The sky was a rather strange shade of gray, almost too dark to be considered gray, but not dark enough to be considered black. This was a telltale sign that rain would be coming down quite heavy
Two kids were sitting on the back steps of an old building that had been standing for decades now.
The girl had her knees pulled up to her chest, her orange hair loose and tangled from a day of not thinking about it. The boy sat beside her, elbows on his knees, staring at the cracked concrete of the small yard below them.
Neither of them had said anything for a while.
"So you're actually going," she said, it wasn't actually a question.
"Yeah." He scratched the back of his buzz-cut head. "They told me this morning. I leave tomorrow."
She didn't say anything to that. Her jaw was tight in the way kids get when they're working very hard at not doing something.
"It's not that far," he said. "I looked it up on the computer in the rec room. Like forty minutes by bus."
"You can't take a bus."
"I know."
The wind moved through the yard, stirring a plastic bag caught in the chain-link fence. It crinkled against the wire and went still again.
"How long will you be gone?" she asked.
He shrugged with one shoulder. "They didn't really say. Long enough." He picked up a small piece of broken concrete near his foot and turned it over in his fingers. "They said I can't contact you while I'm there. Like, at all. No calls, no letters. Nothing."
That was the one that got her.
She pressed her mouth together hard, and her eyes went bright and glassy, and she turned her face away from him like she could hide it if she was fast enough.
But that wasn't how it worked.
"Hey don't cry." He said, he had no real clue what to do, he'd never had to cheer anyone up before.
"I'm not," she said, voice cracking slightly on the second word.
"You are."
"Am not." But she wiped her face quickly with her sleeve.
He looked at her, and then rubbed his head, turning away.
"It's not your fault. You didn't do anything wrong!"
"They said I did." The boy said, leaving it at that. Don't worry though. When I get out, I'll find you, and we can have loads of fun."
"You don't know where I'll be though"
"Doesn't matter. I'll figure it out."
She finally looked at him. Her eyes were red at the edges now, and she wasn't bothering to hide it anymore. "Do you promise?"
He looked back at her and smiled. It was dopey, but it made her feel better.
"Promise," he said.
She accepted this, how could she not, he had promised her, so of course they'd meet again.
---Present day---
~Oreta awai tsubasa, Kimi wa sukoshi
Aosugiru sora ni tsukareta dake sa~
Jayden layed on his bed, his tv on, but he wasn't actually looking at it. He couldn't find the remote to pause it so he decided he'd just let the anime play.
Tho it's not like he was doing much else, he was scrolling through things to do on his phone, but everytime he started doing something, he lost all interest immediately.
Yesterday was quite the day, he'd gotten superpowers, he formed a club, he met a guy from the Bible... Yeah it was pretty eventful.
Though, after his fight with that criminal guy, he'd started feeling... Empty again. And he still couldn't put a name to that feeling he felt.
And right now he was just kinda. Staring. not at his phone. Not at the tv... Just, staring. At the ceiling, and doing nothing else.
He wasn't daydreaming or anything like that, there wasn't a thought going through his head.
It wasn't the first time he'd caught himself staring off into space like that, and it always weirded him out whenever he did it.
After a couple minutes, he got off his bed and headed out of his room. Adam said that he was heading to sleep which didn't make any sense to Jayden, but he guessed even spirits need to sleep
He had picked up Andrea last night and brought her home since there was no actual danger.
As he walked out of the house, he noticed that it was rather cold outside, tho he guessed that only made sense as it was like 5 in the morning.
Jayden walked with his hands shoved into his hoodie pocket. It was a totally different hoodie from yesterday, over a totally different shirt. A black shirt with short grey sleeves and a pocket. And his hoodie was black and gold.
The route he walked was the same as always cracked pavement, weeds pushing through the joints of the sidet, a streetlight that had been out since October.
He passed the bench where the stray dog sometimes slept. It wasn't there today.
He was still thinking about yesterday, how could he not, that was life altering stuff that most people will never experience, of course he couldn't take his mind off it. The regalia, that weird guy, The fight, oh God the fight.
He couldn't get it out of his mind, he couldn't get the enjoyment out of his mind.
But he should right?
Enjoying fights that much was like... Really weird.
But then again, he was a weirdo now, so...
He'd spent most of last night lying on his back staring at the ceiling again, which was becoming a habit he didn't love.
Andrea had asked him why he looked weird at dinner and he'd said he was tired, which was true enough to pass. She'd accepted it with the easy faith she always gave him and gone back to talking about dragons.
He felt guilty about that. He wasn't sure exactly why.
There was a lot he wasn't sure about.
For instance, his regalia. Apparently Adam told him to return it to his chest before the day went out. But he still had no idea what that was about.
