Stepping out of the signal isolation chamber, part of me had been anticipating I’d immediately get hit by a cacophony of power signals. Thankfully, nothing like that happened. I could feel some, distantly, and it was like someone was lightly touching an old bruise. Not painful, per se, but definitely sore and uncomfortable. It might have been more severe if my expectations had been met, but the few signals that hit me barely elicited a wince.

  Still, it was enough to show I wasn’t back to 100% yet, if even a few distant signals were bringing me discomfort. I was going to have to do something about that. Perhaps I’d learn to tamp down on my own signal, preventing it from resonating with any I came in contact with. Or maybe I’d be able to train it up like a muscle, growing its strength and endurance. Either way, I couldn’t allow myself to spend five hours bedridden and however many more after that off kilter after a few seconds of focusing myself on a signal.

  Dr Klein followed me out into the observation room. It was about the same size as the isolation chamber itself, with two walls covered entirely in computer screens, showing various data feeds and a view of the four camera angles. More than half of the screens were inactive, with the actual power testing apparatus turned off for now.

  We crossed straight through the room to a door directly on the other side. This one was much lighter, and didn’t give that telltale pressurised hiss that showed it was leading to a sealed space. Beyond was a fairly familiar corridor, though I doubted I’d ever been to this particular location. Superverse had a thing for a white aesthetic, in their research areas. The big logo printed across the wall in front of me was a dead giveaway, too.

  The corridor stretched a long distance in either direction, and there were few people around to give me a cue on which way to go. I looked back at Dr Klein, and he nodded towards our right.

  My thoughts were a bit muddled as we made our way down the corridor. No words were exchanged between us, as we’d already agreed it best not to get too deep into things if I was determined to keep my potential abilities a secret. Seeing Dr Klein that interested in me, personally, as a genuine subject rather than an odd point of curiosity to appease Ashika, was surreal.

  That was part of what had me so distracted. Another large element was, naturally, the theory of what my signal was doing. Already, I was thinking up ways to test it, methods to train it. Every new idea had me giddy. I was itching to get out there and learn everything I could, poke at it from every angle. The possibility of gaining my own power in and of itself was tantalising enough, but here I was faced with the prospect of learning more about powers in general, and it was difficult to overstate how much that excited me. It was all I could do not to skip down the corridor. My body was filled with manic energy, waiting to be unleashed on so many questions.

  If there was any one thing that could effectively tamper that mood, though, it was what I knew was heading my way imminently.

  Overdoing it wasn’t an uncommon thing for me. Incidents of arriving home late, drenched in sweat and too tired to muster anything more than a grunt, had been frequent in the past couple of years. No matter how much I insisted I was being careful and knew not to overstress my body too much and so on, the same lectures came my way. I could understand them, to be fair.

  From the outside looking in, it probably did look like I was being ridiculously reckless in my pursuit of power, and it was only a matter of time before I got hurt.

  In other words, the scolding coming my way for essentially rendering myself comatose for five hours, requiring transport to a specialise facility, was going to be unpleasant.

  A grimace snuck onto my face as that reality started to set in. The thing was, if it was just Ashika and Maisie, it wouldn’t be so bad. While they could scold me down to the bone under the right circumstances, and they were definitely going to be giving me an earful about this one, I could at least be sure that, at the end of the day, they’d be somewhat understanding. Ashika especially. She’d forget about it by tomorrow. And Maisie would, ultimately, just be happy I was okay.

  Uncle Adam, on the other hand, was liable to keep bringing this incident up for… Well, indefinitely. We weren’t a family who talked about our issues, generally speaking. Emotions and personal problems didn’t tend to come up in the Shaw household, except for the most extreme of circumstances. The situation with Maisie that had led to the confrontation with Marquise was the exception, not the rule.

  But that didn’t mean we didn’t talk at all. And in this family, the topic of conversation typically centred around the family business.

  Superheroes, in other words.

