The Cost of Being Seen: Part I

Posted on Wed Sep 23rd, 2026 @ 2:01pm by Niamh (Neeve) Keane

6,425 words; about a 32 minute read

Mission: Fallout
Location: Civic Centre Plaza, San Francisco
Timeline: 15th July 2026

Niamh had been standing at the edge of the rally for twenty-three minutes and had already decided to leave three times.

The first had been when somebody knocked into her shoulder hard enough to slosh iced coffee over the back of her hand and kept moving without noticing. The second came when a man carrying a handmade MUTANTS ARE PEOPLE banner stopped almost directly beside her and spent several minutes worrying, with impressive dedication, about whether the lettering looked crooked. The third had nothing to do with either of them. It had happened when the crowd surged towards the stage and several thousand minds compressed another few metres closer together.

Niamh shifted her weight and wiped the sticky coffee against the thigh of her jeans. She had chosen clothes that gave nobody much reason to remember her: faded black denim, boots, an old charcoal top beneath a lightweight jacket despite the California warmth. Her copper hair was pulled loosely back, although several strands had already worked themselves free around her face. There were no mutant colours, no political badges, nothing declaring why she had come. Even the name attached to the cheap hotel room several blocks away belonged to someone who did not exist.

That was how she liked things.

Or had.

The plaza had been difficult before she reached the first security barrier. Now it pressed against her from every direction.

Not voices. That would have been easier.

Thought rarely arrived in complete sentences unless somebody was deliberately thinking through one. Most minds were messier than that: impressions layered over half-formed words, memory snagging on emotion, attention darting towards movement and sound. People thought about being hungry while listening to speeches about civil rights. Someone near her was wondering whether they had locked their car. Another was furious with a sister who had not replied to a message all morning. A teenage boy several rows ahead kept checking whether anybody was staring at the faint scales along his neck. Somewhere to Niamh's left, somebody wanted desperately to believe that today mattered.

That one lingered.

She tightened the barriers around herself by habit.

Not walls exactly. SAAG had called them partitions, because apparently even the architecture inside her own skull had needed an approved vocabulary. They had taught her to separate signal from noise, threat from distraction, useful thought from the endless mental rubbish human beings produced simply by existing. Medication had once made the process easier. Enough of it and the world receded until other minds became shapes beyond frosted glass.

There had been nights when she would have done nearly anything for that silence.

She had not taken any of their drugs in almost two years.

Most days she was proud of that.

Today was not most days.

Niamh lifted the plastic cup and sucked what remained through the straw, mostly melted ice now, while her gaze travelled over the plaza without appearing to settle anywhere. Two clear routes back towards Market. An alley between buildings that looked useful until she noticed the temporary fencing across its far end. Police presence around the outer streets, heavier than she liked. Private security closer to the rally itself. Too many bags. Too many raised platforms. Too many windows overlooking too many people.

Old training arranged the details before she consciously asked it to.

She disliked that about herself almost as much as she depended upon it.

A little girl passed in front of her holding both of her father's fingers in one hand. The other carried a small paper flag with a blue X drawn across it in marker. She could not have been older than six. Her father kept checking the crowd behind them while talking to somebody on his phone, and the child's mind bounced happily between the flag, the promise of ice cream later and whether mutants could really fly.

Niamh looked away before the thought could settle.

Family was dangerous territory even on quiet days.

A burst of applause rolled across Civic Centre Plaza as another speaker finished. People around her joined in immediately, hands clapping above heads, cheers rising from further forward. Niamh did neither. She shifted instead until one shoulder rested against the temporary metal barricade defining the edge of the gathering and let herself breathe through the sudden pressure of collective emotion.

Hope was loud.

That surprised people.

Fear could be sharp enough to cut through almost anything, anger had weight, grief tended to drag other thoughts down around it, but hope spread. It jumped between people. One person's conviction reminded somebody else why they had come; another person's nervous optimism gave permission to somebody nearby to imagine that perhaps this would not end badly after all.

