by Angel Lawson
“Charger?” Owen says, taking point since Casper wouldn’t answer their call.
“In position at the entrance.”
“That’s what she said,” Astrid mutters.
“Seriously? You’re like a thirteen-year-old boy.”
“And that’s a bad thing? You were a thirteen-year-old boy at one point.”
“Yeah,” Quinn says, flipping on his mask screen. “And I was a horny dumbass.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Owen says. “No wonder Casper gets pissed all the time.”
“Sorry boss,” Astrid replies.
He ignores her. “Echo, what is your location.”
“I’m in the alley. There’s a bag of trash spilled on the ground. Looks like someone dropped it.”
“Is the back door open?”
She’s quiet for a moment, obviously mulling over some sort of anal sex retort, but finally says, “Unlocked. How do we want to do this?”
Quinn tries to get a good visual in the building. He adjusts the systems on his mask and the infrared clicks on. Two figures roam the small shop and one sits in a barber chair. Could be Scruggs or another thief.
“Looks like we’re a minute or two late,” Quinn says. “I’ll go in. Pan, you take watch from above. Echo, hold at the back door.”
“Got it,” Astrid says. Owen also gives confirmation.
Quinn moves quickly, kicking in the front door. Using his current, he holds up a shield. The electromagnetic properties can hold off almost any weapon and when the first punk panics and fires a gun, the bullet bounces off and ricochets into a glass mirror.
“It’s one of them!” the gunman shouts. The other scrambles for the money while Scruggs sits wide-eyed in his chair. The man is eighty, if not older, and has been cutting hair in the Swamp for fifty years. He’s an institution and the fact he’s being robbed is blasphemy.
They turn to the backdoor, looking to escape more than anything else. The team’s reputation is not that of killers.
“Echo—heads up.”
There’s a struggle out the backdoor. Two shots are fired. Quinn races to the back and sees both kids on the ground, hands bound behind their backs. She tucks the gun into her belt. Oh, and she looks pissed.
“Echo?” Owen asks.
“I’m fine. This kid is fucking trigger happy.” She gives the kid a nasty look, but they’re under control.
Quinn walks back in and glances at Scruggs, who is shakily getting out of the chair. “You okay?”
“Yeah, jumped me when I was taking out the trash.” He walks over to the cash register and checks the money.
“You need me to call the police?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t want that task force down here any more than I want you guys down here.”
“Wait, what do you mean you don’t want us down here?”
The old man shakes his head. “You don’t see the pattern?”
Astrid walks in from the back. The two kids are bound right outside the door. Two weeks ago, she would have called Jensen. Now they’re not sure who to call.
“What pattern?” she asks, walking in and handing back over any money the kids took from Scruggs.
“This crew of punks is hitting everyone that’s sticking around during the neighborhood transition. It’s either to run us out by the developers or payback for betraying the community by transitioning over.” He grabs a broom and starts sweeping up broken glass. “You guys showing up here just puts a target on my head by either group.”
Astrid frowns. “You don’t want our help?”
“Nope little girl, I don’t. I lived here for a long time, survived a lot of robberies and many years without your help.” Sirens cry through the streets. Someone probably reported the gunfire. He sighs and rubs his forehead. “I won’t tell them you’re here if you let those kids go.”
“Let them go?”
He nods and goes back to sweeping.
From the set of Astrid’s jaw, it’s clear she’s prepared to fight Scruggs on this but the sirens get louder—closer.
“We can’t get caught out here,” Owen says in their ear. “Echo, cut them loose.”
She starts to argue but Quinn jerks his chin at her to head out the back door. Owen is right. The ink is barely dry on their agreement with Jensen. Breaking it already will just make them all a target.
In the alley, the theives, dumb teenagers with smug grins on their faces, hold their bound hands out. They heard the conversation with Scruggs.
Astrid steps behind the kids and pulls out a knife to cut the ties. She makes sure they see it and one of the boys swallows nervously.
“You got off lucky,” Quinn says, raising his voice over the sound of the police sirens. “If you’d killed someone this would be different, got it? He let you go, but don’t forget we’re watching.”
“Yeah, well we’ve got eyes too,” one of the kids says. He’s slim and has a mean face. How he got so jaded so fast is a mystery Quinn’s not sure he wants the answer to. “And you’re the ones with numbered days. The Po-po, they ain’t got time for you. Word’s out. The Superfreaks are going down.” He looks Quinn up and down, there’s very little fear in his brown eyes. “You better watch your back.”
Astrid cuts the ties and both kids hop up off the ground. They dart down the block, slipping down an alley that goes back to the Swamp.
“5-0 is here,” Owen says. “Time to scatter.”
They go their separate ways, circling back to the gym. Quinn sticks to the shadows, wondering what is going on and how this changes thing. A few weeks ago, they were the heroes saving the Harbor Line from Demetria. Now? They’re the villains too.
“I don’t feel right about this,” he says once they meet back up. “Letting those punks go? They should be in jail.”
“I know,” Astrid agrees. Beneath her mask her eyes flash with anger.
“You want to go back and get them?” Owen asks.
