Grace Among the Ashes

Durolord · Nov 4, 2026

The sky was turning yellow.

It started at the Erdtree's roots and climbed, a thick, buttery light that soaked up through the bark and into the branches until the whole golden canopy looked jaundiced. Nothing burned. Greg had expected burning. Instead the light settled over the ruined capital like fog, and where it touched, things went quiet. The soldiers on the walls stopped shouting. A dragon perched on the far battlements lowered its head and began, softly, to laugh.

Greg Veder stood in front of the broken Ring and watched it happen.

Rubble hung in the air around him. He'd pulled it up three fights ago, chunks of Leyndell's marble and a cracked statue's head and somebody's shield, and he'd never quite let it go. Radahn's gravity sat in his bones like a second skeleton, and the stones circled him in a slow orbit, grinding against each other with a sound like teeth. Under the bandages on his right forearm, a cluster of scarlet petals pressed against the skin from the inside. He'd taken that from Malenia, or it had taken him. Some nights he could feel the will inside it, a patient, flowering thing that wanted to bloom through him and didn't care what was left afterwards.

By the end he'd been stronger than almost anything he met. It hadn't helped as much as he'd hoped.

His eyes hurt. They'd hurt ever since the cellar under the city, and the three long fingers that had reached out of the dark and cupped his face with something worse than kindness. The yellow sat right behind his eyes now, bright and patient.

It's fine, he told himself. You chose this. You did the math.

He hadn't found the cellar on his own. Something had led him there.

It had lived under his ribs since Messmer. Greg had pulled the Impaler's remembrance out of a dead man's chest in a land that didn't officially exist, and something had come with it: long, cool, scaled, and fond of him in a way he didn't like, curled around a fire that had never been Messmer's at all. It was hers. He'd only been carrying it for her. A goddess, she said, or half of one. For months she'd murmured to him at night about her other half, torn away and chained under the capital, howling in the dark. Without me it is only madness, she'd told him. Without it, I am only fire. Make us whole, little ember, and no one will ever have to be kindling again.

He'd done everything the other voices told him before that. Find the runes, kill the demigods, climb the tree, mend the Order. It had only made new graves with nicer names on them. So when the goddess offered him a world where nobody had to burn for it, he'd listened. He'd walked down into the dark, and the Frenzied Flame had looked at him the way she did, like it recognized him.

Somewhere behind him a woman's voice said his name. Not the name the Lands Between had given him. His real one, which he had told exactly one person in all the time he'd been here. She'd left him the moment he went down into that cellar. She'd promised to come back. She'd also promised what she would do when she did.

He didn't turn around. If he turned around he would stop, and if he stopped he'd have to think about Alexander's laugh booming off a cliffside, and Blaidd's back as he walked away, and Millicent's hand going still in his.

The yellow reached the top of the tree.

The fire in his chest rose to meet it. He felt the goddess stretch toward the light, and the light lean back toward her, two halves of one thing reaching across a very long gap.

They touched.

It didn't hurt. He'd been braced for it to hurt. Instead there was a sound like a held breath let go, and the crimson fire under his ribs and the yellow fire behind his eyes ran together the way two candle flames do when you tip them close. The color went strange. Red at the heart, gold at the edges, and threaded all through it something that wasn't a color at all, more like the feeling of a word on the tip of your tongue.

The goddess was bigger now. He could feel her filling him, coil on coil, and her voice when it came was no longer a whisper in one ear. It came from everywhere.

There, she said. Whole.

Something moved in his right arm.

The petals under the bandage shivered. He felt the will inside them notice her and recoil, the way a weed's roots shrink from salt. The goddess didn't hurry. She slid down his arm on the inside, cool and certain, and closed around that flowering will, and squeezed, and it was gone. Not the rot. The rot was still there, red and sleeping in his bones. Only the thing that had been steering it was gone, plucked out like a splinter.

That one does not get to want things through you anymore, the goddess said. Nobody does. Only you. Only me.

He was shaking. He didn't know when he'd started.

You carried me, she said, softer. You did not burn the world when it would have been easy. That is rare, little ember. I choose you. You are my champion now.

"What does that mean?" His voice cracked. It always did at the worst moments. "What do I have to do?"

She didn't answer straight away. The yellow light was still spreading, down the trunk of the great tree and out across the capital, and all through the city things were laughing quietly to themselves. He felt her consider it. Felt her weigh the world in front of them like a coin.

Then she lifted what might have been a head, and said, very gently:

Not here, little ember. Not yet.

"Not yet what? What are you—"

The world folded.

He didn't fall so much as get pulled, like a hand had closed around the back of his collar and yanked him backwards out of the frame. The stones dropped out of their orbit and he heard them hit the ground somewhere very far away. The yellow sky smeared. The Erdtree went sideways. His stomach flipped, and he thought, with perfect clarity, oh, I'm going to throw up on a god, and then there was nothing at all.

Then there was the smell of salt and rust.

He woke up on his back with his hand already reaching for a sword.

His fingers closed on fabric. Soft fabric, pilled and warm. He held still, eyes shut, listening. Years of reflexes he didn't remember earning were screaming at him to roll, so he didn't move. Rolling was what you did when you knew where the enemy was. When you didn't, you waited.

A car went past outside. Tires on wet road. A dog barked twice, gave up.

A clock ticked.

Greg opened his eyes.

The ceiling was white, with a brown water stain in one corner shaped vaguely like Ohio. There were glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to it, the cheap kind, mostly peeled. He'd put them up when he was nine. He knew that the way you know an old song: not the memory, just its shape.

He sat up slowly.

Bedroom. His bedroom. Posters on the walls: a game he'd been obsessed with in eighth grade, a cape team he'd had opinions about on the internet, a band he'd never actually listened to but thought looked cool. A desk buried in old homework and energy drink cans. A computer with a sticky note on the monitor that said, in his own handwriting, DON'T FORGET PHO THREAD!!!

Nothing here was a weapon. He checked anyway. The cans were too light. The desk chair would break on the first hit. The lamp had potential.

Okay, he thought. Okay. This is a dream. Or a trap. Or the frenzy finally ate your brain and this is what's left.

He looked down at his hands.

They were wrong. Too smooth, too small, with chewed nails and no calluses. The burn scar across the back of his left hand, the one from the giant's forge, was gone. So was the line on his palm where he'd caught a knight's blade because he'd been too slow to parry. He turned them over and over. They were the hands of a kid who played video games and ate cereal for dinner.

Then he closed his left hand into a fist and felt it: heat, low under his breastbone, like a coal someone had forgotten in the bottom of a grate. When he breathed in it brightened. When he breathed out it settled.

It was the whole flame. He could tell that much. Red at the heart and gold at the edges, the same fire that had run together under the Erdtree. But it was so small. In the Lands Between it had filled him to the fingertips. Here it was the size of a coal, and when he pulled at it, only a thread came.

The rest was there too, if he held still.

Radahn's gravity sat along his spine and out through every bone, heavy and slow, the way a star would feel if you swallowed one. He reached for it, the way he'd reached a thousand times to pull a boulder out of the ground, and nothing happened. It didn't refuse him. It just didn't answer, like a phone ringing in an empty house. And in his marrow, in every long bone, the rot lay asleep behind something that felt like a locked door. No will in it now. Only the red, waiting.

And wrapped around the coal, long and cool, was her. She was holding the flame the way you'd cup your hands around a match in the wind, so it couldn't go out. So it couldn't flare up either.

Too small, she murmured, as if she'd heard him thinking it. This body is a cup, little ember, and you were a lake. Grow, and I will pour.

He reached, out of habit, for the other thing he'd always carried, and his hand closed on warm glass.

The flask. A small, heavy bottle of dark red glass with a stopper shaped like a teardrop, sitting in his palm as if it had always been there. Crimson light moved inside it, low and slow. Not full. Not empty either. He knew without trying that it would heal him, and he knew that it would only fill again at a true Site of Grace, the kind you could rest at. He didn't know if there were any of those here.

He let it go. It went back to wherever it went.

He swung his legs out of bed and nearly fell over. His legs were the wrong length too, and his balance was set for armor he wasn't wearing. He grabbed the desk. A can rolled off and clattered on the floor, and the sound went through him like a bell.

Footsteps in the hall. Fast.

Greg's whole body went into a crouch before he could tell it not to. His right hand went to his hip, where there was nothing. His left hand opened, fingers curled, and the coal under his ribs flared hot enough that he smelled scorched cotton.

The door burst open.

"Greg?"

It was his mom.

She looked older than he remembered, and he knew that wasn't fair, because whatever had happened to him hadn't happened to her. She was in her work blouse with her hair half up, phone in one hand, car keys in the other. Her eyes were red. When she saw him crouched by the desk like a cornered animal her face did something complicated.

"Oh my God," she said. "Oh my God, Greg. Tom! Tom! He's here, he's in his room—"

She crossed the room in three steps and grabbed him.

He nearly hit her.

It was close, closer than he wanted to think about. His arm was already moving, elbow coming up toward her throat, the way he'd learned against things that hugged you to break your spine. He stopped it about two inches from her chin. She didn't notice. She was crying into his hair and saying his name over and over, and his arm hung there in the air like it didn't know what it was for.

He lowered it. Very carefully, he put it around her back.

She smelled like coffee and the vanilla lotion she'd used since he was little. That one he remembered properly. It came back so hard his eyes stung.

"Hi, Mom," he said. His voice came out rough, like he hadn't used it in a long time. Maybe he hadn't, not in English.

His dad appeared in the doorway, still in his warehouse hi-vis vest, breathing hard like he'd run up the stairs. He looked at Greg for a long second. Then he looked at the window, which was latched, and at the door, which had been locked from the outside, and back at Greg.

