The black SUV disappeared around the corner, and I kept staring long after it was gone, the faint growl of its engine lingering in my ears like a ghost that hadn't gotten the memo about moving on.
Maybe I'd imagined it.
No. Don't be stupid. You didn't imagine the SUV. You imagined the government secretly stalking your house — which, considering the last forty-eight hours of my life, wasn't even the most ridiculous sentence I'd thought that day. It wasn't even top five.
Neither option made me feel remotely better. I closed the curtains, the fabric rasping softly against the rod, and stood there a moment longer than necessary, as if the thin cotton barrier between me and the street might actually do something useful.
Rule number one: if creepy government people are watching your house, don't wave.
Rule number two: maybe don't electrocute yourself inside the living room while you're at it.
Baby steps. I was building an entire personal safety manual, one increasingly specific rule at a time, and none of it made me feel any less like a science experiment that had wandered out of containment.
I glanced toward my bedroom door — or, more accurately, toward the rectangle of empty space where my bedroom door used to live before I'd introduced it to the hallway floor with slightly more enthusiasm than the laws of home construction generally allow. Dad still hadn't let that go. Honestly, neither had I. There's something deeply humbling about ripping a solid door off its hinges by accident and then having to explain it to a man holding a tape measure like a weapon.
I sighed. "I need air."
Mom's voice drifted up the stairs, muffled but sharp enough to cut through two floors of drywall. "Alexander!"
"...Never mind."
"I heard that!"
Of course she did. I was starting to suspect mothers develop a form of echolocation somewhere around their thirtieth birthday, specifically tuned to the frequency of their children trying to get away with something.
"I said I'm going for a walk!"
A pause — the kind of pause that meant a jury was deliberating somewhere downstairs. Then Dad answered instead, his voice carrying the particular weight of a man who had clearly been designated spokesperson.
"Stay in the neighborhood!"
"I will!"
"And walk—!"
"...That's oddly specific."
Silence. The kind that suggested my parents were having an entire silent conversation through eye contact alone, the way they'd been doing since before I was born.
Then Melissa yelled from downstairs, because apparently the entire household had opinions about my outdoor activities today. "Maybe don't tear up the sidewalk either, Superman!"
"I'm not Superman!"
"Sure!"
I grabbed my hoodie off the hook and headed for the front door before the roasting could gain any more momentum. Some battles you don't win. You just retreat with whatever dignity you can carry.
---
The afternoon air smelled like wet asphalt, cut grass, and somebody grilling carne asada three houses down, the scent thick and savory enough that I could practically taste it on the back of my tongue. Home. Whatever else was happening to me — the sparks, the eyes, the men in black jackets with silver suns stitched over their hearts — this street, at least, still smelled exactly like it always had.
I shoved my hands into my pockets and started walking.
Normal. Just be normal. You're a seventeen-year-old kid going for a walk. That's all. Nothing weird. Nothing super. Nothing—
A squirrel darted across the sidewalk ahead of me, and I watched it without really thinking about it, the way you watch anything small and quick out of pure reflex.
Except it wasn't quick. It was slow. Painfully, unnaturally slow. The faint scratch of its claws against the concrete stretched into a long, drawn-out scrape, like nails dragged across glass in agonizing slow motion. The air itself seemed to thicken around it, pressing down on every twitch of its tail, every flick of its paws, like the entire animal was wading through something far denser than open air.
Wait. No. That wasn't right. The squirrel was running full speed — I could tell that much just from the way its body was angled, every muscle straining for maximum velocity. So why did it look like it was moving through peanut butter?
I blinked, and the world snapped back into place with a soft pop somewhere behind my ears, sound and motion crashing back to their proper speed all at once. The squirrel vanished up a tree in a blur exactly as fast as it should have been the entire time.
"What..." I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand.
Sleep deprivation. Definitely sleep deprivation. It sounded better than the alternative, which I wasn't ready to name yet, even privately, even just to myself.
I kept walking down the block, trying to shake the strange, floaty unease still clinging to the edges of my vision.
A baseball rolled into the street up ahead. A little kid — maybe six, seven at most, wearing a jersey two sizes too big — took off after it without a second's hesitation. A car turned the corner behind him.
