Chapter 10: A Sudden Awareness

As a scientist, Nick had a better understanding than most people about what a bolt of energy might do if it hit him. None of those things were pleasant. Whether it might reduce him to ash, burn a hole clear through him, stop his heart and boil his brain in its own synaptic fluid, or some combination of any of those, he barely had time to register that it was coming, let alone decide to move.

But the bolt of energy stopped.

Two feet in front of him, it sizzled and popped. Static, it shifted and pulsed, striking an invisible barrier. Some of the nearby air had ionized and smelled of a photocopier. Mouth agape at the sheer impossibility of what he was seeing, Nick turned his gaze to Julie, to gauge her reaction.

Had she also seen this?

Rather than seeing a stunned, bespectacled, pony-tailed graduate student, Nick saw a Julie he did not recognize. Her eyes were obscured by the energy's reflection in her glasses, and her hair was blowing out around her lab coat, propelled by the expansion of particles around the static discharge. Julie's hands were extended toward the crackling electricity that popped and sizzled against the invisible barrier. His lab partner had somehow caught the lightning bolt without touching it.

In the fractions of a second that followed, the man motioned toward Beau and fired a second bolt of electricity. Expectant, Beau dived out of the way and returned fire with a lightning strike of his own. This caused, from what Nick could tell, the man to break his concentration and drop down to a crouch. The two bolts collided respectively with a carpeted wall partition and a desk, both of which exploded into splinters and the acrid smoke of seared plastic.

Without warning, Julie’s hundred pounds – give or take – collided with Nick’s frame in what almost seemed a practiced maneuver. The two of them crashed to the floor as another bolt of energy shrieked over their heads and left a blackened char on the wall behind them.

As Nick’s capacity for understanding the events that were unfolding around him was several moments behind, he was still processing the initial salvos of this exchange when Julie climbed off of him and fired back at the unnamed assailant. People were shooting lightning at each other. One of the people was Julie. Little Julie of the big, fake glasses. Julie of the dry sense of humor. Said Julie was shooting lightning bolts from her hands.

Just when you think you know people.

“Run, Nick!” she cried over her shoulder while letting loose with another discharge of electricity.

The smells of ionized air and burnt synthetic furniture kept Nick from closing his eyes and expecting to wake up. It was real. No doubt. He rolled onto his belly and crawled to the edge of the desk, hoping that the obviously dangerous man would not notice him. Parts of the lab were on fire now. Black smoke poured out of the wreckage of CPUs, furniture, and holes in the cubicle partitions. Almost as if calling for a truce, the sprinkler system activated, and the fire alarm sounded. This was insane. For a moment, Nick allowed the thought to cross his mind that he should let the lightning strikers sort each other out. After all, what was he going to do?

Certainly not get in the middle of it.

Nick saw Beau step through a cloud of smoke, shake for just a moment as if he were unsure of himself, and then redirect a bolt of crackling static back at its originator. He followed that with two of his own. In spite of the sprinkler system, the smoke continued to fill the room. A little way beyond it, Nick could see his possible salvation: the hallway. The bolts didn’t seem to go through the walls. Nick’s eyes locked on the doorway. He could throw himself into a sprint for about six or seven paces. The strange, well-dressed man would be too busy, and a full-on sprint/dive/jump might be too sudden to counter. It was his best hope of getting out of the room where he was clearly a target, a distraction. Julie had even told him to run.

Suddenly, insanely, absurdly, Abuela Assencio appeared in his mind. Why?

Nick was about spring forward into a charge when he saw refraction in the air around Beau a fraction of a second before a bolt of energy snapped across the room and incinerated him.

The man was just gone. A puff of smoke. Some floating ashes. There was a char spot on the floor where he had been. So that’s what would have happened to him if Julie hadn’t stopped it.

Julie howled out a cocktail of rage and loss loud enough to draw attention from the mortal struggle. Nick heard the popping and snapping of the air expanding between her and the other man. Sticking his head slightly farther around the corner, Nick saw her fire another bolt of energy which the remaining man caught, suspending it between his hands which cradled the energy like a blue plasma lamp.

“This has always been a handicap for your type,” the man said. “You let down your guard for people you care about. You fight to exhaustion in situations where you cannot possibly win. I’ve no doubt that if you had jumped out that window and left the others to me, you’d have made your escape. Well, too late for that.”

They were almost at the top of the building, Nick thought. Jump out the window!?

Julie sniffed and moved back and forth nervously. Nick realized that, for whatever reason, she seemed defenseless. The rage she was feeling had dissipated into fear and exhaustion. Either she had stopped fighting or was looking for a way to begin again. In any case, the situation did not appear to be in her favor.

Did the man really have her where he wanted her? He clearly felt comfortable enough to gloat. Nick gazed on, transfixed with horror.

“What you both should have realized centuries ago is the paradox of altruism: anyone deserving of your help should never need it.”

At that, Nick threw himself into a run, but it wasn’t the run he had planned. In some insane moment of ignorant bravery, Nick’s feet landed on a chair a few feet from his quarry, and he sprang off it. The well-dressed man heard Nick coming but too late. Airborne already and parallel to the ground, his flight carried him over the scorching energy bolt that would have incinerated him. Instead, it exploded into the desk that had been his former hiding place.

The Abuela Assencio of his mind nodded.

Nick caught the man well above his center of gravity and brought him toppling to the ground. Terrified of what might come next, Nick tried to do as much violence to his enemy as possible, throwing wild, untrained punches at the man’s face beneath him. The hairs on Nick’s head and arms felt as though they were waiting for a bolt of energy to reduce him to ash. Primal instinct washed over him, transforming Nick from a graduate physicist into a beast, bent on destroying the threat beneath him.

He looked down to see the unimpressed face of the well-dressed stranger. Panicking, he tried to lay into the punches more, more force, more direction. It was all physics, right? At five foot-seven, and a hundred and sixty pounds, Nick should be able to do some damage to this man. In a fever dream of fear, Nick realized that his blows were not even connecting with the face beneath him. It was like punching a very thick air pocket. A shield.

Then, the shield suddenly expanded, throwing him backward. Far. Fast. Nick’s stomach dropped with the speed that hurtled into his awareness as far too fast to be moving on the fortieth floor of anything. As he crashed out the window, his thoughts arrived in three places: His last hope to avoid falling to his death had just rushed past his fingertips. It felt colder than he expected outside. And, lastly, he could see that a small white and black creature with batlike ears was peering out from behind the cubicle divider behind where Beau’s ashes were scattering in the wind from the broken window and the water from the sprinklers.