(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)
Spider-Man POV
The world stayed wrong. Ink bled through glass, color smeared to black, everything flipped like the far side of a mirror. I kept moving and the feeling only sharpened—the sense of eyes on my back, a seventh sense threading cold down my spine. Something in my head pressed against the inside of my skull, like a memory trying to fire through scar tissue and failing.
The echoes started as static.
Then they found words.
At first, guesses—past-tense shapes, almost-voices. Then they clicked into place with the accuracy of a knife laid on a seam.
"You twisted my story."
"You forced me to love you."
"You made me into something I'm not."
Lux's cadence without Lux. Breath that could've been Jinx if the room wanted it to be. The tilt of Neeko's vowels turned brittle.
"You stole what I was supposed to be," sang the Jinx-that-wasn't. "You stole my choices. You stole my essence. I don't even know if I'm me or the version you built. The dog you wanted—obedient, happy to heel."
Neeko's whisper cut low. "You made a mask of who you are and wore it until I needed you. You reached into my lowest place and tugged until I mistook your hand for daylight. Was it love you wanted... or compliance? Because every time someone defies you, it bothers you. Annoys you. And your first instinct is to make the noise stop. Easier, when people comply."
I locked my jaw until my molars ached.
They were wrong. I did what had to be done. The soft way loses wars. The hard way keeps worlds stitched together. I am not letting another Infinity War happen. I won't crawl through that again. I won't watch everything go to zero because I chose gentler words. I need to be sharp, get back up, carry it, and when I fall apart, I need—
—someone to hold the collapse so I can stand again.
The admission landed ugly and true. I hated it.
A new voice threaded the others and everything in me went still. Recognition from very far away, like hearing your name underwater.
"Peter."
She stepped out of the smear with librarian calm, lines deciding themselves as she moved. Dress, hair, hands—there. Her face kept its distance, blurred by a mercy or a curse I couldn't name.
"It's been a long time," she said. Serene, like she was trying not to wake me.
"I don't know you," I said, and part of me knew I was lying. "Who are you?"
Her voice changed. The warmth thinned; something harsher took the seat.
"You left me." No drama. Just weather. "I loved you. I carried you through the pit. I sat with you while you learned how to breathe again. Years, Peter. Years. And now you cheat on me with three girls you bent around your gravity? The you I knew would be sick at the thought. The one standing in front of me—this twisted version—doesn't even resemble him. You're disgusting. Maybe it's good you don't remember me. I wouldn't want to keep you in my conscience, either."
Something in my head snapped like wire pulled too tight. The migraine hit in a white flare. The symbiote surged warm and eager along my ribs. I moved before I could think—forward, violent, a lunge meant to make the world shut up.
She didn't flinch. The space between us did.
I missed something. Not a detail—a section. A chunk of self torn out and mislabeled as air. Looking at her was like staring at the outline of a missing organ and feeling your body remember what it used to do. Half a soul, sitting just out of reach and calling itself none of your business.
My throat locked. My stomach knotted. Tears stung with the stupidity of an old reflex; the humiliation made it worse. I could take the accusations when they wore Lux's voice. Jinx's. Even Neeko's. I could take them and grind them down into posture. But not from her. Not from the librarian I didn't know and knew. Not from the shape my bones recognized.
Breathe.
I couldn't.
This is the Dark, I told myself. This is its game. It wants you off-balance.
"No," said a second voice, calm and close, as if it had always lived in the next room over. It isn't.
My hands went still.
"It's not manipulating you," the voice went on. "It's telling you a truth."
"What truth?" I said, and hated the shake in it. "These are props."
"If they were props, why are you on the floor inside your own chest? If they were lies, would you feel like trash left in the gutter? Would your hands be shaking?"
I paused. That silence felt like giving up ground, which made me want to fill it. I didn't.
"Of course you don't know how to process it, the voice said. Painful truths aren't user-friendly. You've asked yourself for five years what happened to you. Now, when someone answers, you want to cover your ears because you don't like the sound?"
"Shut up," I said. "You don't know anything about me."
"Coward, it said without heat. You broke people and called it mercy. You bent rooms and called it safety. You've become what you swore to destroy, and in your most honest moments you know it."
"I am not—"
"You are. And if you try to kill me, you'll miss. I'm not in a place your hands can reach."
"I'll find a way." I meant it. It heard that and didn't bother to laugh.
"Do you want the truth? it asked. Do you want the memories someone ripped out of you? Keep walking. You'll get them. The test isn't whether they exist—the test is whether you can stand up under the weight. You like control on your terms. Truth won't give you that. Will you look at it anyway? Or will you aim past it and pretend it was never there?"
"I've been fixing things," I said. "I've been doing good."
"You've been masking," it said. "And sometimes your mask helped people. Often, it helped you. That's not evil. It's just smaller than the person you were. The old you would be disgusted."
I swallowed, and it hurt.
"Fine," I said. "Show me."
The librarian didn't move. Maybe she couldn't. Maybe whatever allowed her outline to hold had already paid too much rent. She watched me the way you watch someone choose which kind of pain to carry.
"I don't remember you," I told her. It sounded like a confession and a dare.
"That isn't your fault," she said, and the first crack finally ran through her voice. "What you've done since is."
I stood there, bleeding quiet where no one could see, and chose the only thing I know how to choose.
Forward.
The laughter that had been shadowing me didn't crow. It lowered itself into the trees like a satisfied note and stayed there, listening.
I adjusted my mask, reset my breath, and stepped around the hurt like it was a hole in the sidewalk I'd mapped long ago. The symbiote settled slick and calm across my chest. My Aura spread and reeled in, calibrating me back to effective. Every system told me I was fine.
I wasn't.
The park waited. The city leaned. The black fountain pulsed its wrong rhythm into an orange-dark sky.
"Keep talking," I told the second voice. "You want me to hear it? I'm walking."
"Good", it said, and for the first time it sounded almost kind. "Then listen. And don't look away when it's your fault."
I didn't promise. I watched the ground, counted my steps, and let the wound teach me how to carry it.
I let the map go.
Not the one in my lenses—the one I keep in my head. Routes, contingencies, out-clauses. I set the whole structure down and let my senses pull like thread through cloth.
The city tightens in response.
Streetlamps blink in a pattern I don't like. Three. Pause. Two. Pause. Three. The fountain keeps its wrong heartbeat in sync, black fluid climbing the air, vanishing into the orange-dark. Somewhere behind the buildings, something big turns over in its sleep and the power lines hum in sympathy.
"Good," the second voice says, close. "Let the room choose the path. It makes for cleaner data."
"I'm not your lab rat."
"You're not anyone's," it says. "That's part of the problem."
I stop trying to aim myself. The ground shifts underfoot like someone re-rolled the level design. Sidewalk buckles into sleek tile, then breathes and becomes grass again. A crosswalk's white bars lengthen until they snap into a clean chessboard grid that stretches to the corner and folds up the side of a building. For two steps, I'm walking on squares that aren't there. On the third, they're gone.
My reflection keeps pace in every window. Same shoulders, same calm. Too calm. When I look away, he looks a half-second longer, like he wants something from me I won't give.
"Peter," a mirror whispers with my voice. "You're fine."
"Liar," another one answers, honest and bored.
I keep my eyes moving.
