Astral: Origins

— Woods – SW of Berlin, NH – August 2016

Shadow didn’t know how long she lay in her realm after depositing the people she’d rescued from the bus back into the real world, she’d only waited long enough for the police to arrive and then phased most of herself into her realm and leaping away – the last time she’d tried that she’d nearly ended up in one of the great lakes. This time though where she ended up didn’t really matter. The horror of those people dying meant she no longer cared where she was, but once she was far away from the bus and safely back on the ground she phased into her realm and curled up next to the suitcase that represented her only possession. And fell into a dreamless sleep.

It might have been moments or months later when she finally stirred, the memories had faded somewhat, and she could shut her eyes without seeing the ruined head of the businessman she’d tried and failed to save. She knew that she needed to remember that she had saved nine people on the bus, at least some of whom would be dead if it wasn’t for her. But she still regretted not acting faster, she could have rescued more, more people would have been alive if she’d not sat there staring blankly at the gunman.

She looked around and took in the details of the forest, it was clearly mid-summer, so she’d been somewhere for several months – probably in her realm, she felt around in the suitcase and found that she’d eaten nearly all of the food she’d found in Cleveland. That is unless her mind was blocking something out that had happened after the bus. She just didn’t know but knowing her subconscious as well as she did whatever had happened would percolate through her normal thoughts over the next few hours, and if nothing did then she’d just spent five or six months in her realm. No wonder she was still filthy and hungry.

She climbed a tree to see if she could see any signs of life but all she could see was trees in all directions. So, she phased most of herself into a fully functional body and set off downhill. She needed to find water and that was the best way to find it, once she was cleaner, she’d decide what to do next. But she needed a break, somewhere to hide out for a few weeks while she got her head together, maybe near a small town where she could scrounge a little more food than she’d been eating. Boston would have been great for that but, she wasn’t sure she’d want to travel by bus ever again and it was probably a long walk.

It was a long walk down the hill through the trees but eventually she found a mid-sized stream and what looked like an old railway track – it didn’t seem to be in use and was pretty much totally overgrown, if she followed that she’d be even more likely to find civilisation – Just take it slow. She phased back into her realm and rummaged in the suitcase – it really needed sorting and all the rubbish throwing out but that would have to wait until she was safe somewhere. For now, she pulled out her only change of clothing and found a stretch of reasonably slow flowing water in the sun, it was cooler than she’d have liked but hot tubs didn’t tend to appear out of thin air when you needed a wash and in all the places, she’d been so far, she’d not found anywhere to have a real wash. She stripped off the cheap clothes she’d stolen from a G-Mart in Kansas, they were definitely getting worn through, if she didn’t find a way home soon, she’d need to steal some more – her change of clothes to wait in while she washed and dried these clothes was the ill-fitting bright green jumpsuit she’d been dressed in at the facility. It fit better than the clothes that had been in the suitcase, but that wasn’t to say it fit well.

Once she had rinsed out all of her clothes as well as she could and beaten them against a stone with another stone – if it was okay in Africa and the Amazon it should work here – though she’d tried it before and not gotten great results. She spread her clothes out on a nearby bush in full sunlight, it’d be dark before they could finish drying, she knew from experience, and they would remain wet in her realm. But she’d worn damp clothes before and at least they’d be cleaner than they had been. Then she had a swim, she hated this part not the being wet or even the being naked. Just knowing that if anyone came, she’d be even more vulnerable than normal. She didn’t really care what people thought of her scrawny body, so if some peeping toms were to look at her swimming in the river she didn’t care. But if they approached her and she was naked, that would feel like an attack even if they were just going to ask her for directions or see if she were okay.

But today none of that happened, she got most of the gore from the bus off her hands, arms and face. She knew there was some in her hair but that was such a tangled mess that she didn’t know how to even start cleaning it. Probably with some shears or a knife. Then she sat partially phased into her realm in a sunny patch on the riverbank until the sun went down, she didn’t hear anything human in all that time and was almost comfortable again. And certainly, less fearful for a while. She retrieved her still damp – as expected – clothes from their bush and settled down with just her eyes and ears poking out of her realm, if she hadn’t been disturbed by any human noise, she’d definitely think about spending a second day here even if just to let her clothes dry a little more.

It wasn’t to be – though nothing disturbed her dreams but nightmares, that frankly she was getting used to – along about daybreak a slow rain began to fall. It didn’t wake her, and she wasn’t likely to get any rain in her realm – at least it had never happened before. But by the time she woke up fully everything that had been so warm and dry the day before was cool and damp, so she pulled on the still slightly damp clothes with a little reluctance and walked back up to the rail bed and began to follow it and the river downstream.

After some time, she started hearing the odd motor noise from further to the east, she walked progressively slower until she stood on a slight embankment overlooking a quiet country road, the traffic – what there was of it – seemed to be mostly older models of car and pickup with the odd larger vehicle. The river went under the road in a large pipe while the track-bed had once crossed at the same height as the road, but any real indication of it was long gone. Instead of waiting for a clear moment in the traffic she concentrated briefly letting the real world around her slow down, and then ran swiftly across the road, had anyone been able to see her they’d have only seen something fly past faster than a speeding bird (laden or unladen). Once safely on the other side she phased herself away in her realm and ate another piece of stale and only slightly mouldy bread while she watched to see if anyone had noticed her crossing.

Several hours later and after two more fraught and frightening road crossings the track-bed she’d been following met a fence that separated it from another track-bed, the difference was obvious this one had a well-made track running along it. She didn’t see anyone on the track but due to the amount of wear she could see it was well travelled. The river that had paralleled the old track hadn’t followed it all the way to this point, so she’d either have to brave this track or back-track to the river, and she’d only been travelling on the track-bed at all because the banks of the river had become so overgrown. No, she’d have to brave this track, hopefully the sound of whatever vehicles used the track would give her time to hide.

— Presidential Range Rail Trail – SW of Berlin, NH – August 2016

She’d forgotten about bicycles, and a cheery hello as a middle-aged woman swept past almost made her phase fully into her realm, and she didn’t dare do that because people noticed girls that just vanish. The woman had probably been moving too fast to notice her dishevelled state, but she’d have to move mostly in her realm which she hated. She loved her realm because it made her feel so safe – honestly if she didn’t have to eat, she’d probably just stay in there forever, hide out in a library and read the books while staying in her realm. But she needed to eat. So that was that – maybe one of those posh book shops with the attached coffee shops, she’d have to think about it. First, she wanted to find somewhere she could get properly clean, with clean or better yet new clothes, but new to her would be fine too – well except undies, she didn’t even want to think about wearing second hand undies. Oh, and a bra that actually fit, the one she was wearing was too small, she’d grown a little in the last year, even if the lack of food had left her very skinny.

And to find somewhere safe this side of the Atlantic meant going into a town, and that meant being visible – well if she wanted to move faster than a crawl. Using the time differential trick, she’d used to cross the roads earlier left her hungrier than just running across. She’d already finished the last of the bread and she now only had a couple of raw potatoes – which always gave her stomach-ache, and some apples that she didn’t even remember picking up but that were so soft that she thought that they’re probably turn to pulp and even with the cast iron stomach she’d mostly perfected over the last year probably wouldn’t stay down. No, she’d have to follow this trail, in the real world and look for somewhere she could get some food. And maybe somewhere to stay while she got herself sorted out.

She followed the track-bed as it descended into a much large valley, a couple more cyclists passed her, this time going up-hill and she tried to phase herself a little when they did, she didn’t want them to notice her, especially with how poorly dressed she was. She knew that it was likely that if any kind person saw how distressed her clothes and hair were, they’d want to help, which inevitably meant getting the authorities involved which meant MCO or the police, and as she had no ID, she’d never escape a second time.

She’d never tried to phase just her hair; it felt like it was working but she didn’t know what it’d look like, and she didn’t have a mirror among her assorted junk. And of course she couldn’t feel any difference, it just felt like her normal tangle of hair, she’d got most of the larger lumps of detritus out the other day by the stream, but she knew there would still be blood from the bus and other assorted dirt, but she had no way to actually deal with that. Next time she went into a G-mart, or similar she’d try and get some shampoo and a comb or brush – girls used brushes she seemed to recall from when she still lived with the au-pairs.

The track-bed was once again following a river and as the river descended into the wider valley, she could see more buildings and roads off in the distance. Thankfully for her nerves the track was still not that busy and she’d not seen any other walkers – on the other hand nobody had stopped to tell her it was for bikes only, so she hoped she could carry on walking – it obviously went somewhere, and given that the valley she was approaching had obvious structures in the distance she kind of guessed that she’d end up somewhere around there, but she was purposefully walking slowly now she didn’t want to hit the built up area in daylight, she didn’t know how hidden her disgusting mop was and that more than anything else would tell people she didn’t belong – well unless she were a bag lady and she was too young for that. On the other hand, the state of her clothes, skin and hair would probably keep any predators away. She’d not had to deal with anything like that since Cleveland.

— Berlin, NH – August 2016

It took several more hours to get through the edges of the small town she’d found herself in. Berlin New Hampshire, population 10,512 – she’d never thought those signs she’d seen in movies were real, but Berlin had one. Which was cool in a way, though it’d have been nice if she’d seen while on holiday or something not the way she’d had to arrive. It was now dusk and even with the streetlights and illumination from passing vehicles, from stores and businesses she could pass as a scruffy teen providing she didn’t actually go inside any of the shops. But she wasn’t that bothered yet, she’d look for a busy food place – not fast food, real food and sneak in there and just steal the food that was heading to the bins. But that wouldn’t be for another hour or so, she’d been careful of her energy on the way in and while hungry she could still think and function.

But the smell of fried chicken from the gas station was too much and she headed mostly phased round the back. The dumpsters were pretty empty and what there was, wasn’t food related, so she slipped further into her realm and sneaked into the actual kitchen area. She realised her mistake after a few moments, the smell of fried chicken was real, but this wasn’t a fast-food place just somewhere truckers could pick up a bit of food and the chicken smell came from a large cabinet near the door of the store. But with drool practically running down her chin she raced past it and back out of the building, no hue and cry went up and she could feel the heat through the packages she’d managed to steal.

She felt pretty sick about it, this was just the sort of action that was going to get her caught, she couldn’t just steal like that. Sure, it felt easy now, but she’d seen enough of MCO on TV that she knew they had ways to find stealthy mutants, all it took was one anxious Karen to report her and they’d be here and then she’d be either dead or as good as. Still when she crammed it into her mouth it tasted so amazing that she almost decided to go back and get another two helpings – but she managed to resist the temptation. From the gas station she made her way further into the town, she wondered if this place had a main street like she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t much better laid out than some of the towns at home, maybe if she could find a map, or a tourist information booth, she moved on up the hill.

The Pizza store on the next corner wasn’t open – maybe she was too early, but then she spotted a sign in the window saying it wasn’t open on Sundays or Mondays. So, either too early or a day it wasn’t open, she had no way of knowing which she wandered on looking in windows, passing a recreation centre. Eventually the road joined another and as she turned a corner almost bumping into a guy walking the other way, “Excuse me miss.” He held his hand to one side to allow her to make her way round him, she only glanced at him and this time she couldn’t stop the panic, and she phased fully into her realm – she’d just almost bumped into a cop. What the hell? Why had he been waiting for her? She stood and shivered for a while; she could still move it was just so slow. So, she set out back the way she’d come heading for the river she’d crossed coming into the town centre.

After few minutes she pushed her senses out of her realm trying to tell if there were any pursuit – or anything else – but Berlin didn’t seem to have noticed anything unusual. She waited for an hour before trying a different street. As she wandered round the town the evening was getting darker, with many of the businesses closing for the evening she realised that tonight she’d just have to curl up in her realm and think about finding some food tomorrow, she’d run into places like this before in her cross-country travels, after five or six even the fast food joints were shut, and it could easily be a Sunday. She found a grassy stretch of ground on what appeared to be a fairly busy shopping street and phased to her realm sitting on one of the benches that it had been copied faithfully. She was tired and dispirited, but not quite ready to give up – surely there must be somewhere to be safe even if just for a while.

“I’m telling you sarge, some kid – teen maybe nearly ran into me as I was heading out for a smoke, I didn’t see her coming and as I turned to make sure I didn’t hit her she vanished right in front of me.”
“And I’m telling you there is nothing on any of the cameras, nothing, nada, zilch – almost like whatever you’ve been smoking has started to affect your brain, you’re seeing pretty teens popping out all over.”
“Just one sarge and that’s the thing sarge she might be pretty under all the dirt and what I could swear smelt like old blood, but right now she looked like she’d been dragged through hell backwards. I don’t know sarge something doesn’t feel right about ignoring it.”
“Well write a report and leave it on my desk, I’ll add a note to the morning briefing, and we’ll keep an eye out. Now are you back off your break?”
“I suppose I am – damn.”

— North of Concord, NH – January (8 months previously)

The subject of their discussion was fast asleep in the one place she felt safe but that didn’t prevent nightmares, the presence that controlled her mind and realm knew that soon if nothing else she’d have to step in and save the girl, without whom she wouldn’t exist either. She gathered the teenager into her arms and pulled her into a hug, the teen quieted and fell into a deeper slumber. She’d be tired in the morning when she woke, she couldn’t hold herself like this without spending energy that neither of them really had.

Shadow had boarded a bus in Cleveland to try and get to the eastern seaboard to try and find a way back across the Atlantic, after falling out of the plane in Chicago she’d realised that unless she boarded as a normal human – which needed things like ID and a ticket she’d have to find a slower way to get home. So, a bus to New York had seemed obvious – though in hindsight she did wonder if a train might have been better. Still, it was too late now. The bus she’d got on in Cleveland had taken her to Albany, where she’d had a night scrounging food, then early the next day she’d got on a bus to Boston. She didn’t know which city would be best to find a ship going to Europe but guessed that due to Boston and New York both having big ports, she’d find a liner in one or the other.

A snowstorm on reaching Boston had forced her hand, she didn’t feel up to weathering the cold and wet even with her realm – she didn’t have particularly warm clothes and nothing waterproof to wear on top. She’d been cleaner then, but it wasn’t like she could just wander round a clothes shop and try stuff on. So, she’d just got on the first bus to New York she found – only it hadn’t been a New York bus, she didn’t know if she’d made a mistake, or the driver hadn’t changed the sign on the front – he’d been a miserable sod so maybe he just couldn’t be bothered. Anyway, the bus had been bound for – probably Berlin or maybe somewhere further north. And of course, with the storm outside she’d not been able to tell either which direction they were going or see road signs.

It'd been much the same as the two rides the day before, but without any announcements from the driver – she guessed when he got off the bus he told anyone else alighting how long they had to stretch their legs or have a smoke, she’d not left her seat just in case someone new to the bus had decided it was empty – after all without a ticket she didn’t have any right to the seat and didn’t want to be forced off the bus or worse arrested. In Concord a businessman with a fat briefcase got on and sat a few rows in front of her, the briefcase she noticed was chained to his arm and he looked nervous. She didn’t really think much about it, she’d spent most of the journey dozing mostly in her realm – she did that a lot when she had nothing better to do.

At some pokey little town north-east of Concord – though she even then still thought they were heading south to New York – two guys got on the bus, neither were immediately obviously mutants. One was holding the driver’s clipboard that apparently had a list of the passengers on it and the other stood with his back against the windscreen and looked constipated – or desperate, she couldn’t really tell. They didn’t look like officials, Shadow phased further into her realm to make sure they didn’t see her. She certainly couldn’t show them her ticket.

The larger of the two dropped the clipboard onto the driver’s seat and stepped up the last step onto the bus proper, he pulled his sun glasses off with one hand and pulled something out of his coat, she couldn’t see what it was but moments later when he shot a woman sitting a few rows from the front of the bus she knew that he’d pulled an unsilenced handgun. She didn’t know much about guns; she’d been brought up in England where they weren’t that common. But she knew quite enough to be very scared. She almost dropped fully into her realm but didn’t as she’d never know when it was over – later she was glad she hadn’t, the consequences would have been much worse.

