Chapter Text
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Mia Winters began 3 May 2012 with three locks, two exits, and one lie.
The locks were habit: deadbolt, chain, pressure wedge beneath the door of her fourth-floor walk-up on the edge of Hell’s Kitchen. The exits were practical: the fire escape outside the kitchen window and the neighbouring rooftop three metres across if she took it at a run. The lie was the name on the utility bill, the payroll records, the laminated ID clipped inside her bag.
Mia Winters. Twenty-four. Receptionist, temp, freelance data entry, depending on who asked. Quiet tenant. Paid in advance. No visitors. No family.
She liked lies that could survive paperwork.
By seven-fifteen, bitter black coffee steamed on the counter while Mia stood barefoot beside the police scanner, listening to the city breathe through static. Traffic snarl on Forty-Second. Domestic disturbance in Queens. Ambulance dispatch on the Lower East Side. A missing kid found crying behind a bodega freezer, alive and furious. Mia wrote the last one in a cheap spiral notebook, not because it was her business, but because children misplaced by adults had always been her business.
Her apartment held almost nothing that could tell a story: a mattress low to the floor, a second-hand table, library books stripped of their dust jackets. Beneath the bed, a locked footlocker held cash, forged documents, three knives, a compact first-aid kit, and gloves thin enough to feel the world through.
The gloves went on first.
At eight, she was behind the reception desk of a Midtown records office that processed insurance claims for people who had learned to fear forms more than injuries. Her job was to smile without inviting conversation, scan documents without reading too much, and notice everything anyway.
A man in a navy suit lied about a workplace fall because his employer had threatened to fire him. Mia heard it in the uneven places between his words and felt it, unwillingly, in the tight wet pulse of his fear. An older woman with a fractured wrist kept glancing at the phone in her purse, panic spiking every time it vibrated. Mia gave her the number of a clinic that did not ask the wrong questions and watched gratitude flicker across the woman’s face like a match struck in a wind tunnel.
Do not reach. Do not burn. Do not let anyone see the shape of what you know.
At lunch, she walked six blocks out of her way to pass a pawn shop with mirrored glass. The owner’s nephew had been moving stolen phones through the back room and paying teenagers in pills. Direct interference left witnesses, so Mia had spent a week doing cleaner work: three anonymous tips through three different channels, a security camera nudged two degrees with a thought, a copied ledger slipped into the mail slot of a detective who still remembered how to be useful.
Surveillance was cleaner than rescue. Cleaner than confrontation. Cleaner than the part of her that wanted to put every predator on their knees and make them understand what helplessness tasted like.
New York had nearly killed her more than once, and still she had chosen it. Not because it was kind. Because it was honest about what it cost to survive, and because every alley, service door, subway grate, and broken camera had become part of the map she had made of herself.
She bought a pretzel she did not want from a cart on Seventh and ate half of it while pretending to watch taxis. In the reflection of a bus shelter, she tracked the pawn shop door, the alley, the teenagers slouching too loose against brick. No police yet. Good. If uniforms arrived too early, the nephew would scatter. If they arrived too late, someone would get hurt.
Mia’s phone buzzed once in her pocket. Scanner app. Emergency traffic spiked in a way that made the fine hairs along her arms lift.
The first sound was not an explosion.
It was a pressure change.
The city inhaled. Glass trembled in its frames. Pigeons burst upward in a dirty grey wave. Somewhere above Midtown, the air tore open with a noise like metal screaming underwater, and every head on the street snapped toward the impossible blue-white wound ripping through the sky.
A smell came with it a heartbeat later: ozone sharp enough to sting the sinuses, hot copper, scorched rain though the sky was clear. The taste of it settled on Mia’s tongue like pennies held too long in the mouth. Paper cups skittered across the pavement without wind. A newspaper plastered itself against the ankle of a man who had forgotten how to move.
Mia stopped chewing.
For one suspended second, Manhattan held itself still. Horns blared and died under the rising thunder. A woman beside her whispered, “Oh my God,” not as prayer but as inventory: sky, hole, light, things moving inside it.
Then the first craft came through.
It knifed between towers with an insectile shriek, all black metal and blue energy, rider hunched over its spine. The blast that followed struck three cars in the intersection ahead. Heat punched across Mia’s face. A taxi flipped onto its roof. People became sound: screams, brakes, shattering glass, the wet slap of bodies hitting pavement.
