I carefully made my way to the table across from the agents, and sat in one of the uncomfortable metal chairs. Although the woman was a tad bit intimidating, she wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I imagined.

  I must have been staring, because she raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “You’re not exactly what I expected,” I replied sullenly.

  “What? Did you expect Empowered people?” the man asked.

  “No I…”

  “Despite popular belief the BEI doesn’t employ Empowered people,” he explained without giving me a chance to speak.“We’re regular people that have been trained to deal with Ruptures, and Empowered threats. If there’s a threat which is deemed too dangerous, then the BEI will authorize a response team from one of the enclaves.”

  “I knew that,” I snapped. “I heard you just came back from Coopers, I expected you to be in full tactical gear or something.”

  He paused for a moment and looked at me. “Oh”

  “We might have come right from the investigation, but we had enough sense to drop off our gear before coming in to interview a civilian,” Agent Lawson explained as she calmly clasped her hands together on the table. “Officer Sullivan mentioned you were ready to talk to us. Do you really feel up to it, or do you want a few more minutes?”

  “I can handle it,” I muttered.

  “Good. This shouldn’t take long, we just have a few routine questions, then a quick exposure test and you’ll be on your way,” the woman declared as she reached into her companion’s bag and pulled out a laptop. She opened it up, and spent a few seconds fiddling with the keyboard, while the man pulled out a couple other things and set them on the floor behind the table. I recognized some of the parts, they looked like the testing devices at my school, but far more modern.

  “First question, what were you doing at Coopers when the Rupture occurred?”

  I cocked my head to the side and stared at Agent Lawson for a moment. “You want to know what I was doing at the grocery store? Do you think I’d go there to buy a car? I was grocery shopping! Obviously.”

  “Tammy!” my mother snapped from the couch behind me, but Agent Lawson just held up a hand.

  “I understand these questions might seem a tad simple, but they are pertinent to the investigation. We need to get as many details about the incident as possible, so we can get a clear picture of the situation,” she said, before dropping her hand again and entering something on the laptop. “And did you notice anything… unusual before the Rupture occurred?”

  I caught a glimpse of Tiberius skittering around behind the agents, investigating the equipment that had been lined up. He wasn’t normally that interested in human technology, so I couldn’t help but turn and stare for a few seconds. It was only after Agent Lawson gently cleared her throat that I remembered where I was.

  “Sorry… yeah, there was a guy there. He was super thin, sweating, and wearing a parka a couple sizes too large. I thought he might be a junky so I backed off, but that’s when the rupture happened.”

  “And can you describe what happened then?” Agent Lawson prompted quietly.

  “I don’t know how to describe it, it was like reality ripped open and there was suddenly a portal to another world just sitting in the middle of the aisle. A bunch of massive iridescent, rotting beetles erupted out of the portal and jumped on the man, yanked him back to their world, and that’s when I ran towards the front of the store.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  My breath caught in my throat for a moment, but I did my best to continue. “The beetles managed to make it to the front before I could. They killed Cooper, and cut me off, so I retreated towards the emergency exit. I honestly thought I’d make it out of there, but turns out that asshole Cooper chained it closed, leaving me trapped inside. I grabbed a shelf, tried to smash a window, but it was security glass so… I did the only thing I could, make a final stand in the back of the store. I smashed the bugs with my shelf for a minute or so, then the bugs suddenly pulled back. About half of them made it through the Rupture, the other half were cut off when it closed and kind of… decayed where they were. That’s when I made a run for the exit, and met the police.”

  Both agents stopped what they were doing for a moment and stared at me strangely. “What?”

  “You’re sure that it was only open for a minute? You didn’t lose track of time and it wasn’t open for longer?” The male agent who I still didn’t know the name of asked.

  “Let me repeat myself. The store was full of giant man eating beetles, and I had a fucking metal shelf to defend myself with. I’m lucky that I even lasted a minute,” I hissed. I didn’t want to cry here in front of these federal agents, but that fight in the store was still so clear in my head, so frightening, that I nearly broke down right there.

  Luckily my mother must have understood the situation, because she stepped forward, and threw her arms around me. That small act really helped me calm down. “As you can see my daughter found this entire situation very upsetting. Would it be possible to postpone the rest of the questions until later?”

