I push a fist to the side and step forward, slamming my knee into my opponent’s stomach. The strike pushing them a hair’s breadth away.

  Dropping through the floor, I flip around behind them, twisting in the air, aiming to hit the back of the leg and send him to the ground.

  Travis darts forward easily dodging my attack before shooting a leg out to trip me to the ground right as my feet land.

  “Damn it.” I say, looking up at the ceiling, not feeling in the slightest like getting up at the moment.

  After I figure out what I did wrong, I’ll get up. Till then I can stay here.

  “You’re practicing like someone who’s lost a fight,” he says, tossing a water bottle that just barely avoids hitting my side.

  “Loss and I suppose you could technically call a draw.” I agree, sitting up so I can drink water without dousing myself.

  “You keep improving, and I’ll have to start using my power pretty soon to keep up,” Travis says in what I know probably isn’t but definitely feels like a condescending tone.

  “And I—I don’t know…” I trail off, unable to come up with a witty enough comeback.

  “Have you been watching videos on how other phasers fight? That could help you come up with ways to use your power in a fight.” Travis offers ?in what I’ll take as an olive branch.

  “Not really. Most phasers fight like a normal person with a finishing move of just merging someone into the ground or at least dropping them.” I shrug. “Can’t do that.”

  “What if you’re warping density? You could make yourself hella durable and be an unstoppable monster wading through the tides of your enemies.”

  That would be cool.

  But I can’t even figure out how to walk on air, which I think should definitely be possible; making myself bulletproof is a dream and a half away.

  “Maybe, but I still think just getting faster with it all would be better.” I mumble.

  “Have you never heard the statement slow is smooth, and smooth is fast? You can’t skip steps.” Travis says quickly, dousing my dreams.

  “I know.” I say, pushing myself back up to my feet, but I don’t get into a ready position just yet.

  I can’t beat Travis. He’s way better than me. Even if we’re on a similar level physically.

  There’s gotta be a right way for me to do this, and I just have to find the right avenue to cheat.

  With an exertion of will, I slowly push my mind map out from my skin until it’s ten feet in any direction.

  Now able to “see” more, I inspect the area. Down is still the safest direction for me to use my power without bothering anyone, and with the high ceiling, I can’t just jump up there to hide on the next floor.

  There’s an open area to the left of the room, and to the right there’s the rest of the gym, so I can’t go either of those ways unless I want to tell the world that I have superpowers.

  Actually, is up off the table?

  As I chew on that idea, I put my guard up and nod to Travis that I’m ready.

  On a whim just before we start, I let my eyes drift shut. The asshole has tricked me with my eyes more than once.

  With my map as well refined as I can get it while giving me plenty of room, maybe I don’t need my eyes?

  In a flash, Travis closes the distance, a jab aimed directly at my face.

  Twisting to the side, I slam a fist into his side before breaking away.

  Twice more he comes at me and twice more I dodge the attacks and land simple counterattacks of my own.

  More than that, I haven’t had to use my main ability yet. Though honestly, can this map really only be called a sub-ability?

  Until I take the time to improve it, I’ll call it a sub-ability. All I’ve done so far is learn how to turn it on and off and fiddle with the range a bit.

  A plan formulates in my mind as I dart back a bit farther, hoping to force Travis to kick me like he usually does if I’m a step and a half away.

  If I can get him to kick me, I might be able to pull a rabbit out of my hat.

  As his foot flies at me, I finally phase, lunging forward as his leg passes through my torso. Locking his leg inside my body, I careen forward, slamming my fist into his jaw, sending him stumbling.

  Or it would have. If his leg wasn’t currently stuck inside my body, held in place by wishes and dreams, to get this phasing trick to work.

  Travis reeling off balance, I kick him in his one standing leg hard while releasing my tentative hold over his leg, sending him crumpling to the ground.

  “Yes!” I roar in victory, pumping a fist into the air.

  My mind map snaps back to its natural position of just barely outside my body as I open my eyes, panting. That took a lot of concentration to pull it all off, but I did it.

  Taking my victory lap, I toss Travis his water bottle as I take slow drinks from my own.

  Unlike me, who wallowed in annoyance when I lost before sitting up, Travis immediately gets to his feet, pulling off his helmet and gloves before drinking.

  “That was pretty good,” he compliments, which sets me even further on cloud nine.

  “And this is where you tell me you’ve been holding back this whole time so you’re going to go all out now and make me regret everything, right?” I point out.

  “If by all out you mean I need to use my ability, sure. With you using your powers, I can’t just not anymore,” Travis shrugs.

