Her answer came a moment later when another blast of it shot out of the harbor like an erupting geyser and flew at her. The harbor’s surface below looked like a bank of cannons firing off, pelting frigid water at her. Soaked to the skin, Jamie dodged, even though the blasts were not particularly hard. They didn’t carry the power that, say, Scott Byerly’s attacks did, but they certainly had enough force that she didn’t want to be hit by them—
Just as she was steering her way around the Statue of Liberty, a gust of wind hit her with a fist-like impact. Jamie’s immediate gravity channels released—they were a series she was guiding like spokes off the Statue’s waist—and she dipped before she caught herself on one that was reversing gravity, anchored to the ground, keeping her aloft. She tumbled forward but not down, thankfully, and came around the statue’s waist to find—
The man was just hanging there where she’d anchored him, hands still burning, his back to her, waging his own war against the channels she’d set up against his feet to drag him to the earth. He was moving down, slowly, their drag eventually winning against him, though he seemed to be fighting them with his flight.
Well, let’s speed this up, Jamie thought. She reached out, intending to increase the drag—
The sound of something behind her made her use the statue to set up a repelling channel, and she vaulted away from the statue just as another series of water blasts peppered the surface. They chased her as she dodged them, dipping lower to the ground as she moved away from the most concentrated center of the gravity channel that was holding her aloft. She threw down another at the edge of Liberty Island to keep her from dropping as she moved out from the center of power of the one she’d used before. That was the problem with using gravity channels to keep aloft; once you got too far from them, they weakened in their ability to keep you rising. It was why she always had to use the Statue of Liberty as a guidance point for getting to and from Staten Island.
Jamie anchored to the torch and pulled herself back up in a blindingly fast ascent, riding the channel like she had a bungie cord attached to her belt. She flew up and around as the torch’s surface was blasted with water behind her.
Her mind was racing, the cold seeping in, slowing her reactions. Hypothermia had to be on the way, if it hadn’t settled in already. How would that affect her, as a metahuman, Jamie wondered? Surely she was more resistant to it than a normal person, but the way she felt—soaked, teeth chattering—didn’t seem that terribly different from what a normal person would be experiencing.
She could also feel herself moving just a hair slower.
This man, this meta—he was using fire powers, water powers, and it felt like air powers, in addition to the power of flight. Two of those, Sienna had before … well, Scotland. The others, Reed and Scott had possessed.
But—her mind wrangled with the thought—those powers didn’t come naturally together. They were—
Another blast of wind sent Jamie tumbling sideways. She landed another anchor on the statue’s torch, then started to secure another to the ground, trying to just maintain her altitude. It wouldn’t do to—
Water blasted her, finding her in the air and submerging her, causing Jamie to once again exhale mightily. Darkness squeezed in at the edges of her consciousness, and freezing liquid started to seep up her nose, forcing its way into her mouth.
She gagged, but it only got worse. It forced its way into her sinuses, chilling her as she choked, mightily, the freezing water pushing down her throat and into her belly, seeping cold through her entire being.
The gravity channels she’d laid down—dozens in the last few minutes—started to release, one by one, as the water invaded her, choked her—
Drowned her.
And Jamie Barton started to fall as the light of consciousness began to fade. The man with the flaming hands was in front of her for just a moment, and his face was frozen in brief satisfaction. There for but a flicker and then gone as he was gone, flying upward—
No.
She was tumbling down.
Jamie dropped, one of the channels steering her, almost by accident, to the edge of Liberty Island. It pulled, one of only two she had left, her brain reduced to mere instinct as she warred with the water that threatened to drown her.
She burst free of the liquid entrapping her, but it was within her now, water in her mouth, in her lungs, streaming out of her nose as she plunged toward the surface of the harbor—
Jamie Barton hit the water lightly, the second-to-last gravity channel she’d set up at the edge of the island cushioning her to a drop of a mere six feet; into the frigid harbor she plunged. The gravity tether’s job done, it released.
And left her with only one. Operating on the instinct, grabbing hold of it like a drowning woman—which she was—she activated it.
Darkness followed, and Jamie struggled. She broke the surface seconds later, heaving up water, heaving up liquid, heaving up …
Death.
She was choking, she couldn’t breathe, it was in her and everywhere, like a weight pushing all the air out of her. There was a steady tug, dragging her through the water, waist high, but her head was out, her chest was out of the freezing water, but it was in her, drowning her, and she jerked, furiously, trying to get it out of her, out of—
Voices in the distance. Shouts in the night.
She felt a thump, her shoulders against something. City lights glared, twinkled, in the distance, but Jamie’s mind was panicked, frenzied, only on one thing.
Breathe. Can’t—breathe!
“Hang on, hang on!” someone said, male. Someone grabbed her shoulders, dragging her up.
“Get her out, get her out!” Someone else seized her, pulling her up, up, from where her shoulders rested hard against—
The Staten Island Ferry.
They pulled her out, onto the deck, and water streamed out of Jamie’s mouth. Darkness was pressing in on all sides, panic at a fevered pitch. She was drowning, drowning on the ship’s deck, but—
Water streamed from her mouth, and she took her first hacking, wheezing cough.
“She’s got water in the lungs,” one of the people surrounding her said. His face pushed in, in the haze. “We’re going to get you to Richmond University Medical Center, Jamie. Don’t you worry. We got you, okay? You just relax. You’re—”
Home, Jamie thought, as the darkness swelled around her, swirling, and took her into it, there on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry.
10.
Sienna
I woke up with a hangover. The night was like black tar poured outside the window where I rested my head. No moon, no lights waited outside the glass as I blinked at my own reflection staring back at me, just ink-stained night and the refracted instrument panel of the SUV behind my shadowed face in the window.