He looked like a man. Under other circumstances, she might've mistaken him for one. But he had thrown a whole bed aside as if it'd been nothing, then clasped one hand over her mouth and one behind her head faster than she could blink. His strength was inhuman, but he wasn't some dark demon cut from the night itself or on fire — that had been his oil lamp playing tricks with shadows and the color of his hair. He looked almost normal, though so pale that he looked bloodless instead of pink. Save for his mouth. That looked as if he'd bitten into something red and ripe, the ghost of which still stained his lips even after washing. Or perhaps he'd preferred the taste of flesh instead, left so rare that it might as well not been cooked at all.

Her stomach twisted and rolled at the thought.

"Don't make a sound," he said, and she finally looked from his mouth. His clear, light gaze — the color was impossible discern in fluttering lamplight that reflected in his eyeglasses — held hers more firmly than his hands did. "That wouldn't be good for either of us."

His tone didn't seem angry or demanding, just detached, as if he were noting the color of the walls. If it'd been anything else she would've shrieked the second she had been able to. Instead, she nodded her captured head as much as she could. A slight movement, one that he more likely felt than saw. He moved his palm from her mouth just a little. When not even a squeak passed her lips, he moved his hand completely away. His other fingers were still in her hair, the weight of them a light warning.

"Wh-who are you?" she said, but that wasn't the right thing to ask. "No, what are you?"

They sat so closely together that they couldn't look anywhere else, closely enough for her to taste his clove-laced breath when he laughed. It was more a scoffing noise than a happy one. "The smartest Ellsworth girl doesn't remember me?" he said. "Now that's a crying shame."

Her fear faded under his bright amusement. More importantly, he'd give her a name. She grasped to that scrap of information like a sailor grasping the flotsam of a shipwreck. He knew something about her, and that made him important. "An Ellsworth?" she said. "Is that who I am? What's my first name?"

Fingers curled into hair deep enough for the tips to brush her scalp and make her shiver. "That spill of yours sure knocked you for a loop." He seemed to consider something. "Do you really not know who I am?"

She shook her head no.

"Well, what do you remember?"

Tears welled in her eyes at the new softness in his tone. Her earlier fears seemed ridiculous now. He didn't want to hurt her, and the only thing deeply wrong in this place was her. People were supposed to remember who they were, but when she tried to come up with something, anything, about herself all she found was a deep well that was as empty as it was black. "I kn-know that I'm supposed to know who I am," she said. "But I don't. I just don't. Who am I? Who are you? What is this place? Why did I wake up hurting so much? I don't understand any of it. I don't, I don't, I d —"

A finger pressed to her lips. "Don't go dotty on me, Ellsworth." he said.

She pulled back enough so she could speak. "I'm not." Trying to move farther away from him proved impossible when he was bracing the back of her head with a hand like he was bridling an animal. Irritation sparked in her miles beneath her fear and confusion. "And stop touching me."

He did so without a second's hesitation, murmuring an apology, and both those things hammered down the rest of her fear. His forearms rested on his trousered thighs and his fine, white hands dangling off his knees. Head lowering, he turned his gaze to the floor as if he'd spotted some fascinating insect crawling along the marble. "I can tell you who you are," he began. He looked at her through his coppery eyelashes, then away. Shyness would've seemed the reason for that if his eyes hadn't been so alive. "Do you want to know?"

The answer came to her at once. It was a moment before she worked up enough courage to say it, however. "Yes."

After giving a single nod, he went on. "You're Elise of the Ellsworth family, you're nineteen years of age, and you're a freak just like me."

Her head swam with this small flood of facts. Most of the words made sense, but one didn't. "I don't ... I don't understand," she said. "A freak? Why are you making insults instead of explaining things?"

"It's no insult." He nodded, directing his chin at what lay behind her. "I threw that bed aside like it was nothing, remember?"

As if she could forget that. The suddenness of it, the noise, the terror. "Yes," she said, "yes, I remember."

Something of what she felt must've come through in his words because he looked faintly apologetic. "I hadn't meant to scare you, I'd meant to find you. And when I hadn't, when I saw the edge of your nightgown under the bed like that, I'd thought ..." His shoulders twitched a shrug. "Doesn't matter what I thought. Anyway, doing things like that makes me a freak," he said. "Other freaks like to give themselves cute nicknames, but I know what I am: the impossible made possible."

She'd been wrong. Some memories remained in her. His talk of freaks and impossibilities awoke more than a few in her. "You've read too many comic books."

The young man stood up from his crouch. He took a few steps back until he was standing near the bed on other side of the big doors. He folded up a leg to stand like a crane, then casually jabbed his foot back. The bed exploded backward. It crashed into the next bed over in a great squeal of metal, and both of them careened into yet another bed. His foot sank back down to the floor with a short, soft tap. "Yeah," he said, reaching up a hand to adjust his horn-rimmed glasses, "I always have liked the funnies."