The taxi’s windows burst outward in glittering sheets. A traffic light swung on its cable, red-yellow-green cycling madly through smoke. Somewhere close, a car alarm began its useless, panicked bleat, joined by another and another until the street sounded like a flock of mechanical birds dying in the heat.
Fear hit her next.
Not one fear. Hundreds. A pressure front of terror slammed through her shields: a delivery cyclist thinking of his mother in Spanish; a businessman suddenly ashamed of the last voicemail he had ignored; a child’s bright animal panic from inside an overturned stroller near the curb. Mia tasted copper. The world doubled—her own eyes and everyone else’s—all of them looking up, looking for cover, looking for someone larger than themselves to say what to do.
The emotions had textures. Some were slick and cold, sliding under her skin. Some were jagged, snagging on old scars inside her where no one could see. A man’s terror came wrapped in the smell of hospital bleach from a memory that was not hers. A woman’s grief arrived early, before she had even seen the body beneath the cab, already rehearsing loss with brutal efficiency.
No one did.
Mia moved.
Assessment first: north blocked by burning vehicles; east side windows raining glass; subway stairs twenty metres behind her, already clogging; alley west, narrow but clear; hostile craft banking low over Thirty-Ninth; civilians frozen in open street. She shoved the half-eaten pretzel into the trash without thinking, grabbed the elbow of the woman beside her, and put command into her voice.
She mapped the street the way she had once mapped escape routes from foster bedrooms and locked pantry doors. Fire escapes: two usable, one rusted through at the second landing. Storefronts: pharmacy with steel grate half-raised, deli with rear exit to the service lane, dry cleaner with too much glass to trust. Overhead: three hostiles visible, maybe more masked by smoke; one larger shadow moving behind the clouds like something alive and armoured.
“Alley. Now. Take anyone who’ll follow.”
The woman stared at her, white-faced.
Mia pushed calm at her. Not much. Never much. Just a thin thread under the panic, enough for the woman to blink, nod, and start screaming directions with the authority of someone who had borrowed courage and decided to keep it.
Mia cut across the street at a sprint.
A Chitauri rider dropped too low, weapon swinging toward the knot of civilians trying to drag the overturned stroller upright. Mia’s hand went under her jacket. The knife came free smooth and familiar, matte black, balanced for throwing rather than show. She did not aim for armour. Armour was a fool’s target. She aimed for the soft geometry of movement: wrist joint, exposed cable, the place where hand met weapon.
Its face, if the thing beneath the helmet had a face, turned toward her for half a second. Mia registered wet black eyes, a mouth full of too many teeth, skin the colour of bruised fish. Not human. Not animal. Still a body, still leverage, still vulnerable where motion required softness.
The blade flashed once and vanished into the seam. The weapon jerked wide. Blue fire carved a line across asphalt instead of bodies.
The rider screamed. The sound did not belong in a city street. It scraped along the brickwork and burrowed into the teeth. Mia used the scream. People who had frozen flinched away from it, and flinching was movement; movement could become running if someone gave it direction.
“Move!” Mia shouted.
The stroller wheel had jammed beneath the taxi’s crumpled bumper. The child inside was screaming, lungs raw, fear so bright it almost blinded her. Mia planted one boot against the wreckage and pulled. Metal shrieked but did not give.
Fine.
She let the smallest possible piece of herself slip loose.
Not fire. Never fire. Nothing violet, nothing winged, nothing that would bloom across cameras and hungry eyes. Just pressure, invisible and precise. The bumper bent back two inches. Enough. Mia tore the stroller free and shoved it toward a man with blood running down his temple.
The power wanted more. It always did when fear flooded her. It pressed up behind her ribs, violet and vast and offended by restraint, promising an answer so complete nothing hostile would remain standing. Mia locked her jaw until her teeth hurt and forced it down into a thread, a needle, a breath. Precision, not spectacle. Survival, not revelation.
“Take him underground. Stay off the main stairs if they’re packed. Service entrance on the left side of the station, green door. It sticks. Kick low.”
He obeyed because she sounded like the city itself had issued instructions.
Another blast struck somewhere above, and the shockwave threw her into the side of a bus shelter. The glass had already gone. Her shoulder hit the metal frame hard enough to spark pain down her arm, and for half a second the street dissolved into another room, another year.
She was eight again, maybe nine, small enough that the kitchen table in the foster house seemed built for giants. Rain ticked at the window. Somewhere upstairs, adults shouted behind a closed door, their anger arriving through the floorboards before the words made sense. Missus Vale was smiling at the social worker in the doorway, all soft cardigan and gentle voice, one hand resting on Mia’s shoulder like ownership.
