Vicious recap

Ten years ago at Lockland University, two brilliant roommates, Victor Vale and Eli Cardale, decided to test Eli's thesis that near-death experiences under the right conditions produce ExtraOrdinary abilities. Eli drowned himself and came back able to heal from anything; Victor's attempt killed Eli's girlfriend Angie and left Victor able to turn a person's pain on and off. Eli decided EOs were abominations to be destroyed, Victor shot him and went to prison for a decade, and Eli spent those years killing EOs with the help of Serena Clarke, a woman whose voice nobody can refuse. Victor breaks out with his cellmate Mitch, picks up Serena's younger sister Sydney, who raises the dead, and hunts Eli through the city of Merit. The two meet at last in a cemetery. Eli kills Victor; Sydney brings him back. Serena is shot dead, and with her compulsions broken the police finally arrest Eli, who cannot be killed and so is locked away instead.

The story runs on two tracks at once. In the present, Victor Vale has broken out of prison after ten years with his cellmate Mitch Turner, an enormous tattooed computer specialist who is nothing like the thug everyone takes him for. They are moving through the city of Merit with a quiet thirteen-year-old girl named Sydney and a dog, and Victor is looking for a man called Eli. Victor is an EO, an ExtraOrdinary: he can reach into a person's nerves and turn their pain up past bearing or switch it off entirely, including his own, which he tracks with marker on his skin. Ten years earlier, at Lockland University, Victor and Eli Cardale are roommates, rivals and something close to friends: two exceptional pre-med students competing over grades, and over a thesis. Eli's argument is that ExtraOrdinaries are real and reproducible, the product of a near-death experience combined with adrenaline and sufficient will, and Victor, who has spent his life being unimpressed by things, is interested.

At Lockland the theory stops being theoretical. Eli tests it on himself first, and Victor is the one who brings him back; Eli returns able to heal from any injury, fast and completely. Angie Knight, Eli's girlfriend and Victor's lab partner, is drawn into the work, and Victor, who is in love with her and will not say so, wants his own turn. In the present, Victor's household of three settles into an uneasy routine: Mitch runs the research, Victor works out where Eli has been by reading the bodies he leaves, and Sydney says very little. Sydney is an EO herself. She died and came back able to bring the dead back with her, which is why she was shot and left in the snow, and why Victor picked her up off the roadside rather than driving past.

Victor takes his own turn at dying, with Angie helping, and it goes wrong: Angie is killed, and Victor comes back with power over pain. Eli holds Victor responsible, and something in him settles into certainty: EOs are not people who came back, they are wrong things wearing people, and destroying them is a duty. He starts with Victor. Victor shoots him, repeatedly, and learns that Eli cannot be shot to death. Only one of them ends up charged with anything. Victor goes to prison for ten years for Angie's death, and Eli walks out of it clean, with a new surname, a mission, and a decade of freedom in which to carry it out. Everything in the present follows from that ledger.

In the present, Eli has not been working alone. Serena Clarke, Sydney's older sister, died before Sydney did and came back with a voice no one can refuse: anyone who hears her does what she asks and believes they chose it. She has spent the decade steering Eli, and steering the people who would otherwise be investigating him. It was Eli who shot Sydney, and Serena who told him to. Victor, now out and armed with Mitch's research, hunts Eli by finding the EOs Eli is hunting, and recruits at least one of them by taking away pain that no doctor could touch. The two men are closing on each other through the same city, and both of them know how the other thinks.

The last day narrows fast. Detective Stell, who put Victor away ten years ago, is working a string of deaths he cannot explain, and is being nudged in directions that are not his own. Eli is being protected by a voice he cannot hear as a compulsion. Victor sets his trap with the pieces he has: Mitch, who has stayed out of loyalty rather than obligation, a recruited EO who owes him relief from pain, and Sydney, whose ability is the one thing on the board that neither Eli nor Serena has accounted for. Sydney is being pulled from both directions, by the man who took her in and by the sister who let her be shot. What Victor is planning requires him to be exactly where Eli wants him.

It ends in a cemetery. Victor puts himself in front of Eli deliberately, and Eli kills him, which is the part of the plan Victor did not share. Sydney brings him back. In the same confrontation Serena is shot dead, and Sydney, asked to raise her, refuses: she chooses Victor and Mitch over the sister who decided she was expendable. Serena's death unravels every compulsion she was holding, including the ones that had been keeping the police pointed away from Eli, and Detective Stell arrests him. Because Eli cannot be killed, he is not tried but taken away to be held and studied. Victor survives, but the resurrection is imperfect, and what came back is not quite what died. He, Mitch and Sydney leave the city together: a convict, a killer and a child who raises the dead, with Eli in a cell and Victor's own body an open question.

Victor's plan works by putting himself where Eli cannot refuse to come, and it costs him his life: Eli kills him. Sydney, who has spent the book being told what she is worth by two men who want to use her, brings him back. Serena is shot dead in the confrontation, and Sydney refuses to raise her, choosing Victor and Mitch over the sister who had made her disposable. With Serena gone, every compulsion she was holding in place falls away, and the police who had been quietly clearing Eli's path stop clearing it: Detective Stell arrests him, and Eli, who cannot die and cannot be executed, is taken into custody to be studied and contained rather than tried. Victor comes back damaged. The resurrection is not clean, and the man Sydney restarted is not exactly the one who died. He, Mitch and Sydney leave Merit together, a family assembled out of a convict, a killer and a child who raises the dead, with Eli locked away, Serena's body left where it fell, and the question of what Victor is now unanswered.