There’s a tapping at the door to my cell that wakes me up.

  I blink and sit up. There’s no clock in here. No way to tell what time it is without checking my phone, which is way over there plugged into the wall, but I think I finally managed a full night’s sleep. All it took was to get arrested. But, hey, I didn’t wake up on fire or anything, or drenched like last time, so I figure I’m ahead.

  The tapping comes again, like a fingernail on the thick plexiglass.

  I swear, if it’s a raven, I’m checking myself right into a mental hospital.

  A face peers in. It’s Agent Ochoa. She’s got her head tilted way back, and she’s looking past her nose into the room. I take a moment to understand she’s on tiptoe, otherwise she’d be too short to see through the window.

  I’m off to the side and she hasn’t seen me yet. Her eyes are darting this way and that, and there’s a faint grin on her face. I sigh.

  “Ben?” I hear her call. “You decent?”

  “Yeah!” I say, but I’m not sure they can hear me.

  The door opens.

  I hear Tyler snort. “Did you really just ask if he was decent?”

  Ochoa steps in, looking back over her shoulder. She’s wearing a different suit. Light gray with a pale blue blouse. Her mirrored sunglasses are in place. “You never know,” she says, chewing her gum. “He could’ve been on the can or working out in his boxers. Oh! Or maybe he sleeps naked, or—.”

  “Agent Ochoa!” says Tyler.

  Ochoa looks at me, smiles. She’s chewing her gum. “What?” she says, rolling her eyes and gesturing at me. “He’s decent. Darn it.”

  Tyler pokes her head into the room. “I just need a word with her and then we’ll be right with you, Mr. Walker,” she says, then she frowns at Ochoa and jerks her thumb over her shoulder. “Outside. Now.”

  But Ochoa doesn’t move. Her smile evaporates and, still facing me, she says, “That’s really unnecessary, Agent Tyler. I got this. Mr. Walker, Agent Tyler, is right to point out that I have been acting inappropriately. If I step into the hallway with her right now, she’ll tell me she thinks I’m doing it because it clearly confuses and provokes you and that you don’t know what to do with it. She supposes that my outrageous behavior could be designed to elicit information from you that you have thus far kept hidden or to gauge your character as a brand new unknown quantity in the supernatural community, or that I simply enjoy tormenting you. She would have me come back in here to apologize to you and let you know you would be well within your rights to file a complaint, either with Agent Tyler or her direct supervisor.”

  “I…,” I start, but that was a lot to process. It’s early in the morning. Or it’s not. Dunno. Besides, Ochoa's right. I don’t know what to do with her or with what she said either. I almost thank her for her apology, but then again, I'm not sure she made one.

  Tyler steps inside the cell. She has a small manila folder in her hand. “I don’t believe you,” she says to Ochoa.

  “What?” says Ochoa. “Did I miss anything?”

  “That’s not the point,” says Tyler. “I—.”

  “Please don’t correct me in front of the extraterrestrial,” says Ochoa. “It’s embarrassing and unprofessional.”

  “Don’t call him that.”

  “Unprofessional?”

  “Extraterrestrial!”

  “Why not?” says Ochoa. Then she says in a silly robot voice, “He is not from this planet, ergo he is an E.T.”

  Tyler sighs.

  “E.T., prone bone,” says Ochoa with a snort.

  “Mo!” says Tyler.

  “Last one, I swear,” says Ochoa, and I don’t know how, but she conveys a wink to me even with those sunglasses on that cover half her face. “Did you guys even have that movie?” she says.

  “Uh, yeah,” I say.

  “It’s a good one.”

  “I liked it,” I say.

  “Oh my God,” says Tyler. “Mr. Walker, I apologize for my partner. The sheriff is not going to press charges. You are not under arrest and are free to leave whenever you wish.” She holds up her envelope. “In here is a temporary driver’s license, social security card, and birth certificate. We’re hoping to have a detailed work history, complete with references that will answer if called, within a week or two, but we’ll need to sit down and work all that out with you sometime. That should help you get on your feet. Your new bank sent us a bank card and account information. Most people do all that through their phones these days. I’m sure there’s a pamphlet inside or something that’ll guide you through the process. We’re told that the money from the ticket the clerk stole from you was deposited. You can deposit the other whenever you want. In cases like this, we can create a credit history for you with an adequate score for someone in their early to mid-twenties. That’ll all take up an afternoon at our offices sometime soon. We’ll have to set that up. In the meantime, everything you need to start your new life here is in that envelope. If you think of anything else you need, both my contact information and Agent Ochoa’s are also inside.”

