He hadn't eaten since yesterday.

  His body ran fine without food, same as without sleep — fine for a while and then not fine, and the not-fine part wasn't pain exactly — a low, persistent noise at the back of everything, audible only once it stopped. He'd been ignoring it since the morning. He stopped ignoring it around two in the morning when he passed the convenience store on Allet Street and his stomach made a sound he felt more than heard.

  The sign above the door was half-lit — OPEN 24H, the 2 and the H dark, the 4 holding on. The window displayed a faded poster for a beer brand whose logo had changed three years ago. Inside, under fluorescent lights giving everything the color of old paper, a man behind the counter was watching his phone, chin on a fist.

  He paused outside. Looked at the man, then at the street — empty in both directions, the deep emptiness of a city block at two in the morning, the pavement damp from rain that stopped an hour ago. Across the street, a cat sat on a window ledge watching him — the profound indifference of an animal having decided he wasn't interesting.

  He went inside.

  The bell above the door rang. The man behind the counter didn't look up.

  The store was narrow — four aisles, small quantities of everything, too much charged for all of it. Fluorescent flicker, the kind you couldn't see directly but felt after a few minutes. Someone had arranged the energy drink display near the entrance with more thought than anything else in the place suggested. Little pyramid. Symmetrical. The only thing in the place that showed any thought.

  Cael headed toward the back.

  He wasn't thinking about the mechanics. He needed food, he had no money, he wasn't looking. Simple. Something moved in him about it — not guilt exactly — its memory, a shape where it used to live. He picked up a sandwich in plastic wrap, a bottle of water, a handful of protein bars, put them in the inside pocket of the jacket. Fifteen seconds. He straightened up and turned around.

  The woman in the third aisle was looking at him.

  She'd been there when he came in — he'd registered her as furniture — peripheral, static, irrelevant. He'd been wrong about that. She hadn't moved from beside the canned goods, a basket with nothing in it, and she was looking at him, her face carrying too many layers to read quickly. She was around his age, maybe a little older. Dark skin, close-cropped hair, a jacket, a tear at the left shoulder, badly repaired. Her other hand was at her side and not moving and what made him pay attention — kept still on purpose, and it cost.

  He watched her.

  She watched him back.

  Neither of them said anything for a moment that stretched past the point where most people would have filled the silence.

  "You going to report me?" he said.

  She glanced over — brief, assessing. "No." No warmth in it. No reassurance either.

  "You a cape?"

  Something shifted in the line of her jaw. Neither yes nor no. The answer to a different question.

  "Independent," she said.

  He'd figured. She'd held her ground when he noticed her — neither fear nor aggression. Trained. Maintained. She had the look of a person who'd been in too many rooms they shouldn't be in to react badly to one more.

  He could have kept his eyes down. Let whatever was going to happen happen without him in it. He'd been telling himself that since the incident in the street and the telling hadn't done much.

  "You're waiting for something," he said.

  "You're stealing," she said. Her chin had dropped slightly — not accusation. Statement.

  "Yes."

  She looked at him for another moment. Her posture reorganized itself — not relaxing exactly, but finding a different arrangement. She exhaled once through her nose and put the basket down on the shelf beside her. "Twenty minutes. Then I'm done and you won't see me again."

  He didn't answer. He crossed to the end of the aisle and sat down on the floor, back against the shelf and took out the sandwich and ate it. Plastic, and the distant memory of tuna. He ate it anyway.

  He'd gone back to his phone.

  The woman in the third aisle didn't move.

  Thirteen minutes passed. Cael knew because he'd clocked the time above the counter when he sat down — an old analog thing, second hand ticking. He counted things now. Numbers over noise. The clock said 2:14 when the bell above the door went again.

  Two men. Large in the professional sense — a job requirement. One of them had a face broken and reset at least once, the nose sitting slightly to the left of where it should have been. The other was younger, mouth a thin pressed line, eyes already moving over the store in a sweep skipping the counter entirely, heading straight to the aisles.

  They'd found what they were looking for before they'd made it three feet in.

  Cael watched the woman.

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  She'd moved — he hadn't seen it happen, only registered the result. The basket was on the floor, she'd put two feet between them, weight back on her rear foot. The hand — motionless before — wasn't anymore.

  "Hey," the younger one said. Not loud. The kind of voice that didn't need to be. "Mira."

  "Don't," she said.

  "We've been looking for you for three days." Still that even pitch.

  "I know."

  The bigger one had planted himself in the middle of the aisle, arms loose at his sides. Cael noted his hands — the left one was wrong — fingers too thick, a faint bluish tinge under the skin that pulsed once like a slow heartbeat. A cape, then. Or close enough.

  The counter man had put his phone down. He was looking at the door with his hands flat on the counter and his mouth doing what it did when the brain was sorting between two very bad options.

  "You don't have to be here for this," the younger one said to the room. Dismissive. Already done with it. Cael understood meant him.

  "I know," Cael said.

  He didn't move.

  The younger one looked at him for the first time. Really took him in — up and down. He sized it up, reached a conclusion.

  What happened next happened fast.

  He lunged, and the blue in his hand bloomed outward — no good name for it, halfway between light and fire, a pressure that hit the shelves and split them at the seams, cans tumbling — a small contained detonation. The woman lurched sideways, one hand catching the falling shelf, the other up — and whatever she did wasn't visible exactly — the air between her palm and the man's chest got briefly very wrong, a shiver in the geometry of the space.

