Dad is sitting at the kitchen table, the fingers of his right hand drumming on the mug of tea in front of him. He’s looking at the kitchen door, maybe even looking through the kitchen door at Susan, if his Talent is anything like hers, just as she is observing him. Her hand curls around the door handle and all she can feel is fear.

It’s not as if her father has ever been an intimidating figure. The two of them get on as well as a widower and his daughter could be expected to after the death of the wife and mother. Together, with the help of Martina, they negotiated the awkwardness of puberty, somehow avoiding all of the rich possibilities for humiliation. Susan tries to push the fear to one side, focusing on all the ways her Dad helped her, the way her friends found him the Cool Dad they all wished he had, the way he provided a life of ease and opportunity. The way he never once resented her for all of the bile she’d thrown at him when she’d been overthrown by grief. All the same, she never felt afraid for a moment facing off with Zeus and Red Line, yet the man in the kitchen has a power over her she can’t explain.

Is she unable to open the door because she’s afraid, or because she’s ashamed? She never suspected he could be Talented like she is. She’s never viewed him as being a man of great intelligence or ability or toughness. The realisation comes to her that she’s only ever seen him as her Dad, as the man who fed her and disciplined her and held her when she cried, and not as a person in his own right with wants and needs and thoughts and feelings. Her Dad, sipping from his mug, a fervent believer in the healing power of sweet, milky tea. Her Dad, Will, who’s on first name terms with the greatest Talents in the land.

She takes a single deep breath, letting it out slowly as she turns the handle and pushes the door open. Dad smiles at her as she enters and her cheeks heat again. Dad’s sitting at his usual place at the head of the table.

“Have you had breakfast?” he says, his voice calm. No trace of anger.

“No,” she says, pulling back a chair.

Dad nods and gets up, makes his way to the fridge at the opposite end of the room.

“Scrambled eggs? Bacon?”

“Dad, I…”

“Never attend important meetings on an empty stomach,” he says. “No agreement signed when hungry was worth the paper it was written on.”

Dad pulls a handful of eggs and a packet of bacon from the fridge. He sets them down on the countertop next to the cooker.

“I was wondering if you were ever going to open that door,” he says, turning to look at her.

Disappointment has turned the corners of his mouth down. She always knows when he’s upset with her and it’s almost always disappointment. Rarely anger. Susan wishes he were angry this time. They could be angry at each other for keeping secrets and all of the rage would be burned away cleanly in the room-shaking argument. Susan could apologise tearfully and Dad would wrap her up in a hug and everything would turn out OK. Disappointment is worse. There’s no cheap way out of disappointment, no easy emotional escape route. Every time Susan was mad at failing her Dad’s standards, she felt petty later. When she laughed it off, she felt heartless. This situation, this discussion, is one she won’t walk away from, unlike others in the past. She knows her life is going to be hard enough without feeling like a coward.

“You could see me?” she says.

“If you can call it seeing,” he says as he produces two frying pans from a cupboard, setting them on the hob. “I had no idea you were Talented.”

“Likewise.”

He turns and smiles at Susan.

“I raised you to be careful,” he says and sighs. “Especially after, you know. I wanted to tell you but I didn’t know how you’d react.”

“You thought I’d be upset because you’re Talented?”

Dad turns back to the cooker. He lights one ring and reaches for the butter dish. A knob of butter drops into the heating pan and Dad peels several slices of bacon from the packets.

“Because of Pyro,” he says. “Because a Talented killed your Mum. I didn’t want you to be afraid of me or hate me.”

Susan scoffs.

“You’re the least scary person I know, Dad.”

“Which is why you couldn’t open the kitchen door,” he says.

Susan’s mouth shuts with a click at that as Dad separates the rashers and drops them into the pan, the molten butter hissing and popping under them.

“That’s not fair,” Susan says, her voice rising. “Don’t say it, don’t say life isn’t fair!”

“Gravity,” Dad says. “I’m a gravity Sensitive. Mass concentrations, patterns of gravitation.”

He pushes the bacon around the pan.

“Would you believe me if I said I didn’t tell you for almost the same reason?” Susan says.

Dad nods. “You said.”

“I should’ve guessed,” she says. “Nothing ever got lost when you were around.”

“Made hide and seek no fun,” he says. “And you?”

“And me? And what?”

He raises his eyebrows, waves the spatula expectantly. Susan closes her eyes and focuses on the pan. Four rashers. She picks one up, dangling it in front of Dad’s face before turning it over and laying it gently back into the pan.

“Fucking hell,” he says softly. “Gravity extrinsic?”

“Yeah.”

“How much can you lift?”

The fridge shivers upwards and glides away from the wall until the power cable goes taught.

“More than this too,” she says. She returns the fridge to its place.

“Susie, I’m so proud of you,” he says, beaming at her.

“Even though I’m a criminal?”

“You never robbed a bank?”

