The Loop

August 16th

Ricky

It had been over two weeks since the arrest of the Novak siblings. In the time since, Ricky and Camilla had been interviewed again and again by their superiors, their inferiors, internal affairs, the FBI. If they hadn’t had time to get their stories straightened around before the other cops had shown up to the scene in the park, Ricky couldn’t guess what would have happened.

As it was, there was still a lot of suspicion surrounding their assertion that they’d been running Felipe as a confidential informant for a few months, that they’d set up the meet with the Novaks and Murphys with little warning and no time to get approval from higher up, and that when all hell had broken loose, they’d done everything in their power to keep things contained. They’d glossed over how Ricky had known to go after Gary—the cops already knew he was a Hype from Ricky’s prior run-in with him at the shelter, and they didn’t ask questions about Ricky’s intuition, which had been impressive enough before he got superpowers that other detectives tended to just take him at his word—and they’d avoided mentioning or involving Kayla at all; she’d left the scene at the park before other officers had arrived.

It was all pretty flimsy.

The fact was, though, that everyone was happy to see two of New York’s most active and infamous criminal organizations take such a significant blow, and there was not, therefore, much incentive to keep asking questions. They’d hardly worked in the time since, but they’d had plenty of meetings with both Felipe—he was now staying in a foster home while they worked out custody—and Kayla, who seemed to be embracing her Hype life and was itching to get back out on the streets to help more people. It was like a complete change had come over her.

A complete change had come over all of them, really. And not just in the sense that touching some strange alien orb had literally changed their brains and bodies. They’d all found something they had been searching for, something they’d been needing.

“Where are we at with the Esposito case, ‘El Cerebro’?” Sergeant Barnes laughed and shook his head at the nickname even as he said it. It had been ages since anyone but Ricky’s sister had called him that, pretty much since he’d still been in Mexico. Camilla had known about it, though, and in the aftermath of the night with the Novaks and Murphys, she’d let the nickname slip to others in the station. Now he couldn’t live it down.

“I’m following up on a few leads, sarge. No one has interviewed the guy at the gas station yet, so I was going to head over there after lunch.”

“Good thinking, Ricky. But then, should I be surprised that your thinking is good? Given your name I mean?”

Ricky smiled and shook his head, turning back to his work as the sergeant walked away.

“You just gonna let him make fun of you like that?” asked Camilla, turning around on her chair to face him.

“Come on, Pérez. We both know you’re the one who told them to call me that.”

“Well … I was thinking it could work pretty good as a Hype name, actually.”

“A what?”

“You know … Like a secret identity.”

“It’s not that secret now that you’ve told everyone in the precinct about it.”

“Yeah because if the news starts talking about a Hyperhuman hero team led by a guy calling himself ‘El Cerebro’, everyone in the department is definitely going to make the connection to you, right?”

“I mean … it’s not that much of a stretch—”

Ricky’s phone was buzzing in his pocket again. All day he’d been getting calls from random numbers and he’d been ignoring them. It was starting to get on his nerves though.

“Everything okay there, Ricky?” said Camilla, who must have spotted the annoyance on his face, or maybe she just noticed how hard he slammed his phone down on his desk.

“It’s fine, just …”

Draw out the connections, he thought.

Strange phone calls all day to me? Could be important news. Multiple calls from different numbers to … What? A warning? A threat? Blackmail? He tested each connection in turn and found that the connection between the calls and a warning about something seemed to hold the most weight.

His power kicked in and forced him to overanalyze things that didn’t warrant that much analysis so often that he had quickly learned to tune it out unless he was actively looking for its input, but right now the voice in his head was getting louder, more insistent. It wouldn’t be ignored this time.

“Just what?” Camilla had her eyes locked on his face now, and she looked genuinely concerned.

“I think I should answer my phone next time it rings.”

Before he got a chance, though, the screen on his computer flashed off, and when it came back on a moment later, there was a masked face floating there. A face he didn’t recognize.

“Jesus Christ, you’re a tough man to get a hold of,” said the man on the screen. “Sorry to intrude like this, but you really don’t like to answer your phone.”

The man was young, maybe early twenties. Vaguely unkempt, but not dirty. He could have been any number of homeless youths that Ricky had come across at the shelter except that there was something about him that indicated that his particular brand of unkempt was mostly by design; his hair wasn’t greasy because he couldn’t wash it, but because he chose not to.

