Alice struggled to understand why on Earth she should be so uncomfortable flying in a plane.

  The Black Swan was a marvel of modern engineering. It was as subtle, elegant, and comfortable as it was durable. The stealth cargo plane was propelled by six cutting-edge jet engines. Yet, the matte black metallic skin of the craft muffled the high-pitched SCREEEE of the machinery so much that the people on board were hardly aware of it.

  But even with the sound insulation, the advanced technology, and even the alloy airframe that made the Black Swan capable of surviving crashes and airspeeds that would rip any military-grade plane to ribbons, Alice couldn't help but feel as though she were plummeting out of the sky in an iron cage.

  It was made all the more embarrassing that Alice was fully aware that she, more than any other passenger on the Black Swan, was supposed to be at home in the sky.

  "Just breathe," said Ethan with a smirk as he watched her lean against one of the portholes. "They say you're more likely to die in a car accident then in a plane crash."

  Alice tried to settle the fluttering in her stomach. She tried to glare at him as soon as she heard his laughter but seemed unable to tear her eyes away from the view outside. She would have been willing to do about anything to be out of this clumsy metal bird and out into the open sky.

  "Shut up, Ethan!" she growled. "This isn't funny!"

  "It is a little funny," he chuckled.

  "No, it's not," someone interrupted. "It's sad."

  Alice turned her head and saw Priscilla. She walked past the two of them without sparing either of them a glance. She was dressed in her combat rig, a hissing, whirring mechanical frame that attached to the outside of her body glove, making her roughly as strong as a bear.

  "You're a flying metahuman who doesn't like to fly," she said with more than a little disdain. "You don't have the training or the discipline necessary for a mission like this. And worse, I have to rely on the both of you. So, yeah. Not funny. Just really sad."

  "Give her a break, Priscilla," said Ethan in Alice's defense. "It's her first time out. I've seen her train. I think she's going to be fine."

  Priscilla looked at him with a venomous smile.

  "Beaker, you're no better. Your assessment of her ability is worth less than nothing to me."

  She walked away towards the weapons locker. Alice and Ethan let her go without protest.

  "Don't listen to her," said Ethan as soon as Priscilla was out of ear shot, "or any of them. They think they can tell us how to do this job because they have military training and tech and stuff. But they'll never be as naturally gifted as us, will they?"

  Is that what this team is made of? Alice thought to herself, Us and them?

  Alice had begun to win some modicum of respect from Athena, but Joshua and Levi still seemed indifferent towards her, and Priscilla treated her with outright contempt. She wondered what it would take to earn the trust of the rest of Meta Team, as well as just what kinds of problems she'd run into until that happened.

  Ethan stood, no longer in his pajamas, but dressed for the field. It was a simple black shirt, the sort worn by the rest of the RaTS, but with the long sleeves rolled back so that she could see the thick, corded muscles of his arms. His pants were a dark gray, as were his boots. His hands were fitted with custom-made black gloves laced with high-tech fibers and circuitry.

  Alice, too, was dressed and ready for the mission, Priscilla's criticisms notwithstanding. She was once again in her high-tech body glove. She also wore a black and gray jacket worn by many of the security specialists. Her uniform, like Ethan's gloves, was also made of circuitry and fibers designed to work in tandem with the team's computers and equipment.

  Athena appeared in the compartment with them. Alice was used to seeing her in a security uniform but had never seen her strapped with so much gear. Body armor and a combat rig added to her bulky figure, and a compact automatic weapon was strapped to her chest.

  "Five minutes," she warned them before turning to leave.

  "Hey, Athena," called Alice. She gestured to Athena's gear. "What's with all the firepower? I thought this was a rescue thing. You think we'll run into that much trouble?"

  Athena answered with a cool, matter-of-fact tone that she might have used to explain why she was carrying an umbrella on such a beautiful day. "I'm about to jump out of a plane into a hostile country with only five other team members, knowing that if I'm captured, I'll likely be tortured and incarcerated for the rest of my life in a North Korean prison. And, unlike you, I don't have superhuman strength or invulnerability. I feel like I'd like to be prepared for anything."

  Alice nodded appreciatively. "Good point," she admitted.

