Christmas is cold this year. The snow is still pouring down, unaware that we've passed the threshold for idyllic Christmas weather and gone on into miserable (and we can't get snow days for it, so redundant as well), and the house hums with heaters all day. Adam and I develop cabin fever at once, and he's taken to holding his phone under the table during family game night. He's uncomfortable about weird things and insists, for the first time in years, to help me with cooking when I explain we're baking a cake for Mr. Gray, down the street.

"He was my mentor for STEM Fair last year." Adam says. "This is the least I can do. Even if it's just a gesture... do they know what happened to him?"

"Honey, no one knows what that man has. They think it might be some form of PTSD, but he won't talk about it and we're not going to interrogate him. It's been common in the area. No one knows what to think. No investigation has yielded a damn thing." Our mother stirs the batter faster. "You kids need to stay safe and let us know where you're going at all times. Is that clear?"

Shiloh claims he doesn't know... but there's no way this doesn't have something to do with Ignatius. Why would he be attacking random people? Is he attacking them? "Yes," I say, thinking of reasons and ways I could get around this. I wonder if my room portal still works...

Even though I have cake batter and leftover turkey for dinner, which should practically send me into a coma, I can't fall asleep that night. I watch my wall for holes and drift in between dreams, until I'm too delirious to tell which is the waking world and which is the fractured, erratic land behind my eyes. At one point, I roll over in my bed to find that Adam is gone. His blankets are wrinkled but the sheets themselves are cold. I stumble through the dark house, confused, and pace around the main floor. Would he sneak out at night? I have to be dreaming. I open the door. No one is there. The world is split a few times, further down the street, but it's not any more than I'm used to.

"Adam?" I ask the house. "Adam?!"

There's no answer. I grab milk from downstairs and wander back up to bed. When I awake again, he's back over there, fast asleep, and I feel like an idiot.

To be honest, I don't think I'll ever know if I was dreaming.

---

Garrett sends me a text the next morning, which is odd for a number of reasons. Look at the local newspaper.

"Mom, did we get the news today?" I ask over breakfast.

"Yes. Why?" she says. "Are you looking for the comics?"

"What else?" I say, and she passes me a rolled up print newspaper. News is usually slow over the holidays, but near the bottom of the front page is a story entitled Unexpected Blackouts Continue To Plague Area, citing an 'unknown technical malfunction'. As I flip for the rest of the article, I notice a few missing persons ads in the corner. The top three are middle-aged men, around their thirties or fourties, but there's a woman in there as well. Nothing about this looks good.

Blackouts with no source. Several people missing. I text back.

You're thinking what I'm thinking, right?

There's no way that last one has anything to do with Karen, unless she's gained mind control. In fact, we should ask Shiloh about that last one.

Karen would never do anything like that on purpose, I tell myself, but I text her to be sure. Was it you, I type, then delete it. Closing my eyes, I take a deep breath and decide to start off gently. Are you okay?

The response is instant. Call me.

I get up from the table, flipping the paper open to the comics (I glare at the mediocre art for a while, not that I have any right to judge), and leave unceremoniously with my coffee. I dial her up in the basement, far as I can be from my family, and ask, "Hello?"

"Come over." Karen says.

"To the Veins?" I whisper.

"No. To my house."

"Will your relatives mind?"

"Nah."

"When?"

"Now."

"It's early."

"It's eleven. When do you get up in the morning?"

I pause. "Ten thirty."

"Unsurprising. Get over here." She hangs up.

I run upstairs to get changed, but Adam is lying spread out on his bed with a stack of pancakes and his phone. Forget relationships, my brother could probably date his device if he wanted to. I restrain myself from snorting at the mere thought of it, but Adam swings around as I finish speed-changing.

"What's the deal?" Adam asks.

"I'm going over to Karen's house." I tell him, clutching the door.

"Not Amanda? Will, how did you go from no girls to two in one year?" Adam laughs.

"I'm sorry you're not content with one girlfriend, but actually, I don't have any. I just have two good friends." I say.

"So you got friendzoned, too." Adam says, with that awful deadpan smile he gets when he knows he's pressing my buttons.

"Are you looking for a whole harem? Megan would be upset if she found out she wasn't enough for you."

Adam chokes on his pancake. After managing to swallow, he laughs, knocking the dish of pancakes onto the floor. It's a nervous laugh, almost hysterical, certainly disturbing, and I stare on like I'm watching some kind of natural disaster. I can not tear my eyes away. He looks back up at me, wiping tears from his eyes, and says, "Oh yeah. Definitely."

"Goodbye, Adam." I say.

Three years of jokes and this is what kills him. We might share more DNA with each other than with any other humans on the planet, but I swear I will never understand Adam Rosenbloom.

My mom is happy to drive me over, though she asks me about how I know 'this girl' for far too long, especially when we're driving out of our huge school district. The fifteen minute drive is suspicious enough, especially given her introvert son 'meeting a girl through friends' is ringing all sorts of alarms, but she still pauses when she sees Karen, who is wearing a faux leather jacket with a familiar white, furred rim, standing on the street corner. She looks like a badass. She's practically wearing her Diosite-empowered outfit in broad daylight. My mom looks over into the backseat. "Do you want me to drop you off here?" she asks.

"Sure?" I say. "Thanks, mom."

