Chapter 5: Sunset (Sunrise) Vol 1. Issue 5.

Mackenzie sitting at her desk completely surrounded by papers with writing and drawings [https://64.media.tumblr.com/cf6028d8010a6372b0b2eb414fe1d6f8/a7fb8d38ef9a266a-fb/s1280x1920/48fc2582879f367518f37bc420a2a2356849f776.jpg]

LAHQ. Terre Department. Present day.

Darwin really didn’t know what to expect from this second culling meeting and he sure as hell didn’t feel qualified to be there. He was killing time staring at, but not reading, an events calendar posted on the wall, in an attempt to avoid being too early and having to make small talk with Whitney, when someone touched his back.

“Hey, ‘Cute Ears.’”

Darwin’s body jolted and he whipped around. It was only Ollie with his teasing grin. “Don’t,” he whined, touching his head to double check that his ears were still normal. They were. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

“Sorry, you looked like a zombie, is all.” Darwin cringed but Ollie angled his head toward the door. “Come on, let’s sit together so we get through this.”

Darwin nodded. Together, they went into the big conference room again and took seats near the center of the table. The room was filling up by then and Whitney was sitting at the head of the table on her laptop, a stack of files in front of her.

“Okay,” she called when it looked like most everyone was there. “We’re here to collectively go over the teams that you put forward and assign them out so you can start your evaluations. Now, they’re not going to be standard evals since the criteria is being half tossed out the door, but use your best judgment.”

That would be easy for Darwin—he hadn’t technically made a foster team determination yet in his career. He’d evaluated active foster situations to make sure they continued to be a good fit for the students, but so far, he was working most regularly with students in the Academy.

Whitney proceeded to hand out packets with two sheet summations of each file, which is probably why she looked like she hadn’t slept a wink. They were to go through each file individually, with her reading the highlights out loud so that everyone could take part in the debate as to whether to advance them or toss them back. A debate in which Darwin’s opinion would hold a certain type of weight that he didn’t quite feel comfortable with.

It stretched on for hours and they were beginning to run together, when one cut through his daze. They’d all voted down a lot throughout the meeting, which was only raising the stress of the room.

“This one is in Beatty, Nevada,” Whitney was saying. “I looked it up, it’s very rural so that’s a point against, if these were normal times. Team’s only been in the field for seven months, average age of eighteen-point-three, again another point against but not right now. We’ve got a telepath, invisibility, and healer. Two gens, which is good. One ex-Entropy, which feels problematic.” She looked up over her glasses. “Who put this one forward?”

Oh no. Darwin’s hands instantly became clammy and cold. “I did,” he said, holding back a groan.

“Okay, do you want to give us your reasoning?”

“Uh, yeah,” Darwin began. He stood up as though to present and then realized no one else had done that, so he quickly reached across the table for one of the bottles of water they had set out next to the plate of breakfast pastries and sat back down. “I grew up with Reeve, the telepath, and I remember him being a good guy. Really smart and not the type to just use his telepathy in a bullying way. That’s all.”

“Personal reference is worth noting,” she agreed. “What were your thoughts on the ex-Entropy agent?”

Darwin stammered and attempted to cover it by opening and sipping his newfound bottle of water.

“Wait, last year?” one of the senior guidance counselors interjected from the far end of the table. “I remember this. They were trying to keep it quiet, but someone in Mercury told me that an Entropy agent had defected and broken into Sol to ask for asylum. I heard he brought some really helpful intel with him.”

“And he did defect,” Darwin offered.

“Plus he’s barely nineteen,” Ollie pitched in, backing Darwin up with a sideways glance his way. “So he probably was a kid when Entropy picked him up and didn’t know any better.”

“Alright, we’ll let that slide for now,” Whitney said, turning the page. “Invisibility looks good. Clean record, and the secondary empathy knack could be a huge asset when helping a foster adjust.”

Darwin nodded as though he had most certainly had the same thought.

Eric, his immediate boss, piped up. “The telepath’s been through Reintegration. That seems like a no-brainer.”

Darwin attempted to shrink to an unnoticeable size.

Whitney made a sound of acknowledgement. “I saw that, but look at the date of offense. He would have been fourteen and in the LA Academy that year.”

Eric’s eyebrows rose and he nodded, dropping the matter. Relieved, Darwin reached for his water again as his mouth had grown painfully dry.

Ollie looked around the table. “I don’t get it.” Darwin knocked over his water. Luckily, it was still shut, but his face flushed anyway as he scooped it up and held it in his lap out of sight.

