I moved in the dark/
The room calm and cold/
The quiet hollow/
I am such a haunted soul/

Peter wouldn't have thought he could get back to sleep after his hypercharged accidental midnight liaison, but he did. Not that he was asleep for long.

It wasn't the same nightmare that woke him for the second time, but it was a familiar one. The empty city, the eerie click of the bike wheel, the cars that stretched for miles in gridlock. He was nearly used to the unreal, drugged slow-motion-and-silence of the dream, but as always, just as he was getting comfortable with something, it had to be turned on its head. Spliced in with the familiar washed-out images of New York were clips of Katie, shots of him and her kneeling on the pavement with power flickering around them like a rabid electrical storm. Sandwiched between the calm and empty city were these new, unnerving images, Katie holding onto him like he was about to fall or die, screaming something that was distorted by the fabric of the dream, sounding like someone speaking underwater.

"Shield, Peter!" she seemed to be saying, as near as he could figure out, only that didn't make any sense, did it? "Shield!"

But it was too late to try to interpret mysterious warnings, anyway, because heat and radiation were splashing out from them, rolling in waves like thunder, warping and twisting cars around them, hollowing out a radius of destruction that grew with ever second and showed no signs of stopping—

By now, Peter Petrelli was a pro at nightmares, and he managed to swallow his scream just as it threatened to burst out, determined not to wake Claire and Katie. This turned out to be a misplaced worry, however, as his brain kicked into working order and he began to realize that there was sunshine streaming in around the edges of the blinds like a solar eclipse, and the beds beside him were empty.

Claire popped her head into the bedroom, drawn by the noise of him reeling out of nightmare. "Hi Peter!" she said brightly. "I'm glad you're awake, I was just about to resort to pouring water over your head. Come on, Katie and I are making pancakes."

Remembering the last time Claire had attempted pancakes, Peter scrambled from his bed and followed her into the kitchen, where he was relived to find Katie doing the cooking, flipping pancakes with practiced professional flair. "Jeez, Rachel Ray," he said, hoping to slide past post-makeout awkwardness without her noticing. "Where'd you learn to cook? I didn't see any range-top ovens in Linderman's vaults."

"I'm still remembering," she admitted, nodding to a plate of deformed castoff pancakes. "I used to be a really good cook, worked at this ritzy restaurant and everything, but eight years is a long time, you know?"

Claire shoved a stack of plates into Peter's hands. "Set the table, we're almost ready," she commanded in the way that she'd picked up from her father, unassuming but difficult to ignore.

Obediently, he began putting the plates down on the bar, only half paying attention as he replayed his dream in his head. "Katie," he asked, "what does 'shielding' mean to you?"

She raised one delicate Mediterranean eyebrow. "Off the top of my head, I'd have to say it reminds me of Star Trek, but I'll admit I've never been good at word association games. Why?"

"I had another dream," he explained. "New York Apocalypse Version 3.0. You were in it this time."

"Lovely," she said, deftly flipping a pancake. "You'd think we'd be allowed to deal with one crisis at a time, but no, wouldn't want life to be boring, now would we?"

"In this one, me and you were kneeling on the pavement—which of course made perfect sense at the time, you know how dreams are—and you were yelling at me to shield. Frankly, I don't know what to make of it."

Claire came to sit beside him, licking batter off her fingers. "God, you're dense," she said, her smile lightening the words. "Isn't it obvious?"

"No," Katie said. "It is decidedly less than obvious. Care to enlighten us?"

"The security guard," she said, as if she'd just unveiled the key to the universe. When they continued to regard her with blank, fish-eyed stares, she elaborated. "Remember, back at The Monticello? Both of you acquired that blond lady's ability to shield? It makes sense that you might be able to contain the blast inside some kind of a shield, yeah? In fact," she said, in the tone of someone who has an invisible lightbulb over their head, "now that I think about it, shielding tightly around yourselves might even be enough to stop unwanted abilities."

Both Peter and Katie were looking at her as if they though she might be a reincarnated Albert Einstein. "You know," Katie said slowly. "That just might work. I mean, we pick up these abilities via people's brainwaves, and technically, these shields can block out anything—maybe even brainwaves."

