ANDROMEDA SKYSCRAPER
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 10:57 P.M.
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The sun had been gone for a few hours when Adam returned to the apartment after his daily session of energy discharge at sea. The first thing he did was to go to the bathroom, take off the scorched bandages that covered his left hand’s index finger, wipe it off, re-arrange the splint holding it, and cover it again with new bandages. He no longer felt pain in moving it, just minor discomfort.
He took off his T-shirt in front of the mirror and watched the bruise kissing his rib area.
“See what happens when you want to please everyone, Adam-boy?” he questioned himself.
He went back to the room he’d chosen to sleep in during his stay, and without taking off his pants or shoes—another exhibit that place didn’t feel like home—he fell into bed, looking at the ceiling. It was the third night he had seen that ceiling, and he still couldn’t get used to it.
His phone chimed. A text from a girl named Grace. Who the hell was Grace?
> I knew what happened to your loft. Awful! My friend Tiffany says that…
Oh, Grace! He remembered her; the girl he’d woken up with that Friday morning. He didn’t even finish reading the message.
Then he realized that in his message box were many unread texts, all from the last few days. At what point had so many messages arrived? How could he not have seen them before? Five from the Mint and Strawberry sisters. One from some Carol person. Three from this Grace girl, and even one from her friend Tiffany! Two from the B-Crush guys, one from Ruben Blue, and four from his secretary, Rita Okinawa. None from Trevor.
He intended to answer Rita’s message, the only one that really deserved his attention, but left it for later. There were more urgent things to do with his phone now, such as looking for news about recent strange phenomena spotted in the city; something he’d been doing every night.
He was afraid he’d find a video of his loft on fire recorded by some neighbor of his, where he’d be seen flying away from there with Malin in his arms. He feared there could be recordings of him shooting fireballs at the sea or the reserve’s pond. He always took precautions before beginning his ritual, but there could have been a snooper hanging around; someone had known how to outwit his attention, right?
So far, he found nothing on the web that could put him in the eye of the storm, besides a couple of shaky recordings taken from an avenue—where a vehicle collision just had occurred—that showed a pair of blurry silhouettes flying up in the night sky. Fortunately, there wasn’t a zoom powerful enough to focus on those figures, though Adam knew who they belonged to: That was him and Juzo, escaping from Broga the android that Friday, before getting ambushed in Liberty Park.
The surprise was not to have found any recording of the security cameras from the avenue where he had stopped the car that night, at the moment in which Broga showed up in front of them. Recordings of unusual street events were leaking every so often; how was it possible that there wasn’t a video circulating, showing Juzo and him jumping into the sky, using the thrusters to escape the android? Then he remembered Trevor’s words about avoiding international matters with the Markabian authorities. So, he took his phone and wrote,
> The security cameras on Fifteenth Avenue. That was you?
After a while, he received Trevor’s reply,
> Yes.
He answered,
> Thanks a million.
With a mixture of gratitude, shame, and pain for the actions Trevor took with him, those that helped him and those that increased the distance between them, Adam put the phone aside, grabbed the TV remote, turned it on, and randomly selected one of the countless action movies available. He watched it for a while, but tiredness put weight on his eyelids, and he fell into a deep sleep.
Nothingness.
And he felt needles sticking in his eyeballs: someone had rolled up the window blinds and the sun was bursting into the room.
“Time to wake up!” Malin said, holding the bead chain in her hand.
She, again.
Malin came from another continent, not using a plane or a boat like normal people would. She couldn’t do it that way. Her condition didn’t allow so. She had to use the Auriga, the same ones she’d stolen from Simon.
The passage from her country to this one wasn’t pleasant and could even bring serious consequences to her heart, and even so, she crossed it because of the promise she had made to Juzo. She had assured her partner that she would take care of Adam, although it was more than clear that Adam was in no rush to help her keep her promise.
What Adam didn’t know was that staying in the Proxima district for a long time could have serious consequences for her. Besides Broga and the mercenaries, there were other things she had to watch out for, or as Adam had put it, ‘Other vultures hovering nearby.’
However, her promise outweighed any vulture and the electric whippings she received crossing the space-time barrier at the Kappa Points, and she was determined to become a thorn in Adam’s side until he learned to control his powers.
They had tried it earlier that week, going to a desert plain on the outskirts of the city to use their powers with no one seeing them. No trees nearby to prevent Adam from setting them on fire. But it all ended that same day when he, practicing his flight, lost control and fell to the ground, luxating his finger.
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Malin didn’t stop insisting, though. And for some reason, she had the illusion that this time, things would change, and that Adam would agree to restart training. ‘Wait with hope and you will receive mirages,’ her father used to say; and she had to accept that when the old man was right, the old man was right.
When she entered the room and found Adam asleep, sprawled out in bed with the TV screen on, like a college boy with so much partying on him that he didn’t even have time to undress before collapsing, she realized that she had survived so many battles only to become the nanny to a stubborn child.
She took a step, and something creaked down there. She had just set her foot on a holographic card. She brushed it with the toe of her boot to see if she hadn’t broken it, but the magazine was still active. The cover image was projected onto the card. She recognized it, had seen it before, that Friday. Picked it up; it was Loud’s last issue. There was Adam, half-naked, younger, showing himself on the cover. ‘The best models of the decade,’ announced the magazine. Malin took a deep breath and returned it to the floor.
How foolish had she been to believe that Adam would give up on his lifestyle so easily? Some people tripped over the same stone and would continue to do so until the day of their death.
‘Wait with hope and you will receive mirages.’
Why were Adam’s attitudes surprising? Did she expect him to be as intense a fighter, as devoted to a cause, as Juzo had been?
She looked at the holo-magazine on the floor, then at Adam. What was sleeping there was nothing more than a product of his environment, as much as she was hers.
