Cade stared at his phone for a long moment after typing the message.

  Something crazy has happened to me.

  His thumb hovered over the send button. This was a bad idea. They’d broken up for good reasons—reasons that hadn’t changed, reasons that probably couldn’t change. Reaching out to Sarah now, pulling her back into his orbit when he was becoming something he didn’t understand, felt selfish in a way that made his stomach twist.

  But she’d reached out first. And if he was being honest with himself, she was the only person in the world he trusted enough to show this to.

  He sent the message.

  The three dots appeared almost immediately. Then: What kind of crazy?

  Cade started typing an explanation, deleted it, started again, deleted that too. How did you explain something like this over text? Hey, I got hit by a ball of light from space and now I can bench press 600 pounds and control water with my mind. Also I can sense suffering now. Want to grab dinner?

  He gave up on explaining and typed: Come over?

  A pause. Longer this time. He could imagine her on the other end—sitting in her new apartment, the one she’d gotten after the breakup, weighing whether this was a good idea. Whether he was worth the risk of reopening old wounds.

  Ok

  Cade exhaled slowly and set his phone down. Then he looked at the cracked shower head sitting on his bathroom counter and decided that if Sarah was coming over, he should probably have functional plumbing.

  The new shower head took five minutes to install. Cade had picked it up on the way home—a nicer model than the old one, actually, with multiple spray settings he’d never use. He threaded it onto the pipe, tightened it with an adjustable wrench—gingerly, aware of how easy it would be to crush the fitting—and turned on the hot water to test.

  Steam billowed shortly after, fogging the mirror, filling the small bathroom with warmth he could see but barely feel. Cade watched the mist swirl and thought about what he’d discovered that morning.

  Diseases travel in droplets. Mostly water.

  It was one of the reasons he’d been so careful about masking, about avoiding indoor dining, about all the precautions that had driven Sarah crazy and contributed to their growing apart. Airborne transmission meant water vapor carrying viral particles, suspended in the air, breathed in by unsuspecting people who then got sick and spread it further. A chain of suffering that started with something as simple as an exhaled breath.

  But if he could control water…

  Cade focused on the steam filling the bathroom. Instead of trying to gather it into an orb like that morning, he thought about the space itself—the air around him, saturated with microscopic droplets. He imagined pushing downward, pressing all that suspended moisture toward the floor.

  The steam moved.

  Not dramatically—no visible current or sudden clearing—but he could feel it happening, the tiny droplets responding to his will, drifting downward faster than they should. The air around his face grew noticeably drier. When he breathed in, he tasted less humidity than before.

  He pushed harder. The effect strengthened. Within thirty seconds, the bathroom air was crisp and clear despite the hot water still running, all the moisture pressed down to floor level where it condensed on the tile in a thin sheen.

  Easier than redirecting the stream. The strain seemed proportional to the mass of water being moved. Countless tiny droplets, barely any resistance. A pressurized flow from a pipe, much harder. Good to know.

  A knock at the door.

  Cade turned off the shower, wiped his hands on a towel, and went to answer. He caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror—athletic pants, plain t-shirt, the same clothes he always wore at home—and wished briefly that he’d thought to change into something less… everyday. But that was stupid. Sarah had seen him in worse. Sarah had seen him in everything.

  He opened the door.

  She stood on his porch in a winter coat and jeans, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, face carefully neutral in a way he recognized. It was her I don’t know what I’m walking into expression, the one she used when she was bracing for something but didn’t want to show it.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  They stood there for a moment, the awkwardness thick enough to taste. Three months since the breakup. Three months of carefully not texting, not calling, not showing up at places they knew the other might be. And now here she was on his doorstep, and he had no idea how to begin.

  “You going to invite me in?” Sarah asked. “It’s freezing out here.”

  “Right. Yeah. Sorry.” Cade stepped back, holding the door open. “Come in.”

  She walked past him into the living room—and stopped. Her eyes swept over the converted space, the power rack and deadlift platform and wall of dumbbells that had replaced the furniture they’d once picked out together. It looked different now than when she’d last seen it. More equipment. Less anything else.

