Tenebrism

Turned out that I really didn’t have to.

Him and Rysa were gone the next morning when I finally stumbled out of my room, working on about three hours of sleep (none of which had happened after the stupid goddamn dream) and with a headache rolling in. I had no idea where they’d fucked off to, and right now I didn’t even care. All that mattered was that I had some downtime to just...relax, clear my head, get over it. Just a few seconds to fucking breathe.

I ate four Advil for breakfast and by the time I’d showered, shaved, and dressed I was almost feeling like a human being again. Hadn’t been able to avoid getting a look at myself in the shower though, and I was just about one huge tender bruise and a mess of scabby scrapes and cuts. I kinda looked like a wreck, but still didn’t feel as bad as it looked, and as the meds kicked in I felt even less bad. Not great, but less bad.

I’d been rubbing a towel through my hair for at least five minutes before I realized I was stalling. Because if I went back out to the living room, Keyd and Rysa might be back. Then I’d have to deal with that. But by now my scalp felt raw and my hair was way past dry and starting to get staticy. I threw the towel across the room in the general direction of the hamper, which was just a mountain of stink right now. And then made myself leave my damn room.

But the kitchen and living room were empty and quiet—Keyd and Rysa weren’t here. It was still fucking early, and I did kinda have to wonder where they’d run off to, but it was only a passing thought. Mostly I just wanted to get out of here before they did come back. But where the hell could I go? It was barely seven in the morning. But it was also a weekday, so I actually had class I go could to. It took me a minute to even remember which ones. It was Monday, so...the first one would be motion graphics. At noon.

But the cafeteria opened around now. I could go there, get a real breakfast, fuck around on campus for a while and then just head to class from there. I could even grab all my camera stuff and take the film I’d shot to the darkroom, get a start on that in the time between. There, plan. I liked having a plan. Even something as simple as that.

All the stuff from the shoot was still out here in the living room, in a semi-organized pile in the corner by the TV cabinet that I’d been too distracted to put away again—all the sheets I’d used to make the plain backdrop, some of the makeshift lighting rigs, my camera bag. I hauled that over to the kitchen table, double-checked to make sure everything I needed was in there. One roll of film was still in the camera, the other was rattling around in the bottom of the bag. I’d only had two on me to do the shoot.

I took a second to pull the roll out of the camera, just to save time later. The little canister was so neat and innocent sitting in the palm of my hand, and full of a whole bunch of shots of naked people. Maybe it wasn’t actually such a great idea to develop these right now, because obviously my imagination couldn’t handle it. I didn’t need fuel for any more dreams.

And now I was thinking about the dream. Great. Most of the details were kinda lost by now, but it was impossible to forget some parts of it. The feelings it’d left me with, mostly—other than the obvious. None of them were even bad, which was maybe the worst part. Remembering it just gave me a sense of being content, connected, and satisfied. Along with being really fucking turned on.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I told the film canister as I jammed it back into my bag. “Stop fucking thinking about it.”

Yeah. This was super convincing.

What I really needed to do was stop thinking about trying not to think about it. Somehow.

A sharp wind skittered leaves over the parking lot and flapped my jacket collar up against the back of my neck as I hauled all my shit out to my car. The air was wet and heavy, and thick colorless clouds rumpled up low above the houses and power lines. It might actually rain. Well, this far into November, it was almost time for it. I gave the whole miserable sky a once-over before I got in the car, just in case, but there was still no sign of Rysa or Keyd. Good, that was fine with me.

Halfway to campus, my goddamn brain kicked back in and I remembered that Keyd and Rysa weren’t the only aliens I didn’t want to deal with right now. Ahieel was still...somewhere. Maybe he was still recovering from the last fight, maybe he wasn’t. But he was still a fucking threat, and here I was just running off by myself. The only tiny comfort I had was that the guy didn’t seem to care about me very much—he was gunning for Keyd and Rysa, and if I wasn’t with them then maybe he’d just leave me alone.

Except that maybe I’d made him my enemy by now. I wasn’t exactly the most neutral party anymore, not after what happened in the last fight. If I’d really done what Rysa had said I’d done. I still couldn’t really remember.

But now the further from my apartment I got, the more unsettled and unsafe I felt. Which was stupid, because it wasn’t like Keyd and Rysa were even back there right now, it wouldn’t be any safer if I was there. But I couldn’t stop or ignore the prickles that marched up and down my back or the slow anxious roll my gut was doing. By the time I was sitting at the last stoplight before I’d hit campus, almost everything in me was telling me to turn around, go back. That I wasn’t up to this right now.

But when the light turned green, I went through the intersection and kept going. Turned off the street onto the ramp that slanted down into the underground parking lot beneath the football field. At quarter past seven in the morning, there was parking everywhere down here. I nabbed probably the best spot I’d ever gotten, right near the stairs. I could handle this. I’d been fine yesterday. Well, close enough to it.

The slam of the car door echoed all the way down to the end of the parking lot, bouncing hollowly off the walls and making me grit my teeth until the sound faded out. Why did everything always sound so fucking loud when it was early. It didn’t help the last of my headache that hadn’t totally gone away.

I didn’t bother grabbing my bag; I’d come back for it later. Food first. This level of the parking lot had a wide set of stairs that went straight up into one of the main campus walkways, pretty close to the cafeteria building. I trudged my way up them, up into the heavy grey day that still looked a hell of a lot like it was gonna rain. And found myself right in front of the library.

I wobbled on the top step, fell back to the second. Sucked in a breath, dug my fingernails into my palms. Shit, come on, it was just the goddamn library. So what if there’d been a giant alien frog there once; it wasn’t there now. Still. The memory was fucking strong, enough to send sharp goosebumps washing all the way down my spine, and the dry brush of static energy over my skin.

The whole thing’d been pretty messed up, honestly, and I hadn’t had a lot of spare time to think about it. But I was thinking about it now. The way Keyd and Rysa had chased down the gai and destroyed the thing without any hesitation; the first time I’d seen those shadow whips come out of Rysa’s hands, seen Keyd pull that sword out of his face. All stuff that had unnerved the fuck out of me at the time. It still kinda did.

But they were fighting a war. They had real enemies and had to deal with them, and I got that. Just all this energy stuff, the entities, these things that were living in them and aware and thinking in some way...that just didn’t sit real easy with me. Nothing against Rysa and Keyd. But all this shit with Ahieel and wars and magic, god, it was all a fucking mess.

Get moving, Alan. Just start walking.

I did, turning a hard left and heading for the building that housed the cafeteria on the first floor. The library was a prickle at my right, like the feeling of eyes watching me. Even when it was completely blocked by another building, I couldn’t get that uncomfortable itch to go away.

A wide patio wrapped around the tall glass windows of the cafeteria, flat grey concrete cluttered with dark green plastic-coated tables and benches. Usually there were a lot of students scattered around out here, but this damn early in the morning there were only three; two girls and a guy hunched up in hoodies and picking sleepily at their trays.

