The cold morning air inside the ground-floor warehouse smelled of damp sawdust, machine oil, and old iron.
Pietro stretched his arms over his head, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. "So what do we do first?" he asked, looking around the empty concrete floor. "You going to teach us how to throw punches, or do we sit on the floor and breathe until we see things?"
"This isn't a temple, Pietro," Adrian said, stepping forward. "And you aren't monks. We don't have time to sit around humming for ten years."
Wanda stood beside her brother, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her wool sweater. "Then how does it work?"
"It's biology," Adrian answered plainly. "Power in this world lives in your nerves, your blood, and your genes. When that mortar hit your house, the shock woke up something inside you. But your bodies put a lock on it right away. Your brains are trying to protect your hearts from burning out. Left alone, it could take years to open—or it might blow up when you lose your temper."
He looked at Wanda. "I'm going to unlock the door for you."
Wanda swallowed hard, but she didn't step back. "Will it hurt?"
"A little," Adrian said. "Stay still."
Adrian raised his right hand and pressed his fingertips gently against the side of Wanda's head.
Using Cassandra Nova's template, he reached straight into her nervous system. He ignored her thoughts and focused purely on the biological wiring. Deep behind her temples, buried under layers of stress and fear, sat a dormant cluster of energy—a jagged, sleeping crimson current.
Adrian sent a sharp psionic spark directly into the blocked neural pathways. He acted like a jumper cable on a dead battery, forcing the dormant circuits to open.
Snap.
Wanda gasped, her head snapping back. Her dark eyes turned a brilliant, glowing red.
A sudden wave of crimson shockwave blasted out from her body in every direction. The air cracked like thunder. Ten feet away, an empty steel oil drum crumpled like an empty soda can, and the nearest glass window shattered into dust.
Adrian didn't flinch. He threw out his left hand, snapping up an invisible telekinetic barrier around her. The red shockwave slammed into his mental wall with a heavy thud, rattling his teeth, but the shield held firm.
"Breathe, Wanda," Adrian said, his voice cutting through the ringing air. "Drop your shoulders. Don't push it out. Let it settle."
Wanda took a ragged breath. The glowing red in her eyes faded back to brown.
She lifted her trembling hands in front of her face. Thin, curling ribbons of red mist were actively coiling around her fingers, crackling with tiny sparks of light before drifting away into the air. For the first time in her life, the energy was real, visible, and answering her call.
"What... what is this?" Wanda whispered, staring at her hands in shock.
"Your power," Adrian said, lowering his shield. "The lock is broken. Now it's yours to steer."
Pietro stared at his sister's glowing fingers, his mouth hanging open. Then he turned to Adrian, his eyes wide with excitement. "Me next. Do me."
"Turn around," Adrian told him.
Adrian pressed two fingers against the side of Pietro's neck, right over his pulse.
He sent a quick, precise pulse of bio-electric energy into Pietro's spine. The signal rushed down the boy's spinal cord, forcing his motor neurons and metabolic rate to jump. Pietro's heartbeat suddenly accelerated, thumping against his ribs like a machine gun.
Pietro flinched—and vanished.
WHOOSH.
A blast of wind tore through the warehouse, kicking up a cloud of loose dust and wood shavings.
Thirty feet across the concrete floor, a pile of wooden crates exploded into splinters.
Pietro sat up from the broken wood, coughing and shaking sawdust from his hair. He looked down at his boots, then looked back at where he had been standing a split second earlier. A wide, manic grin spread across his face.
"Did you see that?" Pietro yelled, scrambling to his feet. "Everything stopped moving! The dust was just floating in the air!"
"You also crashed into a wall because you didn't look where you were running," Adrian said, wiping a speck of dust from his sleeve. "Fast doesn't mean smart. You have to teach your eyes to keep up with your legs."
Before Pietro could brag any more, a series of heavy bangs slammed against the depot's outer metal gate.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
"Mr. Kovac! Are you in there?" a panicked voice shouted from the yard.
Adrian signaled for Wanda and Pietro to step behind a stack of crates. Wanda clenched her fists, and the red mist around her knuckles vanished cleanly.
Adrian walked to the small service door, slid the latch, and pulled it open.
Standing outside in the cold fog was Luka, the elderly yard foreman. He was wearing a grease-stained wool cap, his breath fogging in the freezing air, his face pale with worry.
"What happened, Luka?" Adrian asked.
"It's the main substation down by track four, sir," Luka said, catching his breath. "The old transformer blew out ten minutes ago. Sparks flew everywhere. The electric cranes are dead, two trainloads of grain and flour are stuck on the rails, and the heating just went out in forty worker apartment buildings down the block."
