But when you spend most of your time out in the thunderstorms, lightning is more likely to find you.
The Astra Interviews
* * *
I swept Yoshi behind me as the gunman hosed our table. Bullets chunked into bodies around us, and Chakra and Artemis went down. The screams spread outward, but I was over the table as spent cartridges chimed on the dance floor. The world shrank to the skull-masked gunman, time dilating and not in a good way; there were at least a good dozen real capes in the club tonight, and I had to get to him first.
I caught a hand and squeezed the fingers around the grip and trigger as he shrieked, but he kept shooting past me as I flailed for the other. Then the back of his head exploded, screams climbing the scale as his blood and bits spattered club-goers behind him. Dropping the body, I scanned the mob. Safire yelled directions and the servers scrambled to push people towards the exits, but the only people moving against the tide were capes I recognized. Including K-Strike, standing with another steel marble in his hand. No more shooters.
Dropping to my knees, I rolled the corpse for a quick search, averting my eyes from the ruin above his collar. Under the shooter’s coat and the pistol-harnesses I found only clothes. Homicidal yes, suicidal definitely, but not wearing a bomb, thank God. The Fortress’ staff could handle him now—I abandoned him for our table and his victims.
Quin was yelling for first-aid kits. Any bullets that hit her had simply bounced, and Artemis had misted to leave the ones that got her behind, but she held an arm close to her side as she and Quin knelt over Chakra.
Oh God. I stopped breathing and started praying.
Quin yelled into her earbug as she made a pressure-bandage out of Chakra’s hood, and I forced myself to turn away to look for more victims. And there were more. Yoshi might have been momentarily stunned (I’d bounced him off the wall), but he knelt beside another Fortress patron. She cried breathlessly, a high-pitched whine he ignored as he gently checked her over, and I followed his example, triaging victims and not even bothering with Dispatch; they’d just distract and help was already on the way.
Rush arrived only heartbeats later, his arms full of field-kits he laid out in a blur, one for each of us and even for Andrew and Safire. I focused on my work; there was enough for everybody.
We’d all cross-trained in field trauma—enough to know when bullet-wounds, broken bones, and other kinds of injuries were life-threatening and what to do till help arrived. One victim I checked was already gone; she’d taken a bullet through the neck, bled out arterially in seconds. Next to her a guy, probably her date, held in an abdominal wound that pumped dark blood. I applied a pressure-bandage and wrapped it tight while telling him to lie still and count by tens, and was working on another—a contestant with a bullet hole in her arm and a bleeding graze on her temple—when the paramedics arrived to take our place. Then it became a race as we strapped the worst wounded onto rescue boards and it was my turn, mine and Safire’s.
Now I paid attention to Dispatch as they called instructions in my ear. Northwestern Memorial’s trauma center stood ready to receive us as we came in, Chakra and the gut-shot victim first, to drop our cargoes on waiting gurneys. They disappeared through the doors, whisked inside by flapping white coats, and we returned to fly every shooting victim that couldn’t walk themselves into the back of an ambulance. The shooter’d had less than three seconds, and he’d managed to hit more than half a dozen people. I tried not to think of my last sight of Chakra; bone-white but repeating some kind of chant to herself between painful breaths. She hadn’t felt me squeeze her hand.
The police arrived behind the paramedics, cordoning off Rush Street while we worked to stabilize and transport everyone. Then we were done.
* * *
“Astra?”
I looked up at Fisher and realized that I’d wandered back to our table by instinct. Blood spotted it, and I wasn’t touching the cold tapas.
“Astra?” he repeated. Around the room, cops I recognized were taking statements or safeguarding the room till the crime-scene examiners arrived. Phelps was talking to Yoshi and writing as he listened.
“Jeez, kid.”
“What?”
He pointed at my face. Reaching up, I felt a bump on