The data on Impacted individuals doesn’t fit. The numbers from country to country vary too much to be entirely precise, but… By our estimates, if we assume that the distribution is homogeneous throughout the population, a good 50 to 70 percent of superpowered individuals hasn’t been revealed yet.

After drinking what felt like my weight in water, I ate all the snacks the thugs had left lying around and slumped down against a wall with a sigh. I still struggled to accept what had occurred tonight. I had seen a crazy woman kill eleven men. If what she had told me was true, I could understand her wanting to kill them. Still, expeditive vigilante justice didn’t sit too well with me.

I didn’t feel like bringing the matter up with Alison would be wise. Especially since she was the reason I was not stuck in a cage right now. Instead, I chose to try and recuperate a little before thinking about the next step.

I looked at the remains of the wreckage Alison had left in her wake with a faint bitterness. I knew that tonight’s events would leave a lasting mental picture. I wasn’t afraid of blood—or dead bodies, turns out—but seeing the aftermath of Alison’s carnage made my stomach quiver a little.

Instead of averting my eyes, though, I chose to keep staring. It wasn’t out of morbid curiosity or outright creepiness, but rather because I knew it would take some of the realness out of this situation if I started looking away. It would be like pretending it didn’t exist, and that could lead to all kinds of nasty stuff down the road. This lesson had been taught to me by both my mother and my therapist. The best way to deal with serious events in life was to confront them whenever possible. Oddly, I felt quite capable of doing that.

After an undetermined period of time, I decided that I had done enough and needed to get out of here. I waved at Alison, who was currently shoving the last bits of cut-up body parts into one of the large plastic bags she could summon an apparently endless supply of.

“Hey, I think I should get home soon. Do you need help with anything?” I asked.

She raised both eyebrows in bewilderment as if I had caused offense.

“Damn right, I need help. You can help me by cleaning all the bloodstains you can find,” she said. “Burning this place down would typically be the next step here, but I can’t find any decent combustible around.”

I stared at her in shock as she threw a wet rag at me. How can one burn an entire concrete building? Never mind all of the related issues that went along with it, how was this the first solution she could think of?

I sighed and grabbed the rag. I was probably not going home soon. As I got on down on my knees to take care of some of the mess, a thought came to me.

“So, are you implying that we have to worry about DNA traces or something?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Which is why we’re going to make sure there is no reason for them to look around here. No dead bodies, no investigation.”

“So what if one of their goons or an ally comes by and reports them missing or something?” I asked.

“They won’t. They can’t go to the cops, and they certainly won’t do their own DNA testing here. Plus, I highly doubt that this was a permanent hideout. The floors are way too dusty. Chances are their bosses don’t even know about this place.”

“Their bosses?” I asked. “So, the bald guy with the uzi wasn’t the big boss?”

“Him?” she scoffed. “No. He’s small fry. Less than that, even. He’s barely cat herder in chief in this shit-circus.”

“Then why are you here?” I pointed out.

“By chance,” she said without expanding further. “How about you get back to cleaning, though?”

“Alright, last question,” I said. “Why did you not simply kill them all with buzzsaw blades or metal rods?”

“Throwing stuff fast and precisely takes a lot of focus, which is why I tend to rely on my nail gun as much as I can,” she replied. “And doing both at the same time gives me massive headaches. This doobie is a lifesaver after a fight like this.”

“Why not use a regular gun, then?” I asked.

“Real guns make too much sound, plus, I don’t really know how to explain it, but aiming with my tools feels immensely easier than with an actual gun.”

To be fair, she was plenty lethal with the tools at her disposal, especially the nail gun, judging by at least three of the eleven dead bodies. With that gloomy thought, I decided to get back to cleaning. Better be done with it as soon as possible.

I spent a good hour moping blood up, some of it my own. The task was more challenging than it seemed, as we hadn’t found any working tap to wet the rags with. Thankfully another janitorial closet right next to our room had some unopened bleach jugs lying around, which made the ordeal that much easier.