Scissors was a pretty weird weapon if you asked him.
And somewhere underneath the exhaustion and the confusion and the lingering ache in his forearm where Makun's scythe had caught him, there was that feeling again. The one he didn't have a name for yet. The one he'd promised himself he'd examine carefully.
He was still trying to figure out what to do with it.
He passed a corner store he recognized, the same one he picked up shifts at on certain weekdays. The same tired fluorescent sign.
The same handwritten CLOSED SUNDAYS taped inside the window. He kept walking.
The neighborhood changed slightly as he got closer to school, storefronts giving way to narrower streets, older houses, chain-link fences with missing slats. A block ahead, a cat sat on top of a dumpster lid and watched him pass with the particular contempt that only cats managed.
He was thinking about what Amara had said about forgers who forged unintentionally, how she'd never actually seen it before, when he heard it.
Voices. More than a few of them, coming from the alley to his left.
He didn't stop walking immediately. He slowed down out of habit.
Then he heard a girl's voice, clipped and trying very hard to sound unbothered.
"We don't know you. So you can just move."
He stopped. he stood at the mouth of the alley for a second, taking it in without stepping inside. Six of them, maybe seven. Teen boys, a few of them older than him, which somehow made it worse. They were spread across the width of the alley in that loose, practiced formation that wasn't quite a wall but functioned like one.
Hoodies, most of them. One with a chain looped through his belt. One chewing something he clearly wasn't chewing for the flavor.
And against the far side, two girls.
School bags on their shoulders. One was tall, dark-skinned, her jaw set and her eyes sharp, clearly the one who had spoken. The other was shorter, curled slightly inward, arms crossed over her bag strap. Ginger hair, pale, a scattered run of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and the particular expression of someone doing everything in their power to look like they weren't scared.
Jayden looked at the formation, then looked at the girls as he started doing the rough math.
He turned into the alley.
His footsteps were quiet enough that he made it four steps in before the nearest kid glanced back. The kid's eyes moved over him once, sizing, and clearly didn't find much.
"Keep walking," the kid said.
"I'm trying to," Jayden said. "You're all in the way."
That got a few of them turning around. The one at the center, slightly forward of the others, had that easy posture that came from either total confidence or a careful performance of it.
Tall, sharp eyes, a jawline he was probably proud of. He looked Jayden over the same way the first kid had, and came to the same conclusion, except he made it more obvious.
"You know these girls?" he said, looking at the uniform.
"Never met either of them in my life."
"Then you got no business here. We just wanted to have a little conversation with these girls, particularly the ginger."
Jayden glanced past them at the two girls. The tall one met his eyes immediately. She looked kinda annoyed with him, like he was a weirdo despite the fact that he was helping them out.
The ginger hadn't looked up.
He shifted his weight slightly, moving so he was no longer angled toward the exit but toward the group instead. It was a small shift. But the nearest kid noticed.
"You deaf?"
"I'm thinking," Jayden said. "Give me a second."
"Nobody told you to think."
"And yet here I am. thinking." He tilted his head toward the one in the center.
"What exactly is it that you felt like talking about?"
The leader's expression shifted, not to anger yet, but to a kind of annoyed expression. "None of your business."
"Sure." Jayden nodded slowly. "Except you're blocking the way to school, and truancy goes on my record, and I'm already having kind of a week."
"Then go around."
"The alley doesn't go around."
"Use the street."
"I like this route."
A couple of the boys were starting to shift. Not toward violence, but toward that group restlessness, that low frequency impatience that came from a scene taking longer than it was supposed to. The leader felt it too.
"Just get out of our way already dude. Our boss wants to see this girl, so the boss is gonna see the girl."
The leader looked at him for a long moment. He was searching for something, the flinch, the backing-down, the reassessment.
Jayden didn't give it to him. He just stood there, hands still in his pockets, posture unhurried, looking back with the calm expression of someone who had genuinely already had a worse week than this.
"You think you're something," the leader said, less a question than a test.
"Nope," Jayden said simply. "I just don't have anywhere else to be."
"There's seven of us."
"I can count. You apparently can't"
"And one of you."
"The math hasn't changed since you said seven."
One of the boys in the back let out a short involuntary laugh and tried to disguise it as a cough. The boy next to him looked at him sideways.
The leader wasn't laughing. "You got a lot of mouth for someone standing alone."
"You've got a lot of people for a conversation with two girls who weigh a combined total of nothing." Jayden glanced at the ginger, then back. "Seriously. Seven guys. How is this a situation that required seven people."
"Six," one of them muttered. "Darius didn't come."
