We Could Be Heroes

by Mike Chen

  This wasn’t the Jamie who’d researched Telos over pizza with her. Or helped rescue people out of a burning building with her. Something was different. Did they do something to him?

  “Jamie! It’s me. Help me.” Her elbows pounded against the chair. “Help me. Please.”

  His arms flew up forming a V over his head. He held the moment, perhaps for too long. If he was going for theatrics, this went from brilliant-but-scary performance to overindulgent, like the moments when she’d either decide to go all in on watching a movie or turning it off. The only difference was that this moment existed in her reality. If the context weren’t so terrifying, she would have burst out laughing.

  “I am the Mind Robber.”

  He spun on his heel, one arm outstretched, finger pointed directly at her.

  “This is my victory over you. You have lost.”

  All of it was a lie. Was it? He couldn’t have. He couldn’t have been that good of an actor, could he? And yet, seeing him do his stupid Mind Robber schtick hit her harder than stumbling over her feet in the Metro station. Her stomach sank, her shoulders slumped, and the burning in her wrists from her struggle withered as everything melted into the chair.

  Even steps clicked across the floor as he approached her, and the back of her neck began to tingle. “Jamie, don’t do this. We’re friends. Don’t—”

  “I win. And you will never,” his voice came out in a low growl, “remember that my name is Jamie.”

  A sweeping dizziness enveloped Zoe before everything went dark.

  22

  JAMIE LOOKED OVER HIS shoulder again, scanning around the wharf. Not the tourist part on the north side of the wharf, but the quarter-mile stretch tagged for redevelopment. Shuttered windows lined the old factories, piles of garbage went unchecked in alleys, and the stink of algae permeated through the air. And yet, he’d gone there night after night, starting as soon as Kaftan released him.

  Just in case.

  Night six was here, and it looked pretty much the same as the five nights prior. Traffic didn’t change, it was too late in the evening. People didn’t pass through, evening watering holes and clubs lived on the other side. Even the weather, which occasionally got temperamental in San Delgado, remained remarkably consistent on all six days, cool enough for a coat but dry enough to go without an umbrella despite the constant bay mist tickling his face.

  He waited an hour every time, leaning with his back against the pier’s fencing. On occasion, footsteps or voices would precede the appearance of a silhouette. But he knew right away that they weren’t the reason why he came.

  He knew immediately that none of the people were Zoe.

  One time, he dove into someone’s mind, simply to assess if that person posed a threat. Late-night hangouts in the industrial end of San Delgado’s wharf weren’t exactly safe, but a quick flip through the passing man’s memories showed that his pursed frown and tense stance had more to do with a recent romantic breakup than any intent to mug Jamie.

  The first night, he figured that she wouldn’t be here. He knew Kaftan’s team had released her at some point so she could “organically activate her abilities.” A little bit of detective work combined with some memory-diving around Telos confirmed that theory; that, along with knowing that Kaftan needed Zoe’s next iteration to fulfil her plan of reviving her husband, it all pointed to Zoe being let out...somewhere. Maybe in San Delgado, but maybe in a neighboring city. Maybe Hartnell City, to see how she’d collide with the other rumored extraordinaries. Maybe even Janloon, with new rumors of extraordinary-powered gangsters getting into bloody turf wars there. But digging any deeper would have required going online, and at this point, any sort of digital trail was out of the question. Everything required safe distances and a pad of paper, not just because of Sasha’s potential digital tracking, but also the fact that a viral video of Zoe stealing a car on a rural road had gone viral. That hadn’t endeared extraordinaries to the general public—or the police.

  Discretion across all fronts, though the goal was the same: find Zoe.

  She could be anywhere, really. She could be dead. They might have lied.

  Or she just needed time to piece things together.

  That’s what he was counting on. How long it’d take her, he wasn’t sure. But he came here every night at ten o’clock, thermos of hot coffee to go along with his hope that she’d make it.

  Five minutes left. Each night he waited from ten to eleven, a full hour. Zoe would be fine if she made it. At least, he assumed so, given that Sasha’s current serum was a variation of the previous injection that gave Zoe abilities in the first place. Remove, reset, restart—that seemed to be the plan.

  Jamie figured it would take her mere hours to figure out her powers. But how long would it take for her to piece together the clues he’d left behind? The cold air nipped at his cheeks, and he tightened the long scarf to keep the warmth in around his neck. He’d originally included that detail so she could spot him from a distance, but it proved to be quite functional right now.

  Jamie’s phone beeped to tell him that eleven o’clock had come and gone. Day six down. Twenty-four more to go, for a total of thirty, or one month. One month of hoping Zoe would put it all together. And then he could put her back together, as much as he could.

  If not, there was plan B: pack up Normal and hide somewhere in the Caribbean. Anything to get out of San Delgado, away from Kaftan and whoever might be watching him. His goal chart wasn’t totally filled out, but he preferred safety over hitting his projected retirement needs. That would have been plan A, that should have been plan A. But even with all of his instincts telling him to run like hell, the least he owed Zoe was a chance to become herself again.

