All For One: Chimera

[Durolord]

Greg Veder had rules, and he went over them on the bus the way other people checked their phones.

Do not talk too much. Do not correct anyone unless they ask, and they will not ask. Do not sound excited. No anime examples, no game examples, unless someone else brings them up first, and even then, wait. Count to three.

Do not laugh louder than the joke deserves. Do not explain the explanation.

And the big one, the one he kept in his head in letters the size of the Medhall building:

If the room goes quiet, stop talking.

He wasn't trying to be impressive. He'd given up on that around seventh grade. The rules were for getting from first period to last without becoming the entertainment, and some days they worked.

The bus was loud the way it was always loud: forty conversations, a phone playing music through a cracked speaker, the engine shuddering up through the seat and into his teeth. Greg sat by the window with his backpack on his knees and ran the rules again, because it was easier than listening to all of it at once. Somebody behind him laughed, sharp and sudden, and he flinched. Nobody noticed. That was fine. That was the goal.

* * *
​

First period went fine. He didn't volunteer anything.

Second period was Mr. Gladly, who asked about the Treaty of Ghent. Greg knew the answer cold and could feel it pressing against the back of his teeth like a sneeze. He let someone else get it wrong, and drew in the margin of his notebook until the feeling passed.

He drew a curve. He'd been drawing it for a week, ever since a PHO thread about Lung ate an entire Sunday: a clean upward arc with a soft spot at the bottom, where the line was still flat and hadn't started to climb.

By lunch he was three for three on the rules, which was probably the problem. Three for three made him feel like someone who could afford a fourth.

* * *
​

The Winslow lunchroom was two hundred conversations happening at once. Trays slapping down, chair legs scraping, the vending machine that ate dollars rattling every time someone hit it. Somebody's speaker playing a song he didn't know, under somebody else's speaker playing one he did. His brain kept trying to sort it all, to pick out each strand and file it, and there were too many strands.

He had a rule for that too. Eyes on the tray, pick one sound and hold it. Today it was the hum of the drinks cooler by the wall, steady and boring.

His seat was at the end of a table that put up with him. Sparrow and Jordan sat there, and a couple of sophomores whose names Greg had learned and was careful never to use, because they had never used his.

The cape talk started the way it always did. Someone brought up Lung the way you'd bring up the weather, except in Brockton Bay the weather could burn down your block.

"My cousin's shop pays the ABB," Jordan said, low. "Every month. You know what happens if you don't."

"Nothing happens," Sparrow said. "Lung doesn't care about your cousin's shop."

"Lung doesn't have to care. That's the point. You can't fight a guy who turns into a dragon, man. Once he gets going, that's it. The Protectorate just contains him and waits."

"Armsmaster could—"

"Armsmaster could die. Lung fought Leviathan. He gets bigger forever. There's literally no beating him."

Greg looked at his tray. He thought about the curve in his notebook. He counted to three, and then again, and the conversation moved on an inch, and he told himself the moment had passed.

He spoke anyway. He always did. He'd written the rules himself, so he knew exactly who they were written for.

"Okay, but he's not unbeatable, though. That's actually a misconception."

There went rule one.

"Lung's power is an escalation curve, right? He ramps. So at minute zero he's basically a strong guy with fire, and the dragon stuff depends on how long the fight's been going. So the whole fight is decided in the first two minutes. You don't fight the dragon. You make sure the dragon never shows up. Overwhelming first strike, or hit-and-run so the ramp never gets going, and he just—"

He could hear his voice doing the bright, eager thing now.

"—he never gets there. Kyushu proves it, actually, if you read the timeline, because it took him hours to scale up to Leviathan, which means the curve has a slope, which means there's a window, and the window is the whole—"

The table had gone quiet. Not the whole room, just the table and the ones near it, and Greg knew the shape of that quiet. He'd felt it close around him a hundred times. The last rule lit up in Medhall-sized letters, and he heard himself say:

"—it's like a boss fight with a DPS check, basically, you either—"

"Bro," Sparrow said. "It is not that deep."

Then the laughing.

It wasn't mean at first. The first laugh was almost friendly. If he'd laughed along, shrugged, said yeah, sorry, brain stuff, it could have ended there, and he knew it even as he opened his mouth again.

"No, I— okay, that came out wrong. I meant hypothetically. Like, if you think of powers as having activation conditions, then—"

"Veder."

Sophia Hess didn't raise her voice. She never had to. She was at the next table, turned halfway round in her seat, looking at Greg the way she looked at everything, like she'd already sorted the room into things that could hurt her and things that couldn't and was annoyed the second pile kept making noise.

"Relax," she said. "If Lung showed up, you'd trip over your own feet trying to narrate your death."

That laugh was different. Greg's face went hot and the words came out too fast, wrong while he was still saying them.

"That's not— I wasn't saying I'd fight him. Obviously. I was talking about it mechanically, like if every power has conditions and limits, then any power, even a really strong one, has to have—"

"Still talking," Sophia said.

She said it to the room, not to him, and the room agreed. The laugh went round the tables and came back, and Greg sat in the middle of it holding half a sentence about activation conditions until it died.

Emma Barnes sat at Sophia's table. She hadn't really laughed. She was mostly on her phone, and when she glanced up at Greg it was quick, the way you check something's still where you left it. She said, in the voice of someone giving a tourist directions:

"This is why people stop listening, Greg."

And went back to her phone.

Sophia at least wanted something out of these moments. Emma's sentence didn't want anything. It sounded like advice, like something a guidance counselor might say, and he already knew he'd be replaying it tonight and next week and at random moments for years, trying to work out why it hurt more than the laughing.

He looked at his tray and didn't say anything else.

* * *
​

He got through the rest of lunch by becoming furniture. He was good at it. Eyes on the middle distance, eat at a steady pace, wait for the room to finish with you. The conversation drifted to the Empire, then to some PHO drama, and nobody asked him anything. The cooler hummed, and he held on to the hum.

The bell went. Greg gathered his things: the notebook with the curve in it, a library copy of a Maoxiang novel he was never going to read in public again, the binder with the broken ring that bit him every time he opened it.

The shoulder hit him from behind.

Not hard. That was what he could never have explained to a teacher, even if teachers were the kind of thing that helped. It was the contact of someone whose path you happened to be standing in. Sophia didn't even slow down.

The binder went. The broken ring popped, and paper sprayed across the floor, and the notebook landed open at the curve. Someone's shoe came down on it, not aimed, just walking, and left a gray print across the page.

"My bad," Sophia said, three steps gone, in the voice of someone apologizing to a chair.

A couple of people laughed. Most of them just went around him and the papers, the way water goes around a rock. Nobody helped. Nobody had even decided not to.

Greg knelt to pick up his papers, and his brain did the thing.

* * *
​

The thing was: run it back.

He was on the lunchroom floor in real time, but in his head the last ten minutes were already open in an editor, and he was checking which face he should have worn.

He had a few. Everybody did, he figured; he just had to work harder at his. He'd built them over years, in the bathroom mirror and on the walk to school, the way other kids practiced free throws.

The easygoing one, for lunch tables. Shrug at Sparrow, yeah, fair, I'll send you the strategy guide, the friendly laugh, and the conversation moves on.

The sharp one, for people like Sophia. Four words, short and clean, and the laugh goes the other way just once. He'd never actually gotten that one on in time.

The calm one, for teachers and counselors. Hear still talking and only nod, slow and unbothered, and the room reads it as confidence.

The quiet one was the best of them, and the hardest to keep on. Keep the answer behind his teeth, and right now he'd be eating lunch in complete, unremarkable peace.

This was normal. He'd watch the scene back, see which face he'd had on when it went wrong, and pick a better one for tomorrow. He'd been running on that for years.

Except the loop came back empty.

He tried the sharp one again, the four clean words, and this time the scene wouldn't play. It kept hitting something it had always steered around before.

It wouldn't have mattered.

Behind the sharp face he gets the same look from Sophia, because that look was loaded before he opened his mouth. Behind the calm one he gets still talking anyway, or tomorrow, and the shoulder regardless, because the shoulder had never been a reply to anything. The quiet one buys him a week, maybe. Then one sentence comes out a little too bright and the room sees who's under it.

There wasn't a face he could put on that changed how this went. They all had him underneath. There never had been. He knelt there with a page in his hand and felt the hope click and fail to catch, the way a lighter does once the fluid's gone.

He'd expected shame, or anger. What came instead was flat and gray and close to nothing at all. The lunchroom noise went distant inside it. Every strand his brain had been fighting to sort, the trays and chairs and conversations and the cooler, flattened at once and slid a room away. The lights were very bright and very far off. His hands kept picking up paper, and he watched them do it.

And something inside him opened.

* * *
​

Nothing in the room changed. If anyone had been watching Greg Veder, and nobody was, they'd have seen a kid pause for a second with a binder in his hands.

But inside the gray, a door he hadn't known was there swung open onto a sense he had no name for, and it reached across the lunchroom without asking him and touched the people in it.

Most of them were just people. Warm, dim shapes.

Except Sophia.

She was twenty feet away and walking, and there was something in her that wasn't muscle or bone or anything that made her Sophia. It sat in her like a blade in a sheath, and he felt the shape of it the way your tongue finds a chipped tooth, in far more detail than he wanted. Sharp. Cold. Only half there, slippery, like a knife seen through dirty glass.

And for one second, a second he would spend a long time refusing to remember, some part of Greg reached for it.

It slid away. It was oiled, angled wrong, not his, like grabbing for a reflection on water. His reach closed on nothing, and that scared him worse than anything Sophia had done all day.

He flinched back into his own body so hard he nearly dropped the binder again.

What.

What was—

* * *
​

His brain had read every power-classification thread on PHO. It had the obvious word ready instantly, in bold, with citations.

Then the rest of his brain took the word back.

No. Come on. Be serious.

People triggered in locked basements, in car crashes and fires, on the worst day of an actual life. People didn't trigger because Sophia Hess shoulder-checked them and Emma Barnes gave them advice. People like him read about powers and argued about powers and got told it was not that deep.

So it was stress. A migraine aura, maybe; he'd read those did visual things. Or his blood sugar. Or Sophia had spent two years teaching him to think of her as a weapon, and his brain had finally drawn him a picture.

He told himself that, kneeling on the floor, more or less in those words. He'd had a lot of practice talking himself out of things.

* * *
​

By the time he got the binder closed, the lunchroom had emptied. Sophia was long gone, and had probably already forgotten him. Emma had left without looking back.

The noise came back as he stood up, one strand at a time. A tray. A chair. A janitor's cart squeaking by the doors. The cooler, still humming. His knees hurt from the floor.

The shoe print had dried into his notebook, a gray tread stamped across the soft spot at the bottom of the curve. He put it away.

He told himself, one more time, that he'd imagined it.

But in the empty air where Sophia had been standing, he could still feel it, faint and fading, like heat off a stove someone had just turned off. The shape of something sharp and cold, and the exact place his grip had slipped.

Greg picked up his backpack and walked to class.

The part of him that had opened did not close.

 

[Durolord]

Greg got home at 3:47 and was back out the door by 9:40. If you'd asked him what he did in between, he'd have said homework. Really, he'd watched lunch on repeat.

It played on the bus, over a half-eaten burrito, and while he stared at homework he wasn't reading. Eleven minutes, over and over. The curve. The quiet. It is not that deep. Sophia turning in her seat. The laugh. Emma not even looking up. The shoe print on his notebook.

That part was normal. After a bad day the replay always ran.

What wasn't normal was what came after it, which was nothing.

For as long as Greg could remember, the footage rolled and then the editor opened, and he got to reshoot the scene with a different face on. The funny one, with the comeback ready. The calm one, who shrugged. The one who'd sat at a different table, or said one sentence instead of nine. He'd watch the disaster, then pick out tomorrow's face, and somewhere in the trying-on he'd fall asleep.

Tonight the editor opened and stayed blank. He reached for one of the faces and couldn't get any of them to sit right, and it felt a lot like reaching for the cold, sharp thing in the lunchroom and having it slip. He didn't like that the two felt related, so he stopped thinking about it, and then thought about it for the next forty minutes.

* * *
​

At 4:30 he gave up on homework and opened PHO.

He typed trigger event what does it feel like into the search bar and deleted it. He typed stress hallucination symptoms and deleted that too. In the end he went with can stress make you see things, which felt like a reasonable compromise between asking and not asking.

The medical sites said yes, sometimes, see a doctor. PHO had a four-hundred-post thread titled "Trigger events: what we actually know (serious thread, mods are watching)", and Greg read all of it, because of course he did.

It didn't help. The stories, secondhand and a few that claimed to be firsthand, were all about the worst day of someone's life. A guy whose building burned with his family inside. A woman who wouldn't give details, only that it had taken six years of something before the something broke her. Car crashes. Basements. One post, locked but still quoted everywhere, about being held under water a little longer each time.

Every few pages somebody restated the consensus. You had to be living through the worst moment you'd ever have, and it had to hit you exactly where you were weakest.

Greg sat back and went over his day. He'd talked too much at lunch. Sophia had been mean to him. Emma had been mean to him more quietly. His books had gone on the floor and someone had stepped on his notebook.

That was it. Nobody had burned. If he posted it in that thread, people in eleven time zones would be very kind to him about it, which would be worse than being mocked.

