Ida frowned at the footage on the tablet.

  "There," said Agent Steiner, the absolute cinderblock of a government official who Ida had spent the last hour or so in private conference with. He jabbed a sausage finger at the man on the screen. "The regeneration he's doing. How does that work?"

  Ida shook her head. The man on the screen, Imran Bhatt, was frozen in time, face turned skyward, stomach wound pulsating. She'd known of him, he'd been one of the most visible Demigods in the world up until the Singapore fiasco. She hadn't known he was capable of this. "I don't know. I sure as hell can't do it."

  "If someone were to cut you, the cut would heal at a standard human rate?" the agent said.

  "Sure." Ida paused. "That's not an invitation. But sure. Same goes for bruises, burns, sprains. I've had Covid twice and it knocked me out both times."

  The man folded his arms, suit straining at the seams along his elbows, and glowered down at the tablet with her. "We haven't recorded any instances of this before, in any Field Manipulators. Only this man, here, and the woman-" he fiddled with the trackbar, scrubbed to later. Here, a woman in a dazzling green cloak of scales only narrowly dodges a projectile from Bhatts, a tossed fire hydrant that, even just by glancing her, carried two of the fingers on her right hand away with it. Over the course of six seconds, the fingers grew back, first bone, then veins, then muscle, then skin and nail. "The woman, right here."

  Ida leaned back and sucked her lower lip. "You're sure these are Sensitives? Or, Field Manipulators?"

  "They fit every other diagnostic criteria. What else could they possibly be?"

  Ida shrugged. "Weird, weird world. See, Field stuff, it's magical. I'm not going to pretend it's not. But unless someone has a specifically wonky Knack, Fields usually follow a strict set of rules." She held up three fingers. "Energy in is energy out. You can manipulate matter and energy within a Field but you can't create or destroy anything. And Fields themselves have a set volume that can be stretched but not magnified or duplicated."

  "Sounds like Newton."

  "Yeah, Fields seem to follow physics until they don't. Every once in a while you'll meet a Sensitive who can put out more electricity than he absorbs, or who can shoot little bits of Field out and have them self-sustain for a few minutes, making their own energy, and that's where Newton has to pack up and go home. But this-" Ida waved her hand at the screen. "These two are breaking all the rules. Just trampling them. I know they're ostensibly Demigods but I've never seen anyone do anything like this."

  "So, what, you're saying they're superheroes? Wizards?"

  "Hey, you're the one with secret microphones in everyone's pockets, you tell me." Ida fidgeted in her chair. She'd been in this single interrogation room for five hours now, and while the MPD been kind enough not to chain her to the table and shine a spotlight in her eyes, they hadn't exactly furnished her with a La-Z-Boy to sit in. "Could be they are. Listen, when I was nine years old I was medically dead for six minutes, and then three weeks later I threw my first car. We don't live in a sensical, rational world. Internalize that."

  Agent Steiner rubbed a hand across his greying stubble and grunted. "Every other indication points to these two being Manipulators."

  "Well, if you're thinking of asking me how the shiny one managed to lug a mountain into space, don't bother, because I have absolutely no idea how a Field would physically manage that."

  Steiner nodded, implacable. He drummed his fingers on the table for a few moments. "Let's move on, then. Let's talk about the gathering."

  "Thank God," Ida breathed. "I was worried you wouldn't let me get to that."

  "Ballpark, how many Manipulators do you think-"

  "You need to evacuate the city."

  Steiner arched his eyebrows at that. "That so?"

  "You seem to be pretty aware of the fundamentals here." Ida cupped her hands together. "Somehow, and I have no clue how, a wellspring of energy opened up here, one that Sensitives all over are, well, sensitive to. Drawn to. It's making us stronger and it's feeding us. And Sensitives, they're cannibalistic. If one kills another and sticks around for a few seconds, they'll get to absorb the essence of their dead rival, and they'll grow proportionately more powerful as a result."

  Steiner nodded knowingly. "I had the energy well described to me as a 'dinner bell ringing nonstop over Minneapolis.'"

  "Basically. It's a recipe for the biggest gathering of Sensitives probably in recorded history." Ida leaned forward, recalled the routine she'd been mentally running herself through for days. It was crucial that she be as clear and persuasive as possible here. "At first that'll just translate into a few shootouts between little fish, street brawls but with more explosions than usual. Civilians will die, but the rates will be dozens, low hundreds. But once the big fish get here-"

  "Evacuating everyone in the third largest metropolitan area in the Midwest isn't physically possible."

  Ida pushed on. "Once the big fish get here, they'll start snapping the little ones up, and then they'll turn their sights on eachother." She widened her cupped hands, mimicking a swelling, growing snowball. "The power will accumulate in fewer and fewer people, and these people will be even more equipped and motivated to find and throw everything they have at each other. At a certain point, the damage resulting from a fight like that would be comparable, if not worse, than that of a nuclear bomb."

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Steiner huffed. "I don't know if you understand just how nasty a nuke is."

  Ida stabbed her finger at the tablet. "You just showed me a video of a Sensitive dropping a mountain on a city."

  "So now she is a Field Manipulator."