  “Wow,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” says Tyler. “We've found it's better in the long run to help new arrivals rather than have them run around desperate. Standard procedure is to get new arrivals inoculated and given a thorough physical by a doctor, complete with MRI and chem panel. It’s impossible to know what immunities you have or don’t have, what vulnerabilities to viruses or bacteria that exist here but don’t where you’re from, you understand. It’s a safety precaution, but an important one.”

  “I understand,” I say.

  “Great,” says Tyler. “Let’s get you out of here, get you some clothes, get you something to eat, and get you to the hospital so you can get on with your life.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  She’s proud of all those ‘gets,’ and I smile.

  I hear Ochoa say, “Get a life,” under her breath, but she spoils her grumpy remark by giggling.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  Breakfast is at a fast food drive thru, and I’m pleased to see that this universe has my usual. Sometimes I gotta have that bacon, egg, and cheese bagel.

  As we eat, Ochoa says around a mouthful, “So, what have you figured out about your abilities? You going to be able to—.”

  There’s a tremendous noise in a parking lot in front of a strip mall off to our left, like God hit a tank with a baseball bat. The front of a Mustang convertible is resting on its frame as the rear wheels bounce in place. It almost looks like the sports car is abusing itself to the khan or something and twerking at the same time. I bark a laugh, earning a glance from each of the government agents in the car with me.

  There’s a softball-sized hole in the hood of the stricken vehicle which starts smoking as I watch.

  We’re still in the exit, waiting to pull into traffic. Tires squeal as Tyler redirects us into the opposite parking lot, while Ochoa dials nine-one-one.

  Firemen soon arrive and begin pouring buckets of sand into the engine block to keep it from igniting.

  One of them is looking under the car. When he looks back to where I’m standing with the two agents, he says, “There’s a hole in the goddamn asphalt.” He’s got his phone out and we watch him turn on the flashlight app and take another look. “Yep,” he says. “Right through the engine block and into the ground.”

  “What was it?” asks Tyler.

  The fireman sits up while one of his coworkers pours another bucket of sand. “You know,” he says. “I think it’s a meteor? Like, from space?”

  Ochoa and Tyler turn to look at me.

  I shrug. “So, here’s what I understand about my powers,” I say.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  I explain it all, seeing no reason to hold anything back from them. I can’t remember everything I said to them before and what I’ve figured out since then, anyway.

  One. I know that sometimes crazy things happen around me without me Pushing. There was no sense of the meteorite, for example, which seemed to be a random event. What can I say? I am a shit magnet.

  Two. I can see amorphous concentrations of light and dark that aren’t really visually there and that seem to represent positive or negative outcomes.

  Three. The light and dark thingies are not static. They move around. Sometimes more. Sometimes less, depending on the situation and what people are doing around me.

  Four. Things get dark when there are people or things that might make a negative outcome more likely, like the alcohol at the restaurant bar and Crazy Eddie at the police station.

  Five. Things get light when there are more positive people and influences around like the Rigbys and the agents. Even the sheriff seems to calm things down, probability-wise, despite him not liking me.

  Six. The light and the dark get more agitated the more people are around, and the circumstances are less controlled. There’s just not that much opportunity for things to go haywire in a holding cell or an interrogation room. I figure that’s why the sprinkler system went off during my nightmare. Bad things happen when my luck gets dark, and there was very little else for it to affect in the room. When I’m outside? In the wild? Well, all those colliding intents and purposes, all that mortal coil shoving things this way and that, expands and excites possibility. Duh.

  Seven. I can Push my luck to have something happen the way I want it to. If I couldn’t, I’d be dead, in jail, or both.

  Eight. There’s an art to it. I can Push too hard and have things backfire like they did in the convenience store and with the kidnapper’s car. There was that flash and photo negative effect, and then oops.

  There might be more to all this, but for now, that’s everything I think I know. I probably have some of that wrong, or it’s incomplete, and I figure I’d better keep that in mind.

  “Here’s something I don’t understand,” says Ochoa.

  "Just one thing?" Tyler quips.

  We’re back on the road heading to the hospital for me to get checked out.

