“Hazel, the sign’s coming up,” Victor said, smiling up at his daughter in the rearview. “Got your phone ready?”

  “I see it! I see it.” Hazel squinted at her screen, angled her phone’s camera out of her window. A pause, then a flurry of shutter clicks as they passed it: the big, K-shaped “Welcome to Minnesota!” sign marking the border from Wisconsin.

  “You get it?” Flo asked from the passenger seat.

  Dylan peered over her shoulder and grinned. “It’s blurry.”

  “You’re looking at a bad one! Look, this one’s fine.”

  “I tried to slow down for you, kiddo,” Victor said.

  “No, it’s okay, I got one, I got a good one.” Hazel swiped at her screen, deleting bad takes, adding the most legible one to a personal album. “That’s 46! Just North Dakota and Montana left.”

  “And Hawaii and Alaska,” Dylan added.

  “Well, yeah, but those don’t count. Why would we ever be there?”

  “I dunno, maybe dad’s friends want to have another conference but, like, on a beach. Maybe there’s an evil polar bear with too big of a Field who needs to be taken off the streets.”

  “A bear Sensitive,” Victor chuckled. “No thanks. I’d leave that one to its own devices, I think.”

  Flo looked up from the book she’d been skimming, eyes focused in the middle distance, as if she were trying to remember something. She took a deep breath, paused. Took another.

  Victor spared Flo a quick glance before returning his attention to the road. “You feel it?”

  “Yeah,” Hazel said, from behind him. She had her eyes closed, was swaying slightly in her seat. “I thought it was, like, a sneeze coming or something. But no, it’s like the air’s different.”

  “It’s been building for the last few miles, but it’s ramping up now for sure,” Flo said. “Your buddies from the forum were right again.”

  “Yeah, totally,” Dylan added. He massaged his temples like a cartoon telepath, frowned sagely. “The vibes are craaaazy. It’s like… We’re driving through a rainbow cloud… of pure power. All of these gas stations and Verizon stores are covered in a magical presence.”

  “You can’t feel a thing, can you?” Hazel asked.

  “Nope,” Dylan dropped his hands. “Got no clue what you’re all talking about.”

  “You’ll get there, sooner than later, I bet,” Victor said. “Now, Hazel, pop quiz--and it’s no big deal if you don’t get this one--but how close, and in what direction, would you say the nearest active Sensitive to us is?”

  Hazel grinned, thrilled to have a challenge, then shut her eyes tight. She swayed for nearly a full minute, mouth screwed up in concentration. Dylan held his hands up in an X and made an “incorrect” buzzer noise at the instant she opened her eyes.

  “To our right, kinda, and ahead,” Hazel said. She blinked at her father’s reflection in the rearview. “I don’t know how far, really, I’m not good with that stuff. Miles, though. Farther than you can usually see with your eyes.”

  “She’s right,” Victor said, pleased. “In general, at least.”

  “Wow,” Flo reached back and tapped her sister on the knee. “Look at you. I can’t feel a thing at this distance.”

  Hazel beamed. Beside her, Dylan squinted out the window, in the direction she’d indicated, concentrating hard. After a few seconds he let out the breath he’d been holding and nodded, impressed. “Yeah, the geek squad’s probably right about you being a walking radar.”

  “With training,” Victor amended, “you’ll have a bigger range than your old man. That’s for sure.”

  “How long is that gonna take?” Hazel asked.

  “If you’re slow about it? Maybe a decade. If we get more field trips like this, though, who knows. Speaking of which,” Victor turned to Flo. “I want you taking point, on this first one.”

  Flo stiffened slightly. “Right. Ok. Sure.”

  “Is that too scary?”

  “No, it’s just- I wasn’t expecting- You said this was going to be dangerous.”

  Victor nodded. “It is. Not deadly, I don’t think, not with me around to keep an eye on you. But there’s risk to this stuff. If at any point you don’t feel like the risk is worth it, let me know, and I can get you a ride right back to camp.”

  Flo frowned, fidgeted with the coil of rings on her middle finger. “No. I’m in it. I believe in the mission.”