“You’re still new to LA,” Eric explained. “There was an incident back then with a teacher and once he was removed, several of his students were put through Reintegration as a precaution. What happened wasn’t their fault, so it shouldn’t be held against them.”

Darwin gulped.

“Oh, okay.” By then Ollie had noticed how pathetically uncomfortable Darwin had become sitting next to him and dropped it. “I mean,” Ollie went on, “Otherwise, top of his class, no other incidents, clean mission reports…” He shrugged one shoulder.

“Anyone object to checking it out?” Whitney asked. No one said anything. “Who wants it?” Again, no one said anything. Darwin knew he couldn’t since he had a history with a member, so he just sat, winding himself up tighter and tighter with every second.

“I’ll take it,” Ollie called, glancing at him. Darwin mouthed him a thank you.

“It’s yours,” Whitney said, making a note on her copy. “Next, we have a Neptune team based out of Seattle. Retrieval. Who put this up?”

Ollie put his hand up. “That one’s mine.”

Oh no. Darwin attempted to speed read through the file. A foster with a Retrieval team made him real uncomfortable. But if the table decided to advance it, Darwin would feel obligated to volunteer to do the in-person evaluation, since Ollie had just backed him up and volunteered for his pick, which was also kind of shaky, he could admit.

Whitney's voice drifted in, making it harder for Darwin to read. “Teleporter, kinetic absorber, and electricity manipulator. All three have pristine records and several rank promotions in the past few years. That said, it is their job to track, apprehend, and occasionally kill Icarus. Ollie?”

“Yeah, I know the Retrieval thing is a little iffy, but they tend to stay fairly local. Some travel up into Canada or south to Oregon. Not all over the place. Their evals are packed with people reporting that they’re just nice and a cohesive family unit. You don't tend to see a lot of that mushy stuff being included by Neptune, right? It stood out and I think it’s worth investigating.”

“I think you’re right,” Whitney agreed. “Objections?” Darwin held his breath. There were none. “Great, who wants it?”

Darwin exhaled, long and steady, then flashed Ollie the briefest smile. “I’ll take it.”

___

That night, Darwin dreamed of his childhood. He had these dreams often, but they were always murky, filled with holes and question marks. As he tossed in his sleep and tangled in his blankets, Darwin’s sleeping world morphed and shifted between images of classrooms, dormitories, the Atrium, and something more pristine and painful.

LAHQ’s Academy, run by Terre Department, was housed in the basement and sub-basement floors of the LA corporate campus. They were expansive—you’d never know by looking at the corporate park buildings that spread out beneath was an entire school, complete with training gyms designed to withstand the pummeling only an as-yet-untrained knacked child could unleash, a swimming pool, an indoor track, science labs, classrooms, dining hall, and even a miniature shopping mall and food court next to the Atrium.

The Atrium was on the uppermost floor of the academy—it was ground level and the only part of the Academy with a window. Or rather, a giant glass dome, which allowed the students to see the sky. There was a grassy area with trees beneath the Atrium dome, made to look like an indoor park. To people not from LAHQ, it was a real sight to see, a beautiful novelty. To the kids raised in the LAHQ Academy, it was the closest thing to the outdoors they knew. Or at least, that’s how it was supposed to go.

Darwin shifted fitfully in his sleep.

Children with knacks were typically raised in one of two ways. They started out in the nursery, and once they reached age eight, the kids with less volatile knacks and who were behaviorally stable got placed with foster teams to learn and grow. The others—the gifted ones, the kids with knacks that are harder to wrangle, like telepathy or fire manipulation, kids who acted out too much, or kids (like Darwin) who just couldn’t hide an overly visible knack (Darwin’s ears and tail had emerged in his sleep by now)—were placed in one of the Academies. A few different SolCorp locations had them, but LA’s was the biggest, and the kids who were raised there were not allowed to leave, for obvious safety and security reasons, until they graduated. They even had the sim-u-car to learn to drive (even though everyone kind of knew it was a joke).

The problem was, as Darwin’s dreaming mind was struggling to remind him, that Darwin had been among a small handful of students unlucky enough to have gone outside and learned to drive in a real car, on a real street. But even that was hazy at best. In his dreams, he watched as the streets of LA sailed by his window, but instead of a car, he was sitting in a hospital johnny on a cot in a pristine white room where the air was cold and smelled vaguely of bleach.