I walked past them on my way towards the cafeteria doors—one of the girls looked kind of familiar, I thought she might’ve been in one of my classes. I was trying to remember which one when the glass door shoved open right in front of me and a guy barrelled out and clipped against my shoulder. I caught a flash of pale blond hair and white clothes, and suddenly I was backed up against a nearby table, heart hammering and thin clammy sweat breaking out all over my skin, every sense ramped up into overdrive.

But it was just some sun-bleached surfer dude in a white windbreaker. He threw me a disinterested glance and then went on his way down the sidewalk, balancing a muffin and a banana together in one hand. I dropped down weakly to the bench of the stupid table I’d tripped into, air rushing out of me. Jesus. Jesus. Talk about fucking overreacting. It was just a guy with blond hair, for fuck’s sake.

But my pulse was still thick and sludgy in my throat and my palms were sweating and the copper taste in my mouth was sharp and greasy, and every breath tore a sharp stitch under my ribs. I leaned on the edge of the table and couldn’t do anything at all for a good thirty seconds. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t get them to stop. The pebbled concrete under the table looked kinda woozy and wavy, and I closed my eyes against it as all the extra pointless adrenaline trickled away.

Stupid. Fuck, this was so stupid. It’d been a bad idea to do this, I should’ve listened to my own damn instincts. I just needed another day or something, get myself together. It was just too soon, that was all. Yeah. Just a little more time.

Getting back to my car happened in a weird tumbled daze. I didn’t really remember standing up or actually walking back down into the parking lot, but suddenly my car was right in front of me and I had my keys in my hand. I was still fucking shaking as I unlocked the door and crawled inside. I had to sit in there for a couple minutes and just breathe, waiting for it to stop. I wasn’t gonna drive like this, no way.

Finally—finally—I crept slowly out of the lot and back into the street. I went about fifteen fucking miles an hour all the way home and had a goddamn heart attack every time someone honked at me for it. At least the drive was only those couple blocks, and it wasn’t that long before I was inching the car through the complex gate and into the parking spot. The two dozen yards to my front door had never felt so fucking long, and I’d never been so relieved to get inside my apartment.

And Rysa was right there, just a few steps away, almost like she was waiting there for me. Standing near the patio door, arms crossed low over her ribs, thin cuts of light from between the blinds sliding over her face. Seeing her startled me—of course, goddammit—and I jolted back against the door. Our eyes met, and I was so fucking glad to see her that I just about threw my arms around her. But I held back, because that’d be...I don’t know. Too much. I didn’t know how she’d take it.

“Alan,” she said, and something in her voice made me really glad I hadn’t thrown myself at her. She sounded...not angry, but tense. “You’re here.”

“Yeah, I—yeah. ‘course.”

That didn’t seem to make her any happier. She didn’t say anything, but her shoulders were set tight and uneasy. Something was really going on here, and it really wasn’t helping the near-panic that I’d been fighting down for the last half hour. What was the problem? Because I’d gone out for a little while?

“I just went to school,” I said, but right as it was coming out of my mouth I realized how pretty stupid I’d actually been. I’d disappeared on them with no heads up, and Keyd’s tracking spell wasn’t on me right now, and apparently I’d forgot about the crazy motherfucker somewhere out there who was really good at finding us as really bad times. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”

Rysa made a low sound in her throat and turned away. Shit. There went that whole ‘actually deserving their trust’ idea, just because I hadn’t wanted to deal with Keyd after a stupid dream. I hadn’t wanted to make them worry about me, fuck, that was just unnecessary.

“Where’s Keyd?” I said, because I had to say something and I didn’t see the guy anywhere.

Everything I said just made Rysa less and less pleased. “He is…well. He would say differently, but I believe he’s out looking for you.”

“Shit,” I said, as a big swoop of guilt bottomed out in my gut. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t think it would be a big deal.”

“Clearly.” Rysa sighed and shook her hands out from her sides. “Hopefully, he’s paying attention.”

Guess she was gonna contact him through their bond, let him know somehow that I was here. I moved backwards until the backs of my knees hit a kitchen chair, and I dropped down into it. Ran my hands up through my hair, felt the low pulse of the almost-gone headache trying to creep back. This day’d barely started and I already wanted it to be done. I was fucking exhausted.

Then I thought of something else, and looked up at Rysa. She was staring back at me pretty hard, the tips of her fingers twitching lightly.

“Is he even okay enough to be running around?” I said. I think I’d pretty much pulled all the bad energy I could out of him, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t more hiding in there that I couldn’t get to. And what if Ahieel found him again? There was no way he was up to that yet.

“As if I could stop him,” Rysa said. She was still giving me a steady look that I couldn’t read. It wasn’t helping me calm down at all, and I had to turn away and stare towards the black empty screen of the TV. I could still feel her eyes on me, heavy and assessing.

Keyd was back in less than five minutes. He came in through the sliding glass door—I heard the light thump and the shuffly roll of the track, and was up on my feet just as the blinds scrabbled apart and Keyd shoved through them.

When he saw me, he actually took a step back against the wall. His shoulders hit it kinda hard and a huff of air rushed out of him. I watched his hands flattened out against the plaster as he stared at me like he almost couldn’t believe he was actually seeing me. Shit, I’d really freaked him out if it was this obvious. And that was...really unexpected.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t actually—I’m sorry.”

He never took his eyes off me, but he did lean forward off the wall. “It’s all right,” he said, after a long couple of seconds.

“I’m an idiot.”

A tiny shake of his head. “You aren’t.”

The world was tunneling in and it was just him and me there and the apologizing wasn’t enough and I wanted to do something fucking nuts like go touch him or something, just to prove I was actually here because he still looked like he kinda didn’t trust it. I mean, it looked like I’d actually scared the guy that something bad’d happened to me. But it still seemed like a crazy idea. And weird. Too much, again.

“You wanna put that tracking spell back on me?” I offered instead, and Keyd nodded right away. He shoved off the door and came at me a lot faster than I’d expected. I just managed not to jerk away from him, but I did wobble back on my heels a little. Keyd put a hand on my shoulder, steadied me. The touch was...it was like every sense I had just zeroed in on it, tilted and slid everything off balance towards that one single spot, even all the air and blood in my body seemed to drag that way. Heat clamored around in the space between his fingers and my arm, and when he put his other hand on my glasses I just about knocked it away. God. Calm the fuck down, Alan.

There was the build-up, the growing buzzy hum that meant he was starting to use his energy, making the tracking spell with it. It fizzed off his fingers, settled down into my glasses then faded away, quiet and almost unnoticeable. It was there and done, but Keyd still had his fingers on the frames and his palm was just brushing my cheek. The guy was always burning so much warmth off his skin, and it was the same way now. I was pretty sure he didn’t need to have his hand almost on my face anymore.