"Where," his dad said, very quietly, "have you been?"

Four days.

That was the answer the calendar on his phone gave him, once his dad found it in the kitchen drawer where it had been sitting since the police dropped it off. He'd been missing for four days. He'd walked home from the Boardwalk on the twenty-eighth of December, in the dead days between Christmas and New Year, and his phone had been found in a gutter on Lord Street, and nobody had seen him since.

Four days.

Greg sat at the kitchen table with a glass of water he hadn't touched and tried to make the number fit. It didn't. He'd been in the Lands Between for... he didn't know. Years. A few at least, maybe more. He'd stopped counting after the first time he died. Time there didn't run in a line. It ran in loops, every death a stitch back to the last place of grace, and after enough stitches the fabric didn't look like a calendar anymore.

"We filed a report," his mom was saying. She hadn't let go of his hand since they came downstairs. "The police were here every day. Officer Ruiz. She was very nice. They thought maybe the ABB, because of the gutter, because they've been taking kids, and I just..." She stopped and pressed her lips together.

"I'm sorry," Greg said. He meant it so much it hurt.

"Don't be sorry. Just tell us what happened."

His dad was leaning against the counter with his arms folded. He had the look he got when the car made a noise he didn't recognize: patient, worried and very tired. He'd worked a double the night Greg disappeared. Greg knew that because his dad said so, twice, like he was confessing something.

"I got lost," Greg said.

His dad's jaw worked. "Lost."

"Yeah."

"For four days."

"Yeah." Greg looked at the water glass. The light from the window hit it and threw a little wobbling circle on the table. He found himself watching it the way he used to watch the golden motes drift up from a site of grace, waiting for them to point somewhere. "I don't really remember. I was walking home and then I was... somewhere else. And then I was here."

That was true. It was so true it was almost funny.

"Did someone take you?" his mom asked. "Greg, honey, if someone hurt you, you can tell us. We won't be mad. Nobody will be mad."

A lot of someones hurt me, he thought. Most of them were eight feet tall. One of them was a tree.

"Nobody took me," he said. "I promise."

His parents looked at each other over his head, the way they used to when he was little and he'd said something they'd discuss later. It made him feel about six years old and about six hundred, both at once, and he didn't know which one was worse.

"Okay," his dad said eventually. "Okay. We'll take you to the doctor tomorrow. Get you checked out. And you're going to talk to Officer Ruiz."

"Okay."

"And you're grounded."

His mom made a noise. "Tom."

"What, Laura? He's grounded. He's grounded for the rest of his natural life." His dad's voice wobbled on the last word. He turned around and opened the fridge and stared into it for a long time, and Greg realized his dad was hiding his face.

Greg looked down at his hands again. At his mom's hand holding his.

He'd been ready to die for strangers in the Lands Between more times than he could count. He hadn't once thought about what dying would do to these two people.

He drank the water instead of thinking about it.

The doctor said he was healthy, if a little underweight. Officer Ruiz said he was lucky, and asked a lot of questions he answered with "I don't remember." Winter break had two days left in it. Nobody suggested he skip the start of the semester, and Greg didn't ask.

So for two days he stayed home, grounded, and learned how to be a person again.

It was harder than the Crumbling Farum Azula.

The first night he couldn't sleep in the bed. It was too soft, and he could hear everything: the fridge humming, the pipes knocking, a neighbor's TV through the wall. Every noise was something approaching. Around two in the morning he gave up and dragged his comforter into the corner between the closet and the wall, where he could see the door and the window at the same time, and sat there with his back pressed to the plaster and a baseball bat across his knees.

He slept like that until six. It was the best sleep he'd had in years.

His mom found him there the second morning. She didn't say anything. She just looked at the bat, then at him, and her face did the complicated thing again. That night there was a pamphlet on his desk about trauma counseling for young people. He put it in a drawer, but he didn't throw it away.

He relearned things. The microwave, which he'd forgotten how to use and then remembered all at once, so fast it made him dizzy. His locker combination, which he never got back and eventually found written on the inside of an old binder. His best friend's last name (Fabrizio), and then that they weren't really best friends anymore, and hadn't been for a while.

The thing he relearned fastest was PHO.

He'd logged on the second night, mostly out of habit, half expecting the site to look alien. It didn't. It looked exactly the same, the same dumb blue banner and the same people arguing about the same capes, and something in his chest unclenched at the sight of it. There was even a thread in the Brockton Bay local board titled Missing Winslow Student Found Safe, four pages long, half of it people guessing which gang had taken him and the other half people telling them to stop speculating about a minor.

Someone had posted, wait is this the kid who wrote the 4000 word essay on why Glory Girl's aura counts as a Master power

Someone else had replied, lmao yes. glad he's ok tho.

Greg read that reply five times. Then he closed the laptop and sat in the dark corner of his room for a while, feeling like a ghost who'd come back to find out people had missed him a little bit.

On Monday, the first day of the semester, his mom drove him to school.

Winslow High School was built like a fortress that had lost every war it had been in.

Greg stood at the bottom of the front steps and looked at it properly, the way he'd look at a castle he had to get into. Two main entrances. Fire doors on the east side, propped open with a brick because somebody wanted to smoke. Windows on the ground floor too narrow to climb through, second-floor windows wide enough. Security guard by the front door, maybe fifty, looking at his phone. No real sightlines inside, from memory: long hallways, blind corners at every junction, lots of places to get cornered.

Terrible level design, he thought. One star. Would not invade again.

He went in.

The noise hit him first. Hundreds of people talking at once, lockers slamming, somebody's phone blasting music, a teacher yelling about the dress code. In the Lands Between, noise meant something. A crowd meant an ambush. A shout meant a death. His shoulders went up around his ears and his hand drifted toward his hip again, and he made himself put it in his pocket.

They're kids, he told himself. They're just kids. You're a kid. Act like one.

He walked down the main hall.

People noticed him. He'd expected that. The PHO thread had been four pages long, after all, and Winslow ran on gossip the way the Lands Between ran on runes. He heard his name in murmurs on both sides. A couple of girls by the trophy case, still comparing what they'd got for Christmas, stopped to stare. A guy from his old gym class, Marcus or Mark, did a double take.

"Yo, Veder!" Mark-or-Marcus said. "Thought the ABB got you, man!"

Old Greg would have done something with that. Made a joke, probably a bad one. Launched into a theory about how the ABB actually recruited, citing three PHO threads and a Wikipedia article. Tried too hard and watched the other kid's face go flat with boredom.

New Greg looked at him. Just looked, for a second too long, the way he used to look at a knight standing too still at the end of a corridor, working out whether it was going to move.

"Nope," Greg said.

Mark-or-Marcus's grin faltered. "Uh. Cool. Glad you're, uh. Cool."

Greg kept walking. Behind him, he heard Mark-or-Marcus mutter to someone, "Dude, what happened to him?"

Lots of things, Greg thought. Most of them had teeth.

He found his locker after only one wrong turn, opened it with the combination he'd copied onto his wrist in pen, and stood there for a second with the door open, pretending to look for something. It gave him cover. It let him watch the hallway in the little mirror someone had stuck inside the door years ago and never taken down.

He clocked everyone without meaning to. The way you'd scan a new area for anything that wanted to kill you. The kids by the water fountain, loud and harmless. The teacher on hall duty, distracted. A couple making out against the wall, which made him feel weirdly old. A tall, dark-skinned girl in a track jacket walking with a redhead and a shorter brunette, all three of them laughing at something, and the way people sort of flowed out of their path without looking.

He noted the tall one in particular. Sophia Hess, his brain supplied after a second, from somewhere back before. Track team. She moved like a fighter. Not a trained one, maybe, but someone who'd been in enough fights to stop thinking about them. Her eyes did the same thing his did: corners, hands, exits.

Huh, he thought, and filed it away.

He shut the locker.

A voice behind him said, "Wow. Veder. Back from the dead and still a total freak."

Greg turned around.

It was a guy he half recognized: big, thick neck, letterman jacket. Brett, or Brent, something with a B. He'd shoved Greg into a locker in ninth grade, Greg remembered, and Greg had laughed it off and then gone home and written a forum post about how bullying was really a reflection of the bully's insecurities and gotten eleven likes.

Behind Brett-or-Brent, a little way down the hall, Sophia had stopped walking. So had the redhead and the brunette. They were watching with the half-interested expressions of people tuning into a show they'd already seen.

"Hey," Greg said. "Brett."

"Brent."

"Brent. Sorry."

"You were gone over break, dude," Brent said, loud enough for the hallway. A few people laughed. "Everyone thought you got snatched. Everybody was all sad and shit. Then you just show up? What, did your mom ground you for running away?"

Yes, actually, Greg thought.

"Something like that," he said.

"Something like that," Brent repeated in a high, nasal voice that was apparently meant to be Greg's. More laughter. He stepped closer. He was taller than Greg by half a head and probably outweighed him by fifty pounds. He put a hand flat on Greg's chest.

He shoved.

Greg went back into the lockers. The metal boomed. His shoulder blades hit the vents, his head bounced off the steel, and the whole world went very, very simple.

There was a sword at his hip. There wasn't, but there was. His hand knew exactly where the grip would be, exactly how far to drop his weight, exactly how much space there was between Brent's ribs and how the blade would go in under the arm where the jacket gapped. It would take less than a second. Brent wouldn't even have time to look surprised.

The coal under his ribs blazed.

Something stirred in the dark behind it. Cool and coiled and amused.

He put his hands on you, the voice said, soft and reasonable. They always put their hands on you. You could make him stop. You could make all of them stop.

Greg's fingers spread against the locker behind him. The metal under his palm was cold.

Then it wasn't.

