The snow muffles everything.

  Not just sound, though that's the obvious part - how our footsteps crunch-squeak instead of slap against frozen ground, how Liam's voice when he's explaining something about his little brother comes out softer than usual, absorbed by white on the trees and white on the ground and white packed into the spaces between fence posts along the creek. But it muffles other things too. Makes the city feel smaller, further away. Makes the metal detectors at school and the security cameras at the bus stops and the anonymous tip line posters stapled to every telephone pole feel like they belong to some other Philadelphia, not this one.

  January 3rd. Saturday. Last day before everyone goes back to school and the winter break ends and we all have to pretend things are normal again.

  We're at Pennypack Park, near the creek where the water's still moving despite the cold. Maggie picked the spot because the sound of running water covers our voices if anyone's walking nearby, plus it's isolated enough that nobody's going to stumble on four teenagers doing weird shit with their powers. The bridge is about fifty yards upstream. The parking lot is a quarter mile back through the trees.

  I'm sitting on a flat rock someone dragged here years ago, probably for this exact purpose. My boots are rated for snow but my toes are still cold. Maggie's standing, arms crossed, watching Zara practice her glass thing with the broken beer bottle she found half-buried in the creek bed.

  "Just the bottle," Maggie says. "Nothing else."

  Zara's face scrunches in concentration. She's wearing about three layers of winter clothing that make her look even smaller than normal. Her dark eyes track something I can't see. The bottle vibrates, lifts an inch off the ground. A car window two parking lots away probably just vibrated too, or the glass door on the community center, or someone's reading glasses. She's gotten better at filtering but it's still a radius thing, not a precision thing.

  "Good," I say. "Now hold it there for ten seconds."

  She holds it. Gets to seven before the bottle drops and she exhales hard, breath pluming white.

  "That's progress," Maggie tells her. "Two weeks ago you could barely get to five."

  Zara nods, not quite smiling but close. She's the youngest, the most careful, the one who takes notes during our sessions like she's studying for a test. Which I guess she is. The test is just 'can you use this weird thing your body does without hurting anyone or freaking out.'

  Liam's doing his thing near the tree line - practicing staying halfway transformed while Alex bugs him. Liam's arm is currently dragon-scale and clawed, his neck is elongated and reptilian, but his face is still mostly human except for the teeth and the slight golden sheen to his skin. He looks like a bad special effect from a movie with budget issues.

  "Can you fly like that?" Alex asks, circling him.

  "No," Liam says, his voice deeper and raspier when he's partially shifted. "I need the full wings for that. This is just--" He flexes the dragon arm, claws extending. "--utility stuff."

  "Utility stuff," Alex repeats, grinning. "You sound like my dad describing his toolbox."

  Alex Kirby. Not Alex Garcia. Maybe I'll start thinking of him as Kirby instead of Alex. I'll workshop it. Right now he's got both hands up, small controlled flames dancing between his fingers like he's showing off a lighter trick. Except the flames are blue-hot and sustained and definitely not coming from butane.

  "Speaking of utility," Alex says, turning to the rest of us. "Anyone else freezing their ass off?"

  "Language," Maggie says automatically, but she's also shivering.

  "I'm just saying, I could--" Alex gestures broadly, and the flames between his fingers grow larger, more spread out. Heat rolls toward us, enough that I can feel it from ten feet away. Not enough to melt the snow, but enough to take the edge off the cold.

  "Show-off," I mutter, but I'm also moving closer.

  "Practical application of powers for civilian benefit," Alex counters. "Isn't that what you're teaching us?"

  "Yeah, yeah," I reply sarcastically.

  Liam shifts back to fully human - you can see it happen in stages, the scales retracting into skin, the elongation compressing, the gold fading back to pale Irish complexion - and moves into the warmth zone too. Zara follows, still clutching her notebook.

  That leaves Jasmine.

