#chumpdate

spoilers, obviously

Chum 272: A New Kind of Pain

And that's the round - me gasping and winded and a whistle being blown.

The knee took something out of me that the water break between rounds doesn't put back. I sit in my corner with Kate's hand on my shoulder and Kate's water bottle in my glove and the specific knowledge that round one was mine on points but round two is going to be harder because Slate has figured out that this is not a boxing match and I have not figured that out yet.

"He's going to clinch," Kate says, quietly, close to my ear. "He knows you're better at range. He's going to try to make it ugly."

"I can do ugly," I say, which is true in ways most people can't appreciate until they see it in action. Kate knows. Most of these people don't.

The whistle blows. Round two.

Slate comes forward. Kate was right - he's not boxing anymore. He's brawling, closing distance, trying to get inside my jab range where his armor and his weight can do the work his technique can't. He throws a looping overhand that I block with my forearm and the impact rattles my elbow and he's already clinching, arms around my shoulders, head against my chest, driving me into the ropes with his legs and his two hundred and whatever pounds of partially-armored body mass.

The ref doesn't break it immediately. This isn't boxing. The clinch is legal, the dirty boxing is legal, the work that happens in the pocket when two people are tangled up and throwing short shots to each other's kidneys is legal. Slate hits me in the side with a short hook that would break a rib on a person whose ribs aren't already patched with a thin veneer of calcium armor, and my veneer cracks and the rib underneath says something unprintable but holds.

I hit him back. Short, compact, the inside game that Lina hasn't taught me because Lina teaches boxing and boxing breaks the clinch. This is the other thing. The warehouse thing. The thing the alleyways taught me about fighting in close quarters where your reach is useless and your elbows are the weapon and the top of your skull is a battering ram if you angle it right. The stuff Multiplex taught me about trying to fight with my powers, not like a normie.

I drive the crown of my head up under Slate's chin and his jaw clacks shut and his grip loosens for half a second and I pump two hooks into his floating ribs, left-right, and the second one finds the gap between dense segments and I feel his body fold around my fist the way the Songbird's body folded around my fist except this is sanctioned and contained and nobody is going to arrest me for it.

Slate shoves me back. I hit the ropes. He comes in swinging - a wild right that I duck, a left hook that I catch on my glove, and then a straight right aimed at my jaw that he throws with his whole body, everything he has, the punch of a man who has decided that this round is going to end with me on the canvas.

Chum JR.1: There's Tunnels Under Philadelphia

"You ready?"

"Yes," I answer.

"You look ready."

"I am ready," I repeat.

"I'm just asking if you are ready."

"I just said yes twice, Kwame," I say, trying not to roll my eyes.

"Okay." He drains the coffee. "You're ready."

This is how we do pre-op. I have stopped minding it a long time ago. Bulwark needs the ritual and I don't need anything, so Bulwark gets to have his ritual.

Over in the corner, the HRT team is going through their own version of it, which is quieter and more technical and involves a lot of checking each other's plate carriers. There are ten of them. Their team lead is a woman named Vasquez who I have met twice and who I like because she says exactly the words she means and then stops talking.

She is currently not talking. Instead, she is looking at a tablet.

Miasma is sitting on a crate by the door in his suit, helmet in his lap. He's got like a sort of secondary mask, sort of like a thin plastic thing that lets you see his face but also doesn't make you start retching. And his helmet will go on top, but for now I can see his kind of pinkish eyes, the sunken skin, the dark rings. If I didn't know better I would think "this is a very, very tired man".

The earpiece crackles.

"Comms check, forward element." Ford's voice. Flat. She only ever says what needs saying.

"Ramp, copy."

"Bull, copy."

"Mizz, copy." His voice through the helmet is always half-mechanical. He has put it on while I wasn't looking.

"Vasquez, copy. HRT copy all."

"Good," Ford says. "Stand by for Crossroads."

