by Jackson Ford
“Last time I helped you, you blew up my apartment.”
I grimace. Back when I was framed for murder, the team and I used his home to lay low for a little bit. That didn’t work, because a little while after we got there, a special forces team showed up and I accidentally totally destroyed the apartment when we tried to escape. I’ve never lived that one down, even when we were still on speaking terms.
“And by the way,” he says. “Don’t give me that it’ll take way too much time to explain over the phone bullshit, OK? I don’t think that’s ever been true for anyone. You want me to come find you, I want to be damn sure I’m not walking into something that might get me killed.”
“Nic, we don’t—”
“Tell me, Teagan.”
So I do. Well, the CliffsNotes version anyway – I leave out the part about being high on meth. The story takes a few minutes – Leo is getting antsy next to me, and my fuzzy brain keeps wanting to jump ahead. But we get there.
It’ll have to be enough. I don’t know what else I can say to convince him.
“Sheee-it,” he says, after yet another silence.
“Uh-huh.”
“You can’t electrify a building. It doesn’t—”
“Yes, it does; Reggie explained it. It’s something to do with electrons. I didn’t really understand it myself.”
He gives a deep sigh, then stretches. I know this because I hear the click in his back, which sounds like a gun going off.
“Where are you guys?”
“Seriously? Oh shit, thank you. Thank you, Nic, you will not reg—”
“Teagan. Tell me where you are.”
“Right. Sorry. We’re in the LA River right now, up in Glendale. We’re near that building I mentioned – Big Green Storage. But listen, do not come up this way, it’s full of cops, and Annie and Africa are probably still there too.”
“Yeah, I figured. What’s on the other side of the storm dr— river?”
I look up. There are buildings visible at the top of the slope, but they’re as anonymous as they come. “Honestly? Kind of hard to tell.”
“Wait, wait… Glendale means… OK, that’s probably Griffith Park. You could get to the… Actually, hold up.” Scuffling sounds, the rustle of fabric. “Better idea.”
“OK?”
“We could be fucking around for hours trying to find each other with street signs – half them shits got knocked down in the quake anyway. But if you’re in the river in Glendale, there’s this spot I know south of you guys, in Frogtown. Adam’s Gym. They’re right by the river, and they’ve got this big-ass rotating sign on top of the building. You can see it for miles, and I know for a fact it’s still there. Get to the gym, meet me out front.”
“What if I just, I don’t know, drop a pin somewhere? Share it with you?”
“Nah. Cell service is still spotty. It’s been fine for me today, but the last thing we want is for me to lose data at the wrong time. Oh, and you probably don’t want to be carrying a phone around if you don’t want your team to find you.”
Give him this: he might not be a lawyer any more, but he’s got the mind of one. Reggie might not know about Leo’s phone, but who’s to say she won’t start scanning for signals in the area? Or checking to see if I’m signed into my contacts? Shit, maybe she’s even done it already…
No point worrying about that now. “Adam’s Gym. Big-ass sign on the roof. Roger that.”
Nic ends the call. Doesn’t even say bye.
Well, that was fun.
Not like this next bit is going to be any better. “Up for a walk?” I say to Leo.
“Why were you fighting?” Leo says.
“I—”
“You can’t, can’t fight with friends.”
“He’s… it’s… he is, it’s just…” I trail off. How do describe the concept of ghosting to a four-year-old? Leo’s smart, but he’s not that smart.
I break the moment by getting to my feet. The only place to stand is in the ankle-deep water. Not like my feet aren’t soaked anyway. To the north, the brewing thunderstorm gives off another low rumble. The clouds are above our heads now, slowly edging towards covering the sun.
Nic’s comment about the phone comes back to me – it’s very possible that Reggie could track it, and it would make sense to destroy it in the same way I wrecked mine. But that would leave us without any sort of communication, and the last thing I want is for us to get lost, or miss Nic somewhere. I don’t care how visible this sign is – I want options.
