Super Supportive

CHAPTER 81-88

(revised)

by Sleyca

[Thank you so much for supporting me on Patreon! The money I make there means I can justify spending more time writing the story. This ePub is provided for patrons who need or prefer the file format. Chapters will eventually be made available free to all on Royal Road. Please, do not distribute the early releases.]

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

O Cruzamento

“How?” Alden asked Victor, picking him up and squinting at his tubby belly. “How are you getting bigger on the diet kitty chow?”

Mrrraoow.

“It’s because there are no vermin here, isn’t it? You need mice to chase. Maybe the dorms will be infested.”

He doubted it. Anesidora didn’t have much of a pest problem. There weren’t even mosquitoes.

He set Victor back on the sofa because the cat bed wasn’t good enough for his orange majesty, then he grabbed his lunch from the fridge. He sent a group text to the girls across the hall, letting them know they could hang out in his apartment while he was gone if they wanted and use his coffee machine.

Natalie responded a second later. [Wait! I’ll go with you! I just need five minutes.]

[Ok.]

He used the time to let his fingers flick through his non-auriad spells. He magically sanitized his hands, blew a puff of air at his cat, and then played a little tune.

Victor yawned.

“Such a critic.” Alden tickled the cat’s whiskers with his ring fingers while chimes sounded. “You know this is majorly impressive stuff, right? For a human.”

Maybe Victor would respect him more when he started smacking, crushing, and freezing things. He was sure he could do the spell that hit things with a square of force now. I wonder how much free authority I would need to cast that spell Jel-nor did.

A lot, he assumed. And there had been a chant with that one. But the mince-it-into-diamonds spell, or another like it, could be a longterm goal.

When Natalie was ready, he met her in the hall. She was wearing pink overalls and a backpack so crammed full of stuff it looked like it was on the verge of bursting.

“Are you going to school today after all?” Alden asked.

She’d gotten her acceptance from the CNH Arts program a few days before Alden, but instead of starting classes right away, like him, she was waiting until the last possible minute to leave intake. Of her roommates, only Hadiza would be going to school with her, and she was upset about leaving the friends she’d made here behind.

“Apartment hunting,” she said in a determined voice. “Again.”

She wouldn’t be staying in the school dorms because they didn’t have full private kitchens. She wanted all of her new equipment to go with her.

“Emilija finally said that if I could find an apartment she can afford to contribute rent for on her stipend, she’d come stay in Apex with me and Hadiza! She thinks I can’t do it, but I have twenty pounds of cake and brownies in here.” She slapped one of her backpack straps. “I’ll bribe my way through every landlord in the city if I have to!”

They hit the lobby then headed out the doors into the dark morning.

“Do you know if bus or train is faster this time of day?” Alden asked.

“I don’t usually leave this early either. I think it’s train through F, then bus in Apex?”

It was windy again, and strands of blonde hair that hadn’t been caught by her ponytail were whipping around her face.

“Want me to carry your backpack?” He kept looking for excuses to experiment with his new magical weight-lifting discovery.

“I’ve got it. Thanks, though. Are any of the hero track people starting with you today?”

“I only asked Maricel. She’s going, but I think she’s a last possible minute person. She didn’t want to leave early.”

“I want to meet her!”

“We’ll all be on campus together, so I’m sure you’ll run into each other.”

They dashed through a crosswalk just before the signal changed, and then headed in the direction of the nearest station. As they passed by the yoga studio Alden had noticed on his first ever trip through the neighborhood, Natalie suddenly said, “I tried to take a class at this place.”

“Yeah?”

The orange light from a shuttered restaurant’s sign made one of the silver buttons on her overalls glitter.

“I think they didn’t want me there. They were nice at first. They said they were used to people from intake visiting, and they didn’t mind that I’d never done a class before. But then it got weird after somebody asked my rank. You wouldn’t think it would matter, would you? For yoga.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so,” Alden agreed. “But I’m still getting used to Anesidora, too. Sometimes things catch me by surprise.”

“Maybe I’m being sensitive for no reason. This place is going to feel smaller if being an S means some people think I’m supposed to stay on the north island. On top of everything else.”

“I’m sure it’s not like that,” he said. He hoped not anyway. “I think this is a D and F-heavy neighborhood except for intake. Hardly any powers on display. Once you go a couple more blocks, you’ve got people throwing spells around in the streets.”

Natalie perked up. “That’s true. I am excited about living in Apex! It’ll be perfect if I can keep Emilija with us. And you’re going to have roommates finally. I can’t believe they left you alone all that time.”

“I’ve liked having the giant apartment to myself.”

He didn’t tell her that he’d asked for it a few weeks ago. Gustavo had made it easy for him. During one of Alden’s nocturnal rambles through the dorm hallways, the night counselor had casually suggested that there wasn’t much point in putting new people in with him when he’d be leaving in a month. Alden had just as casually agreed.

He’d needed it. It was cool of Gus not to make it into a big deal.

Just a little more of a buffer between him and everyone else. Just a little more time before he forced himself into trying for 24/7 normal. No roommates to whom he’d feel obligated to explain the insomnia, or any of the rest of it.

If I was placing bets on my ability to be a great living companion right now, I don’t know if I’d choose me. It’s probably good I’m in a suite that Lexi is actively trying to make the quiet, studious one.

Another block and then an escalator down, and they were inside the station. It was glossy, immaculately clean, and a little over the top—qualities it shared with most of the other public transport spaces Alden had seen on the island. Starburst-shaped chandeliers the size of cars hung from a high, arched white ceiling, and every now and then when you stepped on a floor tile, it would twinkle with embedded lights.

A train had just arrived. They hurried for the nearest car and slipped inside just as the doors were closing.

“Made it!” Natalie said, sliding her shoulders out of her backpack straps and taking a seat. She patted the one next to her, and Alden sat. “Perfect timing! Now I don’t feel so bad about making you wait for me earlier.”

“It was only five minutes. I’m not worried about…”

He’d just recognized someone at the other end of the car. The stocky, brown-haired man had his eyes closed. He was leaning back in his seat with his arms crossed. Possibly resting, more likely watching videos through his interface.

It was the first time Alden had ever seen him not looking like he was spoiling for a fight.

But then he hasn’t spotted me yet.

It was the angry guy from the boater who’d called him “fucking pet” within thirty seconds of meeting him at LeafSong. Karl.

The last time Alden had seen him, he’d been grunting and glaring from across the locker room in the human dorms. As if the sight of a teenager putting on a pair of socks was an affront to the universe.

Alden swallowed. His hand gripped the edge of the seat harder.

The sudden spike of tension was unexpected and unpleasantly familiar, like he’d just received a postcard from eight months ago, when the boater members had been front and center in his mind. Karl had always struck him as unstable, even by the standards of that unpleasant group of adults. And he’d had an endless list of grievances against Alden that had been aired in a stream of sniping criticisms and backhanded compliments as the days passed.

Alden was an ignorant globie who hadn’t done anything to deserve a Triplanets job. Alden was an idiot who’d chosen the wrong button on the washing machine they all shared and stolen minutes from Karl’s laundry cycle. Karl hated being on the same medical team as a fifteen-year-old. He hated Alden’s expensive lab coat, his higher rank, and the fact that he was getting tons of extra work from Joe. He loathed the fact that Alden was making more money than him.

And I don’t think Manon was making him behave like that at all. He despised me the instant Bti-qwol introduced me.

If anything, it seemed more likely that Manon had been tamping this particular member of her crew’s temper down to prevent an altercation. There was giving Alden the outcast treatment so that he couldn’t make friends with the other humans, and then there was starting a fight in the middle of a premium assignment she’d spent years micromanaging and building her twisted relationships for.

“What’s wrong?” Natalie asked. “You were about to say something, weren’t you?”

He selected her name from his contacts list, then texted her. [Let’s get off at the next station and swap cars.]

She gave him a confused smile.

[There’s a guy I’ve met before over there. He’s a huge jerk. I don’t want him to bother us.]

Karl ought to have enough self-control not to start something on a train…but Karl should also have had enough self-control not to pick on someone who was just trying to do a good job and get by on his first assignment.

Alden didn’t want to deal with him.

Natalie mouthed Oh! then nodded.

After they’d swapped cars and claimed new seats, he said, “Sorry. I was probably overreacting, but—”

“No! Don’t be! Some people are creepy and awful to be around, and Hadiza is always saying ‘We don’t owe them our time, so why are we letting them take it?’ about people like that. Or something! She says it better.” She patted him on the arm. “So, you don’t owe a huge jerk anything. Right?”

“Right.”

His stomach sank.

Right. The boater.

Cly Zhao was a superhero and a Sway, and she knew about it. And she had chosen to leave it alone. But Alden had still intended to send the boater members all messages saying, “Hey. It’s really obvious to an outsider that Manon is messing with your brains. I think your friend group and that job you all like so much is scary cult stuff. Maybe you want to get help.”

He hadn’t done it yet.

He’d been so incredibly busy for the past two months, but not so busy that he couldn’t have drafted a few emails. It was just…this wad of pure stress in his chest whenever he thought about it.

He felt as if the messages weren’t enough, like that plan was a copout. Like he was obligated to do something more serious if he was going to address the problem at all. And at the same time, it was too much. The thought of sending a bunch of emails—ones that might put him back on Manon’s radar—made him so weary.

I’m too freaking young to be weary. At this point, aren’t I just being lazy?

It was like he could see the swamp of human suffering Manon had made from the dry, safe place he’d finally found for himself. And he thought he should jump in and swim through it to help everyone she’d trapped there. If he was a good person, he’d want to do that for them.

Instead, he couldn’t even work himself up to shout a warning to them from shore.

A pleasant tone sounded as the train approached another station.

Karl is in the next car. I could tell Natalie to stay here, step back over there, and try to talk to him. I know he wouldn’t react well. He might punch me in the face, but it’s not like that’ll kill me. I could do it.

Just do it, Alden. Stand up, go over there, and do the right thing.

The thought of doing it crushed him deeper into his seat. The weight of not doing it made him feel like there was a planet resting on his chest.

He sat there, immobilized by the competing pressures, until Karl got off the train a couple of stops later. Alden watched him stride toward another set of escalators, brushing past a woman who had stopped to search through her handbag.

Doors slid shut. The name of the station was still scrolling over them—O Cruzamento.

As the train pulled away, Alden was relieved. And he was devastated that he was relieved.

I’m a bad person now, aren’t I?

He closed his eyes.

“Hey, you are okay, right?” Natalie Choir asked.

He looked over. Her smile had faded. Her single dimple had disappeared.

“Yeah! Yeah, I’m great. Sorry. Just really sleepy from the early wake-up.” He grinned at her. It was forced, but even if it was obvious, she would let it pass. She and the other girls were good about ignoring things like that for him. “So apartment shopping! It’s crazy that people our age can do that kind of thing here, isn’t it? What kind of place are you hoping to end up in?”

After a beat, she nodded at him. “Well, I really want…”

He listened to her talk. The train carried him toward hero school.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

Guess

It took them an hour to get to campus.

On the way there, Alden managed to shove his uncertainty about the meeting on the train down and bury it. He had a busy morning to focus on. He alternated between texting Aunt Connie and chatting with Natalie about their different educational tracks. Their core academic curriculum would be similar, and they might even meet each other in some classes. But while he was enduring super P.E. and lectures on Avowed-caused catastrophes, she would be taking molecular gastronomy and learning how to source rare cheeses.

It’s enough to make a guy question his life choices, Alden thought when they finally parted ways at the bus stop close to the high school section of the Celena North campus.

He headed toward the place where most of his regular classes would be held. A lot of the buildings that weren’t named for alumni were named for virtues. The Forthright Building was a glass and steel oval chunk. Half of the ground floor was dedicated to a theater that doubled as a lecture hall, and the other half was the student coffee shop. The upper levels were all classrooms. An outdoor gallery for student wrightwork and artwork made a large social space on the rooftop.

Alden entered through the doors of the coffee place, checking his schedule more out of sudden first-day jitters than because he’d actually forgotten the room number for his class.

8:00 AM - 9:15 AM Preparatory Sciences - Forthright 1001

9:30 AM - 10:45 AM Engaging with the Unexpected I - Wong 6012

11:00 AM - 12:15 PM Artonan Conversation IV - Forthright 1810

1:30 - 2:45 Intro to Other Worlds - Forthright 1207

3:00 - 4:45 - First Year Study Hall E - Forthright 1901

5:00 - 7:00 - MPE Pre-course - MagiPhys Gym

This would be his schedule until his first full quarter started in January. The MagiPhys Ed sessions for Alden’s acceptance group would begin next Monday. They took place three evenings a week. Everything else was daily. The monitored study hall was skippable if you weren’t in danger of failing a class. Since it was eating two hours right out of the middle of the day, Alden was highly motivated not to be put in a situation where he’d have to sit through it.

All right, he thought, heading into the theater to find a seat for the science class. I’m finally a high school student once more. Let’s do this.

*********

Preparatory Sciences was a combined sciences overview, with a rotating set of teachers. Finlay and Maricel both showed up right as it was starting and grabbed seats in the row behind Alden. Maricel was definitely not a morning person. She kept yawning so much that she was sparking a chain reaction of drowsiness in almost everyone nearby. Finlay, on the other hand, was drinking an iced coffee and a hot tea, and talking so excitedly about the start of classes and the fact that they were all going to be heroes together that Alden was pretty sure they could have used him to power the building if they plugged him in.

He took notes on his laptop and tried to stay focused. The instructor for this week was downright soporific. It was going to be a rough way to start the mornings.

The next class was more interesting, though. Engaging with the Unexpected was only for the hero program students, and there were just thirty of them. It was small enough that Alden’s appearance in it was noteworthy. He waited until right before class started to enter so that he wouldn’t be the guy who stole someone’s very favorite desk.

When he walked in, eyes fixed on him.

“Are we getting a new person?” a girl asked.

“Unless he’s lost.”

“Fresh first year meat!”

“Ignore Ray. He’s the biggest idiot in the whole school.”

“Don’t listen to her; she’s just mad I hit five before she did.”

“A5 can’t even scratch an S1 in a totally balanced fight, so I don’t know why you’re bragging, you troll.”

“Says who?!”

“System theory.”

Alden wasn’t paying much attention to the argument. Instead, he was staring at a familiar face. Andrzej—the B-rank Polish boy who had given him the Chainer class in exchange for Cudgel Meister—was sitting in the back corner with a weapon that looked like a swollen baseball bat propped against his desk.

His face was totally blank as he stared at Alden.

Alden lifted his hand in a wave, but before the other boy could respond, their teacher jogged into the room.

“Sorry I’m late, everybody!” he said, yanking his long dark hair back with an elastic band as he skidded to a stop in front of the board. “I was arguing with someone about wolves.”

“Aww. Did Big Snake get caught smuggling in the puppies?” a girl asked, her mouth turning down in a pout. “He was going to let our class play with them if we beat up the Uni freshmen!”

“As motivating as that sounds, Penelope, we can’t have enhanced apex predators running around Apex. Even if they do start out small. And fuzzy. And so cute you just want to…” He suddenly realized Alden was in the room. “Oh how exciting! You came today. I wasn’t expecting you until next week. Let that be a lesson to me. Hello! I’m Instructor Marion!”

He leaned over the podium and stuck out his hand for Alden to shake.

“Everyone this is Alden. He’s joining our class mid-stream with my permission. We seem to be short a desk. Someone go steal him one from next door, and—”

“Me!” shouted a girl, leaping to her feet.

“Maria, by ‘steal’ I meant ‘borrow with permission!’” Instructor Marion said hastily.

One of Maria’s hands was flat on her desk. Her eyes were closed. She pointed over her shoulder toward the back wall of the classroom with her other hand.

“Similar Summoning 2!” Her hand flashed a series of signs. Her mouth moved in a chant that was only a few syllables long.

There was a crashing sound, and people in the neighboring classroom started laughing and shouting.

“Duck, Ray,” another girl who was typing away on her cell phone said idly.

“Huh?”

With a crack, a school desk appeared in the air over Ray. He yelped and covered his head with his arms, but the desk just hovered there. A boy wearing the black school uniform jacket that was optional except on certain occasions had stood up and was pointing at it.

“Thanks, man,” said Ray. “Sorry I said Object Shaping was dumb in gym last week.”

“Don’t tempt me to drop it on you.”

The desk floated toward Alden. “Your seat, sir,” the Shaper said grandly.

“Um…thank you all.” He felt a little lost, but he was definitely impressed by the amount of magic that had just gone down in less than a minute.

They made a space for him on the front row. Alden glanced back at Andrzej curiously. The Cudgel Meister gave him a half-hearted smile.

Is he just freaked out to see me or what?

Maybe he was afraid Alden would tell everyone he’d passed along Chainer? He’d been really worried about people resenting him for it. He’d implied his superhero uncle was anti-Velra, and Alden was assuming it was an extreme level of anti, since Andrzej had given up such a lucrative opportunity.

Alden hadn’t had time to waste on deeply studying the family since he arrived. He had glanced through some local news headlines to see if he was mentioned in connection with them, though. Thank goodness he wasn’t.

“Tragically Missing Avowed Teen” was a weird but minor story here, and it wasn’t at all related to the much juicier news that Aulia Velra had blasted her whole family with hardcore magic, resulting in “unknown amounts of havoc and potential damages” to the rest of the island. Alden was thinking that the blowback from the chain was mostly people discovering it had been cast in the first place and the political fallout from that.

Aulia had lost the Unified Rares and Uniques seat on the Anesidoran council. It was a position she’d held for decades, representing all of the ultra rares and uniques, whose population was too small to justify having their own individual class councilpersons. Beyond that, many Velras had had old scandals come to light—a mistress, a drug problem, suspicions of genetic engineering that wasn’t legal even on Anesidora.

And to top it off, there were a lot of lawsuits being filed against them.

Some people who’d had upsetting and bizarre things happen to them were trying to blame it on the uberluck wordchain’s butterfly effect. It wasn’t going to result in much since, “Maybe the Velras made my upstairs toilet fall through the ceiling; I really feel like they might have,” wasn’t a strong legal argument. But it had to be a headache for them.

Still, while public opinion had turned against the family, it didn’t seem as though the average Anesidoran spent a ton of time worrying about them. They were more fascinating than the other important families on the island, for sure, because of the secretiveness about their class and the maniacal lengths they went to in their efforts to keep an iron grip on it. However, Alden still had the same impression he’d had when he first read about them all those months ago. The people who really cared were the other Avowed who were trying to establish their own political positions and class dynasties.

Billionaires whining about more successful billionaires. The only reason I have to think about them at all is that one of them believes I’m cosmically significant to her.

Maybe Andrzej’s uncle was just politically inclined, too.

Alden put it out of his mind for now and turned his attention to class. Instructor Marion introduced himself and the course for Alden’s benefit. He was a Sway in his late twenties who’d graduated from the university program just a few years ago. He wanted a heroing job, but since he hadn’t landed one yet he was getting an advanced degree and focusing on mental coaching.

Engaging with the Unexpected was a class on how to approach unexpected situations from the correct mindset.

Every week, they would be presented with a different real-life situation encountered by a working Avowed, and they would have discussions about it. The method Instructor Marion was teaching was supposed to be a multi-pronged approach to calming yourself down, thinking clearly, and checking your own assumptions.

The situation the other students had been given to think about over the weekend was one in which the hero, an audial Brute who had been listening in on an apartment tower in an attempt to locate a suspected terrorist, had overheard a clear case of domestic violence.

The first question they were supposed to ask themselves was, “Is the thing I’ve encountered actually a problem, or is it something else?”

Everyone in class said that the domestic violence incident was a legitimate problem in need of a solution. After that, however, they broke down arguing in a way that made Alden think lengthy disagreements were a frequent occurrence.

“Question Two is, ‘Is this my problem to handle?’” the Shaper who’d floated the desk to Alden said. “And the answer is no. The hero is looking for a terrorist who’s suspected of planting a bomb somewhere in the city. Anything less important than that gets sidelined.”

“The bomb isn’t going to go off for hours!” a Wright argued. “The guy is beating his wife right now. It’ll take like three minutes to go punch his lights out.”

“You’re assuming it’s a man beating a woman,” said a girl. “We weren’t actually told that.”

“Why does it matter?”

“Well, if it’s an adult hurting children, it’s extremely urgent, isn’t it? If it’s, like, a tiny little old lady hitting a bodybuilder it’s still bad, but he’s probably not going to be injured if we leave him to handle it on his own.”

“What? So we only care about helping people if they’re on the verge of death?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth. But if you’re on your way to stop a terrorist from blowing up a hospital, and you take a break to save one single person, you’re fucking bad at math.”

“Respectful language or you lose your right to join the discussion!” said Instructor Marion.

<<We should use a wordchain,>> someone suggested.

“You always want to use wordchains.”

<<They’re a resource. It’s dumb that the rest of you ignore them unless the situation is something completely unmanageable.>>

“We do have recommended wordchains in this course for a reason.”

“Peace of mind?”

“What? Why that one? Unless your adrenaline is off the charts here why are you going to sacrifice your edge?”

<<Not that one. I think the one that reduces your attachment to recent memories is appropriate, so that leaving the domestic violence incident behind doesn’t weigh on the Brute for the rest of their terrorist pursuit.>>

“That one looks so impossible to cast.”

“I’m not even going to try to learn that one. It’s completely inappropriate for a superhero to deliberately care less!”

<<It’s a very weak chain. And it’s not like it’s permanent.>>

“You’re already leaving the domestic violence case unaddressed, and we haven’t even decided to do that.”

Before long, a third of the class was involved in the fast-paced argument. Alden was trying to follow what they were saying, catch up on the case itself, and read through the course syllabus on his laptop at the same time.

Instructor Marion spoke up again. “I think I’ll give you a little more information now,” he said. “Since we don’t seem to be moving forward. The domestic violence incident is taking place between two adult women. Neither of them sounds like they’re badly hurt at this point. There are three children in the apartment with them who are currently uninvolved. The hero hears the children whispering about calling the police.”

“Calling the police is what the hero should do, and then they should go back to their actual job.”

“If there are children there, then I switch my opinion. The hero should take a few minutes to remove them from danger.”

Almost everyone was nodding their head in agreement.

A girl in a paisley dress raised her hand. “I originally said the hero should break up the fight. And…I know this sounds bad, but…hearing that there are three kids there makes me change my mind.”

Everybody, including Alden, stared at her.

She winced. “Breaking up a fight between two adults would only take the audial a couple of minutes, like we said. You just separate them. Maybe even drag one of them out of the building and tell them not to come back in until they’ve cooled off? They’re capable of taking care of themselves since they’re not seriously hurt. But if you go and pull three kids out of the apartment, you become responsible for them. You have to stay with them and keep them safe. It wouldn’t be a short interruption anymore. It would be a long one. The terrorist would definitely get away.”

“Just give them to a neighbor!”

“No…that’s not right, is it? You can’t break down a door in the middle of the night, steal three kids from their home, and give them to a stranger. That would be more traumatic for them than the fight!”

“The optics of that would be terrible.”

“Optics this, optics that. Someone’s always bringing up how things are going to look. That’s not how superheroes should think!”

“It is if they want to be superheroes for more than five minutes.”

“Andrzej,” said Instructor Marion, “you haven’t spoken up yet today.”

“The B-rank has the same boring opinion as always.”

The instructor sighed. “Snide comments about other students’ rank or abilities also mean you’re out of the discussion for the day. And you don’t get credit for attendance.”

“I think it’s relevant,” the boy who’d spoken protested. “Since his solutions are almost always based on his rank.”

The teacher gave him a sharp look, and he snapped his mouth shut.

Andrzej cleared his throat. “I would call in to my handler,” he said. “And I would do what they instructed to do.”

He’s getting his English down great, thought Alden.

