Revision Chapters 81-84 (Patreon)

All right! Here are the revised chapters that are going up on Royal Road in the coming days. The vast majority (literally, almost all) of the brand new material is in Chapter 81 and Chapter 83. The others are just lightly cleaned with a few lines added or removed here and there. There is a clarification about Artonan relationships in 87 I'm sure some people will be interested in...it's only a paragraph or so long.

I'm really happy with presenting the story this way! The first two chapters will be going up on Royal Road right this second, and the third will be up tomorrow.  I'm also putting the first four below for people reading on the app who don't want to grab the ePub! The next four are in the following post. (Too long to put all together. You'd just be scrolling for eternity to get to the bottom.)

BRAND NEW READERS: the ePub with the revised chapters is attached below. You can also read here on Patreon. (Patreon is currently having issues with italics for some people. I apologize if they're affecting your device. The ePub won't be impacted.)



Newest Chapters 81-84 (formerly 81 and 82):
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 paid 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 now 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.”



************