Strangers among us

He tapped off the alarm and took the phone apart, then ran the pieces under the tap and left them in the sink. With the blackout curtains opened, the house revealed itself in descending memory.

Two-story late aughts construction. White noise carpet and off grey walls. The upstairs like a single space, with rooms that gave easily to doorways. From the bed, he could see clear across the hall into the office, where window blinds glowed overcast grey. Mortgage signed three years ago. Lately, a steady stream of offers by pickup truck investors with warehouses full of new kitchen tile and adhesive backsplashes, all ignored or laughed at or cussed out. Home. A piece of a distant, fragmented childhood recycled into the afterlife. That he loved it made the abandoning of it more powerful, a more fitting sacrifice towards the birth of a Spirit.

He got dressed in dark clothes with lots of pockets, very unlike the suits and athletic wear and Dallas nightclub douche attire that made up the rest of the wardrobe. They stuck out like something willed into being. He felt electrified putting them on, and leaving the rest behind.

It had been a rough awakening. Dropping into a specific Hardworld was more complicated than the free-form priming he had done in training, and he found many of his abilities hazy or out of practice. This self owned an assault rifle, a pistol, and a Mossberg pump for home defense, but hadn’t been to the range or done any force on force in months. The market had just been too crazy.

This Gradie had made a small fortune trading cryptocurrencies with ridiculous names, a skill developed during a period of righteous solitude, and which had allowed him to live the kind of life Gradie dreamed about in the Real. The memories pulled on him as he walked through the house. The trips, the girls, the messages from high school acquaintances looking for advice or something else. His upcoming two week Maldives vacation, the plane boarding in an hour, primed to prevent any contact from his few friends and long ignored family during the job. He stuffed the shredded tickets under the trash and thought of aqua beaches and how long it had been since he had called his sister.

The SUV honked outside, and the memories lost their power. His spirit jumped up at the sound, eager to charge out into whatever waited in this new world. Being in a Hardworld on a job was nothing like dropping in for training. It was like the whole world was open to him. Like his real life was about to begin. He sped out the door in a way that stirred up hazy memories of flying through an impossible city at impossible speeds.

Outside, a soft morning was breaking on a suburban street that could have been anywhere in the state. The sky hummed a weak blue between fragmenting clouds, and a silver-grey brilliance smoldered just over the roofs across the street, either an invading overcast or the last remnants of the retreating storm. Dog barks and kid’s shouts zipped through the cool air like bullets let out blindly. House faces held pieces of last night’s shadows in their grouts and under their gutters. Hedge bushes and fruitless trees only ten years free of their metal stakes sang in sunlight tones from wet leaves on their heads, while their undersides grumbled in sleepy darkness.

The horn honked again, and Gradie thought he saw the sun jump two inches up the sky as the sound rattled his joints.

The SUV was all black with silver trim, like one of its parents had been a hearse, and parked in the driveway at an angle, unable to fit otherwise, with the driver’s window facing him. The window rolled down with a billow of smoke like a magician was going to pop out of it. Sam let her cigarette tipped hand hang down while the last of the smoke slithered out the side of her face.

“What are you wearing!”

He was wearing a black trench coat over black pants and a dark navy oxford. The twins had told him to dress for rain, because it created a natural liminal moment that made using a fragment easier for some Hardworlders. Now, Gradie thought they might have been fucking with him. No one else had ever said anything about Hardworlders being able to affect the weather, though there had been a rainstorm the night before the office—

“You look like a flasher!” she laughed and shook her head, drawing lines of smoke in front of her face.

Unable to think of a good enough comeback about her mechanic coveralls, he smiled as if she was only mildly annoying and walked around to the passenger door. It didn’t open. He stood there looking at his reflection for a bit before the window rolled down.

“Why did you wear that? You’re gonna blow our cover!” She looked up at him with those grey-blue eyes, the same color as the departing storm, and he realized it was too hot for the fucking jacket.

“It’s supposed to rain,” he said.

“So wear a poncho or something!” She smiled like he was telling a joke just standing there, and he felt his cheeks warm.

“This is what I’m wearing. You gonna open the door?” He was suddenly terrified his daydreams of trench coat shootouts would spill out of his eyes, so he made them hard. She looked away and put out her cigarette.

“The center doors unlocked.”

“All right.” He was fine with not sitting near her, if that’s what she wanted.

He pulled himself in and slammed the door.

“So what, do you have a chauffeur fetish or something?” he said into the awkward silence.

“What?”

Gradie started to repeat himself and she gunned the gas. He realized as he was flying into the center console that he should have buckled in before trash talking the driver. The SUV slammed into the garage door and Gradie ended up with his face an inch above the cupholder ashtray and Sam’s latte. His knee burned from the impact with the ac vent in the console.

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“That’s why you wear a seatbelt,” Sam said softly. He heard her throw it in reverse. The garage door groaned and the tires yelled as they shot backward. Gradie guessed her next move and grabbed onto the passenger seat just before she slammed the brakes again.

“Oops. There’s some play in the breaks,” she said. Gradie reached forward and pulled the lever to drop the passenger seat back and climbed into the front.

“Hey! No! Bad!” Sam slapped the top of his head as he got into the seat. He reached up and caught her wrist. She made a face like a statue and moved her other hand onto her lap, where a pistol waited under her thigh.

“Let go.”

She pointed the gun at his gut. Gradie winced.

“Are you fucking crazy?! You never point—”

“I know. Let go.”

He did but kept his eyes on her. A honk from the street made them both jump. A mom in a coupe was waving out the window behind them.

“Look, if you don’t like that I’m on the team—”

“Oh my god, I don’t care.”