Somewhere a dog barks, so faint it could be memory. A security drone drifts overhead like a fly that learned manners. The ad screens along the boulevard are frozen on a session of static that tried to be a face and lost confidence. Every once in a while the static resolves into a word and forgets it by the time I've read it.
The smell is wrong. Not rot. Not ozone. Something sweet that's forgotten how to be sweet. Cotton candy left out in the rain and dried in a warm room.
I roll my shoulders, the suit sliding slick across my ribs. "Keep talking," I tell the voice. "If I'm doing this your way, I want the lecture."
"Not a lecture," it says. "A transcript."
"Of what?"
"Of you."
I don't dignify that. The fountain is a block away now, then somehow three, then right in front of me with no ground covered between. It doesn't matter. Distance is a suggestion in a place designed by the kind of mind that likes to win without arriving.
The rim is higher than it was. The stone is warmer. When I put my glove on it, the surface pushes back—not pressure; preference. A living thing deciding whether to tolerate my hand.
It does.
The black rise isn't liquid. It behaves. Perfect climb. Perfect cadence. The only ripples come when a memory passes through it and decides to show itself. My face, fifteen, trying to be a man. My face, twenty, pretending pain is paperwork. My face, now, composed into usefulness.
"You built this," a reflection tells me.
"I did."
"You built it crooked," it says, and smiles a smile I'd punch if it came with a body.
"Keep walking," the second voice murmurs. "Don't argue with mirrors. They're paid by the hour."
I leave the fountain at my back and follow the pull. The ground smooths; the squares return. The board under my feet is more confident this time. Etching crawls up out of the tile like a bruise confessing itself: DENIAL on one square. CONTROL on another. HUNGER twice in opposite corners like they're daring each other to blink.
I tell myself not to read them and my eyes read them anyway.
"I get it," I say to the air. "Subtlety isn't the kink here."
"Says the man in black," the voice replies, "who learned a whole language of standing in the right place and breathing the right number of beats to make a room say yes."
I keep my pace even. Three. Pause. Two. Pause. Three. The symbiote likes rhythm. It purrs, then tries to align my breath to its own. I refuse, more out of spite than wisdom.
The windows to my left start playing a highlight reel I didn't authorize. Not battles. Not wins. Conversations I thought I had in private with people I told myself I loved correctly.
"I did what had to be done," my reflection says to Lux. His tone is the exact one I use when I'm right and sick of being right. Her hands twist in her cloak. She nods because my voice told her how.
"The hard way keeps worlds stitched together," my reflection tells Jinx. Poor Jinx; she relaxes like someone took a knot out of her spine. She doesn't notice that she leans toward me when I breathe out on the second beat.
"You needed me," my reflection tells Neeko, soft. I hated myself efficiently for that one by making sure she heard the tremor in it.
The panes answer back line for line.
"You did what was easy," Lux says.
"You like winning better than mending," Jinx says.
"You wanted me to," Neeko says, and the syllables put me back in a hallway that will never stop smelling like antiseptic and iron.
I don't speed up. Speed is surrender in a room that will let you run forever.
The street bends in a way that doesn't belong to geometry. I take the corner anyway and walk into a corridor made of glass. Not a hall of mirrors—this is a colon of mirrors, curved and narrow, designed to make you aware of your own surface area. Every pane shows a different angle of me. I watch the small tells: left shoulder tighter than right; hands too still; jaw set in a way that tells anyone who knows what to look for that I'm not okay.
"Open," a dozen Peters say at once, which is almost funny. The glass laughs for us.
"Peter," the second voice says. "Inventory. Name three things you can't fix with force."
The question is insultingly basic. It annoys me enough that I answer.
"Grief," I say. "Trust. Timing."
"Good. Keep walking."
I do.
The corridor narrows until I have to turn my shoulders. The panes switch strategies. They stop throwing my lines back at me and start rehearsing lines I haven't said yet.
"I'm fine," a Peter ahead of me says.
"Liar," the one on my left whispers.
"I can stop," the Peter two panes up insists.
"Coward," the one behind says, affectionate as a brother.
"I did it for you," one of me offers tenderly to a woman not in frame.
The glass says nothing to that. It doesn't need to. We both hear the dissonance.
The corridor opens as quickly as it constricted. I step out into an open plaza that used to be a commuter hub. The kiosk that sold coffee is still there, but the cups are glued to the counter by the idea of adhesive rather than the substance. The benches along the edges hold people-shaped absences. If I stare, the absences fill with commuters who never look up. I don't stare.
The sky pulses. Three. Pause. Two. Pause. Three. The stars blink in time and then forget to.
"You could let go," the voice suggests, as if it's proposing I try herbal tea. "You could stop being in charge of all the oxygen."
"People die when I try that."
"People die when you don't."
"Fewer," I say.
"For now," it says. "And then your ledger runs out and you pretend the numbers are wrong."
I hate that it knows how I think about what I hate.
A train hovers on broken tracks, carriages held in place like someone has their thumb and forefinger pinched around them. The doors are open; the interior is dark. A woman stands just inside, confused, keys in her hand, as if she walked into a room and forgot why. When I take a step, she becomes a reflection. When I take another, she's no one at all.
The fountain insists on being everywhere. The plaza has one too; smaller, budget version, same wrong physics. I watch the climb and vanish. My heartbeat tries to match it. I bleed the rhythm out of my lungs with a slow exhale and make my own.
"Better," the voice says, pleased.
"You going to start handing out gold stars?"
"It's not that kind of school."
"Right," I say. "No Teacher."
A pane to my right fogs as if someone breathed on it. Two taps sound against metal. Small. Precise.
My hands curl without my permission. Muscle memory is a theology; you don't have to believe in it for it to work.
"Stop," I tell the glass.
It clears.
The plaza slides a few degrees off true, and suddenly I'm walking uphill toward where downhill used to be. The tiles underfoot flatten into a long run of alternating black and white. Real chessboard, not a suggestion. No pieces. Just squares, extending up into the air and curving like ribs. When I step into the shadows between two ribs, the world goes quiet enough that I can hear the suit breathe.
"Hear that?" the voice asks.
"I'm not deaf."
"It's what silence sounds like when it's waiting for you to decide who you are."
I don't dignify that. The board drops away, becomes walkway again, then brick, then water. I don't get wet. The city remembers how to be courteous when it realizes I'm not going to give it a scene.
On the far side of the plaza, three reflections of me are arguing. It's me talking to me, which is embarrassing, but not enough to be new.
"You can't brute-force this," left-me says.
"Watch me," center-me answers.
"You're tired," right-me says, kind. "You keep pretending you found a better way to be human when you really just found a tighter box."
"I like the box," center-me says. "It stacks well."
The panes breathe. If they were alive, this would be the part where they got bored.
"You're close," the second voice says. "Keep walking."
"That's your refrain," I say. "What happens if I stop?"
"You won't."
The path narrows again into a long, straight run that shouldn't exist here. The Mirror World likes curves, coils, bendy arguments. A clean line feels like an insult. The city takes it personally and sends the wind to make a point. It stinks faintly of old leaves and something electrical.
I don't look up. Looking up is an invitation in a sky like this.
The tiles under my boots change texture. Slick. Then rough. Then smooth. The sound they give back stays wrong. Wet when it should be dry. Soft when it should be hard. There's a childish part of me that wants to stomp until the acoustics behave. I don't give it the satisfaction.
"What did you miss most?" the voice asks, casual.
"After what?"
"After zero."
I know what it means. I hate that I know.
