Powers Unveiled

She can’t stop staring at her hands.

They’re just hands—pale, sharp-knuckled, too-long nails bitten to dull rounds. But in the shivering half-light of dawn, they hum. When Lila exhales, a faint shimmer ripples over her skin, like sunlight trapped under water.

She clenches her fists, desperate for the sensation to stop. Maybe this is what a nervous breakdown looks like. She presses her back into the headboard until the wood creaks. But nothing fades—the room still pricks with restless, living dark. Shadows pile in the corners, crawling over messy stacks of textbooks and the battered laundry basket. Her heart won’t slow.

Bedroom door closed, curtains drawn, she forces herself to move. Tea—it always helps. The kitchen is barely bigger than a closet, crowded with mismatched mugs and an unsteady table. She reaches for the kettle, but stops. Her hands shake too fiercely—she flings them away, frustration fizzing in her chest.

Suddenly, the shadow of the kettle—thick and stretched across the counter—lurches toward her, drawn by the motion of her hands. Lila chokes back a scream. The dark pools at her feet, twisting, reaching up her shins like black water flooding the tiles. She backs up, heart stuttering.

A glimmer—something bright—spills from her palm. Silver, sharp as starlight, splinters the air. She sucks in breath, stumbling into the kitchen counter, eyes wild. The glimmer fades, and the heavy darkness slumps away, shivering outwards until it’s no different from any other shadow.

Lila slides down the cabinet, knees pulled to her chest. Dream, she thinks. Hallucination. She squeezes her eyes shut. The noise of rain on the glass is the only reality for a long time. Her phone buzzes on the table—Tommy, probably, asking if she wants to walk to class together. She ignores it. How could she face anyone, like this?

She drifts—half awake, not quite anywhere—until her mind settles. She opens her eyes and swears softly. The kitchen clock reads 7:45, and sunlight is leaking stubbornly through the blinds. The shadows are normal now. Everything is utterly, mercilessly mundane. But she can’t shake what she felt—the way the darkness wanted her. The glimmer of answering light, bright and fierce.

She shuffles to the bathroom. Her face in the mirror is gaunt, eyes red-rimmed, hair jutting out like a copper halo. She washes her hands, scrubbing until her knuckles sting.

---

School is impossible. She calls in sick, her voice rough with sleep, inventing a cold. The lie tastes sour. Afterward, she closes her laptop and sits cross-legged on her bed, breathing deep. Logic, she whispers to herself, like her mother used to. Figure it out. Test it.

She turns off every light, closes the blackout curtains. The room dims to an underwater gloom. Her chest vibrates, a strange tension pressed below her collarbone—restlessness that feels less like fear and more like electric hunger.

She spreads her fingers, palm open in the darkness. "Come on," she whispers, half-ashamed. Her eyes dart to the smudged calendar on her wall, then back to her hand. She takes another breath. Thinks of last night—of her fear, that helpless panic—lets it burn in her, a tiny fire.

A change—the darkness on the floor pools, thickens. It rises like smoke, like velvet ink, up her fingers. Her skin tingles, hairs standing up on her arm. Lila bites down on a gasp. With a trembling, instinctive nudging of thought, she tries to pull the darkness up. It obeys. The shadow circles her wrist, cool and slick, flickering with threads of chill silver light.

Tears sting her eyes—not from pain, but from relief and terror all twisted together. She lets the feeling surge. The shadow erupts—blossoming out like a flower, petals of shadow and sharp flashes of silver. For a moment, her room is a strange planet, moonlit and bright-dark.

Then it gutters. Darkness shrivels back, peeling off into the corners. The hunger in her chest dims, replaced by exhaustion. She falls to her hands and knees on the beige rug, gasping.

It’s real. She can move the dark—pull it, mold it, spin it into light. Lila stares at her hands, awed and devastated. Why her? What did this mean? What else could she do?

---

She spends the next hours testing, experimenting, heart galloping. With the curtains open, she tries to coax golden slivers of sunlight through the air. At first, nothing. But when she remembers her mother’s voice from childhood—soft and musical, saying, Focus, Lila. Notice everything—she manages something extraordinary. She cups a glittering mote of light in her palm, feels the radiant warmth bead on her skin like dew. It flickers and dies, but for just a moment, it was there—her light, hers to shape.

She loses track of time, sinking into the sensation of power and strangeness until hunger pins her back to the world. The clock reads one. Venturing into the living room, she mans up the nerve to dig through the stacks of moving boxes her dad never unpacked in the wake of her mom’s vanishing, all shrouded under dust covers.

The first layers are old books, photos, and crumpled posters. One box, marked in her mother’s neat script—Moore Family History: Private—is taped half-heartedly. Lila’s fingers fumble with the lid, guilt gnawing at her for prying, but something pushes her on.

Inside: yellowed letters, a stack of battered composition books, a silver locket she remembers from childhood. At the bottom, an oilcloth notebook, cover faded but sturdy. Her heartbeat thuds as she opens it.

The first page is addressed to her mother—For you, Marion, in looping hand. The entries are sporadic, decades old, scrawled in excited shorthand. She skims, searching for anything strange. Then:

July 18—Again, the dusklight followed me home. Shadows bent around my footsteps—brighter than dusk, sharper than fear. Mother said it skips a generation, but I dream of stars flickering between my fingers...

Lila’s pulse stutters. She flips through more:

Sometimes the light answers back. Like singing, inside my bones.

And later: If you’re reading this, Marion, remember—our blood holds more than memory. Don’t forget the oath: help the unseen, heal the unseen. Always. Love, Mother.

Lila sits in numb shock. It’s not an accident. This... whatever lives inside her, it runs back generations.

Her mind spins. Carefully, she tucks the diary away. She closes her palms, and the muggy, late-afternoon sun paints the room amber. When she thinks—really thinks—about the man in the alley, the guilt and terror give way to something new. If you’re reading this, remember—help the unseen.

She glances out the window, city awash in dusk. Sirens howl, distant and forlorn. She thinks about what she could do: shield someone with a wave of shadow, melt away from danger, shine a beacon so bright it cuts through any night. The city is dark, but she—she might be able to bring light.

For the first moment in days, hope threads through her chest. It’s fragile, buzzing, not yet fully real. But it’s hers. She looks at her hands—their trembling, their scars, and the ghost-glimmer beneath the skin—and imagines who she could become.