Dreams have a funny way of bending reality and mirroring it back to you like a fun-house. In reality, Darwin’s Reintegration was spent alone with his Neptune Reintegration team. In his dream, Reeve was sitting with him at the foot of his bed. They were talking, trying to remember the name of their teacher—the one who took them out driving, the one who landed them here—but Darwin couldn’t hear Reeve’s voice. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember what Reeve sounded like, and his dream couldn’t fill it in, so instead, their talking just sounded like the monitoring equipment Neptune used during the Reintegration sessions.

Darwin woke, soaked in sweat. He sat up and looked at the clock. He’d only been asleep for about twenty minutes, but his dream had felt far longer. They usually did. He was not excited to have a whole night ahead of him, so he heaved himself up and turned on the light on his nightstand. On his dresser was the file of the Neptune team he’d be visiting tomorrow, and now seemed like as good a time as any to do some homework before he got there. He tried to shake the dream from his mind, rubbing at his tail absent-mindedly. He was not looking forward to tomorrow, but at least he figured he could sleep on the plane.

---

Present day. Beatty, NV.

A sudden knocking broke through Reeve’s concentration and he sat up sharply.

“Yeah?” he called, swiftly logging out of his private email and angling the laptop away from the door. Closing the computer entirely would seem too off. He’d taken over the unused bedroom next to his as an office space, somewhere he could work behind a closed door without disruption. That was the theory, anyway. He considered installing a lock for the fiftieth time.

The door opened and Hannah stuck her head through. “Just making sure you’re still alive.”

He raised his eyebrows at her by way of answer.

She stepped the rest of the way in and leaned against the doorframe. “Hey, man, you’ve been in there for four hours and it’s been weeks since we’ve had a mission, so it’s not like you’ve got paperwork to do. Gareth thinks it’s porn, but you and I both know it’s not.”

He let his eyebrows drop to normal without changing his expression.

“Yeah.” She waved her hand in small circles in front of her chest. “I know. Empath. But Gareth’s not too smart, and also a pervert—empath, I know. And I lost the toss, so I’m here to check on you.”

Reeve let out a long sigh. “Hannah.”

“Well, what the hell are you doing?” she prodded, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

“It’s just team lead stuff,” he lied. He had his personal laptop out, not the one that was company assigned, but they looked similar enough that she hadn’t noticed. It was simple to use his telepathy to remove any out of place feelings she might be picking up from her head. “There’s always some form or another—” Reeve was cut off by a notification sound. It made his heart jolt in his chest, but he was sure he had signed out of his private email, so it had to be Sol.

He tilted his head to peer at this laptop. It was a secure alert from Sol routed through the usual Uranus channels with the subject line, “Notice: Evaluation scheduled.” His stomach dropped.

“What is it?” Hannah breathed, taking a few steps closer. He’d let his block lapse and she was suddenly feeling his panic.

He opened it, brow pinched. The message was distressingly short and vague. “It’s fine, just go get Gareth.” He saw her glare at him from the corner of his eye before she turned to go, but he was more than a little distracted.

Reeve re-read the email and tried to slow the thudding of his heartbeat. Someone would be coming out for an official evaluation. He double-checked the date. Tomorrow. That was the part that set the hairs on the back of Reeve’s neck on end. His mind raced. He had been careful. So careful.

Hannah and Gareth came into the room like a landslide. “What the fuck is going on now?” Gareth demanded, more confused than angry.

“We’re up for an evaluation.” He forced his voice to be steady.

“Is that not normal?”

“Not in person. And not with only fifteen hours notice.” Reeve squeezed his eyes shut and got himself together.

“Are we in trouble?” she asked.

“No.” He sat and opened his eyes again, holding their gaze without flinching. He reached outward and reined in anything that Hannah’s knack picked up on. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

That night was a bit of a whirlwind. They cleaned and tidied the house. He agreed to help them, once the sun came up, pick up each and every bottlecap that they’d haphazardly flicked off the porch, even though that was squarely on them.

Once he was satisfied with the state of the house, he set out his typical slacks and white button down shirt for the next morning and went to check on the others. As he came out, he found Hannah sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire, wearing what she normally wore: nothing.

“You’ll have to put some clothes on tomorrow,” he sighed. He was too stressed out for this fight.

She tucked her chin in, offended. “Why? They’re Sol. They know what my knack is.”

He pulled out a chair and sat down. “It doesn’t matter that they’re Sol. If you lived in LAHQ, you still couldn’t wander the halls naked.”

“Well that’s immature.”

