To our surprise, the stranger—Fransic from Bruma, wherever that was—, knew how to come back to the path. It wasn’t damaged by the storm, and we didn’t have any trouble walking back home.

It was nice, actually. My brother was  suddenly carefree and full of energy as if last night had never happened and Fransic was happy to listen to his rambling. He even told us a bit about himself. Two siblings, caring parents, no pets, nice neighbors. A simple childhood in a small lumber town. He didn’t have any plans to go back to Laku, which was the city where he lived before he ended up here.

I would have asked about the exact country but I wasn’t just bad at geography: I was unable to understand any reference from other countries, sometimes even other cities. So, what was the point?

Nevertheless, I wondered if the place was dangerous or if he was hiding from a person in particular. It was impolite to mention such things, so I didn’t. Instead, I asked him if he moved out often. 

“Oh, no, I don’t. I haven’t left Laku since I became Laemsi’s apprentice.”

“And you even have a mentor!” Decklan blurted out. “For the healing thing?”

“Oh, no, she is not abiding”, Fransic said and, a second later, added: “I don’t think I’ve ever met any other abiding, actually. It’s an uncommon ability.”

“Well, it's nonexistent here,” my brother said.

“Can you tell me again…? Uh… Have you ever met a foreigner before?”

He didn’t look foreign at all. He seemed perfectly at home in our streets. He was wearing my brother’s coat to hide his ragged and bloodied clothes, and the only thing out of place was his crazy hair. Too long and messy for what our neighbors would call a respectable young man, too short for those rebels that had come back from the city.

We followed the trends from the capital and the countries that produced popular tv shows. Foreigners were recognized only for being too dark or—most likely—too light. He wasn’t either. His skin was slightly darker than Decklan’s, almost chestnut, and probably a warmer tone than mine. In other words, he would have fit in town even more than we did. His way of talking, too, was just slightly slower and softer than what we were used to.

It was odd to think of him as someone from another country, when some of the Company’s employees that we had seen everyday as we grew up, were more different from us than he was.

Yet, my brother didn’t seem to feel the same way. “We got a lot of foreigners, because the factories hire a lot of engineers and all that. They are nothing like you,” he said.

Then he proceeded to talk about the people who came and went, complicating it to the point that even I was confused about who was a stranger and who was a local that had lived out of town a few years.

Fransic would nod and ask short questions that Decklan replied with long answers.

It started with things like “When was that?” Or “Did X study with Y?” but it became more and more specific, and he seemed to be keeping up somehow.

By the time we could see the beaten wood fence of our house, he was already familiar with every last name and understood the connections between all of our friends that had left the town in the previous years. Well, they were mostly my friends, but Decklan would always be on our outings. Dad insisted on that, because he didn’t like that I spent so much time with ‘older boys’. Decklan didn’t mind and my friends had learned to ignore him because they weren’t fast enough to follow his train of thought.

Until last morning, I had thought that nobody was fast enough. But this guy didn’t even blink when my brother interrupted himself and started a five step run towards the mango tree in front of our house.

The ancient orange and black tabby cat that had adopted our family when I was around seven years old, meowed in welcome from his favorite branch, and jumped into my brother's arms. He had done that for so long, that I didn’t know that most cats would refuse to try such a jump.

“‘Morning, Sunset,” my brother said, and carried the ball of fur and trouble into the house. Mom had lost all hope of ending that habit years ago.

Me and our guest entered too, at a slower pace, and after cleaning our shoes. 

“Is this really okay?” Fransic asked. “It’s not against the local customs to let strangers in your house, or…?”

“Why would you think that?” I interrupted. It was odd that he kept talking as if we had some sort of odd culture, when we were just like everybody else.

“I noticed that you didn’t completely agree when your brother invited me. You were suggesting a… what was it? A hospitality center?”

“A hospital,” I said, half fighting the urge to laugh, half ashamed because he had noticed my annoyance at the idea of having guests when we needed to catch up with studying. It was bad enough that we may end up wasting an hour explaining where we had been the previous night.

“Hospital,” he repeated, as if trying to memorize it.”I’m guessing your disapproval is due to something related to manners and tradition, and not because you dislike my presence specifically.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you implying that I don’t? Because you wouldn’t know that.”

“Exactly. I’m sure that you wouldn’t directly show it if you don’t want me around. You feel bad for me because I bled to death twice in front of you, and I think you are too polite to show rejection towards others so openly.”

