7:03 AM – Lower Manhattan, May 17
Lani Ishikawa stood barefoot on the cold floor of her studio, the edges of a half-unpacked canvas beneath her toes, the scent of lemon and paint thick in the air. Her phone buzzed with gallery emails and passive-aggressive curatorial notes, but she ignored them. She always ignored them in the morning.
Instead, she faced the window. The glass framed the city like a living organism—breathing, hurting, surviving. Beneath her third-floor loft, Manhattan murmured its early rhythms: trash trucks, salsa music from the bodega, a man yelling at a cab that almost clipped his mirror.
She closed her eyes and exhaled, letting the weight of those emotions brush over her like wind. One breath. One heartbeat. One moment that was hers.
Her art was never about spectacle. It was about sensation.
"If they feel it," she always told her mentor back in school, "then they can't ignore it."
She was 23 now. A rising voice in the immersive art world. Her newest installation, Feel Me, was being unveiled in a week. It would allow patrons to walk through a chamber where scent, vibration, and ambient sound would mimic grief, joy, heartbreak. The entire exhibit was meant to make people feel something real.
But Lani had always felt too much.
Backstory – Inheritance of Silence
Lani was raised in a house without shouting. Her mother, a grief therapist and child of Hiroshima survivors, taught silence like scripture. You didn't scream your feelings. You absorbed them. Examined them. Felt them in private until they passed.
Her father, once a jazz musician who spiraled into schizophrenia, left the family when she was nine. He left behind stacks of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and a single cryptic note: "My mind is too loud to stay."
Lani never saw him again.
Instead, she learned to tune her emotional senses like a violin. She could walk into a room and know who had cried that morning. Who had lied last night. Who was faking their smile.
At first, it was a gift.
Then it became a curse.
3:12 PM – The Studio
Lani turned the lights low and stared at her sculpture: an amorphous piece of resin shaped like a human heart, pulsing slightly with LED light. It wasn't beautiful in the classical sense—but it felt alive.
She walked past her old journals. Past letters never sent to her father. Past sketches of installations no one would fund because they were "too intense."
Today felt… thick. As if the air had weight. As if something was watching.
Her skin prickled.
She shook it off. Probably just her anxiety playing tricks again.
She had a show to prep. Emotions to shape.
7:58 PM – On the Street
Lani was walking home from a small experimental music showcase when she noticed the stillness. A kind of vacuum in the air.
The sidewalk was full—but quiet. A man looked up from his phone. A baby stopped crying. The subway below made no sound.
And then—
BOOM.
8:00 PM – The Explosion
Light.
Heat.
And then everything.
The emotions slammed into her first—before the sound, before the shockwave, before her body hit the pavement.
Terror like an ocean tide.
Agony like gunfire.
Confusion, rage, love, panic, regret—all at once.
And she felt them. All of them. Every soul within blocks.
Screams and gasps became rivers in her mind. Her body convulsed. Her mind fractured open like glass under pressure.
Then, silence.
10:26 PM – Hospital Room, Somewhere in Manhattan
She woke up to fluorescent lights and a nurse crying silently in the hallway. Machines beeped. Someone coded in another room.
But Lani didn't just hear it—she felt the nurse's heartbreak. The sorrow of a man on the third floor who didn't know if his daughter had survived. The guilt of a doctor who missed a step.
And then—*
She heard a thought.*
"Please don't let me be the one who killed her."
Lani sat up, breathing hard.
She wasn't just feeling emotions now.
She was inside them.
Days Later – First Use of Power
She walked through a recovery center a few blocks from the blast zone. People were in grief. Some had lost limbs. Some had lost children.
A man was sobbing uncontrollably in the corner. Nurses couldn't calm him. The pain in his mind was volcanic.
Lani knelt beside him.
"Can I… sit with you?" she asked.
He didn't answer.
She closed her eyes and reached into her own center, like she used to in performance. But this time, it wasn't stagecraft.
It was real.
She sent calm. Peace. The memory of waves. The warmth of a childhood sun.
The man's body stopped trembling. His sobs softened. He looked at her, eyes wide.
"What… did you do?"
She opened her eyes. "I just… helped you breathe again."
But inside, she felt it—his grief now sitting in her own chest. Heavy. Residual.
She hadn't removed it. She had taken it.
Late Night, Her Apartment
She couldn't sleep.
The city was still screaming.
Her mind buzzed with thought-emotion. Echoes of fear. Random fragments from strangers' minds: "I should've stayed home"—"Where is he?"—"It's my fault."
Lani stared at her own reflection.
What am I now?
Her hands were shaking. Not from fear.
From power.
She could soothe millions. Or break them.
If she ever lost control—if she snapped—it wouldn't be just one person that suffered.
It would be a city.
She pressed her palm to the glass. Outside, the skyline flickered.
I didn't ask for this.
But the pain was real. And now it lived in her.
She whispered, almost prayer-like:
"If I have to hurt to help… so be it."