CHAPTER FOUR: ORIGIN

Western United States of America, Earth

January 17, 2012

Bryn Hansen awoke, as he always did, to a freezing room and the sounds of an argument.

He often fantasized about what it would be like to awake in a warm sunny bedroom, filled with the things he liked, and start the day with a hot meal and his parents' love. There would be no arguments, no temper tantrums or punched walls or thrown objects, just a family enjoying the pleasures of a shared breakfast and conversation. Then he would grab his skateboard and ride up the hill to school. Or- scratch that. The perfect life would not involve schooling of any kind. He would have a great job, a nice modest place of his own and enough money to never want for anything at all.

However, this was the life given him and he had to accept it. No use dreaming about what would likely never be. He had to make the best of what he had, even if it was not much at the moment.

The daily shouting matches between his mother and estranged father set his teeth on edge and in the end, the topic being forcefully discussed was always some irrelevant thing like neglected bills or schedules; the fights stayed in memory far longer than the subject of the argument. Bryn often received his mom's leftover ill will simply because he was a convenient target. Which was more important, the cable bill or the people you love? If I died tomorrow, thought Bryn morosely, my mom would probably dig my dead body up and yell at it some more.

Bryn stretched his slender, tightly muscled 5'9" frame and brushed sleep from his green eyes. The wind howled outside and rattled the windows of his unheated bedroom. From the burning sensation in his nose, it was in the neighborhood of forty degrees outside his warm blankets and on the edges of the windows was a lacy film of frost. At least he had blankets. He could hear his mother, on the phone in the kitchen, screaming at his father at the other end of the call.

"I'm being stupid? I'm being stupid!? I'll tell you what's stupid. Stupid is me, standing there at the fucking bank with ten people in line behind me, trying to explain that there's no way three of my checks could have bounced and having the truth shoved right in my face by the fucking bank teller. In front of all those people. And I'll tell you what-"

No doubt his dad was shouting as well. His mom's voice continued, "Oh yeah, like I'm supposed to believe that! Like the car just HAPPENED to break down right before child support is due. Like you just HAD to pay two speeding tickets last month. What about the fucking rent?"

Sleep was a lost cause now. He would be late for school if he slept in any longer, anyway.

Bryn slid from the bunk bed he shared with his six-year-old sister, Serena. He kept his movements to a minimum in case she was still asleep above him. She was indeed still asleep, a shapeless lump wrapped in a Winnie the Pooh quilt with curls of her chestnut red hair poking from beneath the covers. The yelling competitions never bothered her; the girl could sleep through an air raid siren.

Bryn envied her and for a moment, wished he could reverse time and join her in her young innocence. So much wrong with this world, with our lives, with everything, and she doesn't worry about any of it. Stay safe, little sister. Bryn gave her the gentlest of kisses on her downy cheek and tucked the sheets in where she had kicked them loose. She stirred, bringing herself out of a deep dream, and whispered, "Is it time for school?"

"Just for me, because certain lucky kindergarteners like you get the day off today." He gently tickled her through the covers. "See you this afternoon?"

"Love you," said Serena drowsily. She rolled over and was asleep in moments. Bryn then searched the bedroom for things to wear.

There were no set boundaries for each occupant of the bedroom, and junk amalgamated together on the shelves or dresser wherever there was enough space. Because Bryn was fifteen and Serena only six, the room gained a comical duality from their vastly different interests. On the dresser were a set of dusty athletic trophies from Bryn's junior high track team days. These had been pushed aside by a large stuffed giraffe and in front of it was a colorful collection of toy ponies, as if the giraffe was a general leading the plastic horses into battle. The purple beanbag in the center was the only other piece of furniture save the bed and dresser, and it supported a pile of mismatched ballet clothes and Bryn's socks. The walls held several of Serena's kindergarten fingerpaintings and watercolors and a Bob Marley poster which was far older than Bryn. It gives this place some style, he thought.

Bryn silently slipped into his sweatshirt and slung his backpack over one shoulder. His trusty skateboard was tucked under his arm. His attention to appearance consisted of a comb drawn quickly through his unruly black hair. And so he began his day, a day like hundreds of others, just an ordinary high school freshman trying to make it through to the end.

