Our next big problem came from a hospital rift.
It opened under a medical tower during a storm, trapping patients on the upper floors while shadow insects crawled through the vents. The official raid teams were delayed by traffic and fear disguised as caution. People gathered outside filming the windows where emergency lights flickered red.
I felt the building from across the street. It was alive with electricity. Elevators, heart monitors, surgical tools, backup generators, locked doors, oxygen pumps, camera lines, fire alarms. A normal raider would see walls and monsters. I saw a nervous body made of circuits, and every nerve was screaming.
A doctor ran out through the front doors covered in dust, trying to drag a wounded guard. She was Grace. She had calm eyes, even with blood on her sleeve, and the kind of presence that made panic feel embarrassed.
When she saw me walking toward the entrance, she told me the insects reacted to sound and heat. The elevators were dead, the stairwells were blocked, the top floor had children on life support.
I asked if the backup generators still had charge. She said barely.
"Barely is plenty," I said.
Grace grabbed my arm and told me not to show off inside a hospital. I liked her immediately.
So I showed off carefully.
I entered through the broken lobby and spread my fingers. The building answered. Every monitor beep became a note. Every emergency lamp became an eye. I dimmed the lights, cooled the vents, and made the fire alarm speakers release a high-frequency hum that guided the insects away from patient rooms.
The first swarm poured from the ceiling like black water. I did not blast it. Too risky. Instead, I pulled charge from the floor panels and made a cage of thin blue threads. The insects flew into it and froze, wings twitching. I compressed the cage into a glowing ball, rolled it down the hallway, and launched it out a broken window where it exploded safely above the street.
The crowd outside cheered. I could not hear them. I was busy arguing with an elevator.
The elevator had lost power halfway between floors. Inside were two nurses, a patient on a stretcher, and one very angry monster trying to claw through the ceiling. I jumped into the shaft, grabbed the cables, and poured lightning through the emergency brake. The elevator jolted. The monster shrieked. I magnetized the ceiling panel, ripped it upward, and punched a bolt through the creature before it could drop inside.
Then I rode the elevator up by pulling it myself through the cables. It was not graceful. It was extremely loud. At one point I passed Grace in the stairwell, and she shouted that elevators were not supposed to fly.
"This one is having character development," I shouted back.
The top floor was worse. The rift had opened inside a supply room, and a queen insect the size of an ambulance had wrapped the hall in black webbing. Its body pulsed with stolen electricity from the hospital equipment. It was feeding on the machines. Every second it grew stronger. The life support units dimmed.
Grace arrived behind me with a portable shock device in her hands, ready to fight, even though she had no business standing near that nightmare. She said we had six minutes.
I said I needed three.
The queen attacked. I let it stab me through the shoulder.
Grace screamed. Harper, watching through a drone feed, probably screamed louder. Riley later admitted she punched a vending machine. But I had wanted the queen to connect itself to me. The moment its blade leg pierced my body, I reached through the current in its nerves and found the stolen electricity inside it.
Monster biology was strange, but motion was motion. Signals were signals. It had a nervous rhythm. I grabbed that rhythm and played it backward.
The queen froze. Its own legs began tying its webbing into knots. It tried to scream, but I made the hospital speakers scream first. A focused pulse blasted down the hallway, stunning every insect left in the vents. Then I pulled the stolen power out of the queen one thread at a time and sent it back into the life support machines.
Lights returned. Monitors steadied. The queen shrank, withered, and collapsed.
I stepped over it, bleeding sparks instead of blood. Grace stared at my shoulder as the wound closed in flickers of blue light.
"What are you?" she whispered.
I wanted to say something cool. Instead, I said, "Honestly, still figuring that out."
Grace became our fourth that night. She did not join because of money or thrill. She joined because she saw what my power could do when it was controlled instead of thrown around. She wanted to keep people alive during rifts. I wanted someone around who would stop me from turning every problem into a thunder festival.
It was a good balance.
With Grace at the Stormhouse, our raids changed. She taught me how dangerous electricity could be to normal bodies, and I learned how to make my lightning precise enough to restart a heart without frying a rib cage. She hated when I called it divine defibrillation. Harper loved the name. Riley put it on a jacket. Grace threatened all of us with a medical lecture.
For a while, life became almost good.
That should have warned me.