A half-beat of static, and then Maxwell. His voice is doing the thing it does when he's working. Little pauses between the ends of sentences and the starts of the next ones, where the silence is him reading.

"Forward element. Your entry point is going to be fine. I'm going to be in your ear for the first corridor and then I'll hand off to Fury Forge for the environmental reads. I've run the first forty-five seconds of the breach about fifty times in the last fifteen minutes. You're going in at the second door on the east face because the first one has two shooters behind it and the second one has nobody for the first four seconds. You have four seconds. Ramp, your left shoulder is exposed at the corner of the door if you enter standard. Angle the shield thirty degrees forward. You understand?"

"Yes."

"Say it back."

"Shield thirty forward at entry, angled right."

"Good. Bull, you're going to want to lay granite on the west wall as soon as you're through because the second defender position is going to pivot on you from thirty meters back and that wall is not going to hold what they're going to put into it."

"Copy."

"Mizz, you are going to walk. You don't have to hurry. You are the thing they are going to worry about. Let them worry."

"Copy," Miasma says. His helmet makes the word sound like it's being spoken by someone slightly lower than him.

"Vasquez, your stack is going to want to break left at the first T-junction. Don't. Break right. There's a fallback position laid in on the left that I cannot see cleanly but I can see well enough to tell you it's bad."

"Understood."

"Okay," Maxwell says. "Good hunting. Fury Forge has you after breach. I'm going to be quiet unless something changes. Keep me updated at branching paths"

Chum JP.2: "Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease"

The neurologist's name is Dr. Kessler. She has kind eyes and a terrible poker face, which I appreciate.

Some doctors try to manage your emotions for you - soften the blow, frame things optimistically, give you hope that isn't warranted by the data. Dr. Kessler just looks sad.

"The results came back consistent with our preliminary assessment," she says. "I'm sorry, Joshua. It's CJD."

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. I looked it up after the first round of tests, when they started using words like "prion" and "spongiform" and scheduling me for more scans than seemed reasonable for what I thought was just bad insomnia and some coordination issues.

Prion diseases don't have treatments. They don't have cures. They have trajectories - predictable, measurable, inevitable. The proteins in your brain misfold, and the misfolded proteins cause other proteins to misfold, and the cascade continues until your brain looks like Swiss cheese and you die. Average survival time from diagnosis: four to six months.

"How certain?" I ask.

Dr. Kessler blinks. Most patients probably don't ask that. Most patients are crying, or bargaining, or demanding second opinions. But I need to know the error bars before I can process the data.

"Very certain," she says carefully. "The combination of your symptoms, the MRI findings, and the CSF markers... I wish I could tell you there was meaningful doubt, but there isn't. I'm sorry."

I nod. That's what I expected. The research I'd done suggested the diagnostic accuracy was somewhere north of 95% when all the indicators aligned. Mine aligned.

Chum 241: Psephology

"I'm working on it," I say, which is almost true.

"Mmhm." She doesn't believe me either. But she lets it go, the same way Lily let it go. "Those kids in there - they look up to you. You know that?"

"I know."

"Alex especially. That boy wants to be you so bad he can taste it. And he's going to get himself killed trying."

"I know." It comes out heavier than I meant it to. "I've been trying to - I benched him. He's not supposed to be doing anything right now."

"Benching him isn't going to fix it. He's not acting out because he wants to break rules. He's acting out because he doesn't know who he is if he's not fighting something. Same as you. He's a romantic," she points out.

"A romantic?" is what I ask, trying to process the whole sentence at once.

"An idealist. What you told them earlier," she says. "About not fighting. About being smart. That was good. They needed to hear it." She pauses. "But you need to hear it too."

"I hear it," I point out. "I'm saying it."

"Do you? Because from where I'm sitting, you just got beaten up on purpose to make a point."

I go very still.