“No,” she says, checking her tool belt. “You guys head back. I’m going to check on Luby.”
Owen’s eyes bulge. “Not alone. Fuck that.”
Her eyes dart between him and Quinn. He’s not happy about it in the least, but steps back, knowing better than to push her. “I’ve been doing this for a lot longer than we’ve been a team. I can handle checking on one kid—”
“Who lives in a gang-infested warzone—”
She holds her hand up in front of Owen’s face and he stops, but only by clenching his jaw. He looks at Quinn accusingly and finally he speaks up. “Astrid, we’re a team and none of us get to unilaterally make decisions—got it?”
The look on her face reminds Quinn of her as a child; lost and afraid. Scared that if she touched something, she’d destroy it. She takes two steps back and then turns, racing across the street and scaling a wooden fence in two moves. In the blink of an eye, she’s gone. Owen shifts on his feet to follow. Quinn grabs him by the arm.
“Let her go.”
“You’re kidding.”
“She’s got on her mask. We can track her that way, but yeah, she needs a minute.” Owen’s chest puffs up in anger and a little bit of fear. “She’ll be okay.”
“And if she’s not?”
Quinn holds his eye. “You can take it out on me.”
Chapter Five
Astrid
It doesn’t take long for her to catch the trail of the two kids that broke into the barbershop. Their sweat is still on her gloves, the faint, lingering echo of their heartbeats rattle in her ears. They’re dumb and don’t lie low like they should and stop at the corner shop just outside the Crescent City Homes housing development for cigarettes and beer.
She’s waiting, tucked in the shadows of the broken streetlight, when they come outside.
They stop and turn to run the other direction but she’s ready, flinging two small balls at them. One kid—probably a fluke—darts to the right. The other gets caught when the balls separate with a length of cord between them and boomerang around h
is body, pinning his arms. The magnetic clack locks him in place. The second kid is gone, vanished into the Swamp.
“Hey!” the kid shouts, his hands squirming by his sides. He steps in the beer spilling from the can he dropped to the ground. “What the hell, bitch? You said we could go.”
“I changed my mind.” Ripping off her glove, she reaches for the hand of the mean-faced kid. He jerks back but she holds his arm steady. “Promise, this won’t hurt.”
She narrows her focus, not wanting to get caught up in the onslaught of this kid’s life. She needs to know who is pushing them out on the streets and who told them the Supers’ days are numbered. She grips his hand, dirty and clammy with sweat, and channels his echo.
She pushes past the emotions, adrenaline and hyped up testosterone. Digs in his head for his name: Arvin. High school dropout. Baby at home. An image of money and a slip of paper with a list of names changing hands. Black uniforms. “Keep robbing. Keep drawing them out. Even if she turns you in, it won’t stick.”
She drops his hand.
“Why does the task force want us on the streets?”
“What?” He’s confused but the tone is more suspicious.
“Are they trying to catch us? Are these traps?”
“I don’t know, lady, they just pay me and my crew. I go where I’m told.”
She tightens her grip on his shoulder. “You could have been killed tonight or worse, killed someone else. If you’re just out there playing games, leave the guns at home.”
He smiles, the smug kind of someone that thinks they have all the power. He’s wrong. Dead wrong, and she fears for him.
She touches the small button on the ball behind Arvin’s back. It retracts when her gloves deactivate the magnets. “Go, but understand, Arvin, I’m not the bad guy here.”
He doesn’t take the time to respond before running in the direction his friend vanished minutes before. Astrid doesn’t feel any better about what she’s learned, only that she’s going to have to sit down with Jensen and have another talk.
She has one more visit to make in the Swamp and she runs to the back wall of Crescent Homes and eases over. It only takes a minute to find Luby’s rundown apartment. The blue glow of the television flickers in the cracked, taped-up window. He’s awake, like most nights, taking care of his grandmother.
Afraid someone may be watching the apartment, she texts him from the burner and asks him to meet her on the back side of the building. He doesn’t reply to the message but she hears him on the stairs, then going the long way around, passing the dumpster and mailboxes.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. His eyes dart around nervously. They met when he was vandalizing an old school as part of Kincade’s plan to destroy the older buildings on the Harbor Line. Astrid read his echo that night and something stuck with her.
“Things went south at the barbershop.” She observes him closely, tracking with all of her senses. “You know anything about that?”
His eyes dart to the side and his pulse notches up. “Naw. Was the crew there?”
“Yes.”
“Then how did it go wrong?”
“Scruggs didn’t want us there. Told us to let the crew go.” She lifts her chin. “Said people don’t want our help anymore.”
“I don’t know anything about that.” But she thinks he does. Not from the guilt he’s emanating, but the fear.
She looks up to the window above. “How’s your grandma?”
“Not great. About the same.” Astrid’s not sure what the problem is—she hasn’t asked, but she knows Luby’s grandmother is very sick and that makes him vulnerable to the players in the community.
“You come to me if you need anything, okay? If she needs anything.”
He looks up from the spot he’s been starting at on the ground and says, “Why are you so nice to me?”
