When he returned for Lu’s final semester, Phaios came with a nervous tick, always chewing his lip or picking at cuticles. Lu grilled him about drugs, debts, or accidents, but Phaios swore he’d had a good season, and Lu had watched all the race videos to confirm it was true. 

One night, Lu finished his final for the art portion of his apprentice workshop and eagerly moved on to drawing another version of Adon in their small studio apartment, this one chubby and enjoying all the cakes he’d once made for Aphy, when he heard Phaios’ voice fall into the deeper Grounder inflection, his accent shifting. Lu sat up on his bed, watching as Phios muted the racing game he’d been playing, pacing the room with grunting questions and one-word answers before plopping down heavily beside him on the couch with a sigh. 

Lu grumbled about him shaking the couch with his stomping, turning off his tablet screen and waiting for Phaios to speak. 

Phaios sighed again. “Nika said… stay above the seventh. Junior dropped a hint about the theater going silent,” he drew his hand across his neck, “curtain closed.”

Lu blinked at him, the Grounder vocabulary sounding ridiculously dramatic and foreign, especially in their shiny new Mids accents. Security was raiding the Quartet? The Conductor ordered an intermission? Those phrases meant nothing to Lu anymore and he didn’t try to interpret. He never went below the seventh anyway, that world belonged to Gideon and Benny and all the versions of Lu he wanted to forget except one. He shrugged and returned to his tablet, “I have finals.”

Phaios chewed his lip raw, “you don’t… care what happens? On the ground?”

Lu dropped his tablet to his lap with a thoughtful pause, meeting Phaios’ eye and watching his only friend flinch away, squinting at him accusingly. Lu narrowed his eyes with a sigh, “is Adon on the Ground?” 

Phaios frowned, surprised at the sudden mention of the name he’d carefully avoided for three years, shaking his head, “I mean your family. Benny? Pa? Heranika—”

Lu snorted, returning to his tablet, “then no, I don’t care at all.”

Phaios licked his swollen lip, still biting his finger anxiously, his voice low, “but… something’s going to happen.”

☆

Lu’s phone buzzed and he pulled it from beneath the blankets with a scoff, flipping it around to show Phaios, watching his reaction to the text from Benny. Benny had reiterated Gideon’s command that Lu report for training, pleading rather than ordering. Lu pouted, “Gideon still thinks I’m studying law under his ID, which is illegal and not actually possible anymore. He thinks I’ll willingly return to act as his inheritor.” Lu sighed, tossing his phone and tablet on the bed and jumping into gym clothes, “but he just wants me beside him because the Conductor thinks that if Gideon can control his son, he deserves a place in the Symphony or whatever.”

“Quarter,” Phaios corrected, “why would he think that?” He pulled on his own stinking gym shirt, sniffing socks he picked up off the floor.

“Remember that grounder accident? At the track, with the security raid?” Lu took his socks from Phaios and handed him a clean pair of his own before he could ruin another pair of Lu’s.

“When Y got yanked?” Phaios hopped on one foot, pulling on the socks, “that was Gideon.”

Lu nodded, searching for a clean shirt, “so the whole Quartet would have been at war if they found the gun was Gideon’s.”

Phaios threw a sock at Lu, “I told you that.”

Lu tossed the sock back to Phaios’ side of their room, “remember our run to the dump?”

Phaios smacked Lu’s shoulder, appalled, “I told you not to peek!”

Lu shrugged, finally removed from the consequences of Gideon’s bad choices, “I gave it to X. Well, Junior gave it to X.”

“Who?”

“The Conductor’s son. He has the gun that shot Y.”

“Why would you do that?” Phaios looked Lu over, recalculating his judgments, “are you actually stupid? Or genius?”

“Both,” Lu shrugged again, holding the door open. “X wants to get rid of the Quartet without collapsing the Wells.”

“And you believed that?” Phaios stomped behind Lu to the gym.

Lu scoffed, “if he went through as much as I did, I certainly do. Who would be more determined to fight corrupt fathers than their broken sons?”

Phaios paused, staring at the tips of eagle wings peeking out of Lu’s collar, then jogged to catch up, “is that why you did that? To Adon?” He watched for Lu’s flinch at the name, but he remained calm, “to provoke your Pa?”

Lu halted, but did not turn. He sighed, shouldering the responsibility himself as he hefted his bag, so Phaios wouldn’t be tempted by the chipping guilt, “I wanted to protect Adon from the Flock. Now… now I just want him to be safe. And happy.”

“Do you… want to meet him again? Someday I mean?”

“No,” Lu draped an arm around Phaios with a betraying sigh, “as long as he’s okay, it’s fine. It’s all fine.”

