I slid the door shut and peeled off my shoes and socks, throwing them into the growing pile of socks near the door. I fell into the couch and turned on the holo.

It had been a long day, dealing with customers and my managers all day. Do your best for a customer who would leave and never care again in a minute. Do your best for a manager who only cared when numbers looked bad. Come home, crash hard, wake up early, do it all again.

It would be sad if it weren’t the same every day, which pushed it right into depressing. Every month, money came in, money went out. Rent, medication, food, slowly ate away at my income. Car trouble? Watch the savings blow away. And I was one of the diligent, frugal ones. I saw my friends take trips, go on cruises, buy cars, and wondered how they got the money for these things.

And so every day, I felt like nothing changed except I was a day older. Someday, eventually, I guess I’d retire. I wasn’t exactly putting money away for that, so I didn’t know what would happen, but it seemed like it was forever away anyway.

I receded into the couch, the flickering glow of the holo the only light in the room.

I was wasting my time, I knew. I only had a few brief hours before I’d have to be in bed to restart the cycle. These few hours were the only time I had to do whatever I wanted, the time to be alive. If I’d ever wanted to paint a painting or learn another language, these hours were it.

Instead, day after day, I sat here in front of the holo. I could feel my life slipping by me. I wondered if everyone else had this state of existential dread, or if I was just special in how much I hated my life.

Even just a few thousand would help. I could pay off my loans, start actually putting away money, start saving up for something I really wanted, pull myself out of this slump. I looked down at my hand, could feel my pulse pounding.

Nah. I couldn’t.

I threw on some sandals and went outside, to the corner store. I did as I always did, wandered every aisle, like I was looking for something new and exciting. Nothing ever was. I wound up with the same bowl of instant mac with hot dogs as always.

There was a guy in front of me in line, who was acting really fishy. Glancing around all over the place, unable to stand still. I thought he might be on drugs, and stayed a few steps back, in case he decided to bite me or something. When he got to the front, he whipped out a gun from somewhere and pointed it, shaking, at the cashier.

Shit. I didn’t want to be here. I took a few steps further backward and disappeared into the aisles, moving for the door. I only got a few steps from it before I heard the crazy guy yelling at me. I slowly raised my hands and turned to him.

He was deranged looking, his eyes not pointing in quite the same direction. The gun in his hand was shiny silver and huge, pointing directly at me. In his other hand was a plastic bag, full of credit chits from the til.

He growled something indistinct at me.

“I don’t want any trouble, man.”

“Wallet,” he said, gun even with my eyes. I reached into my pocket and pulled the wallet out of my pocket. I grabbed the small chip I had and offered it to him.

“Gimmie the WHOLE WALLET!” he yelled, and grabbed my arm, yanking it hard. I fell forward onto the ground, the wallet landing beside me. He stepped forward and picked it up, along with the chits on the ground. His hairy leg was right beside my head. I felt blood trickle down my forehead where it hit the ground.

I felt my blood race and looked up. The barrel of the gun was right in my face. The swinging bag of cash dangled right in front of me, my wallet and the money I’d taken out for this week in there.

I won’t. I couldn’t. I shouldn’t.

I did.

I clapped my hand against the man’s bare leg and ignited all the blood in his body in an instant. He screamed an inhuman scream and burned and withered at the same time. In a moment, he was silent and it ended, a crackling husk all that remained of the pathetic man.

I glanced over and the cashier was long gone. Vanished when the robber had turned his attention to me. I hesitated for a second, and then grabbed the bag and fled the store.

I was terrified and giddy. I’d just taken a man’s life and made more money than I would in a month in an instant, and it had been so easy.

Stupidly easy. Painfully easy. The easiest thing I’d ever done in my life. I just clapped my hands and made money appear, basically.

What was the point of listening to my manager berate me for poor numbers and enduring customers argue endlessly over expired coupons when I could make a hundred times that much in ten minutes?