  “You’ve been busy,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Cade closed the door, mindful of the handle. “Look, before I explain anything, I need to show you something. It’s going to seem crazy. I need you to promise you’ll hear me out before you decide I’ve lost my mind.”

  Sarah turned to face him, arms crossed. The neutral expression cracked slightly, concern bleeding through. “Matt said you were acting strange today. He said you caught his laptop and crushed it, and then you ripped a door handle off the wall.”

  “He told you about the door handle?”

  “He told me about all of it. The chair, the bench outside, everything.” She studied his face. “What’s going on, Cade?”

  Instead of answering, he pointed up.

  Sarah followed his gaze to the ceiling—and saw the hole. The perfect circle cut through drywall and wood, now covered from above by the tarp but still gaping open from inside, winter stars visible through the gap.

  “What the hell?”

  “Something hit my house last night. Came through the roof, hit me while I was benching, and… went into me, I guess. No wound. Just this.” He pulled at the collar of his shirt, showing her the unmarked, hairless circle of skin over his sternum. “Whatever it was, it changed me.”

  Sarah stared at the hole, then at him, then back at the hole. “That’s… that doesn’t make any sense. What do you mean it went into you?”

  “I don’t know. I blacked out. When I woke up, the hole was there, there was a matching hole in my shirt, and I was…” He hesitated, then decided there was no point in being subtle. “Watch.”

  He walked to the rack, grabbed a pair of 45-pound plates, and held one in each hand at arm’s length. Then he brought them together, slowly, pressing them against each other with steadily increasing force.

  The plates bent.

  Cast iron, designed to survive being dropped from overhead, crumpled like aluminum cans under the pressure of his grip. Cade held them up for Sarah to see—two ruined circles of metal, warped almost beyond recognition—and then set them on the floor.

  “Last night I benched 585 for reps,” he said quietly. “This morning I squatted 700 for fifty. I don’t think that’s my limit. I don’t think I have a limit anymore.”

  Sarah hadn’t moved. Her face had gone pale, her eyes wide, and Cade could feel something from her now—that suffering-sense pulsing at the edge of his awareness, picking up her shock and fear and the desperate effort she was making to process what she’d just seen.

  “That’s not possible,” she said.

  “No. It’s not.” He flexed his hands, looking down at them. “And that’s not all.”

  He walked to the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and brought it back to the living room. Sarah watched him, still frozen, as he held the glass in front of him and focused.

  The water rose out of the glass.

  It lifted in a perfect column, then separated into a dozen floating orbs that drifted around his head like a slow-motion solar system. Cade guided them with his mind, made them spiral and dance, then collapsed them back into the glass without spilling a drop.

  “I can control water,” he said. “Feel it, move it. I figured that out this morning.” He set the glass down. “There’s more, but that’s… that’s the big stuff. That’s what’s been happening.”

  For a long moment, Sarah didn’t say anything. She just stood there, staring at him, her expression cycling through emotions too fast to read. Then she walked to his couch—the one piece of normal furniture that had survived his gym conversion—and sat down heavily.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Give me a minute.”

  Cade sat on the bench press, keeping his distance, and waited.

  “So let me get this straight,” Sarah said finally. “A ball of light from space hit your house, went through your ceiling, hit you, and now you have superpowers.”

  “That’s… basically accurate, yeah.”

  “Like a superhero origin story.”

  “I guess.”

  “And you decided to tell me this because…?”

  Cade was quiet for a moment. “Because I trust you. Because I didn’t know who else to tell. Because Matt made a joke about Clark Kent and I almost had a panic attack, and when you texted, I…” He trailed off. “I know I shouldn’t have asked you to come. We’re trying to move on. This isn’t fair to you. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Sarah’s expression softened slightly. Some of the fear drained out of her, replaced by something more complicated. “You’re not wrong that this isn’t fair. But you’re also not wrong that you needed to tell someone.” She paused. “How strong are you, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. I ran out of weight this morning trying to find my max.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Cade could feel her processing, turning the information over, fitting it into her model of reality. Sarah had always been like that—quick to accept new data once she’d verified it, even when the data was impossible. It was one of the things he’d loved about her.

