The Liminal People

by Ayize Jama-everett

  Looking down, I see that the ground—the pavement, the people, the cars, all of them—are moving laterally, not getting bigger. That means I’m not exactly falling yet. I’ve got this.

  My assassin is powerful and stupid, or, more likely, untrained. If you have the power to push all the contents of a room twenty feet forward, then you could’ve just done that to my head.

  Flight equals height, propulsion, and trajectory. I wrap my arms together tightly and arch my back and aim for the office building. The main pieces of my room wall are still traveling outward before me; they weigh at least three times as much as I do. That means if I do nothing, I’ll fly at least as far as they do. I look down again. Fuck, I’m up high. Fuck that. Focus. Aim your body. The idiot behind you put a lot into that one blow. Let it be their downfall.

  The wall debris is halfway across the street before it starts to fall. Good. Across the street, the windows of the business building have shattered. Blessings. Just aim. Arch your back, you stupid bastard. Toughen the skin, compact the bones, deaden the epidermal nerves. This will only hurt if you . . . landing is going to be rough. Curl, the office floor will be carpeted. Arch your damn back. Fist in front, in case of computers and big machinery. Here it comes.

  I land like a spastic chicken. Almost forget to dodge the lighter contents of my room until some of them embed themselves in the walls over here. Fuck. Whoever it is, they’re strong. And looking across for me. The lights are out. Smart little twat. I can feel their eyes strain. Fuck it, you little bastard. You want to see me? No problem.

  I brush the loose bits of glass and shattered metal off my body. I boost my adrenal output, kick up my ATP to Olympic runner stats, and dense up my leg muscles so tight they’re almost bulletproof.

  “Wrong day to fuck with wrong man.” And I run. I run at the gaping hole in the side of the building, the hole in my life, the hole in my future if I screw this. I’m powered by rage and a weird bio-chemical prowess that makes people like me special, a process that give us abilities no one truly understands but one for which we will be hunted and killed anyway. I run with my weird fuel, and just when it looks like I’m doing what Yasmine always thought I would, I jump instead. I’m sailing across the night sky again, angry, heading at the yawning expanse created not five seconds ago. Halfway there, I see my unsuspecting foe. This moron is dressed in all black, complete with a lower mouth cover. Can’t be more than fifteen years old. Doesn’t matter. Dog girl taught me what happens when I underestimate kids. Before this kid can process my crazy ass flying across the street, I’ve got a super dense fist going straight into that masked jaw. The punk does good. At the last minute he pushes back against my fist with the same power that pushed me out the window. Instinct saved the jaw. Won’t save this asshole. I’m dropping my knees on the fuckwit’s ribs, making them more brittle with my power. I saw cops in the distance on my jump back over. I won’t have a lot of time to get this done.

  “I am tired of you little fuckers trying to kill me!” I grab the bastard by the neck and drag him into the bathroom. Fire alarms are going off. The hotel is emptying. I don’t care. I keep his head in the toilet with my foot. All of a sudden I’m flooded with images of Mac again.

  He hates me. I’m little again, in our house in Maryland. I’m only eight. He throws me into the ceiling and pins me to the floor with his power. It’s the first time I’ve seen him use his power so blatantly. He says he’s better than I ever will be and that I should worship him. Oh God!

  What’s going on?

  My skin is tearing. Ants and beetles fat with blood are crawling out my skin. They’ve lived in my body all my life. I am the sum of their thoughts. I’m in the burning car with Yasmine.

  I am the burning.

  Her skin is melting off, and I’m sitting next to her. Smiling. No.

  In between waves of guilt and nausea, I realize I’ve felt this before. I am not seeing ants and fires. I’m feeling them. My visual cortex is picking up nothing, and my frontal cortex is in overdrive. I keep reminding myself to pay attention to my body, like Nordeen has taught me. This has happened before.

