“If you’re going to be hanging around the shop, we’ve got to know if you’re working for us or against us,” Knife said as we sat in a private booth in the crowded shop, awaiting our pie. There were enough people around that our conversation could not be easily overheard, and there were enough witnesses that I didn’t think they would kill me right here.

“It all depends on you really,” I said, idly flipping through the menu again. I had ordered a slice of blueberry, but there were so many other tasty options that I was beginning to regret my decision. I would have to come back here again, if only to try the strawberry rhubarb. But that was only if I made it through this conversation successfully. I guiltily set the menu aside and returned my attention to my murderous companions. “What are you for or against?”

“As if we’d tell you that!” Knife looked offended at the very thought.

“But how can I tell you whether I’m with you or against you when you won’t tell me what either option means?” I countered, quite reasonably.

This set off a whispered argument between Bea and Knife. As they argued, our pie arrived at our table, each slice a piece of perfection that made my mouth water in anticipation. Mine was topped with whipped cream, and a drizzle of blueberry sauce in the shape of a heart.

Ignoring the continued argument, I quickly dug in to my pie, moaning with pleasure as warm blueberries burst on my mouth in an explosion of sweetness. I took another forkful and stuffed it in, again filling my mouth with the rich flavour of blueberries. My eyelids slid shut to better savour the sensation. Maybe closing my eyes against these three people was not the best idea, since two of them had recently tried to kill me, but I was feeling pretty safe in the store. Besides, the pie was truly delicious.

When I opened my eyes, three sets of identical confused expressions met mine. “What? I’ve never had pie before,” I said.

“You’ve never had pie,” Abe repeated. Although his voice did not change in inflection, and his expression showed no hint of alteration beneath the hair, I could sense his disbelief. He could hardly have been more surprised if I had told him I was a supervillain.

“Nope, my parents were pretty set against sweets of any kind,” I said, allowing a shadow of grief to pass over my face.

“Why did you run away?” Knife jumped in.

I gaped at him, as Bea whacked him across the face with a napkin.

“That is not the kind of thing you just up and ask a girl!”

“Sorry,” he muttered, stabbing his pie rebelliously and not looking sorry at all.

“No, it’s fine,” I said, wanting to alleviate any more arguments before the tension in our corner booth became so thick you could cut it with a knife and serve it next to the pie. “I got into some trouble that seemed way too big to handle, so I thought I should get a fresh start in the city. What I didn’t realize was that the trouble in the big city would be infinitely larger than anything my own small town could dream up.”

Shovelling more pie in my mouth, I looked up to find my companions sitting in silence, each one staring off into space. For the first time I wondered about their origins. Somehow my made-up story had struck a chord within each of them. I was pretty sure Bea had a similar story to the one I had just concocted, but I wouldn’t have thought it of the other two.

“Anyway, enough sad stories,” I said, jolting them all out of their reveries. “We were talking about business, and you were about to tell me exactly what kind of a business you have going on here.”

“I don’t think you’ve any right to be asking that,” Knife said, returning from his distant memories and quickly switching back to anger.

“Why ever not?” I asked, giving him my best innocent-little-girl smile. “After all, there’s nothing wrong with telling me about it, right? That is, as long as you aren’t doing something illegal. Besides, I’m sure that I’m going to find out anyway.”

I took in their stricken expressions and widened my eyes even more, if such a thing was possible. “You are doing something illegal? Is that what this is about? I mean, I suspected as much when you had me kidnapped and threatened to kill me, but I thought maybe you were just protecting Bea and getting a little bit carried away. I should go to the police!”

“That’s it,” Knife growled. “You’re dead.”

“No!” Bea grabbed his shoulder as he made to rise and lunge across the table, crowded restaurant and unfinished pie not withstanding. Perhaps I had not been quite as brilliant as I had thought when I assumed no one would kill me in a crowded pie restaurant.

“That does it! I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m going to the police,” I said, pushing my chair back from the table and getting to my feet. Then I looked back down at my half-finished slice of blueberry pie, the fork still full of delicious sugar and blueberries.

“That is, once I finish my pie,” I corrected myself, sitting down and shovelling another forkful into my mouth, pretending not to notice that Knife was halfway across the table trying to wrap his hands around my throat.

