Chapter 5: Eye of the Beholder

I wake up to my alarm buzzing and immediately reach to hit the snooze button when I realize that I have already hit it twice and I am going to be late if I attempt any more sleep. I pull the covers over my eyes. The simulated window the Agency had installed in my bedroom lets in way too much fake sunlight for my liking. I feel for the window dimmer switch that I know is to the right of my bed when I hear a knock at my door. Why don’t these people ever let me wake up in peace?

I instruct the party to enter my room because my eyes are hurting from the fake sunlight and because I’m too tired to get up and let them in. I know that it is one of four people: Rhodes, Darius, Shadowmind, or Tux, and quite frankly, I’m not about to get out of bed at this hour of the morning for any of them.

“Let me get that for you,” I hear Tux say as he enters my room and his footsteps make soft pattering noises against my carpet. I can tell he is near my bed and I see through the blanket that the room gets darker. I uncover my head and see Tux stepping away from the window dimmer switch.

“Thanks,” I say as I uncover the rest of my upper body and sit up. “It’s a little too bright out there for me.”

“Well, you think, anyway. You haven’t seen the outside in four days, Physion. You’re not missing much. Two more riots broke out in your neighborhood. Rhodes sent a team of escorts to check out your place. Doesn’t seem like anything was damaged, though,” Tux says as he sits down in the oversized chair the Agency gave me to replace the strikingly dorm-like furniture they had in my room when I first got here. Almost immediately after he sits down, he stands right back up and starts walking toward the door.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot you need to change. I wouldn’t want to pull a Darius on you or anything,” he says with a small smile as he opens my bedroom door. I laugh a bit and shake my head.

“You could never pull a Darius. He’s…quite the character,” I say to Tux as he steps into the hallway and starts closing the door behind him. It’s been Rhodes’ policy to either appear in person or send one of my fellow team members to make sure I am awake by a certain time on days that I have appointments. I change quickly into some of my more comfortable clothes and consider heading to the cafeteria to get some coffee or tea before my meeting when I realize that I only have fifteen minutes before I’m supposed to be there and decide against it. Instead, I flip the switch that changes my simulated window back into the main room options screen and search through my music collection to find something to help me wake up. I listen for a few minutes before I head to the meeting room.

I always think it’s strange that as I’m walking to and from my room, I hardly ever see another Gifted in the hallways. I’m not sure how many actually live in the housing barracks. I’ve only been staying here for the last four days. Ever since the vision we all saw where the Pyromaniac set my name burning on a wall, I’ve been too terrified to go back to my apartment alone. I asked Rhodes to send someone to stay with me, but he refused. He said that the more the other members of the Agency know about me, the greater chance there is of my secret getting out and jeopardizing the entire Agency. I’m too scared to leave, scared to stay, scared to see what is going to happen next.

I enter our usual meeting room and sit down across from Shadowmind. Only he and Rhodes are in the room besides me. I look at Rhodes and he begins speaking.

“Good morning, Physion,” he says with a nod of his head. I nod back at him and toward Shadowmind who returns the gesture.

“Due to the draining nature this type of briefing has on psionics, we’ve decided to split up your mental briefings into individual sessions. Shadowmind will take your hand and show you everything we’ve learned about the Pyromaniac in the last few days. This type of session is quite intense, my dear, please do not be alarmed if at any point you feel as though you’ve become the Pyromaniac, that is precisely the goal of this session. No matter how much you feel like you are not yourself, please do not break physical contact with Shadowmind. While he can transmit visions without physical contact, it requires much more energy of him and this session will already take a lot out of him for a little while. Do you understand?” Rhodes asks me in a very serious tone. I nod again.

Shadowmind looks and Rhodes and then to me and I see his tattoos lightly appearing as I grab his hand.

I wake up to the sound of an alarm and a TV in the background. I must have fallen asleep with watching something useless and stupid again. Probably about the riots. This city has gone to hell in a handbasket, anyway. I don’t even want to hear about it anymore. Even though it’s a little chilly in my apartment, I throw the covers off anyway and walk to the bathroom. I glance out the window on the way. The fifteenth floor always has such a great view. Not to mention the likelihood of a social dissenter crashing through my window has been greatly reduced.

I grab the toothbrush and toothpaste on the counter near the sink and rinse them off. I leave the water running as I brush. There’s really no sense in conserving municipal water. The municipality is garbage. This city is a dump. I look up to the mirror attached to the medicine cabinet above my bathroom sink and study myself as I brush.

My hair is black and wavy, I never know how to manage it sometimes. I always wonder if the boss will notice that it sometimes looks like a kitchen scrubber. I study the lines of my face and realize that I look like every other twentysomething male whose been screwed fifteen ways to next Sunday by the mayor and the riots and the university closings. I look down to spit and watch the green of the toothpaste swirl away. I look back up and inspect my teeth. The reflection suddenly shows them becoming jagged and sharp. The face in the mirror changes to that of a middle aged man with beady eyes.

“You know they never wanted to stay there, anyway,” he says with a grin. “You know they’re practically begging for you to put them out of their misery. You can save them, boy, you can show them what happens to those who sin.” The figure throws his head back and laughs loudly. I watch for a few seconds before the laugher starts to fade and before I know it, the face in the mirror is mine again.

Before I fall completely into this life, I realize that my name is MaryJane Wells. I can feel sweat forming on my forehead and I remember that I am mindlocked with Shadowmind. I remember that this is a briefing. I know that I am not this person, I know this. I want to let go, but I feel Shadowmind’s hand wrapped tightly around mine and I let out a small sigh. I feel a slight pain in my head. I am back in the Pyromaniac’s world.

I walk to the closet and pick out a pair of dress pants, a shirt, and dress shoes. I lay them flat on the bed.