Suddenly this was way too much; everything was hot and pressing in close and suffocating around me and I needed air, fuck, just...I couldn’t do this. I broke a step backwards, Keyd’s hand dropped away, the room crashed back in around me and it was too bright and loud even though nothing was making any noise, there was just some kind of metallic ringing that was shrilling louder and louder deep in my ears until it was all there was and what the shit was happening.

A sound came out of me, maybe a word or half a sentence but I didn’t even fucking hear it, this was seriously like the same kind of minor panic attack that I’d only managed to put on pause earlier on campus and now was just barreling right back in with no fucking stopping it. Everything was crinkling in grey and staticy and there was a big shape that was getting too close, looming over me and pressing all the air out of the room and then something touched me and that was the last fucking thing I could take.

I shoved my arms out, my palms smacking something solid and warm that kind of yielded back, and whirled around. The whole room was spotty and swimming with blobs of color but the hallway was right behind me and I went for it, as fast as I could get my clumsy far-away legs to take me. Getting out was all I cared about, and that was the last clear thought I remembered having for a while.

When I sorta came back to myself, I was sitting on the edge of my own bed, the door shut and the lights off. Every part of me was shaking like a fucking leaf, and I could hear my own gasping half-sobbing breaths loud in the quiet room. Cold uncomfortable sweat stuck my shirt against my skin under my jacket, and I twisted out of both of them and threw them against the far wall. Scrubbed my hands up and down my face and tilted my head back towards the dim grey ceiling.

Fuck.

This was out of control. I hadn’t been able to leave my goddamn apartment today and I’d hardly slept in over a week and absolutely everything was just a fucking mess. Being keyed up on adrenaline and stress for days on end was fraying everything in me apart. I had no reference to deal with this kind of shit. And I couldn’t stop shaking.

I had no idea how long I’d even been in here, but suddenly there were whispering voices outside the door, and then a light clunk and downward tick of the handle like somebody had touched it. I snapped my head up, blood suddenly pounding in the roof of my mouth and in my throat. Something tasted strong and coppery on my tongue.

No. No no no nonono, no. Don’t come in here, don’t fucking come in here. That was the last thing—just don’t.

As if they’d heard my thoughts, the door handle clicked again and popped back straight again. A few seconds later the voices went away, and there was just silence outside my door. Nobody came in. I let out a long shaky breath, keeled over onto the bed, drew my knees up and grabbed a pillow against my face.

Hold it together. That’s all I had to do. It shouldn’t be that fucking hard.

#

It was a long, long time before I came out of my room again. And it was mostly because I was pretty disgusted with how badly I was handling this. It had to change, now. Who cared if I wasn’t totally comfy with the idea of creepy entities living inside people and giving them magic powers? Goddamn murderous blond alien guys sure didn’t care. I had to suck it up, and just deal with it, and make my own fucking moves here. And there was only one way I could think of to that.

Rysa was out by herself in the kitchen, bracing her arms on the edge of the table and looking down at something on it. Good. Perfect.

I went and stood across from her; she didn’t seem to notice. Spread out on the table were the patched-together maps we’d torn out of my Thomas Guide five hundred damn years ago. I hadn’t seen those around for a while; hadn’t even known they were still using them. There were a lot more marks scribbled over them now, blacked out sections and lines drawn everywhere, little symbols and marks I couldn’t read or figure out.

And there was a black X over the spot where the Crystal Cathedral would be. I had a gut feeling Ahieel wasn’t actually anywhere around there, and it looked like Rysa did too. There weren’t any spokes drawn out from it, no sectioned off places to search. It was just a mark on the map, way off to the side from everything else.

“Hey,” I said, and Rysa hummed a little but didn’t look up. “I’m ready for that training now.”

That got her attention. She lifted her head, looking at me through a couple stray strands of dark hair. “Alan—”

I could tell I was about to get the kid gloves—understandably, after this morning—and interrupted before she could say anything else. “Maybe it’s not a great time, but I don’t think there’s gonna be a great time. And Ahieel’s here now, so...this matters now.”

She was quiet, but her mouth twisted around a little like she was thinking about it.

“I’m seriously ready now,” I said. “Let’s go, let’s do some of this. I really need to do this.”

I might’ve sounded a little crazy or something, because Rysa put a hand to my shoulder and gripped hard.

“All right,” she said, her voice pitched low and calm. “Just a little.”

So we walked down to the park again, the same one that I’d taken her and Keyd to the first morning I’d met them, the one she’d given me my first sort-of training lesson in. There really was never anybody here, and there really wasn’t today with all the ugly grey weather. Still, we went all the way to the far end again, away from the neighborhood streets and where the back of houses were the only things nearby.

Rysa stopped at the edge of the little softball diamond that was back here, the tips of her boots scuffing into the soft brown dirt. She rested her hands on her hips, and my attention caught on all the dark patterns that spread out over her hands and wrists. There was something I’d been wondering about those for a while, but especially since the photoshoot, when I’d really noticed it.

I reached for her wrist. “Can I just...see something—”

Rysa let me take her hand. I curled my fingers lightly around hers, pressing down against the dense black marks. They buzzed and tingled against me, a vibration that burrowed down into my skin the same way touching Keyd’s had been like. So they always felt like that; it wasn’t some weird thing with just him. That was a fucking relief.

“Thanks.” I dropped my hand off her, and she flexed her fingers and moved slightly back. She didn’t ask what that’d been about, and I didn’t really want to tell her.

“Before anything else,” she said, “I think we should revisit the basic ideas.”

Sounded good, because with all the nearly getting killed and the distracting dreams and shit, I’d forgot everything she’d ever told me about this. Except how to make a shield, I remembered that. Even if I’d never done it usefully.

I expected her to start explaining things again, going over it in her straight-forward right-to-the-point way. But she didn’t. She took another step back and turned away, her profile to me. Then she sliced her hand up in front of her face, straight up and down. She took a breath in, out, and then swung her arm sharply around, hand clenched into a fist, like she was winding up a giant crank. And I felt ripples in the air, pulses of energy blooming out from the space in front of her, right in the second before the air caught fire.

At least, that’s what it looked like. Shimmers and curls of purplish-black flames licked off her arm, trailing a huge burning loop in the air in front of her. Each pass of her arm made it bigger, brighter, sent another beat of energy vibrating through the air and hitting me right in the chest. Then—

She punched forward, stepping her whole body into the move, and drove her arm through the middle of the dark swirling fire. For a second it all dragged back along her arm, made a bubble around her fist, and then...exploded forward. A fat stream of purple-black flames spiraled out a good thirty feet in front of her across the softball diamond. There was no heat and no sound, but I felt it strong and powerful right through my chest. The flames fluttered out into nothing after a couple seconds, and Rysa lowered her arm.

“Wow,” was really all I could say. Was that supposed to be a basic idea?