As the gunman walked backward in the bus, he shot every adult and older teen, none of the passengers moved, nobody screamed, nobody tried to tackle the gunman or hide in their seats, they just sat and let him gun them down. The teenage boy the row in front of her decided her, though it was a long shot she knew she could pull people into her realm. It took longer than moving inanimate objects and she’d need to touch them – at which point she was defenceless against them, but she couldn’t let another person die like the boy in front, he’d been one of the few other passengers who noticed her – he’d smiled at her… maybe he’d just thought her a pretty girl but it’d been nice. She couldn’t do much against the gunman but maybe she could pull the remaining passengers clear and hide them in her realm until the police arrived.

Behind her on the bus there weren’t that many other passengers, three more businessmen, two older people sitting together, and right at the back a mother with a tiny baby who had also smiled at her – the woman not the baby. She didn’t get to the first businessman fast enough just as she reached him a hole appeared between the annoying tinny headphones he’d been wearing all afternoon. So she dipped deeper into her reserves and slowed the apparent time of the world around her and grabbed for the next guy. She started pulling him in but either it was harder than she remembered or he was somehow resisting her, because she’d only managed to start the process when a bullet passed right through where her head should have been if she wasn’t mostly in her realm and blew most of the man’s head off, because the shot was away from her she didn’t get the worst of the gore – but even then she was liberally coated.

Her heart banging painfully in her chest she darted to the last businessman and grabbed and phased him into her realm, she felt faint for just a moment but ignored it and lunged at the older couple with a hand on each and a firm yank phased them to safety and then she dived to reach the mother and her child who felt considerably easier than any of the rest. She turned and looked toward the gunman who was just turning his gun toward the now apparently empty seat of the first guy she’d rescued. His face twitched in puzzlement, before he looked up and along toward the back of the bus – for a very brief moment she saw panic in his eyes – so brief she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it. Then he turned and walked back down the bus toward the front stopping to put two bullets into the wrist of the sweaty businessman who’d had the big briefcase strapped to his arm – it wasn’t now. Then she noticed in the very front two rows of seats two small girls, she didn’t know which passenger they belonged to, but she couldn’t let them die. Phasing almost fully she leapt forward passing through the gunman before dropping mostly into the real-world to stop by their seat, the smaller guy was just starting to react to her appearance when she and the two small girls vanished.

Her realm looked considerably different to normal she’d never seen so many real living people in it – she was the only person that could pull them in so that wasn’t surprising, but they made the place look more real, even though the pen and ink style of the realm had grown on her since she’d first visited in England over a year ago. Normally the place was like a set of a movie before anything happened – not quite sterile, whatever controlled it made it look as real as it could, but with nothing living it wasn’t quite right – an uncanny alley movie set.

She was covered in blood and the other passengers would all have some of it smeared on them, she’d not had time to be careful in her panic, this wasn’t a great situation, she didn’t know what was happening in the real world and she’d need to find out, but she couldn’t move far from her guests, if she got too far from them they’d begin to fade away and it was uncomfortable for her, feeling like she was stretching her mind in some manner. She could do it as she’d done in the facility, but it would hurt. And didn’t want to rescue them only to kill them by losing them in which ever reality her realm sat in.

On top of that now that she’d fully entered her realm she needed to fully exit and start returning or if she were knocked out, she’d fully materialise in the real world. And though she didn’t know for certain she guessed that whatever power that the smaller guy had been using – he must have been using something – if that affected her, they could catch her with it too – if she fully materialised, she might be unable to escape. She navigated carefully out of the bus and then jumped and scrambled onto the top, in her realm she was far more able than in the real world, she’d never have managed that in the real world it was just very slow. Then gradually just a few millimetres as she thought of it, she phased her senses slowly into the real world. It soon became clear that the bad guys were still there, a loud argument coming from the bus, but in the distance, she could hear sirens.

She waited on the bus until the bad guys exited, she could see no sign of the driver and guessed that he was either dead or had run away when the shooting started, the bad guys leapt into a large SUV that had been parked nearby, she read the number plate, then popped fully into reality before phasing back into her realm she moved to each of the stored passengers and returned them to reality – she’d have preferred to move them somewhere more comfortable but she was unable to move animate objects in her realm very much and certainly not enough to get them anywhere better. She slipped away looking for a pay phone. When she finally found one, she put in a call to 911: “911 which service do you require?”
“Police and ambulance please.”
“Where are you ma’am?”
“I don’t know I was on a bus and some guys attacked it… I escaped but there was a lot of blood… please…”
“We have had other reports ma’am, please stay nearby emergency services will be there shortly.” Then after a pause. “Do you know if the shooters are still present?”
“They left, white SUV – I don’t know what type, but I saw their number plate.” She gave the dispatcher the number that she’d seen.
“Thank you ma’am, police and ambulance will be with you in just a few moments.”
“I… I can’t… I’m sorry… I did what I could I just wasn’t fast enough…” She tried to hang up the phone, but her hands were shaking so badly that she missed the cradle and left it hanging.

She didn’t remember how she got into the forest, but she stopped briefly before crawling under some bushes not even managing to slide into her realm before her mind overloaded with horror shut down and she lay still before slowly vanishing from sight.

— Berlin, NH – August 2016

When she finally surfaced from her dreams, she didn’t feel very rested, this happened enough that she knew she’d need to spend at least some time in the real world today. It really helped to not duck in and out a lot, just being in there, or if she only slept in there, she slept fine it was the ducking in and out that seemed to mess up her head – and sleep – the most. The park she’d spent the night in didn’t have much in the way of out of the way places to hide in while she switched from phasing into the real world to phasing into her realm, but she waited until the few pedestrians on the street were further away and did so. Now mostly in the real world she began to look for a G-mart or similar, she hadn’t seen an open restaurant that looked like it might be doing enough business to have waste food be thrown out – and some of the ones she’d seen open had looked tatty enough that she thought that the staff might be eating food off the patrons plates that got sent back.

It turned out that there was a G-mart close to the southern edge of the main town – she knew that it was a Goodkind owned place and that they hated mutants – but it was just a supermarket so she didn’t really care about that, but they were probably no more likely to catch her than a Walmart – but she’d not seen one of those round here. G-mart had probably run them out of business anyway. Plus, as an additional benefit of shopping in a G-mart was she was stealing from people who thought that she was evil just by existing – like her dad – though she supposed if she stole from them, she’d be just proving them right. Starved if she did, starved if she didn’t presumably.

She still wasn’t comfortable enough to spend long there though, making a beeline to the small section of non-perishable foods aimed at hunters and the like, she’d probably have been okay to stay a little longer, nobody seemed to pay her any attention even though she was definitely visible in the real world – she checked her hair in a mirror and felt a little relief that is just appeared short. Though she could still see how dirty the skin of her face was – a wandering store security guard frightened her off before she could figure out where the shampoo and soaps were kept. She’d got the most important things, and if she held out for a few days she could come back – that seemed the safest thing to do.

She went back to the park in the centre of town, it was quite quiet and even though there were people around she still felt more comfortable than alone – it was the thing she missed most, human contact. She nibbled on the food she’d stolen from the supermarket and dozed. She didn’t have a watch or any way in which to tell the time but a building up the road had a clock with chimes so she knew it was not long after noon when an older lady and gentlemen arrived and took up seats on a nearby bench, they looked like they had brought enough food for a picnic with several other people which at first made her scared – was her retreat going to be invaded by hordes of people? – And then when she realised that all the food they had was just for them a sharp bright jealousy.

The lady was good looking maybe in her thirties while he looked a similar age but plumper as though his job whatever it was didn’t need much moving around, they were talking about their jobs. “Three weeks then all hell breaks loose.” The gentleman said rather morosely.
“Pish,” the lady replied, “you love it, almost like you’re someone important again.”
“I’m tired Myra, I love working with the students. But it’s getting harder – every year I wonder if this will be my last year. When I started, I was only thirty and I thought I was old – too old for the league. The academy seemed like such a great place to retire to from that, but sometimes I wonder if a normal school might be better.”
“You’d last about a week in a new school, you’re a good educator Eddie but you do best when the kids are smart, normal schools have smart kids sure, but smart enough to drive you to excel?”
“Maybe, but every year they just seem a little more jaded and…”
“They’re teens Eddie you’d be complaining about that in any high school in the country – probably the world. We’ll do everything we can to make their stay with us comfortable and happy, it’s our job to produce well educated and well-rounded adults, and I think we do a good job. They mostly leave with the skills and knowledge to survive in an increasingly dangerous world.”
“And we’re the best – I know the arguments, Myra – I seem to recall making them to you the last time you were thinking of quitting.”
“Well there you go then.”

They both smiled at each other and ate and drank quietly for a while. “So, are you ready?” Eddie asked Myra.
“Oh heck no, ask me in a month and we might be just about ready then.”
“We have the new intake starting to arrive in what? – Ten days.”
“Don’t scare me Eddie, I think everything will be done, we seldom run more than a few days over on summer maintenance, and the kids won’t be in class immediately – which is a relief. Oh and of course Liz has organised some pre-semester meetings, so everything needs to at least look ship-shape. But the cafeteria should be working again.”
“What was the issue?”
“It was a pickle. We don’t know if it was intentionally designed to take out the kitchens – or something else – but one of the power distribution panels in Schuster had been messed with and it wasn’t obvious unless you dismantled it and pulled it off the wall. How whoever did that last semester with no one noticing I can’t get begin to guess.
“But the power to the cafeteria lights – all of them, turned off when more than some random number of ovens or microwaves in the kitchen were operating. Literally had some sort of RNG device attached. So, it was a nightmare to troubleshoot. And it only kicked in on August first.”
“Oh I’d heard about the power issues, but Gerry just said it was a short somewhere”
“And it happened when some of the other maintenance projects were just wrapping up so some of that had to be undone to get to the panel and find out what was wrong with it – which made other projects run behind too.”
“Sounds like every summer in honesty dear.”
“It does doesn’t it. Oh well everything left to do now apart from some issue in the tunnels is cosmetic so we should manage to get everything done. Two weeks should be enough.” The conversation paused as they consumed some cream cakes Myra giggling a little when Eddie managed to get cream on both the tip of his nose and end of his chin.
“Well, we’d better get back to it, I’m sort of happy that Dunwich doesn’t have so many shops in the summer it gives us an excuse for a morning in Berlin.”
“Well yes, but I do have things to get done this afternoon too, do you want dropping in the village? You can walk up, and we’ll have a cafeteria meal for supper.”
“Yes that sounds nice, it’s such a nice day that a walk up from the village would give me some fresh air and exercise.” The two sat and ate a little more before packing away the remains of their picnic, Myra packing it away in one of the bags the food had come in, as she stood and stretched turning almost by accident toward the observing girl who she clearly winked at. As the two passed out of the park area Myra placed the paper-bag next to a rubbish bin, as the two wandered off up the street she heard Eddie ask Myra, “Why on earth did buy so much food, it was only supposed to be a snack?” But if Myra replied, Shadow didn’t hear it.

She almost ran over to the bag of food that Myra had left; it was nearly full of mostly untouched – some even unopened – food. She looked up the street after the couple, but they must have gone into another business. She needed a map to find out where this Dunwich was, it sounded like there was a school where Myra and Eddie worked – though Myra had known she was there and would appreciate the food. And for a moment she wavered – it could be trap, but she needed some respite, and this just didn’t feel like one.

But that didn’t matter, she couldn’t ask anyone where Dunwich was so she needed a map and she’d not seen so much as a public tourist map as she wandered round the town centre, the noise of the nearby public clock made her look along the road and she saw a building that had a sign that said Town Hall, if anywhere were likely to have a map it was there or the police station and she wasn’t going there at all – if it could be avoided.

Attached to the door of the town hall was a Perspex box marked Tourist Maps which contained folded maps, local advertising on one side and a map of the area on the other – with a more detailed map of the town inset. She scanned the map looking for this Dunwich place, she kind of assumed it was a small village after what Eddie had asked Myra, but she didn’t know, finally she found it in the top left-hand side of the map a tiny place called Dunwich Village. Though the map only really showed villages and touristy type places, there was no sign of a posh school. So, the best option for her was to make her way to Dunwich and hope that it was close to the school – and that she could either follow someone going to this school or maybe see it from up high.

The map wasn’t very detailed, it showed two roads that went in the general direction of the village, a railway and a couple of rivers – of them all the railway pretty much went directly to the village, there was even a station marked. She followed the line back down to Berlin, did Berlin have a station… ah yes, she must have walked right past at least twice. It didn’t take long to retrace her steps, she was still mostly present in the real world but with an immediate goal in mind pushed the fear away so she wasn’t really worrying about being caught and as luck would have it nothing happened, Berlin was sleepy and mostly empty in the warm summer sunshine.

There were two trains a day that even went through Berlin and Dunwich, and both – if the timetable could be understood only stopped at Dunwich if a passenger wished to alight – so to get the train to actually stop she’d need to buy a ticket. But as trains were considerably slower than jet aeroplanes and she’d managed to fall out of one of those with no damage she thought that she’d probably be able to jump off a train and survive even if it didn’t stop. On the other hand, she didn’t know if she could get aboard in Berlin. Back in England if a train arrived and no-one wanted to get on or off the doors didn’t open. And with only two trains a day she couldn’t just hope that someone would get on or off. She needed a plan to get on that train whether or not the doors opened.

There were no bridges over the railway in Berlin itself, nor were there any that she could see between Berlin and Dunwich, she was just beginning to feel resigned about jumping off a building roof when she noticed that back down the valley beyond the G-Mart was a place called Cascade, in Cascade or more truthfully where the road crossed the railway to get into Cascade there was a railway bridge. The train was due in Berlin at half three, she’d left the town hall with it’s public clock a little after one. It wasn’t that far to go but she was going to have to run along the track to get there, then if she didn’t get there in time she’d try jumping into the air while mostly in her realm and hitting the train on the way down. That wouldn’t be easy, she’d failed to do that in Chicago and nearly been caught by that hero – she’d managed to forget about that horrifying adventure until now and hope she didn’t dream about that next. It wasn’t even remotely as bad as the bus or the facility, but she didn’t want to relive being chased through Chicago by a hero.

Running down active track-beds takes a little more concentration than walking along inactive ones, there were things that you could trip over, dirt and infrastructure that wasn’t really designed to be walked on, and she was in a hurry. Since her change into a girl a year ago her body was much fitter and more capable, though her incredibly poor diet hadn’t done it any favours, she was still quite capable of running while nearly fully in the real world quite quickly. She only realised that the distance she’d been seeing on the map didn’t translate to the real world when she arrived at the bridge after less than fifteen minutes. But that didn’t matter she was there ahead of the train and had a nice long view south to see it coming, the annoying chain link fence instead of proper parapets like she was used to seeing in the UK wouldn’t stop her scrambling round and dropping onto the train roof, then it was just a matter of clinging on until the train went through Dunwich.

— Berlin, NH – Dunwich – August 2016

The roof of the train was almost too hot to hold on to, she’d had no problem dropping onto it and didn’t really need to cling on, but felt safer doing so, but the sun warmed metal wasn’t the most comfortable of surfaces to grip. She was staying mostly solid as while that meant she was more likely to be spotted and reported, it also meant that if the train did go faster than whatever magic speed she couldn’t keep up with while phased she wouldn’t just fall through like she had in Chicago on the jet – that had been scary. And a little funny too, now she thought about it.

She didn’t know if anyone saw her, but the train stopped in Berlin as expected she couldn’t see if any doors opened or not but there hadn’t been anyone waiting to get on as the train rolled into the station, so she was happy that she’d jumped on at the bridge. As the train rolled northwards toward Dunwich, she just hoped Dunwich was as lucky as Berlin had been. Then she pulled a packet of apple pies from the bag Myra had left for her and ate a whole one – determining to throw out the apples and potatoes as soon as possible. The bag of food should last her a week or more.