“Of course, if I did know what you were doing, then maybe I could be persuaded that there was nothing actually wrong with it, and therefore no reason for me to take this matter to the police,” I suggested, flicking my eyes up from where another forkful was hovering in front of my mouth.

They all looked at me, then Knife sank back into his chair. Bea released him when it became apparent that he was not going to murder me where I sat quite yet.

“Well, I don’t know if this is exactly the right place to discuss that,” Bea said, looking around at all the people. They busily chattered on, unconcerned with her discomfort.

“They’re all focused on their own thing,” I reassured her. “No one ever notices anything going on around them. They’re too caught up in their own mundane lives.”

I looked around the café with the benevolent smile of someone who can squish all those lives to pieces with a single thought. It would be so easy to make the forks everyone was using to eat the delicious pie leap up and wrap around their owners' throats, or flow into their noses and mouths and choke them to death.

I shook my head to remove such thoughts from my mind. I had to focus on what was going on right now, not on what I could do with my powers. I was not wearing a mask, and I had my false identity to protect, after all.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“If we tell you about our operation and you go running to the police, I will kill you. No matter how many witnesses are present,” Knife said, leaning across the table so that no one else would hear. Bea gave him a warning glance, but did not berate him. Obviously if I did betray their trust, I would receive no help from any of them, but would be immediately tossed out in the street to be picked up with the morning’s trash.

“I understand,” I said, leaning over in the same manner and speaking in an exaggerated whisper. I was doing my best to be the innocent country girl, but it kept slipping. I was still not entirely comfortable with hiding my true self. The day to day minutiae of suppressing my instinctive reactions and taking on a whole new persona was still taking some getting used to. Apparently this internal dilemma was confusing everyone around me as well, because they were uncertain whether to trust the tough girl who hit them over the head, the innocent little schoolgirl running away from mom and dad, or the girl who seemed completely willing to be an accomplice in a criminal enterprise. I would have to figure out which one I wanted to be, and soon.

They exchanged glances, and some unspoken words passed between the three of them. Or at least they passed between Bea and Knife. I didn’t think that Abe said anything in their silent conversation, because he rarely said anything in actual conversation either.

“Alright,” Bea said, once they had had a good long time to argue with each other using only their eyes and little nods or shakes of their heads. “We’ll tell you a little bit about what we are doing, but if you go to the police with this information or use it against us in any way, I swear I will strangle you with my bare hands.”

“Understood,” I said again, nodding with wide eyes.

“We have a business that takes goods from areas where people have a lot of them and transports them to where people need them,” Bea said. She was choosing her words carefully, clearly trying to make it sound not quite like what it was.

“You’re smuggling,” I said bluntly.

She glared at me and opened her mouth to refute the claim.

“Yes,” Abe interjected, causing both Bea and Knife to look at him in astonishment. He ignored them and returned to shovelling pie into his mouth, for all the world as though he hadn’t just admitted to being a criminal. His beard was full of pie crumbs and I watched as they hypnotically moved up and down every time he chewed.

Bea made a few squawking noises before throwing up her hands in defeat. “Okay, yes, we’re smuggling. But it’s for a good cause.”

I snorted, accidentally spraying pie crumbs across the table. Smuggling explosives for a good cause?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bea said, blushing. “And yes, we’re making money, but we’re also helping out other small business owners. You’d think with the big push for getting trains running to every remote community on the planet it would be easier to import anything you want. But those people at RUBE put crazy taxes on everything. We just avoid those taxes, so we can resell things at a more reasonable price.”

“So you’re like that Robin Hood guy, breaking the law simply to help out the poor and downtrodden?” I asked with an ironic smile.

“Something like that,” Bea said, twisting her face up in an imitation of a smile, at the same time as Knife said: “Not at all.”

They looked at each other for a long moment.

“I’m not going to sit here pretending we’re doing this out of the goodness of our hearts.” Knife tossed his fork onto the table with a clatter. “We’re smuggling because we want to get rich. That’s it. End of story.”

“But – ” Bea’s hands were clenched into fists, her knuckles turning white. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she leaped over the table and slugged Knife.

“No.” Knife cut her off. “I know you’re a goody two-shoes, but get real. We’re not doing this to help a bunch of other people. We’re the ones risking our necks. Sure it helps them too, but that’s just a side effect. It’s safer to spread things out than sell it all out of your clothing store.”