Reeve rubbed at his face. “You know I’d be completely fine with you never wearing clothes if it was just us. You do whatever the hell is comfortable to you and fuck the rest, but it’s a little different when it comes to the people evaluating our performance. You know I’m right. Just please play along so we can get a positive review.”

She set her pile of cards down and stood up. “Fine.”

He was about to let her walk away when he saw, in his mind, her stretched out, oversized t-shirts and loose shorts so short that they were hidden entirely beneath the shirt. He cringed. “No, you can’t wear—can you please put on something that looks professional?”

“Professional what?” she retorted—rightfully, he could admit. “Please, do tell me what the uniform is for getting naked, invisible, and shooting people?”

“Okay,” he said, placating. “Wrong choice of words, but also you know what the fuck I mean. Respectable.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “You saying you can’t respect me right now?”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Reeve drew out a long exhale and reminded himself that she didn’t know why he was so wound up about this visit.

“Alright, alright,” she relented. “You gonna give this same shit to Gareth?”

“Aside from the part about not being naked, yes.”

“Okay.” She pointed a finger at his face. “Here’s the thing. I don’t exactly own office attire.”

Reeve didn’t meet her eyes. “I’ll pull something out.”

Hannah looked him up and down. “If they come out to the desert and we’re all in your nerdy khakis and white shirt get-up, they’re gonna think we’re a cult.”

“Not my clothes.” he snapped. “I picked up a couple of outfits for you in case there was a corporate thing.”

“You bought me just-in-case clothes.” She shifted her weight and cocked one hip. “You micromanaging… Man, I gotta see this.”

He shut his eyes, briefly. “Back left of my closet. Just wear it.” The upside was that he was sure he would actually be looking forward to their evaluation, simply because it would signal an end to Hannah’s complaining about how uncomfortable the perfectly fine women’s slacks and plain, v-neck shirt were.

Reeve searched out Gareth to have the same fight, but he was already planning to be surprisingly well dressed for the occasion, in clean dark jeans and a lightweight black sweater. He could sense Gareth was feeling the stress of making sure Sol thought he was worth their investment and risk.

Before going to bed, Reeve encrypted and locked anything on his laptop that he’d prefer to keep private and stashed it in the packed suitcase he kept under his bed. Fuck. That didn’t look good either. He disassembled the packed bag and half-considered downloading a bunch of porn as a cover, but instead just slipped the laptop underneath his dirty laundry basket inside his bedroom closet. He wouldn’t sleep well that night.

---

Beatty, NV.

“They’re here,” Reeve called.

When the black sedan pulled up, Reeve was as ready as he could ever be. He pulled the edges of his telepathy in and tucked it away. Most times, background telepathy wasn't an issue, but a formal evaluation was not the time for there to be even the hint that telepathy had any influence. Still, if he had to, he would figure that out when he got there.

He unbuttoned and rebuttoned one cuff on his shirt as he waited by the front door for the others.

“Let’s get this over with,” he heard Hannah say. They emerged from the lower level door together, looking polished enough that they wouldn’t turn heads in the halls of LAHQ, which was the best Reeve could hope for. They could come out of this with full marks yet.

Together, they walked out onto the deck and Reeve raised his hand in what he thought of as an assertive wave. The man who got out of the car was far from the intimidating figure he’d cooked up in his mind. He was a young guy, a few years older than Reeve, with wavy light brown hair and a sharp nose. He leaned into the passenger side and pulled out a black satchel. He was slender and wearing a light colored button down shirt with matching slacks and blazer. Reeve was glad he’d ignored their jeering and stuck to his dress shirt.

With a jerk of his head to follow, Reeve left the porch to greet him. “Long drive, I’m betting,” he called over with a warm smile.

“You’re not kidding,” he returned with a grin and extended his hand. “I’m Oliver del Sol. I’ll be doing your eval. And I’ve got your file here, so I know you’re Reeve, you’re Hannah, and that makes you Gareth.”

The muscles in Reeve’s jaw tightened. “You’d probably rather go inside where it’s cooler?”

Oliver adjusted the bag on his shoulder to retrieve a clipboard. “You’re right, but I need to do an inspection of the premises. You’re welcome to join me.”

Reeve looked at the others. “Sure, I’ll go with. You guys can go stay cool.” Gareth nodded and went inside. He could have stood to look a little less grouchy, but it could be worse.

“This part will be pretty boring,” Oliver assured him. Reeve followed him as he walked the perimeter of the house and jotted down a few notes. He gave a cursory glance at their Sol-issued car and nodded to the detached garage. “Can I see in there?”

