The best thing about enhanced vision, I decided, is that it stacks with binoculars.

  It must have been the sunniest day of the year, enough that the polished roofs of cars reflected lasers into my eyes, and the sky was such a cloudless, one-note blue that it seemed like part of an incomplete painting. I was spending the morning pretending to sightsee, adjusting the zoom on my expensive binoculars as I peered out the window of a seventy-floor tourist trap.

  I saw the busy crosswalks and car-packed streets in detail, despite staring from a skyscraper, down to the exact angle with which the driver of a shiny red convertible rubbed his eye. Far back in the bumper-to-bumper press of traffic, a teen girl yawned and raised a hand to her mouth but forgot to move it in time, leaving her closing her lips around her fingertips. She looked around, seeming embarrassed, then let out a breath of relief that nobody had seen her.

  On the sidewalk, a crowd of elementary-age children trailed after a trio of adults. They were clearly a group of teachers and students on a field trip. One of the schoolboys extended a purposeful leg into the road, eliciting a storm of honking, and a teacher scooped him into her arms.

  'Your defense is strong, Michael,' I read the teacher's lips, 'but we don't have a healer to fix broken bones.' The boy threw a minor fit but ultimately went along. With my enhanced mental and visual processing, it was like hearing them speak in real-time.

  Belatedly, after the children turned a corner, the absurdity of my situation made me grin a little. Car honking was loud, but I wouldn't have heard it without my hearing boost. The binoculars were fantastic, but my enhanced eyes were doing just as much work for my vision. This was just what it meant to have average means and high-level senses in a city with skyscrapers. It meant knowing that, miles away from you, a man was using precisely two fingers to scratch his ass.

  "You're sure you know the way back to the apartment? It's a big city."

  It was my father's voice close behind me. I turned to find both my parents standing arm-in-arm, in that particular way they did when they were worried. It had been the same when I moved into the Wellston High dorms.

  "I've gotten good with the subway," I said, deactivating my ability.

  I spread my arms wide to encompass both of them, leaning in for our third hug of the morning. Then I glanced over their shoulders, looking for a pair of conspicuously missing suitcases. "I thought you were leaving for the airport."

  "Mhm. We left our luggage with the taxi," my father said. "The driver's probably been anxious, waiting for us."

  Which meant they'd taken an extra seventy-floor elevator trip for me. I put my face in the valley of their connected shoulders, leaving it conspicuously long, then separated from the embrace. Close up, I could see in their faces that there was a chance they'd miss the flight.

  I turned to my mother. "Can you remind me what my most important rule is, Mom? I want to hear it again."

  "Don't allow belittling comments on age or level, Meili," she said earnestly. "To any issues with how young you are, remind them of your trajectory. To words about your level, tell them you're fifteen with years to grow. And, worst comes to worst…"

  Her voice became faux-serious. "Point at your earrings and tell them to research the Lingard clan."

  "I don't remember that last part."

  "I came up with it just now." She smiled. "I think it's good."

  I laughed a little. I didn't actually want to hear the advice for the something-teenth time, but I wanted my mother to be able to say it to me again. For her sake. She probably knew it, too.

  After saying goodbye, they meandered off to the elevator, turning back at me to wave and smile with every few steps. I couldn't help but think of a taxi driver anxiously tapping his foot against the bottom of his car. Then the steel doors closed, blocking their faces, and my thoughts became something else.

  It was the final day of May, my fourth day living in my New Boston apartment, and my first day alone in the city. After a half-week of family time touring the North Atlantic Sector, I'd been shooing my parents off with no small amount of effort... maybe sending unintentional signals in the process. Regardless, June first would be the initiation of my internship, leaving me with precisely a single day to make good progress on my John-related schemes. Once my work at NXGen got into full swing, I would only have the weekends.

  I should've been panicking. That was minimal time for what I wanted to accomplish this summer, but I felt oddly fine. My preparation earlier in the month had given me some initial calmness, which meant I didn't need to panic about the fact I was panicking, so I didn't panic, and I kept calm, and so on. It was a nice feedback loop.

