I duck into the store, finding three teenagers huddled behind the counter. One's clutching his arm, blood seeping between his fingers. Their eyes widen when they see me.

  "Holy shit," one whispers. "You're real."

  "Very real," I confirm, kneeling beside the injured one. "What happened?"

  "Guys came looking for Jump," says the third, a girl maybe fourteen or fifteen. "Said the online guide mentioned convenience stores. Tore the place up, then started hitting people when they couldn't find anything."

  I examine the wound - a clean slice, probably from a knife. Not life-threatening if it gets proper attention. Doesn't go down too far past the fat.

  "You need pressure on that but it's not immediately life threatening," I tell the injured boy, pulling a compression bandage from my belt. "Hold this tight. Don't take it off to check it, just trust the bandaid. Keep your hand above your heart. When things calm down, get to an emergency room. Stitches and a tetanus check."

  "When's that gonna be?" the girl asks, voice small.

  I wish I had an answer. "Soon," I lie. Second lie of the night. "Stay here, keep the gate down, keep quiet."

  They nod in unison, wide-eyed. I slip back out onto the street, checking my phone again. No new texts, but it's almost 9:00. I've been at this for over an hour already, and Elias's trail is getting colder.

  I cut through the alley behind the convenience store, following the blood trail that's growing fainter but still distinct enough for me to track. The pattern suggests Elias is moving with purpose toward Broad Street, not randomly wandering.

  The trail leads to the entrance of a subway station - not to go in, but to cut through. Smart. These connecting passageways let you cross under Broad without dealing with the chaos above. I follow, moving carefully, alert for threats.

  Inside, the station is eerily empty. No transit cops, no passengers, just scattered trash and a distant echo of chaos from the streets above. The turnstiles have been forced open, bent metal testimony to the strength of desperation. But was that Elias, or some other desperate soul? This place is always so empty, and right now it's even emptier than usual, barring a couple of homeless people and cowering civilians too afraid to brave Broad Street.

  Yeah, that's fair.

  Elias's trail leads through the station but doesn't go down to the platforms. Instead, it follows the underground walkway beneath Broad Street, emerging on the other side. The blood trail is getting harder to follow - just microscopic spatter now, almost invisible except to my enhanced senses. But Fly-altered blood has a weird habit of aerosolizing more than regular blood. Like it's thinner. Looser. Watery. There's nothing interesting here. I just keep sprinting.

  Back above ground on the east side of Broad, the chaos has a different quality here. Fewer people running wild, more strategic movement. Groups moving with purpose, checking specific locations. The hunt is more organized.

  Elias's trail leads north on 15th Street. Straight toward the warehouse Tasha mentioned. I scan the street for signs of pursuit, but it's just me. His blood's almost completely stopped now - the microspatter getting so faint that it feels more like an intuition than a sensory input.

  A warehouse? That's not really much of a warehouse, I'm thinking as I round the corner. More of like... a parking garage? Whatever. I check my phone again. 9:05 PM. Why did you need to check that, Sam? Get moving!

  The structure looms ahead - five stories of concrete and steel that's seen better years. Chain-link fence surrounds it, topped with razor wire, but there's a human-sized gap where someone's cut through. Recent, from the lack of rust on the cut edges. Less of a warehouse or a parking garage, and more of one of those storage container places? But homegrown, not franchise. Intimidating. It's real, real close to South Street, so it makes sense they don't want random tourists mucking around here.

  Anyway. Elias's blood trail leads straight through the gap. No hesitation, no scouting around. He knew exactly where he was going. There's bigger droplets, like he suddenly started randomly bleeding more. He can turn into animals, right? That's his thing.

  I follow, squeezing through without catching my costume on the jagged wire. Inside the fence is a small parking lot - really more of a driveway than anything else. The blood trail is so faint now it's like trying to follow a ghost, but I can still sense the distinctive wrongness of Fly-enhanced blood.

  Not the least of which being that I can smell Elias now. His cut hasn't finished clotting, and that means I've got eyes.

  His trail leads to a side door - rusted metal hanging slightly ajar. I approach cautiously, listening. No sounds from inside. I pull the door open slowly, wincing at the creak of hinges.