In a flash I was upstairs and home, the door bolted behind me. My heart was pounding impossibly hard, I didn’t even know it could beat that hard without my chest bursting. But from excitement or fear, I didn’t know.

I looked in the bag again. Piles of chits, sorted by type, exactly as the cashier had pulled them from the drawer. My wallet. The small chit which had come from my own wallet.

With this…I could go from lunch meat and white bread to eating out, all week. No more mac and cheese with little hot dogs.

I shook the thought out of my head. Or, I could use this to pay for rent. Put some money away. Live like I always had, just with a little more money in the bank. A little safer.

The thought of it made my skin crawl. Maybe it was my blood racing, or that I’d just gotten away with murder, but my ordinary shitty life seemed even more shitty than it ever had. I looked down again and felt the weight of the bag in my hand. I could do this. I could make a living off my powers. It would be easy, so much faster and easier than…

…than what? Slowly getting older and putting money away until some day, I died? What was the point of such a life. It’s not like I had much of a family to care about or to care about me. No legacy, no romantic prospects, no career, no real reason to exist.

Inwardly, I fumed. I hated this money. I felt like it had opened a door to the outside world, letting me see just how terrible my complacent life had been before. But on the other hand, it did open the door…not just let me peek.

Whatever I chose, I had to be smart about it. No exuberant spending, no cruises or houses or sports cars. I laughed a little louder than I expected. Sports cars? I was holding a bag with a few hundred tops. I was getting ahead of myself.

But not that far ahead.

The money was gone in less than a week. I wondered how I’d lived on so much less than that for so much longer. I hadn’t bought anything extravagant, just small things I’d always denied myself before, and it was amazing how fast the money went. I needed to figure something out. Something bigger, so I wouldn’t have to do this again in another week.

That was how I found myself underneath a bank in the middle of the night, melting through the ground with my hands, the tunnel lit only by the flow of lava flowing past me downhill back towards the sewer where I’d breached the earth, while a cloud of smoke completely filled the tunnel.

When I awoke with my powers, my blanket on fire and the room filled with smoke, neither of them bothered me in the slightest. I had to sacrifice my mobile to explain to the firefighters that it had spontaneously exploded in the night and set my blanket on fire. The firefighters seemed skeptical, saying ‘no mobile had spontaneously exploded in 200 years,’ but barring a better explanation, they left without incident.

That was a week ago, and I’d decided I had to hide my powers and everything about them, or else risk bringing the XPCA down on me. I was fireproof, but I had no desire to test my bulletproof-ness.

So what the heck was I doing melting my way into a bank? As though in answer to my thoughts, I felt my hands touched a material different from the rock. I’d burned through concrete. Just a little further and the smoke thinned as it flooded into the room above me.

I hadn’t planned that, but it would keep any cameras from spotting me. It’s a good thing that worked out, I chastised myself for not even remotely thinking this through.

But that was a concern for later. Now, I was in the vault, able to see through my own smoke into…

Where was I? This wasn’t a bank vault. Where were the rows of safe deposit boxes? Where were the rows of gold bars? Where was the big stacks of credits?

Instead there was…black cabinets everywhere. A pretty large room, almost like a library, with rows of the metal cabinets standing in lines in the center of the room like bookshelves.

No, I thought, more like a locker room. Each one of the cabinets was a locker, I realized. I had my smoke vision, and the cabinets had metal doors with a large diamond lattice pattern letting me see inside. I got close to look inside the dark, now-smokey cabinets.

Guns. Lots of guns. I took a step back, my mind racing.

Guns? Was there a gun vault in the bottom of the bank? More importantly, could I still turn these into my payday?

I froze when I heard yelling from upstairs and the sounds of a lot of people running around. Shit. How’d they know I was here? I looked around and couldn’t see any alarms or cameras I’d tripped. Some kind of motion alarm? Would it go off from the smoke, or had I blundered into it?

The door burst open and several men and women armed with fire extinguishers, wearing clear face masks with air canisters and police uniforms stormed into the room.

