“Ok now try to go more than like an inch off the ground,” Dylan urged. “Even for like a second.”

  Madison hugged her arms tighter to her torso, chewed the inside of her cheek. “I dunno-”

  “It’s okay!” Dylan grinned, blew a lock of hair from his face. “It’s okay. For, like, the millionth time, you’re not gonna get in trouble.”

  “Victor said not to use our Fields at home.” Madison kept shooting glances to the door of the motel bedroom she was sharing with Hazel, who had been out getting groceries with her sister for nearly an hour now. She kept expecting someone to barge in, to blow up at her, for talking to Dylan. She wasn’t doing anything explicitly wrong right now, but him having snuck over to her room, his urging to fly when there wasn’t an adult around to watch, it felt transgressive. Her skin prickled in anticipation of a punishment.

  “Victor’s not here right now. And besides, Hazel and Flo and I do it all the time. Nobody’s come to bag us up, yet.”

  “Somebody came for me. In the hospital.”

  “Yeah, and you got away. And that was without Dad within screaming distance.” Dylan puffed up his chest. “Any bad guys come our way, I’ll beat the sh- the shit out of ‘em. And if I can’t, Dad sure as hell will.”

  “Right. You’ve said that.”

  “So give it a go. You’re not gonna get better at flying without practice. I don’t know why Dad’s not already drilling you on it.”

  “He wants me to get good at the… The um.”

  “Fundamentals,” Dylan said, his voice a nasal, baritone impression of Victor’s. “He’s obsessed with the fundies. But half of the coolest things I’ve ever pulled off, I did it only because I was doing extra practice on my own. You just follow his direction, you won’t learn how to control anything in ages.”

  And he had been obsessed with fundamentals. Victor had had Madison running basic energy retention drills all week, trying to hold enough heat from a hair dryer in her field to power a lightbulb held in her other hand. It had taken her upwards of six hours, with a break for a surprisingly tasty lunch thrown together by Hazel, to achieve a glow in the bulb for any more than a few seconds. This, to her, had seemed an excruciatingly slow development, but the others had been floored. Dylan had half-pouted that the same trick had taken him six months to figure out.

  Victor had just smiled, self-satisfied, as if he’d taken a gamble allowing her to try this exercise and it had paid off exactly according to some sort of plan. He’d clapped a hand on her shoulder and told her she’d do “big things.”

  The sudden contact had startled and nauseated her, but the words had had the opposite effect. She’d never heard that sentence said before, least of all to her. What was a “big thing?” Madison didn’t feel big. She didn’t feel as if the things she’d done had ever even approached bigness. The words had made her feel warm and impossibly overestimated in equal measure.

  Maddie frowned at the floor. The carpet here was a sickly yellowish. It reminded her of the wallpaper at Gramma’s. She felt a flare of an urge to escape, and in a moment of impulsivity, channeled that impulse into an attempt at flight.

  She rocketed off the ground and bumped her head against the ceiling, letting out a yelp and dropping back, loudly, onto the bed.

  “Crap!” Dylan zipped over to her, looked her up and down. “Not so fast Maddie! Not like that!” He was giggling now. “You good?”

  “I-” Madde could feel herself blushing. “I think so. Just bumped my head-”

  “Hey!” Hazel kicked her way into the room, dropping two grocery bags at the entryway as she charged in, Flo watching impassively behind her. “Dad said no Field stuff!”

  “Since when have I followed that rule?” Dylan called back. “Since when have you?”

  “She’s new! What do you have her doing- Maddie, are you okay? Is Dylan pressuring you to do stupid stunts?”

  “I-” Maddie glanced back and forth between them. She held her hands up defensively. “No, no, he’s not- Nobody’s-”

  “She isn’t supposed to be practicing on her own!” Hazel turned to Dylan. “What if she attracts some psycho here?”

  “I already said, Dad and us would beat them up if they did. Have you ever seen someone tougher than dad?”

  “She’s using her Field all the time anyway,” Flo said suddenly. “Like, I’m sure Dad knows that.”

  All heads turned toward Flo.

  “Whaddaya mean?” Dylan asked.

  Flo pointed at Maddie’s legs. She looked down, suddenly self-conscious. “She’s standing. She was in a wheelchair before, right? That doesn’t just get better overnight. She’s probably always flying, a little, to keep her body weight up.”

  Now all the heads were turning to look at her. Madison flushed again, feeling stupid for not considering that. “I thought- I thought they did something at the hospital to fix me.”

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  “Oh, no, sweetie,” Flo said, a look of pity on her face that made Maddie feel a bitter spike of resentment in her chest, one she tamped down immediately, almost surprised at it. “They probably gave you fluids and some medicine, maybe, but doctors can’t just fix paraplegia in a day.”

  “I wasn’t- I didn’t always need a wheelchair,” Madison explained. “It was only the last couple years. When I wasn’t eating enough.”

  The room was quiet now. Dylan frowned down at his shoes. Hazel couldn’t seem to decide between reaching to pat Madison’s hand or stuffing her hands in her pockets. Flo kept that awful, doting look of condolence trained on Madison, burning her skin with it.

  She decided to wipe that look away the best she could, and made another effort at flying. She directed a little mental aversion toward the floor, a minor dose of the fear that had sent her moving during all her previous flights. But only just a little: a single droplet of emotion, carefully parceled out and directed downward.

  Madison juddered a foot in the air, arms wheeling, and stopped. Hazel lurched back and Dylan whooped.

  “There you go! Like that! And you didn’t even hit the ceiling this time!”

  “Can you move side-to-side?” Flo asked.

