“I dunno Walt,” the tall man said, running a hand through his hair, “I gave The Silver Goddess: Reyah a go, but it’s just so slow. Doesn’t feel like anything is happening.” Walter scoffed indignantly as he left his dirty plates behind on the cafeteria table, scrabbling to catch up to Ajax’s long strides.
“Nah man! I know that it seems really slow now, but I swear to God that it’s worth it. Just stick around till issue twenty! Things pick up so quick, and then they form a team and everything!” Ajax turned a questioning eye towards the exuberance of the much smaller man.
“Still, the art is super rough. I keep seeing the art for newer comics in the ads. Is there a newer comic you could recommend instead?”
“Wait, you’re reading the original?” Walter winced, “I guess I forgot to link you the Deified edition…”
Mirah and Aaliyah watched to two boys making their way towards the elevator, Ajax lending half an ear to the excitable Walter.
“God, he never shuts up about that comic book stuff.” Aaliyah muttered, downing the last quarter cup of orange juice and pulling herself up from her spot at the table, making to follow the path the boys had cut through the mess of the breakfast rush.
Aaliyah didn’t wait for Mirah to follow, leaving the girl to make her own way over to the elevator. Mirah, while usually tolerant of Walter’s infatuation with all things comic book and hero-centric, was in absolutely no mood to hear about how ‘cool’ Filmore Sparks’ new console game was.
No. Mirah had just learned of the single most horrifying fraction of a second in Linked history. The killer of heroism itself.
Mirah deliberately dawdled, letting herself fall behind Aaliyah’s graceful saunter. She waited a moment, watching the elevator doors close on the group then waited only a few seconds before she made her own way towards the elevator.
Without the natural imposing stature of Ajax to cut through the crowd, Mirah was left to be jostled around by the rowdy groups, jumping from their tables excitedly and pulling out the theatrics for their friends.
One boy with bright red hair pushed his chair out just as Mirah moved behind him, making her stumble and fall towards the ground.
That was before she was swept up all in one smooth motion, strong arms closing around her body. Then, just as suddenly as they had enclosed her, they set her standing and pulled away.
Mirah turned toward the bearer of those arms and found the same redheaded boy who had knocked her over, wearing an apologetic grin. Confused, Mirah turned towards where the boy had been sitting only moments before—and found the boy sitting there, apologetic worry on his face, flushing pink across his pale features.
“Hey, I’m really sor–” He began, but Mirah didn’t let him finish. She slipped away between two other trainees, standing between the tables and chatting.
“Good going, Casanova.” Another voice jibed as Mirah slipped away towards the elevator.
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“Mirah.” Willem greeted as Mirah closed the door to the team’s training area, his voice quiet but clear. Mirah walked towards the trainer’s voice, and found him in the back of the room, where he sat on one of the fighting mats opposite an unamused Aaliyah. Mirah couldn’t help but quirk an eyebrow.
“I’ve set the others up with their tasks for the day. Come with me.” The short man stood from his spot on the mat and started to walk down an aisle of training equipment against the leftmost wall. “You stay right there, Aaliyah. I’ll be back in a moment.”
There was a scowl of displeasure and frustration from the blonde girl, flopping back onto the mat exaggeratedly as Mirah passed by, following the stout trainer into the maze of unique equipment.
As she was guided down the aisle, she looked towards the right side of the room and saw that the Training Room was in use. She couldn’t quite make out what was on the surveillance screens before her shoulder bumped into something. Looking down, she saw a stoic Willem with hand outstretched, pushing against her shoulder.
“Distracted?” He asked as he stared at the scarred girl opposite him. Mirah paused hesitantly for a moment before nodding.
Willem levelled a thoughtful gaze at the Mirah. It was a neutral gaze, holding no significant amount of any specific emotion. Willem was prone to the action, and Mirah had never found the thoughtful gaze uncomfortable, so she was content in sharing a quiet moment with the man.
“I see. Maybe you should go visit Tracker after training.” With that, Willem seemed satisfied. He turned towards a big board that stood maybe a meter away from the stone wall behind it. The board was a square, about two by two meters. Spaced in a grid pattern along its matte black surface were protruding buttons, slightly clear and rounded. One button that rested in the centre of the board glowed a faint red.
“This is a precog training test. Have you seen one before?”
“No.” Mirah said, prompting the man to continue as she stared quizzically at the board.
“This button in the centre starts the test.” Willem pressed the button and the board lit up, two numbers appearing just above the previously red button, which now glowed green. It currently stated ‘1/10’.
“Now, you can select the difficulty,” Willem tapped the two buttons just to the side of the middle button, raising the number, and then lowering it back to one, “But we will use the lowest for now.” He pressed the middle button and the whole board began to gently breathe with a blue colour, a mechanical voice counting down from ten.
“Your task will be to hit these buttons as quickly as you can, or before they turn on at all.” He explained as the timer hit zero. One of the buttons in the far-left corner of the board lit up in red, and Willem reached out at tapped it, making it go clear once again.