"Nobody asked you," the leader said, without turning around.
Silence settled over the alley. Somewhere at the street end, a car rolled past, oblivious.
The tall girl had shifted slightly, Jayden noticed. She was no longer braced against the wall the same way. She was watching the leader now with a different kind of attention, calculating the same thing Jayden was, whether this was going to move, and in which direction.
The ginger still hadn't looked up. But her arms had uncrossed.
The leader took one slow step toward Jayden. Jayden wouldn't exactly call it aggressive, more so it looked like an attempt at being intimidating.
"Last time," he said, quieter now. "Walk away."
Jayden looked at him steadily.
"Tell me what you wanna say," he said. "Specifically. And we'll figure out if it's real."
The leader stared at him.
Jayden stared back.
Neither of them moved.
Then the leader looked away, check-in his crew. He was doing some kinda math up there in that brain of his, and he must've come to an answer real quick.
He exhaled through his nose. A long, deliberate sound that was trying very hard to be contempt. "Not worth it," he said, to no one in particular.
He turned. The others followed without protest, the restlessness that had been building finding its exit in motion. One of them knocked a trash can on the way out, whether by accident or on principle was hard to say.
Their footsteps faded toward the street end of the alley, and then they were gone.
After the alley had gone quiet, Jayden turned to face the girls. "You good?" He asked
The tall one was already straightening her bag strap, looking him over to figure out what his deal was. At least that's what Jayden thought she was doing with her eyes anyway.
"Yeah," she said. "We were perfectly fine on our own, and we didn't need your help."
Jayden looked around at the alley he was in, scanning to check if there was anyone still here. "Mhm"
"I could've taken em okay? So don't go thinking we owe you a thanks or anything like that."
"Mhm"
"Im not helpless, so don't look down on me you hear?"
"Mhm"
"I don't need any help. Especially not from someone like you." She said after she looked him over again, chin slightly lifted.
"Someone like me? What does that mean?"
"Those eyes of yours, they're totally dead. It's like the lights are on but nobody's home, it totally creeps me out
Jayden opened his mouth.
Then he thought about how much energy an argument would cost him at five twenty one in the morning.
He closed his mouth.
"Cool," he said, and turned back toward the street.
"Hey, I'm not finished-"
"Yeah you are," he said, without turning around. "Have a good morning."
Before she could say anything else, her orange haired friend grabbed her and said something that Jayden couldn't hear.
Either way, even if she did start an argument, he was already on the sidewalk and too far away from her to even really care.
He made it to school at 5:40, so about his usual time, which is why the school was so empty. He sat wheel he always sat, on a chair outside, just infront of the entrance, so that everybody coming in could see that he was here before them.
He focused on his phone so he hadn't seen when people started coming in, unlike earlier in the day, he was able to get invested in a manga he was reading, which was able to hold off the total lack of motivation for a second. In fact he got so engrossed, he didn't even realize that school hours were pretty much upon him now.
Well, that is at least until he noticed a couple girls running to class. He'd memorized pretty much everybody's habits this early in the morning, he usually didn't have much else to do.
Those girls only left like that if class was starting.
After getting up, he got to class with four minutes to spare, which was close enough to on time that he didn't have to explain himself to anyone. He dropped into his seat, pulled out his phone, and stared at the screen.
He tried reading the manga he'd been reading earlier, but he just couldn't get into it again after being interrupted like that.
So he opened YouTube, searched for anything he'd find interesting, and then backed out.
He went to his gallery.
Scrolled through photos he barely remembered taking, a blurry shot of something Andrea had made at school, a screenshot of directions he'd never needed, the corner of a sky he must have photographed for reasons he couldn't reconstruct.
He locked the screen.
He stared at the black mirror of it.
He unlocked it again.
Outside the window the tree was doing nothing interesting.
He was mid-consideration of whether to just put the phone away entirely when the door opened and two people walked in together, clearly mid-conversation. He glanced up out of habit.
it was the tall girl from the alley, and the ginger, the tall one seemed to be talking about the earlier incident. He could tell because she mentioned something about dead eyes.
The tall one split off first, heading toward a seat near the window.
The ginger kept walking.
She went three rows over, one seat up, dropped her bag, and sat down.
The ginger on the other hand, sat just two seats away from him. And yet somehow, he had no memory of her in the slightest. Was this girl.. like him? Obviously she wasn't a forger, he could see that plain as day she had no weapons on her. But she was kinda like a background character, someone who nobody notices, like him.
Maybe he should go talk to her after class was over.
Meanwhile the guys from earlier had made their way to an old warehouse.