“Of course.” Reeve lifted the door for him. He’d done his best to tidy the place up without it looking suspiciously clean. Still, Reeve scanned the walls trying to look at each thing as this agent would. The covered car, the tool bench that came with the house and its scattering of tools and rags. The stain on the floor from his first botched attempt to change the oil. Off in one corner was the large wooden crate that held the new engine he’d bought on a whim before realizing that even if he knew how to hook it up, he had no idea how to actually get it into the car.

Oliver lifted the corner of the cover and whistled. “Yours?”

“It’s a project to work on between jobs.” He tried to sound as casual as can be.

Oliver’s head bobbed with a smile. “That’s really cool.”

Reeve was getting the impression that Oliver was an Academy kid like him and, if he was based in LAHQ, he probably didn’t even own a car of his own, let alone have much knowledge in the area. Reeve was grateful for that, and for him not asking any further questions. He really hated not using his telepathy to be sure.

They went back outside and gazed out over the red-brown dirt, dry scrub, and rough scrabble of rocks that surrounded the house.

“Nice, private spot, but not much usable backyard, huh?”

Reeve scratched at the back of his head. “Not yet.” He motioned to him to follow and gestured at a gap in the brush where the dirt was beaten down. “Hannah’s working on clearing a walking path and we’ve got a couple of targets set up about fifty yards south to keep sharp.” He extended his arm, pointing to the short structures he’d purchased in the distance. He liked using words like “south” as directions. It made him feel significantly more outdoorsy than he was.

Oliver made a couple of furious notes. “Alright,” he said, squinting hard enough to show some teeth. “Let’s get inside. I’m baking.”

Once inside the safety of the air conditioning, he announced he needed to do a walkthrough of the home. Reeve stuck with him while Hannah and Gareth sat awkwardly at the table, giving him dubious looks.

He began in the kitchen, poking his head into a couple of cabinets and the fridge, which threw Reeve more than a little. What the hell was he looking for? He glanced around the living room and then headed down the hall. Oliver briefly stuck his head into Reeve’s room, as Reeve held his heart in his throat.

“I assume this is you?” he asked.

“Yup,” Reeve replied awkwardly, but Oliver moved on without so much as a note.

He paused at Reeve’s office. “Is this the fourth bedroom?”

“Yeah, two more downstairs. I use it as an office, which,” Reeve shrugged, not sure what to do with his hands, “you can probably guess.”

He nodded and went across the hall to look into the bathroom. “Just the one bathroom?”

Jesus Christ, was Sol planning on listing their place for sale? Reeve swallowed the thought and schooled his face. “Just the one, but we get by okay.”

Oliver made another note and it was killing Reeve to not lean in to try and read over his shoulder. “Basement?”

Reeve forced a smile. “This way.”

He brought him downstairs. Directly in front of them was their utility room and storage area, which was mainly empty, besides whatever it had come with and some ammo. He took him right and through the door that led to the long multipurpose area. In the front was their medic area. There were cots and two rolling carts filled with whatever medical equipment Hannah felt she needed. A utility sink sat in the corner with a cup holding Hannah and Gareth’s toothbrushes, which looked odd next to the packages of gauze, trauma shears, and bottles of whatever medication she had leave to provide them. Oliver poked through it without much interest.

On the other end of the narrow room was a large orange sparring mat with training pads in a variety of sizes and a rack of free weights. Oliver made a few notes and nodded for Reeve to continue.

He led them back around to the other side of the stairs and into the first room. It was sparse, and not only because they had gone on a cleaning spree the night before. There was a low, platform bed tucked into the far left corner. The lack of box spring made it look distressingly close to the floor, in Reeve’s opinion. The bed had been made with a sage-green blanket pulled up over the pillows. There was a short coffee table serving as a nightstand with nothing on it, and a cheap-looking, free-standing wardrobe had been converted for gun storage. In the opposite corner was a smallish television, set of floor chairs, and a video game system.

“I take it this is Gareth’s?”

Reeve shook his head with a smirk. “This is all Hannah.”

“Hm.” He made another note.

Finally, he looked at Gareth’s room, just beyond Hannah’s. Gareth had a, thankfully, normal-looking bed with a dark red plaid comforter. He had a chest of drawers and matching bedside table with a brass organizer for his wallet, phone charger, and such.

When Oliver seemed satisfied, they headed upstairs where they found Gareth and Hannah chatting in hushed tones.