Niamh had never trusted hope very much.

Hope was how adults persuaded children to step into cars.

Hope came with reassuring smiles and forms signed by parents who had been told everything would be temporary.

Hope said we're here to help while somebody behind the speaker was already thinking about restraints.

Her mouth tightened around the straw.

"Christ," she muttered, and dropped the empty cup into an overflowing bin.

The word came out flatter than it would have in Galway. Most of her accent had been sanded down over years of Americans correcting, repeating or simply staring at her until she adjusted. It returned when she was tired or angry, sometimes so suddenly that she heard her mother in certain vowels and hated herself for noticing.

A woman beside the barricade glanced over at the muttered profanity and smiled.

"Bit much?"

Niamh looked towards the crowd.

"Bit people-y."

The woman laughed, apparently deciding this was a joke, and turned back towards the stage.

Niamh almost smiled.

That was another thing she was still getting used to. Conversations that meant only what they meant.

No objective.

No information to extract.

No reason to remember where somebody's hands were or whether their pulse had changed.

Just a stranger making conversation because two people happened to be standing beside one another.

Normal life contained an absurd amount of unnecessary interaction.

She was beginning to suspect that was part of the point.

The next swell of applause was louder, and this time Niamh allowed herself to look towards the main stage. Luis Reyes was due soon, if the programme screens scattered around the plaza were accurate. The Human-Mutant Coalition banners stirred overhead in the light breeze, bright enough to be seen from halfway across the square. Cameras occupied raised positions beyond the crowd. News crews moved around the edges searching for useful faces, preferably emotional ones.

Niamh edged another half-step behind the people in front of her.

Being photographed remained somewhere between unpleasant and unacceptable.

She had spent two years making sure that anybody looking for PSI-12 had to work for it. There were probably newer photographs of her somewhere, captured by airport cameras or petrol stations or hotel lobbies she had failed to notice, but she had no intention of volunteering another one because somebody wanted hopeful footage for the evening news.

Her attention wandered instead across the minds closest to her.

She did not deliberately read them deeply. There was a difference, however thin it sometimes seemed. Surface thought leaked. Niamh could no more stop noticing all of it than somebody with good hearing could decide not to hear a nearby conversation. Going further required choice.

She had rules now.

They were not always noble rules.

Some existed because getting caught was inconvenient. Some because manipulating people left an aftertaste she had learned to dislike. Some because she had discovered, slowly and without anybody grading her performance, that being able to do something did not mean she was entitled to do it.

SAAG would have considered that sentimental.

The thought almost made her grin.

They would have considered quite a lot about the last two years disappointing.

She had used her abilities for money. For food. For places to sleep. She had convinced border officials that documents were in order when they were not, persuaded hotel clerks that deposits had already been paid and once made an aggressively persistent landlord forget the number of her room entirely. She had frightened people who deserved frightening and manipulated a few who probably had not.

Freedom had not transformed her into a better person.

It had merely removed the person signing off on the decisions.

Niamh was still working out what came after that.

A young mutant perhaps sixteen or seventeen stood not far from the stage, his hand locked tightly around another boy's. He kept rehearsing something internally.

If they can just see us. Properly see us.

Again.

If they can just see us.

Again.

Niamh swallowed.

"Yeah," she murmured beneath the noise. "Good luck with that."

The cynicism felt cheap as soon as she said it.

That annoyed her more.

She had not come because she believed Luis Reyes was going to solve anything. She certainly had not come because she trusted politicians, organisations, coalitions, institutes or anybody else who put a noble word on a letterhead and expected her to feel safer.

She had come because she had seen the rally advertised three days earlier and spent three days pretending she wasn't thinking about it.

Because there were mutants choosing to stand openly beneath the California sun and tell the world what they were.

Because humans were standing beside them.

Because some stupid, stubborn piece of her wanted to see what that looked like when nobody was behind reinforced glass.