Rysa turned to me. “That’s within my power to do, but not a natural ability that I have,” she said. “I have to use the extra energy that the entities generate to construct it. That power is limited and finite, much more so than using the entities themselves. It can be replenished when it is drained, but that takes time and rest. We don’t often use it.”

“Why not?” That fireball’d looked pretty fucking powerful to me.

“You saw how long it took,” Rysa said. Long? That’d been maybe five seconds, tops. “It’s not as efficient in a fight, compared to something like this.”

A black shadow whipped off her wrist and snapped through the air, lashing out at least as far as the fire had, and definitely way fucking faster.

“Right. Okay,” I said. “Point taken.”

“Now that we’ve seen a little more of your ability, it’s more clear how it works. Our assumptions were right,” Rysa said. The black whip-shadow coiled up back to her arm and settled down on her skin. “Obviously, you aren’t generating energy yourself, as we can. You’re taking it in as constructed spells or as raw energy, and we already know you can let it out again in those same forms, as well as create your own.”

“Right, like the shields,” I said. “Are those really spells?”

“The word might not be perfectly translatable. Lhennej is our word. A combination of power, and knowledge, and focus. Knowing what you want to accomplish, strength to will it into being, and the power and control to support that creation.”

“Okay,” I said. That sounded exactly like how she’d taught me to do the shields. “This is...making a lot more sense now, actually. I don’t even know why, you explained this exact same shit before.”

“If I could make a guess,” Rysa said, “I would say that you didn’t fully accept you could do these things. When I taught you before, you were surprised every time you did something successfully. So you held the understanding away from you, couldn’t connect with it. Now…” she almost smiled at me, “you understand that it’s real.”

I did? Most of this still seemed pretty fucking unreal. But I was here right now, trying to learn how to do magic. That made it real enough.

“Could I learn to do something like that?” I asked. “That fireball thing, if it’s made of the kind of energy that I can mess with...I could do that?”

Rysa squinted at me. “Conceivably. But it would take far more skill and knowledge than you currently have.”

“I didn’t mean today,” I said. Far more skill and knowledge, right. “I just meant... ever. I could do that?”

“....yes,” she said, almost hesitantly. “But your ability isn’t best suited for fighting. It’s limited, and you can only use as much as you take in. And, as you saw, much slower. That’s what I was showing to you, so you understand the limits.”

“What the hell is it good for, then? Sorry,” I added, when she hiked an eyebrow at me.

“Right now, it’s good for being able to protect yourself. “ She raised the other eyebrow, pointedly. “Isn’t that why we’re here, right now?”

“I—yeah. It is.” I ran a hand back through my hair, light static crackling and sticking the strands to my fingers. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“You can stop apologizing, it’s only wasting time.”

For a second I thought she was actually annoyed with me. Then I saw the little pull at the side of her mouth, and relaxed. Teasing me again.

“Okay,” I said. “Then let’s do some of this.”

#

There weren’t any magic words to say, no magic wands to wave, nothing like any fantasy books I’d ever read. So maybe I didn’t read a lot of those anymore, but I did get through all of Harry Potter, and this wasn’t anything like that.

Just like with the shields, it was all thinking, and focusing, and doing. All mental, thoughts and concentration and willpower. Or something like that. Lhennej, Rysa called it, and maybe that was a better word than any of the ones in English. Because we didn’t have the right words for talking about magic.

Rysa had me start simple at first; even simpler than the shields had been. Just directing energy around to different parts of my body, like into my hands or feet, holding it there, then moving it somewhere else. It was kinda like pushing a little swarm of bees around my body, and just about as comfortable. When the energy was all grouped up together in a mass like this I could really feel it, and ever since that last fight with Ahieel I hadn’t had any left in me at all. Rysa had to let me take some from her, and I had to get used to how itchy and staticy and weird it felt all over again.

When we were done with the warm up, so to speak, Rysa handed me a little broken twig from the grass, had me hold it flat in the palm of my hand, and told me to spin it around without touching it. Without giving me a single clue on how to do that.

“Seriously?” I said, and she stood back and waited, arms crossed loosely over her ribs.

“Think about what I taught you before,” she said. “About how to create a shield.”

And that was all I got out of her. God, she really wasn’t the the hand-holding type. Sink or swim here.

Okay, well, the shields had been all about...picturing something that seemed protective, like the wall around my grade-school playground. And then kind of shoving energy into that idea, and making the power and the concept combine. I stared down at the soggy twig in my hand. If I wanted to make it spin…

A compass was the first thing that popped into my head. Specifically the one I’d nicked out of my dad’s office a lot when I was a kid, his old USGI one. No idea how many times I’d gotten in trouble for taking it outside and playing with it. A dark green metal thing with a folding lid and a metal clip that kept it snapped closed, and when it was all opened up there was the fat metal bar that spun around in its plastic plate, pointing north.

I could see it perfectly in my head, the wobbly way it’d swung around in my hand whenever I spun around on the neat square patch of grass in our backyard, trying to get it to point any other way. I focused on that, the motion of it, and tried to drag just a little bit of energy up and into my hand, pushing it through that image of the compass.

A hazy purple light sifted up out of my palm, glowed around the twig. It kind of twitched, jerked to the side, and then rolled over. Not exactly spinning. I let out my breath in a huff. Well, it’d done something. I glanced up at Rysa, who looked fairly pleased.

“Good,” she said. “Try again.”

So I did. About a dozen more times, until I could get the thing to sort of scoot around in almost a full circle. And then tried a whole bunch more tiny tasks that Rysa set for me. We didn’t even get to shields again. I had a feeling she didn’t exactly trust my claim about being ready for this and was going really easy on me, but I was kinda glad about it. Rysa told me that as I got better at this, I wouldn’t have to picture everything so literally. But I didn’t know how true that was gonna be, since this was just about the hardest thing I’d ever tried to do.

We’d been at it for at least two hours, and everything I managed to do was still slow and clumsy and confused. It was all...sludgey, like everything was getting gummed up and stuck and taking a hundred times the effort that just thinking should have. My thoughts tried to break apart and scatter as soon as I tried to direct them, I couldn’t hold images in my head, like I was just smashing them up against some big mental wall. And yeah, I was new at this, but I’d thought practice would at least start making it smoother. It seemed like it was actually getting harder, and I was just getting worse at it.

I was pushing through a headache by the end, and when making a little purple light move around my fingers actually greyed out my vision and made me stagger off balance, Rysa made me stop and told me we were done for the day.

“It takes so much damn effort,” I half-complained to her as we walked back through the neighborhood together. Slowly, because I was kind of jittery and unstable from running all that energy through me constantly. It still hadn’t rained, but the late afternoon around us was damp and grey and dreary. The breeze pushed at our backs and feathered Rysa’s dark hair apart at the back of her neck. “I kinda thought it’d start getting...easier.”

