Cole remembered pulling the school doors open, and the door handles off in the process. “You were there after,” Cole said absently. “I opened the doors myself.”
“Are you sure? You’re not gaslighting me, are you?”
“I remember.” Cole looked up at Choch. “I want them back. Can you give them back to me?”
Choch leaned over, so his face was inches away from Cole’s palms, looking them over carefully. He lifted his head up. “You sure? They’re so nice and pretty and smooth right now.”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Choch nodded, eyebrows raised. “Alright, okay. And you know what? I’ll do it for free, because I like you, CB. You’re still my boy, grows up and everything.”
“No strings?” Cole clarified.
Choch suspended himself in the air, jerking around like a marionette. Then, suddenly, he stopped, and landed on his feet. Smiled. “None. Scout’s honour.”
Choch pressed his hands on Cole’s palms. Steam rose from them, and pain flooded from his hands up his arms and right into his chest. Cole was seven again, standing at the doors to the school, his hands wrapped around the hot metal handles. Moments later, he’d see Eva’s shoes underneath a collapsed wall, and Choch would be there. Coyote. Offering him a deal that would change everything, forever. Cole didn’t pull his hands away from Choch, despite the pain. Just watched the steam rise like his breath in the cold air. Then, Choch pulled his hands away, and the scars were back. Cole stared at them, before clenching his fists protectively.
“Voila,” Choch said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need some fresh air.”
Choch started whistling again and wandered off into the forest. It was late when Cole returned to the tent, but he could tell the fire was going before he entered the structure. It glowed a soft orange in the darkness. Brady was waiting for him, tending the fire. A plate of food and a neat pile of folded clothing waited for Cole. He greeted Brady and sat across from him. He didn’t waste any time digging into supper.
“Don’t eat the plate while you’re at it,” Brady said.
Cole slowed the pace, but not by much. “It’s amazing how hungry you can be after not eating for a month.”
“I’ve read about this thing called ‘dry fasting,’ where people do exactly that,” Brady said.
“We fast,” Cole pointed out.
“That’s true,” Brady said, “but not for weeks at a time. I’ve done it for ceremony, you know?”
“And not because you’re dead.”
“I don’t plan on trying that particular brand of fasting for a long time.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. Kind of sucked.”
“Do you appreciate it more, though?”
“Eating?”
“No, dummy,” Brady laughed. “Being alive.”
“Sure,” Cole nodded. “I mean, of course I do.” But Cole wasn’t sure if that was true. Yes, he knew he had a job to do, and was thankful to be back because his friends needed him, even though they didn’t know it, or know why. He didn’t even know why. When he’d died, though, he’d gone to a good place. He’d felt only joy and peace. Maybe he’d brought some of that back with him, but he still missed it. “It’s good to see you again.”
“You too,” Brady said. “I still feel like I need to rub my eyes each time I see you.”
“Likewise,” Cole said. “But I’m here.”
“Good, because if you’ll direct your attention to the clothing and try not to eat it, too…”
“Very funny.”
“…I tried to put together what I could, but I couldn’t really find a costume, per se. The Halloween bin’s back at the house.”
Cole couldn’t hide his disappointment. He’d pictured himself in something like a Boba Fett costume, or Snake Eyes or something.
“I mean, do you need a disguise or a costume?” Brady asked. “Are you trying to keep everybody believing you’re dead, or Superman?”
“I just…” Cole tried to get over the letdown. “It’s like what I said. I don’t want people to know I’m alive. I want to disguise myself. That’s it.”
Brady just kept looking at Cole, as though he knew Cole wasn’t telling the truth. Of course, Brady knew. He always knew. Him and Eva both.
“I want to wear a cool costume,” Cole admitted.
“You’ll still look cool,” Brady said.
Cole unfolded the clothes one by one. There was a pair of army green cargo pants (“There are so many pockets it’s like a utility belt!” Brady encouraged.), a black Pearl Jam t-shirt, a black hooded sweatshirt with an oversized hood, and, finally, a neck warmer with a skull across the front.
