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