The rain hadn't let up. Riley stayed outside anyway.
She stood under the tree that held up the common house, arms crossed, watching the USGS vans churn mud into the clearing, unload stuff into the cabin, infiltrate their home without a care in the world.
She hadn't talked to her dad after Sadie invited him to the camp. She didn't trust him. How could she? After years of being under constant surveillance, she didn't buy a single thing he was saying.
A few feet away, Abby was still holding the phone he'd given her, whispering to her parents. Riley could hear the way her voice shook - raw, overwhelmed and grateful. The kind of reunion she wished she could have.
She watched him instead. Dr. Allen Truman, Scientist, shit dad, spineless G-man. Unloading crates, joking with some woman with a clipboard and a trench coat like it was just another Thursday. Like none of it mattered. Like he hadn't ruined her life.
Riley tightened her hoodie around herself. Her power hummed around her, under her skin. It had for a while now - she'd dismissed it, chalked it up to exhaustion, stress, but maybe it was something else. It wasn't too late, she told herself. She could still run away again. Make a new life. Maybe found her own superhero camp. There had to be plenty of super kids in New York, right?
She was so lost in thoughts that she didn't realise when Abby was walking towards her. Or, probably to the rope ladder up to the common house. No way she'd wanna talk to Riley right now.
"They're okay" Abby said, wiping a tear and a raindrop away.
"I figured," Riley said. She didn't smile. "I'm glad."
Neither of them said anything for a bit. They just stood there, listening to the trees and the patter of the rain. Around them, USGS Field Lab 228-43 "Jefferson" was coming alive.
"I think I'm going to throw up if I have my dad turn our home into some research picnic" Riley muttered. Abby stifled a short laugh.
"He gave me the phone."
"Oh, did he. I'll enter him for the dad of the year award."
"He's trying, Ri."
"I don't need him to try" she said and fought against the tears welling up in her eyes. "I needed him to not have ten video cameras in every corner of my home and plan to throw me into a lab in San Mateo County."
Abby didn't push. She just leaned against the side of the cabin next to her, silent, but there. At least for a minute, until a scientist got closer to them. Marlene.
"Riley." She said and nodded at her, trying but failing to treat her as an equal. "Abigail."
"What do you want?" Riley asked and didn't look Marlene in the eyes.
Marlene adjusted the strap of her clipboard satchel, eyeing the girls like she wasn't sure if she should be polite or authoritative. "We're setting up diagnostics in the mobile lab. Sadie said that one of your friends wasn't doing well. The telepath."
Riley's stomach twisted. "His name is JP."
"We want to help him." Marlene said, her tone clipped, but not cold, at least for her. "I used to be a physician before I started with the USGS, and we have a portable imager. It's designed for walls, but it'll make an image of his head in a pinch."
"You're asking to poke around in his brain like he's... a bug under glass." Riley stepped forward, protecting something that wasn't actually there. "Why should we trust you?"
"I'd be doing this with or without your trust. I'd rather have it."
Abby was quiet, but Riley could feel the tension.
"Fine." Riley said. "But Marigold stays with him. And Louise."
"Lot of people for a single wide trailer."
"So make room."
Marlene sighed, but didn't argue. "Bring him down when you're ready." She walked off toward the lab trailer, muttering into a walkie talkie.
Riley turned to Abby. "The second she steps out of line, I'm teleporting us all to Canada."
"You've been to Canada?"
"...no." Riley admitted and looked up the tree. "Come on. Let's get JP." She took Abby's hand and focused. The air shimmered around them, and with a flash of light and a distortion of the space around them, they disappeared and reappeared on the top of the treehouse complex.
Riley hated the mobile lab immediately. It was partitioned - one half was Dr. Vassos' insanity corner, the other half was a poorly improvised hospital room. It smelled of half-eaten hamburgers and rocks. Louise had taken a seat on the smallest stool she could find, clutching her bag, careful not to touch anything.
Marigold stood further away. She leaned against a cabinet full of rock samples. She didn't sit, didn't blink. She couldn't take her tired eyes off of JP on the padded bench.
He looked better than the day he had before, but that wasn't saying much. He was pale, his hair matted with dried sweat, his eyes closed.
Dr. Marlene Hutton was all business, moving with the practiced experience of someone who'd done this a million times. She snapped nitrile gloves on, adjusted an IV drip.
"What are you giving him?" Mari asked, almost accusing.
"Saline. Helps with dehydration, might ease the headaches."
"And what if it doesn't?" Riley asked, but Marlene ignored her.
