Virgil approached the Red Market Syndicate's headquarters with the careful stride of someone who'd walked into a hundred dangerous places and walked out again. His revolver hung visible at his hip, not drawn but not hidden either—a statement rather than a threat.

  The morning rain had left the street slick, reflecting the dull gray of the surrounding buildings and the occasional flicker of neon from the signs advertising fixes most people couldn't afford.

  Two guards flanked the entrance, their pipe guns an awkward weight in inexperienced hands. The taller one stepped forward, mouth open to deliver what was probably a rehearsed warning, but then he got a good look at Virgil's face. Recognition hit him like a physical blow. He swallowed whatever he'd been about to say and took half a step back.

  "That's Backfire," the shorter one whispered, the name carrying on the damp air.

  Virgil didn't bother correcting them, didn't bother speaking at all. He just kept walking, steady as gravity, and the guards shifted aside like water around a stone.

  From a grimy second-floor window, Isabella Sartori watched the scene unfold, smoke curling from the cigarette between her fingers. Her eyes narrowed as she tracked Virgil's progress across the courtyard. She took a final drag, then crushed the stub against the windowsill with deliberate force.

  The wrench hit the concrete with a hollow clang that echoed through the garage of The Vigil.

  Fii frowned, staring at her still-outstretched hand. She'd been holding it—definitely holding it—and then suddenly it wasn't there, like the gravity she'd wrapped around it had simply... hiccuped.

  "Butterfingers," Quinn said, not looking up from where he was elbow-deep in the sand buggy's engine block.

  "I didn't drop it." Fii extended her power again, and the wrench rose smoothly back into the air, suspended in her gravitational field. Normal. Everything normal. Except it hadn't been. "It just... slipped."

  "Things tend to do that when you don't hold 'em right." Quinn's voice carried the easy humor she'd grown used to, but there was a note underneath it, attention shifting her way despite his focus on the engine.

  Fii rotated the wrench, testing the boundaries of her control. The gravity wrapped around it remained steady, responsive to every minor adjustment of her will. Like always. Like it should be.

  "Need that socket wrench over there?" she asked, nodding toward Quinn's toolbox.

  "Yeah, the 15-millimeter."

  She reached out with her power, lifting the requested tool from the box and floating it toward him. Halfway there, a sensation like pins and needles raced up her arm—and then the socket wrench wobbled mid-air, then shot sideways like it had been struck, hitting the wall before clattering to the floor.

  Quinn pulled himself out from under the buggy's hood, wiping grease from his hands onto an already-stained rag. "Okay, that wasn't butterfingers. What's going on?"

  "Just tired, I guess."

  He squinted at her, unconvinced. "Weird-tired or just regular tired? 'Cause you got this look like when you're pretending things are fine but they're actually all kinds of messed up."

  "I don't have a look like that." Fii walked over to where the socket wrench had landed and picked it up, then tossed the wrench onto the workbench, miscalculating the throw. Instead of landing with a clatter, it hung suspended for half a second before dropping normally.

  Quinn sat up. "Okay, that was definitely not normal. Your powers doing something funny?"

  Fii's hand moved to her back, tracing the spot where Bill had clapped her. The memory of his touch made her skin crawl.

  "Maybe." She flexed her fingers, watching as the air around her hand seemed to ripple slightly. "Something feels off."

  "Off how? Like broken-off or weird-off?"

  "Weird-off. Like..." She paused, searching for the right words to describe the feeling. "Like when you think you're at the bottom of the stairs, but there's actually one more step."

  "That's... specific." Quinn moved closer, studying her with concerned eyes. "Think it has something to do with that Red Market creep? The one you said could control organic matter?"

  The question hung in the air between them, heavier than it should have been. Fii hadn't considered it until now, but it made an uncomfortable kind of sense. Bill had tampered with her somehow when he'd touched her, leaving a mark she hadn't been able to see. What if he'd done something more permanent?

  "Could be." Fii frowned, trying to remember every detail of the encounter and what Glimmerstrike had told her afterward.

  She'd been so focused on getting in, finding the Super, and getting out, she hadn't taken the time to analyze everything that had happened.

  "Glimmerstrike mentioned something about him tampering with her body. Maybe he did something to me too."

  Quinn crossed his arms, his expression stern. "We should tell Virgil. If that guy did something to you—"

  "No." The word came out sharper than intended. Fii softened her voice. "Not yet. Virgil's got enough to worry about, and we don't even know if there's actually a problem."

  As if to contradict her, the screwdriver on the workbench suddenly shot upward, embedding itself in the ceiling with enough force to crack the concrete. They both stared at it, Fii's mouth slightly open.

  "That," Quinn said slowly, "is definitely a problem."

  Fii raised her hand, feeling the gravity field around the screwdriver. It should have been simple, a gentle tug to pull it free, but when she reached with her power, something else responded—something deeper and stranger than the familiar force she'd grown accustomed to manipulating.

