Who knew there was such money in dead chimps, Susan thinks as she surveys Professor Chase’s beautiful house. It backs onto a golf course and Susan is sheltering under the dark boughs of the wooded rough, the night alive with roaming moths and hungrily biting midges. The moon hangs waxing and low in the sky, good conditions for skulking. She’s enjoying the reprieve of the cool night air from the punishing heatwave of the past week, dressed in her best burgling clothes. Soft natural fabrics, cotton touch gloves, black trousers and a long-sleeved black top with ballet shoes on her feet. Ballet shoes don’t come in black, but if someone gets close enough to notice the colour, it’ll be the least of her problems and the beginning of theirs.

Susan’s hands and feet tingle with anticipation, thrilling at the heightened risk of the adventure. That’s the nature of the beast. Professional burglars hate risk, viewing it the way a toddler views broccoli, something to be accepted with suspicion and great care. Susan’s met a few burglars during the summer holidays from her law degree. She’s been interning with the same law firm for the past three summers, a firm Martina’d put her in touch with. The kind of law firm that dealt with the day-to-day realities of law, rather than the rarefied air of human rights or commercial law. The first summer was the worst - she was little more than a glorified clerk, opening and sorting letters. It got better the following year. On the good days, she accompanied the partners on trips to see clients. She discovered the delights of conveyancing and the long hours a solicitor could spend waiting outside a court for a hearing. The best days involved defence duty, those mornings when a partner took her into the police cells or one of the city’s prisons to meet the night’s selection of miscreants in need of representation. Outside of the usual selection of drunks, thugs, and drunk thugs, would be the clients who interested her, the burglars and safe-crackers.

The burglars she met were exclusively men. Regardless of their current status as jailbirds, they considered themselves very careful but confronted with a pretty girl and a pretty smile, plus the protection of the legal relationship, Susan found they were happy to talk about their trade in general terms. You need a way in and a way out of the area, one told her. Never break into an occupied house, said another. Do your best to look like you belong to the neighbourhood - prod-noses and curtain-twitchers will call the Police on outsiders. It made Susan wonder how these men ever got caught and when she asked them, all she got was a shrug of the shoulders and a comment on the fickle nature of luck or occupational hazards or being done up like a kipper.

Drax Avenue, Copse Hill, borough of Merton. Wimbledon Common a stone’s throw away. A lovely place to raise your children, although the mortgage might be painful to service. Susan’s glad she doesn’t live in this area. She wishes she lived in Chase’s house. She walked laps past it in the late afternoon, getting the lie of the land. It stands alone, just off the road and away from its neighbours. A gorgeous blood-red-bricked Edwardian home with a large swimming pool in the tree-fringed back garden next to a broad swathe of lawn. Her Sense told her that, as expected, the house was empty. She took in different details on each pass. Yes, there are security cameras on the house overlooking the driveway and an alarm box on the front wall.

There’s another camera facing the back garden about twenty metres from the fence. She crouches behind the fence, eyes closed, a mosquito whining to and fro by her left ear. The camera has a swivel mount, she Senses. That makes things easier. No need to smash the lens with a rock, or cover it with a plastic bag. She has both handy. She exerts her Talent, the camera fixed in her mind’s eye, and pushes. Nothing at first. Rust locking the swivel in place. No problem.

Susan’s never found a limit to how much she can move with her Talent. She started small, balls and toys and so on, and worked her way up from there. She rearranged the furniture in her room one weekend when she was nine using only her Talent. She’s knocked people head-over-heels with it. If she can get a grip on it, it will move for her, even at the cost of a headache. There’s one exception, one thing which refuses to allow itself to be moved. She can’t move herself. She can’t fly. Her Extrinsic mulishly refuses to acknowledge that she’s there. She’s often used her Intrinsic to float down from jumps or falls, or to make herself massive to resist shoves. She doesn’t want to admit to herself how annoying it is. It’s alright for Red Line to arrow around like a dragonfly, yet Susan remains grounded.