  However far you went out in my family tree, you’d find superheroes. Cousins, aunts, uncles. Even a few grandparents. Old age was no longer the problem it used to be, if you had the right connections. Most of them weren’t famous. In fact, the majority were closer to a guy like Tumble than they were to Maisie’s promising career. But there was still a family pride in it, and they all generally knew the business inside and out.

  They knew what it took, was the important part. They knew, and many had told me repeatedly, that you needed something better than an F-rank on the Shimada Scale to do anything significant in the hero game.

  Thankfully, Uncle Adam wasn’t one of those. I don’t think I would’ve been able to stomach living with him for the last couple of years if he had been.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of voicing his concerns about my stubborn refusal to accept powerlessness. Oh, he didn’t phrase it like I should give up, and I don’t think he even believed I should. But he was more than ready to bring up any and all past incidents to highlight a pattern of behaviour he deemed unhealthy, trying to push me to slow down, take things easy.

  As if I ever could.

  So it came as no surprise to me when we found him waiting for us at the first turn in the corridor, leaning against the wall with his head tilted back, eyes closed. The fact he was dressed in his grey-and-black pinstriped three-piece suit was a bad sign; it meant he’d come straight here from work, and hadn’t left to change since. His messy salt and pepper hair was a further ill omen, since he preferred to keep it in check whenever he could.

  “Oh, Mr Whitaker,” Dr Klein said, greeting him with cheer. “Good news. Your nephew here is awake and well!”

  Uncle Adam opened his eyes, and immediately his power signal flared to life. I grimaced, feeling it weigh on my own signal like I’d draped a bag of sand over a bruise. I deeply wished I could tune it out. His pale grey irises curved open like the aperture on a camera, faintly glowing—his power sign would have been a big hint to his capabilities if I didn’t already know them.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Insight was the name he used on the job. He saw things.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” he said, his voice deep and gravelly, like he smoked five packs a day. I knew he’d never touched the death sticks. “It was very kind of you to go out of your way for him like this.”

  Dr Klein waved him off, briefly glancing between Adam and me. “It was no trouble. I was already somewhat familiar with Mister Shaw’s situation when Miss Reddy came to me about it, and the isolation chamber wasn’t in use.”

  “Still, it was kind of you,” Adam said. His attention turned to me, and he stared into my eyes for a long moment before sighing. “What inspired you to such recklessness this time, Emmett?”

  “In my defence, I had no way of knowing it would do this to me,” I said.

  “From what I understand, you were already feeling unwell, and then pushed yourself further.” He paused, and there was a shift in the power sign of his eyes, the aperture narrowing slightly. “Vixen said you made a convincing case, and I could tell she genuinely believed you. Looking at you now, I think you were aware of the possibility of problems arising.”

  “I’ll repeat: I had no way of knowing it would do this to me. At most, I thought it would just worsen the symptoms I was already experiencing, and I’d have to sleep it off when I got home. ”

  Adam frowned. “And you would have done it anyway if you did know.”

  I nodded. “If I knew what I’d get out of it, yes. Without hesitation. I’d do it a thousand times over, even if it meant months in that room back there.”

  “What did you get out of it? I can see you haven’t formed a foundation.”

  I didn’t bother asking him what he could see that told him that. He wouldn’t tell. “An answer I hadn’t considered yet,” I said. “I know a few things about my power signal I didn’t before, and I have a bunch of theories I want to test out.”

  Adam blinked, and his irises changed once more. They got smaller this time, like he’d switched out the lens, and there was a faint twinkle right at its centre, like a distant star. Another blink, and they were back to that wide aperture. “Okay. I suppose there’s no point in mentioning that this is yet another data point that shows me I should be concerned about you.”

  “You totally just did mention it, though…”

  “I suppose I did,” Adam said, and then, apropos of nothing, turned one-eighty degrees and started ambling down the corridor, hands stuffed in his pockets. “Let’s go grab Maisie and Ashika, and they can shout at you in the car. They’re quite irate.”

  “So I’ve been told,” I said, grimacing as I moved to follow.

