"It feels automatic," Simon mused. "I don't seem to have to make a conscious effort to convert the energy, once the process begins. The, what'd you call it, the Field? It seems to handle that on its own."

  He punched the wall of the guest room a few times, with his right hand. The impact was oddly soundless. In his left, the LED bulb he'd unscrewed from the bedside lamp flared with each punch, as the kinetic energy from the contact magicked itself into electricity, transported instantly into the bulb's wiring.

  Simon stared, entranced. "Incredible. Why's the impact so quiet? Is it- I suppose that's because the kinetic energy's going away before it can turn into sound. Incredible incredible incredible. That means the conversion has to be happening pretty much near-instantaneously."

  He turned to the sickly, ruined man he had affixed to the room's cast iron bedframe with a bike lock. He'd upped the security after catching the man trying to drag himself over to the door seconds after he'd left to use the bathroom. "Why isn't this being used on an industrial level? The conversion efficiency alone would revolutionize the energy grid, even if it was only being used by a handful of people, at select nuclear plants, or at major transformers-"

  "Please, kill me or take me to the hospital," the man groaned. "One or the other."

  "Hospital soon. I still need more information from you."

  "You keep saying that."

  "And you've got no choice but to keep believing it." Simon grinned, feeling a sick thrill at the authority he wielded. Was this how Father always felt? "So, back to the kinds of energy you were talking about. Heat, force, electricity, sound. What are the others? Electromagnetism? Gravity? No. No, if you could control gravity you wouldn't be in this situation, I think."

  "Could I at least have another drink of water?" the man rasped. He was so pitiful. Not twelve hours ago he'd stormed into his garage and shot an unarmed minor in the head, and here he was begging like some kind of victim.

  "Fine," Simon said. He rolled the half-full Dasani the man had been taking drafts of back over to him. The hitman groaned as he leaned to reach for it, a rattling, dying sound. His legs were folded beneath him, useless and pretzeled.

  "I assume there's an upper limit to the amount of energy you can store within your Field, or you wouldn't have been drained so quickly by pushing my car away. That was why you were groping for the battery, right? Unlucky for you, Father's EVs keep those in the rear."

  "You don't need me," the man said, between feeble sips. "You don't need my help. You're figuring it out on your own."

  Simon brightened at the praise. "Well, yes, I imagine I'm making quick work, but it'd be silly to throw away a useful resource here."

  "Nah, man, you're- You're growing fast. Freakish fast. That thing you did with the lightbulb just now-" he coughed, flecking his arm with backwash and blood. "Kinetic into electric. Took me a month to get right."

  Simon beamed more. "Well, I mean- I've always been a quick study. Father says-"

  He darkened. The man was focused on something else. His Field, threadbare as it was, was flickering oddly, rhythmic and intentional. Simon tried to widen his senses, to 'listen' for the different kinds of energy near him, as the man had put it a few hours ago. It took him a few seconds to find it: his captive was emitting bursts of infrasound in simple, staccato patterns. The sound was fairly weak, probably wouldn't be able to travel much farther than a few hundred yards, but directed. Focused on a point nearby, above.

  "That's a neat trick," Simon said. "Almost got me there with the flattery."

  "I don't-" another cough. Feigned helplessness? "I dunno what you're-"

  "You're calling a friend. Sending out a signal."

  Simon stood, the hairs on his neck at attention. A chill drew his skin taught. He felt a giddy, reckless fear wash over him, as a contingency plan began to self-assemble in his head.

  "Nobody's comin' for me, man-"

  "Shut up." He listened. Simon couldn't pick any sounds up, any signs of approach. Either his senses weren't attuned well enough yet, or his next assailant was hiding his approach especially well. Probably a mix of both. "You know, I figured you'd have an accomplice coming by to check on you, sooner or later."

  "Yeah," the man grinned, mouth gritty with dried blood. "Yeah, you little shit. The cavalry's coming."

  "I considered fleeing, early on, once I'd gotten a few good nuggets of actionable data from you." Simon stretched, unconsciously reverting to the habits drilled into him by Father. Three minutes of stretching should always precede rigorous physical activity, lest he risk a sprain. "But I ran a little cost-benefit analysis and decided that that would be imprudent."

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  "You calculated wrong, you freak."

  He turned to grin down at his captive. Distantly he was sure he probably looked a little crazed. "I reasoned that if I ran now, I'd just be running from you the rest of my life. Whereas, if I stand my ground, here, and win-" he felt his grin widen. "Then there's a good chance that I'll never have anything to be afraid of. Ever again. I'll-"

  He was interrupted by a series of gunshots, only audible as the bullets ripped through the thin wood of the guest room door. Three shots made impact, two in his torso and one in the head.

