The barefoot little boy looked completely out of place among the diamonds, tuxedos, and champagne flutes surrounding me at the Plaza’s Grand Ballroom.

The drainage culvert was three feet wide, half-submerged in freezing mountain runoff that numbed my shins within seconds. Carrying Clara on my back and holding Leo tightly against my chest, I navigated the subterranean darkness guided only by the faint glow of the pocket watch in Leo's grip.

Behind us, muffled explosions rattled the pipe. Julian’s men had breached the bunker. It wouldn't take them long to find the blast gate.

“They're behind us,” Clara gasped against my ear, her pulse fluttering erratically against my collarbone. “Charles... you have to put me down. The grade is too steep. You won't make the riverbank with both of us.”

“Quiet, Clara,” I grunted, my boots slipping on the slick algae before digging into the gravel beneath. “You spent twenty years keeping my brother alive. I can carry you for twenty minutes.”

Leo didn't make a sound, but his small hand reached out and pressed against Clara’s forearm.

“Leo, stop,” I ordered, noticing the faint violet glow beginning to trace the veins of his neck. “Save your strength!”

“She’s cold, Uncle Charles,” the boy wept softly. “She’s slipping into the dark.”

“If you use that fire now, you won't be able to run when we hit the surface! Do you understand me?”

The boy pulled his hand back, sobbing into my collar, but the brief contact had done its work; Clara’s breathing steadied slightly, the color returning to her lips like a miraculous transfusion. The child wasn't just a conduit of raw power; he was an engine of restorative vitality, giving away pieces of his own life force to keep the dying alive.

After five hundred yards of agonizing descent, the pipe terminated at a rusted iron grate hanging over the roaring rapids of the Ausable River.

The cold air hit us like a slap. Fifty feet below, black water churned over jagged boulders, swollen with autumnal rain.

“Mr. Whitmore!”

A silhouette dropped from the overhanging rocks above the pipe opening. It was Lev. His tactical vest was shredded along the left shoulder, blood soaking through his sleeve, but his rifle was still up, his eyes scanning the ridgeline.

“The transport?” I yelled over the roar of the water.

“The Sikorsky had to pull back—they brought portable surface-to-air launchers,” Lev shouted back, helping me ease Clara onto a narrow ledge of shale beneath the cliff face. “I have an armored Zodiac boat hidden half a mile downstream. If we reach it, the current will carry us past their perimeter into Lake Champlain within an hour.”

Suddenly, the beam of an aerial searchlight sliced through the mist.

High above the gorge, a second helicopter—an unmarked matte-black gunship—hovered into position. A sniper on the skid was already adjusting his laser sight toward our ledge.

The red dot found Clara’s chest.

Lev raised his rifle, but the distance and the rotor wash made a clean shot impossible.

“Get down!” Lev screamed, lunging to push us flat against the rock.

CRACK.

The high-caliber round didn't hit Clara.

It struck Lev directly in the side, bypassing his plate where the armor was torn. The impact spun the giant man sideways, sending him skidding toward the precipice. He caught the rock edge with his right hand, his legs dangling over the boiling foam fifty feet below.

A second round tore through the rock six inches from Leo’s head.

The child looked at Lev. Then he looked up at the circling gunship.

Something inside the boy snapped. The fear that had kept him huddled in my arms evaporated, replaced by an expression of cold, terrifying ancient fury.

“Leo, no!” I lunged to grab him.

The boy stood up on the slippery ledge, facing the blinding searchlight. He didn't hide. He didn't flinch. He extended both arms outward, his small chest expanding as he drew in a ragged, freezing breath.

The air around us dropped twenty degrees in a fraction of a second. The mist hanging over the river froze instantly into floating crystals of ice.

A pulse of violet-black energy detonated from the child’s body with the force of an artillery shell.

The electromagnetic shockwave roared upward through the gorge, ripping through the mist like a solid wall of glass. When the wave slammed into the gunship, the aircraft’s avionics died instantly. The turbine engine choked on ionized air, sputtering into silence. The searchlight burst in a shower of sparks.

The helicopter spun out of control, its tail rotor failing as it swung violently toward the granite wall of the canyon. With a deafening roar of crumpling aluminum and aviation fuel, the aircraft slammed into the opposing cliff face, sliding into the dark river below in a blazing streak of wreckage.

Leo collapsed instantly, blood pouring from both nostrils, his body going limp as a rag doll.

I caught him before he hit the stone, pulling him back against my chest as I scrambled to the edge of the rock to grab Lev’s wrist.

My newly healed muscles screamed under the strain of holding a two-hundred-and-forty-pound man with one arm while cradling a child with the other. But the fire inside my bones didn't break.