The station at Dunwich consisted of a long low building which appeared to have been divided into a pretty stereotypical ticket office which was locked and empty and an oversized – for the size of the place – waiting room. She initially guessed that the place had had greater passenger numbers in the past, but then on looking at the age of the building realised that this must have something to do with the school. Did the pupils arrive by train? Round the back there was a single lane road with a fingerboard sign pointing down it with the word Dunwich engraved on it. The entire station was dead and with no other clues as to where to find the school she cautiously made her way toward the village.

Unlike Berlin this place didn’t have a board announcing it’s population. There were maybe 3 long roads and 7 shorter crossroads. It looked like it was mostly residential though she did notice a building with a sign indicating it was the local police station, though it looked pretty dead like the rest of the small town and several up-market shops and restaurants. However all but a couple of the shops were shuttered and when she looked closer at one a sign simply stated that the shop would reopen on the 1^st of September. This couldn’t all be for a single school could it? Of the open shops, one was a place called Rogers' Fabric Boutique which appeared to be a clothing shop as opposed to what at home would have been some sort of haberdashers given the name and a general store that unlike the other shops looked like it was probably open year-round. She didn’t bother examining all the shops as there wasn’t much point but after walking the three long roads the only other place, she’d found that was open was a seedy looking bar. She guessed that it like the general store catered to the locals and not the students of the – she assumed – nearby school.

She’d been hoping that there would be people who she could eavesdrop on to find a more exact location for the school, but unless she braved the bar in the evening, she wasn’t likely to find anyone to listen to in Dunwich. There were only two roads in or out of the place, the one that came down by the railway that she walked in on and one on the far side that had disappeared off the map very quickly – she didn’t get it out to check, her memory was good enough now. And she knew that the map made no mention of any school – or indeed anything of any interest in the immediate area. She set off walking staying to the edge of the road, she’d spent most of the day mostly in the real world and was feeling better for it, but she didn’t feel quite as safe as she perhaps once would walking down a deserted road in the middle of a forest. She wasn’t worried about bears – though she knew bears were something to watch out for, but monsters of the human variety might decide that a lone female – even as dirty and scruffy as she was, might be easy prey.

It was now late afternoon and while still pretty warm the sun was mostly behind the trees that shaded the road, as she walked out of the village she could see a fairly large mountain in the distance – large by English standards doesn’t actually have to be especially large though and she didn’t have an easy frame of reference. The road was going slightly downhill and she found something she’d never expected to see in the shape of an old fashioned covered bridge, she walked through it and then on impulse walked back through it, she’d seen them online and in various books but never expected to see one in person, honestly she could feel a big bubble of joy welling up inside her and just for a moment she felt that maybe this whole trip hadn’t been all pain and sorrow.

But there is only so much awe an old wooden bridge can summon, and this one wasn’t even in the best of repair – it probably had a few decades left in it but some of the wood was rotten and once you looked closely it looked shabby and poorly maintained. Still it had made her day, she honestly felt that things were beginning to look up, that nice lady had given her a bag of food that should last a few days, the journey since she’d woken up after the bus had been pretty easy and apart from one day of wet weather even the weather had been cooperating – she guessed that something would go wrong soon, sod’s law and all that, but for now she’d enjoy the good luck.

She’d been walking for nearly forty-five minutes when she came across a paved drive leading away from the surfaced but unpaved road she’d been walking on. It wasn’t the first time she’d passed an entrance to a property, but it was the first that looked like it could be for a school – she had until this very moment been thinking that the school must be a posh boarding school, what in England would be called a Public school – she wasn’t sure why, but nothing either Eddie or Myra said indicated that it would be, she rather though that if there was a cafeteria that adults would head to for supper outside of term time than the food would be good, and the very fact that they were even serving meals outside of term time, indicated to her that they must be far enough away from other places that workers and staff couldn’t easily get away from the place between jobs. On the other hand apparently, Myra was going to walk up from the village, and while she knew that the Americans didn’t use the same size definitions for town, city or village that she’d been taught, Dunwich was too big to be a village, also too far from this drive – if this was indeed the school. It was likely that this didn’t lead to the school, there was a shortcut of some kind that she didn’t know about, or the village that Myra had referred to wasn’t Dunwich.

But she was going with her gut here, the school was posh and empty apart from some staff and maintenance – and she guessed some sort of security who she expected to be able sneak round with impunity. But crucially the grounds would be empty until the kids came back in ten days, that gave her more than enough time to relax and recuperate, maybe get some decent sleep outside of her realm. And she was beginning to realise that staying out of her realm was much better for her mental health than hiding in it all the time – though the precise reason why being able to escape to or stay in a totally safe place should make her more scared, she didn’t know, but it seemed that that might be the case. She resolved to try and stay more in the real world expect when trying to sneak past security types.

She followed the driveway after a few hundred metres, the trees and bushes that had hemmed the road in were trimmed back and subtle planting could be seen, this was not a rich recluse’s driveway. After a few hundred metres more she came across a pair of beautiful wrought iron gates. Closed. The gate posts were adorned with two large spheres that even from a distance she was thankful that some gut feeling had made her phase into her realm before they’d had line of sight on her. She rather felt that those globes had sensors or cameras in them and that if she lingered, she might even be seen by whoever was monitoring them.

The signs of subtle planting concealed a great deal of security fencing that made it very difficult to move off the drive to try and follow the brick walls that held the gates, she managed in the end and due to most of her being in her realm managed it without gaining any more tears in her shabby clothing. The wall was tall and topped with more things that made her think of the globes by the gate, she didn’t feel comfortable being in sight of the wall any more than the globes at the gate – even though only her metaphorical eyes and ears were present in the real world.

— Whateley Academy Campus – Various Locations – August 2016

It took her most of two days to realise that she wasn’t going to manage to walk all the way round, there were hidden barriers and other things to make it hard for anyone to approach the place, it seemed to her more like a military camp or like one of the castles at home than a school – assuming she had actually found the school. In desperation she tried jumping over the wall. Not just a little way above it but she got a good mile or so away from where she thought it was and leapt into the air going mostly into her realm as soon as she leapt. She’d done this enough to know how to manoeuvre and slowly brought herself back out of her realm until she began to fall slowly enough that it was more like gliding, about when she crossed the point where she expected the wall to be she could suddenly see the place. As though she’d fallen through a layer of cloud or mist, not that she’d not noticed any – but as just her senses it was entirely possible, she hadn’t.

She’d been expecting a couple of big buildings with maybe some small buildings and sports fields, but this place was huge, dozens of large buildings dotting a manicured landscape. Fewer sports fields than she had been expecting though. Not that she cared, she’d never enjoyed – sports much – and then she remembered that she wasn’t here to be educated she was going to camp out for a couple of weeks then leave. What actual facilities the place had didn’t matter even a little bit. There was a cafeteria, there would be dumpsters… but she had enough food at the moment to last a week. There would be taps so she could drink, probably drinking water. And there wouldn’t be hoaches of people. She was close enough now to see more detail and she increased her external mass to sink down faster, she didn’t want to have to land among the buildings – that wouldn’t be safe.

She could see people now, not many though – just as she’d hoped. Some were obviously grounds staff and others could be anything – wearing normal clothes, a couple of people wearing suits and office type clothes and a group of people wearing uniforms that could only be some sort of security. Given that it was broad daylight, on a weekday – she assumed – before any students had arrived, they were either being trained or the security here was much stronger than she expected. She turned to try and see the wall from this side, but from what she could see it was just a wall. So, the security was to keep people out and not in. This wasn’t a prison – that was a relief, she’d be safe here as long as she didn’t get caught.

She settled through the trees on a hill overlooking the jewelled dome that seemed to be a central point of the campus. She’d go and sneak round the buildings after some of the lovely food that Myra had so thoughtfully given her. She wondered if she’d see her again – she worked here after all, but as she couldn’t exactly approach her, and she was probably in the village wherever that actually was – walking up for a supper later on. She’d keep an eye out for her, not that she could really do anything to say thank you.

No, this place – at last till the start of term – would do. She’d not bother going into any of the buildings, unless they kept their bins inside one maybe – but she’d be really careful they’d probably never know she was here. She could live without a shower – one would feel so nice, and to finally wash the remains of the blood that she’d picked up on that bus out of her hair, she’d tried washing in cold water but never felt clean. If only she’d dared to steal some soap, but since the bus she’d avoided security or where lots of people were – just in case… just in case they were looking for her.

Who could be, she didn’t know. MCO obviously, but she’d heard of the DPA or Darpa, but she didn’t know what they were, something to do with arresting mutants, but she wasn’t sure. Plus of course whoever it was who’d taken her to the facility here in the US must still be looking for her, they must know by now that it was her that escaped and called the cops.

She sneaked through the trees where they overlooked many of the buildings it was warm in the sun and she was tired – she’d been sleeping better in the last few days, being mostly outside her realm helped. True she felt totally safe in there – but that might be the issue, when she could retreat in there everywhere else felt less safe, but she still needed to interact with the real world, so she needed to leave her realm. So, when she did, she was more scared than just dipping in when she needed to hide or throw off pursuit. She rather hoped that while safely camping out here, she’d be able to stay out – mostly – for longer periods and see if her fear became more manageable.

She also needed to think about and pick a new name she hadn’t been Adam Smith for well over a year – especially if you counted from when she first started manifesting and not just waking up in the facility, and while she liked using Shadow that Jex had bestowed on her, she didn’t really have anything to do with shadows. She didn’t have a clue what she could pick though, she knew that names had power – not really in a mystical sense but in the sense that some names worked better for some better than others. And she didn’t want to pick a name that could bring ridicule at a later time. And she needed one that matched who she was – she knew that card carrying heroes and villains had codenames – those came up on Tales of the MCO a lot, so she might need one of those too. Though at this point she had no intention of being either a hero or a villain – though as she’d rescued those people on the bus and helped save those kids in the facility. On the other hand, she’d stolen things on her journey – she didn’t think the two balanced out yet, but she wasn’t home yet and she was going to have to find some clothes more suited to colder weather before she did get home.

She found a sunny spot on the manicured lawns below the trees well out of sight of any of the paths and buildings, and settled down to think, but before long she fell into a gentle doze which in turn became a slumber. While she had as normal phased a little into her realm, so she was safe from being knocked out. She was at this point defenceless. But her sleep was deep and dreamless, something about the place even made her subconscious feel at ease.

It was dusk when she awoke, she startled and looked around, but nothing other than the light levels had changed, she phased fully into the real world and stretched before phasing back into her realm just slightly. She pulled the bag of food that Myra had given her from the suitcase and brought it out into the real world too. Time to go through it more thoroughly, she knew from the heft that it had quite a lot of food in it. And she was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the food was the sort that would do fine outside of a refrigerator, it was all filling and not all sweets – much of it wasn’t typical picnic food either. Right at the bottom was a letter.

Dear Waif;

My husband and I hope that the food in the bag will keep you going through whatever it is that has you on the streets. You look to be in a rough spot, and I’d love to be able to direct you to a charity or support group that might be able to help you. But alas, in this part of the state there really isn’t much that I can do, I’ll leave an address in Boston – if you can get that far – that should be able to help.

If that is too far I work at a school close to a place called Dunwich which is around ten miles north of here and I would be willing to help you.

I was once in your position, though I had other issues that made living on the streets tough. And the person who helped me out asked me to pay that action forward, I’ve never been in a position to help someone directly, but when I saw you sleeping in that little park today I knew my time had come. If you can get to the school gates and use the intercom and ask for Myra Henderson, either Eddie or I will come and find you. The school is safe, at least till the students arrive in two weeks.

I hope that the food helps and that you find somewhere safe to stay either by coming and asking us or by going to Boston and looking up the support group there.

Best wishes

Myra Henderson (and Eddie, though I’ll tell him later).

Below which Myra had written the two addresses, one in Boston and one near Dunwich with rough directions as to how to get to the school gates from the centre of Berlin – well that would have made getting here easier she thought with a laugh. There was no chance she’d go to the gates and ask though, that felt too unsafe, but perhaps she could find the woman on campus and approach directly, if she had a pen – which she didn’t – she could write on the envelope and perhaps thank Myra that way.

She walked back through the trees dropping a little more into her realm with each step so that by the time she reached the edge of the trees she was just her senses again. The campus looked quite different, most of the buildings had lights on in them but very few buildings were well lit. Time to see what the bins held, it was a long time since she’d actually dived into one, she’d learned to wait near the rear door of a restaurant and steal the food off plates before it was actually thrown away.

Exploring the campus wasn’t hard, most of the paths were well lit – by fake looking old fashioned lampposts. And the exterior of most of the buildings – at ground level anyway – were well lit too. But it was less easy to work out the function of many of the buildings, some just didn’t have windows she could look into, of they were sufficiently off the ground to make peering in difficult, others were either obvious just by looking at them, had some sort of sign outside like the Medical Centre – Doyle or were fairly obvious from the buildings around them. Many though had no obvious purpose, she didn’t think even grounds as nice as these needed quite so many large equipment sheds, but she couldn’t think of any other purpose for several smaller buildings. Then she found the holy grail. Not only did the school have a riding centre – a sign outside announced that. But a changing area, she assumed for students to change in after they had been out on their horses. The changing rooms were open, maybe the grooms who looked after the horse that lived in the stables – there were a few – used it to clean up after exercising them. And while there were several cameras watching the front of the riding centre, there was only a single one – at least that she could see – watching the door into the changing area from the stables. And none covering the two large doors that lead into the stables from the riding areas.

She’d not try the showers out immediately, too much risk of someone arriving to lock the building up, she’d take a look later tonight to check to make sur ethe building was still unlocked – maybe watch it tomorrow to see how many people used it and how often. But soon she could be properly clean, though she’d have to find a way to detangle her hair – she didn’t think detangling shampoo, even if she had any would do the trick.

The cafeteria was inside the giant jewelled dome in the centre of the campus, the doors were shut though she could see people eating, so either there was another way in or they’d gone in while she was fantasizing about a shower. She sneaked slowly round the building – it had more cameras than virtually any of the other buildings – she supposed that they wanted to catch troublemakers who might throw stones at the dome, she guessed that it would be fragile and hard to repair. Finally in a corner tucked away somewhat out of sight behind a screen of bushes and small trees she found a service entrance. There were no dumpsters outside and while there were cameras, they left enough blind spots for a very sneaky girl to sneak past.

She didn’t exactly need to find food now, she still had at least a week’s supply from Myra, but it was now a habit to look for food and she didn’t need to actually take anything tonight. Sneaking in was rather anticlimactic, she couldn’t see any obvious cameras but stayed well phased just in case. About twenty metres into the service area with the actual kitchens off to the left was another set of metal gates, similar to the ones that were already standing open at the entrance, beyond these there was a fairly steep looking ramp that led to parts unknown but she wondered if there was perhaps a tunnel where service vehicles and deliveries – plus the bins – could be kept.

— Kane Hall Security Suite – August 2016

Officer Jones was wide awake, but bored half out of his mind on the tedium of monitoring the Academy. He knew why he was here, and he loved his job especially the benefits and wage. And though he’d heard some of the stories from the old hands he felt that at a school he’d far more likely to retire with all his limbs and without a pine box. But monitoring the sensors and cameras was a boring job, but he only had around an hour to go before he’d get to go on patrol. Then only four hours till shift end.

An AI actually did the monitoring he was really just there to watch the telltales of the AI and to spot things that it might not see – the AI flagged an anomaly at the Crystal Hall service entrance, something had tripped several of the sensors. The AI had flagged it because each sensor had independently flagged it as an error – they’d detected something that they shouldn’t be able to detect. The cameras hadn’t seen anything unusual. Some kitchen porters messing around – but there was that the covering on a pile of boxes moving – was someone hiding in them? He asked the AI – but it disagreed with his diagnosis. Still, he was being paid the big bucks to make decisions like this and besides he’d bet that the patrollers were bored out of their minds too – he’d call it in and go back to watching.