  The screwdriver didn't just come loose; the ceiling around it warped, concrete rippling like water before the tool broke free and dropped into her waiting palm.

  "Holy shit," Quinn whispered.

  The concrete above settled back into its normal shape, leaving no evidence of the distortion except for the hole where the screwdriver had been.

  "That's new," Fii murmured, turning the screwdriver over in her hands. It felt normal now, its weight and balance unchanged. But something had definitely shifted when she'd tried to remove it from the ceiling. Like she'd connected with something deeper.

  Quinn ran a hand through his hair, leaving streaks of grease behind. "Maybe you're just... evolving? Like, getting stronger or something?"

  "Maybe." But the explanation felt hollow. This wasn't like her usual power growth, where things became more controlled, more precise. This felt unstable, unpredictable—wrong, somehow.

  "I'm sure it's nothing," she said, but the words fell flat even to her own ears. "Let's just get back to work on the buggy. Virgil will be back soon, and I want to have something to show for our time."

  Quinn didn't look convinced, but he nodded and slid back under the vehicle. "Just... maybe don't use your powers for a bit? At least until we figure out what's going on?"

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  "Yeah." Fii set the screwdriver down carefully. "Good idea."

  She turned back to the sand buggy, trying to focus on the mechanical problem in front of her rather than the whisper of anxiety crawling up her spine.

  Just a fluke. Powers acting up from stress. Nothing to worry about.

  They worked in relative silence for the next hour, the quiet broken only by Quinn's occasional request for a tool or Fii's questions about the buggy's design. She was careful not to use her powers, handling everything with her hands even when it would have been easier to float a wrench across the garage or lighten a heavy component.

  The effort of restraint made her head ache. Since the transformation, her powers had become as natural as breathing—a constant, unconscious manipulation of the gravitational field around her body. Suppressing them felt like trying to hold her breath underwater, a pressure building inside her chest that demanded release.

  "Pass me the socket wrench again?" Quinn asked, his voice muffled from his position inside the engine compartment.

  Fii reached for the tool, her fingers closing around the cool metal. As she handed it over, their fingers brushed, and a jolt of something electric passed between them. Quinn yelped, dropping the wrench.

  "Static?" he suggested, rubbing his fingers.

  "Sure," Fii agreed, though they both knew it wasn't. Static didn't make the air around your hand ripple like heat waves off hot pavement.

  Before Quinn could say anything else, the garage door banged open. Virgil stood in the entrance, silhouetted against the gray slum backdrop. His coat hung more heavily on one side, and even in the dim light, Fii could see the darkness staining the fabric—blood, not all of it his own.

  He limped inside, shutting the door behind him. His face was a mask of exhaustion, lines carved deeper by whatever had happened at the Syndicate headquarters. But his eyes were clear, alert, scanning the garage and settling on Fii with an intensity that made her skin prickle.

  "You look like crap," she said, the casual words at odds with the concern tightening her chest.

  Virgil snorted, easing himself onto a crate by the door. "You should see the other guy."

  "Guys, plural, I'm guessing," Quinn chimed in, wiping his hands on his jumpsuit. "Red Market doesn't exactly travel light."

  "No, they don't." Virgil's voice was gravelly, worn thin by exhaustion or pain or both. "But they're not a problem anymore."

  Fii stepped closer, trying to assess his injuries without being obvious about it. A cut above his eyebrow had crusted over with dried blood, and the way he cradled his left arm suggested more damage hidden beneath the coat. But he was alive, walking, talking—better than she might have expected, given where he'd gone and why.

  "So..." She hesitated, uncertain how to ask what needed asking. "Bill?"

  A shadow crossed Virgil's face, something cold and hard that reminded Fii why people in the slums still whispered about Backfire with a mixture of awe and fear. "Handled."

  "Is he dead?" The question hung in the air, heavy as lead.

  Virgil met her gaze. "No."

  The single word should have brought relief, but instead, it sent another ripple of unease through Fii's stomach. If Bill was alive, he was still a threat—to her, to Quinn, to anyone she cared about.

  "Then what—"

  "He won't be using his hands to hurt anyone else," Virgil said flatly. "Or any other part of him, for that matter. I made sure of it."

  The implications settled like stones in Fii's gut. She'd spared Bill out of mercy, out of some instinctive revulsion at the thought of becoming a killer. But Virgil had found another way—not death, but something that might be worse.

  "And Isabella?" Quinn asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

  "We came to an understanding." Virgil's lips twitched in what might have been a smile if there had been any warmth behind it. "She's a pragmatist. Once she saw what happened to her right-hand man, she decided cooperation was in her best interest."

  "Cooperation?" Fii echoed.

  "A truce. The Red Market stops their organ business, stops harvesting people. In exchange, I don't obliterate her operation." Virgil shrugged, wincing as the movement jostled his injuries. "I figured it was the best outcome we could hope for. As long as they're not hurting innocent people, they're no worse than any other business in the slums."

