Chapter 7

The ride home was spent in somber silence, Sera seeming to pick up that I wasn't really in the mood to talk, rather thinking (angsting) over the revelations of the day.

Scales. Powers. School. Strength. Sophia.

I still wasn't sure about the first. Sera's wing-and-feather tracery was obviously a reflection of being the Simurgh. But if that was true, what did the scales mean for me? Why did Sera have her patterns when I had a feeling it would have been just as easy for her to have perfectly normal —albeit extremely pale— skin?

How was it related to my powers? Because obviously it was related somehow or I wouldn't have them.

And then there was how easy school had been, the way my mind felt like it was on overdrive and I could remember the entire day perfectly, things just… making sense. It was like the difference between a database on a computer instead of a library with a physical card catalog. Was this another part of what Sera had meant?

I had a lot of questions, and I could clearly feel the bubble of concern in the back of my head from Sera as she glanced at me every few minutes. She was right. This link or whatever was getting stronger. And noticeably quick.

She was huddled into my side the entire trip home, and I could feel her warmth, the movement of her breathing and even (slightly) her heartbeat, the human softness belying her durability and strength.

I had to wonder what we were now. Two of a kind, but two of a kind of what?

Was it any wonder she considered me her sibling when there was nothing else like us out there and she had been recreated just to be like this, to be with me?

Along with that was everything that was coming with it. I couldn't help but think of Sera's strength the day I'd met her: that single finger flicked against my forehead, the way my head wouldn't have just broken, but literally exploded from the force… were I not as durable as I now was.

If I'd had that, I could have accidentally crushed Julia's forearm into paste. Instead, she'd only been left with a rather dark bruise.

I was more glad than ever that Sera had convinced the 'shard' behind our powers to give this to me gradually.

Finally, Sophia.

Sophia, Sophia, Sophia. Even when I thought I managed to escape their shit by becoming a parahuman—or whatever the hell it was Sera and I counted as—it seemed I couldn't.

Because Sophia fucking Hess was right there along with me.

I still had them, too. Her powers. They were slipping away, as she wasn't within my apparent range anymore, but I could still use them.

I felt a hand on my forearm and blinked, looking around and then realizing with a start that Sera and I were already at our stop.

Was it going to be like this every day? Going to school, gaining Sophia's powers, and having them disappear in the hours afterwards?

More things to get out of Sera.

We walked home in silence, neither of us saying anything as I unlocked the door and opened it for her, following after she'd crossed the threshold.

"Ask me."

I turned around to look at Sera, having locked the door and deadbolt behind us after entering.

"What?"

She huffed, her arms coming up and crossing in front of her. "Ask me. You've practically been radiating discomfort and worry and dread curiosity for the past thirty minutes." The pale girl bit her lip and looked away. "I can't… You're blocking me out and I know it's about me and there are questions but that's it so just, just ask. Please."

…That bubble of concern in the back of my head? It was positively laced with anxiety now.

I sighed, moving into the living room, my backpack slung down to the floor as I sat on the couch. "It's not you," I corrected, wanting to make that clear from the start. This wasn't her fault. Not directly. In some ways, you could say it was mine for triggering and causing all of this.

The anxiety started to smooth out as she moved to sit at the other end of the couch. "What is it, then?"

I let out a breath, trying to decide on the order to do this, and decided to start with what seemed like the simplest. "School felt… easy. Really easy. Is that because of…?"

She nodded hesitantly. "That's Bastion. Or, well, what Queen's doing that it copied from it."

"And that would be…?" I asked.

Sera shifted uncomfortably. "Um." She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it, looking away again. She swallowed, and I heard a quiet, "I hate this."

With another breath, storm-grey eyes came up to meet mine. "Alexandria."

Wait. What did Alexandria have to do with how easy schoo—?

My eyes went wide. Oh. Oh. Well. Um. That was a bit… overwhelming.

"Why?"

Her discomfort came back. "Because everything has trade-offs," she said quietly, before looking at me intently. "Do you remember when I said what I was like before? Practically just a bunch of shards without any real sapience?"

I nodded.

