The Cost of Being Seen: Part III

Posted on Wed Sep 23rd, 2026 @ 2:08pm by Niamh (Neeve) Keane

4,850 words; about a 24 minute read

Mission: Fallout
Location: Lower Transit Shelter, San Francisco
Timeline: 15th July 2026 - 1900 hrs

By seven o'clock, San Francisco had acquired the strange exhaustion of somewhere that had been screaming for so long it was beginning to lose its voice.

The lower transit platform had filled and emptied several times during the afternoon as routes opened, failed and were replaced by whatever remained passable. What was left now had settled into something resembling a shelter rather than an evacuation point. The worst of the wounded had been taken elsewhere, families occupied blankets against the tiled walls and volunteers moved between them with water, scavenged food and the increasingly vague promise that someone would know more soon. There were fewer sounds from above than there had been an hour earlier, although nobody seemed willing to interpret that as good news. Rumours had filtered underground instead: Sentinels in the Financial District, something enormous tearing through city streets, fighting near the Golden Gate, X-Men and Brotherhood operating together because apparently the day had run out of ordinary absurdities. Niamh had stopped trying to decide which stories were true. She had spent the better part of six hours inside the fear of people who had actually lived through pieces of it, and that was enough San Francisco for one lifetime.

She sat on the edge of an old platform bench with a bottle of water between her hands and enjoyed, cautiously, the fact that nobody currently needed her. The blood beneath her nose had been washed away in a staff bathroom an hour earlier, though the headache behind her eyes remained as a dull reminder not to be clever. Her psychic reach had been pulled close until the people around her registered mostly as presence rather than information. Fear here, exhaustion there, grief moving heavily somewhere behind her. She left the details alone. After spending an afternoon knowing too much about too many strangers, ignorance had become unexpectedly luxurious.

Mei appeared beside her with another bottle of water and sat without asking. The two of them had reached the point where conversation was no longer compulsory, something Niamh considered a considerable improvement in their relationship. Around them, two children played some incomprehensible game with bottle caps while their father watched with the concentration of someone afraid they might vanish if he looked elsewhere for too long. A volunteer was trying to convince an elderly woman to eat. Near one of the pillars, the silver-skinned mutant Niamh had noticed earlier had finally fallen asleep with her head against a rolled jacket.

"They're saying the bridge is bad," Mei said eventually.

Niamh twisted the cap on her bottle. "They've been saying everywhere is bad since half one."

"The Golden Gate."

"I know what bridge you meant."

"I know you knew."

Niamh looked across at her. "Then that entire exchange was pointless."

"Conversation usually is."

That earned a faint smile. Niamh drank, and for perhaps thirty seconds there was nothing more complicated in her world than lukewarm bottled water, a bruised shoulder and the distant argument of two volunteers trying to work out whether they had any coffee left. After everything that had happened, the ordinariness of it felt indecently good.

The first change was small enough that she almost missed it.

The silver-skinned woman stirred against the pillar. A teenage mutant sitting with his family farther along the platform looked up suddenly, his attention snapping towards nothing Niamh could see. Another rubbed irritably behind one ear. Individually, none of it would have mattered, but Niamh felt the unease pass through each of them with the same strange quality. It was not fear yet. More the instinctive discomfort of discovering that someone had entered a room without hearing the door.

Her bottle lowered.

Mei noticed. "What is it?"

"I don't know."

Niamh reached outward carefully.

The pressure met her halfway.

Her entire body went rigid.

It arrived without the texture she associated with another consciousness. There was no emotional noise to sort through, no surface thought or memory or personality. It felt manufactured, vast and hideously clean, something pushed across the psychic field of the city with enough force that every mutant mind around her reacted before any of them understood what was happening. The silver-skinned woman woke with a gasp. The teenager grabbed his mother's arm. Somewhere behind Niamh, somebody dropped a cup.

Then the signal drove deeper.

Niamh's bottle slipped from her fingers and bounced beneath the bench.

