The Celestial Engineer

Chapter 6: The House on Miller Street

Brenda was waiting under the hospital canopy when he pulled up, arms crossed, heels tapping against the concrete. She didn't wait for him to get out. She yanked the passenger door open and dropped into the seat like the car owed her something.

"Finally," she said. "Howard's stable. His assistant already thanked me personally for getting him here in time. Me, Alex. Not you." She pulled down the visor mirror and checked her lipstick. "You'd think after tonight the Vance family might actually remember my name at the next gala."

Alex pulled out of the lower deck and merged onto the road without answering. Two hours ago he'd had his hand pressed against Howard Vance's dying liver. Now he was being informed that the credit belonged to a woman who'd spent the drive over calling him useless. He didn't feel angry about it, which was strange. He noted it, the way he might note a load-bearing wall, and moved on.

"You're quiet," Brenda said, glancing at him. "What, did you actually fall asleep in that bathroom? God, Alex, you reek of hospital disinfectant. At least tell me you didn't touch anything you weren't supposed to."

"I washed my hands," he said. She made a small sound of disgust and turned to look out the window, done with him for the night. That was fine. He preferred the silence. The house on Miller Street was dark when they got home, the porch light burned out for the third month running because neither of them had gotten around to replacing it. Brenda went straight upstairs without a word, already back on her phone, texting her mother about the Vance family and the commercial plaza contract she was suddenly sure they were owed. Alex stood in the kitchen for a while with the lights off.

He wasn't tired the way he should have been. His body felt wound tight, like a spring that hadn't been let out yet, and every small sound in the house came through sharper than it should have. The refrigerator compressor cycling on. Brenda's footsteps overhead, muffled by carpet. A car passing two streets over.

He closed his eyes and the compressor sound sharpened further, close enough that he could pick out the exact rhythm of the motor, a faint clicking underneath the hum that didn't belong there. A worn bearing, probably. Two more months and it would seize.

He opened his eyes fast, unsettled by how easily that had come to him. He hadn't gone looking for it. His attention had drifted and the answer had just arrived, the way it had with Howard's liver, the way it had with the c***k in his own truck's axle. He didn't know how to stop that from happening. Nobody had handed him an off switch.

Alex sat down at the kitchen table in the dark and made himself think it through properly, the way he used to work a problem on site before touching a single piece of equipment. Three things, so far. He could see through matter when his focus caught on it. He was stronger and faster than any man had a right to be. And whatever the meteorite had done to his body, it had also done something to his mind, because information kept arriving whole instead of being worked out.

What he didn't know outweighed all of that. He didn't know how far the vision reached, or whether it worked through more than a few feet of concrete, or whether it had a limit at all. He didn't know if the vibration he'd used on Howard and on the wiring at St. Jude's could do more than move a tumor two millimeters or short out a junction box. He didn't know what would happen if he pushed any of it harder than he had tonight, mostly by accident, without meaning to.

He thought about testing it. Right here, in his own kitchen, where nobody would see him fail. He picked an old coffee can off the counter, one Brenda kept spare change in, and set it on the table. He focused on it the way he had on the BMW's chassis, and the tin skin thinned in his vision until he could see the coins stacked inside, a scatter of quarters and one old subway token from a trip they'd taken years ago, before her family's business took off, before any of this.

He held that focus a little longer than he needed to, just to see what happened. Nothing dramatic. No pain, no strain he could feel. But something in the air around the can seemed to hum faintly, a pressure he felt more in his teeth than his ears, and the metal lid popped open on its own, the latch giving way like it had been pried.

Alex stared at the can for a long moment. He hadn't touched it. He put the lid back on carefully, the way he might put a lid back on something he wasn't sure was safe, and pushed the can to the far side of the table.Upstairs, Brenda's voice carried down through the floor, still on the phone, still talking about the plaza contract like the whole night had been about her.

Alex sat there a while longer, listening to the neighborhood settle into its usual late-hour quiet, and thought about Patterson Sterling lying in that suite believing a doctor had saved his life. Three days, maybe less now. He'd have to go back before the fluid returned, and he'd have to be more careful this time than he had been the first, because he wasn't the only thing in that hospital that could see clearly in the dark. There were cameras behind those walls same as everywhere else, and he still didn't know what they'd caught.

He didn't have a plan yet for how to get back into that wing a second time without anyone noticing. He only knew he'd have to find one, and soon. He went up to bed without turning on a single light, his eyes doing that work for him now whether he wanted them to or not, and lay awake a long time listening to Brenda's voice drift into silence down the hall, wondering what else about himself he hadn't discovered yet.