"There are three ways a person can awaken an ability.
The first is natural awakening; the kind that happens at birth. This follows the scientific principle that abilities are hereditary. Like every other genetic trait, they transfer from parent to child. If your parents have abilities, there's a reasonable probability you were born carrying one.
The second is developmental awakening. This happens when the DNA doesn't register the parental trait at the expected period, when the genes need more time to properly develop. This is the origin point of late bloomers. The ability is there, coded into the biology, just waiting on the body to catch up to itself.
The third method is the most inconvenient of the three. Researchers, who apparently enjoy giving unfortunate things poetic names, call it situational awakening. These are also late bloomers, but with a specific difference, the ability can remain entirely dormant indefinitely because it has never been triggered. The awakening requires a catalyst. Typically a life-or-death situation, a moment of sufficient intensity that the body decides it has run out of other options—"
"Dude." Sancho's arms went up on either side of him. "Who the actual fuck are you talking to?"
"The fourth wall."
A pause. He looked at me with the expression of someone who was trying to decide if this was an insult.
"What fourth wall? What—" He pointed the knife. "Just shut up and fight me."
He closed the distance fast, blade angled toward my face. I moved, threw his secondary arm off before it could follow through to my midsection. That was misdirection, blade to the face, fist to the gut while I was looking at the blade. I knew the structure of it. I hadn't survived this many fights by being born yesterday.
He came again with the knife in a wide arc. I stepped back, reading the rhythm, watching for the gap. I thought I had it, reached for his wrist— and his other hand connected with my arm instead, slamming against it before I could fully extend.
It hurt. I grabbed the wrist anyway, found the half-second I needed, and dragged a blow across his jaw.
He pulled back. Moved his jaw slowly, testing it, looking at me with an expression that hadn't changed much since the beginning, that specific demeaning look that said he still hadn't processed that the version of me standing in front of him wasn't the same version he'd poisoned in a karaoke parlour. I'd just taken down ten of his men. He was still looking at me like I was a small inconvenience.
He came again. Same precision with the blade, slightly more desperation behind it. I could see it in his eyes, greenish, and growing more frustrated with each attempt that didn't land. The movements were getting looser. The control was starting to cost him effort he hadn't budgeted for.
"When did you start fighting fair?" I let his swing pass close to my face without flinching. "Or did you forget about your ability?"
His response was to drop the careful approach entirely. He came at speed he couldn't fully manage, blade extended, committing to the reach. I grabbed the arm this time, turned into him, pressed my back against his shoulder and drove my elbow backward into his gut.
The groan that came out of him had a quality to it — not theatrical, just honest. The sound of someone whose body was telling them the truth about how this was going.
I'd been holding back. Genuinely. I'd assumed that behind all the knife work there was something else— maybe a second layer, or an ability held in reserve for when things got difficult.
A person in his position usually had something. But he'd burned through everything he had on his ten men and on the dramatics of the setup, and what was left was just him.
"You know, you have better options than this," I said. He was crouched now, hands wrapped around his stomach. "School. You're East High's Ace. You've clearly got the organizational skill and the people management for it, and that's not nothing. With the connections you have, you could run something legitimate. Student government, community work. There are paths." I looked down at him. "But you chose this one. Why, because Dante told you to?"
"Don't." His voice changed immediately. "Don't say his name like that."
The shift was real. Whatever composed anger he'd been operating with dissolved and something rawer came through. He pushed back to his feet, full commitment, knife still in hand, rushing with the kind of force that comes from not caring about the outcome anymore.
I caught his wrist before the blade could find anything. Knocked it out of his grip. Took hold of him and dropped him to the floor.
"Oh, so now his name matters more to you than your own life?" I was breathing harder than I wanted to be. "More than what you do with it?"
"What did I have." His voice was quiet. Not a question. The quiet of someone going back to a place they've been before and don't need to explain. "Influence? Sure. Bad influence. When my mother died, when my father turned out to be a murderer and they had words for that, for my brother and me both— that... that was the influence we had." He made a sound that was almost a laugh and wasn't. "The world already decided what we were. We didn't need to work for it. And you don't get to come here and tell me I chose wrong when you don't know what the choices actually looked like!"
The silence that followed had weight.
He came at me again, faster, hands already changing, the grey scales spreading across his skin as the ability activated. Not that. Not the poison contact. I moved before his hand could reach me, stepped into him, put my hand on his shoulder, pulled him forward and off balance.
WHACK.
Clean. Direct. He went down.
