"Again," Ren said.
"That's the fourth time." Jian was sitting on an overturned bucket at the far end of the backyard, arms crossed, watching Ren with the specific tight expression of someone counting down from a number he hadn't told anyone. "You've moved a rock four times. Groundbreaking. Should we alert the news."
"I need to know what I can actually do."
"You need to not end up like the kid three streets from my house." Jian didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "That's what you need."
Ren didn't answer that. He crouched by the same rock from a week ago — heavier this time, the size of two fists instead of one, because a small thing four times in a row told him nothing except that the ceiling was low. He wanted to know how low.
He reached for it the way he'd learned to reach: not grabbing, not straining, just asking the same quiet, patient way he'd have asked his own hand to close.
Something answered. Bigger this time — not the thin single string from before, something closer to a chord, several notes at once, and for half a second the rock actually lifted, an inch off the grass, trembling like it wasn't sure it believed in gravity anymore.
[Stop.]
One word, and this time there was no dry commentary riding under it. Just the word, flat and fast, like a hand closing over a stove burner before it could finish heating.
Ren didn't stop.
He didn't decide not to stop, exactly — it was more that stopping had stopped being a thing he had access to, the way you can't decide to unclench a muscle mid-spasm. The rock rose another inch. Something behind his sternum pulled taut, then tighter, like a wire being wound around a spool that was already full.
"Ren." Jian was on his feet now.
The pain arrived without warning, and it didn't arrive where pain usually did. Not his head, not his hands. It came from somewhere under his ribs, deep, in a place he had no name for and had never had reason to locate before — a sensation of movement, something shifting inside him that had no business shifting, like a limb he didn't know he had was trying to unfold in a space built for a much smaller thing.
The rock dropped. Ren dropped with it, onto his knees in the wet grass, one hand clawed against his own chest like he could hold whatever it was still.
"Hey — hey, look at me." Jian was crouched in front of him now, hands hovering, not quite touching, the way you'd hover near someone you weren't sure was safe to grab. "Ren. Breathe. In through your nose, whatever, just — breathe."
Ren breathed. It took longer than it should have to remember how.
The feeling didn't fade the way the Ch 2-era headaches had — it didn't sit and wait to be earned back. It receded slowly, reluctantly, like something being coaxed rather than released, and even after it was mostly gone he could still feel the shape of where it had been, a hollow warmth under his ribs where something had briefly, very briefly, worn a size too large for the space it lived in.
"That wasn't a headache," he said, once he could talk.
"No," Jian agreed. Quiet. He'd gone pale in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. "That was not a headache."
[I said stop.]
The panel flashed, and this time Ren could have sworn — though he'd never have been able to prove it, never have been able to point to a single word that carried it — that something in the terse little message sounded less angry than scared.
"I heard you," Ren muttered, mostly to himself, since Jian couldn't see the text and didn't need to know exactly how thoroughly he'd been told not to. "I just didn't — I couldn't."
"Couldn't stop, or didn't want to?"
Ren opened his mouth to say couldn't, and found, sitting there in the wet grass with his best friend watching him like he might come apart at any second, that he wasn't entirely sure that was true.
"I don't know," he admitted. "Maybe both."
Jian sat back on his heels, dragging a hand down his face, the gesture Ren had learned by now meant Jian was buying himself a few seconds before he had to say something he didn't want to say.
"You know what's actually terrifying," Jian said finally. "It's not that this is real. I got over that part in about four minutes flat, back at lunch, because I've had my whole life to get used to the idea. What's terrifying is watching you push against something that's clearly trying to protect you, on purpose, because some part of you apparently doesn't care what it costs."
Ren looked down at his own hands. Steady again, mostly. Nothing to show for what had just happened except the hollow ache still fading under his ribs.
He realized, sitting there, that somewhere over the last six days the question he'd been asking had changed shape without him noticing. It wasn't is any of this real anymore — hadn't been, if he was honest, since the mud and the general and the smell of smoke that shouldn't have existed anywhere near a Northwood alley. That argument was over. He'd lost it days ago and just kept fighting out of habit.
The question now, the one sitting where the old one used to be, was smaller and somehow worse: why does something in me want to break its own leash to get to whatever's on the other side of it.
"I don't think I did that because I wanted to test a limit," he said slowly. "I think I did it because some part of me is impatient. And I don't know why that part of me is in such a hurry."
Jian was quiet for a moment.
"Yeah," he said finally, standing, offering Ren a hand up. "That's the part that worries me too."
He didn't say what a drag, this time. Ren noticed the absence of it more than he'd have noticed the words themselves.