You could tell the place was old just from the smell, and the looks of the place weren't exactly any better. Broken windows up near the ceiling let in thin strips of daylight that didn't reach the floor. Somewhere in the back, water dripped in a slow, irregular rhythm.
In the warehouse, there were a bunch of kids and people outside,
The leader of the group, whose name was m, led the rest of them through the warehouse floor, past the clusters of people doing various things he didn't pay attention to.
He took the stairs at the back two at a time.
The upper level was cleaner than the floor below. Not clean, but cleaner. It was clear someone had made an effort up here. A few folding chairs. A space heater in the corner doing its best against the cold that came through the walls. A table with a laptop on it that no one was currently using.
And at the far end, a boy.
He looked about sixteen, maybe seventeen. He was sitting on the edge of the table with one leg dangling, scrolling through his phone with the unhurried ease of someone who had nothing pressing to do and no one he needed to answer to.
He was about six foot 2 and rather muscular. Dark eyes that moved up from the phone before the group had even fully cleared the stairwell, which meant he already knew they were coming.
The leader of the group stepped forward. "We found her."
The guy turned to them surprised. "Where."
"Hudson Crest. That's where she goes."
---
The teacher was up in front of the class, writing on the white board, saying something about the first world war, he wasn't actually listening to her, he was pretty sure most people weren't.
Jayden had his notebook open in front of him. He had written the date at the top of the page and nothing else.
He was looking at the room.
Not at the board, not at his phone, just at the room, at the people in it, at the slow drift of color that moved off every person like heat off summer asphalt. He'd been seeing it since he ate the apple and he'd filed it away under sleep deprivation and moved on, because that had seemed like the more manageable explanation.
Now thanks to everything that happened yesterday, he knew exactly what he was seeing, though it was only now that he decided to really dissect it.
The girl beside him had a pale green wisp which rolled off her shoulders slowly, it barely extended out past her body, reaching slightly above her head. The boy behind her had a bigger wisp coming off of him, being more amber colored, it floated off of him fast and it extended outward, almost completely covering his desk and everything within it. Across the room, one of the preppy kids had a gold wisp, but he was confused as to how he could see it as it didn't extend outside her skin.
Every single person here had a different color coming off them, it was... Interesting to him
"Heyoo, whatcha doin?" Came an annoyingly familiar voice from right next to him. He didn't need to turn around to know who it was.
"Just.. people watching i guess." Jayden said, wasn't exactly a lie.
"Did anything interesting happen?"
"No."
"Nothing at all?"
"Nothing at all."
Adam looked around the classroom with the mild curiosity of someone visiting a museum exhibit that was fine but not exceptional. His gaze drifted across the students, the board, the water-stained ceiling tiles.
"You're looking at the souls," he said.
Jayden said nothing, which was confirmation enough.
"How long have you been seeing them?"
"Since I ate your apple." Jayden turned a page in his notebook for appearances. "I thought I was just tired."
"You were also tired. Both things were true." Adam leaned back in the chair, which did not creak under him because physics had no opinion on Adam. "But no, that's not the exhaustion. Anyone who removes their soul from the grid can perceive other souls. It's a side effect of the separation. You step outside the current and suddenly you can see it."
Jayden thought for a second"Is that what the colors mean? The soul?" He'd had that suspicion after that weirdo was talking about seeing his soul or something, this now was just confirmation
"The color, the shape, the movement. All of it. Every soul is different. Size tends to reflect how strong that person's soul is, so for instance someone with a particularly strong soul will have strong willpower and a strong regalia. The colors represent who you are as a person and the emotion your currently dealing with" Adam nodded toward the girl with the pale green wisp. "Movement on the other hand is pretty complex, and I doubt someone like you will understand it."
Jayden looked at the man in a way where Adam could tell he was conflicted. On one hand that confirmed his suspicions and gave him more info than he had. And on the other hand, he wanted to know what movement meant
Jayden's eyes moved across the room slowly. Looking over at all the people who were in his class. Now that he was seeing it, he could see that most of them had souls that hugged their body, while a few were bigger and some were a lot smaller.
"Well thanks for that little nugget.. Now wat about the spirits?" Jayden asked.
Adam glanced at him sideways.
"The things around Amara. The samurai and the heart." Jayden kept his voice low, as to not get anyone giving him weird stares.
"Now that I know what to look for. I can see more of them." He tilted his head almost imperceptibly toward the window next to him. Where a bird that looked to be made of paper sat. "It's been sitting there since I got here."
Adam looked.
"And there's something near the door." Jayden didn't point. "Its like a rhino flower thing."
Adam was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough that Jayden actually turned to look at him.
