Lu thought moving through the world would be easy after leaving Gideon, but when it was still difficult, he thought of it as penance. He tried to date, but the girls only wanted a bad boy Grounder but conveniently without the PTSD problems of jolting violently any time they ran sharp nails along the nape of his neck or blew that ruddy oil and electricity smelling smoke in his face. They wanted him to change for them, to become warm but remain cold to the rest of the world, to be an exception to the monotonous same-ness of the Mids. No matter how much he tried to blend in to avoid them, however, he always gave himself away by not quite dressing the part—an easy target. One girl broke up with him after a week because he coughed so hard he cried while his body adjusted to the elevation and sway of the stilts. She said men weren’t supposed to have tear ducts and Lu was so shocked that he pocketed the entire breakup while it was happening to tell…. He didn’t have anyone to tell. 

He tried to date, he really did. But then the boys… the boys reminded him too much of Adon. 

Lu watched people, mimicked them, repeated their mannerisms and cadences until the accent felt natural. He endured loveless breakups and obsessed over class projects. He nodded along with workshop criticisms of his designs, wrote absent marketing reports full of analytical errors that professors still praised, until he understood that he would always be different, that they expected failure of him and so his minimal effort was greeted with an offensive gravitas and patronizing encouragement. He would never belong among the Mids, he was already scarred with ugly black lines, Gideon’s talons already flying away with his insides, leaving him hollow and lonely and always looking up, wondering where Adon might be above him. 

After his first year, Lu began to relax, confident that Gideon could no longer drag him away. He still kept himself surrounded by people, just in case the uncles tried, but he stopped racing between the rail and his dorm, stopped scarfing down dinners squatting at corner tables watching the doors, until he understood that he was more than just different from the Midders. He was different from other people in general. Others regrew their hearts, giving them away, feeling the world break them, cracking and straining through growing pains, then regrowing them, again and again, in layers like the trees they’d never seen. They were fragile as glass and reblown at will, another and another, and Lu couldn’t help but admire their courage. He’d only ever had the capacity to grow one, and he’d given it away so carelessly. No, not carelessly, he realized as he drew Adon in the margins of his tablet notes, sketching him in endless new canvases auto-saved with no intention to be kept. He’d expected to be able to grow another like everyone else, but guilt or pride or grief poked at his lonely empty chest until he accepted the hole and stopped trying to fill it.

Committed to the empty space beside him, the one he’d evicted himself, the one he still held doors open for, the one he sometimes looked for in the swarming crowds of the transport hubs, Lu closed himself off from his peers. Accidentally at first, focusing on revising half-assed worksheets and finishing his curriculum with good enough grades that he could ensure a decent job in the Mids, the kind Gideon's uncles couldn’t pull him away from, the kind that made him necessary and important, that could give him a purpose. 

But then, his isolation became purposeful, because the more he learned about what normal was for his young peers, the more of an outsider he felt, the more he hated Gideon and the Wells for what had been normal to him. He’d made the mistake of confiding to a friend that Pa had ordered the tattoo, that it hadn’t been his choice, and the friend had been so horrified and defensive of Lu, that Lu couldn’t look him in the eye again. They’d drifted apart by the end of the semester, and Lu could only think of all the things he was no longer allowed to talk about, all the things the Flock had done to him… all the things they’d made him do. He cried a lot, and sometimes he thought about the girlfriend, not because she’d laughed at his pained tears, but because he couldn’t remember her name, and it hadn’t even been a year since their breakup. 

By his second year, his entire department of administrative-art majors called him quiet and introverted, a mysterious loner they personified from a distance. He was nice enough that he didn’t attract cruel rumors, but he never fully escaped their curiosity, and continued his endless dosage of acclimation meds while his body developed whatever anti-vertigo was, his glasses working to correct his vision as he stumbled through windy days of shuddering stilts that made him think of the groaning ground. He was happy with his reputation, he liked surprising his classmates with his quality group work and confusing their expectations when he continually aced their tests, wandering back to his quiet room with his eyes glued to his tablet, wondering how horrified the other Agriculture students were with Adon, more a Grounder than Lu ever was, though Adon probably adapted and blended in better. Adon probably at least had friends. 

Lu drew Adon with short hair and long, with the baby fat still in his cheeks and with chiseled cheekbones, muscled from hauling plant pots or soil bags and winnowed from late nights spent studying. He drew him tipsy and aggravated, happy, and surrounded by the Mids, then the Uppers. He began posting his strange portraits to an anonymous Platform account, not to gain any interest or following, or even to find Adon, simply as a record of his only heart, given away. 

After a particularly rough day of assignments and gossip in his third year, Lu extracted himself from curious classmates demanding another drink, paid for through drinking games that demanded answers he couldn’t give. Was he taken? No. But his heart was, and that seemed like the same thing. He’d meant to put on an act for Gideon, but it had worked just the same, he’d ripped his heart out, and smiling in groups of laughing people stung with a guilty wound that refused to heal. He trudged home and drew three new portraits of Adon: at a lonely bar, on a date, dancing surrounded by friends, then threw his stylus across the room before he could start another. 

