Ugh. It was like digging into a cadaver. I mean, the guy was alive, but whatever system they had him linked to was barely keeping his brain active, and there were literally vast sections of his body that were barely kept from rotting, including his lungs and digestive tract that apparently hadn’t been used in weeks subjective time.

I was busily scanning. Okay, blueprinting his entire body wasn’t going to work. His cell structure was already memorized, but I was going to have to build this up and fill in the blanks as we went along.

The suspension alpha was named Timesink and was capable of freezing baseline humans and low-powered alphas in time bubbles. An incredibly useful nonlethal power set, probably much more useful than mine, but she’d been running herself to exhaustion nearly every day for weeks keeping this near-cadaver preserved. A cute Irish brunette, except for the overly pale skin and the dark spots of exhaustion under her eyes. She was a solid class four, which meant thousands of energy, but she’d been running her physical body to exhaustion controlling her power.

I looked at her after several hours of her maintaining the suspension, and she looked wiped, her eyes closed as she sat near him with her hands on one withered arm. She could do it at range, but that required more power and control than touching him.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” I said to her, as her eyes opened at my words.

“The deal?”

I nodded, “This is gonna look pretty awful. He’s going to look like he’s disintegrating into gas. Normally it would be instant, but with your time compression, you are going to be able to watch the lovely process as it occurs. I know what it looks like, because my power has time compression attached to it also, and it’s ugly… like throw-up ugly.”

“I am suspending his active molecular structure right here.” I tapped the side of my head. “Including the memory and energy imprint of… well… whatever keeps him alive. I like to think of it as the soul, or the spirit, but I know it works because that’s how I preserve myself when I apport. That’s basically what I am doing, apporting him while I reconstruct his body minus some of the problems, and hopefully, his nervous system intact, although he might need some time and retraining to do certain things, like talk.”

“When I say drop the shield, drop it… that should get him breathing again, which I will need for the last part of the apport, resetting his energy pattern. If you leave him in the suspension field, I can’t reattach his pattern, and if it takes too long, the pattern will dissipate and go wherever… you know… dead people go. You will be left with a perfectly functional living body, but no one will be home.”

She nodded, nervously, “You know, Wallace Maxwell is a very bad man. Before Adrian took over, he ran the consortium like a feudal slave camp. He strangled his last wife with his bare hands when he found out she couldn’t give him any more sons, even though it was his disease that caused it.”

I sighed, “Not my problem.”

She shrugged, “You could let me keep up the suspension field, so his… life dissipates. Adrian hired you to heal him, not to keep his soul intact.”

I nodded, “Adrian hired me to wake him up. That’s what I intend to do. Apparently, the consortium is on a bit of a razor’s edge and he needs the information in this guy’s head. That’s all I plan to do. Give him his father back.”

She sighed. “I know. My second gift is telepathic. I can tell you are telling the truth. His mind is still alive but lost. He’s still an evil pile of shit I don’t want to see in control again. We could recover from losing his information, but I don’t think we could recover from him being coherent again. If Adrian had called me before Wallace was struck with dementia, I could have recovered it, but afterward, it’s too chaotic for me to dive.”

I shrugged, “You do what you need to do, and I will do what I need to do. Afterward, I am out of here. You are aware that I can still use my abilities if you put a tachyon freeze on me, right? I will do what I have to do if you try to stop me. Please don’t make me hurt you to escape.”

She nodded, “You are telling the truth, but you are… protected from mind diving. Either your power has created some kind of shield, or you have been trained a lot. I don’t think your power is what the scientists think your power is.”

I smiled a little, “It’s not,” and tucked my helmet under my arm… I was going to be out of here quickly and already checked myself and my armor for odd quantum signatures and essence links. At least he had kept his word about that. “One thing to remember is that he still has the genetic proclivity for ALS, and later in life, it becomes more likely to express. I removed the heavy metals that helped trigger it, but eventually, it’s likely to come back.”

“Are you ready?” I asked her. It had taken several hours to rebuild a good blueprint pattern, but the actual assembly now that I had decent aural range would be as fast as rebuilding after an apport.

She nodded, looking a little sad.

