That was the day my life began to change.

  After the dust settled and Stupendous vanished, the other Responders got to their feet. Bulwark, the crack in his granite chest still visible, loomed over me. His voice was a gravelly rumble.

  “That was very reckless of you,” he said, not unkindly, but like a mechanic stating a fact about a broken part. “You are Baseline. Unregistered. You should have run with the others.”

  Siren, leaning on Cyclone for support, just shook her head, her expression a mix of pity and professional disapproval. I had broken the number one rule of their world: Know your place.

  I went home that evening to a silent apartment. The news was replaying the Stupendous's punch on a loop. My dad was waiting. He didn’t say a word. He just pulled me into a hug so tight I could feel the old, familiar hum of his dampener through his shirt.

  When he let go, his eyes were red. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice thick. “I saw what happened on the news.”

  I braced for the lecture. When you see danger, you run the other way.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “What you did… that was a very brave thing.” He swallowed hard. “I’m proud of you.”

  The words hung in the air, so foreign and so needed they felt like a different kind of Signature. They didn’t fix anything. I was still powerless. The world was still broken. But the bedrock of my life—my dad’s fear—had just developed a hairline fracture of pride.

  ---

  A few days passed. Life, stubborn thing, pretended to be normal. And now, I was trapped in the seventh circle of normal: a school bus.

  The vehicle groaned and wheezed its way up a winding mountain road, bound for a weekend “ecology and teamwork” retreat. The air smelled of diesel, old vinyl, and the collective dread of forty teenagers.

  And Edgar.

  “—and then I said, if your Signature is a glow-in-the-dark fingernail, maybe you should just join a punk band and stop wasting the S.O.S.’s time!”

  His voice, loud and sharp, cut through the bus’s murmur from three rows back. He was holding court, as usual. Edgar Rodigar, Signature: Repulsion. The human repulsion field.

  “It’s not a glow, it’s a bioluminescent regulatory signal,” a mousy voice tried to counter.

  “It’s a nightlight, Samuel!” Edgar crowed. “A Tier 3 Signature so useless it loops back around to being tragic. At least my power does something.”

  I slumped lower in my seat, staring out the window at the passing pines. My cheek still ached where he’d punched me. My ribs were sore from where we’d crashed. You’re powerless, his words echoed. He wasn’t wrong. The brief, dizzying brush with the Almighty hadn’t changed my DNA. I was still Theodore Griffin, certified Baseline.

  The bus hit a pothole, jolting everyone. Edgar, thrown off balance, slammed a hand against the window to steady himself.

  “Watch the road, you moron!” he yelled toward the front, though the driver couldn’t hear him.

  He caught me looking. His eyes, always a little too bright with defiant energy, narrowed. He jerked his chin at me. A challenge. An acknowledgment. Our usual language.

  I turned back to the window. The mountains were getting taller, the forest thicker and darker. We were heading into the deep, quiet places where the world felt older than heroes, older than Signatures. A strange chill, unrelated to the bus’s rattling air conditioning, traced a path down my spine.

  I just wanted the trip to be over. I had no idea it hadn’t even begun.

  ---

  The bus groaned to a halt in a gravel pull-out overlooking a vast, jagged valley. “The Sentinel Range” lived up to its name—brooding, ancient peaks watched us with stone-faced indifference.

  “Alright, huddle up, future geologists!” Mr. Hael announced, clapping his hands together. He was a wiry man with perpetual enthusiasm, a stark contrast to the solemn mountains. “Grab your field kits. We’re hiking about half a mile to our first site: the famous Folded Ridge. You can see the striations from here!”

  We piled out of the bus, the sudden quiet and crisp, thin air a shock after the diesel rumble. Edgar was the first one out, stretching with exaggerated drama.

  “Finally! I was about to use a Pulse just to get some legroom,” he announced to no one in particular.

  The teacher handed out clipboards with gridded paper, pencils, and small rock hammers. “Your task,” he said, “is to sketch the visible strata on this ridge. Note the color, estimate the thickness, and mark any visible folding or fault lines. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Earth’s history book, and we’re reading a page written in stone.”

  We began the hike up a well-worn trail. The group quickly stratified itself. The kids with useful Signatures or athletic builds led the pack. The rest of us—the Baselines—drifted to the middle or the back. I found myself in the middle, the familiar feeling of mundane normalcy settling over me again.

  Edgar, of course, was near the front, using tiny, lazy pulses of repulsive force from his fingertips to flick pebbles off the trail, showing off.

  After twenty minutes of uphill walking, we reached the site. The Folded Ridge was exactly that: a dramatic cliff face where layers of dark slate and lighter sandstone had been bent and crumpled by unimaginable force into graceful, violent waves frozen in time.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Fan out along the overlook!” Mr. Hael instructed. “But stay within sight! Find a good vantage point and begin your sketches. This is where the Third Catastrophe’s seismic waves were focused, folding this rock like putty. Imagine the force!”