“You’re not used to structuring your thoughts in this way,” was Rysa’s immediate reply. “Which is exactly as it should be. What I had you do today was much more detailed and precise than forming shields. You have to open new pathways for more complicated ideas to travel down. We all have to train to do this, to make it a second nature.”

“‘kay. How do I do that?”

“Meditation.”

“...really.” Was that a real translation, or just the closest frequency could do?

Rysa nodded. “It’s an important part of our own training. Structuring your mind, controlling your thoughts, creating clear pathways for connecting to the energy itself. Learning to communicate with it.”

“Huh.” Getting those creepy vibes again. I wished she hadn’t reminded me about some parts of this stuff being sentient. “I thought it was just the entities that could...communicate.”

She hmm’d an agreement. “Your communication is different—a one-way channel from you to it. Meditation can clear that channel, leave it open and ready for the energy to understand and react to your commands. That’s why it’s difficult for you right now. You’ve never had to use that pathway of thought, or they’ve never existed at all before.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“But you’re doing well,” she added. “Our training lasts for years, and we’re aware of the entities and their potential for our whole lives before that. You’re experiencing everything at once.”

I didn’t feel like I was doing so well, but Rysa knew what she was talking about and I didn’t really think she was the type to say nice shit just to make me feel better. I had to trust that she really meant it—that I was doing good, and that I could get better. But it obviously wasn’t gonna be easy.

“So...” I said to her, as we turned onto the last block, “exactly how do you meditate?”

#

Back at my apartment I took the best shower in the world, the heat from the water pounding through my skin and muscles and down to my bones. Second shower of the day; who cared. I was fucking exhausted. But in a good way. In a way where I felt like I’d done something, actually put effort into making myself this tired. Not just worn out from stress like I’d been the past couple days.

Afterwards I sat on my bed, back against the wall. Meditation. Well, why the hell not? It couldn’t hurt anything. The whole idea’d always seemed kind of new agey, or just something that was for people who did yoga and tai-chi in a park somewhere. Kind of a gentle, quiet thing. Definitely not something that intensely trained warriors did. But hey, another thing to be wrong about.

Rysa’d explained to me that it was something they trained to do immediately when they went into the army, starting simple and getting more involved as they forged that open channel with entities and made the connection stronger. Since I didn’t actually have any entities, the simple stage was good enough for me. Rysa’s instructions had been to concentrate on breathing and focus on one body part at a time, really get aware of myself and all the borders and shapes of my body and the space that I took up in the world. And do that for as long as I could. Which sounded pretty easy, honestly.

It wasn’t. Sitting there quietly doing nothing gave my mind an opportunity to wander all over the damn place. Thoughts just kept popping up—stupid stuff, tiny stuff, like that it’d been a while since I’d gotten the mail and it’d been even longer since I’d called home. I usually checked in at least twice a week and...yeah, I hadn’t called since before Halloween. Thrown a few short emails back and forth with my sister and my mom, but I was kinda surprised that I hadn’t gotten a call wondering what the hell I was up to.

And I’d completely forgotten about concentrating on my body at all. Okay, this was exactly what I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I shook my head, huffed out some air, rolled my shoulders around a couple times, flexed my hands open and closed. Then, sat still, started over. One body part at a time, starting all the way down at my feet.

One thing at a time, nothing else. Think about breathing. Breathe slow. Concentrate. Narrow everything down. I was somewhere around my knees when an image sorta faded into my mind, burning in the dark behind my eyelids. I could see it and feel it at the same time; a single bright thread stretching through me, just a hair-thin line that seemed like it was pulled right from the base of my spine all the way up to the top of my head. I didn’t know it was about, but it was easy to concentrate on. Easier even than parts of my body, which were starting to feel kinda floaty and disconnected the longer I sat here with my eyes closed.

Still, I kept at it. But somewhere in the middle of concentrating on my ribcage, I fell asleep.

#

I didn’t remember my dreams, if I even had any, and when I woke up again everything was...calm. Rested and quiet. For a couple minutes I just stayed under the blankets that I must’ve crawled under at some point, warm and unexpectedly content, blinking into the dull light shifting in through the blinds. Everything seemed okay. It was like I’d slept—really slept—for the first time in days.

Maybe the meditation shit had actually helped, just in a different way than I’d figured. Something sure had.

The light in the room got steadily brighter, turning from a greyish blue to yellow. I peeled the blankets off and got up, moving kind of slow and easy. I didn’t even know what time it was, other than sometime in the morning. I had the time to relax and I was gonna take it. I’d fallen asleep with all my clothes on, so I pulled on new ones—my last pair of clean jeans, I was gonna have to get to that laundry soon—and threw some water on my face, then went out into the living room.

I wasn’t real surprised to see both Keyd and Rysa out here this morning. Keyd was sitting on the couch that was pushed against the wall, kind of sunk back in the cushions, and Rysa was perched on the arm of it near him. They looked like they’d maybe been outside earlier; Rysa’s hair was kinda all over the place and there was a fleck of dried leaf crunched up on the shoulder of Keyd’s shirt. Neither of them paid much attention to me as I went into the kitchen; they just kept talking together quietly.

I was starting to hunt through the cabinets for some breakfast before I remembered there was basically nothing here. Right. Shopping. Another thing I needed to do. Hell, why not right now? What was today, Tuesday? I had class, but I didn’t really want to go to calculus anyway. Food seemed more important. I hadn’t exactly managed to get to class yesterday anyway.

I leaned around the kitchen wall so I could see out to the couches. I waited for something that seemed like a pause in their conversation, and then said, “hey, guys.” Rysa glanced up, and Keyd craned his head to the side enough to sort of look at me. “I gotta go get groceries, and I...well, I figured I should let you know, this time.” I wasn’t gonna fuck that up twice. “Shouldn’t be gone real long.”

Can one of you come with me, was not a question I actually wanted to add to that, but I wasn’t sure if I could make it through a whole grocery run on my own. Hadn’t done too well with the going out by myself thing yesterday. Even if I was nowhere near as stressed out right now.

But Keyd and Rysa threw each other one of those looks, the ones that were an entire conversation and a decision in only a couple of seconds. Then Rysa opened her mouth to say something, but Keyd got to his feet before she could.

“I should—”

“Yeah,” I said. Maybe too quickly, because Keyd’s eyes shot right to mine. “I mean, that’s fine. Sounds good.”

Rysa put a hand to his arm in what looked like a question, but also kind of a warning. Like she was definitely gonna put a stop to this if she saw a good reason to. Keyd turned his wrist in her grip, curled his fingers lightly back around her.

“Jinnhe dejj,” he said to her. He put his other hand to his chest, just the fingertips pressing down in a loose cage around where that mark of his would be. “Hasn hejkaji kefyretan enjar.”

Yeah, I could tell what this was about. They didn’t need to be speaking English.

“I can always help him out a little more if he needs it,” I said, and both of them looked at me. “I mean, I’m not the worst person to be around, right?”

