Contestant 3 - Eliza Quinn

Eliza Quinn had been inside the vault for eleven seconds when she heard Coach Rainer knock twice on the outside wall.

“Talk to me, Lizzy.” His voice came through the steel in a flattened blur, but she could still make it out. She always could. Maybe because she had been listening for that tone all her life—the patient, steady one people used when they wanted her to stop doubting herself and simply do the thing already.

“I’m good,” she called back, though her voice came out thinner than she wanted.

Inside the training vault, the air smelled like steel and ozone from the emergency systems. The room was a sealed cube of reinforced alloy with no visible doors, built to simulate entrapment. Today, it resembled a collapsed subway tunnel.

A red strobe flashed lazily overhead. In the center of the floor, a weighted rescue dummy lay pinned beneath a collapsed beam assembly. Three feet beyond it sat the objective: a hard black case marked with bright hazard stripes. Retrieve the case, extract the civilian, exit through solid matter. Controlled demonstration. No panic. No unnecessary strain.

A basic run. Basic, of course, for everyone except the girl inside the steel box trying not to think about the fact that the previous candidate had been a broad-shouldered bruiser who punched through a concrete training slab hard enough to earn applause from the observation deck.

Eliza crouched by the dummy and slid one hand through the edge of the fallen beam until her wrist vanished inside it. Phasing was a strange thing, not painful, not even unpleasant. Just wrong in the way standing too close to a cliff was wrong, as though her body had opinions about states of matter and resented being overruled.

“Lizzy,” Coach called again, more gently this time, “breathe first. Then move.” She shut her eyes for one second. In for four, hold. Out for four. She phased her forearm fully through the beam, reaching for the dummy. She strained to keep her upper arm phased and her hand solid so she could grab for the civilian. Once she had a grip under the arms, she relaxed her dual control and dragged it free in an awkward half-stumble, nearly tripping over her own boots in the process.

The observation deck above the vault windows erupted in muffled cheers. Eliza flushed hot with relief. Then she immediately hated that she was flushed with relief. It was a training exercise. A real heroine would have done it cleanly, elegantly, without looking so grateful that a room full of evaluators didn’t laugh when she made it through phase two.

“Good,” came Coach’s voice through the wall. “Now the case.” Eliza nodded even though he couldn’t see her. The case sat inside a recessed containment cradle. Standard trial conditions: the cradle itself was locked, shielded, and designed to punish clumsy use of her gift. She couldn’t just phase the whole thing out in one smooth action without risking a feedback sting up both arms. She would have to soften the anchor points first. Small sections. Gentle work. Control, not speed.

Which was another way of saying she had to succeed at the kind of thing that looked unimpressive from the outside. She knelt, placed both palms against the steel lip of the cradle, and exhaled. The world around her fingers went strange.

Matter loosened. Not disappearing, not dissolving—just slipping one hard breath out of alignment with itself. The restraint brackets flickered, edges ghosting silver as she pushed strain through them. A pulse of pain needled behind her eyes. Her power always did this when she used it on anything more dense than her own body. A tremble of weakness rushed through her mind as she pushed her power. One latch. Then another. The case came free into her hands.

“Yes,” Coach said, and she could hear the smile in it. “There you go.” Warmth bloomed in her chest before she could stop it. That was embarrassing too. She hated how much she liked the praise. Hated how obvious it felt. Hated even more that she still needed it.

“All right,” Coach said. “Take the wall. Your choice.”

The left wall was the shortest. The right wall opened into the viewing corridor. Theoretically, it didn’t matter. Eliza swallowed and glanced up through the observation glass. Beyond it, silhouettes watched her move—evaluators, support staff, a few older trainees. She could just make out one of the senior girls with gravity powers, tall and broad-hipped and effortless in the black facility uniform. Last week she’d bent a collapsing stairwell back into place while laughing at a joke someone made over comms.

Eliza looked down at her own thin wrists around the hard black case. Her power felt like a consolation prize whenever she thought about the other girls. Move through, slip past, make things less solid. Never hit harder, never stand bigger, never be the kind of woman who made people safer.

Left wall then, the shortest path. She moved before they realized she had hesitated. She tucked the case into a sling bag and dragged the dummy by the arms with the other, and stepped forward until her nose nearly touched the steel.

“All right,” she whispered to herself. Then she leaned and let her power take her. Cold passed through her first. Then pressure, then that same impossible wrongness, and then she was stumbling out into the viewing corridor beneath bright lights and startled applause, carrying the case and hauling the dummy half-sideways behind her.

Coach Rainer reached for the case as she dropped the dummy. “See?” he said. “Told you.”

Eliza pushed sweaty hair back from her face and tried for breezy competence. “It wasn’t pretty.”

“You came out with the objective and the civilian,” his tone was steady and his face showed relaxed pride. He rested a broad hand briefly on her shoulder, steady and familiar. “That counts.”

She laughed a little. “You always say that when I’m fishing for validation.”

“And yet you keep fishing,” his smile never wavered.

A couple of the evaluators were already making notes on tablets. Someone on the far side of the corridor said, “Good phasing work,” in the careless tone women sometimes used when they meant good enough, for now.

Eliza pretended not to hear it. Coach did hear it. His mouth tightened almost imperceptibly, but he only said, “You did well, Lizzy.”

She flinched when he said it. Then she hated herself for flinching. That nickname followed her around like a shadow. Her friends used it, her brothers used it, the coach used it. Half the time she liked it. Half the time she wanted to stand up straighter and insist on Eliza. As if that alone might add five years, but she knew it would do the opposite.

Before she could decide which half this was, the corridor lights flickered. Not failed. Flickered. Every screen along the wall flashed white.

Eliza frowned. “Did I do that?”

