I'd never really been into any of the 'cliques' in my high school, and certainly didn't dive into any in my stay at college. I'd observed them, as much as I could be said to observe anything back then, and found them...interesting, I guess?

It seemed to me that they were just groups of people who defined themselves too much by one thing. Nerds weren't just smart people, they were people who, given the option, would choose eclectic intellectualism over anything else. There wasn't anything stopping a nerd from being fit and tan and dressing well, most just wouldn't because it wasn't a priority for them, not compared to their nerdy studies. Same for popular girls being catty, or jocks being dumb.

The stuff that stereotypes came from. And yeah, there were a lot of exceptions; I was one of them. Football was the most important thing to me, and most of my friends were on the team. But I also kept up my studies instead of doing like most of them did and hanging out. I was that relatively rare asocial jock.

After I'd turned Exhuman that had all changed, of course. I'd been too focused on surviving and enduring the world's bullshit to fixate on anything, really. There was always another disaster, always more going wrong that needed to be addressed or I or someone else would be fucked. In reacting to everything, you don't get to choose your priorities, and the concept of self determination sorta goes away.

And yet here I was now. Free time back on my hands and a choice to be made, and wouldn't you know it, I'd gone and murdered my inner jock, trading my mouthguard for a soldering iron, and was going full gearhead and app-slapper up in this.

It was...amazing, really. All the hours that slipped by, just Whitney and me and the sounds of our tools on the exosuit. It was like a trance I could slip into, a world where everything just worked and made sense. When I stopped, I found my mind right back on Alyssa, and AEGIS to a degree, and how crappy my life really was. It wasn't a real surprise that I was soon completely addicted to the work, and somehow Whitney became the responsible one who was making sure we ate and slept regularly.

Though she kinda cheated and set alarms, but she did make us stop when they went off. It was a fair system.

A lot of the exosuit's damage was surface-level, meaning new plating had to be procured, and neither of us were exactly blacksmiths, and certainly not blacksmiths of the level to produce combat-grade nanofiber-reinforced ceramic-composite ablative resistive-coated plates. So those were on order to be installed, with the billing going through the XPCA.

The more fun parts were the systems damage. Everything from pneumatics to circuitry we could handle, and did, often both of us crowded over a small orifice in the exosuit's frame, four hands working together to get some piece to torque into place, or one of us on a computer while the other held a diagnostic probe jammed in the thing's guts, or my favorite, her explaining to me exactly what something was and how it worked, frequently with a practical demonstration.

We were taking one of the scheduled breaks at the moment, both of us shiny with grease and sweat, sitting on the floor in her apartment's basement storage, talking over half a leftover box of pizza, very nearly as greasy as we were.

"We're losing pressure at the elbow, I'm almost sure of it," she said.

"We've checked the elbow a hundred times. It has to be the seal on the accumulator."

She scoffed. "Trust me, if it was the accumulator, you'd know. We'd kick on the pressure and boom."

"Then what can it be?"

"It's the elbow. I'm telling you."

I stood up to go check it and got tutted until I sat back down.

"Eat your dang food first," she said.

"Fine, Mom."

"Like I'd ever have a kid as bratty as you," she smirked at me. "My kids are well-behaved and do exactly as they're told."

"Because they're machines," I rolled my eyes at her.

"Uh yeah. Have you seen human babies? They're not very useful the first few years of their lives. Some of them remain that way forever. And they whine a lot when you try to take them apart or install upgrades. Not my thing."

"Finding a guy who'd put up with you long enough to have a kid isn't your thing, you mean."

She shoved me but laughed. I don't know quite when the two of us had become so close, but I imagine spending most of a week now completely in each other's company and completely in synch, to say nothing of being open with each other and facing the same outlook on the same kinds of life issues...that probably had something to do with it.

She was getting pretty good at saying what I was thinking, and she did so again now. "Hey, you know...I've never had a friend like you," she said. "Never met anyone with the same interests really, besides my dad."

"There's gotta be a lot of them out there. There's a fuckton of exosuits in the world, and someone's gotta enjoy putting them together. Or back together."

"Probably," she said, taking a slow bite of pizza and resting the slice back on her leg. "But I've never met them."

"Well, I've never really had this kind of interest in this kinda stuff until I met you. So I guess we're even."

"Guess so," she said smiling. "Point being...thanks, I guess. It's a lot more fun working on this with someone, and especially someone who's interested." She shook her head, her long hair, tied up under a bandana swaying back and forth. "You've done a lot to make my old life look like crap, you realize."

"Um, are you sure your old life wasn't just crap?"

"No. It's all your fault," she said smirking at me. "But I mean, late nights alone in the shop, even the last time I fixed up this suit, I did it all alone, working until I couldn't and then sleeping until I couldn't and then doing it all again until the work was over. There wasn't anything...more to it. I did it because I had to, not because I wanted to."

"But you're really good at it. How many people do you think could fix up an exosuit by themselves?"

"Really has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Being good at something and liking it aren't the same thing."

