Evan stood in his rental power armor, testing its movements and flexibility. It was slightly too big, but he didn’t have enough money to get a custom modification. It would have to do for testing his hoverboard.

He used the armor’s extra strength to carry the hoverboard from the garage to the driveway. “Are you sure we’re allowed to test here? There’s a hoverpark not too far away.”

“We’re fine here,” Strucka said. “Besides, I don’t want people getting suspicious about our work.”

Evan looked at him curiously from the driveway. “Why? Don’t you want to attract more customers? There’s no risk in doing this publicly.”

“There’s massive risk, actually,” Strucka insisted, putting his hands on his hips. “It would be a reach to call this thing a prototype at this stage of development. I can’t afford for things to go wrong in the public eye, and we know shit’s gonna happen. There’s a reason you’re wearing that armor.”

“You don’t need to be afraid of failing in public. What if you succeed and attract an investor?”

Strucka shook his head. “None of the major hoverboard companies took that approach. All of their development was kept under wraps for obvious reasons, which is why I need to do the same. If someone sees that our designs are too similar to existing patents, I’m done. I can’t afford to pay those fines!”

“It’s not too similar, is it?” Evan asked, concerned.

Strucka shrugged and glanced at the projected screens at the back of the tiny apartment garage. “I tried to differentiate it enough, but those companies will likely try to remove competition anyway. It’s best we keep this project between us.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Evan said, pointing to the metal printer in meticulous motion on the work bench. “You wouldn’t be making that had I not mentioned the project to Domrik.”

“Oh, you mean the rich martial arts guy?” Strucka laughed. “I still can’t thank you enough for that, my dude. He put down a truckload of shards for this little decoration. He says it’s a gift for a close relative. Must be quite the relative.”

Evan gaze at the frame of the printer. Strucka had started the process an hour before he arrived, and there was only a slightly curved shape to show for that time. It was printing at the highest level of detail, so the process was going to take around thirty hours. Evan flinched at the thought of Strucka’s electricity bill.

“Can’t wait to see it once it’s finished,” Evan said, setting the hoverboard down onto the street pavement. “Hey, what should our top speed be today? Thirty?”

“Hell no! We gotta fine-tune the stabilization functions before we go that fast. I’m thinking ten is good for now.”

“How high will your landlord tolerate?” Evan asked, gesturing to the old lady he had met a couple of times since starting with Strucka. She had on her usual scowl. He was almost convinced her face had frozen into that expression, as if it were a mask that contorted when she spoke.

“Oh, shit,” Strucka muttered, walking onto the driveway and following Evan’s gaze. He immediately put on a practiced smile and called warmly, “Ms. Masseem, how are you today?”

“Mr. Laski,” she announced as she approached on the sidewalk. “I’m afraid I will have to disallow this extreme aspect of your business on my property. Several tenants have submitted formal complaints about the noise level and damage risk of your experiments.”

“But Ms. Masseem,” he pleaded, “we’re following density regulations. The odds of causing a fire—”

“I do not care about regulations,” she growled, her gaze boring into him. “Your neighbors have deemed your activities too dangerous and disruptive to continue. You are still allowed to manufacture, but testing will have to take place off my property from this day forth. Otherwise, you will experience swift eviction. Am I understood?”

Strucka’s jaw worked before he uttered his reply. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said, nodding curtly. “I will inform the tenants concerned. They will appreciate the change.”

Evan relaxed as she stalked away. “She really holds nothing back, does she?”

“No, she does not,” Strucka said, returning to the garage and leaning on his desk. He lowered his head. After a few seconds, he slapped the surface hard. “Fuck!”

Evan looked away. It was jarring to see such a shift in mood so quickly. Strucka seemed like an upbeat gut most of the time, but Evan was starting to see through the façade after a few weeks of working with him. The first clues were the shouting matches he would overhear between Strucka and his mother. Both behaved politely around him, yet when they interacted with each other, it was as if they were trying to start a war. Evan had thought his own family experience was rough with shouting matches only once or twice a week. Strucka’s family made Evan’s look saint-like.

