The PowWow

The lights went out all at once, which is not a thing that happens by accident in a parking lot with its own dedicated electrical service, and I registered that fact about half a second before I registered anything else that mattered.

Half a second, it turned out, was already too long.

Something hit Jacob first. I didn't see it coming — nobody could have, not in that dark, not at that speed — but I heard it, a sound like a car door slamming except wetter, heavier, and I saw my brother's enormous frame go sideways in a way I had genuinely never once seen it go in thirty years of watching him absorb things that would have ended other men. He didn't fall. He staggered, which from Jacob was its own kind of alarm bell, a landmark suddenly discovering it could move.

I turned toward him. That was the mistake, if there was one single mistake in the whole blur of it — turning toward my brother instead of toward whatever had just hit him — and the second mistake was not having any real chance to correct the first, because something caught me an instant later, high on the shoulder, and the parking lot tilted sideways and kept tilting.

I want to describe what that felt like honestly, because I think it matters that you understand what it feels like when my gift simply isn't fast enough. There was no half-second of intention before movement, no tell I could read, no angle I could anticipate. There was only speed, a moment of sharp pain, the asphalt of the parking lot coming up to greet me, and more pain.

Roiya was already moving, I think, some instinct in her recognizing the shape of an attack before the rest of us had caught up to the fact that we were in one. I heard her voice, sharp, cut off almost as soon as it started.

Then the pop.

Small. Mechanical. The specific unremarkable sound of a canister doing exactly what it had been built to do, and then a hiss, and then something in the air that made my eyes water and my head go thicker and slower than the blow alone had already made it, a chemical fog laid on top of a physical one, so that whatever visual information the darkness had left us was taken by the gas instead.

I heard the van before I saw it. Heard the door. Heard Roiya's voice again, briefer this time, more furious than frightened, the sound of someone fighting something she couldn't see clearly enough to fight properly.

I got to my knees. I don't remember deciding to. My body simply arrived there on its own timeline, ahead of my mind, which was still working through several layers of fog at once and not managing any of them particularly well.

"Jacob."

Nothing. Or not nothing — a sound, low, a big man forcing air back into lungs that had briefly forgotten how — but nothing that resembled words yet.

I got one hand on the pavement and pushed myself higher, and through streaming eyes and a headful of cotton I caught, for maybe two full seconds, the shape of it: a van, dark, unmarked, sliding door already grinding shut, and a figure — tall, fast, wrong in a way I couldn't yet name because naming things requires a working brain and mine had checked out somewhere around the second blow — folding itself into the driver's side with an economy of motion that belied its mass. No hurry. No fear of being caught. The specific, unbothered efficiency of something that had calculated exactly how much time it needed and spent every second accordingly.

"Levi." Jacob's voice, finally, thick and slow but present, closer to me now than I'd realized. "Where—"

"Van," I managed. "They've got—"

I didn't finish the sentence. I didn't need to. The van's engine caught, tires found pavement, and it was moving before either of us had gotten fully upright, taillights swinging out toward the exit lane with the calm, unhurried confidence of a vehicle that had never once considered the possibility of pursuit.

I tried for the plate. God help me, I tried — some old reflex from years of cataloging rooms and reading faces reaching for the one piece of hard data that might still be salvageable out of a night that had otherwise given us nothing — and for one clear second I actually had it, three characters sharp against the dark, and then the gas or the blow or both together reached up and scrambled it before I could lock the sequence down. I said the numbers out loud anyway, twice, in a voice that didn't sound entirely like mine, and heard them come out wrong both times, transposed, useless, the specific cruelty of almost having something and then watching your own mind fail to hold onto it.

"I had it," I said, mostly to myself. "I had the plate and I lost it."

Jacob didn't answer. He was on his feet by then, swaying slightly, one hand pressed flat against the side of his own skull like he was checking, physically, that it was still attached and functioning the way a skull is supposed to.

The lot was quiet again. Ordinary. Streetlamps flickering back on overhead one by one, the specific delayed reboot of something that had been deliberately, temporarily killed rather than simply failed on its own. A car alarm two rows over, triggered by something in the commotion, wailing uselessly into the empty dark.

Roiya was gone.

I said it out loud, because some facts don't finish becoming real until you hear your own voice say them. "They took Roiya."

Jacob turned to look at me. Whatever was left of the confusion in his face was already burning off, replaced by something colder and far more familiar — the specific stillness he gets right before a decision, the one I'd learned to read as clearly as anything else about him over thirty years.

"They knew," he said. "This was not chance. Whoever did this knew exactly how to take each of us down. My size. Your speed." He stopped, jaw working. "They studied us."

I thought about the blow that had caught Jacob first, fast enough and heavy enough to stagger a man who did not stagger. I thought about the strike that had dropped me before I'd had even the half-second of warning my gift usually bought me. I thought about the gas, timed perfectly to finish what the first two hits had started, and the van, already positioned, already running, already gone before either of us could do anything but watch.

Somebody had built this. Planned it. Rehearsed it, maybe, the way you rehearse anything you intend to get exactly right on the first and only attempt.

"We don't know who," I said, working through the fog, trying to force the machine back online even half-functional. "I didn't see a face. Did you?"

"No." Jacob's hand came away from his head. Whatever had hit him had left a mark already darkening along one cheekbone, though I doubted it would slow him for long. "Only size. Speed. Nothing else."

"Then we don't know."

"No," Jacob agreed. "But we know this." He looked toward the exit lane, toward the empty street the van had disappeared down, and something in his voice went very quiet and very certain, the specific quiet that had always, in my experience, preceded something enormous.

"Suriel’s at work again," he said.