In R2, it was a fast three-minute bike ride to General Avenue and the scene of the ‘bus incident’. The windows and door of the real estate agency had long ago been repaired and there were no traces of the bus crash. Except for the concrete bollards that the city council had erected along a few blocks of General Avenue to ensure that no similar accident could ever occur, you would never know what had happened here.

I got off my bike and walked to the spot where I had nearly died a little over a year ago. The memory was still very vivid in my mind and I had a feeling that it always would be. Besides the kidnapping of my mother, it was the most significant event in my life. It was the day that I discovered my abilities.

I had visited this spot several times over the past year, but this time I would be going back into the layers that I had seen when the bus passed through me. Surrounding myself in an L1 field, I shifted to L1 and looked around for the books that I had dropped a year ago. They weren’t anywhere to be found, so I shifted to L2 and found them right at my feet. It seems that I had held onto them until the bus had disappeared.

Much like the blue pen in my experiments earlier today, the books gave off a sense of being out of place. The sense was stronger with the books that it had been for the pen and I made a mental note to verify if the sense got stronger with larger objects. The books were in great shape. They’d been sitting in the road for over a year, but that road was in L2 and so nothing could touch them or cause them to deteriorate.

It felt good to find the books and I held them reverently, like I would a trophy. I had done it. It had taken some time, but I was finally able to do on purpose what I had only been able to do by accident before.

The moment passed and I shifted the books into my R1 backpack before I returned to my bike and rode off, in L2, to a wooded area located about five miles outside of town. Without any need to watch out for traffic, I soon pulled up to the overgrown firebreak in the woods in which I had hidden Seb’s truck.

Shifting back to reality, I pulled off the branches and the tarp that I’d used to camouflage it and I verified that the truck had been undisturbed since my last visit. This area of the woods was rarely visited and I’d made sure, before I’d stowed the truck here, to check at the local parks services offices for the dates of the next clearing of the firebreak. I still had another month before workers were scheduled to cover this area.

With the truck uncovered, I loaded up my bike into the back and shifted myself and the car to R2 for the ride home. It felt good to drive again and despite not having driven for a few months, it felt natural. I didn’t hit a single greyed-out car the whole way. I also ran every red light and blew through every stop sign. I’d have to make sure not to get into the habit of doing that or I’d never pass my driving course this summer.

I parked the truck on the street just outside my house. I removed my bike from the back, shifted the truck to L2 and removed the field from it. Now the car would stay in L2, without me having to use up any energy to keep it there, and I didn’t have to worry that I’d get tired and it would suddenly appear on the street in reality. The truck immediately started giving off ‘wrong frequency’ waves, but I ignored it. I was going to cause a lot more of those waves going forward.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

It was still early enough that dad wasn’t home yet and I had the house to myself. From my closet, I pulled out the duffel bags that I’d used to transport the money that I’d liberated from Serpentine a few months ago. That money, almost three million dollars of it, was currently sitting in between the various walls of my house. I braced myself and shifted to R3. This time I was ready for the short drop through the house foundation and I managed to not fall on my ass. Score one for the good guys! I was getting better at this shifting thing.

Getting the money out of the walls was much easier than putting it in. I wrapped the bundles in a field and shifted them to R3, where they fell into the open duffel bags that I’d set up beneath them. Returning to my room in reality, I threw the bags into the corner of my room and shifted them to L2 and removed the fields surrounding the bags. The money could now be easily accessed, and I never had to worry about dad, or anyone, finding it by mistake. I really liked having my own personal storage universe. It made life so much easier.

With those chores out of the way, I was at a loss of what to do. I was all keyed up from figuring out so many new things about my power and successfully using that knowledge to solve a few of my problems. I needed to do something. To tell someone. But there was no one to share my victories with. My decision to keep this all to myself kept coming back to haunt me. Although I’d given those closest to me a glimpse into my powers, by showing them my ‘land sense’, that was only the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more to tell.

My mood took a turn for the worse as I contemplated my choice and knew that despite my loneliness I wasn’t going to tell anyone about my abilities. The full extent of my power needed to remain a secret. My plans for Shauna and the as yet unknown team were going to piss off a lot of very powerful and well connected people and I had no doubt that they’d come looking for me, if they ever found out what I could do.

As always when my mood darkens, I tried to snap out of it by putting my problems in perspective. Yes, I had a secret that I couldn’t share with anyone, but I had a superpower. Not only that, but my superpower was letting me live my dream of helping victims of human trafficking. If that meant that sometimes I’d feel a little lonely or isolated, then I’d just have to suck it up and move on. I was one of the lucky ones. Some people never lived long enough to reach for their dreams at all.

My mind flashed to Evan, the seven-year-old cancer patient at the hospital ward that I volunteered in a few times a month. A few months ago his condition had taken a turn for the worse and he’d been deteriorating ever since. Before I’d left on the trip with Mark, Evan had asked his parents to stop his treatments. The treatments were making him feel sick and they weren’t working. The doctors had told his parents that he only had a few weeks left to live, a month at best.

I know that you’re not supposed to compare problems, since everyone’s problems are important to themselves, but compared with Evan’s impending death, my issues were insignificant.

Eva and I had planned on visiting Evan in a few days, when Eva returned from trip, but all of a sudden I felt like I couldn’t wait a few days. I wanted to check up on him now. Maybe Evan wouldn’t be there in a few days.