Mirah struggled back to her room, her body and mind having slowly devolved to the mess of exhaustion that you’d expect from having trained more than twelve hours consecutively.
It was possible that it was part of the cost to her link, one that had gone unforeseen until now. Tracker had warned them of that likelihood, that they may just find a physical cost to pulling on that power, but Mirah doubted that was the case here. It was the more familiar kind of exhaustion, though exacerbated thoroughly.
Mirah’s trudging steps led to the elevator, and while the linktech machine took its precious few seconds to climb to her floor, Mirah simply pondered. It wasn’t something she especially enjoyed doing, more interested in reacting to the world that surrounded her than a possible future that didn’t, but her link wasn’t exactly giving her much of a choice in that matter.
Honestly, Mirah had started to see the irony in her being the one with a link like this, both precognitive and capable of messing with possible futures. She’d understood the basics of her link for a long time now but watching June’s face light up in understanding as she realised that Mirah had manipulated the future itself was oddly reaffirming.
Mirah had shared the woman’s shock mostly because of the extent to which she had manipulated the future with her link. Not only was it a future that was—for all practical reasons—extremely unlikely, but it was also something that she’d had to pull together with precision that she’d been unsure her link would even be capable of in the first place.
Mirah, the girl who was so caught up in the present, laser focused on what was happening in the here and now, had been given a link that focused entirely on the possible future. The irony wasn’t lost on Mirah, not even slightly. Though, it did make her wonder just what had influenced her gaining this link, what specific concoction of thoughts and circumstances gave her access to such an immensely odd link.
Odd but, as she was coming to realise, potentially incredibly powerful. As of now, there was a lot of limits placed on her ability to be able to do what she’d done with June on repeat. For one, comprehension. It was a particularly important part of what made Mirah capable of even predicting June’s movement.
Mirah could slip into the black space that held the webs of golden lines at a moment’s notice. It took the effort of a simple blink, giving her immediate access to viewing of those moments of the future. But not all of them were like the tree that she’d slowly pruned June’s web into. The simple reason for this was that Mirah had cultivated a repertoire of June’s actions and slowly refined likelihoods, leading to the more linear visualisation of the bouts with June.
However, Mirah wasn’t going to be able to do the same with everything and everyone. That comprehension was her power, and that would mean that she’d be at a massive disadvantage against situations and people she didn’t understand correctly. This would, naturally, call into question the validity of her precognition, or if it was inherently flawed, and the answer to that was yes and no.
She could see everything that someone was capable of in any given moment, and that in itself was an astounding advantage regardless of how you cut the cake. However, it also meant that she could see the infinitesimally unlikely events in someone’s web, and each permutation of a single action a thousand times over.
In that way, her ‘future sight’ as some called it, was more of a vast array of possibilities than a specific future like some were capable of seeing. One man, in the United States, was capable of seeing the best and worst future of any given situation three times a day. His link, as well as many others, were classed in the court of public opinion as a ‘kingmaker’ link. He reportedly sells one of his charges each day for a sum of money so large that you’d have to recount the zeroes at least a few times.
Mirah did not have something so clear or distinct, and instead of a hard limitation with her future sight, she had too much freedom. Which, while incredibly difficult to navigate, gave her an extremely interesting option for growth, one that was clearer than what you’d expect from a link that was so inherently bizarre.
As the elevator opened to the eighth floor, letting the soft and comforting smell of the clean carpets and the gentle smell of what Aaliyah had told her was lavender, she walked out into the corridor and began to make her way towards her own room. Yet, on the way to room number one, she heard the sound of muffled voices.
This wouldn’t be so strange, usually. Ajax and Walter had a history of spending nights together doing whatever Walter was excited about at any given time, but the distinctly crystalline voice intermixed with the more normal sounding female voice coming from Ajax’s room was certainly not normal.
Mirah stopped outside Ajax’s door, number two, and opened her ears to the sounds within the room, trying to catch what was being said. However, the walls dampened the sound too much for her to realistically be able to understand the words that the voices of Jamie and Julia were sharing. In a last-ditch effort, Mirah opened her mind to the webs of golden lines, then seeking the actions of their mouths, desperately trying to determine what was being said by mouth movements alone.
That was, as Mirah soon found out, a laughable idea. All the got was a deluge of white noise and incomprehensible tongue, lip, and facial muscle contractions that Mirah had no hope of actually understanding. Maybe if she was able to read lips she’d have a vague hope, but the training she’d need to do for that…
Mirah swallowed gently before she gave up on any alternate methods and just decided to take decisive action. Mirah clasped her hand around the doorhandle, not needing to wait for Ajax’s keycard to open the door with it being given a grace period to allow others to move through the door within a time after the key had been used.
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She swung the door open, revealing a bright room with a straight line of sight to the living room where four people sat. Ajax and Walter sat on their chairs while Julia and Jamie sat comfortably on the couch. Those in the room broke from their conversation, turning to look at the sudden onlooked with surprised expressions, though it quieted to befuddlement when they realised it was Mirah.
Mirah spent a few more moments looking into the room, peering at each of the occupants with neutral eyes, before deciding to move into the room herself, closing the door behind her. Each of them looked at her hesitantly, more surprised by the suddenness than anything more sinister.
She quickly found her usual seat, sitting in it and barging into the conversation with the subtlety of an elephant.
