She was back from the distribution center by ninth hour.
The apartment smelled like grain steam and the particular quality of tiredness that soaks into a room after someone has been on their feet since before the Pulse started its morning cycle, it got into the walls, that kind of tired, settled into the corners the way cold settled into corners in winter, made itself part of the air of the place. She moved through it without stopping, shrugging off her outer jacket and dropping it over the back of the chair at the door, rolling her shoulders once, twice, working something loose in the left one that had been sitting wrong since the third hour of the shift.
Aion sat at the table.
She moved through the kitchen without asking him anything. She'd been making grain bowls when he came home carrying that particular stillness in his walk, the kind that meant something was turning in him without resolution, working through its cycle without completing it, since he was eight years old. It had become its own communication between them over the years. A bowl appearing on the table meant: I see that you're working through something and I'm here while you do it and I'm not going to push the door before you're ready to open it. He'd figured this out around age ten and had never mentioned it, because it worked better as an unspoken thing, and they'd both known for a long time that some of the most important things between people worked better that way.
She set the bowls down and sat across from him and settled back into her chair with her hands flat on the table, the way she sat when she'd decided the other person needed to find where the thing started, and she was going to be there for as long as it took.
He told her everything and the strange occurrences over the past months about his vein.
She listened entirely. Bowl untouched, hands flat, eyes on his face.
"Your father had something like that," she said.
He went still.
"Not often, but i think it comes from understanding your own vien and it's abilities" she said. "Once that I know of for certain, and a few other times afterward that I found myself looking back at differently." She turned her bowl slowly between her hands, not eating from it, just turning it. "He fell from a relay station roof. Before you were born, before we'd been together very long, this was before I knew what he was capable of, before I understood what the vein could do at the expression level he'd reached. He told me about it much later. We were sitting somewhere like this, eating something like this, and it came out of him the way things sometimes came out of him when he was tired enough to let them." She paused. "He fell from about the height which could hurt a normal person. He should have been badly hurt but i think it is a special treat among those with veins."
"He wasn't hurt?," Aion said.
"He wasn't. He told me the vein did something he didn't expect at the moment of maximum stress. He couldn't describe what, exactly — he had the same problem you have. He said he never understood why it happened." She looked at the table.
Aion was quiet for a long moment.
"He had that habit," she said. "He was very good at what he did, and he had confidence in his understanding of it, and when something happened that didn't fit that understanding, he—" She stopped. Took a breath. "He moved on. He was always moving. It was easier for him to move through the things he didn't understand than to stop and look at them directly. The moving felt like control and the stopping felt like the opposite of it."
"The Still-Wind," Aion said. "When the crystallization happened. It was fast."
Her hands went still on the bowl.
"Too fast," she said. "I've spent time since looking. Read everything I could find on Still-Wind Set acceleration, the official reports, the open research papers, the case documentation that isn't restricted. Nothing I found describes what I watched happen to him." Her voice was level and even and had been level and even for sixteen years, maintained through consistent practice. "The worst documented cases take longer. Significantly longer. He wasn't even Stage 1 when the Still-Wind hit the settlement. He was gone in under minutes."
"Do you think he reached his body's limit," Aion said.
"I don't think so because your father was powerful and strong but at the same 3 beasts are just impossible for one possible but he handled them." She looked at the table surface, at the grain of the wood. "There were things coming down from the east ridge — pulled out of the highlands by the Still-Wind energy, those large creatures sometimes come when the energy is strong enough. Too many of them and moving too fast. They were already through the outer markers. He was buying us time to reach the hill shelter." She paused. "He made it. We made it. And then I watched the Surge take him from the outside in, the crystallization moving through the stages faster than stages were supposed to be, faster than anything I'd read said they could move."
Aion ate.
"I've spent a lot of time since wondering," she said. "Whether the speed was from going that far past his limit — from the Surge firing during a Still-Wind, when everything runs at once and the body has no capacity to manage the output. Or whether there was something about him specifically, I never knew to ask about his ability." She looked at him. "Things sitting in the dark that I didn't know to bring a light to."
Aion looked at his bowl.
"I'm going to find out what happened that day," he said.
"I know but please son be careful, and always fight to survive."
"Whatever it is. I need to understand it before someone else decides what it means for us."
"I know that too, you will get better at this." She looked at him, not with worry, because it was past worry, had been past worry for years. Something quieter. Something she had already decided to carry and had been carrying without complaint since he was six years old and she had first understood what she was looking at. "And remember to always come home."
"I will," he said.
He ran home after dinner the long route — up the relay station exterior on the east side, up through the eight brackets, across the rooftop in the dark with the Pulse cycling overhead, down the other side. Vein off the whole way. Not reaching for anything, not activating anything. Just his legs and his hands and the handholds he'd memorized at eleven and the bracket that still shifted if you tested it before you committed to it.
At the bottom of the descent, the landing point at the base of the east wall had it.
The same texture. Stone that had recently been something slightly other than stone, in the process of settling back. He crouched and put both palms flat on it and stayed there with the Pulse cycling overhead, amber and regular and steady, and looked at the ground.
He stood. Stood there a moment longer.
He went inside. He was asleep almost immediately, the way he always was after days like this, the body making its own decisions, taking what it needed, the mind not quite catching up before it was already gone.