His pain didn't qualify. He'd spent years dismissing his own problems before anyone else could, and he did it now without even noticing.

Insufficient suffering. Application denied.

So, back to stress. He'd already decided that on the lunchroom floor, and it was nice to have four hundred posts agree with him. He felt almost relieved, and didn't stop to wonder why.

* * *
​

The Brockton Bay board's sidebar had a new post, twenty minutes old.

anyone else hearing about ABB stuff near the docks tonight??

Fourteen replies. The usual mix of nothing confirmed and my cousin heard, plus one guy swearing he'd seen Oni Lee on a roof, which somebody swore every week.

Greg checked it again after dinner, and again at nine, when it had twenty replies and still no pictures. The docks thread was nearly always nothing.

At 9:40 he told his mom, who was half asleep in front of the TV, that he was going for a walk. That was true. He said he'd be back soon, and he believed it.

* * *
​

The walk was supposed to clear his head. Everyone said walking helped.

It had never done much for Greg. Usually he had the editor to keep him busy, choosing the face for tomorrow and running the day again with it on. Without it, the footage just kept looping at walking pace, a little sharper each time, and around the fourth block he admitted to himself that he wasn't out here to clear anything. He just couldn't sit still in his room with it.

He went east, because east was downhill.

The night was ordinary. A guy pulling the shutter down on a bodega. Two women at a bus stop arguing, fondly, about the schedule. Older kids on bikes doing slow loops in a gas station lot. He could feel them all, faintly, the way he'd felt everyone in the lunchroom, warm dim shapes he wasn't seeing so much as knowing were there. He decided not to count that as anything.

Crossing Aldgate, something flickered.

It was far off to the north, there and gone, like a bass note coming through six walls. He stopped on the curb, and a car honked him back onto it.

Stress, he told himself. He'd spent the whole afternoon thinking about the Sophia thing, so of course his brain was doing encores. He'd literally just read a thread about how brains did that.

He tried to leave it there, but the explanation didn't sit right. The flicker had come from the north and a little east. He could still feel exactly where. He'd never heard of a stress headache that came from a direction.

Hallucinations weren't supposed to have directions. Were they?

He could check. Walk toward the next one, stand where it seemed to be, see an empty street, and go home as a person who got weird migraines. That was a normal thing to be. The other possibility was that he'd wanted a power so badly he'd dreamed one up on the cafeteria floor, which would mean the whole lunchroom had been right about him. He'd rather have the migraines.

So he walked north and a little east, to prove there was nothing there.

* * *
​

The second flicker came near the rail corridor, a brief pressure ahead and to the left, like his ears popping the wrong way. He detoured toward it and found a fenced lot full of stacked pallets and one orange cat. He stood there for a full minute and felt nothing at all, and was very pleased with himself for about thirty seconds.

Then the third one brushed past from a completely different direction. Fainter this time, and moving, the way you can feel a truck go by on the next street over.

That one he couldn't explain. He tried anyway. Low blood sugar. The burrito. Too much screen time. Power lines, which lasted two blocks, until he noticed the flickers didn't follow them. By the time he ran out of excuses he'd stopped really believing them, and was walking a little faster.

He checked his phone under a streetlight. The docks thread was up to thirty-one replies. Somebody said the cops had pulled their cars back from Dock South. Somebody else called him a liar, and a mod was threatening to lock it.

Greg looked up at the street sign and did the math. Nine blocks from Dock South.

He should turn around. He knew how those threads ended. He'd read the after-action posts with the candle emojis at the bottom.

He actually stopped. He turned back toward home, toward the desk and the cold half of a burrito and the replay waiting for him.

He stood there for a while.

Then he turned back around and kept going, and didn't try very hard to explain that one to himself.

* * *
​

The closer he got to the water, the emptier the streets got. Brockton Bay knew its own neighborhoods, and tonight everyone east of the tracks had decided to stay in.

And the flickers stopped flickering.

It built slowly, like a headache, except it was out there instead of in him. A pressure, low and wide, somewhere ahead. Nothing like the lunchroom thing, which had been small and precise, twenty feet away, a chipped tooth. This was huge and vague. He couldn't have pointed at it with a finger. He could have pointed at it with his whole arm.

It was hot. Not the air, which stayed cool on his skin, but some other sense entirely was reporting heat, the way you can feel an oven from across a kitchen. And under the heat, something was turning over, slow and steady, getting denser each time around.

He noticed he was sweating when his phone nearly slid out of his hand. His heart was going like it did in the dream where you've missed a whole semester of a class.

Fear, he told himself. You're six blocks from an ABB thing in the dark and you're scared. Scared people sweat.

Which was true. It just didn't explain the heat.

* * *
​

He heard the shouting before he understood it was shouting. Men's voices, quite a few, somewhere among the warehouses. The sound bounced off the brick so the direction kept moving. Every sensible part of him voted to stop, and he cut between two buildings instead and came out on a cross street with a clear view down to the docks.

The air was buzzing.

His first thought was a transformer. Then the buzz moved, swung past overhead in a low, ragged ribbon, and he looked up and saw insects. The wrong number of insects, flying in a pattern insects didn't fly in. Nothing did that without someone—

The PHO catalog in his head opened on its own. It was the one part of his brain that had never embarrassed him, and it ran the search in under a second. Brockton Bay capes with insect control: none. East Coast: none that were active. He'd read every classification thread and new-sighting thread going back two years. He could have told you the costume colors of villains in Boston. Nothing.

Under the fear, Greg felt a small, bright spark of awe.

New. Brand new. First-night new.

The next thing his PHO brain did was more practical. Every cape fight in this city ended up online by morning, filmed on somebody's phone from somebody's window, and PHO never forgot a face. He pulled his hood up. He'd grabbed his gray fleece neck gaiter off the hook on the way out, because April by the water was still cold, and he dragged it up over his nose until only his eyes were showing. He felt ridiculous. He kept it on.

He followed the ribbon down the block to where it gathered. There was a girl on the edge of a rooftop, one story up, against the orange haze the city threw up onto the clouds. Her costume looked homemade even from here, dark and ridged, nothing with a budget behind it. She was crouched very low, and the insects poured down past her into the lot beyond the building, where the voices were.

She was completely still, like someone who'd just realized the plan had ended a few seconds ago.

She was outmatched. Greg didn't need details for that. One new cape on a roof, a lot of voices below, and the pressure he'd been walking toward for a mile, which wasn't ahead of him any more.

It was here. He could feel it at the bottom of his senses like a wall, and now it had a center, and the center was moving.

He turned his attention onto it, and it got bigger.

Not seemed. Got. As if it had felt him looking and swelled to meet him.

Greg yanked the sense back like his fingers had touched a stove. The shape kept the size it had taken, and kept growing anyway, turning over and over, hotter each time. Below the girl's rooftop, a voice that was mostly fire said something short to the men around it.

Then Lung stepped into view.

The shape inside him wasn't sharp like Sophia's.

It was a furnace learning how to become a dragon.

 

[Durolord]

Greg's body decided to stay before his brain could object, and he ended up pressed flat against the corner of a loading dock with a clear view down into the lot.

Maybe a dozen men in ABB colors stood there in a loose ring, the way people stand when they want to be near power without being too near it. In the middle of the ring was Lung.

Greg had seen pictures. Everybody had. PHO had whole galleries, mostly blurry, mostly from far away, mostly of the dragon stages with the wings and the silver scales. Nobody photographed this stage, because nobody who saw it was thinking about their phone. A big, shirtless man in a metal dragon mask, tattoos running up his chest, pacing slowly through his men like he'd never once needed to hurry.

Inside him, the furnace turned over. Greg could feel it from sixty feet, a subwoofer thump in his chest: slow, heavy, rhythmic, like a heartbeat.

He kept his new sense pulled in tight. He remembered what had happened on the street when he'd looked at it too hard, and he wasn't going to—

Lung spoke. The voice had been built over years to carry over noise, and the accent rolled the words, but Greg heard every one of them.

"The children. Just kill them. Doesn't matter if they're heroes or villains or whatever, just shoot them. Shoot to kill."

The men laughed. One of them racked something.

Greg stood very still. His brain played the sentence back for him, because that was what his brain did, and it didn't get better the second time. The children, said the way you'd say the trash. There was no heat in it at all, which was strange from a man made of fire, and the men had laughed.

Greg knew that tone. He'd heard rooms use it about him, deciding what he was worth without asking and then going back to lunch.

He was still standing inside that sentence when the lot started screaming.

* * *
​

The ring blew apart all at once. Hands went to faces. Guns went off into the sky. Men folded sideways into each other. Greg's first wild thought was gas, and then the streetlight caught the air over the lot and he saw that the air was moving.

It was the bugs from the rooftop, all of them, dropped onto the lot like a curtain coming down.

His skin crawled in pure sympathy. The PHO part of his brain leaned forward with horrified interest, because a swarm was supposed to billow and this one didn't. He watched a column of insects split around a man's swinging arm and close up behind it. The thickest masses went for the same places again and again: eyes, mouths, ears, the hands holding guns. Men went down screaming about their eyes.

On the roof, the girl in the homemade costume crouched without moving, and Greg realized the stillness he'd taken for panic was concentration. She was the only calm thing in the lot. She was running it.

She'd heard the order too. Lung had said kill the children, and four seconds later the sky had fallen on his men.

* * *
​

Lung didn't go down screaming. He burned.

Fire came off his skin in a sheet, as casual as a shrug, and the bugs nearest him crisped out of the air in a halo of tiny sparks. And the furnace inside him climbed. Greg felt it without wanting to, the pressure leaning on his pulled-back sense like heat through an oven door, one step up, then another, the rhythm quickening.

In the firelight Lung's outline was already wrong. The shoulders too heavy. The arms too long, by an amount Greg's eyes kept refusing to accept.

His own voice from lunch came back to him. The whole fight is decided in the first two minutes.

He checked his phone without thinking. The fight was three minutes old.

So he'd been right. It didn't feel like being right. It felt like standing behind a wall watching a man grow, while a girl on a roof threw insects at him that had stopped mattering a step ago.

* * *
​

Run.

His brain gave him that answer straight away, with reasons. He was fifteen, in a hoodie and a neck gaiter. No costume, no training, no weapon, no power. The thing in his head was probably stress, and even if it wasn't, it was a sense, and you couldn't hit a dragon with a sense. If he stayed, he was a hostage waiting to happen. One more child for the order to apply to. The right move was to be four blocks away ninety seconds ago.

He knew all of it. His feet didn't move.

On the roof, the girl had started backing away from the edge in a low crouch, the bugs covering her. Smart.

But Lung had stopped paying attention to the bugs. The mask had tilted up, tracking her. He said something to what was left of his men, and two of the ones who could still see started round the far side of the building, the side with the stairs. Lung himself walked toward the wall beneath her, unhurried, fire crawling up his forearms in slow ropes.

Could she see the stairs side? Could the bugs see for her? Greg didn't know how it worked.

And for a dizzy second the lot was the lunchroom. A ring of watchers. One person alone in the middle, her worth already decided by a voice that didn't sound interested. And everyone else going around it, the way water goes around a rock, because that was what you did.

Greg had always been the rock. Tonight he was standing on the outside with everyone else, and all he had to do was what they always did, which was nothing.

* * *
​

The girl reached the edge above the alley and dropped to a fire escape, fast and controlled, almost clean.

Lung came round the corner below her before her feet hit the second landing. She didn't see him. Her head was turned toward the stairs side, toward the two men, and her bugs were over there too. Lung's arm was already coming up, and the rope of fire on it was already leaving, and Greg saw the whole shape of it from his useless angle.

He was running before the argument in his head could sit back down.

He didn't even shout a warning, which would have been the smart version of the stupid plan. He just ran, across open ground and into the alley and up the first half-flight of the fire escape two steps at a time, the whole thing clanging like an alarm. The girl spun toward the noise, which put her back to the fire, and Greg grabbed a fistful of costume at her shoulder and yanked her sideways and down.

They went over the low side of the landing rail onto the half-flight below in a tangle of arms and legs and clattering steel. Above them, the air where she'd been standing turned orange. The metal up there ticked and stank.

Greg landed mostly underneath her, which was the one competent thing his body did all night. The breath went out of him with a noise like a stepped-on accordion.

The bugs hit him before either of them had stopped moving.

They didn't sting. They landed, a sudden crawling weight on his neck and face and the backs of his hands, hundreds of points at once. Through watering eyes he saw the girl already up in a crouch on the stairs above him, lenses on him, one hand half raised. The swarm had moved faster than she had, and now she was catching up, deciding what he was.

Oh no oh no oh no—

"Sorry!" His voice came out at a pitch he would later refuse to remember. "Sorry, he was going to, there was fire, he threw, I think he was going to— I'm not with them! I'm deeply not with them. I'm not with anyone. I'm not even supposed to be here—"

The bugs lifted off his face. A thin crawling layer stayed on his wrists, and he understood that message fine.

"Who are you?" Her voice was low and tight through the mask.

"Nobody," Greg said, and meant it.

A sheet of fire hit the wall a floor above them, and the question stopped mattering.

* * *
​

"Move. That way, down, go—"

She was already moving, and the bugs on his wrists tugged, actually tugged, steering him like reins. Greg found that taking orders from a bug girl in a dragon attack was the easiest conversation he'd had all day. She didn't need him to say anything right. She needed him to be a body that went where it was pointed, and he could do that.