"Silence," I say.
"How convenient."
"Honesty isn't always a speech," I tell it. "Sometimes it's the part where you shut your mouth."
"That hasn't been your strong suit lately."
"Neither has humility," I say. "And yet."
"And yet," it echoes, amused.
A traffic light up ahead bleeds green down its pole and into the sidewalk like paint on a hot day. The green runs until it hits my boot and stops. It tries to climb the leather, changes its mind, and melts back into the street. The air above the intersection thickens with a powder that wants to be snow and can't remember how. It piles at the edges of the world, hopes no one will notice, then evaporates when I get close.
"Demonstrations," I say. "You showing off for me or for yourself?"
"Who says this is about you?" the voice asks, fake-innocent, which is almost endearing.
"It's always about me," I say, and that honesty tastes like someone else's blood.
A row of storefronts on my right decides to be a library. Stacks climb the walls and keep going where the roof should be. The shelves are full of books I know I've read and can't name. A mug sits on a table by the door, steaming.
I don't go in.
"Progress," the voice notes.
"You want me to need it," I say. "You want me to move toward it and pretend that's my idea."
"I want nothing," it says. "Wanting is your species' thing. I keep records."
"Good for you," I say. "How's my permanent file?"
"Thick," it says. "Heavier than you're carrying."
I make a sound that would be a laugh if I believed in those here.
The street ends in a wall that isn't a wall. It's a seam where the city decided two versions of itself should collide. One side is the Valoran I know, if you squint. The other is what it thinks I deserve. I pick neither and walk the seam itself like a curb.
The next corner arrives and I don't decide whether to turn; I'm already on the new street. It takes me three steps to realize my feet brought me here for a reason. The reason stands thirty yards ahead, between a dead street vendor's umbrella and the shadow of a stop sign that doesn't cast from anything.
A silhouette, tall and narrow, waiting with his hands in his pockets.
He looks like a man the way a perfect counterfeit looks like money—better than the original because the errors have been smoothed away. Tailored coat. Shoes that don't get dirty. A posture that says he knows where the exits are and thinks I should too. His face, when he brings it out of the shadow, is bright with a kind of quiet joy that doesn't belong here. It belongs over coffee at a table where the best part of the day hasn't happened yet.
Everything in me goes silent long enough to register the sound of the fountain's pulse. Three. Pause. Two. Pause. Three.
"Evening," he says, as if we're neighbors who met by the mailboxes.
I don't answer. The suit tightens; my Aura presses outward, then back in again, calibrating to a threat I can't quantify. He doesn't flinch. He reads the pressure like humidity.
"You walk well," he says, delighted. "Most people start to run."
I stop ten yards short. Close enough to be rude if this were a party, far enough that I have time if this is a trap. It's both.
"What do I call you?" I ask.
He tilts his head, considering, like a man choosing between two honest answers.
"Carter," he says, and the smile widens by a millimeter, like we've just agreed on a joke no one else needs to hear.
"Carter," I repeat, because names like to hear themselves.
"Helps to have something to call each other," he says. "Otherwise we just point."
He doesn't posture. No slow clap. No monologue. He looks at me the way bartenders look at regulars—like he already knows my order and is waiting to see if I admit it.
"Mask comfortable?" he asks, mild.
"It fits."
"Good. You touch the left lens when you're deciding not to escalate. The right when you've already decided to."
I don't blink. He smiles like I did.
"Counting?" he asks.
"No."
"You are. Three. Two. Three." He lifts a finger with each number, casual. "It keeps your hands steady."
"It keeps my breathing steady."
"Same difference when your hands are what you breathe with."
I don't give him a laugh. He doesn't want one. He wants the micro-tell right after.
"You ration feeling," he says next, like he's checking off a grocery list. "Not absence—economy. Use it when it buys leverage. Offer it when it closes distance. Withhold it when it would cost you posture."
"Is this where you charge by the hour?"
"Just collecting honest words," he says. "They're rare here."
He tilts his head, considering me from a new angle. "When someone stands too close, you picture their betrayal first and their kindness second. Defensive calculus. Sensible, given your history."
"What history is that?"
"The one you can't name without your head hurting," he says gently.
My knuckles itch.
He keeps the same friendly tone. "Sarcasm is your shield. Cruelty, your scalpel. You call it honesty when you need to use it on people you love. It works. They hear the accuracy and forget the incision."
"You always this charming on a first date?" I ask.
"Only with people who think they don't date," he says, delighted.
He doesn't move closer, but the street shortens anyway. Ten yards become eight without either of us taking a step. The city likes him. Or it fears him. With some things, the behavior looks the same.
"Let's try small questions," he says. "They're kinder."
"I'm all ears."
"Do you ever sleep with the Aura off?"
I hate that my hands answer before my mouth does. A twitch. A fraction.
"Thought so," he says, still friendly. "You learned a breathing pattern that makes rooms like you. That isn't evil. It's just... efficient. Anyone in your orbit should get informed consent. They don't."
"That's a big accusation for a small question."
"Not an accusation," he says. "An observation."
He shifts his weight. The coat behaves like it's in lighter gravity than mine. "You like straight answers. You give them when the lie would cost more. You hate being opposed. Being ignored is worse. You call obedience 'trust' when you've earned it and 'strategy' when you haven't."
"You've been reading my fan mail."
He grins wider by a millimeter. "Two years."
Right. He did say the quiet part once: data. Clean.
"How many hearts are you managing at the moment?" he asks. Light. Teasing, even.
"Managing?"
"Thread count," he clarifies, eyes dipping to my chest and back up, as if he can see the geometry and finds it tasteful. "Three prominent lines. A few thinner ones. Very elegant tensioning."
"You counting for sport?"
"For structure." He gestures with an open hand. "You say you're comfortable with a crowd. But you're not. You prefer a single door you can close behind you. One person as home. The crowd is an alibi and a control grid."
My jaw tightens a notch. He clocks it like a polite man notices an empty glass.
"You do protect what you love," he adds, and there isn't mockery in it. "Fiercely. But you've started protecting people from themselves by editing the parts that make your job harder. You call that safety."
"Sometimes it is."
"Often," he agrees. "And sometimes it's possession."
He lets the word stand between us like a wet sign on tile: caution. Slippery.
"Tell me," he goes on. "When the others aren't around—when your bright friends with their bright eyes are doing their best somewhere else—what do you do with problems?"
"Fix them."
"End them," he says, still gentle. "Quickly. Cleanly. You are more efficient alone. You don't have to narrate your choices."
"You going to arrest me?"
"On what jurisdiction?" He laughs, genuinely pleased. "I said efficient. Not wrong."
The wind picks up and dies in the space of a breath. Somewhere behind us, a stack of newspapers decomposes into dust and then remembers it's paper again. He watches my eyes not track it.
"Good," he says. "You're present. Let's keep going."
He takes a half-step, then doesn't. The street shifts under him so it looks like he did. The stars above us realign by a hair, like someone adjusted the frame.
"Two ghosts travel with you," he says. "One corrected your hand. One corrected your breath. Neither is here. The missing is louder because of that."
I don't let the two taps move through me. They move anyway.
"You don't say their names," he observes. "Not because you're hiding them. Because you don't have them."
"Want to tell me who they are?"
"I like letting people remember themselves," he says. "Sticks better."
"Kind of you."
"I try."
