I push down, putting all my weight on the staircase so it swings down from the fire escape and into Ember’s waiting arms. She led me through the streets and alleys of Seattle before randomly stopping at this building and asking me to help her get to the roof. I was perfectly happy to oblige.

As she clambers up the stairs, the rusted metal of the structure starts to creak and groan under even her slight weight. We’re a little further north, which means the buildings are a little worse for wear. I move up ahead of her, the metal not even wincing at my weight. I don’t think I actually weigh a lot less than her – I can hit someone pretty hard with a runup – so maybe something about my powers or my body muffles my movements, lightening my touch.

Once I’m on the roof, the city opens up in front of me. In one direction, there’s the black expanse of the north, where sparse buildings and streetlights slowly give way to water-damaged streets long since shuttered up and abandoned. Those shuffling amalgams of flesh and machinery came from the north. In the distance, a patch of glowing white light emerges from the sparse spots of yellowy-orange, some immense building holding firm among the dead city.

To the south, the living city stretches up to the heavens. The distant towers, glittering spires rising up from canyons permanently glowing an incandescent haze. From this distant perch, it looks like a city that never sleeps; where darkness never touches the roads and even the alleyways are well lit.

Is it wrong that the thought of those brilliant streets scares me more than the dark expanse of the north?

At long last, Ember emerges from the fire escape. Granted, she can’t skip up the shadows like I can, but I need to take my victories where I can find them. She doesn’t seem affected by losing our race – probably because I never told her we were racing – instead unzipping her concealing raincoat and tossing it aside.

The transformation is like night and day. With the raincoat on and her masked face hidden beneath the shadows of the hood, she almost blended into the environment. There are a lot of people out there who walk like they don’t want the world to notice them, especially in this part of the city.

But take the coat off and she suddenly goes from someone who wants to hide to someone who wants to be seen.

The cut of her costume is one thing, drawing the eye of at least half the population, but it’s also in the colour. Most of her costume is charcoal-grey, almost black, but the orange lines twisting up her arms and legs, curling around her torso, draw the eye in even more. It’s in how she carries herself, too. Proud and upright, like nothing in the world can root her from her spot.

Ember sits down on a boxy piece of long-abandoned machinery, one leg resting on the other as she stares out at the distant city.

“You can’t beat that view.”

She chuckles to herself,

“When people think of Capes, this is probably what they picture. Lone figures standing on a rooftop at night, with a cityscape stretched out in front of them. Of course, this high that’s all you can really see. You can’t see the streets unless you’re leaning right over the edge. You can’t move anywhere, either, not unless you’ve got a power that lets you leap forty feet at a time. But still, there’s something about spandex on rooftops that holds people’s imagination.”

I cock my head to one side and look up at her, curiously.

“Sorry.” She smiles down at me. “The problem with one-sided conversations is that there’s nobody to stop me from going off on tangents.”

She stands up, stretching aches out of her arms and looking around at the adjacent rooftops.

“Anyway, I brought you up here because it’s quiet. Alleyways are good, but there’s always somebody wandering around down there: gangbangers, vagrants, junkies or just couples looking for a quiet place to screw. But who in their right mind would hang out on the roof of a derelict shithole like this?”

She leans over the edge, looking down at the near pitch-black alleyway at the base of the fire escape like she’s making sure we won’t be disturbed. Then, gracefully, she spins on her heels and grins at me.

“By now I’ve got a pretty good picture of what you can do. It’s more than just merging with darkness, isn’t it? You can jump out of the darkness, fast enough to catch a notebook in mid-air. I’d bet good money you can go fast enough to leap between buildings.”

I nod, more than a little proud, and slip into the shadowed rooftop. I hurl myself along its length then, right before the lip of the roof, leap out of the shadows as my momentum carries me across the alleyway and onto the sloped roof of the building opposite. At the sound of applause, I turn back to Ember and duck my head in a brief bow, before dipping into the shadows again and leaping back across the gap to land right at her feet.

“Very impressive. You’d make a great spy, you know. No wonder you were so hard to track down.”

She sits back down on the rusted box of machinery, taking on a slightly worrying look.

“Tell me… when you’re merged with the shadows, do you feel differently? Think differently?”

I pause for a moment, thoughts moving through my head like lightning. I can’t help but think of the night I found Mike after he-

I ran away because I was filled with terror, with guilt and regret. It was all I could think about, all I could imagine, until I slipped into the shadows and all those fears were swept away with a kind of cold but calm serenity. A clarity of thought.

I nod, causing a sad expression to pass briefly across Ember’s face.

“I thought so. The PRT have a way of classifying powers. It’s not really perfect. It was designed to provide some baseline grunt with an idea of the sort of threat they’re going up against – which says a whole fucking lot about their priorities, if you ask me – but it’s good enough for government work.”

