Carlos sat awake in his bed while moonlight poured through the open window, washing his bedroom in pale blue light. Beside him, his younger brother slept quietly in the other bed across the room.

Carlos couldn’t sleep.

Fear and paranoia twisted inside him as he stared at the wall beside his bed.

First telekinesis.

Now this.

The powers inside him no longer felt contained. They felt alive somehow, expanding little by little every day, pressing outward in ways he couldn’t understand. Part of him feared that eventually something inside him would simply break open.

Or worse.

That he would.

Deep down, Carlos somehow knew the organization was already aware of what he was feeling. There was some kind of connection between them that he didn’t fully understand, something almost psychic.

And because of that, he knew they were going to send someone.

So he began trying to plan.

If they sent someone through the front door, maybe he could quietly bring the man into the kitchen to talk. But what if the floor creaked? What if his parents woke up? What if his brother—

Before Carlos could think any further, a faint shimmer appeared near the doorway to his bedroom.

Then a portal quietly opened.

Carlos froze.

A teenage girl stepped out from the darkness inside it.

She looked roughly his age.

For a moment she hesitated, almost as if trying not to startle him, then slowly walked across the room and sat down cross-legged at the foot of his bed.

The moonlight spilling through the window illuminated only parts of her face, but there was something unexpectedly warm about her presence. Gentle. Familiar somehow.

Carlos instantly felt himself calming down.

This was not at all what he had expected.

He had been preparing himself for some kind of clinical psychiatrist arriving through ordinary means. Instead, this girl sat quietly at the foot of his bed like she already understood why he was afraid.

For a few moments neither of them spoke.

Then she looked at him softly and said:

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

Carlos blinked, slightly caught off guard by how direct the question was.

“I’m developing these powers,” he said quietly. “At first I could move things with my mind, and I was okay with that. But now…”

He lifted one hand slowly.

As he watched, his hand became thin and insubstantial, dissolving into something like drifting gossamer dust before passing directly through the wall beside him.

The moment he did it, a cold chill ran through him.

Someone was watching.

Carlos turned sharply toward the other bed.

His brother was awake.

Wide-eyed.

Staring directly at both of them.

“No, no, no, no, no…”

Panic surged through Carlos immediately.

Without even thinking, he started desperately trying to use powers he didn’t fully understand. He tried to make his brother disappear somehow — just until the girl left. Then he tried forcing him back to sleep.

Nothing worked.

His brother simply kept staring.

What unsettled Carlos even more was that the girl seemed completely unphased by any of it.

Eventually, exhausted and overwhelmed, Carlos forced himself to calm down again.

He looked back toward her.

“Why didn’t the organization send an adult man instead?”

The moment he asked, images suddenly flooded his mind.

Not explanations.

Consequences.

He saw his mother discovering everything.

He saw a sinister man standing motionless in the hallway outside his bedroom door.

And somehow Carlos knew that if that man had appeared, he would have done something terrible in response — trapping him somewhere distant and unreal, locking him away inside some kind of dimensional prison.

The visions vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

Carlos blinked and looked around the room.

The girl was gone.

Only the moonlight remained.

For a long moment, Carlos sat there silently.

Secretly, he hoped he would see her again someday.