She reached for the pouch on her belt and wrapped her fist around the projectile inside.

She calculated the distance, focus shifting from Ace to Max and back again.

Clenching her fist around the dart, Nova lunged.

The needle was inches from Ace’s shoulder when he turned and grabbed her forearm, locking her in a debilitating grip. While his other hand remained outstretched, holding the star toward the city, he forced Nova’s fist to eye level, studying the syringe. The bright yellow liquid sloshed inside. He frowned.

“That is not the neutralizing agent,” he said.

“No, this is one of Leroy’s,” said Nova. “This one is Agent N.”

She drove her other hand forward, jamming the dart into Ace’s side.

Ace released her arm and drew back. In the same moment, Nova reached up and snatched the helmet from his head. Ace cried out in surprise but she was already sprinting, both arms crushing the helmet to her chest.

Her feet were lifted into the air as Ace summoned the helmet back to him. Nova held tight, curling her body around it as the helmet flew back to Ace, taking her with it. She somersaulted in the air. Her shoulder crashed into Ace, knocking him against a column.

Nova fell to the ground, but her body had dulled to the constant battering and she stayed folded around the helmet, bracing to be thrown halfway across the roof again.

But another attack did not come.

Daring to lift her head, she saw Ace examining the fingers of his open hand, his face wrinkled, his hair gray and unkempt.

Agent N was working.

She had no time. Springing to her feet, Nova swiped one hand at her uncle’s, snatching the bracelet from him.

He hardly seemed to notice.

In the distance, the first buildings began to fall, slipping from the sky.

“Adrian!” she screamed, hurling the helmet as hard as she could across the roof.

Adrian caught it one-handed. “What—”

“For Max! Quick!”

Even as Adrian’s face tightened with confusion, he planted the helmet onto Max’s head. The kid gasped, both hands reaching up to pull it off.

“The city!” Nova screeched.

Max froze. He looked out at the city. At the hundreds of structures that were slipping from Ace’s control, being claimed by gravity, starting to plummet back toward the earth. A strip mall struck the ground with concussive force. A bank tower speared through Mission Street, forty floors of glass and steel caving in on themselves.

Max recoiled from the sight at the same time he lifted his arms toward it.

The crumbling buildings slowed their descent, and gradually stilled.

Max groaned. His entire body shuddered.

“Adrian, this too!” Nova threw the star.

Adrian caught it and immediately dropped it with a yelp, shaking his hand as if it had burned him.

He looked at Nova and she looked back, baffled.

Setting his jaw, he went to pick it up again, but Max stretched out his own hand and the star leaped into his grasp. There was a flash, and Nova saw those flickers of energy again, swirling through the wasteland like a brewing storm.

Max’s limbs stopped trembling as the star lent him strength.

In every direction, the buildings haltingly, tentatively, began to settle themselves back onto their foundations.

Nova exhaled, feeling the first wave of relief, when her fingertips began to tingle. She gasped and looked down at her open palm.

A sensation of fragility streamed through her limbs, even as a foggy, sleepy weakness seeped into her mind. It felt like powerlessness. It felt exactly like when she had once gotten too close to Max inside the quarantine.

She pressed a hand to the Vitality Charm under her shirt. It should have been protecting her, but …

The helmet.

It was amplifying his powers.

Perhaps the charm could no longer protect her.

Max, focused on resetting countless buildings back in place, seemed oblivious that he was even doing it. Nova took a step back, then another, wondering if she had the strength to get away from him before he absorbed everything.

She didn’t get far.

Nova yelped as her feet were suddenly lifted from the ground. Ace had one hand on her upper arm, the other scooped beneath one leg as he lifted her over his head. Nova screamed, thrashing in his hold, swinging her arms in an attempt to find skin, any skin.

Adrian screamed her name, but she barely heard it over her own panic. Ace stormed toward the edge of the roof and she realized that he intended to throw her over the side.

She used every technique she knew, kicking and flailing, trying to curl herself into a smaller target or rock her body from side to side. But her thoughts were too frantic, too scattered, and Ace’s grip was iron, his own scream an animal’s wail as he reached the ledge and prepared to heave her to the ground eighty feet below.

Something glinted in the blinding floodlights, driving straight toward them.

Nova felt the impact slam into Ace’s body. She heard his strangled cry.

His grip loosened, and Nova arched her back, rolling out of his hold and landing on all fours at his side.