Pain burst behind her eyes as the shelter erupted around her. Mutants cried out almost together, not because they had agreed on anything but because the same pressure had found all of them at once. One man staggered against the wall. A little girl started screaming and clutched at her mother's clothes while the woman desperately asked what was wrong. Humans looked around in confusion, frightened by reactions to something they could neither hear nor feel.

Niamh knew what it was doing.

That was worse than the pain.

There was something inside the signal that wanted obedience.

Her breath caught.

For one instant the station became too bright.

Cold metal pressed beneath her jaw.

Not a memory in any orderly sense. Her body recognised the feeling before her mind gave it a name, muscles tightening where restraints had once held them, throat constricting around the remembered weight of a collar that was not there. She could almost hear the tiny mechanical click of it closing.

Niamh squeezed her eyes shut.

"Don't."

Mei was in front of her now. "Niamh?"

The pressure increased and the station slipped again, the present bleeding against sensations buried too deeply for chronology to matter. Chemical bitterness at the back of her tongue. Somebody's hand steadying her arm for an injection. A calm voice explaining that cooperation would make everything easier. None of it was being projected by the array. It did not know Niamh Keane and did not care what had happened to PSI-12. It was simply pressing against pathways that had been forced open years ago, and her own mind was supplying the rest.

Then she felt the other mutants begin to give way.

The fear changed everything.

Niamh opened her eyes.

A young man near the platform edge was staring at his own hands as though they belonged to somebody else. The silver-skinned woman had both palms against her temples and was whispering something Niamh could not hear. The teenage boy had gone unnaturally still beside his mother, his thoughts losing their edges beneath the pressure of something trying to replace intention with instruction.

Niamh reached for him.

The signal found the opening immediately and struck through her with enough force to make her gasp, but she held on. Beneath the imposed pressure she found the frightened, confused core of the boy's awareness and wrapped her own mind around it, not taking control, simply putting something between him and whatever was forcing its way inside.

Stay with me.

His attention jolted towards her.

Niamh reached for another.

Then another.

She did not think about permission until she was already inside four minds, shallow enough to avoid memory but close enough to feel where each person ended and the broadcast began. Under any other circumstances she would have stopped and asked. There was no meaningful consent to obtain from someone already fighting for possession of their own body, and she hated the necessity even as she accepted it.

The shelter around her became a map of struggling minds.

She gathered the closest first, then those already slipping. Five became seven. Seven became ten. Every new connection increased the pressure inside her skull because the signal did not merely attack each mutant separately; it travelled through the psychic space between them, pushing wherever Niamh tried to build resistance. She could feel people fighting in different ways. Anger from one. Terror from another. A woman repeating her daughter's name because it was the only thing she trusted herself not to forget. Someone begging internally for whatever was happening to stop before they hurt anybody.

That thought struck Niamh harder than the rest.

She knew what it was to be afraid of what somebody else could make you do.

The fear passing through the group found something solid in her.

Niamh stopped trying to push the signal away.

She held the people instead.

The distinction changed the shape of the struggle. Fighting something this large directly was impossible; she understood that almost immediately. Whatever machinery was generating the broadcast possessed scale she simply did not. So she stopped meeting force with force and concentrated on what the signal was trying to erase. The people inside her shelter arrived in fragments as emotional bleed worsened: a grandmother's yellow kitchen, a dog sleeping upside down across a sofa, the smell of engine oil on somebody's father, mango ice cream eaten beside a beach, a sister stealing clothes and denying it while still wearing them. None of those memories belonged to Niamh, but they belonged to somebody, and that mattered.

She pushed them back towards their owners.

Yours.

Not a command.

A reminder.

The teenage boy beside his mother suddenly sucked in a breath as though surfacing from deep water. The silver-skinned woman looked towards Niamh without quite seeing her. Someone farther away began sobbing, but the mind behind the crying became recognisably itself again.

Niamh's nose started bleeding.

She felt it only when warmth reached her upper lip.

Mei noticed immediately. "Niamh."

"Don't."

There was no sharpness in it this time. She simply could not spare enough attention for the argument.

