THE TAXI ROLLED to a stop between Main Street and Tokiwadai Avenue. An unprepossessing figure stepped out of the car and thanked the driver. He brushed back his crusty, black hair and pushed his spectacles up against the bridge of his nose and admired the grand city. He puckered his lips and squinted to make out the skyline in the distance. A frown gradually filled his sallow complexion. He wiped the grit off of his trench coat and walked down the snow covered sidewalk toward the heart of the city.

At noon, Center Plaza was always filled with students rushing to catch lunch before their next block of classes. Among the stream of students, a tall figure clad in gray, pushed against the flow of bodies and walked toward the school district. The students stared at the man as he carried himself awkwardly across the busy space. He bumped into one of the girls, who dropped her book into the snow.

The man quickly picked up the book and brushed off the salt on the cover.

"I'm terribly sorry about that," he said as he handed the book back to her. Without waiting for a response, he quickly shuffled away and vanished into the crowd.

MIKOTO LAID ON her bed, phone against her ear, tracing outlines in the ceiling with her finger.

"94? Not bad," she said.

"I know," came Tōma's voice from the other end of the phone. "The highest grade in the class too!"

"Well, now. I think it's because this time you actually listened to me," she said.

Tōma laughed. "Sure, Biribiri."

"Right. So what's your next exam going to be on?" she said.

"Temperature and blackbody radiation," he said.

"Ah, the ol' heat exam that everyone fails," said Mikoto.

"Fails?" repeated Tōma.

"You know about radiation?" she asked. He said he did.

"You know about Planck's law?" she continued. He said he did not.

"That's why everyone fails," she said. "They test you on Planck's law and they never tell you about it in class. Planck's law is a simple equation that tells you what color light a hot body will emit. The hotter something is, the shorter the wavelength, so a blue flame is much hotter than a red one."

Tōma pondered her words for a beat and then acknowledged them with a grunt. "So, that means your railgun…"

"My railgun is light orange, so that's just above 1000 ºC," she said. "That's also why the coin melts after only 50 meters, because the coin is a cupronickel alloy, and this alloy melts at around 1000 ºC."

"Well, why don't you use a coin with a higher melting point then?" he asked.

Mikoto thought about this for a few seconds and then realized that Tōma actually offered a sensible suggestion. "Because Japanese coins are convenient to carry around."

"Fair enough," said Tōma. Best not to press the point, he thought to himself. "Do you plan to tell Kuroko about us soon?"

The question turned Mikoto's arms into limp noodles and threw a cold weight down to the pit of her stomach.

"I wasn't planning to…." Her voice trailed off.

"Well, she wants to duel me. And judging from the other day in the library, she wants to kill me too."

"Look, Tōma," said Mikoto, "I don't think Kuroko is…"

A sharp click from the door, that unmistakable sound that she would burst into the room any moment now. Mikoto stared at the door, paralyzed.

"Mikoto, is something the matt—"

Mikoto snapped the phone from her ear and scrambled for a book, a brochure, anything. She watched in abject terror as the knob turned and the door began to creak open. Unable to find anything, Mikoto panicked and tossed her phone away.

"Good afternoon, Onee—"

The phone tagged Kuroko square in the face, and the thud of her body slamming the floor marked where the honorific should've been.

Outside the school district, the lanky man stood face to face with a small girl in one of the dark back alleys of Academy City.

"You say you're a level 4 telekinetic?" he asked.

"Yes, and if you don't leave me alone, I'm going to have to show you what I'm all about!"

The man lowered his head and adjusted his glasses. He opened his palm and revealed a jet of flames that cast a hideous glow on his face. "I'm sorry."

"Who are you?" asked the girl.

The man closed his palm and then pounced at her, his trench coat following behind him like a streamer. She raised her hand out of reflex, but before she could defend herself, her scream had been silenced in a haze of smoke.

"A student just lost her abilities?" repeated Mikoto. Kuroko nodded as they walked down the hall to the Judgment wing.

"Yes. Aki Misako, 14 years old, level 4 pyrokinetic," said Kuroko. "At around noon, she said she felt ill and couldn't show any kind of psychic ability after that."

"So?" said Mikoto. "I have a hard time using electricity when I'm sick."

"Ah, but what's interesting was that just an hour later, a student was attacked by a tall man wearing a trench coat in District 7. The victim was 15 year old Haruka Nishimura, also a level 4 esper."

They stopped in front of the door of the Judgment office.

"She had burns on 23% of her body, and the burn signatures matched Aki Misako's pyrokinetic ability," said Kuroko. "We have twenty witnesses who all testify that Aki Misako was in the mathematics building, half a mile away from where the attack took place."

"That means…" Mikoto started. The door slid open.

"An ability stealer," said Kuroko as she walked in.

