The F-Class Awakening

Chapter 2 : The Girl Who Knows Him

A week after the Awakening, Evan was stacking crates on Pier Nine, and it was going about as well as he'd expected.

The job came with the F-Class packet. Six pages, one of them a list of approved employments, all of them physical, none of them requiring what you might call a mind. He'd taken the pier because the night shift paid more, and because his mother slept badly, and there was no point lying awake in a flat that small listening to her not sleep.

The work was simple. A crane lifted containers off the ships. A crew opened them. Evan and three other men moved what was inside onto pallets. Nine hours, three breaks, hand truck, no talking.

In that week he had learned that Connection worked exactly the way the Registry said. Touch two things and they stuck together for about six seconds. That was all.

He had tested it. Extensively. At three in the morning, out behind the pier, with a bent nail and a scrap of canvas and fog so thick he couldn't see his own hands.

Nail to canvas: stuck. Six seconds, maybe seven, then nothing but a faint tug, like a spiderweb you'd walked through on the way somewhere else. Two crates: stuck. A chain to a hook: stuck. His boot to a pallet: stuck, and then he'd had to sit down on the dock and wait for the dizziness to pass, which meant the ability wasn't just weak, it was expensive, which was somehow worse.

He kept a list in the back of his notebook. Thirty-one things tried, and what each one did. Thirty of them had done nothing interesting.

The one that bothered him wasn't on the list. It was what had happened on the platform, with the Needle in his hand, when he'd reached back and taken hold of a stranger's life. He'd tried to do it again. Twice. He'd pressed a nail into his own palm and asked, and nothing had answered.

He hadn't told anyone about the list. Or the platform. Or the half-slip of paper in his jacket.

"Vale."

Evan set the crate down.

The foreman was standing at the end of the aisle with a girl beside him, which did not happen. Pier Nine did not have visitors. Pier Nine didn't let anyone past the gate without a manifest, a badge, and a reason.

She looked nineteen, maybe. Dark hair tied back badly, as if she'd done it in a hurry and forgotten about it. A weatherproof coat, hood down, though the rain had started an hour ago and was coming through the roof vents in long diagonals. She was looking at him with an expression he couldn't read at all.

"She says she knows you," the foreman said. "You know her?"

Evan looked at her.

"No."

The girl said, "Left foot twice. Right foot once."

Evan went still.

"When it's a door you don't know," she went on. "You don't notice you do it. Left, left, right. Every time. Then you put your hand on the frame before you go through, like you're checking the whole building's still there."

The rain came through the vents. Somewhere behind them, a container shifted on its chains and groaned.

"Lots of people do that," Evan said.

"They really don't." She tilted her head. "I've watched."

"You've watched me."

"Yes."

The foreman looked between them, decided this wasn't his problem, and said, "Ten minutes," and walked off.

Evan wiped his hands on his thighs and crossed the aisle, stopping at what he felt was a reasonable distance. Up close she was younger than he'd guessed and more tired than she wanted him to see. There was a fine red mark along her jaw, the kind you got from pressing a hand there and forgetting to stop.

"You know my name," he said. "I don't know yours."

"Serena."

"Serena what?"

"Serena." She said it as if the rest didn't matter. "You're not going to offer me your hand."

"Should I?"

"No." Fast. Faster than she'd said anything else. Then, more evenly: "Not yet. I'm sorry. That came out wrong."

"Most things do."

She looked down at her boots, then back up. "You still do that. You say the small thing and it lands like a big thing and you never notice."

Still?

"Okay," Evan said. "You have my attention. What do you want?"

"I want to talk somewhere that isn't a warehouse with a man watching us from the mezzanine."

Evan glanced up. The foreman was on the mezzanine, watching with the flat suspicion of a man who had already decided this was going in a report.

"There's a shop two piers down that stays open for the night crews," Evan said. "Coffee?"

"Tea."

"Nobody wants tea."

"I want tea," Serena said, and Evan had the sudden, disorienting sense that this was funny to her for a reason he wasn't going to be told.

*  *  *

The shop had six tables, one window, and a woman behind the counter who had never once asked Evan a question. He got a coffee and a tea and sat down across from the girl. She wrapped both hands around her cup and didn't drink.

"You're F-Class," she said.

"That's public record."

"Connection."

"Also public record."

"Everything's public record." She looked up. "That's the point of it."

Evan let that sit. He noticed things. It was the one thing the Awakening couldn't measure, and it was the only thing he was sure he was good at. She held the cup like it was holding her, thumb worrying a chip in the rim. She'd taken the chair with her back to the corner. She'd checked the door twice since they sat down, and the second time she hadn't moved her head to do it.

Somebody had taught her how to sit in a room.

"You know things about me," he said.

"Yes."

"Things you shouldn't."

"Yes."

"So either you've been following me —"

"I haven't."

"Or someone told you."

Silence.

"Or," Evan said, "the third thing."

Serena's thumb stopped on the rim.

