Victoria Kane's hands had forgotten how to tremble.
Fifteen years of forcing calm into every muscle, every breath, every microexpression had trained the shake out
of her. But standing in this glass tower forty-seven floors above Manhattan, delivering another soul-crushing
presentation to men who saw her as either a curiosity or a threat, she felt something dangerous stirring in the
space between her shoulder blades where the dampener sat embedded in her spine.
A phantom itch. A whisper of what used to be.
"As you can see from slide twelve," she said, her voice carrying the mechanical precision of someone who'd
given this exact speech two hundred and seventeen times, "the statistical probability of a Resonant-related
incident affecting your facilities remains negligible. Current dampener technology maintains a 99.97%
suppression rate across all registered—"
"Ms. Kane." The interruption came from Gerald Hutchins, CFO of Meridian Technologies, a man whose face
she'd memorized from the briefing packet but whose features she'd already forgotten. They all looked the same,
these executives. Expensive suits. Practiced concern. Fear dressed up as fiscal responsibility. "What about the
incidents we've been seeing? Seattle last month. That thing in Philadelphia. The dampeners are supposed to be
foolproof."
Victoria's jaw tightened by exactly two millimeters—enough to register her irritation, not enough to seem
unstable. "The devices are designed to manage Dissonance accumulation within acceptable parameters. The
cases you're referencing involved legacy hardware that exceeded its operational lifespan."
"So they're failing."
"They're aging," Victoria corrected. "Like any technology. The Department of Resonant Affairs has protocols
for—"
"With all due respect, Ms. Kane, you used to be one of them." Hutchins leaned forward, and Victoria saw it in
his eyes. Not curiosity. Not even fear. Recognition. The terrible knowledge of what she'd been. What she still
was, under all the suppressors and corporate polish. "The Vanguard. Viper. You saved my cousin during the
Newark incident in '09. Pulled her out of a collapsing parking structure while bullets were literally bouncing off
your—"
"That was a long time ago," Victoria said, and the words tasted like ash.
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind the conference table, the city sprawled in every direction. She
used to cross those distances in seconds. Used to feel the kinetic energy of every moving thing—cars, birds, the swing of construction cranes, the flutter of a child's dropped balloon—and know with absolute certainty that she
could touch it, redirect it, make it hers.
Now she felt nothing but the constant, grinding ache of the dampener keeping her locked inside her own skin.
"The point is," she continued, pulling her attention back to men who didn't matter, "current protocols are
sufficient for—"
The door to the conference room exploded inward.
Not literally. No fire, no debris. Just the violent slam of metal against wall and a figure stumbling through,
wild-eyed and gasping. The security guard who should have been stationed outside came tumbling after him,
clutching a bleeding nose.
"I'm sorry, sirs, he just—he pushed past—"
The young man couldn't have been more than twenty-five. Rail-thin, wearing a hoodie that had seen better days
and jeans with holes that weren't the fashionable kind. His eyes found Victoria immediately, and she saw the
madness there. Not the chemical kind, not the break-from-reality kind.
The kind that came from having your soul slowly amputated while the world told you it was for your own good.
"You," he breathed, and his voice cracked like ice. "You're her. Viper. You were one of us."
Victoria's hand moved toward her hip before she remembered she didn't carry a weapon anymore. Before she
remembered she didn't need to. Before she remembered she wasn't allowed to.
The dampener pulsed at the base of her skull, a warning spike of pain that meant it was working overtime to
keep her locked down.
"What's your name?" she asked, keeping her voice level while her mind catalogued exits and cover positions
and the structural integrity of the floor-to-ceiling windows forty-seven stories above concrete.
"Danny." His hands were shaking so badly she could see it from across the room. "Danny Marsh. East Side
Guardian Corps. I was—I could—" His voice broke completely. "I used to make light. Just light. Pretty,
harmless light. I saved people with it."
Victoria's eyes dropped to his wrist, where his dampener was flickering between green and amber. The telltale
sign of imminent failure.
The dampener at his wrist cracked. Not shattered—not yet—but the sound was like a gunshot in the terrible
silence.
"I was twenty years old," Danny whispered. "I just wanted to help people." Then his hands ignited.
It wasn't the controlled manifestation Victoria remembered from her active days, when Resonants used their
powers with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. This was raw. Desperate. Light exploded from Danny's palms
like a star going nova, and Victoria's tactical mind—the part that had never needed the dampener, that had
survived on pure training and instinct—calculated trajectories in the half-second before impact.
Victoria moved.
Her hand closed around his wrist as he released another blast. The kinetic energy hit her palm like a freight
train.
And the dampener shattered.
The sensation was indescribable. The kinetic energy of the city flooded through Victoria like a drug, like a
disease, like coming home after a lifetime in exile. She could feel everything. For one perfect, terrible moment,
Victoria Kane remembered what it felt like to be a god.
Then the Dissonance hit.
It started behind her eyes—a pressure that felt like her skull was trying to collapse inward. Her vision blurred,
doubled, tripled. She tasted copper. Felt something warm running from her nose.
And Danny was still cascading.
"I'm sorry," Victoria whispered, knowing he couldn't hear her over the roar of his own destruction.
She absorbed everything.
The impact nearly killed her. Danny's light poured into her—not just the photons but the kinetic force behind
them, the molecular vibration, the heat energy, the terrible mathematical certainty of a power eating itself alive.
Victoria compressed it all. Made herself a battery for apocalypse.
Then she caught him before he hit the ground.
The room was intact. The windows were whole. The executives were alive.
Victoria's hands shook. Her first tremor in fifteen years.
Her phone rang.
"We need to talk about what's really happening to the dampeners, Victoria," Director Chen's voice was tight
with the kind of control that came from years of practice hiding fear. "And about who's behind it. How soon can
you get to DC?" Victoria looked down at Danny's unconscious form, at her own blood-slicked hands, at the broken dampener
pieces scattered on the carpet.
"I'll be there in three hours," she said.
"Victoria, you can't move that fast anymore. The dampeners—"
"I don't have a dampener anymore, Sarah."
The silence on the other end of the line stretched so long Victoria thought the call had dropped.
"Jesus Christ," Chen finally whispered.
Victoria hung up.
Her phone buzzed. Text messages from a family that had spent three years carefully avoiding each other.
Malcolm. Sienna. Marcus.
Their dampeners were failing too.
All of them.
Victoria stood in the lobby, blood drying on her face, power humming under her skin, watching her phone fill
with messages.
She thought about the Cascade. About Marcus Trent losing control. About the twelve thousand people who died
because they couldn't stop him in time.
About the fact that fifteen years later, it might be happening again.
On a much larger scale.