Aaryn William King was born a genius.
Not a genius as in straight A+ student, but an Albert Einstein, he’s-so-smart-he-finished
-college-in-fifth-grade genius.
That didn’t last long.
This negligible, miniscule, seven-year-old creature was electrified with one trillion watts of electricity for thirty microseconds, which is not even enough time to say ‘hello’ but enough to annihilate a sixteen thousand-pound elephant. The power surge flowed through the neurons of his brain, shrinking the capabilities of his intelligence from a prodigy to an average boy; at the same time, this shrinking of his intelligence caused the excess to flow into other parts of the brain that no human has ever had access to before. This foreign part of the brain caused Aaryn to experience a plethora of dreams each night that he could never remember in the morning, but each dream was actually a ‘rerun’ of the previous day’s experiences, and these moments were then stored in that extra part of the brain—effectively saving his life on a ‘backup’ drive.
However, Aaryn wasn't able to utilize this precious information and so its existence was unknown to him. And it would have remained that way evermore, but certain events would not permit such waste of knowledge and power.

Before Aaryn had closed his eyes, lush forests and bucolic pastures zoomed past the car window, the fluffy sheep of the sky scudded across the wild blue yonder as their feathered playmates weaved in and out of the wool. But when he opened them, the horizon had retracted to a few blocks of ashen, monotonous, drab facades and multitudes of honking, metallic monstrosities.
Aaryn groggily blinked his eyes, adjusting to the new environment surrounding his parents’ car. “How far ‘till the hospital?” mumbled Aaryn, still half-asleep.
“Just a few more blocks—not too long with this little traffic,” replied Aaryn’s father as the car passed beneath a green light.
“How’s Mom doing?” inquired Aaryn. “Her leg okay?” Mrs. King was reclining in the passenger seat, dozing as Aaryn had been a moment before (the King family were renowned for their in-car, on the go, and spur-of-the-moment sleeping capabilities, sometimes dozing through Christmas parties that had become too humdrum for their tastes).
“She’s fine, but her leg’s swelling a little,” Mr. King informed Aaryn. Aaryn’s mom had been thrown off the Kings’ single horse, Violet, and Mrs. King’s leg had fractured. Her need for medical care had caused this trip to the city hospital, and Mr. King had asked Aaryn to come along to help—not that he would do anything but sleep—and Aaryn had accepted the invitation.
After a few moments of silence, the car pulled into the parking lot of the city hospital—a mostly modern, glass and steel structure but with an ancient entrance that clashed with the rest—and Mr. King gently shook his wife awake, saying, “We’re here honey. We’re at the hospital. How’s your leg feeling?”
Mrs. King roused herself almost instantly (another acquired talent) and, quickly blinking away sleep, replied, “Still tender and aching, but I can hold out till the ER.” As she gingerly got out of the car, holding onto Mr. King, who had exited the car for that very purpose, she spoke to Aaryn, who had remained in the backseat, “I want you to stay here and get your rest for tomorrow’s science quiz.”
“But, Mom—”
“No buts, mister—you’re going to stay here and that’s final,” Mrs. King silenced her son’s complaints with a swift reply.
Mrs. King knew perfectly well that Aaryn could just as easily take a nap in a chair in the hospital, but she was a proud woman and disliked her fourteen-year-old son seeing her during a moment of weakness.
“Fine,” sighed Aaryn, resigning himself to an afternoon of a heated car interior and a single, precious window into the gaseous, refreshing heaven we like to call, the ‘wind’.
As his parents said that they'd be back as soon as possible, Aaryn remarked to himself about an odd feeling, like a growing tendril of dread from his subconscious—a sensation similar to those ringing tones everyone hears once in awhile.
With a sudden, irrepressible urge, Aaryn yanked open the car door and started sprinting towards the hospital and the retreating backs of his parents, already almost at the front doors.
Too late.
The hospital exploded.

Light. Searing, probing rays.

Then heat. Scorching, fiery pain.

Then sound. Crackling, howling, ripping, reverberating cacophonies.

