ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN: Unfolding

118       By the time Alden finished cleaning up after himself, he was the last student left in the gym except for Maricel, who was talking animatedly to Fragment about what she’d seen the other Ground Shapers doing at Earthbox. He headed toward the locker room, wondering how he was going to haul his exhausted body to North of North and if the recovery sauna was going to be powerful enough to save him. The sound of his own name made his hand pause just before he pushed on the door. He nudged it open a crack instead of shoving straight through. “…like he’s special or something. It’s just catching balls.” Winston. “I only caught a glimpse,” said Kon. “But Waker throws so that you can barely see the things coming before they’re on top of you. Catching them might not be impossible, but it’s not like it would be easy.” “And the balls were throwing themselves back! It was great! Instructor Klein was mad because I kept looking over there instead of at him.” And that’s Jeffy. I hereby forgive you for making my plaid shirt smell like cheap body spray, Jeffy. “Don’t you want the instructors to help you when you’re figuring something new out with your powers?” Haoyu said cooly. “This is a school. They’re teachers. They teach. It’s not that confusing.” I’m going to buy more copper appliances for the apartment. “It’s not something new,” Winston retorted. “It’s catch. He’s just a B, and Big’nLittleSnake was so focused on him toward the end of our session it wasn’t even as hard to dodge as usual!” “It was new, idiot,” Lexi snapped. “If you actually paid attention to other peoples’ abilities instead of getting jealous over stupid—” Alden threw the door open and hurried in before Lexi could get himself into trouble. He pretended not to notice the hush that fell over everyone. The running showers were the only sound in the room. Alden smiled blithely around at them all and texted Haoyu. [Make Lexi come with us to use the sauna today.] Haoyu gave him a surprised look. [You’re good at making him do things,] Alden said. [I’ll pay for the guest pass and the reservation.] ****** “You can’t keep saying, ‘I guess we’ll invite Kon instead,’ when you want me to agree to things,” Lexi complained as they walked beside the busy street that ran between the edge of campus and North of North. “I know what you’re doing!” “It’s not like I’m lying when I say it,” said Haoyu. “Kon and I get along. I really might have invited him instead.” “Why do you keep asking me to come here anyway?” “For your health and happiness. But today I insisted because Alden wanted you to come, too.” Lexi looked back. Alden was several steps behind them. “Why are you making me come to your grossly fancy potion sniffing facility with you? And…do you need one of us to carry your bag or something?” “No. I’m fine. I think I just pulled a muscle. Everywhere.” Lexi rolled his eyes, and reached over to take his duffel from him. “Thanks. You A-ranks are so handy. And North of North isn’t grossly fancy. It’s a very good amount of fancy. Right, Haoyu?” “Exactly.” A few minutes later, when they stepped into the gym, the girl who often guarded the lobby presented Lexi with a velvet gift bag full of swag in honor of his first visit. “The smoothies and frozen yogurt are free,” said Haoyu. “The showers are big enough for ten people.” “Spirit waxing might be real.” “Are you two trying to sell me a membership or what?” In Alden’s opinion, the place was more than worth the price of the membership that evening. What was that? he wondered while he stood under warm water in the rainfall shower. He remembered the feeling of his fingers, and his skill, wrapping around tennis balls he probably shouldn’t have been able to catch. How was I doing it? What was it that happened? He didn’t know. It was frustrating not to know but exciting to think that Bearer had something like that to show him. When he arrived at the sauna, there was nobody inside except for Lexi and Haoyu. Usually, there would be a few other people taking advantage of the potion-infused steam, but if you hung around for long enough you’d hit a patch or two when everyone else was gone. Alden’s roommates were sitting on the bottom bench, their hands moving through the air as they worked with their interfaces. Lexi glanced at Alden, eyes lingering on the left side of his chest for a moment. “It’s not real,” Haoyu whispered loudly as Alden sat down beside him. “He got it because he wanted to look more mature than the rest of us.” “Haoyu, don’t tell him the truth. I want everyone to think I’m a serious Avowed.” “Sorry,” said Haoyu. “It’s very, very real. He killed some people for a wizard, and the tattoo makes it so he can never reveal the locations of the bodies.” “That’s right,” said Alden. “I’m a dangerous Rabbit.” Lexi looked at him. “You might be.” “You do know I’m kidding about the murder, right?” “I know that. But what was with your reaction time in class today?” Lexi asked. “You were moving completely differently than you were a couple of weeks ago.” Haoyu groaned. “Lexi, you can’t even relax and joke around with us for a second?” Silence fell, then Lexi cleared his throat. “Knock knock.” Alden stared at him. Haoyu’s eyes lit. “Who’s there?” “Alexei,” Lexi muttered. He looked like he already regretted doing this. “Alexei who?” Haoyu asked. “A lexicon is a kind of dictionary. Do you want to buy one?” Haoyu’s grin was huge. Alden thought he was probably wearing a similar expression. “You have your own family knock knock joke!” he exclaimed. And he was brave enough to deliver it, too. “Lexi. Kon. It’s perfect,” Haoyu said. Lexi’s face was way too red for the amount of time they’d been in the sauna.