Evan carried the board back into the garage and placed it in the wagon. “Sorry to hear that, man.”

Strucka was rubbing his eyes. “Ugh, I’ll be fine, but this complicates things. You know entry into hoverparks isn’t cheap, right?”

“It’s not that expensive if you get a seasonal pass.”

“If we can go enough times before we get banned or something.”

“How can they ban us? As long as we don’t actively try to hurt people or destroy the place, we’ll be fine! Accidents and crashed happen daily. They know how to deal with it. Riding armor is required anyway, so people are rarely sent to the hospital.”

He didn’t mention that he might get a discount because of his inherited fame. He didn’t want to give his friend false hope. The surprise would be welcome, but if there was no surprise, there would be no disappointment.

Strucka sat on his stool and manipulated the interface of the projection. Evan watched over his shoulder as he looked up the nearest hoverparks. The closest was a half-hour drive away. Only a five-minute flight by hoverboard, Evan thought with a smirk, but he didn’t have his riding license yet. Riding was prohibited this far into the city anyway. It was only allowed on wide roads meant to accommodate both cars and hoverboards. There were designated lanes on highways where the speed limit didn’t apply. There were districts where flying more than three meters above three meters above the ground was permitted, but it was rare to spot a rider flying over streets and rooftops. Wind was a huge factor at high speeds, and only hoverboards with wing mods could safely navigate the skies, and those were rare for some reason.

“Looks like there’s a good deal at Mt. Speed,” Strucka observed. “It even has a rental and repair shop.”

“What’s their speed limit?” Evan asked, leaning in.

“Six hundred fifty kilometers per hour.”

“Ha! Awesome. That’s almost racing speeds.”

“Calm down, young speedster,” Strucka chided playfully. “We aren’t going anywhere near those speeds for a few weeks at least. Not until we get that think aerodynamically sound. The power modules will need tweaking as it goes under higher load.”

“I doubt it. I had help from my dad, remember? I don’t think we’ll have a power management issue.”

“What about overheating? How big are the heatsinks?”

“Do we really need those? They look clumsy. Not all boards have them.”

“Not all boards are meant for racing. They need to be exposed to the external environment. There’s no way around it besides messing with the arrangements.”

Evan frowned, thinking. “How much is a quality heatsink?”

“It’s just apiece of shaped metal. A hundred shards, tops.”

“Alright, fine. I’ll let you pick the material since you know more than I do about that. Nothing over a hundred shards.”

“Of course.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

They went to a department store and purchased the material they needed. Strucka dropped Evan off at Hector’s house, then returned to his apartment to continue work on the hoverboard.

The familiar sense of heaviness returned to Evan as he opened the front door. It was like a fog smothering his mind, dulling his thoughts and slowing his movements. He was starting to regret staying at his dead friend’s house. He had conceded to his mother’s fearful demands to stay near protection, but he now questioned how she had talked him into it. Logic must have evaporated at that time. Nothing had made much sense anyway.

He stored the armor pieces in the garage where he usually kept the hoverboard. Lorey lay on the living room couch, gazing languidly at a trio of projected screes above her. Her black braided hair spayed out over the pillow underneath her head. The projections were emitted from a node in the ceiling. The Eastons had one of those fancier houses featuring the cutting edge of luxury.

Evan noticed her and stopped behind the couch. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she replied with hardly a movement of her lips.

He tried to read the text from his shallow angle to the screens, then gave up. “What are you looking at?”

“My mother’s old notes and publications,” she said, flicking her gaze at him momentarily. “Nothing too interesting.”

“Right. You’ve been absorbed in uninteresting research for the past few days,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Your data told you your mom might still be alive, didn’t he? You’ve been missing class for this?”

“Yes, I’m helping my broken-hearted father look for my long-lost mother. Problem?” Her eyes were already glassy.

Evan put up a hand. “No, I didn’t meant o accuse you. I was just… surprised. She’s been gone for over a decade, right?”

Lorey sighed. “Since I was eleven. Adam was eight.”

