"Ren."
Amelia's voice came through layers, fog first, then something closer to sound, my hearing arriving back in stages the way it does when something has knocked the system sideways. My vision was glitching at the edges, the kind of visual static that came with whatever had just moved through me.
[CURRENT RANK IS STATIC]
[REPORT: TOO UNSTABLE FOR CURRENT TOURNAMENT]
[ASSIGNING NEW TOURNAMENT]
"Ren." Clearer this time. "Hold back."
She said it the way someone says something they already know won't land, with the specific weight of a person who is genuinely worried and also genuinely aware that worry isn't going to be enough.
Hold back.
Rowan was on the ground behind me. I didn't need to look to know what he looked like. I'd seen him while I was pinned, his body twitching, his eyes drifting, the current still running through him while I was held flat on the pavement unable to do anything about it. Whatever condition he was in now, the shock guy had put him there.
And Julian, a whole King of East High, a school with the resources and reputation that came with that title—had walked out of his territory with four people specifically to hunt someone he knew was weaker than him. He'd stood there watching while his bodyguard electrocuted a kid with glasses who had no real combat ability.
And she wanted me to hold back.
"What the hell just—" Julian was mid-sentence and mid-processing, both at the same time.
His expression had the specific quality of someone trying to make the current moment make sense and finding that it didn't have clean edges yet. The force field was gone. His barrier user was on the ground. The math wasn't adding up for him.
It wasn't entirely adding up for me either. I'd deflected two ability barriers by yelling a name. I was aware that this was not a thing I had known myself to be capable of. But working out the mechanism of it was not the current priority.
Julian's face was the priority. Specifically, the part of it that needed to be kicked.
The shock guy moved before I could. He came in fast — personal-bodyguard energy, the urgency of someone who has watched their situation deteriorate and is trying to reverse it with speed. His hands were still crackling, energy rebuilding between his fingers as he came in and shoved them toward me.
My first instinct was to dodge. But something else clicked faster.
I caught his fist in my palm.
He looked at his own hand. Then at me. Trying to figure out whether his ability had stopped responding or whether something about me had changed. I looked back at him with the expression of someone who has run a quick cost-benefit analysis and arrived at a conclusion.
He'd held Rowan by the collar and run current through him until his body stopped cooperating. There was a fairness argument for what came next.
I twisted his wrist, found the elbow, and broke it at the joint. The crack was structural. The yowling that followed was honest. I grabbed the arm before he could process the injury, swung him by it, and bent it up behind his neck at the angle it was not designed to reach.
I looked at Julian over the shock guy's shoulder. Let him read whatever he wanted to read in that.
Then I pulled the arm harder until I heard the second crack. Pushed him off.
Julian's expression had made its way from shock to something that sat just the other side of it. Not quite composure, but the beginning of recalibration.
"Ah." He said, like something had been confirmed. "You're not a cripple."
He'd known enough to come after me with four people, and had done it anyway. The observation didn't earn a response. I went at him directly— blows, kicks, everything I had moving in his direction. Each swing carried more weight than the last, a cumulative force that I could feel building in my arms.
He moved around all of it. Lightly, like he wasn't even tracking the attacks individually, just reading the rhythm of me and staying a fraction ahead of it. The agility was real.
While I was still focused on the attack, he caught my forearm, pulled me off balance, and drove a punch into my gut with the full weight of a planted stance behind it. Then stepped back. His remaining bodyguards came forward, moving to close it—but he raised one hand and stopped them.
"I'll take it from here." The certainty in his voice was the kind that came from experience.
"Arrogant bastard." I wiped blood off my mouth with the back of my hand.
I went at him again. Different approach this time — less momentum, more observation. C-2. His torso had been open more than once, but he'd been moving too fluidly for me to exploit it cleanly. The real problem wasn't finding the target, it was predicting where he'd be when I arrived.
He dodged my first reach and returned two punches to my gut before I'd completed the swing. I took them and kept watching.
Left. Right. Left. Swerve. Duck. Attack.
