When the powers came, the world divided cleanly into the gods and the rest, and Meher woke up firmly among the rest. Her power, such as it was, arrived without ceremony on an ordinary Tuesday: she could feel, exactly one second before it happened, when someone near her was about to cry. That was all. Not why. Not how to stop it. Just the one-second warning, a small cold bloom behind her sternum, and then the stranger's face would crumple and it would be true.
It was, by every measure the new world used, useless. It moved nothing. It lifted nothing, broke nothing, saved no cities. On the registry she was filed under Negligible, and she filed herself there too — a woman with a party trick in an age of miracles, watching the broadcasts of the storm-gods and the flying titans and feeling the precise size of her own insignificance.
Then one evening on a crowded platform the cold bloom came, sharp and close, and she turned and saw him — a young man at the yellow line, ordinary as she was, a second away from tears and, she understood all at once, a second away from something far worse than tears. She had a single second of warning and a power everyone agreed was worthless. She could look away, the way the world had taught her to, and let the negligible woman do the negligible nothing she was rated for. Or she could decide, right now, that one second and one small true thing about another human heart was the most super power there had ever been.
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