Antibody

I’m dying, and it’s not my problem.

I wish it was. Wish it could be. Wish I was dying in one of those cool ways where you get a whole action movie to yourself before finally biting it on a carpet of fresh snow, bleeding out with a smile on your face. That’d be sick. But no. It’s me instead. I’m sick. And I can’t do anything about it but lie here.

So it’s everybody else’s problem.

Like my brother’s.

“Meds, LT!” he shouts, tossing them to me. I biff the catch and the bottle lands in the sheets next to me.

“Don’t throw them! What’d you have to do to get these ones? What if we lose them!?” I say, way whinier than I was going for. ‘Course, I always sound whiny cause of the stuffed-up nose. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t sick.

“Uh, it’s a child-proof cap, dumbass, you probably can’t even get it open. What’s gonna happen if I throw it? Sue me for wanting to cheer you up a little. Which, like—you know that stuff saves your life, right? Don’t ask where I got it, you should be happy. That’s like six months right there.” he rambles, on his way to the fridge for a beer.

There are sweat stains on his clothes, even though it’s March and it’s freezing outside. And he didn’t pull up in the truck. It was another car. One I’ve never heard before. Barely heard it this time, cause it’s an electric. We don’t own an electric. Nobody out here owns an electric.

He stole a car. Again. I struggle to sit up and carefully place the immune pills in the drawer next to the syringes and the dwindling bottle of the last stuff they put me on, the stuff I’m on right now that’s making my body feel like it’s made of bricks. I don’t even know what it is, just that it’s expensive and they stole it and they won’t tell me how or where from. Did somebody need it more than me? Did somebody get hurt? They won’t tell me. They won’t tell me anything.

I stew in it for a while while he flips through the news and calls Maylene. He gets nervous after he does something criminal, goes through every channel to see if anyone is talking about it. He knows it’s wrong. Maylene does too, but I guess she loves him. Like Mom loved Dad, and now they’re both in prison.

It’s not fair. They were just trying to do right by us. Some stupid super buries your town in a landslide chasing down some rogue, and suddenly you don’t have a home. Or food. Or meds for your sick kid. Someone should’ve taken care of us, the government or the TRA supers or something. No one did, so they stepped up, and then they got caught and Ryder stepped up, and Maylene stepped up because she thinks he’s cute and she’s an anarchist or whatever. It’s just gonna keep happening. People are just gonna keep getting caught and going to jail or worse and it’s because of me.

Boy in the bubble. Boy they made wrong. Boy whose body’s too lazy to live and too stubborn to die.

Lodestone boy. LT, the amazing Lodestone Teen. I should be a super. I’d be great at it. I could drag my whole team down and they’d always have an excuse why they never win. We would’ve gotten ‘em, it’s just that LT kept getting in the way! Oh, that’s okay then. Anything but dropping him. Anything but letting him go. All for one. Right?

Fuck!

“Why bother?” I snark. The TV goes quiet. I can hear Ryder stand up.

“What?” he says.

“Why do you even bother anymore? With the meds? You could’ve been running food and formula to the refugee camps today but you went and got some worthless immune pills instead!”

He storms over, all six feet of him, a tall lanky shadow at the door of my room.

I try to spit some more aspersions at him but break out into a coughing fit instead, my lungs betraying me right when I’m about to tell him how pointless it all is. That gives him his chance to sweep over to me, sit down on my bed and pull me into a hug.

I cough all over his shirt while he grips me tight. I’m never going to get old enough to be as strong as him.

“You’ll get sick.” I protest.

“Yeah? So what?”

“People need you.”

“You need me.” he says, and I try to stop myself from crying over it, but I can’t.

Within the week, the electric vanishes—they probably stripped it for parts—and Dad’s beat-up old truck is back. The pills make me feel better, better enough that I actually get to leave the house sometimes. Ryder makes me put my tracker on so he can find me if I pass out or something, but I never do. I know my limits. Just a few hundred steps, just up the hill, so I can see the hole in the Calgary Tower and the scars on the moon and the lights of the refugee camp down in the valley.

