All For One: Chimera

[Durolord]

Greg Veder had rules.

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 too excited — excitement is a smell, and they can smell it. No anime examples, no game examples, unless someone else opens that door first, and even then wait, count to three, make sure the door is actually open and not just a draft. Do not laugh louder than the joke deserves. Do not explain the explanation.

And the last rule, the big one, the one he had written in his head in letters the size of the Medhall building:

If the room goes quiet, stop talking.

He was not trying to be impressive. He'd given up on impressive somewhere around seventh grade, the way you give up on a game that keeps crashing at the same save point. The rules were not about winning anything. They were about getting from first period to last period without becoming the entertainment.

Some days it worked.

He made it through first period without volunteering anything. Made it through second by drawing escalation curves in his notebook margin and keeping his mouth shut when Mr. Gladly asked a question Greg knew the answer to, knew it cold, could feel the answer pressing against the backs of his teeth like a sneeze. He let someone else get it wrong instead. Sat on his hands, almost literally. That was the trick nobody told you about surviving: it mostly felt like holding your breath.

By lunch he was three rules for three, and that was the problem, probably. Three for three made him feel like a person who could afford a fourth.

---

The lunchroom at Winslow had a sound to it, a specific frequency of two hundred conversations none of which wanted you in them. Greg had a seat at the end of a table that was not his table, exactly — it was a table that tolerated him the way a bus stop tolerates pigeons. Sparrow and Jordan and a couple of sophomores whose names he had learned and then carefully never used, because using someone's name when they had never used yours was its own kind of mistake.

The cape talk started the way it always did, which is to say someone brought up Lung the way you bring up weather, except this was Brockton Bay, so the weather could burn down your block.

"My cousin's shop pays the ABB," Jordan said, low, like the words themselves cost protection money. "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. That's the whole — you can't fight a guy who turns into a dragon, man. Nobody can. Once he gets going, that's it, game over, the Protectorate just contains him and waits."

"Armsmaster could —"

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

Greg did not speak.

He looked at his tray. He looked at the curve he had drawn in second period, which was still in his head, a clean upward arc with one obvious soft spot at the bottom. He counted to three. He counted to three again. The conversation moved an inch and he told himself it had moved past the moment, that the door was closed, that whatever he knew could stay pressed behind his teeth where it lived.

He spoke anyway.

He always spoke anyway. That was the thing about the rules — he had written them, which meant he knew exactly which version of himself they were written for, and that version of himself was sitting right here, leaning forward, already talking.

"Okay, but that's not — he's not unbeatable, though. That's actually a misconception." Rule one, gone. "Lung's power is an escalation curve, right? He ramps. Which means at minute zero he's basically just a strong guy with fire, and the dragon stuff is a function of sustained combat pressure over time. So theoretically the entire fight is decided in the first two minutes. You don't fight the dragon. You make sure the dragon never gets compiled. You interrupt the ramp — overwhelming alpha strike, or you deny him the combat trigger entirely, hit-and-run so the escalation never stabilizes, and he just —" rule three was somewhere behind him now, he could hear his own voice doing the thing, the bright eager thing, "— he never gets there. The Kyushu thing proves it, actually, if you read the timeline, because it took him hours to scale to Leviathan's level, which means the curve has a slope, which means there's a window, and the window is the whole —"

The room had gone quiet.

Not the whole room. The table. The tables near the table. A quiet with a shape to it, and Greg knew the shape, had felt it close around him a hundred times, and the last rule lit up in his head in Medhall-sized letters — stop talking — and he heard himself say:

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

"Bro." Sparrow wasn't even laughing yet. That came after. "It is not that deep."

Now the laughing.

It wasn't even mean, at first. That was the part people never understood when Greg replayed these moments at two in the morning. The first laugh was almost friendly, almost with him, and if he had laughed too, shrugged, said yeah, sorry, brain stuff — there was a version of this where it ended here. He could see that version. He could always see that version, the way you can see the exit ramp you already drove past.

"No, I — okay, that came out wrong, I just meant hypothetically, like if you model powers as having activation conditions, then mechanically —"

"Veder."

Sophia Hess did not raise her voice, because Sophia Hess never had to. She was two seats down at the next table over, turned halfway around, and she looked at Greg the way she looked at everything: like she had already weighed the room, sorted it into things that could hurt her and things that couldn't, and was mildly offended that the second category kept making noise.

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

The laugh that got was a different species from the first one. The first laugh had an exit. This one was a door closing.

Greg's face went hot. The words came up fast, too fast, he could feel them coming out wrong even as he said them: "That's not — I wasn't saying I'd fight him, obviously, I was talking about it mechanically, like if you think of powers as having conditions and constraints, then any power, even a strong one, has to have —"

"Still talking," Sophia said, not even to him. To the room. Like a referee calling a foul.

