The wind roared, but the thrum was silent.

  Frankie’s wings caught the updraft. Weighed down by the massive, broken form of the Queen clutched in her talons. The muscles of her back—thick, black cords of supernatural tissue—burned.

  She rose from the mudflats. Rising past the concrete pilings, past the rusted girders, back toward the storm.

  Above her, the bridge deck was a chaotic strobe of lightning and gunfire.

  The National Guard jets were screaming in now. Low. The heat of their afterburners baked the air; the terrifying whistle of targeting systems locking on.

  They were targeting the bridge. They were targeting the biomass.

  Frankie didn’t care.

  She crested the railing. She hovered for a split second, a black shape against the gray sky.

  Then, she slammed Daria down.

  She drove the Queen’s body into the asphalt directly in front of Tasia’s convertible. The impact cracked the road surface. Daria bounced, her white chitin armor shattered, blue ichor leaking from the cracks.

  Frankie landed on top of her.

  She pinned the Queen’s chest with one clawed foot. She flared her wings, shielding the body from the rain.

  The blue sensor in her head flickered weakly. Her chest heaved.

  You cannot… Daria’s voice leaked into Frankie’s head. It was faint now. Static. You are just one.

  “You’re a bug,” Frankie growled.

  She raised a fist to smash the sensor again.

  Hitting her won’t work. She is regenerating.

  The white armor knitting together. The blue light in the sensor was brightening, drawing power from the atmosphere, from the drones, from the fear. The hive was preparing to reboot in a mental blast.

  Frankie needed a conductor.

  Twenty yards away, Damon stood near the toll booth. Battered and soaked, he held the aluminum bat.

  His eyes locked on hers, tracking her hesitation.

  “Frankie!” he screamed over the wind.

  He reached into his pocket.

  He pulled out Ted’s silver serving spoon, sharpened to a needle point on both ends.

  He stepped out from cover.

  He wound up like a pitcher on a mound.

  “CATCH!”

  He threw it.

  The silver object spun through the rain, end over end, catching the lightning.

  Time slowed. The spoon’s rotation became sluggish, revealing the tarnish on the handle.

  She snatched it out of the air.

  The silver burned her palm instantly. Her black fur smoked. Reversing her grip and striking despite the smoke shows she ignored the pain.

  Below her, the Queen’s blue sensor flared blindingly bright. She opened her needle-filled mouth to shriek.

  “Grounding,” Frankie whispered.

  She reversed her grip on the spoon.

  She drove it down.

  She punched the silver stake through the center of Daria’s chest, shattering the white armor plates, burying the metal deep into the pulsating blue core.

  SH-CHUNK.

  Time stopped.

  For one second, there was no sound.

  Then, the reaction hit.

  A supernova.

  The silver spoon bottlenecked the massive bio-electric charge. With nowhere to transmit, the energy looped back on itself.

  Daria arched her back. Her mouth opened so wide her jaw snapped.

  A column of blinding blue light erupted from her chest. It shot straight up into the sky, piercing the clouds, turning the night into day.

  Blistering heat rolled off the beam.

  Frankie threw herself backward, shielding her eyes with her wings.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  SCREEEEEEEEE—

  The scream was severed.

  Daria shattered.

  There was no sludge. No body left behind. The electrical overload disintegrated her instantly. She turned into a cloud of blue dust and ozone, swept away by the wind.

  The column of light vanished.

  Frankie lay on the asphalt, her fur singed, panting.

  Silence.

  Then, a cascade of soft thuds.

  Frankie pushed herself up.

  Down the length of the bridge, the army of the dead—hundreds of them—had stopped moving.

  They stood perfectly still, their arms raised, their mouths open. The blue light in their eyes flickered.

  Then, it went out.

  Thump.

  The drone nearest to Frankie—the mechanic she had thrown earlier—collapsed.

  Before hitting the ground, his form fell apart. The gray resin, the stolen skin, the muscle—it all turned to dry, gray powder.

  He hit the asphalt and exploded into dust.

  Then, the next one. And the next.

  A wave of disintegration rolled down the bridge.

  Hundreds of bodies collapsed. The sound was like heavy rain on dry leaves.

  The mailman. The librarian. The teachers. The neighbors.

  They fell. They crumbled. They blew away.

  Within ten seconds, the bridge was empty.

  Just a long stretch of wet asphalt covered in piles of gray ash, washing away into the gutters with the rain.

  Frankie stood up.

  She retracted her wings. The pain of the shift was dull, distant.