“That’s not an answer,” a girl said in an exasperated voice. “Asking someone else to choose for you is just a way of shifting responsibility.”

“Heroes have to <<answer to the authorities>>. Calling them is responsible and appropriate,” Andrzej said.

“We’re crunched for time hunting a terrorist. There’s a problem that needs dealing with. Are you going to wait five minutes for someone else to debate what to do, or are you going to solve the problem yourself in three?” a boy with a pugnacious look on his face asked.

“Three?” someone else asked.

“One minute to break up the fight. One to take the kids to a neighbor’s place. The third is to explain to the neighbor that you’ve already called whatever government agency you’re working with and told them to send child protective services to fetch the kids.” The speaker cracked his knuckles. “Done. Superheroes are supposed to be competent enough to handle shi..stuff fast and smart without begging for permission from people who don’t even understand how our powers work. We’re a one-stop solution to serious superhuman shi…stuff. If on the way to handle the serious superhuman stuff, we patch up some human stuff in a less than perfect way, that’s on the normals to brush over and fix.”

“I think a lot of governments would disagree with you.”

“Maybe out loud? But in practice, everyone knows we’re not cops. We have a different set of skills and different mandates, so we follow a different set of rules.”

“This is a change of subject, but I looked up the statistics on the lethality of domestic violence incidents, and…”

The discussion continued at a rapid-fire pace until the end of the period. It was a lot…really a lot…of thorny moral problems. Before Alden could even begin to think his way through one, the class would get divided into two or three factions that were all absolutely convinced they knew the right answer and that everyone else was a horrible person who deserved to be kicked off the island. He liked it a lot more around the midpoint, when the instructor made everyone start fitting their arguments within the course framework instead of just butting heads. Their homework was to write a few paragraphs about what they thought their own personal reactions would be to finding themselves in a similar situation, and describe how they would manage those reactions.

Instructor Marion called Alden over after class for a quick discussion. “Given the way this class is structured,” he said, “I think it’s fine to come into it late. We can just grade you on your performance and discussion over the next few weeks and pretend you’ve been here all along. Try to get an A so I don’t feel like it’s unfair to everyone else? Anyway, what I actually wanted to talk to you about is the second half of the course coming up next quarter.”

“The advisor mentioned they were paired.”

“Yes,” said Marion, sitting on the edge of the teacher’s desk. “The way I teach Engaging with the Unexpected II is heavily practical. Students are required to take part in a pre-approved term project outside their comfort zone, and then we only meet twice a week for everyone to report on the difficulties they’re facing and discuss solutions and mental approaches to handling them.”

“What kind of project?”

“You can choose all sorts of things. Some do community service work. Others take up hobbies they’re ill-suited for or even part-time jobs. The idea is to put yourself around people who think differently than you and sincerely pursue success in an area you don’t have qualifications for. I’m telling you now so that you can take your time thinking about whether or not you want to take the course in the normal way or if you want to skip the practical component. It seems to me that unwillingly spending months away from Earth would be far enough outside anyone’s comfort zone. We could count that as your practical experience if you were willing to have discussions about the challenges you faced in class, or you could go the normal route if you prefer.”

“Oh. Okay,” said Alden, surprised and not sure what he thought of the offer. “Thank you for the consideration.”

“Just be ready to let me know before next quarter.”

So that was my first ever real hero class. It was lively. And now I’m stressed out on behalf of an audial Brute I’ve never even met. It sounds like we’re going to be talking a lot about what it means to be a hero in the first place and how to do the right thing. I don’t know if I can fit myself—

He almost ran into Andrzej standing in the hall.

“Good morning,” said the boy, smiling more readily than he had earlier.

“Hey, man!” said Alden. “How’s the cudgel working out for you?”

Andrzej hefted his bulbous bat. “I like it. Simple but <<effective>>.”

“So you got into school,” said Alden. “That’s great.”

“Thank you. You also. Did…” He paused as a group of students exited the neighboring classroom. Then, whispering, he said, “I hope the people you gave that class to didn’t…do anything bad to you?”

Alden was surprised. So that was the reason for the awkwardness?

“No. It wasn’t exactly a good experience, but it was no big deal. There was a little kidnapping situation. It only lasted a few minutes. And they payed me really well.”

Andrzej heaved an enormous sigh.

“Good. Good!” The Polish boy held a hand to his chest. <<I knew you were the person who had disappeared because I looked you up, and I thought…what if they did that and their Artonan friends used the System notification to cover it up? But then I did not want to tell anyone because…how would that…I’m very glad you’re all right!>>

“Thanks. But they weren’t involved in that at all. It was completely separate.”

Alden didn’t think he had never met an Artonan who could and would casually cover up a random assassination, using the System, for a human. Probably not even Joe. Either the Velras had way scarier alien friends who loved them way more than he’d imagined, or Andrzej had completely unrealistic ideas about what they were capable of.

<<You should come to…wait, my English. I’m trying to practice.>> He sighed. “It is hard to remember when I am excited. You should become members with The B List.”

“The B List?”

“It is our rank club for the hero students. Almost every B is a member.”

“That sounds like it could be cool.”

Or sad. He could see it going either way.

“It is very helpful. We have several meetings every week. There is a study meeting, and we have private gym time at eight PM on Sundays. I always go to both of those. There is also a meeting off the campus sometimes. For fun.”

They only had a couple more minutes to talk before Alden had to head back to the Forthright building for his conversation class. He’d wanted to take Convo VI, which was the highest level offered at the high school, and which his test scores should have qualified him for. But according to the advisor, the teacher for that one wouldn’t take mid-term students.

This should be easy, and it’ll give me credit so it’s not a total waste I guess. The more requirements he could satisfy this quarter the more freedom he’d have in later ones to pick classes he needed.

Conversation class was being held on the eighth floor, and as Alden emerged from the stairwell, he had a sudden sense of displacement. This floor was styled differently from the others. Abstract wood carvings decorated the walls, and rows of shoe cubbies stood beside each classroom door.

It wasn’t exactly like LeafSong or the lab, but it was clearly Artonan-inspired.

They must do all the culture and language classes up here, and this puts you in the right frame of mind? Or if they occasionally had visiting instructors from the Triplanets that would explain it.

Alden felt an urge to video himself walking down the hallway so that he could share it with Kibby. She’d get such a thrill out of seeing him in a school.

I’ll get here really early one day and do it when there aren’t so many people in the halls. If I’m having class here, does that give me an excuse to buy my own learning cushion?

It hadn’t occurred to him that he wanted one until just this second, but he did. Sitting on a sofa or chair for your auriad practice just didn’t feel the same.

He found his classroom, stuffed his shoes into a cubby, and headed in.

Look at these monsters, he thought, staring at his fellow students. Cushions all the wrong distance apart, chip crumbs on the floor, sprawling, butt sitting. Kibby would lose her mind.

Maybe he would video the class for her one day. The respect humanity would lose because of it would more than be made up for by the joy Alden would get out of listening to Kibby in ranting mode. It had been too long.

He grabbed a cushion from a stack by the window and positioned it on the edge of the room beside a boy and girl who were touching up each other’s elaborate face paint.

“New?” the boy asked, while the girl squinted and applied tiny rhinestones to one of his eyebrows.

<<Don’t move!>> she commanded in Hungarian.

“It’s my first day,” said Alden, wondering what on earth they were doing.

“Welcome, fellow Northie.”

<<I said don’t move, Mikkel. You keep knocking the jewels off.>>

“What track are you?” Mikkel asked.

<<Say arts. Arts is best,>> said the Hungarian girl.

“Not Arts. I’m in the hero program.”

“Nice. Come to me in a few years when you want costuming. I graduate from high in two quarters, and I’m already accepted into the fashion department for uni.”

<<You hope you graduate. Do you even remember your lines for our next class?>>

Lines. So they’re probably doing skits or something for another class.

That would explain the number of people in the room wearing odd accessories and makeup. It was at least half of the other students. The artists were obviously heavily represented here. Alden figured it made sense. Arts and sciences were larger programs than the hero track to begin with, and it was more normal for hero students to take human languages since Earth-based bilingualism was required for their university graduation.

The teacher, an orator Brute named Instructor Rao, breezed into the room five minutes late—which would have convinced Kibby the world was ending—and class finally started. The first half involved everyone standing individually to recite memorized poems.

They weren’t bad, but most of them weren’t great either.

“I don’t believe you’ve gone yet?” the instructor said in Artonan, pointing at Alden.

He blinked up at her. “I was admitted to the school on Saturday,” he responded in his best Thegundese accent. “This is my first time in this class.”

“So you haven’t memorized any poems?”

“I didn’t know we needed to.” And if he had, memorizing one in a single day was kind of a big ask. “I…guess I can try to translate one from English?”

She waved at him in a way that looked semi-encouraging, so he stood up and excavated the only poem he could remember from ninth grade from the depths of his skull.

“I guess I will be saying the Artonan version of ‘The Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost. ‘Two roads parted in a yellow forest…’”

He managed it.

Rhyming poetry sounded terrible in another language, and he had to keep pausing to remember the lines before he could translate them, but he got through it. And when he was done, people clapped.

“Man, that was phenomenal!”

“Why the hell do you know how to say undergrowth in Artonan?”

Luck. He’d used the words for ‘weeds,’ since Kibby had liked to insult Thunder Lettuce with it.

“That’s not even the most impressive thing. How did you know what word to use to get the System to translate it as ‘hence’?”

“I was leaning formal. Since it was a poem,” said Alden, trying not to feel absurdly proud that he’d finally found humans who appreciated his language learning efforts. “I’m glad the System translated it right.”

He tried to decide if “hence” was good enough for “orbital stonechild” to be forgiven.

Instructor Rao was harder to read than his classmates. She said, “Well done.” But it was the same thing she had said to every other person regardless of whether they’d done well or not.

After recitation, they had conversation in pairs. Everyone already had a favorite partner, so Alden ended up looking around for anyone else who’d been left out. The only person remaining was a boy in a white Venetian mask with a long beak.

Alden would have bet he’d be the one, based mostly on the fact that he’d been in isolation already. Nobody had put their cushion next to his. Since he was sitting in the center of the room, it was very noticeable.

He was also betting he knew who this person was. The boy had recited his poem with precision but in a listless voice, and almost his entire face was covered. So there wasn’t a lot of information to go on. But his height was a giveaway; he was shorter than the shortest girl in the room by a couple of inches.

And Alden had just been talking to Andrzej about his family.

I guess he’s not coming to me, he thought, watching the other boy sit there.

He sighed, picked up his cushion, and headed over. “I think we’re learning partners today,” he said, sticking with Artonan since the teacher had told them to. “You’re Lute, aren’t you?”

The beaked mask turned to him. “No,” he said flatly.

Yikes.

“Sorry!” Alden said. “I thought you looked a little like someone I met once. I’m Alden.”

I guess I should have figured it out when he didn’t feel even a little bit uneven?

Lute and Aimi Velra both had been the last time he’d met them. He’d actually been running into more people who were clearly wordchain users here on campus, but the feeling didn’t bother him much now that he had confirmation from Gorgon that his gremlin wasn’t even supposed to be worried about that kind of debt.

He would still have expected a Velra to trigger it pretty hard, though.

“My name is Clarence.”

“Hi, Clarence. She said we’re supposed to be talking about the weather, so I’ll start. It’s nice that the sun is out. I’m looking forward to eating second meal outdoors.”

Alden waited.

The other boy heaved a dramatic sigh. “Fine,” he said in English. “I guess you aren’t a tool sent by the Grandwitch. Unless her tools have gotten really good at faking gullibility.”

He pulled his mask off. “Yes. I’m Lute. Hello.”

Alden was so taken aback it was a second before he could respond. “Why would your grandmother send me to talk to you?” he demanded. “And why on the Mother would you lie about your own name?”

And how is it gullible to believe someone about their own name?!

Lute’s pale blond hair was sticking up where the elastic from the mask had tugged at it. He finger combed it while he scowled at Alden. The power of the scowl was enhanced by a black eyepatch over his right eye that had rivers of dried costume blood crusting and flaking below it on his cheek.

“Aulia is delusional and thinks I only hate her temporarily. Instead of eternally. So I was just checking.”

“Artonan, Mr. Velra!” Instructor Rao called from the front of the room.

“My preferred name is Lute!” Lute spat in English.

Then he muttered, “Teachers always use other people’s preferred names. Funny how they can’t remember mine.”

All right. Well. This has been weird already.

“We should probably talk about the weather,” Alden said in Artonan.

“I like sunshine,” Lute said dryly in the same language. “I like crushable clouds. I like thunderstorms.”

Alden blinked at him. “That…that was the wrong word for fluffy…unless you do things with clouds I’m not familiar with.”

Lute sighed and dug at the strap on his eyepatch. “The word is fluffy?”

“Yes. That thing looks like it’s cutting into your face,” Alden added. “Don’t you want to take it off, too?”

“Huh?”

“What’s wrong?”

“You talk too fast,” said Lute. “And I have translation being off for educational time. What are you saying?”

Oh. This is an early intermediate class.

He had assumed the Velras would all speak fluent Artonan. It seemed like an obvious thing for them to learn to prep for Chainer before they were old enough to be selected. But even though Lute’s pronunciation was flawless as far as Alden could tell, he seemed to have a limited vocabulary.

“The covering over your eye looks uncomfortable,” Alden said, trying to enunciate each word carefully.

“It’s a new one.” Lute was prying at the eyepatch again. “I think I have bought the wrong smallness for my face.”

“It looks like it’s chopping your face in half. Just take it off.”

Lute glared at him.

“Why? You got a thing for gawking at prosthetics?” he asked in English.

Alden’s blood froze. He switched to English, too, without even thinking about it. “It’s not part of your costume?”

“Why the hell would it be part of—?” Lute snapped his mouth shut and touched his finger to his bloody cheek. “Oh. That’s right. I forgot I was fooling around with the stage blood this morning.”

“Oh shit,” said Alden, mortified.

“Artonan, Alden!” the teacher called.

“Oh shit,” Alden said in Artonan. “I’m sorry.”

Lute cackled. “Yeah. Bad person. Making jokes of the one eye boy!”

“I am very sorry.”

Lute beamed at him. “Guess how it happened. More fun than weather”

“No, it’s fine. I—”

“Guess.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

You A**hole

Alden breathed a huge sigh of relief when conversation class was over. Lute had refused to talk about the weather and had insisted on playing, “Guess how I lost my eye?”

It was a game that was not improved by Alden’s embarrassment over assuming the eye patch was a costume, nor by Lute’s limited Artonan vocabulary.

Do you think my eye is juice like wevvi fruit? Do you think grandma takes it and eats it?

“Something is wrong with all the Velras,” Alden said as he took the stairs down to the ground floor.

By the end of the period, Lute had been in hysterics, and Alden wasn’t even sure the Velra boy had lost his eye. He’d lied about his own name after all.

But he couldn’t accuse him of having a twisted sense of humor because what if he was wrong? Again.

Was it the blowback from the gloss?

Lute had been worried at Hannah’s funeral that he was going to lose his fingers. Had he lost an eye instead?

He was mad at his grandmother for sure. Even madder than before.

And if the whole thing wasn’t just some sick joke, then…yeah. Who could blame him? Aulia lost a council seat, and Lute lost an eyeball?

Alden had frantically tried to look up whether or not human Healers could regrow eyes while Lute joked around. They couldn’t. They could fix injuries, but not serious destruction. So it was possible…

You’d think the Velras could get an Artonan to grow him a new one. Maybe they’re not as well connected as people think? Or Aulia’s well connected, but she doesn’t share those connections with every family member?

Can’t Lute get a bionic?

Alden comforted himself with a peanut butter mousse cup Natalie had made while he took a walk around campus. Konstantin had sent him his official invitation to a party on Friday. Alden was supposed to bring his favorite mocktail ingredients.

He turned toward Celena Circle. The high school’s main green space wasn’t crowded, but there were a few groups of friends enjoying lunch together on the lawn.

“Call Boe.”

He swallowed another mouthful of peanut butter before he made his decision about the day’s conversation topic.

“So I’ve told you good things about Anesidora and bad things about Anesidora, but today let me tell you something that’s just funny. They take mocktails really seriously. And they think that’s normal. Like we have coffee shops where nobody bats an eye if you order something with eight ingredients and a specific kind of foam? They’re the same way about mocktails. Someone asked me what kind of cherries I wanted to garnish my glass the other day, and there were three different choices. It’s hilarious. But I could get used to it.”

He scraped his spoon against the sides of his mousse container, and when it was insufficient to the job, he gave up and licked it.

“I really enjoyed sharing my magic food with Jeremy,” he said. “And you didn’t get any. Because you’re a terrible person who ran away from home, and you refuse to answer your phone. I’ve left you more than sixty messages. Yes. I’m counting.

“I’m scared for you, jerk. If you’re not careful, you’re going to get downgraded from best friend to slightly less best friend. Be warned.

“In other news, I met another Velra today. This one was nuts, too, but he didn’t use his powers to blow a wordchain I was saving for myself. So I think that puts him at number two on my personal Velra ranking list.

“I hope you’re safe. I’m going to…to…”

The insulated metal cup Natalie had packed the mousse in fell from his hand. It clanged as it bounced against the sidewalk, but the loud noise didn’t even register. The words scrolling across the bottom of Alden’s interface stole every last speck of his attention:

[voice call connected]

Say something. Keep him here.

“Boe? Boe, if that’s you, please don’t hang up. I—”

“Alden, you’re alive?” Boe’s voice was a whisper. “Are you really…are you okay?”

Alden was so excited, he shouted out loud. “Am I okay?! Boe, where have you been? Where are you now?!”

“I’m…um…I think that I’m…” Boe sounded frazzled. He took several deep breaths.

“Are you all right?” Alden demanded.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Boe said. “You’re alive. And…do you have an apartment on Anesidora now? Is that right?”

“Have you really not been getting my messages?!”

“No. I haven’t. I was…are you somewhere private?”

“I’m standing in the middle of campus.”

“You’re in school? On Anesidora?”

Holy crap, he really hasn’t gotten a single one.

“Yes. It’s my lunch break. Who cares? Can you tell me where you are?”

“Let’s…okay, Anesidora…let’s not talk while you’re out in public. Go back to your apartment. Call me from there.”

“Stay on the phone with me!” Alden commanded. He was already sprinting toward the nearest bus stop. “Don’t hang up.”

“You’re really all right?” Boe asked. He was still taking such deep breaths that Alden could hear them. “Where were you? Did you get hurt? What happ—?”

“I’m fine. I’m completely and totally healthy and fine and good. I’ve been home for two months. Well, not home. But here on the island, and oh my god, the timer for this bus says it’s going to be fifteen minutes. I’m going to run to another stop. Don’t hang up.”

“…how long will it be until you get to your place from wherever you are?”

“An hour. Maybe a little more if traffic’s bad. I can find another quiet spot to talk.”

Boe didn’t say anything for a second, and it was only the “call connected” notice that kept Alden from panicking and thinking he was gone.

“Are you all right, Boe?”

“Well, I’m a lot fucking better now that you’re not gone,” said Boe. “I’m sorry, though. I do need to hang up on you—”

“No! Why would you—?”

“I need to collect myself.”

“Collect yourself while I listen!” Alden didn’t care how weird that sounded in the heat of the moment.

“No,” Boe said. “Sorry. I need the hour. It would be better if I had even longer than that, so don’t break your neck trying to get to your apartment. I was so shocked when I saw your name…I answered before I’d even thought it through.”

“Don’t hang up on me! Please! Boe, just mute me or something!”

His friend laughed shakily. “You made me think you were dead for half a year, you dick. I think you can give me two months and an hour.”

The call disconnected.

********

******

Contract Park Middle School

Chicago, Illinois

five years ago

*******

*********

Middle school was going to be different for him.

Aunt Connie had said so, but she didn’t have a great track record on the advice front. Counselor Davis—Call Me Maggie!—had said so, but she was part of the reason elementary school had ended on a sour note. Even Coach Randall had said so, but he had also said he couldn’t let Alden play in many games because he sometimes showed up late for practices.

When he didn’t know Alden was listening, he’d told the assistant coach that it was because the other kids’ parents always came on game day. And it was a shame if they didn’t get to see their children play.

So baseball was out. And counselors who came into the school during the last half of fifth grade and then babied you were even more out.

Everyone had only just started to forget that Alden was the one who got all the careful treatment in third grade. They’d only just stopped being afraid of the weird, scary kid he sometimes was in fourth. But fifth grade had been going well. The teacher hadn’t forced a single heartfelt talk on him, and she hadn’t told anyone to be careful of what they said around him.

Then Call Me Maggie had to arrive and be conspicuous about the fact that she considered him to be one of her special students. She was so proud of his good grades! Go Alden!

Like she had anything to do with any of it. The old counselor had been helpful and professional. She’s supposed to be a guidance counselor. Not a therapist. But she just breezed in and acted like she knew all about me, and—

No. He wasn’t going to get mad about it again. He wasn’t going to stew over it. Not any of it. He wasn’t someone who did that anymore.

Middle school was going to be different. Because he wanted it to be.

And Hannah Elber had said she was confident in Alden’s ability to make it different.

His phone was full of pictures from his day trips to Anesidora that summer. He had been invited to the island by a real superhero. That wasn’t something many people could say.

And she’d had him back a second time. She had even let him try on her motorcycle jacket.

It didn’t give him powers. But she was cool.

Sixth grade was his for the taking. He had a new sky blue backpack he’d picked out with Connie during a last minute school supply shopping mission. And he hadn’t spent a single night recently thinking about those pictures of Body Drainer’s body—never, ever think about those again—or staring at message boards and hating people like wakeuptheresbacon for badmouthing his parents.

His tinnitus even kind of went with the music he was listening to on his headphones as he slipped into his new classroom and looked around for a good seat.

I can make it different. I can make myself different. I can be better.

He was going to start by making a friend in homeroom.

He decided right away that the left side of the classroom wouldn’t work. Terry Millikan was over there with one of his friends. Nothing was wrong with Terry, exactly, but Terry had come over to Alden’s house once last year and then called his mom to pick him up early because there was a roach trap in the kitchen and a single beer in the back of the fridge. Terry thought…Alden wasn’t sure what he thought.

It wasn’t like Alden was allowed to drink the beer. It was just sitting there in the fridge not bothering anybody. And the roach trap was there so that roaches wouldn’t bother anyone either.

The classroom wasn’t full yet. There were a few girls on the other side of the room and a boy in the back corner.

That’s a really ugly scarf, Alden thought as he examined the lumpy woolen object and its owner.

Maybe he had tried to knit it himself? Did people their age knit?

Alden could be friends with a knitter.

He took the desk next to him. He spent a long time pretending to organize the supplies in his backpack, hoping his new friend would introduce himself first because then it would be easier. When it didn’t happen, he took a deep breath, and—

“F-fuck off,” the boy said under his breath.

Alden blinked.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” the boy said.

“I haven’t even said anything yet!” Alden protested.

“Keep it that way, d-dickhead.”

He whispered the word “dickhead,” too. It was like he wanted to swear like a grown up, but he was embarrassed to be doing it at the same time.

Change of plans, thought Alden. The knitter has issues. I need a different desk.

He picked his backpack up again…only to realize an unfortunate thing had happened while he was hoping that the other boy would start the conversation for him. Almost all of the seats in the room had been taken. The only ones left were over by Terry’s group.

Alden hovered over the desk indecisively.

This wasn’t going at all like he’d hoped. The scarf boy was hostile. He wasn’t great at being hostile, but he was obviously trying hard to be mean and that wasn’t normal.

Terry Millikan though…

He’d been polite when he said he had to call his mom and leave. But something about it had made Alden feel bad about himself, his aunt, and their house.

The knitter swearing at me just makes me feel like the knitter has his own troubles. Not like he’s judging me.