  Impact with his Field, though, primed and ready to absorb kinetic energy, not his body. Some of the energy leaked through, and he felt firm thwacks at the hits, mean little pinches that would be sure to raise welts. But nothing more.

  He slumped to the ground, making sure to land on a patch of his captive's drying blood, turned as he hit the floor to smudge his blazer with it. He held his breath and played dead.

  A few suppressed breaths, and the door was open.

  "Shit." A voice, its owner unseen, just behind Simon. "He really got you, huh."

  "He's not-" the captive crumpled in another fit of coughs.

  "Not as harmless as he looks? I dunno, from where I'm standing, he was a pretty easy job. What'd you do, miss? Gun jam?"

  "He's-" more coughs.

  Simon had his next five moves planned by now. The general thrust of his course of action was solid in his mind, burned into it by days of tossing and turning, constant replaying of the chess game that had nearly ended him. It was a strategy he knew like the inside of his own eyelids, now.

  Hold the middle. Play on his overconfidence. Let him come to you.

  "Huh. No payload. You sure this guy had a Field up?"

  "He's not fucking dead-"

  Simon sprung to his feet and gathered up the remnants of the energy from the bullets, kinetic echoes still fresh in his Field. He shunted the energy clumsily to his hands, still unfamiliar with the process of moving that much force. As the energy hit his right hand, he turned it to sound; his left, he turned to light.

  The result was a flashbang that elicited little more than a startled yelp from the new gunman: a shorter man, bald beneath his dark cap, beefy semi-auto in one hand.

  This first strike wasn’t meant to hurt, it was meant to maximize the chance that his enemy would do the predictable thing. He knew from years of competition experience that one predictable choice often led to more. Simon braced.

  The short man cursed and lashed out at Simon, slashing one arm through the air. The wave of force that followed knocked him across the room, back through the now bullethole-riddled door, and into the rest of the basement.

  He hit the floor almost silently: his Field still primed against kinetic energy, he’d sucked up most of the force from the man’s attack, then his contact with the door, and then the ground. He hadn’t actually been flung by the attack, he’d absorbed too much of it for it to carry him off his feet. He’d transported the incoming kinetic energy to his feet a fraction of a moment after impact, thrown himself, to make it look like the attack had landed better than it had.

  The man was on him now, straddling him, rained down three quick blows in succession. Just before the fourth, the man caught on: he wasn’t actually breaking through.

  This, Simon knew, was the critical moment. The instant that would determine if he’d sufficiently modeled the fight in his head, if the years and years of conditioning and training and learning had given him the tools he needed to stand before a dangerous, grown man and read him like a book.

  The man would switch from kinetics, now, this was obvious, would hope to catch him off-guard with something else. Simon estimated that heat would be too obvious, too normally used as a second-choice. Light and sound wouldn’t make sense; no need to stun someone you already had pinned. Radiation would be too slow. If these people could control gravity, or electromagnetism, or time, then he was dead.

  He primed his Field against electricity.

  The man’s fist crackled with white light, and the rest of the energy he had stored in his Field disappeared into Simon’s. The man gawked, for a moment, as he realized the position he was in. Seconds ago, he’d been crackling with energy, and Simon had had none.

  Now, the tables were turned.

  Check.

  Simon howled with victory and grabbed the man by each side of his fleshy head. With one monumental push, he jettisoned all of his stored energy through his fingers, turned it into heat.

  The inferno that bloomed from his hands far eclipsed what should have come. It was as if the energy, upon converting to heat, had doubled, tripled in volume, in blatant disregard of everything Isaac Newton had ever decreed possible.

  At first, the man’s defenses held. His reflexes had been such that the first lick of flame against his skin had been signal enough for him to switch his priming from kinetic to heat. But Simon knew, from his other prey of the night, that these people and their defenses didn’t handle consistent, drawn-out pressure well. They could tank explosions all day, but constant, unrelenting damage, like, say, the kind one might sustain from an electric SUV accelerating them inexorably into a wall, sapped their stamina, eroded their walls.

  That’s mate.

  Five seconds and one gargling deathrattle later, and the man’s bald head was a cinder on the floor of Simon’s father’s house.

  He stood from the defeated corpse of his first real enemy, his heart alight. He looked through the smoke and dust and swirling carpet fiber in the air, locked eyes with his prisoner.

  The man looking back at him was sheet-white. Staring as if at a monster.