He didn't go all the way out, somewhere between unconscious and barely here, lying on the floor with his chest rising and falling in the shallow way of someone who has been through something and is still deciding whether to come back from it.
"Here's something you should think about, when you're able to think again." I wasn't sure he could hear me. I said it anyway. "If every person became a product of their worst experience, the world would only ever get worse. People move on from things. People change. People look at what happened to them and decide what they're going to carry forward and what they're going to put down." I stood over him. "It's either you decide to make life happen for you. Or you keep letting what happened to you make the decisions."
I caught myself mid-sentence and registered that I had started to sound exactly like Amelia. Which was its own kind of uncomfortable.
Behind me, Rowan's chair hit the floor in repeated impacts, legs against wood, trying to get my attention without being able to use his hands or his voice.
Right. Him.
I walked over, crouched, and pulled the cloth from his mouth.
"Are you alright?"
He looked at me. His face was processing several things at the same time. Then he opened his mouth.
"Teach me how to fight."
I blinked. "What?"
"Please." His voice had a quality I hadn't heard from him before, not the quiet, fidgeting, glasses-adjusting tone of someone trying to take up as little space as possible. Louder than that. Urgent. "I want you to teach me how to fight."
"Uhhh."
***
[External POV]
How long had she been up here eating into her own thoughts?
Something had shifted in Seraphine Reese over the last several months. The kind of shift that was difficult to name because it wasn't one dramatic change but a collection of smaller ones, the way she'd gone from quietly reserved to something closer to absence.
The way she'd stopped performing any interest in what her title as Queen of Silvic High was supposed to mean. The way she came to school every day and then disappeared, and this rooftop was where she disappeared to.
It was the same view every time. The same neighbourhood below, going about itself without consultation. The same shitty world that had been running the same game against her and had kept her on the losing side every round.
"Fuck this," she said to it. Quietly. Privately. Like even the profanity was something she was conserving.
The wind moved through her dark hair, loose strands crossing her face. She gathered them and tucked them back, one by one, and then exhaled at the horizon with the full exhaustion of someone who had been carrying something heavy for long enough that the effort had started to show in the skin around her eyes. The dark circles there were not new, but they were bolder than they'd been. More visible.
She reached into her jacket. Pulled out a cigarette pack and a lighter. She put the cigarette in her mouth, flicked the lighter.
Nothing.
She flicked again. Harder.
Still nothing.
"Dang it."
A hand reached past her and took the cigarette gently from between her lips.
"Didn't I tell you to quit smoking?" Zael's voice. He was there beside her, having arrived without announcement in the way that he did.
Dark blue hair, eyes the same colour, carrying the specific quality of presence that she had spent the last three months trying to convince herself she wasn't waiting for. He held the cigarette by the filter and looked at it like it was evidence. "You never listen."
"What about you," she said. Keeping her voice level. Keeping everything level. "Did you quit?"
"Absolutely." He dropped the cigarette off the side of the building. "I mean... I stopped for a while."
She had always been able to read through Zael's lies. Not because he was bad at them— he was reasonably good— but because she knew the specific gap between what his face did when he meant something and what it did when he didn't.
She looked away. Tried to arrange her expression into something that communicated nothing.
He leaned against the railing beside her, repositioning until he could find her eyes.
"You didn't miss me." He said it like an observation rather than a complaint, with the smile underneath it that acknowledged he was making a choice about the angle. "Fair enough. I missed you though. That's why I came back early."
Three months. He called that early. But she wasn't going to complain out loud.
"Don't get grumpy on me now." Zael must've noticed the judging look on her face. "You know I tried so hard to call, but you kept saying you didn't want to. You ignored my voicemails and barely responded to my texts. What was I supposed to do?" He let that one hang for a while, then continued. "Also, the guys said you've been locking yourself shut from everyone. I know something definitely happened to you."
"Please don't do this right now."
"Well, I can't just pretend you're fine when you're not." He didn't say it with pressure. More like a statement of his own limitation. "You know I don't know how to do that with you."
She was quiet.
He waited. This was the thing about Zael that complicated everything, he knew when to stop talking. He knew how to wait for the silence to run out of room.
Maybe this was the moment. If she didn't say it now, if she let him stay close again, let the familiar weight of him re-enter her orbit, she'd lose the ground she'd spent three months standing on.
"Let's end it, Zael." She said it to the neighbourhood below. Quiet, steady. The way you say something you've been rehearsing long enough that the rehearsal has become the thing itself. "I want to break up."