That was preferable. He sat back down.

“Hi! I’m Alden.”

“I don’t care.”

“What’s your name?”

“I said I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to anyone. You…you a-assho—”

“It’s asshole,” said Alden. Connie and her friends swore a lot. It wasn’t something he usually did because it upset a lot of people when an eleven-year-old swore, and he tried hard not to upset people. “You’re trying to call me an asshole. You asshole.”

He smiled.

The other boy looked surprisingly horrified, considering he’d started this whole thing. He turned around in his seat and stared at the board. He seemed to be attempting to retract his head into the folds of his scarf to hide himself from Alden.

Alden felt pretty sorry for him. Clearly whatever impression he’d been attempting to make had gone awry.

Scarf kid whipped back around and glared at him, nostrils flaring. “I don’t want you to pity me,” he spat. “I don’t need you. Go sit with those other assholes you keep staring at.”

Now it was Alden’s turn to be surprised. If he’d made that face and spoken in that voice when he was trying to run Alden off the first time, instead of whispering “dickhead” like he’d only just learned the word from a dictionary, Alden would have fled.

So he does have a really scary setting? And a fake scary setting. He’s strange.

“Isn’t your scarf hot? It’s summer.”

“Don’t make fun of me!”

“I’m not. Did you knit it yourself? It’s neat if you did.”

“Go away.”

“You go away.”

“I have to sit in the corner seat. I ran here just to take it.”

Elementary School Alden had liked corner seats, too. Maybe Middle School Alden, who was going to be different, should try the middle of the room. Surrounded by people.

“I like it here. I’m Alden. Wait…I already said that, didn’t I?” He set his backpack down. “I won’t bother you anymore. We can both sit here and not talk. That’s fine with me. We change classes in sixth grade anyway, so you can sit wherever you like for the others.”

The boy pressed his lips together and said nothing.

When the teacher called roll, Alden found out his name was Boe Lupescu. They all stood up to say something about themselves, and Alden said he might like to be a superhero if he could one day. He’d decided this summer. After visiting Hannah.

A few people laughed. It turned out they were supposed to be too old for that this year. You couldn’t just dream of being chosen by the System anymore.

But everyone was saying stuff like that before summer break…

Fifth grade and sixth grade—miles apart after all. He suddenly felt like he’d missed out on something by having mixed feelings on the topic of superheroes in the years since the disaster. He wouldn’t say it aloud in class again.

When Boe stood up, he said his last name was Romanian, then he sat back down. Two seconds and done.

Someone laughed at him, too.

Alden felt sorry for him again and tried to catch his eye. But Boe refused to look at him.

It’s all right, he thought. I’ll make other friends.

And that was how the school year began.

By the end of the first week, Boe Lupescu had developed a real knack for alienating people. He didn’t even use swear words to do it after his misfire with Alden. He ignored classmates when they tried to talk to him. He answered robotically when he had to. Then, if anyone dared to keep bothering him, his mouth started spraying acid.

Their classmates began to avoid him. Then they talked to other people, who avoided him, too. Boe was rapidly becoming one of those kids everyone knew it was okay to hate.

The weirdo with the bad temper. Nobody likes him, so it’s fine not to be nice to him. It’s normal not to be nice to him.

This was a problem. Alden had to start avoiding Boe, too, or he wouldn’t be able to make friends.

But…

“Why don’t you just go hang out with them?” Boe slammed a locker so hard it made Alden jump. He pointed down the hall to where some of their classmates were standing in a group laughing at videos on one of their phones. “You want to, right? Go.”

“You spoke to me!” Alden exclaimed.

Boe stared at him.

Alden grinned. “I haven’t said anything to you. Like I prom—”

“You asked me if I knitted again on Wednesday.”

“And you didn’t answer! I haven’t said anything since then.”

Boe clenched his jaw.

“I don’t mind being quiet if you just hate talking,” Alden said.

“Why?”

Alden knew why, but he didn’t know how to explain it. Boe was angry, but he wasn’t a bully. He never sought people out to be mean to them. Like a human cactus, he only stabbed if you grabbed. But it seemed like he considered any form of interaction to be a grab, and other people didn’t get it.

“If you don’t let people talk to you, most of them take it really personally.” Alden felt like he had to at least try to get the idea across. “They don’t understand why you’re being that way. So they start to hate you.”

“Good.”

“You won’t have any other friends.”

“I don’t want any friends.”

Alden glared at him. “Well I do. At least one.”

Boe raised an eyebrow and pointed down the hall again.

Asshole. Asshole. He really is one, Alden thought, marching away to watch the video with the other boys. I bet he doesn’t know how hard it is to fix how people see you when they’ve already got opinions about you in their heads.

******

At the end of September, the sixth grade took a field trip to Brookfield Zoo. Alden sat next to Boe on the bus.

It wasn’t intentional. He wasn’t mad at his homeroom neighbor, but he’d mostly given up on trying to speak to him weeks before.

“You don’t wear your scarf anymore.”

“People kept pulling on it.”

“Sorry.”

Boe nodded once. That was the entire bus ride conversation.

Maybe it’s for the best.

Alden wasn’t in the mood for talking that day either.

Everyone else was ecstatic to be out of the classroom. When they reached their destination, they broke into small groups and ran laughing from exhibit to exhibit. Alden trailed after them.

By lunchtime, he wished he’d just stayed home pretending to be sick.

“If you hate the zoo so much why’d you come?”

Startled, Alden looked up from the bag lunch he’d been picking through. Boe was standing over him with an even more annoyed expression on his face than usual.

How’d he find me?

Alden had elected to sneak away from the group to eat his lunch behind a trashcan, so that he could have a minute to himself.

“I don’t hate the zoo.”

“You’ve been miserable all morning. It’s not like you.”

“Go away.”

“You go away.”

“I was here fir—!” Oh. Alden stared down at his slightly soggy turkey and cheese sandwich. He swallowed. “I do like the zoo.”

Boe Lupescu sighed and stalked away.

Great talking to you, asshole, thought Alden. I guess we’ll do it again in a month.

Five minutes later, he heard footsteps that were more like footstomps, and Boe appeared around the trashcan again. He thrust a paper plate with a funnel cake on it under Alden’s nose. It was covered in sugar and chocolate drizzles.

“Funnel cake.” It was less a question and more a command.

Alden would have been shocked if Boe had offered him a pencil stub. An entire fried dessert was…

“Is it poisoned?”

“Yes.”

Alden took it. Boe sat down beside him.

They ate it in silence. The cake was huge. By the time it was gone, Alden had greasy, sticky fingers. And he felt a lot better.

“My parents brought me here right after we moved to Chicago,” he said. “I think they wanted to make sure we did something fun together as soon as possible, so I wouldn’t miss my old school or my friends.”

Boe was trying to wipe chocolate sauce off his glasses. He didn’t answer.

“I have good memories of the trip. Happy, but it’s not just that they’re happy. They’re really clear. I remember what I saw here and what my parents said about the different animals. And now they have to be all mixed up with this day…and everyone just wants to talk about poop and how earth animals aren’t as interesting as alien ones and how the anteater’s nose looks like a penis.”

Another minute passed.

Alden waited. He thought Boe would probably say nothing. Or maybe something mean. But it would be nice, wouldn’t it? If he didn’t…

“My favorite thing about the anteater is that it eats tens of thousands of ants every day,” Boe said. “Ants suck. And anteaters suck up ants.”

Alden smiled.

“I wanted to hear the guide talk more about them,” he added. “And I wanted to actually learn about dik-diks, but I couldn’t because everyone else was so busy being stupid about the name.”

“They were really cute.”

“They were.”

“The name is…”

“It’s hilarious. But people make dick jokes every single day in class. I’ve never seen a tiny antelope before, and they wouldn’t let me enjoy it.”

“We could sneak off and go back on our own,” Alden said.

The other boy looked down at the empty plate on top of his knees.

“Or not,” Alden added hastily. “We’d probably make the teachers mad if they realized. My aunt isn’t going to mind if they tell her, but…you know…I’m sure your family cares more than—”

Boe stood up suddenly. “Let’s go.”

“Really?”

“We’re still not friends. I can’t have friends. It’s just for today.”

“Okay!”

“You’re not listening. I just want to see the animals without everyone else around.”

“I get it. Can we go to the Australia section by ourselves, too? They have wombats.”

“You’re not my friend.”

“That’s fine. Do you want to come over to my house this weekend?”

********

******

F-city

Anesidora

present day

******

*******

Alden remembered how just a couple of months ago, after waking up in the forest, he had sent Boe and Jeremy text messages asking them to give him time to get back home to Earth and settled in before he called them.

It had felt like a reasonable request at the time.

But it wasn’t! Being on this end of it is torture. What if I call him in an hour, and he doesn’t answer?!

And apparently Boe was still paranoid about having calls overheard. Fair enough. There were people running around in the Informant’s wearables, and residences like the apartment were supposed to be safe from those.

When the hour was up, Alden was still on a crowded train zipping through F-city, and it was only the knowledge that he would be the worst kind of hypocrite that kept him from calling right that second. All the questions he’d had about where Boe was, and the fear that he’d been holding back by clinging to Jeremy’s assurances that he had sounded fine on his last phone call, were welling to the surface.

<<You seem nervous, dear,>> a woman with graying hair said in Cantonese. <<Are you all right?>>

Alden realized he’d been swaying in place like some anxiety-stricken cobra. He tightened his grip on a handrail and tried to hold himself still.

Just as the train reached the last stop, a text message popped up: [What’s your ETA?]

Alden felt so relieved he could have melted into a puddle.

[Ten minutes,] he texted back. [At most.]

Because he was going to run.

[I’m going through some of your messages now,] Boe wrote. [Sounds like I have to off Jeremy and some poser named Stuart to re-secure my best friend position. Talk to you soon.]

It felt like it took forever to reach the dorms. Then it felt like it took forever for the elevator to reach the ninth floor.

Then, finally, he was walking through the door of his apartment. He locked it and set the Do Not Disturb notice.

“Hey, Victor,” he said, carefully stepping over the cat as it weaved around his ankles. “Boe finally answered! We’re going to call him. And we’re not going to freak out or freak him out. Normal friend stuff.”

That was what he’d wanted from Jeremy when he got back home.

“It’s fine if we don’t even talk about where he’s been,” Alden muttered to himself as he headed toward the sofa. “Just as long as he’s okay and doesn’t run away again.”

He took a deep breath.

“System, call—”

“You’re still the same as always,” said a familiar voice—maybe the most familiar voice in Alden’s life—from just behind him. “Aren’t you? And… you’re really alive.”

Alden turned slowly to see a skinny, pale boy with dark hair in an ugly bowl cut stepping out of his bedroom. He was wearing ripped jeans and a black t-shirt with a skull on it. His hair was wet, and he was gripping a towel in one hand. It was dragging on the faux wood floor.

“Boe.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

The French Sauce

“Alden…you’re…I just knew you were gone forever,” Boe said. “I handled it about as well as you’d expec—mmmph!”

Alden was crushing him in a hug before he even realized it. He was solid. He was real.

“You weren’t here when I got back home!” Alden shouted in his ear. “I thought you were dead, too!”

“Didn’t Jeremy tell you—?”

“Of course. And I believed him. Mostly. But so much had already gone wrong, and sometimes I thought…you know it’s not the same as seeing you with my own eyes!”

“Asshole,” Boe said in a muffled voice. “You don’t get to play the victim when you died first. And instead of Jeremy telling me you were fine, I had the freaking System telling me you were space dust.”

Boe put an arm around him briefly, then pushed him off.

Alden took a step back. “How on earth are you here, Boe?”

“You just told the cat you weren’t going to ask me questions.”

“About where you were all this time. You don’t have to say if you don’t want to answer. But how are you on Anesidora?! How did you even get into my apartment? The door’s not supposed to open for people unless I give it permission to.”

He examined his friend. Ripped jeans. Drippy hair.

“And when you said you needed to collect yourself did you mean you needed to shower and get dressed up in my clothes?”

Boe’s smile widened. “That’s definitely what I meant.”

Alden laughed a little too wildly. “What the heck, man?”

“No. I really was collecting my thoughts. Showering helped. Actually…could you do me a favor?”

“Anything,” Alden said at once.

“…you sound so serious. I’m not going to ask you for your firstborn. Could you just…do your wordchain?”

“What wordchain?”

“You mentioned in a couple of your messages that you’ve got Peace of Mind down pat?” Boe shifted his eyes toward the damp streaks the towel was leaving on the floor. “That one.”

“Oh. Okay? You want me to do that right now?”

“Yeah.”

“…just a sec then.”

It took more than a second, but Alden composed himself and started the hand gestures. The gremlin stirred briefly and then ignored him.

“My heart calls out to another in good faith,” he said in Artonan. “Spare me a portion of your mind’s ease in this hour when my own mind is troubled. Tomorrow, I will grant another an equal comfort of mind.”

A moment passed, and he felt the chain settle. The overwhelming joy he was feeling faded just a little.

“You didn’t even ask why,” Boe noted.

“It’s only a wordchain. I’ll recite it all day if you want.”

“But it dimmed your mood slightly in this case. I’m sure that’s not how you usually want to use that one. Thanks. For doing it. And…for being so thrilled to see me in the first place that I had to ask you to.”

Alden considered that—a bit more calmly than he would have a minute before. He thought of a lot of questions to ask. All of them were things Boe had to know he was dying to have answers about.

Finally, he said, “You want food?”

“The magic food I don’t deserve because I’m a terrible person?”

“Yep.”

“I can’t say no to that.”

Alden stepped over to the fridge. “Scandinavian, Indian, or Chinese?” he asked, examining the containers.

“So international.”

“Natalie—did you hear any of my messages about her?—she wants to cook for everyone, so she’s trying to learn recipes from all over the place.”

“Indian food,” said Boe, leaning against the counter on his elbows. “And dow that you’re not out in the middle of a crowd of superhumans, you can ask me where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. And why I wanted you to do a wordchain. Just because you promised the cat you wouldn’t, it doesn’t mean I’m going to hold you to that.”

“You know…I had a reversed version of this conversation with Jeremy last week.” Alden headed over to the microwave with a veggie curry dish. “Where I said he could ask me anything because he was my friend, and he said he didn’t have to ask me anything because he was my friend.”

“Ugh.” Boe covered his face, and peered at Alden through his fingers. “He said that? With his own mouth?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. He is an angel among men. Fuck. How do you compete with that?”

“I can’t. And I know you can’t.”

“Well, I’m a bastard. It’s been established.”

“Me too. But I’m a lesser bastard. So I’m only going to ask one slightly prying question instead of the million I want to. How’s your hand?”

Boe uncovered his eyes. “My hand?”

Alden pretended to punch a cabinet. He smiled at Boe. “Your hand,” he said.

“Oh.”

“I mean the hand you put through a brick wall,” Alden clarified.

“I know what hand you mean.”

“The hand you put through a brick wall after trying to get the angel to beat you up. And saying something so horrible to him that he won’t even repeat it.”

“I was there. I know what I did.”

“That hand.” Alden took the curry out of the microwave and slid it across the counter toward him with a fork. “Is it broken? Do you need a healer?”

Boe stared down at his fingers. “Nope,” he said finally. “Not so much as a scratch.”

Well…then the question had to be asked. He took a deep breath. “Did you get selected while I was gone?”

“It was before you left.”

There was a brief silence.

“Oh, don’t do that, man,” Boe groaned.

Alden had been reaching for the soap. He paused. “Don’t wash curry sauce and train germs off my fingers?”

“No…please don’t be sad I didn’t tell you. Be offended. Or annoyed. Or even angry.”

“I’m not sad. This is just my face.”

“You’re sad,” said Boe. “Sad is…it’s the worst. I’m terrible at dealing with sadness. My own. Other peoples’. It ruins my self-control.”

“I’m not sad,” Alden said again.

He absolutely was. But only about that one specific thing. It wasn’t that important, and it was overshadowed by his relief that Boe was alive, his worry about what his friend was doing here, and quite a lot of happiness.

“Alden, I’m so sorry.”

There was an uncommon amount of sincerity in Boe’s voice.

“Why?” Alden forgot about his soapy hands and stared at him. “You haven’t done anything wrong except for being an enormous dick to Jeremy, and even he says you were amazing prior to the wall punching incident. I didn’t mean to make it into a bigger thing than it was by bringing it up like that.”

“That…the ‘wall punching incident’ was a much bigger thing than he let on,” Boe said. “But that’s between me and him. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I had powers. You told me right after it happened for you.”

Of course I did.

“It’s fine. Everyone has secrets.”

“I knew you didn’t think we had them. I knew it wasn’t right to keep it from you. I hated myself for it so much, especially after you… I didn’t want it to be that way. I’m just a fucking coward. I almost told you a hundred times. There were reasons I should have, but I didn’t want to lose my friend.”

Alden snorted. Then, he realized Boe was serious.

“I’m not going to stop being your friend.” How could he even think that? “We’ve spent almost every single day together since we were eleven. You could say harsh things to a dik-dik, and we’d still be friends.”

“What about a baby dik-dik?”

“No. Not then. I have to draw the line somewhere.”

They smiled at each other.

Alden said, “Those last few days before everything went wrong…I didn’t mean to be so wrapped up in myself? But I didn’t slow down for a second. Selection and then the funeral and then my moon mission—“

“Right,” Boe interrupted. “Moon mission. You’re going to need to explain that to me very slowly. Because the messages I’ve listened to so far were not clear at all. You just throw phrases like ‘grasshopper demons’ and ‘running until I’m bloody and broken’ into soliloquies about how much you love your private chef’s guacamole. Like those things are equally important. And like I have the full story.”

Alden opened his mouth.

“Not right now,” Boe said hastily. “Let me get my dramatic reveals out of the way before something comes up or I chicken out. Like I said, I regretted it. So let me do it. First, I’m a U-type.”

U-type. Didn’t see that one coming. Wait…

“That’s not why you didn’t tell me, is it? You should know I don’t have anything against U’s just because—”

“I know.”

“Well good,” Alden said. “And U! That’s cool. I was assuming Brute because of averages and the wall punching.”

“It’s not cool.”

“It’s not?”

“…uncomfortable is the kindest adjective I’ve ever applied to it, and that’s just on good days. Imagine the System stuck a Sway and a Mourner in a blender. And the thing that came out didn’t work as well as either of those. So it keeps trying to patch the creature with random shit it finds in its pockets.”

Alden stared at him.

“Sway. And Mourner?”

“And random shit.” Boe was biting his thumbnail and watching him nervously from beneath wet bangs.

Mourner. The emotional transference class.

“Oh…you weren’t saying I looked sad a second ago. You were saying you knew I was.”

Boe nodded.

Alden didn’t know how he felt about that. Or I do, but it’s not the way I think I should feel so it’s confusing.

“Eat your curry,” he said, finally turning his attention back to his hand washing. He watched the suds flow down the drain. He heard the scrape of the fork in Boe’s hand against the container.

If anyone else had told Alden they were spying on his feelings, he would have been furious. And scared. Even though he put effort into not being one of those people who treated Sways like lepers, he still had to consciously ignore that spike of anxiety when he was around them. Even Instructor Marion this morning in class…Alden really liked the teacher, but there was always a What if? factor you had to leap over before you could act natural around one.

So why…?

“You’re not doing some Swayner thing to calm me down right now, are you?”

Boe grimaced. “Don’t just cram the class names together. Swayner sounds terrible, and I’m not really either one. I’m my own monster.” He paused. “I’m not doing anything to you. But this curry is doing something weird to me. I feel like it’s cuddling me as I eat it? That can’t be right.”

Alden dried his hands on a paper towel while Boe squinted suspiciously at a chunk of carrot.

Where are his glasses?

“I don’t think I care,” Alden said.

Boe looked up.

“Maybe it’s just the wordchain working overtime, but…I don’t think I care very much if you’re reading my mind right now.”

His friend frowned.

Alden shrugged.

“Well, I’m not reading your mind. I don’t hear your thoughts,” said Boe. “But I am feeling what you’re feeling, like your emotions are pressing down on top of my own.”

“Then you know. I don’t really care that you’re doing it. That’s crazy, right?”

Alden bent to pick up Victor before the cat could try—and fail—to jump up onto the counter with the food.

“You’re going to care a lot later. Right now you’re very relieved and happy to see me.” Boe tilted his head. “The positive emotion and the Peace of Mind are cancelling out the anger you should be feeling.”

“Maybe.”

“You are slightly worried, though. If you want to leave, I—”

Alden stared down at the chunky orange feline in his arms. “I’m not worried about you reading my mind—”

“Which I’m not doing.”

“Or my emotions. The thing I’m worried about is, like, whiny little kid stuff. So let’s just pretend I’m not worried at all.”

Very little kid stuff. Lying in bed with your wombat plushie and wondering if maybe your best friend doesn’t think you’re his best friend because he’s been keeping a secret from you.

Is that kind of fear not something you grow out of?

Alden cleared his throat. “Even if I don’t care, you obviously shouldn’t be reading my emotions without permission in the first place. Because it’s rude. And immoral. So stop it.”

“I can’t right now. I was about to tell you, if you go away and come back in seven or so hours, you can have complete emotional privacy.”

“Just stop using your skill. Or whatever you call the talent you use to do it.”

“I’m not using one. My default state is empathic sponge. I use a skill to block your emotions, not access them. And since I’m magically toast at present…don’t squeeze the cat that hard, you doofus. He’ll bite you.”

“Sorry!” Alden set Victor back down. “What do you mean empathic sponge is your default state?”

“Pretty sure you know the definition of all those words.”

Alden narrowed his eyes at him. “That doesn’t make sense. The magic thing you do is your normal? And not doing the magic thing is…you using your powers?”

“Ta-da,” said Boe, waving his hands and wiggling his fingers like a party magician. “I’m real special. In a useless kind of way.”

“What the…are you a born psychic of some kind?”

Like Hazel Velra?

It was literally the only thing Alden could think of that would fit. But on the other hand, it didn’t fit at all. Psychic powers weren’t part of the standard human makeup. He just assumed Hazel’s uniqueness was because she’d been experimentally enhanced by some really unethical scientist. The Velras didn’t seem like the type to go for purely organic kids.

“I guess you could call it psychic? Makes me feel like I should have bangle bracelets and a crystal ball. But it’s not natural. Or at least I wasn’t born this way. The emotion reading came contemporaneously with my affixation.”

“That is a specific and unusual way to put it.”

Boe’s expression was sardonic. “The System likes to keep Uniques quiet. Our affixations are unusual. And we can get…significant help…with them if we don’t broadcast why we got our powers in a different way from everyone else in the first place. I’ve rejected the additional help so far. I think that’s uncommon, judging by how often the System nags me about it. But I’d rather not completely burn that bridge until I’m certain I’m not going to need to cross it one—holy shit, Alden, your emotions are all over the place! What—?”

“I’m good!” Alden said. He accidentally knocked over the soap dispenser and caught it just before it could fall.

“You are not. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

Boe reached a hand out toward him. “Something is seriously—”

Alden whipped around and opened a random cabinet.

Oh my god. So clever. Turning my back to hide my face so that my empathic friend won’t know how I feel.

This was going to take some getting used to. He stared at all the bottles of multicolored coffee flavorings, trying not to think so hard about unusual affixations with unusual System involvement.

“Maybe you should eat some of the curry?” Boe suggested in a strained voice.

Alden laughed in spite of himself. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be a freak. That came out of nowhere, huh? Now I guess you know how much of a mess the new me can be. Are you all right?”

“Don’t worry about me right now. Is there a subject I should avoid? I will, but I’m not sure what I said.”

“It wasn’t you. Don’t burn the bridge. I’m not sure what kind of ‘significant help’ Earth is offering you, but maybe it’s something you really will need one day. So don’t burn it. Affixations are…they’re super important. So additional help is good. Hey, I finally became a coffee drinker! I make lattes now. With this absurd magic bean machine. Do you want one?”

