The Loop

The trick wasn’t opening portals—that was easy, natural; the trick was not opening a portal every time she thought of some distant place and pictured it in her mind. Her thoughts kept drifting back to Micah, to the garden in the backyard at Michelle’s place—formerly their place—or to the porch swing where they’d sat in happier times and watched their son play and sipped cocktails and laughed about silly things that had happened to them both at work. And she had to restrain herself from opening a portal to that place and stepping through. It was all her mind and body wanted to do. She was only able to pull herself back from actually doing it by reminding herself that she could only create a doorway to the place, not to the time.

She shook her head and brought herself back to the present moment, her current location. Maybe it was a quirk of her power, or maybe she was just sentimental, but it was like she had an innate sense of every place she had ever been or seen or even imagined, and thinking about them was almost like traveling to them. “Here and now,” she muttered, earning her a puzzled look from detective Pérez.

“Shhh,” Ricky intoned, glaring back at both women.

They stood on a rooftop terrace looking down over the small courtyard surrounded by high-end apartment buildings where Felipe had requested both Sean Murphy and Sammy Novak and her brother to meet him. He had told both of them that he had important information about the others and he was willing to trade it for his safety. Now he stood in the middle of that courtyard, shooting glances up at the rooftop where he knew they stood watching every few minutes, feet tapping endlessly and hands roving from pockets to knees to chest and back in a never-ending loop.

Kayla silently prayed that the two detectives were sure that they'd be able to intervene and make some arrests without anybody—especially anybody innocent—getting hurt. Surely they didn’t actually plan to just let two rival gangs shoot it out in the middle of a residential area while they exfiltrated Felipe and the four of them got to safety. She didn’t really believe they did. At least, she didn’t believe Ricky did. She had a harder time reading Camilla.

Ricky was watching from the edge of the roof, his enhanced eyesight and hearing allowed him to watch and listen in as if he were right there in the middle of the action. He wanted to watch closely to try to utilize his power and signal them when it was the best time to make a move, he’d explained. Kayla and Camilla, meanwhile, were huddled behind him, looking through a tiny half-inch square portal that Kayla had created on the front of Felipe’s chest; the end of the portal in the courtyard was concealed in a small gap in the buttons of his jacket—a spot they’d all agreed had the best chance of going unnoticed. She had to concentrate on keeping that portal in place, moving it with Felipe’s body. On their end of that portal, they had a small tripod set up with a camera looking through, recording whatever happened. It was effectively a bodycam where the actual recording happened remotely.

Right next to her mouth was an even smaller portal, the other end of which floated next to Felipe’s right ear. The way that sound traveled, only some of what was said at his end of the portal came through to her unless it was spoken close to him and at a sufficient volume, but she could speak directly to Felipe through her end. It hadn’t been part of the plan, but she had wanted a way to be able to speak directly to him, if only to whisper encouragement to him, if only to keep him aware that he wasn’t alone.

“Hang in there, Felipe,” she whispered, and he glanced up at the rooftop again. “It won’t be long.”

She was only trying to ease his anxiety, but as luck would have it, she was right. The Murphy’s pulled up first. The three of them on the rooftop heard the squeal of brakes, the slamming of car doors. She quickly opened up a small portal on the other side of the building and glanced through before shutting it again.

“Simon and Sean both,” she said. “Three guys with them.” She spoke loudly enough for Camilla and Ricky to hear, but of course Felipe heard her too. She and Camilla couldn’t see his body from the portal they had open in front of them, but they could see the movement of his jacket as he shivered.

“Describe the three guys,” said Camilla.

“I didn’t look for long,” she replied. “Two of them had red hair.”

Camilla grinned. “I’ve already dealt with those assholes once, and that was when I didn’t have powers. They shouldn’t be an issue.”

“Good to know.”

“Shhh,” said Ricky again.

They hadn’t known for certain which of the two gangs would arrive first, but Ricky had told them he was fairly confident it would be the Murphys. “They’re more organized,” he’d said. “More likely to be on time.”

Still, the Novaks weren’t far behind. Sean and Simon had barely entered the courtyard, their goons standing a respectable distance back, and waved their hands in wary greeting to Felipe before Kayla heard another car door slam. It sounded like it was on the far side of the complex, away from where the Murphys had come in. If anyone down in the courtyard had heard it, they gave no sign.

Kayla and Camilla watched through the portal at Felipe’s chest as the two Murphys approached him, looking around cautiously, as if they could smell that this was a setup somehow, but they hadn’t figured out the angle just yet. Through the open portal they caught snippets of mumbled words, relying more on the tones of the voices than anything else to infer meaning.

“I’ve got—to tell you about—and if you like what you hear, maybe—” Even though his voice was muffled and distorted and most of his words were lost by virtue of not being spoken directly into the small portal at his chest, Kayla could tell he was frightened. The Murphys were bound to hear that in his voice, too. She just hoped they chalked it up to being afraid they would kill him right then and there—which, to be fair, he was—and not catch onto the fact that he was being duplicitous.

“No way you can make them any louder, I don’t suppose?” Camilla said.

