For a few weeks now the organization had been falling apart and Ren wasn’t too sad about it.

The so called board of directors consisted of useless cowards as far as he was concerned. They were rich folks who had exploited Junior’s naiveté. Now that the Shadow had become a concern and no one trusted anybody anymore, and after the spectacular loss of the Korean and Japanese bases – and after Aron’s not so polite threats – the directors had left one by one. They were only interested in easy money. This wasn’t what they had signed up for.

The European and the Indian branch had disbanded already. The last South African investor had announced his intention to leave. The Japanese had decided not to rebuild at all. Arabia, Scandinavia and Russia had never been big bases and sort of fell by the way side as the rest crumbled.

Junior would be a lot less busy if he had to take care of fewer expenditures and staff members, Ren had been told. The precog could afford, eventually, to spend less time looking at the future of stock.

For now, however, he was inundated with papers. The aftermath of the organization’s slow collapse brought an insufferable amount of bureaucracy upon the nominal leader.

Ren carried a cup of hot cocoa with whipped cream and a stack of soft cookies into the office where the slender boy had fallen asleep, draped over ten thousand pages worth of diversified portfolios.

A shame to wake him up when he had a moment’s peace, but the slumbering boy would get a headache-inducingly stiff neck for days if he kept laying like that.

For a while Ren just watched. He put the tray down and let the cocoa’s aroma permeate the air, observing the slight rise and fall of Junior’s back. The pretty boy’s mouth was a little bit open, like he was about to drool in his sleep.

Ren poked him in the shoulder. Once the leader snorted, his eyes fluttering open, Ren caressed his cheek until the boy had shaken the drowsiness.

Junior smacked his lips. “Wh-what time is it?”

“Noon. You’ve been in here since six in the morning, I think. I haven’t seen you all day.”

“Oh. Thanks for waking me up. And for this,” he pointed at the cup, the weird smirk on his lips that made him strangely look like a dinosaur somehow. Maybe Ren was just imagining it. Who else would pay close enough attention to every detail of Junior’s face to make such odd comparisons?

“Please don’t go back to work right away,” the empath said. “I’m bored out of my mind here. Baekho asked me to train with him, but he’s so aggressive. Minron are intolerable unless you’re into hour long group cuddling.”

“Minron? They have a ship name now?”

“It’s not like you ever see one without the other.”

Junior rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Actually, now that you mention it, there is something I want to try with you and Minhyun. I thought there might be a way to combine our powers into something greater.”

“Haven’t we been through this?”

“No rogues this time. Just passive observation. And we’re staying awake for a change.”

“I don’t know…”

With pouty lips, Junior looked up at his bed buddy. “Please? Pretty please? I need an excuse to get away from this desk for an afternoon.”

Ren sighed. Of course he’d say yes. How could he not? And the fact that Junior knew exactly what the chances were made the defeat all the more humiliating. Out of spite, he stole the biggest cookie.

***

The three of them picked the library. Yes, the head quarter had a library. Ren hadn’t known until Junior brought them there.

Minhyun wandered between the low shelves while the other two set everything up. There wasn’t much to do. They agreed to sit at a table for now and only transition to the floor if meditation became necessary. Really, their ‘set up’ consisted of choosing the fluffiest cushions to make the hard plastic chairs bearable.

“Alright,” Junior said once they had all settled into a seat. “Combining you two was a terrible mistake. Aron’s powers aren’t really combinable as far as I can think. Baekho’s Twi turns all our powers off. So the only combinations we could still try are between the three of us.”

Ren squinted. “How can you two combine? Seeing into the future of a dream? Wait, you want to try to read people’s minds before they even think what they think?”

“No, that’s not possible the way you imagine,” Junior said. “People being fickle in their heads is the very limit of my ability. I want use exactly that. If you and I can read the general emotions of this place a day from now, or even just a few hours ahead, we could gain a massive advantage over anyone trying to outdo us.”

“How does this interfere with your five percent limit? Wouldn’t you still be unable to- Oh! I see, you think since I can feel emotions no matter how faint-“

“It would go around my limit,” Junior finished the sentence, nodding to himself. “Or so I dare to hope. We’ll see.”

Minhyun clicked his tongue. “Then I guess I’ll link us and we can see if Ren’s sense works through the link. Ready?”

***

“I feel… I feel… um, I think I feel…” Junior said for the umpteenth time. “Frustration?”

“That’s just mine,” Ren said with an eye roll.

“I didn’t know you could sense your own feelings.”

“I can’t. It’s simply obvious. How long have we been trying?”

Minhyun looked at his phone. He had been texting Aron non-stop, since his participation was completely passive. “Three hours almost on the dot.”

Ren sighed. “There’s no way for us to tell the difference between them. Give up already.”

He was pointing out the problem that had plagued them for the very beginning of the experiment and which they were as far away from solving as ever. There was just no way to tell which emotions Junior might have been feeling through the link – if he was feeling anything at all. Were they present or future emotions? How to differentiate?

At some point they had committed to cause some large scale upheaval at a specific time the next day, just so that there would be a distinct emotion in the near future. It was a nice idea, but yielded no results. There was no way to say how far in the future Junior’s emotion-sense would extend. If it existed at all.

“I’m fairly sure you’re just making things up,” Ren accused the leader. “You can’t possibly tell any of the emotions happening in here right now. I can sense them clearly. Even if the link weakens them, you’d have been able to name one or two.”

Junior shrugged. “What’s there to sense in here? Just some people reading. They might be entertained or immersed or bored or fascinated or-“

Ren pointed to the third boy. “Minhyun has been ting Aron for the last hour. They went through three distinct scenarios. This lanky bastard has been getting hornier ever minute.”

Not looking up, Minhyun raised one hand. “Guilty.”

Dejected, the leader sank his head to the table surface. “Fine. We’re stopping. I think I can use my time more productively. Why did I let myself get dragged into this?”

“Excuse you?” Ren said louder than the library rules allowed. “You were the one who dragged us into this.”

The empath rose from his seat to assault the boy. Tickling him until he fell to the floor, Ren thought whether to let a Conmote do the dirty work of punishing the leader. Only when Junior’s emotions became very similar to what Minhyun was experiencing, did Ren realized that the precog had known exactly what reaction he was going to get with his lies.

Clearly, he needed to be punished a lot harder.