Javier: ## As your mentor, Meili, I feel I have a responsibility to warn you. Our superiors are unamused. ##

  Meili: ## I'm sorry, sir? What is it that I've done wrong? ##

  Javier: ## I'm referring to how you're using your speaking time with subject Jane H. Doe. Our technicians do examine all the footage, even if they're currently two weeks behind. ##

  Javier: ## I have some quotations with me, if you would like to explain yourself. ##

  Javier: ## You said this to her two weeks ago. "I know you're, like, stuck in here, but do you ever wonder what train conductors actually do? I mean, the train runs fully automatically, and it just stays on the track if you don't touch it. So what could their work day possibly look like? Clock in, sit around for eight hours, and go home?" ##

  Javier: ## "Sometimes I'll watch a show and absolutely despise the way the characters talk. Like yesterday, this random side character used 'take a chill pill,' 'talk to the hand,' and 'oh snap' in the same sentence. I took a bunch of psychic damage from that. After I recovered, I started wondering how much the dialogue writers are getting paid, because there's no chance anyone actually talks like that." ##

  Javier: ## These are just two of the twenty-five quotations I have received. Supposedly, these are indicative of how you spend all your speaking time with subject Jane. ##

  Javier: ## Do you understand my frustration? ##

  Meili: ## I do, sir, but there's a good reason. Truly. It's my fault for not explaining this sooner, but this is simply the tactic I'm choosing to use because I believe it maximizes my chances. ##

  Javier: ## I wondered if you would say so. ##

  Javier: ## Still, I simply don't understand what the benefit of behaving in such an unprofessional, low-tier way could be. ##

  Meili: ## To be as persistently annoying as possible. ##

  Javier: ## This is far too important to be joking about, Meili. ##

  Meili: ## I'm being genuine, sir. I'm fully aware that we're only allowed to speak with subject Jane because there's a chance she has knowledge that would benefit our research. ##

  Meili: ## But from the records I've seen, we haven't succeeded once. She hasn't accepted any deal offers. Advanced tricks or tactics have all failed. And it certainly doesn't help that her mental capacity is in question. ##

  Meili: ## I don't believe in replicating previous failed attempts, so I chose the best strategy remaining. ##

  Javier: ## Which is annoying the subject, persistently, until she gives up knowledge of her own free will? ##

  Javier: ## Certainly, I can admit that no one has tried it, but… ##

  Meili: ## It's gotten me results. If you check last Friday's recording, I was able to get her to say a word to me. ##

  Javier: ## Really? ##

  Meili: ## She spoke quietly, but yes. She said, "Why?" ##

  Javier: ## I see. ##

  Javier: ## I'll apologize for jumping to conclusions, then. ##

  Javier: ## And it is true that, with enough persistence, a mosquito can annoy even an elephant into moving. ##

  Meili: ## Are you calling me a mosquito, sir? ##

  Javier: ## Of course not. ##

  Javier: ## From these quotations I'm reading, you're much better. ##

  ***Beautiful***

  "You know, John," said Alicia. "There's no guarantee that your Mom's Aura Vision interprets patterns exactly like yours does."

  She was twirling a black strand of one of his own hairs between her fingers. John sat cross-legged on the couch with his hands folded over his core, making his 437th attempt at creating the letter 'k' with his aura. Or maybe it was his 438th.

  He turned to her. "Is that something to be worried about?"

  "Well," she said. "When you mold your aura into the shape of a letter, it's only a letter through your eyes specifically. That might be a problem."

  "You see the letters too," he pointed out.

  "I mean, sure, but that's just because I'm piggybacking off your vision." Alicia grinned at him. "And it's not like your 'handwriting' is anything to write home about, even through your eyes."

  His eyebrow twitched.

  "All I'm saying is," she continued, "how do we know your Mom will recognize the letters? We only know what they look like to you."

  John opened his mouth, ready to disagree using whatever argument popped into his head, because there was absolutely no chance they'd missed something so simple for two whole days…

  "Huh." He frowned. "You're right."