“Could I get some water?” Oliver asked.

Gareth stood to get it while Oliver got situated at the table with the rest of them. He stashed away the clipboard and brought out another set of forms.

This time, he was sitting close enough to get a better look. Reeve had been expecting either Uranus’ letterhead or, worst case scenario, Neptune’s. But this didn’t have a departmental letterhead at all.

“Thank you,” he said, accepting the water from Gareth and looking at them. “Okay, just a few questions and I can get out of your hair.

The three of them nodded at each other.

“Now, I know you three haven’t been in the field long, but how would you say you’re working together?”

Reeve bit his tongue. They were...figuring it out. He and Gareth rubbed each other the wrong way pretty terribly most of the time. Gareth was reactive, to put it lightly and Reeve could admit, only to himself mind you, that he didn’t exactly have a surplus of social graces. Still their fights had grown fewer and farther in between. It would have been nice to blow off their aggressions sparring more often, but Reeve simply didn’t have the reach or strength to be any match for Gareth without his telepathy, and that negated the whole point.

Reeve and Hannah understood each other, as people with knacks that read others. She was a peacekeeping force in the house and if that made it seem like she had less of a temper than Gareth, Reeve knew that was only down to her Mars-instilled discipline. She and Gareth clicked. After a few missteps at the start, they fell in thick as thieves in a way he didn’t have with either of them.

Reeve badly wanted to answer, but he figured the guy would want to hear anyone else’s voice for a change. The others nodded slowly and Gareth was smart enough to avoid making eye contact with Reeve.

“We’re still getting to know each other,” Hannah spoke up, tugging uncomfortably at one sleeve, “but yeah, I think we’re working well.”

Gareth had his hands folded in front of him, trying not to fidget as well. “I think the three of us put together cover all the bases we need.”

Reeve thought that might have been the nicest thing he’d ever heard Gareth say or think about him.

Oliver was writing again. “How do you handle conflict in the house?”

They exchanged a couple of glances.

Reeve cleared his throat to tell the others to shut up. “Well, Gareth and I disagree a lot, but it’s nothing some hashing out or time to cool off can’t handle.”

“Ever end in a fist fight?”

Gareth pressed his lips together and shook his head. “No punches have been thrown here except for sparring.”

That appeared to be an acceptable answer to Oliver. “And how’s your transition from Entropy? Are you finding it hard to adjust?”

Gareth reared back, unable to contain his reaction. “Uh,” he shot them a look. “It’s fine. Sol’s night and day from Entropy. You don’t...You couldn't get me to go back to save my life.”

“And no concerns from you two on that end?”

Reeve shook his head, which was in all honesty.

“Of course not,” Hannah retorted. “If anything, he holds back way more than I would because he’s overthinking how he was trained. What?” she went on at Gareth’s glare. “You do.”

Oliver scribbled on the sheet. “And is there a sexual nature to your relationships?” Reeve felt his eyebrows drift upward and found he wasn’t alone looking around the table. “There’s nothing against that,” Oliver continued, as if that would comfort them.

“Not me,” Hannah declared, prompting Gareth and Reeve to shake their heads vehemently at each other. Even if Gareth weren’t straight as an arrow, Reeve wasn’t the type to be all that into a hate-fuck.

“Civilians?” Oliver pressed.

Hannah put her hands up. “I’m just not interested.”

Reeve grit his teeth. “Telepath.”

“Right,” Oliver nodded and he was relieved to not have to go into it further. Telepathy came with pros and cons that affected all aspects of life (even the most private) and some were harder to hide from civilians than others.

Oliver turned to Gareth and waited. Gareth ground his jaw and hesitated.

Hannah’s face split into a grin and answered for him. “Vegas, baby.” Reeve bit back a laugh as Gareth rolled his eyes.

Oliver pursed his lips, suppressing a grin. “So, not a lot of civilian presence inside the home?”

“No,” Reeve said definitively.

Oliver clicked his pen a few times. “Okay, I think that’s all I need right now.” He stood up and slid his papers back into his briefcase.

“Hey,” Hannah spoke up, making her voice softer. “Can we ask what this is about?”

Oliver bit his lip. “Sorry, no. I can tell you we’re screening for a special assignment, but that’s all I can say right now.”

They all shook hands and walked him out to his car, exchanging some inoffensive pleasantries about the heat and his long drive back.

“What the fuck was that?” Hannah asked out of the corner of her mouth as he was driving away.

“I don’t know.”