“Who the hell are you?” asked Camilla, coming around his desk and staring at the screen. “And what do you want? And bear in mind before you answer that we’re detectives, so you might want to measure your words carefully.”

“I know who he is, obviously; Ricky ‘El Cerebro’ Gonzalez. I wouldn’t have been trying to call since last night if I didn’t know who I was trying to reach, but I’m not familiar with you.” The man—Ricky kept having to remind himself to think of him as a man and not a boy—turned to the side, as if looking at someone outside the frame. “Adam, who is this chick who’s with the guy? Do you remember her or not?”

“Ask if it’s … Kayla, I think her name was?” said another voice, spoken by someone unseen.

“Are you Kayla?” asked the first man, turning back toward the camera.

Ricky and Camilla exchanged dumbfounded looks, but Ricky was quicker to regain his composure. His power had kicked into overdrive, but it was barely helping him; the situation was filled with too many unknowns to create any reliable connections.

“I am Ricky Gonzalez, as you apparently already know. This is my partner, detective Camilla Pérez. Now I’m going to have to ask you to start explaining who you are and how you know what you know. Please.”

“Sure thing, sorry. I should have started with my name. I’m Lincoln Sinclair. The guy I was just talking to is Adam. We’re Hyperhumans. And that’s all you need to know for now, besides that what I’m about to say to you is going to sound absolutely crazy … Well, actually, considering the world we’re living in now, maybe it won’t sound that crazy. But the point is, you have to trust us. A lot of lives are depending on it.”

Felipe

“I got here as quickly as I could. What’s the emergency?” Felipe asked, looking around at his new friends, his teammates. ‘I got here as quickly as I could’ had become a bit of a joke between them, since they could get anywhere in the city—or outside of it—in minutes by giving Kayla a call and asking her to open up a portal.

“We got some … intelligence that there’s going to be an attack here tomorrow. We’re deciding how best to handle it. Based on the description of the attack, we suspect there might already be bombs planted.”

Felipe looked around at the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. It was an impressive building, one of the buildings that tourists flocked to with ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and the desire to snap the perfect selfie. And in this case, Felipe couldn’t blame them; if there were only a handful of architectural feats that made New York distinct, this was one of them.

And his uncle was supposed to be here tomorrow. In his letter—the one Felipe had almost forgotten about with every crazy thing that had happened since he’d read it—he’d said he’d be coming by train into New York on the seventeenth.

“Wait, you guys didn’t say anything about bombs over the phone,” Kayla said, staring wide-eyed at the other two adults as if she’d just realized she was the only sane person left on the planet. “Why would you bring a teenage boy into a situation where you suspect there might be bombs?”

It was telling that she didn’t ask why they’d included her. After all, she was as much a civilian as Felipe was. He didn’t begrudge her the fact that she was looking out for him, in her way, but it did irk him that she apparently believed she could handle more than he could. After all, it was he, not she, who had been stuck between rival criminal enterprises and had managed to find a way out, unscathed.

“I fought the same two giant monsters as you, Kayla. I think I have just as much right to be here as anyone.”

What he didn’t mention was that, all things considered, he’d rather not be invited to situations that might involve bombs or explosions. Or giant monsters.

“He’s here because he can expedite the search process,” said detective Gonzalez. “And you’re here so that we can safely dispose of any bomb we might find.”

“Dispose of how? And why aren’t you guys calling in the actual police? Bomb squad? SWAT? Somebody else?”

“Because then we’d have to explain where this tip came from, and why we’re taking it seriously.”

“The cops don’t take every bomb threat seriously?” asked Kayla incredulously.

“Do you have any idea how often there are terrorist threats against places like Grand Central? If we shut the whole place down for every teenager making a prank call or incel trying to mess with some woman’s commute by making a false threat, the place would never open long enough for trains to come through.” Detective Pérez’s voice was full of impatience, like she alone didn’t have the time to waste on this discussion.

“So people phone in threats all the time and you guys do nothing?”

“Not nothing,” detective Gonzalez said, clearly trying to reassure her. “We assess the viability of the threat and we send out people to search for any evidence of actual explosives. Generally we try to keep all of this low key to avoid starting a panic unless we have reason to believe the threat is credible.”

“And the same goes for right now. Find the bomb, if it exists, throw it through a portal into the ocean, and don’t get everyone panicked,” said detective Pérez.

