Chương 48: The Omission

It was a bit too easy to forget, being who I was, but most people weren't good at committing massive deception toward the people they loved. This included John Doe - certainly when it came to his knowledge of Jane, knowledge we had to fool his father into believing didn't exist. Thankfully, there were multiple factors making this deception simpler than it should have been.

We were helped by William Doe's tendency to avoid ever talking about his wife, and by the fact that he and John were living hundreds of miles apart. Except now we were staying in William's apartment over break.

"What did you guys get up to yesterday?" He asked casually over breakfast, only for John to instantly tense his sitting posture into something very anti-casual. From the chair beside John, I kicked him lightly below the tablecloth.

"We went to an Unordinary book fanclub meetup," I answered.

"We were planning on telling you about it." William swallowed a bite of waffle and blinked at me in surprise.

"Not what I was expecting," he said, smiling a little. Maybe he hadn't thought that IRL fan meetups would be a consequence of Unordinary's skyrocketing reach, or maybe he just hadn't thought we'd attend one. In either case, I was telling the truth. The day before, after taking some time to process the revelations Jane had given us, we had headed to a "casual small-scale meetup for readers of recent speculative fiction."

Only, when we arrived at the library hosting it there must have been a thousand people, and Unordinary was the only book being discussed. One reason for going was that I was genuinely intrigued by Unordinary's cultural impact and perception. I'd thought John would find it interesting as well, and he definitely had. The other reason was that, when William inevitably wondered about what his son had been doing the whole afternoon, I didn't want John to have to lie to his face.

Or at least this way it was only a lie by omission.

"I thought," said John, "that I wouldn't be able to understand what anyone there was talking about. You know, 'cause I'm barely on chapter three. But the conversations were about worldbuilding more than anything else - what a world without abilities would look like. Some of them were pretty interesting."

"So that's how it is." William rubbed at his chin, voice holding a slight nervousness that I thought would have been gone by this point.

"Nobody said my take was ridiculous, I hope?" John had just stuck a golden, syrupy triangle of waffle into his mouth. So I answered, "A handful were only there to be antagonistic and argue. Ignoring them, everyone seemed to agree that you wrote Unordinary's world in a convincing way, and there were mostly just smaller critiques about believability."

"Like?" William asked.

"There was a man who thinks we wouldn't have invented houses if not for Earth Manipulation, so he had to suspend his disbelief there. A woman told me that Lightning Control is the only reason we learned how to harness electric power." William said nothing for a second, considering it.

"Even if an invention was inspired by an ability, that doesn't mean we couldn't have come up with it on our own."

"That's what I said, too," I replied. I started to smile.

"Also, the man's ability was Earth Molding and the woman's was Electric Shock, so I have to imagine they were biased." The father-son pair snorted, making similar faces. After four days of staying over, I'd noticed that their mannerisms were nearly the same. Half of me took this as a cue to wonder how much John would suffer as a result, by the time he was a working adult, for the fact that he had 'low-tier manners.'

The other half reminded me that we were trying to transform the universe before graduating high school.

"Some people were saying that car crashes are a reason we need abilities," John added, "because 10x more people would die in cars if we didn't have them to save us. Millions of car deaths per year. Another common one was that we need abilities to fight as much as we do, since we would be too fragile without them. They said cities where the population's dense would have us killing each other too much." I'd imagined yesterday that William would dislike these lines of reasoning; the look on his face now confirmed it.

"What do you think my counter to that was, when I was writing the book?"

"I thought the argument kind of made sense," John replied, "at least for a few minutes. But then I was like: 'why couldn't we just act a little differently?' You know, drive more carefully to make up for weaker defense. Not get into as many fights." William made a relieved expression.

"I'm glad you understood that part."

"Well, yeah." John nodded.

"… It actually started bothering me, by the end, that some of them didn't even think of that as an option." Because you already do these things, Dad, went unspoken. On the side of optimism, something like fifty percent of the meetup had accepted the possibility that modern society could function without abilities. Compared to the zero percent I had witnessed in the years before Unordinary, it was a massive leap forward.

I made this observation to William, pointing out the truly enormous effect his book was clearly making - but he didn't seem nearly as excited as I wanted him to be. This lack of elation had been consistent through the four days of my visit. After I had a few bites of my strawberry waffle, the morning news channel that I had been tuning out switched to a very relevant story.

"Next up," said the anchor, "a pair of New Boston locals report having their duel forcibly ended by a masked high-tier woman. Could she be among the infamous 'superheroes' that have recently appeared all over the globe? What does the forbidden book 'Unordinary' have to do with their sudden appearance? To discuss the issue, we have here Dr. Aaron Schultz, distinguished professor of Media at…" I turned to William.