  After some brief assurances that Adam knew where to go, Dr Klein awkwardly said his goodbyes, splitting off down another corridor that looked like a dead end. Sure enough, Uncle Adam soon navigated us through a winding series of white corridors until the space opened out into some sort of reception room without any issue—not that I had ever doubted his sense of direction. He probably picked out the correct route by watching the history of the footsteps on the floor, or something equally absurd.

  His power signal never dimmed. I thought about saying something, but decided against it.

  The reception room was a simple space, maintaining the scientific research facility vibe of the rest of the corridors I’d seen so far. About the size of a basketball court, though its ceiling was a regular height, its dominating feature were the rows of comfortable-looking white couch chairs laid out for the people waiting for whatever appointments they had here. The walls themselves were white, but interspersed in equal intervals were vertical screens that showed off various advertisements for Superverse’s shows.

  “Where exactly are we?” I asked.

  “Beneath the Colosseum,” Adam replied, gesturing for me to go ahead. “The facilities down here aren’t as advanced as what they have up in the Tower, but luckily the isolation chamber was all that was needed.”

  Over in one corner of the room was a series of flashy white vending machines with touch screen interfaces, and before one of them stood Ashika and Maisie. Both of them had changed their outfits, Ashika switching out for a new tracksuit, for some reason, while Maisie had gone for camo print leggings and a grey hoodie. Their heads were close together in fierce debate, their hissed whispers audible even across the room, though I couldn’t make out the subject of their argument.

  “Yo,” I said as I came up behind them.

  They both went still. There was a moment of silence. Eerily coordinated, the two slowly turned their heads towards me, showing off their blank faces.

  A lesser man would have run away at that point. I was made of sterner stuff, though, and so, despite the alarms blaring in the back of my mind, I was able to hold my hands up and say, “Sorry for causing you trouble.”

  Funnily enough, that didn’t seem to mollify them.

  “What should we do with his bones once we’re done with him?” Ashika mused.

  “Sell them to a lab. They’ll want to study how a guy’s skull can be so dense,” Maisie replied, her voice equally mild.

  “Oh, I don’t know about the skull. Wasn’t really planning to leave it intact.”

  “Understandable, but my power might let me reconstruct it if you don’t smash it into too many pieces.”

  “Good to know. What about his stuff? Give that away to charity, ya think?”

  Maisie snapped her fingers. “Actually, I was thinking it would be better to keep everything is its place as a sort of museum. People would come from far and wide to see how the world’s biggest idiot lived.”

  “Damn. Why didn’t I think of that? You’re so smart, big sis. Unlike some people.”

  “Oh, I’m just capable of thinking things through, is all.”

  Ashika gave an exaggerated sigh. “A truly rare trait, these days.”

  Neither of them had looked away from me throughout that entire exchange.

  Meanwhile, my shoulders were somewhere around my ears, and my wince was deepening with every word. “You guys done?”

  Maisie took a step closer to me, peering into my eyes. “I don't know. Are we?”

  Ashika matched her, on my other side. “The only done thing around here is your life once I’m finished with you.”

  “We’ve moved on from that,” Maisie whispered.

  “Oh, okay,” Ashika whispered back. Then louder, “Alright, serious time. What the fuck, dude? There’s pushing yourself and then there’s pushing yourself, and I thought you knew the difference.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Genuinely. I thought I knew the difference, too.” I gestured around me. “I had no idea this would happen.”

  “What did happen?” Maisie asked.

  I grimaced. “Can we talk about that in the car?”

  The girls agreed to give me a stay of execution, but they exuded menace at my back the entire way down to the parking lot, where they sandwiched me in the back seats of Adam’s black sedan. I could feel their glares on either side of my head throughout the surprisingly long journey from the car park through to the streets outside the Colosseum, but I remained resolutely silent all the way to the freeway.

  And once there, I decided to take refuge in audacity.

  “I have a plan,” I said, “and I want you guys to help me.”

  Discord :)