That much she had kind of expected. She had never spent that many nights away from home, but on the rare occasion her family went on vacation, she always had that sense of being misplaced on waking up.

Emily looked at her clock, realized that she hadn’t actually set it up yet, then pulled her phone from the crack between the mattress and bedframe. Raising her head, she gave it a tap and read 6:34 on the top of the display.

Her head fell back onto her pillow. She had her first classes at ten. Sleeping a bit more was possible, but she wasn’t tired, just lethargic and more than a little nervous.

With a heavy sigh, Emily climbed out of bed, picked out her toiletries from a still-packed box, then slumped her way toward the bathroom.

She set her pj’s aside first. They were clean enough to be worn one more time, she figured, and she still didn’t know too much about the laundry situation. The shower wasn’t as warm or as strong as back home, but she didn’t mind. Her blond hair took some scrubbing to look nice and neat, then she was out of the shower and wrapping a pair of thick towels around her waist and her hair.

Her last stop was the mirror, where she brushed her teeth.

The brush fell into her sink, dropped when her hands went slack.

Eyes that were still misty locked onto the reflection in the mirror. Not of her own freckly, still-pudgy face, but on the words hovering above her head.

Emily Wright

???, Level 0

She took in a deep breath, then another. “No,” she said.

Her denial didn’t do anything to the words hovering there. A shivering hand wiped the smog off the glass. All it did was make the hovering words shift along with her.

She wondered if it was a projection, some fancy hologram, but the words had to be written backward for her to read them in the right order when reflected.

Emily’s eyes screwed shut. She went over the facts like her counselor had once taught her. It had been an exercise to keep the stress down.

Fact one: There were words above her. The kind of words that appeared above the heads of Heroes and Villains when they wanted them to.

Fact two: It had been Power Day when she went to bed the night before.

Fact three . . .

Emily grabbed the edge of the sink, then noticed her toothbrush. Carefully, she pulled it out of the sink’s hole, wiped it clean, then spat into the sink. A simple gesture, one she’d done a thousand times before. It felt wrong to do something so normal while her life was falling apart.

“No, no, it’s . . .”