They stood at a grocery stall for twenty minutes with the line of people ahead of them going nowhere before Adon gave in to Mess’ whining and grabbed a pizza from the dispenser. When they got home, Adon offered Lu a plate, but Lu refused until Mess and Adon pouted like they couldn’t eat if he didn’t. He took half a slice, Adon happily scarfing down the other half and sliding a full plate in front of Mess, texting Aphrodite and pulling Mess’ homework out of his bag to sign for his test scores. 

“Messenger,” Adon chided between disappointed bites, “you promised you studied.”

“I did!” Mess frowned, clearly disappointed with his own results. 

“You tried as best you could? Really?” Adon arched a suspicious brow.

Mess nodded emphatically, but his frown deepened.

“Okay then,” Adon smiled, ruffling his hair and holding out the fifty-eight percent test on his second-hand tablet, “then if you tried your best, you deserve a reward.”

Lu watched in awe as Adon sent the test to their fridge display, so old and scratched that Lu could hardly see it beyond the amber tint. Adon decorated it with limited heart stickers and stars, then pulled the Used Center thrift-step page up, scrolling through pages of boys’ shoes while Mess began to squirm. 

“What about these?” Mess turned an expensive pair of shoes to Mess, taking it back when Mess shrugged listlessly, “don’t worry, I’ll find one you’ll like. A good pair that will last a while. But don’t forget we’re also saving to get you a district alert and ID badge.”

“Well…” Mess chewed his lip, concern creasing his brow as he admitted “maybe I didn’t try my best-best.” 

“Sometimes our best still doesn’t work out Mess,” Adon smiled earnestly, “we’ve talked about that, I know it’s hard to accept sometimes, but it’s important to celebrate your efforts too, not just the outcome. We ate cake when I finished the CAPT even though we don’t know my score yet, right?”

Mess’ face drooped miserably as he wrung his hands in his lap, staring at his test on the fridge. 

Lu watched the show, captivated by each move like a chess match. 

Adon held out another shoe option, Mess rejecting the neon green shoes with a small shake of his head. “Family will always accept you, Mess,” Adon continued scrolling through options, “even when you fail. As long as you try, that’s what matters. But we’ll accept you for whoever you are, so when you say you tried your best and failed, it’s family’s job to cheer you on extra so that you have the energy to keep trying, right?” Adon ruffled the top of Mess’ hair, tied back to match Lu’s. 

“I didn’t!” Messenger finally confessed, “I didn’t study! I didn’t try at all.” He shoved his pizza away from him, sulking at himself.

“Oh,” Adon dropped his arm, “but you said….”

Lu stopped chewing, the smacking of the cheese too loud in the unnerving silence stretching between them. He couldn’t tell if Adon’s disappointment was genuine confusion or an act to get Mess to understand the hurtful consequences of his lies. Watching them, Lu felt that Adon had lifetimes more experience than him. They were the same age, but Adon knew how to love a ten year old, and Lu didn’t even know how to like himself. He’d never had any kind of conversation about effort or intent, about trying or failing, with Pa or Benny. As long as he won, they didn’t care about the method, intimidation, arson, it didn’t matter. In fact, they seemed prouder when he cheated, but he only ever felt like a cheater. In the face of Adon’s sincere encouragement to try, Lu felt like a coward.

Lu simply followed the rules, and that set him apart from the other Wells kids. He didn’t have Grounder and Dusted parents high out of their minds. He didn’t have responsibilities yet, but he would have the Flock some day. He was being trained to sustain Gideon’s legacy, and then meant laughing at fingers flying through the pits, attending his training sessions and following Phaios to the track when he was bored. He gambled with uncles at noisy tables and listened to the Quartet gossip because he needed to know who to be wary of on his way to and from school. But he managed his nightmares alone, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d tried his best at anything. 

No… there was that portrait of a family member. He’d tried for hours to remember her face before sneaking a peek at the photo Pa had hidden in the drawer by his bed. IT was the first time Lu had tried to convey real emotion in his work: the fear of forgetting, the humiliation of being forgotten. And it was the first time he’d gotten second place, called to the Asylum counselor about emotion management programs and watching his exposure risk. 