"There are limits to what the human brain can handle. That's what the shards do: handle all the fiddly bits of what a power is while humans direct them. And when a power is really tightly integrated with a person, the line between where the person ends and where the shard begins is… blurred. It's more obvious for some capes than others. 'Breakers', especially." She watched me carefully, her eyes flitting between mine, but when I didn't say anything, she forged ahead. "How do you think people can still think when they're nothing more than light or wind or fire?"

And just like everything else that day, it clicked.

How would a person think if they didn't have a brain? It was universally agreed that their power somehow let them do that, in some way, and that's exactly what happened. Just… significantly more literal than might be expected. People could think when they physically shouldn't be able to because the things that managed their powers were so ridiculously powerful, that they were even able to act as the substrate for their users' mind in place of their brain.

"…Shards."

She nodded. "Shards."

I had to sit back a bit at that and take a few moments. It all somehow came back to the overpowered alien supercomputers, didn't it?

"…And Alexandria?"

"Because out of all the capes out there that came from Mom, she's the most similar to us," Sera said, pouting a little, "at least like this. It's kind of annoying, actually. Like, out of everybody, it had to be her? But yeah! Queen's actually doing everything, not just part of it, but it's basically the same 'cause Bastion was still the best example. Oh and it's also kinda a safety thing because dying isn't allowed anymore."

Al…right. I supposed I could get behind that. Dying would not be good.

(No one left. No Mom. No Dad. Just me. Just me.)

I turned over everything I'd gained in my head for a minute, before focusing back on the other issues I had.

"So um. What about my powers?"

Sera sat up straight, all signs of her previous melancholy gone and replaced by a huge grin. "Do you like them? I thought you would! It took so much convincing for Queen to agree how to do it."

I blinked. "I… guess? I haven't really gotten to do anything yet. But you said that your powers and mine are coming from the same place. How is psychic Tinker related to power-sponge Trump?"

She got a glint in her eyes. "Did you even notice? The way you reacted at lunch? You didn't move in reaction to that girl, you moved before her."

"…Precognition?"

Sera nodded. "Mine's like sonar. Ping! See the feedback. Ping! Make it clearer. Ping! Refine again." She frowned. "Actually no, but kinda. Um. It's more like… getting to know someone so well that you know what they're thinking and what they're going to do before they do it. I learn people's pasts, and that lets me figure out their future and how to change it. To see further forward, I have to see more behind them. The further back, the longer it takes. For you, it's instantaneous. You don't need to see back because there's no need to see how to change their futures. It's focused on you."

There was suddenly a magazine hurtling off the table towards my face, but my hand was already there to catch it mid-air before it hit me.

"See?"

I nodded mutely.

"But yeah. That's where my Sight went: to you. Even if it's not as powerful now."

"You gave it to me?" She'd given up one of her strongest abilities, the thing that made her so feared, because of me? "Why?"

Sera tucked a loose strand of white hair behind her ear. "It was part of my agreement with Queen. Knowing everything about someone, about what's going to happen…" She shook her head. "I do miss it, sometimes it would make things so much easier, but now everything is new." She gave me a radiant smile. "Besides, why wouldn't I want you to have it?"

I swallowed, a sudden lump in my throat.

"And the telekinesis? The telepathy? The screaming?"

She winced at the last one. "That's just stimulating neurons in peoples' heads. Not that hard. At least, not the way I was. Now… now I just know how people around me feel, and I can't mess with peoples' bodies anymore or communicate with them. Queen's link is the only reason we can do that. The telekinesis, well, I've still got it, obviously. For you…" Her grin came back. "I'll let you figure that out! But I promise it's good."

"What about the Tinkering? How are you a Tinker when I'm a Trump?" I asked.

Sera just stared at me. "Taylor. Do you know why Tinkers and Thinkers were the worst to go up against me?"

I frowned, trying to remember. "Because you could co—" My eyes widened. "Because you could copy what they could do."

She nodded. "The longer they were around me, the further back my Sight reached for them, the better I could use their abilities and powers against them."

That… was almost exactly how my connection had worked today. No, it wasn't almost, it was exactly how it had gone.