At some point, Alison had gone out to check for outside activity. Turns out, this area of town was indeed deserted at night. Or dawn now, actually.

After at least another hour, I finally finished with the cleaning. My arms and legs were sore, my back was killing me, and my hands were incredibly itchy from the sweat that had accumulated in the gloves Alison had given me. I sighed in relief as I took them off. I was dead tired. I strongly suspected that my red cell count had not recovered yet. I need to get to my bed and lie down for a year or two.

Nobody would be waiting for me as I lived alone in my studio. My mother might try to call, but I don’t think she would worry too much if I didn’t answer. After all, I tended to ignore most of her calls.

By sheer luck, I had found the remains of my phone in two pieces in one of the building’s trashcans. I didn’t know why they would go through the trouble of recovering it, but I was happy to be able to salvage the sim card.

Alison had found a few cellphones after rummaging through our captors’ pockets. At first glance, they seemed to be cheap disposable models, but one of them was a relatively recent Samsung model, and Alison graciously offered it to me. Sadly, the sim card slot wasn’t adapted to my sim card’s format, so I couldn’t use it right away.

Before leaving, I decided to set out to look for stuff we potentially missed in the building. In the meantime, Alison decided she would hide the bullet marks in the walls by striking at them with a sledgehammer. The rest of the building was already severely run down, so a few more walls knocked down wouldn’t raise too much suspicion, I wagered.

I tiredly made my way through the abandoned precinct to look for anything important. I passed by a flight of stairs when I heard faint moans coming from the unlit staircase below.

My blood went cold, and a chill went down my spine. What if there were more of them hiding in the building? I immediately ran back to Alison to warn her.

When I entered the room, she was gleefully smashing bricks of concrete with her hammer, a manic smile plastered on her face.

“Hey, I think—” I started.

“What?” She yelled back as a large chunk of concrete fell to the floor, covering the sound of my voice.

“I think there’s somebody down below us,” I said anxiously.

“Well, everyone is entitled to their own beliefs,” she replied offhandedly.

“No, I mean…” I began, trying my hardest not to cringe at the impromptu lousy joke. How can she be so flippant at a time like this? I swallowed back a snappy reply and instead tried to address the issue. “I mean, there is someone in one of the rooms downstairs.”

“Yeah, I got it. Let’s go greet them then,” she answered as she summoned a nail gun and a welding helmet.

We quickly made our way to the stairwell I had heard the sounds coming from. She flicked it on and carefully started going down. I picked up a large piece of rubble from the ground and followed her downstairs.

The room at the end of the stairs was slightly lit up by flickering neon light. It looked like an old armory or a former evidence room, perhaps. As it had a wire grid splitting the room in two, with a small slot at mid-height that probably served as an exchange point. I couldn’t quite make out what was behind the grid in the darkness, but I could distinctly hear someone sobbing.

When we finally got closer, Alison’s nail gun disintegrated as she laughed at what she saw.

“THAT scared you?” she cackled.

“Hey, I mean, it could have been a trap!” I replied defensively.

What stood in front of us was a man in fetal position, cradling his face in his hands and sobbing quietly. He seemed to have wet himself at some point, I noted.

“Hey, sir, it’s okay. We’re here to rescue you,” I called out to the man.

My brow rose in surprise when the man uncovered his face to look at us. I should have expected this, but here stood Tim, my “predecessor” in a way.

“You came to save me?” He whimpered, not bothering to wipe the tears and snot off of his face.

“Err. Sure thing,” Alison replied with unveiled displeasure.

She spawned a crowbar behind her back and jammed it in the door frame. After a few good tugs, the metal groaned before the door burst open.

Tim quickly got up and exited the cell.

“Are they gone?” He asked.

“They are,” I replied.

“Where?” He asked, fear apparent in his eyes.