“And while we’re doing that, where the hell are you two going to be?” asked Felipe, ignoring for a moment the fact that his reply implied that he was onboard with the plan in any way.

“We’re going to find the man who set the bomb.”

“So the guy with the super brain and the incredible eyesight and hearing isn’t going to help play hide and seek?” asked Felipe. “Instead he’s going to leave it to a kid and a lawyer?”

“A kid who can bend light and see around corners and a lawyer who can open portals and get the two of them to safety in an instant if anything bad happens?” said detective Pérez. “Yeah, I actually feel pretty good about that plan.”

“I still don’t know …” said Kayla.

“Look, Kayla, you’re the one who’s been itching to get back out here and put our powers to use. This is what that looks like. People could die if we don’t do everything in our power to stop this.” Ricky’s face was gentle but set. It was a reassuring combination.

And he was right, Felipe realized. He thought of his uncle, thought about what he would feel if he knew that something happened at the station that resulted in his uncle getting hurt. Something that he could have prevented and chose not to because he was scared.

“Hey … wait a minute. You never said who tipped you off about a bomb in the first place.” Felipe looked at the other three. Kayla looked as lost as he felt. The other two exchanged a worried glance, as if silently debating how much to reveal.

“If I told you that the tip came from a man from the future, what would you say to that?”

Felipe considered for a moment.

“That’s only like, the fifth strangest thing I’ve heard this week,” he said.

“Is it true?” asked Kayla.

Ricky nodded once, slowly.

“As far as we know,” said detective Pérez. “He knows a scary amount about us if he isn’t from the future, anyway.”

Kayla

They’d been searching for two hours, looking through every place that was accessible to them and many that weren’t. From restaurant kitchens to offices to indoor parking, they left no part of Grand Central untouched. Between Kayla’s portals allowing them to peer into—and sometimes walk into—closed off spaces, and Felipe’s power allowing them to see things in other parts of the station, their search had been exceedingly thorough. They might have called the search off by now, as no one sane could have still expected to find anything. And yet, the longer they went without finding something, the more anxious Kayla got. She grew more certain by the minute that they would find something, and maybe they’d find it too late.

Felipe had retreated back to the main concourse. That was just as well, he could bend light in such a way that he could see the entire structure, inside and out, at the same time. Physically moving around to do his search wasn’t strictly necessary. Kayla kept a small portal by him connected to one by her own head so that they could talk back and forth as she paced through endless halls and rooms she’d already searched, eschewing doors and walking a completely nonlinear path through portals that she opened and closed in the blink of an eye. She made sure that no one saw her create or step through a portal, but that didn’t mean that no one saw her round a corner and seemingly disappear into thin air.

She opened small portals into drawers and lockers with their other ends floating in the air in front of her eyes and saw through them the usual mix of uninteresting things one might expect to find in such containers: file folders, receipts, keys, purses, jackets, guns … Guns? She thought, going back to the locker she’d just looked into. People certainly shouldn’t be bringing guns to a place like this. Especially not … she counted. Especially not eight of them.

The eight pistols—the detectives would have been able to identify the models, though Kayla certainly couldn’t—were in a locker inside the staff changing area in one of the nicer restaurants in the station. They were all holstered and sat lined up neatly on the floor of the locker, as if they’d been placed there with great care.

Kayla opened a portal quickly and stepped through to an unoccupied area of the terminal as she heard someone coming into the back of the kitchen. She left a small portal open to watch the intruder.

“You ready for the dinner rush?” asked a man, walking into the locker area with his back turned to the portal, speaking to someone Kayla couldn’t see.

“Ready, my ass. If it’s anything like last Friday, I swear to God I’ll walk out that door and never look back. We don’t get paid enough for that shit,” said a woman.

“Preach, sister,” said the man, turning toward the lockers with a wide smile on his face.

The man was tanned, with a neat mustache and the beginnings of brown stubble covering his chin. He ran a hand through his slick, black hair and used his apron to dab sweat off his forehead.

“Fuck me,” he muttered to himself. “If she quits, there’s no way I’m sticking around.”

Kayla watched to see what locker the man would go to, praying it wouldn’t be the one with the guns.

That was exactly the one he approached, turning the lock toward him with his right hand and leaning in. Kayla prepared to widen her portal and step through, to stop him before he …

“Ah, fuck off,” said the man. “Ashley, have you seen this shit?” The man took a step back from the locker and turned an incredulous face on the doorway his coworker was coming through.