Well, it’s hard to see the hole in the tower from here. Actually, I don’t even know if they’ve fixed it or not. That’d be like them. Patching up some dumb monument that’s just the baby version of the CN Tower before they get around to helping average people who don’t have enough to eat. It makes me… well, I’d say it makes me sick, but everything makes me sick so I’ll say it pisses me off.

This whole thing does. Once the neglect got too much and a few of us started stealing to survive, we got lumped in with the Kiwis, ‘cause they were already the bad kind of refugee, and then all the funding got cut. That’s when that kid with the arteries triggered. Boy, I’d like to thank him. Way to make a bad situation worse. Turning into a super and killing a bunch of cops is one thing, but did you have to be entirely blood themed?

He looked like a monster. We all looked like monsters.

If he’s not dead, he’s probably in jail now. Like Mom and Dad. That’s where we’re all headed.

Even Ryder. He tells me he stays out of trouble, but he doesn’t. I know he doesn’t, because he’d do anything for anyone who makes him feel at home, and this is his home now, as fucked up as it is. He was basketball team captain two years in a row, took them to the provincial championship. He helped Dad all the time, skipped class whenever he even got a whiff that there was work worth doing. He was gonna be an electrician like him. His friend from the team got lost on a camping trip once and he drove out there, licence or no licence, didn’t even ask, all just for a chance at helping out. He got arrested for that one, almost totaled the truck looking for the poor guy, and Dad…

Dad told him he was proud of him. That you have to stick together with the people that matter to you, no matter what. That a man’s got to be loyal.

And when he said that, he was thinking of me. He was thinking of me, in the other room, down with some fresh hell of an illness, who he’d been taking care of all night because our town barely had a doctor.

He didn’t get it. None of them ever got it. They still don’t. I couldn’t sleep that whole night because my big brother was missing, and my dad was swearing and fighting with Google over my symptoms and trying to hide how much he hated being responsible for me, and Mom was driving up and down town trying to see if someone had found her idiot boy and his idiot friend. We were supposed to spend that night all together and instead, I wasn’t alone—they’d never let me be alone—but I was still alone.

Because you’ve got to be loyal. And that means no one ever gets to solve their own problems. It means that if Ryder’s lost, we’re all lost. It means that if I’m sick, we’re all sick. It means that if Mom and Dad go to jail, we all go to jail.

A healthy immune system finds the disease, latches onto it tight, and kills it dead. A bad one, a shit one like mine? It breaks up on impact. Scatters. Can’t make enough killer cells to win, but it can sure make enough killer cells to turn my insides to feverish mush. Half of what’s killing me is the disease, and the other half is my own body floundering, racing in every direction trying to save everything instead of packing away that one thing that’s hurting it.

There are fifteen thousand people down there in that camp, and my big brother could be their hero, but instead he’s stuck being mine.

I stand there in the dark at the edge of the hill, looking down at the dammed-up creek bed far, far below, wishing I was brave enough to jump. I stand there for what feels like an hour.

I turn back and go to bed, eventually. Of course I do. I can’t do it. I can’t do it with the scars on the moon staring down at me. It’s like he’s watching. He’d never say it, but there’s scars on him too, and he’s still there. He’s still there.

I’m bleeding and for once nobody cares. Look at me, getting my wish.

“Guys?” I murmur from behind a growing stack of blood-soaked tissues as Ryder flips through the channels and all of them really are talking about him.

“They’re running scared!” Maylene shouts, holding up a piece of a Soviet-made submachine gun she’s cleaning on our kitchen table. “Knocking over the police station was one thing, but the TRA medlab? All eyes on us! Hail Eris!”

“The TRA?” I ask. Ignored. Again. Those are supers! My brother and his friends got home in the middle of me coughing up blood and I find out just now that it’s because last night they were fighting supers!? Those people will turn you into a smear on the sidewalk by mistake, without even trying to!

“Yeah. Yeah, man, this is it. This is what’ll finally earn some attention. Who do you think the Children of Eris will send? The Theomachiast? Riptide? Dormouse?” says the loud-ass Maori kid Maylene’s always hanging out with. Tai, I think.

Jeez, I was trying to sleep when you guys burst into our house! If you can call it a house.

“Dormouse?” Ryder snarks.

