My head ached like mad.

In the enormity of that moment, nothing else seemed to matter. I didn’t care that my ear-piercing scream was going to draw people. I didn’t care that I might have just disintegrated Ileene Plotsky’s soul. I was just a father and a doctor, and in front of me was a child—a wounded, helpless child—mortally injured. The jagged tears Ileene’s ghost had ripped open in Andalon’s face, neck, and chest bleed liquid light. Something not quite like vapor sublimated from the fluid, rising up like fog before the Sun.

I cried. “Andalon? Andalon!”

I knelt over the little girl, trying to cradle her, to lift her up, to hold her, to provide even a modicum of comfort, but she might as well have been a will-o-wisp out on the Bay’s marshes. A will-o-wisp in the shape of a fledgling nymph; tangled cerulean hair and prone, half-clenched limbs gathered in a pool of liquid numen. There was nothing to touch, nothing to hold, nothing to comfort, just a ruined hologram; a painted phantom, beaten to a pulp.

My arms and hands phased through Andalon’s stainless nightgown. They phased through its tears. They phased through her neck and mouth; through the space behind her bloodshot eyes. Shuddering, I bent over her, falling back on instinct, trying to perform CPR even though, if I’d stopped to think about it—maybe even tried fracturing my consciousness again—I might have realized there was no point.

I propped myself up with my arms, only for my hand to phase straight through Andalon’s chest and press down on the cold, scratch-riddled hallway floor underneath. A distortion wave rippled out from my arm where it passed through her, making her form flicker.

“No!” I cried, yanking my arms out of her. “Please! I didn’t—I didn’t mean to—”

The flickering quickened. Andalon’s body became moiré patterns of half-vanished features overlaid on one another: the line of an arm, the silhouette of her fingers, her nightgown’s quivering curve. She glitched before my eyes, and then vanished altogether.

I ran my gloved palms across the floor like a dog scratching at a door. A desperate, lonely fool. It took a moment for reality to catch back up to me. I pushed myself up and onto my feet, getting ready to run.

“…sh… …p… …no…”

I heard a sound fainter than a whisper. It stopped me in my tracks.

“…ie… tay…”

Another.

“ …f… …ife…”

And another.

Inchoate words unwound in the distance, piling up in wispy layers. The voices thickened without growing louder, blurring into wooly white noise. Electric sensations shot up my nose, making me snort. My eyes watered. In an instant, I went from panicked and alone to panicked and aware. Eerily aware. I don’t know how to explain it other than say that it felt like every molecule around me—in the floor, in my clothes, in the air—was an eye, and that all of those eyes were watching me. Or was I watching them?

I… I don’t.

I shook my head.

What?

I groaned.

No, never mind.

My senses were raw. It was like I was a callused foot, the thickened skin picked and peeled away, exposing the naked tissue beneath.

Is… are these… withdrawal symptoms?

I was a stripped wire. A denuded tree. The protective covering was all gone.

Strange, leafless trees erupted from the walls.

I walked off as quickly as I could possibly manage, weaving side to side to dodge the trees.

I shook my head, only to stagger as a thunderbolt of thunder struck at my abdomen. My head bobbed with a reflex I didn’t know I had as saliva poured into my mouth. The spit tide rose, rapidly submerging my tongue and then trickling out through my lips. Sweet fluid rolled down my chin and then hit my mask, which absorbed it like a sponge. I reached for my face, but my hands smacked against my protective plastic visor.

The saliva wasn’t stopping.

My mask loosened as it wetted. It slid over my unkempt beard’s spit-slicked hairs. I swore I could hear something fizzing—I just didn’t know where.

Electricity danced up and down my limbs. Suddenly, all the adaptations I’d made to the lag between my will and my bodily movements got thrown out a window. My vision flashed black every other nanosecond as I saw the absence of sight that occurred as electrochemical impulses traveled from my retinas and into my brain’s optical cortex by way of the optic nerves.

Suddenly, footsteps other than my own echoed off the floor and the hallway’s arched ceiling. A very loud, very real voice shouted: “I’m coming! I’m coming!”

Angel Angel Angel Angel!

If someone found me like this, I was done for. I’d be found out, and as much justice as that might have, I wasn’t going to be able to work to keep the armies of Hell at bay if I was locked in a room like all the other transformee patients. And—who am I kidding?—there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in summer of me being able to convince the system—let alone my colleagues—that I was on a mission to stop Hell from conquering the world!

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Fudge!!

The walls and floor began to swirl and churn. Monstrous limbs reached out from the eddies as the ceiling overhead seemed to stretch up to infinity.

I pushed my numb feet even harder, quickening my pace, leaping on my numb feet, desperate to dodge the hell-portals opening all around me.

No!

Stopping in my tracks, I slapped myself in the face.

“Ow!” I yelped.

Focus! Focus focus focus!

I blinked. The hyperphantasies around me had vanished, though I could swear I could still sense things flickering at the edge of my perceptions.

At this point, if losing my humanity meant getting control over these terrifying abilities of mine, it might just have been worth it.

“Is someone hurt!” the voice yelled. The footsteps got louder.

No!

My only thought was fear. In a panic, I looked around as quickly as I could.

There!

I saw a nearby stairway door. I ran to it like my life depended on it—and, as far as I knew, it did. I threw open the door as quickly as I could, rushed into the old-fashioned octagonal stairwell and was about to slam it shut when I stopped myself mid-spin on the staircase’s wrought iron landing.

Looking down, watching as drops of my saliva fell onto the stairs and through the tiny gaps in the iron grate. The fizzing came from the metal underfoot. I squinted, and I thought I could see smoke.