Because she had spent ten years being told that people were right to fear what she could do, and another two years telling herself she no longer cared what anyone thought.

Apparently both arguments had cracks in them.

Niamh rubbed two fingers slowly against the inside of her wrist, where one of the old restraint scars caught pale against the freckles. The motion was unconscious until she noticed herself doing it.

She stopped.

The crowd shifted again.

A brief pressure gathered behind her eyes, not pain yet, but enough that she lowered her gaze and concentrated on the familiar work of keeping herself separate. One mind. Then another. Let them pass. Don't follow. Don't catch.

The technique had been taught to make her useful.

She had repurposed it for grocery queues.

That, at least, still amused her.

A cheer went up closer to the stage.

Niamh checked the time on her phone.

13:28.

"Five minutes," she told herself quietly.

Five minutes, then she'd leave.

She had already identified the route back to the hotel, knew which streets to avoid and had enough cash hidden in three different places to be out of San Francisco before dark if the size of the gathering started drawing the kind of attention she disliked.

The thought should have settled her.

Instead Niamh remained against the barricade, green eyes moving across thousands of strangers who had made the peculiar decision to gather in one place and publicly hope for something better.

For once, she let herself listen without searching for anything.

The noise was almost unbearable.

It was also, beneath everything else, alive.

---

1330 hrs

The first warning did not come from the stage.

It came from somewhere behind Niamh's eyes.

One moment the plaza was crowded with the ordinary mental clutter of thousands of people trying to listen, talk, film, worry, hope and decide whether they regretted coming. The next, a single mind somewhere towards the northern side of the square experienced a flash of absolute terror so sharp that Niamh's attention snapped towards it before she knew why. There was no context at first, only the primitive certainty of danger and the image of something raised where it should not have been. Another mind caught the same threat a fraction of a second later. Then five. Twenty. A ripple of recognition travelled through the crowd faster than anyone could turn their head.

Gunfire reached her ears after the fear did.

The sound cracked across Civic Centre Plaza and tore the afternoon apart.

People dropped instinctively. Others remained upright because they had not yet understood what they were hearing, their confusion lasting just long enough to become dangerous. Somebody screamed. The noise multiplied through thousands of throats as automatic fire ripped into the gathering, followed almost immediately by an explosion powerful enough to shudder through the pavement beneath Niamh's boots. A section of the crowd lurched sideways as if the entire mass had been struck, bodies colliding with barriers, signs, prams and one another in the frantic need to be somewhere else. What had begun as a peace rally became the opening stage of the Purifiers' coordinated attack, colliding with sudden mutant manifestations among terrified civilians as panic spread across the plaza.

For Niamh, the physical chaos was almost secondary.

The crowd hit her all at once.

Thousands of minds stopped pretending to be separate.

Fear did not arrive as sentences. It came as slammed doors, remembered faces, unfinished prayers, pain before the body had properly located the wound. A man three metres away thought suddenly of his mother because his mind had apparently decided that was where dying began. Somewhere beyond him a woman could not see her son and every thought in her head had been reduced to his name. A teenage mutant who had been nervous about the scales on his neck ten minutes earlier was now convinced the gunfire was meant specifically for him, even as people fell around him without distinction. Someone else had been shot and did not know it yet; Niamh felt their confusion as their body began failing beneath them. A human man who had arrived carrying a sign supporting mutant rights saw an uncontrolled burst of energy erupt from a frightened girl nearby and, for one ugly instant, thought Jesus Christ, they're doing this before shame crashed into the thought almost as quickly as it had formed.

Niamh caught all of it.

Her carefully constructed barriers folded under the weight.