  “Speaking of blind dedication to dad,” Dylan said. “I want to take point on this first one, too. Put me in, coach.”

  “Hazel, get him,” Victor said. Hazel giggled and discharged a little electricity Dylan’s way, zapping his arm.

  “Wait, don’t- AH, God, I mean, gosh, damn-dang it. Haze! Dad!” Dylan pouted and kneaded his tricep.

  “Your defense isn’t up to par yet,” Victor chided. “Electricity’s what you’re best with, too. You’ll never hear me say your output is anything short of phenomenal, Dylan. But your conversions are too slow and your efficiency isn’t enough to stop a concerted attack by a more experienced Sensitive.”

  “I- Buh-” Dylan sputtered. “Then what am I even here for?”

  “The only way to learn from the best is to see them work up close,” Hazel said, in imitation of her father’s stuffy baritone. “It’s okay, he doesn’t let me do the fun stuff either.”

  Victor had already turned back to Flo. “When we get in there, once it starts, come in with your Field already primed against kinetics. Nine times out of ten, when you catch someone off guard, they go for blunt force first.”

  “Right, right.” Flo frowned. “Okay, so, even when I’m practicing alone, it still takes me, like, two to three seconds to get a Field up big enough to trap someone inside. What if they don’t sit still?”

  “Oh, if they’re any good they won’t. Don’t worry about that. I’m having you jump in first just so you get your feet wet, so you get used to a 1-on-1 scenario, but once you have them off-guard I’ll join, and I’ll knock them down. Daze them enough that you’ll have plenty of time.” Victor reached out, found Flo’s hand, gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Whoever it is we’re after right now, they’re a small fry. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Yeah, speaking of,” Hazel said, eyes closed again. “This person, it feels like they’ve just been using their Field, like, full-blast, this entire time. Is that normal?”

  Victor frowned, thoughtful. “You know, good point. No. That is odd. I’m sure we’ll find out what they’re up to soon.”

  Victor pulled off the freeway, onto a highway, then a side street, then an unpaved dirt road. He worried their car around a tight corner, ignoring a “No Trespassing - Private Property” sign, before eventually, after some silent concentration, coming to a stop in a seemingly random stretch of road. Trees bracketed the path, huge and swaying, their shadows casting a long, shifting carpet in dimming evening light.

  Dylan hopped out of the car, stretched. “I can feel it now. Like the air’s thicker.” He did a few jumping jacks, flexed. “Feels great.”

  Victor and Flo moved to the rear of the car and popped the trunk. They retrieved two oversized, modified backpacks: leather harnesses with huge truck batteries sticking out, thick metal balls sewn into the straps, dangling from the packs like bead curtains.

  “These are a little overfull,” Victor said, hefting his. “Dylan, could you-”

  “On it, boss,” Dylan said, hurrying over to place a hand on each of the packs. The air around him shimmered slightly, crackled with stray energy, as he siphoned some charge out and absorbed it.

  “Do some retention exercises with that while we’re working,” Victor said. “When we’re done here, if you’re still holding enough charge in your Field to turn on a lightbulb I’ll buy you a Blizzard.”

  “Score!”

  “Uh, guys?” Hazel called back to them, from several yards up the path. “Something’s off.”

  Victor waved the others after him and hurried over to Hazel. “What’re you feeling?”

  “So, they’re there, right?” Hazel pointed into the opaque mass of trees to her left. “Maybe, like, I don’t know, a football field or two away?”

  “A quarter mile, I’d say. Why?”

  “They’re not moving.” Hazel shifted on her feet, anxious. “Just sitting there, bleeding energy. They’re not converting it, I don’t think, not using it to move around or hit stuff. Just standing still and shining bright, like they’re trying to get someone to notice them.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Victor nodded. “I thought the same thing. But, from what I’m feeling, whoever this is, they’re too weak for us to need to worry. If they’re setting a trap for us, then it’s about to backfire on them.”

  “But what if it’s an ambush?” Hazel said. “I just read in this book about coyotes, how they do a thing where they send one of their own out to lure a dog over, to chase it, and then they lead it back to where their whole family’s waiting, and they all pounce.”