  Athena left their compartment. As Alice leaned against the porthole, feeling her stomach turn somersaults, she was aware that Ethan was speaking, but she had no idea what he was saying. Her mind was elsewhere. Thoughts raced through her already busy mind, asking things like What if I make a mistake and What if someone gets hurt because of me, or dies? What if Priscilla is right, and I'm really not ready for any of this? She was all too aware that she was suddenly somewhere other than the Ready Room, that nice, controlled environment where buildings were built to be destroyed and the disaster victims were made of plastic. This was the real world. Things were going to happen. Had already happened. She hadn't even arrived yet, and people were hurt and dying. This was worse even than when she went to North Carolina and saw the people caught in the flood. Those people lost their possessions, and a few got hurt. Here, people were already buried under thousands of pounds of burning concrete and steel.

  Alice was suddenly overcome with an unexpected emotion: shame. She'd been practically begging Athena to let her into the field, to give her a real mission to test her mettle, and now that she'd gotten her wish, she was afraid.

  "Hey, Earth to Alice."

  Alice felt a hand on her shoulder. She saw Ethan, donning that million-dollar smile of his.

  "Nerves? About the mission, I mean?"

  She gave a shallow nod, pressing her hand harder still against the smooth, cool surface of the glass porthole. She realized she'd have to be careful lest she break it.

  The hand that rested reassuringly on her shoulder gave her a brisk slap on the back. She felt the weight of that slap, the power of it. She imagined he'd done it with enough force to knock a normal man down. But not her. She was like him. It was a gesture only she could appreciate.

  "Don't worry," he said. "It'll be fine."

  Alice waited for him to say more, but he just stood there smiling at her, as though waiting for thanks for what he said. Her face fell into incredulity.

  "That's it?" she demanded. "It'll be fine? That's your pep talk? Holy cow, Ethan! I've read fortune cookies with more personalized advice!"

  Ethan just grinned wider.

  "Your lucky numbers are seven, thirty-two, ninety-eight..."

  Alice just shook her head, her ponytail bobbing back and forth like a loosely coiled spring. She wanted to shout at him more, to vent her discomfort and her frustration on him like a dragon breathing flame. But the anger she felt towards him was fading. The corners of her mouth seemed to float towards her eyes of their own accord. Dispute herself, she was smiling at what he said. She loathed to admit it, but he had made her feel a little better. His encouragement, shallow as it was, had eased her turning stomach, and had taken the edge off her anxiety. He had an effect on her, and she had no idea whether to love it or hate it.

  Five minutes later she stood in the cargo bay. She stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Ethan and the rest of the team. Athena and the others wore helmets with goggles and breathing masks that made them seem like alien creatures from science fiction. Ribbed hoses struck out from their faces like elephantine trunks while the dark, smooth surfaces of their eye protection reflected the red-lit machinery of the bay at distorted proportions.

  Alice realized she and Ethan were, compared to the others, carrying almost no gear at all. Their only accessories were their body gloves and breathing masks. Alice wasn't even wearing a parachute.

  "Thirty seconds!" Athena's voice crackled in Alice's earpiece.

  Alice grabbed the high-tech goggles perched on her head and lowered them onto her face. Immediately, bright green figures and numbers danced in front of her eyes, and green halos illuminated the members of her team so that she'd see them, even in the dark. Once her breathing mask latched in place over her face, a cool breeze of oxygen tickled her lips and nose.

  The cargo bay door gaped open with a deep, metallic groan like the mouth of some flying, robotic whale. The air outside whipped into the cargo bay with a FOOM! Beyond the red lights of the cargo bay, the horizon glowed with the pale light of a sun not yet risen. Immediately Alice felt the tumbling in her stomach ease. She now had access to the sky.

  Athena signaled the team to prepare to jump.

  "Hey, Ethan!" Alice shouted over the din of the rushing air. "Think you'd live if you did this without a parachute?"

  "Oh, definitely," he shouted back matter-of-factly. "But it really stings!" He must have known she had a surprised expression despite the mask. He added, "Iraq, three years ago! I'll tell you about it sometime!"

  "Go, go, go!" ordered Athena.

  Six shadowy figures tumbled out of the Black Swan, which immediately closed its cargo door and powered away, not to return again until summoned by the team.

  Five of the six dark figures tumbled in the pre-dawn light, dropping like stones towards the Earth below. One did not drop, but soared, maneuvering the gale-force winds like a skier lazily switching back and forth down a snowy slope.

