EARTH

  The first thing Cade noticed was the familiar press of the bench beneath his back. His arms hung loose at his sides, hands dangling past his shoulders toward the floor, almost touching the lower edges of the power rack he was in. Above him, the barbell sat racked where he’d left it—but beyond it, where his ceiling should have been, stars burned in a perfect circle of night sky. The edges of the hole were still smoking. He stared at it for a long moment, his mind sluggish, trying to reconcile what he was seeing with anything that made sense. Had he passed out? For how long?

  He sat up slowly, methodically, the way he’d trained himself to move after heavy sets. Checked his body for damage. His shirt had a hole in it—a perfect circle perhaps three inches across, the fabric around it singed but not burning, positioned directly over his sternum. But beneath the ruined cotton: nothing. No wound. No burn. Not even redness. Just skin, unmarked, as if whatever had punched through slate and drywall and wood had simply… passed through him. Or into him.

  Huh.

  The hunger was gone. He’d been planning to eat after this session—a rice bowl waiting in the fridge, pre-portioned and macro-counted, alongside the vegan protein shake he always had post-workout. His body should have been demanding fuel after that last grinding set of 455. Instead, he felt… full. Not stuffed. Just complete, as if whatever empty space food normally filled had been occupied by something else.

  Cade stood. Flexed his hands, rolled his shoulders, took a deep breath and released it. Everything worked. Everything felt fine. Better than fine, actually—he felt rested, which made no sense given that he’d apparently just been unconscious on a weight bench.

  He looked at the bar still racked above the bench.

  Might as well see if anything’s broken.

  He lay back down, positioned himself under the bar, and unracked the weight. It felt wrong immediately—not heavy-wrong, but light-wrong, like someone had swapped his plates for props while he wasn’t looking. He lowered the bar to his chest and pressed. The weight flew up. He did it again. And again. By the eighth rep, he hadn’t found anything close to the grinding intensity he craved, the failure point where muscle and will fought for dominance.

  Eight reps of 455, and he felt like he was warming up.

  Cade racked the weight and sat up, staring at the bar. Then he stood, walked to his plate tree, and swapped 25s for 45s.

  495 for eight. Easy.

  He added two 25s.

  545 for eight. Still easy. Still nowhere near failure.

  Swap the 25s for 45s again. 585—a weight he’d never touched in his life, a weight that should have been years away if it was ever achievable at all.

  The first rep moved like 405 used to. The second and third were smooth. By the sixth, he felt something—not fatigue exactly, but resistance, the first hint that his muscles were actually being asked to work. The seventh rep slowed. The eighth ground up through his sticking point, arms shaking, the bar crawling the last few inches to lockout.

  Eight reps at 585.

  Cade racked the weight and sat up. His hands were trembling—not from exertion, but from something closer to shock. He looked at the hole in his ceiling, the winter stars winking down at him, and thought: What the hell happened to me?

  He grabbed his phone from where it sat on the deadlift platform, propped it against a dumbbell, and angled it toward the bench. Hit record. Then he lay back down under 585 pounds and did another set of eight, struggling on the last rep just like before, making sure the camera caught every second.

  Evidence. Proof. Something to look at tomorrow when his rational mind tried to convince him this had all been a fever dream.

  The rest of his workout proceeded in a haze of recalculation. He’d planned incline press at 315—he bumped it to 435 and found it comfortable. Dumbbell work, cable flies, all of it scaled up by percentages he was calculating on the fly, trying to find the edge of his new capabilities. But the strangest part wasn’t the strength itself. It was the recovery, or rather, the lack of need for it. Usually, by the end of a session, he was spent—not destroyed, but genuinely fatigued, ready for food and rest. Tonight, he felt like he could keep going forever. Like his body had forgotten how to tire.

  He stopped anyway, following his program out of habit more than necessity. Some part of him understood that routine was going to be important in the days ahead, an anchor to normalcy in whatever this was becoming.

