When Zoe activated her new shadow shell ability, a kind of darkness enveloped her. Her skin, hair, eyes, and even her clothes all became like shadow versions of themselves, any texture being replaced with a faint turtleshell pattern.

Dexter reached out and touched the shadowy skin of her bare arm. “It’s hard.”

“That’s what happens when you touch it.”

Dexter frowned. “Is that a joke, or are you being serious?”

“Both. I felt it harden as you touched it.” She bent her arm at the elbow several times. “It’s softer now. Touch it again.”

Dexter did. It felt not quite like a turtle’s shell under his fingertips, but reminiscent of that. He wondered if he’d ever be able to make his forge ability create something like this, or if it was somehow fundamentally different.

Zoe eyed Je-won’s sword. “You up for a test?”

“That doesn’t seem like a good idea,” Je-won replied.

“Never know if we don’t try.”

Je-won’s sword hadn’t easily cut through Zoe’s shadow shell, but cut through it, it had.

She had a bandage around her arm now, waiting for the cooldown on her heal to expire so she could use it again on herself.

“Was that your plan all along?” Je-won asked, as, while Zoe watched, he and Dexter loaded supplies into Je-won’s vehicle for the trip to NYC to heal Zoe’s parents.

“I’m a strategic genius.” She gave a villainous laugh, then cut off abruptly. “But no. That hurt. It still hurts.”

“At least you know your limits now,” Je-won said.

“Yeah, sure. Magical summoned laser sword, no check.”

“It’s still a great ability,” Dexter reassured her. “Kitchen knife didn’t cut through it. And it has a short cooldown.”

“And a short duration,” Zoe grumbled.

This was true, it only lasted for a little under twenty seconds. But she could use it again soon after, so it wasn’t so bad. Nothing like her heal.

“Sure you want to leave now?” Je-won asked Zoe as he and Dexter finished loading up the car.

“Might as well,” Zoe answered. “It’s going to take a while to get there.”

Despite having only slept for less than five hours, neither she nor Dexter thought they could get back to sleep any time soon. And Zoe wanted to get to the hospital to heal her parents as soon as possible.

Nara and the others were still sleeping, and Dexter knew they’d be upset they hadn’t woken them to say goodbye. But it was easier this way. Nara would probably insist on coming with them, and this way they could avoid that argument.

Je-won snapped his fingers as he remembered something. “Wait here.” He jogged into the house and came out a minute later with a familiar item.

Zoe laughed from the passenger seat.

Je-won opened the rear door and put the item inside.

Dexter, who was now in the driver’s seat, looked over his shoulder at the pizza peel Je-won had just deposited. “Nara won’t miss it?”

Je-won chuckled. “She can enchant anything she wants. You have your ability to summon a weapon, but Zoe doesn’t.”

“I am not getting on the front lines,” Zoe stated.

“Doesn’t hurt to have backup.” He patted his car like it was a cherished horse, taking it in back to front. It had some minor dings and dents from what it had been through recently, but still ran perfectly. “Be safe. Get back as soon as possible.”

Dexter nodded. “We will. To both.”

Je-won looked torn. “I’d go with you, but…” He turned to look back at his home.

“It’s fine,” Zoe said. “You have to protect your family.”

He looked back at them. “You’re my family too.”

Zoe smiled and patted Dexter on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. He’s got me to protect him.”

They didn’t make it far before Dexter remembered Leah, and his promise to her as he was on the phone with her drifting off to sleep.

“What are you doing?” Zoe asked as he slowed the car down. “You see something?”

“How do you feel about making a detour?”

“That depends on where, and why. I told you to use the bathroom before we left.”

He chuckled. “It’s not that.” He gave her a quick version of what happened to Leah, and her injury.

“You two kissed? Wow, that sounds like more than asking her out.”

“That’s the part you’re focusing on?”

“Absolutely.”

He sighed. “So, will you?”

“Heal my best friend? No Dex, of course not. Why would I let you make the ten-minute detour to do that?”

Dexter turned the car around, and headed in the direction of the hospital.

While the world they drove through didn’t look quite like a post-apocalyptic nightmare, it was clear things weren’t going well for Earth’s inhabitants.

The sun had yet to show itself on the horizon, and the very early morning—or very late night, depending on perspective—was lit only by moonlight through an overcast sky. The roads they traveled were silent and dead, their car the only source of sound and life. If any monsters still roamed the land from the most recent attack, having failed to be vanquished by their targets, they did nothing to make themselves known.