"What's the third thing?"

"I don't know yet." He turned his cup a quarter turn. "That's why it's the third thing."

Her face did something he had no name for. Not sadness. Closer to how a person looks when a light comes on in a house she'd thought was empty.

"You're supposed to be worse at this," she said.

"Right now it's the only thing I'm good at."

"That's not true."

"You don't know that."

"I do," Serena said. She flinched, and he watched her decide to keep going anyway. "The sixth of Harvest, when you were fifteen. You went up to the roof of your building at four in the morning because the shouting downstairs wouldn't stop. You sat with your back against the water tank and you didn't cry. After about an hour you said out loud, to nobody, I'll figure something out."

The shop was very small and very quiet.

Evan didn't move.

He had never told anyone that. Not one piece of it. Especially not the part where he'd had to say it out loud, because saying it out loud was the only way he'd been able to get up off that roof and go back downstairs.

"Nobody told you that," he said. His voice came out flat. It usually did when it mattered.

"No."

"You were there."

"No."

"Then how —"

"Evan."

He looked up.

Serena had put her cup down. Both hands flat on the table. She was looking at him with an attention that was total and completely unguarded, and it was, if he was honest, the most frightening thing that had happened to him all month, including the Awakening.

"Before I say the rest, I need you to understand something," she said. "I'm not here to hurt you. I'm not here to use you. If I were, I'd have done it a week ago, when I found out you'd taken the pier job. Instead I stood outside that gate for four hours every night trying to decide whether to walk in."

"Four hours a night."

"Six, on Thursday."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I'm afraid of you," Serena said, without any drama at all.

Evan felt the floor of his life tilt about two degrees and stay there.

He opened his mouth. Nothing useful came out.

"Okay," he said at last. "One question. I need a straight answer. How do you know me?"

Serena looked at the window. The rain had thickened, and the fog beyond it had eaten the far piers. She was quiet so long that he thought she wouldn't answer.

"Because we've met," she said.

"I'd remember."

"You wouldn't." She turned back. "That's the whole problem."

Evan waited.

"When I was fifteen," she said, "I remembered you for the first time. Not your face. Just a feeling, like a room you've walked out of and can't find again. It was the worst year of my life. I kept knowing things I had no way of knowing, and everyone told me I was imagining it, and eventually I believed them."

"And then?"

"And then I stopped imagining it." She said it the way you'd report a late bus. "Two years ago, everything came back. All at once. And it wasn't a feeling anymore."

Evan set his cup down carefully and didn't pick it up again.

"What came back?"

"You," Serena said.

The shop door chimed. A man in a rain cape came in, shook himself off, ordered, left. Neither of them watched him.

"I know your walk," she said. "I know you hum when you're nervous and don't notice. Badly. The same four notes. I know the exact face you make when someone talks down to you, because you made it on that platform and it's the same face. I know you're left-handed and throw everything underhand anyway. I know you."

"You've been watching me for two years."

"I've been remembering you for two years." Her voice cracked at the edge, and she put it back together almost at once. "The watching was to check."

Evan sat with that.

There was a version of this where a person got up and left. He was aware of it. He was also aware that he'd spent his whole life being the one who noticed things, and everything in the last twenty minutes was pointing at one place. If he ran now, he'd spend the rest of his life not knowing.

"Check what?"

"That you were him. That you were the same."

"Same as who?"

She didn't answer.

"Serena. Same as who?"

"The man I remember."

Evan said nothing for a moment.

"And?"

The girl across the table looked at him, at eighteen-year-old Evan Vale in a wet coat in an all-night shop at the wrong end of Halcyon, with a torn slip of paper in his pocket that said DO NOT RE-TEST. She did not look away.

"You are," she said. "Exactly."

Outside, the fog swallowed the streetlight.

"Suppose I believe you," Evan said, very quietly. "Suppose any of this is real. What is it you remember? What happened?"

Serena picked up her tea and drank all of it in one long swallow, like a person stalling. Then she set the cup down.

"Not here," she said. "And not tonight."

"Then when?"

"Tomorrow. There's a place in the old quarter, down on the water. Nobody goes there." She stood. This close, he could see how hard she was working to keep her voice level. "Evan."

"What?"

"Bring the half-page."

His hand was at his pocket before his brain caught up.

"I don't have a half-page," he said.

"You do," Serena said. "You've had it for a week. You've looked at it nine times." She pulled up her hood and turned for the door.

The bell chimed behind her. Through the window he watched her walk out into the fog, and the fog took her.

Evan sat in the empty shop with a cold coffee.

He hadn't shown that slip to anyone. He hadn't told anyone it existed. Nine times, she'd said. He tried to count, and got to seven before he stopped, because he didn't want to find out she was right.

When he finally left, he paused at the door.

Left, left, right.

His hand was already on the frame.

He took it off and stood there on the step in the rain, looking at his own hand like it belonged to someone who'd been watching him for years.