by Jackson Ford
“So. Four-thirty?” He gets to his feet, straightening his shirt.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I’ll be here.”
I walk him to the door, give him a hug. He smiles at me as he steps out, as if our entire conversation never happened. As if we were just two friends shooting the shit on a night off. He walks away without looking back, his body swallowed by the shadows.
I stand in the doorway for a moment, body sagging against the frame. In the distance Harry’s cart is moving along the sidewalk, its load of bottles clinking.
I hate lying like this. Not telling him the truth sticks in my gut. But what else am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to date him, knowing at any point he could discover that China Shop isn’t a moving company and I don’t have what you’d call a regular job? How am I supposed to be with someone when I have to lie to them?
Superheroes in comics and in movies pull off that secret-identity shit all the time. But this isn’t a movie, or a comic, and I am definitely not a superhero. Secret identity? I can barely pull off the identity I have. I won’t do that to Nic. I won’t put him in that situation.
Oh, who am I kidding? That’s just surface level. If that was the only thing stopping me, I’d figure it out. I’d find a way to keep my secret-agent life under wraps. The real reason I can’t date Nic is because of a quiet voice inside me. You don’t want another Travis. You don’t want that to happen again.
Travis.
A name I’d sooner forget, and one which I’ll never be able to.
Oh, fuck this. I’m sorry, but fuck it. Right now I’m so tired I’m not sure I can make it to the bedroom, let alone get my clothes off. Solutions to life’s problems can wait.
Somehow I find my way to the bed. Kick out of my pants, swap my shirt for an oversized Lakers T, brush my teeth. Put my phone on charge. I make sure all the windows are open in the hope that at least some cool air will sneak in, then I collapse on top of the bed.
The last thought before sleep takes me is that Nic smelled nice tonight.
ELEVEN
Jake
Jake’s hands are shaking.
He did it.
He really did it.
His first task. Complete. One step closer to finding out who he is.
His bike is parked on the corner of 6th and Figueroa, nudging up against a street lamp. At this time of the morning there’s hardly anybody around. The only sign of life is a homeless person limping across 6th, right where it starts to curve over the freeway. Jake crosses to his bike, and it’s only when he tries to sling his leg over that he realises it isn’t just his hands shaking. His entire body trembles, as if an earthquake is rumbling up through the Californian earth.
Nobody stopped him. Nobody saw him. They didn’t even know he was there. He slipped in and out like a ghost. It shouldn’t have been this easy, this fast. He rolls it around in his mind, trying to find a mistake. He can’t. So far, on this glorious night he hasn’t let Chuy down.
“I did it,” he says. His hands are sweaty, so he blows on them, barely aware that he’s doing it. “I did it, Chuy. It’s done. I handled it. I did.”
Should he send Chuy a message? Call him? No—better to breeze through the other tasks and only then make the call. The conversation unfolds in his mind. Yeah, it’s done. For sure. Nah, no problems, we’re good. Thank you, I appreciate that.
Headlights. Bathing him and the bike in a yellow glow. An electric car moving silently through the night, creeping up Figueroa towards him. Jake tenses, his Gift feeling out everything nearby. The street lamp. A trash can. The loose rivets on a nearby metal railing. The cute knee-height metal fence in the tree planters that border the street. If this person stops, if they get out the car…
But of course they don’t. Why would they? He huffs a breath, another, calming himself as the car slides past. A Chevrolet with both an Uber and a Lyft card in the front window. The driver, a young guy with a trim moustache, glances at Jake. He looks away, uninterested, eyes back on the road. The passenger in the rear is shrouded in shadow. The car hisses past, vanishing into the night.
“You’re OK,” Jake says. There’s no one around, not even the homeless man. Just the distant rumble of traffic from the 110.
You’re OK.
He smiles at the memory of her voice. He can always count on her. Even now, even when it would be so, so easy to give in. She’s the only other person—outside of Chuy of course—to ever know about what he can do. He can’t risk failing tonight because doing that would mean failing her. It would mean never finding out who she was, where she came from, and that way he’d never find out those things about himself.
