Augustus I practically crawled over to Taneshia on my hands and knees. She had a giant, fist-sized hole in her back and I started to panic. Blood oozed out of it. I wanted to freak out but tried to hold it all together. I let out a stream of curses.

I took a breath and realized I was about ready to hyperventilate. She was bleeding hard, and I didn't know what to do. I wasn't a doctor, I wasn't a nurse. I was a dude who was about to lose his shit because a girl he lov-errr ... had known for a very long time was dying in front of him.

Then I realized ... she wasn't squirting blood out. It was a steady ooze, and the bones the dude had broken when he had pulled his hand out of her back already looked like they were-very slowly-growing back together.

And there were scorch marks all around the edges.

"Shocked ... myself," Taneshia said, speaking into the dirt. I could feel the vibrations in the soil, could barely hear her. "Tried to ... cauterize ... until my healing could kick in."

"You are smart, girl," I said. "Knew there was a reason you were the one that went to college."

"Damned right," she muttered. Her wound looked clear, but ... did metas have to worry about infections? That was something I'd need to ask S- I looked up into the sky as a sonic boom shook the world around me. Sienna came jetting down in front of my house, and I saw her disappear behind the roofline, smoke hanging in the air above the street. "You going to be okay?" I asked Taneshia.

"Go if you need to," she said. "I'm a little ... sleepy ..."

"I'll be back," I said, staggering to my feet. I limped along, not because my legs were injured, but because I was just so completely wiped out from my exertions that I was having trouble putting one foot in front of another. "Just hang out here."

It took what felt like ten minutes to get to the corner of the house, and then I slid around it. The whole street was heavy with smoke now. Looked like the fire engines had caught on fire, along with the cop cars in front of the house. Looked like Mr. Cavanagh and Mr. Weldon-if they were the ones behind this-had done a real number on the neighborhood. Dammit, this was my home.

I wanted to drag both those bastards out into the light of day.

Instead I dragged my feet along, slow and steady, moving toward my house. I'd seen Sienna head that way, and Jamal had gone that way a while earlier. I'd almost forgotten about my murdering brother. I had no idea what to do about him. I could hear sirens in the distance as Atlanta's finest finally got around to organizing their response to this calamity. I couldn't blame them; this was disastrous. It wasn't like our whole area broke out into a literal war every day.

I crossed the second lawn, watching out for the holes I'd left. I looked to my right as I saw water bubbling up out of the ground where I'd buried the dude that shot the jets of water at me. I guessed he was still working his way through it. I used my hand to shift some mud down in that hole, block the bubbling. I didn't have the strength to fight anyone else right now.

My legs were hurting now, and I started to get the feeling maybe I'd skinned my knees at some point. My rib was killing me, my whole side on fire. I wanted to stop. To fall down. To just give up and let myself rest.

But I couldn't.

Sienna and Jamal were still in the smoke, somewhere, fighting the good fight against these guys. I couldn't let them soldier on alone.

I pulled myself over another lawn, and I knew now I was only two houses away.

The smoke got thicker, hung in my throat. I couldn't hardly breathe, and that bitter taste was just caught on my tongue. My eyes were tearing up, but I kept putting one foot in front of another.

And then the smoke started to clear, and what I saw nearly took what was left of my breath away.

Sienna Nealon was atop Jamal, hand clutching hold of his wrist. Jamal's mouth was open, locked in a silent scream, and he was writhing under her grip.

Her grip.

"Sienna!" I shouted. "No!"

When I thought about it later, I don't know what I was expecting. Her to ignore me, maybe. To shout back some argument. To double down and grasp him even tighter.

I didn't expect what happened.

I didn't expect her to fly into the air ten feet in an instant, dropping her hand from him so fast it looked like he'd flung her into the air. Her head whipped around and her body hung there, and I knew she'd done it herself, not because of anything Jamal had done to her. He was too busy clutching his arm tight to his body, sporting a sickening burn on his forearm that was blistered and charred.

"What?" Sienna asked, standing there, staring at me through the dusky smoke. "What is it?"

"I ... didn't expect you to stop just because I said so." I said it because I was a little stunned.

Her answer came out kind of cross. "Well, I did. So ... what's the deal?"

I nodded to Jamal. "He's my brother. You can't ... do whatever you were going to do to him."

She kept her cool, but I saw a hint that she might have been rattled. "Oh. You know he's the lightning man, right?"

"Yeah, but he's not in league with Cavanagh," I said, stumbling closer to Jamal. "Are you?"

"No," Jamal said, shaking his head through gritted teeth. "I hate that man ... now that I know it was him."

"Know it was him that ... what?" Sienna asked. She floated closer to the ground.

"Killed Flora," Jamal said, still clutching his burn gingerly. "He killed Flora."

