Chapter 3: Scar Tissue
The stools scraped against the concrete, a sound like teeth grinding. Jess sat, elbows on her knees, staring at a dark oil stain shaped like a fledgling bird. Vi took the other seat, the metal cold even through her pants. The space between them felt vast, charged.
For a long minute, the only sounds were the distant drip of a leaky pipe and the low, persistent hum of the sump’s ventilation. Caitlyn had moved to lean against a workbench near the door, giving them the illusion of privacy while maintaining a sightline to the entrance. Daya remained by the tool rack, her arms crossed, a silent sentinel.
“You look old,” Jess said finally, not looking up.
A rough laugh escaped Vi. “Prison’ll do that.”
“Stillwater.” Jess tested the word again, her voice hollow. “They don’t take lane trash for jaywalking.”
“No.”
“What was the charge?”
Vi glanced at Caitlyn, who gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of her head. A warning. “Does it matter?” Vi deflected.
“It does to me.” Jess’s head lifted. Her green eyes were hard, glistening. “Seven years, Vi. I woke up in a clinic with Daya mopping blood off my neck and a hole in the world where you and Powder were supposed to be. The story was you’d bolted. Took your sister and ran for the topside. Left us to clean up the mess.” She gestured vaguely at the garage, at her life. “This is me cleaning up. So yeah. The charge matters.”
The guilt was a physical weight, cinched around Vi’s ribs. She nodded, accepting the blow. “Aggravated assault. Theft. Possession of illegal hextech.” She kept her voice flat, reciting a ledger. “They threw ‘conspiracy to incite insurrection’ on there for flair. They needed a name for the riots. I was handy.”
Jess absorbed this, her jaw working. “You didn’t do all that.”
“I did enough.”
Silence settled again, thicker now. Jess picked at a fleck of dried shimmer on her knuckle. “Why’d you come back?”
This was it. The core of it. Vi took a breath, the air tasting of metal and regret. “I’m looking for Powder.”
Jess went very still. Her hand, which had been picking at her knuckle, slowly rose to her neck. Her fingertips found the top of the scar, tracing its rough path down toward her collarbone, a subconscious gesture she seemed utterly unaware of.
“Powder,” she repeated, the name a ghost on her lips.
“She’s still down here,” Vi pressed, leaning forward. “I know she is. Things have changed. There’s a new… power. Silco.”
At the name, Jess’s eyes flickered to Daya. A silent communication passed between them. Daya’s calm expression didn’t change, but her posture seemed to solidify.
“You don’t find Silco,” Jess said quietly, her hand still on her scar. “He finds you. If he wants to.”
“Then I’ll make him want to. I just need to find Powder first. I need to know she’s okay.” Vi’s voice cracked, a fissure of raw desperation she couldn’t seal. “She was just a kid, Jess. I left her. I need to fix it.”
Jess’s face paled, the warm honey of her skin leaching to ash. Her fingers pressed harder into the ropey tissue of her neck. “You left her,” she echoed, her voice dropping to a whisper. “You left all of us.”
“I didn’t have a choice! The enforcers–”
“You had a choice!” Jess shot to her feet, the stool screeching backward. The sound was like a shriek. “You had a choice when that beam started to go! You had a choice to grab her, or me, or to fucking look!” Her breath came in short, sharp gasps. She was trembling. “You chose her. And then she was just… gone. And so were you. And I was under a ton of rubble with my back on fire!”
Vi stood up, her own frustration boiling over. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t see that scar every time I close my eyes? I carried you out of there!”
“You left me there!” Jess roared, pointing at the floor as if the rubble lay beneath their feet. “You laid me down in the dark and ran after her! I was awake, Vi. I heard you go!”
The truth of it, spoken aloud, hung in the air like cordite. Vi had no defense. The memory was a shard of glass in her gut: Jess’s bloody face, her weak grip, her whispered “go.” She’d thought it was a blessing. She’d thought it meant Jess would be okay. She’d been a kid, too.
“She’s my sister,” Vi said, the words stripped bare, a final offering.
Jess laughed, a broken, wet sound. “And what am I?”
Before Vi could answer, Daya was there. She didn’t move fast, but with a definitive, solid presence that inserted itself physically between them. She placed a hand on Jess’s heaving shoulder, not to restrain, but to anchor.
