"Look who I found upstairs," Mr. Old as Time called to Miss Kaylee from beside Kenny.

Miss Kaylee exited the cell that Kenny assumed Clay was being held in, locking it. "Hawking! How did you get in here? Why are you out past curfew?"

Rather than responding, Kenny frowned. She had forgotten that Miss Kaylee locked the door to Clay's cell. Without the key, her plan would fall apart. The young girl watched intently as Miss Kaylee placed her keychain and ID card on a white cart near the door. She was trying to remember what the key to Clay's cell looked like when the woman turned toward Mr. Old as Time, allowing Kenny to look at the boy.

Clay seemed to be shouting, but the cell must have been sound-proof, for Kenny couldn't hear him. He looked much worse than he had in her dream: his clothes were stained with (what she hoped was) dirt and clay, and there were dark circles under his eyes. Kenny wanted to run to him and embrace him, but she knew she would have to stay where she was for a bit longer in order for her plan to work.

Once the events Kenny had foreseen had passed, she began paying close attention to everything that was being said. Mr. Old as Time began speaking.

"Metal will be glad to know that she helped you get your files back. How is everything with...?" He nodded towards Clay's cell.

Miss Kaylee's face lit up, and Kenny wanted to cringe. "It's astonishing. It's like he's another Einstein. You should know about that, Hawking. You've read the files, correct?"

The girl didn't make any movement to signal she was getting her index cards, causing Miss Kaylee to frown.

"I think that means yes, Mr. Old as Time, so hurry and get her to Detention. Also, it'd be nice if she spoke. Make her less anxious, if you will. In fact, I'll take her. I was just about to take a bit of a bathroom break, anyway. Continue your rounds around the building to see if anyone else is here."

Mr. Old as Time gave the woman a single nod and passed Kenny to her. Miss Kaylee took the girl's arm firmly, and the three walked up the staircase and away from the Nursery. Kenny waited until Mr. Old as Time had turned down another corridor to proceed with her plan.

"Gabriel Jackson. Do you know anything about him?" Miss Kaylee asked.

The young girl shook her head absentmindedly, thinking about how she was going to escape the woman's grasp. However, before she could take another step forward, the hand around her forearm tightened suddenly. Kenny stifled a gasp and turned to look at Miss Kaylee incredulously.

"I apologize, Hawking. Let me be clearer. The boy you played catch with daily before I brought you to AGC. Einstein's doppelgänger. Do you know anything about him?"

Kenny stared at her former teacher, frozen in shock.

"Yes, I know about Gabriel. I questioned his brother, and he didn't seem to know very much about him. I was supposed to talk to you today, but I was distracted by your friend, Clay. However, now that we're alone, we can talk about Gabriel and his mother. Did you meet her?"

Do you have evidence that says I did? Kenny thought. Outwardly, she was as still as an inanimate object.

Miss Kaylee sighed irritably, loosening her grip on the girl's arm. Before she could speak, Kenny pulled herself away from her captor and slammed her shoe into Miss Kaylee's tibia. The woman kneeled over slightly, and Kenny attempted to push her over before she began sprinting to the Nursery.

Miss Kaylee called someone's name, but Kenny was already halfway to the Nursery. Her shoes nearly caused her to slide past the stairway to Clay as she ran. Taking the steps two at a time, she hurried down the bright steps and hallway to Clay's cell. Bronze key, she thought to herself as she picked up Miss Kaylee's keychain. Kenny picked the bronze key she'd seen before and jammed it into the lock.

It didn't fit.

Kenny turned the key upside down and tried again. This time, she barely managed to squeeze the key into the hole. She jerked it counterclockwise once it was in and ripped the door to Clay's cell open. Running over to her friend, who was sat in the corner, she pulled him to his feet.

"Hawking?" Clay asked, his eyes wide. "Why are you here?"

Kenny shook her head and led Clay out of his cell. The entire floor had been caked with clay and soil, and the boy was covered with it. Even if they did hurry, Miss Kaylee could follow Clay's footsteps as he trailed dirt down the hallway. Pulling him along, Kenny began moving away from the staircase. She hoped there was another way out of the Nursery as she pulled Clay down the bright corridor.

"Can we stop for a bit?" Clay asked after a brief moment of sprinting. "I just need...."

Kenny shook her head vigorously, glancing up at the staircase every few seconds. The two had barely made it a few steps past Clay's cell, and they were running out of time. She could hear footsteps heading towards them.

"I need...," the boy repeated. "I need...."