Her name was Lauren. She was young—still a teenager when she had him, that much is certain. When he first began to show signs of his Gift, she wasn’t scared. They’d been staying in a tiny apartment in Iowa—Sioux City, maybe Duluth, he’s never been entirely sure—and he’d started to move objects around. Just a little—picking up his toy fire engine with his mind, moving a coffee cup from the rickety kitchen table to the sink, letting it rotate in the soft winter sunlight through the window, not even realising he was any different until his mom stopped dead in the arched kitchen doorway, a soft moan escaping her as she stared, wide-eyed, at the spinning cup.
She’d hugged him. Held him close. Hadn’t said a word.
Those are his earliest memories. The coffee cup. The fire engine. The sight of his mother in the doorway. He has so little of her now, and he held on to those memories with all his strength. They’d kept him going through some very dark nights.
She never shrank from his power. Was never scared of it. He remembers the comic books she bought him. X-Men and Justice League and old issues of Spider-Man. He remembers her pointing to Jean Gray, a blaze of red and green and yellow leaping off the page, and saying, She’s like you. Like the girl version of you.
And he remembers the one thing she taught him above all else. Keep it a secret. Never use it, not ever, not even if there was no other choice.
Most of his other memories of that time are a blur. The apartments changed—sometimes better, sometimes worse. The towns changed. One of them was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he knows that much. It’s a town he walked flat a few years back, coming up with nothing, certainly nobody who remembered either of them. Ditto for Cumberland, Ohio. He remembered the red-brick church, remembered standing before it, holding her hand. Cold wind searing his skin. Nothing else. Certainly no one who recognised him, no one who went, Oh, you’re Lauren’s boy, right? You’ve got her eyes. How’s she doing these days?
They’d found their way to Nebraska. Omaha. Big skies and wide dust-swept streets. He hates how incomplete his memories from this period are—the ones he does have are separated from each other like monuments in a vast desert. Their house, with a door that was nearly falling off its hinges. His mom giving him a new comic book—a new Spider-Man, although even that is unclear—and telling him to read it in his room while she talked to a man he didn’t know: a man in a dark suit with a sweat-stained shirt collar. His face is a blur in Jake’s memories.
And then one day his mom didn’t come home.
They wouldn’t tell him where she was. They wouldn’t answer his questions. They just took him to another house—one with other kids and two grim adults who looked him up and down like they would a prize steer. No matter how much he cried and begged, they wouldn’t tell him anything.
His mother is dead, of course. She was probably dead before he ever arrived at that house, because there is no way—ever, not in a million years—that she’d just leave him. He accepted that she was gone a long time ago. What he couldn’t accept—what wouldn’t go away, like an itch that he could never scratch—was that he didn’t know what happened to her. More than that: he didn’t know a single thing about her or where he’d got his Gift from. If she didn’t have it, then why did he? Who was Lauren? He didn’t even know her last name.
And they wouldn’t tell him.
He’d tried.
He’d asked. He’d demanded. He’d thrown things. Not with his power (never use it, not ever), but he’d thrown things. He’d been labelled a problem child almost from the beginning.
He didn’t last long at the first house. Or the second. Or the third. Eventually, they put him in a house in Lincoln run by a crotchety, overweight old lady called Denise. The three other boys in the house barely talked to him—it was if they were worn out, like toys where the batteries had been drained to almost nothing. Undaunted, he’d asked Denise the same question: Do you know who my mom was?
She went to Brazil, Denise had said, a smile twisting across his face. Went to convert the Indians in the darkest jungle.
Jake had stared at her, eyes huge. When Denise roared with laughter, he’d leaped a foot in the air, bolting for the stairs. He’d shut himself in his room, frantically scanning a comic he’d gone through a dozen times already. Again he had no idea what to feel. She hadn’t abandoned him for Brazil, wherever that was—no way, not ever. But then why would Denise say that? Where was Brazil, and why were there Indians in the jungle?