Too fast.
My stomach dropped before my brain had even finished processing the shape of what was happening, the realization landing like a fist to the chest. The kid didn't look up. He just kept running, straight toward the street, reaching for the ball like nothing else in the world existed — not the car, not the danger, not anything but the small white sphere rolling toward the gutter.
"Hey—!"
My voice came out too late. Too slow. The words felt like they were dragging behind the moment instead of arriving in time to matter.
Move.
The thought didn't feel like mine. It felt like instinct — something older and faster than conscious thought, something that had apparently been waiting its whole life for exactly this kind of emergency. My body reacted before I could question it, before I could talk myself into hesitating even half a second longer.
My foot hit the pavement, and the world stretched.
Sound warped into a low, distant hum, like everything around me had been dropped underwater. The car crept forward, its tires rotating so slowly I could count the individual grooves cut into the rubber. The kid's arm extended toward the baseball in agonizing increments, his small fingers inching through air that had somehow turned to syrup.
"...Holy—" My own voice dragged out beside me, distorted and heavy, like a recording played at the wrong speed.
But I wasn't slow. I was fast. Impossibly, terrifyingly fast. The sidewalk blurred beneath my sneakers, the air snapping against my skin with a static charge that raised the hair on my arms. One step. Two. Three. The distance that should have taken five or six seconds to cross vanished in what felt like a single held breath.
I reached the kid just as the car's shadow started to fall across him.
I didn't think. I just grabbed him, his shirt bunching in my fist as I yanked him backward and lifted him clean off his feet. His weight barely registered — like hauling a half-empty backpack instead of an actual human child. The car crept forward, inches from where he'd been standing a heartbeat earlier. Too close. Way too close for comfort, even in slow motion.
I stumbled back onto the sidewalk, still holding him against my chest.
Then everything snapped back all at once. Sound crashed in from every direction — the roar of the engine, the sharp screech of tires trying to brake too late, a startled gasp from somewhere behind me. The kid blinked up at me, confused, clearly having experienced none of the last several seconds the way I had.
"Huh?"
I set him down quickly, my heart hammering hard enough against my ribs that I half expected him to hear it too. "You—uh—you dropped your ball," I managed, scooping it off the asphalt and pressing it back into his hands.
He examined it for a second. Then looked up at me.
"Thanks, mister!"
Mister? Excuse me? I glanced around instinctively, half expecting an actual adult to materialize somewhere behind me and take credit. Nope. Just me. Seventeen years old, apparently now qualified for "mister" status by virtue of a single good deed. My back hurt out of pure principle.
The driver leaned out his window, face pale, hands still white-knuckled on the wheel. "Kid — are you okay?!"
"...Yeah!" My voice cracked embarrassingly on the single syllable. Very heroic. Very smooth.
The little boy sprinted back toward his mother, who scooped him up immediately, hugging him tight enough that I could hear her exhale from where I stood. The driver eased the car forward at a considerably more responsible speed this time, glancing back at me twice in the rearview mirror before finally turning the corner.
I stood there on the sidewalk. Heart racing. Hands shaking, just slightly, in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with whatever had just happened inside me.
I looked down at my own hands like they belonged to someone else.
I did that. I actually did that.
A grin spread across my face before I could stop it, wide and a little unhinged, the kind of smile you can't help even when you know you probably shouldn't be wearing it in public.
"No way..."
I looked down the length of the empty residential street ahead of me. Long. Straight. Not a single car in sight. Just rows of palm trees stretching into the distance, their fronds whispering against each other in the light afternoon breeze.
Every responsible decision I had ever made in my entire life raised its hand at once, forming an orderly, disapproving line inside my skull.
Alex. Don't.
Every irresponsible decision I'd ever made interrupted before the first group had even finished speaking.
Counterpoint — what if we do?
"...That's a terrible idea," I said out loud, to absolutely no one.
Unfortunately, terrible ideas had an incredible track record of finding me lately, whether I invited them or not.
I crouched slightly, instinctively settling into something that resembled a sprinter's stance, my heartbeat quickening in my ears for reasons I couldn't fully explain. Instinct, maybe. Whatever this new part of me was, it seemed to already know exactly what it wanted to do — it was just waiting for permission.
