An intercom screeched with Vihn’s voice. “Daniel, can you bring Evan topside?”

  The spectators protested, but Evan’s powers dissipated with a sigh of relief.

  Daniel sighed. “Man. Guess we’ll have to get back to it later. Come on.” He led Evan through the halls, past the marketplace, across a pathway underneath the waterfall, and up a ramp to a metal cage guarded by two rebels wearing red armbands.

  One of them stepped in front of Daniel. “Thought you were grounded, Ace?”

  The other sniggered.

  Daniel blushed. “You’re a funny guy.”

  The guard winked, then addressed Evan. “Who’s this?”

  “He’s our new addition.”

  “He’s new? I’m sure I’ve seen him.” The guard leaned in uncomfortably close.

  “Uh-” Evan stammered.

  “Probably when he came down that lift earlier, dig?” Daniel stepped between the guard and Evan.

  The guard shrugged and let Daniel and Evan cross into the cage, keeping his eyes trained on Evan until the cage ascended through a chute.

  “What was that?” Evan asked.

  Daniel shook his head. “Listen, only us in Phoenix One know who you are. Most people think Evangelos Jr. is in another part of the Federation, training to become a dictator, or whatever. The less people who know where you really are, the better. Besides, not everyone here is going to trust a GK, and others might have their own agenda if they ever found out.”

  “Own agenda? What, like kidnap me?”

  “Still bitter about that, huh? No. Worse.”

  Evan took a deep breath, reminded that he was never fully safe.

  Daniel must have noticed Evan’s shift in comfort. “But don’t worry, man, they won’t find out.”

  “Not all rebels get along, huh?”

  “That’s the beauty of freedom, everyone gets to think for their self.”

  “So,” Evan changed the topic, not wanting to get into another discussion about choice and free will, “why do people call you Ace?”

  Daniel mumbled curses to himself.

  “Huh?”

  “Ah, we’re at the top,” Daniel said.

  Blinding sunlight caught Evan off guard. He shielded his eyes as the cage stopped with a thunk. His vision finally restored as they stepped outside, and he was mesmerized once again by what he saw.

  Before them was a city overrun by thousands of trees that stretched toward the clouds. Branches and vines weaved in and out of sky skyscrapers through brick and steel. Flowers grew where windows used to be. Marshes cultivated in the streets where hundreds of birds perched upon the skeletal remains of cars and traffic lights. This was all that remained of old era Philadelphia.

  “Craaap. Should have started the tour with this, huh?” Daniel said.

  Evan shut his mouth, which had been dumbly hanging open. “Sorry. This is… it’s a jungle.”

  “Thought you’d like some fresh air,” Vihn said. He sat on the hood of his Jeep, its windows welded with scraps of metal where it had been shot the night before. He hopped off the hood, reached into the glove compartment, and rustled through some papers.

  “You won’t do much against purifiers if you keep passing out every time you use your powers.” He pulled out a metal pen and a flower vial, then held them out side-by-side. “These flowers are what some of us call a conduit. Something that you can manipulate with your powers. You can start by doing your thing with this pen.”

  Evan took the object and clicked it. “I’m not sure there’ll be a pen left if I use my powers on it.”

  Vihn shook his head. “You said your power is molecular dispersion, right?”

  “Yeah, but that’s just some stupid name my dad’s science team came up with.”

  “So, what? Did they experiment on you? Run tests? Figure out the extent of what you can do?”

  For some reason these questions tightened around Evan’s chest like rope, but he didn’t know why. “No, I don’t remember anything like that.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Vihn sighed. “Your father was the CEO of Monolith, correct?”

  “Yeah…” He said bitterly, the recent takeover by Crain still fresh in his mind.

  “Alright, Monolith scientists understand the mess behind Affliction better than anyone else. Molecular, molecules. Dispersion, distribution.”

  Evan rolled his neck. “Where are you going with this?”

  “You might have forgot, but you did more than just disintegrate stuff when we were in Hazard Station.”

  The gruesome memory came back. The Federation soldiers whose bodies were mutilated and melded into the walls and tables, fused together by Evan’s power.

  Vihn pointed to the pen. “Start with that, try and change its form without dusting the thing, and without passing out. We’ll see if there’s more to you than a walking crematorium.” With that, he left Evan.

  The chrome exterior of the pen was slick in Evan’s hand. He clicked it again and stepped into an opening of trees.

  Daniel hung back and sprawled himself cross-legged on a fallen log, spinning a tablet between the tips of his fingers, his mouth mumbling away.

  Colored leaves rustled underneath Evan’s feet as he walked down a narrow path and sat behind a tree, out of sight. He rolled the pen back in forth in his palm. It was solid, so finely crafted. The shaft glistened in his fingertips. He unscrewed the tip and placed the ink stem carefully on the ground, and then screwed the cap back on. This way if he messed up, the ink wouldn't ruin his coat; not that the blood stains hadn’t already.