She pushes the camera again. Her brows furrow as she focuses. She forms a shape with her hands, as though she had the camera firmly in her grasp. She exhales and increases the force, moving her hands in concert, twisting. The rust yields and the camera jerks and turns degree by degree, emitting little squeaks of protest. Susan turns the camera parallel to the wall and extends her Sense again. The house is still empty. The neighbours are either in bed or undetectable and the only things moving in the woods around her are small and furry. Only bats patrol the sky, Red Line is hopefully sleeping somewhere.

There’s no gate in the fence, so she’ll have to jump onto or climb all eight feet of it. She focuses again, feels her weight diminish and she leaps up cat-like from a standing start, arms reaching for the top of the fence, easing herself over it. She drops to the ground, although the slow speed of her fall always feels wrong. She has as much time as she wants to spot the landing and get into position. Just like walking on the moon. She touches down on the lawn and looks around the garden. All clear. She pads across the lawn to the split-level patio and creeps up the steps to the back door.

She glances through the window. A dark kitchen lies inside, the only light source a blue LED clock on the oven. Her Sense tells her more: stone-tiled floor, two walls lined with cabinets, wooden table in the centre of the room surrounded with four chairs. Two doors leading off, one to a hallway and the other to a dining room, judging by the massive table. Off the dining room, double doors leading to a living room.

A ghost visits unbidden as she scans the ground floor. She sees her mother standing in the doorway of her home, smiling and waving goodbye. It’s been ten years. Susan visited the cemetery as usual with her Dad on Thursday. She sat beneath an oak tree overlooking the grave and let her sadness out, let the grief and regret roam free for a while, her face wet as she held her father and felt his shoulders shake. They left flowers on the grave. They lit a candle. She sends the thought away, chases it with a message: I’m doing my part. She fills and empties her lungs, fills and empties, and crouches down beside the door.

She smiles when she sees how secure the door is. A standard tumbler lock with a double cylinder as the main lock and her Sense picks up a deadbolt inside too, secured with its own key from the outside only. She smiles wider as she recalls the first time she picked a lock. It was her own front door after she’d left her key at home one frigid December school day six years ago. She’d never really probed a lock before that and it surprised her how complex the innards of one was. It surprised her how inaccurate her Sense was, too. She’d never concentrated so hard before that and it took twenty minutes before she could distinguish all the moving parts. Five channels each holding a tiny metal pin, one deadbolt. She used her Talent to jiggle each pin up into position and hold it there, a task which she felt melting her brain. Then she tried to turn the cylinder. She almost screamed when her Talent lost its hold on one pin, which dropped down and blocked the cylinder. When she scanned the lock again, she realised how stupid she’d been. She could just slide the latch in and push the deadbolt back. A minute later, she was boiling the kettle for tea.

Susan twists the deadbolt open. Her Sense examines the kitchen for the other security system in the house, the burglar alarm. Max’s notes were reasonably specific on the topic of security. Chase had a wireless dialler system installed, with the standard wall-mounted PIR sensors. Max wasn’t specific enough to include the panel code. There, one sensor above the door to the hall, a small plastic box. Her Sense crawls over the sensor, probing for weak points, access points. A small screw in the base holds the cover in place. Screws demand concentration, especially a screw this small, this far from her. She draws in deep, slow breaths, holding each while her Talent twists the screw a half-turn at a time. The fingers of her left hand twitch, mimicking the action. Tamper alarms preclude simply wrenching the cover off. Red Line would probably go in for such a lack of subtlety, the thug, but Susan is no thug. It takes a minute of agonizing precision before the screw drops to the floor. Susan exhales with a sigh and dries her face, shaking the tension out of her arms and working her hands. She focuses again, her Talent pushing at the cover to find how to open. She levers it up and away, exposing the sensor face and the battery mounted above. The battery pops out and bounces on the hard stone flags and Susan works the back door’s latch open.

