Chapter 37: Try a Little Tenderness

The bruise on Neiry's ribs had already healed by the time he got home, which meant the ache he was still carrying wasn't physical.

He noticed that — clinically, at a slight remove, his heart rate: elevated, thirty minutes after the fact, well past the point his body had any reason to still be running hot. Breathing: fine. Injuries: none. Something else, then. Something that didn't have a gauge.

He sat on the edge of his bed in the dark with his shoes still on, replaying it.

Valerie's fist meeting his palm. The floor cratering under both of them. The specific, singing pleasure of reading her hips a half-second before she moved and being right. He turned the memory over the way he'd turn over a coin, looking for the trick in it, because there had to be one. He did not enjoy violence. He had tried spending centuries making sure of that, building the rule into himself the way a mason builds a load-bearing wall — you did not enjoy it, because enjoying it was how you became something that needed to be put down. That was the deal he'd made with himself somewhere throughout his life.

Tonight it had not held. Tonight he had grinned into Valerie's rematch like a starving man finally handed a plate, and some part of him — some very old, very patient part — had simply exhaled.

It's just adrenaline, he told himself, and knew immediately that it was a lie, because he was fluent enough in adrenaline to recognize it and this had not been that. Adrenaline was fast and empty and left nothing behind. This had left something behind. This felt like coming home to a house he'd been told, his whole life, that he wasn't allowed back into.

He sat with that for a while. He was good at sitting with things. It was one of the few parts of himself he'd never had to force— the stillness had come standard.

Here was the part he didn't say out loud, not even to Infinity, who already knew it anyway and had the decency, tonight, not to bring it up: he did not, strictly, feel most things the way the people around him seemed to feel them. He had learned early — young, if young meant anything for a thing born already knowing how to kill — that whatever machinery produced warmth in a person, whatever let Kaleb tear up over a busted pocket watch or let Mia's whole face change when someone was kind to a stranger, had simply not been installed in him at the factory. He was always reminded whenever around them he's not human. Not partially. 

So he had forged a human persona. On purpose. With the same discipline he'd once used to build a sword style, because that was the only kind of discipline he actually trusted.

He had watched humans the way other people watched weather — patiently, for years, cataloguing patterns. He'd learned that a smile a half-second too late reads as a lie even when it isn't. He'd learned that people forgive almost anything if you remember to speak in the right tone and a small detail about them later. He'd learned that saying I'm fine in a certain flattened tone was a request to be asked again, and that saying it in a different flattened tone meant the opposite, and that the difference between the two tones was something he could hear now the way he could hear a heartbeat change through a wall. He had learned to laugh at the right moment, not because something was funny to him, exactly, but because he understood, structurally, why it would be funny to someone else, and mirroring that understanding back at people made them trust him. He had learned to tease Kaleb. He had learned to let his voice go soft with Mia. He had learned — and this was the part that scared him, if scared was even the right word for what he did instead of fear — that he was good at it. Frighteningly good. Good enough that most nights he forgot he was doing it at all.

Which was, he supposed, the actual problem. Not that the personality was fake. That it had stopped announcing itself as fake, somewhere along the way, and he had lost the exact date.

He caught his own reflection in the dark window across the room — Astoria's lights smeared gold behind the glass, his own face laid over the top of them like a double exposure — and looked at it the way he'd look at a stranger. Which one of you is real, he thought, not unkindly, the way you might ask a coworker a question you already half-expected wouldn't have a clean answer. The window didn't say anything back. Neither did he, for a long time.

He stood up. Sitting with it wasn't accomplishing anything and Neiry did not do things that failed to accomplish anything — that, too, had come standard.

His room was small and mostly bare, the way it always was, except for the one shelf that wasn't. He kept things there he couldn't fully explain keeping. A dented compass with no working needle. A single yellowed movie ticket stub from a theater that had closed before he enrolled at Jefferson, found in the pocket of a coat he'd bought secondhand for four dollars because something about the weight of it had felt correct. And, propped in the corner where a normal fourteen-year-old might keep a guitar he didn't play, a portable turntable he'd found at the same hobby shop where he'd tracked down Kaleb's grandfather's photograph — cracked case, needs a new belt, the owner had warned him, and Neiry had bought it anyway for reasons he still hadn't produced a satisfying reason of.

