The distribution of power rankings by the Guardian standard is a slightly skewed bell curve. The numbers (determined last in the 2023 superhuman census) in the United States currently stand at the following, rounded to the nearest percentage.
S-rank: 2%
A-rank: 10%
B-rank: 37%
C-rank: 40%
D-rank: 9%
F-rank: 2%
There has been some debate on whether the unlucky few D and F ranks should genuinely be considered as superhuman or instead be classified merely modified; that, however, is not within the scope of this article.
Please note that rankings are holistic; some S-ranks have a grab-bag of lower-rank powers that create a sum greater than their parts, while there exist A- and B-ranks that have an S-rank power with a secondary restriction that prevents them from achieving the peak of the ranking system.
- “Power Classifications, pt. 2,” written by Lakeside Institute and most famously used in the Superhuman 101 textbook
#
Lachlan and Vivian continued walking.
I’m going to show everything except my… organ punching? Limit break? Vivian seriously needed to find a better name for the plausibility-breaking usage of her power. It was her strongest trait, and she was reasonably sure that she’d get bumped up a rank or two if she was willing to explain it, but secrecy felt like the best policy here.
The plan was simple. Get an official ranking here, then use her status as a registered super to create a resume (ugh). There was clearly something brewing with Killjoy’s super-drug, and if Vivian could play a part in resolving that, she might be able to at least be considered for Arina.
Going corporate was morally questionable, but it meant safety. Vivian had done several hours of Googling on the topic shortly after her powers first manifested, so she was basically an expert. Okay, she definitely wasn’t, but she had a good general idea of the benefits.
If she got into Arina, she’d get consistent pay and health benefits. Even if she only did the minimum amount of hero work to keep her job, Arina would keep her on to prevent other corpos or villain groups from poaching her.
Corporations protected their investments. Arina meant security. It meant not having to worry about being sent off to die in a Cataclysm. It meant having a way to pay off the crushing debt of student loans. And, most importantly to her at the moment, they had a deal with the Guardians. Her identity and powerset would be hidden unless she wanted them not to be.
That’s assuming I get in, though, which assumes that I’ll actually be able to take down Killjoy. Fantastic.
“Uh, Earth to… you,” Lachlan said awkwardly, waving a hand in front of Vivian’s eyes. “Shit. Sorry, I, uh—“
“You can call me Vivian,” she said defeatedly. “Any Guardian that cares probably already knows.”
Lachlan grimaced. “I’ll do what I can to keep that from spreading too far.”
Rachel saw it. Vivian didn’t know whether her friend had seen an entry for a new Kinetic in Lafayette or Kinetic Vivian Amelia Li. She needed to ask about that—it was the difference between maybe a couple dozen Guardians knowing her name and a hundred thousand.
Whether or not it had spread far, Lachlan knew. Of course he did. At least he’d tried to respect her identity—well, if you ignored the part where he showed up to her dorm unannounced, of course.
The morning already felt like a lifetime ago.
Vivian realized she was letting the silence drag on too long and tried to correct. “Alternative names people have tried for me include Viv, Vivy, V, and on one occasion, Ian. Try any of those until you find one that feels right for you. Except the last one. Unless you want your nose broken.”
Her humor was forced even to her own ears. Lachlan pretended to find it funny, which she appreciated. If he didn’t look like he’d been pepper sprayed at an insane asylum, I might actually find him attractive. Now there was a scary thought.
“I’d say Vivian’s a pretty name, but that’s a compliment for your parents, not you,” Lachlan joked. “Alright, let’s get a move on. This shouldn’t take too long.”
He opened one final door marked KINETIC TESTING and showed her in.
Seeing the Guardian testing facilities in person was more thrilling than Vivian would ever care to admit. Though not particularly inspiring in scale, the range of esoteric equipment produced and standardized by Zenith—the only Synth of the founding Guardian members—had been plastered on commercials, TV shows, movies, and all other kinds of media that she’d devoured since she was a child.
“I would’ve killed to be here as a twelve-year-old,” she murmured.
“Not anymore?” Lachlan asked. He considered things. “Fair enough.”
“I’ll tolerate it,” she said. “No pictures, I assume?”
“Nah, pictures are fine. During open hours, we actually take our tours through this facility. This one is the third most popular, just behind the Marksmen and Brawlers. You don’t want to see the Esper room. Seriously.”
Vivian snorted. If it was the same room they used as stock footage on the news, the “Esper testing facility” was an empty concrete room with a table and a helmet. Anything was better than that.
