Meditation was far from Dyna’s favorite activity at Carroll. It wasn’t electroshock testing, so it wasn’t the worst, but it was a close second. Other students seemed to like it. There were more meditation chambers at Carroll than there were students and most of them saw daily use. Many were simple rooms with unobtrusive walls and floors with a mat or pillow to sit on. Others varied. Some looked like a psychologist’s sitting room. One was located beneath a large aquarium, where someone could sit surrounded by fish and water. Another was covered in gears that turned slowly to the tune of a lightly thumping piston. Everyone had their own individual preferences.

Everyone except Dyna. The unique rooms were often too busy, filled with distracting things, like the clock room with its many clocks on the walls constantly ticking away. The general rooms were often boring. As dedicated as Dyna felt she was, there were few people in the institute who had received more reprimands than her for falling asleep in a meditation chamber.

It wasn’t that she intended to nap. She just didn’t get meditation.

The instructors often said that there was no wrong way to meditate. Some people cleared their minds, sitting still in a room. Others thought about their day or paced about. Or they opened their minds—whatever that meant—listening in on the cosmos or the collective unconsciousness of humanity, ascending beyond the noosphere.

Those last ones were often the more pretentious sorts, but at least they got something out of meditation.

If there was no wrong way to meditate, didn’t that just mean that there was no correct way?

Dyna had certainly never found something that worked. Of course, nothing else she had tried worked either, but at least things that weren’t meditation often involved doing something.

But today was different.

Today, she knew she had experienced some kind of psionic event. Not just experienced, but caused. She wasn’t here to ponder on the infinite and vast. She was here to remember.

To remember how she felt. To remember what happened. To try to feel like she had in that test chamber.

Dyna didn’t necessarily intend to do anything. She certainly didn’t want to pass out or cause trouble for the rest of the institute.

When Walter came for her, she wanted to be ready. Not to sit about twiddling her thumbs for hours while he just watched.

The mirror chamber seemed the best for her needs. It wasn’t the most popular meditation chamber. In fact, she idly noted the check-out logs for the room and found that only two other people had used it in the last six months. Neither recently.

Pulling open the door to the room, it wasn’t hard to see why. No matter which way she looked, she saw no end to the room. It stretched out infinitely in every direction, only broken by white lights and a black border around the lights. The black and white beams lined the corners of the physical chamber, making the place look like infinite cubes. Naturally, an infinite number of Dyna clones occupied each of the infinite cubes, all moving just as she did.

There were rumors that some poor psychic who could perceive alternate versions of the world had gone mad and killed himself in this room, leaving a psychic imprint haunting the place. But that was probably just a rumor. There were a lot of those kinds of stories dotted around Carroll.

Dyna thought it would be good for her because it somewhat resembled the chamber from the other night. That room had only had one panel open at a time and had otherwise looked like some mid-century smoking room, but more than once, those panels had opened up to an infinite stretch of rooms.

At the very center of the room there was a small black tiled platform set into the mirrored floor. A small square pillow provided just a little cushion as she sat down. Dyna kept her posture upright, legs crossed beneath her.

Closing her eyes seemed like it would defeat the purpose of coming into the mirrored room, but she did so anyway. She was just here for the idea of the room.

And then… This was the part she always faltered at. Thinking.

What had she actually felt during that test? Agitated. Uncomfortable. Disturbed. It hadn’t been a very pleasant test. Most of the images she had seen in the— What had Walter called it? Psychically sensitive paper? None of it had been calm or soothing images. And it supposedly came from her mind? It had been like her horror movies had come to life and, given that she always occupied a space in those visions, she had featured in those horror movies front and center.

“Have I watched too many?” Maybe she could cut back a bit. Skip Friday movie night with Melanie. Or maybe schedule a few sessions with a therapist. Carroll had plenty to spare.

She had figured out that they were illusions pretty much right away. They hadn’t frightened her. A disturbing image was disturbing regardless of context, so she had still been affected.

Was that it? Did she need to be disturbed and uncomfortable to use whatever power she might have? That wasn’t unheard of. Lots of lectures at Carroll covered the demonstrated proof that stressful situations often enhanced an individual’s powers.

That wasn’t good. Dyna didn’t get scared at much of anything. Movies, roller coasters, games, stories, and so on… It was all fake, so she couldn’t ever feel frightened. Rather, she liked that kind of stuff. And her power didn’t activate under stress alone or she would have done something far earlier during any number of tests—both academic and medical.

Had that clicking pen played any real role?

Dyna tried to remember how it felt. That weight and stony surface. The odd way it clicked in her mind but not in reality. It was much easier to remember than vague emotions and memories. So much easier that she could practically feel its weight in her hand.

Swallowing, Dyna peeked an eye open.

She glanced down at her hand.

Her very empty hand.

With a snort, she blew a lock of platinum hair out of her face.

Dyna didn’t know what she expected.

Scratch that. She knew exactly what she expected.

An empty hand.

Crick forming in her back from sitting still for an hour, Dyna stretched to the left, then to the right. Her mirrored clones did the same, following her movements. None of them moved in different ways than she did, unlike many of the copies of herself from the night before.