  The interior is dim, illuminated only by what little streetlight filters through dirt-encrusted windows high on the walls. It takes my eyes a second to adjust. Concrete pillars stretch upward into shadow. Has this place been used? Orange painted shutters all busted open, like school lockers, then to a stairwell and a nonfunctioning elevator, and repeat. It's clearly been ripped apart for loot, but how recently?

  And blood. Fresh blood - not Elias's weird Fly-blood, but normal human blood. Lots of it, splattered across the concrete floor about twenty feet in. Someone got hurt in here, and recently.

  I follow Elias's trail, which now moves with more purpose. No more meandering from vantage point to vantage point. He came here for something specific.

  The trail leads up the stairs to the second level. I move quietly, keeping to the shadows, all senses on high alert. The blood pattern changes as I ascend - larger droplets, more frequent. His wound reopened. Maybe he strained something climbing.

  He's on the roof. I can see him. On the roof, just watching. Doing something with his hands - makeshift bandage? I'd be surprised if he knew I was here.

  The second level is more of the same - empty storage, concrete pillars, shadows. But there's something else here. A makeshift workstation set up against the far wall - folding table, laptop, notebooks, camera equipment on tripods. And maps pinned to a portable corkboard, showing Philadelphia with dozens of locations marked in red.

  Stolen story; please report.

  I take a picture with my cell phone and send it to Tasha wordlessly. She's been texting me, but I'm so tunnel visioned that anything that's not "police en route, GTFO now" isn't registering.

  I approach carefully, scanning for threats. The blood trail leads directly to the workstation. Elias was here, recently. Very recently.

  The laptop is open but locked. The notebooks contain pages of cramped handwriting - observations, times, locations. Scientific notation I don't understand. Graphs showing stuff I don't get. One page has a crude sketch of what looks like the nervous system with various compounds labeled around it.

  A sound from aside me - the scrape of feet on concrete. I freeze, looking up toward the ceiling. Another scrape, then silence. I watch the sound, watching his silhouette move past me in my mind's eye. A fresh droplet hitting the floor about ten feet away. I spin to face it, just in time to see a figure darting behind a pillar on the far side of the level.

  "Elias," I call out, keeping my voice steady. "I know it's you. I can track your blood."

  A moment of silence, then a voice - not particularly familiar, not particularly foreign - calls back out. "Damn. I thought I was being subtle."

  "Come out where I can see you," I say, moving slowly to maintain distance from the pillar. "I just want to talk."

  "About what?" he calls back. "That I need to turn myself in?"

  Does he remember me?

  "About why you're working with Rogue Wave," I reply. "About what they're planning."

  A bitter laugh. "What makes you think I'm working with anyone?"

  "The setup," I gesture toward the workstation even though he can't see it. "The maps. The observation points. You're studying the Jump drops for someone. Unless you're just a really good detective and you figured this all out when groups of internet investigators haven't managed, all by yourself."

  A pause. "It's complicated."

  "Uncomplicate it for me."

  I hear him sigh. "I couldn't walk. The medical industry fucked me out of my doctorate. Fly picked me back up." He's confident. He's practiced this speech. Maybe in a mirror?

  "Your condition," I say, loud enough to be heard, already trying to slowly step closer. Slowly. Trying not to be noticed. Like dealing with an easily startled animal. "Your disability. You feel like they fixed you."

  "My disease," he corrects sharply, almost spitting it, "is terminal. The one thing I wanted to do with my life was help other people like me and those... charlatans at the agencies, sitting on their death panels, they ruined that for me. For society. I could've done something great."

  I take another step to the side, trying to get a line of sight on him. "So what are you doing here? What's all this for?"

  "Research," he says. "They're testing different Jump formulations. Different distribution methods. I'm documenting the results."

  "People are getting hurt out there, Elias. People are dying."

  "Make it mean something," he says quietly. "I can make it mean something. If we learn how exactly Jump and Fly cause powers to happen, we could replicate it. Make it so that nobody has to suffer like I did again. Distribute it behind the industry's back."

  "Bullshit," I say flatly. "Rogue Wave doesn't care about helping people. They just want chaos."

  Another bitter laugh. "Since when has order helped us? We have literal miracles set upon us every day and yet there are still riot cops in the street, beating crackheads in Kensington, tazing high schoolers in lunchrooms. How has society just... absorbed this all? The Genesis Births should've been the greatest paradigm shift in human history. It just ended up becoming a fancy little cape attached to the boot stamping on our heads."