"Did you call the city utility office?"
"I did," Luka said bitterly, spitting into the gravel. "The city clerk told me they don't have parts for the south ward. Said we can wait until next month. Mr. Kovac, people have little kids in those flats. If the heat stays off in this weather, folks are going to freeze."
Adrian looked over his shoulder. Pietro and Wanda had stepped out from the shadows, listening to every word.
"Grab the heavy tool kit by the workbench, Pietro," Adrian said. "We're going to take a look."
Five minutes later, they stood outside the fenced transformer yard near the tracks.
A crowd of thirty railway workers and cold residents had gathered near the chain-link fence, stamping their boots in the mud to stay warm. Above them, the heavy steel housing of the substation transformer was blackened with soot, thin grey smoke leaking from its ventilation slots.
Suddenly, a loud snap echoed through the yard.
An overhead support cable on the electric cargo crane had snapped from the sudden power surge. The heavy steel cable whipped down through the air like an iron whip, heading straight toward two older mechanics standing near the fence.
The workers yelled, freezing in panic.
Before anyone could blink, a silver blur cut across the mud.
Pietro moved before his brain had time to second-guess. He caught the whipping end of the steel cable in mid-air, spun on his heel, and wrapped the loose line three times around a heavy iron mooring post, locking it tight before the whiplash could hit anyone.
He let go of the cable, hopped backward, and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets like nothing had happened.
The two mechanics blinked, staring at the secured cable, completely dumbfounded. "How did that...?"
"Wind must have caught it," Pietro said with a smug grin, though his chest was heaving.
Adrian stepped past the crowd and climbed the rusted metal ladder up to the transformer platform. He unlatched the heavy steel access panel and swung it open.
Inside, the thick copper busbars were scorched black, melted together into a useless lump of slag.
Adrian pulled a pair of heavy pliers from the tool kit so the crowd below saw what they expected to see. But underneath the steel casing, where no one could see his fingers, he used micro-telekinesis.
He gripped the melted copper on an atomic level, prying the burnt metal apart, smoothing the scorched contacts, and bridging the broken circuit with clean, re-aligned wire.
As the connection closed, a wild electrical arc flared violently, threatening to blow the circuit breaker again.
Standing at the base of the ladder, Wanda saw the blue spark jump.
She didn't think; she reacted. Her dark eyes hardened, and a tiny, needle-thin beam of red hex light shot from her fingers, striking the transformer housing. The erratic voltage instantly grounded out, the dangerous spike flattening into a smooth, steady current.
Adrian reached down and slammed the heavy iron lever upward.
CLACK.
A deep, rhythmic hum vibrated through the steel platform.
High above the rail tracks, the giant floodlights flickered, buzzed, and burst into bright white light. Down the street, chimney smoke began to rise again as electric blowers kicked on, and warm light poured through the windows of every tenement on the block.
The crowd of workers fell silent for three seconds, staring at the glowing streetlamps.
Then, a loud cheer went up from the rail yard.
Luka ran forward, grabbing Adrian's hand the moment his boots hit the ground, shaking it furiously. "You fixed it! The city said it would take weeks, and you got it running in ten minutes!"
Workers crowded around, patting Adrian on the back and offering hurried thanks. A couple of older men offered Pietro cigarettes, which the boy politely declined with an embarrassed laugh, while several women smiled warmly at Wanda, thanking them for helping the district.
Adrian politely waved off the praise, keeping his voice modest. "Just loose copper, Luka. Get the cranes moving and unload that flour. People need bread tonight."
"Right away, Mr. Kovac!" Luka shouted, turning to bark orders at his crew. "You heard the man! Get those engines started!"
Adrian, Pietro, and Wanda walked back toward the depot through the muddy tracks.
Pietro was still buzzing, flexing his fingers over and over. "That was incredible. We actually did something out there. No hiding in a hole."
"You did well with that cable," Adrian admitted, glancing at him. "And you handled the arc cleanly, Wanda."
Wanda looked at her hands, a quiet confidence settling in her face. "It felt... natural. Like waking up an arm that was asleep."
"Enjoy the feeling, but keep your heads down," Adrian said as they reached the red-brick office steps. He looked back at the bright lights glowing over the southern district.
"The power is back on in the dead ward," Adrian said quietly, turning the brass door key. "The city hall bureaucrats and the other militia captains will hear about this before sunset. Tomorrow, they'll want to know who is running the south."