Kyle's friends dragged him out through the side door still muttering, still confused about a fight he didn't remember losing, and the party swallowed the gap he left behind in about four seconds. That was the part that always got me. Not the violence. Not even the power. The forgetting. A room full of witnesses, and by the time the bass dropped back in, half of them were already telling each other a version of the story that made more sense than what actually happened.
I liked that about people. I liked it more than I probably should have.
"You're staring again," Emma said, bumping my shoulder with hers.
"Just thinking."
"About Kyle?"
"About how fast everyone stopped caring about Kyle."
She laughed, but it came out thinner than usual, still riding the tail end of an adrenaline spike. "Honestly? Same. I thought I'd feel worse. I think I'm just glad it's over."
It's not over. It's the first time you've seen me do it on purpose, in public, to someone who wasn't a stranger. I kept that thought where it belonged, behind my teeth, and put my arm loosely around her shoulders instead — not a claim, just a steadying weight, the kind you'd offer a friend who'd had a rough ten minutes.
"You did good tonight," I told her instead. "You didn't let him run the room."
"I had help."
"Barely."
She smiled up at me in the dark, and for a second I let myself just be fourteen and warm and a little drunk on secondhand adrenaline, the way any of the other kids in that basement were. It was a good costume. I wore it well.
The rest of the party wound down around us in the way parties do once something real has happened in them — the music kept going, but nobody's heart was fully back in it. Jake, the buzz-cut guy from Emma's grade, tried to restart a dance circle near the speakers and got maybe four people to join him before it fizzled. Ava, whose birthday it technically was, kept glancing toward the door Kyle had gone out of like she expected him to come back through it with reinforcements, and every time she did, three or four other people's eyes followed hers, the whole room running on the same nervous energy for a good twenty minutes after the fact.
A girl I didn't recognize — one of Ava's art-class crowd, judging by the paint still under her nails — sidled up at one point and asked, in the careful, thrilled whisper reserved for gossip too good to say at normal volume, whether it was true I'd "knocked him out with one hit." I told her I'd gotten lucky. She didn't believe me, and I watched the story leave her mouth and travel two more clusters of people across the basement before I lost track of it, gaining detail with every retelling the way stories always do at parties like this one — by the time it reached the stairs it had apparently involved a broken nose. I let it grow. A story people embellished themselves was a story nobody would ever think to question the mechanics of.
I didn't stay much longer. I walked Emma two blocks toward her street before we split off, and at her corner she stopped, hesitated in a way that told me she was deciding whether to say something, and then didn't.
"Text me when you're home," she said instead.
"Always do."
"Damian." She caught my sleeve before I could turn away, and for a second her face did something complicated — gratitude and confusion fighting for the same real estate. "That thing with Kyle. At the end. What actually happened?"
I'd had the answer ready before she asked it, because I'd known the question was coming from the second I saw her face after the crowd gasped. "I got lucky with the angle. He was already off balance from the first punch. People remember it looking cooler than it was."
She studied me a beat longer than felt entirely comfortable, then nodded, slow, like she was choosing to believe me because the alternative required more energy than she had left tonight. "Okay. Weird night."
"Weird night," I agreed, and watched her go, hands in my pockets, and let the smile drop off my face the second she turned the corner.
Somnus, I thought, apropos of nothing, and then wondered where that word had even come from. Something I'd read once. God of sleep. It sat strangely well next to Sleep, the word I'd used on Kyle — one syllable, and a grown man's fight left his body like someone had cut the string holding him up.
That was the part I hadn't told Emma. It wasn't the first time I'd used the word "sleep" as a command. It was the first time I'd used it on someone who might, eventually, in some roundabout way I hadn't fully worked out yet, be able to trace it back to me. Every homeless man I'd ever hypnotized was a ghost by design — no name, no file, no one who'd notice if the story didn't add up. Kyle had a name. Kyle had friends who saw it happen. Kyle would wake up tomorrow with a headache and absolutely no memory of losing a fight he was clearly winning up until the exact second he wasn't, and somewhere in the back of his skull that gap would sit wrong for the rest of his life, an itch he'd never be able to scratch.
I told myself it didn't matter. No one traces a gap in memory back to hypnosis. Hypnosis isn't real, as far as any of them are concerned — it's a party trick from an infomercial, a guy on a stage with a pocket watch. Nobody at that party was going to lie awake tonight thinking the new kid did something to my brain. They were going to think Kyle drank too much and made a scene, same as always, and move on with their lives.
Still. I'd crossed a line tonight, and I knew it the way you know you've stepped off a curb before you feel the drop. Not because it was wrong — I'd stopped organizing my life around wrong somewhere around the second homeless man — but because it was careless. I'd done it for an audience. I'd done it because it felt good to be looked at like that, like something out of a story, and that want was new, and it scared me a little more than the killing ever had.