  “Do you have any idea what did this?” she asked. “Or why?”

  “No. But…” Cade hesitated. This was the part he wasn’t sure how to explain. “There’s something else. When I woke up early this morning, there was something in my head. Like a… a directive, I guess. An oath.”

  “An oath?”

  “‘I will seek to minimize suffering.’ Those exact words, just… installed in my brain. Like someone wrote them into my source code.” He looked at his hands again. “And since then, I can feel it. Suffering. Around me. Like a pressure, or a heat. I felt it from Henry this morning—his arthritis, his loneliness. I felt it from half the people at work. I can feel it from you right now.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened slightly. “You can feel what I’m feeling?”

  “Not specifics. Just… that you’re struggling with something. That there’s pain there, somewhere.” He met her gaze. “I don’t know if whatever did this to me chose the oath, or if I chose it somehow, subconsciously. But it fits. It’s not that different from how I already tried to live. Just… more.”

  Sarah was quiet for a long moment. Then she stood up, walked to the power rack, and ran her hand along one of the uprights. “This is insane,” she said. “You know that, right? This is absolutely, completely insane.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, I believe you. I just watched you bend plates and make water float. But believing something and accepting it are different things, and I’m going to need some time for the second part.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  She turned to face him. “Show me something else. Something with the water. I want to see it again.”

  Cade gestured toward the kitchen without looking away from her—then paused. The glass was empty now, the water collapsed back into it and gone. He’d have to go refill it, walk away, break the moment.

  Instead, without thinking, he reached out with the water-sense the way he’d been doing all day—feeling for moisture in the air, the humidity, anything to grab onto—

  And something else happened.

  Water appeared.

  Not pulled from the air, not condensed from humidity. Created. Droplets materialized in the space between his outstretched hand and Sarah’s face, blooming into existence like dew forming on an invisible surface. He felt the energy leave him—a slight draw, barely noticeable, like flexing a muscle he hadn’t known he had—and the water simply was.

  Cade stared. Sarah stared.

  “Did you just…” she started.

  “I didn’t mean to.” His voice was hushed. He let more flow, cautiously, watching droplets appear from nothing, drifting through the living room like sideways snow. “I was trying to pull moisture from the air. But this isn’t moisture from the air. This is… new.”

  He examined the sensation. The energy cost was real but minimal—a slight draw against whatever reservoir now lived inside him. The same energy he tapped when straining to move existing water, but converted directly into matter. Water from will. Something from nothing.

  “That’s beautiful,” Sarah whispered, reaching out to touch a drifting droplet. It burst against her fingertip, cool and wet and undeniably real.

  “I think I could have done this all along,” Cade said slowly. “Since this morning. I just didn’t know to try. I was so focused on moving water that already existed—the shower, the pipes—that I never thought to just… make more.”

  “That violates about six laws of physics.”

  “Everything about me violates about six laws of physics.” He let another wave of droplets bloom into existence around them, marveling at how natural it felt. Like a muscle he’d been born with but never flexed. “Conservation of energy, conservation of mass—none of it applies anymore. Or it applies differently. The energy has to come from somewhere, and I can feel it leaving me, but wherever it’s stored, there’s a lot of it.”

  She turned to face him. “How strong do you think you actually are? If seven hundred pounds is nothing, then what’s your limit?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to test it at lunch—there’s this metal bench bolted into concrete outside the office. I grabbed the frame and pushed, and I snapped one of the bolts like it was plastic.” He shrugged. “But I can’t exactly go around stress-testing infrastructure. I need somewhere private, something I can push against without making a scene.”

  Sarah was quiet for a moment, thinking. Then her face changed—a spark of something that looked almost like interest breaking through the shock.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “There’s that park,” she said slowly. “Brecksville Reservation. The trails in the back, past the nature center—I bet nobody goes there in winter. It’s all old-growth forest.”

  Cade frowned. “What are you thinking?”