The fact that he didn’t seem to recognize me from before was somewhat perplexing. Vexing, even.

“They won’t bother you anymore,” Alison replied firmly.

Tim promptly took Alison’s hands and looked at her straight in the eyes.

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” He said in a whisper.

Alison rolled her eyes.

Tim grabbed my hands and thanked me as well.

That was uncomfortable.

“If you ever come by the Steak Corner on l’Allée des Jasmines, next to the Boulevard Indigo, you will be fed for free and like kings!” Tim added as he let go of my hands.

“Whatever, we need to head out before the wrong kind of people shows up to ask questions.” Alison declared.

The man didn’t need to be told twice. He scurried upstairs and left.

“What people? Are there more of them?” I asked with concern after the man had left earshot.

“No. If there were any of them remaining by now, they’d have done something. I just wanted that creep to fuck off,” she said in an exasperated tone.

“So…” I said. “What now?”

“Now, you go home and forget about all this,” she said bluntly.

“What about the bodies?” I asked.

“Let me worry about that. You’ve done more than you needed to. Here, keep this for the trouble.” She said, handing me a stack of bills.

“Wow, I… Thanks,” I said, taking the gift gracefully. There might be almost a thousand euros in there! Although I lived relatively comfortably, this amount of money was NOT something I would refuse, especially as a student living by himself.

“Don’t mention it,” she said dismissively. “Just go home and forget about all this.”

“I… Yeah, that sounds nice,” I replied. This grotesque nightmare was finally coming to an end.

Something didn’t sit right with me, though. But I couldn’t place my finger on what.

I looked at the girl who had shared my plight for what felt like days when it had barely been a night. The bruises had somewhat faded, and the bump on her brow had shrunk considerably. She still didn’t look pretty, but she had definitely gone up a few links in the prehistoric human family tree.

The fact that she still looked somewhat unattractive to me helped me conjecture that my unease around her wasn’t fueled by a potential crush on her. It was definitely something else.

If I was honest with myself, tonight had been a pure nightmare. The roller coaster of emotions and the insane exertions had strained my nerves to a point they had never reached before.

“Well… I guess this is goodbye then. Thank you for not letting me die,” I said with a timid smile.

“As I said, don’t mention it. Don’t do it again, though,” She replied. For the first time since our capture, I felt like exhaustion had gotten to her.

It was truly unsettling. A few hours ago, she was in a full-fledged Matrix-style fight against the mob, and the next moment she was cracking jokes about me nearly dying.

Alas, we were probably meant to part ways, so I just awkwardly nodded and slowly started going upstairs. I grew more confident that I should just go home and forget about this whole ordeal with each step.

By the time I stepped outside, the sun was fully visible on the horizon. I slowly started making my way towards the street in hopes that finding my way back home wouldn’t take too long.

I woke up in what felt like the middle of the night. The alarm clock next to my bed seemed to support this theory, as the blue LCD display currently indicated 23:20. I had slept close to 15 hours, yet it felt like barely more than a couple. By the time my brain caught up with reality, I had already relieved myself in the bathroom and was now mechanically stepping into the shower.

I had been so tired last night that I ended up forgetting most of my trip back to my apartment. I seemed to have made it home safely, though. At some point, I had removed my torn clothes and unceremoniously thrown them into the trash. The bullet holes couldn’t be fixed at this point, and I knew for a fact that dry blood stains were a pain in the rear to get rid of.

As I stepped out of the steamy cabin, I took a few minutes to inspect the bullet wounds—or scars, rather—I had received last night.

Most of them were already of a dark pink hue, still lighter than my natural skin tone but not as noticeable as regular scar tissue. The curious thing was that wrinkly texture the skin now bore, just like on my index finger. When you looked at it from up close, it felt like there was an excessive amount of skin that my body just didn’t know what to make of. The texture was also rougher than expected, and every single one of my wounds, finger included, felt noticeably number than the rest of my body. The feeling reminded me of that time I had given myself a jolt on one of my fingers after touching the stripped part of a connected wire. For several minutes after the event, my finger had felt as if it were tv static.

