“We can stop here.” I say, pointing at an empty parking lot.

  “You sure?” Amelia asks parking regardless of her questioning of my decision-making. “We’re pretty far from where I picked you up?” She accuses.

  “Yup, that’s the point.” I say, stepping out of the car and beginning to put on my ‘costume,’ so to speak. “I don’t want you to get caught, and they probably would notice a car, but if I run over and drop down, I hopefully won’t get caught.”

  “Uh huh and when you inevitably get in trouble?” She says, giving me the look.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “As soon as you don’t deserve it.”

  Point.

  “I’ll be okay.” I promise. “I have super powers and I’m a lot tougher than I look.” I say, zipping up my jacket so that no zippers accidentally get caught on anything.

  “You look like a soaked kitten could beat you in a fight.” Amelia says pointedly.

  “I’m not going to be in any fights now, am I? I’m going to phase in. Scout around and come back.” I promise, slipping the sunglasses back on.

  Tonight they’re pulling double duty, covering a good chunk of my face and hiding my eyes. Gotta love multipurpose tools.

  “You’re such a lame superhero. Black jeans, black jacket, purple t-shirt and reflective sunglasses. Boring!” Amelia chimes in unhelpfully.

  “I have a mask too.” I point out, slipping the mask on over my ears, leaving most of my face entirely covered.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Amelia asks gently.

  “I’m positive. You can’t go through walls. If you got captured and forced through their experiments, I don’t know what I would do with myself.” I say, bouncing on the tips of my toes to prepare to run.

  “Go get em tiger.”

  “I’m not making a roar sound for you.”

  “But it’s so fun! I’ll demonstrate,” she teases. “Rawr.” She practically purrs.

  “Not a chance.” I laugh before shutting the door. “Be back soon.” I wave before jogging off.

  It doesn’t take me long till I’m back at the scene of my escape.

  While I could drop down here and make my way back, I need to find an entrance that normal people can use.

  They drove us in, which means they have to have an entrance for a normal car to use. And it’s all underground, so it has to bring air in somehow, right?

  As I search around for a vent with my mind map, I eventually realize that perhaps I’m making a lot of reasonable assumptions for a group that doesn’t have to pay attention to a single one.

  I can pass through rock as if it’s less than air. They had a lady there who could incapacitate anyone with a glance and Andromeda, who could clone herself.

  Teleporting both people and air is totally reasonable?

  All they would need is to roll one teleporter with their experiments and brainjack them.

  Should I give up?

  Nevermind, there’s a weird vent-looking thing connected to a storm drain that definitely is not in the other storm drains I’ve walked by.

  Feeling a bit of hope at that, I clamber down, keeping most of my body phased for now since I don’t want to feel more cramped for space than I need to.

  Focusing my mind, I push my awareness down, trying to see where it leads.

  About ten feet below me, there looks to be a storage room full of boxes of stuff I can’t identify from this far away. But most importantly, there doesn’t seem to be anyone.

  Praying to the stars above that there aren’t any cameras, I phase fully, dropping through the floor and landing in a superhero landing in the storage room.

  While my knees don’t like the landing, I much prefer it to landing on my face.

  Now actually in the room, things become a lot clearer as I adjust to my new position.

  Below me is another floor of the compound, though it looks to be a hallway directly below me.

  This room is chock-full of crates of various items. Two different small cases that feel wildly different. And a bunch of weapons and armor. Maybe this is where they keep all of their valuables?

  And as I edge to the nearest wall, it feels like the next room over is a parking lot where they have three vans.

  If this is the trend of the whole topmost floor, it looks like the experiments are kept on another level.

  As I look through the boxes for something incriminating but small enough I can carry with ease, I settle on the two case-looking things.

  Phasing a hand into the crate, I grab the first case, the metal cool to the touch. With a brief exertion of will, the case is phased and pulled out.

  This seems to just be a container full of twenty-four mini disks. Not entirely sure, but it goes into my left jacket pocket before quickly being zipped shut.

  I briefly flex my power, phasing fully to make sure that everything is still in line. Ever since the crab incident, I’ve been feeling paranoid about reaching for more than I can handle, but for now I seem fine.

  Moving over to the side with the weapons, I do the same trick, pulling out another box.

  This one feels very dense. There’s practically no open space, and I can’t make heads or tails of what could be inside it.

  However, the button on the side is so incredibly tempting that I push it immediately.

  With a whir, the box begins to unfold and reshape itself until I’m holding a gun-looking object in my hand that seems to almost hum.

