Darkness, and then light.

  Ali gasped awake, startling the woman whose hand was still buried wrist-deep in his chest.

  “The fuck?” the woman spat. Ali could smell her breath at this distance, could see her eyes, just barely, through the glasses. Her face was tattooed.

  He looked down, head still swimming in the afterglow of an already distant warmth, to see the woman’s arm jutting from his chest. All around the entry wound his skin was pulsating and dancing, sealing itself around the foreign body. Ali felt a powerful, sickening chill in his chest at this, and tried to pull away.

  The woman yanked her hand out, scattering chunks of ribcage and lung on the sidewalk. With a powerful, painless twinge, like a massive muscle spasm, Ali’s chest wound shunted itself closed. He could hear sucking noises coming from his own chest.

  Ali made a noise of baffled distress, then turned and vomited into a bush.

  He was just wiping his mouth when something struck him in the back and sent him flying, bouncing across the dark street like a skipping stone. He slammed into a dumpster, crumpling it with the impact, and slid to the ground.

  Twenty yards away, by the bushes where he’d been standing, the woman in the glasses was watching him, head cocked in confusion. Ali’s body was shuddering and jumping inside his clothes. His bones were snapping back into place with loud, wooden clacks. His skin hissed as it grew and replaced missing patches. His body was blisteringly hot to the touch, so much so that he was steaming slightly in the early morning air, yet he didn’t feel particularly stuffy.

  He didn’t hurt much, either. Part of that was shock, he figured, but mostly the agony of his injuries was being drowned out by a much grander, more alien sensation: where his ruined body was fixing itself, he felt distinctly like some great quantity of something was flowing into him, as if he were a slowly draining cup that was being vigorously topped off. The mysterious force, or energy, or substance entering him seemed to enter via his wounds, and spread throughout his body until it met its limits at the edges of his skin. It was invigorating and deeply invasive in equal measure.

  A brick, whistling through the air at a cannonball clip, hit Ali and sheared the bottom of his jaw off. He screamed, more out of surprise than pain, but within moments he was being filled with that energy again, felt its silver coolness flowing into the space where his chin would have been. A new jawbone jutted violently out from the bottom of his skull and cocooned itself in muscle, fascia, and skin before he’d had the chance to stop screaming.

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  The woman turned to wrench the hood off of a parked car and -- completely inexplicably -- wrench the battery out. Hefting the block in one hand, she blinked across the street and leveled a kick at Ali that sent him skittering again.

  Ali found himself embedded in a brick wall across the street. He pulled himself from it, bricks falling away in his hands startlingly easily, and dropped to the ground. The woman had sprinted after him, was readying to smash him with a street sign she'd ripped from the ground.

  “Wait!” Ali managed to get out before the sign pummelled him into the sidewalk. Blood and bone splattered the asphalt around him, but he’d healed the wounds they’d come from before the woman had managed to raise his weapon to attack again. “Wait, fucking-”

  Another blow, the cutting edge of the street sign lodging directly between Ali’s eyes. There was a moment of cold blackness, of blind-deaf oblivion, and then he was back, his hands gripping the sign, pulling it out of his own brain. “Stop!”

  The woman had lost her glasses in the melee, and Ali could see the naked terror in her eyes. Around them, lights were flicking on inside buildings, faces appearing in windows, as the clamor woke this corner of the city. A sanitation worker peered around the edge of the alley, watching them, his phone raised and recording.

  The woman raised her sign-cudgel again, brought it crashing down, back up, back down. Ali folded in on himself, hugged his head with his hands, his legs pounded too deep into the concrete to draw totally fetal. After a few more blows, the woman stopped. Ali, slick with his own blood and half-blinded by the steam rising from his skin, glanced up.

  The woman held the ruined street sign at her side, her face a sickly pale. “Why won’t you die?”

  “I don’t know,” Ali said, voice cracking. He was crying, now.

  The woman shook her head, as if to wake herself from a dream. She raised the sign up again, and a pair of hands clamped down on her arm before she could bring it back down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” A man, hair bedraggled and without his shirt, was trying to restrain her. “That’s a fucking kid!”

  Ali noticed that a small crowd was forming at the mouth of the alley, that the door to the apartment complex he’d been flung into was open, that residents were pouring out.

  A woman, silk hair bonnet still on, hurried between the two of them. “Stop! You’re killing him!”

  A rock, thrown by some unseen member of the crowd, bounced harmlessly off the attacker’s head. She glanced around, dazed, taken aback by the sudden attention. Her face warped in indecision, then fear, then frustration, and she snarled.

  “Get your hands off me.” Ali’s attacker shoved the man holding his arms, sending him tumbling into a far wall. The display of power stunned the crowd long enough for the attacker to dart away, at a superhuman-but-not-quite-blinding clip, and escape off down the road.

  The woman nearest him turned to inspect Ali. He saw her eyes scan over the blood caking his arms, over his legs embedded deep in the ground. In equal parts concern and disbelief, she asked, “are you okay?”

  Ali shuddered, tried to choke down his sobs. “I… I have no idea, ma’am.”