by Jackson Ford
If the driver hadn’t already been leaning on the brakes, it would have creamed me. As it is, it still sends me bouncing across the tarmac. I skid to a halt on my back, ears ringing. My shoulder took the full force of the hit, and it’s letting me know just how much of an asshole I am for putting it in this situation.
The driver pops her door, screaming at me, wanting to know if I’m OK and what the hell was I thinking and should she call 911. She has a high-pitched, screechy voice, and a serious valley girl accent. Her right headlight is cracked from where it hit me, a thin spiderweb radiating out from the centre.
Burr. Ten feet away, weaving through the line of cars to get to me. His white grin has turned dark red.
“Teagan!”
Nic and Carlos are both trying to get to me from the other side, Annie and Paul behind them, everyone yelling my name. The traffic has picked up, cars whizzing past on both sides, leaving me stuck in the middle. If there’s a gap for Burr, he’ll be on me in seconds.
Slowly I get to my feet. Nic and company are still shouting for me. I put a hand out to tell them I’m OK, my eyes finding Burr’s, not looking away from him. The valley girl has stopped screeching, hands gripping the top of her car door, looking between us and probably wondering what the hell she’s got herself into.
“There’s a gap.” Paul’s voice cuts through the sound of the traffic. “Teagan, behind you. You can make it.”
And Burr will just keep chasing us. He won’t stop. Not unless I make him.
I face Burr head-on. Throw my arms out like I’m inviting him to step outside.
Valley girl is about to get one hell of a surprise.
I have almost zero PK energy left. But I still have enough to do something simple. It doesn’t take a lot of pressure to break glass that’s already cracked; snapping a big shard out ofvalley girl’s broken headlight is easy. I snag it, pull it towards me and zip it up to hover in front of my face.
The remaining headlight on valley girl’s car illuminates the shard perfectly. She makes a really strange sound, a kind of breathy whuh, like someone hit her softly in the gut.
Oh, I’m just letting everybody know what I can do today.
Burr pauses, his grin faltering. I make the glass twitch, dancing in the air in front of me. The message is clear: Take one more step, and this goes in your eye. Then maybe I break your other fingers.
His grin is gone now. What’s left is raw hatred.
Freak show.
If he decides to move anyway, if he rushes me, there’s no way I’ll be able to fight him off. My PK is starting to falter, just like before, the very last dregs of my energy draining away.
There’s still a gap in the traffic behind me, all the way to the sidewalk. To Nic, and Carlos, and the others. I take a step back. Then another. Never looking away from Burr. He doesn’t move.
As I reach the sidewalk, I drop the glass shard into my hand. Then I point a quivering finger at Burr.
In that moment I know he won’t stop coming. For him this isn’t just a simple mission with an objective and a target. He took this one personally. Like I’m an affront to everything he stands for.
And next time I might not be able to stop him.
Carlos, voice urgent in my ear. “We gotta go.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Jake
After their first meeting, when Jake showed Chuy what he could do, the other man had cut off contact for three months.
That was how Jake saw it. Like Chuy had taken a long hard look at their relationship and decided he didn’t like what he saw. Taken a knife and delivered a single, clean cut.
It was agony. Jake didn’t have Chuy’s number—he’d never got it, never even thought to ask. He spent whole nights wide awake in the shelter, staring at the bulging mattress above his head, wondering if the clunk of a footstep from the corridor outside was the cops. Or worse.
It occurred to him that he could track down the woman at the Mission—the one who had spotted him using his ability in the first place. It made sense. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. A dozen times he promised himself that he’d visit the next day, and a dozen times he found an excuse not to.
The nights that followed those promises were the worst. They were the nights he abandoned sleep and retreated to the alley behind the building, honed his Gift, not sure what he was doing but doing it nonetheless.
He’d already been up to the junkyard in Northeast LA—or parked across the street from it anyway, waiting for the guy with the beard to show himself. That hadn’t happened. A bald man with lidded eyes and a badly fitting suit had come out of the office at the front of the property and stared at him, expressionless. Jake had ridden off.