Flames, dancing specters of deadly energy, their touch of death cremating those stupid enough
to approach these sacred children of Helios. Smoke stung Aaryn’s watering eyes as he tremulously raised his head to view his surroundings, quietly awed at the otherworldly scene before him, his eyes of frozen sparks beginning to glow, pulsing with a terrifying, lethal luminance.

His frantic, stunned mind cleared only minimally when sirens sliced through the noise of the roaring flames, but it was enough to rouse him into action and he crawled towards the singed, slumped forms of his parents’ bodies. He came to his mother first, and her eyes blinked open, staring into the strange eyes of her son.

As Aaryn reached to wake his father, Mrs. King croaked, “No, leave him, it’s too late—he’s gone.”

Aaryn’s pupils dilated in pain, but the shock had set in and his feelings were dulled, delayed for the time being. He returned his gaze to his mother as she began coughing weakly and lay down her head to rest. She grabbed Aaryn’s hand and reached up to hold her child’s face in her hands for the last time.

“I’ll be seeing you, Aaryn, my child,” Mrs. King spoke her last words as she held her son’s gaze and then closed her eyes, letting out a last, long breath.

“Goodbye, Mother.” Aaryn folded his mother’s hands over her chest and stood up, surveying the former parking lot with a tear-stained face. Only then did he consider who could have blown up the hospital, and that thought led to the promise:
I will find the ones who did this, and. Make. Them. PAY!

The last thought unleashed something. Something with deep, integral power. And that thing was Aaryn’s mind, free of its natural tethers.

A tsunami of pain, terror, anger, hate, helplessness, and vengeance inundated the barriers of the mental world and surged forth into the physical world.

All the remains and debris from the bombed hospital rose into the air and were launched with incredible velocity into the sides of the surrounding buildings, effectively destroying their pitifully weak walls.

Aaryn stood in the center of a clearing cloud of dust, his eyes now blazing with a brilliant radiance akin to that of the fire that still burned behind him. The irises of his eyes were now swirling flames and his pupils were tenebrous pits leading down to the deeps of Tartarus. The illumination gradually faded and the flowing motion stopped, but the irises remained a fiery, striated hue.

Aaryn suddenly sagged with fatigue, tired from the strenuous task of obliterating the sides of seven different buildings, but he remained on his feet and began walking towards one of the alleys that led away from the hospital, not desiring a conversation with dazed spectators or perplexed police and firefighters.

He stumbled into the cooler shade of the alley, collapsing behind the cover of a dumpster full of garbage. His eyes closed almost instantly into the first dream he would remember since he was seven years old, finally delving into the reservoir of knowledge that encompassed ten years of life experiences and learning.

With incredible speed, Aaryn sat up to see his surroundings, and the first things that came to his mind
were the events of the previous day, and he leaned his back against the wall, not crying but feeling empty of every emotion he could ever feel. He was a husk of a human that had expended all of its feelings in a single moment.
The second thing that came to mind was that he was aware of something like a sixth sense. It was a sense like that of touch, but somehow gentler, and it stretched pretty far—so he didn’t have to actually touch the objects he felt. He could somehow ‘feel’ the garbage bag next to him, and if he ‘concentrated’ this sense (which he began realize was the manifestation of the power he remembered from myth and legend as telekinesis), he could feel the weight of the bag, as if he were holding it. Testing this ability, Aaryn attempted to pick it up, and succeeded in having the bag float in air a foot above the alley ground.

When he released the bag and relaxed the telekinesis, letting himself touch all the objects in the alley and farther, he suddenly realized with a shock that a girl was creeping up the alley at him. When Aaryn looked, he could now see the girl, who looked about his age, with his eyes and observed her ragged, but well-kept clothes and a remarkably beautiful face with a head of dark brown hair and clear blue eyes that widened as she saw him looking at her.

Aaryn stood up and said brusquely, “Hello, what are you doing?”

The girl straightened to her full height—almost as tall as Aaryn—and replied, “I was going to rob you, but that seems out of the question now.”