He'd fixed the belt in about four minutes. He was good with his hands when the thing in his hands didn't have a pulse.

There was exactly one record he owned. He'd bought it the same week as the turntable, entirely on impulse, because the cover — a man in a suit, warm-lit, mid-song — had made something in his chest do a thing he didn't have a word for yet. He still didn't have a word for it. He put the needle down anyway.

The room filled with horns.

He stood there for the first eight bars doing what he always did, which was analyze — the low, warm crawl of the bassline, the specific ache built into the way the horns came in a half-beat behind where you expected them, a trick, he understood intellectually, that was designed to feel like longing. He catalogued it. He noted, with real interest, that whoever had arranged this had understood something true about how humans experienced time, that the gap between expectation and arrival was where the feeling actually lived.

And then, without deciding to, he was singing along. Badly. Flat on the low notes in a way that would've made Seraphina the demon who trained him, five hundred years and one execution ago, put her head in her hands. She always sang better. He didn't notice he was doing it until he was already three lines in, already swaying, one sock half off, doing something with his shoulders that could not, by any generous definition, be called dancing.

He stopped.

He stood very still in the middle of his room with the record still turning and felt something close to panic, He laughed Oh god I'm so stupid. The panic had a shape he recognized, the vertigo of a man who has just caught himself doing something with no audience, no reason. Nobody had been watching. 

He sat down hard on the edge of the bed.

He didn't know what to do with that. He genuinely, for the first time in longer than he could easily account for, did not know what to do.

"This is boredom".

The record kept playing. He let it.

Infinity found him like that — sock still half off, staring at a turntable like it had personally betrayed him — and didn't bother with a dream this time. It simply arrived, the way it had started doing lately, a white silhouette folding itself out of the shadow behind his closet door with no more ceremony than a roommate walking in.

You are doing the thing again, it said. Where you look at a small, meaningless event as though it contains anything important.

"It might," Neiry said.

It is a song, vessel.

"It's not the song."

Infinity didn't answer right away, which for Infinity counted as consideration. When it finally spoke, its voice had lost the clinical flatness it wore like a uniform in their early conversations — there was something almost gentle threaded through it now, gentle the way a scalpel can still be precise while being careful.

You are asking why you enjoyed it.

"I'm asking what enjoyed it," Neiry said. "There's a difference."

Is there.

"You know there is."

Another pause. Outside, a train rattled somewhere over the elevated tracks, the sound arriving and fading the way it always did, indifferent to what was happening in this particular room on this particular night.

You built a version of yourself to survive among them, Infinity said finally. That is not new information. What is new is that you are afraid the version you might become. It can now stand on its own, make its own decisions, sing badly to a dead man's record at midnight, entirely without your permission.

Neiry didn't say anything, which was as close to agreement as he was willing to get.

You keep asking me who you are, Infinity went on. I will not answer that tonight. Not because I am withholding it from you — because I do not think it is a simple enough thing yet to hand you. But I will tell you this much, since you are so determined to sit in the dark being tragic about it: a thing that was built does not stop being real simply because it was built. Structures still stand. Bridges still hold weight. The question was never whether you constructed the parts of yourself that can love singing at midnight for no reason. The question is whether you're going to let them keep existing, or spend the next five hundred years denying yourself of something so simple.

"That's uncomfortably direct of you."

I am learning from you, Infinity said, and there was something in it that might, on a more sentimentality, have been called fondness. It's a slow process.

It didn't stay much longer after that. It rarely did, these days — it had noticed, the same way Neiry had, that its visits worked better as punctuation than as paragraphs.

He layed back on the bed once it was gone, staring at the ceiling, the record having long since clicked off and returned to silence. His mind, unhelpfully, did not stay on the song, or on Infinity, or on the strange loose feeling still sitting behind his sternum where the singing had been.