“What is it?”

“Ahmed went and put another electronic lock on his locker.”

“I don’t get it … Does he not realize Desi is just going to make him take it off and replace it with an approved one that she can get into? This has happened like, five times already. The man doesn’t learn.”

“I get wanting to have your privacy, but … What’s he bringing to work that he needs to keep so private? You know what I keep in my locker?”

“I don’t even want to know, Jace—”

“My smelly-ass shoes, some deodorant, and a change of underwear.”

“I said I didn’t want to know, but thanks for that …”

The man laughed and Kayla backed off, waiting for the two of them to get their things and leave. In the meantime, she dialed Ricky’s number.

“Hey, Kayla, what’s up? You find anything yet?”

“Not a bomb, if that’s what you mean, but … Yeah, maybe.”

“What have you got?”

“What did you say the name of the guy we’re looking for was?”

“Talib. Why?”

“Can you check and see if he has any friends or associates named Ahmed? And then can you make an anonymous tip to the NYPD that there’s a locker with a bunch of guns in it inside the staff room at the Manhattan Lobster Lounge?”

“Will do. That sounds important, and I’m sure it’s connected somehow, but our source told us there was definitely going to be a bomb. It will be set off tomorrow, and when the small and relatively harmless explosion draws in first responders, our guy will pop out to take them all out with powers.”

“And you think if you capture him today, the bomb will still go off tomorrow? But so what? You said the explosion was harmless.”

“I said ‘relatively harmless’. People still died in the initial attack. According to our source, anyway.”

“All right. We’ll keep looking.”

“Thanks, Kayla.”

Camilla

“So how are we going to do this?” asked Camilla, looking at her partner for clarification. Somehow he’d naturally fallen into the leadership role in their new dynamic, and whereas she might once have resented him for that, she had to admit that he was the best choice. And not just because of his power.

“When we get in there,” he replied, “we’re going to get Kayla to pull in the kid from Texas, and he’s going to talk his uncle down. Hopefully. If that doesn’t work out, we’re going to arrest him.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” she asked, pulling a ski mask from her pocket and putting it on.

“We’ll figure that out when we get there; I’m pretty good at thinking on my feet. And where the fuck did you get that from?” said Ricky, indicating her improvised face covering.

“What? You don’t have anything to obscure your identity? You said we’re not going in there as representatives of the NYPD, right? At least not unless we need to be. Which means the use of our powers is on the table. Which means you suspect we might need to use our powers. Which means we have to protect our identities so that this Talib guy can’t out as us Hypes if he ends up in a jail cell and needs to make some shady deal with the prosecution.”

They were standing on the front doorstep of an older, rundown apartment building in Astoria and, following Ricky’s lead, they were carrying on their conversation normally, even though he’d realized five blocks ago that they were being tailed.

“All of that is true, but … I guess I just didn’t think about it,” he said after a while.

“You didn’t think of something?” she said, incredulous. “You?”

She forced a small chuckle and kept a smile plastered on her face as she quickly scanned the block up and down. Enhanced eyesight was a gift that they both possessed, and yet, if they were being followed, she had seen no evidence of it. Should she just take Ricky at his word? He didn’t tend to be wrong about much.

She wished she could just ask him to clarify, but all he’d given her was a quick, whispered “we’re being followed” with his head turned to the ground as they’d driven up the street, looking for a parking lot. That told her a lot, in itself.

It said that, at least as far as he was concerned, there was a possibility that whoever was following them had a way of overhearing their conversation, even in a car with the windows rolled up. That he’d spoken with his head down told her that he even believed it was possible that their pursuer could read their lips.

Is this the guy we’re after? Or is someone else chasing us while we’re chasing him? Again, she wished she could ask. But all she could do for now was follow his lead. And what he was doing was playing everything casual, so she was, too.

“Give me a second,” he said, digging through his pockets and pulling out a handkerchief.

“There’s no way …” she said, laughing again as he turned his handkerchief into a makeshift mask, like in an old Western movie. Of course, that would make them the outlaws; the lawmen never covered their faces.

But then, her face covering made her look like she was getting ready to rob a bank in modern America, maybe it was only fitting that Ricky’s made it look like he was getting ready to do the same in 1860.

Her thought was cut short as something streaked past her, missing her face by a quarter inch only because some part of her brain registered the movement and caused her to step back in time.

“Fu—” she began.