"See?" I gestured at the TV.

"They weren't acknowledging it as the source just a few days ago. Now, if they keep trying to ignore it, people will see right through."

"... rdinary is very clearly an anti-law, anti-society, dangerous, deceptive book, one that inspires criminality in those who read it-" The 'distinguished professor' tried to inject passion into his voice, but still spoke slightly artificially, probably because he was reciting the lines an agent had given him. William let out a huff.

"I know what you're saying, Meili." His eyes were fixed on the screen.

"But if these are going to be the marching orders, I think I would rather be ignored." John and I exchanged a look. I believed that Unordinary, with the strength of its story and writing, would convert new readers out of their initial negative impressions of it in just a few chapters. As a result, I counted even poisonous coverage as good coverage, as long as it made people curious enough to check out the book. But I also understood why it would be different for William.

Unordinary was to him deeply personal, a piece of art and himself… and here came The Authorities, trying to put it down in whatever way they could.

"Nobody asked me what my level was at the fan convention," I said after a bit.

"I talked to more than a dozen people, and I know the power levels of just three of them. It was almost like I was in a different world."

"There was definitely something different going on in there," John agreed.

"In debates, there were points when I completely expected one guy to ask the other what his level was. Pull the level card. I kept wondering why it wasn't happening." When a potential friend would ask about William's power level, usually a minute after they met, they quickly stopped being potential friends. I knew this without him having to tell me.

The implicit rule - that ability levels were to be introduced second only to names - had no doubt strangled him for years, but if it could be erased, if Unordinary contributed to erasing it…

"Wow. Now I wish I could have been there." William's lips had slowly curved upward.

"That's- I appreciate you telling me." It wasn't quite the elation I thought he deserved, after he'd achieved the greatest feat of literature in the nearest century, but it would have to do. … What we weren't telling him was that the fan gathering had been cut short by a raid. Twenty authority agents had barged into the library, announced that they needed to take everyone in for questioning, and that we were all to obey. A thousand ordinary people vs.

twenty god-tiers was horribly one-sided, so all thousand had walked off in handcuffs - except for me and John, who'd resorted to sneaking out with invisibility. The official reasoning for not telling William was that it would make him feel guilt and anger without accomplishing anything, when I wanted him to feel the opposite. This was totally true. He had no way to help anyone who'd been arrested, whether the agents had let them go or kept them.

The unofficial, true reason was that I wanted to continue being seen as mature and safe and trustworthy. Multiple times now, I had led John into a risky situation. Similar times were soon to come. It had taken so much to get to this point, the point where William viewed me as such an angelic good influence that he'd prepared a guest room for me in his apartment, and I planned to keep it this way. His impression of me still mattered in too many ways to make honesty worthwhile. Lying by omission.

I gave John a quick look, and he nodded.

"By the way, Dad," he said.

"Meili and I are gonna be out training for a while." In my previous life, I'd read an essay arguing that lying by omission was morally better than lying outright. It was quite long, but the main point was that strict lying created falsehood, while lying by omission was only a failure to correct it. One analogy was that murder and 'failure to prevent murder' both had the same end result of a dead body, similar to how both forms of lying had the same end result of falsehood.

But you would likely rather 'fail to prevent murder' than murder someone. Therefore, wasn't it reasonable to prefer to lie by omission? My problem with the argument was that, if lying was truly wrong, it wasn't because it created falsehood. A person with false beliefs could just as easily spread falsehood by being honest, but in that case would their honesty become immoral? Probably not. Instead, the more fundamental issue with lies was probably the intentional deception, of which outright lying was only one form.

This was a pretty unfortunate conclusion to come to, though, considering I had spent the literal majority of my second life intentionally deceiving people. We were deceiving William in a variety of ways. He'd probably envisioned an outdoor park, but John and I were at a high-tier training center, the receptionist making wide eyes at us as we confirmed a private room reservation.

It was an 'unbreachable pod' special, a training room soundproofed in six different ways, locked behind doors thousands of times denser than steel, a service primarily used by god-tier lovers wanting to cheat on their arranged marriages.

"We're just here to train," I told the receptionist brightly. The woman relaxed at that, but I was again lying by omission, to both her and William. We were here to train in a sense. In another sense, it was research - testing - to see how bad John's ability looked after the massive enhancer he'd injected. Once we were standing on rubber floors in the unbreachable pod, John's eyes began shining a charred amber, the glow darker than I'd ever seen it. I activated Devil's Hands for him to copy.

