Chương 43: The Feeling

Drops of sweat crawled down my sides, and my damp face stung in the cold air. I was far from fully recovered. Still, after weaseling through the interrogation and running away from Cecile, I did my best to clean myself up and went immediately to speak to Arlo.

"To clarify," Arlo said as he shut his density-enhanced locker, "You're saying that you led a group of thirty high-tiers to believe that you're engaged to my branch cousin."

"…It was to ensure that my internship went well," I added.

"I'm sorry. It was a mistake. I'm regretting it pretty heavily now." We were in the ten-minute break between the day's fifth and sixth period. Arlo considered my explanation for a moment, examining his backpack contents, and let out a huff.

"I suppose it's good that one of us could use the rumor to our benefit." His lips curved upward for a second.

"Still, I assume he'll be quite irritated. You ought to submit a formal apology through the clan channel, Meili." There was a half-second of silently bracing myself, and then I realized he was done. That's it? I'd expected– Well, my judgments were surely scrambled all over the optimism-pessimism spectrum, but I had expected some negative reaction from Arlo. There was a reason I had rushed to be the first to tell him.

"I was worried about my affiliate contract," I blurted.

"There's no need for that," he said.

"My mother happens to value entertainment above nearly all else. I imagine she'll find this hysterically funny, without ever considering if you should be punished."

"That does sound characteristic of her." I felt myself steadying, physically, in the rhythm of my breath.

"Yes. And even if that weren't the case, the clan currently has no attention to spare on small issues, if you remember." Forgot about that.

"I do. Thank you for the reassurance, Arlo." They were still voting every day with the flower-turning. As a mere affiliate I was only supposed to know about it in the vaguest terms - a 'clan-wide effort' that kept the mainline members busy. Once we started heading for our classroom, Arlo added, "You should keep in mind, though, that it would be very different if Aunt Valerie were leading us."

"I… Understand." The name alone made me twitch.

"But in what sense?" The students in the hallway very deliberately made room for us, and I hoped he would elaborate, though of course he refused.

"Not in the hall," he said. He'd gotten slightly looser with talking about things at school, but he still cared about keeping clan business private from all the normal students. He still cared about all the traditional conventions, in general. The nearest students gave their slightly-bowing nods of respect as they parted around us, and when a group of four freshman girls forgot to do so I spotted a blip of dissatisfaction on Arlo's face.

He expected that everyone fought their rank matches to know their place, and expected them to act in accordance once they knew. It wasn't some impressive inference on my end to know this about him. His attitude was public and open, uncontroversially. But he was at least allowing students with pure sensory or information-gathering abilities to sit out of matches, a Rei-era policy. And he'd softened his view of John, despite the many ways John violated his expectations, once I'd explained that he was a late bloomer.

In canon they'd brought each other near-death multiple times. In this world, their worst conflict was a standoffish argument. It was the kind of gap, or positive divergence, that could keep compounding on itself gradually over time. The problem now, I finally admitted to myself, is that I might not have time.

"Arlo," I said unprompted, "Do you think that it would be improper, for an Authority Agent to use their own family member's report to start a team investigation?" He gave me a questioning look. He didn't know that I was talking about Cecile Arbor's family.

"I wouldn't say so at all," he replied.

"My aunt often bemoans the shortage of trustworthy sources; I think a direct family member of an agent would be appreciated and prioritized as a reporter. Though of course I can't speak on The Authorities' behalf." Just your behalf is bad enough on its own, I thought.

"... If this is because you have an incident you want to report," Arlo added, "I would be happy to relay it to Valerie."

"It's nothing like that." We reached our math classroom, and I swung open the door for him as usual, pointedly unaggressive.

"I was just idly curious, that's all." I sat down and opened my textbook with a carved-on smile. Like I was excited to learn more about polynomial factorization. A fake part of me suggested that maybe Cecile wouldn't try to ruin literally everything again, maybe she would quietly accept her failure. I mean, come on, forever defaulting to the most extreme pessimist prediction isn't a sustainable way to exist, and just a few hours ago- My honest mind laughed and killed the thought.

I had always just assumed that, no matter how difficult the situation was, I would at least get my full four years at Wellston High School. Four years to try and try and try - I'd taken what had felt like the necessary measures to ensure this was true. But now it turned out that, from just a single moment of carelessness, I had put myself close to ending everything. I let myself think about the worst case.

