Being in no mind to cook, Jeisa walked into the main house's kitchen and grabbed one of her casserole trays from the freezer.

"Hey Sport," her dad said, walking into the kitchen from his study. The sun was just about to set. Jeisa was hoping he would be too engrossed in his work to come out here.

"Hey dad."

"I haven't seen you for a few days. Everything okay?"

Jeisa tugged at the hem of her white sweatshirt. "Everything is fine."

"Your nails are done. Is it the girl with the green eyes? Were you guys hanging out? It would have been nice to get a heads up."

Jeisa sighed. She really didn't feel like lying tonight. She was already so deep in disappointing her father, she didn't have the strength to go any lower.

"I found something, dad," she finally said. "But right now, I just want to rest a little bit. I'll bring it up later tonight and we can discuss everything."

"Alright honey," he replied, walking up to her. "Can I at least get a hug."

Jeisa smiled and let him gently wrap his arms around her. A lungful of his familiar woodsy, musky scent centred her. She was home. And even if she was struggling to keep herself from sparking at that very moment, she knew that, as long as he was here for her, she'd be okay.

*

"Should I ask where or how you got this phone?" her dad asked.

It was almost midnight when Jeisa had returned to the main house. She found her dad waiting up for her, sipping on a fresh mug of coffee. She knew he would be there. They both usually tried to keep their word when they promised to meet, especially when it was about their work keeping Wraith Hamlet safe. They were in her father's study, Jeisa standing next to him as he sat at his desk, working on cracking through the phone he'd connected to his computer.

"I won't lie if you don't ask."

"Noted."

"What I can tell you is that the owner of that phone belongs to a group that is after our former target, the police captain."

"I thought we agreed to let her be?"

"Trust me, dad, I did," Jeisa assured him. "Then I met her daughter. We kind of... hit it off from the start and... became friends. She knows that someone is after her mother and I'm pretty sure the owner of that phone is a part of that, because it sure as hell isn't us, right? You didn't hire a bunch of goons to target her after I failed, did you?"

"I'm hurt that you'd think I'd consider any bunch of goons being anywhere as good as you." He said with a chuckle.

"Aww... love you too, dad." Jeisa said, giving him a half hug in his office chair. "So, what does the phone tell us? Anything about the police captain? About the WMDs?"

About Cass and how she's tied up in all this?

But Jeisa kept that last one to herself. She knew that she should tell her father about Cass. This girl was a part of this even though Jeisa couldn't see how that could be. So, why didn't she tell him about her? Why couldn't she? Why did she want to keep Cass to herself for a little while longer? To keep pathetically basking in whatever little affection Cass would shine on her every so often, like at the spa? To stay on this stupid ride?

'You're one of those people, aren't you? The ones who believe that choice actually exists.'

The words streaked through Jeisa's mind from weeks ago, when she was confronted the dope dealer fiend woman misleading young teen girls.

"It's a brand-new phone, a burner and it looks like he would delete everything after use," her dad said, breaking through her thoughts. "I recovered the deleted files. One number that called in, but its disconnected now. Another burner phone. The other files are location pins. Three addresses."

"That's the police captain's house," Jeisa said, pointing at the first address recovered.

Her dad cussed as the second location came on screen.

"That's our address." Jeisa whispered.

"I know this one too," her dad said, pointing at the third address. "The man who lives there is called Franz, and he lives there with his daughter, Makayla. She's only a few years younger than you. He was... a colleague. But that was a long time ago."

Her dad looked up the third address on a live map.

"Fuck." Jeisa said, staring at the blackened rubble on the screen.

"Yeah." Her father worked his keyboard. "This police report mentions evidence of a pipe bomb. No. That's not possible."

Robyn's words from the woods played through Jeisa's mind.

'...they're already tracing the origins of the pipe bomb put in our kitchen...'

"Dad, I'm going to ask you a random question, but it's relevant, I promise." Jeisa said, her voice low and a little shaky. "Was there a pipe bomb in our house at some point in the last few days?"

Her dad didn't even hesitate.

"The motion sensors caught him immediately. I watched him plant it on the security feed and disarmed it immediately after he left. Don't worry. I've upped the security around the house," he said. "They won't be getting in here again."

"You upped the security?" Jeisa wasn't sure if she was surprised or afraid. "How did I not notice that? And why didn't you tell me?"

"You've been a little... distracted, lately." her dad said, turning around to face her. Concern coloured his face. He gave her a soft smile. "You didn't even mention my new haircut."

It was like a slap in the face when she finally noticed that her dad had shaved the beard that he always kept full, and his hair was in a buzz cut. He looked like someone completely different. How had Jeisa been so messed up that she missed that? What was happening to her?