A gloved hand pushes the door open and Susan steps in. She takes in the size of the kitchen, the island in the centre of the floor and the double-doored fridge. It all seems very fancy. She’s sorry she can’t turn the light on and drink in the luxury, or open the fridge and pour herself an ice-cold glass of Chablis to enjoy in the living room. Maybe afterwards, once the keys are safely in hand, she’ll come back this way and lift an expensive bottle to enjoy at home. A nice cool something to help her bask in the warm glow of doing good.

The other thing Max wasn’t specific about was the location of Chase’s office, let alone where he left his keys. Susan doesn’t enjoy judging by appearance yet in her experience, photographs never did justice to just how eccentric people truly were. Chase’s picture showed a man whose eyes proclaimed him deep in the grips of idiosyncrasy, so goodness knows quite how batty he is. She hopes his wife, should she exist, is the kind of woman with a firm grip on domestic matters, giving Susan a fighting chance of locating the keys swiftly.

Susan scans the hall from behind the kitchen door. Her notes say another sensor faces the front door and a third watches the hall upstairs. It would be a miracle if they were of a different design to the first, one easier to open. She groans when she Senses she isn’t that lucky tonight. It takes a few minutes before she’s prised both covers off and both batteries out, and then the dark house is hers to do with as she chooses.

She starts her search in the hallway. There’s a wardrobe at the foot of the stairs with a matching shoe cupboard, and a bureau just down from the door. Bureau first, she decides. She runs her hand over the old oak surface, appreciating the fineness of the grain. She opens the flap and pokes around inside, shifting bundles of old letters and nudging aside forgotten old coins. She moves on to the drawers, filled with photo albums and bundles of documents, taking her time searching, using her Sense as well as her fingers. She frowns when she turns to the wardrobe empty-handed. Not lucky tonight.

She opens the wardrobe, musty with old tweed jackets and woollen overcoats. She coughs as dust rolls over her. She tries the pockets of each coat in turn only to back away, her frown deepening. She eyes the shoe cupboard before reproaching herself for her stupidity. Of course they won’t be in there. Chase is a chimp murderer, not an outright lunatic.

Susan walks through the living room and dining room, hoping against hope that she won’t have to go upstairs. Nothing key-shaped shows up when she scans each room. She grits her teeth when she stands at the foot of the stairs. Up she goes, gentle and cautious, her Sense showing her the hallway as clearly as if it were daylight. The one good thing about it being dark is that she can let her Sense overlay her sight. When it’s bright, combining both is dazzling, the gravity Sense flooding her brain with excess information about the weight of everything she can see and all the things behind her and over and above, so she prefers using her gravity Sense with closed eyes. Her Sense is always on passively, attracting her attention the same way her peripheral vision reports new sights to her, if she cares to respond.

She winces as stairs creak beneath her. She’s alone, according to all of her senses, but her heart is thumping in her chest, the insistent beat of hard rock. The rushing of blood in her ears is a river in flood. She stands atop the stairs in the velvety darkness and extends her Sense again, the layout of the upper floor revealing itself to her. Two large bedrooms, two small, and two bathrooms. Off to her right, in a small room extending out under the slope of the roof, is an office with a dormer window following the steeply sloping roof down to the driveway at the side of the house. The presence of a dense box standing in the corner draws her attention. A safe. Her Sense can pierce its walls despite its weight and thickness. It feels like there is a large bundle of keys in there.

The door opens silently and Susan steps in. Heavy bookshelves extend the length of one wall, filled with books and photo frames. A desk stands in the centre of the room, modern and made of fibreboard. Something about the desk feels wrong to Susan, its cheapness or flat-pack origins at odds with the quality of the rest of the furniture in the house. She scans the house again. Still nothing here but her and the night.