  Fii nodded numbly. The logic was sound, but she couldn't shake the feeling that Virgil had made a deal with a devil. Or maybe it was just that he'd taken the action she couldn't bring herself to take, and it had paid off in a way her mercy never could have.

  As if reading her thoughts, Virgil's expression softened slightly. "You did what you thought was right, letting him live. No shame in that. But in this world, mercy has consequences, and somebody's gotta deal with 'em."

  "Yeah." The word came out rougher than intended. "I'm getting that."

  A strange sensation washed over Fii then—a tingling that started in her fingertips and radiated up her arms, across her chest, settling uncomfortably at the base of her skull. The garage seemed to waver around her, dimensions shifting subtly, as if she were looking at it through rippling water.

  "Fii?" Quinn's voice sounded distant, muffled.

  She blinked, trying to focus. The room stabilized, but the feeling remained—a wrongness in the air, in her body, in the spaces between heartbeats.

  "You okay, kid?" Virgil was watching her with narrowed eyes, his assessment cutting through the haze of her discomfort.

  "Fine," she managed. "Just tired."

  Virgil didn't look convinced, but he didn't press the issue. Instead, he pushed himself to his feet with a barely suppressed groan. "Well, get some rest. We leave for the Wastes in a week, and I need you sharp."

  Fii nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The tingling had subsided, but in its place was a hollow feeling, a space inside her that hadn't been there before—or maybe it had, and she just hadn't noticed until now.

  Virgil headed toward the stairs that led up to the living quarters, each step measured and careful. At the doorway, he paused and looked back. "Next time, kid, finish the job. Makes things cleaner for everyone."

  Then he was gone, leaving Fii and Quinn alone with the weight of unspoken words between them.

  "He did what he had to," Quinn said quietly. "You know that, right?"

  "Yeah." Fii stared at her hands, flexing the fingers slowly. "I just wish..."

  What? That she'd killed Bill herself? That she'd never gone after Glimmerstrike in the first place? That she'd somehow found a way to be both merciful and effective in a world that rarely allowed for both?

  Before she could finish the thought, another wave of wrongness swept through her. This time, it wasn't just a feeling. The air around her hands visibly distorted, light bending around her fingers as if they were surrounded by intense heat. Tools on the nearby workbench rattled, some rising a few inches before clattering back down.

  "Whoa." Quinn took a step back, eyes wide. "That's—"

  "Not normal," Fii finished for him, staring at her hands. The distortion faded, but the memory of it lingered, a reminder that something had changed, something fundamental.

  "Maybe you should sit down," Quinn suggested, moving cautiously to her side. "You look a little—"

  The world tilted. Not metaphorically—literally shifted on its axis, the floor beneath their feet angling sharply to the right before snapping back into place.

  Quinn stumbled, catching himself on the buggy's frame. Tools scattered across the floor, a few hanging suspended in mid-air as if gravity had simply forgotten them.

  Fii clutched her head, a spike of pain driving through her temples. For a moment—just a heartbeat—she saw something impossible: endless sand dunes stretching to the horizon, a sky the wrong shade of blue, rock formations that couldn't exist in the world she knew.

  Then it was gone, and she was back in the garage, Quinn's concerned face hovering inches from her own.

  "What the hell was that?" he demanded, hands gripping her shoulders.

  "I don't know." Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, distant and echoing. "Something's wrong. Something's... changing."

  Quinn's eyes searched hers, worry etched into every line of his face. "What can I do? Should I get Virgil?"

  "No." The word came out more forcefully than intended. "No, he's dealing with enough right now. I'll be fine."

  It was a lie, and they both knew it. But Quinn nodded anyway, respecting her choice even when he disagreed with it.

  "At least sit down for a minute," he urged, guiding her to a nearby crate. "Take a breather."

  Fii sank onto the crate, suddenly aware of how tired she was. Not just physically, but down to her bones, a fatigue that went deeper than muscles and sinew.

  She could feel her power thrumming beneath her skin, no longer the familiar pull of gravity but something wilder, more complex—as if she'd spent her life speaking a simple language only to discover it was merely one dialect of a much larger tongue.

  "It'll pass," she said, as much to convince herself as Quinn. "Whatever it is, I'll figure it out."

  Quinn squeezed her shoulder gently. "Course you will. You're Fii. You always figure it out."

  His confidence would have been comforting if she'd shared it. But as she sat there, the strange energy pulsing through her veins, Fii couldn't shake the feeling that this was beyond her understanding—that something fundamental had changed, and there was no going back.

  Outside, the perpetual drizzle of the slums intensified, raindrops hammering against the roof of the garage like tiny fists demanding entry. Through the grimy window, Fii could see Luku approaching, hunched against the downpour, his face set in the stoic expression of a man who had seen worse weather and survived.

  In a week, they'd be heading into the Wastes, looking for Edith, for answers. Fii had thought she was prepared, but now she wasn't sure.

  She glanced down at her hands, watching as tiny motes of light seemed to orbit her fingers for a moment before vanishing.

  Not gravity. Something else.