It went to Mia.

Not the tactical version of Mia — not Beacon requires eleven more days of training or her sunstride technique loses integrity past a forty-five degree pivot, correct in the next session — but the small, specific, useless version. The way she'd laughed at something Kaleb said during the sparring session tonight, head tipped back, completely unguarded, and how he had clocked the sound of it from across the training bay before he'd consciously registered hearing it at all. The way she chewed on the inside of her cheek when she was concentrating and thought no one could see. The fact that he could, at this exact moment, describe the specific shade her eyes went when she was about to say something teasing versus something serious, and that this was something new, something he had never once decided to collect, and yet had, apparently, been collecting for months.

He thought, with the particular dread of a kid watching a conclusion arrive before he was ready for it. She's something else.

He didn't have a category for it yet. He was aware, distantly, that most people his age — most people would already know what to call this. Would've had a word for it by now, easy, the way Kaleb apparently had words for everything, all the time, whether anyone asked for them or not.

He was starting to suspect that distance had quietly closed to zero without telling him.

He thought, briefly, meanly, about how easy it would be to lie to himself about this — to keep it filed under fascination the way he filed everything else about humans, another specimen pinned to the board, interesting, contained, safe. He was very good at that particular lie. He had four hundred years of practice at exactly that kind of lie, going back to a waterfall and a girl who was, tonight, three miles away, laughing at something in a training bay, with absolutely no idea she'd been carried home in the back of someone's mind the whole walk there.

He thought about texting her something. Anything. Good work today. Four words, easy, harmless, the kind of thing the built version of him produced without effort a dozen times a week.

His thumb hovered over the screen for longer than four words should have taken.

He put the phone down without sending it. He tried putting his mind elsewhere. 

It had been eleven days since he'd last eaten properly. His body hadn't complained yet. It would, soon, in its own quiet unbothered way, and when it did he would deal with it the way he always dealt with it — efficiently, without drama, the way you'd refuel a machine. He didn't examine that thought very hard tonight. There would be time for it later, and some part of him — the old part, the patient part, the part that had gone still and satisfied for eleven full seconds during a fistfight and hadn't fully come down from it yet — was, if he was being honest with himself, not in any hurry to examine it at all.

Ugh I'm bored, he thought again, and this time felt entirely certain about something.

I haven't really had much time to think and be alone, he thought, and it landed strangely, because it was quite true and he knew it — but tonight he'd had nothing but time alone tonight, hours of it, more than he wanted. What he meant, if he made himself finish the thought honestly, was that he hadn't had time to think and not be interrupted by the thinking itself. There was a difference. He didn't feel like finding the correct words for it. He wanted his hands busy instead.

That, at least, he could fix like a professional.

He was out the window before the thought had fully finished forming, shoes hitting the fire escape in that same unhurried, contained way he did everything requiring more strength than a normal person carried. The subway was too obvious a way to travel at that hour with his face doing whatever it was currently doing, so he took the rooftops instead — not as Dark, no mask, not a mana signature worth mentioning, just a fast kid moving efficiently across a city that had long since stopped noticing him — until the familiar seam in Long Island City's skyline dropped him down into the stairwell that led underground.

The base was cold and quiet at that hour, half-lit by the standby glow of consoles nobody was watching. He didn't turn on the main lights. He didn't need them.

He told himself he was there to clean the training mat, and for a while that was even true, in the sense that it was work and work didn't ask him any questions he couldn't answer.

Darkness poured off his hands in thin, obedient tendrils, lifting the broken chunks of concrete Valerie's last strike had left scattered across the floor and stacking them, piece by piece, into a neat pile by the wall for Kaleb to haul out later. He found the equipment rack Volt had put a dent in and simply pried the dent back out with his bare hands, the metal groaning once and then behaving. He found the corner of the arena where the flooring had cracked clean through under six hundred thousand volts and knelt there for a long time, coaxing the fracture shut with slow, careful pressure, the way you'd reset paint rather than just cover it. He rebuilt the section of reinforced barrier that had taken the worst of the final exchange, replacing the warped panel entirely, checking the new seams twice for no reason except that checking them a second time meant being finished.