You’re babbling, Alden.

Just because Boe had something weird going on with his affixations.

It’s not something like mine was. His tone was too casual. And every U-type has something weird going on. Which you knew anyway. It’s not a huge surprise. They’re Uniques for some reason.

Boe let him change the subject at least.

“I’ll take a decaf mocha.”

“Didn’t you tell me once that decaf was for people with untreated heart conditions?”

“I don’t need to be more alert right now. And you definitely don’t.”

Point taken. Alden reached for the bottle of chocolate syrup.

“So…you really can’t turn off the feelings barometer?”

“I really can’t. And you’re really not leaving the apartment even though I told you so.”

“Boe, it’s my apartment. If I wanted to get away from you, I’d kick you out, not run away myself.”

“Don’t. I’ll get arrested.”

Alden turned back to face him. “Are you going to explain that?”

“I can’t tell you how I got my weird powers. But I can tell you what they all are,” Boe said instead of answering. He took another bite of the food. “If you’re interested.”

“Nooo…I’m not at all interested. Keep them to yourself.”

“Okay.”

Alden set down the chocolate syrup with a bang. “Tell me. Or I’ll think of horrifying stuff on purpose and barf my feelings all over you.”

Boe blinked. “Well, that’s a threat I wasn’t expecting.

“You wouldn’t believe some of the trauma I’ve got in my head now. It’s a weaponizable amount for sure.”

“I don’t know why Jeremy thinks you’re the nice one.”

“He just hasn’t known me long enough yet. Do you want a rosette on your latte?”

“I want to see you try to make one. I feel the emotions of everyone in my vicinity. Unless I use a skill to actively block them.”

“What’s the skill called?”

“The System lets me name them myself.”

Alden accidentally shot chocolate syrup across the counter. “What?!”

“Nobody else has them. They’re custom. So why wouldn’t I get to?”

“That’s so unfair!”

“I can even change them. I just type in a new one. At first, I called the emotion blocking skill Moody Moon Barrier.”

“I love it. So mystical.”

“Bedlam Beldam has one called Kitty Moon Barrier. It was in her honor.”

“Magnificent.”

“Now I call it Skill Number 1.”

Alden glared at him. “I was so happy that you had a dorky pre-schooler name for your superpower, and you go and change it to the blandest thing in the world.”

“Sorry. Skill Number 2—”

“Really?”

“We can’t all be baggage Rabbits. Skill Number 2 is the really nasty one. It lets me magnify peoples’ emotions or force my own onto them.”

Oh. Yeah, that’s a little… “So that’s what you mean by comparing yourself to a Sway. Mourners only take negative emotions away from people, right?”

“That’s right. They have enhanced control over their own emotions, too. But as far as others go, it’s just absorbing the unwanted ones. And there are consequences…” Boe trailed off. “I think the System must mean for them to be assistants to Mind Healers? And maybe it hopes humans will use them like a less-objectionable version of a Sway. But in practice not many of them do that kind of work from what I can tell.”

“You don’t hear about them much, do you? I know they’re incredibly rare, but—”

“I think they mostly sit around doing nothing and making themselves happy.”

“You mean magically happy?” Alden asked.

“It’s a feature. Of their power set. Like a counterbalance to the bad. But why soak up the bad at all? Why not just ignore universal suffering, flip the happy switch on yourself, and bliss out for as long as you can before you overdo it and turn your mind into jelly?”

“You think the Mourners sit around all day high on their own skills?”

Boe shrugged. “The System has been spitting out fewer and fewer of them over the years. If you pay attention to that kind of thing. So whatever it is the Artonans hoped human Mourners would be good for, it must not be working out in practice.”

“Do you have a happy switch?”

Boe raised both eyebrows. “Do you think I have a happy switch?”

A sarcastic and abrasive switch maybe.

“You’ve never struck me as someone who could choose to be perky.”

Boe looked down at the rosette on top of his latte.

“I don’t have a happy switch,” he said after a long pause. “But I can…there are ways to misuse my power that…they make me feel good. Let’s not talk about that. Especially while I’m missing my Moody Moon Barrier.”

“Got it.” Then, Alden smiled. “And did you call it that just to amuse me?”

“I guess when people come back from the dead, I’m a pushover. It’s revolting. Skill Number 3—”

“Damn. How many different powers do you have?”

“Last one. Other than foundational enhancements. I actually gave Skill Number 3 a new name. I typed it in during that heinous memorial service they had for you at school.”

That was right before he ran away.

“It’s called ‘I Need a Break from People,’” said Boe.

“That’s what you wrote on the note you left on Jeremy’s bed after the memorial. When you dropped off the cat and vanished.”

“Yeah. It’s…” Boe was still gazing into his coffee.

“You can skip it if you don’t want to talk about it. I don’t need to know.”

“No. It’s not that. This one isn’t based on violating other people’s emotions. So that’s good. But it’s just that I’ve never described it before. I don’t actually know what it does, so it’s hard.”

“My new principal is a Unique. She can phase through solid objects.”

Boe blinked. “Ghosten?”

“That’s her.”

“Lesedi Saleh is your principal. You did get into superhero school! After only being home for a few weeks? You’ve been…wow, you’ve been really busy.”

“You need to finish listening to my messages. They’re not all guacamole.”

“There were sixty of them. Give me time. My third skill is not as cool as Ghosten’s power. It’s like an escape hatch.”

“It gives you a break from people?”

Boe nodded. “Hence the name. It’s one of those things I mentioned— something the System found in its pocket and tried to patch me up with. That’s my best guess for its intentions anyway. When I trigger the skill, I go somewhere. For a while.”

“Where?” Alden asked.

“I don’t know,” Boe said slowly. “I’m disembodied. But I can still think. I’m me, but without the…complexity…of my physical form weighing on me. It gives me some clarity. I know that sounds like mumbo jumbo—”

“It sounds like a cross-dimensional teleport,” said Alden.

“What? Does it?”

“It does. I’m a fan of them I think.”

“If you say so.”

“They’re really centering.”

“We for sure need to talk about you after I’m done with my turn and my powers are back online.” Boe sipped his drink. “Wherever it is I go when I activate that skill, it’s only me there. And I just have an echo of my emotions…my own emotions. Being there completely dumps all of the feelings from other people that get tangled up with me. So…all right. Yeah. It’s really centering.”

“See. I know things.”

“Uh-huh. To take the escape hatch, I have to do something the System calls ‘attaching my existence’ to another being.”

Alden drummed his fingers on the counter. “Fine. I do not know things anymore. What does that mean?”

“It means I have to target a person or sufficiently intelligent animal before I activate the skill. They’re either carrying me around somehow, or their emotions are acting as a beacon that lights the way back to real life? I’m not sure.”

“That’s…”

Boe grinned. “You’re confused.”

“It’s a very unique talent?”

“Well, you know what the ‘u’ in U-type stands for.”

“But what are you supposed to do with that set of powers?”

Boe set down his mug. “You’re just assuming I’m supposed to do something with them at all. That they have a purpose. At the risk of lighting a spark under that bridge I just talked about—”

“Don’t.”

“The System could flash a warning sign in front of my eyes if it wanted to, right? I think it’s fine to say this much. I don’t believe my talents are intended to be useful to me, Earth, or the Triplanets. I don’t think the Artonans want me to be Boe the Dark Empath Who Occasionally Takes a Time Out in His Own Personal Other Realm. I think I’m…oh there’s the flashing sign. So you are awake. Hi there, shithead. Give me a list of things I can say, then.”

Did he just call the System shithead and demand a list of talking points?

That wasn’t a shock, considering it was Boe. What surprised Alden was the fact that his friend didn’t really sound annoyed at all.

That was chummy cussing, wasn’t it?

Boe’s eyes flicked up and down. “Random.”

“Are you talking to me or to it?”

“I’m only allowed to tell you, ‘I think I’m random,’” Boe clarified. “Any more and the mighty magical overseer will be wroth with me.”

“At least it answers you.”

“It’ll answer anyone if it thinks the answer is likely to save it trouble down the line,” Boe said dismissively.

“Have my messages been going to you through your cell phone? Or the System?”

“Both I assume. Unless the autopay for the phone plan had a hiccup. I just couldn’t access it while I was gone.” Boe looked at him. “You’re still not upset about me knowing what you’re feeling?”

“I’m not.”

“Not that I’m not…relieved. And pretty damn touched. But I think that’s definitely not going to last.”

“My feelings aren’t particularly embarrassing right now, are they?”

“You only have to experience everybody else’s emotions for a few days before you realize that almost nothing we inadvertently feel should be embarrassing,” said Boe.

Alden felt his left eyebrow shoot up. “Are you sure you’re Boe and not his kindly doppelgänger?”

“Don’t misunderstand. People are horrible. They are so, so awful. I hate most of them most of the time. But not because of what they feel. It’s because of what they do with those feelings. Two completely different things.”

“About doing horrible things…what you’re getting around to telling me is that you used Skill Number 3 to attach yourself to my cat, right?”

“I needed a break from people,” said Boe. “It gets hard for me when I’m soaking in everyone else’s madness on top of my own. Eventually, I can’t disentangle anymore. It starts to feel like I’m being overwritten. And after the memorial…why are you heading over to the sofa to bother that poor animal again?”

Alden crouched over Victor. “Are you the reason he’s fat now? Was he tired from carrying you around, and it ruined his metabolism?”

“That’s definitely how magic works.”

“Victor, do you want me to beat up Boe for you?” Alden asked, trying to find evidence of magical interference with his pet. “Did the evil Mournay ask your permission before he used you as some kind of wellness retreat?”

“Mournay is not happening. That’s even worse than Swayner. You make me sound like a French sauce.”

“We can’t use Dark Empath Who Occasionally Takes a Time Out Inside Alden’s Formerly Fit Cat, or whatever it was. It’s just too long.”

“You seriously want to workshop a name for my bonkers unique class?”

“Of course.” Alden smiled at him. “That’s what friends should do when you get uncomfortable random powers.”

Boe slid off the counter stool and came to stand beside him. He looked down at the cat. After a long while, he said, “Alden, you were dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know it was probably worse for you than for me.”

“It was bad. I thought about it sometimes…how terrible it would be for you. And Connie and Jeremy, too.”

“I almost couldn’t take it,” Boe said quietly. “Where were you?”

“Moon Thegund broke. It was full of chaos and tiny demons. There was no way back home. I’m sorry it took me so long.”

Boe sighed. “Me too. I didn’t mean to be gone for months. Time doesn’t move the same for me when I’m hiding in that place. I have a sense of it passing, but it’s not accurate. I stay until I feel like I won’t fly apart. It feels like hours. But usually it’s a few weeks.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Alden said. “Losing track of real time like that.”

“I don’t know if it is or not. I was scared of the same thing—that years would go by without me knowing. And I haven’t really had practice with the skill. So when I used it right after your memorial, I came back too soon. I wasn’t all right yet. That was when I flipped out at Jeremy’s.”

Alden looked at him. “It must have been agony,” he said hesitantly. “Having everyone else’s grief piled on top of your own sounds…”

Boe didn’t answer right away.

Finally, he nudged Alden with an elbow. “You should feel guiltier. Give me some good guilt.”

“I said I was sorry—”

“Not for going missing. For making me an illegal immigrant. I was expecting to reappear in Jeremy’s suburban mansion. There was a reason I attached myself to your cat. Instead I popped up butt naked in a strange apartment. I thought he’d given away Victor. I thought some homeowner was going to bust in and shoot me.”

Alden gaped at him. “Your clothes don’t go with you?”

“My glasses don’t even go with me. They’re buried in a plastic bag under a bush below Jeremy’s bedroom window. You’re just a friend-shaped blur right now.”

Alden laughed.

“Jerk.”

“I’m sorry; it shouldn’t be so funny—

“I was panicking. I was running around the room, trying to figure out where I was and get clothes on myself so I could escape, and then I see the ocean out the window and the sketches of Apex and F-city on the wall. And I think…this place looks like pictures I’ve seen of the intake dorms on Anesidora. And I’m confused and very concerned because the only thing worse than breaking and entering in some trigger happy person’s house is breaking and entering on an island full of people with superpowers!”

Alden laughed harder.

“And then I see a call notice flashing on my interface, and I click it without checking, expecting it to be Jeremy because the only other person in the world who gives a shit about me is dead, and maybe Jeremy can tell me what the hell is going on. But then…it’s my best friend. Leaving a voicemail. About how he’s making a personal list of which Velras he hates least. I thought…I sincerely thought I’d lost my grip on reality.”

“Boe…”

“I thought I should have done it ages ago, if all it took to hear from you again was losing my mind.”

Alden tried to control his emotions. He couldn’t.

He took a few steps back from Boe, who was staring at him with an expression so raw that Alden didn’t know what to do with it.

“Sorry. Shit, I…” Alden said apologetically. “I know you need me to be less…but I can’t just be chill after you say something like that.”

“Fair enough,” Boe said, still staring at him. “That was my bad.”

“Peace of Mind isn’t a super strong wordchain, man. It can’t take this much of a beating.”

“I’m the one who completely exhausted my barrier skill before taking my time out. I know it doesn’t recover much when I’m away. So that’s my bad, too.”

“Am I…my feelings are intense and all over the place again. That’s tough on you, right? It bothers you. Should I go?”

“…you should probably go.” Boe smiled wryly. “Unless you want me to go. And try to explain to the superpolice how I got to Point Nemo all by myself.”

“I’m supposed to be meeting my personal trainer at the gym this afternoon.” Alden backed toward the door. “I’ll do that. I’ll come back tonight. You said a few hours. Some? I forgot the number.”

“Six or seven should do. You have a trainer?”

“I have a trainer. And I’m in hero school. Today was my first day. And I’ve got a commendation from a really important Artonan. And I have twelve million dollars.”

Boe opened his mouth at that, but he didn’t say anything.

“Yeah. There’s a lot,” said Alden. “We’ll cover it when you’re not being forced to ride my every emotional nuance with me. I’m going now. Help yourself to my food. And clothes. And whatever…I have an expensive laptop. Enjoy. Call Jeremy. Don’t feed the cat. He’s a liar.”

Alden’s hand was hovering over the door panel, but he didn’t touch it. “Boe…you’re not going to disappear again, are you? You’ll be here when I get back?”

“I’m glad you asked first. I didn’t want to be the one to sound all needy.” Boe sat on the sofa, threw his legs up onto the low coffee table, and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ll be here. No disappearances. You’re coming back, aren’t you?”

“Yep. Just going to the gym. No trips to other worlds for months. I promise.”

“Good.”

“Good. And send me your glasses prescription. I’ll have some new ones drone delivered.”

“Showing off your new money swag?”

“Do you enjoy squinting at everything?”

A text message with the prescription appeared on his interface. Boe hadn’t even twitched.

“I can mental text as well,” said Alden. “You’re not that impressive.”

“Takes a ton of practice, doesn’t it?”

“I figured it out really fast and all by myself. I’m amazing like that.”

“Your emotions shift when you lie. Shitty B-rank.”

Alden suddenly realized… “What is your rank?”

“A.”

“That’s only one above me.”

“But it is above you.”

“I have 20/10 vision,” Alden said. “So we’re even.”

Boe sighed. “Alden, go away for six hours until my skill’s recovered. I really will be here when you get back.”

“Ah. Sorry. I was stalling a little. Bye.”

“Bye,” said Boe. Then, just before the door shut, he added quietly, “Love you, too.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

The Other Half of It

Boe is all right. Boe is here on Anesidora. Boe is…an empath.

The thoughts flowed through his head again as he dashed toward a wall made of the tough, rubbery material that formed all the impediments on the North of North gym’s morphable obstacle course. The course was popular, and even at Alden’s level, they never let more than three people use the room at the same time. So this slot had been booked days ago.

Glad I didn’t skip. Bobby would have killed me.

The trainer was standing off to the side, adjusting the obstacles ahead of him slightly every time he ran it. The blocks and bars were never quite the same distance apart. The walls were never the same height. Occasionally something would be unexpectedly loose or wobbly, and he’d have to change tactics. There were even sections where puddles of water could appear only to be quickly dried before his next run, though Bobby never made use of those.

Alden popped up the wall. It was narrower than it had been last time, and the second obstacle he was supposed to be scaling from here—a pillar—now had a series series of vertical and diagonal ridges and crevices instead of the horizontal ones that had made the job doable last time.

He glanced toward his trainer. She probably thinks I’m not paying attention today.

It was true. It was only willpower that was keeping him from trying to sneakily research U-types through his interface while he did this. That and the fact that he didn’t have two consciousnesses, so he was sure he would plow face first into something.

“I’m not sure I can climb that!”

Bobby gave him a thumbs-up. She was wearing a striped yellow and black tank top and a bobble antenna headband. Even though Halloween was still officially a couple of days away, a lot of places were treating everyone to Halloweek. Including the gym.

Anesidora took a more-is-more approach to holidays. If it was celebrated anywhere on Earth and it was even moderately fun, chances were it would be honored on the island.

“Give it a try!” she called back. “Remember your handholds.”

A minute later, Alden hit the floor, which had gone soft enough that it wasn’t painful. He accepted a hand up from Bumblebee Bobby. “Almost!” she said. “We need to work more on your climbing technique. Underbars next!”

When his workout was over and they had talked about how to adjust his schedule to fit around his new classes and the school gym period that was starting up next week, Alden headed to the showers. He rinsed off under a full rainfall ceiling while New Age music played, and then he dried with a heated towel that had been folded around a pouch of lavender.

This place is too expensive. And I know it. But they do make you feel good about giving them your money.

He never knew what to do with the lavender pouches. If you handed them back to a bathroom attendant, they just threw them away. He’d been keeping them all and tucking them into his sock drawer.

He needed to kill a few more hours, so he sat at the smoothie bar, drinking something that definitely had too much maple syrup in it to actually be healthy, and did his homework. To say he wasn’t into it would have been an understatement. He hadn’t even brought his bag with him when he raced out of the apartment, so he had to do it all through the interface instead of on his computer or tablet.

He skimmed the science reading, then he watched an episode of a show that featured two Artonan farmers arguing over the ownership of a livestock animal that looked like a jumbo mole cricket. It seemed to be part of a historical comedy series about the farmers. Their argument got more and more ridiculous as the show progressed, until by the end of it, the animal got fed up with them and left both farms behind to go live its life in the wild. Where it was almost immediately killed an eaten by a poacher lady.

Not bad, Alden decided. For me. But I wonder if the people who were struggling to describe the weather today are going to be all right?

The banter between the farmers was fast-paced and full of childish insults that probably weren’t frequently encountered unless you lived with a little girl who thought it was hilarious to hear an Avowed call the household appliances things like “ugly butt.” If you were listening without translation, like they were supposed to, wouldn’t it be difficult for people who weren’t used to it?

Instructor Rao did make me recite a poem even though it was my first day of class. Is she a hardass or is she just phoning it in?

He put extra effort into typing up what the moral of the story was so that he could record himself reading the whole thing later and send it to Kibby.

“This is what my class is watching,” he would say. “Since you’re my first Instructor, I wanted your opinion on my work if you can spare me your valuable time.”

She was going to love it.

Finally, he typed up two paragraphs for Instructor Marion’s class about the domestic violence/terrorist situation, feeling ill at ease with the questions it provoked. And with the fact that he lacked the passion and confidence in his own judgment that his new classmates had displayed.

Most of them were really sure that it would be no big deal for them to do the right thing, whatever they thought that was. Even the ones who had incredibly dangerous plans had a lot of conviction about them.

He grimaced down at the dregs of his smoothie and sent the homework in to Instructor Marion. Then he turned his attention to Boe.

He checked the time.

My empath friend needs at least two more hours to get his skill online so he can not be an empath. Maybe even three if I’m being extra considerate.

It was so backward for an Avowed’s skill to be the thing that kept them from being powerful.

What the fuck is up with that?

Alden knew a lot more about affixations now. It wasn’t enough to completely unravel this mystery, but he could make better guesses than he would have been able to before he left home.

He wasn’t born with the ability to read emotions. But he can’t turn it off. And it doesn’t wear out. It could be a passive skill that’s always on like a stat point…? No, it would have to be a weak effect compared to the amount of authority bound into it for that to work, I think, and it doesn’t sound weak at all.

So he’s been changed. It’s permanent. Brain alteration? Is it a specific upgrade to Processing? Or is it more like being open to other peoples’ emotions is now a part of Boe’s self on the existential level?

That’s…

He guessed how it had been done didn’t matter as much as the fact that it had been. Without Boe wanting it. He would never have chosen powers like that. Yet he didn’t seem particularly angry at the System or the Artonans. Alden could only ever remember there being a normal, Boe-ish amount of negativity and suspicion toward either party.

And if he had already been forced to affix prior to Alden’s own affixation…

There was nothing, thought Alden, staring blankly across the counter at the smoothie bar’s frozen yogurt machine. When I first told him I’d been chosen, he didn’t want me to talk about it over the phone, but that makes complete sense now. He’s unregistered himself, and he’s cautious about it because he doesn’t want to get deported. That’s an Earth-based problem.

And when he was encouraging me to seriously consider being unregistered and choosing a quiet class…that was an Earth-based concern, too. He didn’t want me to leave Chicago.

He wasn’t actually very negative on me being an Avowed at all.

Maybe it’s just because there’s not much choice in the matter, so why drag me down. But you’d think if he’d been forced to have painful powers that are at odds with his personality, there would be some serious bitterness and hatred toward the System.

Alden didn’t think he was so clueless that he couldn’t pick up on Boe’s feelings at all.

I must be, though. At some point—probably last year?—he was selected and had those powers dropped on him all at once. And I didn’t notice.

He tried to remember a moment when Boe might have changed. A period of particularly terrible moods, evidence of him struggling more than usual to put up with their classmates, a reluctance to spend extended periods of time with Alden…

I can’t think of anything. Am I unobservant? Have I been that bad of a friend?

Maybe if it had happened around the time Hannah went missing?

That could have been it. I guess the next question is how do I even be a good friend to an empath? Especially an empathic Boe?

Boe could get tangled up in other peoples’ emotions so badly he had to evacuate to his own personal nowhere, so…okay.

Emotional control was not Alden’s best quality these days. He had far more good moments than bad ones. But the bad moments could be intensely bad. Thankfully they mostly came at night, and he just dealt with them in the privacy of his room. But if Boe was sleeping next door, then obviously…

If he’s having a hard time and he’s exhausted the authority bound into the barrier skill, what do I do? If I’m in a regular level mood I can offer to Peace of Mind it. And if I’m in an Intensity 99.9 mood, I’ll leave.

Oh yeah, there’s also…

He pulled up the contract he’d signed with the Velras back in February. There, attached to it whether he wanted them or not, were four wordchains that weren’t available anywhere he could find on the internet. There were even videos of various pairs of hands hastily performing the associated gestures in bizarre locations. Someone had filmed their fingers swirling around with a grocery store’s meat cooler as the backdrop.

Yes, Grandchild Number Forty-Three, Alden imagined Aulia saying on a phone call. I have decided to gift Feather’s Touch to that boy Aimi manhandled. I’m sure he will love it. Perform it immediately. I don’t care if you’re standing in front of a shelf full of pork chops! Just do it!

One half of Feather’s Touch made your skin extremely sensitive. The other half would make you numb. It was nice that both halves had upsides in addition to downsides, but Alden wasn’t interested in it right now.

The only one of the four that might be helpful for dealing with emotions was…

This one. Purposefulness.

It seemed to be something that would improve your focus. So maybe you could use it to control what your attention was on if you were spinning out emotionally. Like focusing on a task instead of whatever was upsetting you? The Velras had conveniently forgotten to describe the effects for him themselves, so he had to guess based on the Artonan words in the chain.