  He ate his rice and vegetable bowl despite the absence of hunger, chewing mechanically, washing it down with the protein shake because that’s what he did after workouts. The food sat in his stomach like a polite guest who’d arrived at the wrong party. His body didn’t seem to want it, but it didn’t reject it either.

  After, he climbed onto his roof.

  The night was bitter, temperatures hovering in the low twenties, and he chose not to wear gloves or a hat, just his jacket. Expecting to regret it, instead he felt… fine. Comfortable, even, as if it were 30 degrees warmer.

  The hole was clean. That was the unsettling part. Whatever had punched through his roof hadn’t shattered or torn—it had simply removed material in a perfect circle, edges slightly melted, as if cut by a laser or something hotter. He dragged a tarp over it, positioned concrete blocks at the corners, ran rope through the grommets to anchor everything against the wind. The whole time, his mind churned through possibilities.

  Meteorite? But meteorites didn’t burn through roofs in perfect circles, didn’t pass through human bodies without leaving marks, didn’t—

  Didn’t make people suddenly able to bench press six hundred pounds.

  What hit me?

  He had no answer. The winter stars offered nothing but cold light, ancient and indifferent. Eventually, he climbed back down and went inside.

  Cade showered and tried to sleep. Put on an audiobook—Mother of Learning, a story about time loops and second chances that he’d listened to once before—and let the familiar words wash over him while he gamed on his phone. But sleep wouldn’t come. His body felt charged, almost vibrating with energy, as if rest were another physical need that had simply… stopped applying.

  Eventually, he drifted off anyway, more from habit than exhaustion.

  He woke at 4:07 AM, alert and rested in a way that made no sense. He’d gotten maybe four hours of sleep, should have been groggy and resentful of consciousness, reaching for his phone to check if he could squeeze in another hour. Instead, he felt like he’d slept twelve hours, eaten a perfect breakfast, and downed three cups of coffee.

  And there was something in his mind that hadn’t been there before.

  Not words, exactly. More like a knowing, a certainty that had taken up residence in his consciousness without asking permission. He examined it carefully, the way you might probe a sore tooth with your tongue, trying to understand its shape and boundaries.

  I will seek to minimize suffering.

  The thought wasn’t his. Or rather—it was his now, but it hadn’t originated from him. It felt installed, like firmware, a core directive written into his operating system. An oath, he realized. That was the word for it. An oath he hadn’t taken but somehow bore anyway.

  Where did this come from?

  He thought about the hole in his ceiling, the strength, the water. Something had done this to him. Something with a plan—or at least a purpose.

  Minimize suffering.

  As missions went, he’d heard worse. It wasn’t far from how he already tried to live, after all. The veganism, the careful ethics, the constant calculus of harm reduction. This new directive didn’t conflict with his values; it aligned with them almost perfectly.

  Which was either comforting or deeply unsettling, depending on how he looked at it.

  Cade decided to figure it out tomorrow. For now, he just wanted to close his eyes and drift back to—

  Nothing. There was nothing to drift back to. He searched for sleepiness the way you might search your pockets for keys, finding only emptiness where the familiar weight should have been. His body simply wasn’t tired anymore. Four hours had been enough. More than enough.

  Great. Add “doesn’t need to sleep” to the list.

  He gave up on rest and swung his legs out of bed—

  And launched himself halfway across the room.

  The push-off he’d intended as a gentle rise had become something more explosive, his arm extending with force he hadn’t calibrated for, sending him stumbling forward in a graceless lurch. He caught himself against his dresser—gently, so gently, the wood creaking under his grip anyway—and stood there for a moment, breathing.

  Right. Super strength. Going to have to get used to that.

  He moved more carefully after that, treating his apartment like it was made of tissue paper, hyperaware of every grip and step. The bathroom required the most caution. Brushing his teeth became an exercise in restraint—too much pressure and he’d crush the handle. The door needed conscious effort to open without tearing it from its hinges. Every mundane action had to be reconsidered, recalibrated.

