Why did I knock? I thought immediately.

It’s not like it’s her bedroom or anything… What a weakling.

“Hello?” came a curious feminine voice from inside.

I edged the door open with a creak of wood.

Inside, sat in one of the comfy armchairs of the enormous living room, just as I had been when Mute had first come to give me my tour, was Amina. Djinn. I had to stop thinking of her as ‘Amina’...

“Er...hi there,” I said.

She rose in my presence which I guessed she was supposed to do in her country. She still wore her black burqa, long and flowing, that covered every part of her except for her eyes and hands.

Now that we weren’t on a train surrounded by passengers and terrorists I could take her in a little more: She was a bit shorter than me at around five feet and a half. Her hands were delicate and the colour of chocolate. Her eyes were brown with a hint of silver. The line of the top of the bridge of her nose was smooth and concave, instead of jutting out at an angle.

Just then I became instantly suspicious that underneath the veil of her burqa Djinn was very beautiful. I suddenly wondered how old she was. I had assumed all along that she was a grown woman, but it crossed my mind now that she might not be; the conservative religious clothing made it hard to tell.

“Hello?” she said again, this time with a note of puzzlement.

She must be confused because I haven’t said anything else yet. Her voice had come out slightly muffled because of the veil over her mouth, but in spite of that and the Arabic accent I could understand her perfectly.

I had better say something. “Er, hi, I’m Go—Weakling...”

“Go Weakling?” said the woman. The silver in her eyes seemed to sparkle slightly.

“Er, no, not ‘Go Weakling’, sorry, just ‘Weakling’.” Idiot. A thought occurred to me. “Er, Captain Weakling, actually. I’ve recently been promoted. Oh; but you don’t have to call me that if you don’t want to. Captain, I mean. You can still call me ‘Weakling’, I think. If you want to. Really, you can call me whatever you want. Er, actually, come to think of it, ‘Weakling’ is fine for now…...this isn’t going so well for me, is it?”

To my absolute horror Djinn let out a little giggle and put a hand over her veil to hold it back.

I sure hope she's laughing because she finds me endearing, I thought, and not just because she thinks I’m a complete imbecile… Why did I even vocalise that last part about ‘this not going so well for me’ anyway? I wouldn’t even have had the balls to say something like that out loud a few months ago... Miracle Force and regularly meeting up with Ali must have improved my confidence a bit, even if it was only a bit.

“You may call me Djinn,” said the girl. Girl? Woman. Woman?

I had to know. “Er, this may seem like a weird question and I know you’re not supposed to ask girls this, but…...how old are you?”

I waited with baited breath, hoping I hadn’t offended her. The girl-woman giggled again. “I am sixteen years old,” she said.

My head rocked back with surprise. She was only a little older than me! Sixteen. The same age as Mute. As Bill Jackson. As Ali. Ok, that made more sense. Abram had taught us that metahuman powers most commonly manifested themselves during adolescence, usually at times of trauma or upheaval. So she was definitely a ‘girl’, then. Well, more or less a girl. A teenage girl.

“How old are you?” said the teenage girl in return when I didn’t say anything again. English may not be her first language, but she spoke it proficiently.

“Oh, what, me? I’m fifteen.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“Did you come in here just to ask me how old I am?”

“What? Oh, no, sorry! I’m here to give you a tour. I mean, if you’d like. Would you like to go on a tour?”

“What is a ‘tour’? You mean a holiday? I just arrived here.”

“Oh, no, just like a tour of this Base. Not like tourism. The Commander just asked me if I would, sort of, you know, show you around the place, like show you the ropes.”

“Ropes? You have ropes here? What for?”

“Oh, it’s an expression. I mean, er, show you where everything is.”

“Ah, I see. Yes, please. I would like that very much.”

“Great! Er, why don’t you come this way?”

Hyper-aware of my own movements like a toddler taking his steps for the first time, I bumbled boyishly back over to the door and held it open for the teenage girl in the burqa.