Kenny turned to Clay to find him falling to her, unconscious. She gasped and attempted to catch him but only succeeded in falling to the floor with him. The young girl cursed at herself for not factoring this into her plan; she had forgotten that Miss Kaylee was "studying" Gift overexertion and that exhaustion was one of the many side effects.

"There! There they are!"

Kenny tried to push her friend's body off of her, but by the time she did, Mr. Old as Time had already taken her by the arm. Miss Kaylee ran to Clay and checked his pulse before picking him up.

"That was very rude of you, Hawking," she snapped, her voice taking on the qualities of a frighteningly calm disciplinarian. "Take her to Detention and watch her, please. Forget the questioning. Just make sure she doesn't get away this time."

Mr. Old as Time held Kenny tightly the entire walk to the Detention room. She began to think of more plans to execute, but the only ones that seemed remotely possible involved Einstein. The girl wondered if he had found the index cards in his backpack yet or if he was still trying to figure out what the side pocket was. Out of all the phrases she could have chosen to say, "the side pocket" was the most cryptic. She frowned at herself for creating such a haphazard plan.

At the thought of Einstein, Kenny began to ponder her first day at AGC. She remembered everyone she'd met and wondered if being brainwashed would cause her to be as cold as Gene. She doubted Fins, Color, and Clay would still want to be friends with her if that happened. Using this as motivation, Kenny decided to try one final time to find Clay and escape with him. However, before she could begin, the young girl noticed something from the corner of her eye.

It was a small but growing black dot.

Not now, Kenny thought as she was engulfed by the Darkness. After five days without having a single Black Out, her supposedly suppressed Gift of precognition chose this moment to force one upon her. She attempted to fight it by focusing her eyes on the few things she could still see, but soon, everything was swallowed by the black terror.

Kenny couldn't think about anything other than the suffocating void surrounding her. She rattled her head for something to focus on to get through the Black Out, but it was immensely difficult. Finally, she held onto the picture of a painting. On one side of the canvas, swirls of yellow and white danced in joyous harmony while the same Darkness that surrounded her dominated the other. The painting seemed familiar, but Kenny couldn't pinpoint where she'd seen it before. She stared at the light side of the canvas and imagined what it would be like to be there rather than having a Black Out.

Kenny imagined what it would be like to just touch the light side, and suddenly, she was having a dream.

Is that what triggers the visions? The young girl thought to herself, a new concept dawning on her. The light side?

She wasn't sure which one she liked better—the Darkness or the Lightness.

In this vision, the body she had been thrown into was speaking to Miss Kaylee and Dr. Zhang about a school in Beijing. However, before the dream could go very far, she was placed inside an entirely different body in a new dream. For what seemed like hours, Kenny hopped between unfinished dreams of pain, happiness, and several other emotions. She didn't understand what was happening in any of them, so she began studying the nature of the visions rather than the visions themselves.

Kenny was consistently unable to move in almost all of the visions. The only one where she hadn't felt restrained in her own body was one of immeasurable, debilitating pain, so there wasn't much movement anyways. She certainly hoped that wasn't something in her future.

Kenny was also able to recognize many of the people in the dreams. She saw Einstein, Gene, Clay, Color, Fins, and Miss Kaylee often. Mrs. Brennan also appeared at least twice—AGC's secretary whom Kenny had nearly forgotten about. The girl hadn't spoken to her much since her first day of school.

I was thinking about my first day of school before I Blacked Out, wasn't I? Kenny asked herself. Perhaps that's why I'm seeing all of these people.

The more she thought about it, the more Kenny realized that her dreams weren't simply dreams. She thought back to the first one she'd had, where she'd been a child and a ball had slammed into the back of her head. That was the same night Metal had taken her index cards. The young girl recalled what her roommate had said about being hit with a soccer ball as a baby.

Then there was the dream about snow where Kenny had been a teenage girl. She'd been thinking about Miss Kaylee that night, as she had stolen her backpack a few hours before. Perhaps the woman had seen snow as a teen—a rare occurrence in Virginia in 2050. After that, she'd had a dream about Crash the same day she read his journal. She didn't have an explanation for the vision she'd seen where she fought herself, but she also didn't doubt Einstein knew something about it with all the lying and mind controlling he'd done.

When Kenny's thoughts turned back to Einstein, the dream around her faded. She was now in a dark room, staring up at the bottom of a bunk bed. Her current body waited a few moments before slipping out of bed and turning to her closet. It pulled on a coat and a backpack, as it was already dressed in trousers and a shirt. Its head looked at the ID card her hand picked up, and Kenny would have gasped if she could.

She was in Einstein's body.

