“You have two hours.”

And with that, Bil left the Mercurial Self with unbridled freedom while the Primum slept. Lyssa gathered the black mist about her limbs. She opened the window and with a quiet crack she jumped through the air in bursts of dizzying speed. She dove into the sky, charging head first into that black veil, until the city arrayed itself before her. The towers of checkered light downtown still dwarfed her of course. Some of those buildings were over a hundred floors high. And she was beginning to run out of stamina.

But she didn’t stop. She pulled herself through the ever thinning medium until the autumn air chilled the skin exposed by her panda bear pajamas. Her heart raced and burned. Finally she dried the last of her gift’s proverbial tank and began a slow free fall back down to the surface. It was fine. She usually found one last jump before she met the earth unceremoniously.

Here she found her wine. Here at the end of the rope she laid out. When her muscles felt ready to snap and her lungs collapse. Though it was here the so-called Primum felt genuine, life-threatening fear. And from that fear the head they all shared became one occupant more crowded.

White force-fire erupted from the soles of her feet, keeping her afloat in the cool, night breeze.

“How long has this been an arrangement?” Eury’s voice echoed.

“A while. Before my time, even,” Lyssa said. “She doesn’t even wonder why her own gifts seem so intuitive or ask where the muscle memory comes from. If she’s too lazy to train then it perforce falls to one of us to keep her in shape.”

“You just like the freedom.”

“That too. You could join me.”

Eury did not even reply. The two Selves intertwined fingers. Their arms pressed tightly together, their veins merged like rivers, until they became closer than any pair of lovers, then closer still. In that moment, there was no Mercurial, or Eury behind Lyssa’s eyes, but someone entirely new. A perspective less and much, much more than a hybrid of the two. She would have to thank Whitworth later. Without his interference she never would have known this was possible.

“What a strange feeling,” she said. In a single bound she flew hundreds of meters, leaving behind a comet’s trail of force-fire and a wake of pressurized air. She slipped through the atmosphere faster than sound, yet without upsetting it enough to cause a shattering shockwave. She surmised her gift generated a variety of pressure waves, half against the phase of the other, canceling both. Though she had never been as good at it as she was now. The gifts had always felt like tools before. But in her current mindset, they felt like her own arms.

Gaining confidence, she primed her gifts like springs and pushed forward. There had been enough metaphors about the poetic nature of flight such that the romanticism of it had mostly been lost. Any grade-schooler knew the inspirational story of the Wright brothers, who sought to mimic what a lucky few humans were born able to do. Historians have often referred to it as an evolutionary arms race. Man to technology versus superman to gift. The optimist said there was no distinction; we are all, in our own fashion, mankind. Of course, gifted were one in ten in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The optimist was quieter now.

She looked at the light grids beneath her. The streets were so perfectly designed, allowing millions to commute day and night from wherever they were to wherever they wanted to be. Nowadays philosophers minced words on the poetic nature of normality. Gifts were on the rise. Villainy was on the rise. Her eyes scanned the brilliantly lit streets. Where there were shadow, she did not linger. But that was where crime might take place. She wondered if that was how heroes felt. The wait, the anticipation. Like a hawk looking for a rodent, as was its nature. Was it in a hero’s nature then, to save? Then what value was there in doing good, if all other choices were trivial? A hawk did not choose to hunt the vole, it needed to hunt the vole.

All inappropriate thoughts for an aspiring hawk, to be sure. Lyssa wondered how she would make of this when the Primum woke, if she remembered it at all.

Though sometimes things did not happen in the shadows. She had found herself above the industrial sector of the city. Enormous tracts of land devoted to factories and warehouses and semi parking spaces. A fair few were still churning out smoke even at this time of night. Good cover for those with ill intentions, no doubt. She watched a police vehicle make its rounds through those streets as a matter of duty. Its lights were off, its course lazy. The good men of badges did not have her perspective. They did not notice that behind the wall of trucks moving, there was a set of warehouses the vehicles were not delivering into or out of. But the lights were on and people were moving down there, hidden in plain sight.

She reduced her altitude and extinguished her force-fire, landing on a smokestack. The most obvious tell that people were up to something was when they looked up once every minute or so. Nobody looks up. The other suspicious tell was the submachine guns. The weapons were hidden behind their backs; they weren’t expecting trouble.

