The next day at school, Kai isn't in class. He isn't chatting in front of his locker,  lifting weights in the gym, or dribbling pizza sauce into his mouth against a cafeteria table like usual. And neither is Finn, though if Chip is honest with himself, and he usually is, he doesn't care about either of them. 

Well. Maybe that's not totally true. Kai is pretty okay, and it's hard not to feel a little tingle of admiration for someone who washed the blood out of your hair after your best friend tried to kill you. Or kidnap you. Or...it's all foggy to Chip, now, but he knows when you wake up in a stranger's apartment after a traumatic experience and a pretty boy from school soothes you and then clings to you, tittering, heating up tea, and occasionally holding your hand, you kind of trust him.

Also, Kai has a car. A car Chip needs.

Percy isn't at school either, and she won't answer her phone. It makes him extra-twitchy through the monotonous minutes. Every moment, Monet could be dying. Every moment, Max could be burrowing deeper and deeper into that monster of a city.  He texts Percy during Pre-Calc and Biology, just 'hey's and 'how are u?'s He gives up after Music Theory and during English, her  silence becomes unbearable. 

So he leaves. He doesn't speak, just slides his chair silently from under the desk, hefts his knapsack over his shoulder, and throws open the door while kids mutter and Ms. Harrison reaches for the phone on the wall. He'll always see that image, the woman's manicured nails a sheen under the artificial light. Her hand open and extended, forever reaching before the door slammed between them.

He walks through the undamaged parts of the school, the hammering and whirring of nearby machinery a constant reminder of what Monet and Max have done. He fingers crumpled sheets of paper stuffed in his pockets. Song fragments. Eventually, he escapes out the iron doors with a shove of his shoulders and continues walking. Down the sloping sidewalk, balancing on the curb, heel-toe, heel-toe. The wind whips up his hair and salt stings his skin, the streets all quiet, all crumbling tar and gaping potholes. He walks, and walks, balancing on the yellow strip of paint, his mind a cloud.

He wanted the old Max back, he tells himself, even the voice in his head a pleading, desperate sound. That's why he acted the way he did when Max hurt him. Why he returned the threats with silence, the curses with gentle touches, the bruises with...with love. With the sort of love that swells up from the brokenest parts of you. Chip thinks about this, dropping off the curb and kicking up pebbles along the side of the road. He thinks of a girl in a hospital bed and the distraught girl who was supposed to be his best friend. How she was oblivious for months.

He thinks of his own nervous laughter when she'd ask about his bruises, Max's sidewise glances. How Chip changed the way he walked, the way he stood. He started slouching more, stumbling over things that weren't there, and laughing in her presence after purposely stubbing his toe on his own amplifier. "Such a clutz," he'd say, tracing his newest bruise. "I wish I knew how to walk." And sometimes Percy would drift her eyes over his lanky body for a second too long, squinting. Maybe, she'd remembered how graceful of a dancer he'd been. He'd taught her, after all. Tango. Waltz. Foxtrot. And then she'd get distracted, by a ding on her phone or a random thought about the vastness of the universe, and Max's pinching grip on Chip's elbow would slacken and both boys' shoulders would relax.

Chip thinks about this, still wandering the quiet streets. It's October, too cold for romantic walks on the beach, and without its superheroes, Silver Dollar is a little nothing town you pass through on your way to famous beaches, its crumbling buildings and shattered city streets warning tourists away. So the cars that buzz by are few today, sputtering and whirring, filling the air with the choking reek of engine exhaust. 

He doesn't think much of this, breathing in drifts of sand and the distant smell of fish guts drying on the pier. The familiarity of home. He scoops change from his pocket and palms it as the bus stop bench creaks under his weight. An hour passes of Chip staring at the blue, blue sky, quiet and thinking. Trying to do that thing Percy wanted, trying to tease himself apart and understand all the layers of meaning. Trying to piece together what happened, why at the time, he didn't tell anyone. Reliving every moment he stood outside his aunt's door, feeling small in front of it. And that strange, creeping feeling of guilt. Like he had done something to be ashamed of, though he knew he hadn't. He relives these feelings, the knot in his stomach, the closedness in his chest, the suffocating feeling that he was thinking himself to death. He relives them, but he still doesn't understand them.

