Information flooded my mind. Too much, too fast. In moments, I was overwhelmed, my brain unable to handle the deluge, and something had to give. Something shifted to the side, and my signal ballooned outwards until it was larger than my body, so large that I lost all feeling aside from that supernatural sense. Or maybe it was that my body was shrinking. It was impossible to tell.

  Everything else went numb. The world turned dark. Sound vanished. The background sensations of my body faded away. All I was left with was my power signal.

  It was the same black void I’d experienced after exhausting myself that first time, except here it wasn’t accompanied by exhaustion. There was nothing like that. In fact, I felt pristine, brand new, like I hadn’t just worked myself to the brink of collapse. Visualising my own signal, it was like a stretch of gossamer fabric swaying in a gentle breeze, utterly neutral. Isolated, like there were no other signals around me.

  Except there were. Countless thousands of them, maybe even millions, stretching out for what had to be miles. I’d never thought about the range of my signal sense before, never imagined I’d have a good opportunity to test it, but I knew it was barely a fraction of what I was experiencing now.

  My signal sense was passive in this state, giving me no more information about other signals unless I went looking for it. But with this newfound clarity, I could pinpoint their exact distance from me. The one right by my side had to be Ashika. There were two behind me, a few metres away. In front there were a dozen or so. Within a few blocks, there were several hundred, including the area I remembered the super villain hideout was located. It seemed Marquise’s people had the place entirely surrounded.

  It didn’t stop there. I could feel signals on the next street, hundreds of metres away. They stretched out in every direction. It was a harrowing experience, knowing just how many powers were active in this small portion of the world. Feeling them for myself. I felt like I’d been transformed into a cloud, draped across the city.

  And I knew I hadn’t just achieved a sudden power up out of nowhere. This was outside intervention. There was only one person I knew who could do such a thing, although I hadn’t known she was capable of it until this moment.

  I tried to speak, but the disconnect from my body rendered me mute, powerless. For all intents and purposes, my entire being was now my power signal. Trying to move that earned me an instant response.

  “Allow me to pose you a few challenges, Mr Shaw,” Marquise’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Assuming neither I nor anyone else had moved, I couldn’t help noticing there was no sign of a signal in the spot where she’d been standing in front of me. “Let’s start with this: the information you relayed via your distress beacon indicated you believed there are possibly sixteen villains present on site. Count again, if you please.”

  The impulse to ignore her was strong. I had no teeth to grit and no eyes to glare with and no fists to clench, but I wanted to rage against her, to defy whatever ridiculous game she was playing with me while the hostages were still in danger. It was good for her I had no mouth.

  “Indulge me,” Marquise said. “I assure you our good mayor’s family will leave with not a hair on their heads harmed.”

  What even was her angle here? By the looks of things, she already knew perfectly well how many were present in the supervillains’ warehouse. I counted seventeen now, but that was only active signals. There could be more. My sense was unreliable in this situation.

  “What do you mean by active signals, out of curiosity?” Marquise asked, alarming me. Was she reading my thoughts?

  A second later, her words registered, and bafflement overshadowed trepidation. How could she possibly not know what I meant by active signals? It was only possible for me to sense powers when people were actively using them. If that wasn’t the case for her, then I could completely understand why she made her office a signal isolation chamber.

  “An interesting hypothesis, but one I believe is incorrect. Consider this: does one need to activate their powers to get a signal reading for the Shimada Scale?”

  The answer to that was no. The implications hit me immediately. She was right—there was no such thing as an active signal, just an active power. All the research on the matter made signals out to be a phenomenon that was always consistently present and thus measurable. Everyone had one. It wasn’t something that just went inert when it wasn’t in use.

  But what did that mean for me? I knew already that my signal sense was, in reality, my own signal reacting to the others in my range, resonating with powers when they were active. In its passive state, it was like my signal was merely brushing against those others, feeling that they were there and nothing more. When I actively tried to focus my sense, that was my signal emulating the outside signal to a greater degree, which inevitably failed and exhausted me for reasons I didn’t yet understand.

  I figured there were two options here: either my signal sense was misnamed and was only resonating with powers, making it more like a power sense, or I just hadn’t figured out how to analyse signals that weren’t in use.

  Considering my experience with the signal measurement machines in Superverse’s labs, I was almost certain it was the latter.

  From the context of her leading questions, Marquise already knew that.

  “Indeed,” she said. “Given that you can interact with signals at all, you shouldn’t have any problem interacting with them when the powers they provide aren’t currently in use.”

  That much was evident, but the question was how. It didn’t feel like a matter of just looking deeper, or focusing harder, or any other tricks I’d tried before. I wasn’t even convinced it was a matter of precision.

  Everything I did with my signal sense to interact with other signals was, ultimately, manipulation of my own signal. My methods were crude, blindly messing about with a system I didn’t have a manual for. It was like I was trying to operate a complex machine without any idea what the millions of buttons did. But it worked, somewhat. I hadn’t exactly advanced by leaps and bounds, but the pulse method I’d employed earlier showed I was improving my control over my signal.

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  With all that in mind, knowing my signal sense was all about resonating with other signals, what would I have to do to my own signal in order to sense ones which weren’t actively employing their powers? There was an obvious answer, but I didn’t see how it would be possible.

  Even if I somehow pulled it off, intensifying the strength of my own signal seemed like a surefire way to knock myself out.

  “Don’t concern yourself with strain, for the moment,” Marquise’s voice sounded like it came from behind me, but I hadn’t been aware of anything moving. I wondered what was going on in the real world. Was I standing there gaping like a buffoon? Had I collapsed to the ground, and I’d return to find my body in bed in another isolation chamber? Or was she doing the same thing as she had with Maisie? Whatever the answer, Marquise didn’t share.