Again she was interrupted by an object streaking past. Again, she narrowly avoided getting hit.

There was something unnervingly familiar about the way the objects were moving.

She didn’t have time to dwell on that notion, as she found herself suddenly plunged into a sort of staticy, semi-darkness.

“Ricky?” she said, fighting to keep the panic out of her voice.

Since this … whatever it was, had begun, Ricky hadn’t said a word. Now she couldn’t even see him to know if he’d been hit, if he was even aware of what was happening.

She hit the ground as she heard something whizzing by her. Whatever it was, it struck the glass door of the apartment building and shattered it.

Finally, Ricky spoke: “This isn’t our guy. This is … us. Somehow it’s us. Our powers, I mean.”

His meaning clicked, and she knew it was true. The manipulation of light, that was Felipe’s. The objects being hurtled at impossible velocities, that was hers. This thought made her instantly indignant.

“Who the fuck is using my own power against me?” she muttered.

“Can you see anything?” Ricky’s voice seemed to be getting farther away each time he spoke. Am I moving? she wondered. Or is he?

“I can’t see a thing,” she responded.

“I’m starting to see a little bit,” he said. His voice could have been coming from the end of the street for how quiet it was. “I think he has all our powers, but not as strong as the versions we have. He can’t keep light out of both of our eyes if we move away from each other.”

“How is that helping us, Ricky?” But despite her incredulous tone, she followed his lead once again and started shuffling on her hands and knees in the opposite direction of his voice. It took an enormous amount of willpower, and a ton of trust in Ricky, to be moving away from what she thought of as a source of safety when she was so exposed.

“Just hang tight,” he said, his voice getting so far away that she could barely make out the words.

It struck her that whoever was attacking them could probably still hear them talking, could certainly see them. She assumed he was launching his attack from a good distance away, based on the initial volley of supercharged objects, but for all she really knew, he was standing over her prone body, smirking to himself at the thought of them trying to make a plan of escape, while holding a stone that he could launch into her skull at any second.

She heard a gentle whooshing noise, like the air rushing from place to place when a door is opened between rooms with a pressure differential.

Kayla, she thought. Backup.

“Kayla?” she spoke aloud.

A man’s laugh answered her.

“You always were the slowest one on the team,” said a voice she didn’t recognize. “Not Kayla. Just her power.”

“Whoever you are, just fuckin’ get to the point.” She had flipped herself around so that she was sitting on her butt with her hands on the ground behind her, face to the sky, for all the good that was doing her. She felt since the man had gotten close enough to speak that her vision had gone from merely badly obscured to completely and hopelessly black.

“Whoever I am? I’m your friend. I’m your teammate. Don’t you remember me? Of course not. How could you? Even when I was on the team, I wasn’t really a proper member, was I? I was only good for making the rest of you better, and after the rest of you died, I wasn’t even good for that. If the way the orb changed me hadn’t given me a brain that was uniquely suited to being sent back in time, I’d have had no real purpose at all.”

What the fuck is this guy talking about? she thought.

“Back in time?” she asked, skeptical. “Are you the one who gave us the lead about this Talib guy?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

She wracked her brain for more questions or comments, anything to keep him talking instead of finishing her off. She was on the ground, blind, not even quite sure where he was. She was completely at his mercy. She didn’t like being at anyone’s mercy.

Finally, she said, “Then who are you? Really? And how did you find us here? And why?”

“I’m your adversary. I’m the Adversary. The rest doesn’t matter. Goodbye, Camilla.”

She heard the motion of his body but could only guess at what he was doing. Winding back to throw a rock through her skull, probably. Her hands scrabbled on the ground around her, looking for any small object she might use to fight back. She could aim based on where his voice was coming from. She could do something. She didn’t have to just lie here and die.

Where the fuck is Ricky? she thought. He hadn’t spoken in a while. She hoped this man—this Adversary—hadn’t killed him already, but she couldn’t count anything out. She couldn’t count on anyone but herself.

She heard another whooshing noise, and assumed the man had moved again. Her hands finally settled around a small, round stone. Say something, you son of a bitch, she thought.

“Where’d you go, asshole?” she said, tightening her grip on the stone and mentally preparing to use her power and throw the stone as soon as she had the slightest inkling of where her opponent was.

There was no answer. She was in the dark and now she seemed to be alone.

Then: footsteps. Several sets of them. And the blackness in her vision fading. And faces resolving in front of her, Ricky, Kayla, Felipe, and three more she didn’t know. Young people. A couple looked to be no more than sixteen or seventeen.