She followed me and then stopped in the doorway. I thought that she was still walking, though, so I let go of the door and it swung back towards her. I realised too late and put my arm out to catch it, but missed. The door slammed into her.

I grimaced.

Only, instead of slamming into her, the door kept on going. It passed right through her like she was a ghost. As it swung through her, she appeared on the other side of it and it slammed shut as if nothing had happened.

I stared. “Woah...” I said eventually. “Is that one of your powers?” Stupid question, Weakling.

“Yes,” said the girl. “I think in English you call it ‘intangibility’? That is what Mr Abram calls it. My powers are ‘intangibility’ and ‘teleportation’. I can move through any matter and I can travel to any place which I can imagine.”

“Right!” I said, remembering my own conversation with Abram, “That’s why your codename’s ‘Djinn’; like a spirit. I get it.”

I thought I saw Djinn smile underneath her veil, but I couldn’t tell. I wished I could know for sure.

“Your English is really good, by the way,” I said as she fell into step beside me.

“Thank you.” Djinn rubbed the back of her neck over the top of her head-dress. “It was hard for me to learn. Girls in my town are not allowed to be educated. I must teach myself using the internet.”

“Well it’s come out really well.” Oh my God. I sounded so pathetic, so bland. “So, er...how much of The Base have you already seen, then?”

“Not very much. Just my room, Mr Abram’s office and the ‘mess hall’ so far.”

“Where’s your room?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. Geez, Gonzalo, don’t be such a creep! You’ve just met her and you’re already asking her where her bedroom is! Just remember Ali...

Thankfully she didn’t seem to mind. “It is on floor ‘minus two’.” The Base’s floors were numbered negatively as you travelled down from the entry on the ground floor.

“Ah right, that’s where Mute’s room is too,” I said. And where mine would be if I ever came to live here, I thought.

“It is very nice here…” Djinn said, glancing around at the well-lit corridor bedecked with artwork and cream carpets.

“Yeah, it’s pretty amazing isn’t it? Kind of like a cross between a giant mansion and a luxury hotel, but all underground! And you’ve got the UN headquarters right on top of us. Crazy, hey? Who knew there was so much space down here? The whole place is massive. So, er, where do you want to see first?”

We had reached the elevator. She didn’t mind what she saw first, so I took her to the canteen. (“The food here is amazing.”) Then I gave her the tour in much the same order that Mute had done for me before. I showed her the recreation room with its many TVs and sofas. (“This is where we chill out after training.”) I showed her the swimming pool with its hot tubs and flumes. (“I come here about twice a week.”) I showed her the briefing room with its rectangular table and interactive holographic maps. (“We’ve only used this once. It was a little scary, but also super exciting.”)

She took all of these in with wide eyes, the only part of her face I could completely see, looking just as utterly overwhelmed as I am sure I had done.

While I showed her around The Base I spoke only about the rooms we were visiting, as I was too shy to ask her any more personal questions about herself. I had lucked out by getting a positive answer to my first question about her age and I didn’t want to take another risk like that again.

Nobody had told me how much I was allowed to know about her, though. I knew her name and her age now, but Abram had already told me that I should forget the first of those.

Truth be told, I wanted to know everything about her. She was a mystery to me in that dark, flowing, almost-all-covering clothing. She was a foreigner, a Muslim, and, most mysterious of all, a girl.

What had happened in her life before we met her on that train? How had Abram found out about her? What had she done or what had been done to her to make her want to run away from her home country’s government? And what did she even look like underneath that veil?

In my mind I imagined she looked like Ali.

As we approached the workout room, the last stop on the tour, she broke our pattern of me describing a room followed by an awkward silence and asked me another question about myself:

“So how long have you been here, Weakling?” she said.

For a second I thought about correcting her to call me ‘Captain’, but the thought passed. “Me? Oh, I’ve been training here about six months. I don’t actually live at The Base, though. I sleep at my apartment in Williamsburg, just a bit outside Manhattan. Oops; I probably shouldn’t have told you that. Oh well...”

