It happens on your way home from dropping your brother off at school. You’re stopped at a red light. There’s a soundless flash that makes your ears pop and the world go blank. You stand on the brakes, hard, trying to push the pedal right through the floor. As your eyes squint themselves open, the horizon pulses distantly, once, twice.
It is prohibited for an Osu to interact in any way with the Nwadiala, and that includes using your gifts against them. It is woven into our initiation rites, and to speak or even think of such is considered blasphemy.
Sometimes at night, when Mark isn’t drunk enough to forget the day’s work, he has the urge to pray. He hasn’t believed in there being anything out there to pray to in years, but he dimly remembers his childhood awe of God and the comfort of being able to confess your sins to a faceless presence. The things he’s done, the things he’s watched, they weigh on him. He knows they don’t weigh on Renward. Renward is innocent.
“Velvet and buttons, yes,” Pudgy says, his voice gone soft. He draws his left hand against his empty belly, fingers of his right hand scrabbling over the itchy skin on the back of his left. Michael blinks, then looks up to the trees that arc over them, bare-branched and thin. It is summer, yet nothing grows.
He is at a console, his hands running over the keypad. His fingers are faster than anyone else’s. His mind cannot reach the capacity of my processing power, but the way he thinks, computing thoughtlessly, is akin to my own. The other reason he is my second choice is because he has a 57% chance of being murdered within his first year as captain, but I can work to make him safe.
The phone rang, had been ringing; his family calling early. He relaxed and reached out along the electromagnetic connections in the air, pushing his will across the apartment’s network to open a connection directly into the OsNun CR permanently embedded in his skull. The conductive receiver, buried beneath the layers of carbon filaments and reinforced ceramics that replaced most of his brown skin, buzzed with every word.
She stood in a brass doll stand on the window shelf in Mrs. Lovey’s Irresistible Toys and Candy Store looking out on Eighth Avenue and 72nd Street.
Run didn’t always hate Demon Fighter. She used to love it. But she also used to have a mother. Lots of things change.