Yet Bryn was not an ordinary fifteen-year-old. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

All across his hometown of Eureka, his classmates were bundling themselves against the bitter January weather and either catching the school bus or getting rides from their parents. Monday mornings meant irritated teachers, homework deadlines and shitty breakfast food in the cafeteria. To them it was just another day with nothing to fear except the wrath of Mrs. Jordan, the hormonal and foul-tempered biology teacher.

For Bryn it was a matter of life and death.

He bypassed the living room where a fire crackled and his mom bawled curses into the phone receiver. It was better to ignore her when she was in these phases, so her anger would go to his overworked father and not him. He felt sympathy for the man, who lived a hundred miles away and worked long hours at a power plant to support the woman who had exiled him. Bryn took an apple from the kitchen to munch on during the commute but, as he found out when he opened the front door, the commute would take longer today. Two inches of snow had fallen during the night and his skateboard was now useless. "What else is new," he muttered.

The long and chilling walk past the dismal apartment complexes, the swimming pool and up the hill to his high school only allowed more time for his fears to percolate inside his mind. These fears were like imaginary friends, or persistent ghosts, in that they never completely left him. He could feel their footsteps behind him when he walked and see their shadows on the walls at night. Namely, they were two: the fear of losing his sister and the fear of others discovering his secret.

This is Bryn: a contradiction in personality and habits, a social hermit viewed as uptight and snobbish when in reality he is simply shy; a person thought cold-hearted but who possesses a heart far overpowering his head; and someone misunderstood and ostracized by his female peers because even if he knows how to love and care for someone else, he sees all girls as shallow and brainless lemmings. He carries love for only one girl, his sister Serena.

Anyone watching them could see they were close, as siblings often are. Bryn and Serena communicated at a level usually reserved for married couples of many years. When his mother was on nightshifts working as a security guard for the gold mine several miles outside of town, the responsibility for feeding and caring for Serena (and for a little while, diapers) fell on her older brother. Thus they grew up together, played together and knew each other like two sides of a coin. The only thing keeping Bryn from leaving the hellhole of his hometown and seeking his fortune elsewhere is the knowledge that no one would be there for her. She is the bright spot in his darkness.

And this is also Bryn: a young man who possesses a secret gift. Or, in his way of thinking, a curse. One that he wishes he was never born with.

---

He remembered the first time it happened. It was a vacation trip to a lake, in the golden years before the divorce. Bryn was eight years old and his mom, mostly happy in her marriage and without as many lines of stress and worry in her face that she carried now, was heavily pregnant with his unnamed baby sister. The sun shone down on a beach of golden sand. A summer breeze whispered through the pine trees around the lake, fluttering beach towels and umbrellas of those who welcomed the onset of summer. The lake itself looked almost fake, its deep picturesque cerulean color too vivid, as if it was plucked from the pages of a child's picture book. Sailboats with vibrant colors bobbed in the distance.

It was early June, and at that time the mountain lake had not fully shed its chill from earlier months of snowmelt. The upper layer of water was temperate but below five feet was paralyzing cold. Only the adventurous (or the scuba divers with insulated wetsuits) were seen swimming, although farther out on the water were jetskis and wakeboarders. Bryn made castles and dug holes in the damp fragrant sand while his dad, full of chesty bravado, jumped flailing into the water while his mom watched and laughed.

An eight-year-old boy will always want to imitate his father. Bryn was no different. Soon he tired of making sand shapes and wandered close to the lapping waves. His parents, ten feet away on the shore, warned him to stay close. Yet he longed for the adrenaline rush of swimming in the lake although he was, in truth, a weak swimmer.

So he waved to his mom and dad as the waves caressed his feet and he waded a few feet out to where his knees were submerged, then his thighs. No one saw it coming: a wave of abnormal size that slammed into the shore. His parents certainly didn't, as they shared an intimate kiss on the beach and their hands explored each other's bodies.

The wave itself was not the true danger. True, it hammered Bryn at waist height with enough force to knock him on his back, but he thought it was all good fun until the water receded and easily pulled his sixty pounds beneath the surface. Another wave followed the first and sucked him deeper. The worst thing was the disorientation of being weightless in the churning water and not knowing what direction to go; he kicked and thrashed to right himself.