  Alice listened to the rushing of the wind in her ears and felt the sting of the cold on her face. This was her element. Above the Earth, there in the sky, free to move as she wished, she was ultimately herself.

  As she soared through the heavens, Alice touched a button on the Motherboxx strapped to her wrist to turn on her music. The beat of "Geronimo" by Sheppard thundered in her ears, and she could not hold back her smile as she whispered, "Bombs away!" as she broke into a tight dive.

  "Reign it in, Alice," Athena's voice crackled in her earpiece. "We're not here for fun. The more you play around up here, the more likely the North Koreans are to discover us on the way down."

  Alice quieted her music and gave a brief acknowledgment. She let herself free-fall, falling in next to Ethan, who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself all the way down.

  "This part never gets old!" he cried.

  The six of them were falling towards a low group of gray clouds. Only after she stared at it for a moment did Alice realize that what she was looking at was actually smoke. Just as they reached the top of the billowing cloud, Athena gave the order, and five parachutes strung out behind the team members and billowed open like a time-lapse video of mushrooms.

  Alice slowed her own decent to match those of her teammates. Together, like a flock of dark birds, they descended through the smoke.

  Alice had been training with Athena in the Ready Room for months, and so she thought she might be as prepared for what lay beyond the gray cloud as any person might hope to be. She'd been through simulations of collapsed buildings before, not to mention earthquakes, tornadoes, and bombing wreckage. She'd even responded to a real flood on her own before she'd even heard of ORIGIN. But this was different. When the smoking corpse of the Ryugyong hotel finally appeared, she realized she was pathetically, embarrassingly unprepared for any of it.

  Even before the team cleared the smoke enough to actually see ground zero, Alice could hear it. Her body glove's systems amplified the sounds below her in stunning detail. Sirens blared from fire trucks, and their hoses blasted jets of water in an attempt to stop the fires in the wreckage. A man on a megaphone attempted to give instructions. Whether the man was attempting to direct the rescuers or the countless civilians gathered around the hotel, Alice couldn't be sure.

  Most disturbing of all the noises were the voices of the frightened, the injured, or the dying. Somehow, through the din of all the other incredible noises that day, theirs floated above all the rest. Though they spoke Korean, and Alice did not, it made no difference. Most of them were screaming.

  The team touched down in a poorly kept city park of sorts. It was a pale, crunchy field of grass with a few sparse trees surrounded by unattractive gray buildings.

  One by one, each ORIGIN operator hit the ground running, trailing their wilting parachutes behind them. Alice didn't land at all, but stopped two feet from the ground, her arms wrapped around her body as though she were trying not to shiver in the winter chill. Her body glove was designed to keep her warm in almost any climate, but her trembling had nothing to do with the weather.

  "We're four blocks from ground zero," announced Athena when the others gathered around her. "Once we arrive, I want Rollcage set up in a discreet place, up high if you can."

  Levi nodded in response. Just as they'd been instructed, Athena was using each team member's call sign. Now that they were out in the field, they couldn't risk using real names.

  "Fox Fire, stick with Roll Cage. Don't let anyone disturb him. We need those drones."

  Priscilla, who'd been busy adjusting her face mask and her insect-like eye gear, looked up in surprise at her orders.

  "I should be out there digging," she protested. "Make the new girl do the babysitting."

  Athena shook her head.

  "I need all my heaviest lifters out there, and I can't leave Rollcage alone. Not here. Corpse is our medic, so we need him there with the wounded. That leaves you."

  Priscilla shot another venomous look at Alice, but she said nothing. She stalked away from them and began preparing her bulky Silf jet, the jet-propelled platform that carried her through her missions like a screaming angel of death.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Alice would have been lying to herself if that didn't give her some degree of personal satisfaction, but her nerves for what was to come left her no room to enjoy it.

  Athena turned to Joshua, Ethan, and Alice. "I want you two to proceed directly to the hotel. Start assessing, help where you can, but don't move anything heavy until your engineer says so."

  Alice nodded her head emphatically. She was determined not to make a costly mistake here.

  "Whatever you say, Mom," chuckled Ethan.

  Does Ethan not take this seriously? Is this all one big joke to him?