I decided that I didn’t like that man. He knew too much.

“Not really,” he denied, almost as I came to that conclusion. “I do know more than I’m told, sometimes, like just right now. But it’s not how I knew about your politeness, I just noticed that. It’s kind of evident. Is it disrespectful to know things? I don’t do it on purpose. And I promise this was the first thing I knew about you. Well, the second; your address was the first.”

There it was. He made as much sense as Decklan.

“Let me try to understand,” I said. “Is this another special ability?”

He nodded. “I receive knowledge without studying or investigating. I just know.”

“You just do? Out of nowhere?”

“Maybe? Some believe that it comes from the universe or a wise deity… many think that is a sense like any other, and we just don’t understand it yet. Most people don't really care, they know it's useful and that’s that.”

I was tempted to remind him that no, most people didn’t know that, because they didn’t know it was possible. But he already knew that, right? I didn’t know if he would take the remark personally… Apparently it was true that I was too polite.

“A moment ago, when I thought that you know too much, you weren’t reading my mind, you just suddenly knew that I think that way of you. Is that so?”

He nodded, a wide smile lightening all his face. “People always fail to understand that those are different things.”

I wondered why, when it was pretty obvious. “Why? Do you know everything that people think?”

He shook his head. “And I know things that aren’t thoughts.”

I had supposed so, but I took the chance to ask: “What kind of things?”

“All kind. But not at will. Other percipients can do that: find answers to their questions. But I’m limited to random stuff.”

My brother was coming back from the kitchen, holding a piece of bread and a can of sweetened condensed milk. He caught the end of what Fransic was saying, and exclaimed something with his mouth too full to be understandable.

“You put that back or I’m telling!” I threatened.

“Both aight angie!” he pleaded.

“Then make a proper breakfast! You can’t put all that sugar in your body. You know it’s bad for you and for everyone around you!”

“Both…!”

“And stop talking with your mouth full! You’re spitting all over the house!” I pointed at our cat, cleaning a splotch on the floor.

“Zat…”

“Don’t make me force you to keep your mouth closed!”

He looked at me with resentment written all over his face, forcefully chewed a couple of times and swallowed too soon. When he regained the ability to breathe, he defended himself: “That fell from the bread. I saw it.”

“Why do you think that I care about that?” I asked, perplexed.

“You are just jealous because sweet food doesn’t make you happy anymore. You are old.”

“You should be old too, Decklan. We’ll be at college in months. Months! Don’t you get it? Well, we may be at college, if you don’t sabotage us every day like you did yesterday.”

“I knew it!” He yelled in victory. More condensed milk fell from the bread slice as he used it to point at me accusingly. “I knew that you would do that!”

How dare he! To treat me like it was me doing something wrong, when I was doing my best not to yell at him! How. Dare. He.

Of course, now I would yell at him.

But I was just taking a step towards him and taking a breath when I was interrupted by  a light touch on my shoulder, where our guest had put his hand.

He didn’t retire it when he asked, not at me but my twin: “Can you explain better what it is that you knew? And a little slower.”

“She knows!” Decklan growled, looking at the shadow-like reflections on the screen of the turned-off TV.

“Don’t you want to say it, though? In a way in which your sister can understand why it makes you angry?”

“How can she not understand!?”

“Because she’s angry too. I bet you don’t understand why she’s angry either.”

“Yes, I do! She thinks I got us lost on purpose to avoid studying, because she knows I’m bored!”

“I don’t think that,” I said, a little surprised because he expected that I would.

He looked at me, muttering something that sounded like “Really?”

“We were taking a break already, and I know you would have tried to focus even if you were still bored.” I elaborated. “Besides, you aren’t manipulative. If you didn’t want to study you would have said so. You just get stupid when you have been doing the same thing for a long time.”

Fransic gave me a stern look, and I felt the urge to explain that my brother knew that I wasn’t insulting him.

“It’s okay,” Decklan was the one who explained. “That’s how she spells ‘adventurous’. Can’t blame her, it’s a tricky word.”

I laughed.

“You really don’t blame me?” He looked at me with such a hopeful face that I felt tempted to lie.

I didn’t. “That’s not what I said. You did leave the path.”

“But I do that all the time, I don’t know how I lost my way. I’m sorry, really, I am!”

“I know. And I didn’t find the way back either. It’s the rain, by the way, when everything’s wet it’s…”

“It changes.”

