"I don't think you ever truly get used to having a Gift, but it eventually does become a part of you.

I remember the first time I used my Gifts without conscious thought. I had an idea, and the next thing I was cognizant of was when I was testing the device's functions. I didn't recall the steps in between until I started digging for them.

It was like driving a car along a road you've taken hundreds of times before, and you realise that you drove without thinking about it.

That scared the stuffing out of me; let me tell you, I did my best to deliberately restrict all my Gift uses for weeks afterwards.

But it's who I am now. I couldn't change it without killing myself, so my only choice was to get used to it."

― Interview with Joined "Meister" #R42MHM217505. April 15th, 2011. - Cycle R42

***

My Command worked on Clara.

It felt like running face-first into a brick wall and exacerbating my already throbbing headache, but I had gotten through. I had made Clara jump. Well, hop. A bit. But I had made her move.

The woman looked disturbed. A nasty sneer appeared as she glared at her feet, but she started to grin when she looked at me.

It wasn't any less disconcerting; she showed far too many teeth.

"Don't ever fucking do that again or I'll rip your lungs out through your asshole, dig out your eyes with a spoon and then skullfuck you. And don't fucking read my mind," Clara threatened, her grin not faltering one bit while she intimidated me.

"I can rip most of the cunts apart with my air bullets. But not if they move too fast. But it'll be piss easy to fucking splatter the disgusting pissflaps if you can stop them. Can you?" She seemed positively giddy.

"I don't think I can read minds," I mumbled, trying to think through the pounding in my skull.

I could Command her.

That didn't track with my pheromone control hypothesis. I didn't know for sure if people were influenced by pheromones like insects were, but I didn't think so. So that left radio waves or the other one.

And the radio waves argument also died a quick death. Unless the spine somehow made Clara susceptible. Except that didn't track with how I Commanded the Bugs; they didn't have an implant.

I think.

Okay, back to square one. To be fair, my pheromone and radio wave ideas were probably primarily wishful thinking combined with panicked semi-reasoning, so there is no use in using them to explain how I do what I do.

Okay, Lana, think it through. Occam's Razor. Law of Parsimony. Sherlock Holmes.

Basically, all are common sense applied logically.

Except, that common sense had left the building together with the concept of the impossible. Which quite possibly made them all borderline useless.

I sighed. I'd already written down the only unrealistic logical solution I could devise while writing my lists.

Fudging Psychic.

Going by what I knew, which admittedly was nothing more than comic books and superhero films, it fit. Now the question was probably why I was so resistant to the idea that comic book superpowers were real.

Because that's bloody insane, and that would make me insane.

"Answer the fucking question, professor," Clara snapped.

I blinked.

Professor? Ah, X.

So she thought my abilities were psychic as well. Not that she'd come across as a great thinker, so following her suggestion wasn't something I'd do without serious thought. Or want to do, period.

Wow. I was twisting myself into a pretzel and being an absolute bitch about it just because I was trying to avoid the psychic explanation.

I sighed again. If nothing else, I could follow where the evidence lead.

Clara had jumped.

She could not have known what I wanted her to do, so she couldn't have done it to screw with me. I'd affected her with what I wanted her to do. I'd done the same with the two Insect-things.

Three instances and two completely different species that gave the same result. Four if I counted lashing out at Glasshand. But I hadn't seen the results there.

Okay, I didn't have even a fraction of the evidence I wanted or needed to construct even a shaky hypothesis, but I could at least call it 'Psychic' and move on from there.

Not that that was any more useful explanation than 'it's magic.'

I groaned. Okay, I could probably hide behind the third law for now and let Future-Lana figure it out. Psychic it is.

"You fuck up yourself even worse?"

I pulled my attention away from my revolving thoughts and tried to recall what she'd been saying.

"Huh? No. Headache. And uhm, yeah, I think I can stop them. It was easier to use the machine this time. I think it gets easier the more you do it. Hurts, though."

"It's a fucking superpower, not any shitdripping machine," She snapped at me, then in an instant calmed down again and continued as if nothing had happened, "That's how it worked for me. The more I used my power, the easier it all became. The smaller stuff doesn't even cause me to breathe heavily anymore."

I opened and closed my mouth, trying to think of something to say. I came up blank and filed away Clara's flip-flopping mental state for later and concentrated on our abilities.

Point one: practice helped make things easier. Good to know.

Point two: ...

"Wait, you need to breathe more when you use your air control?"

Clara nodded and looked at me suspiciously. It took me more than a few beats before I finally realised that my asking for a potential weakness I could exploit could be iffy. Particularly since I'd known her all of twenty minutes and already discovered she might not be in control of her moods, but it was easy enough to defuse after I reminded myself that I needed her to have a chance of living through this hellhole.