  “Take the speeder that helped you guys get next to the kidnapper’s car without triggering him,” she says. “You were Pushing at the time, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, here’s the thing,” says Ochoa. “That guy didn’t just manifest out of nothing. He didn’t get summoned from the great beyond. He was already on the road before you Pushed.” She holds up her phone. “More importantly,” she says. “He was already speeding. The staties got him a couple minutes after that fucker went off the road for his spontaneous upside-down exploration of that hay truck. The kid bragged that he had been doing ninety since he left Willamette. Again, before you Pushed.”

  “What’s your point?” asks Tyler.

  “The point is either Ben didn’t make that happen,” says Ochoa. “Or that he did.”

  “Yeah, so what?” says Tyler, then she gasps. “Oh shit. What the hell?”

  “What?” I say. “What is it?”

  “How’d that kid start speeding before you Pushed? He was doing what you needed before you know you needed it.”

  Oh wow. “Um.”

  “Wait. This is actually happening a lot.” Ochoa points at me. “Those lottery tickets. They didn’t teleport into those dispensers at the convenience store. The bank robbers chose your bank. All that happened before you even were here in this world.”

  “Did I do that? Or did my luck move me where I needed to go?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” says Ochoa. “Or maybe it does. Maybe that’s academic? What it means, though, is that your ‘luck,’ as you call it, might not function linearly in time.”

  “What?”

  “Your Push,” says Tyler. “Could have traveled back in time to affect the decision-making of the speeder, the lottery tickets, the bank robbers’ plans.”

  “My… will can travel in time and make people do things?”

  “No,” says Ochoa. “The kid chose. He’s responsible. Nobody forced the robbers to walk into that bank. The clerk made a choice. Even if you Pushed, it’s not like you held a gun to anybody’s head. I mean, probably not, right? We're still figuring this out.”

  “I don't know...,” I say.

  “Assuming that meteorite was you too, how long ago was it when something nudged it onto that trajectory? Rocks in space, knocking into each other around Saturn or some ringed planet from another solar system. A supernova. A hundred years? A thousand?" Ochoa shakes her head. “Dude, you might be the first person able to act outside of our normal three dimensions.”

  “Four if you count time,” says Tyler.

  “Nah, the fourth dimension isn’t exactly time,” says Ochoa. “I mean, Finkle said it was, yeah, but there’s since been some—. Why am I talking about this?”

  “I have no idea,” says Tyler.

  “Who’s Finkle?” I ask.

  They just look at me like I asked who George Washington was. Shit. Is he a thing over here?

  “Still, this is cool, right?” says Ochoa.

  “I’m not sure Mr. Walker would agree,” says Tyler.

  I’m not sure I would. But then I’m not sure I wouldn’t. It’s all too new, and I'm too scared.

  I say, “You guys can call me Ben.”

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  We spend a lot of time with various doctors at the hospital where they give me a bunch of shots, take my medical history, and shove me into or through machine after machine.

  The whole time I’m thinking about what Ochoa said about me being able to act outside of time and what that means. Hey, none of us really get to know what our existence is for, right? The absurdists I enjoyed reading in high school and college would say there is no purpose. That life is pointless. I always felt that, if they’re right, then good. We get to choose for ourselves. Only now, maybe I don’t get to do that. Not fully.

  Now that I’ve got this power, maybe it directs me to where I need to be. Maybe the space I’m in, the people I’m with, the problems I face are all where I’m supposed to be. Where I'm needed. Where I can do the very best for myself and others. Maybe that’s true for everybody and we just can't tell, and maybe it means that everybody can make that true. It’s just that, with me now, it’s more so.

  Does that make any sense?

  When the doctors are done and I’m pronounced healthy and immunized, we get in the elevator and I’m thinking we’re about to leave and go to the car. These two lovely agents are done with me, and I’ll be able to please the sheriff by getting out of town. Just where I’ll go, I have no idea.

  We’re on the second floor and the elevator showed when we got on that it was going down, but Ochoa punches the button for eight.

  She’s rubbing her plump bottom lip, looking at me like she’s trying to guess my weight.

  “What are you doing?” asks Tyler.

  “We were here all last night trying to identify that kidnapper and get him to talk to us, right?” says Ochoa.

  “Yeah,” says Tyler.

  “Would you say we didn’t have any luck with him?” says Ochoa.

  Tyler says, “Yeah, he totally stonewalled us. I’ve never seen anybody so….” Tyler looks at me.

  I shrug and smirk.

  Then, “Oh!”