Lyssa slammed her fists on the wall. She received no response, not even the proper feedback. Her hands simply came to an abrupt stop on the surface. She took a step back and examined the room. Grandfather’s living room was just as she had remembered it. Except there was supposed to be doorways leading into the kitchen and reception hallway. She was stuck in this memory snow globe, a diorama of minutes that seemed to have refused to leave her psyche.

She grabbed a fire poker and bashed at the wall. The antiquated floral wallpaper did not even scratch. Even as she tried to escape, the scene was reasserting itself. Her younger self drank tea with her grandfather, alive again. They talked, their speech mumbled by her forgetfulness. She watched his head slump back again and his tea spill. There was a scream, and the flash of pale fire leapt around the room, stopping everything it touched.

Was this where she had kept that shard of herself? Reliving the same moment over and over. Why not the other times she was allowed to visit grandfather? Why was the ending the most vivid?

It didn’t matter. She was stuck in her own head. Someone else was out there with a gift she did not understand, using her face.

--

No one could fault the students for not reacting within the second of seeing ripples move towards them in the river. They were kids. This could not be stressed enough. They had all that power lying in wait in the twisted chemistries of their cells, yet not enough wherewithal to notice non-gifted men rise out of the river in absolute silence, peppering a dozen students instantly with the red paint of failure.

“Get away from the water!” Vortex shouted. She threw up a wind shield, diverting the path of the paintballs. A couple hit her own allies. She tried not to notice her mistake.

They ran back behind the cover of the trees. That was their first instinct, run and hide. Recover and strategize would be the more marketable terms, but the men in the water were non-gifted. The difference was training and experience. When the students had finished retreating, the soldiers had already dove back into the water.

Another hail of paintballs came immediately from somewhere deeper in the woods. A pincer attack. The students had been read like a book.

“They’re wearing masks,” a student said as they landed back on the earth and folded their wings. “We can’t do that smoke tactic again.”

“This game is ridiculous,” Ironhog, the enormous, quill-backed gifted, said. “I could crush all of them, but if they hit my suit three times I’m done? I’ve taken RPG-7s to the chest before.”

“They’re closing in! What do we do?”

Vortex did not know what to say. The game was unfair. But they were gifted, and most soldiers were not. And real life was not about fairness. The conundrum was whether or not she should cut her losses and keep going forward herself. She could fly away if she wanted to. Her wind made her invulnerable while airborne.

As they took cover from the paintball fire, she looked around, searching for a solution. Someone to rely on. Who was it that started the fire a few kilometers back? That student seemed to be quite resourceful. Vortex managed to find her cowering in the distance, taking cover behind a rock that was too small to hide her full frame.

“What are you doing!?” She shouted. “Get back!”

But the soldiers had noticed. A rain of paint flew towards the out-of-position student.

“Stop!” Lyssa shouted. “Leave me alone!”

An expanding dome of pale light caught the paintballs. They slowed to a glacial pace midflight. The dome did not stop there. It kept expanding until they were all caught in it. Vortex felt her lungs gripped in a vice, her arteries constrict, her heart slow.

--

Whoa, what am I looking at here, Tim?

Joe that looks like a stasis field. I thought we had seen all stasis manipulators accounted for in the other groups we’ve been covering, but looks like we’ve missed one.

Odd considering this one isn’t on the listing. All gifts are supposed to be registered. What’s going on here, M.A.G.E?

--

Who was grandfather to her? Lyssa sat in front of the fireplace, watching the memory unfold for the umpteenth time. She had no idea how time had passed since she was stuck. The happiness, then the fear and desperation, the pale flash, then back to the beginning. She watched his lips move. But they were blurred, because she did not remember. Their speech was muffled, because that was how the mind dealt with dialogue it did not know. It was all just noise.

She changed gears, and tried remembered something less specific. Ideas. What were they talking about? She searched the room again. Old books were slotted tightly into shelves set against the walls. They were titles Lyssa did not understand. Heady topics like atomic physics and protein folding. Lyssa looked up in realization.

Her grandfather, Dr. Reginald Unas, the biophysicist. The image of his face cleared just a little as she pulled forth recollection from newspapers and television. She had his eyes, brown and sharp, with eyebrows well-suited to emote. His hair was a frazzled, silver mess. She had seen him before away from his house.

Lyssa had been looking up at him. She had thought she saw an angel. But the halo had been an operating light. Why was she there? She thought harder. She was looking up into the operating light, then her head had fallen to the side, and she saw stumps where her hands should be, covered by bandages and metal contraptions. Tubes and instrumentation snaked in and out of her body.

Her parents had argued with grandfather. Lyssa had never seen them so charged about something related to her. They did not want whatever was about to happen. But time was running out. So the choice had been taken out of their hands. Dr. Unas had bent down and said, “Everything will be alright.”

The pale flash.

The memory began again. Grandfather and granddaughter drank tea in front of a warm fire.

“When you grow older, things are going to happen to your body. Things you won’t be prepared for, okay?”

“I know what puberty is, grandpa.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” They laughed. “You don’t understand right now. You might not even remember. I… gave you something. To save you. When the accident happened. We didn’t have the money to hire someone with a powerful enough healing gift. I performed the world’s first gift transplant. Shame I can’t publish it.”

Young Lyssa made a confused face.

“Don’t worry about it.” Dr. Unas sighed. The teacup was trembling in his hand. “It’ll be fine. In fact, you won’t need to worry about anything ever again… In time you will understand. The mutagenic process that causes people to develop gifts as a child… I routed its molecular pathway to your stress response. Frankly even I didn’t know it would work. Your life is going to get a lot harder, pumpkin… But I don’t know if anything can hurt you ever again.”

The tea spilled. His head slumped back. Desperation. Pale fire. The memory did not begin again. Lyssa stood on her feet, alone in a dark room. Alone with the truth.

This was her. All of it. All those years of internal bickering, sleepless nightmares, and endless voices. Her brain on fire, feverish from adapting to gifts she shouldn’t have had. Years of being picked apart by cruel kids for talking to herself all the time. Years of inexplicable events that made her question her reality.

“I am my own master,” she said.

The room melted into oily colors. The walls came undone. She pressed against it, one finger first, then with both hands, until it gave way like quicksand.