Chapter 32 : Nux and Capable
The mirror shard was barely six centimeters wide, but Nux stared into it like it contained everything he'd lost.
I found him in the barracks at midnight, guided by a pulse of distress through the Network that had pulled me from fitful sleep. He sat on his bunk with the mirror fragment clutched in one hand and a wet rag in the other, scrubbing at his lips hard enough to draw blood.
The chrome wouldn't come off.
War Boys were chromed before every battle—silver spray paint across their mouths, the metallic taste of devotion coating their tongues. It was ritual. It was blessing. It was the promise of Valhalla, shiny and eternal.
Nux had worn chrome a hundred times. The residue had worked its way into the skin around his lips, staining it permanently silver-gray. No amount of scrubbing would remove it.
"I can't get it off," he whispered. "I keep trying and it won't—"
"Stop." Capable's voice came from the doorway. She crossed to him with the quiet confidence of someone who had spent years learning to move without being noticed, and gently took the rag from his hand. "You're hurting yourself."
"I don't want to see it anymore."
"Why?"
The question was simple, but Nux's face crumpled like paper in rain. Through the Network, I felt his emotions surging—shame, grief, confusion, all tangled together in a knot that had no beginning or end.
"Because every time I look, I see who I was." His voice cracked. "I see the War Boy who would have killed you. Who wanted to kill you. Who thought dying in Joe's service was the only thing that mattered."
Capable sat beside him on the bunk. Her hands found his—rough, calloused, still trembling from the scrubbing—and held them still.
"Tell me about the first time," she said.
"What?"
"The first time they chromed you. Tell me what it was like."
I should have left. This was private—a moment between two people building something fragile and important. But the Network connection held me in place, Nux's emotions bleeding through whether I wanted to receive them or not.
He told her.
Fourteen years old. Standing in a line of War Pups, all of them chosen for their first real raid. The Imperator holding the spray can, moving down the line like a priest dispensing communion.
The cold metal taste on his tongue. The burning in his nostrils. The absolute certainty—not faith, certainty—that he was about to become immortal. That the gates of Valhalla would swing wide for him if he died brave enough, chrome enough, witnessed enough.
The roar of the crowd as the vehicles launched. The ecstasy of belonging to something larger than himself. The terror underneath it all, suppressed so deep he hadn't known it was there until years later.
He was crying now. Capable held his hands while the tears cut tracks through the faded chrome stains on his cheeks.
Through the Network, the memory leaked.
Not deliberately—Nux didn't know how to control the bleedthrough yet, didn't understand that strong emotions pushed harder against the connection's boundaries. His most private moment surged outward, and everyone connected received it simultaneously.
A child's hands being painted silver. The taste of metallic poison. The roar of a crowd. The absolute belief that dying was the only way to matter.
Across the Citadel, I felt Toast flinch. The Dag gasped in her garden quarters. Mors, in the workshop, dropped a tool and pressed his palms against his temples.
Nux felt us react.
"No." His voice went sharp with panic. "No, that wasn't—I didn't mean to—"
He tried to pull away from Capable, but she held his hands tighter.
"What's wrong?"
"They all saw. Everyone connected." Nux's breathing came fast and ragged. "I shared it without meaning to. They're all—they know now—they saw—"
It's okay, I sent through the Network. You didn't do anything wrong.
But the damage was done. Nux's most intimate memory had been broadcast to people he trusted, without his consent, because he hadn't known how to prevent it.
The Network required boundaries. I had always known that intellectually—the emotional bleedthrough had been a concern since the first connections formed. But this was the first time the cost had manifested so clearly.
I went to the barracks.
Teaching Network control took hours.
Nux sat cross-legged on the floor while I walked him through the process—how to wall off private moments, how to feel the connection's pressure and push back against it, how to share deliberately instead of leaking uncontrollably.
"Think of it like a door," I said. "Right now, it's standing open. Everything that comes through—your emotions, your memories, your thoughts—flows out without filtering. You need to learn how to close the door, and then how to open it just wide enough to let through what you want to share."
"How do I close it?"
"Focus on something neutral. Something that doesn't carry emotional weight." I thought about my own techniques—the engineering calculations I ran when the Network's emotional noise got too loud, the deliberate focus on mechanical problems instead of human feelings. "Find an anchor. Something solid in your mind that the emotions can't easily push past."
Nux closed his eyes. Through the connection, I felt him searching—cycling through memories, testing their weight, looking for something stable enough to build on.
He found Capable's hands holding his.
Not the emotional content of the moment—just the physical sensation. The pressure of her fingers. The warmth of her skin. The simple fact of being held.
The bleeding stopped.
His emotional turbulence was still there—grief and shame and confusion, all the weights he carried—but they no longer pushed through the Network's boundaries. He had found an anchor, and he was holding it.
"Good," I said. "Now you need to practice. Every time you feel strong emotions, focus on the anchor. Eventually it becomes automatic."
"What's your anchor?" Nux asked.
I hesitated. My anchor was engineering—the cold logic of physics and mechanics, the reassuring predictability of cause and effect. But that answer felt too clinical, too distant from the human struggle Nux was going through.
"Problems I can solve," I said finally. "When the noise gets too loud, I think about something I can fix. A broken pump. A damaged vehicle. Something concrete."
"That works?"
"Most of the time."
Capable had been waiting outside the barracks, giving Nux space to learn without an audience. When we emerged, she was sitting on a stone bench, watching the stars through a gap in the Citadel's structure.
"Is he okay?" she asked.
"Better." I looked at Nux, who had stopped beside me. "He'll need practice. We all will. The Network is more demanding than I realized."
"Can you—" She hesitated. "Can you feel what I feel? When I'm near him?"
"No. You're not connected."
"Good." Her voice was soft but certain. "Some things should be private. Should only belong to the people experiencing them."
She was right. The Network was power—coordination, shared knowledge, emotional support—but it was also intrusion. Intimacy became violation if the boundaries weren't clear.
"You don't have to share everything with everyone to be known," Capable told Nux. Her hand found his, and he gripped it like a lifeline.
The barracks were quiet. For the first time since Joe's death, no chanting echoed through the War Boy quarters—no chrome prayers, no ritual preparations for battles that would never come. Just a War Boy sleeping in a woman's lap, and the sound of his breathing.
The sound of someone who expected to wake up.
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