Notes on an Adrenaline-Filled Night

I keep my head up, watching the ceiling as I pass the mailboxes, keeping a solid distance. More than an arms length is fine for most things. My building is mostly grad students and service workers, but hopefully this early in the year means they won’t be out this late into the night. I breathe, in and out. My hope is futile. There seem to be a few people waiting by the elevator. They know each other, and one is visibly drunk, which means the others are likely drunk as well. Stairs, then. Drunk people tend to struggle staying stable and still, bumping can cause complications. And I need to focus. Then, thinking back to the fight, I realize I’m not sure being in a metal box is the best for me right now. The bolts grow next to me as thinking about the fight makes me feel the disharmony. I breathe, pushing that away. Disharmony or not, I am getting to my apartment before I think about that fight any more. I need my board, my account. Something, anything, to track these stray thoughts.

From the eighth floor doorway of the stairwell, I need to pass several rooms to get to my own. It’s centrally located to the elevator, not the stairs. One of my neighbors is just getting back as well, the elevator doors opening. He notices me and smiles. I try to focus on my door, play up the intoxication, but that doesn’t work as well when I’m coming from the stairwell. “Ev,” he says. We’ve both lived here several years. My eyes drift almost subconsciously as I hear him say my name.

“Rich,” I reply slowly, looking back at my door. Unfortunately the glance was enough. Learning to read body language was one of my earliest memories, not that that means much of anything. And Rich is upset, and not drunk. He had a date, and it clearly didn’t end how he would have liked it to, though given how late he’s getting back, I’m not sure how it went wrong.

“I wanted to ask you about this barbeque on Wednesday,” he begins, but his tone says he’s just looking to talk to anyone, not me. He walks alongside me.

“Wasn’t planning on going,” I reply. I can’t tell him to go away, because he is walking towards his door, but I can be just on the verge of rudeness and hope he gets the hint. I make it to my door and stop.

He continues on to his own door, adding, “Well if you do come, make sure you dress badly, The new owners are supposed to have spies among the crowd looking for people whose rent they can raise without too much fuss.”

I go to pull my keys out of my pocket and realize I already have something in my hand. A phone. Not mine, which means probably his. Placing it on the floor, I slide it backwards towards the elevator. He’ll realize its missing moments after he enters his house and when he steps outside his apartment, he’ll be able to see it face down on the floor, then be so relieved that it isn’t broken that he likely won’t wonder why it fell down there. I enter my apartment, locking the door behind me.

My apartment is a well appointed one bedroom, with a small kitchen as I enter and a bathroom across from the bedroom. I head into my closet and pull out a large corkboard, filled already with pinned pages from newspapers and my own notes. Then, I go to my sofa and open up the cardboard box hidden under one of the cushions. It’s filled with pages and pages not on my corkboard, because they don’t have anything to do with me. Grabbing my pad of paper, I start notes on the evening. And I start at the pressing matter. Writing across the top of the page simply ‘Dani’.

Disharmony, I add below it, metals move with thought. I can feel it, but I let the disharmony echo in my mind. To control, one must understand. What is that disharmony. Induced ferromagnetism is related to the atomic dipole which are normally unaligned lining up. Generally only possible with strong magnetic fields or electric currents. The thought hits me without provocation, and I write it down without thinking. So, Dani can somehow manipulate either currents or magnetic fields. Or both, I muse, after all I remember an article explaining they’re related.

I always knew in the back of my mind that I wasn’t special. There were others like me out there. Or at least, as far back as I can remember I had a feeling. I suspect someone like me is why I need my history board to begin with, but I don’t know why or how. I tear the Dani page off of the pad and slides it into the account box. Speaking of, I start the next one. Writing across the top ‘Impaled, advanced military gear’. Fabric and connection. Sudden transposition. Familiar in use but not function. I’m going to need to add it to the board as well. Wormholes, his body writes, formed in local spacetime. I slide that page into the box, then pull out an index card. Writing down ‘Teleporter was known’, I pin it to the board next to the card that simply reads ‘Memory Wipe’. I have one more account to write before my full attention goes to the board.

‘Dropped, advanced military gear’, I write across the top. It is weirder when they don’t have names, but not infrequent. Aware of surroundings, I write. Inner ear felt active. Inner ear is for equilibrium, sound, orientation, and some vibrational sensation. Echolocation of some kind might make sense, except I wasn’t doing anything, wasn’t emitting any sound as far as I could tell. Unless the adaptation is some additional spatial sense that does not exist in human beings which our mind interprets in conjunction with other spatial elements like direction, motion, and balance. Like something similar to a fish’s wave detection, but using air pressure changes. That would be translated through our ears, as that’s where we note air pressure the most, and would allow for a sense of things based on movement around you. I write it down with a question mark, needs to be tested added to the side. Then, putting a tab on the page to be able to access it quickly, I slide that page into the box in front of the other two.