"My eyes start feeling hot and infected before their capillaries burst if I push too hard, and there's a burning in my head that feels like someone is stabbing a hot poker through my skull and whisking it around."

Her eyes widened a bit before she nodded, her glare softening slightly.

"Some of the other fuckers I met had something similar. One said he thought it related to what we can do. I do air shit, so I get fucking asthma. You have to see something to mind-rape, so your eyes burn out, and your brain melts."

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

And another lovely way of describing things.

I didn't correct her. I'd frozen the Insectman -no, Bug was a better name- without having to keep looking at it. But if she thought I'd need to see things to keep them frozen, that'd only work to my advantage if she turned out to be a threat.

Huh.

That was the first time ever I'd thought of something so manipulative and was looking at somebody else like they were a threat. Not like an opponent in a competition threat, but an actual threat to my life.

Still, I didn't correct her, even if it made me slightly sick with myself and made a mental note to test if I could start my ability without seeing my target as well as I could sustain it that way.

What the hell was happening to me?

"How far is your completion?" She asked me.

"My what?"

Clara gave me a longsuffering look, then stripped up her left sleeve, where she had a similar bracelet I had wrapped around her arm.

There hadn't been a seam during my casual inspection since after the doctor examining me snapped it over my arm, and I'd been unable to take it off, so I hadn't thought about it much.

Too many other things had been taking priority.

Now that my foul-mouthed rescuer pointed it out, I studied it better than the fleeting glance I'd given it since.

It was a wide bracelet, maybe fifteen centimetres, covering my left lower arm from just above my wrist to halfway up to my elbow. It was almost a centimetre thick, with rounded off ends and the same dull gunmetal grey colour our spine implants were. I knew that underneath it was a rectangular metal implant of the same colour.

I felt around the sides of the bracelet, where it sat tightly against the skin. The skin was slightly cold and numb to my touch, just like around the spine implant. There was no change in contact between flesh and metal, even when I twisted my arm or pushed on the skin next to the implant. It didn't interfere with movement one bit, though.

Before crawling into another rabbit hole of questions, I chalked that up to stupidly advanced tech and resolved to let Future-Lana find out the specifics.

On the outside of my arm side, I found the indent where the doctor connected the cable to their console. There were no actual plugs or connectors, just a smooth dent, nothing else.

On the inside of my arm side, I found two pairs of symbols etched into it from some form of sharp jagged script. Not any letters or numbers I knew.

It reminded me of something like kanji mixed with runes or hieroglyphics. At the very least, the script's harsh, jagged style with almost no roundings invoked a sense of violent martial might.

And for some reason, I knew what they meant. Sort of.

"Do you know what they mean?" I asked Clara

"Everybody does if you look at them long enough. What's your completion?" she pushed.

I filed away how this was even possible for Future-Lana to answer and turned my attention back to the... I'd call them sigils for now.

Each one gave me an idea of what they meant. But it wasn't a single word but an entire concept.

The largest of the four symbols, on the lower left of the bracer, meant something like Assimilation, Mixture, Consumption, Integration, Absorption, or Digestion, which was more than slightly worrying.

The sigil beside it meant something like Lesser, Low, One-sixth, Seventeen per cent, or Incomplete.

The doctors who examined me after the implantation said that my Integration was eleven per cent beyond minimum viable. So, for now, I'd assume that this was what he was talking about.

Now the real questions were;

was the seventeen per cent, including what they called minimum viable, or had my Integration progressed by six per cent?

And how did etched sigils change?

"They change?"

"Only the number ones.

I ran my finger over them and felt the sharp indentations.

So, etched but changeable. Some form of moldable metal?

Future-Lana was going to be very busy figuring all this out. I, on the other hand, turned my attention to the remaining pair of sigils.

Of the other two runes on the middle right of the implant, the left one meant something along the lines of Pressure, Stress, Intensity, Tension, Burden, or Force. The right one implied Dangerous, Starving, Critical, Penetrative, Demanding, Fraying, or Pregnant.

I blinked at that last one. Probably a translation error or a translator who thought all the others described a pregnant woman. Which, well, fair enough.

Still, it told me very little, except when considering that I was stressed out of my mind and that I'd pushed my ability to the point that I had a marching band running around in my head, and the world had taken on a deep shade of red.

How did that help? No idea. But every bit of information was a step forward.

"If you mean Integration," I chose the same word the doctor had used to describe the first sigil, "it's at seventeen per cent."

"Seventeen, that's.. fuck me, nobody I've met was below forty," she grinned at me, "you're adbso-fucking-lutely fucked."