“That’s enough,” Daya said, her voice a low, resonant counterpoint to their fury. She looked at Vi, her dark eyes holding no malice, only a profound and weary certainty. “You’re digging in a grave, Vi. Silco isn’t a man; he’s a system. The girl you knew? She’s part of his machinery now, if she’s even alive. Asking about her, looking for her…” She shook her head slowly. “That road doesn’t lead to happy reunions. It ends with fire. And missing bodies.”
Across the room, Caitlyn shifted. Her hand, which had been resting idly on her thigh, drifted closer to the rifle leaning against the bench beside her. The movement was subtle, professional, but Daya’s eyes caught it immediately.
“Princess over there thinks her badge is a shield,” Daya continued, her gaze locking onto Caitlyn’s. “It’s not. It’s a target. You bring that topside beacon into these lanes, you’re painting one on all our backs.”
Caitlyn’s hand stopped, hovering. “My presence is non-negotiable,” she said, her tone even but firm. “I’m here to ensure–”
“To ensure what?” Jess snapped, peering around Daya. “That we play nice? That we give you Silco on a platter so your council can sleep better? We live in his world. Every breath we take is taxed by his chem-barons. Your ‘ensuring’ gets people disappeared.”
Vi looked from Jess’s raw, pained face to Caitlyn’s tense, principled one, to Daya’s unshakeable wall of calm. She was stranded in the middle, the cause of the fault line cracking open between her past and her present. The instinct to fight, to smash through the tension, vibrated in her knuckles.
The instinct to fight, to smash through the tension, vibrated in her knuckles. Vi forced her hands to unclench, feeling the old fractures ache. She focused on Jess’s face, on the friend she’d failed, and in the strained silence, a glint of unnatural light caught her eye.
It was a quick flash, violet and oil-slick, as Jess turned her head away in frustration. It wasn’t the garage lights. Vi knew that particular chemical shimmer anywhere. Her own voice sounded foreign, drained of its earlier heat. “Your eyes.”
Jess didn’t turn back immediately. She deflated, some of the fight leaving her shoulders. She finally looked at Vi, a deliberate, challenging stare. The faint luminescence was unmistakable now, a ghost in the iris. “So?”
“You’re using.” The words were flat. “After everything that shit caused? After what it did to… to people we knew?”
A harsh, short laugh escaped Jess. She leaned back against a workbench stacked with engine parts. “It’s not like that. It’s recreational. Tuned. We use it for the bikes, mostly.” She gestured vaguely at a skeletal racing frame suspended from chains. “Lets you feel the engine’s heartbeat, syncs your reflexes. Lets you see the track in slow motion. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand it’s poison,” Vi shot back, the image of monstrous, twisted forms flashing behind her own eyes.
“Is it?” Jess’s gaze was steady, eerily calm. “Vander smoked those cigars that smelled like a tire fire. Said it took the edge off. You going to lecture him, too?”
The mention of Vander was a low, effective blow. Vi felt a surge of hot irritation, a defensive anger for the man who’d been a rock. She opened her mouth to retort, but the fight just leaked out of her. This wasn’t the battle.
Vi looked away first.
And then her gaze snagged on something.
It was barely anything. A trick of the light, maybe, if you weren't looking. But Jess was looking now too, and she was very good at looking, and the faint chemical luminescence at the edge of Vi's eye was thin and recent — nothing like habit, nothing like ritual. The kind that came from necessity. From a vial taken in a desperate moment because the alternative was worse.
Jess's gaze tracked there and held.
One eyebrow rose, very slowly. She said nothing. She didn't have to. The look did it all — quiet and precise and absolutely merciless, landing right in the centre of Vi's chest.
Vi's mouth opened. Closed.
"That's different," she said.
"Mm." Jess looked back at her own hands. Picked up a bolt from the workbench and turned it between her fingers, easy as anything. "Sure it is."
From the back of the shop, Daya kept her back turned and her shoulders perfectly still. Which meant she had heard every word.
Vi let out a long breath through her nose. The argument wasn't finished. It was just suspended — filed somewhere neither of them was ready to open, sitting alongside everything else this conversation had already stacked up between them.
"I'm not done with this," Vi said.
"I know." Jess set the bolt down. "You never are."
It almost sounded like something it used to. Not quite. But almost.