The wall didn't break when he leaned against it.

  That was new. That was something he noticed.

  He pressed his shoulder blades flat against the concrete and felt nothing give — no crack, no groan, no protest from the material. Cold, solid resistance. Normal. The wall was fine. He was fine. Everything was fine.

  His hands were in his pockets because that's where he put them when he was trying not to think about them.

  The apartment belonged to no one. Third floor, east side of a building the city had condemned sometime last winter. Half the windows were boarded. The other half had been punched through by weather or kids or something worse. The floor was covered in a thin layer of plaster dust that recorded every step he took like pale snow, and he'd stopped trying to avoid leaving prints.

  Nobody was looking for him here. They were looking for Ouranos.

  He'd found the name three weeks ago on a news crawl, reflected in a shop window he was walking past. OURANOS INCIDENT: DOWNTOWN BRAWL LEAVES 4 BLOCKS UNINHABITABLE. The anchor's jaw had been tight — eyes a degree too wide, the forehead pulling in ways it shouldn't. He knew the face. He'd drawn it a hundred times.

  He'd found the sketchbook in a recycling bin outside a pharmacy. Most of the pages were used — grocery lists, a child's drawing of a horse with too many legs — but there were thirty-seven clean pages at the back. He counted. He always counted now. Numbers held when most didn't.

  Kept it under the windowsill. Took it out when the light was right — early morning, the sun through the broken east-facing glass turning everything amber. A pencil sharpened with his thumbnail, which was not how you were supposed to, but he was more careful now than before, and it worked.

  He drew people more than anything else.

  But not hers. Not anymore.

  Her name was Nadia.

  They'd met in a figure drawing class two years ago — the kind with a live model and thirty students who'd all convinced themselves they were serious artists. He was. She was too, in her own right, though she drew differently than he did. Looser. More interested in the negative space than the subject. She used to say that what you don't draw is more honest than what you do.

  She had this habit of chewing on her thumbnail when she was thinking. Her left thumb. She'd press it between her teeth and stare at her canvas with her eyes slightly narrowed, and her whole face would go very still in a way that felt private, like watching someone sleep.

  He'd loved her for two years before he told her. She already knew. She'd known for eight months, she said, and she'd been waiting for him to catch up.

  That was the version of Nadia lodged in his chest. The one who had waited for him.

  He didn't think about that version. He thought about the other one constantly, which amounted to the same problem.

  The powers had come on a Tuesday in March, which seemed wrong. Catastrophes deserved dramatic days. Storms. The solstice. Instead: a Tuesday, laundry in the machine, the dead boredom of a morning with nothing in it.

  He didn't know what triggered it. Neither did anyone else, and he'd stopped expecting an explanation. The world had had capes — parahumans, metas, whatever you wanted to call them — for thirty years, and the origin question remained mostly philosophy. Radiation, genetics, trauma, cosmic accident. The academies had whole departments dedicated to arguing about it. The religions had whole denominations.

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  He'd woken up on a Tuesday and put his hand through the kitchen wall reaching for his phone.

  The wall had been there since before he was born. It took him less than a second.

  He'd stared at the hole for a long time. Dust in the air. Pipes exposed. The electrical wire he'd narrowly missed — intact, which read like a joke. Then he sat down on the kitchen floor with his back against the refrigerator and pressed his forehead into his knees and made a sound that wasn't quite crying and wasn't quite anything else.

  Nadia found him there an hour later. She crouched down in front of him, and her face did something complicated — eyes wide, mouth pressed together, compassion and fear so close together you couldn't separate them. She put her hand on his arm.

  She said, We need to tell someone.

  That was the beginning of the end, though he hadn't known it then.

  What he was:

  Strong. The number didn't mean anything useful — tests maxed out, scales broke, the people Nadia had brought to him in those first weeks — friends of friends, she'd said, people who could help — would get a reading and then look at each other with their faces held neutral, trying not to show how frightened they were. He'd stopped trucks. He'd held up a collapsing parking garage with one hand while sixty people evacuated, and his arm hadn't shaken.

  Fast. Not a speedster — nothing like that. He couldn't outrun the dedicated runners, the ones whose entire power was velocity. But he moved the way something very heavy traveled when nothing slowed it down: with a momentum that didn't negotiate. When he decided to be somewhere, the distance between here and there ceased to matter.

  He flew. He didn't know how. There was no mechanism he could point to. He — stopped being subject to gravity when he chose to, and then he was, when he chose that instead. It felt like nothing. Neutral as breathing.

  He didn't break.

  The one that mattered. The one they wrote about, the one making news anchors do that face. Twelve capes sent at him — all at once, organized, built to end whatever he was. The strongest hit him hard enough to level a city block. She shattered three bones in her hand.

  He'd looked at her. Blank, he thought — or close enough. Not because he wasn't feeling anything. Because he was feeling too many things and none of them had shapes yet.

  She'd looked back at him with her teeth clenched against the pain and something moving behind her eyes that might have been awe and might have been the look of someone who'd understood something they wished they hadn't.

  He flew away.

  The sketchbook was open in his lap. The light was amber and going gold as the sun rose higher. He was drawing hands — the air between fingers, the empty shape a hand left in the world when it passed through it. What you don't draw. Her method, not his. Her voice in his head, slightly amused: You're finally doing it my way.

  He pressed too hard with the pencil and the lead snapped.

  He sat very still. He looked at the pencil in two pieces. He looked at them — hadn't crumpled the sketchbook, hadn't torn through the page, steady and careful and under control.

  His jaw was tight. There was a pressure behind his eyes that wasn't tears and wasn't quite pain. It was the feeling of holding a weight he couldn't put down, and being very tired of it and being very tired of holding it.

  His family thought he was dead. His mother had gotten a notification — missing in connection with a cape incident, body not recovered — and she grieved quietly and alone, which was how she did everything. His sisters — Iris, sixteen, who had always taken everything too loudly, and Ada, thirteen, who went quiet instead — had probably held each other in the dark and not known what to say. His father still went to work every day, which was the kind of thing that happened when there was no body to bury.

  He could call them. He could.

  But a call could be traced. A voice could be recognized. His mother would tell someone — not out of malice, out of relief — and relief traveled. He knew exactly how far.

  So he sat in a condemned building, a snapped pencil in his hand and thirty-six remaining clean pages, and watched the city through a boarded window, and tried not to think about somewhere out there, in an office with security and funding and twelve capes on speed dial, someone was sitting at a desk — a file with his real name on it.

  Nadia had given them his name.

  I had to, Cael. You have to understand why I had to.

  He put the sketchbook down. The ceiling above him was water-stained and cracked and completely, unhelpfully intact — because he was sitting beneath it, and he was trying.

  Outside, the city went on. Traffic. Voices. Someone laughing two streets over — the bright, unguarded laugh of a person who had no idea they were sharing a city with Ouranos, no idea that he was here, here, breathing slowly, counting to four on every exhale, holding the world at arm's length.

  He picked up the pencil.

  He started drawing again.