She staggered against the barricade hard enough to jar her shoulder, one hand gripping cold metal while the other pressed instinctively against her temple. The technique SAAG had spent years drilling into her became impossible to perform cleanly because there was no longer signal and noise, only too much signal arriving at once. Threat. Pain. Movement. Weapon. Child. Exit. Fire. Blood. Somebody thinking in Spanish, somebody else in Mandarin, a prayer in a language she barely recognised and a man mentally apologising to a wife who could not possibly hear him. Her own thoughts disappeared into the crush often enough that for several frightening seconds Niamh could not tell whether the panic tightening her chest belonged to her.

Separate.

The instruction surfaced with a voice she had not heard in years.

Not her own.

Identify. Categorise. Discard.

A white room existed behind the plaza for half a heartbeat, bright enough to hurt. Someone standing beyond reinforced glass. A pen tapping twice against a clipboard whenever she lost focus.

Niamh's fingernails dug into her palm.

"Fuck off."

She did not know whether she was speaking to the memory or the city.

Another burst of gunfire answered anyway.

The crowd surged against the barriers and nearly took her with it. Niamh forced herself upright, no longer trying to shield herself from everything because that was already failing. Instead she narrowed. SAAG had taught her how to do that too, how to turn a room full of minds into priorities when somebody somewhere wanted information before the screaming stopped.

Immediate threat.

Direction.

Intent.

The difference became obvious almost immediately.

Panic was chaotic. Even hatred inside frightened civilians changed direction every second, searching desperately for something to blame because blame was easier than helplessness. Mutants wondered whether humans had finally decided to kill them openly. Humans saw uncontrolled powers erupting amongst the fleeing crowd and wondered whether the rally had been a trap. People who had arrived believing in coexistence discovered how quickly conviction buckled when an energy discharge passed over their heads. Others surprised themselves in the opposite direction, dragging strangers to their feet without first asking whether the hand they grabbed belonged to a mutant.

Beneath that disorder, Niamh found minds that were calm.

Not peaceful.

Calm.

The distinction turned her stomach.

Men had entered the plaza already knowing where they meant to stand. Their attention moved in measured arcs rather than panicked circles. Ammunition counts appeared briefly and vanished beneath training. Fields of fire. Rally infrastructure. Crowd density. The practical inconvenience of civilians running in the wrong direction. One mind registered a mutant manifestation nearby not with surprise but satisfaction, as though the terrified boy whose skin had begun producing plates of hardened material had just proved something important.

There.

Another thought answered from somewhere else.

Take the active ones first.

Niamh froze.

There was hatred, certainly, but hatred was almost the least disturbing part of it. She had heard people hate mutants since she was ten years old. Hatred was hot, repetitive and usually embarrassingly unimaginative. What she felt from these men was organised. Their disgust had been processed into procedure. A woman collapsing beside a barricade became an obstruction. A teenager whose hands were glowing became a priority target. A cluster of civilians trying to drag someone wounded behind cover became movement requiring suppression.

The Purifiers had not come here angry.

They had come prepared.

A concussive blast went off somewhere ahead and the psychic impact of it struck Niamh before the pressure wave reached her. Several minds disappeared from the noise so abruptly that her stomach clenched. Others flared brighter with pain. One of the latent mutants in the crowd manifested violently under the stress, a burst of uncontrolled force throwing people around them and feeding fresh terror into people who no longer knew which direction danger was coming from. The attack had been designed to create precisely this kind of confusion, leaving humans and mutants trapped together while fear made each side look like confirmation of everything the other had been warned about.

Something warm touched Niamh's upper lip.

She wiped at it without thinking and came away with blood across the side of her index finger.

For a moment she simply looked at it.

The sight belonged to another life too.

White tile beneath bare feet. A medic telling her to tilt her head forward, not back. Someone behind the observation glass noting duration and volume while Niamh shook hard enough that the restraint cuff tapped rhythmically against the arm of the chair.

The memory vanished when somebody crashed into her.

Niamh caught the woman automatically and shoved her upright before she could go down beneath the crowd.

"Move," Niamh told her, pointing towards the western edge of the plaza. "Don't stop here. Go."