With a flash, I disassembled his pattern. As a baseline, he had no real defense against it, although as decrepit as he was, even if he were an alpha it probably wouldn’t have provided any defense. Then again, I needed the organic molecules and started feeding more essence into the flow of movements as I built new molecular structures from the inside out.

I could see Timesink’s expression change as the whole thing occurred, from disgust to anger, and so I flipped around, reassembling and rebuilding his body on the carpet next to the expensive four-poster bed it had been a moment before. It took a lot more energy since he had a lot more that needed to be rebuilt than I usually did when transmitting myself or even a guest, and each additional atom took real energy to assemble.

After a moment, he drew a breath as the essence pattern from his innate energy rejoined his body. He was remarkably quick to recover, and his eyes opened. My blueprint had not only restored his health, but all the alleles were rebuilt, and I built his body the way that his genetic pattern dictated, as a healthy, fit, and fairly muscular twenty-year-old man.

The bodyguard, or clone number six, glanced at Timesink. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and I took a step back.

“Did you get it?” the clone said, and Timesink slowly nodded. Wallace tried to lift himself on his hands, smiling, very similar to his son, and the big clone pulled out his pistol and put three bullets in his head.

***

I should have guessed. Pragmatic. Adrian said that he needed the information his father kept locked in his head, not that he needed his father alive. I’d let my own interpretation blind me to the fact that they didn’t need him alive, they just needed the information, blackmail material, and contacts before he died and his contacts were freed from whatever obligations they had to the old man and could begin to work against the consortium.

And I felt guilty as hell. The murder was my fault. I should have suspected things, but as Adrian said, I was a naive, stupid, ignorant child. I honestly thought he was desperate to get his father back because if I were able to have mine back, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

But I couldn’t raise the dead, not really. Once their essence pattern was gone, they were gone. Technically I could repair a dead body that wasn’t too far decayed, but my window of opportunity was usually less than ten minutes, and their brain had to be intact since the essence pattern seemed to be linked to their mind and identity.

When I re-materialized at the table in the apartment, Mindy jumped in shock. “You are back?” she yelled, “Sabrina said…” she stopped as she realized I had covered my face, and realized I was silently sobbing into my own hands.

Yeah, big strong man. So self-confident and controlled. The stress, and someone getting murdered right in front of me that I had just spent incredible effort to bring back to life, was too much. After a moment I realized that Mindy had tugged her chair towards me and was wrapping her arm around my shoulder, just holding me as I broke down.

I just couldn’t deal with it. Everything was hitting me all at once. Christine’s betrayal, the constant juggling, and the stress of trying to work jobs and go to school since then, my absolute control as my life got flipped again and again, the expectations, my dad’s death, losing the company, my cousin’s backstabbing.

“This is such bullshit.” I sobbed, my face still clenched in my hands as Mindy patted my back. “I am so sick of adulting. It’s not fair, and I know it never will be, but this sucks.”

She sighed and patted my back. “It sucks. I know. Can you tell me?”

I shook my head. “I am only nineteen damned years old. I should have decades of stupidity ahead of me. But they shot him right in front of me. I still have blood on my armor.”

“Wait, what?” she murmured. “Nineteen? I thought you were like.. twenty-seven. I thought you were engaged.”

I nodded slowly against my still-damp hands, trying to collect myself. “Yeah, after I awakened and Christine helped my cousin take the company, I made myself look older so I could play stuntman. No one wants to fight a supervillain that looks like a skinny teenager.”

“So that means you were engaged at seventeen?”

I nodded, “Yeah. The stocks were tied into a trust fund, but I was able to choose the management and draw dividends. Christine convinced me to let my cousin take over the management, and I gave her my willed five percent voting stock. I thought… but I was so dumb, so dumb. She left me and he stopped the management account’s dividends because I was pulling more than we were earning, and I was broke, and lost my dad’s house, and then Adrian put me in a room I couldn’t break from.”

I finally stopped sobbing quietly, and hiccuped, “And he said he wanted me to save his dad’s life, and I knew that I would do anything, anything at all to save my dad, so I saved him… and then they got what they wanted and shot him...in the face. Right in front of me.” I tried hard not to start sobbing again. Dammit, be a man! Children cry, not adults.

“Why did she leave you?”