  Probably a weapon, since it’s near all the other weapons in this room, but it can’t fire bullets. There’s nowhere to load them. Maybe it fires some kind of energy?

  Which is metal as hell, but I am no pistolero, so I hit the not-trigger button on the gun, causing it to fold back into its original boxy shape.

  Slipping that into my right jacket pocket before sealing it behind the zipper, I case the edges of the room, trying to feel if there’s anybody nearby.

  The hallway below me is too dangerous, but the garage might be okay? There isn’t room for a fourth car in there, and nobody is there that I can feel.

  With a sharp inhale to steady my nerves, I push my way through the wall before quickly dashing into one of the cars hiding inside it to take better stock of the room.

  Once again, no guards, and besides the cars, the only things of note I can feel is a nearby stairwell and what feels like a tank full of some kind of liquid.

  Probably gas.

  Below me looks to be what the movies have led me to believe to be the security room, since it has a bunch of monitors and a simple desk chair.

  Why nobody is watching that room is beyond me, but if they’re not spying, that means I can move around freely.

  Actually.

  With a smile, I drop down into the security room and quickly begin looking at the monitors to see what they’re watching, only to almost immediately start dry heaving.

  The only thing this room is observing is their torture chambers.

  One person is getting burned alive, a fire crawling across their skin at a snail's pace.

  Another person is being bombarded with a hail of BB guns as they curl up in the corner.

  Another looks to be having ?surgery done while conscious and screaming the whole time.

  What’s worse is that while I can see it with my eyes.

  Just below me is a child being tortured. A small girl, clearly a child no older than five, covered in bandages while freely bleeding from one of her dismembered eyes.

  “Maybe I can stop this?” I ask quietly, wondering if I can save one of them.

  Maybe I can phase the girl and carry her out? I don’t know how much the crab man weighed, but maybe I can carry someone while still using my powers if they’re light enough?

  I just need to do my weight plus whoever I’m carrying.

  Grabbing the desk in the room, I flex my power, trying to phase both it and myself, and instantly I feel the recoil again.

  With not much hope, I try just phasing the desk, and I’m hit with the rebound again, though it doesn’t feel nearly as bad.

  The limit of how much I can channel at once is making itself known. I’ll fix that one day. But doesn’t do anything right now.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Which means that I can’t help get any of them out.

  Fine.

  I just need to finish exploring this place.

  Tearing my focus away from the monitors and below me, I feel out to the sides, checking to see if there’s anybody watching me.

  Seems like I’m in the clear. Just thirty feet away from me seems to be a storage closet, so I aim for that.

  With a charge, I pump my legs as I pass through, trying to go as fast as I can just in case there’s someone who could see me as I plow through walls.

  Hunkering down in my new chosen safe spot, I slowly count to thirty to see if anyone enters my mental map range to presumably chase me.

  While there’s someone familiar looking in the room behind me, it doesn’t look like there’s anybody running down the hallway screaming about how there’s an intruder.

  Upon reaching thirty, I let out a breath before focusing on the person behind me to figure out what they’re doing. They’re wearing a lab coat, which means they’re probably one of the doctors here.

  Crouching down, I push my head through, trying to glimpse the person on the other side.

  The moment they’re turned away, I push my face through enough that I can see, and the sight of a green-skinned scientist makes me recoil back, not wanting to get caught.

  While not Andromeda, the lady who buried me alive, what’s her name is the one who injected me?

  She’s not working with a civilian today, though. She’s puttering about a lab, talking either to herself or the gruff-looking dude on the table.

  Wait a minute, she just pulled one of those disk things out of a box. One almost identical to the one in my pocket.

  As the patch is placed on the man, I watch his skin knit itself together rapidly.

  Why would super criminals need badges that stitch people together? And the second question is, would it work on me? I am sorely tempted to grab more samples.

  The green-skinned witch moves to her computer as the healed man leaves, his movements almost robotic.

  With where the computer is I might be able to get an ear into the room without risking too much.

  I chance it.

  “Main variant of enhancement is proving to be stable.” She says to herself as she types at a keyboard, her fingers blurring to a speed I can’t tell what she could be typing. “Control chips are stable even when the recipient is enhanced.”

  Control chips?

  Please don’t mean control chips like they have in cartoons of brainwashing?

  Well, they mentioned chipping the sludge person earlier right I shouldn’t be surprised.

  Acting on autopilot, I rub the back of my neck to make sure that magically some kind of mind control device hasn’t appeared inside my body.