The drawers of the desk contain the usual work paraphernalia, pens, pads of paper and assorted chargers. No set of keys. Susan turns her attention to the safe. There’s a dial on the front but no keyhole. She probes the door, feeling her way through the layers of lacquer and metal. She pities the Normie safe-crackers. Her burglar contacts had all been afraid of safes, averring that getting into one required either stumbling upon the combination or key, or knowing the black magic worked by safe-crackers. Who had the patience to sit in front of one of these steel boxes and twiddle with the dials while listening for the minute clicks that signified progress? Not those men. They wouldn’t touch them at all if they had the choice. If not, they’d much rather take the thing away to a quiet place and go brute force and drill the lock or slice the thing open with a welding tool or pump it full of water and blast the door off.

Susan’s Sense lays the safe’s mechanism completely bare. This seems to be an expensive one, with a glass relocker, a nightmare for the average burglar who’d prefer to drill than solve. The wheel pack has four notched wheels and she goes over each in turn, feeling for the notch in each. Her Talent eases each wheel round in turn, the cam ticking, clockwise and anticlockwise. The notches align and the fence drops into the gap, the latch mechanism releases. Susan turns the handle and swings the door open.

There, the keys. Susan reaches for them, picks them up. They jangle as she brings them closer. Something about them feels wrong in her Sense. She holds the bundle in the palm of her right hand and runs the fingers of her left over them. They aren’t keys. They are key blanks, uncut, unformed.

“Susan,” says a deep, familiar voice from behind her.

Susan spins, flinging the keys. She falls onto her backside and gasps. Red Line is floating in the doorway. It has to be him, it can’t be him, how could he know she’s here? But it is him, flicking on the light, his armour shining like a beetle’s carapace. Her Sense tells her that there’s nothing in the doorway, no object with mass at least.

“Susan,” he repeats, “stay calm and listen to-”

Susan bounces him into the bookshelf, her Talent hurling him, the wood crunching under his mass and paperbacks spraying across the room. He falls to the floor, groaning and shaking his head, sweeping debris off himself. Susan launches the desk at him. It snaps in half on the crown of his helmet, folding around him and spinning away. There must be an escape route. The door lies beyond Red Line’s stirring figure, much too dangerous. The dormer window behind her. She picks up the office chair and smashes it against the window. The inner pane shatters but the outer resists and Susan propels the chair again. The glass bursts outwards at the second attempt, the chair tumbling and rattling away into the night.

Red Line hauls himself up onto all fours. Susan bowls him hard into the hallway and he rolls away,head-over-heels, limbs flailing and crashing through the doorway. Time to go. Susan hops out of the window, reducing her weight as she slides down the roof, instinct stretching her arms out against the tiles for balance. She gasps as shards of window glass slice at her fingers. She hits the ground and glances around her. Lights are coming on in the neighbours’ windows. She closes her eyes, her Sense hungry for information.

She detects Red Line sat with hands on head in the house. Back-up is almost certainly inbound. For all of his faults, Red Line is no vigilante, rather a willing tool of the Police. A voice inside her is screaming, pleading for her to run. A quieter, calmer voice tells her, stop, think. Nobody runs from Red Line and escapes. He can track your body with his Sense. Don’t run. Hide. Use his trick against him.

Over there, her Sense reports. Behind the neighbouring house, just beyond the fence, a wheelie bin. She hopes the bins aren’t done on Tuesdays in this area. Susan focuses on her weight, dropping it to zero. She takes a step and boosts herself into the air, arms cartwheeling. She’s drifting towards the top of the fence, an astronaut floating in orbit, and she grabs for it with both hands. Her left misses. Her right scrabbles for a grip, her fingertips straining, getting enough purchase to gain control over her motion. She swings herself over the fence, arcing around against the other side. The fence groans as her full mass impinges on it. A Police siren wails, far off but drawing closer.

Susan clings to the fence which runs alongside a path next to the house. The bin is four metres away. Her Talent lifts the bin, pulls it towards her and drops it at the edge of the house. She swings the lid open and tilts the open mouth of the bin towards her. She grimaces at the stink of rubbish that washes over her. Susan swings her legs into the bin and pushes her body in, shoving off from the bin. The bin rights itself with the transfer of mass, rocking from side to side until settling in place. Susan closes the lid, maintaining her zero-weight state. She gags. It feels like there are a few binbags under her and it smells like dead bodies marinated in cat shit, cooked in the August heat. She reopens the lid, just a crack, and drags in a few grateful breaths.