"Okay," I muttered, mostly to talk myself into it. "Just a little."
Three. Two. One.
I pushed off.
---
The ground disappeared beneath me. The neighborhood dissolved into streaks of color, houses smearing into warped, elongated shapes that bent and stretched at the corners of my vision like reflections in a funhouse mirror. Wind exploded around me, roaring in my ears like a jet engine spinning up to full throttle, tearing at every loose thread of my hoodie. The fabric snapped behind my shoulders like a cape, cracking sharply in the rushing air with every stride.
Mailboxes. Trees. Driveways. Everything blurred together into long ribbons of green, gray, and gold, twisting past faster than my eyes could properly register individual shapes. The air burned against my face, cold and sharp, stinging my eyes until they watered.
I laughed. A loud, uncontrollable laugh that tore out of my chest before I even realized I'd made the sound, trailing behind me like a delayed echo, as though sound itself couldn't keep up with how fast I was moving.
"Oh my God!"
I shot past three entire blocks in what felt like a single heartbeat.
"I am definitely getting grounded forever."
I tried to slow down. Nothing happened. My legs kept pumping at the same impossible speed, muscles burning with an energy that didn't seem to be running out anytime soon.
"...Uh-oh."
Okay. Tiny problem. How exactly does one stop, when one has accidentally turned into a human missile with apparently no brakes installed?
Good question, Alex. Really wish you'd thought to ask it before you started running.
The neighborhood park rushed toward me, the open green field expanding in my vision at an alarming rate. Fast. Very fast. Way too fast. The ground seemed to tilt upward, rushing to meet me the way pavement rushes toward you in the final second of a fall.
"I should've read the instruction manual!"
I dug my heels into the grass as hard as I could, and the impact jolted up through both legs, vibrating through my bones like I'd just slammed on a car's emergency brake at highway speed. Dirt sprayed out behind me in a wide arc, clumps of grass and soil tearing free with a sound like fabric ripping. A cloud of loose leaves erupted into the air around me, spinning wildly in the wake of my momentum. Heat built rapidly beneath my shoes, friction burning through the rubber soles hard enough that I could smell it.
I finally skidded to a stop just beside the baseball field, breathing hard, laughing even harder, and — as far as I could tell — completely unharmed.
I looked back at the trail I'd left behind. A pair of joggers had stopped dead in their tracks, staring at the hundred-foot gouge carved cleanly into the grass, still smoking faintly at the edges. One of them slowly lowered his water bottle without taking his eyes off it.
"...Did you see that?"
"Nope," his friend answered immediately, already turning back around.
"Me neither."
They both resumed jogging in the opposite direction without another word.
Honestly? Respect. Sometimes denial really is the healthiest coping mechanism available, and I wasn't about to argue with anyone who'd chosen it.
I stood there a moment longer, catching my breath, staring down at my own scorched sneakers. Whatever this was — whatever had crawled into my body somewhere between the lightning strike and this exact moment — it wasn't going away. It wasn't a fluke. It wasn't adrenaline, or sleep deprivation, or any of the increasingly desperate explanations I'd been recycling since yesterday.
It was mine now. Whether I'd asked for it or not.
---
I slowed to a walk by the time I reached the mall, forcing my breathing back to something resembling normal before the automatic doors hissed open and cool, recycled air washed over my face. The noise inside — music bleeding out of storefronts, the low murmur of a hundred overlapping conversations, the clatter of trays somewhere near the food court — felt almost aggressively unreal after everything that had just happened outside.
I headed straight for Castro's Castle, weaving through the early-evening crowd until I ducked behind the counter and slipped through the narrow hallway marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. The smell of grilled meat and cilantro hit me instantly, warm and familiar, grounding me in a way nothing else had managed all day.
I pushed through the swinging door — and nearly collided with someone coming the other way.
"Oh — sorry!"
I froze.
Gwendolyn.
Of course. Of course it's her. Not now. Not like this, still half-convinced there was park dirt somewhere in my hair.
She stepped back, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear, her expression softening the moment she recognized me. "Hey, Alex," she said, a small, easy smile forming. "Didn't expect to see you already."
