Chapter 5: Resonance Burns

I thought about escaping every day, just like I'd said to Misaki.

Not in heroic ways.
Not with dramatic timing or clever plans.

Just… leaving.

Walking when I wasn’t supposed to.
Not stopping when the door opened.
Not sitting when they told me to.

The thought always came with the same ending.

A gunshot.
An alarm.
My body on the floor.

And then—

My parents.

That was how they stopped me the first time I said it out loud.

“I’m done,” I told them.

The words felt small and pathetic after everything they’d put me through. The room smelled like disinfectant and warm metal. My wrists were still sore from the restraints, faint red marks blooming under the skin.

The lead researcher didn’t even look up at first.

“Sit down.”

“No.”

The word came out hoarse, scraped raw from my throat. My legs trembled as I stood, but I stayed upright. That alone felt like rebellion.

“You can’t keep me here,” I said. “You don’t understand what I am.”

That made her look at me.

Not with anger.

With interest.

“You think that makes you dangerous?” she asked calmly.

“Yes.”

Silence.

Then the screen behind her lit up.

A kitchen.

Too familiar.

My mother’s hands were moving in the sink, sleeves rolled up, humming under her breath. My father leaned against the counter, glasses slipping as he laughed at something she said.

Alive.

Real.

My vision tunneled.

“If you leave,” the woman said gently, “they die.”

The word die landed like a physical blow.

I didn’t remember sitting back down.

I remembered shaking so badly my teeth clicked together. My AIM field spiked violently, flaring outward in a way I couldn’t control.

That part, they noticed.

The alarms screamed. Researchers shouted. Sensors spiked.

They liked that.

They liked anything they could quantify.

They restrained me again.

Harder this time.

“Good,” the woman said. “You understand.”

She folded her hands, composed.

“You don’t need to escape,” she continued. “This is what you’re here for.”

She turned another screen toward me.

Documents.

Contracts.

My name, printed neatly at the top.

“Your parents signed,” she said. “Full consent. Long-term participation. Behavioral conditioning. Experimental latitude.”

I remembered the beginning then.

Men in suits.
Polite smiles.
Stacks of paper spread across our living room table.

My parents squinting at kanji they didn’t fully understand. Someone explaining everything patiently, reassuringly.

Opportunities.
Evaluations.
A future only Academy City could provide.

I remembered how uneasy I’d felt.

And how I’d ignored it.

“They did this because they love you,” the researcher said, not unkindly. “You should honor that.”

That was the moment escape stopped being a plan.

And became something unnecessary.

After that, they stopped restraining me as much.

Not because they trusted me.

But because they didn’t need to anymore.

They showed me my parents just often enough to keep everything aligned. A video call once a month. A still image now and then. My mother waving. My father smiling tiredly.

Proof of safety.

Proof that compliance worked.

Then the experiments changed.

They stopped trying to force my power out.

Instead, they started teaching me.

They called it Resonance Conditioning.

It was observation only.

At first, it was overwhelming.

AIM fields were everywhere.

I’d always felt them before—pressure, noise, interference—but now they were structured. Ordered. Violently precise.

Every person distorted space differently.

Weak espers barely made a ripple, faint static clinging to their skin.

Stronger ones carved grooves into reality.

And the children—

The children were the worst.

Their AIM fields were unstable, jagged, fraying at the edges like they were tearing themselves apart just by existing.

The researchers were careful about what they told each other.

“She’s learning to perceive resonance,” one of them said once, confidently.

“Replication without output,” another agreed. 

That was the story they wrote in their reports.

When they asked me what I saw, I described patterns.

Colors.
Shapes.

I talked about overlap and interference, about how difficult it was to hold an AIM field without collapsing under it.

All true.

Just not the whole truth.

I never told them what happened when I stopped holding back.

The first time they put me near the electric kid again, I almost screamed.

His AIM field hurt to look at.

It cracked and surged unpredictably, collapsing and re-forming in chaotic waves. Power leaked everywhere, uncontrolled, eating at his own nervous system.

“Activate,” a researcher ordered.

The boy hesitated.

“I—I can’t—”

“Now.”

The discharge exploded out of him.