“Hey, don’t shit on Dormouse! They’re half the reason we even knocked over that lab in the first place. It sounded like such a bad idea, but you were right, Ryder. Every channel. They’re interviewing big names. Anax Stellis, Stratus, Demiurge. We hurt them. We hurt them bad in there.”

Maylene’s voice fades out as I realize what just happened. They were only going to hit the police station, steal some guns, slash some tires. But the TRA lab, the TRA medical lab right next door, they went from hoping a super wasn’t in there waiting for trouble to start all the way to knocking that place over too. And it was Ryder’s idea, because—

Because he was trying to find a miracle cure, for me, again, and putting the whole thing in danger because of it!

I try to speak but all that comes out is blood. I halt for a moment and then puke my guts all over the table and the floor and Ryder’s shoes and everything. There’s a chorus of disgusted voices and then the familiar sound of Ryder ushering everyone out while I sit there trying not to cry. Maylene calls from the front door that I should hang in there, that she and Ryder are gonna make me better, that it’s all gonna be better when the Children of Eris are taking care of me.

Yeah, right. The Children of Eris? Super-terrorists in charge of my medical chart? That’d be great. That’d be so much better than having my brother to myself!

No. That’s selfish. You can’t think like that! You can’t pretend things can go back to normal, because they can’t, and they won’t, and you’ll just fuck yourself up thinking like that. You won’t get him back, you won’t get your life back, you won’t get any of it back because it’s gone and you’re going to go down the drain with it. That’s not what this is about. Normality? Don’t be stupid! It’s about getting your sad little life over with before one of these idiots gets themself killed trying to save what can’t be saved, that’s what it’s about!

A bunch of it got on my shirt, so I’ve taken that off and I’m about halfway through cleaning the table when Ryder comes back. I turn to look at him and it makes me cough again, spattering red stains on the spot I just went over with the paper towel. I shut my eyes in frustration and try not to sob.

“You are getting through this.” Ryder says from the doorway. “You are going to get better. I’m gonna make you better.”

I ignore him and keep cleaning. If I can get rid of all of it before he comes over here and takes over for me, I win.

He stares as I keep working. He knows that if I don’t talk for long enough it means there’s a problem, a real problem, that I’ve bottled up something inside and it’s about to break free. Like the puke. Even my feelings are sick.

“What’re your orders, LT?” he asks, softly. He thinks that if I talk, things are gonna be okay. If I talk, nothing bad is going to happen. If I talk, he wins.

I get another paper towel. He stares.

“LT?”

That gets me.

“Stop pretending you’re Dad!” I shout.

“Yes, sir.” he says defiantly.

“No! No, stop—stop calling me that! I’m not your little soldier! I’m not special. I’m just a broken kid, I just don’t work anymore and you can’t accept that! I died in that landslide, when the clinic went under, the doctors said so. Why did you knock over the TRA medlab!?”

“I was following orders. Dad said to keep you safe and I—”

I cut him off.

“All you did was get an army of superheroes on our tail! That’s all you did was drag us deeper into this mess, this crap! Now they’ll be looking for you and Maylene and… and Tai and everybody! They’re not gonna see it our way! They’re not! You’re nothing but a criminal to them now and they’ll hunt you down and it’s all because you can’t accept that there’s nothing you can do to help me!”

He stiffens and stands straight. I brace myself. He’s taking us back there. He’s taking us back to intensive care, like I told him not to, like I told him he has to stop doing.

“We follow you wherever you have to go, and we don’t leave anywhere without you.” he says.

“Shut up.”

“You’re the LT, you’re the lieutenant, you’re the one who earned the promotion, and now you outrank all of us, so we’ve gotta listen to what you say, but even more important than that we’ve got to look out for you.” he continues.

“I’m not six years old anymore!” I say with all my strength, which isn’t much. Just enough to be heard. He’s making room for it, for me, no matter how mean I get. “My name’s Casey. I’m not in the fucking army. I’m a fucking invalid who just happens to be your brother.”

He swallows. Swallows down his anger. He never shows it to me, even though I know he’s packed full of it, even though I know he must be for him to do what he does all day, to steal things and hurt people and stage his little revolution.

