Chapter 15: Slot One — Part 2
The razor was from the medicine cabinet. Disposable, double-blade, the kind Karen bought in bulk from Walgreens. I held it over the inside of my left forearm — the same location Claire used for her baseline cuts — and drew a line.
Shallow. Two inches. The sting was immediate and real in a way that the meta-knowledge of regeneration didn't prepare me for. Knowing that a cut would heal didn't make cutting yourself feel normal. The body had objections that the brain couldn't override with logic. My hand trembled on the second stroke.
Blood welled. I clicked the stopwatch — Claire's spare, the one she'd left in the quarry kit that I'd pocketed during pack-up, a small theft I'd confess to never.
Ten seconds. The edges of the cut began pulling together, slower than watching grass grow but faster than any wound had a right to heal on a body that wasn't Claire Bennet's. Eleven seconds. Twelve. Thirteen. The surface sealed at fourteen, leaving a faint pink line that faded over the next thirty seconds into unblemished skin.
I made a deeper cut. Same arm, half an inch higher. Blood ran down to the elbow before the healing kicked in. Twenty-eight seconds to close. The deeper tissue regenerated first — muscle fiber knitting itself back together with a sensation I could only describe as itching from the inside — then the surface skin sealed on top.
I held a lighter under my thumb for three seconds. The blister formed, yellowed, and began shrinking almost immediately. Full resolution in about fifty seconds. The pain lingered after the tissue was healed — phantom feedback from a nervous system still catching up to the repair.
Partial regeneration at roughly a quarter of Claire's speed. Maybe twenty to twenty-five percent of her full capacity. Enough to heal cuts, minor burns, punctures, and probably shallow stab wounds. Not enough to survive a gunshot to the chest. Not enough to walk away from a car crash. Not enough to heal the kind of damage Sylar inflicted with telekinesis.
I documented everything in the coded notebook: cut depths, healing times, pain duration, the phantom feedback phenomenon, the fatigue that accumulated after repeated use. By the time I'd run six tests over thirty minutes, the healing had slowed to roughly half its initial speed — the partial regeneration burning through whatever fuel it used, degrading with repeated activation the same way Claire's baseline healing slowed when she was tired or hadn't eaten.
Which meant my twenty percent was subject to the same metabolic constraints as her hundred percent, just at a reduced scale. Push the healing too hard and it would slow, stall, possibly fail entirely. The power had limits. The limits had limits. And I was testing those limits alone in a bathroom at midnight with a disposable razor and a stolen stopwatch.
The absurdity arrived unbidden: six weeks ago I'd been laughing on a curb in Odessa because being transmigrated into a television show was the most incredible thing that had ever happened to anyone. Now I was sitting on a bathroom floor cutting myself with a razor to calibrate an ability I'd copied from a teenager who didn't know I'd taken it.
Progress was a strange word for what this was.
[Zach's Bedroom — October 22, 2006, 11 PM]
The math was simple and the conclusion was uncomfortable.
Twenty percent of Claire's regeneration was useful but insufficient. It would keep me alive through injuries that would hospitalize a normal person, but it wouldn't save me from the threats that actually mattered. Sylar's telekinesis could pin me to a wall and open my skull before the healing could engage. The Company's bag-and-tag teams used sedatives that bypassed physical resistance entirely. And Homecoming — three weeks away, the event that defined everything — would put me within range of a serial killer who'd already acquired telekinesis and enhanced hearing and whose next upgrade was a death sentence for anyone in his path.
Completing Slot 1 required more absorption sessions. The Powers.md documentation — the knowledge I'd carried from a previous life, organized into a framework that existed only in my head — suggested that Phase 2 Absorption needed sustained proximity and focused intent. The first partial take had lasted twenty seconds and given me roughly a fifth of Claire's ability. Full capacity would require multiple sessions, each one pulling more of the pattern into the slot, each one risking another nosebleed or headache or worse.
And each one requiring Claire's presence without Claire's knowledge.
