Page 162 of Victorious

“What are you doing?” he demanded as she slotted the old blue cartridge back into the disc.

“This is a massive breakthrough, Victor, don’t get me wrong, but this,” she said, holding up the violet vial, “is a prototype, not a finished product, and until I can run more tests, I want you to keep using the old compound. Just to be safe.”

As Victor accepted the old cartridge, the scientific side of his mind applauded her due diligence. But the rest of him—the part that had spent nearly a decade either powerless or dying—wasn’t interested in safe.

For the first time in years, he had his power back.

And he wasn’t about to sit around counting the minutes until it disappeared.

XVIIINOW. THEN.

VICTOR left the lab that night with a small heart monitor strapped to his chest, and instructions to return the next morning. He rolled his neck, his shoulders, his wrists, like a body shaking out its stiffness.

Eight to twelve hours. That was what Dani had given him.

And he didn’t plan to waste it.

He left his car in the lot and set off on foot, savoring the cold night, the crisp air, as he strolled along the edge of campus, marveled at the sheer quantity of neural information.

It had been so long he’d almost forgotten how different the world felt, filtered through his power, how bright, when he could not only see but sense the life forms all around him again, their nerves lit up like Christmas trees.

As Victor ambled down the sidewalk, his power brushed against the nearest bodies, and they shifted without thinking, moved out of his way.

That was the thing about pain.

It came in so many forms. The shallow, and the bold, the blunt and the precise. The nervous system was a complex network that registered pain and then made sense of it.

Applied in the right strength, to the right place, pain could convince a person they’d been shot or stabbed, grazed or flayed. Too much, too fast, and the sudden surge short-circuited the nerves, dropping a body like a sack of bricks. Whereas a subtle touch might not even register as real discomfort, only a subconscious urge to get away.

Victor leaned on those he passed, and they moved, like pieces on a chess board, exactly where he wanted them.

“Thank God you didn’t kill yourself,” mused Eli, falling in step beside him, hands in his pockets. He was dressed in a crimson shirt. Victor recognized it—it was the same one he’d been wearing their last night as students.

He didn’t look at Eli, even as he answered. “God had nothing to do with it.”

Eli’s mouth twitched at the edge of Victor’s sight. “Thank me, then.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, he adjusted his own dials, until shallow pain broke out like sweat across his skin. Not enough to really hurt. Just enough to ground his body. And make Eli Ever disappear.

Victor walked on alone.

And not alone. Not anymore.

With each forward step, each set of nerves in sight, in reach, he felt more and more like his old self. But his ability to move, to think, to breathe again, revealed the last three years for what they were. Insufficient gasps.

It didn’t matter now.

All that mattered was the old familiar current humming in his head, the steady beating of his heart. His power, back online again. At last.

He walked without a destination, and yet, he knew what he was looking for. A chance to flex, to stretch, to test his strength.

In short, Victor was looking for trouble.

And it didn’t take long to find it.

He was headed for the stretch of bars off campus, but on the way, he ambled past a parking lot set off the road, and saw four figures crouched around a car, in the process of breaking in, or boosting it.

He slowed, then turned back, tugging a black ball cap out of his coat pocket and sliding it over his head, snuffing out the pale light of his hair, and hiding half his face. He watched the men work over the car like termites, prying at the hubcaps, the window, the door.