The sunlight shone thick and heavy against the water's surface.

Somehow I had found myself in the middle of the pool barely able to see because everything around me was painfully bright.

Tiffany was standing at the edge of the pool, still dressed in the blue overalls we were told to wear at the Wedder Gorge facility.

She was talking with several others I recognised.

"Tiffany!" I shouted.

I was thrashing in the water, my body growing heavier by the second. Water was starting to enter my mouth.

I tried calling the others that were standing chatting with Tiffany.

"Abigail! Blain! Mikayla! Sophie!"

Each in their own time took notice of me, but none of them stopped their conversation.

My body lost what little strength it had left.

I went under.

*

It was still dark outside when I woke.

Moonlight peeked in from the window which was within arm's reach of me from where I lay on the bed.

My excited breathing steadied as I realised I wasn't drowning.

What a nasty nightmare, I thought.

That feeling of helplessness and dread which had gripped me in the nightmare lingered. I felt sick, as if I had fallen asleep beneath a ray of light shining in through a window; my whole body felt hot and sweaty and constricted by the clothes I hadn't taken off before falling asleep.

Using my power I increased my vision, causing the room to appear brighter than it was. It had the strange effect of making everything as easy to see as if it were daytime, but with the colours muted to the point of almost becoming gray.

The hump-wound at the back of my right shoulder ached and stung. I must have laid on it pretty hard whilst asleep. I reached back and ran a hand under the green flannel shirt I had been given earlier, and ran my fingers over the hump, noticing the crusty scab-like coating I had used my power to create had become slightly wet.

I wiped the residue from the sap-like juices seeping from the hump off my hand onto the bed.

For a while I just lay thinking about my situation. It took me nearly half an hour of sitting and thinking in the dark to have the sense to open the window beside me by a crack. Cool air seeped into the room. I was thirsty, but Donald and Sienna had asked me not to go roaming about their home without them around so getting something to drink would have to wait.

The memories of all the things I had experienced during my escape from the Wedder Gorge facility forced themselves to the front of my mind. In a way I was helpless and unable to prevent myself from remembering everything that had happened. My mind raced from one scene to another as if determined to make sure all of the ordeal I had gone through wasn't overlooked.

The memories, fueled by the nightmare I had just had, sorted themselves by focusing on one person at a time.

First I thought of Tiffany, remembering how she had cried whilst I stood before her after telling Robert Hoffman and everyone else in the room that I had no intention of going along with the PUNCH program. That memory made me remember how Tiffany and I had drifted apart shortly after we arrived at the facility. I remembered her blemishless, much prettier face and her new, long and shiny hair which she had at first brought about with her power due to her own insecurities about her looks. It was almost as if the Tiffany I had known before, the one who had a shaved head, and normal blemishes; the girl who was easily mistakable for a boy and unfeminine in a lot of her mannerisms; that Tiffany seemed different to the prettier one that replaced her.

I thought back to the helicopter flight we had taken, then further back still to us agreeing to stick together back at the little bed and breakfast we had stayed after the dreadful treadmill torment.

I remembered outrunning Alex Landly, and how it had been Tiffany looking out for me that gave me a semblance of comfort during a nightmarish ordeal.

And further back still, to the pair of us talking on the coach on the Severn Bridge.

To when she had pretended to choke on a piece of tuna and sweetcorn sandwich to create a distraction for three runaway teenagers; which she had done because one of the teenagers had offered her a lighter, which she needed to smoke her cigarettes.

And even further back I remembered first meeting Tiffany and thinking to myself that she was a person that likely wasn't someone to be trusted. Someone it probably wasn't wise to spend my time around.

I was right, I thought.

No, said another part of me, She's not a bad person. She just had to make a hard choice. She put her son ahead of her own wants.

No, she just wanted to use her power to make money. She was clear about that from the start.

It's your own fault for thinking she was going to stick by you through thick and thin. Did you really think she was going to stick to her promise?

Yes, I thought. Yes I did.

In the same way I spent the next hour thinking about the others I had met at the facility, those who had also appeared in my nightmare.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

It seemed to be something my mind needed me to go over, as if there was something I needed to remember or understand about all of the people I had met at the facility.

In the end after lots of thinking I found myself with no sudden revelation from having thought so much about everything that had happened.

Did I really go through all that? I asked myself.

Did I kill that girl that became a were-tiger? Was it me that stayed behind to help those helpless Pied Piper bastards? Had I really witnessed the Adam-George-Amalgamation breaking loose and tearing Dr.Abdullah limb-from-limb?

The more I thought about it all, the more I thought about it. And the more I thought about it, the creeping dread and unease, on top of the sickly feeling I woke up with, took even greater hold of me.

I needed to distract myself from the thoughts that were threatening to send me into a full blown panic attack.

I rose from the bed and decided to search the nearby bookshelf. I quickly found what I was looking for; there was a huge medical textbook which most likely belonged to Donald. His wife Sienna had mentioned he was a doctor yesterday evening.

Need to fix this wound on my shoulder, I thought.

I took the huge medical textbook with me back to the bed and sat cross-legged by the window. It felt good to have the cool air against my skin whilst I sat.