The goldette's expression showed off his surprise, it was easy to tell that the man was surprised by the boys duscovery
"Most new forgers don't pick up on uncontracted spirits for weeks," Adam said. "Usually the brain takes a while to interpret spirits into something you can understand."
"Is that a problem?"
"Nah, doesnt really change much about you. Spirits that aren't contracted to anyone tend to drift. They go where souls are. They're drawn to the grid the same way water finds low ground." He looked toward the corner where the paper bird sat. "Most people can't see them, so they don't bother hiding."
"So there's just. Spirits. Everywhere."
"Everywhere people are, yes. Always have been."
Jayden looked at the paper bird again. It hadn't moved. It was just sitting at the corner of the windowsill with its folded wings pressed flat, watching the classroom with eyes that were too precise for something made of paper.
Then it turned its head and looked directly at him.
He looked back down at his notebook.
"That one knows I can see it," he said.
"Yeah, of course it does. Spirits tend to be attracted to people who can see them. So whenever they find someone who's spiritually aware, they start flocking to you. So be prepared, cause once the spirits start to see you're a forger, you'll have more attention on you than most people ever get in their entire lives."
Jayden said nothing. He wrote a single line of notes that had nothing to do with the first world war.
"So like.. this means that I can speak to the dead right?" Jayden questioned, but Adam shook his head
"You can see spirits. Not souls."
"What's the difference?"
"Spirits don't come from humans. They're born as spirits, and stay in-between the grid for the rest of their unending life. But human souls, never leave their spot on the grid, they just reincarnate into another human" Adam explained to the teenage boy.
"Okay so I get that.. but I actually still don't fully understand what the grid is." The teen questioned the man
"That's a topic for another time" the man said, which annoyed Jayden, but the boy said nothing.
After class ended, Jayden closed his blank notebook, pocketed his phone, and filed out with the rest of them.
The hallway received him the same way it always did, which was to say it didn't. He was just another body in the current, moving with it toward wherever the current was going.
He was thinking about the paper bird. Whether it was still in the classroom or whether it had followed him out. He hadn't looked back to check, which was either discipline or avoidance and he wasn't sure which.
He made it about thirty feet before he saw her.
The ginger. She was ahead of him in the hallway, looking like she was having trouble getting out of the crowd.
That was the thing he was only just now cataloguing. Every time a new face showed up in his life, some new person who hadn't existed in his peripheral vision before, they had a way of just continuing to exist in it. Like the world had a limited number of extras and once you noticed one of them they got promoted to a recurring role whether either of you had agreed to it or not. Or at least that's how he looked at it.
He'd never seen her before today, and yet suddenly he was now seeing her all over the place. It really made him question how observant he really was.
He turned toward the side exit that let out near the east field, the longer route but the less crowded one, and pushed through the door into the gray morning air.
The east field was mostly empty this time of day. A few people cut across it on the way to the next building, a couple of kids sat against the far fence with their phones out. Somebody had left a bicycle leaning against the wall that had clearly been there since before today.
He was halfway across when he heard the impact.
It wasn't loud. A dull, dense thud, the kind of sound that had weight behind it, followed immediately by the shorter sound of someone hitting the ground.
He turned.
The ginger was on the ground.
A football was rolling away from her across the grass, slowing as it went. She had one hand up near her temple, the other flat on the ground, and she was doing that thing people did in the immediate aftermath of getting hit, her face scrunching up in pain
Jayden ran towards her to help her up. He grabbed her arm and pulled her back up onto her feet
"Are you okay?" He asked, giving her a once over, fully taking in her appearance this time. She had short orange hair and wore a pair of red glasses. She wore a hoodie but from what he could see of her body, she was rather skinny. It wouldn't be too great of an exaggeration to say that if one small breeze passed it would be it for her. Her soul was also, surprisingly small. Like, so small he almost couldn't see it.
"I'm fine," she said quietly, reassuring the boy in front of her as she brushed herself off
"You really need to be more aware of your surroundings. If you had just a little bit more spatial awareness you probably wouldn't be dusting yourself off right now." He said, before noticing the people around him
The handful of people crossing the field had slowed down. Some had stopped entirely. They were standing at comfortable distances, watching with the loose, open attention of people who had decided this was something to observe rather than something to involve themselves in. A group near the building entrance had their phones out. One of them appeared to actually be recording.
He looked at all of them for a moment. Everytime something even slightly interesting happened, at least one person had their phone out. It was a part of bystander syndrome he didn't really venture into.
Recording every little thing wasn't his style.
He looked back at the girl now standing in front of him.
"Does it hurt?" Jayden asked,
"A little."
"You might want to see the nurse," he said.
"I'm okay."
"You took a football to the head."