Aaryn was taken aback by her forthrightness and, at loss for anything else to say, asked, “Who are you?”

“M’ name’s Josephine, if you must know—and yours?”

“Aaryn,” he said his name like it belonged to someone else, and it might have, given the circumstances. He gestured behind him, at the smoking wreck of the hospital, and asked, “Who did this?”

Josephine sighed as if she were tired, though she appeared fine, and answered, “The terrorist gang in northern downtown—they’ve been pretty busy lately, but this is off the charts. Though maybe that’s why they did it. . . . Anyway, the city’s underground’s been filled with talk about it.”

“What was the point of blowing up a hospital, exactly?” Aaryn practically growled, his anger returning with a vengeance.

“Whoa, hold on. I wasn’t the one who blew it up!” Josephine held up her hands, as if belying her very words. Then suspicion and revelation hit her, and she asked, “Who did you lose?”

Aaryn didn’t speak for a moment, anger temporarily forgotten, then relented. “My parents,” he whispered hoarsely, staring into the distance, his mind overflowing with memories of his beloved family.

“I’m so sorry, I really am,” Josephine murmured to him.

“What could you possibly know?” Aaryn snapped petulantly. “No one knows.”

Josephine’s eyes flashed with anger, but whatever she was about to say was halted by rough hands that grabbed the pair of them and started to reach into their pockets for money and valuables. In the midst of their conversation-slash-argument, four men dressed in dark, obscure clothes had snuck up on them and constructed an ambush.
Aaryn panicked and started to struggle, but his captors were too strong to overcome.
Unless. . . .

He reached out with his mind and sensed the bodies of the four attackers—two for Josephine and two for him. He instantly froze their bodies into rigid, straight planks and shoved them towards the walls of the alley—where they all tumbled to the ground, still immobilized more effectively than any ropes or chains could have done.

Josephine stumbled to her feet, breathing heavily, and stared open-mouthed at the four bodies that had, seconds earlier, been bent on mugging them both. She looked up at Aaryn, who had risen to stand as well. “Did you do this?” she exclaimed, dumbfounded.

Aaryn shrugged. He deftly shut the men’s mouths with his mind as they began shouting and cursing. “I’ve only been able to do it since the bombing—I guess I can move things with my mind now,” he spoke calmly, as, deep inside, it felt right for him to be able to do this, not miraculous or flabbergasting.

“Um, okay?” Josephine said, phrasing it like a question, as if she were unsure of what to do or say.

After a long pause, they both glanced back at their captives—all of whom were desperately darting their eyes back and forth, as if their gaze could free them as Aaryn’s had imprisoned them.

“These aren’t the terrorists, are they?” Aaryn said with an odd, frigid tone that hinted at threat of the lethal kind in his voice.

“No, but they could tell you where the base of the terrorist boss, the Dracul, is,” Josephine informed him. “Takes a thief to know one, as it goes.” At this information, Aaryn paused, his eyes glittering, and after a moment’s hesitation, he lifted the tallest mugger ten feet above the ground with his mind. He released the bonds on the man’s mouth after informing the man that if he spoke without permission, Aaryn would drop him on his head. Though ten feet may sound small when heard, it is sufficient to snap a human’s neck and kill him or her instantly. However, perhaps wise to this information, the man simply opened and closed his mouth, as if testing his ability to chew.

“Where does the Dracul’s gang live? Tell me, and we’ll let you go. If you don’t, I’ll drop you and move on to the next one,” threatened Aaryn while he began to plan how to drop the man without killing him, yet making it seem realistic to the other men.

But Aaryn’s plans were unneeded, as these muggers were not nearly as loyal to ‘the Higher’ as they were in the movies (plus these ones were threatened with a preternatural power—much more frightening than a familiar gunpoint). “The twenty-second warehouse on Plummer’s Lane, I swear it. Please don’t hurt me,” the mugger babbled frantically, as most bullies do when they’re confronted by a bigger bully.

