August 15 - 11:05 p.m.

Adam

I still hadn’t worked out what exactly my déjà vu, or premonitions, or whatever they were meant, but I had had more of them. More recollections of a future which felt like the past, more recollections of a present which no longer resembled itself the way my mind insisted it should.

Many of these feelings were indistinct in a way I couldn't put into words. The memories were hazy. Often I didn’t know what exactly I expected to happen, I only knew that it wasn’t what did happen.

There were a few things that deviated from what I had in mind that I could pinpoint, though. For example, in the aftermath of what happened with Shannon, Christine came to me and told me that she thought it was better if we remained friends. I’d like to say that I didn’t peer into her thoughts to figure out why, but I’m not that strong. What I found was that a part of her resented me for not coming to their rescue sooner. She said that if we were to become some sort of crime fighting team, as seemed to be what everyone had decided without much discussion, a personal relationship would complicate things too much.

It’s not that I thought she was wrong, only that it wasn’t what I expected to happen—what I remember happening. In my mind, I recall us having a personal conversation after the events at Shannon’s, but I remember it bringing us closer. Between the loss of Shannon’s life and the loss of Linc as a friend, maybe it had been sympathy that had drawn her to me, but that was when we had started dating in earnest.

But because Shannon lived, and because Lincoln remained with us, things weren't the way I remembered them being.

And one other major thing: Shannon got the last charge from the orb. She hadn’t been doing well mentally, in the aftermath of what happened—who can blame her? I thought— and Lincoln reasoned that she needed purpose in her life to get her back on track. A fine argument, and one I agreed with.

But it was supposed to be Angie.

I remember it being Angie.

I glided in near silence through the black velvet night air. It wasn’t silent for me, of course; I could hear the wind tearing past me. But I surveyed the minds of the people on the street or in houses below me, dipping briefly just under the surface where their sensory perceptions were before their brains even processed them. They heard nothing, or, if they had particularly good ears, they heard a low humming that might have been from a drone or far-off plane.

I could’ve taken my parents’ car, but we’d all agreed that these meetings were to be kept secret, so I’d left through my bedroom window in the dead of night.

It seemed like overkill; if I told my parents that I was going out to meet up with some friends, they wouldn’t think anything of it. But an overabundance of caution was better than none at all.

And besides, I’d discovered that I quite liked flying. The moment it occurred to me that I could as easily lift my own body with my telekinesis as any other object, it was like an epiphany. I’d taken to it quite naturally, as if I’d done it a million times before. And maybe, somehow, I had.

I was flying in the direction of Shannon’s house. As a meeting spot, it was the best choice we could think of. She’d inherited it from her parents, and with the tragedy surrounding those events, even the version of them known to the public, her lawyer had expedited the process of getting it into her name, and the police had wrapped up their investigation quickly.

I wasn’t sure what the meeting was about—Linc had called it—but not attending wasn’t really an option. Our fates were tied together now and we all had to do our best to keep each other in the loop.

Still, the way Linc had sounded on the phone had me worried. His voice had had an almost accusatory note to it.

I pushed the worry out of my mind, pushing upward against gravity and gaining speed and altitude at the same time. A confused flock of pigeons scattered at my approach and gave me some reproachful squawks as I passed them. I smiled wide and couldn’t stop myself from laughing. Flying was probably the most satisfying use of my power so far, and no amount of stress or worry could diminish the sheer joy of it.

I focused on the things I wanted to bring up. It was silly stuff, stuff I was almost embarrassed to be thinking about because it was straight off the pages of a comic book. But at the same time, given the world we were living in now, it seemed necessary.

We needed pseudonyms, code names, secret identities, whatever. We had to be able to identify each other in the midst of high stress situations involving onlookers and outsiders without revealing too much about ourselves. Of course, my power made it so we could communicate silently, but I’d given it a lot of thought and—aside from the fact that it seemed irresponsible to rely too heavily on any one of our powers—there was an element of giving too much away just by our silence. If we were ever facing down someone like Pitch again, we’d be better off revealing as little about the nature of our powers as possible unless we absolutely needed to. Being coordinated while seemingly not talking might lead someone to the correct conclusion about my powers.

We needed costumes. That was probably the silliest part, the part I was least looking forward to bringing up. They didn’t have to be tights and capes and cowls, but they had to be something that could publicly identify us as … what? I hesitated to use the term superheroes, although of course the media was using that term—as well as supervillains—unironically, and had been since about a week and a half after people started getting powers. And perhaps more importantly, the costumes were needed to protect our identities.

Jaleel had pointed out in retrospect how supremely stupid it had been for all of us to go into Shannon’s house, powers blazing, and nothing even covering our faces. Anyone with outdoor security cameras could have caught us in the act and released our identities to the internet already. In fact, this had come closer to happening than any of us were comfortable with, and it was only because of Lincoln’s ability to get into the cloud storage servers of several security camera companies that any such footage had been altered or erased.

As I entered a dive and swooped toward the road, temporarily arresting my power’s hold on my body and falling freely for the thrill of it, I recognized the minds of two of the people in a car fifty feet below me. Jaleel and Harper were riding together. I considered dropping in, either physically or mentally, but I decided against it. It was curious that Linc wasn’t giving his sister a ride, but I put it out of my mind as I sped off away from them.

We needed funding. That was the part that was most immediate, easy to discuss, and easy to solve. Between Jaleel’s ability to see the future, and Lincoln’s ability to get inside of computers, the stock market would be easy enough to game. Hell, we could win a few jackpots and be set up for life.

I overshot Shannon’s house and found myself flying above Christine as she jogged to the meeting. She was always jogging everywhere, lately, and she'd started lifting weights. It was like getting powers that made physical fitness redundant had nevertheless made her want to get fit. I felt anxiety in her mind and resisted the urge to intervene. As I flew on and circled back toward Shannon’s, I thought I felt that anxiety giving way to a sort of serenity. Maybe that was what the jogging was for. I smiled.

There were other things, too, of course. Armor for those of us less durable, a better paradigm for how we approached engagements—it didn’t really make sense to have Lincoln or Jaleel physically on site for every type of activity. A team name. A logo? Lots of little things.

And we wouldn’t be the first group of people to try their hands at any of it. The media hadn’t started using the terms superhero and supervillain out of nowhere. They’d done so in response to costumed vigilantes and costumed criminals running around and blasting each other with lasers and lightning and mental barrages.

The variety of powers was astounding, and I had no doubt that for every power we heard about, either in the media or through rumors on online forums, there were uncountably more, perhaps even stranger powers that people were keeping close to the vest. Some of the rumors we heard were frightening. Some were astonishing. And some were downright silly. There was, for example, rumored to be a girl on the East coast who could control bugs with her mind. Ridiculous.

And the variety of powers was matched by the variety of colorful costumes, logos, names. I was astonished at how quickly people had come up with it all. Some of them must have already had their superpowered persona ready for years, just waiting for their actual powers to arrive.

I arrived at Shannon’s house and hovered, forty or so feet above the roof. She and Lincoln were there already, having a muted conversation in the kitchen. I could have known exactly what they were saying, but I had some respect and discretion. If they weren’t talking openly in front of me, I wasn’t going to intrude.

I circled the block from above a few times, keeping an eye out for the others, but also not wanting to stop flying just yet. And, of course, not wanting to be the first to arrive and have to be alone with Lincoln and Shannon.

I felt Christine coming from one direction, jogging, and the car with Jaleel and Harper from the other direction around the same time.

Good timing, I said to all of them at once.

Jaleel jerked the steering wheel hard in surprise and Harper laughed. Christine looked up, spotted me quickly, and waved.

I landed in the driveway just as Christine arrived, hands on knees and panting, and Jaleel pulled in.

“You know what this is all about?” I asked Harper.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said. “But I will say, Linc has been pretty agitated the last couple days.”

“Well,” said Christine, still catching her breath. “I guess … we just go in … and find out.”

“Brilliant,” I said, with some measure of trepidation.

Christine

August 15th - 11:05 p.m.