 The bus that slows and then pulls to a screeching stop in front of him once belonged to Red Comet High, and you can tell by the fading yellow paint streaked across a rusting hull. Chip pays his way to the hospital with the last of his money and leaves the bus shambling. He's almost hit by a battered sedan while crossing the street and freezes when the hospital doors whoosh shut behind him, as if the place wasn't his destination all along.

 He stands in the lobby for a long moment, his eyes sweeping over the white floors and white walls, the sharp antiseptic smell a prodding reminder that this is a scary place and that, worse, it's a scary place he's been before. The waiting is full of people shifting uncomfortably in stiff plastic chairs. There's a woman rocking a baby against her chest, and elderly couple pressed shoulder to shoulder, the man asleep against his wife, and there are so many others, flipping through magazine pages, murmuring softly to each other or squinting at the words while their hands tremble. And at the very corner of the room, nearest the door, Avery Jackson is asleep with his fingertips pressed to his forehead, his body slouched forward and his elbows pushed to his knees. Shirt untucked and wrinkled. When Chip creeps toward him, he notices the man isn't wearing shoes, just argyle socks. 

Chip lays a hand on his shoulder and the man jolts awake, his breathing suddenly heavy and his eyes wide and bloodshot.

"Chip?" Mr. Jackson says, sitting up. His eyes sweep his surroundings quickly, and then he fiddles with the button on his collar absently. Chip nods and the man gives up with his collar, setting his eyes calmly on the boy. "They won't let us see her. Surgery." His tone is calm and his voice soft. 

"Oh." Chip shoves both hands in his pockets, staring at the strands of sunlight shifting across the floor. "Um, sorry. I'm sorry, about what happened, and, uh, the hospital." He leans his weight on his heels, still afraid to look up at the grieving parent. "Can I...can I ask about Kai? Finn?"

Mr. Jackson grimaces before catching himself and setting his face to a neutral expression. "They're holding up."

Chip digs his nails into his thigh. He wishes he knew how to speak. He wishes, and not for the first time, that he'd spent less time shut up in his attic room, forcing himself to strum those silvery chords until his fingertips were sticky with blood. "I mean, um, if I can ask, where are they?"

Mr. Jackson straightens in his chair. Chip hazards a glance at his face. The man's eyes are hollow, his lips pressed together into a grimace, and Chip gets the uneasy sense that the man is looking through him rather than at him. "Finn's getting a soda, and Kai's down the street at the McDonald's. At least, that's what he told me."

"Thanks," Chip mumbles into his collar. "I..."

Mr. Jackson watches him silently. A sadness Chip can't name wells up from the pit of his stomach. Not exactly for Monet, that's a sort of dull ache he didn't realize he felt until now. No. Something about the man himself. Chip's mouth hangs open and Mr. Jackson folds his hands together. His voice is still soft. "Yes, son?"

Chip stiffens, his heart an ache in his chest. He can feel it pounding, can feel each slamming beat, and with it, that strangled, growing sadness. He needs to get out of this place with the antiseptic-smell and the man calling him 'son.' "Sorry," he repeats. Or squeaks. He feels like his head has been dunked under water, unable to breathe, think. "S-sorry about everything."

Mr. Jackson watches, issuing a sad smile despite the terror masked behind his tired eyes as the boy's face flares bright red and he bolts out through the sliding hospital doors, stumbling over his laces and the heavy soles of his platform shoes.

***

The McDonald's is a scooping hill away from the hospital, and Chip has to struggle through the scraggly grass and the clumps of sand. He surveys the McDonald's and finds it empty, aside from a man in a gray Polo mopping Coke from the floor. He tries the bathroom, too. And after shifting awkwardly against the sink basin for ten minutes, pretending to play with his hair, he's about to give up his search. It's only a quiet clunk! sound ringing through the mirror that sends Chip outside the McDonald's and assessing the dumpster behind it. Kai kicks a beer can against the back of the restaurant. He stomps it, once, twice. Until it's crushed flat under his heel. Then he stomps it again, letting out a sound that's not a scream but can't be described as anything else, loud and painful but still choked, strangled. 