  Guinea a couple of years ago. Local witchdoctor with real power, but thought he was a match for Nordeen. He threatened to steal our souls. Instead he did . . . what’s happening to me now, forcing emotions and sensations on me, demanding that my mind come up with some logic as to why my skin feels like it’s bleeding off, why I’m freezing and sweating at the same time. It’s like a bad acid trip. I stopped it then, and I can stop this now.

  I lash out. I cause all bodies in a six-foot radius of me to shut down renal functions. I demylinate all neurons in under a second. It’s not out of choice—I just reach out with my powers and pull. It stops the images. Fucking telepath. This wannabe ninja is a telepath, and a girl if my powers are any judge. But my opponent has her head out of the toilet. Her nose is bleeding, her brain is seizing. Her blood is building up toxic levels of waste by the second. She’s still got hate in her eyes.

  “You killed my parents.” Fuck! Tamara. Dressed like a goddamn ninja, I should’ve known. Telekinetic and telepathic. I heal her quickly but keep her energy low. She’s powerful and angry. That’s dangerous.

  “I’m saying this once. I don’t have time to convince you, and after what you just did I’m sure as hell not letting you in my head. My name is Taggert. I am . . . was . . . a friend of your mother’s.”

  “Such a friend you killed her!” The rage in her posh accent, turned hard by street living, is almost endearing—like a rabid fox snapping out of fear more than aggression.

  “Use your head for something other than a hat rack, girl. What kind of killer sits in the car he’s rigged with explosives?” It’s a logic she can’t fight, but I boost her pulse rate and clear her headache a little, just so she can think clearly. I’m famished and freezing lying against this tub. “You were just in my head, right? You pulled . . . you saw what I saw. Any part of that even seem like fun to me?”

  “You could be her.” She stands, trying to figure out how to get the embarrassment of toilet water out of her hair.

  “Who?”

  “Or work for her.”

  “Unlike you, I don’t read minds. Feel like trying to make some sense?”

  “What do you want from me?” She’s looking down at me, eyes still filled with tears, but now more born of frustration than anything else. My back is getting cold. That’s a bad sign for me. Means my body is so tired from the jump, the fight, and the neurotoxins Tamara flooded my brain with that it’s not up for maintenance healings. No way I’m letting this little girl know that.

  “She wanted me to find you.” She knows what I’m talking about. I let my words sit in the air until she admits her own fatigue and sits on the sink. “Now I want to find the assholes that killed her. I get the sense you can help me with that. You down?”

  “You’re like us?”

  “Us?”

  “Me and Mum . . .” She starts choking on her tears.

  “No time. I’m sorry I shoved your head in the toilet, but you’ve got to decide pretty quick if you trust me. Cops are coming. . . .” I don’t need to go on. She shouldn’t be able to stand after the beating I gave her. Even with my healing. But the notion of cops has her moving. I stand to match her eyes only to find she’s a good foot and a half shorter than me. “So, do you trust me?”

  “You say your name is Taggert.” I nod. “My mum says she only ever told one person what she could do with her powers. What—”

  “She could set fires. Put them out, too. I accidentally lit some curtains in a cabin when we first knew each other, and she put them out. That’s how—”

  “OK. You’re him. What now?”

  The girl’s got power. We leave the room and no one sees us. She won’t let them. I’m stumbling a little, looking like a drunk, but no one is noticing the barrel-chested swarthy guy with glass in his hair or the toilet-smelling ninja as we walk by. At first I thought it was the alarms distracting them,
but I spot-check the cornea of one of the people running by us to get to the stairs, and we’re not even a blip on his visual cortex. Firemen and cops run past us, baffled by the reports from their comrades already in my old suite. They want to know how a window wall can be blown out without a hint of fire damage or evidence of explosives. At least they think they want to know.

  Outside, thoroughly confused Britons gawk at the sky, and the little girl in all black keeps her mental miasma up. I see one or two people trying to stare at us, but only for a second. I don’t know what they see, and neither do they. But somewhere in their minds, Tamara gets them to decide it’s not worth remembering or focusing on. The contents of a hotel room from thirty stories above make much more interesting observation. I take an extra second to scan for wounded and find none. Good. I take Tamara’s hand and let her guide me.