  More importantly, 'New Bostin' was such an insignificant district of New Boston that I could feasibly observe the whole of it from a high enough vantage point – and it was also where John and William Doe lived. Successfully reading the lips of someone a mile away from me had been all the verification I needed for what I planned to do.

  Once enough time had passed, I turned away from the window and headed for the elevator myself. I felt my pulse begin to quicken. My school year was over, but that didn't mean everything school-related was resolved; I had no idea if I'd been able to reach Seraphina at all. I didn't know if Cecile was going to plot against me after the way my mother had provoked her parents, and Rei could still become a vigilante in university and get himself killed like in canon.

  But there was no point in worrying about these things now. Not while I was here.

  I wasn't supposed to know where the Doe family lived, but I did. I shouldn't have known where John went to school, but I knew. I hadn't found a non-suspicious reason for visiting an attractionless, low-level district of New Boston, so it was visual eavesdropping time - I could learn a lot about John without making contact with him.

  A pleasant jingle chimed. The elevator had made it to the ground floor while I was trapped in thought. I walked out of the building to the curb, sighing to myself, and stuck out a hand to reel in a taxi.

  What was creepiness and stalking, compared to what I'd already done?

  ***Beautiful***

  The therapist's office was nice but small.

  The couches were soft and clean, and the bookshelves that rimmed the sitting space weren't tall enough to tower or short enough to snort at. Whether from a scented candle or another source, the air smelled faintly of spiced lemon tea, noticeable but not strong enough to distract John from his thoughts. The temperature was also nice, cold enough for the hot summer, and whoever set it didn't fall into the trap of overcompensating.

  But there was only enough space for two parallel seats and a single window. He thought Dr. Saledi would call it intimate, maybe, judging by the short time he'd known her.

  She made a penstroke on her notepad. "I find that the world is often smaller when you're young," she said.

  Thirty minutes in, and it was the first therapist-like thing she'd said - as a follow-up to an earlier question about how he liked being fifteen. She adjusted her round-rimmed glasses, which, along with her circular face and brown, short-cropped hair, gave her the image of an extra-tall squirrel.

  "In what way?" John asked.

  "Let me give you some context." Dr. Saledi put the pen and notepad down. "This is a kind of 'starter' I use to start knowing someone. Particularly people who have experienced change in their lives. I ask them to put themselves in the mind of their younger selves at varying ages and fill in a blank. 'X was my whole world.'"

  The topic felt a lot more like his expectations. He'd never even heard of therapy up until a week ago, and even then, he only knew it was supposed to be some sort of mental conditioning with odd questions. "And It's larger for older ages?"

  "Generally." She nodded. "It starts with your parents, then your house, then your neighborhood, city, and sector. Or it starts with school and friends. The older you are, the more likely you are to name an abstract 'world,' larger in another sense. For example, a personally important activity like combat, ability training, or some type of art. Maybe a career or discipline."

  John ran a confused hand through his hair, thinking about it. "I don't know if it's changed that much for me. Not much time to."

  John was a Freshman in high school. It seemed like the kind of exercise meant for people four times his age. His life was vastly different than it had been a year ago, now that he had his ability, but in the fourteen years before that…

  Dr. Saledi's smile grew. "Lots of people say similar things. It's all about the ages you use." She paused, tapping her pen against her chin. "Let's start with age nine. No rush. We start whenever you're ready, so take as much time as you need."

  He did. After just a few minutes, he came up with a firm answer, one he didn't like.

  Caught between being genuine and telling a believable-sounding lie, John reminded himself that his dad had recommended he do this. Advised him to take it seriously, not blow it off or half-ass it.

  He took a heavy breath. "When I was nine…"

  ***—***

  When John was nine, a fist was his whole world.

  He wished it was wider, secretly, when he stared at the open sky. But every Friday by recess, twenty minutes into lunchtime, he was stuck between its fingers.

  The fist came crashing down, blotting out the sun and clouds. It molded his head into the concrete ground, and at first contact he knew his place was underneath it. It had more force, more depth to it than his whole body - and it brought darkness with it, forcing his eyes closed and keeping them shut. With one strike, sensations blurred while perception faded, and there was no difference between leaving his eyes closed and opening them; pain became his only sense and thought.