They came off the bottom of the fire escape into the alley and she pulled them both flat behind a dumpster. Her head was turned toward the brick, but he could tell she wasn't looking at it. Her attention was out around the block on a hundred thousand legs.

Greg pressed his back to the cold metal, and his other sense slipped open.

He didn't mean it to. It went the way your eyes go to a car crash. And Lung filled the mouth of the alley in Greg's head, not vague any more but built, an engine turning over with that heavy beat, and every turn added more.

Around the engine, he could feel what it was building toward. A huge outline, laid out in advance, the way you can feel the size of a dark room. Dragon-shaped and mostly empty. Lung wasn't growing so much as filling it in.

Oh, Greg thought, stupidly. It's a mold. All that stuff in his notebook about curves and windows, and the dragon had been designed before the fight even started. The only question was how fast it filled.

Then the outline turned toward him.

He never found a better way to describe it. The huge half-empty shape turned, like a satellite dish, and its attention came across sixty feet of night and found the place where his sense was touching it.

And pushed back.

Greg slammed the sense shut, much too late.

"He's coming," he said. "I don't know how I— he's coming at us. This side. Not the bugs. Us—"

The lenses turned on him for one beat. Then she went up the side of the dumpster, and her swarm peeled off everything else on the block and came together.

* * *
​

What happened next took about eight seconds, and Greg failed at it the entire time.

The swarm hit Lung at the mouth of the alley as one black club, more insects than should have existed on one block of the docks, straight into the eye slits of the mask. Lung was six and a half feet now, silver tracing his shoulders where scales were coming in, fire breathing off him in lazy sheets. He actually rocked back half a step and swiped at his own face.

"Go!" the girl shouted at Greg, her voice cracking on it, and pointed to the far end of the alley.

Greg went, badly. He made it four steps. A dock alley is a museum of things to fall over, and his foot found a flattened length of pipe with the precision his body saved for the worst possible moment. His ankle went sideways and he came down on one knee, palm skidding through grit.

The world behind him got bright.

Great. Good. Excellent cardio, Veder.

He turned around on the ground. Every thread agreed you didn't turn around; you ran and you didn't look. He turned anyway, one knee and one hand down, exactly the way he'd knelt on the lunchroom floor picking up his papers.

Lung was through the swarm and into the alley, and there was nothing between them.

The mask found him. The children. Just kill them. Doesn't matter. The huge scaled arm came down at him, not even fast, like a man swatting something off a table.

Greg's hand came up. There was no plan in it, just the reflex of anything grabbed at in the dark. His fingers hit the forearm coming down, kettle-hot under the scales, and closed.

And the part of him that had opened on the lunchroom floor didn't wait for permission.

It went through the contact all at once, and there was the furnace, right under his palm, no sixty feet of air between them now. Sophia's power had slid away from him like a reflection. This was the opposite. It was running flat out and pressed skin to skin against his grip.

Lung reached for him.

Greg grabbed back.

And the furnace had a handle.

 

[Lastword855]

Looking good so far. A bit disappointed this isn't NSFW.

 

[HowardOberheit]

Very compelling writing, looking forward to more.

 

[Durolord]

Greg would swear afterwards that time stopped. It didn't. The fire kept crawling, the swarm kept screaming, and his knee kept grinding into the grit. It was his attention that went somewhere else. It dropped into the contact like falling into deep water, and half a second of skin on scale-hot skin opened up around him into a place big enough to drown in.

He felt Lung in layers.

Nothing like the PHO categories, Brute and Blaster and a rating on a chart. More like textures, one under another. On top was the fire, loud, a roaring skin of heat that came from nowhere except Lung deciding to burn. Under it was the toughness, slow and stony and patient. Under that was the healing, and that one was almost gentle, ten thousand tiny repairs running all the time. For a fraction of the half-second Greg felt a stupid ache of envy. A body that fixed itself.

And threaded through all of it, holding it together, the engine.

From sixty feet away he'd felt it as a heartbeat. Up close it was simpler than that. It was one word, and every other layer was organized around it.

More.

Hit me and I'm more. Fight me and I'm more. Every second of the fight, traded in for bigger and stronger and longer.

And for one second, which he would never tell anyone about, Greg understood it from the inside. It felt natural. Obvious. It felt like a power built for someone who had decided, in some unimaginably bad hour of his life, that he was never going to be the smaller thing in a room again, and the engine had kept that promise every fight since.

Above it all hung the dragon-shaped outline, filling. And the engine was moving, climbing mid-stroke, every valve open. It was the most alive thing in Lung, and the most alive thing Greg had ever touched.

Then Lung's hand closed on his shoulder, and the pain went white down the whole left side of his body, and Greg panicked.

* * *
​

There wasn't any technique to what happened next. Nothing he could ever honestly call a decision. There was a fifteen-year-old's animal terror, and there was the part of him that had opened on the lunchroom floor, already through the contact, already touching the one moving thing.

The panic went down through that open part like a scream through a throat.

And the open part pulled.

The engine tore loose. It didn't come quietly. It came like a root out of packed ground, grinding through every layer it was threaded into. He felt the fire shudder and the healing spasm. Somewhere deep in Lung, something pulled tight and gave.

Far away, in his actual body, Greg heard himself make a noise. He heard Lung make one too.

Then it was out, and then it was in him, and above the alley the huge dragon-shaped outline, which had been filling all night, went quiet.

* * *
​

Lung stuttered. Six and a half feet of silver-traced muscle in the middle of a motion, and the motion hitched, like a film slipping on its reel.

The hand on Greg's shoulder jerked open. Lung took one step back, which nothing Greg had just felt inside him should have allowed. The fire on his arms guttered, the way a flame does when a door closes somewhere in the house. It didn't go out. The scales stayed. The size he'd already reached stayed. The fire, the toughness, the mending, they were all still his.

But the climb had stopped. Greg could tell by the silence where it used to be. That heartbeat he'd felt across a quarter of a mile was gone from the air. Lung could fight for another hour and finish it exactly as strong as he was right now.

Because the engine was in Greg's chest.

It went in like a second heartbeat, and it went in wrong. Out of step with his own, half a beat behind. Pressure bloomed under his breastbone and stayed. Heat, without any of the toughness that should have come with it. Every muscle he had came quietly up to a readiness he hadn't asked for, the brace of something that expects to be hit and plans to be more afterwards.

It was his. Something impossible had just become his.

And under the terror and the pain and the certainty that he was about to die, there was something else. Something quick and hot that he recognized before he could stop himself.

For one second, for the first time in his life, Greg Veder had been the bigger thing in the room, and some starved part of him had liked it.

He felt it for exactly as long as it took to recognize it. Then he shoved it down, fast and hard, into a hole somewhere at the back of himself, and covered it over, and didn't give it a name. There was a fight happening.

There was a fight happening, and the dragon was looking at him.

* * *
​

The mask had no expression. That was what masks were for. But for one more second the engine was still warm in Greg, half Lung's, and through it Lung's body read like plain text. Greg, who got tone wrong and timing wrong and needed a written rule to know when to stop talking, read him perfectly.

It wasn't pain. Lung had been eating pain his whole life.

It was loss. The huge frame was standing in the alley taking stock of itself and finding the foundation gone. Taken back. By a boy on his knees in a hoodie.

Lung made a sound, half roar and half word, mangled by a throat stuck between shapes. Nobody else in the alley could have understood it. Greg did, because the engine in his chest turned toward the voice like a dog hearing its old owner.

"Mine."

Then Lung came at him with everything he had left, which was still a building's worth of fire and muscle, and Greg's borrowed readiness surged up his spine.

* * *
​

What saved his life, in order:

The swarm, which dropped onto Lung's mask in one solid mass the instant he moved, because the girl had been waiting for exactly that.

A bottle of something, pepper spray or capsaicin, Greg never found out which, bursting against Lung's face inside the swarm.

The pipe. The same one that had betrayed his ankle. His hand found it on the ground and he swung it with hysterical strength into the side of Lung's knee, which bought him half a second of stagger. Half a second was all the fight had left to give.

And the dogs.

They came out of the dark at the mouth of the alley as if the dark had decided to join in. Three of them, each the size of a car, all spikes and bone plates and muscle in the wrong places. Greg's PHO brain matched them even mid-terror. Hellhound. Undersiders. Do not approach the animals.

They hit Lung at a full gallop, all three at once.

Crunch.

It sounded like a traffic accident. Lung went sideways through a chain-link fence, fire sheeting across dog hide, and the dogs didn't care. Up on the roofline there were new voices, a girl whooping and a boy counting something low and fast.

Lung got up once, burning, streaming insects, one arm hanging wrong. Every Lung fight ever recorded said this was where he got worse. Greg felt the whole alley wait for it. Even the dogs braced.

It didn't come. The fire stayed the same size, and so did he, and Greg saw the exact moment Lung understood that, in front of witnesses. A small sag. And the mask turning, past the dogs and the swarm and every real threat in the alley, to find Greg kneeling by a dumpster with a pipe in his hand.

It held there for a second. Two.

Then the biggest dog hit him again, and Lung fell wrong. Sideways and sudden, through the wreck of the fence, limbs in the wrong order, more like something crashing than something falling. Dust came down off the fire escape. The fire on him sank to a low, sullen glow.

He didn't get up.

* * *
​

The alley went quiet in stages. The dogs circled, blowing like horses. The swarm unwound upwards in loose ribbons. Greg became aware of his own breathing the way you become aware of a fire alarm that's apparently been going for a while.

He looked up. The girl in the homemade costume was ten feet away, looking at him.

The bugs left his wrists, all at once, like a hand coming off a pan someone's just realized is hot.

Then she took a small, controlled step back.

Greg read the step before he'd finished turning his head. He'd been reading that step his whole life, in hallways and lunchrooms and the backs of classrooms. He'd pulled her off a fire escape ahead of a sheet of flame, and here she was ten feet away, working out what he was, and stepping back from the answer.

"What did you do to him?" Her voice was flat. It barely made the shape of a question.

"I don't—" It came out in pieces. He looked down and found he was still holding the pipe, and there was blood on his palm where it had bitten in. "I grabbed— he grabbed me. I don't know. I think his power had a part that was going up. Like a motor. And I grabbed it."

"Did you steal Lung's power?"

She asked it plainly, like she needed the word out loud between them.

"No," Greg said. Instantly. Much too fast, a hand slapped down over something on a table.

She didn't move, and she didn't believe him.

"I mean. Maybe? Not all of it. There was a lot of it, and most of it wouldn't— I don't know, okay? I don't know what I did. I didn't know I could do anything until it had already—"

He stopped and looked at his own hand like he'd only just been introduced to it.

* * *
​

"Holy shit," said a new voice, delighted.

A blonde girl in lavender and black, with a domino mask, was picking her way over the fence with the bright, nosy interest of someone arriving at a garage sale.

"Okay, so, big guy's down. That's new. That's not how that usually—"

Her eyes found Greg, and her smile went away.

She looked at him like a word she'd read five times that wouldn't mean anything. Her head tilted a degree, then another. Then her hand came up and pressed two fingers hard into her temple, and her breath hissed out through her teeth.

"Ow," she said quietly, to herself. Then, to Greg, brighter, with something underneath: "And who are you supposed to be?"

"Nobody," Greg said, for the second time that night.

She winced again, harder, as if the word had a sharp corner.

Somewhere to the south a motorcycle engine was getting louder. A boy in silks like a Renaissance Faire costume, standing at the mouth of the alley, said one name, and everybody moved.

"Armsmaster."

The dogs grew. The capes climbed on. The blonde girl walked backwards the whole way out, eyes on Greg like he was a math problem that had caught fire.

The bug girl hesitated. One second, lenses on him.

"Go home," she said. "Whatever you are. Go home."

Then they were all gone over the rooftops, and Greg was alone in an alley with an unconscious dragon and a motorcycle getting closer.

He ran.

* * *
​

He ran badly, on a twisted ankle, with his lungs burning. At the end of the block, cutting across a lot, he splashed through a puddle and glanced down without meaning to. The streetlight was behind him, so his face was in shadow, but his eyes caught the light anyway, for a second, like an animal's.

He told himself it was the streetlight and kept going.

A block later his foot came down on a curb he hadn't seen, and the jolt sent a spike of plain, stupid, tripping-in-the-dark fear through him.

The engine answered.

One stroke. Heat flushed up through his chest and his whole body came back up to that readiness, every muscle quietly informed. Nothing a camera would have seen. Just the feeling of something inside him noticing the fear and asking, very politely, the only question it knew.

More?

Greg caught the fence and his balance and stood there in the dark with his heart slamming and the second heartbeat slamming half a beat behind it.

"No," he said out loud, in a voice that cracked. "No, no. Stay. Stay."

The engine idled back down, and waited. It was very good at waiting. It had been built for it. And it would be right here under his breastbone, ready, the next time anything in the world raised a hand to him.

Then he started the long walk home.

Behind him at the docks, the dragon lay in the wreck of a fence and didn't get up. Greg was still on his feet, and in his chest the thing he'd taken from Lung started, very quietly, to climb.

 

[Durolord]

Taylor Hebert had beaten Lung, and she couldn't make herself believe it.

