"Wolf on a Leash" by Danielle Summers

I've spent my life in the company of strangers. No family, no friends. Just shadows passing by in the blink of an eye, like any possible relationships I could have are viewed through the eyes of someone in serious need of a cataract operation.

I'm not one to gloss things up. I don't need to. That's why I'm going to jump straight into this and get it done. If I air all of my dirty laundry then nobody can hold anything over me. This is an exercise in letting go and nothing more.

So I grew up in an orphanage. I don't know if my parents were dead or if they didn't want me, but the outcome's the same either way so what does it matter. I don't have family, so I have one less weakness.

It wasn't a fun experience by any stretch of the imagination. Our matron was a sour-faced, old cow. The kind of woman who looks about fifty five even though she's only forty. If she was a meal she'd be steamed fish, mashed potato, cauliflower, and white sauce. On a white plate. 100% bland - she'd be 110% but going above 100% might be too interesting for her.

This was made worse by the fact that I never really befriended anyone in the orphanage. I didn't have time to, because for some reason I was the only one that didn't get adopted. I don't know why, but I'm sure it couldn't be my cheery outlook on life that influenced the decision of prospective parents.

Yeah, so I lived there until I was fourteen. Good old "angsty teenager" age, which is exactly the time you don't want to develop superpowers. Don't know where they came from, but that might be why I was put up for adoption. Although, to be fair, my parents probably should have stuck by me to help me figure out how to use this thing. But they didn't - probably couldn't be bothered with the extra hassle.

One morning I awoke from a nightmare (not a particularly irregular occurrence) and everything was completely different. The first thing I noticed was my arms. My forearms itched and stung, like they'd been burned. When I looked at them, I saw that they had. Each arm had three hoops burnt into it, and they hurt like hell. That wasn't the only thing that had changed though.

I sat up to examine the burns, and as I did so I noticed that the wall that should have been next to me wasn't. Instead, there was an enormous hole, singed around the edges with some embers yet to die out. It was a good thing my wall had nothing on the other side, but I'm sure the street lamp that was now missing a top didn't feel that way.

I was, well, gobsmacked. My mouth hung open like I was a teenage boy that had just seen his first pair of breasts. Would you have acted any different? Yeah, didn't think so.

So I had no idea how this crap happened. All I knew was that I was in pain and my room had a bit of a nasty draught, and maybe those things were related. But I was about to start knowing a hell of a lot more.

On a particularly average day, during a particularly average argument between me and one of the more optimistic girls who thought her parents would come any day, I got quite annoyed. It got to the point where I was shouting at this poor girl about how her parents didn't love her, when I realised my arms started to hurt. I looked at them and saw three bright rings around them, kind of like the rings around Saturn or Jupiter or whichever one it is. I held out my arms, palms upwards looking at the source of my pain (or some of it at least) when a bolt of red light came out of both palms and blasted a hole in the ceiling.

Everyone screamed and panicked and all that kind of stuff you do when someone fires lasers from their hands and explodes the roof. I think they overreacted to be honest. It's not like anyone died.

So once the fire department had sorted out what was quite frankly a minor fire, and everyone had been bandaged up for their cuts and bruises, the police started asking questions. And, you guessed it, all fingers started pointing to me.

The police started quizzing me on what had happened. I'd spent my life in an orphanage and I wasn't too keen on swapping that system for the prison system, so I kept quiet. My arms stung like Hell but I couldn't go to the ambulance in case they reported it to the police. I just sat on the steps up to the orphanage in complete silence until everyone left.

Unlike everyone else here at this school, I didn't rush to use this thing. I didn't want it, my life was tricky enough without lasers, and I needed to keep it a secret. So I kept myself isolated as much as possible so nothing would trigger it. Without anyone near me I couldn't get angry, so I couldn't, you know, "blow up".

