by Cubed, Magen
“Is she okay?”
“Yeah, she’s upstairs. I got her to calm down.”
“What about everybody else?”
“I don’t know. Nobody’s answering me.”
The sound of slamming and banging signaled Clara’s return as she burst through the front door with Adam and Bridger at her heels. “It has gone to shit out there,” she yelled, flinging her bag into the living room sofa. “Nobody leave the house without a buddy or something.”
“Are you guys okay?” Norah asked, coming into the living room.
Clara threw herself into the armchair and held up her ruined shirt. “I got dead. Again. And I didn’t even start it this time. This is bullshit.”
Kyle glanced at Adam, who looked immediately guilty. “And where were you?”
“I had to deal with some divorce drama,” Bridger answered for him. “Adam gave me a ride into the city. Is everybody okay? Where’s Hannah?”
“We’re fine,” said Norah. “It scared the shit out of her, but she’ll be okay.”
“What do we do about this?” asked Adam. “These riots are getting out of control and we have to protect Hannah.”
“We can’t fix this,” Kyle said sharply. “What do you expect us to do?”
“I expect us to find a way to keep ourselves safe, or are you okay with us getting killed in the street like dogs?”
“Hey, hey,” Bridger said, taking Adam by the arm to pull him away. “That’s enough, c’mon.”
Before Kyle could say anything else, the bathroom door creaked open. He turned to find Amanda standing in the doorway, drying her hands with a towel. Everyone’s eyes flew to her. The look on her face hit Kyle in a hot wave of panic.
“Hey,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “I’m just going to head out now, okay?”
“Amanda, wait.” He followed her to the stoop; there he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “I didn’t even know you were here. I’m sorry.”
“I came by when you didn’t message me back.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s your people you should worry about. That little girl was really shaken up.”
“Norah says she’ll be okay.” He sighed. “Look, I don’t know what you heard back there.”
“I’m not so sure, either. And look, I get it, you guys have been through a lot together. I’m not trying to judge here, but this sounds crazy, and I think it’d be better if I just left for now.”
“They’re not crazy.”
“Well, it sure fucking sounds crazy, Kyle.”
“Can you let me explain?”
“Can you really?” She let out a bitter little laugh. “According to your friends, they die and they come back. I don’t know how you can really tackle that.”
“Something happened to us on that train. I don’t know what but it changed all of us.”
“Into what?”
“Something that’s bigger than ourselves, if that makes any sense at all.”
“No, it doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t the time for your cryptic bullshit,” she said. “What is happening here?”
He sighed again. “I don’t know yet.”
She paused, then finally nodded. “Let me know when you do, okay?”
“Okay.”
As she turned to walk back to her car, Kyle closed a hand around his eyes and knew he wouldn’t be sleeping that night.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I.
The house was silent in the hours just before dawn, but Norah wasn’t sleeping. Broken glass stuck in her pride like thorns. The busted window was already taped up and covered. Bridger promised to get a repairman down in the morning to fix it, but that didn’t do enough to lessen her nerves as she slid out of the bed she shared with Hannah. She untangled herself from her daughter’s sprawl of limbs to put on her house shoes and jacket.
Moving down the stairs on quiet steps, she was grateful the house didn’t stir. It took Norah well over an hour to calm Hannah down after the cinderblock came crashing into the living room. Nothing typically shook the child after rounds of surgeries, doctors’ appointments, and being poked and prodded and scanned. But this—the violent peak of their ongoing struggles—was enough to reduce the child to tears while she sat on her hands on her mother’s bed.
“Why does this keep happening to us?” she asked between the ebb and flow of sobs. “I just want things to be normal again.”
Norah rubbed warm circles across her daughter’s back to calm her broken breathing. “I know, baby. People just do ugly, stupid things when they’re scared. And sometimes people get hurt because of it.”
“Are you going to stop them?”
“I want to, Hannah. I do. But I can’t. We have to wait for the cops to do their jobs.”
“But you guys have powers. You can be like superheroes,” Hannah implored around a hiccup. “You can stop this from happening again.”
“It doesn’t work like that, baby. I’m sorry. We just have to be tough for a little while longer, okay?”
“But what if he wins?”
“Who?”
“The bomber. What if he wins? What’s going to happen to us?”
Norah sighed. “We won’t let him win. I promise you.”
Creeping into the silent kitchen, she found Bridger’s cigarettes still on the kitchen counter. He’d forgotten them there the night before when he left with Adam. Marlboro Reds were never her brand. They were too harsh for her liking and hard to get out of her clothes afterward. But she always smoked when she was stressed, and she didn’t have room to be picky about stolen cigarettes, so she shuffled out to the front stoop to light up. Kyle sat on the top step, staring up at the dirty, purple sky with a cigarette of his own burning between his fingers.
She took a drag, let it out, and drew her jacket tighter around herself. The tar burned her lungs and felt black on her tongue. “Not sleeping either, I take it?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“How’s Amanda? She ran out of here pretty fast last night. I wasn’t sure what was up.”
“Not sure. She... didn’t know.”
“About what?”
“About us.”
“Oh, fuck. I’m sorry. I just assumed she knew.”
