Joyce Knightly February 29th,20XX

“Aaron calm down! The kids’ll be fine! We… We just need to trust them!”

Never mind the fact that my voice trembled with every word and my heart threatened to beat out of my chest, I focused on calming Aaron down before he got out of the car and flew over to the school.

I grabbed him by the arm and tried to pull him back down into his seat, but I just ended up rising into the air with him. We were still wearing our seatbelts, so his antics weren’t that noticeable, but the hard fabric of the belt dug into my shoulder.

Well, even if it had been noticeable, I’d taken one of my automatic cars today. I didn’t trust myself to drive in this state of mind, so I was using the car’s auto-driver function.

“Aaron!”

He finally looked at me and realized what he was doing.

“Sorry. I’m just nervous. I mean, how could this happen on their first day of school?”

That’s what I wanted to know as well.

It would have been laughable if it wasn’t so awful.

I’d chosen that school because it was the same one Aaron and I had graduated from. I didn’t remember too much about it, but I’d thought it was a safe school. The teachers were overall kind, and all the kids were too concerned about their family politics and public images to even consider ever raising a hand in violence.

There were quite a few things I’d worried about when sending those kids to the new school, but a domestic terrorism attack hadn’t been one of them. My heart had dropped when I’d gotten that call from Tillo, but it had raced when Aaron had suddenly threatened to fly over there and resolve everything.

“Can you go faster? We need to get there right away!”

I bounced between spamming the police station with requests for help and texting Tillo to assure him we were on the way. The mechanic voice responded in a cold, unsympathetic tone that made me irrationally angry.

“Traffic is at a 40 percent congestion rate. This is the maximum speed I can use without endangering any passengers. I would advise against attempting to override, as this transportation vehicle has been programmed to shut down when tasked to endanger the passengers.”

For the first time in a long while, I regretted upgrading my car to the newest model. At the time I’d thought its auto driver functions and traffic control function was great, but now I wished for nothing more than to turn it off. The auto driver was still useful for when I didn’t want to drive and none of my drivers were available, but the traffic control function was one that could read the movements of other cars on the road and would give you an analysis of the best way to drive. It would provide you with an accurate route and the safest measures one could take while driving. All the cars had this function, but mine was special because it would forcibly stop the car and put the driver on ‘time out’ if they tried to go any faster than its recommended speed limit.

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I’d bought it while I was teaching my younger sister how to drive and had installed it into all of my cars in case she went wild again and tried to steal one off me. I couldn’t watch her all the time, and she was too resourceful in escaping whoever I assigned to watch over her.

Putting in these functions had been a great idea at the time, but now I wished to the bottom of my heart that they would suddenly malfunction and stop working.

Aaron’s left leg bounced up and down so quickly that it created an anxiety-inducing rhythm on the floor of the car. I wanted to ask him to stop, but I knew it was this or flying up to the ceiling of the car again.

He still wore in the blue jumpsuit, and the pair of darkened goggles were slung to the belt at the waist. A black face mask hung out of his left pocket and his phone drooped out of his right. Apart from the bright green shoes that clashed with the rest of the outfit, he already looked like a hero.

I’d called and begged him to wait for me to pick him up so I knew he’d had time to change, the fact that he hadn’t, and had even grabbed a mask made it clear that he intended to use his powers.

After an agonizing twenty-minute ride, we finally reached the gates of the school, but the car was stopped. The heavy marble and metal gates didn’t swing open and effectively worked as a barricade for our car and the tens of others that were lined up around the gates.

My phone went off, and I quickly picked it up.

It was the police chief.

“What’s going on?!”

His voice was shaky as he spoke, and I could hear the frustration through the line.

“The assailants incapacitated the staff that were in charge of the door. I’m trying my best to get in there, but it’ll take about half an hour to get through the lock.”

“What about over the walls? Couldn’t one of you scale them?”

It was an entirely unreasonable request, but I was in a panic. Not just for my kids that were in there, but for all the others. Things were too tense for them to be fretting about doing things by the book.

“I would if I could, ma’am. The walls are one thing, but they have an electric wall about ten feet above the stone one. Couldn’t get enough of a hold on ‘em to climb them.”

I resisted the urge to have them try anyway and took a deep breath. Getting more people hurt wouldn’t help anyone.

“Just keep trying then.”

As I tried to phone the principal and ask what the hell the in-school security had been doing, Aaron grabbed the mask out of his pocket and fixed the goggles over his eyes. He brought out another loose black cloth and tied it over his hair before pulling its hood up and completed the look by fastening the mask over his nose and mouth.

“Aaron-”

He cut me off as he ripped the seatbelt off and carefully put his phone into one of the zippered pockets.

“I tried to do it your way, Joyce. Not that I think the police are incompetent, but they aren’t enough in this case.”

I quickly gave up on convincing him not to use his powers and directed the car away to a relatively isolated place. I couldn’t guarantee that no one would see him, but this was the best we could do under these conditions.

“Be safe! Don’t put yourself in any more danger than you need to!”

Before he could crack open the door, my phone buzzed, and a video popped up onto its screen. A look at Aaron showed me he’d received the same notification.

The picture of a man in his early to mid-forties holding a young girl with a knife to her throat was revealed. I was worried for the young girl but the look on Aaron’s face, even through the mask and goggle set, threw me off and made me take a closer look at the distressing scene.

She was a pretty young thing, but she looked a bit too calm as she looked into the camera, even with the knife at her neck she kept her eyes trained at the screed and made subtle attempts to show her right earring to the camera.

It took me a minute, but as soon as it registered; I choked on my saliva.

Before I could even speak, not that I would have known what to say, Aaron jumped out of the car and into the air.

For the first time, I regretted not having gotten powers.

The feeling of envy and nervousness ran rampant over and through me as I watched the dark blue dot fade into the sky. If only I could go in there with him, then I wouldn’t have to wait as nervously as I currently was.

I shook it off the best I could and returned to man my phone. I couldn’t get in there and fight alongside Aaron or the kids, but that didn’t mean that I was useless.