Simon kneeled down on the sternum of the red-robed woman thrashing beneath him. He repeated his question, a little muffled by the flames dancing around his head.

  “Who do you work for?”

  The woman gasped and growled and gnashed, sputtering and then swallowing her words. She seemed restrained, muzzled. Simon felt a hot wave of frustration, and the flames dancing around his face flared.

  He’d been keeping the fire going for two hours now, at first as an experiment, but now as something almost like a fashion choice. After some cursory testing he’d discovered that he could, in fact, make more heat than the energy he converted seemed to allow for. Whatever he took in, if it came out as heat, there was more of it.

  Frustratingly, he couldn’t immediately pivot this extra energy into any other forms. All attempts to quickly re-configure this excess heat immediately sputtered, the energy fleeing from his grasp the instant he attempted it.

  Still, a near-infinite supply of heat was plenty useful on its own. And he thought he looked cool, keeping this eternal fire going around his head, obscuring his face from outsiders, a flickering, hellish mask. It helped offset his small, boyish frame a little, made him look as menacing as he was beginning to feel.

  “One more time. Who are you working for?”

  Tears squeezed out of the corners of the woman’s eyes. She’d been almost pathetically easy to take down. She’d ambushed him, charged into his backyard, where he’d been up late practicing his newfound craft deep into the night. The overuse of his power, Simon assumed, must have called to her somehow. He made a mental note to be more careful about that.

  Still, even as it caught him by surprise, Simon had easily weathered her clumsy ambush and bowled her over, knocking her defenses down with a single massive, concentrated wave of fire, followed almost immediately after by just enough electricity to scramble her nerves enough to tackle.

  This had all become even easier after his captives had died, one after the other, within an hour of them. So much easier after that green-grey shimmering bolus had risen from their bodies, had floated in the air and slipped, warm and easy, into Simon’s own field, suffusing him with warmth and power. He’d been strong before those two gifts, and they’d probably, at the very least, doubled his raw ability in the space of an instant.

  He was hungry for more.

  “I don’t want to have to kill you,” Simon lied. “But if you’re going to keep up like this, without answering my questions…”

  He trailed off, burning a white-hot torch of energy at the tip of a finger, leveled toward her neck.

  “It’s self defense. You attacked me.” He could feel a rise in the back of his throat, a bile-like burn of queasy anticipation. “I’m giving you one more shot. Who are you working for?”

  The woman chomped at him and writhed. Simon shrugged, affecting the casual gesture more to calm his own nerves than anything, and prepared to blast the stored heat through the woman’s brain. One shot, quick and painless, he told himself. Humane.

  His finger was inches from her skull when the woman’s face changed entirely. Her expression of crazed resistance melted away, replaced by calm, detached amusement.

  “What do we have here?” She said. Her voice sounded oddly thin, strained, a contrast to her newfound, confident expression. Wait, no: her facial muscles were twitching, still, struggling to hold their shape, as if tugged into place. “Why is your head on fire?”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “It’s not. It’s-” Simon felt oddly bashful, explaining the look out loud. He very nearly dropped the flames, decided not to at the last second. “What’s happening? Why are you talking like this?”

  “She works for me. Phoenix.” The woman studied him, expectant.

  Simon blanched. “What- Apologies. What is that supposed to mean? Why are you speaking in the third person?”

  The woman blinked, a smile creeping across her face. “You’ve never heard of me?”

  “No. I expect I’d remember the name Phoenix if I’d heard it.”

  The woman looked from Simon’s obscured face, to the energy bubbling still in his hand, back to his face. “How long ago were you awakened?”

  “Awakened?” Simon guessed at the meaning of the word. “A few days ago. Well- No. More like a couple weeks. I presume you want me to count the time before I had any real control over the ability?”

  The woman blinked. “Two weeks?”

  “Almost exactly, yes.” Simon shook his head, dispelled the attack he’d been readying. “Sorry, sorry, what’s happening? Who am I talking to? Is this woman being-”

  “Controlled remotely, yes.”

  “I- How-” Simon reeled. None of this fit with his internal paradigm for how the field was supposed to work. What did this have to do with manipulating and converting energy? “How is that possible?

  “I could say the same to you. Two weeks is an awfully impressive time frame to go from neophyte to master.”

  “Master? Really.” Simon, despite himself, felt the praise tug at him. “I don’t know about- Surely, I’m a quick study, but there’s so much I don’t know. Master, master is a big word-”

  “Would you like to know more?” The woman’s smile was easy and warm. Grandfatherly, somehow, despite her age and appearance.

  “Of course. I feel like my understanding of what exactly is happening to me is getting completely overturned almost every day.” He studied the woman. “Why do I feel like I’m making a deal with the devil?”

  She chortled. “You have good instincts. Do you know about the tunnels under Minnehaha falls?”

  “I can Google it. Why, do you want me to meet someone there?”

  “If I were you, and was interested in learning more, I would try to be at the tunnel’s mouth tomorrow morning at nine.” The woman nodded, despite her cramped posture. Simon noticed that her eyes were still squeezing out fresh tears. “I feel we have much we could offer each other.”

  “I’ll be there.” Simon moved to get off of the woman’s chest, but paused. “One question, first. This woman you’re controlling- Is she ever going to be free of you? Do you intend to keep her as a puppet forever, or does this,” he gestured vaguely at the woman, at her flickering, fluctuating, weak Field, “does this wear off?”

  “It’s forever.” The woman blinked away more tears even as her grin widened. “I’m a very capable man.”

  Simon nodded. “Then it would be the moral thing for me to kill her.”

  The woman’s smile wiped away, replaced by an expression of tasteful shock that lasted only a second before the calm patriarch’s grin returned. “My, you are something. Greedy boy.”

  “It’s not greed, it’s-”

  “Justify it to yourself however you please. I couldn’t care less. Have her essence, by all means. Consider it an advance.” The woman wriggled against the force holding her back, the power holding her expression in place waning. “I’ll be sure to see you tomorrow.”

  And then she was back to flopping and growling, choking out her half-baked words. Simon nodded, considered all he’d heard. He realized that he was on a precipice here, ethically. That up until now, he’d had justifications for the violence he’d committed. That his rationalization about killing her being for her own good was paper-thin. That if he decided to end her life and consume whatever odd payload he now assumed floated out of anyone like him, who dies at the hand of another, he’d be a different person forever. A worse one.

  He also remembered how good it had felt to absorb those two essences. How strong they had made him.

  Simon spent exactly two seconds making his moral calculations, and then he reached for his power and leveled a finger at her head.