The leaden feeling in his gut hadn’t gone away. He’d thought it was worry, but he knew what it really was. Disgust. Disgust at Chuy for vanishing. At Los Angeles, a city that had seemed to offer so much when he drove into it and which had given him absolutely nothing. Most of all at himself for not knowing what to do next.
Then again, was he really to blame? Hadn’t he been down this road before, hunting for a trail only to get nothing? What was the point?
His ability couldn’t help him. It would just get him noticed. Maybe, he’d thought, it would be better if he vanished too. After all, it wouldn’t matter who Chuy told if they couldn’t find him.
But they will find you. They’ll use computers and tracking programs and informants and everything you don’t have. They’ll find you.
He’d bent his first piece of metal that night. Ripped the lid off a dumpster and bent it in two, grunting with the effort, sweat bucketing down his face. In the end he’d collapsed, dry-heaving, the lid clattering to the ground. He’d crawled back inside, somehow got into bed, shivering and shaking.
The only way he got to sleep any more was by running through stories from history in his head. The stories he liked best. The Battle of Changping, in 262 BC, where two of the greatest kingdoms the world had ever seen, Zhao and Qin, went head to head. Alexander the Great. Hannibal crossing the Alps with his war elephants. The inquisition. The sacking of Rome. He had their details memorised, but it was different now. The images were thin. Insubstantial. Like a shirt that has seen too many hot days and not enough dry closets.
He would never take his place in history. Not ever. He would never find out who he was or where he came from. For the thousandth time he thought about walking into a records office, taking the people there hostage, making them find out for him. Only, what if they couldn’t? What then?
He didn’t think he could kill. And if he did, they would hunt him down. He was strong, stronger than he thought was possible… but he wasn’t strong enough. They’d wipe him out.
And then, on a day so hot the walls themselves seemed to sweat, Chuy had shown up at the hostel.
Jake had been about to go to work—he’d picked up a gig in Pomona, handing out flyers for some car rental place—and was climbing onto his bike when there’d been the impatient noise of a horn behind him. Chuy, in the same beat-up Civic, wearing the same flannel shirt. He hadn’t parked—had just stopped in the middle of the street, backing up traffic behind him.
“You coming or what?” he’d said, then flipped a lazy finger at the honking cars behind him.
Jake had stared, sure he was about to start sobbing uncontrollably. He hadn’t. He’d scooted round to the other side of the car, ducked inside, squashing a takeout container underneath him. Chuy had taken off with a squeal of wheels, rocketing away from the line of cars.
They hadn’t gone to the junkyard that day; they’d just driven, moving in a loose circle up through Glendale and San Fernando, all the way down to Santa Monica. At first they’d just listened to music, Chuy pumping salsa and Latino rap and old-school rock through the Civic’s crackly speakers. But after a while he’d begun to talk.
Nothing important: sports, politics, the shit he’d seen in LA, how everyone here was a fucking actor. Jake hadn’t said much, merely nodding, occasionall
y giving a grunt of agreement or laughing at Chuy’s jokes. He didn’t trust himself to talk yet.
They’d ended up in Playa Del Rey, watching the sun set over the ocean, drinking a six-pack of Budweiser that Chuy had had in his trunk. It was piss-warm, but Jake would later think that he’d never been happier, sitting in the shotgun seat of that car with Chuy, having a beer, talking about nothing. When was the last time he’d done that? Just… relaxed?
“I’ve been practising,” he’d said after his third beer.
Chuy had given him a sideways look. “Practising what, man?”
“You know… my Gift.”
The beer muddied his thoughts, made it hard to focus. Certainly, if he tried to lift anything now, it would wobble up into the air, barely in control—if he could get it up in the first place. The choice of words nearly made him giggle, and he only just managed to stop himself.
“OK,” Chuy had said, not sounding very interested. He’d taken another swig of the warm beer, eyes on a woman in a bathing suit roller-skating past.
“I’m serious. I can do stuff now.”
“Yeah? Good for you.”
