The lobby of Templeton Federal smelled of Pine-Sol and quiet panic. It was a smell Zach Bennet knew too well. He knelt, hidden behind a ridiculously oversized marble pillar, and pressed two fingers to the earpiece humming against his cartilage.
“Status,” he murmured.
“*Five tangos, seven hostages,*” Hikaru’s voice whispered back, a phantom tickle in his ear. “*Small-calibre semi-automatics. One of them’s got a child.*”
Zach’s stomach twisted. A low-grade tremor started in his hands, a familiar herald of stress. He dug into his jacket pocket, fingers closing around the crinkly cellophane of a hard candy. Just knowing it was there helped. A little.
“Copy that, Cloak. Stick to the plan. Smash, you’re on deck.”
“*Ready to rock,*” Drake’s voice rumbled back, full of unearned confidence.
Zach risked a peek around the pillar. The bank was a cavern of beige marble and polished brass, cold and impersonal. The linoleum tiles in the back offices, which he’d glimpsed on his way in, were the exact same shade of mottled grey as the ones in the principal’s office. Linoleum, the great unifier of depressing institutions. It was a crime against aesthetics.
One of the robbers, a jumpy man in a ski mask, was pacing near the teller stations. The hostages were huddled on the floor, a miserable clump of humanity. A woman clutched a little girl, maybe six years old, who was doing a remarkable job of not crying. Zach’s throat tightened.
A faint ripple in the air by the pacing robber’s ear was the only sign of Hikaru at work. The robber stopped. He shifted his weight, then scratched his neck. He muttered something to the man guarding the hostages.
“*He’s thirsty,*” Hikaru reported. “*Told him there’s a water fountain down the west hall.*”
“Copy. And Spark?” Zach whispered.
“*Systems are mine,*” Brielle’s voice chirped, sharp and metallic. “*Cameras are looping, silent alarms are dead. He walks past that service door, his piece is a paperweight.*”
This was their rhythm. A well-oiled, underfunded, government-issue machine. Zach hated it. He hated the fear in the hostages’ eyes, the cheap fabric of their black uniforms, the constant, grinding pressure from their handler, Chief Sullivan. Most of all, he hated that they were good at this.
The thirsty robber grumbled his way down the hall, away from his friends. He passed the service closet. Five seconds later, a muffled *thump* echoed faintly.
“*First down,*” Drake grunted. “*Peach, tie him up pretty.*”
A rustle. Sevati wouldn’t bother with a reply.
One down. Four to go. This was the slow part, the patient part. Picking them off one by one until only the leader was left, confused and alone. Zach unwrapped the candy, a sour lemon drop, and slipped it into his mouth. The sharp tang cut through the anxiety. He needed his blood sugar stable. He couldn’t afford the shakes. Not now.
The second robber fell for the oldest trick in the book: a sudden, desperate need for the loo. He was halfway down the same hall when Brielle spoke again, her voice tight.
“*Chief, I’m getting something weird. Off the second guy’s gun.*”
“Weird how?”
“*It’s not just a gun. There’s a… module. Attached to the grip. Power source is shielded. I can’t get a lock on it, can’t disable the components. It’s not like any tech I’ve ever seen.*”
A knot of ice formed in Zach’s gut. That wasn’t part of the script. These were supposed to be dumb, garden-variety thugs. “Can you disable the gun itself?”
“*The kinetic action, yeah. But the module… it’s still active. It’s broadcasting something, low-frequency. Encrypted.*”
“Smash, get that module,” Zach ordered. He didn’t wait for a reply. “Cloak, pull back. Something’s wrong.”
It was too late.
The lead robber, a big man with a shotgun, suddenly stiffened. He tapped his own earpiece, not a police-issue one. He shouted, “Aris! Marco! Report!”
Silence.
“Damn it!” The leader grabbed the nearest hostage—the woman with the child—and yanked her to her feet, pressing the shotgun to her head. “Show yourselves! I know you’re here, you government freaks!”
The little girl shrieked.
The plan was dust. Zach was on his feet, stepping out from behind the pillar. “Let her go,” he said, his voice level and calm. He poured every ounce of his will into the words, the power he was supposed to command, the gift that made him their leader. “You don’t want to hurt her. You want to put the gun down and surrender.”
The robber laughed, a ragged, ugly sound. “Don’t try that mind-trick crap on me, kid. Doesn’t work.”
Zach’s blood ran cold. The words had felt… hollow. Empty. The power hadn’t been there. It hadn’t been there for weeks, but he’d kept hoping, praying it was just stress. A fluke.
It wasn’t a fluke.
“Come out, all of you!” the robber yelled, his voice cracking. “Or mommy gets it!”
Drake burst out of the hallway, a furious battering ram. “Get away from her!”
The robber didn’t hesitate. He shoved the woman forward and spun, leveling the shotgun at Drake.