He studies my face without trespassing. Not staring. Not invasive. The way you check a thermometer to see if a fever broke.
"You regret less than you should," he says. "But more than you admit. The flashes embarrass you. You punish yourself by working until you can't feel them."
"Or by standing in haunted parks talking to men with good shoes," I say.
"They are good," he agrees, glancing down like he'd forgotten. "Thank you."
The ground ripples with a pattern that almost makes a sound. Three. Pause. Two. Pause. Three. He taps his thumb softly against his thigh, off-beat, and the ripple hesitates, confused.
"Another small question," he says. "Do you like who you are when no one is watching you perform competence?"
"That person keeps people alive."
"That person keeps you safe," he says. "They're not the same sentence. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they don't."
The reflex is anger. The suit warms to it the way cats move toward a sunny square on the floor. I don't feed it.
He notices. "Good restraint," he says, approving. "You've been practicing."
"On who?"
"On yourself."
He lifts his chin toward the reflected city around us. "You know what I like about you? You're honest about your need for control. You don't couch it in purpose. You couch it in math. You say: the soft way loses wars, the hard way stitches worlds. It's blunt and it's wrong, but it's honest."
"Wrong how?"
"The soft way loses some wars," he says. "The hard way loses you."
I hate that it lands. I hate that he says it like he's complimenting my taste.
His eyes stray past my shoulder, up, where the green in the moonlight wants to show itself and thinks better of it. He lets the city flirt with spectacle and doesn't call attention to it. Salesmanship. He sells ease. Not worship. Not awe. Efficiency.
"Tell me about the first punch," he says suddenly.
"What?"
"The reflex," he clarifies. "How long between insult and strike. How it feels to skip the part where you consider the mercy you used to be proud of."
"Who says I skipped it?"
"You did," he says, and it's not a trap; it's a memory cue. "With your body. When your head couldn't keep up."
"I do what I have to."
"I know," he says. "That's why I like you."
The plaza's little fountain coughs and resets its climb. My heart tries to match it. I let it, then break it. The deviation buys me a second of clean air.
"You didn't ask me my name," I say.
"I gave you one," he says, thoughtful. "It will do."
"For tonight?"
"For as long as it's funny."
"I'm thrilled I amuse you."
"You do," he says warmly. "Most people bore me by insisting on being smaller than their damage. You at least built a system."
He gestures around us with a small flick of the fingers, taking in the warped skyline like a critic at an installation. "How do you like my room?"
"Drafty," I say.
"Accurate." He looks pleased, as if I've passed something.
He doesn't push. He doesn't lean. He walks around me without moving, testing angles the way sunlight tests a window. Every time he finds a line he likes, the city clicks half a degree into alignment with it.
"Last small question," he says. "When you finally get the truth you've been asking for, will you keep it? Or will you make a better story?"
"I don't make stories," I say. "I hold the line."
He smiles like that was the answer he was waiting for. "Of course you do."
He pockets his hands, casual. "Walk with me?"
It isn't a command. It feels like one because the world obeys.
The street hinges at the middle and reattaches a foot to the left. Storefronts slide, align. The sky's starfield shivers, then settles into a new pattern that matches the tap of his thumb instead of the fountain's climb. The air itself seems to move half a beat ahead of my steps, like time is doing me the favor of arriving early.
I don't move.
He doesn't turn to see if I follow. He smiles without widening it and takes a single, ordinary step.
The city goes with him.
He takes the step.
The street folds with him like paper pinched between fingers. Storefronts slide into a tidier argument; the sky rotates by a hair until the stars sit where his thumb wants them. Time tugs half a beat forward, helpful as a doorman.
I match pace without giving him the satisfaction of calling it following.
Above us, the moon remembers a color it shouldn't know. A green wash rolls across the city—thin at first, then confident. It isn't a hue so much as a tuning. Heads lift in the blocks below. Not in unison. In sympathy. People angle toward the light as if a choir director lifted a hand they didn't see.
Carter glances up, pleasantly curious. "Odd. Urban glare? Some old sodium vapor playing tricks with particulates?"
We both watch a traffic circle's worth of pedestrians slow to the same tempo. Conversations soften by the same degree. A man checking his phone forgets to frown. A woman arguing into her headset smiles without changing her sentence.
The green deepens one notch. I feel it push on the frequency my Aura prefers—a gentle, precise pressure, as if someone set a tuning fork next to a wineglass.
I break my breath on purpose. Three. Pause. Two. Pause. Three. The suit purrs; I tell it no with my spine.
Carter notices the change without looking. "It happens, doesn't it?" he says, like we're discussing weather. "Moon takes a shade, people match. Small phenomena, big feelings."
The light drains away cleanly, like someone saw their reflection and decided they looked better in their natural color.
"Lucky," he adds, smiling. "Could have made everyone sentimental."
We turn. The city swaps avenues without asking—as if we'd chosen a different route and the world decided to agree early. On the flat line of the eastern edge, a squall forms where the grid should keep nothing from forming. Whiteout, crisp and total, like someone poured chalk into the sky. It advances two blocks with laminar grace, piles itself into drifts that shoulder up against building faces, then stops, considers, and vanishes. The ground remembers it shouldn't be cold.
"Local inversion," Carter muses. "Textbook. Air does like its surprises."
His hands never leave his pockets.
We pass two men at an outdoor table that never existed, trading cards that refuse to sit on the surface and keep sliding into the mirror of the wood. They don't notice. When the moon washed them, their eyes got the same far-away glaze I've seen on cultists and tired parents. Now they're fine. Now they're nothing.
On the next block, the city tries to decide whether it's going to be kind to me or honest. It picks both, which is worse.
Akali stands in the street like she forgot how legs work. Kai'Sa's bracelets strobe a pulse that doesn't belong to physics, her breath caught between fight and flight. They're here and not. Their reflections on a storefront are holding hands on a bench again, smiling a tenderness that's none of the city's business.
The green left a hangover. Their pupils don't agree with the light. Their balance is arguing with their skull.
Carter's smile warms. Not cruel. Interested.
I don't look at him. I step in front of the girls and let my voice land on the exact frequency that steadies nervous systems.
"On me," I say. No push. A scaffold. "Right here."
Threads lift from my chest, thin and clean, geometry my mind draws whether or not I sign off on it. Akali's gaze snaps to mine because my cadence offers her an easier rhythm than the world. Kai'Sa's shoulders drop a centimeter when my exhale hits the second beat.
My Aura is a loaded tool. I tune it down until it's just enough to keep the ground from slipping. It would be easy—so easy—to leave the lines in and name it protection. The reflex writes the script by itself: stay close, breathe with me, I'll make the room make sense.
I keep the threads light. I hold, then ease off.
"I've got you," I tell them. "You can hate me later."
Akali takes a breath that doesn't hurt. Kai'Sa blinks fast, swallows, nods. The bracelets ratchet down their strobe.
Carter watches without comment, the way you watch a craftsman fix a hinge.
The world tries to argue again. The reflections on the storefront tilt their heads, pitying. I don't care. I anchor the girls for three breaths, then step back and let the geometry slacken.
"Go," I tell them. "Find real sky. Don't stop until the colors make sense."
They run because they're smart. The Mirror World doesn't yank them back. Not this minute.
"Merciful," Carter says, as if talking to himself. "Someone could almost believe this city loved you."
"Someone would be wrong."
"Someone often is."
