My pickup was at ten.

I hurried back to the dorm after class. I had a plan: shove everything I needed for the night into my backpack, brush my teeth, and head downstairs.

I could feel things churning a little in my gut. I was holding out hope that my monthly visitor would give me another day or two, but that seemed unlikely, and the thought of my period ruining my evening brought a little flash of anger.

Whatever. I made sure my bag had pads. I could keep calm, especially with Manu to help me out.

Or so I thought. As I was coming down the stairs, my phone blipped at me with a text message. A bit worried that it was Manu, I had to check it, and so, standing in the middle of the stairs, the rage built quickly.

Manu was right on time, and so was I, and when I slammed the passenger door, he correctly deduced that I was not happy.

"Everything okay?" he asked, knowing the answer.

"That's a big fuckin' nope," I said.

"What's up?" he asked as he pulled out of the loading zone.

I flipped my bag into the back seat. "My mom and step-dad are breaking up. She's decided to move out."

"Breaks up your family a bit?"

I sighed. "You might say that. The cost, according to her, means that she can't fly me home for Thanksgiving."

He nodded. "Okay. Were you planning on—"

"Yeah, I was."

"And—"

"It's always a super tense time but I was kinda counting on it, right? I dunno." I half-sulked, half-fumed in the passenger seat, and ignored the fact that I didn't really want to go home for Thanksgiving and spend time with my family.

"Okay," Manu said, turning on to the highway.

I took a breath. "Sorry, I'm just... I'm tired, and the rage demon is lurking. I don't think I'd feel good about this if it wasn't that time, but..."

"So, uh, I wish I could offer..."

"It's alright, I'm sure you have your own family plans."

"Yeah, half the family doesn't celebrate Christmas, so Thanksgiving is always a big deal. Every year we head out to spend time with my grandmother, and since I'm not in school at the moment, the trip will be two weeks, and I'm expected to be there."

"Yikes. Your family doesn't mess around."

"Not with reunions, no." Manu turned onto an unfamiliar exit. "I haven't had dinner yet, I hope you don't mind."

"I have, but I could eat." Another consequence of my monthly visitor. I wanted snacks. "Where are we going?"

"Little place I know that's open late. You like pizza?"

"Love it."

"Good." I could sense him hesitating. "You like weird pizza?"

I hesitated right back, curious. "'Weird', how?"

"Barbecued lamb and vegetable pakora with a tomato-butter gravy instead of a marinara?"

I raised an eyebrow. "I have no idea."

"Well, you'll find out, then, because that's what I'm going to order." He turned into a parking lot. "Unless you want something else."

"You know what? I'm in. I don't know what 'pakora' is, but I'm sure that if you like it, I'll like it."

He laughed. "It's a mix of my mom's cooking, the Canadian version of my mom's cooking, and... well, pizza." He shut off the car. "You like spice?"

"Uh. Hm. I don't know how to answer that," I said. "Some?"

"I suggest you prepare yourself, then." He opened his door and got out.

I wasn't that hungry, so mooching a single piece of pizza would be fine, I figured, even if I didn't totally like it.

I was not prepared.

The, I supposed, owner and chef greeted Manu as an old friend. He was a cheerful older man, balding, with deep lines in his dark face. The two of them spoke in a mix of English and what I later found out was Hindi, but so quickly that I couldn't really recognize what the English words were. He introduced me, and suddenly I was part of the family, even though I couldn't understand anything. I felt the warmth and comfort of that immediate appreciation.

The owner addressed me directly. "You like spice?" he asked. His English was completely unaccented.

"Some, I suppose," I answered honestly.

"Heh, alright, I'll make sure it's not too much." He immediately turned and headed back into the kitchen. "Sit wherever you like," he called to us as the door swung closed behind him.

We chose a quiet booth in the corner, far from the entrance. "So, how screwed am I?" I asked lightly.

Manu held up his hand with his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. "Just a bit." He laughed. "Pat'll bring out some chili oil for me to add to mine, and he won't make it too spicy for you."

I was still not prepared.

The first bite was a burst of unexpected flavours, things I just wasn't expecting in a pizza. The sauce was almost sweet, the cheese was exceptionally mild—it wasn't mozzarella, I don't think—the crust was more like a flatbread than a traditional pizza crust, and the toppings... It felt like a dozen different spices and textures, things I couldn't name, things I could but were still unfamiliar in their presentation. The lamb was so tender it practically melted, and the breaded vegetables were crisp and tasty. It was recognizable as pizza, in the broadest sense, but that didn't really matter, it was delicious.

