Three days of nothing happening and I'd almost convinced myself that was allowed to just keep being true.
Gwen walks half a step ahead of me down Roosevelt, arguing that the new season of some detective show she's hooked on figured out its killer two episodes too early. I tell her that's the whole appeal, you're supposed to feel smarter than the cops for twenty minutes before the show catches up.
"That's not smart," she says. "That's the writers being lazy."
"Or generous. Ever consider generous?"
"I've considered a lot of things about you, Ethan. Generous isn't usually on the list."
It's the kind of afternoon that doesn't need anything from me. No Digivice buzzing, no rogue data signature lighting up somewhere across town, just two people walking and giving each other a hard time. Gatomon would call this boring. I'd call it the good kind of boring, the kind you don't get enough of when half your life runs on a system that likes throwing quests at you when you least expect it.
That's when the guy across the street stops walking like something yanked the string out of him.
He's maybe forty, business casual, the type who blends into every crowd on this block. He's just standing there, and then his hand comes up to his own collar like he's choking on something that isn't there. Gwen catches it before I do.
"Ethan."
I follow her eyes. The guy's shoulders lock up, and then he shoves the woman next to him hard enough that she stumbles into a mailbox. A grocery bag hits the pavement and splits open, oranges rolling into the gutter. Somebody yells. The man doesn't look like he heard it.
"That's not a normal person having a bad day," Gwen says, already moving.
"Yeah, I clocked that too."
We can't exactly Digivolve our way through a crowded street corner, so it's just us, two teenagers who look like they shouldn't be involved, wading into something that's actively trying not to be handled. I grab his arm from behind and he throws me off like I weigh nothing, which, for the record, I do not. Gwen gets between him and the next bystander, talking low and steady, the kind of voice you'd use on a spooked dog, and it buys us half a second.
He comes at me again and this time I get both hands on his forearm and drive him sideways into the side of a parked car. It's not clean. It's not anything close to how this would go if we could actually fight the way we're used to fighting. It's just two kids trying not to let a stranger hurt anyone, dragging out every ounce of the physical conditioning the System's been quietly stacking onto me since level two.
And then, as fast as it started, he just stops.
His whole body goes slack against the car door. The fight drains out of him like someone flipped a switch, and what's left in his eyes isn't rage anymore, it's confusion, raw and a little scared, like he woke up somewhere he doesn't remember walking to.
"What," he says, and doesn't finish the sentence. He looks at his own hands like they belong to someone else.
I still have his arm. His skin is hot, way hotter than it should be for a guy standing on a sidewalk in October, and under my palm I can feel a tremor running through him that isn't the aftermath of adrenaline. It's steadier than that. Rhythmic, almost. His eyes take a second too long to focus on my face, like his brain is running behind his body.
"Hey." I ease my grip, not letting go entirely. "You with me?"
"I don't." He swallows. "I don't know what just happened."
A crowd's already thickening around us, someone's got a phone out, and in the distance I hear the specific mix of sirens that means this is about to become somebody else's problem, which honestly, is the outcome I want. Gwen catches my eye and gives me the look, time to not be here when the questions start.
We back off into the gathering, letting an EMT crew take the guy by the shoulders, letting the crowd swallow us the way crowds are supposed to. That's when I feel it, the itch at the back of my neck that says I'm being looked at, and not by someone with a phone out for the free content.
I turn. There's a man standing still at the edge of the block, not filming, not craning his neck like everyone else, just watching. Watching me, specifically, in a way that makes the hair on my arms stand up. I blink and he's gone, folded into the foot traffic like he was never there at all.
"You good?" Gwen asks.
"Yeah." I glance back one more time at the empty spot where he was standing. "Yeah, I'm good."
I'm not entirely sure that's true, but it's the answer that lets us keep walking.
Back at the Digital Home that night, I lay it out for Gatomon and BlackGatomon the way I'd lay out a bug report, here's what happened, here's what I noticed, here's what I can't explain. BlackGatomon's ears flick at the part about the heat coming off his skin.
"Fever?" she offers.
"A fever doesn't make a guy shove a stranger into a mailbox and then forget it happened."
"So it's not a fever." Gatomon says it like she's already three steps past me. "Which means you don't actually have a theory. You have a symptom."
"Thanks for the diagnosis."
"I'm a cat, not a doctor."
I tell them about the guy on the corner too, the one who wasn't filming, and even as I say it out loud it sounds thinner than it felt standing there. Maybe he was just some rubbernecker who got bored and left. Maybe I'm reading main character energy into a stranger checking his phone.
"You get a good look at him?" BlackGatomon asks.
"Not really. He was just there and then he wasn't."
Nobody in the room has a better answer than a shrug, and eventually the conversation drifts somewhere easier, whether Cutemon's been sneaking extra food again, whether I'm actually going to sleep tonight or just tell myself I will. I let the stranger go. I let the heat under my hand go. Filed away, not gone, just quiet for now.
Across the city, in a basement that used to be a print shop before the presses got hauled out and sold for scrap, Jokermon held up the last shard between two clawed fingers and grinned at it like it owed him money.
"One more," he said, to no one in particular, since no one in particular was listening. "Little piece for a little nobody."
The man on the other end of the room didn't ask questions. He never did, not after the first shard took root in whatever passed for his spine these days. Jokermon pressed the fragment into his palm and watched the tremor start, the fast little flutter that meant it was working, and laughed the way you laugh at a joke only you're in on.
"You're not much," he told the man, who couldn't hear him anymore, not really. "None of you are. That's the fun part."
Every shard was a door left half open somewhere in the city, a little crack in the wall between here and home, and Jokermon had lost count of how many he'd scattered by now. He didn't need to keep count. Myotismon wanted an army waiting when the real door finally swung wide, and Jokermon wanted an excuse to watch the world twitch and jump every time one of his little presents went off.
Two birds. One very entertained stone.
He tucked the empty pouch back into his coat and hummed something that didn't have a tune, already thinking about where the next one would go.
***
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