  The bigger one didn't shiver.

  He closed the distance in two strides and hit her.

  Cael had drawn enough bodies to know the physics of it: a fist moving that fast, that much mass behind it, into the side of a skull. The sound was worse than it should have been. She hit the floor hard, one shoulder catching the corner of the metal shelf bracket on the way, and the metal went into her — not deep, but enough. The blood was immediate and very red under the fluorescent lights, a different color than you expected blood to be, more saturated, more itself.

  She hit the floor and didn't get back up.

  He loomed over her. His left had gone back to its normal color. He was breathing through his nose at the measured pace of a man for whom this wasn't new, checking whether a job was done.

  "She's breathing," the younger one noted, eyes off her. Like it mattered. Maybe it didn't.

  The man with the broken nose crouched down and took hold of her jacket.

  Cael got up.

  The younger one turned. "I told you—"

  "You did," Cael said.

  He stepped over the split shelf and the scattered cans and came to a halt two feet from him, who glanced up from his crouch — the slow, unimpressed gaze of someone interrupted before. He took in Cael's height, his weight, the jacket. Something flickered behind his eyes — not concern. A look that said he'd dealt with worse.

  The blue started in his hand again.

  Cael let it hit him.

  It wasn't nothing — it registered, a pressure that passed through him and dissipated without finding anywhere to go, dissipating into open air. He watched the man cycle through several things in quick succession. The blue bloomed harder, more of it, and Cael registered it the way he'd registered the cape in the street grabbing his wrist: distantly, like weather.

  His face had stopped moving. Locked into something new — not fear yet, earlier than that, the widening of a world that had revealed an extra room.

  Cael took hold of his wrist. Not hard — he never did it hard, because hard meant the wrist didn't exist afterward. Enough. The blue went out.

  The floor had a crack in it from the initial blast, a dark line running from the shelf base to the far wall. Cael studied it. The man was where he'd been.

  "Let go of her jacket," Cael said. He hadn't moved from where he stood.

  He let go of her jacket.

  "Get out," he said. Not loud.

  They went. The younger one first, then the other, backwards, the bell above the door marking their exit with its small cheerful sound that belonged to a different night entirely.

  The man at the counter was rooted. Staring at Cael, hands flat on the surface, pale under the bad lighting, mouth slightly open and not closing.

  Cael crouched beside her.

  The shoulder wound was bad — the bracket had gone in two, maybe three inches, the kind of depth that bled fast and didn't stop on its own. She was unconscious. Her breathing was uneven but present. The blood pooled dark under her against the linoleum.

  He'd done this in the street two days ago. Crouched in front of a stranger, offered a hand. That had been a choice with a weight on each side, a thing he'd thought through in the thirty seconds between the window and the door. This — he hadn't thought about this at all. He'd stood up before the calculation had a chance to run.

  What stayed with him. The men leaving, the woman bleeding — none of that was what stayed. The standing up. How fast it had been. How it hadn't felt like one.

  He checked the wound badly, with more guesswork than knowledge. Applied pressure using the cleanest part of his sleeve, which wasn't very clean. Looked at the man behind the counter.

  "Call someone," he said.

  The man reached for his phone, fingers not entirely steady.

  Cael stayed where he was. He didn't know why. He had no reason to stay — the men were gone, someone was coming, he'd done whatever he'd done. The room smelled like blood and a chemical tang that came after a power discharge, something between burnt plastic and copper. The fluorescent light above them ticked.

  He took in her face at rest — jaw slack, the long line of the neck, what unconsciousness did to someone who'd been tightly controlled while awake. He had that habit. Even now.

  He didn't draw her.

  He sometimes thought about drawing things he knew he shouldn't. There was a version of this that was a painting — the blood, the linoleum, the overhead light making everything the same flat color. The way her jacket bunched at the shoulder around the wound.

  He was talking quietly into his phone. The words came to him but didn't register. He was thinking about the street, the Bureau cape with her fractured visor, the moment she stopped seeing a civilian.

  He'd helped the Bureau cape because the weight on one side of the scale had been heavier. He'd known it going in. He'd known what it was going to cost.

  But he was here, doing this.

  He didn't know what that said about him. He wasn't sure he wanted to.

  He pressed harder on the wound. The woman's breathing steadied slightly, or maybe he was imagining that. In the distance, far enough to be a shape in the air, a siren.

  He stayed until it was close enough to matter. Then he took his hand away and rose and stepped over the crack and passed the register without looking, and out onto Allet Street where the rain had started again, thin and cold, the kind that didn't commit.

  He turned up the collar of the jacket against the rain.

  He didn't know her name. He hadn't asked. He turned it over as he walked — not regret — something found he hadn't decided what to do with yet. She'd called herself an independent in the same tone he'd have used. Like it was the least interesting true thing about her.

  He wondered if she'd think about him.

  Probably not. You didn't think about the furniture.

  The rain came down harder. He walked through it and it ran off him and didn't make him cold, and he thought about the standing up, the not-deciding. How he'd been on his feet before he'd chosen to be.

  The street opened onto a broader road and the city spread out in front of him in its middle-of-the-night version — lights, a few cars, the orange-grey sky of a place that never got fully dark. He stood at the corner and took it in.

  Different scale. Same ending.

  He kept walking. The rain didn't slow him down. Nothing did.

  That was what scared him.