I shrugged a little, not sobbing but feeling… broken. “Because I was a loser. I didn’t know how to manage anything, and even when I awakened I got like, the worst power ever, and she wanted a real man, not a broke loser. And she was sleeping with him, and I’d held out for years waiting for her to be ready, and she was sleeping with him the whole time. She said she was only waiting for me to get my inheritance, so she could support her career, but now that I didn’t even manage it anymore, she didn’t need me.”

“Holy shit, that absolute bitch!”

I nodded, “I guess, but I was also a loser too. I can’t really blame her. Hell, I am still a loser. An ignorant, stupid, immature loser.” I dropped my hands, wiping off my face, and then waggled them in the air, “Woo woo! Look at me! I can make stupid gewgaws and fix booboos! I have a power that I never asked for, don’t want, and that people will kill me for.”

I slapped my hands on the table. “I should have just gone back to school, let people beat me up for publicity, and then faded out. Maybe when I hit twenty-five and can claim my trust, I might be able to sell it to a bank and get a truck or something, if the company isn’t completely dead by then.”

She shook her head, “Even like things are, you could get so rich from your inventions!”

“Why?”

She looked at me oddly, “Why what?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Why get rich off of them? I don’t want to. It’s not my money, it’s my stupid power. My Dad always talked about raising yourself on your own merits and being responsible for your own failures. This stupid power isn’t mine, it belongs to someone else. I don’t know how or why I got it, but it’s not my merits, it’s a cheat, a sham, a fake boost, like finding a lottery ticket in a sewer that wins you millions.”

She scooted around to face me directly and bent forward a little as I rested my forehead on one hand, my elbow on the table. “Okay, what could you do at first?”

I shrugged, “Push dust around.”

“And every other thing, how did you learn to do it?”

I shrugged, “I just kept experimenting and pushing at it, going smaller and smaller until I did something that worked.”

“So you gained a tiny little power, the ability to push dust, which you can do with your fingertip, and you worked your ass off until you turned it into a gift that could heal people, create things from nothing but energy, throw fireballs, freeze, alter entropy, walk on air, disintegrate, teleport, create kinetic shields, and probably even fly. You make brilliant little microscopic computers, break the comm barrier, and make incredible armor, shields, and maybe even weapons. Every step was your effort, your labor, and your mind.”

“You did that, no one else. Lots of people get powers, but most of them never do anything more than what they were first born with. Maybe they get tougher over time, or their powers get stronger, but no one has stretched their abilities like you have… you might as well be saying that you don’t deserve to be tall, or you don’t deserve to be handsome, or you don’t deserve to be as smart as you are.”

“One thing you are not, though, is a loser. A loser would still be pushing around dust.”

I smiled slightly, wiping my face off again, “I do still push around dust. Just… lots of it.”

She sighed and quirked a hint of a smile herself. “Now I understand why you don’t have any interest in alpha girls. It sounds like she tore you apart.”

I shook my head, “Not until I was stupid. I tried to do that stupid John Cusack radio thing, I kept pestering her, texting her, and then she finally came out and let me have it, and explained exactly why. Because I was being a stalker and a moron, and she even threatened to end me if I didn’t leave her alone.”

She nodded slowly. “Damn. That’s… okay, you were kind of acting like a loser.”

I laughed bitterly, “See? See? I told you. The secret's out.”

She nodded, she was dressed in pink flannel pajamas, with no makeup, and honestly, I thought she was a lot prettier that way. Also, she hadn’t re-dyed her hair, which meant that the first few inches were starting to come in orange-ish. She hadn’t been lying.

“To be fair, now? Most girls would gut themselves just to get seen with you. Heck, I already know I have had to keep Abigail from sneaking into your bedroom when we were...uhh… having a girl’s night while you were working.”

“I thought Abbey was an innocent virgin.”

She nodded, “She is, but she was kind of drunk, and she’s a geek… she’s watched porn and started talking about what she’d like to do to you. And Candace got into it too, although she was a lot more descriptive. Even Akyo got into the action a little bit.”

“And you?” I asked her curiously.

She shrugged, her platinum ponytail flopping off her shoulder. “I might have mentioned that I wouldn’t mind seeing you walking back from the bathroom in the throes of a creative frenzy again.”