"I know," she said, with a faint embarrassment as her eyes moved briefly to the scattered audience and then back to the ground in front of her feet.
oh. So she was one of those kinds of people.
"I'm Jayden,."
"Um.. Illyssa," she said, her voice soft.
"Pleasure meeting you again illysa" the teen said which confused her.
"A-again? What do you mean again?"
That's when they both heard fast footsteps from the direction of the side door.
"Illyssa."
It was the tall girl from the alley. She covered the distance between the door and the three of them at a pace that was technically still walking but only just barely, and when she arrived she went straight to Illyssa's side, eyes moving over her quickly.
"What happened, are you okay, who-" Her eyes landed on Jayden and stopped. "You. You're the guy from the alley."
"Huh?"
"That I am," Jayden agreed.
"Did you-"
"I'mma stop you right there. No."
The tall girl looked at Jayden, then at Illyssa. "How hard did it hit."
"I'm fine, Renae."
"That's not what I asked."
Illyssa's mouth did a small, patient thing that suggested this was a familiar dynamic. "It hit pretty hard. I'm okay."
Renae turned to fully face Jayden who was looking at something else.
"You following us or something?"
"I left that alley before you did so if anything, you're following me," Jayden said.
"Pfft, yeah right. Like id follow you of all people dead eyes." The girl a insulted him
He ignored her rather childish remark, focusing a little more on the girl who'd gotten hit in the head. He noticed now that she was starting to bleed. "She should go see the nurse."
"I know that." Renae's eyes narrowed slightly. "I don't need you to tell me that."
---
The nurse had put a small bandage above Illyssa's left ear and told her to stay out of PE for the rest of the week. Renae had waited outside the nurse's office the entire time, standing rather than sitting, arms crossed, checking her phone every thirty seconds. People had told her to go to class, but she always found an excuse to not do that, sitting there with illyssa for the rest of the school day
When Illyssa came out, Renae looked her over once, said "okay," and started walking.
Illyssa followed behind her, like she always did
---
The bus home was very loud and very annoying, just like always. conversations stacked on top of each other until the whole thing was just noise. Renae had gotten them seats near the middle, which she preferred because the back was too chaotic and the front was too visible. Illyssa sat by the window and watched the neighborhood scroll past, her bag on her lap, fingers laced together over the top of it.
Renae was talking, she was saying something about how her teacher was a total jerk or something like that.
Illyssa said "mhm" at the appropriate intervals. She was listening she just... Didn't have anything to say.
That's just how she was.
---
Their house was a narrow two-story on a block that had seen better decades. The front step had a crack running down the middle of it that had been there since before Illyssa could remember. Someone had put a potted plant next to the door at some point, optimistically, and the plant had given up.
Inside, it was warm and loud and you could just tell it was full of energy even without seeing the people. The television in the living room was going. Something was on the stove that smelled like onions and stock. Two of their younger siblings were fighting about something near the stairs, but no one actually paid it anymind, because that stuff tended to happen a lot.
Their mother was in the kitchen doorway when they came in, phone pressed to her ear, halfway through a conversation she showed no signs of ending. Her eyes moved to the door when it opened.
And her eyes found Renae immediately.
"Hey, how was school? Come tell me what you made for lunch, I've been thinking about that thing you mentioned last week-"
She was already gesturing Renae toward the kitchen, almost as if the phone call was totally unimportant. Though she was still talking to the person over the phone the whole time.
Illyssa stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and stood in the entryway for a moment.
Not a single person looked up at her.
One of the younger siblings shoved the other and they both tumbled sideways into the wall, laughing now.
"Hey, where's Lucas? Did he come back from football practice yet?" Their dad called from somewhere in the house.
"No, it's just me and illyssa" Renae said, which seemed to be a good enough answer for their dad.
"Cool" he said.
Illyssa didn't seem too surprised that nobody was paying her any attention, she simply pushed past her younger siblings and climbed the stairwell.
Only Renae noticed as she climbed the stairs, a sad look on her face.
Her room was the smallest one at the end of the upstairs hallway. She would've asked for another one.. if she wasn't the way she was.
She dropped her bag by the foot of the bed, took off her shoes, and lay down on top of the covers. She stared at the ceiling like there was something interesting up there, but aside from A small water stain near the light fixture shaped kinda like Canada, there was nothing interesting up there
Somewhere downstairs, the rest of her siblings all showed up one by one. She could tell because they all got a very animated greeting.
Illyssa's phone was in her bag. She didn't reach for it.
She wasn't tired, not exactly, and she wasn't anymore sad than she usually was. It was more that the day had used up whatever fuel she'd started with, and now there was nothing left that she particularly wanted to do with the hours remaining in it.
