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Cooper started to shout a warning, but before he could, the scientist stiffened the first two fingers of each hand and jammed them knuckle-deep in an agent’s eyes, flowed into simultaneous flat-hand chops to the tracheas of two others, then slammed his knee into Bobby Quinn’s groin, twice. Before it had begun, the fight was over. The agents fell away, gasping and groaning.

Abe Couzen took a deep breath. His fingers trembled, and a trickle of blood ran from one nostril. Even so, Cooper sensed a stillness to him. Somehow, after having taken down four armed professionals in less than two seconds, the scientist was calm.

Until Ethan arrived, staggering to a halt beside Cooper. At the sight of his former protégé, emotions flashed in quick succession across Abe’s face: pleasure, puzzlement, suspicion, anger. “You’re with them?”

“What?” Ethan panted furiously. “No, I’m . . . this is . . . he’s . . .”

“I’m not with anyone, Dr. Couzen.” Cooper kept his hands low and out. “But I’m here to help.”

Around them, the world was catching on to the fight. Most people started to move away. A few pushed forward to see what was happening. Somewhere a woman gasped. Cooper ignored it all, just watched his target. He wasn’t a reader, couldn’t pick up deep secrets from body language. But what Abe was thinking was no secret. He was weighing the idea of killing them. All of them: the agents, Cooper, even Ethan. A pure and viper-cold calculation, laced with certainty. He believed he could do it.

Instead, he turned and ran.

Horns screamed and tires squealed as the man leapt into traffic. A cabbie stomped his brakes, the car a yellow blur slewing sideways, colliding with a Honda. Abe didn’t even slow, just shot past the accident in progress, the cars missing him by less than a foot. Cooper leapt into pursuit, but his angle was bad, and by the time he’d made the opposite sidewalk, his quarry had put thirty yards between them. He leaned into the run, not taking his eyes off the man’s back as he dodged through foot traffic grown suddenly heavy, a stream of people exiting from—

Shit. Grand Central. Abe shoved in the doors, sending a woman sprawling in the process. By the time Cooper had reached the door, she was rising, saying, “What’s your problem, asshole?” just before he knocked her back down. He sprinted the length of the hallway, past displays for d-pads and the new Lucy Veronica line of suits, and into the sweating cool of the concourse.

A roar overwhelmed him, the echoed overlapping of thousands of conversations. Over the loudspeaker a strained voice pleaded, “People! There are no more seats on the Metro-North Hudson Line. I repeat, there are no more seats on the Hudson Line. Please, please, stop rushing the platform—”

Everyone in Manhattan appeared to be trying to leave. Beneath the starry dome of the main concourse, ticket lines had degenerated into formless throngs, the peace barely kept by uniformed soldiers slinging assault rifles. Every outbound train on the board was listed as sold out, but the voice on the loudspeaker did nothing to stop people from pushing toward the platforms, ticket or no. It wasn’t a crowd, it was a mob, a howling, throbbing, reeking mob, everyone shoving and yelling, luggage slung over shoulders, children clutched in arms.

Bad enough for anyone, but Cooper hated crowds, felt dizzy and lost in them. His gift, never under his control, read the impulses and intentions of everyone at the same time. It was like trying to focus while the dog howled and the baby shrieked and the phone rang and the radio blared, only there were a thousand dogs and babies and phones and radios all going at once.

He took a breath, clenched and unclenched his fists. There was a trash can near one wall, and he climbed atop it, staring at the crowd, trying to sort faces, to spot one needle in a needlestack. A nearby soldier yelled to get down, but Cooper ignored him, kept scanning—

Saw him. Abe had glanced over his shoulder to check the pursuit, and in that moment Cooper caught a glimpse of his face. Despite the crowd, the scientist had doubled the gap between them.

Impossible. The mass of people was a living wall, packed shoulder to shoulder. No one would be able to get through them.

That’s not quite true. Shannon would.

Before he’d known her name, before they’d saved each other’s lives, before they’d become lovers, Cooper had called her the Girl Who Walks Through Walls. Shannon read people as vectors, could anticipate where a sudden hole would open, predict the spot others would avoid, sense which people would collide and slow everyone around them. “Shifting,” she called it, and where he hated crowds, she thrived in them, could move untouched and unseen.

Abe Couzen was moving the same way.