“Alright, hit me,” Vivian said. “Is it like they show in the movies?”
“Honestly, kind of. The main difference in real life is that we have to send the footage of the tests off to a third-party AI. It takes a couple of hours to get final results, though the eyeball we give is usually pretty accurate. Doesn’t make for great TV.”
“Actually, I was watching The Maker a couple days ago, and they had a plotline about that,” Vivian recalled. “It’s a newer show. The test wasn’t super thorough and the AI threw a shit-fit. Accidentally tossed the guy in D instead of S.”
“Huh. I haven’t watched live-action television in a bit. Looks like they’re catching up to the times.” Lachlan grinned. Given the current state of his face, he looked like he was about to offer Vivian a hit. “They’re also right on there being different levels of exactness, which means that there’s some variance in projected ranking versus practical ranking, though the AI has never fucked up that bad. The worst discrepancy has been, like, two ranks, and that test was done awfully.”
“Let’s just do the fastest test,” Vivian said. “I think I know what it’s going to be already, and I don’t want to take too much time.”
“Let me get it started,” Lachlan said. “If we were doing this properly, we’d have lab techs up our asses analyzing every little facet of your power and every inch of you.”
Vivian made a sound. “Ew.”
“Thankfully, it’s just us, so—“ Lachlan walked over to a wall and pressed a button. Machinery started whirring. “Here we go!”
From there, it turned out that the amalgamation of documentaries she’d watched on the topic were actually somewhat accurate—though they did skip over several vital steps.
A soft, synthesized voice guided her through the whole process. They began by putting Vivian’s hand into a scanner and giving the machine a single biological sample from her body—she chose a tear, which she couldn’t induce emotionally but could by blinking a lot. According to the machine, this step would allow it do so some magical Synth stuff to identify what medium her power worked with best.
“This step isn’t always a hundred percent accurate, especially on speed mode,” Lachlan added while the machine buzzed and hummed, processing her superhuman DNA. “You see diminishing returns the longer you do it, though, and I think you’d rather not wait weeks to get registered.”
He sounded like he’d given this explanation a couple of times before, and Vivian couldn’t help but wonder who would need it. Wasn’t he new here? Had he just been practicing? Why?
“Medium identified: universal. Confidence: ninety-six point four percent. Medium identified: vectors. Confidence: sixty-three point one percent.”
Vectors? She’d seen a fictional character have total control over those before, but she was pretty sure that didn’t apply to her powers. Maybe not yet, then? Lachlan didn’t look terribly surprised, at least.
After that was a simple mass control test. A steel ball materialized within a glass chamber, and the machine instructed her to keep it aloft for as long as possible. As soon as she started holding it, it started to fight her, pushing down harder and harder. Zenith’s testing machine explained that it was increasing its internal gravity to determine at what point Vivian’s power would fail.
Apparently, at just around five times Earth’s gravity, she could no longer lift a one-kilogram ball with purely her power.
From there, there were a bevy of tests that each took less than a minute. A fine control one involving water, then one with sand. Then after that, a precision one where she had to guide a marble through increasingly tight gaps in a metal sheet. Then more tests. At first, the novelty was exciting enough to keep Vivian engaged and her mind off more sensitive topics, but playing trained monkey got old pretty fast.
All told, it took about twenty minutes to finish every test.
“This is the rapid test, so your new registration’s already ready for upload,” Lachlan said. “Want to see it before we okay it?”
Vivian nodded. Apparently, she didn’t do so with enough gravitas, because the other super elbowed her lightly.
“C’mon!” he said. “Lighten up a little! You get to know where you rank! Isn’t that cool?”
“Maybe for you,” she said, cracking a smile. “You knew you were going to be high up there.”
“Fair point.”
“Not even going to try to say I could be up there?”
“I don’t like lying on principle.”
The two of them stared at each other for a moment, then doubled over laughing. It wasn’t even that funny of a joke, but it had been a long, painful day. Vivian would take her wins where she could get them.
When they were done, Lachlan fiddled around with another set of controls and the machine spat a paper out at him. At the same time, it spoke.
“Subject: Unregistered Lafayette Kinetic.
Power: F. Can lift objects of up to 5 kilograms. Can be useful with objects of 3 kg or fewer. Power force estimated at 50 newtons.
Speed: F. No enhanced reactions. Microscopic delay between activation intent and activation actualization.
