THE GROUND BENEATH IT

  Xel spent the first day after Maren Street in bed.

  Not because his ribs demanded it — though they did, in the specific insistent language of broken bones that heal faster than they should, a dull complaint that sharpened into something pointed every time he moved wrong. He spent it in bed because Max had looked at him when he walked back into the apartment at four-fifteen in the morning, bruised and guarded and unwilling to explain himself, and had said: You're not going anywhere today. And then he had gone and got the first-aid kit and the ice pack and the extra blankets and arranged them with the silent efficiency of someone who has done this before, too many times, and was not interested in arguing about it.

  So Xel lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and thought.

  The warmth had been real. He was certain of that. Not certain in the way of something he could prove or demonstrate or describe to someone who had not felt it — but certain in the way you are certain of your own heartbeat. It had been there. It had come from somewhere inside him that he had not known existed. And it had changed something about how he moved and how hard he hit.

  And then it had been gone. And his ribs had made themselves known again. And he was sitting in the middle of Maren Street at four in the morning, looking at his ordinary hands, with no way to account for what had just occurred.

  He ran through it again. He had been losing. He had been hurt. He had been getting between the creature and the woman out of stubbornness and nothing else, because that was the one thing he had always been able to do — keep refusing. And then something from below the surface of everything had come up.

  He did not have words for it.

  He was not accustomed to not having words for things.

  Max came in at eleven with coffee and toast and the expression of someone who had been thinking about what he wanted to say and had decided on an approach.

  He sat on the edge of the bed. Put the coffee on the side table. Set the toast down. Looked at Xel.

  "Okay. Walk me through it."

  "Already told you."

  "You said there was something on Maren Street. Something that wasn't a person. You said you fought it. You left out everything after that."

  Xel was quiet for a moment.

  "I couldn't hurt it. For most of it, I couldn't touch it. It was like hitting stone."

  "What happened at the end? You said it left."

  "I hit it differently."

  "Differently how."

  "I don't know. Something changed. I felt it. And then when I hit it, it moved."

  Max absorbed this. His expression was thoughtful — not the blank careful expression of someone processing shock, but the genuine working-through-it expression of someone who has already accepted the strangeness and is now focused on what it means.

  "The heat you mentioned. That's what you're talking about. The thing you felt in your chest."

  "Yeah."

  "I've been watching you your whole life, Ex. I've watched you lift things you shouldn't be able to lift. I've watched you heal from injuries that — that's not normal. You know it's not normal. I know it's not normal. We've been not talking about it for years."

  He paused.

  "Last night sounds like whatever that is... went somewhere new."

  Xel turned to look at him.

  "I don't know what it is. I don't have a name for it. But I know you. And I know that whatever happened last night wasn't random. It was you. Something in you."

  "I've never felt it before. Not like that."

  "Maybe you weren't in a situation that called for it."

  A pause.

  "You're still you. Whatever that was — you're still you. That's the important part."

  Xel looked at him for a moment. Then back at the ceiling.

  "Thanks, man."

  "Don't thank me. Drink your coffee before it gets cold."

  He took his own coffee and went to the door.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  "And Ex? If something like last night happens again — you tell me. Before the fact if possible. But definitely after."

  "Yeah."

  "Not a request."

  "Yeah. I know."

  Max went.

  — ? —

  Three days later, Xel was back at the gym.

  His ribs had sorted themselves out in a way that his doctor would have called impossible and that Xel had simply accepted as the way his body worked. The shoulder had taken a little longer — two full days of being careful about how he used it, then a morning where it simply seemed to have finished whatever process it was running and returned to normal function. He had tested it carefully before going in.

  The gym was Ortiz's. It was not glamorous — a converted industrial space that smelled of rubber and old leather and effort, lit by the kind of fluorescent lights that were always doing slightly too much and casting everyone beneath them in a slightly haggard light. Xel had been training here since he was fourteen. He knew every corner of it, every worn patch on the canvas, every place where the floor tilted slightly toward the south wall.

  Ortiz was waiting for him.

  Ortiz was sixty-three years old and looked like someone had carved him out of something that did not acknowledge age. Dark skin, grey at his temples, hands that had wrapped more people's fists than he could count. He had been a fighter himself, once. Then he had become the person fighters came to when they were serious about the work rather than the attention. He had trained dozens of people. He kept training Xel because Xel was the only one he had ever met who had no ceiling he could find.

  He looked at Xel when he came in. Looked at the way he moved. Took inventory in the specific way he had of reading a body before it told him anything.

  "Ribs."

  "Three days. They're fine now."

  "What happened."

  "Fight."

