“How was your dinner?”

“Uhm… good.” It was hard to focus on the question. Lyssa had never been this far down the school. The corridors were byzantine, with floors that initially seemed modest revealing themselves to be mezzanines for great hangars. Enormous planes and giant robots stood at the ready, or pillars of pipes and dioramas showcasing mysterious machines. Many of them glowed.

“Wow.”

“That one’s an IC-CIWS,” Whitworth said, nodding at a heavily modified cargo plane. “Haven’t quite got it working, though.”

“A what?”

“Intercontinental close-in weapon system. For nuclear missiles and flying Supes. Can’t intercept hypersonic projectiles yet.”

“Are you sure it’s okay showing me this?” Lyssa asked nervously.

“Bah.” He waved dismissively. “There’s way worse below deck.”

We are below deck, Lyssa wanted to say.

“Listen, sorry for making you wait,” she said instead. “I needed the uh- the-”

“People need to eat,” Whitworth said simply.

“…Do you?”

“Sometimes.”

“I also heard you don’t sleep.” Lyssa wondered if she was pushing it.

“I sleep sometimes too.”

They must have walked for miles before finally settling down in a dome-like room. It was as featureless as most of the facility’s halls. If she was told to walk back, she had no doubt she would die of dehydration before finding familiar ground.

“How do you remember where to go?” She asked.

“Somewhere in this facility there’s a jar with a brain in it. It belonged to a psychic with the ability to scramble your sense of direction. It has a very long range but it’s very weak. So weak that once you know of it, the effect no longer works on you.”

Lyssa blinked. The Director was right. She could at least remember how to get back to an elevator now.

“Only a few people know about it,” Whitworth continued. “Everyone else uses a positioning device to get around. They all wonder why, but they don’t ask.”

“I’ve been a student here for little over a month, sir.”

“Remember those people whose minds you fried in that restaurant?”

“Wh-who?”

Whitworth laughed.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“With a poker face like that you’re not ready for Clandestine. That’s okay. Well they belong to a vigilante cell. Or the vigilante cell of America. We don’t know. We were holding them here so we could undo the damage and find out anything we could about them. But yesterday a team infiltrated the facility, found exactly where they were kept, and exfil’d them. All in the time it took to resolve that bank incident.”

“Okay?” Lyssa failed to see why she was being told this.

“I have been advised that I have too many tentacles in too many places. So I want you to keep a third eye out for me while I focus on resolving some more immediate concerns.”

“I-I don’t know how I could help. You understand me, right? How I work? My gifts, they’re alive. They’re-”

“You. They’re a mindset. An adaptation so you don’t fry your brain running several distinct gifts at once.”

“The point is,” she said pleadingly, “I don’t control her. I can borrow small amounts of her power. But if I want the full deal I have to interact with her, or any of them really. Convince them to let me use them.”

“We are here to teach you how to see things differently.”

“What is this place?” She looked around, more closely this time. They had been standing in a pillar of dim light. The wall were not visible. Or they were the deepest black. The lack of bearings was disorienting. She could only see the curvature of the ceiling from the pit where the light spilled from.

“Sit down.” The Director did first, assuming a meditative stance.

Lyssa attempted the position. It hurt a little. She was less flexible than he was.

“Now breathe,” Whitworth said.

Lyssa did, and felt her senses slip away.

--

“Do you think she’s okay?” Penny asked.

“Why would she not be?” Amelia responded.

They walked through New Langshir’s busy night. Just two among the hundreds of people on the sidewalks. A gallery to the neon and the red-and-yellow trails of light cars left in their hurried wake. In the distance, downtown rose like a mountain made of countless peaks. One prominent highrise stood out like an absent thumb with its many lit windows, the collage of rectangular spots absent of light spelled out an ‘H’.

“She seemed out of it at dinner.”

“She has always seemed to be somewhere else,” Amelia said.

“You don’t think that’s strange?”

“The women on my mother’s side of the family all have multiple arms. My aunt sleeps on the ceiling, on bedding made of her own silk. Some people are just eccentric.”

“Ooh! Those crepe guys are back!” Penny pointed at the stall across the street by a park entrance.

“For example, some people’s minds move on very quickly and it is hard to maintain conversations with them.”

“Can we get crepes?”

“Yes, Penny.”

Penny reached into her jeans’ pocket.

“Here’s a fiver.” She put the bill on Amelia’s palm. “I want something with, like, a lot of fat and sugar on it.”

“That sure narrows it down for these sorts of food purveyors,” Amelia remarked as she walked towards the long line.

Penny waited in the area, absorbing the city’s din. The casual conversation of friends and couples underneath umbrellas on outdoor establishments, basked in orange, evening-friendly light. The soft whisking sounds of toy drones hovering above laughing kids with remote controllers in their hands. Eighty million people. Eighty million vectors for ideas and interactions.

People weren’t numbers. For a second, the perpetual smile she wore faltered as her mind imposed the imagery of enormous winds swirling through the city, whispering anger and fear and sadness in her head while tearing up the roots of thousands, the air singing with psychic might. And empathy, regret. But Penny wasn’t the kind of person that could hate nature, even if she so desperately wanted to hate something, anything at all. She watched the city move and spin around her, and wondered what she would do if it happened again.

Her eyes lingered on an idiosyncrasy in the picture of peace before her. She forgot about her conundrum instantly. On a road parallel to the park fence, two figures in dark clothing grabbed a third, and all three disappeared into a van.

She ran across the street, ignoring the ensuing moment of car horns and screeching brakes.

“There is still thirty people ahead of-”

“Abduction,” she said to Amelia.

Amelia whipped out her phone and begun pressing.

“Wait!” Amelia called.

But Penny had already run ahead.