I had finished another patrol of the mansion grounds, and had discussed with Azad that we would take turns doing a patrol every hour throughout the daytime. Then, through the night, both of us would simply need to keep an ear out for trouble.

The day drew on and I found myself retreating to one of the smaller bedrooms which I had picked out. Once inside, with the door locked behind me, I then removed the skull-cowl and slip-mask (I had begrudgingly replaced the word 'sinew' with 'slip' since it sounded much better to me after Azad had nicknamed the suit), and I had set the mask and cowl (which came as a single piece) onto the side dresser table.

I then ran a finger down the middle of the slip-suit which, in turn, opened up and peeled off me. The pinkish-hue of the suit lost some of its colour, and what life was in the suit when I wore it faded away as soon as it was no longer attached to my body. The suit from the neck down was its own piece, which I hung up inside the wardrobe in the bedroom using a sturdy wooden coat hangers.

Finished, I picked up the blanket, the one we had bundled the blue basket in, from the floor and wrapped it around myself, moved over to the single bed which was just a shabby mattress on a bed frame, and sat down.

Taking off the suit the way I had done, and putting it away, had been a ritual that was very important to me. I needed to tell myself that the suit wasn't me, that it and I were separate and that I could take it off and return to myself, return to being Burgess O'Bannon, with the ease of someone removing a costume.

I was back to my normal stature, and I felt just like my normal self. My body had already healed the aches and pains from my brawl with Azad.

It was dark outside, and I listened as Azad finished his heavy-footed patrol of the mansion grounds. The new human-metal he was made of came with the price of him not being all that subtle when moving around.

Probably ways to fix that, I thought to myself as I sat alone in the dark.

Every fifteen minutes or so I listened out for any trouble, or Xandra's return, because she was due to return at any moment. If anything, I had expected her to return much sooner, but she hadn't.

She'll be fine, I thought, She's gone off on her own before, she knows what she's doing.

I prevented my vision from heightening in the dark, and I had the thick crimson curtains drawn so that the room was pitch black.

It was pure bliss to be sat in the dark with nobody and nothing to intrude upon the peace. Faintly, I could see the skull-cowl staring back at me in the dark, or thought I could. A part of me feared it might start talking to me, confirming I was already further along in my gradual insanity I felt I was slipping into already. Thankfully, the skull-cowl remained silent, though I couldn't help but feel as if it were watching me anyway.

I could tell I was still under a great deal of mental anguish because of how I let myself stare into the darkness for minutes, and then hours. I remained very still, only moving every so often to get the stiffness out of my limbs. My mind wandered through memories, daydreams, introspective monologuing, and more. I imagined myself arguing with the likes of Robert Hoffman, Abigail Hoffman, Tiffany, Blain, and Mikayla.

In fact, the arguing part paid most of the rent when it came to what it was occupying my mind. I ran through what else I might have said to Sophie and Walter back down in the underground complex when it was rapidly flooding. Then, I imagined what I might say to them both should I ever see them again.

We survived! I imagined myself saying to Sophie and Walter excitedly.

We're surviving, I imagined Sophie correcting me.

I thought about what it would be like to walk up to the front door of my London flat and to see Mum again, and how overjoyed she would be at seeing me after being so afraid for my wellbeing and from (what was likely to be) months if not years apart. But somewhere in that daydream I found myself still wearing the slip-suit. Mum didn't recognise me, she screamed as I pleaded for her to understand that it was me, Burgess, her son. I tried to take the slip-suit off, but it wouldn't come off, because the suit and I had become one.

As scary as the daydream was, my mind ran through the possible outcome in a detached way.

More and more I had formed a habit of reasoning out every possible bad scenario, as if doing so were a drug I couldn't get enough of.

I imagined myself on a rooftop somewhere in the heart of London. And there, on the rooftop, whilst I wore the slip-suit, stood five figures all in black military uniforms. They had cornered me, and each, one after the other, removed their helmets. The five that had found me, cornered me, were Tiffany, Blain, Mikayla, Jay, and Amar. Robert Hoffman had finally turned them into his personal superhuman assassins, and I was their next target.

In that daydream I heard Tiffany, who seemed to somehow become the defacto leader of the PUNCH squad, speak up.

Under the MICE act, you are a known fugitive and are under arrest. If you attempt to avoid arrest we will be forced to terminate you.

And in the daydream I responded, And do you even know who I am?

And Tiffany responded, It doesn't matter, all we need to know is you're not one of us.

Aha, I thought, coming out of that particular daydream, at least in my daydream the PUNCH squad wouldn't know I'm me in the slip-suit.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

There were many flaws with my daydream of course. I estimated at least a year or two before Robert Hoffman would decide to make use of the powered teenagers that had decided to join up with the PUNCH program.

The more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that the five I daydreamed cornering me on a London rooftop would be that particular five. The PUNCH program, being something international, might one day decide to swap around its mice in order to stop early allegiances from forming.

Perhaps sending the likes of Tiffany or Blain to America to be enforcers of the PUNCH program would be a better way to isolate and control them. Likewise, along with the precedent of American Pied Piper officers being sent to the UK, it was likely American PUNCH program members would be sent to the UK to be enforcers. There were plenty of precedents in history where foreign mercenaries were used by the government to attack and control their own people during a time of civil war or unrest.

