Deacon’s sudden indrawn breath was because I had yanked her toward me. Unlike a lot of Alphas, I don’t need glowing eyes or dramatic gestures. My power is quiet, intimate, and utterly undramatic until it’s too late. I simply weakened the molecular bonds in a perfect circle on the van floor beneath us and spiked the hoverfan’s regulator. When I yanked her additional weight onto me, we dropped through the floor like a stone through smoke.

  This part was… tricky. I’d taken inanimate objects with me before, some much heavier than this ninety-pound slip of a girl, but nothing alive, nothing with a soul and a will capable of mentally resisting. That mental integrity is usually why I can’t just reach into someone’s chest and give their heart a time-out.

  But after an initial spike of panic, Deacon seemed to… relax. She willfully allowed herself to be drawn into the atomic vortex of my weird form of teleportation. It was like she recognized the process, saw the blueprint of her body I was holding in my mind, and most importantly, saw that I was carefully preserving the soul-space containing the wispy tendrils of her spirit energy. That was the part that stayed coherent when the rest of me was a chaotic mess of potential, the anchor point I coalesced around after a jump.

  Man, we were moving fast. I could feel the free path of the roadway beneath us, and a flash of incredible heat and a sound like a dying star told me something truly terrible had just happened to the van we’d vacated. We were shooting back toward the city walls at a velocity that would make a speedster blush.

  I wasn’t trying to be flashy. No sonic booms, no heat waves, no icy trails. Assuming that a pyrokinetic and a kinetic controller couldn’t detect molecular motion or thermal variation in their immediate area would be a fantastic way to end up as a very well-done steak. Stealth was survival.

  But I had more important things to do. I was traveling at a sickening speed, faster than I’d ever gone before, and I was actively shedding my old, corrupted resets. This was the plan: use the unique, non-corporeal state of the teleport to purge the metaphysical blockages while I didn’t have physical restrictions.

  And it was working. It was working too well.

  My energy channels didn’t technically exist at that moment, so I couldn’t force energy through them, but the excess, congealed “alien” spirit energy I couldn’t use was being stripped away by the sheer pressure of our motion. And the soul-blob that was Deacon? She was eagerly consuming it. She forced the energy to orbit her core, spinning her spirit so the stripped essence was twisted and converted into her own native essence—the essence of change.

  Fascinating. The Dao of Change, while not seeming particularly combat-oriented, was apparently incredibly sociable with other energy types. At first, I worried I was just dumping my toxic waste into her, but it wasn’t physical poison; it was just solidified spiritual potential. She spun it, purified it through her own unique lens, and fed it back to me. That clean, compatible energy allowed my own Dao of Momentum to shoot us along even faster, a perfect, terrifying feedback loop.

  Wait. Did she want to get away? She said she was ‘bound.’ Was this her chance to break free? Maintaining our energetic state wasn’t hard with my pool, and she was feeding energy back into it as fast as I could use it. Curious, I took a closer look at her blueprint as we hurtled through the world.

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  Huh. Biologically, she varied from human standard in minor ways, well within the range of some sub-breeds. She was arguably more ‘normal’ than I was. But I was stripping my own enhancements back, reverting to a cleaner slate.

  Then I saw them. The non-biological components.

  Wireless trackers and radio bugs were prehistoric tech, but she had an infrared crypto-radiator, a telltale radiation implant, and nestled right at the base of her skull—a nasty little alpha-particle dispenser. Voice-activated, probably.

  One wrong word and it would flood her brain with heavy Helium-3 isotopes, killing her in minutes through biocellular degradation. Charming. For an alchemist resistant to traditional poisons, a deadly radioisotope was the perfect, untreatable leash.

  Well, I was in the business of cutting leashes. None of it was necessary for her body’s function. So, I left it all behind. The monitoring gear, the dispenser bracelet filled with complex compounds I didn’t understand… all of it, dumped into the void between here and there.

  I left alone a strange ring tied deeply into her soul space; it had its own spiritual boundaries and was laced with energy types on an axis I didn’t want to mess with. Some mysteries are best left for later.

  There! A familiar location snapped into focus. The last time I was here, I’d been fighting Glacier Girl right over… there, where her pressurized cold bomb had smashed into my body. And there was the little maintenance closet with its deep industrial sink. Perfect. I coalesced our forms, reset my own body with a wince of familiar pain, and unceremoniously dumped Deacon’s extracted “extras” into the sink. They vanished down the drain with a satisfying glug.

  After a moment, her own body reset, sans sinister mechanical additions. Instead of writhing in the agony I always experienced—rebuilding your nervous system from scratch is a real bitch—she was grinning at me like a kid on Christmas morning.

  “Huh? Are you okay?” I asked, bewildered. I was fighting the urge to vomit from the sensory shock; she looked like she’d just had the best ride of her life at the metaphysical amusement park.

  “Yes I am!” she chirped. “That was… amazing. Can we do it again?”

  I stared at her. “What? Aren’t you in pain? Didn’t that hurt?”

  “No, should it? I mean, I am not a body cultivator, but I imagine a mortal might find it unsettling. But it was far less painful than breaking through a single realm barrier! And the amount of energy you fed me was… invigorating!”

  “I don’t understand. I was trying to purge excess, corrupted energy I couldn’t use. I thought I was dumping my spiritual sewage on you. But you’re… happy.”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “You don’t know how to purify your essence yet. Frankly, your development is bizarre. You haven’t even opened your dantians, yet you’re halfway into the energy condensation stage. Your body is also… fluctuating. It’s not the same as it was in the truck. A temporary ability?”

  I winced. “It wasn’t supposed to be.”

  “So wait, you really ARE a mortal? Not even properly into the body tempering stage?” she asked, her head tilting with academic curiosity.

  I shrugged and tentatively tested my energy channels. They were tender, new, but clear. The path was open. I’d need time and a whole lot of radioactive junk food to properly fuel them. “That depends. Are you going to try and kidnap or kill me now?” I chuckled. “You don’t look particularly vengeful.”

  She shook her head, her grin softening into something more genuine. “No. The suicide device is gone. Which means I am gone. But I will owe you a life debt!”

  I waved a hand dismissively. “Yeah, I hear that a lot. Don’t worry about it. You were an emergency exit strategy and a potential investment. When you get settled, send me a note through Vilnet. I could use an alchemist who doesn’t faint at the sight of my messed-up energy signature. But right now, we’re both a little too hot to handle. Can you make it from here?”

  She nodded, a new sharpness in her eyes. “Yes. The few remaining members of my family are prepared for such opportunities. We have been for a long time.”

  I nodded and turned my focus inward. I needed more energy for the jump back to the academy. Chalk up another narrow escape to good old-fashioned, crippling paranoia. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.