I hadn’t told the team—and God, did I hate that we were calling ourselves a team—but I’d been doing some work on my own. Nothing too crazy, nothing too violent—excluding last night—but nothing they would have condoned either. Mostly it had been little stuff. Driving to Dallas and walking the streets at night, looking for women being attacked, making their assailants’ days a little worse. I wore a ski mask to do it. And gloves. And clothes that covered every inch of my body. It was safe. I was safe. I couldn’t be identified and none of it could come back on me. Certainly not on the team.

So why did I feel guilty for not telling them?

Could it be that Adam’s caution was rubbing off on me? No. I still liked Adam as much as ever, but I did not trust or buy into his outlook on the world, and that mattered more than ever now that we had the tools to meaningfully change it.

Still, the previous night had set something in motion in my brain that I didn’t like. I was thinking thoughts that weren’t me. It made me consider not even attending the meeting that Lincoln had called. It made me rethink the whole concept of teaming up with people whose goals and ideals of justice didn’t align perfectly with my own.

August 14th

It had started out like any other night in the city. I was patrolling, walking the South Boulevard–Park Row, ears keenly attuned to cries of help or pain. I wasn’t averse to helping anyone in need, but my ears seemed better at catching crimes where the victim was a woman. I’d always had an uncanny ability to tune out and filter noises in a crowded area—that wasn’t a superpower, just plain old me—but with my senses further enhanced by the baseline boost that almost all Hypes seemed to get, I had no problem picking out the sort of sounds I was looking for.

I had been out for half an hour already and the city seemed, by and large, asleep. Outside of a few catcalls that I pointedly ignored, I had neither seen nor heard anything that gave me pause. I had almost made up my mind to grab a taxi to South Dallas when I heard it: not just a cry for help, but a veritable scream of terror.

I turned and twisted around, willing the sound to repeat itself even though that would mean whoever was being hurt would have to hurt some more for me to find them. The neighborhood I was in was an eclectic mix of some of the largest, nicest old houses in Dallas and some of the most rundown, and I’ll admit that my bias led me to the conclusion that the screams would be coming from one of the latter.

Another scream rang out and I made my way toward a ramshackle old beater of a house. Roofing shingles littered the yard and the siding—which might once have been yellow and was now the nondescript, sun-faded color of neglect—was hanging loose in more places than it was fastened tight.

There was light streaming out of the front window and as I approached, I heard the scream again. I quickened my pace, and I was moments from destroying the front door when I realized that the sounds coming from inside were howls of laughter, not terror.

Did I imagine the whole thing? I wondered.

But no, the scream came again, and its intent was unmistakable. There was no joy in it. It was coming from the house next door, a gigantic, well maintained home from the early 19th century. The lights were on upstairs, and that’s where the screaming was coming from.

I had spent the day outside, ostensibly suntanning as far as anyone knew, but really I’d been charging up. I could feel the energy stored inside my body, itching to be used. I kicked off the ground, augmenting the strength of my muscles with my power, and landed on the balcony that stretched along the front of the house.

Wasting no time, I reached my hand out and annihilated the window separating the balcony from the interior of the home. Almost immediately, an alarm started blaring, drowning out the screams which had faded now to moans and groans of pain. I had to work quickly.

I entered a sort of upper lounge, and directly across from me was a railing overlooking the kitchen and living room downstairs. A man came running at me from the hallway to my left, brandishing a fire poker. The improvised weapon already had blood on it. I felt my own blood flare up, making my head pound, making rational thought impossible.

“Who the fuck are you?” the man asked, stopping short as he saw me standing there in my improvised costume, leaving no skin unobscured.

“Your reckoning,” I said, spying past him to where a woman—a girl, really—was crawling down the hallway. Her left leg was clearly broken, and it trailed out behind her as she crawled, and each time she dragged it across the floor to catch up with the rest of her body, she let out a small whimper of pain.

The man saw where I was looking and he started sputtering. Some lame excuse, probably. I didn’t wait to hear it.

I charged him, leaping again with my power and leading with my right knee. It made a satisfying crack as it connected with his cheek and sent him spiraling backward. He landed on his ass, but quickly gained his feet again, facing me and holding the poker out between us for all the good it would do him.

I knew I had to wrap this thing up quickly, but I couldn’t help toying with him a little first. I allowed him to get in close, stood stock still as he swung at me, once, twice, seven times. He made solid connections with each hit and on the final one, I even staggered backward as if he’d actually hurt me. I fell over, a look of surprise on my face.

“Yeah, take that, you bitch!”

I started laughing, feeling the energy he’d just added to my reserves coursing through me. I launched myself to my feet, grabbed the poker as he swung it at me, and released a blast of kinetic energy through my palm sufficiently powerful to obliterate the part of the poker I held. It fell to the ground in two pieces, and the man stumbled backward.

“You’re one of those … those fucking things,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“One of those things? Do you mean a woman? Or a Hype? I suppose for you they’re both just two different types of people you can look down on.”

“Hey, I didn’t … I mean, she made … You don’t understand. She … sometimes she needs to be reminded—”

“No. No.”

I reached out my hand and released a blast of light and heat. He cried out. It wasn’t enough to burn him—not badly, anyway—but it was more than enough to blind him temporarily and give him a scare. Put the fear of God—or Goddess—into him.

He screamed and scrambled backward, away from me. I advanced, no longer sure what I was doing, what I intended to do.

“Get up,” I said.

“Please, please just let me be. I’ll … I’ll go to counseling. I’ll turn myself in to the police.”

I advanced.

“You want money? Look at this place. I’ve got money. Whatever you want. Take it!”

I advanced.

“Stop,” the woman said from across the room. “Please. You’ve made your point. Henry didn’t mean it. Did you, babe?”

I advanced.

I heard sirens nearby. I felt as if the room was going brighter as my anger burned hotter.

I advanced.

“Holy shit!” cried the woman.

I stopped. I looked to where she was pointing. An armchair near where Henry had been when I’d blasted him with light and heat was in flames.

I looked back at Henry with clear eyes for the first time in minutes and saw the damage I’d done. Most of the skin that hadn’t been covered by clothing was bright red and blistered. In some spots, the skin was nearly black. I looked across the path of his retreat and saw bits of charred clothing, some still burning at the edges. How had I not noticed any of this before?

“Please,” he said again, real desperation in his voice now. Maybe that desperation had been there the whole time and I’d just been ignoring it.

I looked behind me once more and saw that the carpet underneath the armchair had caught, and the flames from the chair itself were licking the ceiling.

“We need to get out of here,” I said.

I carried the woman to the balcony first. Neighbors were watching and many of them had their phones out, filming.

There were a few long moments where I stared back in at the flames slowly but interminably spreading across the second floor of the house and debated leaving the man inside. He was badly burned, I reasoned, he already might not make it.

I went back in, flames licking around me and doing nothing but charging my internal battery, and carried him out to the balcony as well. I grabbed them, one under each arm, and jumped from the balcony, using my legs impacting the ground as just another source of energy.

I set the two of them down on the lawn, each badly injured now, and set off at a run down the street.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, I thought. I can’t get caught like this.

Voices chased after me.

“Who are you?”

“How’d you know they were in there?”

“Are you a hero?”

“No, you idiot. She set the fire!”

“She did not. She ran in there and saved them. I have the whole thing on video.”

The voices grew fainter as I reached one corner, then another, and another.

I stopped to catch my breath. I ran into some bushes and pulled off my disguise. I had normal clothes on underneath. I threw the disguise into a dumpster two streets away and used my power to set fire to it.

It was after one in the morning and this part of town was quiet. There were no cop cars passing me, no suspicious glances from anyone. I was in the clear, physically at least.

Mentally? Emotionally? I wasn’t ready to address those things yet.

I made my way back to my car, parked in a Walmart parking lot a mile and a half away. I walked slowly, like someone might walk if they wanted time to work through their thoughts, only I couldn’t and wouldn’t let myself dwell on anything that had happened.

Am I a monster?

No. Shut up.

Why couldn’t I see how badly I hurt him?

Shut up.

Why can’t I control myself?

Shut up.

Images of my sister’s face floated to the surface. Why was I thinking of her at a time like this? It was obvious, but I didn’t allow myself to acknowledge the connection.