  “Well, feel it out harder. Do you sense anyone else?”

  Hazel screwed her eyes closed, grimaced in concentration. It was nearly a minute before she spoke again. “No. I don’t. Well-” She opened her eyes, glanced up the path, head tilted, as if she was listening hard. She shook her head. “I thought- For a second I thought someone was coming. From far off. But no. I don’t feel anyone else.”

  Victor smiled, clapped his hand on her shoulder. “I trust you, then.”

  Hazel shivered. “Thanks, Dad. If we get coyote’d, it’s on me, then. No pressure.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Have some confidence.” Victor waved sharply into the underbrush, then Flo was at his elbow, and they were jogging into the woods.

  Hazel dropped back, found Dylan, nudged him as they ran. “You’re not even a little freaked out?”

  Dylan grinned. “No, Haze, I’m psyched. This is what alllll that homework’s been leading up to. Game day, baby.” He glanced over, saw the genuine worry on his sister’s face, and sighed. “Ok. Ok. Sure. I’m not, like, not a little nervy. All the ‘ambush’ talk was a bit spooky.”

  “It feels wrong,” Hazel insisted. “Something’s up.”

  “How far out are we?”

  “We’re-” Hazel paused, glanced over her shoulder. Dylan looked too.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s- I just thought, for a second, I felt… No. Nothing.”

  “Ok, now you’re trying to freak me out.”

  Victor held up a fist, and the group came to an immediate, silent halt. He crouched, crept forward, head cocked, sensing. His arm rose, swiveling out like a dowsing rod, following some unseen stimulus. It straightened, pointing toward their target, obscured by brush forward and to their right. Then one quick gesture to Flo and she shot off, darting through the woods, weaving around trees, quick and quiet as a ghost.

  “Stay here,” Victor breathed, then bolted, here and then gone, an afterimage.

  Hazel stood, shifting from one foot to another, straining to listen to the painfully quiet susurrus of leaves and bugs. She closed her eyes again, held her own hands out, fingers groping for currents, energies. A second passed, and she let out a little gasp.

  “What?” Dylan hissed. “Ambush?”

  “No. No, I figured it out. Wait here.”

  “What? Hell no.”

  Hazel wasn’t carrying a battery, didn’t have enough energy to speed away like her sister had. “Wait! Flo, Dad, time out!”

  She raced through the woods, Dylan close behind her, and crested a little hillock to see that she hadn’t needed to warn them after all. Victor and Flo were standing at the bottom, crouched over something unseen.

  “What’s up?” Dylan asked. “Is that- Oh, man.”

  Hazel scrambled down the hill to join them. She pushed her way to Flo’s side, looked down at the girl laying crumpled at her feet, bloody and thin. Energy radiated off of the unconscious body, a blazing beacon, a leaking faucet.

  “Well, you were right about something being off,” Victor said.

  “Flo, Jesus.” Dylan began. “You really beat the shit out of her, huh.”

  “Dylan, language,” Victor chided.

  Flo shook her head. “Not me. We found her like this.”

  Victor knelt at the woman’s side, steepled his fingers on her arm, eyes closed. “No broken bones, maybe a sprained wrist. Almost definitely concussed. And… Hm.” Victor opened his eyes, frowned down at the girl’s legs. They were shockingly thin. Hazel felt as if she could’ve reached around her entire calf with one hand.

  Victor plucked some pine needles, crusted in sap, from the girl’s arms. He looked up, toward the canopy of trees swaying above them, visibly confused. “Now this one’s a thinker.”

  “Should we…” Dylan shuffled back and forth, as if unsure which direction he should be moving. “We’re gonna take her to a hospital, right?”

  “That’s the only option, as far as I’m concerned. The poor kid’s in no condition to make any sort of donation right now.” Victor nodded toward Flo. “Do you think you could make a thin, horizontal barrier for her to rest on? A stretcher? I’d prefer not to sling her over my shoulder.”

  “Sure. It’d be pretty slow going, moving it with her on it, but I think I could manage.”