“No, listen. The other night—”
“Dude.” Chuy had waved the bottle out at the ocean. “We gotta talk about this now? About work and shit?”
“Work?”
“Whatever, man. We can’t just hang out? Talk like normal people? I mean, I know you an X-Man or whatever, but you don’t gotta be an X-Man all the time, right? You can’t just kick back, have a beer?”
They’d done just that, getting more and more drunk. After a while Chuy had plied Jake with questions: where he grew up, what he’d done before he got to LA, where he’d got the bike. Jake found himself telling it all, talking for longer than he’d done in years.
For his part, Chuy told him he was from Venezula—Caracas. He’d been in the States four years, owned a car service up in Canoga Park. “You gotta give back, man,” he’d told Jake, staring out onto the darkening ocean. He’d tapped his chest. “Get right here.” Pointed to the sky. “Get right there. You gotta try make the world a better place, even when it doesn’t want to be.”
“Right on.” Jake took another pull of Budweiser, his third.
Whatever Chuy had said, Jake had figured that one night in the junkyard wasn’t going to be enough. He’d been right. Chuy had shown up at the hostel two nights later, one of the Bud cans from the beach still rattling around in the car’s passenger footwell.
They made their way deeper into the junkyard—the bearded dude was back at his post as if Chuy had conjured him. For all Jake knew, maybe he had.
Chuy had joked about Jake’s ability. “We gotta find a spot with plenty of hubcaps right? You want me to set up a couple bullseyes, keep score?”
The jokes had trailed off when Jake lifted a rusty V8 engine block out of a destroyed pickup. He’d held it for a moment, floating it above them, then launched it. The block vanished into the maze of cars, the crunch of its impact echoing. He’d torn off a car door, bent it in half, doing everything he could to keep his expression neutral, trying very hard not to reveal the strain he was putting himself under.
Chuy watched, barely blinking, sitting on the hood of a crushed car with his elbows on his knees. Eventually, he’d nodded, sprung off the car, clapping Jake on the shoulder and telling him they’d go get a beer.
At first Jake had been confused—wasn’t this what Chuy had wanted? But as soon as they’d got back in the car, Chuy had started talking. Slowly at first, then more animated: about how special Jake was, about how he could change the world if he wanted, about how they were going to change the world. At one point he’d pulled into the parking area of a gas station on La Brea, moving way too fast, squealing to a halt just before he would have rammed the car into a concrete barrier.
Jake had lurched forward in his seat and hadn’t even had time to fall back before Chuy had grasped him by the shoulders, looking at him with burning, almost pleading eyes.
“I fucking knew it,” he said, spittle showering Jake’s face. “You didn’t have it all at first, nah, you didn’t, but you fucking had it inside you, didn’t you, hijo de puta?”
He’d grabbed Jake’s hand, holding it tight, almost massaging it. “You don’t know what this means, man. To me, to everyone. You gonna change everything. We gonna set this whole city right, and they aren’t even close to ready for it, you know what I’m saying?”
Jake had grinned, amazed and delighted. All that practice, all those hard nights in the alley… it had paid off. He might not know what Chuy was saying, not really, but in that moment it didn’t matter.
Chuy had sat back, breathing hard, stroking his chin. Then he’d started nodding to himself. “OK. OK. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We gonna help each other. Tell me again.”
“About what?”
“You, motherfucker. Your story. Wait. In fact, hold on.”
He’d pulled out his phone, opened up a note app. “OK. From the beginning. Where you grew up, your moms, all of it.”
“I don’t… Why?”
Chuy had looked at him like he was dense. “You want to find out where you came from. Shit, I do too. Maybe I can help.”
Jake had sighed, the good mood starting to slip away. “Look, man, like… I appreciate that. I do. But I searched for years, and I came up with nothing.”
Those burning eyes had found his, feeling like the only points of light in the darkened car. “I know people,” Chuy had said, suddenly deadly serious. “I got friends who got friends. Who got friends who got friends who got friends. I hustle. Now I’m trying to help you out here, and you being mighty ungrateful all of a sudden. So come on. Spill it.”
