147 Week of Normalcy

The week passed more slowly than I’d hoped. The newsroom’s rhythm was mechanical, but predictable from emails, deadlines, gossip, half-finished lunches, and the sound of keyboards clattering like tiny typewriter teeth gnawing on steel. For someone like me, who had lived through fire and ruin, this place was almost alien in its normalcy.

My assigned tasks were menial, but not humiliating from drafting follow-ups on minor local stories, formatting reports for the senior journalists, editing photos, and filing document references. Nothing so simple as making coffee or manning the photocopy machine, though, to confess, I’d have preferred that. Sitting before a computer, typing words that barely mattered, felt more exhausting than any battlefield I’d been on.

Bunny offered to do it for me once, texting me. “Let me handle the typing. I can make your reports flawless.”

“No,” I muttered under my breath, eyes fixed on the glowing monitor. “If I’m supposed to be learning to act ‘human’ again, I can at least type my own damn words.”

Amelia had been unexpectedly helpful, almost kind. She checked in on me throughout the week, sometimes dropping by my desk to review my progress, sometimes leaving sticky notes with sarcastic but useful advice such as ‘Don’t sound like a manifesto,’ or ‘Use contractions, you’re not writing a eulogy.’ She was patient in an unfamiliar way.

Journalism wasn’t my world. It reminded me of my brief, doomed stint in the school paper during freshman year. Mom’s idea, of course. She said it’d help me “open up to people.” Instead, I discovered that being a writer there was just another popularity contest. The ones who smiled the most got their names printed first. I quit after a month, claiming I was too busy. Truth was, I couldn’t stand pretending.

The newsroom’s energy was relentless. People drifted between desks, traded papers, and laughed at inside jokes. Phones rang, printers coughed. I tried to blend in, to move with the current, and to nod when others nodded.

By Friday evening, the setting sun turned the office windows into mirrors. People started packing up, shoulders slouched, eyes on the clock. Amelia was typing something on her laptop, looking focused.

“Dinner?” I asked, standing by her desk.

She didn’t even look up. “No, thanks.”

“You sure? I’m buying.”

“I know you are,” she said, pausing her typing to give me a small, knowing smirk. “But you’ve got somewhere else to go tonight, don’t you?”

That made me blink. “What do you mean?”

“Just go, Nick,” she replied softly, not unkindly. “You’ll see.”

The parking lot was nearly empty when I got there. Streetlights buzzed overhead, painting everything in tired amber, while I idly texted on my phone.

“Keep an eye on her,” I texted Bunny. “Something’s off with Tigress.”

Bunny’s response came instantly: “You sure?”

“She’s hiding something.”

That much, I knew. My empathy could read emotion like a scent, but Tigress was a locked box. My telepathy wasn’t much better. I could skim the surface thoughts of ordinary minds, but with her, there was static. She had psychic conditioning and anti-mental training from her hero days, probably. It wasn’t technology shielding her, just raw discipline.

Two of our co-workers, however, weren’t so careful. I’d brushed against their minds enough to know they were capes, low-level ones, but powered nonetheless. They carried faint traces of power inhibitors, subtle implants that blurred their psychic signatures. The SRC issued those to field agents and undercover operatives. Meaning, at least two people in the office weren’t what they seemed.

I hadn’t been slacking all week. Between typing forgettable news blurbs and drinking burnt coffee, I’d been profiling everyone. Guesswork told me someone among my co-workers might be from the Task Force. The one watching and evaluating me.

When I reached my car, I didn’t need my empathy to sense someone nearby. Guesswork was leaning against the passenger’s side door, phone in hand, grinning like a salesman with bad intentions.

“What’s this?” I asked, stopping a few feet away.

“It’s time,” he said simply, slipping the phone into his pocket and straightening his jacket. He walked over, opened the passenger seat door with mock chivalry. “The boss wants to see you.”

I exhaled through my nose, watching him. “That so?”

“Uh-huh. Big meeting. Real important.” His grin widened. “Try not to look too gloomy. You’ll scare them.”

I walked around and got in, sliding into the back seat, right behind the driver’s spot. It was a safer position and easier to move if things went wrong. “Hurry up,” I said flatly.

Guesswork chuckled, closing the door with a satisfying click. “Always so tense,” he muttered as he strolled to the driver’s side. “Relax, partner. It’s just business.”

“It’s always been, and that’s why I’m like this…”

“You still don’t trust me?” asked Guesswork as he settled into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

“I don’t trust anyone,” I said. “I’ll work with whoever furthers my goal. If that’s the SRC, fine. If it’s you, fine. Trust is important, but there are different kinds of it. Right now, what I have of you is professional trust, but even that is not a sure thing.”

He laughed. “So, how do you find work?”

“Boring,” I replied.

He was chatty as the city passed in a grey blur outside. “The task force might go hard on you, so keep your guard up. Speaking of you, what does it have to do with you fighting this Entity? You don’t strike me as altruistic. SRC’s got me by my throat and the money’s—” He launched into some rehearsed story about orphanages and charity, the kind of detail designed to soften me.

It was wrong in all the tiny places that mattered. Guesswork talked a lot, but his lies had texture. This man’s lie was a smooth veneer with no grain.

A traffic light turned red. I let the engine idle, listened to him prattle, and felt the perfect timing. My hand slid behind the seat, found the man’s side of the chair, and closed around something that wasn’t bone but flesh, his heart, through the thin fabric of his shirt. Fingers wrapped. Pressure applied.

“Where’s Guesswork?” I asked. My voice was soft and lethal. “You have two minutes before that light turns green. Fail to answer, and I’ll kill you. I prefer phasing people six feet under, and this is just perfect. No one will see you vanish if I just phase you now down under, right? Tinted windows, traffic, and lots of noise. If I phase you now, you’ll be nothing. Where is Guesswork?”

