Let us go and make our visit

Gradie had been watching the powerlines go by for an hour when they pulled off the access road and slowed into a turn.

“This is it,” Michael said from the driver’s seat.

They turned down a dusty street, with low brick walls along the sidewalks, into an unfinished subdivision. Off to the side, a portable office trailer sagged in a sand lot and Texas thistle bowed in bright purple bursts all around it. There were half-built houses scattered across the dirt lots and not a car in sight.

“Which one?” Gradie asked.

“Which one what?” said EP.

“Which one is the clubhouse?”

“All of it is the Clubhouse. It’s our home in the hardworlds.”

“Why? Wouldn’t you want like a bunker or something?”

Michael laughed.

“That wouldn’t really fit with the work we do.”

They passed an empty lot marked off by a rebar and tarp divider, a house with stickers still on the windows and a sold sign on the curb, a golden wooden frame roasting in the sun, houses with faces of brick and faux stone and bare drywall and tacky little screwed in shutters, leaning porta potties, pressed wood boxes with numbers spray painted on the sides, fill rock heaps, fruitless saplings with rebar supports, checkerboards of dead drying grass, and an empty pool complete with waterslides.

His warm euphoric weekend feeling dissolved, and something else floated out of the air. It flowed under his skin, rolled out with his breath, slid up his spine and spread behind his throat. A feeling between excitement and panic, severing him from himself, like he had popped into existence the moment they entered the neighborhood. That feeling, of being stuck on the edge of something, out of reach of everything else, got stronger as the street rushed beneath him.

Michael, as usual, seemed to have a sixth sense.

“Feels strange, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.” He struggled to put the feeling into words.

“It’s a fragment,” Michael said.

“Like the hotel room?” It felt wrong to mention out loud what he still partly believed were his dreams, but it was even stranger to have someone else understand.

“Yes and no,” Michael said. “A fragment can mean just a part of the Otherworld created to look like the Real, but this is more specific. In this case, fragments are places we drop out of the Otherworld and sink into the Hardworlds.

“What?”

“The Otherworld is liquid, malleable. When we make something there, a portion of it solidifies. If we make something realistic enough, something that conforms to the rules of the Real, it becomes too dense to exist in the Otherworld and drops out. Like a stone formed in the center of a pond.”

Gradie’s focus drifted away from Michael’s voice. Outside, the horizon hid behind a brick subdivision wall and house faces squared off at odd angles under a blazing blue sky. Bright clouds hovered frozen in place and gave neither depth nor motion to the world below. Everything floated alone.

“Feels…separated,” Gradie said.

A Fragment. The name fit like a glove. He felt fragmented from the rest of the world. He liked the feeling.

“We call it floating,” EP said. “You feel it in a fragment because they’re liminal spaces.”

“A what?”

“An in between place, like an empty parking lot, a hotel hallway, or a dead mall. Places that seem cut off from everything else, but also familiar.”

Gradie’s mouth hung open as he matched the feeling with places from his memory. His thoughts drifted towards the mall, but Michael interrupted him.

“It’s easier, psychologically, to drop a liminal space into a Hardworld. The mind can conceptualize that there’s a wider world beyond it, without knowing exactly what.”

Gradie had gotten used to only one out of any three words Michael said to him making any sense, but somehow, he understood exactly what Michael meant. Portals to other worlds. What else could they be?

Michael parked in the center of a T intersection facing a massive three-story house. For its size, it wasn’t made of any better materials or style than the rest of them. It looked like four or five of the other houses fused together.

“They’re pulling in,” EP said.

Down the sand-blown street, a large black SUV barreled over trash and kicked up dust like a Humvee in war footage. Michael opened the door and looked back at Gradie.

“Time to meet the team.” He got out and the car rocked. EP followed him and Gradie sat there a moment, pinned to the seat by the thought of meeting new, and in this case probably deadly, people. Reminding himself that this was another universe where his job would be shooting people, he got out and stood next to the car in a pose he hoped conveyed some kind of confidence.

The SUV stopped smoothly on the dirt and dried sod front lawn, and the driver’s door opened before it stopped rocking. The driver got out, and Gradie’s nervousness gave way to curiosity, and something else.

She shook the last drops out of a paper coffee cup and dropped it to the ground. A sudden wind sent it skipping across the dirt and pressed her coverall against her body. For a moment, her swelling curves were silhouetted against the black mirror side of the SUV.

She locked eyes with Gradie as a gentler breeze threw her short, thick, bright red hair into a dance on top of her round head. Her eyes were a blue grey that made him think of bursting rain clouds lit up by the sun. Pale skin, freckles, perfect round face. She was the cutest thing he had seen in a long time.