  Vihn wasn’t wrong about why the scientists called his powers molecular dispersion. It was the ability to deconstruct and manipulate matter. Destruction was all that Evan had been able to manage in the past. It took a great amount of focus to will something apart, let alone will something back together. He focused on the pen. His head throbbed as he tried to break the pen apart with his thoughts, imagining it splitting in two, perhaps even unrolling into a flat sheet of metal; all to no avail.

  “Just going to keep staring at it?” Vihn asked after an hour had passed.

  Evan sighed.

  Vihn flicked his hand, and with a faint glow of his eyes, the leaves around Evan peeled back and cleared a circle of dirt.

  Evan envied the stranger’s control.

  “Every Affliction has a drawback, it’s the handicap we get when we use our powers.” He pointed to his radiating eyes. “For me, it’s these. Big telegraph, and I can go temporarily blind when I push myself, then all I see are the dark outlines of plants. It lasted a whole month, once.”

  Evan was used to passing out and losing control when he used his powers. If something simple like Vihn’s glowing eyes never stopped, then what hope did Evan have to get over his own drawback?

  “Don’t worry kid, you’ll learn to balance it. You just need to anticipate your drawback and guide it. Think about it, Evan. You can do a lot. Destroy. Manipulate. Create? Maybe kill purifiers. Don't beat yourself down when you fail, or you might find yourself in a deeper hole.”

  His words lifted the load from Evan’s shoulders, when he ignored the killing part.

  “Let’s unleash your gift.” Vihn pointed at a weed in the dirt. Its thin stalk stuck out from the earth about a foot in the air. Small yellow buds populated its body and wavered in the wind. “If you think about it, our powers aren’t that different when it comes to their mechanics. Plants are just a form of matter like everything else. That pen might not grow, but both have a form. Both can be taken apart.” He waved his hand, and the weed snapped. The top half fell over like a tree at the hands of a lumberjack.

  “And both can be weaved back together.” With his palm stretched outward, the severed weed sprouted tendrils that pulled itself back into its original place. The parts bonded again as if nothing had happened to them. “Try it.” Vihn slipped his hands into his pockets and took a step back.

  Just take it apart, and then weave it together. Evan stretched out his arm as Vihn had. It felt silly. He brushed off the shy feeling and focused on the weed. The plant shook like a nervous animal, but to the wind rather than Evan. It taunted him by jostling. He centered his thoughts on it again, imagining it snap. But it didn’t.

  Then again. Nothing.

  He tried once more with intensity in his eyes and sweat beading. But, no, still the weed swayed unabated.

  “This sucks.” Evan sighed.

  “You’re trying to skip to the climax. You have to earn it. Start with the exposition, rising action, turning point, climax, then falling action.”

  “What the… heck?”

  Vihn frowned. “Take your time. Quit rushing.”

  Evan tried again and focused on the weed’s every detail, the light green of its stem, the small branches with buds of yellow that jutted out from it in each direction. He imagined that the plant was breathing with him. It soaked the dimming rays of the Sun and drank up whatever water was below it. He panned the base to the top, then to the center where Vihn had snapped it in half. There was a crease there, a scar. He imagined it snapping, just as before. But again, nothing happened.

  The same strategy wouldn’t work, so before giving up, he tried a different approach. He imagined how it came back together. He pictured the snapping of the plant in reverse. The detail was clear, the tendrils sprouting to each other and bonding. He imagined those tendrils pushing apart from each other.

  The scar bulged. The top half of the weed shot straight into the air, then fell back to the earth. The plant was contorted, half of the stem still in the ground, and the other twisting from it like stretched taffy, swirling in the dirt.

  “Woah, freaky, man!” Daniel’s voice cracked – having apparently wandered over to them.

  “Uh...” Evan felt two emotions, the first was frustration, the second a desire to try again.

  Vihn smirked. “That’s a good place to stop. It’s getting dark. Here, try this.” Vihn flicked a vial from his jacket at Evan and then winked. “It’s genetically altered by Monolith Industries. Healing, eating, fighting, it does it all.”

  Evan rotated the vial; in it was a familiar flower. The plant was the same size as his index finger, with five delicate, ivory petals that stroked against the glass. Despite Monolith screwing up with Titan Project, they still maintained a great influence on the Federation. Amongst this thought, Evan had another. If the rebels hadn’t invaded Monolith during the Class Rebellion and sabotaged the labs, then would it be the Federation with powers and the rebels without?

  As he got back into the elevator, yet another question came to him. The government had been quick to demonize superhumans when the issue was out of their control, but they didn’t blame the manufactures, and certainly not his father who had been the CEO. How much control did Evan’s dad really have, and what was Monolith’s original plan for Titan Project? Whatever the answers were, he didn’t know if he was ready to find out.

  Something darted across the darkened ruins, a blur of grey and gold.

  Evan’s skin crawled.

  “What’s wrong?” Vihn asked.

  Evan shook his head. “I thought I saw something.”

  “Knowing what’s out there in those ruins, you probably did.”

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