He widened his eyes a touch. The information wasn’t new, but that was the first time she said Adam’s name since the tragedy. He had been worried that her preoccupation with research was an avoidance mechanism. Perhaps it was helping her move forward. Maybe it was his imagination, but he thought he detected her dry sense of humor come back online for a moment. It struck him that she might be coping with the grief better than he was. It was difficult to tell through the tinted lens of his own suffering.

“What did your mom study again?” he asked.

“She studied neurophysiology in relation to Aetheric stimulation.”

“Ah, like how Aetheric corpuscles interact with neural impulses.”

“That, but also on a more organ and system-wide level. My grandmother suffered from a severe case of the Shivers before she passed away. My mother spent years trying to help her cope with it.”

The Shivers was a well-known disease that affected mostly the elderly. Diagnosis often led to despair of the affected family, though it wasn’t contagious. It often preceded the decline of memory and cognitive function. Treatment was expensive yet ineffective.

“Did she find a cure?” he asked.

“After my grandmother passed, she wanted answers. She went back to college and got a degree in medicine. Science said that the condition was genetic, but she wanted to challenge that. I think it was out of fear that she might suffer from it, honestly, but she started seeing trends with Shivers patients. The more often they had interacted with Aetherite, the more severe the case. It was a nearly perfect correlation, but she didn’t understand it. Even worse, none of her colleagues were asking questions about Aetherite, so they didn’t know a correlation even existed. We were all taught that Aetherite was safe to use. Very few studies had been done on the impact of Aetheric energies on human health, and the studies that were run were small and poorly designed.

“So she did her own studies. It was expensive as shit, and my father resisted it at first since it forced them both to work overtime, but her interventional studies started showing clear improvements with the reduction or elimination of Aetherite in the lifestyles of the participants. This supported her hypothesis: Aetherite is neurotoxic to humans.”

Evan raised his eyebrows. “Really? You’re kidding.”

She looked at him. “Absolutely not. This is serious, and the other scientists took it seriously, but not in the way my mother expected. There was ruthless debate on the efficacy of her studies, and only one out of her fourteen papers passed peer review. The media didn’t report on it, of course. I only know about it because of her epic rants after coming home.

“She eventually gave up doing interventional studies and turned to epidemiology to try to find the mechanism. Fortunately, this was around the time when your father came out with his Densification equations. She studied them enough to create her own experiments on the side of her usual neurology work. The closer she looked at organic tissue under the influence of Aetheric currents, the more determined she became. She kept telling us she was on to something, but didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

“What did she discover?” Evan asked, captivated.

She smiled briefly, then sighed again. “Then one day, she didn’t return from the clinic. We searched for days, weeks. Security footage showed her walking around a corner in a hallway from one angle, but all others showed nothing. She just disappeared without a trace.”

“Just like that other Aether scientist a year ago…”

“Mike Ginger.”

“Yeah, that guy.”

“Rumor had it he was close to a discovery as well. We’ll never know, because his notes were confiscated and classified, but fortunately my mother kept a copy of her notes on her private wristpad.”

“You think her disappearance had something to do with her controversial work? Couldn’t it be a coincidence?”

“Of course it wasn’t!” she blurted. “She would never do something like that to us. It makes no sense!”

Evan narrowed his eyes, thinking. “So she was kidnapped because she thought Aetherite was dangerous. Who could be behind that?”

She shrugged. “My father thinks it the Phantom Scythe, whoever that is.”

“It could be him…” Evan pondered, his abdomen and lower back tingling as he recalled walking through Zandith’s invisibility illusion for the first time. “He can turn things and people invisible.”

She gave him a confused look. “How do you know… oh, right. My bad.”

“It’s fine,” he conceded, shifting his weight back and forth as tingles traversed his legs. He supported himself on the couch. “So your mom’s research is why you never wear your wristpad?”

“Yep, I’m convinced. Why do you think it hurts so much to use Aether? It can’t be good for you.”

“Yeah, well, weight training hurts too.”

“That’s completely different. You’re using your body to do something it’s meant to do. Humans were never meant to use Aether.”