“Okay the skull is cool.” Cole slipped it on over his head, so it covered everything under his eyes. “It’s like an x-ray of my head!”
“I thought you’d like that,” Brady said. “And I figured you could just keep wearing the black sneakers, hey?”
Cole started to shed his clothing, in order to put on his makeshift costume.
“Want me to step outside?” Brady asked.
“What? No. Why?” Cole said.
“Sorry. My dad’s trying and everything, but we’re in this one-room cabin, and even now when he changes, he asks me to go outside no matter how cold it is. We still have some work to do.”
“Well, you don’t have to step outside for me. You can even check me out.”
“You’re not my type, loser. Maybe if you had a superhero costume or something…”
“Shut it.”
Cole changed into his new clothes. He tried to stand, but was too tall for the tent, so he had to sit down to model the outfit for Brady. “Well, what do you think?” Cole had his hood pulled up and neck warmer in place.
Brady nodded, impressed. “You actually look pretty great. Good costume.”
“Thanks,” Cole said. “I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t appreciate you getting this together for me. It’s awesome. Really.”
“You wanted to be Boba Fett.” Brady smiled wryly.
Cole laughed. “I did want to be Boba Fett, but this is better.”
Brady got up to go. He stopped at the flap. “So, in the morning? Eat breakfast, head back?”
“In the morning.”
“Cool.” Brady went outside, but before the flap settled back into place, he popped his head back inside. “Hey, superhero. You got a name? Coley Fett, something like that?”
“There are a lot of Fletts in Wounded Sky,” Cole said. “Close enough?”
Brady feigned a thoughtful expression. “I think I actually have a cousin named Boba Flett…or was that Bubba? Bobby?”
“Anyway,” Cole said, “I do have a name, and I didn’t make it up. They gave it to me.”
“They? Mihko?”
“Yeah, Mihko,” Cole confirmed. “In the folder with the files on all the kids, they’d given me a codename or something. My dad, he…” Cole tried not to picture his dad with Vikki, the woman with whom he had planned to run away. Reynold’s girlfriend. Lucy’s mom. The plan that had gotten his dad and Vikki killed, “…he was doing his own experiments on me. You know that already, I guess.”
“And they worked,” Brady said.
“Yeah,” Cole said, “but at what cost?”
The fire crackled. On Cole’s part, he thought of the moment he’d found the files in Reynold’s chest, in the closet in his bedroom. How deep did Reynold’s involvement go? Even if he was dead now, Cole needed to figure that out. He knew one thing for sure: all of this was related to the experiments Mihko had run on the kids. Eva. Cole. Jayne. So many of them. Maybe the fire was related.
“So what is it?” Brady asked.
“Huh?”
“The name, space cadet. What is it?”
Cole stared into the fire, rubbing his fingertips against his scars within clenched fists.
“They called me The Reckoner.”
8
MAN WITH A PLAN
COLE WOKE BEFORE SUNRISE, WHEN the early mornin
g still felt like night. He’d woken up several times during the night, looking forward to the morning and going back to Wounded Sky. He sat in front of the dwindling fire until it died, leaving only ashes and embers. Then, he put on his costume, and waited.
Brady entered the tent, feeling around in the dark blue glow of the early morning. He found Cole sitting where he had been since waking, legs crossed, hands on his knees, staring at the remains of the fire.
“Oh my gosh, Cole, you scared me.”
Brady set down the things that he had brought with him, and tossed a log onto the pit. He blew on it gently until a small flame sparked to life.
“Just sitting here in the dark?” he asked.
“I’m used to the dark.”
“Do me a favour.” Brady sat down. “Could you save the whole brooding thing for later?”
“Sorry, I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“Everything I have to do.”
“You mean everything we have to do.”
“We have to do,” Cole said. “Sorry.”
Brady had brought two backpacks, one for him and one for Cole, and breakfast. Cole demolished the food—a plate of jackfish, hash browns, and berries. When he was finished, he rummaged through the backpack. Extra clothing. Toiletries. Some comics. Snacks for the walk back to the community.
