He leaned his head against the window and gazed aimless toward the shop, toward the last glinting shards of broken glass that still clung to the frame. Police tape crossed and crossed again. If there were cops watching, he hadn’t seen them. Then again, maybe they were better at this than he was. She was wrong. He knew the truth. He’d seen pictures, and anyway who could possibly manage that kind of cover-up? Who had the resources? Who would dare try? But she was right about the other thing. He didn’t act as if he knew. Nobody did.
“What are you doing here, Jan?”
“I want to solve this case. Octavia’s a decent person. I’d like to stop the world from fucking with her, if I can.”
“I don’t mean here, now.” But he almost did. “I mean, in Jokertown.”
“You think I could live anywhere else?” She clunked the thermos back in the cup holder. “They’d lock me up. They’d lock any of us up.”
“You could pretend.”
“Too much of that going around.” She gripped the steering wheel. He saw a road roll on before her, long, straight, endless, and unpeopled, a road where she could drive forever and ever and never crash. She uncurled her fingers one by one. “I came down here when my dad died and my card turned. I was messed up. It took me a long time to sort things out.”
He said “I’m sorry” by reflex and in the silence after he wished he hadn’t, because even if the reflex was right, there was a wrongness to just saying the words without taking time to find the heart behind them. He should have waited and thought about who Jan might have been, who her father was, what turning her card would have done to her life, about how she’d come down here and how she’d ended up in a hole beneath a crumbling building. But she nodded as if he’d said the right thing, and maybe he had.
“I like it down here. My family used to live here, like Octavia’s—they left while Octavia’s grandma stayed. We never knew each other, but that’s kind of a connection. Besides, she makes good coffee. And her family history in the area makes me reasonably confident she’s not a reptoid agent.”
The world weighed so many million pounds and most of them were pressing down on Robin’s head and shoulders. The window glass felt cool against his temple. Maybe he should have drunk more of that tea, even if it didn’t taste like Lemon Zinger. “Of course,” was the best he could do.
“What about you, Ruttiger? What brings you down down to Jokertown?”
The first instinct was to answer I don’t know, but he did know. Didn’t he? He’d given all those interviews, though he’d never mentioned Jokertown, because if he had the spotlight would have followed him, as no doubt it would find him again someday when some kid scraping along through her tabloid internship by stapling together a TaskRabbit gig and a rideshare gig and a side hustle drawing porny fan art asked herself whatever became of…and pitched the story to her boss. He had reasons. He thought he had. He had some vague notion of giving back to “the community,” less certainty than ever what “the community” might be, and in the years since American Hero he’d had a growing sense that his life looked less like heroism and more like celebrity with every column inch or TV interview. Not everyone felt that way—Terrell hadn’t—but what everyone felt and what everyone did wasn’t Robin’s responsibility. He only answered to Robin Ruttiger. Not even to Terrell, these days. And didn’t heroism always tend to celebrity over time? To be a hero was to be a face, a personality, a brand. People liked you because of what you did at first, and then they liked you because you were you. Which was where it all got complicated. Heroes didn’t change anything.
And what made you a hero, or a villain? You got sick, or in Robin’s case a mad scientist injected you with a mutated virus strain to see what would happen, and you got better or you got dead. Even if you got better, mostly you changed in some way that didn’t help. Your eyes disappeared, wheels replaced your feet, you grew chitin plates all over your body. Your flesh turned to stone. And for the rest of your life you were the stone guy, or the girl with the chitin face, or the woman who turned into a wolf when she heard a bell ring.
And if you were one of the vanishingly lucky, like Robin, who had some marginally useful gift and could pass undetected in a crowd, well, when people found out that you could stretch your body like a rubber band, or fly, or move things with your mind, or deadlift a train, or turn invisible, they stopped caring whether you wanted to play the violin or teach high school or be a pharmacist. If you wanted to turn invisible for the rest of your life, or be a professional move-things-with-your-mind person, you were in luck, best wishes, enjoy the run. But if you didn’t…
The world was really good at deciding who you were without consulting you.