But Hikaru was faster. A shimmer of displaced air, and she was there, slamming her body into the robber’s side. The blast from the shotgun went wide, peppering the marble wall with a deafening roar. The robber stumbled, but the module on his sidearm flared with a sickly green light. He swung his arm back, not with the gun, but with the hand holding the modified pistol, and an arc of emerald energy lashed out, catching Hikaru in the chest.
She cried out, a sound of pure shock, and collapsed. For a terrifying second, she flickered, becoming semi-transparent before her form solidified on the cold floor, utterly still.
The world narrowed to that single, green light. Zach had never seen a power like that. His power was failing, Brielle couldn’t read the tech, and now there was… this.
The robber stared at his own hand in shock. It was the only opening they would get.
“Now!” Zach roared. A gout of flame erupted from Jacob’s hands, engulfing the robber. He screamed, dropping his weapons as he fell. Sevati’s vines erupted from the cracks in the marble, thick as pythons, wrapping around his limbs and squeezing until he went silent.
Zach didn’t watch. He scrambled to Hikaru’s side. Her eyes were wide, her breath coming in ragged gasps. There was no visible wound.
“I… I can’t…,” she whispered, her hand weakly pressing against her chest. “My power. I can’t feel it. I can’t go invisible.”
Drake was beside them, his face pale under his mask. “What do you mean, you can’t?”
Zach already knew. He’d seen the green light. He’d seen the module Brielle had warned him about. He’d seen a power he didn’t recognize used to do something impossible.
It took the police forty-five minutes to clean up the scene. By then, the hostages were safe, the robbers were in custody, and Chief Sullivan was waiting for them in the back of an ambulance, his face a thundercloud.
He didn't yell. That was worse.
“One of your members was neutralized by a non-gifted with a piece of cobbled-together tech,” Sullivan said, his voice a low, dangerous monotone. He held up a small, blackened device. The module. “You were outmaneuvered. You were sloppy. A civilian could have died.” Sullivan’s gaze fell on Zach, cold and heavy. “Your power. Did you use it?”
Zach met his eyes. A lie was suicide. The truth was worse. “I tried, sir. It didn’t work.”
The silence that followed was suffocating. Sullivan stared at him for a long, dreadful moment, then pocketed the module. He withheld things. He always withheld things.
“Get your unit home,” he said, a flat dismissal. “I’ll be in touch.”
The ride back to their derelict apartment was silent. The adrenaline had faded, leaving a hollow ache. Drake drove, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. Jacob was huddled in the back, his knees drawn to his chest. Hikaru stared out the window, one hand still pressed to her chest, where the green light had hit her. Just before they got home, she tried again, her breath held tight. Nothing.
The power was just… gone.
Later that night, long after the others had collapsed into their respective beds, a small sound from the boys’ room pulled Zach from his own restless attempt at sleep. He found Jacob tangled in his sheets, whimpering, his face slick with tears.
“It’s okay, Blaze,” Zach whispered, sitting on the edge of the cheap mattress. “It’s over. You’re okay.”
Jacob’s eyes flew open. He launched himself into Zach’s arms, burying his face in his shoulder, his small body wracked with sobs. “He… h-he had the little girl,” he choked out. “I saw… I could’ve… The fire…”
Zach wrapped his arms around him, pulling the boy into his lap and holding him tight against his chest. He rocked him gently, one hand stroking his curly hair. Jacob was small for twelve, and in moments like this, he felt impossibly fragile. “You did good,” Zach murmured into his hair, the lie tasting like ash. “You were perfect. We all got out. Everyone’s safe. That’s a win.”
He held him for a long time, the weight of the boy a familiar, crushing burden in his arms. He felt more like a father than a sixteen-year-old. He felt a hundred years old.
When Jacob’s breathing finally evened out into sleep, Zach gently laid him back down, pulling the thin blanket up to his chin. He stood in the quiet darkness of the apartment, the only sound the hum of the ancient refrigerator. He was the leader. He was their shield.
And he was failing. His power was gone. Hikaru’s was stolen. And a bank robber had tech no one could explain.
But that wasn’t what kept him awake. In the chaos, Drake had secured the lead robber’s sidearm. Before the police took it, Brielle had taken one look at the module mounted on it.
“It’s not broadcasting anymore,” she’d said, her voice shaking. “It’s receiving. It’s a receiver, Zach. It wasn’t sending a signal. It was waiting for one.”
Zach walked to the kitchen and quietly opened a drawer. He pulled out a lemon drop, the cellophane crackling with impossible loudness in the stillness. He stared at the small, translucent candy in his palm. It was something solid in a world that was dissolving around him.
Waiting for a signal. From who?
He popped the candy in his mouth, the sour jolt a welcome distraction. The question hung in the dark air, a spider spinning a web he was already caught in.