It was mindless, useful work, and it asked nothing of him except his hands, which was exactly the trade he wanted to make that night: hands for thoughts, motion for stillness, anything at all instead of another minute alone with a turntable and the question of what he's doing.

Somewhere around he used magic to create a seal resetting a barrier that did not, strictly, need resetting a second time, he sat down on the ruined couch Kaleb kept lobbying to replace, just to rest his eyes for a moment.

He did not intend to fall asleep.

He woke up to the pale, indifferent blue of the standby monitors and the sick, dropping certainty that several hours had gone somewhere without him expecting.

"No," he said out loud, to no one, checking his phone with the specific horror of someone late in real time. Six-forty-one. First bell at eight-fifteen. Forty minutes to get from a hole in the ground in Long Island City back to Astoria, into a shower, grab his bag then into a version of himself passable enough to survive homeroom, and out the door.

He was moving before he'd finished being annoyed about it.

He took the rooftops again, faster this time, no pretense of taking his time, cutting corners a normal pedestrian ever could, and dropped through his bedroom window at six fifty-eight looking, he was fairly sure, like a crime scene. He showered in 10 minutes, a genuinely heroic act of time management. He put his shirt on inside out, caught it in the mirror, took it back off, to fix it correctly, looking at the mirror with a feeling that today's version of himself was already behind schedule on being a functioning person.

He grabbed a granola bar off the counter that his aunt had left out — she was already gone for her shift, the kitchen holding a hush of a place someone had recently left — and he was out the door with one shoe not fully laced, jogging down the block with the specific undignified look of a boy who did not, in fact, look heroic or a kid who lived for so many years. 

He was three blocks from school, still working the second shoelace with his teeth gritted, when the world offered him an inconvenience.

It started as a sound before it was a sight — a wrong note in the ordinary hum of morning traffic, an engine revving somewhere it shouldn't be revving, followed by the particular squeal of tires that meant a driver had lost whatever control they were having with their own vehicle. Neiry's head came up on pure instinct half a second before the rest of the street reacted, tracking the sedan that had jumped the curb outside the deli on 31st, its hazards flashing uselessly, a stroller-pushing mother frozen directly in its path with the specific paralysis of someone whose brain hadn't caught up to what her eyes were reporting.

He didn't have time to think about strategy. He barely had time to think about looking normal.

He was moving before the decision finished, ducking between two parked cars, and for exactly a second and a half — his mask, no suit, nothing that would survive being photographed — a thin lattice of shadow poured off his hands and closed around the sedan's front axle like a fist closing around a wrist. The car's forward momentum met something considerably more stubborn than physics generally allowed for and simply stopped, engine still screaming, tires smoking, six inches short of a woman who hadn't even had time to scream yet.

By the time she turned to see what had happened, Neiry was already back between the parked cars, tucking his shirt in, taking the mask off doing his best impression of a kid who'd just been startled by a loud noise like everyone else on the block.

"Whoa," he said, to absolutely no one, at a volume calculated to be heard by the two people nearby who'd actually turn to look at him. "Crazy, right?"

Nobody argued. Nobody looked twice. That was the whole design.

He picked his backpack up off the sidewalk where he'd dropped it and kept walking, checking the time, rethinking, arriving at the entirely reasonable conclusion that he was now going to be only a little late instead of catastrophically late, which felt, on a morning like this one, like a personal victory.

By the time he ran into the school and slid into his seat in the homeroom, damp-haired, one shoelace still a tragedy, nobody at the table would have believed he'd spent the previous six hours at an underground base leaning it up while thinking who he is.

"Bro," Kaleb said, not even looking up from his phone, "you look like you got dressed during an earthquake."

"Whatever I got dressed during several earthquakes," Neiry said. "It was very productive."

