Black background with a sad-looking man sitting in a metal chair. He is wearing a long grey coat and ominously lit by a single bulb. Sunset logo along the bottom [https://64.media.tumblr.com/04652698b744278475ccf4ea9ed17284/929fa597efed5d4f-b7/s640x960/b4407715bbc91bec3b9739748b5f55ca317fdb3f.webp]

Sol LAHQ. Neptune Department.

Jake was notified via email that his orientation for the new position in LAHQ would begin a few days later. He’d messaged his (old) teammates that he’d arrived safely and about how big and confusing the building was, but he had been putting off calling them until he had any real news. He was worried that if he couldn’t sustain the conversation with enough good things about this transfer, he’d just get too sad.

The morning of his orientation, he arrived in the Neptune wing and found that the divide between this and his old job was bigger than he’d thought. After clearing one set of secure doors to enter the department, one could either continue straight into the offices that housed Cleanup (his specialty), Retrieval (finding Icarus), and upper management—or one could go down. Floors below ground, one would pass through another, more restricted set of secured doors to enter the Reintegration wing, which was quite literally set apart from the rest of Neptune.

With a tremor in his gut, Jake scanned his ID at the Reintegration door and the light flashed green. Beyond the door, he was met with a large, open office area unlike any of the others, including the other side of Neptune. Reintegration agents sat at individual desks, but had no walls or cubicles to afford them any sense of privacy.

An agent at a desk set right by the door studied his face hard and checked something on his screen. “Jacob del Sol?”

He nodded, throat tight. He’d tried to leave his sour stomach at home, but he knew no one expected that of him at this point in the game.

“Head straight back to the locker room on the right-hand side and get changed. Laura will be there shortly to take care of you.”

“Thanks.” Jake looked around as he walked. Everyone seemed busy at their computers or in discussion. Most were in office clothes like Jake, but a few were in full tactical Neptune Blacks—they must have been a Retrieval team in delivering an Icarus. Reintegration didn’t do field work. As he got closer, he noticed that against the back wall, there was one office set apart from the others. The walls and door were clear glass. Fredericka del Sol, the head of Reintegration, sat at the desk inside. Jake gulped and hurried past.

Walking slowly down the hallway, it wasn’t long before he located a sign on the wall marking a locker room. When he went inside, he was surprised to see it was an actual locker room. Tile floors, rows of lockers with benches, and the smell of soap and steam hung in the air, telling him there were showers somewhere farther in. It was empty, making it slightly less awkward to pace the aisles until he found a locker with his name on it.

As a Cleanup agent, Jake had never really considered it, but it made sense there was a locker room. In Cleanup and Retrieval, the uniform was either street clothes or Blacks in the field or office attire, but Reintegration had their own uniform when they were interacting with Icarus.

Jake opened the locker. Inside was a stack of folded, plain grey scrub shirts, and two long, thin coats hung up on hooks. They were similar to a doctor’s coat, but in dove grey. It set them apart from Pluto’s white coats or Venus’ blue lab coats, but still reinforced the medicalized atmosphere of Reintegration. Which all meant they’d need locker rooms.

Jake swiftly got dressed in the empty locker room, making sure his ID lanyard was clearly visible. The coat didn’t feel like it sat right on his shoulders. A woman in a grey coat walked into the locker room and looked at him. She was tall with dark hair pulled into a bun.

“Jacob? You’re shadowing me today.”

He nodded. “Just Jake’s fine. You must be Laura.” He felt her brush his mind with her telepathy and he returned it, letting her get a feel for his mind so she’d be able to easily identify him later. As the only telepath on his old team, it wasn’t a practice he did automatically yet, but he was getting used to it.

“Well,” she smiled, “you’ve found your locker. You’ll want to get yourself a bag for bringing clothes to and from. You never leave this wing wearing your Greys. And they don’t provide pants, but you’re going to want to bring a pair of pants to wear for Reintegration and then a pair to change into for office work and going home.”

“Do they need to be grey?”

“No, it doesn’t matter, but it’s not like your shirt is the only thing that’s going to end up soaked in sweat, so bring an extra pair of pants next time.”

“Oh.” He didn’t understand that. Like every Neptune agent, Jake underwent Integration, the gentler version for those without offenses against the company, like natural-born people being brought into Sol, but he honestly didn’t remember much of it. Which was probably by design. And while he knew it was ultimately meant as a way to rehabilitate people, Jake knew, as everyone did, it wasn’t pleasant.

She handed him the file she was holding and he took it, but wasn’t quite able to open it.

“I was nervous my first time too.” Her smile was thin, but sincere. She started walking and he fell into step beside her.