Breathing out, I look back at my board. A picture of an elementary school event that has a face which looks kind of like mine in the background. A pair of photocopied pages from a pair of middle school yearbooks that have the same person, one Evander Ainsley. Why I changed it at some point to Evander Allen, I don’t know, but I’m almost certain that Ev is me. Was me. Then nothing until the pictures of a locked motel room. A bill paid for three months in cash. The card next to it says an attractive woman paid. A list of all the media in the room, preplanned. A lot of spycraft books and MMA fight videos. Like the planner knew what I needed to survive. Thinking about it, my neck feels warm. Like it does whenever I look at my board. It’s on the board, too.

This is the first time I’ve encountered another since I woke up. And of the three people with adaptations I encountered, I knew how to utilize one of them in combat already. Like instinct. That, combined with the wipe, means one thing is likely. I take a new notecard and write simply ‘plethora of adapted people’. And, in the center of the board where it is empty and labeled ‘age 13-17’, I pin my first pin.

Unfortunately, the new information also changes the other side of the board. I flip it around. I already have a pin in my old middle school, and in the location of the Ainsley family’s residence, before they had an accident around the time I went missing. And I have a pin several states over in the motel I woke up at. Previously, I assumed that wherever I was before waking up, it had to be within a day’s drive of that motel. But with a teleporter involved and without any more details than that, I need to make note that it might be further. I don’t have enough knowledge. I need to understand more about adaptations and their limits. I need to have understanding and focus to control the actions that come from my adaptation, and even then instinct is often stronger than understanding. But Dani did not seem to have that limit. And the teleporting one could only go as far as I could sense, but the surround-sensing one didn’t have any limits, save normal sensation limits where the further out things are the more vague the sense of them is. I need to read up on adaptation and theory. Which means mooching off of one of my neighbors in grad school. Preferably without them knowing. But that can wait for tomorrow. I have work in the morning, and really ought to get some sleep.

Lying down, I breathe. So much adrenaline still in my system. I need to slow everything down. Intention and focus. I breathe deeply again, in, hold, and out. Then I begin to do something I try to avoid. I reach out for one of the acts. Most come when they’re needed, but in theory, I should be able to access them at any time. In theory. In practice, I need the adrenaline in my system to utilize my adaptation, though I don’t know why. Reaching out, I seek the meditative practices. And opening them, I begin to meditate.

Holding the knowledge-gate open while trying to empty my mind is hard, and they don’t work well together, but it’s not wholly impossible. I can feel my heartrate slowing, and the access becoming more difficult as the adrenaline leaves my system. Like I’m in a library whose lights are turning off. But I keep the book open as long as I can. And then, I open my eyes, clear. And lying down, I drift slowly to sleep.

Waking up in the morning, I shower the alcohol off of me. Getting dressed for work, I head out. I call the elevator, and wait. The phone isn’t on the floor anymore, so my guess was correct. The doors open and I head inside. There is a college kid in the elevator already, looking vaguely stressed. A biology book is poking out from his bag. I stay far away to avoid any complications, though I do clone his phone with one of my burners so I can use the camera to get his passwords. He undoubtedly has an account with the science journal sites that I need to research adaptation. One other person joins us, the guy who runs the local drycleaner. Then the doors open on the ground floor. The three of us head out together, and while I walk faster than the others, I can still feel us separate almost immediately out the door. The college kid is heading across the street, to the parking lot. The drycleaner is walking left, to his place. And I start my walk to work, watching the sky.

It takes me a bit of my walk to realize something interesting. I’m not stressed, I’m not in danger, and yet looking up isn’t helping me not notice the people nearby. Fortunately, I’m out here early enough that none of the people I can feel moving around me are actually within arms reach, but this poses problems for avoidance. Pulling out my phone, I text Lily. ‘New problem. If things seem heated at the bar, tell me not to come for the next week or so.’

‘All good?’ she texts back almost immediately. Why she’s awake at this hour is not something I want to think about.

I send a simple shrug emoji. Then I begin to look up articles about the regulation of acute stress response. I won’t be able to read it all right now, or even before I make an inevitable mistake, but if I can find an expert’s book on it, I can at least play an audiobook of it while I’m doing my other research. And hopefully figure enough out to not draw too much attention to myself.