Lu sighed, propping his head on his elbow and chewing the rest of his pizza while Adon walked Mess through his test corrections and excitedly found a perfect pair of shoes on sale, even though Mess cried that he didn’t deserve them. Lu smiled at them, watching Adon unconsciously add more pizza to Mess’ plate. Lu may have lost the art contest to Aphro, but he couldn’t blame the judges anymore. Her portrait of Adon was beautiful, but the more Lu hung around Adon, the more he realized Aphro’s work was devoid of emotion or personality. She’d painted Adon as his students and admirers saw him, the way they spoke of him, a distant beauty, a fleeting or saving kindness, a momentary infatuation or spark of interest as he passed, rather than the contradicting mathematically precise and organized leader guiding himself and his siblings and a dozen students toward the security of the Mids. 

Lu felt a sudden urge to draw Adon himself, to play with the delicate lines and capture the conflict of renowned beauty and judgemental eyes tired of suffering. He stared at Adon who was adding another piece of pizza to Messenger’s empty plate, illustrating complex math with cups and pens rather than the millions of resources the academy provided to wealthier students. Adon glanced over once, catching Lu’s steady gaze and blushing to his ears, but continued to explain answers to Mess, otherwise unphased by Lu’s quiet attention. Mess began to excitedly understand the larger concepts, working through the problems until he was completing them himself, high-fiving Lu while Adon cheered and began directing him through the next details. 

Lu pulled out his own tablet and began sketching Adon, refreshing an empty page each time he failed to capture the contradiction of innocence, focus, and determined grit. Adon wasn’t pretty like the Arcade stars or AIE actors, he was entrancing, a worthwhile ending of a survivor story, a hopeful encouragement, like a friendly nudge to try harder rather than the unobtainable or uncanny glitter of celebrity. He cared about people and saw a clear path forward where others saw only darkness. It was easy to follow his warmth like a beam of solar light, shoving through the crowd to get closer to the source. But who refilled Adon’s plate, Lu wondered, slouching onto the futon and giving up his drawing, watching Adon bent over Mess at the tiny counter. 

Aphro snuck in, glaring at Lu curled on her bed. She took the last three pieces of pizza without question and stalked to the desk in the corner with her headphones turned loud, ignoring Adon’s wave with an eye-roll. Adon and Mess shrugged at each other and continued their work while Lu watched happily, ignoring the smell of dust from the heater that had bothered him last time. Adon packed two lunches then flipped through his tutoring sheets, marking notes and corrections, jumping into student video calls that Mess and Aphro habitually ignored, and checked for his CAPT score update only once. It wasn’t posted yet. 

When Adon tucked Mess into bed after a fight about washing and brushing teeth, which Lu inadvertently solved with a video of Grounder tooth decay that Adon snatched away with a shout, Lu followed him out of the unit with an attempted wave at Aphy still in the corner. 

Adon headed to his cake-cafe shift, sliding a hairnet beneath his helmet as he waited for the handrail and Lu checked the weather alerts. 

“It’s raining up top,” Lu reported, looking at Adon’s lack of mask and pollution coat, “don’t you have a grav-suit?” Adon shook his head with an exhausted shrug and Lu gaped internally, keeping his face smooth. He didn’t know anyone without at least an old gravity suit. Most of the districts near the Wells required the tactical suits to survive outside the skywalks and corridors that dead-ended into collapse zones, access routes to the ground, or colonies that had once been the pinnacle of wealth and survival shortly after the Catastrophe, according to the Janes. But he remembered Adon weaving Mess through open halls, unconcerned about the air, and wondered if they couldn’t afford the protective necessities, or if they didn’t know. He thought of Adon pumping the handrail through the open rail pits that jumpers launched into, with or without chutes, his hands exposed to the dripping acid, skin flaking away, only the filter-less helmet between him and the ash-filled air. He thought of that flying finger. 