“Dad said—”

“Dad’s gone.” I spit.

“Well, then I say there’s hope.” he says.

“What’d you find in that medlab, Ryder?” I say.

There’s silence. Eons of it. What came of it? What you did, the place you broke into to help me, the people you angered for that shred of hope, what did it all come to?

“Nothin’.” he says at last. I think I can hear his voice crack.

God, Ryder, I didn’t mean it. I try to fix it.

“I don’t want hope. I want you. Is that too much? I know I’m dying. I just… I just want…”

I don’t get any further. My voice breaks down like the rest of my body always does, and he comes and gets me, and after I’m done crying it out and he’s laid me down in bed and cleaned up the rest of the vomit—guess I lose—he puts his phone on silent and comes to stand at the door of my room.

“I’m sorry, LT.” he whispers.

Don’t call me that, I want to say, but I’m half paralyzed from the exhaustion and the water loss. I don’t know what this new bug my body’s fighting is, but it’s almost as bad as the one that put me in the ICU eight years ago, and this time all I’ve got is this decrepit house and my teenage brother to take care of me. This is it. This one kills me.

“It’s because…” he continues.

I wait. I wait to hear it. He takes his time to think things through when he really means them. I have to honour that.

“It’s because if I lose you, they win. The so-called superheroes, the TRA, the law and the feds and everyone who shut us out, they win if I lose you. It’s about us, sure, but it’s about you, LT. It’s about you because it’s about us, you understand?”

I can hear the regret in his voice. It soaks into my skin and sinks into me as I lie there, for hours, too sick to sleep and too sick to move. It’s telling me what I dreaded all this time, what I didn’t want to believe, didn’t want to believe because it would mean I’m contagious, that I’ve been a biohazard worse than I ever thought all this time.

He can’t live without me. If I die, he dies, and he’s already gone too far. I’m pulling him down with me into this pit of sick they all stubbornly called a life, all this time, and he’s drowning in it, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

I spend the next four hours wallowing in the despair of it all, nurturing the lump in my throat and the pain in my limbs and the despair settling in my chest, trying to trigger. To turn into one of them. A super.

Anything. Fire powers, turn into a demon, super strength, mind control, whatever, just give me something, God. I’m miserable enough, aren’t I!? Maylene says anyone can be a super who cares enough, who hurts enough, who reaches that place where life isn’t yours anymore, isn’t bearable anymore. I’m there. I have to be. Just give me something. Anything. Please.

God gives me sleep. It’s about what I deserve.

Ryder said something last night about going to a meeting this morning, so when I wake up at 3 AM with stomach cramps, I kill his alarm and hide his phone in the yard. As soon as I’m finished shitting myself half to death, obviously. Can’t forget that part. Can I just go one day without something new being wrong with me?

He’s a deep sleeper. Used to miss first period all the time back when his high school wasn’t buried under twelve meters of mud. It’ll give me time to think before he wakes up and goes off on me for sabotaging his self-destructive little crusade.

I never went to high school. I was a month out when our town went under. I was so excited, even though I knew I might not graduate. I made it. I had all these plans. I was gonna join a bunch of clubs, get into gardening, make new friends. I had my prom outfit picked out, isn’t that sad? I was gonna show up in a suit with biohazard symbols stitched on, with an IV drip I had to cart around. You know. A joke.

I was thirteen, okay? I know it’s stupid. I just wish I’d gotten a chance to be stupid instead of having to be so damn smart all the time. There are symptoms I could develop that would stop me from seeing these things, right? Seeing where we’re going, Ryder and me? A coma would be nice, those look comfy. Ooh, or brain fog, or memory loss! Anything to make me forget that I’m going to die alone in a refugee camp and my brother’s going to prison for life for working with a Children of Eris sabotage squad.

The Children of Eris. I wish Maylene never told me. They’re anti-government, anti-TRA, anti-social, and sure, Ryder and I are all those things too but that doesn’t mean we bomb Parliament and carve out communes in the middle of Toronto and murder superheroes on camera. Only supers can really join them, but they work with radicals like Maylene too—they’re the ones who source the guns and set the targets and talk up their crazy fucking ideology. Which is something like ‘if you kill enough people, eventually everyone left will be happy’.

