Amanda runs up to me in the halls the next day. She's badly beaten up, which I imagine she likely had no good excuse for. Three people have mentioned the freak accident over near Shady Oaks. We're running out of good excuses. Something twitches at the back of my mind, and I pretend it doesn't bother me. I walk with as much poise as I can away from her, and then I'm reminded of a line of hers.

No running from problems.

I'm not running anymore. That's become the problem.

"Will," she says, gasping. She holds me by the shoulders. "I don't have my Diosite anymore. I woke up in the morning afterwards, and I couldn't find it anywhere-- Will, what happened? Did Ignatius win?"

I take my hand out of my pocket. There, in the center of it, lies a glistening crystal, which is not a single rock but several of them set on top of each other, combined into a singular refractive eye of several shades with a rocky, crystallized rim. She stares at my open palm, then presses her fingers into it. The stone wavers out of reality for a second. "That's yours, isn't it?"

I nod.

"What did you do?" she asks.

"I made a deal with Shiloh," I reply. "Don't worry about it."

Her face tenses. "Do Karen and Garrett--"
I shrug. "You guys were right about me. I couldn't stand up to Shiloh. I didn't have the guts it took to finish Ignatius off. I couldn't do anything with the powers I had, and as a result, the whole team suffered. You guys could have died. You almost did, if Shiloh hadn't healed you. He said... well, I guess we kind of... came to..." It's so hard to talk under the sweltering heat of her gaze. I think she honestly might be worse to fess up to than Shiloh was to talk down. "We made a deal."

"You cut me out?" she asks.

"He possessed you that night," I say. "It's-- it's not fair for all of you to have to deal with this. It was hurting you. Now it'll only hurt me."
"What if he--"

"Ignatius won't get through," I promise her. "It doesn't matter when he calls. The middle of the night. The morning. Shiloh will wake me up. Whenever he moves, I'll be there to aggress him. One of these days, I'll pin him down, and when we do... you thought better options didn't exist. You all did. Well, they do, and it's all about what you're willing to give up."

"This isn't going to work," Amanda says. "What did Shiloh tell you?"

"It's about what I told him I wanted," I respond. "He just made it happen."

---

The first night that the treants come, what surprises me most is how alone I am. I hadn't realized the way we, as a team, bled into each other. Maybe I was always under the assumption Karen and Garrett hated me too much to really be working with me. Maybe I was too scared to notice. Doing things alone, though, is instantly different from any kind of team activity. I can feel the cold night air around me, biting at my neck, and as I walk through the early spring, Shiloh's eyes darting around out of mine, I lift my shield for light. It generates an intense aura now, a rainbow of colors around the edge, and it's not my power, not quite, but I'm working out how to wield it, one step at a time. Shiloh's there to fall back on.

I don't want to fall back on him.

I'll admit that running across the woods, high off adrenaline with the moon at my back, is everything I never knew I wanted. Somewhere way out in the woods, all the shackles of what is expected of me fall apart, and I become someone outside myself, past myself, hidden behind Luna. As a stranger, I sneak between trees as a moonbeam and emerge onto the bank as the rage of the entire world, of thousands of people the moon has seen below. Though it is cold from its vantage point, and though it can never hope to meet those down in the fold of its valleys, sleeping under its life, they can rest knowing they are safe where they stay.

I don't feel like a hero. I feel like a young god.

As soon as the loneliness gets strong enough to sadden me, I catch company down near the banks. My shield goes through a treant, cleaving it in two. The treeflesh around its deerlike head burns where I made the indent. I raise a hand and the shield returns me, only to cut open its neck. I flip some switches on the back of the shield, small modifications I've made for ease of use, and the next treant erupts from the inside with ice. I test out every color Amanda's lent me, watching the treants erupt into energy around me, and try and fail to suppress a cry of triumph.

"Guess who's useless now?" I ask the world. "Guess who's running? I'm not. I'm never running again! Come on, give me your bullshit. Give me your issues. I'm taking the whole world on my shoulders and then some. What do I have to do?"

The corpses of trees are teeth, already dulling to molars and fading to lumps of magicless sediment on the ground, collapsed atop themselves. The river is a tongue that cuts through the land but can not rise to make noise. The land can't answer me.

"What am I doing?"

No answer, still. I should get out of the habit of talking to myself before it becomes a problem.

How long do we have before the echo of their powers fades? I ask Shiloh.

Two weeks.

I chase him for hours, but even with Diosite tracking, I can't find Ignatius. Shiloh wants me to go home before I do. The adrenaline does not ebb off when I hit the bed, so even at three in the morning, I end up staring despondently across the room, towards my brother. He doesn't sleep up here very often, anymore, and I'm just glad someone's there to greet me home, even if I'd be distressed if he were awake.