  “How long would it take to get her back to the car?”

  “Maybe twenty minutes?”

  Victor weighed the option, then shook his head. “Thank you, but it’s probably just best if we-” he paused, stiffened.

  Hazel noticed it a second later: the feeling of an approaching Field, from behind them, maybe two hundred yards away, closing fast and hot. No, wait: two Fields. Close together. Hazel gasped softly, a reflex, disoriented by how suddenly they’d appeared, how quickly they were coming.

  Victor stood, facing the presence, jutted a thumb upwards. “Dylan, Hazel. In the trees. As high as you can, hide. Now.” He reached a hand out, deposited some energy from within his battery into their Auras.

  “But what if-” Dylan started. Hazel grabbed him by the arm, yanked. She augmented her movements with the donated energy, and tossed Dylan five feet up into the nearest tree. He yelped, surprised, but caught a branch and swung upright in the same motion.

  “Go!” she hissed. Dylan nodded and sprang, blurring, up the trunk, a crackle of loose electricity fizzling in his wake. Hazel leapt after him, climbed as high as she could manage, until the trunk began to feel perilously skinny. She and Dylan flattened themselves behind a bough thick with needles. Hazel peeked down at the scene unfolding below, extending her hearing to listen.

  “Dad, should I-” Flo began.

  “Stay here, keep the girl and yourself behind a barrier. In case there’s shrapnel.”

  Hazel blinked. Shrapnel?

  Flo nodded, and had just crouched over the unconscious girl when the rogue Field users arrived. She could barely make them out, half-obscured by vegetation. A man and a woman, with their own battery packs on their backs, strapped on top of combat vests. Something was off about them, it took Hazel a moment to place it: their Fields flickered like flames, ebbing and flowing, little plumes and fingers flowing from their boundaries, pointed back behind them, as if being sucked gently towards some distant, unseen vacuum.

  “The cult,” Dylan whispered. “They’re cult guys.”

  Hazel’s heart dropped.

  “Hi there!” Victor called. The two cultists paused at the top of the hillock, heads swiveled in Victor’s direction, totally motionless. There was a glassiness to their eyes, an absent, clumsy animality to their motions that troubled Hazel. “Listen! There are children around. The energy source you’re tracking isn’t worth the trouble, I promise. Barely anything here to absorb.”

  The male cultist nodded to the female one, and she slunk back into the brush. Her Aura disappeared from Hazel’s senses immediately, so quickly that it jarred her. As if a solid object in front of her eyes had ceased to be in an instant, leaving a vacuum in its wake.

  “No, don’t-” Victor sighed, not-angry-just-disappointed. “Don’t try to flank us. Come on, buddy, I’m sure your boss is riding you pretty hard, but I promise there’s nothing here for you.”

  The male cultist drew himself up, gaze sliding from Victor to where Flo sat, crouched, over the girl. He tensed, his Aura fluctuating as he gathered power.

  “Welp, okay. I was hoping we could talk it out, but maybe all you culty types understand is big dog, pecking order stuff. Fine.” Victor rolled his neck, exhaled once, forcefully. His Field suddenly exploded, tripling, quadrupling its volume in a fraction of a second. The shockwave of this expansion blew branches off some of the nearby trees, startled birds into the air for a hundred yards around. The male cultist, way at the top of the hill, was bowled back a step by the force of it, and Hazel had to cling hard to the now swaying trunk she was hiding on.

  “Listen, buddy, I’m saying this for your sake,” Victor boomed. He was amplifying his own voice, doubling its volume. His Field’s sheer size warped the sound further, deepening the waves, echoing them as they traveled through it. The thin patch of hair on his head billowed as if trapped in some powerful updraft. Leaves and pebbles danced at his feet, caught in tiny gyres. The actual ground shook. Hazel had seen her father flex his power a few times, but never anything like this. Her mouth fell open. “I hate roughhousing as much as the next honest guy, really. But if you or your partner take a step closer to me or this poor girl, I’ll squash you like a bug.”

