It’s funny what you remember the moment before you’re going to die. Everyone says your whole life flashes before your eyes. But that’s a lot of information to replay in what might amount to no more than a few seconds. I’ve always wondered—does time slow, or do thoughts speed up?

First, I remembered a time I was at the beach. When I was a little boy and Mami held one hand, Papi held the other. Last, I remembered the day I decided to get strong enough to climb the tower.

***

I’m three years old. The water reaches my chest, but only their knees. They swing me over the crashing waves. I feel the tingle of their magic as they hold me up just a little longer than gravity wants. For a few seconds it feels like flying.

Then the sea swells and I splash into a wall of water. The wave crashes over me, but I don’t mind. I’ve done this before and there is a pretty song underwater.

I sink to the muddy, sweet sand of the bottom. The current pulls me head over foot, and the world is the inside of a washing machine. I feel the smooth and rough and wet. Sand gets in my mouth and scratches my back. Eventually, I kick off the bottom, slimy sand catching between my toes as I launch to the surface and gulp a lungful of air and I’m coughing and laughing with burning red eyes, shouting. “Again, again!”

“Estás bien, míjo?” – Are you okay, my son? My mami asks.

“Coquí is fine, especially if he is asking to do it again,” my papi says.

I turn away from them and stare into the deep.

“I can hear a voice in the water,” I say. “She’s singing.”

“Maybe your magic is coming in,” my papi says. “Like your teeth.”

“It’s about time,” my mami says.

***

I’m five years old. It’s after my parents’ divorce, my magic is weak, it hasn’t come in yet like it should, and Mom is worried. My parents are both Magician Special Agents. Federal Law Enforcement Officers working along FBI and local police to stop bad guys. Drugs, human trafficking, necromancy. They stop important crimes. They’re above average. I’m far below average. What will people think?

Mom has the call on speakerphone. I’m leaning with my back to the shut door. She doesn’t know I can hear her.

“And what if he stays like this forever?” Mom asks, her voice is weird when she talks and jogs on the treadmill. She’s trying to lose weight. I think she looks fine, but that’s not good enough.

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” he says. “You need to give him time and relax. He can feel your stress.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down, Vic. You know I hate it. Lorena’s son is the same age and he already do half a dozen cantrips. And the way Coquí looks at me. It’s like he’s telling me it’s my fault.”

Mom called because she still needs him, even though she’s angry at him. She doesn’t want him to know how much she needs him. I can feel it.

She’s scared I’ll be less. She’s scared I’m broken. I don’t blame her.

“He’ll find his own way, give him time,” Dad says. “I’m sorry I can’t come over. Lizzy needs me to watch over Jan while she’s breastfeeding Pierre.”

I haven’t seen Dad in months. He has another family. Two kids. One more will come in less than a year. He’s too busy to see me. Another broken promise. But at least he believes in me. That’s something.

***

I’m seven years old. My therapist says I’m a strong empath, but with little magic potential otherwise. My gifts are all passive. I could make a good mental health counselor someday, but I’ll struggle to perform practical magic. My body doesn’t seem to produce much mana on its own and so I have very little available. I might have to learn to do some basic things manually.

Kids at school are cruel. They laugh that I can’t do simple things like turn on the hologram during story time, and that I can’t use the pencil sharpener. They call me frog boy. I lay in bed and listen to the rain and the frog song. That beautiful two-tone whistle that is unique to my namesake. Co-quí! Co-quí!

For the first time, I try and hate the sound. But I can’t hate the sound.

Co-quí! Co-quí!

They’re singing for me. Thousands of tiny creatures of the night, falling from the sky, then singing my name. They calm my hate, and then put me to sleep.

***

I’m eight years old, and this Magical Empathy, this heightened ability to sense and feel what others are feeling? It means I need to wash the dishes and clean my room by hand. It means I’ll never be able to use flying magic for myself. It means my books on the adventures of Indiana and his Intrepid Company are a waste (according to Mom.) Watching movies about the Tales of Sky Captain Cid and his Cloud Crawlers are as close as I’ll ever get to being a hero. It’s not that big a deal, is it?

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Something inside me is sleeping and I don’t even know it.

***

I’m twelve years old. Fernando is my mother’s boyfriend. He has a red mustache and a face scarred with pocks and crisscrossed gashes. He looks grizzled, but when he smiles, he has roguish charm. He feels solid and dangerous, but not toward me or my mother.

“What happened to your face?” I ask, knowing intuitively he won’t mind the question even if Mom looks at me like I’m being rude.

“Bad guys,” he says, sounding proud. “Don’t worry. I took care of them.”

“Nando!” Mom says indignantly. “He’s just a boy.”

“Almost thirteen, right? He’s practically a man. I got more of these bad boys all over. You want to see?”

My mom leaves us alone, then goes to fix dinner.

This experience is strange. The way Fernando and I are speaking—man to man – It’s something I haven’t had a chance to do with my own father.

Fernando is an agent like my mom. Only, he was once an adventurer proper. That’s where he got most of his scars. He delved dungeons and even tried his hand at La Torre in Miami, the famous Labyrinth with infinite floors.