“In the centre of the board, it’ll tell you how quickly you hit it.” He gestured to a number that said ‘1429ms’. Mirah opened her mouth to ask what ‘ms’ meant, but the display re-ordered itself into ‘1.429sec’, answering her question.
“You’ll need to use your precognitive ability to predict which button will light up. You aren’t as powerful a precog as some, so I doubt that you’ll be able to hit one before it turns on, so I’ll set a goal for you to reach for.” Willem ignored the lights that were turning on while he talked and pressed the middle button twice in quick succession, making the board go dark. He tapped the button, set it to the maximum difficulty of ten, and started the countdown.
Willem motioned gently for Mirah to move back from the board, standing a meter behind the stout man in front of the much larger board. It slowly counted down, each number it announced made the board briefly flash red. With a simple ‘Start!’, buttons began to turn on faster than Mirah could even think.
Yet, as soon as the buttons flashed brightly, they turned back to their dull, clear colour. Mirah recoiled, scrunching her eyes together and opening them again, focussing them on the man in front of her.
Willem stood almost entirely still, his knees slightly bent, and his upper body shifting only slightly every few moments, yet his arms were a blur. Every moment the short man’s hands flashed out with blinding speed, hitting the button with a tactile click, before moving on to the next a mere moment later.
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As Mirah observed the test for a whole minute, dumbstruck by the speed of the trainer, she noticed something. He was consistent. Perfectly consistent, in fact. The number in the middle of the board, despite it updating a few times a second, always stayed at the same number.
‘50ms’
That was… obscenely fast. Far faster than anything Mirah could naturally accomplish.
With one last press of a button, the board’s red died down to a mute green, displaying a plethora of statistics. Accuracy, buttons hit, missed buttons, mistakes, average reaction time, and more. The average reaction time graph was a solid line, unbroken and unwavering from that exact ‘50ms’ mark.
“That is your goal. Fifty milliseconds. If you can develop your precognitive ability to where you can beat this, I’ll consider you acceptably proficient with short term precognition.” He turned to Mirah and flashed a small grin before turning to leave Mirah to her training.
“What if I can hit a button before it lights up?” She asked, to the trainer’s surprisingly wide back. It made the man pause and turn an eye towards his trainee.
“Well.” He punctuated the word with a lifted eyebrow, “That would be very impressive.”
Mirah turned back to the board and stared at the graph pensively. Mirah knew nothing about what was achievable as a normal human, but that clearly wasn’t. Though she realised that it was less a display of pure speed, and far more one of precision.
He could go faster than that.
Mirah rubbed at the bridge of her nose and sighed heavily, slumping a little at the task ahead of her. She let her mind rest for minute before taking a deep breath and pressing the middle button, opening her mind to the whispers.
And set the difficulty to one.
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If Mirah had thought herself exhausted before, she was wrong. So very, very wrong.
Her muscles ached in places she didn’t even think muscles existed. It wasn’t even just her arms, it was her legs too. She had seen Willem barely move his body, keeping himself centred to the board, but Mirah was far from achieving the same. She had been jumping at the buttons in the corners, putting herself further and further off centre until she had to put herself back in position, ignoring the flashing buttons.
It was frustrating, tiring and embarrassing. She had trained for hours, pushing herself far beyond how she had before. Before, she had just followed Willem’s instructions, mindlessly running around the track in the main training area.
This time, however, she found herself doing test after test pushing for just a little more speed, a little more accuracy. After hundreds of tests, she realised that Willem had long since left the private training area, gone to attend other duties, she supposed. Though, it didn’t seem that any others in her groups had left either, other than Aaliyah. She had found Ajax sitting on a chair in a corner, squeezing a metal ball. Which meant the Training Room was occupied by Walter. All she could see on the surveillance displays was a blur of fire, blinding the cameras to any real detail.
It seems like everyone was working hard, except maybe Aaliyah.
Mirah stripped out of her clothes quickly, throwing them in a pile on her living room floor, then walking into her shower and turning it on. Mirah didn’t mind the shock of cold water against her warm brown skin, sprouting goosebumps across her arms and legs.
Though, the cold quickly became a steaming heat, and the fan above her automatically turned on to accommodate. For a while, Mirah stood under the showerhead, allowing the hot water run over her face and through her hair. She could feel a small amount of that water finding its way into her mouth through the split in her lip she could never quite pull closed.
After a minute or two of scrubbing her body and hair with an all-in-one shower gel, she turned the shower off and dried herself with a nearby towel. She was in the middle of furiously drying her hair when something caught her eye. She looked up from underneath the towel to see herself staring back.
Mirah was stunned as she stared at herself in the mirror, letting the towel drop from her hands.
It hadn’t occurred to Mirah before this moment, but she realised that she’d never intentionally looked in a mirror, or inspected herself for many, many years. In fact, the person that stared back at her from the mirror almost seemed… false to her.
So much had changed about herself, even if it had only been a few weeks since arriving here. Her skin, which had been a pale and deathly was now a pleasant light brown. Her dark brown hair, which she had kept cropped close to her head with a pair of blunt children’s scissors, was only slightly longer now, but she could see her hair naturally curl at its ends ever so slightly.