They passed abandoned cars, both undamaged and crashed; boarded-up gas stations with signs proclaiming they were out of fuel; damaged buildings, even ones on fire.

They took all this in, but kept driving, carefully navigating the occasionally clogged roads—which turned what should have been a ten-minute drive into something much longer—until they came upon something they couldn’t simply pass by.

It was on an overpass, a highway crossing beneath it. The bridge was nearly completely blocked by abandoned or broken-down cars, far more in one place than they had seen thus far. Only a narrow corridor over the bridge remained, just barely wide enough for Je-won’s car to pass through.

But this wasn’t what had attracted their attention.

“Is that…” Zoe said, as Dexter slowed the car to a stop several feet back from the object of their focus, lying half-on half-off the bridge’s sidewalk, the car’s headlights pointed at a forty-five-degree angle to it due to the cars blocking the way, only incompletely illuminating it.

“A body,” Dexter said, putting the vehicle in park.

“What are you doing?”

“He might be alive still.”

Zoe gave him a skeptical look.

“Stay here if you want. I have to be sure.” Though, with the headlights even partly on the body as they were, he was pretty sure the man was dead.

Still, he got out and shut the door, stood there a moment, looking around for any signs of danger.

The dark spring morning was quiet, and uncharacteristically temperate, with a warm, comforting breeze that felt out of place in this darkness, in this new world, with mechanical death all around him, and a human corpse a few feet away.

He hesitantly approached the body.

It was a man perhaps in his early forties, though it was hard to say for sure without being able to fully see his face. He was on his side, his back facing Dexter. He wore jeans and no shirt. A tattoo covered his back, but even with the car’s headlights partly lighting the scene, Dexter couldn’t make out what it was of. Not simply because of a lack of light, but due to the extreme damage the body had endured.

Sound drew his attention away from the body and he turned to see Zoe getting out of the car.

“This is a terrible idea,” she said as she came to his side, clutching the pizza peel. “What if it’s a trap?”

Dexter studied the scene.

It did look like it might be. Could it be the system that orchestrated this? If so, it hadn’t sprung it this far.

In the future, he’d have to be more cautious.

But what was he going to do, leave someone on the side of the road to die?

No, he wouldn’t do that, no matter how bad things got. If he could save anyone, he would. He would never freeze again, never let some horror startle him into inaction. Never be controlled by fear.

“So?” she whispered. “He alive?”

Dexter shook his head.

Zoe stared at the corpse, a grimace on her face. Then she sighed. “This is going to make everything take longer.”

“We had to check.”

“Not that. This.” She switched the pizza peel to her other hand, held out the now free one, and twitched her finger.

“What are you doing? Healing it?”

“That’s the idea.”

“It’s off cooldown?”

“Looks like it. Here goes.” She tapped the air, at an interface he couldn’t see, which selected the body for healing.

Dexter didn’t expect it was possible to bring the dead back to life, but no harm in trying.

Unless it created a zombie.

To both of their surprise, the corpse’s grievous wounds began to close, the flesh on its back slowly unrending itself.

Zoe swore and stepped back at the unexpectedly effective effect. So did Dexter.

They watched in awe as the corpse knit itself back together.

After a minute, the changes stopped, or stopped being visible to the naked eye at least.

Even in the dim light, even through the tattoos that swirled the man’s back, Dexter could still see angry red marks where the wounds had been. But they had completely closed.

“Go check his pulse,” Zoe urged.

“You’re the one who healed him.”

“You’re the big strong warrior.”

Dexter sighed and cautiously approached the body. He actually was now seriously concerned it might be a zombie.

Still, he knelt beside it and reached out for the carotid artery. When he pressed his fingers to the neck, the flesh was tepid.

He kept them pressed like that, ready to leap back at a moment’s notice, waiting to feel the telltale throb of life.

“Nothing,” he said after several more moments, and was about to remove his fingers when suddenly a message appeared

Aaron Murphy Imprint received

“Whoa,” Dexter said, getting up and backing away. “I looted him.” He shuddered at the thought.

“What’d you get?” Zoe asked with a little too much excitement.

“An imprint.”

“He was a construct?”