“Did you find anything?”
“Nothing worth calling in, there might have been someone looking into the vegetable boxes – the cover had been lifted round the back where there is no camera coverage, maybe some pilferage. Impossible to say. One of the porters said that some of the waste food might have gone too, but it’s possible that someone else had chucked it without him noticing.”
“Well I’ll add a note on the system to keep an eye on the service entrance and to have one of the maintenance teams check all those sensors and check they haven’t been tampered with. Oh, and alert pest control – both types make sure we don’t have any little pests running amok. Two weeks till the kids get back and the place will start to get busy in the next few days, don’t want to have one of the kids sneaking into the cafeteria and doing something stupid.”
“Is it really as bad as they say?”
“Put it this way you don’t get paid what you do because the job is safe and easy. You’ll earn every cent.”
“Every cent… shit I’m not sure I want to work here anymore.”
“It’s not normally that bad, but people do die – or worse – in the line of duty, I’d lay even odds by the end of the year we’ll have had at least one fatality in the faculty, two in the staff and five of the kids.”
“They don’t play around.”
“Think what you were like in school, things you got up to. Then think that you can leap tall buildings and fire lightning bolts from your ass – think how much trouble you could have caused – then multiply it by six hundred.”
“I will really be earning me pay then… damn.”

— Whateley Academy Campus – Various Locations – August 2016

She’d finally retreated, she’d actually come away with some bread rolls that someone hadn’t bothered eating, she’d long given up being a fussy eater and two buns in hand was always better than any in the bin. As the evening darkened to full night she retreated back into the trees, finding a secluded place to spend the night was of course harder when she couldn’t see as much, but it just meant she went further from the buildings and hoped for the best. She did spend the night in the realm, with nothing to sleep in or on and a night cool enough to be uncomfortable with sleeping on grass, outside just wasn’t sensible.

She woke with the first light and quickly made her way to the stable area – she’d meant to go there after the kitchens but hadn’t and now she wanted to keep the place under observation all day and see if she could see a pattern in the use of the building. If she could then – if it was possible – try and get a shower later in the day. First, she checked the doors – still unlocked – then she found somewhere she could see both doors into the stable, and by luck the other door out of the changing area. There might be internal doors into the other parts of the buildings that she just couldn’t see, but she’d just have to live with that. She climbed a tree and twisted a branch out of the way so that she had an unimpeded view and then settled down to watch. Eating the first of the bread she’d pilfered the previous night and another apple pie from her stash.

She’d have been safer to watch mostly in the realm, but she knew now that spending too much time in there was detrimental to her mental health. For now – when possible – she’d remain mostly in the real world and stick to using her realm as an emergency shelter. She spent the day in the tree – well most of it she’d found an outside tap in her wanderings the previous evening and filled up several of the empty plastic bottles that she had in the suitcase, these had been rinsed and filled, while she’d never got top the point where she was too thirsty – unlike her hunger – she’d always made sure she had access to some water. Of course, what goes in must come out so around lunch time – when more people seemed to be heading toward the centre of the campus, she dropped out of the tree and spent a few minutes in a convenient bush. It was still the only thing she genuinely missed about being Adam, the ease of use, she rather thought that periods might be unpleasant too but as she hadn’t had one yet, she hadn’t worried about them much either, a problem for future her.

When she’d counted them the evening before she’d only seen six or so horses in the stable block, so it didn’t take the two young women much time to bring each horse out and put it through it’s paces. After which each was deposited in the paddock to graze, after which the two set to work with a quad bike and trailer and she assumed cleaned out the actual stables. When she’d been a kid she’d never had much to do with horses and though she’d read books about them and knew that mucking out was a real task, she didn’t know the frequency – or much more than it was smelly job, and you had to clean out the dirty straw that the horse slept on and put clean back in. Either the two young women doing the job weren’t doing a good job, or perhaps they only did one stall a day, but it didn’t seem to take them very long.

In the afternoon someone else came with a small tractor and an attachment and brushed or raked the manège yard leaving it smooth for the following day. Around late afternoon the two women tied each horse in turn to the rail round the paddock and groomed them working down both sides of each horse and chatting comfortably, then taking it turns to lead the horse inside. Once they were done, they both headed into the stables and vanished for about an hour, when they reappeared, they both had damp hair and were wearing nicer clothes. She wasn’t close enough to hear what they were talking about, but the two were obviously close friends and as they walked off, she felt lonely – very lonely.

She crept into the changing area, it was everything that she had imagined it would be, it was clean and smelled nice, with pretty patterns in the tiles that covered most of the walls – she was in the female changing room, she guessed that the male changing area would be plain white tiles, like those at her school. She’d been at a boys only school so the only female changing areas had been for staff. As she’d hoped there were no cameras inside the building – she just hoped that nobody else would turn up while she was getting washed, especially if she planned on getting most of her clothes washed as well – she’d wear the green jumpsuit to head back into the trees, it was too bright to function as camouflage, but it was all she had and while she was fairly sure that she could give the local security the slip, doing it naked, through a forest which as manicured as it was still contained sharp things to stab into her skin was not optimal.

The shower was everything she had hoped for, she was in there far longer than she meant to be, someone had left toiletries in the showers area and she made use of them resolving that if she could she’d do something nice for whoever it was – if she could find out. So for the first time in what was probably more than a year she was clean all over, it was probably only due to whatever had caused her change into a girl that had kept her free of disease or other things that could affect girls – she seem to recall an au-pair who’d had to go to the doctor several times for medicine to treat a UTI, now she could get one – but hadn’t even as dirty as she’d been. The water going down the drain had started out black. She washed her clothes but without the correct sort of detergent she couldn’t get them as clean, but she washed them until the water ran clean, then wrung the water out as much as she could and stored them in her suitcase. She’d have to find a sunny spot tomorrow and let them dry in the sun.

She was just looking at all the mess that she’d created and thinking about how to get it clean – she didn’t want the two women who had showered here today to find that someone else had been in – not least because this amount of disgusting mess was embarrassing, there was blood from the bus, her own hair including lumps she’d been forced to tear out of her own head. Plus, assorted other fluids that she had no clue about… the shower head wasn’t going to help clean up, it didn’t move enough, so she’d need to find the cleaning supplies that must be here somewhere. However, there was a problem, a problem that looked like three security guards in uniform. They hadn’t seen her, but if they were doing more than just walking through, or knew someone was here, she’d be cooked. Clean but cooked. She had no time, just grabbed the comb that she’d been using, she felt guilty but it was just s cheap plastic one that she’d found in one of the lockers – all the others had been empty – and slipped quickly and quietly out of the changing area, once through the door into the corridor that opened into the barn she went almost fully into her realm and sneaked past the now four guards until she was outside, she hung around a little to see if they were here to find an intruder or it was just a random patrol that she’d been unlucky enough to run into. But if they were talking it wasn’t loud enough to be heard.

She made her way back into the trees and once she was well out of sight of the buildings and paths she climbed a sturdy tree and sat down to eat something, she’d almost been caught and she really didn’t care, being clean would almost have been worth it. Now all she had to do was work out how to get clean more often, she wasn’t looking forward to either putting her clothes back on – even when they’d dried they’d still be less than clean, or just getting dirty again, sitting on a large branch with her back to the main bole of the tree nearly fully in the real world she dozed and wondered about her future, eventually she fell into a proper sleep.

— Whateley Academy Riding Centre – August 2016

“Report.”
“Got a message from housekeeping that sensors in the Riding Centre changing area indicated someone in there, we deployed to the area but after searching the place found no-one present…”
“So the housekeeping sensors are futzing now?”
“No we found evidence that someone had been having a shower, probably female – she was in the female changing room and some of the hair we found was pretty long – not long before we arrived, had we arrived a few minutes earlier we’d have caught them in the act. As it was there was only circumstantial evidence of anyone being there.”
“Did you collect the evidence?”
“Yes sir, I have a bag of various bits of hair, some pretty big flakes of dried blood and some of what I think are bits of dried skin… but not one hundred percent on that, if we have anyone who can do forensics, they might be able to pick up more.”
“I doubt it’s necessary, have you checked with housekeeping who should have access to those areas?”
“Yes two girls who come in from Berlin over the summer to care for the resident horses – horses that belong to staff members. They left the grounds at approximately four o’clock, which is about when they normally leave, the Stable Master has rung them at home and they are both in Berlin at the moment.
“There is another lad that lives in Dunwich who does the same job on the weekends but he is also confirmed to be where he would be expected to be.”
“Get these samples over to Doyle and see if they can find me an identity for our mysterious person.”
“Good job private.”
“Thank you sir.”

— Doyle Hall – Medical Centre – August 2016

“Can you tell me anything about those samples I dropped off last night?”
“Most of them yes. Hair samples all come from the same person, I can’t give you an age but it’s definitely female hair, some of it was very dirty with contaminants, more on that in a moment. The person – woman – that they came from is not a habitual drug user, doesn’t smoke and probably isn’t a drinker or not in large amounts. She has been travelling for quite a while and probably living rough some of the results indicate she might be from Northern Europe originally but that could be a false positive.
“The contaminants in the hair indicate she has travelled mostly on foot or without using roads much, she also has had quite a bit of blood in her hair some of which has remained in it long enough to actually stain the hair – which is unusual. I’m not a specialist in forensics, but having reached out to a colleague who is we suggest that wherever the blood in the hair came from originally it might not be the woman’s own, while I could arrange to have the staining examined to try and recover a complete DNA strand from it, that is beyond what support the medical department can offer without someone more senior signing off on it However the blood samples that were separate might well be the source.
“Of the other evidence, the blood is from two sources, both people died in an attack on a bus near Concord last January, however the blood dried though it may be, is too fresh to share that source, we’re a bit stumped on that one. But from the police reports that my friend has access to there is an unknown person responsible for saving several people off the bus who has never been identified all the police know is that there were small in size, they have several partial footprints. The actual perpetrators of the attack – a robbery, have both been arrested and charged but they either haven’t been asked or haven’t said anything about the missing person. Though one apparently did say that he didn’t see or shoot any people on the back of the bus. Though the police report places several more potential victims in the back of the bus. And the perpetrator is known to kill everyone at the scene of his crimes except little kids.”
“And the skin?”
“Female, active metagene complex, no idea what the actual mutation is. I’d imagine you have an unregistered and scared teen or child hiding out who may or may not have witnessed the bus attack who may have some time ability to slow time or actually travel through it hiding out on the campus somewhere, beyond that I can’t say.”
“Thank you doctor, we’ll just have to look harder, we’ve been getting AI reports of weird sensor readings for the last few days and now this. We have a meeting of the trustees coming up and we need to know the security is pretty air tight before then.”
“Well if you find any further evidence I’ll be happy to take a look at it, but unless it’s more extensive than what you have found so far I don’t think I will be able to tell you anymore.”
“Oh, could you tell me the colour of the girls hair, or is it too stained?”
“Probably a dark blonde or light brown, but if she has spent as much time outside as I suspect it may well be lighter than it would normally be.”
“I don’t need to know the normal colour, just what it’s likely to be now so we can assign an AI to keep a process reserved for looking for her, the sooner we catch her and find out who she is the sooner we can find her somewhere safe to be… it's possible that she’ll end up here as a student, but we need to find her first.”

— Schuster Hall, Office of the Headmistress, Amelia Hartford’s Desk – August 2016

“How are preparations going for the trustees meeting going?”
“Everything is going fine, I don’t know what the meeting is about or why it’s being held here, but everything is about as ready to go as we can make it. Security I’m told have reactivated the outer wards that they don’t normally do until just before the start of term, some of the reagents used for that will need to be resupplied earlier than normal in the New Year.”
“Security have told me we might have a stray in the grounds too, you mentioned a girl you’d seen in Berlin, could she have made it here?”
“I told her to come to the front gate, but given how cautious you can get on the street I wouldn’t be surprised if she could get here but I’d be surprised if she could get in past all the security. And the walls are not exactly easy to navigate.”
“Yet we have persistent reports of scrambled sensors and security found evidence that a youngish girl has been using one of the showers in the Riding Centre.”
“I don’t know what to tell you Amelia, the girl was obviously in need and you know I couldn’t just let her go without at least offering to help, and if I’d approached her there she’d have run and I couldn’t do anything obvious in the middle of Berlin, we do get some leeway but if I use my powers I am a little large to be overlooked.”
“I know Myra, it just couldn’t have come at a worse time. Please give security a good description of the girl, all we know at the moment is she was dirty and had long hair.”
“Oh she didn’t have long hair, it was fairly closely cropped, probably a dark brown, she was about fourteen but very skinny.”
“Damn, so we might have a different girl here security IDed ours as long hair with summer faded hair.”
“Well if she had some way of hiding the length, it could be the same girl. I don’t know. I didn’t see anything obvious that would indicate her being a mutant, but I suppose she might have had it in a ponytail or something, and I just didn’t see it.”
“No our girl is definitely a mutant, or skin and hair samples found in the shower indicate a positive indication of an active metagene complex.”
“So some method of hiding that she can use to hide her hair, yet she’d have looked more normal with long…”
“The hair we recovered was a dark almost black from bloodstaining, we think she was in some way involved in the Concord Bus Massacre. The police are looking for a young person who apparently survived but left the scene. If the two are related, which some blood found in the shower suggests, then it is likely that she also has some control over time too”
“Oh, I’d better talk to security – but my ability is not suggesting she is a threat to anyone here – or anywhere else for that matter.”
“And you are confidant Myra?”
“You know how my ability works Amelia. I am as always totally confident that it works the way I think it does which gives me confidence that the girl is no threat. She is just a scared teen who needs a safe place.”
“Very well I will also pass that on to security and Liz, who I have been keeping appraised of the situation.”
“I’m sorry I pulled the girl here.”
“We all have our crosses to bear, Myra, you to look out for waifs and strays and mine is to keep this place functioning in some sort of order. Now how is my god daughter doing?”
“Oh she is in fine form, we are still working on the paperwork for her admittance, she was so far ahead in school we are hoping that she will be accepted into the freshman year, she’s still a little on the young side, but we think – and she thinks – doing another year in Junior High so she is a year older, will stunt her education. And that was before she picked up her exemplar trait, as you know we’d hoped she’d either manifested earlier and gone straight into the junior high program here and so had the challenge she needs, or later and so straight into the freshman year.”
“And have you seen anything of her future?”
“I try not to look, but anything I do see is utter chaos and madness.”
“So nothing new there then?”
“No, she can be a little horror, and then so utterly charming and loveable that it more than makes up for the bad. I think she is looking forward to going to high school even when she is in with the junior high kids, she’s lonely – it’s not like she can go and play with her old friends now.”
“No I’d imagine that that must be hard. Well give her all my love and after this damnable meeting of the trustees, I will invite you all round for supper before school starts.”

— Whateley Academy Campus – Various Locations – August 2016

The rest of the week passed quietly; she spent time watching the changing rooms at the stables. She couldn’t see any sign of extra security, but she knew it must be there. They almost had to have found the mess she left and if not security then the two young women who once again showered the following day. So, she stayed away from the showers.

On the Saturday following her arrival – and she knew it was Saturday due to eavesdropping more than a few members of staff that passed either close to her perch near the stables or elsewhere on the campus, several big limousines arrived and some well dressed people got out, she was too far away to see them accurately but she guessed that they were important people for the school, a short time later she heard the sound of a descending aircraft and watched in fascination as a dropship dropped onto the ground on the far side of the campus from her position. She only realised after a moment tat she’d almost entirely retreated into her realm, apparently there were still some things that could make her do that. She’d spent most of the week physically present in the real world. She was definitely sleeping better even though she still did that in her realm, nights were just too cool to sleep out directly, though she had experimented with just having a physical head… that had worked until she actually fell asleep. Still it had been nice to watch the stars.

