It doesn’t take that long before I double back and land in that sullen, grimy little alleyway again. Before you ask why I even bothered with the flashy exit a moment ago, it was just to make sure Jade wasn’t on my tail. I love my sister, I really do, and I would split the sky clean in two for the girl, but she also has a mouth. One that moves about several hundreds times a minute if dad walks into her bedroom when he finally notices there’s one less heartbeat in the house. Got about an hour before that, so make it count. Do you really think I would go all the way to Santa Freya just hoping to find one person in the borderline hundreds of thousands that were milling around right now?

I might not get the grades Jade does, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid enough to think that.

I just have to make sure that I throw Jade off my tail for at least an hour. I’ve snuck out of the house plenty of times before, sometimes just to skim through the sky and try to get flying down without being so clumsy, or just because I had seen a gig slot opening up at some dingy dive bar in downtown Saint’s. An hour, it was always an hour by the time dad finds me. He has a frighteningly good ability of just knowing where I am, appearing right behind me like he’s been there the entire time. The walk home would be awkward and silent, and when we finally reach the front yard, he always pats me on the shoulder and smiles, but says nothing else, like a way of telling me that hey, kiddo, you tried your best, but come on. He’s Guardian. The Guardian, protector of earth, hero of war, and seemingly has an in-built Kacey tracker. He catches me again, then I can kiss goodbye to my hero license this year.

It’s a damned good thing that I had seen something that Jade had missed. Her cameras might be fancy, but my eyes are just as good, maybe even a little better. Crouching, I find what I had seen just before I had flown away.

That pink-haired girl didn’t have a teleporter waiting for her. Nothing close to it.

First I find a loose pink thread of her hair on the ground, but not all of it. Just half of it, as if the other half simply isn’t there anymore. It lies half on the concrete and half in the alley, the part in the alleyway entirely gone.

That’s because of the fracture separating the pavement and the space between the two buildings.

There’s a crack deep in the concrete, this tiny hairline fracture that splits the alleyway from building to building, like a jagged little line just beyond the sidewalk’s edge. Once again, I look over my shoulder, seeing a police man strolling down the street, probably on duty making sure nobody tries to get too close to the crime scene. When he glances my way, I’m not where he’s looking anymore, but instead, I’m sticking to the shadows, up close and personal to the wall. He shrugs and walks onward, and I leap back down onto the ground as silently as I can.

Back to the tiny fracture. It does look like the barrier that I had been talking about, and see? I wasn’t just being special by putting my hand out and checking if it would disappear. There was something I wanted to see, to try, and there had been something that happened. For the briefest moment, my hand flickers, kind of like how it would look just before it breaks the surface of some bath water. Wavy, weird, then it’s normal again soon afterward when my hand crosses the barrier and into the rest of the alleyway. I tried walking through it, flying through it, and I know I must look crazy to whoever’s watching me from their apartment, but even running through it was a big no.

There’s some kind of barrier here, something very thin and watery, but also so perfectly done that I would have probably missed it if Jade kept rushing me. The reason that the soot stopped so suddenly was because of it.

Hell, I don’t know—maybe Bubblegum just walked right into it and disappeared that way.

And that can mean many, many things around these parts, but I had my suspicions.

Which is always my least favorite suspicion—a Spellcaster. (That, or a very powerful Psychokinetic, but I’m running off an educated guess here, and I’m not Iron Maiden with her fancy gadgets to scan the damn place).

So I get onto my hands and knees and peer at the crack, narrowing my eyes so much they hurt. Nothing. It’s too thin for even me to see anything. Dad probably would have, and maybe grandpa before him, but I only recently got a hang of my powers without them turning off and on without my permission. It’s frustrating, a little more than aggravating, but I stomach my anger and come up with a new idea. If this really is something that a Spellcaster put up, then you can always tell from the noise. Psychokinetics are very particular with their silence. They force the world to move around them, and because of that, things get pretty quiet because they’re exerting themselves on literally anything and everything they can get their grubby little mind fingers on. So if everything is dead silent…

I shut my eyes and get closer to the thin film separating the alleyway and the sidewalk, thankful to the high heavens that nobody is out on the streets tonight to see me doing this out in public. I focus, concentrating on making my breathing deep, my heart slower, and my focus directly on the barrier that presses against my eardrum.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It feels like a pressure change, and I’d explain it, but I doubt you’ve skimmed the atmosphere before.

So think of it like you’ve just plunged into the deep end of a pool, and suddenly noise is hollow.

But it echoes with the sounds of the city. Footsteps. Voices. Fighting. Crying. Cheering. Everything.

I open my eyes again, and the world rushes back to me, almost giving me a headache. Spellcaster. I sigh through my teeth and stand, working the aches out of my knees, because this is probably going to get messy.