  Before he could start freaking out or kicking himself, Meili's voice interrupted him. "Don't worry," she called from the bathroom. "I already made sure to collect a few of your mother's stray hairs, just in case. So Alicia should be able to watch through your mother's eyes."

  "…Got it," John said, pretending he hadn't been on the verge of panic. "I should try to get into the facility pretty soon, then, so we can see how different her vision is."

  Meili called out a generic agreement, and Alicia just nodded. He went back to practicing. But after mentioning their plan to smuggle him in, he couldn't help but think about it, and he started smiling in anticipation. Each day, he got a little better at copying Invisibility and Silence at once, and once he perfected the pair of abilities…

  Alicia raised an eyebrow, giving him a questioning look.

  "What?" he asked.

  "It's just kind of odd," she snickered. "You learn how to use two abilities at once, and the first thing you get excited about is turning yourself into a level 5.0 voyeur."

  John rolled his eyes and grabbed one of Alicia's many small boxes of human hair, shaking it pointedly. It made a familiar rattling noise. "It's just your creepiness rubbing off on me," he said. "Your fault."

  "You keep calling me that," she said with a huff. "But Meili's the one who steals strands of people's hair; all I do is use them. So why am I the creepy one? "

  He snorted a laugh. Then a quiet dribbling noise started from the bathroom, which he'd come to recognize as the sound of Meili washing her hands.

  It was distinctive; she always used a particularly gentle setting for the sink. He visited often enough that he knew things like these, little points of familiarity, and he also knew that a previous John would have been disappointed in a lot of ways.

  The apartment had a totally normal fridge, which had never once contained an item he couldn't find at home. No expensive alcohol or rare substances, which were commonplace in rumors. No attractive, high-tier college girls wandering in to say hello.

  Instead, there was a collection of god-tier hairs that was quite possibly the largest on planet earth. Enough used-up whiteboards to serve as a second layer of flooring. Increasingly unhinged schemes and theories, discussions with an odd fixation on time travel… And to top it all off, the only girl he'd met was a 1.9.

  But he was grateful for what he'd found. And he knew Meili would be out of the bathroom soon, so he decided it would be better if he spoke his thoughts before that.

  "I know this is late, but thanks."

  ***Beautiful***

  When a floating, disembodied aura first appeared outside her cell, Jane's initial, resigned thought was that they'd finally mangled her beyond repair.

  It was a dark orange mist. Cylindrical and cloudlike, swirling and shifting in place. But it was incredibly dense, and that density was distributed evenly, such that it almost certainly didn't belong to a human.

  Once it was gone, she spent the rest of the day confused.

  There were two options. One was that the aura was a person's, and her physical vision had gotten bad enough that she'd started blanking out people who were clearly standing right in front of her. Number two was that, lo and behold, the human body wasn't meant to have bits of its vital internal energy removed every week… and that her Aura Vision passive had started malfunctioning as a result.

  For the rest of her life, she'd never have anyone to gamble with, but she put mental odds on the second.

  .

  .

  .

  "I'm the only fifteen-year-old who knows about the different types of pencil skirts," said the girl. "That's the kind of corpo I am. Someone my age asks why I seem so exhausted, I tell them about my nine-hour workday, and they stare at me like I'm an alien. So it's like: am I the weird one?"

  When the disembodied aura came back the next day, Jane noticed something. It appeared right as a particular redheaded intern girl came to check in – and it had done the same the day before.

  "…Someone else like me has to exist somewhere, right? But everyone else doesn't want school to start, meanwhile I'm excited because it'll be a nice break, and…"

  Little Miss Redhead (not knowing names made you resort to nicknames) was an anomaly herself, one Jane had already taken notice of earlier. Not only was the girl approximately ten years younger and two levels weaker than anyone else with access rights, but she also never did anything.

