30 Days of Demonfire

Prejudice

"I don't know, Mar'i, your heat signature isn't changing," Proxy says through the comm.

I'm sitting in a lotus position in what's essentially a glass case with a solar lamp fixed in the top, designed especially for me by Bruce with help from my mother, which was pretty special because they have never gotten along. It's supposed to give my powers a kick, and I'm hoping it'll help with this eyebeam thing.

"It's not about how hot I am," I answer, disrupting my breathing cycles that go with the alien yoga. "It's about my emotions. Once I get to trying a few out you might get something."

Tamaranean powers are a pretty easy formula. Happy equals fly. Confident equals strong. Angry equals starbolts. The stupid thing is, I don't know what makes eyebeams. My mom doesn't know what it is, because she says she always uses the same memory to use it and I guess she gets a pretty wide array of emotions from it. She won't tell me which memory she uses, which makes me almost a hundred percent sure that it's something involving my dad.

That conclusion really doesn't help because my mom has felt just about every emotion there is, some that they only have a word for on Tamaran, when it comes to my dad.

It's not love. It better not be, because then I wouldn't be able to use the stupid eyebeams ever. It couldn't be that, anyway, because I've felt them scratching at my eyes just waiting to be tapped into and I've never been in love.

What kind of stupid emotion powers something like that? There's already happy, confident, and angry. How about scared? Psyching myself into an emotion like this is really difficult sometimes, but it's what the Tamaranean yoga is supposed to help with.

When I'm 'faking' emotions like this, I need to get my body to mimic the emotion, then I can make myself feel it. I start breathing faster. I clench my hands into fists. My spine goes rigid and I grit my teeth. I'm acting like I'm already scared, see? I should switch from modeling to acting, because I can make myself cry way easier than I see most people on TV do it. Unfortunately, I can't make the powers work just by faking an emotion. I need to actually feel it. I've gotten pretty good with the main three—happiness, confidence, and anger—but fear is a new one, so it takes longer.

To do that, I need to scare myself. I wouldn't say that I'm particularly brave, but when have super-strength and you can generate starbolts in your palm, it takes a lot to actually scare you. I've only really had two nightmares since I've been little. One is of my family dying. Dad, mom, Bruce, Steph... It gets pretty bad. I really don't want to go that route, so I focus on the other nightmare.

It's stupid, but I've always been kind of afraid of water. My dad thinks it's a little funny, because Tamaraneans are descended from cats. Very funny. And I don't mean, like, pools. It's lots of water. The ocean. Going down in a submarine. Submarine are so much worse than the ocean, actually, because all that's keeping you from all that pressure and all the water is some metal—

"Heart rate spiked," Proxy notes through the comm. "Increased adrenaline. What are you doing?"

Proxy kind of messed up the whole process, but it's okay because fear isn't it. I didn't feel any heat behind my eyes.

"Tricking myself into being really frickin' scared," I explain, tucking my hair behind my ear as I take up the deep breathing exercise again.

My cell phone vibrates in my pocket and I sigh, reaching for it. I'm supposed to be at the GU Library right now, working on a slide show for my English class. Damn group projects.

"I gotta go, Prox," I say, and she taps at some screen, lighting up her face and her dark hair. The lamp above me switches off and as I step out of the glass chamber I realize that I feel good, the way I always do after being under the lamp.