We start walking again. He doesn't invite it; the street assumes it. I let the plaza slip behind us. The chess etching underfoot has bled into the paving so fully I don't need to look down to see where the words live. DENIAL. CONTROL. HUNGER. TRUTH. I don't step on TRUTH like a child avoiding cracks. I step where I have to.
Carter tips his chin at a distant block where the whiteout squall didn't quite finish its exit. A single drift clings to a rooftop, defiantly precise, like a design choice. A breeze hits it from the wrong direction and it doesn't move. Then it remembers it should, and it does, dissolving into ordinary cold air.
"Air's a mood," he says, mock-philosophical. "City planners never plan for that."
He doesn't claim credit. He never will. He asks questions like he's adding to a civic report. He lets the room perform the argument for him.
We pass a billboard that used to be an apology for a soft drink. The static tries to become a face again, then a word. It lands on EASIER for a second too long and I feel my molars grind. The suit likes easier. It hums at the syllables like they taste sweet.
"Don't," I tell it, under my breath.
"Not a fan of the slogan?" Carter asks, amiable.
"I've had worse."
"True," he says. "But few more honest."
On a side street, a bicyclist rides through a patch of air that forgot it isn't water. The tires slice a ripple; the ripple doesn't collapse. He coasts for six impossible seconds, gliding on a smoothness the city won't admit to. Then reality remembers itself and the bike returns to friction. He laughs, delighted, looking around for the prankster. There is none.
"City spirits," Carter says, faux-superstitious. "Always good for a story."
He is enjoying himself. Not in a way that needs my pain; in a way that appreciates well-made systems doing what they were made to do.
"Small question," he adds, as if catching a thought. "How many people can you hold up like that before your wrists shake?"
"Depends on the day."
"And the guilt," he says gently.
"And the guilt," I agree, because lying would cost me more here.
We walk past a newsstand that sells headlines no one wrote. Every paper on it carries a different version of my face. Some are honest. Most are flattered. All are composed. None are tired. A child version of me stares out from one with a bruise blooming at the cheek and a smile that promises he'll deserve the next one. I do not stop.
The moon threatens green again, then thinks better of it. The wind considers bringing the white back and decides no. Somewhere behind us the fountain coughs, resets its climb, matches my heartbeat perfectly for one pulse, then loses the beat.
Carter watches me register each of these and not give any of them as much attention as they want. He looks—genuinely—pleased.
"You're good at triage," he says. "You used to be better at repair."
"People change."
"They do," he says. "Especially when they decide to stop being complicated in public."
He slows, not by walking slower but by asking the street to remember how to stretch. It does. We end up under an overhang that belongs to a building the city hasn't finished inventing. The light here is almost ordinary. I can hear my own thoughts without the room humming along.
"Truth for a truth?" he offers, easy as a drink across a counter. "I say something true you don't have. You say something true you've been hiding from yourself. No witnesses. No receipts. Just two men in the wrong city."
"No."
He smiles anyway, as if the refusal was the answer he wanted. "You don't even want terms?"
"I don't bargain with people who move the moon to make a point."
He glances up like the idea just occurred to him and grins a fraction. "I think it moved itself."
"Sure it did."
"Another time, then," he says, not pressing. "When the day costs you more and the price bothers you less."
He turns his head. The stars obey the gesture by half a degree. The street obliges with a hinge. Time takes one polite step ahead to keep us from tripping.
We start walking again.
I don't follow. I arrive where he is, because the world likes him, and if I want to stay in the conversation, I have to go where the conversation is.
He doesn't look back to check.
He knows I will.
He angles us toward a service alley that shouldn't be here. The city obliges by remembering a door. Inside: a narrow room that smells like hot metal and old coffee. A workbench grows out of the wall—a slab with a vise, a scatter of drivers, a bracket hanging by a single bolt at the wrong angle.
I don't touch it.
Carter steps into the space my body remembers as his. Not Carter's—his. Left shoulder to my right. Close enough to steady without crowding. He doesn't look at me. He lifts two knuckles, taps the bracket twice—small, precise.
I hear the sound in my bones before my ears catch up.
Nothing else. No speech. No correction. He holds the angle the way my teacher used to: patience as a posture, saying again without saying again.
Every part of me wants to move, to fix the misalignment, to satisfy the ritual. My hand twitches toward the torque. I force it still.
The symbiote enjoys the tension like a cat watching a glass on the edge of a table.
"Cute," I say. It comes out too dry.
He doesn't grin. He keeps the bracket where it should be and then, as if the decision was made for him, steps back. The room exhales. The vise forgets what it was gripping. The tools line up as if embarrassed.
We leave without deciding to.
On the next block the city tries to be a café and almost succeeds. A table sits under an awning that keeps out a rain that hasn't been invented yet. There's a mug on the table, steam curling in a way that suggests the shape of a hand. The page of a book lies open to a line I recognize and cannot read.
He doesn't sit. He stands where she stood—my left this time, one pace off, where her patience made a room feel smaller and survivable. He watches the steam the way she did when she measured whether I was breathing or just moving air.
"Breathe," he says, soft.
It isn't mimicry. It lands the way the word used to land: a permission disguised as an order.
I don't obey. I do it anyway. My lungs discover they had been cheating and correct their form.
The mug stays warm. It will keep staying warm until I move. That was the rule.
I almost say her name.
The window to my right fogs and writes Liar with the tip of someone's finger.
I close my mouth. My tongue hurts where the syllable dragged across it and didn't get to live.
Carter never changes shape. He never cants his head the way they did. He never steals their voices. He occupies the coordinates they left in me and lets the room supply the rest. The map of where to stand, the distances that mean care, the things you don't say because the presence says them for you—he lays his body exactly there and the city does the arithmetic.
We walk. The bench becomes sidewalk becomes hallway becomes a seam between versions of Valoran that don't want to meet. He lifts a hand to adjust a cuff; a street of mirrors tenses and then relaxes as if a judge entered chambers. The wind blows from nowhere in particular and brings with it the dry, empty smell I've come to associate with the space behind reflections.
"Coincidence," he offers, friendly. "Cities have their little courts."
He says court like it's a place that remembers verdicts.
I catalog. Joyous man. Human language. Green moon that tuned a thousand pulses. A squall that remembered to leave. Questions small enough to dodge and dangerous to answer. A smile that sells ease. The way he likes standing in other people's positions more than wearing their faces.
He drifts to my right again. Two knuckles lift—tap, tap. The bracket's ghost answers with a phantom ring from somewhere behind my ribs. I don't move. He doesn't ask me to.
We pass a glass wall that only reflects when it wants to. For a blink, it shows me at the workbench with the Teacher. For another, the Nexus table with the Librarian. For a third, this exact alley with this exact man. The three scenes kiss at the edges and try to decide which one is true. The pane gets bored and goes dark.
"Small mercies," he says, watching a cloud decide whether to exist. "Memory can be such a bully."
"Is that what you told them?" I ask. "When you stood where I stood and offered them a simpler world?"
"I don't offer worlds," he says, amused. "I offer better workflows."
The answer is so honest it feels obscene.
We stop without stopping under an arch that is also a rib, also a proscenium, also a simple overpass with bad graffiti. He positions himself on the left again, the way she would when she didn't want to block my line of sight. The steam on the mug we left a block ago threads itself through the air and finds us. It keeps its temperature.
"Breathe," he says, almost a whisper, and a piece of me I hate relaxes.