He inhaled stubborn tears and went to retrieve it, only to find it irreparably broken. Good, he was becoming obsessed anyway. 

☆

Lu slumped into his sparse bed, pulling out his phone for a different distraction as the two drinks he’d been bullied into wore off—not enough to put him to sleep, not enough to stop him from thinking of Adon as he opened random apps. He sighed and stopped himself from his new irritating habit of endlessly scrolling the Caldera Platform Database for Adonis Calderas. There were millions of them, and with no filter function or Adon’s district ID code, all he could do was squint at tiny abstract or auto-generated profile pictures and wonder. His finger hovered over the New Internet logo, to search for Adon through all the words he knew, but he stopped himself with a glance at his disassembled stylus. Enough was enough, Adon was living in the Agriculture Apprentice dorm, having a great time. If he wanted to find Lu, he would. Lu flicked his finger over to that old, childish addiction and opened his only friend: Ultimate Ground Racer Obstacle Run 7000. 

He skipped class for two days to maintain his top-ten leaderboard position, yelling text-to-talk profanities until the asshole he’d been trading tenth place with for four hours dared him to turn on his mic, then began raging at Lu about all the ways he’d kill him if he ever made it below the Wells to try racing for real, comparing a real race to the shitty game graphics with too much detail. 

Lu sat up, squinting at the username and pursing his lips as he listened to the string of insults. Only Nika’s guys were good enough  to play games in their free time and still win races, and once his mind conjured the track and the people that belonged to it, the name surfaced from his memory with the face, stepping out of the crowd of uncles, burnouts, Grounders and Wellians he’d deliberately left behind him. 

Lu scoffed at his victory screen, his faceless competitor cursing in indecipherable whines. Lu slid the mic switch of his headset on, hesitating, “Phaios?”

Silence, the speaker crackling with the miles of interference between them, then Phaios spoke, “who the fuck?” 

Lu laughed with a relieved sigh, “it’s just me.” He said it with warmth, but his chest tightened as he swallowed his frown, unaccustomed to his own name, “Lu.”

“Well fuck me, Lu-Lu,” Phaios breathed, “nearly gave me a heart attack! Thought you were one of those fuckin’ obsessed guys ‘bout to come kill me!”

Lu laughed lightly. Phai’s Grounder accent was lighter than it used to be, but was still hard for Lu to understand. Phaios was as much a victim as he was, he reminded himself, forcing a smile as the game restarted, “nah, just me.”

Hours later, after mindless chats while they raced hundreds of anonymous Calderans, avoiding the topic of the only thing they had in common, Lu finally asked, “did you hear anything after you left? About… Adon?” His Grounder accent was more pronounced with exposure to Phai’s voice, but it felt strange in his mouth, crowded, like it was meant to be spoken around all the things he meant to say, and he was now an imposter asking such  direct questions. 

“Adon?” Phaios frowned, “that… kid?”

“He’s the same age as us,” Lu tsked. 

Phaios sighed, “no man, sorry.”

He wouldn’t have, and they both knew it. But if he’d heard nothing, Lu reasoned, it was because Adon had successfully ascended to his rightful place in the Uppers, no longer trapped on the Ground. That could be enough. That had to be enough, it was the only thing he would ever know.

Lu worked harder at his second-rate school, taking Adon’s usual place at the top, because the higher he climbed, the closer they would be. He ventured to new cafes every weekend, dragging an uncooperative Phaios beside him as his only friend even in the Mids, under the excuse of trying new cakes. But Phaios saw Lu’s eyes sweep over every patron, eyeing customers bent over textbooks or focusing intently on tablet screens, scanning for Adon. Phaios began helping unconsciously, looking at faces in crowds for the pretty boy he’d only seen a handful of times. He’d never felt particularly responsible for Lu’s misery, but understood Lu as a kindred victim, circling the same drain. 

They spent many weekends wandering the Mid’s cafes, then bars, talking about all the versions of themselves they didn’t want to be anymore. They didn’t speak of Adon aloud, but he was always present at the edges of Lu’s every movement, and after two drinks, Lu always sniffled about becoming someone capable of keeping promises. Phaios never made him elaborate.

During race season, Lu studied and Phaios returned to Nika’s track, upgraded from pit crew to racer, winning his contractually obligated runs and returning to the Mids post-season to find his mechanic job at the rails waiting beside a sickly Lu holding the door of their condo open, taking a break between finals, projects, or the dozens of portraits of Adon he didn’t know Phaios knew about. And each time, Phaios was both surprised and grateful to find Lu alive. He listened to a drunk Lu cry about broken promises, and sometimes empty ones about chasing Adon till he died, and did not talk about Nika or Xeri or Nyx’s place or all the good things Lu had left behind, realizing guiltily that Lu had never known the good people of the Wells. Already, a twenty-one-year-old Phaios understood more about how Gideon had broken his son than Lu did.

☆