This…

She didn’t want to say that it had been a waste of time, but she didn’t really feel like she had accomplished anything either.

No. That wasn’t true. Dyna had to remind herself, but she accomplished exactly what she wanted to accomplish. She wanted to remember how she felt. Not do something.

But she wasn’t satisfied.

Maybe trying a little more wouldn’t hurt?

Feeling several snaps run down her spine, Dyna straightened herself out again.

And…

This. This is the part that always falls apart.

From what she had learned, both through lectures and asking her contemporaries, most people simply used their abilities instinctively. Like moving an arm that they had always had. They could train their abilities in the same way that someone could train their arm by lifting weights, but they still knew they had that extra arm in the first place.

Dyna didn’t. She didn’t know how she was moving her regular arms. It was all electrical impulses in her brain sent through nerves to tell muscles to contract and expand, but it wasn’t like she thought about those impulses. She just did it.

Just doing it didn’t work for psychic abilities. At least not for her.

She looked around the mirrored room, wondering if she could trick herself into getting scared. Maybe by imagining some shadow moving? Or one of the mirrored copies of herself moving unnaturally?

Standing, Dyna turned in place, both looking and trying to imagine something spooky.

Only to turn to find a bald man in the room with her, grinning wildly with his eyes hidden behind the glare on his rectangular glasses.

Dyna let out a startled shout. One the apparition quickly echoed, stumbling backward as he did so, bumping into the door and falling as the door pushed open against his back.

That… broke the tension. Whatever fright Dyna momentarily felt vanished as she rushed across the room to help him up. He was clearly one of the staff if his long white laboratory coat was any indication. If she had knocked him over using some psychic power, she might have been given a pass. But startling someone, even if they startled her first, was probably not a good look.

Luckily, the man didn’t seem hurt. He accepted her hand to help him back to his feet. As she did so, she couldn’t help but notice some fairly thick black gloves hiding his hands. After brushing off his lab coat, he straightened himself and donned a wide smile once again.

“Terrifically sorry,” he said, bowing his head. “Didn’t intend to startle you.”

He was bald, but he had thin yet full sideburns of black hair starting at the arms of his glasses and extending down along his chin to a pointed beard. Realizing that she was staring, Dyna started. “No, no. Sorry for screaming. I just… wasn’t expecting anyone.”

“I did knock,” he said. He had a slight accent. Slavic? “I suppose the soundproofing deadened the noise. Thought you fell asleep, or were in some manner of trance-like state.”

Dyna didn’t bother saying that she wasn’t. It should have been obvious. Stranger was that she hadn’t noticed him enter. The door to the room was a mirror that didn’t quite seamlessly align with the rest of its wall. That and a simple metal plate to push against were all that indicated its presence. But with the door open, there should have been a gaping hole in all the mirrored cubes.

Deciding she had been overly focused on less obvious things to frighten her, Dyna shook her head. “Was there something I could help you with, uh…”

“Cross. Doctor Phillip Cross.”

“Oh…” The name meant nothing to her.

Apparently realizing that, the taller man chuckled. “We haven’t met before, but I was the one overseeing your eventful compatibility analysis down in Psychodynamics.”

“Oh. Oh!”

“Yes, oh!” He peered over her shoulder, dark eyes looking into the mirrored meditation room. “You were… trying to recreate the situation?”

“Yes, I— I mean, no. Maybe? Sorry. I know Walter said to wait until after all the test results came back.”

“Bah!” Cross waved a gloved hand. “Walter is too cautious. We are scientists! No scientist ever made eggs without breaking a few chickens.”

“Uh…”

“You understand my meaning,” he said. Not as a question, but as a statement. And it was true, she had heard the actual idiom plenty of times. “Point is, I enjoy a subject with some drive.”

He paused like he expected some kind of response. “Right,” Dyna said, not sure what else to say.

“Now, I did not come to wax philosophical over culinary feats.” He turned on the heel of a thick boot that looked like it was designed to keep chemicals far away from his feet. “Walter told you nothing, yes? Would you like to know what happened during your test?”

“Yes?”

Cross pulled a fairly large tablet out from an even larger pocket on his laboratory coat. Dyna wasn’t sure if she was supposed to see his password or not, but she was standing right next to him and he didn’t make any attempts to hide it. It wasn’t even biometric. Maybe it didn’t have anything really secure on it.

After tapping a few times to open the image gallery, he flipped the screen to face her.

A twisted, broken room filled with chains, hooks, blades, blood and viscera. She might have thought it to be one of those horror houses that popped up around Halloween were it not for the chair in the center. An overlarge chair made from red leather and dark stained wood.

Cross reached over the top of the tablet and swiped off to one side. The image changed, showing off the same room but from a different angle. This time, the angle displayed the entrance to the room. And the smeared wall, the same one that she had smeared by dipping her fingers in the wet oil painting.

Walter had said that the room changed to reflect what she saw during the test… but it was like all the scenes she had seen had merged together. Not all of them, unless they had already removed the headless bodies and trees from the forest vision she saw—one inspired by Sleepy Hollow, she presumed.