She made a face he couldn’t decipher and broke eye contact, saying something muffled by the wind to a man stepping out of the center seat. Beer bottles tumbled out the door and clinked at his feet.

He was slim built and just over six feet, with a diamond face and aquiline features. His black eyes scanned everything with calm confident indifference. He nodded at whatever the girl had said and gave Gradie a quick nod before looking around at the half-built neighborhood like there could be snipers anywhere, but he wouldn’t be too concerned if he saw any.

Stolen story; please report.

“Morning,” Michael called to them. “Luke, I’m gonna need your speech unslurred today.”

Luke looked down at the bottles then back up with a smile.

“Oh, it’s more of a hair of the dog situation, man.” He spoke with a cadence halfway between smooth and slurred, and the words glided out so easily you worried about them dropping out of place on the way.

Another man came around the passenger side, shaking his head. He was about average height judging from the SUV, but his squat features made him seem much shorter. Predatory brown eyes looked Gradie over then shot off to find some other prey. Cigar smoke flowed off of him and the cherry made a figure eight as he walked, wrestler like, across the dirt.

“Where’s our two super models?” he said.

“Shut the fuck up,” the girl laughed. He smiled without looking at her and drew off the cigar.

“Celeste is en route,” said EP, tapping on her phone.

“Getting outta bed right… about…” Luke said, looking at his watch and holding one finger in the air.

“—and Lindsey is—” EP was cut short by the demonic roar of a motorcycle flying into the neighborhood, engine roar funneled by the two stone walls at the entrance.

“She wearing one of those latex biker suits?” Luke asked hopefully. The girl punched him in the kidney, and he buckled and dropped his half lit cigarette.

“Shit!”

“We’re gonna put you in one of those, you don’t shut up,” she said. The cigar smoking man laughed.

“Gradie,” Michael said loudly, pointing. “This is Luke, our lead operator, Philip our weapons and supply specialist, and Sam our driver.”

“Sup.” Luke shook his hand while digging the cigarette out of the dirt. Philip’s handshake felt like an attempt to break knuckles, and his eyes searched Gradie’s for something in the half a second they were fixed on him.

Sam shook his hand plainly and froze. A heartbeat of grey blue stare, flickering like a car fire, then fluttering lips and words that landed before their meaning.

“You smell like burnt gasoline.”

“Oh yea, I torched my car.” His voice came out just louder than the wind.

“Oh.” Or it might have been just an exhale. She put her hands in her pockets and glanced out at the houses behind him.

“Sam was our newest member until a few hours ago,” Michael said.

“So, what do you do?” Her eyes flicked back to him, and he noticed a ring of another color in the center.

“Uh,”

“That remains to be seen,” Michael said. “We’ll have to see what he takes to.”

Philip made a face like he had something to say about that, but a black Hayabusa growled into the driveway before he could.

She was not wearing a latex suit, but a black leather padded jacket, dark blue jeans, and worn in black boots. The helmet came off and a bun of sandy blonde hair caught the sun, whisps of gold stretching in the wind. Barely-there eyebrows, freckled heart-shaped face, and green eyes glaring like she was already sick of it.

Hazily, Gradie recognized her. She was the woman he had seen walking across the lot in that other dreamlike world, who had shot the cop inside the gas station. The one he had kissed and taken a beating from. The memories were soft while the woman on the bike was solid and real.

“That’s a sick bike Lindsey,” Sam said. Lindsey smiled, showing a kindness Gradie had trouble matching with the memories of headshots and a warning to Michael; Don’t buy it.

“I’m gonna get one of those, and yall are gonna half to squeeze into a sidecar,” Sam said.

“You’ll be driving the bus you try that shit,” said Philip.

“Welcome to the team.” Lindsey was suddenly in front of Gradie. He shook her hand. If she remembered or cared about their first meeting, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell anything. She had a wall about her as well-built as Lucy’s. She walked to the front of the house and everyone followed.

“Waiting on princess, yet again,” Philip said.

“She has a name,” said Lindsey.

There was a raspy meow from the bushes and a stocky brown tabby nuzzled its head on Sam’s calf.

“Aw, Bojo!” Sam picked him up like a baby and he purred loudly and rubbed his head on her chin. Gradie wondered about infinite copies of cats, and whether they would remember the other versions of you, but his head had been spun out so much on the ride over that he tried to focus on nearer things, like Lindsey’s ass or the soft sound of EPs voice as she spoke to someone on the phone.