In this way, what I intended to be a break from overthinking became a similar marathon of that very such thing, albeit without a pen and paper in my hand like the night before.

The one concern for the future which rose above all the others was enough to knock me out of my stillness, and to audibly gasp.

I had thought about my friend and how the future would fare for him. On the one hand, for all I knew, he was out there somewhere on the run, with powers, facing similar desperate situations. The thought that he may have been murdered by Peepers whilst on the run occurred to me, and had sobered my thoughts, bringing me back to the present moment, making me freshly aware of the dark confines of my surroundings.

I'd been overthinking all through the night because morning light was peeking around the edge of the curtains.

The other option, I thought, is that my friend doesn't have powers.

That option scared me too. Because, I reasoned out, it didn't matter whether or not he had powers because the wider populace would still treat him like he had done something seriously wrong. I imagined a precession of all the non-powered teenagers, that had fit the initial 17-to-19 age bracket, but hadn't been discovered to have powers, being forced into a second-class status in society.

I imagined that precession being given badges or something similar to make it clear to others what they were, and angry civilians throwing all sorts of rubbish at them in their fury.

Obviously, my trust for the average human being was at an all time low, and it seemed to be all too likely that paranoid people would still suspect the teenagers thought not to have powers as possible latent threats. Who was to say the power couldn't show itself later rather than sooner? Maybe a teenager could fail the treadmill torment test, or whatever similar tests other teenagers may have been subjected to in the effort to weed out the powered from the non-powered; maybe they could fail the test but still be powered at a later date. Maybe, and this is something I knew my friend would likely have the forethought to consider, maybe he might have found himself captured after a short-lived stint on the run, only to realise the purpose of the treadmill torment, which he would make himself fail on purpose as to not give his powered self away. If anyone would have the guts to do that, despite the possibility of spontaneously-combusting (not knowing the truth that all of the spontaneous-combusting crap was fake), it was my friend.

It was then I thought of Xandra, and how she believed Regina, the cartoon Raccoon she had known inside her own mind since she was a child, was real enough to consider to be her friend.

The notion that I, too, might be just imagining my friend as a figment of my imagination, some false daydream brought about by the power, reached the fore of my thoughts.

"No!" I shouted aloud, because the idea disgusted me to my core.

I pictured my friend's face clearly in my mind. It wasn't a face that would draw attention; it was just a normal teenage boy's face. I remembered all the details as best I could; the shape of his nose, eyes, and so on. The effort to do so, though not particularly difficult, frustrated me enough that I stood away from the bed, the blanket still held tight around me, and I started to pace around the room.

His name, I thought, just remember his name.

The name sprang to mind immediately. It started with an N. I said the full name in my head numerous times as if to make sure I really knew it.

But what if I'm just imagining these details? I thought, How would I tell the difference between what is a memory, and what is a hallucination? What might be the power's influence, and what is my own?

I'll need to verify it through an outside source, I thought, find his social media accounts, or ask my family members if they know how N is doing.

I took a deep breath and decided I had enough of breathing in the stagnant bedroom air. I went to the curtains, opened them, and opened the window (the window panes in my bedroom had managed to be one of the very few not cracked or broken). Crisp morning air met my nose and eased my worries just a little.

How did I get to this point? I thought.

I remembered back to the start of the evacuation, and how I had decided to make a conceited effort to think of N only as my friend, and not to mention him to anyone out of respect for his decision to go into hiding. It had been a smart choice on my part to do so, and one, especially as I had The Archetype Project so fresh in my mind, which was in line with my ambitions for the future. And still, I wondered if that effort to think less about N, on top of all the distractions that came with nearly dying numerous times over a month and a half, had made my life before the evacuation, and N as a consequence, seem less real, like another life entirely compared to the one I was now living.

Maybe, I thought, sombrely, N being one of the true good things in my life. Someone I considered a brother more than my real one, maybe it was harder to remember and appreciate the things which didn't cause me grief.

I had a lonely, friendless childhood. And I had known N since the start of secondary school. We hadn't become friends until we shared the same classes in Sixth Form. And for around about a year and a half we became inseparable, taking our long night walks together, or going into the city, or simply strolling around Stowchester during the day just talking about life, the universe, and everything.

No, I thought, remembering the last night walk N and I had shared, He's real. One-hundred-percent-real.

Until that fateful night all our talk of the future had been hypothetical. Where I had been so sure of the things I wanted to do with my life (notably a career making movies or doing anything involved with filmmaking), N had been uncertain. To him the future had been one big hypothetical and he had found himself struggling to know who he was or what he wanted to do, because he found it so hard to find his purpose in life. All of our conversations, by the end of each time we hung out, tended towards the big questions of what life was even about.

I wondered if he had his answer yet. Or if he, like me, had been so absorbed in merely surviving that he hadn't made any progress towards that answer at all.

I wondered if he had found any certainty, because I certainly hadn't. All I had was more questions.

All my senses were reduced to their normal level, so it was by pure chance I saw the figure down below beyond the mansion wall.

It wasn't Xandra.

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