The room agreed with her. The room always agreed with her. Laughter went around the tables in a little wave and came back to him, and Greg sat in the middle of it holding half a sentence about activation conditions, and the half-sentence died in his hands.

Emma Barnes was at Sophia's table. She had not laughed, not really — she was looking at her phone, mostly, and when she glanced up at Greg it was brief, the way you glance at something to confirm it's still where you left it. She didn't smirk. She didn't perform anything. She said, in the tone of someone offering directions to a tourist:

"This is why people stop listening, Greg."

And went back to her phone.

That was all.

Sophia's thing had a temperature to it, at least. Sophia wanted something from these moments; you could feel the wanting, and a thing that wants something from you is at least admitting you exist. Emma's sentence was room temperature. It was advice. It was the kind of thing a guidance counselor would say, the kind of thing that sounded, if you replayed it — and he would replay it, he knew already that he would be replaying it tonight and next week and possibly at random unguarded moments for years — like it was for his own good.

This is why people stop listening.

Not we're being cruel to you. Not Sophia is a predator and we are her audience. Just: the thing that is happening to you is correct, and everyone here knows it, and the only person who hasn't figured it out is you.

Greg looked at his tray and did not say anything else, which was what the rules had been for all along.

---

He survived the rest of lunch by becoming furniture. He was good at it. You let your eyes go to middle distance, you eat at a steady neutral rate, you become a thing the room has finished with. The conversation moved on to the Empire and then to some PHO drama and Greg contributed nothing, was asked nothing, and told himself that this was the system working as intended.

The bell rang. Trays, backpacks, the shuffling migration toward fifth period. Greg gathered his stuff — notebook with the escalation curve, the library copy of a Maoxiang novel he was not going to read in public ever again, binder with the broken ring that bit him every time —

The shoulder hit him from behind.

Not hard. That was the genius of it, the thing he could never have explained to a teacher even if a teacher had been the kind of thing that helped: it was not hard. It was casual, glancing, the contact of someone whose path you had inconveniently occupied. Sophia did not even slow down. The binder went, the broken ring popped, paper sprayed across the floor in a fan, and the notebook landed open to the curve, and someone's shoe — not even aimed, just walking — put a gray print across it.

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

A couple of people laughed. Most didn't. Most just flowed, around him and the paper, the way water flows around a rock, and that was the part that got in deepest, deeper than the laugh: the flowing. The room had a procedure for this. Greg-on-the-floor-picking-up-paper was a known event, processed, filed. Nobody helped. Nobody had decided not to help, even — deciding would have required the event to register as something a decision applied to.

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

The thing was: rewrite. Run it back. He was kneeling on the lunchroom floor in real time, but in his head the last ten minutes were already in the editor, and he was generating Gregs.

Greg-who-laughed-it-off: shrugs at Sparrow, says yeah, fair, I'll send you the strategy guide, gets the friendly version of the laugh, conversation moves on, nobody dies. Greg-the-sharp-one: looks at Sophia and says something clean and short, four words maximum, something that lands and ends, and the laugh goes the other direction just once, just once. Greg-the-calm-one, who lets "still talking" hit and just nods, slow, unbothered, bulletproof, and the room reads the nod as confidence instead of defeat. Greg-the-silent-one, the best one, the one who felt the answer pressing against his teeth and kept it there, who is right now eating lunch in a parallel universe in complete unremarkable peace.

Every imagined Greg was better than the real one. That was normal. That was the engine he ran on, honestly — the rewrites were where the better Gregs lived, and tomorrow he would try to be one of them, and the trying was a kind of hope, and the hope was —

The loop returned nothing.

He noticed it the way you notice a missed stair. He ran Greg-the-sharp-one again, the four clean words, the reversed laugh, and for the first time in years of running these, the simulation refused to compile, because it hit a fact it had been routing around all this time, and the fact was:

It wouldn't have mattered.

Greg-the-sharp-one gets the same look from Sophia, because Sophia's look was loaded before he opened his mouth. Greg-the-calm-one gets "still talking" anyway, or gets it tomorrow, or gets the shoulder regardless, because the shoulder was not a response to anything Greg did, it was scheduled. Greg-the-silent-one buys himself a day, maybe a week, and then says one sentence with too much brightness in it and the room recognizes him, because the room already knows what he is. The room decided a long time ago. There was no version of himself — no funnier, sharper, calmer, quieter Greg, no Greg with better rules or stricter counting — that changed the output, because the output was never computed from his input.

Even the imagined Gregs wouldn't have been enough.

The rewriting habit was the load-bearing wall, was the thing, and he felt it go — not dramatically, nothing dramatic, he was a fifteen-year-old kneeling on a lunchroom floor picking up a paper with a shoe print on it — he just felt the hope mechanism quietly fail to engage, the way a lighter clicks and clicks and you understand the fluid is gone.