"Sounds good in theory," Peter agreed, reminding Claire suddenly of her eighth-grade science teacher, "but how can we be sure? I'd prefer not to field-test it on Ted the Magic Exploding Man, if it's all the same."

"Easy enough," Claire said assertively. "Peter, shield."

"Shield as tight as you can," Katie advised. "See if you can get it right along your skin."

"Okay," Peter said dubiously, layering shields over himself with a barely-perceptible blue shimmer. "It does feel a little different, I guess."

"Good," Claire said, and without warning, she grabbed his hand and thrust it onto the burner.

He yelled in pain and surprise, jerking away from her. "Ow, Claire! What'd you do that for?"

"Watch," she said, catching his hand again and turning the half-circle burn marks to the light.

"They're not healing," Peter said blankly.

"Exactly!" she said. "That means it works, right?"

"You're a genius, Claire," Katie said, giving her a one-armed hug. "Now take those shields, off, Peter, your burn is grossing me out."

---

Jonathan and Candice knew the instant Sylar reemerged—he made sure they knew, with a heart-stopping primal scream and an ineffective-but-frightening attack on the flimsy hotel door. His flare of rage lasted only a moment, long enough for them to wonder exactly how much they'd bitten off, and whether they could chew it. After the initial attack, he subsided into an equally unnerving silence, a quiet of such thick intensity that they could feel it through the walls like nerve gas, asphyxiating them.

Candice turned back to her phone call with forced calm. "Did you hear that, Mr. Linderman? That's exactly what we have to deal with. I'm okay with guard duty, I really am, but this is like babysitting a ticking time bomb, and I'm pretty sure you're not paying me enough for that. Besides which, he's a horrible inconvenience—I seem to recall you telling me that our priority was Peter, but what with Mr. Gray hanging around like an uncool charity friend, we haven't been able to do much at all. In short, he's cramping our style."

"I hadn't foreseen this possibility," Mr. Linderman said mildly. "It is indeed a conundrum."

"Understatement of the year," Candice said sarcastically. "I know that protocol for something like this is pretty much to shoot him in the head, but guess what, been there and done that with not even a tacky souvenir shirt to show for it."

"No, I wouldn't want you to kill him," Linderman mused. "Not now. This situation has become singularly interesting—I should very like to study it."

Candice took a deep breath and counted to ten, telling herself that yelling at one's superiors was generally considered a bad career move. "Yes, Mr. Linderman," she said, overly sweet and hoping that he could read the screams between her words anyway. "Very interesting. What am I supposed to do about it?"

"Keep him contained," Linderman said authoritatively. "I'll send someone to pick him up. In the interim, I want you and Jonathan to take twelve-hour shifts watching him and watching the Petrellis. Take no overt action until we take Sylar off your hands, but gather as much information as you can."

Candice flicked her eyes to Jonathan as he came out of the kitchen, a bowl of ramen noodles in his hand, which he was inhaling with a rapidity only seen in vacuum cleaners and teenage boys. She looked at him, her partner, her only ally within five hundred miles, and she very nearly gave up altogether. She forced herself to pull out memories of him crackling with the rawest kind of energy, looking like some surreal demi-god with a bright halo of electricity, and she felt better, enough to answer Mr. Linderman. "Will do," she said lightly. "Tell your delivery boys to hurry."

There was a brisk syncopated knock on their door, and she shot it an annoyed glare as if she could make the knocker leave by sheer force of will. "What?" she snapped.

"Room Service," came a male voice, slightly muted by the door.

With a dramatic sigh, she went to open it. Jonathan, who had watched too much TV and too many spy movies, felt the pit of his stomach drop out with a sudden certainty of what would be on the other side of the door. The bowl of noodles fell from his nerveless fingers, and he reached out as if to stop her from opening it, yelling, "Wait, no—"

But it was far too late, whole seconds and decisions too late, and the doorway framed a person who was quite obviously not Room Service. The gunmetal glint in from his hands was a hint, and the I-mean-business stance and the cold-set jaw, but as always, the giveaway was the horn-rimmed glasses.

It was Mr. Bennet.