If Cecile got this to happen again, and I made just one mistake dealing with the lie detection, then suddenly Mind Reading would be on the table. The reveal of all my thoughts would be on the table. They would imprison me, and the government documents Alicia had spied on would come into play, the ones that described punishments for irredeemable criminals.

"You do not want to read these," Alicia had said to me then, but my morbid curiosity had been too strong, and now I knew about what could happen in too much detail. Abilities introduced so many creative ways to punish a person. All of this was on the table for me, and my mind kept piling on more and more and more - until the weight of possibilities made the table shatter in pieces, and the table was my future life, and what remained of it was nothing. The bell rang.

I knew my hands were quivering, and tried to leave quickly, unsure if I could hold myself together. The Precalculus teacher held me back. I ended up grinding my teeth, smiling, as he praised my factorization.... I spent the rest of Friday locked in my room. I spent Saturday morning lying in bed, trying to stare a hole into my ceiling as plans whirled around in my head. Alicia and John called around noon, partly out of concern (which I appreciated), and partly because there were important plans to talk about.

I took the opportunity to call them to my room. There, I made a very convincing argument that the most important plan was to avoid going to prison, and then asked them to help me think about what material a teenage internet stalker might possibly find on us. It was the opposite of a comforting explanation, which was the point. They were motivated to brainstorm with me. That was why, when we came up with a list of exactly two items, I was reasonably confident that it was right.

The first dangerous thing was the King of the Hill battle event, specifically in how it linked Alicia to me, as a close enough friend to invite to New Boston. The second was John's one-on-five fight with his former classmates over the summer. Both items were reasonably findable by Cecile, but on the other hand neither of them seemed like they would be worthy of The Authorities' attention, no matter how she tried to frame them. The second one didn't even implicate me at all.

Then Alicia made a further observation: even assuming that Cecile could force me into another lie detector test, I would only be in danger if the agent knew to ask a question that I had no good answers for. My original, desperate, emotionally-inspired plan - beating Cecile into a monthlong coma to stall for time - was actually likely to backfire in this way. It would have increased the likelihood that they asked me a hard question.

("Did you injure Cecile Arbor so severely because you were afraid of her discovering something you've done?") After some more thought, I concluded that other noticeably big, suspicious actions ran into the same issue. Like if I offered Cecile the title of Jack to appease her, the obvious question would be:"Did you offer Cecile Arbor the Jack position in hopes that she would stop investigating before she found something incriminating?"

Ultimately, it seemed like taking obvious action would give a future cross-examiner an easy place to start targeting. So I decided against it - instead, I wanted to focus on countermeasures that existed only in my mind. John and Alicia decided to help with this by asking realistically difficult questions, questions an agent could potentially 'luck' into without knowing why it would be hard for me to answer.

"So who is this 'Alicia' girl to you?" asked Alicia, in a faux-gruff interviewer voice.

"A girl who happens to be useful to me," I answered.

"Why did you bring her to the King of the Hill battle event?"

"Because I knew her ability would help me win." She nodded very seriously.

"Alright, I see… And, Miss Strauss, why did you invite Alicia to New Boston during your internship?"

"Because I had work for her to do," I answered.

"What kind of work?"

"Reading, writing, and note-taking. I didn't give her anything from the internship, of course." Alicia nodded and leaned back on my bed, satisfied with my truth-twisting ability, but John poked me on the shoulder with a frown.

"Wait a second," he said.

"Time out from the exercise. Isn't that last part just a lie?"

"It isn't," Alicia replied.

"The intern-level files are all useless when you have access to higher levels. I haven't looked at a single one."

"That's how I'm convincing myself that it's true," I confirmed with a nod, and John made a thoughtful expression.

"Right. Technical truth," he said to himself.

"Okay then, Meili: If not your internship, what things did you have Alicia read, write, and notetake about?"

"... Busywork that I would have hated doing myself," I answered, after a moment of being stumped.

"Tedious reading and writing, for example about Wellston City building codes." Totally true. Alicia broke into hacking coughs. We kept going like this, through potential lines of questioning, keeping track of what I could and couldn't handle. After a while, I finally felt some level of calm. Not because I was coming up with clever workaround answers every single time - if anything, the pool of potentially-lethal questions was deeper and worse than I'd expected.