He ran it twice before I was sure of the pattern. Twice more before I was ready to use it. The punches I absorbed in the process were the price of the information.
He tried the pattern again. I watched his feet set for the duck, let my reach go high enough to make the swerve look like the right call, and the moment he ducked, I grabbed the fist that came through the gap.
He paused. One clean half-second of surprised stillness.
I drove my foot down onto his.
He made a sound he didn't intend to make, something compressed and involuntary, and hopped back on one foot, cursing. That was the opening, and it was exactly the size I needed. I moved into it and brought my foot up hard under his chin.
The crack arrived before he did. He left the ground, blood leaving his mouth before he came back down, and stayed there, unconscious, which in the moment felt like the minimum appropriate outcome.
I stood over him, breathing. The adrenaline was pulling back and tiredness was moving in to fill the space it vacated. My legs registered their objections. I went to my knees.
My eyes found Rowan.
He was on the ground a few metres away. Still. The three remaining bodyguards were doing something behind me. I could hear them, swearing, working themselves up to a decision, but I was looking at Rowan and waiting for a sign that he was breathing.
Then a siren.
Loud, official, the specific pitch of a bureau vehicle. The bodyguards didn't finish their deliberation. They ran. Whatever loyalty they'd arrived with had a hard ceiling, and the sound of the bureau vehicle was above it. They left Julian on the ground without looking back.
A black Mustang with a customised siren on the roof pulled to a stop in front of us. The man who stepped out had static grey eyes, a set jaw, and the expression of someone who had been doing this job long enough that his face had stopped pretending to feel differently about it than it did.
He was in the standard black uniform, and if it had read 'I HATE MY JOB' across the chest, it would have clarified nothing new.
He walked toward me and said something. A question, from the shape of it. But the long sustained beep in my ears was absorbing most of the frequency range and I couldn't pull the words out of it.
"Ren." Amelia's voice, cutting through. Sharper than before. "Ren, can you hear me?"
I could hear her. Processing it was taking longer than usual.
"Ren. Ren—"
Then the ground came up.
***
The first thing I registered was antiseptic. Which, at this point in my life, had become the specific smell of waking up somewhere after something had gone wrong.
A nurse in petite, white uniform— holding a clipboard— was at the ward door, finishing a conversation with the grey-eyed officer from the street. I caught fragments: adequate suppressants... vitals returning to normal... can be discharged anytime today.
I took inventory of myself before moving. Bandages on both arms. A plaster on my cheek. Something tight and structured around my midsection that communicated the area had opinions about any sudden movement.
Every bone in my body had submitted a formal complaint about existing. The sunlight coming through the shutters was aggressively bright in the way that hospital sunlight always managed to be.
Then I noticed the cufflink on my right wrist. Sealed to the stretcher railing.
Then I noticed the stretcher next to mine.
Julian Redgrave. He was sitting up in hospital clothing, handcuffed to his own rail, looking at me with the slow, measuring stare of a person who has decided the situation isn't over yet and is cataloguing what comes next.
His expression was that of someone who had accepted the handcuffs as a temporary condition rather than a statement about anything.
The officer came over. Studied me for a moment with the same flat professionalism he'd apparently been carrying since he got out of the car.
"You doing alright?"
"Mostly." My voice came out quieter than intended. I moved my cuffed wrist slightly, felt the resistance. "This is making things complicated."
"Right." He pulled a key stack from his breast pocket, selected one, and worked the cufflink free. "Witnesses on scene said the East High students initiated. That you were with your friend... Rowan."
I sat with the word friend for a moment. It wasn't exactly the category I would have filed him under. Then something more urgent moved through.
"Where is he?" I looked at the officer directly. "Rowan — is he okay?"
He was quiet. The specific quiet of someone sorting through available answers and checking each one for accuracy before committing to it.
"I have the full case file. Juvenile processing for everyone responsible for what happened." He said it carefully. "We'll make sure accountability is assigned properly."
"That's not what I asked." I kept my eyes on him. "Is Rowan okay?"
He looked back at me. Whatever was in his expression was doing something more complicated than his face wanted to show.
"Rowan is—"