Mei moved closer without touching her. "What do you need?"

The question took a moment to reach her through the pressure.

"Keep everyone back."

"From you?"

"From them."

Mei looked around at the mutants Niamh was holding together and understood.

The humans nearest them were beginning to panic now. Some had seen loved ones behaving strangely. Others had watched powers flare unpredictably when the broadcast struck. Mei moved into that confusion before it became dangerous, getting volunteers between frightened families and the affected mutants without making it look like a containment line.

Niamh barely registered any of it.

The signal surged again.

This time it carried enough force to drag a sound from her throat.

The psychic shelter buckled. One mind slipped sideways, then another, and Niamh caught both before the connection broke. Emotional bleed flooded through her partitions faster than she could sort it. She loved someone named Elena. She was terrified of drowning. She had once broken her wrist falling from a bicycle. She missed Galway.

That one was hers.

Niamh seized it instinctively.

Rain on Shop Street. Salt off the bay. Her mother's voice calling from another room before everything became complicated.

For the first time since the broadcast began, Niamh deliberately held one of her own memories.

Not SAAG.

Before.

The signal pressed against it.

She refused to let go.

The shelter steadied.

Blood reached her mouth. She tasted iron and swallowed it without thinking. Somewhere near her right ear another warmth began to gather, slower than the nosebleed but unmistakable. Her vision blurred briefly and returned.

She had passed the point where sensible people stopped.

Unfortunately, sensible people had not spent the day inside her head.

A movement at the edge of her vision caught her attention.

One of the mutants near the far wall stood suddenly.

The change in him was subtle enough that most people would have missed it. Niamh did not. His mind was still there, furious and terrified, but his body had begun following something else. His hand closed around a folding chair lying beside the medical supplies and lifted it towards the nearest volunteer.

Niamh reached for him.

The broadcast was already inside.

Their minds collided around the same piece of ground.

Pain flashed white across her vision.

The man swung.

The chair stopped.

For half a second the entire moment felt wrong.

The man still held it. His arms continued trying to complete the movement, muscles straining against resistance that did not exist inside his mind because Niamh was not controlling them. The chair itself hung motionless in the air.

Niamh stared through watering eyes.

The metal frame began to shake.

The man lost his grip.

The chair tore sideways.

It crossed several feet of open platform and smashed against the tiled wall hard enough to buckle one leg.

Mei looked from the chair to Niamh.

"What the fuck?"

Niamh had nothing.

Not even a bad answer.

The broadcast struck again before either of them could process it.

Something burst painfully across the white of Niamh's left eye. Her vision smeared at the edge and she dropped one hand to the platform to keep herself upright, the movement pulling several frightened minds tighter around her without conscious intent. The man who had held the chair collapsed, suddenly free enough to understand what his body had nearly done.

The psychic shelter shuddered.

Niamh felt the first genuine crack.

One of the minds she was protecting began slipping away from itself, then another. The signal seemed to have adjusted to the resistance, pushing harder wherever she had built structure. She could not widen farther without losing control of what she already held. She knew that with the detached certainty of someone who had spent too many years being taught her own limits.

It should have been the moment she disengaged.

The thought arrived in a voice that belonged to nobody currently in the station.

Too much load. Declining accuracy. Withdraw the asset.

Niamh almost laughed.

After everything that had happened since lunchtime, that was what finally made her angry.

Not the Purifiers. Not the pain. Not the blood running over her mouth or the machine somewhere across San Francisco trying to turn an entire people into puppets.

The assumption that survival meant letting go.

She looked at the mutants around her. Some were strangers she had never spoken to. Others had been moving through her network for hours. None of them belonged to her. That was precisely the point.

Her hands trembled against the platform.

Niamh closed her eyes and tightened the shelter around every mind she could still hold.

"Not yours," she whispered.

Mei, close enough to hear, said nothing.

Niamh was not speaking to her.

The broadcast bore down again, vast enough that somewhere beyond the shelter she could feel thousands of mutant minds caught beneath the same pressure, far too many for her to reach and far too many for her to pretend this little pocket of resistance mattered on the scale of the city.