As he had acquired the desired result, Aaryn grimly knocked the heads of the four men together; just enough to knock them out for a few hours, and released them of the telekinetic bonds. As he started walking towards the end of the alley opposite the razed hospital, Josephine stepped forward and asked, “Y’ mind if I join you?”

Aaryn had taken a liking for the girl’s audacious attitude and so, thinking that he would miss the pleasure of human company without her, he smiled and said, “You'd be welcome.”

Together, they quickly walked out of the alley and turned the corner, the
odor of smoke mixed with pain and death diminishing with every step.

Through the labyrinth of side streets and obscure alleys they went, avoiding everyone if possible. Throughout the day, when there were no prying eyes, Aaryn practiced moving objects with his mind with Josephine looking on in quiet awe. He began to realize that the strength of his mind was at least a hundred times stronger than his body was; enough to lift an average dumpster, for example—which he practiced quite a few times with varying success, including veneration from Josephine and a few alarmed cats.
As it was far from the hospital to the warehouse, they had to stop for the night next to the best dumpster they could find—the one full of thrown-out blankets and linens that weren’t too dirty.

As they settled in, Aaryn slightly uncomfortable with the feeling of not having washed for more than a single night, they began conversing. They had been silent the entire day except for necessary, monosyllabic words, so they were practically loaded with conversation ammunition.

“Why do you live on the streets?” was one of the points in Aaryn’s interrogation.

Josephine stared at the blank wall opposite her, mulling over the answer. “I was an orphan for most of my life, living in the orphanage on the other side of the city. But I was always the outsider from all the other children—I was more energetic, I wanted to go on adventures and live free of rules and someone always telling you what to do,” she paused, hesitating. “When the headmistress was replaced with this mean, old lady worse than the first, it was the last straw. I left.”
Aaryn had been thinking over how much luckier children who grew up like he had were, never knowing the pain and struggle of life unsheltered by parents.

“So, ever since then, I’ve been scraping a living here through stealing and scavenging,” Josephine finished with a note of pride and defiance in her voice, daring Aaryn to criticize.

“Do you . . . like . . . life out here?” Aaryn’s voice wasn’t condescending or mean, just inquisitive.

Josephine was a little surprised at this question, expecting one patronizing, and thought about it. “Yes. . . I do. It’s really . . . exhilarating—with every moment an adventure and every problem a conquest,” answered Josephine, with a wondering, blissful tone. Aaryn was as equally awed with these ruminations as she was with his power. He wondered what it would be like to live as she did, with blissful thrill in every action—to fight for the right to live every day. It sounded splendid to him.

Then Josephine asked abruptly, “What are you going to do when you find the Dracul?”

“Kill him,” was the instant answer.

Josephine raised an eyebrow. “And how will that make you any different than him?”

Aaryn was shocked. He spluttered, “He-he’s evil! He killed my parents! He would deserve it!”

“And how do you know he is evil? Maybe he was thinking along the same lines as you were,” Josephine forestalled Aaryn’s attempted interruptions. “He could have been out for revenge as well—maybe he had a loved one who died because the hospital refused them aid? It happens quite often, you know.”

“Why are you asking me this? I thought you were on my side,” said Aaryn furiously.
“Because, if you kill the Dracul, you’re goin’ to need a good reason afterward if you don’t want to go crazy with guilt. Does that sound like a glorious end for hero?” demanded Josephine.

Aaryn rose to his feet, and she did the same. His eyes contorted with fury and he reached forward with his mind, about to grasp Josephine with it, when she stepped forward, stared straight into his fiery orbs with those icy, arctic-blue eyes, and slapped him across the face. Hard.

Aaryn staggered, shocked out of his rage with astonishment. “Why did you do that?” he asked, confounded.

Josephine crossed her arms and glared at him. “Because you deserved it,” she said calmly. “Now, give me a good answer to the question or I’ll abandon you here and leave you to get lost.”

