Page 33 of Tracking Snow

I've felt it too. The painful press of pressure that feels like you are going to explode, fly apart, and disintegrate from under the attack of Seven's anger, pain, and darkness.

The most cursed and unclean of all of us, and of course, he is the most powerful.

He hates it. Even more than we hate it.

None of us want these powers.

We are not what Snow thinks we are. She thinks what we can do is cool, a gift, something to play with and marvel over. She's wrong.

Is she? Six asks.

This is what happens once you've kissed a girl? Two asks with an edge of incredulity. Even the most practical of us lose their mind.

The thing she said about escaping our existence for a while has merit, Six counters, pretending he's logical.

But I'm with Two. Six has been swayed by the girl.

Seven had been so focused on punishing Four for heating things up, literally and figuratively, that he was distracted when Six kissed Snow.

He isn't distracted now.

You are all forgetting what we are. But I’m here to remind you. We aren’t to get close to anyone. Ever.

The pressure starts at the base of our skull while I'm easing Snow's door shut behind us. She drifted off about twenty minutes ago, curled around the dent we left in her mattress.

I move quickly, wanting the whole width of the city between her and what Seven is about to do.

So we take the stairs instead of waking her, and we start the long walk home.

The night air helps for three blocks. Then it doesn't.

Our right hand makes a fist. I'm not the one making it.

I steer us into the alley behind the shuttered laundromat, and the fist meets the brick, and the brick wins, and the fist goes back again anyway. Knuckles first.

After that the heel of the hand. Next, Seven drives our own knuckles into our thigh, our ribs, short hard shots from a range nobody can slip, because how do you slip a punch thrown from inside the body it lands on.

I reach for the hand, but it does not answer me.

Stop, Four whispers. The first thing he's said in hours.

Two goes for the phase the way he does when something is coming, and there is nowhere to go, and he tries anyway. Six has stopped talking entirely. Five is somewhere at the back with his hands over his ears.

Seven doesn't stop. Teeth catch our cheek and metal fills our mouth. I do what I do, which is count.

Four knuckles split. One rib bruised, maybe two. The brick has a smear on it at shoulder height that we will not look at on the way out.

This is the part Snow will never see. She marvels at the heat in Four's palms and the illusions Six pulls out of empty air. She has no idea what it costs to carry something so unclean in the same body where the rest of us are trying to sleep.

Unclean. Mother's word. It's the right one.

When the worst of it drains off, Seven goes quiet and heavy in the back of us, and the body is mine again, and it hurts everywhere I put my attention, so I put my attention on walking.

This is why I'm out most nights, if anyone asks. The walking. A body this full needs emptying, and the city after two in the morning is the only place big enough to pour it into. Boston empties out the people who can afford to sleep and fills up with the ones who can't, and the ones who think nobody is watching.

I watch. There's no harm in watching.

On Wentworth, every window burns in the hospital, a wall of yellow squares with the night shift moving through them. Coffee and antiseptic drift out through a propped staff door with a broken bulb above it. A woman comes out in wrinkled scrubs, paper cup in one hand, a fat romance novel pinned under her arm, a shirtless man on the cover. She rolls her neck, one side, the other, and takes the dark end of the bench.