“She’s imaginative,” Missus Vale had said. “Troubled, poor thing. We do our best.”
Mia had known, with sudden terrible certainty, that the woman was thinking about the basement. About the lock. About how long bruises took to fade. The knowledge had not come as words exactly. It came as taste, colour, pressure behind the teeth. Rotten-sweet satisfaction under a lace curtain of concern, and behind it the old household rhythm of doors closing before anyone could run.
The social worker had smiled back.
That was when Mia learned adults could be dangerous not only when they lied, but when other adults wanted to believe them.
A horn screamed inches from her ear. Manhattan snapped back into place.
The ground began to carry the battle through the soles of her boots. Every distant impact translated upward: a thud through concrete, a tremor through bone, a warning in the knees before the ears caught up. Sirens rose in every direction and cancelled one another out until they became one long animal howl trapped between the buildings.
Above the rooftops, the invasion multiplied. More craft poured from the wound in the sky in black, darting clusters, peeling off toward avenues and cross-streets with insect logic. One slammed into the side of a building three blocks north and kept moving, shedding brick and office furniture in its wake. A desk chair tumbled end over end through the air before vanishing behind smoke.
Mia staggered upright, retrieved her knife from the fallen alien’s wrist with a wet pull, and wiped the blade on her jeans. The rider was not dead. Good. Dead things made patterns. Wounded things made distractions.
Her phone, miraculously intact, crackled from the pavement where it had fallen. The emergency scanner had become a wall of overlapping voices.
“—unidentified hostile aircraft over Midtown—”
“—all units, be advised, reports of unidentified enhanced activity in the impact zone—”
Mia’s head came up.
There it was. Not miracle. Not help. Not people keeping other people alive in the middle of the end of the world.
Enhanced activity.
A label with a hook in it.
Another voice cut through, official and strained. “Civilian responders are advised to withdraw from active zones. Repeat, civilian responders should clear the area and allow authorised personnel to manage evacuation.”
Authorised personnel. Mia almost laughed. They were six blocks away and pinned behind traffic. The civilians were here, bleeding on streets she knew by every service door, loading dock, blind corner, broken camera, and alley that smelled like old beer and rain.
A news helicopter battered through the smoke far above, its rotors chewing at the poisoned air. Mia saw its camera nose dip toward the street and turned her face away before instinct became image. Around her, phones were already lifted by shaking hands, recording fire, aliens, bodies, miracles, mistakes. Evidence, people called it when it served them. Threat profiles, when it did not.
She picked up her phone, killed the speaker, and slid it into her pocket.
No one was looking for her specifically. Not yet. But she could feel the future taking shape in the language already forming around the chaos: unidentified, enhanced, responders, authorised. Words people would use later to decide who had been brave and who had been a problem.
Mia had spent her life avoiding rooms where other people defined her.
Then a building groaned.
Across the intersection, the corner of a glass-fronted office tower had taken a direct hit. Smoke rolled from the lower floors. People pounded against the lobby doors from inside, trapped behind a twisted security gate that had dropped halfway and jammed. A second Chitauri craft angled toward them, drawn by movement.
Inside the tower lobby, silhouettes beat at the glass with chairs, laptops, bare fists. The security gate had trapped them in a bright aquarium of smoke. Sprinklers coughed once overhead and gave up. A woman pressed both palms to the pane and left bloody crescents where her nails had torn. Behind her, fluorescent lights flickered hard enough to make every face appear in fragments: eye, mouth, soot, fear.
Mia counted distance, debris, line of sight. Too far for a throw. Too visible for power. Too many cameras, though half of them were probably dead. Too many witnesses with phones clutched in shaking hands.
Too many people still alive to leave.
She ran toward the tower.
A fallen street sign lay near the curb. Mia kicked it up, caught the pole, and swung it hard into the side mirror of a burning delivery van. The mirror snapped free. She flicked it into the street with a twist of her wrist and a razor-thin pulse of telekinesis, sending sunlight and firelight flashing toward the incoming rider.
The van’s explosion punched the air flat. Mia felt the heat lick through the back of her jacket and smell singed wool before pain reached her skin. The blast shoved pedestrians into one another like pins. A man fell, tried to rise, and went down again when his shoe stuck in softened tar.
Misdirection worked on anything with eyes.
The craft veered. Its shot blew apart the van instead of the lobby. Heat rolled over Mia’s back as she dove beneath the half-dropped gate, shoulder scraping metal, knife already in her hand. Inside, the air was thick with dust and printer toner and the electrical stink of burning wires. People screamed when they saw her slide in under the smoke.