The sandy bottom was at that point only three feet below him, close enough that he could stand with head and shoulders exposed in flat water. However, the sudden rapid currents gave him only seconds, not enough time for him to regain his balance and swim for shore. The waves screamed in his ears to match his own muffled screams; the ebb of the current pulled him yet farther, where the bottom suddenly dropped out of reach of his legs: ten, fifteen, twenty feet deep and further into murky blackness. Bryn had only received three swimming lessons so far. He didn't know any of the basic rules of open water swimming or, for that matter, how to swim at all. The lessons on floating seemed a lifetime ago.

In hindsight, all he had to do was relax, roll over, and swim for the shore that was much closer than it seemed. But he panicked. He imagined himself drowning helplessly, suffocated under crushing water with no one to save him. He reflexively gasped for breath and icy cold water seared his throat. At that moment, while his dad ran madly to the shore after noticing his absence, something remarkable happened.

Bryn tried to visualize his next action, which was to orient himself and move his arms toward the surface and oxygen. Instead, the panic overwhelmed all rational impulses. He strained for where he thought the shore would be. Instead of his arms obeying the command of his brain, there was a sudden disorienting flash of orange light, the uncanny sensation of his muscles turning to formless rubber, and beneath him was solid wet sand.

"BRYN!" He heard his dad's shout from a long distance away. His throat was sandpaper and his ears were stoppered by frigid water. Suddenly he felt a towel wrapped around his body and strong arms lifting him up. He violently coughed up the water in his lungs.

Sheer relief at being alive brought hot tears, but he blinked them back because it wasn't like a man to cry. He clutched to his father desperately. "Bryn! You're okay. Shhh, you're okay." Then his mom was there, with comforting touches and kisses, and everything was all right again.

Bryn avoided the water for the rest of that afternoon and stayed near his parents on the beach. His curiosity about what had exactly happened under the lake's surface came much later. His dad, who had seen the strange orange glow but dismissed it as a trick of the sunlight playing across the waves, was too overjoyed to see his son safe to notice that Bryn's appearance on the sand was quite sudden- or, more to the point, that he reappeared twenty feet down the beach from where he had went under.

---

And that, thought Bryn, was only the first time.

He could have dismissed that occasion as a miracle, if it had been the only time such a thing had happened to him. But it wasn't. Seven years later and I still can't really control it.

At twelve Bryn was given several Spider-Man comic books. Naturally, he read through them multiple times and built up the notion that this thing, whatever it was, was his very own superpower. Peter Parker had his spider abilities, his web-shooting and wall crawling, and Bryn could- well, teleport.

The word 'teleportation' carried with it ideas of mad scientists and technology that ordinary people could only dream of, things plucked from a growing comic book collection and the overactive imagination of a young boy. He fancied himself with a cape and secret identity, and a mission of defending the helpless, as Spider-Man did, with his powers. It was a talisman he could carry within his chest and use to boost his self-esteem when his life started to go south following the divorce.

Except teleportation was the wrong word. His experiments with it, done in secret in the sparse woods behind his house, were all failures. He found that it only manifested when he was under extreme duress, for example in danger of imminent drowning, and its results were varied. And unlike his idea of how teleportation was 'supposed' to work, it was not always instantaneous, as the lake incident had been; he had very little control over the end destination. Once, he visualized the base of a spruce tree and willed himself to it, but it felt as if he drifted formlessly through the air for several seconds only to land ten feet short.

One thing struck him during these experiments, though. His body, normally a solid thing, became almost like air. He found that he could pass his hand (or what he thought was his hand, because it too was not solid anymore) through his torso with no resistance. The only strange thing was the orange light that accompanied the transitions. It seemed to emanate from his very skin during a teleport, or a 'phase' as he called it, and during these phases he was invulnerable to any solid objects. Later he became adept at phasing directly through trees and boulders.

Bryn restricted the tests of his newfound power to the forest because he was continually afraid of the telltale glow revealing him to be something different, something other than human. He didn't want his parents finding out, much less his classmates. This thing, which fate (or genetics, radioactive spiders, or cosmic radiation) had bestowed on him, was a gift that he had to safeguard and use in the correct way.

