Thursday night. I'm in my apartment with a glass of red and the Argus Corps transition documents spread across my dining room table when someone knocks on my door hard enough to rattle the deadbolt.

  Not knocks. Pounds. Three times, fast, then a pause, then three more. Not Kingdom protocol. Not police protocol. Someone who's angry and hasn't thought through what they're going to say when the door opens.

  I check the peephole. Jasmine Perez. In civilian clothes - tank top, joggers, sneakers - which means she came here on her own time, not on Argus Corps business. Her hair is loose and wild and her skin has that faint heat shimmer that means she's running at least Gear One. Maybe Gear Two. She's sweating.

  Awesome. Great.

  I take a breath. Check the apartment pressure - my systems are nominal, reinforced walls and windows rated for my full operational output, which is considerably more than a very angry twenty-nine-year-old gymnast. I paid good money for this apartment specifically because it can handle what I do. I set my wine glass down, smooth my t-shirt, and open the door.

  "Jasmine--"

  She's past me before I finish the word. Not superspeed - she's not in a high enough gear for that - but fast, aggressive, a woman who's decided she's coming inside and isn't interested in being invited. She stops in the middle of my living room, turns to face me, and I can see it now. The flush across her collarbone. The way her hands are shaking. Not fear. Rage.

  The temperature in the room has already gone up two degrees. I can feel it in the pressure differential.

  "You want to tell me what the fuck is going on?" Jett says, and her voice has that vibrating quality it gets when she's running hot. Not quite a tremor. More like a tuning fork someone struck too hard.

  I close the door. Lock it. Turn to face her with the calm, measured expression I use for constituent complaints and crisis management. "You're going to have to be more specific, Jasmine."

  "Don't. Don't do that." She's pacing now, three steps one way, three steps back, her body red like a tomato. "Patriot's been investigating shit. And Devil has been investigating shit. And I'm sure Miasma has been investigating shit but he's not talking to anyone. So I was thinking hey why are we all investigating our boss? And then I started asking my own questions, and you know what I found?"

  "What did you find?" Keep the voice level. Keep the pressure stable. Let her burn.

  "Weather reports. Videos. That Richard Duvall guy that Sam Small mentioned, when you tried to pull that stupid fucking political stunt at her school - yeah, his family commissioned an independent autopsy and it doesn't add up with the fucking... brain... bubble thing. Embolism. They don't do autopsies on natural deaths, and nobody liked the guy. Which is why it's weird that his lungs had exploded and he was covered in blood spots like he was asphyxiated. Someone suffocated him."

  Hold on, what? Fuck. I forgot that thread. I see Jasmine in my mind's eye slamming the timer and passing it back to me. Time for speed chess.

  "So, what, someone strangled him to death? That's tragic, and I really feel for the guy, his family, and his four different accusations of sexual assault, but I don't see what this has to do with me," I counter, sliding my knight across the board in my brain. Not a stable position, and I know it. She has too many pieces. I can't threaten her from here. "Doesn't he - didn't he have asthma? I'm not sure what his garbage lungs have to do with me either."

  She's at Gear Two now. I can tell because the air around her is doing that shimmer thing, like asphalt on a hot day, and her skin is flush and slick and wet. The room temperature has climbed to maybe seventy five. Her face screws up.

  "No. Like a decompression injury. Asphyxiation from strangulation causes localized damage. He didn't have any bruises around his neck. No buildup. No damage. At least, nothing present on an autopsy. Someone exposed him to a hard vacuum," she says, and I feel the creeping centipede of suspicion climb up my neck. Her bishop takes my knight easy. Fuck.

  "You're saying someone like I'm supposed to be able to answer your riddles thr--"

  "STOP LYING TO ME!" she roars, my tile floor cracking underneath her feet. A wave of heat bursts off of her. Okay. Okay. Placation mode. Arms up, hands exposed. She didn't even blink. Knocks out a pawn. I need to castle fast.

  "Jasmine, it's not what you--"

  "You used us," she says, and her voice cracks on "used." Not from the heat. From something underneath. "You put us together and pointed us at Rogue Wave and we went because we trusted you. Because you told us this was about protecting people. About making up for what we did wrong. About redemption." She spits the word. "And the whole time you were--"

  "Jasmine." I keep my voice soft. Maternal, almost. Not condescending - she'd catch that and it would make things worse. Genuine. Or as close to genuine as I can manufacture under pressure. "Sit down."