  Pulling myself into the full safety of my closet, I return to my ascent up the shelves, aiming to get back to the first floor once again to scout around.

  Now back on the first floor I do my best ghost impression and begin stalking through the area trying to cover everything with my mental map only stopping to change directions when I encounter either people or a wall that is thick enough that I don’t think there’s going to be anything beyond it.

  And I now know where the entrance to this place is for normal people, so I scramble up to find the street names. I don’t know how normal people are supposed to get through the fake wall. There’s gotta be a way to trigger it, but I am not seeing how I could get in if I couldn’t moonwalk through walls.

  Sneaking back in, my new goal is to get a count of how many people they have captured and if there’s anyone else I can learn the powers of.

  Most of them seem to be asleep with only a few people up doing stuff, making me feel a lot safer about all of this.

  Dropping down to the second floor, I circle around; I make my way so that I’m behind the room where all the still currently normal humans are.

  The room I am in is interesting. It’s a medical room, though one wall is filled with pull-out hatches, most of them full of something I don’t recognize.

  “No.” I gasp, running over to one hatch and tugging on it gently, praying that what I felt with my mind is wrong.

  I need it to be wrong. I can’t believe that something like that actually exists.

  This room is a storage room. Just for their failures.

  Staring up at me with blank eyes is the corpse of something that was once human.

  Though if I’m being honest with myself, it more looks like some jelly that was shaped into a human and colored to look mostly correct.

  Collapsing to my knees, I dry heave, so very thankful that I didn’t eat anything before coming here that would have been significantly worse.

  I know that the experiments are torture and that they are trying to make supers that they can brainwash into doing their bidding, but still.

  Part of me didn’t think about all the ones that would die.

  Pushing the hatch shut, I move to the wall separating me from all the captured civilians, trying to think of something I could do.

  Free them all and lead them out? I can’t fight a bunch of supers, and I don’t know if I’m immune to telekinesis.

  That’s not including them being attacked. I can’t protect someone else. My powers don’t do that.

  Could I even lead all of them away?

  I place my hands against the wall as my mind races, trying to figure out anything I can do. There has to be something?

  Right?

  Every plan I try to come up with immediately feels like it’s struck down with the obvious conclusion of what will happen if I dared to try.

  It’s all hopeless.

  As the blood pounds in my ears, I punch the wall.

  I’m useless.

  Damn it.

  When the stinging in my hand becomes too much for me to ignore, I stop punching and pull myself away from the wall, continuing to back away until I can’t feel what any of the captives are doing.

  Like this, I could almost lie to myself that everything is okay, and that nothing is going wrong with any of them.

  Come on. I got as much information as I could, and Amelia is going to go file a report with the police. Just move. I think to myself, taking a moment to figure out the way out of this place.

  My heart breaks at the thought of leaving the little girl here. But I can’t help her. Can I?

  I try to listen to the logical argument as I make my escape.

  Upon reaching the surface, I take one last look towards their lab. Not that I can see it. It’s far out of sight, but I can feel the weight of it pressing against me.

  I run away and hate myself every bit for it.

  Running through the streets, I take the effort to slow down from a superhuman pace to a normal person's pace, or one that I hope is a normal human pace.

  It doesn’t take me too long before Amelia’s car comes into sight and I can see her singing along to whatever song is playing on her phone.

  That site makes me relax. I made it. I’m safe, and hopefully, this whole ordeal is going to be behind us soon.

  Opening the door, I note that there seems to be a takeout box on the passenger seat.

  “Did you go and get food while I was risking stupidity?”

  “Yeah, you can’t have a stakeout without any steaks to take out. So I went and got some,” Amelia explains.

  “I’ll enjoy it when we get home.”

  “Gasp, you’re inviting yourself over to my place! I would have made you come over anyway,” Amelia says, putting the car into gear and heading back home.

  “I did get you a present, though.” I say, pulling out one of the two boxes I stole and hitting the button so it turns into its magical pistol form.

  “A gun?”

  “A laser pistol.” I correct.

  “Pulse pistols aside, why are you giving me one?” Amelia says, trying her best to drive while also admiring the gun.

  “I don’t know how to shoot a gun. And I have superpowers. You can shoot a gun and don’t have powers. And are going to do something potentially risky.”

  “Do you really think that a gang of super criminals will have bought out at least some of the police?” Amelia asks, her voice full of wonder as I hit the button, causing the laser gun to fold into a box again.