  I cringe at the idea of him using his ability. That’s going to be a pain in the ass, depending on what it is.

  “You should work on that spatial awareness ability. It’s a lot stronger than you think it is,” Travis muses, rubbing his jaw as if I actually hurt him.

  Maybe I did, but I doubt it.

  “I’ll add it to the list of a million and one things I need to do.” I agree pointedly, not saying I’ll work on it anytime soon.

  Using my powers smoothly without having to plan the whole thing in advance, actually being able to phase a person, flying, becoming bulletproof. There’s a ton of things that I bet would be way more useful than being able to feel everything around me better or farther.

  In terms of impactful powers that do kickass stuff, I bet being able to feel the world around me is pretty low on the totem pole of powers. And it’s growing on its own fine enough.

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  “I’m a speedster.” Travis says, breaking me out of my thought process.

  I take a few seconds to process that statement before determining I am one hundred percent screwed.

  No wait. He’s gotta be lying. If he was a speedster, there wouldn’t be the whole lab issue in the city; he could take it down on his own in an afternoon.

  “Bullshit,” I say, crossing my arms and leveling ?a stare. Though can you actually tell what I’m looking at when my eyes are just undulating voids of darkness?

  “I am I have the run fast power. But I have several issues with my ability that make it hard to work around.” Travis admits wistfully, looking out.

  “The kind that would mean I could figure out how to stop you?” I ask, taking a half step back once again. If he’s actually a speedster, getting more distance for me to react to has to be a good thing, right?

  “If you’re smart enough, I guess?” Travis says, putting the glove and helmet back on.

  “Mat, I was really enjoying not falling onto you constantly, but I suppose this means you and I are going back to our regularly scheduled meetings.” I grumble to myself, keeping my eyes open this time as I expand my mind map back to ten feet.

  I don’t need to win this time.

  I just need to learn.

  That’s what I need to think about. Nobody expects me to win a fight first try. I can learn the perfect counter and execute on that.

  I already know how Travis fights at normal speed, so I probably know how he fights at high speed, right?

  “Ready?” Travis asks, his eyes alight with the joy of being able to kick my ass after I got on my high horse.

  “This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” I say, trying to come up with a plan. My best guess is how I won last time won’t work.

  I phase a good chunk of my body, leaving only my arms from the elbow down and my legs from the knees down. Now all my striking bits are available, and he can’t just slam his fist into my chest.

  On go Travis rockets towards me moving at a speed I can react to. More than that, it’s not actually that much faster than the top speeds he’s used while fighting me before.

  Wanting more time to think about it, I take another step backwards, trying to catch an opening that I can use to achieve my victory.

  It’s with the next step that I realize that I could have made the wrong decision.

  The world trembles for the barest moment, and I see Travis moving through the world faster, his next step happening just a little bit faster than the previous one did.

  I lunge forward, trying to make up for my mistake. If I’m right about how this ability works, getting farther away was not the right choice.

  Now empowered by taking a second step, Travis blurs along, taking a third step, getting the all-powerful speed boost before he grabs my wrist and throws me, the world turning before I can do anything to react.

  A moment later, the world stops spinning, and a good chunk of my body is still falling through the floor.

  That explains why it’s my arms and legs that hurt and not my back.

  I pull myself out of the floor before making myself fully solid. “Yeah, I don’t know how I’m going to beat that,” I say, not bothering to get up.

  “It’s not that complicated. I’m sure with all of your senses you figured out where your biggest problem is.” Travis points out.

  Yeah, I do the fact that I let him speed up is the problem. But is speeding up based on the time he’s moving while accessing his powers or is it defined by the moment he steps? More than that, what is his maximum speed? Can he accelerate infinitely or does he cap out at a reactable speed?

  By the third step, he was substantially quicker but not impossibly so?

  Can Travis start his power early and build up a pre-charge to the full situation?

  My alarm goes off, telling me that I’ve managed to survive the day and that I don’t need to keep banging my head into the wall.

  “That’s my cue.” I comment, pushing myself up to my feet and pulling off all the protective equipment.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Travis asks, looking at me with a new expression.

  “Of course I am. Just gotta keep looking up, right?” I shrug as I get myself ready to head back home.

  I have a bit of time before I need to pick Bianca up from her super friends' thing, which means I can put some time into thinking about Thanksgiving and how or what I’m going to do about that holiday if I’m going to do anything.

  I know it’s not fair to my loved ones if I choose to do absolutely nothing about it, but it doesn’t change the fact that I really want to just call the whole event off and not deal with it.