'Why?"

"The shittier it is, the more the powers fucked people using them up."

"It goes up," I said, hoping I wasn't wrong.

"Yep, but slow as fuck. I started at forty-nine. I'm at sixty-three after two fucking weeks."

I filed that tidbit away because mine had increased by six per cent in a few days. Maybe it was different for different people, or the lower it was, the faster it increased?

I added even more questions to the growing mountain.

"What about the second one, any idea what it means?"

"Nope, it tells you how fucked you are the more you use your powers. Then goes down again if you don't. Doesn't change much for me. Any shit-for-brains can tell when they've used too much."

"It tells you your limits?" I ask, surprised that something like that could exist.

"Fuck if I know," Clara shrugged, obviously not caring about something that didn't affect her much.

I'd have to keep an eye on it in the coming days. If that thing could tell me my limits, it could answer so many questions and assist in so many tests.

"How long have you been here?" I changed the subject now that I had the woman answering questions in some sort of stable way.

"Two weeks or so."

"And you met others like us?"

"Yes."

"So, what happened to them?"

"Dead. Or fucking wish they were," Clara answered with finality.

I hadn't expected the shutdown, so I floundered for the next subject I wanted to know more about. Luckily, my stomach butted in with a loud growl, reminding me of other important things I needed.

"Do you have some food and water? I've eaten almost nothing since I arrived here."

Clara glared at me before visibly coming to a decision.

She pulled a packet of what looked like oatmeal bars from a backpack and tossed them at me. I reflexively tried to catch them but flinched when my ribs started screaming again. The package hit me squarely in the face, lighting up the wound covered by the tape again.

I could feel the tears collect in my eyes, but I caught the woman's toothy grin before she took out a canteen and threw it on my lap.

The bitch had done that on purpose.

I grit my teeth to carefully breathe through the new waves of agony, but I wouldn't give her the satisfaction of seeing me cry.

I repeatedly reminded myself that I was dead without her so that I could ignore her infantile bullying. After the pain had receded slightly, I concentrated on ripping the oatmeal bar packaging open. I was only a little disappointed to see it wasn't full.

There were three bars left, and even if every bite pulled at my face painfully, I set to eating the first with gusto. It was a squidgy and tasteless affair. The normally crunchy oatmeal had turned limp from age, giving it a consistency like half-soggy cardboard.

It was probably the best-tasting thing I'd ever eaten. I sipped some water before finishing off the second bar as well. The third I repackaged and put aside for later.

"Get some fucking sleep, Snow White. I'll give you a night to pull yourself together, but we'll need to fuck off in the morning. You need antibiotics for your mug if you're not gonna die of an infection."

She wasn't wrong, but the lure of finally getting some answers was too strong. I could put off sleep a few minutes more.

"Do you know where we are?" I asked the most important thing now on my mind.

"North of London."

London. England. An island. Shit. Alkmaar didn't sound like an English city, so we'd probably have to get to the mainland unless it was Welsh or something.

"How do you know?" I pressed, hoping that it was something unsubstantiated.

"I can read a fucking sign," Clara ruthlessly crushed my glimmer of hope.

"Okay. You heading towards that Alkmaar Fortress thing they mentioned?"

"I fucking need to get back home, so that's the plan."

"Do you know where it is?"

"Don't know Europe."

Okay, we could deal with this. Knowing where we were and where we started from was a clear step up.

"We'll need to find a map. An atlas or something like it. Schools, libraries, something like that should be able to at least allow us an idea of where to head out to."

Clara grunted in what I assumed was agreement. I started chewing on my lip a bit when the other part of being this being London dawned on me.

"I'm pretty sure there was nothing wrong in London last week," I hedged.

"Not our London," Clara answered with a shrug, apparently readily accepting the most recent impossible revelation.

With effort, I didn't push her again about how she knew we were in London but just stared at her while trying to come up with another explanation. She simply settled into a lawn chair and made herself comfortable while I had an existential crisis.

I eventually noticed my sword on the ground behind her, and seeing that I hadn't lost the stupidly large hunk of metal sort of made me feel a bit better. Not much, but a bit.

I sighed again. If she was wrong, then she was wrong, and I'd find out soon enough. If she was right, it just added to the world -ha- of new impossibilities I'd have to deal with.

"Sleep, Kelly. Not gonna carry your limp ass."

I gave her a grunt of confirmation and tried to settle in, making sure not to strain my ribs any more than I had to. They ached, but it was my mind running a thousand kloms per second that still kept me up for hours.

Psychic. In a different London.

What the heck does that even mean?

Fudge.