I sighed, “Well, Kate wants me to go out with her. Flat-out stated it.”

“Do you want to?”

I shook my head, “Not a fucking chance. I honestly think she’s blocking me from talking to Quiet Code because she’s on her team. She acts like the weird dual thing was some kind of meaningful connection, but I think she just wants to do it again for the power boost. I have zero interest, but I don’t want to blow her off completely because I think Quiet Code might be my answer to the software problem, and I don’t want an angry mean girl walking around claiming I psychically raped her.”

“Did you?”

I shook my head, “No, I did what I had to do to hold her together after she had a power overload. It felt great, but it wasn’t sexual or anything, and I am not sure, but I think it could work with other people too if their power has anything to do with molecular motion. It kind of crippled her power at first, but after she pushed it out, I think she gained a lot of power from it as well and might gain more.”

She nodded slowly, “Would it work with me?”

I thought about it. Freezing and heating were literally all about molecular motion. “Probably. But it’s really intimate. Like too intimate. Not exactly sexual, but damned close, and from what Sabrina says, it works better if it is sexual. So umm… not a good idea.”

“Why not?” she asked, blinking innocently.

I smirked a little, “Yeah, so now I am wondering if you want me for my powers. Not exactly reassuring.”

She laughed, “No, but you did help me out hugely, although admittedly I paid for that. Do you mind if I give you some advice? From mentor to sidekick, big sisterly advice, or something like that?”

I shook my head, “Not at all.”

“You have four options. The first one is going to a counselor. Let them know what is going on with Kate, and see if they can offer options. I mean, it’s admittedly weird power shit. But Kellar Academy is the home of weird power shit. I can’t promise it will end well, but it will end better than just letting her string you along. You already know from experience what the end result of letting yourself get strung along is.”

I nodded, “I definitely do.”

“Your other option is to find someone to date. Make it clear that you have moved on. It doesn’t have to be serious, or sexual, it just has to be obvious. That way, if she starts to grumble about psychic rape or whatever, well, it’s been weeks since the event that you rescued her in. No one, literally no one, would take it seriously because it would sound like sour grapes.”

“And shut down completely the only avenue to get to Quiet Code, the only serious instinctive cyberkinetic, the one who might be able to create code for my armor and comms that could make them useful to people in the field, and potentially save thousands of lives,” I grumbled.

“Have you tried another route?”

I nodded, “Yeah, Frost Phoenix rules her team quarters with an iron hand, and she’s third and second year… I can’t even get into her classroom areas without getting shut down and accused of being a stalker or raider.”

“Lunch?”

“Different schedules. They don’t like to let the years mix.”

She nods, “So option three is, bang Kate’s brains out, get the casual fling and her victory lap out of your head, and then hope that opens up your access to Quiet Code.”

“No thank you. I am not going to spend my V card on something like that.”

She looked at me seriously, “I thought you were joking about that.”

I shook my head, “Nope.”

“So option four. Pull a stunt. Get Quiet Code’s attention somehow, and let her know you need to talk to her.”

I snorted. Weirdly, I was feeling a lot better, but I’d probably have nightmares about Crystal blowing someone’s brain out all over me or something. “What kind of stunt? Hold up a radio in the parking lot playing ‘Blinded by Science’ and hope she notices? That didn’t work out so well last time.”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. “You are aware, that your teammate is possibly the most powerful information manipulator in existence. So I suggest part of column two and part of column four. Take someone out on a very visible date, and have our darling Abigail practice her control by getting a message to Quiet Code through means only she understands. Abbey may not be a programmer, but I am certain she could set it up so that Quiet Code notices.”

I looked at her a little confusedly, “You want me to take Abbey on a date?”

She went thoughtful at that, and then smiled a little, “Yes, absolutely. You could use a date as a bribe for her help. Even if it doesn’t work out, just make sure you do something for her that no one else can, she will probably be tickled pink and call you her straight gay best friend.”

“Her what?”

She chortled at my shocked tone, “Straight gay best friend. A gay best friend is kind of a status symbol, but you are straight, but as a rare male alpha, it’s still a status symbol. You’d be like her gay best friend, but straight.”

