Thursday morning, 6:30 AM, and it's cold enough that our breath is visible but not cold enough to be miserable. We're on the roof of a two-story commercial building on Cottman that I've used as a lookout point during patrols - good sight lines, easy access via a dumpster and a fire escape, flat roof with a low parapet. Parapet. What a funny sounding word.

  Alex is wearing running shoes and a hoodie and looks like he slept about four hours, which is either because he was up late worrying about things or up late playing video games. Could go either way with him.

  "Rule one," I say, standing on the parapet ledge. "You are always learning to leave. Not to chase. Not to fight. To leave."

  "That feels counterintuitive for superhero training."

  "It's not superhero training. It's don't-die training. The best fight is the one you're not in. If you can get away clean, you get away clean. Every time."

  "Even if--"

  "Every time, Alex."

  He chews on that for a second. I can see him wanting to argue - he's a romantic, that's what Mrs. Patterson said, he wants the version where you stand your ground and fight for what's right - but he's also not stupid, and he's still got some rib shit going on from the warehouse raid where he almost got killed by Garbage Day because he couldn't get away fast enough.

  "Okay," he says, and then pauses.

  "I just need you to set your expectations. What I am going to teach you is going from A to B. It is not ingress or egress. Ingress, traversal, and egress are all different skills. I am teaching you the middle one."

  Alex blinks at me a couple of times. "What?"

  I try to remember where I actually learned these terms from. It bubbles up in a carbonated cloud of memory. I narrow it down to either two - Jordan, or my Mom. Possibly both independently. "I am not going to be teaching you getting into buildings or getting out of buildings. Not at this level. Parkour is for getting between buildings right now. The easiest fight to leave is one where you are never where you shouldn't have been."

  He raises an eyebrow at me. "First: that's too many negatives. Second: you are looking at me with a straight face and saying 'don't do heroic trespassing'."

  I scrunch my face up. I don't want him to have the satisfaction of having made me laugh. "That's right. Don't do heroic trespassing. Do you even have your JLUM--"

  "Yes, Mom!" he grunts before I even finish the acronym.

  "Good boy. Now, if throwing yourself against the armies of darkness is something you really want to do, that's apparently a career path. You can do it once you graduate high school. In the meanwhile, I am going to teach you how to leave. Outdoors. Then, if we figure that out, I will teach you how to leave indoors. And if you can keep up with me, eventually, maybe in a couple of months, I can teach you how to leave from indoors to outdoors," I say, trying to dangle carrots in front of his head.

  I don't know which particular part of that sentence got his attention, but it worked, because he's not looking at me anymore. "That's egress, right?"

  "Right."

  He inhales and shuts his eyes. "Teach me to leave."

  We start with basic movement. How to drop from a ledge without making noise - bend your knees, land on the balls of your feet, absorb with your legs, don't slap the ground with your palms. How to use a wall to change direction - plant one foot, push off at an angle, let momentum carry you around the corner instead of stopping and restarting. How to read a gap - can you clear it? If you're not sure, you can't. Find another way.

  Alex is not bad at this. He's athletic, he's got good proprioception, and he's completely unafraid of heights, which is either an asset or a liability depending on how much supervision he has. What he doesn't have is patience. He wants to run before he can walk, wants to vault a railing before he can drop from a four-foot wall quietly.

  "Again," I say, after he lands from a fire escape drop with a thud that would wake up anyone sleeping in the building below. "Quieter. Pretend there's someone with a gun on the street and the only reason you're alive is they don't know you're up here."

  "That's dark."

  "Welcome to my entire life. Again."

  He goes again. Better this time - not silent, but closer. His hands leave faint steam marks on the cold metal railing.

  "Your hands," I say. "You're leaving heat signatures on everything you touch."

  He looks at his palms. "I think I'm sparking. I'm not doing that on purpose. Can you smell it?"

  I sniff the air. None of that propane scent. "Okay. That's good to know, and we can work on it at the group together. In the meanwhile, you need gloves. Thick ones. And be aware of it." I make a mental note to talk to Amelia about heat-dispersing glove liners. She'd probably find the challenge interesting.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  We do another forty minutes. By the end, Alex can drop eight feet without making more noise than a footstep, can change direction off a wall at a decent speed, and has identified three different routes off this rooftop, which was the actual test. I didn't tell him it was a test. He figured it out because he's not stupid, just impatient.

  "Same time next week?" he asks, slightly out of breath, sitting on the parapet with his legs dangling over the edge in a way that makes my stomach clench even though I've done worse.

  "Same time next week. And Alex - this stays between us. You don't go practicing on random buildings at night."

  "I won't."

  "I'm serious. If you fall and break something and it comes back to me, I will be so mad at you. Like, genuinely, for real mad. And I'll tell Mrs. Patterson, and then you'll have two angry women to deal with."

  He grins. "Jennifer is scarier than you."

  "Mrs. Patterson is scarier than most people. That's why she runs the center and I just work there."

  We climb down the normal way - fire escape, alley, street. Alex waves and heads toward the bus stop. I watch him go and I think about the fact that six months ago I would've tried to handle his restlessness by giving him a mission, something dangerous and important that would make him feel valued. That's what Belle did with me. It worked, in the sense that I'm alive and effective. It also nearly killed me about fifteen times.

