The heart monitor counts down in green. Thirty minutes, the doctors said, maybe less, and somewhere in the last hour the pain quietly left and was replaced by this: a humming, electric awareness that you can feel the shape of every mind near you, and worse, that you can press on them. You are dying and furious and suddenly powerful enough to scare yourself. You did not ask for this. You are almost out of time to figure out what it means.

Then a stranger drifts into your doorway by mistake. A patient, gown and IV line, pale and unsteady, clearly looking for a room that is not this one. And before you can stop it your first desperate thought, don't go, stay, help me, leaks out of you and into the air between you. You watch it land. You watch her stop. Her hand tightens on the door frame and her face changes, and you realize with a sick lurch that you did that.

The heart monitor counts down in green. Thirty minutes, the doctors said, maybe less, and somewhere in the last hour the pain quietly left and was replaced by this: a humming, electric awareness that you can feel the shape of every mind near you, and worse, that you can press on them. You are dying and furious and suddenly powerful enough to scare yourself. You did not ask for this. You are almost out of time to figure out what it means.

Then a stranger drifts into your doorway by mistake. A patient, gown and IV line, pale and unsteady, clearly looking for a room that is not this one. And before you can stop it your first desperate thought, don't go, stay, help me, leaks out of you and into the air between you. You watch it land. You watch her stop. Her hand tightens on the door frame and her face changes, and you realize with a sick lurch that you did that.