The camera that was recording the action through the chest portal had a highly sensitive directional mic—Ricky and Camilla had ‘borrowed’ it from the station—and it would pick up and record the conversation far better than their ears could.

“I could open another, larger portal, but that would almost certainly get noticed. Unless the soundwaves from their voices happen to be pointed in just the right direction …”

“Yeah, I didn’t really think so.”

Still, from twenty storeys up, they could hear the sudden shout, not through the portal, but through the air separating them from the ground. They watched as Felipe’s viewpoint spun 180 degrees, catching only the brief startled looks on the faces of the two Murphy men before they were out of view. Instead, they saw the Novaks approaching, and immediately they saw the wrinkle in their plan.

The Novaks hadn’t brought any backup with them, not one single goon, but it was obvious why they hadn’t felt the need to.

“Oh, fuck me,” said Camilla. “We didn’t plan on that.”

The Novaks—Sammy and Chris, both—were barely recognizable as humans. They were both at least eight feet tall, and wrapped in massive, tight cords of muscle that stretched and strained under skin that looked more reptilian than mammalian. Their eyes were large and solid black and menacing as they roved over the scene before them, lingering for an uncomfortably long beat on the rooftop where the three of them hid. Ricky ducked down behind the lip of the roof and stared at the two women with a look of pure shock.

“Get him out, now,” he said.

Kayla needed no more prompting. Through the small portal she already had opened, she saw as the view at Felipe’s chest started moving backward, the boy obviously taking involuntary steps away from the two monsters in front of him. The Novaks advanced, moving away from one another, as if to flank Felipe and the Murphys. They didn’t need the portals to hear the gunshots as the Murphys opened fire.

Kayla opened another portal, actual door-size, and reached out and yanked Felipe through it.

“Are you alright?” she asked, as the noise of fighting erupted below them.

He looked badly shaken, his eyes wide and his face shining with sweat, but he nodded.

“Is this what the two of you wanted?” she asked the detectives, anger and accusation coming through clearly.

“Of course not,” snapped Ricky. “I planned on swooping in and arresting everybody before things got out of hand.”

She glared at Camilla, who shrugged. “I didn’t expect that,” she said, “but I thought things might get a little violent, sure.”

“So what the fuck do we do now?”

Lights were starting to come on in many of the apartments ringing the courtyard, and the sound of people shouting was picking up. Kayla opened another portal, this one directly above the courtyard, and the four of them stood around the other end of it and watched the scene unfolding below them. The two hulking monsters had been shot a great many times, and they were dripping dark red blood from holes all over their bodies, but it didn’t seem to be slowing them down any. Two of the Murphys’ goons were dead, their bodies shredded by the long claws that the Novaks seemed to have sprouted since the fighting began, while the remainder were moving in a circle around the perimeter of the courtyard, taking cover behind benches and flower pots and trying to keep putting bullets into the creatures.

With a swiftness that their physiology alone couldn’t account for, one of the Novaks—Kayla could no longer tell them apart—lunged twenty feet across the courtyard and impaled the third Murphy thug into the wall with their claws, now grown to at least a foot in length. The man’s scream shook Kayla to her core.

She watched in horror as one of the residents on the first floor came out into the courtyard, ostensibly to get a better angle for the video he was taking with his phone, and one of the Novaks locked onto him, their eyes tracking him with the intensity with which a cat tracks a mouse.

“We have to do something,” she said, her voice small. She prepared to open a portal and yank the man through, when the creature turned and very deliberately looked up at the edge of the rooftop. There was no way the creatures could possibly see them up here, but they seemed to be aware of their presence anyway.

“They can smell us,” said Ricky. “Not just our bodies. They can smell our powers.”

“Also, they can probably see that big-ass portal floating in the air above them,” said Camilla.

Kayla said nothing, neither revelation was enough to pierce through the shroud of confusion and dismay that was overtaking her mind. I have to get out of here, she thought. I have to get that guy out of there. I have to get Felipe out of here. Instead of doing any of those things, she sat frozen to the spot and watched as the creature in the courtyard started advancing on the civilian once more, ignoring the bullets that the two standing Murphys were putting into its back. The man, for his part, seemed almost oblivious to the danger he was in, as if watching the action through his phone screen had actually made him forget that he was really there at all.

It was Felipe who took action first, jumping to his feet and twisting the light around all of them into twisting, shimmering technicolor strands that moved through the air in looping patterns before settling into a locked-in pattern that was invisible to the naked eye. The creatures below them looked confused, twisting in place and visibly snarling.

“What did you do to them?” asked Kayla.

“He made them blind,” replied Ricky.

“Never mind that,” said Felipe. “Just get that guy out of there before they start relying on their other senses.”

“Right,” she said. She opened another door-size portal and pulled the man through, depositing him roughly on the rooftop next to them. She closed that portal and opened another, shoving the man through to a spot six blocks down the street before he had a chance to recover and realize he’d moved at all.

“If you see anyone else putting themselves in harm’s way, give them the same treatment,” said Camilla, as she ran to the edge of the rooftop.

She looked back at Kayla with an almost wicked grin.

“Otherwise,” she said. “Just back me up.”

She picked a half dozen stones up from around the edge of the rooftop and opened fire.