No, it was more that John and Alicia were accompanying me, that I didn't have to pull myself from destruction on my own. I was mentally spent, and starving, and smiling a little by the end. I was beginning to truly feel alright. My appreciation of friendship was tested, however, when we were leaving for our late-night dinner, as John studied the trash and laundry littering my dorm.

"By the way…" He scrunched his nose.

"I don't think this is okay, Meili. Didn't we plan that your mom would visit tomorrow for the ability evolution research? She might have a panic attack when she opens the door." Alicia nodded solemnly. Well then, I thought, suddenly flushing a burning pink. Destruction doesn't sound so bad right now. They laughed as I pushed them out of the room. Beautiful Is it a little bit more okay, for a girl's room to be gross compared to a guy's, or is it actually even worse?

John considered this question (and other far more important questions) as he stood outside the fenced-off private training grounds, watching Meili and her mother stretch and warm up inside. The state of Meili's room didn't actually matter at all. Alice, Meili's mom, had come to Wellston High for her planned visit, but all of it would be at the training grounds. Apparently the woman didn't have much time to spare. He was examining them both with his aura vision.

They were still preparing for their duel, so their abilities were both inactive. In this state, Meili and her mom looked like they had identical auras… but he was sure he would find some difference between them once they started fighting. After all, Meili's ability was the evolved version. Devil's Hands versus her mom's Demon Claw. The whole point of watching them fight was to expose what actually changed in an ability during evolution - and hopefully what caused the process in the first place.

"God. I don't know how long it's been since I've done this." Meili's mom, a red-haired woman in doctor's scrubs, cracked her knuckles. Then she cracked her neck. Her hand crept from her side, like she was about to activate her claws. But she only raised her hand at him, waving.

"Excuse me? John?" She smiled at him, though it seemed kind of strained.

"Would you like us to limit our speed or stay close to you? I know you're a very strong power-copier, but for your special vision to function…"

"I'm copying sense enhancement right now, ma'am." He smiled back.

"Feel free to go one hundred percent - it's actually better if you pull out all the stops."

"…All the stops," she repeated, pausing.

"Got it." We just met, he thought, so maybe she feels awkward about my level. Meili shouted from further out on the grounds, even though she didn't have to be loud.

"Are you recording with the aura imaging camera, John? Remember we also want to have video for Darren!" Oops. He felt for the camera around his neck. It wasn't recording, like she'd probably noticed, so he turned it on.

"It's on!" he said back, and she gave a judgy eyebrow-raise from however far away. Meili looked to the side and muttered to herself, "Imagine we did a whole fight and he wasn't recording." (But he could still hear her.)"Yeah, yeah." John cocked his head.

"Just stop stalling and get on with it already. We've been theorizing about this too much. I've been dying to know what the deal with evolution is." John was honestly skeptical that having video would even matter. If discovering the source of ability evolution were as simple as recording an evolved ability and its counterpart, the knowledge would have already been public. His ability was what would make this test unique.

Of course, his aura theory wasn't quite advanced enough to satisfy academic perfectionists like Darren or Meili: that was their argument for keeping a video to look at. But John himself had read his fair share of NxGen files, enough to have knowledge far beyond any regular person's. A surprising amount of it boiled down to visual things he could simply look for and see. If someone's aura distribution pattern was concentrated near their skin, then they probably had a skin-modifying ability.

If the distribution instead concentrated in the spine and brain, then their ability was probably mental. If a person's aura was dense then they were likely strong, and if it was 'light' then they were likely weak. If the movements of their aura seemed rough and inefficient, then their ability mastery was likely low. Finally, Meili activated her ability. She was an example of low mastery; really, every single high schooler was.

John watched closely as her aura rippled, activating her claws, which then morphed into a crowded mass of thin spiked tendrils. The aura movement worked just fine. But there was a clear rough-feeling quality to it, which screamed that it could have been done in a less wasteful and more… well, more, way. These were the kinds of things he could know at a glance. Even malleability and potency took only a little longer to process, the two 'advanced' factors that affected an ability in subtler ways.

John could take in all of the attributes when he met someone for the first time, weigh everything in an instinctual mental formula, and then predict their level. Even with just five seconds, he would still get their level right down to three digits more often than not. Alice Strauss activated her ability, too, forming a shorter pair of red claws that gleamed with sharpness. Just from her aura movement he could tell that Alice was superior in pure piercing power.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. The two redheads scanned each other, hesitating for half a second, and then charged at a full sprint. Meili's swarm of tendrils crushed forward from the side and front. They pierced with skin contact, or almost, but Alice's speed advantage was enough to slice them in the moment before that.