  I’m thinking we’re going for a car. Either hers, or a stolen one, or even a taxi. Instead she angles for the Underground, which makes no sense because the damn thing is closed. But she’s moving with purpose, and I’m not in the mood to argue. I can barely keep my eyes open I’m so tired and hungry. In the station she hops down quickly onto the tracks and starts jogging. I adjust my eyes to the lack of light and follow quickly behind her. Ten minutes of sharp turns and descents down elevator shafts and we end up in what used to be a tube stop—the type often forgotten by maps and city dwellers alike. It’s cemented up. The girl stands back, breathes deep like she’s about to do some heavy lifting, then pushes a five-by-three section of cement straight back. She doesn’t glow, doesn’t hum, but I feel the explosion in her mind that only our kind can produce. The only sounds are a slight grunting from her and the giving of the ground beneath her feet as some invisible power pushes her backward slightly. Throughout our night jog I’ve paid attention to the rats, which seemed to care nothing for us or the empty trains that roar above, behind, and to the sides of us. But all creatures back away from Tamara as she uses her power. She’s strong. But she’s also tired. I almost don’t make it to her side to catch her when she falls from exhaustion. I smell rosewater in her hair as I gather her up in my arms, gently. A perfect square of orange light heralds us into the station.

  Inside, the old station is clean and dry. More than that, it looks like a kid’s room. There’s a stereo, a laptop, running water, even a bathtub. The pictures on the wall—the crown prince and other pop stars—don’t match with the girl I’m holding in my arms, but what do I know about interior design and teenagers? Tamara’s fighting for consciousness. I give her body the cue to sleep, and it thanks me. There’s a huge futon, unmade, in the center of the station. I take off her shoes. I put her in the futon and tuck her in. I unwrap her hair from the yard-long black cloth that’s been holding it hostage since our fight. That deep eggplant red/black combination puts me in mind of her mother, especially with the rosewater. She looks like the kid pictures I’ve seen of Yasmine.

  I go over to the mini fridge. Sodas and water. I drink three of both, then sit on the pavement at the foot of the futon. In my pocket, the razor letter. Why not? Nothing else can shock me today. I tear it open with my fingers. Just an address. In Cheswick.

  There’s a twinkle in my mind, a foreign storm in my port, and I’m awake. I know where I am, who I am, and how I got here—just not how I fell asleep. So I don’t lash out. And as soon as I’m fully awake, the alien storm has an eye. Tamara is standing over me, hands on her hips, shoulder-length black/red hair pulled to one side. Her face wears the battle scars of shock and exhaustion poorly. She’s got creases where her cheekbones, jaw, and eye sockets should be smooth. I try not to take pity on her.

  “So, you fly?” she’s demanding.

  “No. I jumped. How’d you find this place?” I stand and do the stretches I know will kick my natural body chemistry into gear. I pay attention to the pains and aches in my body the way mechanics pay attention to the pings and vibrations in their cars. Every pain, or lack thereof, tells me something. By the stiffness in my legs I can tell I’ve been asleep for at least three hours.

  “Friend. Former friend, she used to squat here. I saw it when she wasn’t looking and took it over when she left. What do you do?” She’s trying to sound more London than she is. Either that or the posh schoolgirl enunciation of Yasmine’s was a lie.

  “I heal. What kind of friend?”

  “The kind I’m going to kill the next time I see.” I stop stretching and take a deep look in her eyes. She wants to mean it. She wants to be that hardcore, but she’s not.

  “The one who lived here, that the one that made the car explode?”

  “No. Explain the healing thing.”

  “Answer my question first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m older and smarter than you, and I don’t want you getting the idea that we’re equals.” She clears the distance between us in under a second.

  “Get it straight, old man. I talked to the girls at school—who said you looked different than you do now, by the way. I caught you meeting up with mum at the club. I tracked you down. I snuck into your room, I gave you the impromptu flying lesson, and you’re hiding in my spot. So, yeah, we’re not equals. I’m better than you.”