  The shower was next—he reached for the faucet with exaggerated gentleness, turned it on with what he hoped was appropriate pressure, and stepped under the spray.

  Cade couldn’t feel the heat. The steam told him the water was hot, but against his skin it registered as merely warm, pleasant, unremarkable.

  Temperature resistance. Add it to the list.

  He turned the water to cold. He could tell it was cold—the gauge on the handle, the shift in the sound of the spray—but the discomfort he’d always expected never came. He’d been sensitive to cold his entire life, the kind of person who dreaded winter showers and avoided ice baths like plague. Now the cold water felt like nothing. Well, at least he could finally take those cold showers everyone swore were so healthy, and save on his energy bill at the same time.

  He was reaching for the shampoo when he noticed something strange. The steam wasn’t behaving correctly. Mist from the previously hot water should have drifted randomly, dispersing according to the chaos of air currents and thermodynamics. Instead, tendrils of vapor seemed to follow his hands as he moved them, curling toward his fingers like iron filings drawn to a magnet.

  Cade went still. Then, slowly, deliberately, he waved his hand through the steam.

  The vapor moved with him.

  He tried again, this time concentrating, imagining his hand pulling the mist along. The effect strengthened. He could see it clearly now—a ribbon of steam trailing his fingers, responding to his will like a thing alive.

  No. No way.

  He cupped his hands in front of him and focused, trying to gather the scattered vapor, trying to—

  The steam collected into an orb.

  It hung there in front of his palms, a sphere of suspended water droplets the size of a tennis ball, defying every law of physics he’d ever learned. He stared at it, heart hammering, and in that moment of distraction, his awareness suddenly expanded.

  He felt the water in the pipes.

  Not saw, not heard—felt. The rush of it through copper and PVC, pressure and flow and temperature, the entire plumbing system of his house suddenly mapped in his mind like a new sense he’d never known he possessed. The sensation was overwhelming, alien, and he flinched—

  The pipes groaned.

  His flinch had been physical, but also something else. Some part of him had yanked at the water, pulled it backward against its flow, and the pressure had to go somewhere. The shower head cracked with a sound like a gunshot, cheap plastic splitting, water spraying wildly from the rupture.

  “Shit—”

  Cade’s first instinct was to shut off the water, but he stopped himself. Instead, he focused on the spray forcing its way through the crack, and he willed it to stop.

  It was hard. Far harder than moving steam. The water wanted to flow outward, following pressure differentials, obeying physics. Trying to push it back felt like pressing two magnets together at their matching poles—possible, but fighting every natural inclination.

  He changed tactics. Instead of pushing against the flow, he tried to redirect it, to convince the water that the crack simply wasn’t there, that the path of least resistance still led through the shower head’s intended aperture.

  The spray sputtered. Thinned. Stopped.

  Water flowed from the shower head normally, the crack sealed by nothing but his concentration. He held it for five seconds, ten, feeling the effort like a muscle he’d never trained before—and then his focus slipped and water burst from the crack again, spraying him in the face.

  Cade shut off the faucet. The spray stopped immediately—no water pressure, no leak. He stood there dripping, examining the cracked fixture, and laughed.

  It wasn’t a happy laugh. It was the sound of a man who’d just watched his understanding of reality crack open like a shower head under impossible pressure.

  I can control water.

  He added it to the list, somewhere between “superhuman strength” and “temperature immunity.” The shower head was a cheap fix—twenty bucks at the hardware store, ten minutes with an adjustable wrench. He’d pick one up on his way home from work, along with calling a roofer about that hole.

  He finished washing with the water on low, keeping the pressure gentle enough that the crack barely leaked, and made a mental note to be more careful with his new abilities. Whatever this water-sense was, it came with consequences he didn’t fully understand yet.

  Afterward, still wired with energy he had no idea how to spend, he walked to his living room gym and stared at the equipment.

  Might as well see where the ceiling is.