She was crouched on a rooftop two buildings from the wrecked fence, with her bugs spread through four blocks. Blue-white light from an approaching motorcycle was strobing up the warehouse walls. Below her, Lung lay in chain-link and ash, out cold, on her first night, against the one cape everyone in the city agreed couldn't be beaten. Months of planning, of running before school and sewing silk in her bedroom and filling notebooks, and the result was better than anything she'd let herself imagine.

She was shaking, and not from that.

She'd felt the whole fight through a hundred thousand small bodies. She'd tasted the smoke on a thousand sets of mouthparts. And she knew exactly what had happened, because she'd been everywhere in that alley at once. A boy with no costume and no sense had grabbed Lung's arm, and Lung had broken.

* * *
​

She kept a knot of flies over the spot where it had happened.

The boy was gone. She'd tracked him two blocks through her range, a skinny shape lurching on a bad ankle. He'd stopped at a fence, swaying, and said something out loud to nobody, and her bugs hadn't been close enough to hear it. That bothered her more than it should have. Then he'd walked north, out of her range, an ordinary kid under the streetlights.

I think his power had a part that was going up, he'd said, blood on his palm, voice cracking. And I grabbed it.

She'd asked him straight out if he'd stolen Lung's power, and he'd said no so fast it was almost a flinch. Then all the rest of it had come pouring out, maybe, not all of it, I don't know what I did, and he'd looked at his own hand like it belonged to a stranger.

That was when she'd stopped being afraid of Lung and started being afraid of him.

You could plan for a dragon. She had planned for this dragon, in a notebook, like a lunatic, and the plan had been wrong, but Lung had at least been the kind of thing you could write a plan about. The boy was a skinny kid who said sorry while saving your life, and he'd reached inside the strongest parahuman on the East Coast and pulled out the part that made him Lung.

Could he do that to anyone? Could he do it to her?

She reached for the swarm without meaning to and felt it the way she always did: a pressure at the back of her skull, a map of four blocks that was also somehow her own body. It was the only thing that locker had given her instead of taking. And somewhere north of here there was a boy who might be able to reach in through the skin of her wrist and take it out of her like a wallet, and leave her with a silence where four blocks of the world used to be.

She'd stood ten feet from him thinking that, and her body had decided before she had. Bugs off his wrists. One step back.

He'd noticed. Something had crossed his eyes, very blue in the firelight and the only part of him showing over that gray gaiter, and it wasn't anger. It looked like recognition, like he'd been on the wrong end of that step his whole life.

Taylor knew the feeling. She knew it from hallways and locker bays, and from a lunch table where a seat had stopped being saved for her. She knew exactly what it was like to watch somebody decide what you were.

She'd done it to him anyway, and in the middle of everything that had happened tonight, that was the part that made her feel ashamed.

The motorcycle pulled into the lot. Armsmaster swung off it, and Taylor put the boy away and climbed down to have the conversation she'd rehearsed for a different kind of victory.

* * *
​

Greg made it eleven blocks before his body handed him the bill.

He'd been expecting a crash. PHO had whole threads about the shakes and the hollow legs after a fight. He hadn't expected the engine to notice.

As the fear drained out of him, block by block, the engine read the change and recalibrated. It wasn't an attack. Even while it was happening he could tell it wasn't broken or angry. It was doing its job, which was reading the body it lived in and setting readiness to match. And the body was eleven blocks from a dragon, soaked in sweat, ankle screaming, blood sugar on the floor. As far as the engine was concerned, that meant danger, and danger meant full readiness.

His heart, which had been settling, jumped from eighty to a hundred and forty in a breath. Every muscle from his neck to his calves went tight at once and stayed there.

In Lung, that would have been free. Lung's body could tear and knit back together in seconds. Greg was fifteen, with ordinary ribs, and nothing in him was built to hold that.

His skin felt two sizes too small. His hands cramped into half-fists and he had to pry them open. Heat came off him into the cold night, his body burning fuel for a fight that was eleven blocks behind him and getting further away.

Around the thirteenth block he tasted copper, touched his upper lip, and his fingers came away dark.

"Oh, come on," he told the blood.

* * *
​

"Walk me through it again," Armsmaster said. "From his arrival."

Taylor stood in the lot with her arms folded over the armor she'd spent months making. Ten minutes ago it had felt like real armor.

He'd wrapped Lung in containment foam as briskly as someone bagging groceries. He'd taken her name, or the name she hadn't finished choosing, which had come out as "Bug," like a sneeze. His lie detector had probably logged the hesitation. By his own standards, she suspected, he was being polite.

Now he was crouched over Lung with a gauntlet scanner, and it had been running too long, and his mouth under the visor had gone tight.

"The Undersiders arrived after Lung was already compromised," she said. "Their dogs took him down."

True, and rehearsed. Compromised was doing a lot of work.

"Compromised how?"

"He stopped escalating."

"Lung doesn't stop escalating." He didn't look up. He said it the way you'd correct someone's spelling. "His ramp continues until the threat is gone or he disengages. I've fought him." The gauntlet chimed, and he frowned and ran it again. "His readings are consistent with a transformation winding down. They are not consistent with his file. There's a—"

He stopped, and she watched him decide that whatever it was sat above her clearance. He stood up.

"Something interrupted him mid-ramp. I'm asking you what."

* * *
​

She could give him the boy.

There was a civilian. He grabbed Lung's arm, and Lung just stopped. All of it true. The lie detector would love it.

And then the whole PRT would turn toward a skinny kid in a hoodie who could steal powers. Taylor had read enough PHO threads to guess what happened to people like that.

He'd pulled her off a fire escape ahead of a sheet of fire, babbling. Sorry, sorry, I'm deeply not with them. Whatever he was, she was nearly sure he hadn't known what he could do. Nobody acted that badly on purpose.

And if she gave Armsmaster the boy, she'd have to explain how she knew about him. The fire escape. The bugs on his wrists. Her whole night. She had things in this lot she wasn't ready to hand over either.

He's dangerous, she thought. He saved me. She didn't like that both of those were true.

"It was chaos," she said slowly, checking each sentence as she said it. "Bugs in his eyes. Pepper spray. He took a hit to the knee. The dogs came out of nowhere and hit him three times. I was focused on keeping my swarm on his face. I couldn't see everything that happened in that alley."

Every word of it was true. She'd just left the important part out.

Armsmaster's head tilted a fraction. She could almost hear the lie detector going over it and finding nothing to flag.

"There's blood on a length of pipe by the fire escape," he said. "It isn't Lung's. Presumably it isn't yours."

"One of the ABB?" she said. A question couldn't be a lie. Probably.

He looked at her for three long seconds.

* * *
​

A dog barked behind a fence on block sixteen, sudden and close.

The engine turned before Greg even flinched. His heart slammed, his vision went white at the edges, and his knees got the message late. He sat down hard on somebody's low garden wall.

Not again. Not again not again—

He put his head between his knees and bled a little more from the nose and counted the bricks between his shoes. Twelve. Twelve was fine. Twelve was not on fire.

"Stay," he whispered. "It's over. It's a dog. Stay. Down."

It listened. That was the worst part. It idled back down as smoothly as a machine that bore him no ill will at all and would do exactly the same thing next time. There was nothing to fight. It was like someone had bolted a jet turbine into a hatchback. The turbine worked perfectly. The hatchback was him.

He laughed once into his knees, and it scared him.

* * *
​

"You did notable work tonight," Armsmaster said at last, and then went into a speech Taylor realized he'd had ready the whole time.

The dangers of independent heroics. How Lung, awake in a cell, would want the name of whoever had brought him down. How it would really be safer for her if the official record kept things simple, and the credit went somewhere that could survive it.

Taylor nearly laughed. He was the second person tonight to take something off Lung's body, and at least he'd asked first.

"Fine," she said. "It's yours."

It wasn't really hers to give. She gave it anyway.

He offered her a ride, and she said no. He offered a debrief at the Rig, a card, a number to call. She took the card so he'd stop offering things. Then she went up the side of a warehouse the way she'd practiced, and across two roofs, and only when she was three blocks away and alone did she sit down on the gravel and put her head on her knees.

She reached for the swarm. It was all there, every fly and every roach in every wall and the moths around the streetlight on the corner.

She checked twice more on the way home anyway.

* * *
​

Greg got home at 1:40 in the morning. The house was dark. His mom's door was shut, and the TV murmuring behind it meant she'd fallen asleep in front of it again. Greg checked his phone. No missed calls. He decided to count that as good news.

In the bathroom mirror, Greg understood why the girl had stepped back. Dried blood under his nose and along his lip. A spray of burst blood vessels across the white of his left eye. The shoulder where Lung had grabbed him was already going plum-purple, in the shape of fingers. And he was standing wrong, stiff as a plucked wire. When he tried to drop his shoulders they came down an inch and then crept back up. The engine was still idling, and idle, for the engine, meant ready.

He cleaned up at the sink with the water at a trickle and flushed the red tissues. Then he did what he always did when something was too big to look at all at once, and went down it item by item, under his breath.

"Ankle. Swollen. Shoulder. Fingerprints. Nose. Possibly done, possibly lying about it. Heart." Two fingers on his neck, counting against his watch. "Ninety-six. At rest. Hours after anything actually dangerous."

The engine could put him in the hospital without a single enemy in sight. He'd taken it and left everything that made it survivable, the toughness and the healing, back in a parking lot, because it had been the part that was moving. He hadn't chosen. He wasn't sure that made it better.

He leaned in close to the mirror. For a second, under the bathroom light, the iris of his red eye looked a shade too gold. He blinked and it was blue again. He'd been awake for twenty hours, and he'd been grabbed by a dragon.

"Okay," he whispered, to himself or to it. "Okay. So we have a problem."

The engine idled under his breastbone, half a beat late, and didn't seem to think so.

He lay down on top of the covers fully dressed. Getting a shirt off over that shoulder was a job for some future Greg. The walk home replayed itself on the ceiling, and he noticed, distantly, that the editor was still empty. He went looking for the face he should have worn in that alley, the sensible one that stayed home, the obedient one that ran when he was told, and none of them fit over what had happened.

And underneath the replay, under the bruise and the offbeat idle, the small hot thing from the alley shifted in the hole he'd dug for it. The feeling of being the bigger thing.

Greg rolled over on top of it and didn't look.

* * *
​

Taylor got home at two. She came in through the back door and stood in the dark kitchen, still in the costume, listening to her dad snore upstairs. She'd let the swarm go except for a few. A spider in the corner by the fridge. Two moths on the porch light.

She'd made a notebook for Lung. She thought about making one for the boy, and tried to work out what she actually knew.

Male, fifteen or so. Blond hair, too long, what little stuck out of the hood. Blue eyes, and a gray gaiter over everything below them. A Winslow hoodie under the soot, she was almost sure. A voice that cracked when he was scared, which had been the whole time, and which she was fairly sure she'd heard somewhere before. He'd said sorry four times in thirty seconds. He'd put himself underneath her when they fell. And when she'd asked what he was, he'd said nobody like it was something he'd checked.

She knew that one too.

She sat down at the kitchen table in a costume that stank of smoke and pepper spray, and on the first page of a new notebook she wrote, in small careful letters:

Can he take it without touching?

She underlined it twice. Then, below it, smaller, because she was honest even when nobody was checking:

He didn't try to take mine.

* * *
​

At the docks, the last PRT van door closed on a foam-wrapped dragon whose readings didn't match his file.

Armsmaster stood a moment longer at the mouth of the alley. The bug girl had gone over the rooftops the way the Undersiders had, turning down everything except the trade. The scene techs had photographed the fence, the scorch marks, the dead insects drifted in the gutters like black snow.

The pipe lay where it had been flagged, with a yellow evidence marker beside the dark smear on the grip. Type O. Donor unknown. A civilian's blood, in an alley where, according to the only witness, there hadn't been any civilian.

Everyone kept saying the fight was over. Armsmaster looked at the place where Lung had fallen, and then, last of all, at the empty alley where someone's blood had dried on a pipe.

 

[Jarski]

Oof, Greg is going to have an interesting time explaining those wounds! I'm looking forward to more.

 

[Durolord]

The problem with the night's data was that all of it was good.

Colin had built a career on bad data, sensor noise and witness error, and on tools that cut through it. At 3:55 in the morning, alone in his lab with the Lung file open across four screens, those tools were telling him with high confidence that something impossible had happened. He did not accept impossible. It meant the model needed revising.

So he revised.

He started, as always, with the cleanest dataset. Gauntlet diagnostics from the scene, cross-referenced against PRT medical's intake scans from forty minutes ago, cross-referenced against the master file.

The master file on Lung was thick. Colin had contributed to it personally, with his own armor's sensors, on three occasions, one of which had put him in medical for a week.

Lung's escalation had a shape. Energy output, mass gain, regeneration: all of it climbed along a curve that varied with stimulus but had never, in eleven years of records across two continents, changed its fundamental character. Steady increase under sustained conflict. Gradual decay after disengagement.

Out of combat, the curve relaxed. It had never simply ended.

He had the night's reconstruction on the center screen, built from thermal satellite passes, two seismic pickups and his own readings. He'd been looking at it for an hour, the way you look at a sentence with a word missing.

Lung's output climbing through the engagement, steep and characteristic, every point sitting obediently on the projected ramp. And then, at 23:41:17, a break.

Not decay. Not the long post-fight slope he'd measured three times with his own equipment. A vertical drop to a flat line. The escalation simply stopped, mid-fight, while Lung was still taking damage. Under conditions where the curve had never, in recorded history, done anything but climb.