  Parkour on a rooftop at 6:30 AM isn't glamorous. It's not going to make Alex feel like a hero. But it might keep him alive long enough to figure out what kind of hero he actually wants to be. The air is crisp. It's not quite spring yet.

  Thursday after school I head to the center for mentorship hours. The walk takes me past the Songbird contingent - four women today, standing on the sidewalk with signs. PROTECT OUR CHILDREN FROM DANGEROUS POWERS. SAFETY FIRST. One of them is maybe twenty-five, holding a thermos, wearing a yellow scarf. She makes eye contact with me as I pass. I nod. She doesn't nod back. Okay.

  Inside, the center is humming. That's the only word for it. Patricia's at the front desk handling something with a parent on the phone, her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead exactly like Dad wears his. The main room has maybe fifteen people in it - kids doing homework at the big tables, a couple of parents talking in the corner, Liam showing one of the other kids something on his phone that's making them both laugh. Down the hall I can hear the parent support session - Rachel - not my mom, the other Rachel - isn't leading today, someone else is, and the sound of it is just... voices. Normal voices talking about normal things in a room that exists because people decided it should.

  Jasmine's in her usual spot by the window, headphones in, sketchbook open. I stop by her table on my way through.

  "Hey."

  She pulls one earbud out. Progress - a month ago she wouldn't have done that. "Hey."

  "What are you working on?"

  She turns the sketchbook toward me. It's a drawing of the community center, but stylized - the building rendered in clean lines with vines growing up the sides, flowering, the windows glowing warm. It's really good. Better than really good. I mean, I'm not an artist. But it impresses me.

  "Jasmine, this is beautiful."

  She shrugs, but her mouth twitches. "It's just the building."

  "It's the building the way it should look. Have you shown Mrs. Patterson?"

  "No." She puts the earbud back in. Conversation over. But the sketchbook stays turned toward me for another few seconds before she pulls it back, which I'm going to count as a win.

  Zara's got homework spread across an entire table and is working through what looks like eighth-grade algebra with the kind of intense focus that means she's either really engaged or really lost. I sit down across from her.

  "Need help?"

  "I understand the concepts," she says, very seriously, in a way that means she does not fully understand the concepts. We spend twenty minutes on factoring quadratics, which I'm pretty good at because math is the one school subject where my brain cooperates consistently. She gets it by the fourth problem. She's quietly levitating the little glass marbles I gave her, unobtrusively, fingertip to fingertip. It almost just looks like mundane juggling if you don't know what to look for.

  Friday I vary my route home from school and take Melissa's path again. Not because I'm afraid of getting ambushed, but just because, you know. Melissa's there. She walked home like an hour ago, because I stayed late for extra exam prep. I don't know why. It's not like I plan on being, you know, like a scientist or anything. I'm no Jordan.

  Anyway, so Melissa is on her front porch. "Sam! Oh my God, get over here. I have to tell you about Dylan Kowalski."

  I sit on the porch step. The Doritos are Cool Ranch. "Tell me about Dylan Kowalski."

  Dylan Kowalski, it turns out, asked Melissa to prom in the most spectacularly awkward way possible - a handwritten note passed in chemistry class that said "Prom? Circle yes or no" like they were in fourth grade. She circled yes and drew a smiley face and he turned bright red and didn't talk to her for the rest of the period.

  "That's actually adorable," I say.

  "It's SO adorable. He's so nervous around me. Like, I'm not scary, right?"

  "You're a little scary."

  "I am NOT scary."

  "You're intimidating. In a good way. You've got..." I gesture vaguely at her. "Presence."

  She throws a Dorito at me. I catch it and eat it. Her mom appears at the screen door - Mrs. Marshall, who looks like Melissa in twenty years and who has decided I am a permanent fixture of this household based on approximately two prior visits.

  "Samantha, you staying for dinner?"

  "Oh, I don't want to-"

  "It wasn't really a question, hon. We're having pot roast."

  I text Mom: Eating at Melissa's. Home by 8. Mom texts back a thumbs up and nothing else, which means she's either busy or she's so happy I'm at a friend's house doing normal things that she doesn't want to jinx it by making a big deal. Melissa is close enough that my Mom knows where she lives. I can sprint home in like... 3, 4 minutes if I have to.

  Dinner at the Marshalls' is loud. There are five of them - Melissa, James, their older sister Stephanie who's home from community college for the week, and their parents. Mr. Marshall works for SEPTA and has opinions about every bus route in the city, which I find genuinely fascinating in a way that confuses Melissa. James asks me if I've seen some anime I haven't seen and then spends ten minutes explaining the plot with the enthusiasm of someone who has never considered that another person might not care.

  I sit at their table and I eat pot roast and I listen to a family talk over each other about nothing important and I realize, with a clarity that feels almost physical, that I'm not performing. I'm not monitoring the room for threats. I'm not composing cover stories or planning escape routes or cataloging everyone's position relative to the exits. Instead, I'm just having dinner. And my eyes sting a little bit, which is probably just the horseradish.