Time at school didn't move in milestones.
It moved in repetition.
The same hallways, the same bells, the same faces showing up tired on Monday and lighter on Friday. Ethan learned Annie the way you learned weather patterns by seeing how she changed slightly depending on pressure.
They didn't seek each other out. Simply stopped avoiding the empty spaces between conversations.
Most mornings, they crossed paths near the lockers by the science wing.
Annie was usually early. Too early. She adjusted her books while half-listening to whoever was talking to her, eyes drifting toward the schedule taped inside her locker.
"Do you ever feel like they expect you to be awake before everyone else?" she asked once, closing the locker harder than necessary.
"Yes," Ethan said. "But that's not about school."
She exhaled through her nose. "My mom says discipline is gratitude."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is."
She said it without anger. Just fact.
They sat near each other in theology.
Annie tried to participate. Not because she loved the subject, but because she felt obligated to. She framed her answers carefully, using words she'd grown up with gift, calling, responsibility.
Ethan didn't interrupt.
He noticed when her answers grew shorter as the year went on.
Lunch was usually where she relaxed the most.
They sat at a table that changed depending on who showed up first. Sometimes it was just them. Sometimes others joined. Annie laughed easily there, less guarded.
"I hate that they clap when I do anything," she said one day, stabbing at her food.
"People like symbols," Ethan replied.
"I'm not a symbol."
"They don't ask first."
She shook her head. "My mom says it's because they see God in me."
Ethan didn't answer right away.
"What do you think?" she asked.
"I think people like explanations that make things simple."
She nodded slowly. "Yeah."
Annie talked about church a lot, but never the way people talked about something they loved.
It was always schedules. Expectations. Who she was supposed to meet. What she was supposed to say.
"My mom already signed me up for another youth event," she said one afternoon, leaning against the lockers.
"Did she ask?"
"No."
"Did you expect her to?"
Annie smiled tiredly. "Not really."
Ethan noticed how her power reacted before she did.
When she was relaxed, it stayed quiet. When she talked about her mother, it crept in small pulses under the skin, light trying to escape without permission.
She hated that.
"Is it showing?" she asked once, pulling her sleeves down.
"A little."
"God, I hate that I can't control it perfectly."
"You control it better than most people your age."
"That's not comforting."
"It's accurate."
Sometimes they studied together after school.
Not intensely. Just sitting at the same table, doing their own work. Annie liked that Ethan didn't fill silence. She talked when she needed to. He listened.
"I keep thinking I should feel more grateful," she said once, staring at her notes without reading them.
"For what?"
"For being chosen."
"Do you feel chosen?"
She paused. "I feel… scheduled."
Ethan didn't correct her.
As months passed, she got pulled out of class more often.
Competitions. Interviews. Church-related appearances. Things framed as opportunities.
She came back smiling and tired.
"How was it?" someone would ask.
"Great," Annie would answer automatically.
Later, quieter, to Ethan:
"I just want one weekend without being inspirational."
"That seems reasonable."
She laughed. "You always say things like that like they're obvious."
"They are."
Ethan never told her what he knew.
He never challenged her belief directly. He never mentioned Vought. He never spoke the words Compound V.
Not because he was protecting her faith.
Because belief was part of the system she was still inside.
Breaking it early wouldn't free her. It would just destabilize her.
Besides, for him she was still a child and you don't impose such wonders on a child.
By spring, Annie was more tired.
Not depressed or angry.
Just worn.
Her mother's expectations hadn't changed. If anything, they'd grown sharper.
"She says God doesn't make mistakes," Annie said one afternoon, sitting on the steps outside the gym.
"And?"
"And sometimes I wonder if that means I'm not allowed to want anything else."
Ethan considered that.
"People say that when they don't want to hear questions," he said.
She didn't reply immediately.
Then: "You don't talk like my church friends."
"No."
"Good I need a change sometimes because I would go crazy.
They never defined what they were to each other.
They didn't need to.
Annie trusted Ethan to hear her without correcting her.
Ethan trusted Annie not to ask him for answers he wasn't willing to give.
That was the arrangement.
At the end of the year, nothing dramatic happened.
No confession. confrontation, reveal.
Just familiarity.
Annie still believed her power was a gift from God.
Ethan still knew exactly what it was.
And between those two truths, they shared conversations, lunches, quiet study sessions, and moments where neither of them felt like they had to perform.
For now, that was enough.
But this year wasn't about it
It was about learning how belief was built and how heavy it became when everyone else carried it for you.
The first day of summer didn't feel like relief.
It felt like a gap.
School ended on a Friday, and on Monday morning there was nothing waiting for me. No bells, corridors, predictable noise. Just the house, quiet in a way that made even normal sounds stand out. The refrigerator clicking on. My mother's footsteps upstairs. A car passing outside.
At breakfast she looked at me over her mug and asked the question she always asked when routine disappeared.