Einstein stepped out of his closet, carefully closing the door behind him. He walked to a desk near the other side of the room and slowly opened a drawer. Once it was open halfway, he peered inside and shut it after staring at its contents. He continued this process with the rest of the drawers in the desk, and Kenny soon realized he was looking for Gene's ID card.

Thinking about Gene reminded the young girl of Detention and Mr. Old as Time. She knew she was probably already being brainwashed somehow and that Einstein could only help her and Clay if he had someone to assist him. If her hypothesis about the visions was correct, she was currently witnessing the past and was unable to change it in Einstein's body. But what if she found a way out to come out of his body? Would she be able to do anything then?

Einstein picked up Gene's ID card and closed the drawer. His body began to walk towards the door, which meant Kenny had to hurry if she was to call Gene for help. She imagined reaching out to him and jumping into his body and succeeded. However, she couldn't move whilst in a sleeping Gene. She tried once more, this time imagining that she stopped midway to Einstein's body. There was an odd pressure on the back of her head, as if she shouldn't have interrupted her jump from one person to the other, but it worked.

Kenny couldn't help but smile at how peculiarly incredible this was. She took several steps toward Gene, but she found she moved slow in this form. It seemed as though the planet was on fast forward. By the time Kenny got to Gene's bed, at least half an hour had passed. She wondered how she was going to be able to call to the boy if she was moving so slowly.

Then she wondered how she was going to call out to him at all.

Talking to Gene is a necessity, Kenny told herself. Einstein will die if you don't. You'll be brainwashed if you don't. Clay will be experimented on, for goodness sake. Just say something.

"Gene," the girl blurted before she could over think her decision to speak. "Go find Einstein in the Nursery and help him. And get Clay."

The boy shot awake, still moving much faster than Kenny, and began speaking too quickly for her to understand. He stood from the bed and looked for his ID card in the drawer, pacing once he realized it was gone. After barely two seconds, he stepped out of his room and didn't return. Kenny hoped he had gotten her message and not simply gone to tell a teacher Einstein had stolen his ID card.

Before Kenny could enter another body and check on Gene, she was taken from her vision. The dreams went by much quicker now that she was no longer in a body, and she could barely take a step in each vision before she was transported to another. She eventually stopped trying to move, and after dozens of dreams, she wondered if she would ever be able to get out of this state.

A few more dreams passed, but because Kenny didn't have a body, she wasn't sure if they were about the future or the past. She spent time sitting down and watching as the visions came and went too quickly for her to notice. She counted the dreams as they did so, spotting five before suddenly coming to a halt in a small kitchen. She frowned and stood, moving at average speed now.

"What's going on?" she asked an elderly man at the kitchen table.

"Hello."

Kenny started, not expecting him to answer her. She took several steps backward, but her curiosity stopped her from moving on to the next fast-paced vision.

"I'm not sure who you are," the man continued. "But I have to tell you that in order to stop, you have to have a Black Out."

Kenny shook her head, confused. In order to stop what?

"I hope that made at least some sense to you. I don't know anything else about your...traveling predicament. I was only told to tell you to have a Black Out. Don't shoot the Envoy. "

An envoy? Kenny thought. For who? And how did you get here?

However, before she could ask any questions, the man waved goodbye, and his image flicked away. Kenny was taken away from the small kitchen and thrown back into the quick moving dreams. She spent several visions thinking about what had happened and what the man had said before deciding that it was worth a shot to try. She brought up the painting in her mind and leaped headfirst into the Darkness.

Just as quickly as she had come out of her Black Out, she was now back in the thick of it. It was not a pleasant experience compared to watching visions, but Kenny tried her best to wait for her vision to clear. When it finally did, the girl felt as though the chair she was sitting in was lurching violently. Mr. Old as Time stood near her, typing something in what she assumed was a computer. He took something from the back of her head and untied her before leaving the room.

Kenny frowned, but she decided to question it later. Unsteady, she stood from her chair and began to move toward the door when she spotted someone leaning against the wall. She froze for a moment but identified Einstein's coat around his waist and rushed toward him.

The boy looked like he was in pain. Very quietly, Kenny asked, "Are you alright? Did Gene find you?"

"How did you know?" the boy murmured in response.

Kenny shook her head. She wasn't sure she would ever be able to explain what she had done with words. "No time. He should have gotten to Clay by now, so let's go."

The young girl took Einstein and pulled him onto her. She knew they had to leave before Mr. Old as Time or Miss Kaylee could come back into the room. Compared to what she had experienced in the visions, they walked at an incredible speed, even with Einstein feeling ill. Kenny wasn't exactly sure what was wrong with him, but she didn't want to make it worse by speaking.