"Who was Flora to you?" I asked, offering him a hand. Smoke swirled around us, the wind picking up and driving it west as it billowed off the nearby fire engine.

He looked at my hand for a long moment. "She was my girlfriend," he said and took my hand. I pulled him to his feet. "She was my first girlfriend, Augustus. And your boss and his thugs killed her."

The wind picked up and blew smoke between us all as we stood there staring at each other. I looked at Sienna; she looked back at me and then at Jamal. "We should probably get out of here," she said finally. "Unless you want to try and explain what's going on to a very unsympathetic police force."

"We're sitting in the middle of a meta warzone," I said. "No, I do not want to try and explain this to the police, because anything I say is probably going to be used against me since I buried at least three people during this fight."

"Grab your brother," she said, "and hold on tight."

"We need to get Taneshia," I said. "She's around the corner. She's hurt."

"Fine," Sienna said and grabbed hold of me as I threw an arm around Jamal. "Any idea where we should go?"

"Where's Momma?" I started to ask in a panic, remembering now that we had no place to go, really, because our house had been burned down.

"I got her out," Jamal said. "It's why I was late joining the fight. I got her five streets away. She's at Mae Grubb's house."

I felt my feet leave the ground and Jamal followed behind a moment later. "Great," Sienna said. "One less worry on the mind. But that still doesn't leave us anywhere real convenient to go, unless you want to have what's bound to be a super interesting conversation right in this Ms. Grubb's house?"

"I know where we can go," I said and looked at Jamal. "I think Flora Romero's house is still empty."

He looked at me, and the sun hit his glasses right when we broke free of the smoke. There might have been just a little extra reflection behind the glasses, though, the first time I could really remember seeing any emotion from my brother in ... years. "Yeah," he said. "Flora's house is empty." He pushed his lips together, and they twisted as he turned his head to keep from looking at me.

Sienna Flora Romero's house was an empty mess of broken windows and scuffed up floorboards. Plywood hung in place to cover up some of the worst, most shattered windows, and the glass was spread all over the floor in the kitchen.

The four of us were arrayed around the living room at the back of the house, staring at each other in the darkness as the light of day faded and the sound of sirens filled the air. Jamal was looking surly at me, Augustus looked pissed at Jamal. I was shooting occasional looks at Taneshia, who was unconscious on the floor in the corner, on her face, with a nasty wound in her back.

"Well, this is fun," I said.

"Yeah, a real barrel full of monkeys," Augustus said.

"What are you so sour about?" Jamal asked, voice extremely quiet.

"Uh, let's see-my boss is apparently trying to kill me, my girl-" He froze and looked at Taneshia. "Uhh ... my friend has been seriously injured ... my brother's a killer, we probably got the law after us, which is a first for me, and ... oh, yeah, we still got no idea why any of this is happening. Pick one of those and it's a bad day. Throw in our childhood home getting torched right to the ground, and it's a full-on winner, man."

"That does suck," I said. "But hey, at least Momma made it out alive."

"Yeah," Augustus said, "now she can kill me and Jamal both when she finds out he's a murderer and I got our house burned down. Yay. Now it's the best day ever."

"You didn't get the house burned down," Jamal said, and pointed his finger at me. "She did."

"Me?" I asked, feeling a little dumbstruck. "I wasn't even there!"

"They were trying to draw you out," Jamal said, looking at me.

"Well, that was dumb," I said. "But then, they've been playing this dumb the whole time. We would never have dug up Flora's yard on our own," I waved my hand toward the yard outside, still in its excavated state, "if those mercs hadn't ambushed me there and Augustus forced the issue by turning up bones."

"They only ambushed you because I tipped them off you were going to find something," Jamal said.

I blinked. "Well. I guess we're the dumb ones, then."

"You did what?" Augustus was on his feet, only a thin veneer between him and full rage. I was feeling a little nonplussed myself, but controlling it better than him.

"I tipped off the next link in the chain I was following that Sienna was investigating Flora's house," Jamal said. "It had taken me to Roscoe and Kennith-"

"Whom you killed," I said. "Why was that, exactly?"

"They were working with the bad guys," Jamal said, sullen. "Joaquin Pollard got paid by Kennith Coy."

"Kennith Coy was on parole," I said. "He was working at a tire shop."

"Which makes a good question how he ended up with ten grand in his bank account that made its way to Joaquin, doesn't it?" Jamal asked. "You know what he said when I asked him?"

"Before or after you blasted him to death with a bolt of lightning?" Augustus asked.

Jamal's expression hardened. "The man didn't talk after death, fool. I asked him before I let loose on him. He said I shouldn't be asking questions that were too big for me. And then he pulled a gun, so I lit him up."

