If he didn’t stop teleporting in the next half hour, he knew he would soon be in some deep .

You think you’ll be in deep if you don’t stop teleporting? a nasty voice snarked in his head. How about if you do, huh? Do you seriously want to get caught again? Are you really that eager to go back to four white walls, no windows, a bed made of wood and the screams of little children in the backgro-

Screw you, he snarled, throwing sharp, panicked glances behind him. No one seemed to recognise him or be coming for him, but he broke out into a run anyway, clenching his fists furiously as he did so. Great, now he was arguing with himself. It seemed nearly three years in that hellhole he had escaped from had done wonders for his psyche.

Pushing away all thoughts of internal conflict for a moment – he could deal with that later - his eyes darted around, quickly taking in his surroundings. He didn’t know where he was; just two minutes ago, he had left a beach in France and landed in a dark alleyway in the middle of what sounded like the rush hour. Two minutes before that, he had been in some kind of jungle in South America, and two minutes before that, it had been a village somewhere in Asia.

A once-over scan of the people who gawked at him as he ran by, with their familiar accents and none-too-conservative clothing, suggested that he was probably in the US right now. It’s probably been a while since they’ve seen a barefoot, dirt-smeared Asian kid loose on the streets, he thought dryly. He needed to rest, and he needed to do it soon. His feet were aching, his tongue was heavy with dehydration and, most importantly, he could feel his energy literally being drained from him, seeping out of his skin like dirty dishwater from a sponge. He couldn’t rest here, though; they had people everywhere, especially in the US. Everyone - or at least, everyone where he had come from - knew that.

If I can just get out of the US- but where to-

A frantic search in the nearby buildings gave him his answer. His eyes landed on a huge poster in the window of what looked like a travel agency, with massive white block letters announcing the latest trendy destination. He had learned enough English in school to read what it said, but even without it, he would have recognised the blue flag anywhere, with its Union Jack and white stars, and the kangaroo hopping in the back.

They don’t have anyone stationed there yet, I don’t think.

I never overhead them mention it, anyway.

It should be safe.

Ducking out of the throng of tall Westerners into an alley at the side of an apartment building, he crouched behind a large dumpster, effectively concealing himself from any passersby. The stench of a week’s worth of garbage from the building’s tenants lingered in his nose, but he paid it no attention. He had smelled a lot worse, after all, in the past few years. Taking a few deep, steadying breaths, he closed his eyes and concentrated.

Come on. You can do this.

You won’t be safe here. You won’t be safe at all, until you get to Australia.

He inhaled.

3, 2, 1.

When he breathed out, he was gone, leaving no trace that Lee Jihoon had ever been in Seattle twenty-six minutes after Facility 529 had blown up.

=========

Unlike in Seattle, the sun was still high in the sky in Sydney. He walked for a few minutes from his teleportation point – thank God it had been in the back of some restaurant, where there was no chance he could have been seen; he kept forgetting that the majority of the world didn’t know that people like him existed – until he reached a walkway b with pedestrians. No one looked at him twice, causing relief to flood through his bones.

Safe.

For now, anyway.

He kept walking. He needed to rest, and then he needed to figure out what the hell he was meant to do now. There was no way he’d be able to keep wandering around like this; they might not have a branch in Australia, but they would almost certainly have some kind of eyes and ears in Sydney, the country’s most famous city. A nearby electronic clock in the window of a store declared that it was eight past noon, and 28 degrees Celsius. He had at least a few hours to recover and think.

A humid breeze blew in from his left, and when he turned, he saw that he had wandered onto a promenade apparently overlooking ‘Darling Harbour.’ Interesting.

He had forgotten what clean water looked like. The only fluids they had given him at the Facility had been grey and dirty-tasting, both for drinking and for scrubbing himself clean once a fortnight, and that could hardly have been classified as water. The harbour was beautifully blue, with the sun’s rays twinkling across the rippling water like the jewels his mum used to wear at fancy dinner parties. God, he hadn’t seen her in so long. She probably thought he was dead.

It was strange, he mused as he sat on a bench near the water, allowing himself to relax only slightly. The thought comforted him; it was better she thought him dead than to know the truth. Better that she moved on with her life, instead of imagining what horrible things were happening to her son, and never even getting close to the tru-

But that was over now. He would not be going back, ever. No need to think about it anymore.

What to do, what to do.

It hadn’t even been a half hour since he had been free. It felt slightly surreal, but much realer than anything else that had happened in the past 36 months.

He was the only survivor from the explosion; he had checked. Facility 529 had been utterly decimated. He had no idea who had done it, and he hadn’t thought to stay back and see. As soon as the building began to collapse and the first cracks of sunlight he had seen in almost a year began shining through, he had gotten the hell out of there, teleporting to the first place that came into mind.

No one had followed him yet. He hoped that they thought he had died along with the others, at least for now to buy him some time. Eventually, they would realise that he was not part of the dead, and then they would look for him. They were thorough that way.

Were there others like him? He knew he wasn’t the only one with powers – they had taken thousands upon thousands of kids around the world, there was no way he was the only one. Besides, that loathsome Kirei from the Facility had been one too; a metahuman. His lips twisted into a disdainful sneer, an expression his face had grown all too used to ever since he had been captured. He was glad she