Her friends hovered just behind her, mid-conversation, glancing between the two of us with the mild, opportunistic curiosity that only teenage bystanders can produce on command.
Say something. Just say hi. It's one word. Why can't I—
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Not even a "hi."
My chest tightened, like something invisible was pressing in from the inside, squeezing the air out of my lungs one careful degree at a time. My tongue felt thick and useless. My thoughts scattered in every direction at once — too many, too fast, none of them assembling into anything I could actually speak out loud.
She's looking at you. She's waiting. Don't just stand there. Move. Say something. Anything.
I could feel my face heating up, a prickling flush crawling steadily up my neck. My hands twitched uselessly at my sides, suddenly foreign, like I'd forgotten where they were supposed to go or what they were even for.
Gwen tilted her head slightly, still smiling, still waiting.
Say it. Say anything. Don't mess this up again.
I just stood there.
Then I nodded — too stiff, too quick — and stepped around her, brushing past without a single word.
Coward. Idiot. What was that?
I could feel it immediately behind me: the shift in the air, the small, awkward silence I'd left hanging there like a dropped tray still clattering across tile.
I kept walking, jaw tight, forcing myself not to look back as I pushed deeper into the kitchen. My ears burned with every step, each one somehow louder and heavier than the last, as though the whole restaurant could hear exactly how badly I'd just failed at the simplest possible interaction.
Behind me, I caught her voice again, softer now. "...Okay."
One of her friends let out a small laugh. "What was that about?"
"I don't know," Gwen said, sounding more confused than upset. "He's probably just busy."
"Or moody," another friend offered.
"Yeah, maybe," Gwen said, brushing it off easily. "Come on."
Their voices faded as they moved on toward the food court.
Busy. Yeah. That's exactly what that looked like. Great job, Alex.
I exhaled sharply and grabbed my apron off the hook, yanking it over my head harder than strictly necessary.
"Whoa," Melissa said from the prep station, one eyebrow already climbing toward her hairline. "What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing," I muttered, tying the strings too tight, the fabric digging into my waist in a way that at least gave me something physical to focus on.
She glanced toward the hallway I'd just come from, then back at me, clearly having seen more than enough to draw her own conclusions. "Did you just blow off Gwen?"
I shrugged, grabbing a stack of tortillas and setting them down on the counter with slightly more force than the task required.
Melissa frowned, wiping her hands on her own apron before leaning in closer. "Okay... weird." She paused, glancing toward the door again. "Hey, have you seen Matthias? He was supposed to be here already. He's covering for Harrison today."
I shrugged again, not even bothering to look up this time. "Nope."
She studied me a second longer, clearly deciding it wasn't worth pushing any further right now. "Alright, dude. Whatever."
Before I could respond, the front doors swung open again. Emanuel walked in — my older brother, college sophomore, resident tech wizard, and somehow still the hotshot soccer star half the school apparently talked about behind my back — nodding at me first, then at Melissa as he rounded the counter.
"What's up with you?" he asked, glancing between the two of us before his eyes settled back on me, sharp with the particular amusement only an older sibling can summon on command. "Still can't ask her on a date?"
I rolled my eyes, grabbed the rice scoop, and turned back toward the line without dignifying that with an actual answer. "Shut up."
Melissa smirked. "He totally just froze."
"Of course he did," Emanuel said, leaning back against the counter like he owned it. "Classic Alex."
I ignored both of them, reaching over to adjust one of the metal trays on the grill line — my bare hand brushing directly against the edge of a pan that had just come off the heat.
It should have burned. Badly.
It didn't. I didn't feel a thing.
For one long, suspended second, I just stood there, fingers resting flat against scalding metal like it was nothing at all, like the pan hadn't spent the last several minutes absorbing direct flame.
Melissa blinked. Emanuel straightened up, all traces of teasing draining from his expression in an instant.
"...Alex?" Melissa said slowly.
I looked down at my own hand. Still nothing. No pain. No heat. No reaction of any kind.
They were both staring at me now, and the silence stretched a beat too long to pass off as anything ordinary.
"How are you—" Emanuel started.
My stomach dropped. Oh. Right.