The shame had been a flood. The anger after it had been a flare. This was neither. This was nothing at all, a flat gray nothing, and the sounds of the lunchroom went distant inside it, flattened, like the whole room had been moved one room away. The fluorescent lights were very bright and very far. His body kept picking up papers. He watched it do that.

And something inside him opened.

Inward. Not out — nothing in the room changed, no light, no sound, no force; if anyone had been watching Greg Veder, and no one was, they would have seen a kid pause for one second with a binder in his hands. But inside, in the gray, a door he had not known was a door swung open onto a sense he had no name for, and the sense reached out across the lunchroom without his permission and touched the people in it, and most of them were just — people, just warm dim shapes of person —

— except Sophia.

Sophia, twenty feet away and walking, had something inside her. Not muscle. Not bone. Not whatever the thing was that made her Sophia. Something else, seated in her like a blade in a sheath, and Greg felt the shape of it the way your tongue feels a chipped tooth: precisely, helplessly, in detail he did not ask for.

It was sharp. It was cold. It was half there — phased, slippery, a knife seen through dirty glass. It felt like violence wearing discipline as a costume.

And for one second — one airless, hanging second that he would spend a long time refusing to remember — some part of Greg, some part of the gray nothing where the hope used to be, reached toward it.

The sharp thing slid away from him. Not because she moved. Because it was angled wrong, oiled, not his, like grabbing at a reflection on water. His reach closed on nothing and the nothing scared him worse than anything Sophia had done all day, and Greg flinched back into his own body so hard he nearly dropped the binder again.

He knelt there, heart going, papers in his hands.

What.

What was —

His brain, which had read every power-classification thread on PHO, which had spent years cataloging triggers and ratings and the exact mechanics of how a person becomes more than a person, served up the obvious word instantly, in bold, with citations.

And then his brain, which had also spent years learning exactly what Greg Veder was and was not allowed to have, took the word back.

No. Come on. Be serious.

People triggered in locked basements. People triggered in car crashes, in fires, in the worst hour of the worst day of an actual life. People did not trigger because Sophia Hess shoulder-checked them and Emma Barnes gave them advice. The universe did not look at the lunchroom floor of Winslow High and select Greg — Greg, specifically, of all the people in this city who were drowning — and people like him did not get powers, full stop, that was practically a law of physics; people like him got to read about powers and theorize about powers and be told it is not that deep.

Stress. That's what this was. A stress thing, a migraine aura — those did visual stuff, he'd read that, auras could do all kinds of stuff — or a panic response, or his blood sugar, or his eyes, or his brain doing one weird desperate trick because the day had pushed on it too hard. He had imagined a shape inside Sophia Hess because Sophia Hess had spent two years teaching him to imagine her as a weapon. That was just trauma doing art. That was nothing.

He told himself that, kneeling on the floor, in almost exactly those words.

He was very convincing. He had a lot of practice talking himself out of hoping for things.

---

By the time he got the binder closed, the lunchroom had finished emptying. Sophia was long gone, off to whatever fifth period contained her, already not thinking about him — he knew that with total certainty, knew that the moment lived only in him now, the way all of them did. Emma had left without looking back. The room had returned to being a room.

Greg stood up. His knees hurt from the floor. The shoe print on the escalation curve had dried into the paper, a gray sole-pattern stamped diagonally across the soft spot at the bottom of the arc, and he looked at it for a second and then put the notebook away.

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

But twenty feet away, in the empty air where Sophia had been standing, he could still feel it — faint, fading, like heat off a stove that someone had just turned off. The shape of a sharp cold thing. The angle of it. The place where his reach had slipped.

Greg picked up his backpack and walked to class, and the part of him that had opened did not close.

 

[Durolord]

Greg got home at 3:47 and was back out the door by 6:20, and if you had asked him what he did during those two and a half hours he could not have told you, because the honest answer was attended a continuous screening of the lunchroom and nobody gives that answer out loud.

It played on the bus. It played while he microwaved a burrito and ate maybe half of it. It played while he sat at his desk with a tab open to homework he never looked at, the same eleven minutes of footage on loop: the curve, the quiet, it is not that deep, Sophia turning halfway around in her seat, still talking, the wave of laughter going out and coming back, Emma not even looking up. The shoulder. The fan of papers. The shoe print drying into the soft spot at the bottom of the arc.

That part was normal. The replay was always the program after a day like this.

What was not normal — what kept making him stop chewing, stop scrolling, sit very still like someone listening for a sound in the walls — was that the replay just played. Nothing came after it. For as long as Greg could remember, the footage rolled and then the editor opened, and the better Gregs came out to reshoot the scene: the funny one, the sharp one, the bulletproof calm one. That was the deal. That was how you got to sleep. You watched the disaster and then you watched the version where you weren't you, and the second version was the painkiller.

The editor was open. The editor was empty.

