There were two main consequences for Emily keeping the poltergeist a secret. The lesser one was that she was grounded for two weeks. Emily didn’t argue about this, or tell her moms how much better that was than being locked in a sealed room for almost two months.

The bigger consequence was that she felt terribly guilty; she’d betrayed her mothers’ trust. She promised herself then and there that she wouldn’t do that again.

E

It was a while before that conviction was put to the test. Nothing that happened while she was grounded felt especially significant. She didn’t notice that she was bumping into things less often, even when she was distracted. She didn’t notice how it wasn’t as hard as it should have been to move her dresser out of the way to get at her jacket, which had fallen behind it. She didn’t notice that the nail she stepped on didn't sink into her foot.

Noticing things that aren’t happening is hard.

Through all that time, she did her best to avoid thinking about the poltergeist. It was gone, and that was that. She didn’t want to dwell on her mistakes, or on the pain she’d felt there at the end. She didn’t want to think about how she’d failed. Once she wasn’t grounded anymore, there was even less reason to think about it.

Three weeks after the final poltergeist incident, Emily was getting very little exercise. She hadn’t been going to Aikido, at first because of being grounded, but then because she didn’t feel comfortable around Max. She understood why Max called the Cavaliers. If she’d been in that position, she might have done the same thing. But it still hurt. Other than Emily letting Max know she was okay, the two hadn’t talked since the incident.

So she needed to find something else to do for exercise. The obvious solution was running. She wouldn’t need special equipment (she already had a decent pair of running shoes), and wouldn’t have to worry about figuring out a class or anything. The downside was the Texas summer.

Twenty two days after her final encounter with the poltergeist, she got up at six in the morning (to beat the heat), and went for a run. The first sign that something was going on was during her stretches. She had expected to be a little stiff, since she hadn’t done any in over a month, but if anything, she was more limber than she remembered. She shrugged that off, and started her run at an easy pace, barely more than a fast walk. After a few minutes of that she decided to pick up the pace.

That’s when it happened. She didn’t have a particular pace in mind, just ‘keep speeding up until I can’t.’ The problem was, she wasn’t reaching that point. She was pretty sure she was running faster than she’d ever gotten on her bicycle, and she still wasn’t feeling a limit.

She sped up a little bit more. It was still easy. Not only that, but she wasn’t even breathing hard. This freaked her out enough that she slowed herself down and turned back toward home.

“Hi, Emily,” her mum said, when she came in the front door, “Did you have a good run?”

Emily grunted in response, then said “I’m going to go shower. Have a good day at work.”

“Thanks. You have a good day, too.”

In the bathroom, Emily inspected herself again, like she had when she’d first noticed the poltergeist. She still didn’t have a mark anywhere on her body. She even used a hand mirror to inspect the back of her neck.

While she showered, she thought. The only thing she could think of didn’t make any sense. The poltergeist was gone, and even if it weren’t, how could it make her faster? Besides, if it were still there, she’d know. She’d be able to feel it. But she had to be sure.

Once she was dry and dressed, she lowered herself onto her little yoga mat on her floor. She crossed her legs, feet on top of her knees, and closed her eyes. Taking deep, slow breaths, she began to meditate.

She repeated the steps she’d learned to let her feel the poltergeist’s presence. There was nothing out there, but there was something, somewhere. She stopped reaching outwards and focused on her breathing. In. Out. In Out.

Suddenly she could feel her lungs, every tiny branching tube as her diaphragm compressed and expanded them. She could feel her heart—not just her pulse, but each chamber of her heart expanding and contracting. She followed a pulse of blood as it coursed out and through her body.

She returned her attention to her heart, losing herself in the four-way rhythmic pulse. She could feel what it would take to speed it up, so she did. That didn’t feel good, so she slowed it back down to where it had started, then slowed it further, until it was stopped. That felt really bad so she immediately returned it to how she’d found it, and sent her attention flowing through her body.

Her stomach was much higher up than she expected, but once she adjusted her expectations based on that, everything was pretty much as she would have thought. She felt part of herself freaking out a bit, but this was too interesting to let that part ruin things.

She moved her focus to her skin. There she could cross reference what she could see with what she could sense. She ran a fingernail down her inner arm and could feel it through the skin, but also through the fingernail. She had a flash of the moment she woke up after trying to contain the poltergeist. She remembered how she’d been able to feel her nails, her hair, her teeth.

She could feel all that now.

She couldn’t avoid thinking about that day any longer. It was time to figure out exactly what had happened to her.

Closing her eyes again, she thought back to the poltergeist’s last moments. It had been hurting her, but not on purpose. Her body—or anyone’s body—was not built to contain something like it. It had tried to leave, but she wouldn’t let it. It couldn’t repair her as fast as it was damaging her.

How did she know that? She had known what it was thinking—not that it was thinking, exactly. She hadn’t sensed thoughts, but intentions. It had those; she remembered them shifting. It had tried to flee. When she hadn’t let it, it had tried to protect her from herself. When that hadn’t worked it had—

“Am I even me?”

The words slipped out. She felt like herself, except for this new, deeper, awareness of her body. She was pretty sure she had all the memories she’d had before the whole thing started. But she could also remember the need to protect Emily. She remembered fear and frustration at not being able to do so. She remembered a final decision.

She remembered becoming.

She wasn’t sure what she had become, though. Everything that made her her was still there. She’d just taken a tour of her own body, and it was, as far as she could tell, a human body. It had blood. It had bones. It had muscle. But was it still made of cells?