Once he had pulled out of sight, she whipped to face him. “What do you mean you don't know? Isn’t that like, the point of you?”

Gareth let out a laugh at that.

“Exactly how wise do you think it is to be found using telepathy to influence an evaluation? On the off chance he was from the investigation wing of Neptune?”

Hannah huffed and went inside. “There’s no reason for Neptune to be out here.”

“What about you?” Reeve pressed, willfully ignoring her comment. “You can’t turn yours off.”

Hannah grabbed two beers out of the fridge, setting them in front of Gareth. Reeve chose not to point out that it was barely noon.

While she stripped methodically out of her clothes, Gareth opened both beers and set one back by Hannah. “Whatever the fuck it was about, he was in a good mood when he left,” she said then sat and took a sip.

Reeve took a chair and envied her her drink, a rare thought for him and it soured his stomach. “What the fuck type of special assignment involves commenting on how many bathrooms we have?”

“Adding another teammate,” Gareth offered.

“Possible,” Hannah agreed. “Foster?”

Reeve shook his head. “No, we’re nineteen kinds of disqualified to foster a student. Fourth teammate makes sense.”

“Please god, not another telepath,” Gareth muttered.

“Here here,” Hannah said, raising her beer. Gareth clicked the neck of his beer into hers with a chuckle. With a sigh, Reeve raised his empty hand and mimed toasting with them.

---

LAHQ. Living quarters.

It had been three weeks since Mackenzie had woken up from using her knack and began recording what she had learned. Louis schooled his face and knocked on the door to the quarters that Rafe and Mackenzie shared. Rafe answered, looking just as run down as the last time he’d checked in, but he smiled seeing Louis anyway.

“Come on in,” he said warmly.

Louis stepped inside and gave Rafe a quick hug before handing him the large flat white he’d brought, Rafe’s coffee of choice. He took it with only half of a scolding look. “Thank you.”

“How are you holding up?” Louis asked. It seemed like the question to ask, even though he knew the answer couldn’t be positive.

It didn’t matter how many times they lived through these periods, it never got any easier on Mackenzie or Rafe. Mackenzie was in her own world, leaving Rafe the impossible task of trying to go on with daily life. Rafe complained that he brewed coffee and then forgot, leaving it to burn on the heating plate for hours. He would read an email, respond, and then couldn’t say what the email had been about.

Rafe shrugged. “Tired. She’s alright, about the same. You?”

Louis shrugged, holding up the bag. “Figured she’d be needing more memory by now.” He pointed to the coffee. “You too.”

He chuckled at that. “Thank you,” he repeated, meaning it. He nodded, and Louis walked with him through the sitting area and into Mackenzie’s study, where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Mackenzie was bent over a large sketch pad, drawing some sort of schematic at the moment. She didn’t look up when they walked in.

What she did—drawing, writing, or speaking into an audio recorder—varied minute to minute. It all depended on what was the easiest and fastest way to get down the information at hand. It’d be simpler if she could just type everything into her computer, but there was something about the physicality of writing, drawing, and talking that worked with the flow of information where a word processor just didn’t.

Her normally pristine office was a disaster. While Rafe, Louis, and a number of Pluto agents did their best to provide her with what she needed, they didn't even attempt to clean or organize anything. There were stacks of notebooks piled high into corners. When her pens ran out of ink or her pencils wore down to nibs, she dropped them where she sat and picked up a new one from the cup of writing instruments that they constantly refilled. A clear bin on her desk was a third of the way filled with memory cards from her voice recorder. They’d brought in a twin bed for her to sleep on, though, last he’d heard, Dakota had to medicate her to get her to sleep at all.

Rafe leaned over and kissed her head, though she didn’t seem to notice. She was thinner than before she’d gone under, and her hair had grown out a little to be slightly stringy and worse for wear. Her hands looked red and angry, the heel of her writing hand black with ink and graphite.

“Has she spoken to you yet?” he asked gently.

Rafe shook his head. Louis couldn’t imagine how much it must pain him to live with and care for the woman he loved and have her not even look at him for weeks on end.

But Louis knew that with every hour that passed, the knowledge was slipping away, becoming harder to grasp, so she had to dedicate every moment to getting as much down as she could. While her brain held that knowledge, it didn’t leave much room for anything else. And she couldn’t hold it all forever, so there was no time to waste.