  Alice walked side-by-side with Ethan towards the hotel. The streets between the ugly buildings were choked with shouting, crying, and disturbingly quiet people. Alice saw shock, horror, and resignation in their dark, slanted eyes as she pushed her way through them towards the site. She could smell them. She wondered if the sharp, almost bitter odor in the air was, in fact, the collective fear of tens of thousands of people in one place.

  As they reached the final block of buildings, Alice watched as the other team members peeled away to find vantage points. She watched as Levi and Priscilla made their way to the roof of an apartment building, Priscilla's Silf jet firing up to a whining roar. She grabbed a hold of Levi and pulled him on to the device, which lifted both Meta team members up a couple dozen stories and deposited them above. Alice could see Levi begin unzipping the heavy bags he carried and unfolding his equipment until he had a small, temporary nest from where he could pilot his drone and relay her instructions.

  "Athena," Alice said into her mic, "The crowd's getting too thick. I can't get any closer without physically shoving my way through."

  The buzzing, convulsing sea of people around her pressed in like the deep water of the ocean attempting to crush a submersible. Even with all her abilities, Alice still felt like she could be trampled to death. The sorts of crowds she'd experienced in concerts were like nothing here. It would have been impossible for her to move through them without hurting someone.

  Alice paused to lift a woman who'd tripped beside her on the street. The woman, Alice guessed she was in her thirties, muttered something in Korean but didn't even look at her as she continued to flee into the press that nearly killed her.

  My first rescue of the day.

  "You're too close for us to worry about subtlety now," answered Athena. "Fly the rest of the way in."

  Alice took a deep breath and let go of the forces that kept her on the ground. She realized this was the first time she'd deliberately flown in public since her adventure in North Carolina. As people shouted and pointed, she grabbed Ethan's outstretched hand and carried him with her, soaring ten feet above the heads of the people below.

  Within seconds, they reached the police barriers that kept the undulating sea of people at bay. Korean policemen seemed desperate to maintain order. Few of them noticed the pair flying above their heads, so absorbed were they in the cacophony in front of them, but the few who did froze in shock and disbelief.

  "Hey, toss me to the far side of the wreckage," shouted Ethan above the voice of the crowd. "We'll start at opposite ends and work our ways towards the middle."

  Alice obliged, grabbing Ethan's wrist with both hands and hurling him like a hammer. Ethan flew through the air in a graceful arc and disappeared from Alice's view over the summit of the gray wreckage. He landed on a small pile of debris over a hundred yards away with a faint KRUMP and a puff of dust.

  Alice found a small pile of her own to land on, and touched down gently on a tilted, cracked, dusty concrete slab. Looking around the mountain of debris around her, she saw a confusing, nightmarish landscape of crumbled concrete, broken glass, and twisted metal girders and rebar sticking out of the mass at odd angles like broken bones puncturing the skin of a massive beast.

  The noise was incredible, but through the constant screams of sirens, shouts, and cries for help, Alice heard the radio buzzing in her ear that meant Levi had made radio contact with her.

  "Meta Six, can you hear me okay?" he said, calling Alice by her temporary call sign. Alice worried what creative name they'd give her in time, especially if she proved herself to be nothing more than a clueless teenage girl with powers.

  Maybe I'll be known as "Mall Rat".

  Alice told him she could hear him just fine.

  "Good," he replied. "Now, I'm going to need you to do something for me. I've already got my drone in the air, and I've got a nice view of the debris from above."

  Alice looked up and immediately recognized the familiar shape of Levi's drone. Its fans twisted beneath the domed shell as the tiny aircraft darted side to side like a hovering insect.

  "What I need is a view of the debris from the inside. Just touch your fingers to that concrete slab you're on, and the sensors in your glove should give me a pretty good idea of what things look like underneath the surface."

  Alice did as she was instructed and crouched, placing her fingers on the surface of the tilted concrete surface. Immediately she could feel the circuitry-laced material of her gloves hum with vibration. She knew from training that the gloves were using something like sonar or ultrasound to make an image of the chaos under her feet, a map of sorts, and that other electronics in her tight-fitting body glove would send those images to Levi, who could read them.

  "Beautiful," said Levi when Alice's gloves stopped humming. "I'm getting a nice view of things in a fairly large area. Now let's get to work."

  As Levi relayed instructions to Alice, she began darting from place to place looking for survivors.