As he grew older, he toyed with it less and less because life had slowly made him afraid of being different. I'm like Peter Parker, Bryn often told himself. We're both outcasts with secrets that we hide from others, for their own good. To protect them as well as us.

The year Bryn fully honed his powers, and the year he later abandoned them, was the year he started sixth grade.

---

Bryn's home life then, two years before the explosive divorce, was the polar opposite of his experiences in elementary school. He woke up each morning dreading to go to school and begged his mother to let him stay home. "Everyone has to go to school," she would tell him, bouncing baby Serena in her arms. "I went to school, and I'm still here. I survived, didn't I? It's the best time of your life because you don't have to pay car insurance and rent and deal with all the problems of being an adult."

He reluctantly stood in the driveway at 7:55 each morning to catch the school bus and on the trip, he would say a silent prayer that the day passed without incident. Wasn't school supposed to be fun? With the nice teachers and playgrounds and everything? Why is it so horrible?

And it was horrible. For Bryn, at least.

Bryn's hometown held about thirteen hundred people within the town limits proper. A town of this size or smaller has a certain dynamic, a clannish and exclusive atmosphere, and compounding this was its distance from any other settlements. The nearest town was seventy miles away. People born and raised there tended to stick together in a jam, and rightly so, because often your neighbor was the best source of help when something went wrong.

However, newcomers to Eureka who moved there for job prospects often found it unwelcoming at first. It was like one of those old gangster movies of the 1940's where a group of families had controlling interests in everything from entertainment to food, only in a much more nebulous way. You were nobody, in other words, until you had set roots down in the town and proved your value and trustworthiness. The opinion of 'locals' mattered more than yours did. Bryn's parents had only lived there for seven years.

The schools were no different. With a school-age population of perhaps 250, divided between the elementary and high school, average class sizes were 15 to 25 per grade. His sixth grade class held sixteen students. These small classes only exaggerated the fact that school-age kids form alliances and tightly regulated cliques, and someone like Bryn, a social loner, was left without any friends in the class. His fiercely independent personality often rubbed others the wrong way without him ever meaning to.

It wasn't like I went looking for trouble, remembered Bryn. When the bullies were claiming the swings or the merry-go-round just because they were bigger than other kids, for no reason other than brute dominance, I would hang around the edges of the playground where the grass was sparse. They never came over there. Besides, the teachers favored their pets and suck-ups who, often enough, were the bullies themselves. It was best to stay out of everyone's way. If you weren't one of them, you were an enemy.

It was a single day that changed all that, a Monday in late April. The day started out well enough. School bus, Power Rangers backpack, paper bag lunch, math class first thing in the morning. Then history and English and spelling. He sat alone at lunch to eat his bologna sandwich and afterward ran to the playground to enjoy the fifteen or so minutes before classes resumed.

The swings were free, Bryn noticed, so he hurried to claim one. He enjoyed the swingset most of all. Every child dreams of flying and the swings were the playground's best simulacrum of flight.

When he reached the apex of the swing's arc, during that split second of near-weightlessness before gravity's inevitable embrace, it also reminded him of the sensation of phasing. All the laws of physics and matter ceased to exist.

Bryn pistoned his legs to get momentum. Just then he heard a girl's shout from the vicinity of the slide directly opposite him. One shout among the clamor of children at play was nothing to worry about, but he saw that its source was a blonde third-grader who had been roughly shoved out of the line for the slide. The shover was a classmate he knew well and hated: David Stern. A dimwitted meathead if there ever was one. He was at the head of a clutch of fifth- and sixth-graders taking possession of the slide and denying entrance to any others.

Letting the swing wind down, he watched as the girl- I think her name is Katie- ran off crying to the nearest teacher. The playground was supposed to be patrolled by three teachers at all times. Today there was only one, the petite kindergarten teacher. Bryn couldn't hear Katie from his distance, but the teacher's advice must have been rubbish because she made no move to discipline the kids at the slide or, at the very least, comfort the crying girl. Katie, in snuffling tears, climbed halfway up the jungle gym and sulked.

