I am here again.

  The void lingers, long enough to be noticed—before the big bang answers it. Color detonates across my vision: blue first, then red, then black swallowing both. The sequence is wrong, but it repeats anyway. I am reminded of the woman.

  My breathing desynchronizes. My jaw tightens against nothing.

  Something foreign presses into me, intimate and unwelcome, like a graft performed without anesthesia. Blue floods my vision. Not just blue. Aqua, the exact shade of her eyes. It swirls, gathers itself, and begins to organize.

  Two spheres converge against a black canvas. Between them, a hole opens. A silhouette takes shape.

  Those almond eyes look down on me, endless and ocean-deep. The dread is immediate and absolute. I feel reduced, scaled down to irrelevance, like an ant standing before a behemoth that has noticed it.

  Holding its gaze costs me something. I can’t name what leaves, only that it’s gone.

  I steady myself anyway. This is my domain. This is my body.

  I am not trapped in here with it.

  It is trapped in here with me.

  I look up, unbothered and untamed, and meet its hubris head-on.

  The silhouette closes its eyes.

  When I wake, the universe has agreed to be small again.

  It is the 24th of January, by Earth time. I’ve been asleep for three days.

  I am stronger.

  More importantly, I understand more.

  My power has clarified. Not fully, but enough to be dangerous. And layered over it is something else. A residue. A borrowed frame of reference. I do not know how to explain it, I just see the world differently.

  I have gained part of the woman’s ability.

  That alone is unprecedented.

  Infected don’t usually inherit powers this way. It’s easier for newly infected to gain abilities through killing because their parasites haven’t fully developed yet. Even then, it rarely works. Infected are hard to kill, and newbies can barely manage that against anyone but each other and when they do, the victim’s parasite is usually too immature to survive transmission.

  That’s why almost no one carries more than one ability.

  And yet.... I do.

  I clean myself up and pull on a sport suit. The fabric seals itself around me, responsive and light.

  It’s time to test my abilities.

  The training room greets me with sterile indifference: a vast white space, seamless walls, cameras embedded at every angle. Sophisticated systems hum behind the surfaces, tracking vectors, forces, margins of error I can’t see but know are being calculated. My bodysuit syncs instantly, streaming physiological data somewhere far above my clearance.

  “Send a training bot,” I say.

  A wall tile directly opposite me irises open. A humanoid machine steps through, matte black at base settings, smooth to the point of featurelessness. No sharp lines. No expression. Even its face is flat.

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  “I want you to fight like a very weak, untrained teenager,” I add.

  The bot acknowledges without hesitation.

  We fight.

  The bot moves first.

  Clumsy. Overcommitted. Its right shoulder dips a fraction too much before the punch even comes. Whoever programmed “very weak untrained teen” understood fear but not hesitation.

  I don’t dodge.

  The fist connects with my cheek.

  There’s force—measured, deliberate, but no intent behind it. A hollow strike. My head snaps to the side, skin stinging, but my feet don’t move. The bodysuit tightens microscopically around my neck, already compensating.

  The cameras hum.

  Vectors update. Stress responses logged. Heart rate up 6%.

  I smile.

  I step forward and shove the bot in the chest. Not hard. Not soft. Just enough to test inertia. It stumbles back two steps, arms flailing as its balance routine scrambles to recover. Human error baked into machine logic.

  Good.

  It swings again, wider this time. Desperation encoded into the motion. I slip inside the arc and drive my elbow into its ribs. Metal dents inward with a dull, disappointing thud.

  Still no resistance.

  I grab its wrist and twist. The joint spasms. There is panic, reflexive tightening.

  “This is fun,” I mutter.

  I slam the bot into the floor.

  The impact echoes through the room, white walls swallowing the sound. The bot lies there for a fraction of a second too long before attempting to rise. That delay is everything.

  And then—

  Something stirs.

  Not in my muscles.

  Not in my nerves.

  Deeper.

  The unease from before crawls back up my spine, cold and intimate. Blue flashes at the edge of my vision—not overwhelming this time, not drowning. Controlled. Focused.

  I feel it.

  A foreign frame of reference sliding into place.

  The bot pushes itself up, but now I don’t see it as an object.

  I see alignment.

  Its center of mass. Its balance plane. The exact angle at which effort becomes collapse.

  The woman’s ability.

  Not fully. Not cleanly. But enough.

  I step, barely adjusting my foot placement, and tap the bot’s shoulder.

  It falls.

  Not backward. Not sideways.

  It folds inward, joints locking against themselves as if gravity suddenly remembered a better way to work. The bot hits the ground and doesn’t move, its recovery algorithms looping uselessly.

  Silence.

  The cameras spike.

  Warning glyphs flicker briefly across the far wall before stabilizing.

  Heart rate steady. Cortisol elevated—but not spiking. Neural activity: anomalous.

  I stare down at the bot, breath slow, controlled.

  So that’s her.

  Not force.

  Not domination.

  She didn’t overpower reality.

  She convinced it.

  She had her own reality.

  A laugh slips out of me, quiet and sharp. I command the bot to stand down for a moment. I can feel it, this was just the beginning of her powers. She was far far stronger than this, unimaginably strong.

  I wait for the blue to disappear for I need to test my own powers.