  Other researchers, even if they didn't have the permissions for more 'intensive' research, would try to pester her for knowledge. Oftentimes it was aggressive. Sometimes they offered bribes: a nicer room, an extra trip outside. Every labcoat-wearing man and woman with access seemed convinced that she could better serve the cause, if only they could 'get through to her.'

  Of course, 'the cause' mainly consisted of them extracting from her body like she was an oil field or gold mine (or some other analogy, because gold veins didn't grow back if you only mined a little). They were right that she was holding out. But no amount of favors would get a single hint out of her, save for true freedom, which they'd kill themselves before giving her.

  Rather than take a deal, her long-term strategy of acting out a condition was much more effective. They used diagnostic abilities to check her, of course, but faking a diagnosis of 'mentally impaired' was as simple as controlling the aura in her nervous system and brain. Soon she'd start playing the part of a braindead robot, able to give only what she'd already given, and the researchers would hit a wall as a result – once further progress required her to be willing and mentally able. Eventually, if she got incredibly lucky, The Authorities would decide to release her 'useless body' before she died.

  Regardless, Little Miss Redhead stood out because she made everything easy. All the girl ever did was replace the one-way interrogation glass with a normal (see-through, not soundproof) window, and then start blabbering randomly.

  It was the same this time. As Jane stared blankly out into the hall, the girl had moved on from pencil skirts to a dinner date.

  "…So we make it to the restaurant," said the redheaded girl, "but our seating's awful. We can only watch the big Turf Wars match from one side of the four-person table. So my fiancé asks if he can sit beside me. Can you imagine? Beside me. On a date! We're on a date, and he wants to sit beside me, like we're in the cafeteria for lunch period!"

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Jane said nothing, as always. She simply stared straight ahead and blinked emptily as a mentally degenerating captive would.

  Her best guess about Little Miss Redhead's antics was that it was a strategy, some kind of ploy to befriend her… It hadn't worked in the slightest.

  "But maybe I'm being unfair to him," the girl kept going. "Sometimes, having him beside me does feel romantic. Like if we're in the theater, at the tensest part of a horror movie, and he holds my hand or lets me rest in his arms. Right beside me."

  At what was oddly her fifth use of 'beside me,' Little Miss Redhead made a quick jutting motion with her elbow toward the disembodied, ghostlike mass of aura that was floating…

  Beside her.

  "When I imagine him beside me," the girl said, "I do tend to like it. And just the two words are nice on their own, don't you think? Beside me."

  Jane's eyes widened, despite herself, in a completely un-braindead way.

  .

  .

  .

  By the time Miss Readhead and the floating aura returned for their third visit, Jane had come up with a theory.

  The disembodied aura was real. At least in the sense that the girl was aware of its existence, too. So Jane could be pretty sure she was only faking mental degeneration, and her brain hadn't actually broken from the aura extractions.

  But that still left the question of what it was. Her best guess was that one of the geniuses at NxGen had actually managed something genius, for once, and figured out how to produce synthetic aura. Or at least some substance close enough to aura that it could trigger her Aura Vision, which was already enough to count as a baby step toward godhood.

  And this would explain the girl's behavior – over the past month, Little Miss Redhead hadn't been showing up at her window just to blabber on about public transport, movie dialogue, and dinner dates. Each time, the girl had come with an earlier, unfinished version of the invisible substance in tow. The only difference was that it hadn't been perfected enough to trigger Aura Vision.

  Then, once the synthetic aura had started appearing on Jane's radar, the girl saw some shift in her reactions. That was when the 'beside me' trick had made an appearance. Jane knew that she'd certainly given a tell then, and not only that she could see it, but also that her mind might not be quite as far gone as she'd been pretending.

  So she'd been played like a fiddle. To submit, to let them take whatever they could… that was one thing. But to be tricked, to have them outsmart her, and rip knowledge out of her without her even knowing?

  Little Miss Redhead replaced the glass, still accompanied by the dark-orange mist, and Jane let not a single ounce of reaction show on her face.

