Simon couldn’t sleep. His mind was racing. A plan for revenge had been coalescing for hours now, and was complete enough for him to act on it.

  Full of purpose and far from tired, Simon rolled out of bed and began pulling on his outfit for the day: khakis, dress shirt, a half-zip sweater in case the night was chilly. He didn’t have the patience for a full shower, so he doused his blond quaff in the sink and teased it into order, freezing it in place with a handful of pomade.

  Sufficiently groomed, he set into motion. He had a pack ready in five minutes, having already made a mental inventory of exactly what he’d need during his restless, fuming planning. He expected to want to be able to live out of the bag for a week at least, to minimize opportunities for Father to follow his movements by tracking card charges. He’d take a few hundred in cash for food and gas.

  He was leaving. If Father really wanted to “re-prioritize” his little sister so much, then he should be prepared to deal with the consequences of that decision. When the help returned tomorrow morning and found the house abandoned, when they phoned Father to inform him that his failed experiment had flown the coop, Simon anticipated that the man would strike a different tone. He estimated that there was well over a 90% chance that Father would drop everything an attempt to find him.

  He represented well over sixteen years of work, after all. Any clinical trial running half that long would be a disastrous resource to squander. Father would make an effort.

  He’d be furious if he found Simon, and the boy was too analytical to allow himself the folly of hoping that the odds of that were low. There were factors working against him, not the least of which being his total unfamiliarity with navigating the world without the help of chauffers or chaperones or tutors to handle the busywork.

  Still, Simon thought he had a fighting chance to see his own plan out to the end.

  He’d spent most of the last day lighting matches. After hours of sweaty, migraine-inducing concentration, he’d managed to get his technique consistent enough that he could usually get a match lit within a window of five to eight minutes. He managed to light six in a row this way before feeling too spent to continue.

  If he could put enough distance between him and home to buy him time, he was sure he could use some of the phone numbers he’d lifted from Father’s (almost disappointingly amateurishly) encrypted contact list to put himself in contact with a reputable enough media outlet or academic institution to arrange a meeting to prove his abilities.

  If he could replicate this feat of spontaneous combustion, in a controlled environment, he could make a name for himself. He’d suddenly stop becoming Professor Lindberg’s generational attempt at instrumentalizing his model theory of child psychology for maximizing IQ, and become Simon, the first ever documented superhuman. A feat not only essentially unparalleled in modern science, but, more importantly, one that Father couldn’t realistically claim any credit for.

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  Sure, he could try and argue that his newfound pyrokinesis was a knock-on result of his intensive intellectual training, but he had nothing empirical to prove this, no claim with any rigor to it. He hoped Father would try. With any luck, the resulting academic backlash would paint him to be a quack, instead of just irrelevant.

  He finished packing and trundled his suitcase down to the garage, tossed it into the trunk of his Father’s second car, an electric SUV he’d acquired from some colleague in the energy industry. Simon climbed into the driver’s seat and rifled through the glove compartment, found the car’s manual. He had never driven before. Father had considered a driver’s license a needless distraction.

  But a quick browse of the manual, coupled with the basics he’d absorbed from the few films he’d been allowed to watch, would be more than sufficient, Simon was sure. He’d figure it out on the road.

  He punched the door to open the garage, body thrumming with energy. He’d never done anything nearly this disobedient before. He’d never so much as committed a misdemeanor before, and here he was, starting off his great rebellious journey with some light grand theft auto. He was proud of himself, distantly, and also sick-to-his-stomach terrified. He put the car into reverse, started backing out. He wondered what Father’s face would look like when-

  Simon yelped and hit the brakes. He’d nearly hit a man.

  A man. Standing in his driveway, in a gated community. At five in the morning.

  Wearing all black, hair and face concealed by a hat and dark glasses. He was holding something, pointing it his way, difficult to make out in the dark and glare of the rearview mirror.

  Simon deduced that he was about to be shot at remarkably quickly for someone who had never even considered being put in that position before. Unfortunately for him, this deduction came just a fraction of a second before a bullet, oddly divorced from any audible gunshot, pierced the rear window and crashed through his priceless brain, spattering some of it on the windshield on the way out.

  Quiet, and then adulation.

  Simon was being buoyed up by a seething crowd of arms and hands. The limbs were grasping, fawning, desperate for even a glancing touch, tossing him like an angry sea.

  The limbs, and their owners, were dirty and feeble, but where they touched, a sheen of brilliance leached onto their surface, sloughing off of his own flawless form. Every one of the faceless horde that made contact with him was brought to screeching euphoria by the purification the grazing touch afforded them.

  All around him, voices chanted in varied, unknowable but totally comprehensible non-language. They sang songs of his superiority, professed their testimony of his great mind.

  Simon laughed and cheered, overwhelmed by a great sense of relief. He’d made it. The world had recognized him for what he was. He’d finally been delivered into a place that felt Right. That felt Correct.

  He was able to enjoy his proper place, as the object of an oceanic volume of worship, for less than a moment and more than a universe’s many lifespans, before it left him as soon as it had found him.