“You know they took everything from you, Dave,” I hear a voice say. I look around and suddenly become angry.

“They took it! They took it all and left me with nothing!” I yell to my apartment. I hear nothing in reply, only the unintelligible ramblings of someone on TV.

Just as suddenly as I became the Pyromaniac, my viewpoint changes and I am suddenly watching the Pyromaniac from what seems to be a third person view. I wonder if he can see me watching, but his actions seem as though he is a character in a movie. I don’t think he can see me.

I presume the Pyromaniac’s real name to be Dave. I watch him as he picks up the dress pants from his bed and then hangs them back up in his closet. As he is rehanging his shirt, he stops suddenly and puts on his videophone headset. I didn’t hear it ring.

“A wonderful day for golf,” he says to the person on the other end of the line. “I hear we’ve got a storm rolling in.” I hear nothing for a few seconds and then he speaks again.

“I wondered what she meant, Steve, I wondered what she really meant. I was never able to understand her dialect.” The Pyromaniac then rips the headset off and throws it across the room. I can see from my viewpoint that it wasn’t even turned on.

The Pyromaniac walks back into the bathroom and stares into the mirror. After a few moments of only heavy breathing, he points at it and says “YOU don’t know anything about me. You don’t know. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything.”

Just as I’m starting to feel as though I might slip back into the Pyromaniac, the scene shifts and I see the Pyromaniac walking down a street in what appears to be Graymann Village, but I am uncertain and I don’t see any street signs in his immediate vicinity. The Pyromaniac pulls a cigarette out of the front pocket of his leather trench coat and puts it to his lips. I notice his eyes temporarily turn pitch black and his irises change to red briefly as the cigarette starts burning. I think I recognize some of the taller buildings I see along the skyline behind him and when he passes a small convenience store, I am certain that he is in Graymann Village. He stops suddenly and cocks his head to the side as if he’s thinking and then keeps moving along. He taps the cigarette ashes onto the sidewalk and clears his throat. I have no idea where he’s going, but I have a distinct feeling of anxiousness.

I glance at the scene and am half expecting a riot to break out in front of him, but the Pyromaniac keeps going. He walks quickly past an alley and I see a mangy dog digging around a dumpster toward the other end of the small street. The Pyromaniac slows his pace a little and I notice his eyes turn black again and the red irises reappear. I’m not sure if he snaps his fingers for effect or for an actual purpose, but as soon as he does, the dog is lit aflame and without even turning his head to look, he takes the cigarette out of his mouth and whistles as he walks past the alley.

He walks a few more blocks alternating between smoking and snickering to himself when he suddenly makes a sharp turn down a small side street and I notice that he is in the packing district. He picks up his pace considerably for another block and a half before he makes a quick left to the side of a warehouse and I see him jump up to the fire escape ladder and scale his way to what seems to be the third or fourth story. He glances down to where I am standing and I wonder for a moment if he can see me, but he looks away again and uses a brick I did not see him pick up to smash in a window near the fire escape. He moves very quickly and before I know it, I see the end of his trench coat trailing as he enters the window.

My viewpoint shifts suddenly and he is standing among a warehouse of crates and barrels and boxes. He is on a metal walkway that circles around what would be the third level of the building. I see cranes and winches and such all over, forklifts, conveyer belts. The Pyromaniac pulls out another cigarette, looks at it for a moment, and then puts it back in the pack and slips it back inside his trench coat. I hear him laugh, slowly and quietly at first, but it gradually becomes louder and more forceful. I watch him take off his glasses and put them in another jacket pocket. He throws his head back and my viewpoint changes again so that I am hovering above him. His eyes are blacker than I have seen them previously and his irises are red with flickers of blue in them every so often. He straightens his head so that it appears as though he’s looking directly in front of him and I see a small flame start in the center of the packing floor. I watch as the flame develops tentacles that spread and snake along the floor in a strange fashion. They snake up the walls and across the metal girders. I know that flames do not behave this way normally.

When it appears as though he is done making designs, the Pyromaniac lifts his left hand slightly and a wall of flame engulfs the entire left side of the warehouse and spreads to the ceiling. He does the same with his right hand and before I can even tell what’s happened, the entire building is engulfed in massive walls of flame. The smoke is making it difficult for me to watch him, but I notice that the area immediately surrounding him is completely free of smoke or flame. He moves across the metal walkway toward the stairs leading to the levels below and I notice that as he walks, the flames and smoke part for him as he travels through them.

He makes it all the way to the main loading dock door before he create a small line of flame that spreads up the door and incinerates it, leaving an opening for him to exit. With his eyes still black and his irises still glowing bright red, he looks to the location where I had been hovering over him and I feel sick to my stomach as I hear him yell.

“I know you’re there, Physion. I can feel you spying on me,” he says and then breaks into crazed laughter. He turns slowly and begins walking out to the loading dock area when he turns back around and snaps his fingers. His eyes return to their normal brown with black irises and immediately, all of the flames disappear, leaving nothing but ash and smoldering remains. He reaches into his pocket and puts his glasses back on.

“Consider this your freebie, Physion. Nothing would have happened to you if you just stayed here, we both know that, but it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?” he says over his shoulder as he walks out.
I snap out of Shadowmind’s psionic transmission and I am back in the meeting room.

“How did he know about me?” I ask in a shaky voice.

“We don’t know, Physion,” Shadowmind says to me. “But he seems to have it out for you.”

I sit for a moment trying to understand what just happened before Rhodes tells me I can leave and he will send a messenger to get me in my room when it is time for the entire group to meet. I get up and walk out, and just as I grab the door handle to turn it, I swear that for a brief second I can smell smoke.