He kept reaching for a better Greg and his hand kept closing on nothing, the same way it had closed on the sharp cold thing in the lunchroom air, and he did not like that those two nothings felt related, so he stopped thinking about it, which is to say he thought about it constantly while telling himself he wasn't.

At 4:30 he gave up on homework and did the thing he'd been circling all afternoon. He opened PHO and typed trigger event what does it feel like into the search bar, deleted it, typed stress hallucination symptoms, deleted that too, and finally split the difference like a coward: can stress make you see things.

The general-medicine answer was yes, sort of, sometimes, see a doctor. The PHO answer was a 400-post thread in the cape-discussion subforum titled "Trigger events — what we actually know (serious thread, mods are watching)" and Greg read all of it, because of course he did.

It did not make him feel better.

The thread was full of secondhand accounts and a few claimed firsthand ones, and they had a shape to them, and the shape was: the worst day. Not a bad day. The worst one. A guy whose trigger was the night his building burned with his family inside. A woman, vague on details the way the real ones always were, who said only that it had taken six years of something before the something broke her. Car crashes. Basements. One post, heavily reported and locked but still readable in quotes, from someone describing being held under water in increments. The thread's consensus, repeated every couple of pages like a chorus, was that triggers were the floor falling out of a life. The cape geeks even had the numbers: you basically had to be having the worst moment of your existence, and the moment had to mean something, had to hit the exact fault line of who you were.

Greg sat back and looked at the ceiling and conducted a brief formal review of his day.

He had talked too much at lunch. A girl had been mean to him. Another girl had been mean to him more efficiently. His books had been knocked on the floor and a shoe had stepped on his notebook.

That was it. That was the whole catastrophe. Nobody had burned. Nobody had held him under anything. Stacked against the thread, his day didn't even make the qualifying rounds — it was the kind of day that, if he posted it, would get him gently mocked in eleven time zones. Got laughed at in the cafeteria was not a trigger event. It was a Tuesday. People like the people in that thread earned their powers in basements and burning buildings, and people like Greg got to read about it afterward and theorize, because reading about it afterward and theorizing was the entire load-bearing structure of his personality, and —

— and his pain didn't clear the bar. That was the finding. He ranked it himself, quickly and with practiced efficiency, the same internal clerk who'd spent years stamping his problems not serious before anyone else could: insufficient suffering, application denied. Whatever happened on that lunchroom floor, it wasn't the floor falling out of his life. His life didn't have far enough to fall.

So: stress. A migraine aura, maybe, those did visual stuff. Trauma doing art.

He felt almost relieved, which should have been the tell, and wasn't.

The sidebar of the thread had the usual Brockton Bay subforum activity feed, and the top item, twenty minutes old, was "anyone else hearing about ABB stuff near the docks tonight??" — fourteen replies, the usual mix of nothing-confirmed and my-cousin-heard and one guy insisting he'd seen Oni Lee on a roof, which someone insisted every single week. Greg read it twice. Probably nothing. The docks thread was always probably nothing.

At 6:20 he told his dad he was going for a walk, which was true, and that he'd be back soon, which he believed.

---

The walk was supposed to clear his head. That was the official mission statement. Walking cleared heads; everyone said so; it was practically medicine.

The problem was that head-clearing, it turned out, had always been outsourced. The walk gave him rhythm and air and the long light of early evening coming down the cross streets, and his head took all of it and used it to run the footage in higher resolution. Without the editor — without the better Gregs waiting at the end of each loop to absorb the impact — the replay just hit the wall and bounced and played again, and somewhere around the fourth block Greg understood, in the wordless way you understand a toothache, that he was not walking to clear his head. He was walking because home was where you had to sit still with it.

He went east because east was downhill and away.

The city felt — he kept reaching for the word and discarding candidates — occupied. Not visibly. Nobody glowed. The sidewalks held the usual evening census: a guy hosing down the front of a bodega, two women arguing affectionately about a bus schedule, kids on bikes doing slow figure-eights in a parking lot. Person, person, person, the same warm dim shapes-of-person the lunchroom had been full of, and Greg was not seeing anything, there was nothing to see —

— and then, crossing Aldgate, a flicker. Far off, north, gone before it finished arriving. Like a single bass note through six walls. Like someone two buildings away had opened an oven door for half a second.

He stopped on the curb. A car honked him back onto it.

Stress. Obviously. He had primed his own brain at lunch with the Sophia thing — the imagined Sophia thing — and now it was doing encores. That was how brains worked; he'd just read a whole thread about how brains worked.

But here was the thing, and he was honest enough with himself, in this one narrow domain, to know it was the thing: if it was stress, it would happen everywhere or nowhere. Stress didn't have a bearing. Stress didn't sit at a compass point. And the flicker had been north and slightly east, had been located, the way a smell is located, and a hallucination with coordinates was either not a hallucination or a much more interesting hallucination than the thread had described, and there was exactly one way to find out which.