I pushed the images away.

I focused instead on what I would say at the meeting. I thought about telling them I couldn’t be a part of their team. I thought about telling them I worked best on my own. But was that true?

August 15th

A day later, jogging to Shannon's house for a meeting I wasn't sure I wanted to attend at all, I felt Adam in my head briefly. I knew he thought he was being subtle, trying to go unnoticed, trying to be unintrusive, but over the month we’d had our powers, I’d come to recognize a certain change in the space of my mind that meant he was near. I knew he didn’t pry—I might not have trusted everything about him, but I trusted that—so I didn’t find it invasive. If anything, knowing he was around was comforting. The fact that he was being coy and moving on without saying anything was almost endearing.

It made it hard to hold onto my conviction. I realized that I had to leave the team, not for myself, but for them. I was too volatile. I’d end up getting them hurt. But feeling Adam—where even was he? Flying above me?—passing near made me want to stay.

I decided I’d hear what the others had to say before making up my mind.

Angie

August 15th - 6:30 p.m.

Fuck Adam and fuck his friends. That had become my mantra and it was one of the few things keeping me going.

I didn’t hold to it. Not really. He was still my brother and I still loved him, still felt a closeness to him built up over years of bonding and tricks of brain chemistry. But every time he did anything to annoy me even slightly, the mantra popped back into my head. The ‘fuck his friends’ part had been amended more recently, when he’d started leaving the house at all hours, claming he was meeting up with Christine, or Lincoln—who I hadn't thought he even liked anymore—or whoever. I didn’t really have any issue with his friends, but obviously they weren’t doing much to make him less of a shit, so fuck them, too.

Some days, when Adam was being normal, and nothing bad was presently happening, and my parents were both home, and we all ate dinner together, and sat on the couches afterwards and watched Wheel of Fortune, I’d forget why I’d come up with the mantra in the first place.

What had Adam ever done to me? I’d wonder.

And then I’d remember. It was about everything he hadn’t done.

He hadn’t helped me save Ben’s life. Okay, I could forgive him for that. He couldn’t have known. He wasn’t there for me after. Again, how could he have known how badly it was affecting me? But since Sarah, and her parents?

Actually, I had to give it to him. He had been there for me. He had been more attentive, more attuned to my moods. He was always asking me pointed questions like he knew what was going on in my head, like someone had assigned him to be my therapist.

And that pissed me off even more.

How can you be here now? I wanted to ask him. Now that it’s too late.

“Ange!” my father said, his voice just below a shout.

“What?” I asked.

“Do. You. Want. More mashed potatoes?”

I pushed my plate away, stared at my father blankly. I got up from my chair and walked away from the room.

“Teenagers,” I heard my mother say quietly as I stopped on the first step on my way upstairs. I could hear the exasperated shrug. I could see the knowing, smug look that she would be shooting my dad as she said it.

I got into my room and slammed the door behind me. I collapsed against the door, hands to my knees and tried and failed to hold back my tears.

I heard Adam coming up the stairs.

Fuck off, Adam, I thought.

I heard him standing outside my door. I could imagine him standing there with his fist held up, debating whether or not to knock.

Fuck off, Adam, I thought again.

I heard him sigh and retreat toward his own bedroom, as if my thought was loud and violent enough that he'd gotten the message.

I cried in peace, but it wasn’t peaceful. There was a part of me—a big part, if I was being honest with myself—that wanted very badly to let him in, to let anyone in. How could I keep this burden to myself without it destroying me?

Part of my tears were that.

There was another quite large part of me convinced that no one could help me, that no one even really wanted to. I didn’t know what Adam’s angle was. Feeling guilty about his role in the events that had let me here? Maybe. But I didn’t really care. My job wasn’t to absolve him. And he couldn’t even bother to be around enough to help anyway. No doubt he’d be going out again tonight, and coming back tired, and never willing to say what he and his friends really got up to.

Part of my tears were that.

I finally pulled myself to my feet and grabbed my laptop. I logged into the website which had been the only thing—besides my mantra—that was keeping me going: Hyperhumanhate.com.

I searched through the new topics. One thread title caught my eye because it was from Dallas, not too far from here: Hyperhuman Woman Beats Man and Woman Nearly to Death and Burns Down Their Home, Is Heralded as Hero - Video. I clicked the link. I joined the discussion.

Harper

August 15th - 10:10 p.m.

As I climbed into the passenger seat of Jaleel’s car, two emotions were duking it out in my head. First, I was almost giddy with excitement to have this group, this team, people who I could rely on and who actually seemed to want me around. But then, I was always ready for the other shoe to drop.

“Hey, seeing as how your brother is the one who called this meeting … Do you know what it’s about?”

“Honestly no idea.”

“I have my suspicions,” Jaleel said. He was staring hard ahead and his hands had the wheel in a deathgrip. I kept glancing between his face and his hands, thinking of something to say and then forgetting it. I felt my heart rate increase noticeably.

Is this it? I asked myself.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

He sighed, relaxed his grip a little. He looked at me and sighed again.

“Look … I’m not trying to be rude, and I know he’s your brother, but he’s …”

“Kind of a dick?” I suggested.

“Kind of a dick,” he said. He glanced at me with a small smile.

“So what? He’s kind of a dick. What does that have to do with why you’re trying to strangle your steering wheel?”

“I think he’s making some sort of power play,” he said.

“A power play? What does that mean?”

“Okay, so … You know how Adam is like the de facto leader of our little … team, group, whatever?”

“Sure. Yeah. I guess.”

“Because he was the first one to touch the orb, and it was up to him to choose who else could touch it, blah, blah, blah. And like, Adam’s a good guy, I would say, right?”

He kept glancing at me, gauging my reaction to his words? Determining what direction to take based on what I thought of what he was saying? Probably. Or maybe he really felt he had to catch me up on all this. Maybe he really thought I was dumb enough to need the obvious explained to me.”

“Yeah, Adam’s alright,” I said slowly.

“Right, but he’s not necessarily … Okay, and again, I’m not trying to be rude, but—”

“You think you’re the smartest person in the group. You think my brother thinks he’s the smartest in the group. And you feel like the smartest person in the group, aka you, should be running things.”

“Okay, I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,” he said, looking at me in surprise. “But that’s not far off—”

“But,” I continued, “you think since Linc thinks he’s the smartest and you think you’re the smartest and there’s really no surefire way to determine which one of you is right, maybe Adam should be in charge, because he’s at least fair and decent and you’d rather it be him than my brother.”

The look on his face had passed from surprise to sheer astonishment.

“Are you sure you didn’t get a bit of telepathy from the orb, too?”

“Listen, it doesn’t take telepathy to understand human behavior, it just takes patience and observation. I know I’m definitely not the smartest person on the team. That’s fine. But I do get people. It’s why I’ve never had trouble making friends.” I glanced at him, afraid that I was veering into the sort of territory that normally got me in trouble with people. He was looking at me in a way I interpreted as earnest, sincere. “It’s also why I never have trouble losing them,” I finished quietly.

“What? You? Losing friends? You’re one of the most popular girls at school. You’re hanging out with some new cool group every month …” He trailed off at the end.

“Exactly,” I said, deciding that if I’d gone this far, I might as well just go with complete honesty. “The problem is, eventually I get too obsessed with trying to read people’s behavior. I either comment on something I shouldn’t, or I get paranoid about signs that probably have nothing to do with me, and everything implodes.”

I was holding in my tears and keeping a straight face. If I saw anyone else doing it, I’d recognize it for what it was. I hoped Jaleel wasn’t that perceptive.

“I … I had no idea. But your teammates—not us, obviously. Your sports teammates. Volleyball. Track and Field? You always seem chummy with them.”

“That’s different. As long as we’re playing together, I just focus on that. And we’re all encouraged to try to get along for the sake of the team. In the end, though, those people were never really my friends.” I looked down at my hands. I wondered how much more I would have to say before Jaleel decided he didn’t want me around anymore, before he took the rest of the team aside and told them he thought they’d be better off without me.

