After only a few seconds of Zu’s power surge, the lights on the registers began to pop like firecrackers, dropping streams of blue-white sparks and glass to the ground.

She had only meant for it to be a distraction, I think; a flash and a bang to draw the attention of our attackers away from us long enough for an escape. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her waving us toward her, but the machine under Zu’s other hand had heated to a terrifying molten glow. I felt the invisible grip on me slacken suddenly, but fear kept me still as the dead. She wasn’t letting go. Liam and I must have had the same thought—the same scorching fear—because we pushed to our feet, shouting for her to stop.

“Turn her off!” someone managed to shout over the alarms.

“Zu, let go!” Liam stood and stumbled over cans of sunscreen and bug spray from a nearby display. I saw him lift his arms, ready to yank Zu away with his abilities, but Chubs was faster. He tugged the glove off Zu’s other hand and pulled it over his own, then all but ripped her arm away from the metal.

The lights went out. Just before the overhead bulbs exploded, I saw Zu’s face as she came out of whatever trance she had been locked in. Her big eyes were rimmed with red, her short black hair on end, freckles standing out against the full flush of her oval face. The sudden darkness gave Liam the opportunity to knock both her and Chubs to the ground.

And then, by some small miracle, the emergency lights flicked back on.

The first sign of movement didn’t come from us. I saw our attackers clearly now, climbing over the mangled heaps of white shelves. Four of them, each dressed in layers of black, each with a gun raised and ready. My first thought, as it almost always was when I saw anyone in a black uniform, was to run. To get the others and bolt.

But these weren’t PSFs. They weren’t even grown-ups.

They were kids, like us.

FIFTEEN

AS THEY CAME CLOSER, I saw their mismatched dark clothes and the grime on their faces. They were all thin limbs and hollow cheeks, as if they had stretched out a great deal in a short period of time.

All boys, about my age.

All easy to take, if we had to.

“Christ on a cracker,” the one closest to me muttered, shaking his mop of red hair. “I told you we should have checked the van first.”

Liam’s blond head popped up from the wreckage.

“What the hell are you fools trying to pull?” he snarled. There was another sound, too, like the mewling of a kitten. Or a little girl crying.

I climbed over a bin of bargain DVDs to get to them. Zu sat on the floor, her pink palm facing up toward Chubs’s squinting eyes. Without the glasses perched on his nose, he looked like a different person. “She’s all right,” he said. “No burns.”