He could walk toward the next one. Walk right up to where it seemed to be and stand there and confirm, with his own eyes, in the actual world, that there was nothing there. Empty street. No cape. Brain static with a compass glued to it. And then he could go home and be a person who got stress migraines, which was a normal manageable thing to be, instead of — the alternative, which he was not going to think about, because the alternative was so much worse than being crazy. Being crazy was just chemistry. The alternative was being the kind of person who wanted it so badly he'd hallucinated it, the lunchroom's whole verdict confirmed in one pathetic diagnosis: Greg Veder, who narrated his own death wish, who read one thread too many and dreamed himself a power on the floor of the cafeteria like a kid drawing himself into the comic.

He'd rather be broken than be that.

So he walked north and slightly east, to prove there was nothing there, and he wants it on the record — he told himself, with each block, that this was the opposite of going toward something.

---

The flickers did not cooperate by disappearing.

The second one came near the rail corridor: brief pressure, like ears popping in reverse, somewhere ahead and left. He detoured there, found a fenced lot full of pallet stacks and one orange cat, stood for a full minute feeling absolutely nothing, and experienced thirty glorious seconds of vindication — see, nothing, stress, case closed — before the third flicker brushed past him from a different bearing entirely, fainter, moving, the way you feel a truck pass on a parallel street.

Things he told himself, in order, over the next mile: low blood sugar. The burrito. Too much PHO, too little sleep, the screen-glow thing where your eyes do tricks afterward. The power lines — that one lasted two blocks until he noticed the flickers didn't follow the power lines. Each excuse worked until the next data point, and each data point made the excuses do more work, and underneath the whole rotation, steady as a pilot light, was the actual reason he kept walking: every flicker was another chance to catch the nothing in the act of being nothing, and the nothing kept refusing to hold still for it.

He checked his phone under a streetlamp. The docks thread had grown — thirty-one replies now, somebody saying the cops had moved cars around Dock South, somebody else calling them a liar, a mod threatening locks. He was, he noticed with the detachment of a man reading a map of someone else's mistake, about nine blocks from Dock South.

He should turn around. He assembled the thought carefully, gave it good posture: you are a fifteen-year-old civilian walking toward an ABB rumor in the dark, and you know exactly how those PHO threads end, you have read the after-action posts, you have seen the candle emojis. He even stopped. Turned ninety degrees back toward home, toward his room, toward the desk and the cold half of a burrito and the replay waiting patiently on the loop with its editor open and empty —

He stood there for a moment.

Then he kept going the way he'd been going, because at least out here the thing eating him had coordinates.

---

The closer he got to the water, the more the city emptied — Brockton Bay knew its own weather, and tonight the forecast east of the train tracks was stay in — and the more the flickers stopped being flickers.

It built the way a headache builds, except outside him. Pressure, low and wide, somewhere ahead. Not sharp like the lunchroom thing; that had been a precise small shape at twenty feet, a chipped tooth. This was the opposite kind of feeling, big and unfocused, weather instead of weapon. He couldn't have pointed at it with a finger. He could have pointed at it with his whole arm.

Hot. That came through clearly, even at — what was this, a quarter mile? More? Something out there was hot, in a register that had nothing to do with temperature; the evening air on his skin stayed cool while some other sense entirely reported furnace. And under the heat, slower, a kind of contained motion. Coiled. The pressure had the feel of something cycling and building, a thing turning over and over on itself in the dark, getting denser with every turn —

Greg was sweating. He noticed it when his phone almost slipped out of his hand. Cold evening, damp palms, heart doing a tempo he associated with the dreams where you've missed a whole semester of a class.

Fear, he told himself. That's all this is. You're nine — six, now — blocks from an ABB thing and you are terrified, and terror does this, terror sweats.

He was correct.

He was not only correct.

---

He heard the shouting before he understood it was shouting — men's voices, more than a few, somewhere among the warehouses ahead, bouncing off brick so the direction kept changing. He should have stopped. Every system he had was voting to stop. He cut between two buildings instead, came out on a cross street with a clear line down toward the docks proper, and that was when the air changed.

It buzzed.

His first thought was electrical, a transformer, and then the buzz moved, swung past overhead in a low ragged ribbon, and Greg looked up and his brain reported, with the flat precision of an instrument that has not yet caught up to the implications: insects. A lot of insects. A wrong amount of insects — not swarm-season wrong, not dead-fish-on-the-beach wrong; organized wrong, the ribbon overhead flying in a coordination that insects did not do, that nothing without a — that nothing did —

— and the PHO catalog opened all on its own, because this, finally, was his actual area of expertise, the one wing of his brain that had never once embarrassed him in front of anyone who mattered, and the catalog ran the query in under a second. Brockton Bay capes, insect control. Nothing. East coast, insect control, active. Nothing. He had read every power-classification thread, every "rate the local capes" thread, every new-sighting thread back two years; he could have named the costume colors of villains in Boston; and the database returned zero rows, and Greg stood in a dockside street at night and felt — God help him, under all the fear, distinctly — a little spark of awe, because the only explanation was the rare and specific one: new. Brand new. Night-one new. Nobody-has-ever-posted-about-you new.