Heat poured out of him. Not fire. Nothing anyone could see, just the wavering shimmer you get over a road in summer, sliding off his skin and into the steel. He felt the cold go out of the locker door. Felt the hinge under his pinkie finger soften, very slightly.

No, he thought. No no no no, not here, not now, not—

He took his hand off the metal.

It took everything he had. It felt like pulling his own arm out of a fire, except backwards, like the fire was the thing that wanted to stay. His whole body shook with it. He jammed both hands into his hoodie pocket and stared at the floor.

"What," Brent said, "are you crying?"

"No," Greg said. His voice came out level, which surprised him. "I'm just going to stand here. You should walk away now."

Brent laughed. But it was a slightly uncertain laugh, the laugh of a guy who'd expected something and gotten something else.

"Or what, freak?"

Greg looked up.

He didn't do anything else. Just looked, the same way he'd looked at Mark-or-Marcus, only longer. He let Brent see whatever was in his face. He didn't know exactly what that was. He'd stood in front of things that had eaten armies and stared them down. He'd watched a god bleed. He'd made a choice that had turned a world's sky yellow, and he could still feel the heat of it at the back of his eyes, bright and yellow and waiting.

Whatever Brent saw, he didn't like it.

He took a step back. Then another. His face went red, then white. "Whatever," he muttered. "Fucking psycho." He turned and shouldered off through the crowd, too fast to be casual.

The hallway's attention drifted away, disappointed. The redhead tugged Sophia's sleeve and said something, and the brunette laughed, and the two of them moved on. Sophia didn't. She leaned against the trophy case with her arms folded, watching him like she was waiting for the rest of the show.

Greg let out a breath he'd been holding for about a year.

Okay. That was fine. That was completely fine. You did not stab anyone. Gold star. Proud of you.

His hands were still shaking in his pocket. He pulled one out and looked at it. Normal. Pink. A little sweaty. No glow, no smoke. He looked at the locker behind him.

The bottom hinge was glowing a dull, cherry red.

It wasn't bright. You'd only see it if you were looking right at it. But as he watched, a thin curl of smoke rose from the paint where it had started to blister, and the whole hallway suddenly smelled faintly of hot metal.

Greg slapped his hand over it. It hissed against his palm and didn't hurt at all, which was its own kind of problem. He held it there and counted to ten in his head, and felt the heat soak back into him like water into sand.

When he took his hand away, the hinge was gray again. Blistered, but gray.

He looked up.

Sophia Hess was still by the trophy case. She wasn't looking at his face. She was looking at his hand, and at the blistered hinge beside it, and then back at his hand.

She didn't look scared. That was the part he didn't like. She looked the way he probably looked when a boss showed him a new move: interested, and already working out what it meant.

The bell rang. The crowd surged between them. When it cleared, she was gone.

Cool, Greg thought. Great start. Love it.

He made it to lunch.

He didn't remember much of the morning. History, where the teacher made a point of saying "welcome back, Greg" in a voice that made the whole class turn around. Math, where he understood nothing. A free period in the library, where he sat at a table in the back corner with his back to the wall and pretended to read a book about the Second World War while watching the doors.

At lunch he went to the cafeteria, took one look at the room (two hundred people, one exit, the noise like a battlefield before the charge), and walked straight back out again.

He wandered. He didn't know where he was going. His feet took him away from the noise, up a flight of stairs, down a corridor of locked classrooms, past a sign that said STAFF ONLY in faded letters. Through a fire door that was supposed to be alarmed and wasn't. Up another short flight of stairs that dead-ended at a door to the roof, chained shut.

The stairwell was dim. One fluorescent light, flickering. Cracked concrete steps, a little drift of old leaves and cigarette butts in the corner where the wind got in. Somebody had written TONY WAS HERE on the wall in sharpie, and underneath, in different handwriting, NO HE WASN'T.

Greg sat down on the top step with his back against the chained door and let out a long breath.

It was quiet. Properly quiet, for the first time all day. He could hear the building creak and settle around him, and far below, the dull roar of the cafeteria, muffled by concrete. Nobody could come at him from behind. There was one way in, and he could see it.

Okay, he thought. Okay. You can stay here. This can be your spot.

He pulled a granola bar out of his bag. His mom had packed it. She'd packed three, actually, along with a sandwich, an apple, two juice boxes and a note that said Love you! Text me if you need anything!!! with a little heart. He'd read the note four times on the bus. He hadn't stopped being embarrassed by it, and he hadn't thrown it away either.

He unwrapped the granola bar. Took a bite.

Then he stopped chewing.

There was something in the air. Not a smell, not a sound. More like the faint pressure you feel before a storm, or the way the air changes when someone walks into a room behind you. He swallowed and turned his head slowly, scanning the stairwell.

Nothing. Leaves. Concrete. The flickering light.

He put his palm flat on the step beside him.

It was warm.

This warmth was gentler than the hinge, and older, sunk deep into the concrete like heat into a stone that had been sitting in the sun all day. It came from the place, not from him.

Greg's breath caught.

He knew this feeling. He'd chased it across a whole broken world. It was the feeling you got when you came around a corner, battered and bleeding and down to your last flask, and saw that faint golden flicker in the air ahead. When your whole body sagged with relief because, for a little while, you could stop.

A site of grace.

Not a real one. It was too faint for that, just a smudge. If grace was a candle, this was the warm spot left on the table after somebody blew it out. But it was there. In a Winslow stairwell, under a sign that said TONY WAS HERE.

He closed his eyes and pressed his hand harder against the concrete. For a second the coal under his ribs went very still, and he saw it.

A girl, sitting exactly where he was sitting now. Years ago, maybe. Knees pulled up to her chest. Crying so hard she couldn't breathe. A bottle of pills in her hand, the cap already off.

She sat there for a long time.

Then she put the cap back on and went downstairs.

That was all. He didn't see what happened to her after. He didn't know her name. But whatever she'd decided in this stairwell, whatever it had cost her to get up and walk back down those steps, it had left something behind. A mark. A little scorch of stubborn, desperate, ordinary courage burned into the concrete.

Someone had survived here.

Greg opened his eyes. They were wet. He wiped them on his sleeve and laughed a little, unsteadily, at nothing.

The coal under his ribs answered the warmth in the stone. It flickered once, brightened, and for a moment the dim stairwell filled with the faintest golden haze, motes drifting up from the step like dust in a sunbeam. They didn't point anywhere. They just hung there, gentle, the way grace always had. Rest, they seemed to say. You can rest here.

Then, in the dark behind his heart, something shifted its coils.

Little ember, the voice murmured, and it sounded almost pleased. Look at you. You found a hearth.

The motes went out.

Greg sat very still on the top step of the stairwell, with a half-eaten granola bar in one hand and the other pressed flat to the warm concrete, and listened to the building breathe.

He'd come home. He wasn't sure all of him had.

Then a smell drifted up the stairwell from somewhere below. Sour, and under the sour something sweet and wet, like fruit left too long in the sun.

The coal under his ribs went cold.

He knew that smell. He'd last smelled it in a red swamp in Caelid, holding Millicent's hand.

Durolord · Friday at 6:42 PM

He was on his feet before he'd decided anything.

The granola bar went into his pocket. His bag stayed on the step. He took the stairs down two at a time, quiet on the balls of his feet, the way you came down into a catacomb when you didn't know what was waiting at the bottom. The fire door at the foot of the stairs swung shut behind him without a sound, because he caught it with two fingers before it could bang.

The smell was stronger in the corridor. Sour first, rot and old milk and something dead in a drain. Under that, the sweet part. Thick and wet and patient, like fruit that had split in the heat and kept going.

Nobody else seemed to notice. Two boys passed him going the other way, arguing about a football game. A girl was texting with her head down. If any of them could smell it they'd have run, or thrown up, or at least said something.

Maybe it's just you, he thought. Maybe this is the frenzy and you're making it up.

The coal under his ribs stayed cold. It had never been cold before. In the Lands Between it had gone hot for danger, hot for anger, hot for every fight. Cold meant something else. He'd felt it go cold exactly once, in the red swamp, kneeling in water the color of a wound with Millicent's fingers going loose in his.

He followed the smell.

It took him down the main stairs to the second floor, then left, away from the classrooms and toward the old science wing where half the rooms were used for storage. The lunch noise faded behind him. The lights here were the old kind, yellowed, and one of them buzzed like a trapped wasp.

He heard the laughing before he turned the corner.

Three girls stood in the middle of the corridor. The redhead from this morning had her phone up, filming. The brunette had both hands over her mouth, giggling into them like it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen and she knew she wasn't supposed to think so. Sophia Hess leaned against the wall with her arms folded, smiling a little, like a cat watching something it had already caught.

They were looking at a locker.

Somebody inside it was screaming.

It wasn't words. It had probably been words once, maybe for a long time, and now it was just sound: high and raw and hoarse, broken up by a wet coughing that turned into retching that turned back into screaming. The locker door shook every time she hit it. A thin brown trickle had run out from the vents and down the front, and dried, and been covered over by a fresh one.

Greg stood at the corner and his whole body went quiet.

He'd seen this before. Not the locker. The shape of it. A pit in the catacombs where something had been thrown in alive and left. A cage in Caelid hung over a drop. People made the same sound everywhere, it turned out, when they'd worked out nobody was coming.

"Oh my God," the brunette said, through her fingers. "Oh my God, I think she's actually crying. Emma, is she crying?"

"Keep it down, Madison," the redhead said, still filming. "You'll ruin the audio."

The smell came off the locker in a wave, and the sweet part of it caught the back of his throat and his eyes watered.

Scarlet rot. It wasn't possible. There was no Caelid here, no swamp, no Malenia blooming in a field of red flowers. But whatever was in that locker, whatever somebody had collected and saved and poured in there with her, it had gone so bad that it smelled to him like the worst place he'd ever been.