"So," she said, "what are you going to do with yourself now?"
I had answers prepared, but I chose the simplest one.
"I'll be out a lot."
She raised an eyebrow. "That's not an answer."
"It's the honest version."
She watched me for a moment, then sighed. "Just… don't disappear."
"I won't," I said, and that was close enough to the truth to work.
The first weeks of summer were about looking, not doing.
Out of town, past places that used to matter and now didn't. Industrial zones that smelled faintly of old oil and wet concrete. Streets that ended without ceremony, like someone had stopped caring halfway through.
I wasn't searching randomly. I was narrowing things down.
I needed a place no one thought about.
That was harder than finding something hidden.
I saw the factory for the first time from across the street and didn't stop.
The second time, I parked and stayed in the car.
The third time, I got out.
It was old in the honest way. No fake decay. Attempts to look aesthetic. Just concrete, rust, and neglect layered over years of disuse. Windows reinforced long ago and never updated. The kind of building that had been expensive once and was now inconvenient.
I stood there longer than I meant to.
Not imagining what it could become. Just confirming what it already was.
Unwanted.
That was the point.
Buying it didn't feel like an achievement.
It felt administrative.
People asked the kinds of questions people asked when they didn't actually care about the answers. What did I plan to do with it. Was I working with anyone. Was this an investment or a project.
I gave answers that sounded boring.
They accepted them.
When I told my mother, she stared at me for a long moment.
"You bought a factory?" she asked.
"Yes."
"You're fourteen."
"I know."
She rubbed her forehead. "Why?"
"Because it was there."
That was not the answer she wanted, but it was the one I gave. After a while, she let it go. She always did when she realized pushing wouldn't get her anything useful.
I didn't renovate the place the way people imagined renovations.
I didn't make it look better.
I made it quieter.
More stable The outside stayed exactly the same. Inside, things slowly stopped being random.
Thanks to my superhuman physique, lasers, and flight skills, renovation was a piece of cake once I got the materials.
I worked mostly at night.
It wasn't secrecy. I just didn't want any curious people.
During the day, the Sun came through the upper windows in long, angled lines. I let it reach me. I felt the familiar response growth still happening, but slower now. Each change heavier, more deliberate, as if my body had learned patience.
Somewhere in the middle of summer, Annie called.
Not texted. Called.
I was sitting on the concrete floor with my back against a wall that still smelled faintly of dust and metal. I answered after the second ring.
"Hey," she said. Her voice sounded tired, but not upset. More like she'd run out of energy for pretending.
"Hey."
"Am I interrupting?"
"No."
There was a pause.
"I'm at another church thing," she said. "I went outside because it's loud."
I could hear it in the background. People talking. Someone laughing too loudly. Music playing that was supposed to feel uplifting.
"How long is it supposed to last?" I asked.
"Two hours," she said. "We're forty minutes in."
"That sounds painful."
She laughed quietly. "You always say that like you're diagnosing something."
"I am."
Another pause.
"My mom keeps introducing me to people," she continued. "Like, not normal introductions. More like… presentations."
"About what?"
"About what I'm supposed to be," she said. "Not who. What."
I leaned my head back against the wall.
"You don't have to perform right now," I said.
"I know," she replied. "But it's like… if I stop smiling, it feels like I'm breaking something."
We didn't talk for a few seconds.
Then she asked, "What are you doing this summer, anyway? You never say."
"Working on a project."
She snorted softly. "Of course you are."
"It keeps me busy."
"That's not what I asked," she said. "But it's fine. I just needed to hear a normal voice for a minute."
"You can call anytime."
"I might," she said. "Thanks."
When the call ended, the factory felt quieter than before.
The lab came together slowly.
Not all at once. cleanly.
Things arrived in pieces. Some days nothing happened. Other days everything felt like it shifted a few centimeters closer to where it needed to be. I didn't rush it. Rushing was how you missed things that mattered later.
I wasn't in a hurry, I had all the time in the world unlike my last life
The server room came before anything else.
Not because it was impressive. Because it was necessary.
I needed a place for information to exist outside my head. Somewhere patterns could sit without demanding attention.
Somewhere things could wait.
The system didn't feel alive.
That was intentional.
It didn't speak. It didn't suggest. It observed.
So did I.
I still saw people from school during summer.
Parties. Small gatherings. Places where powered kids relaxed just enough to forget themselves. I didn't push I just watched them
What I needed was already there.
Traces. Patterns. Differences that only mattered if you knew how to see them.
I kept everything contained. Labeled. Quiet.
Annie's data was there too.
Because she was relevant.
By late summer, the factory no longer felt like a building I had bought.
It felt like a place that expected me.
When I locked the door at night and walked back to my car, the air felt different. Still. Listening.
School would start again soon.
Annie would go back to smiling when people expected it.
My mother would stop asking questions for a while.
And I would sit in classrooms knowing there was something waiting for me when the day ended.
That was enough.