"I'm going to need a few basic answers" she said to Marigold. "You've been taking care of him?"
Marigold nodded. She was fidgeting nervously.
"What's his blood type?"
Marigold thought for a second. "Red."
Marlene didn't flinch. "What about medication? Have you been giving him anything, painkillers, antihistamines, anything like that?"
"I've been using my power." Marigold said. "It works to cool his fever down."
"Shouldn't do that. Fever's there for a reason. Fluids help more." She said, tone even. "How exactly does your power work?"
"I can... feel life. Where it is, where it's not, when it's... out of place. Wrong. And then I just... nudge it back into place."
"That doesn't mean anything."
"Not everyone's a scientist here, doc." Mari replied casually and looked at JP, monitors beeping.
"Yeah, well, no offence to the superpowered, but I prefer my medical attention without magic." Marlene muttered as she wrote something down on her clipboard. "When did this start?"
"Tuesday morning." Marigold said. "We found him like this in his treehouse."
"Nearly three days without fluids. Dangerous. Any more and he could have died from dehydration."
"I had it under control" Marigold answered, crossing her arms.
"No, you did not." She put the clipboard down. "Nausea. Headaches. A vegetative state." She held up JP's hand, showing his fingernails to the room. "Purple fingernails. Textbook symptoms of severe dehydration. Your power may have kept him from having a stroke, but it didn't heal him."
Louise had been quiet the whole exchange through, holding a pen, probably going through an echo of sorts. Then, she set it down, and signed to Marlene.
"Yes" Marlene said and signed back. "Laval, Quebec."
"You speak-"
"I did my residency there. Paediatrics. Working with deaf children." She watched Louise sign more. "And you can be glad I did." Marlene took the clipboard and started scribbling as Louise signed. "He's hearing voices. His heart rate was up on Tuesday, down yesterday. The... mountain is doing it? Applying... pressure?" Marlene signed a little more.
"That's the theory" Riley explained. "Autumn's gravity power is influenced the same way. She says it feels like pressure."
"Autumn?"
"Her girlfriend" Marigold said casually. Riley blushed, but didn't say anything. "Gravity manipulation."
Marlene didn't answer right away. She stepped back, peeled of her gloves and dropped them in a bin. "I can't speak to what's affecting your powers. That's not my field. But I know when someone's close to organ failure, and JP here is. If we hadn't come when we did-"
"You weren't coming. Sadie invited you" Riley cut in, sharp.
"Then you should be grateful for whatever deal she made." Dr. Hutton met Riley's glare without flinching. "I'm not your enemy. I'm a doctor. And he is my patient. So unless you'd rather he die on your watch-" She stopped herself. "Sorry. That was out of line." She got up from her chair and adjusted the IV again. "I'm going to do my best to keep him comfortable. But if this is something supernatural, well... my expertise in that field is limited."
Louise signed, and Marlene nodded.
"Yes, you can stay."
The day passed quickly. A lot was happening - the USGS was almost done moving back into the mountain lab, and Autumn had been watching them all day, hover-sitting on the porch of SF house. Riley'd been at her side. Sadie had called them all to dinner, but Riley wasn't in the mood to go. So, she went back into the mountain lab. She had to know what her father was up to.
The lab looked different now that it was operational. It wasn't scary anymore, not like the place between here and the past, but just an office. Most of the dust was gone too, and the staff had brought their anachronistic laptops into the space that had been untouched since the nineties.
Riley stood at the door to her dad's old office. The door was open, and Dr. Allen Truman was inside, alone. He sat at his old desk, surrounded by freshly organised folders and digitised readouts glowing from a tablet computer. The dust had been wiped off. The cork board was still there, but the strings were in new configurations. He looked older.
Riley stepped in the doorway. "You left something behind."
Allen turned. His eyes lit up with surprise, then turned to something more somber. Hope. Guilt, maybe. Riley held out the notebook.
"I found it here. In your office."
He stood slowly, taking it like it might vanish. He opened the cracked leather cover, flipped to the back, and looked at the polaroid images of his wife and him on the steps of the monument. He didn't say anything.
"I thought this was lost" he murmured eventually. "When we had to leave, I only grabbed what I could carry." He looked up at Riley. "You read it?"
"Course I did. It was the closest I ever got to you."
"So you know how she-"
Riley nodded. "She died on the plane. While you stayed down here. With Dave." Riley's voice cracked, and she hated that it did. "You chose a cave over her, dad."
"I didn't know she wouldn't make it."
"You never do."
He didn't answer. Just ran his thumb along the edge of the page where her name was written.