"Really?" I asked. "Where did the gun go?"

"I don't know," Jamal said. "Didn't matter. But I assume some stooge of Cavanagh's or Weldon's picked it up since it could probably be tied to them. They own the police force in this town."

"How's it going to get tied to them?" Augustus asked.

"That big dude," Jamal said, "the one that works for Cavanagh. He's the point man on all the ugly illegal dealings."

Augustus blinked. "Laverne?"

I stared at Augustus. "Tell me he's got a back-up named Shirley."

"Surely you must be joking," Augustus said.

We both had a nice chuckle while Jamal stared at us like we were idiots. "I bet he gets that one all the time," I said. "Still, if Kennith Coy was a bagman or a money fronter, what about Roscoe? He was just a factory worker-"

"He was working in Cavanagh's new bioresearch facility," Augustus said. "What was he doing there?"

"Experimentation on human test subjects," Jamal said. "Like the residents from the shelter that Flora found out were missing. Cavanagh was pulling them off the street, figuring they wouldn't be missed." His jaw got tight. "And he was right-except Flora. Flora missed them, and she went looking. Found something, too. Found out enough that someone got touchy about it and sent Joaquin Pollard to kill her."

"If you knew it was Cavanagh all along, why didn't you just kill him instead of Roscoe and Kennith?" Augustus asked, surly.

"I didn't know it was Cavanagh until today," Jamal said. "Roscoe and Kennith didn't give me squat. I had to do the research to trace things back. I still can't prove it. But Roscoe said something to someone that ended up online and I found it in an email-"

"In a random email, somewhere on the net?" I asked.

"Yes," Jamal said.

My eyes narrowed at him. "That's some serious hacking."

He held up a hand and his fingers crackled. "I haven't exactly been idle in the last year. I can use my powers with brute force, but there's some other stuff I can do, too. Finer things. Manipulate 1's and 0's. It's taken a lot of practice, but it's been worth it. I found the link that tied Kennith and Roscoe to Pollard and the experimentation, and then went to question them both. Kennith tried to get fresh with me, pulled a gun. Roscoe ... he was a whole other thing."

"Yeah, well, don't leave us in the dark," Augustus said, then froze. "I didn't mean to do that pun, I swear. And I talked to Roscoe's wife. He was a decent dude, had his shit together-"

"He was a damned cruel, torturous bastard," Jamal said, teeth practically grinding. "You know why they picked him for the job? Because he didn't care what happened to other human beings. Roscoe Marion enjoyed watching other people suffer. It's all over his electronic record. You know what he did in his free time? Watched bum fight videos and worse. Cavanagh's people figured out Roscoe had a mean streak, and they put him in a place where he could use his sadism to their advantage. The email I intercepted? It was to a friend of his, reaching out with a possible employment opportunity because they were looking for more sick sons of bitches to be lab techs."

"This is off the scale crazy," I said, rubbing my forehead. "You're telling me one of the biggest big shot billionaires is running a torture-porn style operation for the homeless right in urban Atlanta, backed by one of the most connected figures in local politics ... and no one's tumbled onto that until you and your homegrown, baby lightning computer hacking investigation?"

"You came down here looking for me," Jamal said. "Think about that. Flora's death would have been written off as a robbery gone wrong. The Bluff-Vine City and English Avenue-is the fifth-highest rated neighborhood for crime in the entire U.S. These men prey on the weak. The nearly invisible. And they've got an operation that's stitched up tight. So tight because guys like Laverne, Cavanagh and Weldon? They don't leave loose ends or things to chance. They even buried their dead in Flora's yard because, hell, no one was going to look there, and if they did, it wasn't going to lead anywhere but to Flora, really. Only someone with the ability to parse the darkest corners of the net would ever be able to dig up a fraction of a trail." He shook his head. "You could spin your wheels here for months, knowing it was Cavanagh and Weldon at the center of it, and you wouldn't even have enough to get a reporter to publish a piece faintly suggesting they had anything to do with it."

"There's a lab," I said. "There's got to be some proof in the lab."

"There might be," Jamal agreed. "But as near as I can tell, there's nothing that links Cavanagh to that lab. The payroll is done through a separate company that doesn't co-mingle funds with his, that isn't traceable to him as an owner, that he's never set foot in-"

"Yet the press seem to know he's in the biotech business," I said. "That he developed the suppressant."

"Yet another shell corporation," Jamal said. "But that one you can trace to Cavanagh. The lab that developed it is in ... Arizona or something, I think. Not Atlanta, for sure. He owns, like, fifty percent of it through a holding company and another forty-five percent through a fund he's the primary investor in. Still, the water's muddy enough he could deny he knew anything about it, and if the press was feeling charitable about him-which we know they always are-they'd give him a pass."