The enhancer he'd used to talk to Jane had been ten times the size of the one in second place, so it wasn't like I expected the aftereffects to be light. Still, I wasn't quite prepared when the black claws that appeared on John's hands were visibly smaller than mine.

"Shit." He stared down at them with widened eyes. His face started twisting in effort, like he was trying to get the claws to morph in shape, but they managed a slight stretch and nothing more. It was like John had gone back in time.

"Damn," he muttered.

"Fuck. I'm not gonna inject even half that much ever again. Uh, Meili-""It doesn't seem like a good idea." I agreed.

"Just don't panic for now. NxGen records say that a single large dose doesn't produce any observable long-term effects, only short-term." If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. After a minute of struggle, he'd managed to merge two claw fingers into a skinny black spear.

"Right." He let out a breath.

"Right. How long do you think it'll take me to get back to normal?"

"If you focus," I answered, "you should only need today." The next hours were like a time-lapse of ability development, accelerated by a factor of multiple thousands. In the first hour he went from merging fingers to merging a whole hand, then fusing both into a single obsidian blade. The second saw him match my range extension and surpass it.

Next he redeveloped more complex structures with properties beyond sharpness, feathery wings and elastic ropes, the same intermediate-stage techniques I had been learning at a comparative tortoise-like pace. I was recording his progression in detail - by hour four he'd built himself back up to advanced techniques. He tested a bladed, whirring drill on the block of density-enhanced metal provided by the training center, upping the rotation speed until he bored a hole straight through.

Then he switched to the living forest technique, a sprawling growth of thorned vines and branches that flooded the whole room with black. I crammed myself in the corner for safety. The living forest technique was a surrounding tactic that made every point in space vulnerable to 360 degrees of attack. John tested it by picking a random human-sized pocket of air and converging there, slashing and whipping and stabbing, a blender so violent that it could reduce anything to parts.

By this point I was unable to detect any flaws, but John evidently did, as after each destructive convergence I saw the anger on his face, frustration at himself. Frustration that he still hadn't returned to his peak violence. Disappointment that he'd failed to turn thorns into flesh-hooks that would keep an enemy in place, or maybe that he'd forgotten to start with a slash to the eyes. I could only guess about the specifics.

I was much more sure that the experience was full of discomfort for him, as if spending just a day with less capacity to destroy other people made him into a lesser person. Five hours in, with our training pod utterly destroyed in every corner but mine, John turned to me and grinned.

"I'm back, Meili." The words came between heaving breaths.

"That's good." I returned a smile.

"I don't think you'll need to take an enhancer for a long time." The fact that I could read him like this, understand his terror at the idea of returning to weakness… Well, I'd once attributed it to John being a teenager who was bad at masking how he felt. Now it seemed more like he wasn't trying to hide it from me at all. Because he trusted me, because he was comfortable with me knowing who he was.

"... Maybe it's not the time to be talking about this," I said.

"But I feel like I need to know. How did you feel after killing Alexander Penny?" (It was perhaps the greatest lie by omission, that we still hadn't talked about the man we had murdered - the way our ignoring of the subject implied it wasn't a big deal.)"I think," John replied after a pause, "that I'm happier about my dad being alive than some guy I've never met being dead, and I'm not sure we're even the ones who killed him."

"How's that?"

"We framed him to The Authorities, sure. They still could have given him a life sentence, jail time." But we knew that wouldn't happen, I thought, not saying anything. John had ultimately given me a favorable answer. He was prepared to justify being the cause of someone's death. He looked at me, the lingering sweat of exertion beading down his forehead, and placed his hands on his hips.

"What is this about?"

"It's important for our Seraphina plans," I answered.

"I think something similar might be our best chance to make her evolve Time Manipulation." He blinked at me.

"Something similar?"

"Getting Seraphina to kill someone, I mean." Beautiful Seraphina slipped around a right roundhouse, except it was actually a left straight. But the left straight was really a right-hand chop, and the right-hand chop turned out to be a left-handed palm strike, and eight nanoseconds later she was lying prone on the combat mats with a broken nose. She winced and hurried to rewind the cracked bone. Quick, go before she hits you again. It was something like the thirtieth time she'd had this same thought.

Seraphina knew this because she'd counted, counted thirty broken bones after four minutes fighting her mother, and there were eleven minutes left.

"On your feet," Narissa ordered in her calm, steady, grating voice. The white sleeves of her combat uniform were stained with red flecks.

"Compose yourself and get up." Seraphina followed the order, slow by a purposeful beat.

"I must say, I'm disappointed," Narissa judged.