  “Trees.” She almost smiled. “If you want to know how strong you are, try pushing against something that’s survived a hundred years of Ohio winters. Wrap your arms around a trunk and see if you can move it.”

  “That’s… actually not a bad idea.”

  “I have those sometimes.” The almost-smile flickered again, then faded. “I’m not saying I’m okay with any of this. I’m still processing. But if you’re going to have crazy space powers, you should at least figure out what they can do.”

  Cade stood up and took a step toward her. “Sarah…”

  “Don’t.” She held up a hand. “Not yet. I came here because Matt said you were falling apart and I was worried. That’s all this is right now. I need more time before we talk about… anything else.”

  “Okay. That’s fair.”

  They stood there, an arm’s length apart, the weight of their history pressing down on them both. Cade could feel her emotions shifting—the shock giving way to something else, something warmer, something that scared her. He could feel his own emotions, too, rising up despite his best efforts to keep them contained.

  “I should go,” Sarah said quietly.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know.” She didn’t move. “But if I stay…”

  “Yeah.”

  Neither of them moved.

  “This doesn’t change anything,” Sarah said. “You know that, right? I’m not here because you have powers now. I’m here because you’re still Cade. Compassionate. Weird diet, weird masks, weird everything. That’s who I came to check on.”

  “I know.”

  “Good.” She took a breath. “So what happened today, really? At work. Matt’s version was pretty dramatic.”

  Cade laughed despite himself. “I broke a chair, crushed a laptop trying to catch it, and ripped a door handle off when Matt made a Superman joke and I panicked.”

  “Clark Kent, not Superman.”

  “Same guy.”

  “Not really. Clark Kent is about hiding who you are. Superman is about what you do with what you have.”

  Cade blinked. “That’s… surprisingly philosophical.”

  “I had a lot of time to watch movies after we broke up.” Sarah’s mouth twitched. “The point is, Matt was trying to tell you to be more careful, and instead you proved his point by destroying more office property.”

  “Yeah. Not my finest moment.”

  “You’re going to need to figure this out. The strength thing. Before you hurt someone by accident.”

  “I know. That’s why I can’t go back to work tomorrow. Not until I’ve got it under control.”

  Sarah nodded slowly. “That makes sense. Take a sick day, practice the calibration thing.”

  “I was thinking…” Cade paused. This was the part where he should back off, should let her leave, should stop pulling her deeper into whatever his life was becoming. Instead, he heard himself say: “I was thinking you could call off too. Come with me to the park. Help me test things.”

  Sarah stared at him. “You want me to watch you wrestle trees.”

  “I want you to be there. In case something goes wrong. In case I need someone to tell me I’m being an idiot.”

  “I could do that from a phone call.”

  “You could.” He held her gaze. “But I’d rather you were there in person.”

  Sarah was quiet for a long moment. He could feel her wavering—the pull of their history warring with the distance she’d worked so hard to establish. Three months of carefully moving on, and now here he was, asking her to spend the day with him in a snowy forest while he tested his impossible new abilities.

  “This is a terrible idea,” she said.

  “Probably.”

  “I just started a new job. I can’t be calling off for no reason.”

  “You could tell them it’s a family emergency.”

  “We’re not family. Not anymore.”

  The words hung in the air between them. Cade felt them land, felt the truth of them, and felt how much that truth still hurt. For both of them.

  “No,” he said quietly. “We’re not. But you’re still the person I trust most in the world. And right now, I need someone I can trust.”

  Sarah closed her eyes. When she opened them again, something had shifted in her expression. The careful neutrality was gone, replaced by something rawer, more honest.

  “One day,” she said. “I’ll call off tomorrow, come to the park with you, help you figure out your weird space powers. But this doesn’t mean we’re getting back together. This doesn’t mean anything has changed. I’m just… helping a friend.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it, Cade.”

  “I know you do.”

  She nodded, as if confirming something to herself. Then she picked up her coat from where she’d dropped it on the couch. “I should go. Get some sleep before tomorrow.”