  He grabbed the safety squat bar from its wall hooks, preparing for the familiar heft of fifty-five pounds of steel—and nearly threw it over his shoulder. The bar felt like nothing. Like picking up a foam pool noodle. He held it at arm’s length, moved it through space, and the only resistance came from its awkward dimensions, not its weight.

  His stomach dropped.

  He’d spent years building this gym. Thousands of dollars on equipment, countless hours of research on optimal setups, all in service of having a space where he could push himself to his limits without depending on anyone else. The power rack, the specialty bars, the carefully curated collection of plates that climbed all the way to—

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  Just under 700 pounds. Because I’ve never needed more.

  He loaded the bar anyway. Every plate he owned went onto that safety squat bar, 45s stacked until the sleeves were full, the bar bowing slightly under a weight that would have stapled him to the floor a week ago.

  Cade positioned himself under the yoke, unracked it, and squatted.

  The weight moved like it wasn’t there.

  He did it again. And again. Perfect depth, perfect form, and absolutely zero challenge. He kept going, counting reps, waiting to feel something—the burn of lactic acid, the shake of approaching failure, any indication that his muscles were being asked to work. By twenty reps, he felt mildly warm. By thirty, he’d found a rhythm, almost meditative. By fifty, he racked the weight and sat there, barely breathing hard, and felt something twist in his chest.

  It wasn’t disappointment exactly. It was grief.

  He looked around the room he’d built—really looked at it, the way you look at a place when you realize you’re leaving it. Three years of planning. Thousands of dollars. The power rack he’d researched for months before buying, comparing load ratings and hole spacing like his life depended on it. The specialty bars he’d saved up for one at a time, each one a small celebration. The deadlift platform he’d built himself over a weekend, cutting and gluing the horse stall mats, sanding the plywood until it was perfectly level.

  All of it rendered meaningless in one night.

  He sat down on the bench—the same bench where everything had changed—and pressed his palms against his eyes. The urge to train was still there. That was the cruelest part. His body still craved the work, still wanted to push and strain and fight for every rep. But there was nothing left to fight against. He was an engine with no load, a climber at the summit with nowhere left to go.

  For most people, losing a hobby would be an inconvenience. For Cade, training wasn’t a hobby. It was the architecture of his days, the structure that held everything else in place. Without the daily session, without the constant background calculation of programming and recovery and progressive overload—what was he? Just a guy who was strong for no reason, in a room full of equipment he’d outgrown overnight.

  He sat there for a long time. Longer than he’d sat still in years.

  Eventually, he made a protein shake out of pure habit and moved to his displaced couch, controller in hand, trying to lose himself in a game. It didn’t work. His mind kept cycling—not to the questions about his limits or his future, but back to the gym. To the thousands of hours. To the grinding sessions where every rep was a war, where the bar moved or it didn’t, where the only thing that mattered was whether he’d earned the right to add five pounds next week.

  He missed it already. Missed it the way you miss a person, not a thing.

  As he played, his frustration slowly transmuted into something else. Not acceptance—not yet—but curiosity. Whatever had happened to him, whatever that light had been, it had given him something extraordinary. Strength beyond human limits. Control over water. Maybe more, something he hadn’t discovered yet.

  If he couldn’t challenge himself with weights anymore, he’d have to find other ways.

  He was deep in thought, strategizing ways to test his capabilities without attracting attention, when something pulled at his awareness.

  It came from the direction of his neighbor’s house—Henry’s place, the small ranch next door where the elderly widower had lived alone for as long as Cade could remember. Not a sound, exactly. More like pressure, a subtle insistence at the edge of his consciousness that something was wrong over there. The oath pulsed in his mind: minimize suffering.

  Cade sat up, frowning. Was this another new ability? Some kind of… suffering-detection? It would make sense, if the oath was real, if whatever had changed him wanted him to actually act on that directive. Hard to minimize suffering if you couldn’t identify it.

  He didn’t know what to do with the feeling, so he did the only thing that made sense: he walked next door and knocked.