"Productive," Kaleb repeated, delighted, the way he got delighted by almost anything before nine a.m. "You're so stupid Is that what we're calling it? Because your shoe is still—" He gestured vaguely, expansively, at Neiry's feet, like he was presenting evidence. "That. That's happening. It's so weird to even imagine you being a superhero."

"Wow man, I'm suddenly aware."

"Are you, though? Because it looks like a genuine cry for help."

Mia laughed — that real laugh, the one that tipped her head back and showed all her teeth, the exact sound he'd catalogued without meaning to, except this time it arrived with no warning and landed somewhere warm behind his ribs before he could brace for it. "He's not wrong, Neiry. Are you doing okay? That's — how do you even forget to tie your shoes. What did it do to you."

"It's nothing you guys can drop it. I was just really busy last night," Neiry said, straight-faced, "and I'm choosing not to talk about it further."

I look so stupid 

"Oh my god," Marjory said, sliding into the seat beside Mia with her usual armful of books, immediately picking up the thread the way she always did once she'd been in the friend group long enough to know its rhythm. "Wait, catch me up, what are yall talking about."

"Nothing," Neiry said, at the exact moment Kaleb said, "Neiry came late looking like mess," and Mia said, "It's a whole thing, honestly," and for a moment the three of them talked over each other in the specific, easy chaos of people who liked each other, and Neiry sat in the middle of it doing the thing he did better than almost anything else in the world — leaning in, laughing at the right beat, tossing the joke back half a second before it could die, watching Marjory's face light up at being included, watching Kaleb practically vibrate with the joy of having an audience, watching Mia's eyes catch his for exactly as long as a laugh takes to land and no longer.

It was effortless. It had always been effortless, the same way breathing was effortless once you stopped noticing you were doing it.

Second period was history, and Mr. Oladipo had them arguing about whether the first documented power-users should've been quarantined or studied, which was a bad question to ask a room full of freshmen at eight-forty in the morning, because half of them had opinions and none of them had finished waking up yet.

"They're saying containment," Oladipo said, tapping the board, "as a policy, not a punishment. What's the difference?"

"There isn't one," said a kid near the window whose name Neiry was fairly sure was Devon. "Locking someone up is locking someone up."

"Okay, but what if the person can level a building by sneezing," someone else said.

"Then you don't lock them up, you train them—"

Neiry, who had been mostly doodling in the margin of his notebook, felt Oladipo's gaze land on him the way it sometimes did — not calling on him exactly, just checking, the way you'd check a scale to see if it was balanced.

"You've been quiet," Mr Oladipo said. "You have a take, or are you just enjoying the show?"

"Both," Neiry said, and a couple people laughed, which bought him half a second to actually think about the question instead of just performing an answer. "I think the framing's wrong. You're asking if it's about safety or control. It's never really one or the other. Every policy that says it's about safety ends up being about control eventually, because control's cheaper to maintain."

The room went quiet for a second in the specific way a room goes quiet when someone says something that sounds like it came from an older person wearing a fourteen-year-old's face.

"That's — " Oladipo paused, recalibrating something behind his eyes. "That's a very cynical answer but I definitely agree."

"I've thought of this before and we see in our daily lives look at inflation because of war," Neiry said, deadpan, and the room laughed for real that time, and Oladipo shook his head and moved on to somebody else, and Neiry went back to his margin doodle feeling the small, specific unease of having said something a little too true a little too easily. He filed it away to be more careful about later. He always meant to be more careful about that. He rarely managed it.

Between third and fourth period, a girl named Priya from student council — someone Neiry had exchanged maybe four total sentences with all year — caught up to him at his locker holding a clipboard like it was a small, fragile animal.

"Hey, quick thing," she said. "We're doing a supply drive for the after-school program and I need, like, eight more homerooms to actually respond to the sign-up sheet instead of just staring at it. Would you post about it? And tell Mia too please she has a lot of followers."

Neiry blinked. "I've posted twice this year."

Neiry paused thinking. So obviously this probably isn't about me, you just want me to tell Mia.

"I know," Priya said, entirely unbothered. "Both times you did post though you got a response rate spike. I did the math."