  It always stopped, eventually. How long it took any given time, how many strikes, he never knew, it could have been three or thirty. Like always, the sensation of dusted pavement around his neck told him it was over, because only then did his body have the room to feel something so small.

  "He didn't even block," a boy's voice said. "Lame. I thought you said this would be fun to watch!"

  "Of course it's not as fun when he doesn't try!" Marsha's voice answered. "He tries sometimes! I thought he would today!"

  John lay in a ditch of his own torso's shape. He could barely hear or see, much less sit up or crawl away - but the fact he could listen to them speaking was a good outcome. He kept his hearing more often when he didn't struggle.

  Still, the boy was a blurry mess in his eyes, and John couldn't identify the voice even when the boy spoke again.

  "This guy really doesn't have an ability? Not just a stupid one like Greta's Far Vision? None at all?"

  John opened his eyes a little further, watching the squiggly, Marsha-shaped blob above him move away. There usually wasn't this much talking, because it was usually only her, but he welcomed the distraction.

  "How else could I do this so much?" she replied. "The teachers won't tell me not to, no matter what happens. Isn't it great?"

  "I dunno… What if he tells his parents?"

  The boy sounded slightly hesitant, and Marsha didn't answer right away. John shifted a little, hoping the end had finally came, and caught a thin glimpse of the summer sky.

  "His dad's only a stupid cripple, just like he is. And he doesn't even have a mom, so it's fine. "

  "Oh. Okay." The boy's voice became relaxed. "Aren't your mom and dad both threes, Marsha? I guess it's good, then."

  Oh, John managed to think. So he was worried about her.

  His crossed fingers started hurting. He barely kept his cry of pain in, waiting until the diminishing sound of footsteps became too faint to hear. Then he pulled himself off the ground, resting his back against the brick wall of his elementary school.

  Burning hiccups strained his injured throat. There'd been worse before, he knew, yet he couldn't keep himself from crying, for something like the first time in months. The tears rolled down his chin, staining the ground, and he cursed himself for his weakness just like usual.

  John decided he'd fight back next time. That way, at least, he wouldn't have to listen.

  ***—***

  "When I was nine… I guess a fist, maybe."

  There was a long, drawn-out silence. Dr. Saledi's body seemed to stutter in her chair, like she was stuck between two actions, before she leaned down to retrieve her notepad from the ground. She clicked on her pen with an exhale and started writing.

  "I don't usually ask people to elaborate, not until I hear what they say for a few ages." She spoke and wrote at once. "Still, could you tell me a bit about what you mean by that? Are you thinking of a certain person?"

  John didn't know what he meant himself, really. When he'd been nine, he spent more time at home with his father or listening in class than in one-sided fights. The half-year period where Marsha beat him every week was long, but the severity and injuries hadn't been anything special. Other kids had also beaten him during the same period, and their frequency had increased immediately to compensate once Marsha moved away to another sector.

  Still, the answer felt right. More than something like 'my dad' or 'school' as his whole world

  "She's the only person from elementary I haven't gotten back," John decided. He smiled, reminded of all the old faces he'd beaten into the ground over the past few months. "Marsha, the girl I was thinking about - she had some kind of heavy fist ability. But she doesn't live here anymore, not since I was nine. And that might be why I thought of her."

  There was probably a different reason, deeper in the back of his mind, but he didn't really care enough to go digging for it.

  "I see." Dr. Saledi nodded. "And if you saw her again, what do you think you would do?"

  "She'd definitely start something," he said. "And even if she didn't, I'd start it for her. She probably wouldn't accept that my level's higher than hers now, so I would have to teach her a lesson." John cracked his knuckles.

  I could make a hole in the ground with the shape of her head, he thought. Just like old times.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The brown-haired woman scribbled some more on her notepad. She was good at keeping her face in a mild smile, hiding her reactions, so John didn't know what she was thinking. Even with a question as minor as 'how do you like your school,' she hadn't given much of a reaction to his response.

  She went on to ask him a few more questions about his answer. Was there a specific moment in the past that he thought of when he came up with a fist; what was the frequency with which he thought of Marsha; were there other fist-related people in his life?

  After he answered enough of them, they moved on to another age.

  ***—***

  When John was eleven, he made a friend.

