It was night by the time Peter started walking home.
The streets were quiet, streetlights humming overhead, and he could hear things he never used to — a car radio two blocks over, someone’s TV through an open window.
He was still turning the day over in his head when he heard it.
A muffled scream, cut short.
Then the scrape of shoes dragging on pavement.
Peter stopped walking.
It was coming from the alley to his left, dark and narrow, next to a closed laundromat.
He didn’t think — he just moved toward it, and what he saw made his stomach drop.
A girl, maybe twenty, was being forced into a windowless van.
One man had a hand clamped over her mouth.
Another had her arms pinned behind her back.
She was fighting, but it wasn’t doing much good.
“Hey!” Peter shouted, breaking into a run.
They shoved her in and slammed the door before he’d covered half the distance.
The van’s engine roared and it pulled out fast, tires screeching around the corner.
Peter took off after it — and within a few strides realized he was closing the gap fast.
Too fast.
He could feel it, that same effortless speed from the rooftop sprints, easily enough to catch a van on a straight street.
He forced himself to slow down.
A sixteen-year-old outrunning a moving vehicle on foot wasn’t the kind of thing that went unnoticed.
Someone would see.
Someone would post it.
And whatever he was right now, he couldn’t afford to be that — not yet, not out here on an open street with his own face on display.
So he held back, jaw tight with frustration, and let the van pull ahead while he ducked into the next alley instead.
He planted a foot on a dumpster and eyed the fire escape three stories up.
His legs wouldn’t move.
That’s really high.
His heart was already hammering, and not from the run.
Every instinct he had was screaming that jumping off a dumpster toward a metal railing three stories up was the kind of decision that ended with him in a hospital bed, if he was lucky.
He could still feel, faintly, the crushing weight of the ceiling from a few nights ago.
His body hadn’t forgotten that, even if the rest of him wanted to move past it.
You don’t have time to think about this.
He jumped anyway.
His stomach lurched somewhere around his throat as the railing rushed up far faster than he expected, and for one horrible second he was certain he’d misjudged the whole thing, certain he was about to slam face-first into brick.
Then his hands caught the railing on pure instinct, fingers closing hard around the metal, and he hauled himself up and over, chest heaving.
He crouched there a second, shaking slightly, staring back down at the drop he’d just cleared like it belonged to someone else’s life.
Okay, he told himself.
Okay.
You didn’t die.
Do it again.
The van’s taillights were already pulling away below.
He didn’t let himself think this time — just ran and jumped the gap to the next roof, landing hard, stumbling, catching himself on his palms.
The next jump, his legs didn’t hesitate quite as much.
By the fourth or fifth, something in him had started to trust it, his body seeming to already understand the distances and the landings without him working it out consciously at all.
The fear didn’t fully go away.
It just got quieter each time, buried under the need to keep the van in sight.
He kept pace with it from the rooftops the rest of the way — but keeping pace was all he could do.
He’d catch up to it easily enough if it stopped at a light.
He had no idea what he’d actually do once he had.
Grab the back doors and hope for the best?
Land on the roof and hope it didn’t just crash with the girl still inside?
Every option he ran through ended badly for someone.
So he didn’t try.
He just followed, matching its turns from above, waiting for it to lead him somewhere he could actually do something useful.
It slowed near the docks and turned down a narrow road between old shipping containers, pulling into a warehouse whose metal door was already grinding open to let it in.
Peter dropped onto the roof just as the door rolled shut behind it.
He crept across the corrugated metal until he found a broken skylight, just wide enough to see through, and lowered himself down through the gap.
He climbed down the inside wall — hands and feet gripping easily, another thing that didn’t feel like it should be possible — and crouched behind a support beam overlooking the warehouse floor.
What he saw made him sick.
At least six armed men were scattered around the space, rifles slung over their shoulders like this was just another night at work.
The girl from the alley was being dragged toward a row of shipping containers along the back wall.