Her jaw fell open.

Ace Anarchy stood at the ledge of his cathedral. A god among men. A revolutionary. A visionary. A villain.

With a chromium spear impaled through his heart.

Nova scurried backward, colliding with another body, and a pair of arms wrapped around her from behind. She screeched and spun out of reach, already calling on the well of power in her gut.

Adrian grabbed for her again, his face wild with worry.

Adrenaline draining from the tips of her fingers, Nova swiveled. Ace seemed frozen in time. His head was cocked back. His eyes on the brightening sky. The great floodlights around the wasteland lit up the metal driven through his chest.

Ace Anarchy tipped forward and fell.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

“EVERYONE OKAY UP there?” called a ragged voice.

Nova peered over the ledge, avoiding the sight of Ace’s broken figure below. A surge of relief rushed through her to see Hugh Everhart on his feet, if only barely.

With an exhausted grin, he wiped an arm across his brow. “I once swore to protect you. I’m sorry it came so late.”

She laughed, half delirious with gratitude that it wasn’t her broken body at the base of the cathedral.

“Dad!” cried Adrian, throwing himself against the balustrade a few feet away. “You’re alive!”

Hugh chuckled. “Yes. But not invincible anymore, I don’t think.” He tried to disguise the pain that flashed over his features as he shifted his attention to the other side of the roof. “How’s Max doing?”

Nova studied Max, taking in his shuddering limbs and the helmet that was far too big for him. Little ten-year-old Max, who was clever and brave and now might very well have stolen the superpowers of Ace Anarchy and Captain Chromium, arguably the two strongest prodigies in the world.

And Nightmare’s, too, she knew with absolute certainty. There was no need to test the theory. When she called for her power, that subtle strength that had always pulsed beneath the surface of her skin, it was no longer there.

She would never put anyone to sleep again.

But what surprised her more than anything was that she suddenly recognized Max in a way she had never recognized him before. Watching him was like watching an illusion.

He stood as still as the gargoyles that surrounded them, his face shrouded by the helmet, his arms stretched out like offering a gift to the world. The star hovered a few inches above his cupped palms.

He looked like the statue. The one she had once conjured in a dream. The one who had held a star in its hands.

The star brightened, and for a moment, she saw the flash of energy lines again, the coppery-gold strings her father could manipulate, the remains of a supernova that had brought superpowers to humanity. The lines were still there, but more sparse now than she’d ever seen before and—unnervingly—they were all flowing in one direction.

They were all flowing into Max.

She blinked, and the vision was gone. She was left gaping at the boy, afraid of what it could mean.

“Adrian,” she whispered. He was focused on his brother, his face pinched with concern. Nova stepped closer and tucked a hand into his, but he hissed in pain and pulled away. Nova started. Adrian flashed her a sheepish look and flipped his hand over, showing her the blisters on his palm where the star had burned him. “It’s not so bad.”

She linked their elbows instead. “Don’t panic,” she said, “but I think Max might be absorbing all the superpowers that are left … maybe, in the whole world.”

Adrian frowned. “What?”

“The helmet is amplifying his power,” she explained. “He took my power already, and your dad’s.”

His eyes widened.

“I think he’s taking them all.”

In the distance, the final building fit into place. Shattered concrete and snapped rebar melded back together. The skeletons of broken scaffolding and discarded fire escapes climbed back up their facades. Erupted asphalt streets sunk into smooth, level grades. Collapsed walls righted themselves. Bricks and mortar fused like puzzle pieces. Sludge-filled water drained into the sewers. The whole world knit itself back together, as if the wounds caused by Ace Anarchy had been nothing but a long nightmare they could finally awake from.

Electricity had not been restored, leaving a city that would once have been aglow with a million golden windows instead awash in the light of a million stars and an indigo sky. The horizon was glowing with the promise of dawn. It was absolutely breathtaking.

“He did it,” Nova whispered.

Adrian didn’t respond.

She cast a look up into his face and saw that he wasn’t witnessing the same amazing sight she was. His attention was trained on his little brother, his lips parted with growing horror. “What’s happening to him?”

She followed his gaze.

Shining rivulets appeared beneath the skin of Max’s hands, like veins of melted gold disappearing into the cuffs of the Renegade uniform. More were on his throat, where the helmet didn’t cover. They glowed with an iridescence that was both beautiful and terrifying, its warmth pulsing in time with the star.