We don’t have to wait long.

Just long enough for Ochoa to hand me a protein bar since we didn’t make it to lunch and I haven’t eaten since yesterday. The thing tastes like cardboard but I’m so hungry it doesn’t matter.

“Nice gun,” I say around a mouthful, nodding at the rifle she’s got tucked behind her. She’s got it on a sling over her shoulder.

She smiles and brings it around to rest in her lap. She takes a bite of her own bar and points out a series of runes carved into the body of the rifle with one manicured finger. Then, she points to the safety.

I don’t know much about guns but I know “red you’re dead.” What I’m looking at here is a tiny lever with a thumb pad. Next to it is a little window that currently showing black. She flips it and the window turns red. She flips it farther and now it’s gold. Ochoa says, “Gold goes through pretty much anything. This gun? Worth about three of your motorhomes.”

I nod.

I glance back at her car. It looks like the surface of the moon, cratered with bullet holes, some of them quite large. I consider the hill she drove down, tire tracks carved into the side of it, winding into each other. The incline has to be, what, forty degrees at the top? Forty-five? Would I have driven down that?

I turn to Ochoa, meaning to thank her, but she’s getting up. Cops are zooming into the lot now. There’s a fricking helicopter overhead. I see other cruisers blasting past, chasing after the fleeing bikers, no doubt, though the Wild Specters have an unfortunate head start.

I’m pretty sure all the metal men are still here.

Ochoa walks toward the police, her rifle pointed up in the air in one hand, her badge in the other.

Akron’s police station is much larger than Willamette’s, of course. Akron's bigger. It’s busier too, which makes me nervous. The aethings are calmer here than back at Applebee’s, for instance, but they’re nowhere near as calm as it was at Sheriff Abernathy’s office.

I’ve noticed that I’m always monitoring them now, even when I’m not paying attention. I catch myself nudging chance over and over, keeping things just to the light side. I’m getting used to doing it. I shouldn’t be surprised. People can get used to pretty much anything. I suppose it’s a lot like walking outside in a field or something. You walk along and sometimes your foot hits a bump or finds a root or a hole and you might stumble but how often do you fall? No, you correct and adjust your balance. That’s what I do when there’s a dark flareup. I correct and adjust the balance.

Adam said he was a balancer. I don’t think he was talking about the same thing.

And the police are very curious about Adam. I go over the story over and over again. That leads to telling them the whole thing over and over again, from me leaving Nick at the bar to now, all five days.

This is the afternoon of my fifth day in this dimension. My God.

Whenever they leave me alone for more than five minutes, I nod off. The one thing I haven’t gotten used to yet is the aftereffects of adrenaline. I’m exhausted.

They’ve got me in an interrogation room where I’ve been assured that I’m not in any trouble. I’m not under arrest. I’m a hero, in fact. Nothing to worry about. I’m sure they’re right but Alex is on his way anyhow.

They’ve got the big mirror on the wall. Cameras in the corners. The little lights aren’t on but I doubt there’s any law that prevents them from being disabled. I try not to worry about it.

Ochoa shot a bunch of bad guys. Agent Tyler’s got her gun pending review. Technically, Ochoa’s on suspension which is why I’m surprised to see her come into the room alone.

She’s still got on her pale gray pantsuit with the shiny pink blouse. She’s had a rough day but she doesn’t look any worse for wear. For some reason, I remember that she kissed me this morning not long after finding me naked and cowering with my junk hidden from the Edelmans in the refrigerator.

“Hey, Mo!” I say in falsetto.

She smiles graciously like she’s never heard that before.

“I thought you were on suspension?”

“Yeah,” Ochoa sighs. “But they want me to do this.” She gestures at the room.

“Okay,” I say. “What’s that mean?”

Her smile morphs into a grin. She gives her gum a few last chews, saying nothing, before she swallows.

“That’s not supposed to be good for you,” I say.

“You’re loosening up,” says Ochoa. “Good for you. What can I say? I live dangerously.” She waggles her eyebrows.

“You’re on suspension but you’re still here,” I say. "To talk to me."

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry you had to do that.” Kill those men, I mean. I can't say it.

“Yeah, thanks.” She sighs. “Ben, there are things you aren’t saying. You might not be aware of it and it might not be much but we can all tell. Memory is weird. It edits itself. Changes things around sometimes. I’m here to help you remember.”

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I remember Tyler telling me that she’s never seen anybody better in an interrogation room than Monica Ochoa.

“I want to help,” I say.

“I know you do,” she says. Then she reaches up. And takes off her glasses.

I know how sometimes a person seems attractive in sunglasses or a face mask and then they ruin the illusion by removing them? I read somewhere or watched a documentary or something that says it’s our brain that does it to us. We see somebody a couple of blocks away and think, wow, she’s really cute. Then, the closer she gets, we have to revise our opinion the other way. Sometimes it even turns out to be a dude when you were hoping for a woman.

The point is that I thought Ochoa was attractive when she had her glasses on. I knew that might change if I ever got the chance to see her with them off. I knew I might be disappointed. That’s fair, right? Wouldn’t most people hope for cuter? Even if there was no way on Earth I would get with her or have a chance with her? No? Just me?

Ochoa’s face is symmetrical. High cheekbones. Delicate features. It’s her eyes. They’re large, round, soft, and contain way too much light. They’re kind. And somehow, don’t ask me to explain, they listen. They’re the eyes of someone who loves you. They make me want to cry.

I don’t think I can say a word to her right now. I can’t look at her.