The lobby floor glittered with safety glass that was not safe for anyone crawling. Mia’s palms found grit, blood, and something slick she refused to identify. Smoke clawed at her throat. Every breath tasted of melted plastic and panic sweat. Somewhere above, something heavy scraped across a ceiling tile, followed by the patter of plaster dust over shoulders and hair.
A young man in a courier jacket was pinned under the edge of a fallen directory sign. Mia crouched, set two fingers beneath the metal, and lifted with her body first, power second, so anyone watching would see strain instead of impossibility. The sign rose just enough for two office workers to drag him free. He sobbed once, soundless, then clamped a hand over his own mouth as if ashamed of needing air.
“Back wall,” she said. “Stairs behind the elevators. Cover your mouths. Anyone who can walk helps someone who can’t.”
“Who are you?” a man demanded, voice cracking.
No one, she thought.
Out loud, Mia said, “Someone who knows the way out.”
Another impact struck the tower. The lobby lights died. For a breath, darkness took them all, broken only by the blue-white pulse of alien fire outside and the red wink of emergency signs above doors. In that strobing half-light, Mia saw the crowd begin to fold inward, fear feeding fear, the first edge of a crush forming near the stairwell.
She stepped onto a toppled planter so they could see her. “Single line. Hands on shoulders if you can’t see. You—blue shirt—count people through the door. You—grey skirt—keep them off the glass. If anyone falls, everyone stops. Say it back.”
They said it back raggedly, voices breaking, but saying it made them people again instead of a stampede. Mia felt the shift ripple through the room: fear still there, huge and ugly, but given rails to run on.
Outside, another shadow crossed the glass. Larger this time. The thing moving between towers was not one of the small craft but a leviathan, ribbed and plated, its bulk blotting out a slice of afternoon. It passed overhead with a pressure that made every tooth in Mia’s mouth ache. The building moaned around them as if recognising a predator bigger than architecture.
The violet fire surged so hard her vision sparked at the edges.
No.
Mia curled both hands into fists until her nails bit through the gloves. Fire would save them and damn her in the same breath. Fire would turn one street of witnesses into a citywide hunt. She swallowed the heat, swallowed the scream that came with it, and chose smaller things: a jammed stairwell door nudged open from across the room, a falling light fixture pushed two inches aside, a child’s panic softened just enough that she could breathe.
Small things kept people alive too.
Above them, Manhattan shook as the sky kept opening.
The stairwell door groaned open on a breath of hotter air.
“Move,” Mia said, and this time the word travelled.
It passed from person to person in broken echoes: move, move, move. Hands found shoulders. Strangers became railings. Someone gave up a jacket to wrap around a woman’s bleeding arm. Someone else took off a scarf and tied it over a child’s mouth against the smoke. The crowd was still terrified, but terror with a task was less likely to crush itself.
Mia kept to the side of the line, not leading from the front, not letting herself become the thing everyone stared at. She corrected with touches and short commands. Left. Step over. Duck. Keep your hand on him. Don’t look outside. She pressed calm where panic spiked too high and let anger burn where fear needed spine.
Halfway down the service corridor, the ceiling gave a warning crack.
Mia felt it before she saw it: a shift in weight above them, old concrete surrendering around newer wiring. Her hand snapped up. Not enough to stop the fall. Enough to change it.
A section of ceiling collapsed in a roar of dust and tile. She shoved the debris sideways with invisible force disguised as impact from the blast outside. It crashed into a row of filing cabinets instead of the people beneath it. The cabinets buckled. The corridor filled with chalk-white grit. A man started coughing so hard he dropped to one knee.
“Up,” Mia told him, already hauling him by the back of his shirt. “Cough later.”
He gave her an offended look so ordinary, so alive, that she almost smiled.
Then the wall at the far end blew inward.
A Chitauri rider came through with it, not flying now but thrown or leaping, armour scraping sparks from the floor. It hit hard, rolled, and rose with a hiss that narrowed every breath in the corridor. The evacuees froze.
Mia stepped between them and the alien before she could decide whether that was foolish.
Knife in right hand. Broken length of metal trim in left. Distance: four metres. Civilians behind her: thirty-two, maybe thirty-five, including two children, one elderly man, one woman losing blood too fast. Exit behind the alien: blocked but not sealed. Cameras: one ceiling dome, dead; one security panel by the lift, possibly live. No fire.
The rider lunged.
