The bottle was warm by the time Hangrove lifted it to his lips again.
He didn't care. Warm, cold, it all burned the same going down, and burning was the point. Burning meant he was still feeling something, which meant he was still alive, which was the only thing he had left to be grateful for — and even that felt less like a gift and more like a clerical error.
He sat at the far end of the bar, the stool beside him occupied by his jacket and the quiet, deliberate message that it sent: don't. The place was loud tonight. Somebody had put money into the jukebox and the bass from it hummed through the floorboards and up through the legs of his stool and into his bones. He found he didn't mind the noise. Noise was easier than silence. Silence had a way of filling itself in.
You were an inch from death, Hangrove.
He took another drink.
An inch. Maybe less. He'd replayed the moment so many times in his head that it had stopped feeling like a memory and started feeling like a room he was trapped inside of — the sound of it, the smell of it, the terrible physical certainty that the thing coming at him was faster than anything a man had a right to survive. And he had survived. He knew he had survived because he was here, in this bar, drinking warm whiskey while somebody's love song hummed through his bones.
But some part of him hadn't made it out. That was the only way he could explain the heaviness. The part of him that used to get up in the morning and put on the badge and mean it — that part had stayed behind in whatever room the memory lived in. And he didn't know how to go back and get it.
His supervisor had called twice. He hadn't answered.
The third drink became a fourth. The fourth became a blur. Somewhere in the blur he got loud — not angry, just loud, the way men get loud when grief comes out sideways — and the bartender, a wide-shouldered woman with patience worn thin by the hour, leaned over the counter and told him, quietly but with no room for argument, that it was time.
He tried to negotiate. She pointed at the door.
He ended up on the pavement outside with his jacket under his arm and the cold night air hitting him like a reprimand. He stood there for a long moment, swaying slightly, looking up at a sky that offered nothing. No stars. Cloud cover. Just the dull orange glow of the city bouncing back off itself.
Go home, Hangrove.
He didn't know if he could do that either. Home was quiet.
He started walking anyway.
Three floors below street level, the fluorescent lights of the DARC underground research laboratory had never looked so festive.
It wasn't that anyone had decorated. There were no streamers, no occasion for it. It was simply that the people inside the lab were happy — genuinely, viscerally, scientifically happy — and happiness, Sir Ferguson had observed over many years, has a way of changing the quality of light in a room. The technicians moved differently. Faster. There was laughter at the instrument panels, which was not a thing he normally permitted himself to enjoy, but tonight he let it go.
They had found it.
Not a cure, not yet — that was the secretary's misunderstanding, bless her — but something arguably more important: a vector. A mechanism. A key that fit the lock, even if they hadn't decided yet which way to turn it.
The test subject lay on the observation table behind the reinforced glass, chest rising and falling in shallow, exhausted.
He couldn't do use his powers anymore.
Whatever the compound had done, it had done it thoroughly. When the researchers had asked him to demonstrate — gently, with paramedics on standby — he had tried. Ferguson had watched from behind the glass as the man's face strained with the effort of reaching for something that wasn't there anymore. The power had not dimmed. It had not flickered. It had simply ceased, as completely as a light going out.
"Yes, yes!" The secretary — Susanne, though she rarely signed anything with her first name — had clasped her hands together with an enthusiasm that Ferguson found almost touching. "We can finally remove these powers. The shift victims, all those people who never asked for any of this — we can give them their lives back, sir."
Ferguson had turned from the window slowly, which was how he did everything that mattered. "Marcus was not a victim of the shift incident."
He had looked at her then, steadily, with the particular quality of gaze that had ended more arguments than he could count. "Marcus's powers nearly put us out of operation, Susanne. He was one man. One man nearly put us out of operation." He had let that sit for a moment before continuing. "The shift gave us assets. People with abilities that DARC can now control, that DARC can now direct. Those people are not a problem to be solved. They are the reason we are still relevant. The reason the government still signs the checks." He had turned back to the glass. "The compound stays in the lab until I say otherwise."
Susanne had said nothing more. She was good at reading rooms.
At the center of the lab, the paramedics moved around the test subject with brisk, professional efficiency, checking his vitals, adjusting the drip, doing what they were paid to do. Ferguson watched for a moment longer, then turned and walked back toward the elevator, hands folded behind his back.
They had the key. Now he had to decide what it unlocked.
The first building had been too tall.
Kade had stood at the edge of it for a long time — long enough that a pigeon had landed two feet away from him, regarded him with one skeptical orange eye, and then left — and the longer he stood there, the more the question rearranged itself in his head.
Can I fly? was one question.
Can I survive finding out I can't? was a different question entirely.
He had retreated. He was not proud of it, but he had retreated, making his way down through a stairwell that smelled of old concrete and somebody's cigarette, reasoning with himself the whole way down. Strategy, he told himself. Not cowardice. Strategy. You start small. You work your way up. You don't take a calculus exam before you've learned how to count.
