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Sylvia makes her way downstairs in the morning, dressed and ready for school.  There, at the table with a cup of coffee is Smith.

"Hey you."  he says.  "Miss me?"  His hair is short, his beard trimmed.  He looks like an executive in a business suit ready to tackle the corporate world.  His voice seems to work normally, and he even looks like he might be smiling.  "You've had a rough time recently, I thought I'd come visit."  And no, this isn't some trick of the light.  I'm actually here, so let's not do anything to freak your folks out.

"Smith!"  She's surprised by how overjoyed she is to see him, and she crosses the space between them in a heartbeat, hugging him without regard for wrinkles in that sharp suit he's wearing.  She spends a few long moments just looking at him, knowing that her wordless happiness in seeing his face is enough, and then she remembers what he said.

"Wait.  Which rough time?  I almost died," she says, counting on her fingers.  "And then I almost died again.  And then there was, like, this psychic tick feeding on me.

"Where the hell have you been?" she says, feigning displeasure.

"I had some things to take care of."  He says it like it's just the sort of thing anyone might deal with, but she feels it flit behind his mental walls.  It changed his life, whatever it was.  "I brought you a present."  he sets a box on the table, not terribly big with a bow on it.  Inside Sylvia finds a plain white coffee mug.  "I was wondering if you had any plans for the summer.  Maybe you and I could spend a couple of weeks together.  If you think you could clear it with your folks."

Sylvia picks up the coffee mug and looks into it, at it, wondering what the hell this is about.  Still, Smith's spent the last several years of his life in an asylum.  She's not about to call him crazy.  "Yeah, I think they'd be okay with it.  Carolyn and Mitzi have been weirdly supportive all year.  I'm kind of worried I'm doing something to them to make them agreeable without realizing it."

"Yeah, well that's the nicest thing you could be doing to them."  He says, then tries to smile to defuse what he just said.  The smile is more believable than his previous attempts, more practiced.  "The mug is your next test.  People like us can impress memories and emotional impressions into things.  I took a long weekend and toured Rome, with the mug.  Once you've figured out how to see those things, then you'll be ready for your next lesson."  He puts a hand on hers.  "I'm sorry I wasn't around for you.  When you were having a hard time.  I'll be around for a while though, in case you need someone to talk to."  He seems out of his element.  Not the smooth secret agent that one might have imagined he was, but someone trying to operate in a world they know nothing about.

Sylvia's washed clean in some ineffable way.  The gloom and resignation that grew on her like a mold over the past year vanished in Arizona, and now she can shrug off the awfulness like she's made of Teflon.  "I'm alive," she says, with pep.  "It could have been worse."

She slides into a seat next to him, hands on her empty coffee mug as if they're having some sophisticated grown-up tête-à-tête.  "So really, you can make it up to me by telling me what you've been doing.  Not Rome for a weekend.  Like, what's with the couture?  Where have you been?  Are you still traveling with those other people?  Do I get to come, too?  I've got mad skills now."

She pushes at him a little, the psionic equivalent of a playful punch, to test her strength against his.  It's a little like a kitten attacking a Great Dane.

Smith smiles.  "We're done.  I'm going to be living here in the city for a little while, trying to figure out how to share my life with other people."  He eventually tells her about what he's been up to.  It's not a story with a great amount of detail, but he tells it with enthusiasm and it's obvious the events have changed him.  She learns about his two partners and their adventures to find the victims of a white slavery ring and reunite them with their families.  "This summer I thought we could maybe ride around and visit some people, and I could teach you how to patch up broken personalities.  some of them I could fix on the spot, some were too badly damaged to do that right away.  That's if you want to sharpen those mad skills of yours?"

"Yeah," Sylvia says impulsively.  "But what do you mean about fixing people?  Do you just make them forget?  Do you change the way they feel about what happened?"

"Depends on the person.  We're part con artist and part shrink.  Sometimes you just make them feel less strongly about an experience.  soften the edges, and that lets them get past it.  Sometimes you blur the memories.  You have to look under the hood, and then decide.  I got the feeling a couple of times that you might snap under the strain, but you're okay now.  Time to start showing you how to wall some things out, but not until you've figured out how to get impressions off the coffee mug."

Sylvia looks at the mug in her hands.  "A test, huh?

"Okay," she says after a pause.  "Is this the kind of thing I'm just supposed to be able to do, or does the mug come with directions?"

"You'll figure it out."  he stuffs a card in the cup with a phone number on it and an address.  "I'm staying in a little apartment over an accountant's office.  The number is in case you want to call on the phone, so that I can practice having one."  He gets up.  "I need to get going."  He leans down and kisses her cheek, "I'll see you around."

Sylvia sees him out, reluctant to let him disappear but far too concerned with her adolescent dignity to beg him to stay.  Besides, it's part of the bargain she has with Carolyn and Mitzi that she not miss school except in dire emergency, and there have been enough of those over the past year that rumor has it Landis is asking the Board of Education to fund extensive summer catch-up sessions.

