“You don’t come here!” he said, and a fleck of spit left his mouth as he shouted, to land somewhere on my top. “I have to fucking balance everything. I lose my heart or I lose my body. I’ve gone to the fucking bathroom in the morning and there was blood and meat in the bowl when I was done, and there’s two people I can trust to handle the clog or leave me alone so I can handle it. She was one of them. You can’t fuck with that!”

“I didn’t!”

“You did! You said stuff and you might have changed her mind about stuff and I can’t know how to balance it if I don’t know what was said! She changes my sheets when there’s fluids on the bed that aren’t blood, semen, piss or shit, no questions asked, because Jessica said it’s under control. Now Jessica isn’t here and you’re putting ideas in her head and she might change her mind about things!”

“What the hell is going on, Chris, that you’re dealing with stuff like that? Powers don’t usually tear you up like that.”

I saw a flicker of something in his expression, between the outrage and the reckless madness I’d seen as he talked about fluids and Jessica.

Not his powers?

“None of your business!”

“Is it not your powers?” I asked. “Someone else’s? Someone did this to you?”

“None of your business and fuck you!”

“Have you shared about this with the others?”

“No! Of course not! Because I don’t fucking want any fucking people fucking with me!”

“Chris,” I said. “We can’t help you if you don’t share. I know power stuff, I studied it, I saw a lot of it at the Asylum.”

“Read my lips,” he said, panting as he said it. Now he had the vein in his forehead. “I. Don’t. Want. Help. Not from you. I want to be left alone and I’m willing to do the hero thing because it works for me. I’m fine.”

I’m fine, he said.

He stared me down and there was no waver in his eyes, no sign of anything in his face or posture besides repressed outrage.

No fear.

“Are you fine because you’re striking that balance, emotionally?” I asked. “With the forms?”

“If I want help,” he said. “If my body starts going screwy and there’s no way to salvage it, I’ll go down to the seven-seven building, near where the Wardens headquarters used to be.”

I shook my head. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s housing the Wardens used. Odds are pretty good it’s where your sister’s living.”

My heart sank to roughly where my knees were, but the place it had been wasn’t left intact. It was cold and empty and sick and painful all at once.