  I found a flat rock to sit on, positioned my clipboard, and started to draw. The task was calming in its simplicity. Observe. Record. The world made sense when you broke it down into layers. For a few minutes, there was just the scratch of my pencil, the murmur of other students, and the sigh of the wind through the pines.

  Edgar was a few yards away, not sketching. He was using his power to levitate a small, flat stone in front of the cliff, trying to align it with the strata as a measuring tool. It was a flashy, impractical way to do it, and entirely him.

  “See, Griffin?” he called over, not looking at me. “Precision. You can’t just eyeball it. You need control.” His floating stone wobbled.

  I ignored him, focusing on the subtle shift from gray to ochre in the rock. This was my world now. Observation from the sidelines. Documenting the extraordinary from a safe, powerless distance.

  That’s when the air over the ridge began to smear.

  A low-frequency hum, deeper than sound, vibrated in my molars. The birds stopped singing.

  My pencil froze on the paper.

  I looked up, and the sky was wrong.

  The world ended not with a bang, but with a sickly, shimmering tear in the air.

  One moment we were sketching strata on our clipboards. The next, the sky over the ridge line rippled, like heat haze gone wrong. A sound like tearing canvas mixed with breaking glass echoed off the stone. A hole, edged in poisonous green light flecked with angry yellow, hung in the world for a second before disgorging a cloud of iridescent, buzzing motes.

  Then the ground remembered how to move.

  It wasn’t an earthquake. It was a flinch. A single, violent shudder that threw everyone to the ground. From high above, the mountain answered with a roar of grinding stone. A section of the cliff we’d just been studying sheared away and came down in a thundering avalanche of dust and rock, crashing onto the trail below, sealing our way back.

  Chaos, pure and simple.

  “Breach! It’s a Breach!” someone screamed, the word carrying a terror we’d only known from news streams.

  Our teacher, Mr. Hael, scrambled up, face white. “Everyone! Away from the green light! Back to the bus path—other way!” But the “other way” was a steep, unknown slope into thicker forest, now filling with a strange, glittering mist rolling down from the rupture.

  The buzzing motes descended. They weren’t bees. They were jagged little things that clicked, and where they landed on skin, they left a burning, itchy welt. A girl near me shrieked and batted at her arm.

  “Move! NOW!” Edgar’s voice cut through the panic. He’d planted himself, hands out. A shimmering, repulsive field erupted around him, and the motes veered away, repelled. “Come on, Griffin, move your feet!”

  We ran. A blind, stumbling, terrified herd down the slope. The mist curled around our ankles, then our knees. It had a sweet, metallic smell that made my head swim. Trees began to warp at the edges of my vision. Whispers seemed to come from the rocks.

  We crashed through a creek, icy water soaking us to the thigh. Someone fell, crying out. Mr. Hael yelled to keep together.

  That’s when the mist thickened into a wall.

  One second Edgar was ahead of me, a blurry outline. The next, a gust of wind—or something that felt like wind—swirled the glowing fog between us like a curtain. I heard his curse, suddenly muffled and distant.

  “Edgar?!”

  No answer. Just the buzzing, the click of insects on leaves, and the maddening whisper of the mist.

  “Theo? Theo, over here!” Mr. Hael’s voice called from what I thought was the left. I stumbled toward it, branches clawing at my clothes. “Here!”

  I pushed through a dense thicket and found nothing but more trees, more mist. The light was fading. The forest was eating the day.

  “Hello?!” My voice sounded small, swallowed by the wilderness.

  Silence.

  A deep, primal cold seeped into my bones, separate from the mountain air. I was alone.

  The rule repeated in my head, a desperate mantra. When you see danger, you run the other way. But which way was the other way now? Every direction was danger. Every shadow held the click of jagged wings.

  The first drops of cold rain began to fall, mixing with the mist, soaking me. Survival became a simple, brutal math: find shelter or succumb to the cold.

  Blindly, stumbling over roots hidden in the gloom, I followed the contour of the slope downward, hoping to find a rock face, an overhang. My teeth chattered. The itchy welts on my neck burned.

  Then, I saw it. A darker blackness in the gray stone of the mountainside. An opening, about twice my height, jagged and unwelcoming. A cave.

  It wasn’t a choice. It was the only equation that didn’t end in zero. Shelter.

  I hesitated at the mouth, peering into the absolute dark. It smelled of damp earth and something else… something clean and sharp, like ozone after a lightning strike. From deep within, a faint, almost imperceptible hum vibrated in the air, felt more than heard.

  Taking a shuddering breath, I stepped out of the whispering rain and into the waiting darkness.