The Bentley slewed wildly, and not even Shade’s speed could control it. The car plunged off the side of the road, crashed through a guardrail, and went airborne like some steampunk flying machine, and off the side of a hundred-foot drop. The slope was almost vertical, blanketed in pine trees and punctuated with rock outcroppings.

“Shade!” Cruz screamed in slow motion.

The Bentley was in the air, the heavy engine dragging the nose down, plummeting toward trees and rocks and annihilation. Shade snapped her seat-belt release, stood with one foot on the dashboard and the other on her headrest, bent down, grabbed Cruz under the armpits, and hurled Cruz upward against the force of gravity.

Cruz flew and screamed in what to Shade was comically slow motion, hung in the air for a very long time, then was captured by gravity and began to fall. In that time Shade rolled into the back seat, grabbed Malik under one arm, and launched herself backward as the car fell away from her.

Rising, Shade slammed into Cruz, twisted in midair, snatched her friend, yanked her close, put her free arm around Cruz’s chest, and with both her friends in her arms had time to consider how to lessen the impact of the inevitable hard landing.

The car fell, engine lowest, its wheels spinning just a foot away from the jumbled cliff face. It smashed through a small tree, banged into another, twisted and smashed sideways through a third.

The slope of the cliff came out to meet Shade as she fell, and she slid and ran, skidded and hopped on her disturbing insectoid feet, bleeding off speed, dodging trees, absorbing the energy into her inhumanly powerful legs, fighting the mass of herself and her two friends.

The car passed her now, smashed into a tree thick enough to destroy the hood, slammed nose-down into a boulder, flipped end over end, and skidded the rest of the way on its back, trailing a debris cloud of expensive trim in all directions.

Shade, still carrying Malik and Cruz, neared the bottom of the cliff and turned skidding into running across gentler grades and finally slowed enough to drop Cruz and Malik onto the pine needles. Through the trees Shade could make out glimpses of barracks-style buildings ahead and below, just as Dekka had described it.

For Cruz and Malik, it had all taken about seven seconds.

“Jesus H. Christ, Shade!” Cruz erupted once she had patted herself frantically as if she expected to be missing some bits.

Villain, Chapter 11