Tala healed faster than he should have.
Gray watched from across the warehouse, his back against the wall, his pattern-sight dim but persistent. The boy who had nearly drowned in the subway tunnel sat by the makeshift hearth, wrapped in blankets that Mina had produced from somewhere, his dark hair still damp but his color already returning. Hours had passed. Hours. And yet Tala looked like he'd slept for a week, his eyes bright, his movements easy, the trembling that should have lasted for days already gone.
Something about it prickled at the back of Gray's skull. He'd seen injuries before. He'd watched people die from less. The cold alone should have settled into Tala's bones, left him shivering and weak for days. Instead, the boy was asking questions, making jokes, looking at the warehouse like it was a gift he'd been waiting his whole life to receive.
"You're staring," Mina said quietly, appearing at Gray's elbow. Her voice carried no accusation, only observation. She'd learned to read him in the weeks since they'd met, and she knew his silences weren't empty.
"Something's not right," Gray admitted, keeping his voice low. "He should be worse. He nearly drowned."
Mina's gaze moved to Tala, thoughtful. "I checked him over. His lungs are clear. No fluid. His temperature is normal. By everything I understand, he should be dead or dying, but instead..." She trailed off, her brow furrowing. "Instead, he's healing like the water never touched him."
Gray's pattern-sight flickered, reaching toward Tala without his full consent. The threads around the boy were strange, layered in ways he was beginning to recognize but still couldn't fully interpret. There was something in Tala's chest, a pulse of blue-green light that throbbed in rhythm with something beyond the walls of the warehouse. Beyond the city. Beyond anything Gray could name.
It reminded him of the water in the tunnel. The way it had seemed to glow. The way it had released Tala when he reached safety, as if it had been carrying him rather than drowning him.
Tala reached for a water bottle on the floor beside him.
The liquid inside shifted.
Not much. Not enough for anyone else to notice. But Gray saw it, a tremor that ran through the water like a response, like recognition. The surface rippled without being touched, without being shaken, without any cause that physics could explain.
Tala didn't seem to notice. He lifted the bottle to his lips and drank, his throat working, his eyes on Elias, who was explaining something about supply routes. The water settled back into stillness, but Gray's pulse did not.
He looked at Mina. She was watching Tala too, her expression unreadable, but there was something in her eyes that told him she'd seen it. The shift. The impossible movement of something that should have been inert.
She caught his gaze across the room. A question formed in her expression, silent and careful. *Did you see that?*
He nodded. Once. Barely perceptible.
They would watch. They would wait. Whatever was happening to Tala, whatever had happened in that tunnel, it wasn't over. The water had moved wrong, and wrong things in this new world had a way of becoming dangerous.
---
The afternoon stretched into evening, and Tala's energy only seemed to grow. He'd attached himself to the group with an ease that should have been impossible, a stranger becoming family in the span of hours. He joked with Ren, who had been quiet and withdrawn since the collapse, coaxing the younger boy into a conversation about the best places to hide during a storm. He flirted clumsily with Mina, who laughed for the first time in what felt like weeks, a sound that startled everyone including herself.
And he looked at Gray and Elias like they had hung the stars.
"I've been alone for so long," Tala said, during a lull in the conversation. His voice was soft, but it carried through the warehouse with the weight of confession. "After my family... after I lost everyone... I thought I was the only one who could see the threads. I thought I was going crazy."
Elias, who had been documenting something in his notebook, looked up. His expression was measured, careful, but Gray could see the interest beneath the surface. "You see the threads? The same ones Gray sees?"
Tala nodded. "They're everywhere. Connecting things. Showing me where to go, what to avoid." He paused, his gaze dropping to his hands. "Sometimes they show me things that haven't happened yet. Warnings. Possibilities."
Gray felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. The threads showed him patterns, structures, the underlying architecture of reality. But they didn't show him the future. They didn't speak to him or guide him. They simply were, and he observed.
What Tala was describing was different.
"Can you show me?" Gray asked, his voice careful. "Can you show me what the threads look like to you?"
Tala's face lit up. He closed his eyes, his expression shifting into something like concentration, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then Gray's pattern-sight flared, responding to something he couldn't name, and he saw it.
A thread, blue-green and luminous, stretching from Tala's chest toward the water bottle on the floor. It pulsed with light, with intent, with something that looked almost like hunger. And as Gray watched, the water inside the bottle trembled again, responding to the thread like a instrument responding to a player.
Tala opened his eyes. "Did you see it?"
Gray nodded slowly. He had seen it. And he wished he hadn't.
Because the thread wasn't just connecting Tala to the water. It was pulling from it. Drawing something out. And the water, for its part, was giving. Freely. Eagerly. As if it recognized Tala as something other than human.
As if it recognized him as kin.
---
That night, after Tala had fallen asleep in a corner of the warehouse, his breathing deep and even, Gray found Mina by the window. She was staring out at the ruins, her expression troubled, her hands wrapped around a cup of something warm.
"The water moved for him," she said, without turning around. "Twice that I saw. Maybe more."
"I know."
"He's not just healing fast. He's healing like the water is helping him. Like it's part of him." She turned to face Gray, her eyes searching his face. "What does that mean? What is he?"
Gray wished he had an answer. He wished he understood his own abilities well enough to make sense of what he'd seen in Tala's threads. But the truth was, he was still learning. Still guessing. Still trying to survive long enough to figure out what this new world had made of him.
"I don't know," he admitted. "But I think we need to find out. Before it becomes a problem."
Mina nodded slowly. "And if it already is one?"
Gray looked at Tala's sleeping form, at the boy who had emerged from the water like something born of the storm, and felt the weight of responsibility settle onto his shoulders. Another person to protect. Another mystery to solve. Another thread in a pattern that kept getting more complicated.
"Then we deal with it," he said. "Together. Like we always have."
Mina's expression softened. She reached out and touched his arm, a brief contact that carried more meaning than words. "You're a good man, Gray. Even when you're terrified."
He didn't feel like a good man. He felt like someone stumbling through the dark, trying not to trip over the bodies of the people he'd failed to save. But he didn't say that. He just nodded, and watched the water bottle by Tala's side, and waited for it to move again.
It didn't. Not that night.
But Gray knew it would. Eventually. The water had recognized something in Tala, and water, like all things in this new world, had a long memory.