2009

“If you want to use your abilities, they need to be like an extension of your own body” Said Sid, standing at the other end of the gym. “You need to be able to move with it, fight with it, treat it like another limb. Your power is you, you are your power.” She tipped a bucket full of baseballs out to the ground, and levitated two into the air. “Close your eyes.”

Jodie did as instructed, and flushedBig Pete’s ring with power. She focussed her hearing, waiting to hear the ball whistling through the air. She heard nothing, and the first ball folded her in half. She put her hands up, protecting her face and waving the other around to cover as much of her body as possible. She tried to put up a wall of force, but it was too much effort, too much at once, and thought the second one was blocked through sheer luck, Jodie practically collapsed before the third was even thrown.

“Again.”

2021

Jodie downed her fifth shot. The Sense made it impossible for Jodie to get past a light buzz, but she could try. It was pervasive, a reflex whenever she wore the ring around her neck, one that she had no conscious control over, no more than she did her sight or her hearing. Jodie had learned to live with a consciousness that extended the limits of her body. The Sense dusted people’s minds for the most obvious of surface thoughts and identified everything within whatever room Jodie was in, larger if she tried. It was, in essence, like having the answer to every question dumped in her mind. What were everyone’s names? Who was paying by card, who by cash? Was the man approaching the bar about to order a drink, or offer to buy her one? That one she didn’t need The Sense for.

“Two doubles of spiced rum and a mojito for good measure.” She said, before he had the chance to make his offer. He was relatively handsome, the kind of man who slid through life on a sharp jawline and not much personality. He smiled, as he’d practiced a thousand times in front of the mirror, and called the order. “Celebrating something?”

“My girlfriend died yesterday.”

“Damn. that’s heavy.” he sat further back on his stool, no longer leaning over her. “Do you wanna like…”

“Fuck off.” Jodie took the drinks as they arrived.

“Hey I just want to help, A girl I dated once nearly died-”

“Fuck off.”

“Fine. Bitch.” he muttered, and went back to his group, who jeered at his return. Jodie lifted the drink to her lips. It smelled off, imperceptible to anyone else, and it was fizzing in one corner. She took a sip to make sure, and with a pulse of The Sense burned off the Rohypnol he’d slipped in the drink. Finally. An excuse.

2009

“You’re relying too much on the senses you can already use. You’ll never progress like that, no more than if you tried to hear pictures.” Sid’s voice was barely intelligible behind the earmuffs Jodie had been forced to wear. Between that and the blindfold, she could barely stand up straight. Every baseball sent her to the ground. Another, another. Jodie launched a wave of energy, randomly, and the next ball didn’t collide. She’d done it. She’d won! She’d unlocked her power and she’d-

The next ball took her in the shoulder. Unannounced. Jodie gritted her teeth and focused. She put up another wall of power, but this time instead of making it solid, she turned it into a web. She spun as many lines as she could keep track of, and traced them with her mind. Standing up, she passed through one of them. Jodie grinned. She saw herself.

2021

The man stopped screaming by the third time she mashed his face into the dumpster, mostly because his nice jawline was too broken to allow the sound through. Jodie dropped him, and he fell to the ground, gurgling. Two of his friends emerged into the car park, following the noise. They noticed Jodie standing over their friend, illuminated by the single light over the door, and rushed over immediately. Bravado. Jodie was a machine, a weapon. Drugged, intoxicated and without The Sense they wouldn’t be a match for her. She met the first, grabbing a wide, careless punch and shattering his arm through the elbow. The second saw, and tried to run, but she palmed the back of his head with superhuman strength, tripped him, and fractured his skull against a nearby step. He’d live. For now