He's a mess. It's hard to believe that the pair of us are the same thing, that we came out of one body, long ago, that there's any equivalency of all. I am overwhelmed by light that I stole off of other people, like the moon steals the sunlight. He's a black hole, the place where a star used to be. Besides being two patterns in the abyss of space, two indentations of gravity in the nothingness, we have no way to understand each other.

----

I hadn't expected Karen to come to my school, but when I leave out the side door, she's standing there like a gargoyle, stone-still and ready to free herself from the prison of rock and pounce upon an unsuspecting passersby at any moment. I'm unsuspecting enough, and I make the mistake of not taking the extra second to run. No. Not a mistake. Good, deliberate decision. I force myself to stand up a little straighter in her presence and ask, "Talked to the police?"

Karen shrugs. "You know what they don't believe."

I fold my arms, imitating her stance. "Might have something to do with the fact that all the evidence has been burned. They came in and saw an arson case. I've been reading up on it."

"Walk with me."
I don't refuse. I follow her down towards suburbia, out onto one of the bike paths in the vicinity of our school, and out to a small road that runs alongside the open forests for miles. We could hightail it out of town on here, or at least reach the places I've been patrolling by night.

"Is Garrett okay?" I ask.

"Yes."

"You guys healed?"

"Oh yeah."
"Does it hurt?"
"I miss it."
"Okay."

"Yeah."

We stand in silence for a minute.

"Amanda says you're still in it," she asks.

"Yep," I say.

"Well, it's obvious. You look like shit," she says. "When was the last time you slept?"

"Last night, two hours. Yesterday, three in class, four more at home. Day before that... no, didn't sleep that time. Hm. It's actually not the missions, not all the way. Usually, it's just so much energy that I can't really get to sleep after." I shrug. "It's fine." Doesn't entirely sound like my voice, but that is doubly fine. "It's under control now. I fixed everything."
"You're doing all this alone? For how long, Will."
"Until it's over," I say. "I work better alone, anyways. Maybe that was a bad call in the first place. I thought I needed friends, or people to help me, and I just... don't. You know? Just don't. I deserve to-- I mean-- yeah, no, I deserve to be alone."

"What the hell." Karen states, incredulous.

I decide to imitate her nonchalant shrug, too. I'm probably going to pass out or throw up, but I think that might just be from being interrogated. People are stressing me out these days. "It's okay, Karen."

"Will--"

I slap her hand away from my shoulder. She sees a wild animal. I see a wild animal, just... a different one. A predator of some kind. Maybe a wolf? I wish I was cool enough to be a wolf. I've never really had wolf vibes, but, "Please just let me be, Karen."

"Look at what Shiloh's doing to you," she says. "I knew we weren't the good guys."

"I don't think that matters. It's not about how good we are. We either do the right thing, or we just don't." She's at last beginning to realize she won't get through to me, which I think is a good thing. "That all?"

"We weren't friends, were we?"

"I wanted to be," I say, "So badly. I wanted people... so badly. Then I realized I wanted... I wanted to be needed, to, as well as liked. But I can't do that anywhere else. I've never been great at anything." If I cry she's proven right, and I can't give her an opening, so I don't. I stand there, stock still, cherub still, becoming a gargoyle. Something mechanic, or natural, something other than human, driven to complete a function and nothing else. At least I might be good at something for once. "If I can't be a superhero, martyr's... not a bad second option, right?" I realize how bad that must sound. "Please leave me alone, Karen. Let me do this."

"Will--"
She's not stronger than me. I have all the energy. All the power. There's a portal not far from here. If I run, I can get to it. I back up, at first slowly, and then I sprint for it.

"Will!"

That's not what I answer to. I vault over the fence, into the Veins, and just stay there, waiting for the next alert. It's been a few hours. Any second, I'll be needed again.

----

Six hours.

Sometimes five.

I see him occasionally. I get close. He disappears. He is running for his life. I am Artemis. He is the stag. She always lands the quarry. I want hunting dogs. I want maidens. I want to not be hunting alone. I stand up every beast in the entire region. I draw him away from people he could hurt. He draws closer to civilization when he thinks it'll bother me. Draws back when he almost gets shot, once. I think I almost had him this time, but getting shot doesn't bother him. Not enough human left. I wonder how much human he thinks I have in me.

I'm all person, right?

All person.

I think this is getting to me.

I keep winding the long circles around him, like a bee.

He's waiting for me to give up.

That's how I know I'm human. That's why humans evolved in the first place. It was the stamina. We would hunt wild animals for longer than anyone else. Animals would live knowing there was something in the woods that would come after them that would not stop, would not tire.