She was knocked from her musings by a sudden burst of noise when several more dropships dropped from the sky, one creating interesting ripples on the lawn closest to her position, unlike the previous ship which was clearly for only a couple of people these drop ships meant business and had obvious weapons and when they’d settled onto the ground heavily armed security personnel streamed out of the hatch, she was glad her body was near fully hidden anyway and was now firmly in her realm, whatever had happened wasn’t expected, she could hear shouts of the local security forces who rather than meeting the incomers with force, appeared to be briefing them as they moved toward one of the buildings she had taken to be an equipment store, but considering the amount of troops who ran in must be some sort of access building. She stayed in her realm only her senses poking out for the rest of the day, all night and most of the rest of the day. She dared not move security both the local guys who she was by now fairly familiar seeing and the new guys who were heavily armed and carried gear that might see a mutant, even one like her. And then just as suddenly as it started the other troops climbed aboard their drop ships which silently soared into the sky, an hour later the executive drop ship followed, and the campus began to look more normal.

She was rather shaken by the events; she’d assumed that this was just a posh school – okay a very posh school. But still just somewhere to hide out until the start of term. Now she realised that it could well be something more, she knew that most normal people even rich ones couldn’t afford drop ships, and as for the military force that had landed – that was something only the head of state could call in. And they hadn’t been American and the number of heads of state who had rapid deployment dropship elite troops who could be deployed to another sovereign country – that couldn’t be large. She’d not really paid much attention to politics at her old school and hadn’t been in school for over a year anyway, so she didn’t really know who it could be, but it left a very bad feeling in her heart. She knew she was leaving tomorrow as soon as it got light.

Her safe place wasn’t.

If only it had been that easy, she’d awoken before first light when only the eastern horizon was glowing with dawn, and it wasn’t light enough to actually do anything. It wasn’t like she had anything to pack but some inner demon wanted her to have a last shower – she managed to resist that temptation. After what had happened over the weekend, she assumed that security would be quite a lot more vigilant. She did make her way cautiously and carefully to the outside tap she’d found and carefully filled all her plastic bottles with clean water. She’d never actually had a problem with finding water, but it never hurt to have too much and while she must be carrying seven or eight litres – she wasn’t sure as the bottles were marked in ounces and she had no clue how to convert them – even if her dyscalculia allowed. Which it probably wouldn’t, she’d have to teach herself a specific way to convert the two, like she’d done with all the other mathematics she’d learned. She’d always been top of the class in everything but art, but had to work three times as hard to beat he dyscalculia, dyslexia, ADD and autism. She kind of missed it actually, in school there had always been people to talk to and even if she’d had trouble understanding a lot, she’d never been lonely. Miserable sure – but never lonely.

When it was finally light enough to get out of there she tried to get out the same way she came in, but instead of going over the wall each time she floated down on the inside, she tried in a few places – it didn’t matter to her where outside she landed as long as it was outside, but as she floated forward she must be hitting the inside of some sort of forcefield, though she couldn’t sense it in any manner. She even tried popping fully physical and punching it but to her physical body it wasn’t there.

Then she hid.

She’d been trapped – she wondered if it had all been a trap but she couldn’t believe it, if whatever that barrier was, had been designed to stop her they’d have trapped her in the changing room or somewhere else that they could control. She was still loose within the grounds and if she dared she had no doubt that she could inconvenience them. She didn’t want to though, it just wasn’t in her make up – never had been, she’d hated stealing even from the mutant hating G-Marts – though it was a little easier knowing it was them she was stealing from, she’d not stolen anything from any of the Walmart’s she’d passed on her journey, and nearly everything else had already been thrown away before she’d taken it – except the suitcase of course – but that was from the facility and that was something she’d accepted long ago.

Over the next two weeks if she had been thinking clearly she’d have noticed that the school didn’t in fact resume for two weeks, the first students arriving a week after she’d heard the staff were expecting them, but the fear was back and she spent most of her days looking for a safe place to hide, she almost stopped leaving her realm, she avoided all the places she’d been before, and tried to minimise how much she ate as that would be what ran out first. Even if she ran out of tap water there was still a lake. But food when it was gone was only going to be had from the waste bins or cafeteria kitchens and they were dangerous places that they could trap her and take her to be experimented on. That fear – the fear of what she had seen in those labs at the facility she’d woken up in all those months ago could happen to her – would have happened to her without the ability to completely vanish from the real world.

— The Facility – Kansas – November 2015.

When she awoke, she knew something was different, she’d been in the living room at home her father looking at her like she was some form of monster and those people who he’d just been paid by to take her away. She’d still been Adam then. She remembered the look in his eyes the most. Hate, anger, fear, gloating, disgust – maybe she was just putting into his eyes what she thought he felt. Vivianne from Italy, her of the luscious red lips and bimbo cluelessness – apart from knowing the reason for her employment right from the moment her father had collected the girl from the airport. Her eyes held a different look – hers said “tough break kid” and “your father’s a piece of shit, but he pays the bills”. Maybe not a bimbo at all – maybe an armour to stop people seeing the real person under the inflated breasts and shapely posterior.

The people who had just bought her didn’t betray themselves to her recollection at all – she rather thought it had been two men and a woman. But that was all her memory managed, she drew a blank about if they’d said anything to her, only a pinprick of pain in her arm as the left the house and then nothing until here. Wherever here was. A room, a bed a toilet built into one wall, a sink ditto. And nothing else, no obvious cameras, the door was just a door – metal probably but painted almost the same colour as the rest of the place a dirty institutional green. There were no speakers, screens, motivational posters – the place was functional but completely devoid of anything resembling identifying features. At some point they’d removed what she had been wearing and changed her into a bright green jumpsuit, no underwear and she was a little uncomfortable.

She slipped into the mind state she’d been learning for the last month, she’d got pretty good at calling it up then slipping into what she’d begun calling her realm – she’d discovered at school back when she still went to a school when that arsehole George Lambert had ambushed her behind the art block, knocking her out for who knew what reason she’d vanished in front of him. Of course she’d been mostly Adam still then, but it seemed every time she went to her realm she’d become a little more feminine until one day she’d no longer been Adam at all, that’d been a great day – the day her father found out that his son was a mutant and a daughter. Still the shock hadn’t killed him, he’d just locked her in her room for the next month, a bucket for pee and poop and one meal a day. He’d also changed the wifi passwords and physically cut the ethernet cable. He hadn’t prevented her from using her computer for the first week but after that he'd disconnected and removed it from her room taking her phone and tablet too. Most of the dead tree format books had been given to her by her father and were either copies of the bible or books about it or Christianity. It had been an unenjoyable three weeks. Then he’d sold her.

In the facility she’d phased into her realm as soon as she calmed her nerves as much as she could, she obviously couldn’t escape, even when she was just her senses, she couldn’t pass though holes that weren’t big enough for her whole body – that didn’t make any sense to her, but clearly the ability she’d got had a reason for this limitation – besides there wasn’t even a keyhole. She did the only thing she could do sat partially in her realm and concentrated to allow the world around her to speed up – without a watch or clock it was of course impossible to know how long she actually sat there, but eventually the door began to open, and she dropped the time dilation effect. Two male looking adults entered the room, they wore masks that made them look like they had no faces. “Up, out.” The order seemed to come from both of them and the voice was neither male nor female, for a moment she thought about hiding in her realm, but why do that? It’d only let them know she could do that. She got off the bed where she’d been sitting and walked out the door, prepared to run if she got the chance, but two more faceless guards were waiting outside the door. “Follow.” The voice now came from all four of them. She followed, she heard the door behind shut and could somehow feel the guards behind following. They walked down one corridor and through some sort of double forcefield door checkpoint, along another corridor and through another airlock security door like the previous one. The next room had open fronted cells down each side, ten per side. It was a well-lit room but while the fronts of the cells appeared to be open, she couldn’t see into them easily, almost like there was a layer of frosted glass between the cell and the main room. Another forcefield she decided.

Four of the cells were obviously empty and she was pushed into the first one they came to, by the time she had turned a forcefield covered the doorway, faint sparkles making it obvious. From inside she could see out – her forcefield might be different to the others though – and the four faceless guards walked in single file out of the door they’d arrived though. She thought for a moment that there would be voices of the other inmates then, but while there were mechanical noises and some unpleasant biological sounds plus the hum of the machines that made the forcefields no voices intruded. She turned to look at her own cell. A bed that looked much the same as the one in the previous cell graced one wall along with a toilet and sink combo. However, in the centre of the room there was an additional bed, this one didn’t look comfy at all – not that the other one did either – but this one had obvious points to mount straps to tie the occupant down and below it was a drain. The floor was clean but stained with what was obviously blood. She didn’t think that this room was designed to be a fun place. After looking for cameras she fled and phased into her realm entirely. The room, the faceless guards, that table and the drain terrified her.

With no offensive abilities that she’d discovered, she could only hide, but would they be able to see her in her mobile sensing only form or would they be able to track her down and catch her again? It wasn’t something she could answer, but as far as she knew no-one actually knew what her powers really were – her too of course, she’d guessed some sort of warper. But it wasn’t like she’d had much access to reference material since she’d discovered she even had powers. Plus, she’d still have to wait until someone came to open the forcefield door, but there didn’t appear to be any actual cameras in the cell and no obvious cameras in the main room she hoped that when whoever came to start experimenting on her did arrive, they’d come to the conclusion that she’d already escaped. She did however have one issue; in her realm she couldn’t actually see or sense the door forcefield – it may as well not exist. And without that she had no way of knowing when or if anyone had arrived. The walls were all completely solid and she could move slowly over to them – slow being the only speed when fully in her realm.

She could actually walk right through the space where the forcefield should be, it didn’t seem to affect her at all. But what would happen when she returned to the real world? As it happens nothing, she’d only let her sound perception through – what she thought of as her ears though when she’d tested it in the mirror at home she couldn’t see any physical ear, and she could only hear the same sounds from before. She allowed her visual perception through next. The centre room was just as it had been except now there were 17 frosted glass forcefields instead of 16. She tried to press her senses up against the forcefield of her cell to see in and her perception just pushed through it. She could get through forcefields? That was news to her, but of course she’d never actually tried – she tried to think where she might have encountered one in the past – maybe at the airport two years ago when travelling to her grandmother’s funeral. But that was before she’d even turned into a girl.

So she’d had no way to know that forcefields didn’t affect her non-corporeal form. She’d definitely have to check if the affected her physical form. She was fully back in her cell now and she went fully physical, the forcefield felt fizzy gave slightly under her touch but otherwise could have been a solid wall or sheet of glass. It felt different to the walls, but at the same time pretty much the same. Physically there and blocking her. So, if she could pass through forcefields did that mean escape would be easy. Somehow, she doubted that – her first cell had had a door made of something other than a forcefield… she was glad she was facing into the main room as four of the guards entered at it at a trot and headed directly to her cell, she phased back into her realm leaving only the barest hint of her senses. Somehow, they knew that she’d left the cell. But they weren’t looking round the main room, so probably knew had gone back in. Can they see me?

Apparently not, but they too apparently could just walk through the cell forcefield they appeared confused to find no one in the cell, “the telemetry stopped in this location” once again the voice appeared to come from all of them. They all pulled out devices and appear to scan the room, including the ceiling and floor, “there is no sign of the telemetry button.”
“Please continue to scan the lab room team 4”, this was a different voice, still coming from all four guards, but this one sounded female. “Team 5 patrol corridor Charlie south and Delta, team 2 seal access points and guard corridor x-ray.” The four guards passed through the forcefield and continued to scan as much of the entire volume as they could reach including going into the other cells. She noticed that when they came out of some of the cells their feet left bloody footprints. That worried her, what was going on in those cells?

The guards didn’t appear to have any real self-will they just kept searching for what must have been hours, whatever this telemetry button was it looked like they’d just keep searching until they found it or something else happened. After a while it got to the point that it was so boring to watch them, she phased fully back into her realm, slouching on the bed from her cell that had been faithfully copied across, she wasn’t sure what to do next. She didn’t want to leave the lab area until she’d at least looked in the other cells, she wasn’t sure if she could get through all the forcefields either and she didn’t want to try with so many guards searching for her. She’d not been fed since waking up and was beginning to get a little hungry especially having used that subjective time trick she’d learned back in England. She was just sitting and feeling a little sleepy when she spotted an unfamiliar spot on the floor, it was black rather than the sepia or grey she would have expected. She knew what this was, this must be the telemetry button the guards were looking for it must have fallen off when she first came in her while in the cell. She picked it up, it didn’t look like much some metal contacts that would probably be touching her skin and a hard waxy coating that would stop it from getting damaged easily, she didn’t care to think where it was on her body or who had applied it but probably somewhere like the middle of her back where she’d find it very hard to actually remove even if she knew it were there.

She phased her senses out of her realm and floated out in the main lab, the guards looked to be about half way through their search loop as she made her way over to the entrance door, it too was a forcefield, and like the cell doors she could pass through it. Rather than actually go through it she flicked the button out of the door and down the corridor before standing next to the door to see what would happen.

“Telemetry resumed, subject is in corridor Charlie south, data is offline.” She could hear from the guards scanning the lab, she stood well out of the way as they jogged past her, once they arrived in the corridor they walked down it four abreast scanning every inch of the floor, walls and even the ceiling. “Team 5 shift to Charlie and patrol. Other teams continue patrol patterns.”
“Team 4 reports, telemetry button recovered, subject 4461 is not attached.” She almost giggled at that; these guys must be some sort of robot.
“All teams;” the female voice spoke again “subject 4461 has escaped into the facility. Team 3, patrol Beta and Echo South, team 1 patrol corridors Alpha and Echo North, team 5 patrol Charlie, Charlie south, Delta and Foxtrot. Teams 4 and 6 expanding search patterns from Lab 1.” She just hid, mostly phased into her realm and watched as the guards continued to search the apparent facility without even looking back into Lab 1. With the guards on the other side of the Forcefield door she could no longer hear the orders as well as before, so she poked her head out. The guards searched in absolute silence for ages. They only seemed to speak if they discovered something, but the facility didn’t seem to have much in the way of things to be discovered. They’d stopped using the little scanner do-dads, after they found the telemetry button and now, they worked in teams of three to sweep areas with their bodies while the fourth member watched. It was boring to watch the robot guards as they searched, and she didn’t want to over-use her time dilation ability until she could find some more food. So, guessing that the one of the last places they’d look would be back in the cells of Lab 1. So, she went back into Lab 1, she wondered how many labs there would be and if they all held cells which obviously contained research projects. She’s now noticed bloody footprints outside of eight of them, some of the footprints must be old as they were dried and almost black while others had been left as the guards searched for her and the telemetry button.

The first one she checked didn’t have any bloody footprints, not that its contents were any nicer to see. A young girl, probably about the same age as herself, was chained onto the bed. It was a little difficult to tell the age because someone – or possibly one of the machines that surrounded her had removed all her skin. It was probably a good thing she hadn’t eaten in a while or she’d have lost it all, as it was she dried retched several times, tears streaming down her face – she wanted to do something – anything to help the girl, but even if she knew how to stop the machines that were clearly torturing the girl she didn’t know if her intervention would do more harm than good. She had got to get out of here and call someone – maybe even the MCO or someone, she didn’t think that any of the legitimate authorities – even the ones she herself was scared of could be any worse than this.

None of the other cells were quite as bad as that one. Eight of them had teens of both genders tied down with more machines that continually slashed various parts of their bodies to – she thought testing their regeneration, while other machines sprayed various chemicals onto the wounds. A boy was trapped in a cage which was fully of various types of biting and stinging insects that were obviously biting and stinging, the boy looked dead – but after watching for several minutes she saw that he was still breathing.

