Crazy Awakening: My luck can copy Talents.

Mercier Street looked different now that they were looking at it with intention.

The streetlights were spaced strangely—there were thirty-meter stretches of complete darkness between poles. The cameras Adrián had marked on the map as "absent" in the radius were indeed absent: where there should have been a municipal camera at the corner of Mercier and Alvarez, there was only an empty pole with a dangling cable. The buildings on this block had their metal shutters down even at the businesses Adrián knew operated during the day.

It was a street designed to disappear into. Without having been designed.

They stopped in front of number one hundred sixty-eight.

An old doorway. Dark wooden door with a bronze knocker. Worn stone step. Above the door, a closed balcony with drawn curtains.

Adrián stood in front of it.

"Here," he said quietly.

"Here what?" Sariel asked.

"Here is where it happened."

She went very still beside him.

"...your sister."

"Yeah."

"Are you sure?"

"I’m sure. I came here many times. The first two years. Then I stopped coming because it hurt too much, and my therapist told me I needed to stop coming."

Sariel said nothing.

Adrián looked up at the closed balcony. Then down at the stone step. Then at the mouth of the alleyway that branched off the left side of the building—a narrow passage that disappeared into the darkness toward the interior of the block.

"She came out of the bar on the corner. She was going to catch the bus on the avenue. She cut through this alley because it was faster. It was raining. I was sick with the flu, but I told her I wanted to go with her because I didn’t want to be home alone. Dad was out of town. Elena told me no. I insisted. She gave in. We both left."

Sariel squeezed his hand—Adrián hadn’t realized she was still holding it—with a small but present pressure.

"We went into the alley. I was running ahead because I wanted to get to the bus before her to prove I was faster. It was a stupid kid thing. When I got to the avenue, I turned around to laugh at her. And she wasn’t there."

"..."

"She hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t made a sound. Nothing. Five seconds before, she’d been behind me. Five seconds later, there was no one in the alley. I was fourteen."

Sariel breathed. Deeply. Slowly.

"Did you go back for her?"

"I ran back. Screamed her name. The street was empty. The bar on the corner had its blinds down, it was night, no one was walking around. I went back to the start of the alley, and that’s when I saw it."

"What did you see, Vega."

Adrián was silent. Stared at the dark mouth of the alleyway.

Then he spoke, in a voice he didn’t entirely recognize as his own.

"Wings. Black. Already in the air when I turned around, coming out of the alley and going up, against the rain clouds. Very big. The size of sheets. I saw the wings for two seconds, maybe three, and then the thing disappeared behind a building and I didn’t see it anymore. I didn’t see the face. I didn’t see the body. Just the wings."

Sariel had gone very quiet.

Adrián didn’t look at her.

"The police took my statement. I told them. Black wings. Large. Flying upward. The officer wrote ’acute post-traumatic stress manifestation’ in the report, not what I said. When I asked to see the report at sixteen, I found that note. They didn’t even put my real statement in. They changed it."

"Vega..."

"No one believed me. No one. Not Dad. Not the police. Not the first therapist, or the second, or the third. By fifteen, I’d stopped telling people. By sixteen, I’d stopped telling myself. I learned to say ’something weird’ instead of ’wings.’ Learned to say ’I didn’t see well’ instead of ’I saw them perfectly.’ Learned to make people think I was getting over it."

Silence.

Adrián finally turned his head and looked at Sariel.

"Were they shedding feathers?"

"...what?"

"The wings. They were losing feathers as they went up. And the feathers fell to the ground and disappeared before touching the pavement. They didn’t fall normally. They dissolved. Like they were made of ink."

Sariel didn’t respond.

She was very pale. Paler than Adrián had ever seen her, and Sariel was a girl with a fairly limited palette of paleness.

"Corvax... No, Sariel."

"Yeah?"

"I never described that to anyone. The ink feathers. Never. Not to the police. Not to the therapists. Not to Dad. I kept that to myself because I knew it sounded crazy. This is the first time I’ve told anyone."

"..."

"And you haven’t said anything either."

"Vega."

"Do you know what it is?"

She didn’t respond. Her amber eyes were fixed on the pavement, unblinking, with an expression Adrián had never seen on her—an expression that wasn’t criminologist, wasn’t library girl, wasn’t the girl who’d kissed him against a theater wall half an hour ago. It was the expression of someone processing information she shouldn’t be processing.

"Sariel."

"Vega."

"Do you know what it was?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"No."

"You’re lying."

"Vega, no—"

"You’re lying. Your right cheek tenses when you lie. I noticed it yesterday. I noticed it today. I’m noticing it right now."

Sariel took a step back.

Just one.

But Adrián saw it.

And in that moment, something started happening to him.