"Honey, I know something is going on with you and that you'll tell me when you're ready," her father continued. "I'm just hoping that'll be soon because the way things are unfolding, there's much more to this than we can see. We need to be on the same page again."

Jeisa nodded.

"The captain's daughter, Robyn, told me that they found a pipe bomb in their kitchen." Jeisa said. So much was shifting around in her mind now. She suddenly realised that maybe she didn't need to mention Cass at all, because one thing had become clear. They hadn't been after Cass. "I've already been to the captain's house. I'm going to that last address. Something connects the three of us. The answer has to be there."

"There's nothing but rubble left there," her dad said. "What do you think you'll find that the police haven't?"

"Where are we standing right now, dad?" she asked, motioning to the study.

"You think Franz had a fortified basement bunker?"

"You said he was your colleague," Jeisa responded, walking towards the stairs. "If he's even an atom similar to you, then I'll definitely find something that survived that fire, but was out of the cop's reach. I didn't recognise any suspicious additional spaces in the captain's house, but I wasn't there to explore. Hopefully Franz' house will yield something that'll tell us exactly what this is about."

*

It was late, dark, and quiet. Jeisa stayed on her bike, in the shadows, making sure there was no one around to see her. The explosion had happened almost two weeks ago, but a lot of the neighbours hadn't returned yet, most of them probably staying with relatives until they felt safe again. That worked in Jeisa's favour. There was less of a chance of anyone being around to report her to the authorities for sneaking into what was still being considered an active crime scene.

Debris crunched under her feet as she slowly made her way across the rubble. After a few minutes of walking across what was left of the house's layout, Jeisa began to think that maybe her father was right and there was nothing to find here. Before leaving, she saw the exposed electrical cables. The electricity was obviously cut after the explosion, but maybe there was a residual pulse leaking through that Jeisa could spark? She reached down and let her technopath tendrils ease off her fingers and meld into the cables...

...then she immediately let go!

A heady buzz had rocked Jeisa to the core. Electricity was flowing through the cables, but it wasn't just the usual mains electricity. This was different. This was a personal power source. Something off the grid that fed only to this house. Jeisa took a moment to catch her breath before she followed the cabling to what was evidently once a study. She cleared as much debris as she could until she found it – an unscathed section of the floor, only blackened by everything else that had burned around it. Jeisa placed a palm on the floor and felt the technopath fibres spread out and touch something she could spark and feed from.

That section beneath Jeisa suddenly lit up, startling her into abandoning the spark. She watched as that part of the floor screeched and buckled, then slid open, creating a door that led into a hole that was darker than the cloudy, dark night. Jeisa took a few moments to consider whether she should go down the dark hole or wait to see if something came out of it first. When nothing had reached out to grab her, Jeisa tried to slow her heart down, took out a penlight she always carried for her assignments and slowly lowered herself into the hole.

It was a small basement pantry, with two shelves, one on the right and another to the left, both about ten feet long and three feet deep. They each had more than half a dozen shelves from floor to ceiling. The air down here was stale and Jeisa was apprehensive as she moved across the space. The shelves were filled with doomsday hoarder amounts of homemade canned goods and large bottles of water. This Franz guy could have survived a zombie apocalypse or some other world ending event for years living off this with his daughter! Jeisa was suddenly upset that, after all he'd done with his own two hands to prepare for the worst, it was a pipe bomb secretly installed in his kitchen that had taken him out.

Jeisa found the mini-server room accidentally. As she was exploring, her technopath tendrils had almost unnoticeably made their way out Jeisa. Before she knew it, she was soaking up the delightful energy pulse through another electric panel on the far wall of the underground pantry. As she drowned herself in the buzz, the wall slid open to reveal the still-functioning servers. Unable to stop herself, Jeisa lay her hands on the switches and sparked harder than she had before, drinking all the power that she could.

The heady flood of energy brought her to her knees.

With her eyes shut, Jeisa drowned in it all, letting the power fill her, push her to the edge. But this energy was laced with information in a staccato that was distracting. Jeisa grit her teeth and tried to push the data away. None of it mattered to her. Only the energy. And she needed more! She took a deep breath and pulled as much as she could from whatever source of energy this server was feeding from. It pooled around her chest, slowly ran lower. But that data was fragmenting the experience. Annoying her more and more. She was going to bring this power source to its knees, but first she had to destroy this data. Burn it all! Clean that energy...

Cassidy Tallum...

