Page 49 of Anarchy Chained: Alpha Thomas

She shrugs. “About ten seconds.”

“Bullshit,” I say. “You have three to five good seconds if you’re lucky. You’re a mirage, Sadie. Nothing more. A trick.”

“Well, as fun as this whole my-superpower-is-better-than-your-superpower shit is, I’m tired of it. Let’s move on to something else. Like why you were in the crazy house to begin with.”

I catch her smirking reflection in the front window, her face lit up by the dim green dashboard lights.

“I tried to kill myself,” I say. I figure I’d have to tell her eventually.

“What?” She sits up in her chair and looks straight at me. “Why?”

I let out a long breath of air. It’s my turn to stare out the window. “I haven’t thought about it much. Things just got… crazy about a month back. My friends and I were… doing… shit.”

“What kind of shit?”

“Evil supervillain shit.”

This makes her smile. “Like what?”

“It’s not important. The important part is what went down a few months back. When my friend, Case, also a Prodigy student, shot me with a drug that disrupted a carefully concocted protocol I’ve been using for more than fifteen years to rein in this stupid mentalist bullshit.”

“Hmm,” she mutters, then stays silent for a few seconds. “So you don’t like your power?”

“My power is a force of nature. I could do without blasting people like a bomb when the wrong set of circumstances randomly happens. So no. I don’t enjoy what they made me into.”

“So you were… what? At the end of your rope? You had like a… breakdown?”

“Sure. You can call it that.”

“Who cares what I call it. What do you call it?”

“Temporary insanity, I guess.”

“But why?” she asks. “What triggered that?”

I’m not even remotely interesting in talking about what went down that day. Not to her. Not to Case or Lincoln. Hell, not even to myself. So I give her the only part I am willing to talk about. “This mentalist shit. It’s a mind fuck, right? For me it is, anyway. I never asked to be this guy. I never wanted to have that power. So I’ve been taking drugs for a long time to keep the emotions at bay. I think it’s triggered by emotions. Brain chemistry and all that bullshit. But Case shot me with an inhibitor or something. None of the drugs worked after that. It was one emotion after another. A constant stream of fucking feelings.”

I stop. Because I’m getting dangerously close to the end of that train of thought.

“What’s it like to live without emotions?”

“It’s bliss,” I say. “Pure motherfucking bliss.”

“Sounds sad to me.”

“Says the girl who doesn’t even know where she came from.”

“I just lost my memory. From that stupid power of yours. I’ll get it back. I can feel it coming, anyway. There’s static in my head.”

“What kind of static?” I’m happy to switch the conversation back to her.

“Like electricity. Like… static. I don’t know. Flashes of light and… words.”

“Words?” I ask. “You said that before. Messages across your eyes.”

“Do you know anything about that?” she asks.

When I look over at her, she’s staring at me intently.