Night had fallen on the city early, winter lowering its darkness on the canyons and towers. Jamie Barton was slipping through the night, reeling herself across the harbor on a gravity channel that anchored her to Freedom Tower on one end and the Statue of Liberty’s torch at the other. She slipped over the water, watching it wash beneath her, half-asleep.
Her new cowl was a little itchy; it was mostly for effect at this point, since everyone in New York knew she was the superhero known as Gravity. She’d designed it herself. That was her job—her day job, after all, designing clothing, and boy, had that business taken off since her secret identity had come out. She was a top clothing manufacturer in New York at this point, her superhero-themed outfits selling like wildfire, as her friend Clarice would say.
Yeah … Jamie had it pretty good at this point, she had to concede, the wind whipping her hair behind her. If she was fortunate, online orders would spike again tomorrow. Because tonight she’d been photographed at the scene of a particularly large bank robbery, foiling the perps just as things were getting intense. She’d just split them up like badly behaving kids at a party, yanking them apart with simple gravity channels. Easy enough.
The Staten Island Ferry’s horn bellowed beneath her, and Jamie smiled, waving down. There were a couple people shadowed on the deck as she slid over them in rough approximation of flight. It wouldn’t do for Staten Island’s own superhero not to wave at the ferry, after all. She reached her apogee, only a few hundred feet from the Statue of Liberty’s torch, and started to adjust. She’d need to throw her next gravity channel down on the island, probably somewhere near—
A bright flame lit in the night, just above the torch, as though someone had set it on fire. Jamie paused her ascent, stopping in the middle of the gravity channel, hanging in midair. She peered into the dark and realized—
There was someone just … floating there.
And they had fire coming out of their hands.
Her first thought was, “Sienna?” but she stifled it. She’d seen Sienna just a few months ago, during that rescue mission in Scotland, and … she didn’t have fire powers anymore.
No, this was someone else.
She could see the hints of his profile in the dark, even at this distance. His face was grim under the flames, mouth a flat line. With a jerk, he floated toward her, not too quickly, and stopped fifty feet or so away, just hovering.
“Who are you?” she asked, a little tentative. She wrapped a couple gravity channels around his feet, snugging him to the ground very lightly, preparing to activate them full bore should he go from looming to …
Well, threatening.
“Who I am is not important,” he said, voice echoing in the cold air. His accent was Eastern European, reminding her of a Polish man who sold her cloth.
“What do you want?” Jamie asked.
“It is not about ‘want.’” His voice was clear, and he just hovered there, almost blocking her. She could adjust course, dip lower, or set up a channel straight to Staten Island—and might, if he proved intransigent, but …
So far he wasn’t being threatening. He was just hanging there. Like he wanted to talk.
“Then why are you here?” Jamie asked. She peered at him. Hadn’t she read something on her phone earlier? Something about a meta who attacked a bridge after that carrier disaster down in Virginia? A man who—
Wreathed himself in flames? Was that it? Jamie couldn’t remember. She’d been rushing around New York most of the day, dealing with one police scanner call after another. You’d think criminals would get it through their heads that Gravity was on the scene and call it a day, but no …
“I have to be here,” he said, crisply. His hands still glowed, or else he’d be barely visible, a shadow in the night in this place.
This was the most frustrating conversation Jamie could recall having since … well, probably this morning, when she’d last talked to her teenage daughter. “Oooookay,” Jamie finally said, wanting to give up and shrug, just walk away like she had with Kyra. But it wasn’t entirely wise to leave a man with flaming hands and flight powers at your back while you were riding a gravity channel home. “Well … unless you have some other need of me, I’d like to call it a night—”
“There is need,” he said. “You … have power.”
Jamie just hung there, waiting for more. “… Yes?”
“I have power,” he said, and the flames grew brighter. “We must … test powers, one against another.” His English broke a little in the middle.
“I’m not looking for a fight,” Jamie said, preparing to scoot back on the Freedom Tower channel and laying out a few more delicate ones from herself to other points that she could throw the switch on in case of emergency. Two at different spots on Liberty Island, one attached to the statue’s waist, and a final one onto the Staten Island Ferry some two miles out by now.
The man just hung there, fire burning at his fingertips, and then suddenly … it started to glow brighter. “I am.”
His attack was dramatic, fire flaring at her in an orange glow, bulbs of it streaking toward her in the night. Jamie yanked herself down on one of the gravity channels, the one planted at the edge of the island below her. It pulled her back and down, and at the same time, a second later, she activated the two she’d subtly attached to his feet, and his glowing hands were yanked in the other direction.
Have to avoid the flames, Jamie thought, tempted to slap herself for thinking the obvious. Of course she had to avoid the flames. Who would want to jump through them willingly—
Oh. Right. Sienna Nealon.
But Jamie wasn’t crazy like that, so she just bent and let the next gravity channel whip her around the base of the statue as the ones she’d left on the man did the work of pulling him down. She’d slide around the base of the statue as her channels worked, and she’d catch him near the ground and set up a flux around him, a field that even fire couldn’t escape. Once that was done, she’d—
A roar reached her ears just before a power burst of water came ripping out of the harbor and engulfed her. The freezing wash soaked through her costume in a bracing shock. Her skin went numb, her breath left her in a single, urgent exhalation, and she halted in place.
Her mouth opened of its own accord, to let the air out in a rush, and she blasted out the other side of the sudden wash, trying to wrap her analytical mind around what had just happened.
She was still a hundred feet above the water, and it looked—well, not calm and placid, because it was the harbor, but it was relatively still. How had that water come rushing up to—