On the ground, onlookers—fans and bystanders alike—are the first to realise that this is not merely another thrill seeker. The way the shape moves is different. Its ease in the air, its manoeuvrability, all indicate that this is not a man or a woman in a suit.

This is something else.

High above Times Square, heading north towards Central Park, a burst of bright yellow fire envelops the woman from San Francisco. She writhes, screams, and crashes into the side of a building, smashing glass and scattering blazing parts of herself into the streets below.

A high, ululating cry echoes through the streets of New York, a call that has not been heard by this many people in a thousand years. There’s something joyous in the sound, and something terrifying. It’s so non-human that it sends the crowds below scattering, even before the burning woman’s remains strike concrete.

The Indian woman steers left to avoid the same fate, and flies straight into the boom of a crane protruding from the core of a building still under construction. Her head bounces across an intersection. Her body remains trapped aloft.

The third wing-suited shape heads for the ground as the French woman realises what has happened. Fate has caught up with her and the two women she thinks of as sisters.

She is the only one left.

Seconds later the winged creature—as big as her, but with membranous wings that stretch six metres to either side—emerges from behind a skyscraper and breathes fire into her face.

On the ground, the screams and panic are recorded by a thousand phones and sent onto the web.

In the sky, that delirious cry of joy echoes once more as the creature called Asher Vain glides out over the Hudson.

* * *

In Kansas City, a homeless man who has been begging outside a shopping mall for sixteen years pulls off his holed coat, shirt and trousers, then does the same with his long, knotted black hair and skin. His hairy chest makes a ripping sound as it parts from his body, and with several hard tugs he pulls the rest of the skin from his torso, arms and legs. He throws the wet coverings towards a cowering group of shoppers, who shout and flee in terror. Sweeping pale pink fluid from his glistening hide, he hops along the street on one large leg, shrieking at pedestrians, leaping into the road and causing multiple crashes, and finally disappearing into a side street from where witnesses later claim to hear insane, endless laughter.

* * *