It took him three days to pluck up the courage to ask, and when he had, Denise had looked at him like he’d gone crazy. What the hell are you talking about, boy?
My mommy. You said…
And that strange smile had come a second time. Like she’d found a five-dollar bill in his jacket lining. She ain’t in Brazil, kid. She went to rob a bank. They killed her partner, but she got away. I heard she’s hiding out in Mexico somewhere.
Jake had screamed. He’d cried. He’d rushed at Denise, beating tiny fists against her midsection, while Denise laughed and laughed.
After that it was like she’d discovered a new game. She’d go to work at a second-hand clothing store in town, and in the evenings she’d drink her cheap gin and mixer, and lie to him. She’d tell Jake that his mommy was in prison, that she was trying to swim across the Pacific, that she’d joined the French Foreign Legion, that he’d dreamed her all up.
Once she told Jake that his mom had been upstairs the whole time, trapped in the attic. Jake had called her a liar, a liar, but later, when he thought Denise was passed out downstairs, he’d tried to pull down the stairs leading to the attic, balanced on a chair, fingers reaching for the hanging rope. Of course Denise heard him. Of course she roared with laughter.
The other boys didn’t care. They didn’t even have enough energy left to bully him.
By then Jake had more control over his ability. He still didn’t have a name for it, but he was just starting to realise that no one else could do it. He fantasised about using it on Denise, shoving his little red fire truck down the woman’s throat as he laughed. He never would. His mom had told him to never use it front of other people, and there was no way he was going to let her down. It would be like losing a part of himself, and he held to it even as the crevasse between them began to mist up, even as her shape on the far edge began to fade.
Denise is dead now. Heart attack. Jake didn’t even get to see it happen. There were more homes. More grey kids. More harried, brusque foster parents. And still they wouldn’t tell him anything.
He’d grown beyond comic books then, was reading more widely, and found himself obsessed with history books. World War II, Egypt, the colonisation of Australia, the Civil War—all of it. History made sense to him in a way that made-up stories didn’t. This happened. Then this. And then this. And that is how we came to be where we are today.
Even when he’d aged out, the system wouldn’t help him. Nebraska was one of the few states that didn’t have an open adoption records law, and every agency he contacted came up empty. He didn’t have enough money for a private detective, so on the morning of his eighteenth birthday he’d left the house he was staying in—a tumbledown structure on the edge of Lincoln run by a thin, feeble man whose name he now forgets—and struck out on his own.
The deal he has with Chuy is simple: he helps Chuy with three specific tasks, and Chuy will give him all the information he needs on his mom. On where he came from. Chuy can do it; he’s proved it already, thanks to the photo.
Jake dips his hand in his jacket. The photo is still there, in the inside pocket. A printout on flimsy white paper. He doesn’t need to pull it out—it’s seared in his memory. He was only a baby then, a grinning little goon in a red sweater, but you could already see the resemblance to the woman holding him. Blonde, smiling, no older than sixteen or seventeen. A photo he hadn’t known existed until Chuy gave it to him.
Jake clambers onto his bike. The shakes aren’t so bad now. He guns the engine, then takes off, U-turning on Figueroa. He heads west, towards Hollywood.
Above and to his right, the Edmonds Building blots out the sky.
One down, two to go.
TWELVE
Teagan
The flames crawl across the ceiling, spread across the walls in huge, rippling waves. The axe is heavy in my hand, wood grain rough against my skin. Sweat stains the handle.
Laughter. Behind me. I turn to look and…
Music.
The dream fractures, real life forcing its way in. My body is completely paralysed, frozen by sleep. When it kicks to life, I jerk up from the pillow, cricking my neck, my eyes rocketing open. Music. My phone. Has to be. Did I not put it on silent?
I grope for it, hand fumbling in the dark. It flops against a water glass on my bedside table, knocking it over, water gulping over the edge. “Shit.”
The music is my ringtone: Rakaa’s “Mean Streak.” Great song. Loud and aggressive and fun. Unless it wakes you up in the middle of the night.
