Title: Once Burned
Fandom: The Hypnotists Series - Gordon Korman
Rating: G
Length: 240 words
Author notes: This ficlet assumes familiarity with at least the first two books in the trilogy.
Summary: Kira glimpses a familiar face.


The new librarian smiles as he scans the stack of books that Kira hands him, but when he looks her in the eye, his pleasant expression fades. “Have I… seen you here before?”

Kira lowers her gaze. His name tag reads “Vinny,” but she knows him as Mr. St. Charles, a graduate student who volunteered for multiple experimental sessions at the Sentia Institute. The last time she saw him, his face was a mask of desperation, and patches of sweat spread rapidly across his shirt as he tried to extinguish flames that only he could see. Dr. Mako called her work “masterful,” and her face had felt nearly as hot as the illusion of fire that she’d placed in her subject’s mind.

He shouldn’t recognize her now. Dr. Mako also said that none of the volunteers remembered their time at the institute, and Kira wasn’t the only one who’d believed him; it took her a long time to accept that he had many ways of twisting or hiding the truth. Now that Sentia has fallen apart, she sometimes sees his smile when she closes her eyes, hears him praising or criticizing her, and she can’t always be sure where dreams end and where half-suppressed memories begin.

If Vinny has nightmares of burning buildings and screaming children, whose face does he see before he wakes up?

“I’m not sure,” Kira whispers as she seizes her books and flees for the door.