"What?" Lisa asks.

He finds himself hissing again.

"What is this, are you a cat now?" She laughs hollowly at him. He raises his hand to –

his hand? He doesn't have hands. He's not... he's in the wrong shape.

She's staring at him now, as he wriggles beside her. "Tom, if this is another fucking joke, I'm not in the mood."

He crashes to the floor and tries crawling around to bite her ankle. It's harder than it really should be.

"You've lost it, Tom, what is this? Are you psychotic? Or –" Her eyes widen. "Are you... awakening?"

Even a snake knows what that beautiful word means. Distracted from violence, he hisses gleefully.

Lisa thinks for a while. A long while.

"I think when somebody awakens they have to be in hospital for a week," she says slowly. "Otherwise... otherwise it kills you. But if you get through it alright, you're an esper after."

She sounds sick. Looks sick. He doesn't know why. He's finally becoming what he was meant to be.

Lisa's getting her clothes back on. She picks up her phone and slips it into her pocket.

She picks up his, too. Looks at it for a while.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "But I can't think of a world that'd be better for having you as a hero."

She pockets it and climbs down, leaving Tom to parch to death in the summer heat. Cracks the phone with a rock, then drops it in the creek half a mile away. Goes home and throws up, gets shouted at by her mother for going out with that awful boy again.

"I left him, mum," she says. "This time I left him for good."