How quickly things change. The school halls darken with whispers; strange, sidelong glances follow Henry everywhere, marking her like a dangerous secret. No one dares use the girl’s washroom anymore—not since Henry shattered its walls in a surge of panicked teleportation, fueled by the horror of Clay waking from his coma.

Townes and Jenna spin desperate lies to hide Henry’s explosive truth. They say it was a bomb, a faceless threat easier to digest than the reality of Henry’s uncontrollable power.

Reston, New York School Bombing

At home, tension bleeds through every silence. Cleo confronts Henry, demanding to know how she could leave Clay to die trapped in twisted metal. Henry refuses her mother’s accusations and flees into the night without an answer, shadows following closely behind.

But Henry doesn’t stay quiet for long. When Cleo presses too far, Henry retaliates, words sharp and cold: “Maybe I messed up, but at least I’m not the one sleeping around.” The air between them turns poisonous.

Dominic and his family live as teleporters, untethered and lost, drifting from one borrowed luxury to another. They break into forgotten mansions, peeling back ghostly dust covers, wandering through someone else’s faded dreams. It’s madness, surviving on stolen glimpses of wealth.

Sheriff Dale tries to bond with Deputy Anna through hardship, telling her she grew up in the ghetto. Anna shrugs off Dale’s assumptions coldly—just the city, she insists, safe and sterile. No violence, no real darkness—unlike here.

The school reels in chaos, teachers fumbling through emergency manuals they barely comprehend. No one knows how to handle a bombing—panic spreads silently, infecting everyone. It feels like workers in a chemical plant, blindly trusting rules printed on a page to keep them alive.

Thomas Hope, Cleo’s newest boyfriend, preaches about responsibility after just four months of playing house. Religious principles are easy to claim from the comfort of someone else’s bed; hypocrisy has never looked so sanctimonious.

Then there’s Sam, the hacker—clever, dangerous, and wrapped in mystery. Obsessed with classic Atari games, armed with secrets and a concealed handgun, he provides intelligence to teleporters desperate enough to trust him.

Townes understands pain intimately. “Hugs can hurt,” he observes grimly. Children know it best—squeeze too tightly, hold too long, and affection turns suffocating. Comfort can become a prison.

Fear intrigues Townes. It shapes people, controls them. Hellfire is fiction, but the terror it inspires keeps humanity obedient. Imagine, Townes muses darkly, if fear had physical mass—it would crush people, pulling them inevitably into its void, a black hole consuming all around it.

Disproving theories, Townes notes, matters as much as proving them. Facing fear—like leaving home for a new city—forces uncomfortable truths to the surface. Nothing is ever exactly as imagined; discovery comes wrapped in darkness.

Jenna confronts Lucas over his twisted actions, calling him out fiercely: “Putting a girl in your trunk? That’s psychopath territory.” Lucas, cold-eyed and venomous, snaps back, demanding explanations for the destruction Henry caused while teleporting. Jenna shields Henry with stubborn silence.

Driven by desperation, Henry stands atop a bridge, weights strapped tight against her body, heart racing. She will either teleport or die—her life now balanced on the razor’s edge. It echoes chillingly of biblical temptations—like the devil whispering softly in Jesus’ ear, urging a leap to test divine protection.

Teleportation feeds on fear and isolation. Henry knows this deeply; only in true solitude does the power awaken. Alone, fear rising like dark wings around her, she waits for angels or oblivion—whichever comes first.