“Hey, I’m only seventeen. It’s not that unusual.”
“But you might have, I mean, you knew that…” I trailed off.
“I was born with a shorter fuse than most?” he finished for me evenly.
I nodded.
“So, what—I was supposed to jump out there and grab whatever I could get my hands on while I had the chance? You know I’m discriminating, Mega. On the contrary, it made me want to ensure that every experience I had really counted. That it be the best it could be, or not happen at all. I didn’t want to rack up bad memories, no regrets.”
I understood that. We were so different yet so much the same.
“We’re totally different,” he said, like he was reading my mind, “but so much the same. You were born super everything: super strong and smart, super hearing, smell, eyesight, and super freaking fast. Man, I love that one. I think your speed-demon power is the one I’d want the most. And I was born super…well, not weak but with a flaw in my design. After I died when I was eight years old and discovered what was wrong with me—”
“You were eight when you died?” I’d been eight, too, when I’d pretty much given up the ghost.
He nodded. “Yeah. Dying did the same thing to me all your superpowers did to you. Made me fearless.”
“You do realize a lot of people wouldn’t have taken that lesson away from it. They would have felt more vulnerable and been more careful with themselves.”
“I saw something that day, Mega, during those three and a half minutes, and I know that there’s more after this. I have faith and it’s strong. I’m not afraid. Death is just the door to the next big adventure.”
Yeah, well, that was a door I wasn’t letting open for him for a long, long time. “I used to wonder if you had some secret superpower,” I told him. “I saw you walking down the street one day, and the ZEWs peeled away from you like you were one of Barrons’s dudes or something.”
A dazzling grin lit up his face. “Yeah, they do, don’t they? Talk about perplexing the fuck out of Ryodan,” he said, and laughed. “Should have seen his face the day I was with him, Barrons, and Mac, and the ZEWs gave me the same wide berth they gave him and Barrons. It was priceless. I’ve got the Rhino-boys’ number, and a few other lower castes, too, but I haven’t made progress with the higher castes yet. Got diverted, working on the song.” He reached down and pushed up the cuff of his jeans, revealing a sort of watch strapped around his ankle with a small black cube attached to it, covered with blinking lights. “I got started thinking one night about how the Fae are made of energy and how dogs and invisible fences and silent whistles and things like that work, so I began experimenting with a transmitter, modulating and testing frequencies on the Fae, goal being to repel, not kill. Sometimes we set our sights too high when a lesser goal would be both quicker to attain and virtually as effective. I figured if I could invent something that kept all the Fae away from you, well, I’d be the Shit.”
“You’re already the Shit, Dancer,” I told him.
“Yeah but I want to be even shittier shit,” he said, and waggled his brows at me.
I smiled, forcing myself not to let the sadness I felt show. I couldn’t do that to him. It wouldn’t be fair. “You’re the shittiest shit I know and probably ever will.”
He sobered quickly, looking into my eyes, studying me with unnerving intensity. “Shittier than Ryodan?”
I was instantly wary, defensive. “What do you mean? What does Ryodan have to do with any of what we’re talking about?”
“Don’t be a porcupine, Mega. Not prying or judging. It’s just that sometimes I think he…well, maybe you…the two of you, er—” He broke off, sighed, and shoved a hand into his thick hair, ruffling it. “I’ll never be like him. I’m not wired that way. I’m a brainy, geeky seventeen-year-old with a bad heart. Not much makes me feel insecure but that dude does. He’s everything you are and I’m not.”
I bristled. “Don’t you ever tell me you have a bad heart! Never say those words again. You’ve got the biggest heart in the world. You bring out the best in everyone around you and people love you. But you’re right. You’re not like him and never will be.”
He shifted uncomfortably and went crazy on his hair again, running both hands through it. I let him stew for a moment, trying to absorb this bizarre moment, that he cared about me enough that it made him—the man not even Death rattled—feel insecure. Then I got distracted watching his arms. Now that I knew how perilous working out was for him, I admired even more deeply the patient will that had found a way to work within limits that would have made a lot of other people give up. I’d learned at a young age that every day mattered, that killing time was the worst thing you could do to it. Dancer had learned it, too.