Probably they thought I would get in touch with them for more details and help learning to do them?

Alden was curious. About the chains and why some of them were even made exclusive in the first place. But it was a resistible curiosity.

This one would be good, though. He’d shift learning it higher up on his overstuffed to-do list.

Thinking about the Velras reminded him of an annoying new problem that had to be managed. Someone was running around Anesidora who could call in your chain debt prematurely. And she was willing to do it, too.

Which meant Alden now had to consider the consequences of whatever debt he was carrying hitting him unexpectedly. The blowback from the wrong chain at the wrong moment could screw you over in a big way.

It wasn’t like he expected Hazel to be hiding around every corner waiting to snipe him. But usually people carried debt for quite a while. It wasn’t likely Alden would run into the Chainer at any given moment, but the chances of a random meeting happening over the course of days or weeks were much higher.

And Peace of Mind’s negative half is so…

[Hey,] he texted Boe, [I’m taking a little longer than I expected. Finishing up homework. I’ll be back in four hours.]

Then he headed upstairs to the spa.

He’d seen it on his first tour of the facilities. He’d admired it, just like he had the rest of North of North. But he’d never actually used a spa before, and he hadn’t expected that to change anytime soon.

It’s so fancy. He watched jellyfish drift through the aquarium wall that divided the check-in area from a lounge where Avowed in robes drank herbal tea and waited for their scheduled treatments. I wonder if I could bring Connie here or if it’s members only.

He thought he recognized several famous people, though they looked different in terrycloth and slippers than they did in their superhero get-ups. According to local gossip, more big names than usual should be around over the coming days, since a battle group was being called in to deal with one of the annual demon destruction events. There was much more news about it here on Anesidora than Alden had ever experienced at home, and he didn’t think it was just his own personal interest in what was going on that made it feel that way. Mentions of it were everywhere.

But local interest was still mostly on who would be involved and how they would get along with each other and match powers, not in how the fight would go.

A demon would appear in the offshore facility where that always happened. A select best-of-the-best group would destroy it. Nobody else would get to see anything interesting. It had happened so many times before that it wasn’t worth worrying about.

Alden did learn that the battle group spent several weeks away from their other jobs, preparing. It was something he probably should have known just because it made logical sense that you couldn’t have a mass of disparate powers clashing. But news about the demon allotment had always been such an after-the-fact blip before now that it had felt like something that lasted only a single day.

Do the Artonans even need us to kill a random demon for them or is it some training thing that the Avowed-should-be-saviors faction insists on?

If giant, powerful demons were anything like the grasshoppers then they didn’t seem like something that would be particularly shippable. He understood very little about teleportation or the System’s abilities, but he couldn’t imagine that dropping a chaos monster on a specific location was anything but hell on magical resources.

A man in one of the spa employee uniforms stepped around the aquarium and took a position behind the check-in desk. A special notification below his name tag on Alden’s interface told him that the guy was non-Avowed. It wasn’t really necessary information in his opinion. It wasn’t like superhumans went around greeting each other by swinging magic swords or exchanging deadly blows.

Maybe it’s more to explain why he has to use tech for everything, so that people don’t think he’s being rude.

That did seem likely after Alden talked to him. He read his smart watch for the translation, and nodded.

A few minutes later, Alden had his own personal relaxation room. There was a heated lounge chair. Three walls were screens that would display different landscapes if he wanted, and the fourth looked out over the meditation garden. There was a “sound therapy” playlist and a mini fridge full of drinks that looked like liquefied salads.

Seems interesting. I don’t expect to enjoy it much.

He settled into the lounge chair, took a breath, and said the sacrifice half of Peace of Mind.

Yeah, yeah, I know, he thought at the gremlin. I’m a good boy. Paying my debts right away.

Alden suspected the next three hours were going to suck, no matter how great it was to be able to pay off the debt in private, in a spa.

The thing about the bad half of Peace of Mind was that it hit above its weight. The calming half of the wordchain just settled over you and took the sharp edges away, so he was sure that its counterpart only sharpened all those same edges by an equal amount. On its end of things.

But the human brain was primed to fixate on danger and negativity, so that you’d be inspired to pay extra attention to anything that could hurt you.

In practice, it meant that one wrong, slightly too magnified bad thought could spiral into something that had less to do with the magic of the wordchain than it did with your mind and body overreacting to it. Alden had taken advantage of that to fan his own fear when he was running with Kibby.

Now, though, there were no advantages to be had—only his own heart rate elevating for no real reason and a sick feeling of dread making his stomach clench. He decided to combat it by watching Kibby’s latest batch of videos. He pulled up his current favorite.

It was full of evidence that the Quaternary’s team of wizards and Avowed were spoiling her. He tried to focus on every detail, to notice things he hadn’t the last time he watched it.

“Hello, Alden!” Kibby said, a smile brightening her whole face. “This video is about scarlet ryeh-b’t females and Stu-art’h, who is the son of the Primary and the nephew of the Quaternary, and how he named one after you. I have been thinking about whether that was funny-mean of him or not.”

She looks so relaxed.

Alden had hardly ever seen Kibby look relaxed unless she was actually asleep. It was beautiful.

She was in the travel dome’s medical area, which had been turned into her room. And it was such a wonderful child’s room. She had stuffed alien critters on her bed. Except for the size, they were all anatomically detailed and realistic. Either Artonans didn’t go for cartoonish stuffies, or Kibby herself didn’t. The toys she and her sister had played with at the lab had been similar.

In one corner, a brand new learning cushion, a short desk, and a vase full of promise sticks made a small classroom for her. There was a projection on the wall that scrolled through pictures she’d chosen. Half of them were still-frames from Alden’s video messages to her. There were a lot of close-ups of Kraaa and Rrorro, and several pictures of clouds flashing with green light. They looked innocent until you realized that they were images captured from space of the lab blowing up.

She definitely has shots of the crater she made somewhere, and she’s just saving them because she hopes I’ll ask to see her work.

“First let me show you my hair,” said Kibby, angling her head and her tablet. “Rrorro is learning braiding, but I don’t like it as much as yours.”

That is just pure favoritism for me, thought Alden. He’d learned to do the French braid for her when he realized that having her hair done made her happier. But Rrorro must have been an overachiever in all things, because the healer had gone for some advanced level basketweaving with ribbons.

I could do that now that I’ve had more auriad practice. I can totally beat Rrorro. Her species doesn’t even have hair.

Kibby popped back upright.

“Scarlet ryeh-b’ts are known for their merry natures, their large sizes, and their athleticism,” she said in an instructive tone. “So maybe the son of the Primary was not being as rude as I thought at first when you told me he had tried to replace your presence in the universe with an animal.”

She paused. “It would be better if he were not being rude. It would be unfortunate for the son of the Primary and the nephew of the Quaternary to be a rude and thoughtless person.”

My next video is clearly going to need to be in defense of Stuart. She is so judgey. I think I should have explained that Other Alden is awesome instead of just mentioning her in passing.

“You are merry, large, and athletic—”

Merry? Alden shook his head.

“And your coat was red. Perhaps Stu-art’h was being funny-mean by naming such a ryeh-b’t after you. As friends do. So it may be all right for you to talk to him socially.”

She went on discussing Stuart’s behavior and ryeh-b’ts for a while. Alden focused on noticing other things about her and the room around her. She had a rolling space heater. One of the wizards with Alis-art’h must have been doting on her, or else the Knight herself was, because Kibby was wearing one of their magic rings on a chain around her neck.

On her way to being a wizard for real. I know that must make her so proud. She’s…

Oh. He’d forgotten. There was a thought he’d been avoiding every time he watched Kibby’s videos. Not…not a terrible one. Definitely not an urgent one. But here it was, jabbing at him with those unnaturally sharpened edges.

She’s going to want to be a knight.

“That’s more than a decade in the future,” he said loudly and quickly, trying to kill it. “She’ll live a whole new life before then. She might take one look at all the plants and animals on Artona I and decide she wants to be a biologist.”

She might like her authority sense so much that the idea of doing that to herself sounds like insanity. Joe told her nobody wanted to be a knight when they actually grew up.

Joe doesn’t understand her at all.

Or maybe he’d understood a different Kibby. One whose family hadn’t died in such a hideous way while she watched.

She’ll want to do it. And they’ll probably let her.

He didn’t know how the Artonans figured out the knight candidate thing. Obviously the Rapports had some private schooling going on, at least for the children of current knights. But they must have had some way to welcome in other wizards. Most likely with open arms.

He could be completely off-base, but he really doubted there were masses of qualified volunteers being turned away.

Maybe she sucks at magic too much to be a knight.

Unlikely. After all, affixations were practically the cure for sucking at magic. Aliens sucking at magic and Artonans giving them a way to do it easy-peasy was the cornerstone of the whole Avowed/wizard relationship.

Even if there’s some elitist rule about who can be a knight that I don’t know about…Alis-art’h will just smash right through it for Kibby if she decides to.

And Alden was sure she would decide to. How could you spend months living with Kibby and not think she was the absolute best?

I don’t want it for her. I want her to do magic and be happy. I want her to go to some posh school like LeafSong and show up every last one of those wizard-raised prodigies. I want her to get her own lab one day, and I want it to be twice as big as Joe’s, and I want her to have so many friends and fun hobbies that she can’t figure out how to balance them with her deeply fulfilling work as the universe’s greatest scientist.

I don’t want her to fix chaos outbreaks. I don’t want her to face whatever “the really bad kind” of demons actually are.

I don’t want her to know what the affixation feels like.

Alden knew you couldn’t make another person’s major life choices for them. Kibby was smart. She’d get smarter. She’d know so much more by the time she had to make her decision. And she deserved to become whoever she wanted to be.

But knowing didn’t change how he felt.

And what he felt was an anxiety that was rapidly ratcheting up toward panic. And with the panic came a flood of his other greatest fear hits.

It’s only six months before I’ll start getting summoned again. Something awful could happen to me. If I don’t get stronger I could be in danger. If I do get stronger I’ll have to affix sooner. I’ll have to feel that sooner. Idon’twanttogothroughthatagain.Ican’t.

Fantastic, he thought, holding the sides of the fancy heated lounge chair so tightly his hands ached. So this is what the bad half of Peace of Mind is like for me these days. What a treat.

He forced himself to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth.

What if this doesn’t ever get better, and I’m fucked up forever?

That thought set off a whole new string of imagined horrors. The only good thing about them was that they were much less realistic and logical than the others, so he could distance himself from his own crazy a little more. It culminated with a fear that someone would walk into his relaxation room here, see the state he was in, and they would stuff him into Avowed jail.

Because that was obviously what the authorities did to upset teenagers.

By the time the three hours was up, Alden was exhausted with himself. Fortunately, he was also too tired to keep going without the little extra oomph from the chain driving him.

He could tell it was over when he had his first positive thought in a while that wasn’t immediately followed by a panic spike.

Boe’s all right. I’m all right. Jeremy and Connie are fine. Kibby’s with good people, and she’s happy.

Finally, they were all accounted for.

********

Alden was still less emotionally solid than he would have liked to be when he made it back to the dorms, but Boe had texted to say his shields were fully up. It should be fine.

It was night, and the halls in The Warren were full of people decorating their doors for a spookiest apartment contest. He stopped to compliment the guys in 912. None of them were from countries where Halloween was widely celebrated, but they’d really gotten into the spirit of things and gotten hold of paint that Alden hoped was temporary.

There were dark red stains on the floor that made it look like someone had dragged a body down the hall to their apartment.

When he stepped into his own place, the first thing that hit him was the sound of the pinball machine. He shut the door quickly. Boe was leaning over the game, and behind a new pair of brown tortoise-shell frames, his eyes were fixed and focused.

“You’d better not be beating my high score.”

“I was going to,” Boe said without looking at him. “Because I thought it would be funny if you came back, and I had put the cat’s name in place of yours. But it’s not happening for me. Why are you so good at this?”

“I have hidden depths.” Alden walked over to him. “Pumpkin fro-yo? It’s the seasonal special at the gym.”

Boe abandoned the game and blinked at the cone of dark orange soft-serve. “Did you just pull ice cream out of the pocket of your pants?”

“Yogurt. They’re brand new pants. I had to buy all new workout clothes because I fled the apartment without thinking hard enough earlier.”

Boe took it from him and bit into it.

“Please note that the curl on top was perfect. Before you ate it just now.”

“Are you seriously fishing for superpower compliments?” Boe grinned. “It’s cool.”

“Don’t strain yourself.”

“It’s very cool.” Boe examined him. “What kind of training are you doing at the gym? You look worn out.”

“Obstacle course running today.”

“Fun?”

“Actually yes. How’s your empathy?”

Boe’s face scrunched. “That sounds so wrong. I guess people knowing you’re an empath means they ask things like that, though? It’s safely muffled. You’re free to hate me freely if you want to.”

He said it jokingly, but Alden wondered…

“I’m still not mad that you read my emotions earlier. And I’m not upset anymore that you didn’t tell me about being an Avowed.”

“Technically I’m not,” said Boe.

“Not what?”

“Avowed. I didn’t agree to the Contract. Yet. I still can anytime. The System throws it in front of my eyeballs every morning exactly two minutes after I wake up. You have to give it credit for determination. But you can’t be Avowed if you never make a vow, right?”

Alden stared at him.

“Sorry. I’m being pedantic. I know most people call Contract refusers Avowed anyway.”

“I wasn’t thinking that. I was just realizing that automatically affixing means you didn’t have a chance to say yes or no to start with at all.”

Boe took another bite of his yogurt. “Correct. So it keeps offering. In case I want to sign up and get with the program.”

“You didn’t discourage me from agreeing,” Alden said slowly.

“I seriously wish I had. So fucking much. A refuser wouldn’t have gotten that job.”

Alden let the obvious question hang between them.

“I thought Gorgon might have intended for you to be summoned more,” Boe said, “to develop the skill somehow. Since he picked Rabbit. And I thought it would be okay for you. No, not even that…I thought you would probably like the occasional trip to the Triplanets. You’ve always thought aliens were interesting. And I assumed that no matter what your skill was, even the worst Rabbit assignments wouldn’t be bad.”

Fair enough, I guess. I thought that, too.

“I promise I would have told you if I had some secret knowledge about it being the wrong choice. I would agree to the Contract myself if I had better powers for it. A high-paying job once in a while would really help me out. I was a little envious that you could go the usual route.”

Oh. “You’re a refuser because you don’t want to be asked to use your skills. At all.”

“Skill Number 2,” said Boe. “Specifically.”

“The forcing and magnifying emotions one.”

Boe nodded. “It can be dangerous. For the people I use it on and for me. Even if they asked me to do something pleasant with it, there are problems. By not signing, I have to accept some inconveniences, but it means I’ll most likely never be called unless there’s some specific emergency.”

“What kind of problems do you—?”

Boe turned back to the machine. “So. Pinball. Show me your trick.”

It does sound nasty. Being forced by the Contract to force someone else to feel a certain way. If it was helping someone calm themselves down after a nightmare, great. If it was terrorizing a prisoner while they were being interrogated or something similar…yeah, I wouldn’t want to roll the dice on that either.

He let Boe change the subject and went to stand in front of the machine.

“Behold my trick,” he said, as a new game started up.

Boe watched him. After a couple of minutes, he asked, “Did you get a lot more points in Speed?”

“Just a little. And Dexterity. But I asked the Artona I System to pay special attention to my hands.”

Boe was quiet while he finished the yogurt. The pinball machine spat out two more balls.

“I give up. I can’t think of any reason for you to do that,” he said.

“You wouldn’t say that if you saw how fast I can type now.”

“I know you must have a real reason. Is there some hand weapon you found that you liked?”

When Alden didn’t answer, Boe said, “Or we can talk about other stuff. I made it through all of your messages. Some of your insults were creative. And you’ve thrown yourself into Avowed life with ludicrous energy for someone who should be in rest and recover mode. That’s kind of concerning. But how’d the first day of school go?”

“Surprisingly okay. The academic part is more normal than I thought it would be. There’s a hero track class called Engaging with the Unexpected that’s…well, it’s not boring for sure. And I met Lute Velra in Artonan Conversation.”

“Short mopey harpist from Hannah’s funeral.”

“You bothered to remember who he was? I probably only mentioned him once.”

“I’m a good listener,” said Boe. “And it was an S-rank Velra. At the time, I was planning to follow up and see if he really did lose fingers. I thought it might be hitherto unknown proof that Chainers could guess exactly what consequences they were getting from something like a luck wordchain.”

“He might’ve lost an eye instead. I don’t know what that’ll do for your theory.”

“Really?” Boe looked intrigued.

“Might’ve.”

“You couldn’t tell?”

“He was wearing an eye patch.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean he lost it. There are all kinds of reasons to wear one.”

“He said he lost it.”

Boe’s brow furrowed. “Then why is there doubt?”

“I think he could have been screwing with me. Actually, he definitely was. He made me teach him the word <<squelchy>> to describe eyeballs popping? Do they even do that?” Alden shivered. “Anyway…I think he really lost the eye. And his sense of humor about it is pitch black. But he was having so much fun saying disturbing things that I’m not completely sure.”

“I feel like I need to meet this person.”

Alden snorted.

“Can I ask…?” Boe trailed off, and Alden braced himself. So much had happened to him he didn’t have any idea what the question was going to be.

“What should I ask about?” Boe said finally. “What’s the critical, need-to-know information about Alden Thorn now that he’s back home?”

“That’s hard.” He wanted to tell Boe things. More than other people. But also, there was something bothering him a little. “Can I ask you something first?”

He didn’t wait for him to answer. “I promise I won’t freak out. Or get mad at you—”

“I think I know what you’re going to ask.”

“Whatever the answer is, I’ll be fine with it. But if you don’t tell me either way, I’m going to keep wondering. Have you ever used it on me? The skill that alters feelings?”

Alden regretted the question almost as soon as it was out of his mouth.

Boe’s expression was blank.

“I’m sorry,” Alden said quickly. He let go of the flipper buttons, and the pinball game ended with depressed digital moan. “Please forget I said that. Now that I’ve done it, it sounds wrong. It’s like asking any other person if they secretly hurt people just because they can.”

“It is like that.”

“I know. Shit. Boe, I didn’t mean to—”

“But it’s not exactly the same. You wouldn’t have asked if I was ‘any other person.’ You don’t go around asking every Sway on the island if they’ve stuck their fingers in your brain, do you?” He sighed. “I’m your best friend. And…I kept information from you. About something major. It’s fine. No, I’ve never magically screwed with your emotions on purpose. There have been mishaps, when my own mood was so out of control that I activated part of the skill without thinking about it. But I always reined it back in as soon as I realized.”

“That’s understandable,” Alden said quietly. “I’m sorry for asking.”

“It’s fine.”

“I feel bad.”

Boe’s smile twisted. “Don’t feel too bad. I’m definitely not a saint. I actually…I ought to tell you something, and the System doesn’t want me to.”

“Don’t piss it off for my sake.”

“It’s pretty important.”

“Is me not knowing going to kill either one of us?”

“No.” Boe frowned at him. “But…Alden, that’s an extreme tolerance level for someone else’s secrets negatively affecting you. Too extreme.”

“Fine. Is me not knowing going to seriously hurt anyone?”

“I don’t think so. The thing I want to tell you about already happened. It’s done.”

Alden considered that. Then he considered Boe. His friend didn’t have a lot of tells, but there was a tightness around his eyes. “You did something you feel guilty about. Or something bad happened to you. Or you know something about the System, powers, or me that I don’t. And you think not telling me about it now, after everything that’s happened and after coming clean about other things, might be like…a betrayal?”

When Boe didn’t answer, Alden asked, “Am I close?”

Boe licked melted yogurt off of his thumb. “Yeah. You covered it with that,” he said in a tone of forced casualness.

“ ‘kay. Then don’t worry about it. Do what you need to do to keep the System happy.”

“I’ll bother it until it gives me a way to tell you.”

Alden squinted at him. “Isn’t that the opposite of what I just said?”

“Not exactly. Hey, don’t roll your eyes at me! I’m trying to think of ways to get a magical entity to let me open myself up to someone even more. Do you know how not me that is? Ever since I jumped out of catspace this afternoon, the world’s been nuts. I’m in the wrong hemisphere. You’re alive. I spent the afternoon surrounded by teenagers who are even more emotionally haywire than normal teenagers, and that’s saying something.”

“You could feel the neighbors?”

“That’s what you focus on?”

“That and ‘catspace.’”

Boe rolled his own eyes. “My range is good. Even when I’m not actively trying. I can pick up about two apartments’ worth of people in every direction. Fortunately most of them were gone for the day until just a couple of hours ago, so I didn’t have to endure the madness for long.”

“That bad?”

“…there’s a lot of longing going on around here.”

“Longing?”

“I think it’s a mix of lust and homesickness. It’s an uncomfortable combo. And there’s so much of both.”

Alden held laughter back with an iron grip.

“You think it’s funny?” Boe said dryly.

“Don’t read me.”

“I’m reading your face.”

“Don’t read my face.” Alden smiled. “Anyway, about the secret. Don’t worry so much. If you can’t say something because of magic bullshit, you can’t say it. For example—”

“Just whip off your shirt in the middle of a conversation why don’t yo—holy shit! You’re tatted now?!”

Alden dropped the shirt on top of the pinball machine.

“It’s so depressing that everyone is going to notice that before anything else. I don’t think I’ve turned vain exactly, but do you know what I had to go through to get my body fat redistributed by a god-tier healer? Do you know how much gym time I’m getting?”

“Did it hurt?” Boe was leaning in to examine the contract tattoo.

Alden lifted his arm to show off the triangle of absolute secrecy better. “No. It’s basically painted on. The Artonans like to get high as kites when they do it, too. I skipped that part.”

“I can’t picture Instructor Pa-weeq high. She’s so straitlaced.”

“She could be a completely different person outside of class. She probably gets drunk at parties on the weekends and deliberately throws food on the floor.”

“What’s the contract for?” Boe asked.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Oh. I see. That’s the point you’re making about magic bullshit.” He tilted his head. “After catching up on all your messages, I’ve got the gist of what happened to you on Moon Thegund. But…did you have to agree to go to that place? Did someone make you do a side quest?”

“No. I chose to do it,” said Alden.

“What was the assignment?”

“Berry picking.”

“Berry picking?”

“It’s very Rabbit, right? Marleck berries grow there. Or they used to. I assume they’re just as dead or mutated as all the other plants now.”

There was a pause before Boe spoke again.

“Did you know it was dangerous?”

“The danger might have been understated, but I knew it wasn’t the safest thing to do.”

His lips thinned to a line. “Was it worth it?”

“The berries?”

“I know we’re not talking about berries!” he snapped. “We’re talking about you volunteering to throw yourself at the first random heroic-sounding thing you found! Without caring about whether you were ready for it. Without caring what might happen to you! Or what that would do to the people who were waiting for you to come back home. Like a jackass!”

“I knew you’d be mad.” The edge of the pinball machine was cold against Alden’s back. “It was worth it.”

“Because of the little girl? The one you’d do it again for?”

He nodded.

Boe looked away from him. After several seconds, he said quietly, “I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it to you in the end. I’m saying in the beginning, when you first made the choice to do it—to go on a mission to what was clearly a dangerous place, probably without even knowing for sure if you were helping good people or alien serial killers—why didn’t you place a little more value on your own life?”

“I did get paid well.”

Boe’s head jerked around. “If I thought you’d actually done it for money, I would be so furious with you, Alden.”

“The pay was nice. You’re right, though. It was mostly me ‘throwing myself at the first random heroic-sounding thing I found.’”

He was surprised at the sarcasm in his own voice. He hadn’t meant for it to be there.

Boe frowned. It was more of a concerned frown, though. He was opening his mouth—probably to apologize since he seemed to be in an unusually apologetic mood today—when Alden said, “It’s kind of a relief that you think I was a jackass. For doing that.”

