Chapter 38: Familiar Shape

She was standing behind me, wearing her usual black jeans and a heavy metal t-shirt, grinning. She shouldn't have been here. Her classes were all in the other buildings. I checked it myself when we were working on Plan C. She wasn't supposed to be anywhere near Zero and his Disease.

'Hi! What are you doing here?'

I gulped. Humans had this saying: if you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

Damned humans and their damned human God.

'Uh... you know...'

She looked at me, then at Tanya, a smile frozen in place.

'Hey, I know you. You were at that Solstice party, right?'

And I remembered the party, Claire asking: "Who's that girl you've been staring at this whole evening? Is she, like, your ex?" And me saying: "You're seeing things."

Fuck.

Tanya gave her a polite smile.

'The Solstice party? Yes, I think I was.'

She gave me a look, and I said hurriedly:

'Oh, right. Claire, this is Tanya. Tanya, this is Claire.'

'Nice to meet you, Claire.'

Claire looked at us, and there was something brittle in her eyes.

'Likewise! So what brings you two to the campus on this cold snowy morning? I mean, Matt's usually only here in the evenings, after dark. Half of the guys think he's a vampire.'

She looked down, casually glancing over the wedding band on Tanya's finger.

Tanya didn't notice. She had worked something out in her mind, and smiled with relief, tension draining from her body.

'Wait! Are you a member of his band?'

'That's right, we're fellow Bandits. What about you? Matt's so secretive about his friends, it's kind of exciting to meet one! You guys are, uh, friends, right?'

I opened my mouth to say something, but at that moment Mickey showed up from around the corner at high speed, sliding on the floor a little.

'Matt! Have you seen that shit?! Am I a genius or wha...'

He noticed Claire and trailed off.

'Uh... who the hell are you?'

At some point since we last saw him a minute ago, Mickey managed to ditch the janitor uniform. With a backpack on one shoulder and ridiculous-looking AR glasses on his face, he looked like a student. Maybe even a year or two too young to be one.

'I'm Claire. Who the hell are you?'

He blinked and gave me a confused look.

'I'm Mickey.'

Claire looked at his AR glasses and said:

'Wow, you look like a douchebag, Mickey.'

He burrowed his brows.

'Well you sound like a bitch... Claire.'

She grinned, then raised her head and burst into laughter.

'Oh, Jesus. Where were you hiding this guy, Matt? I like him.'

#

And that was how I found myself eating fries in the university cafeteria with a girl I was in love with, my hot-headed partner in crime and a woman capable of reading people's minds, with Protectors minutes away from finding me and an insane wraith of immeasurable power on his way to meet us.

Somewhere out there, human God was laughing his ass off.

'Hey Matt, are you going to finish those?'

I shook my head, and Claire moved my plate to her side of the table with a pleased expression. She took a bite, shot a quick glance at us and smiled.

'So how do you guys know each other?'

Tanya was looking at her intently, thinking about something. It couldn't have been easy for her to maintain the tracing Affect on Zero, deal with the sense of his madness, and appear calm all at once. She was pulling it off, but if there was a plausible explanation of what the three of us were doing together at the campus, it wasn't going to come from her.

My mind was blank, too. An awkward silence hung over the table.

Then Mickey looked at me and said:

'Well, Matt and I used to be foster brothers, sort of.'

Claire raised an eyebrow.

'Really? I thought you got legally emancipated instead of going into the system, Matt.'

I took a sip of coffee, not tasting anything.

'Yeah, I did. But it took a couple of months to go through the hoops. I spent them in a state house.'

Mickey nodded.

'That's where we met. I wasn't very, uh, tall back then, so some punks decided to show me how things are. They jumped me, and if it weren't for Matt... I would have messed the bastards real well, which would get me in trouble. Bang! In comes Matt and saves my ass. We became friends after that.'

Claire took another bite of my fries.

'What about you, Tanya?'

Before Tanya could respond, Mickey chimed in:

'Tanya's my step sister. Her old man took me in not long after Matt got himself a ticket out of the house. Shit, was he a cool dude. Taught me everything I know.'

I really shouldn't have been surprised, but Mickey's story actually made a lot of sense. I kept forgetting that underneath that combustible facade of his, he was actually really smart.

'Good for you, Mickey! So they know each other through you?'

There was a hidden meaning in that question, and Mickey sensed it. He looked at me, then at Claire.

'Actually, these two don't know each other that well. Truth be told, the Duncans weren't very fond of Matt. Thought he was nothing but trouble.'

'Matt? Trouble?'

Claire was clearly fascinated by the idea.

Mickey laughed.

'I mean, he is a little crazy. Like, freakishly obsessed with some weird shit. Have you seen his cube collection?'

Claire grinned.

'Oh yes.'

'Like what's up with that?'

'That's what I said!'

I frowned.

'I'm right here, you know.'

Mickey winked at me.

'Anyway, I wouldn't say that these two despise each other, but Tanya is sort of overprotective.'

'Am not.' Tanya said without looking at him.

'Right. So you didn't tell Matt to go fuck himself at that party when the two of you had bumped into each other?'

Claire gave me a guarded look. Tanya sighed.

I noticed that her hands had started shaking.

'First of all, I just politely told him to fuck off. Furthermore, that was right after you two almost got beat up by those junkies. Remember that? How come stuff like that only happens to you when Matt is around, huh, Mickey?'

They were playing off each other so perfectly that I almost believed in this dysfunctional family unit myself.

Mickey raised his eyebrows.

'What are you talking about? Stuff like that happens to me all the time. If anything, Matt's the one who should keep better company.'