“It’s a good first case to have,” she said. “We’ve been working with him for about a month now, five to six sessions a week, so we’ve fallen into a rhythm and he’s responding. It ought to be a smooth session and give you an idea of what it looks like when everything goes right.”

The hallway dead-ended at yet another secure door. She scanned her ID and stepped aside for him to do the same. The doors buzzed open and they went in, passing a security outpost behind a thick glass window. The hallway was wide. Too wide. It was disorienting compared to the rest of the building. The white tile, white walls, and bright overhead lights only made it seem wider. Lined up along one side of the hallway were empty gurneys.

“This is offices,” she said, pointing to a row of doors, her voice a little bored. “If you go right up there, you’ll get to Icarus Containment, which includes dampener holding cells, interrogation rooms, and medical. We’re heading left to the Reintegration rooms.” Jake slid into line behind her, making way for a group of six Neptune agents in full tac gear to walk past them. Jake could tell they’d just delivered an Icarus to the containment teams. Wanting to look anywhere else, he took that moment to glance at the reports until they’d gone by. Thick black marker dotted the page where the Icarus’ name had been redacted. It was replaced at the top of the page with “38C.”

“He attacked a civilian?”

She nodded once. “It was a sexual jealousy thing that got way out of hand. Used his knack. Nearly killed someone.” She looked at him with raised eyebrows. “We see too many of these. Never date a civilian.”

They turned left through another set of secure metal double doors. It was sparse. There were plain doors along both sides of the hall.

“Left is storage, supplies, and decompression. Right—”

“Decompression?” he interrupted.

She waved him off. “For us. For afterwards. The right is Reintegration. We’re a little behind, so you’ll have to see the rest later. We’re in here.”

Jake hesitated, staring off to the left, wondering what could be in those rooms that could make this feel okay, but he reined that thought in and followed Laura into one of the rooms. It was almost bare, all chrome and white. There was one tall metal cabinet along the wall, one rolling stool, and one metal chair. As lacking as his memory was of his few integration sessions when he was eighteen, the smell of the cleaning solution and the familiar sharp sounds of the acoustics made his palms sweat.

“Are there many Reintegration rooms?”

“Just three. We see more incoming agents and natural borns than we do Icarus.”

“How long have you been working here?” he asked her.

She plucked the file from his hands and slotted it into a clear holder hanging on the wall. “Three years. They generally pull you after four years. No one does this work their whole career. Where are you coming from again?”

“Cleanup.” Her eyebrows rose. “I did wipes,” he explained.

She nodded, thinking. “We don’t do much wiping here. Except for pretty rare circumstances, wiping information isn’t an effective means of altering behavior.”

“No?”

“No, we work on the deeper foundations. The things that cause you to make the decisions you make. I explain it as, say, if a friend hit you during a fight and you ended the friendship—but we wanted to mend it. Instead of making you forget the fight, we’d focus on why you didn’t forgive him.”

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

That made sense. It would adjust the present behavior and safeguard against recurrence.

“Can I ask you something?”

“That’s my job here.”

“I don’t understand my transfer. I didn’t request it. Is that normal?"

Her brow lowered. “Well, no, but not unheard of.”

He hadn’t meant to bring it up, but he couldn’t keep it in. “I’ve never passed the psych eval for working Reintegration. I’ve failed it three times.”

She was quiet for a long moment. “Sometimes they see strengths in us that we don’t know in ourselves. Not everyone is cut out for this work, but if you’re here, they say you are.”

“But—”

She pointed to the metal cabinet, cutting him off. “That’s all supplies. And that’s observation.” She gestured to a long pane of darkened glass along one wall. “It’s normally empty, unless you’re in training or it’s a high profile case. There’s a camera in the corner recording as well.”

It was a clear signal, so Jake dropped it and did his best to keep up. “Oh,” he said, following her lead. “I would have expected it to be a two way mirror.”

She squinted at him as though he’d suggested something obscene. “No.”

He tried another tactic and sent her a gentle, questioning thought.

No one wants to watch themselves work, she replied.

The door opened and two men in grey coats came in. One was of middling height with a stocky build, pushing what looked like a four or five gallon covered metal sink on wheels, filled to the brim with ice. The other was pushing in a laptop on a metal cart, and was taller and slim.

“This is Eric,” she said, gesturing to the shorter one, “and Bertram. This’s Jake. He’s shadowing me.” They nodded at him.

“Welcome to HQ,” Bertram smiled. His voice had a hint of an accent.

“Eric is our technician and Bertram is our monitor. You’ll generally keep the same people with you throughout a case, but you’ll have different teams on different cases, if that makes sense.”

