Adon elbowed him away with a laugh. It wasn’t bad to smell like cake. Lu loved cake. The only reason Adon hadn’t left the cake shop was the look Lu gave the cakes when he brought them out. 

His phone buzzed again and Adon checked in case it was Mess, jumping as a runner ran past just as the rail butted against the gravity tunnel windows. Lu chuckled, but Adon frowned down at the auto-payment-received alert and opened his Asylum credit account to find his savings draining, the blue bar dropping into the red zone, a large PENDING printed over the grey TBD stipend. 

“It will be okay,” Lu assured, “it’s just two weeks. The stipend will kick in, we’ll graduate, and move to the Mids and fight about what to have for dinner.”

Adon nodded, resolutely, falling into Lu as the car lurched around a hairpin turn into the Wells Transport Center. They wandered home slowly, stopping for a dinner Lu insisted on, then a dessert they brought back to share, only to find the unit empty. Adon relaxed when his GPS map showed Mess beside Aphro at least, sighing at the embarrassing red fee notice displayed over their fridge screen, notifying him of permanent record fines. Lu said nothing. He wanted to, but their first fight wasn’t about Pa’s dealings with the Quartet, so it definitely wouldn’t be about Adon’s sister or mom either. It should be about not texting back soon enough, missing each other too much, or smiling at greedy students demanding Adon’s attention all the time, or about Lu avoiding the CAPT worksheets, or chewing with his mouth open because he wasn’t used to eating with others. While their peers had dramatic end-of-the-world fights and bragged about make-ups like there was no tomorrow, their fights about family traumas and growing into adults who never got to be kids, digesting all the impacts and adapting as they changed around each other could come later, slowly, in time. They had tomorrow. For now, they had to believe in tomorrow.

☆

Lu flopped on the familiar futon, expertly avoiding the painful center bar and patting the space beside him for Adon, who curled like a cat, only half in his lap. Neither of them looked at the bed or each other, too conscious of every movement between them, until Mess and Aphro banged loudly through the door and they were both glad for their noble restraint, horrified at the bare idea of acting on what they were both thinking. Lu caught Adon’s matching wide-eyed flush and began to giggle at what could have been, his soft laugh breaking Adon out of the nightmarish replay running through his head until they keeled over each other cackling, Mess jumping on them so he could join in their giggles.

Aphrodite looked at them, inhaled, paused, then ran back out the door before Adon could protest, not yet ready to voice the apology she knew she owed him, still seeking a way to carry the heavy weight of her guilt. Mess, on the other hand, saw the cake and reached for it from the warm place between them, wiggling his butt until Adon scooted over and Lu scoffed but handed him a fork. Mess swung his legs happily, looking from Adon to Lu and back again, happy to see them happy, “what’s so good?” he gestured to Adon’s twitching smile, his mouth full of cake.

“I got my test results today,” Adon tapped Mess chin, a habitual gesture to chew with his mouth closed.

Mess nodded, closing his mouth around another bite, turning to Lu for a better story than Adon would tell. 

Lu wrangled the certificate out of Adon’s bag, presenting it proudly to Mess, “your brother placed third, in the whole group of testers,” Lu explained, elaborating and bragging until Mess understood what it meant: no more pre-worn shoes or patched bags, no more shared beds, and their own kitchen. He looked at the Agricultural Program certificate with the same reverence and awe that clearwater held for their reflective ponds, imagining all the simple ways life would change, the time he would have to spend with them, playing games or watching movies like the other kids in his class who lived faraway did. He would understand their Mids references and no longer be the last name in their Academy roll call, all the Calderas saved to the end. 

They chased Adon excitedly around the unit, teasing his red ears until a neighbor pounded on the wall. They snuggled into the futon and let Mess show off the emotion-class video he’d made, intended to teach them about Asylum Security Enforcement and Private Security Providers.He told them all about his teacher scaring them with Sec-Offs coming into class and warning them about emotions going too high, about how the Mids kids at the academy were hardly bothered, but the Grounders like him were confused. Lu took over explaining how the newer district IDs measured things like heart rate and other signals, tracking individual health and AIE Systems tracked emotional exposure, to help citizens maintain balance and peace. All three of them agreed it was stupid, a leftover value from a The Catastrophe that wasn’t necessary anymore, but still embedded in every fiber-optic strand of the city on stilts. They talked about all the ways their lives would be better in the mids until Messenger leaned a frosting-covered cheek into Adon, “will you still work at the cakeshop?”