This forced Meili to demanifest, leaving her open, and Alice capitalized by feinting a forward stab and blitzing a backside angle – but Meili's eyes flashed the deep violet of detection two beats before the strike connected. She dodged above her mother's behind-the-back stash attempt with a powerful flap of wings. Meili had grown recently, making them both 4. 7s. John shook himself out of the combat, which was distracting him by being way too evenly matched and interesting. He started focusing more on their auras.

How exactly was fifteen-year-old Meili competing with her grown adult mother? He would figure out the source of it, of evolution. After all, he was consistently right about abilities - it had become a part of his identity recently, part of the way he thought about himself. Maybe he hadn't memorized any theorems, but in terms of practical understanding he was one of the best on the planet. It was mostly thanks to NxGen. Their knowledge had created his understanding.

And if plans kept going right, he thought, this same understanding would be what came back to kill them in the end. … … I don't understand, John thought five minutes later, as Meili morphed a long spear to clash loudly with her mother's claws. I really don't understand. The fight had turned into a competition of two vastly different combat types. Alice was stronger, faster, tougher, recovered better, and reacted faster than her daughter.

She sped around the chain-link dome that enclosed the battleground, rocketing off walls and dead winter grass at jet speed, creating charging angles on Meili. In a pure melee she would have won in ten seconds. But Meili could fly. Meili had far better range. She positioned herself above the center of the dome, flapping her wings, raining down spear strikes and sweeps of a crimson scythe. Alice slipped past a particularly wide one, now positioned directly under Meili, and jumped.

Her explosive burst upward left a crater in the frost-hardened ground. Meili, probably sensing that she couldn't go high enough to dodge, instead flapped wings to rotate to the side. When Alice's trajectory reached even with Meili's elevation, Meili had already turned her wing-claws into two thick scarlet ropes. They were alive like snakes, shifting unpredictably in the air as they went for a constriction – but Alice still managed to contort midair, catching the top rope with one claw.

She immediately blitzed into a handstand roundhouse kick with the rope as her sole leverage. It landed flush on Meili's chin. Blood fell from the sky. But Meili's reaction came right after, and the rope was a thorny vine curling and piercing into Alice's arm as they both fell through the air. Alice dislodged the crimson vine, arm leaking red as she collided with the ground. Meili reformed her wings in time to stay in the air. They were both breathing hard, panting.

The whole fight had been evenly matched like this, despite their completely opposite combat kits. And this what John was failing to understand. It didn't make sense, it was impossible to understand- -Because their auras really were the same. They were equally dense, equally distributed, the same exact shade of red through every single exchange. If he'd watched them fight without his normal vision, he would have thought they were twins.

Alice made aura movements that Meili didn't, while Meili made movements her mom didn't, but between each movement they returned to exactly the same distribution. There was nothing that explained the massive difference in their abilities. First of all, he thought, your aura distribution and properties are supposed to decide what movements you can and can't make! It was the third thing I learned about aurology! So any difference in aura movements should have been a personal choice.

Meili's mom should have been able to fly, stretch her claws, do everything Meili was doing and more if she just chose to. But that wasn't the reality in front of him. He'd thought, maybe, that the difference was in one of the two more niche properties of potency or malleability… Nope, he thought. Exactly the same. An aura's potency decided how well it could 'override' the effect of another ability.

Like how a construct-conjuration ability would override a similar but less potent ability if they tried to conjure in the same space. He'd thought that, maybe, because Meili's ability was sort of like construct-conjuration- Potency is exactly the same. Or maybe the difference was malleability, which was supposed to decide how quickly and naturally an ability flowed from doing one thing to another. One of the main tricks with Devil's Hands was switching between claw structures, so maybe- Malleability is the same.

This doesn't make any sense. Meili was flying down from the air, and she spoke, putting him back in reality.

"We're taking a break." She landed on the patchy bump of frozen grass close to him.

"What did you see, John? What was the difference?"

"I…" He hesitated. He felt totally confused and slightly defeated. Meili met his eyes.

"There wasn't a difference, was there?

""There has to be something," he replied, shaking his head.