I am the thing after that. I chase humans and never tire even though I haven't slept.

---

At Sally's house, I look at myself in the bathroom mirror for ten minutes. My eyes are rimmed with heavy, dark circles, and this is definitely a hallucination, but I think they glitter a little when the light hits them the right way. I feel like there's a rock on top of my lungs, obstructing my breathing. Amanda's powers are getting harder to use. I need Garrett's, but I've only been using them to move myself around, and that's about all I can do. Karen's fizzled out after our conversation. I keep moving further away from all of them, and as I do, those powers... they're going to decline, too. I roll my Diosite over in my hands. I know I can't mess this up. I had to cut all of them out for a reason. People only hurt you or disappoint you or you hurt them and disappoint them and I was definitely doing the latter and maybe it hurt me, too, and I know I'm sensitive, but getting better is so, so hard, and it's easier to just take this when it's offered to me.

I took it. What was I supposed to do? Was there a right decision?

No, it wasn't offered, I mean, I did this of my own command--

I splash water on my face.

I don't really want to go back outside.

We've circled back around to the webcomic again, but Amanda doesn't want to talk about it and we're basically just doing it because Megan made the script, like she promised. It's a great script. Megan Briggs made it! Of course it's great! Like everything else she's ever done, it's a miracle, the kind that makes you want to cry.

I sit a little further away from the other girls.

"Will, you've got a little something, there," one of the girls says of my eyes.

"It's fine," I say.

"Have you been sleeping?"

"No," says Amanda.

"We'll force you to sleep," insists Rebekka. "We're having a sleepover. You should come. The two hours of sleepover-sleep might be more than your usual hours."

"Can't," I say. "I've got a project due the next day."

Old excuse from sixth grade, when I started avoiding things. Feels good to dust that one off.

---

I have not slept in so long. I can't go back to sleep. I don't know when I'll be interrupted and the thought keeps me awake. I'm barely scraping by in school at this point. Evan and I need to present our little project on Monday and we have not started it, still, and it is Thursday. We have had a whole month of on-and-off classtime around our study of the next book. It's a third of our grade next quarter. He stares off into the distance. I stare off into the distance. I pass him little sheets of paper from my brother. He looks at them appreciatively and tucks them away. It's a great working relationship.

He scribbles something on a paper today and passes it back. Your brother looks like garbage. Take better care of him.

I scowl at Evan. "My brother is not my keeper."

He leers at me. "If you have the ability to take care of yourself, you should do that. Otherwise, get people to hold you accountable."

"Oh yeah? You're the one boxing people out."

"Yeah?" Evan says. He's twitching again. We look like dogs in an underground fight ring. Scrappy, foaming at the mouth, just looking for something to punch. "Yeah. Sure. Whatever."

I feel the tense sensation of a door slamming in my face.

Even then, he slips me a small piece of paper after class. All that's on it is an address, which only raises more questions. "Get this to Adam, okay?"

---

"That's why you spread it out," I tell Shiloh one night, after a mission. Long cuts lace my arms, which he is healing. I am so far past crying that I can't even form the tears to stain my cheeks. "That's why you spread it out through all those people. It's so heavy. Feels like the weight of the world on my shoulders. It hurts."

"Why did you do it?" he asks.

"I didn't want you to hurt anyone else."

"Do I hurt you?"

"I'm being selfish," I say. "Maybe I just didn't want to give this up."

"They would have made you give it up?"

"What am I going to do when it's over?" I ask.

Shiloh stares at me. "I don't know."

"I miss the team," I say. "That was the best part, and it's over."

"They miss you," he says. "I can feel it from here."

"You're still lying," I laugh. "Stop."

He shakes his head. "I can sense their fear from here."

----

Amanda sits next to me at lunch, still.

"Are you doing okay?" she asks, under her breath. I can hear her practically whispering in my ear. "I thought I caught a glimpse of you last night. I took my mom's car out and drove it with her license out to the park. Had a lighter on me. Was prepared to burn the forest down."

"Don't do that. It's not safe."

"Bitch."

I laugh, but it comes out wrong.

"If you die, I'm never going to forgive myself. If everyone dies, I'm never going to forgive myself," she says.

"You won't have to. You'll be dead," I say. When Amanda glares at me, I add, "I got it."

"That isn't your call to make."

"I'm safer than any of you. More easily controlled. We, as a group, are a liability. I, as an individual, am a weapon."

Amanda stares at me blankly. "What the hell?" she says.

I don't say anything. I don't think I can respond to anger. I settle back against her. "I miss you."

Few days, maybe. Maybe longer? Either way, I don't think everyone else is going to suffer for it. Shiloh and I made a deal.

He'll stick to it.