Elena ended up pulling the ice cream usually reserved for Friday out of the fridge and sitting Sam at the kitchen table with a bowl and a large spoon. They spent a little time putting things back together—Patrick cleaned up the living area, and Elena fed the animals that needed it, and let Savannah out of her cage so she could hop around the apartment for a little while. Sam left his seat for a couple of minutes to chase her.

"So what exactly happened back there?" Patrick said.

Elena shrugged. "Honestly, not much. The lady was crazy. She took us in to talk about Sam—well, she called him Planck—being possessed, and she talked about her husband's work on LED's."

"I guess the anomalies had a weird effect on them?"

"LED's are built to very narrow specs. They all have to be the same frequency of light."

"Frequency?"

"Color, basically. I guess Sam being around shifted the colors just a little."

Patrick nodded. "Sounds about right." He smiled as he glanced over at Sam, who was licking the bottom of the bowl. "Do we have any LED's?" Patrick asked.

"Not where I can easily get to them, but it doesn't matter. I have a—" she contemplated trying to explain how her scope detected frequency, but decided against it— "machine that detects color very precisely."

"Can't we just see shifts in color?"

Patrick sat beside Sam, looking over the little cuts in his fingers where the glass had sliced him. "Michelle!" he called to the front. "Sam needs your help."

"In theory. But I'm wondering if there's something we're not seeing with the light bulb he's already been trying to use."

"I mean, it's been getting hot."

"Exactly." Elena smiled. "I'm wondering if it's putting out infrared."

"Remind me what's infrared again?"

Sam plodded over from the table, chocolate smears covering most of his face. "It's that thing where your camera can see heat instead of light," Sam said.

Elena nodded. "That's one way to explain it. But light has lots of frequencies. There are only a few colors we can see."

Sam's eyes widened. "There are colors we can't see?"

She wasn't sure if she would call the invisible frequencies colors, but it was close enough. "Yeah. Lots of them."

"That's so cool!"

"Sam, can we try one more time with the light bulb? I want to measure something."

He crossed his arms and stuck out his lower lip. "I'm bad at the light bulb."

"I think you might be making the light bulb work, actually. Just in one of the colors we can't see."

He dropped his arms and let his breath out. "Okay."

It took a few minutes to clear the table, wash the dishes, and pull back out the materials and scope. Elena sat across from Sam with the sensor and data acquisition device. "Okay, Sam. Go ahead and light up the bulb."

He put the wires in place. Again, as far as they could tell, the bulb didn't light; but the sensor disagreed. Elena grinned as the frequency range appeared on the screen instantly. The frequencies were on the order of hundreds of trillions of Hertz.

She squeezed her eyes shut and ran a few calculations in her head. Three hundred million divided by a hundred trillion . . . hundred billionths? She stared at the screen. It couldn't be right.

Sam tapped on her arm. "So? Did I make invisible light?"

"I . . ." She ran the numbers in her head again, then pulled out her calculator. But no matter what she did, she kept getting the same numbers.

"So?" Sam scooted forward in his chair. "Am I making invisible light?"

He was creating visible light, not invisible. The frequencies should have been right for the human eye. She lowered the device and looked at Sam.

"No, you're not making infrared."

He deflated.

"It looks like you're making visible light. We just can't see it."

"So . . . invisible."

"Um." She bit her lip and shook her head. "Yeah. Invisible visible light."

Sam stared at her with a confused expression.

"Hey!" Patrick sat down in the chair next to him, holding up a hand for a high five. "Invisible visible light! That's way cooler than regular invisible light, right, Elena?"

"I mean, yeah, I guess." It definitely left her with a lot more questions, whereas a simple shift to infrared might have answered some.

"Yeah! Cool!" Sam held up both hands, high fiving Patrick with one—Patrick jerked his hand away, shaking it—and holding out the other to Elena. "Invisible visible light! Can we do another experiment?"

Elena ignored his hand. "No, we need to try this one again."

Sam dropped both arms. "Why? I did a really cool superpower!"

"Because we're not trying to get you to use your powers. We're trying to get you to control them."

He wrinkled his nose. "But it's cool."

"But you saw how Mrs. Wilson was. She was scared."

"She was crazy!"

"Being scared can make people crazy. I'm not saying she was right, I'm saying what Patrick was saying earlier. Every superhero needs to be able to control their powers, to protect themselves."

Sam sighed and sat back down in the chair. "Okay. What do I need to do?"

"You know that feeling you get in your skin when your power is being used?"

"Yeah."

"Well, you need to use that feeling. See if you can change it."

"How?"

"Just try, first. Then tell us how you feel."

He groaned. "This is a lot of talking about feelings."

Elena turned her back to roll her eyes, picked up the battery she'd left on the counter, and turned back to hand it to him. "Okay, put the pieces together again."

He did. "It's kind of warm."

"It's okay. Feel that weirdness again?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Okay, see if you can use it. Pull it inwards or push it outwards or something."

His brow furrowed, then he scrunched up his face.

The lights in the cabin dimmed while the light bulb in his hand shone, less brightly than it had with Elena, but still visible. "Whoa."

"Wow, cool! That was pushing it out. I can pull it out, too. Watch!"

"Wait, Sam—"

The light bulb burst in his hand, and little shards of glass flew across the room.

"Ow!" He dropped the metal and jumped up, holding his hand. "It got glass in me!"

He could do it. He could control the anomalies, at least a little. Elena felt numb with astonishment as she realized that some part of her hadn't believed he would be able to do it at all.

He couldn't control whether or not they happened. Light always behaved oddly around Sam, and there was nothing he could do about that. She'd wondered at what area around him the anomalies took effect, but it looked like that was exactly what he could control. He could make the anomalies cover a wide area with limited effects, or he could make them cover a tiny area with extreme intensity.

Maybe the sum total of his power was constant, or maybe it changed with time. If she could take a measurement of the energy shift in his anomalies, and multiply it by the area it covered, she could calculate a sum total of sorts. She could measure the extent of his power, and how it changed with time, and take notes on what caused it to shift. She could figure out exactly how much of a danger Sam could be.

Exactly how much of an asset he could be to Tech United.