“I’m using ‘jackass’ extremely liberally, so don’t think I—”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t do it again,” Alden said. “For strangers. I already told you, right? In the message. That the idea of doing something like that scares me now. That it sounds horrifying…I’m going to Celena North to get stronger. So that things can’t hurt me anymore. Perfect attitude for a future superhero, right?”

He tried to smile to lighten things up. But it felt wrong.

Boe stared at him for a long time. “You’re…are you worried that feeling that way makes you selfish?”

“I miss who I was.”

Maybe that was at the very heart of it. Maybe it was the thing he couldn’t get over. He had been coming to recognize it over the past weeks, but there was nobody to tell. No reason to ever let the words out.

Now, in the wake of the afternoon he’d just had, he found he couldn’t hold them back.

“I wasn’t done, Boe,” he said. “That day when I got summoned from the consulate, I wasn’t ready to stop being the person who shook his head every time you talked Jeremy into a stupid bet. I wasn’t finished riding the L. I was excited to be chosen, and I thought I knew what I wanted, but there wasn’t time for me to calm down and process any of it. I didn’t get to say goodbye to anything. Not Aunt Connie. Not you. Not myself.”

His eyes burned.

Of fucking course I’m going to do this now. I’m still messed up. I should have stayed at the spa.

His voice was thick, but his mouth kept moving.

“I didn’t know I was about to lose it all. My home, the people who loved me, the dreams I had about who I was going to become—that was the last time I ever got to have those things all together and so simply. And so that was the last time I was ever going to be that Alden…I wasn’t done. But I can’t have it back, can I?”

Snot was building up in his nose.

Why did even the pre-tears stage of crying have to involve so much moisture?

“Alden…”

“I’m fine. I am. But I wanted to come back home to me. Only it turns out that I’m not here anymore. And sometimes it’s okay with me that it’s all changed. It really is. Even…even though I probably look wretched right now, I’m so happy just to be alive. There are some great things in my life that I didn’t have before.

“Kibby—I’m going to make you watch all of her videos. Jeremy did it so you have to. And I can do magic now. Not Avowed magic. Real wizard magic. I can learn all kinds of spells. Nobody knows, and it’ll be a huge mess if they do, so don’t tell. But it’s cool. I think maybe I love it.”

He missed the startled expression on Boe’s face while he was wiping his eyes.

“But even with all the amazing new things, I can’t believe it’s over. My old life being gone doesn’t make sense to me. I promise I knew better. I’m not stupid. But I think I still wanted everything to be the same here when I got home. Just for a little while. Just so I could let it go instead of having it torn away.”

Orange fabric was thrust toward his face, and he blinked down at the shirt he’d just taken off.

He took it from Boe and scrubbed at his eyes with it. “Thanks,” he said into the fabric. “Sorry.”

“You shouldn’t be,” Boe said quietly.

“Am I fucking with your empathy?”

“No, I can’t feel anything through the shield.” Then, he added in a very awkward voice, “Uh…do you…if you want me to drop the barrier, I could?”

Alden let out a choked laugh and lowered the shirt to look at him. “God. No. Why would you do that?”

Boe shrugged and pushed up his glasses. “I’ve never been openly an empath before. Maybe offering when you’re upset is like…the polite thing for me to do?”

“You don’t want in on my feelings right now. Trust me.”

“We could cry together in a manly fashion. It would be a bonding experience.”

“That’s one hell of a bond.”

“Hey, I told you I was taking my best friend position back from Jeremy.”

Alden blew his nose.

“I know you feel like crap right now,” Boe said. “On multiple levels. But Alden…I don’t think you have to worry so much about having lost yourself. You can’t get everything back, but at the risk of sounding even creepier than I actually am—”

“You’re not creepy.”

“—I know you very well. When you came into the apartment earlier, and you were talking to the cat, I was feeling everything you were feeling and…do you remember what the first thing out of my mouth was?”

Alden thought back. “No. I’m pretty sure it was lost in my shock at the fact that it was coming out of your mouth. Right here. Where you’re not supposed to be.”

“It was, ‘You’re still the same as always, aren’t you?’” said Boe. “I remember because it wasn’t something I was just saying. It’s something I felt during that whole conversation earlier. I know how you think about things. And I know how you feel about them, which is even purer in a way…though that might just be me trying to convince myself I’m superior to actual Sways. You’re not as different as you’re afraid of being. You don’t feel like a stranger to me.”

“No?”

“You feel like you, Alden. You’re just a little older. We both are. And we’ve had a really horrible year.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

One Word

Alden slept like a baby.

Going to bed physically tired and emotionally drained on the night you’d found out your missing friend was okay turned out to be the perfect recipe for rest. When his alarm woke him early in the morning, he turned it off and hugged his pillow tighter.

Bed is amazing. I’m going to sleep until noon.

He was on his way to doing it, too, when someone turned on all his lights and yanked his blankets off with a businesslike brusqueness that was almost as cold as the air in his room.

“No,” Alden moaned, bringing his knees up to his chest. “Why??”

“Because you have school. You ran out on your first day. You can’t skip your second. Your new teachers will think you’re a flake,” said Boe, reaching over to yank the pillow away, too.

Alden clung to it. “It’s not real school. The first week was optional. I haven’t even moved into the dorms!”

“But you showed your face, and they all know you don’t have anything better to do now. So you’ll make yourself look bad. Go to school. Make nice with the other Avowed.”

Alden tightened his grip on the pillow. “That was the best sleep I’ve gotten since February,” he hissed.

“You were that relieved to see me, huh?”

“No! How can an empath be such a heartless monster?”

Boe rolled his eyes. “Did you really want to sleep all day?”

“I guess not. But I didn’t plan to go to school either. I planned to stay here with you.”

“Thanks,” said Boe. “But I stayed up all night maintaining my barrier and sorting out my own return to life, so I’m going to sleep all day. And you can go to school. And then we can hang out all afternoon.”

He ripped the pillow from Alden’s grip.

Alden groaned.

“You can go late and skip the science lecture you hated,” Boe said placatingly, tossing the pillow at the foot of the bed. “It was a giant class, right? Nobody will miss you there. ”

That wasn’t a bad idea, and…Alden checked a blinking message. “Natalie wants to come over to deliver my last few meals.”

“That’s fine. I’ll just hide out in here. Why are they your last meals?”

“She’s not going to have time to prep for me as often with her classes. Maybe every now and then she said.”

Boe raised both eyebrows at him. “I’m not reading you right now, but you sound mournful.”

“You tasted her food.”

“I did.”

“How am I going to survive without her?”

“Judging by the number of messages you left me describing various condiments, not too well. Can I borrow more of your clothes?”

Alden waved at the closet then rolled out of bed.

[Come over. I’m running a little late this morning, so if you’re heading up to Apex early again I won’t be able to go with you.]

“I texted her,” he reported. “Stay out of sight.”

A couple of minutes later, he received a notification that Natalie was at the door, and he went to open it.

“Hey!” She glided past him into the kitchen. She was wearing a pleated skirt and a pastel blouse with a pattern of rabbits and radishes on it. Her arms were full of containers, and the smell of vanilla and cinnamon followed her into the apartment. “Don’t be upset with me. I know you’re going easy on the sweets. But I finally got the cinnamon rolls right, and they’re fresh out of the oven, so I just had to bring them over!”

He shut the door and breathed deeply. “Natalie, I miss you already.”

“We’re going to the same high school.”

“I’ll starve without you.”

Natalie giggled as she set everything on the counter. She opened the fridge. “The campus has so many options! You’ll find something. How was your first day? Are the teachers nice? What about the other students?”

They chatted briefly, and the cinnamon rolls made an appearance. She’d even managed to make something that tasted so much like real cream cheese frosting that Alden was going to need to find a way to send one of these things to Gorgon.

“I know you said you were running late, so don’t mind me,” Natalie chirped. “I’m just going to have my coffee in your living room with Victor. There’s my precious boy! Who’s a good kitty?”

Victor was rubbing his head against Natalie’s ankles.

Alden swallowed an enormous mouthful of sticky, sweet roll. “Um…yeah. That’s all right.”

He glanced past her at the door to his room. It was opened a crack. He definitely hadn’t left it that way.

“I’m going to go change out of my pajamas. Be right back.”

The second he entered his room, he was met with Boe sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed, polishing his glasses on the hem of his shirt. He put them on his face, and gave Alden a double thumbs up.

“What were you doing poking your head out?” Alden whispered. “What if she’d seen you?”

Boe grinned. [There are certain things a person has to experience for himself.]

Right. We can text.

[What’s that supposed to mean?]

[You can’t just casually mention in one message that your personal chef put all her freely selectable S-rank points in Appeal and then never describe what she looks like at all. What kind of a friend does that?]

[You risked prison to see how pretty she was???]

[Yeah. And it was very worth it.]

“No it’s not,” Alden mouthed at him.

[She’s a masterpiece. The System has outdone itself. And I barely caught a glimpse of her face. Are her eyes gold, or am I imagining it?]

Alden had spent some time pondering the eye color since it was Natalie’s most impossible-looking feature. [I think they’re as gold as they can be without falling over the edge of fascinating into the uncanny valley.]

[She must have been stunning to start with. I don’t think even S-rank Rabbits get enough free points on their first affixation to do that well. Did she choose some trait that boosts her appearance on top of it?]

[I’m not going to ask her that. Just sit here quietly. I’ve been letting her and the other girls from her apartment hang out when they want. I couldn’t think of how to tell her no without it being unusual. She probably won’t be long. I’ll throw up the Do Not Disturb as soon as she’s gone so they can’t get in for the rest of the day.]

[It’s fine if she stays. I’m jealous of Victor. Listen to all the nice things she’s saying to him. Even her voice is worth it.]

Alden rolled his eyes.

********

“Okay, three things,” Boe said a short while later. He was in the fridge, opening all the containers Natalie had brought and sniffing them.

Alden was boxing up a cinnamon bun and trying to figure out the best way to get it to the Chicago consulate.

“Number one— Alden, you’re friends with a supermodel! Strong emphasis on the super. And she cooks. And she’s nice. I did not see your life going this way.”

“I’m going to have some cereal delivered to the apartment so that you don’t eat all of my magic meals.”

“Cereal?”

“You like cereal.”

Boe inhaled deeply from a container full of soup. “I do. But you’re really asking a lot of highly processed breakfast food if you think it’s going to beat this.”

“Cereal and whatever else you want.”

“Sandwich-making supplies will be fine. Number two—and I’m not joking around with this one—you know you’ll be in huge trouble if anyone finds out you’re harboring an unregistered, don’t you? At the very least, you would get expelled from your new school.”

Alden turned to him. “Don’t get caught.”

“I don’t plan to. If anyone who isn’t you comes through the door, I’m catspacing myself. But you need to seriously consider how risky this is. Do you want me to go ahead and leave?”

“No. Also, how would you leave?”

“Again. Catspace. I disappear; you send Victor to Jeremy. My time sense isn’t good there, but if I try to do it fast I’m sure I’ll be in and out within a week or so.”

“Or six years later. Or never. That skill sounds dangerous, Boe.”

“I think the riskiest thing about it is the chance that I end up appearing without my clothes in front of Jeremy’s sister. Sarah would beat me to death with a wind instrument before she stopped to realize who I was.”

“It might not be Sarah. It might be his new girlfriend. She carries a tennis racket.”

“Oh we need to talk about him and Kimberly Martinez at some point. He’s dating an older woman. And he didn’t even have to work for it! She asked him out at lunchtime in front of a hundred people. When he was wearing the wiener dog shirt.”

“The dachsund-frolicking-with-a-ketchup-bottle shirt?”

Boe nodded. “That’s the one.”

“His taste in clothes…” Alden trailed off.

Then he looked over at Boe’s taxi driver, who was lying in the spot on the sofa Natalie had just vacated. “I don’t want to jinx Victor, but has it occurred to you that he’s a pretty old cat?”

“You’re age shaming him as well as fat shaming him now?”

“I’m being serious like you asked,” Alden said. “You be serious, too. What happens to you if the creature you’ve attached yourself to dies? Do you know?”

Boe was quiet.

“Oh my g…you don’t know, do you?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I like to think there would be some kind of emergency eject, but it’s not something I can test.”

“And you’re mad at me for being reckless?”

“Mine was a last resort,” said Boe. “To keep me from going insane. Or doing something I would regret until the end of time. Yours was some kind of ‘Alden feels like he has to throw himself at danger because’—no. It’s over. Never mind. About the cat…you have to admit that if I’m just planning to be gone for a week or two, the likelihood of the cat dying right then isn’t that high.”

Alden tossed the cat a diet treat from a jar on the counter. “You’re awesome, Victor. I hope you have nine lives and live to be twenty in every one of them. But, Boe, if you have to use your escape plan, shouldn’t you attach yourself to something sturdier? One of those tortoises that wander around gardens eating lettuce for two hundred years. Or a young human being.”

“You volunteering?” Boe asked in a dry voice.

Alden stared at him. “Yes. Of course. If you ever need to.”

Boe blinked. “Oh…thank you? I’ve never tried the skill on a person though. Like I said, I haven’t had many opportunities to practice it. And since I don’t know exactly when I’m coming back, a house pet is actually better than a human in some ways. If I used you as my attachment point, you’d have to confine yourself to a private location until I reappeared. Victor’s usually chilling out in a semi-private location anyway, so he doesn’t have to inconvenience himself for me.”

Victor’s a cat, thought Alden. What if he’s chilling out in a garbage can? Or on top of a roof? Or under a parked car?

Alden knew his concern must show on his face, but Boe ignored it.

“Number three,” he said. “You should pretend to call me from a public location today. And we should talk. Just like we would if you’d heard from me for the first time yesterday, but we hadn’t seen each other.”

“You want a fake phone call?”

“Anesidora is so incredibly not private, Alden. The Informant—”

“Oh, I met his son! He tried to sell me experimental Wright equipment. He knew all kinds of things about me. Not deeply secret stuff, but it was still unsettling.”

“The Informant is the biggest example. But at least the guy has a reputation for never openly violating the rules about private spaces. But you’ve got to take into account everyone else who can get intel on you. Superpowers make it really easy to spy on people. Sways, audials, people with legal and illegal listening gear. And there are probably a hundred spell impressions that will let people pry without anyone ever knowing.”

“I realize that. I can’t decide if it’s something I have to be constantly worried about or not.”

“You have to be constantly worried about it with regard to certain subjects,” Boe said seriously. “For example, me. Unlike the rest of the world, Anesidora is fairly forgiving about unregistered Avowed. They’ll treat us like we’re one hundred percent legit as long as we willingly show up before we’re twenty. And even if you’re older or you get caught and dragged here against your will, if you haven’t ever committed a crime other than refusing to register, they just give you a probationary period for a couple of years. During it you have to agree to have all of your talent uses logged by the System. Then you’re a citizen just like everyone else and free to move on with your life.”

“Having every power use logged and shared sounds terrible,” said Alden.

“Not compared to prison. And depending on how the legal system is feeling, that’s where I might end up instead of in the Welcome Aboard program if I get caught here in this particular situation. Technically I used my powers to break onto the island…which there can’t be a lot of examples of on the books. But I’m sure they’ll take a dim view of it since I’m Swayish.”

“I would tell them it wasn’t your fault.”

“And then they would point out that if it was an accident, I should have just gone to announce myself the second I arrived.”

Alden couldn’t disagree with that. “So. Fake phone call. Yes. Let’s do it.”

“Thank you. We’re actually lucky I popped up while you were still in intake. In Rabbity intake, too. We’re as far from Apex as we can get. Your neighbors don’t have spy powers. The rooms are all sound-proofed. We can be pretty sure they’re not bugged since you newcomers are well guarded, and nobody would risk it just to eavesdrop on random Avowed constantly moving in and out of the place. And the Sways are in an entirely different building here.”

“I have to leave at the end of the week.”

“I know.”

“You’re not going to suddenly decide to register between now and Saturday, are you?” Alden asked. He kept his voice casual.

Boe fiddled with one of the magnets that held the weekly activities schedule to the fridge. “You wish I would.”

“It’s hard not to wish it,” Alden answered. “But I don’t expect you to. I swear. A lot of people treat Sways like shit here. U-types tend to be admired, and some people are jealous of them, I think? Because of the rank-up potential and the one-of-a-kind powers. I’m just starting to get a handle on it all. But I know you wouldn’t enjoy being treated like shit or like an extra-special mystery. You should stay at home and be normal. It would make me happy for you if that was what you wanted and you got to have it.”

“I’d fucking love to be normal.”

Alden smiled.

“But I’m not,” said Boe. “And you’re not. I was agonizing over it a lot while you were at LeafSong. You weren’t supposed to get selected, you dick. It messed up all my future pretending-to-be-normal plans.”

“Sorry about that.”

“What are the chances? I used to think you were going to be chosen. When we were kids. Because you said you really wanted to be a superhero, and I thought…well, I was eleven. I had some specific, crazy ideas about how the System chose Avowed. But I grew out of it.”

“I promise your crazy ideas aren’t as crazy as my current theories,” Alden muttered.

“Really? I’d love to hear whatever you’ve come up with. But what I need to tell you now is…I don’t think I can.”

“Register?”

Boe shook his head.

Alden swallowed. He’d known Boe probably felt that way. If he’d wanted to live on Anesidora, he’d already be living here. But there had still been a flicker of hope inside him.

“Since you’re here now…maybe one day,” Boe said. “But I’ve got some things I have to take care of first. If I even can. And, honestly I need to think. I didn’t do a lot of thinking while you were away.”

“No?”

“Well, I did, but my thoughts were the kind of thoughts that made me sure I needed to magically evacuate from humanity, so…”

“Gotcha.” Alden hopped up to sit on the counter. “Those kinds of thoughts get erased when your reality changes, right?”

Boe put the magnet back on the fridge. “I hope so.”

“For example, I had thoughts about hiring other Avowed to carry me around in a palanquin when I got home. And they were going to force-feed me racks of ribs.”

“Why did you abandon that one? I’m in favor of it.”

“I suppose it could always return if I have a few too many bad days in a row.”

Boe’s smile faded. “Mine weren’t nearly that fun.”

“Mine weren’t really either. Do you know…well, you can’t know. But it almost didn’t happen. Me getting stuck on Moon Thegund. I had to go to the party—”

“It’s been so long since I thought of you at that party. You were so unhappy about it, but Jeremy and I were having a lot of fun picturing you there. Please tell me you’ve got pictures of your costume somewhere.”

“Not a single one,” said Alden. “But that party kept me from picking berries that night. And if it hadn’t, I would have been able to…”

Save Kibby and her sister. The next night, I would have saved her father and the scientist in the green coat. The only reason I didn’t teleport in time was because Kibby was scared of leaving. We delayed so her dad could make her feel better.

The delay would have come a night earlier if not for the party. It would have come on a night when nothing went wrong. On the day the System broke, I would have left a few minutes sooner.

Three more people would have lived. Kibby would have her family.

He wanted to say it all. But it was too much detail about his real assignment from Joe for the contract to abide. The words wouldn’t come out of his mouth.

He cleared his throat.

“I would have picked the berries faster,” he said. “If not for that party, I would have come back home when I was supposed to. I know nobody hurt me on purpose, but things happened that wouldn’t have happened if others had just been semi-okay people instead of flaming-dumpster people. And sometimes, when I was puking up food because I’d guessed wrong about it being safe for humans to eat or I was watching one of the lab lights flicker out for the last time and feeling like it was a metaphor for what was happening to me and Kibby…I wanted some punishment. For the dumpster people.”

“Just hearing about it makes me want to punish the dumpster people, and I wasn’t even there.”

“I don’t mean justice, Boe,” said Alden. “I mean punishment. If someone had sent me a space pigeon message while I was in one of those moods, and it said that Manon and the executives who owned the lab had gotten lost on Sreeeakk and were being hunted by the locals, I’m afraid I might have smiled.”

Boe shrugged. “Little dark. But it’s not like it isn’t understandable. What about now?”

“Now? I wouldn’t smile. But I wouldn’t want to go help them out either.”

That sounds horrible, doesn’t it? I can’t just not care about—

“To hell with the dumpster people.” Boe had just taken a mug from a cabinet. He raised it in salute. “May the grivecks enjoy their feast. And don’t you need to go to school now?”

“No. Let’s play video games all day.”

“How are you going to fake being normal and give me my fake phone call if you stay here instead of going to school?”

Alden groaned.

“Anyway, I’m not playing video games with a person who had his hands magically speeded up. Unless they’re puzzle games. Or games where we use foot controllers.”

“Buzzkill.” He checked the time. “But if I’m going, I really do need to leave…ten minutes ago. I’m going to have to run to make it to class.”

He slid off the counter and grabbed his bag. “I’ll leave you the laptop. I’ll take the tablet. It’s unintuitive if you haven’t used Artonan tech before.”

Boe was leaning toward the coffee machine, studying all the buttons. Just as Alden was about to head out, he said, “The hand speed—you did it for spell casting, right?”

Alden stopped and his eyes widened. “I completely forgot I blurted that out last night.”

“Oh, I definitely didn’t forget.” Boe pulled on a lever, and the coffee machine started grinding beans. “You’re a wizard now?”

“I mostly just know kindergarten-level spells.”

“But you do know spells. As in multiple ones. That the System didn’t give you.”

“Yes.”

Boe turned to smile at him. “Alden, you’re a wizard?”

Alden adjusted his bag. “Humans can’t cast just like Artonans. Their spells are designed for them. I’m anatomically incapable of lots of them. But for hand casting at least…one day, I’m going to be a wizard.”

It felt simultaneously embarrassing and awesome to say it.

“Oh my god,” said Boe, grinning more now. “That’s so freaking cool.”

“It is.”

“I don’t know why you’re turning red. It’s literally so cool I can’t even think of a way to make fun of you that doesn’t just make you sound more awesome. You mage geek. You didn’t get to be an Adjuster like you wanted, and the Rabbit spells made you mad, and so you just…became a wizard instead?”

“It wasn’t that intentional.”

“Who cares?! I didn’t know humans could even do that!” Boe stared at him. “Do the Artonans know humans can do that?”

“They’re aware it’s a possibility, but I think it’s such a distant one that they don’t take it seriously. Humans aren’t naturally suited to it. A lot of different complicated things had to come together for me to get there. And the Artonans definitely don’t know that I’ve actually managed it. I’m keeping it a secret from them, too. ”

“This is terrible,” said Boe, shaking his head. “You just keep sounding more ballsy and badass with every word that comes out of your mouth. I’m going to have to diss your rank more until I feel better. Shitty B-rank.”

“Shitty B-rank wizard,” Alden countered.

Boe winced. “Oh great.”

Alden nodded.

One word really could hold a lot of power.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

Incautious Caring

Boe Lupescu sat on the floor in a bedroom on Anesidora, staring out the window toward the ocean.

Through his interface there was a live feed of his apartment in Chicago, provided by the hidden nanny cams he’d installed. The images alternated between living room and kitchen. His parents weren’t there right now.

It was a good sign at this time of day. They didn’t have friends or hobbies, so they could only be at their latest jobs. Neither of them had gotten fired or just stopped going in.

It’s either a miracle or…

In the kitchen, dirty dishes filled the sink and the breakfast table, and a jug of milk had been left out to spoil on the stove. But it was only a few days worth of dishes. Only one milk jug.

The woman Boe had paid in cash to keep the place above the biohazard level while he was away was supposed to come once a week. She was obviously doing it, or it would be worse.

The smoke alarm was lying on the counter. It must have started beeping and bothered them.

I should have checked the batteries.

He swiped the scene away and looked out at the Pacific. It was a cloudless day, and the small dark waves stretched on and on. A helicopter was visible in the distance.

