Sample:

A rather painful way to die, don’t you think, Joshua?

“I would say so, Agent Smith.” The ever-present voice of my partner wasn’t too loud, thankfully. She was a talker, but you’d never know it if you met her.

“What?”

I remained on one knee, and looked up to the police liaison standing at my side. “Sorry, Officer—” I grasped for his name.

“Press. Bruce Press.”

“Bruce. Yes, I like that. My partner was just saying that this must have been a painful way to die.”

The bearded man looked down at me, then over to my partner, then back at me. He pointed toward her. “But she didn’t say anything.”

I turned back to the taped off area in front of me. “Oh, I guess it’s finally happened. I’ve been working with Adoette Smith for so long, I guess I just know what she’s thinking.”

The local police officer laughed a little, but I could tell his mind wasn’t letting it go. Smart man—and apparently, a man who had requested the “honor” of being the police liaison with the S.C.E.T. But Officer Press did not ask the question most likely on his mind, which I appreciated.

I surveyed what remained of the crime scene. The school’s gymnasium had been closed for five days. Ordinarily, the school would have been re-opened by now. But these were not normal circumstances. Whether it was political maneuvering, or posturing, or out of fear, the locals had decided to give us complete access to the school before opening it back up to CHS students.

Of course, the teenager killed under the retractable bleachers had been taken to the morgue, and the cleaners had done their work, but we could still see the results of Stacey Miller’s… abilities.Maybe the locals thought I could smell the remnants of Sovereign power in the air.

I focused on the police report Office Press had provided. According to Stacey Miller’s statement, she had been attacked by Christian Murphy, a seventeen year-old senior at CHS. Descriptions of her appearance that evening and the next morning corroborated that much of her statement: Polaroid photographs attached to the report showed a torn sweater and bruises on her face, neck and shoulders.

The condition of the retractable wooden bleachers was harder to explain. They were meant to form a solid wall of wood when completely “pushed in.” Currently, however, they were in a transitional state no engineer would have ever designed.

The wood benches, where students and parents sat for basketball games, looked none the worse for wear. Underneath, where metal bracings and crossbeams were meant to roll and collapse in upon themselves like some sort of giant accordion… frankly, it was a mess. Pieces were bent and broken, and I could easily see where more had been cut away by the investigation team when they extracted the teen’s body from the floor.

Stacey claimed she had witnessed Christian Murphy beating a boy named Anthony Lee with a baseball bat. Murphy had chased her, threatened her, torn her sweater, and had hit her in the face. She said she broke away from him and ran underneath the bleachers in an attempt to evade the larger boy.

According to Stacey, as she cleared the bleachers, Christian Murphy dove at her and grabbed her by the ankle. This caused Stacey to lash out and, in so doing, caused the bleachers to retract with great force. Metal bracings, including some that had been pulled from their supports, had impaled Christian.

The reason that I and Agent Smith had been dispatched to the town of Portsmouth, Virginia, to investigate?

Stacey Miller claimed she had caused the bleachers to retract with her mind.