Anyhow, I could still move my finger like any other, but hitting it against a hard surface didn’t feel like it hurt, and I couldn’t really discern textures when touching things with it.

Still, if this was the price for not losing a finger and not dying after being shot, I would take it even if it freaked me out a little bit.

I still wondered, though, how did it work? What were the limits of my abilities? Was I virtually unkillable? Pretty sure that wasn’t the case. I did not want to find out what a bullet to my brain would do. Also, I had to run out of juice at some point, right? The energy expended to heal my wounds had to come from somewhere if my understanding of physics laws was correct. Although, those seemed to be less and less reliable throughout the last decade. Knowing how my body worked, my theory was that calories probably had a role to play; I felt ravenous when I got back home. Even now, a few hours afterward and having fed twice, I was still hungry.

I tried not to think too hard about it. While having been a very fortunate event at the time, my power’s appearance was still fresh on my mind, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

The next day, I was chopping tomatoes for my salad while following a YouTube recipe on my phone when I accidentally nicked the top of my middle finger with the knife. I absent-mindedly glanced at the shallow wound as I waited for my power to kick in. While the blood slowly oozing out from the injury wasn’t cause for concern, I couldn’t help but frown after a few seconds. This tiny scar should have healed by now. I ran my finger under tap water to wash away the blood. The more I stared at it, the more it seemed that the cut wasn’t closing.

Did it wear off? No, no, no, no! It can’t be gone! I thought in despair.

Dread started creeping into the back of my mind at the perspective of having the only thing remarkable in my life taken away from me. Everything froze, and my surroundings seemed to fade. Had my powers worn off? I simply could not accept the thought of having the only thing that made my life special removed from me. This is not fair. A part of me knew that this wasn’t that big of a deal, that I should be happy to be alive more than anything. That part of me was really quiet right now, though.

I grabbed a meat cleaver off the kitchen rack. There was only one way to check. Anger and despair coursed through my veins as I swung down the knife on the last phalanx of my left pinkie.

Sanity came back to me like a train to the face. My surroundings lost their hues as carmine blood gushed out of the now open end of my finger like colored ink out of a broken pen. I could hear my own heartbeat pounding in my inner ear, pulsing at the same rate as the waves of pains coming from my now half finger. It barely registered, though, as I was coming to the realization that not only I might have lost something important, I had also maimed myself in an attempt to contradict reality. Sane people did not do that.

I never thought I would feel so much relief at seeing burls and knots of flesh forming themselves at the end of my finger when, after a few more seconds, the wound finally started to close.

I let out a quivering sigh as I slumped down against my fridge, clutching my finger and staring into nothingness.

The cut on my middle finger seemed to still be bleeding, curiously. For the healing to kick in, maybe my injuries had to be life-threatening? Or something like that? Knowing what I knew from my childhood of superpower worship, I knew that most abilities came with odd limitations and drawbacks, some of them seemingly random.

I sighed again. This was not normal, and I felt like I had to do something about it.

The next day would be Monday, and on Mondays, I was supposed to go to class.

I studied graphic design in hopes of becoming an illustrator or something like that. I had initially wanted to enter Art school, but private schools were out of the question, and University was just too selective. In the end, I had applied to pretty much all semi-related fields, even going as far as trying to get into video editing.

It was by sheer randomness that I had ended up in Corman-sur-Rhône. I was initially from Annecy, and my mom still lived there, but she had encouraged me to move away from there as she didn’t want me to end up being a ‘Tanguy’, as she so delicately put it. So I had chosen randomly and selected the first and nearest University that had replied to me.

Now in my second year, I didn’t regret my choice, but I could see that the reasoning behind it was somewhat dubious and made a mental note of not flipping coins on essential matters from now on.