  Time to go. She wasn’t coming.

  A cool breeze kicked up, picking up mist from the adjacent bay. Jamie closed his eyes, letting it wash over him as he considered another possibility.

  Maybe she did figure it out and simply chose not to come.

  It seemed unlikely, given Zoe’s instinctive pursuit of truth. But even though everything that he’d said and done was a form of best-case scenario for their circumstances, he’d wondered if things could have gone differently. Instead, he’d jumped right into it without even consulting her. That was a form of betrayal in itself, leaving him with an underlying fear that he’d given up on his only friend.

  Well, not only friend, but only human friend. Normal still counted.

  Jamie adjusted the backpack weighing down his shoulders, scanned the scene behind him one more time and started his usual walk down the pier.

  23

  SHE WAS NOT JUST Zoe Wong. She was the Throwing Star. She knew that now.

  It took some legwork to get there.

  When she awoke a few weeks ago, her eyes focused on a name tag in her dingy apartment. Senses started activating, taking in sounds and smells, along with the realization that she stood in the middle of an empty room, light casting in from its single window overlooking the Oakmount port, San Delgado’s cityscape visible across the bay. Dirty carpet, a sleeping bag and a crisp name tag sitting in the middle of the room, the name “Zoe Wong” scribbled across it in felt-tip marker. Next to it, a smartphone that got full service without any need to activate an account.

  At the time, she wasn’t sure if that was her or someone else. Maybe whoever owned the place, the landlord or current renter or whomever. But the weird note next to it, the one that said “See how strong you are,” that stuck in her mind more than the name.

  That wasn’t what you’d normally tell people. Even if you were, like, a professional arm wrestler or something. It really didn’t make for an appropriate welcome note from a landlord. So that was weird.

  Plus, there were the memories.

  They didn’t make sense. They seemed scattered, random, as if someone took a few dozen screenshots out of a movie and placed them out of
order. Most of them involved this man, a slight man with floppy brown hair and a British accent. But what he said made no sense. Was he a boyfriend, a boss? Why did half the memories take place in some ugly warehouse room? And the other memories she had, they were the opposite of that—visceral, kinetic, still images of being at great heights or punching someone in an alley. Brief, but tangible, and always fleeting, like they were on their way over a cliff but if she thought hard enough about it, she could throw out a hand and rescue them.

  The questions remained over the weeks, but at least now she’d partially found stuff to furnish the place. Her notebook rested on a coffee table with one cracked leg. In the corner, a fan helped circulate the air in the room, despite kind of smelling like wet dog. In the other corner a plastic penguin greeted her whenever she came home. And in the center, a lawn chair recovered from her building’s lobby that she’d managed to scrub clean enough to use without leaving dirt smudges on her pants each time.

  Zoe sat down, her eyes closed and hands against her temples. She must have been the Throwing Star. Her memories showed it. Searching online brought up stories of things she knew she could do. The speed, the strength. Articles didn’t mention her thermal vision, but maybe she’d just never told anyone about that before; either way, it was really cool. And after reading about the whole hovering thing, she decided to try it out two nights ago and go figure, she could hover, and it was awesome.

  But where did someone even get a suit like that? Did she have a partner of some kind who furnished her with supplies? And why did she carjack that guy—and why did she let him record it?

  Zoe shut her eyes, teeth grinding into her top lip as she attempted to will more memories out of herself. They had to mean something, this random collection. Most of them surrounded that mystery man, a seemingly nonsensical conversation they had in that grimy room, but others showed her flashes of her powers. There was one, though, just one that didn’t make any sense at all.

  It was a wall of some kind. A wall with the strangest decor, but focusing on it, getting it to stay still enough with the details, that proved to be the hard part.

  She’d take one more shot at this. She slid out of the relaxed pose of the folding chair, her bare knees scraping on the rough carpet floor until she was kneeling. Her eyes closed again, her entire body tensed and she urged the memory to come to life, from the pale lighting to the haphazard elements pasted on the wall. It had to mean something, she kept telling herself, some place or some code or some clue to who she was, what she was meant to be.

  The thoughts swirled around, and though her hands were balled into fists, a strange urge took over. As if by autopilot, her left hand raised, a single finger pointed out, and she tapped the air, nerves at the back of her neck tingly and alive.

  And suddenly the memory appeared in her mind’s eye, as clearly as if she were looking at the decorated wall in that moment.

  Her finger held, a strange tension wrapped around it, and when she angled her finger one way, she noticed something strange about the memory: the cheap analog clock on the wall began ticking forward. Angled the other way, and the second-hand backed up. Held still, and the image held still.

  Zoe snapped back into the present, eyes flying open and sweat dripping down her cheeks. Her breath heavy and her body so tight it might snap the floorboards in half, she stared straight ahead until a sense of composure returned, focusing on the blank wall in front of her.

