by Mike Chen
Praise for the novels of Mike Chen
“Mike Chen always highlights the humanity at the heart of his astounding stories.”
—BookPage on A Beginning at the End
“[A novel] rooted deeply in the hearts of his characters and emphasizing hope and connection over fear. Chen has a true gift for making the biggest of worlds center around the most complex workings of the heart... Compelling, realistic, and impossible to put down.”
—Booklist, starred review, on A Beginning at the End
“Sometimes it is not the violent battles of post-apocalyptic stories that pull readers in; it is the emotional connection of humanity finding their way. Chen’s prose lights a brilliant, fragile path through the darkness.”
—Library Journal, starred review, on A Beginning at the End
“Heartfelt and thrilling... Quick pacing, complex characters, and a fascinating premise.”
—Publishers Weekly on Here and Now and Then
“Chen carefully balances heart, humor, and precise world building to bring alive an emotional and genre-bending story.”
—Booklist on Here and Now and Then
“A subtly woven meditation about the fragility of time raises the bar in this smart, fun, and affectionate story.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Here and Now and Then
Also by Mike Chen
HERE AND NOW AND THEN
A BEGINNING AT THE END
Mike Chen
We Could Be Heroes
For good friends
Mike Chen is the author of Here and Now and Then (a finalist for Goodreads Choice: Best Sci-Fi, a CALIBA Golden Poppy and the Compton Crook Award) and A Beginning at the End (“A brilliant, fragile path through the darkness.” —Library Journal). His short fiction is featured in Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View—The Empire Strikes Back, and he has covered geek culture for sites such as Tor.com, The Mary Sue and StarTrek.com. In a previous life, he covered the NHL for Fox Sports, SB Nation and other outlets. A member of SFWA, Mike lives in the Bay Area with his wife, daughter and rescue animals. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram, @mikechenwriter.
MikeChenBooks.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Acknowledgments
1
THE WAY THE BANK teller shrunk back in fear captured everything.
After all, Jamie Sorenson was a villain.
Not just a villain. He was the Mind Robber. And he terrified the people of San Delgado. The mere whisper of his name summoned panic, and when he incapacitated security guards with a brain-stun (his own term, which he thought was quite cool), that panic made robbing a bank as easy as handing over a bag—or in this case, planting a backpack on the counter.
“Tell me, who do you love in your life? Husband? Boyfriend?” Jamie reminded himself to not assume. “Girlfriend? Child? Parents? Who are they?” he asked. He put a hand up, then dramatically turned one finger toward the bank teller. Her eyes widened, clearly aware of the modus operandi documented last year in the San Delgado Times: a front-page feature breaking down his robberies and “extraordinary ability to stun people into a frozen stupor or worse, blank the memories of witnesses.” They’d even given him the name Mind Robber, though he’d added the eye mask and hoodie himself.
From the corner of his eye, he made sure the remaining bystanders hung on his every word.
“My...my...wife,” the woman said with barely a whisper.
“Do you want to lose her?” He stepped forward, and as he waved his finger, she winced. “Erased forever? Your whole relationship lifted from your brain? Your mind—” Jamie took a deep breath “—robbed of the very things you love?”
“No, please, don’t.” The teller’s lips trembled, and her eyes welled up. “We’re in the middle of the in vitro process. We’re going to have a family. Please, don’t.” With each word, her hands shook.
Focus, he told himself. To get out of here clean, he needed to keep everyone else quiet and scared.
Only one way to accomplish that: threaten the things that people held most dear. With the slightest flick of a finger, he peeked into the teller’s memories. He needed a name as the coup de grâce. Images flew by, but about half of them had a woman—a woman with dark brown skin, black curly hair and a gracious smile. Probably her wife, but what was her name? Voices came through as he focused, and during a conversation about in vitro costs, he heard it.
Victoria.
“Then get the cash. Every register. And the safe. And no silent alarms. Remember, I can track what you’re seeing. I know what you’re thinking. The police can’t help. She can’t help you.” Jamie hesitated, wondering if he should clarify that he referred to the Throwing Star. Given the context of things, it seemed unnecessary. Besides, better to keep with the personal stakes. “One wrong move and...” Jamie went with the educated guess. “Victoria is removed from your memory. Forever.”
The woman’s sudden sobbing confirmed his hunch.
He unzipped his backpack’s main compartment, only for a library book to almost slip out, a memoir from an ex-soldier who moved to Alaska to race sled dogs. That certainly wasn’t threatening, and while maintaining eye contact with the bank teller, his hand pushed the book down to the bottom as discreetly as possible. He slid the backpack several inches toward her, and she complied, stuffing it with cash before taking it to the adjacent register. Across the room, the two bystanders—a woman who had been working at a nearby desk and a customer in a polo shirt—continued watching, silent with their hands up.