The Police car races up the street in front of the house, the wail of the siren shutting off. The trees behind the garden are painted in a ghostly blue, winking on and off as the car’s light spins around. Susan hears the slamming of doors and a collection of urgent, angry voices.

“Did you see her?” booms Red Line. Susan Senses him fly out of the office window. “Where did she go?”

Susan’s breath catches as he descends to the ground, remonstrating with the Police. His gravity presence is beautiful, unlike anything else she’s experienced. As he ascends back into the sky, his weight inverts itself in a series of pulsations which slow or increase in intensity and direction as he adjusts his position. Susan wonders if she’s the first to know Red Line this way, or if Red Line himself has ever felt it.

More Police cars turn up along with a large van. Red Line is tracing a figure eight in the sky, stately as an airship. Three people get out of the van and Red Line drops down to meet them.

“You lost her, boss?” a man drawls.

“She’s gone to ground,” Red Line says. “Can you pick up her trail, Bloodhound?”

“I’ll need a sample.”

“First floor office, right of the stairs.”

“Right.”

Bloodhound strides off into Chase’s house.

Red Line turns to the two others.

“Wavelength,” he says. “Wavelength!”

“Too much, too many,” says a shrill male voice

“I know, I’m sorry. She might have a mobile. Can you find its signal?”

Wavelength hold his hands to his head and crouches down.

“Noise. Noise.”

“It’s the Police radios,” says the third person, a woman. Susan realises this must be Frequency, Wavelength’s twin sister. Twin Talents, both Sensitives. Frequency, sensitive to light radiation, from IR up to UV, and Wavelength, drowning in an ocean of radio waves.

“Hold on,” Red Line says, “wait for radio silence.”

A moment later, Wavelength shakes his head like he’s emptying trapped water from an ear and stands up straight.

“Mobile phones,” he says, pacing up and down the street. He walks for fifty metres down the hill and back. “Mobile phones. No 2G. 3G, yes. 4G, yes.”

“Any signals outside houses?” Red Line says

“Police officers have mobiles. Bloodhound. Driver.”

“Anything from the gardens or woodland?”

Wavelength shakes his head. Bloodhound emerges from the house, head raised, creeping forward one step at a time.

“Don’t come over!” he says. “There’s enough of your stink confusing things.”

Bloodhound moves into the middle of the driveway, swinging his head from side to side. He steps up to the fence at the point where Susan grabbed it.

“She was here,” he says. “She touched the fence.”

“And after that?”

“All I can smell is garbage, rotting chicken, cat litter, cooked vegetables.”

It’s all Susan can smell too, her eyes screwed up as she drags night air into her nose through the lid gap.

“Come on,” Red Line says. He hops the fence into the garden next to her bin.

Susan closes the bin lid. She floats in place, taking tiny breaths. Red Line is scant metres from her, prowling around the garden like a tiger. On the ground, his Talent silenced, he is massive. Over six feet tall, his armour must weigh a ton given how he shows up in Susan’s Sense. The garden gate opens and Bloodhound joins Red Line.

“Well?” Red Line says, his metallic voice gruff.

“This bin stinks, I can tell you that much. You’d know if you weren’t wearing that-”

Red Line raises a hand.

“Dunstall Road,” he snaps. “Locals reporting a prowler.”

Red Line shoots into the air and away.

“-stupid helmet,” Bloodhound says.

Bloodhound heads back into the street. Susan’s Sense watches him gather up Wavelength and Frequency into the van, joining the Police cars in screeching off towards the last location of this prowler. She scans the sky and the garden as the vehicles recede. She pushes the lid open and hauls herself out. She crosses the garden and hops the fence into the woods, mind scrambling for a good excuse to give Max.