  Madison felt an urge to smile, looking down at her feet, dangling in the air. Dylan motioned to Flo and they grabbed both ends of the motel bed, snagged the mattress and walked it beneath her.

  “Guys,” Hazel said, stifling a chuckle. “I really do think this is against the rules.”

  “Take it slow, don’t bust down any walls,” Dylan said. “Come on, we’ll catch ya!”

  Madison lurched in the air as she angled her emotions toward the far wall. Her movements were short and staccato, and she felt the early ache of whiplash in the bones of her neck. But gradually, with much whooping and clapping from Dylan and Flo, she reached the other end of the room.

  On a whim, Madison rolled in the air and pushed back off the wall, bouncing off like a swimmer finishing a lap, and glided across the room. Her progress was smoother this time. This time even Hazel was taken to clap, though she had her head tilted strangely, as if straining to listen.

  “Flo’s right,” Hazel said. “There’s just a little bit of a signal when you’re flying. Like, you’re using energy, but just barely. I only noticed it now because it was kind of always happening around you, all the time.”

  Hours later, when Flo and Dylan had gone back to their motel room and Hazel was deep asleep, Madison laid awake looking at the ceiling. She’d been finding it extremely hard to sleep for more than a few hours. Every time her rest would lapse into something deeper than surface-level half-dreaming, she’d jolt awake, sweaty and cold, ready to flee. Half of the time she’d already be hovering out of bed; she’d taken to sleeping with the covers pulled tight around her now.

  It was too odd, too destabilizing to be sleeping in a room with other people. Sleeping is a solitary activity, one she used to spend upwards of sixteen, seventeen hours a day doing, just to pass the mindless, gaping expanses of dead time in Gramma’s basement. She felt exposed, too vulnerable, with someone around while she slept. It flushed her with a sort of shame, as if to be seen sleeping was embarrassing, a lapse in character somehow.

  Plus, only recently, that man had very nearly killed her while she slept. That she was awake for that had been pure luck. That didn’t help.

  She was ruminating on this when she heard a distant, muffled clamor coming from somewhere in the empty lot to the rear of the motel. Something in her gut told her that this sound, a quick succession of deep, almost infrasonic booms and foundation-rattling shakes, had something to do with her.

  Almost too afraid to move, but even more afraid to sit in the cramped dark of the motel and wait for the source of the noise to come to her, she crept toward the door and let herself out, careful not to wake Hazel. The cool asphalt outside the motel room rasped her feet, but only just a little; Flo must be right, she must be half-flying, even when she was walking. She was barely supporting any weight with her legs.

  She crept around the building, poked her head past a corner, towards the now-subsided commotion. She saw a huddled figure, maybe a hundred, a hundred-fifty feet away, hunched over another, whispering something. Her eyes adjusted more, and in the ample streetlight she saw that the topmost figure was Victor, and that he was holding another man to the ground with one knee.

  The man was in all black, a mask hanging off one of his ears.

  Madison strained, tried to hear what Victor was saying to the man without going any closer and giving herself away. She heard a psst from a few yards to her left, and she jumped.

  “Try to focus on grabbing the sound with your Aura,” Dylan whispered from his hiding spot, half-concealed by a shrub. Seems she wasn’t the only one drawn to investigate the noise.

  “What?” Madison’s eyes leapt from Dylan, back to Victor and her stalker in the distance, then back to Dylan.

  “Like, okay, like when you were doing the hair dryer practice, you were grabbing the heat energy from the air, right? And turning it into electricity. Electrical energy.”

  “Y-Sure. I think so. What does that have to do with-”

  “Sound is energy too,” Dylan made a wooshy-woosh hand gesture by his ears. “Tell your Aura to try and pick up sound, coming from where dad is.”

  “I don’t think I know how-”

  “Just try it. Visualize. Use your fundamentals.” Dylan grinned.

  Madison shook her head, hesitated, and did as he said.

  After a few seconds’ effort, the noise in her ears began to take on a canned, amplified quality, as if she was listening through a metal pipe that stretched over to where Victor lay. The crickets were singing louder, now, the wind detectably raspy in a way it hadn’t been before, the faraway traffic became a harmony instead of a single-note drone.

  And she heard Victor’s voice; garbled as if through a bad speaker, but audible.

  “-give me your consent, and I’ll take your Aura from you.”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  “I don’t want to kill you, but anyone else would’ve. If you say yes to this-”

  “They’re gonna get you. If not me, someone else-”

  “This doesn’t have to be violent. You give me your power, you walk away.”

  “Rai- M will see me dead. They don’t take deserters.”

  “They’re not going to have the resources to track you down. Rai has bigger things to deal with right now. You give me your Aura, you get on a bus, you get far away from this city and hunker down. You’ll be fine.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Victor visibly shifted his weight, driving the man’s torso deeper into the asphalt. Madison would’ve heard him groan even without this amplified sense of hearing.

  “Buddy, you’re not really in a position to haggle here.”

  A long silence, serenaded by crickets and engines and a dozen other alien night noises, noises usually unknown to her.

  “Fine. Fine, okay. Take it.”

  “You made the right call.”

  The man began to buck, and Madison just barely detected a glimmering something passing from his torso to Victor’s, a flash of alien green unlight that both brightened and darkened the lot ahead of them for a second.

  The man was unconscious, now, lying limp in the lot like a ruined puppet. He looked shockingly harmless, even a little pathetic, splayed out like that.

  Dylan was at Madison’s side now, nudging her ribs with his elbow.

  “See?” he said. “Told ya he wouldn’t let anyone get to you.”