It mattered here.

For tonight, that was enough.

Niamh lowered her head, blood falling in dark drops between her hands, and held on.

---

1917 hrs

The pressure disappeared so completely that for one terrible second Niamh thought something inside her had broken.

There was no gradual weakening, no warning that whatever machinery had been bearing down on them was beginning to fail. One moment the broadcast filled every space between thought and intention, grinding against the shelter Niamh had wrapped around the mutants nearest her; the next there was nothing where it had been. The absence was almost violent. Niamh's body had braced itself so completely against resistance that its removal sent her forward onto both hands, shoulders jerking as she caught herself against the platform. Around her, people reacted with the same disorientated shock. Someone screamed. Someone else began laughing and could not seem to stop. The silver-skinned woman folded into the arms of the stranger beside her, while the teenage boy Niamh had held onto all this time buried his face against his mother's shoulder and sobbed with the furious embarrassment of someone old enough to hate being seen doing it. Whatever had happened at the Golden Gate, whoever had reached the thing responsible and torn its hands away from them, the intrusion was gone.

Niamh didn't trust it.

For several seconds she remained exactly where she was, blood dripping slowly from her nose onto the concrete between her palms, waiting for the pressure to return. The city was still there inside her awareness, enormous and wounded, but its minds had become recognisably individual again. Frightened, exhausted, grieving, furious, confused; human things belonging to human beings and mutants rather than an artificial will imposed over all of them. She searched for the alien pressure once, carefully, and found only the psychic afterimage of something too large having occupied space it had no right to occupy. Her own shelter remained tangled around more than a dozen minds because she had held it so tightly that some of them were still clinging to her without knowing they were doing it.

Niamh closed her eyes and began letting them go one at a time.

There was unexpected intimacy in the release. Fragments remained behind as each consciousness separated from hers: the yellow kitchen disappeared first, then the dog on the sofa, engine oil, mango ice cream, a daughter's name and the lingering fear of deep water. She had no idea whose memory belonged to whom anymore and suspected some would remain muddled for days. Her own thoughts surfaced gradually beneath them. Galway. Her name. The ache in both arms from holding herself upright. The sharp pulse behind her eyes. One by one the people she had sheltered ceased feeling like extensions of the same wounded thing and became strangers again.

The relief was extraordinary.

So was the loss.

That unsettled her enough that she hurried the last connection.

You're back.

She did not know whether she sent it to one person or all of them.

You've got yourselves. Let go.

The final mind slipped free.

Niamh remained with her eyes closed for another moment, listening to nothing more intrusive than the ordinary psychic clutter of a crowded station. Someone was frightened of what they had nearly done. Someone wanted their husband. Someone else was trying to remember whether the violence they recalled belonged to them or the signal. It was messy and painful and imperfectly theirs.

She had never been so glad to hear people thinking badly.

"Is it over?"

Mei's voice came from somewhere above her.

Niamh opened her eyes slowly. "That bit is."

Mei crouched several feet away, obeying the distance Niamh had demanded earlier even now. There was blood along one side of Niamh's face, another thin trail beneath her right ear and a savage red crescent staining the white of her left eye. Mei looked at all of it without the slightest attempt to disguise what she thought.

"You look like shit."

"That's very comforting."

"I've been working on my bedside manner."

Niamh shifted her weight back and sat heavily against the platform bench. The movement brought the bent folding chair into view where it had struck the tiled wall earlier. One leg had folded almost sideways. The space between where the man had stood and where the chair had landed suddenly seemed considerably larger now that Niamh's head was no longer occupied by a city trying to crawl through it.

She stared at it.

Mei followed her gaze.

Neither spoke for a moment.

"Did you know you could do that?" Mei asked.

Niamh's eyes remained on the chair. "No."

There was enough in the answer to stop the next question.