Behind his ribs, behind its locked door, the red that had once been Malenia's stirred in its sleep, as if it recognized the smell too. There was no will in it anymore. It only turned over, like a dog hearing its old name.

He started walking.

Madison saw him first. She dropped her hands, and her giggle died, and she said, "Uh, Sophia," in a small voice.

Sophia turned her head. She recognized him. He watched it happen: her eyes flicked to his hands, then back up to his face, and her smile changed shape. It got narrower and more interested, like this morning by the trophy case.

"Veder," she said. "Keep walking."

He kept walking. Right past her.

"Hey—"

The screaming stopped.

It didn't trail off. It cut out mid-breath, like someone had flipped a switch. In the silence he could hear the yellow light buzzing overhead, and Emma's phone making the little chime that meant it had stopped recording, and his own heartbeat, very slow.

Then he heard something else.

It started as a hum. Low, everywhere, coming up through the floor and in through the walls. It sounded like the building had started breathing through its teeth. A fly bumped against the light above them. Then another. Somewhere down the corridor, a window rattled, and kept rattling.

Madison said, "What is that?"

Nobody answered her. Greg put his hand flat on the locker door.

The metal was warm and wet and sticky. He didn't let himself think about what with. Through it, faintly, he could feel her: not hear, feel, a weight slumped against the far side of the door. She wasn't hitting it anymore. She wasn't moving at all.

The lock was a cheap combination one. The hinges were on the inside.

Okay, he thought. Okay, this is the part where you work out a clever plan with a paperclip and a bit of string. This is a heist movie. You've seen loads of heist movies.

He didn't have a paperclip.

He reached for the coal.

It was still cold, and for a second nothing answered. He felt for the other things, out of old habit, and they were there exactly where they'd been this morning: the heavy slow star of Radahn's gravity sunk in his spine and bones, the red asleep in his marrow behind its door. He pulled at the gravity the way you'd pull a lever in the dark. Nothing. It didn't refuse him. It just didn't move.

Please, he thought, and didn't know who he was asking.

Something long and cool slid around the coal. For her? the goddess asked, curious. You don't even know her.

Please.

She considered it for the length of one heartbeat. Then she opened her coils, just a little, the way you'd open your fingers to let a match catch.

The coal caught.

Heat came up through his chest and down his arms all at once, hard enough to make him gasp. It poured out of his palms into the steel. The sticky film under his hands hissed and went dry. The locker door ticked as it expanded. Paint around the edges began to curl and blacken.

His hands, pressed flat to the metal, were glowing. Crimson under the skin, like a flashlight held behind your fingers, and at the edges of the crimson a thin rim of yellow-gold that crawled along his knuckles and wouldn't sit still. His eyes stung. When he blinked, the yellow stayed.

It was the whole flame. Only a thread of it, the most this body could carry, but the whole thing, red and gold together. He'd never had to think about the gold part before. In the Lands Between it had been his, and it had been a weapon, and he'd pointed it at things that deserved it. He didn't know what it did to people who just happened to be standing too close.

He couldn't stop. If he stopped she'd stay in there.

Sophia Hess was standing two steps behind him and a little to the side. He knew without looking that she could see his face, and his hands, and the light. He could feel her watching. Emma and Madison were further back, at the wrong angle, staring at the locker and the rattling windows.

The voice came up from somewhere under the coal, silk over stone, very calm.

They put her in a grave, the goddess said. Give them one.

For a second he saw it, clear as a memory: turning around, and the fire leaving his hands, and the three of them, and the smell that would replace the smell of the locker. It would be so easy. It would be fair. He'd stood in judgement over people in the Lands Between for less than this, and he'd never once lost sleep.

He set his teeth.

"No," he said out loud, to nobody anyone else could see.

He hooked his fingers into the gap at the top of the door.

The edge was hot enough to soften, and sharp. It went into his fingers like a knife into bread. He felt it and didn't feel it, the way you felt wounds in the middle of a fight, as a fact to be dealt with later. He set his feet. His balance was still wrong, still built for armor and a longer body, so he widened his stance until it was right, and pulled.

The top hinge went with a shriek. The bottom one held. He shifted his grip lower, felt the steel open his palm, and pulled again, and the whole door came off in his hands with a sound like a car crash and he threw it, without thinking, down the corridor.

It hit the floor and skidded and slammed into the far wall.

The smell came out like something alive.

So did the bugs.

They were everywhere at once: on the floor, on the walls, a black boiling carpet of them pouring out of the vents and the drains and the gaps around the windows. Flies and roaches and ants, spiders dropping from the ceiling on threads, a hornet's nest's worth of something with wings. Madison screamed. Emma's phone hit the floor.

Taylor Hebert fell out of the locker into his arms.

She was soaked to the shoulders in something brown and red and black, and she was so light. Her glasses were gone. Her eyes were half open and not seeing anything, and her lips were moving.

The bugs were crawling over her. That was the image that stuck with him afterwards. Not onto her. Off her, out of her hair and her sleeves and the folds of her hoodie, streaming away from her in every direction like she was the center of a pond and they were the ripples. A cockroach ran across the back of his hand and kept going and didn't bite. Nothing bit him. Every single bug in the corridor was moving like it had somewhere to be.

He knelt on the filthy floor with her across his lap, and he put his bleeding hand on the side of her face so she'd know someone was there.

Her lips moved again. He bent closer.

"I can hear them," Taylor whispered. Her voice was hardly anything. "All of them."

Then she went limp.

* * *

The next part came in pieces.

He remembered shouting for help. He didn't remember the words. He remembered Madison running and Emma not running, standing completely still in the middle of the river of bugs with her face gone white as paper, staring at Taylor like she'd never seen her before.

He remembered Sophia.

She hadn't moved. The bugs went around her feet like water around a rock. She wasn't looking at Taylor. She was looking at him, at his eyes, and he knew from her face that whatever she was seeing there wasn't the color eyes were supposed to be. Her lips were parted. She didn't look scared. She looked the way people looked at a fire, or at a cliff edge, when part of them wondered what it would be like to step off. Her pupils were huge. A thin smile kept trying to start at one corner of her mouth and stopping, and starting again, as if she'd heard a joke and couldn't decide if it was funny.

He knew that look too. He'd seen it on soldiers who'd looked into the yellow too long, just before they started laughing.

Stop looking, he thought at her, uselessly. Stop looking at it.

"Your eyes," she said.

He didn't answer. He didn't trust what would come out.

"They're yellow." She took a step closer. A beetle crunched under her sneaker and she didn't look down. "Like, actually yellow. Glowing. What the fuck are you, Veder?"

Tarnished, he thought, and almost said it, and the word felt so ridiculous in this corridor that he nearly laughed, and the laugh frightened him more than the fever did. It sounded like the dragon on the battlements.

"Get a teacher," he said instead.

"Is that a cape thing? Did you trigger? When you were gone?" She was smiling again, a strange tight smile, and she was close enough now that he could smell her shampoo over the rot. "Everyone thought you got grabbed by the ABB. You didn't, did you. You went somewhere."

"Sophia." Emma's voice. It came out cracked down the middle. "Sophia, we need to go. We need to go, there's going to be—"

"Shut up, Emma."

Emma shut up. Greg noticed that, even through the fever. He noticed how fast she did it.

Sophia crouched, so they were eye to eye over Taylor's limp body. Up close her eyes were brown and very steady. Fighter's eyes. Someone who'd looked at a lot of people on the ground and decided things about them.

"You know what I think?" she said softly. "I think you're the same as me. I think you just figured it out."

"I'm not anything like you," he said.

It came out quiet, and level, and she flinched. Just a little. Just enough that he saw it, and saw her see that he'd seen it.

He hadn't even meant it as a threat. But the goddess shifted under his ribs, pleased, and he understood that it had sounded like one.

Sophia stood up. Her face had gone smooth and blank. "Whatever," she said. "Hope she was worth it."

Then a man's voice was shouting "What is going on here? What is—oh, Jesus," and it was Mr. Gladly, the social studies teacher, skidding around the corner with his tie flapping, and he stopped dead and put his arm over his face against the smell.

"Call an ambulance," Greg said. His voice came out level. That was the voice he'd used to give orders to people who'd been dying. "She needs an ambulance. Now. Tell them she's been in there for hours. Tell them biohazard."

Mr. Gladly stared at him, at Taylor, at the door twenty feet away against the wall.

"Did you," he started.

"Now."

Mr. Gladly fumbled for his phone.

The fever hit him about then.

He knew what it was the moment it started. He'd felt it a thousand times in the Lands Between, at the end of long fights: the bottom of the well. Whatever it was that fed his incantations, whatever made the fire come when he called, he'd poured all of it into that door, and this body didn't have much to begin with. There was nothing left.

In the Lands Between, running dry had meant a headache and a long sit at the nearest grace. Here it came out as heat. His skin went hot and then cold and then hot. His eyes ached as if he'd been staring at the sun. His cut hands began to throb in time with his heartbeat, and his own pulse sounded wrong in his ears, too loud and too fast, like somebody knocking on a door.

The goddess had pulled back somewhere deep, curled tight around the coal. Too much, she said. She sounded almost fond. I told you. A cup, not a lake.

He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood, and focused on that, and on the weight of the girl in his arms, and on counting her breaths. One. Two. Shallow, but there. Three.

The bugs were going. Not dying, leaving, flowing back the way they'd come, out through the windows and down the drains. In a minute there was nothing left but a few stragglers and a hum that faded into the walls and then wasn't there at all.

Nobody touched him. Nobody touched Taylor. He knelt there in the corridor in the filth with her head against his shoulder until he heard boots.