I settle for turning the phone off. Reggie might still be able to track it, but she’d have to suspect I was using it first. I think that’s a stretch, and I can live with the odds. For now.
“It doesn’t sound like it’s too far,” I say. “Ready?”
“Are we going to the place right now? The one with, where my dad is?”
He must mean Compton. No point lying to him again. I kneel in front of him. “Not right away. It’s pretty far, and I don’t have a car. The person I just called is gonna help us, but we gotta go meet him. We’re gonna find your dad, though, bud. I promise.”
Leo takes an age to respond. He literally chews his lip for a minute. But then he looks up at me, his eyes bright.
“OK.”
SIXTEEN
Teagan
It’s harder going than I thought it would be. And I did not think it would be easy.
The water tracks a serpentine course between the sloped, concrete sides. The ankle-deep section we started in quickly gives way to knee-deep, then waist-deep water. I was hoping we could just walk alongside it, along the hard-packed dirt. But the bushes and vegetation are thicker than I thought they’d be, cut through with little offshoots from the main stream. We spend too much time clambering across slippery rocks, pushing through undergrowth and thick, almost impenetrable clumps of bamboo.
There’s hardly any wildlife – no birds, and definitely no fish in the green-brown water. It’s the lack of birds that bothers me the most. This much vegetation, you’d expect to see something.
The sun has edged behind the cloud bank, plunging the world into that weird pre-storm half-light. It’s not raining yet – small mercies, I guess – but the air is muggy, almost syrupy. It’s doing nothing for my comedown. I’ve slipped into a kind of queasy, uneven trance, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, and doing my best not to concentrate on the pounding headache and the hollow, yawning howl in my gut.
The area we’re heading to, Frogtown, isn’t actually an official place. It’s a local nickname for Elysian Valley, a neighbourhood just to the north of Dodger Stadium, bordered in the west by the 5 freeway. I have no idea why it’s called Frogtown, and it wasn’t exactly an appropriate question to ask Nic. All I know is, it’s south of where we are now. We keep pushing south, and everything will be OK.
Every so often, there’s a structure at the top of the concrete slope – a flat wall, like a billboard, maybe ten feet tall by twenty wide. The bottom sits flush with the top of the concrete slope. They appear in clusters, three or four at a time, on both sides of the river, and there doesn’t appear to be any logic to where they’re placed. This being LA, they’re riddled with graffiti. Some pretty good pieces, too. I spot some WRDSMTH, some Kim West, even one piece that looks like a Mr Cartoon job.
But what the hell are the walls the graf is painted on? I stare at them for the longest time before it hits me: flood barriers. The City of Los Angeles is putting up some extra insurance in case a real big dump happens.
What I don’t get is why the barriers are spaced so strangely. Is it strategic? Like, they’ve worked out where a potential flood would breach the edges of the river? Are they trying to protect specific buildings? Maybe the quake knocked the others down… only, I don’t see any debris.
Annie would know. Hell, I can hear her now. Damn city builds some, stops for a while, builds some more, tears some more down cos they ain’t up to code or some shit. Same motherfuckers moving folks out
of their neighbourhoods, letting developers come in. It ain’t right, man.
It’s hard not to dwell on how angry she’s been lately. How most of it seems to have been directed at me. The thoughts taste bitter. I get that she’s grieving, I do, but…
I really thought she and I were doing better. We’ve never seen eye to eye, but we were… well, not friends, exactly, but friendly. That’s gone. Blown away like smoke.
Leo doesn’t talk much. Just follows, head down, carefully placing his feet. I’d like to say it’s a companionable silence, but it isn’t. Unease radiates off him. Like he could change his mind at any second.
And really, if he did, what could I do about it? Maybe I could knock him out or something, drag him with me, only what the hell do I know about knocking people out? I’ve got as much chance of giving him a brain haemorrhage as I do of sending him to sleep.
And I’m pretty sure if I try, he’ll just zap me out of existence.