To be fair, the card often turned in ways that echoed your own personal damage. Sometimes it was a sick joke and sometimes it was a gift, which was what made the whole thing feel so mean. But whatever you became when your card turned, it wasn’t all about you. It couldn’t be. People weren’t just one thing. Not even heroes.
Once the card and the world decided who you were, the world tried so hard to use you. It had been easy to hide his graduate school plans from the talk shows and the magazines, because they weren’t interested. They couldn’t imagine him wanting to be anything but the stretchy guy. If he’d never left, he would have lived well and never realized he wasn’t free. But what about Slade, whose eyes made sounds like marbles rolling when they moved? God forbid the kid ever step into a military recruiter’s office to ask for directions. And there was always the other side of it: say he goes for a walk uptown one afternoon, or worse, out with his family to some small town where they don’t see jokers hardly ever, and there’s a cop. And.
He tried to explain all this to Jan Chang in the car across the street from Octavia’s shop with its broken window, but he’d been awake since four and he felt so heavy, and all these thoughts he’d spent so much time chaining together in the privacy of his own head smeared when he tried to speak them. He couldn’t hear his own voice over Jan’s resounding and silent disdain—even if he was pretty sure that disdain was just him filling in the blanks. Words bunched up. Sentences tangled. His voice ran thick as mud, then dried and hardened and with a lurch he found himself awake and blinking in predawn blue, a taste in his mouth fouler than Jan Chang’s tea, to find Octavia Zargoza knocking on the car window, waving, and offering a cup of fresh coffee.
* * *
The day blurred past. He hadn’t met with his first two students yesterday, so they wouldn’t notice that he was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, or that his hair was wacky. Oh, who was he kidding? They would notice, kids always did, but they wouldn’t say anything about it to him. After those meetings he had two hours until next period, which he’d ordinarily spend in a vain attempt to summit Mount Paperwork, but instead he sprinted to the 6, and home, and the kind of ten-minute shower-shave-dress-pack-an-overnight-bag routine he’d got the knack of back on the show. His apartment was efficient, spare, modernist, all things he told himself he liked, but in cold daylight it just looked empty. He found himself wanting a beheaded lion, or a trace of broken filigree. Back to the 6, then, and, in spite of construction and thanks to a breakneck run that undid most of the benefits of his shower and change of clothes, he reached his office just before the next bell.
“Look, Slade, Ms. LaJolla says you’re good at math.” What she’d written had more of a sense of could be about it than Robin was letting on, but he was here to nurture potential. And to spend six hours a day corresponding with colleges and program administrators. And to attend five hours of meetings a week. But nurturing potential was what he wanted to do. “Now, the school has plenty of resources to help with that. We have books of puzzles, and there’s this Intracity Math Olympiad which you might like—it’s competitive, but you’d also get to meet kids from all over the city who share your interest.”
No answer but marbles rolling over granite.
“I’m not trying to trick you, Slade. We don’t want you to be bored.
School is all about potential, and growth, and discovery. Maybe you feel you don’t fit in, but there’s more to this place than you might think. Your teachers care about you, and so do your fellow students. We want to help you build a place for yourself. I want to help. What do you need?”
Slade looked up. The colors in those opals shifted, unreadable. “Bathroom?”
So Robin made it through that, and the meeting after, and the rest of the day until sunset, when he crossed the park again to join the stakeout. He was looking forward to it now. Everything had gone fine the night before, except for the sleeping part. Now, he had fortified himself with adrenaline and anticipation. He’d do better. After all, he knew something about how to be a hero.
The car was gone.
He looked all along the street and around the corner at a loss, until he tried looking up. The car wasn’t there, but Jan was, waving to him from the roof of the boxy building across the way with the flower shop on its first floor.
“What happened to the car?” he asked after he climbed the fire escape. God, he needed to find time for the gym. This sort of thing didn’t used to wind him.