  “Put down whatever it is you’re smoking, child, and start thinking. You tracked me down? I was hired to find you. If you couldn’t find me, then I wouldn’t have been doing my job. Trust, I don’t want to be found, I won’t be. I’ll give you credit for getting the drop on me, but all you did with that advantage was give me time to strike back. If I hadn’t put together who you were, your face would still be in that toilet bowl. You’re powerful, but you obviously have little training and even less skill. Save your attitude for the norms, because you’re just not that impressive to me.” She’s so confused by the calm I’m exuding, the calm I’m making her feel, that she has to break the closeness she established. She searches the fridge before speaking again. I’m sitting on the corner of her bed.

  “Drink up the whole icebox why don’t you?”

  “Side effect of my power, I’m afraid. I get thirsty and hungry often. Now, who lived here before you?”

  “Her name is Prentis,” she says after she realizes I won’t let the subject go. “She can talk to animals. Rats and dogs mostly . . .”

  “We’ve met.”

  “Alia sent her after you, did she?” She says that name with all the venom in her throat. Alia.

  “This Prentis works for Alia?”

  “More like Prentis is her dog. Prentis was on the street most of her life. Living with her pets like she was one of them. Years before I ever linked up with her, Alia found her. I don’t know the right word for what she did to her. . . .”

  “Does it involve powers?”

  “No. I mean maybe, but I don’t think so. What do you call it when one person crushes another’s will solely by influence?”

  “Slavery?” I’m asking.

  “Then it’s like Prentis is her slave, but Alia never laid a glove on her, so I don’t know . . .”

  “Who is this Alia?”

  “She’s the reason I’m hiding out in Prentis’s old squat. You want the guy who blew up the car . . .” She’s pausing, breathing deep to control her tears. When she speaks again there’s a slight quiver in her voice. “I want Alia. She’s the boss.”

  “You know who took out the car?”

  “His name’s Rajesh. He’s Alia’s muscle. He would’ve been my first suspect if not for you showing up and tailing Mum . . .”

  “And they’re all like us?”

  “I’m nothing like—”

  “What I mean is, they all have powers, right?” She nods her head. “Tell me what you know about them. Tell me everything.”

  She sits down on her bed before she starts. Tamara may be slumming it, but she crosses her legs and has diction that is to the manor born when necessary. Still, as I look at her, I’m hard-pressed to find Fish’n’Chips. Yasmine is written in her deep olive skin, oval face, and dark red
hair. She is my former lover’s child through and through. Her mother used to adopt the same posture whenever she had serious information to give, poised and legs crossed, but relaxed.

  To steady her nerves, or to make the point that she’s grown, Tamara fishes a pack of smokes out of somewhere and lights one without offering me anything but her suspicion.

  “Prentis was like a known street kid, yeah? She never talked about parents or home, yaw know? Everybody knew her but she’s what, maybe a year younger than me? So when she wanted to hang, I just accepted it. She was like this instant street cred, yeah? This is beginning of last form, last year. I didn’t know she could do the thing with the animals. I just thought she was just good with dogs and stuff, see? Like she’d talk to them and they’d do what she said. It was just a thing.

  “I kept her away from Mom and Dad. I knew, I fucking knew they wouldn’t approve of her. She’s sweet, least I thought she was, but she was always dirty. Not in her head, yeah? Like physically. Maybe from living down here, don’t know. Guess that wasn’t really the issue. It was more that she was always scared. I didn’t think of her as anything more than a cool accessory-type friend. I should feel bad about it, but . . .

  “’Bout three weeks after we start hanging out, I start getting these headaches, yeah? I’m catching echoes from sounds that aren’t really there. I’m getting nosebleeds that only are relieved when I focus on something. So I’m concentrating more on not blinking than on my iPhone, and what happens? Thing goes flying across the room. The iPhone, I’m saying. I do it again to prove I’m not crazy, then take it down to Prentis, yeah? Figured she’s street level, knows things. So I show her the trick. And then she shows me hers. Says there’s someone who knows a lot more about this stuff than she does . . .”