Through the half-open door of one container, Peter could see more people inside — hands tied, huddled together, terrified.
Human trafficking.
The thought hit him like a punch.
One of the men shoved the girl toward the open container, and Peter’s whole body tensed to move.
Then he stopped himself.
No mask.
If he went down there like this — just his own face — every one of those men would see exactly who he was.
And if even one of them got away, which guys like this usually did, that face would end up on a file somewhere.
Connected to him.
Connected to May.
He hesitated on the beam, torn between what was happening below and what he didn’t have.
Then something happened that he had no way to explain.
It started at his wrists — a strange warmth, easy to miss at first.
Then it spread up his arms, fast, like ink spreading through water, dark and glossy in the dim light.
Peter froze, staring at his own hands as it climbed higher, over his shoulders, up his neck.
What is this — what’s happening— He touched his own face and felt something covering it, warm and seamless, not like fabric at all.
He caught his reflection in a piece of broken glass on the floor below and nearly stopped breathing.
Two large white eyes stared back at him from a face of solid black.
No mouth.
No nose.
Nothing that looked like him at all.
I didn’t do this.
I don’t know how I did this.
His heart was pounding, his breathing loud in his own ears, which somehow sounded different now too — sharper, but muffled at the same time.
He pressed a hand against the beam to steady himself.
Below, one of the men laughed at something, and the girl let out a muffled sob that cut straight through Peter’s panic.
Figure it out later, he told himself.
They need help right now.
He looked down — at the men, at the girl, at the people huddled in that container with nobody else coming for them tonight.
Whatever had just happened to him could wait.
Peter dropped from the beam into the shadows.
He’d already called 911 from the rooftop before climbing down, whispering the address as best he could figure it, telling them armed men, a warehouse, people being held against their will.
They’d come.
But there was no telling how long that would take, and no guarantee these people would still be safe when they got here.
He decided he had to act now.
He knew he was fast.
He knew he was strong, stronger than he still fully understood.
But he wasn’t skilled — not enough to walk out into the open and take on six armed men without something going wrong, without one of them getting a shot off before he could stop it.
Even with everything his body could apparently do now, that math didn’t work in his favor.
So he decided not to play it that way at all.
He scanned the warehouse from the shadows.
There were only a few light fixtures scattered along the ceiling, throwing weak, uneven pools of light across the floor.
If he took those out, the whole place would go dark.
It wasn’t just about staying hidden, either.
He’d noticed something in that terrifying moment in front of the broken glass — his new eyes weren’t just for show.
In the dim edges of the warehouse, shapes had started standing out to him that shouldn’t have been visible at all — warm outlines glowing faintly against the cooler dark, like every person in the room was giving off their own soft light.
He could see the whole layout now, every man, every angle, even in near-total blackness.
They won’t be able to see anything.
I will.
Peter moved along the wall, quiet, until he found the fuse box mounted near a side door.
He pried it open and worked fast, disconnecting what he needed to without any problem.
The lights died.
“What the hell—” one of the men below shouted, his voice sharp with confusion.
“Who cut the power?!” “Check it!
Go check the box, now!” One man peeled off from the group, rifle raised, moving cautiously toward the side wall where the fuse box sat — right into the dark where Peter was already waiting.
Peter moved before the man even reached it.
He came up fast and silent behind him, one hand clamping hard over his mouth before he could make a sound, the other locking around his throat.
The man thrashed, dropping his rifle, clawing uselessly at Peter’s arm.
Go to sleep.
Go to sleep, Peter repeated in his head, tightening his grip carefully, terrified of his own strength.
Don’t break his neck.
Don’t break his neck.
The man’s struggling slowed, then stopped entirely, and Peter lowered him to the ground as gently as he could manage, breathing hard.
Okay.
That worked.
He looked out across the dark warehouse floor, at the five remaining heat signatures still moving, still shouting at each other in confusion, still armed.
“Now for the rest of you,” Peter whispered