“And you like it here?”

“Here? Oh, yeah, it’s great here. It’s like a dream come true! I mean, you’ve seen most of the place now. And Commander Abram looks after us really well. He pushes us hard in our training, for sure, but that’s only because we have to go on some very important missions. Like when we rescu...found...you. He really wants the best for us. You’ve made a good choice in staying here.”

We stopped outside the door to the workout room but she carried on asking me questions.

“And your ‘power’...you are not hurt by bullets?”

“Yeah. I guess you saw that on the train. I’m ‘invulnerable’—like very hard to hurt. Er, and also I have super strength.” I stuck my chest out just a fraction.

Djinn’s brow crinkled. “So why are you called ‘Weakling’? This means you are ‘small’, does it not?”

“Oh, right, yeah it does. It’s sort of a joke I guess.” And a re-appropriation of what my bully used to call me in high school, I added to myself, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

“A joke?” she said, the crinkle deepening. “I do not think it is funny.” She stared at me seriously.

“Er…” I wondered how to explain it to her. I didn’t know what the Arabic word for ‘ironic’ was.

Her countenance softened. “Weakling, do not look so troubled. I made one too. A joke.” She laughed—a melodious, muffled sound.

“Oh, er, ha ha,” I said nervously, massaging one of my palms with a thumb. I couldn’t work this girl out yet. I felt embarrassed, but she had given me permission to be vulnerable by making a joke. “By the way,” I said, remembering that Mute was inside, “before we go in here to the workout room, I just wanted to thank you for helping me out back on that train. If you hadn’t done what you did—taking out that terrorist and then teleporting us out of there—Mute could have died. I guess we both could have died, or at least been captured.”

She kept her own thoughtful silence for a moment at that. I thought that under her veil she might have been biting her lips. Then: “That is alright. You are very welcome. You were trying to rescue me, after all.” She’d used the same word I had corrected myself from using a moment ago. I thought that there might be a pink colour in her cheeks but I couldn’t see properly underneath the veil. That frustrated me.

“Why do you wear that burqa?” I said all of a sudden. Woah, slow down, Weakling! I thought at once. I must have let my guard down when the conversation had taken a more personal turn.

Mercifully, Djinn didn’t seem to mind. “The Qur’an commands it,” she said straight away. “The great prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, commanded women to dress modestly. It is the will of Allah.” She said ‘Qur’an’, ‘Muhammad’ and ‘Allah’ using the proper Arabic pronunciations that employed the back of the throat, which I’d never heard anyone do in person before.

“I know,” I said, “but you can interpret that in different ways, right?” I thought back to my culture lessons here at The Base, and my briefing before the Iran mission. “Why not just wear a lighter niqab head covering, or even just a hijab headscarf?” Why are you saying this? I thought. Stop talking, you moron! This is none of your business!

Djinn fixed me for a moment with those earthy-metallic eyes. They were uncommonly like Ali’s eyes. A faint thought half-formed in my mind. But no, that wasn’t possible…

“You are a smart one, Weakling,” she said at length, playfully. “The truth is that I come from a very strict Muslim area and family, where the custom is for women to wear the burqa outdoors or in presence of men. But you are right. Personally, I do not agree with this custom any more. If I still followed my family’s custom, I would not even be speaking to you, or to any other man who is not my husband. Since I came to America, I do not have to wear the burqa any more. If it was just for comfort, I would probably wear the niqab or the hijab instead.”

“So why are you still wearing it?” I asked, ever more surprised at my own boldness.

Djinn took a step closer and drew right up in front of me, looking up a little so that I could feel her breath on my face even through her veil. “I wear it,” she said quietly, “out of habit; to protect my identity; and so that American boys do not spend all their time staring at me.”

She walked through the double doors into the workout room, her body shimmering a little as she passed right through them.

I just stood for a moment, staring at the closed doors.

Then I gulped and opened them to go in after her.

No more personal questions, for now at least, I thought.

I had probably used up all my luck for that day.