At first he thought it was the cold. A stabbing pain in his left temple, sharp, like someone had driven a needle behind his eye. He closed his eyes. Brought his free hand to his head. The pain traveled down his jaw, down his neck, settled somewhere in his chest.

And everything started moving.

At first very slowly. Then not so much.

Kenji’s bracelet, heating up against his skin yesterday. "Trust your instincts." The store clerk’s scar. The toothpick clenched in his hand. "Another one getting involved without knowing it."

Sariel saying she was a third-year. Then second-year. Then "depends on how you count the credits."

Sariel saying she was from Prague. Without a Prague accent.

Sariel saying "I lost someone too." Without saying who, or how, or when.

Ishtar knowing things from classes she hadn’t attended. Ishtar seeing him leave a store she shouldn’t have been near.

"Vega"—Sariel’s voice came from very far away, even though she was a meter away—"Vega, breathe."

But Adrián wasn’t entirely there anymore.

He was in the alleyway.

He was in the alleyway three and a half years ago, fourteen years old, sick with the flu, hair wet from the rain, running ahead of Elena and hadn’t turned to look at her in five seconds—and those five seconds were the most important five seconds of his entire life, and he’d spent them running a stupid race.

But this time, in the alleyway, Adrián turned.

In the memory, Adrián had never turned until he reached the avenue.

In this, Adrián turned in the middle of the alley. For no reason. Because the trance led him there. Because the pain behind his eye pushed him to look. Because something inside him—something that had been there all along but was only now waking up—told him to look.

And he saw.

He saw the scene his brain had blocked for three and a half years. Saw Elena two meters behind him, and saw a figure descend from the roof of the building on the left side, silent, with four black wings extended and feathers falling behind like ink, and saw Elena open her mouth without being able to scream because the figure already had her by the throat with a gloved hand, and saw Elena’s eyes—green, terrified, searching for her little brother with a desperation Adrián hadn’t been able to read back then because he was fourteen and it was raining and he was running toward the bus.

And this time, in the trance, Adrián also saw the figure’s face.

Very light blond hair, almost white. Eyes just as yellow as Sariel’s, but colder, older. A mouth closed in a serious, almost religious line. She didn’t spare a single glance at Adrián. She just lifted Elena by the throat with the ease of someone lifting a kitten, spread her four black wings, and disappeared upward.

And Elena vanished.

And the feathers fell.

And they dissolved.

And it was over.

Adrián opened his eyes.

He was on his knees on the pavement of Mercier Street. He didn’t remember kneeling. Sariel was crouched in front of him with both hands on his shoulders, saying something he still couldn’t process. Her mouth was moving. Her yellow eyes—the same yellow eyes as the woman in the memory—were very wide.

"Vega, breathe, Vega, listen to me, breathe."

Adrián looked up.

And behind Sariel, spread against the moonless black sky of Mercier Street, he caught sight, for half a second, of two pairs of wings.

Black.

With feathers she wasn’t shedding—not yet—but that existed. That were there. Overlaid on her silhouette like a double exposure in an old photograph.

Adrián blinked.

The wings disappeared.

Sariel was still in front of him, wingless, talking to him.

But he had already seen them.

And she, looking into his eyes, saw on his face exactly what he had seen.

Sariel went very still.

Her hands, still on Adrián’s shoulders, loosened.

"...you saw them," she said, very quietly.

"Sariel."

"You saw me."

"Sariel, what—"

"You shouldn’t be able to see me."

Adrián said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.

Sariel straightened slowly. Stepped away from him. One step. Two. She brought a hand to her mouth. Closed her eyes.

"You shouldn’t. Not in your state. Not without having..." she opened her eyes. "It already woke up. In you. It already started. Tonight. Ahead of schedule."

"Sariel, what the hell are you saying."

She looked at him.

And for the first time all night, all week, Adrián saw the full expression on her face. Without the criminologist smile. Without the calm. Without the irony.

It was a torn expression. Of someone from whom a decision she’d been putting off for days had just been ripped away.

"Forgive me," she said.

"..."

"Forgive me, Adrián."

And from Sariel Corvax’s back, in the absolute silence of Mercier Street at ten minutes to eleven, four enormous black wings unfolded, their feathers starting to fall to the pavement like spilled ink.

In her right hand, a spear of black light materialized, as long as her body, with a violet glow running along its edge.

Adrián, still on his knees, looked at her.

"Sariel," he said, and his voice sounded very small, very young, like the voice of a fourteen-year-old boy in a rainy alleyway. "Was it you?"

She didn’t answer immediately.

When she did, tears were streaming down her cheeks.

"No," she said. "It wasn’t me. But we’re the same kind."

She raised the spear.

And on Adrián’s left wrist, Kenji’s bracelet heated up for the last time, and the dark wooden bead began to glow with a very faint white light, very small, very late.

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