That’s only if I manage to somehow get through the barrier.

A barrier which is very adamant on me not getting through it.

“Can I help you kid?” a voice asks. I turn around and find a tired, chubby looking Asian guy not too far away from me, cigarette in his mouth and hollow bags underneath his sunken eyes. He’s wearing a grease stained apron, and smells like a gnarly mix of dish soap and sizzling meat, which is something I could have gone a long time without filling my lungs with again. “I’ve been watching you run back and forth through this alleyway for five minutes straight. Listen, I know you’re not committing any crimes right now, but…come on, what’re you doing?”

“Uh…” Come up with something good. “It’s this new trend on the internet where you run really fast—”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

I flinch. “Maybe I just like seeing how fast I can run into an alleyway just in case I need to one day?”

He walks toward me and stops right beside me, hands in his pockets as the cigarette keeps burning in the corner of his mouth. A tendril of smoke coils around him as he turns his head from me to the empty, slightly garbage filled alleyway, then back at me. He takes the nicotine out of his mouth, and for a second, I think he’s gonna tell me to get out of here or stop being such a punk and weirding off his customers. Instead, he says, “Looking for her?”

I blink, then say, “No clue what you’re talking about, dude. I just told you that I like running a lot.”

He sniffs, grunts, and flicks his cigarette to his right.

I expect it to hit the puddle in the alleyway, snuffing itself out.

It doesn’t make it a second into the dark before it vanishes.

“What the—”

“Weird, isn’t it?” he says. Then he turns around, heading back to the restaurant. “Anyway, you’re free to—”

“Hold on a second!” I say, making him stop and look over his shoulder. “How did you just do that?”

“I put one leg in front of the other then started walking. I learned how to when I was a kid, like you.”

“Not that,” I say, waving my hand at the empty alleyway. “You just made it vanish a second ago!”

He digs a pinky into his ear, looking like he would much rather get back to his job and his customers than deal with a kid who was losing her freaking mind right now. “Not really sure that you want to know. It’ll be a pain.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And you said you just like running, kid,” he adds, turning around again, walking. “So do that instead.”

I wait for several seconds, my heart in my throat as he gets closer to the door. Something deep inside me tells me that him going in there will be the end of our little chit-chat. I don’t know this guy, but I’ve passed this street so many times that I can probably do it blindfolded. But he’s new. I’ve never seen him before. You come around here and grab your order and then fly home from school. Not because I ignore them. Hell, they know me by name around these parts, I’m damned sure of it. I was even here when the old man who owned the place passed on last year. Whole ceremony and everything, and even then, I hadn’t seen this guy. It was before I got my powers, before everyone in the family finally let me in on the fun little secret they had been hiding from me for a while.

And you know the most fun part about having superpowers? You can hear heartbeats.

This guy doesn’t have one.

“Okay! Okay,” I say. He stops, one hand on the door, the other still in his pocket. The flickering red neon sign written in Chinese above him bathes him in scarlet. I take a deep breath, then scratch the back of my head. “Fine, yeah, you got me. I was looking for the pink-haired chick. The one that just burned up the Easy Mart.”

His hand slips from the door and back into his pocket. “What’re you, some kind of teen detective?”

“I mean, sure, you can say that.”

The guy stares at me for a while, his mouth slightly open and his head tilted. “Huh,” he mutters. And then we wait in silence. A quietness that lasts for a lot longer than I feel comfortable wasting knowing very, very well that dad can crash this party any second now. Then the Asian guy walks up to me again, looks me up and down, and I see the crest of a tattoo just underneath his sleeve before he goes to scratch his chin. “You don’t look like one.”

“What’re we meant to look like?”

He shrugs one shoulder. “Dunno. Smarter-looking, I guess.”

“Calling me stupid?” I ask, cocking an eyebrow.

He waves his hand. “‘Course not. Anyway, I guess you check out. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Running is a lot easier than doing this. Heck, if you’ve got enough energy to keep running, I can give you a job. A lot safer.”

“I kinda don’t like running, I was lying about that,” I say, shrugging. “Just not my thing.”

Then he smiles, showing a line of teeth. He chuckles quietly. “Alright, then try jumping.”

“What do you mean try jumping?” I ask him, looking at the alleyway. “What does that even mean?”

He jumps once, then says, “Like that, but through there.”

You really do find all sorts of people around here. “Why would that make any difference?”

“Well, you’re taking advice from a stranger right now, so why not just try?” he says. “If it doesn’t work, then at least I’ll get a laugh out of it when you splash into the puddle. If it does, then good look, super detective.”

He stands there, dead serious, and I wonder why on Earth I’ve got the heart to trust people the way I do, but I turn and face the alleyway, anyway, taking a deep breath, readying myself to make a massive fool out of myself.

Then I jump.