Sixers

A bomb screamed overhead, then dropped somewhere far enough in front of me that my old Ford pickup truck absorbed most of the shock and the boom. Flinching, I wondered which of the skyscrapers had been hit this time. I hadn’t thought there were any left to come down. From my left, the morning sun flickered, shadow, haze, shadow, haze, and I throttled my urge to drive faster, instead easing carefully around the holes in the pavement.

The current war had come to my city only ten days ago, but already so many buildings had been mol-decked, so many lives taken, leaving gaping holes in the skyline and gaping holes in families.

The molecular decohesifiers were supposed to be more humane, instantly breaking the connections between molecules and then sucking into their own relatively tiny black holes, leaving almost nothing behind, or so the scientists said.

But theboom from the black holes collapsing shook the surrounding buildings like small earthquakes, causing some of those buildings to come down too, damage the politicians claimed was “avoidable” if buildings were “kept up to code.”

Having random bits of sludge left behind instead of bodies didn’t make the deaths any cleaner or easier for the survivors.

In my opinion.

The gas mask on my face shifted, bumping up against my tech goggles, and I winced. The raw spot on my left cheekbone would probably be bleeding by the time I reached my son’s house, forty miles away.

Forty miles would have been nothing before, but now … ?

My son.

Panic and fear and the need to see him safe surged up inside me hard enough that my foot hit the accelerator and my old truck—just as disguised as I was—roared forward.

The bumper struck an abandoned car, and Ipushed inside my head, using a wisp of magic to shove it out of the way. It hurt like poking a bruise, but pain and I were old friends.

Sixers, they called us, from sixth-sensers, now that they had equipment sensitive enough toprove our magic existed, only what the three-letter agencies didn’t know waseveryone had that sixth sense, just some more than others. It was like having blue eyes or a gift for painting—stronger in some, weaker in others, but always there in the population somewhere.

Lila had told me. She had been my roommate during the eternity-long six weeks I’d been held in their facilities, prodded, poked, and tested, until they’d finally admitted that though I tested off the charts, I was useless to them.

They didn’t understand that my gift was actually a touch ofall the gifts, which meant I couldn’t do anything flashy. No fire starting more than a candle. No healing more than a simple, shallow cut. No seeing the future more than a feeling of dread or excitement. Certainly no reading minds or influencing them or anything useful.

I could move things with my mind—barely—like I did now, helping my old truck to push the car out of the way, and my sense of the future was that I was supposed to be here, now, heading across the torn-up city to my boy’s house.

I’d left the government facility with a shiny, laminated card explaining my “disability” and a sense of relief that they’d let me go.

As far as I knew, Lila had never gotten out. She was too valuable.

A man stepped out into the road ahead of me. He wore dusty black BDUs and a balaclava, with a handgun strapped to his thigh and a rifle half-slung over one shoulder, his dark-brown skin showing only between his gloves and his sleeves. His goggles were cleaner than mine. His partner, a woman, watched me from the other side of the road.

The first checkpoint.

I slowed the truck to