  "Don't tell me to sit down."

  "You're about to set off the smoke detect--" is where I start.

  Then, I have to stop. I don't like using my powers. I really don't like using them in any situation where someone can watch me and make it excruciatingly clear that it is not, as it says on the scorecard, weather control. But I've also been working with Jasmine for a while. I know her tells like the back of my hand. And, crucially, I know when she's about to go Gear Four. It happens before she even does her stupid anime call out. I know this because her eyes get bloodshot - I don't even think she's noticed herself.

  So, when a blood vessel in her eye visibly bursts, and she starts bleeding from the nose, that is when I get scared. Not scared tactically - just scared in the way a lizard is scared of an angry, barking dog.

  So I bite. Time for the command grab.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  "GEAR FI--" is what starts to come out of her mouth, before I clench the muscle in my brain and suddenly turn the column of air around her into a hydraulic press. My hands - palms out - both come down, and I have to come down with them, because even my aura can't restrain this much air pressure, and I need to kneel to absorb it. The sound is overwhelming, something like a sonic boom or a gunshot or an earthquake or all three all at once, all simultaneously, brought to bear against Jasmine's head from above so that I can pin her to the floor.

  The tiles underneath her crack, crack, shatter, leaving a Jasmine-shaped imprint along the floor that is rapidly traveling through the rest of my apartment.

  Then, Jett gets up. I squeeze my brain harder, and a second wave of hydraulic force sufficient to break all my lamps at once (which happens unceremoniously) hammers her from above, throwing her into a kneel. Both of us, kneeling, face to face. I can't sustain this level of force for long. I can't. I'm out of breath. I can feel every second squeezing back on something important in my body. My chest is tight. I can feel my nose pop, and I know that only my pressure aura is the thing keeping the blood from spraying out with enough force to make me pass out.

  I don't talk to her. She's burning calories and energy at 32x the rate a normal person, if she is in some sort of mythical Gear Five and not just in Gear Four But Angry. Even then, I've never known her to be able to sustain Gear Four for very long in the first place. And she wouldn't be able to hear me anyway over the howling wind.

  But she's talking. She's still talking, screaming over the downburst.

  "MAAAAYAAAAA! YOU... WON'T... GET..." is about as far as she gets. Each step is punctuated by a judo shoot in slow motion. Dragging her entire body against what must be... maybe 6, 7 atmospheres of force at most, enough that I can muster at close range without liquefying both of us. Yanking herself across the pressure gradient even as I tilt it on a diagonal to push her away from me in addition to grinding her against the ground. She's screaming loud enough that even I can hear her over the wind.

  I just need to outlast her. I just need to outlast her. I have better stamina than her, right?

  Maya. Breathe. Maya. Breathe!

  Step.

  Step.

  Step.

  Thump. Her body hits the ground and I let go of the pressure system. I feel hot, fresh blood spray out of both nostrils and scream down the back of my throat, copper and battery acid. Ugh. I have a headache the size of the sun, right behind both eyeballs. I've never seen anyone able to move against the hammer like that, and that scares the shit out of me. I'm panting like a dog. And now the secret is out, and I have to - very rapidly, while bleeding onto my favorite t-shirt - figure out a good way to spin this so that I don't need to turn Turbo Jett into a fine paste, while also preventing her from wanting to turn me into a fine paste.

  Patriot couldn't do that. I don't even think Mr. Tyrannosaur could walk through the hammer in full dino mode - cross section is too big, even with his legs. Maybe Captain Plasma could do it. So I have about 5 seconds to catch my breath before she starts asking questions and mustering up enough heroic spirit to turn me into baby food, assuming she's still awake. Let's check.

  Stink eye full of blood - yep, she's awake.

  "Maya," she croaks like a wizened old frog. "You... fucking... bitch..."

  What I want to say is something cool. A full sentence. But my lungs are out of juice, too, and I can barely get up from the floor. So instead of a cool, full sentence, what comes out is more like a dog after a long treadmill run. "Just... let me... fucking... explain... girl," I breathe, yanking my shirt up over my shoulders so I can wad it up and blot out my nose. Fuck, that hurts.