“I’ll figure it out. How’s Hannah?”
“She’s asleep. She’ll be okay, though. The whole thing just scared the shit out of her.”
“Don’t blame her.”
“It’s getting worse out there.”
“I know.”
She sighed and took another drag. “Do you think we can actually stop him?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know anymore.” She shrugged. “Before, I thought we could—that somehow we’d get lucky or just be at the right place at the right time. Now, I’m not sure.”
He nodded. “You guys should get out of town for a while. Take Hannah and lay low until this blows over.”
“And go where? My entire family’s here, and Adam’s family, and Bridger’s wife. Clara has her entire life here now. We can’t run, not anymore. I’d rather stay here and fight it out.”
“Are you really ready for that?” He took one last drag and plucked the limp bud from his mouth to tamp it out on the step. “It could get a lot worse.”
“Somebody threw a brick at my kid, Kyle,” she said darkly. “I won’t let that slide.”
“Fair enough.”
Tossing away her half-smoked cigarette, she snuffed it out under her heel. “Just keep us posted, okay? Whatever happens next?”
“Of course.”
“Good.” She opened the door and stepped inside. “Now, go to bed. We got to shit to do tomorrow.”
He couldn’t help but smile. “I will.”
II.
Going to Bedford Park was Clara’s idea. It was just to get out of the house and the feeling of desecration that hung in the air. Kyle had disappeared by the time Adam and Bridger shuffled downstairs separa
tely for breakfast. Hannah was eating her cereal at the kitchen table, and Norah couldn’t stop drumming her fingers on the counter as she drank her coffee. She was still unable to look into the black hole made of their living room or the remnants of violence left behind. So, Clara made them all dress and load up in Adam’s car, bound for the park by Essex River. It was better than being home; almost anything would have been at that point.
At Bedford Park, Hannah could run as fast as her braces would let her and Norah could follow after. The sunshine could help Hannah forget, just for a moment, about the street fights and the riots. They hid there as Clara checked her phone for updates on her news feeds and Adam sat in the grass and rolled the blades between his fingers. Bridger couldn’t stand still. He fidgeted in his own skin as he licked his lips and busied his hands with his well-worn cigarette pack.
“I didn’t see it coming,” he said. He rubbed the spot between his eyes and felt the pangs of uselessness. “A head full of news reports and I missed this entirely.”
“It’s not your fault,” Adam said. He tucked his knees to his chest and held himself like a child. “None of us saw this coming.”
“Yeah, but that’s my whole thing, right? I see the future. Otherwise, what am I doing here?”
“You’re doing the best that you can, Bridger. That’s what all of us are doing.”
“But that isn’t enough, is it? Not anymore.”
“Dude,” Clara chimed in, still scrolling through her infinite feed of articles and blog entries. “Literally none of us know what we’re doing here right now, in case you haven’t noticed. You can’t make yourself crazy.”
Bridger rolled his eyes and found a new plot of grass to pace in. Adam sighed.
Clara pocketed her phone. “All right, so, bigger question: what’s our next move?”
“We don’t have a next move,” Adam said.
“Well, we need to find one. So far, we’re just waiting for Kyle to crack the case, and that’s getting us nowhere.”
“We’re all trying here.”
“But it’s not good enough.” Clara leaned back in the grass. Above her, the sun filtered between the boughs of overhanging trees, painting her skin in intermittent stripes. “I just don’t want to go home.”
“Hey.” Adam scooted in close, sharing her shade. “Nobody’s going anywhere.”
“My mom’s ringing my phone off the hook. She wants me to come home, but I can’t go back to California.”
“You don’t have to. You’re an adult, Clara. You make your own decisions.”
“But she and my grandmother are terrified for me. I never came home after the subway crash because I couldn’t handle it, and now... now if I don’t go home, they’re never going to be okay about this.”
“What do you want to do?”
She shrugged and clapped a hand to her forehead. “I don’t know what to do. And I never don’t know what to do. And you have no idea how much this is killing me right now.”
“Yeah.” Adam was careful not to look directly at Bridger when he spoke. Bridger still paced around with his hands in his pockets. “Well, you might be surprised.”
Sitting up, she leveled him a hard look. “What happened yesterday?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“You look like shit, for one. And for another, you haven’t looked Bridger in the eye all day. You two have been joined at the hip as long as I’ve known you. What’s going on?”
He shook his head and felt stupid for even speaking of it. “I don’t know yet. And I’m just going to have to try to find a way live with that.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Tell him what?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you kidding?”
“What?”
“Look, I know you think you’re all smooth with this shit, but your crush is visible from space, okay? And if homeboy can’t see that for himself, he’s not worth your time.”
He sighed. “It’s not that easy.”
The sudden thud caught their attention. Bridger collapsed facedown in a fit of locked muscles and firing nerves. Norah grabbed Hannah and ran over as Adam and Clara scrambled to their feet. Blood was already gushing from Bridger’s nostrils as Adam raced across the grass to pick him up. He turned him over to wipe his face clean with his shirt sleeve. Behind Bridger’s eye sockets, an explosion rippled across black glass like waves in a pond, blowing out windows for half a block around a tall skyscraper in the center of Camden. Somewhere in the city, corporate offices burned to the ground, and rows of cubicles and clean, white rooms disappeared inside the towering flames. People ran and screamed and begged for their lives over the crackling roar. Opening his eyes, he righted himself to cough at the taste of copper.