* * *

There were two paramedics. One was a broad woman with gray hair in a bun, and she took one look at Taylor and started snapping out words he half understood, and the other one, younger and freckled, crouched down by Greg and said, "Hey, bud. Hey. You hurt?"

"No," Greg said.

The paramedic looked at his hands.

Greg looked at them too. Both palms were opened up from the base of the fingers almost to the wrist, deep, the edges of the cuts white. There was blood on his jeans, on Taylor's hoodie, on the floor. He'd forgotten.

"Okay," said the paramedic. "Okay, bud, you're coming too."

"I'm fine."

"You're bleeding through your sleeves and you've got a fever I can feel from here. You're coming too."

He went. He didn't have the energy to argue, and anyway, they were taking her, and he didn't want to let her out of his sight. That wasn't logical. He knew it wasn't. He'd known her for about four sentences, total, back in ninth grade. But he'd pulled her out of a hole, and in the Lands Between that meant something. If you found somebody in the dark and you got them out, you stayed with them till they could stand.

They loaded Taylor on a stretcher and wrapped her in something silver. They sat Greg on a little bench in the back of the ambulance with gauze pressed into both hands. The doors slammed. The siren started, and the sound went right through his skull.

The ambulance swayed through traffic. Taylor lay under the silver blanket with a mask over her face, fogging and clearing, fogging and clearing. The older paramedic kept a hand on her wrist and talked into a radio in numbers.

"Fifteen-year-old female, prolonged confinement, contaminated biological material, suspected aspiration, sepsis risk. Possible parahuman event on site, PRT notified, school reports insect swarm. Second patient fifteen-year-old male, bilateral palmar lacerations, deep, temp one-oh-three point eight and climbing, alert and oriented."

Alert, Greg thought. Debatable.

The younger paramedic leaned over to check his gauze. "You know her?"

"A bit."

"You pulled her out?"

"Yeah."

The paramedic looked at him for a long second, then at the bloody gauze, and said quietly, "The teacher said you tore that door off."

Greg didn't say anything.

"Locker doors are bolted on," the paramedic said. "From the inside."

"It was rusty," Greg said.

The paramedic didn't push. He just nodded slowly and went back to his radio. But Greg saw him write something on a clipboard, and he saw the word PRT on it before the paramedic turned the board away.

He leaned his head back against the wall of the ambulance and shut his eyes.

The fever was still climbing. In the dark behind his eyelids the yellow pulsed in time with the siren. He could feel the place the goddess had wrapped around the coal, tight and quiet, as if she'd done something she was very pleased with and was waiting for him to notice.

You helped, he thought at her. Why did you help?

Because you asked, she said. And because you said no, after. You always say no, after. A slow, pleased ripple went through her coils. I like watching you say no.

He decided not to think about that either.

Mom's going to ground me into the next century, he thought, and it was so normal and stupid that he nearly laughed. Third day home. First day of the semester. He'd been grounded for the rest of his natural life about forty-eight hours ago, and he was in an ambulance.

The ambulance braked. The doors banged open on gray daylight and cold air, and a sign that said BROCKTON BAY GENERAL HOSPITAL: EMERGENCY, and a whole crowd of people in scrubs waiting at the doors.

They took Taylor first. He watched her go, the silver blanket catching the light, until the doors swung shut behind her.

Then someone took his elbow, gently, and helped him down.

Durolord · Monday at 2:59 PM

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Bug swarm at Winslow??

Topic: Bug swarm at Winslow??

In: Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay ► Schools

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BayWatcher_77 Winslow Survivor (Original Poster)

Posted On Jan 3rd 2011:

Anyone else at Winslow today?

Around 12:40 the whole east wing started HUMMING. Then bugs. Everywhere. Flies, roaches, spiders coming down the walls on threads. My whole chem class climbed on the desks. Mr. Kowalski climbed on HIS desk.

Five minutes later they all just. Left. Out the windows. Down the drains.

Ambulance came. School's saying "pest control issue" and sent everyone home at 1:30.

That was not a pest control issue.

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(Showing page 1 of 4)

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Glasstowner Actually Reads the Article

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Winslow junior, can confirm. There were ants coming out of the drinking fountain on the second floor.

I'm never drinking from that fountain again.

(I wasn't drinking from it before either but now it's official.)

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Turquoise_Pigeon Thread's Last Sane Person

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

New bug cape? That would be a first for the Bay. Last notable insect controller in the wiki is Swarmlord out of Austin and he retired in '08.

Sources: the wiki. Also my uncle, who lives in Austin.

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Glasstowner Actually Reads the Article

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

@Turquoise_Pigeon they weren't attacking anyone though. Nobody got bitten. They were just. Going places. Like they'd been called.

Felt like a trigger, not an attack. My cousin triggered and the whole street lost power for a day. Same energy.

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Vista_Fan_4Life Wards Groupie

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Wasn't a girl taken out on a stretcher?? My friend said she was IN a LOCKER. Like inside it.

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BayWatcher_77 Winslow Survivor (Original Poster)

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Heard the same. And here's the weird part. Somebody pulled her out.

Not opened. RIPPED. The door ended up at the other end of the corridor. My friend's friend saw it bent in half.

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TinMother Mod (Out of Patience)

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Reminder: speculation about the identities of minors, especially injured minors, is against board rules. Discuss the event, not the kids.

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Turquoise_Pigeon Thread's Last Sane Person

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Ripping a locker door off is Brute work. A bug swarm is Master work. Two triggers in one corridor on the same day?

That's not a coincidence. That's a cluster. Or something worse.

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Glasstowner Actually Reads the Article

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Or the door was rusty. Have you SEEN Winslow. The gym doors are held on with duct tape and prayer.

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End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4

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(Showing page 4 of 4)

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Bagrat Cape Geek (Has Sources)

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Okay, I have SOURCES. Scanner chatter at 12:51: two patients from Winslow to Brockton General. One "biohazard exposure." One "lacerations, both hands." PRT notified en route.

Both hands. Think about what you'd have to do to a steel locker to cut up both hands.

Heat damage was mentioned too. Make of that what you will.

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Vista_Fan_4Life Wards Groupie

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Wait wasn't the Winslow kid who went missing over break back today? The ABB one? My brother said he was acting SUPER weird in the hall this morning. Like staring-people-down weird.

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TinMother Mod (Out of Patience)

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

@Vista_Fan_4Life Warning issued. See my post above. Next one is a ban.

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Acree Professional Worrier

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Serious question nobody's asking. If it was a trigger, it happened inside a locker. In the middle of a school day. During lunch.

Who put her in there? And how long did nobody notice?

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Glasstowner Actually Reads the Article

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

@Acree yeah. That.

For what it's worth, whoever pulled her out, good on them. Hall full of people and ONE person actually helped. That should be the story here, not "cluster or something worse."

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BayWatcher_77 Winslow Survivor (Original Poster)

Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:

Update: my mom just got the email.

"A student was injured today due to a maintenance issue in the east wing. The school is cooperating fully with the relevant authorities. Classes will resume as normal tomorrow."

That's it. Nothing about bugs. Nothing about a locker. Nothing about a door at the other end of the hall.

Why do I get the feeling we're never hearing about this again?

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End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4

Durolord · Monday at 5:05 PM

Amy Dallon had been awake for nineteen hours and on shift for twelve of them, and she was eating peanut butter crackers out of the fourth-floor vending machine when Dr. Hadley found her.

"Panacea." He was out of breath. He'd taken the stairs, so he wanted something. "We need you in Emergency."

"I'm on break," Amy said.

"It's urgent."

"It's always urgent. It's literally the name of the department." She ate another cracker. It tasted like salty cardboard, and it was the first thing she'd eaten since a granola bar at six that morning, so she was going to finish it. "Is someone dying?"

Dr. Hadley hesitated.

"Then I'm finishing my crackers," Amy said. "Then I'm going to the bathroom. Then I'll come down, and you can tell me which of the forty people in the waiting room has the kind of insurance that got you up four flights of stairs."

"That's not—" He went red. "That's uncalled for."

"Is it, though?"

He opened his mouth, shut it and left. Amy watched the door swing behind him and felt the usual small, mean flash of satisfaction, and then the usual guilt, which was bigger. He wasn't a bad doctor, just a tired one, like all of them. He thought of her the way most of the staff did, as an expensive piece of equipment that sometimes talked back.

Heroes don't sulk over crackers, said a voice in her head that sounded a lot like her mother.

She finished the crackers anyway.

* * *

It wasn't anyone with good insurance.

It was a girl. The charge nurse met Amy at the doors and walked her through it fast: fifteen, Winslow High, found in a locker at lunch after nobody knew how long, the locker full of used sanitary products and spoiled food and Christ knew what else. She'd breathed some of it in, been sick, and breathed some of that in too. Her temperature was climbing. There'd been an insect swarm at the school, and the PRT had called ahead to say they couldn't rule out a parahuman event, which was why somebody had remembered Panacea was in the building.

"Parents?" Amy asked.

"Father's on his way. Mother's deceased."

Amy pushed through the curtain.

The girl on the bed was tall and thin and gray under the lights. They'd cut her clothes off and cleaned her up as well as they could, but the smell was still in her hair. She was breathing fast and shallow through a mask, with a rattle on every breath.

Amy pulled off her glove and put two fingers on the girl's wrist.

The body opened up to her all at once, the way they always did. Lungs first: inflamed and wet, with bacteria settling in for the long haul in the lower right lobe. The bloodstream was already getting crowded. Cuts on her hands from the inside of the locker, infected. Underweight. Old bruises on her upper arms in the shape of fingers, a few weeks old and going yellow.

Amy's mouth went flat. She wasn't allowed to comment on that, so she made a note to tell the social worker.

She started with the lungs.

