Pulse

ever made Clara Quinn bleed. It scared her, but more than that, it focused her mind on the task at hand. She was smart enough to realize that Dylan was learning her weakness: a hard enough impact into a living thing, such as a field of grass, could do damage.
    She pulled one of the tall stadium lights out of the ground with the force of her will, turned the rotted wooden end in Dylan’s direction, and fired. The lights sparked and popped on the tail end; and when the weapon hit Dylan in the chest, sending him tumbling end over end, she was surprised by her reaction. She felt her heart turn dry and brittle, like a dead flower on hot pavement. She looked at him lying there on the grass, not moving, and wished he wasn’t a weak and useless first pulse.
    Her wish, she was surprised to see, came true.
    Dylan stood up. Unfazed, he plucked two more stadium lights out of the ground, their wires sparking against the black sky, and hurled them in her direction. She dodged them, but only barely, and realized the incredible truth.
    “You’re a second pulse?”
    “Not possible!” Wade yelled. The idea that someone he hated as much as Dylan could have the same level of power was a reality Wade couldn’t deal with. He focused all his energy on one of the smashed vans, picked it up, and hurled it with unprecedented speed. Dylan tried to move to one side, but Wade swerved the flying van in the same direction. The door connected solidly with the top half of Dylan’s body, sending him end over end through the air as he tumbled across the field. Dylan was up almost before he was down, shaking the grass out of his thick hair and holding his ground. He had a look of quiet determination on his face as he wiped a smear of dirt and grass off his shoulder.
    “I do hate a dirty T-shirt. Makes me crazy.”
    Clara shook her head slowly, looking across the field at Dylan like he were a ghost she couldn’t believe she was seeing.
    “I thought we were the only ones.”
    “Guess you thought wrong,” Dylan said.
    Clara’s emotions, which she had never trusted as much as her intellect, were a tangled mess. She loved the thought of Dylan being like her. His power made him ten times more attractive. He was not her equal, but he was close, and this made him even harder to resist. And yet, this new information made another emotion well up in her chest. Fear. She’d never felt it before, and she didn’t like it one bit. Passion was fine, but only if she was alive to enjoy it.
    Wade was coming at Dylan at the same moment Clara was, and this was a big problem for Dylan. One of them he could take head-to-head, fighting them at least to a draw. But two was another story. Eventually they would discover his weakness, possibly by accident, and his second pulse would give out. He knew it was a fight he couldn’t win, but he was going to throw as many punches as he could before it was too late. He threw the rest of the vans, trying to create a diversion so he could escape, but they picked up every object they could find. Dylan was fending off sections of the bleachers, random van parts that had blown free, entire vehicles, roofing tiles flying like ninja throwing stars—everything that wasn’t nailed down tight was heading his way. He was taking hits from all sides as he backed up against the gymnasium wall, pinned down, with an endless array of objects crashing into every part of his body. He took special care to protect himself from flying rocks and boulders, ducking and moving so they wouldn’t touch his skin. Everything else was fine; he could take a beating all day. But rock was Dylan’s kryptonite. Like living things for Clara and Wade Quinn, a boulder had an especially damaging effect on Dylan Gilmore. A really big one could move past the power of his second pulse. He watched as one of the vans missed its mark by ten feet and blasted a hole through the cinder-block wall. As it did, a slab of cement the size of a car door broke free from the wall, spinning wildly until it struck Dylan square in the chest. His ears rang and his vision blurred as he tumbled head over heels along the cinder-block wall of the gym. When he came to a stop, the door was on top of him, the wide section of cinder block touching skin through his ripped T-shirt. He felt the weight like burning coals, searing the second pulse out of his heart. The cement slab felt like it weighed a million pounds.
    “Dylan!”
    He knew the voice and was immediately on high alert,