The second hand of the bank’s large wall clock inched forward.
Jamie scanned the room, scowling to appear extra threatening, but really just a cover as he gauged the level of trust in the room. Everyone had a role to play: he was the villain, the aggressor, and they were the passive victims. If everyone stayed in those roles, his escape would be swift.
Jamie took a second, making sure he’d accounted for every step in his list. Couldn’t be too careful these days, not with the police on his tail. Or the Throwing Star, San Delgado’s resident vigilante, for that matter. He’d seen enough videos of her extraordinary beatdowns of common street muggers, and that didn’t fit into his plans. Not one bit.
The money flowed in, clean and quick—in fact, it might have been the smoothest of his nine bank robberies so far. Though the bank teller was
out of sight, he heard the distinct thump of bundled cash being tossed into the backpack. Seconds on the wall clock ticked by, a click click click that made each moment seem like hours.
Her footsteps returned to a normal pace as she approached her window. “Here,” the teller said. “Please. Just go.”
Jamie reached over, then pulled his arm back with a flourish before grabbing it. “You didn’t trip the alarm, did you?”
“No. No, of course not.”
“Are you sure?”
Though his abilities didn’t come with a lie detector, the freshest memories were the easiest to read. He dove in and confirmed she told the truth.
“Yes,” she said, nodding faster and faster. “Please, take it. I promise, I didn’t do anything.”
Jamie wrapped his fingers around the backpack’s strap, giving a little twirl as he flipped it onto his shoulder. The weight of the bag awkwardly slammed into his side, taking his wind for a second. “Alright.” He turned, putting his back to the three people watching him. “You’ve cooperated for now. Consider yourself lucky.” He hesitated, counting to seven for an appropriate dramatic pause.
One.
They wouldn’t remember this since he was about to wipe the encounter from each of their minds, but the security cameras would capture it, local news would broadcast it, and social media would discuss it.
Two.
The hashtag #MindRobber would boost his legend even further. Just the thought, the mere mention of him would generate fear in anyone he encountered.
Three.
Okay, it stroked his ego a little bit too. When you wake up in a dingy apartment without any of your memories, you really don’t have much else.
Four.
His only other accomplishment at this point was returning library books on time and being a good cat owner.
Five.
Remember your lines. And a good American accent, practice makes perfect, he told himself. “The Mind Robber has spared you...this time.”
Six.
Jamie adjusted his posture to make his big declaration before brain-stunning the two bystanders and the teller and removing the memories of this bank visit with surgical precision. Done, finished clean, in a mere ten minutes. He took in a breath to begin when the silence broke.
It wasn’t a word of defiance. Or desperation, or despair.
No, this sound was a guttural ungggh, like something choked. Jamie turned, then his eyes widened in horror.
This was unexpected. Uncontrolled. The preparation, the scouting, the review of his plans, the speech rehearsal, and none of it ever accounted for this.
The other employee, the woman standing by the desk, clutched her chest, eyes shut and brow creased in pain. She dropped to her knees, then fell face-first onto the floor, her skull hitting the stone tile with a sickening crack.
“Oh my God,” screamed the teller. “Wendy!”
The man in the polo shirt stepped over before stopping and turning to Jamie. “Please! Let me help her!”
What do I do what do I do what do I do...
None of the robberies had gone totally smoothly, but nothing had ever happened on this scale. Jamie froze, petrified as blood began to trickle from the woman’s head onto the floor. All that preparation, the theatrics, the ridiculous cackling, it acted as crowd control so no one played hero or got hurt. But this was something completely different. “I, um...” He wanted to say something, something to make this alright. Why didn’t he get the ability to reverse time, just a few seconds—seven seconds, precisely, to remove that stupid dramatic pause and just get out of there.
Run. He should run. Every instinct told him to get out of there—no, stun the remaining people, lift their memories, then get the hell out of there. Should he call 911 first? That woman, she was on the floor probably dying because of him, either from an apparent heart attack or the ensuing face-plant onto a solid rock floor. She deserved medical attention.
“We need a doctor!” yelled the bank teller.
Was Jamie a doctor? Maybe. At least in his previous life, the one that hid behind that moment of waking up about two years ago with no identity, no memories, no history. Did medical training linger somewhere in the void of his brain?
More importantly, could he even recall that type of information?
“Please!” the man in the polo shirt urged. “She needs help!”
“I know that!” Jamie yelled back, his English accent breaking through for a moment. Any cool resolve in his character was totally broken. “Are you a doctor?”
“No, I’m an engineer. We need to call an ambulance. Please!”