And then, after the second bite, the burn hit.

I tried my best to play it off, but apparently it's not just arousal or embarrassment that makes me go red. Manu was reasonably understanding, at least outwardly, as I tried to swallow my entire glass of water in a single gulp.

Manu then had the audacity to add chili oil to his 'mild' slice of pizza while I grabbed a piece of naan with garlic. Also delicious, and did a good deal more to cool my burning mouth than the water.

"Guessing one slice will do?" Manu asked.

I tried to scowl, honestly, but it was too tasty not to keep eating, alternating a bite of the pizza with a slow breath and a bite or two of the naan. And just to be contrary, I took another piece (Manu was finishing his third by that point). It did get easier, as time went by, and I got used to it; by the end of that second slice, my mouth was thoroughly burning and I did not care. I thought about a third piece myself, then, feeling full, decided against it, and just sat back and watched as Manu polished off the rest. We barely spoke, just being comfortable in each other's company, with the awareness that a lot of what we wanted to talk about, we didn't want to talk about in public.

Really, it was an excellent late-night snack. Something I would look forward to again for a proper dinner. Maybe being better prepared, and having something a little milder, but the flavours and the textures were beautiful.

Manu paid the bill and gave the owner a solid handshake. "See you again soon, friend," Pat replied, and I think he may have been talking to me. We both thanked him and left.

"What did you think?" he asked.

"Nice guy, nice food, and I wasn't quite as screwed as I thought I'd be," I said, getting into the car.

"Glad to hear it, because, uh... when I cook..."

"I think I get it. So the chili oil you sprinkled on your pizza?"

He nodded as he started the car. I brushed a little sweat from my brow. "Hey, did you know," he began.

"Hm?"

"Spicy foods are supposed to be an aphrodesiac."

"Yeah?"

"Mhmm, same with cinnamon, ginger, and cumin."

"And I'm guessing the pizza had all those on it."

"Sure did." He pulled onto the highway.

I put my hand gently on his knee. "You know, you didn't have to get me all worked up."

"Didn't really intend to," he said. "Just a nice coincidence."

I heard the little catch in his breath, felt my heart racing just a bit.

"Funny," I said, my voice low and soft, my hand running up his leg "I thought that might be part of your 'experiment'."

"Uh," he said, and I noticed him focused very closely on the road. "No, I hadn't planned on it."

I curbed my instinct, my urge to slide my hand higher and to start coming up with verse, an act that might have caused a car accident, and we did make it safely to his apartment complex.

We then kissed heartily in the lobby, multiple times. An observer might have thought we were taking advantage of the wait for the elevator; they might also have noticed that we hadn't pushed either call button. Making the most of the late hour and the unlikelihood of being interrupted, we were doing what we could with our time before we had to climb six flights of stairs. Maybe, I thought privately, if I could get worked up enough, I'd have the energy to mount the stairs, and then enough left over to mount Manu.

Alas, gravity does not care if I'm horny, and we made it to Manu's door a little worse for wear and not at all ready to continue what we had started on the ground floor. Still, a glass of cold water each and a topless snuggle on the couch made for a great start. Or restart.

About twenty minutes to midnight, I leaned my head back on Manu's chest and he cupped my little breasts. "Not sure how much longer I'll be awake," I said. "You're just too comfortable."

Manu's fingers shifted in ways that made me sigh and twitch happily. "I'm not opposed. Are we skipping mad science night?"

I shook my head slowly, drawing my short hair across Manu's chest, enjoying the feeling of it. "I'm here for the mad science. And the sexy pillow I'm lying on."

"Then I should maybe get up."

"Nope. Mad science from here. You're my pillow now."

Manu laughed. "I don't have anything to do mad science with right here."

I stretched, deliberately pressing my bottom into Manu's crotch as I did. "I suppose I could move."

In a flash, Manu's hands shifted from my tits to my ribs, gently digging in and causing me to squeal and jump.

"Okay, okay!" I said as he stopped. "I can take a hint." I flipped over and kissed him, rubbing my bare chest against his, and flopped carefully onto the ground. "I've pretty much recovered from the stairs at this point," I continued, staring up at the ceiling, folding my hands over my belly. I almost regretted lying on my back, considering how much Manu loved my breasts and how much they vanished when I was supine.

"Right." Manu sat up with a grunt. "Dating you is going to help me get in better shape, I think. Anyway, I need to get my laptop out." He nudged my hip with a toe. "Any chance you can have those off by the time I get back?"