"Somehow I just didn't see it. But if you go grab some guy with Ability Detection, he'll say you have Devil's Hands, Meili, and your mom has Demon Claw. There's gotta be something that triggers that." She seemed to consider something, tilting her head back and forth.

"You know, John," she said.

"If what separates Devil's Hands and Demon Claw is something that exists in my aura but you can't detect, there's still an explanation, isn't there? The emotion-carrying theory." He suppressed a groan.

"Really?"

"I'm not even half-joking this time - I'm being genuine here." A real look of excitement started growing on her face.

"Your mother can read the emotions in aura, right? We know this for sure; it was the only reason she trusted us at all when we first trying to contact her. Emotion is a property of aura."

"I don't think it should count as a property," John said.

"She made it sound like a temporary thing, like the feelings get in there for a while and then fade away. Whatever feeling shouldn't be permanently changing what your ability can do."

"But why wouldn't it, exactly?" Meili asked.

"I think you might just be saying that because you don't see emotions with your passive. Maybe if the feeling is strong enough, or persistent enough, or you feel it enough times, then it starts to linger." He frowned.

"I mean, I obviously can't disprove that or anything. But how likely is it that you've felt an emotion that your mom and all your older relatives never did? It seems like a stretch."

"Is there anything that's less of a stretch?" He opened his mouth reflexively, then paused to consider it. If they were going to treat emotion as a property of aura, then it was potentially the only property that Meili and her mom had differences in.

"You might be right," he admitted.

"Still, I think there's an off-chance that I find something else once you guys fight some more. We still have over an hour." Meili's expression morphed into a grimace, like she was suddenly in pain.

"What?" he asked.

"I think," she said, "you've been having a lot more fun watching us fight than we've been having as the fighters. I've told you, right? I really don't like all of the…" She waved her hand in the general direction of the training grounds.

"…Yeah. This. Especially not with my mom." Oh right, he thought. Meili oddness.

"So you really were stalling," he gave her a look, "when you were 'stretching.' You didn't want to fight.

""I was honestly hoping this would happen," she said, smiling unapologetically.

"When I see my mom or dad for the first time in a while, I want to talk to them about life for an hour, instead of spending it cutting them up." She said the words 'cutting them up' in a weirdly sarcastic way, like it was obviously this awful thing to experience doing. Of course John disagreed. When he was younger, he had really enjoyed sparring ability-less against his dad. The battle high, his few cheap wins, even his many losses… it wasn't like William would ever stomp on his face when John was down.

If he were in Meili's place, with two parents of around equal level to him, he would have wanted to spar every single day. It sounded amazing. Apparently, not to her. Meili's mom came over, and they wrapped each other into a hug. The blood on the sleeves of Alice's doctor scrubs didn't matter at all. They both apologized for the (completely minor) injuries they'd left, Meili whispered something in her mom's ear, and they both giggled. They did seem like they were enjoying themselves a lot more.

He looked away and clenched his fist. For just a moment, John let himself get a little angry, about what he didn't have. Then he recalled that Meili had been in a messed-up state the day before – and that, a day ago, he had instinctively assumed that fighting her mom would help release all the negative emotions. In reality, it had probably only hurt. Maybe I shouldn't be labeling it just as Meili's oddness, he thought.

He hadn't really considered the implications: what did things feel like, for people who simply didn't like combat in general? I was going to say that we should study the fighting video here together, but…

"Hey," he interrupted them, gesturing with his camera.

"I'm gonna go take the film to Darren so he can look at it. I don't think we've talked about the emotion-carrying theory with him before." Meili instantly gave her support. He started to fly away, and when he looked back they seemed a little happier. He'd gotten it right. Beautiful"Mom," I said, breaking through our pleasantly mundane conversation thirty minutes after John left.

"I think I've failed you slightly as a daughter." She gave me a surprised look.

"Why would that be, dear?" We both stood behind the open back of her minivan, gathering the first-aid supplies that my mother (like every other car owner in this world) kept in the trunk.

"I guess I should give you some context," I started.

"There was this… halfway inappropriate article in the school newspaper. It was ranking all the strong underclassmen based on their chances to make god-tier, that was the premise, but they also added personal details about us." Cecile Arbor ranks in the D-tier. She's fresh off four consecutive losses to her arch-nemesis, Meili Strauss. No, we're not trying to be cute or ironic there - our investigators have found that even their parents are feuding. But that's a story for another time.

"Cecile Arbor's parents have a feud with Meili Strauss' parents," I paraphrased.

