“The way they’re going, that’ll be in a few months.”

He smiled.

He’d been her, once. Lost, anxious, fresh out of school with no idea of how to disengage from adolescence and commit to being an adult, still figuring out how to balance work in the labs with ensuring he was keeping the door open for professional growth, with family, keeping up with pop culture enough he didn’t end up alienated from friends, trying and failing to manage a love life, and the little things like keeping his apartment clean.

Like her, he’d dressed himself up like an adult, faked it, put on a mask. He’d picked a few things to do well and let others flounder. Maybe that had been a mistake.

The door opened. They had guests, and these weren’t pen carriers or serving girls. They were the closest thing Shin had to royalty. Luis, the head of the Founders, who had been closest to Goddess, and Yosef from the Lone Sands or the Cold Sands, depending on the season. With them were some of Shin’s parahumans.

Cryptid, a woman he thought he might have recognized from old files, and a man he didn’t recognize.

He stood from his seat, and Natalie Matteson followed suit.

He couldn’t help but pay attention to Cryptid. The boy was halfway to being a man, but he had skipped puberty, applying the components of the adult man with broad and inconsistent strokes of the brush. It made his frame seem uncanny and wrong, and the collar with cloth draping down from it obscured some details enough that Kamil had no idea if it hid the worse details or exaggerated the bad by hiding the good.

Ungainly, not lopsided but imbalanced. Put together wrong.

Kamil knew he had a longstanding habit of finding parts of himself in others. Empathy run amok, maybe. When he was young he had alienated people, responding to every complaint and problem by relating to it.

He couldn’t help but relate to this uncanny boy with the mind and memories of an adult. Memories of kidnapping people young and old, of various nationalities, disabled and able, subjecting them to brutal experiments, some of which had changed the permanently, in mind and body. Had the man known as Lab Rat been a power in his era, in his area, then Kamil might have been haunted for the rest of his life by the fact that he hadn’t stopped him sooner.

He related because he felt uncomfortable in his own skin. He was gangly without being tall, at five feet six inches, with a tendency to put on weight toward the stomach and hips. He was cursed with a perpetually angry look that almost never matched his mood, a jaw that seemed set like he was spoiling for a fight, and a crooked nose. His hairline was receding, and gray hair had coming in early, in locks and patches with no rhyme or reason to it. If none of that was enough to prejudice people against him and force him into an uphill battle when it came to proving himself as an academic and leader, the fact that he was black might.