"That's still how it works, too. My range isn't as wide any more, just a couple miles or so. All of my Tinkering in the past few days is because Archive is surprisingly close by," she said, looking thoughtful. "But yeah! You've got the other side now! The peanut butter to my jelly! The knife to my fork! The fury to my sound!—"

"…The power to your knowledge. The brawn to your brain," I concluded. "The shield to your sword."

Her grin was sharp, a predatory thing that somehow looked just as home as the innocent smile she'd given minutes before. "Yes."

God, we really were a pair, weren't we?

So apparently I connected to physical abilities the way she did with mental ones, if I was understanding everything right.

"The scales?" I prompted.

Her expression eased. "Ah… Can that be a surprise? I promise it's nothing bad, though!" she said at my incredulous look.

Well, if she was that heartfelt about it. And I didn't really mind them so much now that it seemed like nobody else was going to notice them at school, with how hard they were to see already. "Okay."

She smiled. "Thanks!"

There was only one thing left, the one I'd been putting off because I didn't like thinking about it.

"One of my—" Bullies? Enemies? Annoyances? Aggressors? I tried to think of the right way to word it. "One of the people who made me trigger is a parahuman," I said, and realized it wasn't a question, because I didn't need answers, I just needed to say this. To get it off my chest. "I… I thought this would make me different, that would make me better than them, but nope." Angry tears began welling up in my eyes. "One of them has to ruin that too."

Sera stood up and walked over, sitting next to me, her shoulder touching mine as she took my left hand in hers and gently squeezed it.

"I-I can't understand. Why? She has powers, why would she need to pick on other people?"

"Powers… powers don't usually fix problems," Sera said quietly. "They actually make them worse, most of the time." I turned to her in surprise, and she looked up to meet my eyes, hazel to grey. "You… We are a bit different in that way. We got lucky. For you, a normal trigger in that situation would have given you something like a projection. That still wouldn't make it easier for you to connect to normal people, though, and likely you'd have withdrawn further, connecting only with what your power provided in an effort to hold on to what you did have."

That… painted a rather grim and disturbingly realistic picture, because I could see it happening exactly like she described.

"Powers bring out the best and the worst in people," she said, looking away. "What else would you expect from giving traumatized people preternatural abilities? Every single cape that triggers has gone through a moment where they were crushed down so hard that they just… broke. Some people have an easier time picking up the pieces and putting them back together than others. Some don't even try.

"People are people. People with powers are just people… with powers. Horrible, good, selfish, kind, ambitious, paranoid, sadistic… Powers only make those things more obvious, like turning up the contrast on a screen. People don't act better or worse because they have powers, they act better or worse because that's who they are."

"…Basically, Sophia's always been a sadistic bitch, is what you're saying. And it doesn't matter if she's a cape or not because it doesn't change the fact that she's a bitch," I summed up.

My sister shrugged, and we sat quietly for the next few minutes, leaning on each other and taking comfort in that closeness.

"Can I at least control which powers I'm getting?" I asked, breaking the silence. "Like, not taking them if I don't want them?"

"You can, I think. Your range is smaller but you can control who you're picking up. My range is a bigger, but I can't pick and choose who I'm getting things from. I thought it would be easy to handle, but then…"

"Tinkering," I said, thinking of the first evening she was here, and what I'd come home to.

She gave a weak nod, a slight flush rising on her cheeks.

"Powers come with a drive to use them, and it looks like I pick that up from people too. I've never gotten distracted like that before. I didn't know I got that alongside the power," she admitted, turning to look at me. "I'm pretty sure you don't."

I hadn't felt anything like that, at least not from the line I'd had to Sophia's power, but my own…

The thing coiled within me was back to the way it had been before school: tightly wound and sleeping, but somehow I knew that was only temporary. Eventually—tomorrow, the next day, next week, the week after—it would wake up and stay awake, and I had no idea what that would mean.

All I knew was that things were changing, and the only person who could understand was my sister.

"It'll still be a few days until everything settles for you and Queen stops holding back, but that's not too long," Sera said.

Right. I needed to practice my strength to make sure I wouldn't accidentally out myself or anything.

I nodded in acknowledgment. "Is there anything you want to do before I have to go to work?"

"Not really," she told me.

Neither of us made any motions to move from where we were, just sitting there, together, until I had to get up to leave for work.

It was nice.