The bandage above her ear itched slightly.
She left it alone.
After a while she turned onto her side, drew her knees up slightly, and looked at the wall instead of the ceiling. It didn't offer anything better.
Downstairs, dinner would be ready soon. Someone would call up for Renae. Maybe for her too, though that was much less likely. Either way, she'd go down when it was time, sit in her usual seat at the far end of the table, eat without saying much, and come back up here.
She was very good at that part.
She closed her eyes, not to sleep. She wasn't tired, she just.. needed to lay her head down for a minute.
---
The school was way quieter at this hour, of course it was, it was a school that usually held probably around 1000 kids and at this hour there were at most a couple dozen lingering around. A few cars left in the lot. A janitor's cart somewhere inside near the main entrance, visible through the glass doors. One security light that was doing its job and one that wasn't.
Jayden was sitting on the concrete bench outside the front entrance, in exactly the spot he'd sat yesterday, and the day before that, phone in hand and not really using it.
He'd been there for about forty minutes. Unfortunately, thanks to his little stunt to try and get away from adam and amara he had to stay back everyday to at least pretend to be preparing the club.
He was thinking about the feeling again. The one from the AV room, the one that had come up through the exhaustion and the confusion and the shaking in his hands when it was over. He'd been thinking about it carefully, the way he'd promised himself he would, turning it over. He still couldn't quite peace together what it was despite it having been a whole day.
All he knew about it was how much he wanted to feel it again. How much he wanted to do that again.
He turned his phone screen on, then off.
Three vans pulled into the school lot.
He watched them from the bench without moving. They parked at angles that suggested the people inside either had no idea how to drive, or intentionally parked in front of other people's cars. Doors opened. He counted. Seven, nine, eleven people total, all of them wearing the same dark hoodies.
The same group from this morning, Plus reinforcements. He could tell because a couple of the same guys were apart of this.
They spread out along the fence line, a couple heading toward the side entrance, two more circling toward the field, the rest moving toward the front.
Jayden sat very still on the bench, watching them move around. It was weird to him to watch a bunch of gang thugs looking for something in a highschool.
"Who the heck are those guys?" Adam asked as he watched the group move around
"Not a clue. Though it looks to me like not a single one of them has a gun, pr really anything to be scared of."
"Id say those numbers are something to be pretty scared of."Adam responded.
"Compared to what I dealt with yesterday? There may be more of them, but that guy was way more of a threat."
He put his phone in his pocket. And he stood up.
Adam looked at the kid in amusement as he got up out of the chair. " Oh yeah, go kick their butts."
"Yo!" Jayden yelled at a couple of the nearest guys, who quickly flagged a couple of his friends to come over.
They quickly made their way over to the guy.
"What are you people looking for?" Jayden asked.
"Well you see We're actually looking for a girl who goes here, orange hair, glasses, kind of skinny?"
Jayden noticed the way the guy talked. For someone in a gang, he was surprisingly enthusiastic... Almost a little childish.
"Sooo you're telling me you came to look for this girl when everybody's already gone?"
The guys thought about it for a second, and realized that yeah, that was probably a dumb idea. "... Would it be bad if we said yes?"
"Y'know for a gang of crooks, none of you are all that smart." The boy said. Which was apparently enough to tick off the group of guys.
"What did you just call us!?"
"Um, a gang of crooks? I don't think I could've been any more clear with what I said." He said.
"Now listen here you-" before he could say a word, he was kicked across the jaw by Jayden, sending him to the ground.
This got the rest of the guys to jump at him. He dodged back.
"How's about we play a little game. If I win, you take me to your leader. If you win... Fuck you you're not going to."
---Later---
Jayden walked into the warehouse with eleven guys flanking him, none of them touching him, which he appreciated. They'd made a point of that on the ride over, almost like a courtesy. You beat us up so we'd rather not touch you. Fair enough.
He took in the space as they moved through it.
It was bigger than it looked from the outside. The floor was wide and open, the ceiling high enough that the upper level formed a kind of mezzanine along the back wall, accessible by a metal staircase that had seen better decades. Light came in through the broken upper windows in long dusty columns, and someone had strung work lights along the lower beams that gave the whole place a warm, makeshift quality.
What he hadn't expected was the people.
There were a lot of them. More than he'd counted outside the school, more than the three vans would have held. They were everywhere, sitting on overturned crates, standing in clusters, a few of them at folding tables with cards laid out. Two kids were kicking a ball back and forth near the far wall with the focused energy of people who had nowhere else to be and had decided to make this work. A girl maybe twelve years old was sitting on a crate reading something, her legs dangling, completely unbothered by the noise around her. A couple of boys close to Jayden's age were arm wrestling over a table.