Jake had.
The phone in his hand beeps again. Sandy’s phone, receiving another text from Javier. It takes every ounce of control he can muster not to crush it right then and there.
The man was supposed to arrive at five o’clock. Then it was five forty-five. Then eight. The job he was on had gone badly: crew not arriving, parts defective, a hold-up while a particular map was located. He’d apologised over and over again, saying he knew how it looked, that he had no choice: xoxo Sands plz tell the Bean i’ll c her soon.
The latest message is yet another apology: Still going. Plz put Kelly to bed and I’ll give her a kiss when I arrive k? xoxo
He debates whether or not to respond, decides not to. He might be able to pull off Sandy’s diction or, at worst, get her to do it—she and her daughter were still locked in the kitchen pantry, their sobs long since gone silent—but it was far more effective to stay silent. Let Javier wonder. It would make him get over here faster.
The doorbell rings, the chime echoing through the house. It’s followed by a sharp, urgent knock.
Jake blinks, a sour taste trickling through his mouth. Then he’s off the couch, marching over to the the pantry, cracking the lock with his mind and ripping open the door. The two captives inside yelp in surprise, shrinking back into the darkness. Sandy’s daughter is clutched tight in her arms.
“Who’s at the door?” he says.
She doesn’t respond. Her eyes dart between his face and the phone.
He snaps a kitchen knife into the air from somewhere behind him, dances it into the pantry. The woman recoils like she’s spotted a venomous snake. The girl has started sobbing again, face buried in her mother’s shoulder.
“The door,” he says. “You didn’t say anybody was coming round.” It can’t be Javier—not after he just texted that he was still running late.
“I don’t know,” the woman says. “Please…”
The anger is a tight band around his head, crushing his temples. He storms into the pantry, lifts Sandy up, using the knife for a little extra encouragement. Getting Kelly out of her arms takes longer than he would have liked, the girl almost hysterical, kicking at him. Her mother has to soothe her, begging her to be quiet. And all the while the knocking at the front door gets more and more urgent.
Jake sends Sandy into the front hall. He and Kelly wait just round the corner, out of sight, his hand clamped over the girl’s mouth, and the knife hovering over her head. He jerks his head at the front door. “Open it.”
He crouches down, still holding the trembling girl, as Sandy opens the door.
“Thank God,” says a male voice. Old, gravelly—the voice of someone who goes through a pack a day.
“Is… is everything OK, Mr….” Sandy says.
“It’s Alan. From number 281? Two houses down?”
“Right. Sorry, yes. Hi.” Under the circumstances she manages to sound calm. Relaxed, even. Under Jake’s hand the girl moans softly.
“I saw your car in the driveway. And the lights were still on.”
“OK?”
Alan pauses. “They’ve issued the evac warning. I just wanted to check you were all right? We’re hearing the winds have shifted, so this whole area might get the actual order later on, and…”
“Oh.” She actually sounds upbeat. “Yeah, no, we’re good, yeah. Thanks for checking.”
“Are you sure? I just know with your husband not… I mean…”
The man trails off as if he realises he’s overstepped the mark.
“We’re fine.” Sandy’s voice is a little less steady this time. “We’re getting ready, I promise. Thanks for checking though.” A slight creak as the door starts to close.
“Are you sure?” Alan says again. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable leaving if—”
Jake hears the man’s sharp intake of breath.
The knife, the one he was holding over Kelly’s head, has drifted very slightly out into the hall.
He lost focus. The lack of sleep, the continued use of his Gift—it’s all taking a toll on him. He didn’t let the knife drift far, but it doesn’t matter.
Alan has seen it.
Jake doesn’t hesitate. Still holding Kelly, he puts his head round the corner. Sandy has realised something is wrong, is looking back over her shoulder. Alan is framed in the open doorway: an overweight man of about sixty with a messy goatee and a sweat-stained T-shirt. Behind his thick glasses, his eyes are huge.