That’s how antibodies work. They grab onto infected cells, trap them, slow them down, and they call out for blood—well, white blood cells—and the immune system obliterates them and their catch all at once like a rock dropped from orbit. Eats the whole disgusting mess alive.

Maylene thinks that if we make enough martyrs, one day nobody will be sick anymore. She thinks that one day nothing will be wrong in the world, if we just hold on tight enough and call out loud enough and send enough hurt and pain and destruction down on the things we hate.

Only she’s got it all wrong. She’s the antibody, sure, but she didn’t grab onto anything worth killing. She grabbed onto my brother, same as I did, and she’s a lodestone same as I am. He might’ve made the decision to knock over that TRA lab, but she’s the one who brought him there, her and her politics and her smug city-people solutions. Why don’t we just scream louder? That’ll fix things, right? Spoken like someone who’s never had to change a flat tire all alone in the backwoods. No. Sometimes you keep your head down and you do the work and you come out okay, even though no one’s listening.

Yeah, Maylene, you’re an antibody. And you’re bringing the TRA down on me and my brother. My only brother. I know I don’t get to be angry. I know I’m killing him too, slower, in a way that hurts more. But at least I know. You think you’re saving all our lives.

It should be you. Just you. It should be you who takes the fall, you who the killer T cells swallow up. I wish it could be me, but they’d never believe I pulled the trigger. I’m too young, and too weak, and too sick and too good.

It should’ve been me. I can’t even betray my family properly. Is there anything this rotting shell of mine can do with any goddamn dignity?

I cough and hack as I place the Discord video call on my shitty ancient phone. Normal calls haven’t worked for months, something about bills.

Amazingly, she picks up. What time is it, 4 in the morning? I’m not ready for it. I’m not ready to do this at all, but I can try.

“Hey.” I say. Worst opening ever. And she says—

“Why are you calling!? Did they get to you already!?” It’s more of a wild, accusatory shout than a conversation starter. Her eyes are downcast, bloodshot, swollen with terror. In the background, I can see Tai jittering and shaking, stumbling around in sweatpants, aiming a handgun around the room with erratic sweeps of their white-knuckled hands.

“Y-you have to leave my brother out of it. Tell them it was you that did it.” I say. It takes all my strength. I hold back a coughing fit to try to make it stick, to try to make it sound like anything but the delirious fever dream of a terminally ill child.

“LT, this isn’t the fucking time for fucking jokes, wake Ryder up and tell him he needs to run, now, they’re coming. They’re coming, LT.” she says, panicked.

She’s pale. Half-dressed. Her mouth’s hanging open in raw urgency. I’ve never seen her scared before, and here she is, scared for me. She barely even notices me most of the time, but now her eyes are locked on mine, begging, pleading with me to stop being a slimy mucusy little shit and run until my rotting lungs give out.

This is bad. This is really bad. But if I’m gonna run for my life, I’m not pretending anymore.

“That’s not my name.” I say. “It’s Casey. Call me Casey and I’ll log off right now and go wake him up. Otherwise—”

I don’t know what I was about to threaten, don’t know what I’m even saying, but it stops when the shapes behind her in the dark materialize into a… thing. Maybe a person. A real thing, not a shadow, not the nameless killer cells hanging in the sky above us. It’s the first super I’ve ever seen.

He’s got mandibles. Not fangs, mandibles like some giant insect and rows of shark’s teeth behind them and messy windswept hair hanging around them matted by the venom dripping from every edge and point and blade.

He’s small. My size. His eyes look like mine too.

There’s a deafening boom that blows out the speakers as Tai shoots the monster-boy in the back of the head. He flinches and hisses like a giant cockroach. Lightning arcs through Tai’s sparking smoking burning body in the blink of an eye. Maylene turns and screams and something sharp and swift goes through her arm and a splatter of fresh blood coats the camera. The mic goes dead.

My jaw drops. There’s sweat on my palms. A lump builds in my throat.