In the last cell – thoroughly disgusted and beyond sick to her stomach she found a carefully shielded box. She couldn’t see anything inside without actually putting her senses into it, and given the experiments in the other cells she didn’t feel brave enough to do that. The box was sort of shaped like a piston and one end of it clearly moved into the rest, compressing whatever – or more likely – whoever was inside it. And unless they were incredibly small it would be as horrific as any of the other cells. The box and machine were powered off what looked like a generic power strip, connected to a socket in the ceiling. So, she perhaps unwisely pulled the plug. The forcefields on the box dropped immediately while the piston side of the box fully retracted – some sort of safety feature she guessed, though safe for who she didn’t know. Inside the box was a solid looking brick of flesh, at least that is what she at first assumed, the brick however gradually unfolded itself to reveal fairly normal looking teenage girl – naked, and with some disgust she realised that the flesh tone covered her whole body including her eyeballs. “Hello, who are you, why are you doing this to me?” The girl had an American accent, but she didn’t have a clue which specific region it came from. Until this point, she’d been almost fully phased, just her senses poking through, she’d used her sense of touch to disconnect the electrics, but now she slowly phased into reality.
“I’m a prisoner here too.” The girl jumped slightly turning toward where her voice must be coming from, her eyes clearing and beginning to look like real eyes.
“Did you turn off the machine?”
“Yes I…;I didn’t know there was anything in it but most of the other cells have torture machines in them so I thought this one might be one too.”
“Well it certainly hurts enough, but it’s not doing me much harm.”
“What? How?”
“My regen is off the charts… don’t have anything else, but they tried to drug me at first and when that didn’t work, they shut me in there. I don’t think they know what to do with me, I heard some of the scientists talking once and they were pretty annoyed I wasn’t much good to them – apparently – they’d paid MCO quite a lot for me.”
“MCO?”
“I think so, they arrested me when all I was trying to do was find my mom and sister, I could have probably got away if I’d wanted to, but I figured that if I did as they said I’d be able to get someone to tell me where they’d gone when I was handed over to the CPS. But I was just delivered here.
“And then I couldn’t really escape, I tried but while I can get through the forcefield the guards just grabbed me and chucked my back in my cell.”
“Oh, well I’m going to try and escape and go get help, but I can hide really well so the guards can’t find me. You could come with me, but I don’t know if I can hide you too.”
“Well if you try now then we can break out together… some of the sounds I’ve heard while being shut in that box have been really scary. Name’s Jex by the way.”
“Um… I don’t really have a name at the moment… um… when I changed my old name no longer really fit and I’ve not found a new one yet.”
“Well can I just call you Shadow then, if you’re good at hiding?”
“Yes that’s fine, I really need to get a proper new name, but I’ve only needed to for a couple of days really.”
“I’ve been here for a couple of months I think. But I’m just using the name my sister called me.”

Shadow as she was now called phased fully physical and while holding Jex she tried to phase into her realm. It worked but was pretty slow. Once she’d done that, she pulled the girl back out of her realm. “So how do you do it?” Jex asked.
“What hide you? I just pull you into my hiding space, I call it my realm, it’s not hard but it takes a few seconds.”
“Well if you’re going to touch me don’t touch me too long my skin is sort of slightly acidic.”
“Sort of?”
“Well okay it’s not acidic at all, but that’s the best way of describing it. Just don’t touch me for too long or your skin will start to… um… dissolve…”
“I didn’t feel anything, didn’t you see my realm?”
“I haven’t moved at all.”
“Oh… well I phased you into my realm and then popped you out again. It takes a few seconds to phase you in, I’ve never tried a human before, but I guessed that like a something really big it’d just not work.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Nope… but we’re prisoners in a lab where they’re doing really horrible experiments on kids, should I perhaps go away and practice for a few days and make sure it’s really safe to escape?”
“Uh… you might have a point. Are you sure you took me to this place though? I didn’t move… I don’t think.”
“I’ll take you there again, hang on.” Shadow once again pulled Jex into her realm, then phased back into the real world to check she’d actually gone – she had. Then phased back into her realm. “You’re definitely here now and not in the real world anymore.” Jex didn’t respond, just stood there staring blankly into the distance. Shadow waved her hand in front of Jex’s face, but the teen didn’t even blink. “Okay, this is weird, it’s like you’re here but not here…” she slowly and with great effort managed to turn Jex round so she was mostly facing the other direction, then phased her back into the real world before following her herself.
“Oh I moved, did you do that?”
“Yes, when you’re in my world you’re like in suspended animation or something, but I can move you a bit… it’s really hard, and I get the feeling I shouldn’t get too far away from you… that might be bad.”
“Bad?”
“Um like you might not be there when I come back bad… that is something I’d want to test a lot before I did it to anyone.”
“Yeah… we’ll not do that.”

“So how are we going to do this?” Jex asked.
“How fast can you get through a forcefield?”
“The ones on the cells, I can pretty much walk through, I only managed to get my fingers through the ones on the doors in the corridors before the guards found me and brought me back here, those doors are a bit tougher, so maybe a couple of seconds.”
“Can you do anything about metal doors, can you pick locks or something?”
“I can get through those too, it’ll be slower but I’ll leave a hole for you.”
“That acid thing your skin does?”
“Yeah, not acid but I can make holes in stuff with it.”
“Could you attack just the locks or hinges instead or do you have to make a big hole?”
“Uh… I hadn’t thought about that, that would be much easier… I can make the um… acid work faster, maybe even much faster, but it’s hard to control and if it runs away from me I might just start eat…”
“Wait eat?
Jex sighed, “After I manifested I got squashed when a mountain fell on me, and while I was waiting to be rescued I got really thirsty, so I drank some water that was running past my mouth… it had something in it that changed how my mutation works. My regeneration got lots more powerful – and it was pretty high before – but now my skin eats everything it touches… as I said I can control it a bit so it’s pretty slow most of the time, but if I let it get away from me it can get a lot faster… but then I might eat things or people I’d regret.
“When I first started looking for my mom, I ran into a bunch of… I think they were survivalists or preppers who took exception to me, and they were trying to kill me with, uh, guns. I was running away and bumped into a girl who’d been shooting at me too and I ate her by mistake… I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help myself… being shot really hurts.” Shadow embraced the sobbing teen.
“if she was trying to kill you, I think you’re justified… it was like self-defence…”
“But she wasn’t much older than me, I look mostly like her now. My body seems to take on the form of what I last ate a bit. When I got out from under the mountain, I looked like an earth elemental out of a film or something.” They stood for a moment while Jex collected herself.

“So you ate your way out of the mountain that fell on you?”
“Yeah, when I was down there I thought it took a couple of months, but I think it took about ten years, by the time I got out my house where my mom and sister lived had been burnt down and there were trees and things growing up through the floor.”
“Then when I went into town to ask the sheriff what had happened to mom and Astrid, he called MCO to come and arrest me… then I came here.”
“Astrid was your sister?”
“Yeah, she was a couple of years younger than me, a mutant too but she had a type of GSD that was slowly killing her, there was some place in New Hampshire that said they could take her in and maybe cure her, but we didn’t have a lot of money and the brochures for the place looked really expensive, so mom was just looking after her at home and doing what she could to make her life easier. I miss them.” Shadow once again hugged the sobbing teen, she’d bottled all these emotions up while she was being tortured, and now she had someone to talk to they were all coming out and desperate as the situation was Shadow didn’t think she blamed Jex at all.

“Jex we have to try and escape, then call the cops – they’re torturing the kids in the other rooms, it’s bad and the longer we leave it now we know the worse we’ll feel. I’m going to go scout ahead and see if the guards have finished searching for me, if not we’ll have to wait until they do. I’m going to phase mostly into my realm so you won’t be able to see or hear me, and I’ll go and have a look around.”
“Okay, good luck… um if there are no guards out in the lab area out there,” Jex pointed through the cell door, “come back and tell me and I’ll follow you, so we don’t get too split up, then if anyone comes you can hide me and still not get too far away.”
“Good idea, back shortly.” Shadow phased mostly into her realm and poked her senses back into the lab 1 area, there were no new noises or any sign of the guards. As quickly as she could she ran over to the forcefield doors into the corridor and looked out there too, she could hear movement somewhere but not close and there was no sign of any actual guards. She slipped back into Jex’s cell and said, “the coast is clear up to the first set of doors, I can hear things beyond them but can’t see any guards.”
“Eep… is that you Shadow?”
“Yes…”
“You sound a bit different… maybe I ought to have called you Spooky Voice Girl. I’ll go and wait by the first set of doors.”
“See you in a moment then.” Jex just walked straight into the forcefield cell door and quite quickly forced her way through then trotted over to the exit. Shadow slipped past and made her way into the corridors.

Though the first pair of air lock style forcefield doors was in front of her she could she some movement which she took to be a group of patrolling guards returning down the corridor, so she went right, this corridor ran straight for quite a long way with metal doors off to her left and more forcefield doors to the right. The first door on the left – almost straight on from the lab 1 doors – was welded shut. Even if Jex could make a hole, it might lead somewhere else that would be hard to move into or out of. She wasn’t fully in her realm, now she had an ally she didn’t feel quite so vulnerable and was moving with her senses including touch all available in the real world but her physical body still in her realm. As she got to the first door on the right she looked into a large laboratory area, she hoped that there weren’t more kids being tortured in it. She crept in and did a loop around the surprisingly large room. There were some more people who looked much like the guards but in white with blue face coverings, each was working at a station and was entirely focused on what they were doing. As an experiment she knocked some glassware off a table and none of them even twitched. Other than those guys the place was devoid of life – if you could call them living. Shadow went back out into the corridor and had a look at the second door on the left (from Lab 1), this was similar to the door to her first cell, with a slightly better paint job. It also had a handle and keyhole. As a set of floating immaterial sense of sight, looking through a keyhole was pretty easy. But there wasn’t much to see, the area looked like it had two levels though the top level was mostly out of her sight and the lower level looked to be desks and tables – not a lab anyway. She slowly tried the door handle, but the handle didn’t rotate at all, so she left it alone, if they needed to go this way Jex would have to attack the latch, as the door opened inwards, and the hinges were on the inside.

As she walked further down the corridor, she saw figures through the forcefield doors at the end as she paused momentarily, they came through the doors – the doors opened and closed automatically. She stood to one side as they walked down the corridor, going toward Lab 1, she hoped that Jex wasn’t visible, she held her breath as the reached the end of the corridor, they paid no attention at all to the door into Lab 1, did a smart about face and patrolled right back toward and past her. After they went through the doors at the end again, she looked into the right most door – another set of forcefield doors leading into another open space with a row of ten cells on each side, all the forcefields were engaged. In a way she’d have liked to check what these cells hid, but she was just too scared of what she might see. She turned and looked at the last door on the left, this like the door into the office space also had a door handle but this time it had no keyhole, when she turned the handle, the door started to open slowly. She pulled it shut before she thought any alarm could sound and went back to Lab 1 to collect Jex.

“Jex?” The naked looking teen girl had secreted herself in one of the empty cells and popped out when Shadow called her. She trotted over to the doors.
“Well?”
“Minimal patrols, I’ll be able to see them coming through the doors and hide you, I think. We’ll have to hang around while the patrols move around, but we can get out of this lab and a long a long corridor. Not back the way I came in though.” She sighed, “I’m hoping that if we can move around a bit, we might find a better place to hide or a way out, even if it’s not where we came in.”
“I think that’s sensible, I can’t believe they’ve given up looking for us.”
“I hope that they don’t even know you’ve escaped, and that they think they can catch me with all the patrols – or maybe at the exit. So, you’re my trump card.”
“Do they know what you can do?”
“I don’t know what I can do really, my abilities are pretty new to me and I’m still figuring things out. I’ll go and stick my head through the door and see when the patrollers come along as soon as they’ve gone back the way they came we can make a break for it. Okay?”
“Sounds like a plan Shadow.” She wasn’t used to being called Shadow, but it gave her feeling of companionship whenever Jex did so, sending up a silent prayer to a god she didn’t believe in Shadow poked her head out into the corridor – luckily, she had to phase her physical form into her realm as otherwise she’d have come face to face with eight patrolling guards. None of them appeared to be even looking around, it was almost like when ordered to patrol they just walked up and down. They all turned without acknowledging each other and marched away down the corridors. Once the group that were in the corridor, she planned to take had gone through the doors at the end she pulled her head back. “Jex time to go. The guards are out of sight, I would have timed them to see how long we have, but I don’t have any way of doing it. And I don’t think counting elephants would cut it.”
“Counting elephants… oh Mississippis… come on let’s go.” True to her comment before it took Jex a little while longer to get through the forcefield door but wasn’t slow, they both ran along the corridor toward the doors at the end Shadow keeping an eye on them so that as soon as she saw the forms of the guards though them she could grab Jex and phase her into her realm mid-stride, phasing herself at the same time. Then she phased her senses back out to watch the progress of the team of guards. Like clockwork they walked up to the end of the corridor by Lab 1, turned and walked back. Either whoever ran the lab had something else up their sleeve for security or had got the lowest level of robots to patrol their facility, but these guys were… Jex had said they’d grabbed her and put her back in her cell. So maybe they just patrolled like this and when seeing something out of place they’d leap into action. But for now, she was just glad.

Jex trotted onward when she phased her back into reality, almost like she’d never stopped running. “Jex that door on your left, I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s not locked. Go in I’ll be right behind you. When we get in if there any people, I’ll phase you into my realm and try and lead them away.”
“Be careful, when they attack you, those guards are really fast.”
“Okay.” They both charged through the door, Jex shutting it firmly behind them. The room was in fact empty of anything threatening, shelving racks filled it up to the ceiling and though it was well lit there were plenty of shadows to hide in if they needed. There weren’t any other obvious exits though. The back wall was fully in shadow though. “No way out that I can see Jex.”
“Worst comes to it I can eat my way out, which way though?”
“That back wall, it’s fully in shadow, anyone coming in won’t be able to see us as easily.”
“Good point, I’ll go and see what I can do, you go and see what’s on all these shelves. See if there are any weapons or things we can use.”
“Shall I look for clothes for you?”
“No point I’d just eat them after a while, especially if I’m not concentrating. Wait a moment I can do this:” Jex concentrated for a moment then her body changed to a rocky texture. “It’s the best I can do.”
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Not been cold since I drank whatever it is I drank – nor hot either.”
“Okay I’ll go and look on the shelves you look for or make us a way out.”
“On it.”

Shadow raced to the shelves, there must have been some way to access the top shelves, seeing as they went right up to the ceiling but it wasn’t obvious so she could only really look in the boxes on the lower two levels. There were four rows running from near the door to the back wall. The ones on each side wall were shallower while the two running down the middle were deeper. The shelves on the left wall were mostly empty, though there were quite a lot of empty boxes, mostly food related, but most of them looked like they might have been MREs or Biscuit Browns – which she’d had to eat once while at school camp – while there might have been some edible boxes higher up she didn’t feel like climbing and she wasn’t that hungry, she’d not asked Jex but given that her skin was eating everything it touched all the time, she figured she’d probably not need much food. But she wondered if even biscuit browns were edible to the girl. The centre two rows held boxes of chemicals, bottles of liquids and glassware that looked like they would be used in a lab, plus some bits of odd machinery that looked like it might be for imaging or preparing samples. There was also a whole load of spare parts that were rougher looking, and she realised that they were for the machines for torturing. Those she moved into her realm, there were probably some on higher shelves too, but she did what she could. The far wall (right from the door) was empty without even any empty boxes to show that it had ever been used. She jogged to the back wall to find Jex. Along the back wall was another set of shelves that she hadn’t seen before, these didn’t go up to the ceiling and were covered in all sorts of junk, some was so covered in dust that she could only guess it had been here for a long time. A pile of suitcases attracted her attention. A large modern looking case with wheels and a towing handle in bright green, blue and white attracted her attention first. Inside it held quite a lot of adult – ladies – clothing, and some odds and ends carefully wrapped up in among the clothes. On a whim she phased it into her realm, having some spare clothes even if they were much too big wouldn’t hurt, the bright green jumpsuit that she was actually clad in didn’t fit either, but she’d be much more obvious in that. And whoever actually owned the suitcase was either one of the workers or victims of this place – or no longer needed it, she was about to open the next suitcase when Jex called her.