  Henry answered in a bathrobe, sparse white hair uncombed, clearly surprised to see anyone at—Cade checked his phone—7:14 in the morning. The old man’s face cycled through confusion and concern before settling on polite wariness.

  “Cade? Everything alright?”

  “I just…” Cade hesitated. I sensed your pain through the wall wasn’t going to work as an explanation. “Had a feeling something was wrong. Wanted to check on you.”

  Henry’s eyebrows rose. Then he chuckled, a dry sound like paper rustling. “Nothing more wrong than usual. Arthritis is a bastard in cold weather.” He studied Cade’s face. “You sure you’re alright? You look like you haven’t slept.”

  “I’m fine. Just—” Just got hit by a ball of light from space and now I have superpowers. “Couldn’t sleep. Weird night.”

  “I know the feeling.” Henry’s gaze drifted past Cade, toward his house, and fixed on something. “That a new tarp on your roof?”

  “Yeah, actually. That’s also what I wanted to ask you about. Had some kind of… I don’t know, meteor strike or something. Punched a hole right through to my living room. You know any good roofers?”

  Henry’s face shifted through surprise and concern. “A meteor? Good Lord. You weren’t hurt?”

  “Somehow, no. Just the property damage.”

  “Well.” Henry shook his head slowly. “Can’t help you on the roofer front, I’m afraid. The fellow I used to call passed on a few years back. But if you find a good one, let me know—my roof’s older than you are. Probably due for a look.”

  They exchanged a few more pleasantries, Cade promised to pass along any contractor recommendations, and he walked back to his house feeling strangely hollow. He’d sensed suffering—that was real, that had happened—but what was he supposed to do about an old man’s arthritis? The oath demanded action, but not every problem had a solution a superstrong twenty-something could punch.

  Figure it out later. For now, just get through the day.

  The drive to work felt surreal. His car sat oddly in the driveway—listing slightly to the driver’s side, the suspension compressed in a way he didn’t remember. Probably the cold. Cold did things to shocks.

  Cade had done this commute hundreds of times—the same highway on-ramps, the same exits, the same parking garage at the end. But today, everything looked different. The other drivers on the road, the pedestrians on the sidewalk, the homeless man huddled under an overpass—all of them registered in his awareness as points of pressure, faint signals of discomfort and dissatisfaction bleeding through some sense he didn’t yet understand.

  So many people. So much suffering.

  He pushed it down, turned up his podcast, and focused on the road.

  The office was a mid-rise in a suburban business park, all glass and gray brick, surrounded by similar buildings housing insurance companies and logistics firms. Cade badged in, nodding to the security guard, and donned his N95 mask as he entered the elevator. He’d worn masks in public since the pandemic, long after most people had stopped, because the calculus was simple: minor inconvenience to him, potential prevention of serious illness to someone immunocompromised. Minimizing suffering, in small ways. Some of his coworkers thought it was weird. He’d stopped caring about what they thought years ago.

  Today was an all-hands day, one of the mandatory in-office sessions that management insisted on quarterly for “collaboration” and “team building” and other buzzwords that mostly meant people who could do their jobs perfectly well from home had to commute instead. They were kicking off a new project, which meant requirements gathering, scope definition, architecture discussions—an endless parade of meetings that could have been emails, punctuated by awkward video calls with the remote team members who’d managed to avoid the in-person mandate.

  Cade was just grateful he could work from home most days if he wanted, and the commute wasn’t too bad. He’d always found being in person at an office to be more distracting than productive. He’d adapted. Mostly by tuning out during the parts that didn’t require his attention and letting his mind work on actual problems in the background.

  Today, though, tuning out was harder. Everywhere he looked, he felt that pressure, the low-grade suffering of people who’d rather be somewhere else, the anxiety of deadlines and performance reviews, the quiet desperation of lives that weren’t quite what anyone had planned. One woman in accounting was going through a divorce, Cade had heard, and he could feel it radiating off her like heat from a stove. A guy from DevOps was worried about his kid’s health. The project manager running their kickoff meeting was barely holding it together behind a cheerful facade, something dark and heavy sitting in her chest.