  “It’s not up to me,” breathed the man from the hilltop. He was swaying, eyes glazed, blinking hard, like he was trying to wake up from a dream. Somewhere, off to Hazel’s left, she felt the faint flutter of his partner’s Aura as she slipped up, failed to hide herself for a split second. She turned, but couldn’t see her in the brush.

  “Your boss, Phoenix, he’s pulling your strings, isn’t he? Controlling you?” Victor’s voice, still booming, had a tinge of sympathy to it. “Buddy, here, let’s make a deal. I have a special Knack. Lets me absorb people’s, uh, Auras. Or- Blessings. Without killing them. So long as they give it voluntarily.” He widened his arms, open and amiable. “It’s how I got as strong as I have. Now, I’m not sure, but I’d be willing to bet that if you came down here and gave me your energy, all of it, he wouldn’t be able to control you anymore. You’d be free.”

  The man on the hill paused, stumbled. Hazel couldn’t quite tell, but the way his shoulders hitched, the man might have sobbed. A moment passed, and the man slowly straightened, a look of pain on his face. “He won’t… He isn’t letting me.” The man’s arms flared out, he crouched, as if each of his limbs had been wrenched into a clumsy fighting stance. “I’m sorry!”

  Victor sighed, then took a step forward. The cultist woman’s Aura flared again as she launched herself toward Victor, the man on the hill flung himself down to meet them, and the woods exploded.

  Ears ringing, eyes swimming, the tree beneath her swinging wildly in the aftermath, it took Hazel a moment to collect herself enough to decipher what she was looking at below her. Several trees had been bowled over in the clearing below, two of which smoldered with ropes of dying flames. Flo stayed crouched in place, untouched, safe beneath her barrier with the girl.

  It took her another few seconds to find Victor, standing maybe fifty yards from where he’d been a moment ago. He was pinning the woman up to a tree trunk with one arm, holding the slumped form of the man by the collar with his other. The woman gnashed at him, kicking, each blow accompanied by crackles of electricity, sound, light. Her battery pack was crushed like a soda can, discarded on the ground behind her, and each of her feeble attacks withered as the last of her energy leached from her Field.

  “It’s easy,” Victor said, voice reassuring, no longer amplified. “Just picture yourself letting go of your Field, letting it slide from you like a coat. I’ll pick it up. Then you’ll be free, you can rest.”

  The woman gnashed at him, crying. She barked odd syllables, but every time she came close to forming a word, her mouth spasmed, and it died in her throat. Victor waited a few moments, then shook his head sadly. He lifted her with his one free arm, then, pistonlike, slammed her against the tree. The woman gasped and crumpled.

  Victor laid her next to her partner, gently, on the forest floor. “Kids? All clear.”

  “Ho-o-o-ly shit, Hazel,” Dylan breathed as they clambered down. “See what I mean? Game day.”

  They joined their father as he reached Flo.

  “The girl okay?” Victor’s voice sounded oddly thin.

  “Just fine,” Flo nodded. “You weren’t kidding about the shrapnel.”

  “Dad, that was, just, I mean, that was the most badass thing I’ve ever-” Dylan trailed off as he registered the look on his father’s face. “Oh. Dad, are you okay?”

  Victor nodded, his face downcast, shaded. He sniffed, and Hazel realized he was crying.

  “They’re not…” Hazel began. “You didn’t kill them.”

  “No,” Victor said, voice thin and soft in a way that made her uneasy. He crouched down, scooped the skinny girl from the ground, perfectly gentle. “No, couldn’t bring myself to, sweetheart. Maybe I should’ve. But they’re just unconscious.”

  “Are you gonna be okay?” Hazel asked. She didn’t know if she should reach for his hand or not.

  “You know, I was excited to bring you all out of camp, into the ‘real world,’ for this trip. There’s nothing like the real world, really, when it comes to learning fast. It’s useful, it’s fascinating, and it’s important you kids learn how it works.” Victor sniffed, blinked the last of his tears away. The skeletal thing in his arms stirred a little, made a childish, weak noise. “I’m okay, thank you. Sometimes the real world just hurts my heart.”