These are not fun thoughts. I block them out by thinking about cooking. Running through recipes in my head, techniques I’ve used, techniques I want to try. When I actually have a decent kitchen again. When I go to cooking school—
I yank back from that thought like it burned me – a sensation I’m all too familiar with.
When you’re saving the world – or at least, keeping this little part of it safe – it’s hard to become a professional chef. I might hate Moira Tanner, but she was right about that. All the same, having to put aside that dream… hurt.
It’s no fun thinking about any of that. So instead, my mind switches to thinking about Nic.
So much better.
What kind of vengeful, sadistic God arranges things so that the only person I can turn to is one I ghosted? With good reason, by the way. Nic Delacourt said some pretty awful things to me after the quake, and yeah, he apologised afterwards, but that didn’t make me any less pissed at him.
To be fair, I never intended to just leave him hanging. I’m not that terrible. I just couldn’t figure out what to say to his messages. I tried out a dozen responses in my head, but every time I’d try typing one, I’d end deleting it. After a while, it just got awkward. In the end, I just kind of… left it.
Ugh. Maybe I am that terrible.
Don’t forget what he said, too. The way he looked at you when he called you selfish, for not revealing your ability. A sorry is not going to erase how that look made you feel.
We haven’t gone very far – maybe just around the first big bend in the river, a little over a mile – before I notice that there’s something wrong with Leo. You know, beyond the whole freaked-out-kid-with-lethal-superpowers-thing.
He’s limping. Dragging his left foot. And he’s doing something weird with his hand, which is twitching in irregular jerks. He wasn’t doing that before, I’m sure of it.
I frown. “You OK there, dude?”
“Fine,” he says, sullen. Oh yeah, his left foot is messed up – scratch that, his entire left leg. It’s jerking, too, just like his hand.
“Did you hurt yourself somewhere?” I say. I don’t remember seeing him trip or anything, but I’m so zonked that there’s a chance I just missed it.
He drags his twitching foot over a bump on the hard-packed surface. “It’s just my wiggles.”
“I’m sorry, your what now?”
“My wiggles. When I make ’lectricity, my foot starts wiggling.” He blinks down at his jerking wrist. “And my hand.”
“Leo, dude, those aren’t just wiggles.”
“They don’t hurt,” he says. He sounds confused, like he doesn’t understand why I’m making a big deal out of this.
“OK… does this happen every time?”
“Only when I zap things for a while. Or zap a really big thing.” He scratches his nose with his good hand. “I can’t really use my ’lectricity while I got wiggles.”
Electricity. Isn’t that how nerves work? Is his ability affecting his nervous system somehow? Jesus, what is it doing to his brain?
If I push my power too hard, my body drains itself of energy. If I push myself really hard, my PK goes really fuzzy. It’s super-hard to lift anything, or even sense it.
On the surface, Leo’s wiggles make sense. They’re the result of his ability being pushed too hard. So why do I feel cold thinking about them? Why do they send a shiver of worry up my spine?
Maybe it’s because they cause a physical reaction – an actual movement I can see. Or maybe it’s because he can’t use his ability until they go away. It’s as if he gets a supercharged version of my PK’s feedback, like he’s experiencing it all at once.
Who the hell did this to him? And why?
“Do you…?” I shake my head. “Do you need help? Like a piggyback or something?”
“I’m OK,” he insists. “Sometimes, when it happened, Dr Ajay would give me an ice cream.”
For a second, just a second, he smiles.
Man, listen. Leo Nguyen from Albuquerque has the greatest smile. It fills up his entire face, makes his nose wrinkle. It is impossible not to look at it, and not feel a little bit better.
Then it’s gone. Just like that. Replaced by the same mistrustful look – only even more now. Like he’s said too much.
“Who’s Dr Ajay?” I say, filing the name away for later.
In response, he just shrugs.
I don’t know if he doesn’t want to tell me, or if he doesn’t know how. I don’t remember being four years old all that well, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t too communicative, either. Especially about stuff I didn’t really understand.
Which doesn’t stop it being ridiculously frustrating.
