Chapter 569 | Progressive Manifestation Syndrome

Chapter 569: 569 | Progressive Manifestation Syndrome

"Fair," I said, and kissed her.

The water made everything slick. Sloane’s hands slid up my chest and locked behind my neck, and she pulled herself up until her toes barely touched the tile, all that coiled strength going soft against me. The choker sat wet against her throat. I dragged my mouth down to it, found the pulse underneath, and felt her breath hitch through the bond before it hitched out loud.

"That’s cheating," she said.

"What is?"

"You know exactly what my neck does to me."

"I know a lot of things about you."

"Stop being smug and do something about it."

So I did.

I lifted her by the backs of her thighs and pressed her against the shower wall, and she wrapped her legs around my waist like she’d done it a hundred times, which she had. The tile had to be cold against her back. She didn’t seem to care. Her nails scored down my shoulders and the water washed the marks away before they could bruise, and for once I appreciated the healing for something other than surviving fire.

"Ribs," she breathed, remembering.

"Ribs are fine."

"You promise?"

"I promise if you promise to stop talking."

She bit my lower lip in answer, which I chose to interpret as agreement.

We didn’t make it quick. We never did. The bond had a way of turning everything into a feedback loop, her pleasure bleeding into mine and mine spilling back into her until neither of us could tell where the sensation started. It was the single most efficient way to lose track of time ever devised, and I say that as someone with a System that literally displays timers in my field of vision. Even the interface knew better than to interrupt.

When we finished, Sloane pressed her forehead to my sternum and just breathed for a while, her heart hammering against my chest, the water running cool now because we’d burned through the hot tank the way we burned through everything.

"See," she said. "Still breathing."

"You checked?"

"I always check."

I set her down carefully. Her legs wobbled and she gripped my forearm until they steadied, and there was something almost unbearably tender about watching Sloane Fitzgerald, second-highest combat score in her cohort, need a moment to remember how to stand.

"Mom’s pizza is definitely here by now," she said.

"Mom is definitely going to know exactly what we were doing."

"Mom watched us do it forty minutes ago, Lukas. There’s no dignity left to protect."

She had a point.

Diane was sitting at the kitchen island when we came down, two pizza boxes open in front of her, wearing an oversized silk robe and reading something on her phone with the specific frown she reserved for problems that required lawyers. Her pink hair was pulled up loose, strands falling around her face, and she looked less like a CEO and more like a woman who’d spent eleven days sleeping in a hospital chair and had finally remembered she owned a home.

She didn’t look up when we walked in.

"The stuffed crust is Sloane’s," she said. "The thin crust with the vegetables is mine. There is a third box in the fridge that is entirely meat, which I assume is yours, Lukas, because you have the palate of a raccoon."

"I like meat on my pizza. That’s not a personality flaw."

"It’s not a virtue either." She set her phone down and finally looked at us, and her mouth did something complicated when she took in Sloane’s wet hair and my wet hair and the fact that we’d both come downstairs approximately twenty-five minutes after I’d left to shower. "Efficient use of your recovery time."

"Mom."

"I’m just saying. Most people convalesce."

"Most people don’t have you scheduling their sex lives," Sloane shot back, pulling the stuffed crust box toward her and folding an entire slice in half like she hadn’t eaten in a week. Which, given her metabolism and the afternoon we’d had, she probably hadn’t.

I got my box out of the fridge and dropped onto the stool beside Sloane. The pizza was still warm. The kitchen was warm. The whole house had that particular quality of a place lived in by people who wanted to be there, and I let myself sink into it the way I’d let myself sink into the shower, one small piece of normal at a time.

Diane watched me eat for a moment. Then she said, "We need to talk about Monday."

And there it was. The thing waiting under all the pizza and showers and the specific relief of not being dead.

"I figured," I said.

"The Commission is sending Director Yun-Seo Park." Diane pulled her phone back and turned it so I could see a photo, a woman in a charcoal suit with the expression of someone who had never once been late to anything in her life. "She flew in from Geneva within nine hours of the breach. That tells you how seriously the IHC is taking this."

"That’s the Commission woman?"

"That’s the Commission woman. She ran the initial task force briefing. She’s methodical, she doesn’t inflate threats, and she has absolutely no interest in being lied to." Diane set the phone down. "Which is a problem, because you are going to have to lie to her."

Sloane stopped chewing. "How much does she know?"

"She knows what the footage shows. She knows Lukas moved faster than a licensed A-rank while wrapped in electricity that doesn’t appear on any Force Manipulation registry in the world. She knows there was a white staff in two clips that isn’t on his equipment manifest. She knows his file says Rare-tier Channeler and his performance says something else entirely." Diane ticked each point off without raising her voice, which was somehow worse than if she’d shouted. "She’s not asking whether the file is wrong. She’s asking what kind of wrong, and how expensive it’s going to be."

"Great," I said. "Love that for me."

"This isn’t a joke, Lukas."

"I know it isn’t. That’s why I’m joking about it." I set down my slice. "What’s the story?"

Diane leaned back on her stool, and I watched her shift out of guardian and into the thing she actually was, the woman who ran the highest-grossing Hero PR agency in California and had rebranded a Hero who set buildings on fire. Her voice changed. Slowed. Every word landing exactly where she wanted it.

"Progressive Manifestation Syndrome," she said. "It’s already in your file, thanks to Charles. We’ve been building toward this. Your Aspect didn’t finish developing when it manifested. It’s still evolving, and under extreme stress it expressed capabilities you didn’t know you had. The electricity, the speed, the staff. All of it. New functions surfacing because a twelve-foot monster was about to kill your instructor and your body reached for whatever it could find."

"And the fact that none of those functions look anything like Force Manipulation?"

"Compound expression. Rare, poorly understood, and specifically the category the IHL wrote to avoid having to understand things. The same category we used for Reyes." Diane’s eyes held mine. "You don’t know how it works. You couldn’t reproduce it if you tried. It happened, it terrified you, and you have no idea whether it’ll happen again. That last part is the most important. You are not a boy hiding power. You are a boy who got scared and grabbed something he didn’t understand."