When Bea opened the door to her backyard, I whistled softly. She hadn’t been kidding about the boxes. Stacks lined the dingy white fence on all sides, many of them rising above my head. They also filled most of the open space, leaving only a narrow path of much-trodden brown grass through the yard to an open gate. At the centre of the chaos, just visible from where the path began at the back door, stood a woman and a boy, heads bent over a map spread on top of one of the cardboard boxes.
At the sound of the door slamming they both jumped, and the boy shoved their map down the front of his oversized sweatshirt. That wasn’t suspicious at all.
“Peg, I brought you some help!” Bea called, bouncing down the steps ahead of me.
The woman in the yard spotted Bea and a smile broke across her face like a wave breaking on the beach. In three long strides she had crossed the yard and swept Bea up in her arms, twirling her around. I jumped off the steps and backed into the side of the house to avoid being hit by her swinging legs, but I couldn’t help smiling as I watched them. I’d thought Bea’s smile was bright before, but it was nothing compared to their joy in each other’s company.
My heart squeezed, a pinch of jealousy that caught me off guard. I gave myself a little shake. I wasn’t interested in having a fiancé, and supervillains had no need of friends. The thrill of jumping off rooftops and robbing banks was all I needed in my life. I would feel better once I had my mask back on, that was all.
“I thought you might have forgotten me out here,” Peg said, setting Bea down at last and giving her a kiss.
“I actually brought you someone to help with that,” Bea said, tilting her head in my direction.
Peg turned, her eyebrows snapping together at the sight of me. “Who’s this?”
Bea caught her by the elbow, drawing her away. “Let me explain. Delphi, if you’d just give us a sec?”
I nodded and sat down on the steps to wait. The boy immediately emerged from behind one of the stacks of boxes, darting over to my side. He was probably ten years old, and dressed in clothes made for someone closer to my size.
“Who’re you?” He asked, shoving his dirty face into mine. I recoiled, fighting the instinct to cover my bare face with my hands.
“I’m, um, Delphi.” If only Principal Sicarius was here now, he’d probably get a good laugh out of this. I’d fought so hard to leave Delphi behind and now here she was popping up again everywhere I turned.
“Cool. I’m Billy.” He scuffed the ground with his muddy grey sneakers and glanced over his shoulder at Peg and Bea, half-hidden behind the boxes. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Sure. I’m good at secrets,” I said lightly.
Billy leaned in even closer. “Aunt Peg made me promise not to say what’s in the boxes, but it’s just too cool – ”
“Billy!”
The boy leapt away from me as though I’d turned into a poisonous snake. I held in a sigh of frustration – Bea and Peg couldn’t have waited ten more seconds to finish talking? I should have known that was too easy though. If I wanted to know what they were up to with all these boxes, I would have to find out myself.
Bea disappeared back into the house and Peg came up to me, her mouth smiling but her eyes wary. “So, think you can help us?”
“Depends,” I replied, mimicking her abrupt way of speaking.
“On what?” She looked ready to stab me with something sharp and never worry about me again.
“On what you want me to do,” I said. “Are you just moving boxes? That’s what Bea said. I can help with that, no problem.”
“Yup,” Peg scratched her head. I got the impression she had been expecting me to either attack her or start ripping open the boxes.
“Alright, where to?” I propped my hands on my hips and looked around the yard at the towering stacks of boxes.
“What?” Peg asked, unable to keep up with this rapid change in the conversation.
“Where do you want me to move the boxes to?” I repeated patiently. “I’m guessing you don’t want them just shuffled around in this yard? There’s not exactly a lot of space back here.”
“Oh, yeah, right.” She tugged on her grey-blonde ponytail. “There’s a truck in the alley. Just load them in there until you run out of room. Then let me know and I’ll send the truck off. You can take a break between loads.”
“Ok, I’ll get right on that then, shall I?” I said, already moving to my right and grabbing two boxes from the top of a shorter stack. I almost dropped them on my toes, not ready for their weight. Two boxes might have been overkill.
A driver leaned against the truck in the back alley, smoking a cigarette, staring at the ground. I flashed him a friendly smile as I staggered past, but he didn’t even look up. I dropped the boxes in the back of the truck and jumped in as well. Time to find out what my potential minions were up to.
I placed a hand on the top box and nudged the flaps with my mind, convincing them to slide out of the way. The cardboard oozed apart, revealing a row of softly gleaming metal cylinders. I bit back a gasp. Explosives. We had practiced with these back at the Academy. They were a popular invention from the Rubes – practically impossible to detonate if you didn’t know what you were doing, and with an incredibly accurate range. They were mostly used for construction by companies lucky enough to be able to afford the astronomical taxes, but they also had great potential for supervillainy.