We’ve been walking for a couple of miles now, and aside from the sloped sides, there’s no concrete anywhere. It’s a literal river: a snaking channel, bordered by dirt and foliage. And it’s a lot deeper now. I can’t see the bottom, but it’s got that thick, heavy look of deep water.
Must be fun to go kayaking here. Maybe, after this shitstorm is all over, I’ll come back and do that. Someone must have set up a business renting canoes to jackasses like me. It might be fun to row row row my ass down the river in the middle of a city, just me and a six-pack and my headphones.
Leo yells. Points, his hand twitching.
We’re just coming around a sharp bend in the river, and what Leo is pointing at is a sign. Massive, bright green, neon. It’s maybe two hundred yards away, above the west bank, and it brings a huge smile to my face.
Give Nic this: he picked a good target. You’d have to be blind to miss it. You can probably see it from space.
“All right!” I hold up my hand for a high-five from Leo, but he ignores me, limping even faster towards the sign.
“Not cool, man,” I mutter. But I follow.
The bamboo groves are more numerous here, and it’s getting hard to find a route between them. It looks like we can get up the slope in a little gap just ahead of us. There’s a flood barrier at the top, but we can slip around it if—
Wait.
“I’m hungry,” Leo says. “Can we get cheeseburgers when we meet your friend? Hey – come on!”
“Just a second.” I look back towards the bend, squinting, focusing my PK. It’s like trying to start a car on a cold morning, but I get there.
Someone’s coming.
So? It’s not like the river is your own private walking path. There must be a bunch of other people who use it.
I feel lightheaded all of a sudden. Woozy. Like I’ve had too much whiskey. It’s… different from the meth hangover, somehow. Fluffy, instead of actively awful. I blink hard, try to shake it off.
It might be one of the team – I’m pretty sure either Africa or Annie would have tried the river, sooner or later – or the cops. Maybe even the one that caught us outside the fence. But it’s just the one person – I’m pretty sure the cops wouldn’t come alone. Whoever it is is moving fast.
That’s not what worries me though. I can’t sense the person themselves, but I can
feel what they’re carrying. It’s a twitch at the edge of my mind, like you might get if a gust of wind rippled your shirt collar. Whoever they are, they’re carrying a hypodermic needle.
A big one.
Before I can act on this, a voice calls out my name. And my mouth falls open.
“Teagan? Are you there?”
It’s a male voice. Clear, calm. German accent. A voice I know.
As I watch, staring in stunned silence, the speaker steps around a clutch of bamboo.
He’s in his early thirties, with an artfully messy spike of blond hair over a clean-shaven face. A pair of aviator shades sit perched on his forehead. He wears a well-cut dark suit over a white V-neck T-shirt. Despite the dirt, his leather loafers are immaculate, and his ice-blue eyes shine with a hot, bright energy. When he sees me, his face splits in a huge smile. “There you are,” he says.
I last saw him in person during the quake. On his private jet at Van Nuys Airport. But I’ve seen him since, in my most private thoughts. Even though I knew I’d probably never see him again.
And yet, amazingly, impossibly, here he is. In the middle of the LA River. Right in front of me.
Jonas Schmidt.
SEVENTEEN
Reggie
Right when Reggie’s day couldn’t get any worse, Annie’s camera starts to glitch.
She’s on the 2, the part of the freeway that crosses the river, looking south, when the feed goes black. “Annie.” Reggie says, frowning. “Check your video.”
A hiss of static. “Shit, hold up.” There’s a rustle of fabric. “Looks OK to me. Can you reboot it?”
Reggie does so. Still nothing – the same black screen. There are no error messages, and the connection looks good. The audio’s still fine – Reggie can hear Annie’s phone in the background, beeping with texts. Annie hasn’t been idle, reaching out to several of her contacts, trying to see if there’s anybody in the Glendale area who might have seen something. So far, she’s come up empty.
For the thousandth time, Reggie scans their systems. Nothing. She has run multiple threat detection packages, looked in every nook and cranny, and she can’t find evidence of an intrusion.