At least I could pull bad energy shit out of him if that was suddenly needed. And maybe I could do a few other things now, too. Rysa knew that, but Keyd hadn’t been around for my training sessions. So I held up my hand and focused, trying to imagine that open channel Rysa’d talked about and pulling just a tiny bit of energy down it. A ripply little pulse shot down my arm and buzzed up my palm, and a couple of purple sparks jumped off of my fingers and bloomed into little hazy lights. I tried not to be surprised that it’d actually happened like I’d wanted, and just focused on making the things stay together and close to my hand.

I glanced up to see both Keyd and Rysa watching me. Rysa looked fairly pleased, and Keyd was...well, he was actually smiling. A small one, but he was looking at the little wisps swim around my fingers like it was something amazing he’d never seen before. When his eyes flicked up to mine, a startled jolt yanked at my gut and my concentration broke and the energy collapsed and dissolved away into the air. Shit, whoops, that wasn’t real impressive.

But it seemed to have made up Rysa’s mind. She gave Keyd’s wrist a squeeze, and then let go of him. “Otajva, jaihn.”

“Iaymat irad.” Keyd brushed his hand gently over the back of her neck, and then turned to me. “When you’re ready.”

“Great. But, bad news,” I said, and got a slight head-tilt out of him. “We’re gonna take the car.”

#

The store was even closer to my place than In-N-Out was, so Keyd didn’t have to handle it for long. I kept the radio on this time as a distraction. For both of us. Keyd’s attention was definitely caught by it, like I’d figured it would be. They probably didn’t have anything like radios on his planet. The reception sounded a lot more staticy and jittery than usual, and that probably had to do with Keyd’s energy messing with it, since it got worse whenever any part of him got closer to the dashboard.

Still, it was listenable. I usually switched it back and forth between the classic rock station and a couple of the more decent top 40s ones. Nothing was any good on the latter ones, and I toggled over to the classic rock just as the opening guitar licks of a Boston song peeled out over the air waves. Yeah, that was good.

“Hey, you mind?” I said to Keyd, reaching for the volume. I popped it up a couple notches, and when Keyd didn’t do much of anything, cranked it up another twist. The music pounded out of the speakers and buzzed and rattled down the plastic moulding, because my car was over ten years old and had a pretty worn-out stereo system.

A whole childhood of listening to my parents’ music meant I had just about every rock album from the 70s and 80s memorized. It was practically muscle memory to sing along. But Keyd was right here, and I wasn’t actually any good at singing, so I just drummed my hands on the wheel and knocked my head around a little to the beat.

You know, fuck it. I was gonna sing along if I wanted to. Keyd could deal.

I chimed in with the song just as the chorus kicked in, and for about the next two minutes I kind of forgot Keyd was even here. After that stupid freakout I’d had yesterday, I couldn’t have imagined doing something so ordinary as singing along with the radio less than a day later. It was nice to have this feeling of things being….if not normal, then at least kinda manageable. It still didn’t make that much sense, since nothing had actually changed, but I was definitely gonna go with it.

When the song ended and a commercial cut in, I glanced over at Keyd with just a little embarrassment. But not all that much. He had his lip sucked into his mouth and was staring really hard at his hands.

I had a sudden thought, especially if I understood how this frequency thing worked. “You can’t understand the words at all, can you?” I jerked a thumb at the radio.

Keyd glanced over at me, gave a tiny shake of his head. He had this crooked little smile tugging up at one side of his mouth, definitely a new look on him. “But I understand you.”

It took me a second. Then, “oh, wait. Oh man. That’s not even fair! You let me do that for a whole song? Dude, uncool.”

And then Keyd made a throaty noise and kind of bowed forward in the seat, and I realized he was laughing. Laughing, and trying to hold it back or not let me see. Which just made it…cuter. No, wrong word. It was sure something though, something that I liked.

“Now you gotta sing something. Make it even,” I said to him, and Keyd curled the back of his fist against his mouth and shook his head. But I was pretty sure he was still laughing. I reached over and bunted his shoulder with my fist, before I really thought about what I was doing. He’d nearly annihilated me last time I’d done something like that. Even if that time had been a lot more angry and not at all friendly.

But all Keyd did was huff and rub his hands over his face like he was trying to scrub the smile off it. It didn’t work, ‘cause he was still doing it when he looked back at me, and shit he really did have a nice smile, like did they have braces over there on his alien planet because his teeth were just about fucking perfect, maybe like a couple of them were a little tilted out of line and one looked like it had a little chip in it, but how stupid was this that I was checking out his teeth so I glanced back at the road and realized I was just about to rear-end the shit out of a Sentra.

“Fuck!”

Stomped on the brakes, hard. The pedal juddered and mushed under my foot, a sharp shriek of the tires skidding on asphalt, and the seatbelt bit into my shoulder and strained hard across my chest. Keyd jolted forward and his hands slammed against the dashboard before he got snapped back against the seat with a breathy grunt. But I’d stopped the car in time. The front bumper had to be like an inch away from the Sentra, which was a bright shiny blue and so new that it didn’t even have a real license plate yet, just one of those filler cardboard ones. That would have been a fucking mess if I’d hit it.

“Ugh, fuck. Sorry, shit—you good over there?” I said, wincing as the seat belt eased out of its chokehold across my chest, and glanced over at Keyd. He’d wedged himself back into the corner between the seat and the door, one hand clenched around the bottom edge of the cushion and the other splayed over the window. He looked pretty unnerved—and it was easy to see. So he had to be really shaken up. He still didn’t have a fucking seat belt on, so it actually could’ve been worse. “Shit, man. I’m sorry, really sorry about that.”

Keyd shook his head tightly. “Fine,” he said, even though he clearly wasn’t, at all.

I breathed out and slid my sweaty hands along the wheel. Shit. Fuck. That’d been stupid. Good job, Alan.

Neither of us said another word the entire rest of the fucking drive.

#

Having Keyd trail me around the Stater Bros was unsettling. Mostly ‘cause of the leftover adrenaline from the almost-car accident. Normally, it wouldn’t’ve been a big deal at all. I’d’ve forgotten about it already. But being aware of Keyd’s unease was keeping it all fresh and strong, almost like I was soaking it all up from him. All this weird guilt was churning around in me too; I mean, the guy hated cars already and I’d pretty much made it worse by proving they were kinda dangerous.

I tried to make the whole shopping trip fast—just throwing shit into the cart, doing my usual lap around the store on auto-pilot and grabbing the same damn stuff I always got. But at some point I realized that I had house guests, and they ate too. Maybe not that often, but it seemed rude not to count them in.

“Hey,” I said, and Keyd turned away from where he’d been peering suspiciously at a row of granola bar boxes. A few feet away down the aisle, an older lady in one of those motorized carts was giving him just about the same kind of stare. “What’d you guys like to eat? ”

Keyd shook his head, glancing around the aisle. “I don’t think there would be equivalents here,” he said. “I don’t even…understand how this is food.”