"You have to ask?" I said with a giggle. "Except, I'd rather just keep my underwear on and pad on, okay?"

I didn't need to ask twice. "Of course," Manu answered as he got up and headed to the bedroom.

It's not that I was really worried. Rage Demon hadn't really interfered much, and I wasn't so much as even starting to spot, but I still felt more comfortable with pad in place.

"So my plan," Manu said, coming back out with the laptop, "is to kind of get a feel for how this... uh... signal or whatever it is works." He put the computer on the table. I was still staring up at the ceiling from the floor, having compliantly taken my pants off. "There's obviously something that hits you in some way. I want to know where it comes from, if it can be manipulated, or interrupted, or... I don't know, I just have a bunch of weird ideas and I want to try them out."

"Sounds good to me," I replied. "Do I have to move?"

"Probably?" He laughed, offering me a hand up, which I took. "Visuals are involved. You should be able to see things."

I scrambled over to sit on the couch that I'd just flopped off of. I wondered for a moment, with Rita telling me about the Presence and the way it spread, if Manu's ideas for his 'mad science' had come to him through my poetry.

He hesitated. "How much, uh... do you want to know?"

I shrugged. "You told me that knowing things might bias the experiment, right?"

"Sure, but—"

"I trust you."

Manu nodded. "Okay. Uh. I reserve the right to call things off if they're getting weird. Weirder. Too weird."

I laughed. "Only if they cross the 'too weird' threshold, alright? I'm as curious as you are."

"Okay. Any, uh, lines I shouldn't cross?"

I considered. "Not that I can... no, wait. Keep your own head clear, alright?"

He smiled. "Yeah, I think that's probably for the best."

I tilted my head. "You hadn't thought about that," I guessed.

"No comment. Ready?"

I confirmed that I was. He pressed the spacebar, still standing over the laptop and watching me. My eyes were drawn down to the screen as the familiar music began. A still image faded into view as the first shockwave pulsed through me.

It was Tempest. It was "Fly from the Flames."

A song about broken mirrors and glass tornadoes and where the only escape is to fly away, fly away in the arms of love.

I'd never heard the whole song before, but I was transfixed, held in place, as my body got more and more energized. Every note pulsed through my skin and made my bones rattle, and I could feel the tides in my blood shifting as if the moon was pulling on my soul. Gravity, so much an enemy in the stairwell, now felt like it was the only thing keeping me from floating off into space, and the image on the screen forced me back into the chair, forced me to keep looking.

There was a small gap in the sound, and I took a breath, and oxygen flooded my brain... and my sneaky bastard of a boyfriend had set the file up to loop. I got one deep breath in and my whole world shook and shattered, and blasted reflections and impossible warmth came in with the introductory chords that sang out, We cannot call one such as you.

I wanted it to stop.

I wanted it never to stop.

And the whole time, something... else was there. Something other than Tempest's music. Vaguely I recognized Manu's voice, and my own, and I was...

Oh God, I was reciting. The words from the song were pouring out of me, I could feel them, echoes of power within echoes of power, output feeding into source in an accelerating shriek of energy that I couldn't hear. Words and images and context and meter and rhyme and symbol and allegory and metaphor hammered at me in every note of the third listening, so much that I didn't even notice that the music had started again.

Five minutes, maybe. Ten. Fifteen? Was it more? My body was exhausted, and I didn't know why. I was slumping back, my eyes were watering, and I was shivering though I wasn't cold. My mind was cast almost forcibly back to the memories of earlier that evening, to the classroom, to listening to Haven and Meaghan singing, or Oscar's strange stereo recitation, or Son's militaristic cadence, watching James' half-serious half-joking dance piece, all of it pressing on me at once, including Kat's halting speech, and her sharing of Lyric's imagery.

Unfiltered creativity, not a finished creation, seemed to rush through me. Not even solid enough to be ideas or notions or anything, just the basic building material of creative ideas. It was raw power, impossible and undirected. It was weird, there was nothing that I could do with it. It was like having a beach full of sand and no blueprint for a castle. My thoughts couldn't grasp hold of anything, couldn't build anything, as my identity threatened to dissolve into that stream of fire and light. I pushed against it, I couldn't be part of it, but the echoes closed in around me and the joy of it eroded the edges of who I believed I was.