Bea and Peg were smugglers then, and ones with pretty good connections if they could get their hands on crates of these explosives. I couldn’t have picked a better group of minions. They were hired for sure – they just didn’t know it yet.
“Delphi!”
I spun around, heart pounding, and released my mental hold on the box. The cardboard snapped shut again just as Peg poked her head in the truck.
“What’re you doing in there?” She asked, craning her head to look around me and check the boxes.
“Just making sure they’re not going to slide around,” I said, hopping down from the back of the truck and flashing her an innocent smile.
“Hmph.” She raised an eyebrow at me, but said nothing else.
It took an hour to load the truck all the way, one box at a time. I shut the doors of the truck with a satisfying clang and gave the driver a double thumbs up. He glared at me and pitched his long-dead cigarette into the dirt, before walking into the backyard without a word. He came back a moment later with Peg trailing behind him. She gave me a hard stare and opened one of the doors a crack to check inside, then nodded to the driver.
Without speaking a word, the driver got into the truck and pulled away, leaving the two of us coughing in the cloud of dust and exhaust.
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“Well, you might as well sit down while you wait for him to come back,” Peg said at last.
“Thanks.” I followed her back into the yard and plopped down on the hard-packed dirt in the middle, freshly cleared of boxes. Dust rose in a cloud around me, and I made a face as it settled in a thin film over my jeans.
“Peg?” Bea’s voice came from inside the shop, slightly muffled, then the door creaked open and she appeared, holding a tray of sandwiches and three glasses of water. “Have you got those boxes moved yet?”
“We’re working on it!” Peg yelled back, a faint smile crossing her face. Beatrice wove her way through the depleted boxes, the water glasses on her tray sparkling like jewels in the dusty backyard.
“You aren’t having the poor girl do it all, are you?” She asked, eyeing me. I slumped down, doing everything I could to look as exhausted as possible. There was no harm in hamming it up once in a while, especially if it resulted in a ham sandwich.
Bea hurried over at once, shoving a sandwich and glass of water into my hands. “Of course they have, idiots! No sense of how to treat a girl properly. I should never have sent you back here to work for them!”
She set the plate of sandwiches beside me and turned to Peg, hands on her hips. As soon as her back was turned, Billy darted in and snagged a sandwich.
“We were busy!” Billy protested through a mouthful of sandwich. Peg’s face twitched, but she offered no comment.
“Too busy to help a poor girl lift all those heavy boxes?”
“That’s why she’s here, right? So we could do our stuff while she did the boring stuff. No offence,” Billy added as an afterthought in my general direction.
Bea shook her head and turned back to me.
“You’ll have to forgive them their manners. You just sit, eat, and relax, and we’ll let them get on with their big important things,” Bea pulled a nearby box over to where I was sitting and dropped down onto it with no care for her pretty, though well-worn, dress. No doubt a reject from her store.
“So, what brings you to the city then, Delphi?” Beatrice asked. She caught me right as I took a gulp of water and I choked, accidentally inhaling some of it. At least my coughing fit gave me a chance to think of a good answer. This didn’t seem like the time to tell her I was a supervillain looking to hire some minions. Although, come to think of it, was there ever a right time to tell someone that? We had learned about hiring and firing minions at the Academy, but I had honestly slept through most of that class.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” Bea watched me out of the corner of her eye. “I’m just curious. But I know every girl has her secrets, even me, and I’m not about to share mine with you.”
“I’m looking for a fresh start,” I said. It was the first thing that came into my head, and it was the truth, just not the whole truth. “I thought this would be a good place to do it.”
Bea shook her head. “I don’t know who told you that, but they pulled a fast one on you. This city is not a good place to start anything right now, especially for young girls without much money.”
I shrugged and flashed her a cheeky grin. “It’s worked out well so far, hasn’t it?”
“Only because you met me!” Beatrice said, grinning back. “I came from the same sort of thing myself, little girl alone in a big city, although I did have my husband. Still, neither of us knew anyone until we met Peg. She introduced us to some other people and after that things turned out alright. It’s hard on your own, but if you find someone to watch your back the city doesn’t seem so big and bad.”
“I’ll remember that.” It sounded like Bea would be open to letting me come back and help out some more, which would give me time to figure out how to approach the sensitive topic of supervillainy.
“You two about done gabbing over there?” The driver had returned, and was standing at the back gate of the yard. He was in the same position he had been in before, leaning against the fence with his arms crossed, looking at me and Bea with half-closed eyes.
“Give us a sec!” Bea yelled back. “Why don’t you get those two lazy bums to start?”
She gestured over at Billy and Peg, who were kneeling on the other side of the yard, quietly arguing over their papers again. I pretended to be completely absorbed with my sandwich when they looked up, guiltily folding the papers once more.