"You are far from acclimated to combat on an elevated tier of speed. You bite at every feint. The students at Wellston High have evidently failed to serve as proper whetstones." No, she thought. I fell for them because I'm a 7. 2 and you're a 7. 4, and my processing isn't fast enough to manage anything but an instinctive reaction to your movements. With some god-tier abilities, a 7. 2 and 7. 4 could have a half-reasonable fight - Time Manipulation wasn't one of them. Seraphina snorted.

"Is it not slightly unreasonable, that at my present level-""-And," Narissa held up a palm, "we will be having a discussion about your degenerating manners before school break is over, young lady." Seraphina paused, failing to process the utter non-sequiter.

"My what?" Her mother scrunched her face. The skin bunched into folds, and Narissa flared her nostrils, pushing out an ugly, mocking imitation snort.

"Like a low-tier pig, Seraphina," the woman said, smoothing her face back to its normal stone expression.

"The way you seem to express your irritation now. Not to mention that unsightly shrug you insist on doing with your shoulders, instead of using your words like a serious person. I don't know what's going on at Wellston High, what Vaughn is doing, for you to come home like this." Seraphina found that she was clenching her teeth, unwittingly grinding them.

"You-" A high roundhouse flashed, or maybe a snap kick, maybe a flying knee - Seraphina instantly ducked to dodge. But the blow was a low kick to the ankles, and she felt them both burst. She toppled to the ground screaming, her feet wet with blood and bits of cartilage.

"I have no plans to be lenient today." The awful, arrogant, self-satisfied voice rang out above her.

"The minutes we spend talking will not count toward your fifteen-minute spar with me." Seraphina breathed rapidly, trying to be strong. She managed to rewind her ankles to perfect health. But then a stomp faster than light came down, only it was actually a soccer punt, one that sent her spine-first into the wall of the combat stage. Now slumped against the wall, she tried to sit up. When that failed, she attempted weakly to rewind her body, but nothing seemed to happen.

Her head and back were slick; her connection to the world seemed to slip away. She hated this. Hated being home, hated the South Atlantic sector, hated her mother. Her feelings were no more complicated than that. Outside the windows, lukewarm rain drizzled down instead of snow. She hated that she was weak, in this house, that she had to obey every word. She hated that time rewinds served as an excuse for more hurt, even though they only erased injuries, didn't erase the pain.

"-Must have skipped some of her training," came a voice in the darkness.

"Growth has clearly slowed." The anger stopped Seraphina from blacking out, because she hadn't. She'd followed her mother's training schedule perfectly for four months. She'd followed it, in fact, even though she really could have stopped, even though she'd seen the training schedules of other young clan members at Wellston High. The way they all seemed to manage just fine with half her training hours, even just a third. Suddenly she was back in the world, multiplying the speed of her arm.

She picked up the piece of wall she'd previously broken with her impact, then launched it with all the force she could muster. For a literal moment in time, Narissa's eyes widened. The projectile took one and a half moments to reach where her head was, but in that half-moment gap the woman had already slipped out of the way. Seraphina had expected it, though, as she beamed forward at an angle that accounted for the dodge. She clenched a fist, swung. Nothing but air.

Still, surprise was certainly stuttering her mother's movements, as Seraphina managed to slip under the instant countershot. She flexed two fingers into talon hooks, swiping upward at Narissa's face, trying for an eye gouge. Again a miss. But there was still contact, evidenced by the thin line of red above her mother's eyebrows. Time returned to its base state.

They stood five paces apart, to them a distance of nothing, yet between them were thousands of footprints pressed into the training mats, the only evidence of an immense effort that was otherwise imaginary. Slowly, Narissa moved a hand to the trail of blood, then brought it down to stare at the crimson stain on her fingertips. The woman hadn't expected to be hit.

Seraphina wished she could have gotten a slice to the eye, that way she could witness her mother in pain for once, but she was more than happy making Narissa bleed. She smiled.

"Does the time when I'm hurting you count toward our fifteen-minute spar?" Seraphina asked.

"Or does it only count when you're hurting me?" Beautiful"…I can't be me, if my ability can't do this," I said to John.

"Your mother confirmed that it's the feeling that causes evolution. So if we want Seraphina to evolve Time Control, we need her to feel that gaining control of time is the only way she can remain herself." He shook his head, looking away.

"I don't think that means we have to make her kill someone." I met his eyes - I had tried to explain this twice already, but he didn't seem like he was understanding. I wondered if he was being purposefully obtuse, trying to keep himself from getting it.