The phone is still in its flip-open carry case, an old one with this shitty little 3D unicorn thing on the back—a cartoon character smoking an enormous joint, familiar under my fingers.
Reggie is calling. Did I oversleep? Nope. It’s still dark outside. The phone’s clock reads 3:52 a.m. I’ve been asleep for a little under two hours.
I hit the answer button, collapsing back on the pillow. “What? Fucking what?”
“Teagan.” Reggie sounds breathless.
My head is pounding. “Reggie, wh—”
“Red light, Teagan. Repeat, red light.”
That wakes me up.
Our little team doesn’t have cute call signs. I wanted us to, but nobody would let me, mostly because I insisted that Paul be known as Agent Whiteboard. What we do have is a series of what Reggie calls lights: shorthand for when something goes wrong on a job, and we need to act fast. You don’t ignore lights. Ever.
A red light is a bug-out, mission aborted, drop whatever you’re doing and regroup at the office. The only thing more serious than a red light is a black one, which is code for Move to Oklahoma and change your name and never talk to anybody ever again.
“On my way.” I squirm out of bed and immediately regret everything. And not just because my feet land right in the puddle of water. I am sore. Like I’ve run twenty miles, then turned round and run all the way back—payment for the PK I used last night. My stomach is an empty roaring hollow, and my head… It’s like I’m drunk.
Clothes. Some jeans, worn two nights previously and left crumpled on the floor. An old Jurassic 5 tank top. I throw my leather jacket over it, jamming an arm into the sleeve, realising it’s inside out, flipping it the right way round with a strangled curse.
I stumble out of my place into the baking-hot night, get halfway to the sidewalk before I double back, swearing, to lock the door. Phone, wallet, both in my jacket, which it’s actually too hot for right now, but whatever. House and car keys in my hand. Red light. Why the hell would Reggie call a red light? It doesn’t make sense. The job is over.
I’m so lost in my own head that I don’t realise Harry is there until I smack right into him.
He’s just crossing in front of the archway leading to the street, pushing his overladen cart. If I wasn’t still half-asleep, I would have noticed him right away, but I am, and so I don’t. I hit his cart hard enough to send the black bag on top c
rashing to the sidewalk.
His soda cans explode across the street, clanging and clattering. Harry yelps in surprise, jumping back like he put his hand in a wall socket.
I skip around the cart on one leg, torn between wanting to yell at him and wanting to apologise profusely and help him get his cans back. He looks terrified, panic-stricken, still taking stuttering steps backwards.
I have to go. You don’t fuck around with a red light. “I’m really sorry!” I yell, sprinting for the Jeep, leaving Harry gawping at me. It takes me three tries to open the Batmobile, and then about thirty seconds to start him up. My hands are shaking too badly.
It’s a miracle I don’t crash. I’m barely aware of what I’m doing, operating on muscle memory, zig-zagging the Batmobile in and out of the traffic as I head for Venice Beach. More than once, a fire engine rockets past me, its siren drilling into my skull, heading for the orange glow on the northern horizon. The HELLSTORM.
Thirty minutes later, I swing the Batmobile into Brooks Court, nearly knocking over the trash cans opposite Paul’s Boutique, screeching to a halt behind the open garage door. The van is still there. Before I’m halfway out the car, Paul pokes his head out the front door.
“You,” he says, pointing at me. “Inside, now.”
Normally, talking to me that way would get something pointy thrown at your head. This time I just shove past him. The drunk feeling hasn’t gone away, and every single muscle in my body is letting me know just how much of an asshole I am.
They’re all there. Carlos, leaning against the kitchen counter, arms folded, still as stone. Reggie and Annie, standing by the couch. Annie is still wearing her security-guard uniform—Jesus, didn’t they go home? Either way, it’s impossible to miss the grim expressions on their faces.
I come to a wobbly stop by the end of the counter, gripping it to keep myself upright. “Hi. Sorry. I’m here.”