  I assess the chessboard in my head. Here's the crossroads. Here's the moment where I decide what this conversation is. I have maybe three main angles of attack with many, many variations between them. She clearly knows the barokinesis now - that ship has sailed. The only question is how we sell it. Funny little coincidence? Richard Duvall - known scumbag - tried to molest me in my office? Trying to blackmail me? Everyone wants a piece of this. How do we play it?

  Option one: deny the Duvall thing specifically. "That wasn't me. I don't have that kind of power. What you just felt was weather control at close range - you know that's what I do." Possible. Barokinesis and weather manipulation aren't that far apart on paper. High pressure, low pressure, it's all atmospheric. But she just felt the hammer. She knows what five atmospheres of directed force feels like now, and no weather controller on the NSRA registry can do that. Deny is dead on arrival.

  Option two: come clean. Tell her everything. The Kingdom, the murders, Mrs. Zenith, all of it. Throw myself on her mercy.

  Not a chance. That's suicide with extra steps. Moving on.

  Option three: the truth. Selectively arranged. Everything accurate, nothing honest.

  I wipe my nose on the wadded shirt. Copper and snot. Glamorous. Jett is still on the floor, shaking, calorie-depleted, her body temperature dropping fast now that Gear Five - or whatever the hell that was - has burned through her reserves. She needs sugar. She needs food. She needs to not pass out on my broken tiles.

  "Kitchen," I say, hauling myself to my feet. My legs are not cooperating. "Come on. You need to eat something or you're going to crash."

  "Don't--"

  "Jasmine. You just burned through about eight thousand calories in ten seconds. Your blood sugar is in your shoes. Eat something, and then I'll tell you everything."

  She stares at me with her angry, bloodshot eyes for a long moment. Then she lets me help her up. Her skin is cooling fast - the opposite problem now, her body overcorrecting after the caloric burn. She's shivering. I get her to the kitchen, sit her on a stool, and put a glass of orange juice and half a jar of peanut butter in front of her. She eats mechanically, spooning peanut butter straight from the jar, which under different circumstances would be disgusting but right now is just triage.

  I almost like her. I guess I do like her, in a coworker sense. You can like your coworkers while never wanting them to read your erotic fanfiction. That's how I sell it to myself, anyway.

  I sit across from her. Still bleeding, but slower now. The headache is settling into something manageable. I've got maybe five minutes before she's recovered enough to get angry again, and I need to use them.

  "Richard Duvall," I start. "You're right. It wasn't asthma. It wasn't natural causes."

  She stops chewing. Stares at me.

  "It was me."

  The peanut butter jar sits between us. My blood is on the counter. The cracked tile is on the floor. We're two women in a destroyed apartment having the worst conversation of our lives.

  "Duvall found out about my situation," I say, and I choose each word the way you'd choose where to step in a minefield. "Not all of it. Enough. He lost his election, he lost his staff, he was spiraling. He started looking into people on the council who he thought he could leverage for a comeback, and he found - something. A thread. I don't know exactly what, but he came to me and he made it clear that he was going to use it."

  "Use it how?"

  "How do you think?" I let my voice go flat. Tired. "He had four sexual assault accusations and a career in ashes and he thought he found a woman he could squeeze. He wasn't interested in justice, Jasmine. He was interested in what I could do for him."

  And he was. I remember that very clearly. "Maybe I am, Maya. Maybe I’m smart enough to know when something doesn’t add up. Like how a former superhero suddenly decides to run for office, right when this Kingdom starts making big moves in Philly... Proof? Well, not yet. But I’ve got my ear to the ground. And you know what else I heard? They’re going to steal a rhinoceros. Can you believe that? A whole darn rhino."

  He even had a recorder with him. I remember pickpocketing it off of him before he got the chance to use it. He was going to expose me. And he was going to make himself my problem. I just knocked that piece off the board before it became one.

  Jett's jaw tightens. I see the calculation happening - the known facts about Duvall, the accusations, the kind of man he was, the kind of man who'd corner a woman in her office and call it leverage. I don't have to say the word. I just have to let her imagination do the work.