Anger boiled hot in Bryn at this injustice. Weren't teachers supposed to uphold fair play? By then his swing had lost all momentum and he watched the slide uneasily. David and the others took turns sliding down in dramatic poses, driving other kids away by their noise and presence alone.

When another girl was shoved, hard enough to knock her into the gravel, Bryn had had enough. Months of anguish at the hands of these idiotic bullies came boiling to the surface- all the snide comments and being tripped in the hallway- and now it was happening to someone else, someone who might not have been able to defend themselves as well as he could. He felt those shoves and hurled insults as if they were all happening to him. Bryn leapt from the swing and walked resolutely over to the slide's ladder.

David Stern never saw it coming.

Bryn anchored his legs and bodyslammed David off the ladder. He made a satisfying thud as he landed and the air was driven out of him. "You little-" he shouted, and came up swinging. But Bryn was ready. He dodged David's lumbering swing which was aimed for his nose- the dirty cheating bastard- with a neat sidestep and countered with a blow to his blubbery stomach.

David was four inches taller than Bryn and had a weight advantage of over fifty pounds, but Bryn was much quicker. Things were not going David's way in the fight at all. "Mess with someone your own size," Bryn bellowed. He hit him again and again, driving him further from the slide with surgical punches. David might have come out of the fight with broken bones had Bryn not forgotten about the other kids behind him.

He aimed another punch at the bully's scowling face but it never connected because someone pinned his arm and another kicked at his ankles. David's friends had come to his assistance and in a matter of seconds Bryn was in a very grim situation. That freckle-faced punk, Jason, had his arms trapped behind him and thus he was an easy target for David's angry fists. David got two punches in, hefty thudding blows to Bryn's ribs and mouth, before Jason released him.

"Teach you to mess with me, you little weasel." He spat on Bryn's shirt.

And in the next three seconds a number of things happened very quickly. Jason locked his arms and pushed Bryn into the hard gravel; David hauled back his foot to aim a kick at Bryn's face; and Bryn- flinched.

He flinched (or more precisely, phased) away from the kick. If successful, that kick would have added several broken teeth to his growing collection of bruises. There was a soundless ripple of brilliant auburn light and Bryn was nowhere near David's foot or any of the attackers. He instantaneously reappeared five feet away, solid and whole and shaking with fury.

"Too scared to fight me one-on-one?" screamed Bryn, spitting blood from his mouth. "Have to get your pussy friends to back you up?" Only then did he realize what had just happened- that his uncontrollable ability had suddenly gained a measure of control. So I have to visualize exactly what I want to happen, at the speed that I want it to happen. Interesting.

But he had also used his ability in front of sixty witnesses, seven of whom were only feet away and witnessed it in all its unbelievable glory.

David Stern, lip bloodied and shirt torn, backed slowly away from Bryn. He had just witnessed something that defied all common sense. That wormy kid Bryn Hansen had almost beaten him senseless, for no reason at all, and just when he was going to teach him a lesson, Bryn vanished and reappeared somewhere else. It was like a magic trick.

Bryn felt his blood turn to water. The kids around him either ran for their lives or remained frozen in place, unable to comprehend any of it, and Bryn caught sight of David running to the teacher- no doubt to tattle him out like a coward. The implications of what he had just done began to sink in. Oh god… what did I just do? Everyone thinks I'm a freak now. That I'm unnatural and dangerous. They're probably going to expel me from school and do weird tests on me and probe me for my secret. I have to get out of here.

Complete silence reigned on the playground. Every kid had seen the fight and known that something extraordinary had happened; the classroom bell rang but no one heeded it. And as for Bryn, he remained rooted to the spot, legs shaking as if they would soon collapse.

The teacher walked resolutely toward him, flanked by David. At least I got some good hits on the fucker.

Then, when she called out his name, no doubt to discipline him and not that slimy kid dogging her heels, Bryn ran. He ran as if a legion of monsters were on his tail. He ignored her frantic shouts and whistle blasts. He ran across the playground, through the gate to the parking lot, and into the trees beyond the hill. He ran well past the limits of his muscles. His breath was deafening and his heart hammered like gunfire. Moments later, he fell to his knees and vomited painfully, but even that didn't slow him down. He wiped puke from his lips and bloody shirt as he ran. Not until he had put a full mile between himself and that abominable schoolyard did Bryn stop.

