The car had been useless as a car for weeks, half-submerged near a flooded intersection with its engine long since drowned, but Killian saw something else in it the moment he waded close enough to study its frame properly.
He pressed both hands against the hood, closing his eyes, feeling past the surface of the metal into the deeper structure beneath — the atomic architecture that made steel steel, that gave it shape and rigidity, that he could, with enough focus, convince to become something else entirely.
The reshaping took nearly ten minutes, sweat beading along his brow despite the cool, wet air, the car's frame slowly folding and stretching and thinning under his sustained concentration until what remained bore no resemblance at all to its original shape — a narrow, low-slung hull, watertight, buoyant, crude in its finish but structurally sound.
