“This is not simple,” Kayla whispers. “This is not simple, but this is . . .”

For a second Charlotte thinks Kayla has literally lost her mind. How else do you explain it when a grown woman starts suddenly jumping up and down and clapping her hands together and cackling like a hyena? “Oh my God! Oh my God!” Kayla cries over and over again.

She looks like she just won the lottery. But even in the midst of her joy, she doesn’t allow anything less than five feet of space between herself and Charlotte. Now it’s clear why Kayla had such a hard time believing her story; she wanted it to be true so much she didn’t trust herself. She wanted it to be true the way we want fairy tales and romance novels and Santa Claus to be true. And now that she has undeniable proof, it’s like she’s a child again.

Charlotte laughs, then feels awestruck that she can laugh. That even as the drug courses through her, making the impossible possible, she has all her human emotions within reach.

“Women,” Marty mutters. Charlotte makes a fake grab for his throat, and he goes skittering backward so quickly he ends up on his ass, which only makes Kayla laugh louder, which only makes Charlotte laugh louder.

“If it’s anything like last night, we’ve got three hours,” Charlotte says once she catches her breath. “Let’s play.”

17

“Again,” Marty says to Kayla.

“I’ve circled twice, Marty. Nobody’s here.”

“Third time’s the charm.”

“For you and the eye doctor, maybe,” she grumbles.

Kayla’s right, the place does look abandoned. The warehouse has meteor-size holes in its walls. Weeds grow in the broken asphalt of its empty loading docks. The chain-link fence looks relatively new, like someone threw it up for protection after the last tenant left, but even it’s collapsing in sections.

By the time her companions start arguing over which particular nest of shadows will conceal the car best, Charlotte’s managed to thread her hair into a ponytail without tearing out large chunks by the roots. Together with the fact that she hasn’t torn a hole in any part of Kayla’s back seat, this accomplishment makes her feel pretty damn proud of herself.

Inside, they find almost nothing Charlotte cannot bend to the point of breaking.

She’s most impressed with what the drug does to her aim. After snapping some rebar with her bare hands, she’s able to throw pieces of it through the air with enough force to spear the wall from what would amount to two car lengths away, a trick similar to what she did outside the bar when she sent the steel spike into the ground. To overcome gravity like this from this distance, an ordinary human would require impeccable aim. For her it’s not an issue because of the insane amount of propulsion that comes from even the lightest flick of her wrist.

With each successful hit, she takes another step back. Eventually she discovers the point at which distance overcomes her enhanced strength. At about three car lengths between her and the wall, the rebar starts to fall short.

“We need to film this,” Charlotte says.

“You sure about that?” Kayla asks.

“I’m sure I’ve only got one pack of pills, and if I run out and nobody believes me, there’s gonna be no way to prove we’re not all crazy.”

“You planning to tell the world about this?” Marty asks.

“I don’t know yet. I don’t know anything yet. But if we have to tell someone, I want to be believed.”

Charlotte begins rubbing two pieces of rebar together to see how long it takes her to make sparks. The answer—ten seconds. They light up the vast, shadowy interior of the warehouse, making it clear how much her eyes have adjusted to the darkness.

“I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass,” Marty says. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea to have any of this on film. Not yet.”

“I understand you feel that way, and I’m not asking you to store it on your phone for longer than it takes to transfer it to some kind of portable hard drive. And I don’t want either of you on camera. I’ll keep you out of it as best I can—I promise. But I’ve got to have some kind of record that this is actually happening.”

Marty’s staring at her, wide-eyed and frightened. It takes her a few seconds to realize it’s not the prospect of putting all this on film that’s got him scared. Not in this moment, at least. It’s that she just gave him an order in a firm tone of voice, and right now, when she’s capable of breaking steel, her orders mean more than they did an hour ago.

“You’ve got the pills, Charley,” Kayla says. “That’s your proof.”

“Yeah, and we saw how easy it was to prove they work. All I have to do is set myself up to be raped and murdered. You can’t trick this drug, guys. If I know the threat’s not real, nothing happens. I mean, come on. Imagine I’m in police custody, trying to get them to believe my story, but the only way to prove it is to get them to drop me in the worst neighborhood in town, where I might end up breaking some guy’s neck or, you know, destroying private property. Do you really see that going well for me?”

It’s dark again inside the warehouse, but she can tell from the shapes of their bowed heads they’re studying the shadows at their feet, considering her words.

“Also, there’s another reason we need the film,” she says.

“What’s that?” Marty asks.

“It might be all you guys have if something happens to me.”

“All right now,” Marty says, closing the distance between them. He seems to have forgotten what she’s capable of until he’s curled an arm around her back. By then it’s too late to pull away without being insultingly obvious about it. But he does stiffen briefly before he begins walking her toward the ruined entrance. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you, Charley. Come on. Let’s go do your little movie shoot. We’ve only got two hours left.”

They’d agreed to do the shoot back at the safe house. When they’d first rolled up, and Kayla and Marty asked her to hang back while they cased the place, she’d had to remind them she was the one capable of breaking someone’s spine with a light shove, so why not have her go in first? With bowed heads, they’d complied. The house had turned out to be as empty as they’d left it.

Now, the shoot complete, she’s in the shower, washing off the grime of that awful bar, scrubbing her ear of the sticky film left by her assailant’s hot whiskey breath.

The strength left her a few minutes ago. Three hours after being triggered, just as she’d expected. And even though she feels newly vulnerable, there’s a comfort to knowing the pill keeps a regular schedule. That parts of it are knowable, quantifiable. It makes it seem a little less frightening than it was the night before.

Under the spray, she studies the mottled skin on her hand. She’d spent several minutes passing it back and forth through the stove’s open flame while Marty filmed. The skin should be badly discolored, but instead it looks like it’s been drawn on with a red marker and the ink has already started to fade. The effect was similar to when she pressed the spike against her palm: a riot of sudden bruising accompanied by dull pain that was mostly pressure. There’s probably some threshold, some intensity level at which the heat and the flames become unbearable. But if the first test is any indicator, it’s more than can be produced by a single stove.

Recounting her story for the unbiased lens on Marty’s phone felt therapeutic, more cathartic than repeating it to Kayla and Marty, maybe because she didn’t feel like she had to make anyone believe her. The proof was right there in her hands, in the way the flames kissed her skin. For good measure, she also bent several pieces of rebar they’d brought from the warehouse, and cracked some chunks of concrete, the latter of which Kayla and Marty convinced her to carry in from the car with the two of them flanking her like Secret Service agents so nosy neighbors couldn’t observe her impossible strength.

There’d been one other endurance test she’d wanted to try, but when she asked them to head out to the backyard with her, they just glared at her.

Good call, she thinks now. Maybe I’m not ready to try taking a bullet, either.

But there was another test they had agreed to help with.