By morning, the hum was gone. Cole checked. Lay still for a full minute before getting up, the way you check a bruise to see if it still hurts, and felt nothing underneath his ribs but the ordinary ache of a bad night's sleep on a mattress that had given up being a mattress sometime around age six.
He decided not to think about it. Decision made, filed, closed.
It didn't stay closed. It never did, with him — things just went quiet instead of gone, sitting in some back room of his head with the lights off, waiting for him to open the door again whether he wanted to or not.
"You look like garbage," Mia said over breakfast, which was cereal today, no honey toast, because apparently a man was allowed exactly one signature breakfast item before his sister started rationing it out of spite.
"Thank you. I worked hard on it."
"Did you sleep at all?"
"Some."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you're getting with cereal in my mouth."
She didn't push. Small mercy. She had her own morning to survive — some test she hadn't studied for, judging by the textbook open on the counter with a page corner folded down exactly once — and Cole let her have the silence she needed, the same way she'd let him have his the night before. An even trade, mostly unspoken, the kind siblings run on without ever writing the terms down.
School, when Cole eventually made it there, felt different in the specific way that things feel different after everyone's heard a version of a story that isn't quite the true one.
Nobody said anything directly. That wasn't how it worked. Instead there were looks — a kid by the lockers who stopped talking mid-sentence when Cole walked past, a teacher who took one beat too long making eye contact during roll call, a group near the stairwell who very obviously hadn't been discussing him until thirty seconds before he arrived and were now discussing the weather with an enthusiasm the weather had done nothing to earn.
Reeve caught up to him between second and third period, moving with the particular urgency of someone who'd spent all morning collecting information and needed somewhere to put it.
"Everyone's saying you levitated the guy."
"I didn't levitate anyone."
"Someone said you turned his windshield back into sand and then back into glass."
"That's not how glass works, Reeve."
"I'm just telling you what's going around." He fell into step, backpack riding low on one shoulder, the strap worn thin in a spot that suggested it had been carrying more than books for longer than Reeve probably wanted anyone to notice. "You could correct the record, you know. Tell people what actually happened."
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
"What actually happened is boring. Boring doesn't spread."
"Boring is also true."
"True's overrated as a marketing strategy."
Reeve gave him a look — the specific look of a kid who wanted, badly, to be the one people talked about in stairwells, and had spent seventeen years watching that particular spotlight land on literally anyone else. Cole caught it. Filed it, gently, next to everything else he knew about his best friend and never said out loud.
"You're doing fine," Cole said, apropos of nothing Reeve had actually asked.
"What?"
"Nothing. Forget it."
The man was waiting by the school gate at lunch, which was its own kind of strange, because adults who weren't parents or teachers didn't usually linger at a school gate without somebody eventually asking questions. He wore a suit that cost more than Cole's entire wardrobe, shoes so clean they looked like they'd never touched actual pavement, and a smile that had clearly been practiced in a mirror until it stopped looking like it needed practice.
"Cole Vale."
"Popular name this week."
"Ellis Marrow. Talent Acquisitions, Kessington Group." He held out a card. Cole didn't take it immediately, just looked at it, the way you look at an offer you already suspect is a trap dressed up nicely. "We're aware of your situation with the Ministry."
"Everyone seems to be."
"We'd like to sponsor you. Full licensing support, legal representation for the observation status, a stipend while you're classified." Ellis smiled wider. "Kessington doesn't just wait for the system to catch up. We invest early."
"In what, exactly?"
"In potential."
Cole finally took the card. Turned it over once. Plain black, gold lettering, a logo that meant nothing to him and clearly meant a great deal to someone somewhere.
"And if I say no?"
"Then someone else says yes eventually, and Kessington regrets not asking first." Ellis's smile didn't move an inch, which Cole was starting to recognize as a very specific kind of tell — people who smiled that steadily were usually working hardest to keep something else off their face entirely. "Unclassifiable resonance events don't stay unclassified for long, Mr. Vale. Someone always finds a use for the gap."
"Careful," Cole said. "That almost sounded honest."
"I find honesty saves time, in this business."
"What business is that?"
Ellis didn't answer that one. Just inclined his head, the smallest possible bow, and turned to go, loafers clicking against pavement that had genuinely never seen better shoes.
Cole watched him leave. Flipped the card again. Slid it into his back pocket, next to the peeling laminated observation card, two pieces of paper from two different systems both apparently very interested in a kid who mostly wanted a nap and some toast.
Reeve found him again after school, jogging to catch up, backpack thumping against his spine.
"Was that a Kessington rep? At the gate?"
"You know them?"
"Everyone knows them. They sponsor half the licensed fighters in the eastern district. If they're already sniffing around you—" Reeve stopped himself. Started again, quieter. "That's fast, Cole. That's really fast."
"I noticed."
"Doesn't that scare you even a little?"
Cole thought about the hum from the night before. The woman's voice he hadn't actually heard, not really, just felt the shape of something adjacent to it pressing against the edge of a dream he wasn't sure he'd been having. The word collect. The word, worse, that had come right after it.
"A little," he admitted, which surprised them both, Reeve most of all, because Cole Vale didn't usually admit to things like that out loud, on a sidewalk, in daylight, where anyone could hear him say it.
"You're being honest right now. That's new."
"Don't get used to it."
Reeve almost smiled. Almost. "For the record — whatever Kessington's offering, whatever the Ministry's doing, I'm not going anywhere."
"I know."
"I mean it."
"I know, Reeve."
They walked the rest of the way in silence, the good kind, the kind that didn't need filling, past the corner store with its expired candy and the laundromat with its wrong-frequency hum, and if Cole noticed the same unmarked car sitting two blocks further back than it had any reason to be, he didn't mention it.
He'd mention it eventually.
Just not today.
[End of Chapter 6]