“I’ve come to you?” Melpomene asks her, the girl rolls her eyes. “You came, I brought you, whatever, does it matter?”

I remember an expression Rodrigo used to refer to people like that. He said they had a potato stuck in their throat, and that was why their accents were so strange. He called them strawberries, and Travis called them snobs, if I remember correctly.

“Who are ya? “ I dare to ask, the girl looks at me suspiciously. She looks somewhat smug. “Do you think I'm a stuck up?” she says suddenly. I take a step back. “What? Did you read my mind?” The girl makes a face. “No bro, I just asked you and you just answered me”.

The girl looks at Melpomene and then at me, she looks us up and down, and makes another face. I feel something on my hand, Melpomene is taking it. Before I can ask her what’s wrong, Mel goes out of phase, and I with her. My body feels strange, a little lighter. Mel’s hand drags me towards the fence, I put one hand out so as not to hit the iron, but it goes through it, along with my whole body. Mel lets go of my hand and I return to normal, we’re on the other side now. “Yo! Wait!” the girl shouts and begins to push us towards a tree near the entrance. She stops pushing us until we’re behind the trunk, hidden. “You can’t be here!” the girl says quietly.

“So why did you bring me?”

“Did she bring you?”

“Yes! I brought her!”

The girl raises two of her fingers and I can feel a breeze on the back of my neck. I turn around, but nothing. I open my mouth to say something, but I can’t. My voice is gone. I try again, but my throat won’t respond. I can’t make a sound. “Dumbo”. A foreign voice rings in my head. What the Fuck? “Who are you talking to?” I’m not talking to anyone, are you… are you in my head? “You could say, this way they won’t hear us”. How did you do that? Is it your power? “One of them”. “You have many powers” Mel? Are you in my head too? “Listen, you have to follow me, we’re going somewhere quieter”.

The girl takes both of us by the hand and leads us along the side of the fence. In the distance, I can see that the school’s windows are still lit. What is this school? “It’s a boarding school, the Petal Institute”. We continue walking behind the bushes, until we finally reach a small hatch where the girl enters. It could be dangerous, but I’ll trust that we can get out of any situation now with Mel’s powers. Almost any situation, after all, I’ve survived two psychopaths. Entering through the hatch, a set of stairs down awaits us. We end up in some sort of dusty basement, surrounded by shelves and rusty tools. Under the light of a single spotlight, the girl brings her fingers together above her head and as she separates them, I feel something escape my throat. It’s just air.

“Alright! Let's talk!”

“Who are you? What are your abilities? How did you get them? What do you want?” Mel asks the questions so fast that she doesn't give her a chance to answer them. The girl thinks for several seconds.

“Kristen Bree, who are you?”

“Melpomene Li, this is Sam Horace” I greet the girl with a hand, but she rolls her eyes again.

“I felt you when you accessed the network, that's why I brought you here, I thought you were really looking to meet... others”.

“The network?”

“I call it that, it's when you let your powers go free”

We both looked at each other in confusion. I'm sure Mel thought that sounded ridiculous.

“I've been cursed with these powers for a while now, I was practicing how to master them... while we were looking for a way to get rid of them”.

“Get rid of ‘em!?” Kristen is surprised and takes Mel by the shoulders.

“Why don't you want them?

“They're unstable and dangerous”

“Maybe you know a bit more about it”, I barely say it when the girl turns to look at me.

“What’s up with him?”

“Excuse me?”

“He's ended up involved in all this, he's helping me free myself from this... curse”

Kristen takes a few steps back and sighs heavily. She’s just a child, but her gaze is very condescending. “I was born with my abilities. The connection of minds, the visions and the… destruction, although I have completely lost the last one. For a long time I sensed others, like you and me, when they let their powers flow and connected to the network”. A door suddenly opens, an old man in a blue uniform enters and looks at us in surprise.

Kristen raises one of her hands and points it at the old man without even looking at him. The guy stops and stays completely still. His hands and legs are still in the same position, it's impossible to stay halfway for a long time without starting to shake, but the old man has become..., “I froze him, the connection allows me to control many things... although reading minds has become difficult lately” Kristen says and lowers her hand. The old man remains in the same position. She has really immobilized him. Looking at Melpomene, I realize that she is surprised. In a good way.

“I… I don’t know how many powers I have”

“Come again?”

“They’re very unstable… they change from day to day, but my emotions can also change them or make me lose control”

“Really? That’s cray. What kind of abilities do you have?”

The two girls continue to talk for minutes. Melpomene tells her about Phantom Week, and other abilities she has managed to see. According to her, in addition to the seven she has revealed to me, and their variants, she has also seen herself capable of controlling wind, water, and on one occasion, a dog she had. Kristen is surprised by each thing she tells her, and then she shows her phase shifting ability once again to her. We talk about the strange world she created when Hernandez tried to kill us, and what I had to do. Kristen is left speechless. She is only a high school girl, but unlike Mel, she does fully control one of her powers. The second, however, has been a problem for her.

The visions Kristen describes are unpredictable, spontaneous, and mysterious. She tells us that she usually had one a year. She saw deaths of relatives, catastrophes that happened in Azul, miracles, and other things. But lately, her visions have been coming back with great force, presenting her with the same vision for many nights. “As if… something… was telling me what to do,” she says. When I ask her what vision she had, she reveals that it was one of the reasons she brought Melpomene as soon as she detected her with her powers. “I saw a man under the moon, and then you guys on a television”.

“It must have been Hernandez” I tell Mel, she nods and starts thinking. “What else have you seen?” she asks. “I still see you two, but now I see a child”

“A child?”

“Yes, it’s a child, crouching in the dark, and suddenly… he jumps at me with a knife in his hand!”

“That sounds horrible” Melpomene’s cell phone rings. It’s her parents. We are forced to go back before we raise suspicions. Kristen says goodbye, and we promise to meet up later. In the end, it seems that Kristen just wanted someone to talk to about her abilities, and decided to bring Melpomene. But the description she gives us about her vision makes me think. If it’s true that she saw Hernandez first, and he looked for us, that means that we will soon come across that… child. Or maybe it will be like last time, and that child will find us both first. Is it that hunch he had? Maybe I’m thinking about it too much.