“Ha, alright, now I know you’re messing with me. Humans evolved alongside Aetherite for hundreds of thousands of years. That’s why we can use Aether and other animals can’t.”

“Remember Mike Ginger? He was also a geologist, and he specialized in studying the origins of Aetherite. Is that a coincidence? Trust me, Evan. Aether does nothing good for humanity. It creates wars and hatred. It’s even created a corrupt financial system.”

“What are you saying, that we should just give up the most abundant resource we have? That’s not a solution. Look, you’re using it right now!”

“Only because I have to. All my mother’s notes are digital, and nobody makes digital screens anymore. It’s all about the next flashy projection gizmo secretly geared toward feeding the laziness of humanity.” She thrust her arms up at the transparent screens above her. “Ooh, look at me! So advanced, so cool, so trendy. Ugh, I’m sick of it.”

“Hey, now, the Aether is cool! Do you know Domrik?”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “That pretentious guru guy my father has a crush on?”

“He’s not pretentious! He showed me a whole bunch of cool Aetheric tricks yesterday.” He didn’t feel it was appropriate to mention the assassins sent to kill him.

“Yeah, and doomed you to a life twenty years shorter than it could be,” she replied, returning to reading and scrolling with a finger.

Evan grabbed his hair in frustration. “Why do you have to be so negative! He healed your dad’s hand after he slugged an armored Guard on the day of the attack. Did he tell you that?”

She paused from reading. “No, that’s impossible.”

“Well, I saw it.”

“You were traumatized. Who knew what you really saw?”

“I didn’t imagine that Hector’s index finger suddenly had an extra joint and was covered in blood!” Evan shouted, grabbing his own hand for emphasis. “The memory is burned into my brain, Lorey, whether I like it or not. Domrik also communicated with Adam right in front of us. How do you explain that?”

“Pfft,” she laughed. “Now you’re the one messing with me.”

He gaped at her. “I’m not! Why do you think Hector thought your mom was still alive somewhere? Adam saw her and told us.”

“Oh really? Then where is she?”

“He said it was a mountainous area but couldn’t give us specifics.”

“Well, that’s inconvenient.”

“Why didn’t Hector tell you any of this? You have a right to know!”

“I bet if you asked him, he would say that I wouldn’t believe him, and he would be correct.” She waved away the projections and sat up. “Look Evan, I’ve met Domrik a handful of times. He seems nice. Losing someone is tough, really fucking tough. I don’t have a hard time imagining him putting on a little show for my father to ease his pain. And I don’t blame him either. I do appreciate you telling me this, though. Now his quick recovery makes a bit more sense.”

“But do you realize it’s possible that Adam is still alive in some other form?”

“Every person has their coping mechanism. My father’s is believing that both his missing wife and his dead son are still alive, even if in different forms. I’m not going to try to change his mind. It’s none of my business. In fact, I support him. That’s why I’m doing my research. Do I think it will lead anywhere? No, but my father does, and the last thing he needs is for his daughter to give up on him. This is my coping mechanism.” She stood from the couch and patted down the wrinkles on her shirt and jeans. “I don’t need to delude myself with fanciful ideas of immortality and reincarnation. I’m stronger than that.”

It took all of Evan’s effort to not flinch at her last words. He stood in silence, staring past her, contemplating. Did she really think Hector was weak? Anger boiled within him, threatening to overflow into words. In the back of his mind, he recalled the brief instruction he received from Domrik on techniques of meditation and when to apply them. He took a slow, deep breath and felt his feet grounded on the wood floor. In that brief retreat, a question floated into his mind. Why was he so offended for Hector?

Lorey broke through his thoughts. “Anyway, fun talk. You hungry? Smells like the pot roast is about done.”

He blinked, and finally noticed the smell of stew wafting from the kitchen. He unclenched his fists. “Starving, actually. I got carried away with the hoverboard stuff.”

“Ha, you’re funny,” she said as she started toward the kitchen.

“That was unintentional!” he protested, his mood lifting against his will. The darker questions faded into the periphery of his mind. Only Lorey could shift tones so effectively. He wondered how she did it.

As much as she irritated him, he had much to learn from her.