I searched the table of contents of the book and found there was a section on human anatomy, specifically the upper body. I turned the pages and found what I was looking for; an artistic depiction (one which I could only assume was very accurate to the real thing) of the inner workings of the human body; it showed the muscle, veins, and bones, labeling each. Several pages after the first which showed the torso depicted and explained in detail how each organ and part of the torso worked.

My mind was awake, but even so I had never been one for studying. My goal was to fill the gap in my knowledge where it came to the anatomy of my own shoulder, to give me an idea of what needed to be fixed. I figured if I could accurately use my mind to imagine my shoulder being healed by the power, it might work.

I had a theory about how the power worked. If there had been one good thing to come out of my time at the facility it was that I had witnessed plenty of us teenagers using the power in different ways.

What if the power, when used, first relied on imagination? But, as a kind of limitation, what if the more extreme uses of the power relied too much on imagination? I knew what it was like to turn into a were-fox, not to the degree that Adam and Holly and all the rest had when they lost control of their power and became mindless hulking beasts; but enough that I achieved enough fox-like features to magnify my voice to the point I was able to deafen the Pied Piper officers (whether they would forever lose their hearing I wasn't sure.)

Did I know anything about fox anatomy? No. But I had seen and heard plenty of foxes in my life. How much imagination on my part did it really take to lengthen my nails to claws, to grow out my ears, to change the colour of my eyes, to lengthen my teeth, and to increase the vocal power of my throat to be more like a fox? It wasn't that I really became a fox in my anatomy, but more like I changed aspects of myself to create a likeness.

I hadn't considered the idea of growing gills in order to not drown to death when the underground Chellam complex was flooding with water but, if my theory was right, it wouldn't have mattered. I had no idea how gills worked. I just vaguely knew what they looked like. So maybe I would have grown gill-like openings in my neck, but they might have been completely useless when it came to actually giving me the ability to breathe underwater.

Maybe more imagination was used in the absence of actually knowing the intricacies of the thing being done with the power that made all the difference. Maybe Holly, and Adam, and the other revolutionaries would have kept better control over their transformed selves were they better able to understand the animals they had tried to transform themselves into a likeness of?

What had been their intent anyway? They had seen their goal was to integrate their 'shadow-selves', a concept related to Jungian psychology, something I knew little about and doubted the failed revolutionaries, for the most part, knew much about either.

When they tapped into the power had they done so with the idea of taking on their 'shadow-selves'? Maybe then it was no wonder they had lost their minds because, due to the very way they were intending to use the power from the outset, it prompted that loss of control because they wanted to gain power and to be free of their usual inhibitions.

I wished I had a pen and paper to write these thoughts down but I was too set on the task at hand to want to get up from the bed again and look for some.

I found myself staring down at the page in front of me which depicted the inner workings of the human shoulder, and found that I simply wasn't taking any of the information in. Fear struck me, what if I needed to spend the next few months studying shoulder anatomy in order to have a hope of fixing my shoulder wound?

Don't panic, I told myself, you haven't exhausted all of your options yet.

I remembered running through the forests and fields full-tilt yesterday. My mind had somehow kept up with the sprinting speed, enabling me to not trip over the many obstacles in my way. That had been something my mind, were I my normal self pre-power, would not have been able to do.

Which, I thought, Might mean I can use my power to improve my cognitive function too?

This was dangerous. I knew all too well the dangers which came with messing with powers. I had seen the body horrors which could stem from messing around with the power; who was to say how much more horrifying the things which could happen if the power was used foolishly to change what the mind was capable of?

I decided it was worth the risk. I didn't want to spend the next few months, or longer, with a nasty weeping hump on my back.

But what was it I was intending to do? I searched for the right idea and decided what it was I was going to ask the power to do for me.

Help me learn, I thought, much in the same way I had wished for the power to make me stronger when I had learned to coil.

Help me learn. Help me learn.

I repeated this wish over and over again, seeking the unlocking sensation within my mind like I had done for the other uses of the power.

After a few moments I found it, like a solid shape in my mind, like groping for a door knob in the dark and finally finding it.

Help. Me. Learn.

I felt my brain kick into high gear like the revving of an engine. As if I were on some drug I found myself suddenly seeing the contents of the page before me as if for the first time.

I was thinking, but what I was doing was beyond mere thought. I wasn't just reading the contents of the page, I was absorbing it. Not just line by line, word by word, but I could sense a whole spider-like web of different ideas and concepts connecting.

It was one of the most pleasant and exciting experiences ever. It was better than being completely enamored by an incredible movie. Or spending hours lost in an amazing video game. It was like that little light-bulb moment of joy that happens when a friend tells you an interesting new idea that you hadn't thought about a certain way before; but stretched out, magnified, and far, far more exciting.

I finished reading the page in front of me, then turned to the next, and the next one after that. I had only intended to read the pages relating to the torso and shoulder anatomy, but quickly found myself turning onto the next page to learn about the human neck. The more I read, the more I felt like I was having an outer body experience, outside looking in, my body turning the pages and my mind absorbing the information, something completely separate from another part of me; a core part; whatever that might be.

I lost track of time.