Chapter 652: Safe

Grey landed hard enough that his knees cracked against concrete, and his eyes practically bulged out of their sockets when he looked up to find a road stretching out in both directions. A horn screamed before his mind could catch up, headlights filling his vision as Grey threw himself sideways and rolled across the pavement while the car swerved violently around him.

Tires shrieked, the vehicle shot across the opposite lane, then bounced down into a shallow ditch hard enough that the front end crumpled against the embankment. Grey cursed and scrambled to his feet, his thoughts spinning with a hundred questions he didn’t have time to answer as he rushed toward it.

Something felt wrong almost immediately.

Grey was moving fast, probably faster than the average person could manage, but compared to what he’d gotten used to it felt like running through waist-deep water. His legs weren’t exploding with the same power, his balance felt strangely ordinary, and by the time he reached the ditch he was already breathing harder than a sprint of this distance had any right to make him.

"Fuck."

Smoke was leaking from beneath the hood.

Grey grabbed the driver’s-side door and pulled, expecting it to come off easily, only for the metal to bend slightly beneath his fingers while the hinges stubbornly stayed in place. He stared at his hands in disbelief, then looked down to find the chains around his body had completely retracted and gone limp.

Even his portable oven barely responded when he reached for it.

The connection was still there, faint enough that Grey could tell it hadn’t disappeared entirely, but the response was so slow that it felt like sending a command through a computer from thirty years ago. At this rate, he genuinely thought it might take an hour before the damned thing bothered answering him.

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

Flames flickered beneath the crushed hood.

Grey planted one foot against the side of the car, grabbed the damaged door with both hands, then pulled until the muscles in his arms burned. Metal groaned as he roared and leaned backward with everything he had, finally ripping the door free in a screech of twisting steel that would have left people staring back on the old Earth.

Even so, right now, Grey could only think about how ridiculously weak he felt.

He threw the door aside, reached into the car, and dragged the young man behind the wheel free before hauling him up the embankment. The fire under the hood was spreading quickly, so Grey crossed the road with the unconscious man over his shoulder after checking that no more vehicles were coming, then made it behind a line of trees just as the heat behind him suddenly surged.

BOOM.

The car exploded, and Grey dropped behind the trees with one arm over his head while burning debris scattered across the road. He stayed there for several breaths afterward, huffing far harder than he should have been, his heart pounding while he tried to understand why carrying one normal-sized guy for a few hundred feet had actually tired him out.

Was he really back on Earth?

Grey reached behind himself and pulled Virtueless free, giving the weapon a hard shake. "Hey, can you hear me?!"

"Stop shaking me and focus on the boy in front of you."

Grey immediately looked over and realized the young man wasn’t just unconscious. He wasn’t breathing.

"Shit."

Grey dropped beside him, tilted his head back, checked his airway, then started compressions with the rhythm he vaguely remembered from a first-aid class back in school.

The memory came back surprisingly clearly now that he needed it, right down to the instructor’s thick Albertan accent telling everyone that broken ribs were better than a broken heart, an accent Grey had spent the entire course half convinced was being exaggerated on purpose.

After a set of compressions, Grey pinched the guy’s nose and leaned down.

"WE NEVER SPEAK OF THIS, ALRIGHT?!"

He sealed his mouth over the young man’s and blew, went straight back to the chest, then continued the cycle without slowing down. Something cracked beneath his hands after another series of compressions, probably a rib, but Grey remembered the instructor being very clear that if ribs were breaking, you kept fucking going.

Grey repeated the process again, then again, and on the fourth time he leaned down the young man suddenly sputtered into his mouth.

Grey jerked back.

The guy sucked in a ragged breath, his eyes snapping open before pain hit him hard enough that he shrieked and grabbed at his ribs. "I don’t fucking swing that way, man!"

Grey stared at him.

He had just dragged this idiot away from an exploding car and restarted his heart, and somehow that was what he had chosen to lead with?

Grey wiped his mouth hard with the back of his hand before spitting into the grass. "You’re welcome."

The young man wheezed through the pain, looking toward the burning wreckage across the road before his expression soured. "Fuck you, you’re the reason I crashed in the first place."

Grey paused, then laughed. "Touché."

The young man’s eyes moved back to him, and for the first time he seemed to actually look at Grey properly. Confusion appeared first, followed by recognition so violent that he almost tried to sit up before his ribs reminded him why that was a terrible idea.

"What the fuck?!" he shouted. "Aren’t you Grey Temolt?! What are you doing here?!"

Grey blinked. Was he famous or something?

He opened his mouth to ask, but warning sirens suddenly screamed somewhere in the distance, followed by a pulse of red light that swept across the horizon and painted the road, trees, and smoke in a bloody glow.

The young man’s face went white.

"No, fuck!"

Grey’s attention snapped toward him.

"They’re gonna catch me!"

Grey frowned as the sirens grew louder.

If this really was Earth, who the hell was he afraid of getting caught by? Wasn’t Earth supposed to be safe?