  Cade walked her to the door. They stood in the entryway, close enough to touch, neither of them reaching out. The moment stretched, filled with everything they weren’t saying.

  “Sarah,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. You might regret it when I’m yelling at you to stop trying to uproot a hundred-year-old oak.”

  “I could never regret anything involving you.”

  She looked away. “Don’t. You can’t say things like that anymore. We agreed.”

  “We agreed to move on. We didn’t agree to pretend we don’t feel anything.”

  “That’s the same thing.”

  “It’s really not.”

  Sarah let out a breath. “I’m going to go now. Before this turns into a conversation neither of us is ready for.”

  She opened the door, letting in a gust of winter air. Cade felt it wash over him—cold he could register but not feel, like a memory of sensation rather than the thing itself.

  “I’ll pick you up at nine,” he said. “Unless you’d rather drive separately.”

  “Nine works. I’ll text you my new address.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Sarah stepped out onto the porch, then paused and looked back at him. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “I’m glad you’re not hurt. When Matt first messaged me, I thought…” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  “I don’t know if ‘okay’ is the right word.”

  “Alive, then. Enhanced. Whatever you want to call it.” She almost smiled. “See you tomorrow, Cade.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  He watched her walk to her car, watched the taillights disappear down his street, and then closed the door—gently, so gently—against the winter night.

  She came back forty minutes later.

  Cade was sitting on his couch, staring at nothing, trying to process everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, when the knock came. He opened the door to find Sarah standing on his porch again, coat in hand, expression somewhere between defiant and embarrassed.

  “I went home,” she said. “But I’m back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m an idiot.” She stepped past him into the house. “Because you just told me you got hit by a ball of light from space and now you have superpowers, and I was going to go home and try to sleep like that’s normal. Like any of this is normal.”

  “Sarah—”

  “And because I kept thinking about you here alone, in this house with a hole in the ceiling, trying to figure out what’s happening to you, and I couldn’t—” She stopped, took a breath. “I couldn’t leave you alone with that. Even if being here is complicated. Even if it’s a terrible idea.”

  Cade closed the door behind her. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I know I don’t have to. I want to.” She turned to face him. “That’s the problem, Cade. That’s always been the problem. I want things I shouldn’t want, and you make it worse by being exactly who you are.”

  “I don’t know how to be anyone else.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know.”

  They stood there, closer than before, the tension between them shifting into something else. Cade could feel her emotions through the suffering-sense—anxiety, yes, but also something warmer beneath it. Something that had never really gone away, no matter how hard they’d both tried to bury it.

  “I still love you,” Sarah said quietly. “I know that doesn’t fix anything. I know we’re still incompatible in all the ways that matter. But I never stopped loving you, and pretending I did was exhausting.”

  “I never stopped either.”

  “I know.” She laughed, soft and sad. “That’s what makes this so hard.”

  Cade reached out, slowly, giving her time to pull away. She didn’t. His fingers touched her arm, traced up to her shoulder, came to rest against her cheek. She leaned into his palm, eyes closing.

  “This is still a terrible idea,” she murmured.

  “The worst.”

  “We’re going to regret it tomorrow.”

  “Probably.”

  “I don’t care.” She opened her eyes. “Show me something. Something with the water. I want to see it again.”

  Cade glanced up at the hole in his ceiling—the vaulted slope of the roofline open to the winter sky, stars burning cold and clear through the gap. Then he looked around the room, thinking, and his eyes landed on the junk drawer in the kitchen. He held up a finger—one second—and came back with a cheap red laser pointer, the kind he’d bought years ago to entertain a friend’s cat.

  “Trust me,” he said, clicking it on.

  He didn’t just make droplets this time. He’d done that already, proved it was real, felt the wonder and the terror of it. This time he wanted something worth the moment.

  Water bloomed into existence above them—not a scattered cloud but a constellation, dozens of tiny spheres suspended at precise heights between the floor and the open sky. He held them there, feeling each one individually, adjusting their positions with a care he hadn’t known he was capable of. Some he made no larger than a pinhead. Others he let swell to the size of marbles, hanging in the air like glass ornaments on invisible strings.

