Shadow Echo

The entrance hall of the Prism Institute was large enough to make a hundred people feel like a small number.

I had counted them twice already. Forty-three other first-years distributed across the space in the particular arrangements of people who didn’t yet know each other. Some had arrived with their parents. Some together. Some completely alone.

The ceiling vaulted above us in grey stone, ribbed like the inside of something ancient that had decided to become a school and hadn’t fully committed to the transition. Fog pressed against the tall windows on the north wall.

Through the glass, nothing was visible except white.

I stood between my parents and tried to look like someone whose family history was normal.

I did not entirely succeed, but I had been practicing.

My eyes traced the walls of the ancient keep that now hosted the place where I would spend the next four years of my life.

Along with, apparently, another forty-three mutants who had just hit adulthood and had their powers surface. Together we would learn to use them, and decide what to do with our lives, studying for a profession alongside various mutation-oriented lessons.

It seemed like a fairly thin curriculum to me, but everyone else insisted the Institute worked miracles in the post-Flux world, where mutants like me were simply a fact of life, and our powers ran on the same current as our feelings.

My mother stood next to me, dressed in a dark crimson fitted jacket and a pencil skirt of the same color, a black shirt beneath the jacket, matching heels. Her long black hair was pinned into a simple bun.

She looked, as always, stunning.

Watching her wait in line with me felt almost absurd. She was Selena Haze, or more accurately, Selena Haze-Sorokin, since she had married my father two months ago.

She was also the Institute’s senior evaluator, her sole purpose to push the mutants the faculty deemed unstable further still, until she could decide whether they should be sent to the Board of Mutant Affairs, or simply the Board, as everyone called it, for Null-Point Shot evaluation.

Fail there too, and you received a small shot that stripped away your feelings, made you a Grey, and stopped you from being a danger to society.

Despite that, most people believed the first evaluation at the Institute was the one that sealed your fate, which explained the absence of anyone standing near us in line.

“I don’t understand why we have to wait in the line,” she told my father, in the cold, precise tone I had spent most of my adolescence finding extremely irritating.

My father gave her one of his easy smiles.

“It’s the regulation, honey. It has to apply to everyone. Including you. And our daughter.”

She scoffed.

“Well, it shouldn’t.”

The woman in line ahead of us turned reflexively, then her expression shifted the instant she registered who she was looking at.

My mother would probably hold her son’s future in her hands within in a few months, and she was also considered one of the world’s three strongest telepaths and — according to Time, among other outlets — the hottest.

I found the second part considerably more disturbing than the first, as her daughter.

The woman ahead of us, having realized her mistake, smiled, nodded, and turned away.

“Mother. Can you not be, well, you. Just for an hour.”

She raised an eyebrow, and I braced for one of her tempers.

Then my father stepped beside her and put his arm around her shoulder, and she relaxed into it at once.

I had accepted many things about my father in the last two months.

The first was his existence, a fact my mother had kept from me for almost eighteen years. The second was that he had cared for me instantly, from the moment he learned about me. The third was that he was the opposite of my mother in nearly every way, relaxed and easy-going and methodical, in a manner I was still learning to read.

I was still working on learning him, still rotating through Val, Valerian, father, and dad, in a pattern dictated entirely by whatever I happened to be feeling in the moment.

What I couldn’t accept, and probably never would, was how instantly he changed her. She became a different person in his presence.

I had caught her twice actually being cute with him, which I believe scarred me for life.

I may have been angry with my mother almost constantly, for a mountain of reasons. But I respected her. Feared her, even, just a little.

Cute was something I had no capacity to handle.

And yet there she was, letting her head rest slowly against my father’s massive arm, forgetting entirely that we were standing in a line.

“It’s just a line, honey. It’ll end eventually. Let’s not make a scene that brands our daughter for the rest of her Institute life,” my father said.

My mother nodded. “Fine.”

I looked at them. My father was a large man, tall and heavily built, and despite my mother being tall herself, she looked small folded into his arm.

That drew eyes to us again.

As if my reputation needed further ruin before I’d even enrolled.

Because apparently it wasn’t enough that my world-famous mother was standing in line with me, my father had to arrive in full official grey-blue MOSF uniform to see me admitted.