“Who the hell are you guys?” she asked.

“I called in the cavalry,” Ricky said, by way of explanation. “Our new friend, Adversary, ran off when he saw he was outmatched.”

“I’m Adam,” said the man she took to be in charge of the three newcomers. “This is Harper and Jaleel. Good to meet you … again.”

“Again?” she asked.

“I’m sort of from the future,” he said, as if that was enough for her to understand what the hell was going on.

“And what are you doing here, exactly?”

“Jaleel is here to try to talk to his uncle, as discussed,” said Ricky. “The others wouldn’t let him go without an escort, which is just as well. When I got clear of Adversary’s power, I got in touch with Kayla, got her to give our new friends a call to ascertain their locations, and get everyone here as soon as possible. Jaleel really thinks he can get through to his uncle. Maybe this thing doesn’t have to get ugly.”

“It’s already gotten ugly,” Camilla pointed out.

“I know I can reach him,” said the one who’d been introduced as Jaleel. Young, handsome, dark-skinned. His face was intelligent in a way she had trouble putting into words, like you could see the cogs moving behind his eyes, taking in the world.

The girl, Harper, had eyes that flitted back and forth from face to face, reading expressions and watching for cues. Clever girl, Camilla thought. She’d make a good detective.

And Adam, the one she took to be in charge was … unremarkable. Decent looking, slightly frazzled and out of place. Maybe a little pale? But if he was scared, there were no real tells, and that counted for something.

“Let’s get in there, then,” said Camilla. She wasn’t sure exactly why they needed so much backup now, and if it were up to her, she probably would have sent these kids back to Texas. Two civilians assisting her and Ricky was more than enough; they didn’t need three more who they didn’t even know.

And even Kayla and Felipe weren’t actually supposed to be here. She wanted to ask how their half of the mission had gone, but everything was so shaken up now that all she really wanted to do was go in, arrest Talib, and get the crazy day over with.

Jaleel

“Uncle Talib?!” Jaleel shouted through the small portal that Kayla had created into his uncle’s apartment. “Are you in there?”

He tried to keep his voice steady in front of these strangers. Adam had vouched for them, in a fashion, but that had technically been a different version of them in a different timeline with an established relationship to and mutual respect for Adam. These people didn’t know them and didn’t really have any reason to trust them. The pretty Hispanic woman, in particular, seemed to have some degree of hostility toward them, and Jaleel didn’t want to appear weak and give her any more reason to feel negatively toward him.

There was no answer from inside the small apartment. No noise at all, in fact.

They were standing around the corner from the apartment’s front entrance, in a narrow alley between buildings.

“I think we’re clear to head in,” he said.

“Based on what, exactly?” asked Camilla. “The fact that the known terrorist didn’t answer when you called his name? How do we know he isn’t getting a bomb ready to blow us all to bits the second we walk in?”

“He wouldn’t do that,” said Jaleel, but he knew his voice didn’t sound as certain as he wanted it to. He wasn’t as certain as he wanted to be.

“By your own admission, you saw a future in which he first set off a bomb, and then executed a superpower-based attack on Grand Central. I don’t think you can possibly know what he would or wouldn’t do, kid.” The woman’s look was somehow simultaneously smug and grim.

“Sorry,” she added, probably reading the pained look on his face. It didn’t help.

“Kayla, do a quick sweep. Portals into every room, no longer than ten seconds each.” The detective, Ricky, spoke with such a calm and controlled and confident voice that it seemed impossible for him not to be in charge of a situation. A natural leader, Jaleel thought, wondering if anyone on his own team could come close to matching that level of authoritative charisma. Harper, maybe? Christine? Certainly not Adam.

Kayla opened portal after portal, each looking down into rooms from corners by the ceiling. The only kid on their team, Felipe, looked into each one with an intense expression on his face.

“What’s he doing?” Jaleel said, nudging Adam to draw his attention to it.

“If I remember correctly,” Adam said, in a tone that Jaleel knew meant he was drawing on memories of another timeline that he didn’t yet fully trust or believe, “he can bend light. So if I had to guess, he’s looking through each room in more detail than anyone else can?”

“Do you see anything, Felipe?” Jaleel asked the boy.

“I’m afraid— Wait, yes.” His face fell and he looked at Jaleel but didn’t meet his eyes. “We’d better get in there.”