  His back crashed into a wall with a sickening crack, and he choked on the air, hunching over reflexively to shield the spot he'd been kicked. He managed to stay on his feet for a second, with the support of a wall behind him, but a spasm in his spine sent him face-first to the ground. John struggled to his hands and knees, then willed his eyes open, but all his vision got him was a view of the bottom of a shoe.

  An infinite boot, higher than the sky, the clouds. Stepping on him.

  It was the first week of middle school, and his welcome presents were broken bones for each day of the week. In elementary, some kids hadn't gotten their abilities yet, but New Bostin Middle had a single cripple student, himself. As the easiest target around, his popularity skyrocketed, and John became known across school on the very first day. His face might as well have been a product advertisement on a billboard - 'walking easy victory, ripe for the taking, great for risk-free ability training or an ego boost after a loss!'

  And if that was the customer hook, then John also came with a disclaimer on his back: that he was only usable once per day, that his weak body relied on healing tonics to recover. So Monday had been his wrist, Tuesday had been sternum, one bone a day until he wished his skeleton would disappear.

  "Damn," the boy laughed, taking his foot off John's face to punt him in the stomach. "He sure is weak."

  He could do nothing but dry heave, curling into a ball on his side. The three upperclassmen who'd cornered him stared down at him expectantly. They were probably waiting for him to throw up, but he hadn't been stupid enough to eat lunch. When nothing came out of his mouth, their eyes sharpened into a familiar look, and John threw his mind somewhere else.

  The rest of what happened was lost to time. They eventually left, as usual, and he regained the ability to think sometime later. He came back to the world shivering, lying limply on the ground with dried mud coating his body, the autumn wind sweeping at the new rips in his uniform.

  His first bitter thought was that he'd have to get more sewing supplies.

  So John focused on being grateful it was over and pointedly nothing else. John didn't think of - for example - the fact that Friday was everything day, the day where every part of his body was available to hit, because healing tonics worked much better over the weekend than a single night. He didn't think of the fact that Friday was 'anything goes' day - because you wouldn't put a public resource in the emergency ward, unable to be used.

  "Just do your job, little dude. You're a public resource."

  His thoughts went the wrong way.

  If anyone were to ask, John never started sobbing. And if he did cry, repeatedly pounding a weak fist into the wall, it was a cry of righteous anger. He didn't make the sound of a boy choking on a self-hatred that was too acrid to swallow.

  Regardless, he seemed to be attracting footsteps. The sound of them tempted John to close his eyes and feign unconsciousness. But as the steps grew closer and their sound grew clearer, he realized they were oddly familiar. They seemed exhausted, almost timid, just like his own after a beating. He wiped at his eyes and pulled himself to a crouch just as the source of the footsteps turned the corner.

  It was a girl, probably in sixth grade like he was.

  John immediately noticed that the whole left of her face was a continuous reddish bruise. The girl's eyes were flickering over his body, examining him, and John did the same: her mid-length green hair was patchy, shorter in some places than others, with stray strands on her shirt.

  There were open gashes on her arms and shoulders. Likely from an ecounter with a cutting ability, and he could spot her limp once she was close enough. The girl looked nearly as bad as he felt.

  "Hi." She stopped two paces away from him. "Are you alright?"

  "…I'm okay." John rubbed at his throat by reflex, even though it wasn't injured enough to affect his voice. "What are you doing here?"

  A subconscious instinct jolted. Before she could say anything, he leaned away, backing up as fast as he could. He couldn't even stand, but he wanted to run - from the smile that appeared on the girl's face.

  A smile. In other words, bad news.

  Her expression morphed into a confused one. "Well, first of all, I'm Claire. Do you think I'm going to do something to you? Don't you know who I am?"

  He would've kept backing up if his back hadn't already been pressed against a wall. He'd heard someone mention that name in the same sentence as his own. But it wasn't the type of sentence he would let himself listen to the meaning of, not if he wanted to keep his head down and last the day.

  "No," he said. "I don't."

  "My ability lets me see way into the future... But it activates completely randomly." Claire stuck her hand out. "John, right?"

  Oh, he thought. So it's one of those rare non-combat abilities, one you can't grow by fighting. He nodded and took her hand, letting her pull him up. "That's almost as bad as me."