“Celeste is pulling up.”

“Whatever the fuck that means,” Philip said. Lindsey opened the front door without so much as turning the knob and Gradie followed them inside.

The entryway, with a four screened camera feed on the wall and an assault rifle slung from a hook in the corner, led to a high-ceilinged hallway lined with three closed doors and a stairwell. The gentle cool stillness felt like arriving somewhere long awaited after the dusty windiness outside, and when he stepped into the living area at the end of the hall, the strange feeling of being stuck between things fell away like a fever braking.

“Home sweet home,” Sam sung, dropping Bojo on the middle tier of a massive cat tree that reached from the floor to the second-story loft railing.

It was like a house thrown together suddenly at the whims of a strange but driven person, without regard to cost or taste.

The walls were covered in large TVs and shelves, the shelves in books, guns, photos, blueprints or bare carpet coated in cat fur. The furniture was miss-matched and well-worn, topped with blankets, cushions, and pillows. There were high-backed office chairs all around the table between the living room and the kitchen bar. Gradie smelled rich coffee and a distant grill. It was like a home that had been waiting for him all his life.

Michael moved around in the sunlit kitchen, full of pastel appliances and hanging stainless steel. The espresso machine started up and Sam watched it intently. The rest of the team found seats or poured drinks. Gradie stood around awkwardly for a bit, watching Bojo move from shelf to shelf across the wall, then sat down in one of the chairs at the table.

“So, what am I going to be doing today?” The chair rolled off towards the couch and he had to kick himself back into place.

“We’re going to give you an introduction to operating in a Hardworld,” Michael said. “And get you familiar with concepts you’ll need to understand when you’re on a job.”

“Oh.”

“You disappointed?” asked Lindsey, as she sat down at the bar.

“I thought we were going to do some training or something.” Lindsey took a cappuccino from Sam with an opened mouth smile of feigned surprise that Gradie would never have been able to imagine on her. Sam returned it with a wink. Michael yelled over the milk frother.

“Most training happens in the Otherworld where we can get you used to not failing. I brought you here because until you get into a Hardworld by yourself, we can’t really teach you anything.”

The doorbell rang.

“It’s open!” Sam yelled from the kitchen. The door slammed shut and someone jingled down the hall.

“Why is it always like a dust storm out there?” She blinked dust out her eyes, batting her long lashes and showing off her nails as she pulled on her lower lids. Her black eyes flicked across the room and found Gradie. A catlike smile made him stop breathing. She was a knockout. Her hourglass figure tested the limits of cutoffs and a crop top.

“Hi, I’m Celeste.” He was still sitting so she had to bend over to shake his hand. He got an eyeful.

“Gradie,” was all he got out, as a deep growl.

“Stand up when a lady enters the room,” Philip barked.

“Shut the fuck up!” Celeste laughed. She set her purse on a stool and bounced into the kitchen.

“Samantha! I need your coffee! The shit they serve out there is inhumane.” She hugged Sam from behind, wrapping her arms around her waist and nuzzling the top of her head.

“Stop,” said Sam, smiling shyly and turning red.

“What do you want, Gradie? Cappuccino, latte?” Michael said, tamping espresso.

“Uh, however.” Celeste still hadn’t let go of Sam and was now swaying her in a kind of dance.

“Sam special then,” she said to the top of her head.

Gradie forced himself to look away from the girls and saw a shotgun leaned against the wall. A nervous pang twisted his stomach. What if he couldn’t do whatever it was they did? What if he wasn’t cut out for it? He reached for the excitement he had felt watching his car burn, but it was like a mindless mania compared to the calm confidence of the team. He searched through his memories of the Otherworld, but got pinned once again by Lucy’s seeking stare.

Sam saved him from his reflections with a steaming cup of foam. He took a sip and the world dropped away.

“Holy shit.” It was the best coffee any version of him had ever had.

“She’s a witch.” Celeste bounced by with a latte cupped in both hands. She took a sip and winked at Gradie, but he had no idea why.

“I thought you would be a flat-white kinda guy,” Sam said bashfully as she sat down on the couch. A puffed lens of microfoam wobbled over the rim of her cat print mug but never spilled.

“All right, let’s get started,” said Michael.

Luke, Celeste, and Lindsey sat on a couch to his left. Michael took a seat between EP and Sam on another couch in front of him. Philip stood off in the corner near a slightly open window, blowing cigar smoke through the crack.

“Welcome to the team Gradie,” said Michael.

“The first thing I want you to do, is to tell me who you are.”