She shakes her head, realising she’s gone off on another tangent.

“You’re what they’d call a Stranger and a Mover, because you’re hard to find and very fast, but you’re also a Breaker. It means you shift your body into a different state – your shadows. The thing about Breakers is that they tend to think differently when they’re shifted. That altered state fucks with their head.”

She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees for a moment before letting out a breath and standing up.

“I’m a Breaker too. We’re probably going to have to fight alongside each other at some point, so you need to understand my powers as well. Thing is, my altered state fucks with my head something fierce.”

Instinctively, I start to back away from her as all the colour seems to drain from her costume and her face, the surfaces of skin and fabric shifting instantly, making it impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. In an instant, she’s gone from looking perfectly normal to resembling a statue formed of compacted ash, her hair flowing and trailing off at the tips into a fine grey powder.

Suddenly, less than a second after the first change, cracks of glowing fire start to form on the surface as she takes a step forwards, a spiderweb of orange lines that creeps up and down her body. She opens her eyes, ashen eyelids peeling back from burning pits of orange light. Her mouth doesn’t move – I don’t think it can.

Her burning gaze settles on me as she holds out an arm to one side. Starting at her elbow and travelling down to her fingertips, the glowing cracks of her arm spread and grow even brighter, until her whole arm is burning with a bright orange glow. Then, her hand explodes in a flash of bright light as a flaming projectile of clumped ash soars across to the next building. For a moment, she’s left there with just a stump of an arm until ash creeps down from her elbow to reform the limb.

I simply watch, terrified and transfixed in equal measure, as the glowing lines start to dim, occasionally flaring back up as Ember seems to struggle to get them under control. Once they’re entirely gone, her ashen form disappears and reshapes itself until she’s standing in front of me looking just the same as she did before the transformation.

Some of my terror must have crept into my face, because she lets out a long, drawn-out, sigh.

“Pretty scary, right?”

I nod. She’s the third Parahuman I’ve ever seen use their power, after the child in the store and the armoured giant who fought alongside the soldiers. Mike’s fear of them – of me, when we first met – makes a lot more sense now.

“It’s useful, though. Can’t be denied. Bullets pass straight through me when I’m shifted, and the more of my body I burn the stronger those blasts get. The problem is that it makes me think differently. I get angry, but in a very cold way. It makes me hard to reason with, makes it hard to let go of that power. I wouldn’t hurt you or anything – it’s not that extreme – but be careful, okay?”

I nod, firmly. Frankly, I’m glad to have an excuse to keep back when she’s like that.

Once she’s seen my acknowledgement, Ember walks over to her raincoat and slips it back on, putting the hood up and becoming just another anonymous figure in a city full of them.

“So now you understand the job and you understand me, but I’m not too sure you understand Seattle and I’d much rather show you than tell you,” she says, gesturing at the deep shadows of her hood.

I take her meaning immediately, springing at her face with a running jump and merging with the shadows. She takes a half step back in shock before controlling her reaction and letting out a low chuckle, shaking her head in weary resignation.

She doesn’t talk as she descends down the fire escape and into the alley, heading off in a seemingly random direction. I never really paid attention to where I was going when I went out at night, only focusing on making sure I always knew how to get back. The city was simply too big for me to take in, too massive for me to even begin to understand. But Ember’s been here for years, and she clearly knows the city, or just this part of it, like the back of her hand.

She wanders down back-alleys and side streets, through the overgrown gardens of abandoned homes and into the better-lit districts where the city is still clinging to life. These streets have more people on them, huddled figures out on business or drunken gangs of friends staggering down the street with beer cans and bottles clutched in their unsteady grip, murky brown liquid occasionally sloshing out to stain the pavement.

Ember moves through the sparse streets as just another anonymous figure, huddled in on herself both to make others dismiss her and to deepen the shadows of her hood, hiding her masked face and letting me see out of the darkness. Occasionally, the headlights of a passing car would play across the hood and illuminate the bottom half of her face, but it never comes close to illuminating her mask.

I get the feeling Ember has a lot of experience sneaking around like this.

Abruptly, she crosses the street, hurrying a little to get ahead of a slow-moving van before resuming her sedate pace once she’s on the opposite pavement. I’m confused, peering out of her hood to try and get an idea of what I just saw. There’s a woman in front of us who crossed the street at the same time, her arms hugged close against her chest as her too-small dress does nothing to keep out the chill, but I don’t see why Ember would cross the street for her.

Then I spot them, sitting on the stairs of a brick building on the other side of the road. Five men, passing three lit cigarettes between them. They’re looking out at the street with predatory disinterest, glaring at anyone who gets close to their building. Each of them is wearing strips of cloth, bandannas or armbands in the same light-blue colour I’ve seen on a lot of the gangs around here, and it’s clear they’re there to guard the building.