Lyssa smiled. She took a deep breath and erupted in a ball of black mist and white flame, landing in the middle of the operation. Crates were blasted away. Men fell on their backs, then quickly got to their feet to bring their guns to bear. Before them stood a figure clothed in white fire about the face, and black mist around the arms.

A man appeared from one of the warehouses. He loosely wore a black jacket with tributaries of aged cracking in the leather, matching a pair of faded blue jeans.

“Who the hell are you supposed to be?” He called out.

“The name is not important,” Lyssa said. Her voice sounded alien, modulated through the rippling pressure of her gifts.

“Sure it is,” the man replied. He rubbed the unshaven shadow on his chin in thought. “I’m going to have to ask for a hero ID. We all have a license to carry. And we’re not breaking any laws by working overtime. Families to feed and all th-”

A beam of brilliant white raced towards him. The entire area was bathed in white light and an expanding wave of overpressure dense enough to seem solid. If the eyes were quick enough to see. The wave reached even the semi-trucks several lanes away, tilting them a few degrees off the road. Horns blared.

When the dust settled, the scene was littered with shattered crates and fallen workers, struggling to get up again. Warehouse doors were torn off the rails. Lyssa bent down to examine what had spilled out of the boxes. Submachine guns, the same ones on the backs of the guards.

“Hm…”

“You’re not a hero, are you?” The man spoke from behind the smoke. A layer of asphalt hovered in front of him, buzzing with arcs of yellow lightning. The shield fell apart with a wave of his hand. “That was an unwarranted discharge of a gift. Add refusal to identify on the list. You could be suspended for weeks.”

“Listen sir,” Lyssa said. “Technically, I wasn’t even born yesterday. I just wanna fight somebody.”

“Let me phone it in real quick.” He dialed a number on his phone. “Boss? You seeing this? …I don’t know, maybe one of your unofficial fans. Somebody who got inspired watching those clips of vigilantism on the telly… I mean kids are impressionable. I told you this was gonna happen… I could tell because she’s wearing cartoon pajamas… Alright I’ll discourage ‘em.”

He pocketed the phone and raised his hands defensively.

“I have to warn you,” he said. “This ain’t gonna be like the movies. When things break you don’t just grimace it off. It sticks for months. Lotta pain meds and hospital bills and crying.”

“Tell me about them,” Lyssa replied.

“Cheeky little-”

The air flashed with white energy. Beams of pure thrust met dark bulwarks of asphalt chunks, deflecting into errant rivers of friction. The other men were retreating in a panic to the cover of the warehouses. If there was anything flammable nearby, it would have surely gone up.

“Is this what you want?” He called out. Lightning flashed and more pieces of ground lifted, sharpening into spearheads. “You think your parents would appreciate you taking the law in your hands?”

Lyssa vanished, reappearing several steps to the side, dodging the spikes.

“I’m experimenting,” she said.

“Find a safer hobby.”

The yellow lightning traced the ground beneath her feet. A shell of asphalt lifted like a reverse flower. The sky grew dark as heavy petals began to envelop her. She leapt through the closing gap and into the sky, then immediately to the right. Shards of manmade ground flew past her face, coming close enough to brush her hair.

She ought to be more powerful than her opponent, she was using two gifts at once after all. Somehow he had her on the ropes. She moved behind him, outpacing sound, but not his reflexes. When her force-fire beams discharged, he had already raised another of his shields of buzzing stone. The shields broke if she put them under duress, but he was positioning them to deflect, not to block. The surroundings were taking a beating from their sparring.

She stopped and put some distance between them.

“You have less than one hour before I force you two apart.”

“I think I’m done,” Lyssa said.

“What?” The man shouted. His shields fell apart with a clatter. “What was your plan, kiddo?”

“Practice,” she said. “That’s all. This place looked consequence free. You people don’t look like the type that can call the cops.”

“Seriously? You came here, broke our stuff, all for exercise?”

“I thought I was clear about that. I can’t beat you anyhow. See ya.”

She raced home and slipped under the covers of her bed. With some reluctance the Selves separated back into their individual components and returned to their own rooms. The halls of the mind mansion finally went dark. When Lyssa woke the following morning, she would stumble to the washroom with her eyes barely open and her entire body aching. She would not question it. After all, that was how everyone woke up: as exhausted as the night before.