I puke all over the floor. There’s blood. I try to shout for Ryder, try to get up but it happens again, more of me spilled all over our house, more stains, more reminders that all I can do is make a mess—

The phone! My camera’s still on! I leap up and reach for it but double over coughing, my vision going dark, my head going light. It takes almost a minute before my shaking hand manages to shut off the call.

I can hear Ryder getting out of bed in the other room, swearing and muttering to himself. He tries not to let me hear it, but I must’ve sounded like I was dying just now. Besides, I deserve it. I deserve the scorn. They all pretend I don’t but I’m the one who’s sick, the one who drags everyone down. I should’ve killed this ridiculous fake they call a body a long time ago, gone to Heaven or wherever sick kids go in a world that lets this kind of thing happen. Can’t be worse than here. Can’t be worse than being the opposite of a person, taking things out of the world instead of making them, hurting people instead of helping them. No. It can’t be worse.

Maybe if Ryder leaves me here, he can get away. I’ll never tell, no matter how nice the TRA treats me, no matter what they offer, and in a few days I’ll be dead. The perfect fall guy.

But no. Life’s not that pretty. He’d never leave me.

I think I pass out, because the next thing I know I’m in his arms and he’s calling 911.

“They’re gonna catch you.” I whine, on instinct. A man’s got to be loyal, even if you’re just half of one, even if you’re just a broken doll like me.

“I don’t care. Case, do you see that?”

My head lolls to the side and my eyes focus on the bloody puddle of vomit I just retched up.

“Yeah.” I murmur deliriously.

There it is, the rotting slime inside me. No. That’s the real me. Painting our lives, steeping them, soaking them.

I want to be human. Not lead. I want to be human. Not glass. I want to be human. Not antimatter.

“You’re getting to a real hospital if it’s the last thing I do.” he says.

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know it really will be. He doesn’t know about the hero monster, the nightstalker. He doesn’t know Maylene and Tai are dead or taken. He doesn’t know that this is our last night together no matter what he does, no matter what weight he carries for me, no matter what delusions make everything look okay from inside his stupid loyal head.

Make it all worth it. Please, God, make it all worth it. Make me worth every drug they pumped into me and every dollar they spent. Make it worth those sleepless nights where they all took care of me even as it pulled them apart. Make it worth Dad, everyone’s rock and everyone’s uncle and our hero and our north star, make it worth him and Mom rotting in some state prison. Make it worth the weight of me, worth the whole fucked up relay race of carrying this splintered faded lodestone idol in the shape of a boy for lives and years and terror nights.

Make me worth their love, God, because I won’t let you waste it.

God doesn’t answer. I rise to my feet all the same.

It should be impossible. Standing. In the bathroom mirror down the hallway, I look like a zombie, shaking with fever, dripping with liquid bits of gore, pale and dehydrated and coming apart.

It’s strange. It’s really strange.

I feel fine.

“Case, sit back down, you’re gonna pass out again.” Ryder says firmly from the floor, rising to pick me back up.

I wave him off.

“Maylene and Tai, something terrible happened to them. The TRA got to them. We have to get out of here. You didn’t use the truck when you knocked over the lab, so we’ll be okay to run in that, probably.”

I’m barely finished when I break out into another fit of coughs, my lungs exploding again like I’m so used to.

Okay. Maybe not that. That’s a sign, it’s got to be.

“Uh, nevermind,” I say, interrupting a bewildered Ryder, “you did use the truck when you knocked over the lab, so they’ll catch us. They’ll probably catch us anyway, but it’s just the one guy, so we’re probably best staying here and trying to juke him, run down into the refugee camp where they can’t follow without causing a whole domestic incident.”

The astonished look on his face tells me I was right. Yeah, big bro—I pay attention too, you know. Easy to do when you’re bedridden.

I take a clean, deep breath. No symptoms. No sickness. That’s it. That has to be what to do, that’s how I can tell. The path, the way out, is where I’m not sick. If I’m sick, whatever we’re doing, it’s not the path. It’s as simple as that.

Maybe God was listening after all.

No. No, it was me. Just like Maylene always said: we are our own salvation. I can feel this incredible thing running through my blood, warming me through, saving me. Saving us.

I could get used to being salvation. I really could. Tears well up in my eyes, but a sudden cramp in my stomach snaps me out of it.