It was easy. People never understood that part. You found the bacteria and told them to stop, you found the inflammation and told it to settle, and you nudged the damaged cells to fix themselves a bit faster than they would have on their own. Twenty seconds. The rattle smoothed out and the temperature started to drop. The infection in the girl's hands went out like ink in water.

Then, because she was thorough and because she was tired, her power drifted up toward the girl's head.

Amy stopped it there. She always stopped at the brain. It was her one hard rule, and she had never once broken it. But even from the edges she could tell something was going on in there, far more activity than an unconscious girl should have, sparks in places that didn't usually light up at all.

Trigger, Amy thought. Oh, hell.

Not her department. She pulled back, carefully, and let go.

"She'll be fine," she told the nurse. "Lungs are clear, blood's clear. She'll wake up in a few hours with a headache and a sore throat, and she'll be hungry, so give her something with sugar in it." She paused. "And get Social Services up here before her dad arrives. There are bruises on her arms that didn't come from the locker."

The nurse wrote it down. "PRT will want to talk to her."

"PRT can wait till she's awake. And till her dad's here, and somebody's checked she actually wants to talk to them." Amy rubbed her eyes. "Is that everything?"

"There's one more." The nurse hesitated, which was unusual. Nurses didn't hesitate; nurses were the only reason this place ran. "The boy who pulled her out came in with her. Deep lacerations to both palms. We've packed them, but the right hand needs surgery, there's tendon damage. And he's running a fever. A hundred and four point two, and it won't come down."

"Infection?"

"That's the thing. His bloods are clean."

Amy looked at her.

"Bay six," the nurse said.

* * *

The boy in bay six was sitting up on the bed with his bandaged hands in his lap, and when Amy pulled back the curtain he was already looking at her.

Most patients looked up when the curtain moved. He'd been watching it before she touched it, as if he'd picked her footsteps out of the corridor noise.

He was about her age, with blond hair that needed a cut, and thin in a way that looked recent, his hoodie hanging off him. There was dried blood on his jeans and something worse on his sneakers. His face was red with fever and his forehead was wet with sweat. He should have looked like any sick kid in an emergency room.

He didn't, and she couldn't have said why. He sat too still. He'd put himself on the side of the bed where he could see the curtain and the gap to the corridor. When she came in his shoulders didn't drop, exactly, but they shifted, as if he'd looked her over and put her on a different list.

"Hi," he said. His voice was rough. "Are you the healer? Panacea?"

"Amy," she said, before she thought about it, and frowned at herself. "Panacea. On duty it's Panacea."

"Okay, Panacea." He glanced at her badge, which said AMY DALLON in big letters, and didn't say anything about it. "How's Taylor?"

"Who?"

"The girl from the locker."

"She'll be fine." Amy pulled the chair up beside the bed. "You know her?"

He thought about it. "Sort of. Not really."

"But you tore a locker door off for her."

He went still in a different way. "Who told you that?"

"Nobody. I'm a good guesser." She wasn't. On the way down the charge nurse had whispered that a teacher found the door twenty feet down the corridor, bent nearly in half, and the boy holding it. He didn't need to know that. "Let's see your hands."

He held them out palm-up and steady. Most people held their hands out to her the way they would for a blood draw, limp, waiting for it to be over. He watched her face instead of his hands.

She reached for his wrist and stopped an inch away.

"May I?"

She always asked. Nobody noticed. They were in too much pain, or too dazzled by a cape in the room, or busy telling her how much they loved Glory Girl. Half of them said "Sure" without looking up and the other half just stuck out an arm.

The boy looked at her hand. Then at her face, and something in his expression eased.

"Yeah," he said. "Thanks for asking."

Amy didn't know what to do with that, so she touched his wrist.

* * *

Hands first, because that was the job.

The right palm was worse. Flexor tendons to the middle and ring fingers nicked, not cut through; the nurse had been right about surgery. The left was deep but clean. Flecks of paint and rust in both. She cleaned them out, knitted the tendon, closed the muscle and then the skin. Fifteen seconds.

Then the fever. She went looking for the source and found nothing. No infection, no inflammation. His immune system wasn't even trying, as if it didn't know there was a fever. The heat was simply there in his blood and tissues, steady and even, like someone had switched it on from outside.

She followed it, and started to see the rest.

His eyes first. There was scarring on both retinas, and it was yellow, which she had never seen in a retina in her life: fine, exact lines laid across the back of each eye and running up the optic nerves, where they branched. The branches had a pattern. It looked almost like writing.

Under her hand his breath caught. Her power was already moving on.

His skin was young, smooth and a little underfed. Underneath, at the level where she could read a body's history, every muscle carried the ghost of a tear and a repair, and another tear over that, layered thick as paint on an old wall. The surface said fifteen. The layers said years of being hurt in ways that should have killed him.

That's impossible, she thought. His skin's brand new.

His bones were worse. They were far too dense for fifteen, dense like a weightlifter's, like someone who'd spent years carrying loads that should have broken him. His vertebrae were faintly flattened. Healed microfractures ran all through his arms and legs in a regular pattern, out from his core, as if something had pulled on him from the middle, hard, over and over. She'd once read a paper about bone loss in astronauts. This was the opposite.

In his marrow there was something red.

She went in carefully. Cells that weren't his, and weren't bacteria or fungus or anything she recognized, tucked in among the marrow in every long bone she checked: femur, humerus, radius. They were scarlet and packed together like seeds in a pod, each cluster wrapped in a thin membrane she was sure his body hadn't made. Where the membrane met living bone the tissue was faintly scarred, as if something had once eaten its way in and been stopped right there and sealed.

They were asleep. What bothered her was how empty they felt. Bacteria wanted to eat and divide, cancer wanted to grow, even a virus had some blind purpose. These wanted nothing. They felt like a tool left on a workbench.

Waiting for someone to pick them up, Amy thought, and didn't like that she'd thought it.

She didn't touch them.

Then she reached his chest, and her power stopped.

She hadn't stopped it. That had never happened. Near his heart, not in it, something was wrapped around something warm, and she couldn't see it or read it, only feel the outline: long and cool and coiled. Her power slid up to the edge of it and drew back like a hand off a stove. When she pushed, it wouldn't go.

Something in there noticed her.

Amy took her hand off his wrist so fast she nearly knocked the chair over.

* * *

For a few seconds neither of them said anything.

The boy opened and closed his hands and looked at the new pink skin where the cuts had been. He didn't seem surprised by the hands. He was watching her face to see what she'd found.

"Well," he said. "That was a lot of frowning."

"Your hands are done." Her voice came out too high, and she cleared her throat. "Tendons, muscle, skin. You won't need surgery."

"Thanks."

"I can't fix the fever."

"I didn't think you could."

"There's nothing to fix. There's no cause, it's just—" She stopped. "Your body's running hot and doesn't know why. It'll probably break on its own. Drink fluids. Don't go anywhere."

"Okay."

She should have stood up. She had a report to write and probably four more patients waiting, and her hands were shaking a little.

"What happened to you?" she asked instead.

Up close under the fluorescent lights his eyes were blue, ordinary blue. She'd seen the backs of them now.

"I got lost," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one I've got." He smiled, crooked and tired. "Put it in the report if you want. Patient says he got lost. Everyone else did."

"I'm not writing that in a report."

"What are you writing?"

That you've got writing burned into the backs of your eyes. That your bones look like you've been carrying a planet. That there's something in your marrow I think is alive, and something around your heart that definitely is, and it looked back.

"I haven't decided," she said.

He nodded, as if that was perfectly reasonable.

Out in the corridor someone's pager went off and a trolley squeaked past. Her break had ended about four hours ago. She stood up.

"Hey," the boy said.

She looked back.

"You asked first. Before you touched me."

"It's protocol."

"No, it isn't." He said it gently, like something he'd noticed and thought she might want to know. "I've seen a lot of people get healed. Nobody else asked. You do it because nobody asks you."

Amy stood with her hand on the curtain and reached for something dry to throw back, the kind of thing she'd say to Dr. Hadley or the nurses or Vicky when Vicky was being too much. Nothing came.

"Drink fluids," she said, and left.

* * *

She wrote the report at the nurses' station with a cup of hot chocolate going cold beside her.

A PRT liaison was already on the phone to the charge nurse, asking about the boy in bay six: name, age, whether the healer had noticed anything unusual. The charge nurse kept glancing at Amy while she talked.

Patient: Veder, Gregory, 15. Presenting: bilateral palmar lacerations, pyrexia of unknown origin.

Amy thought about yellow lines shaped like writing, and bones that belonged to somebody twice his age and three times his weight, and scarlet cells asleep in his marrow. The cool coiled thing that had turned her power back.

The way he'd said Thanks for asking, as if nobody had asked him anything in a long time either.

Under Findings she wrote: Surface injuries only. Healed. Pyrexia not responsive to treatment; likely to resolve without intervention. No further parahuman intervention required.

She signed it and handed it over, and she didn't let herself think about why.

Then she went back up to the fourth floor, bought a chocolate bar, and ate it standing in the empty corridor.

Durolord · 2026-11-11T14:55:48+0000

From a black notebook kept in the back of a desk drawer, under a stack of old school papers. The handwriting is small and neat. Some words are crossed out so hard the pen has gone through.

January 3rd, 2011. 11:48 p.m.

Not writing this in the official file. Writing it here so I stop thinking about it.

Subject C. (Coiled. His name's on the official report and the official report says nothing, so he doesn't get his name in this one.)

Age 15. Male. Presenting: palmar lacerations from tearing a locker door off by hand. Hands repaired, no complications. Fine.

Pyrexia 40.1°C. No infection, no inflammatory markers, no immune response at all. His body wasn't reacting to anything. The heat was being put into him. I don't know how else to say it.

