{I remember… looking at the sun.}

{The sun?}

{Yeah, I had… always liked to notice the sun on a nice day. I didn’t actually know what I was seeing during that moment. I just thought to myself, ‘oh, at least it’s still a nice day today, the sun must be bright right now’ and then… I saw it.}

{That’s the last thing you thought about?}

{My birth parents and my foster parents are dead, Ajax, I don’t have anyone else I wanted to think about right then. Your family is important to me too, but I didn’t think about them in my last moments… Wow, that sounds really sad when I say it out loud.}

{No, I’m sorry, I can’t judge you for that. Near death experiences are more unconscious than conscious. So… what was it like?}

{What?}

{The sun, you know?}

{It’s… not something I can really describe in words. Let’s just say that there’s a reason why it’s worshiped across so many religions. It wasn’t something that could have blinded me when I saw it in that vision, but… it had a heavy presence. That’s the best way I can describe it. By the way, you’ve tried staring directly at the sun already, right?}

{Yeah, during one of the sunrises, I realized I could do it.}

{It sure is… something, isn’t it? I’ve noticed that my healing is faster than the rate at which the sun can blind me. So, its light doesn’t really feel as intense as when we were back on Earth. But, what can I say? It’s the sun. You can’t help but pause… Well, looking at the sun in that vision is like that but times a billion at least…}

{I see.} Ajax smiles to himself. He had seen his family, but she had seen something divine.

But, she isn’t sharing the full truth. It was true that for a brief moment she had seen the sun. What a sight it was. As if she was looking into the face of God.

But, there were others she had seen as well. She had seen the mayor of New Amsterdam City. He had pushed to destroy homeless encampments like the one she had been living in. His administration didn’t provide any increased funding for homeless shelters or youth group homes either.

She can still remember the day the cops started tearing the tents down. Some people there were undocumented immigrants who were captured by the police for deportation. There were some old people, disabled people, and mentally ill people as well. The possessions that they had were simply thrown away.

But, what was the mayor doing when she was on her way to Omicron? He wasn’t at the office. He wasn’t giving in front of a crowd. He wasn’t even with his family. He was at a golf course. He was there with two other old pricks she didn’t recognize. He was smiling. The thought of it fills her with a coldness.

He was not the only person she had seen.

There was a man sitting down to breakfast with his family. He was with his wife and adult children. They were having fried chicken and waffles with syrup. He looked quite different than how she had seen him in pictures. He was much older, a cane near his chair. He was talking to his daughter.

The glimpse she got of his family looked like it came out of a painting.

It was sickening.

The man is retired now but nineteen years ago, he was a cop. Shaula had learned that her parents were killed by this cop in a car accident. The off-duty cop had hit his parents’ car and they had died. The police ruled that her parents were at fault. However, Shaula learned that the cop in question had a history of drunk driving charges.

Shaula knew what this man had done. She could see the truth like a searing bolt of lightning. She knew that the force had covered up his crimes. He had faced no punishment, and now he’s retired, living out his days with his family.

Shaula had also seen her foster parents’ graves. She had never visited them in person. She then saw what her foster brothers were doing. In her foster family, she was treated not as their real children were. Her foster mother had hated her sister, Shaula’s mother, and took out that anger on Shaula.

Her foster father was even worse. She had seen their gravestones, and felt contentment. Then, she had seen her foster brothers, and her contentment vanished. They had treated her like an insect. They knew what their parents had done to her and ignored it.

They were also living without their punishment. They were just fine.

It was her dream to exact vengeance upon these people she saw. Her true dream. She would first have to complete her schooling, and properly decouple from Ajax and his family. They could not be implicated.

Then, she would have to plan how she would kill them. She had too much taken from her already to just forget what was done to her. She absolutely had to end their lives.

She would have her pound of flesh.

This dream was what prevented her from sinking into pure despair when she was on the streets. It was like a warm fire that kept her sane prior to meeting Ajax. But, now she’s in this world, unable to fulfill that dream.

On the other hand, if she returns to Earth, she now has all the tools needed to fulfill her dream. She wouldn’t even be caught.

Now that she can never sleep, she can never have nightmares about what has been done to her. Nightmares of her hated enemies living their lives in peace would never visit her again. It is one of the good things about losing that human feature.

She is brought back to reality by Ajax. He is more interested in the power they had used.

{Shaula… The power we used. I think it is like the ability to move through space, right? Like, we had an origin point: where we were in that classroom. We had a destination point: where we landed in the Mega forest. It wasn’t like traveling at the speed of light, it was more like we went through… a wormhole, I think.}

{Honestly, I never learned any of the sci-fi shit you did. How does a wormhole work exactly?}

Ajax shows Shaula an analogy using a sheet of paper. To cross between two points on a flat sheet of paper, you could connect the two points with a line. But, if you folded the paper so that the two points overlap, you could strike a much shorter pathway through.

{Actually… I do remember the starmap changing. I didn’t know what was happening, what I was looking at, you know? It was like… space was being torn. But, not like a wormhole or a portal, more like space was bending and twisting… and that bending caused it to… shred.}

{I think I know what that was. With the paper, we can think of the line as traveling in two dimensions. In order to fold the paper to connect the origin and destination to create the ‘wormhole’, we’d have to make use of our third dimension. So, how would a wormhole in three dimensional space work?}

{...Folding space while in the 4th dimension? So are you saying that in order to activate our power, we’ll have to learn how to access the fourth dimension or something?}

{Not quite, I think our power accesses the fourth dimension for us. If we think of using it like magic, then what we would have to do is feed an origin point, a destination, and the region of space between the two points. That feels like the most intuitively correct way to access the power. I think… in order to go home, we’d need to learn how to use that star map. For both, the origin and destination, as well as knowledge of the space between.}

{...Where did you get all that from? Ajax, I have no idea how to do that. I know how the star map was used, but… that came from somewhere else, somewhere outside of myself, you know?}

{I have the same suspicion. But, we can still crawl before we can fly, right? Think about it. That star map, it basically involved an understanding of the space around us and two coordinates, right?}

{Uh huh?}

{So, what if I were to take this bronze coin…} Ajax picks up a bronze coin.

{You see this, right? What if I were to imagine this bronze coin, moving from a spot on my bed to a spot on the floor over there?} Ajax points from his bed to a specific tile a few meters away.

{Visualize… I think I get what you’re doing. It is pretty important to check if we can replicate this power on a small scale. We can… use the memory of having already used that power, just with different origin and destination coordinates, and a different understanding of the space between them.}

Ajax and Shaula take this new idea and both attempt to apply it. Shaula takes her own bronze coin. She imagines the origin of her bed and the destination of the tile floor first. She then imagines the space between the two points. Then, she reaches into herself for that power.

Ajax follows this same process. They both can feel that power within them. They can understand what it is like to activate it. After all, it was done for them once already. Getting a good hold on their power, they brace themselves.

They try to move their coins to their destinations. This is when they see a sign that they are on the right track.