I say a name in my head. The glass answers with Liar a heartbeat before I get cocky enough to make it vocal.
I let the rebuke live. I deserve it.
He steps back. The map in me reorients to the absence like a compass needle deciding north.
"What are you doing," I ask, not a question.
"Demonstrating," he says, as if we're in a showroom and he's trying to get me the good warranty. "It's often clearer than explanation."
"Clearer than impersonation."
"Impersonation is rude," he agrees. "This is cartography."
He says it with a warmth that doesn't belong in a city like this. Joy. Unforced. Either he feels it or he can fake it better than anyone I've ever met.
The wind from behind the mirrors sighs along the alley. The light shifts green for a heartbeat and pretends it didn't. Somewhere, exactly two taps echo and go quiet, and if I admit I heard them I will fall into a hole I don't have time to climb out of.
I add the pieces together because I have to.
Joyous human who never stumbles over a word.
Propagandist who lets the room sell for him.
Moonlight that tunes crowds like instruments.
A court you can be brought to without walking.
A void that breathes like a draft under a closed door.
A habit of standing in the empty coordinates of the people who built me.
I don't say the name my head wants to test. I don't give him the pleasure of hearing me try it on.
"I see you," I say instead.
The smile widens by a millimeter, delighted that the coin dropped without touching the ground.
"Good," he says, as if we've both just agreed to an honest price.
He takes my measure the way tailors pretend they're only checking seams.
"No names," he says lightly. "Just terms."
"Hard pass," I say, because reflex is a kind of spine.
"Try hearing them," he suggests. "Refusing sounds better when you know what you refused."
He steps a pace to my right; the alley finds a skylight it didn't have. Pale light spills down, clean as a clinic. My temples throb once as if they've been waiting for their cue.
"First," he says, conversational. "I can take the headaches."
The word lands exactly where the pain lives. The symbiote stirs, hopeful.
He watches my pupils, not my posture. "They're useful," he concedes. "They tell you when you've lied to yourself hard enough to bruise. They also make your hands less reliable. Your work suffers. Your aim, your patience, the tiny muscles that steady your voice. I can quiet them. Permanently."
"What do you charge?" I ask, and I hate that I ask.
"Not money," he says, gently pleased. "Practice. Keep the tide out." His chin dips, eyes flick to my chest and back like he's looking at a watch. "Aura on. All the time. No more toggling. No more oh, I didn't mean to nudge. You codify what you already do. You'll sleep easier. So will everyone around you."
The room doesn't breathe. I do.
"You're asking me to make coercion policy."
"I'm asking you to stop pretending your weather is natural," he says, friendly and cruel in the same sentence. "Name it. Own it. People prefer consistent gravity to intermittent storms."
I picture Lux relaxing on command, Jinx's shoulders easing, Neeko's world narrowing to a room with me in the middle. The part of me that loves ease purrs. The part of me that remembers what home is snarls.
"No," I say.
"Shame," he says. "You'd be very... efficient."
He lifts two fingers in a small, harmless gesture. The skylight fades. The alley remembers the color of old coffee.
"Second," he says. "A gift, really. A memory you're missing."
The world tilts a fraction. A bracket rings twice from nowhere. Steam lifts from a mug I didn't look at. My throat forgets how to swallow.
"Which one," I ask, soft because anything louder will crack.
"The one that keeps waking up behind your eyes and finding nowhere to sit," he says. "I can put it back on its chair."
I keep my face calm. The suit tightens, mistaking restraint for threat.
"And the cost," I say.
"Honesty," he says, bright with approval. "Payment on delivery: you accept what the edit means."
"What edit?"
He smiles like I told a good joke. "There's no such thing as an unedited return. You know this. The moment you know a thing is back by a foreign hand, your head will never stop checking its edges. You will keep turning it in the light for forgery marks, even when you're holding it close. You will never be sure where it ends and I began. It will be yours again, and it will also be mine. That's the cost. The seed. The doubt that never dies."
The mug's steam curls toward me like it remembers my breath. I want to step forward and let it find me. I don't.
"No," I say, and it hurts like pulling a hook backward out of skin.
"Shame," he says again, and he means it. Not disappointment. Aesthetic regret. The way you feel when someone refuses a perfect fit because they don't trust the mirror.
He looks past me, as if giving me a moment to want what I refused and hate myself later. The city obliges by pretending nothing is happening at all.
"Third," he says, voice easy as a bartender offering a refill. "The real offer."
"Of course it is."
"A simpler world," he says. "Fewer variables. Same city, same people, but the friction shaved. The corners softened. The choices that cost you friends become choices your friends make happily. You keep them safe because the roads all slope toward safety. You'll still have to work. You'll just stop tripping over other people's definitions of love."
He watches me not react and smiles, delighted.
"It won't be mind control," he adds, helpful. "No weird colored moons, no strings on wrists. Just the kind of compromise people already make when they love someone and don't want to die. You concede, finally, that love should bend to safety. Not all the way. Just enough to stop breaking your teeth on it."
My mouth tastes like metal. I don't know if it's blood or memory.
"Say yes," he says softly. "And you'll still be you. You'll just be a version that survives."
The suit is very interested. The part of me that built systems to carry grief leans toward him like a plant toward a window.
The second voice, the one that has been threading truth through me since the park, stays quiet. It lets me pick.
I think about what happens to rooms when I decide their safety is worth more than their agency. I think about Lux's eyes when she waits for my breath to tell her where to stand. I think about Jinx laughing because I kept the wolves at the door and then kept the door closed. I think about Neeko waking up to a world that only opens the doors I approve. I think about her voice saying breathe and meaning don't vanish. I think about the two taps. I think about how easy it would be to be proud of being useful and never admit I'm also being small.
I let the silence stand long enough that he starts to enjoy it for the wrong reason.
"No," I say, and I feel the word cut something clean in me that needed cutting.
He considers me for a heartbeat, then nods once, accepting the refusal like a man who appreciates a well-set bone.
"Pride?" he asks, curious.
"Terror," I say. "And pride."
"Good," he says, delighted again. "You tell the truth when it costs you. I was starting to worry."
He lifts his hands from his pockets and brings them together for a single, polite clap.
It shouldn't echo. It does—once, twice, three times, the same sound looping with no air to carry it, like a bad edit refusing to correct. The world tilts a hair toward the noise, then rights itself. The sound keeps going without source until it decides it's finished.
Behind him, the alley remembers it has another end.
A corridor unfurls where brick used to be—narrow, glass-walled, the kind of space that believes in angles the way churches believe in altars. Mirrors line it, patient. A soft breath of cold slides out, not a draft so much as the feeling of something that has been waiting without hurry.
He doesn't look back to admire the work. He just lets it exist.
"Shall we?" he asks, as if we're stepping into a gallery. "You'll like this one. It's honest."
I don't answer.
I step forward anyway.
The corridor inhales us and changes its mind about being a corridor.
Floor and ceiling buckle into a grid that keeps folding into itself until there's no up left—just squares spilling into sky and curving back like ribs. Etching rises from the tile as if truth bruised its way through paint.
DENIAL. CONTROL. HUNGER. LOSS. TRUTH.
No pawns, no horses, no kings. Just ideas on bases, sliding where they please without hands to push them.
