The petition had three days left, and Caleb spent the first of them in his mother’s basement learning how not to die from his own power.

It was Sam’s idea. Sam had been quiet at the table the night Caleb came back from the review, and then he’d said, in his flat way, "You blacked out on a kaiju’s neck and a stranger told you to sit down before you burned up. That’s a problem you can practice."

"You don’t practice this."

"You practice everything." Sam had spent two years not being able to hold a spoon. He had opinions about practice.

So the basement.

Sam had salvaged a diagnostic cuff off a decommissioned training suit, one that read kinetic sync off the skin, and he’d wired it to an old tablet that showed one number and a graph. He fitted it to Caleb’s left forearm, over the new bone, and powered it up.

[KINETIC SYNC: 1.2%]

"There’s the famous number," Sam said.

"There it is."

"Now do the thing, and do it small, not the whole arm. Just wake it up a little."

Caleb closed his eyes and reached for the silver like he had on the kaiju’s neck, except slower, just a touch, just enough to feel it stir under his ribs.

The number jumped.

[KINETIC SYNC: 9%]

The cuff chirped. Caleb’s whole left side went warm, and the warmth wanted to keep climbing, to spill up his arm and out. He let it for one second, and then the burn started, that fast. He pulled back, and the number dropped.

[KINETIC SYNC: 1.2%]

"Okay," Sam said, watching the graph instead of Caleb. "That right there is the problem. You touched it and it tried to take your whole hand. Four minutes at Verrin and you were done. Why four?"

"I don’t know. That’s when it ran out."

"It didn’t run out. You ran out." Sam set the tablet down. "Listen. When I woke up, my body wasn’t mine. Two years gone. The brain says lift the arm and the arm just lies there, foreign, like it belongs to a guy who left. And every physical therapist I had said the same wrong thing. They said force it."

He flexed his own hand, slow, the tendons standing up.

"Forcing it doesn’t work. You tear something every time."

"What works is you stop treating it like a tool that’s broken and start treating it like a person who doesn’t trust you yet. You ask for a little. It gives a little. You don’t grab. You don’t punish it for being slow. You build the trust back one inch at a time, until the arm believes it’s yours again."

He looked at his brother.

"Your silver isn’t a battery you’re draining in four minutes. It’s a thing in your chest that doesn’t know yet whether you’re going to use it up and throw it away, like everybody’s used up everything you’ve ever had."

"So it spends itself all at once, scared, before you can. Same as a man would."

Caleb sat with that.

"You’re telling me to make friends with it."

"I’m telling you it’s already part of you, and it’s waiting to find out what kind of part. You decide that, and you don’t decide it in a fight. You decide it here, slow."

Sam picked the tablet back up. "Again, but smaller. And this time don’t pull back when it scares you. Don’t grab and don’t run. Just hold steady, and let it sit at the edge with you."

***

They worked for three hours.

It went badly for two of them. Caleb would wake the silver, the number would climb, the burn would start, and his whole body would want to either slam it open or shut it down, and both of those were grabbing, and Sam called it every time without looking up.

"Grabbed," when he slammed at it. "Ran," when he shut it down. "Grabbed again," flat, with no judgment in it, just the call.

Around the third hour something shifted.

Caleb stopped trying to manage the number. He just sat with the warmth at the edge of his ribs, breathing, like you’d sit near a dog that’s been kicked, not reaching, just being there until it decides you’re not the next boot.

The burn rose. He didn’t flinch from it and he didn’t feed it. He let it be a thing in the room with him.

The number climbed and held.

[KINETIC SYNC: 22%]

[STABLE]

It sat there. No spike, no crash. Twenty-two percent, steady, and the burn was there but it wasn’t eating him, it was just warm, like a hand on his chest that had decided to rest instead of grab.

"There," Sam said quietly, leaning toward the graph. "Look at that, it’s holding stable."

"How long can I hold it?"

"Don’t ask how long. Asking how long is you already planning to spend it. Just hold."

So Caleb held. And the silver held with him. And it didn’t feel like a countdown anymore.

That was when he felt the other thing.

It came in under the warmth, faint, like a train two stations off, felt through the soles before you hear it.

It wasn’t in the basement with them. It sat out east, and down, and far, something of the same nature as the silver, and there was more than one of it.

A low, patient weight, off under the city, the same as the silver was a weight under his ribs. And for half a second the silver in his chest leaned toward it like iron toward a magnet, recognizing kin.

Caleb’s eyes came open. The number crashed on its own.

[KINETIC SYNC: 1.2%]

"Whoa." Sam was on his feet and crossing to him. "Hey, you went gray. You were stable a second ago. What happened?"

"I felt them." Caleb’s voice came out wrong. His hands were shaking, and not from the burn.

"Sam, I held it steady and I felt them. The statues, the eleven, east of here and under the ground. The thing in me knew them. It pulled toward them like it wanted to go."

He pressed his palm flat against his chest, hard, like he could hold the silver down.

"It isn’t only a power, Sam. It’s the same thing they are, and I’m the same thing they are. I just got close enough to feel it."

Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. He sat back down on the basement step, slow, like he did everything.

"Okay," he said finally. "Okay. So now you know something you didn’t this morning."

"That I’m turning into a kaiju."

"That you can feel them. Those aren’t the same sentence, and you’re going to want to keep them not the same." Sam’s voice stayed flat and level, an anchor.

"You held it steady today, on purpose. A thing that’s been blacking you out, and you sat with it for thirty seconds and it behaved. That’s the headline."

"The rest is information, and we use information."

Caleb looked at his brother, who had come back from being gone into a body that didn’t want him and had argued it into belief one inch at a time, and who was now sitting on a basement step telling him the same thing was possible with this.

"You’re better at this than the physical therapists," Caleb said.

"I had a worse patient," Sam said, and almost smiled. "Myself, mostly."

The cuff was still on Caleb’s arm. The number sat at 1.2, the old useless famous number, except it wasn’t useless anymore and it wasn’t the real number anymore either, and somewhere under his ribs a weight had learned, for half a minute, to rest instead of run.

Three floors up, a feed sat open and locked, as it always was, and Caleb thought about that as he peeled the cuff off, about the one viewer who had watched him learn to do this through whatever she watched him through.

He didn’t know if she’d seen the basement. He suspected she saw everything. And he suspected she was pleased, in whatever cold patient way a thing like that was pleased, because every hour he spent learning to hold the silver instead of burning it was an hour he became more useful to whatever she was keeping him for.

He filed that with the rest, and went upstairs and ate and did not tell his mother that for half a minute that afternoon he had felt eleven buried things turn toward him in the dark like they’d been waiting for him to learn their language.

Three days left on the clock. And one new thing he could do, and one new thing to be afraid of, which was turning out to be how most days went now.