The second building was four stories. Respectable height. Not fatal height. Probably not fatal height. He stood at the edge of the rooftop and looked down at the alley below and performed a rapid, unscientific assessment of the situation.
I won't die, he told himself. I won't die.
He said it again. Then a third time, the way you repeat a word until it stops sounding like a word.
He ran.
The rooftop was short and he covered it in seconds, his sneakers slapping against the graveled surface, and then the edge was there and then the edge was gone and then there was nothing under him and his stomach made a noise like a question and the ground was rising very fast and he had just enough time to think I am absolutely going to die before—
He hit.
The impact traveled up through his feet and his knees and his hips and rattled his teeth together, and he stood there for a moment in the alley with his arms out at his sides, taking inventory. Feet: present. Knees: complaining, but present. Everything else: accounted for.
"Ouch," he said.
Not dead. Definitively, categorically not dead. He looked down at himself, then up at the edge of the rooftop four stories above him. He had just fallen four stories and the worst of it was a word.
He went back up.
The second jump was easier, which was a strange thing to discover about yourself — that jumping off buildings was something you could get easier at. He hit the alley again and the impact was the same but his brain received it differently, processed it as data rather than catastrophe. He stood, rolled his shoulders, looked at his hands.
Third time.
This time he didn't run. He stood at the very edge of the roof with the toes of his sneakers hanging over, and he looked down, and he breathed, and then he stepped off.
Eyes closed. The air hit his face and the sound of the city rushed up around him and he waited for the impact that would tell him it was over —
It didn't come.
He opened his eyes.
The alley floor was three feet below him. He was not falling. He was not standing. He was simply there, suspended in the space between the building and the ground, hovering with the specific, improbable stillness of something that had decided gravity was a suggestion.
"Woah," he said. Then again: "Woah."
He tried to push himself upward. It was like learning to flex a muscle he hadn't known existed — the first attempt produced nothing, the second a slight wobble, the third a lurching, ungraceful rise that took him up past the second floor window, the third, the fourth, and then above the roofline entirely, the wind catching him fully now, the city spreading out below him in a glittering, indifferent sprawl.
"I can fly!" The words came out of him like something pressurized. "I can fly, I can actually—"
The muscle gave out.
He fell like a coat off a hanger — sudden, complete, no dignity to it whatsoever — and hit the alley for the third time with an impact that was, by any measure, the most emphatic of the three.
He lay there for a moment, staring up at the slice of orange sky between the buildings.
"I can fly," he said again, more quietly. "I just can't... stay flying."
His mother didn't ask about the scrapes. She had learned, over the past several weeks, not to ask about certain things. She was watching something on television when he came through the front door — she tracked him briefly with her eyes, noted the state of him, and returned to her program with the practiced neutrality of a woman who had decided that some battles were not hers to fight tonight.
"Marcus is in the kitchen," she said.
Kade stopped. "Marcus is here?"
"Has been for an hour."
He stood in the doorway for a moment, processing this new information alongside the persistent ache in his heels, and then made his way down the hall.
Marcus was at the kitchen table with a glass of water and his phone, and he looked up when Kade came in with the expression of a man who had a number of things to say and was rationing them. His eyes traveled over the scrapes on Kade's forearms, the tear at the knee of his jeans, the general impression that he had recently survived something.
"I'm not going to ask," Marcus said.
"Good."
They caught up the way old friends catch up — in loops, circling back, moving through the easy things before approaching the ones with weight. Kade's mom brought in a plate of something without being asked and then left them to it, pulling the kitchen door almost but not entirely shut behind her, which was her way of communicating that she was not listening while also being available.
An hour into it, Kade went quiet.
Marcus recognized the quiet. It was a specific kind — not empty, but full. Something sitting just behind the teeth.
"Just say it," Marcus said.
Kade looked at the table. Looked at his hands. Looked at the wall.
"I can fly," he said.
A beat.
"Okay," said Marcus.
"I mean — I have powers. Like the shift people. I don't know how, I don't know when it started exactly, but I can — I can do things. Physical things. I fell four stories today and I'm sitting here."
Another beat, longer.
"Okay," Marcus said again, but it was a different okay — the kind that means I am going to need a moment to recalibrate my entire understanding of the last hour.
Kade looked up at him. Then, slowly, he pushed his chair back from the table, planted his feet on the kitchen floor, and rose.
Not stood. Rose. Both feet lifting clean off the linoleum, his body drifting upward until his head was an inch from the ceiling and he was hovering there, still and certain, looking down at his friend with an expression caught somewhere between pride and apology.
Marcus's mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
His chair scraped back half an inch of its own accord, which was perhaps the most honest response available to him. He stared up at Kade — at his friend, who was currently on the ceiling, casually, in a kitchen in a house on a normal street — and his face cycled through several distinct stages of processing before settling, finally, on something that was not quite belief and not quite disbelief but the raw, unguarded territory between them.
His mouth was still open.