“I never took anything that wasn’t stolen itself.”

“Zeus said you were wanted for burglary.”

“Yeah,” she says. “When you can see inside a lock, working out how to pick it is hardly a challenge. Moving parts that small is hard, but that’s what I do best.”

“What did you take?”

“You don’t need to know, Dad.”

“I want to know.”

Susan sighs.

“You remember Mum’s last brief?” she says. “The bronzes in the British Museum?”

“From Nigeria.”

“One of them made it home.”

Dad lets out a short bark of amusement.

“Even though you’re a criminal, I’m proud. Your mother would be proud too.”

Susan blushes. Dad drops a piece of butter into the other pan and lights the ring under it.

“It wasn’t the only thing,” she says. He shrugs.

“You can move things,” he says. “Can you fly?”

“I’ve tried. Can’t make it work.”

“If you want toast, best put it on.”

Susan opens the bread bin with her Talent, takes out the loaf inside. Her Dad laughs and shakes his head as the knot in the bag unties itself and two slices of wholemeal extract themselves, dropping neatly into the toaster, which turns itself on.

“I mean, I’m impressed, but can you make coffee?” he says.

A few minutes later, Susan takes the plate of bacon and scrambled eggs from her father. He sits next to her at the table, two steaming cups of coffee in front of them.

“When did you work out you were Talented?” he says.

“Fell out of a tree and didn’t hit the ground,” she says. “It was at Grandad’s, when we stayed with him that summer, the pear tree. I was three.”

“You weren’t hurt.”

“When the ground is coming towards you at a crawl, it’s fun.”

Dad pushes a forkful of bacon into his mouth.

“And your Extrinsic?” he says around the meat.

“About the same time. That winter.”

“What happened?”

Susan stiffens and drops her fork onto her plate. Dad swallows.

“Are the eggs bad?” he says.

“It’s not the eggs,” she says.

She doesn’t know how to tell him. She doesn’t want to either, this one particular secret having been locked away deep inside her for years, kept out of the light even after others had got away. She’d never told her mother or best friend. She can feel the pink returning to her cheeks as this one secret clings on inside her throat.

“Is it that bad, Susie?”

She risks a glance at him. Concern in his eyes.

“I…I hurt someone,” she says.

“You hurt someone when you were four years old?”

“At playschool.”

“Susie, it’s OK. It was a long time ago. I’m sure they’re Ok now.”

He reaches over and takes her hand in his.

“Yeah, no,” she says. “I hurt them.”

“Tell me,” he says, voice caressing and calm, the voice that read stories until she fell asleep, even in the months after Mum died. Especially then, when they escaped together into books.

“Okay,” she says, pulling her hand away and laying both palms flat on the table, as though holding it in place on a tossing deck. “Remember Martin Higgins?”

“Vaguely.”

“He slipped on the ice in the playground, hit his head.”

“Now I remember,” Dad says. “He didn’t slip?”

“He was being mean to me and I was angry. Like, raging. All I could think about was how good it would be if he fell over and broke his face. I saw it in my mind’s eye and it happened.”

She draws in a ragged sigh.

“I still see it happen, sometimes. I see, I hear his head hitting the ground. I see the blood. When he woke up a week later he was blind. I don’t even remember why he was laughing at me.”

Dad takes and squeezes her hand.

“I’m sorry, Susie,” he says. “Sorry for both of you.”

“I was four and I knew I’d fucked up. I never told you or Mum about it then because I was afraid you’d send me to prison,” she says. “And then, after Pyro, I could never tell. Are you still proud?”

“You were just a child. I’m proud of the woman you are today.”

Susan pushes back from the table and goes to hug her father.

“They offered you a job, didn’t they?” he says.

“I shouldn’t talk about it,” she says. “Can you talk about your work for them?”

He shrugs.

“The Authority would call me up when something needed finding,” he says. “Usually something underground, things in pipes or ducting. Every now and then, they’d send me off after an earthquake looking for survivors trapped in rubble. Nothing cloak-and-dagger since the Seventies and those jobs they never gave me many details about, just gave me a mass and a shape and then pointed me in the general direction and said ‘go find’. Paid well, though.”

“Paid for the house?”

Dad nods.

“Can I trust them?” Susan says.

Dad says nothing, his eyes scanning Susan’s face, appraising and calculating.

“Can you trust a man who changed sides in the middle of a war, and another who never shows his face?” he says.

“When you put it that way…”

“I trust Henry.”

“Henry?”

“Zeus. Heinrich Bayer as he was, Blitzkrieg. Betrayed the Nazis, came over here in ‘45.”

“Like in the movie?”

“I asked him about it once. He refused to talk about it.”

“But you trust him.”

Dad shrugs. “Other than that, he’s never kept things from me. Never lied, as far as I can tell.”

“Red Line?”

“Wears a mask, distorts his voice,” Dad says. “Not exactly the behaviour of a brave man.”