  "I realized yesterday that I never told you my name," said the girl. "It's Meili. Sorry. I've been talking at you all this time but I never really introduced myself."

  Please just leave. Jane blinked and scratched her arm.

  "Anyway," Meili continued. "I was walking along this river with my fiancé, when…"

  The unknown, floating aura(?) started moving. Before then, although it occasionally swirled and twisted, it had remained essentially at the same position in space. Now it was rocking side to side vigorously, and Jane struggled not to stare.

  "…But I still can't see the eagle he's talking about, so he tells me to look carefully with my third eye. Obviously I think to myself, third eye? What does that even mean? But it turns out he just meant for me to use the sense enhancements that come with my ability… and the eagle was pretty amazing, like he said. But still! 'Use your third eye' is such a pretentious way to say that. I think he's been watching too many weird shows."

  Jane's annoyance began to give way to confusion. 'Look carefully with your third eye' was an obvious command, but if it was really an order from researcher to subject, why dress it up in an inane story?

  Didn't they already verify that I can see it? She thought. What's the point of this? Something doesn't add u-

  The floating orange mist went still. Then a ripple spread over the surface, and five messy, fuzzy tendrils extended outward like the appendages of a cartoon alien. One tendril stiffened and straightened, and a second began to curve into an unintelligible shape.

  It seemed somehow intentional, but if that was the case, then the aura truly did come from a person. Realizing what this meant, she looked carefully with her third eye and searched for the human feelings within.

  Strong frustration in the aura… Anger… Hope? What the hell?

  Then it shifted again, only slightly, but the change was like the final turn of a key inside a lock.

  Suddenly, the orange mist read hi.

  ***Beautiful***

  Stay calm, John wrote with his aura, one word at a time. I'm not with them.

  In his earpiece, Alicia was telling him that his letters still looked washed out and blurry. Especially the letter 'e,' for some reason, which of all the letters was the worst to mess up.

  The red-haired girl is a friend, too. She helped me sneak in. I'm invisible and make no sound. But we're being filmed, us with normal devices, you with aura imaging. So continue with your act.

  I'll also make this clear now: we are sympathizers, we know William Doe. As proof, he once spent three hours deciding whether a comma or a colon would work better for a sentence. He asked you to choose, but you said it didn't matter, and he got angry. Later, you suggested a colon, but he had already picked a comma, and you got angry.

  Blink thrice if this is enough to know we are allies.

  The white-haired woman in the cell blinked thrice. His mother blinked thrice.

  Alright, he wrote, and his control nearly destabilized. Today we're out of time. But we will return. We want you to know how your family is.

  Meili was still blabbering, going on and on with the fake anecdotes (she didn't even have a boyfriend) and fake-airhead personality. On film, anyone watching the scene would only see a young, inexperienced intern trying and failing to work her strategy.

  John took a deep breath, then realized that his channels were aching. He hadn't felt any pain as he wrote, but he decided to be smart and relax his aura to a more natural state. Once he did, and all his attention was no longer spent on manipulating it, there was finally room for the realization to reach him. He had spoken to his mom.

  It was, he knew, only thanks to his incredible amount of luck. He was lucky that there were no aura-imaging cameras outside the cells, just because some minority of researchers found them 'invasive.' Lucky to have Alicia's ability on his side, to help him adjust his writing so his mother could read it. Lucky that the invisibility he'd copied extended even to his bodily fluids, his sweat and piss and tears.

  But tears would reappear, once he deactivated his ability, and it would be conspicuous if he left the floor damp. So John kept himself from crying. He smiled with invisible teeth.

  ***Beautiful***

  The owner of the strange orange aura made it clear to her. They had four weekdays before the school year started, after which they would no longer be in contact.

  But that was fine. It was almost better, even, that time was limited; Jane knew that she would have felt far too suspicious if there hadn't been a catch. It would have been too convenient a swing of fortune, too extreme, to suddenly go from a decade of isolation to a future where she'd escaped it.