After 23:41:17, Lung's output held level. He kept the mass he'd gained, the fire, the regeneration, which was now fading in medical along the normal post-fight slope.

That made it worse. The rest of the power was healthy. One function had been deleted from it.

Colin did not use words like deleted in reports. He used it now, privately, at 3:55 a.m., because it was the accurate word, and the accurate word was the problem.

Powers were suppressed, disrupted, countered, drained. There were known Trumps for every one of those verbs, with known signatures, and he had spent forty minutes ruling each of them out against the data. Nothing on file produced a clean, instant removal of a single power function while leaving the rest working. Nothing on file even aimed at that.

A new verb, then, which meant a new parahuman.

He pulled up the footage.

* * *
​

The camera belonged to a freight depot two lots north of the fight. A fifteen-year-old unit mounted to deter theft. Twelve frames per second, no audio, the lens fogged with salt.

Its field of view caught the mouth of the alley at a slant, half blocked by a fence. As evidence, it was garbage. Colin had requested it anyway. The depot's security contractor had taken forty minutes to produce eighty-eight relevant seconds.

Colin had now watched those eighty-eight seconds fifteen times.

He started the sixteenth.

Frame: the alley, smeared with light from Lung's fire off-screen. The insect mass registering as grain across everything. And at the left edge, mostly behind the fence line, a figure.

Male. Adolescent. Gait analysis put the probability above ninety percent on fifteen to seventeen. Roughly five foot ten, slight build. A hooded sweatshirt, hood up. The lower face covered by something dark, a scarf or a knit gaiter. In no frame was more than the eyes visible, and the lens never resolved those. No costume, no armor, no visible equipment. Colin had enhanced every frame where the hands were visible, and the hands held nothing until the pipe, and the pipe came later and was scenery.

The figure stood at the alley's edge for two minutes and eleven seconds.

Colin had run the posture against the PRT's behavioral library, and the library said what his own eyes said. Not a surveillance stance. Not an ambush stance. Not the readiness of anyone with training of any kind.

A textbook freeze response. Shoulders climbing, weight back, half-turned toward escape the entire time and never taking it. A bystander whose flight reflex had jammed.

Then, at 23:39:46, the figure moved.

Not away. Across open ground, into the fight, at a sprint the analysis software scored as untrained, near-maximal, inefficient. The fence hid the next nine seconds. Thermal data suggested he'd gone up the fire escape.

When he came back into frame, he was at the bottom of the structure, in a heap, with the insect controller. Colin noted for the file that the heap was consistent with a pull and a fall, with the boy underneath. He had put his own body below hers for the landing.

Untrained people did that by accident roughly never.

The rest of the footage degraded as Lung's fire flooded the cheap sensor. But the essential sequence survived.

The boy, trying to flee, falls over debris. Lung, by then over six feet, partly scaled, his output still climbing, closes in and strikes downward. The boy's arm comes up into the strike.

Contact at 23:41:16.

Break at 23:41:17.

Colin had stepped through it frame by frame so many times that the timestamps had stopped being numbers. At twelve frames a second, the whole event lived inside about fourteen frames. He had enhanced all fourteen. No weapon. No device. No projected effect. No energy signature on any band the depot's sensor could have caught, and nothing his own scene readings suggested after the fact.

There was a hand, an arm, skin contact, and then the most documented power curve on the East Coast lost a function.

Correlation was not causation. Colin had that principle installed at the level of firmware.

He also had eleven years of Lung data in which the curve had never ended, and one night in which it ended within a second of contact with an unidentified teenager. His discipline did not allow him to call that a coincidence.

* * *
​

He pulled up the transcript of his conversation with the insect controller. Bug, allegedly. The hesitation before she'd said it was 0.4 seconds. Long for a prepared identity, short for an invention. Consistent with a real cape name not yet settled.

The lie detection software had passed her. Every statement she'd made fell within truthful parameters. Stressed, guarded, but truthful.

That bothered him. Rookies lied badly, one sentence at a time, and their lies flagged. This girl's testimony had no flags and no information.

It was chaos. I was focused on my swarm. I couldn't see everything that happened in that alley.

Each sentence true. Together, they described a blindness her own abilities contradicted. He had watched her insects work in the later part of the fight, with a target discrimination that implied she could sense position through the swarm itself. Fine-grained. Many points at once.

A surveillance network of a hundred thousand bodies had been spread through that alley for the entire event. And its operator's account was that she hadn't seen.

Testimony where every piece passed and the whole didn't add up had been put together in advance. She had walked into the conversation already protecting something.

The list of candidates for something was short. At the top of it was someone with type O blood, who had left some of it on a pipe eleven feet from the point of contact.

He added a note to her file. Cooperative, capable, withholding. Do not mistake compliance for alignment. He flagged the credit arrangement for review in thirty days.

The arrangement itself was sound. Lung awake and vengeful in a cell was a real risk to an independent minor, and the official story was safer for everyone. That it was also cleaner for the Protectorate's numbers was incidental.

He noticed himself noticing that, and set it aside.

* * *
​

At 4:30 he opened a new file. Classification pending. Access: himself.

He typed:

Unknown parahuman. Male, adolescent (est. 15–17), no costume, no equipment, no prior file match. Present at Lung engagement. Physical contact with subject Lung at 23:41:16; termination of subject's escalation function at 23:41:17 (see attached curve analysis). Mechanism unknown. No energy signature detected. Persistence of effect unknown. Flag Lung's medical telemetry for long-term monitoring.

Provisional assessment: Trump, subcategory undetermined. If effect constitutes permanent alteration of parahuman function via contact, threat ceiling is —

He stopped. He looked at the cursor.

The honest end of that sentence contained words that triggered automatic processes.

If he wrote potential S-class tonight, the file would leave his hands by morning. Piggot's desk, then the regional directors, then an assessment team that would model the boy from Colin's data without ever watching the eighty-eight seconds. And the machine would do what it always did with Trump nightmares, which was containment first.

Containment first, against an unidentified subject, meant a citywide hunt for a teenager whose entire known behavior consisted of freezing, intervening to save a stranger, apologizing, falling over a pipe, and running away from his own victory.

The footage had no audio. The body language in the heap sequence was unmistakably apologetic anyway.

The data did not support S-class. That was the defensible position. One event, one subject, mechanism unobserved, no evidence of intent, no evidence the effect could even be repeated. Premature classification would spread uncertainty through the response system and waste resources on a variable that was, for now, best developed through observation.

Surveillance first. That was sound methodology. He believed it, and he wrote it.

He was also aware, in the walled-off way he was aware of things he'd decided not to weigh, that a contact-based power-altering Trump, identified and described by him, developed under his lead, was the kind of finding that ended up in textbooks. And that handing it to the machine tonight meant it stopped being his at nine a.m.

He did not write that down. It was not relevant to the methodology.

He finished the assessment:

— significant. Recommend: no public disclosure, no general alert. Blood evidence (type O, sample C) to priority sequencing. Depot footage to enhancement queue. Passive flags: ER admissions matching subject profile (bruising, possible shoulder trauma, nosebleed); school absence records for the next five days; PHO activity referencing power loss, theft or alteration. Surveillance posture only. Review at first match.

The lab queued the footage enhancement automatically. The request went where such requests went. Ninety seconds later, a small green window opened itself in the corner of his main screen.

Dragon: Late night, Colin. Interesting footage parameters. Anything I should know about?

He looked at the window for four seconds.

Armsmaster: Open investigation. Early stage. I'll brief you when there's something worth your time.

Dragon: That's what you said about the nanothorn project.

Armsmaster: And I briefed you.

Dragon: Eight months later. Flagging this one for follow-up. Goodnight, Colin.

The window closed.

He sat for a moment with the mild irritation those exchanges always left him, then pulled up the footage one last time and let it run at full speed. No enhancement, no overlay. Eighty-eight seconds, the way a bystander would have seen them.

A boy freezes at the edge of a dragon fight. A boy runs the wrong way. A boy pulls a stranger out of the fire, falls down, and puts his bare hand up against the end of his own life.

And the end of his life stops.

Then, holding a victory the entire Protectorate East-North-East had never once managed, in possession of the most valuable capability Colin had ever put in a file, the boy runs away from it. No claim. No name. He flees the scene of his own miracle like a kid who's broken a window.

Every point in the file fit one of two models. A subject sophisticated enough to fake total incompetence in front of a camera he couldn't have known was there. Or a subject who had discovered his power the moment it fired, with his hand on a dragon's arm.

The data said the second model.

For one unguarded moment at 4:51 in the morning, he felt the assessment soften in his hands. Just a kid. No intent. No training.

He caught it. That softening got people killed.

No intent. No training. No understanding of how it worked, its limits, how long it lasted, or what it cost. A teenager in shock, carrying a touch-range ability that had deleted a function from Lung, walking around the city right now, unidentified, unmonitored, and unaware.

That did not make him safer.

It made him untrained.

Colin saved the file, set the flags live, and started designing the search.

 

[Jarski]

Some very interesting details here such as the automatic flagging system, and the modelling of Greg. I'm looking forward to more.

 

[J4ck j4ckson]

Great chapter, i more curious to how much greg and taylor will grow as characters here

 

[Durolord]

The first lie Greg told after stealing a dragon's heart was to his mom, over cereal, on Monday morning.

The weekend hadn't needed one. His mom worked doubles Saturday and Sunday, and Greg spent both days mostly asleep, with his door shut and his hood up whenever he heard the car. Monday had breakfast.

"I'm sick," Greg said.

His mom looked at him.

Greg had spent twenty minutes in the bathroom mirror getting ready for this look. He'd arranged his collar over the finger-shaped bruise, checked that the burst blood vessel had faded to a pink smudge in the corner of his eye, and practiced a face that said mild stomach thing.

"You don't look sick," his mom said. "You look like you lost a fight."

"I fell," Greg said, and then, because his mouth had never once quit while it was ahead: "Off my bike. The curb came up weird on Aldgate, there's that bit where the tree roots push the asphalt up? I wasn't even going fast, I just came down wrong on my shoulder, and the handlebar got my face a little, which is why the eye thing, which looks way worse than it is, it's a capillary thing, they fade in like a week, I looked it up—"

His mom's eyebrows had been climbing through all of this at the steady rate of a woman watching her son build a house out of wet cardboard.

"Your bike," she said, "has a flat. It's had a flat since March."

Silence.

"I walked it back," Greg said.

His mom looked at him for a long time, and Greg watched her decide, the way a hundred teachers and counselors had decided, that this was a problem she was too tired to open before work. Bullies again. Poor kid. Don't push.

"Stay home," his mom said. "Ice the shoulder. We'll talk about the bike."

Greg spent the morning on the couch chewing on that. The lie hadn't worked because it was good. It had worked because a kid coming home bruised and evasive was something his mom had seen before, and nobody looks hard at a story they already expect. It made him feel worse than getting caught would have.

The engine idled under his breastbone, half a beat late, and had no opinion.

* * *
​

He'd stayed off PHO all weekend, mostly by sleeping through it. On Monday he lasted until eleven.

Just reading, he told himself. Not posting. Not even logged in. XxVoid_CowboyxX had posted about cape mechanics nearly every day for two years, and the account could take a week off. The whole city was chewing on Friday night, and he was the only person alive who knew what had actually happened, and not looking was physically worse than the shoulder.

The official story had landed Saturday morning.

ARMSMASTER DEFEATS LUNG.

Containment. Transfer to a parahuman detention facility. A PRT statement that said nothing in three paragraphs.

The thread under it was four hundred pages long and doing what threads did. Celebration. Skepticism. Empire trolls. ABB doom-posting. And woven all through it, building up, a second conversation.

anyone else think the timeline's weird? lung doesn't go down in 20 min

my cousin's building faces the docks, says there were DOGS. like car sized dogs. thats hellhound, why isnt anyone

so we're all just accepting that lung "stopped ramping"?? since when

His fingers had typed half a reply before he caught them.

Actually, if you model the escalation as a discrete function rather than

Delete. Delete delete delete.

He sat on his hands, the lunchroom trick, and closed the laptop. The only person he could have talked to about any of it had told him go home, whatever you are, and didn't know his name.

* * *
​

He stayed home Tuesday too.

The ankle went down. The shoulder went from plum to a sort of thundercloud yellow at the edges. He googled capillary eye heal time nine times and got the same answer nine times.

He also started to learn the engine. It didn't seem to care about danger so much as stress. A car backfiring two streets over. The phone ringing. A cooking show host raising her voice at a contestant. Every time, the half-stroke, the heat, the brace.

At four in the afternoon the toaster popped.

Greg had put the bread in himself. He had been standing next to it, waiting for it. It popped, and the engine slammed through a full stroke, and his heart hit one-forty, and his whole body went into fight stance in his own kitchen in his socks.

He ended up sitting on the linoleum with a dish towel pressed to his nose while the toast went cold in the slots.

"You beat Lung," he told the ceiling, "and lost to bread."

He ate the toast anyway.

* * *
​

That evening he was microwaving dinner when a fly landed on the kitchen window. Then a second one. Then a third, settling in a neat, deliberate line on the outside of the glass.

Greg stopped with a fork in his hand. The line grew, and bent, and he stood in his kitchen and watched several hundred insects build themselves into letters on the glass.

