Null tests me every two days, always hooking me up to an EEG machine and heart monitor. Every week or so they draw blood, filling vial after vial of it. I don’t know what they do with it. I never see any other prisoners. If there are any others, they’re not in the same section of the building as me. As far as I know, I am alone. Shortstack, the guards, and the scientists in the lab are the only people I see, and aside from Shortstack, none of them speak to me. It’s a lonely existence.

          Some self-pitying part of me wonders at my mother. She lost one son when he was only ten, and now her second has been gone a year. I hope absently that she’s okay, but I have trouble picturing it. I miss our little house in East City, far from the shining glass of Central. I remember the brick, cool and rough under my skin when I scratched my initials into the side of the house. I remember the dust motes that floated in the sunlight, and the way Aiden’s room always, somehow, smelled like him.

          There are no dust motes here, no lingering smell of my brother. And no carvings besides the tallies across the surface of my desk.

          I hear a knock on my glass wall as I’m marking day number three hundred and fifty on the desk. I look up and see Shortstack. For the first time I’ve ever seen, she’s alone.

          She has one hand raised, delicately knocking her knuckles on the glass, the other hand tucked behind her back. She’s in her usual black shift dress, standing before the small slot in the front glass wall where the guards slide my meals to me onto a glass shelf.

          “Where are your escorts?” I ask, rising from the chair at the desk and crossing the small cell. Shortstack smiles a little. Her makeup is immaculate as it wings out from the corners of her eyes. They’re dark brown like coffee.

          “Not here,” she says. I cock my head at her.

          “Are you trying to take advantage of me?” I say, and she smirks. She brings her hand out from behind her back, and slides a scuffed metal cup through the slot in the glass, setting it on the small shelf on my side of the glass wall.

          “Wow. Impressive, Shortstack,” I say, giving her a grin. She only huffs a small laugh and nods to the cup, tucking her hands behind her back.

          “Move it,” she says. My grin fades.

          “What about the lab?” I ask. Shortstack shakes her head.

          “No lab, Sasquatch. Just me. Go ahead, move the cup.”

          I blink at her for a second, but then look at the cup. In a cell isolated from metal, the hum I feel from the cup is startling. I narrow my focus to the pull of the metal. It wiggles a little, making my skin prickle pleasantly.

          “Use your hands,” Shortstack says, breaking my focus.

          “What?”

          She inclines her chin toward the cup. “Use your hands to direct it,” she says. I give her a skeptical look, and she raises her eyebrows at me, urging me on.

          I return my gaze to the metal cup, and extend a hand toward it. Shortstack quietly mutters, “Focus.” I feel the hum of the metal, but it feels louder, like it’s turned way up.

          My fingers tingle first, and then my skin prickles with warmth that travels up my arm and down my spine. The hair on the back of my neck rises. Power engulfs me like a warm wash of light and suddenly the cup flies off the glass shelf, slamming against the far wall and clattering to the floor.

           The breath flies from my lungs, and I drop my hand, staggering back. I feel a tear leak down my cheek as the flood of power drains from me. I gulp hard, shuddering breaths, bending and bracing my hands against my knees.

          “How was it?” Shortstack asks, her voice quiet.

          I turn my head to peer at her. I’d practically forgotten she was there. “What was that?” I ask, breathless. I still feel drained.

          “That was your power,” she says. “How did it feel?” She’s unfazed, her hands still clasped behind her back. She eyes me critically, her brow knit.

          “It was—it felt like electricity—all over,” I stammer. My breathing eases and I stand upright again. “Did you know that would happen?”

          She shakes her head. “Not to that extent. You’re very powerful,” she says. I stare at her for a second, and walk to the cup, bending to pick it up. Its hum has gone back to normal in my hands. I set it back on the glass shelf by the slot in the wall and Shortstack takes it back. I step closer to her, my breath fogging the glass between us. I tower over her, but the way she looks up at me makes me feel like the smaller of the two of us.

          “Why did you come here?” I ask quietly. “Why did you show me how to do that?”

          Her expression is fierce. “I can’t tell you that,” she says.

          “Why not?”

          She doesn’t answer for a long time. “I just can’t, Finn,” she says, shaking her head.

          I breathe a sigh and Shortstack steps back from the glass wall between us. She grasps the cup in her hands, her fingers tapping on the sides. She turns to leave.

          “Wait!” I say, and she pauses. “What’s your name?”

          She looks at me over her shoulder, partially turned away from my cell.

          “Asher,” she says, and hurries away, her heels clicking on the floor as I watch her go.