The woman stared at her for half a second, eyes huge and uncomprehending, before following the direction of Niamh's hand. Niamh had not pushed the instruction psychically. She realised that only after the woman was gone.

Another explosion rolled through the square.

That one broke the remaining hesitation in her.

She knew how crowds died.

They compressed against blocked exits. They followed people who had no idea where they were going. They stopped to help in exposed ground and created clusters somebody with a rifle could exploit. Panic made everyone certain that the nearest route was the only route, even when fifty other people had made the same decision.

Niamh's gaze swept towards the path she had identified earlier.

Market. South-west. Away from the densest gunfire.

The temporary fencing that had made one alley useless still mattered. The police line farther out might now be another problem rather than a refuge. The street beside the government buildings remained partially open from what she could see, although people were already flooding towards it.

She pushed away from the barricade.

Her body knew what came next even while her mind struggled to remain entirely her own. Shoulders low. Don't fight the crowd head-on. Move diagonally through pressure. Keep one hand free. Watch hands before faces. Do not stop because someone screams behind you unless the objective requires it.

There was no objective.

That thought struck somewhere deeper than the others.

No handler waited in her ear.

No extraction point had been assigned.

Nobody had told Whisper what mattered.

Niamh wiped fresh blood from beneath her nose with the heel of her hand and moved with the fleeing crowd towards the route out, keeping her shields as tight as she could while the plaza continued breaking apart behind her. Every few steps another mind struck through them hard enough to leave an impression: a child calling for a father, a man convinced the mutant beside him had caused the explosion, a woman dragging that same mutant behind concrete anyway, a Purifier selecting another target with dreadful patience.

She kept moving.

For the moment, survival still had the shape it had always had.

Find the exit before someone decided she belonged to them.

---

1335 hrs

Niamh made it almost two blocks before she stopped.

That was what she would remember afterwards. Not that she had wanted to leave, because wanting to survive had never been something she apologised for, and not that she had been frightened, because anyone who could stand inside what San Francisco had become and feel nothing was either lying or already dead somewhere important. She would remember that she had actually done it. She had reached the outer edge of the worst crush, found pavement where people could run without climbing over one another, and put enough concrete between herself and Civic Centre that the gunfire had begun to lose some of its shape. Market Street lay ahead through dust, sirens and people moving in every direction. Her hotel was close enough. Her bag was packed because her bag was always packed. There was cash hidden in three different places, documents under a name nobody would connect to Niamh Keane and a car she could abandon before anyone had time to decide the bridges needed closing.

Her mind had already started taking her apart and rebuilding her somewhere safer.

Dump the phone. Leave the clothes. Don't use the main roads. Don't cross anywhere with automated facial recognition if there is another option. If the hotel is compromised, forget the bag. Cash can be replaced. Identity can be replaced. Everything can be replaced if you are still alive to replace it.

SAAG had taught her that much exceptionally well.

Niamh hated how comforting it still was.

Then a thought struck through the psychic noise behind her with such desperate clarity that she stopped moving.

Please don't see her.

The crowd pushed around Niamh while she stood there, one shoulder clipped by somebody running hard enough to nearly turn her, but her attention had already gone backwards. The thought came again through the panic spilling out from Civic Centre, not louder because the woman thinking it possessed any unusual psychic strength, but because everything else inside her had collapsed around that single need.

Please. Please don't see her. She's only a child.

Niamh found her.

A woman crouched beside the overturned remains of a vendor's cart, her body folded protectively over a girl who could not have been more than thirteen. Pale light leaked between the child's fingers despite both hands being pressed tightly against her stomach. Every frightened breath made it brighten. The woman shielding her was human; Niamh could feel that much without searching. She was terrified of the power beneath her arm, confused by it, frightened by what the girl might accidentally do.

She was covering her anyway.

The girl's thoughts were worse.

I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. Mum, I didn't mean it. Make it stop. Please make it stop.

Something old and unpleasant shifted in Niamh's chest.