“Technician I know,” Jake said apologetically, “but what’s a monitor? I mean, I get that you’ll be monitoring but…”

“I’m the one keeping the bigger picture,” Bertram explained. He leaned against the wall, tapping his pen absentmindedly. “Eric will be busy managing the subject’s physical threshold while Laura’s going to be in the thick of it. It’s my job to watch for physical or telepathic distress and make sure all the agents in the room are actively aware of the subject’s state in the case of hyperarousal.”

“You’ll see,” Laura said with a shrug. “It’ll all fall into place.”

The door clicked open. An agent in a black Neptune shirt held the door as a second agent wheeled a gurney into the room. The Icarus was awake and strapped in, laying down. He was wearing plain white, loose fitting clothing. His face was gaunt with deep circles under eyes and he was several days overdue for a shave. The flaking cracks in his dry lips made Jake’s stomach clench.

“Alright,” Bertram began, his voice soft, “let’s get you up, okay, 38C?” Jake realized at that moment that this was the first time he’d ever had contact with an Icarus. His brows drew together. How could he have only now thought about this, with all the weeks leading up to his transfer? The containment techs were unstrapping him and lowering the guard rails. The Icarus wore black dampener bands on both his wrists.

She and Bertram helped him down off the stretcher and seated him in the chair. It looked more like the Icarus let it happen as opposed to really needing that much assistance. Eric made no move to help, but Jake could feel him watching, concerned, and ready to jump in if the Icarus went unsteady.

Is he sick? he thought to Laura.

No, she replied without looking back. Reintegration takes a lot out of you and in the beginning, we move them everywhere in stretchers. We want them getting as little exercise as possible. Everyone’s safer if we can foster some temporary muscle atrophy.

Jake was starting to sweat in earnest. When it was clear they had him, the agents with the stretcher withdrew without a word. Bertram and Laura tightened the thick, padded straps on the chair, which held him in place at the shoulders, legs, waist, and neck. The Icarus’ eyes resisted their listless rolling and focused in on Jake.

“Who’s that?” he croaked. His voice had a withered sound to it.

“This is Jacob del Sol,” Laura told him, enunciating. “He’s in training, but don’t worry, he’s not going to be in your mind at all. He’s only going to be in mine, watching me work.”

“Hi,” Jake said weakly. What else was there to say? ‘I’m sorry?’ No.

38C’s eyes blinked too slowly, then he turned his face to the wall. Eric opened the large cabinet and the door swung open without a creak. He handed Bertram a blood pressure cuff, pulse ox, and a tangle of nodes and wires.

“So once we get started,” Laura explained while Bertram hooked the Icarus up, “I’m going to make space in my mind so you can observe.”

Jake nodded, watching Eric pull out a large jug of water and a blue tourniquet strip. The water was poured over what must have been almost ten pounds of ice. Eric carefully tied the tourniquet around the Icarus’ forearm, just below the elbow. 38C watched all this with a tired disinterest. Jake’s heart was starting to pound in his ears, but when Laura asked them all, Ready? he nodded anyway. Laura took her position behind the chair and Jake felt the pull of her invitation into her head. He went, taking a passive backseat and let her broadcast to him everything she was doing and feeling.

38C’s mind felt tight. Like trying to pull on a wool sweater that was a little too small. Scar tissue wasn’t quite right because there was no scarring, but sometimes telepathy could leave a mark. A trace. Like a page full of pencil scribblings with one word in ink. Jake felt Laura sifting until she found the spot she was looking for. She touched on a part of his mind and lingered, letting Jake take a moment to soak it in. If minds were organized, straightforward, and unchanging, a telepath’s job would be much easier. It’s not as though they could go to the “loyalty” section of the mind and shore it up. That didn’t exist. The area she was working in had to do with his memories of growing up in the Academy. He watched her take a thought, a memory of a memory, and shift it. Not overwriting it with something new, just nudging it—the way a measurement two inches left or right can change the entire stability of a building. Then she wove an illusion, hijacking the Icarus’ senses and convincing him he was somewhere else entirely, like being in a virtual reality or a dream without realizing it. He thought he was in a city park. A burbling of pigeons could be heard underneath the thrum of traffic. A woman was with him on a bench. She looked as though she’d been crying. “Let’s just go,” she urged him. “I don’t understand it all, but can you and I just disappear?”

Jake could feel the Icarus’ mind churning, conflicted, angry and he could feel Laura’s disappointment. Laura made another adjustment to his deep childhood keystones and ran the scenario again. And again. And again, until his conflicted reaction was of regret and sadness that he was going to lose her. She ended the simulation and wiped it from his mind.