I yanked my hand back a full half-second too late, already realizing my mistake as it happened. "Ah—!" I hissed, forcing the wince, shaking my hand like it had only just started hurting. "Hot — hot—!"
Melissa's eyebrows shot up. "You didn't even—"
"I'm fine!" I cut in fast, already backing toward the sink. "Just — just gonna — water—"
I shoved my hand under the faucet, letting the cold water run over skin that felt, infuriatingly, completely normal. No burn. No redness. Nothing at all to justify the little performance I was currently putting on.
Behind me, I could still feel them watching.
"...Dude," Emanuel said slowly, arms crossed now. "You touched that for like ten seconds."
"Yeah, well," I said, forcing a laugh that came out more strained than casual, keeping my hand under the water far longer than necessary just to buy myself a few extra seconds. "Guess I've got fast reflexes."
Melissa didn't look convinced. Neither did Emanuel.
I stared down at the water running harmlessly over my hand, heart pounding, pretending to inspect an injury that had never existed in the first place.
What the hell is happening to me?
And somehow, even with everything else piling up — the speed, the door, the sparks, the SUV outside my house — all I could actually think about, standing there with my hand under a faucet for no reason, was Gwen.
I could still see her face — confused, a little amused, patiently waiting for me to say literally anything at all.
I could've just said hi. I could've asked how she was doing. I could've — God, I could've actually asked her out, the way I kept promising myself I would every single time this exact scenario played out.
It's not even that hard. People do it constantly. Words. Just words. "Hey, do you want to hang out sometime?" Boom. Done. A completely normal human interaction that apparently every other person on the planet had already figured out how to survive.
Instead, I'd turned into a statue and fled the scene like the building was on fire.
I leaned back against the counter, letting out a quiet groan under my breath, low enough that hopefully neither Melissa nor Emanuel caught it over the sizzle of the grill.
Next time, I told myself. Next time I'll actually do it. I'll just walk up, say it, be normal for five whole seconds.
Easy. Totally easy.
Except the mere idea of actually following through twisted my stomach into the exact same knot it had been in thirty seconds ago, and my chest tightened right along with it, as if my own body had already voted against the plan before I'd finished proposing it.
Yeah. Next time.
Assuming, of course, I didn't panic like a dog during fireworks season and bolt in the opposite direction all over again.
---
The rest of the shift passed in a strange, uneven rhythm — normal on the surface, entirely alien underneath it. I took orders. I rolled burritos with hands that could apparently survive open flame without complaint. I laughed at one of Emanuel's terrible jokes about soccer refs, and I very deliberately did not look toward the food court, in case Gwen happened to still be sitting somewhere within sight.
Matthias never showed up for his shift. Melissa texted him twice, got nothing back, and finally gave up with a shrug that didn't quite hide how annoyed she was. I didn't mention the black duffel bag from that morning, or the thirty thousand dollars currently sitting somewhere in the world with Mateo's fingerprints all over it. Some things you don't say out loud in a kitchen full of hot oil and easily overheard conversations.
By the time my shift ended, the mall lights outside had shifted from daylight-bright to the warm orange wash of early evening. I untied my apron, hung it back on its hook, and stood there a moment longer than necessary, staring at my own hands under the fluorescent kitchen lights.
Twenty-four hours ago, those hands had belonged to an ordinary kid with an ordinary bike, an ordinary crush he was too much of a coward to act on, and an ordinary Tuesday ahead of him.
Now they could apparently rip a bedroom door off its hinges, catch falling children mid-collision with moving traffic, sprint faster than sound could keep up with, and press flat against a red-hot pan without so much as flinching.
Somewhere out there, past the parking lot, past the freeway, past the edge of the city, a black SUV with tinted windows and no front plate was probably still circling, patient and unbothered, waiting for exactly the right moment to stop pretending it wasn't watching.
I pulled my hoodie back on, the same one that had cracked like a cape in the wind less than two hours earlier, and headed for the exit.
Whatever came next — Gregory, the FHB, the silver sun stitched over a stranger's heart, or just another disastrous attempt at saying two words to Gwen — I had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that today had only been a preview.