He went white, a deliberate puppet on strings. The man’s eyes darted, sweat beading at his temple. “W-What are you talking about?”

“You have his mannerisms, the shades, the fit, the cadence, even surface thoughts you copied. Perfect facade.” I tightened my grip just a fraction. “You failed one thing. You talk too much. Guesswork talks, yes, but he doesn’t hand me his weaknesses on a silver platter. An orphanage? Really? If he were going for a sob story, he’d do it, knowing that it would work. Do you really think I care for some no-name orphanage?”

He swallowed, jaw working. “I… I don’t understand.”

“If you choose to keep playing the fool, then the only way for you is down,” I said as I phased his feet. “So down you go.”

Something in him unraveled. Shadow peeled from skin like an actor shrugging off a costume. The Guesswork mask slid, not into nothing, but into a balding, middle-aged face that smelled faintly of aftershave and desperation. The shadow-edges retreated, leaving scarred sockets and a mouth that trembled.

“The boss sent me,” the man blurted, voice thin. “There’s no need to be so harsh, really, it’s a test. Guesswork was… was busy out of town. I was instructed to play him: ask questions, learn your motives.” He tried to laugh it off. “Personal test. Nothing more.”

“If I let go of the intangibility, your feet would be cut off, so don’t do anything unnecessary.”

I didn’t buy the trembling, and I certainly didn’t buy the timing. I dialed Guesswork’s number with one quick motion. It rang. Once. Twice. The third ring ate the line and then clicked into an endless loop that said, very clearly, unreachable.

The man’s face tightened; his eyes flicked to my hand. “You won’t reach him,” he said, too calm now. “He’s on the other side of the world. He’s too far off, with little signal. So, I don’t think you will be able to contact him.”

The light turned green, and the city pulled us forward like a slow tide.

“Drive,” I said as I pulled his legs and worked to micromanage my intangibility. “Bring me to your boss. You’ve irked me, so I’m taking you as collateral for the meeting. Understand that right now, I’m very disappointed in your work.”

He blinked, fingers white on the wheel. “Don’t you think that’ll leave a bad impression with the boss?”

“Do you think I care?” I asked. The answer was obvious. “I only care whether your people and the SRC will be useful to me. Want my motivation? Fine… I hate that Entity so much I’d cut the world in half to kill it. That work?” I let the sentence hang like a blade. “Then drive.”

We stopped at an abandoned factory wedged between taller, empty buildings. I opened the door and stepped out, my hand still half-phased through the man I’d borrowed. He made no sound. He was breathing, but quiet; his heart thudded faintly beneath my palm. The sensation was oddly intimate and obscene. I kept my fingers curled, a phantom grip that could become a hook in a breath.

“Lead the way,” I ordered. “And tell me your name.”

“Blot,” he said without drama.

I’d heard of him, someone who’d worked as a thief unopposed for years until the SRC finally caught him. Of course, the last thing that was heard of him was his mysterious disappearance. If he’d been working for the SRC, then he must’ve improved his powers quite a lot since then.

We moved into the factory’s belly, concrete and rust, and the smell of old oil wrapping around us. I pushed my empathy and telepathy out like feelers, probing the hollow rooms, the stairwells, and the catwalks. The place should have been populated with lookouts, traps, and the usual paranoid infrastructure the SRC loved for meetings. But there was nothing.

Blot walked ahead, inwardly calm but outwardly scared. Chances were he was wearing another ‘shape’ to protect his real appearance. I kept that in mind. We crossed a pool of broken glass and pushed through a roll-up door into a larger chamber. The light there had a clinical blue to it, coming from a single lamp overhead.

“Stop right there,” said the man in the middle of the floor. When he stepped forward, the air seemed to compress. “The name’s Continuity. I’m the leader of the special task force, Division 5. I believe this is our first meeting, Eclipse.”

He had long white hair that hung clean against skin so pale it looked like porcelain under the lamp. His eyes were a red that caught and held light, animal and clinical at once. An albino prince of sterile menace. I tried to sweep him with my psychic probes and felt them snag and fold back like thread against steel. Around him, there was a fluid dome, a no-zone that smudged my perception. It tasted like static and old batteries. It wasn’t total impenetrability; it was a moving, unstable blind that argued with my mind as if it had its own small will. I could sense its edges, the seams, but not pierce them cleanly.

“Your powers are strange,” I observed, testing a conversational tone. “What are you?”

He tilted his head, an almost bored gesture. “I’m not like most capes,” he said. “I didn’t get my abilities from a ‘pull.’ I was given them with a very nasty injection. It’s painful. More painful than any trauma. That’s all I can say about the method.” His voice carried no plea, only a clinical acceptance of whatever had been done to him. “You’d be wise to let go of Blot. This is a safe place. No one here will harm you.”

Safe place, he said.

“I’d rather not let go,” I answered. My voice was level, but every syllable had an edge. I kept my hand where it was. “I don’t know what you might do. If Guesswork had picked me up, or if you’d come at me honestly, I’d behave differently. But you sent a shapeshifter to impersonate him. You tested me with a fake. Not a great start. What’s even a ‘handler’ for?”

“You’ll cooperate,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “The Entity situation is beyond standard protocols. You will be monitored and bound. We need your capabilities.”

“I want to cooperate.” I let the words land with more hunger than I let show. “If it means getting rid of a literal end-of-the-world hanging over us, I’m game. I’ll work with you. But not from my knees. This is how we’ll talk, with my hand literally on the man you sent. That puts us on equal terms.”

“Fine,” said Continuity finally, the single word a small defeat. “Have it your way.”