I’m not moving fast enough!

“Hide. I’ll distract their monster, they can’t arrest me, I didn’t do anything wrong. You run on my cue, okay Ryder?” I say.

He stares at me like I’m an alien, but he starts moving, gets behind a closet door with a frying pan in hand. I guess he didn’t have time to grab his gun. Whatever. Feel like it’d never work anyway, and I guess I’m psychic now, so I’m probably right.

“You… you triggered? I always thought it’d be…” He gestures vaguely with his hand. “Shinier.”

I shrug. This is good enough.

That’s when the terror hits me. Deep, raw, primal, welling up from my bone marrow. Like cursed immune cells, eating me alive from the inside or dying off before their time, the two forces that tore me apart my whole life intertwined, rotten honeycomb all through my skeleton. My heart pounds. Insectile shadows squirm in the corners of my vision.

My head snaps to the hallway, but there’s no one there. Then, back to Ryder, make sure he’s okay, and—

There it is—there he is? The monster boy. The creature, still dripping with blood. It’s running down his chin. He reaches out with a bladed chitinous arm choked by blue-black scales, but…

But I’m not afraid anymore. It’s gone like a weight off my chest, like the shit inside my stomach after I throw up. And even better—I’m not feeling sick. Things must be okay.

His bloody hand comes to rest, gently, on my shoulder. There’s worry in his soft brown eyes.

“Are you alright? Who are you? Do you know the Children of Eris? Wait, no, you—you look horrible. Do you need me to call an ambulance?” he says sharply, through stretched lips and razor teeth.

I smile, instinctively. What can I say? He’s looking at me like I’m a person.

“Yeah, th-that’d be great—” I start, but I’m cut off by a sudden pang of nausea as Ryder swings the frying pan at the kid’s head as hard as he possibly can.

There’s a clang and a gasp of alarm as it slams into his skull hard enough to split bone, but he barely flinches. I can see him about to whirl to face his attacker, about to slice Ryder up like he did Maylene, and I can’t let that happen, and something just—

He misses. He misses with that wicked blade of his, slices Dad’s ancient stereo in half with a shower of sparks instead of Ryder’s head, and it’s because right in the middle of his swing he starts coughing his lungs up. Ryder watches in amazement as the monster-boy doubles over, leaning on his bladed limbs to stand, then drops to one knee, retching.

“What did you do!?” Ryder shouts in amazement.

“What did you do to me?” the boy echoes, weakly, before projectile vomiting a reddish streak across our floor. That’s gonna be so much cleanup. Ugh. Is that a human finger!? I try not to think of the implications as I usher Ryder towards the door, looking back to see the TRA responder squirming on the ground, struggling to get up in the midst of another bout of coughing and fatigue.

“Wait!” he shouts after me. “We can help you!”

I don’t answer, and afterwards the sounds he’s making get pretty brutal. I wince, remembering the worst days when I was in intensive care. Still, somehow, I think he’ll be okay. I guess I don’t quite know how these powers work yet, but if I was really going to hurt someone, I’d feel sick to death about it, right?

Yeah. I would. I can trust myself now. Maybe everyone can trust me—maybe from now on people will listen. Maybe I’ll be a voice, not an expense sheet and a sob story and a sad little shrine with all its candles burning low. Yeah. Yeah, that’s me now. A voice. A voice you can trust.

Or, well, maybe I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Maybe it’s enough for just Ryder to trust me.

I climb in the passenger seat, probably getting puke everywhere, but if I do he’s too strung out on adrenaline to care.

“We gotta get down to the camp. Tai’s got family down there for one, and Cousin Lyra. Right? Come on, they’ll never catch us, the monster boy saw my face but if we get far enough away I bet he can’t even teleport after us. They all have limits!” I ramble.

He looks at me skeptically, but after a moment it turns to something like awe.

“Hey, there’s some colour in you, Case. You uh, you don’t look dead anymore. Does that mean…”

He’s always been a bit slow.

“Yeah. Means I’m okay. And… I think it means, if I’m not sick, I think it means we’re okay. That we’re gonna get away with it. That things are gonna be alright. Just drive.”

He does.