  He settled in for a few shuffling steps, leaning his arm across her shoulders, then flinched. The smile was back.

  "That's exactly what Oliver said to insult me as he beat me up. 'You're no better than John.'" Claire's grin widened, somehow, as she shook her head. "That jerk. And he threw in some extra stuff to go along with your name."

  He didn't understand what the smile was for. It wasn't because Claire was happy to beat him up - it wouldn't grow her ability at all, and she was too injured for it to be more fun than painful. They were probably going to get blamed by the school nurse for 'failing to avoid a fight' once they got to the infirmary, so what was there to be happy about?

  "You're smiling," he pointed out.

  She touched her mouth tentatively, as though she hadn't realized. "Oh. Yeah. That's a habit."

  "It made me think you were going to kick me into the ground. It's Weird."

  She blinked at him, then frowned. "That's what a smile can mean, not what it has to mean."

  She said nothing else as they limped toward the infirmary, the wind cutting against his skin. John only felt more confused than before. He also became embarrassed as they went, too aware that his limp, sagging limbs were regaining their strength at the pace of a coma patient. Anyone with half-decent recovery would've been able to stand on their own by now, while John was barely sure he could crawl.

  "It's not like I enjoy people beating me," Claire muttered out of the blue. "That's not what it means, either."

  He hadn't even been close to thinking that. "Why were you smiling, then?"

  "It's a habit," she said. She paused for a while, tilting her head back and forth. "But if you need a reason, I was happy I wasn't alone."

  John didn't quite understand. But a month later, once they were close, Claire said something that made a lot of sense.

  If all the smiles you saw were from people happy to crush you, she told him, then that was what you were good for - being a useful tool for growth or entertainment. But if you got other kinds of smiles, smiles that had nothing to do with violence or abilities, then you were worth more than that.

  So Claire smiled, often in situations where it didn't make sense. She smiled at him.

  ***—***

  "And she's still a close friend of yours?" Dr. Saledi pushed her glasses up her nosebridge. "Claire?"

  "Yeah. Her and Adrion, a guy I've known since I was really young," John said. He thought for a while, weighing what to say. "But recently… You think I can talk about something outside myself for a bit?"

  He didn't want to derail her for something that wasn't useful. Dr. Saledi was a high-tier, and she was the one in charge, not him.

  She nodded. "So long as you want to talk about it, I wouldn't call it separate from you."

  "Okay." He grimaced. "It's just, we've been kind of weird recently. She started a big argument with me over nothing. I got into a fight with Oliver – the guy who was beating her, the day me and Claire met. Nowadays, he doesn't understand his place as a 2.5. He's a total loser, super jealous, and he can't accept that I'm a whole league above him."

  "I beat his ass whenever I want to, now, but somehow he got it into his head that calling me a fake was a good idea." John scoffed, rolling his eyes. "Like my power is less real, just because I only got it recently. I took him to the floor and smacked him around a bit once he was out. It was classic stuff, really. Taught him his place was underneath me."

  "…But Claire didn't like that for some reason. She wanted me to go easy on him – Oliver, the guy who's been beating us down for years! If I'd called him a fraud a year ago, he would've done the same thing!"

  John caught his breath and stopped. He realized, belatedly, that he'd been leaning forward in his chair and gesturing wildly with his hands.

  "Sorry." He huffed, falling backward into his backrest. "She's being a total loser right now, but I know she'll come around."

  He looked back at Dr. Saledi. She was silent. Her hand shot across her notepad, like usual, but her expression had finally changed. Her eyebrows scrunched up, and her lips pursed together.

  John wondered if he'd messed up, somehow, by making her use her time thinking about a low-tier like Claire.

  But her old smile came back after a bit, exactly the same as before.

  "This is all good to know, John. I think I only need one more age. Given we're already thinking about the present day, how about fifteen? What has your world been recently?"

  ***—***

  The summer before his Freshman year, John's eyes shone with a faint spark of aura. For a brief, unreplicable moment, he made a warm light glow in the center of his palm.