“It’s like the packs we brought on top of the school when we were kids.”
“Just like old times,” Brady said. “I mean, that’s really all my stuff, but I didn’t want you to feel left out and not have your own.”
“Thanks, man.” Cole fastened the pack over his shoulders. “I wish we were doing something like that, instead of heading into…”
“Certain death?”
“I was going to say the lion’s den. I’ve kind of already done the dead thing, so…”
“Yeah, but I haven’t.” Brady put his own pack on. “And I’d prefer not to.”
“It wasn’t much fun. The actual act of dying.”
They left the tent. Predictably, the cold was there to greet them; their breath looked like ghosts. Cole pulled the neck warmer over his mouth and his hood up.
“That does look pretty badass,” Brady said.
“And, added bonus: it’s cold outside.”
“What can I say, I thought of everything.”
“Even heroes get cold.”
“It’s efficient. It’s warm. It looks cool.” Brady raised a finger to coincide with each item on the list.
“You checked all the boxes. I love it.”
“No cape though.”
“I mean,” Cole said, “we both know the pitfalls of capes, according to The Incredibles.”
“I guess I really did think of everything.”
At the cabin, Elder Mariah was waiting for them, bundled up to ward off the chill. She had a smudge bowl, a bundle of medicine, and an eagle feather.
“I know there’s no point asking you to stay,” she said. “I know that you have to go, but…”
“We’ll be careful,” Brady assured her.
“I won’t let anything happen to him.” Cole patted Brady on the shoulder. “He’s my special guy.”
“Oh my…” Brady rolled his eyes. “Well, at least you’re not brooding.” He mimicked the patting, but patted Cole on top of his head. “And I won’t let anything happen to this nerd.”
“Ekosani,” Elder Mariah chuckled. “I feel better knowing that you’re together. Now…” She placed the bowl on the ground, knelt over it, and lit a match. She held the match to the medicine, until a tiny flame burst to life from it, which she quickly extinguished. She nursed the ember within the bundle, fanning it gently with the eagle feather, and smoke began to billow away from it. Cole accepted the smudge, cupped his hands together, and brought the smoke towards him; ran it through his hair, over his eyes, over his mouth and pressed it against his heart; then pushed it down across the rest of his body. He said a prayer, asking Creator for strength and courage and guidance for the task they had in front of them. Brady did the same, eyes closed the entire time, his lips moving while he recited his own prayer to Creator. When the smudge was finished, Elder Mariah placed the bowl on the ground and embraced both of them.
“Now, whatever you do,” she said, “you’ll do it in a good way.”
“We’ll be back,” Cole said, “and we’ll need your help.”
“Ehe,” Elder Mariah said. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
“Kininaskomitin, nókom,” Brady said.
“Kininaskomitin, nósisim,” Elder Mariah said to Brady, and then to Cole said, “Kininaskomitin, niwákómákan.”
“You really think I’m your relative?” Cole asked.
“I don’t think you are, I know you are,” she said. “I’ve always thought of you that way.”
“Me, too,” Cole said. “And I’ll take all the family I can get, you know?”
“Yes.” She gave him another hug. “I know.”
They set out across the field that, just a short time ago, Cole had crossed from the other direction, following an impulse that he wasn’t sure that he could describe. He wasn’t sure that he could describe the need in going the other way either, back the way he came. Just that it was a different kind of pull. An urgency, in coming here, to heal. An urgency, in leaving, to save others. Cole knew that there were two things he needed to do: stop Mihko and kill Reynold. All of these things coursed through Cole’s mind like blood, until they were already almost through the field, and they hadn’t yet spoken a word to each other. When he snapped out of it, he saw that Brady had been watching him, with a knowing grin.
“That’s how I know that you’re all the way better,” he said.
“Yeah? Just zoning out like that? Eva would say the same thing, you know.”
“You’ll have to be better company,” Brady said. “This is like an all-day hike, okay my friend? I don’t have a podcast to listen to or anything like that.”