  She's been sitting on a different rock about fifteen feet away, watching us for the past forty minutes. Black jeans, black jacket, black boots, black beanie pulled low. The goth thing is deliberate and committed. She hasn't said more than five words since we got here. Hasn't said more than thirty words total across the past eight sessions.

  But she keeps showing up.

  "Jasmine," Maggie calls. "You want to join us?"

  Jasmine shakes her head. Stays on her rock.

  I catch Maggie's eye. Maggie shrugs. We've talked about this. You can't force participation. Showing up is step one. Talking is step two. Actually using powers is step three. Jasmine's still on step one, and that's okay. Dr. Jensen said she spent three months at Whitford Institute before they transferred her here. Whatever happened, whatever her activation was like, it was bad enough to need a special level of intervention, apparently.

  So we don't push.

  "Alright," I say, letting my voice carry without yelling. "Let's talk about what happens when civilians see you using your powers."

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Liam groans. "We've been over this."

  "And we're going over it again, because it's important." I stand up, immediately regret leaving the warm rock. Alex adjusts his flames, tracking my movement, keeping me in the heat radius. It's... thoughtful, actually. "Zara, scenario: you're at school, something startles you, you instinctively reach out with your power. What's the worst case scenario?"

  Zara thinks about it. "Every glass surface in the classroom reacts. Windows rattle, someone's phone screen cracks, and everyone's glasses explode"

  "And then?"

  "And then they call the office, and the office calls the NSRA, and the NSRA calls my parents, and my parents--" She stops. Takes a breath. "My parents already know. But everyone else knows now too."

  "Right. And that's just the immediate response. What about the next day? The next week?"

  "Metal detectors," Liam says quietly. He gets it. His school already has them. "More security. Teachers watching you differently. Kids either avoiding you or trying to get you to do tricks."

  "Anonymous tip lines," Zara adds, even quieter. "The posters. The ones that say 'See something, say something.'"

  There's a moment where we're all just standing here in the snow-muffled quiet, thinking about the infrastructure of fear that's become normal. The metal detectors, the cameras, the color-coded evacuation maps, the NSRA consultants who come to schools and explain protocols. It all happened gradually enough that you barely noticed until one day you're walking through a detector just to get to English class and it feels like that's how it's always been.

  "So what's the strategy?" I ask.

  "Don't use powers in public," Alex says. "Obviously."

  "Not always possible," Maggie counters. "Liam, what if you get startled? What if something triggers an involuntary transformation?"

  "I go to the bathroom," Liam says immediately. "Lock myself in a stall. Wait it out."

  "Zara?"

  "I..." She hesitates. "I try to limit it to something small. One object. Something that could be explained as clumsiness or accident."

  "Good. That's thinking ahead. Alex?"

  "Fire's harder to hide," he admits. "I'd probably just own it. Say I was lighting a cigarette or something."

  "You don't smoke," I point out.

  "They don't know that."

  Fair. I reach for my pocket for a cigarette almost on impulse. Then, I remember that I have an image to uphold in front of everyone here, and I refrain. "Alright, great. Now... what's the best case scenario? We've all catastrophized. Start anti-catastrophizing with me. Y'all know what that word means, right?"

  We keep going for another half hour. Scenarios, responses, what to do if someone films you, what to do if the police show up, what to do if another powered person shows up. It's the boring part of having powers, the part that nobody talks about in movies. The constant low-level awareness that you're different and visible and monitored.

  Eventually, we loop back to practicing. Liam does his partial transformations, getting faster at the shift. Zara works on expanding her range without losing control. Alex practices precision - melting specific icicles hanging from the bridge support without touching the ones next to them.

  I'm watching Jasmine again. She's still on her rock, still apart from us, but her body language has changed. Less hunched, more alert. She's watching Liam transform, watching Zara lift glass, watching Alex's surgical control over his flames.

  The sun's starting to drop behind the trees when it happens. Liam shifts a little too fast, overcorrects, stumbles backward. His heel hits ice hidden under snow. He goes down hard, arms windmilling, already partially shifted into a significantly heavier dragon. I've seen his full form. It's really heavy.