"Could I stay up here while you look for Gene and Clay?"

Kenny didn't respond, for she could already hear footsteps coming up the staircase. Once she realized it was Gene, she traded Einstein for Clay and hugged her friend.

"Hawking! Do you know where we are? Gene wouldn't tell me," Clay explained innocently. "And since when have we started talking to Gene and Einstein? Can we leave now?"

Kenny's eyebrows furrowed. She looked up at Gene to ask him why Clay couldn't remember anything about the Nursery, but she spotted Dr. Anderson behind the boy instead. The woman reached for Clay, simultaneously irritated and shocked.

"What are you all doing here in this building? What is going on?"

Kenny turned to see Mr. Old as Time was coming from the other direction. The children were trapped between the two teachers, and there was no time to create a plan. Kenny took Clay by the hand and prepared herself to run.

"We'll all go towards Mr. Old as Time," Gene explained under his breath. "He can probably hear everything I'm saying right now, so we have to hurry before he has time to prepare. Now!"

Kenny, Clay, and Gene sprinted towards the orchestra instructor, miraculously managing to slip past him with nothing but a few tugs at their clothing. The children sprinted down the hallway, running to the exit and out of the Nursery building. They continued running until they reached the gate, and Kenny prayed it would open like Einstein had said.

Gene pulled on the gate. It was locked.

"What do we do?" he shouted desperately. "How do we get through?"

Clay looked up and pulled something from his pocket. "I took this from the cart like you told me to!"

It was Miss Kaylee's ID card.

With a hurried, questioning glance, Kenny took the card from her friend. She pressed it on the scanner near the gate, and after an agonizingly long silence, it clicked open. Gene opened the gate door wider, ushering Kenny and Clay through before getting out himself. He closed it hard to make sure it was locked.

"Mr. Old as Time has an ID card with the same privileges as Miss Kaylee, so he can and will open the fence. Where do we go now?"

"Keep running," Einstein replied. "Someone should be coming soon."

"And if they don't?"

Einstein was silent, causing both Kenny and Gene to frown. The boy hadn't told either of them of this part of the plan. However, the children had nowhere else to go, so they continued to run down the sidewalk and across the street. Before they could run very far, a car raced out of several bushes less than a mile down from the school and skirted to a stop in front of the curb. The window of the automobile winded down, and someone shouted, "Get in!"

A woman in the passenger seat turned to look at the children, and her eyes widened. "There's at least four kids here, Jacob. I thought it was just Einstein."

"That's a long story," Gene offered, recognizing these people as Einstein's companions. "But we're being chased."

"Just get in the car!" the man shouted again.

The children hurried into the backseat of the four-seater, pressed tighter than atoms in a solid.

"Step on it!" the woman cried.

The car was still as the man's eyes hovered by the AGC gates. It was if he was waiting for them to be caught. Sure enough, Miss Kaylee had pushed past the gates, with Mr. Old As Time hobbling closely behind, and they began to sprint to the car.

"Jacob, we need to go! Now!" However, he continued to stare at the teachers for a moment longer. The woman in the passenger seat snapped her fingers in the driver's face, and he quickly pressed the gas pedal, speeding away from the school.

"Sorry about that," he murmured with a frown. "I thought.... Never mind."

"Who is this, Einstein?" Kenny whispered to the boy next to her. She hoped he had great taste in friends.

"The man's my Gifted Guardian," he replied. "He goes by—"

"Hello, everyone," the man introduced himself, coincidentally interrupting Einstein. "This is Gilly, and my name is Jacob."

"My AGC nickname was Coal," the woman added. "Way more badass than Gilly. Call me that if you'd like."

Jacob laughed. "Well, if we're going by AGC nicknames, I guess you could call me—"

Jacob looked up at the rearview mirror once more, connecting eyes with Kenny for a split second as his lips shaped the word she was least expecting at that very moment— "Crash."

And then it hit her with the full force of a tornado. Crash.

He was Crash.

A/N: This is it! Other than the epilogue, this is technically the last chapter of The Prodigies! I've taken a bit of break from science fiction like this for now, trying to find an outlet in which I can express myself better. *cough cough* I'm on the hunt for more LGBTQ+ stories and have decided to write some myself *cough cough*. I plan to publish the chapters of a new short story I've written. There will be daily updates starting this Friday. I'll be publishing the warning and summary soon, so stay tuned for that. Also, please vote and comment if you liked this chapter! See you for the last time on Wednesday!