“I know you didn’t expect! Nikola.” Kaveh turned to the alien, clasping his hands in front of him. “Please, this is dangerous. People will get hurt. We need to leave!”

Miranda’s dull, stunned expression snapped to shock, not at Nikola but at something behind them. Kaveh turned around to see that black van, the one with the Tesla coil, plowing through the crowd, ramming human bodies out of the way like a motorboat moving through a lake covered in lily pads.

Nikola turned around to face the van, seeming curious but not alarmed even as the van picked up speed. Kaveh felt a strange pressure in his chest, as if the air had become thick like water, harder to breathe. Then, perhaps twenty feet away from where Nikola stood, the van slammed into an invisible wall, sending the driver, a bald white guy in a black nü-metal hoodie, into his windshield, cracking it with his skull.

Kaveh barely got a chance to get his bearings enough to see that people had already gotten hurt by the van, possibly killed. The driver sat back up, and then Kaveh saw what he had in his hand—a detonator.

Miranda saw it the moment Kaveh did, and yelled, “Everyone down!” before the man pressed the detonator. Kaveh felt the air thicken as Nikola steeled himself, some sort of defensive posture, an extension of what he must have done earlier with the invisible wall. Kaveh covered his face with his arms and fell to the ground, bracing for the bomb. Something went off, and people screamed and scattered, but it wasn’t an explosion. For an instant, Kaveh thought his time had come when Nikola’s half-ton mass collapsed on top of him.

Half screaming, he wormed his way out from under Nikola, who was now utterly immobile. He looked at the black van, looked at the Tesla coil, looked at the man inside it trembling on the other side of the spiderweb of broken glass his head had created, holding the detonator in his shaking hand, blood dripping from his forehead. Kaveh shot to his feet and looked down at Nikola, who was sprawled out on the pavement, his eyes closed.

The militia had figured out how to attach a pulse emitter to that van. But how? How had they known this would be effective against—

Then he heard the wheezing of a helicopter engine, of helicopter blades both coming closer, and slowing down. He turned around in time to see the tail of the news helicopter slam against the side of a skyscraper somewhere around the twentieth floor, which sent the aircraft into a tailspin toward the crowd below. That electromagnetic pulse hadn’t just been effective against Nikola—it had shorted out every other electrical object in sight.