He followed the ribbon's heading with his eyes, down the block, to its convergence.

There was a girl on the edge of a rooftop, one story up, against the last gray of the sky. The costume read homemade even at this distance, even in this light — dark fabric, something armored and ridged about it but nothing with a budget, nothing with a PR department, a costume the way his binder was a binder. She was crouched low. The insect ribbons fed down past her, around her, into the lot beyond the building, where the men's voices were, and she had the absolute stillness of someone who has just discovered that the plan ended several seconds ago.

She was — Greg did the math no one had asked him to do — outmatched. He didn't need details. The grammar of the scene said it: one small new cape on a roof, many voices below, and that pressure, that coiling furnace pressure, which had been building this whole time, which was not somewhere ahead anymore.

It was here.

It was — and Greg's whole body understood this before any of it reached words — expressing. The heat that had read at a quarter mile now stood at the bottom of his senses like a wall, and it was not weather anymore. It had a center. The center was moving. And here was the part that he would not be able to explain to anyone, ever, the part that made his stomach drop through the street: when he paid attention to it — when he turned his new impossible sense full onto the shape of it the way you'd turn your head toward a sound — it got bigger. Not seemed bigger. Got. As if attention were a hand, and the shape could feel the hand, and swelled to meet it, and Greg yanked the sense back like fingers off a stove and the shape kept the size it had taken and kept growing anyway, turn over turn over turn, the coil winding hotter, and somewhere below the girl's rooftop a voice that was more furnace than voice said something short and final to the men around it.

Then Lung stepped into view, and the shape inside him was not sharp like Sophia's.

It was a furnace learning how to become a dragon.

 

[Durolord]

Greg's body made the decision to stay before his brain could file an objection, which was how his body made most of its worst decisions, and he ended up flattened against the corner of a loading dock with a sightline down into the lot, watching.

The lot held maybe a dozen men in ABB colors, arranged in the loose orbital pattern of people who wanted to be near power without being near it. The center of the orbit was Lung.

Greg had seen Lung in pictures. Everyone had — PHO had whole galleries, mostly blurry, mostly distant, mostly of the dragon stages, fire and silver scale and wings. Nobody photographed this stage, the man stage, because nobody who saw the man stage was thinking about their phone: a big shirtless figure in a metal dragon mask, tattoos running up his torso like the fire was already underneath and looking for a seam, pacing slow at the center of his men with the gait of something that had never once needed to hurry.

And inside him, the furnace turned over. Greg could feel it from here, fifty feet, sixty — could feel it the way you feel a subwoofer in your sternum, a slow heavy cycling, heat under pressure with a rhythm to it. A furnace with a heartbeat. He kept his new impossible sense pulled back, held tight against himself like a hand off a stove, because he remembered what had happened on the street when he'd paid attention, and he was not going to feed it, he was not going to —

Lung spoke.

The voice carried. It was made to carry; you could hear that it had spent years giving orders over noise. The accent rolled the words but the words were not difficult, and Greg heard them with terrible clarity, and his brain transcribed them with the flat fidelity of a court reporter:

"— 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 behind his corner and experienced the sentence again, in replay, because that was what his brain did with things now, and the replay did not improve it. The children. Said the way you'd say the trash. There was no heat in it — that was the part that went through Greg like cold water — the furnace had a heartbeat and the voice had none, the order priced an unknown number of kids at zero with the energy of a man canceling a delivery, and the men laughed, and somewhere in Greg a very old ledger turned to a familiar page. The page where a room full of people decides what you're worth, briskly, without consulting you, and then carries on with lunch.

He was still standing in that sentence when the lot screamed.

---

It happened all at once and from nowhere — the men's casual orbit detonating into chaos, hands at faces, weapons firing wild into the air, men folding sideways into each other — and Greg's first lunatic thought was gas, and then the streetlight caught the air over the lot and the air was moving. Particulate. Alive. Bugs, the bugs, the wrong amount of bugs from the rooftop ribbons, all of them at once, dropped onto the lot like a curtain falling, and Greg's skin crawled in mammalian sympathy even as his PHO brain leaned forward with horrified professional interest.