“No way,” Adon smiled, “I’ll be in the big greenhouses and food banks.”

Mess pouted, sniffing Adon’s shirt, “I’ll miss you smelling like cake.”

Lu snorted an I-told-you-so laugh. 

Adon rolled his eyes, “get a candle!” 

They laughed and juggled junk into bins, joking about nothing in particular, Lu fixing the hooks by the flood step so they didn’t get charged for the broken panel, Adon writing lists and the order he would complete them in, Mess packing all his favorite things that he would unpack over the next two weeks to use. When Aphy returned, she remained at her desk, sketching in a notebook with headphones on and they didn’t bother her to join in their cleaning party as they danced around the small unit and ignored arguing neighbors and barking dogs.

☆

On his way home to the Wells, deeper than the share-rail station went because he’d instinctually pressed the public car button even though Adon wasn’t with him, where the rain water still sat in knee-deep puddles from the storm days ago, Lu texted Adon while winding through the sludge and slime, sending increasingly ridiculous couple items. He actually liked the matching insignia rings, but the matching shirts and Bird suit costumes were just for fun. Adon responded with panicked question marks and Lu realized he had to explain the Birds and Gideon’s dumb Upper tuxedo uniform all the uncles wore unless they were in the construction jumpsuits that were supposed to be fireproof but… didn’t seem very effective given all the funerals Lu had been dragged to in the last year. 

Pa’s Flock wasn’t a gang the same way the Forest kids were, and he wasn’t the leader of organized crime he imagined himself to be, like the Conductor, royalty among the decrepit Wells, offering hope and jobs, but he was certainly on his way. The Flock had once been Gideon and his friends, running a bar in the Arcade like any other group of Grounders calling themselves a gang and inventing tags and exclusive turf rights. The Ground was a battlefield back then, all the uncles loved to lecture Lu about the days when they couldn’t even walk through a hall without getting ghost guns and their metallic predecessors fired at them, by Sec-Offs or each other. 

Lu didn’t know exactly what Pa’s griffon symbol was, but by the wings, he’d assumed it was some kind of bird. He’d gotten a warning alert when he’d searched it, and the Old Internet had too many conflicting definitions, so Lu just assumed it was a bird and didn’t think past it. The griffon was the Flock’s symbol the way the shield belonged to Forest, there had been meaning in it once, eroded over generational experiences cut off too early to be passed down. Pa was obsessed with birds. His insignia ring was something called an owl, all the uncles were initiated with a tattoo of a bird specifically picked by Pa. Lu assumed they had some kind of meaning when he was younger, but he’d accidentally overheard Pa and Benny arguing about which bird to give Kinesias, flipping through an old banned encyclopedia and choosing something called a Mountain Jay because Benny had extra blue ink and that was the one he wanted to ink. No meaning, no special choices, just a bird for a Bird, another member of Gideon’s Flock, another funeral Lu would have to attend. 

Pa’s induction tattoo was a large owl, black ink with yellow eyes, that took up his entire left arm and shoulder, with a falcon added to the left when Lu was born. Benny had a similar tattoo that was a different bird, something plucky and not so much intimidating as it was annoying looking. Benny had said the founders of the Flock all got the tattoos, but Lu had only ever heard Pa reference the founder as himself. It wasn’t the first time Lu thought of them as a cult as he wandered lazily through half-assembled halls, his grav-suit and helmet fully connected, safe inside his suit as he flicked his fingers over the touchpad on his leg to text Adon back, the messages flashing in the corner of his mask screen.

Lu had never seen a bird. He’d heard the crows come down after a bad flood season, the pigeons and doves that had blown down from the uppers, even a few gulls when Benny brought him to the docs, but he’d never seen them flying free through the sky the way Benny described. Lu wasn’t allowed out for the first three weeks after the big floods, when the birds came down and the jumpers turned into floaters. Benny said there were too many bodies to trip over when they had everything at the compound. He’d been shut in for weeks, which was when he started drawing. There were only so many times he could fight Phaios for the AIE System or beg Junior to let him change the channel. 