  How do normal people live like this? Surrounded by all this pain and just… not noticing?

  Maybe it was better not to notice. The oath pulsed: minimize suffering. But how was he supposed to minimize something so omnipresent, so woven into the fabric of human existence?

  He couldn’t. Not yet. So he focused on smaller things—not breaking the chair he was sitting in, not crushing the pen he was holding, not accidentally revealing to a room full of colleagues that something impossible had happened to him.

  It worked until about 2 PM.

  The meeting was one of those scope-definition sessions where everyone talked in circles about requirements they didn’t fully understand. Cade sat near the back of the conference room, trying to stay engaged, but his ADHD was in full revolt. He shifted in his chair, bounced his leg, clicked his pen, cycled through the usual repertoire of stimming behaviors that helped him survive meetings that were 80% filler.

  One of his shifts was too forceful. Or maybe the chair had simply had enough—it had been creaking under him all morning, louder than usual, the plastic flexing in ways he’d attributed to cheap construction. When he leaned on the armrest, it didn’t just crack. The whole chair lurched, the base groaning, the armrest snapping clean off as the frame beneath him bowed outward—

  Toward Matt’s laptop cord.

  The PM’s computer had been sitting at the edge of the conference table, charger cable trailing. Cade’s flailing grab caught the cable and yanked, pulling the laptop off the table and into the air. His reflexes—his new reflexes, faster than anything human—had him catching the device before it hit the ground, fingers closing around it in a grip meant to be gentle.

  The laptop screen shattered.

  His fingers had punched straight through the display, cracks spiderwebbing across the glass, the panel flickering and dying under the pressure of a grip he still couldn’t calibrate. Cade stared at the ruined device in his hand, at the perfect finger-shaped dents in the aluminum casing, and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

  “Holy shit,” someone said.

  “Cade, are you okay?” Someone else.

  He looked up. The whole room was staring at him. The broken armrest on the floor, the shattered laptop in his hand, and no explanation that wouldn’t sound insane.

  “I—these chairs are flimsy,” he managed. “The armrest just snapped. I’m so sorry, Matt, I was trying to catch it—”

  Matt was staring at his laptop the way you might stare at a beloved pet that had just been run over. “I’m going to have to reinstall everything on a new machine.”

  “At least the internals look intact. You might be able to dock it and pull your files off.” Cade winced. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Better than IT having to crack it open and extract the drive.” Matt sighed, running a hand through his hair. “It’s fine. These things happen.”

  Cade set the laptop on the table gently—so gently, hyperaware of every ounce of pressure on his fingers—and muttered another apology.

  The meeting resumed, but Cade could feel the room’s attention lingering on him. The guy who broke a chair and crushed a laptop in the same motion. People would talk about this. People would ask questions.

  He needed to be more careful.

  Lunch was usually a refuge.

  While his coworkers gathered in the break room or walked to nearby restaurants, Cade took his meal outside. The building had a summer outdoor eating area—picnic tables and metal benches arranged on a concrete patio—that sat empty through the winter months. No one else wanted to eat in thirty-degree weather. Cade didn’t mind the cold, didn’t want to take his mask off indoors, and valued the solitude more than the comfort.

  Today, though, he didn’t have anything to eat.

  He’d brought lunch, but when he’d opened the container in the office fridge, his body had responded with absolute indifference. No hunger. No desire. The same nothing he’d felt last night after his workout, as if whatever had changed in him had also rewritten his relationship with food.

  He’d been eating anyway, forcing fuel into a system that no longer asked for it, but today he just… didn’t. He sat alone on a metal bench, breath misting in the cold he couldn’t feel, and stared at the gray Ohio sky.

  I’m not hungry. I’m not tired. I’m stronger than should be possible. What else has changed? What am I becoming?