  “Test your idea,” she said instead. “For the next few minutes, consider yourself to be in something like a simulation. Let your imagination run free. Attempt techniques that might have seemed too dangerous to you, in other circumstances. There will be no consequences.”

  As soon as I heard that, my mind went straight to the task of cataloguing the active powers in the supervillains’ lair. If I had no need to worry about consequences, that surely included the exhaustion that came with analysing someone’s signal. I hesitated a moment, waiting for any censure. But Marquise didn’t speak up to stop me, so I got to it.

  I started with the small cluster of villains towards one end of their warehouse, where the hostages were presumably being held. If I was to use Ashika as a measuring stick again, these guys seemed to be a mix of D and C ranks on the Shimada Scale. They could bring some decent power to bear, but nothing too intimidating.

  Focusing on the closest one gave me pause. Not because of anything to do with his powers, but because of my own signal. I’d never had the chance to examine my own signal in any kind of depth before, aside from a handful of seconds where mine had resonated with Vixen’s before I promptly fell unconscious.

  Every other time I used my sense to analyse a power, my brain had focused on interpreting the information gleaned from the other signal. It made sense. In those cases, my signal was resonating with another. It wasn’t providing any information about itself, because there was nothing to give.

  But like this, where I was experiencing the world through nothing but my signal, I got new context. My signal resonated with the other, just like it always did. I spent a few seconds analysing the information gained; a foundation related to jumping, an aspect for landing, another for orientation, a third for air resistance. I filed them away, my attention pulled back towards myself, fascinated.

  Never before had I had the chance to really examine what my signal was doing in situations like these. In its neutral state, it was practically formless. An ethereal cloud of nothing. It was so faint, I’d never be able to detect it if I wasn’t being forcefully mentally disconnected from the rest of my body’s functions, as if someone had grabbed me and forced me to stare at one thing and one thing only.

  When it resonated with another, it gained substance, but, to my surprise, didn’t truly attempt to mimic the other signal in every way. In resonance and frequency, yes, but there was a certain aura to it that was hard to describe, something I hadn’t noticed and wouldn’t have been able to notice if Marquise wasn’t doing… whatever she was doing.

  “And what will you do with this information, Mr Shaw?” Marquise’s voice came from above, this time, like she was the voice of the Lord from on high.

  I didn’t know. The implications of this hadn’t registered yet, since I hadn’t truly wrapped my head around what I was seeing/feeling/hearing/experiencing. There was something deeper to signals, something individual, and that applied even to me, the guy whose signal was lower than F-rank.

  “Allow me to give you a hint,” she said, and this time, the world contracted. It shrunk and narrowed, all the other signals beyond the ones within the warehouse hideout vanishing. Even the ones next to me disappeared, and I had to suppress a sudden jolt of panic. It was easy, when my body was so distant from me. It was perhaps more accurate to say I knew I should be worried about no longer being able to sense Ashika somewhere nearby, and all I had to do to overcome that feeling was… not worry about it. Marquise had no reason to do anything to her.

  My attention was forcibly directed to the warehouse, to the point I felt like I was there in among the villains. All sixteen signals floated down and surrounded me in a ring like they’d been dragged over by force, and I couldn’t help noticing there were several gaps in the encirclement. There was no need to turn around to take them in one by one, because I had no sense of direction like this. It was like I was looking every way at once with 360 degree vision.

  At the same time, I could still sense their positions in the actual warehouse some distance away. It was a massive headfuck.

  “This is every human present in the warehouse, conscious and unconscious,” Marquise said, her voicing coming from outside the ring. She seemed to circle around me as she continued, “They range from E-rank to B-rank, between Level 1 and Level 8.”

  Did that include the hostages? The two girls had seemed young, but I couldn’t hope to guess whether they’d reached thirteen.

  “A reasonable question, but you’ve made another assumption,” Marquise said as her voice reached one of the wider gaps in the circle she’d placed me in. “You appear to be under the impression that signals just magically appear at the age of thirteen, and one can have a revelation some time thereafter. What makes you think that?”

  Literally all the research around powers. There had never been a single recorded case of anyone gaining a power younger than thirteen, and no power signal had been measured before that age either.

  “Why do you hold research as infallible? You of all people should be able to see that there are holes in the science. Oh, they haven’t gotten anything wrong necessarily, but I’m sure you are aware there are hundreds of questions that have yet to be answered, yes?”

  Of course I had. Just earlier today I’d been wondering about the potential that built up in some signals, which could then be tapped into for a new Revelation that would let them gain another Aspect, thus ‘levelling’ up their power. There was no clear answer for that. Why did some people start with such a higher score on the Shimada Scale than others? Why did some people seem to grow faster, while others didn’t? Even people who trained hard, like Alanna. She worked her ass off, to hear her tell it, and I’d noticed that there’d been no untapped potential in her signal. Zero.

  “Pertinent questions,” Marquise said. She sounded closer, but still outside the ring. It was hard to wrap my head around. “Please don’t take it as some false humility when I tell you I don’t have all the answers either. However, I can tell you that what they call a power signal is present from the moment a person is born.”

  The implications of that hit my mind like a meteor strike, upending the world as I knew it. New theories flooded into the cavern the metaphorical meteor had rent through my preconceived notions, but just as many questions joined them, forming a raging torrent that just left me more confused than I had been before.

  One question floated up above all the others. Her wording confused me. She had said quite specifically: ‘what they call a power signal.’ It held a weight of implication.

  If not that, then what did she call them?

  When Marquise spoke again, it was from right next to me.

  “The Soul.”