  Then he pointed the laser into the nearest droplet.

  The beam hit the first sphere and scattered—not randomly, but along paths Cade could feel and adjust, each droplet acting as a tiny lens he could shape from the inside. He nudged the water, flattening one droplet here, elongating another there, and the single red beam split into dozens of threads that bounced between the suspended spheres like light trapped inside a diamond.

  Lines of red light crawled across the walls, the steel uprights of his power rack, the ceiling. Where threads crossed, they brightened into points. Where they hit the falling-away edges of the larger droplets, they fanned into soft arcs. The whole room became a web of refracted light, shifting and alive, as Cade made micro-adjustments to the water—each tiny change sending new patterns cascading through the constellation.

  Sarah’s breath caught.

  “That’s beautiful,” she whispered.

  “It’s just water and a three-dollar laser pointer.” He tilted one of the central droplets a fraction of a degree and a sweep of red light traced slowly across her cheek. “The physics is doing most of the work.”

  “No it’s not.” She reached up toward one of the larger droplets, not touching it, just letting the scattered light play across her open palm. “An hour ago you were crushing plates like tin cans. Now you’re holding fifty pieces of water in the air and shaping each one like a lens. That’s not the same thing.”

  She was right. It wasn’t. And the fact that it felt easy—that holding this delicate, intricate structure required less effort than bending cast iron—told him something about how his abilities were growing. Not just in raw power, but in precision. In finesse.

  He let the display hold for another few seconds, then clicked off the laser and gently released the water. The droplets fell like rain, pattering softly around them, the web of light vanishing as each tiny lens rejoined the ordinary world.

  “What else?” Sarah asked quietly, still looking up at where the droplets had been. “What else did this thing give you?”

  “I don’t know yet. The strength, the water, the temperature immunity, the sensing.” He paused. “And the oath. I keep coming back to that. Minimize suffering. Like it’s not just a suggestion—it’s the reason for all of it.”

  “Whose mission?”

  “I don’t know. Mine, I guess. Whatever did this to me, whatever it wanted—I think that’s what it wanted me to do.”

  Sarah was quiet for a moment. “That sounds like a lot of responsibility for someone who didn’t ask for it.”

  “I’ve always felt that responsibility. Now I can actually do something about it.”

  “Can you? You’re strong, sure. You can control water. But how does that minimize suffering?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Cade let his hand drop from her face. “But I’ve been thinking about it. All the suffering in the world, all the pain that humans cause each other and themselves—what if someone could actually stop it? Not all of it, maybe, but some of it. Enough to matter.”

  “And you think that someone is you?”

  “I think I might be becoming the only one who can try.”

  Sarah studied him for a long moment. “That’s terrifying, you know. What you’re describing.”

  “Which part?”

  “The part where you think you can fix the world. That kind of thinking leads to bad places.”

  “Or good ones. Depending on who’s doing the thinking.”

  “And you think you’re the good kind?”

  Cade didn’t answer immediately. It was a fair question, maybe the fairest question anyone had ever asked him. Who was he to decide what the world needed? Who was he to impose his vision of reduced suffering on everyone else?

  But then he thought about the oath. About how it aligned with everything he already believed. About all the pain he’d felt today, radiating from coworkers and strangers and even Sarah herself. If he could do something about that—if he had been given the ability to do something about that—didn’t he have an obligation to try?

  “I think I’m someone who cares,” he said finally. “And I think that’s got to count for something.”

  Later, naked and tangled together on his bed in the dark, Sarah pressed her back against his chest, pulling his arm around her waist the way she always had—claiming him as her personal weighted blanket, a habit from their years together that three months apart hadn’t erased.

  She lasted about ten seconds before she tried to adjust his arm and couldn’t.

  “Cade.” She lifted his wrist with both hands, managed to raise it a few inches, then let it drop back against her stomach with a soft oof. “What the hell. Your arm weighs like forty pounds.”

  “Does it?”