It would take months of exposure to harm a body, the way the Grounders wandered or the Dusters searched frantically for their next hits, but Adon’s nonchalance told Lu he’d done it a dozen times already. Lu shrugged out of his gravity suit coat, he had a dozen of them and he was outgrowing it anyway. He shoved Adon’s arms inside before he could object, pushing each finger into the gloves of the base layer inside, showing him quickly how to velcro the sleeves in place while the handrail screeched in front of them and several exhausted people jumped down. Lu tucked the zipper, connected the hood over Adon’s helmet, not letting him pull up the visor to argue, pulling the built-in filter of the coat over the mouthguard of the helmet to offer at least a small layer of protection, something he’d never even done for himself while racing Phaios on the track. He velcroed the collar in place and stepped back proudly, smacking Adon’s fidgeting hands away, ignoring his muffled objections. 

“I want you to be safe,” Lu felt the weight of the words as he said them. He was worried. He was worried about Adon. He wanted to protect him, the same way people insulated homes and contained fires to keep the heat. Adon was his only source of warmth, and he wanted him safe. Lu blushed at the truth of it, chewing his cheek and pointing a thumb behind him, “I’ll take the halls home, don’t worry, I won’t step out.” He could see Adon’s protest in the tilt of his head as he stepped up to the handrail and patted his helmet in farewell, letting his hand slide down Adon’s arm and grip his hand inside the grav-suit, “please be safe.”

Adon squeezed back and nodded, scanning his pendant ID and stepping onto the dangerous rail, waving once before adjusting his grip and pumping out into the open rains of Indigo District, winding around stilts and skywalks toward violet. 

Lu watched him shrink in the distance. He may be a prince among failed business empires, a spoiled rich kid who belonged next to Sophia Silver according to Adon and the Grounders, but he was just another kid from the Wells, racing the rains home before the floods could catch his ankles and drag him out to sea.

Lu raced home, getting lost only twice, unaccustomed to the halls. He found a dinner waiting for him, the silence of the cement hall pressing against him between each bite, the long banquet table mocking his loneliness. He wanted to go back to Adon’s. He wouldn’t look at the mold or frown at the cold draft sneaking through the window. He wouldn’t mind the rattle of neighbors on the other side of thin walls or the old appliances that had secret codes directions to get working. It was fine if Adon was there. He swallowed numbly, clanging his fork against the porcelain plate just to hear the sound echo off the pillared hall, sliding his feet over the plush carpet and counting the black and white checkerboard tiles, picking apart the food on his plate. He wondered how Adon and Mess would fight over the salad, giggling at the thought of Mess dunking each fresh leaf into a bowl of dressing, then laughed harder at the hypothetical look of horror on Adon’s face. 

When he finished, it was Junior who collected his dishes. They hadn’t talked in years. Lu followed him toward the kitchen, curious about the places he wasn’t allowed to go now that he thought about them. No one stopped him, and he bounced behind Junior with a million questions, like they’d never drifted apart. Junior ignored him, distracted by his own problems and the soft glares uncles gave as they passed. Benny was Pa’s second, managing the house and security training, but somehow Junior had managed to stay off Gideon’s radar, never being inducted into the Flock. Lu used to be jealous of Junior, always smiling, blaming his crazy mom any time uncles challenged him and asked why he didn’t join, laughing off the small threats of new members who didn’t yet know that he may be unaffiliated but that he could probably single-handedly ruin the Quartet alliance if he wanted to. He had too many friends. 

Lu had wanted to be like Junior once. But then he’d heard a fight in the greenhouse before Junior had distanced himself. Lu had snuck around a bush in time to see Benny hit Junior hard enough to drop him and understood that they all had the same kind of loving fathers. Junior just had a loving mother too. 

Junior left him in the kitchen, stalking away muttering something about his wife. When no one else came in for several minutes, Lu familiarized himself with appliances, bowls, and ingredients, then pulled up a tutorial for popular egg dish, following the recipe carefully and thinking of Adon who had made only two lunches. He wondered briefly where the chickens lived as he cracked the eggs, how they’d survived the Suffering and Catastrophe the Janes were so bent on teaching. He made the dish three times before he was confident, listening to the songs Adon had sent him over the weekend while he cooked, sketching his assignments between beeping timers and wishing he was at school for the first time ever as he wrapped the lunch box in the fridge and followed Benny out to another funeral parade.