Alice stepped barefoot into the laboratory, the cold, hard floor turning her feet numb as though she'd stepped onto a frozen lake. That was something she'd had to get used to in past five weeks in ORIGIN's subterranean world. Cold. Constant, mind-numbing, strength draining, breath-stealing, merciless cold. Athena had made sure that Alice had scarcely a moment of warmth since she'd arrived for her training. She'd been made to exercise while Athena sprayed her with water from a hose. She'd had to haul concrete blocks the size of minivans up and down the length of the Ready Room, all through knee-deep, freezing mud. Athena would sometimes order her to get down on her belly and roll in the artificial surf of a man-made sea, seemingly put there in the Ready Room some days for no other apparent purpose than to make Alice miserable. And miserable she was. She exercised while tired, while hungry, in the water, in the mud, and in the dark. And in the cold. Always, in the cold.

  In fact, the only times she wasn't shivering or her teeth weren't chattering was when she was in her bed, and that was too rare and too brief to be of any comfort.

  So compared to all that, this momentary reprieve from her training to walk barefoot into a bright, sterile laboratory was like a stroll in the park. The floors really were cold, though, and her jaw was beginning to tremble.

  The huge white and gray machine looked like something of a cross between a medieval torture rack and an MRI scanner. The whole thing moved and swiveled like a gyroscope. It was so impressive and incomprehensible that when she saw it, she asked the man beside her if it was some sort of alien spacecraft.

  "No, it's not alien." It was Dr. Jaa Lee, the man she'd met the day of her tour of ORIGIN. Most staff and team members referred to him affectionately as Jolly. "But the technology is so far beyond anything we could reproduce that it might as well be from another world. Carlo Angelus, the man who invented it, had such a high IQ that many theorize he was a metahuman himself."

  Jolly was a Chinese man in his mid-twenties, and the amount of respect he seemed to provoke from the other members of the technology department led her to believe he might be a capable genius himself.

  Several medical and technology staff members worked together to secure Alice to the machine. Her wrists, ankles, torso, and head were strapped down so that she was spread-eagle over the framework of the machine. As she felt the numerous hands secure her in place, the machine began to hum so deeply that it made her teeth chatter.

  Athena, who was never far away these past weeks, watched the whole thing passively.

  "Is this what the machine is for?" she asked, trying her best to stifle her trembling. "To make me do my best impression of a star fish?" It was possible that her shakes had less to do with the temperature of the floor and perhaps to do with how being attached to this machine made her feel.

  "It's to show us your Angelus field," answered Jolly. "We've been able to detect it before with smaller equipment, but this will be the first time we will actually be able to see it."

  "What's an Angelus field?" She remembered overhearing Clawson and Jolly speaking to each other about her "field" before and had never understood what they'd meant.

  Jolly grinned, an eager student being asked his favorite question in class.

  "It's a quantum field made of non-Newtonian particles that interact with space-time. The body acts as a quantum field generator and the particles often change the metaphysical properties of the generator by allowing it to supersede the laws of Newtonian physics and thermodynamics."

  For a moment, Alice was quiet. If her hand wasn't buckled tight to one of the spokes of the machine, she would have scratched her head with it.

  "So, what's an Angelus field?" she asked again.

  "It's a nearly undetectable forcefield generated by metahumans," volunteered Athena. "We have no idea how it works. Only that it might be responsible for your abilities."

  "For example," Jolly added, "it might give you the ability to fly by allowing you to mentally control your own personal gravity field. That's my hypothesis, anyway."

  "Where does it come from?" They had Alice's interest now. Anything she could learn about herself might make her weeks-long hardship worth it.

  "We don't know."

  Well, that was a letdown.

  "How did I get it?" she tried again.

  "We don't know that either." Jolly said this with an almost embarrassed smile.

  There was a long, pregnant pause.

  "It does seem like your Angelus field might interact with that of another metahuman," Jolly added, trying to patch the gaping holes in his expertise. "You might be able to detect one another that way. It might also draw you towards each other somehow."

  Alice thought of the tugging in her insides that seemed to gently wash her towards Ethan whenever they were near.

  "Well, by all means!" she said, settling into her restraints on the machine. "Let's see my Angelus field!"

