Halfway down the hallway, the regular overhead lights were replaced by the annoying, bathing orange glow. Gen. Lincoln passed through the third checkpoint and finally was admitted to the area outside the holding cell.

Two soldiers on either side of the door, in full hazmat gear. That didn't count all of the various technicians who were watching, recording, transcribing everything that occurred in the next room.

To call it a room was not to do the holding cell justice. It looked like a reappropriated bank vault with the metal door to match. It had managed to hold every "powered" individual they had imprisoned within, until there was no more usuable information to be extracted from them. Once interrogation was complete, there was only autopsy.

Orange light here as well. Everywhere the orange light. They made the general and everything else they touched look like a scene from a diseased Halloween.

One of the technicians came up to the general, handed him a clipboard. He flipped through the pages, frowning all the while. "Nothing?"

"Nothing, sir."

The general looked up from the clipboard. "It says here you took off one of his feet yesterday?"

"That's right, sir. And other things. With no anesthesia." The technician continued, as though this had to be justified, "One last push to try and get information. We asked him questions while we moved his ribs around and he watched. It worked in the past. Not with this one, though. He just…watched."

"No," the general agreed. "That doesn't work with this one."

The technician eyed the door for a moment. "He's secure, sir. We've paralyzed his body temporarily—for your protection, of course—but kept him lucid. That will only last a couple of hours. Plenty of time for you to complete a final interrogation. Even if he did have powers at this point, he couldn't access them more than likely."

The general nodded. "All right," he said, nodding to the soliders, "let's get this over with."

The door began to rattle a bit as the various mechanisms allowed it to finally swing free. The process took a full minute until the opening was wide enough to allow passage. They went in: one soldier, the technician, the general, and the other soldier. In that order.

The captive was hanging in a metal and fabric cocoon in the middle of the room. Once, one of the filthy things had been able to manipulate the rack they had strapped him to for a medical procedure. He had suddenly been on his feet, the rack behind him and encircling his limbs as a sort of crude exoskeleton. They had lost fifteen men before they were able to put that little bastard down.

That was before they had made so much progress. That was before the orange lights. But still…there was no such thing as too much caution. So here inside the holding cell, the lights were so intense as to almost be painful to look at it. The eyes took a long time adjusting.

Once the general's did, though, he could see the captive's eyes. They were closed. Apart from the way that the body was badly deformed from the pieces they had removed in a futile attempt to get him to talk, he looked almost…peaceful.

"Daniel," the general called out. "Daniel, can you hear me?"

The eyes flickered open. "Yes. Yes, I can." The eyes found the general. "And may I ask who you are?"

"General James Lincoln. I head up the project."

Daniel…actually smiled. "Ah, yes…the project to deal with…my kind.."

The general wished there was a place to sit, but of course, there was nothing in the room that wasn't absolutely necessary. For everyone's protection. The vault door began to work its way shut behind them.

The general nodded. "Yes. Your kind. Let's talk about that for a second. You claim them, and yet we don't have a single report of you actually using any powers. At all."

Daniel's smile didn't fade. "That's right…maybe I'm not even powered. Maybe I'm just…a joe shmoe sympathizer."

The general chuckled despite himself, "Son, I've seen plenty of sympathizers in my day. They've been willing to hide you, feed you, educate you…but undergo torture and not give up any goods on you? I'm afraid I can't buy that one."

Daniel looked up a little and chuckled. "Yes, well, I suppose if you're here that must mean your men are tired of trying to get me to talk. I'm a liability. I'm going to be silenced. You're the last name on the dance card…the idea being that, since I'm going to die anyway, there's no reason not to give up any goods." Daniel smiled and looked directly at the general. "Tell me I'm wrong in my assessment."

The general didn't bat an eye. "You're not wrong. I'm here to talk to you one last time and then my men will kill you."

Daniel nodded, "Well, we understand each other." He gave a little cough and smiled. "I should make you understand why I'm here, at the very least." He coughed again and said simply, "Middleton."

The general shook his head, "Oh please don't trot out that tired story. I hope I didn't fly all the way over and come down here just for that."

"Massacres never grow old, general. They're never old news."