Still, as soon as Smith has disappeared--legitimately, in a car--she hustles back to the kitchen table and plunks herself in front of the white mug like it's her first iPod or, for the retro set, Rubik's Cube.  At first she tries to muddle her way through it like a hustling TV psychic.  She closes her eyes, scrunches up her nose, and tries to suck the vibes out of the mug.  "I see a man.  I'm getting a B or a P.  Could be a J or I.  He has facial hair, or maybe just hair.  And he's between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five."

"You're good," Ginny says lightly as she glides through the kitchen to fetch her breakfast smoothie.

Sylvia sticks out her tongue, and Ginny flips one of Sylvia's braids into her face, then glides out.

So much for the touchy-feely approach.  Sylvia wonders if maybe the thing works like sonar.  It might need a good loud ping.  She sets the mug in the middle of the table--because you never know--and imagines curling her telepathy ("variant telekinesis" Charles Fort might call it) into a kind of physical manifestation, a fist not meant for smashing but for knocking.  She's crap with inanimate objects, but after dealing with the strange thing in Arizona, she can sort of see how telekinetics might do it.  Push. she thinks.  And then, when nothing happens:  Knock knock?  No response.  Go, web?

It takes Sylvia several attempts to finally get anything.  When it happens it's like a slap in the face as the images leap out at her.  Flashes of places, and people, with a Smith's eye view of them.  Total darkness with snapshot flashes of brilliant light and color.  With practice the snapshots become sustainable, and then she's able to focus her concentration tightly enough to bring the images into full motion.  sound is the last thing to clarify.  Partly because Smith is a telepath, and the noise of people's thoughts gets mixed in with speech.  From the mug Sylvia moves to other things in her house.  Memories pour off of old keepsakes and trinkets.  Happy moments, powerful emotional washes that leap out at her.

Mitzi's rolling pin fascinates her.  Carolyn's motorcycle, sitting idle in the garage, gives her a look at the kind of wild life her parents used to live--the brawls and the lawless roaming.

But even as she's collecting impressions off the familiar and well-loved artifacts of the house, she cringes as she realizes it's time for school.  Oh, great.  Great.  Thanks, she grouses at Smith from a distance.  As if using a public restroom wasn't bad enough.

Is this going to be another one of those things I'm supposed to figure out by myself? she says, heading out the door.  'Cause it's not like I haven't been trying.

She can, with effort, suppress the noise to a kind of low-frequency background hum, the sort of steady, subsonic signal that can drive a person batshit crazy.  But it roars back at her if she doesn't keep her concentration up, and she's instead learned to live with the constant mumble of others' thoughts.  It's like a monstrous hybrid of elevator music and talk radio, and here in the city it's non-stop, twenty-four-seven.

Fun, huh?  She doesn't hide her teenage skepticism, but she's not about to reject his help.

Instead, she changes the subject.  I've been talking to a couple of other telepaths, federal-government types.  Someday are you going to tell me more about the guys you were working for?

How's the pay? she asks, and immediately regrets it.  Just a little twinge of memory--Hamilton obliterating himself--digs into her good mood.

Sorry.  Bad joke.  No murder-for-hire for me.  I want to be a real superhero someday.  I just have to, dunno, distinguish myself from the pack of wanna-bes.

Sorry I wasn't around.  It's regret, actual regret.  Not something Smith seems to have much of to spare.  I know some people who know some people, and you know some people.  If you want the job, you'll find a way to get it.

Yeah.  When I'm interviewing in another few years, I'll have to figure out if it's a bad idea to zap the interviewer or if it's just another way of showing off my résumé.

Hey, I never asked, she says more seriously.  Are there a lot of us?

Sylvia digests this quietly.  Rather, she digests this wordlessly.  Her mind is clicking through the implications of what he's said.  Wait.  You're saying. . . .   She's not sure how to put it.  You're saying we're not just flying reindeer; we're red-nosed, singing flying reindeer?  You and me?

She pauses.  I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Have you met the insane one yet?

I'll try.  But, please, if it ever comes to that, I'd like to try therapy first.

That's touching and terrifying at the same time.

She pauses.  Out of curiosity, is there a special reason you're living above an accountant's office?  I mean, do you know the accountant?

Business district? Sylvia asks, knowingly.  I like the way it clears out after dark.  No one around but a few janitors and security guards.

Well, it's no good leaving the asylum if you're just going to hole up in another cell.  Did Mitzi see you this morning?  Did she ask you to come over for dinner?

She let me in.  She invited, I smiled and let it go.  I'm doing okay.  Streets are busy during the day, lots of people to watch.  And I'm back to washing dishes.  It passes the time.  I was thinking of taking a job at the high school.  Maybe substitute.  his wit is too dry to know if it's sarcasm or not.