“Harper,” he said. “I am sorry. I never really considered you as anything but the cool, popular sports girl. Obviously there’s more to you. I’m really glad you’re on the team.”

I looked at him, then back out the window. I had no idea what to say. I felt more like crying than ever.

“Hell,” he said. “Maybe you should be in charge of this thing.”

I laughed. “Lincoln would probably be happier with that than with you,” I said. “Definitely happier than with Adam.”

He laughed.

“Listen, I don’t really think that’s what this is about. I said I had no idea, but that’s not really true. I have some idea.”

“Do tell.”

“He’s been talking a lot—not to me, but to himself, out loud—about New York. Muttering things like ‘we have to save New York’ and ‘what does Adam know about New York?’”

“New York?” He sounded shocked, somehow. Like that was the last thing in the world he’d expected me to say. Or like it meant something to him. He saw the way I was looking at him and continued, “I kind of thought we’d focus on more local issues first, is all …”

“Yeah, well. Lincoln is always about going big. I think he can’t see the point of a thing unless it makes a splash.”

“But what are we saving New York from?” Again I saw something strange and hard to interpret in his expression, like as soon as I'd mentioned New York, he'd suddenly known more than I did. It made me uneasy.

“That part I really don’t have a clue about. And I don’t know what Adam has to do with anything, either.”

I hadn’t noticed at first, but I was feeling like a weight had been lifted from me. I was still nervous that this whole thing might come apart, but now I didn't think that I'd be the cause of it.

Lincoln

August 15th - 10:50 p.m.

I wasn’t sure if what I’d done could technically be considered murder, but I was having trouble convincing myself that it had been anything less. In the aftermath, I’d looked over the files that were still there on Overseer’s server, bits and pieces of algorithms and memories, not enough to remain sentient, but enough for me to piece together what he had been.

I’d gone on the offensive in the first place because before the orbs had even arrived, I’d been hacking deeper into Custodian Systems Inc. and I’d come across files that were clearly meant to be hidden that alluded to an impending attack on New York City.

The strangest part was that something about them suggested that their hiding was nothing but theater; that somehow I was supposed to find them. Certainly I’d never had an easier time hacking corporate servers, and no one had stepped in to try to stop me, and each tool needed to gain access was one I'd already learned to use. Overseer hadn’t threatened me with some falsified footage of me committing a murder or a kidnapping again. It all felt too convenient.

“Babe,” Shannon said. “Are you ready?”

“Sure.” I smiled tightly at her. We were sitting in her kitchen, and it felt like a place condemned. In the weeks since her parents’ murders, she’d covered many of the things in the house with sheets, and boxed up the rest. She’d been indecisive about whether or not she wanted to move. She couldn’t bring herself to stay, and she couldn’t bring herself to go.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

It might have been the fact that her house made a convenient meeting spot that finally tipped the scales in favor of keeping it. I didn’t feel great about that, about the needs of the team potentially overruling what was best for her mental state. On the other hand, if she wasn’t involved with this in some way, I wasn’t sure what she’d be doing with herself right now. I wasn’t convinced she’d be able to hold herself together without the structure and purpose we provided.

That was part of the reason I was dreading the possibility that this meeting might end in the splitting up of the team.

At least without the team, she’d still have her powers. She’d still have me.

“Are you going to tell me what you called this meeting for?” she asked.

“I want to, but … It’s better if I only have to explain everything once. I’m still not even sure if I want to say what I need to say, or if those questions are better left alone.”

“Very cryptic. You know I’m not that into the whole mysterious guy thing, right?”

I laughed. “Are you sure about that?” I asked, adopting my best quiet, gruff, mysterious voice.

“What the fuck was that supposed to be?” She snorted.

“I … I thought it was a sexy, mysterious voice.”

“Babe. Never, ever do that voice again.” She continued cracking up.

I didn’t think it was that bad.

The discovery I’d made about the attack on New York, combined with the fact that in all the time I’d been working for the Exposure Collective—which I’d worked out years ago was really just a subsidiary of Custodian Systems; they’d never actually done any exposing, and given that the nature of the main business of Custodian Systems was vague and enigmatic to the point that nobody—not even the people who worked there—seemed to know what the company actually did, it seemed that I’d finally gained some important insight into who I was working for: a shadowy, cryptic, terrorist organization.

Once I’d had my power—and the immediate crisis involving Shannon had been sorted—I’d felt like I had the upper hand in dealing with them. I’d moved in on Custodian Systems, bouncing between servers all over the world, and I had to admit, even against my power they seemed strangely well prepared. Almost eerily so.

Still, in the end, I’d found what I’d been looking for: Overseer’s real location. At first I thought I’d been chatting with a person when I made contact with that server, and in a way I had been.

It had taken digging and blasting pieces out of him for me to realize what I was really dealing with.

And in his final message, he’d indicated that I should ask Adam about New York. Was it some kind of trick? What would Adam know about any of this? Outside of that one awful day when Adam and Harper had caught me in the process of trying to kill myself, I’d kept this side of my life completely separate from my personal life. How would Adam even be connected to Overseer? Had he been all along?

I intended to find out.

But in the aftermath of my attack, I mellowed on the idea that this was some sort of plan to attack New York. Instead, I thought, it might have been a warning, or a plea for help. Something that Overseer knew was going to happen but needed someone else to stop? It didn’t exactly make sense, but then none of this made sense. Either way, it was something. And there was a chance Adam knew what.

I touched my computer, my eyes glowed. I located each of their phones by GPS.

“Five, six minutes tops,” I said. “My sister and Jaleel are in a car, Christine is walking or running, and Adam is … I’m not sure. His movements are pretty erratic.”

Across from me, Shannon was leveraging her own power. She’d been watching tutorials on computer programming and hacking for most of the day, and she was now far more adept at it than I had ever been. If it weren’t for my power making getting into locked systems as simple as walking through an open door, she’d probably be able to find things out faster than me.

“I think I’ve got him. I used an exploit in the third-part calculator app on his phone to get root access. He should really consider updating his firmware more often.” She looked up at me over the rim of her laptop, a smirk playing at the corners of her lips, as if to say how did you ever struggle with this stuff? It’s trivial.

“You see what I mean? About his movement?”

She turned her screen to me and showed me a local map with a colored arrow overlaid on top. Behind the arrow was a looping, twisting line: Adam’s path.

“He’s flying,” she said.

She turned the laptop back to herself and started tapping on some keys.

He can do that? I thought.

“Here,” she said. “His phone camera.” She turned the screen to me again and we watched from the camera on the phone poking out of his pocket as Adam swooshed over the tops of houses.

“I think that’s my roof,” said Shannon. “I guess he’s here.”

“They all are,” I said, touching my laptop again and seeing all of their signals pulling up to the house.

“Here goes nothing,” I said.

Shannon

August 15th - 1:30 p.m.

Freedom, followed by guilt for feeling free, followed by freedom, followed by a directionless sort of drifting, followed by existential dread, followed by the realization that true freedom is terrifying. And, finally, underneath and foundational to all of it, a gaping, impossibly gigantic sense of loss.

Lincoln and the gang had helped me get a long way in resolving all but that last thing. It would take a lot more to start to fill in that hole, and even then …

They’d told me about the team, the powers, the orb. How could they not, given the nature of my rescue? And then, after a few days of convening, they’d given me a choice: try to repair my life, continue on—with their support, of course—and move past my trauma as a mundane, ordinary individual, or join them and maybe do something extraordinary.

I hadn’t been in a good place when they’d put the choice before me. But even if I had been, it was hard to imagine being given the option of getting superpowers and turning it down.

“Are you up for joining us tonight?” Lincoln’s voice came through my phone sounding toneless and robotic.

“Are you actually talking?” I asked. “Or are you using your power to send your voice through the ether?”

“Is this better?” he asked, sounding more like himself, more human.

“Much. And what do you mean, am I up for it? You’re hosting the meeting at my house. Where else would I be?”

“We don’t have to keep doing it there.”

“No. We do. And don’t worry about it. I like it. But what’s this meeting about, Linc? You’ve hardly said anything about any of this stuff since you did that hack or whatever yesterday. Does it have to do with that?”

