Mia Vale did not need anyone to walk her to class.
She'd said as much, twice, to a hallway monitor who meant well and a guidance counselor who meant even better, both of them under the impression that being related to whatever Cole had become last week made her fragile in some new and specific way. She wasn't fragile. She'd never been fragile. She'd broken her own arm falling out of a tree at nine years old and hadn't cried, not once, not even when the doctor reset it, because crying felt like handing someone a reason to treat her like she needed handling.
"You okay?" Priya asked, at the lockers, in the voice people used now — softer than usual, careful, like Mia might crack down the middle if someone spoke at normal volume.
"I'm fine."
"I just meant, with everything going on with your brother—"
"I know what you meant." Mia shut her locker harder than necessary. Not slamming. Just firm. A period at the end of a sentence nobody else had finished yet. "I'm fine, Priya. Nothing's going on with me."
Priya backed off. Most people did, eventually, once they hit that particular wall in her voice — not anger, exactly, something colder and steadier than anger, the tone of someone who had decided a long time ago that needing help was a door she wasn't opening for anyone, family included, especially family.
Especially Cole.
Three boys were talking about him near the gym doors. Not quietly. Kids that age rarely bothered with quiet when the subject wasn't standing right in front of them.
"—heard he like, melted a car—"
"Nah, I heard he possessed the guy—"
"My cousin said the Ministry's got a file on him thick as a phone book—"
Mia stopped walking. Just for a second. Long enough to consider three different responses, weigh them, discard two, and land on the one that cost her the least energy for the most result.
"He didn't melt anything," she said, arriving at their circle without being invited into it. "And he's not possessed. He calmed a guy down who was having a bad day. That's it. That's the whole story."
The tallest one — Dax, she thought his name was, though she'd never bothered confirming — looked at her with the specific delight of someone who'd just found new material.
"Oh, she's defending him. Cute."
"I'm not defending anyone. I'm correcting you. There's a difference."
"Must be scary," Dax said, "living with something like that. You ever worry he'll—"
"He's my brother," Mia said, flat, final, the exact tone she used on hallway monitors and guidance counselors and, once, a landlord who'd threatened to raise the rent without notice. "Not a science experiment. Not a monster. My brother. And I don't need you to worry about me, or protect me, or feel sorry for me, or do literally anything except walk to your next class and think about something that isn't my family for five consecutive minutes. Can you manage that?"
Dax opened his mouth. Closed it. Something about her voice — steady in a way that didn't match a sixteen-year-old standing in a hallway with a backpack digging into one shoulder — made the joke die somewhere behind his teeth before it reached air.
"Whatever," he said, which was the sound people made when they'd lost an argument and hadn't figured out yet that they'd lost it.
Mia walked away without waiting to see if he tried again. She never waited for the second round. Waiting implied she needed to know how it ended, and she already knew — she always knew — because losing an argument to Mia Vale required someone willing to keep arguing after she'd already decided the conversation was over, and nobody ever was.
She didn't tell anyone about the shaking in her hands after. Small, only visible if you were looking, gone by the time she reached her next class.
Some things you just handled yourself. That was the whole point.
Cole caught the car on Thursday.
Not by accident. He'd started timing it — three days of the same make, same color, same specific spot two blocks back where a driver could sit and watch a stretch of sidewalk without technically parking illegally — and Thursday, instead of walking past it like he had all week, he crossed the street and knocked on the window.
It rolled down slow. The man inside looked like every Ministry employee Cole had met so far: tired in a way that had stopped being about sleep and started being about the job itself, coffee in the cupholder gone cold enough to have a skin on it.
"You're not subtle," Cole said.
"Wasn't trying to be."
"Then what's the point of the car? Just park in my driveway. Save us both the walk."
The man almost smiled. Almost. "Compliance surveillance. Standard for observation-status cases."
"Standard." Cole leaned against the door frame, easy, unhurried, the posture he wore like armor. "Third time this week I've clocked you. That's not standard, that's dedicated."
"Above my pay grade to explain the assignment specifics."
"Everything's always above somebody's pay grade in this city. Feels like a design flaw."
The man's radio crackled — nothing intelligible, just static and a half-syllable of someone else's conversation — and he reached to turn the volume down, which gave Cole exactly enough time to notice the folder on the passenger seat. Thin. A single photo clipped to the front, too far away to make out clearly, except for the shape of it — not him. Someone else. Someone with longer hair, standing at an angle that suggested the photo had been taken without their knowledge.
"Who's that," Cole said, before he could decide whether asking was a good idea.
The man's hand moved fast. Flipped the folder shut, face carefully blank in the specific way faces go blank right after they've shown too much.
"Nobody you need to worry about."
"Didn't ask if I needed to worry. Asked who it was."
"You should get to school, Mr. Vale."
"You should get better at hiding folders."
The window went up. Slow, same as it had come down, a small, deliberate refusal to be rushed even in retreat. The engine started a moment later, and the car pulled away, unhurried, exactly like it had every other time, like nothing about this conversation had happened at all.
Cole stood on the curb a while, hands in his pockets, turning something over that had nothing to do with his hands.
Nobody you need to worry about.
People only said that, in his experience, about the things most worth worrying about.
He told Reeve about it that evening, sitting on the front steps with a soda that had gone flat an hour ago and neither of them cared enough to get a fresh one.
"A photo of someone else? Not you?"
"Not me."
"That's — okay, that's actually more unsettling than if it was you." Reeve turned his own can in his hands, picking at the tab, not opening it, just picking. "If they're watching you and someone else, and the someone else isn't you, then what are you actually for?"
"Bait, maybe."
"That's a horrible thing to say about yourself."
"Doesn't make it wrong."
Reeve was quiet a second. Then, quieter: "You think it's connected? To the other two. The ones from before you."
Cole thought about the hum from a few nights back. The word fourth. The word, worse, that had come after it, a word he hadn't told Reeve yet and wasn't sure he ever would, because some doors you keep shut even from the people standing closest to you, especially those people, because if it turned out to be real, he didn't want them anywhere near the blast radius.
"Maybe," he said instead. "Probably."
"That's not comforting."
"Wasn't trying to comfort you. Trying to be honest. New hobby, apparently."
Reeve huffed something close to a laugh. Flat soda, cracked steps, a streetlamp flickering two houses down for entirely mundane electrical reasons that had nothing to do with anything — and for one small stretch of evening, that was almost enough to make the day feel ordinary again.
Almost.
Three blocks over, in a house Cole had never seen and would have no reason to recognize, a photograph nearly identical to the one in the folder sat pinned to a corkboard next to two others — a face with longer hair, a date circled in red, and a single word written beneath it in handwriting too neat to belong to anyone in a hurry.
Waiting.
[End of Chapter 7]