  The machine thrummed to life, and white and metal rings began to spin and rotate around her body until she could no longer follow them with her eyes. The wind of the passing rings roared in her ears, and bright flashes of light blinded her and heated her skin almost to the point of pain. Her skin prickled, like the static before a lightning strike, and soon the infinite pin prick of tiny arcs of electricity began to dance across her body. Her head swam, and she resisted the urge to vomit.

  Then the machine went quiet, and the rings slowed to a stop.

  "Get her onto the table," she heard Athena order the others in the room, "and cover her with a blanket!"

  Alice suddenly felt like that was a good idea. She was freezing cold all of a sudden, cold in a way that made the icy mud of the Ready Room seem a luxurious bath. Her body began to shake beyond control.

  Someone, Alice wasn't certain who, half-carried her to an examination table and began to check her heartbeat and her breathing.

  "Her heart rate is returning to normal," she heard a staff member say.

  Normal? I'm not sure it's beating at all! Have I ever been so cold in my whole life?

  Feeling like someone trying to move after being encased in drying concrete, Alice turned her head so she could see Jolly. He was standing at a console, the one that controlled the Angelus. A holographic display was dancing with what seemed to her to be a formless shape. It was as brilliant in color as any rainbow, and it shifted and gyrated as though to some unheard music. The cold, shocking and awful as it was, was not quite enough to distract her from it, so beautiful were the colors. They were like the northern lights, but more lovely. Alice felt an immediate kinship to it, somehow. It was like looking at a photograph of herself taken from a new angle. At the same time, she found herself inexplicably feeling both radiant and humble.

  That's me, she realized. A part of me I've never been able to see.

  "Beautiful," said Jolly, full of awe. "Absolutely beautiful."

  **********

  Alice's eyes grew heavy, each of them feeling as though they were trying to resist the weight of the Megaton by themselves. She only intended to blink, but when she did, they stayed closed. Her head slipped off her hand and she almost went tumbling face-first into her bread pudding.

  Her head darted up again, and her eyes flew open, and she remembered that she was in the galley sitting alone at a table with her textbook and her dessert for company. The book was titled, Emergency Care and Transportation of the Sick and Injured, 11th Edition. She tried again to focus her eyes on the page. The text swam and darted about the paper between diagrams and photographs of injuries and the techniques for treating them. It was unreadable. She decided to take another bite of the pudding, hoping the cinnamon and sugar and citrus glaze would bring some signs of life back into her own brain.

  It wasn't helping.

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  What, do they spray these books with chloroform?

  Alice would have cursed books and reading and classes then, but she reminded herself that there was nothing really wrong with it all. She thought the book was interesting, as well as the classes she had to attend between her physical training sessions. For a few days at a time, Athena had been sitting her down behind a desk while she listened to an instructor teach her some new aspect of her new job. So far, in the five weeks since she'd arrived at ORIGIN, Alice had learned about sociology, law enforcement, anatomy, and now, emergency medical treatment. The textbook of the latter now bore an amber smear of citrus glaze across a paragraph describing the proper treatment of shock victims.

  Under normal circumstances, Alice would have thought it all to be fascinating, especially given that she might one day soon use some of that knowledge to save a life, but she wasn't in normal circumstances. The three-hour classes often lay between grueling sessions of endurance or strength training. She often entered the room cold and sore, and soon the soft breath of warm, recycled air would soon take its toll on her, and she would begin nodding off.

  Joshua, whom Athena had assigned to be her first aid instructor, had taken to spraying her in the face with ice water to rouse her. She had never been so tired in all her life. Much of it was the physical strain of her training. Alice was beginning to understand why most people avoided exercise. It seemed every muscle in her body had undergone some strange alchemy, somehow transforming into dry, splitting wood. Athena often had Alice begin her training for the day—if one could call it day; she usually had Alice sweating before sunrise—by working on the Megaton until Alice could scarcely lift her arms above her head. Then, her real training would begin, when Alice was already so physically spent, she could barely stand.