Now that we know which adjustment had to be made, we need to cement this change, Laura thought to him.

Jake opened his eyes. He felt her lean into her alteration and hold it tight. She nodded to Eric, who responded by rolling closer on the stool. He positioned the tub of ice water and submerged the Icarus’ arm past the wrist. At first, there was little reaction, but then Jake could see the heart rate numbers on the monitor begin the climb. With his connection through Laura, he felt the panic and the pain rising. 38C’s muscles were jerking, pulling involuntarily at his bonds. Jake gripped his own fists to hold his ground. He knew it was involuntary, because he was in his head and the Icarus knew for a fact there was nothing he could do that would stop this.

As the heart monitor crossed over 130 beats per minute, 38C began yelling. It wasn’t words really, just a maddened wail. The sound of it in the close metal room was overwhelming and Jake fought to keep his breathing slow and steady. It went on for a long time, with Bertram silently taking notes. When he grew accustomed to the pain and his heart rate began to drop, Eric removed his arm from the ice. He waited for Laura to give him the okay to repeat the process and he released the tourniquet on the opposite arm, which had turned a sick shade of purple. The searing pain as the nerves shot alive began a new wave. When that had resolved, they returned to the ice bucket, this time with about two cups of salt thrown in. 38C was begging now, in between cracking screams. The sound of it wasn’t as difficult to withstand as feeling the thoughts that fueled them through his connection with Laura.

When Bertram called an end to it, they had been there for hours. Jake withdrew from Laura, probably too quickly, and locked himself back in his own head, trying to close himself off from it all.

The Icarus looked catatonic and the others were all wrung through with sweat. Eric’s breathing was a little erratic. No one was speaking. Jake felt faint. He remembered suddenly that they’d been working with this Icarus almost daily a month and his body went cold.

“Excuse me,” he managed to get out, then clamped his mouth shut.

Across the hall, came Laura’s thought, though only faintly beyond the protective walls he’d put up. They gave him pitying looks without judgment as he pushed past the agents who were coming in to retrieve the Icarus.

Jake rushed into the bathroom across the hall and was sick until he felt like he’d heaved himself inside out.

As scary as it was to think that this transfer was some kind of clerical mistake, it was worse for Jake to think that what Laura had said was true—that his superior had seen something in him that suggested this was something he was suited for.

He was supposed to call his team, his old team, that night. He couldn’t do it. He didn't think he could do any of it.

---

Swansea, Wales.

“Do you want to talk?" Reeve asked him.

Alex shook his head, feeling his shoulders tense in the fresh, cool air. "No, I just want to walk."

They walked. Maggie's house was set in a long row of tall, narrow homes on a rounded hill, like books on a shelf. Beyond the street, the hill sloped away steeply and a city lay at the bottom of it, small and grey. The sky was a clouded, dull grey that faded and blended into the edges of the sea at the horizon. The haze made the city look sleepy and isolated, hidden from the world. He wanted that.

Alex drifted off the road, letting his steps drop with heavy thuds over the dirt, and plopped down to sit on the damp grass. He knew he’d regret it later, when his jeans were wet and chilly, but he didn’t care. The void where the gentle pressure of Reeve’s mind used to be hadn’t stopped feeling disorienting. It was lonely in a way and comforting in another.

He ran a blade of grass through his fingers, feeling its smooth surface and the simple Story of warm sun, pattering rains, and cool dew at night. Alex thought to yank it up by the base with a satisfying snap and carry it with him, but stopped himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Reeve scan the road, turning slowly with that slightly blank look on his face. They were alone. Alex stared at the grass around him for a long moment, taking in how deep green it was next to all of this grey, until he felt Reeve settle down next to him.

"You sure you don't want to talk about all this?"

"Yeah," he said, wiping his hand off on his jeans. They were already damp. He thought he’d have more time. He looked at the haze and sniffed. "It's cold."

"We probably won't be here too long.” Reeve had situated himself with one leg splayed out and one knee bent. It looked casual, but the rigidity with which he held the pose made Alex think of store mannequins. Reeve took a short breath and continued, “Once Maggie gets a hold of—"

"No," Alex interrupted him sharply, looking down at the grass briefly. "It's cold. That's all." Alex glanced up at him. He wanted to yell, but mostly he wanted things back the way they were. "It's just cold."

Reeve nodded into the breeze and looked up to track a gull, dark grey against the dull sky. The silhouette of Reeve’s annoyingly serious face was the one familiar thing in the whole landscape and, though the stories of the hill pulled at him, he held onto the now and let his head drop, heavy, onto Reeve’s shoulder. Reeve finally knew better than to open his mouth.

***