I glanced at my new phone; the display indicated a time of 10:02, too late for the morning class but too early for the afternoon ones.

I wasn’t in the habit of skipping classes at minor inconveniences or mood swings, but I felt like I had deserved some additional sleep after the weekend events.

I arrived on time for the afternoon lesson; since it wasn’t related to the one in the morning, the professor didn’t bat an eye. This class was an introductory one, meaning that at least forty students sat in a medium-sized room, so I could isolate myself from the rest of my peers.

During the first year, I hadn’t made many friends here. I wasn’t disliked by anyone—that I knew of, at least—but I simply did not socialize. I had been invited to parties many times throughout last year and even attended a few of them. But aside from the occasional drunk classmate mistaking me for a therapist, I hadn’t made any connections. If I were honest, I wasn’t too much bothered by that.

When contrasted with my high school life, ostracization was far from being a bad situation. So I mostly kept to myself and sat at one of the last rows in class to be sure to not have to interact with too many people.

I found it exceptionally hard to focus on the lesson today. Although the course content—personal branding and networking—was of great interest to me, I struggled to write down on my computer anything said by the professor, and I couldn’t hold my gaze on him for more than a few seconds at a time. My attention wasn’t even drifting outside or to my phone as it usually tended to do when I got bored. No, this time, it felt like my surroundings had grown numb and blurry. It felt like the words coming out of the professor’s mouth were slurred and jumbled. As if this was nothing more than a parody of a lesson.

I ended up leaving during the break. Having signed the attendance sheet during the first period, I knew I wouldn’t get into trouble. I simply couldn’t get the events of the last weekend out of my head, and if I was going to be miserable because of it, it might as well be at home.

I slumped down in my bed and turned off the lights. Mental exhaustion and a sour mood kept me in sleep limbo. I couldn’t tell how long I had been asleep—or awake—by the time I felt hungry. The sun had been set for a while, apparently, as my phone indicated a time of 22:11.

I silently cooked a tin of cassoulet and stared into nothingness. I felt numb.

The next day I cut the middle man and simply didn’t go to class. I stayed inside, playing some PS4 and occasionally browsing Reddit but didn’t bother myself to think about University. It just felt so… distant now. I needed a breather, and what’s a week out of school, really?

I knew, deep down, that I should call my therapist to talk to him. But what would I tell him? That I got kidnapped, discovered I had superpowers, and helped a crazy woman kill 11 men because she was trying to get revenge for a dead person? I wasn’t sure of many things in life, but I knew for a fact that I couldn’t simply tell him all this. Even though I trusted Dr. Santos a lot, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable telling him about the carnage Alison had wrought and especially how I ended up playing a role in it. If he were to contact the cops and they started an investigation, or worse, called the IHI, things could go south real quick.

The decision not to call my therapist, I reasoned, was out of self-preservation. I hoped he wouldn’t think it was because of my usual avoidance strategy.

My next appointment was next Friday, and I didn’t really know whether I wanted to go or not. Although I was frustrated that I couldn’t talk to Dr. Santos about my recent troubles, I felt like I owed the man as much truthfulness as I could give. Also, he would immediately start suspecting something if I didn’t go. The last time I had started skipping appointments, he had called my mom, and I simply could not face her right now. There was no way I would lie to her, and exposing her to the truth was a risk I would not take.

It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make sense how my issues had gone from extremely grave matter to rather mundane topics, but the stress level had somehow increased instead of decreased. It didn’t make sense that even though I had been mixed up with gangs and human trafficking, I was still worrying more about confronting my psychiatrist and my mom. It didn’t make sense that I wasn’t affected by the death of eleven men. It didn’t make sense that getting a superpower wasn’t the biggest news in my life at the moment. More than anything else, it didn’t make sense that I wanted to see Alison again.

Alas, this was simply not happening. No matter how good the thrill of all the action had felt and how I loathed going back into my old life afterward, I knew that focusing on my studies would be more important in the long run.