“Do you know a lot about the gangs around here?” Ember whispers, quiet enough that only I can hear it. I form a hand over her shoulder and tap it twice; I stole from people who might be in gangs, and Mike liked to ramble about them every now and then, but I can’t say I ever paid attention to who they were.

“Okay,” Ember keeps whispering, “so there are a lot of gangs in this city, like any major city, but there are only a few big ones. Most of them are under Elite control, and any big gangs that aren’t under our control get broken up pretty quick. The exception to that rule is the Triad.”

She falls silent as a man shuffles past us, a bag of late-night grocery shopping dangling from his hand.

“See, the thing about the Triad is that they used to be our allies. They got invited to Seattle after Leviathan because they had contacts in some Pacific smuggling syndicates and they were looking for a place to put down roots. They expanded, brought a whole bunch of local gangs under their control, and helped us drive out the Bratva.”

A car passes us, its headlights invasively bright, causing Ember to duck her head to keep her mask hidden. I catch a brief glimpse of four men inside, as well as what I think might be the barrel of a rifle.

“Things were pretty great. They’d been moving closer and closer to us over the years, and there was talk of bringing them properly into the Elite. Then, about three months back, they abruptly cut off all contact and start aggressively taking territory. Now a lot of the smaller gangs are signing on with them, looking for a chance to topple our hold on the city. It’s a total clusterfuck.”

Ember kicks a can out into the road, venting her frustrations before shrinking back into her false meekness.

“You ask me what the number one threat to the city is, and I’d say it’s those Triad fucks. They’re screwing up the status quo, bringing down heat that we really don’t need, and they fucking good at it. They’ve killed or crippled four of our Parahumans, and snatched away three others. One of them was a defector, but the other two just disappeared.”

I can’t help but feel a little uneasy. I’ve spent the day being dragged from stronghold to stronghold, seeing all the men the Elite can put on the streets and all the incredible technology they have at their disposal. I joined the Elite because I wanted to feel safe – and I do – but I don’t like that there’s a force in this city that can threaten them.

I’ve already lost two lives: the life I can’t remember, and the miserable life I made with Mike in that abandoned factory. I don’t know if I could survive losing another.

I don’t look out much as Ember walks through Triad territory, instead choosing to hide myself away in the shadows of her raincoat, slipping down onto the small of her back. I stay like that, nestled in the darkness, until I feel her stride picking up a little. I shift back up to the shadows of her hood, peering out at a much more normal-looking neighbourhood.

The streets here are a mix of newer-looking blocks of apartments, between five and eight stories tall, and older suburban homes that look like they’re clinging on for dear life. In places, rows of partially-demolished houses wait surrounded by yellow tractors and construction equipment.

“You know, ten years ago all this was suburbs, as far as the eye could see,” Ember pipes up. “Then everything north of Seattle gets waterlogged to shit and they start tearing down the white picket fences to make space for new apartments. Now there’re running battles between the last middle-class holdouts and the property developers trying to get rich off rent.”

The dynamics here are a little different. In the Triad’s neighbourhood, Ember was just one of the crowd, crossing the street to avoid the gangs. Here, people are crossing the street to avoid her, or at least giving her plenty of space. It’s not raining, so someone walking down the street with their hood up is a little suspicious in a neighbourhood where people don’t need to keep their head down.

It has me worried that someone will get angry or scared at us being here. I doubt the Triad have people out here, but there’s also those government Capes, whatever they were called. If someone shouts for help, one of them might answer.

But nobody comes. It’s late at night, the streets are quiet, and the few people who are out have better things to do than worry about one slightly suspicious person. Ember walks through the city without issue, with me watching covertly through the shadows, staring intently at everyone and everything we pass.

And then, we turn a corner and suddenly there’s an immense wall at the end of the road, part of the great barrier that rings the city. It stretches high above me, as tall as a four-story building. A promenade has been built atop it, with shuttered shops and restaurants in the process of closing up for the night. Ember walks towards it, ignoring the stairs up to the promenade in favour of a small, well-lit tunnel that cuts through the wall itself, with a heavy steel door suspended over the entrance.

The tunnel is brighter than any of the streets around it, so bright I have to duck back into the depths of Ember’s coat to avoid being forced out. Luckily it doesn’t last long, and the moment Ember steps out of the tunnel I’m back in her hood, looking out eagerly at the water that surrounds the city.

The tunnel opens up onto a lattice of marinas and jetties, each of them filled with gleaming white boats in all shapes and sizes. Behind the well-lit marina, the water is visible only as a jet-black expanse interspersed with glowing green and red buoys, while the faint glow of sparse streets and houses can be seen on the opposite bank.

“It’s quite a sight,” Ember says, her mouth curling up into a smile, and I can’t help but agree.