In a fit of anger, Evan threw the plastic water bottle across the room, only his ears started ringing with the familiar buzz that accompanied his newfound talent’s emerging. The bottle slammed into the wall beyond his bed and buried four inches of itself in the plaster and concrete. The buzz went away and Evan knew the power went with it.
“Shit.” Evan got up from the floor and walked across the room as if he feared the bottle would come flying back out at any moment. Once he was at the end of the bed, outside of any potential line of fire, he reached out and touched the still exposed end of the bottle. It was warm to the touch and vibrating fast enough to be imperceptible until his finger stopped the motion. “Well there goes my deposit,” he said as he grabbed hold of the bottle and slowly pulled it out of the wall.
Once the bottle was free, Evan reached into the hole left behind and ran his hands over the cold, smooth walls. Pulverized concrete coated his fingers in a fine dust that drifted into the room on the slightest air current. Evan whistled in admiration. “I’ve got skills.” He probed deeper and cursed as he pulled back his hand. The tips of his fingers were red and blistered from where he had touched the steel out shell of the building. The bottle had even managed to punch through the extremely durable environmental shielding that normally sat between the outer layer and the concrete interior. “Fabulous.”
The breech in the insulating barriers would quickly turn his little apartment into an unlivable space that alternated between scorching hot and numbingly cold. Evan considered stuffing something into the hole to ward off some of the extreme temperature changes, but anything short of replacement shielding would let rather unhealthy quantities of cosmic radiation into the room. The idea of being bombarded by exotic particles did not please him at all.
"Jacob," he said aloud, "I do not know if you can hear me or not, but I need to get out of this place. I'll leave a note at the front desk. I hope I can trust you on this." Evan figured that a clever guy like Jacob probably left some sort of bug in the apartment, and if he did not, well he had proven quite capable of tracking Evan down.
Evan gathered his few remaining belongings and gathered them into his duffle bag. Each move left him a little poorer, and he worried that too many more moves would leave him little more than a penniless beggar. On the moon, that was a position that did not last long as the consumption of air bore a price. The official position was that such people were deported back to earth or conscripted into labor camps where they worked until death overtook them, but Evan suspected that many were simply ejected from the habitats to die from compulsory decompression.
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