Her ultimatum made Aaryn pause and actually think for a moment, possibilities running through his brain. “Then I won’t kill him, but he needs to be stopped before someone else gets hurt—and who better than me? With my power and your knowledge,” he almost asked that last part. “We could save innocent lives that he will take if he has the chance. A crazy man like him will probably hurt himself and those around him.”

Josephine smiled grimly. “Now you've got it,” she confirmed satisfactorily. “You won’t go insane anyhow.”

The twenty-second warehouse stood before them, a tall, hulking building made of dark grey bricks that must have been at least twenty years old. If eyes truly are the windows to the soul, the grimy,
glass-paned windows of the warehouse certainly were as well—indicating the malignant nature of this
horrific building.

Aaryn looked at Josephine standing next to him, and he knew there was no stopping her going in with him—it just wasn’t in her nature. He beckoned to her and they both traversed the distance of the empty street, moving as quietly as they could in the early morning twilight.

They entered through a postern, as they had planned previously, and found an empty hallway lined with closed, unremarkable doors that probably led to various storage rooms. Aaryn surveyed their surroundings and stretched out his telekinesis, worming it underneath the doors as they passed through the hallways, but he only sensed rooms full of junk devoid of life.

When they came to what appeared to be the headquarters of the warehouse—a large room containing various weapons, gadgets, and important-looking papers—they finally came across the sole living being in the entire building.

This being was a guard, apparently left to ‘hold down the fort’ while his superiors were away. He was dressed in faded blue slacks and carried a large handgun in the holster at his hip. The moment the guard caught sight of the pair of teenagers, he whipped out the gun in a manner that displayed his taste for show—a twirl and a flick that brought it pointing at Aaryn and Josephine.

“Who er—aaarrrggg!” the guard managed to spit out before Aaryn shut his mouth as the teenager used his mind to swing the guard upward till he hung near ceiling—a good twenty feet above the ground.

“Now, where is the Dracul?” asked Josephine serenely, getting the hang of these threats. “If you won’t tell us, my friend here could indeed drop you a few times—that would be quite painful, I would imagine.”

Aaryn experimented by letting go of the man for a few moments, which dropped him very near to the floor before he was raised back up to the ceiling.

This guard would have proved to be a much greater challenge to extract information from than the mugger had been, as he desired a better post under his master, who was a very frightening man on occasion. But all thoughts of promotion vanished from the man’s mind when he very nearly broke his neck on the concrete floor. So instead of bravado, blabbering words poured from his mouth, “Th-the Pullmont Mall—a b-bomb. . . .” His voice trailed off as he stared in terror at the dizzying drop to the floor below.

Aaryn glanced in horror at Josephine, who wore a similar expression on her face. Aaryn almost killed the guard by accident, he was so astonished and angry, but he fortunately caught the man in time to knock his head gently enough on the floor, in order to knock him out and keep him silent.

The two teenagers began sprinting down the hallway the way they came, in unspoken consent to go to the site of potential destruction and do what they could. For time’s sake, Aaryn opened the doors with his mind as they went along.

“Do you know where that mall is?” questioned Aaryn as they raced out the door of the warehouse.

“Yes, I've been a few times,” Josephine panted. She chose a direction and Aaryn followed as quickly as possible, dodging between buildings and cars as they crossed streets in their hurry.

“That’s them,” Josephine murmured into Aaryn’s ear as she pointed at black van that was parked in an alley on the other side of the street from the mall, which was a nondescript—albeit large—building of countless glass windows with sheets of shining metal for a roof. “He must have already planted the bomb and wants to watch the show this time,” she commented, her voice dripping with disgust.

“Then I’m going in,” stated Aaryn, getting up from their spot behind a telephone booth and a parked car. Josephine rose as well, and he didn’t object.

They crossed the street as nonchalantly as possible, attempting to blend in until they reached the side of the mall not in view of the van, then they sprinted to the double doors in the back of the mall. Aaryn forced them open by moving the lock with his mind till it clicked, and then they pushed through the doors, acting as most shoppers do and talking nonsensical chit-chat while Aaryn searched for the bomb by stretching his sense as far-ranging as possible, thinking that he would find it if he felt vibrations that didn’t come from vending machines or other, negligible mechanisms.