  Instead, with only four days, she could be appreciative. Having someone to talk to (or at least something in that vein, after years without anything close) was such a visceral experience that the emotions attempted to physically manifest on her body. But they were happy ones, or at least she thought so. They were unfamiliar.

  For the first three days, the amber-colored aura mostly wrote about William, and there were multiple times when Jane had to bite her tongue and think of an aura extraction to suppress her smile. It helped that the man was doing well. William was still a writer, still trying to write his 'masterpiece,' but in the meantime he'd managed to become someone impressive.

  He was a published fiction author. Not some random boy on the internet armed with self-confidence and a keyboard. Not a 'self-published' nobody, standing at the most awkward of halfway points, who could hardly bear to speak the words, "I'm an author." These days he was the man with six novels, which had sold well enough to provide for himself and his son. Supposedly, there was a story about a time loop, about a drug addict, about a prehistoric forest – and she thought that his old dream, to write about everything he could, had just about come true.

  It had been twelve years since they'd spoken about that dream, on the day Jane had been forced to leave. She'd left knowing that she was giving him a difficult task, that she was setting him up to fail.

  But even if it was illogical, she had always felt that he'd succeed. Now she knew that he had, and in a way that she could never have foreseen.

  Meili was the one with an access card. Meili was the main reason she got news from the outside world. According to the amber aura's words, Meili only knew William because she was such a fan of his work. So it was William's writing, in other words, that had attracted Meili's help, that made communication possible.

  (And it was really just like the man, somehow managing to write his wife to happiness).

  .

  .

  .

  On their final day of contact, they asked her to give a visual signal if she wanted to move on from William to John.

  Jane decided that she did, so she blinked four times in rapid succession. A sense of acknowledgement radiated from the cloud of amber aura, and then another attribute appeared, something rarer and implacable.

  She couldn't determine what it was. It would have been simple in her prime, but not with twelve years of rust.

  Let's begin, the tendrils of aura wrote, with much-improved handwriting from before. For William, twelve years is a large part of his life. For John, it is his life - and so I have a story to tell you.

  We'll start at the beginning. From ages three to six, John lived normally for a child of his age. He cried, played outside, behaved with poor manners, and thought of himself as the center of the world.

  But a doctor's opinion can't be helped. He was a late bloomer at best, a cripple for life at worst. By eight years old, in a class of thirty, he was one of two remaining kids without an ability.

  By nine, he was alone.

  I know William has told you about parts of his life as a student. I won't go into much detail. Instead, I was recently shown a research paper, and I'll use it to make my point.

  Before puberty, a child is meant to be egocentric. That means to be selfish, to hold yourself in high esteem. If an eight-year-old thinks of himself as the world, as the most important, that's normal and natural. If he's humble, if he thinks about other people, then he's mature for his age.

  John thought of nothing but other people, starting from age eight. Because he needed to survive. What he thought about was this: who liked to torment him the most, who wanted practice with a punching bag? Who had things to be angry about, who would take it out on him?

  There was no room left for himself, with a classmate's fist as his whole world. Eight-year-olds aren't meant to be self-hating, or suicidal, but there were times when he was. Children who receive at least ten one-sided beatings per month, before age ten, will almost always have a small and shaky self-worth - John received somewhere around thirty.

  He still managed to make two friends. He survived middle school with their help. But he kept a list of names the whole time, of classmates to hurt back, just in case he ever got his ability.

  When he was fourteen, he did. He started with the names at the top of the list.

  Jane's reader immersion was broken, for just a moment, when she sensed how much the amber aura was straining. The writing tendrils flickered in and out of existence, then stabilized, and she felt again that they were changing in some unquantifiable way.

  She focused. Even after a decade without practice, she still had many years of prior training to rely on, from which some analog of muscle memory remained. She drew on it, and this time managed to recognize the change. The amber mist was toughening, drawing resilience from the strength of its owner's… oddly strong desire.

