The broadcast played on, Pierce’s voice now addressing the Senate vote, urging the public to demand mandatory power removal as the only pathway to safety.Hannah’s anger simmered low and persistent, curling hot through her limbs.It wasn’t just that Pierce was lying.It was the way she weaponized people’s fear as casually as someone flipping a switch.
Then a sound rose beneath Pierce’s final words, muffled at first but unmistakable.Shouting.Breaking glass.A crash that echoed through the maze of buildings to the rooftop where she and Gray stood.
Another crash followed, sharper this time, a detonation that washed orange light across the street several blocks away.
Gray met Hannah’s gaze for the first time since the footage of him appeared, and the full force of his control slipped under the pressure of anger—not at the rioters, but at himself, for giving Pierce a weapon so easily abused.
“We need to move,” he said.
They ran.
The bond guided their pace as they descended the rooftop and crossed alleys choked with smoke.Every step brought the sounds of violence into sharper focus.The raised voices were no longer afraid.They were angry, whipped into a rage by the broadcast.The mob spilled into the streets with the force of a breaking dam.
Hannah had expected chaos, but nothing prepared her for the sight that opened before them as they rounded the corner into the main boulevard.Fires clawed up the sides of buildings, painting the night in a frantic orange glow.Smoke drifted through the streets in long, shivering ribbons, carrying the sharp smell of burning insulation and shattered glass.People ran in clusters—some in fear, some in pursuit, some simply swept up in the frenzy with no sense of who or what they were fighting.
The crowd wasn’t just large.It was surging, pulsing like a living thing fed by panic and fury.
And none of them were supernaturals.
These were office workers still in their scrubs and badge lanyards, bartenders with their aprons tied around their waists, retirees in windbreakers, teenagers in hoodies, a scattering of wealthier residents wearing coats they’d thrown on over sleepwear.Ordinary people.Neighbors.Customers.Commuters.All transformed into a mob that didn’t seem to know where the line between vigilance and violence had vanished.
For a moment Hannah could only stand there and absorb the sight, a cold ache spreading through her ribs.She recognized people she used to pass on her morning walk to the bank, patrons who chatted with her in line at the café, a woman she’d once helped fill out a loan application.They looked different now.Hardened.Strained.Their expressions contorted not because they wanted to hurt anyone, but because they genuinely believed they were already under attack.
This was what Pierce had created: terror dressed up as righteousness.
Gray slowed at her side, studying the shifting lines of the crowd.Even without touching him, she could feel the struggle inside him.His instincts urged him to contain the danger, to break apart the mob before anyone was hurt.But he knew what it would look like if a Pollux variant moved into a crowd this size with force behind his steps.Cameras were everywhere—phones held high, news drones hovering overhead, lenses trained on the street like a network of silent, waiting jurors.
Hannah reached for his arm without thinking, her hand brushing warm skin.The contact was brief but the bond responding with a jolt of electricity.Gray inhaled softly, and the sound was intimate in a way the chaos around them only magnified.He didn’t pull away.If anything, he angled closer to her, centering himself the way he always did when his control wavered at the edges.
“They’re engineering a spectacle,” he said quietly, eyes fixed on the movement of the crowd.His voice carried a restrained intensity that sent a shiver down her spine.“If variants defend themselves, we’re monsters.If we don’t, we’re casualties.Pierce wins both ways.”
Hannah followed his gaze and saw exactly what he meant.Protogenus operatives in plain clothes wove through the mob, their movements too sharp, too deliberate.They nudged people forward, passed out makeshift weapons, whispered to those whose fear was already closest to combusting.
And then she spotted someone she hadn’t expected to see at all.Her former boss from the bank held a metal bat, shouting toward a supe-owned shop whose windows were already broken.
The shock of recognition hit Hannah so hard she stopped walking.
“I know her,” she said, her voice catching.“We stood next to each other in the break room every morning.I never saw this in her.”
Gray glanced down at her, and his attention wrapped around her like a protective shield.“Fear makes people do things they never imagined,” he said.“Pierce didn’t just lie to them.She fed them a story they were already halfway afraid to believe.”
Hannah watched the crowd move again, the bat swinging, the flames rising, and her gut twisted painfully.She had lived among these people.She had laughed with them, served them, listened to them talk about their kids and vacations and retirement plans.None of them would have guessed she was a variant.Now, knowing she was one had turned them into soldiers in a war they didn’t understand.
Gray watched her, with an understanding that made her throat tighten.Their powers were different, their histories different, but the isolation—the feeling of being other—was the same.It linked them with a strength that was more real tonight than it ever had.
“What do we do?”she asked, though she could already sense the answer gathering around them, rising in the magnetic charge of Gray’s power as it brushed her skin like a warning and a promise.
He turned to her fully, and for a heartbeat the riot blurred into a distant roar.The look he gave her held so many things at once.
“We do what we came here for,” he said.“We protect them, even when they don’t know they need it.”
His hand lifted, almost touching her cheek before he stopped himself, fingers hovering inches from her skin as if the restraint cost him something.Her breath caught, her power answering his in a slow radiating glow.
And in that moment, the storm inside Gray Spark finally shifted direction.Gray stood beside her with the riot churning like a storm beneath them, and Hannah felt the moment his restraint stretched thin enough to tremble.It wasn’t the dangerous kind of loss of control.It wasn’t the kind that made lightning flash uncontrollably from his skin, but the kind born from conflict and conviction pulling him in opposite directions.She sensed it in the way his shoulders tightened, in the careful breath he drew as he watched the crowd lash out at shadows and at each other.
“They’re scared,” he said, voice low, almost contemplative.“But fear doesn’t excuse what’s happening here.This isn’t protection.This is a riot waiting for an excuse to become a massacre.”
Hannah followed his gaze to where another storefront erupted into flame.The building belonged to a Castor healer she’d met once.He spent his weekends volunteering at the animal shelter.People shattered his windows as though he were a threat lurking behind them, not someone who mended bones and stitched wounds for free.