The Judgment office smelled like coffee only when an urgent case came up. The pinging of keyboard strokes, the beeping of machines filled the modest, almost clinical room. Color coded filing cabinets stood steadfast against the ashen walls and flanked the computer terminal where Uiharu Kazari was working alone. Konori Mii must have tended to more urgent matters.

Kazari looked up and formed a cheery smile. "Misaka-san! Shirai-san!"

Mikoto and Kuroko walked over to Kazari. "Any leads?" asked Kuroko.

"Take a look at this CCTV clip I found," said Kazari.

On the screen, behind the scanlines and static, a dark figure in the distance brandished a stream of fire from his hand and then lunged at the girl in the foreground. A flash of orange and then a veil of smoke overtook the screen. The smoke then faded and revealed the girl unconscious on the scorched ground as embers pelted her body.

"Any idea who the perpetrator is?" asked Mikoto.

Kazari opened the file on her desk.

"He only goes by the alias 'Dante'," said Kazari. "Born in 1989 in District 10 of Academy City, disappeared in 2005 after Judgment cracked down on gang activity there."

Attached to the folder was a black-and-white head shot of Dante, the only photograph on file. Mikoto grabbed the picture and inspected it. His hair swept over his thin eyebrows and was wiry like steel wool. Both his eyes and lips seemed withered from age despite his relative youth.

"No doubt, a product of The Strange," said Kuroko. Mikoto agreed.

"Something else came up before both of you got here," said Kazari. "Aki Misako called Judgment to tell us that she got back her abilities."

Kuroko pondered this for a beat. "So this Dante guy doesn't actually steal abilities, just borrows them?"

"It would seem that way," said Mikoto.

"Any idea how he does it?" asked Kuroko.

"According to witnesses, Dante physically bumped into Aki Misako at around noon," said Kazari.

"By touch, then?" said Kuroko, mostly to herself.

Mikoto and Kazari both agreed. It was the best guess for now. Mikoto tossed around the facts on the case so far. Dante was an ability borrower, so the stronger the esper he came in contact with, the better. She was a prime target, and Dante knew this, no doubt. After all, the peerless electromaster didn't just build her reputation on pool measurement tests alone. She could fire coins to rival the effect of an anti-tank rifle, summon lightning storms, shift magnetic fields. Every last student in Academy City knew her name; she wasn't safe anymore.

AT A QUARTER PAST TEN, half of Academy City was already asleep. The windows of the student dorms altered between lit and unlit like a checkerboard. The islands of light from the streetlamps threw Dante into sharp relief as he walked through the snow. They were looking for by him now, he told himself, whoever They was. Let them come.

He had been a ghost for half a decade, traveling all over Japan but never straying too far from Academy City. He needed to settle the score for what happened to him in District 10. For five years, he gathered the tiles to assemble a mosaic of what happened to him, who was involved, why they did it. If it were up to him, he told himself, he would've left it all alone, disappeared and saved himself the trouble.

He felt a twinge in his forehead.

The snow beneath his feet began to shift. The streetlamps ignited and turned to wooden pillars aflame; the ground lit up and began to quake. He closed his eyes and continued to walk. His skin began to crack and peel off as the blisters on his palms started to expand. The flames lapped at his ankles; the earth was a bright red. He imagined himself as a monk. The face you have on when you die is the one you show to God, he told himself. To carry yourself with dignity even in death is the sign of the enlightened. His muscles began to disintegrate and the fire incised through his bone. He could feel the sinews in his legs melting, but somehow, he continued to walk. Carry your dignity, ignore the pain, keep walking, and for God's sake, do not open your eyes. The heat rippled through his center and pulsed with his heartbeat. The ground beneath him was white-hot now and started to chew away at his feet. I'm the phoenix, and this is my cremation, my rebirth. The blinding light pierced his eyelids and poured into his head. A flash of fire finally engulfed him.

He opened his eyes.

A gust of cold air struck his face. It stung worse than the heat. He was back in Academy City.

He let out a quivering sigh and continued to follow the footprints down the sidewalk.

Every day, he was immolated, and every day, he was resurrected. The hallucinations started in 2005, and they never went away. He took medication, abused drugs, injected himself with sedatives when he felt an attack coming; it only amplified the pain. The doctors told him it was posttraumatic stress disorder, but they were liars. Such a simple diagnosis didn't even cover a fraction of his pathology. His senses were also damaged beyond repair. For five years, he watched life go by at five frames per second. Every frame stuttered into the next one, and he was never sure what happened in between each snapshot. His hearing was muffled, and his touch was numbed; he felt disembodied. Borrowing an esper's abilities alleviated the numbness, but the hallucinations never went away. The fire waited in deadly patience to pounce on him when he was most vulnerable, waited to dip him in kerosene and light a match at his feet so that the fire ascended from bottom to top and burned him like a sinner at the stake. The only way to stop it, he convinced himself, was to settle the score.