Carter doesn't change. The room does for him. A breeze finds him first—no, not a breeze. A decision the air made to move. It tastes clean, high, mountain-cold, and wrong here. It lifts the hem of his coat and combs the street's grime out of the seams. He is very slightly more centered after it passes, like wind adjusted his posture.
Another step and the smell shifts. Ozone. Sharp, metallic, the prickle before a storm breaks a transformer. The hair along my wrists thinks about standing up. The symbiote stretches thin and gleaming across my forearms, purring at the charge.
Then the undertone arrives, quiet and humiliating: a rot-leaning sweetness, the way a hallway smells the day after someone mopped every sin they could reach. It sits under everything like a dare to keep your face still.
He doesn't sprout anything. He doesn't roar. But when he turns his head to follow the slide of a TRUTH piece, the alley throws his shadow three inches too far and the edges of that shadow have teeth. Not a lot. Just enough that your nervous system logs it and pretends it didn't.
"Agency," he says lightly, as if we're touring a design studio. "Framework."
He's narrating because he knows I hate being narrated at.
The board moves to pen me toward a corner that didn't exist before. CONTROL and HUNGER bracket my path. LOSS glides behind them without hurry, confident the corner will still be there when I arrive.
I shoot web.
Not at him. At the story.
Lines snap out, bright and thin, and catch nothing visible until they do. They stick to edges that don't have names—beats between beats, the timing notch you put a knife into to free a mechanism. I anchor TRUTH to HUNGER across three squares and feel the tension hum. If HUNGER moves, TRUTH has to follow. If TRUTH goes first, HUNGER gets dragged like a mistake.
The room hates that. It respects it.
"Anchors," Carter says, eyes warm. "Good choice."
I throw more. Symbiote-hardened, the webbing goes matte and heavy in the air, Narralith by behavior if not by metallurgy. I staple cause to effect: If the door opens, it can't re-close for five breaths. If the street turns left, gravity will remember it's not a spiral. If someone takes a step, the ground won't forget them.
The labels underfoot keep sliding. DENIAL tries to take a square I'm balanced on. I nail it to LOSS for a count of three and step off before I have to pay the interest.
The first loop shows its teeth as we crest the bend of a rib.
A man at a curb steps out into a crosswalk that never resolves. Cars roll toward him forever at a distance that never closes. He checks his phone, tucks it back, steps again, almost weeps, resets at the curb with a breath he never finishes. He's been here for minutes or days; the Mirror World doesn't care how you measure.
I could lift him and carry him out. The board would adjust and we'd be running again inside of two moves.
So I web the rule that's keeping him.
If a foot leaves the curb and the light is white, time will pass without asking permission.
The air buckles like I stapled a page to skin. The cars are suddenly where they should have been three seconds ago. He stops—midstep—laughs once like he found a dollar on the ground, and hustles across without looking back.
"Elegant," Carter says, genuinely pleased. "Local solutions are underrated."
A gust spins down from nowhere, tight as a drill. It tries to blow my anchors off their ideas. The Narralith web hums but holds. The suit grins against my ribs.
The board slides again. CONTROL wants me on a rail where it can talk to me about logistics. I let it think it got me and cut across to the square marked TRUTH. It doesn't like my weight. I give it more.
Up ahead, a staircase remembers that it is a loop. Commuters—shadows that decided to be people for a shift—climb and find themselves at the landing where they began, relief pulling their faces into tired smiles that never reach their eyes. Down-climbers do the same; they meet in the middle, apologize, step aside, and land back where they started. Polite Hell.
"Staple the handrail," the second voice says, like it's instructing a child to set a table.
I put one web across the word EXIT above the door and another across the last riser. If a hand touches the rail, the landing is where it pretends to be. A woman reaches and the world heaves, then decides to obey. She blinks, almost cries, realizes she won, and sprints.
Carter steps into a square of HUNGER and the whole board shifts to give him room. He watches me not look at him as electricity thinks about skittering along the tile between us and decides to keep thinking.
"You're fighting the room," he notes, approving. "Good instincts. People waste themselves on the person."
"I'm good with people," I say, because petty is a ballast.
"Mm," he says, amused.
The odor under the air thickens. A newsstand collapses into tinder just by remembering that wood happens. It doesn't burn. It sulks. I ignore it.
The chess labels learn me. They start to slide under my feet at the last second, trying to trick me into stepping on DENIAL when I think it's TRUTH. I extend the symbiote down my boots and let it read the floor. It purrs at the pressure differences and sends little nudges up my calves in time with the pulse I've been using. Three. Pause. Two. Pause. Three.
On the far side of the bend, the city tries something subtler. A little boy stands in a doorway that is also a mirror. He waves to a mother that is also a reflection. They keep missing each other by a second; when one turns, the other turns back. The game plays sweet until you see the panic in the boy's shoulders.
I freeze the square. Then I web the interval between the gestures. If one turns, the other cannot. The moves snap downward into sequence; the mother sees him on the next beat and the boy collapses into her like physics is finally on his side.
"Kind," Carter says.
"Required."
"Both," he says, which I hate more than I should.
The board doesn't panic when I win small. It makes better offers. A corridor tilts toward ease so obviously that my ankles almost do it a favor.
I staple the angle to No.
"Stubborn," he says.
"Experienced," I say.
He drifts closer without taking a step. The Haunter's wind returns—a push that is not a push, tailored to the moment between exhale and inhale where my balance thinks about being a suggestion. The ozone sharpens until it's a taste and I feel the beginning of a filament trying to run across my web—static hunting a path. The foul undertone leans up from the floorboards like a rumor.
I pull my anchors tight enough to sing. The web obeys the song and the room grudgingly follows the web.
A plaza resolves where there wasn't one. Benches. A broken kiosk. A fountain a quarter of the size of the first one, with the same wrong climb and the same lie about gravity's preferences. The mirror-park has learned I will not sermonize it into decency and now it wants to make me waste time on maintenance.
A handful of people-shaped absences sit on the benches and recover from things they'll never describe correctly. They're safe because the room is bored of them. The loop that matters hides in a corner the world doesn't like to render: a door swinging between one room and the next, refusing to choose a hinge.
Inside, a woman keeps picking up her keys.
She drops them, winces, stoops, lifts. Drops them. The metal hits the tile with the same polite tink every time, a metronome for despair. She is exactly at the age where tears embarrass you more than pain.
I don't step inside. I web the hinge to the finish—doors that pick a direction stay chosen for five breaths. I add a second staple: keys on a floor stay found. The world resents the specificity and obeys. The keys stay in her hand. She laughs the wrong laugh—sharp, defensive—then the right one, tiny and private. She leaves the door open on her way out like a good scout.
The square labeled LOSS slides under my toes and waits. I put one foot on it and do not move the other. The room wants me to commit. I refuse but don't retreat. The suit shivers, proud. It likes this version of me: exact, impolite, impossible to hurry.
Carter's coat breathes. In the reflection of the kiosk's broken glass, his shadow's fingers are very slightly too long. In the reflection of the fountain, he doesn't show at all.
"Framework," he says again, friendly as a neighbor discussing HOA rules. "You are arguing with them very well."
"Then why aren't you losing?"
"I don't have to win," he says, delighted. "I only have to tutor."
"Fire me," I say.
"After this lesson," he says.
The board decides to be honest and ugly at once.