  “I used to be able to shove you around in your sleep. Now it’s like spooning a bag of cement.” She tried again, got it even less far this time, and gave up. “You’re denser. Like, physically. The muscle is the same size but it’s just… more.”

  Cade considered this. He didn’t feel heavier to himself—but then, his strength had scaled so far beyond his mass that he probably wouldn’t notice the difference. Carrying an extra hundred pounds would feel like nothing when you could squat seven hundred for reps.

  “Add it to the list,” he said.

  “The list is getting really long.” She settled back against him, accepting the weight of his arm with a small sigh. “At least you make a good anchor. I’m not going anywhere.”

  They lay like that for a while, quiet, Sarah’s fingers tracing idle patterns on his forearm. When she spoke again, her voice had shifted—softer, more careful.

  “Tell me about the oath thing again. The exact words.”

  “‘I will seek to minimize suffering.’ It just… appeared in my head. When I woke up at 4 AM, it was there. Like someone had written it into my brain.”

  “And you don’t know where it came from?”

  “No. It could be whatever hit me, installing a directive. Or it could be me, choosing something subconsciously, manifesting powers that align with what I already believe.” He stared at the stars through the hole. “I don’t know which would be scarier. Being given a purpose or discovering I made one for myself.”

  Sarah was quiet for a moment. “You’ve always had a purpose, though. The veganism, the masking, all of it. You were trying to minimize suffering before any of this happened.”

  “Trying, yeah. And failing, mostly. What does one person’s choices matter in a world this broken? I don’t eat animal products, but factory farming keeps happening. I mask in public, but diseases keep spreading. I try to reduce harm wherever I can, and the harm just keeps compounding.”

  “So now you have powers. You think that changes the equation?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. If I keep getting stronger—and I think I am, I think whatever happened to me isn’t finished yet—maybe I can actually change things. Not just reduce my own footprint but actually fix what’s broken.”

  Sarah propped herself up on an elbow, looking down at him. “That’s a big ‘maybe.’”

  “Everything’s a big ‘maybe’ right now.”

  “Fair.” She was quiet for a moment, then asked: “Does this change how you feel? About… us? About the future?”

  Cade knew what she was really asking. The reason they’d broken up, underneath all the surface-level incompatibility, was a fundamental disagreement about what life should look like. Sarah wanted kids. A family. The normal trajectory that most people followed without questioning. Cade had come to believe—through years of philosophy courses and ethical reasoning and late nights staring at the ceiling—that bringing new consciousness into a world that couldn’t guarantee freedom from suffering was an act of cruelty dressed up as love.

  They’d argued about it for months before finally accepting that neither of them would change. That they loved each other, but love wasn’t enough to bridge a gap that fundamental.

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I still feel the same way about… about not wanting to be responsible for bringing kids into this world. Not when it’s this broken. Not when there’s so much pain everywhere.” He turned to look at her. “I can feel it now, Sarah. The suffering. It’s not theoretical anymore. It’s this constant pressure on the edge of my awareness, all these people hurting in all these different ways. How could I create new life knowing it would feel that too?”

  Sarah’s expression flickered—pain, understanding, resignation. “I know. That’s what you’ve always said.”

  “But,” Cade continued, “if I can change things… if I can actually make the world better, reduce that suffering instead of just accepting it… maybe the equation changes. Maybe someday it won’t be cruel to bring someone new into this. It’ll be a gift.”

  “That’s a lot of ‘maybes’ stacked on top of each other.”

  “I know.”

  She lay back down, pressing her face against his shoulder. “I’m not going to wait around hoping you develop enough superpowers to cure the world of suffering, Cade. That’s not fair to either of us.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  “Good.” She was quiet for a moment. “But I’m glad we have tonight. And tomorrow. Whatever this is, whatever it becomes, I’m glad I’m here for this part.”

  Cade wrapped an arm around her, pulling her closer. “Me too.”

  They lay there in silence, watching the stars through the hole in his ceiling, and didn’t talk about the future anymore.

  Morning came gray and cold.