"I remember reading that and thinking, 'I should probably check in with mom and dad to see what that's about,' and then I completely forgot for two months. It was my mistake." My mother made a face while she leaned into the trunk. She found a face patch for my bruise and some wound-cleaning spray, passing both back to me. She turned.

"We could have just as easily called you and told you about what's been happening. We chose not to." Right, I thought, but now that Cecile and I are actually arch-nemeses, apparently, I need to know these things.

"I know. Now that I'm asking, though-" She hugged me again.

"I love you, Meili," she said.

"I appreciate it when we're able to talk during your school year. I dislike that, every time we do, there's always a horrible adult conflict trying to pull you in. I don't want to keep doing this to you."

"That's only been true, like, two and a half times," I protested. She smiled, separating from me.

"It's a lot when you don't call very much." I rolled my eyes. My parents were busy around the clock - because they worked with coworkers who were all higher-level than they were - so when was the time to call? That was my natural response. But I could see that she was leading me off-track.

"I'm just worried," I insisted, "because a feud between 4. 7 and 5. 8 doesn't sound like much of a feud." (Also, I thought, because Cecile Arbor's mom put me in an authority-sanctioned lie detector test.) My mother huffed a breath.

"If you absolutely have to know, Meili, then yes. You're right. I wouldn't call it that either. Since that incident last spring, when we were having our Wellston parents meeting to advocate for a fourth royal spot, we haven't done anything to attack the Arbors. But I lost my self-restraint with them that day."

"I remember," I said.

"I remember being nervous, listening to you through the phone."

"That's right, you heard most of it," she acknowledged.

"Camille and Arthur Arbor have been… unhappy, with us, since. First with me, they sent in reports of botched, self-undoing surgeries. Which is impossible, you know, because they've never been patients here. My supervisors took it as justification that I needed more practice, in other words longer working hours." That doesn't remotely make sense, I thought, angered at the idea of my mother going from thirteen-hour workdays to what somehow existed beyond that.

Even with a botched surgery, the failing surgeon would get less work, not more. This is just shameless might-makes-right. It was, but my mother didn't need me to tell her; she knew it far better than me.

"Then they moved on to your father." She rolled up a sleeve and started wrapping gauze around her puncture wounds, the wounds that I had made.

"The Arbors found five of the marketing campaigns he directed and reported them all for anti-authority rhetoric. He was the only common factor between all five. The firm has found that reason enough to begin freezing him out." I was getting that familiar and self-ashamed drop in my stomach again, that happened whenever my canon-comparison worked against me. Whenever I caused something to go worse than it would have gone if I had never replaced Meili.

Maybe this was unfairly self-critical: how was I supposed to see the future, predict every effect of a butterfly's flapping wings? At the same time, I thought, m y existence might have permanently crippled my father's twenty-year career.

"Why didn't you ask me to help months ago, Mom?" I asked.

"My level's getting there now. I'm clearly on track for god-tier; everyone at Wellston agrees I'll make it. If you set up a meeting, I could have gone to them, told them to stop - they would have had to respect me."

"We didn't realize what the Arbors were doing until they were fully done. And what did I just say, about horrible adult conflicts pulling you in?"

"Mom…"

"Look," she said.

"There's no need for you to insert yourself directly. The way horrible adults function is, past a certain age, you're judged just as much on the level of your child. Especially if your child is higher level than you, especially if they're a higher tier than you. This will all blow over in however many months." It took me a second to understand what she was saying.

"When I reach high-tier, you mean?"

"Exactly." She nodded.

"The best way you can help is by working hard toward making the most of your potential. That's all. I barely feel like I have to tell you that, even, because you're already growing so quickly." Now finished dressing her arm, she reached high to muss up my hair; at some point I'd gotten a bit taller than her. She smiled.

"You know I'm proud of you, dear." I nodded, and felt my face screwing up. It was probably for the best that she didn't want me involved… with recent events, confronting Cecile's parents was obviously too risky. After a while, she pressed her car key, and the driver's door opened with a beep.

"Back to work?" I asked.

"You know, same old," my mother said.

"This was nice. Slightly difficult, to be told to 'pull out all the stops' against my daughter, but it sounds like I helped you and John make a breakthrough. He seems awfully good-natured for a teenage god-tier." She said the last part in an evocative way, as if to imply that I should get with him, this teenage god-tier, and further boost our family's respectability by association. But this was her style of motherly humor; she was joking. I played my daughterly role and shook my head vigorously.

