For the second time in as many days, Pietro felt that he was dying.

  He squirmed in his bed, his normally spotless sheets sweat-ridden and rumpled around him. His vision flashed and pulsed with half-images and apparitions, alien colors and unfamiliar geometries. He was in his room, in the daytime. He was standing on the lip of a smoldering ruin. He was floating in the sky. He was in his room, at night. He was being tossed across the surface of water. He was being pummeled through the floors of a skyscraper. He was in his room, and Yelena was beside him, goggling down. He was watching the sun rise on a barren landscape.

  Time was slipping past him. His body registered its passage with its usual benchmarks: distantly he was aware of a growing thirst, a gnawing hunger. He stumbled from his bed for just long enough to relieve himself in his spinning bathroom, before, nauseated, being forced to crawl to return to his mattress.

  He was missing work. His phone buzzed and buzzed and buzzed again. At one point, in between landscape-shifting jumps in setting, he thought he remembered a man breaking in. Another of those dark-suited mask-wearing assailants. He’d had a gun.

  Yelena had materialized from the shadows -- God, had she been standing behind a curtain? -- and put her arm through the man’s torso from behind. He’d shrieked and Pietro had barely heard him.

  Yelena had dragged the man’s dying body to his bedside and propped his face before Pietro’s.

  “Do you recognize him?” she’d breathed, voice patient and reverent. “Does his face seem familiar?”

  It had taken Pietro three minutes of concentration to shake his head no. Satisfied at this answer, the woman had snapped the man’s neck, had consumed the thin trickle of energy that leaked out from him after.

  Then she was gone, and it was morning, then night, then morning, then day, then the same night. Room, stadium, field, crater, lake, room, river, hospital, bunker, basement, sky, room.

  Yelena reappeared again, slithered through a window in his bedroom, materializing out of the shadows outside. She had another man in her hands. He was larger, rougher around the edges, with sunken eyes and a scruffy neckbeard. He squirmed and yelped his terror as she manhandled him over to Pietro.

  “This man,” she asked. “Is he familiar?”

  Pietro nodded. He was. He couldn’t place from where, or when. The bunker? With the smiling businesswoman? Had that already happened? Was that a memory or a dream?

  Or had he just nodded to spare the man’s life?

  Yelena smiled tersely and slipped away, taking the man, blessedly unharmed, with her.

  She was at his bedside more and more now, feeding him broth and sips of water. Helping him to the bathroom. Keeping him alive. The whole time muttering her thin, papery sermons. Repetitious nonsense about gifts and death and destiny.

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  Eventually her gibberings coalesced into something more actionable.

  “Learn from what you’re seeing,” she urged. “Your Shroud, its power is eating you alive. But you already know how to use it. You’re telling it to yourself. You just need to find your own voice, see your own example. Listen. Learn.”

  He couldn’t possibly parse what she meant. His world was still fractured, still fracturing. A minute and an hour and an instant passed and she spoke again.

  “Search your new memories. Look for yourself, look for your first time using your Shroud. Remember what it will feel like to carry power within you, to take it from one extreme to another, to release and redirect it. Remember. Foresee.”

  She repeated this, and other sentences near-identical to this, for an indeterminate period of time as Pietro writhed and languished. Then, gradually, the brute force of all that repetition began to work.

  He began to see.

  He saw himself surrounded by a tight silhouette of shifting energy. He saw himself catching rays of light from the air, snatching electricity from wires, absorbing the force from impacts, stealing them for himself. He saw how the energy around him responded instantly, more than instantly, automatically, to his inclinations, how it knew to suck the power from a bullet and turn it into heat far faster than even the electrical impulses of firing nerves could ever have managed.

  He saw himself shielded from things that should have killed him. He saw himself exerting force that was superhuman. He saw himself, for the first time in his life, as a wielder of power, instead of its plaything.

  And he followed the thread of images back, from more to less power, watched himself learn it in reverse. He began to understand, intuitively and inexorably, how it all worked.

  And just before the epiphany that would have tied it all together, Yelena returned to his bedside with a can of gasoline, scavenged from who-knows-where. She began dousing his bedspread.

  “It is one thing to see and understand,” she whispered. “And another to know, to use. Show me that you know.”

  And with a snap of her fingers, his covers were aflame. Noxious vapors choked his breathing, smoke blinded him. He felt the heat began to lap at his still-feverish body, tried to squirm out of the blankets.

  Yelena placed her hand on his chest, sure and immovable as rock. The flames didn’t seem to hurt her.

  She had a field around herself, too. He saw now, he understood. The heat from the flame wicked harmlessly into the field before it could burn her flesh. She turned it into harmless light, stored that light in the medium of that shifting aura.

  The flames were eating into him, now, gnawing into the first layers of skin.

  They didn’t get any farther. After a brief bout of incredulous hesitation, he made the jump: he tried to emulate what he had been shown.

  He felt the heat, now, not in his body, not in the agony of a million cells being immolated, but in an abstract, directional sense. He knew the heat’s direction and presence the same way he knew “up” and “left.”

  He nudged that heat, where it brushed up against the border of his own power, and took it from the flame, stole it so he could keep it for himself.

  In seconds, the fire was extinguished. The leaping orange light and hysterical dancing shadows died, replaced again by the cool blue of dusk shining in through closed blinds. All that was left in the place of the inferno was a chemical afterodor, a ruined duvet, and a charred man swelling with new power.

  Yelena beamed down at him. “There he is. Happy birthday, Pietro.”