Fortunately (but fortunately for the Dracul as well), there were many shoppers that day and Aaryn and Josephine had no problems weaving through the crowds, up and down escalators, and past numerous shop windows without attracting attention to themselves. Not a single person gave them a second look as they continued their frantic race against time—literally, in this case.

The minutes flew by and Aaryn still hadn’t found the bomb, only multitudes of other useless machines, and so they began to panic. “Where could it possibly be?” Josephine almost snarled, a few of the customers giving her odd looks.

Then Aaryn was struck by a sudden, brilliant thought: “Josephine, I’ve got it!” he exclaimed. “Where would you put something you didn’t want to found? Somewhere most people don’t go! The boiler room that we passed downstairs—it explains why I couldn’t feel it—because of all the vibrations from the boiler!”

Josephine grinned in victory as they both sprinted to the door titled ‘BOILER: KEEP OUT!’ that they had passed on the first floor five minutes earlier. Aaryn opened the door and they both got in quickly and closed it so no one would wonder at what they were doing.

After that, it was a simple task of listening closely and combing the shelves and the boiler itself in the middle of the room—a loud, metal thing that looked like a mini oil truck without wheels. Josephine found it fairly quickly under one of the supply shelves. The bomb was a package the size of large book with a counter ticking down the time, which, at the moment, was three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

Aaryn and Josephine stared at each other for a moment, then, in unanimous consent, they grabbed the bomb, dashed out of the room and then out of the building at full speed. When they reached the street, they slowed down and crossed, heading towards the dark van in the alley ahead. The men inside clambered out as they recognized the package in Aaryn’s hands. All of them obviously knew of the danger of being so close to an incendiary device, and so all but one ran away, in full retreat from their own weapon.

The remaining man was unmistakably the Dracul, with a heavily creased and worn black suit and beady, soulless eyes that contained a light of insanity within. He leered at them in contempt and smiled maliciously. “What’re yuh doin’ with that? Hmmm? Think you can scare me, you bunch of meddlin’ children,” he screeched in a rusty, smoker’s voice.

Aaryn, unfazed, held up the bomb and motioned towards the pad of numbers that obviously were for entering a password to halt the bomb exploding. “You know the code, so enter it or you’re
going to die when it blows,” demanded Aaryn with a voice of such steel that iron would be jealous of it.
The timer now read thirty-two seconds.

The Dracul’s grin simply broadened as he riposted, “Yuh think I care if I die? What do ya’
think the last bomb was fuw? ‘Don’t care if I live o’ die. Thi’ live’s too mis’abull.”

The flames of Aaryn’s eyes intensified as he prepared a biting retort, but Josephine clutched his arm, saying, “He can’t help us anymore, Aaryn—it’ll blow any second now.”

Aaryn stared into her endlessly blue eyes as she stared into his flaming ones. In that moment, his world froze and he realized he didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. He needed to live. His mind raced at the speed of light as he thought, I. Will. Live.

As the time on the clock went down from five to four, Aaryn utilized his entire might to launch the bomb straight up, skywards. With so much velocity, it soared through the clouds before its timer went from one to zero, and then the sky was illuminated with the searing flash of a thousand shades of red, orange, and yellow, all almost as brilliant as the sun as the city reverberated with the thunderous boom.

After Aaryn glanced at the disappearing figure of the Dracul, who had slipped away the moment he had the chance, he thought, I’ll have to stop for a visit at the police station some time soon.
Then he glanced at Josephine and, inspired by their fantastical adventures, said, “Your life sounds pretty good out here in the free, wild city. Mind if I join you?”

As an answer, she glanced up at the still glowing sky, said, “Looks like your eyes,” and leaned forward, taking his hand in hers.

Together, their shadowy forms slipped away through the twilight city as the clouds in the sky continued to radiate their light over the city.