"When the plane flew over the peak," he eventually said. "All our sensors spiked. Every instrument in this place went haywire. Radiation. Seismics. Magnetics. It was like something in the mountain woke up. And at that exact moment..." He tapped the page. "You were born."
Riley didn't move.
"Do you know what it's like?" He said, quietly. "To see a thousand inexplicable random variables align, and realise your daughter is one of them?"
Riley nodded. "Yeah." Her voice was flat. "I live with it every day."
Allen put the book down and met her eyes. "You were never a project to me. Never data. I just... didn't know how to keep you safe."
"So you tried to control everything else."
"I was scared." The admission came out small. "Not of you, more of... what I didn't understand. Of what happened to Sarah, of what you might become. It's why I moved to San Francisco."
Riley stayed in the doorway, fists clenched in her hoodie pocket. "I'm not here to forgive you. I just figured you should have your book back."
"Thank you." He sat in silence for a while, and Riley refused to leave. "You haven't... had any symptoms, have you?"
"No" Riley lied. "Just JP."
"And your girlfriend. And Abigail." It felt weird hearing someone call Autumn her girlfriend.
"We had something good here. Something safe. A home." Allen Truman understood what she was trying to say. Unlike San Francisco. "I want to stay."
"You're still a minor." Allen sighed. "And you missed weeks of school. Glen Park's not exactly cheap."
"I'm not going to go back." Riley said, a little louder this time. "You know you can't make me. I can-"
"-teleport. Yes. I know."
Eventually, Dr. Allen Truman spoke again.
"If I ask you about the Roosevelt chamber, about the lab - would you tell me the truth?"
Riley shrugged. "Depends on what you're asking."
Allen took a sketch out of the drawer on his desk. It was the image the radar collected of the inside of the sphere. The eye of the anomaly. "Do you think it sees us?"
Riley stared at the sketch, and something crawled inside her, under her skin. Even rendered in pencil, it was eerily visceral.
"I think it already has," she said. "When we were down there for the first time, something changed us. Jacob got obsessed with it."
"I take it he painted all the fractals in the observation gallery?"
Riley nodded. "Abby teleported through it."
"What happened?"
"You should ask her that." Riley said and turned to leave.
"Riley. Wait." She looked back. "I know I made mistakes. And I'm sorry you can't trust me anymore. But I'm still your father. And I still love you. No matter what you think of me, that's never going to change."
She let the words settle, but didn't respond.
"Good night, dad."
"Good night, Riley."
Somehow, it was still raining. A large puddle had formed on the clearing. Jacob stood there, looking at the ripples. His face was scrubbed clean of the white paint, his vest was washed. He looked... normal.
"You look less like a sleep paralysis demon" Riley said, trying not to sound too relieved.
"Dr. Hutton gave me something. Said it would help with the pressure."
"Is it working?"
He nodded. "I dreamed again. Normal dreams, not this weird mountain shit."
"I'm glad." Riley said. Jacob crouched down and inspected the ripples on the puddle closer. "Abby was worried sick about you."
"I know. I regret doing that to her. She deserves better than that."
"You two are close." Riley said and looked at the puddle. No stars were reflected, the clouds hung deep.
"I care a great deal for her" he admitted. "I didn't think that was possible for me, but it is. Although, I'm not as close with her as you are."
"I'm not even her best friend." They both stood at the edge of the puddle. "Anything interesting in the water?"
Jacob didn't answer right away. He tilted his head, eyes tracking the faint ripples intently.
"I think the mountain is messing with gravity." He shook his head and stood up. "But Autumn probably knows more about that."
Another beat of silence as they stood under the trees. "My dad's here. Said some things."
"Useful things?"
"He asked me if I have any symptoms."
"And?"
"I lied."
Jacob gave her a long look. "Have you?"
She thought about the hum under her skin. How displacing herself felt different. Heavier. Like something else was jumping along with her. "I dunno. Maybe."
"I think whatever's in there, underground, I don't think it changes what we are. I think it changes... how we are."
"Like, messing with our perception?"
"I think it's... realigning us. Like tuning a radio. We've been seeing just one channel of reality our whole lives, and now... it's trying to show us more. Our powers are getting harder to use, yes, but they're also stronger."
"You talked to the scientists about this?"
"I will. Feels good to know someone professional is taking care of this."
"With them around, I guess you're not alone anymore."
"I don't think I felt alone with y'all."
They stood there in silence, just listening to the rain.
"Wanna go back up?"
"Yeah," he said. "Thanks."