  "What kind of fight."

  Xel considered how to answer this. He had not told Ortiz about the creature. He had not told him about the warmth, or what it had done, or the way the strikes had been different at the end. He was not sure he could explain any of it in terms that would make sense to someone who had not been there.

  "Something I couldn't hurt. And then something changed and I could."

  "Changed how."

  "There's something in me. I've always known there was something. But I felt it differently that night. Like it came up from somewhere and I could use it."

  A pause. Ortiz looked at him. Not skeptically — thoughtfully, with the expression of someone fitting a piece into a picture he has been working on for a long time.

  "I've been watching you train for seven years. I've pushed you as hard as I can push anyone and you've never reached the bottom of it. Never found where the limit was." He paused. "Whatever you have — I don't think it was ever going to stay quiet forever."

  He stood.

  "The technique I've been teaching you is designed for someone with human limits. Managing force, redirecting momentum, using your opponent's energy against them. That's because your limits were unknown. But if what you're describing is real — if there's something additional in there — then you need to learn how to use it without losing yourself to it."

  "What do you mean."

  "I mean that power without discipline is a fire without walls. It burns what it finds. You need to know the difference between choosing to use it and having it choose for you."

  He looked at Xel with the steady, unadorned attention of someone who is saying something important and not packaging it.

  "You're already the most capable person I've ever trained. I'm telling you that means nothing if you can't control what you are."

  "I know."

  "Show me what you have. All of it, today. No holding back. Let's see where we actually are."

  — ? —

  There is a letter.

  Xel found it when he got home. Slipped under the apartment door, plain envelope, his name on the front in a handwriting he did not recognise. No return address. No postmark. Just: Xel.

  He stood in the hallway with it for a moment, looking at it. Then he went inside and opened it.

  Plain paper. One page. A close, formal script he had never seen before:

  Xel.

  You don't know me. I know you. I know what you are, and I know what is coming. I can't explain in a letter what needs to be explained in person. What I can tell you is this: there is someone else like you. You are not alone in this. And there are people who know you exist — people who do not mean you well — who are already moving.

  Come to 14 Ashwood Gate. I will be there.

  It is your choice. But come soon.

  — I.S.

  He read it twice. Then set it on the kitchen table and looked at it.

  Max came in from the bedroom.

  "What."

  Xel slid the letter across the table.

  He watched Max read it. Watched the expression move through several stages — mild surprise, careful attention, a particular quality of stillness that Max did when he was taking something seriously.

  "Someone else like you."

  "Yeah."

  "Is this related to the thing on Maren Street?"

  "I don't know. Maybe."

  "I.S. That's all. No full name."

  "Ashwood Gate is in the north end. The mansion district."

  A pause. Max looked at the letter. Then at Xel.

  "If you're going, I'm coming."

  "It could be a trap."

  "Probably is. That's why you need me."

  "You'd be useless in an actual trap."

  "And yet. Here I am."

  The second letter arrived three days later. Same handwriting. Same plain paper. But this one was addressed to the corner of Maren and Desmond, where Xel had taken to stopping on his morning route — a thing he had done, he realised, for reasons he had not fully examined.

  Still thinking? Come. The window is not indefinite.

  — I.S.

  He put both letters in his jacket pocket.

  He looked out at Ravenport from the apartment window. At the city he had lived in for twenty-one years without ever quite feeling like it was where he belonged.

  He thought about the warmth. About the creature on Maren Street. About someone else like you.

  He thought about Max, asleep in the next room, trusting him with his safety the way he had always trusted him with it.

  He reached a decision.

  — ? —

  The temple was quiet.

  It was always quiet, but this was a different quality of quiet — the quiet of a place that has begun to understand it is about to be left. Zirous moved through it in the hour before dawn, doing the rounds that he had done for fourteen years: the east gate, the training courtyard, the shrine room, the storage hall with its smell of cedar and old stone, the path to the spring. Checking, securing, saying goodbye in the only language the place understood.

  Zia was already packed. She had been packed for two days, with the compressed efficiency of someone who had learned early that you should always be ready to move. She sat on the front step with her bag at her feet, watching the eastern hills lighten from black to dark blue.

  "Ready?"

  "Yes."

  He looked at the gate. At the path beyond it, narrowing into the trees, leading eventually to roads and trains and a flight across the Pacific.

  His sensei had spent fourteen years preparing him for something and had died before telling him what it was. The letter, the amulet, the direction in both of them — this was the continuation of a conversation that had only had one speaker so far.

  He was going to find the other voice.

  "Let's go."

  They went.

  — ? —

  END OF CHAPTER TWO