The MOSF, the Mutant Observation and Suppression Force, was the body that oversaw mutants who went a bit too wild with their powers, and its operatives, like my father, were known to use lethal force when necessary.

My father was famous too, in his own right — though because of his callsign, almost no one connected a face to it — which was exactly how he preferred things.

It was better that way.

It would make people far more uneasy to know that the large, easy-going, black-haired man with his arm around Selena Haze was MOSF’s boogeyman.

So I stood there, watching my mother actually smile, while I did my best impression of a normal mutant girl waiting in line.

I counted the crowd again, and my eyes landed on a boy roughly my age, walking toward us.

He was tall. Taller than me, and I stood a little over six feet. Black jeans, a plain black t-shirt beneath a black leather jacket.

Something about him read old-fashioned, though then again, we were standing inside a centuries-old castle fitted with holo lights and small drones quietly polishing the corners, so perhaps everything here was a matter of perspective.

He stopped beside my father, his blue eyes passing over me for just a moment.

“David, you came.” My father’s voice was eager.

My mother stepped back from his arm, resuming her usual I-am-the-queen-and-you-are-not posture.

“I didn’t think I had a choice,” David said. His voice was low, a little rough.

I liked it instantly.

“You had one,” my father said. “Just not a good one.”

David nodded, his expression unreadable in any pleasant sense.

My father gestured toward me. “This is my daughter, Zoe. And my wife, Selena.”

David glanced at my mother, already knowing exactly who she was.

I offered my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

He took it reluctantly. The moment our hands touched, a jolt tore through my entire body.

My power, or half of it, was shadow manipulation, inherited from my father. As far as I knew, we were the only two who had it. And yet, at the contact, I felt a surge of shadow essence pour from him into me.

Nothing like my own. His was thick, rough, raw. I pulled back reflexively, and my own shadow essence sprang from my palm toward him. And his rose from inside his body to meet mine. His whole body was briefly wrapped in it, tendrils of shadow reaching in every direction.

A girl behind us screamed, and the sound sent a pulse through the room that apparently triggered another student, his form shifting, fur rising, fangs lengthening.

Everything around us felt like a kettle about to boil over. Parents, most of them non-mutants, scrambled to shield their children or simply ran.

“Enough.”

The word cracked through the hall as a grey-haired woman in a black suit stepped inside, heels striking the floor in a clean, unhurried rhythm. Two men followed a pace behind her, one tall and heavily built, the other lean and dark-skinned.

Everyone froze. Her command moved through the crowd like something physical.

“I am Dean Korr. Welcome to the Prism Institute. Please try to contain your powers. I understand admission day can be stressful, but I assure you, you are perfectly safe on the Institute grounds.”

The line reassembled itself.

She crossed toward us.

She gave my father a nod, and he answered with a military salute, which struck me as strange, though I filed it away along with everything else about my new surroundings.

“Colonel,” she said. “Perhaps we should admit your ward privately.”

My father nodded. I frowned. I had made it clear to both of my parents that I wanted no special treatment.

Before I could voice the complaint, I watched my father set his hand against David’s back and steer him quietly out of the hall.

He was his ward, not me?

Something in me had already assumed the offer was for me, and I felt the small, foolish sting of jealousy before I’d even finished the thought.

Val turned to me and gave me a nod and a warm smile, the kind that meant nothing was wrong, that this was simply how things were.

I stood there and watched him walk off with David and the Dean, until all three of them disappeared from the main hall.

“Mother, who was that boy?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, in her usual cold tone. “But I’d wager he’ll top my list for mid-term evaluations in March.”

“I thought not everyone goes through mid-terms.”

“No. But he will. Most certainly. You should keep your distance from that boy, Zoe.”

“He has shadow powers. Like me. Like Val. And he seems to be struggling to control them—”

“Exactly my point,” she cut in.

I nodded. Not because I agreed with her.

After almost eighteen years under my mother’s thumb, I intended to be as free as the circumstances allowed, and to meet and help anyone I chose.

She had just placed David at the top of that list.

“You worry too much, Mother,” I told her, smiling.