The petition had three days left, and Caleb spent the first of them in his mother's basement learning how not to die from his own power.
It was Sam's idea. Sam had been quiet at the table the night Caleb came back from the review, and then he'd said, in his flat way, "You blacked out on a kaiju's neck and a stranger told you to sit down before you burned up. That's a problem you can practice."
"You don't practice this."
"You practice everything." Sam had spent two years not being able to hold a spoon. He had opinions about practice.
So the basement.
Sam had salvaged a diagnostic cuff off a decommissioned training suit, one that read kinetic sync off the skin, and he'd wired it to an old tablet that showed one number and a graph. He fitted it to Caleb's left forearm, over the new bone, and powered it up.
[KINETIC SYNC: 1.2%]
"There's the famous number," Sam said.
"There it is."
"Now do the thing, and do it small, not the whole arm. Just wake it up a little."
