“I’ve gotta go, this is ridiculous,” Felipe said. He paused for a moment, then added, “thanks for the superpowers, I guess.”
He started heading toward the exit.
“Simon actually cares about you,” said detective Gonzalez. Felipe stopped dead in his tracks. He didn’t reply, but his silence seemed to be enough of a response for Ricky to continue.
“He wasn’t always the way he is now. In another, better life, he could have been like Liam. But he was the first born. He had pressures put upon him that his little brother never had to deal with. When he took you under his wing, when he saw the good influence you had on Liam, he actually developed a fondness for you … a protectiveness.”
Felipe stood still for a minute, his back still turned to the others. While he pondered the implications of what the detective had said, he drew a ball of darkness together and passed it back and forth between his hands.
“That’s fuckin’ bullshit,” he said, finally. “If Simon gave a shit about me, he’d tell his dad to leave me alone. He’d tell his dad that it wasn’t my fault that —” He tried to continue, but something caught in his throat and stopped his voice short.
“I said he cares about you. I never said he wasn’t a coward.”
“Catch us up, Ricky, because you’re doing that thing again where you think everyone can keep up with whatever the hell you’re going on about, even though we don’t all have superpowered brains.” Detective Pérez actually sounded amused.
“Technically we do,” Kayla said. “Just not superpowered in the same way as his. You think a non-enhanced brain could track movement or handle the visual stimuli yours can? You think a normal brain could hold precise geographic coordinates together at all times in order to create an extra-spatial tunnel between them?”
As if to demonstrate her point, she created a series of portals around the room and started stepping though them, appearing to jump instantaneously from one point to another. At one point she even stepped through a vertical ‘doorway’ portal and came out a horizontal portal thirty feet in the air, near the rafters, falling almost the entire way to the ground before passing through another horizontal portal and out a vertical one right beside detective Pérez.
Detective Pérez ignored her. Ricky ignored both of them. He kept staring at Felipe, waiting for him to say something else.
“That isn’t even … That doesn’t have anything to do with why your plan is so shit … with why you’ve wasted so much of my time that I could have spent trying to actually solve this thing.”
“The solution is exactly that, though,” said Ricky, and the sureness of his voice, the certainty in the set of his features, was enough to drive Felipe mad. How little time did someone have to spend with superpowered intuition before they forgot that not everyone could see things the way they did? Felipe couldn’t blame him though, his own view of the world had expanded and changed so much in such a short span of time that he had trouble understanding how anyone could exist with limited senses like he had up until just two days ago.
“You’re not making any sense.”
“Because you’re not listening to what I’m telling you. We get everyone together, and we see how things play out.”
“You mean you put me in a room full of people that all want me dead, and you watch me die?” Felipe wasn’t angry anymore, only tired. “Yeah, great plan, detective Gonzalez.”
“We bring you to a place we can secure, you message both parties and tell them to meet you there, we have your back. Sean won’t let the Novaks kill you. Sammy and her brother won’t let Sean be the one to get the kill. Simon doesn’t even want to see you dead, not really. We’ll be standing by to make sure you don’t actually get hurt, and Kayla’s power can get you to safety in a hurry. We run interference, try to prevent any casualties, but we watch where things are headed, and at the end of things, once we actually see them committing some crimes, we move in for the arrest. As soon as it’s safe to do so.”
“That’s still … very crazy,” said Kayla. Felipe nodded aggressively and pointed at her.
“She fucking gets it,” he said.
“Actually, it’s not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” said detective Pérez. “We can’t just go in and kill them all—I mean, we can, but we can’t. If we keep running and hiding, they’ll keep searching for us, for you, and they’ll wear us out through attrition. Eventually one of us gets hurt, or one of them gets hurt at our hands … some extrajudicial shit that doesn’t look good for law enforcement. If we keep the game going long enough, they’ll get powered people on their side and eventually it becomes a complete nightmare, or an all out war, and innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire—”
“You guys are cops,” said Felipe, not trying to hide his exasperation. “Can’t you just fucking arrest them right now?”
“We don’t actually have much evidence of their crimes,” said Ricky. “Nothing that isn’t circumstantial. Nothing that would hold up in court. I can attest that we were chased by a few of the Novak thugs last night, but if we put them in front of a judge, they’ll just say they weren’t acting as representatives of the gang, and if we put Sammy or her brother on the stand, they’ll deny having any knowledge of anything. If you testify against Sammy herself, she’ll just say that she had you cornered in the park with two of her thugs over a little lovers’ quarrel—a spat. And if she goes away for that for any length of time, her brother comes at you even harder. As far as the Murphys go, we’ve currently got nothing. Camilla witnessed three of them looking for you. That’s not even a crime.”
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As he spoke, his partner was periodically nodding or inserting little ‘mmm-hmms’ and ‘yeps’.
“These fuckers have skated for a long time, kid,” she said. “Nothing seems to stick to them. Witnesses who swear they’ll testify magically disappear or have a change of heart. Cases that we’re sure are bullet-proof fall apart at the last minute. They’ve got a chokehold on the city, and more cops and lawyers and judges in their pockets than we can count. But if we actually saw them committing a crime—assault, attempted murder—or we got a recording of them admitting to committing a crime … Well then it’s game fuckin’ over for them.” Detective Pérez smiled solemnly at him.