Is not what I was going to say, but that didn’t matter. “Besides… It was a good thing, right?” I looked at my brother’s new bestie, his clothes still soaked in blood, and he nodded.

“So we are okay?” Decklan asked.

“Yes. But we still have to study, and you know that.”

My brother groaned, but admitted that I was right.

I was happy to have that figured out, but then our guest gave his opinion without being asked. Again. “You really don’t want to study, do you?”

“Don’t say that in front of her!” Declan whispered as if he hoped that I wouldn’t hear.

“I think she noticed too.”

“Yes, but… Listen, it’s not that I hate to study. I don’t know why I can’t… And we are studying too much! And I’m sure she hates this whole thing too!” He pointed at me dramatically. 

“Then why do you do it?” Fransic asked, with that tone teachers usually have when they are trying to trick students into figuring something out by themselves.

I was sure he wanted to remind us that we were studying to get into the right career and do the best we could with our future. He was probably a recently graduated teacher, or the older brother of a rebellious teenager, and was trying to motivate us. Certainly he couldn’t really ignore why we were willing to endure the whole admissions rigmarole.

My brother didn’t care what Fransic wanted to hear or remind us. He didn’t get any motivational epiphany as he rambled about medicine school and saving lives and using our skills for good.

“Not the telekinesis,” he clarified. ”That’s more like a superhero skill, obviously, and Tal thinks it would only cause us trouble, she doesn’t want the hero’s path, and I won’t go anywhere without her, especially not the superhero’s path, because the superhero’s family is always the first to get killed…”

“Superheroes aren’t real, Decko,” I reminded him.

“What’s a superhero?” Fransic asked, this time sounding nothing but curious.

“Exactly!” Decklan exclaimed in triumph. “A superhero doesn’t have to run over the roofs in a silly costume. You are a superhero if you have superpowers and fight crime.”

“Oh. I see,” Fransic said. “But you should know that you can be heroic without fighting anyone.”

“Thank you!” I exclaimed. “That’s what I’ve been saying for the last ten years!”

I hadn’t been saying exactly that for more than two years, and I had refused to fight the crime for as long as I could remember, but it was a fair approximation and my brother didn’t question it.

“I know, I know. But we won’t use our special ability either. I wanted to save lives using my special ability.”

“Like you did when you found me dying?”

My brother made an stupid face: open mouth, brows together, his eyes so filled with astonishment that he couldn’t close them, and that thing he did with his head to think better. It was a mixture between his usual confused puppy expression and the first epiphany of his life.

“We did, didn’t we? We actually helped.”

“Does it surprise you?” Fransic said.

“Of course it does, we didn’t know what we were doing!”

“And we would have if we had studied more,” I scolded, despite being sure that it wasn't true.

Again, he didn’t question it. “You see, the helping part is still the most important one, and my sister… She’s just like you, she won’t shut up about how our actual super skill is that we are smart—even though everyone knows I’m not—and how instead of fighting people we can take care of them. Not the same people, obviously…”

“Why not?” Fransic said. “People who've done wrong get hurt too.”

“Yeah, well, they brought that on themselves.”

“How would you know that? When someone is hurt, there is no time for judgment.”

Decklan squinted at him, suspicious. “You and my sister are hooked on the same TV show or something?”

Fransic gave him a confused stare, but my brother had already moved on. “Okay, whatever. We can help criminals, too. The point is: we have to study to pass the admission tests, and study a bit more to apply for the scholarship. You see, if being poor is awful, not being poor enough to get social support makes it worse.”

The stranger frowned, confused.

“That's not true, the last bit. But yeah, it’s an expensive career,” I noted, as if that would make everything more clear for the guest. It did. Or at least, he looked like he understood now.

“So, the scholarship is payment for a career you can’t afford,” he said, sounding as if it was an amusing discovery.

I don’t know why, but that was the last straw. I couldn’t stop myself from asking: “You didn’t know that? What planet are you from and how do people pay for expensive careers there?”

At the mention of the word “planet” he looked at me like he was about to ask something, but he ended up answering my questions instead.

“We don’t have expensive careers where I come from. People teach us because we need to learn, and then we use our new knowledge in any way it’s needed. As for the planet… it depends, which planet is this one?”

The best part of his sassy rebukes was that he made them sound like he was being serious.

I had no choice but to answer in the same fashion. “Earth, 1981.”

He gaped as if I had said we were in 2001, but he wasn’t thinking about the date at all.