Mia went low. The weapon passed over her shoulder hot enough to crisp loose strands of hair against her cheek. She drove the metal trim into the joint behind its knee, not hard enough to pierce armour, hard enough to make the leg fail. As it staggered, she pivoted inside its reach and slammed her knife pommel into the side of its helmet.
Pain flared through her wrist. The alien barely noticed.
So she cheated.
Not visibly. Not beautifully. She caught a fallen stapler with her mind and shot it across the corridor into the sprinkler valve above the rider’s head. Water burst down in a filthy rush. The alien flinched at the sudden impact and sound. Mia used that flinch, hooked one foot behind its damaged knee, and drove her shoulder into its centre of gravity.
It fell badly.
“Go!” she shouted without turning.
The line broke around her, not into panic but around an obstacle. Shoes splashed through sprinkler water. Someone sobbed a prayer. Someone else cursed with impressive creativity. Mia kept the rider down with one boot on its weapon arm and two careful ounces of force pressing its wrist into the floor until bone or something like it gave beneath the armour.
The sound should have satisfied the part of her that remembered basements and locked doors. It did not. There was no satisfaction in survival, only the next problem.
The last civilian through was the woman in the grey skirt, limping now, face streaked with soot and mascara. She glanced back at Mia. “Come on.”
Mia almost did.
Then, beneath the sirens and the alien’s wet breathing, she heard banging from behind the service-room door.
Three knocks. Pause. Two knocks. A child’s rhythm, not an adult’s.
“Go,” Mia told the woman.
The woman understood enough to hate it. She went anyway.
Mia slammed the alien’s head once against the floor, hard enough to blur its focus, then crossed to the service room. The handle was bent. The frame had warped. She slid the knife away, put both gloved hands on the door, and pulled like she was only human.
The door did not move.
Inside, someone whimpered.
Mia stopped pretending.
A narrow pulse of force punched through the latch. Metal snapped inward. She caught the sound in a cushion of pressure before it could ring too loud, swallowed the violet spark that wanted to follow, and yanked the door open.
Two children crouched between shelves of copier paper and cleaning chemicals. A boy of maybe ten had his arms around a girl half his size. Both wore matching school polos beneath too-large visitor badges. Their fear hit Mia cleanly and without armour. Not abstract terror. Not adult calculation. Just the absolute conviction that no one was coming.
It went through her like a blade.
“Hi,” she said, because children deserved beginnings that were not orders. “I’m Mia. I know the way out.”
The boy’s chin trembled. “There’s a monster.”
“Yes,” Mia said. “So we’re going to be quiet and rude and leave without saying goodbye.”
The girl made a tiny sound that might have become a laugh in another world.
The alien rose behind her.
Mia felt the movement in the air before the children saw it. She pushed them behind the doorframe and turned as the rider fired.
There was no time to be subtle.
She caught the blast three inches from her chest.
For one impossible heartbeat, blue alien fire flattened against an invisible curve. Heat roared across her face. The force of it drove her boots back through water and broken plaster. Violet light surged under her skin, hungry, furious, bright enough that the edges of her gloves glowed.
No.
She twisted the shield sideways instead of outward, turning the blast into the wall. Concrete exploded. The corridor filled with dust and screaming metal. Mia’s knees hit the floor. Pain lanced up both arms as if every bone had become a struck bell.
The children stared.
So did the rider.
Mia bared her teeth. “Run.”
The boy grabbed his sister and obeyed.
Mia did not give the alien time to aim again. She tore a length of exposed electrical conduit from the shattered wall with a thought and let gravity pretend to help. It whipped across the corridor, struck the rider’s weapon, and pinned the barrel against the floor. Her second knife came free from the sheath at her spine. She threw from her knees.
This time she aimed for the throat.
The blade sank. The rider folded with a wet, astonished rasp.
Mia stayed still until she was certain it would not rise.
Her hands shook when she pushed herself upright. Not from fear. Fear had become weather. This was the aftershock of restraint, the brutal muscular effort of not becoming the brightest thing in the city.
Outside, the evacuation line had reached the service alley. She followed the children through the blown-out gap, keeping herself between them and the street. The alley was a canyon of fire escapes, overflowing bins, and smoke that turned daylight brown. Above, the leviathan’s shadow slid over brick and metal ladders like a storm with ribs.
The grey-skirted woman was there, counting people with shaking fingers. “Thirty-four,” she said when she saw Mia. “Thirty-six with the kids.”