Maybe Adam wasn’t the only one in that room who tripped over the same stone.
However, Juzo had died so that his brother might inherit some sort of supernatural power, and that brother, instead of honoring the fallen, was letting the days go by, sleeping and turning like a sleepwalker; with no intention of training, contenting himself with venting his excess energy from time to time and wasting the time the other man had bought with blood.
Enough was enough!
Detaching the X-shaped elastic shoulder straps, Malin removed the small Daedalus thruster that she carried folded on her back, leaving it on the floor. She’d see what she’d do with it. Then she grabbed the bead chain, pulled it down, and the morning glow entered the room.
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Sleepy, Adam shielded his eyes from the light with his hand.
“You again,” he muttered. “Don’t you people know what ‘leave me alone’ means?”
He sat on the bed; his hair was messed up as if he’d been pulling it while sleeping. He looked up and found her, with her arms crossed, dead serious, like a counselor disappointed with a troubling inmate. Next to her, on the floor, was one of those little chrome rectangles; one of those folded thrusters.
“You came equipped,” he pointed out. “You keep stealing property from your government.”
“To train your flight,” she said.
Then Adam shrugged and showed her his bandaged finger. “We’ll do it when I can move it without it hurting, okay?”
She didn’t say a word.
Adam checked the hour on his phone: 10 a.m. He’d slept for almost twelve hours. Great! He rubbed his face to wake himself up and got into the bathroom next to the bed. She was about to follow him. He shooed her out with a gesture. Malin stepped outside; and Adam locked himself in, slamming the door shut.
Her hands turned into fists, and her lips pursed, holding back a torrent of insults.
The door opened again. Adam went out in his underwear, grabbed a new change of clothes from the closet, and went back to the bathroom.
“You know the way out,” he said, closing the door in her face.
“I won’t go until we train, Adam.”
“In that case, I’ll go.”
“Go where?”
“Where you won’t go.”
Malin paced in front of the bathroom door, looking here and there, hearing the water from the shower running and the thick foams of soap and shampoo going down the drain. She found Loud’s card on the floor again, still with its holographic image open, and kicked it.
I’ll get the best out of you, dumbass; even if I have to chase after you, night and day, she thought. We’ll see how happy you are having me as your roommate.
Then, she took a deep breath; she had to speak softly. “By the way,” she said, raising her voice a little so he could hear her. “My back injuries are healing fast thanks to a pill I got in Markabia. If you want, I—”
“Are you still there?” Adam barked.
“I was thinking about sharing my pills with you—I mean, for your finger; but you can go to hell,” she answered. Adam said something she couldn’t hear clearly. “What’s that?!”
“I can’t hear what you’re saying!” he shouted.
After a while, the bathroom door opened, letting out a cloud of steam, and Adam came out barefoot and without a shirt, although already wearing pants.
“You really got dressed up behind closed doors!” she pointed out. “Didn’t picture you like a shy guy.”
“I need you out, please,” Adam asked. “Please. I need to be alone.”
“Sorry. I won’t go until I’m positive you can protect yourself.”
“Protect ‘myself’? What are you talking about? I’m the one who took care of that Simon guy, remember?! I know how to throw a Photia. I don’t need you, Malin.”
“Knowing how to drive a car doesn’t make you a rally racer, and a truck doesn’t turn you into a truck driver, Adam.”
“See? That is what you don’t understand, Malin. I’ve never meant to be the rally racer or the truck driver you’re talking about; that’s an idea you have stuck in your head.”
“That’s not an idea. We’re talking about your security; about your life! About the lifetime you gained thanks to Juzo’s sacrifice!”
“Do you think this is easy for me?” Annoyed, Adam went out onto the balcony, took a deep breath, looked around the wall of skyscrapers around him, and went back inside. “You can’t expect me to put up with all these changes overnight, y’know?”
“You talk as if it were a wardrobe change or a new job,” she said. “If you didn’t notice, there are no refunds here.”
“Malin, your analogies suck; you know that?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You bet I know there’re no refunds here!” Adam pointed at himself. “Everything keeps reminding me of it every time I shave, or I look in the mirror, in case I forgot. I know I’m way past the point of no return, that every moment I’m far away from the shore. But that doesn’t mean I have to put up with your presence. Also, do you know what other presence I shouldn’t have to put up with? Juzo’s!” He pointed at his head. “Juzo, who’s stuck right in here, like a freaking chip I cannot unplug. I didn’t ask for you people to come here, to tell me about the plans of a bunch of lunatics; nor I did ask you to bring a freaking android to my freaking door. Damn, I almost died!”
“You stupid, selfish prick!” Malin showed her teeth. “You almost died? Well, there was someone who did die!”
“I know!” Adam’s eyes were glassy and red. “You don’t have to remind me of it either!”
“So, stop being such a drama queen, Adam, and realize this isn’t only about you! Now you have immense power, and guys like Simon won’t stop knocking on your freaking door just because you stayed locked in your room, listening to music out loud and playing the sad teenager role!”
Malin snorted, furious, and announced the end of the discussion with a gesture. The plan was to upset him, dear; not that he upsets you, she said to herself and went out to the balcony; she needed to calm down.
“A freaking chip you can’t unplug from your head,” she repeated. “That’s a neat analogy; I’ll give you that.”
“Way better than yours. A truck driver? Huh, please!”
Malin nodded.
“Look, Malin,” Adam added, “I appreciate what you’ve done for me. I appreciate you’ve come to protect me, and that you’ve kept your promise to my brother with such devotion. But I’m letting you off the hook. You can go back in peace to your place.”
Malin shook her head. “Repetitive use of the Auriga isn’t good for the heart, darling, so you’d better get used to putting two sets of plates on the table because I won’t be leaving anytime soon.”