That was the part I kept coming back to. The ethical knot at the center of the tactical calculation. I was copying Claire's ability without her consent. The process didn't hurt her — she didn't feel anything, her power remained at full strength, there was no visible effect. But the absence of harm didn't equal the presence of permission, and the fact that I could take something from her without her knowing didn't mean I should.
The glovebox in my truck held a rubber glove that belonged to a fifteen-year-old boy whose mind had been emptied by people who'd decided what was best for him without asking. The Company had justified every bag-and-tag, every memory wipe, every forced containment with some version of it's for the greater good and they don't need to know. I'd parked on a highway overpass and watched those people leave work and told myself I was different.
Was I?
The question sat in the room like a third person. I stared at the coded notebook — the one with the healing test results next to the timeline of future murders and the Greyhound receipt from a failed mission to New York — and tried to construct an argument for telling Claire the truth.
I have an ability. I can copy powers through proximity. I copied yours last Saturday at the quarry. You didn't feel it. I need to copy more of it to complete the process. I'm asking your permission.
Clean. Honest. The kind of disclosure that a decent person would make.
Except it opened the door to every question behind it: How do you have an ability? How long have you known? What else can you do? Why didn't you tell me before? And behind those questions were the questions I couldn't answer: How did you know about Brody? How did you know Chandra Suresh was murdered? How do you know things you shouldn't know?
Telling Claire about Absorption meant eventually telling Claire about everything. Evo-Sense. Meta-knowledge. Transmigration. The fact that I'd watched her entire life play out on a screen and she'd been a character to me before she was a person.
I couldn't tell her everything. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
But I could tell her enough.
I picked up the phone. Flipped it open. Claire's contact photo — a candid shot she'd taken at the quarry, grinning, dirt on her cheek, the expression of someone who'd just walked away from a forty-foot fall and found it funny. I'd taken the photo during a session and it had become her contact image without either of us discussing it.
I need to tell you something. In person. Tomorrow after school?
The reply took forty seconds. ok. ur being weird again.
I know. I'll explain.
u better.
I closed the phone and sat in the dark for a long time, listening to the house settle around me — the refrigerator cycling, a car passing on the street, Karen coughing once in her bedroom — and tried to arrange the words I'd need tomorrow into a shape that was honest enough to rebuild trust and incomplete enough to protect the bigger secret.
The cut on my forearm — the last test, an hour ago — had healed completely. No scar, no pink line, no evidence. The skin was smooth and new and entirely unblemished, and the absence of a mark where there should have been one was the most unsettling thing about this entire situation.
I was changing. Becoming something that hadn't existed in any version of this story. Not a character, not a transmigrator, not a fan with foreknowledge. Something new, with powers I'd copied and secrets I couldn't share and a countdown to Homecoming that was shrinking every day.
[October 23, 2006 — After School]
I drove to Claire's house on Tuesday with no rehearsed lines left.
Twenty minutes in the car, practicing sentences, discarding them, building new ones, discarding those. Every version of the conversation either gave away too much or too little. Too much: I can sense evolved humans and copy their abilities through proximity. Too little: Something weird happened to me and I need your help. The truth was a spectrum and I needed to find the exact frequency that made Claire trust me without making her ask the questions that would unravel everything.
The Bennet house was a single-story on a quiet street — beige siding, clean lawn, Noah's sedan not in the driveway, which meant he was still at Primatech. Sandra's car was there. Mr. Muggles was probably asleep on the couch. Normal house, normal family, secret underground prison employer.
I parked at the curb and walked to the door. My hands were steady. The partial regeneration in Slot 1 pulsed faintly, a warmth in my chest that hadn't been there three days ago. Evidence of what I'd done. Evidence of what I was about to confess.
I rang the bell.
The door opened. Claire stood there in a Union Wells hoodie and jeans, hair pulled back, no makeup, the casual version of herself that she only showed to people she trusted. She looked at my face and her expression shifted from neutral to alert — reading me the way she read healing data, looking for the anomaly.
"Whatever it is," she said, "just say it."
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