face.
“Really?” she shouted. “Don’t make me carry you!”
The Defenders were there to help. I looked between her and the swarm of them, including the few who had noticed us—who were pointing and shouting in our direction.
The Defenders were there to help.
The silver, shining words. The promise, the oath they all took. For the common defense.
But it had been a Defender who had guided Mel and me toward the speakers. It had been a Defender who’d had that gun in his pocket, even though they were banned from carrying lethal weapons.
I didn’t let myself think it through. I just followed the girl. Her long legs easily outstripped mine as she caught up to her friend. I tucked my chin against my chest and limped after them as quickly as I could.
The fountain at the back of Old Main, repurposed and rededicated as a memorial to the community’s Lost Generation, gurgled up water as if nothing had happened. This side of the building looked otherwise abandoned. The cars that clogged the small parking lot had been deserted, a few doors left open with the engines running. All except one.
It should have struck me as strange, but I was too relieved to care. I ran toward our SUV, noticing for the first time that the front headlights had been cracked and the hubcap melted by the earlier attack.
The boy tried to catch my shoulder, but I dodged away. My heart galloped as I all but slammed into the passenger side of the SUV. I could just make out Agent Cooper’s form through the tinted windows.
I pounded on the glass to get his attention.
“Cooper!” I shouted. This wasn’t like him—I’d never seen him so still in all the years I’d known him. “Agent Cooper!”
The piercing drone in my ears grew louder and louder, pitching up and down with my pulse as I ran to the SUV’s driver’s side.
I saw the distorted shapes of the boy and girl through the shattered driver’s side window and the hole in the front windshield before I saw Agent Cooper. He was slumped forward against his locked seat belt, blood still dripping from his forehead and pooling where his sunglasses had fallen into his lap. One of the lenses was blown out.
I reached inside, slicing my arms on the jagged edge of the window. I gripped his shoulder, his tie, then recoiled at the feeling of warm blood. The left side of his skull was broken in, exposing white bone. The speckled pink of soft tissue.
That last fading spark of composure I’d been clinging to was stamped out, and I was left in the clawing dark.
It poured over my mind, my eyes. I knew I was screaming by the burn in my throat. Heat gathered in the center of my palms, and the car’s engine revved to life. The remaining headlight flashed, exploding out onto the asphalt. The flat, dull blare of the horn finally broke through the high-frequency wail stabbing into my ears.
What the hell is going on?
The air shifted behind me. I turned, throwing out my elbow, intending to catch the boy in the chest. I couldn’t stand the idea of being touched, not with the charge from the car’s battery flowing through my senses, giving me power, giving me control when seconds ago I’d had none.
A hand latched onto my head, yanking me back away from the car. My heels caught in the uneven paved surface and knocked me off balance. The rubber of the glove caught in my hair’s twist and dragged painfully across my scalp.
I screamed again, punching back at whoever was behind me. The charge curled just above my knuckles and between my fingers, searing the air. It caught the attacker, but right in the thick chest plate he was wearing over his black jumpsuit. Everything, from the helmet he wore down to the soles of his boots, had been coated with a thick tire-like cover of rubber.
The pulse of power flared white as it met the resistance of his body armor and traveled out through the air, looking for another conductor.
Shit. There wasn’t anything electrical on him that I could sense, not even a comm in his ear. Shit!
My body knew what to do a full second before my mind did. I went limp, making myself deadweight. The asphalt dragged against the back of my legs, tearing at my calves, but the shock of that one movement was enough for him to relax his grip in my hair.
I swung my leg so