---

The Eureka school system kept meticulous paperwork on its students. If a girl caught a high fever and went home with her mother, there was a record of it somewhere in one of many file cabinets. Also noted were any 'infractions' as they liked to call them, instances when someone put a toe out of line. One day in the spring of 2012, a newly hired administrative assistant named Robin got the task of reorganizing the records of these crimes and punishments and discarding those older than six years. The file was organized by date and the latest incidents were filed first. Consequently, Robin found that a disturbing number of cases had one student at the bottom of them or tangled up in them somehow. That student was Bryn Hansen.

Intrigued, Robin pulled out several folders and examined their contents. Each one represented two months. Here was a record of a fight which left two teenagers in the hospital. And there: an account of a vandalized locker and destroyed belongings, with no culprit named but Bryn Hansen suspected. Interesting that such a small school has such troublemakers and unsolved mysteries, thought Robin.

Bryn was not a bad kid in the mold of delinquent losers destined for thirty years of dead-end jobs and brushes with law enforcement. Life simply dealt him a bad hand.

No memories from the days after that playground fight were any good. Ever since that fateful day his life had been a swift tailspin starting with the month-long suspension from school following the fight. If it had been up to him, he would have abandoned school and become a runaway, but his parents would have none of that. The suspension was, of course, in addition to the severe parental beating Bryn received for his behavior.

Bryn got the feeling that not even the elementary school principal knew what to make of the whole affair. The staff was dealing with him as they would any other dangerous and incorrigible student, and that was a thirty-day quarantine interspersed with harsh words detailing the consequences if he did not 'shape up'.

His suspension allowed ample time for his mind to wander and think about the circumstances that had landed him here. Often he wondered where his head had been. All he had to do was stay on the swingset, ignore the bullies, and mind his own business. No one was getting hurt, right? Except that Katie girl's emotions, perhaps. But he HAD to start that fight and end up blowing the secret he had worked so hard to safeguard.

Had he truly been fighting for the benefit of Katie or those like her, the victims of a few bad apples like David Stern, or only to satisfy his own misguided sense of justice and personal superiority? And what was the difference?

He avoided thinking about the years in between that incident and the present day. It was a time in his life that he wished he could erase.

The truth hit Bryn during the summer after sixth grade. He had emerged from suspension to find that most of his peers either shunned or openly antagonized him. It was more of the same, really: jeering comments, purposefully tripping him on the school bus or in the classroom aisles, even spitting in his lunch tray. The naked truth about bullying is that in order for it to stop, either the authority (in this case, the school administration) needs to put an end to it or the bully needs to reach an understanding with the bullied. Bryn soon learned that the teachers were in no hurry to enforce these rules, and when they did, he was treated as equally guilty.

What was a guy to do? Was it his fault that when his lunch tray was spit upon and knocked to the floor, he grabbed the tray and used it to knock the two offenders unconscious? Or that time his locker was smashed and the books inside vandalized. Not only did the principal blame Bryn for destroying his own belongings, he tried to make him pay the school back for the damage.

The school treated him as a budding criminal. His classmates feared him. But as Bryn walked the fine line between intermittent detention and expulsion, he realized that there was no other course. The only one that would stand up for him was himself. And if it meant going against how things were done around here, so be it. He would not submit to them. He had scars from fights and gave many more in turn; even as he became known for being violent and unstable, he grew more introverted and shy and avoided confrontations. Fighting was his one way of dealing with those who just had to fuck with him. Needless to say, he never used his powers again following the sixth grade fight. Ordinary punches (or in extreme cases, hard plastic lunch trays) worked just fine.

In his heart Bryn only wanted to be done with high school and go his own way. Only three more months and three years of this hell. Then I'm free.

---

Resolutely, Bryn walked up to the main doors of his high school. He was ready for whatever the day had to throw at him. Little did he know that the day had momentous events in store, and they would not simply be thrown at him but loaded into a gun and pointed squarely at his head.