Thinking about classes made me sigh again. It was messed up how the only time I managed to stop giving a damn about my day-to-day issues was when my life had been threatened. Now, I wasn’t about to dive into another shootout just to get out of class, but the fact that after all that, they simply came back, unrelenting, was downright depressing.

By most Universities’ standards, the Institute of Digital Arts and Creation had relatively lax attendance rules. Still, as with most educational structures, sudden changes in students’ behavior were often noticed pretty quick and usually dealt with swiftly. It was no surprise, then, that by Friday, the University had called. The Education Manager Of Undergraduate Studies, Mrs. Quérent-Madelon, had called, to be exact. I didn’t know her all that well personally, but I knew enough to know that she was harsh yet courteous, and no matter how much some people could piss her off, she never showed outward signs of aggressivity.

I had overheard from a conversation in one of my classes that she was pretty much the Severus Snape of the school, except female, overweight, and wearing heels that threatened to break the tiles of the halls she threaded. The only thing that set her apart from Dolores Umbridge, I supposed, was the fact that she wasn’t especially vile. She was merely the mouthpiece for the department tasked with monitoring student behavior, after all.

To my surprise, she hadn’t called to warn me of potentially lost points on my grades or a summons to a disciplinary hearing. She had simply asked whether I had a valid motive for not attending, and when I answered that no, I didn’t have one, she told me that I could either immediately go back for the afternoon period or be expelled.

It had been a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, as I was not planning to go back to school until at least one more day. I knew it wasn’t out of laziness or anything as trivial as that, but she didn’t. And sadly, although my psychiatrist could back me up if I explained the whole situation to him, I didn’t think he would if I didn’t tell him the whole truth, and on top of that, I didn’t believe the school cared much for my mental state. Funny how they always took physical ailments as severe enough to miss classes, but severe depression barely made the cut. And as this cruelly cretinous universe would have it, I could now only experience the latter.

I sighed. I had to come back at some point, anyway.

The afternoon lesson was about vectorized drawing, and even though it was a course I very much enjoyed, I could not seem to focus. The teacher, Mr. Laurent, was an older gentleman in his late forties. Bald, tall, and charismatic, pretty much all the students liked him, myself included. Today, though, even though the contents of the lecture sounded intriguing, my mind was simply too bent on mentally reviewing what had occurred during the weekend.

Also, I was worrying a bit. I didn’t like it, as it was a kind of worry I wasn’t used to. What had me stressed wasn’t the usual everyday stuff. No, this time, what had gotten me worried was that I had caught myself fantasizing about the abandoned precinct, not in a weird or perverted way, but in a thrill-seeking way. Like I was planning on revisiting a scary ride at the town carnival. The event’s fear and trauma were still there, but I wanted to feel that disconnection with my boring reality again.

“Alex, do you hear me?” A voice called.

My mind struggled to put a face on the voice as I focused my gaze towards its source.

Right, Mr. Laurent.

“Sorry, could you repeat that?” I asked tentatively.

“I said, would you mind showing us your work?” He said in an exasperated voice.

“Oh, I uh…” I was about to give a silly excuse about why I hadn’t done anything during the two hours. But apparently, I had. What I had drawn was a complex mix of red and grey that, at first, my brain couldn’t work out into an actual image. When did I make that? I barely remember using my computer at all.

When the last strands of haze clouding my mind escaped my thoughts, I realized that what I was staring at was too zoomed in to see. I scrolled the mouse wheel a little bit until the shape morphed into that of a dead bald man wearing a white tuxedo and a gold earring. He had an uzi for a right hand and a phone for his left. Streams of blood were streaming down from his mouth and eyes, in which several tools and bits of metals were protruding embedded. Also, he had a massive sawblade cleaving his stomach in half.

I looked up at my expectant classroom. Nobody had made a sound during the time I was staring at my screen in shock.

“Well?” The teacher asked again.

I needed to have a talk with my therapist.