  Her eyes shut again, a canvas of black to view images. With a few minutes of practice, jumping back into the memory became as easy as turning a page in a book. Her hand extended, she held the image of the wall and saw it clear.

  It wasn’t a wall. It was a corkboard.

  And they weren’t decorations. They were a web of documents and photos pinned to the wall, all tied together point-to-point by string. But diving back into the image, examining it, staring at it in her mind, the details didn’t make sense—buildings and people and printouts, and the image wasn’t close enough for her to read the details, leaving the whole thing as random as—

  As random as her memories.

  If she could do this with one of her memories, maybe she could with others?

  * * *

  It took about two hours for Zoe to sort through all her memories, or at least she felt certain she’d covered them all. Next to her sat a pad of paper, one of those free bits of stationery that Realtors leave in the lobby of buildings. On top of that lay a pen, a clickity-click pen with the logo of a local plumber, which she’d found wedged into the back of an otherwise empty drawer in her apartment. Thirty-two memories, it seemed. Thirty-two very specific memories, some nothing more than a half-second flash and some as long as two or three words. Nineteen of them were from a conversation between her and the mystery man, and the rest seemed to showcase her powers: a kick here, a punch there, sprinting along a rooftop in the rain.

  But the words, the man’s words. What could they possibly be describing?

  1. As the

  2. You fight crime

  3. At dock 19

  4. My name is Jamie

  5. Working together

  6. I’ll

  7. 10 o’clock

  8. I’ll

  9. Throwing Star

  10. Got caught

  11. We were

  12. Meet me

  13. With

  14. You are

  15. When we

  16. Wait every night

  17. At

  18. Zoe Wong

  19. A long scarf

  It read like a book with pages torn out. Pieces of the story were missing, huge gaps connecting the dots between these various words and phrases. Jamie—Jamie was the man. That had to be it. And there was confirmation that she was the Throwing Star. But the rest of it? It sounded like some incident happened, maybe at that Dock 19. She lived in Oakmount, across the bridge and about twenty miles from there. Dock 19. If she got out to the library tomorrow, she could research any incidents that might have involved Dock 19.

  She stared at the list, wondering if any words and punctuation had been lifted out of it. They remained puzzle pieces without any edges or corners, no final image for reference and scope. There may have been a handful of words between them or they may have all been one bit each from each chapter in her life.

  Her eyes closed, trying to will some logic out of it all. But logic didn’t arrive.

  Something better did.

  The memory of the corkboard. The individual disparate pieces, all connected together by string.

  What if the words weren’t clues to a bigger message?

  What if they were the message?

  Zoe moved at accelerated speed, tearing individual sheets from the notepad, and transcribing each statement onto its own piece of paper. She spread them out in a large arch in front of her, and though her body moved at extraordinary speeds, her mind failed to keep pace. Moving the pieces back and forth, here and there, swapping them, inverting them, trying to make sense of them, the bigger picture eluded her.

  She knelt down, staring at the words, holding each sheet up to her face, as if proximity would create the connective tissue from one word to the next.

  Except maybe being close wasn’t the trick.

  Zoe vaulted up then threw her palms out, hovering in her apartment, loose strands of her hair brushing against the popcorn ceiling. From there, she could see all the phrases as equals, and her mind locked in, the logic beginning to take form.

  She landed with a thud, probably frightening whoever lived below her. On her knees, she swapped pieces of paper, moving them into slots until some form of coherent message appeared. Fifteen minutes later, something finally made sense, not just as words but with everything else that remained in her mind.

  You are Zoe Wong. You fight crime as the Throwing Star. My name is Jamie. We were working together wh
en we got caught. Meet me at Dock 19 at 10 o’clock. I’ll wait every night with a long scarf.

  The small of her back ached from being hunched over for so long, a pain that resonated differently than what she felt after her clumsy experiments to test her powers or trying to live up to the legacy of the Throwing Star. She stood, arms stretched overhead, mind filled with possibilities at the untangled mystery before her.

  24

  THE CLOCK KEPT TICKING on Zoe, and with each passing evening—twenty, in fact—Jamie wondered, well, he wondered about many things. Were his clues too vague? Would she even be able to recover them? Had Dr. Kaftan moved her all the way to the other side of the continent?

  Even if they reunited, then what? He knew what would be next for him—a plane ticket with Normal in tow. But would Zoe try to take down Kaftan? Or would she disappear in her own way?

  He supposed it didn’t matter. He owed Zoe the chance to become herself again. Anything else was up to her. Jamie sighed, his breath curling into a little fog visible in the cool night. From afar, something clattered; a quick look down the wharf showed no signs of people, not even a silhouette in the distance.

  Perhaps just a cat in the alley. Hopefully a cat somewhat more capable at survival than Normal. Jamie smirked to himself at the thought, and memories surfaced naturally—no digging around or pulling up or freezing, no hand gestures. This was simpler, the mere come and go of warm memory, of that first day and Normal’s courtyard ineptness at handling a bird. Jamie let himself sink into the memory, unable to fight the smile coming over his face.