“Never mind—Just … It’ll be easier to just tell you tonight. Speaking of, though, do you want to try out your power again? Learn something new?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling a sort of rush that can’t be appreciated by anyone who hasn’t experienced the thrill of having a superpower and the opportunity to use it. “What did you have in mind?”

“Hacking.”

“Like computers? That’s your thing.”

“Yeah, well … I don’t really need to actually hack anymore; my power has taken all the challenge out of it. And I thought it could maybe, you know, bring us closer together.”

Lincoln wasn’t normally the type to pursue cutesy couple activities. Then again, hacking computers wasn’t really like scrapbooking or ballroom dancing.

“I don’t know …” I said.

“Did I mention I really, really like your new haircut?”

I laughed.

“What do they call that again? A … fairy cut? Elf cut?”

I laughed again, harder.

“Goblin cut? No … That’s not it, but it’s close …”

That he pretended he couldn't think of the name ‘pixie cut’ was funny. That he really did like it was obvious. That I was able to even get a pixie cut without an overbearing mother telling me not to was …

I moved on before my mind could dwell on it.

“Fine, okay, whatever. I’ll do it.. I’ll probably be running circles around you in no time, though. I don’t want to embarass you too badly … And it’s called a pixie cut, for your information. You really like it?”

“I really do,” he said. “But then, I’d like it no matter what mythical creature you stole it from, simply because it’s attached to you.”

I made a show of groaning at the overly affectionate treatment, but we both knew I was pleased.

I kind of wished he had suggested something like boxing, or playing the clarinet, or flying a plane. I could have learned to do any of those things just as well, just as quickly. But then, I could learn how to hack computers and still learn how to do any of those things later on if I wanted to.

My power made learning anything almost trivially easy, in the weeks since I’d gotten it, I’d learned seven languages, breezing through online courses, lessons, and videos faster than a normal person would have been able to find the resources to start to learn. My ability to take in information was so vast that I had to set the playback speed of the videos I watched to ten times speed, otherwise I felt like I was wasting precious time.

It wasn’t just information that I could learn either, my body could gain the muscle memory to perform actions it had never done before, simply by seeing someone else do them. The only limitations seemed to be my own pre-existing physical limitations. That is to say, although I could execute a deadlift with perfect form, I couldn’t magically lift 800 pounds, and although my body understood the underlying movements required to contort itself to fit into a suitcase, if I actually tried to do so, I’d end up breaking my neck.

But things that required a less severe and sudden increase in flexibility or strength were no problem. I’d been playing the cello for years, so my body already possessed the calluses and finger flexibility and fine motor skills and hand mobility to pick up any other instrument with ease. I was already an accomplished and adept fencer, so nearly anything that required speed, coordination, and posture was no challenge. Leveraging my power, and my body’s natural baseline, I’d become a talented ballet dancer and gymnast in less time than it took me to buy the shoes and equipment online.

“Show me that backflip again,” Linc said suddenly, as if the conversation hadn’t just taken a two minute lull, and as if we’d been talking about backflips.

“This is an audio call, Linc. How are you going to see me do a backflip?”

“As if I can’t look through your webcam if I want to.”

“That’s … actually incredibly creepy.”

“No … I didn’t mean it like … Obviously I wouldn’t do it without asking first. I’m not going to cross any boundaries.”

“I know you wouldn’t. I’m just teasing you, babe.”

“So …?”

I stood up, crouched, and threw my body backwards, flipping over in the air.

“Ta-da!”

Applause emanated from my laptop.

Truth be told, I was a little annoyed because I wasn’t entirely sure that the gymnastics were something I wanted to hold onto, and each time I performed some part of a skill, it felt like it became more entrenched.

The one major caveat to my power was maintenance. If I didn’t use the skills or knowledge that I gained relatively frequently, the abilities would slip out of my mind and I’d have to start all over again learning them. I’d let it happen with my Mandarin and my archery, and I’d found that when I went to relearn those things, they’d taken just a fraction longer to stick in my brain and my muscle memory than they had the first time.

On the other side, any skills that I practiced too much seemed like they started to push other things out of my head. I had to strike a balance, and I had to learn to let go of things that I didn’t really care about or that I wasn’t sure I would need.

The result of all of this was that my days had very quickly become structured, and in a tragic and perhaps comedic twist of fate, they were structured not so differently from how they’d been under my mother’s rule.

Every day was chopped into time blocks during which I practiced a specific skill or tested myself on a specific knowledge set. I became cautious about learning anything new, for fear that I’d feel compelled to maintain that thing, cutting into my already dwindling free time.

And now, computer hacking? Something I didn’t really care about outside of the cursory interest that I’d gained by being in Lincoln’s proximity for years. I consoled myself with the fact that I’d just let it slip once Lincoln revealed whatever it was he actually wanted out of it.

And I was sure he wanted something specific out of it. Lincoln was a great guy, and I loved him, but he was nothing if not a planner and a schemer.

“Hey, is it cool if I come over a couple hours early?”

“Of course. You know I’m always happy to see you.”

“Great, I’ll be there in like fifteen minutes. Love you.”

I wondered sometimes in the breaks between team meetings and practicing or learning skills or mourning my dead parents, in the times when my brain wasn’t occupied with something that kept it from looking inward, if I really wanted any of this. Maybe I was just going along with it because I felt obligated—to Lincoln, to the team. But there was something compelling about the power, something that urged me on, and it made it hard to stop long enough to think of much else.

And with where my head was at these days, not stopping to think felt like a blessing. And sometimes it felt like a curse.

Jaleel

August 15th - 6:30 p.m.

There were things I wasn’t telling the team. I knew there were things we all weren’t telling each other, and that frustrated me, but I couldn’t act like I wasn’t doing the same thing as everyone else.

Adam’s thing, for instance. He insisted his visions were different from mine, that they weren’t so much premonitions as memories of a past life that were both incomplete and obsolete, but beyond that he was pretty vague. No one was pushing him on it, but it bugged me.

Christine, meanwhile, was showing up to meetings exhausted, saying she hadn’t slept much. When pressed for details, she never gave anything away. But I didn’t miss the faint smile that played across her face whenever she mentioned it. She was probably just hooking up with some guy, and didn’t want to talk about it in front of Adam, but still …

And those were just the most obvious things. I wished I was better at reading people, so I could work out what they were all holding back, but so far all I’d been able to deduce was that everyone was holding something back.

The most concerning team member to me right now was Lincoln—arrogant, secretive Lincoln—calling a meeting, trying to commandeer the team.

But I hardly had time to spare for any of that, because the thing that I was holding back was so troublesome that I couldn’t focus on anyone else’s issues.

I had used my power half an hour ago, and I was still reeling. In forty-eight hours, there’d be a news report about a terrorist attack in New York City, at Grand Central Station, and my uncle Talib would be one of those responsible.

I saw the aftermath of the initial attack, a small explosion designed to draw reporters and first responders to the scene, and I saw in the background of a news camera shot as my uncle rose hovering from an uncovered manhole, eyes glowing red, stuck out his hands, and caused the ground around him to shake and split. Massive cracks formed in the pavement and swallowed dozens of people before the station’s feed switched back to the studio, where the anchors sat speechless with looks of shocked dismay on their faces.

I’d made a habit of watching the evening news at two different times every night, and I’d made a habit of using my power during one of the two times, alternating every second day, so that I would always get a glimpse of the news two days in advance. Between the time we’d intervened to save Shannon and now, the nightly local news hadn’t had a single story that warranted us stepping in. There had been occasional stories out of Dallas that seemed more interesting, but I didn’t think we were established or experienced enough to justify going to another city to fight crime. National stories almost never made it into the local broadcast, not unless something very serious had happened, and anyway, we weren’t in a position to intervene in anything happening elsewhere in the country or the world.