Shattered, reflective glass swarmed me in a fiery wind, but the cuts it made didn't hurt. Instead it filled me with that raw, all-devouring creative force, the fire flowing into me, burning away the rough edges. I was no longer the creator, but the created, with Tempest's music the tools doing the work, and the hand holding them...

I didn't know the hand holding the tools. I didn't know the shape of it, the colour of it, the feel of it. Whether it was human, animal, alien, or something else. Angel or demon, god or devil, or more-than-human or... just a person. I was becoming the raw material, and someone I didn't understand was converting me into something I didn't know, and yet I knew intimately and closely.

I knew the final shape, though I didn't understand it. It was familiar but unknown.

And that was the whole experience. Familiar, but unknown. It felt like... like...

It felt like where I knew I should be, even if I didn't know where that actually was. I knew when I got there, it would be right.

I wanted to be there.

I was terrified to be there.

I saw the cost. Connections damaged, broken, even shattered beyond repair. Lives changed forever. My own. Others'. A defensive shell pushed away from me from a growing new light inside, and a forever-commitment that would never be undone, and love, so much love, more love in a day than I'd experienced in years and years of neglect and dismissal and being the unwanted, unexpected offspring of two people who had legally bound themselves together but had no real interest in one another, forcing them together into a permanent resentment made from a temporary family, and a whole cadre, a whole legion of people who were the same: unhappy, unloved, unloving, uncaring. Selfish in a way they weren't responsible for, since they knew no other way to be.

I knew I had been that way. I envied those who were that way. That simple, self-focused life. I could be that, but for the force within me pushing out, seeking connections, seeking meaning and deepness and intensity and so much love from others, and needing to share that force from within to make those connections, to find meaning and deepness and intensity, and to share every bit of the love that was coming in, tendrils of light and life that desperately sunk their hooks into others in order to survive.

Behind me was a life where those tendrils found no purchase.

Ahead of me... the fire.

Against the lyrics of the song, the way forward was not to fly away from the flames, but to dive forward, to let myself burn, and to let others, those who made the choice to connect themselves to those lifelines, take the ashes and shape them, rebuild them—rebuild me—right from first principles, to let my mind, my soul, my poetry, my very body, every part of me be determined by someone else's connection to me.

I had the right to determine the shape, but they, whoever they were, had to hold the tools. I would direct the process, but they, flawed creators all, would make the final product, which might or might not be anything like who I thought I ought to be.

And out of fear, I lashed out. I felt my hands strike something, painfully, felt that something give way, heard it crash to the floor, felt myself snapping out of the moment with such violence that it hurt. I was apologizing before I knew what I was sorry for, but I knew I was sorry, and then Manu had his arms around me and I was crying and he was naked and I didn't know why and I felt myself latching onto him desperately, sinking my fingers into his back, feeling the vertebrae under the surface and the wetness of his soft chest under my tears. He didn't understand but neither of us cared and he was offering me every ounce of comfort and love he could and I who lived and died by writing couldn't come up with a single coherent word or thought.

I wasn't afraid, not any more, not with him holding the tools to reshape me, not there in his arms.

Finally I started to hear his voice through the floor of emotions, more than just comforting tone, but what he was actually saying.

It was alright. It was alright. It was an old, cheap laptop anyway.

He knew that wasn't what I was crying about, but that was all he could understand to comfort.

He held me until we made our way to the bed, and then held me more, and longer, until all the tears were gone and the sobs had settled. And then I looked at him.

In his eyes, so, so clearly, I saw those tendrils of life and light reaching out from me to him, pulling him closer to me, pulling me closer to him. Suddenly I didn't care so much about the rage demon or my blood in his bed, and it was obvious he didn't either. His hands felt like mine as they ran down my sides and gently pushed my underwear down, and mine felt like his as they rubbed slowly at my breasts. It was all too much and yet not enough. I lay on my back, or let him roll me on my back, and splayed myself across the sheets, and just let him have his way with me, and it was fantastic. My body was too tired to really register the sexual activity much, but my mind and my heart did. His careful, calm thrusting made me feel beautiful and warm, and helped me to cement who I was, right then, in that moment, at a time when there were way too many questions about who I was. His kisses helped me put aside everything that just happened, every insecurity, every inconsistency, and just lock in to being where and who I was.

As he came, as my body became aware of the warmth of him spreading inside me, I felt myself soften along with him, and all the tension flowing out of me, and his last, gentle kisses came as the exhaustion was overtaking me, and he could see both how good his actions were for me and how my waning energy was no criticism of his technique, and I was asleep before he climbed off.