"Think about it. What are the kinds of things only time travel can solve? Irreversible things. Things that can't be cured or taken back. People say that no ability can return the dead to life, but that's not true. A time travel ability can." He kept on shaking his head, not stopping, and ran a hand through his hair.

"But how would it actually work, Meili? What could we possibly say or do to her to make her do that? It doesn't seem like - It doesn't seem like something we could realistically make happen."

"Well. Let's start at the end," I said.

"We want Seraphina to kill someone and regret it. We want her to think, 'I don't want to be a murderer,' and then realize that she's become a murderer, have it sink into her sense of identity. We want her to resist this new identity, and realize that the only way to avoid it is to go back in time."

"Yes, fine!" His voice had gotten louder.

"That's what you think will get her to evolve. But how the hell is that something we can set up?" I said nothing for a while, thinking, very carefully gauging the level of aggression coming from him. John wasn't stupid. By now it was clear that he was hiding his moral issue with my plan behind an argument of practicality and realism - because the practical aspect of it was perfectly clear.

"The person she murders won't stay dead," I pointed out.

"The whole point is that the killing gets reversed, lost to time."

"But there's no guarantee Seraphina evolves," he immediately said.

"It's totally possible that she can't reverse time, and then the victim stays dead forever."

"We already caused someone's death. You were clearly eager then."

"Yeah, to save my Dad's life, your life, probably mine. Of course I was. But this-" I put my hands on his shoulders.

"John," I said.

"This is to save the world, so now really isn't the time to start being dishonest with me. Tell me the truth. Do you actually not know how we would execute a plan like this? Or do you already have a really good idea for how we would do it, down to the person we would make Seraphina kill?" He stared at the ground and pursed his lips. It was more than enough of an answer. By now, Alicia had been spying on Seraphina for months on end, feeding us every bit of information.

We knew more than enough about her home life - knew, for one, that there had already been plenty of times when Seraphina wanted to kill her mother. Beautiful As they headed home, snow fell through the air, down into wet clumps on the sidewalk that someone would take care of in the morning. The sun had already set, and New Boston didn't make snow workers work through the night. They were walking close, but Meili didn't look at him, instead staring out into a dark sky.

John could hardly remember the last time he'd argued with her - a serious argument about something that mattered. Not lighthearted or a joke. They wanted different things. The only thing he really wanted, in a sense, was to have his family back together - the conspiring and time travel and reality-transformation were only in the picture because that was the only way his mom could ever be free. He understood that Meili truly cared about making the time-travel plan work, to a degree he couldn't really match.

What he didn't understand was why. If Meili were any other person, she would have spent the day after learning ability evolution's secret a lot differently. It would have been a different kind of conspiring, the enjoyable personal gain kind. Who hadn't daydreamed about rocketing past their level ceiling? Even though he knew Meili, he'd sort of expected and wanted to spend the rest of the day like that, coming up with ways for her to evolve, imagining what her ability could turn into.

And then she'd brought up killing people, blindsiding him, and he'd made the mistake of trying to brush her off…

"Sorry," he spoke.

"For acting like I didn't know what you were talking about. The past few days have been kind of insane, so I thought today would be… Well, not exactly a break, but-""Recovery." She bobbed her head.

"I know what you're saying." They stopped at an intersection. Looking through the windows, John didn't see a single person wearing a seatbelt.

"I thought," he said, "that you would want to go for another evolution. But you haven't said anything about it at all. I don't think I can name anyone else in the world that would be true for." Meili stood there, her coat half-zipped, red hair rippling behind her in the wind.

"Do you want the good-sounding explanation or the not-so-good one?" John laughed a little.

"Both?"

"The better one is that there don't seem to be any records of people evolving their ability twice," said Meili.

"Of course they could have been erased. Still, if I'm the first one to manage it in however many decades, I'm basically inviting the strongest clans in the world to pore over every little detail of my life."

"Makes sense," he replied.

"... And the other explanation?" A freezing wind swept by. Meili had left her ability inactive, and she shivered a little, her face seeming slightly vulnerable in the cold.

"The other explanation," she answered, "is that there's a reason my ability evolved the first time, John. It's the same reason I'm ready to go so far to win, all the way to killing people. An obsession, I think, is probably the best way to put it. It decides how I feel about myself." John nodded his head, even though he wasn't sure he understood.

"The only way I evolve again is if we start losing," she said in a shaky voice.

"Losing this. The Authorities catch on to us, or we hit a wall in the research, or something else goes terribly wrong.

"... But I don't want us to get to that kind of point, John. If we do end up losing, nothing my ability can possibly turn into would be of any help."