He picks up the crushed can, and Chip leans against the dumpster, watching. Blood spring up on Kai's finger, but he throws the crushed can one more time against the wall. The shredded aluminum clangs! and falls to the blacktop with a hollow thud, and he realizes the boy's shoulders are shaking.

"Uh, hey?" Chip says, crunching gravel underfoot. Kai whirls around, shoulders tensed and boxy. Chip sizes him up quickly; dark eyes rung with circles, a stiff blazer jacket that's buttoned loosely over a bare chest. "Hey, I'm sorry."

Kai blinks, rubbing his bleary eyes with the edge of his hand. His fingers are still bleeding, and Chip digs his hands deeper into his pockets, wishing he kept bandaids. The other boy stares at him for a long time, as if he'd never seen him before, and then he grunts, digging his heel into the gravel. He looks so tired, Chip thinks. Kai's hair unbrushed and sticking up in every direction, eyes drooping and rung with hollow circles, the sagging frown and pale skin. Chip swallows. He'd always thought of Kai as a sort of manic pixie dream boy, a kind of child in a teen's skin, but there's something so painfully adult in his silence, in the blood welling up from his shaky hands.

"We should go inside," Chip says, stepping so close to Kai his breath clouds against his cheek. "Get your hands looked at."

Kai kicks at the gravel. "Nothing'll get her back," he says, still staring up at Chip. "It was just supposed to be fun. This superhero stuff. And then you got hurt, and Finn, and Monet."

"We should really bandage up your hands," says Chip, Kai's voice making sweat bead down his brow. This is the first time Kai has sounded like an adult to Chip, not only the words, but the voice itself. 

"I wish it didn't happen." Kai clenches both fists at his side. "I just wish none of this happened. I wish it so bad...I just, she's gonna die." His voice cracks. "They think she's gonna die."

Chip isn't one for physical contact with strangers, but he lays his hand on Kai's shoulder. He could remind Kai that Monet's a superhero, and that superheroes are hard to kill. But he doesn't. He knows better than anyone that elevon-o'clock miracles are a cruel myth. Sometimes people die. And false hope is a sweet sort of poison Chip refuses to feed Kai.

Kai flinches, and then he leans against Chip, keeping his movements slow. Tentative. So unlike the guy who'd grab him and Finn by their wrists and drag them. His face only brushes Chip's shirt, his fingers hovering around the small of Chip's back. Breathing sharply, Chip pulls the boy closer, and Kai collapses into him. Not crying. Not talking. Just breathing. Short and desperate pulls of air against his chest.

Warmth oozes against Chip's back; blood. He pets Kai's hair, but Kai doesn't say anything, and so Chip smooths each unruly feather against the shivering boy's neck. The contact is strange to him. The heat of another body. The smell of linen and faded cologne. The petting itself, also strange, but Chip just does it, despite his own squeamishness. LIke his body isn't even his to control anymore.

They stand like that for a minute, Chip growing more before Chip, still squinting at the back of the McDonald's says. "I think I know where Masquarade—"

"Max," Kai says, and though his voice is quiet, there's an edge to it. Like he knows how hard it is for Chip to connect the villain to a boy he was once friends with. More than friends with. "You mean Max."

"Max," Chip repeats, yanking his hand off Kai's neck. He lets it hang at his side, unsure of what to do with it. His fingers are still warm and tingling from the contact of another human's skin. "He's uh, he's in Starlight City. I want to chase him."

Kai laughs, chirpy and clipped in that strained, fake way. He pulls away from Chip's chest, wiping his eyes with a blood-crusted thumb. "My car's in the shop. But there's someone else who just got a car you can convince."

"Yeah?"

"Finn."

Chip kicks up a spray of gravel. "Shit."

And for the first time since he's heard the news about Monet, Kai cracks a smile.