Ten years old. Too much noise. Everyone looking at her differently after discovering what she could do. Her mother thinking I love you and I'm frightened of you in the same heartbeat.

Then another mind crossed hers.

Active mutant. Left side. Behind the cart.

Niamh's gaze moved.

Four men were advancing against the flow of civilians. They did not look frightened. That was what separated them from almost everyone else in the street. Their minds possessed a horrible coherence among the chaos, trained attention moving across windows, rooftops, bodies and exits. One was thinking about ammunition. Another had noticed the glow beneath the cart and was already adjusting his route.

The third was wondering whether the woman hiding the girl was a sympathiser.

The fourth was hoping the kid resisted.

Niamh stood very still.

She had heard hatred before. She had grown up inside it. She knew what fear sounded like when somebody smiled at you while privately thinking that people like you should not exist. She knew the peculiar revulsion of somebody touching the inhibitor collar around her throat while telling themselves they were protecting everyone else in the building. Those thoughts had hurt when she was young because she had not understood that other people's ugliness did not automatically become truth simply because she could hear it.

These men were different.

They were not ashamed of what was inside them.

One of them looked at a thirteen-year-old girl hiding beneath another woman's body and thought of her as contamination.

Something in Niamh's mind recoiled.

Something else, older than freedom and colder than anger, opened its eyes.

She looked towards Market Street.

She could still go.

That mattered.

Nobody had blocked the route. Nobody had put a gun to her back or tightened a collar around her throat. There was no handler waiting to punish hesitation and no voice in an earpiece reminding PSI-12 what failure would cost her. For two years, that had been the definition of freedom Niamh trusted most: the ability to leave.

She had spent those two years stealing pieces of normal life wherever she found them. Bad coffee. Cheap hotels. Grocery shops where nobody knew her. Sitting alone in cinemas because it was easier to manage thirty minds when all of them were staring in the same direction. Getting angry about bank forms and laughing when she realised she knew how to interrogate an intelligence officer but not how tax worked. Small, ridiculous things that nobody in SAAG had ever thought worth teaching her because Whisper had never needed them.

All she had to do was keep walking.

The Purifier nearest the cart lifted his rifle.

Niamh heard what he intended before his finger touched the trigger.

She turned around.

There was no grand feeling attached to it. No sudden conviction that she had found her purpose. She was frightened, furious and deeply resentful that four men she had never met had made walking away impossible.

"Fuck's sake."

The Galway softened vowels came back around the curse.

Then she went into their heads.

SAAG had spent years teaching her not to approach a hostile mind as a person. A person invited hesitation. A hostile mind was a system. Sensory input. Motor control. Attention. Memory. Fear. Pain. Decision. Find whichever mechanism served the objective and pull.

The first Purifier never fired.

Niamh reached into the impulse travelling from his brain to his hands and replaced it.

His rifle swung away from the girl.

He knew immediately that he had not chosen to move it.

The panic that flashed through him was almost intoxicating in its familiarity.

Niamh pushed harder.

Left.

He turned towards the man beside him.

Raise it.

His arms obeyed.

The second Purifier had just enough time to understand what was happening before his partner drove the rifle stock across his mouth with both hands.

Bone cracked.

The impact threw him sideways, blood spraying from his lips as several teeth went with it.

The first man screamed inside his own head.

Stop. Stop. STOP.

Niamh heard every word.

She made him hit the other man again.

Not because she needed to.

That was the first moment she frightened herself.

The second blow caught the Purifier across the side of the face and dropped him heavily against the kerb. Niamh felt the man she controlled fighting desperately for ownership of his arms, every instinct insisting that they belonged to him because they always had.

She knew exactly what it felt like when your body stopped being yours.

That knowledge should have made her stop.

Instead she remembered a restraint table and somebody explaining that resistance only prolonged discomfort. She remembered a guard thinking little freak while checking the collar seal around her throat. She remembered being sixteen and listening to a man calmly justify what they made her do because mutants like her could not be trusted with ordinary choices.

