I had a glimpse of the masked woman with her hand raised. She made a quick beckoning gesture and something in me went.

I hit the top of the vehicle I’d been meaning to go over. A second had passed, I’d stopped flying, I’d dropped the Wretch and I’d let go of the gun I’d been using as a club.

Stupid, I thought.

People grabbed me. I twisted away and tried to roll over the trunk of the vehicle to the far side, and I found myself as weak as a baby.

Fly. I forced myself to fly, and it did take some forcing. Not because my power was weak or gone, but because my head wasn’t all there. My thoughts were as weak as my body.

I’d bought some time. People on our side who had been pinned down by gunfire were getting closer. Brio, Anelace. I didn’t see Capricorn, Lookout, or Ashley, but I saw Rain, who was hanging back, a silver blade in hand that he wasn’t throwing.

The strength I’d lost was quickly returning. My thoughts returned. The sinking feeling that had started when I’d seen that people were gunned down and quintupled when I’d hurt the guy in the middle of the fighting lingered.

“Who are you!?” I called out. “Why do this!?”

There was a bang at the back of the car. I looked up just in time to see someone vaulting over. The man with the mask, holding up someone’s bulletproof vest as a shield between him and the heroes.

I flew away, Wretch up, and I saw the world I was flying to go dark. The ground beneath me illuminated, sweeping out like a ripple extending from the point of his landing.

My flight died, and I skidded to a landing, my still-frost-stiff costume skimming on a snow-slick road.

I tried to use flight to stand, then remembered I didn’t have it. I climbed to my feet, wary. The man tossed the shield aside, then rolled his head around, cracking his neck.

The cars were nearby, the ditch, the road beneath me. But there was no wind, and I didn’t feel the cold anymore—cool air, but not cold. The ground had a glow to it, like there were dim lights just beneath the snow. That glow was more intense toward the edge of the circle.

A ring thirty feet in diameter—and past those thirty feet, there was nothing. Some of the cars and trucks had been cut apart, but the cut pieces still stood.

Not white, not black, not gray or anything neutral. It made my head hurt to look at it and to think about it.

I panted for breath, feeling the lingering weakness from the woman’s power, and I could tell that the air here was thinner. I’d experienced thinner air by flying especially high.