"That feels like a lot of effort for a supply drive if you're going out your way."

"I run a tight ship," she said, already backing away, already moving on to her next target down the hall. "Just — think about it. You don't even have to say anything nice. People just tend to do things if they see your name on it."

He watched her go, turning that over. He hadn't asked for that, whatever it was. He wasn't sure what to do with owning something he'd never applied for.

He clocked Mason Okafor at the far end of the hallway a minute later, shoulder-checking a smaller kid hard enough to send a binder skidding across the floor, laughing about it before the kid had even finished picking it up. Neiry didn't say anything. He didn't need to — Kaleb wasn't there to see it this time, and inserting himself into it as Neiry would only make it worse for the kid tomorrow.

He left it. The way Mason's laugh came a half-beat too fast, too loud, aimed more at whoever was watching than at the kid on the floor. That wasn't a bully enjoying himself. That was someone performing being fine with something.

He didn't do anything about it. Not yet. He just kept walking, and kept it, the way he kept everything, filed somewhere he could find it again later if it turned out to matter.

Lunch was loud, the way it always was, and Neiry had mostly stopped listening to the actual conversation at the table in favor of watching it — Destiny mid-rant about something on her phone, Kaleb stealing fries off Marjory's tray with the casual entitlement of a little brother, Aaliyah rolling her eyes at both of them without looking up from her book.

"Okay but Mia's the whole reason coach didn't bench half the team," Destiny was saying, to nobody in particular, gesturing with a fork. "She's literally the only reason Ms. Alvarez didn't fail three people on that group project. She's, like — she's just amazing at convincing the coach not to, it's insane."

"Girl she's too good," Aaliyah said, not looking up. "It's suspicious."

"It's not suspicious, it's just — " Destiny shrugged, like the sentence finished itself. "Some people are just like that."

Mia, three seats down, mid-conversation with Marjory, didn't even hear it. She wouldn't have made a big deal out of it if she had — she never did, she'd just get that faintly uncomfortable look she got whenever people complimented her too directly, like she wasn't sure where to put it.

Neiry heard it, though. Heard all of it, clean, the way he heard everything.

And something in his chest — small, ugly, gone almost before he could name it — twisted. Not at Mia. He knew, even in the half-second it happened, that it wasn't really at Mia. It was in the shape of the sentence. She's just a genuinely good person. Said like it was simple. Said like being good was a fact you could just have, what does being good even mean? He thought it's something people fought for every day and sometimes lost. The whole idea reminded him of his past, that tone he heard before. Centuries before. Different mouths, same certainty. The Angels are righteous. The Demons are maniacal scum. Humans blindly would follow whatever those precious Angels would say without considering the amount of bloodshed they'd cause.

It wasn't fair. He knew, even as it happened, that it wasn't fair — Mia had never once claimed to be perfect, had never once asked to be anyone's proof of anything. The unfairness was entirely his. The feeling didn't care about that. It came anyway, quick and cold and gone in under two seconds, and he sat there with the last of it dissolving in his chest and had absolutely no idea what to call it, only that he didn't like having felt it, and that he had no intention of telling anyone it had happened at all.

"You good?" Kaleb asked, mouth full of stolen fries, because apparently his face had done something.

"Yeah," Neiry said. "Just tired."

"Right, the shoe thing," Kaleb said, already moving on, already forgetting to wait for the real answer, and Neiry let him.

By the time the last bell let out, the day had worn itself down to the ordinary hum it always ended on — lockers slamming, buses idling, someone's speaker playing something two blocks away that nobody near it seemed to actually want to hear. Neiry walked home alone, no rush this time, backpack loose over one shoulder.

He passed the same hobby shop on the corner of 30th that he'd bought the turntable from, months back. The owner had the door propped open to let the evening cool in, and from somewhere inside, low, half-buried under the traffic, something was playing on an old radio. He couldn't tell what song. Didn't stop to find out.

He just slowed down for a second, the way you slow down for something you recognize without being able to say why, and then kept walking, hands in his pockets, no closer to an answer than he'd been at two in the morning.