Re: the townhouse
In other eras, these were just the sort of young people who might have started a revolution. They might have protested or rioted for their rights and the rights of all those who, like them, suffered. Surely they all had their own stories, ways they had been mistreated by a system that classified powered individuals by the level of threat they might present. Whatever their rights as citizens, what were their rights as people who could level buildings, or read every classified thought of every top member of government?
This was not a new conflict, just an old one with a fresh face. Like the old conflicts, its proponents were young and angry, not a one older than college-aged. There was the boy on the couch, with rapid reflexes and a knack for the fight. There was the girl who came thundering down the stairs, with scaled skin and fingertips that dripped pearl-white venom, fangs as long as fingertips. In the kitchen, a girl threw pots and pans at the charging captain with her mind, fast enough and hard enough to kill a lesser being. At the mouth of the basement stairs lurked an illusionist behind an imagined door, holding a gun that glinted in the dark, spoiling the effect, revealing his position.
And in the basement was the girl who had been scanning the captain’s mind since he arrived, along with a wan, exhausted looking boy with red eyes and white skin who had been dampening everything in the house with a frequency to keep the neighbors unaware and any trackers nice and quiet. When the girl squeezed his shoulder, giving him tacit permission to turn off, he all but collapsed.
Sound flooded back into the room. The soldier in the chair looked clean. Unmarked, even. He was apparently unconscious, shirtless, and chained securely to the chair, which was bolted, less securely, to the floor. The bolts showed some signs of strain.
The girl had pretty hazel eyes and dark skin. She wasn't a very good demagogue, for she chose not to speechify. She seemed almost as exhausted as her albino counterpart, weary, haunted, and she spoke of memories of the past.
She spoke of the frigid cold at Christmastime, the way the snow turned to grey slush on Brooklyn streets, but how it shimmered, somehow perfect, until the city got to it. She spoke of lean days as the brilliant Christmas day when someone got their hands on fresh, fragrant firewood, enough to keep everyone warm well through New Years. She spoke of Steve’s ma, her gentleness, the color of her eyes as blood ran from them, as blood ran from all the eyes and crusted into black, thick tracks. It was 1961, she said, and the world was falling apart, but with something to fight for how could anyone complain? Seeing the bodies rolled into jungle pits, coated furry thick with flies, there was only a sense of calm, a buzzing in the brain from 72 hours without sleep, and satisfaction.