As I watched the car roll away, the sinking feeling within me twisted a little toward the positive. Yes, my parents were worse off compared to the original Meili's parents, but it was a temporary growing pain. The trend would reverse once I reached 5. 0 and beyond. And it was this sense – of comparison and shame and a desire for superiority over the girl whom I'd replaced – that inspired my theory about ability evolution. This was what made me think evolution was fueled by emotion.

John was right to wonder if I had ever felt something that my mother had not, but the truth was that I had, and I'd felt it exactly when my ability evolved. I still remembered the moment it happened. I had been staring out my window, helplessly, watching Ventus' bones break one by one. I'd thought that he might be permanently crippled. I'd wondered if the reason he wasn't crippled, in canon, was because the original Meili jumped down to help him. But I refused to jump down. I refused to fight.

I didn't like fighting, didn't recklessly charge ahead into conflict like Meili. That was who I was. But I didn't want to be worse than Meili, desperately, when it came to someone's well-being. I didn't want to hurt people just by existing. So I'd stretched my claws out to save Ventus, further than Demon Claws should have allowed, and my ability had helped me, responding to my feelings. That was Devil's Hands. After learning about Jane's emotion-reading, after today, it seemed like the answer.

But what exactly defined the feeling, how to produce it in other people, whether the feeling they needed was the same as mine – I didn't know. There was likely an additional genetic factor to evolution, but if there were others beyond that… I didn't know. Still. I knew one thing, now. I had been searching for what to call it, this evolution-sparking feeling, and once my mother was gone the name of it finally crystallized within me. This is what I call the feeling. This is what it was.

I can't be me, anymore, if my ability can't do this. Beautiful WDoe: ## Unordinary still has fewer than 100 bookmarks on most sites. ## Meili: ## As planned, yeah? ## WDoe: ## Yeah. I've just been getting a little nervous. ## WDoe: ## Usually, for an online launch like this, I would make a big promo post on my site. But, you know, that would ruin the anonymity. We're fully relying on your strategy. ## Meili: ## Hmm. ## Meili: ## I want to use an analogy for why I think it'll work.

Have you heard of this book called Pay It Forward? ## WDoe: ## I don't think so. ## Meili: ## It was banned by The Authorities, so that makes sense. The premise is that a twelve-year-old boy wants to make the world kinder, so he does a really kind thing for three people. Then he tells each of the people he helped to 'pay the kindness forward' to three people of their own, and tell them to do the same. ## Meili: ## Three times three is nine. Nine times three is twenty-seven kind acts.

Repeat the 'pay it forward' cycle twenty times and you reach eight billion people - suddenly the whole world is kinder. ## WDoe: ## Nice concept. But it seems like reading it would require some suspension of belief. ## Meili: ## Well, yeah.

'Pay it Forward' is unrealistic because doing a real act of kindness for someone is hard. But recommending a book is easy. Recommending a masterpiece is fun and self-rewarding, because you get the satisfaction of being the one who introduced someone to something amazing. ## Meili: ## On December fifth, you give the signal to your thirty most loyal beta readers. They each recommend it to friends and family.

If those friends and family each recommend to friends and family of their own, suddenly Unordinary's growing fast enough to catch the algorithms on the novel websites, and we explode from there. ## WDoe: ## Which is what you're saying you think the author's note at the end of the final chapter will do. ## WDoe: ##"Please recommend this story to anyone you believe will enjoy it." We're relying entirely on the strength of the book. ## Meili: ## Yes, and that's why I'm so confident this will work.

WDoe: ## Fair enough. ## WDoe: That, and the 'world-shaking' prophecy Aarav relayed to us, I assume. ## WDoe: ## My one issue might just be that I'm impatient, then. You never explained why you want to wait until December fifth. ## Meili: ## Did I not? I guess I thought it was kind of obvious. ## Meili: ## It's because of school winter break, adults always using their vacation days in late December, New Year's, et cetera.

I want us to be peaking right then, but if we get too big too early we might get shut down before the year ends. It's the only time of year when basically everyone is on vacation - unlike, for example, the weird break North America does in late November while Asia and Africa don't. ## Meili: ## If the timing's right, people will have time to read it, no matter what continent or sector they live in. Everyone. The whole world. ##