I’ve spent the last forty minutes watching the back of Asa’s neck. It’s the most productive I’ve been since my last deployment. From my seat in the sixth row, I can see the way the fine, pale hairs at his nape react when I shift my weight in the plastic chair.
He knows I'm here. He knows exactly where I'm sitting, even though he's spent the entire lecture staring at the whiteboard, tracing out design theory equations that look like poetry I can almost understand.
There's a smudge of blue ink on his thumb. He doesn't know it’s there. He keeps pressing it against the side of his fountain pen, a rhythmic, nervous tic that makes me want to reach across the distance and wrap my hand over his until he stops. I want to feel the pulse in his wrist against my palm. I want to see if the ink tastes like him.
It’s been four days since I pinned him against his desk. Four days of being respectful. Four days of keeping the Black Current on a leash so short it’s beginning to choke me. I watch him turnto the class, his face a mask of academic precision that almost masks the flush blooming along his collarbone. He catches my eye for a fraction of a second, and the red deepens, spreading toward his ears.
"The intersection of geometric stability and energetic flow isn't just a mathematical curiosity," Asa says, his voice steady but a half-octave higher than it was ten minutes ago. "It's the foundation of how we contain power. Without the correct anchor point, the system doesn't just fail. It consumes itself."
He isn't just talking about architecture. He’s talking about us, whether he knows it or not. I can feel the resonance of his voice, a low-frequency hum that silences the jagged static in my brain. Being near him is like walking into a soundproof room after a week in a factory. The pressure in my chest eases, the entropic hunger of my power settling into something that feels almost like peace.
I lean forward, imagining his small body beneath mine, those delicious cries of...
A heavy, rhythmic pulse moves through the ESA emergency band strapped to my forearm. A Class-A breach. I push to my feet, the chair scraping against the floor. The rest of the students jump, heads swiveling toward me. Asa stops mid-sentence, his chalk hovering an inch from the board. He looks at me, and for the first time today, the academic mask slips. He sees the way I’m holding my shoulders. He sees the weapon waking up under my skin.
"Thorn?" he asks, his voice dropping the professor act. There's a sharp edge of concern there, the kind of raw, unpolished worry that makes the Black Current flare in response. It wants to protect him. It wants to burn the threat before it can reach this room.
"Duty calls," I say. To everyone else in the room, I’m just the strange ESA placement assigned to the university’s stabilityinitiative. They don’t know the emergency band on my arm means the city is bleeding somewhere close enough to matter.
I want to stay. I want to tell him to go home, to lock his door, to stay away from the windows. I want to grab his hand and drag him with me because the thought of being five miles away from him while the city breaks feels like a physical amputation.
The extraction team is waiting at the edge of campus in a blacked-out transport. They don't speak as I climb in. Mercer’s voice crackles over the comms, as if he isn't ordering me into a slaughterhouse.
"Sector four, Jorak. Node thirty-two has bypassed the secondary suppression cycle. We have a localized flare-sick event. Clean it up."
Clean it up. As if I’m a janitor rather than a bomb. I lean my head against the cold glass of the window and watch the university disappear. A dull ache starts behind my eyes, a hollow longing that tells me exactly how far I'm from my Asa. That shouldn’t be possible, but it’s been happening over the last four days.
An awful reminder that I’m not at his side, something that only ever happens with a compatible Esper-Guide pair.
Something me and Asa definitelycan’tbe.
By the time we hit sector four, the air is thick enough to chew. It tastes like burnt copper and wet ash. The suppression node is a squat, concrete monolith at the center of the intersection, and right now, it’s screaming, a vibration that rattles the teeth in my skull. The street is a graveyard of stalled cars and shattered glass.
I see the civilians first, a dozen of them, trapped in the flare-radius. They aren't themselves anymore. The stray power from the node has flooded their nervous systems, turning their eyes into blown-out voids and their movements into jerky, violent spasms. A woman is screaming at a mailbox, her hands bleedingwhere she’s tried to claw through the metal. A man is hunched over a gutter, his body vibrating so hard I can hear his bones clicking.
Two ESA Guides are on the perimeter, their faces pale and slick with sweat. They’re trying to hold a suppression field, their hands linked, but the energy coming off the node is jagged, entropic. It’s tearing through their barrier like a saw through silk. I can smell their burnout from here, a sour, metallic stench that reminds me of everyone I’ve ever broken.
"Get them out of here," I growl as I vault from the transport, not waiting for the orderlies to move. I step into the path of the flare, and the Black Current surges to meet it.
The power tears through the corrupted energy, but it also wants to tear through me, through the pavement, through the air itself. I can feel the heat of it charring the inside of my veins. Every breath is a struggle to keep the entropic force from expanding into a sphere of total annihilation.
I reach for the node’s energy. It’s a messy, knotted tangle of power that’s been buried too long, fermented into something poisonous. I sink my hands into the invisible flow, and the world turns to gray and black. The Current roars out of my palms, a swarm of dark needles that begin to shred the corruption.
It hurts. It hurts in a way it didn't when I was with Asa. Back in the office, with his hand near mine, the power felt like a tool. Here, it feels like a curse. I can hear the civilians crying as the suppression field collapses, their minds fracturing under the weight of the leaked energy. I push harder, forcing the Current to swallow the flare, to drag the poison back into the ground.
The feedback stings, making me stagger back, my boots skidding on the cracked asphalt. My vision flickers, and for a second, I see Asa standing in the middle of the street, looking at me with those wide, terrified eyes. It’s a hallucination, a productof the distance sickness and the strain, but it makes me lurch forward, a strangled sound tearing out of my throat.
"Focus, Jorak," Mercer’s voice echoes in my ear. "The node is still active. Don't let the resonance peak."
I want to kill him. I want to find the frequency of his voice and shred it until there’s nothing left but silence. But I do my job instead, my hands glowing with a dull, bruised light, as I slam the Current into the base of the monolith. The ground shudders. The screaming vibration of the node drops an octave, then two, until it settles into a low, menacing thrum.
The flare-sick civilians collapse and the Guides on the perimeter fall to their knees, gasping for air. It’s over. The immediate threat is contained, but the air still feels wrong.
I stand in the center of the wreckage, my chest heaving, my hands shaking so violently I have to fist them into balls. The Current is still buzzing under my skin, unsatisfied. It wanted to destroy. It wanted to feed. I feel like I’m made of glass, held together by nothing but the memory of a scent — pear and vanilla, hidden under the smell of ozone.
"Nice work, weapon," a voice says from the shadows of a nearby alleyway.
I spin, the Current flared and ready, my eyes narrowing until the world is nothing but shadows and heat. Silas is leaning against a brick wall, his arms crossed over his chest. He looks like a ghost in the gray light of the sector, his Alpha scent sharp and bitter, like old coffee and burnt paper.