  In the silver convertible, Tasia Moreno was crouching in the driver’s seat, peering over the dashboard. Her phone was still in her hand, recording.

  Tasia looked at the empty bridge. She looked at the piles of dust.

  Then she looked at Frankie.

  Frankie stood in her Werebat form—seven feet tall, covered in black fur, claws dripping with blue slime.

  Tasia lowered the phone.

  She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry.

  She nodded.

  It was a small, terrified, trembling nod.

  Frankie turned away.

  The job was done. The signal was dead.

  The adrenaline faded, and with it, the biomass that sustained the combat form.

  Frankie fell to her knees.

  Pain. Bones grinding on bones. Her skin shrunk. The black fur receded, soaking back into her pores. The wings dissolved into mist.

  She collapsed mid-step.

  Frankie gritted her teeth, refusing to make a sound.

  She shrunk. Smaller. Smaller.

  Until she was just a shivering, naked girl on the wet road. Her skin was marble-white again, the silver scar on her chest glowing faintly in the gloom.

  She curled into a ball, the cold of the rain finally registering on her nerves.

  Footsteps. Running.

  “Frankie!”

  Warmth.

  Someone threw a heavy wool coat over her shoulders. Strong arms wrapped around her.

  Leilani.

  “I’ve got you,” Leilani sobbed. “I’ve got you, baby.”

  Frankie leaned into the warmth. Heat rolled off her mother.

  “Is she dead?” Frankie asked. Her voice was small. Human.

  “She’s dust,” Leilani said. “You did it.”

  Damon dropped to his knees beside them. He touched Frankie’s face, his hands shaking.

  “You came back,” he whispered. “You came back down.”

  Frankie looked at him. Love shone in his eyes.

  She knew she should feel it.

  She reached out and touched his cheek. Her fingers were icy.

  “Target eliminated,” she whispered.

  Damon flinched slightly at the tone, but he leaned into her touch.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Target eliminated.”

  A roar overhead.

  The jets.

  They banked low over the bridge. They didn’t drop bombs. With the heat signature gone, they swept the deck with searchlights for a recon pass.

  Searchlights swept the deck.

  “We have to go,” Dee Dee said, running up to them. She was shielding her tablet from the rain. “The military is moving in. Ground units are breaching the barricade. If they find us…”

  “They’ll dissect us,” Ted finished, appearing from behind a toll booth. He looked at the piles of ash. “Or just shoot us. I vote we leave. Now.”

  Leilani helped Frankie stand. She wrapped the coat tighter around her daughter.

  “The van,” Leilani said.

  They moved fast.

  They passed Tasia’s car.

  Tasia was staring at them. She looked at Frankie—the pale, scarred girl huddled in the coat.

  “Tasia,” Damon said, stopping. “Come with us.”

  Tasia shook her head. She gripped the steering wheel.

  “My dad is coming,” she whispered. “He’s… he’s in the Guard. He’s coming.”

  Her gaze shifted to Frankie.

  “I filmed it,” Tasia said. Her voice was steady, surprisingly strong. “I filmed everything. The white thing. The dust. You.”

  Frankie stopped. She looked at the girl in the pink coat.

  “Delete it,” Leilani warned.

  “No,” Tasia said. “I’m going to upload it. The world needs to know.”

  She looked at Frankie.

  “I saw what you did.”

  Frankie studied her. Her logic center calculated the risk: Viral footage. Exposure. Threat.

  But Tasia’s eyes weren’t hostile anymore. They were awestruck.

  “Go,” Frankie said.

  Damon guided her toward the van.

  They piled in.

  Ted gunned the engine. He spun the van around, tires squealing on the wet asphalt.

  They sped back up the approach ramp, toward the tree line, just as the first Humvees smashed through the barricade on the far side of the bridge.

  Soldiers poured out, rifles raised, sweeping the bridge.

  They found Tasia Moreno sitting in her ruined convertible, surrounded by wet ash.

  They found no monsters.

  And as the van disappeared into the logging roads of the Pine Barrens, the bridge faded into the darkness.

  She touched the silver scar on her chest.

  It was cold.

  “We’re alive,” Damon whispered, squeezing her hand.

  Frankie looked at him. She forced the corners of her mouth up. It felt like pulling a lever.

  “Alive. Yeah.”

  Outside the window, passing trees blurred. The fog was lifting. The air was clearing.

  But the silence in her head—the dead zone—remained.

  And she knew, with the cold certainty of a machine, that while the war was over, the girl who had started it was gone.