At the gym, Arez made Lu run extra laps for not calling him trainer or John or Coach, even though they’d known each other for nearly four years as friends, and he’d never punished Phaios who was much more of an asshole than Lu was. It was Arez’s only retaliation against Lu for taking up his time to study various techniques and master all the different forms as his best student, winning each sparring match that Arez wasn’t on his game for, and still refusing to represent their gym in tournaments. 

Lu could fit anywhere in the Mids by then, except Arez’s gym, where he intimidated the boys with his Grounder accent (emphasized by Phaios), his giant tattoo, and the quiet way he pounded the bags, following the session board without complaint. The gym was constantly enthralled by new rumors and theories, only for Lu to ignore them without offering answers and continually deny Arez any hope of coaching a champion. 

During training hours, Lu and Phaios both could get fucked as far as Arez was concerned, but after he closed up, they were back to friends, arguing about which dining cart had the biggest portions as they limped growling stomachs past other obligations. Lu once again refused the offer of a local tournament spot, despite the promise of a good purse. The fight cage reminded him too much of the pits, and the flying finger in his memory always made him nauseous, reminding him of warm noodles and Adon’s confused shock as he tried to understand why Lu was telling him about it at all. Besides, Lu was never training for a one-on-one combat that followed rules with refs. He was preparing for uncles and canes and wrist straps holding him down as needles marred his skin.

The uncles arrived the day after his graduation ceremony. Lu stood at his post box, opening his assignment envelope that would tell him his first employment position, when he heard them rustling around the corner. He fought them off for an impressive ten minutes, even Mykos started to get upset and annoyed that it was taking so long. It felt good, punching Troy, and Old Paris, and all the men who’d bragged that they’d changed his diapers then watched as Pa slammed a bejeweled fist into his face and laughed. It felt religious, to push back against every taunting order he’d once followed, to shove away the people who had stood guard at his door, keeping him locked in, felt like he was finally breaking free of the trappings of Gideon’s cultish Flock. But there were seven of them, with years of training and experience Arez could never compete with, then there were knives pulled too eagerly as Sias entered with a ghost gun aimed at Lu’s head and the uncles inhaled nervously. 

“Time to return, little prince. Gideon has some words for you.” Sias snickered, slapping Lu’s fists away from his useless guard and rattling the plastic gun, “let’s go.”

They surrounded him, wrestling him into a rail car like a celebrity security detail, and no one helped because the Lower Mids were too close to the ground and everyone there was terrified of attention that might send them stumbling down a single layer. 

“Have a good talk with your Pa,” Old Paris sneered, “he’s getting… mighty close with that Conductor, so we don’t need no warring princes, ya hear?”

Lu squinted through the thick accents he’d once understood intuitively, wondering if he’d ever shared their accents fully, or if he’d always been somewhat removed from the Wells by Pa’s ambitions. 

Slowly, as the rail car jerked along the descending track, he realized Gideon hadn’t sent them, they’d come because they were nervous, to protect themselves from whatever politics they didn’t understand. 

“Did…” he sighed, confused and unsure whether to reveal his losing hand, his endless ignorance, “did Heranika send you?” She wouldn’t, but her psycho son might have, “I don’t have a legal degree,” he confessed his secret easily, his throat clenching as his body remembered his unintentional promise to Adon to stay alive before his brain did. If Gideon wanted to push him off the Uppers for defying his will, then let the obits call him a jumper, maybe he’d see Adon at the funeral. Maybe Gideon would pay the fee and let his brick be a swirl of colors instead of that cloudy clear glass. He scoffed at the thought, who was there to pick a color? Who would know the only color he ever thought of was all the steel blues of Adon’s eyes, the lustrous blondes he could never get quite right, the warmth of his skin tone that didn’t quite match his hair, beautiful and imperfect. He sighed at their shocked faces, pushing his hair out of his face with a sheepish shrug, hardening it into an impressive imitation of Gideon’s calm warning voice, “I don’t have anything that will help you, and Gideon has no right to expect anything from me. 

Lu glanced out the square window, watching the station approach. As they cleared the approach light, he dove over Troy, hit the emergency door-open line right as they halted in front of the plexiglass platform doors, all of them sliding open with the emergency alert siren wailing. Surprised it had worked, Lu dashed between grabbing hands and swishing doors, tripping through the rush hour crowd  of the public platform as Sec-Off patrols raced to the alarming private car, calling for perimeters as they eyed the uncles’ coats and tattoos. 

Lu guffawed inwardly, elated and proud as he twisted instinctively through skywalks and corridors, cutting over the grav-tunnels and back toward Magenta District. They’d kidnapped him, trapped him as he always knew they would, but he’d escaped. The horror of helplessness clashed with annoyance and giddiness at his victory. He’d done it. He’d done it once, and now he knew it could be done again, and he felt the entire universe inside him shift into the new reality: he was freeable. 

He passed a cake shop and ducked inside, smiling at his celebratory reward. 

☆