  Ida scooted back in her chair, took a calming breath, focused. She knew she'd never forgive herself if she didn't communicate the severity of the situation as clearly as she could. "Please, you want me as an advisor, then listen to my advice, if not anywhere else but here: there is no benefit to keeping any normal humans in this city right now. Not economic, not political, not scientific, and definitely not ethical. The Twin Cities are essentially dead in the water, and if nobody figures out a way to dissuade Demigods from entering the city, then most of the Midwest is toast, too. Chicago, Toronto, Detroit. Some of the more pessimistic models suggest that if more than five Demigods get involved, it could very well result in continent- or planet-wide dieoff of normal people. I'm talking about an extinction event."

  "Your concern is noted." Steiner said, gaze steely.

  Ida could feel her chance slipping away. She studied the man, saw clearly on his face how little he seemed to care about what she was saying. She reached out with her Field to listen to his heart, his breathing. It wasn't a foolproof lie detector, but it helped. His biometrics were completely normal, relaxed. "You don't believe me?"

  "I'm just as aware of this risk as you are."

  No change, no jump in pulse, no rush of blood to the skin. "You don't care? You should care. You won't have a job if the fucking world ends."

  "The last thing I want is needless carnage."

  The man was ice cold. Ida, baffled, took a moment to realize why. "You think you can capitalize on this somehow. You think you figured out a way to kill them."

  Steiner cocked his head, as if the idea had never occurred to him. "If these people really are the loose, walking nuclear warheads you claim, then that'd definitely constitute a grave national security risk. We'd be wise to clear that up in one fell swoop, if the occasion presented itself."

  Ida felt like laughing in his face. "I promise, whatever method you think you've cooked up to kill a Demigod, it won't work. You're a guppy taking aim at a battleship."

  "With all due respect, only one of us is qualified to make any sort of claims about the United States' weapons capabilities."

  "And only one of us knows what the hell a Sensitive is actually capable of." Ida stood from the chair, nearly knocking it over. "If you're not going to commit to even attempting an evacuation, then I'm leaving. I need to get as far away from this city as physically possible."

  Steiner held one of his bearpaw hands up, as if he had any power to stop her whatsoever. "Please, Ms. Miller, sit back down. Remember that you're still technically under arrest."

  Ida couldn't hold back a derisive laugh anymore. "You can't arrest me. You could sic every cop in the precinct on me right now and you wouldn't be able to so much as mess up my hair, let alone hurt me."

  "Maybe," Steiner said, voice chillingly even. "Or maybe you underestimate us. Maybe the room's been surreptitiously filled with a colorless, odorless neurotoxin that will shut down your brainstem without an antidote delivered in the next hour."

  Ida felt a chill. She glanced toward the door, entertained the idea of speeding out, breaking down the wall if she had to. She thought about cuffing the smug G-man's carotid on the way out, snuffing him out as a petulant parting fuck-you.

  Indecision kept her rooted to the spot. She felt the early mistings of a headache coming on.

  "Or maybe," he continued, "we put a remotely-armable artificial virus in your complimentary cup of water. Fields can stop bullets, but can they stop super-smallpox?" He smiled at her, a lipless grimace. He was enjoying this. "Or maybe I pull up my phone and show you a fatal infohazard I have saved on my camera roll. A special pattern of lights and colors developed by the boys in the black sites, one that makes the human brain eat itself the instant it sees it."

  Ida squinted, eyes darting from the man to the door. It was very rare for her to feel as cornered as she did right now. It wasn't a welcome experience.

  "Or maybe all that shit I just said is made up, and we really can't stop you." Steiner said. He shrugged. "The point is, you don't know. You're a welcome expert in an extremely niche field, but your grand diagnoses about the all-powerful, unkillable nature of your so-called "Demigods" are prognostications made from a point of total fucking ignorance about the might and smarts of the greatest military industrial apparatus the world has ever seen. You don't know what we're capable of."

  Steiner crossed the room toward her, fearless. "You don't know what I'm capable of."

  "Coming here was a mistake," Ida snarled.

  "Hey, maybe." Steiner shrugged again. He looked at something on his phone. "1148 Montpelier Drive."

  Ida blinked. "What's that?"

  "The address where your daughter Bailey is staying, right now." Steiner's blue eyes met hers. There was nothing behind them. "She's having a sleepover. She and her friends are watching Shrek 2 and eating Takis. She's almost entirely visible from the house's northwesternmost window, a window paned with decidedly un-bulletproof glass."

  Ida felt as if the blood in her body had been replaced with a cold, hateful slurry. She was rooted to the spot. Steiner smiled down at her, almost sympathetically.

  "You Manipulators think that because you're bulletproof you can't be hurt. Ida, Ms. Miller, you should know that one thing I've learned in my long and storied history serving our great nation is that bullets are among the least efficient ways to hurt people." He held his hands out. "If it's creative enough, and well-connected enough, the guppy can and will find a way to sink the battleship. It happens over and over and over again. And it only happens because the battleship thinks itself invincible."

  He rested his hand on her shoulder, hard and firm. Ida tilted her head to glare up at him. She burned with a sudden, desperate hatred.

  "We're going to need your help in the coming days, Ida. Your insights are going to prove invaluable. I know it feels unfair, but you turning yourself in will be remembered as a great and patriotic sacrifice, one that will help save many American lives." Steiner stepped back and stowed his hands in his pockets. "But you are still under arrest. Please sit down."

  Ida considered blowing the room up then, with both of them in it. She imagined leaping across the table and scything her hand through the ghoul's brain, pumping him with a fatal voltage of electricity, siphoned from the walls and floor, reaching her Field into his chest and bisecting his heart with a thought.

  Then she remembered her daughter, and Ida sat down.