Jan sat cross-legged against her duffle bag. Her tea thermos steamed. “Wasn’t mine.”
“What? I thought—I mean, you said—”
“Relax, Ruttiger. It belonged to a friend. She needed it tonight. Here.” She unzipped her bag without looking, pulled out a thermos, and handed it to him.
“It’s okay, I don’t—”
“It’s Assam. It’s sort of like Lipton if Lipton was good.”
He unscrewed the lid, sniffed, uncertain. Tried a sip. Blinked. “Oh, I like this.”
She rolled her eyes behind the sunglasses, he was certain, though he couldn’t see. But he sat down, and together they sipped tea as the streetlights came on and the sun set and the sky grayed out. There were so few stars, but the city’s constellations changed as offices and shops winked out and home lights on, people coming home, making dinner or ordering, finding their sofas and cats where they left them. Robin needed a cat. Or a rooster, or something. He yawned. Jan hadn’t. And she hadn’t slept at all last night.
“Did you sleep during the day?”
“I don’t sleep. Dreams are easy targets for mental manipulation. For the last two months I’ve trained myself on distributed napping: sleeping for fifteen minutes every two hours. I’m trying to adjust the ratio by only half-sleeping for thirty minutes every two hours.”
“Does that work?”
“Da Vinci used it to increase his productivity.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“It works perfectly, right up until you die.”
That deserved a stronger answer than “Um.”
“I don’t consider that a drawback,” she said.
“Wait.”
“I mean, if you think about it, it’s true for everything.”
“No, I mean, wait.” He held out his hand, palm down, and leaned over the building’s edge. “Someone’s coming.”
Masks and tracksuits. Robin had believed the story, but there was always that spot of difference between hearing a report and seeing for yourself. Someone said, Don’t go through that door, there’s a giant snake in there, and the image your mind coughed up for “giant snake” was so vivid and particular that when you went through the door after all (you always did), you couldn’t see the real snake because it didn’t look like the one in your head.
The first masks peered around the corner, big-horned costume-shop noh-theater affairs, with hoods pulled tight to hide the heads that wore them, and black tracksuits with thin white stripes up the sides. The scouts motioned behind them, and other identical masks and tracksuits slipped around the corner up the sidewalk toward Zargoza’s. One held a bottle with a rag in its mouth. The yellow police tape across the shattered window looked very thin.
“We should call the cops,” Robin said. “911.”
Jan shook her head. “We have to assume the cops are reptoid-compromised. We can do this ourselves.”
“There are eight of them, and two of us.”
“We have powers,” she pointed out.
“They might have powers too. Or guns. You’re going to get us killed.”
“I’ve arranged for backup.” The tracksuits had gathered across the street from Zargoza’s. A Zippo lighter glinted in the streetlight. “Some things we just have to do ourselves.”
He was still trying to think of a way to tell her no, and was in fact reaching for his cell phone to call the cops, when he realized she wasn’t there anymore, and heard a clang from the fire escape and a loud cry: “Freeze, reptoids!”
Some did freeze. That happened more often than you saw on television. Even people who didn’t freeze might slip, or fall, or hurt themselves trying to turn and draw and fire and run all at once. Snap reactions came with instinct but mostly with training—so the number of tracksuits who didn’t freeze was worrying. A spark bloomed to flame on the rag in the bottle’s mouth, and as the tracksuit threw, Robin, who had better instincts than he was comfortable with, poured himself over the building’s edge.
Stretching yourself flat was harder than people without stretchy powers tended to assume. Like with super strength and heavy lifting, the mind played a role: what your body could do and what you knew how to ask it to do were two different categories, especially if you added the important adjective safely. People thought, if you were stretchy, you could just make yourself ribbon-thin, flat and broad as a rubber sheet. Well, yes, technically. Except, by the age of three or so, most human beings are used to the notion of having a rib cage. Even if the card you drew transformed your body into, for example, a highly elastic skinlike membrane around a hydraulic fluid—don’t ask about the nervous system, the answer to that question’s even more unsettling—thereby allowing you to splay and morph yourself so as to, say, spread yourself flat and broad as a tarp, with your arms hooked over lampposts, and use your body to shield your friend’s bakery from an incoming Molotov cocktail, doing so still caused a fair amount of mammal panic as what passed for your hindbrain insisted you were crushing yourself to death.
