My signal sense was a strange thing. Prior to the last month or so, I hadn’t given much thought to it, but it was clear to me now that it was something different to what other people online described. I had always assumed that I was just experiencing something different because I was the latest of late bloomers. That I wasn’t fundamentally no different from anyone else, just that I'd had more time to get used to the sense. Most people had powers by 14 after all. I had already gone two years beyond that.

  Quite apart from my newly realised ability to focus it, and setting aside the fact that my own signal seemed to be resonating with others, the biggest discrepancy that had always been in clarity. In retrospect, it should have been obvious. I should have been training this ability for years. But I hadn’t, and now I had so much to catch up on.

  It frustrated me greatly. Right now, I shouldn't have been forced to rely on a technique I was going to be developing on the spot. It should've been just another trick in my repertoire. A skill mastered long ago. Something I could pull out at will and wield with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.

  Instead, I was going to have to build something from scratch under the greatest of pressures. Far from ideal. But they say necessity is the mother of invention, and I was in deep need right now. Failure here was, objectively, not the end of the world. The heroes hopefully already knew where the villains were hiding out. Even if they didn't have precise locations or information on their enemies abilities, I was sure they'd win the day.

  However, I refused to leave anything to chance. I wanted to stack the deck as much as possible. Those hostages were getting out alive, and those fucking villains were getting what was coming to them if it was the last thing I did.

  Closing my eyes, I finally allowed myself to dig deeper into my signal sense. But only for an instant. That flash of information was all I needed, for the moment. Taking inspiration from the day’s training with Alanna, I took only a snapshot of the signals in my range, gaining a millisecond of new understanding that allowed me to untangle the garbled sensory data my signal sense provided me in its passive mode.

  My lips thinned. My brows ruffled. My stomach dropped, and my heart tripped over a beat and went tumbling into a horrible uneven rhythm. It felt like someone had just punched me in the chest, reaching into my lungs and somehow gripping the air in there and tearing it out.

  This was all more than just a physical reaction. Just that moment of taking in so many signals at once with severely discomforting on a level far beyond anything to do with biological functions. I had to take a moment to breathe.

  And I was still more to it than that. I felt I was allowed an emotional reaction to the discovery there were more than five signals active in the building adjacent to us. More than five villains. Several times more. Closer to 20, if I'd got things right.

  I wasted no time pulling my phone to my lips and whispering this discovery. Ashika was close enough to hear my words, and I felt her stiffen.

  “What?” She hissed. “Twenty?! What the fuck is going on here?”

  “I already suspected this wasn't just a temporary hideout,” I murmured back. “Seems like this is the base of operations for a pretty serious outfit.”

  “Shit, man. The hell are we going to do about this? Hope they're sending in a big team already?”

  “They probably would've been sending some big guns anyway, considering the severity of the crime and who it was targeted at. But I doubt the rapid response unit will be equipped to deal with this many villains in one go. Especially not when it's a hostage situation.”

  “But they'll know about it now at least, right? They'll have to put together a bigger strike team and all that, and it’ll take longer, but just knowing where the hostages are has got to make a difference.”

  “I can't say for sure whether the distress system is relaying all this information to the authorities in real time, but it's supposed to. We'll have to rely on that.” My fists clenched, fingers digging painful furrows into my palms. The sting grounded me in the moment before any memories could threaten to surface. “Still, there's more I can do until then.”

  Ashika’s hand came to rest on my shoulder and squeezed. “You sure about that? You're looking kind of clammy already, dude.”

  “I can handle it,” I said. “No other choice, anyway.”

  “Okay. If you say you can handle it, then you can handle it. I trust you.” There was a pause. “Just… be careful.”

  “Always am.”

  Ashika fell quiet, and I turned my attention back to my signal sense. Before coming in here, we had done some testing. Nothing particularly scientifically rigourous, just some basic trials to help me calibrate myself based on signal feedback. It had been quite simple: I'd repeated the feel of focusing my attention on a signal in brief flashes as best I could, as I had done with Alanna.

  But in this instance, I wasn't looking for any hint of what the power did. Aside from the fact I already knew Ashika’s power, that wasn't the goal of this endeavour. Well, not the primary one at least. If I could get some idea of what the villains could do, that would be great. But I wasn't expecting to, because I was pretty sure that actually would knock me right out, just like what has happened with Vixen.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Instead, Ashika had walked back-and-forth, and from side to side, constantly changing her location between each repetition of the trick. I had decided to call it a pulse. Like a sonar. I could already tell vaguely what direction a signal was coming from even when it was completely in passive mode. Now, I was trying to gauge how far away it was with much greater accuracy than vaguely distant and right in my face.

  Needless to say, it was not a well-developed technique. To say it was difficult was an equal understatement to saying Heracles was strong. Ashika was perhaps not the best test subject, given how her signal tended to grow stronger with prolonged use and I was relying on the strength of the signal to gauge how far it was from me, but I hardly had an abundance of willing candidates, and time was ticking away to boot.