I’m not supposed to be here.

There were things he did not deserve that he allowed himself to have anyway. Anesidora wasn’t one of them.

I can’t be here. If I’m not a ticking bomb anymore, I have to go back home.

He selfishly wished that someone would come and arrest him. If it happened in the right way, if he wasn’t accused of anything too serious, it would be such a relief. To have what he wanted anyway forced on him, through no fault of his own. He would feel guilty, but he’d be able to justify it to himself eventually.

He’d definitely be outlawed from returning home. And with summonses being extremely unlikely, he would just live here. He would start over. Alden worried about people hating Boe for his powers, but he didn’t care so much about that himself. It would be unenjoyable, but he would endure it for a while.

Until he’d made enough money to buy a shitty boat. And then he’d live on his shitty boat, just far enough offshore that he only had himself to deal with.

He’d attend college online. He’d get way too many degrees, enjoy the amenities on the island whenever he wanted, help Alden figure out…

I think he has a lot more to figure out than he used to.

“Hey. What did you do to my friend?” he whispered to the System.

The System didn't answer because the answer didn’t benefit it. Or it was forbidden.

That storm of emotion yesterday—not the second one that Boe had only witnessed instead of experiencing himself. The first one. The strange, sudden one right after they’d been reunited. So strong it broke through Peace of Mind and the relief and happiness Alden had been feeling. It wasn’t panic. Panic was shallower.

Dread.

What was that?

More importantly why was it? Boe had thought back over the whole conversation so many times in the night. The dread had come when he mentioned the fact that the System offered U-types additional assistance with their affixation. That didn’t make sense.

I sparked a barely related memory from the moon situation maybe?

Feelings weren’t as easy to follow as he imagined thoughts must be. Someone saw a cute puppy and they felt joy. Someone else saw the same puppy, and they grieved. Maybe for one they’d lost. Or for a dozen other reasons that Boe preferred not to care about.

He strictly limited the number of people he cared about.

Incautious caring was dangerous.

[I made it to class on time. The second and third years are really passionate about this domestic violence/terrorist problem. The girl next to me is snapping ink pens in half every time someone argues against rescuing the kids. I hope she brought plenty of spares.]

Boe stared at the words in a state close to wonder. Last night, he’d set messages from Alden to come straight through, no notification required. His friend could text him. Because he wasn’t dead.

Just this once, the universe had been uncharacteristically generous.

[The pen snapper is some kind of Brute. Do you think you could take her in a fight??]

He’s lonely.

Boe doubted Alden had even realized it himself yet. He was trying to deal by keeping himself busy. He was so hung up on what he’d lost, and so worryingly agonized about who he was supposed to be now in the aftermath of that loss…lonely was probably way down on his list of concerns.

But it was still there. He hadn’t had time to form any real connections in this place. Casual acquaintances couldn’t replace friends and family overnight, no matter how hard Anesidora tried to make it happen.

[I assume you mean a physical fight,] Boe texted back. [Probably not. Punching a hole in Jeremy’s wall was my maximum effort.]

[Disappointing.]

[I’m more durable than I am strong. System’s choice. Not mine.]

A brief pause.

[What kind of stats will you choose when you level? You’ll probably level pretty fast if you have to keep that shield up all the time just to be comfortable, right?]

Boe closed his eyes.

“Give me a way to tell him the whole story without screwing myself over,” he muttered. “Or I’m just going to do it anyway and make me and you both unhappy.”

The System didn’t answer.

It hadn’t answered the request no matter how many different ways Boe had asked last night. He was sure there was logic to its behavior, but it was a logic that was beyond human understanding. Most of the time he didn’t mind. Other times, he wanted to smash its non-existent face with a bat.

[Yeah. I do use that skill constantly when it’s up,] he texted. [That’s one thing. And the fact that it’s a dynamic skill is another. Working on figuring it out will level me faster.]

[Dynamic how?]

[Developable. Flexible functions. I’ve been trying to learn how to filter out specific emotions through it instead of using it as a universal block. It’s slow going, but I’m making progress.]

[Cool! :)]

Boe stared at the smiley.

Cool! Smiley face. Good job developing your horror show of a power, Boe. Cool! Smiley face. I’m okay with it. I’m still your friend. I’m not scared of you.

He meant it, too.

And because he meant it, Boe had to live up to it.

He’d really wanted to feel Alden’s emotions a few times last night. To check on him. To make sure he was real and okay. Being an adult about it instead of a needy, sneaky brat was hard.

Even now his inner weasel was coming up with ways for it to be all right.

For example, if Boe just happened to overuse the barrier now so that he’d be too magically fatigued to help himself when Alden made it back later…

He scowled at his own thoughts and dropped the skill. He let Alden’s neighbors buffet him. Some people would probably consider this immoral, too, but Boe personally didn’t.

If it was bad, it ought to be more fun.

Instead, it was often like having one total stranger sit on your chest whispering terrors in your ear, while another handed you a teddybear and a third shoved twenty different flavors of ice cream down your throat simultaneously even though you were too full to eat them. And while all of that went on you were also all afraid of something environmental, like an earthquake. Or a swarm of wasps.

He was familiar with it, but he didn’t think it was possible to be used to it.

Right now, someone had just had their feelings hurt. Someone was guilty. Someone was excited.

In general, everyone was more relaxed than they had been last night. People tended to have a better handle on themselves in the mornings. So it was a good time for him to have the barrier down.

He didn’t know who these other teenagers were. Experience told him that he couldn’t even guess their genders with much more than fifty percent accuracy. He was just with them all, though he didn’t want to be.

[Are you going to sleep now? Should I stop texting you?] Alden asked.

[No. I’ll sleep when a few more people have cleared out of the building. What’s up?]

[Literally a person. An Adjuster just levitated someone to make a point…I’m still not sure what the point is, but people are floating now and Instructor Marion seems to think that’s more acceptable than personal insults, so I guess we’re going with it.]

Boe smiled. [Send me a picture.]

********

In Conversation IV, they were supposed to be talking about the show with Artonan farmers who’d fought over the doomed mole cricket. This exercise was majorly impeded by the fact that almost nobody in the class had the vocabulary they needed to talk about farms or poaching. And a few people hadn’t bothered to watch the video.

The students had complained, but Instructor Rao wouldn’t hear a word against the assignment. So Alden’s ears were being assaulted by sentences that had him on the edge of both laughter and despair.

“The worker man number one and the worker man number two love animals a lot.”

“I love animals a lot like the worker man.”

“The pretty woman who killed the Trenxop beetle was a murderer.”

“It’s a story about freedom.”

“It’s a story about food.”

“The kill-kill woman was probably starving.”

“It’s a sad story.”

“It’s very sad.”

“It’s funny,” Lute Velra said in Artonan. He was sitting on his learning cushion across from Alden, wearing a graphic print spiderweb sweatshirt so long it reached his knees. His eyepatch was still present, but there was no fake blood oozing from it today. “I don’t know why it’s funny, but I’m sure the Artonans think it’s funny.”

“It’s a comedy,” Alden confirmed. “I think it might be building to a romance between the farmers and the poacher, too, but I’ll have to watch more episodes to be sure.”

Given the show’s tone, it probably wasn’t going to be a serious romance. Artonans had so many permutations of relationship, and Alden was sure he hadn’t even heard of some of them yet. The Primary and Alis-art’h’s massive shared household was a bit of a mystery to him still, and since Stuart hadn’t brought it up, he hadn’t wanted to ask.

But the farmer/farmer/poacher combo was likely. By modern Artonan standards, three was the least intimidating option. They could devote just one half of their divided consciousness to each partner, instead of their full attention, so it was like…partial intimacy and lower pressure?

“Talk slower,” Lute reminded him.

“Sorry.” He repeated the words more slowly.

“You not should being in this class,” said Lute.

“‘Should not be,’” Alden corrected. “There’s a level six course offered this term, but they wouldn’t put me in it. I asked.”

“Probably the instructor wouldn’t say yes. Some of the Artonan culture and language instructors have those works because they…” He switched to English again. “How do you say ‘get off on fantasizing that the ritualized classroom garbage actually makes them important?’”

“That isn’t something I would say. Unless I was trying to offend nine out of ten people on the Triplanets.”

“You’re calm.” And they were back to Artonan now. Lute’s tone was disappointed. “You would being more fun if not so calm.”

Alden untangled that. “I think you mean ‘boring’ not calm.”

“You’re boring,” Lute agreed. “I will show you the eye grandmother ate if you teach me bad words in Artonan!”

Alden tried not to picture Aulia Velra eating an eyeball. “That’s not necessary. And I don’t actually know a lot of adult curse words.”

“Boring.” Lute picked at the edge of the learning cushion with his index finger. “How do I say ‘I want to feed myself?’”

“Feed yourself? You mean eating?” Alden pointed at his mouth. “Or are you thinking of another word?”

“I want to feed myself,” Lute said in English. “How do I say that in Artonan?”

Maybe he was on-topic now and thinking about the poacher from the video?

“You said it correctly,” Alden said in Artonan. “‘I want to feed myself’ is good.”

Lute shook his head. “No. Like…” he leaned forward. He was still speaking English. “If I really needed the aliens to listen to me. Is there a special way or a…a formal way of telling someone that you really want to feed yourself?”

If this was a joke, then it was one too obscure for Alden to grasp. And the Velra boy looked serious.

Okay then.

“You can raise the pitch of your voice when you say it.” Alden switched languages, too, since he wasn’t sure he had all the words for this explanation in Artonan anyway. “For emphasis. If you make a request once and someone ignores you and you go higher the second time, it comes across as insistent, but in a politer way than shouting?”

“How high?” Lute demanded.

“Not very. They’re pretty sensitive to tone. Anything that’s recognizably above normal for you should be fine. I guess you might have to do it more than once if it’s someone who assumes it was an accident?”

“I want to feed myself,” Lute said in Artonan. Then, slightly higher, “I want to feed myself.”

Alden was so confused.

“That should do it?” he said. “Unless they’ve got bad manners. And if that’s something you have to insist on in the first place they might. Why is this something you need to know?”

Lute ignored the question and leaned back on his cushion again. “You can see my terrible eye,” he said. “Reward! Look. See.”

He lifted the patch.

For half a second, Alden thought the other boy really had been messing with him this whole time. He had some barely visible scarring below his bottom eyelid, and the eye itself looked almost exactly like its gray neighbor.

Oh, it’s not quite the same though.

“The prosthetic looks really good. Why do you keep it covered?”

“It does look great,” Lute agreed, re-positioning the patch. “The ocularist did an amazing job. But people still stare at it like it’s a hypnotist’s pocket watch. Especially here where plenty of Avowed are walking around with enhanced visual acuity. Even if I eventually get an electronic one that tracks with my real eye better, it’s not going to be perfect. And since I plan to have the System upgrade my own vision when I get the chance, it’ll be even more obnoxious to constantly notice them all noticing. It’s less annoying to me if they stare at a big obvious eye patch than at the thing that’s supposed to be subtle.”

Alden wanted to ask what had really happened and if some kind of magical prosthetic that could actually allow Lute to see wasn’t a possibility. He refrained.

They spent the rest of the period with Lute struggling through a summary of the video.

He seems to be trying hard. His pronunciation is so perfect. And it should be, considering his class. But if he cares about learning Artonan…why didn’t he do it before now?

Back home you had to search out teachers. Anesidora was different. Artonan wasn’t the most popular second language choice, but lessons in it were ubiquitous.

As he left class, Alden texted Boe.

[Lute Velra is really missing an eye,] he reported while he took one of his sneakers from its cubby in the hallway and balanced on one foot to put it back on. [Also, he’s got strange concerns about Artonans not letting him feed himself. If that’s something from an obscure Triplanets subculture, I have no clue about it, and I’m glad I don’t.]

“Hey, by the way…”

Alden looked down to see Lute kneeling by a bottom cubby. The blond boy was sniffing a black loafer.

“Did Lexi Roberts tell you he was inviting the school pariah to be your roommate, or did he not explain?”

Alden froze with one foot still lifted and stared at him. “He said it would be me, Haoyu, and some guy from…you’re the guy from Arts?”

Alden’s housing form was still listed as pending. He’d assumed it was a normal delay, but maybe they were waiting on the fourth roommate to be assigned?

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Lute finally put his shoe on and started sniffing the other one. “That guy isn’t much of a communicator. I actually thought we weren’t friends anymore. Because we haven’t spoken in around a year. But apparently we still are…?”

No, thought Alden. No way. I don’t want to live with a Velra even if he is number two on my Velra ranking list. The list is a list of people to be cautious around. Everyone on the list is a non-roommate.

“So, do you mind? I’ve been wanting to move back on campus, but I didn’t want a repeat of the whole ‘Oh god not him,’ thing I got last time I tried.”

“I am…texting you,” said Alden. “Hold on.”

“Why?”

Because Boe’s paranoia was rubbing off.

[I have no problem with being your roommate except for the fact that I’m trying to avoid your grandmother.]

Lute blinked up at him. “You and everyone else with common sense. It’s not like I’m going to invite her to sleep over.”

[I understand. But won’t she think us being roommates means she’s right about…]

Alden didn’t know how to put it, but Lute just kept waiting, with a neutral expression, for him to spit it out.

[She thinks the Gloss bringing Chainer to Hazel through me means I’m important somehow. To your family. According to Keiko and Aimi. I want her to forget about that.]

Lute’s lips stretched into a wicked smile. “Aww…” he said. “You’re so innocent. I feel bad for you.”

He set his loafer down and started air typing with one hand.

[Aulia will never forget. You gave her most favoritest pet project Chainer. You got summoned to LeafSong, died, then rose from the grave months later. Your goose isn’t just cooked, it’s charcoal.]

[You just know off the top of your head where I was summoned?] Alden wished texting offered more in terms of tone so that he could express how unhappy that made him.

[She mentioned it in passing during a meeting when she was telling certain family members her plans for popping the Gloss debt. I’ve heard some of the old people say the name of the school on occasion, so it stuck out.]

“My point,” the Velra boy continued, “is that you’ve already jumped in the ocean. Or been dumped there. I’d apologize, but one of my new policies is never to say sorry for things I didn’t do. You can’t avoid getting wet at this point.”

[I want them to leave me alone.]

“Me too.” [Is Aulia actually bothering you right now? Or are you just worried about her doing it in the future?]

[She sends me emails offering to help me with things and inviting me to events.]

[You ignore them?]

[I politely reject them.]

Lute frowned down at the floor. [Guess you don’t need money or favors. That limits her options for befriending you. If she invites you to something that doesn’t sound completely disgusting, you should just go and get it over with.]

“No. Why?”

[You don’t have anything to offer that she actually wants at the moment, right?]

[I don’t think so?]

[Then she’ll be satisfied if you just make it obvious you’re not avoiding her. She can only actively torment so many people at once, and she’s already stabbing everyone she can with her pitchfork. Don’t run away, and she won’t feel the urge to chase you and put you in hell with her favorite pincushions.]

“What is wrong with your family?” Alden whispered.

“Ha! Don’t ask me. I’m just trying to survive them.” Lute sniffed the loafer one last time and stuck it on his foot. “But if that’s how you feel, I’ll tell Lexi not to bother. It would almost be a point of pride for me to earn a few more jabs of the fork for associating with you. I’m going for a family record, see? Guess there’s no reason to spread the misery around though.”

Alden finished tying his own shoe while he thought about it. He absolutely hated the idea that he was choosing his high school roommates based on nerves about an old politician he’d never met pestering him in the future.

I lived with tiny demons flying through the walls for months. Why the heck should Aulia Velra be a factor in my current living arrangements?

It was giving the specter of her more power over him than she actually had. Wasn’t it? It was also just wrong to avoid someone solely because of their relatives.

“You should room with us,” he said. “At least I’ve actually spoken to you. I haven’t even properly met Lexi and Haoyu. Unless you count Lexi almost cutting me in half with a whip as a normal getting-to-know-you activity.”

“Normal for certain kinds of Avowed maybe. How did you end up with them?”

“I don’t know anyone else either. They seemed like the least crazy options out of the remaining people in my incoming class.”

“I guess you wouldn’t know anyone since you came from the real world.” Lute stood and hefted his backpack onto his shoulders. “America. Chicago. They make some of the best harps on the planet there.”

Alden was surprised by the description. “They do?”

“Yes. Was it great living there?”

“I like it a lot.” Alden started down the hall toward the stairs.

Lute followed after him. “Have you ever been to Austria?”

“Uh…no. I wasn’t rich enough to travel around like that.”

“I got to go once. Before I affixed. To Vienna. I wanted to move there.”

They reached the door to the stairwell, and Alden held it open for a group of students.

<<Cheater,>> one of them muttered as he swept past Lute.

Lute stared straight at the wall like he hadn’t heard him.

Alden looked after the group. A couple were glancing back over their shoulders to stare at Lute in a way that was definitely unfriendly.

“Did you call yourself the school pariah?” Alden asked when the others were out of earshot.

“You did notice that the whole conversation class sits eight feet away from me like I have some rare incurable disease, didn’t you?”

“Is it just your family…?”

Lute’s gray eye met his. “Under normal circumstances, I don’t think most people our age would care. Tons of students have important relatives around here. But the Gloss was major, memorable magic that Aulia had only used twice before now as far as anyone knows. And I’m considered an accomplice.”

Was he an accomplice? From what Alden knew, Aulia had somehow applied the high-powered chain to and maybe through all of the family members to make it stronger or more effective. Had they had to consent to that or was it just something she could do?

“You haven’t heard any gossip about it yet?” Lute asked.

“Just newspaper headlines. Not school gossip. It’s only my second day on campus.”

“Well I’m in high school, so it’s the high school gossip I get to enjoy. Not the political stuff. And the high school gossip is that every good thing that has ever happened to me was caused by me using my evil Chainer powers, and every bad thing that happens to me from here on out is proof that I’ve been using my evil Chainer powers even more.”

That would really suck. For every accomplishment to be attributed to luck. And every misfortune to be something people thought you deserved.

“I don’t even know any powerful luck chains,” Lute said. He pointed at his eye. “And if I did, they’re way too expensive.”

“Your class is extremely odd,” Alden said. “Sorry people blame you for your family’s decisions.”

“You have no idea… truly, the family advertising about how the class works is beyond misleading.” Lute headed into the stairwell. “And the hatred isn’t completely unfair, I guess. Ultimately, I did agree to be part of the Velra cabal. But I didn’t realize I was signing up to have a once-in-a-generation chain tied around my neck right off the bat.”

He headed down the steps, his fingers trailing along the handrail.

“Maybe it’s getting better.” His voice echoed off the block walls. “I’ve got roommates now, apparently. And it’s been an entire month since somebody pissed in my shoes.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

Diving

Alden stood on the packed train, staring at the name of the approaching station as it scrolled across the door across from him.

O Cruzamento.

The station Karl had gotten off the train at.

It was his second time thinking about it today. In Engaging with the Unexpected, a third year girl had started talking about evil triumphing when good people looked away from it.

Isn’t that what I’m doing? If it is, then…

And then, thank goodness, Boe texted, [Pick up snacks for us.]

[Snacks?]

[Unhealthy ones.]

******

Half an hour later, Alden walked through the door of his apartment and spotted his friend sitting on the sofa. Victor was beside him, and Boe was typing on Alden’s laptop.

“Hey,” Alden said, dropping his messenger bag on the kitchen counter and lifting up the net shopping bag full of snacks he’d bought on his way over from the station. He was preserving it just for the practice. “Why do we need unhealthy snacks?”

“Because we’re watching a movie,” Boe announced. He picked up the remote and pointed it at the television.

Familiar music filled the room, and an equally familiar image of a sand dune appeared on the screen.

“The End of the Lonely Earth documentary?” Alden asked, toeing off his shoes and dumping chips and candy on the coffee table. “I don’t mind, but didn’t we have it memorized by seventh grade?”

“Us and everyone else,” said Boe. “But see, I think it’s going to be way funnier now that my friend is a wizard. And we can pause it every time that suck-up of a narrator says something about the Artonans or Avowed and discuss it with our fresh perspectives. Mostly your fresh perspective. Since you’ve actually been hanging with both Artonans and Avowed, and I have not.”

“My job is to argue with the narrator. Got it.”

“I’ll argue with him, too, of course. You can’t leave me out of a good roasting.”

Alden sat with his legs crossed on the floor and watched the familiar montage of images from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s that started the film. “Telstar” started to play while a woman in high heels and a frilled apron pulled a crown roast out of the oven. A poster for the Four Pests Campaign turned into an image from the Vostok 1 launch turned into a scene of military personnel guarding students as they tried to integrate a school.

Photos of a Japanese city flooded by a typhoon faded into newspaper headlines about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“It was a rough time,” said Boe.

“Would we have nuked the planet by now?”

“Definitely.”

Alden nodded. “I think so, too.”

“This was our lonely Earth,” the narrator said in a deep voice that would have fit right into some of the radio snippets that would play later in the documentary. “The late 1950s and early 1960s was a time full of humanity’s highest highs and our lowest lows.”

“They didn’t have to synch ‘lowest lows’ with that clip of Elvis dancing. He looks like he’s enjoying himself,” Alden said.

“That was uncalled for.”

“If we didn’t blow ourselves up, we’d have gotten over a lot of the rest of it without an alien intervention by now, right?”

“I think we could have eradicated malaria on our own,” said Boe. “Given a few more years. It was great they did it for us, but we could probably have handled that one?”

Alden nodded. “A lot of the things they fought about must have seemed serious one day and then insane the next. You’ve got people all over the world saying some version of, ‘You have a different god than me, so you should die. You like a different kind of political system than me, so die. You look different from me, so you can’t sit in my restaurant.’”

Boe reached for a box of chocolate raisins. “Uh…it’s still like that in tons of ways.”

“But not as bad, right? You’re sitting there feeling superior to other humans for no reason at all. And you’re using it to justify all kinds of stupid shit. And then—”

“Then one day,” the narrator said dramatically as the wind howled across the Sahara, and a re-enactment began, “we learned we were not alone after all.”

A large group of wizards and Avowed, one from almost every resource world, appeared in a cloud of smoke.

“Pretty understated of them to land in the desert,” said Boe. “I’d have materialized on top of the White House or in Red Square. Maximum impact.

“I doubt there was a cloud of smoke when they showed up. I bet it was either nothing at all or something creepier.” Alden was remembering how the teleportation room on Alis-art’h’s ship had smelled like blood. “Anyway, you’re really invested in being better than your neighbor, people on the other side of the planet, and your own wife. Then boom—space wizards and a ton of superpowered representatives from their empire invite themselves over to ask if you’d like to make a deal.”

Then one of the first things they do is…that.

They both watched the screen. The footage now looked different from that filmed by human cameras at the time. It had been captured by the Artonans themselves using both magic and their own technology.

“Tan-wyk and the others casually wandering away from that meeting with U.S. and Soviet leadership and then showing up in Bali a few hours later would have been a decent power move on its own,” Boe noted. “But why not record yourself stopping a volcanic eruption while you’re there?”

There were museums all over the world where you could experience various moments from that day, instead of just seeing it on a screen. The magic rooms made you feel like you were standing there, watching the pyroclastic flow that was going to kill you suddenly encounter an impenetrable wall of magic, the ash and rock piling skywards rapidly.

“Here’s my favorite line.” Boe turned up the volume.

A couple of days later, Tan-wyk with her familiar crown of purple hair stood blinking into a camera—a human one this time—and said in response to a question about what the next stage of the operation would be, <<We will clean up so that it doesn’t look so unattractive. And we will fix the fields that were destroyed. They grow rice here. I like rice.>>

Boe was laughing so hard Alden couldn’t hear the narrator’s next few words. “The best part is that she’s not just saying that! All the other members of the delegation go back to talking to world leaders and doing good deeds all over the rest of the planet, and she just stays right there for the next year, magically fixing things for the local villages and observing the rice-growing process.”