“All day?” Cole couldn’t decide whether this was more, or less, than he’d expected. He had nothing to compare it to.
“Running to get reception and back usually took me a few hours,” Brady estimated. “Good exercise and everything. You know, if you’re not going to talk, we could just jog now, get there faster.”
“If we run, could you play some Rocky training montage music?”
“You know what?” Brady punched Cole’s arm. “You’re out of the family.”
They didn’t run, and, as much as possible, Cole tried to engage with Brady and not zone out. This wasn’t, of course, an unpleasant thing. They hadn’t seen each other in over a month, and there was a lot of catching up to do. However, Brady ended up doing most of the talking. At one point, Brady asked Cole, “So what about you?”
“I was dead, remember?” There wasn’t much he could tell Brady about his month away from the community.
“Your month away from planet Earth,” Brady corrected.
It felt good to be able to laugh about it now; it made Cole feel more alive, to make light of the fact that he’d been dead. Allowed him to escape from the thoughts that would inevitably follow the mention of his death. Like who had killed him and why. A cyclical thought process leading him back to zoned-out ruminations.
“It feels like another world out here, though,” Brady pointed out.
“I can see that,” Cole said. “It’s actually kind of nice walking through Blackwood, now. I can appreciate it. Before it was like, I don’t know, doing. You know? Like a dog chasing a car. You see the car, you just do.”
“The dog doesn’t stop and smell the sweetgrass.”
“Exactly.”
“Yeah,” Brady took a deep breath in through his nose, “I’m going to miss it out here. Just, the simplicity of it. You’re hungry, you go and catch something, or pick something. It’s calm. Easy. It made it more tolerable somehow, that all the chaos was back in Wounded Sky. It’s not that I didn’t care, but…”
“I know what you
mean,” Cole said. “You couldn’t go back. You needed the calm. I could use more of that calm.”
“We’ll be back, right? When this is over?”
“We’ll be back between all the chaos.”
“Between,” Brady repeated. “What’s the plan, actually?”
“You said I couldn’t think, so I haven’t got that far into it.”
“Unfair!”
“No really, man, I don’t know,” Cole said. “I just have a list, I guess, of things that I…we…need to do. Get the people out of the clinic, stop Mihko, figure out if Reynold is dead or not, and what he has to do with all of this. It’s like this puzzle that I’m trying to fit together.”
“Who killed you,” Brady added.
“Yeah, that too.”
“Listen, if you need to think, I won’t run away from you, alright? We’ve gone pretty far, so it’s not like, you know, it’ll be hours of silence”
“Thanks,” Cole said, “but I’m not sure how much thinking will help right now. Let’s just get to Wounded Sky and find a place to hole up. Then we can go down the list.”
“I can hum the Rocky theme song for you,” Brady said. “I’d do that for family, you know.”
“Oh, so now I’m family again, hey?”
“Yeah, but like, a distant relative. Like a third cousin twice removed,” Brady said. “Working your way up, though.”
“Well that sucks,” Cole said. “Everybody’s a cousin up here.”
They stopped for lunch when the sun was halfway through its journey across the sky, digging into the snacks Brady had prepared for them. They ate dried meat and berries and read comics together, leaning up against trees, each of them pretending that’s what they were there to do, doing their best to revel in the peace before they walked into the turmoil. They traded comics, once they were done reading their own, like they used to do when they were kids. When they were finished eating and reading, they packed up and continued on their journey through the woods.
Hours later, their hike was almost over. The trees thinned out and gave way to the community, but more importantly, a guard was posted on high alert fifty yards into the forest from Wounded Sky. Cole and Brady ducked behind some bushes when they saw the guard, a rifle gripped in his hands, and scanning the area non-stop. They watched him until he looked in their direction, then they hid out of view and tried to see what they could through the foliage. There was no way around him. His head was moving constantly, surveying the entire area. Towards the community, where he was, the undergrowth wasn’t thick enough for them to crawl through unseen.
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