“What?” I said, distracted by the lady slowly motoring her way backwards out of the aisle, her eyes still locked on Keyd. I forgot this every fucking time, how weird and kinda scary he looked to regular people.

When I turned back to him, he dropped his palms open at me, almost like a helpless little shrug without his shoulders getting involved. “It’s only boxes.”

“Well. Food’s all in the boxes,” I said.

Keyd gave me such a fucking look that I laughed and held up my hands. He clearly thought I was a moron, but just that expression on him, shit. It was kind of amazing.

“I did assume as much,” he said, while I was still trying to control myself. “What I’m unclear on is how.” He waved his hand frustratedly. “How does any of it keep? How does…it become edible?”

“I use a microwave,” I said. “That’s what I know how to do.”

He just shook his head, like that answer only frustrated him more.

“All right, c’mon,” I said, levering my arm against the cart and starting to shove it around. The lady in the motorized cart had completely disappeared. “I think I got something for you.”

Keyd liked the fruits and veggies section a lot better. As soon as we turned the corner into the open area full of colorful edible unboxed things, a sort of soft relief ran down him, sighing tension out of his shoulders, and I really thought for a second he was gonna go run over and touch everything in the displays. But he didn’t. He kept hovering right at my side, but he was sure looking around at everything with a lot more enthusiasm.

“Hey, grab whatever you want, man,” I told him. “Least I can do for you guys.”

Keyd barely hesitated to do just that. I was pretty sure he didn’t even recognize half of the stuff here—hell, some of these things I wasn’t even sure about. Like, those big pinky-red things that had their skin kinda peeling off in green scales? No idea about those—but whatever he picked out, I threw in the cart. It really was the least I could do.

Later, when we were waiting in the checkout line with Keyd still holding onto a bag of apples, he leaned in close to me and said “thank you”, real quiet and sincere. His breath moved my hair around, tickled a little.

“No problem, seriously,” I said. “I owed you one.”

“You didn’t,” Keyd said. I caught a puzzled edge in his voice that I didn’t get any more time to think about because the cashier was starting to scan my stuff and only half of it was even out of the cart and I didn’t have my wallet out yet, and I basically lost focus on anything else.

#

Keyd nearly wouldn’t get back in the car. And frankly I didn’t blame him one damn bit.

“It’s okay,” I told him, leaning across the roof and drumming my hands on it a couple times. “You can head back, you know, your way.”

Keyd opened his mouth, glanced upwards, and then let out a long breath. “It’s fine,” he said, and that was that. He climbed into the car—even if it took him another couple seconds to force himself to do it—and sat himself firmly in the passenger seat.

I was honestly kind of relieved. And a little...something else. Keyd hated this, but he was sticking with it because of me. And I didn’t really know how to take that, couldn’t even pin down the feeling.

Still, I figured the best thing to do would be talk to the guy, distract him a little. It’d sort of worked before.

“So hey, can I ask why you hate cars so much?” I said, as I was pulling out out of the lot and back onto the road, all the groceries rattling around together in their plastic bags in the backseat.

Oh, great, that was really good—distract him by asking about the thing you’re trying to distract him from. Smart, Alan.

But Keyd answered, and it wasn’t what I’d expected. “It’s not alive.”

What? “No, yeah, definitely not alive.”

“And you have complete control of it.”

Where the hell was he going with this? “Well, yeah. I got a clean driving record, if that’s anything you’re worr—“

“So if you told it to go towards a cliff edge, or into a river or...even into the path of another of its kind...” he said, and I winced a little, “...it would go.”

“Sure, technically, but why would I do that?” Except by accident.

“I don’t think you would. But this…it has no sense of self-preservation. Has no instincts. It—“ out of the corner of my eye I saw Keyd stretch out his arm and move his fingers carefully along the hard plastic of the dash, “—can’t protect itself. Or you.”

That actually made some sense. Especially with what’d happened earlier. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “I see your point.”

Keyd dropped his hand back to his lap. “You do.”

“Yeah. Don’t agree, maybe, because—man, I don’t want to be in a thing that’s got a mind of its own, no thanks—but I get where you’re coming from. If that’s what you’re used to.”

“It is.”

It was quiet for a while, and we were sitting at a red light so I couldn’t even pretend I was focused on driving. I drummed my hand against the side of my leg and played pointlessly with the climate controls. Some rock song was playing on the radio now, almost too quiet to hear. Kansas, I was pretty sure. I weighed the pros and cons of turning it up, but I didn’t wanna just shut Keyd out like that.

“So…what’s your way of getting around, then? Other than flying.” I glanced over at Keyd, and he was looking right back. I snapped my eyes to the intersection again, neck prickling.

“Often, horses.”

“Oh, yeah?” Pretty sure the last time I’d been on a horse was a state fair, in one of those sad little dirt arenas. And it might’ve been a pony. And I’d probably been seven years old. “What’s that like?”

Keyd took another couple of seconds to pick one simple word to come back with. “Good.”

I was gonna take a huge leap here and assume that meant it was something Keyd actually liked to do. Maybe even had fun doing. There was something sad about how guarded he was about this, like he couldn’t even admit he enjoyed it. Also, were we even really talking about horses here, or just something that was close enough to translate? The guy was from an alien planet, after all. Could be alien horses.

Light went to green. I hit the gas pedal a little too enthusiastically and the car gunned forward. Keyd inhaled through his nose and looked up towards the roof. Jesus, he really did hate this. I wanted to keep him distracted, so I opened my mouth and let a stupid question fall out of it.

“So, you got a girlfriend back where you’re from?”

Well, that’d been real fucking smooth. And I could feel him staring at me. My spine tingled all the way down my back. I kept my eyes stuck to the road. Keyd didn’t say anything for a couple of long goddamn seconds, then finally, “I don’t.”

I almost followed up with, ‘boyfriend?’, because why the hell not, they were aliens with a super relaxed view on being naked and having weird soldier pledges, who knew what else they were into. But nope, I just choked all over the question and then way too much time went by for it to sound even slightly casual.

“Me either,” I said instead. “But hey, single life’s not so bad.”

Keyd didn’t say anything for a while. Then, “while it lasts.”

It was kind of a weird thing to say, even though I was used to him saying weird things by now. But there was something in his voice that made me look at him. He was leaning on his hand and staring out the window, his elbow propped on the door handle. Globs of sunlight ran over his face and highlighted that purple shine in his hair.

“What’s that mean?”

“Only that—“ Keyd shifted in the seat but didn’t look away from the window. “I have no say in it.”

“Oh. ‘kay.”

Seriously, what did that mean. It sounded like he had some sort of inability to stay single. But even the idea of Keyd dating someone—first, it was funny, because I couldn’t imagine it—and then it was a little...weird. Didn’t sit right, just made something uncomfortable roll around in my gut. I shoved the whole thought away.