“It’s okay. I’ve got you,” Adam said. “Just tell me what you see.”
“He’s finishing up,” Bridger said. He wiped his mouth. “And it’s going to be in a big way.”
“When does it happen?”
“Tomorrow. He’s going to do it tomorrow.”
III.
There were pieces missing in what Amanda knew of the situation. That was all she could be certain of as she sifted through reports and documentation on the subway and bank bombings. She didn’t give Kyle an answer when he earnestly asked for her trust. After taking a few solid hours for sleep and a morning to recreate the events of the night before in her head, she felt a little bit guilty. In her defense, which she was quietly mounting if only for her own sense of wellbeing, he had asked much of her already. Now he asked her to accept his strange friends and whatever sway they had over him, in whatever form they came in.
Whether she would have helped him anyway was immaterial as she reread her notes, rewatched security tapes, and reconsidered their conversations for anything she might have missed before. The bank footage cut off at the time of the explosion at Welsh Regional, just as she remembered. All the nearby traffic cameras were damaged in the blast, so they only caught the barest glimpse of Kyle, Norah and the others leaving the area. The before and after of the tapes were all too familiar now. They featured a frame-by-frame progression of the explosion as people on the street were swept away by the blast, severed, and burnt away. There was a certain animal cruelty in the violence which left Amanda just that much colder.
Crime scene reports showed a casualty radius of forty feet from the bank lobby. But Kyle—as she now noticed as he was picked up and tossed like a ragdoll—was different. He was standing well within the radius at the intersection and looking at the others before the blast knocked him into a nearby bus just as the adjacent traffic camera fuzzed out. It should have killed him, just as it should have killed all the others, but everyone got up afterwards and walked away without a scratch.
“Son of a bitch,” she said to herself. “They came back. They all came back.”
IV.
Ben’s text message simply read, “The Cardinal Club, 12pm. Meeting with the bosses.”
The Cardinal Club sat in the heart of Camden’s financial district beneath the ivory tower that Kyrios called home. Walter Bosie was an ex-army ranger and a former mercenary according to Kyle’s research. Bosie had appeared at the top of the Kyrios food chain since its establishment in January 2002. He had a severe manner about him; he was tired around the eyes and sturdy underneath his close-fitting black suit, like a man who was used to getting his hands dirty. The photo on Kyle’s phone guided him through the Cardinal Club’s crowded dining room, bringing him to a round table in the back of the restaurant.
Bosie slouched into a plush leather chair in a pressed black suit and green tie. To his left sat a pale woman. Her skeletal face was hidden behind a downward sweep of wild, brown hair. The length of her slender body disappeared in an elaborate red and ochre velvet gown, which clasped tightly around her throat in a crest of dark jewels. To his right sat a dark-skinned man in a sleek, gray three-piece suit and a closely-cropped haircut, his back straight, his well-muscled frame elegantly arranged in his chair. They al
l looked at Kyle like he was a lost child looking for his mother in a crowded department store, out of his depth. It enraged Kyle, but he tried not to show it.
“Walter Bosie,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“I was wondering when you’d finally show up.” Bosie looked up and down Kyle’s lanky body and the way his fists were curled, his muscles taut. “You’re about a day late.”
“What?”
“Ben’s not that smart.”
“I know.”
Bosie’s smirk was lazy like the southern drawl creeping in at the edges of his consonants. “You’re not that smart, either, if you’re following him around.”
“Bosie, Libertine,” said the man in the three-piece suit. “If you’ll excuse us, please.”
Without a word, the other two stood and pushed back their chairs to leave for the bar. The ballet played out as though long rehearsed. The woman’s gown trailed her. Kyle was left standing at the table. He swallowed.
The other man smiled. “Have a seat, Mr. Jeong.”
Kyle hesitated for a moment, unsure of the play, then took the offered chair. “How do you know my name?”
“I know a lot about you. I’m in the business of knowing everything. My name is Luther Kind. I run Kyrios Securities and I’ve been having you followed.”
“Why?”
“Because I want you to work for me. That’s why I offered you a job, which, by the way, is still on the table if you’re interested in negotiating.”
Kyle shook his head. “All of this is about the job?”
“It’s more than just the job. It’s about building relationships for the future.”
“You expect me to trust you? After you broke into my apartment?”
“You misunderstand me, Mr. Jeong. I don’t expect you to trust me. Not yet, anyway. Like I said, I’m in the business of knowing everything, and I particularly know a lot about you. I know that your mother lived here in the EBC her whole life until she met a Korean farm boy in town on a school visa, and then you popped into the world a year later. You look like her, you know; it’s in the eyes. She loved you right up until that car accident when you were six and you had to live with your aunt and uncle and cousin, Douggie. How’s he doing these days, anyway? Prison’s an ugly place for a softheaded boy like that, but you already know that, don’t you?”