“Thirty-seven,” Mia said, nodding to the courier being half-carried by two office workers. “Don’t forget yourself.”
The woman stared at her for one stunned second, then laughed once, hard and broken.
A police cruiser screeched into view at the mouth of the alley and stopped too fast, bumper kissing a pile of broken brick. Two officers spilled out, faces grey beneath their caps. One raised his weapon toward the sky. The other saw the blood, the children, the limping office workers, and lowered his gun by instinct.
“We need medical!” the grey-skirted woman shouted. “And buses, or trucks, anything that moves. There are more trapped inside.”
The officer’s radio spat static, then a voice: “Command repeats, report all unidentified enhanced civilian responders to staging for assessment. Possible non-hostile enhanced activity near Seventh and Thirty-Ninth. Do not engage unless—”
Mia was already moving.
She faded behind the evacuation line, behind smoke and shouting and the officer turning toward the radio with confusion sharpening into interest. A girl’s hand caught her sleeve.
The little one from the service room looked up at her with dust on her eyelashes. “Are you a superhero?”
Mia crouched just long enough to put the child’s hand into her brother’s. “No.”
The girl frowned. “Then what are you?”
A risk. An asset. A containment problem, if the wrong person wrote the report.
Mia said, “Someone who doesn’t want you to get stepped on.”
That answer satisfied the child more than it satisfied Mia.
She rose and slipped through a gap between a dumpster and a scorched delivery truck, following the alley south. Her shoulder throbbed. Her ribs hurt when she breathed. Blood, not all of it hers, dried tacky beneath her jacket cuff. Above the roofs, something green and enormous slammed a Chitauri craft into the side of a building hard enough to rain brick across the street beyond. Mia did not stop to stare.
Heroes could have the skyline. She had exits.
At the next cross-street, a bus had jackknifed across the road, its front end crushed against a hydrant. Water geysered over the wreck, turning ash to grey paste. Passengers hammered at the rear doors. A Chitauri skimmer swept low along the avenue, firing at anything that moved.
Mia closed her eyes for one furious second.
Not my fight had kept her alive for fifteen years.
Not my people had never once been true.
She ran for the bus.
The rear door release was jammed. Mia slammed the heel of her hand against it, then drove her knife into the seam and twisted. Plastic snapped. The doors folded open three inches before catching on bent metal. She braced one foot against the bumper and pulled. This time she did not hide all of it. The doors shrieked apart, too fast, too cleanly, but the hydrant was roaring and the skimmer was screaming overhead and no one on the bus was thinking clearly enough to measure physics.
“Out! Down the alley, not the avenue!”
A teenager stumbled first, headphones still around his neck, blood bright on his cheek. Then an old man with a cane. Then a mother carrying a toddler who had gone silent in the terrible way children sometimes did when fear filled all the available space. Mia caught the mother’s elbow and poured steadiness into her until her breathing changed.
The skimmer banked back.
Mia looked up and saw her reflection split across its black undercarriage: soot-streaked face, dark hair half-loose, eyes too bright. For a heartbeat, violet answered blue beneath her skin.
No cameras. No witnesses who would understand. No time.
She reached for the loose streetlight hanging from its ruptured pole and pulled.
The pole tore free with a scream of metal and cable. To anyone watching, the skimmer’s own wake or the collapsing street might have done it. Mia knew better. She swung the streetlight like a thrown spear through the air. It clipped the skimmer’s underside and sent it cartwheeling into the upper floor of a parking garage.
The explosion blew out every remaining window on the block.
Mia hit the pavement hard, one arm over her head. Glass rained around her in a bright, lethal storm. The Phoenix fire surged again, instinctively trying to wrap her, shield her, declare her. She crushed it down until she tasted blood.
When the rain of glass stopped, the bus was empty.
Good.
Her phone buzzed again. She should have ignored it. Instead, she pulled it free with fingers that had gone clumsy and saw three new emergency alerts stacked over one another.
Shelter in place.
Avoid Midtown.
Report suspicious enhanced individuals to emergency personnel.
Mia stared at the last line until smoke blurred it.
Suspicious. Enhanced. Individuals.
The words arranged themselves like bars.
A distant boom rolled through the avenue, followed by cheers somewhere far enough away to sound unreal. Mia looked north and saw, between towers and smoke, Iron Man streak across the sky in red and gold, trailing fire that did not feel like hers. A shield flashed once on a lower rooftop. Lightning cracked blue-white against the open wound above the city.
Iron Man was here. Thor was here. Others too, unnamed and impossible, moving through the smoke.