It looked less like a criminal operation and more like someone had taken a youth center and put it somewhere no one had given them permission.
"Huh," Adam said from beside him.
Jayden said nothing, but he was thinking the same thing.
He followed the group up the stairs. The noise from below faded slightly as they reached the upper level. Cleaner up here, like someone had decided to clean it. A space heater running in the corner. A folding table with a laptop. A few chairs.
And at the far end, was a guy.
He was pretty big, pretty muscular, and his face was a little threatening
He looked maybe seventeen. Possibly older.
"So you're the guy huh," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Depends on what the one did," Jayden said.
"Beat up eleven of my guys."
"Oh then yeah, that's me."
The boy looked him over once, Jayden looked back at him the same way.
"You look like a highschooler."
"That's cause I am."
"What business do you have with my guys that you had to go and beat em up?"
"I thought eleven guys showing up to an empty school was weird. And kinda stupid if you ask me."
The boy went quiet for a moment, thinking over his next action.
Jayden didn't see the punch. He registered the wind of it, registered the sharp crack of it connecting with his jaw, registered that he was already stumbling sideways into a shelving unit before his brain had finished processing the sequence. His back hit the metal shelf and something clattered off it and hit the floor.
He stood there for a second, hand coming up to his face. His jaw was ringing from the pain of that punch. It was like something had briefly scrambled the signal between his head and the rest of him.
He looked up at the boy with eyes that were way more alive now, almost crazed.
"Okay didn't think it'd be that easy" he said, grabbing his chest to pull out his scissors... And he definitely pulled something out
A full-size, golden umbrella, golden canopy, wooden handle, the kind of thing left behind on buses all over the world.
Jayden stared at it for a hot minute.
"...What."
"Oh," Adam said from the corner, sounding delighted. "Yeah I guess I should probably explain now."
"Why is it an umbrella."
"Because it's not scissors anymore,"
"Yeah. No shit. Why?"
"Did you really think that after eating MY apple and becoming MY host that your regalia would be a pair of scissors? Don't be stupid kid. You're actual ability that you inherited from me, is the power to reforge"
"Huh?"
"That's right, you hold an ability that every forger in the world would be jealous of. You can turn your regalia back into your soul. And then you can turn it into another regalia." He explained "though, considering that you're not me, you probably can't control what you forge."
"So you're telling me that I'm just gonna get random bullshit every fight!?"
Across the room, the boss was watching this exchange with an expression that had changed to be more attentive. His eyes had moved to Adam the moment the goldette had started talking, he was surprised by the sudden appearance of this golden guy, but he filed it away quickly, his attention pulling back to Jayden.
Jayden was standing with the umbrella at his side, jaw still ringing faintly, looking at the floor with the focused expression of someone doing rapid internal accounting.
The boss studied him, the look in his eyes
He'd seen a lot of people come into this room. People who were scared and hid it. People who were scared and didn't. People who were angry, people who were performing anger, people who were genuinely dangerous and people who only looked it. He had a sense for the difference. He'd developed it young, out of necessity, and it had never been wrong enough to cost him anything serious.
The person in front of him was none of those categories. The eyes confirmed it. The eyes that lit up with life just as he got into a fight. This guy was just like him.
He smiled.
"Oh I get it. I get why you went and beat up my people now!"
"Do you? Do you really?" Jayden said sarcastically, there's no way this guy actually understood that he just wanted to fight.
"You're empty inside aren't ya?"
"Huh!"
"Can't find the motivation to do anything, can't find the motivation to live life like everyone else so you're just running around, empty and dead inside? Yeah I get that. And I got a name for it too. You're full" the boy said, looking at the teen who seemed to be listening intently. "And when you're full you can't find the motivation to keep going. No matter how much you want to. No matter how much you try to, you'll never be able to savor anymore of the delicious food in front of ya. That food is life, and now that you're full you can't live no more, and you die on the inside."
He looked over to the people on the floor below with a smile. "That's why people who are full. Need something that makes em hungry. For me, nothing gets me hungry like a fight. And im guessing the same goes for you school boy. Tests, responsibilities, maturity. All of that's what's keeping ya full, bet when you're fighting? None of that matters. In a fight, all you gotta think about is hitting harder than the guy you're fighting. That's why it makes ya hungry."
As he said this, a pair of golden boxing gloves formed around his hand. And made it very clear to Jayden, that he was also a forger.
Tho the boy wasn't thinking much about that fact, and instead he had focused in on the boy's every word. That.. perfectly described how he felt. Now he finally had a name for it.
"You beat up my guys and came to me to get hungry right? So come on! Let's empty our stomachs!!"