  It was a pathetic, piddly thing. They had just gone through a routine beatdown by Oliver, his Hand-Projection Laser able to tear the flesh straight off their bones. John was happy to finally have an ability of his own, but his joy was cut by the fact that their bully had a much better ability of the exact same type.

  Also, beyond its weakness, he failed to reactivate it so many times that he began to write it off as a fluke.

  Then Claire's Clairvoyance gave her a vision. It showed John using abilities of all different types, drastically different from simple laser generation. They came up with a theory, they tested it, and they were right: John could temporarily imitate a nearby ability as long as he understood how it worked.

  So he trained constantly over the summer, slowly understanding the tricks and complexities of aura. He studied the most common ability types, learning from books, demonstration videos, and Claire's visions of his future self.

  On his first day of high school, John was beaten badly as usual. His reputation as a free reservoir of training and satisfaction remained, and he was crushed repeatedly by stronger, more experienced fighters. It didn't help that many of them had unfamiliar abilities - ones he'd never been able to witness, much less copy.

  But, as it turned out, the best way to understand lasers was being hit by them.

  You could make sense of fire breath pretty well once you'd been burnt by it; super-strength was easy to grasp after you'd been made into a human ditch. Telekinesis was comprehensible after being forced to punch yourself in the face, and so was earth control once a boulder had smashed your ribcage in two.

  Being on the receiving end of every type of ability helped him learn. He began putting up a fight sometime in November. By January, people knew his name for a whole different reason. And when Oliver, the one who had started it all, came to beat him down, John managed to stand his ground.

  It was an overcast February afternoon, but John chose to fight outside.

  He ducked under a beam of light, the laser going wide over his head. Wrapping behind a tree, John returned fire, putting his hands together to form a thicker beam. It made a bloody rip in Oliver's side. The boy snarled, charging one up to blast the tree away, but John launched a small potshot that broke his concentration.

  John knew his beams were slightly slower to charge, a matter of practice. Oliver had likely realized it and began launching a rapid volley of weaker blasts while closing the distance.

  Explosions of wood dust and bark pelted John's face, getting in his eyes. He decided to gain distance before he lost too much vision. The instant John left his cover, he began charging as strong a blast as he could.

  His hands shook with strain, struggling to contain the beam. Oliver seemed to have predicted the move somewhat with his own beam charge, and by the light in his palms, he'd started at about the same time. John realized his beam would be weaker. He thrust his arms out and fired it anyway, along with Oliver.

  They blasted each other backward to the ground.

  John could feel an awful burn in his forearms. He knew that, if he looked at them, they would probably look like mangled sticks, the flesh and skin flaying off them like a week-old carcass.

  He hadn't aimed for Oliver's torso but instead risked going for a smaller target, the neck. It was the windpipe, more precisely, to cripple the flow of oxygen to the brain.

  He'd known to aim there. Oliver had done it to him a year ago.

  Slowly, John struggled to his feet. The other boy stayed flat on the ground, hands around his throat, making no attempt to get up. John managed to trudge to his downed opponent, chuckling softly to himself, and he soon laughed with more force and glee than he had in his whole life. Satisfaction and pride trickled down his cheeks.

  "Stop… Don't look at me like that," Oliver choked out. "Don't-"

  He stomped down as hard as he could. Over and over, as if to stamp out fourteen years of his old self. The sun started shining, piercing the clouds, and he caught a brief glimpse of a clear blue sky.

  John laughed some more. He felt closer to it with a body under his feet.

  ***—***

  "The sky as a goal. A body as a stair," Dr. Saledi parroted his words, nodding. "I like that. You can expand on that. I can tell it's a good expression of what you're feeling."

  John frowned. "I don't know what I have left to say."

  It was his first time putting these particular thoughts into words to anyone but his dad. He knew that he probably hadn't been very clear. And they were past the ninety-minute mark, so he didn't want to spend time saying what amounted to nothing. On the other hand, Dr. Saledi's whole job was understanding other people's rambling.

  "The progression is what I look forward to," John decided to say. "Whether it's learning to manipulate projectiles or getting better at regeneration."

