The Reactor

Physicist Mark Green spent ten years building a fusion reactor with the best friend who pulled him back from the edge after his parents died. On the morning of its make-or-break test, someone sabotaged the machine, sealed the exits and left him inside. His last thought, as the light took him, was Good.

He wakes six weeks later in an unmarked facility. The explosion has woken impossible abilities in ordinary people everywhere, and the Arcadia Corporation has already named them marvels, begun recruiting them and put a suppressant drug into mass production. That is a lot of infrastructure for six weeks.

Mark escapes with Aimee Rodriguez, a graduate student who survived an unsurvivable crash by folding space, and with nowhere else to go, they walk into Arcadia’s open arms. There, a man who had decided to die finds friends, work that matters, and Aimee, whom he falls for slowly and tells nothing, because saying it would mean admitting he wants to be alive.

But Aimee has been keeping a file.