2009

One in five balls hurled passed through Jodie’s web. Out of those, maybe one in three she managed to deflect. It wasn’t good enough for Sid. nothing but perfection was enough, and Jodie refused to fall short. The balls came from every angle, the bucket long since run out, and Jodie kept her arms in front of her, in the boxing guard she’d been taught. She was getting better, she could stay upright even when she got hid. One strand of her web alerted her, and she side-stepped one, another, a third. She didn’t celebrate. Celebrating meant letting your guard down, letting your guard down meant pain. It was a lesson Sid had spent seven hours that day teaching her, and Jodie would not forget it. As the strands imprinted themselves in her mind, Jodie strung up more. Splitting energy to make them thinner. The web got more complex, to the point that it stopped feeling like a web. It was just the way things were. She felt herself in it, and Sid, and the balls. She could count them if she tried. With her new sense came balance, she knew where every part of her body was, she could control it. If she really tried, she could make some of the strands real, just for a moment, and help her. That was what she did when she couldn’t dodge the balls, bouncing them off the air. Sid noticed and started to hurl more. Sometimes there would be two in the air at once, eventually, it got to the point where Jodie never stopped moving. Her mind stopped making decisions, her body and her web decided what to do, her mind just gave orders. She moved in ways she didn’t know she could, dancing and deflecting before she registered each baseball.

“Stop.” Jodie felt the words more than she heard them. “We’re done. You did well.”

Jodie peeled off the blindfold, and dropped the earmuffs to the ground. One hundred and eight baseballs were strewn about the room, a day’s worth of training had left marks on the walls and shattered everything that could be broken. Jodie beamed, she’d done well. Sid had told her that. Jodie was ecstatic. But not ecstatic enough to notice the knife flying at her through the air.

Jodie span in place to face it and reached both hands up to grab it out of the air. It was moving too fast for her hands to grasp before it buried itself in her eye. But her hands were not all she had. The knife froze in place inches from her face, and Jodie lowered it into her hands. She looked at Sid. Sid was smiling. She was smiling!

2021

Jodie blocked another hit with Jawline’s face. He was still alive, barely, and anyone else would have struggled to hurl him around like a ragdoll. Jodie was not anyone else. This was training. She’d been too weak to save Chloe, she would never stop training. Not the body, but the mind.

Jodie hated killing. It left an imprint on her, a horrible thing. Back at the flat, before the explosion, she’d tried not to kill. She’d maimed, crippled, but not killed. With the time she’d wasted, she might as well have killed Chloe herself. She’d purged her need for sight, for sound, for anything not provided by The Sense. She could purge this too. Five people lay at various stages of injury around her, the rest of that man’s friend group. Including the man himself, that was six lessons to teach herself.

She had taught herself four by the time her phone rang.

“Green grass”

“Blue water. She’s back” Addie responded.

Chloe.

Jodie dropped the fifth and hung up, but hesitated. Something wasn’t right. Jodie picked up the man again. He was holding her necklace. The one with the ring on it. She wasn’t wearing any other rings. For almost a full two minutes, Jodie had been using The Sense without her magic.

2009

Jodie lay in her cot, silently drawing webs out. It wasn’t second nature yet. That wasn’t perfect. She would be perfect. The lines fractured, more and more. Thinner, more plentiful, till they were the size of molecules. Then smaller still. There was no limit to this aspect of her power, only how much she could control. A cockroach plucked at a spider’s web on the other side of the room, angry that the spider was in its way. Jodie liked spiders. She crushed the cockroach with a twist of her fingers. That drew ants. Flies. Things that ate other things. Jodie had done that, she’d changed things. It wasn’t a power she’d ever had before, nothing she’d done had ever changed things before she had her power. Natalie had told her things, things about people who wanted to hurt those who had power. Jodie wouldn’t let them. Jodie was a protector, and she wouldn’t let anyone be hurt, ever again.

2021

Chloe was unconscious, barely breathing. Her heart was limping along with the Component’s help. But Jodie could feel the rush of blood, the hiss of air. Chloe was alive. Jodie crouched by her head and moved her hair out of her face, Chloe hated it in her face. Katrine said she would wake up in a day, maybe two. Jodie kissed her forehead and left her to rest. There would be so much destruction, but she would protect Chloe. Never again.