“Well … fuck me, I guess,” said Felipe. Anger and exhaustion had both given way to fear. “So you want me to wear a wire, too?”
“Ricky’s plan is the fastest way to end this, with the least amount of bloodshed. Probably not no bloodshed, but hopefully not much. If we only run interference, back you up and protect you but don’t move in specifically to injure or hurt anyone, then it’s essentially the equivalent of running a CI to bring down bigger fish. There’s a legal precedent for that kind of operation. And yeah, you’d have to wear a wire.”
“Using me as bait, in other words.” Felipe sighed. He could see the wisdom in their plan, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
“Bait that’s never in any real danger, sure.”
“And even when you have them, even when you know they’re about to commit a crime, or admitting to committing crimes, you’re still not saying you'll definitely move in to arrest them?” Kayla asked. Felipe glanced her way and saw a curious look on her face, an almost smug satisfaction, mixed with anger.
“Sometimes these organizations are too entrenched to break up with a few arrests—”
“We’ll arrest them as soon as it's feasible,” Ricky interrupted his partner. “But if a couple of them happen to take each other out before we’re able to move in? I won’t feel too bad about it.”
Kayla looked dissatisfied with that response, but she didn’t push it. Instead, she went for a different angle of attack. “And how exactly are you—are we—going to make sure that Felipe doesn’t get hurt?”
“Exactly,” said Felipe, feeling glad that at least one adult present seemed to have a working brain.
“That’s where the powers come in. Kayla, how small of a portal can you make?” Ricky looked toward her, and she seemed genuinely surprised by the question, as if she didn’t really believe that she’d play any part in this.
“I can … I haven’t given it much thought.” She closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath. “Small, small, smaller,” she muttered, apparently to herself.
In the air in front of her appeared a pair of portals that were only visible because of the slight distortion of space around them. The field of distortion couldn’t have been more than a tenth of a square inch. The portals were too small to see through, much too small for anything substantial to pass through.
“Pretty small, I guess,” she said.
“And you can have a lot of portals open at once?” asked the detective.
“Sure, dozens at least. Where are you going with this?”
“And one final question: how easy is it for you to move the portals around in space?”
She didn’t answer aloud, only made a crop of ten or eleven more portals of varying sizes around her and set them rotating in various directions around her body. At some point, Felipe noticed that the movement of some of them started to stutter, and others winked out of existence completely. The look on her face was one of deep concentration, but she was losing ground. Eventually all but a couple of the portals disappeared.
“Moving them is harder. Keeping a bunch open when they’re just floating in place isn’t too difficult, but …”
“That’s fine. We’ll only need you to keep one moving.”
Detective Gonzalez stopped talking, and Felipe was momentarily flabbergasted by his tendency to assume that everyone was on board with whatever he was driving at without further elaboration.
Finally, Kayla broke the silence.
“What one?”
“Sorry?” asked the detective, his mind apparently having moved on so far from his previous remark that he couldn’t even recall what she was asking about.
“What one will I have to keep moving?”
“The one next to Felipe, obviously.”
“Ahhhh,” said detective Pérez. “I think I see where you’re going with this. A tiny portal instead of an earpiece?”
“Less likely to get noticed,” said the detective. “And if it’s not too tiny, we can see through it. And he doesn’t need to wear a wire; we can record sound on our end remotely.”
“And when shit starts to get hairy, the kid makes himself invisible. Things play out, and we either move in, or let things run their course. We pull the kid out, we all go on our merry way in a city where no one wants Felipe dead.”
“That’s basically it, yeah. Except for the part where you implied we might just ‘let things play out’” said Gonzalez. “Took you long enough to get there.”
“Bite me,” his partner said, but she wore a wide smile now, a genuine one. “This could work.”
“I still think it’s nuts,” Kayla said. “Just to put that out there.”
“What do you think, Felipe?” asked Gonzalez, looking him in the eyes. “Because if you don’t feel like this is the play, we won’t do it.”
Felipe looked around at the three of them, unsure how to proceed. On the one hand, the situation he found himself in was so fucked up and intimidating that no course of action seemed smart or safe. On the other hand, if he hadn’t called up detective Gonzalez two nights before and gotten in his car and received superpowers from some strange, alien artifact, he’d be in the exact same situation with regards to the two gangs who were out for blood, but he’d be facing it alone and unpowered. The fact that these three people he barely knew were all out here with him, vowing to have his back, was more than he could have hoped for as recently as a few days ago.
He looked past and through and around them, too. He saw the strands and waves and paths of light, and he was looking at things near and far all at once. He saw the room from the outside, the building from the end of the block, the city from two hundred feet up. He saw how small he was, how small they all were. Perspective.
“Felipe?” said the detective, his voice gentle, his presence grounding.
Felipe closed himself off from the stimulus of the wider city, shut out the pathways of light that showed him anything but the inside of this room and the people in it. He looked directly into the detective’s eyes.
“Fuck it, I’m in.”