Greetings fellow Steemians! Here is my 35th "5" minute * freewrite. The prompt is: "record".

*Not 5 minute this time, 120 minute ;)

This piece is the twenty-third installment in an ongoing story. Let's see how long I can keep this up, using the prompts provided!

A heartfelt thanks to @mariannewest for hosting this awesome daily freewrite:
@mariannewest/day-165-5-minute-freewrite-monday-prompt-record

https://pixabay.com/en/medium-psychic-female-fantasy-woman-goth-1726601/

The Strangeling

Part XXIII

That stopped me in my tracks. I gave Apricot a hard look. "You didn't just pick that out of my head, did you?"

She laughed, delighted by my misplaced skepticism. "That's not how it works dummy! I'm an empath, not a mind reader..."

I nodded, resumed walking. She recovered quickly and caught up, falling into step beside me. We walked on for a few minutes in silence.

"Caspian..." Apricot began huskily, then stopped.

We passed a vinyl record store, the kind frequented only by DJs and music nerds. How disconcerting that barely a hundred and fifty years ago, records had been cutting edge technology. Now, a tiny biochip could track me anywhere I went, and kill me instantaneously if I should happen to interpret my mission directive too loosely for The Company's peace of mind.

I kept my eyes focused on the sidewalk ahead, weaving occasionally to avoid oncoming pedestrians, taking in faces, bodies, bicyclists, fire escapes, shop windows... a Bichon on a leash was sniffing at a wire mesh trash can. He lifted a leg to pee briefly, then sniffed at it again, as if checking to make sure that his own scent was now adequately represented amongst the symphony of others. Clearly we were in a better neighborhood already. Things change in a city, block to block.

A young woman in a flower print sundress gave me the stinkeye, for no perceivable reason. Maybe she thought I was staring at her. Then she seemed to change her mind and smiled brightly, looked away. A kid in jeans and a t-shirt with the logo "Common Grounds" printed on it stood at the curb, across from an espresso bar of the same name, leaning on a parking meter and smoking a cigarette. He had placed his phone on the ground in front of him and was gazing at it suspiciously. He glanced up at Apricot as we passed, gave her a familiar nod. She raised a hand and wiggled its fingers at him.

"That was... pretty much exactly what she said," I answered.

"Yeah, I figured." The sadness was back in her voice.

I took a deep breath. "Apricot?"

"Yeah?"

I was suddenly, violently aware of how badly I missed Mia, of how familiar her presence had become in such a very short span of time. Less than 24 hours. It scared me. I missed having her close to me, the odd, restrained overtones of her musical voice, her tentative, comforting touch. I missed the clear, fathomless depths of her eyes, the intriguing mixture of playfulness and melancholy in her smile. I even missed the intimacy of that shared sense of danger, the tension of living with the monstrously powerful field of emotional energy fashioned out of her by her own mods, contained, but barely. A hurricane trapped in a bottle.

"I don't know how to help her."

My own voice sounded strange to me: louder than I had meant it for it to be, and just slightly higher pitched. I was used to exercising careful, meticulous control at all times. Any spontaneous outbursts were supposed to be by design, crafted to approximate the real thing, not real. Trusting no one, I'd learned to reveal nothing.

But I had to trust Apricot. What choice did I have?

Then again, I'd begun to trust Mia, even to trust myself with her, before that night in the Solitude...

Apricot was silent, her lip pinned between her teeth, her eyes lowered, staring at the ground. After a few minutes she spoke, under her breath, almost a whisper:

"Neither do I. But two things I do know. One: we have to get your biochip removed. That's non-negotiable. And two: we have to somehow find a way of neutralizing the threat of the Wasps. Anything short of killing them, I won't be involved in killing them. When I was under their control, stung by them so many times... I can feel something in them now. It's like the echoes of their individual selves. That boy. They got him from a mental hospital..." She fingered the shark's tooth pendant now hanging around her neck. "Anyway, there's no way we'll find her until we do those two things."

I opened my mouth to ask her how she had come by this information, and abruptly closed it again. It would be a waste of time. I could tell by the tone of her voice that these were not conclusions drawn from analysis, but felt. She had been born with her own intrinsic version of the same kind of power Mia had, the empathic knowing that had marked her, as a homeless teenager, when The Company was looking for raw material out of which to fashion a new Strangeling.

Unlike Mia, Apricot had never been modded, but I'd experienced her abilities firsthand. If she knew these things, she knew them. So there was no point in asking where she got the ideas. But the ideas themselves... they needed to be examined carefully, inspected for flaws. And the first, most glaringly obvious flaw, from my point of view, was that both seemed to be impossible to execute.

"Look, even supposing I can learn to survive without the chip - and I'd say that the chances of that are slim to fucking none - no chip also means no defense against incineration, when and if we ever do find her..."

"Caspian", she replied sharply, like the crack of a whip. I stopped, turned to look at her.

"Do you want to run from her again?" She was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, facing me.

I winced, rubbed a hand over my face, through my hair. I looked around quickly, motioned her to follow me. There was a bus shelter near the curb, with nobody sitting in it, and I knew by the movements and biological activity of the humans in the surrounding area that there was nobody headed there in the immediate future. We walked to it and sat.

"Apricot, neither of us will do her any good as a pile of ashes." I murmured. "If we find ourselves at risk of being incinerated again, running is going to be the thing we can do. If we can survive, at least we can keep trying to fix this. If we die..." I shook my head. "We can't die. We need to stay alive long enough to figure out how to help her. There has to be some way to..."

"What if..." Apricot interrupted. I raised my eyebrows at her.

"What if there is no way for her to control her powers? I mean, any better than she does already? What if this is as good as it gets?" "

"There has to be a way to control..." I continued.

"Caspian stop, please. Hear me out. She told each of us that we weren't "the one". She used the same exact wording both times. What if that means she's looking for something specific. For somebody?"

I stared back at her darkly, trying to process what she was saying. "The one", I repeated.

"Yes, "the one". What if she knows what she's looking for? What if she has a good idea of how to help herself, but it's something she doesn't dare ask of anyone else, least of all someone she cares about, someone she's close to. Something she doesn't dare even let on that she needs..."

"She needed me to lower my thresholds..." I whispered, "and I didn't."

"Right. I couldn't let her in when she asked me to either. I didn't think I could survive it. But what if it wasn't actually going to be incineration? And if it wasn't incineration, whatever was happening, what if Mia wasn't doing it by mistake, but on purpose? What if it wasn't a loss of control, but... an intentional, controlled attempt to make something happen..."

I was catching up now. "Ok." I answered. "But what? What could she have been trying for that felt like... that?"

She shook her head emphatically. "I don't know. But it makes more sense than any other way of looking at it."

I considered. As far as I could see it was, actually, the only possibility that fit. Unless you decided to forget about the whole "you're not the one" thing, which you couldn't. And as long as you trusted Mia...

That wasn't even a question.

"So when we find her..."

Apricot took one of my hands in hers, squeezed it. I could feel the fear in her pulse. Her dark eyes were wide, liquid in the blue plastic shade of the shelter, like those of a wild creature.

"We have to let her do whatever she was trying to do to us."