“She likes rice,” said Alden. “She beat a volcano, so she gets to take a break and enjoy as much Earth grain as she wants.”

The volume was still high, so the narrator’s next words filled the room, “Every human who witnessed such an amazing feat wanted to know, ‘What is magic? And can we do it, too?’”

“Here it comes,” said Boe. “The first official definition the Triplanets gave us of magic. Unfortunately, it was delivered by an Artonan who wasn’t as cool as Tan-wyk.”

“He did take the time to deliver it in every known human language separately. Maybe he was really pumped and creative in the first three dozen, and by the time he got to English he was tired.”

The man on the screen started to speak in a dull voice.

“Magic is the process by which we wizards prove our existence and assert our dominion over all else that exists. If your planet chooses to form a Contract with us, we will gift you with magical tools and conveniences that you will never otherwise be able to obtain. And a few among you will be granted the ability to wield magic yourselves, with the expectation that you will use those powers for the benefit of both your species and ours.”

Boe paused the video. “Such an idiot. The rest of the team was busy presenting themselves as helpful friends who’d come to say hello and tell us about the chaos that was eating the universe, and then he set them back with a definition of magic that fueled everyone’s belief that the aliens had come to exert dominion over all of humanity in mustache-twirling villain fashion. Someone shot the ewtwee Avowed a couple of days after this aired.”

“That upset me so much the first time I heard about it. I know the ewtwee just dug the bullet out of her armor and then added it to her memories necklace. But how could anyone shoot one of them? They’re one of the most harmless aliens. She thought the bullet might have been a gift that was delivered too quickly.”

Ewtwees looked sort of like large fennec foxes with furless, prehensile double tails. They wore charm belts and necklaces full of shiny objects that they liked.

“I saw one in real life,” said Boe. “When I was around six.”

“You did? You never told me that!”

They weren’t a low population species, but Alden had still only ever seen them on screens.

“He must have been an Avowed working for an Artonan visitor, but he was alone at the time. He was coming out of a jewelry store, and he was glittering like he’d bought out the whole place. I wanted to say hello to him, but my mom dragged me away before I could.”

A few seconds passed, then Boe looked at Alden expectantly. “So?”

“So what?”

“You’re a wizard. Say wizard things about magic. Comment on the first definition.”

“Oh! Replay what he said.”

“You have the attention span of a flea.”

“Some jerk made me go to school today. I burned myself out debating superterrorism and talking to Lute Velra.”

Boe replayed the section of the video; Alden listened to it closely.

“It’s only one sentence, It sounds like it’s not an answer to the question at all, and he has a massive wizard-superiority complex,” said Boe. “The definitions the other ambassadors gave when they were cleaning up his mess were much more satisfying to most people.”

“The other answers mostly imply that magic is a kind of special energy Artonan wizards have inside of them and they use it to manipulate the universe,” said Alden.

“That’s right. And that’s the explanation that’s most popular. Remember that kid in seventh grade who called it Alien Spirit Gas?” said Boe.

Alden did. The unfortunate boy had been subjected to fart sounds whenever he walked into classrooms after that.

“Some people think it’s mystery energy,” Boe continued. “Some people think it’s more like prayer with replicable results. Others—and quite a few Avowed—think doing spells is like outputting code that the world responds to. And the Artonans muddy the waters by not outright disagreeing with any of it. I’ve got you here now, so…reveal the truth.”

“Well, magic does a lot of different stuff. So it’s not like you can point at any one of those ideas and say, ‘This is completely wrong.’ Even the prayer one…people who think that are probably thinking of wordchains, right? And ‘outputting code’ makes a lot more sense as a concept if you’re an Avowed with a spell impression.”

“Does it?”

Alden nodded. “They make you feel like a robot.”

“Weird. Should I get one if I ever have the chance?”

“It’s convenient,” said Alden. “Really thorough. Very efficient. Nearly infallible.”

“You sound so surly about it.”

“Feeling my body and my brain do complex things on autopilot grosses me out.”

He looked back at the screen. It was nice that Joe’s first, more generalized lessons on authority hadn’t been conducted under the same extreme strictures as their long final discussion about The Bearer of All Burdens and the original skills. Alden had since figured out some things on his own and had his knowledge shored up by Kibby and Instructor Gwen-lor, so he could talk about this a bit more freely.

“The first definition was better,” he said. “I mean, it was worse in one way because humans don’t have the base concepts of reality or the senses to understand what he meant by it. So it comes across as him bragging instead of giving information. But it was actually better as far as openness and honesty goes. That’s like a stripped-down and language-limited version of the definition of magic they give wizard toddlers.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Boe grinned. “I wondered! For the first time in my life today, I delved into the depressing and embarrassing world of adult humans who believe, despite literally decades of evidence to the contrary, that they can become wizards by mimicking footage of wizards in action.”

Alden winced. “Oh no.”

“Yes. Mine eyes have feasted on many strange sights! There is a man in Washington state making wands out of sticks he marinates in his own bodily fluids. There is a woman who has spent the past twenty years meticulously memorizing every single facial expression ever made by a visiting wizard. However! Despite the fact that many of these people pursue foolish and smelly habits, they do have some valuable qualities. They all speak Artonan well, and their unhealthy obsession makes them strive for authenticity.”

He spun the laptop around to show Alden a Japanese website. The System translated the title as <<Dominant Humans Society.>>

“Please ignore the many layers of confusion the name they’ve chosen can produce. They’re just big fans of the first definition of magic. Because, as they point out, contemporary Artonan guests on Earth use many different words that the System translates as ‘magic’ that are better translated as ‘power,’ ‘dominance,’ ‘sway,’ or…more weirdly…‘my spot.’”

“Avowed who go to the Triplanets often enough have to notice those things, too,” said Alden. “Once you speak the language, it’s impossible not to realize that the way they talk about magic is different than most humans think of it. But it probably comes across as wizard cultural posturing to people who don’t like Artonans or who don’t care to delve into it. Because if a wizard doesn’t sit down and explain it to you really slowly and clearly, it’s easy to convince yourself that they’re just being poetic, arrogant, and alien. Instead of surprisingly literal.”

Boe shut the laptop and set it aside. “So give me your definition!”

He was leaning over his knees toward Alden. He sounded eager.

Of course he did. Alden wanted to tell him, and at the same time, he very much didn’t.

“Talking about it in general is fine,” he said hesitantly. “But if you want me to try to teach you how to do it, too, I…I’m going to need to think about that. For a long time probably. Okay?”

Boe stared. “You think you can teach other people how to do it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it would be impossible if I chose the right person. Probably another Avowed. It would be really hard. And time consuming. Maybe even years worth of time consuming for both of us? If I even wanted to at all.”

“I wasn’t asking you to teach me,” said Boe, watching him closely through his brand new glasses. “I assumed you couldn’t. Either because of that tattoo on your chest or because you were a one-of-a-kind case. For the obvious reason.”

“Oh. I am, but I think there should be others who are capable of it. Only it would be harder for them than it was for me. And possibly less worthwhile.”

According to her, Gorgon’s refinement of Alden’s authority made him qualify as ‘gifted’. He hadn’t thought much about that statement over the past few weeks, but it had crossed his mind a few times. Mostly when he was wondering how gifted you had to be for an entity like that to acknowledge it.

Thanks, Gorgon. Hope you liked Natalie’s cinnamon bun.

“I think you have to be underestimating the difficulty of it even with all those caveats,” said Boe. “Everyone is curious about magic. Plenty of smart Avowed spend time with the Artonans. By all accounts, they’re secretive as hell, but there’s no way every last wizard, including a couple who’ve gone and married humans, would refuse to teach it. Someone would have broken the rules by now. So if it’s not very close to impossible, then the Triplanetary Government must assassinate everyone who does it, because otherwise there would be a small population of human wizards running around already.”

“From what I’ve been told, I’m the only one right now,” said Alden.

It made more sense when you knew the whole truth. Joe was probably the king of rule breakers, and even he had been very firmly against teaching an Avowed magic. It meant flouting your culture, your colleagues, and your conscience. And after months or years of training, you’d be gifting your student not only power but a variety of pain they couldn’t properly understand and consent to until they were too deeply involved to back out.

You’d have to be at least a little bit of a monster.

Or a very patient and determined child who didn’t know any better.

He cleared his throat and pointed at the tv. “My definition is totally better than that guy’s. Here it is: while I was on Moon Thegund being sandblasted by chaos, I became aware of <<myself>> as a unique existence within reality. Becoming aware of yourself in that way is probably what the Human Dominators, or whatever they’re called, are translating as ‘my spot’? It works. You gain awareness of yourself as an entity beyond the physical, and in doing so you come to understand that you both have and are authority. You learn to direct your authority to effect changes in reality—aka doing magic. In the process of doing so, you can grow the strength of your authority and expand it beyond your initial ‘spot’, gaining <<presence>> and the power to do more magic.”

Alden took a breath. Awesome. He’d gotten it all out. Mostly in English. And it sounded closer to right than he’d thought it would.

“I don’t know why you’re grinning. That was some of the most abstract, batshit sounding—”

“It was really very clear!”

Boe shoved up his glasses. “You sound like a snooty Artonan wizard wearing an Alden suit.”

Alden considered that. “Thank you.”

Boe smiled. “Fine. I did understand that better than the single sentence definition at least.”

“Do you want to see me do it? We can always finish the movie later.”

“No. I’m not interested at all.”

Alden undid the buckle on his leather cuff bracelet and unwrapped his auriad.

“Cool. Is that a magic string?” Boe reached out curiously.

Alden had been in the process of standing, and at the sight of a hand reaching for the auriad, he reflexively leaped backward. Only to fall over the coffee table full of snacks.

“Ow…” he said, staring up at the ceiling.

Boe stood with an amused look on his face. “Are you all right? Your Agility stats failed you hard just now.”

Alden let his left foot sweep a chip bag to the floor as he yanked his leg off the table and sat back up. “Yeah. Sorry. That was—”

Boe held up his hands. “I will not touch your magic string,” he said, the solemn voice at odds with his growing smile.

Alden climbed to his feet. “I know. I know. That looked crazy. Maybe you can touch it. I just haven’t really thought about it, and I panicked.”

“Is it delicate, or is it dangerous?”

“It’s part of me,” said Alden. “I’ve bonded with it, and we’re growing more intertwined as I practice.”

“We? Does it have a personality?” Boe asked, lowering his hands.

“No. That’s me projecting.” He looked down at his fingers. He was already absently weaving the auriad into the starting position for the elementary school graduation spell. “It’s an auriad. It’s a tool that feels sort of like an extra limb. But it’s also a deep expression of myself. Honestly, I’ve got a little bit of a security blanket thing going on with it, too.”

He took a step closer and held the interlaced string out toward his friend.

Boe regarded it cautiously.

“It’s neat. It’s almost like liquid instead of string to the touch,” Alden said, holding it in front of his nose. “I promise not to fall over the coffee table again.”

“I’m good. I’m not sure if we’re talking about me shaking hands with your soul or you offering to let me touch your favorite kidney, but either one sounds unnecessary just to satisfy my curiosity.”

Alden shrugged and lowered the auriad. “Well, move Victor off the sofa then, and watch me and my favorite kidney do something cool.”

He headed into the kitchen, his hands moving by rote. His mind was focused on manipulating his authority into the shapes that filled in the gaps in the auriad’s pattern. It felt good. Exciting. Like he was approaching the edge of a high dive, and he was already anticipating the way the water would part for him.

Yield to him.

In exactly the way that he demanded.

His free authority moved. Not as fast as his fingers could. His hand speed had surpassed his authority control by too much, but that was all right. It gave him a new goal to work toward.

He spun to face the sofa as the final design of the spell took shape. Boe was standing off to the side by the pinball machine with the cat in his arms. Alden lifted the auriad, aimed over the counter, and made sure to throw himself into the final push. He didn’t have enough free authority to hold himself back in the way he’d been able to on those final days at the lab.

But the water still parted.

Alden couldn’t see the square of force shoot across the room, but he was aware of it on another level. It was as if there was an echo of the command he’d given in the world around him that he could just barely detect. One day, maybe he’d be able to feel it more clearly.

He was staring at the exact spot he’d aimed for, so he saw the instant the back cushion of the sofa depressed, in a perfect square shape, with a thwuff sound. The whole piece of furniture rocked and fell over onto its back.

“Did you see?!” he demanded, hurrying into the living room and letting the auriad helpfully wrap itself back around his left wrist. He pointed at the fallen sofa. “That was my spell!”

Boe set the cat down. “That was sick!” His voice was almost as excited as Alden’s. “That was a hundred percent a spell that the System would never offer a Rabbit. And you’ve got it anyway!”

“I know!”

“You kicked the couch from across the room!”

“I can do it from even farther, but the aim needs a little work. It’s just the graduation spell they give wizard kids when they leave this fancy-pants elementary school on Artona I. But—”

“But if you can do that you can do so much more!”

“I know. There are like a billion spells I won’t be able to do because I’m not Artonan, but they’ve been wizarding around since the dawn of time and they’ve got more magical knowledge than anyone could ever learn anyway. So even if I’m stuck with pure hand casting and I can’t do double-brain dolphin chanting or jet off to other worlds to get potions ingredients, I’m not ever going to run out of stuff to try!”

“Can you do it again?”

“Yes! A few more times at least. Can I show you some others, too?”

******

An hour later, they sat on the floor in the wreckage of the living room. All the furniture was tipped over. Several chip bags had been used as targets, and crumbs littered the floor. There was a faint smell of smoke in the air from the little bits of paper that had been burned in lieu of candles, they both had very sanitized hands, and the last chiming notes of the song spell were fading from the air.

Victor had abandoned them to their madness long ago.

Alden laid on his stomach on an abused sofa cushion and watched Boe. His friend’s back was propped against the bottom of the overturned sofa, and he was trying to get the wax paper wrapper off a smashed caramel. He was relaxed and happy. They both were because Alden had asked if he wanted to share the emotion.

Boe had seemed surprised. Alden just thought it was the obvious thing to do.

And there was another reason…

Now’s a good time.

“Big anxiety spike,” Boe said without looking over at him. He’d been verbally identifying Alden’s emotions for a while now, maybe as an attempt to fully disclose what he was reading.

“I know. Could you shield up again?”

“Done.”

“I wanted you to know it’s fun for me. Doing magic.”

“That’s an understatement. You’ve got this very specific emotion when you do it. Like self-affirmation and a success high all rolled up together. I haven’t felt anything quite like it before.”

Alden took a deep breath. [My affixations hurt now.]

Boe’s fingers stopped prying at the caramel wrapper. His eyes met Alden’s.

[I don’t know why I’m texting it. I guess it’s easier. When the System does my affixations now, I can feel it. Changing me.]

“Oh,” Boe said quietly.

[The work the Artona I Contract did on me after I got back from all that time away was… I couldn’t even use my skill after it happened. Not until a couple of weeks ago. And it’s still this thing that…sometimes I can’t sleep. I don’t want to talk about it. But I did want you to understand why I freaked out yesterday when you were trying to tell me about U-type affixations. And why I’m not sure about teaching anyone else.]

Boe hadn’t looked away.

Alden did himself, letting his eyes fall on the dirty floor.

“Anyway,” he said after clearing his throat. “Now that I’m back in action again, I’ve been memorizing new spells. I think I’ll be able to cast a couple of them really soon. There’s this one that just crushes the hell out of stuff. Close range. Baseball-sized crush zone. Sphere or pancake depending on how I adjust it. I think it’s going to be like having permanent access to a hydraulic press. I’m going to flatten all the things. I don’t know how practical it will really be in everyday life—”

“Extreme crushing doesn’t have to be practical,” Boe said in a casual voice. “You should just enjoy it.”

Alden smiled. “Right. Also—close range flash freezing. I’ve got both of those down, and I’m basically just waiting until my authority develops enough so that I can do them.”

“The freezing spell goes well with your new passion for keeping inappropriate things in your pockets.”

“Exactly! I can make frozen food and keep it frozen. All I need is a spell to heat it back up, and I’m a one-man kitchen.”

“You can make tiny flames,” Boe pointed out. “Just learn to cook over an open fire, and you’re set.”

Alden gasped. “I’m amazing.”

“You’re shaping up to be the ideal camping buddy if nothing else. You even entertain people with finger songs.”

“The spell I plan to memorize after those is very similar to the graduation spell. It makes a sharper force shape, a triangle that flies through the air like a thrown dagger. Spells that cut and smash in different ways seem to be particularly common uses for auriads, but they aren’t the only kinds. There’s an honest-to-goodness object summoning spell at the end of the book. I’m absolutely drooling over it.”

Anything in your line of sight below a certain size could be summoned.

They talked about some of the other spells Alden was looking forward to, and then, out of the blue, Boe asked, “Does having the tattoo bother you?”

Alden looked at him in surprise. “In what way?”

“In any way.”

“The level of restrictiveness I agreed to is inconvenient,” Alden said after thinking about it briefly. “There are a lot of things I can’t say that I would like to tell a few people. Like you. But I did agree to it. And I got a lot in exchange. I honestly think the wizard who made the contract with me was…more than I was ready to deal with. But he was fair to me other than that.”

“So no lingering contract-specific negative associations,” said Boe. “Do people give you a lot of shit for having it?”

“I haven’t shown it to many humans other than you and Jeremy. The doctor who did my physical exam for CNH was appropriate about ignoring it. And I know the worst you two are going to think is that I was a dumbass who got in over my head. Not that I agreed to a private contract because I was committing murders off-the-record, or that I took money in exchange for letting some creep do experiments on me.”

“Yeah, I assume the most common use of them is to protect sensitive info instead of covering dark deeds. Or that they’re fake and the Artonan-obsessives who have them just wish wizards wanted to tat match with them.”

Alden brightened. “I’m getting one on my face!”

“Excuse me, what?”

“With Kibby! When she gets her summoning rights for the first time, I’m going to be her first Avowed summons. And the entire purpose of the mission will be matching facial tattoos.”

“What will the contract be?” Boe asked slowly.

“Eternal friendship and respect,” Alden said. “It’s all decided.”

“When is this happening?”

“More than a decade from now most likely. But it’s happening.”

“Okay. You look really excited about having blue ink on your face forever, so…way to go. Also that makes me feel much less worried about what I was about to ask you. Can you make a magical contract with someone? Like can you do the wizard part of it?”

“I don’t really know how to. Kibby kept asking me for one because she thought it would be like an authority handshake with magic ink added. And I do think it’s probably something pretty simple at the core. But I don’t know how. I understand how tattoo design works, but I think to make it all come together I’d need instructions.”

“Do you have any way to get those kinds of instructions without risking revealing your wizardness?”

Alden considered it. “I’m not sure. I could ask some people I know really general questions ‘just out of curiosity’ and hope the answers were enough to go on. I could try to buy a magic book with the info in it—”

“Oh yes trying to shop some kind of Avowed magical black market is a very smart thing to do for someone in your position,” Boe said sarcastically.

“Or I could trial and error it. We might end up looking like the walls in a public bathroom before I got done. I’m assuming you’re asking because you want one with me?”

Boe nodded. “I spent all day trying to negotiate with the System. Shithead didn’t give me so much as an exclamation point in answer. Finally, I asked if I could tell you everything without losing its help if I formed a wizard’s contract with you, and it woke up.”

“It actually agreed?” Alden asked, surprised. And impressed. He hadn’t realized you could successfully negotiate with Earth. Maybe he needed to try harder in the future.

“It sent me a picture of those concentric triangles on your chest. And the words, ‘Yes. If you both make not revealing the information to anyone else in the future part of the bargain.’”

“Oh. So it only agreed because in that scenario you telling me would actually give us both less freedom to do what we want than we have now. That checks out.”

“A surefire, ‘Shut Boe up,’ solution seems to be really tempting for it. I guess making myself less of a future variable must take a load off its plate.”

Alden pushed himself up from his cushion. “Is this big secret something you actually want to tell me? Or is it something you feel like you have to do for my sake? Because if it’s the second, then I don’t need it.”

“I regretted a lot of things when you disappeared. This was one. I want to.”

“Then I’ll figure it out. I don’t think I’ll manage it before you leave, though. I can’t possibly get the info I need in the next few days, unless the System’s willing to give me the instructions itself. System, could you do that?”

[No.]

Boe looked startled. “It answered on my interface, too.”

Group chat with the System. What an afternoon.

“Can we not just do a magical contract through you somehow?” Alden asked. “System-moderated. You’re the Contract for an entire planet. This should be right up your alley.”

[You completing such an agreement yourselves will produce a more ideal result.]

“Why?” Alden and Boe asked at the same time.

The System didn’t answer.

Of course not.

“It’s a good idea for you to learn anyway,” Boe said. “If you’re going to wizard, you should wizard all the way. And I would sleep much better if you would contract lock a lot of the news you’ve already given me in my head.”

“You sound like Kibby. ‘Contract with me, Alden! I will not reveal your secrets even under torture.’”

“She does sound cool. By the way, where are all these alien kid videos that you’ve been promising me?”

EIGHTY-SEVEN

Hero Types

Alden’s remaining days with Boe were much too brief, and they threw into stark relief one inconvenient fact about his new life.

“I can’t get approval to go back home for Christmas or New Year,” he told his friend on Wednesday night, slamming the door to his bedroom and stalking into the kitchen. “All the requests I put in this morning were denied. I got the notices while I was in the shower.”

“Well…” Boe glanced up from his perusal of the enormous stack of coupons Alden had received when he first entered intake. “We thought it would be that way.”

“I can’t go back next Christmas either.” Alden yanked open the fridge and glared at a perfectly innocent bottle of green tea. “Because the U.S. approves Avowed for visits up to eighteen months in advance, and the slots for major holidays for anyone C-rank and up fill the day they’re opened. I have ten days off between school quarters then. You know what else I can’t do with that time?”

“Get approval to have guests here on Anesidora?” Boe suggested.

“That’s right! Because Anesidora allows us to schedule visitors two years in advance. And the special occasion slots here also fill up the second they’re opened. So maybe, if I’m lucky enough to not be on a summons on sign-up day this year, I can have a holiday with my family or friends, when I’m in college.”

“February is probably good, right? Or March.”

Alden grabbed a container of acorn squash soup. “Yes. It’s manageable. But weekends get booked up fast, too. I guess I just have to skip school if I actually want to use the fourteen days of family time the U.S. allows me each year. But the local hero team in Chicago will also ask my school how I’m doing before they grant my approval, to make sure I’m a good boy who won’t hurt regular humans while I’m under their jurisdiction. So…I can’t just skip class. I have to get permission from the school, then get permission from the country I was born in, then get permission from the hero team in charge of monitoring me and sign a paper saying I understand they will arrest me if I so much as magically sneeze or step outside the city limits.”

“If it makes you feel better, I’m sure the process is really streamlined. It sounds like a lot, but it’s probably computers putting checkmarks beside your name all along the way.”

“They’re treating me like I’ve done something bad. But I haven’t. And that fact makes me want to do something bad.”

…. chapter continued on Patreon or in the next ePub file. Please read below:

[NOTE TO READERS — October 18, 2023:

This particular ePub file was created after I revised these chapters. I hope you enjoyed it! But that means if you’re reading this, and you’re ready for the next chapter, the one you are looking for is on the Patreon post here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/eighty-seven-89391851

It’s numbered 87 instead of 89. Sorry, I know that’s confusing…the revision added a couple of chapters to our count.

It’s called “Hero Types.” To make sure you’re reading the right thing, I posted the above snippet, so you’d be one hundred percent sure you knew what you were looking for. An ePub is attached to the Patreon post as usual. I’m very sorry for any confusion caused by the additional material.

As always, thank you for reading on Patreon and on Royal Road!

—Sleyca ]