Because it wasn't a swarm. Swarms billowed. This worked. He watched a column of it split around a man's swinging arm and reform behind it; he watched the densest mass find, again and again, the same targets — eyes, mouths, ears, the hands holding guns — with the specificity of a thing that could see. Capsaicin or venom or both; men were going down screaming about their eyes. Twelve armed gangsters were being soloed by insects, and on the rooftop above, the girl in the homemade costume crouched motionless, and Greg understood that the stillness he'd read as paralysis was the opposite. She was the only thing in the lot that was calm. She was administrating.

The girl had heard the order too. That was Greg's read, watching the timeline back — Lung had priced the kids at zero, and the sky had fallen on him four seconds later. She hadn't attacked because she had a chance.

She'd attacked because of the sentence.

Lung did not go down screaming.

Lung burned. Fire shed off his skin in a sheet, casual as a shrug, and the bugs nearest him crisped out of the air in a halo of small sparks, and the furnace inside him — Greg felt it without wanting to, the pressure of it forcing itself against his held-back sense like heat through a closed oven door — the furnace climbed. A register up. Another. The rhythm in it quickening, the coil winding tighter, and his silhouette in the firelight was already wrong, shoulders too dense, arms too long by a measure your eye kept rejecting, and Greg's own voice from lunch played back to him with hideous timing: an escalation curve. The whole fight is decided in the first two minutes.

He checked his phone reflexively. The fight was three minutes old.

The theory had been right. The theory had also been the work of a boy drawing arcs in a notebook margin, and the real thing was not an arc, the real thing was standing in a parking lot getting bigger with a heartbeat Greg could feel through sixty feet of air, and the girl on the roof was throwing insects at it, and the insects had stopped mattering about one register ago.

---

Run.

Greg's brain, to its credit, produced the correct answer immediately and in full. He had it all laid out within seconds, the whole rational case, airtight: he was a fifteen-year-old in a hoodie. He had no costume, no training, no weapon, and no power — the thing in his head was a stress symptom, sub-judice, unconfirmed, and even granting it for argument's sake, it was a sense, it sensed things, you could not hit a dragon with a sense. His tactical contribution to this fight, computed honestly, was zero. Less than zero: he was a liability with legs, a hostage waiting to be acquired, one more child for the order to apply to. Every after-action thread he had ever read agreed on what happened to civilians who lingered at cape fights, and the threads had candle emojis, and the rational move — the only move, the move that literally every system he had was voting for — was to be four blocks away ninety seconds ago.

He knew all of this. He wants that noted. He stood behind his corner knowing all of it, completely informed, argument concluded, verdict in.

And his feet did not go.

Because on the roof, the girl had started to retreat — a crouch-walk back from the edge, smart, the right call, the bugs covering her — and Lung had stopped paying attention to the bugs. The mask had tilted up. Tracking her. He said something to the ruin of his men, and two of the ones who could still see started for the building's far side, the stairs side, and Lung himself moved toward the wall below her with the unhurried confidence of something that knew how this ended, and fire was crawling up his forearms now in slow ropes, and the girl couldn't see the stairs side, or could she, did the bugs see for her, Greg didn't know how it worked —

— and the lot, the whole tableau, resolved for one vertiginous second into a lunchroom. A ring of watchers. One person in the middle, alone, allotted her worth by a voice that didn't even spend effort on the sentence. And everyone else just flowing, around it, water around a rock, because the room had decided this was a known event, processed, filed —

Greg had spent his entire life being the rock. Tonight, for once, God forgive him, he was the water, he was the room, he was a person standing comfortably outside the circle with the option of doing what everyone had always done, which was nothing, which was flow —

The girl reached the roof edge above the alley and dropped to a fire escape, fast and controlled, almost clean, and Lung came around the corner of the building below her before her feet hit the second landing.

She didn't see him. Her head was turned the wrong way — toward the stairs side, toward the two men, her bugs were over there — and Lung's arm was already coming up, and the rope of fire on it was already leaving, and Greg saw the whole geometry of it from his useless outside angle, saw it whole and inevitable the way you see the answer pressing against the backs of your teeth, and he was running before the argument inside him could reconvene.

It turned out rationality only governed him when he was the one being crushed.

---

He didn't shout a warning, which would have been the smart version even of the stupid plan. He just ran — across open ground, into the alley mouth, up the first half-flight of the fire escape two steps at a time with the whole structure clanging like an alarm, and the girl spun toward the noise, toward him, which meant her back was fully to the fire now, and Greg grabbed a fistful of armored costume at her shoulder and yanked, sideways and down, his weight and her surprise doing together what his strength alone never could.

They went over the landing rail's low side onto the half-flight below in a tangle of limbs and clattering steel, and the air where the girl had been standing turned briefly orange and the metal up there ticked and stank.

Greg landed mostly underneath her, which was the only competent thing his body did all night, and the breath went out of him in a sound like a kicked accordion.

The bugs hit him before either of them stopped moving.

