Sam focused, and a split second later, the Acela train, now moving at a relatively sedate fifty-five miles an hour, smashed into the interior wall of a transparent dome. This was not a derailment. This was not a sideswiping of another train. This was a collision like nothing any train had ever endured. This was train vs. brick wall. Irresistible force meeting unmovable object.

  The deceleration was shocking to see. The energy car accordioned, swung left, breaking away from the first car, smashed sideways into the barrier, and bounced back. The second car, the one containing the hostages, plowed into the engine, T-boning it, and split open. Bodies flew from the jagged tear, one flying so fast it smashed into the dome’s interior, splitting the body open like it had just been autopsied.

  The remaining cars cascaded in a jumbled pile, like some terrifying game of pickup sticks.

  Malik was yelling something that Sam barely understood at first.

  “Shade! De-morph!”

  Sam heard but could not take his eyes off the destruction he had just caused. He could imagine all too easily the carnage inside, the bodies suddenly hurled around a steel tube, smashed, broken, split open, spilling their intestines . . . He could not stop looking because to stop looking was to avoid taking on all the pain he knew he deserved. He owed it to the people—the people he had just killed—to look, to acknowledge.

  And he thought, as the helicopter swerved away to avoid hitting the exterior of the dome, that it would be a sort of justice if he simply let go and fell to his death. The alternative was living this moment over and over again in his mind. And he already had so many terrible moments that his nights would never be safe from nightmares.

  It was Dekka who pulled him back inside and pushed him gently into a seat. Sam now saw the nearer horror, right at his feet: Shade, a gory mess, and Malik and Cruz shouting and Simone crying and he was back in it all, back in all that he had escaped.

  The helicopter made a wide turn, having run past the dome, which was little more than an eighth of a mile in diameter. The dome that had appeared at Sam’s command and had cut through buildings and cars and people.

Hero, Chapter 39