  The first of them were easy to find. If Levi had not told her where to look, she would never have made sense of it on her own. At first, she thought she was looking at a small, slender animal flopping around in the rubble. Then her mind registered what she was looking at: a slender, grimy arm, hand and fingers scrambling and waving, poking out of a cavity in the debris. The arm was soon joined by another, which emerged from the small hole like an animal leaving its den.

  Alice was suddenly aware that she could hear faint, exhausted sobbing coming from that hole.

  "Go ahead Meta Six. Rip it up. You don't have to be very gentle here," said Levi in her ear.

  The cavity was large enough to allow a human body to crawl through, but it was barred by bent, ugly pieces of rebar that seemed as secure as any prison cell window. She reached her fingers into the concrete space below and found a grip.

  "Watch out!" she warned the people inside. "I'm going to get you out, but I need you to get away from the opening."

  Alice wondered what good she could do by giving such instructions in English. How many people in this country spoke English? She had no idea. Her meaning, it seemed, got across anyway. Alice watched as the dirty fingers disappeared back into the hole.

  With a faint grunt of effort, Alice pulled at the concrete covering the entrance to the cavity. Though the large chunk of debris was the size of a refrigerator and connected to other large pieces by nearly invisible pieces of steel, it bent and crumbled as Alice lifted it away.

  Sunlight streamed into the dusty depths of the cave-like space under the debris. Alice saw the hands again, and shoulders, and desperate faces. Two women gazed up at her, their mouths sputtering words Alice couldn't understand. One of them was young, maybe younger than Alice by a few years. The girl seemed filthy beyond adequate description, but she appeared to be unharmed. The other woman was older, and she slumped into the closet-sized space as though she could no longer find the strength to stand. Alice saw that one of her legs was bent at an angle that made her stomach turn over.

  Alice reached for the healthy girl first and lifted her out of the hole as though she weighed nothing at all. The girl seemed to be unable to stop jabbering until Alice lifted her in her arms and flew her to the nearest group of paramedics. When she did, the girl fell morbidly silent, her eyes as wide as dinner plates. Neither she nor the rescuers seemed to be able to find words as Alice left her to their care.

  The second woman, the one with the injured leg, had no intentions of going so quietly.

  "What do I do?" cried Alice as she attempted to get a grip on the frantic woman. The woman was screaming what Alice could only imagine were threats and warnings as she beat at Alice's reaching arms with her fists. She retreated as far as she could into her cave, refusing to be rescued.

  "Whatever you have to," answered Levi. "She needs help, and she's afraid of you. But she can't hurt you, and you're strong enough to hold her, even if she struggles. Just don't injure her any more than she already is."

  Alice growled with frustration as she leapt into the hole and scooped the thrashing woman into her arms. The thrashing stopped as soon as Alice took to the air. The woman, instead of trying to get away from Alice, now embraced her in a death grip as her wide, terrified eyes became inseparable from the ground below them.

  The emergency workers seemed to have found their voices again when Alice appeared before them with yet another patient. They shouted and backed away from her as though she were some sort of toxic substance. They stared at her, hissing at each other in their native language, pointing at Alice and the woman in her arms.

  Alice decided it was no use to try to explain herself or to reassure them. She pried the rigid fingers of the woman from around her neck and left her on the ground in front of the workers. The woman lay motionless on the ground, staring, as Alice flew away.

  Many of the other rescues that day were much more difficult. Though Alice was sure her body was up to the challenge before her, the job was running her emotionally ragged. Levi directed her all over the surface of the hotel debris, occasionally instructing her to touch a hard surface here or there to update his image of the wreckage beneath. The constant streams from the fire fighters' hoses and rescuers' attempts to dig survivors out kept the entire structure minutely shifting and changing to small degrees.

  There were so many people to save, and so many of them, most of them, were badly hurt. Alice felt numb from the sheer number of cuts and broken bones she'd seen that day, and she'd only been there for an hour, though it felt like an eternity.

  "Meta Six, I'm picking up what might be a trapped person about thirty feet below you. You'll need to clear a lot of the top away before you can get down that far."

  Alice wondered what a nightmare it must be to be buried alive under all this destruction. As she carefully removed piece after piece of the hotel and carefully placed them in a nearby pile out of the way, the faces of the people she'd saved thus far flashed through her mind. Their dirty, horrified, blood-smeared faces. She worked faster, desperate to find whoever was down there and to free them. The anxiety was excruciating.