Findings I did not put in the report:

1. Retinas. Bilateral yellow scarring in fine lines, ~0.1 mm wide. Branches follow the optic nerves toward the brain (stopped there, obviously). Regular pattern. Looks like a glyph. Something wrote on him from the inside.

2. Soft tissue. Surface is new, weeks old at most. Underneath, the record of hundreds of injuries and repairs, layered. Stab wounds. Burns. Something that crushed his left side. All healed and gone from the surface. You can't have scars without scars. He does.

3. Bone. Density about 1.6x normal for age and build. Spine slightly compressed. Healed microfractures radiating out from the core, like a load pulling from his center in every direction. Closest thing I can think of is extreme gravity. That's ridiculous. Writing it anyway.

4. Marrow, long bones (all I checked). Clusters of foreign cells. Red, seed-like, packed tight, dormant. Not bacterial, not fungal, not anything I've touched before. Each in a membrane his body did not make. Bone around them scarred, like the cells ate into him once and something stopped them. No drive at all. Everything alive wants something. These don't. ~~Like they're waiting for an owner~~ I don't know what they'd do if they woke up.

5. Chest. Something near the heart. Not an organ. My power won't touch it. Tried twice. Long. Cold. Wrapped around something warm.

It noticed me.

I know how that sounds. I can't tell Mom, I can't tell Vicky, and I'm not telling the PRT, because they'd take him apart to find out what it is.

He said "Thanks for asking."

He said I ask because nobody asks me.

~~Who says that to someone they just met~~

Probably a Case 53, or a Changer with a weird trigger. He'll be in the system by Friday and I'll never see him again. That's fine. That's how it goes.

Chocolate bar for dinner. Nobody noticed.

Going to sleep now.

Durolord · 2026-11-11T14:58:18+0000

The fever broke at four in the morning, all at once.

Greg woke soaked in sweat in a hospital bed, with his mom asleep in the chair beside him and his dad asleep standing up against the wall. His hands didn't hurt. He held them up in the gray light from the window and turned them over. Smooth and pink. Not even a line where the cuts had been.

She was good, he thought. She was really good.

He remembered her face when she let go of his wrist. Pale and very still, like she'd opened a door she wasn't supposed to and found something on the other side looking back.

He didn't remember much else about the evening. A police officer, not Officer Ruiz, a man with a mustache who asked the same four questions three times. A PRT agent in a gray suit who asked different questions in a nicer voice and wrote down everything Greg said, which was mostly "I don't know" and "It was rusty." His mom, arriving in a rush of cold air and perfume, stopping at the end of the bed while her face went through about six expressions and settled on one he'd never seen before.

He thought it might have been pride. Hard to tell. She'd been crying at the time.

His dad's voice came very quietly from the wall. "You awake?"

"Yeah."

"Fever's gone?"

"Yeah."

His dad was quiet for a while. "The teacher said you tore the door off."

Greg didn't say anything.

"I've been loading trucks for nineteen years," his dad said. "I couldn't tear a locker door off with a crowbar." He waited. "You want to tell me what happened to you?"

I went somewhere the sky was gold and everything wanted to kill me. I died more times than I can count. I killed gods, and I came back with pieces of them in my chest, and something in there talks to me.

"I don't know how to," he said, which was true.

His dad nodded in the dark.

"Okay," he said. "When you do, I'm here."

* * *

They let him go home that afternoon. The school called to say he should take the rest of the week off, and this time Greg didn't argue.

He was still grounded. Nobody said so. His mom checked on him every hour, sometimes every half hour, standing in his doorway with a cup of tea she'd made as an excuse. His dad took a day off work, which he never did, and spent it fixing a kitchen cupboard that had been broken for three years, within earshot of the stairs.

Greg didn't mind. He sat in his corner with the comforter around his shoulders and read the PHO thread about the bug swarm until he could have recited it.

A hall full of people and one person actually helped, somebody called Glasstowner had written.

He read that one a lot.

By the third night he hadn't slept.

It wasn't the fever, and it wasn't nightmares, since you had to fall asleep to have those. Every time he closed his eyes he was back in the corridor with the locker door coming off in his hands, and the goddess saying Give them one, and the yellow pressing at the backs of his eyes. Every time he opened them he was in a bedroom so quiet he could hear the house settle, and the quiet felt like something about to come around a corner.

In the Lands Between, when you couldn't sleep, you walked. You went and found the next fight or the next grace or just the next hill, and you kept going until your body was tired enough to drag your head down with it.

At two in the morning on the seventh of January, Greg put on his darkest hoodie and two pairs of socks and climbed out of his bedroom window.

Grounded, he thought, hanging off the gutter by his fingertips. Grounded until I'm thirty.

He dropped, landed soft, rolled and came up in a crouch on the frozen lawn, and it felt so good that he nearly laughed out loud.

* * *

He walked east, toward the water.

He'd never been out this late. Old Greg's idea of a wild night was staying up till three on PHO arguing about whether Alexandria could take Behemoth. Now he moved through the streets the way he'd moved through the ruins of Caelid, close to the walls and out of the streetlights, stopping at corners to listen. Highway traffic, a dog, a house party thumping two blocks over. Somebody shouting in a language he didn't know, and a door slamming.

And something else, too faint to notice at first, like a radio playing in the next room. A warmth. Not in him; out there. All down Lord Street he kept feeling patches of it, the way you'd find a sun-warmed stone with your hand on a cold day.

He stopped outside a laundromat with its shutters down and put his palm on the brick.

Warm. The same as the stairwell at Winslow, only fainter. A scorch mark of grace, where somebody had stood once at the worst moment of their life and somehow kept going. He closed his eyes and didn't see anything this time. He just felt it, a little leftover courage cooling in the brick.

He found another on a bus bench. One in a church doorway. One on the railing of a bridge, so faint he almost missed it, and he stood there a long time with his hand on the cold metal.

There were dozens. Maybe hundreds. The whole city was dotted with little graces, all of them nearly cold and none strong enough to rest at.

Brockton Bay, he thought. A whole city of people just about getting by.

It should have been depressing. Somehow it made him feel less alone.

* * *

He'd never actually been down to the Docks. Old Greg knew them from PHO maps and the news: Merchant turf, ABB turf, the boat graveyard, the warehouses. In real life it was mostly dark. Half the streetlights were out and the rest buzzed and flickered. The wind off the bay smelled of salt and diesel, and there was a skin of dirty ice on every puddle.

He was halfway down a street of shuttered warehouses when a woman said, "Please. Please, I don't have anything."

He was moving before he'd decided to.

That kept happening. He made a note to worry about it later.

The alley ran between a closed-down bar and a chain-link fence. A woman was backed up against the fence at the far end, maybe forty, a waitress uniform under her open coat with the name badge still pinned on. Two men stood in front of her. The short twitchy one had a cheap folding knife and kept flicking it open and shut. The big slow one wore a Merchants bandana around his neck and was going through her handbag.

"Twelve bucks," the big one said. "Twelve fucking bucks."

"I told you, please, I just finished a shift—"

"Then what's this?" He held up a little velvet box and opened it. Something glinted.

The woman made a sound. "That's my mother's. Please, she's dead, it's not worth anything—"

"Then you won't miss it."

Greg stepped into the alley. "Hey."

All three of them looked at him.

He could see how it looked from their end: a skinny kid in a hoodie with his hands in his pockets at two-thirty in the morning. He watched them work it out. The twitchy one grinned.

"Get lost, kid."

"Give her the ring back," Greg said.

"Or what?"

"Or I'll take it off you."

The twitchy one laughed, high and nervy, and Greg filed it the way he'd file a sound in the dark: scared underneath, would panic. The big one didn't laugh. He put the ring in his pocket and looked at Greg with flat, bored eyes, and Greg filed that too. Done this before. Wouldn't panic. Would hurt you if you let him.

"Last chance," the big one said.

For who, Greg thought, and walked forward.

* * *

The twitchy one came first, because the twitchy ones always did. He lunged with the knife, sloppy and overextended, all his weight on the front foot. Greg stepped inside it. His body had done this ten thousand times against things with longer reach and sharper blades; he turned his hip, caught the wrist and twisted, and the knife skittered off across the ice and the twitchy one howled and went down on one knee.

Then the big one hit him.

He didn't see it coming, and that was his own fault. His instincts were set for a body he didn't have anymore, for reach and armor that weren't there, and he'd left his back turned half a step too long. A fist like a brick caught him on the side of the head and the world went white.

Ice under his cheek. Ringing.

Get up get up get up roll—

He rolled. A boot came down where his head had been, hard enough to crack the ice. He rolled again and came up too slow, staggering, and the big one had both hands in his hoodie and slammed him back into the fence so hard it rang.

The twitchy one came back with the knife.

Greg felt it go in low on his left side, just above the hip. Not deep. Deep enough. Hot first, and then wet.

Mom is going to kill me if I die in an alley, he thought, very clearly.

The big one pulled back his fist again and the twitchy one pulled back the knife, and something in Greg went cold and quiet and very old.

He reached for the coal.

It came this time, instantly, roaring, like it had been waiting. Something long and cool coiled around it and squeezed, and heat ran up through him into his right hand, and his hand opened with fire in it.

Real flame, deep crimson at the heart with a restless yellow-gold rim, curled in his palm like something alive. As he watched, a thread of it lifted and turned toward the big man, and it had a head. A snake no longer than his finger, made of fire, flicking a fire tongue. It lit up the alley and the big man's face inches away, and Greg watched that face go from bored to terrified in under a second.

Catch Flame. He'd learned it from an old woman in a burned church, a lifetime ago. A beginner's spell: you opened your hand, the fire came, you threw it, and whatever it hit burned. It had never had a snake in it before, or the gold. The big man was staring at the gold the way Sophia had stared at his eyes.