The driver shrugged and gestured to the two of them. To my surprise, they stood and grabbed a box each, following him out of the yard.
“You just have to know how to talk to people,” Bea confided to me. I looked at her with raised eyebrows, impressed. I relied on being a supervillain to make people obey my orders. Bea was at least four inches shorter than my 5’6” and looked about as intimidating as a marshmallow. Despite this, there was a gleam in her eye and the way that everyone around here jumped to obey her orders was nothing short of inspiring. All this, and she only looked to be maybe thirty years old, if that. To run a mysterious box transporting operation and a used clothing business must mean she had some serious talent.
I finished off my sandwich, took a gulp of water, and got to my feet.
“You don’t have to get going quite yet.” Bea said.
I shook my head. “I want to earn my keep around here, not just laze around eating food, as nice as that may be.”
Bea gave a little shrug, and rose as well, brushing dust off her dress. Quicker than I would have thought possible, she grabbed the sandwich tray and disappeared back into the house, whether to avoid manual labour or simply get back to minding the store it was hard to say.
It went much faster with Peg and Billy helping, which they continued to do even with Beatrice inside. The second truck took only half an hour to load, and the yard became much more visible. I figured that a third load would clear it completely, which was good, because the sun was beginning to set behind the tallest of the nearby buildings. As we waited for the truck to return I looked up at the sinking sun, and the millions of reflections of it on the glass panes of the skyscrapers.
Seeing the CN tower again, gleaming in the evening sunlight, an urge to climb it came over me so strongly it was all I could do to turn my back on the building and return to gathering boxes. The molecules of dirt in the ground danced around my feet, sensing my desire, and I glared at them until they dropped sullenly back to earth. So far supervillainy had been deadly dull. Moving boxes didn’t exactly compare to the thrill of standing on top of the city, the knowledge that your decisions could potentially influence millions of lives, and the joy of being safely hidden behind a mask.
The truck returned, putting a stop to my daydreams, and I once again joined Billy and Peg in filling it with all manner of not-at-all-suspicious-no-really boxes. That load emptied the yard as I had guessed, with some creative packing on our part.
Bea came out just seconds after the yard had been cleared of its cardboard maze. Convenient. She’d probably been watching from the window to make sure she wouldn’t accidentally get roped into helping out.
“Would you like to stay for dinner?” She asked me, with a look at the darkening sky. “Peg would be glad to walk you home afterward. It isn’t safe to be wandering the streets around here alone after dark.”
I pretended not to hear Peg’s muttered protest. “That would be great, thanks Bea.”
We all trooped into the house and gathered around a plain wooden table in the kitchen. I lowered myself carefully into a plastic lawn chair, sniffing at the warm air. The odour of oil and spices made my stomach rumble, a loud reminder that I had only eaten a single sandwich all day. Bea immediately handed me a bowl filled to the brim with stew.
“Eat up!” She grabbed another bowl for herself and dropped into the chair across from me with a contented sigh. “Around here, if you don’t dive right in, you won’t get anything. We don’t really worry about please and thank you.”
The atmosphere around the table was one of complete and utter oddity to me. Mealtimes at the Academy were usually dead quiet. Supervillains-in-training weren’t the most talkative lot, because that was a sure way to accidentally spill your secrets. The only exceptions were those who had already developed a healthy dose of crazy, and they spent most of their time giggling and talking to their food.
This meal was different. At first it seemed like utter chaos, with people shouting at each other to move their stupid arm and stop hogging all the stew, but it was all done in a friendly spirit. There was no physical harm done to anyone, just tongues stuck out or eyes rolled. Quiet moments were sprinkled throughout the meal as well, when everyone was content to just sit there chewing. It gave me a warm feeling I couldn’t attribute entirely to the stew.
After the stew pot was scraped clean, Bea ushered me out the door, saying it was already getting dark. I was sad to go, which was both surprising and a bit alarming. Was I so easily won over, that some friendly words and a warm meal would make me easily trust people I had just met that day? I resolved to regain my suspicion of strangers tomorrow. Tonight, however, I was too full of warm food to worry about any mistakes I had made.
Peg and Bea trailed behind me as I made my way back to my apartment, talking in low whispers. When we reached my apartment building, the two of them looked at it sceptically. I would be the first to admit the cracked windows and crumbling bricks did not present the most inspiring façade.
“Well, this is me,” I said cheerfully, waving and unlocking the front door before they could object to my choice of accommodation.
I didn’t fall asleep when I went back up to my room, but changed into one of my new pairs of black leggings, my red tutu and gloves, and black-and-red mask. The mask fit onto my face like an old friend, and a part of me that had been on edge all day relaxed at the feeling of having my face covered. Just being in the outfit rejuvenated me. Delphi might have worked a long day and be ready for bed, but for Death’s Dancer the night was only just beginning.