"But...you do like it."

She studied my face for a second. "You know how they say if you love your job, you'll never have to work a day in your life? Well that's a load of bull. Passions are great because you can stop doing them whenever you want. A job, you do every day, like it or not. You find any hobby in the world and make the guys doing it do it hardcore everyday without stopping and they'll get sick of it too. They could do it, just like I can do this, but it...it's soul-draining is what it is. And the worst part is, you don't have your hobby to turn to afterwards, because you turned it into your job."

"Hmm. Is that why you just laid there doing nothing?"

"Yeah, a big part of it," she said, stretching her long arms and legs. It'd only been a week but I think she was already putting some weight back on with regular meals. She looked a lot better anyway, though maybe that was just the grease and oil being back in place. "Anyway, you keep side-tracking me. My point is, late nights working all alone feel pretty stupid compared to sitting here talking with you."

"Um, thanks?"

"Well, it wasn't that exciting a point, and you kept derailing me. It wasn't worth all that."

"No, it was fine. I just...I'm here. Y'know? I don't feel like I've...done anything commendable. We're kinda hiding from the world, kinda doing our own thing, kinda avoiding people. Nothing of too much merit. Nothing deserving your praise."

She smirked at me. "The meritorious part comes after. When we bang the suit up again."

"During an Exhuman event?"

"Yeah. That's the only thing these powers are good for."

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I looked at her thoughtfully. She'd become a lot more open recently, a lot more willing to discuss all those things she was 'hiding from'. Before, it'd been met with an icy glare if I ever even brought up her powers, and now she was doing it candidly, apparently without reservation. I wondered if I could push my luck.

"I wonder why they work so differently for you than me," I said.

"Dunno."

"Do you...struggle with them? It always looks to me like you're struggling just to keep your single sword under control."

"Yeah, it doesn't feel like it wants to move. I have to fight with it just to make it go how I want."

"But you're also way better at magnetism than I was. Even to the point where you can trap charges and do the ball lightning trick? I heard about that on your last mission."

"Look...can we go back to...talking about something else?"

"I just want to know why they work differently on you than me. It's obvious that somehow my powers jumped ship since you can do all the stuff I did...just differently. I want to know why."

"Well, you won't," she said curtly. "Powers are just...they're just part of something unknowable and messed up. Ask Satan how they work."

"But it's not unknowable," I said frowning. "I learned a lot of tricks while I had my powers, just by figuring out new ways to manipulate them. They're just electricity--"

"They're not, okay?" she snapped suddenly. "Electricity comes from a battery, or a delith cell, or a reactor. What this is, what I have, it comes from nowhere. You don't just control electricity with your mind, okay? There's no brainwave particle on the electromagnetic spectrum. There's no such thing as telekinesis or electrokinesis or whatever. It's just some stupid...awful...unexplainable nonsense that happens to people just to make them become awful."

She slapped the lid of the pizza box closed and stood up, dusting off her shorts and walking back over to the exosuit's arm we currently had detached. She put her hands on it but they didn't move, just holding it as she stood there.

The answer to my question, whether I could push my luck, was a definite 'no'. "You're not...an awful person," I told her.

"We're not going into this," she said.

"I tried to tell you even before you turned. Some Exhumans are good. You get a choice."

"Yeah. I have a choice, to use my powers or not. And I choose not. I don't use them unless it's for the P-Force, I don't think about them, I don't want them, nothing."

"You don't have to be that extreme about it. If I didn't have my powers out in the wilds, I'd have died. I used them to hunt, to cook. There's good uses for them, and if you thought about it more--"

"Athan, listen," she said, turning on me. "I said I don't want to talk about it. Are you trying to get me to eat my words about being happy you're here?"

"No, I just--"

"Then don't. I'm not stupid, I know what you're doing, I'm not going to play with or investigate or figure out squat about my powers. I hate them. I will never use them. I will pretend my damndest to be as close to a human as I can be. The end. Got it?"

I sighed. "Got it."

"Good. I'm gonna grab some soap and check the elbow joint again. Finish your damn pizza."

And so saying she disappeared up the creaking wooden stairway that would take her to the garages adjacent to the apartment units.

I sighed again, frustrated. It's not like I didn't get her perspective, it just seemed so dumb to have something and refuse to even think about it. How closed-minded could she be? Like yeah, she was an Exhuman, and there was a fair amount of coming to terms with that required, but that wasn't as impossible as she made it sound.

I'd hated myself a lot too. I still hated a lot of things about myself, but gradually, I'd realized that most of the common knowledge about Exhumans just wasn't true. It took me seeing and living with other Exhumans to realize that most of us are just like people, just trying to get by, but dealt a much crazier hand. Sure, you could use those powers to go ballistic and wreck ungodly death upon whomever you wanted, and many did, but if you didn't, surely that counted for something, didn't it?

But not to her, I guess. She'd hated me for being an Exhuman, and now she hated herself. Rationality just didn't factor into the equation, given how her whole family had died around her.