The Purifier's terror touched all of that.

Niamh's anger answered.

She released his arms only after forcing him to throw the rifle away.

The third man had recognised her as the source.

His thought struck cleanly through everything else.

Telepath.

Then:

Kill the bitch first.

Niamh entered him before he finished turning.

This one she controlled completely.

His body locked, not from paralysis but obedience. Every muscle still worked. Every nerve continued carrying information. Niamh simply took the decision about what happened next away from him.

His hand moved past the rifle on his chest and down towards the combat knife strapped at his thigh.

His fear changed.

No.

Niamh drew the knife.

No no no no don't—

She made him place his free hand flat against the bonnet of a parked car.

The fourth Purifier was raising his weapon towards her.

Niamh caught him too.

Four minds sat differently than one. She felt the split in her attention, each consciousness requiring a fraction of awareness to keep it where she wanted it, but there was no pain yet and no blood. SAAG had trained her to handle more than this because SAAG had expected Whisper to be useful when rooms became crowded.

The fourth man's rifle stopped halfway up.

He strained against himself hard enough that his arms trembled.

Niamh made him turn it around.

Not towards his head.

Towards his own foot.

His terror came at her hard enough to sharpen everything.

Please.

The word almost made her laugh.

She hated that too.

A few minutes earlier this man had been walking towards frightened civilians thinking about how satisfying it would be if one of them gave him a reason.

Now he wanted mercy.

Niamh made him fire.

The shot tore through the top of his boot.

His scream finally existed outside his head.

The weapon fell as soon as she released his fingers, and he collapsed onto the pavement clutching what remained of his foot.

Niamh turned her attention back to the man holding the knife.

She could feel him begging before she looked at his face.

He had not begged the girl.

That thought was petty.

It was also hers.

She made his fingers close tightly around the knife handle, then drove the blade down through the back of his other hand and into the car bonnet beneath it.

The sound he made was animal.

Niamh released him.

He folded over the trapped hand, unable to decide whether pulling free would be worse than remaining exactly where he was.

The first Purifier had started backing away.

Niamh let him take three steps.

Then she slipped into the deepest part of his immediate attention and filled it with one command.

Kneel.

He dropped hard enough to bruise bone.

She felt his humiliation almost before the pain.

It pleased her.

That was the part she did not want to examine.

People were staring now. Civilians pressed against doorways, crouched behind vehicles, frozen halfway through escape because the violence in front of them had changed shape. A few metres away, the woman still shielded the mutant girl, although her face had lifted enough for Niamh to see it.

There was fear there too.

Not of the Purifiers.

Of her.

Niamh felt it before she saw it.

The reaction cut through her anger so cleanly that for the first time since turning around she hesitated.

The kneeling man seized upon it.

His thoughts filled immediately with hatred again, fear curdling back into the shape he understood best.

Monster.

Niamh looked down at him.

For a second she was eleven again, hearing the same word inside someone who had brought her food ten minutes earlier.

Her anger flared.

She could make him put the knife in his own throat.

The possibility existed between one thought and the next with terrible ease.

Niamh knew precisely how.

Take the hand. Turn the wrist. Lift the elbow. Suppress the instinct that would stop the final movement. It would take seconds. SAAG had made sure of that.

The man stared up at her without knowing how close he had come.

Niamh stepped out of his mind.

He sagged forward, gasping.

"You're lucky," she said quietly, "I'm trying very fucking hard not to be what you think I am."

She did not know whether that was true because of him or because of herself.

That uncertainty followed her when she crossed to the cart.

The girl had stopped crying. Shock had hollowed her expression, but the pale light still trembled between her fingers.

Niamh crouched a short distance away rather than reaching for her.

"Can you hear me?"

The girl nodded.

"Are you hurt?"

Another shake of the head.

"Right. That's something."