The name floated through the data she was burning through and jerked Jeisa from the server, shooting her back into the pantry, sliding between the pantry shelves. The pain from severing that connection crippled her, forcing her into the foetal position for what felt like forever. She could barely breathe. Barely think. Barely be. Death taunted her, but she couldn't reach for its comforting embrace. The pain had her frozen in time and space, reaching parts of her that she didn't even know existed. It felt like she would never know life without this agony and that terrified her!

After what seemed like days, but was only about an hour, Jeisa was finally able to breathe without feeling like she was dragging wet concrete into and out of her lungs. It took another hour before she could finally move, but every movement felt like she was breaking her bones and shattering muscles, just for them to heal, then break and shatter again.

Cassidy Tallum.

Cass.

Jeisa needed to know everything on that server that involved her. she finally got to her feet and faced the door at the end of the pantry. There was a laptop in the tiny server room. Jeisa needed to work it, but she couldn't let herself touch it. She slipped on her biking gloves, stumbled over to the laptop, and tried to find that name again. She finally found the file.

Cassidy Tallum.

Not her real name. An orphan. Adopted. Loving parents, names redacted. Cass was rebellious. Juvie record that would make any gangster's toes curl. Arrested umpteen times as a teen, but nothing ever stuck. She was a fence. The Fence. If you needed a stolen item to get lost and still make you profit, Cass was the one to go to. She was the subject of several urban legends by age fourteen. But this was just one file. Just one name. There were others.

Ariel. Maxine. Keziah.

Jeisa.

But when she tried to open these files, she couldn't. They were corrupted. Burnt. Destroyed.

Jeisa cussed and punched the wall behind her.

She'd destroyed it all when she sparked! This was bad. This was really bad!

She went back to the laptop and tried to find any more files that she hadn't corrupted. There was one file. Just one. But it was important because the first thing on that file was a picture. The ten inch long, five inch wide and two-inch-thick purple case. The file's name was "Terraforming". Jeisa knew what the word meant. It meant changing the geographical and atmospheric features of a planet's surface. There was no more information on the file that Jeisa could access after that.

She cussed again at what she'd done, destroying all this information.

Calming down to think straight, Jeisa focused on what she'd discovered. If that purple case was a machine that could transform a planet's surface, then it was a lot more important than any Weapon of Mass Destruction ever could be! Mr. twenty ninth floor apartment had said that Cass was the only one who could open that case. If that was true, if she had the key to that case, then Cass was in more trouble than Jeisa had believed.

Jeisa may not have figured out why they had been targeted alongside Franz and the police captain, but she did know one thing. They would come for Cass again. Cass was in trouble. Jeisa struggled to breathe again. Cass had to be protected! Jeisa had to protect her at any cost. She had to!

For the very first time ever, Jeisa suddenly wondered why...

***

"I can't believe they weren't mad that we didn't show up the rest of last week." said Jeisa as she pulled a broken tree limb from the hiking path that they were clearing today. She'd only been asleep a few hours after her foray into Franz' burnt down home and was still feeling off after that interrupted spark. She was breaking at the seams.

"It's flu season. They have too many volunteers calling in sick. They couldn't stay mad." replied Cass, pulling out her gloves from her parka and slipping them on. She started walking down the trail ahead of Jeisa. "It's stupidly cold today."

Cass hadn't been her cheery self today and that was worrying. Jeisa wanted to tell Cass about the danger she was in, but this dark mood surrounding her was making it difficult. Still, Jeisa had to try. Cass needed to get the hell out of dodge if she was going to survive this. Jeisa also needed to apologise for that ranger party blunder. She hadn't done that yet and it was eating at her. Maybe that was what had darkened Cass' mood, a thought that was debilitating for Jeisa.

"Cass," started Jeisa, slipping her hands into her pocket. She'd left her own gloves in the Jeep. It was getting late, and the weather was turning. A storm was hanging heavy in the air, and it was darker than it should have been. "We need to talk."

Cass turned to Jeisa and shortened the distance between them. She stood right in front of Jeisa. Her green eyes looked wistfully into Jeisa's. She smiled lightly, but there was that heavy hint of sadness in her smile and those gorgeous emerald eyes. Cass suddenly glazed over the sad look with a mischievous sparkle in her eyes and a sly grin.

"Is this where my serial killer best friend tells me that she wants to flay my skin and wear it?" whispered Cass, moving even closer. "Because I think you'd look gorgeous in my skinsuit."

"I'm not a serial killer." whispered Jeisa, smiling, embracing the levity for a few moments before she dashed it all.

"Maybe you're a spy. A super spy. James Bond, only prettier." she said. "You could tell me, but you'd have to kill me, right?"