“Kayla, big doorway now, please,” said Ricky.

She held out her hands, pointing them at the corners of the small portal that Felipe was currently looking through, and spread her hands apart, as if she were tugging at the edges of a tear in a piece of paper and stretching it out. The shimmering distortion in space grew to the size of a regular doorway, and she looked ready to step through, but Ricky held a hand out to stop her.

“I’ll go in first,” he said. “Jaleel should come with me. The rest of you, wait out here until we say so.”

Jaleel’s heart was pounding in his chest, and he didn’t want to step through the portal at all. But he already knew what he’d find.

Ricky stepped through and he followed close on his heels. He looked around the room, finally letting his eyes fall on the corner where Ricky had been staring from the start. He clasped a hand over his mouth to hold in his scream.

“Ya Allah,” he muttered when he could breathe again. He fell to his knees. “Oh, uncle. Oh, God.”

Ricky placed a hand on his shoulder as he wept.

“It’s alright, son. Let it out.”

Against the wall before them, his uncle Talib stood; or rather, he was suspended upright, giving him the appearance of standing. His body was held in place by dozens of railroad spikes that were driven through him, and blood was splattered everywhere on the walls and floor around him. His body was positioned with arms out to the side and chin resting on chest, and although Jaleel had never set foot in a church, he was familiar enough with Christian iconography to recognize the similarity to Jesus Christ on the cross. Does that mean something? he wondered. Or is it just a coincidence?

He tried to put voice to the thought, but all that came out was a pained sort of moaning.

“Jesus Christ,” said Adam, stepping through the portal and rushing to his side. “This isn’t how it was supposed to happen. What the fuck happened?”

Jaleel still couldn’t speak, but he could do one thing; he could access his power. He pushed his mind off the cliff of the present and cast his senses into the future, to the moment when he’d first seen the news report of the attack. He was seated in front of the T.V., just as he had been before, but the top story was about the stock market, and the suspicion by economists that powered people were interfering with it.

“It’s changed …”

“What’s that, man?” said Adam, leveling a look of concern and pity on him.

“It’s changed, but we didn’t do anything. How can it have changed?”

“That other motherfucker,” said Camilla.

“What other motherfucker?” asked Felipe.

“Watch your mouth,” said Kayla, looking annoyed at the woman detective, then at the Brazilian kid.

“The guy who accosted Ricky and me. He said he was from the future. He did this.”

“I don’t think we can jump to that conclusion,” said Kayla.

“I think we can, actually,” said Ricky, picking up a sheet of paper that was lying at the feet of Jaleel’s uncle. He turned it around so they could all see it. The message scrawled on it in blood was brief: ‘Beat ya here, former friends. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again. Love, Adversary.’

Adam

“Jaleel, man, you don’t need to see this. Come outside with me.” Harper, of all of them, was reacting to the scene the least. She kept her tone level, calm, confident. Adam was impressed. He wished he could do that.

“She’s right, Jaleel,” he said, hoping that by hopping on Harper’s suggestion, he would maintain some semblance of control over the situation. It wasn’t that he wanted to be the team leader, not really, but that he remembered that he had been, last time. The more he let things change, the more they spiraled into something unrecognizable. Then again, the future he remembered hadn’t ended all that well, so maybe shuffling the deck wasn’t such a bad idea.

Jaleel didn’t budge, only glared back at his two friends with a look that told them he wasn’t going anywhere until they figured some things out.

“Did you catch anything from that guy’s mind?” he asked Adam.

“We got here right as he was fleeing; I only got a chance to look at the very top layer of his thoughts, but they were … They were fucking jumbled, like he had no idea who he was. Or … or like he was a bunch of people, all layered on top of one another.”

“That makes sense,” supplied Ricky. Adam looked at him curiously.

“Does it?” he asked.

“I suspect if he’s from the future, like you, apparently, then he was probably sent back in time for the same reason you were. You mentioned something about the apocalypse on the phone?”

“Sure, yeah,” said Adam, dumbfounded. He kept trying to use his power on Ricky, but, like the man who’d fled as soon as they’d shown up, his mind was difficult to parse. His thoughts felt less like the monologue of a single person, a train of thought moving from station to station, and more like a dialogue, a package being sent back and forth between the mind of the man whose brain he was looking in, and something else … something distant. Information pinged back and forth so quickly that Adam scarcely had time to examine it before the next bit took its place.

