He set the sphere down on the table in front of him and pulled his hand away. Suddenly the salt and peppershaker, along with his unused knife and spoon, floated up into the air several inches off the tabletop. Then they started to spin around the orb, moving slowly in a complete circle until they floated back down to roughly where they had started.

“The big unit can do that with three meters of rock debris?” Chris asked.

“That’s what he calculates. If he accelerates all of that, to speeds much faster than my silverware is going, well, you all can picture the results,” Declan said, picking up the salt shaker and sprinkling its contents over his mashed potatoes.

“Digging is approximately ten meters out. Weapons at forty-four percent.”

“That would be devastating,” Chris said.

“Yeah, like my steel and silver orbs, but multiples of tons as opposed to a few pounds.”

“How could my babies generate antimatter?” Tanya interjected. “And what Wulf does is nothing like what Cora does.”

“We don’t know if that’s what’s either of them is even doing, or if they’re using some source we don’t know about, or if it has anything to do with antimatter at all. It’s just we observed that Cora tends to float upward, as if gravity was suspended rather than if she was using telekinesis. Maybe this whole centrosome thing you guys have been studying would shed light on it. We’ll know more when she does it around one of the drones,” Declan said, being very, very careful with his word choices.

“You want to test her?” Tanya asked.

“I said observe. We don’t know when she decides to do it or if she’s even conscious of it. I never said test,” he said, thinking that was the word he had been deliberately avoiding. Nika smiled at his thought, nodding ever so slightly.

Chris and Tanya were exchanging glances. “Well, she’s conscious of it. We have the twins practicing their gifts already,” Tanya said.

“You do? How?” Gina asked.

“We have a game. We call it hunt the babies,” Chris said.

“Of course you do,” Gina said, a sardonic grin on her face.

“Good. They are weak and vulnerable, to even a human. They need all the protection they can get,” Senka said with a nod.

“I guess I understand Cora’s ability as potentially anti-grav, but not Wulf. He turns invisible.”

“To turn invisible, you would have to do one of only a few things. Either pass light through yourself like a pane of glass or bend it around you. Current Earth militaries are trying to put cameras and projectors all around something like a tank in order to kind of take the first route. We think Wulfy is taking the second.”

“He’s bending light?” Lydia asked in disbelief.