It just sucked. But you couldn't just logic someone's trauma away.

And more...and selfishly, I knew, I really wanted to know what she could do with those powers if she let go. Lia and I had come up with some neat tricks but neither of us were literal engineering geniuses like Whitney. Like, ball lightning was something we couldn't even fathom, much less pull off. What else could she manage if she wanted to?

Her legs appeared on the stairs again, heralded by the creaking of the steps and an impossible downpour of dust, and I hurried to shove pizza in my mouth.

"Hey," she said, waving a bottle of hand soap at me in greeting.

"Hmfft," I replied, through pizza.

She paused for a second and then decided to continue on. "I wanted to apologize. I'm not...not angry or anything. About you wanting to talk about my powers. I don't even...actually hate them. It's been an eye-opening experience having them. I guess it's the only way to understand what being an Exhuman is like, being one."

I tried to agree, but I'd hit the crust of my slice, and my mouth was dessicated beyond words. Literally.

"What I'm saying is, I've...changed my mind some. I was mean to you before when I learned you were Exhuman. And to your friends as well. None of you deserved that."

I swallowed desperately. "And neither do you."

She smirked at me. "Nah. I do."

"Why?"

"Because...I do have those thoughts. I do feel that...that impulse that I know is in every Exhuman. To go smash it up and laugh, and say aren't you sorry now? I don't, and I won't. But I do. It's the instinctual animal thing about Exhumans I've always believed was there, and it's in me."

"Whitney, everyone feels that, that's being human, not Exhuman. Everyone wants justice and vengeance when they feel slighted, that's why we have words for those things. That's why our courts are called the justice system. Punishment is a big reason why civilization doesn't fall apart. You're not evil for wanting to see people punished."

She shrugged. "It wasn't in me before. I'm still done discussing it. I just wanted to apologize and let you know."

"...that you're slowly coming around?"

"That I'm thinking differently, and I don't yet think that's a bad thing."

"Well, we'll see where you wind up, then. I trust you, and you're a good person. You're not going to do anything bad, I know it."

She shook her head. "Yeah, I don't. But I'm tired of talking. Let's get back to work."

And so we did. She was right, incidentally, about the elbow joint being our leak, as she was right about most of her hunches. She said it was because the machines told her, but I wasn't quite sure she wasn't just fucking with me.

But after long hours under the buzzing lightbars, we got the exosuit's arm back together and assembled back onto the main chassis, tested and ready to go. We were finally looking at most of an exosuit here, it'd be ready for operation in the next few days.

And then, as the universe often decided to do, all our hard work was nothing. My mobile rang, and I wiped my hands down on rags before I went to answer it.

"Chariot, hi," Cosette said, sounding distracted. "We need you back in urgently."

"Me? Uh. Why?"

"Why do you think? We have a no-contact clause unless there's an emergency, don't we?"

"Which you've repeatedly informed me was non-enforceable."

"Well we're enforcing it right now. Get your ass in here and be ready to fight."

"Um," I said, meeting Whitney's eyes, who was looking at me with the same alarm I felt. "I...uh…"

"What?" Cosette barked.

"The exosuit, it isn't ready yet. Give us another couple of days?"

"I'm not calling you because we have another couple of days. I'm calling you because a situation is unfolding and we need to fold it right the fuck back up. Get your shit together and come out here naked if you have to. I don't give a damn about the exosuit."

"I do. I need it."

"You need…" she sighed heavily in my ear. "Are you...are you fucking with me right now, Athan?"

"No!"

"You need it? After all the missions you ran without that damn suit, now you need it?"

"Yes."

She went silent for a minute before responding. "You have...twenty-four hours. Fix your damn suit and get the hell out here, or I will be sending shadow-ops to pick you up, and they are not gentle."

I hung up, dropped the mobile back in my pocket, and dropped my ass on the concrete. What a fucking disaster.

"Fuck," I summarized the call for Whitney.

"That bad?"

"Twenty four hours and then you have to be out there," I told her. "Some Exhuman event."

"Oh," she said, and then surprised me with a little smirk. "Okay."

"Okay? We're fucked. The repairs I don't think we can manage, but even if we can, there's still a gaping hole in the chest we're missing plating for. Structural integrity aside, I think they'd notice straight off it wasn't me in there, given you have some anatomy that I'm lacking."

She gave her boobs a little bounce leaving smudged handprints, as though only noticing they existed now. "Eh, we'll figure something out." She reached forward and grabbed my arms pulling me to my feet. "This is a great opportunity though. I get to show you my ultimate attack."

"Yeah? What's that?" I asked, irked at feeling more excited by her optimism than I should be.

"I call it the All-Nighter," she said, with a confident smirk. "A superpower greater than any Exhuman's."

She was a genius. She was also an idiot. I loved her for both, but as much as I wanted to say something to that effect, we didn't have the time. Our most productive hours would be now, and we were already behind.

So just like that we were back to work, the dark thoughts and hours slipping away like a bad dream as we delved back into our shared dreams.