“Shadow, we can get through, where are you?”
“Here… I can see your arm, I’m coming.” Jex’s arm waved around a bit and she trotted over to a big hole in the wall, “did you make this hole, it’s huge.”
“Already here and covered up with thin metal sheets, I just ate my way through them, I think it’s some sort of internal door between rooms, the metal plates just looked like the rest of the walls so whoever owns this place probably didn’t know this was here.”
“What does it look like in there?”
“It’s darker, but it looks like the same as in here but without the shelves, I can’t see any people – nothing moving anyway. If it’s the same as in here the door will be straight across, shall we just run?”
“Run across, yeah don’t run too fast and I’ll stay close so I can hide you if there are people.”
“Okay. 3… 2… 1… go…” They’d run almost all the way to the far door – or where they hoped it’d be when Jex who was some paces in front skidded to a halt, looking left and right. “Oh… oh… Shadow…”
“What, what’s wrong?”
“Along the sides of the room, those shapes, those are more of the guards, hundreds of them. They’re just standing there.”
“I think they’re robots; they have to be directed by the guys that run this place. This is probably where they store the unused ones.” The girls crept over to the nearest figure. Jex looking behind. “They’re breathing.”
“There is like a thick umbilical running from a hole in the floor. These are some sort of human or animal. Is this what they make here?”
“I don’t know, but the sooner we’re out of here the better. Let’s see if we can get that door open.” Dismissing the hundreds of robotic human guards the girls quickly moved to the door, just where they had expected it to be, this one was locked and Jex started to force her fingers into the metal round the latch. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Not really, it’s about as painful as sinking your hand into hot sand at the beach, only really the surface is hot then it’s cooler underneath.”
“If you’re eating with your skin do you eat with your mouth too… do you need to?”
“Not been hungry since I drank that stuff under the mountain. But I can still eat, but most of the things I can eat now don’t taste of anything much. If I eat with my mouth things taste like you’d expect them to.”
“Well that’s cool, I get hungry when I’m using my abilities, not been so bad yet but I wonder if I’ll get so hungry at some point that I can’t do my things without getting some more food.”
“Hope you don’t have to find out, we’ll get out of here and call someone who can help us and to rescue those kids, that was sick.”
“You looked?”
“While you were scouting, yes. If I could get sick, I would be… I sort of wish I could find whoever did this and hurt them… but knowing my luck I’d end up looking like them.”
“But you won’t?”
“Unless I went all out the guards would stop me, I’m not much better than a baseline human. I can push myself harder because my muscles won’t get damaged, but I’m no stronger than I was in my original body.” Jex had by this point carved out a hole round the end of the door latch and with a jerk started to open the door.
“Wait, we don’t know if this door is alarmed or something. Let me hide you here and I’ll go scout, then when I know if there are any guards and where they are I’ll come and collect you okay.”
“Okay but don’t hide me, what if you get too far away?”
“Okay hide among the robots, I’ll be as quick as I can.”
“Good luck.”

Shadow quickly slipped out of the door, no obvious alarms sounded but the facility was almost eerily quiet and had been except when the guards – she shuddered at the thought of them – had been searching for her originally, she idly wondered why Jex hadn’t been reported as escaped but then realised that the girl’s skin would have eaten any tracking device long ago. As she entered the corridor, she phased down to just her sensory abilities in the distance to her right she could see a group of the guards walking away from here toward a door or wall – she could tell at this distance – that closed off that end of the corridor, to her left the corridor went round a corner, but with a forcefield door dead ahead if looking right. She drifted to the corner and looked down another corridor, this ended like the other direction in a wall or solid door, she turned and drifted back to the door hoping that the guards wouldn’t investigate the visible hole. They duly trooped past not even turning their masked face to look. As soon as they were past, she slipped back into the room and close the door. “Jex?” The other girl materialised out of the gloom.
“Yes.”
“There is a patrol in the corridor outside, it’s all one corridor they don’t go through any doors, but it’s in two sections with a right-angle bend in the middle. On the corner of the bend is another forcefield door, I didn’t go through as I was worried that the patrol would see where we’ve opened the door – they didn’t even look. I’m going to go and look through that other door, then I’ll come and get you, okay?”
“I’ll wait behind the door.”
“Great won’t be long.”

Shadow quickly made her way back into the corridor making sure she was phased so that she couldn’t be seen, looking down the corridor to the right the guards were on their way back up, so she let them walk past here and the door that hid Jex, then walked through the pair of forcefield doors that made up the airlock. After those there was a small area with an open door to the right. And a heavy physical barrier straight ahead. Even if Jex could get through that, it’d take quite a lot of doing. She peered into the room with the open door. Four more guards stood rigidly in there, two sort of staring into the wall near the door, and two more staring through what looked like a thick window into another passage. But there didn’t seem to be any way out. Still, this was obviously a serious security checkpoint. She went to get Jex maybe she could come up with an idea how they could get through this.

Jex was right where she’d said she’d be, nervously jigging from foot to foot. “I don’t know if it’s the way out, but through the door I told you about is a fairly serious security checkpoint. Double forcefield doors, both sets are shut. Then a gap then a huge metal door. And a room with four more guards in, they’re just standing there. There is a window onto the corridor behind the big metal door, but I couldn’t really see anything through it.”
“Can we get into the bit outside the security room without being seen?”
“Probably. The guys in the corridor don’t seem to be very aware of what is going on around them. And I don’t think the guys in the checkpoint are any better. But I can probably hide you there if they start to move.”
“Then can you um… can you hide them like you do me?”
“Probably, I don’t see why not, unless they have something that makes it impossible for me to. I was worried about doing one and having them all start moving, I don’t know I can phase them if they’re moving.”
“Well if they start moving, we can either wait till they stop, or you come and get me, and I push myself and just eat them. I think we’ll need to be fast, I reckon they must have some way of tracking all of the robots. I haven’t seen any cameras, and this place is about as secure as a paper bag otherwise. But if they realise, we’re escaping I worry about all those others that are stored being activated.”
“Me too.” Shadow peered into the corridor to see the backs of the patrol turning down the corridor. “Quick, go through the first set of doors and try and be really stealthy going through the second set, I don’t want to talk in case they can hear us.”
“Right, good luck.”

The girls quickly made their way into the checkpoint, neither of the guards who stood near the door moved and soon Jex was phased into her realm and she tried to decide how to do the guards, she wanted to get as many into her realm as she could so if Jex was right and they were being tracked in some way they’d have less to fight when they worked out that there were prisoners escaping. She thought that doing the two by the window first would be best, then anyone tracking them might think that the attack was coming from outside. She slipped over to the window and feeling a sense of disgust, she touched one of the guards, it didn’t actually feel like a living thing, which made it feel a little easier – she’d never liked touching people anyway – and this thing, was horrible anyway. She phased it into her realm. Then grabbed for the second one and did the same thing, she was sliding over to the two by the door when the female voice said: “Team 2 report, telemetry signals have gone offline.”
“Team 2 reporting, X-ray secure, no issues noted.” Wait until the conversation is over or… grab and phase number three into her realm. Then the last one… cutting off the conversation.

She phased Jex back into reality and pulled and pushed her over to the window. “They know that something is happening can you get through that as fast as possible?”
“Okay.”
“As soon as you can, climb through I’m going to pull the guards back out once I can escape the room, it should confuse whoever is controlling them. Hopefully there aren’t many more things between us and freedom. If you can see a way forward go, and I’ll follow you.”
“What if I run into more guards, or even people?”
“If you can hide, if not I’ll come and phase you until they give up looking or I can lead them away.”
“Okay.” Jex pushed her fingers into the window unlike before she seemed to relax and her fingers, hand and arm soon moved through the material like it were water. It took her barely ten seconds to make a hole big enough for her to climb through and get through it. As soon as she’d got out Shadow reversed the process of phasing the guards each one popping out – the first two trying to continue whatever they had been saying to their controller, “All teams converge on x-ray, we’re under attack, lethal force authorised.”

Well, that meant that she and Jex had to get out now, though she wasn’t certain how even all the guards and even the ones in the store room were going to kill either of them. But even if they didn’t it didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be recaptured. Luckily as it was only her senses in the real world she didn’t have to physically climb out of the hole in the window and she left easily. She could see where Jex had gone because unlike before there was a Jex shaped hole in the middle of the next set of doors. These looked like they had been metal reinforced with forcefields but whatever Jex had done to them had shorted out the forcefields and melted a whole right through. Jex had said she could mostly control her eating, she just hoped that when they were out and safe Jex could rein it in again.

Beyond the last set of airlock doors, there was a short corridor that led to a concrete ramp which now had a row of footprint divots running up it. At the top Jex waited. “I told you to keep going.”
“I know, I wanted to get my eating under control before I went any further and make sure you were with me. I don’t want to go back in there but for you I would.”
“For me and all those other kids, you’d get out and find an adult to come help us. We’re just kids, we shouldn’t be trying to beat a super villain on our own.”
“I know… I just…”
“Yeah, my feelings exactly. But it’s important that we escape so they can come and rescue the rest of those kids.”
“This is just some kind of storage shed and there is a road or something out there, I’ve heard cars go past. Shall we just go, if it looks like it’s going to be too dangerous, we can rethink, but I’m worried that the guards will come up the ramp and find us.”
“Yes lets.”

The night outside was cold, but above freezing, they could be anywhere in the world, but as Jex pointed out, “they drive on the right,” in the distance to the left there looked to be some sort of town. The girls ran toward it, Shadow still mostly phased, Jex with a ground eating – literally – stride. Jex whooped. “Still in good old US of A.”
“Where abouts?”
“Don’t have a clue, but I recognise the style of the signs and some of the brands on the advertising boards. Wait…” she jogged over to another sign and peered at it after clearing some undergrowth. “Well, we’re on the old Route 66, have you heard of that?”
“Heard of it doesn’t it go from east to west or something?”
“Starts in Chicago and runs through to California somewhere, my mom talked about driving it when she was younger… I don’t know if she did or just wanted to, she wanted to be with dad, but he’d gone by then.”
“Your dad, did they divorce?”
“Nope, he left on business, I don’t know what though. But he kept sending back money right until I left, I want to find him too.”
“Well if we can get out of this in once piece I’ll help you look.”
“Thank you… wait look there is a store, it’s not open but it should have a phone – do we break in if it’s inside?”
“I think we have to, this is an emergency after all. ‘Nelson’s Old Riverton Country Store’…”
“Riverton, we’re in Kansas but quite near to Missouri, this place has a… look you see that truck,” Jex pointed at an old and dirty looking pickup truck black in the pre-dawn gloom, “that’s one of the characters from the Disney film Cars… I forget which one, Astrid loved that film, we had a bootleg copy of it.”
“I never saw it, my father didn’t approve of films.”
“It was a cartoon, but they set it along Route 66 and some of the places and characters were based on real people or something. I remember going to our library and looking it up for Astrid.”
“Cool, is there a phone though?”
“Yes, here… it’s outside so we can… and if we look underneath.”
“Underneath?”
“Pretty much every public phone has a number on a sticker underneath it, with the closest hero group’s emergency number… no sticker no local group then you have to ring the cops.”
“Let me look, you deal with the phone call if there is a number I’ll read it to you okay?”
“Sure.” Shadow already mostly phased as had been normal up to now, looked under the phone. Her vision worked oddly in the gloom; she could see detail as if it were daylight, but only when she concentrated otherwise everything was as dark as a dark night. She read out the numbers on the sticker, “They’re called the Joplin Juggernauts.”
“Joplin is in Missouri.”
“Can they cross into Kansas?”
“I think so, I think the sticker would be for a different group if they couldn’t… I don’t really know, just the urban legend about the stickers.”
“Listen Jex, when they come, I’m going to hide, I don’t have any ID at all and they might try and keep me or arrest me or something, I just want to get home. Will you be, okay?”
“You don’t have to go, I’ll explain everything…”
“They might not listen, I don’t think I want to risk it. But I’ll hang around if they’ll let you explain come out and I dunno wave or something, I’ll come and see then, okay?”
“Okay, Shadow… thanks, not just for me but for all the others too. I think you’ll be fine, and I’ll see you in a couple of hours, but if not, be safe and good luck.”

[1]Notes at the bottom.

— Whateley Academy Campus – Various Locations – September 2016

“So, what do you think it is?”
“Well I can tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t a ghost or poltergeist and it’s not a spirit. It’s not any kind of machine or PK construct. It could be a devise but I don’t think it likely given how long it’s been here and I doubt that after the disappearances it could have survived all of the heavy lifters we’ve had round the place. It could be an astral projection – in fact that is what it most resembles – if astral projections could be anchored to thin air. It seems to be able to sense some of the wards, others it just goes through like they didn’t exist. It doesn’t seem to notice any non-magic shielding. I think an empath might be worth talking to.”
“An empath? Why?”
“Just a hunch… Spidey senses tingling…”

“Medical Centre can I help?”
“Is Insight on duty?”
“Yes she’s in her office would you like me to transfer you?”
“Yes, please.”
“Insight here how may I help?”
“Hi it’s Officer Jones in security, we have a situation on campus and our mage consultant has suggested that an empath might help us. Could you come to the green houses near the interfaith sanctuary? We have an… ah… presence trapped there but we don’t know what it is or how to talk to it. Our mage says it’s not spirit, a devise or magical. Closest she can guess is that it’s some sort of astral projection but her sixth sense – which has been reliable in the past – suggested we call an empath.”
“I’m already on my way Officer Jones. Should be there in about five minutes.”

“So where is this presence?”
“Just down here, we’ve been tracking it for weeks, but mostly it’s been staying around the edges of the campus. One of the maintenance staff saw something near the outside faucet here and called us. It’s in the shed there, it’s just an empty storeroom really, to keep empty beehives in during the winter. Our presence is in there.”
“Are we safe out here?”
“Seen nothing to suggest otherwise, the door is shut, and we have two squads standing by.”
“Well let’s see what we have here.” She slowly approached the hut, staying away from the door, making sure the security teams had a clear line of fire. By the time she was next to the wall she could feel the presence inside. Officer Jones who had followed her over moving with far more assurance listened as she explained what she was feeling. “It’s a girl, quite young – early to mid-teens, she’s not in any pain, but is starving. She… she’s lost, very scared – almost catatonic with fear and almost without hope. I don’t think she’d suicidal but she’s almost at the point of just giving up and… honestly, I think if she gets to that point she might just cease to live. I also get the sense that she’s a long way from home. She’s absolutely no threat to anyone… except an empath who might struggle with the feelings a little. I need to go in there and talk to her directly.”
“Okay, do you need me to come with you?”
“Absolutely not, that I think would make her worse, in fact if you could pull back a bit we’ll see if that helps her fear.”

Shadow had been in and out of her realm too much, she knew that was part of the problem, but she couldn’t do anything through the fear and hunger. She needed some food, she’d taken to drinking water to feel full, tricking her body into thinking – for a while – that she’d eaten something. She also hadn’t been sleeping and was exhausted. It had only been a moment of inattention that caused her to slip out and be fully visible, but she’d been seen and just run into the shed, to get away from the maintenance worker – she recognised their uniforms – but then she was even more trapped, she sank down into a corner and tried to work out what to do. She knew there were people outside, she guessed that if they weren’t security, security would be on the way. She could hear voices outside, but not what was being said.

She didn’t see a way forward, whatever she did she was trapped at the school and there were always so many people around, she’d tried to get to the cafeteria kitchens a couple of times, but the kitchen was too busy and always the fear made her get away before she’d had any chance to steal any food. She’d even gone into the stable and eaten some of the dried food put out for the horses – it hadn’t tasted bad but had given her very bad stomach cramps. She was at the end of her endurance, if nothing else changed she’d phase into her realm and never leave again.

