The fog did not offer the cover he'd hoped for. It clung to the road in thin, useless tatters. Headlights cut through it with ease, pinning him against the wet asphalt. He was out of trees, out of ditches, out of tricks.
Jin leaned against a rusted guardrail, the cold metal biting into his back. His left leg was dead weight, the thigh wound pumping blood in sluggish spurts that pooled dark and sticky at his feet. His shoulder burned like a knot of fire. Every breath was a chore.
"Nowhere left to run, old man," a voice called from the line of soldiers advancing through the beams of their trucks. They formed a loose semi-circle, rifles trained on the center of his chest.
The calm, disembodied voice from the radio returned, this time amplified from a speaker on the lead vehicle. "Target is immobilized. He is to be taken alive if possible. If not—terminate with prejudice."
Jin spat blood onto the road. "Alive?" he rasped. "You had your chance for that." He raised his rifle, the motion slow and agonizing. He was going to die here, but he wouldn't make it easy.
He was counting his last seconds. And his mind, as it often did under fire, drifted.
The world used to make sense. Then people like him broke it. At first, they called them miracles, and the world was drunk on wonder. He remembered the endless news cycles when the woman in Kaelen stopped that collapsing crane.
People cried in the streets, calling it a sign from God. When the boy from the Ironridge Mountains shot a defunct satellite out of orbit with a hunting rifle to prevent it from crashing into a city, they threw him a parade.
They were heroes. Celebrities. The dawn of a new, magical age. Action figures were made in their likeness.
Then fear crept in, a slow poison. The talking heads on television, faces grim, began using new words.
"Unregistered assets." "Potential threats." "Sovereignty risks."
Miracles became weapons. A hero who could stop a crane could just as easily drop one. A boy who could hit a satellite could hit a presidential motorcade from a continent away. Wonder curdled into suspicion. The parades stopped.
He was young and hot-headed when the men in suits came to him. They didn't show him magazine covers; they showed him classified photographs.
Blasted-out schools in foreign countries. The small, broken bodies of children caught in the crossfire of pointless wars. Help us end this, a man with kind eyes and a cold heart had said. You can be a force for real peace.
He believed them. He went to war as a one-man army. He remembered the grit of desert sand in his teeth as he tore a tank column apart with his bare hands, his fists wrapped in raw, shimmering energy.
The soldiers he fought beside had looked at him with awe and unease. He wasn't one of them. He was a living natural disaster they could point at the enemy.
He remembered the roar of the crowd when he stopped a bombing in a packed city square, the shrapnel freezing midair around him like a thousand deadly hummingbirds.
They called him a hero. A savior. But in the quiet moments, in sterile debriefing rooms, he was only a tool. A scalpel when they needed precision, a sledgehammer when they needed brute force.
Then the wars ended, and the fear came home. His friends—the other "miracles"—began to disappear. The metal worker died in a "training accident" on a secure base. The diver "retired" to a black site. The boy who never missed was destroyed by a fabricated report.
The list grew shorter.
The memory he hated most surfaced, sharp and clear: the last job.
"Nothing complicated, Jin," his handler had said, a man named Marcus with a practiced, easy smile that never reached his eyes.
The office smelled of lemon polish, the air too clean, too controlled. "He's a political witness. Get him to the safe house on Route 7. That's all. Do it clean, and there'll be medals on the table and tea in the cup."
"Route 7?" Jin tapped the map on the polished oak desk. His voice was flat, edged. "That road's a deathtrap. Narrow passes, blind corners. We've lost convoys there. Why not air evac?"
Marcus's smile never faltered. He clapped Jin on the shoulder like an old friend.
"Optics, my friend. Airlifts scream panic. No-go zones look weak on the evening news. We need to project control. And besides—" he leaned in slightly, voice dropping into mock sincerity, "it's you. What's a deathtrap to a god?"
Jin had driven the car himself, the witness pale and silent in the backseat. He remembered the exact spot: a patch of asphalt too dark, too fresh, covering an old culvert.
Wrong. Too wrong. Then the ditch went white, the blast perfectly placed to flip the car and turn his world into dirt and static.
He'd woken with blood in his mouth, ribs screaming, the witness already dead—and a team of men in unmarked gear closing in. Not to arrest him. To bury him.
That had been three nights ago.
A flicker in the sky dragged him back to the present.
High above the fog, a pinprick of blue-white light streaked across the heavens at impossible speed. He blinked, thinking it a trick of blood loss. But it was still there. And it was getting bigger.
One of the soldiers pointed upward. "What the hell is that?"
The calm voice on the speaker snapped, sharper now. "Maintain discipline! Eyes on the target!"
But it was too late. Every head tilted skyward, Jin's included. The pinprick swelled into a blazing streak, a tear across the fabric of night, burning with cold, fierce light. The air thickened, with heavy silence. The world seemed to pause.
Then came the sound: a deafening, bone-deep roar that tore the sky apart.
The object—a sleek, dark shape wreathed in plasma—was descending fast, carving a line of fire through the clouds, headed straight for the forest beyond the road.
The ground trembled beneath Jin's hands. The soldiers froze, their formation broken, rifles lowering as they stared at the incoming star. Even Jin, battered and bleeding, couldn't look away.
The light grew brighter, filling the night, its radiance washing over the road until everything else faded into shadow.
And then—
The world held its breath.