“Then why do you care if I sit—"

“Because Luke is sitting up front.”

“I got here first.” It sounded juvenile the moment he said it, so he looked off down the street, hoping the words had broken apart on the way to Sam’s ears. They hadn’t.

“That’s nice. He’s sitting up front because if someone shoots at us, he can drop five of them before they finish aiming. Can you do that?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, maybe babies get in the back.”

“All right, Chives.” Gradie started to open the door and saw Sam speeding away, leaving him on the road. He looked back at her and made a face like his hate was becoming too much for him. While she was raising her gun and looking him in the eye, he grabbed her latte and got out.

“What the fuck?!”

He pulled on the middle door and found it locked. Sam groaned and the lock chunked in the door. He got back in and tried to hand her the cup.

“Sorry, needed some collateral in case you—”

“You can keep it.”

He shrugged and took the stopper out. It smelled like peppermint.

The SUV lurched forward again and stopped suddenly. He slammed into the back of the passenger seat and the lid popped off the latte and spilled it down the front of his shirt.

“Shit!” He puffed his chest out to keep it from getting on his jacket. His hand was burning.

“Hole in your lip?” Sam asked.

Rather than say something that would get him shot, he opened the door with his clean hand and threw the cup on the road. He shook off his other hand and wiped it on his shirt, then carefully took off his jacket and tossed it on the seat. His hand was red and stung like hell. He swore at it.

“There’s a first aid kit under the seats.” Sam said, sounding just a bit sympathetic. Gradie shut the door and put his seat belt on with his burnt hand. The pain shouted at every movement. He sat there and stared at his hand while Sam sighed and started driving.

“This isn’t my body. This isn’t my pain,” he thought to himself. When that didn’t work, he thought about how his hand had felt before the burn, and imagined opening doors and reloading without feeling anything. The pain lessened, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the endorphins. He thought about what it would be like to get shot in a Hardworld and swallowed.

“There’s aloe vera in the kit,” Sam said.

Gradie got the box out and put some on his hand. He noticed as he moved that his chest stung too, so he took his shirt off.

“You are a fucking mess,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Sorry I ruined your hitman aesthetic. Should we stop and get you some actual clothes?”

Gradie looked out the window. Wood-paneled apartment buildings and water-stained corner stores ringed by the husks of old gas pumps zipped by. He got an idea.

“Turn right up here.”

“Why?”

“I need a shirt.”

Sam looked at him in the rear-view mirror but didn’t say anything. He reached back in his memory, suppressing the fear it wouldn’t work this time, and planted a subtle image, a sedan he had seen a million times driving to work, but kept the form vague. That was the paradox of pushing on a Hardworld. Pushing just enough to tell them what you want, but not so much they refuse to give it to you.

He saw it.

“Here, that green Geo.”

She pulled up next to it and he got out. The car had something stacked in the backseat half blocking the rear window, and he already knew it was laundry. He felt goosebumps roll over him.

“I’m actually doing this,” he thought. It had been so long since his win at the office, he had almost forgot, even without the sensation that it had happened to someone else.

He opened the back door and got in the seat with his legs hanging over the street. In one of the stacks, he found a heather grey shirt. Medium, mens. He pulled it on and closed the door.

Back in the SUV, he put his coat back on. Sam was watching him in the rear view again.

“What?”

“So you just knew some dude left his laundry there?” She sounded jealous, or maybe just doubtful. He thought about saying something like ‘it’s easy’ but nodded silently instead. He could see in her eyes that she really wished she could do it. Strange. She could make herself an expert driver, or a master mechanic, but couldn’t make a t-shirt appear in an old car. The self he had dropped into would probably have trouble changing a tire.

As he watched the apartment complex slide away, he took one last look at the sedan, and a stream of memories poured out at him.

He really had seen it a thousand times. He had even seen the owner open the doors without a fob. As far as his memory was concerned, nothing unusual had happened. Something about it made him uneasy, and he reached out for something beyond the Self. It was like resisting the urge to touch a wound for so long that you eventually do it with gusto.

His new memories flared up at him when he tried to remember the Real, and it seemed at the other end of a long hallway, dim and faint. The hallway was made of the Otherworld, and felt just as much like dream as the real did, so that he had to put effort into categorizing his memories.

“Oh, here.” Sam threw something back at him. It bounced off his chest and rolled into his lap. A small plastic case. He opened it up and pressed the earbuds in place one at a time, waiting for the chime that told him the seal was set. Something about the sound afterward was different.

“I think these are glitching.”

“Nope. New hardware. Zoey and the boys worked their magic and now they amplify natural hearing. And they don’t go all quiet during gunshots.”

Gradie noticed there wasn’t an echo of Sam’s voice either, another upgrade since the last time he had worn them in training, when they had mainly served as a convenient way for Philip to berate him.

Now, driving down the highway on a mission, the earbuds directly connecting him with the rest of them, he felt like he was part of the team. His heartbeat quickened and he smiled out the window.

They exited suddenly and pulled off the access road into the drive-through line at Starbucks. It was packed.

“Johnny! I’m making a stop! Are you up yet?” Sam whispered a melody and her voice was in stereo around Gradie’s head. He looked at his knees and focused on not getting red in the face. There was no answer in the earbuds.

“You owe me a coffee.” Sam motioned with her hand, and he took his card out, then thought about it.

“Don’t you guys have millions in your account?”

“Them’s my millions.”

He handed it to her and leaned back in the seat, trying to reclaim that feeling of rushing excitement and being a part of something strange and mysterious, but all he could think about was the sound of her voice in his ears.