Oh. The smoke. It must have gone upstairs, and they’d come here, not because of me, but because of it. I’d berate myself for my complete lack of planning and idiocy later, right now I had to escape before they found me in the smoke. I went back to my tunnel only to find it completely sealed, the flowing lava having cooled as soon as I’d left it. I could re-melt it and follow the flow back to where I’d entered and escape.

“There it is!” someone shouted as I touched the ground. They’d seen me re-melting the floor and the red glow had lit up the entire room. As one, they all descended on the fire, extinguishers at the ready. The pit was only a couple feet deep at this point, nowhere for me to hide. But this was my only way out.

I was hit with white smoke from all directions from the extinguishers, and unlike my black smoke, I couldn’t see through this at all. I choked and coughed as the sprays hit me with surprising pressure, and the sudden cold shocked me. “Someone’s there!” a voice yelled from outside the smoke. “Someone is breaking in! It’s not arson, it’s robbery!”

A muddle of voices erupted. Some of the sprays stopped, others kept pouring on me, the layer of white foam making it hard to heat the rock.

“Robbery–call for backup!”

“Stop where you are, this is the police!”

“Dispatch, confirmed 10-64 in progress in the armory.”

I turned up the heat as much as I dared, but from experience, heating things too fast made them explode violently. I could only hope that with the room full of smoke and police, nobody would try shooting anyone else. Unfortunately, while the lava was slowly making an escape route for me and filling the room with a smokescreen, it also highlighted exactly where I was.

And for several minutes, we kept up this insane loop. I slowly deepened my escape route, they yelled, milled around, blasted me with extinguishers, and repeatedly circled the room. I think they had no idea where I was, unable to get close to the fire from the heat, and obviously not expecting a person to stand in it. It looked like if I just kept at it, I might be able to escape.

That was, until a whole different kind of people entered the room. Backup had arrived, and they’d come prepared for the encounter. Full armored exosuits, weapons drawn, enhanced optics which could probably see right through the smoke. They looked military. As the first one entered the room, he trained his gun directly on me and shouted with a slightly synthesized and computer-enhanced voice:

“YOU IN THE FIRE — STEP FORWARD AND LAY ON THE GROUND OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON.”

I had no intention of doing that, and turned up the heat even more. A lake of lava was pooled around me now in the crater in the floor. This had been much easier when I was tunnelling uphill, as the lava had somewhere else to go. Still, I was almost four feet underground now, deep enough to crouch and be almost completely submerged in the lava and below the ground.

But one look at their guns told me that a little lip of ground above me wasn’t going to protect me much. They were big, heavy, imposing black guns, two or three different types spread amongst the group, with one guy in the back holding a huge weapon which wouldn’t have looked out of place mounted on a VTOL.

“FINAL WARNING. SURRENDER OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON.” The regular police were long-gone, they’d beat it as soon as the super squad had showed up.

I couldn’t fight them, but I was so close now, I knew it. The whole tunnel couldn’t have been sealed up, could it? Every inch of rock melting away felt like any second, I’d break through and flow away with the rest of the lava. But inch by inch had passed and all I’d encountered was more recently-melted rock.

“ENGAGING SUSPECT, WEAPONS FREE,” said the booming robotic voice of the front man, the rest of his team neatly arranged in a semicircle around me now.

“Wait!” I shouted. “Wait! I surrender!” I surfaced, the lava halfway up my torso. It felt like a very thick very warm bath.

“The fiend appears to be bathing in molten rock,” a woman just on the leader’s left said, her voice still synthesized but presumably quieter because she was talking only to him instead of shouting at me. “Surely he is an Exhuman, and we should withdraw and wait for XPCA, there is no other possible explanation.”

“Hold, Karen,” replied the leader. “Jager, call for an XPCA team immediately. We will contain the threat until they arrive.”

“Confirmed,” said Jager. Karen looked at the man, incredulous by her stance, but did not reply.

“PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND STEP FORWARD,” the voice boomed at me again. I had almost started work on my hole again during their chit-chat. I gave one final thought to trying again to escape, and then frustrated, disgusted, threw my hands into the air.

Flecks of molten lava flew from my fingers and danced across the floor, tumbling and bouncing, leaving red-hot trails wherever they flew. The soldiers flinched at the spray.

I realized Karen was right. I was an Exhuman. These guys were just normal military, not XPCA. I might still have a chance to escape…through them. The biggest guy with the huge gun was set up on the far right. If I had any chance, I’d have to take him out first.

As fast as I could, I scooped a handful of lava and flung it at him, heating it as much as I could in the moment it was in my hand. White-hot, it arced through the air, the outside slightly cooling, forming a shell to keep the blob contained, and when it impacted on the wall next to him, the shell cracked, explosively. Like a grenade, flecks of searing lava flew in all directions, hitting three of them, including the big guy. The rest were already moving, some shooting above me as I dipped below the surface, some moving to cover behind lockers, spreading out, taking all angles.

They were good, but I was a freakin’ Exhuman.

I stuck my entire body in the pool and superheated it as high as it would go. I’d never pushed the limits of my powers, and felt them go way way beyond anything I’d done before. The whole pool, and the rock around it, and the rock around that seethed and twisted, the ground becoming liquid in a second. I pushed it hotter and higher and then, as I’d hoped, it just exploded.

I imagined it from their perspective: The room growing unbearably hot, the ground becoming gummy and infirm, the pit in the center of the room widening, blinding white even through the smoke, and then…

The yells turned to synthesized screams. The air itself burst into flames. The cabinets closest to the hole began to wilt and droop, guns and all. Several of the soldiers were down already, succumbed to burns, or the concussive blast, or something else. I didn’t really care, all I knew was I had my chance to escape.

I bolted for the door and found a hunched figure in my way. It was the girl who spoke before, trying to drag her captain out of the room with both arms, her gun gone. He was in bad shape, with one of his legs melted to the floor, his voice a synthesized scream. When he saw me emerging from the fire, his gun, which he’d miraculously still somehow kept hold of, trained onto me instantly, and a spray of bullets bounced off the ceiling near me.

I hit the deck, diving from the wild fire, and retaliated with some fire of my own. I slammed the ground with an open palm, forcing heat into the floor under him. In moments, his screaming reached a new apex, as his lower body began to sink into the floor, his armor liquefying and flames engulfing his entire body. In a moment his screams stopped, and his body, protected by his armor only for so long, more liquefied than burned.

The girl pulling him from the room fell backwards, still holding his smoking arm. She just looked at it, confused. Her chin angled up, and the blank faceplate of her armor looked at me. “You said…you surrendered…” she said, her synthesized voice filled with shock. No sadness, no anger, just incomprehension, as she sat beyond the doorway, the room looking like a gateway to hell, holding the disembodied arm of her superior.

I wasn’t sure what to say or do. I hadn’t meant for any of this. I needed to make her understand that it was her, and her people who had started all of this, who’d pushed me to using my powers. I just wanted to get in and get out without anyone knowing, but they’d come down here with guns, ready to kill.

I threw her down and grabbed her faceplate, searing it to red-hot instantly. It softened in my hands and I ripped it off her face. Underneath was a white girl with strands of blonde hair, stuck to her face from the rivers of sweat pouring out of her. Her eyes were a brilliant piercing green and I felt as though they could stare right into my soul. It gave me pause. I watched the eyes flick back and forth across my face, uncomprehending, hurt, lost.

That was the moment I realized what an Exhuman was. Looking into those eyes and seeing myself and the damage I caused and the lives I took through them. What could be so easy for me would be so hard for everyone else in my wake. I needed to leave.

“I lied,” I said, with as casual a shrug as I could, and stepped over her body, hurrying out of the room.

I couldn’t stop to think. I had to go, the XPCA would be coming soon, and I did not want to meet them.