“We had to cut our way into the room,” Cross said as he swiped the tablet again. “The doors were inoperable. You…”

Someone had taken a picture of her on the floor in front of the chair, soaked in blood. With her eyes wide open in the stillness of the image, it almost looked like she was dead. Or rather, it did look like that. Dyna couldn’t suppress a shudder.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to dama—”

“Sorry!” Cross snapped, shoving his glasses up his nose. “The only ones sorry should be the accountants when they see the cost to repair the room and hall!”

Dyna winced. That didn’t exactly make her feel better about the situation.

“To the rest of us, this is data. We’ve seen subjects like you before, Miss… whatever your name was—”

“Graves. Dyna Graves.”

“Yes, that,” Cross said, dismissing her with a wave of his hand. “We’ve seen those who have had trouble with the regular curriculum here at Carroll’s topside. Their powers don’t fit into the neat mental categories that your peers occupy. And they often need a little help.” He pointed a lithe finger back toward the mirrored meditation chamber. “Sitting in there… you’re not going to get anywhere thinking to yourself.”

“Well sorry,” Dyna snapped, feeling attacked. Nothing worked. Nothing ever got her anywhere. “It’s not like you guys handed me an instruction manual.” Immediately, she winced. “Sorry. I’m just… frustrated.”

“Understandable.” Cross dropped the volume of his voice, turning his back on Dyna. “You canceled plans for your life thinking you were coming here to be a psychic. You had a college you wanted to go to? A career planned out? Perhaps a significant other that you left behind?”

“I was still trying to decide, actually. And no to that last one,” Dyna said with a self-deprecating chuckle. “Not a lot of people talked to me. I… was the kind of person who wore all black, and ran through more black lipstick and eyeliner than the rest of the student body put together. Didn’t have a lot of friends.”

Cross let out a noncommittal hum. If he styled himself in high school as he did today, Dyna doubted many people talked to him either. “And now you’re here. Enjoying yourself?”

Dyna didn’t answer. A day ago, she might have answered right away. A negative answer, but still an answer. Now? Well, it wasn’t like her overall impression of the Carroll Institute had changed much over a single night, but things were different now.

She flipped the tablet over after swiping back an image to show off the disturbed room.

“I feel like I would enjoy myself a whole lot more if I knew how I did this.”

“Indeed. And Walter wants to be in charge of your case. He is talented… if cautious and orthodox. He’ll appear before you sometime this week and will want to take you down to Psychodynamics to undergo some testing and training. He’ll take it slow and steady—after all, he doesn’t wish for this to occur again,” Cross said, pointing one of his narrow fingers at the tablet. “Eventually, I imagine, you’ll become what we call an artificer. A special type of psychic who uses certain psionically sensitive artifacts to enhance your difficult-to-use abilities. While I admit that he may have an unexpected breakthrough, I estimate you’ll come into said abilities within five years.”

“Five…”

“Give or take.”

“That… feels like a lot,” Dyna said, shoulders slumping.

Some of the people in the dormitory were younger than she was and had full control over their abilities. Most were around her age, seventeen to twenty-five at the oldest. Right after high school age. Only a handful were actually older than that. Melanie was twenty-four, and she was the oldest on the third floor.

Cross widened his smile. “Would you like to… accelerate the timescale? Skip over a few of the tedious portions of ability development?”

“I…” Dyna narrowed her eyes. She wanted to agree, but while she hadn’t developed any ability here, she had learned a bit about science. “Should a scientist really be skipping steps? Methodology is important.”

“Bah!” Cross waved a hand. “You’ve been here for six months, yes? Surely you don’t want to go through another six months of the same unproductive activities in the name of methodology. Outdated methodology.”

“Six more… Like, electroshock tests?”

“Like electro—It’s actually electroconvulsive thera—”

“Whatever you call it, it doesn’t work!” Apparently it worked well for some people. Even people undergoing regular therapy outside Carroll’s psychic training. And that was great for them.

It didn’t work for her.

“Exactly. We skip things we know don’t work.” Cross nodded his head as if that settled matters.

And it did. Kind of. Skipping things that didn’t work, getting straight to things that produced results? That was all Dyna wanted out of Carroll. She wanted it to not be a waste of time. She wanted to not continue to waste time.

Here was the opportunity to agree to just that.

“I’ll do it.”

“Excellent,” Cross said, clapping his hands before rubbing them together. The thick gloves he wore squeaked as he did so. “In truth, Walter should have had you in compatibility testing months ago. But he wanted to wait. Wanted to offer you a chance to be normal, in as much as anything at Carroll is normal.” The way he said the word made it sound as if he utterly detested the very idea.

Dyna… didn’t exactly disagree. She didn’t want to be normal. Who did? Every child dreamed of being someone special. The sad fact of reality was that very few people could actually be special. By definition, the average person was exactly that: Average. Normal.

“What, exactly, is the compatibility testing… uh… testing compatibility for? I didn’t get a clear answer when I asked Walter.”

“Wonderful question. That is our next stop.”