Dexter shook his head. “Aaron Murphy, I guess.” He thought about going through the man’s pockets to find a wallet and ID, decided he didn’t need to know that badly.

“You should find out what it does.”

“Later. Who knows how long it will take to find. There’s not even a hint of what it does like there is with constructs.”

Zoe looked at the corpse. “At least we got something for wasting my cooldown. Weird though. Why did it heal him if he was dead?”

Dexter shrugged. “When I entered healer, it said something about restoring state. I remember it didn’t exactly sound like a normal heal.” He went through his message log until he found it. “‘The control of the state of life and matter focused on the act of restoring.’ Is that what yours said?”

Zoe swiped through her interface, then nodded. “Yeah, basically.”

“Well, maybe it can restore anything, but not necessarily bring it back to life.”

She nodded slowly, still staring at the rejuvenated corpse.

“How long’s the cooldown? An hour?”

“A little less.” She swore suddenly.

Dexter’s heart leapt into his throat and he looked around for danger. “What? What is it?”

She chuckled and shook her head. “You’re like a soldier ready for battle.”

“What did you see?” he asked, still scanning the area, the broken-down vehicles, the road beyond the bridge, cast mostly in darkness, the pale diffuse glow from the overcast sky doing more to create shadows which hid, than light which revealed.

“Nothing. I remembered my other ability. Detecting lifeforms. I should have used it. I need some sticky notes,” she grumbled.

Dexter grunted in annoyance, relaxing. But only slightly.

Zoe twitched one of her fingers, activating an ability. “Yep, he’s dead.” She got a faraway look.

Apparently the body was finally getting to her, now that they knew it was truly dead and there was no hope of resurrecting it.

Dexter was pretty sure it was the first time she’d seen a dead body. As far as he knew, all her grandparents were alive, so she wouldn’t have been to a funeral yet.

It may have been her first time. It wasn’t his. And so he knew the sense of dread he felt building wasn’t from the corpse of this man he didn’t know. Nor even the memory of what he’d seen yesterday in the auditorium. But something else entirely, though related.

A thought. An idea. An intuition about the cause of death, and the proximity it may still have to the scene of the crime.

“We should get out of here. Whoever did this is probably gone, but I don’t want to wait around to find out.”

Zoe snapped out of her daze and quickly glanced around. “‘Whoever’? You think a person did this?”

“Who knows. Maybe I’m wrong.”

“Or maybe you aren’t.” She focused her gaze on him. He didn’t like the serious expression she wore. “I sense something. With my ability. It’s faint though.”

It was Dexter’s stomach that lurched this time, like he was on the world’s most dangerous rollercoaster. He studied the abandoned cars, straining his ears to listen.

There. A strange noise. But not the creaking of something hiding in one of the abandoned vehicles or the scraping sound of something crawling out from where it hid under one of them.

The sound was almost like running water. But there was an ominous quality to it, a susurration, but not of voices.

“What is that?” Zoe asked, her own voice a mere whisper.

“You’re the one who sensed it,” he whispered back. “Can you tell where it’s coming from? Or how close it is?”

Zoe shook her head, but then she closed her eyes and turned in place, as though guided by a giant hand.

When she stopped, she was facing the railing of the bridge they stood on.

Dexter made his way to the barrier and looked down, expecting to find the road below flooded.

And it was, but not with water.

A moment later Zoe appeared beside him and saw the source of the strange sound. “That’s… not good.”

Dexter could only nod in agreement.

Below them, moving slowly up the highway, were fifty to perhaps one hundred constructs. He recognized some as types they’d fought before. There were even the octopus-like kind he’d seen in the video of the ship that had been attacked, and several of the kind he’d seen running down civilians in the footage of the city he’d assumed to be NYC.

With unspoken synchronicity, they both slowly moved away then turned and headed for their idling car that would take them far away from here.

Before they could make it back to this promise of escape however, something like a giant flake of ash landed in front of them, blocking their path. It sat there on the concrete, like a particularly dirty patch of snow

“Uh…” Zoe pointed at the object. “What is that?”

“Go around it,” Dexter urged, doing just that.

Before he’d made it more than a few steps, the warm breeze kicked the thing up onto its edge so that it obscured his view of the car.

And then, a message appeared in front of him, letting him know it wasn’t at all the wind which had moved it, but its own volition.

It was no mere flotsam of the apocalypse, but a construct.