A loop crosses our path that isn't a scene; it's a sentence. YOU ARE FINE. It threads itself through the air at chest height, bright as neon, and tries to push past me into my mouth. If it gets in, it will put its feet up. I let it pass through me without catching. It hates that and tries again. I put a line across it with the web, the way you cross out a lie in a notebook. It flickers, offended, and picks on someone else.
"Rude," Carter says, as if the word offended his sensibilities.
"Liar," a pane to my left adds helpfully, and for once it isn't talking to me.
The board slows. It's not out of tricks; it's negotiating. My anchors have pinned enough rules that the room can't glide without paying a toll. It pays. It's patient.
I am not.
"There," he says softly.
He isn't pointing. He doesn't need to. The city has been angling me at a decision for the last thirty heartbeats and I've been pretending not to notice.
A small crowd is gathered at the edge of the plaza, the way birds gather when the air is weird. They're not real. They're also real enough. Their reflections in the fountain smile that borrowed tenderness again, the one the realm likes to put on strangers when it wants them to surrender.
One of them looks up at me with my aunt's eyes.
I don't move toward it. I staple the permission clean in my head: grief is not a door. The web sings. The square under my boots hums and calms.
"You're learning," Carter says, delighted. "My favorite student."
"Find a worse hobby," I tell him.
He laughs. It loops back on itself once, like his clap did, then decides to continue forward like a well-edited cut.
We stand in the cleared plaza with my anchors humming, the loops broken where they matter, the rules pinned, the room irritated. The pieces labeled DENIAL/CONTROL/HUNGER/LOSS/TRUTH sit where I forced them for now. It won't last. It doesn't have to.
I've won something small and human. He is untouched. That was the assignment.
"Good," he says, and the word lands with the weight of two knuckles tapping a bracket into its exact place.
I exhale. The symbiote smooths down my chest, proud. My Aura's threads slacken back into me. The people-shaped absences remember being people and wander out of the picture. The fountain coughs once and tries to match my heart again; I don't let it.
He is where he was. And he isn't.
I don't see him move. I don't feel air displace. One blink, he's across the board. The next blink, he's inside my guard, exactly where a person belongs if they mean to hold your face still while you break.
He doesn't touch me.
His mouth tilts close enough that the word can land without traveling.
"I'm here," he whispers, her cadence exactly where my body remembers it. "Don't worry."
The plaza keeps breathing. The board doesn't move.
I do. Only inside.
He doesn't move. He doesn't need to. The room moves him into place; the words arrive where they always landed.
"Mug down. Three breaths. Page where you left it. Then we talk."
It's not an impression. It's the exact sentence. The cadence that got me through mornings when I wasn't sure the air would hold. Coffee. Counting. Paper. Order first. Then feeling. A hand's worth of rules you can live inside until the day stops trying to crush you.
Everything in me tips.
The migraine opens like a camera flash that forgot to close. White. Hot. Precise. The suit surges to meet it, eager to turn pain into something useful—anger, motion, anything that breathes easier than this.
"No," I tell it.
It purrs anyway. The ribs of the board hum back. DENIAL tries to slide under my heels like a joke; I staple my weight to TRUTH with nothing but posture.
He's close enough to hear the line of my breath.
"You don't have to bend love to make it yours," he says, soft. The sentence doesn't belong to him. He wears it like a well-cut coat and lets the tailor take the compliment.
He lets a single beat pass.
"But you will," he adds, almost tender, "if you don't stop."
The words don't shove. They sit. They make space in my head by taking space from everything else. I can feel the map of what I have been doing for months—years—rearranging itself so the sentence can live there. The geometry of threads from my chest to other people's choices. The tidy justifications. The box I keep becoming because it stacks well.
My jaw locks so hard my molars complain. The suit tightens, black tide smoothing down my chest, proud of restraint because it feels like control. The fountain's pulse climbs into the wrong sky and tries to match my heart. I make my heart miss it on purpose—slip the three on the second beat so I own it again.
He doesn't smile wider. He doesn't need to. The delight is in his eyes, not for my pain, for the cleanliness of the move.
"Thank you for walking," he says, as if we've finished a tour. "Most people run. It wastes everyone's time."
He steps back without stepping. The space between us returns like a room that remembers it had walls. The hall of mirrors around the plaza exhales; panes fog, clear, go flat. The board underfoot unbuckles—squares lay down like a spine after a long day. The etched bases—DENIAL, CONTROL, HUNGER, LOSS, TRUTH—fade into plain tile as if the words were never there and the meaning was my problem all along.
"We'll do this again," he says, conversational. "With less scaffolding."
The wind that isn't wind brushes the hem of his coat. Ozone thins. The undertone of rot-sweet steps back behind the polite soap smell of a city pretending it knows how to be clean. Somewhere behind the buildings, the green in the moon gives up its audition and goes back to white.
"Same time?" I say, because reflex likes to make jokes when it's bleeding.
He tips his head, pleased that I have blood left to be petty. Then he isn't there.
No dissolve. No flourish. He exists to the left of attention and then to the right of memory and neither place requires a goodbye.
The plaza remembers how to be ordinary wrong. The kiosk sulks. The little fountain keeps climbing black into the orange-dark and losing itself. The people-shaped absences finish being people and wander off like they had somewhere to be all along.
My head hangs on its hook for one breath. Two. Three. The white in my vision recedes to a neat border. The suit loosens its hands and sulks, affectionate. My anchors go slack and melt back into narrative, the way good stitches disappear when the skin decides to own them.
"Keep walking," the second voice says. No triumph in it. No comfort. A compass.
I straighten. The cut he put through me isn't a tear. It's a line—clean, deep, permanent enough that my posture has to accommodate it. I catalog the change because that is how I do not drown.
The city leans, listening.
"Right," I tell it, and the word tastes like iron. "We're not done."
I take one step. The ground gives back the wrong sound—soft where it should be hard, wet where it should be dry. The fountain tries to catch my heart again.
Three. Pause. Two. Pause. Three.
I let it, once.
Then I break the beat and make my own.
I take the long way out.
Not because I'm lost. Because the wound wants shortcuts and I'm not giving it one. I keep the anchors in until the room stops fighting me, peel them back clean, leave the rules better than I found them. The plaza exhales. The board forgets it was a board. The echo of his sentence sits where my breath used to be.
I don't close it.
Akali and Kai'Sa find me halfway to the seam—staggering, steadier, eyes still arguing with the light. They slow when they see my silhouette, that reflex they can't help.
"On me," I say, lighter than before. Not a hook. A rail. I give them three breaths of scaffolding, then slacken it so it can't turn into a leash.
"We're leaving," I add.
Akali nods too fast, like yes is the only word the room didn't poison. Kai'Sa watches my mouth for a beat before her focus returns to her own feet. The bracelets hum at a pitch I don't love and then behave.
We move. The tear waits where I left it, a hairline crack holding back an ocean. I flatten space just enough that the exit is a corridor instead of a blade. The Mirror World tries one last petty trick—the bench reflections, hands linked, that borrowed tenderness like a gravity well. I ignore them the way you ignore a mirror trying to be a window.
"Don't look," I tell the girls. "It's not for you."
We pass through.
Real air hits first—wrong in its own ways, but honest. Sound returns with the right timing. The sky remembers blue without help. The tear thins to a seam, a skin, a rumor.
They're where I told them to be: both teams clustered in a staggered arc a block back from the fracture, rooftops chosen for line of sight and exit lanes. Good soldiers, good instincts, or good obedience—depends on who's naming it.
To Be Continued...