  “I think that if they’re making supers, they have as much money as they could want to get some people on their payroll.” I shrug, putting the gun in the glove box.

  Not sure if the gun goes here, but it’s better than putting it into my pockets.

  “Yeah.”

  We drive in silence, though I keep shifting which leg the takeout boxes are resting on because they are hot and get slightly uncomfortable after too long.

  “We’re here.” Amelia says, pulling into her parking space.

  “That we are.” I agree in a whisper, grabbing the laser gun before stepping out into the cold air, holding the food in my other hand.

  “Let’s get inside. It’s fucking freezing out!” Amelia yelps, locking the car before dashing inside in just barely not a run.

  Before long, we’re inside Amelia’s apartment, and she’s immediately dashing to the thermostat to crank the heat.

  “Table or coffee table?” I ask, holding the boxes in preparation for whatever location I’m supposed to be carrying everything to.

  “Coffee table. The dinner table is for dirty dishes.” Amelia calls from her room as she grabs another hoodie for herself and blankets for presumably both of us.

  Smiling at the quip, I place the food down before going to the kitchen to grab some drinks and silverware for the two of us.

  “Hug attack!” She says, hugging me from behind and squeezing tightly.

  That’s something I’ve lost, isn’t it? I can’t feel my friends' hugs try to crush me; they just feel like a regular warm embrace.

  “You good?” I ask awkwardly, shuffling towards the couch, unwilling to be deterred by something like a hug attack when I can still mostly walk.

  “Are you?” She asks instead of answering, which is fair, I guess.

  “Fine.” I lie desperately, hoping that she’s not going to call me out on my shit.

  “Sure.” She agrees before separating to bounce to her seat and look up at me expectantly. “Do you remember where we left off last time we watched?”

  “Painfully so.” I admit taking the remote and selecting the episode we were watching last time.

  “Well, to distract you from your pain, I must admit I was lying about getting steaks for a stakeout that’s not finger food.” Amelia admits opening the takeout boxes and revealing burritos, which I agree is definitely not steak.

  “Well, well, well. That’s definitely different. I thought you needed stakes for a stakeout.” I tease before reaching towards the snacks kept underneath the kitchen table to grab us a bag of chips.

  “I know, I know, I’m lame. But also steak is expensive, and a girl has to afford her other vices.” Amelia complains, snuggling up against me solely for her desire to steal my chips, as she drapes a thick blanket over the two of us.

  “I think steak would have been too heavy anyway,” I say the words long out of my mouth before my brain can check to see if those words were allowed to leave the brain station.

  Amelia says nothing, but she hugs me in an attempt to steal my chips from me, and I let her have some mostly because well they are actually her chips and because what’s the point of having snacks, you can share and not share them.

  This way, I’ll be able to go through more types of chips as we go for new bags to try, anyway.

  Resting my head against hers, I pull a knee to my chest as I finally let my body tremble with everything that’s gone on today.

  I couldn’t do anything to save them.

  Amelia pokes me in the cheek with a Pocky stick. “Don’t make me threaten you with cruel and unusual punishment delivered via candy.” She threatens.

  “And what is that?” I ask before snagging a bite of the pocky stick because if you’re going to put candy near my face, I’m going to steal a bite of it. That's a fundamental rule or something.

  “Well, before you stole my candy, I was going to suggest the Pocky game, but now you’ve gone and stolen my stick.” She pouts at me.

  “I’m sorry.” I laugh, giving her a gentle hug before fishing through the pocky box to grab another one. “Do you want to steal some of mine?”

  “Only if you want to play the Pocky game with me,” Amelia says, putting her face close to mine and putting the stick in her mouth.

  I raise an eyebrow as I take a bite of my end of the stick. “Are you sure you won’t chicken out?” I tease.

  Amelia grins wickedly as she begins to eat her way towards me.

  Alas, the stick breaks, leaving us both with about half of the candy.

  “Too bad.” I shrug, turning my face away from Amelia to pretend that I'm paying attention to the show. It's so easy to let my mind get off of everything here.

  “Well, I take your sunglasses as tribute. You don't need to wear them around me,” Amelia accuses, taking the glasses and putting them out of my reach.

  “I thought my eyes were creepy.” I mumble, not bothering to turn my head.

  “If you want me to romantically stare into your eyes dramatically as the whole world falls away, you could just ask me.” Amelia mocks.

  “No need for that.” I laugh, resting my head against her shoulder.

  “Well, if you’re sure, I suppose.”

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