Sparks jumped wildly, electricity screaming into grounding rods and metal fixtures. The smell of ozone filled the room, sharp and suffocating.

And something inside my head ripped open.

The pain wasn’t sharp.

It was deep.

Like someone had reached into my skull and twisted.

My vision doubled. Then tripled. AIM fields overlapped, tangled, vibrating so violently it felt like my brain was being shaken loose.

And then—

I saw it.

Not him.

His memories.

A white room.
Too bright.

Hands strapped down.

A scream ripped out of his throat as electricity surged uncontrollably through his own body. Researchers shouting numbers. Someone saying “increase output.”

I collapsed.

I hit the floor.

I let myself fall.

Let my vitals spike.

Let them think the resonance was too much.

“Recording spike,” someone said.

“Her field’s matching his.”

They didn’t notice the change.

Didn’t notice how the electricity bent, just slightly, toward me.

I kept my output minimal.

Barely enough to register.
Barely enough to learn.

The boy screamed.

I screamed too.

They shut it down immediately.

I was shaking so badly afterward I couldn’t unclench my hands. Every nerve felt raw, overexposed, like my skin had been peeled away.

That pain was real.

But the control?

That was mine.

That night, alone, the pain didn’t fade.

It settled.

Like something had been carved into me.

I tried to sleep.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw flashes that weren’t mine.

White rooms.
Needles.
A child sobbing while someone calmly adjusted a dial.

I didn’t know their names.

But their suffering had a frequency now.

And I could hear it.

I trained it.

Quietly.

In the gaps between tests.
In moments they thought I was resting.

The first time I tried to match an AIM field alone, I nearly killed myself.

I sat on the floor, back against the wall, hands clenched tight in my lap. I focused inward, searching for the lingering distortion the electric kid had left behind.

I found it.

The moment I aligned with it, pain exploded through my body.

It felt like my nerves were being lit on fire from the inside. Muscles locked up violently, electricity racing through pathways that weren’t built to handle it.

I convulsed, teeth grinding so hard I tasted blood.

Another memory slammed into me.

A child biting down on a strap as electricity surged again and again through their chest.

“Why does it hurt?”

“Because you’re special.”

I screamed and collapsed forward, palms slamming into the floor.

The energy had nowhere to go.

It tore through me instead.

I lay there shaking for hours, unable to move, my body buzzing painfully long after the discharge faded.

The next day, I told them I’d had a migraine.

They believed me.

They always believed what fit their expectations.

They thought isolation would weaken me.

Instead, it taught me how to endure.

Each attempt was agony.

Every new AIM field burned differently.

Telekinetic resonance crushed my lungs like gravity doubled inside my chest.

Pyrokinesis scorched my nerves with phantom heat, skin screaming even when no flame appeared.

One boy’s ability came with memories so bad I vomited until my throat bled.

Every session hurt.

Sometimes it felt like my bones were vibrating apart. Other times it was heat, pressure, suffocation.

And always—

Memories.

A girl crying as telekinesis crushed the walls around her.
A boy burning himself again and again, told pain meant progress.
Children breaking, slowly, methodically.

I learned something important.

AIM fields weren’t just powers.

They were records.

Trauma, repetition, conditioning—all encoded into frequency.

And when I matched it—

I felt everything.

The electric kid never learned control because no one taught him how.

They just punished him until he complied.

I did what he couldn’t.

I listened.

I let the pain happen.

I learned where it came from.

I learned how to redirect it.

Within months, I could shape his electricity better than he ever had. If he was considered a level 3 my power could be considered level 3.9 or even 4

But that was not because I was stronger.

But because I understood what it did to a body.

They never saw that part.

I made sure my hands shook during tests.
Made sure my breathing hit the wrong rhythms.
Made sure the output they measured stayed low.

When they limited my exposure, it wasn’t because they were afraid of what I could do.

It was because they thought I couldn’t.

But the damage was already done.

I could see AIM fields clearly now, even at rest.

Every person I passed left an afterimage.

Every test layered new frequencies onto me.

A year passed like that.

A year of pain.
A year of stolen memories.
A year of pretending to be less than I was.

All that in the hopes of escaping.

But now, it wasn’t about running.

It was about surviving long enough.