"All of you in one place like that," the general protested, "God knows what you bastards were planning—"

"Planning?" Daniel said, and his tone never changed, so even, so controlled. "We were planning to have lives. Send children to school, own homes, have our own community where we could keep ourselves to ourselves and not be bothered."

"An entire town full of powered individuals, any of whom could have been the equivalent of a walking rogue nuclear weapon, and we were supposed to just stay away?" The general paced. If he could not sit, at least he could pace. "Did you know in Arkansas we had a boy of six who wiped out an entire afterschool daycare center because he started giving off a toxin very close to sarin gas? Six years old. Thank God he wasn't immune to the effects of his own poison. Imagine if he had wandered off down the street, lethal clouds in his wake?"

"Imagine if you could drop him on Baghdad," Daniel countered.

The general coughed in astonishment. "Good Lord, man, we barely understand how any of your abilities work, much less how to use them as weapons. I'm primarily concerned with our survival as a species."

Daniel cocked his head to one side. "Even if it means the death of mine."

"Regrettable," the general said, nodding as he resumed pacing. "But I'll trade the few numbers of your lives for the lives of all normal Americans." He looked at the captive a moment longer, "But regardless of all that, you're too young to have been at Middleton."

"I was three," Daniel said. "It's not me I'm speaking of, though, no."

"Mother? Father?" The general asked.

"My wife."

The general stopped pacing. "You were married at three years old?"

Daniel smiled, "No…there was a woman with us at one point. She knew things. My wife wasn't born at the time. But had her pregnant mother not been herded into the tennis courts with the others and gunned down, we would have been married. I might have had a different life. I might never have led my people in open rebellion against you. So, in a way, you created a bigger problem than you felt you had solved."

The general chuckled, "I'm not sure I can believe that, son."

Daniel kept on smiling. "I'm sure you can't. That's the problem with you humans. On the whole, you don't think about the consequences of your actions. The long term consequences, I mean. You rely on everything to be antibacterial, which means that the suppressed bacteria will simply become more and more deadly in response.

"And so with us. You keep trying to wipe us out, to prevent us from rising up and taking our place in the evolutionary scheme of things, and so with each generation we simply grow more powerful and, of course, more angry."

The general sighed. "This audience is over." He turned to the soldiers, "Open the door."

Daniel continued. "Let me give you an example," he said. "You wanted to know my power. Here it is. Guards, your firing pins are now gone."

The soldiers looked at one another, as though Daniel must be kidding.

Daniel's attention went to the technician. "You seemed to enjoy having me laid open so you could play with my internal organs. I don't even need to open you."

The technician jerked backwards as though he had been punched in the stomach. He dropped the clipboard and his hands flew to his chest, his eyes wide in panic.

"Kind of hard to breathe with your lungs down there, isn't it?" Daniel said all this with the same amount of calm. "And the heart isn't meant to be over there, I know. But you won't feel it for much–"

The technician coughed up a wad of bloody matter and slumped backwards into the wall.

"—longer," Daniel finished. The soldiers had checked their rifles to find them useless and gone for their sidearms, only to find them now missing. "Lost something?" he asked them. "Here, let me get those for you." And with that, two muffled crashing noises occurred. The tops of both soldier's heads exploded outwards, the red spray looking dark and wrong in the Halloween lights.

Daniel smiled, "Well, that's the first time friendly fire has ever looked like that."

"The dampeners," the general finally found his voice. "This isn't possible."

"Your orange party lights. Well, yes, my generation finds them merely irritating. We can think around them."

The building seemed to shake on its very foundations.

"What are you doing?" the general asked. Behind them, the vault door began to open. Reinforcements were coming. They were only a minute away.

"Where is this base?" Daniel asked.

"What are you doing?" the general asked again.

Daniel coughed. "Teleportation. That's my power. I can teleport small things or I can teleport very large things very long distances. Right now I'm working on moving this base and everything around it for a hundred miles. We're going to visit the Sun, actually."

"There's a city seventy-five miles from here," the general said, another jolt from the building making his legs shake. Or was it the building doing that?

"Good," Daniel said, "then the message will come through loud and clear."

"Please," the general said. "Please…I…"

"…have children. I know," Daniel said. "So do I, actually. And mine will know yours very soon, general. Very soon. I promise you that."

Daniel then said one last thing, but the words were lost as the building felt like it had been struck violently, and the air seemed to rush from the room.