“My dad made it up when we were little. He thinks it’s hilarious. Can I ask you about gym now?” “I was going to answer you anyway.” Alden shifted, trying to get comfortable. The two of them were watching him expectantly. This is hard. The parts of it I do think I understand would make me sound crazy. Oh, I could feel my goals aligning with my affixation better than usual. I suspect I was establishing my authority over reality more properly, and that was making the skill more effective in a number of ways that I can’t quite grasp just—wait…stop running away! Come back, you guys! I don’t want new roommates! “I don’t think I should’ve been catching some of those,” he said instead. “Most of those. When it comes to Big Snake’s faster pitches, I don’t usually have time to think, ‘Left ankle. Right hip. Shoulder.’ It’s more like ‘Yikes! Motion! Duck!’” He arched his back, trying to stretch it out. “Also, I was very focused on…my mindset. So I wasn’t paying great attention to details. He was throwing them at least as fast as usual, right?” Haoyu and Lexi exchanged a look. “I was busy trying to beat Instructor Klein,” Lexi said. “But…” “It was getting noteworthy toward the end of class,” Haoyu told him. “Not the speed of the individual pitches; he was throwing at what looked like his normal top speed for you.” Alden nodded. Snake threw harder at some people than others, depending on what they were doing with their powers and how suited they were to playing high-speed dodgeball to begin with. “But he was throwing a much larger number of pitches at you. For the last half of the session, he wasn’t even giving you time to return one before the next was in the air. And he was throwing more multiples your way. You would have needed to be an Avowed octopus to catch all of them.” “I’ve got to watch my footage.” “Before you do,” Lexi said, “let me ask—you didn’t know, right? That you could catch something that was being used as a weapon against you. That was why you were so excited even with the first one?” “I’d never done it,” Alden replied. “Of course Big Snake isn’t trying to hurt us for real, but it’s a situation where both parties know his goal is to hit us, not pass the balls to us. So it was a decent test.” A much better test than I expected. Alden had hoped it would be a first step toward sorting out his perception of incoming enemy projectiles. Only a baby step, he’d thought, since it wasn’t a perfect model of an actually dangerous situation. That was all. “I ended up glimpsing something way different than I’d planned. I have practiced playing catch with my skill, but it was to get the hang of preserving objects instantly, instead of halting their momentum and then preserving. It wasn’t like—” “You couldn’t always do that?” Lexi’s face was intent. “It’s something you figured out through trial and error?” “It actually took a lot of practice to be able to do it naturally every time.” “Could you tell when you were on the right track to getting it?” Haoyu asked at once. “How many times would you say you had to try?” Lexi asked at the same time. “Um…you two definitely shouldn’t use most of my experiences to judge your own progress. I learned a lot of what I know about my skill and my trait during a crisis. There were really unique pressures holding me back in some ways and driving me forward in others.” They both looked embarrassed, which wasn’t what Alden had wanted at all. “I don’t mind talking about it with you,” he said hastily. He was surprised to realize that it was closer to a truth than a lie. Maybe it was only because he’d just heard them defending him when they didn’t even know he was listening, but it was a relief, for a change, not to have that internal clench at the thought of possibly being asked a question about Thegund. He was sure it would be back when he was in a different mood, but for now… “I played catch with Kibby all the time. She threw gravel. Small pointy rocks aren’t the most pleasant things to catch, but that worked out for the best because it encouraged me to grab them with the right idea in mind instead of the wrong one. At the time, whenever someone tossed something to me, I had a feeling that I needed to stop it and get a good grip on it before I preserved it.” And when feelings and intuition were all I had to go on instead of my authority sense, it made activating the skill exactly how I wanted to seem like rocket science. It was good they’d asked about this one, now that he thought about it. Instant preservation of moving objects was one of the few things he’d made progress with prior to gaining more deliberate control over his affixation. “Practicing my way out of it worked. I got it right more and more often.” Soon enough, even without his expanding senses changing how he understood his magic, halting the rocks properly would have become a knack in the normal way for human Avowed, he was sure. Just one of those things you could do thoughtlessly once you’d gotten the hang of it, the magical equivalent of riding a bicycle. “Now it’s not hard at all. I—” The sound of the door opening drew his attention. Lute Velra walked into the room wearing a towel around his waist and drinking an orange smoothie. “I see,” he said, wafting steam dramatically toward his nose with one hand, then slurping from his drink. “So this is where the spoiled people do their homework.” “Isn’t it indecent for you to call someone spoiled?” Lexi asked. “Lute!” Haoyu said. “What are you doing here?” “Alden invited me. Sorry I’m late. I had to make sure I tried all the free samples.” He was peering into the tiny cauldron on the pedestal at the center of the room. He didn’t have his patch on, and from this angle, in all the steam, it was impossible to tell he had a false eye. “You might want to drink the smoothie fast,” said Alden. “There’s no food allowed in here. When other people show up, they’ll glare at you.” Lute looked over to answer. “Hey! You have a tattoo!” Before Alden could respond, Lute was right beside him examining it. “Does it go around the side? It looks like it goes around the side.” Alden lifted his