Lyssa was discharged from the infirmary the following morning. I put her on something light duty—organizing shelves and cleaning up the sheds. But when I came to check on her an hour later I found tools and nails floating in the air, slowly moving back in place. I shut the doors to the shed.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She looked at me oddly. “The job you assigned me, foreman,” she said with a nippy tone. This version of her—whatever it’s called—was capable of sarcasm, despite how shy she always seemed.

“I didn’t want this,” I said. “Anyways, you’re not supposed to use your gifts! Doctor Navarro barely managed to help you.”

“He didn’t help me,” she said. “Not even the best superabled physicians of New Langshir would be able to fully fix me. What I have will come and go.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Q-toxin,” she said.

My skin bristled. The blight of the World Wars. The bane of Allied supercommandoes. Even in black and white the pictures were gruesome. It was one of the most engrossing chapters in history I had read.

“Who would…?” I began to ask. How would they even make any? The formula was supposed to have been expunged from history.

“The good guys. Our heroes.” she said. She finished the job. The floor was free from nails and metal fragments. All the tools that tended to find themselves scattered about were put back on the shelf.

“So your own people shot you in the back? And you’re here on assignment for them?” It sounded insane. A girl from the big city up north doing this kind of work.

“Who would you work for?”

“I don’t know? Not someone who shot me?”

“What about someone who whips you?”

“That’s…” I sighed.

“It can get much worse,” she said. She gave me a look through half open eyes. “There’s used to be a city only miles away. Now there’s a hole and millions of displaced citizens. You wouldn’t know. I sure didn’t when I started school. I was too busy struggling with my own… personal problems to care about what was happening outside my own campus. But America is still dealing with the after effects of Rachminau.”

The name brought dread, but the repetition, the constant reminders: it was kind of annoying.

“Exactly,” she said. “It’s just the way we’re wired. Problems aren’t real to us until we have to face them ourselves. It’s always somewhere else happening to someone else. Truth is you and the few thousand workers don’t even have it that rough.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can you read minds?” I asked. I realized I was wearing a shocked expression and quickly took it back.

“No,” she said.

There was a pause before answering. I didn’t believe her. I decided to change the subject.

“So, is there anything you need me to do? To make your not-plan work.”

“Keep it up,” she said. “You’re a good leader.”

“I’m really not. I’m sixteen.”

“Some parents enroll their kids in gifted camp from the moment their power manifests.”

“Well I’m not gifted.”

She smiled. Bumps prickled my skin.

“I don’t need you to fight,” she said. Then she patted me on the shoulder and left the storehouse. I was left alone with the deafening silence.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

The sounds of wailing pulled me back to reality. I burst out of the storehouse and ran to the source. It was coming from the dorms. A crowd of murmuring ‘steadhands blocked the way. I heard half-baked theories and medical speculation.

“Excuse me,” I said. They were slow to move.

A stronger arm persuaded the workers to part a path for me.

“Let him through!” Ivan said.

I glanced at him awkwardly. “Thanks,” I said. Authority was kind of convenient sometimes, I supposed. I still didn’t like having it.

The crowd let me through. It was Farnoush, curled up on his bunk beneath the covers, sobbing hysterically. He squinted fat tears.

“She’s coming to get me!” he was shouting. “She’s taking me apart!” Then he stopped all at once, petrified, frozen in time. The whites of his eyes stared in hollow horror as if he was Saturn mid devour.

“I’m dead already,” he said out loud, then a few more times silently, mouthing the words. “I’m not all here. I’m not all here!” He was patting his body, his palms thumping against his chest, his stomach. Attempts to help him were quickly tossed aside. Farnoush escaped onto his feet.

“Hold him down!” I said.

People reacted. Farnoush was pulled back on the bed like a massive toddler. He tried to strike his captors the whole while, bicycling air with his feet until they were pinned.

“I don’t wanna be here anymore!” He screamed. “Help me! Get me out!”

He was beginning to break free. I waved more people to come bear the weight.

“I wanna leave! I can’t be here anymore!”

I felt something snap.

“You want to leave?” I asked.

“I wanna go home!”

“Well tough!” It took a moment for me to realize the words were coming out of my mouth. “You think anybody chooses to be where they are?! You’re a grown man! You’re here just like the rest of us so deal with it or shut up!”

That did not help. Farnoush’s caterwauling only grew worse.

“Put him to sleep,” I said to Ivan.

The big ‘steadhand nodded and took his former leader’s neck into his embrace. He grasped one of Farnoush’s arms as well. I jumped over the bed and restrained the other. Farnoush was sputtering, his face reddening. It wasn’t until he began to turn blue that the struggling died. After what felt like hours he finally slumped, unconscious but breathing, and at peace. A form of it anyway. I sighed and looked at the clock. It was half past six. I doubted the day would get better.

I supposed I should thank God I was wrong. We got our work done and evening came. Farnoush stayed asleep until noon. When he woke again he stayed in the dorms, disturbed but quiet. At the close of day the ‘steadhands performed their celebrations. Singing, laughing, joking in muted tones. I hadn’t noticed in a long time. Not enough happened here to create new stories. The ‘steadhands just recycled the same ones over and over. The same jokes with slightly different delivery, the same story with different cadences. I had zoned it all out. Now I was beginning to pay attention again to their moods.

“Can you bring a little food to Farnoush?” I asked one of the ‘steadhands. They nodded and did so.

I didn’t know how to feel about the man. He was set to commit something horrible before he was stopped. Did he deserve what Siobhan did to him? I didn’t think so. But I doubted those who had been courted by Nathan Werner would agree. The girls he had been with were never forced to do anything with him, despite the severe reluctance they had every time. And they would always come back with gifts. Was that… wrong? These sorts of things were so complicated they made my head hurt.

But what did Siobhan do to him? While the ‘steadhands huddled inside I asked Lyssa about it under the cover of the night sky.

“She’s a teleporter,” Lyssa said.

“She can disappear and reappear elsewhere?”

“That’s how most of them work. But Siobhan must be special. I don’t think there’s been a documented case of a teleporter being able to take a living being apart like that, let alone put them back together afterward. Teleporters have to simplify. Even a grain of sand contains a lot of atoms. They’re trained to think of their cargo as one discrete thing, to stitch it out of space and put it elsewhere. They’re also prone to sociopathy. Not sure why.”

“How do you know all this?”

“School, remember?” She said. “I’ve been trying quite hard ever since the… incident.” She shifted her back uncomfortably.

“How uh how old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

That wasn’t too far away from me. I thought about it. Then my heart jumped and my chest burned with fear. Doris Werner’s face twisted into a gremlin’s in my mind. I took a deep breath and steadied myself. Lyssa was a gifted just like Doris. Just like them. We were their property. They could kill us at any time and there would be no consequences. In the cool chill of night at the end of a grueling day it was dawning on me.

Lyssa looked so peaceful now, but she had fallen from the sky covered in armor. She could lift metal and produce flames from the palm of her hand. We would never be able to argue as equals. And if we lived together, even in peace someone would inevitably become the slave. All the Werner Homestead did was forego pretense altogether. They were better. We were the dirt under their boots.

“Are you alright?”

“Y-yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

“You should get some sleep.”

“I will.” I left my seat on the ground. “What about you?”

“I’m going to stay awhile.”

She was staring up at the moon, mouthing something. This was the last person who should have all those abilities, I thought. I left her to her silent mumbling and returned to the dorms.