But this … Fuck. Not intervening was wrong. Wrong in a way that seemed so obvious that trying to pinpoint why it was wrong could only possibly obfuscate the issue. But Talib was family, he’d been close with us when my parents had first moved to the States. He’d helped get them set up with jobs, with a home, and he’d stayed tight with us for most of my life, buying me expensive birthday gifts, flying halfway across the country to see me compete in some dumb mathlete competition in the eighth grade. It had only been in the last couple of years that he’d started to drop off our radar. I occasionally heard my parents talking about him, when they didn’t think I was around to hear. And what I heard them saying was never anything good. He was involved in some criminal group, I’d figured, had affiliations with extremists, posted concerning things on social media.

I never thought it was this bad.

Lincoln’s little power play couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’d been ready to call a meeting myself, to discuss what I’d seen and get the team’s input. Now I was afraid the team would fall apart before I got a chance.

I tried reaching out to Talib, but the number I had for him was no longer in service. I looked him up online, but all his social media accounts had been suspended or banned. What would I even say? Hey unc, it’s me, J. Uh, don’t kill a bunch of people at Grand Central in two days, if it’s not too much trouble?

Lincoln could probably help me reach him, but I was hesitant to ask for his help.

No, it seemed important that the group knew, but if it came to it, I’d find a way to figure it out on my own. He was my family, and I was the only one obligated to stop him.

“Jaleel, could you come down here? Supper is ready.” My mother knocked lightly on my door. I looked up at her and she smiled. “Is everything okay, my son?”

“Yeah, mom. Everything’s good.”

I thought about telling her what I knew, but she’d ask me how I knew what I did. I could lie, of course; my parents were devout enough that they believed in prophecy and revelation. I didn’t have to mention Hyperhuman powers at all. But I also knew they were secular enough that they’d look for a mundane explanation before accepting a divine one, and as far as they were concerned, Hyperhumans were mundane. Anything that wasn’t directly from Allah was. But at the same time, everything came from Allah, in one way or another. It was a fine line they walked, certainly not exclusive to Islam, and for most of my life I’d walked it too.

At any rate, they’d either believe me or they wouldn’t. If they did, they’d have no more luck contacting uncle Talib than I was having. And if they didn’t believe me, they’d probably assume I was losing my mind.

I could go to the authorities—of course, so could they—but that would mean outing myself as a Hype publicly or else trying to explain how I knew so much about a planned terrorist attack. I could send an anonymous tip, but the FBI must receive dozens of anonymous tips about possible terrorist attacks in New York City every single day. Without a shred of evidence to back my claims up, there was no guarantee they’d take it seriously either.

And then I was back at the start of my deliberations, the part I didn’t want to admit to myself: I didn’t want to get uncle Talib in trouble. I wanted to stop him myself, in a way that could get him free from whatever sketchy group he was with and without any negative repercussions for him. I felt indebted to him, somehow, for what he’d done for my parents back before I was even around.

“Are you coming down to dinner? If you want to be alone with your thoughts, that’s okay.”

“I’ll be right down, ma.”

She started out of my room, then shook her head and came back in.

“You know, Jaleel—and I know you’re struggling with your faith lately, and might not want to hear this—but no matter what you’re going through, you can find the answers you need if you look to Allah. Many answers are in the Quran, the Hadith, the Tafsir. And if you can’t find the answers there, reflect personally on God’s will. Try prayer.”

I knew my mom meant well. All mothers do. But she didn’t really get what was going on. I was fairly certain there was nothing in the Quran that could help me with my present circumstances.

Maybe if I’d had a little more faith, I could’ve found something in there that would fit—or at least I would force something to fit, even if it didn’t really—but as far as I was concerned there was no old book that held all the answers.

Still, self reflection and prayer, I wasn’t against those things, per se.

Deal with whatever Lincoln and the others have in mind.

Bring up your own problem.

Get input from the others.

Trust that with or without their help a solution can be found.

And, inshallah, everything will work out.

Adam

August 15th - 11:15 p.m.

“Well?” I asked. “What are we all doing here, Linc?”

I took a brief dip into the shallowest part of his mind and found his thoughts disordered and foggy, somehow.

He’s been watching tutorials about how to hide your mind from telepaths, I thought.

Such videos had been made within days of Hyperhumans being officially recognized by the US government, before anyone really knew if telepathy even was a power you could possibly get.

Somehow, though, the advice in them was generally sound. Focus on one thing. Focus on separating your thoughts into layers and keeping the upper layers mundane. Hide your true feelings deeper.

I didn’t know then if there was anyone else with telepathy in the world, but I almost felt like the tricks on display in the tutorials were so good that they had to be coming from someone with inside knowledge of how my power worked.

And I remembered something about that, from my bank of impossible memories, but it was so vague and indistinct that trying to grab hold of it or examine it more closely was as fruitless as holding water in an open hand.

I remembered butterflies.

“We’re here for an important reason.” He looked at me and only me, as if leveling an accusation.

I looked around and saw that everyone else’s heads had turned toward me as well. I shrugged, gave a quick look across the surfaces of all of their minds, and saw varying levels of confusion in each of them.

“And what’s that?” I asked, because I knew, even if his thoughts were occluded, that Lincoln would be just dying to get to his dramatic reveal.

“What do you know about New York?” he asked. “Specifically, what’s going to happen there in two days?”

I stared at him blankly. “New York? State or City?”

Christine

August 15th - 11:20 p.m.

“What do you know about New York?” asked Jaleel, turning to face Lincoln.

For a moment I almost expected someone to turn to me and ask what I knew about Dallas, specifically what had happened there the night before.

I looked back and forth between the three boys, the intense looks on their faces. I wondered if I’d even get a chance to talk about my issues. I wondered if they would even matter, in the light of whatever this was.

“What do you know about New York?” Lincoln now asked Jaleel.

“Can everyone stop asking everyone what everyone knows about New York?” said Harper.

“Actually, I’d like to hear what everyone does know about New York,” said Shannon. “Whatever Linc’s talking about, it’s the reason he’s been so distant the last bit, and I need to know what the fuck is going on.”

“I, for one, know nothing about New York,” said Harper. “Just so we’re clear. Besides that Lincoln keeps talking about it.”

“When have I even talked about it? No I haven’t. What are you even talking about?” he asked her.

“Please,” she said. “If you think you don’t talk to yourself, you need to get your head checked.”

“ … I don’t talk to myself, do I?” He sounded unsure.

We were all standing around in a loose circle in Shannon’s kitchen. We hadn’t bothered with pleasantries or grabbing drinks or even grabbing chairs. I suppose everyone was antsy for their own reasons and wanted to dive into things right away. I knew I was antsy, but it seemed like half the group had some whole other thing going on that the rest of us knew nothing about.

“No, seriously. What do you know? What does the name Talib mean to you?” Jaleel was advancing toward Lincoln.

Angie

August 15th - 11:20 p.m.

I stared at the screen and couldn’t shake the feeling that something about the woman in the ski mask was familiar. Her movements, maybe? Her voice?

It was the fifth video I’d watched of the person that online forums were identifying variously as Bast, The Avenging Angel, and The Guardian Angel of Dallas. They were all dumb names; too wordy for one, too kind for another.

The woman was no Goddess, and no angel; she was just another Hyperhuman who thought she was above the law.

And something about her was familiar.

I queued up the first video again and changed the speed to 0.25x. This was the video I’d found on the front page of hyperhumanhate.net, but it hadn’t been hard to find the others and make the connection that they were all of the same woman.

The same familiar woman.

I pressed play and watched as she advanced in slow motion away from a burning building, with people shouting in the background what they thought had happened.

Unfortunately almost all the videos were like this, picking up after the action had concluded, showing only grainy glimpses of the woman herself leaving the scene, where either some criminal was lying injured or some woman was singing her praises.

Five videos total, but I was certain that she’d been around Dallas and doing God-knows-what a lot more than that. These were just the instances where there had been enough people around that someone had managed to get their phone out in time to catch … what? Her back? Her mask?

No one ever chased after her. No one ever tried to ask her anything. Of course not, I thought. They’re scared of her, and they should be. This woman breaks knees and sets houses on fire and leaves the scene unscathed.

She’s a menace.

Better than the videos were forum posts from people who had allegedly seen or interacted with her: a woman who claimed that Dallas’ Vigilante had saved her from a mugger, another who claimed that she’d burst into her apartment just in time to stop a violent assault.