Range: D. 10-15 feet. Control applies across the entire radius, but subject does not have enhanced senses. Subject’s power usage was significantly less precise when aimed in a direction she could not see.
Fine control: C. Is capable of controlling liquid and sand; could not sort out the individual droplets or grains. Has passable precision.
Versatility: B. Though plausibility-limited by organics, subject can control all other class of object. Relatively low ranking has been selected due to inability to actually move many such classes of object.
Full list of rankings available in comprehensive report.
Verdict: Unregistered Lafayette Kinetic is almost but not entirely useless. In most situations, a trained normal with a gun would do the same thing with higher range. Though powerful enough to warrant being considered beyond an aesthetic level, she does not demonstrate the raw power necessary for a higher ranking.
Note: I would like to see a full display of her abilities. This report grades what was displayed, not the entirety of the aforementioned superhuman. This note will not be present in the report.
Overall rank: D-.”
D minus. That… hurt. More than she’d expected it to.
I should be happy that it wasn’t F, she told herself. Wasn’t that what I was expecting? The lowest of the low. This is without my plausibility-breaking aspect, too, so my actual rank is definitely higher.
Logically, rationally, she knew all that. But somewhere deep down, there was a part of her that had still hoped against hope that she was special, that there was some aspect to her power that she just hadn’t realized yet. That she would be someone important.
Vivian knew this was a decent ranking for her power in her head, but not in her heart, and that stung.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
“Unlucky,” Lachlan sympathized. “Hey, your fine control and versatility’s really good, though! Maybe if you could get a second vial? That’d juice you right up. Hopefully.”
She shrugged. “That’s, what, a ninth of supers? It’s not impossible, but…”
“You could always steal someone else’s.”
“Sure, sure. I too have a death wish.”
“I’m not joking. A ton of vials go undiscovered, and even more go unused. The risk of complications for ingesting your first vial are near zero, but that number increases exponentially per vial. There’re more stockpiles than you’d think.”
“Should you be telling me this?” He looked one hundred serious, which Vivian couldn’t help but be nervous about. Today had been fraught with learning more about being a super than she wanted, but this information was… it was useful. “That sounds like information that desperate supers shouldn’t have.”
“Are you desperate?” Lachlan’s expression softened. “Look, Viv, you stopped me from shooting an innocent—“
“I feel like you’re missing that the innocent was going to be me, that’s just self-preservation—“
“—you stopped me from shooting an innocent, and you shook me out of Ephialtes’ power when you took her down, and you stopped Killjoy’s gas attack from going off, plus you went along with the crazy bullshit I dragged you on and still got punished for it. If I didn’t hand you some mildly classified info, I’d be the biggest asshole on the planet.”
Huh. When he put it like that, it did sound like Vivian had contributed more than she actually had. Well, if he wanted to give her information, she’d take it.
“I, uh, thanks,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know who I’d take it from, but if I get the chance—“
“Killjoy,” Lachlan said immediately. “Can we take this somewhere else? The walls have ears here.”
Vivian knew she should just go home now and rest, but that one word piqued her interest enough that she would never forgive herself if she left this stone unturned. My therapist would be unhappy with me right now.
“Please,” she said. “Tell me more.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
#
For the second time today, Vivian found herself alone in her dorm with an Esper.
“Your roommate really doesn’t show up often, does she?” Lachlan asked.
In response, Vivian showed him her phone.
Sarah: Going out for a few, be back by next monday but hopefully earlier
Sarah: Not sure when this’ll be over so just be ready
“She sent this on Thursday,” she said. “Sarah’s actually got her life together. She goes camping with friends a bunch.”
Why am I telling him this? It was too easy to talk to Lachlan. Vivian wasn’t terribly attached to Sarah, but she liked her well enough. If Lachlan turned against her, would Sarah be hurt in the crossfire? She didn’t want anyone else to hurt because of her unless she wanted them to.
“Ah, gotcha,” Lachlan said after too long of a pause. Vivian suspected he had something more he wanted to say, but he was holding himself back. That made her nervous, and being nervous meant being anxious, and that meant pain. Ugh. “Well, I think we can be reasonably confident that there’s nobody listening in here.”
That was an understatement. Lachlan had changed his entire outfit, checked it for surveillance of any kind (there was none), used his power to determine if any Espers were listening in (they weren’t), and on top of it all, he spent ten minutes checking every nook and cranny of Vivian’s dorm for potential spy cameras or microphones (he didn’t find any, though he did find certain objects that Vivian would much rather he not have seen).