She never really talked to Louis about what it was like for her and he wished more than ever that they had. Before her promotion, she had mentored him when he’d first been assigned to the Saturn department and he remembered one cocky agent in the office commenting offhand that her knack must be “overwhelming.” She’d taken a moment to stop them and clarify. She had explained that the idea of temporary omniscience only seemed overwhelming in theory until you broke it down.

She’d told them to think of a single worker ant. “Picture her six legs, the number of sensitive hairs on her body. Picture everything she has ever eaten, every insect she’s fought, every ant sister she’s greeted, every grain of sand she’s hauled. Think of every place she’s been and will go. Where and how she will die. Understand the intricacies of her rudimentary circulatory system, count the hundreds of thousands of neurons in her brain, see the amino sugars that make up her chitin exoskeleton. Perceive the superposition of the electrons in every atom that makes up her body, second after second. Where each atom came from before she hatched and where each atom will be scattered when her body decays. Knowing all of that for this single ant would be overwhelming. The enormity of true omniscience of every creature and every thing is something that humans like us don’t even have words for.”

Mostly, Louis thought that she didn’t particularly like this one agent and wanted to put him in his place, but the conversation had always stuck with him. It humbled him when he felt like he was struggling to keep up with the responsibilities of her office while not overly neglecting his own. Grace had stepped up and hadn’t once said no when Louis had asked for help. Even Rafe’s Second, Logan, would check in with him every few days to see if he could be of any help. The Saturn and Terre departments might not have much in common, but Rafe and Mackenzie heading them up made the ranked officers a kind of family unit.

“Dakota says she’s doing alright,” Rafe said, startling Louis out of his trance. “She’s drinking better than the first week and she hasn’t needed IV saline since last Tuesday. She makes cooking easy because she’ll eat whatever I put in front of her. I could put a bowl of olives next to her and she’d eat them without even seeing them.” Mackenzie was known for her vocal hatred of olives.

“That’s good.” Or at least, it wasn’t bad. Louis went over to her desk and placed the bag of fresh memory cards next to her voice recorder.

“How are you holding up?”

Louis flinched inwardly. “I’m alright.” It wasn’t a lie, but Louis was beyond exhausted. He’d gone through this before, as her subordinate and once as her Third, but this was an entirely different weight to hold. Being interim-Saturn, and functionally, his own Second, was a lot to handle. He had clearance to more knowledge than he was comfortable with but needed to fully grasp to make the sort of daily calls that were asked of him—which felt like a shitty thing to complain about when Mackenzie was getting walloped with more information than he could conceptualize. But ultimately, and compared to Mackenzie and Rafe, he was alright.

But Rafe knew as well as Louis did that there was no positive answer to that question. “You’ve got people you’re leaning on?” he pressed.

Louis nodded. There were things he couldn’t talk about with anyone but Mackenzie, but Logan, Grace, and some of the other Seconds were getting him through.

Carefully, he glanced through what she’d been working on that day. She had moved on from drawing back to writing in her quick, looping shorthand. He didn’t bother trying to read it, though he’d learned shorthand to work with her. Once all the knowledge had run dry, she’d spend the next few weeks combing through the volumes and volumes of notes and hours of rambling to pick out what was relevant and valuable from facts like what a postal worker in Hoboken, New Jersey had for dinner last October. It wasn’t an efficient system, but when you were dealing with literally all the knowledge of the universe, how could it be?

A sheet of paper caught his eye, sticking out from under the large sketch pad she’d discarded, and he pulled it out. It was the stapled packet of the Venus file on the twenty-five, now twenty-one, gens. Mackenzie had written on it, circling two names and then scrawling notes that were hard to read, as they overlaid the rest of the printed text and then ran over the side of the page onto the front cover of the notebook it had been sitting on.

“What is it?” Rafe asked.

Louis held the sheet in front of Mackenzie. “Can I translate this?”

She didn’t respond, which was as good of permission as he could get right now. He lined up the writing and read through it.

“She’s got locations of two of the kids,” Louis said with a rush of relief that devolved into confusion. “We’re going to need Venus to interpret some of this for us because there’s some stuff here about their knacks that doesn't make sense to me, but we’ve got coordinates for one and, shit, the other is already here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, she’s in the Academy here in LA. A Comet must have detected her knack, found her and picked her up as if she were a natural-born knacked person.”

Rafe stared at him. “You’re kidding me.”

He reread the shorthand. “I’m not.”

Rafe ran a hand down his face. “That’s actually the best case scenario and I never even considered it.” He stood and kissed Mackenzie on the top of her head. She didn’t react. “Let’s go make Josh’s day.”

Louis nodded.

***