“Well, I don’t know if La Torre is really infinite—but no one’s ever reached the top,” he said. “There are only a handful of dungeons in the word that have never been captured (that we know of). I lost three fingers on floor 55 fighting a lightning drake. And Broc—he was our shield. He went down covering the rest of us so we could get out. I quit the life after that, only to discover that people --- well, they are worse monsters than monsters.”

For the space of a second, I feel a bubble of despair and pain percolate to the surface of memory. His eyes snap into focus.

“That’s right, your mom told me you knew some empathy,” he says, grinning, and then sense of connecting to his emotions vanishes.

It surprises me. It is the first time since I was three years old that I’m in the presence of someone whose emotional canvas is completely blank.

“How did you do that?” I ask.

“Most people’s minds are untrained and open,” he says. “But mental defense is important in my field. The best adventurers and mages can do a lot more than defend. The mind is more important than strength. Especially in a dungeon."

"Even in The Tower?"

"Especially in La Torre.”

He puts up his hands in my face, confusing me. Until I realize he has all ten fingers.

"You said you lost three fing--"

“It’s an illusion.”

He put one of his hands down and the one in front of me began to change. The first three fingers of his right hand fade into something else. Prosthetics of some kind. Black and rubbery. Then they fade back into normal fingers as the illusion returns.

“There are enchantments that can create similar illusions, but I do this one myself. There are even some places I could go to grow them back. But keeping them this way… It reminds me of what I lost. It’s my way of honoring Broc and small penance for my stupidity. I got cocky. I let us go into a dungeon under-prepared.”

“Do you regret becoming an adventurer?” I ask.

He looks at me for a long time.

“Try and pierce through my mental defenses. Break through and tell me what I’m feeling.”

“I’ve never tried that before. “

Fernando insists I humor him and do so anyway.

I poke blindly around the hole in the universe emptiness that sit in place of this man’s emotions, feeling for whatever is blocking me. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I keep doing it anyway, even while Fernando talks.

“People told me that I couldn’t be an adventurer,” he says. “They said I was weak and that I wasn’t suited for it. First, I proved them wrong. I got strong. For a while I was almost famous. I got rich. I had a bad dungeon crawl. Then I quit. Do you think I proved them right in the end?”

I shrugged. I was concentrating on the task at hand. The sense I had only ever used passively until now, felt like an invisible muscle. I visualized my empathy like a gentle hands, fingertips brushing gently against… there was something…

“That’s it right there,” he says, pulsing excitement. “You could feel it, right?”

I nodded. There was something solid and buzzing, somewhere deep, between his eyes. Not in the physical world, but there. Later, I learned it was magic. For a moment, I could see it. The threads of magic that made everything.

“How do I break through?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “They say it can’t be done.”

“What’s the point, then? If it can’t be done.” I ask, the colors fading.

“What if I just lied to you,” he says. “Or what if I think I’m telling you the truth, but I’m just mistaken?”

“Huh?”

“People and the world want to write your story for you—they’ll tell you what you can and can’t do. What’s possible and what isn’t possible. You can sit there and let them. You can be passive. A victim. You’ll be alright in the end. Some people will pity you and take care of you, if you want.”

His words strike a chord of anger inside me. It’s a little like waking up.

“I don’t want to be a victim,” I say.

I can feel something happening to my emotions -- a pressure, a flutter, a tingling. Like what a can of Coca-Cola might feel after shaking it. It feels like potential. I push the energy somehow, snapping open the can. The invisible limb of my empathy swells.

“Do you want to let people tell you what you can and can’t do for the rest of your life?” Fernando says, his voice steely and full of bitterness. “Do you want me to feel sorry for you?”

“No way,” I say through gritted teeth. I didn’t know I had so much rage pent up. So much resentment, spilling out of me in a concentrated stream.

I hate the way my mom pities me. I hate the way kids at school feel pleasure and euphoria when they bully me because I am different. Because I couldn’t use the mana-activated pencil sharpener, or turn on a light switch from across the room? Because I can’t cast a simple cleaning spell on my desk? Because sometimes I got overwhelmed and put my head down? Why should that mean that I am less worthy of friendship? Why should that give them license to hate me?

My empathy feels more concrete than it ever has. It’s not passive. It is a fist gathered around the hard bead of something—Fernando’s magic defense? I visualize bringing another invisible hand to bear. Now two of my metaphysical fists work around the bead. It’s so small in my… mind hands? I twist them around the bead until it sits between the hard fingernails of my metaphysical thumb and forefinger… and squeeze.

It cracks open like a walnut.

Fernando winces and lets out a groan.

As far as the world knows, you’re not supposed to be able to hurt someone with magic empathy. That’s just ridiculous. What I’ve done is something different. But I don’t think about the implications. Right now, I just feel. For a few seconds, Fernando and I are linked in a way that I’ve never been linked with anyone. And I understand. Yes, for a few seconds I understand everything.

The connection fades. It takes a few minutes until I am certain that my feelings are my own. Then I tell Fernando about my new dream to become an adventurer. It’s a dream I didn’t know I had.

Strange that I would be so compelled and inspired by a story that seemingly ended with failure. Fernando looks weary, but I can tell he’s impressed. I’ve done something interesting.

“Hey, you think I could climb the tower someday?" I ask.

"Who knows? You want to?"

"Yes,” I say. “I’ll capture La Torre. Will you help me?”