by side.She wondered how long she could pretend that the pull between them was just the bond and not something deeper that left her heart stumbling whenever his gaze lingered too long.
When every screen in the city lit up, she thought it was a power surge, the kind that sometimes rippled through the older grid near the river.But the lights didn’t flicker.They synchronized, casting cool illumination over the streets below.Billboards shifted to the same image.Digital menus in cafés lit up in unison.Apartment windows glowed with identical frames.Even the news drones hovering above the financial district froze midair and rotated toward the highest surface they could display.
A single face filled every screen.
Dr.Helena Pierce.
Hannah’s stomach dropped.Pierce had been a shadow for years—always whispered about, always operating behind proxies, never stepping into the spotlight herself.Seeing her now was like a threat sharpened to a blade’s edge.
Gray went still beside her.A tightening of energy shifted through the air as though the electrical field around him had contracted to a single painful point.
Behind Pierce stood a line of Dioscuri variants, arranged in a precise formation that made them look like trophies.And beside them towered a massive cylindrical machine pulsing with the same sickly green light the Initiative had recovered from earlier skirmishes.
“The prototype,” Hannah whispered.“They’re showing it off.”
Pierce began to speak, her voice amplified through every speaker in the city, each syllable unnervingly calm.
“Citizens of New Athens...”
Hannah braced herself.
Because she knew the attack had just begun.
Pierce’s voice rolled across the city, carried by the speakers embedded in every walkway, lobby, and passing drone.It had the practiced cadence of someone who’d spent years waiting for the perfect moment to reveal herself.Hannah listened as the broadcast shifted from manufactured concern to carefully constructed horror, the screens cycling through scenes of destruction taken from the attacks across the country.Fires.Collapsing metal.Bodies carried from rubble.All real events, all twisted by omission and angle until the Initiative looked like the villain.
Not one frame showed Brynn rescuing civilians in Chicago, or Sarah intercepting falling debris above LAX.Nothing of Xavier and Ari pulling people from an invisible attacker, nothing of Jem and Chris containing an earthquake-level threat.Only terror.Only chaos.Only the narrative Pierce wanted the world to believe.
Then the footage changed.
Gray tensed before she understood why.His image appeared on the screens angry and exhausted.Lightning arced dangerously around his body in the interrogation room.The moment he’d come closest to losing control.A moment he’d regretted.A moment no one outside that room should have ever seen.
Hannah’s breath went tight in her chest.“Gray, how did they get this?”
He didn’t answer.His jaw clenched, and the electricity circulating under his skin brightened with a painful flash before he forced it back down.She knew that look.It wasn’t fear of exposure; it was fear of what this would do to others.Fear of confirming the story Pierce wanted to tell.
He had worked for years to prove Pollux variants could be calm, measured protectors.One stolen moment was all it took to fracture that image.
Hannah stepped closer, instinct guiding her before she had time to question it.The space between their bodies warmed with the slow, coaxing pull of their bond.Power recognized power, settling her heartbeat even as the city darkened around them.Gray didn’t look at her, but the slight shift of his shoulders told her he appreciated her being there.