  But if she could just stop the suffering of just one more person...

  Alice lifted a gargantuan, groaning, cracked pillar with her shoulders. Her eyes fell on a shape in the rubble now exposed to the gray light of day. It was messy and broken and half-buried in the coarse rubble. It was also in pieces, and to Alice it seemed like a toy that had been disassembled by a destructive child and buried in the sand. It wasn't until Alice saw an eye, dark, motionless, and staring, that she realized what she was looking at had once been a human being.

  "Meta Six, why aren't you moving? Remove that pillar so I can see what's underneath. Meta Six?"

  Alice was still staring, oblivious to the voice in her ear and the drone that suddenly appeared by her side.

  Suddenly another voice began speaking to her: Athena, who hadn't spoken a word to her since she first arrived at the site.

  "Meta Six, your heart rate is spiking," warned Athena. "You're going into shock. You need to focus on what you're doing. You're currently lifting eight tons of concrete. If you drop it you could shift the whole thing and some of the people trapped underneath might die."

  Alice barely registered a thing. She did feel tired and numb, and she felt her legs shaking. The enormous weight on her shoulders was shifting, nearly falling.

  There was a Crunch and a small explosion of rubble beside her as Ethan appeared, landing catlike despite his hard impact. She screamed and dropped her load. Ethan, looking like a statue of Atlas come to life, caught the pillar in his thick, corded arms and lifted it gently onto his shoulder.

  "Pull yourself together!" he growled, concentrating on balancing the weight to keep the pillar from breaking apart. "Help me carry this!"

  Alice, with trembling fingers, took hold on the pillar and helped Ethan move it to the safe pile.

  "What happened?" demanded Ethan. "What's gotten into you?"

  Alice landed on the pile, doubled over, clutching her stomach, and vomited. Her breaths between retches became erratic, as though every breath was blindingly painful. As she gagged her last few dry heaves, she collapsed in a heap on the side of the pile and drew her knees to her chest. Her eyes were wide and staring, as though she were still seeing something that was no longer there in front of her.

  "Something's wrong with her," Ethan said into his mic.

  "She's suffering from shock," replied Athena. "She wasn't psychologically prepared for what she was going to see here."

  "So, what do we do?" asked Ethan.

  "Get back to work," ordered Athena. "We're down one Meta. That means twice as much work for you to do. So get to it, and pick up the pace."

  "Roll Cage's location is secure enough," came a voice over the radio. It was Priscilla. "Let me take Meta Six's place."

  There was silence over their coms for a moment as the team waited to hear Athena's decision.

  "Permission granted. Fox Fire, take Meta Six's place at ground zero."

  Ethan took one more look at Alice with a mixture of pity and frustration, and then he crouched like a track runner at the block, and he leapt into the air, returning to his previous area of the debris.

  Alice made no reaction to his departure. She still sat on the ground, her knees to her chest.

  A few seconds later, Alice could hear the scream of Priscilla's Silf Jet as she passed. She saw her shadow descend from the dust-choked air and land on top of the debris pile, and she watched as the redhead's combat rig hummed to life as she flipped chunks of concrete and twisted steel ten times her own body weight aside to reveal the empty spaces beneath.

  "Meta Six," Athena said in her earpiece.

  Alice didn't respond. The voices in her ear were just noise. She wasn't even sure who was speaking, nor to whom.

  Athena sighed.

  "Alice, I know you can hear me. I know you've just seen something terrible. I know you're still seeing it, and it's hurting you inside. But you need to suck it up. That person is dead. More are dying. If you want to make a difference, if you want to go home knowing that you saved the lives you could have saved, you need to get up right now."

  Fine words, but there was no strength in Alice's legs to get up from where she huddled in the dust.

  There was a shrill cry that pierced the dust. A survivor, a woman as gray as the concrete, emerged from the rubble and limped away as Priscilla held a slab aloft, her combat rig whining with effort.

  "Fox Fire," came an urgent voice over the radio. "Be aware, the rubble under your feet is unstable. It's going to shift any minute."

  "I copy, Roll Cage," Priscilla answered as she dropped the slab at her feet. It must have weighed as much as a taxicab. "Just give me a minute to...yeeeaarggh!" she cried.