  This is a simplified summary. There were other justifications and reasons that seemed just as large at the time. But in the end it came down to this: John could not like himself, could not feel secure or strong, if he did not see the people who had shattered him bleeding and screaming on the ground.

  He threw extra blows once fights were over. Then he started the fights himself. He researched the best ways to hurt people, once they were helpless, that wouldn't knock them out. He applied his knowledge, until people didn't want to fight him anymore, and then it was his turn to chase. He fought a group of old enemies at once, and when it was over they were wet stains on the lawn.

  William didn't approve. I'm sure you don't, either, but there's still more to say. As of recently, he no longer fights with anyone from his school. He grew to 5.0, applied to an expensive, faraway boarding school, and got a full scholarship. In just a few days, he'll be leaving New Boston behind.

  And, the tendrils wrote, after a long pause. Now that everything is behind him, he's starting to feel a bit of regret, for copying the people who made his life so miserable.

  Jane realized, then, that they were writing about John in a different way than they did with William. The story had interiority. Unlike the factual accounting they had relayed about William, this time it was a subjective story with a character's thoughts and motivations on display.

  Who could know John's mind so deeply? Of those people, who could control their aura well enough to write with it? There was an obvious answer. Her eyes widened, and her legs stepped forward by instinct, without considering the suspicion it would bring. Her hand dragged itself to press flush against the glass.

  That implacable attribute she'd felt from him, but failed to pinpoint… It was a sense of confession.

  To be honest, the aura wrote, there was a time when John hated you more than anyone else. When he blamed you for every bit of pain in his life, for not being around to help. He thought that you abandoned him for being weak. He thought that if only he could find you, if only he could meet you face to face, he would lay into you with everything he had.

  Maybe not with his ability, even though he's getting strong. With his words. He wanted to scream at you, curse you out, announce to the whole world that this honored, mighty god-tier had abandoned her own child to an everyday of hell. Even just a bit of pain, or a tiny sliver of annoyance – if it was bad he wanted to give it to you.

  Now you're right in front of him. Now you're right in front of me.

  And I know things, now, that I didn't know when I hated you. I've read about how they trapped you, how Dad and I were the anchors dragging you down.

  You could have just let us sink. You could have swum off into the distance. But you didn't, even though we were cripples for the longest time, even though we were utter weaklings. You gave up your life so we could live.

  So I won't use any of the insults I've stored up. I'll just say this. I wish there wasn't glass between us, Mom. I wish I could wrap you in a hug.

  Jane trembled. Most likely, John had been worried about her reaction if he revealed his identity right away, which was why he'd hidden it. And it was justified, because a long series of tempting impulses had started shouting in her, making themselves known.

  How simple would it be, to break the thin barrier between them to pieces? To induce a temporary malfunction with the recorders? To teleport across an ocean, go on the run, turn the whole building to fine dust? Weren't abilities only patterns, stored away easily in her brain, waiting for the right moment to be used?

  These were all old, settled debates, all with the same answer. William would be dead, if she rebelled, along with this boy she was finally getting to know.

  And yet it seemed so hideously, comically sad, that her son would appear in front of her and she'd be unable to say a word. Had she truly become so pathetic? She was among the twenty highest alive, yet three feet of distance and a window were enough to keep her from her child?

  She realized that there was one more option to try. She started searching her mind, desperately, for memories of her teenage self. How had the world looked, when she was a 5.0 with Aura Manipulation, using her new vision for the first time? What kinds of patterns had she seen? Was there a way to write words that her son could read, but the imaging cameras would be unable to detect?

  There was, she concluded, and a small smile appeared on her face. Her aura responded to her will.

  …

  It's not good to write about yourself in the third-person, John, she wrote. I have to say that you've been bad.

  (So many years, since she'd last scolded him as a mother).

  But there's no need for tears, she comforted him, just as she had back then. You've made me so happy by coming this far.

  Through the window, below where John stood, a flat puddle of amber aura had started growing on the floor.

  Invisible tears, she knew, from this boy she wished she could have known.