Elise — and that name felt right, somehow — stared at the carnage behind him. He'd barely tapped the bed with the sole of his shoe, and yet it'd flown back as if it'd been tissue paper in a gale. Those beds had bent and twisted together with the force of his mild tap. No one could do that, it was ...

"Impossible," she whispered.

"Maybe for other people."

Her hands ached. She looked down at them; they'd curled into fists at some point, but she couldn't remember when. Elise relaxed her fingers. "Can I do that too?" she said. "Move things without even trying?"

Yellow light flashed off his glasses as he tilted his head at her. "No, you're special in a different way."

Special. That word trilled warmly inside her. Could she really be ...? "Are we the only people like this?" she said.

He slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, then rocked back onto his heels. For a moment, it seemed as if he wouldn't answer her. "There are other people with other powers." As if sensing her next question, he added, "We're called a lot of things, but the name that we use around here is 'Extraordinaries.' Anyone who's not a complete square will just call himself an Ex, though." He dragged his hands back out of his pockets. "But that's enough interrogation; you can't sit around on this cold floor."

She tried to protest when he came to her. He didn't acknowledge a word of it, just plucked her up like a feather and spirited her away. His arms didn't feel very muscular, and the fact she could feel that through the thin layers of her nightgown set a furnace roaring in her cheeks. No, as far as men went, he wasn't remarkably tall or broad. Average, if anything, and a bit on the wiry side. With those glasses, he looked like an academic only a few years into college. But he held her without faltering or losing his grip. His strength didn't have an easy explanation. Her mind drifted to cheap paper filled with daring heroes and fantastical villains, people who did impossible things.

Before she knew it, he'd set her onto the bed she'd woken in. She refused him when he tried to make her get back into the covers; he compromised by tucking them around her where she sat. He busied himself with something sitting on the table between her bed and the one on the right of it. There was a dainty click and then a hiss. A light unfurled in the bedside lamp. It wasn't the clean light of electricity, but the fuzzy, golden light of gas. She strained forward for a better look as he turned the light up a bit more — a metal tube led from the back of the lamp and straight down into a small hole in the floor.

"Gaslights?" she said, when he noticed her wandering attention. "Those sure are old-fashioned."

He settled into a white metal chair by the lamp's table. "A lot of things are in this anthill." He crossed his legs, then pushed up the sleeve of his jacket to check a golden watch. "Someone will have heard us playing around by now, so it won't be long before they show up to investigate." He tugged his sleeve down. "If you have any delicate questions, you should ask them while you still have a chance."

That bit about "delicate questions" sounded like a joke of some kind, but she wasn't laughing. Didn't feel like laughing, not now or in a thousand years. A storm of questions swirled in her head, so many that she had trouble picking the first one. But she forced herself to choose. "Do we know each other?"

His attention turned to his glasses next. He took them off and stared at some defect that only he could see. "In a way." He yanked the pocket square out of his suit jacket, and cleaned his glasses as he spoke. "We both live in the same town. That means going to the same schools, the same markets, the same movie theater ..." He squinted at his work, then blew on one of the lenses. After a good, long look, he seemed satisfied. He put his glasses back on. "It's hard for us to escape each other in a town like Valens Valley. Hard for anyone."

"Is that where this hospital is? Valens Valley?" The name didn't sound familiar, though that meant nothing when someone had a head as empty as hers was.

Now he fiddled with his pocket square, a brilliant yellow bit of cloth. His movements were quick, precise, and she couldn't help but watch them. "This isn't a hospital," he said. "It's the University's clinic — Rambling University's clinic." He tucked the pocket square where it belonged, and it stood against the navy blue of his jacket in a brilliant point of color. "That's where you are, and where you've been for the past nine days."

Nine days. That seemed a terribly long time. "Why am I here?" She tightened the covers around herself. Only in the light of the lamp did she finally see that one of her hands had a big, faded yellow-green bruise on the back of it. An old bruise. No doubt other bruises like it covered other parts over her body. "What's happened to me?" Something he'd said to her before came back to her. "You said that I'd taken a spill. Does that mean that I had a bad fall?"

"Do you really think you fell?" he said.

She would've said yes, but something in his tone snagged at her like a hook. He was saying something else with that question of his, he had to be. Then the light behind her swelled like a sunrise, and her words shrank back just as she shrank down onto her bed. Footsteps joined the light, echoing down what sounded like a very long and very wide corridor. There were so many of them, too many. A lot of people were coming for her and when they had got her they would ... they would ...

Her knees hit the floor. Blankets and sheets avalanched around her. She had slipped off the mattress without feeling herself fall. Her eyes closed like tight fists. For the second time in one night, she found herself picked up, blankets and all, and placed back in her bed.

The young man squeezed her shoulders so lightly that she might've imagined the touch. "They won't hurt you," he said, "and that's a promise."

Elise jerked her head up, eyes flying open wide to seek him out. He had left his chair to stand at the foot of the bed, and there he watched the people coming for them. She didn't dare look in the same direction — even if she had tried the privacy screen wouldn't have let her see a thing. All she could do was listen, helplessly, as an entire army stomped her way.