I have got to be more careful about what I let myself enjoy.
I got home a little past one. My mom had left the porch light on, which meant she'd waited up longer than she wanted to admit, and I made a mental note to text her earlier next time — not out of guilt, exactly, just upkeep. You don't let the machinery that keeps your cover intact get squeaky from neglect. I let myself in quietly, locked the door behind me, and stood a moment in the dark living room listening to the small, ordinary sounds of a house asleep — the fridge cycling on, my dad's faint snore through the bedroom wall — and felt, not for the first time, the strange vertigo of coming home from a night like that one into a life still built entirely around bedtimes and porch lights.
My room was exactly as I'd left it: laptop closed on the desk, the outline of my jester costume folded in its bag at the back of my closet where my mom had long since stopped asking questions about, the two bracelets on my wrist catching the streetlight through the blinds when I flexed my hand. I stripped down to shorts, dropped onto my bed, and pulled my laptop onto my stomach out of habit more than intention.
The dark web loaded slow at this hour — everyone's traffic funneling through the same tired relays — but it loaded. I checked the fight club's account first. Comments, mostly. A few new subscribers to the "notify me" list for Friday. Someone asking, in the specific unhinged register of a person who has clearly never had a normal thought in their life, whether I'd ever consider "an all-female bracket." I closed that tab without answering it, filed it under maybe, later, if the money's right.
Then I checked the message I'd sent two weeks ago into a listing I'd almost forgotten about.
[Masquerade Party. PM for invite and prices.]
I hadn't heard anything back. I'd assumed, somewhere around week two of silence, that it had been a dead post, one of a thousand things on the dark web that existed for a day and then rotted quietly under newer content. I was already scrolling past it when the unread marker caught my eye.
One new message.
My pulse did something embarrassing — a full-body flicker, the kind I hadn't felt since the bakery, since the very first time I'd confirmed the power was real and not a dream. I sat up straighter and opened it.
[Invitation confirmed. A car will not be provided — arrive by your own means. Formalwear and mask mandatory; no exceptions, no substitutions accepted at the door. Location and time to follow 48 hours prior. This is not the kind of gathering you discuss afterward. We look forward to meeting you, Jester.]
I read it twice.
We look forward to meeting you, Jester.
Not "the applicant." Not a generic form-letter greeting. My name — my real name, the one that mattered, the one stitched into a purple-and-black suit hanging in my closet fifteen feet from where I was sitting. Someone on the other end of that message already knew who'd sent the original post. Someone had done homework.
That should have scared me. Some detached, thirty-one-year-old part of my brain — the part that used to read the news and shake its head at people who walked into obviously bad situations — was telling me, quite reasonably, that an invitation-only masquerade that already knew my dark-web handle before I'd shown up was either a trap, a vetting process, or both, and that showing up unarmed and unprepared would be a phenomenally stupid way to end a second chance at life.
That same detached part of my brain also pointed out, unhelpfully, that a man capable of ending eighteen lives with a snap of his fingers had never once needed to send anyone an invitation to anything. Whoever was hosting this had gone to the trouble of a door, a guest list, a courtesy reply two days later. People who could simply take what they wanted rarely bothered being polite about the asking. That, more than anything else, was what finally tipped me from curious to certain.
The rest of me wanted to go so badly I could taste it.
Because here was the thing nobody tells you about being fourteen with the mind of a man twice that age and a power no one else on Earth seemed to carry: it gets lonely at the top of a very small mountain. Homeless men didn't push back. Teachers didn't push back. Doug and his men didn't push back, not anymore, not since I'd rewritten the parts of them that might have. Even Kyle, tonight, had folded the second I actually decided he should. Nobody in my entire second life had ever made me feel like I was standing across from someone I couldn't simply decide my way through.
Somewhere out there — in a video I still hadn't been able to stop thinking about, a man in a suit who ended eighteen lives with a snap of two fingers and walked two more out over his shoulder — there were people who might.
I wanted to meet them. God help me, I wanted it the way I used to want a promotion in my old life, except promotions never made my hands shake.
I typed back a single line, deleted it, typed it again.
[I'll be there.]
I sent it before I could talk myself into anything more careful, closed the laptop, and lay back against my pillow with my heart still going harder than it should have for a boy who'd just decided to walk toward the one thing in this world that might finally be able to say no to him.
Sleep, when it came, brought the dream again. The throne. The mountain that wasn't rock. The strings running from my fingers down into a crowd of familiar faces. This time, though, I didn't wake up shaking. I woke up almost disappointed it had ended, and lay there a long moment in the dark, turning that fact over like a stone I wasn't sure I wanted to look under.
Youth is something, I'd told myself once, half-joking, walking home from Alessia's rejection.
I wasn't sure that word applied to whatever this was anymore.