“No,” Coach said immediately. The hand on her shoulder tightened. The air changed.

She would never later be able to describe that part well. Not the exact sensation. Only that the corridor seemed to peel sideways. The applause, the fluorescent lights, the smell of machine oil and old concrete—everything folded inward as if the world were suddenly only a set someone had leaned on too hard.

Coach said her name. “Eliza—”

And then he was gone. The floor remained. That was somehow the cruelest part. She did not fall. She simply arrived elsewhere, upright and breathing too fast in a chamber of polished stone under a painted sky.

Eliza froze.

A room stretched around her in gleaming surfaces and impossible calm. Tall windows opened onto a sunlit campus with no students. She looked around the room, four people were already there.

One was a woman in a dark suit, platinum hair severe and luminous, posture so controlled it seemed sculpted. Eliza knew her face instantly. Everyone did. Evelyn Cross. Another was a red-haired girl near Eliza’s age in a training uniform, arms folded tight and expression sharpened into something halfway between anger and refusal. The third was a young man in civilian clothes who looked like he’d been sleepless for a week.

And standing at the center of all of it, was a beautiful woman in immaculate black. She was the only one who looked like she wanted to be there. The woman in black smiled as if she had caught a particularly expressive bug.

“Contestant Three,” she said. “Eliza Quinn.”

Gold script ignited across the wall.

CONTESTANT THREE: ELIZA QUINN

AGE: 18

STATUS: ACTIVE

VICTORY POINTS: 0

Contestant? Eliza’s throat went dry.

“For our audience,” the woman continued, voice brightening with that theatrical tone she used, “Miss Quinn is a newly emerged phase-manipulator with strong infiltration potential, a cooperative disposition, and a well-established tendency to underestimate the tactical value of her own abilities. Eager to please. Responsive to approval. Discomfited by stronger personalities, particularly female ones. Admirably trainable.”

Claire made a face. “God, she says these things like she’s reading a teleprompter to an empty room. We don't matter.”

Evelyn said nothing, but something in her expression suggested a cold anger. Her face tightened as she watched Verena.

Eliza stared at the glowing words. Responsive to approval. Discomfited by stronger personalities. Heat rushed into her cheeks. “Well,” she said, then winced because her voice came out embarrassingly small. She cleared her throat and tried again. “That’s... invasive.”

The woman’s smile did not falter. “You will find that privacy is less foundational here than many worlds prefer to pretend.”

That was such an insane sentence that Eliza almost laughed. Instead, her arms tightened around her midsection, like she could keep nausea at bay manually. “Where am I?” she asked.

“Genesis Response,” said the woman in black. “A seasonal intervention platform under the Harem Hotel umbrella.”

Claire muttered, “That somehow got worse the more she explained it.”

The young man rubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah, it’s awful.”

Eliza looked at him again. He noticed and shrunk slightly, as if trying not to seem like a threat. “I’m Van,” he said. There was a pause.

“Just Van,” Claire added dryly, like she was still annoyed on principle.

Eliza nodded too fast. “Okay.” Then, she blurted out her next question. “Do you know what’s happening?”

Van gave a short, helpless huff of breath. “Not enough.” There was something about that answer—honest, strained, unsatisfying—that made her want to believe him.

The woman in black turned slightly toward the room at large. “Master Van was brought first.”

Eliza stared, “Master?”

Claire’s expression darkened all over again. Evelyn’s did not change, which was somehow more intimidating.

Van said, flatly, “I didn’t choose that either.”

Eliza’s stomach dipped. She looked from him to the display, to the impossible room, to the woman in black whose confidence filled every empty space like a second architecture. Her pulse climbed.

Her thought spun. This wasn’t real. This was a surprise exercise or something. She needed Coach. She needed her dad. She needed someone to explain the edges of the thing before she made a fool of herself inside it. Instead she had a room full of strangers, one legendary heroine, one angry redhead, one trapped-looking man, and a woman who spoke like every answer had already been scripted.

Breathe first, then move. Her coach’s voice, still in her head. The woman in black was still watching her. Eliza squared her shoulders. “I want to go back,” she said.

“Of course you do,” Verena replied. There was no mockery in it. Somehow that made it worse.

Eliza glanced toward the window, the walls, the room’s smooth lines. No doors visible from this angle except the tall open arch behind Verena. Her power tingled under her skin, **** for an instruction.

She picked the nearest wall and moved before she could think better of it. Three steps, hand out, shoulder angled. Her hand struck the wall…nothing. Not resistance exactly, but refusal. Her whole body simply stopped in place. Then, backlash ran up her arm in a numb silver jolt and sent her stumbling sideways with a sharp sound caught halfway between a gasp and a curse.

Van moved first this time. Not far. Not enough to crowd her. Just one reflexive step, hands half-lifted before he stopped himself. “You okay?”

Eliza couldn’t look at the other heroines. She was cold with shame and embarrassment, so she looked at Van. “Yes,” she lied.

Evelyn’s gaze sharpened. Claire looked openly sympathetic for the first time since arriving. Verena merely observed, like a scientist watching a chemical reaction perform as predicted.

“An understandable experiment,” Verena said. “Not a fruitful one.”

Eliza rubbed at the heel of her hand and looked away before anyone could see too much fear in her face. She had wanted, very badly and very stupidly, to run away. To find someone stronger than her, stronger than Evelyn Cross, to not be here anymore.

The bell rang.

Clear. Elegant. Pitiless.

A fourth light ignited on the wall.

CONTESTANT INTAKE: FOUR

Claire muttered something profane under her breath.

Evelyn folded her arms.

Van looked toward Verena with the exhausted dread of a man realizing panic could, in fact, be cumulative.