“Except I suspect that he was sent back more than one time. He said some things about being our teammate, our friend. But I got the orb first—at least, I thought I did—and it was my job to find the others to give its charges to, and I’ve never met that man before in my life. Why would I give a power to him, if I don’t even know him, unless …”

“Unless you did know him, in another timeline,” Adam finished the thought. “Why do you suspect he was sent back more than once, though?”

“You said it felt like more than one mind, layered on top of each other? I think that’s exactly what it was. Like a bunch of personalities, memories, ideas, plans, all shoved into one brain. A cycle of trying to prevent something, failing, and trying again. I think it broke him. I think he decided not to even try last time. And so you ended up at the end of things, and you came back instead.”

Adam had to admit that there was a logic in that. A strange, twisted, confusing logic, but a logic nonetheless. He was catching more and more from the detective’s mind, and he was starting to work out the quirks of it. The odd dialogue-like nature of his thoughts was due to his power; his mind was in constant communion with something other. Maybe all people with powers had that going on, to greater or lesser degrees.

“And now he’s what? Going around trying to kill us? Trying to kill the people we’re after?” Camilla looked around at all of them, as if expecting one of them to be able to answer for this man they hadn’t known had existed until less than an hour ago. “Because, and don’t get me wrong here, kid—” she looked at Jaleel with something approaching pity “—but if you ask me, he kind of did us a favor here. Not that we were going to kill this guy, but we were definitely going to stop him. On the other hand, he also tried to kill us on our way in, so …”

No one spoke. A few heads turned toward Ricky, a few toward Adam.

Finally, Harper spoke up. “I think maybe he’s just had enough? Like maybe he’s sick of it all and he’s just trying to throw a wrench into things? Maybe he thinks you guys wronged him somehow in one or more past lives and he’s out for revenge? Feeling betrayed by your friends sucks … But maybe he also just, you know, loves chaos?”

It was a lot of maybes, but Adam thought she might have been on the right track with at least some of them.

Jaleel hadn’t reacted to Camilla’s assertion that Adversary had done them a favor, but he hadn’t taken his eyes from her face since, and Adam could feel something like hatred radiating off his mind like heat from a fevered man’s skin.

“So where do we go from here? I’m assuming you two have to call this in?” Adam gave the two detectives a pointed look. “But it seems like our reason for working together has come to an end, so I suppose we’ll get back to Texas.”

“No the fuck we won’t,” said Jaleel, wheeling on him. “Not while the motherfucker who killed my uncle is still at large.”

“Jaleel … we’re kind of out of our depth here, don’t you think?”

“I agree with Jaleel,” said Harper. Of course you do, thought Adam. He could see, even without telepathy, how Harper looked at Jaleel lately. He knew she was setting herself up for a broken heart, but he couldn’t have told her that without explaining why, and that would involve revealing something about Jaleel that he didn’t want revealed, something Adam shouldn’t even have known about.

“We’ve got five days until Christine, Lincoln, and I have to be back at college. Not long after that you guys go back to school. I’m assuming our new friends here have things going on in their lives, too. Felipe here looks to be high school aged, for instance. And the two detectives can’t dedicate all their time to helping us without arousing suspicion at their jobs—”

“Actually, we’re good to help,” said Camilla, surprising Adam. After her callous remark about Jaleel’s uncle, he’d thought she considered the situation over. “He might have done us one favor, but he’s still a criminal. We track those down and arrest them. It’s like our whole thing.”

“Okay, well the rest of what I said is valid.”

“Sure, you have a time limit. We get that,” said Felipe.

“I guess it just means that we have less than a week to catch this guy.”

“By the way, there’s nothing stopping you from coming and going from Texas,” said Kayla. “The first time I made a portal that far away, I wasn’t certain I could. But now that I’ve done it once? Easy peasy.”

Adam could see the tide of the conversation turning against him. He had a moment to wonder if he should continue arguing his point, a moment to wonder if he should withdraw his support and leave them to it. Then he remembered Pitch, remembered how good it had felt to show up in time to help, instead of after the damage was done.

He tried to tell himself he was being reasonable, but he had a nagging feeling in the back of his mind, a mental itch that seemed to be urging him toward conflict. Would I be doing this if not for that feeling? he wondered. It was impossible to know, impossible to know even whether that feeling was a part of him, or something darker.

All he could do was trust his gut.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess we’re working together on this thing.”