  Doing it with one person compared to however many there was in the adjacent warehouse was an entirely different prospect. But I'd already wasted enough time lamenting my lack of practice. It was something I'd have to make up for in the future. I'd be training my signal sense at every possible opportunity from now on—I'd already intended to do that anyway.

  For now, I just had to do my best with what I had.

  I let out another pulse. Much like the first one, a lightning-fast flash of focus revealed the number of signals to me. The blowback hit me much harder this time. I felt like I had dropped a medicine ball on my chest. My heart lurched.

  I ignored it, shutting out physical sensation as best I could. Facing the wall as I was, it went without saying that all the signals I felt were in front of me. But there was more information than that. Not all of them were directly ahead. In fact, most of them weren’t. They were at off angles, doing whatever they were doing in there.

  It was like playing a memory game with flash cards. I only had a fraction of a second to take in the information, and I had to try and retain as much of it as possible. I counted sixteen active signals from that last pulse, though I had to account for the fact that there could be more villains in there with their powers currently inactive, and I didn’t know if my range covered the entire building. That info got whispered into my phone’s mic.

  Along with a mental note to test the bounds of my range in future. There were a lot of mental notes like that piling up. I’d have a whole list ready when I next got around to training.

  A few more pulses, and I was starting to build a decent idea of what was happening over there. My body and soul were protesting greatly, but I was ignoring anything physical for now.

  Calling up a rudimentary mental map of the villains’ warehouse, I tried to place where I estimated those fourteen signals were. There wasn’t that much distance between the two warehouses, so it came as no surprise that there were four signals that weren’t that far away at all, perhaps as little as ten metres ahead of me, maybe ten degrees off. It stood to reason that they were standing guard over the hostages since they were the only ones close together like that and the area they were standing in was probably the office space if the two warehouses had a similar layout, but it was impossible to say for sure. Best not to speculate.

  The biggest outlier was a good eighty degrees to my right, and rather distant, probably nestled in the very corner of the villain group’s hideout. Several more felt like they were probably along the rightmost wall, perhaps watching each of the five large cargo doors we’d been able to see from the street. A similar story number were positioned at the opposite side of the warehouse on my lift, though there was no loner in the corner on that end. The final three of the sixteen were above, presumably on catwalks closer to the ceiling.

  My repeated pulses had allowed me to deduce that many of the signals were moving around. In fact, the only one that stayed still was the one in the corner. I figured that meant they were patrolling. Keeping watch. It was another piece of evidence that pointed more towards a professional outfit, but there were still contradictions there.

  In some ways, they appeared to know what they were doing. In others, their decisions seemed questionable. But I was working with incomplete information. I couldn't say for sure what went into their thought process, so it was once again best to not come to conclusions.

  Still, I relayed my speculations into the phone. My voice sounded hoarse and strained even to my own ears. It came as no surprise when I wiped my forehead of the back of my hand and found it as sweaty as if I just ran a marathon. I ached all over, and it wasn't just because of the uncomfortable journey here. My breathing was laboured. My heart ached with every beat.

  When I fully came back to myself, I realised that Ashika’s hands were on my shoulders, and they were the only thing keeping me upright. Without her support, I would've flopped back bonelessly.

  With monumental effort, I turned my head to give her a smile. “Thanks,” I whispered. “Did you hear all that?”

  “Yup,” she replied, voice strained. She wasn't looking at me, instead staring with narrow eyes along the aisle beyond our hiding place.

  A moment later, I heard the footsteps she was surely focused on.

  “Hey, what are you kids doing down there?” A deep voice called out. It didn't take a genius to realise he were talking to us.

  The pair of shoes that came into view a heartbeat later confirmed it. A man in a high viz jacket crouched down, glaring at us. Another pair of footsteps was approaching, and beyond that another voice was calling out, asking what was happening.

  It seemed we'd been caught. But I wasn't going to panic; I had already considered this and decided on a course of action. It wasn't my favourite contingency, but it was obviously unavoidable.

  Embarrassingly, Ashika had to drag me out from under the heavy shelves because I was too weak to do much more than crawl. Stupid of me. But I didn't regret it, considering the information I'd managed to gather. It probably wouldn't make a huge difference, but I could exit this situation knowing I had done all I could to affect the outcome.

  There were three security guards there by the time I was out and up on my feet. Each one was a brick house of a man in the same security uniform with a fluorescent high visibility jacket. They looked remarkably similar, one blonde, one brunette, and one grey-haired, with sharp jawlines dotted with stubble, and piercing stares.

  They all looked equally unimpressed. I hastened to explain the situation. “Look, sorry about this,” I said. “I promise we're not here to cause any mischief. The thing is, there are some bad guys in the building next door to yours, and they've pulled some shit. We came in here so I could use my power to gather intel before the heroes arrive, but I need you guys to keep everything calm. We don't want the villains to be alerted that the authorities are aware of their location before the heroes can strike.”

  None of the three security guards reacted. Not physically.

  If I was in better shape, it might have taken me less time to realise why they had all activated their power signals.

  “Why don’t you come explain it to us in the security room?” one of them said, deceptively casual.

  Discord :)