An accident was how it started. One of those random acts of fate that turn the world upside down and leave you blinking in confusion.

It wasn't even my fault. Like I said, a stupid mistake. An accident.

I had successfully hid my unique, um, 'gift', for the past ten years. A little brush with the Paladins and I was forced to go into hiding, diving completely under the radar. It completely wrecked my social life.

Not that I really had one. I'm what people call intelligent, smart, brilliant, a genius. Take your pick. Basically it means that I can't open my mouth in public without saying something so nerdy it makes me blush magenta and want to crawl under a rock for the rest of my life. Let me tell you, high school dances were pure torture. Scratch that, worse than torture.

But like I was saying, I was under the radar. Well, actually, not completely. I guess you couldn't call having my figure on the news every few weeks 'under the radar'. But I don't know if the Paladins were turning a blind eye or what, because they never came after me on those little expeditions into the outside world. Then again, most of the jumpscars were in the middle of burning buildings, raging rivers, places now covered by scalding mud, lava, or boulders bigger than I am. What can I say? People are in danger, and I like to do what I can.

Maybe the key was they never saw my face. I never stayed for the cameras, vanishing in an instant as soon as the rescued opened their mouths to thank me. I keep my head down, use my long hair or a hood to cover my face. I never say a word. Appear and vanish like smoke.

Dozens of times. And they never as mush as showed a hair. But one slip up in the library…

Yeah. The library. That place filled with books that no one popular would dare set foot. And this was no ordinary library. This was the library frequented by some of the most renowned astrophysicists in the world. It's filled with all these books on supernovas, asteroids, meteors, black holes, and, my favorite and passion, worm holes. All those delicious equations just waiting for an intelligent person to come sink their brain into.

I'm a nerd. I admit it freely.

It's like the way some girls act when they see a cute boy. They just go all drooly and melt in place, and the thing they call a brain turns to putty. Well, I get like that when I find a really good book or a particularly juicy piece of info. When things really start to click in my head and everything starts to make sense.

And I lost it. In the middle of the library, I jumped.

Not far, just up a few feet to the next level, to grab another, well worn, book I consider a dear friend of mine. Like I mentioned, I have no social life.

And in that crucial moment, when I vanished and reappeared in an instant, someone forgot to blink. And that person knew exactly what I was in that instant. They were in the right place at the right time. A cosmic accident.

They weren't there hunting me. Or hunting at all. If they were, they would have had the library emptied faster than I could blink and have those stupid lightning rods they love so much out. I'm sure of it.

And once they knew, it couldn't have been that hard to track me. I do, after all, have a library card. It even has my picture on it. I wouldn't steal these books. These are some of the most valuable tools in the field, some of them the only copies in the world. I'm not that callous.

Of course, my real name isn't on the card. My real address isn't in their database, nor my real phone number or birthday. The only tidbit of information on there is that I have a Ph.D in Astrophysics. The college the library is connected to requires it, and I wasn't going to get in there with anything less than a Masters. Might as well ensure my membership.

And that was all they needed. My picture and my degree and they did what the college couldn't; ignore the dead end profile I had created on my grad school's database and trace the photo all the way back to my elementary school and get my real name.

After that, they managed to find where I was living. My residence isnt in the same city as the library. Its not even in the same country. It's in a tiny, obscure town in the European countryside, where I rent a nice, sunny, two story house from a sweet, wealthy old couple who aren't there most of the time. Lucky for them, they picked the right week to visit the sunny Spanish beaches.

Which is why you can imagine my surprise when my doorbell rings one rainy Monday afternoon.

They were in luck. I was home, as opposed to on the other side of the world, and glued to my computer monitor with a cup of tea, waiting for my state of the art processor to finish running a set of radiation readings from a galaxy three million light years away through a complicated equation so I could compare it to another set in a different galaxy. I had let the computer crunch that set this morning. It had taken most of the morning.

"Coming!" I yelled at the door as the bell rang loud enough to snap me out of a calculating haze. I walked to the door, opening it without looking up from the thick stack of sheets I had in one hand. It took me a few seconds after the door opened to raise my eyes from the paper. The sight of three Paladin outside my door completely drove the numbers from my mind. And trust me, it takes a lot to do that.

"Oh ****."

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