“Alright, lay it on me,” Vivian said, plopping onto her bed.
Lachlan sat down on her shitty dorm chair that she hadn’t gotten around to replacing yet. “So you know how I told you about my power being good at finding supers?”
“You did.”
“Yeah, so that’s not the only part of it that the Guardians wanted me for. The more important part is that in a limited radius, I can find vials.”
Vivian whistled.
“You don’t seem very surprised. That’s a national secret you just learned. You could at least react.”
“Lachlan, since I woke up this morning, I have had my identity exposed not once but twice, watched you shoot at villains, watched you shoot at me, made enemies out of the only dangerous villain in town, and had my mind toyed with by a super from the city. All of this, mind you, on my first day. I am entirely out of fucks to give.”
“Well—okay, but—yeah, never mind, that’s completely fair.”
“So you got sent to this waste of a city to find vials?” Vivian prompted.
“Not exactly,” Lachlan said. “They’re keeping me here while they have other people search for a second compatible vial to give me. It’s the highest-risk town they’d let me choose.”
“Highest risk? You’re looking for trouble?”
“I get restless.”
“Got it.”
They stood there for a few seconds in silence that might have been understanding at first but gradually grew awkward before Lachlan continued.
“Anyway. Sometime last week, I detected what we think is the activation of a vial. A couple minutes later, I felt Killjoy’s signature pop.”
“His whole thing is drugs, right?” Vivian said. “You think he was playing around with the vial?”
Vial as a term referred to the chunks of intelligent alien flesh that granted people like her and Lachlan powers. Days after crash-landing and dying, the Pacific alien’s body had deteriorated. Since then, pieces of it appeared to roughly 0.09 percent of the population. The exact reason and rhyme of how, when, and why they appeared to people was a field of study handled by people far more intelligent than Vivian, of course, but she’d had some experience of her own.
“Almost certainly,” Lachlan said. “You getting some ideas? That looks like a plotting face.”
The name of the alien fragments, every aspiring super learned, emerged from the fact that every last one of them presented themselves to their potential wielders in nigh-indestructible vials made of a glass compound that didn’t exist on Earth until a Synth figured out how to make it in 1997.
According to Lachlan, Killjoy had one of them in his possession.
“I can see it,” Vivian said, thinking out loud. “Ephialtes’ power went past the touch range she’s supposed to have at the bank. Do you think she took the vial?”
Lachlan shook his head. “If I focus my entire power for a few hours, I can spot glimpses of the vial. It’s still there. If I had to guess, I’d say Killjoy’s trying to make his own.”
“That’s not going to end well.”
“Nope.”
Replicating powers had its own article on the SRU wiki and Wikipedia alike. The first link on both pages was List of failed power replication experiments, which consisted of roughly five hundred entries you could sort by name, date, location, or casualty count.
“I think I should steal it before he gets a lot of people killed.” More importantly, a vial would be a way to improve her position. Even if it turned out not to be compatible with her power, which was likely, she’d be able to leverage it for a position at Arina. She was sure of it.
“Really?” Lachlan’s expression brightened.
“Really.”
“Hell yeah!” He seemed eager to elaborate, but his face fell moments after. “I’m not going to be able to join you.”
That didn’t particularly surprise her. “Right. You’re an asset.”
“They’re flying in a Synth from NYC to put a tracker in my bloodstream tonight, actually,” he sighed. “This is probably the last day I have outside the facility without an escort.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t expected the situation to be that harsh, but it made sense. If he could find ways to amplify hero powers consistently, Lachlan was entirely too valuable in a support role to risk losing in a random event—say, a bank robbery gone wrong. “Is there anything you’d like to do?”
“Well, now that you ask, there is.” Lachlan’s eyes glinted with evil intent. “We’re going shopping.”
#
“See, you know one difference between you and me?” Lachlan asked, enthusiastically riffling through the women’s clothing section at the high-end reseller downtown. Vivian hadn’t even known this place existed.
“You signed up with a bunch of mind-controlling freaks, and I didn’t?” she asked bitterly.
“I had morals, and then they showed me enough money to drag my entire family tree out of poverty in one hand and a gun in the other. I think you can guess which I picked.”
Vivian sighed. His story was all too believable. To be honest, she was surprised that the Guardians hadn’t simply chosen to use a Washer to force him over to their side. Maybe there weren’t any that could hold an A-rank Esper down in the long term. The same couldn’t be said for her.
