He trailed off, his jaw clenching as he took another aggressive sip of his coffee.

“If what?”

“It’s gone.” He sighed and I stared at him until he continued. “My ability. It’s gone.”

It was cold, sitting out on a park bench in the middle of January, with nothing but a crooked wool hat my dad had knit with his telekinesis and a cup of rapidly cooling coffee to keep me warm, but in that moment, an even deeper chill ran through my body.

“What?”

“I used to have an Atypical ability and I don’t anymore,” he snarled. “I don’t know if it’s ever coming back.”

“But that’s not … that’s not possible,” I said. “Right? I mean, our abilities are part of us, they can’t just be taken away.”

“Sure they can,” he said. “It’s not easy, but it’s happened before.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“You pick up more than a few things when you’re trapped in a basement with very little to entertain you for two months,” he said. “Especially if that basement is occupied by a bunch of people who run a scientific research organization dedicated to this kind of stuff and they’re not particularly careful about talking about said research around you.”

“And they talked about how this has happened before?” I asked. “People losing their abilities?”

“Yep,” he said. “I don’t know about physical abilities, but anything based in the brain—abilities like yours or mine—can be affected by head trauma or neurological issues.”

I thought about how I haven’t seen my dad using his telekinesis very much since I’d been back and wondered if it was because it wasn’t working that well anymore, somehow affected by the disease, or if he was forgetting he had it in the first place.

“… and they say they don’t know how to fix it, how to cure me, but I think that’s a bunch of bull.” I focused back in on Damien, who was in the middle of his story, speaking more and more bitterly.

“But why would they do that?” I asked. “I mean, if they had a way to help you, they’d use it, right? Isn’t that the whole purpose of the AM?”

“You’d think, right?” he said. “That might be what’s on the brochures but trust me, they do not have our best interests at heart.”

“You say that like this isn’t your first run-in with them,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it isn’t.” But he didn’t elaborate, instead looking back out over the park, stretching out his legs while he took another long sip of his coffee.

So I decided to take the reins and discovered that, incredibly enough, that wasn’t the wildest part of Damien’s story.