Bea glared at him. I wondered if she didn’t want to consider herself in a similar light to Robin Hood, just a little bit. Knife seemed cut out for this life, with his odd nickname and his frequent threats, whereas I would bet Bea had been roped into it, and would stick it out to the end because she was stubborn like that.

“I don’t care,” I said, waving a hand between them to break up their staring contest. My pie was finished now and I pushed the plate away, settling my hands on my stomach and leaning back in my chair with a contented sigh. “I wouldn’t mind getting rich myself.”

They looked at me. “Does that mean you’re in?” Abe asked, pausing in the middle of licking his plate clean.

“Wait a minute,” Knife said, cutting me off before I could respond. “We never said that you could even be a part of this. There isn’t enough to go around as it is. We don’t need another lazy bum hanging around waiting for scraps because we don’t want her to go to the police. I still think we should just kill you before you jeopardize our whole operation.”

“But I can help you,” I said, smiling, although the pie in my stomach had gone into sudden revolt. This was it, I had started down the path of revealing my identity and there was no turning back now.

Three identical skeptical looks greeted this remark.

“I know this person,” I said, leaning in close and gesturing for them to gather around. “They’re recruiting new people right now to join in their campaign of crime and they’re willing to pay very well. Just last week this person robbed a bank single-handedly and got away without the police ever knowing who did it.”

“If they’re as good as all that, how come we’ve never heard of them?” Knife asked.

“That’s the whole point. They’re so good no one has ever seen them at it,” I countered. “But this person is looking to expand their operation and make a real statement to the city. They’re going public soon, and it’ll be all over the news. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor.”

“Hold on, if you just got here a few days ago from out of town, how’d you manage to meet this criminal mastermind?” Knife stabbed his fork at me for emphasis.

“It’s a good question,” I said, nodding to him. “I met them in person the other day. It’s who I was running away from when I fell and hurt my hands a few days ago.”

I held up my still-bandaged hands as proof.

“I don’t know why she came after me in the first place, since I think it’s pretty obvious I don’t have much of value to steal.” I fiddled with my bandaged hands, trying to ignore the voice in my head screaming at me to back out now, before my secret got out. “I must have impressed her somehow though, because when she caught up with me she offered me a job. She didn’t seem like an ordinary crime boss either, I think she might be trying to make a name for herself as a supervillain.”

“A supervillain!?” Bea exclaimed, loud enough that nearby heads turned towards us, searching for the source of the disturbance.

“Shh! Not so loud!” I hissed, glancing around at the other patrons of the pie shop. Surely one of them would notice the supervillain in their midst if my minions-to-be kept shooting their mouths off.

“You’re the one who wanted to have this conversation in a public place,” Bea pointed out, although I was relieved to note that she kept her voice down to a normal conversational level this time.

“Only because I didn’t want your friend there to take a stab at killing me again,” I retorted, nodding towards Knife, who had finished off his pie and was eyeing Bea’s untouched plate hungrily.

Knife flushed, whether with embarrassment or anger I wasn’t sure. Either way, he made no effort to deny the accusation. “It sounds to me like you are making the whole thing up,” he shot back at me.

I glared at him. “She was wearing all black, with a black mask, and had on a red tutu and red gloves. That doesn’t seem like normal criminal getup to me: it’s much too flashy. She also called herself Death’s Dancer, and if that isn’t a supervillain name, I don’t know what is. But I agreed to help, mostly because she promised to kill me if I didn’t. My mission is to recruit people for her crime spree, and I thought you might be interested. After all, you do both enjoy threatening to kill people.”

I paused for a moment to let all of that sink in, then abruptly stood up. “If you’re interested, then go to the rooftop of your shop tonight at midnight and wait for Death’s Dancer to show up.”

Before they could protest, or ask any awkward questions, I walked briskly to the door and out into the street. As soon as I was out of sight, I bolted down the block and around the corner, where I leaned against a wall, breathing deeply to slow my pounding heart. It had been a huge risk talking to them, one I had not even realized I was going to take until I began speaking.

All I could do now was wait and see, and hope that this gang of part-time smugglers were trustworthy.