Black Lightning: The Quiet Subject Seven

Alarms are screaming before he opens his eyes, and his body is already moving before he tells it to - skin hardening like copper over a wound that should have torn him open. Thirty-five percent left in his legs, and a girl is already dragging a boy twice her weight toward a service hatch; the part of him that used to argue about this exact scene online will not let him walk past her. The Pit called him Subject 7-D; Freeland will learn to call him Malcolm Reed, a mechanic's apprentice nobody looks at twice. He knows which boy survives after months of suffering and which girl's hands carry enough current to stop a heart, but none of it tells him what to do next. His chest holds a shout that could kill a man in one breath, and twice now he has stopped his own hand before the third note. A retired nurse he has never met opens her door at four in the morning and says only, get dry first. Somewhere close, a girl with lightning under her skin is going to become the one person who knows exactly what he is.