It all sounded so positive, when you didn’t consider the aftermath. Who was this woman to destroy people’s property and burn down their homes? Who was she to viciously attack men who were only allegedly doing anything wrong? What made her above the law?

I finally settled on advancing the video one frame at a time, certain that whatever had tipped off my subconscious mind that I should know this woman somehow was in this very first video. I watched as she ran from the scene one jerky motion at a time, and … Yes, I thought. There it is. As her left pant leg lifted up I saw for two frames a small tattoo on her ankle.

I knew a woman with a tattoo on the back of her ankle. The video’s resolution was too low to make out any details, so I couldn’t be certain that it was the same tattoo, but combined with the familiarity in the woman’s movements, it made me feel a certain sort of dread in the pit of my stomach.

If that tattoo belonged to the woman I thought it did … But no, my mind wouldn’t let me accept that. It couldn’t be her.

Christine Kinsey didn’t even live in Dallas.

Harper

August 15th - 11:25 p.m.

The look on Lincoln’s face was intense, accusatory, angry, but it was Jaleel that scared me more in that moment. It was like some sort of deep anger that he never let well up to the surface had taken complete control of him. It was like whatever was going on had him so worried that he was willing to do anything, even attack my brother, to figure things out.

I had no idea why everyone kept talking about New York, but for him at least, it was personal.

“Talib? I don’t know any Talibs,” said my brother. He reached behind himself, not taking his eyes off of Jaleel, and touched his laptop with his left hand. His eyes glowed green for a few seconds.

“Talib Bukhari is … your uncle? Resident of Upstate New York. No fixed address. Founder of the pro-Islamic extremist website Jihad Now.”

“Founder?” said Jaleel. “… I thought he was just … I didn’t think he was that involved.” He had stopped advancing, had now turned away and was pacing back and forth across the room.

“What the fuck is going on? What does your uncle have to do with anything?” I asked.

I noticed that Adam had been standing in the corner, quiet, withdrawn. He looked pensive. He looked like he was trying to make himself small and go unnoticed, like he didn’t want anyone’s attention turning back to him.

“I … I used my power again. I’ve been using it constantly, actually. To check the future, to see if anything happens that we could or should intervene in. I’ve been looking for small crimes, local stuff. Stuff we could handle easily and that would maybe put our name on the map? It seems stupid now, but …”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Christine said. “I’ve been feeling like we need to start doing something for a bit.”

“Right. Well, anyway. Nothing has really come up that fits the bill, which is a good thing, really. It means we live in a relatively safe and crime free town—”

“Yay, us,” I said.

“But I used it again, saw the news from two nights from now, and something big happened. Big enough that coverage of it cut into the local news.”

“Big like an attack in New York?” asked Linc.

“Exactly. And how the hell do you know about it? Or are you going to tell me you can see the future now, too? Between you and Adam, I’ll be completely redundant.”

“Speaking of …” Lincoln said, looking pointedly at Adam.

“I don’t see the future,” he said quietly.

“Not what I was getting at, buddy,” Lincoln said.

“Why do you think he knows about New York, then?” asked Jaleel.

“Because someone else knew … My old boss—he’s dead now, but never mind that. I hacked into his supposedly secure servers—this was before I even had my powers, mind you—and found a bunch of cryptic files referencing a coming attack on New York City. Before his untimely death, or … deletion? Anyway, before that, he told me to ask Adam about it.”

“Lincoln,” I said slowly, “did you kill your boss? I know what he did to you a few years ago, but …”

“I didn’t kill him. There was nothing to kill. It was all smoke and mirrors. It was some sort of artificial intelligence all along.”

“I’m sorry,” said Christine, “but I can’t be the only one who’s not following any of this?”

“Lincoln worked for a seemingly legitimate company that was really just a front for a collective of hackers whose goal was to gain access to corporate and political servers or the computers of powerful people and find dirt on them, mainly evidence of corruption.” This was Shannon, summarizing, getting everyone caught up. “A few years ago, Lincoln got curious about who was actually behind the whole thing, but when he got close to figuring it out, he was scared off—”

“They sent him a faked video of him beating a little girl to death and threatened to release it,” I supplied. This got a look of genuine fury from Christine.

“Was a little girl actually hurt?” she asked.

“No. No,” said Lincoln. “God no. The whole thing was a ruse. The girl was fine. Listen, we’re getting off topic here.”

“I, for one, appreciate the background,” Chrstine said. “Especially when it might involve kids getting hurt.”

“No one got hurt,” I said. “Really. The point of the whole thing was just to demonstrate to Lincoln how powerful they were. A sort of … don’t fuck with us type of deal.”

“And you all knew about this?”

“I …” I looked to Lincoln for his blessing to say what I was about to say. He nodded. “Adam and I walked in on him about to kill himself. Otherwise I don’t think he would ever have told us anything about it.”

“He definitely wouldn’t have told me,” said Adam. As heads turned his way, he shrank back once more, retreating inside of himself. He looked contemplative.

“He only told me a long time later, but I imagine he also told me more than the others,” said Shannon. “For example, he told me that he never stopped trying to figure out who was behind Custodian Systems Inc. Or who this enigmatic Overseer is.”

“And after I saw the files that were hidden, but not quite deeply enough that I was convinced they weren’t meant to be found, I was almost ready to go after him again. To try to get help from other hackers online. But then …”

“Then I got kidnapped,” Shanon finished.

“Then Shannon got kidnapped, we all got superpowers, and we brought down a psychotic criminal,” I said. “And now what?”

“After that, I figured I had exactly what I needed to go after Custodian Systems, for real. I had a power that seemed almost intended for the purpose.”

Lincoln

August 15th - 11:30 p.m.

“And,” I said, “as I said earlier, when I finally got to Overseer, I discovered what he really was: some sort of computer program. But the stuff about New York, it seemed real enough. And he told me Adam knew something about it.”

It had taken a lot longer than I’d expected to talk around in circles before we got back to where I’d wanted this meeting to go, but we were finally there. Finally ready to get some answers.

“So,’ I said, looking at Adam. “What do you know, buddy?”

“I’ll tell you what I know. Hell, I’ll show you,” he said. “But first, I want to hear about Jaleel.”

Everyone looked at Jaleel, who finally stopped pacing and looked back at the group.

“My uncle … He was the one I saw in my vision. He had powers, some sort of … ground shattering power? Seismic-kinesis? I don’t know. But he used it. He attacked Grand Central Station, he … A lot of people died.”

“Holy shit,” said Harper.

“Okay,” said Adam. “That all pretty much lines up with what I remember, but …”

“What is that? You’re not clear on it at all,” said Jaleel. “You remember this, your memory tells you that. What the fuck does it mean?”

I had been meaning to ask Adam that exact question, but it wasn’t good optics if I was always the one pushing against him, or against any of the others. I didn’t want to be the adversary of the group, and I knew I had a tendency to come off that way. I just wanted answers. And since Adam's initial admission that he somehow remembered living through the night we'd rescued Shannon before it happened, he hadn't been forthcoming with them.

“It’s … complicated,” Adam said. “It’ll be easier if I just show you. Linc, can you please drop your mental defenses?”

“Yeah, right,” I said.

“Please. There’s no way for me to explain myself if I can’t just show all of you at once.”

Hesitantly, almost certain that I’d regret it, I let my thoughts return to their usual patterns, dropping out of the mental state that I’d been practicing putting myself into from the moment I’d learned there might be ways to protect oneself against mental intrusions.

Almost immediately, my mind was bombarded with colors and noises I didn’t recognize. Traitor! I thought, certain that Adam had backstabbed me and this was some sort of attack. But quickly the noise and light coalesced into recognizable shapes. Buildings, towers, destroyed and empty. Sand blown over roadways, a sepia tint to the world. Fires raging uncontrolled and unnoticed in houses whose roofs had collapsed. Towering things that were blurry and almost formless, like I was seeing them through frosted glass, but even the indistinct impression of them was enough to send shivers down my spine.

This is what I remember of the future, said Adam. Death, destruction, chaos. The images become clearer as time passes, but mostly it’s just a jumbled mess. I don’t know how we got here. I don’t know what caused any of it.