  The suffering-sense pulsed faintly at the edge of his awareness—distant signals from the people inside the building, muffled by walls and glass. He could feel his coworkers’ stress, their boredom, their quiet unhappiness, and beneath it all a current of something harder to name. Not pain exactly. Just… the weight of being human. The accumulated friction of lives lived in service of systems that didn’t care about them.

  Everyone is suffering. All the time. And they don’t even know it.

  He needed to test his strength. Really test it, in a way that would give him actual data about his limits. The gym was useless now; even if he bought more plates, he suspected it wouldn’t matter. He needed something bigger, something he could push against without restraint.

  His eyes fell on the metal bench beneath him.

  It was a heavy-duty thing, steel frame welded to concrete anchors, designed to withstand decades of weather and use. Three bolts on each leg, sunk deep into the concrete pad. A normal person couldn’t budge it.

  Cade glanced around. The patio was empty, the glass wall behind him tinted dark enough that he couldn’t see through it. He was alone. Probably.

  He reached down, gripped the edge of the bench frame, and pulled.

  The bolt sheared off like it was made of cheese.

  The ping of it—metal striking metal, the snapped bolt head ricocheting off the underside of the bench and flying into the bushes—was shockingly loud in the quiet afternoon. Cade released his grip immediately, letting the bench settle back onto its remaining anchors, and sat very still.

  Okay. So I’m strong enough to snap steel bolts with casual effort. Good to know.

  He didn’t try again. He didn’t need more data—not here, not now, not where someone might see. He just sat on the damaged bench, stared at the empty winter patio, and wondered what he was going to do with the impossible thing he was becoming.

  Inside the building, behind the tinted glass, three of his teammates stood at a window.

  “Is he… not eating?” one of them asked.

  “Just sitting there in the cold. Weird.”

  “Did you see him this morning? With the laptop?”

  “And the chair. And now—” They watched Cade stand up, brush off his pants, head back toward the building. “Did that bench just move?”

  “What?”

  “I thought I saw—never mind. Probably nothing.”

  But it hadn’t been nothing. They’d all seen the bench shift, heard the faint ping of something metallic, watched Cade freeze like a man who’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

  “Cade’s having a weird day,” someone muttered, and they drifted back to their desks, not sure what they’d witnessed but sure it had been something.

  Cade almost made it to the bathroom before Matt caught up with him. He’d been somewhat avoiding the PM since the laptop incident, but hallways only had so many exits.

  “Hey, Cade.” Matt fell into step beside him, voice casual but eyes sharp. “Quite a day, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Cade kept walking. “Sorry again about the laptop.”

  “Don’t worry about it. IT’s imaging a new one tonight, I’ll be back up by tomorrow.” Matt paused. “But I gotta say—that catch was impressive. I didn’t even see you move.”

  “Reflexes, I guess.”

  “And the armrest. Those chairs aren’t great, but I’ve never seen one just… snap like that.”

  Cade said nothing.

  “You might want to take some lessons from Clark Kent,” Matt said, and his tone was joking, light, the kind of thing a coworker says when they’re ribbing you about a weird moment and expect you to laugh it off.

  But Cade didn’t laugh. His stomach turned to ice, his stride faltered, and every alarm in his head started screaming at once. He knows. He can’t know, but he knows. How does he know? Did someone see the bench? The bolt? The—

  “I have to—” Cade grabbed the bathroom door handle.

  And pulled it clean off.

  The handle came away in his grip with a shriek of twisting metal, the mechanism tearing free from the door in a spray of screws and mounting hardware. Cade stared at it—a chunk of brushed steel now warped into an almost organic shape, like something that had been squeezed rather than pulled—and felt his face go pale.

  Fuck.

  “Cade—” Matt started.

  “Maintenance should know about this.” Cade set the handle against the wall beside the door, propping it there like it was the most natural thing in the world. “These fixtures are obviously defective. And who puts a handle on the push side? What kind of intuitive design is that?”

  He pushed through the bathroom door—actually pushing this time—and let it swing shut behind him, leaving Matt in the hallway looking at a broken handle and a head full of questions.