“Uh,” Ajax began with a slight hitch in his usually smooth and calm voice, “good evening, Mirah?” What was meant to be a simple greeting instead came out as more of a subtle question than anything.
“Good evening.” She replied quietly, looking at the confusion on her teammates faces, also towards the two women who both seemed really uncomfortable with her sudden presence. Walter grimace slightly before opening his mouth to speak, yet before he could the door that Mirah had walked through moments before clicked as it locked itself, the grace period ending and cutting the cord of silence.
“Mirah…” Walter said, recovering from the shock of the intruding sound, “you know you could have just knocked, right?”
Mirah turned to look at him, eyebrows furrowed slightly in a silent question. Though when no answer made itself evident, she just nodded, taking the words and seemingly disregarding them. Of course she knew she could have just knocked, but she hadn’t needed to knock before, unless the door was locked.
“What are you talking about?” She said simply, flat tone obliterating the awkwardness of the situation and propelling it forwards.
“Julia and Jamie here were just asking us questions.” Ajax said kindly, his voice having regained its calm as the man acclimatised to the presence of his team member. “Mostly about our training so far and what we were up to before training.”
Mirah nodded. It was a conversation that seemed pretty standard, even if her own team hadn’t really talked about those topics casually. There was far too much darkness in each of their pasts for them to break the topic so casually. Each time the topic had come up, one bombshell or another had been launched and subsequently landed on the group dynamic for at least a while. The same had happened only days before with Aaliyah’s own past being unveiled.
The scarred girl turned towards the other two women in the room, giving them a questioning gaze like she had to Walter. Both of them tensed to some degree, with Julia’s discomfort being less noticeable than Jamie’s by a lack of a face to emote upon.
“Well, uh, yeah!” Julia said quickly, trying to surf the wave that was being given to her, “We were just interested in knowing how all this came about, you know? It’s not normal for Undefineds to get training in Australia, let alone sponsored with enough backing to get them up here.” Julia let a small appendage form on her surface, quickly gesturing to the room and the floor that it was on.
“Was it a corp?” Jamie blurted, the words bubbling out of her like a shaken up soft drink. Immediately Mirah twigged to the other girl’s goal. This wasn’t just a friendly conversation; this was an information gathering attempt. Mirah wasn’t the only one who realised this, and in a moment, Walter’s expression soured. Not into hostility, mind, but the man’s quiet features became a little harder, more impassive than Mirah had seen on him even when they’d been having emotional conversations.
“No.” Walter said clearly, taking the reins from Ajax and inserting himself more assertively than he’d been outside of dire, personal moments. “We haven’t been told who we’ve been sponsored by.”
“You haven’t been told, or you haven’t been told?” Jamie said quickly, dropping the pretences and moving onward with this line of thinking. Julia, in as good a rendition of mortification as possible, reached out and slapped the other girl on the shoulder. Apparently, it’d been hardly enough to make the scaled girl even blink.
“We don’t know who our sponsor is. We want to find out, but there aren’t many ways for us to actually get that information, not legitly.” Walter continued, not allowing the annoyance in his chest reach his face. For some reason, it was the subtle accusation of him being a liar that had riled him up. The other part of that equation was that she was effectively implying that they were here under gang money, and that was just about as offensive as it got to Walter.
“Why?” Julia questioned gently, taking over from her abrasive friend, “It doesn’t really make much sense for some to front up the probably ridiculous amounts of money to set you up here with the trainers you have for no reason.”
“It doesn’t,” Ajax intoned, his voice deep with contemplation, “Walter did some math the other day and came up with somewhere in three million–”
“Thirty million.” Walter said quickly, interrupting the other man before scratching at his clean-shaven face awkwardly, “Including estimates on Willem and Tracker’s fees.”
Even Mirah was flabbergasted by that number, despite not having the greatest grasp on money, having never used it more than a few times in her days in squalor. Thirty million was a number that handily surpassed Mirah’s comprehension, leaving her hopelessly trying to understand just how large a number that was, and what it could possibly buy.
“God damn.” Jamie whispered, the visible parts of her face slowly draining of their colour as the words leaked from her mouth.
“Indeed.” Walter said with an expression that just about screamed ‘I told you so’, “If we knew who it was, or what company it was, then it’d probably be advantageous for us to just come out with it, scare off some of the more… hostile trainees.”
Walter’s words were pointed and left not much up to question. Jamie visible grimaced, feeling the burn from her own misguided inquiry. Though even still, Mirah could see the deep-seated confusion int eh other girl’s eyes. It was a mystery, for sure, and even Mirah was starting to get annoyed with it hanging over their heads constantly.
“They paid to have a team of Undefineds put together.” Mirah said, breaking the silence that she’d held since inciting the conversation in the first place. “And the AASAU broke their rules to make it happen. They are ‘Big Fish’.”
With that succinct breakdown of their situation, laying those cards on the table and displaying the few points of understanding that they had, the two girls were left with the same burning question that Mirah and the rest of her team had been sitting with since this all began.
“I– Well, sorry.” Jamie said with a little bitterness, but quickly powering forwards with an adjustment of the thick rimmed, circular glasses perched atop her nose, “But… uh…” There was a slight groan from beside her, Julia’s voice chiming with its crystalline quality.
“What she means to say is, ‘Would you like us to try and help?’”