  "I love when I get a doctor's report and find out my level's jumped up," he continued. "That's where my mind goes when I'm crushing someone, not as much how badly I hate them or how sweet it feels to get revenge. 'Course, I hold on to those feelings, and I lean into them a lot in the specific moment. I remember that they deserve it - it makes it easy to reach a high intensity level. Five factors and all that."

  It took a while for him to get the next words out.

  "But my dad says using negative emotions like this won't be good for me later on. He wants me to let them run their course and fade away naturally... which is why he scheduled this meeting for me. He thinks I've been going too far."

  Dr. Saledi was making a squinting, skeptical face, and she sighed after a while.

  "That would be counterproductive," she said. "I can't agree with that in good conscience. I'm sure your father wants to help you, John, but my understanding is that he's a cripple."

  "Um, yeah," John said. "He doesn't have an ability."

  She peered into his eyes through her glasses, making pointed eye contact. "What reason do you have to take him seriously here when he's never experienced the process of growing an ability?"

  John smallowed. They had gotten into this exact argument just a few weeks ago. Growing up, his dad had taught him that you listened to adults' advice because they had more life experience than children. It was a basic, simple explanation that any child could understand... until the child became more experienced than the adult at something, and the adult still wanted an outsized say.

  The argument had blown up.

  "I talked about this with him." John scratched the hot part of his neck. "He's my dad. And - and I guess that's about it."

  "But you wouldn't follow his every word if he was telling you how to fly a plane or hunt an elephant," Dr. Saledi pointed out. "Or generally, anything he's never done before. It's not that you don't respect him as your father. You understand he's human."

  "Yeah…?" John blinked. "Yeah. That's right. I probably should've put it like that."

  She smiled into her notepad, scribbling away.

  "To directly address what you've been describing, the technical term you're reminding me of is 'positive maliciousness' - turning things like antagonism or a desire for revenge into something productive like ability growth."

  Dr. Saledi looked up, aiming her grin at him. "I don't think there's anything wrong with that, John. Everyone has these feelings, so why not make good use of them instead of doing nothing? I think you're doing a very good thing for your future."

  John went silent, considering it, and he eventually found himself smiling back. He felt more sure of himself, which was more than he'd expected two hours ago.

  "Okay. Most of the kids at my school aren't a good challenge anymore, though. Oliver's boring now."

  "I'd say there's an easy fix to that." She adjusted her glasses. "A body as a stair. You can move up a staircase more than one stair at a time."

  ***Beautiful***

  I learned very quickly that reading lips was only easy when people spoke about everyday, mundane things.

  When every word they spoke made you wince, when you were second-guessing every sentence and desperately hoping to be wrong, it got pretty hard.

  'It was surprisingly easy, sir.' The woman's lips curved into a smirk. 'The moment I affirmed John's actions, he fell into our desired mental state. A non-agent therapist could have done the same.'

  I peered through a window multiple miles away, my eyes trained on the mouth of a brunette woman speaking into her phone. If only I hadn't been reading her lips, her circular glasses, round face, and bob cut would've given her a harmless appearance. My aura usage and mental stamina were flagging in unison. From my shadeless position on the top deck of a building, the hot sun had gathered a ring of moisture around my collar.

  I needed just a few more minutes.

  'And I understand that, sir. I'll send a full analysis of his mind by the evening. It's only that I'm still unsure……'

  'Yes. Right. That part seems very reasonable. I understand that John will want to terminate project JCM91 if he reaches a high enough position to access it. But why go through the trouble of manipulating him instead of terminating the threat early?'

  An eternity went by without her lips moving.

  '...As a spare for his mother, you mean? Won't the cripple genetics keep him from growing enough to be suitable?'

  There was another pause.

  'No, no. That's true, you're right. A low-quality resource is better than none at all. I'll try to-'

  I felt suddenly winded, forcing me to take a long, gasping breath. I couldn't see the woman anymore. It took me a while to understand what had happened: my aura was completely out, leaving me exhausted and squinting fruitlessly into my binoculars at an innocuous-looking building. There was nothing shady or conspiratorial in sight, as though what I'd just watched had been nothing but a hallucination.

  I dropped limply to my hands and knees, shivering. It was the warmest, sunniest day of the year.

  After watching John catch a bus to the hospital straight out of school, I'd expected something useful. It hadn't been this.