  Cade woke at 4:47 AM, alert and rested after barely four hours of sleep. His body simply didn’t need more anymore—another item on the growing list of things that had changed. He lay still for a few minutes, watching Sarah sleep beside him, her breathing slow and even, face soft in the dim light.

  He wanted to stay. Wanted to pull her closer and drift back into that warm, uncomplicated space they’d found together. But his body thrummed with restless energy, and patience had never been his strength. Even before the powers, he’d been the type to bounce his leg through meetings, to pace while thinking, to fill every quiet moment with movement. Now, with whatever fuel source hummed inside him, staying still felt almost physically painful.

  He slipped out of bed—with exaggerated care, hyperaware of every motion—and padded to the kitchen.

  His fridge held the usual arsenal of meal-prepped containers, but those were calibrated for his macros, not for someone who actually enjoyed eating. He dug through the cabinets instead and found steel-cut oats, maple syrup, a bag of walnuts, some frozen berries he kept for smoothies. Not exciting, but edible. Sarah had always tolerated his vegan cooking, even if she’d never fully embraced it.

  By seven, he had a passable bowl of oatmeal topped with berries and walnuts, coffee brewing, a glass of orange juice poured from the carton he kept for post-workout smoothies. He sat at his small kitchen table and practiced making and moving water droplets while he waited, materializing them from nothing, letting them orbit his hand like tiny planets, then evaporating them back into energy.

  Sarah emerged around seven-thirty, wrapped in his bathrobe, hair mussed, shuffling toward the kitchen.

  “You made breakfast,” she said, voice still rough with sleep.

  “I’ve been up for hours. Had to do something.”

  She shuffled to the table, sat down heavily, and stared at the oatmeal like it might bite her. “You know I’m not a morning person.”

  “I remember.”

  “And yet you made food that requires chewing.”

  “There’s also coffee. And orange juice.”

  Sarah perked up slightly at that. She reached for the glass—then paused, a sly smile crossing her face. “Actually. You can make water now, right? Manifest it from nothing?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hmm… Actually… Feed me the orange juice. In big droplets. Like last night.”

  Cade laughed. “That’s not how it works. I can make water, not orange juice. Different chemical composition.”

  “Silly. I meant pull the juice out of the glass. Make it float.”

  He considered this. Orange juice was mostly water—controlling it shouldn’t be that different. He focused on the glass, felt the liquid inside, and lifted.

  A stream of orange juice rose from the glass, separating into a dozen wobbling spheres that drifted toward Sarah’s face. She opened her mouth, and he guided one onto her tongue.

  “Okay,” she said, swallowing. “That’s the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever done for me. I love it. More.”

  He fed her the rest of the juice one giant droplet at a time, both of them laughing at the absurdity of it, until the glass was empty and Sarah was finally awake enough to tackle the oatmeal.

  “How do you feel?” she asked between bites. “Any different from yesterday?”

  “Strong.” He flexed his hands, trying to assess. “Maybe stronger? It’s hard to tell. I’m still not used to any of this, so I don’t have a good baseline.”

  “You said you got most of your new strength while you slept, right?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know if it happened again last night. I was… either asleep or distracted.”

  Sarah smiled around a spoonful of oatmeal. “Distracted. That’s what we’re calling it.”

  “It’s a technical term.”

  She flicked a walnut at him. He caught it without looking—reflexes too fast, hand blurring through the air—and popped it in his mouth.

  “Still getting used to that,” he admitted.

  “You’re going to have to. Can’t be catching things like that in public.”

  “I know.” He stood up, stretched, and Sarah took a moment to appreciate the view. Whatever else had changed about Cade, his dedication to training had sculpted him into something worth looking at. Even more so now, knowing the impossible strength coiled beneath that skin.

  She finished her breakfast while he cleaned up—another exercise in pressure calibration, trying not to crush the dishes or bend the silverware—then sent him to get her spare clothes out of her car while she showered. By the time she’d finished and dressed, it was nearly nine.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready to watch you wrestle trees in a frozen forest? Absolutely.” She grabbed her coat. “Let’s go figure out what you can do.”

  They took her car, heading toward the park.