Mickey's hand was under the table, constantly moving over the screen of his phone. His eyes were glued to the screen of his AR glasses. He tried to look relaxed, but there was an unmistakable nervousness in his posture. How far were the Protectors? Did he have a good look at their current positions?

Mickey smiled.

'I guess that "better company" would be you, huh, Claire? I still can't believe that Matt's in a band. How did you even persuade him to touch a piano?'

Claire gave him a puzzled look.

'What are you talking about? I told him that I needed a key player, and the next day he was in my band.'

'That's funny. I haven't seen him play, like, in years.'

Something was changing around us. I felt the hairs on my arms rising.

'Is he any good?'

Claire raised her arms.

'Dude! You wouldn't believe. It's like nothing I've ever seen. He just closes his eyes, and disappears into the music. Boom! Magic. Matt's almost as good as Nelly. Well, not quite, but still. Impressive.'

Now there was genuine interest in Mickey's eyes.

'Really? So he, like, lets it all go? Loses himself in the music?'

'Sure. Why? What did I say?'

He shook his head.

'No, no. It's just that Matt's usually, well, kinda stiff. Like there's a metal rod in his ass, you know.'

Claire chuckled.

'Oh yeah, I know what you mean. So what are you guys doing at the university?'

I looked out of the window, where the wind was blowing snow into the air. Zero was close now, I could feel it.

Mickey was saying:

'... and that's why I kind of missed out on this whole real education thing. But I'm thinking about applying next year, like, why not, right? So these two are giving me a tour...'

Tanya suddenly turned her head and looked me directly into the eyes. Her pupils were so wide I practically couldn't see the irises.

So, Zero was finally here.

I stood up, heart pounding in my chest.

'Sorry, guys. I need to make a call.'

Claire waved her hand.

'That's okay. So, Mickey, what were you saying...'

I turned around and walked to the cafeteria's door.

Suddenly, the feeling of absolute calm descended upon me.

Now that Zero was close, I didn't need Tanya to feel his presence. His Ability was vast enough to send an invisible shockwave in every direction around him. I just needed to concentrate and feel it in my bones.

I closed my eyes, allowing my senses to expand into the space. Usually at this point, if there was someone using the Ability near, I could feel them. Like a shadow moving through the darkness, a whispering vibration coming from a distant source. The vibration was the Ability, and the source was the wraith. In my mind's eye, I saw wraiths as formless shapes made of tattered blackness, ripples of absolute nothingness in the sea of matter. Usually, I could follow the vibration back to its source.

But now, I couldn't sense it. There was no direction, no part of the world that felt different from the rest of it. It was like Zero wasn't here at all.

Or, maybe, I wasn't looking at it right. After all, Zero was not a usual wraith.

Following instinct, I cleaned my mind from all predispositions and shifted my perspective. I was an ant standing on a painting, unable to comprehend its nature. For an ant, the painting was a vast empty plane of colors. I needed to be something else, to rise above the painting and see the shapes that the artist intended to create from above.

My vision shifted, and I gasped.

I couldn't pinpoint Zero's Ability, because it wasn't a localized anomaly in the normal world. Instead, it was all around me, boundless and vast like an ocean, moving, shifting, boiling. The scope of it was truly terrifying. It was like a storm raging silently, invisibly all around me.

And that storm had an epicenter.

I turned and started walking, getting closer to it. What a fool I had been, thinking that I can contain... this. That I can stop Zero if things go wrong. Yes, I was powerful, as wraiths go. But he was simply on another level. The Disease had made him mad, but it also made him colossal. Or was it one and the same?

I stepped outside, into the cold.

The wind had settled down, and snow was shining in the light of cold winter sun. It was so strange, to see this pure, pristine, calm world, and at the same time feel the insane hurricane of power seething behind it. Somewhere near. Paces away.

I looked around, searching for Zero. His dirty clothes, gleaming blue eyes, gaunt face. I expected to see him in a circle of melted snow, like the last time we met. But he wasn't here. I couldn't see him.

And yet I could feel him.

How was it possible?

My shield of calmness cracked, and I could feel fear and doubt and uneasiness creep in through that crack. He had to be here. I could swear that he was here. Where the fuck was he?!

Don't panic. Think.

I took a deep breath and remembered Mickey, in his apartment after our adventurous excursion into the abandoned railroad museum. He said: "Sometimes the lack of information actually tells you more."

Zero was lacking from the world where he should have been. What did it tell me?

I shifted my perspective again and looked at the world with new eyes. I wasn't looking for Zero, or anything that stood out. Instead, I was looking for something that was lacking.

And there, just a few steps away from me, I saw it.

An almost invisible gray ripple in the world that my eyes refused to linger on. I couldn't focus my gaze on it, couldn't even focus my mind on it. We don't really see things with our eyes; more often than not, we see things with our brains. The brain is a miraculous machine built by millions of years of evolution. At some point, evolution had decided that perceiving things fast was more important than perceiving them clearly. That's why our brain is in a habit of making assumptions, transforming visual feedback into information based on past experiences. Show a man a familiar shape, and he will name it without taking in the details, even if these details are in direct contradiction with this shape's true form. This way we can react to danger faster, survive longer, continue breathing.

The negative side of this is that our brain has trouble perceiving things that don't correspond to past experiences. When confronted with something unfamiliar, it may try to transform it into something that it knows, giving us false information.

Or even ignore it completely.

That gray hole in the world that I was seeing, my mind chose to ignore. But I was more skilled in working my mind in unusual ways than an average human, and so I made it see, made it fight through its programming.

And so I saw the gray ripple for what it really was: a vortex of light bending in the air to avoid something standing in its middle. Making the thing inside, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

It was so elegant.

I extended my Ability and crushed the vortex, making it disappear, revealing the person hiding in between the light.