Levi rolled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchenette and began blindly jabbing buttons on the coffeemaker. After a few seconds of punching various combinations, the machine beeped cheerfully and burbled, spitting out a stream of brown liquid that pooled on the counter. Levi stared stupidly at it until he realized he’d forgotten his mug. Fumbling through the cabinets, he knocked four (plastic) glasses to the floor and almost broke the only nice cup he owned: his mug. He jammed it under the weakening stream of coffee just in time for the coffeemaker to turn itself off. 

After wrangling a full cup of coffee, he shuffled to the fridge, retrieved a squeeze-tube of yogurt, and ate it at the open window overlooking the fire-escape. His downstairs neighbor was smoking out her window, so the scent of ash quickly wafted inside. Levi squinted unhappily at the onslaught of unpleasant odor and shut the window. He’d forgotten to close it the night before, when he’d returned home from his impromptu rescue of the human woman. 

While Levi could feel cold and heat in a similar way to humans, he was much hardier and able to withstand more extreme temperatures without suffering adverse effects. This also allowed him to leave his heating and air conditioning off without being (very) miserable. It didn’t make him any happier about freezing his ass off, though. His toes felt like ice cubes. 

He squeezed the rest of his yogurt out of the tube and dug around in the fruit drawer for something else; he probably needed to go grocery shopping, but without a job money was always tight. He had some savings, money made doing odd jobs in the city, and occasionally a bit from one of the people who were a part of him.

The knowledge that he was made up entirely of other souls was disconcerting, in a way: Levi felt he wasn’t a real person. People, real people, were born, they grew up. Levi had spontaneously come into being when hundreds of soul shards combined into a single consciousness; he looked the same now as he had then. He wasn’t the child of loving parents. He didn’t have a family. He hadn’t gone to school. Everything he’d ever known was left over from a human life that was wrapped up inside him. Levi knew how to sing a German folk song because Irma Steinmetz sang it to her grandchildren before she died. He knew how to play Monkey King because Will Edlynd had played it constantly as a child. He knew the streets because Frank Jonas had driven them thousands of times in a checkered yellow cab. 

Each soul had ended before its time, crying for help when there was none, searching for safety but finding peril instead. Pieces of the souls, parts that couldn’t pass on without closure, lingered in the physical world, hidden from human eyes. They replayed their pain, over and over and over, unable to escape the harshness of their fates, until something happened. 

Something drew the shards together, pulled their frayed and flurried humanity into itself, took their heartache and refashioned it. And in a moment, an angel stepped into the world to live the life the souls had been denied, to be the champion they had needed. Levi had known immediately what he was, who was part of him, and what he was intended for. Before he was even four hours old, he had carried a woman out of the path of a subway train and rescued a toddler from falling out of a broken window. That was his purpose. 

He would protect, always protect. Everything he was was for the defense of others. 

***

Ronnie Ya raised an eyebrow at Reyna’s story the next day. She hadn’t thought the blonde had it in her, but apparently she’d done it. "Wait, hold up! You tellin' me you sprayed that guy in the eyes? That's pretty cool." She grinned, and shrugged thoughtlessly when Reyna gave her an incredulous look. 

"Really? That whole story, and you focus on the paint, of all things?" 

"That's what we're here for, yeah?” Ronnie opened her mouth to say more, but got cut off by James, a friend of Reyna’s. He admonished her for coming in after that kind of brush with death and dismissed Ronnie, who yelped an indignant “Hey! I can’t help it paint’s my thing! I went to school for this!” Narrowing her dark eyes at James, Ronnie made a rude gesture he didn’t see and shook up her can of spray paint. Urban art was her specialty, and when she’d been in high school she’d had her own crew of taggers. A couple of the bigger pieces on the sides of bridges had been her work. 

Nostalgic, Ronnie began applying a layer of white to outline a design. She was older than Reyna and James and most of the other R.A. members; she’d gotten a degree in art at the local university and when she wasn’t painting buildings she was publicizing her urban art exhibits at whichever museums would take her. With short, spiky black hair tipped in blue, purple-black lipstick, and piercings, Ronnie looked every bit a subversive alternative artist. She had never told anyone, but the piercings were fake and she took them off before she went to bed. She was actually terrified of needles.