  I say all the proper goodbyes before making my way to the car and, on a whim, decide to get some fast food as the idea of cooking for myself at the moment sounds like a travesty.

  And being in a drive-through gives me a moment to check on my phone without feeling too bad about texting while driving.

  I’ve been neglecting my friends something fierce, but I just… I don’t want to. It’s not like they’ve invited me over since the whole super thing came out. Well, besides Reyna, she’s been at my side more than ever.

  I really should pay her somehow for all the babysitting I got.

  Though Caleb’s made it pretty clear to me he wanted nothing to do with me until I was over this whole super thing, ?he doesn’t even know I’m fighting bad guys in the middle of the night.

  I exhale slowly as I continue the drive home, the grease from the fast food quickly making itself known, that I’m going to regret the decisions that I made to arrive here.

  “Friendsgiving…” I say the word tasting dull on my tongue.

  Before I fully realize where I was going, I end up in the parking lot of Amelia’s apartment building where I search the windows as if I’m looking to see where she could be in there.

  I step out of the car and make my way to her apartment, walking in as if I own the place, though with Amelia gone and not ?getting paychecks, I don’t know how much longer her autopay will last.

  Though that can be solved easily, so I guess I’ll do that when I get home.

  It strikes me now how incredibly creepy being in this place is, especially with the lights off, like I’m some kind of creepy stalker.

  At that thought, I walk to the light switch, bathing the place in fluorescent light, forcing me to blink my eyes to force the adjustment to go faster.

  I make myself a cup of tea. Holding the mug in my hands, I take a seat on the couch, basking in the familiarity of it all.

  It’s not that familiar, though. There’s no sound of other people moving about the world or music.

  Thankfully, there’s nothing terrifying in this room, like a letter addressed to me or something like that. Though I’m not using my powers to get a good sweep of the entire area I’m living today, as mostly normal as I can, at least now that all the fighting is over.

  I decide to clean. There’s nothing in here for me to really find, but it will mostly ?stop me from feeling like Amelia would just round the corner.

  If the place looks clean and almost sterile, it’s more that Amelia is out on a trip.

  Once the living room and kitchen are in a manageable state, I enter her room to discover that it looks like a tornado went off in here, leaving the whole place an absolute wreck.

  Which is what her room always looks like, down to the pile of half-opened books on her nightstand, forever lost, that she’ll never finish reading.

  For a brief instant, I consider cleaning her room too, but I quickly realize the idea of that is far too much. I am not dealing with this mess, though there’s one last thing I want to check.

  On the desk is exactly what I wasn’t hoping to see. Her laptop and a pile of scribbled notes all of them about the lab.

  I know it makes sense that she took a bunch of notes about all of it and did her own research, but if they hadn’t taken her seriously, maybe she’d still be there with me.

  Compulsively, I organize the notes, almost knocking over a shitty digital camera from its precarious position of holding on by a thread to the computer.

  Did she have a camera set up to spy on the lab to bring video evidence?

  Settling into the computer chair, I adjust the height before opening the laptop and logging in quickly before going to the attached devices to pull up whatever the camera has in store for me.

  Low and behold, it has a shitty video of the kidnappers going in and out. Not that you can tell what they’re doing in the vans, just a van vanishing and appearing through a concealed hatch in the wall.

  On a whim, I check the downloads to see that there are multiple videos. So either she was clearing this one with every video or there are more cameras.

  I bolt out of the chair in an instant; the idea hits me. Could there be a camera there now that has the video of her getting captured and what they did with her?

  There wasn’t anything I could figure out exploring the place one time, but if I have some video to analyze, maybe that means the trail is still there and I could learn what to do?

  Besides the painfully obvious detail that it’s been a while since she was captured and that means any information I find now is behind it doesn’t matter. Even a cold trail might have an insight.

  All I need to do is find the camera, fix it if it’s broken, and pull something from all of that camera footage.

  Though I need proof that there are multiple cameras first.

  Not having nearly the delicacy or reverence I was treating the room with earlier, I pull and rifle through drawers looking for cameras that are identical or nearly identical to the one on her desk.

  After finding several unrelated things, I find a drawer that holds three more cameras exactly the same as the one on the desk with only changes in color and minor scrapes where the paint has chipped.

  If I’m lucky, it was a pack of five of the things, and there could still be one there.

  Though I go through to make sure all the cameras have more videos of the lab and they do.

  Amelia put way more work into this than I feel like I am doing, and I’m out there fighting them?

  Why couldn’t she have gotten the powers instead of me? The world would already be-

  Shaking my head, I forcibly change my thought process, narrowing in on what I can do.

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