My mom does not pull away when I get out of the car. Instead, she follows us until Karen leads me into the driveway of her house. I plunge my hands into my pockets and attempt to look natural, like Oh yes. My parents are not overprotective in the slightest. My mom just drives ten miles per hour down the streets of complete strangers.

When I'm sure she's gone, I note, "You're in outfit."

"Nah, I like the jacket." she pulls at the fringe of the jacket. "Feels safer, after everything we've been through. My family decided that this would be my 'big gift' for Christmas, this thing was like... two hundred and change. Hell of a lot of trouble to go through for a jacket, but it's not like I wanted anything else."

"Safer." I muse. My fingers grip around a shield that isn't there.

"Yeah. Kind of fucked up, but whatever." She opens the door. "Take off your shoes, by the way."

Karen's house is full of people. There have to be at least a dozen relatives sitting in the living room, ranging from a baby up to a pair of adorable grandparents in rocking chairs by the hearth. Traditional Christmas tunes ring through the room, giving the place an almost greeting-card feel to it. The air smells delicious, and I catch hints of Tobasco sauce and some thick stew. I knock my shoes off and put them on the full rack by the door, and Karen leads me at a brisk pace through the room.

One of the girls in the room takes off her earbuds as we enter. She has skin a shade lighter than Karen's and hair that rolls down from her head in tight curls, which bounce as she waves to us. "Hey, it's the nerd kid! You're even shorter in real life. Oh, Karen, he's cute."

"Pass." Karen says. She looks to me, "Basement?"

An older woman enters with cookies, an apron, and one hand planted on her hip. "You two better not be getting up to anything-"

Karen stops, exasperated. "He's a friend from that game group I told you about. In any case, I broke up with Dan three weeks ago, remember? How fast do you think I'm going through men?"

"Aw, Karen. You can't help yourself if they throw themselves at you."

Karen rolls her eyes and leads me into the basement. There are empty blow-up mattresses on the floor and a whole pantry in a room just off to the side, and though the room itself is a bit of a mess, the books on the shelves are well-organized, like a small library. "Sorry. I don't bring guys over that often. Not never, but I mean, not often. I mentioned Garrett to Shauna once in confidence, that's my sister, so she thinks you're the same kid."

"Oh," I say. "They think you're a couple? What have you two even been talking about over Xbox? I thought you hated each other!"

"I just apologized to him. No big deal." Karen says, and her eyes dull. "It's not even mine. It's my brother's. My whole family's been teasing me about how much I've been down there, talking to him. Things have been crazy, Will."

I remember the confused feelings I had for Amanda before the two of us worked things out. Is it possible they could... No way.

"I- I don't know what's wrong with me. I'll be up at late at night and I'll just experiment, easing myself through lines of code I shouldn't understand, but I feel like a key and I don't know where the lock is. I'll take trips in the middle of the night through the Veins and Shiloh will just be sitting there, watching me, like he knows something I don't. Like there's something I'm supposed to know that I haven't worked out. I overloaded one night, blew out the power on our whole street. I came in at 2 AM to mess with powers and Shiloh stared at me the whole time, like he knows something I don't. I'll talk to Garrett for hours sometimes and I don't know why we fit at all, or why I feel like forgiving him. I'll be up there with my family and I'm thinking about the next mission. How ungrateful is that? It feels like everything's changing, and I don't know what's wrong with me... and then I remember." Karen says, running her fingers through her hair. "I needed to see you in the flesh. Honest. So you couldn't lie to me. Will, does the Diosite affect us like it does Ignatius?"

"No," I say, thinking to the tack board. Tell her. That's all me, but Shiloh waits at the back of my mind, ready to step in. I push him away. "I know it doesn't feel like we chose this sometimes, but I think that Shiloh took the four of us because we needed this. There was something missing in Amanda's life, in my life, that lead us here. I'm almost definite Garrett was the same way, and Karen, you're strong. Stronger than you realize. Even when there's no magic, this stage of our lives is full of all these emotions we don't need, don't want, all these unanswered questions- sometimes it feels like your mind is working against you. Our powers don't come from Shiloh. They come from us, amplified through the stone, and we have to master ourselves. It's going to be harder for us than anyone else, but we can do this. Together."

Karen looks at her hands. "You're such an optimist. I'm holding you to that, just to warn you." She elbows me, at last, and I catch half of a worried smile.

"I don't know about Garrett, but if it makes you feel better? I think about missions when I'm with my family all the time."

"Will, not to be rude, but from what you've said about your family, they sound like the worst."

"Oh yeah?" I say, averting her gaze. "They're not that bad. I'm just a wimp."

Karen's mother opens the door down to the basement, casting down light into the dark room. "We're making lunch. Do you two want to help cook?"

"Do I ever!" I say, springing up. Karen follows, and I slide into the kitchen, shaking my residual guilt off like a jacket. The array of ingredients is incredible, and I throw my hands under the sink and wash them off. "Show me the ropes. I've never cooked chili before."

"No one cooks chili the way we do at this house." Karen's mom tells me.

"Amen to that," calls who I assume is Karen's grandmother from the other room.

Karen gets out the knife and starts dicing tomatoes. I follow, singing along to old Christmas songs with the family and trying to invent a new kind of normal, something to hold on to, something we can both fight for- and I remember why I love the holidays so much, because there are some things you never want to change.