The goddess said nothing.

His hand came up. He hadn't told it to.

The big man let go of his hoodie and stumbled back with his hands up. "Jesus. Jesus Christ, you're a cape, kid, I didn't know, I didn't—"

The flame was a foot from his face. Greg could see the man's eyelashes start to curl.

He'd done this before, to people worse than this, in a place where nobody would ever ask. He'd burned bandits off a road. He'd burned a knight who killed a merchant for a bag of runes. It had felt like justice every time, and it felt like justice now, and nobody had asked him to. Not her. Just his hand and an old habit.

He closed his hand.

The fire didn't want to go out. He felt it fight him, and felt the goddess watching with interest, as if she wanted to see which of them would win. His whole arm shook. He held the fist until the last of the heat soaked back into him and the alley went dark.

The big man was crying. He'd wet himself; Greg could smell it.

"The ring," Greg said, in a voice that didn't sound like his. "Now."

The man dug in his pocket, threw the velvet box at Greg's feet and ran. The twitchy one was already gone, footsteps slapping off down the street, his knife left in the ice.

Greg bent down very carefully and picked up the box.

* * *

The woman hadn't moved from the fence. She was staring at him like he was worse than the two men had been.

He'd seen that look on villagers in Limgrave, when he came walking out of the fog covered in blood that wasn't his.

He held out the box and she didn't take it, so he crouched and set it on the ground in front of her with her handbag beside it, and stepped back slowly, the way you'd back away from a frightened dog.

"Are you hurt?"

She shook her head.

"Is there someone who can come get you?"

She nodded.

"Call them. Stay in the light till they come."

She picked up the box and the bag and held them to her chest. "Your hand," she whispered. "Your hand was on fire."

"Yeah. Sorry." He tried a smile. "Don't tell anyone, okay?"

She would. But she nodded.

He made it two blocks before the side of his hoodie was soaked through and his legs went funny, and he sat down very suddenly on the curb under a broken streetlight.

* * *

He made himself look. Four inches long, maybe half an inch deep, just above the hip bone. Bleeding steadily but not pumping. He'd had a lot worse and kept fighting.

In a different body.

This one was fifteen and skinny and hadn't eaten properly in three days. His head was still ringing. His hands shook, and he was cold from the inside out, the way he always got after the fire went out. Every muscle felt like he'd run a marathon. One fight against two idiots in an alley, and he was done.

Okay. Noted. You're not that guy anymore. You're this guy.

He pressed a hand to the cut and, without thinking, the way he'd done it a thousand times, reached for his flask.

His fingers closed on glass.

A small flask of thick dark red glass, warm, with a stopper shaped like a teardrop. It hadn't been there a second ago. It had come out of him, the way you'd reach into a pocket you knew was there. Crimson Tears. Inside it something red and bright sloshed and glowed.

He'd felt it in his hand on his first morning back and put it away again. He'd carried it across the whole of the Lands Between and drunk from it in the middle of a hundred fights. He'd stood at Sites of Grace and watched the red light rise back up through the glass.

He'd also watched it kill a man.

That was early, the first year, at a ruined fort in Limgrave. A soldier with a spear through his gut, propped against a wall, too far gone to talk. Greg had knelt and tipped the flask to his lips because it was the only thing he had that healed, and he'd been so sure. The soldier swallowed. For a second his face went soft with relief. Then the red light came up behind his eyes and out of his mouth, and he burned from the inside while Greg held him and screamed at it to stop.

The tears were meant for the ones the graces had called back. Nobody had told him. He'd found out the way he found out everything there.

He held the flask up to the dead streetlight. It was nowhere near what it had been at the end, after years of making it stronger. It had shrunk with him, like everything else.

He pulled the stopper and drank.

Warm metal and honey. It went down like heat and spread, and he felt the cut pull itself shut and the ringing in his head fade, and some of the cold went out of his muscles. The flask had always been better at bodies than minds.

He lowered it. The level had dropped. Not by much, but he could see it.

It'll refill. You just need a grace. A real one.

There was one on the corner opposite, faint and warm in the base of an old lamppost where somebody had once sat down and decided not to give up. He crossed the street and sat with his back against it and closed his eyes and waited for the feeling: the long breath out, the red light rising in the glass.

Nothing.

He sat twenty minutes, until his legs went numb. He tried a doorway half a block on, and then the next one. When it started to get light he walked all the way back to the bridge with the warm railing and sat on the frozen sidewalk with both hands around the metal and his breath steaming in front of him.

The little graces were too small. They could tell him where somebody had survived, but they couldn't let him rest. Every drink from now on was one he couldn't get back. Somewhere under his breastbone, coiled around the coal, the goddess was patiently quiet, as if she'd known all along and had been waiting for him to find out.

He put the flask away, back into nowhere, back into him. His knees cracked when he stood.

He climbed in through his window just after six. His mom's alarm went off ten minutes later, and by the time she put her head around the door he was in bed with the covers up to his chin and the bloody hoodie stuffed at the bottom of his closet.

"You sleep okay, sweetie?" she whispered.

"Yeah," Greg said. "Like a log."

She smiled and closed the door.

He lay looking up at the peeling glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, thinking about the red line in the glass and how far it could drop before it was gone.

Durolord · 2026-11-11T14:58:53+0000

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New cape in the Docks? ("the fire guy")

Topic: New cape in the Docks? ("the fire guy")

In: Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay ► Capes

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NightShiftNessa Night-Shift Nurse, Runs on Spite (Original Poster)

Posted On Jan 7th 2011:

Posting this for my sister because she doesn't do internet and she won't stop talking about it.

She waitresses at a place on the Boardwalk. Walking to the bus at like 2:30 this morning and two guys corner her in an alley off Lord St. One with a knife. They take her bag. They take our MOM's ring. (Mom passed in '09. A pawn shop would give you forty bucks for it. Don't care.)

Then a KID walks into the alley. Skinny, hoodie, maybe 15. Tells them to give it back.

They stab him. He doesn't care. And then his hand catches on fire. Not burning. Just FIRE, sitting in his hand. Red, she says, dark red, with gold around the edges. And she swears there was a little snake in it. A snake made of fire.

The guy with the bag starts crying. Kid holds the fire right up to his face for like five seconds.

Then he closes his hand and it goes out.

He gave her the ring back. He said sorry for scaring her. He told her to stay in the light till I came.

Anyone know who this is? I want to say thank you.

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(Showing page 1 of 6)

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Bagrat Cape Geek (Has Sources)

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

Fire construct with a shape component. Probably Blaster with a minor Shaker or Master rating for the construct. Could be Tinker if the "snake" is a projector effect.

Red fire is unusual. Most flame Blasters in the Bay run orange-yellow. Hookwolf's guy Sizzle ran white.

Sources: I have a spreadsheet.

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Glasstowner Actually Reads the Article

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

@NightShiftNessa glad your sister's okay. And glad she got your mom's ring back. That's genuinely the best thing I've read on here this month.

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Acree Professional Worrier

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

Hold on. He got STABBED and kept going? And held fire to a guy's face for five seconds and then stopped?

New capes don't stop. Somebody who's been in a lot of fights stops.

Which, honestly, is scarier.

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Turquoise_Pigeon Thread's Last Sane Person

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

Lord St is the edge of Merchant turf. If he's walking around down there at 2:30 a.m. on purpose, Skidmark is going to notice.

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FuqDaPolice420 Tinfoil Hat Enthusiast

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

lol some kid w a lighter and a sad story. my boy theo said the dude was like 5 foot nothing. merchants run the docks. fire boy can GET FUCKED

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Bagrat Cape Geek (Has Sources)

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

@FuqDaPolice420 would this be the same Theo the BBPD found in a bus shelter on Fifth this morning, soaking wet, asking for protective custody?

Scanner, 4:52 a.m. "Subject states the fire guy is going to find him."

Sources: the scanner. Also your own post. You named him.

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FuqDaPolice420 Tinfoil Hat Enthusiast

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

fuck

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End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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(Showing page 4 of 6)

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Vista_Fan_4Life Wards Groupie

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

Okay hear me out. Skinny. Hoodie. Fifteen. Ripped a locker door off on Monday and there was "heat damage."

Fire guy is the Winslow guy. It has to be.

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TinMother Mod (Out of Patience)

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

@Vista_Fan_4Life You were warned. Banned for 72 hours. Do not link capes to the identities of minors.

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Glasstowner Actually Reads the Article

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

F

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Acree Professional Worrier

Replied On Jan 7th 2011:

Banned for saying out loud what half this thread was thinking. Not saying it's wrong to ban. Just saying.

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Miss Militia Verified Cape (Protectorate ENE)

Replied On Jan 8th 2011:

The PRT and Protectorate are aware of last night's incident and are looking into it.

We would ask anyone with information to contact the PRT tip line rather than post it here. Please do not go looking for this individual.

And to the young man, if he's reading: thank you for helping her. We'd like to talk. Nobody is in trouble.

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XxVoidCowboyxX Reformed Shitposter (Mostly Lurks)

Replied On Jan 8th 2011:

"nobody is in trouble" is what my mom says right before i'm in trouble

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Bagrat Cape Geek (Has Sources)

Replied On Jan 8th 2011:

A verified Protectorate response inside eighteen hours for a one-incident unknown? That's fast. They're worried.

Unofficial wiki entry created. Working name: Fire Guy. (Somebody please give him a better one before it sticks.)

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NightShiftNessa Night-Shift Nurse, Runs on Spite (Original Poster)

Replied On Jan 8th 2011:

My sister read the thread over my shoulder. She says to tell you all he wasn't scary.

Then she thought about it and said, okay, he was a little scary. But not at her.

She says he looked tired. Like he hadn't slept in a year.

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End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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