I’d first noticed the person watching me because her face had a lot of freckles, and out of the corner of my eye, I’d thought she was someone else. On closer look, though, I could see that her hair was jaw length and straighter, her facial structure was different, and she was wearing the clothes of a student athlete, with bare shoulders and arms, gym shorts, and a towel around her neck.

I might have dismissed her then, but she’d been looking at me, looking away when I glanced her way. I found myself looking again a few moments later, because one look wasn’t enough to dismiss the unease I felt in response to a freckle-covered face looming in my peripheral vision, peering past the crowd. The same thing happened the second time I looked at her. I caught her staring, and she looked away.

There had been a time that I would have automatically assumed it was positive. I was recognizable, I’d been a hometown celebrity in a town with a fair number of prominent people, and that had led to me getting recognized by at least one person each time I went out. I’d reveled in it.

Now? Traitorous instincts made that the second or even the third rank option in a list. The first thought in my head on realizing I was being stared at was to go straight to the hospital room, to people staring at wretched me in a vain effort to try to comprehend what they were looking at. They wondered how I even functioned, how I worked, tried to understand the configuration. When I moved automatically, the movements caught the eye.

Even with the most polite and iron-willed of them, they struggled to find which eye or eyes they should look at to make and maintain eye contact, and in the search for that common, natural thing, they ended up staring at the rest of me.

At the rest of the wretch, the sideshow freak, the monster.

How had Byron put it, at the meeting with Foresight? Tristan was nourished by the hardheaded struggle. Byron was recharged by periods of rest. It gave Tristan a natural advantage in their endless struggle over a single body.

I was closer to Byron in that. I was recharged by attention, by adulation, encouragement, worship. It was a natural progression of the fact that I’d been built to be a hero, because I could put on a costume and do great things and get that attention and encouragement.