I’m dying, and it’s nobody’s problem but mine.

Well, ‘dying’. I wish I was dying. It’d be better than being sick as a dog for three days straight! Getting healthy was the best thing that ever happened to me. We’re pretty sure I actually got stronger. Ryder needed me to help jack up the truck and I just lifted the thing. Almost dropped it on him when I started coughing out of nowhere, so we’re not doing that again, but hey, super strength!

It felt like it couldn’t get any better. And then I got sick again. But it’s not the old sick, not the killing-me sick. It’s the new sick, the puzzle, the what-do-I-have-to-do-to-make-it-stop.

Except I can’t figure it out. I’ve been doing good deeds, helping people make decisions. Talked Maylene into getting a fucking lawyer. Yeah, she lived, but she’s still stubborn. And an arm lighter. At least they won’t send her to TRA lockup if she beats the murder charges, and she just might now that we’ve talked her into shutting up about the Children of Eris and keeping her head down.

I’ve been helping. People trust me. They’re safer now. But I’m still sick. What kind of saviour can’t even stand up without passing out? What am I for? What’s all this for?

Well, one day it comes to me. It’s the ass crack of dawn and I’m lying awake, eyes red, sniffling, can’t sleep, can’t eat. Same old story, except this time, I close my eyes to try to rest for the seventeenth time, wishing I was dead for the first time since I triggered, and my whole body goes cold. Icy.

I used to skate, before the sickness took my coordination, before everyone worried I’d concuss myself and they took the ice away from me. Here I am, gliding forward. Here I am on a fresh rink, and it’s so cold, so sweet. The fever floods my body. My world turns to endless fields of numbing snow.

I drift on the feeling and my body drifts with me. Not involuntary. It’s me, but it’s so natural—a habit, like brushing my teeth. I barely even notice my hands dialing the number on Ryder’s burner phone, but once it’s punched in, I recognize it.

The TRA general threat line. Superpowered anything, from disasters to sightings to… to recruitment. Am I really doing this? I guess so. I haven’t tripped and fallen yet, haven’t lost my balance. The fever’s still there, and somehow I don’t think it’ll subside until I talk to…

Well, not the first person. She doesn’t even understand what I’m talking about, thinks I’m crazy, but then I mention a flesh-eating boy. A ghoul. Someone I saw hacking off limbs and dripping venom, who I left in a puddle of spit and phlegm and puke when he tried to come capture me. I want to talk to him. I want to say sorry, even though I was right. Sometimes that’s what you have to do to keep on living. Sometimes you have to be the little person to keep being a person at all, to live, to make a difference to anyone, to make the sickness go away.

The callback takes about fifteen minutes to come in. The fever’s going down, but it doesn’t really matter. I know what to say, and if I biff it, the nausea will stop me before I do anything too stupid. I’m immune to it now, the screwing up. The being less than me. I’ve got antibodies, you know.

“Sick boy? Really? Are you crazy? I mean, good on you for calling, nobody ever just accepts they need therapy in my line of work, but… it’s just so…” a voice says from the other end of the line. It’s so human. Not like before.

I cut him off.

“I can’t sit here doing nothing anymore. I want you to listen to me, because I think I can help you save people, think I can… make it all better if I just tell you where the problems are. I want to be a hero. Are you going to treat me like a person? Are they? Your bosses? Be honest. You said you wanted to help me, so be honest.”

There’s a long pause. Fresh clean air fills my lungs as I breathe in, my nose and throat as clear as the summer sky. It’s paradise.

“They… they’re kinder than you could ever believe.” he says. I can hear him choking up a little and trying to hide it. “They won’t just treat you like a person, sick boy. They’ll… they’ll understand. They’ll understand why everything happened, and they’ll forgive you. I promise. I promise you.”

Sick boy. I like that. Sick until it’s all over. Sick until there’s nothing left to be sick about. I’ll use my kindred shape, my body, my gift to find where the sickness is hiding and I’ll hold it tight, and I won’t ever let go ‘till it’s gone. The TRA, the Children, my family, everything that’s wrong with all of them. Gone. My very own problem. Mine. Nobody else’s.

Heaven can wait. I’ll haul them all up with me.