Not stinging — landing. A sudden crawling weight on his neck, his face, the backs of his hands, hundreds of points of contact deploying with the speed of a reflex, and through his swimming vision he saw the girl already up in a crouch on the stairs above him, lenses fixed on him, one hand half-raised, and he understood with prickling clarity that he was one decision away from learning what the gangsters had been screaming about, that the swarm had moved faster than her judgment and her judgment was now catching up and deciding, right now, in real time, what he was —

"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 am deeply not with them, I'm not with anyone, I'm not even supposed to be —"

The bugs lifted. Not all of them — a fine crawling residue stayed on his wrists, and he got the message of that arrangement instantly, the way you get a hand on a shoulder — but the mass of it rose off his face, and the girl's voice came through the costume low and tight and aimed:

"Who are you?"

"Nobody," Greg said, with total sincerity, and a sheet of fire hit the wall a floor above them and turned the question moot.

---

"Move — that way, down, go—" She was already moving, and the residue on his wrists tugged, actually tugged, steering him like reins, and Greg discovered that following orders from a bug girl during a dragon attack was, against all odds, the most functional social interaction he'd had all day. She didn't need him to perform anything. She needed him to be a body that went where pointed, and he could do that, he could absolutely be a body.

They came off the bottom of the fire escape into the alley and she pulled them flat behind a dumpster, and her head did the thing again — the tracking-elsewhere thing, eyes pointed at brick while her attention ran around the block on a hundred thousand legs — and Greg pressed his back to cold metal and made the mistake of letting his other sense open.

It wasn't a choice. The held-back hand slipped, just for a second, the way your eyes go to a crash.

Lung filled the alley mouth of his perception like weather given a body. Heat under pressure — but the pressure had stopped being weather, it had organized, it had architecture now: a coiled engine, turning over with that heavy heartbeat rhythm, and every turn of the coil added material, mass condensing out of the rage the way frost condenses out of cold. And around the engine, through it, Greg felt the shape it was building toward — felt it the way you feel the size of a dark room — a vast contour sketched in advance, dragon-shaped, mostly empty, an absence with wings and a furnace pouring itself patiently into the mold.

His classroom theory had said: a curve, a ramp, a window.

The theory had been correct, and so small it was almost a lie. He hadn't theorized this. Nobody drawing arcs in a margin could have. The curve wasn't a graph of power over time. It was a casting process, and the dragon already existed in potential, fully specified, waiting, and the only variable was fill rate —

— and the contour swung toward him.

That was the only way Greg could describe it, then or after. The vast half-empty shape oriented, the way a satellite dish orients, and the heat of its attention crossed sixty feet of night and found the place where Greg's sense was touching it, found the hand, and pressed back.

Greg slammed the sense shut. Too late, knew it was too late.

"He's coming," Greg said. "He's — I don't know how I — he's coming at us, this side, not the bugs, us—"

The lenses turned to him for one beat of pure assessment. Then she went up the dumpster like it was furniture and her swarm peeled off everything else in the block and converged.

---

What happened next took perhaps eight seconds, and Greg failed continuously throughout all of them.

The swarm hit Lung at the alley mouth as a single black bludgeon, a density of insects that should not have been gatherable on one block of dockside Brockton Bay, straight into the mask's eye slits, and Lung — six and a half feet now, silver tracing his shoulders in first scales, fire breathing off him in idle sheets — actually rocked back a half step and swiped at his own face, and the girl shouted "Go!" down at Greg with her voice cracking on it, and pointed at the alley's far end, and Greg went.

Badly.

He made it four steps. The alley floor of a Brockton dock alley was a museum of things to fail on, and Greg's foot found a flattened length of conduit with the unerring instinct his body reserved for the worst possible moment, and his ankle went sideways, and he came down on one knee, palm skidding through grit, and the world behind him got bright.

He turned on the ground. He shouldn't have. You don't turn; every thread agreed; you run and you do not look. He turned, half-sprawled, one knee, one hand, the exact posture of a boy on a lunchroom floor picking up papers —

— and Lung was through the swarm and into the alley and there was nothing between them, and the mask's eyes found Greg with the men's-room indifference of the order he'd given his men, the children, just kill them, doesn't matter, and Greg watched the huge scaled arm come down at him not even fast, not even angry, contemptuous, a man swatting the trash —

Greg's hand came up. There was no plan in it. It was the reflex of every creature that has ever been reached for in the dark: meet the hand. His fingers hit the descending forearm, scale-hot, skin like a kettle, and closed.

And the part of Greg that had opened on a lunchroom floor — the part that had reached once for a sharp cold thing and slipped, the part he'd been holding back all night like fingers off a stove — did not wait for permission this time. It went through the contact like water through a breach, and there was the furnace, no glass between them now, no sixty feet, the coiled engine turning over and over directly under his palm, fully expressing, every valve open, and where Sophia's power had been angled and oiled and not-his, this — this, blazing, running at full song, 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.