Yolanda cursed to herself.

She still hadn’t lost them. Arleigne’s dogs were good.

She’d been hounded since she’d let that shot go. Even with her sensory capabilities she couldn’t find an opening to escape from them. They might be idiots, but they were idiots with a lot of power, and they knew how to employ it for basic things like jumping around the city. She was tired and flagging, and they were closing for the kill. Had she got careless? She’d assumed that they’d break when she killed Arleigne, but they seemed to be hunting her down just fine. And she was not set up for endurance, strength, or speed.

She jumped up onto another platform, pounding past shocked pedestrians.

Suddenly one of the dogs jumped up in front of her. She threw herself sideways, lashing out with her field at max. She travelled in a long sideways arc. She pushed down again and righted herself just in time to twist her ankle on the walkway. She grimaced. She was done for.

The dogs were all around her now. They hung back warily, waiting, but then, once they were sure victory was hers, they bayed out in triumphant roars, and descended.

She looked up, her senses stretched to the max, and saw someone she hadn’t even noticed before jumping. That was odd. What was odder was how unconcerned the person seemed to be by the situation. He seemed to be looking down at her as if from an insurmountable height. His gaunt face was framed by lank hair, and his eyes looked… terrifying, Yolanda realized. She wasn’t used to being scared. Even awaiting death she felt pride in holding her head high, not breaking, not begging for mercy. But now… She felt something twinge in the deep animal part of her brain. He didn’t stand out very much– he was wearing a long black coat that hid the rest of his figure. But she somehow knew. She knew that this was the end. She’d made a terrible mistake. This man was more dangerous than Arleigne and her dogs, and she’d probably upset his little business. All these things crossed her mind the moment she saw him; and as the dogs descended, flying through the air, she caught a glimpse – as he turned and his coat flew out around him– of a black shape extending from where one would assume a right hand would go. And there was, she thought to herself as she accepted her death, something deeply wrong with that hand. Something horrific that defied reason.

And then she closed her eyes. And then, not feeling death, she opened them again, and when she did she saw the man was gone, and the bodies of the dogs fell, as did a vibrant shower of their blood, spraying like champagne from their decapitated necks and faces still caught in aggressive shouts. She felt the horrible wet substance flash against her face, and she jerked away in disgust. The bodies and their separated heads hit various wires and cables and walkways, setting people shrieking and running with the dull wet sounds of their impact. Several bodies twitched and jerked in their death throes. Yolanda waited, but nothing more happened. She scanned around her. Nothing. Then she felt a prickling on the back of her neck and flipped over quickly. The man stood there. She swallowed. Her scan had detected nothing where he stood. Not a thing. But it seemed that she had been wrong about his role in the chase. He still gave off the overwhelming impression –which her scan had confirmed in its inability to detect him– of being someone she could never approach. Something resolutely beyond her abilities and understanding. Power didn’t radiate from him so much as power would break itself at the horizon of whatever this man stood for. This invariably led to a question: what the hell was someone like him here for?

“Why did you kill her?” he asked.

“Ah… um, I…” she looked down at that black right hand. As if the man’s performance wasn’t enough to convince her of the absolute futility of whatever she might do, that black hand sat casually by his side like an open threat to everyone and everything in the world. It would be pointless to lie. “I couldn’t stand what she was doing.”

The man nodded, seeming to accept it without question.

“You ruined what I thought was a good plan: Follow some naive person to the inevitable donor’s blade, find out who it was and get them to tell me who they sell to. Kill them all at once.” He stated flatly, and then frowned “I wasn’t betting on interference”, So that was what it was, Yolanda thought. Maybe I will still die. Might as well go out swinging

“Why do you want to know who they sell to?” she asked

The man looked at her curiously “Someone did an operation once,” He raised the terrifying hand “They amputated an arm and replaced it with something that looked almost like an arm might look. So I’m going to amputate their arms to make sure it never happens again. Or their heads, to make doubly sure.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t seem to be very well equipped for this sort of undertaking.” The man gestured at the dogs “You could have left well enough alone” the man continued in his flat statements. Yolanda felt a twinge of frustration. His attitude was beginning to get to her.

“It wasn’t like I knew you were planning anything!” she shouted indignantly, “I’m sure you could have swooped in anyway, anytime you wanted. Whereas I just wanted to help that guy!”

“Help him…” the man said, seeming lost in thought, unfazed by her anger. Then he looked at Yolanda again. Yolanda felt as if she was being scanned herself, she felt his gaze touch the depths of her soul.

“Do you love me?” he said quietly.

“What?” Yolanda screeched. She almost couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was uncanny, not to mention thoroughly inappropriate, seeing someone who had just killed a dozen people in an instant start to talk about love. He had saved her, she guessed. But that seemed more out of curiosity than any desire on his part to do the right thing, or god forbid, impress her. This man, she was sure, didn’t have a beating heart.

“If you love me, help me,” he insisted in the same flat tone. She suddenly realised she’d misunderstood. This was the dream. He was repeating the words of that girl in her dream –no, the dream of every sensory field generator. What on earth did this man have to do with that? But this was a mystery that she needed to know about. This was something close to her. And no one knew a thing about it. Maybe… Just maybe this would be an answer. Not a night of her life passed without that girl in her mind. It was frightening. Was it more frightening than that black hand? She wasn’t sure, but putting her fear aside, she knew what she had to do.

“If you love me, why don’t you come back?” she replied. The man nodded. She knew what came next

“If you love me, why don’t you kill me?” she shivered as the man said the last words, their sad pleading nature utterly transformed by his strange deadly aura and flat intoning of every word.

The man raised his hands, and Yolanda looked on as he impossibly, bizarrely, reached into his black hand with his other perfectly normal hand, and from within its strange surface, withdrew a long thin blade.

“This is for you,” he said simply.

Yolanda thought she wanted to turn and run, but as he turned the knife in his hand and offered her the hilt, her flight suddenly changed… into fascination.

No, that wasn’t it. It was… a craving.

It was a craving she’d forgotten, one she’d thought she was long disabused of: the desire to be powerful. Because there was no mistaking what she was being offered. This blade was possessed of some fragment of the power of that horrible black hand. And it was beyond powerful.

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “You want to help,” he paused thoughtfully, “enough to kill.”

And then her hands closed around the hilt of the knife –before she could change her mind, before she could even think– and the man disappeared as suddenly as he’d appeared.