“It looks like the end of the world,” said Harper. “Like every apocalypse movie ever.”

It is. It was.

And there are things from before, he thought at us.

More images: Our team fighting a giant monster on a beach, our team fighting someone who looked like Pitch. No, I realized. Not our team. I wasn’t there. It was all of the rest of them, but without Shannon or me, plus a girl who despite the mask I could tell was Angie.

“Where am I?” I asked.

You went … bad. I know you’re not now, but you certainly were then.

“And, so … Okay, you remember these things? Fine. But from when?” asked Jaleel.

From … before. I think … I think I was sent back in time to stop this.

Once again, the images of fire and destruction.

“And New York?” I asked, trying to stay focused despite my mind reeling at Adam’s proclamations that I’d gone ‘bad’, that the world had ended, that he’d been sent back in time.

Shannon

August 15th - 11:37 p.m.

I hadn’t missed the fact that the team that appeared in the vision that Adam sent to all our minds was missing more than just Lincoln.

“Where the fuck was I?” I asked, speaking for the first time in a while.

I had been reeling the past few weeks, for obvious reasons, and this team had felt like the one thing holding me together, giving me something else to think about and focus on besides my dead parents, besides the trauma of what had happened to me.

And now … to see this vision, to contemplate its implications?

I had spoken too quietly, and everyone was still looking at Adam, waiting for a response to Lincoln’s question.

“Where the fuck was I?” I asked again, louder, angrier.

Adam looked me straight in the face and I felt his mind recoil from mine. I felt alone inside my head once more.

“You … you died, Shannon. I didn’t get here in time. We still stopped Pitch, but not until after you were already gone. I should have told you sooner, but … I still don’t know what any of this means.”

“How dare you?” I asked him. “How fucking dare you step in and mess around with things. You think I want to be here, with my parents gone? With the burden of all the shit that went down? What gives you the right?”

Everyone was looking at me now, some with pity, some with shock. I hated both. Even Lincoln looked at me with something approaching annoyance. Upset that I was stealing his thunder, derailing his interrogation? Probably.

And probably I was being irrational. Adam had saved us in time. I was still here. And I didn’t really want to be dead like my parents. But the weight of everything was coming down on me at once and what else could I be besides indignant and enraged?

“Look, I empathize completely with you, Shannon,” said Christine. “But can we table that discussion for later?”

Of all of them, I felt somehow that she was the most likely to be able to empathize. I guess I knew why. I dropped it, started walking out of the room, changed my mind and came back to stand next to Lincoln.

“Go on then,” I said. “Get your answers.”

“New York,” said Adam. “I didn’t remember anything about it before you all started talking about it, but I do now. Talib, or Zilzal, I remember him. The aftermath, the public debates about how Hypes should be handled, the legislative nightmares, the tarnished perception of us. I remember all of it. Like it was … not quite yesterday, but not so long ago.”

“Adam, man, what can we do?” said Jaleel. “I don’t want my uncle to get hurt. I know he’s a good guy, he's just … misguided. But I don’t want him to hurt other people either.”

“I think I remember someone else. Someone who might be able to help. A guy from New York—a whole team, actually—who we worked with a lot … last time.”

Jaleel

August 15th - 11:40 p.m.

“It’s too dangerous,” I said. “There are too many moving parts to trust this to some … some guy none of us have ever met, who you know from what? Some past life? He won’t even remember you.”

“I know that,” said Adam. “But we can’t get to New York in time to do anything, and if what you’re saying and I’m remembering is true, then this is more than normal cops can handle.”

He paused for a minute, maybe lost in thought.

“Things have changed here,” he said, “because of my memories slowly coming back and my interference. Shannon—” he looked solemnly at her “—would have died. Angie would have been on the team. Lincoln would have become a villain and taken over half of Europe—”

“Wait, you didn’t say anything about Europe,” said Lincoln, and something in his voice made me think he envied that other version of himself, at least a little.

“Never mind that. I’m making a point. Things have changed here because I keep messing them up. Which could be a good thing, or it could be a bad thing. It’s impossible to say right now because I don’t remember enough about the future to determine what sort of changes are needed to avoid, well, that thing I just showed all of you. But things haven’t changed much anywhere else. Not yet. It will take time for the changes to ripple outward.”

“Where are you going with this, Adam?” Christine asked. “We don’t have all the time in the world for you to contemplate the nature of time and free will.”

“The point is, in New York, things will happen exactly like they did last time, if we don’t stop them. This is only a guess, because I honestly don’t remember, but knowing Jaleel, he would’ve set up the same system for monitoring the news last time around, and therefore he would have seen that same story about the attack on New York with the same amount of time to spare before it happened. And yet it did happen, because I remember it happening, and this … this Overseer somehow knew about it, too. So we know that whatever you, Jaleel, were going to try … It wasn’t going to work.”

It made a strange sort of sense, when I wrapped my head around it.

“I’m not following any of this,” said Harper. She wasn’t as dumb as she pretended to be. I knew that. But I couldn’t fault her for having trouble following along with this. I had a power that literally let me see the future, and all this talk of altering the past and changing the future was starting to give me a headache. I looked around at the others and saw similar levels of frustration or mental fatigue.

“But you wouldn’t have suggested we—or you guys, sans me—contact this New York city Hyperhuman last time,” said Lincoln. “Because you didn’t have the memories from the future. You didn’t know anyone in New York.”

“Exactly,” said Adam, clearly relieved that someone could see where he was going. “So that’s our only possible course of action that would definitely not have occurred to us to try last time. His name is Ricky, by the way. He is—was—a cop. A detective.”

“And how well did you know him?” I asked. “You’re certain that we can trust him? And more importantly, you’re certain he can actually get the job done?”

“I knew him very well. We worked together a few times. And yeah, he and his team were capable. They can do this. Whatever’s required.”

Adam

August 15th - 11:50 p.m.

I knew him, alright. Memories flooded into my head as I focused on him. To say we worked together a lot was an understatement; I’d spent almost as much time working with him and his team as I had with my own. To say he’d be able to help wasn’t a lie, but … I couldn’t have told them we had gotten along. I didn’t remember everything about him, but I knew that would have been a lie.

Ricky Gonzalez. ‘El Cerebro’. He’d been a regular ally, a sometimes friend, and a constant pain in the ass.

“I’ll call him. Should be easy enough to find his number, right Linc?”

“You really think this guy can help?” he asked.

“I do.”

“There’s just one other thing I’m wondering … How did Overseer know that you’d know about New York, unless …?”

Lincoln’s mental defenses were still down, so I saw his conclusion immediately. But I would have even if he had been hiding his thoughts.

“... He was from the future, too,” I finished his thought.

I was hyper-aware of Shannon’s movements, her heart rate, her involuntary shudders and twitches. I felt bad that I’d kept something important from her, but, I’d reasoned, what good would knowing how her past life turned out do her in the here and now?

What I felt truly bad about was what I was still keeping from her: that whatever thing Pitch had left inside her was still there, that it was too slippery for my power to grasp and kill, and that when she got agitated, so did it. Why couldn’t I just tell her about it? I couldn’t say. I only had a vague sense that I should wait and see what happened. That I shouldn't tell her anything unless I knew how to get rid of it. No point in scaring her when I didn't even know what it was.

It scared me that I didn’t know where that feeling was coming from. A premonition? A memory? Or something darker? Something influencing my mind the way I could influence others?

“Holy shit,” said Harper. “Lincoln’s robot boss was from the future. What the fuck has my life become?”

“Holy shit.” Christine echoed the sentiment.

“Shiiit,” said Jaleel.

“Holy fuck,” said Linc.

“Oh my God,” Shannon whispered. “Holy mother of God. Jesus Christ.”

“Shit,” I said, ending the conversation.

There would be more to discuss, logistics and timing. More questions about my memories, ones I was and wasn’t equipped to answer, ones I was and wasn’t prepared to answer. There would be more concern from everyone. And fear. And anger. And blame to go around.

But at that moment, ‘holy shit’ pretty much summed it up. And anyway, I had a phone call to make.