THE TAMER WHO REWROTE EVOLUTION

Chapter 9

The laugh stopped as soon as Ethan sat up.

He held his breath and listened. Gravel snored in the next kennel. Pebble breathed slow and deep beside him like a bellows. Wick's wings ticked softly against the straw.

Nothing else.

"Hello?" Ethan said. No answer. He got to his feet, swaying, and walked on shaky legs to the water barrels at the end of the hall. He looked behind each one. There was no one there. There was only a damp patch on the floor, and in the middle of it, a thin skin of frost in the shape of a hand.

It melted while he watched. "That's not funny," he whispered. The lamp buzzed. The frost was gone.

Ethan stood there for a long time with his arms wrapped around himself. Then he went back to the straw and lay down against Pebble's warm side and did not sleep.

Morning came gray and slow.

By the time the first bell rang across the campus, Ethan was sitting on an upturned feed bucket in the training yard behind the kennels, staring at his own hands. They were still faintly blue at the fingertips.

Pebble lay in the sun a few steps away, big as a small boat, chewing a mouthful of gravel with great satisfaction. Wick circled lazily above him, drawing little orange loops in the air. "Everyone is going to find out," Ethan said.

Nobody answered. He had not expected anyone to.

"A Rank F-Null who can evolve beasts. Who can see their trees? Who can feel what they feel?" He laughed, a short ugly sound. "They'll take one look at me and ask the same question I'm asking. Why him?" Pebble swallowed his gravel and blinked.

"No, really," Ethan said. "Think about it. Darius is a Rank B. Sera is an S. They've trained for this their whole lives. They know how to fight. They know how to lead. They have reasons to be here."

He rubbed his palms against his knees. "And I'm just a boy who used to clean cages." He looked down at his shoes. They were cracked at the toes. He had worn the same pair for two years. "Maybe the stone was right," he said quietly. "Maybe I really am nothing. Maybe this system is just borrowing power from you two, from every poor thing I touch. Maybe I'm not special at all. I'm just a door something else walks through."

The words sat in his chest like wet sand. That was the first fear, and it was the quietest one. I don't deserve this. It crept in on soft feet and tucked itself into every hollow place he had. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "What am I even for?" The doubt did not last.

It turned, somewhere in the middle of the next breath, into something hotter. "No," Ethan said.

He stood up so fast that the bucket tipped over. "No. That's not fair. That's not fair."Wick stopped mid-loop. "I did everything right!" Ethan's voice cracked across the empty yard. "I studied every night. I memorized every beast chart in the library. I read until my eyes burned. I got up before dawn to muck out stalls for people who wouldn't even say thank you. And the stone looked at me for two seconds and said nothing."

He kicked the bucket. It clanged off the fence and spun in the dust. "And then my own friend, my best friend, looked me in the eye and said hold it off. Like I was a gate. Like I was a rock you throw at something so you can run faster."

His breath came hard and fast.

"And now there's a man with a silver coin who wants to put me in a cage. And a voice in my head that laughs at me in the dark. And a mark on my chest that eats my body heat and makes me feel every awful thing every beast has ever felt, and nobody asked me! Nobody said, 'Ethan, do you want this?' Nobody ever asks!"

He rounded on the empty air, as if his father stood there.

"Where were you?" he shouted. "You were the great tamer! You were the one who knew everything! You left me with a name nobody wanted and a moth the size of a button, and you never said why!"

The echo bounced across the stones and died. His hands were shaking again. His face was wet. His heart pounded so hard it made his vision pulse. Pebble had risen to his feet. The big beetle was standing very close now, shoulder to shoulder with Ethan, a gray wall at his side. He did not make a sound. He just stood there, solid and warm, letting Ethan lean on him.

"Sorry," Ethan whispered. "Sorry. I'm not mad at you."

Pebble pressed his flat head gently against Ethan's hip.

The anger went out of Ethan all at once, like air from a punctured bag.

He sat down in the dust and put his head on his knees.

He did not know how long he stayed there. The sun climbed. Somewhere across the grounds, a bell rang again. Students laughed in the distance, a happy ordinary sound, like water running over stones. Ethan listened to it.

He thought about what it would be like to be one of them. To wake up in a warm bed. To eat breakfast in the main hall with people who knew his name for good reasons. To walk to class with a beast at his side that nobody had ever laughed at. To have a father who came home.

He thought about a small kitchen with a crooked table, and his mother's hands, and a man's boots by the door that were never there anymore. "I just wanted," he whispered, and his voice caught, "to be allowed to be ordinary."

The wind moved the dust across the yard. "I wanted somebody to say, 'We're glad you're here.' That's all. Not 'You're the chosen one.' Not 'You're a threat.' Just... glad."

A warm weight settled against his shoulder. Wick had landed there. He was small again, as small as a coin, and his glow was dim in the daylight. He did not do anything. He simply sat, close enough that Ethan felt the tiny heat of him through his shirt. Ethan turned his head. "You didn't ask for this either," he said.

Wick tilted his head. "You were the weakest thing in the Wilds. A moth nobody wanted. And you stood in front of a Venom Stalker anyway." The moth's antennae twitched.

"Why?" Ethan asked softly. "Why did you do that?"

Wick did not answer, of course. He only crawled down Ethan's arm to his open palm, and curled up there, wings folded, small and warm and certain.