Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
“I don’t have fucking x-ray vision.” He’s already moving, shoving heavy equipment in front of the doorway—a desk, a metal cabinet, something that might be a centrifuge. It won’t hold them long, but it’s something. “Get behind me.”
“Like hell.” I find a scalpel on one of the trays, then another. Not much, but better than nothing. “We do this together or not at all.”
He looks at me for a long moment. The red emergency lights make his face look carved from stone.
“Then we do it together,” he agrees.
The first guard hits the barricade.
It holds for about three seconds. Then Nate’s improvised barrier explodes inward, bodies pouring through the gap, and the room becomes a killing floor.
There’s no space to maneuver, no room to breathe. It’s all close quarters, brutal and ugly—elbows and knees and whatever you can grab. A guard gets his arm around my throat and I slam my head back into his nose, feel cartilage crunch, drive a scalpel into his forearm until he lets go. Another one swings at me with the butt of his rifle and I duck, let the momentum carry him past me, open his hamstring with my knife.
Nate is a hurricane beside me. He catches a guard by the face and squeezes, and I try not to look at what happens next. He picks up another one and uses him as a weapon, literally swinging the screaming man into his colleagues. When someone gets a taser against his neck, Nate just shakes and absorbs it, taking the pain and turning into power, grabbing the arm holding it and twisting until I hear the snap of breaking bones.
But they keep coming.
For every one we put down, two more push through the door. The room is filling with bodies—some dead, some just incapacitated—and still they keep coming. I’m flagging now, the adrenaline no longer enough to mask the damage to my body. A guard lands a hit to my injured ribs and I nearly black out, only staying upright because Nate’s hand closes around my arm.
“Mia—”
“I’m fine.” I’m not fine. I’m very much not fine. “Keep fighting.”
A guard with a shock baton gets past Nate’s guard, driving the crackling weapon toward his chest. Nate catches his wrist, stops the baton an inch from contact, and I watch the guard’s face as he realizes just how outmatched he is.
“You first,” Nate says, and turns the baton back on its owner.
The guard convulses, drops.
More are coming through the door. I can see them stacking up in the corridor, waiting their turn, and I realize with cold clarity that we can’t keep this up forever. We’re winning every engagement but losing the war of attrition. Sooner or later, my body will give out. And then Nate will have to choose between protecting me and fighting them.
I won’t let that happen.
“Nate.” I grab his arm between attackers, make him look at me. “The ceiling. Can you—”
He looks up. I see him calculating—eight floors of concrete and steel between us and the surface.
“I’ve never tried anything that big,” he admits.
“First time for everything,” I say.
A guard rushes him. Nate puts the man through a wall without looking, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling.
“Get behind me. Now.”
I dive for cover behind an overturned desk just as Nate plants his feet, raises both hands, and does something I’ve never seen before.
The air around him shimmers. I can feel it—a pressure change, like my ears popping on a plane, but everywhere, all at once. The equipment nearest to him starts to rattle, then rise, floating off the ground like gravity has forgotten which direction it’s supposed to pull. It’s magical, almost beautiful, every loose thing rising up around us.
Then he reverses it. Upward.
The ceiling doesn’t just break—it launches. Concrete and rebar tear away like they weigh nothing, because to Nate’s powers right now, they do. The force rips through the floor above, then the next, then the next—a column of destruction punching straight up through the facility as he redirects gravity itself into a weapon.
Debris rains down around the edges, burying the guards still trying to breach the doorway. The building groans, alarms changing pitch to something more urgent.
And above us, eight floors of facility open up like a wound to the sky.
Nate staggers slightly, like it drained all his energy. I’ve never seen him stagger before.
“That was new,” he says, breathing harder than usual.
“It was brilliant.” I grab his arm to steady him—or maybe to steady myself. “Can you still fly?”
“Only one way to find out.” He grabs me around the waist. “Hold on.”
We rocket upward through the hole he’s made, through floor after floor of destruction, past screaming personnel and sparking wires and the chaos he’s unleashed on Global Dynamix’s secret facility. I bury my face against his chest because the wind is too much, the debris is too thick, and I just have to trust that he knows where he’s going and what he’s doing.