Robin wore exceptionally stretchy trousers and shirts in case of just such an emergency, but his sweater vest tore at the seams. The bottle bounced off his belly and shattered, leaving a burning puddle on the asphalt. He let go of the lampposts and snapped back down to normal size, stumbling as his limbs sorted themselves out. The rags of his sweater vest were smoldering; he rolled on the pavement, slapping at his chest. The tracksuits were watching him. He didn’t need to see past the masks to tell they were stunned.
So stunned, in fact, that they didn’t notice Jan Chang drop from the fire escape behind them. Her gloves were in her teeth, her hands bare. She caught one of the tracksuits by the wrist, and he dropped with a snap and a bright blue spark. She reached for a second but he pulled back and drew a knife. Sparks danced between Jan’s fingers, and her eyes glowed bright even behind her sunglasses. She raised her hands; the tracksuits drew back into a semicircle. One flicked out a collapsible baton. Two more drew knives.
Robin caught two lampposts and rubber-band-gunned off them, splattered against the wall of the building across the way, and tumbled down to resume his mostly normal form—a bit stretched—beside Jan. Her sparks glinted off the masks. The tracksuit she’d stunned found his feet, tried to raise his knife, and dropped it.
Tiny lightning bolts danced between Jan Chang’s teeth when she grinned. “Nice move. Got any more?”
He pulled a quarter from his pocket, cupped it in the webbing of his left thumb, pulled the webbing back three feet, then loosed. The quarter struck the nearest tracksuit’s knife hand with a sharp crack, and he swore and dropped the blade. The others backed up further, into the street. They weren’t scared—just timing for their rush. Waiting to see if he had any more quarters. Robin heard a rumble far away, like people in heavy boots running. Reinforcements? “This was a bad idea. We should have called the cops
.”
“Relax, Ruttiger. I told you, we have backup.”
No. Those weren’t booted feet. He’d just never heard hooves on asphalt before.
He wasn’t any more ready than the tracksuits for the buffalo charge.
There was only one buffalo, but it was easily as tall as the tallest tracksuit, weighed as much as the whole group put together, and was doing forty miles an hour at a charge. The first tracksuit to see the buffalo might have preferred to describe his reaction as a warning cry, but it sounded like a scream to Robin. The tracksuits really were well-trained: without audible communication they realized how the odds had changed, and turned to run, weaving between cars, trying to keep out of horn range.
Jan whooped. “Way to go, Chowdown!”
“You know that buffalo?”
“Upstairs tenant. Come on! They’re getting away!”
So he ran.
The tracksuits couldn’t outpace a buffalo on a straightaway, but they ran out onto Bowery and into traffic. Horns blared and the buffalo’s hooves scraped on asphalt. Robin sprang from fire escape to rooftop to rooftop as Jan followed on the ground. Below, he saw the tracksuits split into three groups. “Stay on the north group!” he shouted, and Jan followed them across the road, waving apologies to the cars she ran between. Robin catapulted himself across the whistling gap and landed in a puddle beside Jan on the west side of Bowery. By the time he gathered himself, the tracksuits had vanished around the corner of Houston, but only just. Robin ran, and Jan ran beside him. He might be out of shape but the chase was burning in him now, and beneath that the joy of doing something right for a change. He skidded on the corner of Houston, glimpsed a sneaker and a tracksuit leg vanish around Mott, ran after, Jan thudding behind in her Doc Martens. He forgot to breathe—he didn’t really need to anymore, his skin took all the oxygen his system needed from the air—and his stride was smooth and easy. When he reached Mott he saw them turn east on Prince. Keep it up, keep it up, you’re almost there.
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