I understand about the glasses now. Why she wears them. Very few cops could take eyes like that seriously.

“Ben,” she says. “When you pointed at Applebee’s, that was probably your luck finding Adam, wasn’t it?”

I nod.

“When we got to the restaurant, I went to the bathroom. Is that when you saw him?”

I nod.

“When the hostess took you back?”

I nod.

She takes my hand. Holds it.

I glance up at her. She’s smiling and her mouth looks like it normally does, yes, but it’s an entirely different experience now because of those eyes. I look back down.

Monica says, “He was surprised to see you?”

“Yes. He thought I should be dead.”

“Because of your curses.”

“Yes. He said he was excited to meet—. No, he said he never heard about anybody with a level four anything.”

“‘Fangirling,’ you called it.”

“Yeah. Maybe that’s sexist? But that’s easier than saying he had an almost inappropriate level of interest and excitement, right?”

“He wasn’t… aroused or anything, was he?”

“No!” I look at her face to see if she might be joking. She’s not. The FBI deals with all types, I guess. “No, I didn’t get that impression but, uh, I didn’t make a close inspection.”

She smirks. “I don’t think you would’ve even if you did swing that way, Ben,” she says. “He said his name was Adam?”

“No, he said to call him Adam. I think it was a polite way of letting me know that wasn’t his real name while acknowledging that I should have to call him something. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did that and his name really was Adam. He seems the type.”

“He admitted he was a practitioner?”

“Oh yes,” I say. “He said, ‘Oh yes,’ like he was really into it. Big time.”

“And he knew Lansky?”

“Well, he knew of her. Said the other man with her was a hired goon rather than her partner.”

“He admitted to killing them?”

“Yeah. Said he was saving you the trouble. He said you’d kill her for catching her in the act of something like that.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that but essentially he’s right. Some people are too dangerous to be contained or detained. The law recognizes that but we’re supposed to be real careful about it.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“I’ve never had to do it, but thanks.”

The shit in the parking lot was self-defense and protecting others. Adam was talking about state-sanctioned summary executions after a minimum of due process. Totally different.

“Then he talked about the Boulder police department?” asks Monica. “Boulder, Colorado?”

“He just said Boulder. Said a guy melted the place with everybody in it. That he killed the guy later in… Caracas? What’s that, Venezuela?”

Monica nods. “He didn’t give you a name. Date? Specific location?”

“No,” I say. “Wait. He said he shot him in the head.”

“That’s when you told him I was in the bathroom.”

I nod.

“He wanted to leave.”

“Yeah, but I told him I had questions.”

“That was all it took? To keep him from running?”

“Yeah. He seemed to sympathize. That, and he had some of his own. I don’t think I got around to telling him I work for you guys too, but I still think maybe he wanted to know what I knew.”

“Okay.”

“He asked how we found him. If the FBI was looking for him.”

“But that was as he was leaving, right? Before you got him to stay?”

“Oh, right. That’s right. Then he told me all that about sponsors. Did he have that right? About what they eat? About there being at least eight and maybe more? All named after letters in the Greek alphabet.”

Monica nods. “That’s the current theory, yes. You met the Epsilons today.”

“Epsilons?”

“The Knights of Epsilon,” Monica intones. “The people they send out aren’t practitioners. They make the weapons and armor their acolytes use in their missions. We had no idea they were in town.”

“He said the eight of them compete. Like, there’s different factions.”

Monica nods. “Factions he couldn’t allow to ever win, right? He called himself a balancer?”

I wince. “Not exactly. His words were, ‘I balance things.’ If he was part of a larger group he would’ve said, ‘We balance things,’ right?”

Monica shrugs. “Maybe. Not enough data yet.”

“Did I, uh, get the thing you needed yet?”

Monica says, “When he spoke about Lansky, he said something about the kidnappings.”

“Yeah, he said that she was selling off the people she took. He suspected it was for something he called a mass event. He said it wasn’t a trafficking thing.”

“A mass event. That’s all he said?”

“He said from all he’d found out it was going to be a mass event.”

“Thanks, Ben.”

“Sure.”

She started to get up, then stopped herself. “Oh, Ben! What was he wearing?”

“Huh? T-shirt? Windbreaker?”

Monica smiles. “Designs on the t-shirt?”

“Yeah. It was old. The lettering was fading off from too many washings.”

“Could they have been runes?”

“What?”

“Runes. He was there to trap somebody. Presumably to kill them. He'd be prepared. Were those runes on his shirt?”

“I don’t know runes.”

She stands and comes around the table and places her phone in front of me. On the screen is a rune. A wavy line on the left, a straight one on the right, some random dots and crossings. It looks like a styled hint at the letter A done by a drunkard. I’ve never seen it before. She scrolls and the next one does.

“That could’ve been on his shirt, yeah. Maybe. I couldn’t swear to it.”

She keeps scrolling. I identify three more possibles.

She sits down heavily.

“That was what you needed?”

She shrugs. “We knew there was something.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“The competing factions you were talking about?”

“Yeah?”

“They don’t share runes. Ever. Epsilon’s runes are Epsilon’s runes. They’re carefully guarded secrets, enforced by painful death.”

“Okay?”

She holds up her phone with the first rune I IDed on the screen. “This is an Epsilon rune,” says Monica. She scrolls to the next. “This is an Alpha. This one is an Eta. This is a Gamma.”

“Oh. Oh shit.”

“The windbreaker could’ve been covering more. For all I know they went all the way around his shirt.”

“Shit. Uh, what’s that mean?”

“I’ve no idea.”