“Here,” I said, pulling up the display and jerking it loose of its console so the image hovered in the air between us. Cage, Alexei, and Imani shared a cell. Cage and Alexei were cuffed. Imani wasn’t. In the neighboring cell, Reed was similarly uncuffed, but Mia, Jasper, and Rune were bound.

“We ran out of inhibitor needles.” Priya answered my unspoken question as she came to stand behind me. “We didn’t anticipate having to cuff and recuff you people so many damn times. We had to prioritize the most dangerous powers.”

I got that. I would have left the healers free too. But as we stared at the video feed, Imani passed her hands over Alexei’s hands, and his cuffs fell away.

“How . . . ?” Hallam snarled.

I reversed the feed without being asked and slowed it down, but it didn’t give me any further answers. As near as I could tell from the video, she just . . . slid them off. “Did you leave them loose?” I asked, knowing the answer.

Hallam snorted. “They’re self-adjusting.”

As we watched, Imani crossed to Cage. They spoke in hushed tones for a moment, and then she touched his arms, and his cuffs fell away too.

“It’s her upgraded power,” I realized. The others stared at me, and I hurried to explain. “We think contact with the aliens did something to our abilities. To Matt’s, too. That’s probably how you survived after I . . .” I couldn’t say shot you.

But he was already nodding. “The doctors theorized I wasn’t really dead, only badly injured.”

“You were dead,” I replied sharply. “Believe me, we checked. We would never, never, have left you if you weren’t.”

He stared at me for a long moment. “But that means . . .”

“Liam said it was something about the aliens. He called them the source of the powers. Being around them seems to extend our abilities. Sometimes it’s easy to see how our new ability relates to the old one. Reed healed others, and now he can heal himself. Rune can connect with computers without being in physical contact with them. Other times, the connection is less obvious.” I swallowed. These people could still turn on me, and I was giving away too much. I pressed on, hoping they wouldn’t notice I was suddenly short on examples. “In Matt’s case, he went from sensing life to creating it.”

“That’s impossible.” He looked to Priya, shaking his head frantically.

“I don’t know.” She leaned against the wall, inspecting him, her hand stroking her chin. “I always thought you woke up too . . . too healthy for someone who’d been injured to the point of death.”

“But that means . . .” Matt’s gaze flickered between us.