The convoy thing started three blocks away from him.
He heard it before he saw it, the way you hear something go wrong in a city, which is a particular quality of sound that cuts through everything else and makes the back of your neck react before your brain does.
He had been heading home from school, taking the longer route because the weather was good and he had started doing that, taking the longer routes, getting to know the city the way it actually was rather than the way the memories had sketched it.
He came around the corner and stopped.
The street ahead was blocked.
Three armoured transport vehicles sat at angles that suggested they had not parked so much as ended up that way. There were barriers, or there had been, most of them now scattered. A section of road surface near the middle vehicle looked like something very heavy had hit it from above.
People were moving fast in all directions, most of them away from the scene, and in the middle of it there were figures in orange.
Prison transport. Something had gone wrong with a prison transport.
He stood at the corner and watched for a moment. There were sounds further up the street, impacts and what might have been shouting, and somewhere in his peripheral vision something swung between two buildings too fast to follow. He couldn't see clearly from where he was and he was not going closer.
He turned to find a different route home.
Two of the orange figures were already behind him.
They were big, both of them, and they had the look of people who had just found themselves unexpectedly free in the middle of a street and were working out what to do about it. One of them had something in his hand that had probably been part of the transport barrier. They were looking at him the way people look at a problem they have just decided to solve.
"Walk away," he said, which came out steadier than he felt.
The one with the barrier piece said something to the other one and they spread out slightly, not much, just enough to cover both sides of him, and he understood with complete clarity that he was not walking away.
He backed up until he hit the wall of the building behind him.
The alley to his left was a dead end, he could see that from here. The street to his right was blocked by the transport vehicles. Behind him was brick. In front of him were two people who outweighed him by a significant amount each and were not particularly interested in negotiating.
The first one came forward and grabbed him by the collar and shoved him back against the wall hard enough that his vision went white for a second at the edges.
He got his arms up, tried to push back, got nowhere. The grip was solid and the man barely moved. He shoved again, harder, and the man pulled him forward and slammed him back again and this time his head hit the brick and he felt it in his teeth.
The second one said something and laughed.
He thought, with the part of his brain that was still running calculations, that this was going very badly.
He got a foot against the wall behind him and pushed off, which gave him maybe half a second of momentum before the grip tightened and redirected him sideways and he hit the ground on his hands and knees. The pavement was not gentle. He stayed there for a moment, catching his breath, listening to the blood in his ears.
The first one reached down and grabbed the back of his jacket.
Something shifted.
It was not dramatic. It didn't arrive with a sound or a flash or anything that would have made sense as a moment. It was more like the feeling of a pressure that had been building for a long time finally finding a direction.
He had felt the energy in his chest for days now, low and constant, and it had always sat there passively and he had mostly tried not to think about it.
It was not sitting passively anymore.
The hand on his jacket pulled upward and he came with it, and somewhere in the motion something went from contained to moving and he turned inside the grip without planning to and his arm came around and connected with the man's chest and the man went backward.
Not stumbled. Went.
He hit the wall on the opposite side of the narrow street and slid down it and sat there with an expression that had moved well past surprise into something more like system error.
He stood in the middle of the street and looked at his own hand.
The second one was staring. A long moment passed where nobody did anything.
Then the second one turned and ran.
He looked back at the first one, who was sitting against the wall breathing carefully, clearly not unconscious but also clearly not interested in a second attempt.
His eyes were open. He was looking at the middle distance with the focus of someone counting to ten inside their head.
The sounds from further up the street were still going, impacts and movement, whatever was happening with the convoy still happening.
He looked at his hand again.
He hadn't decided to do that. He wasn't sure he could do it again on purpose. It had come from somewhere below the level of decision, from the same place the pressure always lived, and it had moved through him like something that had been waiting for permission that it eventually stopped asking for.
His hands were shaking slightly. He noticed that with some detachment.
He looked at the man against the wall, who was going to be fine, and then at the street, and then he turned and walked in the direction that was most away from the convoy and most toward something that felt like ordinary life.
He was most of the way home before he stopped walking and stood on a quiet side street and put both hands against a wall and breathed.
Superpowers was a word that belonged to a very specific kind of story.
He was standing in one of those stories. He had known that since the morning he woke up in a room that wasn't his. But knowing it and feeling it were different things, and feeling it and having it come out of you at a man who was trying to hurt you were different things again.
He stayed there for a while.
Then he pushed off the wall and kept walking, because there was nothing else to do and home was only six minutes away and his mother would have questions if he was late for dinner.
He kept his hands in his pockets the rest of the way.