Nova collared

You don’t get paid to hesitate. In your line of work, hesitation gets cities leveled, timelines rewritten, and occasionally your superiors very cross. So when the alert came in—an unauthorized atmospheric entry, energy signature off the charts, trajectory pointing straight toward somewhere densely populated, you moved. Fast. Efficient. Invisible. That’s how your agency prefers it: no headlines, no witnesses, no heroes taking victory laps on morning talk shows. Especially not heroes like Nova Star. Who play judge, jury and sometimes executioner, way outside the rules. She wasn’t difficult to track. Glowing contrails tend to give a person away, and the confrontation in civilian office whose owner she had judged a villain went about as well as expected spectacularly chaotic, briefly blinding, and ending with you slamming a containment collar around her throat just before she could incinerate you and your team. Now she’s here, sprawled on the cold wooden floor of the office building that long ago evacuated. Her next location officially doesn’t exist. The glow is gone. The power is gone. All that’s left is a sharp-eyed brunette in a suit, breathing hard, glaring up at you like she could still burn a hole through your skull on principle alone.