BACKYARD. ALONE. NOW.

The engine turned half a stroke. Heat under his breastbone, his pulse spiking.

He pressed a hand flat against his chest like he was holding a door shut.

"It's fine," he whispered. "Probably."

It held. Barely.

The letters on the window broke apart and came back together as one more word, in case the first message had been unclear.

VEDER.

* * *
​

The backyard at dusk was six kinds of shadow, and she'd picked the deepest one. The corner by the fence, where the neighbor's overgrown hedge ate the streetlight.

She was in the costume. Yellow lenses, gray-black armor panels, a girl-shaped absence against the leaves. And the air in the yard had a faint moving grain to it that his skin understood before his brain did.

He was standing inside her swarm. He had probably been standing inside it since the kitchen.

"You're not sick," she said. Flat. "You've been out of school two days. You were limping Friday and you're not limping now. So it wasn't that bad. So you're hiding."

"Okay. Several things," Greg said, and could already hear himself going. "One, it was that bad, ankles just heal on a curve, the first two days are the worst and then it's fine. Two, I'm not hiding, I'm strategically absent, those are different. And three, which I really feel should have been one: how do you know my name? And my house? There were words on my window. Which, by the way, incredible. Terrifying. The coolest and worst thing that has ever happened to my kitchen—"

"You sat in front of me in World Issues for a semester."

Greg stopped.

Without the dragon and the screaming, he could hear the voice properly, and he knew it. Two rows back and one seat to the left. The tall quiet girl who never talked. The girl from the locker, in January, the thing the whole school had pretended not to know about.

Her name was right there, and he nearly said it. For once in his life, the brakes worked.

"…Okay," he said instead, very carefully, like setting a glass down. "You know me. I'm not going to. Know you. Out loud. If that's. Yeah."

She studied him. She seemed, maybe, surprised.

"It took me till Sunday to place your voice," she said after a moment. "There are four Veders in the phone book. One of them is north of where I lost you on Friday. You walked out of my range talking to yourself."

Greg's face went hot. "That was a private conversation."

"With who?"

* * *
​

She told him about Armsmaster first.

He stood by the fence in the dark and listened, and it got worse as it went.

The lie detector in the helmet. "He times your pauses. I could feel it timing me."

The gauntlet scanning Lung over and over because the readings didn't match his file. The word anomalous, twice. Lung doesn't stop escalating, said like he was correcting her math.

The pipe. Flagged, photographed, bagged.

"Your blood," she said. "They have your blood."

"He took the credit. That was the deal. He gets the win, and there's no rookie for Lung to come looking for." A pause with something swallowed in it. "He never asked if anyone else was there. He asked what interrupted Lung. Like it was a malfunction. He's not looking for a person, Veder. He's looking for a mechanism. And when he finds out the mechanism has a face and a class schedule, do you think that conversation happens in your backyard?"

Greg opened his mouth to say something reassuring.

What came out was "They'd want to test it."

"…Yeah."

"That's what you do with a mechanism. You characterize it. Range. Conditions. Can you repeat it." He'd read the threads. He knew the polite words for it. Power testing. Master/Stranger screening. Classification review. "They'd want to know if it works on anyone. Which means volunteers. Which means. And there's no version where they figure out a power like this and then just let it walk around going to tenth grade. Is there."

She didn't answer.

Greg stood in his own backyard and felt a new rule settle in next to if the room goes quiet, stop talking.

Heroes do not mean safe.

* * *
​

"So," she said. "Third time. The fire escape, the alley, now. What did you do to Lung?"

"I told you, I don't—"

"You said I don't know what I did. That was Friday. You've had four days alone in a house with it. Don't tell me you don't know more."

Something small landed on the back of his neck and stayed there.

"Did you steal his power?"

"No—" He heard it come out too fast again. "I mean. Not all of it. There were layers, okay? The fire, and the toughness, and the healing. I didn't take those. Those are still his, I felt them stay." His hand came up, helpless, and pressed flat over his breastbone. "I took the part that was moving. The part that goes up. He had this engine, this thing that turned fighting into more, and it was running, and he grabbed me and I panicked, and the panic went through this part of me that opened last week at school. I don't control it. I didn't choose. It just pulled. And now—"

"Now what."

"Now it's in me," Greg said. "And I don't have any of the rest of him. And it's trying to help me, and it's going to kill me doing it."

The yard was very quiet.

"Explain that," she said. Different voice. Carefully different.

So he did.

The walk home. His heart slamming against ribs with no scales on them. Muscles that braced for free in Lung's body and charged full price in his. The nosebleeds. The dog on block sixteen.

He was four sentences in when it happened, because talking about it was stressful, and that was all the engine needed. Heat flushed up his chest. His heart kicked from anxious to combat between one word and the next, and every muscle he had braced, in a backyard, in sweatpants, in front of a girl from his class. His hands cramped. And the warmth started at his upper lip again.

"Okay," he managed. "Okay. This. This is it doing the thing."

He turned half away from her, pinching his nose, his free hand pressed to his chest, and dropped into the low, urgent dog-trainer voice he'd developed alone in his bathroom at two in the morning.

"Stay. Hey. Stay. It's nothing. She's not. Nothing's happening. Down."

And the engine idled back down, as if it had only ever been trying to help.

It left him standing there bleeding gently from the nose in front of the only person who knew what he'd done.

* * *
​

The swarm had gone completely still, every small body in the air holding position. He couldn't see her face. He had no idea what she was thinking, and he was too busy bleeding to guess.

"It responds to stress," she said slowly. "Not danger. Stress. It can't tell the difference between Lung and a conversation."

"It can't tell the difference between Lung and the toaster," Greg said, through his pinched nose. "I made toast this afternoon. The toast won."

A sound came out of her, brief and strangled, nearly a laugh. It was the first sound she'd made all night that wasn't flat.

The thing on his neck lifted off. The ten feet between them stayed exactly where it was, but she didn't add to it.

"This is what we're going to do," she said at last.

Greg noticed the we, and decided not to say anything about it in case she took it back.

"You're going to stay off PHO—"

"I'm already—"

"You typed half a reply on Monday. I had a fly on your laptop, Veder."

Greg tried very hard not to think about what else that fly might have seen.

"Stay off. You go back to school tomorrow looking bored, with a story about your bike that you tell once. One sentence. You never add details. If anyone asks twice, you shrug. Can you shrug?"

"I can shrug."

"Show me."

He shrugged.

The shoulder screamed. He kept most of it off his face.

"…We'll work on it," she said.

She stepped back into the deeper shadow. The swarm began to lift quietly off the yard. Her lenses stayed on him the whole way.

And she paused, half merged with the hedge, in the space between leaving and gone.

"You know he's going to look into you, right?" she said, very quietly. "Armsmaster. He doesn't drop things. He doesn't even know yet that there's a you to look into." A beat. "Don't give him one."

Then she was gone, and the air in the yard was just air.

Greg went back inside. There was one fly on the kitchen windowsill. It was still there in the morning, and the morning after that.

 

[J4ck j4ckson]

Very interesting, really iked greg and taylor characterization here

 

[The Impossible Muffin]

This is quite good! I'm eager for more.

 

[Durolord]

Hey everyone!

Quick heads-up before we get going again: I've gone back and rewritten every chapter from 1.1 to 1.6. The new versions are already up and replace the old ones. The story is the same. Greg still has the worst lunch of his life, still walks into the Lung fight, still takes something he shouldn't, and still ends up in his backyard getting interrogated by a girl and a lot of bugs. What's different is how it's told, plus a handful of details I wasn't happy with.

You don't have to reread, but if you want to, now's a good time. Here's what changed.

Overall

• Tighter prose. Every chapter is about 15 to 25 percent shorter. I cut a lot of over-explaining, repeated beats and "the way you..." comparisons, so scenes get to the point faster.
• Less repetition. A few phrases were showing up again and again: "the grain in the air," Taylor's "lenses," the engine being "polite," Greg's oh no oh no oh no, and the "it's just stress, a migraine" beat. Each one now shows up once or twice, where it actually lands.

Characters

• Greg's mom, not his dad. The parent at home is now Greg's mom. His dad isn't in the picture. That means the Monday breakfast lie in 1.6 is told to her, and she's the one dozing in front of the TV in 1.2 and 1.5.
• Greg's "better Gregs" are now faces he wears. In the old version, Greg imagined better versions of himself. Now they're faces he's practiced in the bathroom mirror for years and puts on for different situations: the easygoing one for lunch tables, the sharp one, the calm one for teachers, the quiet one. They aren't separate voices or people. They're just masks he picks out, and in 1.1 he realizes none of them would have changed how that lunch went.
• Greg's look. Greg now has blond hair and blue eyes, not brown and brown. The gold tint in the mirror in 1.5 shows up against blue now.
• Greg covers his face. On the Lung night, he pulls his hood up and wears a gray fleece neck gaiter over his nose (added in 1.2, because PHO never forgets a face). Nobody sees his face that night, and Taylor only gets his eyes, a bit of blond hair, his voice and the Winslow hoodie.

Timeline and continuity

• The fight happens at night. Greg now leaves the house at 9:40 p.m., not 6:20, which matches the time of the fight and his getting home at 1:40 a.m. The streets in 1.2 are a night scene now.
• The walk home. 1.4 no longer says the walk home took an hour and he "didn't feel most of it," since 1.5 shows him feeling every block of it.
• The weekend is accounted for. The fight is on a Friday, and 1.6 opens on Monday. Now his mom works doubles all weekend and Greg sleeps through most of it, hood up, staying off PHO. When he gets home on Friday night, there are no missed calls on his phone.
• How Taylor found him. In 1.5 she thinks his voice is familiar. In 1.6 she says it took her until Sunday to place it, and the phone book did the rest.
• The eyeshine. Greg's eyes catching the light now happens at the end of the first block, and Taylor's tracking matches. She follows him two blocks and loses him at the fence where he talks to the engine.
• Small fixes. Taylor is now "the only person who knew what he'd done," not "the second person ever to see what he was" (others had seen him). Greg's PHO handle, XxVoid_CowboyxX, is now named in 1.6, so you don't need to know it from canon.

What's next

That's all of it. The rewrite is done, the changes are in, and regular posting starts again this Friday.

Thanks for sticking with Greg, and with me. See you Friday!

 

[Durolord]

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[Theory] Did Someone Interrupt Lung's Escalation? (Fight Analysis Thread)

Topic: [Theory] Did Someone Interrupt Lung's Escalation? (Fight Analysis Thread)

In: Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay

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CrunchTheNumbers Cape Geek (Original Poster)

Posted On Apr 13th 2011:

Okay. Before the mods merge this into the main ARMSMASTER DEFEATS LUNG megathread (please don't, Tin_Mother, this is a MECHANICS thread, it's different): I want to talk about the part of Friday night that nobody official is talking about.

Lung stopped ramping.

I'm not asking whether he lost. He lost, it's confirmed, he's in custody, hats off to Armsmaster etc etc. I'm asking HOW, because the official statement is doing a lot of "after a sustained engagement" hand-waving, and here's the thing: we have eleven years of data on Lung. Kyushu. The '07 Protectorate engagement. The thing with the Teeth. Every single documented Lung fight has the same shape. He starts human-ish, he ramps for as long as you fight him, and the fight ends when either (a) everyone disengages or (b) he runs out of people to fight. The ramp does not stop WHILE he's being attacked. It has literally never stopped while he's being attacked. That's not a Lung fact, that's THE Lung fact.

Friday night, per every scrap of witness audio and the scanner chatter (archived before deletion, link below while it lasts), Lung was mid-fight, taking damage, actively engaged — and he just. Stopped. Held at maybe stage 2 of a ramp that's gone to wings-and-twenty-feet against less pressure than this.

Explain it to me. Seriously. I'll take anything.

(Showing page 1 of 41)

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Glaistig_Stan Resident Clown

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

armsmaster has a halberd that does literally everything. the man has a "stop being a dragon" setting. mystery solved next thread

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CrunchTheNumbers Cape Geek (Original Poster)

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

@Glaistig_Stan If Armsmaster had a power nullifier in the halberd, the ABB would have been a memory in 2009. Also per the timeline the ramp broke BEFORE the official engagement window. Read the post.

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Brockton_Bae Has Relatives Everywhere

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

my uncle lives in the towers by the ferry and he says there were DOGS. like dogs the size of vans. before anyone asks no he doesn't have pics because he says he was "not getting near the window" which honestly fair

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Reave Verified PRT Agent

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

Not going to comment on operational details. Will say: be careful with "archived scanner chatter," half of what circulates after big fights is fabricated for clout. The official statement is the official statement.

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Glaistig_Stan Resident Clown

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

@Reave "the official statement is the official statement" is the most official statement I have ever read

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AllSeeingEye Knows Things

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

Fun thread. Quick question for the room: if Lung "just stopped," who or what was he in contact with at the moment he stopped? Has anyone mapped witness audio against the timeline? Asking for a friend.

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CrunchTheNumbers Cape Geek (Original Poster)

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

@Allseeingeye That's... actually the right question, and the fact that nobody can answer it is my whole point. There's a ~90 second gap in every witness account right around the break. Everyone heard the fight change. Nobody saw the moment.