The woman looked past Niamh towards the four men on the pavement. One unconscious. One clutching a ruined foot. One bent over a knife pinning his hand to a car. The last still on his knees, afraid to discover whether standing was permitted.

"What did you do to them?"

Niamh followed her gaze.

The answer could have been complicated.

She chose the simple one.

"What they were going to do to you."

The woman did not look reassured.

Fair enough.

Niamh glanced at the girl's glowing hands. Up close, she could feel the mutation through the child's thoughts more clearly: terror feeding loss of control, loss of control feeding terror until each strengthened the other.

"Don't fight it," Niamh said. "You're making it worse."

"I can't stop."

"I didn't say stop."

The girl looked at her.

Niamh knew that look.

Her voice softened despite herself.

"You're frightened. That's all right. Just keep your hands down and breathe. Whatever it's doing, we'll figure out the rest when someone isn't shooting at you."

For the first time, the child's thoughts changed. Not calm, nowhere near, but enough space appeared between one frightened impulse and the next that the light around her fingers stopped brightening.

Niamh stood.

The woman caught her wrist before she could turn.

Niamh's whole body tightened.

The response was immediate and ugly enough that the woman released her at once.

"Sorry."

Niamh rubbed her thumb over the place she had been touched.

"It's fine."

It wasn't, but there were larger problems in the street.

"Go west. Stay with the crowd. Don't go back towards the square."

The woman looked towards the direction Niamh had been heading only minutes earlier. "You're coming?"

There it was.

The exit.

Niamh could still take it.

She turned towards Market Street and found herself picturing the hotel room again. Her bag beneath the bed. The door locked. Curtains closed. A shower hot enough to wash the city off her skin. She could be gone before dark and nobody here would ever know Niamh Keane had existed.

Then the city reached her again.

Not as the overwhelming wall that had struck her in the plaza. Her mind had begun adapting to the new shape of the noise, separating threads almost automatically now.

A frightened human man beneath broken glass thinking about the mutant stranger who had dragged him into cover.

A young mutant calling silently for a mother who could not answer.

A Purifier somewhere nearby experiencing a sharp thrill after seeing somebody fall.

A woman who had spent years believing mutants frightened her trying to drag an unconscious blue-skinned boy behind a concrete planter while thinking, with furious repetition, help me, help me, help me.

A controlled mind somewhere deeper in the chaos, conscious enough to understand that its body was no longer obeying.

That one reached straight through Niamh.

Her eyes closed.

For a moment there was a collar around her throat again.

Not memory exactly. Memory had edges. This came through muscle and breath, the remembered emptiness of trying to move while something else owned the answer.

When she opened her eyes, Civic Centre was still burning at the end of the street.

Niamh realised she had spent two years telling herself that being free meant never having to do anything she didn't choose.

Perhaps that was only half of it.

The woman was still watching her.

"Go," Niamh said.

"What about you?"

Niamh looked back towards the plaza.

She was afraid.

That mattered enough that she admitted it to herself.

She did not want to hear any more people die. She did not want to feel another mind disappear inside the noise. She did not want to find out how much of Whisper still lived inside her when killing became easier than restraint. There were a hundred good reasons to follow the crowd away from the fighting, and Niamh could have recited every one of them while running.

The problem was that she could hear the people she would be leaving behind.

She had always hated people making choices for her.

Apparently that meant she had to live with the ones she made herself.

"I'll be grand."

The old Galway reassurance sounded ridiculous in the middle of a war zone.

The woman stared at her for another second, perhaps hearing the lie without needing telepathy, then gathered the girl close and moved west.

Niamh waited until they disappeared into the crowd.

Behind her, one of the Purifiers groaned.

She turned her head just enough to look at him.

"Don't."

He stopped reaching for the discarded rifle.

Niamh left them alive.

For the moment, that would have to count for something.

Then she turned back towards Civic Centre, where thousands of minds were still screaming, and walked against everyone trying to get out.

 

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