“Get behind me.Now.”
I dive for cover behind an overturned desk just as Nate plants his feet, raises both hands, and does something I’ve never seen before.
The air around himshimmers. I can feel it—a pressure change, like my ears popping on a plane, but everywhere, all at once. The equipment nearest to him starts to rattle, then rise, floating off the ground like gravity has forgotten which direction it’s supposed to pull. It’s magical, almost beautiful, every loose thing rising up around us.
Then he reverses it.Upward.
The ceiling doesn’t just break—itlaunches. Concrete and rebar tear away like they weigh nothing, because to Nate’s powers right now, they do. The force rips through the floor above, then the next, then the next—a column of destruction punching straight up through the facility as he redirects gravity itself into a weapon.
Debris rains down around the edges, burying the guards still trying to breach the doorway. The building groans, alarms changing pitch to something more urgent.
And above us, eight floors of facility open up like a wound to the sky.
Nate staggers slightly, like it drained all his energy. I’ve never seen him stagger before.
“That was new,” he says, breathing harder than usual.
“It was brilliant.” I grab his arm to steady him—or maybe to steady myself. “Can you still fly?”
“Only one way to find out.” He grabs me around the waist. “Hold on.”
We rocket upward through the hole he’s made, through floor after floor of destruction, past screaming personnel and sparking wires and the chaos he’s unleashed on Global Dynamix’s secret facility. I bury my face against his chest because the wind is too much, the debris is too thick, and I just have to trust that he knows where he’s going and what he’s doing.
Concrete. Metal. Another floor. Another. The sound of the building groaning around us.
And then?—
Open air.
We burst through the roof in an explosion of gravel and tar paper, into the night sky, into the rain that’s still falling soft and steady. For a moment we just hover there, suspended above the ruined building, and I can see the damage he’s done—a column of destruction punched straight through the heart of the facility, smoke and dust billowing from the wound.
“Paragon,” Nate suddenly says, cocking his head, hearing something that I can’t. His arms tighten around me. “He’s on the way. We need to move.”
I look back as we start to fly. I watch the facility shrink beneath us, guards spilling out of emergency exits, vehicles mobilizing in the parking lot. And emerging from the chaos with a mechanical gait, looking up at us with empty eyes?—
Paragon.
He doesn’t chase us. Not yet. Maybe he needs another order from Van Veen or Marsh and he’s not getting those soon, not from them anyway. He just stands there in the rain, his helmet a dark box, and I know he’s watching us go. A reminder of what’s coming. What they’ll send after us.
Then the clouds swallow us, and he’s gone.
Nate flies us northwest, over the Hudson, over Manhattan, higher and higher until the city becomes a glittering carpet far below. The air is cold up here, thin, and I’m shivering—from the temperature, from shock, from everything my body has been through in the last few hours. He pulls me closer, trying to share warmth he might not even feel.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Somewhere I can get you some warm clothes.” His voice is raw. “Somewhere out of the city.”
“And then where?” My teeth are starting to chatter.
“Somewhere they can’t find us.”
“There’s nowhere?—”
“Then we keep moving until there is.”
I want to argue. I want to point out that Global Dynamix has satellites, has Paragon, has resources we can’t even imagine. That we just killed two of the most powerful people in the company and there’s no coming back from that and there will be other people in the wings to replace Marsh and Van Veen.
But I’m so tired. And for the first time in days, despite everything, I feel something I barely recognize.
