The drive to my new workplace was made awkward by the fact that neither Argus nor myself found any reason to speak despite sitting next to each other in the back of a large, black sedan. Personally, I didn`t have much to say apart from some coy comment like "so, do you visit prisons often?" And I was distracted by all the reflective surfaces around me anyway. The driver`s cellphone, the windows of the car, the sideview mirrors, the towering skyscrapers with seemingly endless facade`s of glass, the traffic lights, the lenses of surveillance cameras, everything chrome or glass or smooth plastic or polished steel or wet&. All of them seemed to call for me to come out and play.

　　It might sound overwhelming, and, at first, it was. Entering the world beyond the mirror, where all reflections are connected to each other through a network of light, wasn`t always second nature. I remember being fourteen and getting a headache every time I used my gift. It didn`t stop me though. Boman Sloan kept a water bottle on his desk during tests, and, at the time, I was just skilled enough with my gift to see his answers through the plastic. I sloughed my way through high school, finishing in the top five percent of the class just by matching my class schedule with his genius, gift-enhanced self every semester. Mastery of my gift came with a lot of experimentation- and the motivation of the girl`s locker room- until I figured out a system for filtering through the barrage of images that greeted me whenever I began a projection.

　　"We`re here," Argus brought me out of my thoughts, and I returned to the present moment awkwardly, blinking like a light-averse vampire at the small, nondescript office building presenting itself for my inspection.

　　And then I realized that I had about a million questions. "So& where are we?" came the first and probably stupidest one among them.

　　"Just downtown. This building is the base for our operations," Argus replied graciously, and I tried to play off my ineptitude by nodding with more intention than was actually necessary.

　　"Cool, cool. So, like, what do you do here?"

　　"Sorry?"

　　"What& type of job did I agree to this morning?"

　　"Ah. Yes. I was wondering when you were going to ask me that question," he teased dryly. "At this point, it`s probably best that I answer that inside, if you don`t mind."

　　"Oh. Sure. That`s fine." Again with that stupid, exaggerated nodding&. "Well, Mr. Argus-"

　　"Just Argus will do."

　　"Sure. Argus. Uh& now that I`m& your employee&." I trailed off, not really sure how to go about asking what seemed a most pressing issue: now that I was out of prison, where was I supposed to live?

　　"I think you will find that everything is in order, Mr. Mohandas."

　　I guffawed loudly. In my defense, it was involuntary.

　　"Is there a problem?" Argus asked, an eyebrow raised without any hint of amusement.

　　"I- No! No problem," I fumbled yet again. "You called me Mr. Mohandas. Oran. I prefer Oran. The other makes me feel like I`m in my forties, uh, I mean, older than twenty-one."If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it`s taken without the author`s consent. Report it.

　　"Mn," Argus, a man very definitely at least in his forties, nodded and returned to silence.

　　I felt like an idiot. I was an idiot. And like an idiot, I couldn`t come up with any saving grace with which to redeem myself, so I simply kept my pie hole, now savoring the distinctive, moldy-onion flavor of my foot, shut.

　　While thus preoccupied, Argus showed me around, escorting me through a large lobby on the main floor to an elevator (with shiny chrome paneling!), taking it all the way up to the fifth floor at the top of the complex. "This floor is where team members, like yourself, live. Your room will be 5D& right here," he declared and handed me one of those plastic hotel keys to wave in front of my new door knob. A cursory glance: the room was modest, comfortable though a little sterile, and infinitely better than a prison cell.

　　"Nice," came a quick, still onion` tainted acknowledgement.

　　Argus wordlessly led me back to the elevator, pressing the button for the second floor. "This is the commons floor," he said, holding the elevator door open for me to peer through rather than showing me around. "There is a cafeteria, gym, lounge, laundromat&. It`s all free to employees, but you can explore it on your own time."

　　"Nice." Reading the cues to pull my head back into the elevator in time for him to release the complaining doors, Argus pressed the button for the fourth floor while I scowled at the odd ordering of the tour.

　　"Floor 3 isn`t worth showing you," he said, almost as though reading my thoughts. "It`s all a bunch of offices and cubicles- not your department."

　　"Oh."

　　The elevator chimed once to indicate that we`d arrived at our destination, and Argus took me straight to a room two doors down from the elevator: room 4J- dark, no windows, the only light coming from a wall of monitors. "Afternoon, Daman," Argus nodded at the back of a rumpled, dark-haired head facing the large display of screens.

　　Daman sighed with a level of exasperation that felt unwarranted before turning around to face us, and I stifled another involuntary laugh. The guy looked like he hadn`t left this room, left his chair, since the last time he`d taken a shower& four days ago. He had a gut, grease-smeared glasses, and a pinched face that would forever appear cross and was currently sporting a sneer that told me his first impressions of me weren`t any more favorable than mine were of him. He was the stereotype of a nerd, but the funny thing is, with super powers commonplace, it was unwise to assume that he was an out-of-shape dweeb with a superiority complex. I`d learned that the hard way in prison.

　　"Who`s the moron, Argus?" Daman demanded tersely. And then I snorted, quickly placing a hand over my mouth and making another snort-like sound in an effort to pretend I was sneezing or something. It didn`t land. Daman was glaring at me by the time my arm returned to my side.

　　"His name is-"

　　"-Oran Mohandas, yes, I know," Daman rolled his eyes behind his smudgy glasses and spun around in his chair, returning to staring at the monitors. "He`s the guy with the gift that will supposedly speed up our tracking methods. What was his time finding Kane?"

　　"2:46 and change," Argus stated matter-of-factly. "A small fraction of the time it takes to do with security cameras, and without the need to wait for a target to cross paths with one."

　　The chair began to spin around at a drama-milking rotation speed, Daman`s posture hunched in a way that had him looking over the top of his glasses. "Yes. So& convenient. Let the gifts do all the work. I`ve warned you before that with so many niche gifts on the team, losing just one cog will cripple the entire machine that you are building."

　　Argus stiffened barely enough to notice. "We aren`t replacing the surveillance cameras."

　　"No, of course not," Daman simpered. "We are merely duplicating their function with a convict and his pervy powers on the payroll."

　　"Even you can`t deny the value of more rapid detection," Argus sighed with resignation. "Even knowing which cameras to tune into without having to scan through all of them will be-"

　　"Yes! Fine!" Daman snapped. "Have it your way, Argus. But don`t say I didn`t tell you so."

　　"Regardless, you will be at training tomorrow, correct?"

　　"Whatever." With that, Daman returned once more to face the monitors, and Argus shrugged, leading me back into the hallway.

　　"You`ll get used to him," he said with another shrug of measured indifference, and I bit back the retort: I`d rather not.