Fudging fudge!

I covered my mouth with my hands and craned back my neck, trying to swallow all the fluid. But it kept coming.

What was I gonna do?

Slamming the door shut would give my position away. But closing it slowly would take forever, thanks to the hydraulics in the hinges.

In my panic, a wild idea came to me.

The bottle in the cafeteria.

Yes, I’d used my powers to crush a plastic bottle into a paper-thin slice, but that wasn’t what stuck out at me. What mattered here was the sound.

A literal memory hole opened in the air beside me. Through it, I saw the world as I’d seen it in the cafeteria yesterday afternoon. Seeing it for a second time, I had the double benefit of hindsight and wyrmsight. The psychokinetic threads glisten and twitched—azure, argent, aureate—as they cocooned around the bottle. Then the power flowed; the plexus writhed and flashed as the bottle imploded on itself.

And it had barely made any sound.

Sound. Something about sound.

Closing my eyes, I shook my head, flinging a couple caustic droplets onto the stairway, but I wasn’t paying attention to that. No; I was leafing through my memories. My memories were the pages of an album that reached out into forever, adding more to themselves with each passing second. I flicked my way through the album until I recognized what I’d been looking for.

“Sounds are vibrations,” Mrs. Usher said.

The memory I’d grasped was from a lazy afternoon in my first year of high school. Mrs. Usher had been my science teacher that year.

And, suddenly, I found myself having an out of body experience. It was similar to the hellscape, but different. The hellscape had been augmented reality. My hyperphantasia had projected that scene onto the world around me. As I delved into my memory, I could feel the same hyperphantasia playing out, only this time, it happened… within me.

One moment, I was standing in the stairwell. The next, I was my teenage self again, sweaty, tired, anxious, and more than a little bit hungry. I’d been staring at the clock on top of the LCD board at the front of the class, counting down the minutes until school was out, because Dana was going to pick me up and we were set to go to O’Malleigh’s for one of our late luncheons—ice-cream pebbles and all—to supplement the meager offerings school gave us in place of an actual lunch.

Whoa…

The hellscape had just been a projection, but, this? This felt real. It was palpable; solid to the touch. I felt it all, as real as it had been on the day I’d lived it. Yet I felt my real, adult body at the same time: the weight of my tingling legs and coiled tail pressing my numb feet down against the iron staircase landing beneath my feet.

In my memory, I sat in my usual seat, by the window. It was open; there was a lovely breeze outside. A pair of oak trees in the planters outside of the J Building where Mrs. Usher’s class was blocked the descending sun like fingers in front of a child’s eyes. The breeze made the leaves swish, flickering the dappled sunlight they cast onto the corner of my desk.

Mrs. Usher was showing us the truth behind sound. The graphics displayed on the LCD board paired with and commented on the holographic projection that floated in front of the teacher in the middle of the room.

“Air might seem like it’s empty, but it’s not. It’s a gas, and, like all gases, that means it’s made of a flurry of particles, bouncing around like little billiards, flinging everywhere, ricocheting off one another and anything else they strike.”

From the edge of the image, a wave of particles emerged. It swept across the projection, toward the holographic billiards.

“Here’s a sound wave. It hits the gas particles much like water hits the sand when a wave washes onto the shore. Sound propagates through a domino effect,” Mrs. Usher explained, right as the oncoming sound wave impacted the chaotic particles. “The particles crash into more particles, and they crash into other particles, and in that way, sound travels through the air.”

And then, the key line, the thing I’d come to the memory to find.

“The density of the particles determines the speed of sound. Waves travel faster through dense media than through diffuse media.”

And then everything lurched away, and I was back in the stairwell, and only the stairwell.

I gulped. My saliva was sweet, with an acidic tang.

The footsteps were so close, now.

“What’s wrong?” the voice yelled. “Are you hurt?”

I blocked out the sound. I had to; I only had one shot.

It was time to put this morning’s practice session to use!

Step One: Visualize.

The spectral threads of the forming plexus appeared, loosely tangled.

I breathed in deep. The threads quivered along with me.

Step Two: Imagine what I want it to do.

With my mind, I wrapped the plexus around the door like swaddling, crushing the air beneath it, trapping it against the door. That way, the air wouldn’t be able to send its vibrations through the hallway or the stairwell. I’d be able to slam the door shut, and the sound of it slamming against the frame would have nowhere to go.

I willed the threads to envelop the door, whisking them onto it, and flapping my hands, as if to plaster the plexus on.

Would that make it go faster? I had no idea!

Step Three: Let it go.

The threads swirled. It was dazzling.

Lunging forward, pushing with both hands, I slammed the door shut. Something like a puff of air brushed against my gloves where my hands had plunged into the plexus, yet I didn’t hear a peep.

The glistening threads circled round and round.

Then, I heard the voice. It was faint, and muffled.

“…llo? …any… ere?”

I held my breath, counting to twenty before releasing my mental hold on the plexus. The power dissipated, and all that remained of the sound of the door slamming shut was a soft thud, like a shoe tapping on a marble floor.Staggering back, I leaned against the staircase railing, panting for breath.

That had taken more out of me than I—

—I gasped.

I nearly keeled over as a bolt of pain struck my belly. I grabbed the railing and leaned against it, barely keeping my balance as I struggled down the stairs, step after step, with only one thought on my mind.

Food.

As I bursted out through the ground floor door, I caught sight of a sign further down the hallway, its various arrows pointing in the direction of different facilities: internal medicine; surgical theaters; lobby; pathology; cafeteria.

Cafeteria.

Cafeteria.