  The rest of her fatigue could be explained by the sheer amount of stress she felt. It seemed Athena was determined to keep Alice cold, hungry, tired, and rushed. She often did her training while wet and freezing, and on sometimes as little as two hours of sleep. Any time she did spend in her own living quarters was hardly relaxing. She was expected to clean it herself with high standards of cleanliness and meticulous attention to detail she'd never seen outside a hospital. She'd failed four room checks already, and the penalties had been severe. She spent so much time making her bed she almost didn't have time to sleep in it.

  "Having a good nap?"

  Alice started and found herself staring up at Ethan.

  "Ethan, you scared the crap out of me!" she cried too loudly.

  She was suddenly aware that the other occupants of the galley, a few dozen ORIGIN staff members in a variety of uniforms, all in the middle of their own conversations, had stopped to stare at her. Alice covered her face and looked back down at her book. She hadn't meant to draw so much attention to herself.

  "Wow, calm down there, Alice. You look like you're wound a little tight," said Ethan as he took a seat next to her. "I heard you got strapped to the Angelus today. That's probably why you're jumpy. That machine always gives me the screaming meemies."

  Alice thought back to seeing that dance of color on the machine. It had almost seemed a crown shaped from the aurora borealis itself. Seeing it felt special, like a life-altering event, but it had left her physically and emotionally drained and full of questions.

  "So, you must have one too, right?" she surmised, pointing her spoon at him.

  Ethan nodded and shrugged, as though she'd asked if he owned something as ordinary as a pair of jeans.

  "Yeah. All metahumans do. Or, at least, that's the theory. They say Divinity had one, and I have one, and so do you." He tipped his chair back and gazed wistfully at the ceiling. "But all that means nothing. They don't know what the Angelus field really is. It's all just a bunch of..." He made his fingers into a pointed mouth and flapped them open and shut, as if to say yak, yak, yak.

  Alice took a slow bite of her pudding, thinking as she chewed.

  "I don't know," she slurred around a full mouth, "I think it's great to know a little bit more about us. I mean, don't you ever wonder where we come from? Why we are the way we are?"

  Ethan shrugged. It was as though these questions bored him.

  "By the way, where have you been the past few days?" she asked, looking at him with suspicion. "I was hoping you'd help me get through this course."

  He opened his mouth to answer her, but he paused, looking over his shoulder and scanning the room as if to see if anyone was listening to their conversation. Finally, he scooted closer and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

  "Okay, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but I've been doing a little traveling with Clawson. Just for a few days. We visited a few places where we ran some anti-terrorism operations and a few rescue missions over the past few months. California and the Middle East, mostly. Clawson's investigating something, and it's probably something serious."

  "Like what?"

  He shrugged. "He thinks there might be someone behind some of the conflicts we've been working on. Someone behind it all. You know, like how Al-Quaeda was behind the 9-11 attacks and a bunch of other stuff until Divinity took them out."

  Alice looked at him with an expression of real concern on her face. "Is that true? I mean, did you find out anything?"

  For a moment, she was sure he looked uncomfortable, but if that were true, he seemed determined to hide his real thoughts behind a wall of careless bravado.

  "Nah, we didn't find much. Really, it was boring stuff. Just following up on some jobs we did. We deal with terrorists all the time, so it's no big deal. If I were you, I'd just focus on the stuff in front of you." He pointed to her book, seeming almost eager to change the subject. "Make sure you study hard. That EMT exam is a monster. And the mission qualification exam, which you must pass in order to go out into the field with Meta..." He shook his head, as if trying to shake off bad memories. "Let's just say it's the hardest thing you've ever done in your life."

  Alice ran her fingers through her hair and pulled as though she wanted to rip it all out.

  "I don't know how I'm going to learn all of this," she said.

  "You won't," said Ethan.

  "What?" said Alice, shocked at Ethan's frankness.

  "I said, you won't," he repeated. When Alice stared at him with a mixture of disbelief and hurt, he quickly added, "I mean you're not meant to. Not in so short a time, anyway. Athena is intentionally making it too hard for you."

  Alice asked him what he meant.

  Ethan began to count on his fingers. "She's got you exercising nearly all day, every day, right? She takes away mealtimes as a punishment when you don't make your bed or when you fall asleep in class. Right after your most exhausting exercise, she puts you in a warm, dim, comfortable room and demands that you stay awake and pay attention. And if I don't miss my guess, you've been waking up an hour earlier every day for the past four days. Am I close?"