You can never keep these things hidden though. Nothing is never that easy, especially when the matron is determined to get rid of the living railgun under her roof. She practically forced me into an interview with one couple, and they just kept going on and on about their amazing lives and how happy I would be with them. But I didn't want happy, I sure as Hell didn't think I deserved - still don't. But they wouldn't stop pushing, and then I felt my arms begin to burn.

I screamed at them to stop talking, screamed so loud it hurt my throat. They recognised that whatever was happening wasn't normal, so they ran out of the room, but it was already too late. The rings had appeared and there was nothing I could do after that. So all I could do was point my arms in the direction that would cause the least amount of trouble - straight out of the window.

My blast hit a lamppost outside but nothing else. But just because nobody was injured didn't didn't mean I wasn't in trouble. There had been too many occasions where I'd "blown up" and the matron was sick of paying for repairs. So she narked on me to the feds, got me moved from my comfy little orphanage to juvy. You think you want to develop powerful abilities that blow holes in walls and singe your skin, then get thrown into kiddie prison, then be my guest, because it's not as easy as it sounds.

Every fight you get in, every kid who throws a punch at the new girl because she's weird and keeps to herself and they feel they need to prove something to everyone else. You just have to sit there and take it because you know that none of these sadistic assholes stand a chance if you don't keep it all bottled up.

I ended up letting off a little steam every now and then by punching someone so I would get into solitary and then I wouldn't have to worry about keeping everything hidden for a few days. No aggravation means no explosion, and no explosion is fine by me.

But my cosy existence was inevitably shattered, just like everything else in my life. Some guy had come to visit me, and with my outgoing and bubbly personality you can see why I would be worried. No family or friends so no reason for any company during visiting hours.

When I walked into the room, the light in the far corner flickering and buzzing, I saw two men. The one on the right was at least early thirties and wearing a suit, with his brown hair slicked back and his brow speckled with sweat. The one on the left was closer to my age, wearing a vest and a necklace with a jade spiral, and sun-bleached blond hair. He looked over at the man to his left and gave him a look I'd seen on the faces of too many potential siblings - the "this is what you brought me here for" look.

"Alright fellas, I'm not the whole 'getting adopted' so can we wrap this one up pretty quick?" I cut to the chase with them.

"Ah, I think you have come to the wrong conclusion fraulein," replied the man on the right, clearly displaying a German accent. "We do indeed want to take you away from this place, but we are not quite adopting you."

And now I started to think back to all the damage I caused in my younger days. What if they thought I was a danger to the other people here and there were taking me somewhere 'more secure'.

"We know what you can do, and you're not alone," said the blond boy with an Australian accent. "We can help you learn how to control your powers."

"What I've got, you can't control. Trying to control this... this energy that I have inside me, that's like putting a wolf on a leash and pretending it's a dog. Somebody will get hurt."

"Trust me," replied the Aussie. "There's always a way."

At this point I started to get annoyed. I hadn't flown off the handle for months, maybe even more than a year. But I could feel my arms stinging, burning, singing. The smell of burning flesh filled my nostrils as I felt the uncontrollable rage building me up. I held my hands out in front of me, gesturing these two antagonisers to back off. I tried to lower them when I felt my palms stinging, but my reactions are no match for lasers.

As the red light left my body something changed in the boy that was sat opposite me. An instant before I scorched a hole in his chest and through to his back he started to turn into something else. The skin that was visible started to change into a crystal, and as my assault blasted through his vest his whole body was in the new crystal form.

The colour of the crystal changed from translucent to a solid red all over, and then the blast went out the other side. Refracted in a million different directions, it blew a hole in the concrete wall behind him, about two meters wide in all directions.

"Ah, now that might be our cue to get out of here," said the German, brushing the concrete duet from his jacket. "You, Danielle, can either stay here and be harshly punished for this indiscretion, or you can leave through this hole with us and the world will forget you ever existed."

So I shrugged, walked around the table, and followed them out the hole.

That's pretty much it. Nothing special. I'm here because it's the safest place for me and that's it.