The unfamiliar thing frightened her in a way the broadcast had not. The signal had been external. It had been an enemy, something she could hate cleanly. The chair belonged to whatever had happened inside Niamh when every part of her conscious psychic ability was already occupied elsewhere. She tried to remember the movement and found only pain, panic and the impossible sensation of something physical answering her without hands.

A medic was making his way towards them now, alerted either by the blood or by Mei despite her better judgement. Niamh noticed the blue gloves first.

Her body made the decision before her mind did.

She pushed herself upright.

Mei stood with her. "Where are you going?"

"Bathroom."

"No, you're not."

Niamh looked at her.

Mei nodded towards the approaching medic. "Sit down."

"Absolutely not."

"You've got blood coming out of multiple parts of your head."

"I'm fine."

"Niamh."

There was something different in the way Mei said her name this time. Concern without urgency, as though she already knew force would achieve the opposite of what she wanted.

Niamh hated that it worked.

She looked past her towards the shelter.

People were beginning to understand that whatever had seized the mutants was over. Families were pulling one another close. Volunteers moved cautiously amongst those who had been affected, checking injuries and separating the frightened from anything that could become dangerous if powers flared again. The man who had nearly struck someone with the chair sat against the wall with his face buried in his hands while another mutant remained beside him, saying nothing. Nobody was looking towards Niamh as a saviour. A few were looking because they knew what she had done; others because blood was difficult not to notice. Farther away, one of the Underground volunteers from Chinatown was speaking urgently to another and glanced towards her halfway through.

That look again.

Recognition becoming information.

Niamh felt the old machinery inside herself begin turning.

Who had seen her. Who knew the name Niamh. How many people had watched what happened in Chinatown, the tunnels, here. Mei knew what she could do. The Underground knew there was a red-haired telepath moving refugees through their routes. The Purifiers knew enough to recognise her on sight. Somewhere in whatever remained of their operation, someone had wanted her captured alive.

For most of the afternoon none of it had mattered because people had been dying.

Now there was room for consequences.

"I need to go," she said.

Mei looked at her for several seconds. "Because of them?"

She did not point towards anyone.

She did not have to.

Niamh's gaze moved briefly towards the Underground volunteers. "Because people start asking questions once they stop shooting at each other."

"You helped them."

"That's generally when the questions start."

The medic was close enough now that Niamh could hear him telling somebody to move aside.

Mei folded her arms. "You're concussed."

"I'm telepathic, not concussed."

"You have no idea whether you're concussed."

"Neither do you."

"I know what blood coming out of an ear looks like."

Niamh almost smiled despite herself. "You're incredibly difficult to abandon."

Something passed across Mei's face then, subtle enough that Niamh would have missed it if she had been anyone else.

She wished she had missed it anyway.

Mei looked away first, towards the people scattered across the platform. "At least let someone look at you."

The request was reasonable.

That was the problem.

Niamh knew how this went when reasonable things accumulated. Let somebody examine you. Give them your full name. Tell them where you're staying. Sit here while we contact someone who knows more. Somebody would decide she should not leave alone because she was injured. Somebody else would want to understand her powers. The Underground had earned more trust from her in five hours than most organisations managed in years, but trust did not remove locks from doors once people became frightened for your safety.

Niamh was not willing to discover where their line sat tonight.

She looked at Mei. "My name's Niamh."

Mei frowned. "I know."

"That's all you need."

Understanding came slowly and then all at once.

Mei's mouth tightened. "You're really doing this."

"I've had practice."

"That's not the endorsement you think it is."

Niamh could feel the ache underneath Mei's irritation, but she left it alone. Some things were private even when they were loud.

The medic finally reached them. "Miss, I need you to sit down."

Niamh looked at him.

He stopped.

She had not done anything.

The realisation seemed to occur to both of them simultaneously, and the flicker of fear inside his mind irritated her far more than it should have.

She softened her expression instead.

"I'm fine."

"You clearly aren't."

"Fair point."

The medic opened his mouth again.

Mei touched his arm. "Give us a second."

He looked between them, decided that arguing with two exhausted women covered in varying amounts of blood was beneath his pay grade, and stepped away to check on someone else.

