Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

My amazing cargo elevator stunt didn’t work. Neither did hiding. We are running out of options here, and if at least one of us doesn’t come up with something good, we are well and truly fucked. We may as well just cut to the chase and throw ourselves out the—

My hand strays to my belt. To the giant metal buckle there. Annie’s one is identical.

I reach back with my PK and grab the ergonomic chair behind the desk. The seat is mesh and foam, but it’s supported by a metal frame. There’s a single leg jutting down from below the seat. The base has five points, each with a roller ball, so its owner can scoot around the office when he’s bored. It’s easy to lift and heavy enough for what I have planned. I might have fucked up with the elevator, but not even I could get gravity wrong.

“What the hell are you doing?” Annie says. “That’s not gonna stop them.”

“Got that right.”

I hurl the chair at the plate-glass window. Which doesn’t break. With a deep boing , the chair bounces back into the room, nearly braining Annie in the process.

She stumbles back, hands raised. “Jesus!”

“Sorry.”

Abruptly, whoever is hammering on the door stops. Someone shouts at the others to make room. Which means they’re going to shoot the lock off.

“Frost,” Annie says. She’s using my last name, which must mean she’s really pissed.

There’s a muffled bang from behind the door. The lock judders, but holds.

Snarling, I lift the chair high, turning it so its underside is pointed right at the glass.

Annie shakes her head. “No.”

“Yeah.”

“No. No! ”

I sprint towards her. And as I move, I hurl the chair at the window.

It punches right through. As a rush of roaring wind fills the room, I grab Annie around the waist and hurl us after it as a second gunshot blows the lock off the door.

Which just about brings us up to speed.

Let me tell you a little something about psychokinesis.

Everyone has these ideas about what you can actually do with it. Scalpel-less surgery, using air molecules as an infinitely sharp blade. Getting a job as an assassin, and pinching off blood vessels or ripping hearts open without even touching your victim.

Yeah. No.

There are a hundred dumb Reddit threads about how many magic tricks you could pull off, or how you could make amazing smoke rings. Whoop-de-fucking-do. Also, gambling. People online love to spitball about how PK could help you win a ton of money, influencing roulette wheels or craps dice. Tanner gave me a friendly warning about that once: If I ever catch you in a casino, I will bury you in the deepest, darkest hole I can find .

Plenty of people online claim they have PK, but you only have to do about five seconds’ worth of digging to see that they’re lying out of their asses. If they really could move things with their minds, they’d either be dead or in Tanner’s programme.

It’s just me.

Plus, my ability has limits. Anything over about three hundred pounds is a no go—I’ve been up to that line before, more times than I can count, and it’s like a weightlifter reaching failure point. The harder I try, the bigger the headache is afterwards, and the more food I need to get my energy back.

And I can’t lift organic matter—no carbon or hydrogen molecules. They don’t listen to me, no matter how nicely I ask them to move. My parents were never able to figure out why, and neither could the government science geeks after Wyoming went to shit. I have an effective range of ten feet, no more.

And as for air molecules? I’m surgical, but I’m not that surgical.

It takes about ten seconds to fall from eighty-two floors up, and Annie and I have already spent about two. If I’d taken a moment to think, which is what Reggie is always telling me to do, I might have realised that while I was perfectly capable of lifting both myself and Annie—even together, we’re well under the three-hundred-pound limit—the belt buckles weren’t. I concentrated all of our weight onto two points, both of which decided this wasn’t really their scene. Snap. Even if I’d applied force to them slowly, which I tried to do, they were just never going to cut it.

All the same, give me some credit: when the buckles snap, I don’t panic. I go for the next best thing: our crappy uniforms, with all their synthetic fibres. But there’s too much organic material there, too much cotton, so the weight ends up spread across too few points. It slows us for a second, then the clothing starts to tear, my jacket and shirt splitting across my back.

I let go. The only thing worse than splatting onto the sidewalk would be doing it naked.

Annie screams, arms flailing at my back, an expression of sheer, stunned horror on her face. My stupid tie flaps against my forehead, the freezing air howling in my ears. If I don’t come up with a brilliant idea right now , there isn’t going be enough left of us for Tanner to—

The chair.

The one I used to smash the window glass. It’s tumbling just below us.

I don’t think; I just do, throwing my PK as far out as it will go. I feel the chair almost immediately and rip it towards us, fighting with the buffeting air and the chair’s kinetic energy. Almost there. Almost…

The plan is to flip the chair upright, then pull myself and Annie into the seat. Then we’ll float down on our magic chair, make a smooth landing using the roller wheels on the metal legs, and high-five before making our escape into the night. What actually happens is that the chair hits me side on, wedging my body between the base and the seat.

I grab on tight, holding onto the mesh seat like it’s a life raft. “Hang on!” I shout to Annie, my words ripped away by the rushing air.

We’re too heavy for me to stop completely, not with our momentum and our combined weight. But I can slow us down. A lot.

It’s a really weird sensation—like trying to hold a door closed when a thousand tons of water are pushing on the other side and you’re also on a moving bus. An ache blooms at the base of my skull, my body fighting to deliver enough power. The Edmonds Building rushes past us, the windows strobe-lighting as we fall. We’re perhaps three seconds from hitting the ground.

What I want to do is turn our fall into a sweet-ass glide, all the way to the ground. What actually happens is that we start to move sideways.

Really, really fast.

We zip past the buildings, maybe forty feet off the ground, lights from cars on the freeway just visible. We’re heading right for the strip of tarmac on the building’s north side: an alley filled with dumpsters and parked cars and giant potholes. The Edmonds Building is on our right, a multi-storey car park on our left.

If there’s anyone in the alley, they’re about to get one hell of a surprise.

The chair slides, threatening to slip away from me. At least Annie has stopped screaming. She’s moved on to the panicked-hyperventilation section of tonight’s programme.

“It’s OK!” My voice is just audible over the rushing air. “I’ve got th—”

“ Frost, watch out! ”

We’re heading straight for a sign, one advertising EASY DAY RATES! and EARLY BIRD PARKING! I swear loudly, throwing us sideways, only just managing not to splatter us across it. Unfortunately, the move tilts us, which means we start to slide off the chair’s frame. We’re ten feet off the deck, coming way too fast.

“Hang on!”

“Frost, I’m gonna fucking kill y—”

I throw every ounce of PK energy I have into the chair, pulling it back, pulling us back. We rear up like an attacking cobra, and then we’re dumped onto the ground.