“I accept your apology,” she said dryly. “So are you going to explain why you’re looking for women’s clothing? Wouldn’t have pegged you as the type to crossdress.”
“They’re not for me,” Lachlan replied, diving into a rack of pants and coming out with two pairs apparently selected at random. “They’re for you.”
“At least ask me out to dinner first.”
Lachlan stood up with a grunt, then gave her his best are you serious stare, complete with widened eyes and head tilt. “Not for your personal life, dummy. The difference I was going to point out is that I have a costume, and you don’t.”
“You do?” Vivian arched an eyebrow. “I seem to recall you wearing a graphic tee and jeans to the bank.”
“Left it at the facility,” he replied breezily. “Plus, I have the luxury of having no living friends or family. Hence why I introduced myself to you as Lachlan. I got nobody to worry about.”
That must be nice. Except she wasn’t supposed to find that nice because having nobody to worry about meant everyone he knew and loved was dead. “Right, and still having connections are kind of a problem for me. A problem that, I’ll remind you, has become a real goddamn issue thanks to someone.”
“My point exactly,” Lachlan said, running in stride with the vitriol in Vivian’s voice. She appreciated his utter lack of response to her anger. It was helping diffuse it, and at heart, it wasn’t him she was truly mad at. “You have an identity to protect. Even if some Guardians and I know it now, you definitely don’t want Killjoy or Pine or, hell, one of the New York or SF baddies to figure out how to best hurt you.”
“So you’re trying to assemble a costume,” Vivian said. Her eyes went to the price tags on the clothes he’d picked out. “Absolutely not.”
“Not just a costume,” he said. “We’re going to get you some better supplies. You seriously can’t be going out under-prepared.”
Even at the lower end, those clothes are going to cost hundreds of dollars. Equipment on top of that?
Lachlan caught on to the hesitation.“I’m paying, if that’s your concern. Like I said, they offered me money.”
Once upon a time, she would’ve felt bad about accepting charity. Now, though, she was a college student and exceedingly broke. It was still more of an imposition upon him than she’d like, but he was offering, so…
“We talking a wheelbarrow of cash here?” Vivian asked. “A truck?”
“Think a cruise ship,” Lachlan said with a grin. “Come on. I’m gonna grab some more stuff. You got a look you’re going for?”
#
Four exhausting hours of shopping later, they were finally done. Vivian had mostly let Lachlan take the lead, since she was entirely unused to shopping for her own clothes, and he’d selected a number of options for her.
“Normally,” he explained, “there would be a costume department to help you with the design. In the larger cities, there are actually shops that are targeted specifically at supers. Well, technically, for people who want to cosplay supers, but they’re so good at what they do that new supers get custom commissions. Sadly, this is not a larger city, so we’re going to have to make do with normal clothes.”
And make do he had. Frankly, it boggled Vivian’s mind that one man could spend so much money in a single day—and not even on himself!
It was enough that despite her resolution to not feel bad about the gift, she made a genuine effort at offering to pay for some of it.
Lachlan refused. Afterwards, she noticed that he angled every new piece away from her in what she assumed was an attempt to hide the price tags. She was able to see them anyway, but the gesture was nice.
And wow, what a gesture. If Vivian’s math was in the ballpark of being correct, Lachlan managed to spend something like seven or eight thousand dollars across nine different stores, creating three distinct outfits that she could mix and match pieces from.
In addition, he’d loaded her up with all the self-defense materials they could find. Guns weren’t purchasable by civilians, but her arsenal now included two electric batons (for redundancy, he’d said), two stun guns, ten bottles of pepper spray, several knives of varying sizes, three hundred ball bearings, about a kilogram of chalk dust, and a wide variety of increasingly odd items that Lachlan swore would synergize with her power.
The one consistent piece throughout all three potential costumes was the helmet.
Before they’d started, Lachlan had spent a few minutes typing into a fold-out computer and then placed a brief call to the Guardians and put in a rush order for whatever he’d just designed. Vivian had only been able to hear one half of that conversation, but he’d said things including “it’s fine, she’s a hero,” and “yes, yes, I’ll pay for it,” so she could only assume the other person (presumably a Synth) wasn’t happy about it.
The helmet only took three and a half hours to make, though Lachlan had said to wait for a while before trying it on.
Now, standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror of her dorm (again, she thought), she did.
Since Sarah was still out, this was likely the safest place in town for her to experiment with her new gear. Lachlan didn’t have his own place, and anywhere in the city risked exposure. Here, at least, people would assume that the only reason for her to be running in and out of her room alongside a boy was for reasons much more primal than superheroing.