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HellaCopters Hype Train

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

new bug cape btw?? multiple people in the megathread reporting an INSANE swarm event right before, like biblical, gangbangers running out of the lot screaming about their eyes. nobody's even talking about her because of the lung thing but a brand new cape soloing a dozen ABB on night one is a STORY

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Brockton_Bae Has Relatives Everywhere

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

bug girl ramp-blocked lung confirmed. bugs crawled in and unplugged him

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XxKnightOwlxX Pedant

Replied On Apr 13th 2011:

bug powers don't do that. NOTHING does that. that's the thread.

End of Page.

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(Showing page 7 of 41)

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DockworkerDan Night Shift

Replied On Apr 14th 2011:

ok so my buddy works nights two lots up from where it happened and I've been going back and forth on posting this because it's genuinely the worst photo ever taken but here. taken from the roof during the fight, full zoom on a 3 year old phone. he says there was a KID down there. like a regular kid. no costume.

[IMG_4471.jpg]

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Glaistig_Stan Resident Clown

Replied On Apr 14th 2011:

dan that is a picture of seven beige pixels standing next to an orange smear

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HellaCopters Hype Train

Replied On Apr 14th 2011:

the orange smear is LUNG?? the beige pixels are like ten feet from the orange smear??

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DockworkerDan Night Shift

Replied On Apr 14th 2011:

I said it was bad. my buddy swears on his kids it was a teenager in a hoodie. said the kid ran INTO the fight. his exact words were "I figured I was watching someone die"

also he says when the kid ran off after, his eyes caught the light. like a cat's. like headlights hitting a deer. I'm just passing it on, don't @ me

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MissMilitiaFanClub Voice of Reason

Replied On Apr 14th 2011:

"his eyes glowed" from two lots away, at night, on a three year old phone. the beige pixels have lore now

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XxKnightOwlxX Pedant

Replied On Apr 14th 2011:

if that's a civilian it's the luckiest human being alive and if it's not a civilian it's the most interesting cape in the city. there's no third option

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AverageAlexandros Cape Husband

Replied On Apr 14th 2011:

Civilians do not stand next to Lung and survive.

That's it. That's the post. Whatever the beige pixels are, "bystander" is not on the list. Bystanders next to a ramping Lung become statistics. We have a decade of funerals proving it.

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Tin_Mother Moderator

Replied On Apr 14th 2011:

Reminder: no doxxing, no enhancement requests on images that may show minors, and no "identify this person" crowdsourcing. Posts removed. Next ones are infractions.

End of Page.

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(Showing page 19 of 41)

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CrunchTheNumbers Cape Geek (Original Poster)

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

Okay, thread's gotten big, let me consolidate the actual viable theories, ranked by how much I hate them:

1. TINKER DEVICE (Armsmaster or unknown): explains the stop, doesn't explain the timeline or why it's never been used before or since. Hate level: medium.

2. DRUGGING/POISONING: ABB internal politics, someone dosed him pre-fight. Doesn't explain why the ramp WORKED for 20 minutes first. Hate level: high.

3. MASTER EFFECT: someone puppeted Lung into stopping. Doesn't track. He kept fighting, he just stopped GROWING. You'd need a Master that edits one specific function. Hate level: high.

4. TRUMP. Someone altered, suppressed, or (and I want to be clear I'm only including this for completeness) REMOVED the escalation itself. Explains literally every data point. Hate level: through the roof, because think about what it implies.

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GstringGirl Name Generator

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

re: option 4, the phrase people keep dancing around is "power theft" and I think we should stop dancing. IF (big if) someone took the ramp OUT of lung, "dragon thief" writes itself

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HellaCopters Hype Train

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

Dragon Thief goes hard not gonna lie

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Glaistig_Stan Resident Clown

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

counterpoint: if they took a PIECE of lung and could presumably take pieces of other capes, the name should be about the collecting, not the one dragon. Patchwork. you heard it here first

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Brockton_Bae Has Relatives Everywhere

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

patchwork sounds like a quilt-themed rogue who does birthday parties

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XxKnightOwlxX Pedant

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

A creature assembled from parts of other creatures already has a name. It's called a chimera.

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GstringGirl Name Generator

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

oh that's WAY worse. in the good way. chimera. yeah.

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HellaCopters Hype Train

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

RIP dragon thief you were too pure for this world. CHIMERA WATCH BEGINS

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MissMilitiaFanClub Voice of Reason

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

I want it on the record that we are naming a cape we have zero (0) evidence exists, based on seven beige pixels and a glowing-eyes rumor, and that the name will absolutely stick because that is how this cursed website works

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Tin_Mother Moderator

Replied On Apr 15th 2011:

It is, in fact, how this cursed website works.

End of Page.

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(Showing page 33 of 41)

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Bagrat The Guy in the Know Veteran Member

Replied On Apr 16th 2011:

Few things I can add, sourced as well as I can source them:

1. Lung's transfer to a parahuman facility was EXPEDITED. Days, not weeks. That happens when the PRT wants someone studied somewhere with better instruments, not just contained.

2. A friend-of-a-friend in ENE support staff says there's an open internal file with restricted access. Not the Lung file. A second file. Opened the same night.

3. The ABB has gone quiet in a way that is not peaceful-quiet. Oni Lee was seen at three separate lieutenant locations in one night. That's not mourning. That's an organization checking its own pockets and deciding who to blame.

Make of it what you will.

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Brockton_Bae Has Relatives Everywhere

Replied On Apr 16th 2011:

"deciding who to blame" cool cool cool. cooooool. hey @ whoever the beige pixels are, maybe leave town

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HellaCopters Hype Train

Replied On Apr 16th 2011:

hey wait. waaaait. where's Void Cowboy? thread's been up four days. lung mechanics, secret capes, escalation curve math. this is his EXACT thread. this thread is Void Cowboy bait in laboratory conditions. @XxVoid_CowboyxX get in here, this is your super bowl

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Glaistig_Stan Resident Clown

Replied On Apr 16th 2011:

ok that's genuinely weird. checked his profile, last post over a week ago. man posts 40 times a day about cape mechanics and goes dark the week the biggest cape mechanics event in city history happens?

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MissMilitiaFanClub Voice of Reason

Replied On Apr 16th 2011:

he's a kid, kids get grounded, touch grass everyone

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HellaCopters Hype Train

Replied On Apr 16th 2011:

yeah probably. weird timing tho

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AllSeeingEye Knows Things

Replied On Apr 16th 2011:

Very weird timing.

End of Page.

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(Showing page 41 of 41)

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CrunchTheNumbers Cape Geek (Original Poster)

Replied On Apr 17th 2011:

Final post from me, because this thread started as a fun mechanics puzzle and I've been sitting with where it ended up and I don't feel like joking anymore.

Run the tape forward with me. Say option 4 is real. Say there's someone in this city ("Chimera," fine, the name stuck) who can change what a parahuman IS by touching them. Not beat them. Not counter them. EDIT them.

Every power in this city is somebody's whole life. It's how the Protectorate protects, how the gangs hold territory, how every independent eats. The entire balance of Brockton Bay (heroes, villains, the truce, all of it) is built on one assumption so basic nobody ever says it out loud: what you are is yours.

If that assumption has an exception walking around in a hoodie, then every cape in this city is now carrying something that can be taken, every gang is asking who's next, every hero org is asking how you even classify the threat, and the ABB is already, per Bagrat, "deciding who to blame."

If he can alter powers, this is not a new hero sighting. This is a city-level problem.

I hope it's a tinker device. I have never hoped for anything as hard as I am hoping it was a tinker device.

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Glaistig_Stan Resident Clown

Replied On Apr 17th 2011:

thread started with dragon jokes and ended with existential dread. pho classic. see everyone at the next disaster

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Tin_Mother Moderator

Replied On Apr 17th 2011:

Locking this before page 42 becomes a panic spiral. The megathread remains open for verified information. Be safe out there, Brockton Bay.

This thread has been locked.

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Users currently viewing this thread: AllSeeingEye, Bagrat, and 247 guests.

 

[samChan]

Look very interesting, wonder if he can give away power, or if he power will react like AFO power when he gather too many.

 

[Durolord]

By Thursday, Greg had a list of things that set the engine off.

He kept it in a paper notebook, because the laptop felt like somewhere the fly could read it. It was titled STIMULI, which he thought showed restraint, and by Thursday it said:

Toaster (twice). Dog on Aldgate (large). Dog on Pearce (small, somehow worse). Mom yelling at the Sox game (not at me, engine does not care). Car backfire. Sophia Hess within 40 ft (Wednesday, hallway, see WORST ONE). Pop quiz. Phone ringing after 10 p.m. Thinking too hard about this list (do not think about the list).

The engine wasn't getting worse. It did its job exactly as well as it had in the alley. The trouble was that Greg had to walk past dogs and toasters and Sophia Hess every day with it bolted inside him, and every time it went off he paid: the slamming heart, the cramped hands, and twice more the warm crawl at his upper lip. He'd started carrying tissues in every pocket. He was managing it like an illness, and he still didn't really know what it did, because the only times it had properly switched on he'd been too scared to pay attention.

It only came out for real fear, and it turned out you couldn't be really afraid on purpose in your own bedroom. He'd tried. On Wednesday night, at eleven, he'd watched the worst horror clips he could find and then stood in the dark bathroom and whispered Bloody Mary at the mirror with complete sincerity. The engine idled through all of it. Whatever it was reading, it wasn't the story he was telling himself. It could tell he was a boy in a bathroom and nothing was wrong.

So when the flies came back to the kitchen window on Thursday at dusk and spelled SATURDAY. QUESTIONS., he was mostly relieved.

* * *
​

She'd picked an old print works off the rail corridor. Three lots of weeds and one building with half its roof gone, far enough from anything that the only witnesses were hers. Greg came in at nine through a gap in the fence, which she'd marked for him with an arrow of moths on the chain-link, and stepped out onto the moonlit press floor in his costume.

Somewhere overhead, a lot of small things stopped moving.

"What," Taylor said from the dark of the mezzanine, "are you wearing."

"It's a costume."

She came down the dead stairs and he could feel himself being inventoried. The big gray hoodie, hood up. The work gloves his dad left in the garage when he moved out. Dark jeans. A navy scarf wound over the lower half of his face, and over his eyes a black domino mask from a party store two neighborhoods over, which had come on a card that said MYSTERY MAN! $2.99. Over all of it, an olive-drab jacket that had never matched anything in its life.

"You look like you robbed three lost-and-found boxes."

"Okay, thank you, but every piece has a reason," Greg said, because he'd prepared this. "The hoodie's plain and dark and three other guys at school have the same one, so that's anonymity through statistics. Gloves because of the obvious thing, the thing where I touch people and bits of them come off. The scarf's wool-blend, it doesn't slip when you sweat, I tested it, I ran up the stairs at home eleven times. The mask is a $2.99 party mask on purpose, because if anyone finds it, it traces to a bin of forty identical masks, you cannot forensics a party store, and the jacket—"

"Stop."

"—doesn't match deliberately, because matching looks designed, and designed looks like a cape, and the whole point is I look like nothing, like some guy, like—"

"Stop." She pressed two fingers to the brow of her mask. He was starting to recognize that as what people did when he got going. "I regret asking. It's fine. It's bad in a way you'll survive."

"I know it's bad," Greg said, quieter. "It's not meant to be a hero costume. I can't test this thing in my house. It only comes out when something's actually wrong, so I have to go where things are wrong, and I can't go there as me. That's the whole design. Not-me, for $2.99."

The buzzing in the rafters eased a little.

"Same reason we're here," Taylor said. "I need to know what you can do before somebody else finds out for both of us. So show me."

* * *
​

For the first forty minutes he couldn't show her anything.

He jumped like a fifteen-year-old in work gloves. There was a dead lithograph press in the corner with a roller assembly that probably weighed four hundred pounds, and he heaved at it and made a noise. He sprinted the length of the floor, in case effort counted, and the engine watched him the way a parent watches sports day. He even tried getting angry on purpose. He stood in the middle of the floor and called up the lunchroom, the shoe print, still talking, and worked himself into something hot and tight in the throat, and the engine idled straight through it.

"Nothing," Taylor said. She had bugs on his pulse points, a heart monitor made of midges, which was disgusting and he'd stopped objecting to an hour ago. "Your heart's up, but it's exercise-up. It's not the other thing."

"Because I know it's fake." Greg sat down on the edge of the press, breathing hard. "It's reading what's actually going on, not what I tell it. And there's no threat. I can see the exits. I know you're—"

He stopped. The buzzing in the rafters had started, very slowly, to get louder.

"You know I'm what?" Her voice came from somewhere that wasn't where he'd last seen her.

"…Friendly?" Greg said, to the dark.

"You need it to be real," she said, and now her voice came off the walls, a little wrong, as if the swarm itself was saying it. "You can't make it real. I can."

"Okay, wait, hold on, let's talk about—"

"Your heart rate just hit one-twenty."

"Yes! Because of the idea—"

The swarm came off the walls.

All of it at once, the whole dark pulling in toward him, hornets and wasps and heavy night beetles like a handful of flung gravel, and a sound that skipped every sensible part of Greg's brain and went straight to the oldest part, the part that had known what a swarm meant before there were words. And his body, which couldn't be lied to and wasn't being lied to now, made up its mind.

The engine answered.

Not the little domestic turn it gave toasters. A full stroke. And the heat that had only ever pooled under his breastbone went down his arms and legs, which it had never done before, like something being poured, and his muscles didn't lock up the way they had on the walk home. They worked. He moved.