arm. “Oooo…a mysterious triangle.” Alden snorted. “You should’ve said you had one!” Then Lute frowned. “Now mine is even dumber. You probably got yours doing a deal with a wizard, and mine’s a fancy letter V my grandmother designed back in the dark ages.” “Under slightly different circumstances, an ancestral tattoo would actually be awesome,” said Alden. “Yeah. I guess. But that’s dependent on your ancestors being awesome.” He sat down. “So now Haoyu and Lexi just need to get summoned for something serious or secret, and we’ll all be inked.” “That’s not on my to-do list for the near future,” Haoyu said. “Mine either.” “Fine. But Alden and I are getting ahead of you.” He sucked on his straw. “So! Now we sit around and recover together.” “We’re recovering from an intense MPE class,” said Lexi. “I don’t know what you think you’re recovering from.” “I’ll have you know I used the stairs instead of the elevators to get to all my lessons today.” “Okay,” said Alden. “I’m glad you both came. But now I really do have to review the video to see if I can figure out what I was actually doing with my skill earlier.” “There’s entertainment?” Lute asked. “Can I watch?” “I don’t mind. You don’t have your own homework?” “My homework is boring.” They all ended up watching, even Lexi, who claimed he needed to study his own efforts far more than Alden’s. It was always strange to view the gym footage. The first time Alden had seen his body in high definition from every angle, wearing the unitard and doing the kinds of things they did in MPE, he hadn’t recognized himself. In ways both good and bad. His reaction had included important concerns like: Is my accent slightly different than it used to be? Is my hair funny? My face gets so red when I’m working out, and it makes so many expressions. I bet everyone thinks I’m a creepy tomato head. And there were some more positive observations. Watching himself do magic was incredible. He looked so much more like a superhuman when he used his skill than he’d realized. Alden from a year ago would have thought the guy on the video had cool powers. On top of that, he looked athletic, which was gratifying. He was aware that he was in great shape; he could feel it. But seeing himself move in ways he couldn’t have before was still exciting. And as for moving in ways he couldn’t or, rather, shouldn’t… As they hit the fifteen-minute mark of the recording, Alden watched through his interface as two projectiles came toward him in rapid succession. He paused it. [Lexi: Double miss.] He was typing in their roommate chat so that they wouldn’t bother the man and woman who’d come to relax on the benches across from them. [Haoyu: Single miss.] [Lute: You’re going to get hit in the shoulder and the knee.] Every now and then they were playing this guessing game, trying to decide whether or not Alden could make the catches. [Alden: Double miss. These ones are too fast.] He started the video. The him from just a short while ago threw his body forward to grab the first ball with his right hand before it hit his shin, and then, even as he raised his arm to send the ball back to Instructor Waker, he was snapping up and twisting his spine around to catch the second ball with his left hand even though it had already gone past him. What the hell? thought Alden, thrilled and confused at the same time. “Damn,” said Lute from right beside him. “You are so much better than I imagined you being.” [Alden: Hey.] [Haoyu: That’s right. Give him the annoyed font.] [Lute: Seriously, though. You look like you’re using the self-mastery wordchain even though you’re not.] [Lexi: Did your skill give you some kind of temporary enhancement?] [Haoyu: A speed boost maybe? That would be amazing!] Alden doubted that was it, but he didn’t know what it was either. He rewound and watched again in slow motion. Incoming fastballs that should have hit him one right after the other. Catch. Release. Catch. Release. Smooth as silk. He watched it twice more at regular speed. Then in slow motion. Then one more time, focusing on the fingers of his right hand as they manipulated the ball into the correct position for the return. [Alden: I don’t think my body’s moving faster than I’m capable of. But I was concentrating so hard on intercepting the pitches with my magic that I lost my sense of self-preservation a little.] The all three looked at him. [Lexi: What does that mean?] [Alden: I tuned out everything else. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have twisted around that hard and fast to catch a ball normally. I’m getting whiplash just watching myself. It explains why I’m this sore.] There was your normal best, and then there was your ‘I’ve managed to convince myself that catching the ball is the purpose of my existence, and I’m too busy feeling my authority to notice if things hurt or not’ best. [Lute: Don’t your super stylish turtleneck jumpsuits stop you from injuring yourselves?] They all turned to look at him. Haoyu narrowed his eyes. [So you think our superhero suits are stylish?] [Lexi: They don’t prevent self-inflicted muscle strain unless you’re doing something completely insane.] I might not be moving that much faster, Alden thought as he watched himself miss one pitch then catch another. But I sure am moving in the right direction more often than not. And he moved more and more correctly the longer it went on. By the last few minutes of class, even the balls he missed were bare misses. To start with, some of them had caught him completely by surprise, but at the end, he was always reaching for the spot they were coming toward with one hand or the other. Big Snake seemed to have decided that the harder catches were helping the most. He’d even started throwing a few of them wild, instead of playing the villain and always aiming for Alden’s body. “Your eyes,” Lexi said as they approached the end of the video. Then he seemed to realize he’d...