  I'm close enough now to see the edge of his shadow from behind the pillar. "So why help them?"

  "Because they're the only ones being honest about what they want," he says. "Power in the hands of individuals, not institutions. And because..." He hesitates.

  "Because what?"

  "Because they're right. Things can't go on like this. They're about to make being a superhero illegal and all you superheroes want to do is make sure I can't help people. Go after the real bad guys, for once!" he shouts, almost in tears. My chest hurts, but I can't put a name to the emotion.

  I take another step. "Derek told me you came by to get some stuff from him."

  I can feel the blood pooling in his chest, the way his heart palpitates. He finishes tying his little cloth scrap bandage around his calf wound. "You're working with Derek?"

  "I mean, you've probably alienated everyone else in your life. Nobody else calls me in the middle of dinner panicking that such-and-such just showed up and I need to track them down. What about your mom? Your dad?" I ask, trying to get to something important. Come on, Elias. There has to be something there. "Yeah, I'm working with Derek. You don't remember me?"

  Silence confirms it.

  "Come with me, Elias," I say, softening my tone. "We can get you help. Real help. Not whatever Rogue Wave is promising you."

  "There is no help!" he snaps. "There's no cure. There's just managing the symptoms. Getting regular Fly injections of the same strain. They have enough vials of it to last me for the rest of my natural life, in case it breaks down over time. And I believe in their goals, even if I don't trust them."

  I can see part of him now - his shoulder pressed against the concrete pillar. He's wearing a dark jacket, hood pulled up.

  "At least stop this," I say. "Whatever data you're collecting tonight - it's not worth the chaos out there."

  "It's not that simple," he says. "I have obligations."

  "To who? Monkey Business? Snake Oil? Deathgirl?"

  "To myself," he says. "To society. With knowledge comes responsibility to use that knowledge responsibly."

  I'm close enough now that if I lunge, I might be able to grab him. But something tells me that would be a mistake.

  "Do you really believe that? Were you using that knowledge responsibly when you attacked the courthouse?"

  He's silent for a long moment. Then: "Conceited. Condescending. Do you think that if you just explain it to me perfectly enough that I'll suddenly see the flaws in my worldview and willingly turn myself in? Don't you understand that whatever you think isn't reconcilable with whatever I think?"

  "Which is what?"

  Another pause. "People deserve to live. Unmolested. Without needing to pay for their life. Anyone can do anything, as long as they don't infringe on another person's ability to do the same."

  My phone buzzes in my pocket. I ignore it.

  "And this chaos isn't infringing on people's abilities to do what they want?" I press. "What about your work with the Phreaks? People died, Elias. You killed people."

  "It was a necessary evil, and it still is. I needed to test my modifications to Jump, and the Phreaks were useful idiots, and now they're all in jail. I needed to know what statistical and chemical factors made people mutate uncontrollably, and now I get to bring that knowledge to bear by helping Rogue Wave make safer Jump and Fly. We're not trafficking guns or coke or racketeering people. We're not throwing people in jail. We're not building the structure, we're tearing it down. Whatever comes next will be better," he insists.

  I take another step, almost in position now. "You can't really believe that."

  "I can," he says, and there's some kind of fear in his voice now. "And even if I didn't, we're too far in now to pull out."

  "I can protect you," I say.

  He laughs again, harsher this time. "Like the cops outside? Or did you forget that I'm a nationally wanted fugitive? You have nowhere you can take me that I'll be safe in, and I'm not hiding in the zoo again for another year."

  I'm about to respond when my phone buzzes again, more insistently this time. I glance down at it quickly.

  Dad: It's 9:30. Where are you? Your mother is worried sick.

  Shit. Curfew.

  In that split second of distraction, I hear movement. A scrape of shoes on concrete, then a grunt of exertion.

  I look up just in time to see Elias darting from behind the pillar toward the ramp leading upward. But he's changed - his legs now thick and muscled like a bear's, tearing through his jeans. His arms elongating, fingers spreading into what look like vulture's claws. And on his back, something bulging beneath his jacket, straining the fabric.

  "Elias, wait!" I call, sprinting after him.

  Alright. You want a chase? Let's go.