“Uhh...I am not sure I could do that. If she wanted me to help her change clothes and paint her nails naked, I’d probably try to grope her. I’m only human.”

She shrugged, “Well, then people would be really convinced that whatever went on between you and Kate was over.”

I sighed, “Well, would you like to do something with me as your straight gay best friend?”

She actually looked surprised and pleased, “What’s that?”

I glanced at the minikitchen. “I think I could really use a pint of iced cream. Want to split a banana berry with me while we whine about how evil people are?”

She laughed, “Hell yes!”

***

“Are you trying to bribe me?” Abbey glared at me through the phone’s video panel. She was at her parent’s house, but we had each other’s call codes just in case something happened, and she looked surprisingly happy when her mother waved her over. Miss Snow was nearly as petite and gorgeous as her daughter, and I almost wished she was a cougar.

I looked at her thoughtfully. “That depends. Is it a good enough bribe?”

She shook her head, “not quite. I could get into serious trouble messing with the school’s databases, especially the data labs. The nerd crew gets very upset when so-called idiots mess with their work.”

“So how do I up the ante?”

She looked thoughtful, and then held up a finger, “Hold on” she said, stepping away from the screen. I heard some murmuring that sounded like her mom. And then a moment later she stepped back to face me on the screen. “Okay, I will do it, but it’s going to be more.”

“More?”

She nodded, “Yes, more than just a simple date. No dipsy-duo of a dinner and a flick.”

I nodded, “Ma’am. You wound me. Did you honestly think I would be so callous as to offer nothing more than two hours of bad comedy followed by filling your stomach?” I looked around, and said, “Err… I mean, of course, something better. I just realized how dirty that sounded. It was better in my head, and smoother.”

She laughed, “Like that wasn’t innuendo. Okay, you promise something better than dinner and a movie, and then afterward I want a kiss.”

“A kiss?”

She nodded, “A real kiss. Like mouth and maybe tongues and everything. I figure there’s a very real chance that you are going to wind up going out with all of us, and I want a legitimate chance. Especially since, if you ever go out with Candace, there’s absolutely no way she’d ever let you get away without a lot more than a kiss. She has made that very clear.”

“Wait, seriously? You guys have actually talked about this?”

She nodded, “Yep. No one is allowed to try to take you to bed or try to talk you into marrying them until you have dated all of us except maybe Sabrina, although she might join the club later. But I want to make sure that I get a full chance before Candace or Mindy rip you away.”

“Is Akyo part of the club?”

She nodded, “Absolutely, although she sorta made it clear that she just wants to have a romance with a handsome gaijin before she goes back home. She has to go back to Japan, no choice, and figures there’s no way you’d fall in love with her and follow her home like a hungry puppy.”

I was dumbfounded. “Are you really serious?”

She looked at me oddly, and then answered quietly, looking around, “Umm… no? Of course not. I was just trying to be uhh… clever. But yes, I will get something to her if you give me a date and a kiss, and maybe a snuggle.”

I smiled slightly. She was adorable, in a sweet and innocent way. “Tell you what, even if it weren’t a bribe, I’d give you a kiss and a snuggle, if you really want one. I just wasn’t aware you were… affectionate like that.”

She nodded, “Well, you were so busy dealing with Candace acting like a sl… aggressive person, that you probably didn’t notice that your team is getting pretty close. I am pretty sure any one of us would like a hug or snuggle, especially Candace, but she’d probably want ropes and handcuffs and latex underwear too.”

I saw a hand dart out from beside the phone and smack her shoulder.

“Was that your mom?”

She shook her head, “No that was my sister. She told me to tell you that if you get tired of superpowered girls, she’d be happy to wait for you for at least two years since she’s only sixteen.” another hand darted out to smack her shoulder again, and she said “Ow! She said to tell you she’s eighteen, but she’s lying.” Another smack, and this time she turned to glare off to one side. “I am going to tell Mom that you are trying to play jailbait and she’ll take away your Sybian and furry hentai collection.”

“What the…” I asked before I saw her tackled and a fall of two different colored hairs. After a few moments of oofs and a loud smack, I finally said, “Hey Abbey, I will see you when you get back.” After a moment, I saw a thumb raised, and I laughingly hung up. Damn, she had a heck of a family.