She takes in this kid, skinny with floppy hair that hangs over his eyes; nails dirty, filled with the gunk from the spray paint he tags all over the city—he’s just trying to leave his mark. She knows the feeling.
“We all need people,” she says, thinking guiltily about the team she sent back home. Dammit, now that the adrenaline is fading she’s feeling bad about that. “It took me a long time to figure that out. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, Luby, okay?”
He nods and shoves his hands in his pockets, headed back up to his mom. Astrid climbs back over the fence to deal with the shit storm she left in her wake at home.
Chapter Six
Astrid
After changing, she heads upstairs, ready to face Owen and Quinn. Harry waits for her at the door, weaving between her legs and crying for attention and cheese. She’s aware that the cat is only in it for the cheese these days, but at 14 she can have what she wants.
She thought they’d be in bed by now but the trash talk from the common space says otherwise. Both guys are sitting on the leather couch animatedly absorbed in a video game, controllers shaking and f-bombs dropping. Empty beer bottles line the coffee table.
“Dude, watch out. Watch out! What the fuck!” Owen shouts at someone. Quinn? Himself? Oh, it’s just the guy dressed up like a knight on the screen. She rolls her eyes and walks past them to the kitchen.
Neither acknowledge her, which is fine. She owes them the apology. Unfortunately, this isn’t a strong suit of hers. She buys time, doling out cheese to the demanding cat and shoving two Pop-Tarts in the toaster, giving herself until the buzzer chimes to go back in there and face the music.
Pastries in hand, she walks into the living room and watches the guys beat the crap out of a troll. She bites into the delicious strawberry Pop-Tart and Quinn looks up at her.
“Are you seriously eating that crap?” he asks.
Oh shit. She forgot about the eating better deal.
“It’s been a long night,” she says. “And you had beer. Like, three of them.”
“Mine are gluten-free and low carb.”
Lord, she wants to roll her eyes at him but holds it in. Owen doesn’t, snorting at the man next to him and saying, “He’s drinking piss, As. I don’t think it counts as unhealthy. Gross, but not unhealthy.”
She swallows the Pop-Tart and sits on the chair facing the coffee table. Quinn shuts off the game, making Owen curse and mutter about level eight and booty. “Look, I’m sorry about tonight. I was out of line.”
“You were,” Owen says, stretching out on the couch. Astrid can’t help but think about them—all of them—and what they did on there a few weeks ago. She doubts it’s far from their minds. Her belly flips at the memory.
“You keep calling us a team, Astrid, but you don’t always treat us that way,” Quinn adds. “Do we get full say or is it up to you?”
“I’m not sure I can answer that,” she admits.
“I can tell you this,” Owen says. “That task force isn’t looking at us individually. They’re hunting us together. We have to have each other’s backs.”
He’s right about that.
“Besides that,” Quinn says, “This is more than just positioning. You know that—our bond goes deeper. It’s in our genes. Our history. We can’t forget that. I don’t want to.”
“I don’t either,” she agrees. “I’ll do better. I promise.”
“Just be safe, that’s all we’re asking.”
She notices neither is that angry nor have they asked her where she went. “You tracked me, didn’t you?”
“Fuck yes we did,” Owen says, looking pleased with himself.
Quinn shakes his head and says, “Casper would have if he was talking to us right now.”
She laughs bitterly. “Another failure on my part.”
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she wasn’t cut out to be the leader of this team. The two sets of eyes watching her say something different and that’s what makes it hard. They believe in her.
Owen stands and walks over to her. He offers his hand and pulls her out of the seat. She rises and lands in his arms. “This shi
t has been hard since we were kids and no one ever said it was going to get easier, but you going off like that? It just puts us all at risk.”
She nods. “I get it, Owen. I fucked up. Just another in a long line of stupid moves. Aligning with Demetria, trying to work with Kincade, pushing Casper…”
He strokes her back and kisses her gently, letting her know he’s not angry anymore. She feels that in her soul.
“Take it from a lifelong fuck-up, you’ve got to do way more stupid things to qualify for the title.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
Quinn tugs her away from Owen and embraces her in his enormous arms. She feels safe here. Loved. Pushing them away is dumb. It’s what Casper’s doing and if she has to be honest, is why Draco keeps his distance. They need to understand trusting one another makes them better.
“Fear makes us stupid,” she says, acknowledging the truth.
“Good thing you’re so hot,” Owen says, picking up the Pop-Tart and taking a bite. He glances down at the cat and moves out of the way. Harry hisses at his ankles.
“And a total bad-ass,” Quinn adds, keeping his arm wrapped around her.
She knows in that moment it’s okay to make mistakes. These two have her back and everything is going to be all right.
Chapter Seven
Owen
Christian Hightower is his name. Number four out of eight. He runs laps around the gym, keeping pace with the other recruits. From the outside, Owen has brown hair instead of blond. His skin is two shades darker, his eyes match. His body is the same, as is his voice and mind. This program is bullshit and the only thing getting him through this is getting some dirt on Jensen and his project.
Oh, well, and making Astrid pay, as they arranged.