Niamh raised an eyebrow.

Mei sighed. "Go before I change my mind."

The permission bothered Niamh immediately.

Mei saw that too.

"Bad phrasing."

"Very."

"I mean I'm not stopping you."

"Better."

"Still think it's stupid."

"That's okay."

Niamh reached for her jacket where it had been dropped beside the bench. One sleeve was stiff with dried blood that mostly belonged to somebody else. She pulled it on anyway, wincing when the movement disturbed her shoulder, then used the cleanest part of her cuff to wipe beneath her nose again.

Mei watched her prepare to disappear with an expression that contained several arguments she had apparently decided not to make.

At the edge of the platform, Niamh stopped.

"Thank you."

Mei blinked.

Niamh immediately regretted making the moment strange. "For the water."

"Right."

"And the other things."

"Terrible save."

"Fuck off."

There was a tired smile behind Mei's response. "Go."

Niamh did.

She used a maintenance exit rather than the primary evacuation route and climbed towards street level through a stairwell lit only by emergency strips. Every flight seemed longer than the one before it. Her legs had begun registering the day's abuse now that adrenaline had mostly drained away, and the headache behind her eyes sharpened whenever she moved too quickly. Nobody followed. By the time she pushed through a fire door and emerged into the evening air, darkness had begun gathering between the buildings.

San Francisco looked wounded.

Smoke softened the skyline. Emergency lights pulsed red and blue against glass, concrete and drifting dust. Somewhere several blocks away, firefighters were working beneath a collapsed façade while civilians watched from behind hastily erected barriers. Helicopters moved above the city, their lights sweeping rooftops and streets that had belonged to ordinary traffic that morning. Farther west, beyond buildings she could not see through, something had happened at the bridge significant enough that people clustered around radios and phones whenever any signal managed to reach them.

Niamh stood beneath an awning and watched for less than a minute.

She had come to Civic Centre that afternoon expecting to observe a peace rally for five minutes and leave.

Her hotel was still standing.

That surprised her.

The woman behind the desk had been replaced by a man Niamh had never seen before, overwhelmed by stranded guests and trying to maintain a handwritten list because several systems were down. He barely looked at her when she passed. For once, she did not need to touch his mind.

The room looked exactly as she had left it.

That was somehow worse than if it had been destroyed.

Her bag remained beneath the bed. A half-empty packet of crisps sat on the desk beside the television remote. The curtains were still half-open, showing the same slice of neighbouring building she had looked at that morning when the day had possessed no significance whatsoever.

Niamh closed the door and leaned against it.

Silence gathered around her.

Real silence.

No linked minds.

No Purifiers.

No strangers relying on her to know where danger was.

No voice telling her what to do next.

She looked towards the bathroom mirror and saw dried blood she had missed near her ear, a red bloom across one eye, soot on her cheek and hair that looked as though somebody had tried to pull half of it loose.

The woman in the mirror looked familiar enough.

That would have to do.

Niamh packed quickly.

She had not unpacked much to begin with. Toiletries disappeared into the side pocket. Charger. Spare clothes. Cash. Documents belonging to someone who would cease to exist the moment she walked out. She paused over the phone, then removed the SIM and snapped it between her fingers before dropping both pieces into separate bins.

The routine came easily.

That frightened her more than it reassured her.

Outside, San Francisco continued burning itself into history.

Niamh slung the bag over her shoulder and took one last look around the anonymous room.

She could disappear tonight.

There were routes north she knew how to use. Cash enough to get beyond California. By morning she could have another name. Within a week the red-haired telepath from San Francisco could become a story told by frightened people who had never learned enough about her to find her.

That was still possible.

For the first time in two years, Niamh stood with an exit in front of her and did not feel relieved.

She left anyway.

By the time anyone from the Underground thought to look for the young Irish telepath who had helped move refugees through Chinatown, the room would be empty, the name on its booking useless and the woman they remembered somewhere else.

Niamh disappeared back into the city before midnight.

This time, she knew people would be looking.

 

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