"Something like that." said Jeisa, laughing quietly as she thought of ever telling Cass about her technopath abilities.

Oh no.

She shouldn't have been thinking about that now. She really shouldn't.

Cass was very close now. Jeisa's stomach tangled into painful knots. This wasn't going how she'd planned. The giant dark clouds wrapped the world in menacing silvery light. The air was thick with the smell of rain, but Jeisa was barely aware of the large drop that hit her hand as she reached out to touch Cass cheek. The nanofibers were already brushing Cass pale skin, impatient for the connection.

It was the smallest of sounds.

A slight crunch of leaves. A barely audible pop.

Jeisa was suddenly alert, the filaments pulling back into her. Without warning, she crashed into Cass, twisting herself so that she hit the ground hard, with Cass on top of her. A branch next to them splintered loudly into a million tiny pieces! Someone was shooting at them! Jeisa was up in a heartbeat, dragging Cass with her.

Another pop. Another ear-splitting crash of splintering wood. Raindrops. Large raindrops. The air was cold. Hard to breathe in. Jeisa yanked Cass toward her again. An opening to their right. They took it. To their left, another explosion of shattering wood. Branches. Roots. Tripping them up. Another yank to the left. Another crash as the ground exploded to their right. No more raindrops. A waterfall of rain. Jeisa couldn't see past two feet ahead of her. Good. The shooters wouldn't be able to either.

Because there was definitely more than one shooter.

They suddenly exploded into an opening. A camping ground. No! They were too exposed. Jeisa raced with Cass to the other side of the clearing as fast as she could. The shooters would find them soon. The clap of thunder was deafening. But Jeisa heard Cass through it. Heard her blood curdling scream. Jeisa's heart stopped. Everything seemed to slow down around her. Cass fell into her. Even with the water washing it away as fast as it flowed out, Jeisa saw the blood. Cass had been hit. Thigh. Left thigh. Above the knee. To the side. Through and through. Arterial hit. Femoral. Cass was dying. Three minutes tops.

The rain poured down in bucketfuls.

Jeisa stopped moving. She had Cass lying down and out of her belt in seconds. She twisted the belt as a tourniquet above the wound. Jeisa tore her parka off and ripped her shirt off, pressing it into the mess of blood. She forced Cass' hands to press down on the wound. She then walked back to the middle of the clearing. The cold barely registered. She faced the three shooters entering the clearing.

Jeisa thought of Cass.

Two minutes forty-five seconds.

The three men raised their guns. Jeisa raised her hands as if in surrender. She felt it gathering in the air around her before it hit...

The lightning strike lit up the clearing so brightly that Jeisa was blind for a few seconds after that. The men flung themselves to the ground in surprise. Jeisa wasn't sure if she was still alive. The English language doesn't have a name for the number of electrons that are in a lightning strike. It's the number ten with twenty zeroes behind it. And it was all coursing through Jeisa. All of it! She couldn't keep it though. That lightning bolt was looking for a way out. She smiled.

She'd give it a way out.

Her hands glowed as the lightning bolt's energy pooled in her palms. It was charging the air around her. It wanted out. She gave it its path. Three bolts. Three human targets. Jeisa fell to her knees. It was too much. She should let it all go.

But she wasn't done.

She grabbed at what remained of the lightning bolt inside her. She would hold it for just a bit longer.

Just a little bit...

She got up on unsteady feet and dragged herself to Cass side.

Two minutes five seconds.

Jeisa couldn't tear through Cass' tough ranger pants. She gave up on it and let herself direct very little energy to her fingertips. She burned through the fabric, careful not to touch Cass skin and grateful that the ice-cold rain was probably numbing Cass. Once the fabric was cleared from the skin, Jeisa found the wound's opening and directed more heat from her fingertips. Cass' screams were lost in the shriek of the rain and the thunder. The faint wisp of burning flesh was disconcerting, but Jeisa kept working. Just a few more millimetres and the wound would be closed, cauterised by a lightning bolt.

A mirthless laugh burst out of Jeisa. She was harnessing a lightning bolt! Holding the bolt's energy.

What was she thinking?

This force was untameable.

It would never forgive her for this!

She doubled over in pain. That was it. Whether she wanted to or not, she had to let it go now. She lay next to Cass on the ground, in the rain. Cass was quiet, but she was breathing. She was alive. Jeisa had protected her. And now it was time to be chastised for having the audacity to hold a lightning bolt inside her. Jeisa let the remainder of the energy seep into the ground beneath her. But it was too late. Every cell in her body was in protest.

She was dying.

She hadn't meant to die.

She turned to Cass. She wanted to apologise. She really hadn't meant to die...