He didn't decide to. He was just sideways out of the swarm's first rush, faster than he'd ever moved, and his planted foot came down wrong and his ankle should have folded and didn't. It held, with a deep hot ache like a bad tooth. He came out of it ten feet from where he'd started, gasping, hands wide.

And the second heartbeat fell into step with the first.

For one second it felt right. It felt like a key going into a lock. It felt like the curve had felt from inside Lung, natural and obvious, and something in him rose up to meet it, glad.

Then the swarm came again, and he didn't have time to feel anything.

* * *
​

What Taylor got out of the next four minutes, herding him round the press floor like a sheepdog made of nightmares, was data.

He got faster under threat, and each dodge was sharper than the last. He got stronger. When she drove him into the corner behind the dead press, he put both hands on the roller that had beaten him an hour ago and moved it, four hundred pounds shrieking across the concrete, enough to open a gap where there hadn't been one. And it kept climbing. Thirty seconds in he was a scared kid moving well. Three minutes in he cleared a fallen beam without breaking stride and landed like he'd done it a thousand times. Fighting in, more out. Lung's curve, running in him now.

Okay, some distant part of him thought, as a wasp went past his ear. Okay, this is actually kind of cool, if I don't die.

Then he started to feel what it cost.

The strength was arriving faster than his body could carry it. Moving the roller sent a deep, wrenching pull down both forearms. Landing off the beam, something in his calves tore in tiny pieces. Lung's body had grown up around the engine over a decade, all that toughness and healing holding it together. Greg was the engine on its own, in a tenth-grader, and by minute four the tenth-grader was coming apart. His vision pulsed at the edges. The copper taste came in right on time. His left hand had cramped into a claw.

"Stop," he croaked. "Stop, calling it, stop—"

The swarm lifted off the floor all at once and went up into the dark of the broken roof, and Greg's legs gave out. He sat down hard on the concrete and bled quietly from the nose into the wool-blend scarf that didn't slip when you sweated. He'd tested that.

* * *
​

A water bottle arrived, carried across the floor by a column of crawling things, which was the single most unsettling kindness anyone had ever done him. Taylor crouched a careful eight feet away. On the concrete between them her bugs were walking in lines, and it took him a second to see they were tally marks.

"Your dodge times," she said. "First to last. You got forty percent faster in four minutes." A pause. "Now the part you won't like. Stand up."

He stood up. Everything hurt. He told her so, at length.

"Lift the roller."

"Taylor—"

It was the first time he'd said her name. Her head turned, but she let it go.

"—it's over, it's off. I can feel it idling."

"Lift it anyway."

He put his ruined gloves on the roller and pushed, out of pure tired obedience, and it moved. Nothing like the shrieking slide from the corner. But it rocked and shifted, and an hour ago it had been as immovable as a building.

"It doesn't all go back," Taylor said quietly. "I've had bugs on your pulse all night. Your resting heart rate's lower now than when you walked in. After that. It's not just a power that switches on, Veder. It's renovating you. Every time, it keeps a bit. It's rebuilding you into something that can hold it."

Greg looked at his hands. His dad's old gloves had split across one palm. It was the most use they'd had in years.

He worked it through out loud, slowly, because he didn't like where it was going. "So I'm weak when I'm safe. I'm strong when I'm in danger. And the only way I get stronger for good is being in danger. Over and over. It doesn't care about training, or practice, or planning, or anything I can actually choose. It only cares if I'm a target." His voice went odd, and he let it. "Which is the thing I've spent my whole life trying to stop being. So the best-case scenario for me now is that things keep going wrong near me."

The print works was very quiet.

"Yeah," Taylor said. That was all. He could hear that she'd already done the same math, and that she knew something about powers that fed on the worst parts of a life.

* * *
​

She told him the rest while he peeled off the split gloves and waited for his legs to come back.

"The blonde from the alley found me. Lavender costume. Tattletale."

His PHO memory pulled up a small file. Undersiders. Thinker, probably. Never caught.

"Dead drop, then a phone. Her crew wants to meet me." Taylor paused. "She asked about you. Whether I'd seen 'my friend from the alley' lately. Whether he was 'feeling himself.' I didn't give her anything. But she knows something went wrong at the end of that fight, and she knows you were the something. Lung's gone, Veder. The ABB's bleeding, the Empire's sizing up the territory, and every crew in the city is working out what changed. She's the fastest I've ever seen at that."

Greg wound the bloody scarf around one hand, slowly.

"Are you warning me, or recruiting me?"

She took a while to answer.

"I haven't decided," she said.

He was surprised by how much that helped. If she'd said warning he wouldn't have believed her, and if she'd said recruiting he'd have run.

"Information," she said. "Not trust. You tell me what the power does as you work it out. I tell you what's moving in the city. Nobody surprises anybody."

"And if someone asks you what I can do?"

"I say I don't know." She stood, and the swarm began drifting down from the roof to go with her. "Which is true, and it's the worst answer there is. Armsmaster has your blood. Tattletale knows you exist. The ABB's got a hole where their dragon was. And PHO's already picked out a name for you." Her head tilted. "Page nineteen. When you're allowed back on."

She went up the dead stairs into the dark, and the print works was empty again.

* * *
​

He didn't go straight home. He sat on the edge of the press for a while, flexing his hands, which were, if she was right, slightly stronger than the ones he'd walked in with.

He kept coming back to that one second after the first dodge. The key in the lock. How glad he'd been.

He didn't want to look at it, so he did what he'd done in the alley. He put it in the hole at the back of himself, next to the feeling of being the bigger thing, and covered it over.

It was getting crowded back there, for a hole. It was starting to feel more like somewhere you buried things.

At home, at one in the morning, he got the STIMULI notebook out from under his mattress. He looked at the list for a long time. Toaster. Dogs. Sophia. Pop quiz.

None of it was really the problem. The problem was the thing that answered all of them the same way, and wanted to be used, and had felt right.

He turned back to the top of the page and, above everything else, in capitals, he wrote:

REDLINE

Then he underlined it and turned off the light.

 

[Durolord]

Lung knew before he woke.

He had been many things. A boy in Kyushu, a weapon, a king. In all of them he had slept the same way, deeply, the way a thing sleeps when there is nothing left that it fears. He had never needed to keep watch in his sleep, because the watch was kept for him. Under every breath, since the worst hour of his life, there had been a slow turning, and it had turned through every dream. He had not heard silence in eleven years.

He woke into silence.

It came before the light, and before his body began counting its damage: the knee, the ribs, the long burns of his own fire turned on him by insects. Before the taste of foam solvent and the wrongness of restraints the armored man had built. In the half-second between sleep and the world, Lung listened for the turning, and it wasn't there.

His eyes opened on a white ceiling. Cameras in two corners. Cold sensor discs on his chest and temples, and the hum of machines beyond the wall, where men in clean clothes would be watching his numbers and frowning, because the numbers were wrong.

Lung lay still and reached inward for the climb.

* * *
​

It had never been like flexing a muscle. The climb was not a thing he did. It was a thing he was. Opposition went in and ascent came out, and you did not reach for it any more than you reached for your heartbeat. You leaned on it, and it was already rising.

He was injured, caged, defeated, shamed. Every condition was met, and his anger was already burning.

He leaned on it, and nothing rose.

The fire was there. It stirred under his skin, ready and his, and he considered for a moment making them flood the cell with foam. The hide was there, dormant but whole. The mending was already at slow work in his knee. The house was standing, every room of it.

But where the stair had been, the great stair at the center of it all that had carried him up against the Protectorate and the Teeth and Leviathan, there was a wall.

He pushed. Carefully, then with everything, the old first rage aimed at the place where the answer had always come from. It found no resistance. Resistance he would have welcomed. It found nothing at all, like a cut nerve, like reaching with a hand that was no longer there. The push went out and arrived nowhere, and the fire under his skin flickered, uncertain, an animal circling an empty bed.

Beyond the wall, the machines would have caught the spike and then the flat line after it.

For the first time in eleven years, Lung was exactly as strong as he was. No more. Not ever again.

He did not roar. No one would ever know what happened in this room, but he held himself to it anyway. He breathed. A dragon's discipline was not the fire or the mask. It was this stillness, the patience of something that has decided what it will do and is only waiting for the world to arrange itself.

What he would do had a face.

* * *
​

Over the following days they sent people to speak with him, and he learned from their questions what they did not know.

The first was PRT, a negotiator with a folder, who spoke of cooperation and sentencing, and of the Birdcage as something that might become more or less certain. Then, carefully, watching him: Our medical team has noted some anomalies in your readings. Can you tell us anything about the end of the engagement on Friday?

So. They did not know.

They had the numbers, and they could see the hole in them, but they did not know what had made it. The bug girl had not told them, or had not understood. The boy had not been taken. He was loose in the city, unnamed, and the only full account of what he had done was behind the boy's frightened eyes and behind Lung's own.

Lung looked at the negotiator for a long time and said nothing, and watched the man decide it was pride.

It was pride. It was also sense. To answer was to say it aloud, something was taken from me, and put it in their files. The armored man would understand within the hour. They would hunt the boy with everything they had, and find him, and then he would be theirs. Caged, studied, protected behind white walls like these, out of reach of the only hands with any right to him.

No. The debt was Lung's.

* * *
​

The second visitor came on the fifth day: counsel, retained through channels the PRT tolerated because the law said they must. A gray, careful man who had served the organization for years and knew how to hold two conversations at once. On the surface he spoke of arraignment. Underneath, in the order of his sentences and the names he chose to mention, he told Lung the state of his kingdom.

It was bleeding.

Three lieutenants had stopped answering to the center. One of them, whose district the lawyer mentioned twice, was talking with the Empire. Payments were arriving short, then late, then not at all. Two stash houses had been hit in one week by no one anyone could name.

Lung understood why. Fear had held the ABB together, and the fear had rested on one thing. Not his strength. His lack of a ceiling. Every rival knew that a war with the ABB would end with a dragon the size of the war. The street did not yet know the ceiling had been put in. But the street had watched him fall in twenty minutes to a girl with bugs and a pack of dogs, and it was already beginning to wonder.

"Lee," Lung said. It was the first word he had spoken in five days.

The lawyer gave the smallest nod. Holding. Loyal. Waiting.

Then, near the end, between two sentences about court dates, he mentioned that the organization had recently offered membership to a promising young woman. A graduate student, lately of Cornell. A maker of things. Very eager. They were awaiting guidance on whether to proceed.

Lung considered what remained to him. Fire. Hide. The mending. Lee. And perhaps now a maker of things, who wanted very badly to impress a dragon.

A dragon did not need the climb to burn down a city. The climb had only made it certain.

"Proceed," Lung said.

* * *
​

At night, under the cameras, Lung went over the one thing they had not been able to take from him, which was the memory.

He had been climbing when it happened, and the climb made thought simple and hot, so the memory was not clean. It came in pieces, firelit, from a low angle. But he had gone over it hundreds of times now, and the pieces had settled.

A boy. Fifteen, perhaps sixteen. No colors. A hood, and a cloth over his mouth, and clothes like ten thousand other boys. He had come out of nowhere into a fight that was not his and pulled the bug girl off the fire escape, and Lung had barely registered him, one more small running thing. Then the boy had fallen, and Lung had moved to remove him the way you remove debris.

And the boy had looked up.

That was the piece Lung returned to most. He had seen only the eyes, over the cloth. They had been terrified. Not the hard fear of a fighter out of his depth. Lung had seen that face ten thousand times and respected some of them. This was the other kind. Eyes too wide, the cloth over his mouth sucking in and out with his breath. The look of something hunted in its last second. And the hand that came up had not been a technique or even a decision. It had been the flinch of a boy who had never once been the stronger thing in any room.

That hand had closed on Lung's arm and reached through eleven years of fire and taken the crown out of him like fruit off a low branch.

He made himself look at it, because a king did not look away from how he had been wounded. If it had been the armored man, with some blade engineered for months to unmake him, there would have been fury, but fury he understood. If it had been a greater monster, there would have been no shame. He had built his whole life on the knowledge that the stronger thing takes from the weaker.

It had been a frightened child. The weakest thing in that alley, weaker than the bug girl, weaker than the insects, had reached up from the very bottom and broken off the top.

Either the order of the world was a lie, or the boy was not what he seemed.

Lung decided it was the boy. The fear was a mask, or a shell he had not yet grown out of. Under it was a thief of crowns, small and new and soft, walking the city tonight with Lung's climb inside his chest.

And Lung knew the climb better than anyone alive. He knew exactly what it would be doing to the boy. Making him stronger with every fight. Building him into something that could hold it.

Good, Lung thought.

Let it build. Let the boy grow strong enough to be worth the taking back. There was the cage to deal with, and the kingdom, and the Empire, and the bug girl in her turn, and each debt would be paid in its order. But the first debt had a terrified face and no name, and Lung lay in the white room under the cameras and made a promise that no one would ever hear.

The boy had taken the climb.

Lung would take everything else.

 

[The Impossible Muffin]

Hmmmmmm, I thought the opening description about Amy trying to keep him alive was because he didn't get the changer aspect of Lung's powers, but now it could be because he keeps launching himself into danger.

Kinda hoping for both: it'll give her power something interesting to look at as well as give him a chance to endear himself to her.