I’m not embarrassed about that. I’m not. (She definitely was.)
As the only piece of Synth technology, the helmet had to be first. It looked to be a modified motorcycle helmet, complete with a face-obscuring visor, but the differences were apparent even at a glance. Two ear-like antennae rose from either side of the helmet, unintrusive but distinct.
When she put the helmet on, the visor glowed with information. There were all manners of moderately useful bits and pieces—a weather report, the S&P 500, breaking news, and a compass all monopolized a section of the jerry-rigged screen. There was also something that looked to be a GPS display, but it kept on buffering and displayed a loading symbol more often than not. She was going to have to figure out how to turn that off.
The most important aspect, though, was the camera. In the ‘ears’ of the helmet were microscopic cameras that transmitted their images to her display.
“During your power test, I noticed that you could use your power in directions you couldn’t see, but you don’t have a telekinetic sense or anything, so I figured your visual acuity could use the help. The visor should also adjust to your prescription, assuming the scan the AI got of your glasses is correct.”
Sure enough, even without her glasses, the image was crystal clear.
“Here, try this,” Lachlan said, snatching up a pen and dropping it right behind her.
The cameras caught it live, and Vivian flexed her power, catching it midair.
Lachlan made a happy noise. “Thank god it worked. Synths don’t come cheap.”
“You really didn’t have to—“
“Nuh uh uh,” he chided. “We’ve been over this. No more apologizing or trying to pay me back. This is payment for the Guardians fucking with you, remember?”
Begrudgingly, Vivian stopped, then looked back at her reflection.
Even without the rest of her prospective costume(s) on, the helmet set her apart. It was still unpainted, which she’d have to fix, but this piece of equipment made her feel, perhaps stupidly, that she was really a hero now. She was half-tempted to strike a pose, but Lachlan was still in the room and she wasn’t going to subject herself to that much awkwardness.
“Very nice,” Lachlan said, nodding approvingly. “You can try the rest on later. I analyzed you and these with my power, so they should fit properly, but I shouldn’t be around just to watch a lady change. Here, take them.”
“Espers are so unfair,” Vivian grumbled. She took the remaining bags from Lachlan nonetheless, setting them down in an unused corner.
A surge of manic impulse struck her, and she took a step and hugged Lachlan, gratitude—
Cold dead flesh against her hands. Useless assurances that everything would be okay spilling out of her mouth. Talking to a corpse. Her brother would never move again.
Vivian froze, panicked, calmed down, and panicked again in the span of two seconds. Lachlan barely managed to make a surprised noise before she extracted herself.
“Sorry,” she said, wringing her hands. “I, uh, people are hard.”
Lachlan, that damn understanding fool, gave her a tired smile. “I get it. I really do.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “And—really, thank you so much for everything.”
“Hey, thank me by getting that vial before Killjoy can use it, yeah?” Lachlan said. He lowered his voice to a harsh, thin whisper, as if someone was listening in on them even after he’d checked every possible avenue. “Or before the Guardians can get their bloody hands on it.”
Then he was all sunshine and smiles again.
“I have to go,” he said, patting his pants pocket. His phone was vibrating. “I think I’ve told them to wait, like, five times now. They’re not going to be happy. Good hunting.”
And just like that, he was gone, leaving only several thousand dollars worth of equipment as proof he’d been there.
This is what I want to be, Vivian thought. The kind of person who can just drop nearly ten thousand dollars on a new friend without batting an eye.
In order to do that, she was going to have to get into Arina. And to do that, well, it was practically becoming a mantra at this point. Take down Killjoy. Leverage his vial. Join Arina.
But she could do that tomorrow. Vivian was dead on her feet. She managed to store her new clothes and equipment in her closet without fumbling anything too fragile, then stumbled into bed.
She slept the sleep of the dead.
#
Vivian’s 9 AM Sunday alarm woke her up.
How long was I asleep? God, she’d been tired last night.
As per usual, she didn’t even roll out of bed before checking her phone.
Unlike the usual, Sarah had texted her. Normally, that only happened at night when Sarah had decided she was going to be out. The mornings were Rachel and her California friends, alongside the chat groups she was in.
She read Sarah’s message, then bolted straight up. If any trace of drowsiness from her sleep remained, the message banished all of it.
Sarah: hlp kj has us clal 911
Sarah shared her location.
Sarah: theyre coming back gtg
Sarah: help us