  I quickly wiped my eyes, before patting my mother on the arm. “I can handle it. I’d rather get this over with now, than have to go through it again later anyways,” I whispered softly before locking eyes with Agent Lawson again.

  “Do you have any other questions?” I asked quietly.

  “Just one last one, did you manage to kill or damage any entities while you were in the store?” the woman asked, looking down at her computer to avoid my gaze.

  “They were giant bugs built like fucking tanks. I dropped entire shelving units on them and it only slowed them down. When I swung my shelf they did more damage to me than I did to them!” I said as I raised my cut up palms so the agents could see them. “There was no way I could’ve killed one. I was just lucky to survive.”

  “Alright,” Agent Lawson replied quietly, “I believe you. That’s the last question I have for you today, but there’s one last thing we need you to do before you leave.”

  Her partner, who had apparently been waiting for this moment, quickly moved all the equipment he had unpacked from the floor to the table. “I’m sure you’re familiar with P-wave detectors, your file said you’ve been tested multiple times in the last few years.”

  “Pretty much every six months for the last ten years,” I grumbled. “But the school’s detector didn’t look anything like this.”

  Agent Lawson paused for a moment, so I clarified. “Most kids my age feel uncomfortable around me, which is one of the signs of being Empowered, so they keep checking me, but never find anything.”

  “Right, well, I’m sorry to hear that,” she mumbled unconvincingly. “Since you were at the site of a Rupture we need to check your I-Wave readings, to see if you absorbed any Prosch particles that may have been released by the Rupture. This is one of the newest models of I-Wave detector in the Bureau. It not only checks you for I-Waves, but the halo can scan your brain, so we can also get a rough idea of how dense the Prosch particles are.”

  “I thought it was impossible to get an exact count of Prosch particles in someone’s brain without putting them through an MRI multiple times, which is why the detectors look for I-Waves instead,” I asked as I gently examined what I could only assume was a halo.

  “That’s still true, we can’t get precise measurements, but this new tech can at least give us an approximate particle density, which helps us determine how powerful someone is.”

  “I still don’t get why you’d need that, you can immediately tell if someone's Empowered by the fact they give off I-Waves or not, the particle count seems… unnecessary to me.”

  “Well, to be honest, that feature was actually a request from the enclaves themselves. They like to have a way to rank their members, and since I-Wave readings fluctuate, they prefer to use rough measurement of the Prosch density to help rank their members,” the male agent explained.

  “Well, whatever, not like it makes a difference to me. What do you want to do? Shove my hand in the pressure cuff, like usual?” I asked.

  “And place the halo around the back of your head. The angled bits should fit right in front of your ears,” Agent Lawson explained as she connected the various instruments together. It took a minute, so I just sat there for a minute, already strapped into the device, twiddling my thumbs.

  When they finally plugged the device in it immediately began emitting an ominous low frequency hum.

  “Alright, just sit still for a moment, this will only take a second…” Agent Lawson declared. I felt a tingle go through my arm, and a second later she frowned.

  “That can’t be right,” the woman mumbled. “Mac, check the connections.”

  “What? Is there an issue with Tammy’s readings?” my mother asked worriedly.

  “Well, no, it’s just that they don’t make any sense. It’s probably just a faulty connection, or sensor. Mac?”

  The big man shrugged helplessly. “Everything is connected properly, I triple checked, and there’s no way this device is broken, it just came out of calibration this morning.”

  “Then explain this!” Agent Lawson hissed, as she pointed at some readout I couldn’t see.

  “I can’t!” Agent Mac replied exhaustedly.

  “What? What’s going on? Why won’t you say anything?” my mother asked again. She was getting quite agitated now, so I turned to grab one of her hands.

  Agent Lawson bit her lip. “I’m sorry, but according to this machine your daughter has no I-Wave rating, but the same density as a B-Rank Empowered person. According to the Empowered person act, and BEI directives, we must detain her until we determine whether she is a threat to the general populace.”

  My mother’s hand went limp, but I was the one that said what we were both thinking. “What the fuck?”

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