Lu sighed up at the cement mansion, warm light bleeding out of the windows of the training hall in the basement, the garage where Phaios was probably working with Benny, even the deeper rooms that Lu had never seen had lights on past curfew. It wasn’t unusual, he was just feeling briefly nostalgic for a time when he hadn’t known he was cold. He entered the quiet stone house, squinting in the dark of the entry hall and eyeing the cement pillars standing like sentinels along the walls. 

A light clicked on in the adjacent study, Pa’s voice demanding from inside, “come here, Lu-Bird.”

Lu strode past the long banquet table in the center of the hall, his socks sliding over the black and white tile, passing the columns like the grave monuments that sometimes caught the Flock’s grounder bikes on the way to the docks. He did not sigh, he did not roll his eyes, he stood in the doorway of a room he’d passed every day of his life but only entered twice, hovering near Benny slouched in a chair, head in his hands, waiting for Pa who stood stiff at a large illusion of a window. 

“I have a job for you,” Pa enunciated each word carefully, “failure will prove Benjamin’s incompetence, which I am already highly suspicious of.”

Lu frowned at Benny’s wince, stepping further into the room to accept the box Pa held out for him. 

Pa sighed, “if you can’t do even this simple chore,” he dropped the box into Lu’s hand, returning his gaze to the window, “then I’ll have to agree that your mother was right in denying you an ID. I’ll declare you both useless and feed you to the owls.”

Lu nodded at the strain in Pa’s clipped voice, remembering the very real threat he’d offered Benny, that if Lu wanted to leave, he could just jump. He thought of Pa pushing him off the top of the CAPT Admin building, Benny falling behind him. Pa’s words caught up to him as Lu’s stomach iced over, his voice soft and confused as he ventured through his question, “I don’t… I don’t have an ID?” He glanced at the wristband glowing orange. 

“Of course you have one.” Pa snapped, “you wear mine. Your mother is a selfish woman.”

Lu’s sweaty hands slid over the smooth wooden box, shifting it, filing all the questions for later as he caught sight of the cuts and bruises over Benny’s shaking body. He’d never looked so old. Lu felt responsible, determined to complete Pa’s task to save Benny, who had taught him to throw a solid hook, to watch the business and respect the uncles, to try to fill Pa’s expectations as much as possible. He thought for a second of the CAPT test, the scanners at every entrance, and what it would mean if he had no ID, if he couldn’t take the test, if there wasn’t even a chance of escape. If that was what Pa meant, if he wanted to leave Pa’s house, it would be without a district ID, and the nameless ended up on the Ground, no matter what their story was. 

He felt the chains of un-freedom choking around him, realizing his ignorance as they pulled tight against his throat, blocking any of his questions and stopping his fear from raging. 

“Dispose of that properly,” Pa instructed, pointing at the box, “and I do hope you at least understand the meaning of that.”

“Gideon?” Heranika called from the hall, following his voice to the office, letting herself in.

Pa glared dismissively at Benny as he followed his wife out, flicking his eyes once at Lu with a daring sneer, “tick-tock Lu-Bird.” He shut the door behind them. 

Lu rolled his eyes, bending down to check on Benny, wiping his bleeding forehead and tracking his bleary eyes with a finger, “you’re concussed, Ben.” He scrambled up to get ice, but Benny grabbed his wrist, stopping him. 

“You get that box as far away from you as you can tonight, understand? Acid pits, the body ground, anywhere away from you,” he coughed. 

Lu sat him upright, patting his back, unnerved by the panic in Benny’s wheeze. 

“Phaios is in the garage already, he’s got the nav set up. He’ll go with you.” Benny coughed again, clearing his throat, “you get to the acid pits, you throw the whole box, you come back. Gideon will time you as soon as you leave. He’ll know where you go.” Benny flinched, gripping his side and patting Lu’s concerned shoulder, “at least get it past the cones at the barricade and it will be fine.”

Lu nodded. Pa had tested him with inane tasks before, measuring progress, he’d called it. He’d rewarded Lu’s successes with paint and brushes and canvases, a fair trade, his hobby in exchange for his display of value. But this time was different, heavier. Pa was not passing by as Lu displayed his skills, but sat along the rail where Phaios had the bikes, watching. All his attention was on Lu. It felt dangerous.