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A boy named Bix ran screaming, stopped suddenly, and was thrown into the air. The green light found him there, and he burst into flames.
Like skeet shooting. Gaia wasn’t just killing: she was playing.
Edilio’s boyfriend, the Artful Roger, tried to grab some of his pictures before the light reached the boat he called home, but the end was too swift. The killing light was interrupted by a trailer between the boat and Gaia, so only half the boat burned.
Roger recoiled, shouting for Justin, who he had cared for for months. Roger was two feet behind the kill line. Justin was two feet on the other side, and was incinerated as Roger cried out in horror. He tried to yell, but the heat sucked the air from his lungs. He stumbled back with fire spreading toward him, climbed the ladder, fell onto the tilting deck of the sailboat, and rolled into the water, unconscious.
“Wake up,” Caine said, shaking Sam roughly.
“What the—”
“Get up. You want to see this,” Caine said, and trotted away, up out of the dip where they had decided to spend the night after a long day searching from the mine shaft down to the burned-out remains of the hermit’s shack.
They had decided to leave the power plant for last and had been on their way to the Stefano Rey when night rolled over them.
Sam threw off his thin blanket and followed Caine to the high point. He instantly saw what Caine was pointing at. Far in the north there were flames throwing yellow light against the sky.
“The lake!” Sam cried.
“I think we just found Gaia,” Caine said. “It’s probably, what, five miles away? The road’s out of our way, but it might be faster in the long run. Cross-country like this it’ll take us—”
But Sam was already running.
Caine dashed after him. They ran in the dark, keeping the forest to their left, until Sam tripped and realized he was going to kill himself if he didn’t watch where he was going. He formed a ball of light in his left hand and held it at shoulder level. It didn’t cast much light, but it was better than relying on the faint moon.
If they could keep up the pace—a moderate running speed—they could be there in an hour. Maybe a little more.
Both of them knew it would be too late.
Gaia strode through the burning camp, earbuds still in, music still on, with the terrified Alex cringing like a Harry Potter house elf behind her.
Each time she saw movement she aimed and fired. The killing light was quite effective, she thought, not as messy or as slow as using her father’s telekinetic power. But the lifting and throwing and smashing were more fun, somehow. There was a certain pleasure in grabbing a human, throwing it high in the night air, and letting it fall with a scream that ended in a satisfying crunch of broken bone. Or bashing a car down like a hammer on a fleeing person and seeing the way two tons of steel would collapse a human body and burst it like a water balloon.
A group of maybe twenty was racing away on foot, running at top speed. Gaia turned on her own speed and was on them in a flash, running beside them effortlessly.
She lit her hands, not to kill, but to see the looks on their faces. Terror. They were like terrified herd animals running from a predator, eyes wide, mouths open, gasping, weeping. She was the tiger and they were, what, sheep?
She decided to play with her other powers. She canceled gravity beneath the fleeing people. They stumbled and rose into the air, twisting, unable to get their balance.
She looked up at them and laughed. She raised one hand, picked out a first victim, and fired. A girl burned like a torch in the sky.
It was wonderful.
The others screamed and begged and floated even higher, unable to escape, unable to hide.
She fired and missed, which was embarrassing. The moonlight was too dim to see them clearly, even when Gaia squinted. So Gaia lowered them until her nearsighted eyes could make them out in detail. Then she lit them up, one by one. They burned prettily, casting a lurid orange glow over the ground below.
She pulled out the earbuds to hear more clearly. The sound of burning was—
Gaia toppled over. She hit the ground, face in the dirt, and realized she was staring over at her own leg, lying by itself, the severed knee bleeding.
The second blow was from a knife that seemed almost to come out of thin air, it happened so fast. An invisible force had left it planted in her belly.
Agony!
With Gaia’s focus destroyed, her burning human torches plummeted and splattered in greasy flames on the ground all around her. Someone—a girl, Gaia thought, a blur—was momentarily caught in the light, and Gaia saw her yanking something off her back.
Gaia rolled to one side as BOOM!
