When he awoke, the first thing he wanted to do was to close his eyes again. The hospital room was a sterile white. And the humming of the instrumentation seemed to grate on his ears. The sounds meant that he was alive. Whether or not that was a good thing was a different topic; his whole body was afire, as though someone had emptied a nail gun into him.

“Martin Atrelo?”

There was a man sitting next to his bed, legs crossed but leaned forward in attention. He seemed serious but non-confrontational. Despite the Russian accent, Martin felt soothed by the voice. In fact, the longer that man sat there the more comfortable Martin felt.

“Hello?” Martin said groggily. He must still be coming down from something. Maybe it was the packet of drip suspended beside his bed.

“You were in an accident,” the man said. “If you are able, I’d like to ask a few questions. It’ll help us catch whoever’s responsible.”

“For the accident?” Martin asked.

“Mr. Atrelo, do you have a history with anger management?”

“…yes,” he admitted. The reminder sharpened him up like a strong coffee. “But I’m better now.”

“Do you remember how you got here?”

“I dunno. I think I was, I was at work. Uhm…”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a mechanic.”

“What was the last thing you remember while at your place of work?”

“I think…” Martin strained to think. “There were a few potential clients asking for a quote. There was an older gentleman who had couple of friends with him, a large, young man and another in a leather jacket. The older one said something to me. It made me… I don’t know. I remember feeling extremely angry.”

“I see. Can you describe what this gentleman further?”

“He was kind of thin and weak-looking. Like he just got out of a hospital himself. But it was like he was looking through me.” Now that he was awake, Martin could think again, and he buried his face in his hands. “He was a telepath, wasn’t he? My memories blank out from there.”

“We believe so,” the man said.

“Fucking hell. What did he make me do? Is he why I’m in a hospital? What did I do to him?”

“There will be others coming. They will likely ask you similar questions. Co-operate with them.” The man was preparing to leave. “Oh, and don’t mention that you’ve been approached already and we’ll help you recover.”

“Who are you?”

“Rest, Mr. Atrelo.” The man left.

Martin was left alone to think, to dread on what he had done. He was as desperate to find out as he was happy to never know. Either way he just wanted to get back to a life he had worked hard to salvage.

--

The memories were already slipping away from her. It was the phenomena of dreaming. One could wake up in a cold sweat with vivid recollections of nightmare, only to have the fine details slip away second by second, until they were only left with the emotion.

“Are you sure you’re okay to go?” Xiaoshu asked.

“Yes,” Lyssa said. Even now she could feel tendrils writhe in her insides. She felt bruises fade where her flesh squirmed, and little cuts in her skin mend. She could not remember why.

“So you can regenerate too?” Ecto asked in a curious tone, but she was being wary.

“It’s not,” Lyssa found herself saying. It was something else. Healing was knitting torn flesh shut until connections were remade. Regenerating was regrowth. And then there was pulling meat and skin back together and making the cells forget they were ever apart. Lyssa did not know she had a Self with such a gift. All she knew was it lived somewhere cold and far, far away in the back of her consciousness. What did the Self look like? Lyssa had a feeling she ought to know.

“Don’t do that again,” Bildungsroman’s voice echoed from an imagined distance. The Self seldom set foot in the mind mansion, where Lyssa’s awareness was the strongest.

“Why not?” Lyssa thought inwardly. “It seems I cannot die. Too bad for you since I know how much you would like to.”

“You know so little about grandfather’s legacy.”

“Then why don’t you explain it to me!”

In the real world, Lyssa’s fingers curled into a fist. Moments passed in silence. They continued moving. The rubble pile was right in front of them. Lyssa commanded just barely enough of Bil’s gift to hear her friends somewhere within. Even that tiny wisp of power was being reluctantly lent.

No matter, she would not let anyone, not even a part of herself, stop her from saving Amelia and Penny. She would be their hero first. And then together they would beat this game. In succeeding, she would find her identity, no longer being someone else’s invention. If her Selves did not want to help, all the better.

“She is mute, blind, and dumb,” Bil said. “The Caretaker. She spawned to repair us after the accident of our childhood. It’s an expensive gift, more powerful and more biologically costly than something as banal as healing or regeneration. We do not know how long it takes for her to recover. This is a limit you do not want to test.

“Or do. I don’t care.”

The presence retreated.

Lyssa had not expected an actual answer. She would have to put more thought into it later. She had arrived at the place where her friends were buried. It was a steep landslide of old, decrepit city, still slick with fog-dripping ice. She had spent all this energy getting here, but now that she stood before it, what was she supposed to do? She imagined what combination of her gifts she would need to tunnel inside without upsetting the stability of the rubble. She thought of how long she had before she burned out again, how many uses of her gifts she could muster. Two at once for ten minutes? How long would she have using three at a time? It was hard to think. Her imagination wandered to all the ways the game of deadly Jenga might go wrong. This must have been what rescue teams were thinking when the meteors fell. How many victims of Rachminau were finished off by hasty, ambitious heroes?

Lyssa’s renewed heart pounded.

“Don’t you think we should call for help?” Xiaoshu asked. “There are prevention teams watching the game. We should leave this sort of thing to the professionals.”

What would they think? She was known to the myriad of people who watched the games. If she alerted them to the people beneath the building she would have to explain how she knew they were under there. Then the story would be out that she was hiding yet another gift. She had lied to the people she was training to be a hero to. She had not sought help for her instabilities as she had promised.

“I can’t,” Lyssa whispered. She could feel her skull pulse with voices. Opposing suggestions tore at her. Different perspectives with different logics. She had never felt so conflicted, but she had never wanted something this badly before.

“You’re already thinking like a hero.” Izanami, the metallokinetic. As quickly as she surfaced, she had sunk again into her room in the mansion.

The statement resonated, and Lyssa saw what she began to look like.

“Can you…” Lyssa said, realizing the awkwardness of someone like her telling others what to do, “let them know? I’ll make sure the structure doesn’t collapse further. Meanwhile, can you look for them, Ecto?”

Xiaoshu’s shoulders relaxed. He turned around and began to wave to the sky and calling for help. Ecto stretched her arms.

“I can only phase for so long,” she explained. “And this is a big pile. Do you know exactly where they are?”

“No,” Lyssa said.

“You realize that we should be conserving our strength to win the game as well.”

“I’d owe you one.”

“Yeah, you would.” Ecto began to turn translucent, grumbling as she did so. “Like a needle in a haystack. Who does she think she is? Come save me! Come save my friends! The audaci…” She disappeared into the rubble.

Lyssa furrowed her brow at that last remark. Ecto had saved her, but when had she asked for help?

She would think about it later. Lyssa called on her metal bending gift. A new sense slipped into her cognition. She felt the warped beams beneath the destruction as if they were her own bones. Already the loose concrete and brick were beginning to find new equilibriums, threatening to compress the pockets within. She held onto the steel beams, neither letting them slip further nor pushing them aside. She wasn’t singlehandedly saving the day. She wasn’t earning some glorious victory. But this felt like the right thing to do.