  "Shit!" Maggie's already moving. I'm right behind her.

  But something else moves first.

  The bare tree nearest Jasmine - a scraggly oak that's been dead for at least a year - suddenly bends. The branches arch down and around, forming a barrier between Jasmine and where Liam fell. The dormant bushes near her rock rustle, stems extending. Even the dead grass poking through the snow seems to lean toward her, like iron filings near a magnet.

  They catch Liam like a baseball mitt snagging a fastball. Jasmine's hands are raised up towards her face, ready to protect herself. About, like, a dozen branches got ripped through before Liam started changing back all the way. Another one snaps under him, and he falls unceremoniously into a bush that was busy ripping itself out of the ground and planting it in front of a very startled, very blushing Jasmine.

  We all freeze. Even Liam, who is maybe a foot away from Jasmine's face now. It'd almost be a meet cute if he wasn't about to crush her a second ago and they haven't known each other for like three months.

  Jasmine stares at Liam.

  "I'm okay," Liam calls out, which breaks the moment. "I'm fine, I just slipped, I'm--" He gently pushes himself up out of the bush, immediately slips on his heels, and eats shit into a pile of snow. "--Really cold now, dangit,"

  Maggie helps haul him out. Alex redirects his flames to full blast, trying to warm Liam before hypothermia becomes a concern. Zara's hovering with her notebook like she wants to help but doesn't know how.

  I walk over to Jasmine.

  She's still sitting on her rock. The tree has straightened back up. The bushes have stopped moving. The grass is just grass again.

  I sit down next to her. Not close enough to crowd, but close enough to talk without everyone else hearing.

  "Plant control," I say quietly.

  Jasmine doesn't look at me. "Chlorokinesis."

  "How long have you been able to do that?"

  "Since May. When I activated." Her voice is lower than I expected. Careful. "It's usually unconscious. When I'm scared or startled or--" She gestures vaguely. "--whatever. Plants move to protect me."

  "And you've been practicing," I say. "Watching us teach them. Figuring out how to control it."

  She finally looks at me. Dark brown eyes, eyeliner, expression that's trying very hard to be neutral. "Is that okay?"

  "Of course it's okay. That's literally what this program is for."

  "I didn't want--" She stops. Starts again. "Everyone always makes a big deal about it. At Whitford, they treated it like I was dangerous."

  "Are you?"

  Jasmine's quiet for a long moment. "They could be. If I wanted them to be."

  "But you don't."

  "No." Firm. Certain. "I just want them to stop moving when I don't want them to."

  I nod. Look at the oak tree, still bare and dead and normal-looking. "That's what we're here for. Teaching control. Not suppression, not weaponization. Just control."

  We sit there for another minute. Alex has Liam mostly dry, but has started to pant like a dog. He stops and goes to find his backpack so he can refuel on calories in the form of power bars. He burns those like butane. The creek keeps running. The snow keeps muffling everything.

  "Next week," I say. "We'll work on conscious direction. Not just suppression. If the plants are going to respond anyway, you might as well teach them to respond in useful ways."

  Jasmine nods slowly. "Okay."

  "And thank you for showing us. I know that was hard."

  She shrugs, but there's something less tense in her shoulders now. "It's fine. I didn't want a boy touching me. Sorry."

  "What are you sorry for?" I ask.

  She stares at me like I have three heads.

  I stand up, offer her a hand. She takes it. We walk back to the group together, and nobody makes a big deal about it, and we spend another fifteen minutes making sure Liam isn't going to get frostbite before we pack up and head home.

  The snow's still muffling everything. The city's still got its metal detectors and cameras and anonymous tip lines. Maya Richardson's still out there planning whatever she's planning. The Kingdom's still wounded and dangerous. Mr. Polygraph is still in jail. But...

  This is working. The mentorship program is actually working. It's not stopping supervillains or solving corruption or fixing the world's problems. But it's helping four specific people figure out how to live with powers in a world that's scared of them. That's gotta matter for something, right?