And about a minute later, we were back at my apartment. Keyd offered to help carry everything, so I handed him a couple bags and he followed me in. Rysa didn’t seem to be around, and Keyd didn’t seem to be worried about that, so we just dumped the bags up on the kitchen counter and I started on putting it all away.

Keyd kind of hovered nearby the whole time, almost-but-not-quite getting in my way. The kitchen was basically a hallway with counters running along both walls, so there was only a narrow aisle of space in the middle. I kept turning around and he’d be right there, but already stepping to the side or moving back to give me room. I didn’t really mind, but I didn’t get why he was doing it. Maybe he was hungry or something, and just waiting for a go-ahead to eat some of this stuff.

So I dug around in the lower cabinets, found a battered plastic mixing bowl that I didn’t even know if it was mine or Martin’s, and dumped all the random fruit Keyd’d picked out into it. It almost didn’t all fit, and I had to catch a kiwi that escaped over the edge and rolled across the counter. Man, I hadn’t had one of these in a long time. If I did ever buy healthy shit at the store, it was pretty much apples and oranges, real basic stuff.

“We’ll just keep this all here,” I said, tossing the kiwi from hand to hand before balancing it back on top of the bowl of fruit. “For whenever you guys want it.”

“Thank you,” Keyd said, but didn’t move to grab anything. He was resting back against the stove and I was leaning against the opposite counter, but that still put us pretty close in each other’s space. The edge of one of his boots was just about touching the worn toe of my sneaker.

“Yeah,” I said. “And, you know, thanks for coming with me.”

“Of course.”

“And sorry about the car thing.”

A little smile curled over Keyd’s face, and he leaned off the stove and was suddenly a whole lot closer to me. “It’s all right.”

I snorted, knocked him in the arm. “Yeah, no, I’ll try not to make you do that again.“

That smile of his got bigger, and I was just grinning right back at him. It was like some kind of weird challenge to drag these things out of him, and I was getting better at it. He really did have a nice smile and I liked seeing it and wait, shit, was I really doing this again? At least there weren’t any cars to almost crash into this time. But we were really close to each other, and the room was kinda warm. Or maybe that was just me. Or maybe it was Keyd; the guy was always throwing off a lot of heat. Either way, this was getting kinda strange. I eased back a step, and Keyd blinked a couple times and turned away.

“Hey, so, I got—stuff to do,” I said, and Keyd nodded towards the fridge. “Catch you later, okay?”

I didn’t really wait for him to do or say anything before just taking off back to my room. I just had to get out of there for a second. Get some space. I paced around in front of my desk for a while, trying to shake off the weird heat and prickles that were still running all over me. Maybe this was just left over from yesterday, some anxiety I hadn’t really gotten over. But that didn’t seem right. Maybe I just needed to take a little break, get back to actual real life for a second.

My eye caught on a couple of textbooks stacked up on my desk. Right, it was still a school day. That was a normal thing I could handle, something regular that had nothing to do with magic aliens. I’d missed both my morning classes but I could still make it to motion graphics, if I left like now. And I thought that, maybe, I could actually get there on my own this time—going to the store hadn’t been a problem. So that’s what I was gonna do. After I let Rysa and Keyd know. Because doing that was still a good idea.

But I could only find Keyd, still out in the kitchen. Sitting at the table and having some real problems with an orange. The peel was scattered around in front of him in tiny useless shreds and he’d only gotten like half of it off. He was frowning softly and concentrating way too hard on working another flap of the peel up. God, this guy was such a dork.

I rapped my fingers across the table, got his attention. “Hey,” I said when he glanced up, and really tried not to laugh at that orange. “I’m gonna go to school. Just one class, so not real long.”

Keyd abandoned the orange, pushed the chair back, got to his feet. “Should I…”

I sucked in a breath. Suddenly I wanted to say yes. But— “Naw, I’m good on my own this time.”

Keyd unexpectedly put his hand on my shoulder, looked right in my eyes, and heat just seeped out of him through my shirt and down to my skin. Suddenly everything smelled citrusy and bitter like orange peel, and the strong feel of his energy hummed down my spine. “Are you sure?”

No, I wasn’t. But I couldn’t go through the rest of my life needing to be escorted everywhere. Especially since he and Rysa wouldn’t be here forever. “Yeah.”

Keyd’s thumb pressed lightly into the muscle of my neck, and then he took his hand away. I let out the breath I’d forgotten I was holding. “All right,” he said.

“But thanks, though.” I tapped my glasses. “And the spell’s still there, right?”

He nodded. Somehow we’d ended up really close together, again. I didn’t know if I should take a step back or not.

“Good, okay. Is there—” I stopped, and Keyd tilted his head curiously. “Never mind.”

I wanted to ask if there was any way he could talk back to me through it, just so...I don’t know, I’d know he was there from time to time. But even in my head, it’d sounded like a weird fucking question. I pulled in a breath, held it, let it out again. I wasn’t gonna ask.

But he was still looking at me like he expected me to say something. That little tilt to his head, a questioning pull at his mouth. And I felt like I should say something. What, I had no fucking idea. It just didn’t seem like this conversation was really over.

Plus, Keyd really seemed like he wanted to follow me right out the door. And I would’ve let him, except he couldn’t exactly come to my classes because that’d take some explaining I didn’t want to deal with. But...he could just…hang around in the halls or something, nearby. If that’s what he wanted to do, there was—

No. No, come on, the whole idea here was to do this by myself and at least see if I had some control over all this and could handle real life again.

“I’m gonna go,” I said. Why was I still explaining this to him? I could leave whenever I wanted.

Keyd nodded. His fingers flexed open and closed once at his sides. I turned away, because maybe if we weren’t staring at each other I could get the hell out of here. But I could still feel his eyes on me, could still picture that little quirk to his mouth and that expectation, the feeling that we still had something to say to each other and neither of us were saying it. I didn’t even know what it was.

I really had to get out of here. “See you later,” I muttered towards the wall, and finally—finally—walked out of the goddamn apartment.

But the sense of Keyd watching me stayed with me the entire drive to campus, like I could still feel his eyes on me and that look he’d had. It seemed like I was carrying the unfinished conversation with me, dragging it out over a distance instead of ending it when I’d left. It wasn’t just something I was imagining either, because Keyd was actually kinda here. Via the tracking spell. If he wanted to, he could tune in to see exactly what I was doing. And hear it.

It seemed like I was parked in the underground lot way too soon. For a couple long seconds after I turned the car off I just sat there, listening to the engine tick as it cooled, letting every breath fill up my chest and shoulders before pushing it all out again. Something still smelled like orange peel; it’d probably gotten on my shirt from Keyd’s hand. I curled my fingers around the steering wheel and glanced up at myself in the rear-view mirror.

“I’m doing okay,” I said. Hopefully Keyd was listening in. “Everything’s okay.”