And judging by how today had gone, I wasn't exactly optimistic about my odds of handling tomorrow with any more grace.
---
The walk home felt longer than it should have, mostly because I made myself keep it slow. Deliberately, painfully slow, one foot in front of the other at a pace so aggressively normal it practically hurt, just to prove to myself I still could. After the park, after the pan, after the entire circus of a day, the idea of letting my legs decide anything on their own again felt like handing the car keys to someone I'd only just met.
Streetlights flickered on in staggered order as I passed beneath them, one after another, like the block was waking up for the evening one bulb at a time. A couple walked their dog on the opposite sidewalk, the leash jingling faintly with each step. Somewhere behind a fence, a sprinkler kicked on with a soft hiss, the smell of wet grass drifting out over the sidewalk. Ordinary sounds. Ordinary smells. The kind of evening that had played out on this exact street a thousand times before I'd ever had a single reason to notice how loud an ordinary evening actually was.
I noticed everything now. The specific creak of a garage door two houses down. The uneven hum of a window unit straining against the heat. A television flickering blue behind somebody's curtains, the dialogue too faint for a normal ear to catch, and yet somehow perfectly clear to mine. It should have felt like a superpower. Some days it just felt like eavesdropping I hadn't consented to.
I was three blocks from home when I noticed the car.
Not fast. Not aggressive. Just... present. Idling near the curb outside a house that wasn't mine, engine running low and even, headlights off despite the deepening dusk. I told myself it was nothing. Somebody waiting for a pizza delivery. Somebody killing time before picking up a kid from practice. A hundred boring, reasonable explanations existed, and I ran through every single one of them twice before I let myself glance over.
Black. Tinted windows. No front plate.
My stomach dropped straight through the sidewalk.
I didn't run. Running would have meant admitting I'd seen it, and some instinct — the same one that had shoved me into traffic to save a stranger's kid without asking permission first — told me admitting anything right now would be a mistake. So I kept walking. Same pace. Same posture. A kid heading home after a shift, nothing more interesting than that, please, just let me be that boring for one more block.
The engine shifted behind me, low and patient, and for one long, ugly second I was certain it was going to pull out and follow. Then, just as quietly as it had appeared, it eased away from the curb in the opposite direction and disappeared down a side street, taillights fading into the dusk like they'd never been there at all.
I didn't relax until I'd turned the corner onto my own block, and even then, only partway.
Maybe it really was nothing. Maybe I was seeing black SUVs everywhere now the way you start noticing a specific car model everywhere the day after you buy one. Or maybe whoever had been sitting behind that tinted glass had simply decided I wasn't worth the trouble tonight, and would circle back some other evening when I was paying even less attention.
Either way, I picked up my pace for the last stretch home, and made a point not to look back to check.
I let myself in through the back door instead of the front, mostly out of habit, partly because the back door didn't creak the way the front one did, and creaking felt like exactly the kind of small, ordinary detail I needed more of right now. The kitchen light was still on. Mom had left a plate covered in foil on the counter with a sticky note that just said EAT in handwriting sharp enough to qualify as a threat.
I peeled back the foil, and for a second — one brief, blissfully uncomplicated second — none of it mattered. Not the SUV. Not the sparks. Not Gwen's confused half-smile still looping on repeat somewhere behind my eyes. Just rice, beans, and the particular comfort of a meal made by someone who loved you enough to leave a note about it.
Upstairs, the house had gone quiet in that specific late-evening way it always did — Melissa's music turned down low behind her door, the television murmuring faintly from my parents' room, Emanuel's footsteps creaking across the hallway on his way to bed. Normal sounds, in a house that had stopped being entirely normal the moment lightning decided I looked interesting.
I sat on the edge of my mattress, plate balanced on my knees, and looked toward the empty doorway where my bedroom door was still propped against the wall, waiting for me to finish paying for my own mistake one paycheck at a time.
Tomorrow, I told myself, chewing slower than necessary, I'd figure out how to control whatever this was instead of just reacting to it. Tomorrow, I'd actually talk to Gwen like a functioning human being. Tomorrow, I'd track down Mateo before Gregory did.
Tonight, I just wanted one quiet meal, in one quiet house, before the next impossible thing came looking for me.