The door opening made her twitch slightly – not even having the energy to jump. “Hello,” a voice said, “I’m one of the doctors here at the school, may I come in and talk to you?”
It took a few moments to get her voice to work, she wasn’t thirsty, but it had been quite a long time since she’d last spoken to anyone. The phone call after the bus maybe… “Please don’t hurt me, I just want to go home.”
“Oh…” the spike of terror wasn’t something that Insight expected when someone talked to her and the longing… even as hardened as she was to other peoples – especially teenagers – emotions had tears trickling down her own cheeks.
“No one here wants to hurt you sweetheart. We’re just worried about you, we knew you were around, but nobody has managed to find you to speak to.”
“You trapped me here… I can’t get out I just want to leave and go home.”
“Where is home?”
“England.”
“That’s a long way, do you know how you’re going to get there?”
“I was going to try and stow away on a boat… a liner… or something.”
“If I promised that no one here will hurt you do you think we could go somewhere a little more comfortable and talk there?”
“I… I don’t know, I’m having problems not being scared.”
“Is something external to you, making you feel more scared?”
“No it’s when I use my powers too often, it doesn’t do my mental health any good… and I get more scared more easily even when I know not to be. But I’m trapped and there are so many people… I can’t stay safe without using them… I…”
“Well if you come with me and I promise that you’ll be safe you can stop using your powers for a bit then you’ll see we’re really not worth being scared of.”
“I guess,” Shadow slowly phased out of her reality fully for the first time in weeks before – as normal – phasing slightly back in, that didn’t count, that was just safety, it was taking longer and longer now though. Then she stepped out of her shadowed corner and the woman could see her fully.
“Oh my goodness, you’re… oh sweetheart will you be able to walk far?”
“If I take it slowly, I’ve not eaten very much in three, I think, weeks. If I go too fast, I feel faint. But if we go slowly, I will be okay.”
“No that’s not on, I’m going to step outside, I’m going to have one of our medical teams come from Doyle which is where our medical centre is, they’ll bring something you can ride in. Now do you have a name, we’ve been calling you the presence, but clearly there is a pretty girl somewhere in there too.”
“My last… last friend called me Shadow, my old name doesn’t fit any more, I don’t like to think about it much.”
“Okay we’ll call you Shadow for now, will you be alright if one of our security teams comes with us? I can send them away, but it’ll make them uncomfortable.”
“I guess… sorry I’ve just been so afraid, it’s hard to change my mindset to not being scared.”
“I’ll be right back Shadow, just wait here, if you need to sit down don’t worry, I can see how tired you are.”

“Officer Jones, I’ve met her, she’s much as we’ve been expecting. Very thin though, she’s doing something with her mutant abilities that’s making her more scared than she should be. I want you to call one of the crash teams from Doyle, just a cart will do, she’s upright but I think she’d struggle to walk across the campus. And she’ll need to be admitted, once we give her a medical examination we’ll know more. With the colour of her hair could she be the waif that Myra in admin found a month ago?”
“Well that one never did turn up, so it’s possible. You could ask her if she saw Myra in Berlin, Myra said she gave the girl a bag of food.”
“Well if you could call that cart for me and pull some of your men back, I think as long as you don’t get too close she’ll be fine, in honesty once she’s sitting down I wouldn’t be surprised if she just falls asleep, I can feel her exhaustion from here.”
“I’ll do that, I’ll tap on the door when they arrive.”
“Thank you.”

The girl was swaying gently on her feet while staring blankly at the floor, Insight recognised this Shadow was almost asleep with her eyes open. She’d seen this in very drunk people occasionally. “Shadow?”
The girl started a little, “uh yes?”
“I’ve called a cart from Doyle to come and collect us, I’ll ride and stay with you until we get there, I’m a psychologist^[2] by trade so I’ll hand you over to a doctor, but I’ll either stay to look after you until you feel safe. Is that okay?”
“Uh… um… does Myra work here?”
“Myra?”
“She gave me some food when I was in Berlin and told me to come here so she could help me… I was too scared… but maybe she remembers me still… before I get arrested, I want to say thank you for the food.”
“Why do think you’ll get arrested?”
“Because I’m not supposed to be here. I’m an alien and a mutant… and everyone hates mutants in America… I just don’t want to go back to that place…”
“Which place is that Shadow?”
“Jex and I escaped once, but I lost Jex and I don’t think I could do it again on my own.”
“Jex?”
“She gave me my name…” there was a tap on the door startling the teen and she tried to phase into her realm, but she was so exhausted she just collapsed instead. Insight grabbed for her and caught her before her head hit the ground, feeling how light she actually was. “Send them in.” She called to Officer Jones, “she’s collapsed.”

— Doyle Medical Centre. 3 hours later.

“So?”
“Obviously been on short rations for quite a while, not much more so than any normal teen on the streets, but certainly starving when she arrived here, we have her on a glucose drip. She was well hydrated, but we think that she’d probably drinking more to stave off the hunger pangs. She’s also anaemic, that could be due to lack of food groups in her diet or drinking too much water. We’ve given an injection for that as well. Other than that, she’s in remarkably good health.
“She’s the same girl that we had samples of at the end of August, from um a shower on campus. DNA matches close enough for that. She’s asleep now, simple exhaustion. Dr. Chance has offered to sit in with her, she’s just trying to get hold of Myra Henderson at the moment. I believe she has gone on a shopping trip with to Berlin or Lancaster.”
“Right, well unless you need security I think I’ll go back to Kane and write some reports.”
“Even when she wakes up she’s going to be very weak, I don’t think we’ll actually need a guard on her for a day or two, though obviously that’s going to depend on her specific mutation.”
“Very well, let us know if anything changes please.”
“We will do.”

— Whateley Academy Campus – Various Places – September 2016

“Joanna, I need to go up to Doyle, do you remember I told you about a girl I’d seen in Berlin who needed help, well she’s turned up on campus and they want someone to come up and sit with her until she wakes up. I’ve called your father, who has said you can come up to his workshop if you like or you have books here.” Myra was looking somewhat less well put together than normal. She’d had to call off a lunch date with some friends in Lancaster to get back, her daughter who resembled a two-foot-long dragon – and who’d remain a dragon in shape, until her late teens – wasn’t pleased that her mother who she’d hoped would be with her in the afternoon was pleading to go too.
“I could come with you mom, this girl will probably love to have me there, dragons are awesome after all.”
“Dragons are indeed awesome dearest, but she’s just asleep and you’re not good at staying still. We, I can’t have you racing round Doyle when you get bored.”
“But mom…”
“Nope, I want you to go and see your father, he’ll find you something to build or break. You can spend a couple of hours with him, can’t you?”
“I guess…”
“Well off you go then, I promise that as soon as our waif is awake and situated, I will ring you and we can spend some time doing something together.”
“Okay mom…” And the tiny dragon laboriously flapped her two pairs of wings and flew clumsily away out of the house. Her mother sighed, she wished her daughter would actually practice flying, she knew as soon as she thought she could get away with it, the tiny dragon would start using her PK field and… a soft bang heralded her daughter breaking the sound limit again.

Navigating the tunnels at Mach 1.5 was impossible even for Joanna so she was actually practicing with her wings, though she could fly slowly or even hover with her PK field she did want to be able to fly like her parents. And she knew that at some point they’d insist on going for a fly with her and then she’d be in trouble if she still got her wings tangled up. She just liked going fast and doing tricks, which her wings were still too clumsy for. Her dad was as expected in his workshop, he was talking to some students. And like her mother had suggested she quickly got bored and set off to explore some more of the tunnels. Eventually bored of that too she headed up the nearest access point, she did check that it was a green flag day before actually leaving the cover of the tunnels. She briefly wondered what to do next, then she saw one of her friends from the junior high program and went to talk to her instead. “Paige… up here…” her voice was quite high pitched due mostly to her size.
“Oh hey Joanna, what are you doing?”
“I’m bored.”
“You’re always bored.”
“Maybe… where are you going?”
“Hawthorne, going to see Jex.”
“Can I come?”
“Yeah, but no sonic booms please.”
“Okay.”
“So when do you actually start in high school?” Asked Paige.
“In a week, not this Monday but the Monday after.”
“Will you still play with me?”
“Sure why wouldn’t I? You’re my friend. And you’ll still be in some of the same classes with me… I just get to do some more interesting stuff too. I should have started in Freshman year anyway, but mom and dad wanted me to be older. But I’m not learning anything new this year. They asked me if I wanted to move up a year or just pick up more high school classes.”
“So why did you?”
“’cos if I’m in Junior High, I won’t get into sophomore classes, but if I’m in high school some of the classes will be junior or even senior… they won’t be boring.”
“Wont they be very hard?”
“Probably, but some of the stuff I’m doing now I did two years ago… So, what are you going to see Jex about? Will she be coming out to play?”
“I don’t know she called me said she wanted to take me to see an old friend. I think she needs moral support.”
“Off campus?”
“I don’t think so. But she didn’t say, maybe one of her friends from her old school has come to see her.”
“I thought she’d had problems at home.”
“I don’t know, I’ll go in and ask her, you can probably come with us, Jex is your friend too, right?”
“Yeah but’s she’s your sort-of-big sister isn’t she?”
“Jex is friendly… sort of like you… with everyone.”

“Hey Paige, sorry to call you, but a friend I haven’t seen in nearly a year is in Doyle, someone from admin called to tell me, and I really want to go and make sure she’s okay.”
“An old friend?”
“She saved my life last winter.”
“I thought you couldn’t die.”
“Okay maybe saved my life. She helped me escape from something worse than death. If it’s her anyway…”
“Can Joanna come with us?”
“Is she here?”
“She’s doing tricks outside, I said she couldn’t come in after last time.”
“Phew, she’s a flibbertigibbet…”
“A what?”
“It means flighty and capricious.”
Paige giggled, “that is so her…”
“Come on little sort-of-sister lets collect that dragon and go and find Shadow, I need to say thanks again and make sure she’s okay.”

— Doyle Medical Centre – September 2016

Shadow felt weird, she lay with her eyes shut for a minute trying to find the correct mind state to phase but it eluded her, so she opened her eyes. She was in a bed in a hospital room. She felt an awful lot better than she had, still not great but better. She was still dirty they hadn’t washed her, but they’d taken her clothes off at some point so the gown she was wearing was all she had on. The bed was so soft and comfy, she sat up a little and saw, “Myra?”
“Oh gosh, it really is you. I’m so sorry you had to go through all that you have young lady. They tell me you’re called Shadow?”
“It’s what a friend who I’ve lost contact with called me when we…”
“What?”
“Will they arrest me?”
“No one is going to arrest you child, not here, not unless you do something or have done something very stupid and even then I’ll get you a lawyer, or the school will.”
“I’m a mutant Myra.”
“My dear girl, so am I… so are most of the students and many of the staff. If that’s all that is worrying you, worry no more.”
“You’re all mutants too… but… I…”
“Shadow, I don’t know if you have some sort of probability warping in among your abilities, but if there was one place you could fetch up in America Whateley Academy is one of the few places that will be able to look after you with no issue, it’s not for nothing that we’re considered the pre-eminent schools for mutants in the world.
“We have some of your countrymen already with us. And I think we have another of your friends here too though.”
“Friends? I don’t…”
“I think you do have at least one, Dr. Chance who you spoke to before told me that you’d met Jex, we have a student by that name who is about the same age as you. Could she be the same person?”
“If… if it’s Jex then yes, I do have another friend. We escaped from the same place together; I needed her to do some of the things I couldn’t do. But when the heroes came, she never came out to find me… I thought they’d arrested her.”
“The FBI or someone did arrest her, but one of the Joplin Juggernauts is an alum a very intelligent young man who goes by the moniker Dr. Normal – too much Marvel comics if you ask me. But he knew what to do and got Jex released into his care by the next day, but by then you’d vanished. The Juggernauts looked for a few days, but they have other jobs to do, most of them are only part timers anyway.”
“I’d gone by then I went east… once I knew where I was and mostly followed the old Route 66 to Chicago, then I stowed away on busses and ended up north of Concord but I couldn’t use another bus after that… I… I just couldn’t.”
“You left blood from two of the people on the bus when you had a shower in the changing rooms at the stables. So we knew you were there, but that was last winter, what did you do between there and here?” Shadow explained to Myra much of her story, becoming more and more comfortable with the woman. Someone she’d already felt that she had a connection with just from a bag of food. Now she told her even things that she’d almost forgotten herself.

A knock on the door interrupted the story and someone that Shadow had never seen poked his head round the door, “Myra I have um Voracity and two junior high students to see the patient.”
“Voracity is Jex?” A confirming sound came from the other side of the door.
“She says so, can she come in?”
“Yes, I think Shadow here want’s to see her friend. I’m going to step out for a few moments, see if I can scare up something to drink, can Shadow eat and drink?”
“Of course, the doctor has said she’s not to try and eat too much as that’s more likely to make her ill.”
“Send the kids in they’ll give her someone to talk to while I’m getting her some real food.”

Jex pushed past the nurse and almost ran to the bed… she was followed by a small girl in a lab coat and goggles and a tiny dragon who realising that she’d found her mother by mistake tried to stop her headlong flight but instead crashed into the bed finishing up almost sitting on Shadow’s lap. “Hey mom,” she chirped, “Jex said she’d introduce me to her friend, you’re always saying I need more friends.”
“I… we’ll talk about this later young lady. If you leave here before I get back, you’ll be grounded. Understand?”
“Yes mom.” The tiny dragon tried to look contrite but failed miserably.

“Shadow… it is you?”
“Hey Jex, you made it too. I’d hug you but this gown is my only clothing at the moment, and I don’t want it eating.” Jex grinned and held out her hand, they gripped hands for a short while. “I missed you, you know – it’s been hard work getting here and there were many times when I wished you could be there with me. Did they rescue all those kids? Have you found your sister and mom?”
“They rescued most of the kids, two died – they didn’t tell me which ones, but the girl in our cell block…” She raised an eyebrow to see if Shadow knew who she meant, “she was alive the last time I spoke to her… she’s got issues. But she’s with her family and they’re dealing with them. And I found my sister, and mom and I know where my dad and big brothers are… though we haven’t had chance to meet yet. Um can I introduce my friends before one of them starts flying round the room?”
“Yes. I’m guessing this is Myra’s daughter?”
“Yes, this is Joanna, she will be a freshman in a week I think and my sort-of-little-sister Paige who is in the Junior High program.”
“Junior high program?”
“For kids with early manifestations, who can’t stay at home easily. Paige came here but now her family won’t let her go home, so I’ve adopted her sort of…” Shadow looked at the young girl who was looking at Jex with something akin to adoration.
“Well I got here, what’s it like?”
“It’s high school with mutants… so all the normal stuff… oh wait do you have high school in England?”
“I guess, we called it the Senior School. But I was at an all-boys school, so I guess it’d have been different anyway.”
“So it’s like high school but amped up to 11… or maybe 22. Classes started a week ago, and Joanna here starts next Monday, they wanted her to test out of the Junior High program, before they let her enter freshman year. But given how amazing she is I don’t think she’ll behind much.”
“All dragons are amazing.” The tiny dragon chirped, she’d curled up in a ball on Shadow’s lap, Shadow was almost unconsciously stroking her back, both seemed to be enjoying the contact, but Shadow was dozing off, Jex let her, she could see how tired her friend was. And if Joanna stayed there, she’d not get into any more trouble either.

The End. For now.

[1]The facility was originally plotted and written to be included in a different order, the villain in charge would have had her own little section of story to expound on her beliefs but when I re-wrote the story after publishing Scathi, I moved everything around and the memory of the facility wouldn’t have worked in the same way so it was removed. But basically the villain can only see though they eyes of her minions, who are all re-engineered human (who also cannot see images on screens, it was complicated but logical if she'd had here own voice). She has a limit as to how many she can see control at a time. But the reason that the facility has no cameras (against all logic, sense or security) is that no-one can see the images on the other end. And the villain wouldn’t trust other humans to do their security for them.

[2]I borrowed Insight from Domoviye, (thank you for the loan) and the misrepresentation of her as a psychologist is merely her (the character) dumbing down her actual job to something a young, distressed teen might understand.

Hopefully this reads better than Skathi did, I plan on working on part 2 of this and rewriting Skathi next.