  Alice suddenly stood from where she was and saw that the ground had literally moved under Priscilla's feet. The piece of rubble she'd been standing on had cracked under her weight combined with that of the slab she'd been lifting, and the gap had swallowed her left leg up to the hip. Immediately the redhead removed her mask, spilling her fiery hair over her dusty shoulders like napalm, and attempted to climb out. Judging by the awkward position of her body and her pain-twisted countenance, Priscilla was stuck and possibly injured. Though her combat rig whined and hissed with effort, she seemed unable to free herself from the concrete trap into which she'd fallen.

  Alice's feet moved slowly at first, and then more freely. Her heart still hammered in her chest, threatening at any moment to burst out through her sternum, but she was able to tame her breathing into long, controlled drafts of the dirty air. She was halfway to Priscilla across the broken landscape when she finally remembered to fly. Then it only took two bounds to reach her.

  Priscilla's face was red and sweating when she reached her. Alice looked down at her and froze. Priscilla saw Alice standing above her and glared, as though daring Alice to say something snide.

  And something in her wanted to. Her emotions stirred, disturbed by the horror she'd seen and the abuse she'd endured at the hands of this red-headed bully. Her fear was suddenly replaced by anger, and Alice found her mouth filled almost to bursting with a great many things she wanted to say. Why should she hold back? Suddenly she didn't care where she was or what she'd come to do. She just wanted to yell at this girl, to make her cry the way she'd made Alice want to cry. Why shouldn't she say exactly what was on her mind? It's what Priscilla would have done.

  Priscilla stared back at her and said nothing.

  Alice reached down into the rubble and forced her hands into the crack that held Priscilla pinned. She wrenched them apart like a clam shell while Priscilla gritted her teeth and growled at the pain of it. Alice grabbed the girl's combat rig at the shoulder and pulled her out until she was belly down in the dust, a gasping fish pulled from the water.

  "My leg is broken," she hissed through her teeth. "You need to finish the job."

  "I'm afraid to," Alice admitted. She had not meant to be so honest, to say something so open to Priscilla, of all people. But it had just come out on its own.

  Priscilla rolled onto her back, wincing with the pain. Now that Alice saw it, Priscilla's leg seemed slightly bent at an odd angle. Even the combat rig seemed bent out of place. It turned her stomach to look at it, so she diverted her gaze back to the dusty rubble on which she crouched, as though she were trying to bore holes through it with her eyes. What would she see if she could? What else lay just beneath the surface of that concrete dust?

  "I know you're afraid," panted Priscilla, "but that's not even why I don't like you. I've been afraid plenty of times."

  Alice stared into Priscilla's green eyes. She realized she believed her. How many battlefields had this girl seen in her short life? How much blood?

  "You're letting that fear get the better of you," she continued. "You're running away from people who need you to do your job."

  Running away from people who need me?

  "And if you sit there doing nothing, you're going to prove me right. You'll prove I was right about you all along, that you don't belong here, that no matter what abilities you were born with, you're too much of a coward to fight the battles that need fighting."

  Alice turned her head, looking around her at the remnants of the Ryugyong hotel. Her eyes fell on a collection of ambulances that had gathered at the area where she'd been habitually bringing her survivors. She could see the paramedics from where she sat, and she watched them as they stood by their vehicles, many of them looking out over the debris but not actually venturing out into it. It was like they were waiting for someone.

  They're waiting for me. Just like he'd been waiting for me, and I made him wait too long. He died waiting for me.

  "How many people have I saved?" Alice asked, her voice still quavering. Her mouth felt clumsy, like the muscles in her face had forgotten how to form the words she wanted to say. Tears had begun to slowly trickle down her dirty cheeks. Her dark hair, now tangled and dotted with small pieces of debris, waved in the gentle breeze.

  "Twelve, I think," answered Priscilla. "And there are dozens more of them out there. So why are you still here?"

  Alice looked at her hands and watched them shake. Then, slowly, she climbed to her feet.

  "You are wrong about me," she said.

  No more running. No more hoping for someone else to save the day. No more turning away from people who need me.

  Priscilla relaxed her neck, looking away from Alice and to the dust-gray sky above them.

  "Prove it," she said, closing her eyes.