  Alice blinked at him. Ethan had only just returned from traveling the world with Clawson. How did he know what kind of training she'd been through?

  "How did you know all that?"

  "It's kind of her thing. She's our trainer, right? She wants to know how we handle stress and fatigue and disappointment, so she intentionally puts us in stressful situations to see how we react. Has she busted you for leaving a smudge of toothpaste in your sink, yet?"

  Alice's eyes narrowed to slits. How could he know about that unless...

  "She...she put it there?" When Ethan nodded, she hissed, "I had to skip dinner and put two extra hours in on the Megaton for that! I had been so careful to clean that room! I scrubbed and scraped and went over it with a fine-tooth comb! I knew there was no way I left that in the sink!"

  And that had been the least of it. Training in the cold, in the dark, in the most unfair and exhausting circumstances she'd never imagined, it had all been by design.

  That woman wants me to fail. If Clawson intends to give me a fair chance at becoming a permanent member of the team, Athena sure doesn't.

  Then a thought occurred to her.

  "Did she do all this with you?"

  Ethan nodded.

  "Yeah, about when I was nine." He grabbed her fork and took a heaping bite of her bread pudding. "Wow, the chefs did really good on these," he said, speaking around the mouthful of dessert. "I remember back before we had chefs. The food sucked."

  "You were nine?" Alice repeated, staring at him, ignoring that he'd just commandeered her food. "You've been living here since you were nine?"

  Ethan shrugged and took another bite. "Well, ever since I was a baby, yeah. Clawson discovered my metahuman status really early, so he arranged for me to be raised here."

  What kind of parents would just let their child live here?

  "How often do you get to see your family?" she asked.

  Ethan looked at her, still chewing, and shrugged. He said nothing.

  Is this what Clawson and Athena wanted for her? Sure, she was already grown, so they weren't exactly stealing her from her crib like the witch in Rapunzel, but she had a life outside of all this. When would she be able to get back to it? Had Clawson promised her a shot at being a rescuer only to intentionally fail her and keep her in this place?

  Alice suddenly missed her mom.

  "So, what do you keep listening to?" Ethan said pointing his spoon at Alice's earbuds.

  Alice touched them and shrugged.

  "Just music. An old playlist I keep adding to."

  Ethan held out a hand, and Alice obliged. She gave him one end of her earbuds and watched as he popped it into his ear and listened.

  A grin spread across Ethan's face.

  "Wow, you really like the old stuff, I'm guessing," he chuckled.

  "Yeah," she admitted. "I mean, I like some new things, but time has a way of filtering out the garbage. The longer a song has survived, the longer people have been listening to it, the better it probably is."

  "So, you don't listen to Old Daddy Darkness? Homeward Bone? Spray?"

  Alice screwed up her face as though Ethan had just emitted a foul smell. "What? No! All that Pound stuff is just too much bass and bad, constipated rapping. I like when the artists could actually sing."

  Ethan laughed and stuffed another spoonful of pudding into his mouth.

  "You sound like a grandma," he teased.

  "No," she corrected him. "I sound like my dad. Most of my songs come from him. We had a game we invented when I was a kid. We would find songs that reminded us of ourselves, and we would save them in this playlist. So, these songs aren't just 'old'. They're familiar, like a close friend or a relative. They are more than just noise. They have meaning. After my dad died, these songs were a way I kept him alive. I'd take all this older stuff over Spray and Lil' Mongrel any day."

  Alice wasn't sure, but she thought Ethan stared at her just a little longer than necessary just then. She wondered if it was her peculiar taste in music or the fact that she'd just told him her father had died. After all, this was someone who had been given up by his own parents to a subterranean life of non-stop training. Maybe that look in his eye was nothing but pity, but Alice guessed there might be something more.

  She tried ignoring the heat in her cheeks and snatched the remainder of her dessert from Ethan's grasp. Newfound kinship or no, she wasn't about to let him finish that bread pudding. It really was that good.

  Just a few more weeks, she reminded herself. I'm already more than halfway through. A few more weeks, and I can prove to them that I can do this. Only a few more weeks.

  But Athena had a talent for making minutes pass like hours, days pass like months, and weeks pass like never-ending, soul-crushing, agonizing years.