"I'm not stupid, Sam." Her voice is gentle, not accusing. "I've been doing this work for twenty years. I know what a real victim looks like and I know what someone playing a game looks like. You walked in here with a bruised face and a plan. You told those kids exactly what story to believe about what happened to you. And I'm not saying you're wrong - I'm not saying it wasn't smart. But I've been watching you, and I'm worried."

"Worried about what?"

"Worried about what happens when you run out of face to let them hit." She reaches across the desk, puts her hand over mine. Her skin is dry and warm. "You're seventeen. You've got your whole life ahead of you. And I've seen too many kids like you burn out before they turn twenty-five."

"I'm not going to burn out."

"That sounds like exactly what the person about to burn out says. Jamal told me you like soccer. How many old soccer players you know, Sam?" she asks, trying to empathize with me through normal interests that feel like they're light-years away.

"I mean, Pele's, what, 86?" I mutter, trying to run down a list of names in my head.

"How many you know that still play soccer, smartass?" she catches like a fresh hook to the jaw. "Or do they all retire when they're 30 because they've broken their legs too many times? Are you a soccer player? You gonna cram all the help you can do into the next 13 years and then retire? Or do you wanna make a life out of this? You can do whatever you want, Sam. But think about the demands of the position."

Chum MR.10: CATFISH

"Jasmine, it's not what you--"

"You used us," she says, and her voice cracks on "used." Not from the heat. From something underneath. "You put us together and pointed us at Rogue Wave and we went because we trusted you. Because you told us this was about protecting people. About making up for what we did wrong. About redemption." She spits the word. "And the whole time you were--"

"Jasmine." I keep my voice soft. Maternal, almost. Not condescending - she'd catch that and it would make things worse. Genuine. Or as close to genuine as I can manufacture under pressure. "Sit down."

"Don't tell me to sit down."

"You're about to set off the smoke detect--" is where I start.

Then, I have to stop. I don't like using my powers. I really don't like using them in any situation where someone can watch me and make it excruciatingly clear that it is not, as it says on the scorecard, weather control. But I've also been working with Jasmine for a while. I know her tells like the back of my hand. And, crucially, I know when she's about to go Gear Four. It happens before she even does her stupid anime call out. I know this because her eyes get bloodshot - I don't even think she's noticed herself.

So, when a blood vessel in her eye visibly bursts, and she starts bleeding from the nose, that is when I get scared. Not scared tactically - just scared in the way a lizard is scared of an angry, barking dog.

So I bite. Time for the command grab.

Chum 231: Polar Vortex

Lunch with Melissa and her group of teens, just for a change from the goths and Alex - sorry, Alex!

They're talking about some college fair happening next month, which feels surreal - I'm supposed to be thinking about college applications while also running intelligence operations from my dining room table? But I nod along, eat my sandwich, make appropriate noises about SAT prep. I still don't have to think about this stuff until next year.

"You're quiet," Melissa says.

"Tired. Catching up is kicking my ass."

"Ms. Patel's office hours?"

"Every day this week."

"Damn." She looks impressed, which is weird. "That's dedication."

It's not dedication. I think the word is "sublimation".

English after lunch is actually good. We're doing The Crucible and I've read it before - Mom has strong opinions about Arthur Miller - so I can participate without faking it. The discussion is about mass hysteria, how fear makes people turn on each other, how the accusers in Salem got power by pointing fingers.

I think about the Songbirds. About "concerned citizens" with concealed carry permits harassing teenagers for the crime of having powers. About how easy it is to make someone a monster if enough people agree to see them that way.

"Sam?" Mr. Harrison is looking at me. "You had your hand up?"

I didn't realize I'd raised it. "Sorry, I was just - the part about Abigail. How she figures out that accusations are power. That once people believe you're the victim, you can do whatever you want to the people you accuse."

"Go on."

"It's not really about witchcraft. It's about--" I'm reaching for the words. "It's about how the system creates incentives. Once accusing someone of witchcraft works, everyone starts doing it. Not because they believe in witches but because it's useful. The belief is just... cover."