Her eyes burnt with a brilliant green, an intensity to them she hadn’t even expected of herself. Her eyelashes were full and thick, along with her eyebrows which were just as heavy. Her face was small and rounded now from the weight she’d put on, though her somewhat high cheekbones helped. Her nose was prominent on her face, but any attention it might’ve garnered was pulled below it.
Her lips.
Mirah’s hand raised to touch them, running her fingers over the long-healed scar she’d left with that piece of metal so many years ago. The permanent opening in her mouth showed a glimpse of yellowed teeth.
Mirah grimaced, not letting herself dwell on the scar, and looking downwards instead.
Her body had… improved. Before it had been an emaciated mess, all skin and bone with barely any fat. But now she could see in the contours of her own body that she was starting to fill out. It wasn’t just fat either, but muscle as well. Her breasts, which were flabs of practically nothing, had begun to fill into small handfuls on her chest. The same could be said for her hips, butt and legs, which were all filling into a pleasant contour.
It mesmerised Mirah, as she stared at this thing that had emerged from her body, so radically different from how she knew herself to be.
It was minutes later when she tore herself from the mirror, staring with distrust at the girl in her mirror. She quickly threw on a set of sleep wear, made her way into her bedroom, turned off the lights and wrapped herself with the thick doona and waited for sleep to come.
But she could hear something. It was a small clicking noise that could have been from anything.
But it kept her awake.
Her moments passed in those little clicks, frequent but irregular in both loudness and timing. Soon, the clicking fell to the back of Mirah’s mind and it was something far darker that replaced it. It was something that had been waiting all day to let itself be known, she realised. It started in her chest, a slight unease that wasn’t severe, but was unshakable.
However, the more Mirah tried to ignore the unease, it dipped lower and lower, deeper down inside of her. She realised that she wasn’t in control anymore, that no matter what she did that feeling fell deeper into the dark pit of her stomach. Her eyes were open wide now, but she wasn’t looking at anything, just feeling the darkness inside of her stomach as it twisted and writhed.
She curled herself into ball, trying to protect herself like she had for so many years, but it wasn’t enough. She was paralysed by it, whatever lurked deep inside. The pain inside her stomach was terrible, worse than the cramps from her heaviest blood weeks, where she had to desperately keep herself clean with the paper napkins and wax paper wrapping she had found in a bin.
It was so much worse. Because the bleeding would eventually stop, but this dark pit seemed infinite.
She was clenching every muscle in her body, she realised. Her jaw was grinding her teeth together, making a rushing sound in her ears, her arms and legs were shaking from the force.
Then, all at once, she saw them.
An emaciated woman slumped against the wall, surrounded with trash and filth, eyes rolled into the back of her head, limbs pulled at odd angles and quivering as she drooled on herself while a monster preyed on her daughter next to her. The sharp edge as it sliced through her skin and scratched against the bone. The fear as a predator stalked past her spot in the trash, and terrifying scramble of movement the moment they found their prey.
The deranged smile of a broken man as he faced a crowd, horror spewing from his lips.Then the pure white of death.
“At the cost of it all.”
Fear.
She was so afraid. Afraid of the world and everything in it, of everyone, even the redheaded boy who had helped her. Even Ajax and Aaliyah and Walter and Willem. Of the boys in the cafeteria that stare at her and her group, or the boys in the gangs. Everyone.
Except two.
There was a sound. A slight shuffling of feet. It was rooms away, coming from her front door, but she could hear it. Her mind soaked it in, the shuffle of slippers on carpet. Then a knock.
Once. Twice. It was two simple raps, followed by a long pause. Then a third. A fourth.
Silence.
The turn of a key, the shuffling through the door and it closing behind them. Mirah was paralysed, she couldn’t move but the horror was palpable, the adrenalin coursing through her veins like no exercise could compare to. The flick of a light switch. She could hear the shuffles drawing nearer to her bedroom. Then silence.
Her sweat drenched her clothes, but she didn’t dare move, not a muscle, not a hair.
Then the door opened, shining a soft light into the room that was harsh in the darkness. Mirah’s everything clenched hard, her eyes screwing shut, not willing to comprehend—
“Mirah?” A tired voice spoke from the doorway. Recognition called to Mirah in the back of her mind, but it was shut out, killed by the fear. The shuffling moved right by Mirah’s bedside, and two items were placed onto the bedside table right near her head.
“Mirah, it’s me. Tracker.” The gentle voice spoke again. This time, Mirah dared to open an eye to see her. It was indeed Tracker, dressed in a thin nightshirt, boxer briefs and a fluffy robe which barely protected her from the cool in her crouching position.
“Tracker?” Mirah whispered, though she didn’t realise she had. Her voice was desperate, almost pleading. Tracker winced but pulled a smile onto her face.
“Hey, sweetie.” Though her voice wavered, she managed to hold it strong. Tracker turned to the bedside table and grabbed something. “Here, it seems you have a friend.”
Tracker held out a small slip of semi-translucent paper out to Mirah who, with no shortage of caution, reached out and took it with a shaking hand.
I’ve sent help, Mirah. And hot chocolates –Chef