First Blood on Delancey

Adaptive Evolution did not give him a clean copy of an enemy's power. It gave him a splinter, a cruel little grammar rule, and demanded that his nerves translate it while the fight continued. The shooter's weapon bent air through compressed heat. Kieran tasted copper, understood the angle, and twisted. The second shot curved away from a civilian chest and punched a crater into a delivery van that still smelled faintly of basil and garlic. Holloway carried the government in his posture: straight-backed, sleep-starved, convinced order mattered, and increasingly troubled by the people using order as camouflage. Marcus Holloway became the difference between survival and disaster.