Brandon Sanderson - Firefight

She moved to pull away, but I held on tight.

“Megan,” I said, stepping around her and meeting her eyes. “Let’s at least try .”

“I …” She took a deep breath. “Sparks, you’re hard to ignore.”

I smiled.

Finally, she turned and pulled me toward an abandoned tent, really just a cloth propped up on one side by a pole mounted in the rooftop. “If we’re going to do this, you have to understand,” Megan said softly, “that my powers are not what they seem.”

“The illusions?”

“Not exactly.”

She squatted down in the shadows of the abandoned tent, and I joined her, uncertain what we were hiding from. Likely she just wanted to be sheltered as she talked, not so out in the open. But there was something very hesitant about her.

“I …” She bit her lip. “I’m not an illusion Epic.”

I frowned but didn’t object.

“You haven’t figured it out?” Megan asked. “That time back in Newcago in the elevator shaft, when you and I were close to being spotted by guards. They shined a flashlight right on us.”

“Yeah. You made an illusion of darkness to hide us.”

“And did you see any darkness?”

“Well, no.” I frowned. “Does this have to do with the dowser?” It was the device-a real piece of technology, so far as I knew-that scanned a person and determined if they were an Epic or not. The Reckoners tested everyone in their team with some regularity. “I never did figure out how you fooled it. You could have created an illusion on the screen to cover the real result, but …”

“The dowser records its results,” Megan finished for me.

“Yeah. If Tia or Prof ever looked back at its logs, they’d have noticed a positive identification of an Epic. I can’t believe they never did that.” I focused on Megan, her face lit softly by some glowing spraypaint beneath us. “What are you?”

Megan hesitated, then spread her hands to her sides, and suddenly her wet clothing was dry. It changed, in an eyeblink, from a jacket and fitted tee to a jacket and green blouse, then a dress, then rugged camouflage military gear. The changes came faster and faster, different outfits flickering over her figure, and then her hair started changing. Different styles, different colors. Skin tones soon joined the mix. She was Asian, she was pale with freckles, she had skin darker than Mizzy’s.

She was using her powers. That put my hair on end, even though I had been the one to encourage her.

“With my powers,” she said, a hundred different versions of her face passing in a few moments, “I can reach into, and touch, other realities.”

“Other realities?”

“I once read a book,” Megan continued, her flickering features and clothing finally returning to her normal self, wet jacket and all, “that claimed there were infinite worlds, infinite possibilities. That every decision made by any person in this world created a new reality.”

“That sounds bizarre.”

“Says the man who just flew through a city using a device powered by the corpse of a dead Epic.”

“Well, research derived from a dead Epic,” I corrected.

“No,” Megan said. “An actual corpse. The ‘research’ involves using bits of dead Epic and drawing their abilities forth. What did you think the motivator on that machine was?”

“Huh.” Mizzy had said the motivators were each individual to the device. So … like, individual because they had a piece of a dead Epic in them? Probably just the mitochondrial DNA , I thought. The Reckoners harvested it from dead Epics, and used it as currency.… That was what made the motivator work. It made some sense. Creepy sense, at least.

“Anyway,” Megan said, “we’re not talking about motivators right now. We’re talking about me.”

“That happens to be one of my favorite topics,” I said, though I felt jarred. If Megan’s powers were what she said, it meant I’d been wrong. All those years, I’d been certain I knew what Firefight was, that I’d figured out a secret nobody else knew. So much for that.

“Best I can tell,” Megan said, “I pull one of those other realms-those not -places of possibility never attained-into our own, and for a time skew this reality toward that one.

That night, in the elevator shaft, we weren’t there.”

“But-”

“And we were,” Megan continued. “To those men looking for us, the shaft was empty. In the reality they inspected, you and I had never climbed up there. I presented for them another world.”

“And the dowser?”

“I presented to it a world where there was no Epic for it to find.” She took a deep breath. “Somewhere, there’s a world-or maybe just a possibility of one-where I don’t carry this burden. Where I’m just me again.”

“And what about Firefight?” I asked. “The image you showed the world, the fire Epic?”

Megan hesitated, then raised her hand.

An Epic appeared in front of us. A tall, handsome man with clothing aflame and a face that seemed molten. Eyes that glowed, a fist that dripped trails of fire, like burning oil. I could actually feel the heat, just faintly.

I glanced at Megan. She didn’t seem to be losing control despite using her powers. When she spoke, it was her voice-the her I knew.

“If there’s a world where I don’t have powers,” Megan said, looking at the imposing figure, “there is one where I have different powers. It’s easier to summon forth some possibilities than it is to summon others. I don’t know why. It isn’t like this one is similar to our world. In it, I have a completely different power set, and beyond that …”

“You’re a dude,” I said, noticing the similarity of features.

“Yeah. Kind of disconcerting, you know?”

I shivered, looking over this burning Epic that could have been Megan’s twin. I’d been way off about her abilities.

I stood up, meeting Firefight’s gaze. “So you don’t have to … like, swap places with him or anything? To bring him here, I mean?”

“No,” she said. “I pull shadows from another world into this one. That warps reality around the shadow in strange ways, but it’s all still just a shadow. I can bring him here, but I’ve never seen his world.”

“Does he … know I’m here?” I asked, glancing at Megan.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I can get him to do what I want, mostly, but I think that’s because my powers seek out a reality where he was already going to do what it is I want him to do.…”

I met those burning eyes, and they seemed to be able to see me. They seemed to know me. Firefight nodded his head to me, then vanished.

“I felt heat,” I said, looking at Megan.

“That varies,” she said. “Sometimes, when I swap in the other reality-splicing it into our own-it’s shadowy and indistinct. Other times, it’s almost real.” She grimaced. “We’re supposed to be hiding, aren’t we? I shouldn’t be going around summoning High Epics that glow in the night.”

“I think that was awesome,” I said softly.

I immediately regretted my words. These were powers Megan had just said she didn’t want to have. They corrupted her, sought to destroy her. Complimenting her powers was sort of like complimenting someone with a broken leg on how white their bone was as it stuck from their skin.

But she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, I could swear she blushed a little. “It’s not much,” she said. “Really, it’s a lot of work for a simple effect. Surely you’ve read of Epics who could make illusions of whatever they want without having to pull some alternate reality out of their pocket.”