I nodded.

He gave me a salute, knife up to his forehead, then away. I raised a hand in farewell. We went our separate ways.

Yeah, it felt like the shadows and dark thoughts that dogged me were nipping at my heels now, clinging to my back, rather than lurking around the next corner. A weight. A constant set of thoughts. Some had to do with Amy, some had to do with me.

Dropping something heavy on her from above. Telephone pole to the spine. Tearing her a new one.

All of that felt fresh, new, and constant, like an oven ring with the flame on the lowest temperature. Saying the intensity was ‘low’ didn’t mean I wanted to hold my hand to the ring.

Anelace had been the right choice. Was he more than a little weird, asking me out on a gore-streaked battlefield? Yeah. But I could kind of get that, though, when we’d seen enough ugliness that we distanced ourselves from it or became inured to it. He was also someone who cared to help out at a physio center, he respected boundaries when a pervier asshole could have taken advantage of the interest of the six or seven interested physiotherapists at the center who’d been keeping their eyes on him. Become the center of a tangle of drama. He hadn’t.

As bad as it sounded, I wasn’t interested in more. Not with him. No dating, no relationship. That was a plus. He was accessible and available. Another plus.

I was going to regret the shit out of this, a week from now, when the dark thoughts were still nipping at my heels because they were way harder to put in the box, and the memories of being close to someone had faded and gone cold again.

Already, as he walked away, I felt a bit lonely again.

I headed back toward the situation room, shoulders hunched forwards, hands in my pockets.

Keep me company, I thought. We need to work on you braiding my hair. What impacts that? Is it you drawing on stored memories of me? Reaching for a crystal where you’ve got some motor memory garbage? Is it drawn from my time in the asylum, or is it my current manual dexterity, with something interfering?

Shit. Half my files I could look stuff up in were packed up. Agent–parahuman relationships, the things that impacted it. Off the top of my head… there was stuff like Vista had talked about. Meditation. Practice. Testing limits. Getting closer to the mindset of the trigger. Facing more high-conflict situations. A few incidental reports about dreams, but those were so ambiguous that it could have been capes pulling ideas out of their ass, or extrapolating from nothing.

Not that I didn’t believe there was something to dreams.

A lot of fucky, not-quite-right power stuff surrounded dreams. Like powers didn’t quite know how to handle them, making the rules a little less firm.