She looked inward again, focusing smaller and smaller. Yep. Cells. She couldn’t zoom much smaller than that, so she would just have to assume that the cells were made of whatever cells are made of.

But the fact that she could do that had to mean something. Normal people couldn’t examine their own individual cells from the inside. It would take a mark or magic to let someone do that, and she’d verified again that she didn’t have a mark when she’d showered a few minutes before. She was also pretty sure she hadn’t recently learned to do magic.

She had chores to do, so she tried to put the matter out of her mind for the moment. That was not as effective as she’d hoped. Now that she’d become aware of these changes, she couldn’t completely ignore them.

She was constantly aware of the blood whooshing through her veins. She could feel the individual muscle fibers contract and relax as she moved. It was all a lot.

Once Emily had finished her chores, she went to her computer and searched for ‘sensing your own body.’ Among the results, she found two new words—interoception and proprioception. The former was the sense of the various signals that the body sends to the brain. The latter was more about the position of the body and its parts. What she had seemed to be a combination of both of those, amped up to supernatural levels.

It was nice to have words for it, but it didn’t help her figure out what to do about it. Did she have to do anything about it? Did she have to tell her moms? Enhanced senses didn’t seem particularly dangerous, did they? Keeping this to herself wouldn’t be like hiding the poltergeist. Would it? It wasn’t that she necessarily didn’t want her moms to know. It was just that once they did, it would become a thing.

She was certain of one point; this was not an emergency, so there was no need to call either mom in the middle of the workday. She had at least a few hours to decide what to do. Even with it being summer, she couldn’t stand to stay cooped up inside, so she put on her shoes and headed out for the neighborhood park.

The first thing she noticed was how nice the weather was. The early morning clouds had cleared, the sun was shining, but it wasn’t uncomfortably hot. This was extremely unusual for Texas in June. Even when she was walking in open sunlight, rather than the shade, the sun on her skin felt nice, instead of like some kind of torture.

When she got to the park, she wandered aimlessly for a bit. She felt restless, like there was someplace she was supposed to be, but there wasn’t. It was summer; school was out; she didn’t have any camps. She had a self-paced math class, but she was halfway through that and still had most of the summer left to finish it. She tried to ignore the feeling.

When that didn’t work, she decided to see if she could run it off. One thing this park didn’t have was a running track, but that was fine. She took off at a fast jog. That felt a little better.

She was two thirds of the way through a loop around the park, and approaching the playscape, when she saw a kid balanced on one of the highest rails. That looked dangerous, and the kid, probably six or seven years old, seemed to be losing his balance.

Emily broke into a run as the kid lost his footing and tumbled off the railing. She skidded to stop right under the falling child, arms outstretched. Some instinct told her not to just catch him, so she matched the downward speed of her arms to the child, and slowed rapidly, ending with him an inch or two off the ground.

Once she helped him to his feet, he gave her a funny look, then ran off toward the sandbox. She looked around for the boy’s parents but when she didn’t see any likely candidates immediately, she shrugged and moved on. At least the adrenaline burst from that seemed to have burned off whatever restlessness she’d been feeling.

As she walked into the wooded area at the edge of the park, she went back over what had just happened. She had run very fast, and catching the child hadn’t put even the slightest strain on her arms. The new internal sense obviously wasn’t the only change she was experiencing.

She looked around herself. Although she could still hear people in the park proper, there was no one in sight; the trees blocked them from view. She considered. She could run faster now, and catch a child who’d just fallen fifteen feet without effort, and without hurting the child. What else could she do?

Unlike the live oaks that dominated the park, the tree next to her was fairly tall, with sparse branches; the lowest was maybe ten feet up. She wondered if she could jump high enough to touch that.

Bending her knees like she’d learned in track, she readied herself, then jumped with all her strength.

Before she could react, she’d passed that branch, and the next two, and then smashed into the next two, with a pair of reverberating CRACKs. Panicking a little, she flailed and caught the next branch of the tree and squeezed her eyes shut.

Emily was not a timid person, but she was not good with heights. It wasn’t quite acrophobia, but they made her very uneasy, and she didn’t like them. It took her a moment to make herself open her eyes.

She was at least forty feet off the ground. She closed her eyes again. On the bright side, her arms weren’t getting tired. On the not-so-bright side, she couldn’t quite get herself to let go with one, to start moving along the branch toward the trunk.

When she opened her eyes again, she looked at the two splintery stubs of the branches she’d hit on the way up. The lower one was at least five inches in diameter. If she was moving fast enough to break that, her entire body should be pulped, but she was fine. The only reason she could even tell where her body hit the branch was that her new sense showed her very minor bruising on her shoulder. Even that went away as she watched—the out of place blood flowing back into the tiny burst vessels as they healed themselves closed.

Logically, if that impact hadn’t hurt her, neither would a fall—not that she planned to fall on purpose. She was simply trying to convince herself that it was okay to move along the branch to the trunk. That plan suddenly changed when, with a loud crack, the branch she was hanging on broke.

Startled, Emily let go, and found herself plummeting. Her eyes squeezed shut without any conscious intent on her part, but the expected impact didn’t come. When she opened them, she found herself resting on the air, three feet from the ground.

Without taking the time to figure out how to do so, she twisted in the air until her feet touched the dirt. She stood very still for a moment.

She was definitely going to have to tell her moms.