That man couldn’t help her right away. Jamie raised his hand, flicked a finger and put the man into a stunned stupor, standing but looking blankly into the distance.
“Wendy?” the teller asked. “Wendy are you—”
She stopped short, now also under the influence of a brain-stun. Jamie’s hands trembled as he tried to lift the memories of the robbery from each witness, but his own frayed nerves lacked the focus for such precision. He counted down from five again, a mental regrounding technique gleaned from self-help books for panic attacks, then he took out memory chunks from the event, enough to blur their comprehension. Good enough, he told himself. As he understood it, no memory wipe was one hundred percent anyway, some visual fragments always remained. Broad-stroke erasure would still limit their memories to snippets and flashes, nothing too damning. He took one last look at the teller’s mind, then lost his breath.
He wouldn’t need to call 911. The police would be here soon.
It wasn’t totally clear—adrenaline ruined recall and retention to begin with—but one of the woman’s most recent memories showed her clicking a button underneath her counter. Probably when Wendy fell.
Her bravery was admirable. So was her loyalty.
The injured woman remained prone. Should he sit her up? Check for a pulse? In movies, didn’t they say not to touch someone after a potential neck injury? The police would be here soon anyway. He should get to safety fast.
Yes, that was it. Run like hell. Inconspicuously. Ambulances would arrive quickly. Jamie bolted to the breezeway door and nearly smashed his nose into it when he forgot that he’d locked it per his usual precaution of preventing public entry. He typed the keypad code he’d lifted from the guard’s memory about thirty minutes prior and threw it open the instant it beeped.
The outer revolving doors of the San Delgado Bank branch seemed harder than ever to push, and midway through the turn, he remembered to remove his ridiculous eye mask and yank the hood off. As daylight hit the top of his head, he wondered if his sweaty face mask left indent lines around his eyebrows and his nose. Shaky legs brought him down the bank’s cement stairs when the audible gasps of passersby caused him to pause.
He swiveled, ready to brain-stun whoever may have noticed him.
But they weren’t looking at him. Instead, they all stared at the sky, pointing above the two-story bank.
“It’s her!” he heard. “Out here! I thought she only came out at night!”
A child ran into his legs, his excitement pushing him straight past Jamie while repeating his mantra of “Look!” to anyone who might be in earshot.
Jamie followed the pointed fingers all the way up into the sky. Above the bank building, the sun backlit the silhouette of a hovering feminine figure.
“I can’t believe it,” someone else said. “She really can fly.”
The Throwing Star.
Here.
Jamie put his hood back on and began walking as fast as possible, the heavy backpack filled with cash that bounced with each step.
Oh shit.
2
THE WAY THE BYSTANDERS pointed and stared said everything.
After all, Zoe Wong was a hero.
Not just any hero. With stre
ngth, speed, the ability to hover, even thermal vision, she was more than a person with extraordinary abilities. The local newspaper called her the Throwing Star after smartphone footage of her emerged on social media.
Zoe told herself that she was going to live up to the name. Even though her heightened sense of hearing picked up gasps and exclamations below her, only one thing sat in her mind: she was out to catch a bank robber.
The bank robber of San Delgado.
Zoe scanned the scene of the city’s Banking District, hands outstretched at waist level. Air pulsated beneath her palms, keeping her afloat, though a slight burn crept into her shoulders and worked down to her biceps, her elbows, her hands.
Zoe had seen all of the security footage online about the Mind Robber, read the endless comments about motive and identity. His first robbery started simple, barely a word out of him. But by the most recent one, he had a full persona complete with stupid catchphrases and a ridiculous eye mask and hood, his gestures becoming grander and more theatrical, seemingly posing for the security cameras.
Unlike her. Her attitude—nothing but business. Her schtick—beating the crap out of criminals fast (though she did consider adding a catchphrase since people were paying attention). Her outfit—purely functional. She couldn’t exactly sprint at extraordinary speeds in yoga pants. She’d tried, and they tore right apart. Hence, black leather, each piece held together by interconnecting zippers that unintentionally looked like a silver star.
Zoe scanned through the mass of humanity on the ground, doing her best to tune out the sounds that simply wouldn’t stop: a several-block radius of voices, the rumble and horns of cars filling up the streets, even the random dog barks in the distance. The wall of noise lacked clues as to where he might be. And the colors, a cloud of reds and whites and yellows, heat signatures of all types overlaid the people in her view. She’d learned to read some of it as intensity and emotion in people, though in this case it worked best sensing outlines at a distance.
Her arms burned, screaming to release the air and guide her down, but she persisted for several more seconds, observing the crowd as more and more people were drawn to her like a magnet.