  Inside, Cade gripped the edge of a sink and stared at his reflection.

  Get it together. You’re drawing attention. You need to be more careful.

  But how was he supposed to be careful when every surface in the world felt like it was made of cardboard? When doors and chairs and laptops all broke the same way—easily, accidentally, inevitably—under hands that didn’t know their own strength?

  You adapt. You learn. You calibrate.

  He spent ten minutes in the bathroom, breathing slowly, visualizing gentle movements, trying to reset his baseline. When he actually used the restroom, he found himself weirdly relieved—at least something about his body still worked the way it always had. Then again, if he didn’t need food anymore, why did he still need this? It seemed like an unfair trade. All the inconvenience of being human, none of the pleasure of a good meal.

  When he finally emerged, the hallway was empty. Matt had gone wherever Matt went. The broken handle still leaned against the wall, awaiting someone else’s problem.

  Cade went back to his meetings.

  The rest of the day was an exercise in paranoid minimization.

  He didn’t lean on furniture. Didn’t grip anything harder than necessary. Kept his hands in his lap during meetings, his feet flat on the floor, his body as still as he could manage. The ADHD made it hell—every instinct screamed at him to move, to fidget, to burn off the energy building in his muscles—but he clamped down on all of it, terrified of another incident.

  Matt watched him.

  Cade could feel it without looking—the gaze tracking him across conference rooms, during breaks, in the hallway between sessions. Not hostile, exactly. Curious. Calculating. Matt had seen the laptop incident, heard about the chair—word traveled fast in small offices—and now he’d watched Cade tear a door handle off with his bare hands and pretend it was a maintenance issue.

  The jokes about Clark Kent hadn’t been jokes. Not really. Matt was putting pieces together, building a picture, and Cade didn’t know how to stop him.

  Just get through the day. Get home. Figure it out tomorrow.

  At 5:00, he was out the door while other people were still packing up. Let them think he was antisocial, let them talk about his weird behavior—at least he’d be weird at home, where the only things he could break belonged to him.

  The drive home was long and quiet. After picking up a new shower head, Cade turned off his audiobook and sat in silence, hands measured on the steering wheel, mind churning through the events of the day.

  He’d broken three things. A chair. A laptop. A door handle. All in front of witnesses, all requiring explanations that he’d barely sold. If this kept up—if every day brought new incidents, new moments where his strength slipped its leash—it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that something was genuinely wrong.

  Or genuinely strange, anyway. Whether it was wrong remained to be seen.

  Minimize suffering, the oath reminded him. But whose suffering? And how? He was stronger than any human had ever been, probably, and all he’d done with it today was destroy office equipment and terrify a project manager.

  Some hero he was turning out to be.

  He pulled into his driveway as the sun was setting, winter dark coming early, and sat in his car for a long moment before going inside. The tarp on his roof was visible from here—a blue splotch against the gray shingles, covering a hole that shouldn’t exist, marking the spot where his old life had ended and something new had begun.

  Tomorrow. I’ll figure this out tomorrow.

  He went inside, closed the door behind him, and tried not to think about what Matt might be telling people. About the whispers that were probably already spreading through his workplace. About how long he could keep this secret, and what would happen when he couldn’t anymore.

  His phone buzzed.

  Unknown number—or rather, a number he’d deleted from his contacts but still recognized. A number he’d trained himself not to call, not to text, not to think about when the loneliness got too heavy at 2 AM.

  Hey. Matt told me about your day. Are you okay?

  Sarah.

  Of course Matt had texted her. They’d all worked together before the breakup—same company, same team, Sarah and Cade having chosen it together straight out of school because they’d both had their pick of offers and wanted to be close. When Sarah left the company, she’d left Cade too, but she hadn’t left every friendship she’d built there. Matt had always liked her. Half the office still asked Cade how she was doing, not realizing—or not caring—that he had no idea anymore.

  Cade stared at the message for a long time. Then he started typing.